Colin II: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

“Oh, do wait two minutes,” he said. “It’s ... it’s awfully rotten of me, but I couldn’t stand to be alone in the dark again this moment. I never had such a horrible nightmare.”

“Well, just two minutes,” said Colin. “And what was the nightmare?”

Dennis pulled his father down till he sat on the edge of the bed, and held his hand.

“I don’t know what it was,” he said, with a shudder. “It felt like the devil. But it won’t come back, will it, when I go to sleep again?”

“Of course it won’t. You’re not frightened now, are you?”

“No. At least I don’t think so. If you promise me it won’t come back, I’m not frightened.”

“Yes, I promise you that,” said Colin.

Colin left a tranquil Dennis curled round in bed like a drowsy puppy when he went to his room a few minutes later. But he was not so tranquil himself. He had not imagined that any panic terror would seize the boy: he had only meant to plant a seed, a suggestion, ever so quietly, leaving it to mature.... Dennis would not come to love evil, so that, when the time for his choice arrived, he would choose ‘wisely and well,’ if it approached him with these strangling assaults of nightmare. Why had it happened like that, he wondered? No boy’s soul, at that age, was of such virgin and stainless purity that the breath of evil suffocated him.... More likely that it was his own divided purpose, his own struggle against that obstacle which somehow he had himself set up against the free flowing of the stream he had directed against Dennis. Some force, he felt sure, had reached the sleeping boy from him; that he had intended, and he had felt it flowing through him. But had it reached him in some fierce torrent, raging at having been checked in its passage, and settling on him with claws and teeth? Had it been like some wild beast, which, having been shewn its lawful and desired prey, was held back from it?

He must not approach Dennis again like that, nor seek to hold back the power that he directed. It was no conscious scruple on his part which had blocked the channel: the obstacle seemed to have made itself, and planted itself there. It was of the same nature as the instinct that made his hand search for the switch and turn up the light at Dennis’s appealing cry. He hated the boy to be frightened, quite apart from the fact that Dennis must of his own inclination welcome and cherish the power that was ready to protect him and be his friend even as it had been his father’s friend, and the friend of old Colin. It had come to Dennis to-night as a foe of malignancy and terror: that would never do....

Colin had slipped quickly out of his clothes, and now, before he got into bed, he drew up the blind, and throwing the window wide leaned out into the pregnant spring night. Thick and warm was the darkness, a floor of cloud covered the sky, and there would be rain before morning, the soft, fruitful, windless April rain which sent the sap flooding upwards through stem and branch till it burst into leaf and bud. The young growth needed not pelting showers and fierce suns; it prospered most in these still warm nights.... And Dennis was like these tender, sappy shoots: he must be left to grow quietly yet awhile, not drenched by deluge and speared by violent suns: these would only blast and wither him.... How panic-stricken the boy had been! That psychical onslaught had from its very vehemence been to him a hostile intrusion, not the advent of a protecting power. How instinctively in the shock and terror of it he had called to his father!