West with the Night (18 page)

In Africa people learn to serve each other. They live on credit balances of little favours that they give and may, one day, ask to have returned. In any country almost empty of men, ‘love thy neighbour’ is less a pious injunction than a rule for survival. If you meet one in trouble, you stop — another time he may stop for you.

‘Can I help?’

I had dismounted from Pegasus; the pony stood stiff-legged, straining against the reins, eyeing the angular apparition of steel and rubber with fear and distrust. For myself, I had seen engines before — the big mill engines at Njoro, and, as for automobiles, my father owned one of the first, and I had seen others on occasional visits to Nairobi. They were rolling in, but few had rolled as high as Molo. I knew what happened; I knew they ran out of petrol, or got flat tires, or just broke down.

The stranger turned from his tinkering and smiled and shook his head. No, I couldn’t help. Engines were moody things. They had to be nursed. He had nursed this one for weeks and was getting used to it.

‘Not bored with it?’

He wiped grease from a pair of pliers and shrugged, squinting upward at the sun. No. Well, yes — at times, of course. At times he got damned bored with it. But you had to have something to worry about, didn’t you? You couldn’t just sit on this window ledge of Africa and watch the clouds go by?

‘I suppose you couldn’t.’

I sat down on a hummock of grass, holding my reins, leaning almost against the forelegs of Pegasus. There was no place to tether a horse; there was nothing but rolling downs that went on and on in easy waves until they broke against the wall of the sky. There were no clouds to watch. The automobile so sharply sketched against this simple canvas was an intrusion; it was as if a child had pasted the picture of a foolish toy over a painting you had known for years.

The young man dropped his pliers and sat on his heels. He had intelligent eyes lit gently with humour. He was older than I by six or seven years, but he had the kindness not to show tolerance.

‘I know what you’re thinking. The motorcar looks silly here — your horse looks natural. But you can’t stop things, you know. One day, when roads are built, this whole country will be rumbling with trains and cars — and we’ll all get used to it.’

‘I don’t think I will. The trains I’ve seen are filthy — and even you can’t think much of the motorcar —

He smiled in agreement. ‘Not much really. I’ve got a little farm near Eldama Ravine. If it ever pays off, I’ll get an aeroplane — I flew one in the war and got to like it; in the meantime the car is something to keep me busy …’

I had heard of aeroplanes — they too belonged to Baghdad. People talked about them, my father had talked about them — most times with a shake of his head. They were interesting inventions, it seemed, and there were men who got into them and went from place to place — why, I never knew. It seemed such a far step away from the warmth and the flow of life and the rhythm of flowing with it. It was too much outside of the things one knew — to like, or even to believe. A man was not a bird — how Arab Maina would have laughed at that — men wishing themselves into wings! It would have reminded him of a legend.

‘When you fly,’ the young man said, ‘you get a feeling of possession that you couldn’t have if you owned all of Africa. You feel that everything you see belongs to you — all the pieces are put together, and the whole is yours; not that you want it, but because, when you’re alone in a plane, there’s no one to share it. It’s there and it’s yours. It makes you feel bigger than you are — closer to being something you’ve sensed you might be capable of, but never had the courage to seriously imagine.’

What would Arab Maina have said to that? — Arab Maina, with his wish to walk an even path on naked feet, keeping his eyes on the earth, his great spear in his hand and his vanity buried in his heart? He would have found a legend for that. He would have said, ‘Lakwani — listen! Once there was the child of a leopard who found the ways of his kind too small to live by … and one day this child of a leopard …’

That is what Arab Maina would have said — that and more. But I said almost nothing. I saw that this man, tinkering with his battered engine on that pin-scratch of a road under a sun that burned the metal in his hands, was no fool — at most, a dreamer. He meant these things — not for me, of course (I was just an audience for his dreaming), but for himself. And his were solemn dreams. They were solemn dreams and in time he made them live.

Tom Black is not a name that ever groped for glory in a headline or shouldered other names aside for space to strut in. It can be found in the drier lists of men who figured flights in terms of hours or days, instead of column inches. There was fanfare when he and Charles Scott hurled the sleek red ‘Comet’ across eleven thousand miles of the world in 1934. There were other flights that found the public fancy. All these were diversions. If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.

I saw the ledger written. But so many days followed that one on the road at Molo — so many intervened before we met again.

I mounted Pegasus and waved good-bye and, behind me, heard the tired engine stir to life and sing with a broken voice that had no music in it. And the happy tinker who had revived it again jostled on his dreamy way wrapped in a nebula of dust.

He had been lavish with a stranger. He had left me a word, tossed me a key to a door I never knew was there, and had still to find.

‘All the pieces are put together, and the whole is yours …’ A word grows to a thought — a thought to an idea — an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveller loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.

Jumbled thoughts — restless thoughts — absurd thoughts! Pull yourself together. Whoever heard of Destiny with pliers in his hand?

‘Come, Pegasus — stretch those handsome legs — it’s almost feeding time!’

T
HE RED-JAWED RUSSIAN SQUINTS
over his glass of vodka, swallows, and snorts from the bottom of his belly.

‘Leopard?’ he says. ‘Pah! I have fought Siberian wolves with a clasp-knife. Listen, my friend — once at Tobolsk …’

‘Oxford myself,’ the man at his elbow says, ‘shall we sing?’

‘Wait until the orchestra stops.’

‘White hunter? You’ll want the best, old man. Get Blixen if you can, or Finch-Hatton. The Rift Valley isn’t Hyde Park, you know …’

‘In America we make the biggest there are. Take Chicago now …’

‘Champagne, Memsahib?’

‘Only a little … thanks. Now what were you saying, dear? Is that Lord Delamere with the glasses on?’

‘No. The one with the long hair. He never misses a Race Meeting. He never misses anything.’

‘Good old Muthaiga Club!’

‘Good old Haig and Haig!’

‘Good old Harrow — a toast to Harrow!’

‘Eton, you mean — swing, swing together — steady from stroke to bow …’

‘Forty years on …’

‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen!’ A tipsy fellow, swaying like a wind-rocked palm, frowns over the sea of fun and commands it to subside, but he has no magic. The sea rises, engulfs him in a single swell of laughter, and rolls on and on.

Let there be music. And there is music.

‘Beryl! — I’ve been looking for you …’

The lean, easy figure of Eric Gooch looms at my shoulder.

There is economy in the straight lines of his face, his eyes are blue and candid, and lacking worry. He is a farmer who has farmed for years without crying about it. He likes it. He likes all animals and especially horses. His filly, Wise Child, is in my stable. Now that I have moved to Nakuru, leaving Molo with its smells of Scotland, its cold nights and its contours so unorthodox — except to a Calvinistic eye — I am in closer touch with the owners of the horses I train. This is the big race, the important race — the Saint Leger, and most of my hopes (and Eric’s) hang on the satin-sleek shoulders of Wise Child.

Eric finds a chair and somehow crowds it up to my table. We put our heads together and talk of what to us are serious things; we mumble under the raucous chorus of voices that blend somehow and rise to the rafters of Muthaiga Club in a crescendo that lacks only a conductor to time its swell.

We can talk elsewhere. Nairobi has outgrown its swamp and tin-roof days. There are other places for discussing a horse-race, but none more appropriate, none more congenial. Poet or ploughman, statesman or derelict — every man has his Mermaid’s Tavern, every hamlet its shrine to conviviality, and in the image of the common spirit of those who haunt it, the character of the shrine is fashioned.

A Claridge’s in London or a pub, a Cirro’s in Paris or a bistro — alehouse, coffee-house, bodega, caravansary — by any name each is a sanctuary, a temple for talk, and for the observance of the warming rites of comradeship. Around this samovar, over those crystal goblets or beside that skin of wine, not much is said that, morning after, will stir a sleepy world to thoughtfulness. What music there was is vanished with the vanished hours, what words were uttered are dead with the fallen dust and are as prudently whisked away.

The Old Days, the Lost Days — in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened to those certain songs.

Muthaiga Club may nowadays be changed. ‘Na Kupa Hati M’zuri’ (I Bring You Good Fortune) was, in my time, engraved in the stone of its great fireplace. Its broad lounge, its bar, its dining-room — none so elaborately furnished as to make a rough-handed hunter pause at its door, nor yet so dowdy as to make a diamond pendant swing ill at ease — were rooms in which the people who made the Africa I knew danced and talked and laughed, hour after hour.

But there were occasions for this. Not every night was a gay night at Muthaiga; not many of its members or habitués were idle people. Farms need farmers, safaris need hunters, horses need horsemen. There, as everywhere, work was work, but there were intervals — and a tavern in the town.

‘Days of toil and nights of gladness!’ I do not know the author of that simplest of all designs for living, but I know the man who made it half a creed and half a toast. Glad nights were few on which Sandy Wright — son of Scotland, husband of the soil, and pioneer of my own Njoro — did not lift his glass and exact the pledge, once more, from his often pledged disciples.

Naval officers from battleships anchored at Mombasa could steer an unerring course, on land, to the threshold of Muthaiga. Politicians escaping their fresh-built corridors of small connivance and enormous words lounged in the alcoves of Muthaiga. District Commissioners — leather-brown, the drone of some frontier wind still singing in their ears, their minds free for a while from deserts and decisions, black men’s ways and white men’s edicts — found solace at Muthaiga. Lion, elephant, buffalo, kudu — some dead a day, some dead for years — were revived again and shot again in copses of Wedgwood saucers, behind hillocks of table linen, or in jungles of swizzle sticks.

‘I stood here … my gun-bearer there … Tusks? — just under two hundred …’

‘Black-maned devil — big as they come — my heavy rifle in camp …’

‘Ah!’ says the red-jawed Russian, ‘lion? Listen, my friend, I have fought Siberian wolves …’

Let there be music.

At Race Meetings there is more than music. At Race Meetings there is even more than racing, though the trumpeter who heralds each start seems no mere member of the K.A.R., but a pied piper toward whose high, repeated notes hurry all the keepers of the land, for if they are not children, they must nonetheless respond to an irresistible ditty.

Just as Arab Ruta was once Kibii, British East Africa is now Kenya. Nairobi has a frontier cut to its clothes and wears a broad-brimmed hat, but it tends an English garden; it nurtures the shoots of custom grafted from the old tree. It dresses for dinner, passes its port-wine clockwise, and loves a horse-race.

‘And so,’ says Eric Gooch, ‘what are our chances?’

I frown and shake my head. ‘Without Wrack to run against us, they would be perfect.’

What a thing to have to say! My own skill and labour have moulded every muscle on the hard, dynamic body of the chestnut colt. Wrack’s prowess is the product of my own hands; he is far and away the favourite for the Leger — but he will run against me. Part of that conversation buzzing around these wide, white walls is gossip about Wrack — little words of speculation droning like bees in a bottle.

Eric and I think back.

Just twelve weeks ago Wrack had been taken from my stable at Nakuru by his owner and put into the care of another trainer — a man who knew a good thing when he saw it. In the year Wrack had been with me, he had developed from a leggy, headstrong colt into a full-formed race-horse, swift, haughty, and contemptuous of competition. Wrack could run and knew it. Nervously, his owner had listened to the argument that a girl of eighteen could not be entrusted with those precise finishing touches, that careful shading of muscle against bone, that almost sophistical task of persuading a horse that nothing in his own world of probabilities was so improbable as another horse’s ability to beat him past the post. Wrack had been taken from me on the strength of the doubt, and my reputation as a trainer, which had only begun to take firm root, was hardly encouraged by the act.

But gossip has its better points. Whispers are not restricted to the bearing of bad news and there are men who smell injustice however softly it walks.

Eric Gooch had known that I would bring about fifteen horses to Nairobi for the big Race Meeting, and that some of these would win the lesser races. He had also known that, without Wrack, I had nothing to enter as a serious contender for the classic — the single race that really mattered. Eric had thought hard, and then he had come to my stable from his farm at Nyeri.

‘I’ve worried about this thing,’ he had said, ‘but I don’t know any way out. Wrack is already being backed to win, and, so far as I can see, there is nothing to stop him. Of course, there’s Wise Child — but, hell, you know about Wise Child.’