“I know it, kittner. That’s because we’re here in a strange time.”
“I wish I’d known it in the old days with you and Pop.”
“I was never here in the old days. They just seem old now. Actually now is much more interesting. We couldn’t have been friends and brothers the way we are now in the old days. Pop never would have let me. When Mkola and I got to be brothers it wasn’t respectable. It was just condoned. Now Pop tells you all sorts of things he never would have told me in the old days.”
“I know. I’m very honored that he tells me.”
“Honey, are you bored? I’m perfectly happy reading and not being wet in the rain. You have to write letters too.”
“No. I love for us to talk together. It’s the thing I miss when there is so much excitement and work and we’re never alone except in bed. We have a wonderful time in bed and you say lovely things to me. I remember them and the fun. But this is a different kind of talking.”
The rain was still a steady, heavy beating on the canvas. It had replaced all other things and it fell without varying its beat or its rhythm.
“Lawrence tried to tell about it,” I said. “But I could not follow him because there was so much cerebral mysticism. I never believed he had slept with an Indian girl. Nor even touched one. He was a sensitive journalist sightseeing in Indian country and he had hatreds and theories and prejudices. Also he could write beautifully. But it was necessary for him, after a time, to become angry to write. He had done some things perfectly and he was at the point of discovering something most people do not know when he began to have so many theories.”
“I follow it pretty well,” Miss Mary said, “but what does it have to do with the Shamba? I like your fiancée very much because she is a lot like me and I think she’d be a valuable extra wife if you need one. But you don’t have to justify her by some writer. Which Lawrence were you talking about, D.H. or T.E.?”
“OK,” I said. “I think you make very good sense and I’ll read Simenon.”
“Why don’t you go to the Shamba and try living there in the rain?”
“I like it here,” I said.
“She’s a nice girl,” Miss Mary said. “And she may think it’s not very genteel of you to not turn up when it rains.”
“Want to make peace?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Good. I won’t talk balls about Lawrence and dark mysteries and we’ll stay here in the rain and the hell with the Shamba. I don’t think Lawrence would like the Shamba too much anyway.”
“Did he like to hunt?”
“No. But that’s nothing against him, thank God.”
“Your girl wouldn’t like him then.”
“I don’t think she would. But thank God that’s nothing against him either.”
“Did you ever know him?”
“No. I saw him and his wife once in the rain outside of Sylvia Beach’s book shop in the Rue de l’Odéon. They were looking in the window and talking but they didn’t go in. His wife was a big woman in tweeds and he was small in a big overcoat with a beard and very bright eyes. He didn’t look well and I did not like to see him getting wet. It was warm and pleasant inside Sylvia’s.”
“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.”