When they had all gone by, and were disappearing again, we looked round for the Safari. It was still some way behind us, and exhausted by our agitation of mind we sat down where we stood in the grass, until it came up to us. Dusk was terribly upset, jerking his lead to run after the wild dogs. I took him round the neck, if I had not tied him up in time, I thought, he would by now have been eaten up.

The drivers of the waggons detached themselves from the Safari and came running up to us, to ask us what it had all been. I could not explain to them, or to myself, what had made the wild dogs come along in so great a number in such a way. The Natives all took it as a very bad omen,—an omen of the war, for the wild dogs are carrion-eaters. They did not afterwards discuss the happening much among themselves, as they used to discuss all the other events of the Safari.

I have told this tale to many people and not one of them has believed it. All the same it is true, and my boys can bear me witness.

The Parrot

An old Danish shipowner sat and thought of his young days and of how he had, when he was sixteen years old, spent a night in a brothel in Singapore. He had come in there with the sailors of his father’s ship, and had sat and talked with an old Chinese woman. When she heard that he was a native of a distant country she brought out an old parrot, that belonged to her. Long, long ago, she told him, the parrot had been given her by a high-born English lover of her youth. The boy thought that the bird must then be a hundred years old. It could say various sentences in the languages of all the world, picked up in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the house. But one phrase the old China-woman’s lover had taught it before he sent it to her, and that she did not understand, neither had any visitor ever been able to tell her what it meant. So now for many years she had given up asking. But if the boy came from far away perhaps it was his language, and he could interpret the phrase to her.

The boy had been deeply, strangely moved at the suggestion. When he looked at the parrot, and thought that he might hear Danish from that terrible beak, he very nearly ran out of the house. He stayed on only to do the old Chinese woman a service. But when she made the parrot speak its sentence, it turned out to be classic Greek. The bird spoke its words very slowly, and the boy knew enough Greek to recognize it; it was a verse from Sappho:

“The moon has sunk and the Pleiads,

And midnight is gone,

And the hours are passing, passing,

And I lie alone.”

The old woman, when he translated the lines to her, smacked her lips and rolled her small slanting eyes. She asked him to say it again, and nodded her head.

Book Five.

Farewell to the Farm

Chapter 1.

Hard Times

My farm was a little too high up for gr owing coffee. it happened in the cold months that we would get frost on the lower land and in the morning the shoots of the coffee-trees, and the young coffee-berries on them, would be all brown and withered. The wind blew in from the plains, and even in good years we never got the same yield of coffee to the acre as the people in the lower districts of Thika and Kiambu, on four thousand feet.

We were short of rain, as well, in the Ngong country, and three times we had a year of real drought, which brought us very low down. In a year in which we had fifty inches of rain, we picked eighty tons of coffee, and in a year of fifty-five inches, nearly ninety tons; but there were two bad years in which we had only twenty-five and twenty inches of rain, and picked only sixteen and fifteen tons of coffee, and those years were disastrous to the farm.

At the same time coffee-prices fell: where we had got a hundred pounds a ton we now got sixty or seventy. Times grew hard on the farm. We could not pay our debts, and we had no money for the running of the plantation. My people at home, who had shares in the farm, wrote out to me and told me that I would have to sell.

I thought out many devices for the salvation of the farm. One year I tried to grow flax on our spare land. Flax-growing is a lovely job, but it needs much skill and experience. I had a Belgian refugee to give me advice on it, and when he asked me how much land I meant to plant, and I told him three hundred acres, he immediately exclaimed: “Ça, madame, c’est impossible.” I might grow five acres or even ten with success, he said, but no more. But ten acres would take us nowhere, and I put in a hundred and fifty acres. A sky-blue flowering flax-field is a marvellously pretty sight,—like a piece of Heaven on earth and there can be no more gratifying kind of goods to be turning out than the flax fibre, tough and glossy, and slightly greasy to the touch. You follow it in your thoughts as it is sent away, and imagine it made into sheets and nightgowns. But the Kikuyu could not, in the turn of a hand and without constant supervision, be taught to be accurate enough in the pulling and retting and scutching of it; and so my flax-growing was no success.

Most of the farmers in the country were, in those years, trying their hand at some such scheme, and to a few of them in the end an inspiration came. Things turned out well for Ingrid Lindstrom of Njoro: at the time when I had left the country, and after she had slaved for twelve years at her market-gardening, pigs, turkeys, castor-oil bushes, and soya-beans, had seen them all fail, and wept over them, she saved her farm for her family and herself by planting pyrethrum, which is sent to France and is there used in making perfumes. But I myself had no luck with my experiments, and when the dry weather and the wind from the Athi plains set in, the coffee-trees drooped and the leaves turned yellow; on parts of the farm we got bad coffee-diseases like thrips and antestia.

To bring the coffee on we tried to manure the fields. It had always, as I had been brought up with European ideas on farming, gone against me to take the crops out of the land, without manuring. When the squatters of the farm heard of the project they came forward to help me, and brought out, from their cattle and goat bomas, the manure of decades. It was delicate peaty stuff that was easy to handle. We ploughed up a furrow between the rows of coffee-trees, with the small new ploughs with a single ox to them that we had bought in Nairobi, and, since we could not get a cart into the fields, the women of the farm carried the manure in sacks on their backs, and spread it in the furrow, a sack to the tree, so that we could lead back the oxen and ploughs, and cover it up. It was pleasant work to watch, and I expected great things from it, but as it came to happen, no one ever saw the effects of the manuring.

One real trouble was that we were short of capital, for it had all been spent in the old days before I took over the running of the farm. We could not carry through any radical improvements, but had to live from hand to mouth,—and this, in the last years, became our normal mode of living on the farm.

If I had had the capital, I thought, I would have given up coffee, have cut down the coffee-trees, and have planted forest-trees on my land. Trees grow up so quickly in Africa, in ten years’ time you walk comfortably under tall blue gum trees, and wattle trees, which you have yourself, in the rain, carried in boxes from the nurseries, twelve trees in a box. I would have had then, I reflected, a good market for both timber and firewood in Nairobi. It is a noble occupation to plant trees, you think of it many years after with content. There had been big stretches of Native forest on the farm in the old days, but it had been sold to the Indians for cutting down, before I took over the farm; it was a sad thing. I myself in the hard years had had to cut down the wood on my land round the factory for the steam-engine, and this forest, with the tall stems and the live green shadows in it had haunted me, I have not felt more sorry for anything I have done in my life, than for cutting it down. From time to time, when I could afford it, I planted up bits of land with Eucalyptus trees, but it did not come to much. It would be, in this way, fifty years before I had got the many hundred acres planted up, and had changed the farm into a singing wood, scientifically run, with a saw-mill by the river. The Squatters of the farm, though, whose ideas of time were different from those of the white people, kept on looking forward hopefully to the time when everybody would have abundance of firewood,—such as the people had had in the old days,—from the forest that I was now soon going to plant.