The Cold Snap | Page 3

methodical policy.
As I lay awake, I heard the sides of the house crack in the cold. "What,"
said I to myself with a shiver, "should I do if anything happened that
required me to get up and dress again?" It seemed to me I should be
capable of letting a man die in the next room for need of succor. Being
of an imaginative temperament, not to feel prepared for possible
contingencies is for me to feel guilty and miserable. The last thing I
remember before dropping off to sleep was solemnly promising my
wife never to trust ourselves North another winter. I then fell asleep and
dreamed of the ineffable cold of the interstellar spaces, which the
scientific people talk about.
The next thing I was sensible of was a feeling of the most utter
discomfort I ever experienced. My whole body had become gradually

chilled through. I could feel the flesh rising in goose pimples at every
movement. What has happened? was my first thought. The bedclothes
were all there, four inches of them, and to find myself shivering under
such a pile seemed a reversal of the laws of nature. Shivering is an
unpleasant operation at best and at briefest; but when one has shivered
till the flesh is lame, and every quiver is a racking; aching pain, that is
something quite different from any ordinary shivering. My wife was
awake and in the same condition. What did I ever bring her to this
terrible country for? She had been lying as still as possible for an hour
or so, waiting till she should die or something; and feeling that if she
stirred she should freeze, as water near the freezing point crystallizes
when agitated. She said that when I had disturbed the clothes by any
movement, she had felt like hating me. We were both almost scared, it
must be confessed. Such an experience had never been ours before. In
voices muffled by the bedclothes we held dismal confab, and concluded
that we must make our way to the sitting-room and get over the
register.
I have had my share of unpleasant duties to face in my life. I remember
how I felt at Spottsylvania when I stepped up and out from behind a
breastwork of fence rails, over which the bullets were whistling like
hailstones, to charge the enemy. Worse still, I remember how I felt at
one or two public banquets when I rose from my seat to reply to a toast,
and to meet the gaze of a hundred expectant faces with an
overpowering consciousness of looking like a fool, and of total
inability to do or say anything which would not justify the presumption.
But never did an act of my life call for so much of sheer will-power as
stepping out of that comfortless bed into that freezing room. It is a
general rule in getting up winter mornings that the air never proves so
cold as was anticipated while lying warm in bed. But it did this time,
probably because my system was deprived of all elasticity and power of
reaction by being so thoroughly chilled. Hastily donning in the dark
what was absolutely necessary, my poor wife and myself, with
chattering teeth and prickly bodies, the most thoroughly demoralized
couple in history, ran downstairs to the sitting-room.
Much to our surprise, we found the gas lighted and the other members

of the family already gathered there, huddling over the register. I felt a
sinking at the heart as I marked the strained, anxious look on each face,
a look that asked what strange thing had come upon us. They had been
there, they said, for some time. Ella, Jim, and Bill, who slept alone, had
been the first to leave their beds. Then father and mother, and finally
my wife and I, had followed. Soon after our arrival there was a
fumbling at the door, and the two Irish girls, who help mother keep
house, put in their blue, pinched faces. They scarcely waited an
invitation to come up to the register.
The room was but dimly lighted, for the gas, affected by the fearful
chill, was flowing slowly and threatened to go out. The gloom added to
the depressing effect of our strange situation. Little was said. The actual
occurrence of strange and unheard-of events excites very much less
wonderment than the account of them written or rehearsed. Indeed, the
feeling of surprise often seems wholly left out of the mental experience
of those who undergo or behold the most prodigious catastrophes. The
sensibility to the marvelous is the one of our faculties which is, perhaps,
the soonest exhausted by a strain. Human nature takes naturally to
miracles, after all. "What can it mean?" was the inquiry a dozen