We met two other shooting parties at our auberge. The first comprised a man and his elderly wife who were not immediately starting, some of their kit having gone astray. He was a noted shot, and Madam had been some minor trip with him and meant to accompany another. She was an intensely cross-grained person, quite the last woman I should yearn to be cooped up in a tent with for long at a time. Cecily’s idea of it was that the shikari husband meant, sooner or later, to put into practice the words of that beautiful song, “Why don’t you take her out and lose her?” and stuck to it that we should one day come on head-lines in the Somaliland Daily Wail reading something like this:
GREAT SHIKARI IN TEARS.
LOOKING FOR THE LOST ONE.
SOME LIONS BOLT THEIR FOOD.=
The good lady regarded us with manifest disapproval. She considered us as two lunatics, bound to meet with disaster and misfortune. Being women alone, we were foredoomed to failure and the most awful things. Our caravan would murder or abandon us. That much was certain. But she would not care to say which. Anyway we should not accomplish anything. She pointed out that a trip of the kind could not by any chance be manoeuvred to a successful issue without the guidance of a husband. A husband is an absolute necessity.
I had to confess, shamefacedly enough, that we had not got a husband, not even one husband, to say nothing of one each, and husbands being so scarce these days, and so hard to come by, we should really have to try and manage without. Having by some means or other contrived to annex a husband for herself, she evinced a true British matron-like contempt for every other woman not so supremely fortunate.
She talked a great deal about “the haven of a good man’s love.” One might sail the seas a long time, I think, before one made such a port. Meanwhile the good lady’s own haven, the elderly shikari, was flirting with the big drum of the celebrated ladies’ orchestra at the Aden tea-house.
“All human beans,” for this is what our friend got the word to, as she was right in the forefront of the g-dropping craze, “should marry. It is too lonely to live by oneself.”
Until one has been married long enough to appreciate the delight and blessedness of solitude this may be true, but wise people don’t dogmatise on so big a subject. Even Socrates told us that whether a man marries or whether he doesn’t he regrets it. And so it would almost follow that if one never jumped the precipice matrimonial one would always have the lurking haunting fear of having been done out of something good. It may be as well, therefore, to take the header in quite youthful days and—get it over. But as the wise Cecily pertinently remarks, you must first catch your hare!
The other shooting party was that of two officers from India, one of them a distant cousin of mine, who was as much surprised to see me as I was to see him. They were setting off to Berbera as soon as humanly possible, like ourselves.