The Caravaners by Elizabeth Von Arnim — Read

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?"

I do not wish, however, to leave you longer under the impression that the deserted farmhouse was haunted. It may have been of course, but it was not on that night of last August. What was happening was that a party from the parsonage -- a holiday party of young and rather inclined to be noisy people, which had overflowed the bounds of the accommodation there -- was utilizing the long, empty front room as an impromptu (I believe that is the expression) ball-room. The farm belonged to the pastor -- observe the fatness of these British ecclesiastics -- and it was the practice of his family during the holidays to come down sometimes in the evening and dance in it. All this I found out after Edelgard had dressed and gone across to see for herself what the lights and stamping meant. She insisted on doing so in spite of my warnings, and came back after a long interval to tell me the above, her face flushed and her eyes bright, for she had seized the opportunity, regardless of what I might be feeling waiting alone, to dance too.