Describing the first time he saw Ada, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Bagrov’s grandson, a neighbor’s boy, whom he teased and pinched and made horrible fun of, a nice quiet little fellow who quietly massacred moles and anything else with fur on:
Before his boarding-school days started, his father’s pretty house, in Florentine style, between two vacant lots (5 Park Lane in Manhattan), had been Van’s winter home (two giant guards were soon to rise on both sides of it, ready to frog-march it away), unless they journeyed abroad. Summers in Radugalet, the ‘other Ardis,’ were so much colder and duller than those here in this, Ada’s, Ardis. Once he even spent both winter and summer there; it must have been in 1878.
Of course, of course, because that was the first time, Ada recalled, she had glimpsed him. In his little white sailor suit and blue sailor cap. (Un régulier angelochek, commented Van in the Raduga jargon.) He was eight, she was six. Uncle Dan had unexpectedly expressed the desire to revisit the old estate. At the last moment Marina had said she’d come too, despite Dan’s protests, and had lifted little Ada, hopla, with her hoop, into the calèche. They took, she imagined, the train from Ladoga to Raduga, for she remembered the way the station man with the whistle around his neck went along the platform, past the coaches of the stopped local, banging shut door after door, all six doors of every carriage, each of which consisted of six one-window carrosses of pumpkin origin, fused together. It was, Van suggested, a ‘tower in the mist’ (as she called any good recollection), and then a conductor walked on the running board of every coach with the train also running and opened doors all over again to give, punch, collect tickets, and lick his thumb, and change money, a hell of a job, but another ‘mauve tower.’ Did they hire a motor landaulet to Radugalet? Ten miles, she guessed. Ten versts, said Van. She stood corrected. He was out, he imagined, na progulke (promenading) in the gloomy firwood with Aksakov, his tutor, and Bagrov’s grandson, a neighbor’s boy, whom he teased and pinched and made horrible fun of, a nice quiet little fellow who quietly massacred moles and anything else with fur on, probably pathological. However, when they arrived, it became instantly clear that Demon had not expected ladies. He was on the terrace drinking goldwine (sweet whisky) with an orphan he had adopted, he said, a lovely Irish wild rose in whom Marina at once recognized an impudent scullery maid who had briefly worked at Ardis Hall, and had been ravished by an unknown gentleman — who was now well-known. In those days Uncle Dan wore a monocle in gay-dog copy of his cousin, and this he screwed in to view Rose, whom perhaps he had also been promised (here Van interrupted his interlocutor telling her to mind her vocabulary). The party was a disaster. The orphan languidly took off her pearl earrings for Marina’s appraisal. Grandpa Bagrov hobbled in from a nap in the boudoir and mistook Marina for a grande cocotte as the enraged lady conjectured later when she had a chance to get at poor Dan. Instead of staying for the night, Marina stalked off and called Ada who, having been told to ‘play in the garden,’ was mumbling and numbering in raw-flesh red the white trunks of a row of young birches with Rose’s purloined lipstick in the preamble to a game she now could not remember — what a pity, said Van — when her mother swept her back straight to Ardis in the same taxi leaving Dan — to his devices and vices, inserted Van — and arriving home at sunrise. But, added Ada, just before being whisked away and deprived of her crayon (tossed out by Marina k chertyam sobach’im, to hell’s hounds — and it did remind one of Rose’s terrier that had kept trying to hug Dan’s leg) the charming glimpse was granted her of tiny Van, with another sweet boy, and blond-bearded, white-bloused Aksakov, walking up to the house, and, oh yes, she had forgotten her hoop — no, it was still in the taxi. But, personally, Van had not the slightest recollection of that visit or indeed of that particular summer, because his father’s life, anyway, was a rose garden all the time, and he had been caressed by ungloved lovely hands more than once himself, which did not interest Ada. (1.24)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Bagrov’s grandson: allusion to Childhood Years of Bagrov’s Grandson by the minor writer Sergey Aksakov (A.D. 1791-1859).
In Conan Doyle's novel The Sign of the Four (1890) Watson says that the grounds near Bartholomew Sholto's house look as though all the moles in England had been let loose in them:
Our guide had left us the lantern. Holmes swung it slowly round, and peered keenly at the house, and at the great rubbish-heaps which cumbered the grounds. Miss Morstan and I stood together, and her hand was in mine. A wondrous subtle thing is love, for here were we two who had never seen each other before that day, between whom no word or even look of affection had ever passed, and yet now in an hour of trouble our hands instinctively sought for each other. I have marvelled at it since, but at the time it seemed the most natural thing that I should go out to her so, and, as she has often told me, there was in her also the instinct to turn to me for comfort and protection. So we stood hand in hand, like two children, and there was peace in our hearts for all the dark things that surrounded us.
“What a strange place!” she said, looking round.
“It looks as though all the moles in England had been let loose in it. I have seen something of the sort on the side of a hill near Ballarat, where the prospectors had been at work.”
“And from the same cause,” said Holmes. “These are the traces of the treasure-seekers. You must remember that they were six years looking for it. No wonder that the grounds look like a gravel-pit.” (Chapter V "The Tragedy of Pondicherry Lodge")
Bartholomew Sholto (Thaddeus' twin brother) found the treasure of Agra in the small secret attic of his house. Van and Ada find out that they are brother and sister thanks to Marina's old herbarium that they discovered in the attic of Ardis Hall:
The two kids’ best find, however, came from another carton in a lower layer of the past. This was a small green album with neatly glued flowers that Marina had picked or otherwise obtained at Ex, a mountain resort, not far from Brig, Switzerland, where she had sojourned before her marriage, mostly in a rented chalet. The first twenty pages were adorned with a number of little plants collected at random, in August, 1869, on the grassy slopes above the chalet, or in the park of the Hotel Florey, or in the garden of the sanatorium neat: it (‘my nusshaus,’ as poor Aqua dubbed it, or ‘the Home,’ as Marina more demurely identified it in her locality notes). Those introductory pages did not present much botanical or psychological interest; and the fifty last pages or so remained blank; but the middle part, with a conspicuous decrease in number of specimens, proved to be a regular little melodrama acted out by the ghosts of dead flowers. The specimens were on one side of the folio, with Marina Dourmanoff (sic)’s notes en regard.
Ancolie Bleue des Alpes, Ex en Valais, i.IX.69. From Englishman in hotel. ‘Alpine Columbine, color of your eyes.’
Epervière auricule. 25.X.69, Ex, ex Dr Lapiner’s walled alpine garden.
Golden [ginkgo] leaf: fallen out of a book’ The Truth about Terra’ which Aqua gave me before going back to her Home. 14.XII.69.
Artificial edelweiss brought by my new nurse with a note from Aqua saying it came from a ‘mizernoe and bizarre’ Christmas Tree at the Home. 25.XII.69.
Petal of orchid, one of 99 orchids, if you please, mailed to me yesterday, Special Delivery, c’est bien le cas de le dire, from Villa Armina, Alpes Maritimes. Have laid aside ten for Aqua to be taken to her at her Home. Ex en Valais, Switzerland. ‘Snowing in Fate’s crystal ball,’ as he used to say. (Date erased.)
Gentiane de Koch, rare, brought by lapochka [darling] Lapiner from his ‘mute gentiarium’ 5.I.1870.
[blue-ink blot shaped accidentally like a flower, or improved felt-pen deletion] (Compliquaria compliquata var. aquamarina. Ex, 15.I.70.
Fancy flower of paper, found in Aqua’s purse. Ex, 16.II.1870, made by a fellow patient, at the Home, which is no longer hers.
Gentiana verna (printanière). Ex, 28.III.1870, on the lawn of my nurse’s cottage. Last day here.
The two young discoverers of that strange and sickening treasure commented upon it as follows:
‘I deduce,’ said the boy, ‘three main facts: that not yet married Marina and her. married sister hibernated in my lieu de naissance; that Marina had her own Dr Krolik, pour ainsi dire; and that the orchids came from Demon who preferred to stay by the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother.’
‘I can add,’ said the girl, ‘that the petal belongs to the common Butterfly Orchis; that my mother was even crazier than her sister; and that the paper flower so cavalierly dismissed is a perfectly recognizable reproduction of an early-spring sanicle that I saw in profusion on hills in coastal California last February. Dr Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don’t you, Smith?), has determined the example I brought back from Sacramento to Ardis, as the Bear-Foot, B,E,A,R, my love, not my foot or yours, or the Stabian flower girl’s — an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine, would understand like this’ (American finger-snap). ‘You will be grateful,’ she continued, embracing him, ‘for my not mentioning its scientific name. Incidentally the other foot — the Pied de Lion from that poor little Christmas larch, is by the same hand — possibly belonging to a very sick Chinese boy who came all the way from Barkley College.’
‘Good for you, Pompeianella (whom you saw scattering her flowers in one of Uncle Dan’s picture books, but whom I admired last summer in a Naples museum). Now don’t you think we should resume our shorts and shirts and go down, and bury or burn this album at once, girl. Right?
‘Right,’ answered Ada. ‘Destroy and forget. But we still have an hour before tea.’
Re the ‘dark-blue’ allusion, left hanging:
A former viceroy of Estoty, Prince Ivan Temnosiniy, father of the children’s great-great-grandmother, Princess Sofia Zemski (1755-1809), and a direct descendant of the Yaroslav rulers of pre-Tartar times, had a millennium-old name that meant in Russian ‘dark blue.’ While happening to be immune to the sumptuous thrills of genealogic awareness, and indifferent to the fact that oafs attribute both the aloofness and the fervor to snobbishness, Van could not help feeling esthetically moved by the velvet background he was always able to distinguish as a comforting, omnipresent summer sky through the black foliage of the family tree. In later years he had never been able to reread Proust (as he had never been able to enjoy again the perfumed gum of Turkish paste) without a roll-wave of surfeit and a rasp of gravelly heartburn; yet his favorite purple passage remained the one concerning the name ‘Guermantes,’ with whose hue his adjacent ultramarine merged in the prism of his mind, pleasantly teasing Van’s artistic vanity.
Hue or who? Awkward. Reword! (marginal note in Ada Veen’s late hand). (1.1)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Dr Lapiner: for some obscure but not unattractive reason, most of the physicians in the book turn out to bear names connected with rabbits. The French ‘lapin’ in Lapiner is matched by the Russian ‘Krolik’, the name of Ada’s beloved lepidopterist (p.13, et passim) and the Russian ‘zayats’ (hare) sounds like ‘Seitz’ (the German gynecologist on page 181); there is a Latin ‘cuniculus’ in ‘Nikulin’ (‘grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov’, p.341), and a Greek ‘lagos’ in ‘Lagosse’ (the doctor who attends Van in his old age). Note also Coniglietto, the Italian cancer-of-the-blood specialist, p.298.
mizernoe: Franco-Russian form of ‘miserable’ in the sense of ‘paltry’.
c’est bien le cas de le dire: and no mistake.
lieu de naissance: birthplace.
pour ainsi dire: so to say.
Jane Austen: allusion to rapid narrative information imparted through dialogue, in Mansfield Park.
‘Bear-Foot’, not ‘bare foot’: both children are naked.
Stabian flower girl: allusion to the celebrated mural painting (the so-called ‘Spring’) from Stabiae in the National Museum of Naples: a maiden scattering blossoms.
One of the characters in The Sign of the Four, Tonga (a native of the Andaman Islands who murders Bartholomew Sholto with a poison blow dart) is bare footed.
At a weekday lunch in "Ardis the First" Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) mentions the fact that she had once collected flowers:
Van: ‘That yellow thingum’ (pointing at a floweret prettily depicted on an Eckercrown plate) ‘— is it a buttercup?’
Ada: ‘No. That yellow flower is the common Marsh Marigold, Caltha palustris. In this country, peasants miscall it "Cowslip," though of course the true Cowslip, Primula veris, is a different plant altogether.’
‘I see,’ said Van.
‘Yes, indeed,’ began Marina, ‘when I was playing Ophelia, the fact that I had once collected flowers —’
‘Helped, no doubt,’ said Ada. ‘Now the Russian word for marsh marigold is Kuroslep (which muzhiks in Tartary misapply, poor slaves, to the buttercup) or else Kaluzhnitsa, as used quite properly in Kaluga, U.S.A.’
‘Ah,’ said Van.
‘As in the case of many flowers,’ Ada went on, with a mad scholar’s quiet smile, ‘the unfortunate French name of our plant, souci d’eau, has been traduced or shall we say transfigured —’
‘Flowers into bloomers,’ punned Van Veen.
‘Je vous en prie, mes enfants!’ put in Marina, who had been following the conversation with difficulty and now, through a secondary misunderstanding, thought the reference was to the undergarment.
‘By chance, this very morning,’ said Ada, not deigning to enlighten her mother, ‘our learned governess, who was also yours, Van, and who —’
(First time she pronounced it — at that botanical lesson!)
‘— is pretty hard on English-speaking transmongrelizers — monkeys called "ursine howlers" — though I suspect her reasons are more chauvinistic than artistic and moral — drew my attention — my wavering attention — to some really gorgeous bloomers, as you call them, Van, in a Mr Fowlie’s soi-disant literal version — called "sensitive" in a recent Elsian rave — sensitive! — of Mémoire, a poem by Rimbaud (which she fortunately — and farsightedly — made me learn by heart, though I suspect she prefers Musset and Coppée)’ —
‘...les robes vertes et déteintes des fillettes...’ quoted Van triumphantly.
‘Egg-zactly’ (mimicking Dan). ‘Well, Larivière allows me to read him only in the Feuilletin anthology, the same you have apparently, but I shall obtain his oeuvres complètes very soon, oh very soon, much sooner than anybody thinks. Incidentally, she will come down after tucking in Lucette, our darling copperhead who by now should be in her green nightgown —’
‘Angel moy,’ pleaded Marina, ‘I’m sure Van cannot be interested in Lucette’s nightdress!’
‘— the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into "the sky’s bed" instead of "bed ceiler." But, to go back to our poor flower. The forged louis d’or in that collection of fouled French is the transformation of souci d’eau (our marsh marigold) into the asinine "care of the water" — although he had at his disposal dozens of synonyms, such as mollyblob, marybud, maybubble, and many other nick-names associated with fertility feasts, whatever those are.’
‘On the other hand,’ said Van, ‘one can well imagine a similarly bilingual Miss Rivers checking a French version of, say, Marvell’s Garden —’
‘Oh,’ cried Ada, ‘I can recite "Le jardin" in my own transversion — let me see —
En vain on s’amuse à gagner
L’Oka, la Baie du Palmier...’
‘...to win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes!’ shouted Van.
‘You know, children,’ interrupted Marina resolutely with calming gestures of both hands, ‘when I was your age, Ada, and my brother was your age, Van, we talked about croquet, and ponies, and puppies, and the last fête-d’enfants, and the next picnic, and — oh, millions of nice normal things, but never, never of old French botanists and God knows what!’
‘But you just said you collected flowers?’ said Ada.
‘Oh, just one season, somewhere in Switzerland. I don’t remember when. It does not matter now.’
The reference was to Ivan Durmanov: he had died of lung cancer years ago in a sanatorium (not far from Ex, somewhere in Switzerland, where Van was born eight years later). Marina often mentioned Ivan who had been a famous violinist at eighteen, but without any special show of emotion, so that Ada now noted with surprise that her mother’s heavy make-up had started to thaw under a sudden flood of tears (maybe some allergy to flat dry old flowers, an attack of hay fever, or gentianitis, as a slightly later diagnosis might have shown retrospectively). She blew her nose, with the sound of an elephant, as she said herself — and here Mlle Larivière came down for coffee and recollections of Van as a bambin angélique who adored à neuf ans — the precious dear! — Gilberte Swann et la Lesbie de Catulle (and who had learned, all by himself, to release the adoration as soon as the kerosene lamp had left the mobile bedroom in his black nurse’s fist). (1.10)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Mr Fowlie: see Wallace Fowlie, Rimbaud (1946).
soi-disant: would-be.
les robes vertes, etc.: the green and washed-out frocks of the little girls.
angel moy: Russ., ‘my angel’.
en vain. etc.: In vain, one gains in play
The Oka river and Palm Bay...
bambin angélique: angelic little lad.
Describing Kim Beauharnais's album, Van mentions a picture of Ivan Durmanov (Aqua's and Marina's elder brother) holding a guinea pig (a furred animal) in his hands:
A formal photograph, on a separate page: Adochka, pretty and impure in her flimsy, and Vanichka in gray-flannel suit, with slant-striped school tie, facing the kimera (chimera, camera) side by side, at attention, he with the shadow of a forced grin, she, expressionless. Both recalled the time (between the first tiny cross and a whole graveyard of kisses) and the occasion: it was ordered by Marina, who had it framed and set up in her bedroom next to a picture of her brother at twelve or fourteen clad in a bayronka (open shirt) and cupping a guinea pig in his gowpen (hollowed hands); the three looked like siblings, with the dead boy providing a vivisectional alibi. (2.7)
A vivisectional alibi brings to mind "an Alibi" (a cigarette) mentioned by Van at the family dinner in "Ardis the Second:"
Marina helped herself to an Albany from a crystal box of Turkish cigarettes tipped with red rose petal and passed the box on to Demon. Ada, somewhat self-consciously, lit up too.
‘You know quite well,’ said Marina, ‘that your father disapproves of your smoking at table.’
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ murmured Demon.
‘I had Dan in view,’ explained Marina heavily. ‘He’s very prissy on that score.’
‘Well, and I’m not,’ answered Demon.
Ada and Van could not help laughing. All that was banter — not of a high order, but still banter.
A moment later, however, Van remarked: ‘I think I’ll take an Alibi — I mean an Albany — myself.’
‘Please note, everybody,’ said Ada, ‘how voulu that slip was! I like a smoke when I go mushrooming, but when I’m back, this horrid tease insists I smell of some romantic Turk or Albanian met in the woods.’
‘Well,’ said Demon, ‘Van’s quite right to look after your morals.’ (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): voulu: intentional.
Sherlock Holmes is the author of a monograph entitled Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccoes:
“My practice has extended recently to the Continent,” said Holmes, after a while, filling up his old brier-root pipe. “I was consulted last week by François Le Villard, who, as you probably know, has come rather to the front lately in the French detective service. He has all the Celtic power of quick intuition, but he is deficient in the wide range of exact knowledge which is essential to the higher developments of his art. The case was concerned with a will, and possessed some features of interest. I was able to refer him to two parallel cases, the one at Riga in 1857, and the other at St. Louis in 1871, which have suggested to him the true solution. Here is the letter which I had this morning acknowledging my assistance.” He tossed over, as he spoke, a crumpled sheet of foreign notepaper. I glanced my eyes down it, catching a profusion of notes of admiration, with stray “magnifiques,” “coup-de-maîtres,” and “tours-de-force,” all testifying to the ardent admiration of the Frenchman.
“He speaks as a pupil to his master,” said I.
“Oh, he rates my assistance too highly,” said Sherlock Holmes, lightly. “He has considerable gifts himself. He possesses two out of the three qualities necessary for the ideal detective. He has the power of observation and that of deduction. He is only wanting in knowledge; and that may come in time. He is now translating my small works into French.”
“Your works?”
“Oh, didn’t you know?” he cried, laughing. “Yes, I have been guilty of several monographs. They are all upon technical subjects. Here, for example, is one ‘Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccoes.’ In it I enumerate a hundred and forty forms of cigar-, cigarette-, and pipe-tobacco, with coloured plates illustrating the difference in the ash. It is a point which is continually turning up in criminal trials, and which is sometimes of supreme importance as a clue. If you can say definitely, for example, that some murder has been done by a man who was smoking an Indian lunkah, it obviously narrows your field of search. To the trained eye there is as much difference between the black ash of a Trichinopoly and the white fluff of bird’s-eye as there is between a cabbage and a potato.” (The Sign of the Four, Chapter I: "The Science of Deduction")
When they watch the photographs in Kim Beauharnais's album, Van tells Ada that she smokes too much and that his belly is covered with her ashes:
In an equally casual tone of voice Van said: ‘Darling, you smoke too much, my belly is covered with your ashes. I suppose Bouteillan knows Professor Beauharnais’s exact address in the Athens of Graphic Arts.’
‘You shall not slaughter him,’ said Ada. ‘He is subnormal, he is, perhaps, blackmailerish, but in his sordidity, there is an istoshnïy ston (‘visceral moan’) of crippled art. Furthermore, this page is the only really naughty one. And let’s not forget that a copperhead of eight was also ambushed in the brush’.
‘Art my foute. This is the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre! I’m sorry you showed it to me. That ape has vulgarized our own mind-pictures. I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle.’
‘Oh do!’ said Ada (skipping another abominable glimpse — apparently, through a hole in the boards of the attic). ‘Look, here’s our little Caliph Island!’
‘I don’t want to look any more. I suspect you find that filth titillating. Some nuts get a kick from motor-bikini comics.’
‘Please, Van, do glance! These are our willows, remember?’
‘"The castle bathed by the Adour:
The guidebooks recommend that tour."’
‘It happens to be the only one in color. The willows look sort of greenish because the twigs are greenish, but actually they are leafless here, it’s early spring, and you can see our red boat Souvenance through the rushes. And here’s the last one: Kim’s apotheosis of Ardis.’
The entire staff stood in several rows on the steps of the pillared porch behind the Bank President Baroness Veen and the Vice President Ida Larivière. Those two were flanked by the two prettiest typists, Blanche de la Tourberie (ethereal, tearstained, entirely adorable) and a black girl who had been hired, a few days before Van’s departure, to help French, who towered rather sullenly above her in the second row, the focal point of which was Bouteillan, still wearing the costume sport he had on when driving off with Van (that picture had been muffed or omitted). On the butler’s right side stood three footmen; on his left, Bout (who had valeted Van), the fat, flour-pale cook (Blanche’s father) and, next to French, a terribly tweedy gentleman with sightseeing strappings athwart one shoulder: actually (according to Ada), a tourist, who, having come all the way from England to see Bryant’s Castle, had bicycled up the wrong road and was, in the picture, under the impression of accidentally being conjoined to a group of fellow tourists who were visiting some other old manor quite worth inspecting too. The back rows consisted of less distinguished menservants and scullions, as well as of gardeners, stableboys, coachmen, shadows of columns, maids of maids, aids, laundresses, dresses, recesses — getting less and less distinct as in those bank ads where limited little employees dimly dimidiated by more fortunate shoulders, but still asserting themselves, still smile in the process of humble dissolve.
‘Isn’t that wheezy Jones in the second row? I always liked the old fellow.’
‘No,’ answered Ada, ‘that’s Price. Jones came four years later. He is now a prominent policeman in Lower Ladore. Well, that’s all.’
Nonchalantly, Van went back to the willows and said:
‘Every shot in the book has been snapped in 1884, except this one. I never rowed you down Ladore River in early spring. Nice to note you have not lost your wonderful ability to blush.’
‘It’s his error. He must have thrown in a fotochka taken later, maybe in 1888. We can rip it out if you like.’
‘Sweetheart,’ said Van, ‘the whole of 1888 has been ripped out. One need not bb a sleuth in a mystery story to see that at least as many pages have been removed as retained. I don’t mind — I mean I have no desire to see the Knabenkräuter and other pendants of your friends botanizing with you; but 1888 has been withheld and he’ll turn up with it when the first grand is spent.’
‘I destroyed 1888 myself,’ admitted proud Ada; ‘but I swear, I solemnly swear, that the man behind Blanche, in the perron picture, was, and has always remained, a complete stranger.’
‘Good for him,’ said Van. ‘Really it has no importance. It’s our entire past that has been spoofed and condemned. On second thoughts, I will not write that Family Chronicle. By the way, where is my poor little Blanche now?’
‘Oh, she’s all right. She’s still around. You know, she came back — after you abducted her. She married our Russian coachman, the one who replaced Bengal Ben, as the servants called him.’
‘Oh she did? That’s delicious. Madame Trofim Fartukov. I would never have thought it.’
‘They have a blind child,’ said Ada.
‘Love is blind,’ said Van.
‘She tells me you made a pass at her on the first morning of your first arrival.’
‘Not documented by Kim,’ said Van. ‘Will their child remain blind? I mean, did you get them a really first-rate physician?’
‘Oh yes, hopelessly blind. But speaking of love and its myths, do you realize — because I never did before talking to her a couple of years ago — that the people around our affair had very good eyes indeed? Forget Kim, he’s only the necessary clown — but do you realize that a veritable legend was growing around you and me while we played and made love?’
She had never realized, she said again and again (as if intent to reclaim the past from the matter-of-fact triviality of the album), that their first summer in the orchards and orchidariums of Ardis had become a sacred secret and creed, throughout the countryside. Romantically inclined handmaids, whose reading consisted of Gwen de Vere and Klara Mertvago, adored Van, adored Ada, adored Ardis’s ardors in arbors. Their swains, plucking ballads on their seven-stringed Russian lyres under the racemosa in bloom or in old rose gardens (while the windows went out one by one in the castle), added freshly composed lines — naive, lackey-daisical, but heartfelt — to cyclic folk songs. Eccentric police officers grew enamored with the glamour of incest. Gardeners paraphrased iridescent Persian poems about irrigation and the Four Arrows of Love. Nightwatchmen fought insomnia and the fire of the clap with the weapons of Vaniada’s Adventures. Herdsmen, spared by thunderbolts on remote hillsides, used their huge ‘moaning horns’ as ear trumpets to catch the lilts of Ladore. Virgin chatelaines in marble-floored manors fondled their lone flames fanned by Van’s romance. And another century would pass, and the painted word would be retouched by the still richer brush of time. (2.7)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): éventail: fan.
fotochki: Russ., little photos.
foute: French swear word made to sound ‘foot’.
ars: Lat., art.
Carte du Tendre: ‘Map of Tender Love’, sentimental allegory of the seventeenth century.
Knabenkräuter: Germ., orchids (and testicles).
perron: porch.
Van's mistress, Cordula de Prey marries Ivan G. Tobak, the shipowner. After leaving Ardis forever, Van goes to Kalugano (where Philip Rack, Lucette's music teacher, lives with his family) and on a train meets Cordula:
Aqua used to say that only a very cruel or very stupid person, or innocent infants, could be happy on Demonia, our splendid planet. Van felt that for him to survive on this terrible Antiterra, in the multicolored and evil world into which he was born, he had to destroy, or at least to maim for life, two men. He had to find them immediately; delay itself might impair his power of survival. ‘The rapture of their destruction would not mend his heart, but would certainly rinse his brain. The two men were in two different spots and neither spot represented an exact location, a definite street number, an identifiable billet. He hoped to punish them in an honorable way, if Fate helped. He was not prepared for the comically exaggerated zeal Fate was to display in leading him on and then muscling in to become an over-cooperative agent.
First, he decided to go to Kalugano to settle accounts with Herr Rack. Out of sheer misery he fell asleep in a corner of a compartment, full of alien legs and voices, in the crack express tearing north at a hundred miles per hour. He dozed till noon and got off at Ladoga, where after an incalculably long wait he took another, even more jerky and crowded train. As he was pushing his unsteady way through one corridor after another, cursing under his breath the window-gazers who did not draw in their bottoms to let him pass, and hopelessly seeking a comfortable nook in one of the first-class cars consisting of four-seat compartments, he saw Cordula and her mother facing each other on the window side. The two other places were occupied by a stout, elderly gentleman in an old-fashioned brown wig with a middle parting, and a bespectacled boy in a sailor suit sitting next to Cordula, who was in the act of offering him one half of her chocolate bar. Van entered, moved by a sudden very bright thought, but Cordula’s mother did not recognize him at once, and the flurry of reintroductions combined with a lurch of the train caused Van to step on the prunella-shod foot of the elderly passenger, who uttered a sharp cry and said, indistinctly but not impolitely: ‘Spare my gout (or ‘take care’ or ‘look out’), young man!’
‘I do not like being addressed as "young man,"’ Van told the invalid in a completely uncalled-for, brutal burst of voice.
‘Has he hurt you, Grandpa?’ inquired the little boy.
‘He has,’ said Grandpa, ‘but I did not mean to offend anybody by my cry of anguish.’
‘Even anguish should be civil,’ continued Van (while the better Van in him tugged at his sleeve, aghast and ashamed).
‘Cordula,’ said the old actress (with the same apropos with which she once picked up and fondled a fireman’s cat that had strayed into Fast Colors in the middle of her best speech), ‘why don’t you go with this angry young demon to the tea-car? I think I’ll take my thirty-nine winks now.’
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Cordula as they settled down in the very roomy and rococo ‘crumpeter,’ as Kalugano College students used to call it in the ‘Eighties and ‘Nineties.
‘Everything,’ replied Van, ‘but what makes you ask?’
‘Well, we know Dr Platonov slightly, and there was absolutely no reason for you to be so abominably rude to the dear old man.’
‘I apologize,’ said Van. ‘Let us order the traditional tea.’
‘Another queer thing,’ said Cordula, ‘is that you actually noticed me today. Two months ago you snubbed me.’
‘You had changed. You had grown lovely and languorous. You are even lovelier now. Cordula is no longer a virgin! Tell me — do you happen to have Percy de Prey’s address? I mean we all know he’s invading Tartary — but where could a letter reach him? I don’t care to ask your snoopy aunt to forward anything.’
‘I daresay the Frasers have it, I’ll find out. But where is Van going? Where shall I find Van?’
‘At home — 5 Park Lane, in a day or two. Just now I’m going to Kalugano.’
‘That’s a gruesome place. Girl?’
‘Man. Do you know Kalugano? Dentist? Best hotel? Concert hall? My cousin’s music teacher?’
She shook her short curls. No — she went there very seldom. Twice to a concert, in a pine forest. She had not been aware that Ada took music lessons. How was Ada?
‘Lucette,’ he said, ‘Lucette takes or took piano lessons. Okay. Let’s dismiss Kalugano. These crumpets are very poor relatives of the Chose ones. You’re right, j’ai des ennuis. But you can make me forget them. Tell me something to distract me, though you distract me as it is, un petit topinambour as the Teuton said in the story. Tell me about your affairs of the heart.’
She was not a bright little girl. But she was a loquacious and really quite exciting little girl. He started to caress her under the table, but she gently removed his hand, whispering ‘womenses,’ as whimsically as another girl had done in some other dream. He cleared his throat loudly and ordered half-a-bottle of cognac, having the waiter open it in his presence as Demon advised. She talked on and on, and he lost the thread of her discourse, or rather it got enmeshed in the rapid landscape, which his gaze followed over her shoulder, with a sudden ravine recording what Jack said when his wife ‘phoned, or a lone tree in a clover field impersonating abandoned John, or a romantic stream running down a cliff and reflecting her brief bright affair with Marquis Quizz Quisana. (1.42)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): j’ai des ennuis: I have worries.
topinambour: tuber of the girasole; pun on ‘pun’ (‘calembour’).
on n’est pas etc: what scurvy behavior.
In podagra (Russian for "gout," cf. Doctor Platonov's words "spare my gout") there is Agra (a fortress in India where Jonathan Small, a peg-legged man, and the three Sikh troopers murder and robber a rajah's disguised servant and take hold of a box of jewels, "the treasure of Agra"). In Ward Five (where hopeless cases are kept) of the Kalugano hospital (where he recovers from a wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge) Van visits Philip Rack (Lucette's poor music teacher, and a composer of genius, who was poisoned by his jealous wife Elsie). In Conan Doyle's story The Adventure of the Dancing Men (1903) the last coded message (the code was cracked by Holmes) reads: "ELSIE PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD." Dr Fitzbishop (a surgeon in the Kalugano hospital) tells Van that Rack is not expected to spend another night on Demonia and would be soon on Terra:
On Monday around noon he was allowed to sit in a deckchair, on the lawn, which he had avidly gazed at for some days from his window. Dr Fitzbishop had said, rubbing his hands, that the Luga laboratory said it was the not always lethal ‘arethusoides’ but it had no practical importance now, because the unfortunate music teacher, and composer, was not expected to spend another night on Demonia, and would be on Terra, ha-ha, in time for evensong. Doc Fitz was what Russians call a poshlyak (‘pretentious vulgarian’) and in some obscure counter-fashion Van was relieved not to be able to gloat over the wretched Rack’s martyrdom. (1.42)
In The Sign of the Four Watson is reading Winwood Reade’s ‘Martyrdom of Man:’
“You really are an automaton,—a calculating-machine!” I cried. “There is something positively inhuman in you at times.”
He smiled gently. “It is of the first importance,” he said, “not to allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities. A client is to me a mere unit,—a factor in a problem. The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellant man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.”
“In this case, however—”
“I never make exceptions. An exception disproves the rule. Have you ever had occasion to study character in handwriting? What do you make of this fellow’s scribble?”
“It is legible and regular,” I answered. “A man of business habits and some force of character.”
Holmes shook his head. “Look at his long letters,” he said. “They hardly rise above the common herd. That d might be an a, and that l an e. Men of character always differentiate their long letters, however illegibly they may write. There is vacillation in his k’s and self-esteem in his capitals. I am going out now. I have some few references to make. Let me recommend this book,—one of the most remarkable ever penned. It is Winwood Reade’s ‘Martyrdom of Man.’ I shall be back in an hour.” (Chapter II: "The Statement of the Case")
Watson calls Holmes "a calculating-machine." According to Van, on the Scrabble board Ada was transformed into a sort of graceful computing machine:
Van, a first-rate chess player — he was to win in 1887 a match at Chose when he beat the Minsk-born Pat Rishin (champion of Underhill and Wilson, N.C.) — had been puzzled by Ada’s inability of raising the standard of her, so to speak, damsel-errant game above that of a young lady in an old novel or in one of those anti-dandruff color-photo ads that show a beautiful model (made for other games than chess) staring at the shoulder of her otherwise impeccably groomed antagonist across a preposterous traffic jam of white and scarlet, elaborately and unrecognizably carved, Lalla Rookh chessmen, which not even cretins would want to play with — even if royally paid for the degradation of the simplest thought under the itchiest scalp.
Ada did manage, now and then, to conjure up a combinational sacrifice, offering, say, her queen — with a subtle win after two or three moves if the piece were taken; but she saw only one side of the question, preferring to ignore, in the queer lassitude of clogged cogitation, the obvious counter combination that would lead inevitably to her defeat if the grand sacrifice were not accepted. On the Scrabble board, however, this same wild and weak Ada was transformed into a sort of graceful computing machine, endowed, moreover, with phenomenal luck, and would greatly surpass baffled Van in acumen, foresight and exploitation of chance, when shaping appetizing long words from the most unpromising scraps and collops. (1.36)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Pat Rishin: a play on ‘patrician’. One may recall Podgoretz (Russ. ‘underhill’) applying that epithet to a popular critic, would-be expert in Russian as spoken in Minsk and elsewhere. Minsk and Chess also figure in Chapter Six of Speak, Memory (p.133, N.Y. ed. 1966).
Gerschizhevsky: a Slavist’s name gets mixed here with that of Chizhevki, another Slavist.
Van, Ada and Lucette received a set of Flavita (the Russian Scrabble) from Baron Klim Avidov (anagram of Vladimir Nabokov):
Pedantic Ada once said that the looking up of words in a lexicon for any other needs than those of expression — be it instruction or art — lay somewhere between the ornamental assortment of flowers (which could be, she conceded, mildly romantic in a maidenly headcocking way) and making collage-pictures of disparate butterfly wings (which was always vulgar and often criminal). Per contra, she suggested to Van that verbal circuses, ‘performing words,’ ‘poodle-doodles,’ and so forth, might be redeemable by the quality of the brain work required for the creation of a great logogriph or inspired pun and should not preclude the help of a dictionary, gruff or complacent.
That was why she admitted ‘Flavita.’ The name came from alfavit, an old Russian game of chance and skill, based on the scrambling and unscrambling of alphabetic letters. It was fashionable throughout Estoty and Canady around 1790, was revived by the ‘Madhatters’ (as the inhabitants of New Amsterdam were once called) in the beginning of the nineteenth century, made a great comeback, after a brief slump, around 1860, and now a century later seems to be again in vogue, so I am told, under the name of ‘Scrabble,’ invented by some genius quite independently from its original form or forms.
Its chief Russian variety, current in Ada’s childhood, was played in great country houses with 125 lettered blocks. The object was to make rows and files of words on a board of 225 squares. Of these, 24 were brown, 12 black, 16 orange, 8 red, and the rest golden-yellow (i.e., flavid, in concession to the game’s original name). Every letter of the Cyrillic alphabet rated a number of points (the rare Russian F as much as 10, the common A as little as 1). Brown doubled the basic value of a letter, black tripled it. Orange doubled the sum of points for the whole word, red tripled the sum. Lucette would later recall how her sister’s triumphs in doubling, tripling, and even nonupling (when passing through two red squares) the numerical value of words evolved monstrous forms in her delirium during a severe streptococcal ague in September, 1888, in California.
For each round of the game each player helped himself to seven blocks from the container where they lay face down, and arrayed in turn his word on the board. In the case of the opening coup, on the still empty field, all he had to do was to align any two or all of his seven letters in such a way as to involve the central square, marked with a blazing heptagon. Subsequently, the catalyst of one of the letters already on the board had to be used for composing one’s word, across or down. That player won who collected the greatest number of points, letter by letter and word by word.
The set our three children received in 1884 from an old friend of the family (as Marina’s former lovers were known), Baron Klim Avidov, consisted of a large folding board of saffian and a boxful of weighty rectangles of ebony inlaid with platinum letters, only one of which was a Roman one, namely the letter J on the two joker blocks (as thrilling to get as a blank check signed by Jupiter or Jurojin). It was, incidentally, the same kindly but touchy Avidov (mentioned in many racy memoirs of the time) who once catapulted with an uppercut an unfortunate English tourist into the porter’s lodge for his jokingly remarking how clever it was to drop the first letter of one’s name in order to use it as a particule, at the Gritz, in Venezia Rossa.
By July the ten A’s had dwindled to nine, and the four D’s to three. The missing A eventually turned up under an Aproned Armchair, but the D was lost — faking the fate of its apostrophizable double as imagined by a Walter C. Keyway, Esq., just before the latter landed, with a couple of unstamped postcards, in the arms of a speechless multilinguist in a frock coat with brass buttons. The wit of the Veens (says Ada in a marginal note) knows no bounds. (1.36)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): alfavit: Russ., alphabet.
particule: ‘de’ or ‘d’’.