Chapel let his eyes wander admirably before he caught mine again.
“It is only human to feel that,” he observed in the best style.
IN THE DARK
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.
Today 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 paradeground, 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 messroom 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 outlyingannoyances. 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 bv 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 tonight, 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 tonight, 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
