The Natives of the farm, in the stark realism of their souls, were conscious of the situation and of my state of mind, as fully as if I had been lecturing to them upon it, or had written it down for them in a book. All the same, they looked to me for help and support, and did not, in a single case, attempt to arrange their future for themselves. They tried their very best to make me stay on, and for this purpose invented many schemes which they confided to me. At the time when the sale of the farm was through, they came and sat round my house from the early morning till night, not so much in order to talk with me as just to follow all my movements. There is a paradoxical moment in the relation between the leader and the followers: that they should see every weakness and failing in him so clearly, and be capable of judging him with such unbiased accuracy, and yet should still inevitably turn to him, as if in life there were, physically, no way round him. A flock of sheep may be feeling the same towards the herd-boy, they will have infinitely better knowledge of the country and the weather than he, and still will be walking after him, if needs be, straight into the abyss. The Kikuyu took the situation better than I did, on account of their superior inside knowledge of God and the Devil, but they sat round my house and waited for my orders; very likely all the time between themselves expatiating freely upon my ignorance and my unique incapacity.

You would have thought that their constant presence by my house, when I knew that I could not help them, and when their fate weighed heavily on my mind, would have been hard to bear. But it was not so. We felt, I believe, up to the very last, a strange comfort and relief in each other’s company. The understanding between us lay deeper than all reason. I thought in these months much of Napoleon on the retreat from Moscow. It is generally thought that he went through agonies in seeing his grand army suffering and dying round him, but it is also possible that he would have dropped down dead on the spot if he had not had them. In the night, I counted the hours till the time when the Kikuyus should turn up again by the house.

Chapter 2.

The Death of Kinanjui

In that same year the Chief Kinanjui died. One of his sons came to my house late in the eve ning and asked me to go back with him to his father’s village, for he was dying: Nataka kufa,—he wants to die,—the Natives have it.

Kinanjui was now an old man. A great thing had lately happened in his life: the quarantine regulations of the Masai Reserve had been suspended. The old Kikuyu Chief, as soon as he heard of it, set forth in person, with a few retainers, deep down South in the Reserve, to wind up his multifarious accounts with the Masai, and bring back with him the cows that belonged to him, together with the calves that they had produced in their exile. While he was down there he had fallen ill; as far as I could understand he had been butted in the thigh by a cow, which seemed a becoming cause of death to a Kikuyu chief, and the wound had gone gangrenous. Kinanjui had been staying too long with the Masai, or had been too ill to undertake the long journey, when at last he turned his face homewards. Probably he had so set his heart on getting all his stock with him, that he had not had it in him to leave until they were all collected, and it is also possible that he had let himself be nursed by one of his married daughters there, until a slight misgiving had risen in him as to her good will to bring him through his illness. In the end he started, and it seemed that his attendants had done their best for him and had taken great trouble to get him home, carrying the deadly sick old man for long distances on a stretcher. Now he lay dying in his hut, and had sent for me.

Kinanjui’s son had come to my house after dinner, and it was dark when Farah and I and he drove over to his village, but the moon was up and in her first quarter. On the way Farah opened up the subject of who was to succeed Kinanjui as chief of the Kikuyu. The old Chief had many sons, it appeared that there were various influences at work in the Kikuyu world. Two of his sons, Farah told me, were Christians, but one was a Roman Catholic, and the other a convert to the Church of Scotland, and each of the two Missions was sure to take pains to get their pretender proclaimed. The Kikuyus themselves, it seemed, wanted a third, younger, heathen son.

The road for the last mile was nothing more than a cattle-track over the sward. The grass was grey with dew. Just before we got to the village we had to cross a river-bed with a little winding silvery stream in the middle; here we drove through a white mist. Kinanjui’s big manyatta, when we got up to it, was all quiet under the moon, a wide compound of huts, small peaked store-huts, and cattle-bomas. As we were turning into it, in the light of our lamps I caught sight, under a thatched roof, of the car which Kinanjui had bought from the American Consul at the time when he came over to the farm to give judgment in the case of Wanyangerri. She looked completely forlorn, all rusty and dilapidated, and surely now Kinanjui would be giving her no thought, but would have turned back to the ways of his fathers, and demand to see cows and women round him.

The village that looked so dark was not asleep, the people were up and came and surrounded us when they heard the car. But it was changed from what it used to be. Kinanjui’s manyatta was always a lively and noisy place, like a well spouting from the ground and running over on all sides; plans and projects were crossing one another in all directions, and all under the eye of the pompous, benevolent, central figure of Kinanjui. Now the wing of death lay over the manyatta, and, like a strong magnet, it had altered the patterns below, forming new constellations and groups. The welfare of each member of the family and tribe was at stake, and such scenes and intrigues as are always played round a royal death-bed were, you felt, alive here, in the strong smell of cows, and in the dim moonlight. As we got out of the car, a boy with a lamp came along and took us up to Kinanjui’s hut, and a crowd of people went with us and stood outside it.

I had never before been inside Kinanjui’s house. This royal mansion was a good deal bigger than the ordinary Kikuyu hut, but when I entered it I found it to be no more luxuriously furnished. There was a bedstead made out of sticks and reins in it, and a few wooden stools to sit on. Two or three fires burned on the stamped clay floor, the heat in the hut was suffocating, and the smoke was so dense that at first I could not see who was in there, although they had a hurricane lamp standing on the floor. When I had got a little more used to the atmosphere I saw that there were three old bald men in the room with me, uncles or councillors of Kinanjui, a very old woman who hung on a stick and remained close to the bed, a young pretty girl, and a boy of thirteen,—and what new constellation, worked by the magnet, was this, in the Chief’s death-chamber?

Kinanjui lay flat on his bed. He was dying, he was already half-way into death and dissolution, and the stench about him was so stifling that at first I dared not open my mouth to speak for fear that I should be sick. The old man was all naked, he was lying upon a tartan rug that I had once given him, but probably he could not stand any weight at all on his poisoned leg. The leg was terrible to look at, so swollen that you could not distinguish the place of the knee, and in the lamplight I could see that it was streaked all the way from the hip to the foot with black and yellow streaks. Underneath the leg, the rug was dark and wet as if water was all the time running from it.

Kinanjui’s son, who had come to the farm to fetch me, brought in an old European chair, with one leg shorter than the others, and placed it very close to the bed, for me to sit on.