“What’s the matter?” asked Mlle Larivière.
“Nothing. Il pue.”
“Oh dear! I doubt strongly he ever was in that Rajah’s service.”
14
Next day, or the day after the next, the entire family was having high tea in the garden. Ada, on the grass, kept trying to make an anadem of marguerites for the dog while Lucette looked on, munching a crumpet. Marina remained for almost a minute wordlessly stretching across the table her husband’s straw hat in his direction; finally he shook his head, glared at the sun that glared back and retired with his cup and the Toulouse Enquirer to a rustic seat on the other side of the lawn under an immense elm.
“I ask myself who can that be,” murmured Mlle Larivière from behind the samovar (which expressed fragments of its surroundings in demented fantasies of a primitive genre) as she slitted her eyes at a part of the drive visible between the pilasters of an open-work gallery. Van, lying prone behind Ada, lifted his eyes from his book (Ada’s copy of Atala).
A tall rosy-faced youngster in smart riding breeches dismounted from a black pony.
“It’s Greg’s beautiful new pony,” said Ada.
Greg, with a well-bred boy’s easy apologies, had brought Marina’s platinum lighter which his aunt had discovered in her own bag.
“Goodness, I’ve not even had time to miss it. How is Ruth?”
Greg said that both Aunt Ruth and Grace were laid up with acute indigestion—“not because of your wonderful sandwiches,” he hastened to add, “but because of all those burnberries they picked in the bushes.”
Marina was about to jingle a bronze bell for the footman to bring some more toast, but Greg said he was on his way to a party at the Countess de Prey’s.
“Rather soon (skorovato) she consoled herself,” remarked Marina, alluding to the death of the Count killed in a pistol duel on Boston Common a couple of years ago.
“She’s a very jolly and handsome woman,” said Greg.
“And ten years older than me,” said Marina.
Now Lucette demanded her mother’s attention.
“What are Jews?” she asked.
“Dissident Christians,” answered Marina.
“Why is Greg a Jew?” asked Lucette.
“Why-why!” said Marina; “because his parents are Jews.”
“And his grandparents? His arrière grandparents?”
“I really wouldn’t know, my dear. Were your ancestors Jews, Greg?”
“Well, I’m not sure,” said Greg. “Hebrews, yes—but not Jews in quotes—I mean, not comic characters or Christian businessmen. They came from Tartary to England five centuries ago. My mother’s grandfather, though, was a French marquis who, I know, belonged to the Roman faith and was crazy about banks and stocks and jewels, so I imagine people may have called him un juif.”
“It’s not a very old religion, anyway, as religions go, is it?” said Marina (turning to Van and vaguely planning to steer the chat to India where she had been a dancing girl long before Moses or anybody was born in the lotus swamp).
“Who cares—” said Van.
“And Belle” (Lucette’s name for her governess), “is she also a dizzy Christian?”
“Who cares,” cried Van, “who cares about all those stale myths, what does it matter—Jove or Jehovah, spire or cupola, mosques in Moscow, or bronzes and bonzes, and clerics, and relics, and deserts with bleached camel ribs? They are merely the dust and mirages of the communal mind.”
“How did this idiotic conversation start in the first place?” Ada wished to be told, cocking her head at the partly ornamented dackel or taksik.
“Mea culpa” Mlle Larivière explained with offended dignity. “All I said, at the picnic, was that Greg might not care for ham sandwiches, because Jews and Tartars do not eat pork.”
“The Romans,” said Greg, “the Roman colonists, who crucified Christian Jews and Barabbits, and other unfortunate people in the old days, did not touch pork either, but I certainly do and so did my grandparents.”
Lucette was puzzled by a verb Greg had used. To illustrate it for her, Van joined his ankles, spread both arms horizontally, and rolled up his eyes.
“When I was a little girl,” said Marina crossly, “Mesopotamian history was taught practically in the nursery.”
“Not all little girls can learn what they are taught,” observed Ada.
“Are we Mesopotamians?” asked Lucette.
“We are Hippopotamians,” said Van. “Come,” he added, “we have not yet ploughed today.”
A day or two before, Lucette had demanded that she be taught to hand-walk. Van gripped her by her ankles while she slowly progressed on her little red palms, sometimes falling with a grunt on her face or pausing to nibble a daisy. Dack barked in strident protest.
“Et pourtant,” said the sound-sensitive governess, wincing, “I read to her twice Ségur’s adaptation in fable form of Shakespeare’s play about the wicked usurer.”
“She also knows my revised monologue of his mad king,” said Ada:
Ce beau jardin fleurit en mai,
Mais en hiver
Jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais
N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert,
n’est vert.
“Oh, that’s good,” exclaimed Greg with a veritable sob of admiration.
“Not so energichno, children!” cried Marina in Van- and-Lucette’s direction.
“Elle devient pourpre, she is getting crimson,” commented the governess. “I sustain that these indecent gymnastics are no good for her.”
Van, his eyes smiling, his angel-strong hands holding the child’s cold-carrot-soup legs just above the insteps, was “ploughing around” with Lucette acting the sullow. Her bright hair hung over her face, her panties showed from under the hem of her skirt, yet she still urged the ploughboy on.
“Budet, budet, that’ll do,” said Marina to the plough team.
Van gently let her legs down and straightened her dress. She lay for a moment, panting.
“I mean, I would love lending him to you for a ride any time. For any amount of time. Will you? Besides, I have another black.”
But she shook her head, she shook her bent head, while still twisting and twining her daisies.
“Well,” he said, getting up, “I must be going. Good-bye, everybody. Good-bye, Ada. I guess it’s your father under that oak, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s an elm,” said Ada.
Van looked across the lawn and said as if musing—perhaps with just a faint touch of boyish show-off:
“I’d like to see that Two-Lice sheet too when Uncle is through with it. I was supposed to play for my school in yesterday’s cricket game. Veen sick, unable to bat, Riverlane humbled.
15
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 wristwatch and a cotton frock.
(“Remember?”
“Yes, of course, I remember: you kissed me here, on the inside—”
“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 (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.
16
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 her 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 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 afterwards, 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 eighty 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-oilcloth’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 t
he 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 which, like a misty summit beyond the fierce mountain pass, promised to be the true pinnacle of his perilous relationship with Ada. During that mid summer 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.
Ada, or Ardor Page 9