But he observed that I didn’t like the tone he took, and said, “You friend Dahfu?”
“Damn right I am.”
“Oh me, too. Roi neveu. Aime neveu. Sans blague. Dangerous.”
“Come on, what is this all about?” I said.
Seeing me dissatisfied, the Bunam spoke sharply to Horko, and the queen mother, Yasra, gave a cry, “Sasi ai. Ai, sasi, Sungo.” Looking upward at me she must have seen the underside of my chin and the mustache and my open nostrils, but not my eyes, so that she didn’t know how I was receiving her plea, for that is what it was. She therefore began to kiss my knuckles over and over again, somewhat as Mtalba had done the night before my doomed expedition against the frogs. Once more I was aware of a sensitivity there. These hands have lost shape a good deal as a result of the abuses they have been subjected to. There was, for instance, the forefinger with which I had aimed, in imitation of Pancho Villa, at that cat under the bridge table. “Oh, lady, don’t do that,” I said. “Romilayu—Romilayu—tell her to quit it,” I said. “If I had as many fingers as there are hammers to a piano,” I told him, “they’d all be at her service. What does the old queen want? These guys are putting the squeeze on her, I can see it”
“Help son, sah,” said Romilayu at my back.
“From what?” I said.
“Lion witch, sah. Oh, very bad lion.”
“They’ve frightened the old mother,” I said, glowering at the Bunam and his assistant. “This is the sexton-beetle. Not happy without corpses or putting people away in the grave. I can smell it on you. And look at this leather-winged bat, his side-kick. He could play the Phantom of the Opera. He’s got a face like an ant-eater—a soul-eater. You tell them right here and now I think the king is a brilliant and noble man. Make it very strong,” I said to Romilayu, “for the old lady’s sake.”
But I could not change the subject no matter how I praised the king. They had come to brief me about lions. With one single exception, lions contained the souls of sorcerers. The king had captured Atti and brought her home in place of his father Gmilo, who was still at large. They took this very hard, and the Bunam was here to warn me that Dahfu was implicating me in his witchcraft. “Oh, pooh,” I said to these men. “I never could be a witch. My character is just the opposite.” Between them Horko and Romilayu made me finally feel the importance and solemnity—the heaviness—of the situation. I tried to avoid it, but there it was: they laid it on me like a slab of stone. People were angry. The lioness was causing mischief. Certain women who had been her enemies in the previous incarnation were having miscarriages. Also there was the drought, which I had ended by picking up Mummah. Consequently I was very popular. (Blushing, I felt a kind of surly rose color in my face.) “It was nothing,” I said. But then Horko told me how bad it was that I went down into the den. I was reminded again that Dahfu was not in full possession of the throne until Gmilo was captured. So the old king was forced to be out in the bush among bad companions (the other lions, each and every one a proven evildoer). They claimed that the lioness was seducing Dahfu, and made him incapable of doing his duty, and it was she who kept Gmilo away.
I tried to say to them that other people took a far different view of lions. I told them that they couldn’t be right to condemn all the lions except one, and there must be a mistake somewhere. Then I appealed to the Bunam, seeing that he was obviously the leader of the anti-lion forces. I thought his wrinkled stare, the stern vein of his forehead, and those complex fields of skin about his eyes must signify (even here, where all Africa was burning like oceans of green oil under the absolute and extended sky) what they would have signified back in New York, namely, deep thought. “Well, I think you should go along with the king. He is an exceptional man and does exceptional things. Sometimes these great men have to go beyond themselves. Like Caesar or Napoleon or Chaka the Zulu. In the king’s case, the interest happens to be science. And though I’m no expert I guess he’s thinking of mankind as a whole, which is tired of itself and needs a shot in the arm from animal nature. You ought to be glad that he’s not a Chaka and won’t knock you off. Lucky for you he’s not the type.” I thought a threat might be worth trying. It seemed, however, to have no effect. The old woman still whispered, holding my fingers, while the Bunam, as Romilayu addressed him, doing his best to translate my words, was drawn up with savage stiffness so that only his eyes moved, and they moved very little, but mainly glittered. And then, when Romilayu was through, the Bunam signaled to his assistant by snapping his fingers, and the black-leather man drew from his rag cloak an object which I mistook at first for a shriveled eggplant. He held it by the stalk and brought it toward my face. A pair of dry dead eyes now looked at me, and teeth from a breathless mouth. From the eyes came a listless and finished look. They saw me from beyond. One of the nostrils of this toy wag flattened down, the other was expanded and the entire face seemed to bark, this black, dry, childlike or dwarfish mummy which was gripped by the neck. My breath burned like mustard, and that voice of inward communication which I had heard when I picked up the corpse tried to speak but it could not rise above a whisper. I suppose some people are more full of death than others. Evidently I happen to have a great death potential. Anyway, I begin to ask (or perhaps it was more a plea than a question), why is it always near me—why! Why can’t I get away from it awhile! Why, why!
“Well, what is this thing?” I said.
This was the head of one of the lion-women—a sorceress. She had gone out and had trysts with lions. She had poisoned people and bewitched them. The Bunam’s assistant had caught up with her, and she was tried by ordeal and strangled. But she had come back. These people made no bones about it, but said she was the very same lioness that Dahfu had captured. She was Atti. It was a positive identification.
“Ame de lion,” said Horko. “En bas.”
“I don’t know how you can be so sure,” I said. I could not take my eyes from the shriveled head with its finished, listless look. It spoke to me as that creature had done in Banyules at the aquarium after I had put Lily on the train. I thought as I had then, in the dim watery stony room, “This is it! The end!”
XVIII
That night Romilayu’s praying was more fervent than ever. His lips stretched far forward and the muscles jumped under his skin while his moaning voice rose from the greatest depths. “That’s right, Romilayu,” I said, “pray. Pour it on. Pray like anything. Give it everything you’ve got. Come on, Romilayu, pray, I tell you.” He didn’t seem to me to be putting enough into it, and I flabbergasted him altogether by getting out of bed in the green silk drawers and kneeling beside him on the floor to join him in prayer. If you want to know something, it wasn’t the first time in recent years by any means that I had addressed some words to God. Romilayu looked from under that cloud of poodle hair that hung over his low forehead, then sighed and shuddered, but whether with satisfaction at finding I had some religion in me or with terror at hearing my voice suddenly in his channel, or at the sight I made, I couldn’t be expected to know. Oh, I got carried away! That withered head and the sight of poor Queen Yasra had got to my deepest feelings. And I prayed and prayed, “Oh, you… Something,” I said, “you Something because of whom there is not Nothing. Help me to do Thy will. Take off my stupid sins. Untrammel me. Heavenly Father, open up my dumb heart and for Christ’s sake preserve me from unreal things. Oh, Thou who tookest me from pigs, let me not be killed over lions. And forgive my crimes and nonsense and let me return to Lily and the kids.” Then silent on my heavy knees and palm pressed to palm I went on praying while my weight bowed me nearly to the broad boards.
I was shaken, you see, because I now understood clearly that I was caught between the king and the Bunam’s faction. The king was set upon carrying out his experiment with me. He believed that it was never too late for any man to change, no matter how fully formed. And he took me for an instance, and was determined that I should absorb lion qualities from his lion.
When I asked to see h
im in the morning after the visit of Yasra, the Bunam, and Horko, I was directed to his private pavilion. It was a garden laid out with some signs of formal design. At the four corners were dwarf orange trees. A flowering vine covered the palace wall like bougainvillaea, and here the king was sitting under one of his unfurled umbrellas. He wore his wide velvet hat with the fringe of human teeth and occupied a cushioned seat, surrounded by wives who kept drying his face with little squares of colored silk. They lit his pipe and handed him drinks, making sure that he was screened by a brocaded cloth whenever he took a sip. Beside one of the orange trees an old fellow was playing a stringed instrument. Very long, only a little shorter than a bass fiddle, rounded at the bottom, it stood on a thick peg and was played with a horse-hair bow. It gave thick rasping notes. The old musician himself was all bone, with knees that bent outward and a long shiny head, tier upon tier of wrinkles. A few white weblike hairs were carried in the air behind him.
“Oh, Henderson-Sungo, good you are here. We shall have entertainments.”
“Listen, I’ve got to talk to you, Your Highness,” I said. I kept wiping my face.
“Of course, but we shall have dancing.”
“But I’ve got to tell you something, Your Majesty.”
“Yes, of course, but there is dancing first. My ladies are entertaining.”
His ladies! I thought, and looked about me at this gathering of naked women. For after he had told me that he would be strangled when he couldn’t be of any further service to them, I took kind of a dim view of them. But there were some who looked splendid, the tallest ones moving with a giraffe-like elegance, their small faces or-namented with patterns of scars. Their hips and breasts suited their bodies better than any costume could have done. As for their features, they were broad but not coarse; on the contrary, their nostrils were very thin and fine, and their eyes were soft. They were painted and ornamented and perfumed with a musk that smelled a little like sweet coal oil. Some wore beads like hollow walnuts of gold, looped two or three times about themselves and hanging down as far as their legs. Others had corals and beads and feathers, and the dancers wore colored scarves which waved flimsily from their shoulders as they sprinted with elegant long legs across the court and the basic scratching of the music went on as the old fellow pushed his bow, rasp, rasp, rasp.
“But there is something I have got to say to you.”
“Yes, I suspected so, Henderson-Sungo. However, we must watch the dancing. That is Mupi, she is excellent.” The instrument sobbed and groaned and croaked as the old fellow polished on it with his barbarous bow. Mupi, trying out the music, swayed two or three times, then raised her leg stiff-kneed, and when her foot returned slowly to the ground it seemed to be searching for something. And then she began to rock and continued groping with alternate feet and closed her eyes. The thin beaten gold shells, like hollow walnuts, rustled on this Mupi’s body. She took the king’s pipe from his hand and knocked out the coals on her thigh, pressing down with her hand, and while she burned herself her eyes, which were very fluid with the pain, never stopped looking into his.
The king whispered to me, “This is a good girl—very good girl.”
“She’s certainly gone on you,” I said. The dancing continued to the croaking of the two-stringed instrument. “Your Highness, I’ve got to talk…” The fringe of teeth clicked as he turned his head with the soft, large-brimmed hat. In the shade of this hat his face was more vivid than ever, especially his hollow-bridgednose and his high-swelled lips.
“Your Highness.”
“Oh, you are very persistent. Very well. As you claim it is so urgent, let us go where we can talk.” He stood up and his rising caused a great disturbance among the women. They began to spring back and forth, loping across the little pavilion, crying out, and making a clatter with their ornaments; some wept with disappointment that the king was going and some attacked me with shrill voices for taking Dahfu away while several shrieked, “Sdudu lebah!” Lebah—I had already picked the word up—was Wariri for lion. They were warning him about Atti; they were charging him with desertion. The king with a big gesture waved at them, laughing. He seemed very affectionate and I guess he was saying he cared for them all. I was waiting, standing by, huge, my worried face still stiff from the bruises.
The women were right, for Dahfu did not lead me back to his apartment again but took me again to the den, below. When I realized where he was going I hurried after him saying, “Wait, wait. Let’s talk this thing over. Just one single minute.”
“I am sorry, Henderson-Sungo, but we are bound to go to Atti. I will listen to you down there.”
“Well, forgive me for saying it, King, but you’re very stubborn. In case you don’t know it you are in a hell of a position.”
“Oh, the divil,” he said. “I am aware what they are up to.”
“They came and showed me the head of a person they claimed was the same as Atti in a former existence.”
The king stopped. Tatu had just let us through the door and was standing holding the heavy bolt in her arms, waiting in the gallery. “That is the well-known fear business. We will withstand it. Old man, sometimes things cannot be so nice in cases like this. Do they harass you? It is because I have shown my fondness about you.” He took me by the shoulder.
Owing perhaps to the touch of his hand, I almost broke down on the threshold of the stairs. “Here,” I said, “I am ready to do almost anything you say. I’ve taken a lot from life, but basically it hasn’t really scared me, King. I am a soldier. All my people have been soldiers. They protected the peasants, and they went on the crusades and fought the Mohammedans. And I had one ancestor on my mother’s side—why General U. S. Grant wouldn’t even start an engagement without him. He would say, ‘Billy Waters here?’ ‘Present, sir.’ ‘Very good. Begin the battle.’ Hell’s bells, I’ve got martial blood in me. But Your Highness, you’re breaking me down with this lion business. And what about your mother?”
“Oh, divil my mother, Sungo,” he said. “Do you think the world is nothing but an egg and we are here to set upon it? First come the phenomena. Utterly above all else. I talk to you about a great discovery and you argue me mothers. I am aware they are working the fear business upon her, as well. My mother has outlived father Gmilo already by half of a decade. Come through the door with me and let Tatu close it. Come, come.” I stood. He shouted, “Come, I say!” and I stepped through the doorway. I saw Tatu as she labored to place the great chunk of wood which was the bolt. It fell, the door banged, and we were in darkness. The king was running down the stairs.
Where the light came through the grating in the ceiling, that watery, stone-conditioned yellow light, I caught up with him.
He said, “Why are you blustering at me so with your face? You have a perilous expression.”
I said, “King, it’s the way I feel. I told you before I am mediumistic. And I feel trouble.”
“No doubt, as there is trouble. But I will capture Gmilo and the trouble will entirely cease. No one will dispute or contest me then. There are scouts daily for Gmilo. As a matter of fact reports have come of him. I can assure you of a capture very soon.”
I said fervently that I certainly hoped he would catch him and get the thing over with, so we could stop worrying about those two strangling characters, the Bunam and the black-leather man. Then they would stop persecuting his mother. At this second mention of his mother he looked angry. For the first time he subjected me to a long scowl. Then he resumed his way down the stairs. Shaken, I followed him. Well, I reflected, this black king happened to be a genius. Like Pascal at the age of twelve discovering the thirty-second proposition of Euclid all by himself.
But why lions?
Because, Mr. Henderson, I replied to myself, you don’t know the meaning of true love if you think it can be deliberately selected. You just love, that’s all. A natural force. Irresistible. He fell in love with his lioness at first sight—coup de foudre. I went crashing down the weed-grown part of
the stairway engaged in this dialogue with myself. At the same time I held my breath as we approached the den. The cloud of fright about me was even more suffocating than before; it seemed to give actual resistance to my face and made my breathing clumsy. My respiration grew thick. Hearing us the beast began to roar in her inner room. Dahfu looked through the grating and said, “It is all right, we may go in.”
“Now? You think she’s okay? She sounds disturbed to me. Why don’t I wait out here?” I said, “till you find out how the wind blows?”
“No, you must come,” said the king. “Don’t you understand yet, I am trying to do something for you? A benefit? I can hardly think of a person who may need this more. Really the danger of life is negligible. The animal is tame.”
“Tame for you, but she doesn’t really know me yet. I’m just as ready to take a reasonable chance as the next guy. But I can’t help it, I am afraid of her.”
He paused, and during this pause I thought I was going down greatly in his estimation, and nothing could have hurt me more than that. “Oh,” he said, and he was particularly thoughtful. Silently he paused and thought. In this moment he looked and sounded, again, larger than life. “I think I recall when we were speaking of blows that there was a lack of the brave.” Then he sighed and said, with his earnest mouth which even in the shadow of his hat had a very red color, “Fear is a ruler of mankind. It has the biggest dominion of all. It makes you white as candles. It splits each eye in half. More of fear than of any other thing has been created,” he said. “As a molding force it comes second only to Nature itself.”