XIV
“Perhaps Ginger could slip into one of your things,” suggested Guy.
Esther childishly covered her mouth to hide a laugh, and darted glances of mischief and glee at the others, while Agnes drew in her breath before speaking:
“I’m afraid we donottake the same size, Guy!”
Agnes, thin as a whip, was perhaps a size nine; Ginger’s great size must have been well into the sixties.
Ginger, too, shook her head emphatically.
“Charles would simply die if I wore a frock he hadn’t done!” she said.
“Has Charles done any chemises for you?” Guy inquired.
“IwantedCharles to do some little Roman chemises for me, Guy,” Ginger confided. “I think I have the fullness for them—well, it would have meant giving up all my little feminine frills and laces, of course, and Charles simply would not hear of it! He said it would be a perfectcrime—and he does so love to work with his laces, Guy, I simply didn’t have the heart! But then what’s your feeling on it, Guy?” she asked finally, giving a Carmenesque toss of her head.
“Charlescouldbe right, of course,” said Guy, after allowing it a moment’s thought.
*****
Grand gave a bit of a shock to the British white-hunters along the Congo (as well as to a couple of venerable old American writers who were there on safari at the time) when he turned up in a major hunting expedition with a 75-millimeter howitzer.
“She throws a muzzle-velocity of twelve thousand f.p.s.,” Grand liked to quip. “She’ll stop anything on this continent.”
Ordinarily used by the French Army as an artilleryfieldpiece, the big gun, stripped of all but its barrel, chamber, and firing mechanism, still weighed well over a hundred and fifty pounds.
“She’ll stop anything that moves,” Guy would say, “—including a surfacedwhale.”
Grand had three natives carry the giant gun, while he, wearing a huge cushion-device around his stomach and a pith helmet so enormous that half his face was concealed beneath it, sauntered jauntily alongside, speaking knowledgeably to other members of the party about every aspect of firearms and big-game hunting.
“A spot of bother in Kenya bush the other day,” he would say, “the big cat took two of our best boys.” Then he would give his monstrous weapon an affectionate pat and add knowingly, “—the cat changed her tune when she’d had a taste of the old seventy-five! Yessir, this baby carries a realwallop, you can bet your life on that!”
About once an hour, Grand would stop and dramatically raise his hand, bringing the entire safari to a halt, while he and one of his trusty natives (heretofore known as the “best guide in Central Africa”) would sniff the air, nostrils flared and quivering, eyes a bit wild.
“There’s cat in the bush,” Guy would say tersely, and while the rest of the party looked on in pureamazement, Grand, big helmet completely obscuring his sight, would take up the huge gun and, staggering under its weight, brace it against the great cushion at his stomach, and blindly fire one of the mammoth shells into the bush, blasting a wide swath through the tall grass and felling trees as though they were stalks of corn. The recoil of the weapon would fling Grand about forty feet backwards through the air where he would land in a heap, apparently unconscious.
“The baby packs a man-sized recoil,” Guy would say later. “The Mannlicher, of course, is nothing more than atoy.”
Due to the extreme noise produced by the discharge of the 75, any actual game in the area was several miles away by the time the reverberations were stilled—so that these safaris would often go from start to finish without ever firing a shot, other than the occasional big boom from Grand’s 75.
African hunting expeditions are serious and expensive affairs, and this kind of tomfoolery cost Grand a pretty penny. It did provide another amusing page for his memory book though—and the old native guides seemed to enjoy it as well.