“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“It’s not the Empire nor white prestige since you seem to have rather withdrawn from us palefaces for the moment.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.