On Sunday mornings the mail came late, because of the voluminous Sunday supplements of the papers from Balticomore, and Kaluga, and Luga, which Robin Sherwood, the old postman, in his bright green uniform, distributed on horseback throughout the somnolent countryside. As Van, humming his school song — the only tune he could ever carry — skipped down the terrace steps, he saw Robin on his old bay holding the livelier black stallion of his Sunday helper, a handsome English lad whom, it was rumored behind the rose hedges, the old man loved more vigorously than his office required.

Van reached the third lawn, and the bower, and carefully inspected the stage prepared for the scene, ‘like a provincial come an hour too early to the opera after jogging all day along harvest roads with poppies and bluets catching and twinkle-twining in the wheels of his buggy’ (Floeberg’s Ursula).

Blue butterflies nearly the size of Small Whites, and likewise of European origin, were flitting swiftly around the shrubs and settling on the drooping clusters of yellow flowers. In less complex circumstances, forty years hence, our lovers were to see again, with wonder and joy, the same insect and the same bladder-senna along a forest trail near Susten in the Valais. At the present moment he was looking forward to collecting what he would recollect later, and watched the big bold Blues as he sprawled on the turf, burning with the evoked vision of Ada’s pale limbs in the variegated light of the bower, and then coldly telling himself that fact could never quite match fancy. When he returned from a swim in the broad and deep brook beyond the bosquet, with wet hair and tingling skin, Van got the rare treat of finding his foreglimpse of live ivory accurately reproduced, except that she had loosened her hair and changed into the curtal frock of sunbright cotton that he was so fond of and had so ardently yearned to soil in the so recent past.

He had resolved to deal first of all with her legs which he felt he had not feted enough the previous night; to sheathe them in kisses from the A of arched instep to the V of velvet; and this Van accomplished as soon as Ada and he got sufficiently deep in the larchwood which closed the park on the steep side of the rocky rise between Ardis and Ladore.

Neither could establish in retrospect, nor, indeed, persisted in trying to do so, how, when and where he actually ‘de-flowered’ her — a vulgarism Ada in Wonderland had happened to find glossed in Phrody’s Encyclopedia as ‘to break a virgin’s vaginal membrane by manly or mechanical means,’ with the example: ‘The sweetness of his soul was deflowered (Jeremy Taylor).’ Was it that night on the lap robe? Or that day in the larchwood? Or later in the shooting gallery, or in the attic, or on the roof, or on a secluded balcony, or in the bathroom, or (not very comfortably) on the Magic Carpet? We do not know and do not care.

(You kissed and nibbled, and poked, and prodded, and worried me there so much and so often that my virginity was lost in the shuffle; but I do recall definitely that by midsummer the machine which our forefathers called’ sex’ was working as smoothly as later, in 1888, etc., darling. Marginal note in red ink.)

21

Ada was denied the free use of the library. According to the latest list (printed May 1, 1884), it contained 14,841 items, and even that dry catalogue her governess preferred not to place in the child’s hands — ‘pour ne pas lui donner des idées.’ On her own shelves, to be sure, Ada had taxonomic works on botany and entomology as well as her schoolbooks and a few innocuous popular novels. But not only was she not supposed to browse in the library unsupervised, but every book she took out to read in bed or bower had to be checked by her mentor and charged’ en lecture’ with name and stamped date in the index-card files kept in a careful mess by Mlle Larivière and in a kind of desperate order (with the insertion of queries, calls of distress, and even imprecations, on bits of pink, red or purple paper) by a cousin of hers, Monsieur Philippe Verger, a diminutive old bachelor, morbidly silent and shy, who moused in, every other week, for a few hours of quiet work — so quiet, in fact, that one afternoon when a tallish library ladder suddenly went into an eerie backward slow-motion swoon with him high up on it embracing a windmill of volumes, he reached the floor, supine, with his ladder and books, in such a hush that guilty Ada, who had thought she was alone (pulling out and scanning the utterly unrewarding Arabian Nights), mistook his fall for the shadow of a door being stealthily opened by some soft-fleshed eunuch.

Her intimacy with her cher, trop cher René, as she sometimes called Van in gentle jest, changed the reading situation entirely — whatever decrees still remained pinned up in mid-air. Soon upon his arrival at Ardis, Van warned his former governess (who had reasons to believe in his threats) that if he were not permitted to remove from the library at any time, for any length of time, and without any trace of ‘en lecture,’ any volume, collected works, boxed pamphlets or incunabulum that he might fancy, he would have Miss Vertograd, his father’s librarian, a completely servile and infinitely accommodative spinster of Verger’s format and presumable date of publication, post to Ardis Hall trunkfuls of eighteenth century libertines, German sexologists, and a whole circus of Shastras and Nefsawis in literal translation with apocryphal addenda. Puzzled Mlle Larivière would have consulted the Master of Ardis, but she never discussed with him anything serious since the day (in January, 1876) when he had made an unexpected (and rather halfhearted, really — let us be fair) pass at her. As to dear, frivolous Marina, she only remarked, when consulted, that at Van’s age she would have poisoned her governess with anti-roach borax if forbidden to read, for example, Turgenev’s Smoke. Thereafter, anything Ada wanted or might have wanted to want was placed by Van at her disposal in various safe nooks, and the only visible consequence of Verger’s perplexities and despair was an increase in the scatter of a curious snow-white dust that he always left here and there, on the dark carpet, in this or that spot of plodding occupation — such a cruel curse on such a neat little man!

At a nice Christmas party for private librarians arranged under the auspices of the Braille Club in Raduga a couple of years earlier, emphatic Miss Vertograd had noticed that she and giggling Verger, with whom she was in the act of sharing a quiet little cracker (tugged apart with no audible result — nor did the gold paper frilled at both ends yield any bonbon or breloque or other favor of fate), shared also a spectacular skin disease that had been portrayed recently by a famous American novelist in his Chiron and described in side-splitting style by a co-sufferer who wrote essays for a London weekly. Very delicately, Miss Vertograd would transmit through Van library slips to the rather unresponsive Frenchman with this or that concise suggestion: ‘Mercury!’ or ‘Höhensonne works wonders.’ Mademoiselle, who was in the know, too, looked up ‘Psoriasis’ in a one-volume medical encyclopedia, which her late mother had left her and which had not only helped her and her charges on various minor occasions but had suggested suitable illnesses for the characters in the stories she contributed to the Québec Quarterly. In the present case, the cure optimistically advised was to ‘take a warm bath at least twice a month and avoid spices’; this she typed out and passed on to her cousin in a Get-Well envelope. Finally, Ada showed Van a letter from Dr Krolik on the same subject; it said (English version): ‘Crimson-blotched, silver-scaled, yellow-crusted wretches, the harmless psoriatics (who cannot communicate their skin trouble and are otherwise the healthiest of people — actually, their bobo’s protect them from bubas and buboes, as my teacher used to observe) were confused with lepers — yes, lepers — in the Middle Ages, when thousands if not millions of Vergers and Vertograds crackled and howled bound by enthusiasts to stakes erected in the public squares of Spain and other fire-loving countries.’ But this note they decided not to plant in the meek martyr’s index under PS as they had first intended: lepidopterists are over-eloquent on lepidosis.

Novels, poems, scientific and philosophical works wandered out unnoticed after the poor librarian gave his démission éplorée on the first of August, 1884. They crossed lawns and traveled along hedges somewhat in the manner of the objects carried away by the Invisible Man in Wells’ delightful tale, and landed in Ada’s lap wherever she and Van had their trysts. Both sought excitement in books as the best readers always do; both found in many renowned works pretentiousness, tedium and facile misinformation.

In a story by Chateaubriand about a pair of romantic siblings, Ada had not quite understood when she first read it at nine or ten the sentence ‘les deux enfants pouvaient donc s’abandonner au plaisir sans aucune crainte.’ A bawdy critic in a collection of articles which she now could gleefully consult (Les muses s’amusent) explained that the ‘donc’ referred both to the infertility of tender age and to the sterility of tender consanguinity. Van said, however, that the writer and the critic erred, and to illustrate his contention, drew his sweetheart’s attention to a chapter in the opus ‘Sex and Lex’ dealing with the effects on the community of a disastrous caprice of nature.

In those times, in this country’ incestuous’ meant not only ‘unchaste’ — the point regarded linguistics rather than legalistics — but also implied (in the phrase ‘incestuous cohabitation,’ and so forth) interference with the continuity of human evolution. History had long replaced appeals to ‘divine law’ by common sense and popular science. With those considerations in mind, ‘incest’ could be termed a crime only inasmuch as inbreeding might be criminal. But as Judge Bald pointed out already during the Albino Riots of 1835, practically all North American and Tartar agriculturists and animal farmers used inbreeding as a method of propagation that tended to preserve, and stimulate, stabilize and even create anew favorable characters in a race or strain unless practiced too rigidly. If practiced rigidly incest led to various forms of decline, to the production of cripples, weaklings, ‘muted mutates’ and, finally, to hopeless sterility. Now that smacked of ‘crime,’ and since nobody could be supposed to control judiciously orgies of indiscriminate inbreeding (somewhere in Tartary fifty generations of ever woolier and woolier sheep had recently ended abruptly in one hairless, five-legged, impotent little lamb — and the beheading of a number of farmers failed to resurrect the fat strain), it was perhaps better to ban ‘incestuous cohabitation’ altogether. Judge Bald and his followers disagreed, perceiving in ‘the deliberate suppression of a possible benefit for the sake of avoiding a probable evil’ the infringement of one of humanity’s main rights — that of enjoying the liberty of its evolution, a liberty no other creature had ever known. Unfortunately after the rumored misadventure of the Volga herds and herdsmen a much better documented fait divers happened in the U.S.A. at the height of the controversy. An American, a certain Ivan Ivanov of Yukonsk, described as an ‘habitually intoxicated laborer’ (‘a good definition,’ said Ada lightly, ‘of the true artist’), managed somehow to impregnate — in his sleep, it was claimed by him and his huge family — his five-year-old great-granddaughter, Maria Ivanov, and, then, five years later, also got Maria’s daughter, Daria, with child, in another fit of somnolence. Photographs of Maria, a ten-year old granny with little Daria and baby Varia crawling around her, appeared in all the newspapers, and all kinds of amusing puzzles were provided by the genealogical farce that the relationships between the numerous living — and not always clean-living — members of the Ivanov clan had become in angry Yukonsk. Before the sixty-year-old somnambulist could go on procreating, he was clapped into a monastery for fifteen years as required by an ancient Russian law. Upon his release he proposed to make honorable amends by marrying Daria, now a buxom lass with problems of her own. Journalists made a lot of the wedding, and the shower of gifts from well-wishers (old ladies in New England, a progressive poet in residence at Tennesee Waltz College, an entire Mexican high school, et cetera), and on the same day Gamaliel (then a stout young senator) thumped a conference table with such force that he hurt his fist and demanded a retrial and capital punishment. It was, of course, only a temperamental gesture; but the Ivanov affair cast a long shadow upon the little matter of ‘favourable inbreeding.’ By mid-century not only first cousins but uncles and grandnieces were forbidden to intermarry; and in some fertile parts of Estoty the izba windows of large peasant families in which up to a dozen people of different size and sex slept on one blin-like mattress were ordered to be kept uncurtained at night for the convenience of petrol-torch-flashing patrols — ‘Peeping Pats,’ as the anti-Irish tabloids called them.