“I wonder why they didn’t go in?”
“I don’t know. That was before people spoke to people they did not know and long before people asked people for autographs.”
“How did you recognize him?”
“There was a picture of him in the shop behind the stove. I admired a book of stories he wrote called The Prussian Officer very much and a novel called Sons and Lovers. He used to write beautifully about Italy too.”
“Anybody who can write ought to be able to write about Italy.”
“They should. But it’s difficult even for Italians. More difficult for them than for anyone. If an Italian writes at all well about Italy he is a phenomenon. Stendhal wrote the best about Milan.”
“The other day you said all writers were crazies and today you say they’re all liars.”
“Did I say they were all crazies?”
“Yes, you and G.C. both said it.”
“Was Pop here?”
“Yes. He said all Game Wardens were crazy and so were all White Hunters and the White Hunters had been driven crazy by the Game Wardens and the writers and by motor vehicles.”
“Pop is always right.”
“He told me never to mind about you and G.C. because you were both crazy.”
“We are,” I said. “But you mustn’t tell outsiders.”
“But you don’t really mean all writers are crazy?”
“Only the good ones.”
“But you got angry when that man wrote a book about how you were crazy.”
“Yes, because he did not know about it nor how it worked. Just as he knew nothing about writing.”
“It’s awfully complicated,” Miss Mary said.
“I won’t try to explain it. I’ll try to write something to show you how it works.”
So I sat for a while and reread La Maison du Canal and thought about the animals getting wet. The hippos would be having a good time today. But it was no day for the other animals and especially for the cats. The game had so many things that bothered them that the rain would only be bad for those that never had known it and those would only be the beasts born since the last rain. I wondered if the big cats killed in the rain when it was as heavy as this. They must have to, to live. The game would be much easier to approach but the lion and leopard and cheetah must hate to get so wet when they hunted. Maybe the cheetah not so much because they seemed part dog and their coats were made for wet weather. The snake holes would be full of water and the snakes would be out and this rain would bring the flying ants too.
I thought how lucky we were this time in Africa to be living long enough in one place so that we knew the individual animals and knew the snake holes and the snakes that lived in them. When I had first been in Africa we were always in a hurry to move from one place to another to hunt beasts for trophies. If you saw a cobra it was an accident as it would be to find a rattler on the road in Wyoming. Now we knew many places where cobras lived. We still discovered them by accident but they were in the area where we lived and we could return to them afterwards and when, by accident, we killed a snake he was the snake who lived in a particular place and hunted his area as we lived in ours and moved out from it. It was G.C. who had given us this great privilege of getting to know and live in a wonderful part of the country and have some work to do that justified our presence there and I always felt deeply grateful to him.
The time of shooting beasts for trophies was long past with me. I still loved to shoot and to kill cleanly. But I was shooting for the meat we needed to eat and to back up Miss Mary and against beasts that had been outlawed for cause and for what is known as control of marauding animals, predators and vermin. I had shot one impala for a trophy and an oryx for meat at Magadi which turned out to have fine enough horns to make it a trophy and I had shot a single buffalo in an emergency which served for meat at Magadi when we were very short and which had a pair of horns worth keeping to recall the manner of the small emergency Mary and I had shared. I remembered it now with happiness and I knew I would always remember it with happiness. It was one of those small things that you can go to sleep with, that you can wake with in the night and that you could recall if necessary if you were ever tortured.
“Do you remember the morning with the buff, kittner?” I asked.
She looked across the mess table and said, “Don’t ask me things like that. I’m thinking about the lion.”
That night after cold supper we went to bed early, since Mary had written her diary in the late afternoon, and lay in bed listening to the heaviness of the rain on that taut canvas.
But in spite of the steady noise of the rain I did not sleep well and I woke twice sweating with nightmares. The last one was a very bad one and I reached out under the mosquito net and felt for the water bottle and the square flask of gin. I brought it into the bed with me and then tucked the netting back under the blanket and the air mattress of the cot. In the dark I rolled my pillow up so I could lay back with my head against it and found the small balsam-needle pillow and put it under my neck. Then I felt for my pistol alongside my leg and for the electric torch and then unscrewed the top of the flask of gin.
In the dark with the heavy noise of the rain I took a swallow of the gin. It tasted clean and friendly and made me brave against the nightmare. The nightmare had been about as bad as they come and I have had some bad ones in my time. I knew I could not drink while we were hunting Miss Mary’s lion; but we would not be hunting him tomorrow in the wet. Tonight was a bad night for some reason. I had been spoiled by too many good nights and I had come to think that I did not have nightmares anymore. Well I knew now. Perhaps it was because the tent was so battened down against the rain that there was no proper ventilation. Perhaps it was because I had had no exercise all day.
I took another swallow of the gin and it tasted even better and more like the old Giant Killer. It had not been such an exceptional nightmare, I thought. I’ve had much worse than that. But what I knew was that I had been through with nightmares, the real ones that could drench you in sweat, for a long time and I had only had good or bad dreams and most of the night they were good dreams. Then I heard Mary say, “Papa are you drinking?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Could I have some too?”
I reached the flask over from under the net and she put her hand out and took it.
“Do you have the water?”
“Yes,” I said and reached it over too. “You have yours too by your bed.”
“But you told me to be careful about things and I did not want to wake you with the light.”
“Poor kitten. Haven’t you slept?”
“Yes. But I had the most awful dreams. Too bad to tell before breakfast.”
“I had some bad ones too.”
“Here’s the Jinny flask back,” she said. “In case you need it. Hold my hand tight, please. You aren’t dead and G.C. isn’t dead and Pop isn’t dead.”
“No. We’re all fine.”
“Thank you so much. And you sleep too. You don’t love anybody else do you? White I mean?”
“No. Not white nor black nor red all over.”
“Sleep well, my blessed,” she said. “Thank you for the lovely midnight drink.”
“Thank you for killing the nightmares.”
“That’s one of the things I’m for,” she said.
I lay and thought about that for a long time remembering many places and really bad times and I thought how wonderful it would be now after the rain and what were nightmares anyway and then I went to sleep and woke sweating again with the horrors but I listened carefully and heard Mary breathing softly and regularly and then I went back to sleep to try it once more.
5
IN THE MORNING IT was cold with heavy cloud over all the Mountain. There was a heavy wind again and the rain came in patches but the heavy solid rain was over. I went out to the lines to talk with Keiti and found him very cheerful. He was wearing a raincoat and an old felt hat. He said the weather would p
robably be good by the next day and I told him we would wait until Memsahib woke before driving in the tent pegs and loosening the wet ropes. He was pleased that the ditching had turned out so well and that neither the sleeping tent nor the mess tent had been wet. He had already sent for a fire to be built and everything was looking better. I told him I had a dream that it had rained heavily up in the Reserve. This was a lie but I thought it was good to weigh in with a good heavy lie in case we had good news from Pop. If you are going to prophesy it is good to prophesy with the odds in your favor.
Keiti heard my dream through with attention and with simulated respect. Then he told me that he had dreamed that it had rained heavily all the way to the Tana River, which was on the edge of the desert, and that six safaris were cut off and would not be able to move for weeks. This, as it was calculated to do, made a very small thing of my dream. I knew that my dream had been registered and would be checked on but I thought I ought to back it up. So I told him, quite truly, that I dreamed that we had hanged the Informer. Recounting this I gave him the exact procedure: where, how, why, how he had taken it and how we had taken him out, afterwards, in the hunting car to be eaten by the hyenas.
Keiti hated the Informer and had for many years and he loved this dream but was careful that I should know that he himself had not dreamed of the Informer at all. This was important, I knew, but I gave him some more details of the execution. He was delighted with them and he said wistfully, but in full judgment, “You must not do.”
“I cannot do. But maybe my dream will do.”
“You must not make uchawi.”
“I do not make uchawi. Have you ever seen me harm a man or a woman?”
“I did not say you were a mchawi. I said you must not be one and that it cannot be to hang the Informer.”
“If you wish to save him I can forget the dream.”
“Good dream,” Keiti said. “But make too much trouble.”
The day after a heavy rain is a splendid day for the propagation of religion while the time of the rain itself seems to turn men’s minds from the beauty of their faith. All rain had stopped now and I was sitting by the fire drinking tea and looking out over the sodden country. Miss Mary was still sleeping soundly because there was no sun to wake her. Mwindi came to the table by the fire with a fresh pot of hot tea and poured me a cup.
“Plenty rain,” he said. “Now finished.”
“Mwindi,” I said. “You know what the Mahdi said. ‘We see plainly in the laws of nature that rain comes down from the heavens in the time of need. The greenness and verdure of the earth depend upon heavenly rain. If it ceases for a time the water in the upper strata of the earth gradually dries up. Thus we see that there is an attraction between the heavenly and the earthly waters. Revelation stands in the same relation to human reason as heavenly water does to the earthly water.’ ”
“Too much rain for campi. Plenty good for Shamba,” Mwindi announced.
“ ‘As with the cessation of heavenly water earthly water begins gradually to dry up; so also is the case of the human reason which without the heavenly revelation loses its purity and strength.’ ”
“How I know that is Mahdi?” Mwindi said.
“Ask Charo.”
Mwindi grunted. He knew Charo was very devout but not a theologian.
“If hang Informer let police hang too,” Mwindi said. “Keiti ask me to say it.”
“That was only a dream.”
“Dream can be very strong. Can kill like bunduki.”
“I’ll tell Informer dream. Then it has no power.”
“Uchawi,” Mwindi said. “Uchawi kubwa sana.”
“Hapana uchawi.”
Mwindi broke it off and asked almost brusquely if I wanted more tea. He was looking away at the lines with his old Chinese profile and I saw what it was he wanted me to see. It was the Informer.
He had come wet and not happy. His style and his gallantry were not gone but they had been dampened. He coughed his cough at once so there would be no doubt of it and it was a legitimate cough.
“Good morning, brother. How have you and my lady endured the weather?”
“It rained a little here.”
“Brother, I am a sick man.”
“Do you have fever?”
“Yes.”
He was not lying. His pulse was one hundred and twenty.
“Sit down and have a drink and take an aspirin and I’ll give you medicine. Go home and go to bed. Can the hunting car get through the road?”
“Yes. It is sandy to the Shamba and the car can go around the pools.”
“How is the Shamba?”
“It did not need the rain because it is irrigated. It is a sad Shamba with the cold from the Mountain. Even the chickens are sad. A girl came with me whose father needs medicine for his chest. You know her.”
“I will send medicine.”
“She is unhappy that you do not come.”
“I have my duties. Is she well?”
“She is well but sad.”
“Tell her I will come to Shamba when it is my duty.”
“Brother, what is this of the dream that I am hanged?”
“It is a dream that I had but I should not tell it to you before I have eaten breakfast.”
“But others have heard it before.”
“It is better that you do not hear it. It was not an official dream.”
“I could not bear to be hanged,” the Informer said.
“I will never hang you.”
“But others could misunderstand my activities.”
“No one will hang you unless you deal with the other people.”
“But I must constantly deal with the other people.”
“You understood the sense in which I speak. Now go to the campfire and get warm and I will make up the medicine.”
“You are my brother.”
“No,” I said. “I am your friend.”
He went off to the fire and I opened the medicine chest and got out Atabrine and aspirin and liniment and some sulfa and some cough lozenges and hoped I had made a small blow against uchawi. But I could remember all the details of the execution of the Informer in about the third of the nightmares and I was ashamed of having such a nocturnal imagination. I told him what medicines to take and what to give to the father of the girl. Then we walked out to the lines together and I gave the girl two tins of kipper snacks and a glass jar of hard candies and asked Mthuka to drive them to the Shamba and then come straight back. She had brought me four ears of corn and never looked up when I spoke to her. She put her head against my chest as a child does and when she got into the car on the off side where no one could see her she dropped her arm and with her whole hand gripped the muscles of my thigh. I did the same thing when she was in the car and she did not look up. Then I thought the hell with it all and kissed her on the top of the head and she laughed as impudently as ever and Mthuka smiled and they drove off. The tract was sandy with a little standing water but the bottom was firm and the hunting car went off through the trees and nobody looked back.
I told Ngui and Charo that we would go north on a routine look around as far as it was possible to go as soon as Miss Mary had wakened and had breakfast. They could get the guns now and clean them after the rain. I told them to be sure and wipe the bores dry of all oil. It was cold and the wind was blowing. The sun was overcast. But the rain was over except for possible showers. Everybody was very businesslike and there was no nonsense.
Mary was very happy at breakfast. She had slept well after she had wakened in the night and her dreams had been happy. Her bad dream had been that Pop, G.C. and I had all been killed. She did not remember the details. Someone had brought the news. She thought it was in an ambush of some kind. I wanted to ask her if she had dreamed about the hanging of the Informer but I thought that would be interference and the important thing was that she had waked happily and looked forward to the day. I thought that I was rough enough and worthless enough to become involved
in the things that I did not understand in Africa but I did not want to involve her. She involved herself enough by going out to the lines and learning the music and the drum rhythms and the songs, treating everyone so well and so kindly that they fell in love with her. In the old days I know Pop would never have permitted this. But the old days were gone. No one knew that better than Pop did.
When breakfast was over and the hunting car was back from the Shamba Mary and I made a trip out as far as the ground was possible to drive over. The earth was drying fast but it was still treacherous and the wheels spun and dug in where tomorrow the car could go with security. This was so even on the hard ground and where the track had been firmed and hardened. To the north where the slippery clay was it was impassable.
You could see the new grass coming bright green across the flats and the game was scattered and paid little attention to us. There had been no great movement of game in yet but we saw the tracks of elephants that had crossed the track early in the morning after the rain stopped going toward the swamp. They were the lot we had seen from the plane and the bull had a very big track even allowing for the spreading by the wetness of the mud.
It was gray and cold and blowing and all over the flats and in and beside the tracks were the plover running and feeding busily and then calling sharply and wildly as they flew. There were three different kinds only one of which was really good to eat. But the men would not eat them and thought I wasted a cartridge to shoot them. I knew there might be curlew up on the flat but we could try for them another day.
“We can go on a little further,” I said. “There is a pretty good ridge of fairly high ground where we can turn,” I said to Mary.
“Let’s go on then.”
Then it began to rain and I thought we had better get turned around where we could and back to camp before we were stuck in some of the soft places.
Close to camp, which showed happily against the trees and the gray mist, the smoke of the fires rising and the white-and-green tents looking comfortable and home-like, there were sand grouse drinking at the small pools of water on the open prairie. I got out with Ngui to get some for us to eat while Mary went on to camp. They were hunched low beside the little pools and scattered about in the short grass where the sand burrs grew. They clattered up and they were not hard to hit if you took them quickly on the rise. These were the medium-sized sand grouse and they were like plump little desert pigeons masquerading as partridges. I loved their strange flight, which was like a pigeon or a kestrel, and the wonderful way they used their long back-swept wings once they were in full flight. Walking them up this way was nothing like shooting them when they came in great strings and packs to the water in the morning in the dry season when G.C. and I would take only the highest-crossing birds and high incomers and paid a shilling penalty any time we took more than one bird to a shot fired. Walking them up you missed the guttural chuckling noise the pack made as they talked across the sky. I did not like to shoot so close to camp either so I took only four brace, which would make at least two meals for the two of us or a good meal if anyone dropped in.
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