I would have liked to have stayed on until I could have seen the squatters installed in their new place. But the surveying of the land took time, and it was uncertain when they would be able to move on to it.
Chapter 5.
Farewell
At that time, it came to pass that the old men of the neighbourhood resolved to hold a Ngoma for me.
The se Ngomas of the ancients had been great functions in the past, but now they were rarely danced, and during all my time in Africa I have never seen one of them. I should have liked to have done so, for the Kikuyu themselves thought highly of them. It was considered an honour to the farm that the old men’s dance was to be performed there, my people talked of it a long time before it was to take place.
Even Farah, who generally looked down on the Native Ngomas, was this time impressed by the resolution of the old men. “These people are very old, Memsahib,” he said, “very very old.”
It was curious to hear the young Kikuyu lions speak with reverence and awe of the coming performance of the old dancers.
There was one thing about these Ngomas of which I did not know,—namely that they had been prohibited by the Government. The reason for the prohibition I do not know.
The Kikuyu must have been aware of the interdiction, but they chose to overlook it, either they reasoned that in these great troubled times, things might be done that in ordinary times could not be done, or else they really forgot about it in the midst of the strong emotions set going by the dance. They did not even have it in them to keep silent about the Ngoma.
The old dancers when they arrived were a rare, sublime sight. There were about a hundred of them, and they all arrived at the same time, and must have collected somewhere at a distance from the house. The old Native men are chilly people, and generally wrap and muffle themselves up well in furs and blankets, but here they were naked, as if solemnly stating the formidable truth. Their finery and war-paint were discreetly put on, but a few of them wore, on their old bald skulls, the big head-dresses of black eagle’s feathers that you see on the heads of the young dancers. They did not need any ornaments either, they were impressive in themselves. They did not, like the old beauties of the European ball-room, strive to obtain a youthful appearance, the whole point and weight of the dance, to them themselves, and to the onlookers, lay in the old age of the performers. They had a queer sort of markings on them, the like of which I had never seen, chalked stripes running along their crooked limbs as if they were, in their stark truthfulness, emphasizing the stiff and brittle bones underneath the skin. Their movements, as they advanced in a slow prelusive march were so strange that I wondered what sort of dance I was now to be shown.
As I stood and looked at them a fancy came back to me that had taken hold of me before: It was not I who was going away, I did not have it in my power to leave Africa, but it was the country that was slowly and gravely withdrawing from me, like the sea in ebb-tide. The procession that was passing here,—it was in reality my strong pulpy young dancers of yesterday and the day before yesterday, who were withering before my eyes, who were passing away for ever. They were going in their own style, gently, in a dance, the people were with me, and I with the people, well content.
The old men did not speak, not even to one another, they were saving their strength for the coming efforts.
Just as the dancers had ranged themselves for the dance, an Askari from Nairobi arrived at the house with a letter for me, that the Ngoma must not take place.
I did not understand it, for it was to me a quite unlooked-for thing, and I had to read the paper through twice or three times. The Askari who had brought it, was himself so impressed with the importance of the show he had upset, that he did not open his mouth to the old people or to my houseboys, nor strut or swagger in the usual manner of Askaris, who are pleased to show off their plenitude of power to other Natives.
During all my life in Africa I have not lived through another moment of such bitterness. I had not before known my heart to heave up in such a storm against the things happening to me. It did not even occur to me to speak; the nothingness of speech by now was manifest to me.
The old Kikuyu themselves stood like a herd of old sheep, all their eyes under the wrinkled lids fixed upon my face. They could not, in a second, give up the thing on which their hearts had been set, some of them made little convulsive movements with their legs; they had come to dance and dance they must. In the end I told them that our Ngoma was off.
The piece of news, I knew, would in their minds take on a different aspect, but what I could not tell. Perhaps they realized at once how completely the Ngoma was off, for the reason that there was no longer anybody to dance to, since I no longer existed. Perhaps they thought that it had, in reality, already been held, a matchless Ngoma, of such force that it made naught of everything else, and that, when it was over, everything was over.
A small Native dog on the lawn profited by the stillness to yap out loudly, and the echo ran through my mind:
“?the little dogs and all,
Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me.”
Kamante, who had been put in charge of the tobacco that was to have been dealt out to the Ancients after the dance, in his habitual silent resourcefulness here thought the moment convenient for bringing it, and stepped forward with a big calabash filled with snuff. Farah waved him back, but Kamante was a Kikuyu, in understanding with the old dancers, and he had his way. The snuff was a reality. We now distributed it amongst the old men. After a little while they all walked away.
The people of the farm who grieved most at my departure were I think the old women. The old Kikuyu women have had a hard life, and have themselves become flint-hard under it, like old mules which will bite you if they can come to it. They were more difficult for any disease to kill off than their men, as I learned in my practice as a doctor, and they were wilder than the men, and, even more thoroughly than they, devoid of the faculty of admiration. They had borne a number of children and had seen many of them die; they were afraid of nothing. They carried loads of firewood,—with a rein round their foreheads to steady them,—of three hundred pounds, tottering below them, but unsubdued; they worked in the hard ground of their shambas, standing on their heads from the early morning till late in the evening. “From thence she seeketh the prey, and her eyes behold afar off. Her heart is as firm as a stone, yea as hard as a piece of the nether millstone. She mocketh at fear. What time she lifteth up herself on high, she scorns the horse and his rider. Will she make many supplications unto thee? Will she speak soft words unto thee?” And they had a stock of energy in them still; they radiated vitality. The old women took a keen interest in everything that was going on on the farm, and would walk ten miles to look at an Ngoma of the young people; a joke, or a cup of tembu, would make their wrinkled toothless faces dissolve in laughter. This strength, and love of life in them, to me seemed not only highly respectable, but glorious and bewitching.
The old women of the farm and I had always been friends. They were the people who called me Jerie; the men and the children—except the very young—never used the name for me. Jerie is a Kikuyu female name, but it has some special quality,—whenever a girl is born to a Kikuyu family a long time after her brothers and sisters, she is named Jerie, and I suppose that the name has a note of affection in it.