She woke up entirely.
“Why, what in the world——” she said. Then pulling a window curtain aside she peeped out. “There’s only the Ailsa there,” she said, “dark and quiet. And only the Ilsa here,” she added, peeping through the opposite curtain, “dark and quiet.”
I looked at her, marvelling at the want of imagination in women that renders it possible for them to go on being stolid in the presence of what seemed undoubtedly the supernatural. Unconsciously this stolidity, however, made me feel more like myself; but when on her going to the door and unbolting it and looking out she made an exclamation and hastily shut it again, I sank back on my pillow once more hors de combat, so great was the shock. Face me, I say, with cannon, and I can do anything but expect nothing of me if it is ghosts.
“Otto,” she whispered, holding the door, “come and look.”
I could not speak.
“Get up and come and look,” she whispered again.
Well my friends I had to, or lose forever my moral hold of and headship over her. Besides, I was drawn somehow to the fatal door. How I got out of my berth and along the cold floor of the caravan to the end I cannot conceive. I was obliged to help myself along, I remember, by sliding my hand over the surface of the yellow box. I muttered, I remember, “I am ill—I am ill,” and truly never did a man feel more so. And when I got to the door and looked through the crack she opened, what did I see?
I saw the whole of the lower windows of the farmhouse ablaze with candles.
CHAPTER XVIII
MY hearers will I hope appreciate the frankness with which I show them all my sides, good and bad. I do so with my eyes open, aware that some of you may very possibly think less well of me for having been, for instance, such a prey to supernatural dread. Allow me, however, to point out that if you do you are wrong. You suffer from a confusion of thought. And I will show you why. My wife, you will have noticed, had on the occasion described few or no fears. Did this prove courage? Certainly not. It merely proved the thicker spiritual skin of woman. Quite without that finer sensibility that has made men able to produce works of genius while women have been able only to produce (a merely mechanical process) young, she felt nothing apparently but a bovine surprise. Clearly, if you have no imagination neither can you have any fears. A dead man is not frightened. An almost dead man does not care much either. The less dead a man is the more do possible combinations suggest themselves to him. It is imagination and sensibility, or the want of them, that removes you further or brings you nearer to the animals. Consequently (I trust I am being followed?) when imagination and sensibility are busiest, as they were during those moments I lay waiting and listening in my berth, you reach the highest point of aloofness from the superiority to the brute creation; your vitality is at its greatest; you are, in a word, if I may be permitted to coin an epigram, least dead. Therefore, my friends, it is plain that at that very moment when you (possibly) may have thought I was showing my weakest side I was doing the exact opposite, and you will not, having intelligently followed the argument, say at the end of it as my poor little wife did, “But how?”