: The Story of Gombi by Stacpoole H De Vere Henry De Vere - Short stories; Storytelling Fiction; Hunting stories; British South Africa Fiction

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Produced by: Roger Frank.

The Story of Gombi

Patrick Spence could shoot more than elephants

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?"

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