Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [99]
is not necessary," he said. However, I refused to take the hint. I sat before him in my white pith hat. Of course the king's extreme blackness of color made him fabulously strange to me. He was as black as--as wealth. By contrast his lips were red, and they swelled; and on his head the hair lived (to say that it grew wouldn't be sufficient). Like Horko's, his eyes revealed a red tinge. And even seated on the backless leather chair he was still, as on the sofa or in the hammock, sumptuously at rest. "King," I said. From the determination with which I began he understood me and he said, "Mr. Henderson, you are entitled to any explanation within my means to make. You see, the Bunam felt sure you would be strong enough to move our Mummah. I, when I saw what a construction you had, agreed with him. At once." "Well," I said, "okay, so I'm strong. But how did it all happen? It seems to me that you were sure it would. You bet me. "That was in a spirit of wager and nothing else," he said. "I knew as little about it as you do." "Does it always happen like that?" "Very far from always. Exceedingly seldom." I looked my canniest, greatly lifting up my brows because I wanted him to see that the phenomenon was not yet explained to my satisfaction. Meanwhile I was trying also to make him out. And there were no airs or ostentations about the man. He was thoughtful in his replies but without making thinker's faces. And when he spoke of himself the facts he told me matched what I had heard from Prince Itelo. At the age of thirteen he had been sent to the town of Lamu and afterward he had gone to Malindi. "All preceding kings for several generations," he said, "have had to be acquainted with the world and have been sent at that same time of life to the school. You show up from nowhere, attend school, then go back. One son in each generation is sent out to Lamu. An uncle goes with him and waits for him there." "Your Uncle Horko?" "Yes, it is Horko. He was the link. He waited in Lamu nine years for me. I had moved on with Itelo. I didn't care for that life in the south. The young men at school were spoiled. Kohl on their eyes. Rouge. Chitter-chatter. I wanted more than that." "Well, you are very serious," I said. "It's obvious. That was how I sized you up from the first." "After Malindi, Zanzibar. From there Itelo and I shipped as deckhands. Once to India and Java. Then up the Red Sea--Suez. Five years in Syria at denominational school. The treatment was most generous. From my point of view the science instruction was most especially worth while. I was going for an M. D. degree, and would have done it except for the death of my father." "That's just remarkable," I said. "I'm only trying to put it together with yesterday. With the skulls, and that fellow, the Bunam, and the amazons and the rest of it." "It is interesting, I do admit. But also it is not up to me, Henderson--Henderson-Sungo--to make the world consistent." "Maybe you were tempted not to come back?" I asked. We sat close together, and, as I have noted, his blackness made him fabulously strange to me. Like all people who have a strong gift of life, he gave off almost an extra shadow--I swear. It was a smoky something, a charge. I used to notice it sometimes with Lily and was aware of it particularly that day of the storm in Danbury when she misdirected me to the water-filled quarry and then telephoned her mother from bed. She had it noticeably then. It is something brilliant and yet overcast; it is smoky, bluish, trembling, shining like jewel water. It was similar to what I had felt also arising from Willatale on the occasion of kissing her belly. But this King Dahfu was more strongly supplied with it than any person I ever met. In answer to my last question he said, "For more reasons than one I could have wished my father to live longer." As I conceived, the old fellow must have been strangled. I guess I looked remorseful at having reminded him of his father, for he laughed to put me at ease again, and said, "Do not worry, Mr. Henderson--I must call you Sungo, for you are the Sungo