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 …”
“Your Highness, as to that … who can say? If you think the omens are good, I’ll go along with you. Listen, Your Highness, I look like a bruiser, and I am gifted in strange ways, mostly physical; but also I am very sensitive. A while back you said something to me about envy and I must admit you kind of hurt my feelings. That’s like a poem I once read called, ‘Written in Prison.’ I can’t remember it all, but part of it goes, ‘I envy e’en the fly its gleams of joy, in the green woods’ and it ends, ‘The fly I envy settling in the sun on the green leaf and wish my goal was won.’ Now, King, you know as well as I do what goal I’m talking about. Now, Your Highness, I really do not wish to live by any law of decay. Just tell me, how long has the world got to be like this? Why should there be no hope for suffering? It so happens that I believe something can be done, and this is why I rushed out into the world as you have noted. All kinds of motives behind this. There’s my wife, Lily, and then there are the children-you must have quite a few of them yourself, so maybe you’ll understand how I feel.. ”
I read sympathy in his face, and I wiped myself with my Woolworth bandanna. My nose, independently, itched within, and seemingly there was nothing I could do for it.
“Truly I regret if I wounded you,” he said.
“Well, that’s all right. I’m a pretty good judge of men and you are a fine one. And from you I can take it. Besides, truth is truth. Confidentially, I have envied flies, too. All the more reason to crash out of prison. Right? If I had the mental constitution to live inside the nutshell and think myself the king of infinite space, that would be just fine. But that’s not how I am. King, I am a Becomer. Now you see your situation is different. You are a Be-er. I’ve just got to stop Becoming. Jesus Christ, when am I going to Be? I have waited a hell of a long time. I suppose I should be more patient, but for God’s sake, Your Highness, you’ve got to understand what it’s like with me. So I am asking you. You’ve got to let me out there. Why it is, I can’t say, but I feel called upon to do it, and this may be my main chance.” And I spoke to the examiner, who stood in his leopard mantle and cuffs, holding up the bone rod, and said, “Excuse me, sir.” I held out a few fingers to him and said, “I will be with you soon.” In the heat of my body and fever of mind I couldn’t speak with any restraint whatever and I said, “King, I’m going to give you the straight poop about myself, as straight as I can make it. Every man born has to carry his life to a certain depth-or else! Well, King, I’m beginning to see my depth. You wouldn’t expect me to back away now, would you?”