Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [28]
�!" I said to Dahfu, "I'm real sorry he didn't make it. It must be tough on him." "Oh, it was foregone he could not," said King Dahfu. "I was certain." Then I began in deepest, grimmest earnest, as only I can be grim, "Your Majesty--" I was excited to the bursting point. I swelled, I was sick, and my blood circulated peculiarly through my body--it was turbid and ecstatic both. It prickled within my face, especially in the nose, as if it might begin to discharge itself there. And as though a crown of gas were burning from my head, so I was tormented. And I said, "Sir, sire, I mean � let me! I must." If the king made an answer I couldn't have heard it just then, because I saw only one face in this hot and dry air, off to my left and deaf to the raging cries made by the crowd against Turombo. A face concentrated exclusively upon me, so that it was detached from all the world. This was the face of the examiner, the guy I had dealt with last night, the man Dahfu called the Bunam. That face! A stare of wrinkled and everlasting human experience was formed on it. I could feel myself how charged those veins of his must be. Ah, holy God! The guy was speaking to me, inexorable. By the furrows of his face and the pressure of his brows and the fullness of his veins he was conveying a message to me. And what he was saying I knew. I heard it. The silent speech of the world to which my most secret soul listened continually now came to me with spectacular clarity. Within--within I heard. Oh, what I heard! The first stern word was _Dummy!__ I was greatly shaken by this. And yet there was something there. It was true. And I was obliged, it was my bounden duty to hear. _And nevertheless you are a man. Listen! Harken unto me, you shmohawk! You are blind. The footsteps were accidental and yet the destiny could be no other. So now do not soften, oh no, brother, intensify rather what you are. This is the one and only ticket--intensify. Should you be overcome, you slob, should you lie in your own fat blood senseless, unconscious of nature whose gift you have betrayed, the world will soon take back what the world unsuccessfully sent forth. Each peculiarity is only one impulse of a series from the very heart of things--that old heart of things. The purpose will appear at last though maybe not to you.__ The voice did not sink away. It just stopped. Just like that, it finished what it had to say. But I understood now why the corpse had been quartered with me. The Bunam was behind it. He sized me up right. He had wanted to see whether I was strong enough to move the idol. And I had met the urdeal. Damn! I had met it at all costs. When I gripped the dead man, his weight had felt to me like the weight of my own limbs fallen asleep and ponderous, but I had fought this revulsion and overcome it, I had lifted up the man. And here was the examiner's grim, exalted, vein-full, knotted, silent face, announcing the results. I had passed. With highest marks. One hundred per cent. And I said, loudly. "This I must try." "What is that?" said Dahfu. "Your Highness," I said, "if it wouldn't be regarded as interference by a foreigner, I think that I could move the statue--the goddess Mummah. I would genuinely like to be of service, as I have certain capacities which ought to be put to definite use. I want to tell you that I didn't make out too well with the Arnewi, where I had a similar feeling. King, I had a great desire to do a disinterested and pure thing--to express my belief in something higher. Instead I landed in a lot of trouble. It's only right that I should make a clean breast." I was not in control of myself, and thus I wasn't sure how clear my words might be, though my purpose in the comprehensive sense must have been very plain. On the king's face I saw a very mingled look of curiosity and sympathy. "Do you not rush through the world too hard, Mr. Henderson?" "Oh, yes, King, I am very restless. But the fact of the matter is I just couldn't continue as I was, where I was. Something had to be done. If I hadn't come to Africa my only other choice would have been to stay in bed. Ideally--" "Yes, as to the ideal, I have the utmost fascination. What would it have been?" "Well, King, I can't really say. It's all a puzzle. There is some kind of service motivation which keeps on after me. I have always admired Doctor Wilfred Grenfell. You know I was just crazy for that man. I would have liked to go on errands of mercy. Not necessarily with a dog team. But that's just a detail." "Oh, I sensed," he said, "I should rather say, I intuited some such tendency." "Well, I'd be happy to talk about that afterward," I said. "Right now I am asking what is the situation? Could I try my strength against Mummah? I don't know what it is, but I just have a feeling that I could move her." He said, "I am obliged to tell you, Mr. Henderson, there may be consequences." I should have taken him up on this and asked him what he meant by that, but I trusted the guy and could not foresee any really bad consequences. But anyway, that burning, that craving, that flowing estuary--you see what I mean?--a powerful ambition had me and I was a goner. Moreover, the king smiled and thus half retracted his warning. "Do you really have conviction you can do it?" he said. "All I can say to you, King, is just let me at her. All I want to do is get my arms around her." I was in no state to identify the subtleties of the king's attitude. Now he had satisfied the requirements of his conscience, if any, and caught me, too. No man can do better than that, hey? But I had got caught up in the thing, and it had regard only to the unfinished business of years--_I__ _want, I want,__ and Lily, and the grun-tu-molani and the little colored kid brought home by my daughter from Danbury and the cat I had tried to destroy and the fate of Miss Lenox and the teeth and the fiddle and the frogs in the cistern and all the rest of it. However, the king had not yet given his consent. In his leopard mantle, walking with tense feet in a narrow-hipped gait, the Bunam came down from the box where he had been sitting with Horko. He was followed by the two wives with their large, shaved, delicate-looking heads and their gay short teeth. They were bigger than their husband and came along sauntering behind him and taking it easy. The examiner, or Bunam, stopped before the king and bowed. The women, too, bowed. Small signs passed between them and the king's wives and concubines, or whatever their classification was, while the examiner addressed Dahfu. He pointed his index finger upward near his ear like a starter's pistol, bending often and stiffly from the waist. He spoke rapidly but with regularity, and seemed to know his mind very well, and when he had finished he bowed his head again and bent his eyes on me sternly as before, with a world of significance. The veins in his forehead were very heavy. Dahfu turned to me in his gaudy hammock. In his fingers he still held the ribbons tied to the skull. "The view of the Bunam is you have been expected. Also you came in time