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.