25

On a sunny September morning, with the trees still green, but the asters and fleabanes already taking over in ditch and dalk, Van set out for Ladoga, N.A., to spend a fortnight there with his father and three tutors before returning to school in cold Luga, Mayne.

Van kissed Lucette on each dimple and then on the neck—and winked to prim Larivière who looked at Marina.

It was time to go. They saw him off: Marina in her shlafrok, Lucette petting (substitutionally) Dack, Mlle Larivière who did not know yet that Van had left behind an inscribed book she had given him on the eve, and a score of copiously tipped servants (among whom we noticed kitchen Kim with his camera)—practically the entire household, except Blanche who had the headache, and dutiful Ada who had asked to be excused, having promised to visit an infirm villager (she had a heart of gold, that child, really—as Marina so willingly, so wisely used to observe).

Van’s black trunk and black suitcase, and black king-size dumbbells, were heaved into the back of the family motorcar; Bouteillan put on a captain’s cap, too big for him, and grape blue goggles; “remouvez votre bottom, I will drive,” said Van—and the summer of 1884 was over.

“She rolls sweetly, sir,” remarked Bouteillan in his quaint old-fashioned English. “Tous les pneus sont neufs, but, alas, there are many stones on the way, and youth drives fast. Monsieur should be prudent. The winds of the wilderness are indiscreet. Tel un lis sauvage confiant au désert—”

“Quite the old comedy retainer, aren’t you?” remarked Van drily.

“Non, Monsieur,” answered Bouteillan, holding on to his cap. “Non. Tout simplement j’aime bien Monsieur et sa demoiselle.”

“If,” said Van, “you’re thinking of little Blanche, then you’d better quote Delille not to me, but to your son, who’ll knock her up any day now.”

The old Frenchman glanced at Van askance, pozheval gubami (chewed his lips), but said nothing.

“One will stop here for a few minutes,” said Van, as they reached Forest Fork, just beyond Ardis. “I intend to pick some boletes for Father to whom I shall certainly (Bouteillan having sketched a courteous gesture) transmit your salute. This handbrake must have been—damn it—in use before Louis the Sixteenth migrated to England.”

“It needs to be greased,” said Bouteillan and consulted his watch; “yes, we have ample time to catch the 9:04.”

Van plunged into the dense undergrowth. He wore a silk shirt, a velvet jacket, black breeches, riding boots with star spurs—and this attire was hardly convenient for making klv zdB AoyvBno vokh gvozxm dqg kzvoAAqvo z gwttp vq wifhm Ada in a natural bower of aspens; xliC mujzikml, after which she said:

“Yes—so as not to forget. Here’s the formula for our correspondence. Learn this by heart and then eat it up like a good little spy.”

“Poste restante both ways; and I want at least three letters a week, my white love.”

It was the first time he had seen her in that luminous frock nearly as flimsy as a nightgown. She had braided her hair, and he said she resembled the young soprano Maria Kuznetsova in the letter scene in Tschchaikow’s opera Onegin and Olga.

Ada, doing her feminine best to restrain and divert her sobs by transforming them into emotional exclamations, pointed out some accursed insect that had settled on an aspen trunk.

(Accursed? Accursed? It was the newly described, fantastically rare vanessian, Nymphalis danaus Nab., orange-brown, with black-and-white foretips, mimicking, as its discoverer Professor Nabonidus of Babylon College, Nebraska, realized, not the Monarch butterfly directly, but the Monarch through the Viceroy, one of the Monarch’s best known imitators. In Ada’s angry hand.)

“Tomorrow you’ll come here with your green net,” said Van bitterly, “my butterfly.”

She kissed him all over the face, she kissed his hands, then again his lips, his eyelids, his soft black hair. He kissed her ankles, her knees, her soft black hair.

“When, my love, when again? In Luga? Kaluga? Ladoga? Where, when?”

“That’s not the point,” cried Van, “the point, the point, the point is—will you be faithful, will you be faithful to me?”

“You spit, love,” said wan-smiling Ada, wiping off the P’s and the F’s. “I don’t know. I adore you. I shall never love anybody in my life as I adore you, never and nowhere, neither in eternity, nor in terrenity, neither in Ladore, nor on Terra, where they say our souls go. But! But, my love, my Van, I’m physical, horribly physical, I don’t know, I’m frank, qu’y puis-je? Oh dear, don’t ask me, there’s a girl in my school who is in love with me, I don’t know what I’m saying—”

“The girls don’t matter,” said Van, “it’s the fellows I’ll kill if they come near you. Last night I tried to make a poem about it for you, but I can’t write verse; it begins, it only begins: Ada, our ardors and arbors—but the rest is all fog, try to fancy the rest.”

They embraced one last time, and without looking back he fled.

Stumbling on melons, fiercely beheading the tall arrogant fennels with his riding crop, Van returned to the Forest Fork. Morio, his favorite black horse, stood waiting for him, held by young Moore. He thanked the groom with a handful of Stellas and galloped off, his gloves wet with tears.