Fear

We went up on deck after dinner. Before us the Mediterranean lay
without a ripple and shimmering in the moonlight. The great ship glided
on, casting upward to the star-studded sky a long serpent of black
smoke. Behind us the dazzling white water, stirred by the rapid
progress of the heavy bark and beaten by the propeller, foamed, seemed
to writhe, gave off so much brilliancy that one could have called it
boiling moonlight.

There were six or eight of us silent with admiration and gazing toward
far-away Africa whither we were going. The commandant, who was smoking
a cigar with us, brusquely resumed the conversation begun at dinner.

"Yes, I was afraid then. My ship remained for six hours on that rock,
beaten by the wind and with a great hole in the side. Luckily we were
picked up toward evening by an English coaler which sighted us."

Then a tall man of sunburned face and grave demeanor, one of those men
who have evidently traveled unknown and far-away lands, whose calm eye
seems to preserve in its depths something of the foreign scenes it has
observed, a man that you are sure is impregnated with courage, spoke
for the first time.

"You say, commandant, that you were afraid. I beg to disagree with you.
You are in error as to the meaning of the word and the nature of the
sensation that you experienced. An energetic man is never afraid in the
presence of urgent danger. He is excited, aroused, full of anxiety, but
fear is something quite different."

The commandant laughed and answered: "Bah! I assure you that I was
afraid."

Then the man of the tanned countenance addressed us deliberately as
follows:

"Permit me to explain. Fear--and the boldest men may feel fear--is
something horrible, an atrocious sensation, a sort of decomposition of
the soul, a terrible spasm of brain and heart, the very memory of which
brings a shudder of anguish, but when one is brave he feels it neither
under fire nor in the presence of sure death nor in the face of any
well-known danger. It springs up under certain abnormal conditions,
under certain mysterious influences in the presence of vague peril.
Real fear is a sort of reminiscence of fantastic terror of the past. A
man who believes in ghosts and imagines he sees a specter in the
darkness must feel fear in all its horror.

"As for me I was overwhelmed with fear in broad daylight about ten
years ago and again one December night last winter.

"Nevertheless, I have gone through many dangers, many adventures which
seemed to promise death. I have often been in battle. I have been left
for dead by thieves. In America I was condemned as an insurgent to be
hanged, and off the coast of China have