“If He Should Frown”

It was mid-afternoon, August. Perhaps the prolonged spell of intense heat and dryness, long, burning, crimson days with a baking earth, inert and simmering beneath that merciless ball of fire, had taxed my strength and usual composure unto the point where my self-possession and equanimity had collapsed. It is always that way, too, with these dancing, fiendish thoughts, these hell-born mirages that sneak into a man's brain and drive him mad or nearly scare him to a similar fate. They lie in wait, and wait and wait, these flashing devils, these mad, hideous phantasmata of horror and worse, until they perceive that his mental equilibrium is staggering a bit, things becoming tangled, hazy and grotesque. Then, when his defenses of composure and equability are weakened, they rush a man's last stand, shrieking their demoniacal whoops of attack and before them he goes down in fevered delirium, sometimes stark insanity.

But since that awful afternoon, I have often reflected that perhaps this phantom vision, this eerie dream I had was a more staple thing than a mere errant illusion on a devilish, devastating flight of torture; perhaps it was not the fanciful, itinerant apparition it seemed, born of a heated brain and come to anguish me with terror; perhaps it was even as respectable a thing as a sane, wakeful thought.

How it came about seems strange and disconnected. My study boasts great French windows, both wide and high; they reach almost the ceiling, which is itself of unusual elevation. Heavy purple hangings frame the uncurtained panes and through the sparkling glass I could view from my lounge a vista of glory; a glory of gold in autumn, a glory of white in winter and a glory of ebon rage and tumult ‘midst storms. But this hot, still afternoon, I viewed the shimmering waves of heat only, and through these, down in the cleft, upon the bank of which my house rests, the river, a twinkli