‘At one moment she wants a special room built for the piano, a rose-garden with a fountain in it and Italian statues; next day she talks of selling up and going to live in Yorkshire of all places, and pulling strings to get me back into the regiment - which is out of the question, of course. Now she’s got it into her head that the natives are trying to poison Chang and Zena; she chops up their food herself and insists on sleeping in the dressing-room with the little beggars and locking the doors. All fads and fancies, one extreme to the other. I wish you’d speak to her, Tilly.’
‘I shouldn’t worry, Hereward; I expect it’s the altitude, or the vertical rays of the sun.’
Hereward gave a sharp bark like a jackal.
‘Just what I told her, but now she wants to go off on this safari of Crawfurd’s. Stupid idea - for her, I mean. All right for a fine, strong woman like you.’
Tilly looked displeased at the compliment. ‘It might be good for Lettice. And they say Ian Crawfurd is a splendid shot and knows the country inside out.’
‘A young puppy, if you ask me. But of course I don’t expect my opinions to carry any weight.’
We had reached the river, and a crisis was developing upon the farther bank. Egged on by a tremendous shouting, cracking of whips, and general furore, the oxen had taken a run at the steep part of the bank and would have crested the rise had not the crate unfortunately caught on the branches of a tree. The oxen heaved in vain, the wagon started to slide backwards, dragging the little beasts after it, and Robin, who was riding by the team, bellowed, ‘Stone, stone, stone,’ at the top of his voice. Everyone took up the cry; it echoed round the hillside like a battle-cry while the sliding wagon gathered pace, the frantic oxen scrabbled with their little hoofs and several people tried to hang on to the spokes. A couple of Kikuyu at length rushed up with boulders to put under the wheels, a simple expedient which arrested the run-away in the nick of time. The crate, dislodged by the tree, was now hanging dangerously over to one side, and a few more yards would have seen it topple over and smash itself against the rocks.
A considerable audience had by now sprung out of an apparently deserted countryside to proffer advice, while the drivers and their mates re-told the more dramatic parts of the episode with a great many gestures and pieces of mime, so that one could see again the oxen heaving, the wagon creeping forward, the impact of the tree, the wagon slipping, the oxen giving way, the threatened disaster, the yawning abyss, the heroic struggle of the driver to arrest the wagon, and finally the brilliant last-minute triumph of the two men with boulders who flung themselves into a position of danger and saved the day. It was all much more exciting than the actual incident, and I thought Robin and Hereward unkind to cut it short and insist upon the unroping, rearranging, and securing of the crate, while the oxen panted, and the audience watched with fascinated eyes.
‘Silly idiots,’ Robin said. ‘They forgot the wheel-chocks. And I told them about three times.’
‘What can you expect?’ Hereward agreed. ‘I suppose God gave them brains, but they’ll do anything to avoid using ’em.’
One could see, then, that the drivers had not been very bright; but what a story they would have to tell when they got home!
The wagon reached the Palmers’ without further adventures, and a week or two later we were asked over for a piano-warming. By now they had moved into their stone bungalow, which seemed to everyone the height of luxury; it had three spare rooms, teak floors, bow windows, a bathroom, and gables in the Dutch style, with curlecues. Lettice had hoped for a tiled roof, but this was too expensive even for Hereward, and they had fallen back on the usual corrugated iron, painted green.
‘You’ve done your hair in a new way,’ Tilly remarked. Lettice wore it piled on top of her head in soft, gleaming swathes and she had a fillet of small bronze leaves somehow woven into it.
‘I thought I had better dress up like a concert pianist, even if I can’t play like one,’ Lettice explained. ‘My fingers feel like sausages and make sounds like the wild asses that stamped on Jamsheed’s grave, but never mind, I thought we might all sing choruses. Ian has come back, did you know? And wants us all to go off soon with him on the safari.’
It was good news about Ian, and I went off hopefully to find him. I had been reading about Prester John, so Abyssinia had become a place of riches and mystery, where princes wore crowns that flashed with rubies, and dwelt in castles set on the cloud-enfolded crests of lowering mountains.
Ian said he had met a prince, but without a crown, though he did have jewels set in the handle of his sword, which he used to cut off chunks of raw meat at a banquet; and a cup-bearer, a boy of twelve or so, had poured the wine from a golden goblet, and knelt on one knee before his prince, after the taster had taken the first sip. And although Ian had seen no castles, he had visited a monastery on top of a hill so steep that no pony could clamber up, inhabited by holy men with long beards, and by five princes, relations of the Emperor, whose eyes had been burnt out in their youth, so that they could never lay claim to the throne nor lead armed revolts against the Lion of Judah.
Hereward was moved to exclaim: ‘Revolting cruelty! What barbaric devils they are.’
‘Yes, they are barbarous,’ Ian agreed, ‘but they did it to preserve unity and avoid civil wars.’
‘I see no need to make excuses for them.’
‘Their point, I suppose, is that it’s better to blind four or five young men than to plunge the country into dynastic struggles later on, at the cost of thousands of lives.’
‘I don’t believe they thought of that at all,’ Hereward said. ‘You’ll be defending next their habit of mutilating prisoners, like the wretched Italians taken at the battle of Adowa.’
To change the subject, Ian told us about another and more fortunate prisoner he had met in Addis Ababa. This was a Scot left over from Lord Napier’s campaign, now an oldish man of considerable substance and influence with the Emperor. Ian and his friends had wanted to buy more ponies, but Menelik had forbidden their export; the British Minister said he could do nothing and they might as well go home. The Scots ex-prisoner, however, had fixed the whole thing in three days, at a cost to Ian of a hundred pounds in Maria Theresa dollars.
Hereward looked disgusted and said in his stiffest tones: ‘If you’ll forgive me for saying so, I think that an Englishman who resorts to bribery in a nigger country betrays our name to the world.’
His words fell like lead into a pool; there was a plop and then silence, while everyone searched for something to say. Lettice observed:
‘If the Abyssinians are used to bribery they will go on doing it, and Ian can’t reform them single-handed. Besides, when in Rome…’
‘I have never been able to understand the difference between a bribe and a tip,’ Robin said. ‘Yet you are a blackguard if you do give the one, or if you fail to give the other. It is very difficult.’
‘I suppose it’s a question of timing,’ Ian suggested. ‘One comes before service, the other after. Would it make you think any better of us, Hereward, to know that we gave him his pourboire after he had smoothed our path with Menelik, and not before?’
‘You can split hairs if you like,’ Hereward replied gruffly. ‘Right’s right and wrong’s wrong to me.’
‘You are lucky to see things so clearly,’ Lettice said.
‘There’s no luck about it. Right and wrong are there for everyone to see. They are often inconvenient, and therefore people pretend they’re obscure as an excuse for dodging them. That’s all.’
‘It is quite enough,’ Lettice observed. ‘I can see that I must deputize for Orpheus, without any of his genius. You must please be charitable to me, if not to the Abyssinians or to Ian’s morals.’
Our ears had grown accustomed to rhythm and dissonance, to cadence and chant, but not to melody. Although Lettice may not have been a player of the first quality, the skill of her hands, darting like butterflies above the keys, in summoning from the instrument a torrent of har
mony seemed to me a kind of miracle. A hissing lamp threw a circle of light over her gleaming chestnut hair with the bronze leaves in it, over her pale skin and her dancing hands, and over the piano’s shining surface, still and deep as a lake among mountains; this was a moment of magic revealing to us all, for a few moments, a hidden world of grace and wonder beyond the one of which our eyes told us, a world that no words could delineate, as insubstantial as a cloud, as iridescent as a dragon-fly, and as innocent as the heart of a rose.
When she had finished her piece there was a silence no one cared to break, it seemed to have a tangible existence of its own. Lettice herself dissolved it by arranging some music and starting to sing. Probably her voice was not the equal of her playing, but it was true and gentle, and she sang lively little songs in French. Ian jumped up and stood beside her, looking over her shoulder, as natural and easy as one of the Somali horsemen whose lives he often shared. I suppose the music had tautened our perceptions and made me see them, together in the lamplight, as something other than they were, more handsome and accomplished, more of the spirit and less of flesh and blood, more of the ideal and less of the matter-of-fact - or had woven for reality a richer garment than it usually wears.
At any rate, they looked very fine, and full of laughter as they sang together songs as light as bubbles, and as gay. Ian’s voice was clear and simple and made me think of sherry poured into a crystal glass the Palmers had - the look of it, not the taste, which I did not know. I cannot remember any of the songs that evening except one in which we all joined, the French-Canadian jingle Alouette; and afterwards, whenever I heard this little tune, it reminded me of that evening, and Lettice at the piano with Ian by her, the others joining in with more enthusiasm than accuracy, the sense of gaiety and friendship, and the room with a spicy scent peculiar to everything that Lettice owned.
Chapter 17
MOST of the cannibals went home when the Palmers’ house was finished, but two or three settled down with wives and families, a little group of aliens stuck like a splinter into the flesh of the Kikuyu. The women wore nothing but a triangle of leather, no larger than my hand, dangling from a string round their waists, but made up for it with a great deal of thick, heavy wire coiled round their arms and legs so tightly that the flesh bulged out like inner tubes on each side of the coil. They walked with a free, upright gait, carried things on their heads instead of on their backs and smoked clay pipes with long stems. The Kikuyu, whose own women wore leather aprons to their knees, thought them indecent, bold hussies and had as little to do with them as possible.
They soon acquired goats which, like all livestock, spent the night in thorn-fenced bomas intended to keep out marauding beasts. In this objective, the Kavirondo s boma failed. They lost several goats, and accused the Kikuyu of stealing them. The Kikuyu denied this hotly, and blamed a leopard, whose spoor they pointed out nearby. The Kavirondo retorted that the spoor belonged to a harmless hyena and stuck to their charge, and so a shauri developed which came to Hereward for settlement.
This word shauri was one we used a great deal. It could mean a quarrel, a lawsuit, an arrangement, an agreement, a discussion, a concern – almost anything. Here it meant a contest in rhetoric between Kikuyu and Kavirondo spokesmen. After several hours of this, Hereward gave a judgement of which he was proud. If the Kikuyu are so sure there is a leopard, he said, let them catch it, and their case will be proved. If they fail, and if no better evidence can be furnished, they must restore to the Kavirondo a number of goats equal to those which disappeared.
‘Unsporting, in a way,’ Hereward commented. ‘Traps, I mean. Much rather walk him up and bag him in the open, but there doesn’t seem to be much chance of that.’
Tilly warned Hereward to take special care of the dogs. They were a favourite food of leopards, who would risk almost anything to catch one. But Hereward had taken the side of the Kavirondo, and was not unduly disturbed.
He paid for this – or, rather, poor Chang did. The Palmers were at dinner, the double doors giving on to their veranda were open and Chang was curled up in a wicker chair outside. Chang and Zena went everywhere with Lettice and it was unusual for Chang not to be at her feet, but he was less than six or seven paces away, and no one imagined any danger. Even just after it had happened, they did not realize anything was wrong. Lettice heard a sort of thump, and something like a tear or gasp, and a faint noise that might have been the chair scraping on the tiles. Hereward got up to look, and saw nothing.
It was dark outside, no moon. Lettice called Chang and when he did not respond Hereward felt in the chair, which he noticed had been slewed round to one side.
Of course there was a great hue and cry. Everyone called and walked about with lamps held high, but saw nothing. At last one of the Kikuyu shouted: he had found the spoor. It was not very clear to Hereward, but everyone else agreed that it was a leopard, unmistakably. No sign of Chang was ever found. I wondered if his hair, poor Chang, would give the leopard indigestion, but Juma said their stomachs were like mincing machines. Once I was shown some leopard droppings that had in them bits of undigested fur from the pelts of mice, of which leopards are fond, though you would think mice too small. By such standards, Chang was quite a large meal.
Lettice drove herself almost into a frenzy with remorse and self-blame. ‘If I had only called him…. If I had only for one single second imagined…If only…’ It was too late. Zena was seldom out of her arms, and she refused to be comforted.
‘You’ve still got Zena,’ Tilly said.
‘They were inseparable. It’s like Pyramus losing Thisbe, or Juliet, Romeo; how can Zena live without him? How can I? I expect it’s a punishment, only why should it be wreaked on Chang?’
‘The best thing is to get another quickly, even when you feel (one always does) that you can never, never bear to have another in his place. Like a tooth.’
‘No, I shall never get another; I ought to live in a solitary fortress somewhere, fed through a hole in the wall; I bring disaster on everyone I love.’
‘I don’t think you should blame yourself quite so much,’ Tilly suggested cautiously. ‘Leopards are one of the country’s natural hazards, I suppose.’
‘Hugh has had appendicitis, did I tell you?’ Lettice seldom spoke about her son. ‘He very nearly died, poor little boy, and what good am I to him as a mother?’
‘Perhaps you should bring him out.’
‘That is the one thing I’ve been hoping for; but Hereward…I daresay he’s right, in a year’s time Hugh will have to go to school, and here there’s nothing; but even a year, that seems an eternity; a year would mean everything to me. Now I feel that if he came, I should let him get bitten by a snake, or eaten by a lion, or he would get dysentery or typhoid or malaria….’
When Tilly got home she told Robin that she was going to get another Peke for Lettice, to take her mind off Chang.
‘They are very expensive,’ Robin pointed out.
‘Surely the price of a single Peke won’t make or break us.’
‘No, but the bank…’
‘Well, then, we must blue a bit of capital.’ That was Tilly’s sovereign remedy, but Robin said regretfully:
‘I’m afraid it is too late for that.’
‘I daresay there’s something we can sell,’ Tilly concluded hopefully. She had some turkeys, reared with much care for the Christmas market, and every morning she emerged from what she called her muddle-room, next to the store, with streaming eyes and a red face, having been chopping up the onions they so much appreciated. Now she decided that a pair sold for breeding ought to fetch the price of a small Pekinese.
Meanwhile, a leopard hunt was under way. Hereward went out at dawn with an enormous rifle and an array of amateur trackers, gun-bearers, and beaters, but the spoor was soon lost in the bush and long grass. There was no knowing which way the beast had gone. It could follow our little stream to its junction with the Thika and proceed right down to the Athi Plains without encountering much
in the way of human habitation. Most of this country had been a no-man’s-land between the Kikuyu of the forested uplands and the Masai and Kamba of the plains, so it was neither one thing nor the other, forest nor veld, mountain nor plain. Upstream, the leopard would come to the reserve, which was much more populated, but on the other hand it could also reach forest, and eventually the whole wild mountain-range of the Aberdares. Even Hereward had to admit that the choice was too wide to permit of his putting his mind, as a hunter should, into that of the quarry, and locating it by a sort of telepathy, so he reluctantly agreed to fall back on low cunning, rather than to rely on the manlier virtues of skill, endurance, and courage.
When it came to low cunning, the Kikuyu were in their element, and it soon appeared that everyone was an expert leopard-trapper, but that many different kinds of trap could be made. You could arrange a contraption by which a poisoned spear fell on top of the quarry, you could dig a pit with poisoned stakes into which it would tumble, you could set a noose for its neck, you could conceal an iron gin that seized it by the foot, you could build a small stockade whose gate closed behind it to capture it alive – there seemed no end to the different techniques. The only thing in common to nearly all methods was the use of goats as bait. Poor goats, they were destined to suffer every kind of torture for the convenience, pleasure, or superstition of man.
I forget which kind of trap was first constructed, but I do remember that instead of the leopard it caught a hyena, which none of the Kikuyu would drag away. Hyenas were unclean because they ate corpses, but more than that they were a favourite haunt of dead men’s spirits; the creature whose baleful eyes you saw glinting in the darkness just beyond the halo of firelight might, for all you knew, be your grandfather or your uncle, come perhaps to embody retribution for some insult or injury inflicted on him while he was alive.
The fur of this dead hyena was a dingy sort of grey with dirty white spots. Its powerful shoulders tailed away towards long, sloping hind-quarters, a structure that gave it a curious loping motion. Njombo looked at the beast with distaste and said that all hyenas were lame. When I asked why, he pointed at some piebald crows hopping about at a safe distance beyond the vultures, and told me one of his children’s tales. Long ago, it appeared, the father of all the piebald crows possessed a gourd with white stuff inside which the hyenas saw, and thought was fat.