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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a little narrow arm of the broad river of traffic a couple of furlongs beyond, quite lively during day but deserted and withdrawn in the night.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 , 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.

“N´Ç³Ù³ó¾±²Ô²µ.â€�

“Then why did you wake me?�

“Don’t you hear a sound?�

“Sound? What sound?�

“L¾±²õ³Ù±ð²Ô.â€�

“I don’t hear any, It’s your nerves.�

“N´Ç.â€�

“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?