Out of Africa: And Shadows on the Grass (41 page)

Denys, who held himself to be an exceptionally rational person, was subject to a special kind of moods and forebodings, and under their influence at times he became silent for days or for a week, though he did not know of it himself and was surprised when I asked him what was the matter with him. The last days before he started on this journey to the coast, he was in this manner absent-minded, as if sunk in contemplation, but when I spoke of it he laughed at me.

I asked him to let me come with him, for I thought what
a lovely thing it would be to see the Sea. First he said yes, and then he changed his mind and said no. He could not take me; the journey round Voi, he told me, was going to be very rough, he might have to land, and to sleep, in the bush, so that it would be necessary for him to take a Native boy with him. I reminded him that he had said that he had taken out the aeroplane to fly me over Africa. Yes, he said, so he had; and if there were Elephants at Voi, he would fly me down there to have a look at them, when he knew the landing-places and camping-grounds. This is the only time that I have asked Denys to take me with him on his aeroplane that he would not do it.

He went off on Friday the eighth: “Look out for me on Thursday,” he said when he went, “I shall be back in time to have luncheon with you.”

When he had started in his car for the aerodrome in Nairobi, and had turned down the drive, he came back to look for a volume of poems that he had given to me, and that he now wanted with him on his journey. He stood with one foot on the running-board of the car, and a finger in the book, reading out to me a poem that we had been discussing.

“Here are your grey geese,” he said:

“I saw grey geese flying over the flatlands

Wild geese vibrant in the high air—

Unswerving from horizon to horizon

With their soul stiffened out in their throats—

And the grey whiteness of them ribboning the enormous skies

And the spokes of the sun over the crumpled hills.”

Then he drove away for good, waving his arm to me.

While Denys was down in Mombasa, in landing he broke a propeller. He wired back to Nairobi to get the spare parts that he wanted, and the East Africa Airway Company sent a
boy to Mombasa with them. When the aeroplane was fixed, and Denys was again going up in it, he told the Airway’s boy to come up with him. But the boy would not come. This boy was used to flying, and had been up with many people, and with Denys himself, before now, and Denys was a fine pilot and had a great name with the Natives in this capacity as in all others. But this time the boy would not go up with him.

A long time after, when he met Farah in Nairobi and they were talking things over, he said to Farah: “Not for a hundred rupees would I, then, have gone up with Bwana Bedâr.” The shadow of destiny, which Denys himself had felt the last days at Ngong, was seen more strongly now, by the Native.

So Denys took Kamau with him to Voi, his own boy. Poor Kamau was terrified of flying. He had told me, at the farm, that when he got up and away from the ground, he fixed his eyes at his feet and kept them there till he got down to the earth again, so frightened did he feel if ever he cast a glance over the side of the aeroplane, and saw the landscape from its great height.

I looked out for Denys on Thursday, and reckoned that he would fly from Voi at sunrise and be two hours on the way to Ngong. But when he did not come, and I found that I had got things to do in Nairobi, I drove in to town.

Whenever I was ill in Africa, or much worried, I suffered from a special kind of compulsive idea. It seemed to me then that all my surroundings were in danger or distress, and that in the midst of this disaster I myself was somehow on the wrong side, and therefore was regarded with distrust and fear by everybody.

This nightmare was in reality a reminiscence of the time of the war. For then for a couple of years, people in the Colony had believed me to be a pro-German at heart, and
had looked at me with mistrust. Their suspiciousness rose from the fact that I had, in the innocence of my heart, a short time before the outbreak of war, been up at Naivasha buying horses for General von Lettow down in German East Africa. He had asked me, when we travelled out to Africa together six months before, to buy him ten Abyssinian breeding-mares, but during my first time in the country I had had other things to think of, and had forgotten about it, so that it was only later, when he kept on writing of the mares to me, that in the end I went up to Naivasha to buy them for him. The war broke out so shortly after, that the mares never got out of the country. Still I could not get away from the fact that I had, at the outbreak of the war, been buying up horses for the German army. The suspicion against me did not, however, last till the end of the war, it passed away when my brother, who had been volunteering with the English, got the V.C. in the Amiens push, north of Roye. That event was even announced in the “East African Standard” under the headline of:
An East-African V. C.

At the time, I had taken my isolation lightly, for I was not in the least pro-German, and I thought that I should be able to clear things up if it became necessary. But it must have gone deeper with me than I knew of, and for many years after, when I was very tired or when I had a high temperature, the feeling of it would come back. During my last months in Africa, when everything was going wrong with me, it sometimes suddenly fell upon me like a darkness, and in a way I was frightened of it, as of a sort of derangement.

On this Thursday in Nairobi the nightmare unexpectedly stole upon me, and grew so strong that I wondered if I were beginning to go mad. There was, somehow, a deep sadness over the town, and over the people I met, and in the midst of it everybody was turning away from me. There was nobody who would stop and talk to me, my friends, when they
saw me, got into their cars and drove off. Even old Mr. Duncan, the Scotch grocer, from whom I had bought groceries for many years, and with whom I had danced at a big ball at Government House, when I came in looked at me with a kind of fright and left his shop. I began to feel as lonely in Nairobi as on a desert island.

I had left Farah on the farm to receive Denys, so that I had nobody to talk with. The Kikuyus are no good in such a case, for their ideas of reality, and their reality itself, are different from ours. But I was to lunch with Lady McMillan at Chiromo, and I thought that there I should find white people to talk to, and get back my balance of mind.

I drove up to the lovely old Nairobi house of Chiromo, at the end of the long bamboo avenue, and found a luncheon-party there. But it was the same thing at Chiromo as in the streets of Nairobi. Everybody seemed mortally sad, and as I came in the talk stopped. I sat beside my old friend Mr. Bulpett, and he looked down and said only a few words. I tried to throw off the shadow that was by now lying heavily upon me, and to talk to him of his mountain-climbings in Mexico, but he seemed to remember nothing about them.

I thought: These people are no good to me, I will go back to the farm. Denys will be there by now. We will talk and behave sensibly, and I shall be sane again and know and understand everything.

But when we had finished luncheon, Lady McMillan asked me to come with her into her small sitting-room, and there told me that there had been an accident at Voi. Denys had capsized with his machine, and had been killed in the fall.

It was then as I had thought: at the sound of Denys’s name even, truth was revealed, and I knew and understood everything.

Later on, the District Commissioner at Voi wrote to me and gave me the particulars of the accident. Denys had been
staying with him over the night, and had left from the aerodrome in the morning, with his boy in the aeroplane with him, for my farm. After he had left he turned and came back quickly, flying low, at two hundred feet. Suddenly the aeroplane swayed, got into a spin, and came down like a bird swooping. As it hit the ground it caught fire, the people who ran to it were stopped by the heat. When they got branches and earth, and had thrown them on the fire, and had got it out, they found that the aeroplane had been all smashed up, and the two people in it had been killed in the fall.

For many years after this day the Colony felt Denys’s death as a loss which could not be recovered. Something fine then came out in the average colonist’s attitude towards him, a reverence for values outside their understanding. When they spoke of him it was most often as an athlete; they would discuss his exploits as a cricketer and a golfer, and of these things I had never heard myself, so that it was only now that I learned of his great fame in all games. Then when the people had been paying tribute to him as a sportsman, they would add that, of course, he had been very brilliant. What they really remembered in him was his absolute lack of self-consciousness, or self-interest, an unconditional truthfulness which outside of him I have only met in idiots. In a colony, these qualities are not generally held up for imitation, but after a man’s death they may be, perhaps, more truly admired than in other places.

The Natives had known Denys better than the white people; to them his death was a bereavement.

When, in Nairobi, I was told of Denys’s death I tried to get down to Voi. The Airway Company was sending down Tom Black to report on the accident, and I drove to the Aerodrome to ask him to take me with him, but as I got into the Aerodrome, his aeroplane lifted and sailed off, towards Voi.

It might still be possible to get through by car, but the
long rains were on, and I had to find out what the roads were like. While I sat and waited for the report on the roads, I remembered how Denys had told me that he wished to be buried in the Ngong Hills. It was a strange thing that I had not recollected it before, but it had been so far from my thoughts that they should mean to bury him at all. Now it was as if a picture had been shown to me.

There was a place in the Hills, on the first ridge in the Game Reserve, that I myself at the time when I thought that I was to live and die in Africa, had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills, from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: “Let us drive as far as our graves.” Once when we were camped in the hills to look for Buffalo, we had in the afternoon walked over to the slope to have a closer look at it. There was an infinitely great view from there; in the light of the sunset we saw both Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro. Denys had been eating an orange, lying in the grass, and had said that he would like to stay there. My own burial-place was a little higher up. From both places we could see my house in the forest far away to the East. We were going back there the next day, for ever, I thought, in spite of the widespread theory that All must die.

Gustav Mohr had come from his farm to my house, when he heard of Denys’s death, and when he did not find me there he looked me up in Nairobi. A little while after, Hugh Martin came and sat down with us. I told them of Denys’s wish, and of the burial-place in the hills, and they wired to the people at Voi. Before I went back to the farm they informed me that they would bring Denys’s body up by train next morning, so that the funeral could take place in the hills at noon. I must have his grave ready there by then.

Gustav Mohr went with me to the farm, to sleep there, and help me in the morning. We would have to be out in the hills just before sunrise to decide on the place, and to have the grave dug in time.

It rained all night, and there was a fine drizzling rain in the morning when we went away. The waggon-tracks on the road were full of water. Driving up in the hills was like driving into clouds. We could not see the plains below to our left, nor the slopes or peaks of the hills to our right; the boys who came with us in a lorry disappeared behind us at á distance of ten yards, and the mist grew thicker as the road mounted. By the sign-board on the road, we found where we got into the Game Reserve, so we drove on a few hundred yards and then got out of the car. We left the lorry, and the boys, on the high-road, until we should have found the place we wanted. The morning air was so cold that it bit the fingers.

The place of the grave must not be too far away from the road, nor where the ground was too steep to bring up a lorry. We walked together for a little while, talking of the mist, then we parted and went along by different paths, and after a few seconds we could no longer see one another.

The great country of the hills opened up reluctantly round me, and closed again, the day was like a rainy day in a Northern country. Farah was walking with me with a wet rifle; he thought that we might walk into a herd of Buffalo. The things close by, that suddenly appeared just before us, looked fantastically big. The leaves of the grey wild-olive bush, and the long grass, higher than ourselves, were dripping wet and smelled strongly,—I had on a mackintosh and rubber boots, but after a while I was drenched as if I had been wading up a stream. It was very still here in the hills, only at times when the rain came down stronger, there was a whisper to all sides. Once the mist parted, and I saw a stretch
of indigo blue land before me and beyond me, like a slate,—it must have been one of the tall peaks far away,—a moment after it was again covered by the drifting grey rain and mist. I walked and walked, and in the end I stood quite still. There was nothing to do here until the weather cleared up.

Gustav Mohr shouted to me three or four times to find out where I was, and came up to me, the rain on his face and hands. He told me that we had been going about in the mist for an hour, and that if we did not settle the place for the grave now, we would not have it ready in time.

“But I cannot see where we are,” I said, “and we cannot lay him where the ridges close up the view. Let us wait a little longer.”

We stood in silence in the long grass, and I smoked a cigarette. Just as I was throwing it away, the mist spread a little, and a pale cold clarity began to fill the world. In ten minutes we could see where we were. The plains lay below us, and I could follow the road by which we had come, as it wound in and out along the slopes, climbed towards us, and, winding, went on. To the South, far away, below the changing clouds, lay the broken, dark blue foot-hills of Kilimanjaro. As we turned to the North the light increased, pale rays for a moment slanted in the sky and a streak of shining silver drew up the shoulder of Mount Kenya. Suddenly, much closer, to the East below us, was a little red spot in the grey and green, the only red there was, the tiled roof of my house on its cleared place in the forest. We did not have to go any further, we were in the right place. A little while after, the rain started again.