The Countess of Lowndes Square and Other Stories/In the Dark

by E. F. Benson

For works with similar titles, see In the Dark.

 

In the Dark (Benson)

Reginald Case, newly promoted to the rank of Captain in the 43rd Native Cavalry of the Indian Army, was picking his way back to his bungalow by the light of a somewhat ill-burning lantern from the regimental mess-room where he had dined. It was early in July, the long-delayed rains had broken at Haziri, in the Central Provinces, ten days before, and it was an imprudent man who would venture on a mere field-path like this at night without some illumination for his steps, lest inadvertently he might tread on a meditative and deadly kerait, with murder behind its stale small eyes, or step on the black coils of some hooded cobra. Only a few days before, Case had found one such in the bathroom of his bungalow, curled up on the mat within a few inches of his bare foot, when he went there to bathe before dinner, and he had no desire to give his nerves any further test of steadiness under such circumstances.

To-day there had been a break in the prodigious deluge, and all the afternoon the midsummer sun had blazed from a clear sky, causing all vegetable things to sprout with magical rapidity. This path, which yesterday had been a bare track over the fields, was now covered with springing herbs; the parade-ground, which for the last week had been but a sea of viscous mud, was clad in a mantle of delicate green blades, and the tamarisks and neem trees were studded with swelling buds among the dead and dripping foliage of the spring. A similar animation had tingled through the insect world, and as Case passed across the couple of fields that lay between the mess-room and his bungalow, a swarm of evil flies dashed themselves against the glass of his lantern. Overhead, since sunset, the clouds had gathered densely again across the vault of the sky, but to the east an arch of clear and star-lit heavens was dove-coloured with the approaching moonrise. Against it the shapes of silhouetted trees stood sharp and black in the windless and stifling calm.

It was a night of intolerable heat, and his two bulldogs, chained up in the veranda of his bungalow, with their dinner lying untouched beside them, could do no more by way of welcome to him than tap languidly with their tails on the matting in acknowledgment of his return. His bearer, not expecting him to be back so soon from the mess-room, was out, and he had to wait on himself, pulling out a long chair and table from his sitting-room, and groping for whisky and soda in his cupboard. The ice had run out, and after mixing and drinking a tepid peg, he went back to his bedroom and changed his hot dinner clothes for pyjamas and slippers. Cursing inwardly at the absence of his servant, he lit his lamp with a solitary match that he found on the table, and came out again into the veranda to think over, with such coolness as was capturable, the whole intolerable situation.

At first his mind hovered circling round outlying annoyances. He was dripping at every pore in this dark furnace of a night, the prickly heat covered his shoulders with a net of unbearable irritation, he had just lost heavily for the tenth successive evening at auction-bridge, his liver was utterly upset with the abominable weather, the lamp smelled, mosquitoes trumpeted shrilly round him. Here, more or less, was the outer and less essential ring of his discontent; to a happy and healthy man such inconveniences would have been of little moment, but in his present position they seemed portentously disagreeable. Then his mind, still hovering, moved a little inwards round a smaller and more intimate circle, surveying the calamities of the past six weeks. He had killed his favourite pony out pig-sticking, he was heavily in debt, and this morning only he had been talked to faithfully and frankly by his colonel on the text of slackness in respect of regimental duties. But still his mind did not settle down on his central misfortune—instinctively it shrank from it.

Thick and hot and silent the oppression of the night lay round him. Now and then one of his bulldogs stirred, or an owl hooted as its wings divided the motionless air, while farther away, in the bazaars of Haziri, a tom-tom beat as if it was the pulse of this stifling and feverish night. The clouds had grown thicker overhead, and every now and then some large drop of hot rain splashed heavily on the dry earth or hissed among the withered shrubs. Remote lightning winked on the horizon, followed at long intervals by drowsy thunder, and to the east, in the arch of sky that still remained unclouded, a tawny half-moon had risen, shapeless through the damp air, and illuminating the vapours with dusky crimson. Once more Case splashed the tepid soda-water over a liberal whisky, still pausing before he let his mind consciously dwell on that which lay as heavy over it as over the gasping earth this canopy of cloud.

The veranda where he sat was broad and deep, and two doors opened into it from the bungalow. One led into his own quarters, the other into those of his brother officer, Percy Oldham. He was away on leave up in the hills, but was expected back to-night, and Case knew that, before either of them slept, there would have to be talk of some kind between them. A year ago, when they had taken this bungalow together, they had been inseparable friends, so that the mess had found for them the nicknames of David and Jonathan; then, by degrees, growing impalpable friction of various kinds had estranged them, and to-night, when at length Case thought of Oldham, his mouth went dry with the intensity of his hate. And at the thought of him, his mind, hovering and circling so long, dropped like a stooping hawk into the storm-centre of his misery. He took from the table the letter he had found waiting for him in the rack at the mess-room that evening, and by the light of the fly-beleaguered lamp read it through again. It was quite short.

 

“Dear Case,—I shall get back late on Thursday night, and before we meet I think I had better tell you that I am engaged to Kitty Metcalf. I suppose we shall have to talk about it, though it might be better if we did not. For a man who is so happy, I am awfully sorry; that is all I can say about it. She wished me to tell you, though, of course, I should have done so in any case.—Yours truly,

“Percy Oldham.”

 

Case read this through for the sixth or seventh time, then tore it into fragments, and again replenished his glass. It was barely six months ago that he had been engaged to this girl himself; then they had quarrelled, and the match had been broken off. But he found now that he had never ceased to hope that when he went up himself, later in the summer, to the hills, it would be renewed again. And at the thought his present discomfort, his debts, all that had occupied his mind before, were wiped clean from it. Oldham—they had talked of it fifty times—was to have been his best man.

Suddenly, out of the black bosom of the windless night, there came a sigh of hot air rustling the shrubs outside. It came into the veranda where he sat, like the stir of some corporeal presence, making the light of his lamp to hang flickering in the chimney for a moment, and then expire in a wreath of sour-smelling smoke. One of his dogs sat up for a moment growling, and then all was utterly still again. The arch of clear sky to the east had dwindled and become overcast, and the red moon showed but a faint blur of light behind the gathering clouds.

Case had used a solitary match to light his lamp, and did not know where, in his own bungalow, he might find a box. But he could get one for certain out of Oldham's bedroom, for he was a person of extremely orderly habits, and always kept one on a ledge just inside his bedroom door. Case got up and in the dark groped his way across the lobby out of which Oldham's bedroom opened, and feeling with his hand, immediately found the box on the ledge at the foot of his bed. Standing there, he lit a match, and his eye fell on the bed itself. It was covered with a dark blanket, and on the centre of it, coiled and sleeping, like a round pool of black water, lay a huge cobra. On the moment the match went out—it had barely been lit—and, closing the bedroom door, he went out again on to the veranda.

He did not rekindle his lamp, but sat, laying the forgotten match-box on his table, and looking out into the blackness of the yawning night. The wind that had extinguished his light had died away again, and all round he heard the heavy plump of the rain, which was beginning to fall heavily. Before five minutes were past, the sluices of the sky were fully open again, and the downpour had become torrential. The lightning, that an hour ago had but winked remotely on the horizon, was becoming more vivid, and the response of the thunder more immediate. At the gleam of the frequent flashes from the sky, the trees in front of the bungalow, the road, and the fields that lay beyond it, started into colour seen through the veil of the rain, that hung like a curtain of glass beads, firm and perpendicular, and then vanished again into the impenetrable blackness. He was not conscious of thought; it seemed only that a vivid picture was spread before his mind—the picture of a dark-blanketed bed on which, like a round black pool, there lay the coiled and sleeping cobra. The door of that room was shut, and a man entering it would no longer find, as he had done, a match-box ready to his hand, close beside the door.

For another hour he sat there, this mental picture starting from time to time into brilliant illumination, even as at the lightning flashes the landscape in front of him leaped into intolerable light and colour. The roar of the rain and the incessant tumult of the approaching thunder had roused the dogs, and by the flare of the storm Case could see that Boxer and his wife were both sitting tense and upright, staring uneasily into the night. Then simultaneously they both broke into chorus of deep-throated barking and strained at their chains. By the next flash Case saw what had roused their vigilance. The figure of a man with flapping coat was running at full speed from the direction of the mess-room towards the bungalow. He recognized who it was, and now the dogs recognized him, too, for their barking was exchanged for whimpers of welcome and agitated tails.

Oldham leaped the little hedge that separated the road from the fields and ran dripping into shelter of the veranda. In the gross darkness he could not see Case, and stood there, as he thought, alone, stripping off his mackintosh. Then, by the light of a fierce violet streamer in the clouds, he saw him.

“Hullo, Case,” he said, “is that you?”

Oldham moved towards him as he spoke, and by the next flash Case saw him close at hand, tall and slim, with handsome, boyish face.

“You got my letter?” asked Oldham.

“Yes, I got your letter.”

Case paused a moment.

“Do you expect me to congratulate you?” he asked.

“No, I can't say that I do. But I want to say something, and I hope you won't find it offensive. Anyhow, it is quite sincere. I am most awfully sorry for you. And I can't forget that we used to be the greatest friends. I hope you can remember that, too.”

He sat down on the step that led into Case's section of the bungalow, and in the darkness Case could hear Boxer making affectionate slobbering noises. That kindled a fresh point of jealous hatred in his mind; both dogs, who obeyed him as a master, adored Oldham as a friend. Hotly burned that hate, and he thought again of the closed bedroom door and the black pool on the blanket. Then he spoke slowly and carefully.

“I quite remember it,” he said, “and it seems to me the most amazing thing in the world. I can recall it all, all my—my love for you, and the day when we settled into this bungalow together, and the joy of it. I recall, too, that you have taken from me everything you could lay hands on, money, the affection of the dogs even——”

Oldham interrupted in sudden resentment at this injustice.

“As regards money, I may remind you, since you have chosen to mention it, that I have not succeeded in taking any away from you,” he remarked.

Case was not roused by this sarcasm; he could afford, knowing what he knew, to keep calm.

“I am sorry for having kept you waiting so long,” he said. “But you may remember that you begged me to pay you at my convenience. It will be quite convenient to-morrow.”

“My dear chap,” broke in Oldham again, “as if I would have mentioned it, if you hadn't!”

Case felt himself scarcely responsible for what he said; the tension of the storm, the infernal tattoo of the rain, the heat, the bellowing thunder, seemed to take demoniacal possession of him, driving before them the sanity of his soul.

“Perhaps you wouldn't mention it,” he said, “until you had sold my debt to some Jewish money-lender.”

In the darkness he heard Oldham get up.

“There is no use in our talking, if you talk like a madman,” he said.

The sky immediately above them was torn asunder, and a flickering spear of intolerable light stabbed downwards, striking a tree not a hundred yards in front of the bungalow, and for the moment the stupendous crack of the thunder drowned thought and speech alike. Boxer gave a howl of protest and dismay, and nestled close to Oldham, while Case, starting involuntarily from his chair, held his hands to his ears until the appalling explosion was over.

“Rather wicked,” he said, and poured himself out a dram of neat spirits.

That steadied him, and, recovering himself a little, he felt that he was behaving very foolishly in letting the other see the madness of his rage and resentment. It was far better that he should lull Oldham into an unsuspicious frame of mind; otherwise he might suspect, might he not, that something was prepared for him in his room? Others, subsequently, if they quarrelled, might guess that he himself had known what lay there ... but it was all dim and fantastic. Then the fancied cunning and caution of an unbalanced man who is at the same time ready to commit the most reckless violence took hold of him, and instantly he changed his tone. He must be quiet and normal; he must let things take their natural course, without aid or interference from himself.

“The storm has played the deuce with my nerves,” he said, “that and the news in your letter, and the sight of you coming like a wraith through the rain. But I won't be a lunatic any longer. Sit down, Percy, and try to forgive all the wild things I have been saying. Of course, I don't deny that I have had an awful blow. But, as you have reminded me, we used to be great friends. She and I were great friends, too, and I can't afford to lose the two people I really care most about in the world, just because they have found each other. Let's make the best of it; help me, if you can, to make the best of it.”

It was not in Oldham's genial nature to resist such an appeal, and he responded warmly.

“I think that is jolly good of you,” he said, “and, frankly, I hate myself when I think of you. But, somehow, it isn't a man's fault when he falls in love. I couldn't help myself; it came on me quite suddenly. It was as if someone had come quickly up behind me and pitched me into the middle of it. At one moment I did not care for her; at the next I cared for nothing else.”

Case had himself thoroughly in hand by this time. He even took pleasure in these reconciliatory speeches, knowing the completeness with which a revenge prepared without his planning should follow on their heels. Had a loaded pistol been ready to his hand, and he himself secure from detection, he would probably not have pulled the trigger on his friend, but it was a different matter that he should merely acquiesce in his walking in the dark into the room where death lay curled and ready to strike. That seemed to him to be the act of God; he was not responsible for it, he had not put the cobra there.

“I felt sure it must have happened like that,” he said. “Besides, as you know, Kitty and I had quarrelled and had broken our engagement off. Of course, I hoped that some day we might come together again—at least, I know now that I hoped it. But that was nothing to do with you. You fell in love with her, and she with you. Yes, yes. Really, I don't wonder. Indeed—indeed, I do congratulate you—I congratulate you both.”

Oldham gave a great sigh of pleasure and relief.

“It's ripping of you to take it like that,” he said. “I hardly dared to hope you would. Thanks ever so much—ever so much! And now, do you know, I think I shall go to bed. I am dog-tired. I had a six hours' ride to the station this morning, and even up there it was hideously hot.”

Case again reminded himself that he must behave naturally—not plan anything, but not interfere.

“Oh, you must have a drink,” he said, “though I'm afraid there is no ice. I'll get you a glass and soda.”

He came out into the veranda again with these requisites. Oldham was stifling a prodigious yawn.

“I'm half dead with sleep. Probably I shall chuck myself on my bed just as I am, to save the trouble of undressing.”

Case felt his hand tremble as he put the glass down on the table.

“I know that feeling,” he said. “Sometimes, when one is very sleepy, the sight of a bed is altogether too much for one. I dare say I shall do the same. Help yourself to whisky while I open the soda for you.”

Oldham drank his peg and again rose.

“Well, I'm for bed,” he said. “And I can't tell you what a relief it is to me to find you like this. By the way, about that bit of money. Pay me exactly when it's convenient to you—next year or the year after, if you like. I should be wretched if I thought you were putting yourself about over it. So good night, Reggie.”

He turned to go, and it seemed to Case that hours passed and a thousand impressions were registered on his brain as he walked down the twenty-five feet of veranda that separated the two doors of entrance that led into their quarters. Outside, another change had come over the hot, tumultuous night, and, as if the very moon and stars were concerned in this pigmy drama, where but a single life out of the innumerable and infinitesimal little denizens of the world was involved, a queer triangular rent had opened in the rain-swollen sky, and a dim moon and a company of watery stars stared silently down, and to Case's excited senses they appeared hostilely witnessing. Ten minutes ago the rain had ceased as suddenly as if a tap had been turned off, and, except for the tom-tom that still beat monotonously in the town, a silence of death prevailed. The steam rose thick as sea-mist from the ground; above it a blurred etching of trees appeared and the roof of the mess-room. The grey unreal light shone full into the veranda, and he could see that Boxer was sitting bolt upright on his blanket-bed, looking at Oldham's retreating figure. Daisy was industriously scratching her neck with a hind-leg, and from the table a little pool of spilt soda-water was dripping on to the ground.

All this Case noticed accurately and intently, and, as yet, Oldham was not half-way down the veranda. Once he hung on his step and sniffed the hot, stale air. That was a characteristic trick; he wrinkled his nose up like a dog, showing his white teeth. Once he shifted his dripping mackintosh from right hand to left, holding it at arm's length. Then, as he turned to pass into the door, he made a little staccato sign of salutation to Case with his disengaged hand. Boxer appropriated that, and wagged a cordial tail in response.

Eagerly and expectantly, now that he had vanished from sight, Case followed his movements, visualizing them. He heard him shuffle his feet along the floor in the manner of a man feeling his way in the dark, and knew that he was drawing near to the closed bedroom door and the black interior. Oldham had said that he was very tired, that he was inclined just to throw himself on the bed and sleep, and the absence of matches and the added inconvenience of undressing in the dark would further predispose him to this. He would throw himself on the bed all in a piece, after the fashion of a tired man, and awake to fury the awful bedfellow, with the muscular coils and the swift death that lay crouched beneath its hood, which lay sleeping there. To-morrow there would be no debt for Case to pay, no gnawing of unsatisfied hate, and for Oldham no letter to his lady with the so satisfactory account of the evening's meeting.

Then from within came the rattle of a turned door-handle, and Case knew that the death-chamber stood open. There followed a pause of absolute stillness, in which Case felt utterly detached from and irresponsible for whatever might follow. Then came the jar of a closed door. ...

And that tore him screaming from his murderous dreams, from which, perhaps, he had awoke too late. He found himself, with no volition of his own, running down the veranda and calling at the top of his voice:

“Percy, Percy,” he cried, “come out. There is a cobra on your bed!”

He heard the handle rattle and the door bang. Next moment he was on his knees in the dark lobby, clasping Oldham's legs in a torrent of hysterical sobbing.