The Flame Trees of Thika (19 page)

‘What are you two talking about?’ Hereward inquired, breaking off from his discussion.

‘Ian is describing the habits of ants.’ Lettice pronounced the word like aunts, and the others looked interested.

‘It’s true that some of them have queer habits,’ Robin remarked.
‘My aunt Constance keeps a collection of toads on Clapham Common, and breakfasts off stout and oysters; and my aunt Veronica, who is over eighty, lives alone with six unmarried daughters and will speak to none of them, but plays the harp all day, and is surrounded by pugs.’

‘Ian was speaking of the kind of ant with six legs and jaws longer than its body.’

‘I have no aunts quite like that,’ Robin said reflectively. ‘At least so far as I know; but what with the beast of Glamis, one never can tell what might be found on the top floor of any Scots castle.’

‘Surely we’ve filled in enough time talking nonsense,’ Hereward said, springing to his feet. ‘Where have the beaters got to? Fast asleep, I suppose!’

The shoot got under way. I stayed with Lettice and the mules and ponies; the men were to beat homeward down the valleys, and Tilly, who was learning the sport, went with them. She was frightened of the gun at first but soon learnt to control it, and Hereward remarked admiringly that she would make a splendid little shot.

‘It is much less alarming when you fire it off yourself than when other people do,’ Tilly explained.

‘Like sins,’ said Lettice.

‘What sorts of sin?’

‘Any sort. When other people commit them, you are startled, but when you commit them yourself, they seem absolutely natural.’

‘I hope you don’t speak from experience, my dear,’ said Hereward.

‘Oh, no. I am quite well read.’

I rode with Lettice along the winding paths while shadows began to advance up the red and green hillsides, turning the intervening valleys into pools of darkness. The round thatched huts on the ridges glowed like fresh honey and, on the hillsides, a feathery grass with pink and silver seed-heads bent before the breeze in a manner that, for no reason, always made me feel sad. The beaters made a great deal of noise walking through the shambas below us, waving sticks. Guinea-fowl are great runners; the difficulty is always to get them off their feet. We heard
a number of bangs and a good deal of shouting. Small buck were also about, and this worried me, for any duiker in the district might well be a relation of Twinkle’s, or might leave an orphan behind it, if it were killed, who might never be found, and die in the bush.

‘Why don’t they shoot goats, instead of duikers?’ I wondered. ‘There are far more.’

‘For one thing, the goats belong to people,’ Lettice explained. ‘And for another, they would not provide sport for the guns.’

I inquired why.

‘Because they stand still, and don’t run away.’

Obviously this was sensible of the goats, and I felt a new respect for them. It was the same, I noticed later, with birds; if a guinea-fowl sat in a tree Hereward would not shoot it, but waited until someone made it fly away. This increased the likelihood that he would merely wound the bird, but once when I remarked as much he grew angry, and said that I did not know the meaning of the word sport.

I was quite right about the duiker, however. We heard cries, and saw one bounding away among the crops below us and disappear into a patch of bush, which the beaters quickly surrounded. Hereward and Tilly advanced side by side into the duiker’s refuge. The little buck broke out and tried to escape up the hill, but a Kikuyu threw a stick and turned it. A few moments later it reappeared on the far side of the bush, once more to be turned back by stick hurlers. Finally it tried to break back between Hereward and Tilly. I do not know which of them shot it, but it went down with a dreadful squeal which made Lettice put her hands to her ears. I think it was shot in the spine and its back legs were paralysed. Hereward ran towards it and, after another shot, it lay still.

I ran down the hill to where it lay. It was a female, with a whitish belly and no horns, and soft grey-brown fur. Its feet were clean and sharp and delicate as those of a dancer.

‘I hope it hasn’t got a child,’ I said.

‘It has a child in its belly,’ one of the Kikuyu remarked. He took out a knife and slashed it up the middle. The flesh parted like an envelope slit by a paper-knife and all its red and blue intestines tumbled out and lay in a quivering pile. The man thrust
his hand in and pulled out a perfect little baby duiker, its fur already on it, waiting to be born. Even its tiny feet, no larger than a finger-nail, were perfectly formed; even its eye-lashes were ready. It lay there half-entangled in a slimy sac of tissue that the beater had torn aside, and looked so tragic that I burst into tears.

‘A pity,’ Hereward conceded. ‘No way we could tell it was in that condition.’

‘Poor little thing,’ Tilly said, trying to comfort me. ‘But perhaps the baby would have grown up to be eaten by a leopard, or caught in a trap.’

This only seemed to make matters worse. The Kikuyu quickly stripped the duiker of its guts and threw them into the bush with the unborn baby, and slung it on a stick to carry home. Its head hung down pathetically, and blood dripped from its mouth.

‘I want to go home,’ I said, suddenly terrified lest Twinkle had escaped and been chased and killed.

‘We will go home together,’ said Lettice, who had now arrived, ‘and leave the rest of you to slay more guinea-fowl.’

Several of the beaters came with us, among them the young man Kupanya had picked out as the murderer, who had evidently not yet gone to Fort Hall. He seemed to have forgotten all about his troubles, and had been beating with enthusiasm and energy. To mark his status as a mission-boy he wore a pair of khaki shorts, whereas everyone else had a blanket. After a while our escort broke into snatches of song. These songs, always in a minor key, were plaintive and, to my ears, melancholy, but they were not songs of sorrow. As a rule they celebrated some triumph of battle or of love. Perhaps this song celebrated the death of the duiker and its unborn baby, and was its sole brief memorial. The singer no doubt made its death into a triumph for his skill in running, and for the marvels of the white man’s rifle. But the triumph seemed to me a very mean one, and it was a long time before I could forget the duiker that had been so peacefully browsing on the hillside, a nest perhaps prepared for its child, and was overtaken so roughly by the pain and terror of death.

At the last stream to cross before reaching home, Ian was waiting for us, sitting on a boulder with his blue Somali shawl
flung over his shoulder. When he mounted his pony his movements had the same sort of grace as those of an antelope, lithe and economical. Hereward stumped about like an intruder, but Ian moved as if, like the antelopes and the Kikuyu, he had grown from the soil.

‘I have shot enough guinea-fowl,’ he said. ‘The others have gone to beat the last lot of shambas. Hereward is happy, he is teaching Tilly, and thinks that she is hanging on his words.’

‘You mustn’t be unkind about Hereward,’ Lettice objected.

‘Perhaps not; but he is such a fine specimen, he ought to be stuffed.’

We had to ride in single file in order to keep to the narrow paths, but when we reached a stretch of open grazing, Ian again drew up beside Lettice.

‘You will be going away soon,’ she said, looking ahead of her, and not at him.

‘Yes: we have planned another Abyssinian safari. But I hope it will be my last.’

‘Have you made a fortune, and mean to retire?’ Lettice asked lightly.

‘Neither: but after a while I think the pursuit of freedom only turns one into a slave.’

They rode in silence and I followed behind them, not at all interested in the conversation, and anxious to get back to Twinkle. Yet I could feel again a tension in the air that made their words memorable.

‘There was a scandal when I ran away with Hereward,’ Lettice said. ‘You know that I was married before.’

‘I am afraid all that makes no difference,’ Ian said, rubbing the backs of his pony’s ears with his whip. ‘But of course it is very interesting.’

‘Well, it is the plot of many hackneyed plays and novels. I was married at eighteen to a man much older than myself. I believe there was a rumour that my father lost me at cards, but I should doubt if that was the case. It’s true this man was pushed down my throat, so to speak, by my parents, but I think that I imagined myself in love.’

‘There’s an Eastern flavour to this story,’ Ian commented. He had tied the blue shawl round his waist, and rode close to
her side. ‘Ahmed would think that it was all a great fuss about nothing. The only point of interest for him would be the sum your father lost at cards.’

‘Perhaps his is a better point of view, but I was not acquainted with it at eighteen. And I was most unhappy, which was inconsiderate of me, since the arrangement suited everyone else so well. Hereward was sympathetic, handsome, and kind. He was also impulsive, and we eloped. Of course he had to send in his papers, and it was some time before I realized quite what that meant to him. Hereward is a born soldier. So now here we are. He gave up a lot for me and I hope that he will find this life a compensation. I think he will: I think he is discovering a new purpose. So now you understand, Ian, why you must keep your freedom, or find someone else to surrender it to.’

Ian was silent for so long I thought he had forgotten where he was, and when he did remember he spoke so quietly I could scarcely hear.

‘You have warned me off, but I am not the type to go in search of tigers in Bengal, or the highest peaks of the Himalayas. Nor to feel my heart bleed for Hereward. We are both young, and time is on my side.’

‘It is when one is young that time is too precious to waste.’

Ian pulled up his pony and laid a hand on the reins of hers. ‘Look at that sunset: time can never be wasted when there are such sights to look at, and such things to enjoy.’

The sunset was, indeed, spectacular. The whole western sky was aflame with the crimson of the heart of a rose. Deep-violet clouds were stained and streaked with red, and arcs of lime-green and saffron-yellow swept across the heavens. It was all on such a scale that the whole world might have been burning.

‘Wonderful, but extravagant,’ Lettice said. ‘There is no restraint in it.’

‘Yes, it is the sort of sky that angry Valkyries might ride across,’ Ian agreed.

‘There is more beauty in a butterfly’s wing or a seashell than in that sunset; but it has a barbaric spendour in it, and an element of terror.’

They went on talking about the sunset and ideas it suggested to them, which were many; each mind fertilized the other. I did
not listen, for the crimson sky, the golden light streaming down the valley, and then its obliteration by the dusk, as if some great lamp had been turned down in the heavens, filled me with the terrible melancholy that sometimes wrings the hearts of children, and can never be commmunicated or explained. It was as if the day, which was unique, and could never come again, had been struck down like the duiker and lay there bleeding, and then was swallowed into oblivion; as if something in each one of us had died with it, and could never be recalled. I felt it desperately important that the moment should be halted, the life of the day preserved, its death indefinitely postponed, and that the memory of every instant, of every fleck of colour in that tremendous sky, should be branded on my mind so as to become as much a part of my existence as an eye or hand.

The Kikuyu, however, paid no attention to this great tragedy of the death of the day. They talked of unknown things in liquid, musical voices, and spat, and sang, and hitched their blankets on their shoulders. I felt like a missionary tormented by the sight of thousands of innocent souls perishing merely because they lacked the words that would have saved them. When I pointed to the sky in which the red had all but faded and said: ‘Look, it is good,’ which was the only word available, they glanced up politely, nodded, and one said: ‘Yes, it is good,’ and went on with his conversation.

Perhaps he had words for his feelings, and his feelings were like mine, but I could never know, and this, too, was disquieting. The sunset vanished, the night came swiftly and it grew cold. We made our ponies trot, and soon a light came into view that had been put on the Palmers’ veranda to guide us in.

O
NE
day Sammy said he was going to get married, and would like a few days’ leave.

‘You have two wives already,’ Robin said. ‘You are becoming very rich.’ He spoke a little resentfully, as Sammy’s pay could
not in itself have brought about this state of affairs and many things upon the farm often disappeared, especially maize-meal locked in the store. Robin kept the key, but Sammy was always having to borrow it, and in any case a Kikuyu blacksmith who could make fine chains for snuff-horns, and keen-bladed swords, would think nothing of copying a key.

‘My father has great wealth in Masailand,’ Sammy said, as if guessing Robin’s thoughts. ‘He has many daughters, and their bride-price makes him rich.’

‘Very well,’ Robin agreed. He added to Tilly, with a touch of regret: ‘If each of Aunt Veronica’s daughters had realized a large sum, she would have been a rich woman, and might have left it all to me.’

‘If Sammy goes to his reserve, it may be six months before he comes back to work,’ Tilly pointed out.

‘Luckily the bride is here. She’s a Kikuyu – so far as I can make out, a relation either of Kupanya’s, or of Njombo’s, or of both. So he won’t have to go away, and the ceremony will no doubt take place on the farm. I wonder what we ought to give him for a present?’

When he inquired, there was no hesitation about the reply: a fat ram, or, better still, a bullock.

Robin’s experience had taught him already that the present of a bullock had to be carefully handled. It was remarkable how, whenever Christmas approached, or some big event like circumcision, the very best ox would break its leg and have to be shot. What angered Robin and Tilly was not so much the deception as the suffering caused to the ox, which probably had its leg cracked by a pick-axe or an iron bar. Perhaps the Kikuyu were not deliberately cruel to animals, but they were horribly callous. If they did not actively enjoy watching an animal suffer, they certainly did not mind, and it never occurred to any of them to put a beast out of pain. In their eyes, I suppose, pain was simply a thing that had to be suffered, whether you were a beast or a man; and as for beasts, they did not seem to give them credit for having any feelings.