Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

‘Monsieur a quinze ans, je crois, et moi, je sais, j’en ai dixneuf. Monsieur is a nobleman; I am a poor peat-digger’s daughter. Monsieur a tâté, sans doute, des filles de la ville; quant à moi, je suis vierge, ou peu s’en faut. De plus, were I to fall in love with you — I mean really in love — and I might, alas, if you possessed me rien qu’une petite fois — it would be, for me, only grief, and infernal fire, and despair, and even death, Monsieur. Finalement, I might add that I have the whites and must see le Docteur Chronique, I mean Crolique, on my next day off. Now we have to separate, the sparrow has disappeared, I see, and Monsieur Bouteillan has entered the next room, and can perceive us clearly in that mirror above the sofa behind that silk screen.’

‘Forgive me, girl,’ murmured Van, whom her strange, tragic tone had singularly put off, as if he were taking part in a play in which he was the principal actor, but of which he could only recall that one scene.

The butler’s hand in the mirror took down a decanter from nowhere and was withdrawn. Van, reknotting the cord of his robe, passed through the French window into the green reality of the garden.

8

On the same morning, or a couple of days later, on the terrace:

‘Mais va donc jouer avec lui,’ said Mlle Larivière, pushing Ada, whose young hips disjointedly jerked from the shock. ‘Don’t let your cousin se morfondre when the weather is so fine. Take him by the hand. Go and show him the white lady in your favorite lane, and the mountain, and the great oak.’

Ada turned to him with a shrug. The touch of her cold fingers and damp palm and the self-conscious way she tossed back her hair as they walked down the main avenue of the park made him self-conscious too, and under the pretext of picking up a fir cone he disengaged his hand. He threw the cone at a woman of marble bending over a stamnos but only managed to frighten a bird that perched on the brim of her broken jar.

‘There is nothing more banal in the world,’ said Ada, ‘than pitching stones at a hawfinch.’

‘Sorry,’ said Van, ‘I did not intend to scare that bird. But then, I’m not a country lad, who knows a cone from a stone. What games, au fond, does she expect us to play?’

‘Je l’ignore,’ replied Ada. ‘I really don’t care very much how her poor mind works. Cache-cache, I suppose, or climbing trees.’

‘Oh, I’m good at that,’ said Van, ‘in fact, I can even brachiate.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘we are going to play my games. Games I have invented all by myself. Games Lucette, I hope, will be able to play next year with me, the poor pet. Come, let us start. The present series belongs to the shadow-and-shine group, two of which I’m going to show you.’

‘I see,’ said Van.

‘You will in a moment,’ rejoined the pretty prig. ‘First of all we must find a nice stick.’

‘Look,’ said Van, still smarting a bit, ‘there goes another haw-haw finch.’

By then they had reached the rond-point — a small arena encircled by flowerbeds and jasmine bushes in heavy bloom. Overhead the arms of a linden stretched toward those of an oak, like a green-spangled beauty flying to meet her strong father hanging by his feet from the trapeze. Even then did we both understand that kind of heavenly stuff, even then.

‘Something rather acrobatic about those branches up there, no?’ he said, pointing.

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘I discovered it long ago. The teil is the flying Italian lady, and the old oak aches, the old lover aches, but still catches her every time’ (impossible to reproduce the right intonation while rendering the entire sense — after eight decades! — but she did say something extravagant, something quite out of keeping with her tender age as they looked up and then down).

Looking down and gesturing with a sharp green stake borrowed from the peonies, Ada explained the first game.

The shadows of leaves on the sand were variously interrupted by roundlets of live light. The player chose his roundlet — the best, the brightest he could find — and firmly outlined it with the point of his stick; whereupon the yellow round light would appear to grow convex like the brimming surface of some golden dye. Then the player delicately scooped out the earth with his stick or fingers within the roundlet. The level of that gleaming infusion de tilleul would magically sink in its goblet of earth and finally dwindle to one precious drop. That player won who made the most goblets in, say, twenty minutes.

Van asked suspiciously if that was all.