Pooran Singh went to the Punjab to his family. He had not seen them for many years, but they had kept in touch with him by sending him photographs of themselves, which he preserved down in his little corrugated iron house by the factory, and showed to me with great tenderness and pride. I had several letters from Pooran Singh already from the boat to India. They all began in the same way: “Dear Madam. Good-bye.” and then went on to give me his news and to report on his adventures of the journey.
A week after Denys’s death one morning a strange thing happened to me.
I lay in bed and thought of the events of the last months, I tried to understand what it really was that had happened.
It seemed to me that I must have, in some way, got out of the normal course of human existence, into a maelstrom where I ought never to have been. Wherever I walked, the ground fell away under me, and the stars fell from the sky. I thought of the poem about Ragnarok, in which this fall of the stars is described, and of the verses about the dwarfs who sigh deeply in their caves in the mountains, and die from fear. All this could not be, I thought, just a coincidence of circumstances, what people call a run of bad luck, but there must be some central principle within it. If I could find it, it would save me: If I looked in the right place, I reflected, the coherence of things might become clear to me. I must, I thought, get up and look for a sign.
Many people think it an unreasonable thing, to be looking for a sign. This is because of the fact that it takes a particular state of mind to be able to do so, and not many people have ever found themselves in such a state. If in this mood, you ask for a sign, the answer cannot fail you; it follows as the natural consequence of the demand. In that same way an inspired card-player collects thirteen chance cards on the table, and takes up what is called a hand of cards—a unity. Where others see no call at all, he sees a grand slam staring him in the face. Is there a grand slam in the cards? Yes, to the right player.
I came out of the house looking for a sign, and wandered at haphazard towards the boys’ huts. They had just let out their chickens, which were running here and there amongst the houses. I stood for a little while and looked at them.
Fathima’s big white cock came strutting up before me. Suddenly he stopped, laid his head first on one side, and then on the other, and raised his comb. From the other side of the path, out of the grass, came a little grey Chameleon that was, like the cock himself, out on his morning reconnoitring. The cock walked straight upon it,—for the chickens eat these things,—and gave out a few clucks of satisfaction. The Chameleon stopped up dead at the sight of the cock. He was frightened, but he was at the same time very brave, he planted his feet in the ground, opened his mouth as wide as he possibly could, and to scare his enemy, in a flash he shot out his club-shaped tongue at the cock. The cock stood for a second as if taken aback, then swiftly and determinately he struck down his beak like a hammer and plucked out the Chameleon’s tongue.
The whole meeting between the two had taken ten seconds. Now I chased off Fathima’s cock, took up a big stone and killed the Chameleon, for he could not live without his tongue; the Chameleons catch the insects that they feed on with their tongue.
I was so frightened by what I had seen,—for it had been a gruesome and formidable thing in a miniature format,—that I went away and sat down on the stone seat by the house. I sat there for a long time, and Farah brought me out my tea, and put it on the table. I looked down on the stones and dared not look up, such a dangerous place did the world seem to me.
Very slowly only, in the course of the next few days, it came upon me that I had had the most spiritual answer possible to my call. I had even been in a strange manner honoured and distinguished. The powers to which I had cried had stood on my dignity more than I had done myself, and what other answer could they then give? This was clearly not the hour for coddling, and they had chosen to connive at my invocation of it. Great powers had laughed to me, with an echo from the hills to follow the laughter, they had said among the trumpets, among the cocks and Chameleons, Ha ha!
I was also pleased that I had been out this morning in time to save the Chameleon from a slow, painful death.
It was about this time,—although it was before I had sent away my horses,—that Ingrid Lindstrom came down from her farm at Njoro to stay with me for a little while. This was a friendly act of Ingrid’s, for it was difficult to her to get away from her own farm. Her husband, to make money to pay off their Njoro land, had taken a job with a big Sisal company in Tanganyika, and was at the time sweating down there at an altitude of two thousand feet, just as if Ingrid had been leasing him out in the quality of a slave, for the sake of the farm. She was therefore, in the meantime, running it on her own; she had extended her poultry yards, and her market-garden, and had got pigs, and broods of young turkeys up there, which she could ill afford to leave, even for a few days. All the same, for my sake she gave it all in charge of Kemosa, and rushed down to me as she would run to the assistance of a friend whose house was on fire, and she came without Kemosa this time, which was probably, under the circumstances, a good thing for Farah. Ingrid understood and realized to the bottom of her heart, with great strength, with something of the strength of the elements themselves, what it is really like, when a woman farmer has to give up her farm, and leave it.
While Ingrid was staying with me, we did not discuss either the past or the future, and did not mention the name of a single friend or acquaintance, we closed our two minds round the disaster of the hour. We walked together from the one thing on the farm to the other, naming them as we passed them, one by one, as if we were taking mental stock of my loss, or as if Ingrid were, on my behalf, collecting material for a book of complaints to be laid before destiny. Ingrid knew well enough from her own experience that there is no such book, but all the same the idea of it forms part of the livelihood of women.
We went down to the oxen’s boma, and sat on the fence, counting the oxen as they came in. Without words I pointed them out to Ingrid: “These oxen,” and without words she responded: “Yes, these oxen,” and recorded them in her book. We went round to the stables to feed the horses with sugar, and when they had finished it, I stretched out my sticky and be-slabbered palms, presenting them to Ingrid and crying, “These horses.” Ingrid sighed back laboriously, “Yes, these horses,” and noted them down. In my garden by the river she could not reconcile herself to the idea that I must leave the plants that I had brought from Europe; she wrung her hands over the mint, sage and lavender, and talked of them again later on, as if she were pondering on some scheme by which I might arrange to take them with me.
We spent the afternoons in contemplation of my small herd of Native cows which grazed on the lawn. I went through their age, characteristics, and yielding of milk, and Ingrid groaned and shrieked over the figures as if she had been bodily hurt. She scrutinized them carefully one by one, not with any view to trade, for my cows were going to my house-boys, but so as to value and weigh up my loss. She clung to the soft sweet-smelling calves; she had herself after long struggles got a few cows with calves on her farm, and against all reason, and against her own will, her deep furious glances blamed me for deserting my calves.
A man who was walking beside a bereaved friend and who was all the time in his own mind repeating the words: “Thank God it is not me,” would, I believe, feel badly about it, and would try to suppress the feeling. It is a different thing in two women who are friends, and of whom the one is manifesting her deep sympathy in the distress of the other. There it goes without saying that the more fortunate friend will all the while in her heart repeat the same thing: “Thank God it is not me.” It causes no bad feeling between the two, but on the contrary brings them closer together, and gives to the ceremony a personal element. Men, I think, cannot easily or harmoniously envy or triumph over one another. But it goes without saying that the bride triumphs over the bridesmaids, and that the lying-in-visitors envy the mother of the child; and none of the parties feel the worse on that account. A woman who had lost a child might show its clothes to a friend, aware that the friend was repeating in her heart: “Thank God it is not me,”—and it would be to both of them a natural and befitting thing. It was so with Ingrid and me. As we walked over the farm, I knew that she was thinking of her own farm, praising her luck that it was still hers, and holding on to it with all her might, and we got on very well on that. In spite of our old khaki coats and trousers, we were in reality a pair of mythical women, shrouded respectively in white and black, a unity, the Genii of the farmer’s life in Africa.