The Shape of Fear | Page 5

the very next night that these two tippling pessimists spent
together talking about certain disgruntled but immortal gentlemen, who,
having said their say and made the world quite uncomfortable, had now
journeyed on to inquire into the nothingness which they postulated. The
dawn was breaking in the muggy east; the bottles were empty, the
cigars burnt out. Tim turned toward his friend with a sharp breaking of
sociable silence.
"Rick," he said, "do you know that Fear has a Shape?"
"And so has my nose!"
"You asked me the other night what I feared. Holy father, I make my
confession to you. What I fear is Fear."
"That's because you've drunk too much -- or not enough.
"'Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring Your winter garment of
repentance fling --'"
"My costume then would be too nebulous for this weather, dear boy.
But it's true what I was saying. I am afraid of ghosts."
"For an agnostic that seems a bit --"
"Agnostic! Yes, so completely an agnostic that I do not even know that
I do not know! God, man, do you mean you have no ghosts -- no -- no
things which shape themselves? Why, there are things I have done --"
"Don't think of them, my boy! See, 'night's candles are burnt out, and
jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top.'"
Tim looked about him with a sickly smile. He looked behind him and
there was nothing there; stared at the blank window, where the smoky
dawn showed its offensive face, and there was nothing there. He
pushed away the moist hair from his haggard face -- that face which
would look like the blessed St. John, and leaned heavily back in his
chair.

"'Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I,'" he murmured drowsily, "'it is
some meteor which the sun exhales, to be to thee this night --'"
The words floated off in languid nothing- ness, and he slept. Dodson
arose preparatory to stretching himself on his couch. But first he bent
over his friend with a sense of tragic appreciation.
"Damned by the skin of his teeth!" he mut- tered. "A little more, and he
would have gone right, and the Devil would have lost a good fellow.
As it is" -- he smiled with his usual conceited delight in his own
sayings, even when they were uttered in soliloquy -- "he is merely one
of those splendid gentlemen one will meet with in hell." Then Dodson
had a momentary nostalgia for goodness himself, but he soon overcame
it, and stretching him- self on his sofa, he, too, slept.
That night he and O'Connor went together to hear "Faust" sung, and
returning to the office, Dodson prepared to write his criti- cism. Except
for the distant clatter of tele- graph instruments, or the peremptory cries
of "copy" from an upper room, the office was still. Dodson wrote and
smoked his inter- minable cigarettes; O' Connor rested his head in his
hands on the desk, and sat in perfect silence. He did not know when
Dodson fin- ished, or when, arising, and absent-mindedly extinguishing
the lights, he moved to the door with his copy in his hands. Dodson
gathered up the hats and coats as he passed them where they lay on a
chair, and called:
"It is done, Tim. Come, let's get out of this."
There was no answer, and he thought Tim was following, but after he
had handed his criticism to the city editor, he saw he was still alone,
and returned to the room for his friend. He advanced no further than the
doorway, for, as he stood in the dusky cor- ridor and looked within the
darkened room, he saw before his friend a Shape, white, of perfect
loveliness, divinely delicate and pure and ethereal, which seemed as the
embodi- ment of all goodness. From it came a soft radiance and a
perfume softer than the wind when "it breathes upon a bank of violets
stealing and giving odor." Staring at it, with eyes immovable, sat his
friend.

It was strange that at sight of a thing so unspeakably fair, a coldness
like that which comes from the jewel-blue lips of a Muir crevasse
should have fallen upon Dodson, or that it was only by summoning all
the man- hood that was left in him, that he was able to restore light to
the room, and to rush to his friend. When he reached poor Tim he was
stone-still with paralysis. They took him home to the woman, who
nursed him out of that attack -- and later on worried him into another.
When he was able to sit up and jeer at things a little again, and help
himself to the quail the woman