shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby,dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D.and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds… but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped. What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart,mon grand pch radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, allthat I canceled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita,this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine;Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part o nous ne serons jamais spars; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torneven then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.
“Lolita,” I said, “this may be neither here nor there but I have to say it. Life is very short. From here to that old car you know so well thee is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.”
Carmen, voulez-vous venir avec moi?
“You mean,” she said opening her eyes and raising herself slightly, the snake that may strike, “you mean you will give us [us] that money only if I go with you to a motel. Isthat what you mean?”
“No,” I said, “you got it all wrong. I want you to leave your incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me” (words to that effect).
“You’re crazy,” she said, her features working.
“Think it over, Lolita. There are no strings attached. Except, perhapswell, no matter.” (A reprieve, I wanted to say but did not.) “Anyway, if you refuse you will still get your…trousseau.”
“No kidding?” asked Dolly.
I handed her an envelope with four hundred dollars in cash and a check for three thousand six hundred more.
Gingerly, uncertainly, she receivedmon petit cadeau; and then her forehead became a beautiful pink.“You mean,” she said, with agonized emphasis, “you are giving usfour thousand bucks?” I covered my face with my hand and broke into the hottest tears I had ever shed. I felt them winding through my fingers and down my chin, and burning me, and my nose got clogged, and I could not stop, and then she touched my wrist.
“I’ll die if you touch me,” I said. “You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this.”
“No,” she said. “No, honey, no.”
She had never called me honey before.
“No,” she said, “it is quite out of the question. I would sooner go back to Cue. I mean”
She groped for words. I supplied them mentally (“He broke my heart.You merely broke my life”).
“I think,” she went on”oops”the envelope skidded to the floorshe picked it up”I think it’s oh utterlygrand of you to give us all that dough. It settles everything, we can start next week. Stop crying, please. You should understand. Let me get you some more beer. Oh, don’t cry, I’m so sorry I cheated so much, but that’s the way things are.”
I wiped my face and my fingers. She smiled at thecadeau. She exulted. She wanted to call Dick. I said I would have to leave in a moment, did not want to see him at all, at all. We tried to think of some subject of conversation. For some reason, I kept seeingit trembled and silkily glowed on my damn retinaa radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold,“pinging” pebbles at an empty can. I almost saidtrying to find some casual remark”I wonder sometimes what has become of the little McCoo girl, did she ever get better?”but stopped in time lest she rejoin: “I wonder sometimes what has become of the little Haze girl…” Finally, I reverted to money matters. That sum, I said, represented more or less the net rent from her mother’s house; she said: “Had it not been sold years ago?” No (I admit Ihad told her this in order to sever all connections with R.); a lawyer would send a full account of the financial situation later; it was rosy; some of the small securities her mother had owned had gone up and up. Yes, I was quite sure I had to go. I had to go, and find him, and destroy him.
Since I would not have survived the touch of her lips, I kept retreating in a mincing dance, at every step she and her belly made toward me.
She and the dog saw me off. I was surprised (this a rhetorical figure, I was not) that the sight of the old car in which she had ridden as a child and a nymphet, left her so very indifferent. All she remarked was it was getting sort of purplish about the gills. I said it was hers, I could go by bus. She said don’t be silly, they would fly to Jupiter and buy a car there. I said I would buy this one from her for five hundred dollars.
“At this rate we’ll be millionnaires next,” she said to the ecstatic dog.
Carmencita, lui demandais-je…”One last word,” I said in my horrible careful English, “are you quite, quite sure thatwell, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, butwellsome day, any day, you will not come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope” (to that effect).
“No,” she said smiling, “no.”
“It would have made all the difference,” said Humbert Humbert.
Then I pulled out my automaticI mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it.
“Good by-aye!” she changed, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this. I mean, such is the formal agreement with the so-called authorities.
Then, as I drove away, I heard her shout in a vibrant voice to her Dick; and the dog started to lope alongside my car like a fat dolphin, but he was too heavy and old, and very soon gave up.
And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.
30
Leaving as I did Coalmont around four in the afternoon (by Route XI do not remember the number(, I might have made Ramsdale by dawn had not a short-cut tempted me. I had to get onto Highway Y. My map showed quite blandly that just beyond Woodbine, which I reached at nightfall, I could leave paved X and reached paved Y by means of a transverse dirt road. It was only some forty miles long according to my map. Otherwise I would have to follow X for another hundred miles and then use leisurely looping Z to get to Y and my destination. However, the short-cut in question got worse and worse, bumpier and bumpier, muddier and muddier, and when I attempted to turn back after some ten miles of purblind, tortuous and tortoise-slow progress, my old and weak Melmoth got stuck in deep clay. All was dark and muggy, and hopeless. My headlights hung over a broad ditch full of water. The surrounding country, if any, was a black wilderness. I sought to extricate myself but my rear wheels only whined in slosh and anguish. Cursing my plight, I took off my fancy clothes, changed into slacks, pulled on the bullet-riddled sweater, and waded four miles back to a roadside farm. It started to rain on the way but I had not the strength to go back for a mackintosh. Such incidents have convinced me that my heart is basically sound despite recent diagnoses. Around midnight, a wrecker dragged my car out. I navigated back to Highway X and traveled on. Utter weariness overtook me and hour later, in an anonymous little town. I pulled up at the curb and in darkness drank deep from a friendly flask.
The rain had been canceled miles before. It was a black warm night, somewhere in Appalachia. Now and then cars passed me, red tail-lights receding, white headlights advancing, but the town was dead. Nobody strolled and laughed on the sidewalks as relaxing burghers would in sweet, mellow, rotting Europe. I was alone to enjoy the innocent night and my terrible thoughts. A wire receptacle on the curb was very particular about acceptable contents: Sweepings. Paper. No Garbage. Sherry-red letters of light