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.
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