"I can see what she sees. Dr. Lal is very distinguished. You know it. Don't pretend, after the way you talked in the kitchen. It was beautiful."
"Well, well. What will I do? This thing of Elya's is very bad, you know."
"Very?"
"The worst. And I should have realized that returning might present problems."
"Father, just leave it to me. And you haven't finished shaving. No, go on, and I'll bring you a cup of coffee."
He went, thinking how he had been feinted out of position. Outgeneraled. Like Pompey or Labienus by Caesar. He should not have left the city. He was cut off from his base. And now how was he to reach Elya, who needed him today? Picking up the phone in the den to call the hospital, he heard the busy signal Shula was getting from the Penn Central. Patience, waiting, now were necessary--things Mr. Sammler had no talent for. But he had studied, he had trained himself. One began with external composure. So he sat down on the hassock, looking at the sofa, and at the silken green luxurious wool of Elya's own afghan he had slept under. It was a lovely morning, too. The sun came in as he sipped the coffee Shula brought him. Glass tables on legs and semicircular struts of brass spattered the Oriental rug with light, brought out the colors and the figures.
"Busy signal," she said.
"Yes, I know."
"There's a telephone crisis, anyway, all over New York. The experts are working on it."
She went into the garden, and Sammler again tried dialing the hospital. All lines were busy in that dreary place, and he hung up the repetitious croaking instrument. Thinking of the colossal number of conversations, all those communings. Utilizing the invisible powers of the universe. Out in the garden, Shula was also engaged in conversation. It was warm. Tulips, daffodils, jonquils, and a paradise of gusts. Evidently she asked the flowers how they were today. No answers required. Brilliant instances sufficed. She herself was a brilliant instance of something organically strange. His glimpse of the entire Shula last night now made him feel her specific weight, as she trod the grass. The entire female body was evoked, white skin everywhere, the thighs, the trunk, the actual feet, the belly with its organs, together with the kinky hair straggling from the scarf. All visible and almost palpable. And even about plants, who knew the whole truth? On educational TV one night he and Margotte watched a singular botanist who had attached a polygraph machine--a lie-detector--to flowers and recorded the reactions of roses to gentle and violent stimuli. Stridency made them shrink, he said. A dead dog cast before them caused aversion. A soprano singing lullabies had the opposite effect. Sammler would have guessed that the investigator himself, his pale leer, his wild stern police nose would distress roses, African violets. Even without nerves these organisms were discerning. We with our oversupply of receptors were in a state of nervous chaos. Amid the tree shadows, pliant, and the window-frame shadows, rigid, and the brass and glass reflections, semi- steady, Mr. Sammler wiped his shoes with the paper towel Shula had placed under the coffee cup. The shoes were damp, still. They were soggy, unpleasantly so. Margotte also had her plants, and Wallace was about to found a plant business. It would be too bad if the first contacts of plants were entirely with the demented. Maybe I'd better have a word with them myself. Mr. Sammler was heavyhearted and tried to divert himself. The heaviness was brutally persistent, however.
He came to the point. First, how apt it was that Wallace should flood the attic. Why, it was a metaphor for Elya's condition. In connection with that condition there arose other images--a blistering of the brain, a froth or rusty scum of blood over that other plant which lay in one's head. Something like convolvulus. No, like fatty cauliflower. The screw on the artery could not reduce the pressure, and where the vessel was varicose and weaker than cobweb it would open. A terrible flood! One might try to think of mitigating things--That, oh well! Life! Everyone who had it was bound to lose it. Or that this was Elya's moment of honor and that he called upon his best qualities. That was all very well, until death turned its full gaze on the individual. Then all such ideas were nothing. The point was that he, Sammler, should be at the hospital, now; to do what could be done; to say what might be said, and what should be said. Exactly what should or might be said Sammler did not know. He could not find the precise thing. Living as he did, in this inward style, working out his condensations or contractions, one became uncommunicative. To explain or expand his thoughts tired and vexed him, as he had learned last night. But he did not feel uncommunicative toward Elya. On the contrary, he wanted to say everything possible. He wanted to go to the hospital and say something! He loved his nephew, and he had something that Elya needed. All concerned ought to have had it. The first place at Elya's bedside belonged to Wallace or to Angela, but they were not about to take it.
Elya was a physician and a businessman. With his own family, to his credit, he had not been businesslike. Nevertheless, he had the business outlook. And business, in business America, was also a training system for souls. The fear of being unbusinesslike was very great. As he was dying Elya might conceivably draw strength from doing business. He had in fact done that. He kept talking to Widick. And Sammler had nothing with a business flavor to offer him. But at the very end business would not do for Elya. Some, many, would go on with business to the last breath, but Elya was not like that, not so limited. Elya was not finally ruled by business considerations. He was not in that insect and mechanical state--such a surrender, such an insect disaster for human beings. Even now (now perhaps more than ever) Elya was accessible. In fact Sammler had not seen this in time. Yesterday, when Elya began to speak of Wallace, when he denounced Angela, he, Sammler, ought to have stayed with him. Any degree of frankness might have been possible. In the going phrase, a moment of truth. Meaning that most conversation was a compilation of lies, of course. But Elya's was not one of those sealed completed impenetrable systems, he was not one of your monstrous crystals or icicles. Feeling, or stroking the long green fibers of the afghan, Sammler put it to himself that because he and Antonina had been designated, part of a demonstration of the meaninglessness of this vivid shuffle with its pangs of higher intuition from the one side and the continual muddy suck of the grave underfoot--that because of this he himself, Artur Sammler, had put up obstinate resistance. And Elya, too, was devoted to ideas of conduct which seemed discredited, which few people explicitly defended. It was not the behavior that was gone. What was gone was the old words. Forms and signs were absent. Not honor but the word honor. Not virtuous impulse, but the terms beaten into flat nonsense. Not compassion; but what was a compassionate utterance? And compassionate utterance was a mortal necessity. Utterance, sounds of hope and desire, exclamations of grief. Such things were suppressed, as if illicit. Sometimes coming through in ciphers,... buildings (the empty tailor shop facing the hospital). At this stage of things there was a terrible dumbness. About essentials, almost nothing could be said. Still, signs could be made, should be made, must be made. One should declare something like this: "However actual I may seem to you and you to me, we are not as actual as all that. We will die. Nevertheless there is a bond. There is a bond." Mr. Sammler believed that if this was not said in so many words it should be said tacitly. In fact it was continually asserted, in many guises. And anyway, we know what is what. But Elya at this moment had a most particular need for a sign and he, Sammler, should be there to meet that need.
He again telephoned the hospital. To his surprise, he found himself speaking with Gruner. He had asked for the private nurse. One could get through? Elya must be molested by calls. With the mortal bulge in his head he was still in the game, did business.