Henderson the Rain King (23 page)

therefore I gave it everything I had and roared my head off. Whenever I opened my bulging eyes I saw the king in his hat rejoicing by my side, and the lioness on the trestle staring at me, a creature entirely of gold sitting there. When I could do no more I fell flat on my face. The king thought I might have passed out, and he felt my pulse and patted my cheeks saying, "Come, come, dear fellow." I opened my eyes and he said, "Ah, are you okay? I worried about you. You went from crimson to black starting from the sternum and rising into the face." "No, I'm all right. How am I doing?" "Wonderfully, my brother Henderson. Believe me, it will prove beneficial. I will lead Atti away and let you take rest. We have done enough for the first time." We were sitting on the trestle together and talking after the king had shut Atti in her inner room. He seemed positive that the lion Gmilo was going to turn up very soon. He had been observed in the vicinity. Then he would release the lioness, he told me, and end the controversy with the Bunam. After this he began to talk again about the connection between the body and the brain. He said, "It is all a matter of having a desirable model in the cortex. For the noble self-conception is everything. For as conception is, so the fellow is. Put differently, you are in the flesh as your soul is. And in the manner described a fellow really is the artist of himself. Body and face are secretly painted by the spirit of man, working through the cortex and brain ventricles three and four, which direct the flow of vital energy all over. And this explains what I am so excited about, Henderson-Sungo." For he was highly excited, by now. He was soaring. He was up there with enthusiasm. Trying to keep up with his flight made me dizzy. Also I felt very bitter over some implications of his theory, which I was beginning to understand. For if I was the painter of my own nose and forehead and of such a burly stoop and such arms and fingers, why, it was an out-and-out felony against myself. What had I done! A bungled lump of humanity. Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho! Would death please wash me away and dissolve this giant collection of errors. "It's the pigs," I suddenly realized, "the pigs! Lions for him, pigs for me. I wish I was dead." "You are pensive, Henderson-Sungo." I came near holding a grudge against the king at that moment. I should have realized that his brilliance was not a secure gift, but like this ramshackle red palace rested on doubtful underpinnings. Now he began to give me a new sort of lecture. He said that nature might be a mentality. I wasn't sure quite what he meant by that. He wondered whether even inanimate objects might have a mental existence. He said that Madame Curie had written something about the beta particles issuing like flocks of birds. "Do you remember?" he said. "The great Kepler believed that the whole planet slept and woke and breathed. Was this talking through his hat? In that case the mind of the human may associate with the All-Intelligent to perform certain work. By imagination." And then he began to repeat what a procession of monsters the human imagination had created instead. "I have subsumed them under the types I mentioned," he said, "as the appetite, the agony, the fateful-hysterical, the fighting Lazaruses, the immune elephants, the mad laughers, the hollow genital, and so on. Think of what there would be instead by different imaginations. What gay, brilliant types, what merriment types, what beauties and goodness, what sweet cheeks or noble demeanors. Ah, ah, ah, what we could be! Opportunity calls to rise to summits. You should have been such a summit, Mr. Henderson-Sungo." "Me?" I said, still dazed by my own roaring. My mental horizon was far from clear, although the clouds on it were not low and dark. "So you see," said Dahfu, "you came to me speaking of grun-tu-molani. What could be grun-tu-molani upon a background of cows?" _Swine!__ he might have said to me. It was vain to curse Nicky Goldstein for this. It was not his fault that he was a Jew, that he had announced he was going to raise minks in the Catskills and that I had told him I was going to raise pigs. Fate is much more complex than that. I must have been committed to pigs long before I laid eyes on Goldstein. Two sows, Hester and Valentina, used to follow me about with freckled bellies and sour, red, rust-gleaming bristles, silky in luster, stiff as pins to the touch. "Don't let them loll in the driveway," said Frances. That was when I warned her, "You'd better not hurt them. Those animals have become a part of me." Well, had those creatures become a part of me? I hesitated to come clean with Dahfu and to ask him right out bluntly whether he could see their influence. Secretly investigating myself, I felt my cheekbones. They stuck out like the mushrooms that grow from the trunks of trees, those mushrooms which prove to be as white as lard when you break them open. Under my helmet, my fingers crept toward my eyelashes. Pigs' eyelashes occur only on the upper lid. I had some on the lower, but they were sparse and blunt. When a boy I had practiced to become like Houdini and tried to pick up needles from the floor with my eyelashes while hanging upside down from the foot of my bed. He had done it. I never managed to, but that was not because my eyelashes were too short. Oh, I had changed all right. Everybody changes. Change is ordained. Changes must come. But how? The king would say that they were directed by the master-image. And now I felt my jowls, my snout; I did not dare to look down at what had happened to me. Hams. Tripes, a whole caldron full of them. Trunk, a fat cylinder. It seemed to me that I couldn't even breathe without grunting. Brother! I put my hand over my nose and mouth and looked with distressed eyes at the king. But he heard the guttural vibration of the vocal cords and said, "What is the peculiar noise you are making, Henderson-Sungo?" "What does it sound like, King?" "I don't know. An animal syllable? Oddly, you look well after your exertion." "I don't feel so well. I'm not one of your summits. You know that as well as I do." "You show the work of a powerful and original although blockaded imagination." "Is that what you see?" I said. He said, "What I see is greatly mixed. Fantastic elements have fought forth from your body. Excrescences. You are an exceptional amalgam of vehement forces." He sighed and gave a quiet smile; his mood was very quiet just then. He said, "We do not speak in blame terms. So many factors are mediating. Fomenting. Promulgating. Everyone is different. A billion small things unperceived by the object of their influence. True, pure intelligence does best it can, but who can judge? Negative and positive elements strive, and we can only look at them and wonder or weep. You may sometimes see a clear case of angel and vulture in collision. The eye is of heaven, the nose gives a certain flare. But face and body are the book of the soul, open to the reader of science and sympathy." Grunting, I looked at him. "Sungo," he said, "listen painstakingly, and I will tell you what I have a strong conviction about." I did as he said, for I thought he might tell me something hopeful about myself. "The career of our specie," he said, "is evidence that one imagination after another grows literal. Not dreams. Not mere dreams. I say not mere dreams because they have a way of growing actual. At school in Malindi I read all of Bulfinch. And I say not mere dream. No. Birds flew, harpies flew, angels flew, Daedalus and son flew. And see here, it is no longer dreaming and story, for literally there is flying. You flew here, into Africa. All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems! You see," he said, "I sit here in Africa and devote myself to this in personal fashion, to my best ability, I am convinced. What Homo sapiens imagines, he may slowly convert himself to. Oh, Henderson, how glad I am that you are here! I have longed for somebody to discuss with. A companion mind. You are a godsend to me."

XIX

Around the palace was a vegetable and mineral junkyard. The trees were niggardly and grew with gnarls and spikes. Then there were the flowers, which also lay in the Sungo's department. My girls watered them and they thrived in those white hollow stones. The sun made the red blossoms extremely sleek and taut. Daily, I would come up from the den all shaken by my roaring, my throat grated, my head in fever and my eyes like wet soot, weak in the legs, and especially delicate and trembling in the knees. All I needed then was the weight of the sun to make me feel like a convalescent. You know how it is about some people when they convalesce from wasting diseases. They become strangely sensitive; they go around and muse; little sights pierce them, they get sentimental; they see beauty in all the corners. So, watched by all, I would go and bend over those flowers, I would stoop hopelessly with my eyes of damp soot at the bowls of petrified mineral junk filled with soaked humus and sniff the flowers and grunt and sigh with a sort of heavy, beady wretchedness, the Sungo pants sticking to me and the hair on my head, especially at the back, thriving. I was growing black curls, thicker than usual, like a merino sheep, very black, and they were unseating my helmet. Maybe my mind, beginning to change sponsors, so to speak, was stimulating the growth of a different man. Everybody knew where I was coming from, and I presume had heard me roaring. If I could hear Atti they could hear me. Watched by all, and watched dangerously by enemies, mine and the king's, I lumbered out into the yard and tried to smell the flowers. Not that they had a smell. They had only the color. But that was enough; it fell on my soul, clamoring, while Romilayu always came up behind to offer support, if needed. ("Romilayu, what do you think of these flowers? They are noisy as hell," I said.) At this time, when I must have seemed contaminated and dangerous due to contact with the lion, he did not shrink from me or seek safety in the background. He did not let me down. And since I love loyalty beyond anything else, I tried to show that I excused him from all his obligations to me. "You're a true pal," I said. "You deserve much more than a jeep from me. I want to add something to it." I patted him on the bushy head--my hand seemed very thick; each of my fingers felt like a yam--and then I grunted all the way back to my apartment. There I lay down to rest. I was all roared out. The very marrow was gone from my bones, so that they felt hollow. I lay on my side, heaving and groaning, with that expanded envelope, my belly. Sometimes I imagined that I was from the trotters to the helmet, all six feet four inches of me, the picture of that familiar animal, freckled on the belly, with broken tusks and wide cheekbones. True, inside, my heart ran with human feeling, but externally, in the rind if you like, I showed all the strange abuses and malformations of a lifetime. To tell the truth, I didn't have full confidence in the king's science. Down there in the den, while I went through the utmost hell, he would idle around, calm, easy and almost languid. He would tell me that the lioness made him feel very peaceful. Sometimes as we lay on the trestle after my exercises, all three of us together, he would say, "It is very restful here. Why, I am floating. You must give yourself a chance. You must try �" But I had almost blacked out, before, and I was not yet prepared to start floating. Everything was black and amber, down there in the den. The stone walls themselves were yellowish. Then straw. Then dung. The dust was sulphur-colored. The skin of the lioness lightened gradually from the dark of the spine, toward the chest a ground-ginger shade, and on the belly white pepper, and under the haunches she became as white as the Arctic. But her small heels were black. Her eyes also were ringed absolutely with black. At times she had a meat flavor on her breath. "You must try to make more of a lion of yourself," Dahfu insisted, and that I certainly did. Considering my handicaps, the king declared I was making progress. "Your roaring still is choked. Of course it is natural, as you have such a lot to purge," he would say. That was no lie, as everyone knows. I would have hated to witness my own antics and hear my own voice. Romilayu admitted he had heard me roar, and you couldn't blame the rest of the natives for thinking that I was Dahfu's understudy in the black arts, or whatever they accused him of practicing. But what the king called pathos was actually (I couldn't help myself) a cry which summarized my entire course on this earth, from birth to Africa; and certain words crept into my roars, like "God," "Help," "Lord have mercy," only they came out "Hooolp!" "Moooorcy!" It's funny what words sprang forth. "Au secours," which was "Secoooooooor" and also "De profooooondis," plus snatches from the "Messiah" (He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, etcetera). Unbidden, French sometimes comes back to me, the language in which I used to taunt my little friend Fran�s about his sister. So I would roar and the king would sit with his arm about his lioness, as though they were attending an opera performance. She certainly looked very formal in attire. After a dozen or so of these agonizing efforts I would feel dim and dark within the brain and my arms and legs would give out. Allowing me a short rest, he made me try again and again. Afterward he was very sympathetic. He would say, "I assume now you are feeling better, Mr. Henderson?" "Yes, better." "Lighter?" "Sure, lighter, too, Your Honor." "More calm?" Then I would begin to snort. I was all jolted up within. My face was boiling; I was lying in the dust, and I would sit up to look at the two of them. "How are your emotions?" "Like a caldron, Your Highness, a regular caldron." "I see you are laboring with a lifetime accumulation." Then he would say, almost pityingly, "You are still afraid of Atti?" "Damn right I am. I'd sooner jump out of a plane. I wouldn't be half so scared. I applied for paratroops in the war. Come to think of it, Your Highness, I think I could bail out at fifteen thousand feet in these pants and stand a good chance." "Your humor is delicious, Sungo." This man was completely lacking in what we all know as civilized character. "I am sure that you soon will begin to feel something of what it is to be a lion. I am convinced of your capacity. The old self is resisting?" "Oh yes, I feel that old self more than ever," I said. "I feel it all the time. It's got a terrific grip on me." I began to cough and grunt, and I was in despair. "As if I were carrying an eight-hundred-pound load--like a Gal�gos turtle. On my back." "Sometimes a condition must worsen before bettering," he said, and he began to tell me of diseases he had known when he was on the wards as a student, and I tried to picture him as a medical student in white coat and white shoes instead of the velvet hat adorned with human teeth and the satin slippers. He held the lioness by the head; her broth-colored eyes watched me; those whiskers, suggesting diamond scratches, seemed so cruel that her own skin shrank from them at the base. She had an angry nature. What can you do with an angry nature? This was why, when I returned from the den, I felt as I did in the torrid light of the yard, with its stone junk and the red flowers. Horko's bridge table was set up under the umbrella for lunch, but first I went to rest and get my wind back, and I would think, "Well, maybe every guy has his own Africa. Or if he goes to sea, his own ocean." By which I meant that as I was a turbulent individual, I was having a turbulent Africa. This is not to say, however, that I think the world exists for my sake. No, I really believe in reality. That's a known fact. Each day I grew more aware that everybody knew where I had spent the morning and feared me for it--I had arrived like a dragon; maybe the king had sent for me to help him defy the Bunam and overturn the religion of the whole tribe. And I tried to explain to Romilayu at least that Dahfu and I were not practicing any evil. "Look, Romilayu," I told him, "the king just happens to have a very rich nature. He didn't have to come back and put himself at the mercy of his wives. He did it because he hopes to benefit the whole world. A fellow may do many a crazy thing, and as long as he has no theory about it we forgive him. But if there happens to be a theory behind his actions everybody is down on him. That's how it is with the king. But he isn't hurting me, old fellow. It's true it sounds like it, but don't you believe it. I make that noise of my own free will. If I don't look well, that's because I haven't been feeling well; I have a fever, and the inside of my nose and throat are inflamed. (Rhinitis?) I guess the king would give me something for it if I asked him but I don't feel like telling him." "I don't blame you, sah." "Don't get me wrong. The human race needs guys like this king more than ever. Change must be possible! If not, it's too damn bad." "Yes, sah." "Americans are supposed to be dumb but they are willing to go into this. It isn't just me. You have to think about white Protestantism and the Constitution and the Civil War and capitalism and winning the West. All the major tasks and the big conquests were done before my time. That left the biggest problem of all, which was to encounter death. We've just got to do something about it. It isn't just me. Millions of Americans have gone forth since the war to redeem the present and discover the future. I can swear to you, Romilayu, there are guys exactly like me in India and in China and South America and all over the place. Just before I left home I saw an interview in the paper with a piano teacher from Muncie who became a Buddhist monk in Burma. You see, that's what I mean. I am a high-spirited kind of guy. And it's the destiny of my generation of Americans to go out in the world and try to find the wisdom of life. It just is. Why the hell do you think I'm out here, anyway?" "I don' know, sah." "I wouldn't agree to the death of my soul." "Me Methdous, sah." "I know it, but that would never help me, Romilayu. And please don't try to convert me, I'm in trouble enough as it is." "I no bothah you." "I know. You are standing by me in my hour of trial, God bless you for it. I also am standing by King Dahfu until he captures his father, Gmilo. When I get to be a friend, Romilayu, I am a devoted friend. I know what it is to lie buried in yourself. One thing I have learned, though I am a hard man to educate. I tell you, the king has a rich nature. I wish I could learn his secret." Then Romilayu with the scars shining on his wrinkled face (manifestations of his former savagery) but with soft sympathetic eyes which contained a light that didn't come from the air (it could never have penetrated the shade, like an umbrella pine, that grew across his low forehead), wanted to know what secret I was trying to get from Dahfu. "Why," I said, "there's something about danger that doesn't perplex the guy. Look at all the things he has to fear, and still look at the way he lies on that sofa. You've never seen that. He has an old green sofa upstairs which must have been brought by the elephants a century ago. And the way he lies on it, Romilayu! And the females wait on him. But on the table near him he has those two skulls used at the rain ceremony, one his father's and the other his grandfather's. Are you married, Romilayu?" I asked him. "Yes, sah, two time. But now got one wife." "Why, that's just like me. And I have five children, including twin boys about four years old. My wife is very big." "Me, six children." "Do you worry about them? It's a wild continent still, no two ways about that. I am all the time worrying lest my two little kids wander off in the woods. We ought to get a dog--a big dog. But we'll be living in town anyway from now on. I am going to go to school. Romilayu, I am going to send a letter to my wife, and you are going to take it to Baventai and mail it. I promised you baksheesh, old man, and here are the papers for the jeep, made over to you. I wish I could take you back to the States with me, but since you have a family it's not practical." His face expressed very little pleasure at the gift. It wrinkled especially hard, and as I knew him by now I said, "Hell, man, don't be toying with tears all the time. What's to cry over?" "You in trouble, sah," he said. "Yes, I know I am. But since I'm a reluctant type of fellow, life has decided to use strong measures on me. I am a shunner, Romilayu, and so this serves me right. What's the matter, old pal, do I look bad?" "Yes, sah." "My feelings always did leak into my looks," I said. "That's the type of constitution I have. Is it that woman's head they showed us that worries you?" "Dem kill you, maybe?" said Romilayu. "Okay, that Bunam is a bad actor. The guy is a scorpion. But don't forget I am the Sungo. Doesn't Mummah protect me? I think maybe my person is sacred. Besides, with my twenty-two neck they'd have to have two guys to strangle me. Ha, ha! You mustn't worry about me, Romilayu. As soon as this business with the king is completed and I have helped him capture his dad, I'll join you in Baventai." "Please God, 'e mek quick," said Romilayu. When I mentioned the Bunam to the king, he laughed at me. "When I possess Gmilo, I am absolute master," he said. "But that animal is raging and killing out there in the savanna," I said, "and you act as though you had him safe in storage already." "Lions do not often leave a given locale," he said. "Gmilo is near here. Any day he will be encountered. Go and write the letter to your missis," Dahfu told me, laughing very low on his green sofa amid his black troop of nude women. "I'm going to write to her today," I said. So I went down to have lunch with the Bunam and Horko. Horko, the Bunam, and the Bunam's black-leather man were always waiting for me at the bridge table under the umbrella. "Gentlemen �" "Asi Sungo," said everyone. I was always aware that these people had heard me roaring and probably could smell the odor of the den on me. But I brazened it out. The Bunam, when he did glance my way, Which was rarely, was very somber. I thought, "I may get you first. No man can know that and you'd better not push me hard." The behavior of Horko on the other hand was invariably genial, and he hung out his red tongue and leaned over the little table with his knuckles like tree boles until it swayed with his weight. There was an air of intrigue under the transparent silk of the umbrella, while entertainers skipped for us out in the sun and feet flitted in and out of robes as Horko's people danced to amuse us and the old musician played his pendulum viol and others drummed and blew in the palace junkyard with its petrified brains of white stone and the red flowers growing in
the humus. After lunch came the daily water duty. The laboring women, with deep stress marks on the skin of their shoulders from the poles, carried me out into the lanes of the town where the dust of the ruts was reduced to a powder. The lone drum bumped after me; it seemed to warn people to stay away from this Henderson, the lion-contaminated Sungo. People still came to look at me out of curiosity, but not in their previous numbers, nor did they particularly want to be sprinkled by the crazy rain king. So that when we got to the dunghill at the center of town where the court was situated, I made a point of getting on my feet and sprinkling right and left. This was stoically taken. The magistrate in his crimson gown seemed as if he would have stopped me if he had had the power. However, nothing was done. The prisoner with the forked stick in his mouth leaned his face against the post he was tied to. "I hope you win, pal," I said to him and got back into my hammock. That afternoon I wrote to Lily as follows: "Honey, you are probably worried about me, but I suppose you have known all along that I was alive." _Lily claimed she could always tell how I was. She had some kind of privileged love-intuition.__ "The flight here was spectacular." _Like hovering all the way inside a jewel.__ "We are the first generation to see the clouds from both sides. What a privilege! First people dreamed upward. Now they dream both upward and downward. This is bound to change something, somewhere. For me the entire experience has been similar to a dream. I liked Egypt. Everybody was in basic white rags. From the air the mouth of the Nile looked like raveled rope. In some places the valley was green and it was yellow. The cataracts resembled seltzer. When we landed in Africa itself and Charlie and I put the show on the road, it wasn't exactly what I had hoped in leaving home." _As I discovered a pestilence when I entered the old lady's house and realized that I must put forth effort or go down in shame.__ "Charlie did not relax in Africa. I was reading R. F. Burton's _First Footsteps in East Africa__ plus Speke's_ Journal,__ and we didn't see eye to eye about any subject. So we parted company. Burton thought a lot of himself. He was very good with the �e and saber and he spoke everyone's language. I picture him as resembling General Douglas MacArthur in character, very conscious of having a historical role and thinking of classical Rome and Greece. Personally, I had to decide to follow a different course, as by any civilized standard I am done for. However, the geniuses love common life a great deal." _When he got back to England, Speke blew his brains out. This biographical detail I spared Lily. By genius I mean somebody like Plato or Einstein. Light itself was all Einstein needed. What could be more common?__ "There was a fellow around named Romilayu, and we became friends, though at first he was scared of me. I asked him to show me uncivilized parts of Africa. There are very few of these left. There are modern governments springing up and educated classes. I myself have met such educated African royalty and am the guest right now of a king who is almost an M. D. Nevertheless, I am off the beaten track, without question, and I have Romilayu (he is a wonderful guy) and Charlie himself, indirectly, to thank for that. To a certain extent it has been terrible, and continues to be. A few times I could have given up my soul as easily as a fish lets out a bubble. You know, Charlie is not a bad egg, at heart. But I shouldn't have come along on a honeymoon trip. I was a fifth wheel. She is one of those Madison Avenue dollies who have their back teeth pulled to produce a fashionable look (sunken cheeks)." _But on further recollection I see that the bride could never in the world forgive me for my behavior at the wedding. I was best man, and it was a formal occasion, and it wasn't only that I didn't kiss her, but that I was somehow alone in the cab with her instead of Charlie on the way down to Gemignano's restaurant after the ceremony. In my inside pocket, rolled up, was a sheet of music--Mozart's "Turkish Rondo" for two violins. I was drunk; how did I get through a violin lesson? At Gemignano's I was very obnoxious. I said, Is this Parmesan cheese or is it Rinso? I spat it out on the tablecloth, and after this I blew my nose in my foulard. Curse my memory for being so complete!__ "Did you send a wedding present for me or not? We must send a present. Get some steak knives, for God's sake. I want to tell you that I owe Charlie a lot. Without him I might have gone to the Arctic instead, among the Eskimos. This experience in Africa has been tremendous. It has been tough, it has been perilous, it has been something! But I've matured twenty years in twenty days." _Lily would not sleep in the igloo with me, but I continued my polar experiments anyway. I snared a few rabbits. I practiced spear-throwing. I built a sled, following the descriptions in the books. Four or five coats of frozen urine on the runners and they scooted over the snow like steel. I am positive that I could have arrived at the Pole. But I don't think I would have found what I was looking for there. In that case, I would have overwhelmed the world from the North with my trampling. If I couldn't have my soul it would cost the earth a catastrophe.__ "Here they don't know what tourists are, and therefore I'm not a tourist. There was a woman who told her friend, 'Last year we went around the world. This year I think we're going somewhere else.' Ha, ha! Sometimes the mountains here seem very porous, yellow and brown, and remind me of those old molasses sponge candies. I have my own room in the palace. This is a very primitive part of the world. Even the rocks look primitive. From time to time I have a smoldering fever. It feels like one of those coal mines that have been sealed because of combustion. Otherwise I seem to have benefited physically here, except that I have a persistent grunt. I wonder if this is new, or did you ever notice it at home? "How are the twins and Ricey and Edward? I would like to stop in Switzerland on the way home and see little Alice. I may have my teeth looked after, too, while in Geneva. You might tell Dr. Spohr for me that the bridge broke one morning at breakfast. Send me the spare c_/__o American Embassy, Cairo. It is in the trunk of the convertible under the wire spring that fastens the jack to the spare tire. I put it there for safekeeping. "I promised Romilayu a bonus if he would take me off the beaten track. We have made two stops. Humankind has to sway itself more intentionally toward beauty. I met a person who is called the Woman of Bittahness. She looked like a fat old lady, merely, but she had tremendous wisdom and when she took a look at me she thought I was a kind of odd ball, but that didn't faze her, and she said a couple of marvelous things. First she told me that the world was strange to me. It is strange to a child. But I am no child. This gave me pleasure and pain, both." _The Kingdom of Heaven is for children of the spirit. But who is this nosy, gross phantom?__ "Of course there's strangeness and strangeness. One kind of strangeness may be a gift, and another kind a punishment. I wanted to tell the old lady that everybody understands life except me--how did she account for it? I seem to be a very vain and foolish, rash person. How did I get so lost? And never mind whose fault it is, how do I get back?" _It is very early in life, and I am out in the grass. The sun flames and swells; the heat it emits is its love, too. I have this self-same vividness in my heart. There are dandelions. I try to gather up this green. I put my love-swollen cheek to the yellow of the dandelions. I try to enter into the green.__ "Then she told me I had grun-tu-molani, which is a native term hard to explain but on the whole it indicates that you want to live, not die. I wanted her to tell more about it. Her hair was like fleece and her belly smelled like saffron; she had a cataract in one eye. I'm afraid I will never be able to see her again, because I goofed and we had to get out. I can't go into details. But without Prince Itelo's friendship I might have been in serious trouble. I thought I had lost my opportunity to study my life with the aid of a really wise person, and I was very downcast over it. But I love Dahfu, king of the second tribe we came to. I am with him now and have been given an honorary title, King of the Rain, which is merely standard, I guess, like getting the key to the city from Jimmy Walker used to be. A costume goes with it. But I am not in a position to tell you much more, except in general terms. I am participating in an experiment with the king (almost an M. D., I told you) and this is an ordeal, daily." _The animal's face is pure fire to me. Every day. I have to close my eyes.__ "Lily, I probably haven't said this lately, but I have true feeling for you, baby, which sometimes wrings my heart. You can call it love. Although personally I think that word is full of bluff." _Especially for somebody like me, called from nonexistence into existence: what for? What have I got to do with husbands' love or wives' love? I am too peculiar for that kind of stuff.__ "When Napoleon was out at St. Helena, he talked a lot about morals. It was a little late. A lot he cared for them. So I'm not going to discuss love with you. If you think you are in the clear you can go ahead and talk about it. You said you couldn't live for sun, moon, and stars alone. You said your mother was dead when she wasn't, which was certainly very neurotic of you. You got engaged a hundred times and were always out of breath. You conned me. Is this how love acts? All right, then. But I expected you to help me. This king here is one of the most intelligent people in the world, and I have great faith in him, and he tells me I should move from the states that I myself make into the states which are of themselves. Like if I stopped making such a noise all the time I might hear something nice. I might hear a bird. Are the wrens still nesting in the cornices? I saw the straw sticking out and was amazed that they could get inside." _I__ _could never take after the birds. I would crash all the branches. I would have scared the pterodactyl from the skies.__ "I am giving up the violin. I guess I will never reach my object through it," _to raise my spirit from the earth, to leave the body of this death. I was very stubborn. I wanted to raise myself into another world. My life and deeds were a prison.__ "Well, Lily, everything is going to be different from now on. When I get back I am going to study medicine. My age is against it, but that's just too damn bad, I'm going to do it anyway. You can't imagine how keen I am to get into the laboratory. I can still remember the smell of those places. Formaldehyde. I'll be among a bunch of young kids, I realize, doing chemistry and zoology and physiology and physics and math and anatomy. I expect it to be quite an ordeal, especially dissecting the cadaver. " _"Once more, Death, you and me. "__ "However, I have had to have dealings with the dead anyway and haven't made a buck on any of them. I might as well do something in the interests of life, for a change. " _What is it, now, this great instrument? Played wrong, why does it suffer so? Right, how can it achieve so much, reaching even God?__ "Bones, muscles, glands, organs. Osmosis. I want you to enroll me at Medical Center and give my name as Leo E. Henderson. The reason for that I will tell you when I get home. Aren't you excited? Dearest girl, as a doctor's wife you'll have to be more clean, bathe more often and wash your things. You will have to get used to broken sleep, night calls and all of that. I haven't decided yet where to practice. I guess if I tried it at home I'd scare the neighbors to pieces. If I put my ear against their chests as an M. D., they'd jump out of their skins. "Therefore, I may apply for missionary work, like Dr. Wilfred Grenfell or Albert Schweitzer. Hey! Axel Munthe--how about him? Naturally China is out, now. They might catch us and brain-wash us. Ha, ha! But we might try India. I do want to get my hands on the sick. I want to cure them. Healers are sacred." _I__ _have been so bad myself I believe there must be a virtue in me, finally.__ "Lily, I'm going to quit knocking myself out." _I__ _don't think the struggles of desire can ever be won. Ages of longing and willing, willing and longing, and how have they ended? In a draw, dust and dust.__ "If Medical Center won't let me in, apply first to Johns Hopkins and then to every other joint in the book. Another reason why I want to stop in Switzerland is to look into the medical-school situation. I could talk to people there, explain things, and maybe they would let me in. "So get busy, dear, with those letters, and another thing: sell the pigs. I want you to sell Kenneth the Tamworth boar and Dilly and Minnie. Get rid of them. "We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects but endless fire." _Strange? Why shouldn't it be strange? It is strange. It is all strange.__ "I haven't been drinking at all, here, except for a few nips taken while writing this letter. At lunch they serve you a native beer called 'pombo' which is pretty good. They ferment the pineapple. Everybody is very animated here. Folks with feathers, folks with ribbons, with scarf decorations, rings, bracelets, beads, shells, gold walnuts. Some of the harem women walk like giraffes. Their faces slope forward. The king's face has very much of a slope. He is very brilliant and opinionated. "Sometimes I feel as though I had a whole troop of pygmies jumping up and down inside me, yelling and carrying on. Isn't that odd? Other times I am very calm, calmer than I have ever been. "The king believes that one should have a suitable image of himself �" I believe that I tried to explain to Lily what Dahfu's ideas were, but Romilayu lost the last few pages of the letter, and I suppose that it's just as well that he did, for when I wrote them I had had quite a lot to drink. In one I think I said, or maybe I merely thought it, "I had a voice that said, I want! _I__ want? I? It should have told me _she__ wants, _he__ wants, _they__ want. And moreover, it's love that makes reality reality. The opposite makes the opposite."