During this conversation, Jingadangelow seated himself and beckoned to a woman who hobbled over and set down two drinks before them. The doctor nodded and waved a pair of plump fingers at her in thanks. To Greybeard he said, “How strange to hear ethical objections again after all these years – quite takes me back…
You must lead a secluded life. This old chap Norsgrey, you understand, is dying. He gets noises like frying in his head; it’s a fatal dropsy. So – he mistakes the hope I have given him for the immortality I promised him. It’s a comfortable error, surely? I travel, if I may for a moment indulge in a personal confidence, without any such hope; therefore Norsgrey – and there are many like him, luckily – is more fortunate than I in spirit. I console myself by being more fortunate in worldly possessions.”
Greybeard set down his drink and looked about. Although his neck still ached, good humour filled him.
“Do you mind if my wife and friends join us?”
“Not at all, not at all, though I trust you are not bored with my company already. I hoped some talk of this and that might precede any business we might do together. I thought I had recognized a kindred spirit in you.”
Greybeard said, “What made you think that?”
“Mainly the intuitive feeling with which I am richly endowed. You are uncommitted. You don’t suffer as you should in this blighted time; though life is miserable, you enjoy it. Is this not so?”
“How do you know this? Yes, yes, you are correct, but we have only just met -”
“The answer to that is never entirely pleasing to the ego. It is that although all men are each unique, all men are also each much the same. You have an ambivalence in your nature; many men have an ambivalence.
I only have to talk with them for a minute to diagnose it. Am I making sense?”
“How do you diagnose my ambivalence?”
“I am not a mind reader, but let me cast about.” He expanded his cheeks, raised his eyebrows, gazed into his glass, and made a very judicious face indeed. “We need our disasters. You and I have weathered, somehow, the collapse of a civilization. We are survivors after shipwreck. But for us two, we feel something deeper than survival – triumph! Before the crash came, we willed it, and so disaster for us is a success, a victory for the raging will. Don’t look so surprised! You’re not a man, surely, to regard the recesses of the mind as a very salubrious place. Have you thought of the world we were born in, and what it would have grown into had not that unfortunate little radiation experiment run amok? Would it not have been a world too complex, too impersonal, for the likes of us to flourish in?”
“You are doing my thinking for me,” Greybeard said.
“It is a wise man’s role; but so is listening.” Jingadangelow quaffed his drink and leant forward over the empty glass. “Is not this rag-taggle present preferable to that other mechanised, organized, deodorized present we might have found ourselves in, simply because in this present we can live on a human scale? In that other present that we missed by a neutron’s breadth, had not megalomania grown to such a scale that the ordinary simple richness of an individual life was stifled?”
“Certainly there was a lot wrong with the twentieth-century way of life.”
“There was everything wrong with it.”
“No, you exaggerate. Some things -”
“Don’t you think that if everything spiritual was wrong with it, everything was wrong with it? It’s no good getting nostalgic. It wasn’t all drugs and education. Wasn’t it also the need for drugs and the poverty of education? Wasn’t it the climax and orgasm of the Machine Age? Wasn’t it Mons and Belsen and Bataan and Stalingrad and Hiroshima and the rest? Didn’t we do well to get flung off the roundabout?”
“You only ask questions,” Greybeard said.
“They are themselves answers.”
“That is double talk. You are giving me double talk. No, wait – look, I wish to talk more with you. I can pay you. This is an important conversation… Let me get my wife and friends here.”