One evening I came riding home so late that the stars were already out, and caught sight of a man waiting outside my house on the stones. It was Emmanuelson and he announced himself to me in a cordial voice: “Here comes a vagabond, Baroness.” I asked him how it was that I should find him there, and he told me that he had lost his way and so been landed at my house. His way to where? To Tanganyika.
That could hardly be true,—the Tanganyika road was the great highway and easy to find, my own farm-road took off from it. How was he going to get to Tanganyika? I asked him. He was going to walk, he informed me. That, I answered, was not a possible thing to do for anyone, it would mean three days through the Masai-Reserve without water, and the lions were bad there just now, the Masai had been in the same day to complain about them and had asked me to come out and shoot one for them.
Yes, yes, Emmanuelson knew of all that, but he was going to walk to Tanganyika all the same. For he did not know what else to do. He was wondering now whether, having lost his way, he could bear me company for dinner and sleep at the farm to start early in the morning?—if that was not convenient to me he would set out straight away while the stars were out so bright.
I had remained sitting on my horse while I talked to him, to accentuate that he was not a guest in the house, for I did not want him in to dine with me. But as he spoke, I saw that he did not expect to be invited either, he had no faith in my hospitality or in his own power of persuasion, and he made a lonely figure in the dark outside my house, a man without a friend. His hearty manner was adapted to save not his own face, which was past it, but mine, if now I sent him away it would be no unkindness, but quite all right. This was courtesy in a hunted animal,—I called for my Sice to take the pony, and got off,—“Come in, Emmanuelson,” I said, “you can dine here and stay over the night.”
In the light of the lamp Emmanuelson was a sad sight. He had on a long black overcoat such as nobody wears in Africa, he was unshaven and his hair was not cut, his old shoes were split at the toe. He was bringing no belongings with him to Tanganyika, his hands were empty. It seemed that I was to take the part of the High Priest who presents the goat alive to the Lord, and sends it into the wilderness. I thought that here we needed wine. Berkeley Cole, who generally kept the house in wine, some time ago had sent me a case of a very rare burgundy, and I now told Juma to open a bottle from it. When we sat down for dinner and Emmanuelson’s glass was filled he drank half of it, held it towards the lamp and looked at it for a long time like a person attentively listening to music. “Fameux ” he said, “fameux; this is a Chambertin 1906.” It was so, and that gave me respect for Emmanuelson.
Otherwise he did not say much to begin with, and I did not know what to say to him. I asked him how it was that he had not been able to find any work at all. He answered that it was because he knew nothing of the things with which people out here occupied themselves. He had been dismissed at the hotel, besides he was not really a maître d’hotel by profession.
“Do you know anything of book-keeping?” I asked him.
“No. Nothing at all,” he said. “I have always found it very difficult to add two figures together.”
“Do you know about cattle at all?” I went on. “Cows?” he asked. “No, no. I am afraid of cows.”
“Can you drive a tractor, then?” I asked. Here a faint ray of hope appeared on his face. “No,” he said, “but I think that I could learn that.”
“Not on my tractor though,” I said, “but tell me, Emmanuelson, what have you ever been doing? What are you in life?”
Emmanuelson drew himself up straight. “What am I?” he exclaimed. “Why, I am an actor.”
I thought: Thank God, it is altogether outside my capacity to assist this lost man in any practical way; the time has come for general human conversation. “You are an actor?” I said, “that is a fine thing to be. And which were your favourite parts when you were on the stage?”
“Oh I am a tragic actor,” said Emmanuelson, “my favourite parts were that of Armand in ‘La Dame aux Camelias’ and of Oswald in ‘Ghosts’.”
We talked for some time of these plays, of the various actors whom we had seen in them and of the way in which we thought that they should be acted. Emmanuelson looked round the room. “You have not,” he asked, “by any chance got the plays of Henrik Ibsen here? Then we might do the last scene of ‘Ghosts’ together, if you would not mind taking the part of Mrs. Alving.”
I had not got Ibsen’s plays.
“But perhaps you will remember it?” said Emmanuelson warming to his plan. “I myself know Oswald by heart from beginning to end. That last scene is the best. For a real tragic effect, you know, that is impossible to beat.”
The stars were out and it was a very fine warm night, there was not long, now, to the big rains. I asked Emmanuelson if he did really mean to walk to Tanganyika.
“Yes,” he said, “I am going, now, to be my own prompter.”
“It is a good thing for you,” I said, “that you are not married.”
“Yes,” said he, “yes.” After a little while he added modestly: “I am married though.”
In the course of our talk, Emmanuelson complained of the fact that out here a white man could not hold his own against the competition from the Natives, who worked so much cheaper. “Now in Paris,” he said, “I could always, for a short time, get a job as a waiter in some cafe or other.”
“Why did you not stay in Paris, Emmanuelson?” I asked him.
He gave me a swift clear glance. “Paris?” he said, “no, no, indeed. I got out of Paris just at the nick of time.”
Emmanuelson had one friend in the world to whom in the course of the evening he came back many times. If he could only get in touch with him again, everything would be different, for he was prosperous and very generous. This man was a conjurer and was travelling all over the world. When Emmanuelson had last heard of him he had been in San Francisco.
From time to time we talked of literature and the theatre and then again we would come back to Emmanuelson’s future. He told me how his countrymen out here in Africa had one after another turned him out.
“You are in a hard position, Emmanuelson,” I said, “I do not know that I can think of anyone who is, in a way, harder up against things than you are.”
“No, I think so myself,” he said. “But then there is one thing of which I have thought lately and of which perhaps you have not thought: some person or other will have to be in the worst position of all people.”
He had finished his bottle and pushed his glass a little away from him. “This journey,” he said, “is a sort of gamble to me,le rouge et le noir. I have a chance to get out of things, I may even be getting out of everything. On the other hand if I get to Tanganyika I may get into things.”