"No, certainly not," said Sammler.
What is One?
III
Homeward.
On Second Avenue the springtime scraping of roller skates was heard on hollow, brittle sidewalks, a soothing harshness. Turning from the new New York of massed apartments into the older New York of brownstone and wrought-iron, Sammler saw through large black circles in a fence daffodils and tulips, the mouths of these flowers open and glowing, but on the pure yellow the fallout of soot already was sprinkled. You might in this city become a flower-washer. There was an additional business opportunity for Wallace and Feffer.
He walked once around Stuyvesant Park, an ellipse within a square with the statue of the peg legged Dutchman, corners bristling with bushes. Tapping the flagstones with his ferrule every fourth step, Sammler held Dr. Govinda Lal's manuscript under his arm. He had brought it to read on the subway, though he didn't like being conspicuous in public, passing pages back and forth before the eye, pressing back the hat brim and his face intensely concentrated. He seldom did that.
Drop a perpendicular from the moon. Let it intersect a grave. Inside, a man till now tended, kept warm, manicured. Those heavy rainbow colors came. Decay. Mr. Sammler had once been on far more easy terms with death. He had lost ground, regressed. He was very full of his nephew, a man quite different from himself. He admired him, loved him. He could not cope with the full sum of facts about him. Remote considerations seemed to help--the moon, its lifelessness, its deathlessness. A white corroded pearl. By a sole eye, seen as a sole eye.
Sammler had learned to be careful on public paths in New York, invariably dog-fouled. Within the iron-railed plots the green lights of the grass were all but put out, burned by animal excrements. The sycamores, blemished bark, but very nice, brown and white, getting ready to cough up leaves. Red brick, the Rlends Seminary, and ruddy coarse warm stone, broad, clumsy, solid, the Episcopal church, St. George's. Sammler had heard that the original J. Pierpont Morgan had been an usher there. In Austro-Hungarian-Polish-Cracovian antiquity old fellows who had read of Morgan in the papers spoke of him with high regard as Piepernotter-Morgan. At St. George's, Sundays, the god of stockbrokers could breathe easy awhile in the riotous city. In thought, Mr. Sammler was testy with White Protestant America for not keeping better order. Cowardly surrender. Not a strong ruling class. Eager in a secret humiliating way to come down and mingle with all the minority mobs, and scream against themselves. And the clergy? Beating swords into plowshares? No, rather converting dog collars into G strings. But this was neither here nor there.
Watching his steps (the dogs), looking for a bench for ten minutes, to think or avoid thinking of Gruner. Perhaps despite great sadness to read a few paragraphs of this fascinating moon manuscript. He noted a female bum drunkenly sleeping like a dugong, a sea cow's belly rising, legs swollen purple; a short dress, a mini-rag. At a corner of the fence, a wino was sullenly pissing on newspapers and old leaves. Cops seldom bothered about these old-fashioned derelicts. Younger people, autochthonous-looking, were also here. Bare feet, the boys like Bombay beggars, beards clotted, breathing rich hair from their nostrils, heads coming through woolen ponchos, somewhat Peruvian. Natives of somewhere. Innocent, devoid of aggression, opting out, much like Ferdinand the Bull. No corrida for them; only smelling flowers under the lovely cork tree. How similar also to the Eloi of H. G. Wells' fantasy The Time Machine. Lovely young human cattle herded by the cannibalistic Morlocks who lived a subterranean life and feared light and fire. Yes, that tough brave little old fellow Wells had had prophetic visions after all. Shula wasn't altogether wrong to campaign for a memoir. A memoir should be written. Only there was little time left for relaxed narration about this and that, about things fairly curious in themselves, like Wells at seventy-eight still bucking for the Royal Society his work (on earthworms?) was not acceptable. Not earthworms. "The Quality of Illusion in the Continuity of Individual Life in the Higher Metazoa." They would not make him a Fellow. But to unscramble this would have taken weeks, and there were no free weeks for Sammler. He had other necessities, higher priorities.
He shouldn't even be reading this--this being the pages of Govinda Lal in bronze ink and old-fashioned penmanship. He wrote a Gothic hand. But Mr. Sammler, having seen through so much, had no resistance to real fascination. On page seventy, Lal had begun to speculate on organisms possibly capable of adapting themselves in exposed lunar conditions. Were there no plants which might cover the moon's surface? Water and carbon dioxide would have to be present, extremes of temperature would have to be withstood. Lichens, thought Govinda, possibly could make it. Also certain members of the cactus family. The triumphant plant, a combination of lichen and cactus, certainly would look weird to the eyes of man. But life's capacities are even now inconceivably diverse. What impossibilities has it not faced? Who knows what the depths of the seas may yet yield? Creatures, perhaps even one to a species. A grotesque individual which has found its equilibrium under twenty miles of water. Small wonder, said Govinda, that human beings stress so fiercely the next realizable possibilities and are so eager to bound from the surface of the earth. The imagination is innately a biological power seeking to overcome impossible conditions.
Mr. Sammler raised his face, aware that someone was hastening toward him. He saw Feffer. Always in a rush. Feffer was stout, should have lost weight. He had trouble with his back, and wore at times an elastic orthopedic garment. Large, with fresh color, with the vivid brown François Premier beard and straight nose, Feffer always seemed to demand haste from his body, his legs. An all-but-running urgency. The hands, awkward and pink, were raised as if he feared to collide with another rush like his own. The brown eyes were key-shaped. As he grew older, the corners would be more elaborately notched.
"I thought you might stop here a minute," said Feffer. "Wallace said you had just left, so I ran down."
"Indeed? Well, the sun is shining, and I was in no hurry to go down into the subway. I haven't seen you since the lecture."
"That's right. I had to go to the telephone. I understand that you were wonderful. I genuinely apologize for the behavior of the students. That's my generation for you! I don't even know if they were real students or just tough characters--you know, militants, dropouts. It's not the kids who start the trouble. All the leaders are older. But Fanny looked after you, didn't she?"
"The young lady?"
"I didn't just disappear. I assigned a girl to look after you."
"I see. Your wife, by chance?"
"No, no." Feffer quickly smiled, and quickly went on, sitting on the edge of the bench. He wore a dark-blue velvet double-breasted jacket with large pearl buttons. His arm reached the backrest of the bench and lay affectionately near Sammler's shoulder. "Not my wife. Just a girl I fuck now and then, and look after."
"I see. It all seems so rapid. It strikes me that there is something electronic about your contacts. You shouldn't have left. I was your guest. Too late, I suppose, for you to learn manners. Still, she was very nice. She conducted me from the hall. I didn't expect such a large crowd. I thought you might be making money on me"
"I? No. Never. Believe me--no. It was a benefit for black children, just as I said. You must believe gone, Mr. Sammler. I wouldn't put you into a con, I have too much regard for you. You may not know it, or it may not matter to you, but you have a special position with me, which is practically sacred. Your life, your experiences, your character, your views plus your soul. There are relationships I would do anything to protect. And if I hadn't been called to the phone, I would have blasted that guy. I know that shit. He wrote a book about homosexuals in prison; he's like a poor man's Jean Genet. Buggery behind bars. Or being a pure Christian angel because you commit murder and have beautiful male love affairs. You know how it is."