The Flame Trees of Thika (24 page)

‘Many of us believe in it now,’ Robin amended. ‘One of my cousins near Argyll made a wax image of her neighbour, a grumpy old man who won a lawsuit against her about the salmon-fishing, and stuck pins into it, and he got such bad rheumatics that he had to go abroad to take a cure, and ate some bad fish and died of food poisoning.’

‘He might have got rheumatics anyway, especially in a damp Scotch castle,’ Alec pointed out.

‘It was quite a dry castle,’ Robin replied, rather huffed. ‘And the point was he died of poisoning.’

‘He was over seventy,’ Tilly said.

‘Well, cousin Margaret
thought
she’d killed him, anyway, and was so much encouraged she started on his factor, but the man went to Canada and she never heard whether it worked.’

It was remarkable how quickly Njombo recovered, considering that he had been, as Tilly said, as near a goner as made no difference, and looked as bony as a barbel when he first emerged from the hut. He never spoke of his experience to any of us, and we never questioned him, but I always looked upon him as a man who had been raised from the dead.

O
NE
day Hereward rode over to ask for Robin’s help. The piano had arrived at the station in a crate, and required the united efforts of both farms to convey it to its destination.

‘We shall need two span of oxen,’ Hereward said. ‘I think we shall have to cut some trees down first to widen the road.’

The actual operation took on a military character, with men stationed at strategic points to direct the drivers, others held in reserve at steep places to add manpower to ox-power, and various people warned to keep the track clear on the morning of the move. The worst danger-point was a river crossing with a steep bank on either side. The stream had been roughly bridged with logs, but these were submerged in rainy periods and sometimes washed away, and the banks put a severe strain on our teams. Wagons sometimes ran backwards and Hereward was afraid the grand piano might end up on its back in the stream. His stuffed heads had come too, in several crates, but he scarcely mentioned these, having perhaps concluded that to bring horns to Africa was like conveying cloves to Zanzibar.

We all rode down to Thika to see the crate loaded into a wagon. A gang of lifters had been assembled, a much larger group of onlookers had assembled itself, the Indian station-master bustled round, and Hereward, looking as usual perfectly turned-out in jodhpurs, barked brisk orders that no one obeyed and deployed forces who merely ignored his plan of attack.

‘I wonder what the boys think is inside,’ Tilly observed. ‘A house, perhaps; it’s almost as big as one of theirs.’

When Njombo, who had by now recovered, and accompanied us on a mule, did in fact inquire, the limitations of our Swahili forced her to reply:

‘It is a thing with which you make a noise.’

Njombo, startled out of his calm, let out a long exclamation and remarked: ‘It must be a very big noise indeed.’

‘Not big, but good. You make it with your hands.’

‘But who will be able to?’

‘Memsabu
Mrefu
.’ Hereward’s official native name was
mrefu
, meaning tall; but he had another meaning praying mantis, never used to Europeans, I suppose because they might have considered it an insult to be compared with an insect that could be crushed even by a child.

‘How can memsabu’s hands use such a thing?’ Njombo asked sceptically. ‘It would be a giant’s affair.’

Tilly gave up trying to explain the piano and stood in the
shade of the station-master’s tin office to watch Hereward and Robin marshalling their wagon and teams into a suitable position. The piano was eventually loaded upside down, and this made Hereward angry, but he was powerless to reverse it. Lashed to the wagon, it swayed off along the rutted track, a far cry from the concert halls and drawing-rooms for which its makers had doubtless intended it.

‘Stupid notion, really,’ Hereward commented. ‘Lettice would have it, but what use is a piano out here?’

‘I suppose Lettice will enjoy playing it.’

‘Oh, well, if it makes her any happier, I shall feel it’s been well worth while. You’re her best friend out here, Tilly, so I can say this to you. I’m worried about Lettice. I sometimes doubt if this is the right life for her. She gets queer notions into her head.’

‘I haven’t noticed it,’ Tilly said cautiously.

‘At one moment she wants a special room built for the piano, a rose-garden with a fountain in it and Italian statues; next day she talks of selling up and going to live in Yorkshire of all places, and pulling strings to get me back into the regiment - which is out of the question, of course. Now she’s got it into her head that the natives are trying to poison Chang and Zena; she chops up their food herself and insists on sleeping in the dressing-room with the little beggars and locking the doors. All fads and fancies, one extreme to the other. I wish you’d speak to her, Tilly.’

‘I shouldn’t worry, Hereward; I expect it’s the altitude, or the vertical rays of the sun.’

Hereward gave a sharp bark like a jackal.

‘Just what I told her, but now she wants to go off on this safari of Crawfurd’s. Stupid idea - for her, I mean. All right for a fine, strong woman like you.’

Tilly looked displeased at the compliment. ‘It might be good for Lettice. And they say Ian Crawfurd is a splendid shot and knows the country inside out.’

‘A young puppy, if you ask me. But of course I don’t expect my opinions to carry any weight.’

We had reached the river, and a crisis was developing upon the farther bank. Egged on by a tremendous shouting, cracking of whips, and general furore, the oxen had taken a run at the steep
part of the bank and would have crested the rise had not the crate unfortunately caught on the branches of a tree. The oxen heaved in vain, the wagon started to slide backwards, dragging the little beasts after it, and Robin, who was riding by the team, bellowed, ‘Stone, stone, stone,’ at the top of his voice. Everyone took up the cry; it echoed round the hillside like a battle-cry while the sliding wagon gathered pace, the frantic oxen scrabbled with their little hoofs and several people tried to hang on to the spokes. A couple of Kikuyu at length rushed up with boulders to put under the wheels, a simple expedient which arrested the run-away in the nick of time. The crate, dislodged by the tree, was now hanging dangerously over to one side, and a few more yards would have seen it topple over and smash itself against the rocks.

A considerable audience had by now sprung out of an apparently deserted countryside to proffer advice, while the drivers and their mates re-told the more dramatic parts of the episode with a great many gestures and pieces of mime, so that one could see again the oxen heaving, the wagon creeping forward, the impact of the tree, the wagon slipping, the oxen giving way, the threatened disaster, the yawning abyss, the heroic struggle of the driver to arrest the wagon, and finally the brilliant last-minute triumph of the two men with boulders who flung themselves into a position of danger and saved the day. It was all much more exciting than the actual incident, and I thought Robin and Hereward unkind to cut it short and insist upon the unroping, rearranging, and securing of the crate, while the oxen panted, and the audience watched with fascinated eyes.

‘Silly idiots,’ Robin said. ‘They forgot the wheel-chocks. And I told them about three times.’

‘What can you expect?’ Hereward agreed. ‘I suppose God gave them brains, but they’ll do anything to avoid using ’em.’

One could see, then, that the drivers had not been very bright; but what a story they would have to tell when they got home!

The wagon reached the Palmers’ without further adventures, and a week or two later we were asked over for a piano-warming. By now they had moved into their stone bungalow, which seemed to everyone the height of luxury; it had three spare rooms, teak floors, bow windows, a bathroom, and gables in the Dutch style, with curlecues. Lettice had hoped for a tiled roof, but this was
too expensive even for Hereward, and they had fallen back on the usual corrugated iron, painted green.

‘You’ve done your hair in a new way,’ Tilly remarked. Lettice wore it piled on top of her head in soft, gleaming swathes and she had a fillet of small bronze leaves somehow woven into it.

‘I thought I had better dress up like a concert pianist, even if I can’t play like one,’ Lettice explained. ‘My fingers feel like sausages and make sounds like the wild asses that stamped on Jamsheed’s grave, but never mind, I thought we might all sing choruses. Ian has come back, did you know? And wants us all to go off soon with him on the safari.’

It was good news about Ian, and I went off hopefully to find him. I had been reading about Prester John, so Abyssinia had become a place of riches and mystery, where princes wore crowns that flashed with rubies, and dwelt in castles set on the cloud-enfolded crests of lowering mountains.

Ian said he had met a prince, but without a crown, though he did have jewels set in the handle of his sword, which he used to cut off chunks of raw meat at a banquet; and a cup-bearer, a boy of twelve or so, had poured the wine from a golden goblet, and knelt on one knee before his prince, after the taster had taken the first sip. And although Ian had seen no castles, he had visited a monastery on top of a hill so steep that no pony could clamber up, inhabited by holy men with long beards, and by five princes, relations of the Emperor, whose eyes had been burnt out in their youth, so that they could never lay claim to the throne nor lead armed revolts against the Lion of Judah.

Hereward was moved to exclaim: ‘Revolting cruelty! What barbaric devils they are.’

‘Yes, they are barbarous,’ Ian agreed, ‘but they did it to preserve unity and avoid civil wars.’

‘I see no need to make excuses for them.’

‘Their point, I suppose, is that it’s better to blind four or five young men than to plunge the country into dynastic struggles later on, at the cost of thousands of lives.’

‘I don’t believe they thought of that at all,’ Hereward said. ‘You’ll be defending next their habit of mutilating prisoners, like the wretched Italians taken at the battle of Adowa.’

To change the subject, Ian told us about another and more
fortunate prisoner he had met in Addis Ababa. This was a Scot left over from Lord Napier’s campaign, now an oldish man of considerable substance and influence with the Emperor. Ian and his friends had wanted to buy more ponies, but Menelik had forbidden their export; the British Minister said he could do nothing and they might as well go home. The Scots ex-prisoner, however, had fixed the whole thing in three days, at a cost to Ian of a hundred pounds in Maria Theresa dollars.

Hereward looked disgusted and said in his stiffest tones: ‘If you’ll forgive me for saying so, I think that an Englishman who resorts to bribery in a nigger country betrays our name to the world.’

His words fell like lead into a pool; there was a plop and then silence, while everyone searched for something to say. Lettice observed:

‘If the Abyssinians are used to bribery they will go on doing it, and Ian can’t reform them single-handed. Besides, when in Rome…’

‘I have never been able to understand the difference between a bribe and a tip,’ Robin said. ‘Yet you are a blackguard if you do give the one, or if you fail to give the other. It is very difficult.’

‘I suppose it’s a question of timing,’ Ian suggested. ‘One comes before service, the other after. Would it make you think any better of us, Hereward, to know that we gave him his
pourboire
after he had smoothed our path with Menelik, and not before?’

‘You can split hairs if you like,’ Hereward replied gruffly. ‘Right’s right and wrong’s wrong to me.’

‘You are lucky to see things so clearly,’ Lettice said.

‘There’s no luck about it. Right and wrong are there for everyone to see. They are often inconvenient, and therefore people pretend they’re obscure as an excuse for dodging them. That’s all.’

‘It is quite enough,’ Lettice observed. ‘I can see that I must deputize for Orpheus, without any of his genius. You must please be charitable to me, if not to the Abyssinians or to Ian’s morals.’

Our ears had grown accustomed to rhythm and dissonance, to cadence and chant, but not to melody. Although Lettice may not have been a player of the first quality, the skill of her hands,
darting like butterflies above the keys, in summoning from the instrument a torrent of harmony seemed to me a kind of miracle. A hissing lamp threw a circle of light over her gleaming chestnut hair with the bronze leaves in it, over her pale skin and her dancing hands, and over the piano’s shining surface, still and deep as a lake among mountains; this was a moment of magic revealing to us all, for a few moments, a hidden world of grace and wonder beyond the one of which our eyes told us, a world that no words could delineate, as insubstantial as a cloud, as iridescent as a dragon-fly, and as innocent as the heart of a rose.

When she had finished her piece there was a silence no one cared to break, it seemed to have a tangible existence of its own. Lettice herself dissolved it by arranging some music and starting to sing. Probably her voice was not the equal of her playing, but it was true and gentle, and she sang lively little songs in French. Ian jumped up and stood beside her, looking over her shoulder, as natural and easy as one of the Somali horsemen whose lives he often shared. I suppose the music had tautened our perceptions and made me see them, together in the lamplight, as something other than they were, more handsome and accomplished, more of the spirit and less of flesh and blood, more of the ideal and less of the matter-of-fact - or had woven for reality a richer garment than it usually wears.

At any rate, they looked very fine, and full of laughter as they sang together songs as light as bubbles, and as gay. Ian’s voice was clear and simple and made me think of sherry poured into a crystal glass the Palmers had - the look of it, not the taste, which I did not know. I cannot remember any of the songs that evening except one in which we all joined, the French-Canadian jingle
Alouette
; and afterwards, whenever I heard this little tune, it reminded me of that evening, and Lettice at the piano with Ian by her, the others joining in with more enthusiasm than accuracy, the sense of gaiety and friendship, and the room with a spicy scent peculiar to everything that Lettice owned.