CRY IN THE NIGHT
(Short
Story)
The
event is so commonplace, such as one reads in the columns
of a newspaper; it can be dealt with soberly as well as given a sensational
hue: it all depends on the kind of newspaper that publishes
it. Still the incident is commonplace, simple as the facts of birth and death.
But whenever I think of it the chill in my spine is a long moment; and you who
are going to hear it as a story, however generously endowed with the quality of
imaginative sympathy, will not, I am sure, be able to feel as strongly as I
did, for although I was not an actual eye-witness of the scene, by sheer
propinquity to it I experienced its visual intensity.
My
house is old, big, and rambling, built by a forbear who must have been bitten
by Victorian ideas and ideals. It had more of timber than brick and mortar;
windows, doors, ceilings, panel-work, wall bureaus–all of excellent teak and
jack and rose-wood got down from Malabar. In that locality it was the only
building that the changing times failed to remodel; acknowledging no
architectural progress and recognizing no commercial need to let out the
superfluous space for shops such as laundry, shaving saloon, drug-and-oilman
stores, it stood amid the concrete, box-like structures in the neighbourhood,
with an air that their vulgar nattiness could never disturb its solitary,
old-world peace.
The
two windows of my bedroom looked out across an area of vegetable garden on to
the road. Some years ago the corporation had brought a charge against my
father, alleging that on the pretext of constructing anew the old compound-wall
he had taken a foot off the road; but the father told the inspecting surveyor,
cool as cucumber, that he (the surveyor) might have looked at the blueprint of
the place with a mote in his eye, that he should learn how to handle the
theodolite better before rushing to the pick-axe and the spade. But this has
nothing to do with the story proper; it is just to show that the road was not
wide enough to be a main thoroughfare; it was a little narrow arm of the broad
river of traffic a couple of furlongs beyond, quite lively during day but
deserted and withdrawn in the night. Almost stealthily a lane tan into it from
the right, like a frightened centipede, and at the junction grew a neem.
From my window I had a view of both lane and neem. A view fit for
the brush of a landscape artist.
One
night late in December I lay awake in my bed, envious of the wife who was sound
asleep on her cot near by. How cruel of her to sleep like that, throwing me
into the withered arms of the old hag Insomnia! It is said that he who is
separated from his sweetheart seeks sleep in vain; and to the company of the
great sleepless belong a bewildering variety: he who has quarreled with his
inamorata; the scheming and the wildly ambitious; those that have lost their
reputation and been publicly disgraced; those who pit against the high and
mighty; the moneybags. I didn’t come under any category, still I could not
sleep, I counted the rafters, counted sheep interminably. Some
of them resembled goats, then I began separating the sheep from
the goats.
The
night was bitter cold and the windows of my bedroom were shut. Wondering what
the hour was I looked at the time- piece on the chest of drawers at the head of
my bed; its radium dial was vehement glow in the darkness, indicating five
minutes to three. For a moment the ticking timepiece overwhelmed my brain, its
symbolism intensified by the silence and the darkness; it was the great heart
of life, beating, beating endlessly, rhythmically through the aeons. Suddenly
the alarm went off–I wasn’t aware that I had set it for three–and seizing it,
hardly had I turned off the clamorous needle before three drops of clear pure melody
tumbled into the well of night from the tower of the Ripon
Buildings.
Silence
settled again, more heavily brooding for its momentary break. I relaxed my
limbs as fully as I could to court sleep and was beginning to feel a little
restful, when on a sudden a sound as of moaning galvanized me to sit bolt
upright on the bed and strain my ears. For a split second I thought I heard my
wife sigh in her sleep. Tipt0eing to her cot I bent over her and found her, her
head snug in the crook of her arm, slumbering peacefully. A minute might have
passed and the sound had stopped. From the railway
station not far away came the noise of the shunting steam engine, like the sob
of a disconsolate soul, like wind soughing over a desolate heath. Then again
with the eeriness of the supernatural, as though some horror was latent in it,
the moaning started. I listened, every fibre of my body tense. No need to
doubt, it came from the street outside. I didn’t know at the moment whether I
was more curious than nervous, or both; whatever it was I moved forward to open
the window. The venetian blinds were not working, else I could have drawn them
partially for a peep, the vertical bar which made the slats mobile having been
nailed down at the ends and the successive coats of green paint through the
years, like a thick excrescence, closing up the smallest chink. But scarcely
had my hand touched the bolt when the moan resolved into an abrupt shriek,
sharp like a stab. I almost jumped back, affected by the strange horror of it.
It was and wasn’t human, like the whine of a wounded dog, for the shriek had
subsided again to a low wail, I resented my lack of guts and as an aid for
composure and the need for it woke up my wife.
“What’s
the matter?” she asked, peeved at being suddenly roused from sleep. Or maybe, I
had cut across some delightful dream of hers.
“Nothing.”
“Then
why did you wake me?”
“Don’t
you hear a sound?”
“Sound?
What sound?”
“Listen.”
“I
don’t hear any, It’s your nerves.”
“No.”
“So
what?”
“Come
to the window.”
Reluctantly
she followed me to the window and there behind the blind slat stood in an
attitude of hearkening attentively, and notwithstanding the gloom of the
chamber lit only with the phosphorised face of the timepiece, I could see her
perplexed brow smoothening and her lips fashioning into a soundless ‘O’ as
though what she had guessed intuitively was not an uncertainty.
“Shall
I open the window?” I whispered.
“No,
don’t.”
“Then
what on earth is it? It fair gives me the jitters. I’ll look out and see.”
“You’d
better not.”
The
moan ceased abruptly. Had the cardiac failed?
Taking
courage in both hands I flung open a shutter of the window, expecting some wild
sight to meet my eyes. But the street was empty, uncannily quiet as a
foot-track in a jungle, and I saw nothing except the neem and under it
the night more detached from the moonlit environs. A cold
draught hit my face, the wind rustled through the ragged banners of the
plantain trees in the vegetable garden, it was the chilliest hour heralding the
dawn.
“Shut
that window and come to bed, will you?” snapped my wife. As my partner in life
for over a decade and a half she didn’t feel the need to bill and coo any more,
though occasionally she did thus enliven the humdrum of matrimony, whenever she
wanted a favour from me, for a new jewel or a new saree which she had perhaps
seen at a music hall or a picture house.
“I
thought you recognized the nature of the moan,” I said, sitting on the edge of
her bed.
She
did not answer. I repeated my query, some sixth sense in me being sure that she
knew.
“What
nuisance! How could I know?” she said irritably. “The night has many voices.
And if I tell you of my guess you’ll only laugh at me. You men feel so
unaccountably superior.”
“What’s
your guess?”
“O
nothing!”
“O
hell!”
“Forget
it.”
“You
mean it’s just nerves.”
“Just
coffee.”
She
was referring to my excessive weakness for coffee; her latest was some blasted vita.
I felt her cool palm over my fevered brow, so like being etherized, my eyelids
drooped…
The
day broke. I never am a late riser even with bouts of insomnia, and that
morning I woke not to the ‘cockorico’ of cock or to the ‘caw’ of crow, but to a
loud human buzz in the road outside. Like a zombie I hurried downstairs and saw
my wife standing in the portico. The milkman was milking the cow. The sight of
the stuffed calf which lay near him sticking out its crochety legs of
half-leathered sticks was disgusting in the extreme. How man swindled a poor
dumb animal!
I
took a beeline toward the gate.
“You
needn’t bother to go out” said my wife, in a hushed voice.
“I
knew that something terrible had happened last night, that moan,” I said. “Is
it a murder, and that right in front of our house?”
The
milkman turned round with a significant look.
“More
heinous than murder,” said my wife.
“What
is it?”
“Some
woman has given birth to a child and thrown it in the dustbin.”
I
couldn’t make out whether she was indignant or merely being frivolous.
“Is
the poor mite alive?” I anxiously asked,–“the unwanted, the compromising.”
She
didn’t think it worthwhile to reply. Silently she looked at the stuffed calf
and then at me. There was no mistaking what she felt. Her face had assumed an
expression of contempt, not for me, her devoted spouse–I had the wit to
perceive it–but for the entire male of the species. And were contempt, horror,
indignation, virtue’s antiseptics against vice and wantonness? Who could tell?