“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.”
XX
Romilayu and I said good-by in the morning and when he finally set off with the letter to Lily I had a very unwholesome feeling. My very stomach seemed to drop as his wrinkled face looked through the closing gates of the palace. I believe that he expected at the last minute to be called back by his changeable and irrational employer. But I only stood there in the carapace-like helmet and those pants which made me seem as though I had gotten lost from my troop of Zouaves. The gate shut on Romilayu’s scarred and seamed gaze, and I felt unreasonably low. But Tamba and Bebu diverted me from my sadness. As usual they saluted me by lying in the dust and putting my foot on their heads, and then Tamba settled herself on her belly so that Bebu might do the joxi with her feet. She trod her back, spine, neck, and buttocks, which seemed to give Tamba heavenly pleasure. She closed her eyes, groaning and basking. I thought I must try this one day; it must be beneficial, it contented these people so; however, this was not the day for it, I was too sad.
The air was warming quickly but there were still arrears of the stinging cold of night; I felt it through the thin green stuff I wore. The mountain, the one named for Hummat, was yellow; the clouds were white and had great weight. They lay at about the height of Hummat’s throat and shoulders, like a collar. Indoors, I sat and waited for the morning to increase in warmth, hands folded, mentally preparing for my daily exposure to Atti while I earnestly tried to reason: I must change. I must not live in the past, it will ruin me. The dead are my boarders, eating me out of house and home. The hogs were my defiance. I was telling the world that it was a pig. I must begin to think how to five. I must break Lily from blackmail and set love on a true course. Because after all Lily and I were very lucky. But then what could an animal do for me? In the last analysis? Really? A beast of prey? Even supposing that an animal enjoys a natural blessing? We had our share of this creature-blessing until infancy ended. But now aren’t we required to complete something else-project number two-the second blessing? I couldn’t tell such things to the king, he was so stuck on lions. I have never seen a person so gone on any creatures. And I couldn’t refuse to do what he wanted owing to the way I felt about him. Yes, in some ways the fellow was remarkably like a lion, but that didn’t prove lions had made him so. This was more of Lamarck. In college we had laughed Lamarck right out of the classroom. I remembered what the teacher said, that this was a bourgeois idea of the autonomy of the individual mind. All sons of rich men, we were, or almost all, and yet we laughed at the bourgeois ideas until we almost split a gut. Well, I reflected, wrinkling my brow to the limit, missing Romilayu keenly, this is the payoff of a lifetime of action without thought. If I had to shoot at that cat, if I had to blow up frogs, if I had to pick up Mummah without realizing what I was getting myself into, it was not out of line to crouch on all fours and roar and act the lion. I might have been learning about the grun-tu-molani instead, under Willatale. But I will never regret my feeling toward this man-Dahfu, I mean; I would have done a great deal more to keep his friendship.