42

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 Fräsers 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’at 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.

A pine forest fizzled out and factory chimneys replaced it. The train clattered past a roundhouse, and slowed down, groaning. A hideous station darkened the day.

“Good Lord,” cried Van, “that’s my stop.”

He put money on the table, kissed Cordula’s willing lips and made for the exit. Upon reaching the vestibule he glanced back at her with a wave of the glove he held—and crashed into somebody who had stooped to pick up a bag: “On n’est pas goujat à ce point,” observed the latter: a burly military man with a reddish mustache and a staff captain’s insignia.

Van brushed past him, and when both had come down on the platform, glove-slapped him smartly across the face.

The captain picked up his cap and lunged at the white-faced, black-haired young fop. Simultaneously Van felt somebody embrace him from behind in well-meant but unfair restraint. Not bothering to turn his head he abolished the invisible busybody with a light “piston blow” delivered by the left elbow, while he sent the captain staggering back into his own luggage with one crack of the right hand. By now several free-show amateurs had gathered around them; so, breaking their circle, Van took his man by the arm and marched him into the waiting room. A comically gloomy porter with a copiously bleeding nose came in after them carrying the captain’s three bags, one of them under his arm. Cubistic labels of remote and fabulous places color-blotted the newer of the valises. Visiting cards were exchanged. “Demon’s son?” grunted Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge, Kalugano. “Correct,” said Van. “I’ll put up, I guess, at the Majestic; if not, a note will be left for your second or seconds. You’ll have to get me one, I can’t very well ask the concierge to do it.”

While speaking thus, Van chose a twenty dollar piece from a palmful of gold, and gave it with a grin to the damaged old porter. “Yellow cotton,” Van added: “Up each nostril. Sorry, chum.”

With his hands in his trouser pockets, he crossed the square to the hotel, causing a motor car to swerve stridently on the damp asphalt. He left it standing transom-wise in regard to its ordained course, and clawed his way through the revolving door of the hotel, feeling if not happier, at least more buoyant, than he had within the last twelve hours.

The Majestic, a huge old pile, all grime outside, all leather inside, engulfed him. He asked for a room with a bath, was told all were booked by a convention of contractors, tipped the desk clerk in the invincible Veen manner, and got a passable suite of three rooms with a mahogany paneled bathtub, an ancient rocking chair, a mechanical piano and a purple canopy over a double bed. After washing his hands, he immediately went down to inquire about Rack’s whereabouts. The Racks had no telephone; they probably rented a room in the suburbs; the concierge looked up at the clock and called some sort of address bureau or lost person department. It proved closed till next morning. He suggested Van ask at a music store on Main Street.

On the way there he acquired his second walking stick: the Ardis Hall silver-knobbed one he had left behind in the Maidenhair station café. This was a rude, stout article with a convenient grip and an alpenstockish point capable of gouging out translucent bulging eyes. In an adjacent store he got a suitcase, and in the next, shirts, shorts, socks, slacks, pajamas, handkerchiefs, a lounging robe, a pullover and a pair of saffian bedroom slippers fetally folded in a leathern envelope. His purchases were put into the suitcase and sent at once to the hotel. He was about to enter the music shop when he remembered with a start that he had not left any message for Tapper’s seconds, so he retraced his steps.

He found them sitting in the lounge and requested them to settle matters rapidly—he had more important business than that. “Ne grubit’ sekundantam” (never be rude to seconds), said Demon’s voice in his mind. Arwin Birdfoot, a lieutenant in the Guards, was blond and flabby, with moist pink lips and a foot-long cigarette holder. Johnny Rafin, Esq., was small, dark and dapper and wore blue suede shoes with a dreadful tan suit. Birdfoot soon disappeared, leaving Van to work out details with Johnny, who, though loyally eager to assist Van, could not conceal that his heart belonged to Van’s adversary.

The Captain was a first-rate shot, Johnny said, and member of the Do-Re-La country club. Bloodthirsty brutishness did not come with his Britishness, but his military and academic standing demanded he defend his honor. He was an expert on maps, horses, horticulture. He was a wealthy landlord. The merest adumbration of an apology on Baron Veen’s part would clinch the matter with a token of gracious finality.

“If,” said Van, “the good Captain expects that, he can go and stick his pistol up his gracious anality.”

“That is not a nice way of speaking,” said Johnny, wincing. “My friend would not approve of it. We must remember he is a very refined person.”

Was Johnny Van’s second, or the Captain’s?

“I’m yours,” said Johnny with a languid look.

Did he or the refined Captain know a German-born pianist, Philip Rack, married, with three babies (probably)?

“I’m afraid,” said Johnny, with a note of disdain, “that I don’t know many people with babies in Kalugano.”

Was there a good whorehouse in the vicinity?

With increasing disdain Johnny answered he was a confirmed bachelor.

“Well, all right,” said Van. “I have now to go out again before the shops close. Shall I acquire a brace of dueling pistols or will the Captain lend me an army ‘bruger’?”

“We can supply the weapons,” said Johnny.

When Van arrived in front of the music shop, he found it locked. He stared for a moment at the harps and the guitars and the flowers in silver vases on consoles receding in the dusk of looking-glasses, and recalled the schoolgirl whom he had longed for so keenly half a dozen years ago—Rose? Roza? Was that her name? Would he have been happier with her than with his pale fatal sister?

He walked for a while along Main Street—one of a million Main Streets—and then, with a surge of healthy hunger, entered a passably attractive restaurant. He ordered a beefsteak with roast potatoes, apple pie and claret. At the far end of the room, on one of the red stools of the burning bar, a graceful harlot in black—tight bodice, wide skirt, long black gloves, black-velvet picture hat—was sucking a golden drink through a straw. In the mirror behind the bar, amid colored glints, he caught a blurred glimpse of her russety blond beauty; he thought he might sample her later on, but when he glanced again she had gone.

He ate, drank, schemed.

He looked forward to the encounter with keen exhilaration. Nothing more invigorating could have been imagined. Shooting it out with that incidental clown furnished unhoped-for relief, particularly since Rack would no doubt accept a plain thrashing in lieu of combat. Designing and re-designing various contingencies pertaining to that little duel might be compared to those helpful hobbies which polio patients, lunatics and convicts are taught by generous institutions, by enlightened administrators, by ingenious psychiatrists—such as bookbinding, or putting blue beads into the orbits of dolls made by other criminals, cripples and madmen.

At first he toyed with the idea of killing his adversary: quantitively, it would afford him the greatest sense of release; qualitatively, it suggested all sorts of moral and legal complications. Inflicting a wound seemed an inept half-measure. He decided to do something artistic and tricky, such as shooting the pistol out of the fellow’s hand, or parting for him his thick brushy hair in the middle.

On his way back to the gloomy Majestic he acquired various trifles: three round cakes of soap in an elongated box, shaving cream in its cold resilient tube, ten safety-razor blades, a large sponge, a smaller soaping sponge of rubber, hair lotion, a comb, Skinner’s Balsam, a toothbrush in a plastic container, toothpaste, scissors, a fountain pen, a pocket diary—what else?—yes, a small alarm clock—whose comforting presence, however, did not prevent him from telling the concierge to have him called at five A.M.

It was only nine P.M. in late summer; he would not have been surprised if told it was midnight in October. He had had an unbelievably long day. The mind could hardly grasp the fact that this very morning, at dawn, a fey character out of some Dormilona novel for servant maids had spoken to him, half-naked and shivering, in the toolroom of Ardis Hall. He wondered if the other girl still stood, arrow straight, adored and abhorred, heartless and heartbroken, against the trunk of a murmuring tree. He wondered if in view of tomorrow’s partie de plaisir he should not prepare for her a when-you-receive-this note, flippant, cruel, as sharp as an icicle. No. Better write to Demon.

He carefully reread his letter—and carefully tore it up. The note he finally placed in his coat pocket was much briefer.

Van was roused by the night porter who put a cup of coffee with a local “eggbun” on his bedside table, and expertly palmed the expected chervonetz. He resembled somewhat Bouteillan as the latter had been ten years ago and as he had appeared in a dream, which Van now retrostructed as far as it would go: in it Demon’s former valet explained to Van that the “dor” in the name of an adored river equaled the corruption of hydro in “dorophone.” Van often had word dreams.

He shaved, disposed of two blood-stained safety blades by leaving them in a massive bronze ashtray, had a structurally perfect stool, took a quick bath, briskly dressed, left his bag with the concierge, paid his bill and at six punctually squeezed himself next to blue-chinned and malodorous Johnny into the latter’s Paradox, a cheap “semi-racer.” For two or three miles they skirted the dismal bank of the lake—coal piles, shacks, boat-houses, a long strip of black pebbly mud and, in the distance, over the curving bank of autumnally misted water, the tawny fumes of tremendous factories.

“Where are we now, Johnny dear?” asked Van as they swung out of the lake’s orbit and sped along a suburban avenue with clapboard cottages among laundry-linked pines.

“Dorofey Road,” cried the driver above the din of the motor. “It abuts at the forest.”

It abutted. Van felt a faint twinge in his knee where he had hit it against a stone when attacked from behind a week ago, in another wood. At the moment his foot touched the pine-needle strewn earth of the forest road, a transparent white butterfly floated past, and with utter certainty Van knew that he had only a few minutes to live.

He turned to his second and said:

“This stamped letter, in this handsome Majestic Hotel envelope, is addressed, as you see, to my father. I am transferring it to the back pocket of my pants. Please post it at once if the Captain, who I see has arrived in a rather funerary-looking limousine, accidentally slaughters me.”

They found a convenient clearing, and the principals, pistol in hand, faced each other at a distance of some thirty paces, in the kind of single combat described by most Russian novelists and by practically all Russian novelists of gentle birth. As Arwin clapped his hands, informally signaling the permission to fire at will, Van noticed a speckled movement on his right: two little spectators—a fat girl and a boy in a sailorsuit, wearing glasses, with a basket of mushrooms between them. It was not the chocolate-muncher in Cordula’s compartment, but a boy very much like him, and as this flashed through Van’s mind he felt the jolt of the bullet ripping off, or so it felt, the entire left side of his torso. He swayed, but regained his balance, and with nice dignity discharged his pistol in the sun-hazy air.

His heart beat steadily, his spit was clear, his lungs felt intact, but a fire of pain raged somewhere in his left armpit. Blood oozed through his clothes and trickled down his trouserleg. He sat down, slowly, cautiously, and leaned on his right arm. He dreaded losing consciousness, but, maybe, did faint briefly, because next moment he became aware that Johnny had relieved him of the letter and was in the act of pocketing it.

“Tear it up, you idiot,” said Van with an involuntary groan.

The Captain strolled up and muttered rather gloomily: “I bet you are in no condition to continue, are you?”

“I bet you can’t wait—” began Van: he intended to say: “you can’t wait to have me slap you again,” but happened to laugh on “wait” and the muscles of mirth reacted so excruciatingly that he stopped in mid-sentence and bowed his sweating brow.

Meanwhile, the limousine was being transformed into an ambulance by Arwin. Newspapers were dismembered to protect the upholstery, and the fussy Captain added to them what looked like a potato bag or something rotting in a locker, and then after rummaging again in the car trunk and muttering about the “bloody mess” (quite a literal statement) decided to sacrifice the ancient and filthy macintosh on which a decrepit dear dog had once died on the way to the veterinary.

For half a minute Van was sure that he still lay in the car, whereas actually he was in the general ward of Lakeview (Lake-view!) Hospital, between two series of variously bandaged, snoring, raving and moaning men. When he understood this, his first reaction was to demand indignantly that he be transferred to the best private palata in the place and that his suitcase and alpenstock be fetched from the Majestic. His next request was that he be told how seriously he was hurt and how long he was expected to remain incapacitated. His third action was to resume what constituted the sole reason for his having to visit Kalugano (visit Kalugano!). His new quarters, where heartbroken kings had tossed in transit, proved to be a replica in white of his hotel apartment—white furniture, white carpet, white sparver. Inset, so to speak, was Tatiana, a remarkably pretty and proud young nurse, with black hair and diaphanous skin (some of her attitudes and gestures, and that harmony between neck and eyes which is the special, scarcely yet investigated secret of feminine grace fantastically and agonizingly reminded him of Ada, and he sought escape from that image in a powerful response to the charms of Tatiana, a torturing angel in her own right. Enforced immobility forbade the chase and grab of common cartoons. He begged her to massage his legs but she tested him with one glance of her grave, dark eyes—and delegated the task to Dorofey, a beefy-handed male nurse, strong enough to lift him bodily out of bed, with the sick child clasping the massive nape. When Van managed once to twiddle her breasts, she warned him she would complain if he ever repeated what she dubbed more aptly than she thought “that soft dangle.” An exhibition of his state with a humble appeal for a healing caress resulted in her drily remarking that distinguished gentlemen in public parks got quite lengthy prison terms for that sort of thing. However, much later, she wrote him a charming and melancholy letter in red ink on pink paper; but other emotions and events had intervened, and he never met her again). His suitcase promptly arrived from the hotel; the stick, however, could not be located (it must be climbing nowadays Wellington Mountain, or perhaps, helping a lady to go “brambling” in Oregon); so the hospital supplied him with the Third Cane, a rather nice, knotty, cherry-dark thing with a crook and a solid black-rubber heel. Dr. Fitzbishop congratulated him on having escaped with a superficial muscle wound, the bullet having lightly grooved or, if he might say so, grazed the greater serratus. Doc Fitz commented on Van’s wonderful recuperational power which was already in evidence, and promised to have him out of disinfectants and bandages in ten days or so if for the first three he remained as motionless as a felled tree-trunk. Did Van like music? Sportsmen usually did, didn’t they? Would he care to have a Sonorola by his bed? No, he disliked music, but did the doctor, being a concert-goer, know perhaps where a musician called Rack could be found? “Ward Five,” answered the doctor promptly. Van misunderstood this as the title of some piece of music and repeated his question. Would he find Rack’s address at Harper’s music shop? Well, they used to rent a cottage way down Dorofey Road, near the forest, but now some other people had moved in. Ward Five was where hopeless cases were kept. The poor guy had always had a bad liver and a very indifferent heart, but on top of that a poison had seeped into his system; the local “lab” could not identify it and they were now waiting for a report, on those curiously frog-green faeces, from the Luga people. If Rack had administered it to himself by his own hand, he kept “mum”; it was more likely the work of his wife who dabbled in Hindu-Andean voodoo stuff and had just had a complicated miscarriage in the maternity ward. Yes, triplets—how did he guess? Anyway, if Van was so eager to visit his old pal it would have to be as soon as he could be rolled to Ward Five in a wheelchair by Dorofey, so he’d better apply a bit of voodoo, ha-ha, on his own flesh and blood.

That day came soon enough. After a long journey down corridors where pretty little things tripped by, shaking thermometers, and first an ascent and then a descent in two different lifts, the second of which was very capacious with a metal-handled black lid propped against its wall and bits of holly or laurel here and there on the soap-smelling floor, Dorofey, like Onegin’s coachman, said priehali (“we have arrived”) and gently propelled Van, past two screened beds, toward a third one near the window. There he left Van, while he seated himself at a small table in the door corner and leisurely unfolded the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos).

“I am Van Veen—in case you are no longer lucid enough to recognize somebody you have seen only twice. Hospital records put your age at thirty; I thought you were younger, but even so that is a very early age for a person to die—whatever he be tvoyu mat’—half-baked genius or full-fledged scoundrel, or both. As you may guess by the plain but thoughtful trappings of this quiet room, you are an incurable case in one lingo, a rotting rat in another. No oxygen gadget can help you to eschew the ‘agony of agony’—Professor Lamort’s felicitous pleonasm. The physical torments you will be, or indeed are, experiencing, must be prodigious, but are nothing in comparison to those of a probable hereafter. The mind of man, by nature a monist, cannot accept two nothings; he knows there has been one nothing, his biological inexistence in the infinite past, for his memory is utterly blank, and that nothingness, being, as it were, past, is not too hard to endure. But a second nothingness—which perhaps might not be so hard to bear either—is logically unacceptable. When speaking of space we can imagine a live speck in the limitless oneness of space; but there is no analogy in such a concept with our brief life in time, because however brief (a thirty-year span is really obscenely brief!), our awareness of being is not a dot in eternity, but a slit, a fissure, a chasm running along the entire breadth of metaphysical time, bisecting it and shining—no matter how narrowly—between the back panel and fore panel. Therefore, Mr. Rack, we can speak of past time, and in a vaguer, but familiar sense, of future time, but we simply cannot expect a second nothing, a second void, a second blank. Oblivion is a one-night performance; we have been to it once, there will be no repeat. We must face therefore the possibility of some prolonged form of disorganized consciousness and this brings me to my main point, Mr. Rack. Eternal Rack, infinite ‘Rackness’ may not be much but one thing is certain: the only consciousness that persists in the hereafter is the consciousness of pain. The little Rack of today is the infinite rack of tomorrow—ich bin ein unverbesserlicher Witzbold. We can imagine—I think we should imagine—tiny clusters of particles still retaining Rack’s personality, gathering here and there in the here-and-there-after, clinging to each other, somehow, somewhere, a web of Rack’s toothaches here, a bundle of Rack’s nightmares there—rather like tiny groups of obscure refugees from some obliterated country huddling together for a little smelly warmth, for dingy charities or shared recollections of nameless tortures in Tartar camps. For an old man one special little torture must be to wait in a long long queue before a remote urinal. Well, Herr Rack, I submit that the surviving cells of aging Rackness will form such lines of torment, never, never reaching the coveted filth hole in the panic and pain of infinite night. You may answer, of course, if you are versed in contemporary novelistics, and if you fancy the jargon of English writers, that a ‘lower-middle-class’ piano tuner who falls in love with a fast ‘upper-class’ girl, thereby destroying his own family, is not committing a crime deserving the castigation which a chance intruder—”

With a not unfamiliar gesture, Van tore up his prepared speech and said:

“Mr. Rack, open your eyes. I’m Van Veen. A visitor.”

The hollow-cheeked, long-jawed face, wax-pale, with a fattish nose and a small round chin, remained expressionless for a moment; but the beautiful, amber, liquid, eloquent eyes with pathetically long lashes had opened. Then a faint smile glimmered about his mouth parts, and he stretched one hand, without raising his head from the oil-cloth-covered pillow (why oil-cloth?).

Van, from his chair, extended the end of his cane, which the weak hand took, and palpated politely, thinking it was a well-meant offer of support. “No, I am not yet able to walk a few steps,” Rack said quite distinctly, with the German accent which would probably constitute his most durable group of ghost cells.

Van drew in his useless weapon. Controlling himself, he thumped it against the footboard of his wheelchair. Dorofey glanced up from his paper, then went back to the article that engrossed him—“A Clever Piggy (from the memoirs of an animal trainer),” or else “The Crimean War: Tartar Guerillas Help Chinese Troops.” A diminutive nurse simultaneously stepped out from behind the farther screen and disappeared again.

Will he ask me to transmit a message? Shall I refuse? Shall I consent—and not transmit it?

“Have they all gone to Hollywood already? Please, tell me, Baron von Wien.”

“I don’t know,” answered Van, “They probably have. I really—”

“Because I sent my last flute melody, and a letter for all the family, and no answer has come. I must vomit now. I ring myself.”

The diminutive nurse on tremendously high white heels pulled forward the screen of Rack’s bed, separating him from the melancholy, lightly wounded, stitched-up, clean-shaven young dandy; who was rolled out and away by efficient Dorofey.

Upon returning to his cool bright room, with the rain and the sun mingling in the half-open window, Van walked on rather ephemeral feet to the looking-glass, smiled to himself in welcome, and without Dorofey’s assistance went back to bed. Lovely Tatiana glided in, and asked if he wanted some tea.

“My darling,” he said, “I want you. Look at this tower of strength!”

“If you knew,” she said, over her shoulder, “how many prurient patients have insulted me—exactly that way.”

He wrote Cordula a short letter, saying he had met with a little accident, was in the suite for fallen princes in Lakeview Hospital, Kalugano, and would be at her feet on Tuesday. He also wrote an even shorter letter to Marina, in French, thanking her for a lovely summer. This, on second thought, he decided to send from Manhattan to the Pisang Palace Hotel in Los Angeles. A third letter he addressed to Bernard Rattner, his closest friend at Chose, the great Rattner’s nephew. “Your uncle has most honest standards,” he wrote, in part, “but I am going to demolish him soon.”

On Monday around noon he was allowed to sit in a deck-chair, 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.

A large pine tree cast its shadow upon him and his book. He had borrowed it from a shelf holding a medley of medical manuals, tattered mystery tales, the Rivière de Diamants collection of Monparnasse stories, and this odd volume of the Journal of Modern Science with a difficult essay by Ripley, “The Structure of Space.” He had been wrestling with its phoney formulas and diagrams for several days now and saw he would not be able to assimilate it completely before his release from Lakeview Hospital on the morrow.

A hot sunfleck reached him, and tossing the red volume aside, he got up from his chair. With the return of health the image of Ada kept rising within him like a bitter and brilliant wave, ready to swallow him. His bandages had been removed; nothing but a special vest-like affair of flannel enveloped his torso, and though it was tight and thick it did not protect him any longer from the poisoned point of Ardis. Arrowhead Manor. Le Château de la Flèche, Flesh Hall.

He strolled on the shade-streaked lawn feeling much too warm in his black pajamas and dark-red dressing gown. A brick wall separated his part of the garden from the street and a little way off an open gateway allowed an asphalt drive to curve toward the main entrance of the long hospital building. He was on the point of returning to his deckchair when a smart, pale-gray four-door sedan glided in and stopped before him. The door flew open, before the chauffeur, an elderly man in tunic and breeches, had time to hand out Cordula, who now ran like a ballerina toward Van. He hugged her in a frenzy of welcome, kissing her rosy hot face and kneading her soft catlike body through her black silk dress: what a delicious surprise!

She had come all the way from Manhattan, at a hundred kilometers an hour, fearing he might have already left, though he said it would be tomorrow.

“Idea!” he cried. “Take me back with you, right away. Yes, just as I am!”

“Okay,” she said, “come and stay at my flat, there’s a beautiful guest room for you.”

She was a good sport—little Cordula de Prey. Next moment he was sitting beside her in the car, which was backing gateward. Two nurses came running and gesturing toward them, and the chauffeur asked in French if the Countess wished him to stop.

“Non, non, non!” cried Van in high glee and they sped away.

Panting, Cordula said:

“My mother rang me up from Malorukino” (their country estate at Malbrook, Mayne): “the local papers said you had fought a duel. You look a tower of health, I’m so glad. I knew something nasty must have happened because little Russel, Dr. Platonov’s grandson—remember?—saw you from his side of the train beating up an officer on the station platform. But, first of all, Van, net, pozhaluysta, on nas vidit (no, please, he sees us), I have some very bad news for you. Young Fraser, who has just been flown back from Yalta, saw Percy killed on the second day of the invasion, less than a week after they had left Good-son airport. He will tell you the whole story himself, it accumulates more and more dreadful details with every telling, Fraser does not seem to have shined in the confusion, that’s why, I suppose, he keeps straightening things out.”

(Bill Fraser, the son of Judge Fraser, of Wellington, witnessed Lieutenant de Prey’s end from a blessed ditch overgrown with cornel and medlar, but, of course, could do nothing to help the leader of his platoon and this for a number of reasons which he conscientiously listed in his report but which it would be much too tedious and embarrassing to itemize here. Percy had been shot in the thigh during a skirmish with Khazar guerillas in a ravine near Chew-Foot-Calais, as the American troops pronounced “Chufutkale,” the name of a fortified rock. He had immediately assured himself, with the odd relief of the doomed, that he had got away with a flesh wound. Loss of blood caused him to faint, as we fainted, too, as soon as he started to crawl or rather squirm toward the shelter of the oak scrub and spiny bushes, where another casualty was resting comfortably. When a couple of minutes later, Percy—still Count Percy de Prey—regained consciousness he was no longer alone on his rough bed of gravel and grass. A smiling old Tartar, incongruously but somehow assuagingly wearing American blue-jeans with his beshmet, was squatting by his side. “Bednïy, bednïy” (you poor, poor fellow), muttered the good soul, shaking his shaven head and clucking: “Bol’no (it hurts)?” Percy answered in his equally primitive Russian that he did not feel too badly wounded: “Karasho, karasho ne bol’no (good, good),” said the kindly old man and, picking up the automatic pistol which Percy had dropped, he examined it with naive pleasure and then shot him in the temple. (One wonders, one always wonders, what had been the executed individual’s brief, rapid series of impressions, as preserved somewhere, somehow, in some vast library of microfilmed last thoughts, between two moments: between, in the present case, our friend’s becoming aware of those nice, quasi-Red Indian little wrinkles beaming at him out of a serene sky not much different from Ladore’s, and then feeling the mouth of steel violently push through tender skin and exploding bone. One supposes it might have been a kind of suite for flute, a series of “movements” such as, say: I’m alive—who’s that?—civilian—sympathy—thirsty—daughter with pitcher—that’s my damned gun—don’t … et cetera or rather no cetera … while Broken-Arm Bill prayed his Roman deity in a frenzy of fear for the Tartar to finish his job and go. But, of course, an invaluable detail in that strip of thought would have been—perhaps, next to the pitcher peri—a glint, a shadow, a stab of Ardis.)

“How strange, how strange,” murmured Van when Cordula had finished her much less elaborate version of the report Van later got from Bill Fraser.

What a strange coincidence! Either Ada’s lethal shafts were at work, or he, Van, had somehow managed to dispatch her two wretched lovers in a duel with a dummy.

Strange, too, that he felt nothing special, except, perhaps, a kind of neutral wonder, as he listened to little Cordula. A one-track man in matters of soft passion, strange Van, strange Demon’s son, was at the moment much more anxious to enjoy Cordula as soon as humanly and humanely possible, as soon as satanically and viatically feasible, than to keep deploring the fate of a fellow he hardly knew; and although Cordula’s blue eyes flashed with tears once or twice, he knew perfectly well that she had never seen much of her second cousin and, in point of fact, had rather disliked him.

Cordula told Edmond: “Arrêtez près de what’s-it-called, yes, Albion, le store pour messieurs, in Luga”; and as peeved Van remonstrated: “You can’t go back to civilization in pajamas,” she said firmly. “I shall buy you some clothes, while Edmond has a mug of coffee.”

She bought him a pair of trousers, and a raincoat. He had been waiting impatiently in the parked car and now under the pretext of changing into his new clothes asked her to drive him to some secluded spot, while Edmond, wherever he was, had another mug.

As soon as they reached a suitable area he transferred Cordula to his lap and had her very comfortably, with such howls of enjoyment that she felt touched and flattered.

“Reckless Cordula,” observed reckless Cordula cheerfully; “this will probably mean another abortion—encore un petit enjantôme, as my poor aunt’s maid used to wail every time it happened to her. Did I say anything wrong?”

“Nothing wrong,” said Van, kissing her tenderly; and they drove back to the diner.