scene in all its trivial and fateful detail: hag Holmes writing out a receipt, scratching her head, pulling a drawer out of her desk, pouring change into my impatient palm, then neatly spreading a banknote over it with a bright“…and five!”; photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall (“nature study”); the framed diploma of the camp’s dietitian; my trembling hands; a card produced by efficient Holmes with a report of Dolly Haze’s behavior for July (“fair to good; keen on swimming and boating”); a sound of trees and birds, and my pounding heart… I was standing with my back to the open door, and then I felt the blood rush to my head as I heart her respiration and voice behind me. She arrived dragging and bumping her heavy suitcase. “Hi!” she said, and stood still, looking at me with sly, glad eyes, her soft lips parted in a slightly foolish but wonderfully endearing smile.
She was thinner and taller, and for a second it seemed to me her face was less pretty than the mental imprint I had cherished for more than a month: her cheeks looked hollowed and too much lentigo camouflaged her rosy rustic features; and that first impression (a very narrow human interval between two tiger heartbeats) carried the clear implication that all widower Humbert had to do, wanted to do, or would do, was to give this wan-looking though sun-colored little orphanau yeux battus (and even those plumbaceous umbrae under her eyes bore freckles) a sound education, a healthy and happy girlhood, a clean home, nice girl-friends of her age among whom (if the fates deigned to repay me) I might find, perhaps, a pretty littleMagdlein for Herr Doktor Humbert alone. But“in a wink,” as the Germans say, the angelic line of conduct was erased, and I overtook my prey (time moves ahead of our fancies!), and she was my Lolita againin fact, more of my Lolita than ever. I let my hand rest on her warm auburn head and took up her bag. She was all rose and honey, dressed in her brightest gingham, with a pattern of little red apples, and her arms and legs were of a deep golden brown, with scratches like tiny dotted lines of coagulated rubies, and the ribbed cuffs of her white socks were turned down at the remembered level, and because of her childish gait, or because I had memorized her as always wearing heelless shoes, her saddle oxfords looked somehow too large and too high-heeled for her. Good-bye, Camp Q, merry Camp Q. Good-bye, plain unwholesome food, good-bye Charlie boy. In the hot car she settled down beside me, slapped a prompt fly on her lovely knee; then, her mouth working violently on a piece of chewing gum, she rapidly cranked down the window on her side and settled back again. We sped through the striped and speckled forest.
“How’s Mother?” she asked dutifully.
I said the doctors did not quite know yet what the trouble was. Anyway, something abdominal. Abominable? No, abdominal. We would have to hang around for a while. The hospital was in the country, near the gay town of Lepingville, where a great poet had resided in the early nineteenth century and where we would take in all the shows. She thought it a peachy idea and wondered if we could make Lepingville before nine p.m.
“We should be at Briceland by dinner time,” I said, “and tomorrow we’ll visit Lepingville. How was the hike? Did you have a marvelous time at the camp?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sorry to leave?”
“Un-un.”
“Talk, Lodon’t grunt. Tell me something.”
“What thing, Dad?” (she let the word expand with ironic deliberation).
“Any old thing.”
“Okay, if I call you that?” (eyes slit at the road).
“Quite.”
“It’s a sketch, you know. When did you fall for my mummy?”
“Some day, Lo, you will understand many emotions and situations, such as for example the harmony, the beauty of spiritual relationship.”
“Bah!” said the cynical nymphet.
Shallow lull in the dialogue, filled with some landscape.
“Look, Lo, at all those cows on that hillside.”
“I think I’ll vomit if I look at a cow again.”
“You know, I missed you terribly, Lo.”
“I did not. Fact I’ve been revoltingly unfaithful to you, but it does not matter one bit, because you’ve stopped caring for me, anyway. You drive much faster than my mummy, mister.”
I slowed down from a blind seventy to a purblind fifty.
“Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo?”
“Well, you haven’t kissed me yet, have you?”
Inly dying, inly moaning, I glimpsed a reasonably wide shoulder of road ahead, and bumped and wobbled into the weeds. Remember she is only a child, remember she is only
Hardly had the car come to a standstill than Lolita positively flowed into my arms. Not daring, not daring let myself gonot even daring let myself realize thatthis (sweet wetness and trembling fire) was the beginning of the ineffable life which, ably assisted by fate, I had finally willed into beingnot daring really kiss her, I touched her hot, opening lips with the utmost piety, tiny sips, nothing salacious; but she, with an impatient wriggle, pressed her mouth to mine so hard that I felt her big front teeth and shared in the peppermint taste of her saliva. I knew, of course, it was but an innocent game on her part, a bit of backfisch foolery in imitation of some simulacrum of fake romance, and since (as the psychotherapist, as well as the rapist, will tell you) the limits and rules of such girlish games are fluid, or at least too childishly subtle for the senior partner to graspI was dreadfully afraid I might go too far and cause her to start back in revulsion and terror. And, as above all I was agonizingly anxious to smuggle her into the hermetic seclusion of The Enchanged Hunters, and we had still eighty miles to go, blessed intuition broke our embracea split second before a highway patrol car drew up alongside.
Florid and beetle-browed, its driver stared at me:
“Happen to see a blue sedan, same make as yours, pass you before the junction?”
“Why, no.”
“We didn’t,” said Lo, eagerly leaning across me, her innocent hand on my legs, “but are you sure it was blue, because”
The cop (what shadow of us was he after?) gave the little colleen his best smile and went into a U-turn.
We drove on.
“The fruithead!” remarked Lo. “He should have nabbedyou.”
“Why me for heaven’s sake?”
“Well, the speed in this bum state is fifty, andNo, don’t slow down, you, dull bulb. He’s gone now.”
“We have still quite a stretch,” I said, “and I want to get there before dark. So be a good girl.”
“Bad, bad girl,” said Lo comfortably. “Juvenile delickwent, but frank and fetching. That light was red. I’ve never seen such driving.”
We rolled silently through a silent townlet.
“Say, wouldn’t Mother be absolutely mad if she found out we were lovers?”
“Good Lord, Lo, let us not talk that way.”
“But weare lovers, aren’t we?”
“Not that I know of. I think we are going to have some more rain. Don’t you want to tell me of those little pranks of yours in camp?”
“You talk like a book,Dad.”
“What have you been up to? I insist you tell me.”
“Are you easily shocked?”
“No. Go on.”
“Let us turn into a secluded lane and I’ll tell you.”
“Lo, I must seriously ask you not to play the fool. Well?”
“WellI joined in all the activities that were offered.”
“Ensuite?”
“Ansooit, I was taught to live happily and richly with others and to develop a wholesome personality. Be a cake, in fact.”
“Yes. I saw something of the sort in the booklet.”
“We loved the sings around the fire in the big stone fireplace or under the darned stars, where every girl merged her own spirit of happiness with the voice of the group.”
“Your memory is excellent, Lo, but I must trouble you to leave out the swear words. Anything else?”
“The Girl Scout’s motto,” said Lo rhapsodically, “is also mine. I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such aswell, never mind what. My duty isto be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I obey orders. I am cheerful. That was another police car. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word and deed.”
“Now I do hope that’s all, you witty child.”
“Yep. That’s all. Nowait a sec. We baked in a reflector oven. Isn’t that terrific?”
“Well, that’s better.”
“We washed zillions of dishes. ‘Zillions’ you know is schoolmarm’s slang for many-many-many-many. Oh yes, last but not least, as Mother saysNow let me seewhat was it? I know we made shadowgraphs. Gee, what fun.”
“C’est bien tout?”
“C’est. Except for one little thing, something I simply can’t tell you without blushing all over.”
“Will you tell it me later?”
“If we sit in the dark and you let me whisper, I will. Do you sleep in your old room or in a heap with Mother?”
“Old room. Your mother may have to undergo a very serious operation, Lo.”
“Stop at that candy bar, will you,” said Lo.
Sitting on a high stool, a band of sunlight crossing her bare brown forearm, Lolita was served an elaborate ice-cream concoction topped with synthetic syrup. It was erected and brought her by a pimply brute of a boy in a greasy bow-tie who eyed my fragile child in her thin cotton frock with carnal deliberation. My impatience to reach Briceland and The Enchanted Hunters was becoming more than I could endure. Fortunately she dispatched the stuff with her usual alacrity.
“How much cash do you have?” I asked.
“Not a cent,” she said sadly, lifting her eyebrows, showing me the empty inside of her money purse.
“This