“Say, what’s the matter with those guys?” I said. “They don’t deserve a king like you. With a personality like yours, you could rule a big country.”
The king was glad, I think, to hear this from me. “Notwithstanding,” he said, “there is considerable trouble with the Bunam and my Uncle Horko and others, to say nothing of the queen mother and some of the wives. For, Mr. Henderson, there is only one tolerable lion, who is the late king. It is conceived the rest are mischief-makers and evildoers. Do you see? The main reason why the late king has to be recaptured by his successor is that he cannot be left out there in company with such evildoers. The witches of the Wariri are said to hold an illicit intercourse with bad lions. Even some children assumed to come of such a union are dangerous. I add if a man can prove his wife has been unfaithful with a lion, he demands an extreme penalty.”
“This is very peculiar,” I said.
“Summarizing,” the king went on, “I am the object of a double criticism. Firstly I have not yet succeeded in obtaining Gmilo, my father-lion. Secondly it is said that because I keep Atti I am up to no good. Before all opposition, however, I am determined to keep her.”
“What do they want?” I said. “You should abdicate, like the Duke of Windsor?”
He answered with a soft laugh, then said, in the deeply founded stillness of the room—with the yellow-gray air weighing on us, deepening, darkening slowly—“I have no such intention.”
“Well,” I said, “if your back is up about it, that I understand perfectly.”
“Henderson-Sungo,” he said, “I see I must tell you more about this. From a very early age the king will bring his successor here. Thus I used to visit my lion-grandfather. His name was Suffo. Thus from my small childhood I have been on familiar or intimate terms with lions, and the world did not offer me any replacement. And I so missed the lion connection that when Gmilo my father died and I was notified at school of the tragic occurrence, despite my love of the medical course I was not one hundred per cent reluctant. I may go so far as to assert that I was weak from a continuing lack of such a relationship and went home to be replenished. Naturally it would have been the best of fortune to capture Gmilo at once. But as instead I caught Atti, I could not give her up.”
I took a fold of my gaudy pants to wipe my face which, due to the fever, was ominously dry. Just then I should have been pouring sweat.
“And still,” he said, “Gmilo must be taken. I will capture him.”
“I wish you loads of luck.”
He then took me by the wrist with a sharp pressure and said, “I would not blame you, Mr. Henderson, for wishing this to be delusion or a hallucination. But for my sake, as you have applied to me for reciprocal truth-telling, I request you to be patient and keep a firm hold.”
About a handful of sulfa pills would do me a lot of good, I thought.
“Oh, Mr. Henderson-Sungo,” he said, after a long instant of thought, keeping his uncanny pressure on my wrist—there was seldom any abruptness in what he did. “Yes, I easily could understand that—delusion, imagination, dreaming. However, this is not dreaming and sleeping, but waking. Ha, ha! Men of most powerful appetite have always been the ones to doubt reality the most. Those who could not bear that hopes should turn to misery, and loves to hatreds and deaths and silences, and so on. The mind has a right to its reasonable doubts, and with every short life it awakens and sees and understands what so many other minds of equally short life span have left behind. It is natural to refuse belief that so many small spans should have made so glorious one large thing. That human creatures by pondering should be correct. This is what makes a fellow gasp. Yes, Sungo, this same temporary creature is a master of imagination. And right now this very valuable possession appears to make him die and not to live. Why? It is astonishing what a fact that is. Oh, what a distressing picture, Henderson,” he said. “To come to the upshot, do not doubt me, Dahfu, Itelo’s friend, your friend. For you and I have become united as friends and you must give me your confidence.”
“That’s okay by me, Your Royal Highness,” I said. “That suits me down to the ground. I don’t understand you yet, but I am willing to go along on suspended judgment. And don’t worry too much about the hallucination possibility. When you come right down to it, there aren’t many guys who have stuck with real life through thick and thin, like me. It’s my most basic loyalty. From time to time I’ve lost my head, but I’ve always made a comeback, and by God, it hasn’t been easy, either. But I love the stuff. Grun-tu-molani!”
“Yes,” he said, “indeed so. This is an attitude which I endorse. Grun-tu-molani. But in what shape and form? Now, Mr. Henderson, I am convinced you are a man of wide and spacious imagination, and that also you need…. You particularly need.”
“Need is on the right track,” I said. “The form it actually takes is, I want, I want.”
Astonished, he asked me, “Why, what is that?”
“There’s something in me that keeps that up,” I said. “There have been times when it hardly ever let me alone.”
This struck him full-on, so to speak, and he sat perfectly still with his hands mounted on his large thighs, and his face with his high-rising mouth and his wide, open-nostriled, polished nose looking at me.
“And you hear this?”
“I used to hear it practically all the time,” I said.
In a low tone he said, “What is it? Demanding birthright? How strange! This is a very impressive manifestation. I have no memory of a previous description of it. Has it ever said what it wants?”
“No,” I said, “never. I haven’t been able to get it to name names.”
“So extraordnary,” he said, “and terribly painful, eh? But it will persist until you have replied, I gather. I am touched to hear about it. And whatever it is, how hungry it must be. The resemblance is also to a long prison term. But you say it will not declare which want it wants? Nor give specific directions either to live or to die?”
“Well, I have been threatening suicide a lot, Your Highness. Every once in a while something gets into me and I throw my weight around and threaten my wife with blowing my brains out. No, I could never get it to say what it wants, and so far I have provided only what it does not want.”
“Oh, death from what we do not want is the most common of all the causes. Well, this is such a remarkable phenomenon, isn’t it, Henderson? How much better I can interpret now why you succeeded with Mummah. Solely on the basis of that imprisoned want.”
I cried, “Oh, can you see that now, Your Royal Highness? Really? I’m so grateful, you can’t have any idea. Why, I can hardly see straight.” And that was a fact. A spirit of love and gratitude was moving and pressing and squeezing unbearably inside me. “You want to know what this experience means to me? Why talk about its being strange or illusion? I know it’s no illusion when I can speak straight out and tell you what it has been to hear, I want, I want, going on and on. With this to lean on I don’t have to worry about hallucinations. I know in my bones that what moves me so is the straight stuff. Before I left home I read in a magazine that there are flowers in the desert (that’s the Great American Desert) that bloom maybe once in forty or fifty years. It all depends on the amount of rainfall. Now according to this article, you can take the seeds and put them in a bucket of water, but they won’t germinate. No, sir, Your Highness, soaking in water won’t do it. It has to be the rain coming through the soil. It has to wash over them for a certain number of days. And then for the first time in fifty or sixty years you see lilies and larkspurs and such. Roses. Wild peaches.” I was very much choked up toward the end, and I said hoarsely, “The magazine was the Scientific American. I think I told you, Your Highness, my wife subscribes to it. Lily. She has a very lively and curious mi—” Mind was what I wished to say. To speak of Lily also moved me very greatly.
“I understand you, Henderson,” he said with gravity. “Well, we have a certain mutual comprehension or entente.”
“King, thanks,
” I said. “All right, we’re beginning to get somewhere.”
“For a while I request you to reserve the thanks. I have to ask first for your patient confidence. Plus, at the very outset, I request you to believe that I did not leave the world and return to my Wariri with an aim of withdrawal.”
I might as well say at this place that he had a hunch about the lions; about the human mind; about the imagination, the intelligence, and the future of the human race. Because, you see, intelligence is free now (he said), and it can start anywhere or go anywhere. And it is possible that he lost his head, and that he was carried away by his ideas. This was because he was no mere dreamer but one of those dreamer-doers, a guy with a program. And when I say that he lost his head, what I mean is not that his judgment abandoned him but that his enthusiasms and visions swept him far out.
XVII
The king had said that he welcomed my visit because of the opportunity for conversation it gave him, and that was no lie. We talked and talked and talked, and I can’t pretend that I completely understood him. I can only say I suspended judgment, listening carefully and bearing in mind how he had warned me that the truth might come in forms for which I was unprepared.
So I will give you a rough summary of his point of view. He had some kind of conviction about the connection between insides and outsides, especially as applied to human beings. And as he had been a zealous student and great reader he had held down the job of janitor in his school library up there in Syria, and sat after closing hours filling his head with out-of-the-way literature. He would say, for instance, “James, Psychology, a very attractive book.” He had studied his way through a load of such books. And what he was engrossed by was a belief in the transformation of human material, that you could work either way, either from the rind to the core or from the core to the rind; the flesh influencing the mind, the mind influencing the flesh, back again to the mind, back once more to the flesh. The process as he saw it was utterly dynamic. Thinking of mind and flesh as I knew them, I said, “Are you really and truly sure it’s like that, Your Highness?”
Sure? He was better than sure. He was triumphantly sure. He reminded me very much of Lily in his convictions. It exalted them both to believe something and they had a tendency to make curious assertions. Dahfu also liked to talk about his father. He told me, for instance, that his late father Gmilo had been a lion type in every respect except the beard and mane. He was too modest to claim a resemblance to lions himself, but I saw it. I had already seen it when he was in the arena leaping and whirling the skulls by the ribbons and catching them. He started with the elementary observation, which many people had made before him, that mountain people were mountainlike, plains people plainlike, water people waterlike, cattle people (“Yes, the Arnewi, your pals, Sungo”) cattlelike. “It is a somewhat Montesquieu idea,” he said, and thus he went on with endless illustrations. These were things millions of people had noted in their life experience: horse people had bangs and big teeth, large veins, coarse laughter; dogs and masters came to resemble one another; husbands and wives took on a strong similarity. Crouching forward in those green silk pants, I was thinking, “And pigs…?” But the king was saying, “Nature is a deep imitator. And as man is the prince of organisms he is the master of adaptations. He is the artist of suggestions. He himself is his principal work of art, in the body, working in the flesh. What miracle! What triumph! Also, what a disaster! What tears are to be shed!”
“Yes, if you’re right, it’s mighty saddening,” I said.
“Debris of failure fills the tomb and grave,” he said, “the dust eats back its own, yet a vital current is still flowing. There is an evolution. We must think of it.”
Briefly, he had a full scientific explanation of the way in which people were shaped. For him it was not enough that there might be disorders of the body that originated in the brain. Everything originated there. “Although I do not wish to reduce the stature of our discussion,” he said, “yet for the sake of example the pimple on a lady’s, nose may be her own idea, accomplished by a conversion at the solemn command of her psyche; even more fundamentally the nose itself, though part hereditary, is part also her own idea.”
My head felt as light as a wicker basket by now, and I said, “A pimple?”
“I mean it as an index to deep desires flaming outward,” he said. “But if you are inclined to blame—no! No blame redounds. We are far from so free as to be masters. But just the same the thing is accomplished from within. Disease is a speech of the psyche. That is a permissible metaphor. We say that flowers have the language of love. Lilies for purity. Roses for passion. Daisies won’t tell. Ha! I once read this on a cushion embroidery. But, and I am in earnest, the psyche is a polyglot, for if it converts fear into symptoms it also converts hope. There are cheeks or whole faces of hope, feet of respect, hands of justice, brows of serenity, and so forth.” He was pleased by the response he read in my face, which must have been a dilly. “Oh?” he said. “I startle you?” He loved that.
In the course of further conferences I told him, “I admit that this idea of yours really hits me where I live—am I so responsible for my own appearance? I admit I have had one hell of a time over my external man. Physically, I am a puzzle to myself”
He said, “The spirit of the person in a sense is the author of his body. I have never seen a face, a nose, like yours. To me that feature alone, from a conversion point of view, is totally a discovery.”
“Why, King,” I said, “that’s the worst news I ever heard, except death in the family. Why should I be responsible, any more than a tree? If I was a willow you wouldn’t say such things to me.”
“Oh,” he said, “you take upon yourself too much.” And he went on to explain, citing all kinds of medical evidence and investigations of the brain. He told me, over and over again, that the cortex not only received impressions from the extremities and the senses but sent back orders and directives. And how this really was, and which ventricles regulated which functions, like temperature or hormones, and so on, I really couldn’t keep quite clear. He kept talking about vegetal functions, or some such term, and he lost me every other sentence.
Finally he forced on me a whole load of his literature and I had to take it down to my apartment and promise to study it. These books and journals he had carried back from school with him. “How?” I said. And he explained he had come by way of Malindi and bought a donkey there. He had brought nothing else, no clothes (what did he need them for?) or other belongings except a stethoscope and a blood-pressure apparatus. For he really had been a third-year medical student when recalled to his tribe. “That’s where I should have gone right after the war—to med school,” I said. “Instead of horsing around. Do you think I would have made a good doctor?” He said “Oh?”—he didn’t see why not. At first he exhibited a degree of reserve. But after I convinced him of my sincerity he really appeared to see a future for me. He implied that although I might be doing my internship when other men were retiring from active life, after all, it wasn’t a question of other men but of me, E. H. Henderson. I had picked up Mummah. Let’s not forget that. Anyway a steeple might fall on me and flatten me out, but apart from such unforeseeable causes I was built to last ninety years. So eventually the king came to take a serious view of my ambition, and he would generally say with great gravity, “Yes, this is a very admirable perspective.” There was another matter which he treated with equal gravity, and it was that of my duties as the rain king. When I tried to make a joke about it he stopped me short and said, “It is proper to remember, Henderson, you are the Sungo.”
So then my program, minus one factor: Every morning the two amazons, Tamba and Bebu, waited on me and offered me a joxi, or trample massage. Never failing to be surprised and disappointed at my refusal they took the treatment themselves; they administered it to each other. Every morning also I had an interview with Romilayu and tried to reassure him about my conduct. I believe it worried and perplexed him that I was so intima
te, frère et cochon, with the king. But I kept telling him, “Romilayu, you’ve just got to understand. This is a very special king.” But he realized from the state I was in that there was more than talk going on between Dahfu and me, there was also an experiment getting under way which I will defer telling you about.
Before lunch, the amazons held a muster. These women with the short vests or jerkins abased themselves before me in the dust. Each moistened her mouth so that the dirt would cling to it, and took my foot and put it on top of her head. There was much pageantry, heat, pressure, solemnity, drumming, and bugling all over the place. And I still had fever. Small fires of disease and eagerness were alight within me. My nose was exceedingly dry even if I was the king of moisture. I stank of lion, too—how noticeably, I can’t say. Anyhow, I appeared in the green bloomers with my helmet and my crepe-soled shoes in front of the amazon band. Then they brought up the state umbrellas with their folds like thick eyelids. Women were squeezing bagpipes under their elbows. Amid all this twiddling and screeching the servants opened the bridge chairs and we all sat down to lunch.
Everybody was there, the Bunam, Horko, the Bunam’s assistant. It was just as well that this Bunam didn’t require much space. For Horko left him very little. Thin and straight, the Bunam looked at me with that everlasting stare of human experience; it took root twistedly between his eyes. His two wives, with bald heads and gay short teeth, both were very sunny. They looked like a pair of real fun-loving girls. Ever and again, Horko smoothed his robe on his belly or gave a touch to the heavy red stones that pulled his earlobes down. A white woolly ball or dumpling was set before me, like farina only coarser and saltier; at least it would do no further harm to my bridgework. I could certainly die of pain before I reached civilization if the metal parts which were anchored on the little stumps of teeth ground down by Mlle. Montecuccoli and Spohr the dentist were to come loose. I reproached myself, for I have a spare and I should never have started without it. Together with the plaster impressions it was in a box, and that box was in the trunk of my Buick. There was a spring that held the jack to the spare tire, and for safe-keeping I had put the box with the extra bridge in the same place. I could see it. I saw it just as if I were lying in that trunk. It was a gray cardboard box, filled with pink tissue paper and labeled “Buffalo Dental Manufacturing Company.” Fearing to lose what remained of the bridgework, I chewed even the salty dumplings with extreme caution. The Bunam with that fanatical fold of deep thought ate like everybody else. He and the black-leather fellow looked very occult; the latter always seemed about to unfold a pair of wings and take off. He too was chewing, and as a matter of fact there was a certain amount of Alice-in-Wonderland jollity in the palace yard. Even a number of kids, all head and middle, like little black pumpernickels, were playing a pebble game in the dust.