Out of Africa (35 page)

“No,” said Count Schimmelmann with a slight movement of disgust.

“Do you consider now, Your Excellency,” said the showman, “that it should be, on account of this fact, harder to a Hyena than to other animals to be shut up by itself in a cage? Would he feel a double want, or is he, because he unites in himself the complementary qualities of creation, satisfied in himself, and in harmony? In other words, since we are all prisoners in life, are we happier, or more miserable, the more talents we possess?”

“It is a curious thing,” said Count Schimmelmann, who had been following his own thoughts and had not paid attention to the showman, “to realize that so many hundred, indeed thousands of Hyenas should have lived and died, in order that we should, in the end, get this one specimen here, so that people in Hamburg shall be able to know what a Hyena is like, and the naturalists to study from them.”

They moved on to look at the Giraffes in the neighbouring cage.

“The wild animals,” continued the Count, “which run in a wild landscape, do not really exist. This one, now, exists, we have got a name for it, we know what it is like. The others might as well not have been, still they are the large majority. Nature is extravagant.”

The showman pushed back his worn fur-cap, underneath it he himself had not got a hair on his head. “They see one another,” he said.

“Even that may be disputed,” said Count Schimmelmann after a short pause. “These Giraffes, for instance, have got square markings on the skin. The Giraffes, looking at one another, will not know a square and will consequently not see a square. Can they be said to have seen one another at all?”

The showman looked at the Giraffe for some time and then said: “God sees them.”

Count Schimmelmann smiled. “The Giraffes?” he asked.

“Oh yes, your Excellency,” said the showman, “God sees the Giraffes. While they have been running about and have played in Africa, God has been watching them and has taken a pleasure in their demeanour. He has made them to please him. It is in the Bible, your Excellency,” said the showman. “God so loved the Giraffe that He created them. God has Himself invented the square as well as the circle,
surely your Excellency cannot deny that, He has seen the squares on their skin and everything else about them. The wild animals, your Excellency, are perhaps a proof of the existence of God. But when they go to Hamburg,” he concluded, putting on his cap, “the argument becomes problematic.”

Count Schimmelmann who had arranged his life according to the ideas of other people, walked on in silence to look at the snakes, close to the stove. The showman, to amuse him, opened the case in which he kept them, and tried to make the snake within it wake up; in the end, the reptile slowly and sleepily wound itself round his arm. Count Schimmelmann looked at the group.

“Indeed, my good Kannegieter,” he said with a little surly laugh, “if you were in my service, or if I were king and you my minister, you would now have your dismissal.”

The showman looked up at him nervously. “Indeed, Sir, should I?” he said, and slipped down the snake into the case. “And why, Sir? If I may ask so,” he added after a moment.

“Ah, Kannegieter, you are not so simple as you make out,” said the Count. “Why? Because, my friend, the aversion to snakes is a sound human instinct, the people who have got it have kept alive. The snake is the deadliest of all the enemies of men, but what, except our own instinct of good and evil, is there to tell us so? The claws of the lions, the size, and the tusks, of the Elephants, the horns of the Buffaloes, all jump to the eye. But the snakes are beautiful animals. The snakes are round and smooth, like the things we cherish in life, of exquisite soft colouring, gentle in all their movements. Only to the godly man this beauty and gracefulness are in themselves loathsome, they smell from perdition, and remind him of the fall of man. Something within him makes him run away from the snake as from the
devil, and that is what is called the voice of conscience. The man who can caress a snake can do anything.” Count Schimmelmann laughed a little at his own course of thoughts, buttoned his rich fur-coat, and turned to leave the shed.

The showman had stood for a little while in deep thoughts. “Your Excellency,” he said at last, “you must needs love snakes. There is no way round it. Out of my own experience in life, I can tell you so, and indeed it is the best advice that I can give you: You should love the snakes. Keep in your mind, your Excellency, how often,—keep in mind, your Excellency, that nearly every time that we ask the Lord for a fish, he will give us a serpent.”

At the table on the boat to Africa I sat between a Belgian going to the Congo, and an Englishman who had been eleven times to Mexico to shoot a particular kind of wild mountain-sheep, and who was now going out to shoot bongo. In making conversation on both sides, I got mixed up in the languages, and when I meant to ask the Belgian if he had travelled much in his life, I asked him:
Avez-vous beaucoup travaillé dans votre vie?
He took no offence but, drawing out his tooth-pick, he answered gravely:
Enormément, Madame.
From this time he made it his object to tell me of all the labours of his life. In everything that he discussed, a certain expression came back:
Notre mission. Notre grande mission dans le Congo.

One evening, as we were going to play cards, the English traveller told us about Mexico and of how a very old Spanish lady, who lived on a lonely farm in the mountains, when she heard of the arrival of a stranger, had sent for
him and ordered him to give her the news of the world. “Well, men fly now, Madame,” he said to her.

“Yes, I have heard of that,” said she, “and I have had many arguments with my priest about it. Now you can enlighten us, sir. Do men fly with their legs drawn up under them, like the sparrows, or stretched out behind them, like the storks?”

He also, in the course of our talk, made a remark about the ignorance of the Natives of Mexico, and of the schools there. The Belgian, who was dealing, paused with the last card in his hand, looked piercingly at the Englishman, and said:
Il faut enseigner aux nègres à ětre honnětes et à traveller. Rien de plus.
Laying down the card with a bang on the table, he repeated with great determination:
Rien de plus. Rien. Rien. Rien.

A Swedish Professor of Natural History came out to the farm to ask me to intervene for him with the Game-Department. He had come to Africa, he told me, to find out at what phase of the embryo state the foot of the monkeys, that has got a thumb to it, begins to diverge from the human foot. For this purpose he meant to go and shoot Colobus monkeys on Mount Elgon.

“You will never find out from the Colobus monkeys,” I said to him, “they live in the tops of the cedar trees, and are shy and difficult to shoot. It would be the greatest luck should you get the embryo you want.”

The Professor was hopeful, he was going to stay out till he had got his foot, he said, even if it was to be for years. He had applied to the Game-Department for permission to shoot the monkeys he wanted. The permission he was, in
view of the high scientific object of his expedition, certain to get, but so far he had had no reply.

“How many monkeys have you asked to be allowed to shoot?” I asked him.

He told me that he had, to begin with, asked for permission to shoot fifteen hundred monkeys.

Now I knew the people at the Game Department, and I assisted him to send in a second letter, asking for a reply by return of post, since the Professor was keen to get off on his research. The answer from the Game Department did, for once, come by return of post. The Game Department, they wrote, were pleased to inform Professor Landgreen that, in view of the scientific object of his expedition, they had seen their way to make an exception from their rules, and to raise the number of monkeys on his license from four to six.

I had to read the letter over twice to the Professor. When the contents at last were clear to him, he became so downcast, so deadly shocked and hurt, that he did not say a single word. To my expressions of condolence he made no reply, but walked out of the house, got into his car and drove away sadly.

When things did not go so much against him, the Professor was an entertaining talker, and a humorist. In the course of our debates about the monkeys he enlightened me upon various facts and developed many of his ideas to me. One day he said: “I will tell you of a highly interesting experience of mine. Up at Mount Elgon, I found it possible to believe for a moment in the existence of God, what do you think of that?”

I said that it was interesting, but I thought: There is another interesting question which is,—Has it been possible to
God, at Mount Elgon, to believe for a moment in the existence of Professor Landgreen?

There was on the farm a little boy of nine named Karomenya who was deaf and dumb. He could give out a sound, a sort of short, raw roar, but it was very rare and he did not like it himself, but always stopped it at once, panting a few times. The other children were afraid of him and complained that he beat them. I first made Karomenya’s acquaintance when his playfellows had knocked him on the head with the branch of a tree, so that his right cheek was thick, and festering with splinters that had to be dug out with a needle. This was not such a martyrdom to Karomenya as one would have thought; if it did hurt him, it also brought him into contact with people.

Karomenya was very dark, with fine moist black eyes and thick eyelashes; he had an earnest grave expression and hardly ever a smile on his face, and altogether much of the look of a small black Native bull-calf. He was an active, positive creature, and as he was cut off from communicating with the world by speech, fighting to him had become the manifestation of his being. He was also very good at throwing stones, and could place them where he wanted with great accuracy. At one time Karomenya had a bow and arrow, but it did not work well with him, as if an ear for the ring of the bow-string were, by necessity, part of the archer’s craft. Karomenya was sturdily built and very strong for his age. He would probably not have exchanged these advantages over the other boys for their faculty of speech and hearing, for which, I felt, he had no particular admiration.

Karomenya, in spite of his fighting spirit, was no unfriendly person. If he realized that you were addressing him, his face at once lightened up, not in a smile but in a prompt resolute alacrity. Karomenya was a thief, and took sugar and cigarettes when he saw his chance, but he immediately gave away the stolen goods to the other children. I once came upon him as he was dealing out sugar to a circle of boys, himself in the centre, he did not see me, and that is the only time when I have seen him come near to laughing.

I tried, for a time, to give Karomenya a job in the kitchen or in the house, but he failed in the offices, and was himself, after a while, bored with the work. What he liked, was to move heavy things about, and to drag them from one place to another. I had a row of white-washed stones along my drive, and, with his assistance, I one day moved one of them and rolled it all the way up to the house, to make the drive symmetrical. The next day, while I was out, Karomenya had taken up all the stones and had rolled them up to the house in a great heap, and I could never have believed that a person of his size would have been capable of that. It must have cost him a terrible effort. It was as if Karomenya knew his place in the world and stuck to it. He was deaf and dumb, but he was very strong.

Karomenya, most of all things in the world, wanted a knife, but I dared not give him one, for I thought that he might easily, in his striving for contact with other people, have killed one or more of the other children on the farm with it. He will have got one, though, later in life; his desire was so vehement, and God knows what use he has made of it.

The deepest impression I made on Karomenya was when I gave him a whistle. I had myself used it for some time to
call in the dogs. When I showed it to him he took very little interest in it; then, as on my instruction he put it to his mouth and blew it, and the dogs, from both sides, came rushing at him, it gave him a great shock, his face darkened with surprise. He tried it once more, found the effect to be the same, and looked at me. A severe bright glance. When he got more used to the whistle, he wanted to know how it worked. He did not, to this purpose, look at the whistle itself, but when he had whistled for the dogs and they came, he scrutinized them with knit brows as if to find out where they had been hit. After this time Karomenya took a great liking to the dogs, and often, so to say, had the loan of them, taking them out for a walk. I used, when he walked off with them on a lead, to point to the place in the Western sky where the sun should be standing by the time that he must be back, and he pointed to the same place, and was always very punctual.

One day, as I was out riding, I saw Karomenya and the dogs a long way away from my house, in the Masai Reserve. He did not see me, but thought that he was all on his own and unobserved. Here he let the dogs have a run, and then whistled them in, and he repeated the performance three or four times, while I watched him from my horse. Out on the plain, where he thought that nobody knew, he gave himself up to a new idea and aspect of life.

He carried his whistle on a string round his neck, but one day he had not got it. I asked him by pantomime what had become of it, and he answered by pantomime that it was gone,—lost. He never asked me for another whistle. Either he thought that a second whistle was not to be had, or else he meant, now, to keep away altogether from something in life that was not really his affair. I am not even sure that he
had not thrown away the whistle himself, unable to reconcile it with his other ideas of existence.

In five or six years, Karomenya is either to go through much suffering, or he will suddenly be lifted into heaven.

Pooran Singh’s little blacksmith’s shop down by the mill was a miniature Hell on the farm, with all the orthodox attributes of that place. It was built of corrugated iron, and when the sun shone down upon the roof of it, and the flames of the furnace rose inside it, the air itself, in and around the hut, was white-hot. All day long, the place resounded with the deafening noise of the forge,—iron on iron, on iron once more,—and the hut was filled with axes, and broken wheels, that made it look like some ancient gruesome picture of a place of execution.