The Story of Gombi

Patrick Spence, a real, old Anglo-Irish gentleman, who would have cut your throat had you called him a liar, died not long ago at the age of eighty-six and had a bottle of port with his dinner the day before he took off. Those were Cassidy the old butler’s words. Cassidy said the master was as sound as a bell and walking along by the rhododendron bushes to have a look at the new wing they were adding to the stables when he sprang into the air, cried, “Got me by glory!” and fell flat, just as a buck falls when a bullet takes it through the heart. A fit end for a big-game hunter you will say. A fit, anyhow, the doctors said.

The ancestral home of the Spences, The Grange, Scoresby, Lincolnshire, stands half a mile from the road. You reach it by an avenue of chestnuts, and in Patrick’s time when the door opened you found yourself in a hall hung with trophies of the chase; the whole house was, in fact, a museum. Never in any man had the passion for collection burned more acutely than in the owner of The Grange, or shown itself in a more extravagant fashion. Here you found lamps upheld by pythons, door handles cut from rhinoceros horn, tables topped with hippopotamus hide, skins and masks everywhere of everything from black buffalo to Burchell’s zebra. In the long corridors where the hartebeest heads faced the elands and Grant’s gazelle grinned at Bohm’s zebra, black bears upheld the electric standards—black bears and apes.

The place was a mausoleum. To walk those corridors at night and alone required a fairly steady nerve, especially when the wind of Lincolnshire was howling outside like a troop of lost hyenas. There were envious men who said that three fourths of this collection had been bought and paid for, but that is the way of the world. No man ever dared to say it to the owner’s face.

I was staying at a village ten miles from Scoresby and twelve from The Grange, when one day I met the old gentleman, whom I had known in London, and he invited me to a day’s fishing in the stream that runs past The Grange to join the Witham. We had good sport, but toward the end of the day the rain began—the rain of Lincolnshire driving across the fens, drenching, disastrous, dismal. Spence insisted on my staying for dinner and the night; he gave me a rig-out which included a Canadian blanket coat and a pair of slippers and a dinner of the good old times, including a cod’s head served with oyster sauce and a capon the size of a small turkey.

Afterward we sat by the hall fire and talked, the light from the burning logs striking here and there, illuminating horns and masks and giving a fictitious appearance of life to the snow leopard crouching as if to spring at me from behind the door.

“Are those slippers comfortable?” asked Spence, filling his pipe from the tobacco jar—one of his infernal trophies, a thing made out of a cross section of elephant shin bone drilled out, for the leg bones of elephants have no marrow.

“Quite, thanks.”

“I got ’em in a queer way, didn’t pay a cent for them, either.” The cherry-colored cheeks of the old gentleman sucked in and he made the pipe draw against its will. Then, safely in the clouds, he went on. “Not a cent, though they cost me the lives of several men and near three hundred pounds of good ivory.”

“Mean to say you gave three hundred pounds of ivory for these old slippers?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said he. “It was such a mixed business. I’ll have to give you the whole story if you are to understand it, and first of all I must tell you that though my yarn has to do with Africa those slippers weren’t made in Africa.

“You’ve been to Cape Town, haven’t you?—and Durban and away up to Pretoria by rail, maybe—and you’ve passed thousands of square miles of country that I’ve seen crawling with game in my time—quagga, gnu, rhinoceros, lion—all gone now, not enough left to feed an aasvogel. Yes, I’ve seen that country when it was only to be compared to the country south of the Orange toward Cape Town—one big-game preserve. And it was on my second visit to it that the things happened I am going to tell you of.

“I was hunting with Tellemark, a Swede, I think he was, or Norwegian, I forget which, and we were traveling south of the Limpopo and close on to Portuguese territory; we had a regular caravan—four ox wagons, half a dozen horses, and about forty Kafirs; and we’d had good hunting, waters buck, buffalo, rhino and giraffe, but little elephant. However we were getting into the elephant country—a big rolling country, broken by thick bush and mimosa trees, with great clumps of forest sweeping away west where you could see the giraffes grazing against the trees, looking like toy giraffes taken out of a Noah’s ark.

“The place was thick with game. I’ve seen what looked like a moving cloud shadow miles away—it was a herd of springboks, thousands of them. I have seen twenty rhinoceros in five square miles of that country, and buffalo by the hundred. But one day I saw something stranger than all these. We had rounded a big clump of trees on our second day after entering this country, when we came upon an elephant. He was lying down, dead, a great brute thirteen feet to the shoulder, with ears six foot from tip to lobe, and tusks weighing, we guessed, close on three hundred pounds. The heaviest tusks ever taken in Africa weighed four hundred and fifty, so you may guess we were on to a pretty good thing. But the strange part of the show wasn’t the elephant but the chaps that had killed him. Pygmies—little chaps not five foot high.

“As far as I can make out there are several tribes of Pygmies lingering about in the African forests, and dying out so quick that to-day they are there and to-morrow they are gone. This lot we struck were evidently the stump end of some tribe worn down just to twenty or thirty members; they had killed the elephant on the edge of the forest and they were on him like flies. The trunk and feet had been cut off and the stomach cut open with a big stick stuck to keep it so; half the tribe was inside the elephant and half on top and round about. But when they saw us they dropped everything and made off, running for the woods—reminded me of a lot of sparrows flying from a cat; but one chap failed to get away, he tripped on something, fell flat on his face, and before he could get on his hands and knees, I had him.

“He kicked and fought, but only from fright, and after a while he quieted down and Tellemark gave him some sugar. You should have seen his face when he tasted the sugar! It didn’t seem a bad face, either, round and chubby. And that and the small size of him, together with his plumpness and the bow and arrow he had dropped, made us call him Cupid. The bow was the smallest I have ever seen, not a foot from tip to tip. The arrows were wrapped round with a piece of hide—kind of an attempt at a quiver; there were dozens of them, not thicker much than knitting needles, and without barbs.

“We thought at first that the arrows were used for killing small birds, but our Kafirs knew different; they pointed to the elephant; and, sure enough, there was an arrow sticking in the great ear of the brute, and three or four more sticking in the skin. They were poisoned arrows, and what the poison could have been, Lord knows, but something pretty powerful, for a rifle couldn’t have done the business better. We gave the arrows back to the chap, and the bow, expecting to see him make off to the woods after the others. Not he. The first fright over and seeing that we weren’t dangerous, he hung on, staring at the wagons; it was plain he had never seen anything on wheels before, and when Tellemark got one of the wagons on the move for a few yards to show him how it was done, he cried out like a bird chirruping, and laughed with one hand on his pot-belly till the laughter took the pair of us and doubled us up. But the Kafirs didn’t laugh; didn’t seem to see anything funny in him at all; and they didn’t call him Cupid; they called him Gombi.

“Our head man said he was no good, belonged to a bad lot and that we had better get rid of him. But Gombi had his own ideas about that. He seemed to have attached himself to us as a stray dog does and he hung round while the boys were taking the tusks, chirruping to himself and dodging about looking at this and that till the funniest feeling got hold of me that he wasn’t human but some sort of being from another world that had come across humans for the first time and was taking stock of them. But I hadn’t long to think about him, for all of a sudden round us the air was becoming filled with a stench worse than I ever smelled before.

“It was the elephant. The thing had been new killed and warm when we struck it and now it was going like this, decomposing right under our eyes, for great blisters were rising on the skin—and I won’t go into details. “The poison has done that,” said Tellemark. “Looks like it,” said I. “Let’s shift and get beyond the wagons. The Kafirs won’t mind.” We got away beyond the wagons and lay down on the wire grass watching the boys at work and Gombi hopping round them. Right up above them was a vulture waiting till we had cleared off. I watched him coming down and going up again. Sometimes you couldn’t see him at all, then he showed like a pin point, then he’d get bigger, then smaller.

“Now a vulture even when he is so high as to be beyond sight can see the body of a dwarf antelope, let alone an elephant, so this chap wasn’t coming up and down to prospect; it was sheer impatience, hunger. And I was thinking how full of hunger that sky was when Tellemark shifted his position, and looking up I saw a bull rhino that had broken out of the thick stuff on the forest edge and was coming toward us moving quick, but unflurried. The wind was coming with him so he couldn’t scent us and being half blind he couldn’t see us. Two rhinoceros birds were with him, but they weren’t on his back, they were flying about here and there, following him, and they didn’t seem alarmed. That’s funny, isn’t it, for if those birds had been on his back when he was standing still or moving very slowly they would have cried out at once at the sight of us. Seems to me sometimes as if the animal and bird world is driven by clockwork, not sense. Then, other times, it seems as though there were a big genius behind their movements. Anyhow, the rhino came along unwarned and Tellemark let him get within thirty yards before he dropped him with a shoulder shot, dead as mutton.

“The boys working on the tusks had been looking on, so had Gombi; and when the dwarf saw old pongo graveled like that he came running for all he was worth, skipping round the dead brute, plugging his finger in the bullet wound and sucking it same as a child might with a pie. And then, when he’d done with the rhino, he fastened on to the rifle, looking down the barrels, sniffing at them and evidently connecting the smell with the smell of powder in the air. Then he examined the locks, as interested as a magpie with a marrow bone.