2
I have lately reread The Headless Horseman (in a drab edition, without pictures). It has its points. Take, for instance, that barroom in a log-walled Texan hotel, in the year of our Lord (as the captain would say) 1850, with its shirt-sleeved “saloon-clerk”—a fop in his own right, since the shirt was a ruffled one “of finest linen and lace.” The colored decanters (among which a Dutch clock “quaintly ticked”) were like “an iris sparkling behind his shoulders,” like “an aureole surrounding his perfumed head.” From glass to glass, the ice and the wine and the monongahela passed. An odor of musk, absinthe, and lemon peel filled the saloon. The glare of its camphine lamps brought out the dark asterisks produced on the white sand of its floor “by expectoration.” In another year of our Lord—namely 1941—I caught some very good moths at the neon lights of a gasoline station between Dallas and Fort Worth.
Into the bar comes the villain, the “slave-whipping Mississippian,” ex-captain of Volunteers, handsome, swaggering, scowling Cassius Calhoun. After toasting “America for Americans, and confusion to all foreign interlopers—especially the d—d [an evasion that puzzled me sorely when I first stumbled upon it: dead? detested?] Irish!” he intentionally collided with Maurice the Mustanger (scarlet scarf, slashed velvet trousers, hot Irish blood), a young horse trader who was really a baronet, Sir Maurice Gerald, as his thrilled bride was to discover at the end of the book. Wrong thrills, like this, may have been one of the reasons that the Irish-born author’s fame waned so soon in his adopted country.
Immediately after the collision, Maurice performed several actions in the following order: he deposited his glass upon the counter, drew a silk handkerchief from his pocket, wiped from his embroidered shirt-bosom “the defilement of the whiskey,” transferred the handkerchief from his right hand to his left, took the half-empty glass from the counter, swilled its remaining contents into Calhoun’s face, quietly redeposited the glass upon the counter. This sequence I still know by heart, so often did my cousin and I enact it.
The duel took place there and then, in the emptied barroom, the men using Colt’s six-shooters. Despite my interest in the fight (… both were wounded … their blood spurted all over the sanded floor …), I could not prevent myself from leaving the saloon in my fancy to mingle with the hushed crowd in front of the hotel, so as to make out (in the “scented dark”) certain señoritas “of questionable calling.”
With still more excitement did I read of Louise Pointdexter, Calhoun’s fair cousin, daughter of a sugar planter, “the highest and haughtiest of his class” (though why an old man who planted sugar should be high and haughty was a mystery to me). She is revealed in the throes of jealousy (which I used to feel so keenly at miserable parties when Mara Rzhevuski, a pale child with a white silk bow in her black hair, suddenly and inexplicably stopped noticing me) standing upon the edge of her azotea, her white hand resting upon the copestone of the parapet which is “still wet with the dews of night,” her twin breasts sinking and swelling in quick, spasmodic breathing, her twin breasts, let me reread, sinking and swelling, her lorgnette directed …
That lorgnette I found afterward in the hands of Madame Bovary, and later Anna Karenin had it, and then it passed into the possession of Chekhov’s Lady with the Lapdog and was lost by her on the pier at Yalta. When Louise held it, it was directed toward the speckled shadows under the mesquites, where the horseman of her choice was having an innocent conversation with the daughter of a wealthy haciendado, Doña Isidora Covarubio de los Llanos (whose “head of hair in luxuriance rivalled the tail of a wild steed”).
“I had the opportunity,” Maurice later explained to Louise, as one rider to another, “of being useful to Doña Isidora, in once rescuing her from some rude Indians.” “A slight service, you call it!” the young Creole exclaimed. “A man who should do that much for me—” “What would you do for him?” asked Maurice eagerly. “Pardieu! I should love him!” “Then I would give half my life to see you in the hands of Wild Cat and his drunken comrades—and the other half to deliver you from the danger.”
And here we find the gallant author interpolating a strange confession: “The sweetest kiss that I ever had in my life was when a woman—a fair creature, in the hunting field—leant over in her saddle and kissed me as I sate in mine.”
The “sate,” let us concede, gives duration and body to the kiss which the captain so comfortably “had,” but I could not help feeling, even at the age of eleven, that centaurian love-making was not without its special limitations. Moreover, Yuri and I both knew a boy who had tried it, but the girl’s horse had pushed his into a ditch. Exhausted by our adventures in the chaparral, we lay on the grass and discussed women. Our innocence seems to me now almost monstrous, in the light of various “sexual confessions” (to be found in Havelock Ellis and elsewhere), which involve tiny tots mating like mad. The slums of sex were unknown to us. Had we ever happened to hear about two normal lads idiotically masturbating in each other’s presence (as described so sympathetically, with all the smells, in modern American novels), the mere notion of such an act would have seemed to us as comic and impossible as sleeping with an amelus.
Our ideal was Queen Guinevere, Isolda, a not quite merciless belle dame, another man’s wife, proud and docile, fashionable and fast, with slim ankles and narrow hands. The little girls in neat socks and pumps whom we and other little boys used to meet at dancing lessons or at Christmas Tree parties had all the enchantments, all the sweets and stars of the tree preserved in their flame-dotted iris, and they teased us, they glanced back, they delightfully participated in our vaguely festive dreams, but they belonged, those nymphets, to another class of creatures than the adolescent belles and largehatted vamps for whom we actually yearned.
After having made me sign an oath of secrecy with blood, Yuri told me about the married lady in Warsaw with whom at twelve or thirteen he was secretly in love and whom a couple of years later he made love to. By comparison it would have sounded jejune, I feared, to tell him about my seaside playmates, but I cannot recall what substitute I invented to match his romance. Around that time, though, a real romantic adventure did come my way. I am now going to do something quite difficult, a kind of double somersault with a Welsh waggle (old acrobats will know what I mean), and I want complete silence, please.
3
In August 1910, my brother and I were in Bad Kissingen with our parents and tutor (Lenski); after that my father and mother traveled to Munich and Paris, and back to St. Petersburg, and then to Berlin where we boys, with Lenski, were spending the autumn and the beginning of the winter, having our teeth fixed. An American dentist—Lowell or Lowen, I do not remember his name exactly—ripped some of our teeth out and trussed up others with twine before disfiguring us with braces. Even more hellish than the action of the rubber pear pumping hot pain into a cavity were the cotton pads—I could not endure their dry contact and squeak—which used to be thrust between gum and tongue for the operator’s convenience; and there would be, in the windowpane before one’s helpless eyes, a transparency, some dismal seascape or gray grapes, shuddering with the dull reverberations of distant trams under dull skies. “In den Zelten achtzehn A”— the address comes back to me dancing trochaically, immediately followed by the whispery motion of the cream-colored electric taxi that took us there. We expected every possible compensation in atonement for those dreadful mornings.
My brother loved the museum of wax figures in the Arcade off the Unter den Linden—Friedrich’s grenadiers, Bonaparte communing with a mummy, young Liszt, who composed a rhapsody in his sleep, and Marat, who died in a shoe; and for me (who did not know yet that Marat had been an ardent lepidopterist) there was, at the corner of that Arcade, Gruber’s famous butterfly shop, a camphoraceous paradise at the top of a steep, narrow staircase which I climbed every other day to inquire if Chapman’s new Hairstreak or Mann’s recently rediscovered White had been obtained for me at last. We tried tennis on a public court; but a wintry gale kept chasing dead leaves across it, and, besides, Lenski could not really play, although insisting on joining us, without removing his overcoat, in a lopsided threesome.
Subsequently, most of our afternoons were spent at a roller-skating rink in the Kurfürstendamm. I remember Lenski rolling inexorably toward a pillar which he attempted to embrace while collapsing with a dreadful clatter; and after persevering awhile he would content himself with sitting in one of the loges that flanked the plush parapet and consuming there wedges of slightly salty mokka torte with whipped cream, while I kept self-sufficiently overtaking poor gamely stumbling Sergey, one of those galling little pictures that revolve on and on in one’s mind. A military band (Germany, at the time, was the
