“You’d better send me out again,” Burnett had said, hopelessly. “Anything from Arakan to Zanzibar will do for me.”
Crabb listened to the story with renewed marks of appreciation.
“So you’ve been out and doing in the world, after all?” he said, languidly, “while we—eheu jam satis!—have glutted ourselves with the stale and unprofitable. How I envy you!”
Burnett smoked silently. It was very easy to envy from the comfortable vantage ground of a hundred and fifty thousand a year.
“Why, man, if you knew how sick of it all I am,” sighed Crabb, “you’d thank your stars for the lucky dispensation that took you out of it. Rasselas was right. I’ve been pursuing the phantoms of hope for thirty years, and I’m still hopeless. There have been a few bright spots”—Crabb smiled at his cigar ash—“a very few, and far between.”
“Bored as ever, Crabb?”
“Immitigably. To live in the thick of things and see nothing but the pale drabs and grays. No red anywhere. Oh, for a passion that would burn and sear—love, hate, fear! I’m forever courting them all. And here I am still cool, colorless and unscarred. Only once”—his gray eyes lit up marvelously—“only once did I learn the true relation of life to death, Burnett; only once. That was when the Blue Wing struggled six days in a hurricane with Hatteras under her lee. It was glorious. They may talk of love and hate as they will; fear, I tell you, is the Titan of passions.”
Burnett was surprised at this unmasking.
“You should try big game,” he said, carelessly.
“I have,” said the other; “both beasts and men—and here I am in flannels and a red tie! I’ve skinned the one and been skinned by the other—to what end?”