And now Mlle Larivière clapped her hands to rouse from their siesta, Kim, the driver of her gig, and Trofim, the children’s fair-bearded coachman. Ada reclenched her boletes and all Percy could find for his Handkuss was a cold fist.
“Jolly nice to have seen you, old boy,” he said, tapping Van lightly on the shoulder, a forbidden gesture in their milieu. “Hope to play with you again soon. I wonder,” he added in a lower voice, “if you shoot as straight as you wrestle.”
Van followed him to the convertible.
“Van, Van come here, Greg wants to say good-bye,” cried Ada, but he did not turn.
“Is that a challenge, me faites-vous un duel?” inquired Van.
Percy, at the wheel, smiled, slit his eyes, bent toward the dashboard, smiled again, but said nothing. Click-click went the motor, then broke into thunder and Percy drew on his gloves.
“Quand tu voudras, mon gars,” said Van, slapping the fender and using the terrible second person singular of duelists in old France.
The car leapt forward and disappeared.
Van returned to the picnic ground, his heart stupidly thumping; he waved in passing to Greg who was talking to Ada a little way off on the road.
“Really, I assure you,” Greg was saying to her, “your cousin is not to blame. Percy started it—and was defeated in a clean match of Korotom wrestling, as used in Teristan and Sorokat—my father, I’m sure, could tell you all about it.”
“You’re a dear,” answered Ada, “but I don’t think your brain works too well.”
“It never does in your presence,” remarked Greg, and mounted his black silent steed, hating it, and himself, and the two bullies.
He adjusted his goggles and glided away. Mlle Larivière, in her turn, got into her gig and was borne off through the speckled vista of the forest ride.
Lucette ran up to Van and, almost kneeling, cosily embraced her big cousin around the hips, and clung to him for a moment. “Come along,” said Van, lifting her, “don’t forget your jersey, you can’t go naked.”
Ada strolled up. “My hero,” she said, hardly looking at him, with that inscrutable air she had that let one guess whether she expressed sarcasm or ecstasy, or a parody of one or the other.
Lucette, swinging her mushroom basket, chanted:
“He screwed off a nipple,
He left him a cripple …”
“Lucy Veen, stop that!” shouted Ada at the imp; and Van with a show of great indignation, shook the little wrist he held, while twinkling drolly at Ada on his other side.
Thus, a carefree-looking young trio, they moved toward the waiting victoria. Slapping his thighs in dismay, the coachman stood berating a tousled footboy who had appeared from under a bush. He had concealed himself there to enjoy in peace a tattered copy of Tattersalia with pictures of tremendous, fabulously elongated race horses, and had been left behind by the charabanc which had carried away the dirty dishes and the drowsy servants.
He climbed onto the box, beside Trofim, who directed a vibrating “tpprr” at the backing bays, while Lucette considered with darkening green eyes the occupation of her habitual perch.
“You’ll have to take her on your half-brotherly knee,” said Ada in a neutral aparte.
“But won’t La maudite rivière object,” he said absently, trying to catch by its tail the sensation of fate’s rerun.
“Larivière can go and” (and Ada’s sweet pale lips repeated Gavronski’s crude crack) … “That goes for Lucette too,” she added.
“Vos ‘vyragences’ sont assez testes,” remarked Van. “Are you very mad at me?”
“Oh Van, I’m not! In fact, I’m delighted you won. But I’m sixteen today. Sixteen! Older than grandmother at the time of her first divorce. It’s my last picnic, I guess. Childhood is scrapped. I love you. You love me. Greg loves me. Everybody loves me. I’m glutted with love. Hurry up or she’ll pull that cock off—Lucette, leave him alone at once!”
Finally the carriage started on its pleasant homeward journey.
“Ouch!” grunted Van as he received the rounded load—explaining wrily that he had hit his right patella against a rock.
“Of course, if one goes in for horseplay …” murmured Ada—and opened, at its emerald ribbon, the small brown, gold-tooled book (a great success with the passing sun flecks) that she had been already reading during the ride to the picnic.
“I do fancy a little horseplay,” said Van. “It has left me with quite a tingle, for more reasons than one.”
“I saw you—horseplaying,” said Lucette, turning her head.
“Sh-sh,” uttered Van.
“I mean you and him.”
“We are not interested in your impressions, girl. And don’t look back all the time. You know you get carriage-sick when the road—”
“Coincidence: ‘Jean qui tâchait de lui tourner la tête …,’ ” surfaced Ada briefly.
“—when the road ‘runs out of you,’ as your sister once said when she was your age.”
“True,” mused Lucette tunefully.
She had been prevailed upon to clothe her honey-brown body. Her white jersey had filched a lot from its recent background—pine needles, a bit of moss, a cake crumb, a baby Caterpillar. Her remarkably well-filled green shorts were stained with burnberry purple. Her ember-bright hair flew into his face and smelt of a past summer. Family smell; yes, coincidence: a set of coincidences slightly displaced; the artistry of asymmetry. She sat in his lap, heavily, dreamily, full of foie gras and peach punch, with the backs of her brown iridescent bare arms almost touching his face—touching it when he glanced down, right and left, to check if the mushrooms had been taken. They had. The little footboy was reading and picking his nose—judging by the movements of his elbow. Lucette’s compact bottom and cool thighs seemed to sink deeper and deeper in the quicksand of the dream-like, dream-rephrased, legend-distorted past. Ada, sitting next to him, turning her smaller pages quicker than the boy on the box, was, of course, enchanting, obsessive, eternal and lovelier, more somberly ardent than four summers ago—but it was that other picnic which he now relived and it was Ada’s soft haunches which he now held as if she were present in duplicate, in two different color prints.
Through strands of coppery silk he looked aslant at Ada, who puckered her lips at him in the semblance of a transmitted kiss (pardoning him at last for his part in that brawl!) and presently went back to her vellum-bound little volume, Ombres et couleurs, an 1820 edition of Chateaubriand’s short stories with hand-painted vignettes and the flat mummy of a pressed anemone. The gouts and glooms of the woodland passed across her book, her face and Lucette’s right arm, on which he could not help kissing a mosquito bite in pure tribute to the duplication. Poor Lucette stole a languorous look at him and looked away again—at the red neck of the coachman—of that other coachman who for several months had haunted her dreams.
We do not care to follow the thoughts troubling Ada, whose attention to her book was far shallower than might seem; we will not, nay, cannot follow them with any success, for thoughts are much more faintly remembered than shadows or colors, or the throbs of young lust, or a green snake in a dark paradise. Therefore we find ourselves more comfortably sitting within Van while his Ada sits within Lucette, and both sit within Van (and all three in me, adds Ada).
He remembered with a pang of pleasure the indulgent skirt Ada had been wearing then, so swoony-baloony as the Chose young things said, and he regretted (smiling) that Lucette had those chaste shorts on today, and Ada, husked-corn (laughing) trousers. In the fatal course of the most painful ailments, sometimes (nodding gravely), sometimes there occur sweet mornings of perfect repose—and that not owing to some blessed pill or potion (indicating the bedside clutter) or at least without our knowing that the loving hand of despair slipped us the drug.
Van closed his eyes in order better to concentrate on the golden flood of swelling joy. Many, oh many, many years later he recollected with wonder (how could one have endured such rapture?) th
at moment of total happiness, the complete eclipse of the piercing and preying ache, the logic of intoxication, the circular argument to the effect that the most eccentric girl cannot help being faithful if she loves one as one loves her. He watched Ada’s bracelet flash in rhythm with the swaying of the victoria and her full lips, parted slightly in profile, show in the sun the red pollen of a remnant of salve drying in the transversal thumbnail lines of their texture. He opened his eyes: the bracelet was indeed flashing but her lips had lost all trace of rouge, and the certainty that in another moment he would touch their hot pale pulp threatened to touch off a private crisis under the solemn load of another child. But the little proxy’s neck, glistening with sweat, was pathetic, her trustful immobility, sobering, and after all no furtive friction could compete with what awaited him in Ada’s bower. A twinge in his kneecap also came to the rescue, and honest Van chided himself for having attempted to use a little pauper instead of the princess in the fairy tale—“whose precious flesh must not blush with the impression of a chastising hand,” says Pierrot in Peterson’s version.
With the fading of that fugitive flame his mood changed. Something should be said, a command should be given, the matter was serious or might become serious. They were now about to enter Gamlet, the little Russian village, from which a birch-lined road led quickly to Ardis. A small procession of kerchiefed peasant nymphs, unwashed, no doubt, but adorably pretty with naked shiny shoulders and high-divided plump breasts tuliped up by their corsets, walked past through a coppice, singing an old ditty in their touching English:
Thorns and nettles
For silly girls:
Ah, torn the petals,
Ah, spilled the pearls!
“You have a little pencil in your back pocket,” said Van to Lucette. “May I borrow it, I want to write down that song.”
“If you don’t tickle me there,” said the child.
Van reached for Ada’s book and wrote on the fly leaf, as she watched him with odd wary eyes:
I don’t wish to see him again.
It’s serious.
Tell M. not to receive him or I leave.
No answer required.
She read it, and slowly, silently erased the lines with the top of the pencil which she passed back to Van, who replaced it where it had been.
“You’re awfully fidgety,” Lucette observed without turning. “Next time,” she added, “I won’t have him dislodge me.”
They now swept up to the porch, and Trofim had to cuff the tiny blue-coated reader in order to have him lay his book aside and jump down to hand Ada out of the carriage.
40
Van was lying in his netted nest under the liriodendrons, reading Antiterrenus on Rattner. His knee had troubled him all night; now, after lunch, it seemed a bit better. Ada had gone on horseback to Ladore, where he hoped she would forget to buy the messy turpentine oil Marina had told her to bring him.
His valet advanced toward him across the lawn, followed by a messenger, a slender youth clad in black leather from neck to ankle, chestnut curls escaping from under a vizored cap. The strange child glanced around with an amateur thespian’s exaggeration of attitude, and handed a letter, marked “confidential,” to Van.
Dear Veen,
In a couple of days I must leave for a spell of military service abroad. If you desire to see me before I go I shall be glad to entertain you (and any other gentleman you might wish to bring along) at dawn tomorrow where the Maidenhair road crosses Tourbière Lane. If not, I beg you to confirm in a brief note that you bear me no grudge, just as no grudge is cherished in regard to you, sir, by your obedient servant
Percy de Prey
No, Van did not desire to see the Count. He said so to the pretty messenger, who stood with one hand on the hip and one knee turned out like an extra, waiting for the signal to join the gambaders in the country dance after Calabro’s aria.
“Un moment,” added Van. “I would be interested to know—this could be decided in a jiffy behind that tree—what you are, stable boy or kennel girl?”
The messenger did not reply and was led away by the chuckling Bout. A little squeal suggestive of an improper pinch came from behind the laurels screening their exit.
It was hard to decide whether that clumsy and pretentious missive had been dictated by the fear that one’s sailing off to fight for one’s country might be construed as running away from more private engagements, or whether its conciliatory gist had been demanded from Percy by somebody—perhaps a woman (for instance his mother, born Praskovia Lanskoy); anyway, Van’s honor remained unaffected. He limped to the nearest garbage can and, having burnt the letter with its crested blue envelope, dismissed the incident from his mind, merely noting that now, at least, Ada would cease to be pestered by the fellow’s attentions.
She returned late in the afternoon—without the embrocation, thank goodness. He was still lolling in his low-slung hammock, looking rather forlorn and sulky, but having glanced around (with more natural grace than the brown-locked messenger had achieved), she raised her veil, kneeled down by him and soothed him.
When lightning struck two days later (an old image that is meant to intimate a flash-back to an old barn), Van became aware that it brought together, in livid confrontation, two secret witnesses; they had been hanging back in his mind since the first day of his fateful return to Ardis: One had been murmuring with averted gaze that Percy de Prey was, and would always be, only a dance partner, a frivolous follower; the other had kept insinuating, with spectral insistence, that some nameless trouble was threatening the very sanity of Van’s pale, faithless mistress.
On the morning of the day preceding the most miserable one in his life, he found he could bend his leg without wincing, but he made the mistake of joining Ada and Lucette in an impromptu lunch on a long-neglected croquet lawn and walked home with difficulty. A swim in the pool and a soak in the sun helped, however, and the pain had practically gone when in the mellow heat of the long afternoon Ada returned from one of her long “brambles” as she called her botanical rambles, succinctly and somewhat sadly, for the florula had ceased to yield much beyond the familiar favorites. Marina, in a luxurious peignoir, with a large oval mirror hinged before her, sat at a white toilet table that had been carried out onto the lawn where she was having her hair dressed by senile but still wonderworking Monsieur Violette of Lyon and Ladore, an unusual outdoor activity which she explained and excused by the fact of her grandmother’s having also liked qu’on la coiffe au grand air so as to forestall the zephyrs (as a duelist steadies his hand by walking about with a poker).
“That’s our best performer,” she said, indicating Van to Violette who mistook him for Pedro and bowed with un air entendu.
Van had been looking forward to a little walk of convalescence with Ada before dressing for dinner, but she said, as she drooped on a garden chair, that she was exhausted and filthy and had to wash her face and feet, and prepare for the ordeal of helping her mother entertain the movie people who were expected later in the evening.
“I’ve seen him in Sexico,” murmured Monsieur Violette to Marina, whose ears he had shut with both hands as he moved the reflection of her head in the glass this way and that.
“No, it’s getting late,” muttered Ada, “and, moreover, I promised Lucette—”
He insisted in a fierce whisper—fully knowing, however, how useless it was to attempt to make her change her mind, particularly in amorous matters; but unaccountably and marvelously her dazed look melted into one of gentle glee, as if in sudden perception of new-found release. Thus a child may stare into space, with a dawning smile, upon realizing that the bad dream is over, or that a door has been left unlocked, and that one can paddle with impunity in thawed sky. Ada rid her shoulder of the collecting satchel and, under Violette’s benevolent gaze following them over Marina’s mirrored head, they strolled away and sought the comparative seclusion of the park alley where she had once demonstrated to him her sun-and-shade games. He held h
er, and kissed her, and kissed her again as if she had returned from a long and perilous journey. The sweetness of her smile was something quite unexpected and special. It was not the sly demon smile of remembered or promised ardor, but the exquisite human glow of happiness and helplessness. All their passionate pump-joy exertions, from Burning Barn to Burnberry Brook, were nothing in comparison to this zaychik, this “sun blick” of the smiling spirit. Her black jumper and black skirt with apron pockets lost its “in-mourning-for-a-lost flower” meaning that Marina had fancifully attached to her dress (“nemedlenno pereodet’sya, change immediately!” she had yelped into the green-shimmering looking-glass); instead, it had acquired the charm of a Lyaskan, old-fashioned schoolgirl uniform. They stood brow to brow, brown to white, black to black, he supporting her elbows, she playing her limp light fingers over his collarbone, and how he “ladored,” he said, the dark aroma of her hair blending with crushed lily stalks, Turkish cigarettes and the lassitude that comes from “lass.” “No, no, don’t,” she said, I must wash, quick-quick, Ada must wash; but for yet another immortal moment they stood embraced in the hushed avenue, enjoying, as they had never enjoyed before, the “happy-forever” feeling at the end of never-ending fairy tales.
That’s a beautiful passage, Van. I shall cry all night (late interpolation).
As a last sunbeam struck Ada, her mouth and chin shone drenched with his poor futile kisses. She shook her head saying they must really part, and she kissed his hands as she did only in moments of supreme tenderness, and then quickly turned away, and they really parted.
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