It was fit and decorous that the lions should come to Denys’s grave and make him an African monument. “And renowned be thy grave.” Lord Nelson himself, I have reflected, in Trafalgar Square, has his lions made only out of stone.

Chapter 4.

Farah and I Sell out

now I was alone on the farm. It was no longer mine, but the people who had bought it had off ered to l et me stay in the house as long as i liked, and for legal reasons were leasing it to me for a Shilling a day.

I was selling my furniture, which gave Farah and me a good deal to do. We had to have all the china and table-glass on view upon the dinner-table; later on, when the table had been sold, we arranged it in long rows on the floor. The cuckoo of the clock sang out the hours arrogantly over the rows, then it was itself sold, and flew off. One day I sold my table-glass, and then in the night thought better of it, so that in the morning I drove to Nairobi and asked the lady who had bought it to call off the deal. I had no place to put the glass, but the fingers and lips of many friends had touched it, they had given me excellent wine to drink out of it; it was keeping an echo of old table-talk, and I did not want to part with it. After all, I thought, it would be an easy thing to break.

I had an old wooden screen with painted figures of Chinamen, Sultans and Negroes, with dogs on leads, which had had its place by the fire. There in the evenings, when the fire burned clear, the figures would come out, and serve as illustrations to the tales that I told Denys. After I had looked at it for a long time, I folded it up and packed it in a case, wherein the figures might all have a rest for the time being.

Lady McMillan was at this time finishing the McMillan Memorial in Nairobi, that she had built to her husband, Sir Northrup McMillan. It was a fine building, with a library and reading-rooms. She now drove out to the farm, sat and talked sadly of old days, and bought most of my old Danish furniture, that I had taken out from home with me, for the library. I was pleased to know that the cheerful, wise and hospitable chests and cabinets were to remain together, in a milieu of books and scholars, like a small circle of ladies who, in times of revolution, find an asylum in a University.

My own books I packed up in cases and sat on them, or dined on them. Books in a colony play a different part in your existence from what they do in Europe; there is a whole side of your life which there they alone take charge of; and on this account, according to their quality, you feel more grateful to them, or more indignant with them, than you will ever do in civilized countries.

The fictitious characters in the books run beside your horse on the farm, and walk about in the maize-fields. On their own, like intelligent soldiers, they find at once the quarters that suit them. On the morning after I had been reading “Crome Yellow” at night,—and I had never heard of the author’s name, but had picked up the book in a Nairobi bookshop, and was as pleased as if I had discovered a new green island in the sea,—as I was riding through a valley of the Game Reserve, a little duiker jumped up, and at once turned himself into a stag for Sir Hercules with his wife and his pack of thirty black and fawn-coloured pugs. All Walter Scott’s characters were at home in the country and might be met anywhere; so were Odysseus and his men, and strangely enough many figures from Racine. Peter Schlemihl had walked over the hills in seven-league boots, Clown Agheb the honeybee lived in my garden by the river.

Other things were sold out of the house, packed and sent off, so that the house, in the course of these months, became das Ding an sich, noble like a skull, a cool and roomy place to dwell in, with an echo to it, and the grass of the lawn growing long up to the doorstep. In the end there were no things in the rooms at all, and to my mind at the time they seemed, in this state, more fit to live in than they had been before.

I said to Farah, “This is how we ought to have had it all the time.”

Farah understood me very well, for all Somali have something of the ascetic in them. Farah during this time was set and concentrated upon assisting me in everything; but he was growing to look more and more like a true Somali, such as he had looked in Aden, where he had been sent to meet me, when I first came to Africa. He was much concerned about my old shoes, and confided to me that he was going to pray to God every day that they might last until I got to Paris.

During these months, Farah wore his best clothes every day. He had a lot of fine clothes: gold-embroidered Arab waistcoats that I had given him, and a very elegant scarlet gold-laced uniform waistcoat that Berkeley Cole had given him, and silk turbans in beautiful colours. Generally he kept them all in chests, and wore them only on special occasions. But now he put on the best he had. He walked one step behind me in the streets of Nairobi, or waited on the dirty stairs in the Government buildings and the lawyers’ offices, dressed like Solomon in all his glory. It took a Somali to do that.

I had now also got to deal with the fate of my horses and my dogs. I had all the time meant to shoot them, but many of my friends wrote to me and asked me to let them have them. After that, whenever I rode out and had the dogs with me, it did not seem fair on them to shoot them,—they had much life in them still. It took me a long time to decide the matter, I do not think that I have ever changed my mind so often over any other question. In the end I decided to give them to my friends.

I rode in to Nairobi on my favourite horse, Rouge, going very slowly and looking round to the North, and the South. It was a very strange thing to Rouge, I thought, to be going in by the Nairobi road, and not to be coming back. I installed him, with some trouble, in the horse-van of the Naivasha train, I stood in the van and felt, for the last time, his silky muzzle against my hands and my face. I will not let thee go, Rouge, except thou bless me. We had found together the riding-path down to the river amongst the Native shambas and huts, on the steep slippery descent he had walked as nimbly as a mule, and in the brown running river-water I had seen my own head and his close together. May you now, in a valley of clouds, eat carnations to the right and stock to the left.

The two young deerhounds that I had then, David and Dinah, Pania’s offspring, I gave to a friend on a farm near Gil-Gil, where they would get good hunting. They were very strong and playful, and when they were fetched in a car and drove off from the farm in great style, they panted, their heads close together over the side of the car, their tongues hanging out, as if they were on the track of a new splendid kind of game. The quick eyes and feet, and the live hearts, went away from the house and the plains, to breathe and sniff, and run happily on new grounds.

Some of my people now left the farm. As there was to be no coffee and no coffee-mill there any longer, Pooran Singh found himself out of work. He did not want to take on another job in Africa, and in the end he made up his mind to go back to India.

Pooran Singh, who mastered the minerals, outside of his workshop was like a child. He could not in the least realize that the end of the farm had come; he grieved over it, wept clear tears that ran down in his black beard, and for a long time worried me with his attempts to make me remain on the farm, and with his plans for keeping it going. He had taken much pride in our machinery, such as it was, and was now for a while as if nailed to the steam-engine and the coffee-dryer in the factory, his soft dark eyes consuming every nut in them. Then, when in the end he had been convinced of the hopelessness of the situation, he gave it all up in one movement, he was still very sad, but quite passive, and sometimes when I saw him he talked much to me of his travelling plans. When he went away, he carried no luggage with him but a small box of tools and soldering outfit, as if he had already sent his heart and life over the ocean, and there was now only his thin, unassuming, brown person and the soldering pan to follow it.