Sammmler sat in a peach cretonne boudoir chair. Hearing no movements in the bathroom, he called, "I'm waiting," and she surged up from the water. He heard her feet, solid, rapid. In walking she always brushed objects with her body. She never simply walked. She touched things and claimed them. As property. Then she entered, quick-footed, wearing a man's woolen robe and a towel on her head, and she seemed to be gasping, shocked at being seen in the tub by her father.
"Well, where is it?"
"Daddy!"
"No. I am the one that is shocked, not you. Where is that document you have stolen twice?"
"It was not stealing."
"Other people may make new rules as they go along, but I will not, and you will not put me in that position. I was about to return the manuscript to Dr. Lal, and it was taken from my desk. Just as it was taken from his hands. Same method."
"That is not the way to look at it. But don't excite yourself too much."
"After all this, don't protect my heart or hint that I am an old man who may fall dead of apoplexy. You won't get away with anything like that. Now, where is this object?"
"It's really perfectly safe." She began to speak Polish. Severe, he denied her permission to speak that language. She was trying to invoke her terrible times of hiding-the convent, the hospital, the contagious ward when the German searching party came.
"None of that. Answer in English. Have you brought it here?"
"I've had a copy made. Daddy, I went to Mr. Widick's office..."
Sammler held himself in. Since he wouldn't allow her to speak Polish she was lapsing into something else, childishness. With small-girl softness, she lowered her mature, already fully middle-aged face. She was now meeting his look from one side, with only the one expanded childlike eye, and her chin shyly, slyly sinking toward the woolen robe.
"Yes? Well, what did you do in Mr. Widick's office?
"He has one of those duplicating machines. I've used it for Cousin Elya. And Mr. Widick never goes home. He must hate home. He's always at the office, so I called and asked to use the machine, and he said, 'Sure.' I Xeroxed the whole thing."
"For me?"
"Or for Dr. Lal."
"You thought I might want the original?"
"If it's more convenient for you."
"Now, what have you done with these manuscripts?"
"I locked them in two lockers in Grand Central Station."
"In Grand Central. Good God. You have the keys, or have you lost the keys?"
"I have them, Father."
"Where are they?"
Shula was prepared for him. She produced two stamped and sealed envelopes. One was addressed to him, the other to Dr. Govinda Lal at Butler Hall.
"You were going to send these through the mails? The locker is for twenty-four hours only. These might take a week to arrive. Then what? And did you write down the numbers of the lockers? No. Then how would one know where they were if the letters got lost? You'd have to make a claim and prove ownership, authorship. Enough to drive a man out of his mind."
"Don't scold so hard. I did everything for you. You had stolen property in your house. The detective said it was stolen property, and anybody who had it was a receiver of stolen property."
"From now on, do me no such favors. It can't even be discussed with you. You seem to have no grasp of the matter."
"I brought it to you to show my faith in the memoir. I wanted to remind you how important it is. Sometimes you yourself forget. As If H. G. Wells were nothing so special. Well, maybe not to you, but to a great many people H. G. Wells is still important and very very special. I've been waiting for you to finish, and be reviewed in the papers. I wanted to see my father's picture in the bookshops, instead of all those foolish faces and unimportant stupid books."
The soiled rental keys in the envelopes. Mr. Sammler considered them. As well as exasperating, troubling, she was of course sadly amusing. If the lockers contained the manuscripts and not wads of paper in portfolios. No, he thought not. She was only a bit crazy. His poor child. A creature caused by him and adrift in a formless, boundless world. How had she come to be like this? Perhaps the inward, the intimate, the dear life--the thing that is oneself from earliest days--when it first learns of death is often crazed. Here magical powers must help, assuage, console, and for a woman, those marvelous powers so often are the powers of a man. As, Antony dying, Cleopatra cried she wouldn't abide in this dull world which "in thy absence is No better than a sty." And? A sty, and? He now remembered the end, fit for this night. "There is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon."
And he was supposed to be the remarkable thing, he who sitting on this glazed slipcover felt under him the tedium of its peach color and its fat red flowers. Such an article, meant to oppress and afflict the soul, was even now succeeding. He had remained touchable, vulnerable to trifles. But Mr. Sammler still received primordial messages too. And the immediate basic message was that she, this woman with her sexual female form plain in the tight wrapping of the woolen robe (especially beneath the waist, where a thing was to make a lover gasp), this mature woman should not now be asking that her daddy make sublunary objects remarkable. For one thing, he never bestrode the world like a Colossus with armies and navies, dropping coronets from his pockets. He was only an old Jew whom they had hacked at, shot at, but missed killing somehow, murdering everyone else with their blasts. In their peculiar transformation: a people changed into uniform, masked in military cloth and helmets, and coming with machinery for the purpose of murdering boys, girls, men, women, making blood run, burying, and finally exhuming and burning rotten corpses. Man is a killer. Man has a moral nature. The anomaly can be resolved by insanity only, by insane dreams in which delusions of consciousness are maintained by organization, in states of mad perdition clinging to forms of business administration. Making it "government work." All of that! But in this world he, now he, dear God! was to supply his unhinged, wavering-witted daughter with high aims. And of course in Shula's view he had been getting too delicate for earthly life, too absorbed in unshared universals, excluding her. And by extravagance, by animal histrionics, by papers pinched, by goofy business with shopping bags, trash basket neuroses, exotic heartburn cookery she wished to implicate him and bring him back, to bind him and keep him in the world beside her. Some world! Some her! Their elevation would be joint elevation. She would back him, and he would accomplish great things in the world of culture. For she was kulturnaya. Shula was so kulturnaya. Nothing was more suitable than this philistine Russian word. Kulturny. She might creep down on her knees and pray like a Christian; she might pull that on her father; she might crawl into dark confession boxes; she might run to Father Robles and invoke Christian protection against his Jewish anger; but in her nutty devotion to culture she couldn't have been more Jewish.
"Very well, my photograph in bookshops. A fine idea. Excellent. But stealing...?"
"It wasn't actually stealing."
"Well, what word do you prefer, and what difference does it make? Like the old joke: what more do I learn about a horse if I know that in Latin it is called equus?"
"But I'm not a thief."
"Very well. In your mind you're not a thief. Only in fact."
"I thought if you were really, really serious about H. G. Wells you would have to know if he predicted accurately about the moon, or Mars, and that you'd pay any price to have the latest, most up-to-date scientific information. A creative person wouldn't stop at anything. For the creative there are no crimes. And aren't you a creative person?"
It seemed to Sammler that inside him (faute de mieux, in his mind) was a field in which many hunters at cross-purposes were firing bird shot at a feather apparition assumed to be a bird. Shula had meant to set him a test. Was he the real thing or wasn't he? Was he creative, a force of nature, a true original, or not? Yes, it was a fitness test, and this was very American of Shula. Did an American exist who was not morally didactic? Was there any crime committed which didn't punish the victim for "the greater good"? Was there any sinner who did not sin pro bono publico? So great was the evil of helpfulness, and so immense the liberal spirit of explanation. The psychopathology of teaching in the United States. So, then, was Papa a true creative intransigent--capable of bold theft for the sake of the memoir? Could he risk all for H. G.?