_ It was late afternoon by the banks of a swiftly rushing river, a
river that gave back a haze of heat from its waters as though it
were some stagnant steaming lagoon, and yet seemed to be whirling
onward with the determination of a living thing, perpetually eager
and remorseless, leaping savagely at any obstacle that attempted to
stay its course; an unfriendly river, to whose waters you committed
yourself at your peril. Under the hot breathless shade of the
trees on its shore arose that acrid all-pervading smell that seems
to hang everywhere about the tropics, a smell as of some monstrous
musty still-room where herbs and spices have been crushed and
distilled and stored for hundreds of years, and where the windows
have seldom been opened. In the dazzling heat that still held
undisputed sway over the scene, insects and birds seemed
preposterously alive and active, flitting their gay colours through
the sunbeams, and crawling over the baked dust in the full swing
and pursuit of their several businesses; the flies engaged in
Heaven knows what, and the fly-catchers busy with the flies.
Beasts and humans showed no such indifference to the temperature;
the sun would have to slant yet further downward before the earth
would become a fit arena for their revived activities. In the
sheltered basement of a wayside rest-house a gang of native
hammock-bearers slept or chattered drowsily through the last hours
of the long mid-day halt; wide awake, yet almost motionless in the
thrall of a heavy lassitude, their European master sat alone in an
upper chamber, staring out through a narrow window-opening at the
native village, spreading away in thick clusters of huts girt
around with cultivated vegetation. It seemed a vast human ant-
hill, which would presently be astir with its teeming human life,
as though the Sun God in his last departing stride had roused it
with a careless kick. Even as Comus watched he could see the
beginnings of the evening's awakening. Women, squatting in front
of their huts, began to pound away at the rice or maize that would
form the evening meal, girls were collecting their water pots
preparatory to a walk down to the river, and enterprising goats
made tentative forays through gaps in the ill-kept fences of
neighbouring garden plots; their hurried retreats showed that here
at least someone was keeping alert and wakeful vigil. Behind a hut
perched on a steep hillside, just opposite to the rest-house, two
boys were splitting wood with a certain languid industry; further
down the road a group of dogs were leisurely working themselves up
to quarrelling pitch. Here and there, bands of evil-looking pigs
roamed about, busy with foraging excursions that came unpleasantly
athwart the border-line of scavenging. And from the trees that
bounded and intersected the village rose the horrible, tireless,
spiteful-sounding squawking of the iron-throated crows.
Comus sat and watched it all with a sense of growing aching
depression. It was so utterly trivial to his eyes, so devoid of
interest, and yet it was so real, so serious, so implacable in its
continuity. The brain grew tired with the thought of its unceasing
reproduction. It had all gone on, as it was going on now, by the
side of the great rushing swirling river, this tilling and planting
and harvesting, marketing and store-keeping, feast-making and
fetish-worship and love-making, burying and giving in marriage,
child-bearing and child-rearing, all this had been going on, in the
shimmering, blistering heat and the warm nights, while he had been
a youngster at school, dimly recognising Africa as a division of
the earth's surface that it was advisable to have a certain nodding
acquaintance with.
It had been going on in all its trifling detail, all its serious
intensity, when his father and his grandfather in their day had
been little boys at school, it would go on just as intently as ever
long after Comus and his generation had passed away, just as the
shadows would lengthen and fade under the mulberry trees in that
far away English garden, round the old stone fountain where a
leaden otter for ever preyed on a leaden salmon.
Comus rose impatiently from his seat, and walked wearily across the
hut to another window-opening which commanded a broad view of the
river. There was something which fascinated and then depressed one
in its ceaseless hurrying onward sweep, its tons of water rushing
on for all time, as long as the face of the earth should remain
unchanged. On its further shore could be seen spread out at
intervals other teeming villages, with their cultivated plots and
pasture clearings, their moving dots which meant cattle and goats
and dogs and children. And far up its course, lost in the forest
growth that fringed its banks, were hidden away yet more villages,
human herding-grounds where men dwelt and worked and bartered,
squabbled and worshipped, sickened and perished, while the river
went by with its endless swirl and rush of gleaming waters. One
could well understand primitive early races making propitiatory
sacrifices to the spirit of a great river on whose shores they
dwelt. Time and the river were the two great forces that seemed to
matter here.
It was almost a relief to turn back to that other outlook and watch
the village life that was now beginning to wake in earnest. The
procession of water-fetchers had formed itself in a long chattering
line that stretched river-wards. Comus wondered how many tens of
thousands of times that procession had been formed since first the
village came into existence. They had been doing it while he was
playing in the cricket-fields at school, while he was spending
Christmas holidays in Paris, while he was going his careless round
of theatres, dances, suppers and card-parties, just as they were
doing it now; they would be doing it when there was no one alive
who remembered Comus Bassington. This thought recurred again and
again with painful persistence, a morbid growth arising in part
from his loneliness.
Staring dumbly out at the toiling sweltering human ant-hill Comus
marvelled how missionary enthusiasts could labour hopefully at the
work of transplanting their religion, with its homegrown accretions
of fatherly parochial benevolence, in this heat-blistered, fever-
scourged wilderness, where men lived like groundbait and died like
flies. Demons one might believe in, if one did not hold one's
imagination in healthy check, but a kindly all-managing God, never.
Somewhere in the west country of England Comus had an uncle who
lived in a rose-smothered rectory and taught a wholesome gentle-
hearted creed that expressed itself in the spirit of "Little lamb,
who made thee?" and faithfully reflected the beautiful homely
Christ-child sentiment of Saxon Europe. What a far away, unreal
fairy story it all seemed here in this West African land, where the
bodies of men were of as little account as the bubbles that floated
on the oily froth of the great flowing river, and where it required
a stretch of wild profitless imagination to credit them with
undying souls. In the life he had come from Comus had been
accustomed to think of individuals as definite masterful
personalities, making their several marks on the circumstances that
revolved around them; they did well or ill, or in most cases
indifferently, and were criticised, praised, blamed, thwarted or
tolerated, or given way to. In any case, humdrum or outstanding,
they had their spheres of importance, little or big. They
dominated a breakfast table or harassed a Government, according to
their capabilities or opportunities, or perhaps they merely had
irritating mannerisms. At any rate it seemed highly probable that
they had souls. Here a man simply made a unit in an unnumbered
population, an inconsequent dot in a loosely-compiled deathroll.
Even his own position as a white man exalted conspicuously above a
horde of black natives did not save Comus from the depressing sense
of nothingness which his first experience of fever had thrown over
him. He was a lost, soulless body in this great uncaring land; if
he died another would take his place, his few effects would be
inventoried and sent down to the coast, someone else would finish
off any tea or whisky that he left behind--that would be all.
It was nearly time to be starting towards the next halting place
where he would dine or at any rate eat something. But the
lassitude which the fever had bequeathed him made the tedium of
travelling through interminable forest-tracks a weariness to be
deferred as long as possible. The bearers were nothing loth to let
another half-hour or so slip by, and Comus dragged a battered
paper-covered novel from the pocket of his coat. It was a story
dealing with the elaborately tangled love affairs of a surpassingly
uninteresting couple, and even in his almost bookless state Comus
had not been able to plough his way through more than two-thirds of
its dull length; bound up with the cover, however, were some pages
of advertisement, and these the exile scanned with a hungry
intentness that the romance itself could never have commanded. The
name of a shop, of a street, the address of a restaurant, came to
him as a bitter reminder of the world he had lost, a world that ate
and drank and flirted, gambled and made merry, a world that debated
and intrigued and wire-pulled, fought or compromised political
battles--and recked nothing of its outcasts wandering through
forest paths and steamy swamps or lying in the grip of fever.
Comus read and re-read those few lines of advertisement, just as he
treasured a much-crumpled programme of a first-night performance at
the Straw Exchange Theatre; they seemed to make a little more real
the past that was already so shadowy and so utterly remote. For a
moment he could almost capture the sensation of being once again in
those haunts that he loved; then he looked round and pushed the
book wearily from him. The steaming heat, the forest, the rushing
river hemmed him in on all sides.
The two boys who had been splitting wood ceased from their labours
and straightened their backs; suddenly the smaller of the two gave
the other a resounding whack with a split lath that he still held
in his hand, and flew up the hillside with a scream of laughter and
simulated terror, the bigger lad following in hot pursuit. Up and
down the steep bush-grown slope they raced and twisted and dodged,
coming sometimes to close quarters in a hurricane of squeals and
smacks, rolling over and over like fighting kittens, and breaking
away again to start fresh provocation and fresh pursuit. Now and
again they would lie for a time panting in what seemed the last
stage of exhaustion, and then they would be off in another wild
scamper, their dusky bodies flitting through the bushes,
disappearing and reappearing with equal suddenness. Presently two
girls of their own age, who had returned from the water-fetching,
sprang out on them from ambush, and the four joined in one joyous
gambol that lit up the hillside with shrill echoes and glimpses of
flying limbs. Comus sat and watched, at first with an amused
interest, then with a returning flood of depression and heart-ache.
Those wild young human kittens represented the joy of life, he was
the outsider, the lonely alien, watching something in which he
could not join, a happiness in which he had no part or lot. He
would pass presently out of the village and his bearers' feet would
leave their indentations in the dust; that would be his most
permanent memorial in this little oasis of teeming life. And that
other life, in which he once moved with such confident sense of his
own necessary participation in it, how completely he had passed out
of it. Amid all its laughing throngs, its card parties and race-
meetings and country-house gatherings, he was just a mere name,
remembered or forgotten, Comus Bassington, the boy who went away.
He had loved himself very well and never troubled greatly whether
anyone else really loved him, and now he realised what he had made
of his life. And at the same time he knew that if his chance were
to come again he would throw it away just as surely, just as
perversely. Fate played with him with loaded dice; he would lose
always.
One person in the whole world had cared for him, for longer than he
could remember, cared for him perhaps more than he knew, cared for
him perhaps now. But a wall of ice had mounted up between him and
her, and across it there blew that cold-breath that chills or kills
affection.
The words of a well-known old song, the wistful cry of a lost
cause, rang with insistent mockery through his brain:
"Better loved you canna be,
Will ye ne'er come back again?"
If it was love that was to bring him back he must be an exile for
ever. His epitaph in the mouths of those that remembered him would
be, Comus Bassington, the boy who never came back.
And in his unutterable loneliness he bowed his head on his arms,
that he might not see the joyous scrambling frolic on yonder
hillside. _