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Ernest Hemingway. Green hills of Africa
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PART I PURSUIT AND CONVERSATION
PART II PURSUIT REMEMBERED
PART III PURSUIT AND FAILURE
PART IV PURSUIT AS HAPPINESS
Dear Mr. J. P.
Just tell them you are a fictional character and it is your bad luck to
have a writer put such language in your speeches. We all know how prettily
the best brought up people speak but there are always those not quite out of
the top drawer who have an 'orrid fear of vulgarity. You will know, too, how
to deal with anyone who calls you Pop. Remember you weren't written of as
Pop. It was all this fictional character. Anyway the book is for you and we
miss you very much.
E. H.
We were sitting in the blind that Wanderobo hunters had built of twigs
and branches at the edge of the salt-lick when we heard the motor-lorry
coming. At first it was far away and no one could tell what the noise was.
Then it was stopped and we hoped it had been nothing or perhaps only the
wind. Then it moved slowly nearer, unmistakable now, louder and louder
until, agonizing in a clank of loud irregular explosions, it passed close
behind us to go on up the road. The theatrical one of the two trackers stood
up.
'It is finished,' he said.
I put my hand to my mouth and motioned him down.
'It is finished,' he said again and spread his arms wide. I had never
liked him and I liked him. less now.
'After,' I whispered. M'Cola shook his head. I looked at his bald black
skull and he turned his face a little so that I saw the thin Chinese hairs
at the corners of his mouth.
'No good,' he said. {'Hapana m'uzuri.'}
'Wait a little,' I told him. He bent his head down again so that it
would not show above the dead branches and we sat there in the dust of the
hole until it was too dark to see the front sight on my rifle; but nothing
more came. The theatrical tracker was impatient and restless.
A little before the last of the light was gone he whispered to M'Cola
that it was now too dark to shoot.
'Shut up, you,' M'Cola told him. 'The Bwana can shoot after you cannot
see.'
The other tracker, the educated one, gave another demonstration of his
education by scratching his name, Abdullah, on the black skin of his leg
with a sharp twig. I watched without admiration and M'Cola looked at the
word without a shadow of expression on his face. After a while the tracker
scratched it out.
Finally I made a last sight against what was left of the light and saw
it was no use, even with the large aperture.
M'Cola was watching.
'No good,' I said.
'Yes,' he agreed, in Swahili. 'Go to camp?'
'Yes.'
We stood up and made our way out of the blind and out through the
trees, walking on the sandy loam, feeling our way between trees and under
branches, back to the road. A mile along the road was the car. As we came
alongside, Kamau, the driver, put the lights on.
The lorry had spoiled it. That afternoon we had left the car up the
road and approached the salt-lick very carefully. There had been a little
rain, the day before, though not enough to flood the lick, which was simply
an opening in the trees with a patch of earth worn into deep circles and
grooved at the edges with hollows where the animals had licked the dirt for
salt, and we had seen long, heart-shaped, fresh tracks of four greater kudu
bulls that had been on the salt the night before, as well as many newly
pressed tracks of lesser kudu. There was also a rhino who, from the tracks
and the kicked-up mound of strawy dung, came there each night. The blind had
been built at close arrow-shot of the lick, and sitting, leaning back, knees
high, heads low, in a hollow half full of ashes and dust, watching through
the dried leaves and thin branches I had seen a lesser kudu bull come out of
the brush to the edge of the opening where the salt was and stand there,
heavy-necked, grey, and handsome, the horns spiralled against the sun while
I sighted on his chest and then refused the shot, wanting not to frighten
the greater kudu that should surely come at dusk. But before we ever heard
the lorry the bull had heard it and run off into the trees, and everything
else that had been moving, in the bush on the flats, or coming down from the
small hills through the trees, coming toward the salt, had halted at that
exploding, clanking sound. They would come, later, in the dark, but then it
would be too late.
So now, going along the sandy track of the road in the car, the lights
picking out the eyes of night birds that squatted close on the sand until
the bulk of the car was on them and they rose in soft panic; passing the
fires of the travellers that all moved to the westward by day along this
road, abandoning the famine country that was ahead of us, me sitting, the
butt of my rifle on my foot, the barrel in the crook of my left arm, a flask
of whisky between my knees, pouring the whisky into a tin cup and passing it
over my shoulder in the dark for M'Cola to pour water into it from the
canteen, drinking this, the first one of the day, the finest one there is,
and looting at the thick bush we passed in the dark, feeling the cool wind
of the night and smelling the good smell of Africa, I was altogether happy.
Then ahead we saw a big fire and as we came up and passed, I made out a
lorry beside the road. I told Kamau to stop and go back and as we backed
into the firelight there was a short, bandy-legged man with a Tyrolese hat,
leather shorts, and an open shirt standing before an unhooded engine in a
crowd of natives.
'Can we help?' I asked him.
Wo,' he said. 'Unless you are a mechanic. It has taken a dislike to me.
All engines dislike me.'
'Do you think it could be the timer? It sounded as though it might be a
timing knock when you went past us.'
'I think it is much worse than that. It sounds to be something very
bad.'
'If you can get to our camp we have a mechanic.'
'How far is it?'
'About twenty miles.'
'In the morning I will try it. Now I am afraid to make it go farther
with that noise of death inside. It is trying to die because it dislikes me.
Well, I dislike it too. But if I die it would not annoy it.'
'Will you have a drink?' I held out the flask. 'Hemingway is my name.'
'Kandisky,' he said and bowed. 'Hemingway is a name I have heard.
Where? Where have I heard it? Oh, yes. The {dichter}. You know Hemingway the
poet?'
'Where did you read him?'
'In the {Querschnitt.'}
'That is me,' I said, very pleased. The {Querschnitt} was a German
magazine I had written some rather obscene poems for, and published a long
story in, years before I could sell anything in America.
'This is very strange,' the man in the Tyrolese hat said. 'Tell me,
what do you think of Ringelnatz?'
'He is splendid.'
'So. You like Ringelnatz. Good. What do you think of Heinrich Mann?'
'He is no good.'
'You believe it?'
'All I know is that I cannot read him.'
'He is no good at all. I see we have things in common. What are you
doing here?'
'Shooting.'
{'Not} ivory, I hope.'
'No. For kudu.'
'Why should any man shoot a kudu? You, an intelligent man, a poet, to
shoot kudu.'
'I haven't shot any yet,' I said. 'But we've been hunting them hard now
for ten days. We would have got one to-night if it hadn't been for your
lorry.'
'That poor lorry. But you should hunt for a year. At the end of that
time you have shot everything and you are sorry for it. To hunt for one
special animal is nonsense. Why do you do it?'
'I like to do it.'
'Of course, if you {like} to do it. Tell me, what do you really think
of Rilke?'
'I have read only the one thing.'
'Which?'
'The Cornet.'
'You liked it?'
'Yes.'
'I have no patience with it. It is snobbery. Valery, yes. I see the
point of Valery, although there is much snobbery too. Well at least you do
not kill elephants.'
'I'd kill a big enough one.'
'How big?'
'A seventy-pounder. Maybe smaller.'
'I see there are things we do not agree on. But it is a pleasure to
meet one of the great old {Querschnitt} group. Tell me what is Joyce like? I
have not the money to buy it. Sinclair Lewis is nothing. I bought it. No.
No. Tell me to-morrow. You do not mind if I am camped near? You are with
friends? You have a white hunter?'
'With my wife. We would be delighted. Yes, a white hunter.'
'Why is he not out with you?'
'He believes you should hunt kudu alone.'
'It is better not to hunt them at all. What is he? English?'
'Yes.'
'Bloody English?'
'No. Very nice. You will like him.'
'You must go. I must not keep you. Perhaps I will see you to-morrow. It
was very strange that we should meet.'
'Yes,' I said. 'Have them look at the lorry to-morrow. Anything we can
do?'
'Good night,' he said. 'Good trip.'
'Good night,' I said. We started off and I saw him walking toward the
fire waving an arm at the natives. I had not asked him why he had twenty
up-country natives with him, nor where he was going. Looking back, I had
asked him nothing. I do not like to ask questions, and where I was brought
up it was not polite. But here we had not seen a white man for two weeks,
not since we had left Babati to go south, and then to run into one on this
road where you met only an occasional Indian trader and the steady migration
of the natives out of the famine country, to have him look like a caricature
of Benchley in Tyrolean costume, to have him know your name, to call you a
poet, to have read the {Querschnitt}, to be an admirer of Joachim Ringelnatz
and to want to talk about Rilke, was too fantastic to deal with. So, just
then, to crown this fantasy, the lights of the car showed three tall,
conical, mounds of something smoking in the road ahead. I motioned to Kamau
to stop, and putting on the brakes we skidded just short of them. They were
from two to three feet high and when I touched one it was quite warm.
{'Tembo,'} M'Cola said.
It was dung from elephants that had just crossed the road, and in the
cold of the evening you could see it steaming. In a little while we were in
camp.
Next morning I was up and away to another salt-lick before daylight.
There was a kudu bull on the lick when we approached through the trees and
he gave a loud "bark, like a dog's but higher in pitch and sharply throaty,
and was gone, making no noise at first, then crashing in the brush when he
was well away; and we never saw him. This lick had an impossible approach.
Trees grew around its open area so that it was as though the game were in
the blind and you had to come to them across the open. The only way to make
it would have been for one man to go alone and crawl and then it would be
impossible to get any sort of a close shot through the interlacing trees
until you were within twenty yards. Of course once you were inside the
protecting trees, and in the blind, you were wonderfully placed, for
anything that came to the salt had to come out in the open twenty-five yards
from any cover. But though we stayed until eleven o'clock nothing came. We
smoothed the dust of the lick carefully with our feet so that any new tracks
would show when we came back again and walked the two miles to the road.
Being hunted, the game had learned to come only at night and leave before
daylight. One bull had stayed and our spooking him that morning would make
it even more difficult now.
This was the tenth day we had been hunting greater kudu and I had not
seen a mature bull yet. We had only three days more because the rains were
moving north each day from Rhodesia and unless we were prepared to stay
where we were through the rains we must be out as far as Handeni before they
came. We had set February 17th as the last safe date to leave. Every morning
now it took the heavy, woolly sky an hour or so longer to clear and you
could feel the rains coming, as they moved steadily north, as surely as
though you watched them on a chart.
Now it is pleasant to hunt something that you want very much over a
long period of time, being outwitted, outmanoeuvred, and failing at the end
of each day, but having the hunt and knowing every time you are out that,
sooner or later, your luck will change and that you will get the chance that
you are seeking. But it is not pleasant to have a time limit by which you
must get your kudu or perhaps never get it, nor even see one. It is not the
way hunting should be. It is too much like those boys who used to be sent to
Paris with two years in which to make good as writers or painters, after
which, if they had not made good, they could go home and into their fathers'
businesses. The way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as
there is such and such an animal; just as the way to paint is as long as
there is you and colours and canvas, and to write as long as you can live
and there is pencil and paper or ink or any machine to do it with, or
anything you care to write about, and you feel a fool, and you are a fool,
to do it any other way. But here we were, now, caught by time, by the
season, and by the running out of our money, so that what should have been
as much fun to do each day whether you killed or not was being forced into
that most exciting perversion of life; the necessity of accomplishing
something in less time than should truly be allowed for its doing. So,
coming in at noon, up since two hours before daylight, with only three days
left, I was starting to be nervous about it, and there, at the table under
the dining tent fly, talking away, was Kandisky of the Tyrolese pants. I had
forgotten all about him.
'Hello. Hello,' he said. 'No success? Nothing doing? Where is the
kudu?'
'He coughed once and went away,' I said. 'Hello, girl.'
She smiled. She was worried too. The two of them had been listening
since daylight for a shot. Listening all the time, even when our guest had
arrived; listening while writing letters, listening while reading, listening
when Kandisky came back and talked.
'You did not shoot him?'
'No. Nor see him.' I saw that Pop was worried too, and a little
nervous. There had evidently been considerable talking going on.
'Have a beer, Colonel,' he said to me.
'We spooked one,' I reported. 'No chance of a shot. There were plenty
of tracks. Nothing more came. The wind was blowing around. Ask the boys
about it.'
'As I was telling Colonel Phillips,' Kandisky began, shifting his
leather-breeched behind and crossing one heavy-calved, well-haired, bare leg
over the other, 'you must not stay here too long. You must realize the rains
are coming. There is one stretch of twelve miles beyond here you can never
get through if it rains. It is impossible.'
'So he's been telling me,' Pop said. 'I'm a Mister, by the way. We use
these military titles as nicknames. No offence if you're a colonel
yourself.' Then to me, 'Damn these salt-licks. If you'd leave them. alone
you'd get one.'
'They ball it all up,' I agreed. 'You're so sure of a shot sooner or
later on the lick.'
'Hunt the hills too.'
Til hunt them, Pop.'
'What is killing a kudu, anyway?' Kandisky asked. 'You should not take
it so seriously. It is nothing. In a year you kill twenty.'
'Best not say anything about that to the game department, though,' Pop
said.
'You misunderstand,' Kandisky said. 'I mean in a year a man could. Of
course no man would wish to.'
'Absolutely,' Pop said. 'If he lived in kudu country, he could. They're
the commonest big antelope in this bush country. It's just that when you
want to see them you don't.'
'I kill nothing, you understand,' Kandisky told us. 'Why are you not
more interested in the natives?'
'We are,' my wife assured him.
'They are really interesting. Listen...' Kandisky said, and he spoke on
to her.
'The hell of it is,' I said to Pop, 'when I'm in the hills I'm sure the
bastards are down there on the salt. The cows are in the hills but I don't
believe the bulls are with them now. Then you get there in the evening and
there are the tracks. They {have} been on the lousy salt. I think they come
any time.'
'Probably they do.'
'I'm sure we get different bulls there. They probably only come to the
salt every couple of days. Some are certainly spooked because Karl shot that
one. If he'd only killed it clean instead of following it through the whole
damn countryside. Christ, if he'd only kill any damn thing clean. Other new
ones will come in. All we have to do is to wait them out, though. Of course
they can't all know about it. But he's spooked this country to hell.'
'He gets so very excited,' Pop said. 'But he's a good lad. He made a
beautiful shot on that leopard, you know. You don't want them killed any
cleaner than that. Let it quiet down again.'
'Sure. I don't mean anything when I curse him.'
'What about staying in the blind all day?'
'The damned wind started to go round in a circle. It blew our scent
every direction. No use to sit there broadcasting it. If the damn wind would
hold. Abdullah took an ash can to-day.'
'I saw him starting off with it.'
'There wasn't a bit of wind when we stalked the salt and there was just
light to shoot. He tried the wind with the ashes all the way. I went alone
with Abdullah and left the others behind and we went quietly. I had on these
crepe-soled boots and it's soft cotton dirt. The bastard spooked at fifty
yards.
'Did you ever see their ears?'
'Did I ever see their ears? If I can see his ears, the skinner can work
on him.'
'They're bastards,' Pop said. 'I hate this salt-lick business. They're
not as smart as we think. The trouble is you're working on them where they
are smart. They've been shot at there ever since there's been salt.'
'That's what makes it fun,' I said. 'I'd be glad to do it for a month.
I like to hunt sitting on my tail. No sweat. No nothing. Sit there and catch
flies and feed them to the ant lions in the dust. I like it. But what about
the time?'
'That's it. The time.'
'So,' Kandisky was saying to my wife. 'That is what you should see. The
big {ngomas}. The big native dance festivals. The real ones.'
'Listen,' I said to Pop. 'The other lick, the one I was at last night,
is fool-proof except for being near that {bloody} road.'
'The trackers say it is really the property of the lesser kudu. It's a
long way too. It's eighty miles there and back.'
'I know. But there were four {big} bull tracks. It's certain. If it
wasn't for that lorry last night. What about staying there to-night! Then
I'd get the night and the early morning and give this lick a rest. There's a
big rhino there too. Big track, anyway.'
'Good,' Pop said. 'Shoot the rhino too.' He hated to have anything
killed except what we were after, no killing on the side, no ornamental
killing, no killing to kill, only when you wanted it more than you wanted
not to kill it, only when getting it was necessary to his being first in his
trade, and I saw he was offering up the rhino to please me.
'I won't kill him unless he's good,' I promised.
'Shoot the bastard,' Pop said, making a gift of him.
'Ah, Pop,' I said.
'Shoot him,' said Pop. 'You'll enjoy it, being by yourself. You can
sell the horn if you don't want it. You've still one on your licence. '
'So,' said Kandisky. 'You have arranged a plan of campaign? You have
decided on how to outwit the poor animals?'
'Yes,' I said. 'How is the lorry?'
'That lorry is finished,' the Austrian said. 'In a way I am glad. It
was too much of a symbol. It was all that remained of my {shamba}. Now
everything is gone and it is much simpler.'
'What is a shamba?' asked P.O.M., my wife. 'I've been hearing about
them for months. I'm afraid to ask about those words every one uses.'
'A plantation,' he said. 'It is all gone except that lorry. With the
lorry I carry labourers to the shamba of an Indian. It is a very rich Indian
who raises sisal. I am a manager for this Indian. An Indian can make a
profit from a sisal shamba.'
'From anything,' Pop said.
'Yes. Where we fail, where we would starve, he makes money. This Indian
is very intelligent, however. He values me. I represent European
organization. I come now from organizing recruitment of the natives. This
takes time. It is impressive. I have been away from my family for three
months. The organization is organized. You do it in a week as easily, but it
is not so impressive.'
'And your wife?' asked mine.
'She waits at my house, the house of the manager, with my daughter.'
'Does she love you very much?' my wife asked.
'She must, or she would be gone long ago.'
'How old is the daughter?'
'She is thirteen now.'
'It must be very nice to have a daughter.'
'You cannot know how nice it is. It is like a second wife. My wife
knows now all I think, all I say, all I believe, all I can do, all that I
cannot do and cannot be. I know also about my wife -- completely. But now
there is always someone you do not know, who does not know you, who loves
you in ignorance and is strange to you both. Some one very attractive that
is yours and not yours and that makes the conversation more -- how shall I
say? Yes, it is like -- what do you call -- having here with you -- with the
two of you -- yes there -- it is the Heinz Tomato Ketchup on the daily
food.'
'That's very good,' I said.
'We have books,' he said. 'I cannot buy new books now but we can always
talk. Ideas and conversation are very interesting. We discuss all things.
Everything. We have a very interesting mental life. Formerly, with the
shamba, we had the {Querschnitt}. That gave you a feeling of belonging, of
being made a part of, to a very brilliant group of people. The people one
would see if one saw whom one wished to see. You know all of those people?
You must know them.'
'Some of them.' I said. 'Some in Paris. Some in Berlin.'
I did not wish to destroy anything this man had, and so I did not go
into those brilliant people in detail.
'They're marvellous,' I said, lying.
'I envy you to know them,' he said. 'And tell me, who is the greatest
writer in America?'
'My husband,' said my wife.
'No. I do not mean for you to speak from family pride. I mean who
really? Certainly not Upton Sinclair. Certainly not Sinclair Lewis. Who is
your Thomas Mann? Who is your Valery?'
'We do not have great writers,' I said. 'Something happens to our good
writers at a certain age. I can explain but it is quite long and may bore
you.'
'Please explain,' he said. 'This is what I enjoy. This is the best part
of life. The life of the mind. This is not killing kudu.'
'You haven't heard it yet,' I said.
'Ah, but I can see it coming. You must take more beer to loosen your
tongue.'
'It's loose,' I told him. 'It's always too loose. But {you} don't drink
anything.'
'No, I never drink. It is not good for the mind. It is unnecessary. But
tell me. Please tell me.'
'Well,' I said, 'we have had, in America, skilful writers. Poe is a
skilful writer. It is skilful, marvellously constructed, and it is dead. We
have had writers of rhetoric who had the good fortune to find a little, in a
chronicle of another man and from voyaging, of how things, actual things,
can be, whales for instance, and this knowledge is wrapped in the rhetoric
like plums in a pudding. Occasionally it is there, alone, unwrapped in
pudding, and it is good. This is Melville. But the people who praise it,
praise it for the rhetoric which is not important. They put a mystery in
which is not there.'
'Yes,' he said. 'I see. But it is the mind working, its ability to
work, which makes the rhetoric. Rhetoric is the blue sparks from the
dynamo.'
'Sometimes. And sometimes it is only blue sparks, and what is the
dynamo driving?'
'So. Go on.'
'I've forgotten.'
'No. Go on. Do not pretend to be stupid.'
'Did you ever get up before daylight...'
'Every morning,' he said. 'Go on.'
'All right. There were others who wrote like exiled English colonials
from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they
were making. Very good men with the small, dried, and excellent wisdom of
Unitarians; men of letters, Quakers with a sense of humour.'
'Who were these?'
'Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company. All our early classics who
did not know that a new classic does not bear any resemblance to the
classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better
than, anything that is not a classic, all classics do that. Some writers are
only born to help another writer to write one sentence. But it cannot derive
from or resemble a previous classic. Also all these men were gentlemen, or
wished to be. They were all very respectable. They did not use the words
that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language.
Nor would you gather that they had bodies. They had minds, yes. Nice,
dry, clean minds. This is all very dull, I would not state it except that
you ask for it.'
'Go on.'
'There is one at that time that is supposed to be really good. Thoreau.
I cannot tell you about it because I have not yet been able to read it. But
that means nothing because I cannot read other naturalists unless they are
being extremely accurate and not literary. Naturalists should all work alone
and some one else should correlate their findings for them. Writers should
work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and
not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All
angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from
their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art,
sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the
bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle. They do not
want to be lonesome. They are afraid to be alone in their beliefs and no
woman would love any of them enough so that they could kill their
lonesomeness in that woman, or pool it with hers, or make something with her
that makes the rest unimportant.'
'But what about Thoreau?'
'You'll have to read him. Maybe I'll be able to later. I can do nearly
everything later.'
'Better have some more beer, Papa.'
'All right.'
'What about the good writers?'
'The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain.
That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers.'
'Mark Twain is a humorist. The others I do not know.'
'All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain
called {Huckleberry Finn}. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim
is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.
But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that.
There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.'
'What about the others?'
'Crane wrote two fine stories. {The Open Boat} and {The --Blue Hotel}.
The last one is the better.'
'And what happened to him?'
'He died. That's simple. He was dying from the start.'
'But the other two?'
'They both lived to be old men but they did not get any wiser as they
got older. I don't know what they really wanted. You see we make our writers
into something very strange.'
'I do not understand.'
'We destroy them in many ways. First, economically. They make money. It
is only by hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make
money eventually. Then our writers when they have made some money increase
their standard of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up
their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop. It is
slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they write when there
is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious. Then,
once they have betrayed themselves, they justify it and you get more slop.
Or else they read the critics. If they believe the critics when they say
they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and
they lose confidence. At present we have two good writers who cannot write
because they have lost confidence through reading critics. If they wrote,
sometimes it would be good and sometimes not so good and sometimes it would
be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and
they must write masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote.
They weren't masterpieces, of course. They were just quite good books. So
now they cannot write at all. The critics have made them impotent.'
'Who are these writers?'
'Their names would mean nothing to you and by now they may have
written, become frightened, and be impotent again.'
'But what is it that happens to American writers? Be definite.'
'I was not here in the old days so I cannot tell you about them, but
now there are various things. At a certain age the men writers change into
Old Mother Hubbard. The women writers become Joan of Arc without the
fighting. They become leaders. It doesn't matter who they lead. If they do
not have followers they invent them. It is useless for those selected as
followers to protest. They are accused of disloyalty. Oh, hell. There are
too many things happen to them. That is one thing. The others try to save
their souls with what they write. That is an easy way out. Others are ruined
by the first money, the first praise, the first attack, the first time they
find they cannot write, or the first time they cannot do anything else, or
else they get frightened and join organizations that do their thinking for
them. Or they do not know what they want. Henry James wanted to make money.
He never did, of course.'
'And you?'
'I am interested in other things. I have a good life but I must write
because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my
life.'
'And what do you want?'
'To write as well as I can and learn as I go along. At the same time I
have my life which I enjoy and which is a damned good life.'
'Hunting kudu?'
'Yes. Hunting kudu and many other things.'
'What other things?'
'Plenty of other things.'
'And you know what you want?'
'Yes.'
'You really like to do this, what you do now, this silliness of kudu?'
'Just as much as I like to be in the Prado.'
'One is not better than the other?'
'One is as necessary as the other. There are other things, too.'
'Naturally. There must be. But this sort of thing means something to
you, really?'
'Truly.'
'And you know what you want?'
'Absolutely, and I get it all the time.'
'But it takes money.'
'I could always make money, and besides I have been very lucky.'
'Then you are happy?'
'Except when I think of other people.'
'Then you think of other people?'
'Oh, yes.'
'But you do nothing for them?'
'No.'
'Nothing?'
'Maybe a little.'
'Do you think your writing is worth doing -- as an end in itself?'
'Oh, yes.'
'You are sure?'
'Very sure.'
'That must be very pleasant.'
'It is,' I said. 'It is the one altogether pleasant thing about it.'
'This is getting awfully serious,' my wife said.
'It's a damned serious subject.'
'You see, he is really serious about something,'
Kandisky said. 'I knew he must be serious on something besides kudu.'
'The reason everyone now tries to avoid it, to deny that it is
important, to make it seem. vain to try to do it, is because it is so
difficult. Too many factors must combine to make it possible.'
'What is this now?'
'The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if
anyone is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension
that can be gotten.'
'You believe it?'
'I know it.'
'And if a writer can get this?'
'Then nothing else matters. It is more important than anything he can
do. The chances are, of course, that he will fail. But there is a chance
that he succeeds.'
'But that is poetry you are talking about.'
'No. It is much more difficult than poetry. It is a prose that has
never been written. But it can be written, without tricks and without
cheating. With nothing that will go bad afterwards.'
'And why has it not been written?'
'Because there are too many factors. First, there must be talent, much
talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The
discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be
and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to
prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and
above all he must survive. Try to get all these in one person and have him
come through all the influences that press on a writer. The hardest thing,
because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done. But I
would like us to have such a writer and to read what he would write. What do
you say? Should we talk about something else?'
'It is interesting what you say. Naturally I do not agree with
everything.'
'Naturally.'
'What about a gimlet?' Pop asked. 'Don't you think a gimlet might
help?'
'Tell me first what are the things, the actual, concrete things that
harm a writer?'
I was tired of the conversation which was becoming an interview. So I
would make it an interview and finish it. The necessity to put a thousand
intangibles into a sentence, now, before lunch, was too bloody.
'Politics, women, drink, money, ambition. And the lack of politics,
women, drink, money and ambition,' I said profoundly.
'He's getting much too easy now,' Pop said.
'But drink. I do not understand about that. That has always seemed
silly to me. I understand it as a weakness.'
'It is a way of ending a day. It has great benefits. Don't you ever
want to change your ideas?'
'Let's have one,' Pop said. 'M'Wendi!'
Pop never drank before lunch except as a mistake and I knew he was
trying to help me out.
'Let's all have a gimlet,' I said.
'I never drink,' Kandisky said. 'I will go to the lorry and fetch some
fresh butter for lunch. It is fresh from Kandoa, unsalted. Very good.
To-night we will have a special dish of Viennese dessert. My cook has
learned to make it very well.'
He went off and my wife said: 'You were getting awfully profound. What
was that about all these women?'
'What women?'
'When you were talking about women.'
'The hell with them,' I said. 'Those are the ones you get involved with
when you're drunk.'
'So that's what you do.'
'No.'
'I don't get involved with people when I'm drunk.'
'Come, come,' said Pop. 'We're none of us ever drunk. My God, that man
can talk.'
'He didn't have a chance to talk after B'wana M'Kumba started.'
'I did have verbal dysentery,' I said.
'What about his lorry? Can we tow it in without ruining ours?'
'I think so,' Pop said. 'When ours comes back from Handeni.'
At lunch under the green fly of the dining-tent, in the shade of a big
tree, the wind blowing, the fresh butter much admired, Grant's gazelle
chops, mashed potatoes, green corn, and then mixed fruit for dessert,
Kandisky told us why the East Indians were taking the country over.
'You see, during the war they sent the Indian troops to fight here. To
keep them out of India because they feared another mutiny. They promised the
Aga Khan that because they fought in Africa, Indians could come freely to
settle and for business afterwards. They cannot break that promise and now
the Indians have taken the country over from the Europeans. They live on
nothing and they send all the money back to India. When they have made
enough to go home they leave, bringing out their poor relations to take over
from them and continue to exploit the country.'
Pop said nothing. He would not argue with a guest at table.
'It is the Aga Khan,' Kandisky said. 'You are an American. You know
nothing of these combinations.'
'Were you with Von Lettow?' Pop asked him. 'From the start,' Kandisky
said. 'Until the end.'
'He was a great fighter,' Pop said. 'I have great admiration for him.'
'You fought?' Kandisky asked.
'Yes.'
'I do not care for Lettow,' Kandisky said. 'He fought, yes. No one ever
better. When we wanted quinine he would order it captured. All supplies the
same. But afterwards he cared nothing for his men. After the war I am in
Germany. I go to see about indemnification for my property. "You are an
Austrian," they say. "You must go through Austrian channels." So I go to
Austria. "But why did you fight?" they ask me. "You cannot hold us
responsible. Suppose you go to fight in China. That is your own affair. We
cannot do anything for you."
' "But I went as a patriot," I say, very foolishly. "I fight where I
can because I am an Austrian and I know my duty." "Yes," they say. "That is
very beautiful. But you cannot hold us responsible for your noble
sentiments." So they passed me from one to the other and nothing. Still I
love the country very much. I have lost everything here but I have more than
anyone has in Europe. To me it is always interesting. The natives and the
language. I have many books of notes on them. Then too, in reality, I am a
king here. It is very pleasant. Waking in the morning I extend one foot and
the boy places the sock on it. When I am ready I extend the other foot and
he adjusts the other sock. I step from under the mosquito bar into my
drawers which are held for me. Don't you think that is very marvellous?'
'It's marvellous.'
'When you come back another time we must take a safari to study the
natives. And shoot nothing, or only to eat. Look, I will show you a dance
and sing a song.'
Crouched, elbows lifting and falling, knees humping, he shuffled around
the table, singing. Undoubtedly it was very fine.
'That is only one of a thousand,' he said. 'Now I must go for a time.
You will be sleeping.'
'There's no hurry. Stay around.'
'No. Surely you will be sleeping. I also. I will take the butter to
keep it cool.'
'We'll see you at supper,' Pop said.
'Now you must sleep. Good-bye.'
After he was gone, Pop said: 'I wouldn't believe all that about the Aga
Khan, you know.'
'It sounded pretty good.'
'Of course he feels badly,' Pop said. 'Who wouldn't. Von Lettow was a
hell of a man.'
'He's very intelligent,' my wife said. 'He talks wonderfully about the
natives. But he's bitter about American women.'
'So am I,' said Pop. 'He's a good man. You better get some shut-eye.
You'll need to start about three-thirty.'
'Have them call me.'
Molo raised the back of the tent, propping it with sticks, so the wind
blew through and I went to sleep reading, the wind coming in cool and fresh
under the heated canvas.
When I woke it was time to go. There were rain clouds in the sky and it
was very hot. They had packed some tinned fruit, a five-pound piece of roast
meat, bread, tea, a tea pot, and some tinned milk in a whisky box with four
bottles of beer. There was a canvas water bag and a ground cloth to use as a
tent. M'Cola was taking the big gun out to the car.
'There's no hurry about getting back,' Pop said. 'We'll look for you
when we see you.'
'All right.'
'We'll send the lorry to haul that sportsman into Handeni. He's sending
his men ahead walking.'
'You're sure the lorry can stand it? Don't do it because he's a friend
of mine.'
'Have to get him out. The lorry will be in to-night.'
'The Memsahib's still asleep,' I said. 'Maybe she can get out for a
walk and shoot some guineas?'
'I'm here,' she said. 'Don't worry about us. {Oh}, I hope you get
them.'
'Don't send out to look for us along the road until day after
to-morrow,' I said. 'If there's a good chance we'll stay.'
'Good luck.'
'Good luck, sweet. Good-bye, Mr. J. P.'
We were out from under the shade of camp and along the sandy river of a
road, driving into the western sun, the bush thick to the edge of the sand,
solid as a thicket, the little hills rising above it, and all along the road
we passed groups of people making their way to the westward. Some were naked
except for a greasy cloth knotted over one shoulder, and carried bows and
sealed quivers of arrows. Others carried spears. The wealthy carried
umbrellas and wore draped white cloth and their women walked behind them,
with their pots and pans. Bundles and loads of skins were scattered along
ahead on the heads of other natives. All were travelling away from the
famine. And in the heat, my feet out over the side of the car to keep them
away from the heat of the engine, hat low over the eyes against the sun,
watching the road, the people, and all clearings in the bush for game, we
drove to the westward.
Once we saw three lesser kudu cows in an open place of broken bush.
Grey, big bellied, long necked, small headed, and with big ears, they moved
quickly into the woods and were gone. We left the car and tracked them but
there was no bull track.
A little beyond there a flock of guineas quick-legged across the road
running steady-headed with the motion of trotters. As I jumped from the car
and sprinted after them they rocketed up, their legs tucked close beneath
them, heavy-bodied, short wings drumming, cackling, to go over the trees
ahead. I dropped two that thumped hard when they fell and as they lay, wings
beating, Abdullah cut their heads off so they would be legal eating. He put
them in the car where M'Cola sat laughing; his old man's healthy laugh, his
making-fun-of-me laugh, his bird-shooting laugh that dated from a streak of
raging misses one time that had delighted him. Now when I killed, it was a
joke, as when we shot a hyena, the funniest joke of all. He laughed always
to see the birds tumble and when I missed he roared and shook his head again
and again.
'Ask him what the hell he's laughing about?' I asked Pop once.
'At B'wana,' M'Cola said, and shook his head, 'at the little birds.'
'He thinks you're funny,' Pop said.
'Goddam it. I am funny. But the hell with him.'
'He thinks you're very funny,' Pop said. 'Now the Memsahib and I would
never laugh.'
'Shoot them. yourself.'
'No, you're the bird shot. The self-confessed bird shot,' she said.
So bird shooting became this marvellous joke. If I killed, the joke was
on. the birds and M'Cola would shake his head and laugh and make his hands
go round and round to show how the bird turned over in the air. And if I
missed, I was the clown of the piece and he would look at me and shake with
laughing. Only the hyenas were funnier.
Highly humorous was the hyena obscenely loping, full belly dragging, at
daylight on the plain, who, shot from the stern, skittered on into speed to
tumble end over end. Mirth provoking was the hyena that stopped out of range
by an alkali lake to look back and, hit in the chest, went over on his back,
his four feet and his full belly in the air. Nothing could be more jolly
than the hyena coming suddenly wedge-headed and stinking out of high grass
by a {donga}, hit at ten yards, who raced his tail in three narrowing,
scampering circles until he died.
It was funny to M'Cola to see a hyena shot at close range. There was
that comic slap of the bullet and the hyena's agitated surprise to find
death inside of him. It was funnier to see a hyena shot at a great distance,
in the heat shimmer of the plain, to see him go over backwards, to see him
start that frantic circle, to see that electric speed that meant that he was
racing the little nickeled death inside him. But the great joke of all, the
thing M'Cola waved his hands across his face about, and turned away and
shook his head and laughed, ashamed even of the hyena, the pinnacle of
hyenic humour, was the hyena, the classic hyena, that hit too far back while
Ernest Hemingway. Green hills of Africa
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PART I PURSUIT AND CONVERSATION
PART II PURSUIT REMEMBERED
PART III PURSUIT AND FAILURE
PART IV PURSUIT AS HAPPINESS
Dear Mr. J. P.
Just tell them you are a fictional character and it is your bad luck to
have a writer put such language in your speeches. We all know how prettily
the best brought up people speak but there are always those not quite out of
the top drawer who have an 'orrid fear of vulgarity. You will know, too, how
to deal with anyone who calls you Pop. Remember you weren't written of as
Pop. It was all this fictional character. Anyway the book is for you and we
miss you very much.
E. H.
We were sitting in the blind that Wanderobo hunters had built of twigs
and branches at the edge of the salt-lick when we heard the motor-lorry
coming. At first it was far away and no one could tell what the noise was.
Then it was stopped and we hoped it had been nothing or perhaps only the
wind. Then it moved slowly nearer, unmistakable now, louder and louder
until, agonizing in a clank of loud irregular explosions, it passed close
behind us to go on up the road. The theatrical one of the two trackers stood
up.
'It is finished,' he said.
I put my hand to my mouth and motioned him down.
'It is finished,' he said again and spread his arms wide. I had never
liked him and I liked him. less now.
'After,' I whispered. M'Cola shook his head. I looked at his bald black
skull and he turned his face a little so that I saw the thin Chinese hairs
at the corners of his mouth.
'No good,' he said. {'Hapana m'uzuri.'}
'Wait a little,' I told him. He bent his head down again so that it
would not show above the dead branches and we sat there in the dust of the
hole until it was too dark to see the front sight on my rifle; but nothing
more came. The theatrical tracker was impatient and restless.
A little before the last of the light was gone he whispered to M'Cola
that it was now too dark to shoot.
'Shut up, you,' M'Cola told him. 'The Bwana can shoot after you cannot
see.'
The other tracker, the educated one, gave another demonstration of his
education by scratching his name, Abdullah, on the black skin of his leg
with a sharp twig. I watched without admiration and M'Cola looked at the
word without a shadow of expression on his face. After a while the tracker
scratched it out.
Finally I made a last sight against what was left of the light and saw
it was no use, even with the large aperture.
M'Cola was watching.
'No good,' I said.
'Yes,' he agreed, in Swahili. 'Go to camp?'
'Yes.'
We stood up and made our way out of the blind and out through the
trees, walking on the sandy loam, feeling our way between trees and under
branches, back to the road. A mile along the road was the car. As we came
alongside, Kamau, the driver, put the lights on.
The lorry had spoiled it. That afternoon we had left the car up the
road and approached the salt-lick very carefully. There had been a little
rain, the day before, though not enough to flood the lick, which was simply
an opening in the trees with a patch of earth worn into deep circles and
grooved at the edges with hollows where the animals had licked the dirt for
salt, and we had seen long, heart-shaped, fresh tracks of four greater kudu
bulls that had been on the salt the night before, as well as many newly
pressed tracks of lesser kudu. There was also a rhino who, from the tracks
and the kicked-up mound of strawy dung, came there each night. The blind had
been built at close arrow-shot of the lick, and sitting, leaning back, knees
high, heads low, in a hollow half full of ashes and dust, watching through
the dried leaves and thin branches I had seen a lesser kudu bull come out of
the brush to the edge of the opening where the salt was and stand there,
heavy-necked, grey, and handsome, the horns spiralled against the sun while
I sighted on his chest and then refused the shot, wanting not to frighten
the greater kudu that should surely come at dusk. But before we ever heard
the lorry the bull had heard it and run off into the trees, and everything
else that had been moving, in the bush on the flats, or coming down from the
small hills through the trees, coming toward the salt, had halted at that
exploding, clanking sound. They would come, later, in the dark, but then it
would be too late.
So now, going along the sandy track of the road in the car, the lights
picking out the eyes of night birds that squatted close on the sand until
the bulk of the car was on them and they rose in soft panic; passing the
fires of the travellers that all moved to the westward by day along this
road, abandoning the famine country that was ahead of us, me sitting, the
butt of my rifle on my foot, the barrel in the crook of my left arm, a flask
of whisky between my knees, pouring the whisky into a tin cup and passing it
over my shoulder in the dark for M'Cola to pour water into it from the
canteen, drinking this, the first one of the day, the finest one there is,
and looting at the thick bush we passed in the dark, feeling the cool wind
of the night and smelling the good smell of Africa, I was altogether happy.
Then ahead we saw a big fire and as we came up and passed, I made out a
lorry beside the road. I told Kamau to stop and go back and as we backed
into the firelight there was a short, bandy-legged man with a Tyrolese hat,
leather shorts, and an open shirt standing before an unhooded engine in a
crowd of natives.
'Can we help?' I asked him.
Wo,' he said. 'Unless you are a mechanic. It has taken a dislike to me.
All engines dislike me.'
'Do you think it could be the timer? It sounded as though it might be a
timing knock when you went past us.'
'I think it is much worse than that. It sounds to be something very
bad.'
'If you can get to our camp we have a mechanic.'
'How far is it?'
'About twenty miles.'
'In the morning I will try it. Now I am afraid to make it go farther
with that noise of death inside. It is trying to die because it dislikes me.
Well, I dislike it too. But if I die it would not annoy it.'
'Will you have a drink?' I held out the flask. 'Hemingway is my name.'
'Kandisky,' he said and bowed. 'Hemingway is a name I have heard.
Where? Where have I heard it? Oh, yes. The {dichter}. You know Hemingway the
poet?'
'Where did you read him?'
'In the {Querschnitt.'}
'That is me,' I said, very pleased. The {Querschnitt} was a German
magazine I had written some rather obscene poems for, and published a long
story in, years before I could sell anything in America.
'This is very strange,' the man in the Tyrolese hat said. 'Tell me,
what do you think of Ringelnatz?'
'He is splendid.'
'So. You like Ringelnatz. Good. What do you think of Heinrich Mann?'
'He is no good.'
'You believe it?'
'All I know is that I cannot read him.'
'He is no good at all. I see we have things in common. What are you
doing here?'
'Shooting.'
{'Not} ivory, I hope.'
'No. For kudu.'
'Why should any man shoot a kudu? You, an intelligent man, a poet, to
shoot kudu.'
'I haven't shot any yet,' I said. 'But we've been hunting them hard now
for ten days. We would have got one to-night if it hadn't been for your
lorry.'
'That poor lorry. But you should hunt for a year. At the end of that
time you have shot everything and you are sorry for it. To hunt for one
special animal is nonsense. Why do you do it?'
'I like to do it.'
'Of course, if you {like} to do it. Tell me, what do you really think
of Rilke?'
'I have read only the one thing.'
'Which?'
'The Cornet.'
'You liked it?'
'Yes.'
'I have no patience with it. It is snobbery. Valery, yes. I see the
point of Valery, although there is much snobbery too. Well at least you do
not kill elephants.'
'I'd kill a big enough one.'
'How big?'
'A seventy-pounder. Maybe smaller.'
'I see there are things we do not agree on. But it is a pleasure to
meet one of the great old {Querschnitt} group. Tell me what is Joyce like? I
have not the money to buy it. Sinclair Lewis is nothing. I bought it. No.
No. Tell me to-morrow. You do not mind if I am camped near? You are with
friends? You have a white hunter?'
'With my wife. We would be delighted. Yes, a white hunter.'
'Why is he not out with you?'
'He believes you should hunt kudu alone.'
'It is better not to hunt them at all. What is he? English?'
'Yes.'
'Bloody English?'
'No. Very nice. You will like him.'
'You must go. I must not keep you. Perhaps I will see you to-morrow. It
was very strange that we should meet.'
'Yes,' I said. 'Have them look at the lorry to-morrow. Anything we can
do?'
'Good night,' he said. 'Good trip.'
'Good night,' I said. We started off and I saw him walking toward the
fire waving an arm at the natives. I had not asked him why he had twenty
up-country natives with him, nor where he was going. Looking back, I had
asked him nothing. I do not like to ask questions, and where I was brought
up it was not polite. But here we had not seen a white man for two weeks,
not since we had left Babati to go south, and then to run into one on this
road where you met only an occasional Indian trader and the steady migration
of the natives out of the famine country, to have him look like a caricature
of Benchley in Tyrolean costume, to have him know your name, to call you a
poet, to have read the {Querschnitt}, to be an admirer of Joachim Ringelnatz
and to want to talk about Rilke, was too fantastic to deal with. So, just
then, to crown this fantasy, the lights of the car showed three tall,
conical, mounds of something smoking in the road ahead. I motioned to Kamau
to stop, and putting on the brakes we skidded just short of them. They were
from two to three feet high and when I touched one it was quite warm.
{'Tembo,'} M'Cola said.
It was dung from elephants that had just crossed the road, and in the
cold of the evening you could see it steaming. In a little while we were in
camp.
Next morning I was up and away to another salt-lick before daylight.
There was a kudu bull on the lick when we approached through the trees and
he gave a loud "bark, like a dog's but higher in pitch and sharply throaty,
and was gone, making no noise at first, then crashing in the brush when he
was well away; and we never saw him. This lick had an impossible approach.
Trees grew around its open area so that it was as though the game were in
the blind and you had to come to them across the open. The only way to make
it would have been for one man to go alone and crawl and then it would be
impossible to get any sort of a close shot through the interlacing trees
until you were within twenty yards. Of course once you were inside the
protecting trees, and in the blind, you were wonderfully placed, for
anything that came to the salt had to come out in the open twenty-five yards
from any cover. But though we stayed until eleven o'clock nothing came. We
smoothed the dust of the lick carefully with our feet so that any new tracks
would show when we came back again and walked the two miles to the road.
Being hunted, the game had learned to come only at night and leave before
daylight. One bull had stayed and our spooking him that morning would make
it even more difficult now.
This was the tenth day we had been hunting greater kudu and I had not
seen a mature bull yet. We had only three days more because the rains were
moving north each day from Rhodesia and unless we were prepared to stay
where we were through the rains we must be out as far as Handeni before they
came. We had set February 17th as the last safe date to leave. Every morning
now it took the heavy, woolly sky an hour or so longer to clear and you
could feel the rains coming, as they moved steadily north, as surely as
though you watched them on a chart.
Now it is pleasant to hunt something that you want very much over a
long period of time, being outwitted, outmanoeuvred, and failing at the end
of each day, but having the hunt and knowing every time you are out that,
sooner or later, your luck will change and that you will get the chance that
you are seeking. But it is not pleasant to have a time limit by which you
must get your kudu or perhaps never get it, nor even see one. It is not the
way hunting should be. It is too much like those boys who used to be sent to
Paris with two years in which to make good as writers or painters, after
which, if they had not made good, they could go home and into their fathers'
businesses. The way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as
there is such and such an animal; just as the way to paint is as long as
there is you and colours and canvas, and to write as long as you can live
and there is pencil and paper or ink or any machine to do it with, or
anything you care to write about, and you feel a fool, and you are a fool,
to do it any other way. But here we were, now, caught by time, by the
season, and by the running out of our money, so that what should have been
as much fun to do each day whether you killed or not was being forced into
that most exciting perversion of life; the necessity of accomplishing
something in less time than should truly be allowed for its doing. So,
coming in at noon, up since two hours before daylight, with only three days
left, I was starting to be nervous about it, and there, at the table under
the dining tent fly, talking away, was Kandisky of the Tyrolese pants. I had
forgotten all about him.
'Hello. Hello,' he said. 'No success? Nothing doing? Where is the
kudu?'
'He coughed once and went away,' I said. 'Hello, girl.'
She smiled. She was worried too. The two of them had been listening
since daylight for a shot. Listening all the time, even when our guest had
arrived; listening while writing letters, listening while reading, listening
when Kandisky came back and talked.
'You did not shoot him?'
'No. Nor see him.' I saw that Pop was worried too, and a little
nervous. There had evidently been considerable talking going on.
'Have a beer, Colonel,' he said to me.
'We spooked one,' I reported. 'No chance of a shot. There were plenty
of tracks. Nothing more came. The wind was blowing around. Ask the boys
about it.'
'As I was telling Colonel Phillips,' Kandisky began, shifting his
leather-breeched behind and crossing one heavy-calved, well-haired, bare leg
over the other, 'you must not stay here too long. You must realize the rains
are coming. There is one stretch of twelve miles beyond here you can never
get through if it rains. It is impossible.'
'So he's been telling me,' Pop said. 'I'm a Mister, by the way. We use
these military titles as nicknames. No offence if you're a colonel
yourself.' Then to me, 'Damn these salt-licks. If you'd leave them. alone
you'd get one.'
'They ball it all up,' I agreed. 'You're so sure of a shot sooner or
later on the lick.'
'Hunt the hills too.'
Til hunt them, Pop.'
'What is killing a kudu, anyway?' Kandisky asked. 'You should not take
it so seriously. It is nothing. In a year you kill twenty.'
'Best not say anything about that to the game department, though,' Pop
said.
'You misunderstand,' Kandisky said. 'I mean in a year a man could. Of
course no man would wish to.'
'Absolutely,' Pop said. 'If he lived in kudu country, he could. They're
the commonest big antelope in this bush country. It's just that when you
want to see them you don't.'
'I kill nothing, you understand,' Kandisky told us. 'Why are you not
more interested in the natives?'
'We are,' my wife assured him.
'They are really interesting. Listen...' Kandisky said, and he spoke on
to her.
'The hell of it is,' I said to Pop, 'when I'm in the hills I'm sure the
bastards are down there on the salt. The cows are in the hills but I don't
believe the bulls are with them now. Then you get there in the evening and
there are the tracks. They {have} been on the lousy salt. I think they come
any time.'
'Probably they do.'
'I'm sure we get different bulls there. They probably only come to the
salt every couple of days. Some are certainly spooked because Karl shot that
one. If he'd only killed it clean instead of following it through the whole
damn countryside. Christ, if he'd only kill any damn thing clean. Other new
ones will come in. All we have to do is to wait them out, though. Of course
they can't all know about it. But he's spooked this country to hell.'
'He gets so very excited,' Pop said. 'But he's a good lad. He made a
beautiful shot on that leopard, you know. You don't want them killed any
cleaner than that. Let it quiet down again.'
'Sure. I don't mean anything when I curse him.'
'What about staying in the blind all day?'
'The damned wind started to go round in a circle. It blew our scent
every direction. No use to sit there broadcasting it. If the damn wind would
hold. Abdullah took an ash can to-day.'
'I saw him starting off with it.'
'There wasn't a bit of wind when we stalked the salt and there was just
light to shoot. He tried the wind with the ashes all the way. I went alone
with Abdullah and left the others behind and we went quietly. I had on these
crepe-soled boots and it's soft cotton dirt. The bastard spooked at fifty
yards.
'Did you ever see their ears?'
'Did I ever see their ears? If I can see his ears, the skinner can work
on him.'
'They're bastards,' Pop said. 'I hate this salt-lick business. They're
not as smart as we think. The trouble is you're working on them where they
are smart. They've been shot at there ever since there's been salt.'
'That's what makes it fun,' I said. 'I'd be glad to do it for a month.
I like to hunt sitting on my tail. No sweat. No nothing. Sit there and catch
flies and feed them to the ant lions in the dust. I like it. But what about
the time?'
'That's it. The time.'
'So,' Kandisky was saying to my wife. 'That is what you should see. The
big {ngomas}. The big native dance festivals. The real ones.'
'Listen,' I said to Pop. 'The other lick, the one I was at last night,
is fool-proof except for being near that {bloody} road.'
'The trackers say it is really the property of the lesser kudu. It's a
long way too. It's eighty miles there and back.'
'I know. But there were four {big} bull tracks. It's certain. If it
wasn't for that lorry last night. What about staying there to-night! Then
I'd get the night and the early morning and give this lick a rest. There's a
big rhino there too. Big track, anyway.'
'Good,' Pop said. 'Shoot the rhino too.' He hated to have anything
killed except what we were after, no killing on the side, no ornamental
killing, no killing to kill, only when you wanted it more than you wanted
not to kill it, only when getting it was necessary to his being first in his
trade, and I saw he was offering up the rhino to please me.
'I won't kill him unless he's good,' I promised.
'Shoot the bastard,' Pop said, making a gift of him.
'Ah, Pop,' I said.
'Shoot him,' said Pop. 'You'll enjoy it, being by yourself. You can
sell the horn if you don't want it. You've still one on your licence. '
'So,' said Kandisky. 'You have arranged a plan of campaign? You have
decided on how to outwit the poor animals?'
'Yes,' I said. 'How is the lorry?'
'That lorry is finished,' the Austrian said. 'In a way I am glad. It
was too much of a symbol. It was all that remained of my {shamba}. Now
everything is gone and it is much simpler.'
'What is a shamba?' asked P.O.M., my wife. 'I've been hearing about
them for months. I'm afraid to ask about those words every one uses.'
'A plantation,' he said. 'It is all gone except that lorry. With the
lorry I carry labourers to the shamba of an Indian. It is a very rich Indian
who raises sisal. I am a manager for this Indian. An Indian can make a
profit from a sisal shamba.'
'From anything,' Pop said.
'Yes. Where we fail, where we would starve, he makes money. This Indian
is very intelligent, however. He values me. I represent European
organization. I come now from organizing recruitment of the natives. This
takes time. It is impressive. I have been away from my family for three
months. The organization is organized. You do it in a week as easily, but it
is not so impressive.'
'And your wife?' asked mine.
'She waits at my house, the house of the manager, with my daughter.'
'Does she love you very much?' my wife asked.
'She must, or she would be gone long ago.'
'How old is the daughter?'
'She is thirteen now.'
'It must be very nice to have a daughter.'
'You cannot know how nice it is. It is like a second wife. My wife
knows now all I think, all I say, all I believe, all I can do, all that I
cannot do and cannot be. I know also about my wife -- completely. But now
there is always someone you do not know, who does not know you, who loves
you in ignorance and is strange to you both. Some one very attractive that
is yours and not yours and that makes the conversation more -- how shall I
say? Yes, it is like -- what do you call -- having here with you -- with the
two of you -- yes there -- it is the Heinz Tomato Ketchup on the daily
food.'
'That's very good,' I said.
'We have books,' he said. 'I cannot buy new books now but we can always
talk. Ideas and conversation are very interesting. We discuss all things.
Everything. We have a very interesting mental life. Formerly, with the
shamba, we had the {Querschnitt}. That gave you a feeling of belonging, of
being made a part of, to a very brilliant group of people. The people one
would see if one saw whom one wished to see. You know all of those people?
You must know them.'
'Some of them.' I said. 'Some in Paris. Some in Berlin.'
I did not wish to destroy anything this man had, and so I did not go
into those brilliant people in detail.
'They're marvellous,' I said, lying.
'I envy you to know them,' he said. 'And tell me, who is the greatest
writer in America?'
'My husband,' said my wife.
'No. I do not mean for you to speak from family pride. I mean who
really? Certainly not Upton Sinclair. Certainly not Sinclair Lewis. Who is
your Thomas Mann? Who is your Valery?'
'We do not have great writers,' I said. 'Something happens to our good
writers at a certain age. I can explain but it is quite long and may bore
you.'
'Please explain,' he said. 'This is what I enjoy. This is the best part
of life. The life of the mind. This is not killing kudu.'
'You haven't heard it yet,' I said.
'Ah, but I can see it coming. You must take more beer to loosen your
tongue.'
'It's loose,' I told him. 'It's always too loose. But {you} don't drink
anything.'
'No, I never drink. It is not good for the mind. It is unnecessary. But
tell me. Please tell me.'
'Well,' I said, 'we have had, in America, skilful writers. Poe is a
skilful writer. It is skilful, marvellously constructed, and it is dead. We
have had writers of rhetoric who had the good fortune to find a little, in a
chronicle of another man and from voyaging, of how things, actual things,
can be, whales for instance, and this knowledge is wrapped in the rhetoric
like plums in a pudding. Occasionally it is there, alone, unwrapped in
pudding, and it is good. This is Melville. But the people who praise it,
praise it for the rhetoric which is not important. They put a mystery in
which is not there.'
'Yes,' he said. 'I see. But it is the mind working, its ability to
work, which makes the rhetoric. Rhetoric is the blue sparks from the
dynamo.'
'Sometimes. And sometimes it is only blue sparks, and what is the
dynamo driving?'
'So. Go on.'
'I've forgotten.'
'No. Go on. Do not pretend to be stupid.'
'Did you ever get up before daylight...'
'Every morning,' he said. 'Go on.'
'All right. There were others who wrote like exiled English colonials
from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they
were making. Very good men with the small, dried, and excellent wisdom of
Unitarians; men of letters, Quakers with a sense of humour.'
'Who were these?'
'Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company. All our early classics who
did not know that a new classic does not bear any resemblance to the
classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better
than, anything that is not a classic, all classics do that. Some writers are
only born to help another writer to write one sentence. But it cannot derive
from or resemble a previous classic. Also all these men were gentlemen, or
wished to be. They were all very respectable. They did not use the words
that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language.
Nor would you gather that they had bodies. They had minds, yes. Nice,
dry, clean minds. This is all very dull, I would not state it except that
you ask for it.'
'Go on.'
'There is one at that time that is supposed to be really good. Thoreau.
I cannot tell you about it because I have not yet been able to read it. But
that means nothing because I cannot read other naturalists unless they are
being extremely accurate and not literary. Naturalists should all work alone
and some one else should correlate their findings for them. Writers should
work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and
not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All
angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from
their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art,
sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the
bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle. They do not
want to be lonesome. They are afraid to be alone in their beliefs and no
woman would love any of them enough so that they could kill their
lonesomeness in that woman, or pool it with hers, or make something with her
that makes the rest unimportant.'
'But what about Thoreau?'
'You'll have to read him. Maybe I'll be able to later. I can do nearly
everything later.'
'Better have some more beer, Papa.'
'All right.'
'What about the good writers?'
'The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain.
That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers.'
'Mark Twain is a humorist. The others I do not know.'
'All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain
called {Huckleberry Finn}. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim
is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.
But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that.
There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.'
'What about the others?'
'Crane wrote two fine stories. {The Open Boat} and {The --Blue Hotel}.
The last one is the better.'
'And what happened to him?'
'He died. That's simple. He was dying from the start.'
'But the other two?'
'They both lived to be old men but they did not get any wiser as they
got older. I don't know what they really wanted. You see we make our writers
into something very strange.'
'I do not understand.'
'We destroy them in many ways. First, economically. They make money. It
is only by hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make
money eventually. Then our writers when they have made some money increase
their standard of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up
their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop. It is
slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they write when there
is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious. Then,
once they have betrayed themselves, they justify it and you get more slop.
Or else they read the critics. If they believe the critics when they say
they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and
they lose confidence. At present we have two good writers who cannot write
because they have lost confidence through reading critics. If they wrote,
sometimes it would be good and sometimes not so good and sometimes it would
be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and
they must write masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote.
They weren't masterpieces, of course. They were just quite good books. So
now they cannot write at all. The critics have made them impotent.'
'Who are these writers?'
'Their names would mean nothing to you and by now they may have
written, become frightened, and be impotent again.'
'But what is it that happens to American writers? Be definite.'
'I was not here in the old days so I cannot tell you about them, but
now there are various things. At a certain age the men writers change into
Old Mother Hubbard. The women writers become Joan of Arc without the
fighting. They become leaders. It doesn't matter who they lead. If they do
not have followers they invent them. It is useless for those selected as
followers to protest. They are accused of disloyalty. Oh, hell. There are
too many things happen to them. That is one thing. The others try to save
their souls with what they write. That is an easy way out. Others are ruined
by the first money, the first praise, the first attack, the first time they
find they cannot write, or the first time they cannot do anything else, or
else they get frightened and join organizations that do their thinking for
them. Or they do not know what they want. Henry James wanted to make money.
He never did, of course.'
'And you?'
'I am interested in other things. I have a good life but I must write
because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my
life.'
'And what do you want?'
'To write as well as I can and learn as I go along. At the same time I
have my life which I enjoy and which is a damned good life.'
'Hunting kudu?'
'Yes. Hunting kudu and many other things.'
'What other things?'
'Plenty of other things.'
'And you know what you want?'
'Yes.'
'You really like to do this, what you do now, this silliness of kudu?'
'Just as much as I like to be in the Prado.'
'One is not better than the other?'
'One is as necessary as the other. There are other things, too.'
'Naturally. There must be. But this sort of thing means something to
you, really?'
'Truly.'
'And you know what you want?'
'Absolutely, and I get it all the time.'
'But it takes money.'
'I could always make money, and besides I have been very lucky.'
'Then you are happy?'
'Except when I think of other people.'
'Then you think of other people?'
'Oh, yes.'
'But you do nothing for them?'
'No.'
'Nothing?'
'Maybe a little.'
'Do you think your writing is worth doing -- as an end in itself?'
'Oh, yes.'
'You are sure?'
'Very sure.'
'That must be very pleasant.'
'It is,' I said. 'It is the one altogether pleasant thing about it.'
'This is getting awfully serious,' my wife said.
'It's a damned serious subject.'
'You see, he is really serious about something,'
Kandisky said. 'I knew he must be serious on something besides kudu.'
'The reason everyone now tries to avoid it, to deny that it is
important, to make it seem. vain to try to do it, is because it is so
difficult. Too many factors must combine to make it possible.'
'What is this now?'
'The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if
anyone is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension
that can be gotten.'
'You believe it?'
'I know it.'
'And if a writer can get this?'
'Then nothing else matters. It is more important than anything he can
do. The chances are, of course, that he will fail. But there is a chance
that he succeeds.'
'But that is poetry you are talking about.'
'No. It is much more difficult than poetry. It is a prose that has
never been written. But it can be written, without tricks and without
cheating. With nothing that will go bad afterwards.'
'And why has it not been written?'
'Because there are too many factors. First, there must be talent, much
talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The
discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be
and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to
prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and
above all he must survive. Try to get all these in one person and have him
come through all the influences that press on a writer. The hardest thing,
because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done. But I
would like us to have such a writer and to read what he would write. What do
you say? Should we talk about something else?'
'It is interesting what you say. Naturally I do not agree with
everything.'
'Naturally.'
'What about a gimlet?' Pop asked. 'Don't you think a gimlet might
help?'
'Tell me first what are the things, the actual, concrete things that
harm a writer?'
I was tired of the conversation which was becoming an interview. So I
would make it an interview and finish it. The necessity to put a thousand
intangibles into a sentence, now, before lunch, was too bloody.
'Politics, women, drink, money, ambition. And the lack of politics,
women, drink, money and ambition,' I said profoundly.
'He's getting much too easy now,' Pop said.
'But drink. I do not understand about that. That has always seemed
silly to me. I understand it as a weakness.'
'It is a way of ending a day. It has great benefits. Don't you ever
want to change your ideas?'
'Let's have one,' Pop said. 'M'Wendi!'
Pop never drank before lunch except as a mistake and I knew he was
trying to help me out.
'Let's all have a gimlet,' I said.
'I never drink,' Kandisky said. 'I will go to the lorry and fetch some
fresh butter for lunch. It is fresh from Kandoa, unsalted. Very good.
To-night we will have a special dish of Viennese dessert. My cook has
learned to make it very well.'
He went off and my wife said: 'You were getting awfully profound. What
was that about all these women?'
'What women?'
'When you were talking about women.'
'The hell with them,' I said. 'Those are the ones you get involved with
when you're drunk.'
'So that's what you do.'
'No.'
'I don't get involved with people when I'm drunk.'
'Come, come,' said Pop. 'We're none of us ever drunk. My God, that man
can talk.'
'He didn't have a chance to talk after B'wana M'Kumba started.'
'I did have verbal dysentery,' I said.
'What about his lorry? Can we tow it in without ruining ours?'
'I think so,' Pop said. 'When ours comes back from Handeni.'
At lunch under the green fly of the dining-tent, in the shade of a big
tree, the wind blowing, the fresh butter much admired, Grant's gazelle
chops, mashed potatoes, green corn, and then mixed fruit for dessert,
Kandisky told us why the East Indians were taking the country over.
'You see, during the war they sent the Indian troops to fight here. To
keep them out of India because they feared another mutiny. They promised the
Aga Khan that because they fought in Africa, Indians could come freely to
settle and for business afterwards. They cannot break that promise and now
the Indians have taken the country over from the Europeans. They live on
nothing and they send all the money back to India. When they have made
enough to go home they leave, bringing out their poor relations to take over
from them and continue to exploit the country.'
Pop said nothing. He would not argue with a guest at table.
'It is the Aga Khan,' Kandisky said. 'You are an American. You know
nothing of these combinations.'
'Were you with Von Lettow?' Pop asked him. 'From the start,' Kandisky
said. 'Until the end.'
'He was a great fighter,' Pop said. 'I have great admiration for him.'
'You fought?' Kandisky asked.
'Yes.'
'I do not care for Lettow,' Kandisky said. 'He fought, yes. No one ever
better. When we wanted quinine he would order it captured. All supplies the
same. But afterwards he cared nothing for his men. After the war I am in
Germany. I go to see about indemnification for my property. "You are an
Austrian," they say. "You must go through Austrian channels." So I go to
Austria. "But why did you fight?" they ask me. "You cannot hold us
responsible. Suppose you go to fight in China. That is your own affair. We
cannot do anything for you."
' "But I went as a patriot," I say, very foolishly. "I fight where I
can because I am an Austrian and I know my duty." "Yes," they say. "That is
very beautiful. But you cannot hold us responsible for your noble
sentiments." So they passed me from one to the other and nothing. Still I
love the country very much. I have lost everything here but I have more than
anyone has in Europe. To me it is always interesting. The natives and the
language. I have many books of notes on them. Then too, in reality, I am a
king here. It is very pleasant. Waking in the morning I extend one foot and
the boy places the sock on it. When I am ready I extend the other foot and
he adjusts the other sock. I step from under the mosquito bar into my
drawers which are held for me. Don't you think that is very marvellous?'
'It's marvellous.'
'When you come back another time we must take a safari to study the
natives. And shoot nothing, or only to eat. Look, I will show you a dance
and sing a song.'
Crouched, elbows lifting and falling, knees humping, he shuffled around
the table, singing. Undoubtedly it was very fine.
'That is only one of a thousand,' he said. 'Now I must go for a time.
You will be sleeping.'
'There's no hurry. Stay around.'
'No. Surely you will be sleeping. I also. I will take the butter to
keep it cool.'
'We'll see you at supper,' Pop said.
'Now you must sleep. Good-bye.'
After he was gone, Pop said: 'I wouldn't believe all that about the Aga
Khan, you know.'
'It sounded pretty good.'
'Of course he feels badly,' Pop said. 'Who wouldn't. Von Lettow was a
hell of a man.'
'He's very intelligent,' my wife said. 'He talks wonderfully about the
natives. But he's bitter about American women.'
'So am I,' said Pop. 'He's a good man. You better get some shut-eye.
You'll need to start about three-thirty.'
'Have them call me.'
Molo raised the back of the tent, propping it with sticks, so the wind
blew through and I went to sleep reading, the wind coming in cool and fresh
under the heated canvas.
When I woke it was time to go. There were rain clouds in the sky and it
was very hot. They had packed some tinned fruit, a five-pound piece of roast
meat, bread, tea, a tea pot, and some tinned milk in a whisky box with four
bottles of beer. There was a canvas water bag and a ground cloth to use as a
tent. M'Cola was taking the big gun out to the car.
'There's no hurry about getting back,' Pop said. 'We'll look for you
when we see you.'
'All right.'
'We'll send the lorry to haul that sportsman into Handeni. He's sending
his men ahead walking.'
'You're sure the lorry can stand it? Don't do it because he's a friend
of mine.'
'Have to get him out. The lorry will be in to-night.'
'The Memsahib's still asleep,' I said. 'Maybe she can get out for a
walk and shoot some guineas?'
'I'm here,' she said. 'Don't worry about us. {Oh}, I hope you get
them.'
'Don't send out to look for us along the road until day after
to-morrow,' I said. 'If there's a good chance we'll stay.'
'Good luck.'
'Good luck, sweet. Good-bye, Mr. J. P.'
We were out from under the shade of camp and along the sandy river of a
road, driving into the western sun, the bush thick to the edge of the sand,
solid as a thicket, the little hills rising above it, and all along the road
we passed groups of people making their way to the westward. Some were naked
except for a greasy cloth knotted over one shoulder, and carried bows and
sealed quivers of arrows. Others carried spears. The wealthy carried
umbrellas and wore draped white cloth and their women walked behind them,
with their pots and pans. Bundles and loads of skins were scattered along
ahead on the heads of other natives. All were travelling away from the
famine. And in the heat, my feet out over the side of the car to keep them
away from the heat of the engine, hat low over the eyes against the sun,
watching the road, the people, and all clearings in the bush for game, we
drove to the westward.
Once we saw three lesser kudu cows in an open place of broken bush.
Grey, big bellied, long necked, small headed, and with big ears, they moved
quickly into the woods and were gone. We left the car and tracked them but
there was no bull track.
A little beyond there a flock of guineas quick-legged across the road
running steady-headed with the motion of trotters. As I jumped from the car
and sprinted after them they rocketed up, their legs tucked close beneath
them, heavy-bodied, short wings drumming, cackling, to go over the trees
ahead. I dropped two that thumped hard when they fell and as they lay, wings
beating, Abdullah cut their heads off so they would be legal eating. He put
them in the car where M'Cola sat laughing; his old man's healthy laugh, his
making-fun-of-me laugh, his bird-shooting laugh that dated from a streak of
raging misses one time that had delighted him. Now when I killed, it was a
joke, as when we shot a hyena, the funniest joke of all. He laughed always
to see the birds tumble and when I missed he roared and shook his head again
and again.
'Ask him what the hell he's laughing about?' I asked Pop once.
'At B'wana,' M'Cola said, and shook his head, 'at the little birds.'
'He thinks you're funny,' Pop said.
'Goddam it. I am funny. But the hell with him.'
'He thinks you're very funny,' Pop said. 'Now the Memsahib and I would
never laugh.'
'Shoot them. yourself.'
'No, you're the bird shot. The self-confessed bird shot,' she said.
So bird shooting became this marvellous joke. If I killed, the joke was
on. the birds and M'Cola would shake his head and laugh and make his hands
go round and round to show how the bird turned over in the air. And if I
missed, I was the clown of the piece and he would look at me and shake with
laughing. Only the hyenas were funnier.
Highly humorous was the hyena obscenely loping, full belly dragging, at
daylight on the plain, who, shot from the stern, skittered on into speed to
tumble end over end. Mirth provoking was the hyena that stopped out of range
by an alkali lake to look back and, hit in the chest, went over on his back,
his four feet and his full belly in the air. Nothing could be more jolly
than the hyena coming suddenly wedge-headed and stinking out of high grass
by a {donga}, hit at ten yards, who raced his tail in three narrowing,
scampering circles until he died.
It was funny to M'Cola to see a hyena shot at close range. There was
that comic slap of the bullet and the hyena's agitated surprise to find
death inside of him. It was funnier to see a hyena shot at a great distance,
in the heat shimmer of the plain, to see him go over backwards, to see him
start that frantic circle, to see that electric speed that meant that he was
racing the little nickeled death inside him. But the great joke of all, the
thing M'Cola waved his hands across his face about, and turned away and
shook his head and laughed, ashamed even of the hyena, the pinnacle of
hyenic humour, was the hyena, the classic hyena, that hit too far back while