The Flame Trees of Thika
‘What are we going to do with this child?’ Mr Pascoe demanded. ‘We can’t keep her here, like those infernal mongooses.’
‘I’m going back with Dirk,’ I said.
‘That young Dutchman? What makes you think he’s going back to the Crawfurds?’
‘He came to get some cartridges.’
‘Cartridges my foot. He’s probably on the way to the plateau by now, or else to Nairobi to join the party.’
‘But he’s got Mr Crawfurd’s pony.’
Mr Pascoe only laughed. ‘That won’t bother him.’
‘I don’t think we’ve any right to jump to conclusions,’ Mrs Pascoe said. ‘He is probably quite an honest young man.’
‘Not if he’s a Dutchman,’ Mr Pascoe said ferociously. ‘They’re in my office all day long. Permits to move cattle that turn out to be pinched from the Nandi – cases against each other that turn out to be faked – beacons moved about in the night – slippery as eels, the whole blessed lot of them. Now, what are we going to do about this brat?’
‘I can go home by myself,’ I said.
‘You certainly can’t. Perhaps there’ll be someone on the train who can take you to Molo, and then the Crawfurds can collect you there. As if I hadn’t enough to do without playing nursemaid to a stray female brat!’
He was not really a savage man, just a little gruff and disconcerted; and in the end he called for Snowball, who had also breakfasted, and allowed me to ride with him to the dak bungalow to find out if anyone had seen Dirk.
The bungalow, a railway rest house, was full of bearded, dust-stained Dutchmen who fell silent as Mr Pascoe approached; when he spoke they greeted him politely but with a wary, almost shifty look, behaving a little like wildebeeste that smell a lion about; they do not panic and gallop off, but tend rather to huddle together, stop grazing and stand ready for action, although uncertain what to do. Mr Pascoe addressed a man who looked exactly like a leathery, bearded Boer, but spoke with the accents of Scotland.
‘You’re wearing your boots today, Sandy.’
‘Aye, my feet are looking after them. It’s necessary, in a thieving crowd like this.’
Sandy was one of the few transport-riders who was not a Boer. He was said to keep his boots in a knapsack and to walk barefoot beside his oxen in order to save the leather, and to have travelled back to Scotland on a third-class railway ticket from Londiani to Nakuru. Another story was that he once rode on muleback for three days into the Kavirondo country to retrieve a stolen pair of socks; but others said this was untrue, because he had never owned any socks.
When Mr Pascoe inquired about Dirk, Sandy said:
‘Och, he’ll have gone after his brother, up to Sixty-Four. The brother came through by the last mail, to fetch his gun before he went for a soldier.’
‘You mean he took the pony?’ Mr Pascoe said.
Sandy looked astonished. ‘You don’t think there’s a Dutchman living who’d pay for transport when he could get his legs across a nag?’
In spite of Sandy’s certainty and Mr Pascoe’s smile, I felt sure that Dirk would return the pony. Although Mr Crawfurd would no doubt regard his present action as a theft, to a Dutchman or to an African it would appear merely as a rather long borrow.
Chapter 26
THE wagon-track from Sixty-Four ended outside the dak bungalow, and from its veranda, where travellers waited for the mail, someone called attention to a puff of dust rolling towards us with unusual speed. A high, old-fashioned buck-board came into view, drawn by four oxen who shambled along at a splayfooted jog-trot and drew up with obvious relief beside the bungalow. This was Whitelock’s stage-coach, propelled by oxen trained to trot (if not very swiftly), and changed every fifteen miles between Sixty-Four and Londiani.
By these means, and by keeping his teams going all through the night, Whitelock had reduced the journey from five or six days – and anything up to three weeks in the rains – to twenty-four hours.
One of the passengers who stepped stiffly down from the buck-board was a man of six feet three or four, of massive bulk, but not fat by any means – solid muscle. Everything about him was large – nose, hands, and feet, thick dark moustache, heavy shoulders. He seized Mr Pascoe’s hand and pumped it, and explained that he was on his way to join the war; from what he said, it was high time that someone put a little punch into it. In spite, no doubt, of Robin’s efforts, the Germans kept on blowing up the railway line between Nairobi and Mombasa, and the arrival of troops from India had not made the difference everyone had expected. The local volunteers, who had coalesced into the East African Mounted Rifles, had been whisked up to Kisumu to man a boat on Lake Victoria, and had won a naval victory over a similar German vessel. But there still seemed plenty of scope for Mr Pascoe’s acquaintance, whose name was Dick Montagu.
‘Oh, this is my wife,’ he added as an afterthought. Mrs Montagu had been standing quite still, looking bewildered and nervous. She was as small and light as he was large and heavy; like some hesitant bird, bright-eyed and fine-limbed, she seemed to have alighted on the veranda, rather than to have climbed the steps. Her waist was so slim that her husband could surely have encircled it with his two hands. Dick Montagu ignored her while he got his baggage assembled, and told Mr Pascoe that he would have to spend the night at Londiani in order to wait for the bulk of his kit, which was following by wagon in charge of his Abyssinian servant.
‘It should be here tomorrow, and you can put us on a goods,’ he said. ‘I was caught in the Congo when the show started, and I don’t want to miss any more of the fun.’
Mr Pascoe looked displeased, but said: ‘You’d better bring your wife over to our bungalow for the night, this place is full.’
‘Thanks, old man,’ Dick Montagu replied in a perfunctory manner.
Mrs Montagu behaved as if the Pascoes’ bungalow was a palace, entered after a long sojourn in a swineherd’s hut. And, indeed, that may have been her situation. Her father was one of those rich Americans who had come to shoot big game after Theodore Roosevelt had made the pastime fashionable; and Dick Montagu had arranged his safari. The hunter had bagged not only a lot of large animals, but the daughter as well. She was barely eighteen, and her father forbade the match. After Dick Montague carried her off to the Belgian Congo in a romantic elopement, her father had returned to Philadelphia to cut her out of his life and his will. Dick, who was twenty years older than his bride, boasted that the old man was sure to come round, but over a year had passed, debts had gathered, and the old man was still in Philadelphia refusing to answer letters and as close as a clam.
‘My, you have flowers and real nice furniture, even books,’ Lois exclaimed.
‘Surely you need books all the more on the plateau,’ Mrs Pascoe suggested, in a voice that sounded faintly accusing. ‘I mean, being so isolated.’
‘We have two books, Mrs Pascoe: I have a Bible, and Dick has Rowland Ward’s Records of Big Game.’
‘Well, I expect you would like a nice wash.’ A little soap and water, Mrs Pascoe seemed to indicate, would soon put matters right.
When Lois Montagu reappeared she tried to talk to me, an uphill task for most people. Close cross-questioning revealed Tilly’s interest in a hospital, and this made Lois taut with hope; her fervent wish was to nurse wounded soldiers, but Dick had refused his permission because she was too young and inexperienced.
‘Maybe if I get to know your mother, she’ll kind of sponsor me,’ Lois said. ‘Then Dick will think it’s quite respectable, and let me train to be a nurse. I’m pretty strong really, although I’m little, and I guess I can look after myself, as well as the poor wounded men.’
‘He’s afraid the wounded men will look after Lois,’ I heard Mr Pascoe say to his wife later. ‘He still thinks her old man will cave in.’
Mr Pascoe had decided that I was to stay the night and accompany the Montagus to Nakuru next day, where the Crawfurds would meet me. He had sent a syce to Molo on Snowball with a note to this effect. I knew
that Mrs Crawfurd would be worried and Mr Crawfurd angry, and wanted to ride back on Snowball myself, but Mr Pascoe would not allow it, and there was nothing to be done. However, when we boarded the train it appeared that we were to travel in the guard’s van, and this redeemed the disappointment.
Even the Uganda Mail, which ran three times a week, was not a very fast train, and our goods made no pretences. Several steepish gradients so much exhausted our little locomotive that it paused a long time to regain strength, while its boilers cooled and the logs that it devoured were re-stacked. Once or twice it failed altogether at the first attempt, retreated, and took a longer run, while some of the passengers got out and walked, as if to help it. At every station it drank prodigious quantities of water while the crew, and various attendants who had attached themselves to it, got off to bargain with vendors of bananas, cooked maize, chickens, eggs, gruel, oranges, and the many other comestibles on offer at every halt. In fact our train made something of a triumphal progress, with long pauses to allow the people to admire at close quarters a creature so strange and inexplicable, that brought to remote places a flavour of adventure, a whiff of the mystery of unknown lands.
We arrived in Nakuru latish in the evening, and made our way to the hotel. I was sent to bed in a cubby-hole too noisy to permit easy sleep. The kitchen quarters were nearby, in the public rooms people stumped about on bare boards and in the bar a sing-song developed, interrupted by shouts and laughter, and once by the smashing of glass. The hotel belonged to Lord Delamere and sometimes, when he felt the need of a rough-house, he would drive into Nakuru in a buggy and start to break up his own property.
Now he was away at the war, but the hotel was filled beyond its capacity. Somehow a war seems always to create more people than it destroys. Although armies of young men march away to battle-fronts, all the towns and centres become fuller, busier, more bustling than before. Where all these people, drawn forth as rain brings siafu, had been before, was a mystery.
Sometimes in the night, a commotion arose. The station was very close, and I awoke to hear an engine panting and grinding, bells clanging, whistles blowing, shouts and cries. Had the Germans captured Nakuru, were we all to be lined up and shot? As I did not wish to be shot in my pyjamas, I dressed and went out to investigate.
A train was in, the platform was alive with khaki men, like giant ants whose nest has been disturbed. But Germans would be grim, orderly, and helmeted; these men wore slouch hats or no hats at all, and even in the hard, shadowy light looked young and gay. I saw Lois Montagu standing by herself, and went up to her.
‘It’s the Mounted Rifles on their way back from Kisumu, they’ve won a great victory,’ she said, after the expected exclamations of distress at my truancy. ‘Why, they’re heroes! Look at them, honey – next time you see them maybe they’ll be marching through Nairobi in a victory parade!’
At the moment, food was what they wanted, and the Indian stationmaster, hemmed in by large foraging men, made helpless gestures and looked like bursting into tears. Hot food at one o’clock in the morning was hardly a thing he could be expected to summon with a blast of his whistle, and he must have felt as if an enormous pride of hungry lions had got loose in his station.
Lois stood with her lips parted and her eyes bright, clasping my hand. ‘If I was only a painter, what a picture this would be! All these fine young fellows going off to fight for king and country without a care in the world!’
They had this quite important care, however, about nourishment, which no one seemed able to provide. And then a sort of miracle occurred. Without warning, in the dead of night, the station was quietly invaded by the succulent odour of freshly-baked bread. A kind of mass hallucination? Had so great a volume of insistent thought somehow been turned into smell?
An amazed hush fell upon the men; they stood still and sniffed the air. It was as if a magic ring had been turned and their wishes granted. Through the entrance came a torch-bearer carrying a safari lamp, then a hand-cart piled high with baskets and finally a small, quick-striding figure that I recognized. The light fell upon a nob of red hair, a high voice cried: ‘Well, boys, here’s what you’ve been waiting for. Come and get it!’ And a stampede followed towards baskets full of warm, delicious rolls, whose crusts crackled as they parted to surrender a creamy, soft, and satisfying dough.
Whether Pioneer Mary had started her bakery before the war, or after it arrived with its new demands, I do not know, but a bakery she had, here in Nakuru; getting wind of the troop-train she had prepared for the hungry travellers. Soon the station took on a festive look, with groups of soldiers sitting on crates or sacks of bedding or the carriage steps munching the rolls, joking, once or twice breaking into snatches of song. Pioneer Mary was among them like a red flame flickering along the platform, leaving a trail of laughter, and boisterously greeted as the lady of the loaf.
She was not the only acquaintance there. I looked round to see Dick Montagu approaching with a slighter figure at his side on whose bare head the lamplight shone as on a new golden sovereign. Even Dick Montagu was mellowed, and introduced his companion to Lois without disparaging her. Already half moonstruck by the masculinity of these joking, feasting, migrant soldiers on their way to war, who would seem tomorrow creatures of dream and legend, she gazed as if bewitched at the thin and smiling face of Ian Crawfurd.
‘Dick has spoken of you often,’ she said.
‘I don’t know how the devil you got yourself into uniform so quickly,’ Dick grumbled. ‘I heard you were somewhere out Mount Elgon way, picking out some land.’
‘I happened to have gone down to Nairobi, and to be there when the show started. Otherwise I might have been out of it for months. I haven’t even let Humphrey know yet.’
‘I’ll never forgive you if you clear the Hun out of German East before I can join the party.’
‘I think there will still be plenty for you to do,’ Ian said.
For a while they discussed the war, which they did not think was being well conducted. Then Ian smiled at me and said:
‘I saw your father in Nairobi. He had just come back from questioning some German prisoners.’
‘Did he shoot them?’
‘Well, no; one is supposed to shoot them before they are captured, not after. He had been finding out why they had failed to blow up the bridge at Tsavo. It was really awfully bad luck. They had been given British maps because the Germans thought they’d be more accurate than their own, which showed the Tsavo river in quite a different place. When they got to where the bridge should have been, they ran out of water and had to give themselves up. If they’d stuck to the German maps they’d have got to the right place at the right time and destroyed the bridge.’
‘That was the hand of Providence,’ Lois said.
‘We’re told that God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform, and perhaps the inaccuracy of British maps is included in the mystery…. I hear you are staying with Kate and Humphrey; you must give them my love, and say that I shall write, and that I hope they are very well.’
‘All right…. Thank you very much for Mohammed,’ I said. ‘But I had to leave him at home.’
‘Yes, he would not at all enjoy Molo; you would have had to make a coat for him from a blanket, with a hole to push his head through.’
‘I didn’t want to leave him at Thika, but…’
Above all I wanted to hold Ian’s attention, not to lose him, and to find some thread to lead me on to all the questions I longed to burst out with. But it was no use, they jammed my tongue. The moment passed, Ian turned away to speak again to the Montagus. Dick was asking him about the land he had taken up, but Ian only smiled and was vague.
‘It hardly looks as though I’ll need it, after all.’
‘Don’t make any mistake, old man. That land will be worth a lot of money when we’ve thrashed the Hun. Things will go ahead, we’ll see land values really come into their own. Look after the development clauses, don’t let it slip through your
hands.’
‘I’ll remember,’ Ian said. ‘And now I must go. I’m a corporal, and have a dozen men to look after who’ve never heard of discipline. But two or three are good bridge players, one plays the clarinet, and another is an excellent conjurer, so we’re never dull. I expect we shall meet somewhere on the border, Dick, and perhaps we shall ride together in triumph through Tabora, dragging von Lettow at our heels.’
He took my hand for a moment to say good-bye.
‘Did Ahmed come back?’ I managed to eject one of the questions, even if it was a minor one, out on the perimeter.
‘Funny you should mention that. He did, and he’s joined a troop of Somali scouts and has a pony and a rifle, and glorious dreams of war and loot. So he’s all right. Give my love to Tilly when you see her, and to everyone else….’
He stood for a moment as still as a fish-eagle above a swirling muddy stream, looking down at me, his hat in one hand and the other resting lightly on his belt. I thought he looked thinner even than before, older perhaps. The name in both our minds lay unspoken between us like a barrier, and yet uniting us, for this fleeting instant, like fish caught in the same net. So strong was this impression that I thought I heard through the chatter a clear musical voice and sensed among the stale platform odours, and the lingering reminder of bread, the sunny scent of heliotrope.
Ian hesitated; perhaps he, too, did not want to put to flight the ghosts of happiness whose presence there beside us turned all the khaki men of flesh and blood into puffs of vapour. Then he slipped from one wrist a little bracelet he wore – such things were then in fashion – of plaited hair pulled from a lion’s tail.
‘He had courage: some people eat the heart, but I doubt if that’s necessary.’
I took it without finding anything to say, but I knew in my own heart that it was not for me. He smiled at us, waved a hand, and vanished into the throng and bustle of the train, which was now preparing for departure. The men began to sing the jingle that was then so popular – ‘Marching to Tabora’; and the shouts and cheers, the whistles, the hissing and chugging of the engine, filled the station as a kettle fills with steam. Everything seemed to bubble over; men waved from windows; Dick gave a hunting cry; the red hair of Pioneer Mary flared under a lamp; the guard jumped into his moving van; and we watched the rear light of the last coach vanish, and heard the chugging die away. A plume of sparks, a long coil of dancing fireflies, spread across the black ancient shoulder of the crater Menengai; and gradually the vast digesting dark of Africa swallowed up all traces of that audacious grub, the hurrying train.