Old Knudsen had in his frail sunken breast the simple, fierce, irascible, wild heart of a small boy, who burns with the unadulterated love of fighting; he was a great romantic bully and combatant. He was a singularly good hater, always afire with indignation and rage against nearly all the people and institutions with which he came in touch; he called heaven to let fire and brimstone rain down on them, and “painted the devil on the wall,” as we say in Denmark, in a Michaelangelesque manner. He was highly delighted whenever he could set other people by the ears, like a small boy who sets two dogs fighting, or a dog at a cat. It was an impressive and formidable thing that Old Knudsen’s soul should still,—after his long hard life, and when he had at last, so to say, been washed into a quiet creek where he might have lain with his sails slacked,—cry out for opposition and adversity, like the soul of a boy. It made me respect it, as the soul of a Berserk.
He never spoke of himself except in the third person, as “Old Knudsen,” and never without boasting and bragging to the last degree. There was not a thing in the world that Old Knudsen would not undertake and carry through, and not a champion fighter whom Old Knudsen could not knock down. Wherever other people were concerned, he was a black pessimist, and he foresaw a near, catastrophic and well deserved end to all their activities. But on his own behalf he was a furious optimist. A short time before he died he confided to me, under the promise of secrecy, a tremendous plan. It would make Old Knudsen, at last, a millionaire and put all his enemies to shame. He was, he told me, going to lift, from the bottom of Lake Naivasha, the hundred thousand tons of guano dropped there, from the time of the creation of the world, by the swimming-birds. In a last colossal effort he made a journey from the farm to Lake Naivasha, to study and work out the details of his plan. He died in the lustre of it. The scheme had in it all the elements dear to his heart: deep water, birds, hidden treasures; it had even a flavour of the things that one ought not to talk to ladies about. At the top of it he saw, with the eyes of his mind, triumphant Old Knudsen himself, with a trident, controlling the waves. I do not remember if he ever explained to me how the guano was to be brought up from the bottom of the Lake.
The great exploits and achievements of Old Knudsen and his eminence in everything, as he reported these things to me, were clearly at variance with the weakness and impotency of the old man who reported them; in the end you felt that you were dealing with two separate and essentially different individualities. The mighty figure of Old Knudsen rose in the background, unbeaten and triumphant, the hero of all the adventures, and it was his old bent and worn servant whom I knew, and who never tired of telling me about him. This little, humble man had made it his mission in life to uphold and extol the name of Old Knudsen, even to death. For he had really seen Old Knudsen, which nobody else except God ever had, and after that he would stand no heresy in anyone.
One single time have I heard him make use of the first personal pronoun. This was a couple of months before he died. He had had a bad heart-attack, the same thing that killed him in the end, and when I had not seen him on the farm for a week I went down to his bungalow to get news of him, and I found him, in the middle of the stench from the Hippo hide, in bed in a very bare and untidy room. He was ashen grey in the face, his dim eyes were sunk deep back. He did not answer me or speak a word when I spoke to him. Only after a long time, and when I had already got up to go away, he suddenly said in a small hoarse voice, “I am very sick.” At that time there was no talk of Old Knudsen, who surely was never ill or overcome; it was the servant, who just for once allowed himself to express his individual misery and anguish.
Old Knudsen was dull on the farm, so from time to time he locked the door of his house, made off and disappeared from our horizon. It was most often, I think, when he had had news that an old friend, some other pioneer of the glorious past, had arrived in Nairobi. He would stay away, for a week or a fortnight, until we had half forgotten his existence, and he always came back so terribly ill and worn out that he could hardly drag himself along, or unlock his door. He then kept to himself for a couple of days. I believe that on these occasions he was afraid of me, for he thought that I would be sure to have disapproved of his escapades, and that I would now profit by his weakness to triumph over him. Old Knudsen, although he would sometimes sing of the sailor’s bride who loves the waves, in his heart had a deep mistrust of woman, and saw her as the enemy of man, by instinct, and on principle, out to stop his fun.
On the day of his death he had in this way been absent for a fortnight, and nobody on the farm was aware that he had come back. But he himself must this time have meant to make an exception from his rule, for he had been on the way from his own house to mine, by a path which ran through the plantation, when he fell down and died. Kamante and I found him lying on the path as, late in the afternoon, we were going out to look for mushrooms on the plain, in the new short grass, for it was April, in the beginning of the long rains.
It was befitting that it should be Kamante who found him, for, alone of all the Natives of the farm, he had shown Old Knudsen sympathy. He had even taken an interest in him, as one deviation from the normal in another, and from time to time of his own accord had brought him eggs, and kept an eye on his Totos, which had prevented them from running away altogether.
The old man lay on his back, his hat had rolled a little away when he fell, his eyes were not quite closed. In death he looked essentially collected. There you are at last, Old Knudsen,—I thought.
I wanted to carry him to his house, but I knew that it would be of no use to call in any of the Kikuyus who might be about, or working in their own shambas close by, to help me; they would only run away immediately when they saw why I had called them. I ordered Kamante to run back to the house and fetch down Farah to assist me. But Kamante did not move.
“Why do you want me to run?” he asked.
“Well you see yourself,” I said, “that I cannot carry the old Bwana alone, and you Kikuyus are fools, you are afraid to carry a dead man.”
Kamante set up his little mocking noiseless laughter. “You again forget, Msabu,” he said, “that I am a Christian.”
He lifted the old man’s feet while I bore his head, and between us we carried him to his bungalow. From time to time we had to stop, lay him down, and rest; then Kamante stood up erect and looked straight down at Old Knudsen’s feet, with what I think will have been the Scotch Mission manner in the presence of death.
As we had laid him on his bed, Kamante went about the room, and into the kitchen, in search of a towel to cover his face with,—he only found an old newspaper. “The Christians did that at the Hospital,” he explained to me.
A long time afterwards Kamante had great satisfaction out of the thought of this instance of my ignorance. He would work with me in the kitchen, filled with a secret pleasure, and suddenly break out laughing. “Do you remember, Msabu,” he said, “the time when you had forgotten that I was a Christian, and thought that I should be afraid to help you to carry the Msungu Msei? ”—the old white man.
Kamante as a Christian was no longer afraid of snakes. I heard him state to the other boys that a Christian might at any moment put his heel upon the head of the largest snake and crush it. I have not seen him try to do so, but I saw him standing very still, with a set face and his hands behind his back, within a short distance of the Cook’s hut when a puff-adder had appeared on its roof. All the children of my household spread in large circles around it, like chaff before the wind, with wild wails, while Farah went into the house to fetch my gun, and shot the puff-adder.