‘But this,’ exclaimed Ada, ‘is certain, this is reality, this is pure fact — this forest, this moss, your hand, the ladybird on my leg, this cannot be taken away, can it? (it will, it was). This has all come together here, no matter how the paths twisted, and fooled each other, and got fouled up, they inevitably met here!’
‘We must now find our bicycles,’ said Van, ‘we are lost «in another part of the forest.»’
‘Oh, let’s not return yet,’ she cried, ‘oh, wait.’
‘But I want to make sure of our whereabouts and whenabouts,’ said Van. ‘It is a philosophical need.’
The day was darkening; a beaming vestige of sunlight lingered in a western strip of the overcast sky: we have all seen the person who after gaily greeting a friend crosses the street with that smile still fresh on his face — to be eclipsed by the stare of the stranger who might have missed the cause and mistaken the effect for the bright leer of madness. Having worked out that metaphor, Van and Ada decided it was really time to go home. As they rode through Gamlet, the sight of a Russian traktir gave such a prod to their hunger that they dismounted and entered the dim little tavern. A coachman drinking tea from the saucer, holding it up to his loud lips in his large claw, came straight from a pretzel-string of old novels. There was nobody else in the steamy hole save a kerchiefed woman pleading with (ugovarivayushchaya) a leg-dangling lad in a red shirt to get on with his fish soup. She proved to be the traktir-keeper and rose, ‘wiping her hands on her apron,’ to bring Ada (whom she recognized at once) and Van (whom she supposed, not incorrectly, to be the little chatelaine’s ‘young man’) some small Russian-type ‘hamburgers’ called bitochki. Each devoured half a dozen of them — then they retrieved their bikes from under the jasmins to pedal on. They had to light their carbide lamps. They made a last pause before reaching the darkness of Ardis Park.
By a kind of lyrical coincidence they found Marina and Mlle Larivière having evening tea in the seldom-used Russian-style glassed-in verandah. The novelist, who was now quite restored, but still in flowery négligé, had just finished reading her new story in its first fair copy (to be typed on the morrow) to Tokay-sipping Marina, who had le vin triste and was much affected by the suicide of the gentleman ‘au cou rouge et puissant de veuf encore plein de sève’ who, frightened by his victim’s fright, so to speak, had compressed too hard the throat of the little girl he had raped in a moment of «gloutonnerie impardonnable.»
Van drank a glass of milk and suddenly felt such a wave of delicious exhaustion invading his limbs that he thought he’d go straight to bed. ‘Tant pis,’ said Ada, reaching voraciously for the keks (English fruit cake). ‘Hammock?’ she inquired; but tottering Van shook his head, and having kissed Marina’s melancholy hand, retired.
‘Tant pis,’ repeated Ada, and with invincible appetite started to smear butter allover the yolk-tinted rough surface and rich incrustations — raisins, angelica, candied cherry, cedrat — of a thick slice of cake.
Mlle Larivière, who was following Ada’s movements with awe and disgust, said:
‘Je rêve. Il n’est pas possible qu’on mette du beurre par-dessus toute cette pâte britannique, masse indigeste et immonde.’
‘Et ce n’est que la première tranche,’ said Ada.
‘Do you want a sprinkle of cinnamon on your lait caillé?’ asked Marina. ‘You know, Belle’ (turning to Mlle Larivière), ‘she used to call it «sanded snow» when she was a baby.’
‘She was never a baby,’ said Belle emphatically. ‘She could break the back of her pony before she could walk.’
‘I wonder,’ asked Marina, ‘how many miles you rode to have our athlete drained so thoroughly.’
‘Only seven,’ replied Ada with a munch smile.
25
On a sunny September morning, with the trees still green, but the asters and fleabanes already taking over in ditch and dalk, Van set out for Ladoga, N.A., to spend a fortnight there with his father and three tutors before returning to school in cold Luga, Mayne.
Van kissed Lucette on each dimple and then on the neck — and winked to prim Larivière who looked at Marina.
It was time to go. They saw him off: Marina in her shlafrok, Lucette petting (substitutionally) Dack, Mlle Larivière who did not know yet that Van had left behind an inscribed book she had given him on the eve, and a score of copiously tipped servants (among whom we noticed kitchen Kim with his camera) — practically the entire household, except Blanche who had the headache, and dutiful Ada who had asked to be excused, having promised to visit an infirm villager (she had a heart of gold, that child, really — as Marina so willingly, so wisely used to observe).
Van’s black trunk and black suitcase, and black king-size dumbbells, were heaved into the back of the family motorcar; Bouteillan put on a captain’s cap, too big for him, and grape-blue goggles; ‘remouvez votre bottom, I will drive,’ said Van — and the summer of 1884 was over.
‘She rolls sweetly, sir,’ remarked Bouteillan in his quaint old-fashioned English. ‘Tous les pneus sont neufs, but, alas, there are many stones on the way, and youth drives fast. Monsieur should be prudent. The winds of the wilderness are indiscreet. Tel un lis sauvage confiant au désert —’
‘Quite the old comedy retainer, aren’t you?’ remarked Van drily.
‘Non, Monsieur,’ answered Bouteillan, holding on to his cap. ‘Non. Tout simplement j’aime bien Monsieur et sa demoiselle.’
‘If,’ said Van, ‘you’re thinking of little Blanche, then you’d better quote Delille not to me, but to your son, who’ll knock her up any day now,’
The old Frenchman glanced at Van askance, pozheval gubami (chewed his lips), but said nothing.
‘One will stop here for a few minutes,’ said Van, as they reached Forest Fork, just beyond Ardis. ‘I intend to pick some boletes for Father to whom I shall certainly (Bouteillan having sketched a courteous gesture) transmit your salute. This handbrake must have been — damn it — in use before Louis the Sixteenth migrated to England.’
‘It needs to be greased,’ said Bouteillan and consulted his watch; ‘yes, we have ample time to catch the 9:04.’
Van plunged into the dense undergrowth. He wore a silk shirt, a velvet jacket, black breeches, riding boots with star spurs — and this attire was hardly convenient for making klv zdB AoyvBno wkh gwzxm dqg kzwAAqvo a gwttp vq wjfhm Ada in a natural bower of aspens; xliC mujzikml, after which she said:
‘Yes — so as not to forget. Here’s the formula for our correspondence. Learn this by heart and then eat it up like a good little spy.’
‘Poste restante both ways; and I want at least three letters a week, my white love.’
It was the first time he had seen her in that luminous frock nearly as flimsy as a nightgown. She had braided her hair, and he said she resembled the young soprano Maria Kuznetsova in the letter scene in Tschchaikow’s opera Onegin and Olga.
Ada, doing her feminine best to restrain and divert her sobs by transforming them into emotional exclamations, pointed out some accursed insect that had settled on an aspen trunk.
(Accursed? Accursed? It was the newly described, fantastically rare vanessian, Nymphalis danaus Nab., orange-brown, with black-and-white foretips, mimicking, as its discoverer Professor Nabonidus of Babylon College, Nebraska, realized, not the Monarch butterfly directly, but the Monarch through the Viceroy, one of the Monarch’s best known imitators. In Ada’s angry hand.)
‘Tomorrow you’ll come here with your green net,’ said Van bitterly, ‘my butterfly.’
She kissed him allover the face, she kissed his hands, then again his lips, his eyelids, his soft black hair. He kissed her ankles, her knees, her soft black hair.
‘When, my love, when again? In Luga? Kaluga? Ladoga? Where, when?’
‘That’s not the point,’ cried Van, ‘the point, the point, the point is — will you be faithful, will you be faithful to me?’
‘You spit, love,’ said wan-smiling Ada, wiping off the P’s and the F’s. ‘I don’t know. I adore you. I shall never love anybody in my life as I adore you, never and nowhere, neither in eternity, nor in terrenity, neither in Ladore, nor on Terra, where they say our souls go. But! But, my love, my Van, I’m physical, horribly physical, I don’t know, I’m frank, qu’y puis-je? Oh dear, don’t ask me, there’s a girl in my school who is in love with me, I don’t know what I’m saying —’
‘The girls don’t matter,’ said Van, ‘it’s the fellows I’ll kill if they come near you. Last night I tried to make a poem about it for you, but I can’t write verse; it begins, it only begins: Ada, our ardors and arbors — but the rest is all fog, try to fancy the rest.’
They embraced one last time, and without looking back he fled.
Stumbling on melons, fiercely beheading the tall arrogant fennels with his riding crop, Van returned to the Forest Fork. Morio, his favorite black horse, stood waiting for him, held by young Moore. He thanked the groom with a handful of stellas and galloped off, his gloves wet with tears.
26
For their correspondence in the first period of separation, Van and
