Before the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" Demon Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's father) calls Blanche (a French handmaid at Ardis who promised to Demon the drinks) "a passing angel:"
Demon shed his monocle and wiped his eyes with the modish lace-frilled handkerchief that lodged in the heart pocket of his dinner jacket. His tear glands were facile in action when no real sorrow made him control himself.
‘You look quite satanically fit, Dad. Especially with that fresh oeillet in your lapel eye. I suppose you have not been much in Manhattan lately — where did you get its last syllable?’
Homespun pun in the Veenish vein.
‘I offered myself en effet a trip to Akapulkovo,’ answered Demon, needlessly and unwillingly recollecting (with that special concussion of instant detail that also plagued his children) a violet-and-black-striped fish in a bowl, a similarly striped couch, the subtropical sun bringing out the veins of an onyx ashtray on the stone floor, a batch of old, orange-juice-stained Povesa (playboy) magazines, the jewels he had brought, the phonograph singing in a dreamy girl’s voice’ Petit nègre, au champ qui fleuronne,’ and the admirable abdomen of a very expensive, and very faithless and altogether adorable young Créole.
‘Did what’s-her-name go with you?’
‘Well, my boy, frankly, the nomenclature is getting more and more confused every year. Let us speak of plainer things. Where are the drinks? They were promised me by a passing angel.’ (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): en effet: indeed.
petit nègre: little Negro in the flowering field.
The Demon (1823) and The Angel (1827) are the poems by Pushkin that inspired Lermontov, the author of The Demon (1829-40). In Lermontov's poem Angel smerti ("The Angel of Death," 1831) the heroine's name is Ada. On the other hand, The Angel of Death is a poem by Adelaide Anne Procter:
Why shouldst thou fear the beautiful angel, Death,
Who waits thee at the portals of the skies,
Ready to kiss away thy struggling breath,
Ready with gentle hand to close thine eyes?
How many a tranquil soul has passed away,
Fled gladly from fierce pain and pleasures dim,
To the eternal splendor of the day;
And many a troubled heart still calls for him.
Spirits too tender for the battle here
Have turned from life, its hopes, its fears, its charms,
And children, shuddering at a word so drear,
Have smiling passed away into his arms.
He whom thou fearest will, to ease its pain,
Lay his cold hand upon thy aching heart:
Will soothe the terrors of thy troubled brain,
And bid the shadows of earth's grief depart.
He will give back what neither time, nor might,
Nor passionate prayer, nor longing hope restore,
(Dear as to long-blind eyes recovered sight,)
He will give back those who are gone before.
O, what were life, if life were all? Thine eyes
Are blinded by their tears, or thou wouldst see
Thy treasures wait thee in the far-off skies,
And Death, thy friend, will give them all to thee.
Adelaide Anne Procter (1825-64) was the eldest daughter of the poet Bryan Waller Procter ("Barry Cornwall") and Anne Benson Skepper. In his last letter to Aleksandra Ishimov, written on the day (Jan. 27, 1837) of his fatal duel with d'Anthès, Pushkin asks Ishimov to translate several poems of Barry Cornwall:
Милостивая государыня
Александра Осиповна,
Крайне жалею, что мне невозможно будет сегодня явиться на Ваше приглашение. Покамест честь имею препроводить к Вам Barry Cornwall. Вы найдете в конце книги пьесы, отмеченные карандашом, переведите их как умеете — уверяю Вас, что переведете как нельзя лучше. Сегодня я нечаянно открыл Вашу "Историю в рассказах" и поневоле зачитался. Вот как надобно писать!
С глубочайшим почтением и совершенной преданностию честь имею быть,
милостивая государыня,
Вашим покорнейшим слугою.
А. Пушкин.
27 янв. 1837.
Before the family dinner Demon mentions Moses de Vere's pistol duel with Major de Prey (Percy's father):
‘I say,’ exclaimed Demon, ‘what’s happened — your shaftment is that of a carpenter’s. Show me your other hand. Good gracious’ (muttering:) ‘Hump of Venus disfigured, Line of Life scarred but monstrously long...’ (switching to a gipsy chant:) ‘You’ll live to reach Terra, and come back a wiser and merrier man’ (reverting to his ordinary voice:) ‘What puzzles me as a palmist is the strange condition of the Sister of your Life. And the roughness!’
‘Mascodagama,’ whispered Van, raising his eyebrows.
‘Ah, of course, how blunt (dumb) of me. Now tell me — you like Ardis Hall?’
‘I adore it,’ said Van. ‘It’s for me the château que baignait la Dore. I would gladly spend all my scarred and strange life here. But that’s a hopeless fancy.’
‘Hopeless? I wonder. I know Dan wants to leave it to Lucile, but Dan is greedy, and my affairs are such that I can satisfy great greed. When I was your age I thought that the sweetest word in the language rhymes with "billiard," and now I know I was right. If you’re really keen, son, on having this property, I might try to buy it. I can exert a certain pressure upon my Marina. She sighs like a hassock when you sit upon her, so to speak. Damn it, the servants here are not Mercuries. Pull that cord again. Yes, maybe Dan could be made to sell.’
‘That’s very black of you, Dad,’ said pleased Van, using a slang phrase he had learned from his tender young nurse, Ruby, who was born in the Mississippi region where most magistrates, public benefactors, high priests of various so-called’ denominations,’ and other honorable and generous men, had the dark or darkish skin of their West-African ancestors, who had been the first navigators to reach the Gulf of Mexico.
‘I wonder,’ Demon mused. ‘It would cost hardly more than a couple of millions minus what Cousin Dan owes me, minus also the Ladore pastures, which are utterly mucked up and should be got rid of gradually, if the local squires don’t blow up that new kerosene distillery, the stïd i sram (shame) of our county. I am not particularly fond of Ardis, but I have nothing against it, though I detest its environs. Ladore Town has become very honky-tonky, and the gaming is not what it used to be. You have all sorts of rather odd neighbors. Poor Lord Erminin is practically insane. At the races, the other day, I was talking to a woman I preyed upon years ago, oh long before Moses de Vere cuckolded her husband in my absence and shot him dead in my presence — an epigram you’ve heard before, no doubt from these very lips —’
(The next thing will be ‘paternal repetitiousness.’)
‘— but a good son should put up with a little paternal repetitiousness — Well, she tells me her boy and Ada see a lot of each other, et cetera. Is that true?’
‘Not really,’ said Van. ‘They meet now and then — at the usual parties. Both like horses, and races, but that’s all. There is no et cetera, that’s out of the question.’
‘Good! Ah, the portentous footfall is approaching, I hear. Prascovie de Prey has the worst fault of a snob: overstatement. Bonsoir, Bouteillan. You look as ruddy as your native vine — but we are not getting any younger, as the amerlocks say, and that pretty messenger of mine must have been waylaid by some younger and more fortunate suitor.’
‘Proshu, papochka (please, Dad),’ murmured Van, who always feared that his father’s recondite jests might offend a menial — while sinning himself by being sometimes too curt. (1.38)
Percy's mother, Prascovie de Prey was born Praskovia Lanskoy:
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. (1.40)
Lanskoy was the name of Pushkin's widow in the second marriage. The messenger who brings Van a letter from Percy de Prey seems to be Blanche's younger sister who is mentioned by Ada in one of her letters to Van:
[Arizona, summer, 1890]
Mere pity, a Russian girl’s zhalost’, drew me to R. (whom musical critics have now ‘discovered’). He knew he would die young and was always, in fact, mostly corpse, never once, I swear, rising to the occasion, even when I showed openly my compassionate non-resistance because I, alas, was brimming with Van-less vitality, and had even considered buying the services of some rude, the ruder the better, young muzhik. As to P., I could explain my submitting to his kisses (first tender and plain, later growing fiercely expert, and finally tasting of me when he returned to my mouth — a vicious circle set spinning in early Thargelion, 1888) by saying that if I stopped seeing him he would divulge my affair with my cousin to my mother. He did say he could produce witnesses, such as the sister of your Blanche, and a stable boy who, I suspect, was impersonated by the youngest of the three demoiselles de Tourbe. witches all — but enough. Van, I could make much of those threats in explaining my conduct to you. I would not mention, naturally, that they were made in a bantering tone, hardly befitting a genuine blackmailer. Nor would I mention that even if he had proceeded to recruit anonymous messengers and informers, it might have ended in his wrecking his own reputation as soon as his motives and actions were exposed, as they were bound to be in the long ruin [sic! ‘run’ in her blue stocking. Ed.]. I would conceal, in a word, that I knew the coarse banter was meant only to drill-jar your poor brittle Ada — because, despite the coarseness, he had a keen sense of honor, odd though it may seem to you and me. No. I would concentrate entirely on the effect of the threat upon one ready to submit to any infamy rather than face the shadow of disclosure, for (and this, of course, neither he nor his informers could know), shocking as an affair between first cousins might have seemed to a law-abiding family, I refuse to imagine (as you and I have always done) how Marina and Demon would have reacted in ‘our’ case. By the jolts and skids of my syntax you will see that I cannot logically explain my behavior. I do not deny that I experienced a strange weakness during the perilous assignations I granted him, as if his brutal desire kept fascinating not only my inquisitive senses but also my reluctant intellect. I can swear, however, solemn Ada can swear that in the course of our ‘sylvan trysts’ I successfully evaded if not pollution, at least possession before and after your return to Ardis — except for one messy occasion when he half-took me by force — the over-eager dead man.
I’m writing from Marina Ranch — not very far from the little gulch in which Aqua died and into which I myself feel like creeping some day. For the time being, I’m returning for a while to the Pisang Hotel.
I salute the good auditor. (2.1)
In March, 1905, Demon Veen perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. Van does not realize that his father died, because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair.
According to Van, angels, too, have brooms:
Nirvana, Nevada, Vaniada. By the way, should I not add, my Ada, that only at the very last interview with poor dummy-mummy, soon after my premature — I mean, premonitory — nightmare about, ‘You can, Sir,’ she employed mon petit nom, Vanya, Vanyusha — never had before, and it sounded so odd, so tend... (voice trailing off, radiators tinkling).
‘Dummy-mum’ — (laughing). ‘Angels, too, have brooms — to sweep one’s soul clear of horrible images. My black nurse was Swiss-laced with white whimsies.’
Sudden ice hurtling down the rain pipe: brokenhearted stalactite.
Recorded and replayed in their joint memory was their early preoccupation with the strange idea of death. There is one exchange that it would be nice to enact against the green moving backdrop of one of our Ardis sets. The talk about ‘double guarantee’ in eternity. Start just before that.
‘I know there’s a Van in Nirvana. I’ll be with him in the depths moego ada, of my Hades,’ said Ada.
‘True, true’ (bird-effects here, and acquiescing branches, and what you used to call ‘golden gouts’).
‘As lovers and siblings,’ she cried, ‘we have a double chance of being together in eternity, in terrarity. Four pairs of eyes in paradise!’
‘Neat, neat,’ said Van.
Something of the sort. One great difficulty. The strange mirage-shimmer standing in for death should not appear too soon in the chronicle and yet it should permeate the first amorous scenes. Hard but not insurmountable (I can do anything, I can tango and tap-dance on my fantastic hands). By the way, who dies first?
Ada. Van. Ada. Vaniada. Nobody. Each hoped to go first, so as to concede, by implication, a longer life to the other, and each wished to go last, in order to spare the other the anguish or worries, of widowhood. One solution would be for you to marry Violet.
‘Thank you. J’ai tâté de deux tribades dans ma vie, ça suffit. Dear Emile says "terme qu’on évite d’employer." How right he is!’
‘If not Violet, then a local Gauguin girl. Or Yolande Kickshaw.’
Why? Good question. Anyway. Violet must not be given this part to type. I’m afraid we’re going to wound a lot of people (openwork American lilt)! Oh come, art cannot hurt. It can, and how!
Actually the question of mortal precedence has now hardly any importance. I mean, the hero and heroine should get so close to each other by the time the horror begins, so organically close, that they overlap, intergrade, interache, and even if Vaniada’s end is described in the epilogue we, writers and readers, should be unable to make out (myopic, myopic) who exactly survives, Dava or Vada, Anda or Vanda.
I had a schoolmate called Vanda. And I knew a girl called Adora, little thing in my last floramor. What makes me see that bit as the purest sanglot in the book? What is the worst part of dying? (5.6)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): j’ai tâté etc.: I have known two Lesbians in my life, that’s enough.
terme etc.: term one avoids using.
Ada's lesbian schoolmate at Brownhill, Vanda Broom was shot dead by the girlfriend of a girlfriend on a starry night, in Ragusa of all places:
Would she like to stay in this apartment till Spring Term (he thought in terms of Terms now) and then accompany him to Kingston, or would she prefer to go abroad for a couple of months — anywhere, Patagonia, Angola, Gululu in the New Zealand mountains? Stay in this apartment? So, she liked it? Except some of Cordula’s stuff which should be ejected — as, for example, that conspicuous Brown Hill Alma Mater of Almehs left open on poor Vanda’s portrait. She had been shot dead by the girlfriend of a girlfriend on a starry night, in Ragusa of all places. It was, Van said, sad. Little Lucette no doubt had told him about a later escapade? Punning in an Ophelian frenzy on the feminine glans? Raving about the delectations of clitorism? ‘N’exagérons pas, tu sais,’ said Ada, patting the air down with both palms. ‘Lucette affirmed,’ he said, ‘that she (Ada) imitated mountain lions.’
He was omniscient. Better say, omni-incest.
‘That’s right,’ said the other total-recaller.
And, by the way, Grace — yes, Grace — was Vanda’s real favorite, pas petite moi and my little crest. She (Ada) had, hadn’t she, a way of always smoothing out the folds of the past — making the flutist practically impotent (except with his wife) and allowing the gentleman farmer only one embrace, with a premature eyakulyatsiya, one of those hideous Russian loanwords? Yes, wasn’t it hideous, but she’d love to play Scrabble again when they’d settled down for good. But where, how? Wouldn’t Mr and Mrs Ivan Veen do quite nicely anywhere? What about the ‘single’ in each passport? They’d go to the nearest Consulate and with roars of indignation and/or a fabulous bribe have it corrected to married, for ever and ever. (2.6).
It seems that the girlfriend of a girlfriend who shot poor Vanda dead was Ada herself. Grace Erminin (Vanda’s real favorite) marries a Wellington. Erminia was the nickname of Pushkin’s friend Eliza Khitrovo (Kutuzov’s daughter). In his diary, the entry of March 17, 1865, Leo Tolstoy (who was working on War and Peace) says that he is reading Mémoires du maréchal Marmont, duc de Ragusé (Paris, 1856-57):
Был в Туле. На похоронах у Серёжи. Даже для печали человек должен иметь проложенные рельсы, по которым идти,— вой, панихида и т.д. Вчера увидел в снегу на непродавленном следе человека продавленный след собаки. Зачем у ней точка опоры мала? Чтоб она съела зайцев не всех, а ровно сколько нужно. Это премудрость бога; но это не премудрость, не ум. Это инстинкт божества. Этот инстинкт есть в нас. А ум наш есть способность отклоняться от инстинкта и соображать эти отклонения. С страшной ясностью, силой и наслаждением пришли мне эти мысли. Нынче был у Пашковых. Дети больны, и Соня тоже. Дня четыре не писал. Нынче писал. Раз рассердился на немца и долго не мог простить. Читаю Mémoire Ragus’a. Очень мне полезно.
Before the family dinner Demon mentions that dreadful old wencher Lyovka Tolstoy, the writer:
‘I don’t know if you know,’ said Van, resuming his perch on the fat arm of his father’s chair. ‘Uncle Dan will be here with the lawyer and Lucette only after dinner.’
‘Capital,’ said Demon.
‘Marina and Ada should be down in a minute — ce sera un dîner à quatre.’
‘Capital,’ he repeated. ‘You look splendid, my dear, dear fellow — and I don’t have to exaggerate compliments as some do in regard to an aging man with shoe-shined hair. Your dinner jacket is very nice — or, rather it’s very nice recognizing one’s old tailor in one’s son’s clothes — like catching oneself repeating an ancestral mannerism — for example, this (wagging his left forefinger three times at the height of his temple), which my mother did in casual, pacific denial; that gene missed you, but I’ve seen it in my hairdresser’s looking-glass when refusing to have him put Crêmlin on my bald spot; and you know who had it too — my aunt Kitty, who married the Banker Bolenski after divorcing that dreadful old wencher Lyovka Tolstoy, the writer.’
Demon preferred Walter Scott to Dickens, and did not think highly of Russian novelists. As usual, Van considered it fit to make a corrective comment:
‘A fantastically artistic writer, Dad.’
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): ce sera etc.: it will be a dinner for four
Wagging his left forefinger: that gene did not miss his daughter (see p.178, where the name of the cream is also prefigured).
Lyovka: derogative or folksy diminutive of Lyov (Leo).
The element that destroys Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister who commits suicide by jumping from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic) is water, the element that destroys Demon is air. Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (Marina's twin sister who marries Demon), Van mentions water and air, bibles and brooms:
Poor Aqua, whose fancies were apt to fall for all the fangles of cranks and Christians, envisaged vividly a minor hymnist’s paradise, a future America of alabaster buildings one hundred stories high, resembling a beautiful furniture store crammed with tall white-washed wardrobes and shorter fridges; she saw giant flying sharks with lateral eyes taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent from dark to shining sea, before booming back to Seattle or Wark. She heard magic-music boxes talking and singing, drowning the terror of thought, uplifting the lift girl, riding down with the miner, praising beauty and godliness, the Virgin and Venus in the dwellings of the lonely and the poor. The unmentionable magnetic power denounced by evil lawmakers in this our shabby country — oh, everywhere, in Estoty and Canady, in ‘German’ Mark Kennensie, as well as in ‘Swedish’ Manitobogan, in the workshop of the red-shirted Yukonets as well as in the kitchen of the red-kerchiefed Lyaskanka, and in ‘French’ Estoty, from Bras d’Or to Ladore — and very soon throughout both our Americas, and all over the other stunned continents — was used on Terra as freely as water and air, as bibles and brooms. Two or three centuries earlier she might have been just another consumable witch. (1.3)
At the end of his poem The Good, Great Man is a poem (that Pushkin began to translate) S. T. Coleridge mentions the Angel Death:
"How seldom, friend! a good great man inherits
Honour or wealth with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits
If any man obtain that which he merits
Or any merit that which he obtains."
REPLY TO THE ABOVE
For shame, dear friend, renounce this canting strain!
What would'st thou have a good great man obtain?
Place? titles? salary? a gilded chain?
Or throne of corses which his sword had slain?
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends!
Hath he not always treasures, always friends,
The good great man? three treasures, LOVE, and LIGHT,
And CALM THOUGHTS, regular as infant's breath:
And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,
HIMSELF, his MAKER, and the ANGEL DEATH!
Coleridge is the author of Kubla Khan. Describing the family dinner Van mentions A Great Good Man, Richard Leonard Churchill's novel about a certain Crimean Khan:
Alas, the bird had not survived ‘the honor one had made to it,’ and after a brief consultation with Bouteillan a somewhat incongruous but highly palatable bit of saucisson d’Arles added itself to the young lady’s fare of asperges en branches that everybody was now enjoying. It almost awed one to see the pleasure with which she and Demon distorted their shiny-lipped mouths in exactly the same way to introduce orally from some heavenly height the voluptuous ally of the prim lily of the valley, holding the shaft with an identical bunching of the fingers, not unlike the reformed ‘sign of the cross’ for protesting against which (a ridiculous little schism measuring an inch or so from thumb to index) so many Russians had been burnt by other Russians only two centuries earlier on the banks of the Great Lake of Slaves. Van remembered that his tutor’s great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855-1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing ‘plump and live’ oysters out of their ‘cloisters’ in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin. But then ‘everyone has his own taste,’ as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son gout) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, ‘A Great Good Man’ — according, of course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume Monparnasse about whose new celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of one hand in a bowl, was now telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in the same graceful fashion. (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Great good man: a phrase that Winston Churchill, the British politician, enthusiastically applied to Stalin.
Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel, is one of the two seconds in Demon's sword duel with Baron d'Onsky (Skonky):
Upon being questioned in Demon’s dungeon, Marina, laughing trillingly, wove a picturesque tissue of lies; then broke down, and confessed. She swore that all was over; that the Baron, a physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai, had gone to Japan forever. From a more reliable source Demon learned that the Samurai’s real destination was smart little Vatican, a Roman spa, whence he was to return to Aardvark, Massa, in a week or so. Since prudent Veen preferred killing his man in Europe (decrepit but indestructible Gamaliel was said to be doing his best to forbid duels in the Western Hemisphere — a canard or an idealistic President’s instant-coffee caprice, for nothing was to come of it after all), Demon rented the fastest petroloplane available, overtook the Baron (looking very fit) in Nice, saw him enter Gunter’s Bookshop, went in after him, and in the presence of the imperturbable and rather bored English shopkeeper, back-slapped the astonished Baron across the face with a lavender glove. The challenge was accepted; two native seconds were chosen; the Baron plumped for swords; and after a certain amount of good blood (Polish and Irish — a kind of American ‘Gory Mary’ in barroom parlance) had bespattered two hairy torsoes, the whitewashed terrace, the flight of steps leading backward to the walled garden in an amusing Douglas d’Artagnan arrangement, the apron of a quite accidental milkmaid, and the shirtsleeves of both seconds, charming Monsieur de Pastrouil and Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel, the latter gentlemen separated the panting combatants, and Skonky died, not ‘of his wounds’ (as it was viciously rumored) but of a gangrenous afterthought on the part of the least of them, possibly self-inflicted, a sting in the groin, which caused circulatory trouble, notwithstanding quite a few surgical interventions during two or three years of protracted stays at the Aardvark Hospital in Boston — a city where, incidentally, he married in 1869 our friend the Bohemian lady, now keeper of Glass Biota at the local museum. (1.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Aardvark: apparently, a university town in New England.
Gamaliel: a much more fortunate statesman than our W.G. Harding.