Only when he had satisfied his need for immediate action and his energy had flagged like a top losing momentum, could David Lingslay get a word in, and looking through the eyes of the forty-year-old man at the flushed, wooly body in the mirror, he concluded:
“I am ridiculous.”
Yet this was but a timid observation that remained on the periphery, as if it in no way concerned the forty-year-old gentleman. Unaccustomed to this nakedness, the forty-year-old man felt a shudder of cold. Walking around the pajamas spread out on the carpet, he made for the wardrobe, took out a fresh robe and wrapped it around his frame.
For a moment he wondered if he shouldn’t go back to bed, but then it hit him: Change the sheets! He wanted to ring the bellboy, but here David Lingslay intervened once more, being ashamed to come face to face with a bellboy at that odd hour, and the forty-year-old man let him win, climbing into the armchair and resolving to stay there till morning.
Having gotten settled, the forty-year-old man started carefully probing his belly, pressing it with all his strength, and then feeling the glands under his arms. The survey yielded no definite results, and the forty-year-old man had no alternative but to wait.
David Lingslay tried to emerge again in this space of waiting, quickly formulating a thought:
“I’m a coward. I’m scared of death. What nonsense! Living these three weeks among plague victims I’ve known all too well that I could die any day.”
Yet what David Lingslay knew in no way concerned the forty-year-old man, who refused to let this information sink in, and just squirmed all the more in the armchair.
“I’ll die, I have to die,” David Lingslay tried to convince the forty-year-old man. “What’s so odd about that? It’s simple: I was here, but soon I’ll be gone.”
But the forty-year-old man could in no way fathom this simple fact, and he squirmed all the more. And David Lingslay shuddered, sensing that the forty-year-old man wanted to scream.
“You must not! They’ll hear! The servants will come! The shame!” he feverishly chided.
The forty-year-old man couldn’t have cared less at that moment about the servants. He felt something black and slippery coating his limbs and he gave a long bellow, like an animal, until David Lingslay plugged his mouth with a fist.
“They’ll hear!”
David Lingslay listened carefully for a moment. Not a sound. Only now did he recall that he was the sole occupant of the entire floor.
“Hush! Hush!” he tenderly calmed the forty-year-old man, standing there naked in his brocade robe. He was cold, and his teeth chattered.
Taking advantage of his momentary apathy, David Lingslay tried to reason further.
As an experienced businessman, he was used to calculating the assets and liabilities before proceeding to liquidate a company. And now, from his armchair, as if on high, David Lingslay tried to look back over the life he’d lived and roughly balance its books. Peering over his shoulder, he saw an inconceivable mass of digits flowing toward him from all sides, an impenetrable, all-consuming lava, surrounding his armchair like a gray sea of billions of rats, and in instinctive horror he folded his trembling bare legs under him.
The only island of green flourishing amid this gray sea of digits was his love of the past few weeks, and like a castaway reaching for a plank, David Lingslay grabbed hold of this island and tried to stand on it, to secure himself on its narrow shores. But at that moment the forty-year-old man, who loathed this dead plague-ridden woman, seized him by the arm, fearing to set foot on her legacy.
His life had turned out to be a loss-making enterprise, and David Lingslay felt little regret at closing its ledgers. Had it been worth turning that heavy quern of millions, day and night, for twenty long years like a convict, amply lubricating it with sticky red grease, only to check the balance sheet to find that the laboriously built flour mills were infested with billions of rat-digits, a numberless, ravenous army, already whetting their teeth on the very man who had regarded them as his tool, as a means, and who now suddenly found himself little more than a means to their own mysterious end?
And Mr. David Lingslay, as if sitting an exam, duly replied:
“No, it wasn’t worth it.”
“So I’ll die – I’ll die and nothing will remain of me, not a trace…”
Formulated this way, the thought seemed indigestible even to David Lingslay, and like a stubborn case of hiccups it kept popping back into his throat.
“Hold on… Let’s be sober about this: writers, thinkers, and artists all die. They remain forever in their creations. What have I created?”
Mr. David Lingslay answered:
“Money, possessions.”
A thankless, nameless sort of creation. His heirs would carve up the possessions. There would be nothing left, not even his name. They would duly strike his name from his bank accounts the world over. What would remain? The dull hatred of millions of workers, for whom he had been a terrible legend? Even there they would scrape away his name, replace it with another. In five years he would scarcely be recalled.
David Lingslay for the first time comprehended what he had used to call the philanthropic psychosis of aging millionaires, all the Carnegies and Rockefellers who splurged enormous sums on worthy causes, establishing million-dollar foundations in their own names. He felt the hollering terror of their old age in the face of oblivion, their desire to be commemorated, to latch onto something at all costs, if only through the syllables of their surname. For the first time he understood, he empathized, he absolved them with a knowing smile. The poor devils! By financing someone else’s idea, they deluded themselves that they were the ones being immortalized, as long as they could pin their calling card onto it, though it was only the balance in their checkbooks that brought the two together.
This made even the forty-year-old man a bit ill at ease, as if the earth were sliding from under his feet, while his fingers clutched at thin air. The forty-year-old gentleman was in no state to compete with the logical deductions of Mr. David Lingslay, and his blind animal instinct began convulsively searching for something to cling to, like a barnacle sensing the approach of a wave that would sweep it away, feverishly searching for a protrusion, for chinks in the rock to latch onto and survive. Groping in the void of his consciousness, the forty-year-old gentleman suddenly stumbled upon a familiar face, and his back arched like a whipped dog…
David Lingslay was childless. This tiny anxiety gnawed at him like a worm, though he wouldn’t have admitted this, not even to himself. Having confirmed in his thirty-sixth year that he would not be having children, Lingslay had thought about his family. He had once had a brother, but apparently he’d starved to death in some hole outside London. For a man as devoid of any family sentiment as Lingslay, this information made not the slightest dent. He was occasionally bothered by a twinge of guilt (he had once taken the opportunity to make a tiny correction to their father’s will). Thus looking through his family, he recalled that his luckless brother had left behind some kin. Lingslay resolved to find them. After a long search he found that of the whole brood, only a twenty-year-old boy named Archibald was left, earning a living in London.
Hurrying to send him a first-class liner ticket and a few thousand dollars to wrap up his affairs in Europe, Lingslay wrote a laconic letter suggesting that his nephew move to New York to study.
What showed up was a tall, bony man with good hazel eyes, his face sunken and ravaged, cracked and cut with premature wrinkles, wisps of chestnut hair falling over his high, wise forehead. He moved into the left wing of his mansion.