“I can make drinks still,” Miss Mary said. “Don’t you both look so sinister. I made it all up about Mr. Chungo. Someone has to make jokes here sometimes beside Papa and his pagans and you and Papa and your night wildness and wickedness. What time did you all get up this morning?”
“Not too early. Is it still the same day?”
“The days run into each other and into each other and into each other,” Miss Mary said. “That’s in my poem about Africa.”
Miss Mary was writing a great poem about Africa but the trouble was that she made it up in her head sometimes and forgot to write it down and then it would be gone like dreams. She wrote some of it down but she would not show it to anybody. We all had great faith in her poem about Africa and I still have but I would like it better if she would actually write it. We were all reading the Georgics then in the C. Day Lewis translation. We had two copies but they were always being lost or mislaid and I have never known a book to be more mis-layable. The only fault I could ever find with the Mantovan was that he made all normally intelligent people feel as though they too could write great poetry. Dante only made crazy people feel they could write great poetry. That was not true of course but then almost nothing was true and especially not in Africa. In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.
“Is that really in the poem?” I asked Miss Mary.
“Yes, of course.”
“Then write it down before it gets to sound like a traffic accident.”
“You don’t have to spoil people’s poems as well as shoot their lions.”
G.C. looked up at me like a weary schoolboy and I said, “I found my Georgics if you want it. It is the one that hasn’t got the introduction by Louis Bromfield in it. That’s how you can tell it.”
“You can tell mine because it has my name in it.”
“And an introduction by Louis Bromfield.”
“Who’s the man Bromfield?” G.C. asked. “Is it a fighting word?”
“He’s a man who writes who has a very well known farm in America, in Ohio. Because he is well-known about the farm Oxford University had him write an introduction. Turning the pages he can see Virgil’s farm and Virgil’s animals and Virgil’s people and even his own stern and rugged features or figures I forget which. It must be rugged figures if he is a farmer. Anyway Louis can see him and he says it forms a great and eternal poem or poems for every kind of reader.”
“It must be the edition I have without Bromfield,” G.C. said. “I think you left it in Kajiado.”
“Mine has my name in it,” Miss Mary said.
“Good,” I said. “And your Up-Country Swahili has your name in it too and right now it’s in my hip pocket and sweated through and stuck together. I’ll get you mine and you can write your name in it.”
“I don’t want yours. I want my own and why did you have to sweat it solidly together and ruin it?”
“I don’t know. It was probably part of my plot to ruin Africa. But here it is. I’d advise you to take the clean one.”
“This one has words that I’d written in myself that aren’t in the original and it has notations.”
“I’m sorry. I must have put it in my pocket some morning in the dark by mistake.”
“You never make a mistake,” Miss Mary said. “We all know that. And you’d be much better off if you studied your Swahili instead of trying to speak all the time in Unknown Tongue and reading nothing but French books. We all know you read French. Was it necessary to come all the way to Africa to read French?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. This was the first time I ever had a complete set of Simenon and the girl at the book shop in the long passageway at the Ritz was so nice to send and then get them all.”
“And then you left them down in Tanganyika at Patrick’s. All except a few. Do you think they’ll read them?”
“I don’t know. Pat’s sort of mysterious some ways like me. He might read them and he might not. But he has a neighbor who has a wife who is a Frenchwoman and they’d be good to have for her. No. Pat would read them.”
“Did you ever study French and learn to speak it grammatically?”
“No.”
“You’re hopeless.”
G.C. frowned at me.
“No,” I said. “I’m not hopeless because I still have hope. The day I haven’t you’ll know it bloody quick.”
“What do you have hope about? Mental slovenliness? Taking other people’s books? Lying about a lion?”
“That’s sort of alliterative. Just say lying.
It was not a nice way to talk especially to anyone with Virgil on their mind but lunch came then and lunch was always an armistice in any misunderstandings and the partakers of it and its excellence were as safe as malefactors once were said to be in churches with the law after them although I had never had much faith in that sanctuary. So we cleaned it up and rubbed it all off the slate and Miss Mary went to take a nap after lunch and I went to the Ngoma.
It was very much like other Ngomas except extraordinarily pleasant and nice and the Game Scouts had made a huge effort. They were dancing in shorts and they all had four ostrich plumes on their heads, at least at the beginning. Two of the plumes were white and two dyed pink and they kept them on with all sorts of devices from leather straps and thongs to binding them or wiring them into the hair. They wore bell anklets to dance with and they danced well and with beautiful contained discipline. There were three drums and some drumming on tins and empty petrol drums. There were four classic dances and three or four that were improvised. The young women and the young girls and the children did not get to dance until the later dances. They all danced but they did not enter into the figures and dance in the double line until late in the afternoon. You could see from the way the children and the young girls danced that they were used to much rougher Ngomas at the Shamba.
Miss Mary and G.C. came out and took color pictures and Miss Mary was congratulated by everyone and shook hands with everybody. The Game Scouts did feats of agility. One was to start to turn a cartwheel over a coin that was half buried in the earth edge up and then stop the cartwheel when the feet were straight up in the air and to lower the head to the ground, sinking down on the arms, get the coin in the teeth and then come up and spin over to the feet in a single roll. It was very difficult and Denge, who was the strongest of the Game Scouts and the most agile, the kindest and the gentlest, did it beautifully.
Most of the time I sat in the shade and filled in on one of the basic beat empty petrol drums working the end with the base of the hand and watched the dancing. The Informer came over and squatted down by me wearing his imitation paisley shawl and his porkpie hat.