Henderson the Rain King

  “Henderson is the name,” I said. Because of the way he lolled, and the way he drew on his pipe, I somehow felt that I was being particularly tested.

  “Mr. Henderson. Yes, I should have asked you. I am very sorry for neglecting the civility. But I could hardly contain myself that you were here, sir, a chance for conversation in English. Many things since my return I have felt lacking which I would not have suspected while at school. You are my first civilized visitor.”

  “Not many people come here?”

  “It is by our preference. We have preferred a seclusion, for many generations now, and we are beautifully well hidden in these mountains. You are surprised that I speak English? I assume no. Our friend Itelo must have told you. I adore that man’s character. We were steadfastly together through many experiences. It is an intense disappointment to me not to have surprise you more,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, I’m plenty surprised. Prince Itelo told me all about that school that he and you attended in Malindi.” As I have emphasized, I was in a peculiar condition, I had an anxious fever, and I was perplexed by the events of last night. But there was something about this man that gave me the conviction that we could approach ultimates together. I went only by his appearance and the tone of his voice, for thus far it seemed to me that there was a touch of frivolousness in his attitude, and that he was trying me out. As for the remoteness of the Wariri, this morning, owing to the peculiarity of my mental condition, the world was not itself; it took on the aspect of an organism, a mental thing, amid whose cells I had been wandering. From mind the impetus came and through mind my course was set, and therefore nothing on earth could really surprise me, utterly.

  “Mr. Henderson, I would appreciate if you would return a candid answer to the question I am about to put. None of these women can understand, therefore no hesitancy is required. Do you envy me?”

  This was not the moment to tell lies.

  “Do you mean would I change places with you? Well, hell, Your Highness—no disrespect intended—you seem to me to be in a very attractive position. But then, I couldn’t be at more of a disadvantage,” I said. “Almost anyone would win a comparison with me.”

  His black face had a cocked nose, but it was not lacking in bridge. The reddened darkness of his eyes must have been a family trait, as I had observed it also in his Uncle Horko. But in the king there was a higher quality or degree of light. And now he wanted to know, pursuing the same line of inquiry, “Is it because of all these women?”

  “Well, I have known quite a few myself, Your Highness,” I said, “though not all at the same time. That seems to be your case. But at present I happen to be very happily married. My wife’s a grand person, and we have a very spiritual union. I am not blind to her faults; I sometimes tell her she is the altar of my ego. She is a good woman, but something of a blackmailer. There is such a thing as scolding nature too much. Ha, ha.” I have told you I was feeling a little displaced in my mind. And now I said, “Why do I envy you? You are in the bosom of your people. They need you. Look how they stick around and attend to your every need. It’s obvious how much they value you.”

  “While I am in possession of my original youthfulness and strength,” he said, “but have you any conception of what will take place when I weaken?”

  “What will …?”

  “These same ladies, so inordinate of attention, will report me and then the Bunam who is chief priest here, with other priests of the association, will convey me out into the bush and there I will be strangled.”

  “Oh, no, Christ!” I said.

  “Indeed so. I am telling you with utmost faithfulness what a king of us, the Wariri, may look forward to. The priest will attend until a maggot is seen upon my dead person and he will wrap it in a slice of silk and bring it to the people. He will show it in public pronouncing and declaring it to be the king’s soul, my soul. Then he will re-enter the bush and, a given time elapsing, he will carry to town a lion’s cub, explaining that the maggot has now experienced a conversion into a lion. And after another interval, they will announce to the people the fact that the lion has converted into the next king. This will be my successor.”

  “Strangled? You? That’s ferocious. What sort of an outfit is this?”

  “Do you still envy me?” said the king, making the words softly with his large, warm, swollen-seeming mouth.

  I hesitated, and he observed, “My deduction from brief observation I give you as follows—that you are probably prone to such a passion.”

  “What passion? You mean I’m envious?” I said touchily, and forgot myself with the king. Hearing a note of anger, the amazons of the guard who were arrayed behind the wives along the walls of the room, began to stir and grew alert. One syllable from the king quieted them. He then cleared his throat, raising himself upon his sofa, and one of the naked beauties held a salver so that he might spit. Having drawn some tobacco juice from his pipe, he was displeased and threw the thing away. Another lady retrieved it and cleaned the stem with a rag.

  I smiled, but I am certain my smile looked like a grievance. The hairs about my mouth were twisted by it. I was aware, however, that I could not demand an explanation of that remark. So I said, “Your Highness, something very irregular happened last night. I don’t complain of having fallen into a trap on arrival or my weapons being swiped, but in my hut last night there was a dead body. This is not exactly in the nature of a complaint, as I can handle myself with the dead. Nevertheless I thought you ought to know about it.”

  The king looked really put out over this; there wasn’t the least flaw of insincerity in his indignation and he said, “What? I am sure it is a confusion of arrangements. If intentional, I will be very put out. This is a matter I must have looked into.”

  “I’m obliged to confess, Your Highness, I felt a certain amount of inhospitality and I was put out. My man was reduced to hysterics. And I might as well make a clean breast. Though I didn’t want to tamper with your dead, I took it upon myself to remove the body. Only what does it signify?”

  “What can it?” he said. “As far as I am aware, nothing.”

  “Oh, then I am relieved,” I said. “My man and I had a very bad hour or two with it. And during the night it was brought back.”

  “Apologies,” said the king. “My most sincere. Genuine. I can see it was horrible and also discommoding.”

  He didn’t ask me for any particulars. He did not say, “Who was it? What was the man like?” Nor did he even seem to care whether it was a man, a woman, or a child. I was so glad to escape the anxiety of the thing that at the time I didn’t note this peculiar lack of interest.

  “There must be quite a number of deaths among you at this time,” I said. “On the way over to the palace I could have sworn I saw some fellows hanging.”

  He did not answer directly, but only said, “We must get you out of the undesirable lodging. So please be my guest in the palace.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Your things will be sent for.”

  “My man, Romilayu, has already brought them, but he hasn’t had breakfast.”

  “Be assured, he will be taken care of.”

  “And my gun…”

  “Whenever you have occasion to shoot, it will be in your hands.”

  “I keep hearing a lion,” I said. “Does this have anything to do with the information you gave me about the death of …” I did not complete the question.

  “What brings you here to us, Mr. Henderson?”

  I had an impulse to confide in him—that was how he made me feel, trusting—but as he had steered away the subject from the roaring of the lions, which I clearly heard beneath, I couldn’t very well start, just like that, to speak openly and so I said, “I am just a traveler.” My position on the three-legged stool suggested that I was crouching there in order to avoid questioning. The situation required an amount of equipoise or calm of mind which I lacked. And I kept wiping or rubbing my nose with my Woolworth bandanna. I tried to fi
gure, “Which of these women might be the queen?” Then, as it might not be polite to stare at the different members of the harem, most of them so soft, supple, and black, I turned my eyes to the floor, aware that the king was watching me. He seemed all ease, and I all limitation. He was extended, floating; I was contracted and cramped. The undersides of my knees were sweating. Yes, he was soaring like a spirit while I sank like a stone, and from my fatigued eyes I could not help looking at him grudgingly (thus becoming actually guilty of the passion he had seen in me), in his colors surrounded by cherishing attention. Suppose there was ultimately such a price to pay? To me it seemed that he was getting full value.

  “Do you mind a further inquiry, Mr. Henderson? What kind of traveler are you?”

  “Oh … that depends. I don’t know yet. It remains to be seen. You know,” I said, “you have to be very rich to take a trip like this.” I might have added, as it entered my mind to do, that some people found satisfaction in being (Walt Whitman: “Enough to merely be! Enough to breathe! Joy! Joy! All over joy!”). Being. Others were taken up with becoming. Being people have all the breaks. Becoming people are very unlucky, always in a tizzy. The Becoming people are always having to make explanations or offer justifications to the Being people. While the Being people provoke these explanations. I sincerely feel that this is something everyone should understand about me. Now Willatale, the queen of the Arnewi, and principal woman of Bittahness, was a Be-er if there ever was one. And at present King Dahfu. And if I had really been capable of the alert consciousness which it required I would have confessed that Becoming was beginning to come out of my ears. Enough! Enough! Time to have Become. Time to Be! Burst the spirit’s sleep. Wake up, America! Stump the experts. Instead I told this savage king, “I seem to be kind of a tourist.”

  “Or a wanderer,” he said. “I already am fond of a diffident way which I see you to exhibit.”

  I tried to make a bow when he said this, but was prevented by a combination of factors, the main one being my crouching position with my belly against my bare knees (incidentally, I badly needed a bath, as sitting in this posture made me aware). “You do me too much credit,” I said. “There are a lot of folks at home who have me down for nothing but a bum.”

  At this stage of our interview I tried to make out, I tried to feel as if with my fingers, the chief characteristics of the situation. Things seemed to be smooth, but how smooth could they really be? According to Itelo, this king, Dahfu, was one hell of a guy. He had gotten a blue-ribbon recommendation. Class A, as Itelo himself would have said. Primo. Actually, I was already greatly taken with him, but it was necessary to remember what I had seen that morning, that I was among savages and that I had been quartered with a corpse and had seen guys hanging upside down by the feet and that the king had made at least one dubious insinuation. Besides, my fever was increasing, and I had to make a special effort to remain alert. From this I developed a great strain at the back of the neck and in my eyes. I was glaring crudely at everything about me, including these women who should have elicited quite another kind of attitude. But my purpose was to see essentials, only essentials, nothing but essentials, and to guard against hallucinations Things are not what they seem, anyway.

  As for the king, his interest in me appeared to increase continually. Half smiling, he scrutinized me with growing closeness. How was I ever to guess the aims and purposes hidden in his heart? God has not given me half as much intuition as I constantly require. As I couldn’t trust him, I had to understand him. Understand him? How was I going to understand him? Hell! It would be like extracting an eel from the chowder after it has been cooked to pieces. This planet has billions of passengers on it, and those were preceded by infinite billions and there are vaster billions to come, and none of these, no, not one, can I hope ever to understand. Never! And when I think how much confidence I used to have in understanding—you know?—it’s enough to make a man weep. Of course, you may ask, what have numbers got to do with it? And that’s right, too. We get too depressed by them, and should be more accepting of multitudes than we are. Being in point of size precisely halfway between the suns and the atoms, living among astronomical conceptions, with every thumb and fingerprint a mystery, we should get used to living with huge numbers. In the history of the world many souls have been, are, and will be, and with a little reflection this is marvelous and not depressing. Many jerks are made gloomy by it, for they think quantity buries them alive. That’s just crazy. Numbers are very dangerous, but the main thing about them is that they humble your pride. And that’s good. But I used to have great confidence in understanding. Now take a phrase like “Father forgive them; they know not what they do.” This may be interpreted as a promise that in time we would be delivered from blindness and understand. On the other hand, it may also mean that with time we will understand our own enormities and crimes, and that sounds to me like a threat.

  Thus I was sitting there with my pondering expression. Or maybe it would be more factual and descriptive to say that I was listening to the growling of my mind. Then the king observed, to my surprise, “You do not show too much wear and tear of the journey. I esteem you to be very strong. Oh, vastly. I see at a glance. You tell me you were able to hold your own with Itelo? Perhaps you were practicing mere courtesy. At a snap judgment you do not seem so very courteous. But I will not conceal you are a specimen of development I cannot claim ever to have seen.”

  First the examiner in the middle of the night, waiving the question of the corpse, had asked me to take off my shirt so he could study my physique, and now the king expressed a similar interest. I could have boasted, “I’m strong enough to run up a hill about a hundred yards with one of your bodies on my back.” For I do have a certain pride in my strength (compensatory mechanism). But my feelings had been undergoing a considerable fluctuation. First I was reassured by the person and attitude of the king, and his tone of voice. I had rejoiced. My heart proclaimed a holiday. Then again suspicions supervened, and now the peculiar inquiry about my physique made me sweat anew with anxiety. I remembered, if they were thinking of using me as a sacrifice, that an ideal sacrifice has no blemishes. And so I said that I actually had not been in the best of health and that I felt feverish today.

  “You cannot have a fever, as manifestly you are perspiring,” said Dahfu.

  “That’s just another one of my peculiarities,” I said. “I can run a high temperature while pouring sweat.” He brushed this aside. “And a terrible thing happened to me just last night as I was eating a piece of hardtack,” I said. “A real calamity. I broke my bridge.” I widened my mouth with my fingers and threw back my head, inviting him to look at the gap. Also I unbuttoned my pocket and showed him the teeth, which I had put there for safekeeping. The king looked into that enormous moat, my mouth. Exactly what his impression was, I can’t undertake to relate, but he said, “It does look exceedingly troublesome. Where did this happen?”

  “Oh, just before that fellow grilled me,” I said. “What do you call him?”

  “The Bunam,” he said. “Do you find him very dignified? He is top official of all the priests. It is no trouble to conceive how annoyed you were to break the teeth.”

  “I was fit to be tied,” I said. “I could have kicked myself in the head for being so stupid. Of course I can chew on the stumps. But what if the shank should come out? I don’t know how familiar you may be with dentistry, Your Highness, but underneath, everything has been ground down to the pulp and if I feel a draft on those stumps, believe me, there’s no torment comparable. I have had very bad luck with teeth, as has my wife. Naturally you can’t expect teeth to last forever. They wear down. But that’s not all….”

  “Can there be other things that ail you?” he said. “You do present an appearance of utmost and solid physical organization.”

  I flushed, and answered, “I have a pretty bad case of hemorrhoids, Your Highness. Moreover I am subject to fainting fits.”

  Sympathetically he asked, “Not the
falling sickness—petit mal or grand mal?”

  “No,” I said, “what I have defies classification. I’ve been to the biggest men in New York with this, and they say it isn’t epilepsy. But a few years ago I started to have fits of fainting, very unpredictable, without warning. They may come over me while I am reading the paper, or on a stepladder, fixing a window shade. And I have blacked out while playing the violin. Then about a year ago, in the express elevator, going up in the Chrysler Building, it happened to me. It must have been the speed of overcoming gravity that did it. There was a lady in a mink coat next to me. I put my head on her shoulder and she gave a loud scream, and I fell down.”

  Having been a stoic for so many years I am not skillful in making my ailments sound convincing. Also, from much reading of medical literature I am aware how much mind, just mind itself, we needn’t speak of drink or anything like that, lies at the root of my complaints. It was perversity of character that was making me faint. Moreover my heart so often repeated, I want, that I felt entitled to a little reprieve, and I found it very restful to pass out once in a while. Nevertheless I began to realize that the king would certainly use me if he could, for, nice as he was, he was also in a certain position with respect to the wives. As he would never make old bones, there was no reason why he should be particularly considerate of me.

  I said in a loud voice, “Your Majesty, this has been a wonderful and interesting visit. Who’d ever think! In the middle of Africa! Itelo praised Your Majesty very highly to me. He said you were terrific, and I see you really are. All this couldn’t be more memorable, but I don’t want to outstay my welcome. I know you are planning to make rain today and probably I will only be in the way. So thanks for the hospitality of the palace, and I wish you all kinds of luck with the ceremony, but I think after lunch my man and I had better blow.”

  As soon as he saw my intention and while I still spoke, he began to shake his head, and when he did so, the women looked at me with expressions devoid of friendliness, as though I were crossing or exciting the king and costing him strength which might be better employed.