Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

‘Let us kiss again, let us kiss again!’ Lucette kept repeating, childishly, lispingly, barely moving her parted lips, in a fussy incoherent daze, doing her best to prevent him from thinking it over, from saying no.

He said that would do.

‘Oh but why? Oh please!’

He brushed away her cold trembling fingers.

‘Why Van? Why, why, why?’

‘You know perfectly well why. I love her, not you, and I simply refuse to complicate matters by entering into yet another incestuous relationship.’

‘That’s rich,’ said Lucette, ‘you’ve gone far enough with me on several occasions, even when I was a kid; your refusing to go further is a mere quibble on your part; and besides, besides you’ve been unfaithful to her with a thousand girls, you dirty cheat!’

‘You shan’t talk to me in that tone,’ said Van, meanly turning her poor words into a pretext for marching away.

‘I apollo, I love you,’ she whispered frantically, trying to cry after him in a whisper because the corridor was all door and ears, but he walked on, waving both arms in the air without looking back, quite forgivingly, though, and was gone.

4

A teasy problem demanded Dr Veen’s presence in England.

Old Paar of Chose had written him that the ‘Clinic’ would like him to study a singular case of chromesthesia, but that given certain aspects of the case (such as a faint possibility of trickery) Van should come and decide for himself whether he thought it worth the trouble to fly the patient to Kingston for further observation. One Spencer Muldoon, born eyeless, aged forty, single, friendless, and the third blind character in this chronicle, had been known to hallucinate during fits of violent paranoia, calling out the names of such shapes and substances as he had learned to identify by touch, or thought he recognized through the awfulness of stories about them (falling trees, extinct saurians) and which now pressed on him from all sides, alternating with periods of stupor, followed invariably by a return to his normal self, when for a week or two he would finger his blind books or listen, in red-lidded bliss, to records of music, bird songs, and Irish poetry.

His ability to break space into ranks and files of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ things in what seemed a wallpaper pattern remained a mystery until one evening, when a research student (R.S. — he wished to remain that way), who intended to trace certain graphs having to do with the metabasis of another patient, happened to leave within Muldoon’s reach one of those elongated boxes of new, unsharpened, colored-chalk pencils whose mere evocation (Dixon Pink Anadel!) make one’s memory speak in the language of rainbows, the tints of their painted and polished woods being graded spectrally in their neat tin container. Poor Muldoon’s childhood could not come to him with anything like such iridian recall, but when his groping fingers opened the box and palpated the pencils, a certain expression of sensual relish appeared on his parchment-pale face. Upon observing that the blind man’s eyebrows went up slightly at red, higher at orange, still higher at the shrill scream of yellow and then stepped down through the rest of the prismatic spectrum, R.S. casually told him that the woods were dyed differently — ‘red,’ ‘orange,’ ‘yellow,’ et cetera, and quite as casually Muldoon rejoined that they also felt different one from another.

In the course of several tests conducted by R.S. and his colleagues, Muldoon explained that by stroking the pencils in turn he perceived a gamut of ‘stingles,’ special sensations somehow allied to the tingling aftereffects of one’s skin contact with stinging nettles (he had been raised in the country somewhere between Ormagh and Armagh, and had often tumbled, in his adventurous boyhood, the poor thick-booted soul, into ditches and even ravines), and spoke eerily of the ‘strong’ green stingle of a piece of blotting paper or the wet weak pink tingle of nurse Langford’s perspiring nose, these colors being checked by himself against those applied by the researchers to the initial pencils. In result of the tests, one was forced to assume that the man’s fingertips could convey to his brain ‘a tactile transcription of the prismatic specter’ as Paar put it in his detailed report to Van.