Out of Africa

But he was wrong in his view of himself, so was Berkeley, and so perhaps was Jaques. They believed that they were deserters, who sometimes had to pay for their wilfulness, but they were in reality exiles, who bore their exile with a good grace.

Berkeley, if he had had his small head enriched with a wig of long silky curls, could have walked in and out of the Court of King Charles II. He might have sat, a nimble youth from England, at the feet of the aged d’Artagnan, the d’Artagnan of Vingt Ans Après, have listened to his wisdom, and kept the sayings in his heart. I felt that the law of gravitation did not apply to Berkeley, but that he might, as we sat talking at night by the fire, at any moment go straight up through the chimney. He was a very good judge of men, with no illusions about them and no spite. Out of a kind of devilry, he was most charming to the people of whom he had the poorest opinion. When he really chalked his soles for the job he was an inimitable buffoon. But to be a wit in the ma

Small, very slight, red-haired, with narrow hands and feet, Berkeley carried himself extremely erect, with a little d’Artagnanesque turn of the head to right and left, the gentle motion of the unbeaten duellist. He walked as noiselessly as a cat. And, like a cat, he made every room that he sat in, a place of comfort, as if he had had in him a source of heat and fun. If Berkeley had come and sat with you upon the smoking ruin of your house, he would, like a cat, have made you feel that you were in a picked snug corner. When he was at his ease you expected to hear him purr, like a big cat, and when he was sick, it was more than sad and distressing, it was formidable as is the sickness of a cat. He had no principles, but a surprising stock of prejudices, as you would expect it in a cat.

If Berkeley were a cavalier of the Stuarts’ day, Denys should be set in an earlier English landscape, in the days of Queen Elizabeth. He could have walked arm in arm, there, with Sir Philip, or Francis Drake. And the people of Elizabeth’s time might have held him dear because to them he would have suggested that Antiquity, the Athens, of which they dreamed and wrote. Denys could indeed have been placed harmoniously in any period of our civilization, tout comme chez soi, all up till the opening of the nineteenth century. He would have cut a figure in any age, for he was an athlete, a musician, a lover of art and a fine sportsman. He did cut a figure in his own age, but it did not quite fit in anywhere. His friends in England always wanted him to come back, they wrote out plans and schemes for a career for him there, but Africa was keeping him.

The particular, instinctive attachment which all Natives of Africa felt towards Berkeley and Denys, and towards a few other people of their kind, made me reflect that perhaps the white men of the past, indeed of any past, would have been in better understanding and sympathy with the coloured races than we, of our Industrial Age, shall ever be. When the first steam engine was constructed, the roads of the races of the world parted, and we have never found one another since.

There was a shadow cast over my friendship with Berkeley by the circumstance that Jama, his young Somali servant, was of a tribe at war with Farah’s tribe. To people familiar with the cla

“I dare not,” said Berkeley, “tell Jama tonight that I have changed my mind, and that I shall not this time be going to Eldoret, where lives the young woman that he is in love with. For then his heart will turn to stone against me, it will be a matter of no importance to him if my clothes are brushed, and he will go out and kill Farah.”

Jama’s heart, however, never did turn to stone towards Berkeley. He had been with him a long time, and Berkeley often talked about him. He told me how once, over a matter in which Jama held himself to be right, Berkeley had lost his temper and had hit the Somali. “But then, my dear, you know,” said Berkeley, “at the very same moment I had one straight back in my face.”

“And how did it go then?” I asked him.

“Oh it went all right,” Berkeley said, modestly. After a little while he added: “It was not so bad. He is twenty years younger than me.”

This incident had left no trace in the attitude of either the master or the servant, Jama had a quiet, slightly patronizing ma

Berkeley had a great, ever unsatisfied, love of the Sea. It was a favourite dream of his that he and I should,—when we had made money,—buy a dhow and go trading to Lamu, Mombasa and Zanzibar. We had our plans all worked out and our crew ready, but we never did make money.

Whenever Berkeley was tired or unwell he fell back on his thoughts of the Sea. He then grieved over his own foolishness in having spent a lifetime anywhere but on salt water, and used strong language about it. Once when I was going to Europe and he was in this mood, to please him I conceived the plan of bringing out two ships’ lanterns, starboard and port, to hang by the entrance door of my house, and told him of it.

“Yes, it would be nice,” he said, “the house would be in that way like a ship. But they must have sailed.”

So in Copenhagen in a sailors’ shop by one of the old Canals, I bought a pair of big old heavy ships’ lanterns, which had for many years sailed in the Baltic. We had them up on each side of the door, it faced East and we were pleased to think that the lamps were correctly placed; as the earth, on her course through the ether, throws herself forward, there would be no collision. These lamps gave Berkeley much content of heart. He often used to come to the house quite late, and ordinarily at a great speed, but when the lamps were lighted he drove slowly, slowly, up the drive, to let the little red and green stars in the night sink into his soul and bring back old pictures, reminiscences of ship-faring, to feel as if he were indeed approaching a silent ship on dark water. We developed a signalling system in regard to the lamps, changing their place or taking down the one, so that he should know, already while in the forest, in what mood he would find his hostess, and what sort of di