Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

That exhilaration of a newly acquired franchise! A shade of it he seemed to have kept in his sleep, in that last part of his recent dream in which he had told Blanche that he had learned to levitate and that his ability to treat air with magic ease would allow him to break all records for the long jump by strolling, as it were, a few inches above the ground for a stretch of say thirty or forty feet (too great a length might be suspicious) while the stands went wild, and Zambovsky of Zambia stared, arms akimbo, in consternation and disbelief.

Tenderness rounds out true triumph, gentleness lubricates genuine liberation: emotions that are not diagnostic of glory or passion in dreams. One half of the fantastic joy Van was to taste from now on (forever, he hoped) owed its force to the certainty that he could lavish on Ada, openly and at leisure, all the puerile petting that social shame, male selfishness, and moral apprehension had prevented him from envisaging before.

On weekends, all three meals of the day were heralded by three gongs, small, medium and big. The first now announced breakfast in the dining room. Its vibration suscitated the thought that in twenty-six steps Van would join his young accomplice, whose delicate musk he still preserved in the hollow of his hand — and affected Van with a kind of radiant amazement: Had it really happened? Are we really free? Certain caged birds, say Chinese amateurs shaking with fatman mirth, knock themselves out against the bars (and lie unconscious for a few minutes) every blessed morning, right upon awakening, in an automatic, dream-continuing, dreamlined dash — although they are, those iridescent prisoners, quite perky and docile and talkative the rest of the time.

Van thrust his bare toe into a sneaker, retrieving the while its mate from under the bed; he hurried down, past a pleased-looking Prince Zemski and a grim Vincent Veen, Bishop of Balticomore and Como.

But she was not down yet. In the bright dining room, full of yellow flowers in drooping clusters of sunshine, Uncle Dan was feeding. He wore suitable clothes for a suitably hot day in the country — namely, a candy-striped suit over a mauve flannel shirt and piqué waistcoat, with a blue-and-red club tie and a safety-goldpinned very high soft collar (all his trim stripes and colors were a little displaced, though, in the process of comic strip printing, because it was Sunday). He had just finished his first buttered toast, with a dab of ye-old Orange Marmalade and was making turkey sounds as he rinsed his dentures orally with a mouthful of coffee prior to swallowing it and the flavorous flotsam. Being, as I had reason to believe, plucky, I could make myself suffer a direct view of the man’s pink face with its (rotating) red ‘tashy’, but I was not obliged (mused Van, in 1922, when he saw those baguenaudier flowers again) to stand his chinless profile with its curly red sideburn. So Van considered, not without appetite, the blue jugs of hot chocolate and baton-segments of bread prepared for the hungry children. Marina had her breakfast in bed, the butler and Price ate in a recess of the pantry (a pleasing thought, somehow) and Mlle Larivière did not touch any food till noon, being a doom-fearing ‘midinette’ (the sect, not the shop) and had actually made her father confessor join her group.

‘You could have taken us to see the fire, Uncle dear,’ remarked Van, pouring himself a cup of chocolate.

‘Ada will tell you all about it,’ replied Uncle Dan, lovingly buttering and marmalading another toast. ‘She greatly enjoyed the excursion.’

‘Oh, she went with you, did she?’

‘Yes — in a black charabanc, with all the butlers. Jolly good fun, rally’ (pseudo-British pronunciation).

‘But that must have been one of the scullery maids, not Ada,’ remarked Van. ‘I didn’t realize,’ he added, ‘we had several here — I mean, butlers.’

‘Oh, I imagine so,’ said Uncle Dan vaguely. He repeated the internal rinsing process, and with a slight cough put on his spectacles, but no morning paper had come — and he took them off again.

Suddenly Van heard her lovely dark voice on the staircase saying in an upward direction, ‘Je l’ai vu dans une des corbeilles de la bibliothèque’ — presumably in reference to some geranium or violet or slipper orchid. There was a ‘bannister pause,’ as photographers say, and after the maid’s distant glad cry had come from the library Ada’s voice added: ‘Je me demande, I wonder qui l’a mis là, who put it there.’ Aussitôt après she entered the dining room.