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Raising Pennington

I learned to raise the dead from an old juju man. Why he made me a present of the mystery of mysteries I don't know. Perhaps he hoped to empty the next world of white men, having had -- he said in Kikuyu -- a belly full of them in this. I was grateful. You recall Pennington, whom I esteemed as a friend despite his appetite for native women, had his throat cut "ear to ear" by a mutinous porter. The long safari days lacked savor in his absence, and so I resolved to put the secret of resurrection to the test on my dead chum.

I went to the wild forest people, who had made an idol of him. He was in excellent condition, dry and intact. Thankfully, his head remained atop his neck, else all the charms in the world would not have raised him. Despite his venerable status, I purchased him with a minimum of haggling for a dozen green umbrellas and a full-length portrait of Taft. The portrait was especially admired and hotly contested by two natives, each claiming to have unearthed Pennington after his hasty interment. (We had feared new outrages at the hands of the porters and were eager to be on our way.)

"Sir, the fat man rightfully belongs to me as it was I who found Mr. Pennington while digging for turnips," said one in perfect mission English.

"This black man is crazy!" shouted his rival for the President's lovingly rendered obesity. "I discovered him while digging for yams!"

They would have come to blows had not a meteor fallen on them, putting an end to their disagreeable wrangling.

The chief of the wild forest people divided the portrait between the widows -- an excellent settlement, I thought. I put Pennington under my arm (he weighed little, was stiff and easy to carry), and ran to the rest house where I intended to recite the savage syllables. (I'm sorry, but I cannot divulge them. Not even Houdini could pry the secret from my lips!)

Before I could finish, the Bishop appeared and reviled me.

"Sacrilege! Abomination and horror!" he whinnied. "The road to the afterlife isn't a boulevard to stroll to and fro. The dead had best stay dead."

In no mood to argue, I wrapped him up in his skirts and thrashed him with a carpet beater.

"Unnatural monster!" he shrieked. "Perversion of nature!"

I thumped him once more for good measure, then pushed him out the door into a nearby slough.

I threw Pennington over my shoulders and ran all the way to Mombasa. I now had the wild idea of exhibiting my new-found powers in the Mombasa Club to vex Mr. Willoughby -- chief detractor of my researches into the heart of Africa, belittling them as "lacking scientific rigor." Here is rigor of the first order, I said to myself -- meaning Pennington, who in his extremity embodied the ultimate in rigor. It was not only Mr. Willoughby's disdain that irked, but his constant mockery in front of Mrs. Willoughby -- she whom I desired above all others!

I entered without challenge despite my odd-looking parcel. (The Mombasa Club has been witness to far worse. You have only to recall the spontaneous combustion of the Polish courier during port and cigars, the lion in the cloak-room, or the half-naked Masai trailing a bundle of black strings across the foyer, his hair dressed in red mud.)

Mr. Willoughby crackled his newspaper resentfully.

"How dare you disturb our meditations?" he barked.

Brigadier Craig, who had served with distinction in India, vilified me for having failed to wipe my feet before treading the African dust over "our portion -- our bit of civilization."

Undaunted, I put Pennington on the snooker table.

"Take that dirty thing away!" the majordomo fulminated as he beat a gong into the already tense atmosphere.

The members threw up their hands in disgust.

"Prepare to witness the extraordinary!" I shouted.

Something in my tone must have convinced them of the seriousness of my purpose for they laid down their arms.

"The man you see before you is dead," I continued theatrically.

I invited them to assure themselves of the truth of the matter. They did in spite of Pennington's patently unwholesome condition. They held a mirror to his blackened lips and tickled his feet with an ostrich feather. Try as they might they could not get a rise out of him; not so much as a twitch.

"This man was murdered, buried, dug up, and made a fetish by the wild forest people. In life he was my friend, and I have been given the words to restore him once again to the living."

Their skepticism gave way to astonishment as I began Pennington's resuscitation. I spoke the words softly into his ear, to safeguard them from the gentlemen of the Mombasa Club, who were sure to abuse them given the opportunity.

Pennington opened his eyes.

The gentlemen gasped.

"What have you done?" he asked as he looked about him at the horns bristling on the club-room walls. He worked his jaw a moment to get the stiffness out and repeated the question, this time with feeling: "For God's sake, what have you done!"

"I've brought you back to life, man!" I cried in exasperation.

"Meddler! Philanthropist! I was perfectly content as an idol. I was treated with the utmost respect."

Pritchett, chief of the Mombasa constabulary, had been summoned to put down the insurrection. He arrived with a troop of askari policemen.

"There is no insurrection," I said scornfully.

Pritchett referred to his notebook:

"'Insurrection at the Mombasa Club,' reported shortly after 2 o'clock." He looked at his watch. "It is now a quarter past." He looked to me as if expecting applause for his efficiency. I offered none.

"Resurrection!" I screamed instead. "There has been a resurrection."

"Resurrection, insurrection -- it amounts to the same thing," the imperturbable Pritchett replied. "Both are in violent opposition to the established order; as such, they are illegal."

He escorted me to the court house where I was given a stiff fine. Pennington, who bore still the marks of his rough burial, created a sensation in the street.

"There is also the matter of the Bishop," said the judge after I had paid for Pennington.

"What about the Bishop?" I asked innocently.

"His majesty has been sullied."

The Bishop took the stage with his muddied surplice as "evidence."

I was about to denounce him as a prig but was brutally gaveled down by his Lordship.

I paid -- exorbitantly -- for my happy desecration of the Bishop and left without another word.

I returned Pennington to the wild forest people. They gave me back the green umbrellas but refused to part with either half of Taft. I suspect the image of his immense corporeality nourished their dreams, which are said to be vivid. They were ecstatic and quickly gave him back the death I had deprived him of, if only temporarily. He seemed happy as he suffered their exaltation. For my part, I felt decidedly let down.

"It ought to have been a coup de théâtre," I complained to Sarah Bernhardt, whom Wilde, then the world called "Divine."

She had just reprised her legendary performance in a revival of La dame aux camélias behind the same proscenium arch where Pavlova had danced for us (and won the affection of Captain Slade). The Kikuyus did not respond to the play: they are a stolid people, slow to make a public demonstration of the movements of the heart.

"One never knows how our work will be received," Mme. Bernhardt sighed. "If we did, there would be no flops in the theater."

She coughed into Camille's blood-stained handkerchief.

"Your dead friend does have a certain je ne sais quoi," she continued. "Rather more now that he's dead, I think, though I did not know him before."

I could not argue. Though I loved Pennington, his debauched life had been a secret shame to me, who am certainly no prude as my relations with Anna and Mrs. Willoughby attest.

The wild forest people carried Pennington into the wilderness. I would not see him alive again though, from time to time, I would see him dead: under a juniper tree, in an alley or a swamp with the moonlight on his face. I think he meant me well. I think he appeared to me during times of great unease to make me easy in my mind. To convey to me mutely that this life, from which he departed twice, is the shadow of the next. To safari me, if I should desire it, into his country. Though I have been tempted, there was something in his face -- a sadness which holds me back. Even so, I would have gone with him after leaving the City of Radiant Objects if Wilbur had not taken me to America in his aeroplane (in what Freud would later call "my flight from death").

"The wild forest people have a much healthier attitude towards these things," Mme. Bernhardt said in ringing tones. Though an old woman, she retained her bell-like voice. "They aren't so afraid of death."

She shivered uncontrollably; I would have lit a fire for her, but the night was warm.

"It will come to me soon," she said, her voice betraying her emotion.

She looked to me as if for a cue -- a word that she might answer and so keep the dialogue going; but I did not know this play, if play it was. She fell silent, letting the camellias drop from her hands.

"I would see you home," I said, embarrassed, "but I must stay here. In Africa. My work ..."

She waved away my explanations.

"Paris is not so pleasant this time of year," she said, walking towards the Indian Ocean.

The next day she was to begin filming La dame aux camélias, which I would later see in Cincinnati with the King of all the Belgians. (Or was that a dream?)

"Nothing is real," she called from the rail of her private steamship. "All is theater -- even your friend, his death, his deification -- theater."

She dropped the blood-stained handkerchief into the harbor. The blood was not real. The harbor seemed to be real, but I may have been mistaken. These things are difficult. Sometimes I feel the world slipping away. These things are difficult to tell. Albert knows; he tried to measure it. Tried and failed.

"Adieu!" Mme. Bernhardt cried over the throbbing of the engines.

In a little while (less than I would have thought possible!), the ship crossed the horizon, leaving nothing but a black plume of smoke to mark its place. Soon that, too, disappeared.

"Life is an illusion," she said from beyond the horizon.

(How is it possible I heard?)

"The illusion, however, is terribly attractive."

Her voice ceased.

I turned from the ocean as the light went out of the sky and walked into Africa -- into its jungle where the illusion is most powerful of all.

A lion roared. A tree exploded into a shower of golden birds.

I crouched in terror of a lion that might or might not be real and waited.

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