Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

‘No, it’s much simpler,’ said patient Lucette. ‘Let’s go back to the library where you found that little thing still erect in its drawer —’

‘Z for Zemski. As I had hoped, you do resemble Dolly, still in her pretty pantelets, holding a Flemish pink in the library portrait above her inscrutable.’

‘No, no,’ said Lucette, ‘that indifferent oil presided over your studies and romps at the other end, next to the closet, above a glazed bookcase.’

When will this torture end? I can’t very well open the letter in front of her and read it aloud for the benefit of the audience. I have not art to reckon my groans.

‘One day, in the library, kneeling on a yellow cushion placed on a Chippendale chair before an oval table on lion claws —’

[The epithetic tone strongly suggests that this speech has an epistolary source. Ed.]

‘— I got stuck with six Buchstaben in the last round of a Flavita game. Mind you, I was eight and had not studied anatomy, but was doing my poor little best to keep up with two Wunderkinder. You examined and fingered my groove and quickly redistributed the haphazard sequence which made, say, LIKROT or ROTIKL and Ada flooded us both with her raven silks as she looked over our heads, and when you had completed the rearrangement, you and she came simultaneously, si je puis le mettre comme ça

(Canady French), came falling on the black carpet in a paroxysm of incomprehensible merriment; so finally I quietly composed ROTIK (‘little mouth’) and was left with my own cheap initial. I hope I’ve thoroughly got you mixed up, Van, because la plus laide fille au monde peut donner beaucoup plus qu’elle n’a, and now let us say adieu, yours ever.’

‘Whilst the machine is to him,’ murmured Van.

‘Hamlet,’ said the assistant lecturer’s brightest student.

‘Okay, okay,’ replied her and his tormentor, ‘but, you know, a medically minded English Scrabbler, having two more letters to cope with, could make, for example, STIRCOIL, a well-known, sweat-gland stimulant, or CITROILS, which grooms use for rubbing fillies.’

‘Please stop, Vandemonian,’ she moaned. ‘Read her letter and bring me my coat.’

But he continued, his features working:

‘I’m amazed! I never imagined that a hand-reared scion of Scandinavian kings, Russian grand princes and Irish barons could use the language of the proverbial gutter. Yes, you’re right, you behave as a cocotte, Lucette.’

In sad meditation Lucette said: ‘As a rejected cocotte, Van.’

‘O moya dushen’ka

(my dear darling),’ cried Van, struck by his own coarseness and cruelty. ‘Please, forgive me! I’m a sick man. I’ve been suffering for these last four years from consanguineocanceroformia — a mysterious disease described by Coniglietto. Don’t put your little cold hand on my paw — that could only hasten your end and mine. On with your story.’

‘Well, after teaching me simple exercises for one hand that I could practice alone, cruel Ada abandoned me. True, we never really stopped doing it together every now and then — in the ranchito of some acquaintances after a party, in a white saloon she was teaching me to drive, in the sleeping car tearing across the prairie, at sad, sad Ardis where I spent one night with her before coming to Queenston. Oh, I love her hands, Van, because they have the same rodinka (small birthmark), because the fingers are so long, because, in fact, they are Van’s in a reducing mirror, in tender diminutive, v laskatel’noy forme’ (the talk — as so often happened at emotional moments in the Veen-Zemski branch of that strange family, the noblest in Estotiland, the grandest on Antiterra — was speckled with Russian, an effect not too consistently reproduced in this chapter — the readers are restless tonight).

‘She abandoned me,’ continued Lucette, tchucking on one side of the mouth and smoothing up and down with an abstract palm her flesh-pale stocking, ‘Yes, she started a rather sad little affair with Johnny, a young star from Fuerteventura, c’est dans la famille, her exact odnoletok (coeval), practically her twin in appearance, born the same year, the same day, the same instant —’

That was a mistake on silly Lucette’s part.