Farah, who was with me in the car, asked me: “Where is that Bwana going?” Farah called Emmanuelson a Bwana for the sake of his own dignity, since he had slept in the house.

“To Tanganyika,” I said.

“On foot?” asked he.

“Yes,” I said.

“Allah be with him,” said Farah.

In the course of the day I thought much of Emmanuelson, and went out of the house to look towards the Tanganyika road. In the night, about ten o’clock, I heard the roar of a lion far away to the South-West; half an hour later I heard him again. I wondered if he was sitting upon an old black overcoat. During the following week I tried to get news of Emmanuelson, and told Farah to ask his Indian acquaintances who were running lorries to Tanganyika, whether any lorry had passed or met him on the road. But nobody knew anything of him.

Half a year later I was surprised to receive a registered letter from Dodoma, where I knew no one. The letter was from Emmanuelson. It contained the fifty rupees that I had first lent him when he had been trying to get out of the country, and Farah’s four rupees. Apart from this sum,—the last money in all the world that I had expected to see again,—Emmanuelson sent me a long, sensible and charming letter. He had got a job as a bartender in Dodoma, whatever kind of bar they may have there, and was getting on well. He seemed to have in him a talent for gratitude, he remembered everything of his evening on the farm, and came back many times to the fact that there he had felt amongst friends. He told me in detail about his journey to Tanganyika. He had much good to say of the Masai. They had found him on the road and had taken him in, had shown him great kindness and hospitality, and had let him travel with them most of the way, by many circuits. He had, he wrote, entertained them so well, with recounts of his adventures in many countries, that they had not wanted to let him go. Emmanuelson did not know any Masai language, and for his Odyssey he must have fallen back upon pantomime.

It was fit and becoming, I thought, that Emmanuelson should have sought refuge with the Masai, and that they should have received him. The true aristocracy and the true proletariat of the world are both in understanding with tragedy. To them it is the fundamental principle of God, and the key,—the minor key,—to existence. They differ in this way from the bourgeoisie of all classes, who deny tragedy, who will not tolerate it, and to whom the word of tragedy means in itself unpleasantness. Many misunderstandings between the white middle-class immigrant settlers and the Natives arise from this fact. The sulky Masai are both aristocracy and proletariat, they would have recognized at once in the lonely wanderer in black, a figure of tragedy; and the tragic actor had come, with them, into his own.

Chapter 6.

Visits of Friends

The visits of my friends to the farm were happy events in my life, and the farm knew it.

When one of Denys Finch-Hatton’s long Safaris was drawing to its end, it happened that I would find, on a morning, a young Masai standing upon one long slim leg outside my house. “Bedâr is on his way back,” he announced. “He will be here in two or three days.”

In the afternoon, a Squatter Toto from the outskirts of the farm sat and waited on the lawn, to tell me, when I came out: “There is a flight of Guinea-fowl down by the bend of the river. If you want to shoot them for Bedâr when he comes I will come out with you at sunset to show you where to find them.”

To the great wanderers amongst my friends, the farm owed its charm, I believe, to the fact that it was stationary and remained the same whenever they came to it. They had been over vast countries and had raised and broken their tents in many places, now they were pleased to round my drive that was steadfast as the orbit of a star. They liked to be met by familiar faces, and I had the same servants all the time that I was in Africa. I had been on the farm longing to get away, and they came back to it longing for books and linen sheets and the cool atmosphere in a big shuttered room; by their campfires they had been meditating upon the joys of farm life, and as they arrived they asked me eagerly: “Have you taught your cook to make an omelette a la chasseur?—and have the gramophone records from ‘Petrouchka’ arrived by the last mail?” They came and stayed in the house also when I was away, and Denys had the use of it, when I was on a visit in Europe. “My Silvan Retreat,” Berkeley Cole called it.

In return for the goods of civilization, the wayfarers brought me trophies from their hunts: Leopard and Cheetah skins, to be made into fur coats in Paris, snake and lizard skins for shoes, and marabout feathers.

To please them I experimented, while they were away, with many curious recipes out of old cookery books, and worked to make European flowers grow in my garden.

Once, when I was at home, an old lady in Denmark gave me twelve fine peony-bulbs which I brought into the country with me at some trouble, as the import regulations about plants were strict. When I had them planted, they sent up, almost immediately, a great number of dark carmoisin curvilinear shoots, and later a lot of delicate leaves and rounded buds. The first flower which unfolded was called Duchesse de Nemours, it was a large single white peony, very noble and rich, it gave out a profusion of fresh sweet scent. When I cut it and put it in water in my sitting-room, every single white person entering the room stopped and remarked upon it. Why, it was a peony! But soon after this, all the other buds of my plants withered and fell off, and I never got more than that one flower.

Some years later I talked with the English gardener of Lady McMillan, of Chiromo, about peonies. “We have not succeeded in growing peonies in Africa,” he said, “and shall not do so till we manage to make an imported bulb flower here, and can take the seed from that flower. This is how we got Delphinium into the Colony.” In that way I might have introduced peonies into the country and made my name immortal like the Duchesse de Nemours herself; and I had ruined the glory of the future by picking my unique flower and putting it in water. I have very often dreamed that I have seen the white peony growing, and I have rejoiced because after all I had not cut it off.

Friends from farms up country, and from the town, arrived at the house. Hugh Martin, of the Land Office, came out from Nairobi to entertain me; a brilliant person, versed in the rare literature of the world, who had passed his life peacefully in the Civil Service of the East, and there, amongst other things, had developed an innate talent for looking like an immensely fat Chinese Idol. He called me Candide, and was himself a curious Doctor Pangloss of the farm, firmly and placidly rooted in his conviction of the meanness and contemptibleness of human nature and of the Universe, and content in his faith, for why should it not be so? He hardly ever moved out of the large chair in which he had once placed himself. With his bottle and glass before him, and a sedately beaming face, he there spread and expanded upon his theories of life, luminating with ideas, like some fantastical quick phosphoric growth of matter and thought, a fat man at peace with the world and resting in the Devil, with the stamp of cleanliness upon him that the Devil’s disciples bear, in preference to many of those of the Lord.

Young, big-nosed Gustav Mohr from Norway, of an evening suddenly swooped on the house from the farm he managed, on the other side of Nairobi. He was a rousing farmer and helped me in the work of the farm in word and deed, more than any other man in the country,—with a simple vigorous readiness as if it were standing to reason that farmers, or Scandinavians, were to slave for one another.