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 de-liberately 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.”
“Then doesn’t this apply to you, too?”
He said, with a nod of full agreement, “Oh, certainly. It applies. It applies to everyone. Though nothing may be visible, still it is heard, like radio. It is on almost all the frequencies. And all tremble, and all are wincing, in greater or lesser degree.”
“And you think there is a cure?” I said.
“Why, I surely believe there is. Otherwise all the better imagining will have to be surrendered. Anyways, I will not urge you to come in with me and do as I have done. As my father Gmilo did. As Gmilo’s father Suffo did. As we all did. No. If it is positively beyond you we may as well exchange good-by and go separate ways.”
“Wait a minute now, King, don’t be hasty,” I said. I was mortified and frightened; nothing could have been more painful than to lose my connection with him. Something had gone off in my breast, my eyes filled, and I said, almost choking, “You wouldn’t brush me off like that would you, King? You know how I feel.” He realized how hard I was taking it; nevertheless he repeated that perhaps it would be better if I left, for although we were temperamentally suited as friends and he had deep affection for me, too, and was grateful for the opportunity to know me and also for my services to the Wariri in lifting up Mummah, still, unless I understood about lions, no deepening of the friendship was possible. I simply had to know what this was about. “Wait a minute, King,” I said. “I feel tremendously close to you and I’m prepared to believe what you tell me.”
“Sungo, thank you,” he said. “I also am close to you. It is very mutual. But I require more deep relationship. I desire to be understood and communicated to. We have to develop an underlying similarity which lies within you by connection with the lion. Otherwise, how shall we maintain the truth agreement we made?”
Moved as anything, I said, “Oh, this is hard, King, to be threatened with loss of friendship.”
The threat was exceedingly painful also to him. Yes, I saw that he suffered almost as hard as I did. Almost. Because who can suffer like me? I am to suffering what Gary is to smoke. One of the world’s biggest operations.
“I don’t understand it,” I said.
He took me up to the door and made me look through the grating at Atti the lioness, and in that soft, personal tone peculiar to him which went strangely to the center of the subject, he said, “What a Christian might feel in Saint Sophia’s church, which I visited in Turkey as a student, I absorb from lion. When she gives her tail a flex, it strikes against my heart. You ask, what can she do for you? Many things. First she is unavoidable. Test it, and you will find she is unavoidable. And this is what you need, as you are an avoider. Oh, you have accomplished momentous avoidances. But she will change that. She will make consciousness to shine. She will burnish you. She will force the present moment upon you. Second, lions are experiencers. But not in haste. They experience with deliberate luxury. The poet says, ‘The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.’ Let us embrace lions also in the same view. Moreover, observe Atti. Contemplate her. How does she stride, how does she saunter, how does she he or gaze or rest or breathe? I stress the respiratory part,” he said. “She do not breathe shallow. This freedom of the intercostal muscles and her abdominal flexibility” (her lower belly, which was disclosed to our view, was sheer white) “gives the vital continuity between her parts. It brings those brown jewel eyes their hotness. Then there are more subtle things, as how she leaves hints, or elicits caresses. But I cannot expect you to see this at first. She has much to teach you.”