Thinking of this hotel and the project of how it might be decorated and run featuring the twenty-four-hour safari, all beasts guaranteed, you sleep in your own room each night with piped in coaxial TV, and the menus and the desk staff all anti–Mau Mau commandos and the better White Hunters, and the little courtesies to guests such as each guest finding by his plate the first night at dinner his commission as an Honorary Game Warden and on his second, and for most the last night, his Honorary Membership in the East African Professional Hunters Association delighted me but I did not want to work it out too completely until we should have Mary and G.C. and Willie together. Miss Mary, having been a journalist, had splendid powers of invention. I had never heard her tell a story in the same way twice and always had the feeling she was remolding it for the later editions. We needed Pop too because I wanted his permission to have him mounted full length and placed in the lobby in the event that he should ever die. There might be some opposition from his family but we would have to talk the entire project over and reach the soundest decision. Pop had never expressed any great love for Laitokitok which he regarded more or less as a sin trap and I believe he wanted to be buried up in the high hills of his own country. But we could, at least, discuss it.
Now, realizing that loneliness is best taken away by jokes, derision and contempt for the worst possible outcome of anything and that gallows humor is the most valid if not the most durable since it is of necessity momentary and often ill reported, I laughed reading the sad letter and thinking about the new Laitokitok Hilton. The sun was almost down and I knew Mary would be in the New Stanley by now and probably in her bath. I liked to think of her in her bath and I hoped she would have fun in the town tonight. She did not like the bad dives I frequented and I thought she would probably be at the Travelers Club or some such place and I was glad that it was she who was having that sort of fun and not me.
I stopped thinking about her and thought about Debba and that we had promised to take her and the Widow to buy cloth for dresses that they would have for the celebration of the Birthday of the Baby Jesus. This official buying of dresses with my fiancée present and choosing the cloth which I would pay for while forty to sixty Masai women and warriors watched was as formal and definitive an occasion as Laitokitok would offer in this social season or probably any other. Being a writer which is a disgrace but also sometimes a comfort I wondered, being unable to sleep, how Henry James would have handled this situation. I remembered him standing on the balcony of his hotel in Venice smoking a good cigar and wondering what must go on in that town where it is so much harder to keep out of trouble than to get into it and when, in the nights I could not sleep, I always had great comfort thinking of Henry James standing on the balcony of his hotel looking down at the town and people passing, all of them with their needs and their duties and their problems, their small economies and village happinesses and the sound well-organized life of the canal, and think of James, who knew not one of the places to go, and stayed on his balcony with his cigar. Happy now in the night where I could sleep or not as I wished I liked to think of both Debba and James and I wondered how it would be if I plucked the consolatory cigar from James’s lips and handed it to Debba who might put it behind her ear or perhaps hand it to Ngui, who had learned to smoke cigars in Abyssinia where as a rifleman in the K.A.R. opposing, sometimes, white troops and their camp followers and overcoming them he had learned many other things. Then I stopped thinking about Henry James and his consolatory cigar and about the lovely canal which I had been imagining with a fair wind coming to help all my friends and brothers who had to work against the tide and I no longer cared to think of the thick, squat figure with the bald head and the ambulatory dignity and line of departure problems and I thought of Debba and the big skin-covered, smoky, clean-smelling, hand-rubbed wood bed of the big house and the four bottles of sacramental beer I had paid for the use of it, my intentions being honorable, and the beer having its proper tribal custom name; I think it was, among the many ritual beers, known as The Beer For Sleeping In The Bed Of The Mother-in-Law and it was equivalent to the possession of a Cadillac in John O’Hara circles if there be any such circles left. I hoped piously that there were such circles left and I thought of O’Hara, fat as a boa constrictor that had swallowed an entire shipment of a magazine called Collier’s and surly as a mule that had been bitten by tsetse flies plodding along dead without recognizing it, and I wished him luck and all happiness remembering fairly joyously the white-edged evening tie he had worn at his coming out party in New York and his hostess’s nervousness at presenting him and her gallant hope that he would not disintegrate. No matter how bad things go any human being can be cheered remembering O’Hara at his most brilliant epoch.
I thought about our plans for Christmas which I always loved and could remember in so many countries. I knew this Christmas was going to be either wonderful or truly awful since we had decided to invite all of the Masai and all of the Wakamba and this was the sort of Ngoma which could end Ngomas if it were not carried out properly. There would be the magic tree of Miss Mary which the Masai would recognize for what it truly was if Miss Mary did not. I did not know whether we should tell Miss Mary that her tree was really an extra-potent type of marijuana-effect tree because there were so many angles to the problem. First, Miss Mary was absolutely determined to have this particular type of tree and it had been accepted by the Wakamba as a part of her unknown or Thief River Falls tribal customs along with her necessity to have killed the lion. Arap Meina had confided to me that he and I could be drunk on this tree for months and that if an elephant ate this tree that Miss Mary had selected he, the elephant, would be drunk for a matter of days.
I knew that Miss Mary must have had a good evening in Nairobi since she was not a fool and it was the only town we had and there was fresh smoked salmon at the New Stanley and an understanding although conniving headwaiter. But the fish from the great lakes, the non-named fish, would be as good as ever and there would be curries but she should not eat them so soon after dysentery. But I was sure she had dined well and I hoped she was in some good nightclub now and I thought about Debba and how we would be going up to buy the material for the two lovely hills that she carried so proudly and modestly and how the cloth would emphasize them as she well knew and how we would look at the different prints and how the Masai women with their long skirts and the flies and their insane, pretending, beauty parlor husbands would watch us in their unsatisfied boldness and syphilitic, cold-handed beauty and how we, Kamba, neither one with our ears even pierced but proud and worse than insolent because of too many things that Masai could not ever know, would feel the stuffs and look at the patterns and buy other things to give us importance in the store.
13
WHEN MWINDI brought the tea in the morning I was up and dressed sitting by the ashes of the fire with two sweaters and a wool jacket on. It had turned very cold in the night and I wondered what that meant about the weather for today.
“Want fire?” Mwindi asked.