Then we were going through the woods, following our trail and trying to make time to get out before dark. We had trouble, twice, at boggy places and Garrick seemed to be in a state of great hysteria, ordering people about when we were cutting brush and shovelling; until I was certain I would have to hit him. He called for corporal punishment the way a showing-off child does for a spanking. Kamau and M’Cola were both laughing at him. He was playing the victorious leader home from the chase now. I thought it was really a shame that he could not have his ostrich plumes.
Once when we were stuck and I was shovelling and he was stooping over in a frenzy of advice and command-giving, I brought the handle of the shovel, with manifest un-intention, up hard into his belly and he sat down, backwards. I never looked toward him, and M’Cola, Kamau, and I could not look –at each other for fear we would laugh.
‘I am hurt,’ he said in astonishment, getting to his feet.
‘Never get near a man shovelling,’ I said in English. ‘Damned dangerous.’
‘I am hurt,’ said Garrick holding his belly.
‘Rub it,’ I told him and rubbed mine to show him how. We all got into the car again and I began to feel sorry for the poor, bloody, useless, theatrical bastard, so I told M’Cola I would drink a bottle of beer. He got one out from under the loads in the back, we were going through the deer-park-looking country now, opened it, and I drank it slowly. I looked around and saw Garrick was all right now, letting his mouth run freely again. He rubbed his belly and seemed to be telling them what a hell of a man he was and how he had never felt it. I could feel the old man watching me from up under the roof as I drank the beer.
‘Old man,’ I said.
‘Yes, B’wana.’
‘A present,’ and I handed what was left in the bottle back. There wasn’t much left but the foam and a very little beer.
‘Beer?’ asked M’Cola.
‘By God, yes,’ I said. I was thinking about beer and in my mind was back to that year in the spring when we walked on the mountain road to the Bains de Alliez and the beer-drinking contest where we failed to win the calf and came home that niglit around the mountain with the moonlight on the fields of narcissi that grew on the meadows, and how we were drunk and talked about how you would describe that light on that paleness, and the brown beer sitting at the wood tables under the wistaria vine at Aigle when we came in across the Rhone Valley from fishing the Stockalper with the horse chestnut trees in bloom, and Chink and I again discussing writing and whether you could call them waxen candela-bras. God, what bloody literary discussions we had; we were literary as hell then just after the war, and later there was the good beer at Lipp’s at midnight after Mascart-Ledoux at the Cirque de Paris or Routis-Ledoux, or after any other great fight where you lost your voice and were still too excited to turn in; but beer was mostly those years just after the war with Chink and in the mountains. Flags for the Fusilier, crags for the Mountaineer, for English poets beer, strong beer for me. That was Chink then, quoting Robert Graves, then. We outgrew some countries and we went to others but beer was still a bloody marvel. The old man knew it too. I had seen it in his eye the first time he saw me take a drink.
‘Beer,’ said M’Cola. He had it open, and I looked out at that park-like country, the engine hot under my boots, the Wanderobo-Masai as strong as ever beside me, Kamau watching the grooves of the tyre tracks in the green turf, and I hung my booted legs over the side to let my feet cool and drank the beer and wished old Chink was along. Captain Eric Edward Dorman-Smith, M.C., of His Majesty’s Fifth Fusiliers. Now if he were here we could discuss how to describe this deer-park country and whether deer-park was enough to call it. Pop and Chink were much alike. Pop was older and more tolerant for his years and the same sort of company. I was learning under Pop, while Chink and I had discovered a big part of the world together and then our ways had gone a long way apart.