Kinanjui’s head and trunk were so emaciated that all the structure of his big skeleton stood forth, he looked like a huge dark wooden figure roughly cut with a knife. His teeth and his tongue showed between his lips. His eyes were half dimmed, milky in his dark face. But he could still see, and when I came up to the bed he turned his eyes on me and kept them on my face all the time that I was in the hut. Very very slowly he dragged his right hand across his body to touch my hand. He was in terrible pain, but he was still himself and was still carrying great weight, naked upon his bed. From the look of him, I thought that he had come back from his journey triumphant, and had got all his cattle back with him, in spite of his Masai sons-in-law. I remembered, while I sat and looked at him, that he had had one weakness: he had been afraid of thunder, and when a thunderstorm broke, while he was in my house, he adopted a rodent manner and looked round for a burrow. But here now he feared no more the lightning flash, nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone: he had plainly, I thought, done his worldly task, gone home, and taken his wages in every sense. If he were clear enough in his mind to look back at his life, he would find very few instances in which he had not got the better of it. A great vitality and power of enjoyment, a manifold activity were at their end here, where Kinanjui lay still. “Quiet consummation have, Kinanjui,”—I thought.
The old men in the hut stood by, as if they had lost the faculty of speech. It was the boy, who had been in there when I came, and whom I took to be a late-born son of Kinanjui’s, who now came up close to his father’s bed and talked to me, in accordance, I thought, with what had been agreed upon before I arrived.
The doctor from the Mission, he explained, had heard of Kinanjui’s illness and had been to see him. He had told the Kikuyus that he would come back again to fetch the dying chief into the Mission hospital, and they were expecting the lorry from the Mission which was to bring him there, that same night. But Kinanjui did not want to go into hospital. That was why he had sent for me. He wanted me to take him with me to my own house, and he meant me to take him now, before the people from the Mission should return. While the boy spoke, Kinanjui looked at me.
I sat and listened with a heavy heart.
If Kinanjui had lain dying at any time in the past, a year ago or even three months ago, I would have taken him with me to my house on his asking for it. But today it was a different thing. Things had gone badly with me lately and had made me fear that they would go on worse. I had been spending days in the offices of Nairobi, listening to businessmen and lawyers, and at meetings with the creditors of the farm. The house, to which Kinanjui asked me to take him, was no longer my own house.
Kinanjui, I thought, as I sat and looked at him, was going to die, he could not be saved. He would die in my car on the way home, or at the arrival to the house. The Mission people would come and blame me for his death; everybody who heard of it would agree with them.
All this, from my seat on the broken chair in the hut, looked to me as a weight too heavy to take on. I had not got it in me any longer to stand up against the authorities of the world. I did not have it in me now to brave them all, not all of them.
I tried two or three times to make up my mind to take Kinanjui and my courage failed me every time. I thought then that I should have to leave him.
Farah had stood by the door, and had followed the boy’s speech. When he saw me sitting on silent, he came up to me and in a low eager voice began an explanation of how we were best to lift Kinanjui into the car. I got up and went with him to the background of the hut, somewhat away from the eyes and the stench of the old man on the bed. I told Farah then that I was not going to take Kinanjui back with me. Farah was completely unprepared for this turn of things, his eyes and whole face darkened with surprise.
I should have liked to have stayed a little with Kinanjui, but I did not want to see the people from the Mission arrive and take him away.
I went up to Kinanjui’s bed and told him that I could not take him with me back to my house. There was no need to give reasons, so we left it at that. The old men in the hut, when they understood my declination, gathered round me and stirred uneasily, the boy stepped back a little and stood immovable, he had no more to do. Kinanjui himself did not stir or change in any way, he kept his eyes on me as he had done all the time. He looked as if something like this had happened to him before, which very likely it had.
“Kwaheri, Kinanjui,” I said,—Good-bye.
His burning fingers moved a little against my palm. Already before I had got to the door of the hut, when I turned and looked back, the dimness and smoke of the room had swallowed up the big outstretched figure of my Kikuyu Chief.
As I came out again from the hut it was very cold. The moon was now low down at the horizon, it must have been past midnight. Just then in the manyatta one of Kinanjui’s cocks crew twice.
Kinanjui died that same night, in the Mission hospital. Two of his sons came over to my house next afternoon to tell me. They did at the same time ask me to the funeral, which was to take place on the following day, near his village, at Dagoretti.
The Kikuyus, when left to themselves, do not bury their dead, but leave them above ground for the Hyenas and vulture to deal with. The custom had always appealed to me, I thought that it would be a pleasant thing to be laid out to the sun and the stars, and to be so promptly, neatly and openly picked and cleansed; to be made one with Nature and become a common component of a landscape. At the time when we had the Spanish flu on the farm, I heard the Hyenas round the shambas all night, and often, after those days, I would find a brown smooth skull in the long grass of the forest, like a nut dropped down under a tree, or on the plain. But the practice does not go with the conditions of civilized life. The government had taken much trouble to make the Kikuyu change their ways, and to teach them to lay their dead in the ground, but they still did not like the idea at all.
Kinanjui, they now told me, was to be buried, and I thought that the Kikuyu would have agreed to make an exception from their habit because the dead had been a Chief. Perhaps they would like to make a great Native show and gathering, of the occasion. I drove over to Dagoretti, on the following afternoon, expecting to find all the old minor Chiefs of the country, and to see a big Kikuyu festivity.
But Kinanjui’s funeral was altogether a European and clerical affair. There were a few Government Representatives present, the District Commissioner and two Officials from Nairobi. But the day and the place belonged to the Clergy; and the plain, in the afternoon sun, was black with them. Both the French Mission and the Missions of the Church of England and Scotland, were richly represented. If they wished to impress the Kikuyu with the feeling that here they had laid their hand on the dead Chief, and that he now belonged to them, they succeeded. They were so obviously in power that one felt it to be out of the question for Kinanjui to get away from them. This is an old trick of the Church’s. Here I saw for the first time, in any number to speak of, the Mission-boys, the converted Natives, half sacerdotally attired, whatever office they might be filling, fat young Kikuyus with spectacles and folded hands, who looked like ungenial Eunuchs. Probably Kinanjui’s two Christian sons were there, laying down their religious disagreements for the day, but I did not know them. Some of the old Chiefs were attending the funeral, Keoy was there, and I talked with him for some time of Kinanjui. But they kept themselves much in the background of the show.