Ada

ardor at ardis: hot summer, a country estate--and suddenly the arcane alchemy of love burst into flame, kindled by the fire that blazed in the night

In the early afternoon he descended with his two suitcases into the sunny peace of the little rural station whence a winding road led to Ardis Hall, which he was visiting for the first time in his life. In a miniature of the imagination, he had seen a saddled horse prepared for him; there was not even a trap. The stationmaster, a stout sunburned man in a brown uniform, was sure they expected him with the evening train, which was slower but had a tea car. He would ring up the Hall in a moment, he added as he signaled to the anxious engine driver. Suddenly, a hackney coach drove up to the platform and a red-haired lady, carrying her straw hat and laughing at her own haste, made for the train and just managed to board it before it moved. So Van agreed to use the means of transportation made available to him by a chance crease in the texture of time and seated himself in the old calèche. The half-hour jogging drive proved not unpleasant. He was taken through pinewoods and over rocky ravines, with birds and other animals singing in the flowering undergrowth. Sun flecks and lacy shadows skimmed over his legs and lent a green twinkle to the brass button deprived of its twin on the back of the coachman's coat. They passed through Torfyanka, a dreamy hamlet consisting of three or four log izbas, a milk-pail repair shop and a smithy smothered in jasmine. The driver waved to an invisible friend and the sensitive runabout swerved slightly to match his gesture. They were now spinning along a dusty country road between fields. The road dipped and humped again, and at every ascent the old clockwork taxi would slow up as if on the brink of sleep and reluctantly overcome its weakness.

They bounced on the cobblestones of Gamlet, a half-Russian village, and the chauffeur waved again, this time to a boy in a cherry tree. Birches separated to let them pass across an old bridge. Ladore, with its ruinous black castle on a crag, and its gay multicolored roofs farther downstream, was glimpsed--to be seen again many times much later in life.

Presently, the vegetation assumed a more southern aspect as the lane skirted Ardis Park. At the next turning, the romantic mansion appeared on the gentle eminence of old novels. It was a splendid country house, three stories high, built of pale brick and purplish stone, whose tints and substance seemed to interchange their effects in certain lights. Notwithstanding the variety, amplitude and animation of great trees that had long replaced the two regular rows of stylized saplings (thrown in by the mind of the architect rather than observed by the eye of a painter), Van immediately recognized Ardis Hall as depicted in the 200-year-old aquarelle that hung in his father's dressing room: the mansion sat on a rise overlooking an abstract meadow with two tiny people in cocked hats conversing not far from a stylized cow.

None of the family was at home when Van arrived. A servant in waiting took his horse. He entered the Gothic archway of the hall, where Bouteillan, the old bald butler who unprofessionally now wore a mustache (dyed a rich gravy brown), met him with gested delight--he had once been the valet of Van's father--"Je parie," he said, "que Monsieur ne me reconnaît pas," and proceeded to remind Van of what Van had already recollected unaided, the farmannikin (a special kind of box kite, untraceable nowadays even in the greatest museums housing the toys of the past) that Bouteillan had helped him to fly one day in a meadow dotted with buttercups. Both looked up: the tiny red rectangle hung for an instant askew in a blue spring sky. The hall was famous for its painted ceilings. It was too early for tea: Would Van like him or a maid to unpack? Oh, one of the maids, said Van, wondering briefly what item in a schoolboy's luggage might be supposed to shock a housemaid. The picture of naked Ivory Revery (a model)? Who cared, now that he was a man?

Acting upon the butler's suggestion, he went to make a tour du jardin. As he followed a winding path, soundlessly stepping on its soft pink sand in the cloth gumshoes that were part of the school uniform, he came upon a person whom he recognized with disgust as being his former French governess (the place swarmed with ghosts!). She was sitting on a green bench under the Persian lilacs, a parasol in one hand and in the other a book from which she was reading aloud to a small girl who was picking her nose and examining with dreamy satisfaction her finger before wiping it on the edge of the bench. Van decided she must be "Ardelia," the elder of the two little cousins he was supposed to get acquainted with. Actually, it was Lucette, the younger one, a neutral child of eight, with a fringe of shiny reddish-blonde hair and a freckled button for nose: she had had pneumonia in spring and was still veiled by an odd air of remoteness that children, especially impish children, retain for some time after brushing through death. Mlle Larivière suddenly looked at Van over her green spectacles--and he had to cope with another warm welcome. In contrast to Albert, she had not changed at all since the days she used to come three times a week to Dark Veen's house in town with a bagful of books and the tiny, tremulous poodlet (now dead) that could not be left behind. It had glistening eyes like sad black olives.

Presently, they all strolled back, the governess shaking in reminiscent grief her big-chinned, big-nosed head under the moiré of her parasol; Lucy gratingly dragging a garden hoe she had found, and young Van in his trim gray suit and flowing tie, with his hands behind his back, looking down at his neatly stepping mute feet--trying to place them in line, for no special reason.

A victoria had stopped at the porch. A lady, who resembled Van's mother, and a dark-haired girl of 11 or 12, preceded by a fluid dackel, were getting out. Ada carried an untidy bunch of wild flowers. She wore a white frock with a black jacket and there was a white bow in her long hair. Van never saw that dress again and when he mentioned it in retrospective evocation, she invariably retorted that he must have dreamed it, she had never had one like that, never could have put on a dark blazer on such a hot day, but he stuck to his initial image of her to the last.

Some ten years ago, not long before or after his fourth birthday, and toward the end of his mother's long stay in a sanatorium, "Aunt" Marina had swooped upon him in a public park where there were pheasants in a big cage. She advised his nurse to mind her own business and took him to a booth near the band shell, where she bought him an emerald stick of peppermint candy and told him that if his father wished, she would replace his mother and that you could not feed the birds without Lady Amherst's permission, or so he understood.

They now had tea in a prettily furnished corner of the otherwise very austere central hall from which rose the grand staircase. They sat on chairs upholstered in silk around a pretty table. Ada's black jacket and a pink-yellow-blue nosegay she had composed of anemones, celandines and columbines lay on a stool of oak. The dog got more bits of cake than it did ordinarily. Price, the mournful old footman who brought the cream for the strawberries, resembled Van's teacher of history, "Jeejee" Jones.

"He resembles my teacher of history," said Van when the man had gone.

"I used to love history," said Marina. "I loved to identify myself with famous women. There's a ladybird on your plate, Ivan. Especially with famous beauties--Lincoln's second wife or Queen Josephine."

"Yes, I've noticed--it's beautifully done. We've got a similar set at home."

"Slivok (some cream)? I hope you speak Russian?" Marina asked Van, as she poured him a cup of tea.

"Neohotno no sovershenno svobodno (reluctantly but quite fluently)," replied Van, slegka ulïbnuvshis' (with a slight smile). "Yes, lots of cream and three lumps of sugar."

"Ada and I share your extravagant tastes. Dostoevski liked it with raspberry syrup."

"Pah," uttered Ada.

Marina's portrait, a rather good oil by Tresham, hanging above her on the wall, showed her wearing the picture hat she had used for the rehearsal of a Hunting Scene ten years ago, romantically brimmed, with a rainbow wing and a great drooping plume of black-banded silver; and Van, as he recalled the cage in the park and his mother somewhere in a cage of her own, experienced an odd sense of mystery, as if the commentators of his destiny had gone into a huddle. Marina's face was now made up to imitate her former looks, but fashions had changed, her cotton dress was a rustic print, her auburn locks were bleached and no longer tumbled down her temples, and nothing in her attire or adornments echoed the dash of her riding crop in the picture and the tegular pattern of her brilliant plumage that Tresham had rendered with ornithological skill.

There was not much to remember about that first tea. Van noticed Ada's trick of hiding her fingernails by fisting her hand or stretching it with the palm turned upward when helping herself to a biscuit. She was bored and embarrassed by everything her mother said, and when the latter started to talk about the Tarn, otherwise the New Reservoir, he noted that Ada was no longer sitting next to him but standing a little way off, with her back to the tea table at an open casement with the slim-waisted dog on a chair peering over splayed front paws out into the garden, too, and she was asking it in a private whisper what it was it had sniffed.

"You can see the Tarn from the library window," said Marina. "Presently, Ada will show you all the rooms in the house. Ada?" (She pronounced it the Russian way, with two deep, dark a's, making it sound rather like "ardor.")

"You can catch a glint of it from here, too," said Ada, turning her head and, police verso, introducing the view to Van, who put his cup down, wiped his mouth with a tiny embroidered napkin and, stuffing it into his trouser pocket, went up to the dark-haired, pale-armed girl. As he bent toward her (he was three inches taller and the double of that when she married a Greek Catholic, and his shadow held the bridal crown over her from behind), she moved her head to make him move his to the required angle and her hair touched his neck. In his first dreams of her, this re-enacted contact, so light, so brief, invariably proved to be beyond the dreamer's endurance and, like a lifted sword, signaled fire and violent release.

"Finish your tea, my precious," called Marina.

Presently, as Marina had promised, the two children went upstairs. "Why do stairs creak so desperately, when two children go upstairs?" she thought, looking up at the balustrade along which two left hands progressed with strikingly similar flips and glides, like siblings taking their first dancing lesson. "After all, we were twin sisters; everybody knows that." The same slow heave, she in front, he behind, took them over the last two steps, and the staircase was silent again. "Old-fashioned qualms," said Marina.

• • •

Ada showed her shy guest the great library on the second floor, the pride of Ardis and her favorite "browse," which her mother never entered (having her own set of a Thousand-and-One Best Plays in her boudoir), and which Red Veen, a sentimentalist and a poltroon, shunned, not caring to run into the ghost of his father who had died there of a stroke, and also because he found nothing so depressing as the collected works of unrecollected authors, although he did not mind an occasional visitor's admiring the place's tall bookcases and short cabinets, its dark pictures and pale busts, its ten chairs of carved walnut and two noble tables inlaid with ebony. In a slant of scholarly sunlight, a botanical atlas upon a reading desk lay open on a colored plate of orchids. A kind of divan or day bed covered in black velvet, with two yellow cushions, was placed in a recess, below a plate-glass window that offered a generous view of the banal park and the man-made lake. A pair of candlesticks, mere phantoms of metal and tallow, stood, or seemed to stand, on the broad window ledge.

A corridor leading off the library would have taken our silent explorers to Mr. and Mrs. Veen's apartments in the west wing, had they pursued their investigations in that direction. Instead, a semisecret little staircase spiraled them from behind a rotatory bookcase to the upper floor, she, pale-thighed, above him, taking longer strides than he, three steep steps behind.

The bedchambers and adjacent accommodations were more than modest, and Van could not help regretting he was too young, apparently, to be assigned one of the two guest rooms next to the library. He recalled nostalgically the luxuries of home as he considered the revolting objects that would close upon him in the solitude of summer nights. Everything struck him as being intended for a cringing cretin, the dismal poorhouse bed with a medieval headboard of dingy wood, the self-creaking wardrobe, the squat commode of imitation mahogany with chain-linked knobs (one missing), the blanket chest (a sheepish escapee from the linen room), and the old bureau whose domed front flap was locked or stuck: he found the knob in one of its useless pigeonholes and handed it to Ada, who threw it out of the window. Van had never encountered a towel horse before, never seen a washstand made specially for the bathless. A round looking glass above it was ornamented with gilt gesso grapes; a satanic snake encircled the porcelain basin (twin of the one in the girls' washroom across the passage). An elbow chair with a high back and a bedside stool supporting a brass candlestick with a grease pan and handle (whose double he had seemed to have seen mirrored a moment ago--where?) completed the worst and main part of the humble equipment.

They went back to the corridor, she tossing her hair, he clearing his throat. Farther down, a door of some playroom or nursery stood ajar and stirred to and fro as little Lucette peeped out, one russet knee showing. Then the door leaf flew open--but she darted inside and away. Cobalt sailing boats adorned the white tiles of a stove, and as her sister and he passed by that open door, a toy barrel organ invitingly went into action with a stumbling little minuet. Ada and Van returned to the ground floor--this time all the way down the sumptuous staircase. Of the many ancestors along the wall, she pointed out her favorite, old Prince Vseslav Zemski (1699--1797), friend of Linnaeus and author of Flora Ladorica, who was portrayed in rich oil holding his barely pubescent bride and her blonde doll in his satin lap. An enlarged photograph, soberly framed, hung (rather incongruously, Van thought) next to the rosebud lover in his embroidered coat. The late Sumerechnikov, American precursor of the Lumière brothers, had taken Ada's maternal uncle in profile with upcheeked violin, a doomed youth, after his farewell concert.

On the first floor, a yellow drawing room hung with damask and furnished in what the French once called the Empire style opened into the garden and now, in the late afternoon, was invaded across the threshold by the large leaf shadows of a paulownia tree (named, by an indifferent linguist, explained Ada, after the patronymic, mistaken for a second name or surname of a harmless lady, Anna Pavlovna Romanov, daughter of Pavel, nicknamed Paul-minus-Peter, why she did not know, a cousin of the nonlinguist's master, the botanical Zemski, I'm going to scream, thought Van). A china cabinet encaged a whole zoo of small animals among which the oryx and the okapi, complete with scientific names, were especially recommended to him by his charming but impossibly pretentious companion. Equally fascinating was a five-fold screen with bright paintings on its black panels reproducing the first maps of four and a half continents. We now pass into the music room, with its little-used piano, and a corner room called the Gun Room containing a stuffed Shetland pony that an aunt of Dan Veen's, maiden name forgotten, thank Log, once rode. On the other, or some other, side of the house was the ballroom, a glossy wasteland with wallflower chairs. "Reader, ride by" ("mimo, chitatel'," as Turgenev wrote). The "mews," as they were improperly called in Ladore County, were architecturally rather confusing in the case of Ardis Hall. A latticed gallery looked across its garlanded shoulder into the garden and turned sharply toward the drive. Elsewhere, an elegant loggia, lit by long windows, led now-tongue-tied Ada and intolerably bored Van into a bower of rocks: a sham grotto, with ferns clinging to it shamelessly, and an artificial cascade borrowed from some brook or book, or Van's burning bladder (after all that confounded tea).

The servants' quarters (except those of two painted and powdered maids who had rooms upstairs) were on the courtyard side of the ground floor, and Ada said she had visited them once in the explorative stage of her childhood but all she remembered was a canary and an ancient machine for grinding coffee beans, which settled the matter.

They zoomed upstairs again. Van popped into a water closet--and emerged in much better humor. A dwarf Haydn again played a few bars as they walked on.

The attic. This is the attic. Welcome to the attic. It stored a great number of trunks and cartons, and two brown couches, one on top of the other like copulating beetles, and lots of pictures standing in corners or on shelves with their faces against the wall like humiliated children. Rolled up in its case was an old "jikker" or skimmer, a blue magic rug with Arabian designs, faded but still enchanting, which Uncle Daniel's father had used in his boyhood and later flown when drunk. Because of the many collisions, collapses and other accidents, especially numerous in sunset skies over idyllic fields, jikkers were banned by the air patrol; but four years later Van, who loved that sport, bribed a local mechanic to clean the thing, reload its hawking tubes and generally bring it back into magic order; and many a summer day would they spend, his Ada and he, hanging over grove and river or gliding at a safe ten-foot altitude above surfaces of roads or roofs. How comic the wobbling, ditch-diving cyclist, how weird the arm-flailing and slipping chimney sweep!

Vaguely impelled by the feeling that as long as they were inspecting the house they were, at least, doing something--keeping up a semblance of consecutive action that, despite the brilliant conversational gifts both possessed, would degenerate into a desperate vacuum of self-conscious loafing, with no other resource than affected wit followed by silence, Ada did not spare him the basement, where a big-bellied robot throbbed, manfully heating the pipes that meandered to the huge kitchen and to the two drab bathrooms, and did their poor best to keep the castle habitable on festive visits in winter.

"You have not seen anything yet!" cried Ada. "There is still the roof!"

"But that is going to be our last panting climb today," said Van to himself firmly.

Owing to a mixture of overlapping styles and tiles (not easily explainable in nontechnical terms to non-roof-lovers), as well as to a haphazard continuum, so to speak, of renovations, the roof of Ardis Manor presented an indescribable confusion of angles and levels, of tin-green and fin-gray surfaces, of scenic ridges and windproof nooks. You could clip and kiss, and survey in between, the reservoir, the groves, the meadows, even the inkline of larches that marked the boundary of the nearest estate miles away, and the ugly little shapes of more or less legless cows on a distant hillside. And one could easily hide behind some projection from inquisitive skimmers or picture-taking balloons.

A gong bronzily boomed on a terrace.

For some odd reason, both children were relieved to learn that a stranger was expected to dinner. He was an Andalusian architect whom Uncle Dan wanted to plan an "artistic" swimming pool for Ardis Manor. Uncle Dan had intended to come, too, with an interpreter, but had caught the Russian "hrip" (Spanish flu) instead, and had phoned Marina, asking her to be very nice to good old Alonso.

"You must help me!" Marina told the children with a worried frown.

"I could show him a copy, perhaps," said Ada, turning to Van, "of an absolutely fantastically lovely nature morte by Juan de Labrador of Extremadura--golden grapes and a strange rose against a black background. Dan sold it to Demon, and Demon has promised to give it to me on my fifteenth birthday."

"We also have some Zurbarán fruit," said Van smugly. "Tangerines, I believe, and a fig of sorts, with a wasp upon it. Oh, we'll dazzle the old boy with shoptalk!"

They did not. Alonso, a tiny wizened man in a double-breasted tuxedo, spoke only Spanish, while the sum of Spanish words his hosts knew scarcely exceeded half a dozen. Van had canastilla (a little basket) and nubarrones (thunderclouds), which both came from an en regard translation of a lovely Spanish poem in one of his schoolbooks. Ada remembered, of course, mariposa, butterfly, and the names of two or three birds (listed in ornithological guides), such as paloma, pigeon, or grevol, hazel hen. Marina knew aroma and hombre, and an anatomical term with a "j" hanging in the middle. In consequence, the table talk consisted of long lumpy Spanish phrases pronounced very loudly by the voluble architect, who thought he was dealing with very deaf people, and of a smatter of French, intentionally but vainly Italianized by his victims. Once the difficult dinner was over, Alonso investigated, by the light of three torches held by two footmen, a possible site for an expensive pool, put the plan of the grounds back into his briefcase and, after kissing by mistake Ada's hand in the dark, hastened away to catch the last southbound train.

• • •

Was she really pretty, at 12? Did he want--would he ever want--to caress her, to really caress her? Her black hair cascaded over one clavicle and the gesture she made of shaking it back and the dimple on her pale cheek were revelations with an element of immediate recognition about them. Her pallor shone, her blackness blazed. The pleated skirts she liked were becomingly short. Even her bare limbs were so free from suntan that one's gaze, stroking her white shins and forearms, could follow upon them the regular slants of fine dark hairs, the silks of her girlhood. The iridal dark brown of her serious eyes had the enigmatic opacity of an Oriental hypnotist's look (in a magazine's back-page advertisement) and seemed to be placed higher than usual, so that between their lower rim and the moist lower lid a cradle crescent of white remained when she stared straight at you. Her long eyelashes seemed blackened and, in fact, were. Her features were saved from elfin prettiness by the thickish shape of her parched lips. Her plain Irish nose was Van's in miniature. Her teeth were fairly white but not very even.

Her poor pretty hands--one could not help cooing with pity over them--rosy in comparison with the translucent skin of the arm, rosier even than the elbow that seemed to be blushing for the state of her nails: she bit them so thoroughly that all vestige of free margin was replaced by a groove cutting into the flesh with the tightness of wire and lending an additional spatule of length to her naked finger tips. Later, when he was so fond of kissing her cold hands, she would clench them, allowing his lips nothing but knuckle, but he would fiercely pry her hand open to get at those flat blind little cushions. (But, oh, my, oh, the long, languid, rose-and-silver, painted and pointed, delicately stinging onyxes of her adolescent and adult years!)

What Van experienced in those first strange days when she showed him the house--and those nooks in it where they were to make love so soon--combined elements of ravishment and exasperation. Ravishment--because of her pale, voluptuous, impermissible skin, her hair, her legs, her angular movements, her gazelle-grass odor, the sudden black stare of her wide-set eyes, the rustic nudity under her dress; exasperation--because between him, an awkward schoolboy of genius, and that precocious, affected, impenetrable child there extended a void of light and a veil of shade that no force could overcome and pierce. He swore wretchedly in the hopelessness of his bed as he focused his swollen senses on the glimpse of her he had engulfed when, on their second excursion to the top of the house, she had mounted a captain's trunk to unhasp a sort of illuminator through which one acceded to the roof (even the dog had once gone (continued on page 104)ada(continued from page 100) there), and a bracket or something wrenched up her skirt and he saw--as one sees some sickening miracle in a Biblical fable or a moth's shocking metamorphosis--that the child was darkly flossed. He noticed that she seemed to have noticed that he had or might have noticed (what he not only noticed but retained with tender terror until he freed himself of that vision--much later--and in strange ways), and an odd, dull, arrogant look passed across her face: her sunken cheeks and fat pale lips moved as if she were chewing something, and she emitted a yelp of joyless laughter when he, big Van, slipped on a tile after wriggling in his turn through the skylight. And in the sudden sun, he realized that until then, he, small Van, had been a blind virgin, since haste, dust and dusk had obscured the mousy charms of his first harlot, so often possessed.

His sentimental education now went on fast. Next morning, he happened to catch sight of her washing her face and arms over an old-fashioned basin on a rococo stand, her hair knotted on the top of her head, her nightgown twisted around her waist like a clumsy corolla out of which issued her slim back, ribshaded on the near side. A fat snake of porcelain curled around the basin, and as both the reptile and he stopped to watch Eve and the soft woggle of her bud breasts in profile, a big mulberry-colored cake of soap slithered out of her hand, and her black-socked foot hooked the door shut with a bang that was more the echo of the soap's crashing against the marble board than a sign of pudic displeasure.

• • •

One afternoon, they were climbing the glossy-limbed shattal tree at the bottom of the garden. Mlle Larivière and little Lucette, screened by a caprice of the coppice but just within earshot, were playing grace hoops. One glimpsed now and then, above or through foliage, the skimming hoop passing from one unseen sending stick to another. The first cicada of the season kept trying out its instrument. A silver-and-sable skybab squirrel sat sampling a cone on the back of a bench.

Van, in blue gym suit, having worked his way up to a fork just under his agile playmate (who naturally was better acquainted with the tree's intricate map) but not being able to see her face, betokened mute communication by taking her ankle between finger and thumb, as she would have a closed butterfly. Her bare foot slipped, and the two panting youngsters tangled ignominiously among the branches, in a shower of drupes and leaves, clutching at each other; and the next moment, as they regained a semblance of balance, his expressionless face and cropped head were between her legs and a last fruit fell with a thud--the dropped dot of an inverted exclamation point. She was wearing his wrist watch and a cotton frock.

("Remember?"

"Yes, of course, I remember: you kissed me here, on the inside--"

"And you started to strangle me with those devilish knees of yours--"

"I was seeking some sort of support.")

That might have been true, but according to a later (considerably later!) version, they were still in the tree, and still glowing, when Van removed a silk thread of larva web from his lip and remarked that such negligence of attire was a form of hysteria.

"Well," answered Ada, straddling her favorite limb, "as we all know by now, Mlle La Rivière de Diamants has nothing against a hysterical little girl's not wearing pantalets during l'ardeur de la canicule."

"I refuse to share the ardor of your little canicule with an apple tree."

"It is really the Tree of Knowledge--this specimen was imported last summer, wrapped up in brocade, from the Eden National Park, where Dr. Krolik's son is a ranger and breeder."

"Let him range and breed, by all means," said Van (her natural history had long begun to get on his nerves), "but I swear no apple trees grow in Iraq."

"Right, but that's not a true apple tree."

("Right and wrong," commented Ada, again much later: "We did discuss the matter, but you could not have permitted yourself such vulgar repartees then. At a time when the chastest of chances allowed you to snatch, as they say, a first shy kiss! Oh, for shame. And besides, there was no National Park in Iraq eighty years ago." "True," said Van. "And no caterpillars bred on that tree in our orchard." "True, my lovely and larveless." Natural history was past history by that time.)

Both kept diaries. Soon after that foretaste of knowledge, an amusing thing happened. She was on her way to Krolik's house with a boxful of hatched and chloroformed butterflies and had just passed through the orchard when she suddenly stopped and swore (chort!). At the same moment Van, who had set out in the opposite direction for a bit of shooting practice in a nearby pavilion (where there was a bowling alley and other recreational facilities, once much used by other Veens), also came to an abrupt standstill. Then, by a nice coincidence, both went tearing back to the house to hide their diaries, which both thought they had left lying open in their respective rooms. Ada, who feared the curiosity of Lucette and Blanche, a young chambermaid (the governess presented no threat, being pathologically unobservant), found out she was wrong--she had put away the album with its latest entry. Van, who knew that Ada was a little "snoopy," discovered Blanche in his room feigning to make the made bed, with the unlocked diary lying on the stool beside it. He slapped her lightly on the behind and removed the shagreen-bound book to a safer place. Then Van and Ada met in the passage, and would have kissed at some earlier stage of the Novel's Evolution in the History of Literature. It might have been a neat little sequel to the Shattal Tree incident. Instead, both resumed their separate ways--and Blanche, I suppose, went to weep in her bower.

• • •

Their first free and frantic caresses had been preceded by a brief period of strange craftiness, of cringing stealth. The masked offender was Van, but Ada's passive acceptance of the poor boy's behavior seemed tacitly to acknowledge its disreputable and even monstrous nature. A few weeks later, both were to regard that phase of his courtship with amused condescension; at the time, however, its implicit cowardice puzzled her and distressed him--mainly because he was keenly conscious of her being puzzled.

Although Van had never had the occasion to witness anything close to virginal revolt on the part of Ada--not an easily frightened or overfastidious little girl ("Je raffole de tout ce qui rampe"), he could rely on two or three dreadful dreams to imagine her, in real, or at least responsible, life, recoiling with a wild look as she left his lust in the lurch to summon her governess or mother, or a gigantic footman (not existing in the house but killable in the dream--punchable with sharp-ringed knuckles, puncturable like a bladder of blood), after which he knew he would be expelled from Ardis--

(In Ada's hand: I vehemently object to that "not overfastidious." It is unfair in fact, and fuzzy in fancy. Van's marginal note: Sorry, puss; that must stay.)

--but even if he were to will himself to mock that image so as to blast it out of all consciousness, he could not feel proud of his conduct: in those actual undercover dealings of his with Ada, by doing what he did and the way he did it, with that unpublished relish, he seemed to himself to be either taking advantage of her innocence or else inducing her to conceal from him, the concealer, her awareness of what he concealed.

After the first contact, so light, so mute, between his soft lips and her (continued on page 245)ada(continued from page 104) softer skin had been established--high up in that dappled tree, with only that stray ardilla daintily leavesdropping--nothing seemed changed in one sense, all was lost in another. Such contacts evolve their own texture; a tactile sensation is a blind spot; we touch in silhouette. Henceforth, at certain moments of their otherwise indolent days, in certain recurrent circumstances of controlled madness, a secret sign was erected, a veil drawn between him and her--

(Ada: They are now practically extinct at Ardis. Van: Who? Oh, I see.)

--not to be removed until he got rid of what the necessity of dissimulation kept degrading to the level of a wretched itch.

(Och, Van!)

He could not say afterward, when discussing with her that rather pathetic nastiness, whether he really feared that his avournine (as Blanche was to refer later, in her bastard French, to Ada) might react with an outburst of real or well-feigned resentment to a stark display of desire, or whether a glum, cunning approach was dictated to him by considerations of pity and decency toward a chaste child, whose charm was too compelling not to be tasted in secret and too sacred to be openly violated; but something went wrong--that much was clear. The vague commonplaces of vague modesty so dreadfully in vogue 80 years ago, the unsufferable banalities of shy wooing buried in old romances as arch as Arcady, those moods, those modes, lurked, no doubt, behind the hush of his ambuscades and that of her toleration. No record has remained of the exact summer day when his wary and elaborate coddlings began; but simultaneously with her sensing that at certain moments he stood indecently close behind her, with his burning breath and gliding lips, she was aware that those silent, exotic approximations must have started long ago in some indefinite and infinite past and could no longer be stopped by her, without her acknowledging a tacit acceptance of their routine repetition in that past.

On those relentlessly hot July afternoons, Ada liked to sit on a cool piano stool of ivoried wood at a white-oil-cloth'd table in the sunny music room, her favorite botanical atlas open before her, and copy out in color on creamy paper some singular flower. She might choose, for instance, an insect-mimicking orchid, which she would proceed to enlarge with remarkable skill. Or else she combined one species with another (unrecorded but possible), introducing odd little changes and twists that seemed almost morbid in so young a girl so nakedly dressed. The long beam slanting in from the French window glowed in the faceted tumbler, in the tinted water and on the tin of the paintbox--and while she delicately painted an eyespot or the lobes of a lip, rapturous concentration caused the tip of her tongue to curl at the corner of her mouth; and as the sun looked on, the fantastic, black-blue-brown-haired child seemed in her turn to mimic the mirror-of-Venus blossom. Her flimsy, loose frock happened to be so deeply cut out behind that whenever she concaved her back while moving her prominent scapulae to and fro and tilting her head--as with air-poised brush she surveyed her damp achievement, or with the outside of her left wrist wiped a strand of hair off her temple--Van, who had drawn up to her seat as close as he dared, could see down her sleek ensellure as far as her coccyx and inhale the warmth of her entire body. His heart thumping, one miserable hand deep in his trouser pocket--where he kept a purse with half a dozen ten-dollar gold pieces to disguise his state--he bent over her, as she bent over her work. Very lightly, he let his parched lips travel down her warm hair and hot nape. It was the sweetest, the strongest, the most mysterious sensation that the boy had ever experienced; nothing in his sordid venery of the past winter could duplicate that downy tenderness, that despair of desire. He would have lingered forever on the little middle knob of rounded delight on the back of her neck, had she kept it inclined forever--and had the unfortunate fellow been able to endure much longer the ecstasy of its touch under his wax-still mouth without rubbing against her with mad abandon. The vivid crimsoning of an exposed ear and the gradual torpor invading her paintbrush were the only signs--fearful signs--of her feeling the increased pressure of his caress. Silently, he would slink away to his room, lock the door, grasp a towel, uncover himself and call forth the image he had just left behind, an image still as safe and bright as a hand-cupped flame--carried into the dark, only to be got rid of there with savage zeal; after which, drained for a while, with shaky loins and weak calves, Van would return to the purity of the sun-suffused room, where a little girl, now glistening with sweat, was still painting her flower: the marvelous flower that simulated a bright moth that in turn simulated a scarab.

If the relief, any relief, of a lad's ardor had been Van's sole concern; if, in other words, no love had been involved, our young friend might have put up--for one casual summer--with the nastiness and ambiguity of his behavior. But since Van loved Ada, that complicated release could not be an end in itself; or, rather, it was only a dead end, because unshared; because horribly hidden; because not liable to melt into any subsequent phase of incomparably greater rapture that, like a misty summit beyond the fierce mountain pass, promised to be the true pinnacle of his perilous relationship with Ada. During that midsummer week or fortnight, notwithstanding those daily butterfly kisses on that hair, on that neck, Van felt even farther removed from her than he had been on the eve of the day when his mouth had accidentally come into contact with an inch of her skin hardly perceived by him sensually in the maze of the shattal tree.

But nature is motion and growth. One afternoon, he came up behind her in the music room more noiselessly than ever before, because he happened to be barefooted--and, turning her head, little Ada shut her eyes and pressed her lips to his in a fresh-rose kiss that entranced and baffled Van.

"Now run along," she said, "quick, quick, I'm busy," and as he lagged like an idiot, she anointed his flushed forehead with her paintbrush in the semblance of an ancient Estotian "sign of the cross." "I have to finish this," she added, pointing with her violet-purple-soaked thin brush at a blend of Ophrys scolopax and Ophrys veenae, "and in a minute we must go down, because Marina wants Kim to take our picture--holding hands and grinning" (grinning, and then turning back to her hideous flower).

• • •

Not only in ear-trumpet age--in what Van called their dot-dot-dotage--but even more so in their adolescence (summer 1888) did they seek a scholarly excitement in establishing the past evolution (summer 1884) of their love, the initial stages of its revelations, the freak discrepancies in gappy chronographies. She had kept only a few--mainly botanical and entomological--pages of her diary, because on rereading it, she had found its tone false and finical; he had destroyed his entirely, because of its clumsy schoolboyish style combined with heedless, and false, cynicism. Thus, they had to rely on oral tradition, on the mutual correction of common memories. "And do you remember, a tï pomnish', et te souviens-tu" (invariably with that implied codetta of "and" introducing the bead to be threaded in the torn necklace) became with them, in their intense talks, the standard device for beginning every other sentence. Calendar dates were debated, sequences sifted and shifted, sentimental notes compared, hesitations and resolutions passionately analyzed. If their recollections now and then did not tally, this was often owing to sexual differences, rather than to individual temperament. Both were diverted by life's young fumblings, both saddened by the wisdom of time. Ada tended to see those initial stages as an extremely gradual and diffuse growth, possibly unnatural, probably unique, but wholly delightful in its smooth unfolding that precluded any brutish impulses or shocks of shame. Van's memory could not help picking out specific episodes branded forever with abrupt and poignant, and sometimes regrettable, physical thrills. She had the impression that the insatiable delectations she arrived at, without having expected or summoned them, were experienced by Van only by the time she attained them: that is, after weeks of cumulative caresses; her first physiological reactions to them she demurely dismissed as related to childish practices that she had indulged in before and that had little to do with the glory and tang of individual happiness. Van, on the contrary, not only could tabulate every informal spasm he had hidden from her before they became lovers but stressed philosophic and moral distinctions between the shattering force of self-abuse and the overwhelming softness of avowed and shared love.

When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of an impeccably narrowing corridor. Ada saw herself there as a wonder-eyed waif with a bedraggled nosegay; Van saw himself as a nasty young satyr with clumsy hooves and an ambiguous flue pipe. "But I was only twelve," Ada would cry when some indelicate detail was brought up. "I was in my fifteenth year," sadly said Van.

And did the young lady recall, he asked, producing metaphorically some notes from his pocket, the very first time she guessed that her shy young "cousin" (their official relationship) was physically excited in her presence, though decently swathed in layers of linen and wool and not in contact with the young lady?

She said, frankly, no, she did not--indeed, could not--because at ll, despite trying numberless times to unlock with every key in the house the cabinet in which Walter Daniel Veen kept "Jap. & Ind. erot. prints" as seen distinctly labeled through the glazed door (the key to which Van found for her in a twinkle--taped to the back of the pediment), she had still been rather hazy about the way human beings mated. She was very observant, of course, and had closely examined various insects in copula; but at the period discussed, clear examples of mammalian maleness had rarely come to her notice and had remained unconnected with any idea or possibility of sexual function (such as, for example, the time she had contemplated the soft-looking beige beak of the Negro janitor's boy who sometimes urinated in the girls' water closet at her first school in 1883).

Two other phenomena that she had observed even earlier proved ridiculously misleading. She must have been about nine when that elderly gentleman, an eminent painter whom she could not and would not name, came several times to dinner at Ardis Hall. Her drawing teacher, Miss Wintergreen, respected him greatly, though actually her natures mortes were considered (in 1888 and again in 1958) incomparably superior to the works of the celebrated old rascal, who drew his diminutive nudes invariably from behind--fig-picking, peach-but-tocked nymphets straining upward, or else rock-climbing girl scouts in bursting shorts--

"I know exactly," interrupted Van angrily, "whom you mean, and would like to place on record that even if his delicious talent is in disfavor today, Paul J. Gigment had every right to paint schoolgirls and poolgirls from any side he pleased. Proceed."

Every time (said unruffled Ada) Pig Pigment came, she cowered when hearing him trudge and snort and pant upstairs, ever nearer, like the Marmoreal Guest, that immemorial ghost, seeking her, crying for her in a thin, querulous voice not in keeping with marble.

"Poor old chap," murmured Van.

His method of contact, she said, "puisqu'on aborde ce thème-là, and I'm certainly not making offensive comparisons," was to insist, with maniacal force, that he help her reach for something--anything, a little gift he had brought, bonbons, or simply some old toy that he'd picked up from the floor of the nursery and hung up high on the wall, or a pink candle burning blue that he commanded her to blow out on an arbre de Noël--and despite her gentle protests, he would raise the child by her elbows, taking his time, pushing, grunting, saying: ah, how heavy and pretty she was. This went on and on until the dinner gong boomed or Nurse entered with a glass of fruit juice, and what a relief it was, for everybody concerned, when, in the course of that fraudulent ascension, her poor little bottom made it at last to the crackling snow of his shirt front, and he dropped her and buttoned his dinner jacket. And she remembered--

"Stupidly exaggerated," commented Van. "Also, I suppose, artificially recolored in the lamplight of later events as revealed still later."

And she remembered blushing painfully when somebody said poor Pig had a very sick mind and "a hardening of the artery," that is how she heard it, or perhaps "heartery"; but she also knew, even then, that the artery could become awfully long, for she had seen Drongo, a black horse, looking, she must confess, most dejected and embarrassed by what was happening to it right in the middle of a rough field with all the daisies watching. She thought, arch Ada said (how truthfully was another question), that a foal was dangling, with one black rubber leg free, out of Drongo's belly, because she did not understand that Drongo was not a mare at all and had not got a pouch as the kangaroo had in an illustration she worshiped; but then her English nurse explained that Drongo was a very sick horse and everything fell into place.

"Fine," said Van, "that's certainly fascinating; but I was thinking of the first time you might have suspected I was also a sick pig or horse. I am recalling," he continued, "the round table in the round rosy glow and you kneeling next to me on a chair. I was perched on the chair's swelling arm and you were building a house of cards, and your every movement was magnified, of course, as in a trance, dream-slow but also tremendously vigilant, and I positively reveled in the girl odor of your bare arm and in that of your hair, which now is murdered by some popular perfume. I date the event around June tenth--a rainy evening less than a week after my first arrival at Ardis."

"I remember the cards," she said, "and the light and the noise of the rain, and your blue cashmere pullover--but nothing else, nothing odd or improper, that came later. Besides, only in French love stories les messieurs hument young ladies."

"Well, I did while you went on with your delicate work. Tactile magic. Infinite patience. Finger tips stalking gravity. Badly bitten nails, my sweet. Forgive these notes; I cannot really express the discomfort of bulky, sticky desire. You see, I was hoping that when your castle toppled, you would make a Russian splash gesture of surrender and sit down on my hand."

"It was not a castle. It was a Pompeian villa with mosaics and paintings inside, because I used only court cards from Grandpa's old gambling packs. Did I sit down on your hot hard hand?"

"On my open palm, darling. A pucker of paradise. You remained still for a moment, fitting my cup. Then you rearranged your limbs and reknelt."

"Quick, quick, quick, collecting the flat shining cards again to build again, again slowly? We were abominably depraved, weren't we?"

"All bright kids are depraved. I see you do recollect--"

"Not that particular occasion, but the apple tree, and when you kissed my neck, et tout le reste. And then--zdravstvuyte: apofeos, the Night of the Burning Barn!"

• • •

A sort of hoary riddle (Les Sophismes de Sophie by Mlle Stopchin, in the Bibliothèque Vieux Rose series): did the Burning Barn come before the Cockloft or the Cockloft come first? Oh, first! We had long been kissing cousins when the fire started. In fact, I was getting some Château Baignet cold cream from Ladore for my poor chapped lips. And we both were roused in our separate rooms by her crying au feu! July 28? August 4?

Who cried? Stopchin cried? Larivière cried? Larivière? Answer! Crying that the barn flambait?

No, she was fast ablaze--I mean, asleep. I know, said Van, it was she, the hand-painted handmaid, who used your water colors to touch up her eyes, or so Larivière said, who accused her and Blanche of fantastic sins.

Oh, of course! But not Marina's poor French--it was our little goose Blanche. Yes, she rushed down the corridor and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase, like Ashette in the English version.

"And do you remember, Van, how warm the night was?"

"Eshcho bï! (as if I did not!) That night, because of the blink--"

That night, because of the bothersome blink of remote sheet lightning through the black hearts of his sleeping arbor, Van had abandoned his two tulip trees and gone to bed in his room. The tumult in the house and the maid's shriek interrupted a rare, brilliant, dramatic dream, whose subject he was unable to recollect later, although he still held it in a saved jewel box. As usual, he slept naked, and wavered now between pulling on a pair of shorts or draping himself in his tartan lap robe. He chose the second course, rattled a matchbox, lit his bedside candle and swept out of his room, ready to save Ada and all her larvae. The corridor was dark, somewhere the dachshund was barking ecstatically. Van gleaned from subsiding cries that the so-called "baronial barn," a huge beloved structure three miles away, was on fire. Fifty cows would have been without hay and Larivière without her morning coffee cream, had it happened later in the season. Van felt slighted. They've all gone and left me behind, as old Fierce mumbles at the end of The Cherry Orchard (Marina was an adequate Mme Ranevski).

With the tartan toga around him, he accompanied his black double down the accessory spiral stairs leading to the library. Placing a bare knee on the shaggy divan under the window, Van drew back the heavy red curtains.

Uncle Dan, a cigar in his teeth, and kerchiefed Marina, with Dack in her clutch deriding the watchdogs, were in the process of setting out between raised arms and swinging lanterns in the runabout--as red as a fire engine!--only to be overtaken at the crunching curve of the drive by three English footmen on horseback with three French maids en croupe. The entire domestic staff seemed to be taking off to enjoy the fire (an infrequent event in our damp windless region), using every contraption available or imaginable: telegas, teleseats, roadboats, tandem bicycles and even the clockwork luggage carts with which the stationmaster supplied the family in memory of Erasmus Veen, their inventor. Only the governess (as Ada, not Van, had by then discovered) slept on through everything, snoring with a wheeze and a harkle, in the room adjacent to the old nursery where little Lucette lay for a minute awake before running after her dream and jumping into the last furniture van.

Van, kneeling at the picture window, watched the inflamed eye of the cigar recede and vanish. That multiple departure.... Take over.

That multiple departure really presented a marvelous sight against the pale star-dusted firmament of practically subtropical Ardis, tinted between the black trees with a distant flamingo flush at the spot where the Barn was Burning. To reach it, one had to drive round a large reservoir, which I could make out breaking into scaly light here and there every time some adventurous hostler or pantry boy crossed it on water skis or in a Rob Roy or by means of a raft--typical raft ripples like fire snakes in Japan; and one could now follow with an artist's eye the motorcar's lamps, fore and aft, progressing east along the AB bank of that rectangular lake, then turning sharply upon reaching its B corner, trailing away up the short side and creeping back west, in a dim and diminished aspect, to a middle point on the far margin where they swung north and disappeared.

As two last retainers, the cook and the night watchman, scurried across the lawn toward a horseless trap or break that stood beckoning them with erected thills (or was it a rickshaw? Uncle Dan once had a Japanese valet), Van was delighted and shocked to distinguish, right there in the inky shrubbery, Ada in her long nightgown passing by with a lighted candle in one hand and a shoe in the other as if stealing after the belated ignicolists. It was only her reflection in the glass. She dropped the found shoe in a wastepaper basket and joined Van on the divan.

"Can one see anything, oh, can one see?" the dark-haired child kept repeating, and a hundred barns blazed in her amber-black eyes, as she beamed and peered in blissful curiosity. Van relieved her of her candlestick, placing it near his own longer one on the window ledge. "You are naked, you are dreadfully indecent," she observed without looking and without any emphasis or reproof, whereupon he cloaked himself tighter, Ramses the Scotsman, as she knelt beside him. For a moment they both contemplated the romantic night piece framed in the window. He had started to stroke her, shivering, staring ahead, following with a blind man's hand the dip of her spine through the batiste.

"Look, gypsies," she whispered, pointing at three shadowy forms--two men, one with a ladder, and a child or dwarf--circumspectly moving across the gray lawn. They saw the candlelit window and decamped, the smaller one walking à reculons, as if taking pictures.

"I stayed home on purpose, because I hoped you would, too--it was a contrived coincidence," she said, or said later she'd said--while he continued to fondle the flow of her hair and to massage and rumple her nightdress, not daring yet to go under and up, daring, however, to mold her nates until, with a little hiss, she sat down on his hand and her heels, as the burning castle of cards collapsed. She turned to him and next moment he was kissing her bare shoulder and pushing against her like that soldier behind in the queue.

First time I hear about him. I thought old Mr. Nymphobottomus had been my only predecessor.

Last spring. Trip to town. French theater matinee. Mademoiselle had mislaid the tickets. The poor fellow probably thought "Tartuffe" was a tart or a stripteaser.

Ce qui n'est pas si bête, au fond. Which was not so dumb after all. OK. In that scene of the Burning Barn--

Yes?

Nothing. Go on.

Oh, Van, that night, that moment as we knelt side by side in the candlelight like Praying Children in a very bad picture, showing two pairs of soft-wrinkled, once arboreal-animal, soles--not to Grandma, who gets the Xmas card, but to the surprised and pleased Serpent--I remember wanting so badly to ask you for a bit of purely scientific information, because my sidelong glance--

Not now, it's not a nice sight right now and it will be worse in a moment (or words to that effect).

Van could not decide whether she really was utterly ignorant and as pure as the night sky--now drained of its fire color--or whether total experience advised her to indulge in a cold game. It did not really matter.

Wait, not right now, he replied in a half-muffled mutter.

She insisted: I wannask, I wannano--

He caressed and parted with his fleshy folds, parties très charnues, in the case of our passionate siblings, her lank loose, nearly lumbus-length (when she threw back her head as now) black silks as he tried to get at her bed-warm splenius. (It is not necessary, here or elsewhere, there was another similar passage, to blotch a reasonably pure style with vague anatomical terms that a psychiatrist remembers from his student days. In Ada's late hand.)

"I wannask," she repeated as he greedily reached his hot pale goal.

"I want to ask you," she said quite distinctly, but also quite beside herself because his ramping palm had now worked its way through at the armpit, and his thumb on a nipplet made her palate tingle: ringing for the maid in Georgian novels--inconceivable without the presence of elettricità--

(I protest. You cannot. It is banned even in Lithuanian and Latin. Ada's note.)

"--to ask you...."

"Ask," cried Van, "but don't spoil everything" (such as feeding upon you, writhing against you).

"Well, why," she asked (demanded, challenged, one flame crepitated, one cushion was on the floor), "why do you get so fat and hard there when you--"

"Get where? When I what?"

In order to explain, tactfully, tactually, she belly-danced against him, still more or less kneeling, her long hair getting in the way, one eye staring into his ear (their reciprocal positions had become rather muddled by then).

"Repeat!" he cried as if she were far away, a reflection in a dark window.

"You will show me at once," said Ada firmly.

He discarded his makeshift kilt, and her tone of voice changed immediately.

"Oh, dear," she said as one child to another. "It's all skinned and raw. Does it hurt? Does it hurt horribly?"

"Touch it quick," he implored.

"Van, poor Van," she went on in the narrow voice the sweet girl used when speaking to cats, caterpillars, pupating puppies. "Yes, I'm sure, it smarts, would it help if I'd touch, are you sure?"

"You bet," said Van, "on n'est pas bête à ce point" ("there are limits to stupidity," colloquial and rude).

"Relief map," said the primrose prig, "the rivers of Africa." Her index traced the blue Nile down into its jungle and traveled up again. "Now what's this? The cap of the Red Bolete is not half as plushy. In fact" (positively chattering), "I'm reminded of geranium or, rather, pelargonium bloom."

"God, we all are," said Van.

"Oh, I like this texture, Van, I like it! Really I do!"

"Squeeze, you goose, can't you see I'm dying."

But our young botanist had not the faintest idea how to handle the thing properly--and Van, now in extremis, driving it roughly against the hem of her nightdress, could not help groaning as he dissolved in a puddle of pleasure.

She looked down in dismay.

"Not what you think," remarked Van calmly. "This is not number one. Actually, it's as clean as grass sap. Well, now the Nile is settled stop Stanley."

(I wonder, Van, why you are doing your best to transform our poetical and unique past into a dirty farce? Honestly, Van! Oh, I am honest, that's how it went. I wasn't sure of my ground, hence the sauciness and the simper. Ah, parlez pour vous: I, dear, can affirm that those famous finger trips up your Africa and to the edge of the world came considerably later when I knew the itinerary by heart. Sorry, no--if people remembered the same, they would not be different people. That's-how-it-went. But we are not "different"! Think and dream are the same in French. Think of the douceur, Van! Oh, I am thinking of it, of course, I am--it was all douceur, my child, my rhyme. That's better, said Ada.)

Please, take over.

Van stretched himself naked in the now motionless candlelight.

"Let us sleep here," he said. "They won't be back before dawn relights Uncle's cigar."

"My nightie is trempée," she whispered.

"Take it off, this plaid sleeps two."

"Don't look, Van."

"That's not fair," he said and helped her to slip it up and over her hair-shaking head. She was shaded with a mere touch of coal at the mystery point of her chalk-white body. A bad boil had left a pink scar between two ribs. He kissed it and lay back on his clasped hands. She was inspecting from above his tanned body the ant caravan to the oasis of the navel; he was decidedly hirsute for so young a boy. Her young round breasts were just above his face. I denounce the Philistine's postcoital cigarette both as a doctor and as an artist. It is, however, true that Van was not unaware of a glass box of Turkish Traumatis on a console too far to be reached with an indolent stretch. The tall clock struck an anonymous quarter and Ada was presently watching, cheek on first, the impressive, though oddly morose, stirrings, steady clockwise launch and ponderous upswing of virile revival.

But the shag of the couch was as tickly as the star-dusted sky. Before anything new happened, Ada went on all fours to rearrange the lap robe and cushions. Native girl imitating rabbit. He groped for and cupped her hot little slew from behind, then frantically scrambled into a boy's sand-castle-molding position; but she turned over, naïvely ready to embrace him the way Juliet is recommended to receive her Romeo. She was right. For the first time in their love story, the blessing, the genius of lyrical speech descended upon the rough lad, he murmured and moaned, kissing her face with voluble tenderness, crying out in three languages--the three greatest in all the world--pet words upon which a dictionary of secret diminutives was to be based and go through many revisions till the definitive edition of 1967. When he grew too loud, she shushed, shushingly breathing into his mouth, and now her four limbs were frankly around him as if she had been lovemaking for years in all our dreams--but impatient young passion (brimming like Van's overflowing bath while he is reworking this, a crotchety gray old word man on the edge of a hotel bed) did not survive the first few blind thrusts; it burst at the lip of the orchid, and a bluebird uttered a warning warble, and the lights were now stealing back under a rugged dawn, the firefly signals were circumscribing the reservoir, the dots of the carriage lamps became stars, wheels rasped on the gravel, all the dogs returned well pleased with the night treat, the cook's niece Blanche jumped out of a pumpkin-hued police van in her stockinged feet (long, long after midnight, alas)--and our two naked children, grabbing lap robe and nightdress and giving the couch a parting pat, pattered back with their candlesticks to their innocent bedrooms.

"And do you remember," said gray-mustached Van as he took a Cannabina cigarette from the bedside table and rattled a yellow-blue matchbox, "how reckless we were, and how Larivière stopped snoring but a moment later went on shaking the house, and how cold the iron steps were, and how disconcerted I was--by your--how shall I put it?--lack of restraint?"

"Idiot," said Ada, from the wall side, without turning her head.

Summer 1960? Crowded hotel somewhere between Ex and Ardez?

Ought to begin dating every page of the manuscript: Should be kinder to my unknown dreamers.

• • •

Next morning, his nose still in the dreambag of a deep pillow contributed to his otherwise austere bed by sweet Blanche (with whom, by the parlor-game rules of sleep, he had been holding hands in a heartbreaking nightmare--or perhaps it was just her cheap perfume), the boy was at once aware of the happiness knocking to be let in. He deliberately endeavored to prolong the glow of its incognito by dwelling on the last vestiges of jasmine and tears in a silly dream; but the tiger of happiness fairly leaped into being.

That exhilaration of a newly acquired franchise! A shade of it he seemed to have kept in his sleep, in that last part of his recent dream in which he had told Blanche that he had learned to levitate and that his ability to tread air with magic ease would allow him to break all records for the long jump by strolling, as it were, a few inches above the ground for a stretch of, say, 30 or 40 feet (too great a length might be suspicious) while the stands went wild, and Zambovsky of Zambia stared, arms akimbo, in consternation and disbelief.

Tenderness rounds out true triumph, gentleness lubricates genuine liberation: emotions that are not diagnostic of glory or passion in dreams. One half of the fantastic joy Van was to taste from now on (forever, he hoped) owed its force to the certainty that he could lavish on Ada, openly and at leisure, all the puerile petting that social shame, male selfishness and moral apprehension had prevented him from envisaging before.

On weekends, all three meals of the day were heralded by three gongs, small, medium and big. The first now announced breakfast in the dining room. Its vibration suscitated the thought that in 26 steps Van would join his young accomplice, whose delicate musk he still preserved in the hollow of his hand--and affected Van with a kind of radiant amazement: Had it really happened? Are we really free? Certain caged birds, say Chinese amateurs shaking with fatman mirth, knock themselves out against the bars (and lie unconscious for a few minutes) every blessed morning, right upon awakening, in an automatic, dream-continuing, dreamlined dash--although they are, those iridescent prisoners, quite perky and docile and talkative the rest of the time.

Van thrust his bare toe into a sneaker, retrieving the while its mate from under the bed; he hurried down, past a pleased-looking Prince Zemski and a grim Vincent Veen, Bishop of Balticomore and Como.

But she was not down yet. In the bright dining room, full of yellow flowers in drooping clusters of sunshine, Uncle Dan was feeding. He wore suitable clothes for a suitably hot day in the country--namely, a candy-striped suit over a mauve flannel shirt and piqué waistcoat, with a blue-and-red club tie and a safety-goldpinned very high soft collar (all his trim stripes and colors were a little displaced, though, in the process of comic-strip printing, because it was Sunday). He had just finished his first buttered toast, with a dab of ye-old Orange Marmalade, and was making turkey sounds as he rinsed his dentures orally with a mouthful of coffee prior to swallowing it and the flavorous flotsam. Being, as I had reason to believe, plucky, I could make myself suffer a direct view of the man's pink face with its (rotating) red "tashy," but I was not obliged (mused Van, in 1922, when he saw those baguenaudier flowers again) to stand his chinless profile with its curly red sideburn. So Van considered, not without appetite, the blue jugs of hot chocolate and baton segments of bread prepared for the hungry children. Marina had her breakfast in bed, the butler and Price ate in a recess of the pantry (a pleasing thought, somehow) and Mlle Larivière did not touch any food till noon, being a doom-fearing "midinette" (the sect, not the shop), and had actually made her father-confessor join her group.

"You could have taken us to see the fire, Uncle, dear," remarked Van, pouring himself a cup of chocolate.

"Ada will tell you all about it," replied Uncle Dan, lovingly buttering and marmalading another toast. "She greatly enjoyed the excursion."

"Oh, she went with you, did she?"

"Yes--in the black charabanc, with all the butlers. Jolly good fun, rally" (pseudo-British pronunciation).

"But that must have been one of the scullery maids, not Ada," remarked Van. "I didn't realize," he added, "we had several here--I mean, butlers."

"Oh, I imagine so," said Uncle Dan vaguely. He repeated the internal rinsing process and, with a slight cough, put on his spectacles, but no morning paper had come--and he took them off again.

Suddenly, Van heard her lovely dark voice on the staircase saying in an upward direction, "Je l'ai vu dans une des corbeilles de la bibliothèque"--presumably in reference to some geranium or violet or slipper orchid. There was a "banister pause," as photographers say, and after the maid's distant glad cry had come from the library, Ada's voice added: "Je me demande, I wonder qui l'a mis là, who put it there." Aussitôt après she entered the dining room.

She wore--though not in collusion with him--black shorts, a white jersey and sneakers. Her hair was drawn back from her big round brow and thickly pig-tailed. The rose of a rash under her lower lip glistened with glycerine through the patchily dabbed-on powder. She was too pale to be really pretty. She carried a book of verse. My elder is rather plain but has nice hair, and my younger is pretty but foxy red, Marina used to say. Ungrateful age, ungrateful light, ungrateful artist, but not ungrateful lover. A veritable wave of adoration buoyed him up from the pit of the stomach to heaven. The thrill of seeing her, and knowing she knew, and knowing nobody else knew what they had so freely, and dirtily, and delightfully indulged in, less than six hours ago, turned out to be too much for our green lover, despite his trying to trivialize it with the moral corrective of an opprobrious adverb. Fluffing badly a halfhearted "hello," not a habitual morning greeting (which, besides, she ignored), he bent over his breakfast while watching with a secret polyphemic organ her every movement. She slapped lightly Mr. Veen's bald head with her book in passing behind him and noisily moved the chair next to him on the other side from Van. Blinking, doll-lashing daintily, she poured herself a big cup of chocolate. Though it had been thoroughly sweetened, the child placed a lump of sugar on her spoon and eased it into the cup, relishing the way the hot brown liquid suffused and dissolved one crystal-grained crumbling corner and then the entire piece.

Meanwhile, Uncle Dan, in delayed action, chased an imaginary insect off his pate, looked up, looked around and at last acknowledged the newcomer.

"Oh yes, Ada," he said, "Van here is anxious to know something. What were you doing, my dear, while he and I were taking care of the fire?"

Its reflection invaded Ada. Van had never seen a girl (as translucently white-skinned as she) or, indeed, anybody else, porcelain or peach, blush so substantially and habitually, and the habit distressed him as being much more improper than any act that might cause it. She stole a foolish glance at the somber boy and began saying something about having been fast ablaze in her bedroom.

"You were not," interrupted Van harshly, "you were with me looking at the blaze from the library window. Uncle Dan is all wet."

"Ménagez vos américanismes," said the latter--and then opened his arms wide in paternal welcome as guileless Lucette trotted into the room with a child's pink, stiff-bagged butterfly net in her little fist, like an oriflamme.

Van shook his head disapprovingly at Ada. She showed him the sharp petal of her tongue, and with a shock of self-indignation, her lover felt himself flushing in his turn. So much for the franchise. He ringed his napkin and retired to the mestechko ("little place") off the front hall.

After she, too, had finished breakfasting, he waylaid her, gorged with sweet butter, on the landing. They had one moment to plan things; it was all, historically speaking, at the dawn of the novel that was still in the hands of parsonage ladies and French academicians, so such moments were precious. She stood scratching one raised knee. They agreed to go for a walk before lunch and find a secluded place. She had to finish a translation for Mlle Larivière. She showed him her draft. François Coppée? Yes.

Their fall is gentle. The woodchopper 5.5Can tell, before they reach the mud,The oak tree by its leaf of copper,The maple by its leaf of blood.

"Leur chute est lente," said Van, "on peut les suivre du regard en reconnaissant--that paraphrastic touch of 'chopper' and 'mud' is, of course, pure Lowden (minor poet and translator, 1815--1895). Betraying the first half of the stanza to save the second is rather like that Russian nobleman who chucked his coachman to the wolves and then fell out of his sleigh."

"I think you are very cruel and stupid," said Ada. "This is not meant to be a work of art or a brilliant parody. It is the ransom exacted by a demented governess from a poor overworked schoolgirl. Wait for me in the Baguenaudier Bower," she added. "I'll be down in exactly sixty-three minutes."

Her hands were cold, her neck was hot; the postman's boy had rung the doorbell; Bout, a young footman, the butler's bastard, crossed the resonant flags of the hall.

On Sunday mornings the mail came late, because of the voluminous Sunday supplements of the papers from Balticomore, and Kaluga, and Luga, which Robin Sherwood, the old postman, in his bright-green uniform, distributed on horseback throughout the somnolent countryside. As Van, humming his school song--the only tune he could ever carry--skipped down the terrace steps, he saw Robin on his old bay holding the livelier black stallion of his Sunday helper, a handsome English lad whom, it was rumored behind the rose hedges, the old man loved more vigorously than his office required.

Van reached the third lawn, and the bower, and carefully inspected the stage prepared for the scene, "like a provincial come an hour too early to the opera after jogging all day along harvest roads with poppies and bluets catching and twinkle-twining in the wheels of his buggy" (Floeberg's Ursula).

Blue butterflies nearly the size of small whites, and likewise of European origin, were flitting swiftly around the shrubs and settling on the drooping clusters of yellow flowers. In less complex circumstances, 40 years hence, our lovers were to see again, with wonder and joy, the same insect and the same bladder senna along a forest trail near Susten in the Valais. At the present moment, he was looking forward to collecting what he would recollect later, and watched the big bold blues as he sprawled on the turf, burning with the evoked vision of Ada's pale limbs in the variegated light of the bower, and then coldly telling himself that fact could never quite match fancy. When he returned from a swim in the broad and deep brook beyond the bosquet, with wet hair and tingling skin, Van got the rare treat of finding his foreglimpse of live ivory accurately reproduced, except that she had loosened her hair and changed into the curtal frock of sun-bright cotton that he was so fond of and had so ardently yearned to soil in the so recent past.

He had resolved to deal first of all with her legs, which he felt he had not feted enough the previous night; to sheathe them in kisses from the A of arched instep to the V of velvet; and this Van accomplished as soon as Ada and he got sufficiently deep in the larchwood that closed the park on the steep side of the rocky rise between Ardis and Ladore.

Neither could establish in retrospect, nor, indeed, persisted in trying to do so, how, when and where he actually "deflowered" her--a vulgarism Ada in Wonderland had happened to find glossed in Phrody's Encyclopedia as: "to break a virgin's vaginal membrane by manly or mechanical means," with the example: "The sweetness of his soul was deflowered (Jeremy Taylor)." Was it that night on the lap robe? Or that day in the larchwood? Or later in the shooting gallery, or in the attic, or on the roof, or on a secluded balcony, or in the bathroom, or (not very comfortably) on the Magic Carpet? We do not know and do not care.

(You kissed and nibbled, and poked, and prodded, and worried me there so much and so often that my virginity was lost in the shuffle; but I do recall definitely that by midsummer the machine that our forefathers called "sex" was working as smoothly as later, in 1888, etc., darling. Marginal note in red ink.)

• • •

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 he 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 dryly.

"Non, Monsieur," answered Bouteillan, holding onto 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 hand brake 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 his way through the brush and crossing a brook to reach Ada in a natural bower of aspens; they embraced, 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 all over 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 Ps and the Fs. "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.