She looked very white at this and averted her face and smiled as if it would be a long time before I could understand how much good it was doing me to have this portrait painted.
“I know,” I said. “The ladies around here gave you the business during the Milk Fund drive. They wouldn’t let you on the committee. I know all about it.”
But most of all what I recalled with those broken teeth in my hand on this evening in the African mountains was how I had disgraced myself with the painter’s wife and dentist’s cousin, Mrs. K. Spohr. Before the First World War (she’s in her sixties) she was supposed to have been a famous beauty and has never recovered from the collapse of this, but dresses like a young girl with flounces and flowers. She may have been a hot lay once, as she claims, though among great beauties that is rare. But time and nature had blown the whistle on her and she was badly ravaged. However, her sex power was still there and hid in her eyes, like a Sicilian bandit, like a Giuliano. Her hair is red as chili powder and some of this same red is sprinkled on her face in freckles.
One winter afternoon, Clara Spohr and I met in Grand Central Station. I had had my sessions with Spohr the dentist and Haponyi the violin teacher, and I was disgruntled, hastening to the lower level so that my shoes and pants could scarcely keep up with me—hastening through the dark brown down-tilted passage with its lights aswoon and its pavement trampled by billions of shoes, with amoeba figures of chewing gum spread flat. And I saw Clara Spohr coming from the Oyster Bar or being washed forth into this sea, dismasted, clinging to her soul in the shipwreck of her beauty. But she seemed to be sinking. As I passed she flagged me down and took my arm, the one not engaged by my violin, and we went to the club car and started, or continued, to drink. At this same winter hour, Lily was posing for her husband, so she said, “Why don’t you get off with me and drive home with your wife?” What she wanted me to say was, “Baby, why go to Connecticut? Let’s jump off the train and paint the town red.” But the train pulled out and soon we were running along Long Island Sound, with snow, with sunset, and the atmosphere corrupting the shape of the late sun, and the black boats saying, “Foo!” and spilling their smoke on the waves. And Clara was burning and she talked and talked and worked on me with her eyes and her turned-up nose. You could see the old mischief working, the life-craving, which wouldn’t quit. She was telling me how she had visited Samoa and Tonga in her youth and had experienced passionate love on the beaches, on the rafts, in the flowers. It was like Churchill’s blood, sweat, and tears, swearing to fight on the beaches, and so on. I couldn’t help feeling sympathetic, partly. But my attitude is that if people are going to undo themselves before you, you shouldn’t do them up again. You should let them retie their own parcels. Toward the last, as we got into the station, she was weeping, this old crook, and I felt terrible. I’ve told you how I feel when women cry. I was also incensed. We got out in the snow, and I supported her and found a taxi.
When we entered her house, I tried to help her take off her galoshes, but with a cry she lifted me up by the face and began to kiss me. Whereupon, like a fool, instead of pushing her away I kissed back. Yes, I returned the kisses. With the bridgework, new then, in my mouth. It was certainly a peculiar moment. Her shoes had come off with the galoshes. We embraced in the over-heated lamp-lighted entry which was filled with souvenirs of Samoa and of the South Seas, and kissed as if the next moment we were going to be separated by the stroke of death. I have never understood this foolish thing, for I was not passive. I tell you, I kissed back.
Oh, ho! Mr. Henderson. What? Sorrow? Lust? Kissing has-been beauties? Drunk? In tears? Mad as a horsefly on the window pane?
Furthermore Lily and Klaus Spohr saw it all. The studio door was open. Within was a coal fire in the grate.
“Why are you kissing each other like that?” said Lily.
Klaus Spohr never said a word. Whatever Clara saw fit to do was okay by him.
XI
And now I have told you the history of these teeth, which were made of a material called acrylic that’s supposed to be unbreakable—fort comme la mort. But my striving wore them out. I have been told (by Lily, by Frances, or by Berthe? I can’t remember which) that I grind my jaws in my sleep, and undoubtedly this has had a bad effect. Or maybe I have kissed life too hard and weakened the whole structure. Anyway my whole body was trembling when I spat out those molars, and I thought, “Maybe you’ve lived too long, Henderson.” And I took a drink of bourbon from the canteen, which stung the cut in my tongue. Then I rinsed the fragments in whisky and buttoned them into my pocket on the chance that even out here I might run into someone who would know how to glue them into place.
“Why are they keeping us waiting like this, Romilayu?” I said. Then I lowered my voice, asking, “You don’t think they’ve heard about the frogs, do you?”
“Wo, no, I no t’ink so, sah.”
From the direction of the palace we then heard a deep roar, and I said, “Would that be a lion?”
Romilayu replied that he believed it was.
“Yes, I thought so too,” I said. “But the animal must be inside the town. Do they keep a lion in the palace?”
He said uncertainly, “Dem mus’ be.”
The smell of animals was certainly very noticeable in the town.
At last the fellow who was guarding us received a sign in the dark which I didn’t see, for he told us to get up and we entered the hut. Inside we were told to sit, and we sat on a pair of low stools. Torchlight was held over us by a couple of women both of whom were shaven. The shape of their heads thus revealed was delicate though large. They parted their large lips and smiled at us and there was some relief for me in those smiles. After we were seated, the women choking their laughter so that the torches wagged and the light was fitful and smoky, in came a man from the back of the house and my relief vanished. It dried right out when he looked at me, and I thought, “He has certainly heard something about me, either about those damned frogs or something else.” The clutch of conscience gripped me to the bone. Totally against reason.
Was it a wig he wore? Some sort of official headdress, a hempy-looking business. He took his place on a smooth bench between the torches. On his knees he held a stick or rod of ivory, looking very official; over his wrists were long tufts of leopard skin.
I said to Romilayu, “I don’t like the way this man looks at us. He made us wait a long time, and I’m worried. What’s your thinking on this?”
“I no know,” he said.
I unbuckled the pack and took out a few articles—the usual cigarette lighters and a magnifying glass which I happened to have along. These articles, laid on the ground, were ignored. A huge book was brought forth, a sign of literacy which astonished and worried me. What was it, a guest register or something? Strange guesses leaped up in my mind, completely abandoned to fantasies by now. However, the book turned out to be an atlas, and he opened it toward me with skill in turning large pages, moistening two fingers on his tongue. Romilayu told me, “Him say you show home.”
“That’s a reasonable request,” I said, and got on my knees, and with the lighter and magnifying glass, poring over North America, I found Danbury, Connecticut. Then I showed my passport, the women with those curious tender bald heads meanwhile laughing at my cumbersome kneeling and standing, my fleshiness, and the nervous, fierce, yet appeasing contortions or glowers of my face. This face, which sometimes appears to me to be as big as the entire body of a child, is always undergoing transformations making it as busy, as strange and changeful, as a creature of the tropical sea lying under a reef, now the color of carnations and now the color of a sweet potato, challenging, acting, harkening, pondering, with all the human passions at the point of doubt—I mean the humanity of them lying in doubt. A great variety of expressions was thus hurdling my nose from eye to eye and twisting my brows. I had good cause to hold my temper and try to behave moderately, my record in Africa being not so brilliant thus far.
“Where is the king??
?? I said. “This gentleman is not the king, is he? I could speak to him. The king knows English. What’s all this about? Tell him I want to go straight to his royal highness.”
“Wo, no, sah,” said Romilayu. “We no tell him. Him police.”
“Ha, ha, you’re kidding.”
But actually the fellow did examine me like a police official, and if you recall my conflict with the state troopers (they came that time to quell me in Kowinsky’s tavern near Route 7, and Lily had to bail me out), you may guess how as a man of wealth and an aristocrat, and impatient as I am, I react to police questioning. Especially as an American citizen. In this primitive place. It made my hackles go up. However, I had a great many things lying on my mind and conscience, and I tried to be as politic and cautious as it was in me to be. So I endured this small fellow’s interrogation. He was very grim and businesslike. We had come from Baventai how long ago? How long had we stayed with the Arnewi and what were we doing? I held my good ear listening for anything resembling the words cistern, water, or frog, though by this time I was aware that I could trust Romilayu, and that he would stand up for me. That’s how it is, you bump into people casually by a tropical lake with crocodiles as part of a film-making expedition and you discover the good in them to be almost unlimited. However, Romilayu must have reported the severe drought back there on the Arnewi River, for this man, the examiner, declared positively that the Wariri were going to have a ceremony very soon and make all the rain they needed. “Wak-ta!” he said, and described a downpour by plunging the fingers of both hands downward. A skeptical expression came over my mouth, which I had the presence of mind to conceal. But I was very much handicapped in this interview, as the events of last week had undermined me. I was infinitely undermined.
“Ask him,” I said, “why our guns were taken away and when we’ll get them back.”
The answer was that the Wariri did not permit outsiders to carry arms in their territory. “That’s a damned good rule,” I said. “I don’t blame these guys. They’re very smart. It would have been better for all concerned if I had never laid eyes on a firearm. Ask him anyhow to be careful of those scope sights. I doubt whether these characters know much about such high-grade equipment.”
The examiner showed a row of unusually mutilated teeth. Was he laughing? Then he spoke, Romilayu translating. What was the purpose of my trip, and why was I traveling like this?
Again that question! Again! It was like the question asked by Tennyson about the flower in the crannied wall. That is, to answer it might involve the history of the universe. I knew no more how to reply than when Willatale had put it to me. What was I going to tell this character? That existence had become odious to me? It was just not the kind of reply to offer under these circumstances. Could I say that the world, the world as a whole, the entire world, had set itself against life and was opposed to it—just down on life, that’s all—but that I was alive nevertheless and somehow found it impossible to go along with it? That something in me, my grun-tu-molani, balked and made it impossible to agree? No, I couldn’t say that either.
Nor: “You see, Mr. Examiner, everything has become so tremendous and involved, why, we’re nothing but instruments of this world’s processes.”
Nor: “I am this kind of guy, rest is painful to me, and I have to have motion.”
Nor: “I’m trying to learn something, before it all gets away from me.”
As you can see for yourselves, these are all impossible answers. Having passed them in review, I concluded that the best thing would be to try to snow him a little, so I said that I had heard many marvelous reports about the Wariri. As I couldn’t think of any details just then, I was just as glad that he didn’t ask me to be specific.
“Could we see the king? I know a friend of his and I am dying to meet him,” I said.
My request was ignored.
“Well, at least let me send him a message. I am a friend of his friend Itelo.”
To this no reply was made either. The torch-bearing women giggled over Romilayu and me.
We were then conducted to a hut and left alone. They set no guard over us, but neither did they give us anything to eat. There was neither meat nor milk nor fruit nor fire. This was a strange sort of hospitality. We had been held since nightfall and I figured the time now would be half-past ten or eleven. Although what did this velvet night have to do with clocks? You understand me? But my stomach was growling, and the armed fellow, having brought us to our hut, went away and left us. The village was asleep. There were only small stirrings of the kind made by creatures in the night. We were left beside this foul hovel of stale, hairy-seeming old grass, and I am very sensitive about where I sleep, and I wanted supper. My stomach was not so much empty, perhaps, as it was anxious. I touched the shank of the broken bridge with my tongue and resolved that I wouldn’t eat dry rations. I rebelled at the thought. So I said to Romilayu, “We’ll build a little fire.” He did not take to this suggestion but, dark as it was, he saw or sensed what a mood was growing on me and tried to caution me against making any disturbance. But I told him, “Rustle up some kindling, I tell you, and make it snappy.”
Therefore he went out timidly to gather some sticks and dry manure. He may have thought I would burn down the town in revenge for the slight. By the fistful, rudely, I pulled out wisps from the thatch, after which I opened the package of dehydrated chicken noodle soup, mixing it with a little water and a stiffener of bourbon to help me sleep. I poured this in the aluminum cooking kit and Romilayu made a small blaze near the door. On account of the odors we did not dare to venture inside too far. The hut appeared to be a storehouse for odds and ends, worn-out mats and baskets with holes in them, old horns and bones, knives, nets, ropes, and the like. We drank the soup tepid, as it seemed it would never come to a boil, owing to the poverty of the fire. The noodles went down almost unwillingly. After which Romilayu, on his shinbones, said his usual prayers. And my sympathy went out to him, as this did not seem a good place in which we were about to lay our heads. He pressed his collected fingertips close under the chin, groaning from his chest and bending down his credulous head with the mutilated cheeks. He was very worried, and I said, “Tonight you want to make an especially good job, Romilayu.” I spoke largely to myself.
But all at once I said, “Ah!” and the entire right side of me grew stiff as if paralyzed, and I could not even bring my lips together. As if the strange medicine of fear had been poured down my nose crookedly and I began to cough and choke. For by a momentary twisting upward of some of the larger chips from the flame I thought I saw a big smooth black body lying behind me within the hut against the wall.
“Romilayu!”
He stopped praying.
“There’s somebody in the hut.”
“No,” he said, “dem nobody here. Jus’ me—you.”
“I tell you, somebody’s in there. Sleeping. Maybe this house belongs to somebody. They should have told us we were going to share it with another party.”
Dread and some of the related emotions will often approach me by way of the nose. As when you are given an injection of novocaine and feel the cold liquid inside the membranes and the tiny bones of that region.
“Wait until I find my lighter,” I said. And I ground the little wheel of the Austrian lighter with my thumb harshly. There was a flare, and when I advanced into the hut, holding it above me to spread light over the ground, I saw the body of a man. I was then afraid my nose would burst under the pressure of terror. My face and throat and shoulders were all involved in the swelling and trembling that possessed me, and my legs spindled under me, feeling very feeble.
“Is he sleeping?” I said.
“No. Him dead,” said Romilayu.
I knew that very well, better than I wished to.
“They have put us in here with a corpse. What can this be about? What are they trying to pull?”
“Wo! Sah, sah!”
I spread my arms before Romilayu, trying to communicate firmness
to him and I said, “Man, hold onto yourself.”
But I myself experienced a wrinkling inside the belly which made me very weak and faint. Not that the dead are strangers to me. I’ve seen my share of them and more. Nevertheless it took several moments for me to recover from this swamping by fear, and I thought (under my brows) what could be the meaning of this? Why was I lately being shown corpses—first the old lady on my kitchen floor and only a couple of months later this fellow lying in the dusty litter? He was pressed against the canes and raffia of which this old house was built. I directed Romilayu to turn him over. He wouldn’t; he wasn’t able to obey and so I handed him the lighter, which was growing hot, and did the job myself. I saw a tall person no longer young but still powerful. Something in his expression suggested that there had been an odor he didn’t wish to smell and had averted his head, but the poor guy had to smell it at last. There may be something like that about it; till the moment comes we won’t know. But he was scowling and had a wrinkle on his forehead somewhat like a high-water mark or a tidal line to show that life had reached the last flood and then receded. Cause of death not evident.
“He hasn’t been gone long,” I said, “because the poor sucker isn’t hard yet. Examine him, Romilayu. Can you tell anything about him?”
Romilayu could not as the body was naked, and so revealed little. I tried to consult with myself as to what I should do, but I could not make sense, the reason being that I was becoming offended and angry.
“They’ve done this on purpose, Romilayu,” I said. “This is why they made us wait so long and why those broads with the torches were laughing. All the time they were working on this frame-up. If that little crook with the twisted stick was capable of sending us into an ambush, then I don’t put it past them to rig up this, either. Boy, they’re the children of darkness, all right, just as you said. Maybe this is their idea of a hot practical joke. At day-break we were supposed to wake up and see that we had spent the night with a corpse. But listen, you go and tell them, Romilayu, that I refuse to sleep in a morgue. I have waked up next to the dead all right, but that was on the battlefield.”