<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">It</span> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The words of a well-known old song, the wistful cry of a lost
cause, rang with insistent mockery through his brain:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Better loved you canna be,<br/>
Will ye ne’er come back again?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>And in his unutterable loneliness he bowed his head on his
arms, that he might not see the joyous scrambling frolic on
yonder hillside.</p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />