"The thunder doesn't bother you?"
Even to this, there was no reply. Beginning to feel slightly forlorn, he mumbled as if to himself, "It's coming down like a waterfall. . . there's some more thunder."
"Don't you like it?"
Coming as abruptly as they did, the wife's words seemed to explode in his ears.
"What. . .?" The guest leaned forward despite himself. He deliberately left an interval in which a certain meaning of these words, which could be taken in two ways, might be broached, either by what the wife said or did (if she was going to make an overture). But soon becoming unable to endure that interval, the pressure of its silence, he asked again, "The thunder?" If this conversation had taken place in a bright room, he would not even have had to ask "What?" Now brusquely, he flung out the words that were appropriate to the other meaning (an extremely ordinary one), words that should have been said right away. At the same time, aware of his satisfaction in having warded off a danger and not waiting for what the wife would, of course, reply, he went on, "It's not that I particularly dislike it. But that last one was a bit too close for comfort. Anyone would have..."
Covering his words, the wife said, "I don't mind it at all myself."
"Not again!" the guest thought. It was getting ridiculous. He felt as if he were being told the same joke many times. The "snake," as long as one was afraid of it, was like a real snake. But if one deftly parried its lunge, it was nothing but a rotten straw rope that was starting to unravel. Not to have grabbed that rope and tossed it in a ditch was going too easy on the perpetrator of the prank. And for her to twirl the old rope around yet again! "This sort of woman is anathema in Soseki's stories," the guest muttered to himself. This time, for his own part, he took up the passive defense of "the silence of darkness." After a while the wife said, "What a scaredy-cat you are." But he obstinately held his tongue.
The silence went on and on. Meanwhile, the guest sobered up from the delicious sake of superiority. Had he been wrestling himself again? If the wife's words had only the ordinary, apparent meaning of the like or dislike of thunder and held no hidden message, had he run on a little too far ahead? Yet mulling over once more their affected simplicity and their context, he did not think he was mistaken.
"But if from the start she meant that other thing, and wasn't talking about the thunder at all . . . how banal. What does she take me for?" The guest began to grow angry.
"It's all because of this darkness. I wish I could open the rain shutters right now. These silly thoughts would vanish with the dark."
This was suddenly called out by the wife in a loud voice. It startled the guest. Only now he remembered the houseboy. What had the oaf been doing with himself all this while?
"Takebe-san."
The wife raised her voice again, louder this time. She had seen some leaks in the ceiling of her husband's study and had sent the houseboy in with an empty bucket, but now thinking there might be other leaks, she wanted him to look around the rest of the house. She too wondered where he'd been in the interval. Much to her surprise the houseboy answered her from the next room, the morning room. Realizing at once that their conversation had been overheard in its entirety, she and the guest felt some displeasure. But the wife hesitated to show hers openly. Instead, in a pleasant voice, she said, "Are you all right? After that great big thunderbolt? Shall I put up the mosquito netting for you?"
From the next room came a laugh that was completely lacking in mirth.
"Takebe-san." This time the guest spoke. "I'm sorry to bother you, but will you bring some matches and a tobacco tray?"
"Oh, forgive me. I was so distracted by this uproar that I forgot all about them."
Getting to her feet, the wife went into the breakfast room. "Oh dear. The fire has gone out."
"Do you want me to light it?"
"No, it doesn't matter. Now, where are they? They were around here somewhere. How about the utility charcoal? You don't know?"
"I think it's in that cupboard." There was a sound of sticky, padding footsteps as the houseboy went to fetch it.
"Ouch!"
"Oh, excuse me."
"You hurt me. Where? At the bottom?"
"That's where it was last time."
There was a clattering sound. In the parlor the guest started to get exasperated. "Just matches will be fine. Matches."
"It was here somewhere ... isn't it in this box?"
"Yes, that's right. Probably in there."
"And the matches... ?" Then a moment later, "What are you doing?"
In his gradually heightened state of carnal desire, from this kind of talk the guest could see it all—the small space between the wife's body and the houseboy's, their contact, the wife's damp, fragrant hair, the houseboy's thudding heart and trembling body—much more vividly than if he were looking at it in a well-lighted room. And he could feel it all—the subtle inner excitement that he could not have perceived with his eyes. Once again a jealousy that was without reason raised its serpent's head in him.
From the morning room there was the sound of a match being struck and a little while afterward the wife's voice.
"Takebe-san. You're pale."
"It's nothing. It's the candle."
"Are you quite sure?"
Presently the wife, the tobacco tray in one hand and a candlestick in the other, came back into the room. By then the guest had noticed that the rain had tapered off to a drizzle.
"We no longer need a light. Probably we can open the shutters now." Saying this, he got to his feet and opened two or three himself. The pale, whitish light abruptly shone in. The darkness was gone.
The wife of his friend was standing at his side. Wonderingly he looked at her. She was his friend's wife, and nothing else.
"Why are you staring at me so?"
"Because somehow it's as if I'd met you again after a long time."
"Why, you're right! For a while there I could only hear your voice. I haven't seen you in a long time."
"Good afternoon. How have you been?"
"Fine, thank you. And you?"
The storm, as in its onset, was rapid in its ending. Each minute the raindrops were finer and farther apart. The wind died away. The sky kept on getting brighter. After twenty minutes or so the rain had completely stopped. Already patches of blue sky appeared here and there in the upper cloud cover. In the lower sky clouds like white cotton puffs still sailed before the wind at a fairish speed. Heaven and earth, in the explosion of their magnificent quarrel, the electrical enmity that each had harbored against the other until it couldn't be held back, had bared their hearts to each other. Now both were cool and refreshed, as if they'd revived. The cicadas also, which had been struck dumb by the thunder, took heart again and started up their raucous, sultry cry in chorus. The rooster, which when sky and earth had closed with each other in darkness had flown up in a panic to the perch hung from a rafter in the shed, now came down and, getting its bearings, gave a loud war cry.
From far across the rice paddies there was a brave answering cry. The dog, as wet as any drowned rat, its head hanging low, entered the garden shaking off the muddy water in a spray of droplets. When it saw the wife and guest, a fond, friendly look came over its face. Licking its jaws, it propped its chin on the edge of the porch and whined emptily. Chided for that, it gave