Van said:

‘I’m not eloping with your maid, Marina. It’s an optical illusion. Her reasons for leaving you do not concern me. There’s a bit of business I had been putting off like a fool but now must attend to before going to Paris.’

‘Ada is causing me a lot of worry,’ said Marina with a downcast frown and a Russian wobble of the cheeks. ‘Please come back as soon as you can. You have such a good influence upon her. Au revoir. I’m very cross with everybody.’

Holding up her robe she ascended the porch steps. The tame silver dragon on her back had an ant-eater’s tongue according to her eldest daughter, a scientist. What did poor mother know about P’s and R’s? Next to nothing.

Van shook hands with the distressed old butler, thanked Bout for a silver-knobbed cane and a pair of gloves, nodded to the other servants and walked toward the carriage and pair. Blanche, standing by in a long gray skirt and straw hat, with her cheap valise painted mahogany red and secured with a criss-crossing cord, looked exactly like a young lady setting out to teach school in a Wild West movie. She offered to sit on the box next to the Russian coachman but he ushered her into the calèche.

They passed undulating fields of wheat speckled with the confetti of poppies and bluets. She talked all the way about the young chatelaine and her two recent lovers in melodious low tones as if in a trance, as if en rapport with a dead minstrel’s spirit. Only the other day from behind that row of thick firs, look there, to your right (but he did not look — sitting silent, both hands on the knob of his cane), she and her sister Madelon, with a bottle of wine between them, watched Monsieur le Comte courting the young lady on the moss, crushing her like a grunting bear as he also had crushed — many times! — Madelon who said she, Blanche, should warn him, Van, because she was a wee bit jealous but she also said — for she had a good heart — better put it off until ‘Malbrook’ s’en va t’en guerre, otherwise they would fight; he had been shooting a pistol at a scarecrow all morning and that’s why she waited so long, and it was in Madelon’s hand, not in hers. She rambled on and on until they reached Tourbière; two rows of cottages and a small black church with stained-glass windows. Van let her out. The youngest of the three sisters, a beautiful chestnut-curled little maiden with lewd eyes and bobbing breasts (where had he seen her before? — recently, but where?) carried Blanche’s valise and birdcage into a poor shack smothered in climbing roses, but for the rest, dismal beyond words. He kissed Cendrillon’s shy hand and resumed his seat in the carriage, clearing his throat and plucking at his trousers before crossing his legs. Vain Van Veen.

‘The express does not stop at Torfyanka, does it, Trofim?’

‘I’ll take you five versts across the bog,’ said Trofim, ‘the nearest is Volosyanka.’

His vulgar Russian word for Maidenhair; a whistle stop; train probably crowded.

Maidenhair. Idiot! Percy boy might have been buried by now! Maidenhair. Thus named because of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform. Once, vaguely, confused with the Venus’-hair fern. She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the inner monologue, later exploited by the French and the Irish. N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante écus d’or, at least in the fall. Never, never shall I hear again her ‘botanical’ voice fall at biloba, ‘sorry, my Latin is showing.’ Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, marée noire by now. Who wants Ardis Hall!

‘Barin, a barin,’ said Trofim, turning his blond-bearded face to his passenger.

‘Da?’

‘Dazhe skvoz’ kozhanïy fartuk ne stal-bï ya trogat’ etu frantsuzskuyu devku.’

Barin: master. Dázhe skvoz’ kózhanïy fártuk: even through a leathern apron. Ne stal-bï ya trógat’: I would not think of touching. Étu: this (that). Frantsúzskuyu: French (adj., accus.). Dévku: wench. Úzhas, otcháyanie: horror, despair. Zhálost’: pity, Kóncheno, zagázheno, rastérzano: finished, fouled, torn to shreds.

42

Aqua used to say that only a very cruel or very stupid person, or innocent infants, could be happy on Demonia, our splendid planet. Van felt that for him to survive on this terrible Antiterra, in the multicolored and evil world into which he was born, he had to destroy, or at least to maim for life, two men. He had to find them immediately; delay itself might impair his power of survival. ‘The rapture of their destruction would not mend his heart, but would certainly rinse his brain. The two men were in two different spots and neither spot represented an exact location, a definite street number, an identifiable billet. He hoped to punish them in an honorable way, if Fate helped. He was not prepared for the comically exaggerated zeal Fate was to display in leading him on and then muscling in to become an over-cooperative agent.

First, he decided to go to Kalugano to settle accounts with Herr Rack. Out of sheer misery he fell asleep in a corner of a compartment, full of alien legs and voices, in the crack express tearing north at a hundred miles per hour. He dozed till noon and got off at Ladoga, where after an incalculably long wait he took another, even more jerky and crowded train. As he was pushing his unsteady way through one corridor after another, cursing under his breath the window-gazers who did not draw in their bottoms to let him pass, and hopelessly seeking a comfortable nook in one of the first-class cars consisting of four-seat compartments, he saw Cordula and her mother facing each other on the window side. The two other places were occupied by a stout, elderly gentleman in an old-fashioned brown wig with a middle parting, and a bespectacled boy in a sailor suit sitting next to Cordula, who was in the act of offering him one half of her chocolate bar. Van entered, moved by a sudden very bright thought, but Cordula’s mother did not recognize him at once, and the flurry of reintroductions combined with a lurch of the train caused Van to step on the prunella-shod foot of the elderly passenger, who uttered a sharp cry and said, indistinctly but not impolitely: ‘Spare my gout (or ‘take care’ or ‘look out’), young man!’

‘I do not like being addressed as "young man,"’ Van told the invalid in a completely uncalled-for, brutal burst of voice.

‘Has he hurt you, Grandpa?’ inquired the little boy.

‘He has,’ said Grandpa, ‘but I did not mean to offend anybody by my cry of anguish.’

‘Even anguish should be civil,’ continued Van (while the better Van in him tugged at his sleeve, aghast and ashamed).

‘Cordula,’ said the old actress (with the same apropos with which she once picked up and fondled a fireman’s cat that had strayed into Fast Colors in the middle of her best speech), ‘why don’t you go with this angry young demon to the tea-car? I think I’ll take my thirty-nine winks now.’

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Cordula as they settled down in the very roomy and rococo ‘crumpeter,’ as Kalugano College students used to call it in the ‘Eighties and ‘Nineties.

‘Everything,’ replied Van, ‘but what makes you ask?’

‘Well, we know Dr Platonov slightly, and there was absolutely no reason for you to be so abominably rude to the dear old man.’

‘I apologize,’ said Van. ‘Let us order the traditional tea.’

‘Another queer thing,’ said Cordula, ‘is that you actually noticed me today. Two months ago you snubbed me.’

‘You had changed. You had grown lovely and languorous. You are even lovelier now. Cordula is no longer a virgin! Tell me — do you happen to have Percy de Prey’s address? I mean we all know he’s invading Tartary — but where could a letter reach him? I don’t care to ask your snoopy aunt to forward anything.’

‘I daresay the Frasers have it, I’ll find out. But where is Van going? Where shall I find Van?’

‘At home — 5 Park Lane, in a day or two. Just now I’m going to Kalugano.’

‘That’s a gruesome place. Girl?’

‘Man. Do you know Kalugano? Dentist? Best hotel? Concert hall? My cousin’s music teacher?’

She shook her short curls. No — she went there very seldom. Twice to a concert, in a pine forest. She had not been aware that Ada took music lessons. How was Ada?

‘Lucette,’ he said, ‘Lucette takes or took piano lessons. Okay. Let’s dismiss Kalugano. These crumpets are very poor relatives of the Chose ones. You’re right, j’ai des ennuis. But you can make me forget them. Tell me something to distract me, though you distract me as it is, un petit topinambour as the Teuton said in the story. Tell me about your affairs of the heart.’

She was not a bright little girl. But she was a loquacious and really quite exciting little girl. He started to caress her under the table, but she gently removed his hand, whispering ‘womenses,’ as whimsically as another girl had done in some other dream. He cleared his throat loudly and ordered half-a-bottle of cognac, having the waiter open it in his presence as Demon advised. She talked on and on, and he lost the thread of her discourse, or rather it got enmeshed in the rapid landscape, which his gaze followed over her shoulder, with a sudden ravine recording what Jack said when his wife ‘phoned, or a lone tree in a clover field impersonating abandoned John, or a romantic stream running down a cliff and reflecting her brief bright affair with Marquis Quizz Quisana.