The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (19 page)

Next morning a warm drizzle came pattering, shimmering, stretching in thin threads across the dark background of the forest’s depths. Only three people came down for breakfast—first the Colonel and listless, wan Simpson; then Frank, fresh, bathed, shaved to a high gloss, with an innocent smile on his overly thin lips.

The Colonel was markedly out of spirits. The night before, during the bridge game, he had noticed something. Bending down hastily to retrieve a dropped card, he had seen Frank’s knee pressed against Maureen’s. This must be stopped immediately. For some time already the Colonel had had an inkling that something was not right. No wonder Frank had rushed off to Rome, where the McGores always went in the spring. His son was free to do as he liked, but to stand for something like this here, at home, in the ancestral castle—no, the most stringent measures must be taken immediately.

The Colonel’s displeasure had a disastrous effect on Simpson. He had the impression that his presence was a burden to his host, and was at a loss for a subject of conversation. Only Frank was placidly jovial as always, and, his teeth asparkle, munched with gusto on hot toast spread with orange marmalade.

When they had finished their coffee, the Colonel lit his pipe and rose.

“Didn’t you want to take a look at the new car, Frank? Let’s walk over to the garage. Nothing to do in this rain anyway.”

Then, sensing that poor Simpson had remained mentally suspended in midair, the Colonel added, “I’ve got a few good books here, my dear Simpson. Help yourself if you wish.”

Simpson came to with a start and pulled some bulky red volume down from the shelf. It turned out to be the
Veterinary Herald
for 1895.

“I need to have a little talk with you,” began the Colonel when he and Frank had tugged on their crackling raincoats and walked out into a mist of rain.

Frank gave his father a rapid glance.

“How shall I put it,” he pondered, puffing on his pipe. “Listen, Frank,” he said, taking the plunge—and the wet gravel crunched more succulently under his soles—“it has come to my attention, it doesn’t matter how, or, to put it more simply, I have noticed … Dammit,
Frank, what I mean is, what kind of relations do you have with McGore’s wife?”

Frank replied quietly and coolly, “I’d rather not discuss that with you, Father,” meanwhile thinking angrily to himself: what a scoundrel—he did rat on me!

“Obviously I cannot demand—” began the Colonel, and stopped short. At tennis, after the first bad shot, he still managed to control himself.

“Might be a good idea to fix this footbridge,” remarked Frank, hitting a rotten timber with his heel.

“To hell with the bridge!” said the Colonel. This was his second miss, and the veins swelled on his forehead in an irate vee.

The chauffeur, who had been banging around with some buckets by the garage gates, yanked off his checkered cap upon seeing his master. He was a short, stocky man with a cropped yellow mustache.

“Morning, sir,” he said amiably and pushed open one of the gates with his shoulder. In the petrol-and-leather-scented penumbra glimmered an enormous, black, brand-new Rolls-Royce.

“And now let us take a walk in the park,” said the Colonel in a toneless voice when Frank had had his fill of examining cylinders and levers.

The first thing that happened in the park was that a large, cold drop of water fell from a branch, inside the Colonel’s collar. And actually it was this drop that made the cup overflow. After a masticating movement of his lips, as though rehearsing the words, he abruptly thundered: “I warn you, Frank, in my house I shall not stand for any adventures of the French-novel genre. Furthermore, McGore is my friend—can you understand that or not?”

Frank picked up the racquet Simpson had forgotten on the bench the previous day. The damp had turned it into a figure eight. Rotten racquet, Frank thought with revulsion. His father’s words were pounding ponderously past: “I shall not stand for it,” he was saying. “If you cannot behave properly, then leave. I am displeased with you, Frank, I am terribly displeased with you. There is something about you that I don’t understand. At university you do poorly at your studies. In Italy God knows what you were up to. They tell me you paint. I suppose I’m not worthy of being shown your daubings. Yes, daubings. I can imagine.… A genius indeed! For you doubtless consider yourself a genius, or, even better, a futurist. And now we have these love affairs to boot.… In short, unless—”

Here the Colonel noticed that Frank was whistling softly and nonchalantly through his teeth. The Colonel stopped and goggled his eyes.

Frank flung the twisted racquet into the bushes like a boomerang, smiled, and said, “This is all poppycock, Father. I read in a book on the Afghanistan war about what you did there and what you were decorated for. It was absolutely foolish, featherbrained, suicidal, but it was an exploit. That is what counts. While your disquisitions are poppycock. Good day.”

And the Colonel remained standing alone in the middle of the lane, frozen in wonderment and wrath.

The distinctive feature of everything extant is its monotony. We partake of food at predetermined hours because the planets, like trains that are never late, depart and arrive at predetermined times. The average person cannot imagine life without such a strictly established timetable. But a playful and sacrilegious mind will find much to amuse it imagining how people would exist if the day lasted ten hours today, eighty-five tomorrow, and after tomorrow a few minutes. One can say a priori that, in England, such uncertainty with regard to the exact duration of the coming day would lead first of all to an extraordinary proliferation of betting and sundry other gambling arrangements. One could lose his entire fortune because a day lasted a few more hours than he had supposed on the eve. The planets would become like racehorses, and what excitement would be aroused by some sorrel Mars as it tackled the final celestial hurdle! Astronomers would assume bookmakers’ functions, the god Apollo would be depicted in a flaming jockey cap, and the world would merrily go mad.

Unfortunately, however, that is not the way things are. Exactitude is always grim, and our calendars, where the world’s existence is calculated in advance, are like the schedule of some inexorable examination. Of course there is something soothing and insouciant about this regimen devised by a cosmic Frederick Taylor. Yet how splendidly, how radiantly the world’s monotony is interrupted now and then by the book of a genius, a comet, a crime, or even simply by a single sleepless night. Our laws, though—our pulse, our digestion are firmly linked to the harmonious motion of the stars, and any attempt to disturb this regularity is punished, at worst by beheading, at best by a headache. Then again, the world was unquestionably created with good intentions and it is no one’s fault if it sometimes grows boring, if the music of the
spheres reminds some of us of the endless repetitions of a hurdy-gurdy.

Simpson was particularly conscious of this monotony. He found it somehow terrifying that today, too, breakfast would be followed by lunch, tea by supper, with inviolable regularity. He wanted to scream at the thought that things would continue like that all his life, he wanted to struggle like someone who has awakened in his coffin. The drizzle was still shimmering outside the window, and having to stay indoors made his ears ring as they do when you have a fever. McGore spent the whole day in the workshop that had been set up for him in one of the castle’s towers. He was busy restoring the varnish of a small, dark picture painted on wood. The workshop smelled of glue, turpentine, and garlic, which is used for removing greasy spots from paintings. On a small carpenter’s bench near the press sparkled retorts containing hydrochloric acid and alcohol; scattered about lay scraps of flannel, nostriled sponges, assorted scrapers. McGore was wearing an old dressing gown, glasses, a shirt with no starched collar, and a stud nearly the size of a doorbell button protruding right under his Adam’s apple; his neck was thin, gray, and covered with senile excrescences, and a black skullcap covered his bald spot. With a delicate rotary rubbing of his fingers already familiar to the reader, he was sprinkling a pinch of ground tar, carefully rubbing it into the painting so that the old, yellowed varnish, abraded by the powdery particles, itself turned into dry dust.

The castle’s other denizens sat in the parlor. The Colonel had angrily unfolded a giant newspaper and, as he gradually cooled down, was reading aloud an emphatically conservative article. Then Maureen and Frank got involved in a game of Ping-Pong. The little celluloid ball, with its crackly, melancholy ring, flew back and forth across the green net intersecting the long table, and of course Frank played masterfully, moving only his wrist as he nimbly flicked the thin wooden paddle left and right.

Simpson traversed all the rooms, biting his lips and adjusting his pince-nez. Eventually he reached the gallery. Pale as death, carefully closing behind him the heavy, silent door, he tiptoed up to Fra Bastiano del Piombo’s
Veneziana
. She greeted him with her familiar opaque gaze, and her long fingers paused on their way to her fur wrap, to the slipping crimson folds. Caressed by a whiff of honeyed darkness, he glanced into the depths of the window that interrupted the black background. Sand-tinted clouds stretched across the greenish blue; toward them rose dark, fractured cliffs amid which wound a pale-hued trail, while lower down there were indistinct wooden huts, and, in one of them, Simpson thought he saw a point of light flicker for an instant.
As he peered through this ethereal window, he sensed that the Venetian lady was smiling, but his swift glance failed to catch that smile; only the shaded right corner of her gently joined lips was slightly raised. At that moment something within him deliciously gave way, and he yielded totally to the picture’s warm enchantment. One must bear in mind that he was a man of morbidly rapturous temperament, that he had no idea of life’s realities, and that, for him, impressionability took the place of intellect. A cold tremor, like a quick dry hand, brushed his back, and he realized immediately what he must do. However, when he looked around and saw the sheen of parquet, the table, and the blind white gloss of the paintings where the drizzly light pouring through the window fell on them, he had a feeling of shame and fear. And, in spite of another momentary surge of the previous enchantment, he already knew that he could hardly carry out what, a minute ago, he could have done unthinkingly.

Fixing his eyes on the Veneziana’s face, he backed away from her and suddenly flung his arms apart. His coccyx banged painfully on something. He looked around and saw the black table behind him. Trying to think about nothing, he climbed onto it, stood up fully erect facing the Venetian lady, and once again, with an upward sweep of his arms, prepared to fly to her.

“Astonishing way to admire a painting. Invented it yourself, did you?”

It was Frank. He was standing, legs apart, in the doorway and gazing at Simpson with icy derision.

With a wild glint of pince-nez lenses in his direction, Simpson staggered awkwardly, like an alarmed lunatic. Then he hunched over, flushed hotly, and clambered clumsily to the floor.

Frank’s face wrinkled with acute revulsion as he silently left the room. Simpson lunged after him.

“Please, I beg you, don’t tell anyone.…” Without turning or stopping, Frank gave a squeamish shrug.

Toward evening the rain unexpectedly ceased. Someone, remembering, had turned off the taps. A humid orange sunset came aquiver amid the boughs, broadened, was reflected in all the puddles simultaneously. Dour little McGore was dislodged from his tower by force.
He smelled of turpentine, and had burned his hand with a hot iron. He reluctantly pulled on his black coat, turned up the collar, and went out with the others for a stroll. Only Simpson stayed home, on the pretext that he absolutely must answer a letter brought by the evening post. Actually no answer was required, since it was from the university milkman and demanded immediate payment of a bill for two shillings and ninepence.