We do not care to follow the thoughts troubling Ada, whose attention to her book was far shallower than might seem; we will not, nay, cannot follow them with any success, for thoughts are much more faintly remembered than shadows or colors, or the throbs of young lust, or a green snake in a dark paradise. Therefore we find ourselves more comfortably sitting within Van while his Ada sits within Lucette, and both sit within Van (and all three in me, adds Ada).
He remembered with a pang of pleasure the indulgent skirt Ada had been wearing then, so swoony-baloony as the Chose young things said, and he regretted (smiling) that Lucette had those chaste shorts on today, and Ada, husked-corn (laughing) trousers. In the fatal course of the most painful ailments, sometimes (nodding gravely), sometimes there occur sweet mornings of perfect repose — and that not owing to some blessed pill or potion (indicating the bedside clutter) or at least without our knowing that the loving hand of despair slipped us the drug.
Van closed his eyes in order better to concentrate on the golden flood of swelling joy. Many, oh, many, many years later he recollected with wonder (how could one have endured such rapture?) that moment of total happiness, the complete eclipse of the piercing and preying ache, the logic of intoxication, the circular argument to the effect that the most eccentric girl cannot help being faithful if she loves one as one loves her. He watched Ada’s bracelet flash in rhythm with the swaying of the victoria and her full lips, parted slightly in profile, show in the sun the red pollen of a remnant of salve drying in the transversal thumbnail lines of their texture. He opened his eyes: the bracelet was indeed flashing but her lips had lost all trace of rouge, and the certainty that in another moment he would touch their hot pale pulp threatened to touch off a private crisis under the solemn load of another child. But the little proxy’s neck, glistening with sweat, was pathetic, her trustful immobility, sobering, and after all no furtive fiction could compete with what awaited him in Ada’s bower. A twinge in his kneecap also came to the rescue, and honest Van chided himself for having attempted to use a little pauper instead of the princess in the fairy tale — ‘whose precious flesh must not blush with the impression of a chastising hand,’ says Pierrot in Peterson’s version.
With the fading of that fugitive flame his mood changed. Something should be said, a command should be given, the matter was serious or might become serious. They were now about to enter Gamlet, the little Russian village, from which a birch-lined road led quickly to Ardis. A small procession of kerchiefed peasant nymphs, unwashed, no doubt, but adorably pretty with naked shiny shoulders and high-divided plump breasts tuliped up by their corsets, walked past through a coppice, singing an old ditty in their touching English:
Thorns and nettles
For silly girls:
Ah, torn the petals,
Ah, spilled the pearls!
‘You have a little pencil in your back pocket,’ said Van to Lucette. ‘May I borrow it, I want to write down that song.’
‘If you don’t tickle me there,’ said the child.
Van reached for Ada’s book and wrote on the fly leaf, as she watched him with odd wary eyes:
I don’t wish to see him again.
It’s serious.
Tell M. not to receive him or I leave.
No answer required.
She read it, and slowly, silently erased the lines with the top of the pencil which she passed back to Van, who replaced it where it had been.
‘You’re awfully fidgety,’ Lucette observed without turning. ‘Next time,’ she added, ‘I won’t have him dislodge me.’
They now swept up to the porch, and Trofim had to cuff the tiny blue-coated reader in order to have him lay his book aside and jump down to hand Ada out of the carriage.
40
Van was lying in his netted nest under the liriodendrons, reading Antiterrenus on Rattner. His knee had troubled him all night; now, after lunch, it seemed a bit better. Ada had gone on horseback to Ladore, where he hoped she would forget to buy the messy turpentine oil Marina had told her to bring him.
His valet advanced toward him across the lawn, followed by a messenger, a slender youth clad in black leather from neck to ankle, chestnut curls escaping from under a vizored cap. The strange child glanced around with an amateur thespian’s exaggeration of attitude, and handed a letter, marked ‘confidential,’ to Van.
Dear Veen,
In a couple of days I must leave for a spell of military service abroad. If you desire to see me before I go I shall be glad to entertain you (and any other gentleman you might wish to bring along) at dawn tomorrow where the Maidenhair road crosses Tourbière Lane. If not, I beg you to confirm in a brief note that you bear me no grudge, just as no grudge is cherished in regard to you, sir, by your obedient servant
Percy de Prey
No, Van did not desire to see the Count. He said so to the pretty messenger, who stood with one hand on the hip and one knee turned out like an extra, waiting for the signal to join the gambaders in the country dance after Calabro’s aria.
‘Un moment,’ added Van. ‘I would be interested to know — this could be decided in a jiffy behind that tree — what you are, stable boy or kennel girl?’
The messenger did not reply and was led away by the chuckling Bout. A little squeal suggestive of an improper pinch came from behind the laurels screening their exit.
It was hard to decide whether that clumsy and pretentious missive had been dictated by the fear that one’s sailing off to fight for one’s country might be construed as running away from more private engagements, or whether its conciliatory gist had been demanded from Percy by somebody — perhaps a woman (for instance his mother, born Praskovia Lanskoy); anyway, Van’s honor remained unaffected. He limped to the nearest garbage can and, having burnt the letter with its crested blue envelope, dismissed the incident from his mind, merely noting that now, at least, Ada would cease to be pestered by the fellow’s attentions.
She returned late in the afternoon — without the embrocation, thank goodness. He was still lolling in his low-slung hammock, looking rather forlorn and sulky, but having glanced around (with more natural grace than the brown-locked messenger had achieved), she raised her veil, kneeled down by him and soothed him.
When lightning struck two days later (an old image that is meant to intimate a flash-back to an old bam), Van became aware that it brought together, in livid confrontation, two secret witnesses; they had been hanging back in his mind since the first day of his fateful return to Ardis: One had been murmuring with averted gaze that Percy de Prey was, and would always be, only a dance partner, a frivolous follower; the other had kept insinuating, with spectral insistence, that some nameless trouble was threatening the very sanity of Van’s pale, faithless mistress.
On the morning of the day preceding the most miserable one in his life, he found he could bend his leg without wincing, but he made the mistake of joining Ada and Lucette in an impromptu lunch on a long-neglected croquet lawn and walked home with difficulty. A swim in the pool and a soak in the sun helped, however, and the pain had practically gone when in the mellow heat of the long afternoon Ada returned from one of her long ‘brambles’ as she called her botanical rambles, succinctly and somewhat sadly, for the florula had ceased to yield much beyond the familiar favorites. Marina, in a luxurious peignoir, with a large oval mirror hinged before her, sat at a white toilet table that had been carried out onto the lawn where she was having her hair dressed by senile but still wonderworking Monsieur Violette of Lyon and Ladore, an unusual outdoor activity which she explained and excused by the fact of her grandmother’s having also liked qu’on la coiffe au grand air so as to forestall the zephyrs (as a duelist steadies his hand by walking about with a poker).
‘That’s our best performer,’ she said, indicating Van to Violette who mistook him for Pedro and bowed with un air entendu.
Van had been looking forward to a little walk of convalescence with Ada before dressing for dinner, but she said, as she drooped on a garden chair, that she was exhausted and filthy and had to wash her face and feet, and prepare for the ordeal of helping her mother entertain the movie people who were expected later in the evening.
‘I’ve seen him in Sexico,’ murmured Monsieur Violette to Marina, whose ears he had shut with both hands as he moved the reflection of her head in the glass this way and that.
‘No, it’s getting late,’ muttered Ada, ‘and, moreover, I promised Lucette
