True at First Light

by Ernest Hemingway

  “Shut up,” said G.C. “Where did you learn the word tailed?”

  “I also attend the cinema when my small wages permit. There is much to learn in the cinema for an informer.”

  “You are almost forgiven,” G.C. said. “Tell me. Is the Bwana Mzee regarded as sane in the village?”

  “With all respect, Bwanas, he is regarded as mad in the greatest tradition of Holy Men. It is rumored too that if the Honorable Lady Miss Mary does not kill the marauding lion before the Birthday of the Baby Jesus the Memsahib will commit suttee. Permission, it is said, has been obtained for this from the British Raj and special trees have been marked and cut for her funeral pyre. These trees are those from which the Masai make the medicine which both of you Bwanas know. It is said that in the event of this suttee, to which all tribes have been invited, there will be a giant Ngoma lasting a week, after which Bwana Mzee will take a Kamba wife. The girl has been chosen.”

  “Is there no other news from town?”

  “Almost none,” the Informer said modestly. “Some talk about the ritual killing of a leopard.”

  “You are dismissed,” G.C. said to the Informer. The Informer bowed and retired to the shade of a tree.

  “Well, Ernie,” G.C. said. “Miss Mary had better bloody well kill this lion.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve thought so for some time.”

  “No wonder she is a little irascible.”

  “No wonder.”

  “It’s not the Empire nor white prestige since you seem to have rather withdrawn from us palefaces for the moment. It’s become rather personal. We have those five hundred rounds on nonexistent arms licenses that your outfitter sent out rather than hang if they were found on him. I think they might be impressive in a suttee in the very center of the pyre. I don’t know the drill unfortunately.”

  “I’ll get it from Mr. Singh.”

  “It puts a little heat on Miss Mary,” G.C. said.

  “I understand suttee always does.”

  “She’ll kill the lion but make good peace with her and handle it sweetly and well and try to make him confident.”

  “That was the plan.”

  I spoke to G.C.’s people and I made a few jokes and they were off driving wide around the camp to keep from raising dust. Keiti and I talked about the camp and the way things were going and he was very cheerful so I knew everything was all right. He had walked down to the river and across to the road while the dew was still fresh and had seen no tracks of people. He had sent Ngui on a wide circle up past the meadow where the airstrip was and he had seen nothing. No one had come to any of the Shambas.

  “They will think I am a careless fool that the men go twice in a row to drink at night,” he said. “But I told them to say that I had fever. Bwana, you must sleep today.”

  “I will. But I must go now and see what Memsahib wishes to do.”

  At the camp I found Mary sitting in her chair under the biggest tree writing in her diary. She looked up at me and then smiled and I was very glad.

  “I’m sorry I was cross,” she said. “G.C. told me a little about your problems. I’m just sorry they come at Christmastime.”

  “I am too. You’ve put up with so much and I want you to have fun.”

  “I’m having fun. It’s such a wonderful morning and I’m enjoying it and watching the birds and identifying them. Have you seen that wonderful roller? I’d be happy just watching the birds.”

  It was quiet around camp and everyone had settled into normal life. I felt badly about Mary having the feeling she was never allowed to hunt alone and I had realized long before why white hunters were paid as well as they were and I understood why they shifted camp to hunt their clients where they could protect them accurately. Pop would never have hunted Miss Mary here, I knew, and would have taken no nonsense. But I remembered how women almost always fell in love with their white hunters and I hoped something spectacular would come up where I could be my client’s hero and thus become beloved as a hunter by my lawful wedded wife instead of her unpaid and annoying bodyguard. Such situations do not come by too often in real life and when they do they are over so quickly, since you do not permit them to develop, that the client thinks they were extremely facile. It seemed natural I should be reprimanded and it was certainly not the way a white hunter, that iron-nerved panderer to what a woman expects, should behave.

  I went to sleep in the big chair under the big shade tree and when I woke the clouds had come down from the Chulus and were black across the flank of the Mountain. The sun was still out but you could feel the wind coming and the rain behind it. I shouted to Mwindi and to Keiti and by the time the rain hit, coming across the plain and through the trees in a solid white, then torn curtain everyone was pounding stakes, loosening and tightening guy ropes and then ditching. It was a heavy rain and the wind was wild. For a moment it looked as though the main sleeping tent might go but it held when we pegged the windward end heavily. Then the roar of the wind was gone and the rain held steadily. It rained all that night and nearly all of the next day.

  During the rain of the first evening a native policeman came in with a message from G.C., “Shipment passed through.” The askari was wet and had walked from where a truck was stranded up the road. The river was too deep to cross.

  I wondered how G.C. had the word so quickly and had been able to send it back. He must have run into a scout who was bringing it to him and sent it back by one of the Hindu lorries. There was no more problem so I went out in my raincoat through the driving rain walking in the heavy mud and around the running streams and lakes of water to the lines and told Keiti. He was surprised that there had been a signal so soon but happy that the alert was over. It would have been a difficult problem as conditions were to continue the exercise in the rain. I left work with Keiti to tell Arap Meina he could sleep in the mess tent if he showed up and Keiti said Arap Meina was too intelligent to show up to keep watch by a fire in this rain.

  As it turned out Arap Meina turned up, really wet, having walked all the way from the Shamba in the worst of the storm. I gave him a drink and asked him if he did not want to stay and put on dry clothes and sleep in the mess tent. But he said that he would rather go back to the Shamba where he had dry clothes and that it was better for him to be there because this rain would last another day and maybe two days. I asked him if he had seen it coming and he said that he had not and neither had anyone else and that if they said they had they were liars. For a week it had looked as though it would rain and then it had come with no warning. I gave him an old cardigan of mine to wear next to his skin and a short waterproof skiing jacket and put two bottles of beer in the back pocket and he took a small drink and set off. He was a fine man and I wished that I had known him all my life and that we had spent our lives together. I thought for a moment about how odd our lives would have been in certain places and that made me happy.

  We were all spoiled by too much perfect weather and the older men were more uncomfortable and intolerant of the rain than the young outfit. Also they did not drink, being Mohammedans, and so you could not give them a shot to warm them when they were soaked through.

  There had been much discussion as to whether this rain could also have fallen in their own tribal lands in the Machakos area and the general opinion was that it had not. But as it kept up and rained steadily all night everyone was cheered that it was probably falling in the north as well. It was pleasant in the mess tent with the heavy beating of the rain and I read and drank a little and did not worry at all about anything. Everything had been taken out of my control and I welcomed, as always, the lack of responsibility and the splendid inactivity with no obligation to kill, pursue, protect, intrigue, defend or participate and I welcomed the chance to read. We were getting a little far down into the book bag but there were still some hidden values mixed in with the required reading and there were twenty volumes of Simenon in French that I had not read. If you are to be rained in while camped in Africa there is nothing better
than Simenon and with him I did not care how long it rained. You draw perhaps three good Simenons out of each five but an addict can read the bad ones when it rains and I would start them, mark them bad, or good; there is no intermediate grade with Simenon and then having classified a half dozen and cut the pages, I would read happily, transferring all my problems to Maigret, bearing with him in his encounters with idiocy and the Quai des Orfieves, and very happy in his sagacious and true understanding of the French, a thing only a man of his nationality could achieve, since Frenchmen are barred by some obscure law from understanding themselves sous peine des travaux forcés à la perpétuité.

  Miss Mary seemed resigned to the rain, which was steadier now and no less heavy, and she had given up writing letters and was reading something that interested her. It was The Prince by Machiavelli. I wondered what it would be like if it should rain three days or four. With Simenon in the quantities that I possessed of him I was good for a month if I stopped reading and thought between books, pages or chapters. Driven by continuing rain I could think between paragraphs, not thinking of Simenon but of other things, and I thought I could last a month quite easily and profitably even if there should be nothing to drink and I should be driven to using Arap Meina’s snuff or trying out the different brews from the medicinal trees and plants we had come to know. Watching Miss Mary, her attitude exemplary, her face beautiful in repose as she read, I wondered what would happen to a person who since little past her adolescence had been nurtured on the disasters of daily journalism, the problems of Chicago social life, the destruction of European civilization, the bombing of large cities, the confidences of those who bombed other large cities in retaliation, and the large- and small-scaled disasters, problems and incalculable casualties of marriage which are only relieved by some painkilling unguent, a primitive remedy against the pox, the paste compounded of newer and finer violences, changes of scene, extensions of knowledge, exploration of the different arts, the places, the people, the beasts, the sensations; I wondered what a six-week rain would be to her. But then I remembered how good and fine and brave she was and how much she had put up with through many years and I thought she would be better at it than I would. Thinking this I saw her put down her book, go and unhook her raincoat, put it on, put on her floppy hat and start out in the straight up and down rain to see how her troops were.

  I’d seen them in the morning and they were uncomfortable but fairly cheerful. The men all had tents and there were picks and shovels for ditching and they had seen and felt rain before. It seemed to me that if I were trying to keep dry under a pup tent and live through a rain I would want as few people in waterproof clothing, high boots and hats inspecting my living conditions as possible, especially since they could do nothing to better them except see that some local grog was served. But then I realized this was no way to think and that the way to get along on a trip was not to be critical of your partner and, after all, visiting the troops was the only positive action there was to offer her.

  When she came back and flapped the rain from her hat, hung her Burberry on the tent pole and changed her boots for dry slippers I asked how the troops were.

  “They’re fine,” she said. “It is wonderful how they keep the cooking fire sheltered.”

  “Did they come to attention in the rain?”

  “Don’t be bad,” she said. “I just wanted to see how they cooked in this rain.”

  “Did you see?”

  “Please don’t be bad and let’s be happy and have a good time since we have the rain.”

  “I was having a good time. Let’s think about how wonderful it will be after the rain.”

  “I don’t have to,” she said. “I’m happy with being forced to do nothing. We have such a wonderful exciting life every day that it is good to be forced to stop and appreciate it. When it is over we are going to wish we’d had time to appreciate it more.”

  “We’ll have your diary. Do you remember how we used to read it in bed and remember that wonderful trip through the snow country out around Montpelier and the east end of Wyoming after the blizzard and the tracks in the snow and how we would see the eagles and racing with the streamliner that was the Yellow Peril and all the way along the border in Texas and when you used to drive? You kept a lovely diary then. Do you remember when the eagle caught the possum and he was so heavy he had to drop him?”

  “This time I’m always tired and sleepy. Then we’d stop early and be in a motel with a light to write by. It’s harder now when you’ve been up since daylight and you can’t write in bed and have to write it outside and so many unknown bugs and insects come to the light. If I knew the names of the insects that interfere with me it would be simpler.”

  “We have to think about poor people like Thurber and how Joyce was finally when they get so they can’t even see what they write.”

  “I can hardly read mine sometimes and thank God no one else can read it with the things I put down.”

  “We put in rough jokes because this has been a rough-joking outfit.”

  “You and G.C. joke so very rough and Pop jokes quite rough too. I joke rough too I know. But not as bad as all of you.”

  “Some jokes are all right in Africa but they don’t travel because people don’t realize what the country and the animals are like where it is all the world of the animals and they have predators. People who have never known predators don’t know what you are talking about. Nor people that never had to kill their meat nor if they don’t know the tribes and what is natural and normal. I put it very badly I know, kittner, but I’ll try and write it so it can be understood. But you have to say so many things that most people will not understand nor conceive of doing.”

  “I know,” Mary said. “And the liars write the books and how can you compete with a liar? How can you compete with a man who writes how he shot and killed a lion and then they carried him to camp in a lorry and suddenly the lion came alive? How can you compete with the truth against a man who says the Great Ruaha was maggoty with crocodiles? But you don’t have to.”

  “No,” I said. “And I won’t. But you can’t blame the liars because all a writer of fiction is really is a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men. I am a writer of fiction and so I am a liar too and invent from what I know and that I’ve heard. I’m a liar.”

  “But you would not lie to G.C., or Pop, or me on what a lion did, or a leopard did, or what a buff did.”

  “No. But that is private. My excuse is that I make the truth as I invent it truer than it would be. That is what makes good writers or bad. If I write in the first person, stating it is fiction, critics now will still try to prove these things never happened to me. It is as silly as trying to prove Defoe was not Robinson Crusoe so therefore it is a bad book. I’m sorry if I sound like speeches. But we can make speeches together on a rainy day.”

  “I love to talk about writing and what you believe and know and care about. But it’s only on a rainy day that we can talk.”

  “I know it, kittner. That’s because we’re here in a strange time.”

  “I wish I’d known it in the old days with you and Pop.”

  “I was never here in the old days. They just seem old now. Actually now is much more interesting. We couldn’t have been friends and brothers the way we are now in the old days. Pop never would have let me. When Mkola and I got to be brothers it wasn’t respectable. It was just condoned. Now Pop tells you all sorts of things he never would have told me in the old days.”

  “I know. I’m very honored that he tells me.”

  “Honey, are you bored? I’m perfectly happy reading and not being wet in the rain. You have to write letters too.”

  “No. I love for us to talk together. It’s the thing I miss when there is so much excitement and work and we’re never alone except in bed. We have a wonderful time in bed and you say lovely things to me. I remember them and the fun. But this is a different kind of talking.”

  The rain was still a s
teady, heavy beating on the canvas. It had replaced all other things and it fell without varying its beat or its rhythm.

  “Lawrence tried to tell about it,” I said. “But I could not follow him because there was so much cerebral mysticism. I never believed he had slept with an Indian girl. Nor even touched one. He was a sensitive journalist sightseeing in Indian country and he had hatreds and theories and prejudices. Also he could write beautifully. But it was necessary for him, after a time, to become angry to write. He had done some things perfectly and he was at the point of discovering something most people do not know when he began to have so many theories.”

  “I follow it pretty well,” Miss Mary said, “but what does it have to do with the Shamba? I like your fiancée very much because she is a lot like me and I think she’d be a valuable extra wife if you need one. But you don’t have to justify her by some writer. Which Lawrence were you talking about, D.H. or T.E.?”

  “OK,” I said. “I think you make very good sense and I’ll read Simenon.”

  “Why don’t you go to the Shamba and try living there in the rain?”

  “I like it here,” I said.

  “She’s a nice girl,” Miss Mary said. “And she may think it’s not very genteel of you to not turn up when it rains.”

  “Want to make peace?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Good. I won’t talk balls about Lawrence and dark mysteries and we’ll stay here in the rain and the hell with the Shamba. I don’t think Lawrence would like the Shamba too much anyway.”

  “Did he like to hunt?”

  “No. But that’s nothing against him, thank God.”

  “Your girl wouldn’t like him then.”

  “I don’t think she would. But thank God that’s nothing against him either.”

  “Did you ever know him?”

  “No. I saw him and his wife once in the rain outside of Sylvia Beach’s book shop in the Rue de l’Odéon. They were looking in the window and talking but they didn’t go in. His wife was a big woman in tweeds and he was small in a big overcoat with a beard and very bright eyes. He didn’t look well and I did not like to see him getting wet. It was warm and pleasant inside Sylvia’s.”