In this weird position, with his cap acting as a pseudopodal pad, he jumped up and down, pogo-stick fashion — and suddenly came apart. Van’s face, shining with sweat, grinned between the legs of the boots that still shod his rigidly raised arms. Simultaneously his real feet kicked off and away the false head with its crumpled cap and bearded mask. The magical reversal ‘made the house gasp.’ Frantic (‘deafening,’ ‘delirious,’ ‘a veritable tempest of’) applause followed the gasp. He bounded offstage — and next moment was back, now sheathed in black tights, dancing a jig on his hands.

We devote so much space to the description of his act not only because variety artists of the ‘eccentric’ race are apt to be forgotten especially soon, but also because one wishes to analyze its thrill. Neither a miraculous catch on the cricket field, nor a glorious goal slammed in at soccer (he was a College Blue in both those splendid games), nor earlier physical successes, such as his knocking out the biggest bully on his first day at Riverlane School, had ever given Van the satisfaction Mascodagama experienced. It was not directly related to the warm breath of fulfilled ambition, although as a very old man, looking back at a life of unrecognized endeavor, Van did welcome with amused delight — more delight than he had actually felt at the time — the banal acclaim and the vulgar envy that swirled around him for a short while in his youth. The essence of the satisfaction belonged rather to the same order as the one he later derived from self-imposed, extravagantly difficult, seemingly absurd tasks when V.V. sought to express something, which until expressed had only a twilight being (or even none at all — nothing but the illusion of the backward shadow of its imminent expression). It was Ada’s castle of cards. It was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick’s difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time. Thus the rapture young Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic revelation in the sense utterly and naturally unknown to the innocents of critical appraisal, the social-scene commentators, the moralists, the ideamongers and so forth. Van on the stage was performing organically what his figures of speech were to perform later in life — acrobatic wonders that had never been expected from them and which frightened children.

Neither was the sheer physical pleasure of maniambulation a negligible factor, and the peacock blotches with which the carpet stained the palms of his hands during his gloveless dance routine seemed to be the reflections of a richly colored nether world that he had been the first to discover. For the tango, which completed his number on his last tour, he was given a partner, a Crimean cabaret dancer in a very short scintillating frock cut very low on the back. She sang the tango tune in Russian:


Pod znóynïm nébom Argentínï,

Pod strástnïy góvor mandolinï


‘Neath sultry sky of Argentina,

To the hot hum of mandolina


Fragile, red-haired ‘Rita’ (he never learned her real name), a pretty Karaite from Chufut Kale, where, she nostalgically said, the Crimean cornel, kizil’, bloomed yellow among the arid rocks, bore an odd resemblance to Lucette as she was to look ten years later. During their dance, all Van saw of her were her silver slippers turning and marching nimbly in rhythm with the soles of his hands. He recouped himself at rehearsals, and one night asked her for an assignation. She indignantly refused, saying she adored her husband (the make-up fellow) and loathed England.

Chose had long been as famous for the dignity of its regulations, as for the brilliancy of its pranksters. Mascodagama’s identity could not escape the interest and then the knowledge of the authorities. His college tutor, a decrepit and dour homosexual, with no sense of humor whatever and an innate respect for all the conventions of academic life, pointed out to a highly irritated and barely polite Van that in his second year at Chose he was not supposed to combine his university studies with the circus, and that if he insisted on becoming a variety artist he would be sent down. The old gentleman also wrote a letter to Demon asking him to make his son forget Physical Stunts for the sake of Philosophy and Psychiatry, especially since Van was the first American to have won (at seventeen!) the Dudley Prize (for an essay on Insanity and Eternal Life). Van was not quite sure yet what compromise pride and prudence might arrive at, when he left for America early in June, 1888.

31

Van revisited Ardis Hall in 1888. He arrived on a cloudy June afternoon, unexpected, unbidden, unneeded; with a diamond necklace coiled loose in his pocket. As he approached from a side lawn, he saw a scene out of some new life being rehearsed for an unknown picture, without him, not for him. A big party seemed to be breaking up. Three young ladies in yellow-blue Vass frocks with fashionable rainbow sashes surrounded a stoutish, foppish, baldish young man who stood, a flute of champagne in his hand, glancing down from the drawing-room terrace at a girl in black with bare arms: an old runabout, shivering at every jerk, was being cranked up by a hoary chauffeur in front of the porch, and those bare arms, stretched wide, were holding outspread the white cape of Baroness von Skull, a grand-aunt of hers. Against the white cape Ada’s new long figure was profiled in black — the black of her smart silk dress with no sleeves, no ornaments, no memories. The slow old Baroness stood groping for something under one armpit, under the other — for what? a crutch? the dangling end of tangled bangles? — and as she half-turned to accept the cloak (now taken from her grandniece by a belated new footman) Ada also half-turned, and her yet ungemmed neck showed white as she ran up the porch steps.

Van followed her inside, in between the hall columns, and through a group of guests, toward a distant table with crystal jugs of cherry ambrozia. She wore, unmodishly, no stockings; her calves were strong and pale, and (I have a note here, for the ghost of a novel) ‘the low cut of her black dress allowed the establishment of a sharp contrast between the familiar mat whiteness of her skin and the brutal black horsetail of her new hair-do.’

Excluding each other, private swoons split him in two: the devastating certainty that as soon as he reached, in the labyrinth of a nightmare, a brightly remembered small room with a bed and a child’s washstand, she would join him there in her new smooth long beauty; and, on the shade side, the pang and panic of finding her changed, hating what he wanted, condemning it as wrong, explaining to him dreadful new circumstances — that they both were dead or existed only as extras in a house rented for a motion picture.

But hands offering him wine or almonds or their open selves, impeded his dream quest. He pressed on, notwithstanding the swoops of recognition: Uncle Dan pointed him out with a cry to a stranger who feigned amazement at the singularity of the optical trick — and, next moment, a repainted, red-wigged, very drunk and tearful Marina was gluing cherry-vodka lips to his jaw and unprotected parts, with smothered mother-sounds, half-moo, half-moan, of Russian affection.

He disentangled himself and pursued his quest. She had now moved to the drawing room, but by the expression of her back, by the tensed scapulae, Van knew she was aware of him. He wiped his wet buzzing ear and acknowledged with a nod the raised glass of the stout blond fellow (Percy de Prey? Or did Percy have an older brother?). A fourth maiden in the Canadian couturier’s corn-and-bluet summer ‘creation’ stopped Van to inform him with a pretty pout that he did not remember her, which was true. ‘I am exhausted,’ he said. ‘My horse caught a hoof in a hole in the rotting planks of Ladore Bridge and had to be shot. I have walked eight miles. I think I am dreaming. I think you are Dreaming Too.’ ‘No, I’m Cordula!’ she cried, but he was off again.

Ada had vanished. He discarded the caviar sandwich that he found himself carrying like a ticket and, turning into the pantry, told Bout’s brother, a new valet, to take him to his old room and get him one of those rubber tubs he had used as a child four years ago. Plus somebody’s spare pajamas. His train had broken down in the fields between Ladoga and Ladore, he had walked twenty miles, God knows when they’d send up his bags.

‘They have just come,’ said the real Bout with a smile both confidential and mournful (Blanche had jilted him).

Before tubbing, Van craned out of his narrow casement to catch sight of the laurels and lilacs flanking the front porch whence came the hubbub of gay departures. He made out Ada. He noticed her running after Percy who had put on his gray topper and was walking away across a lawn which his transit at once caused to overlap in Van’s mind with the fleeting memory of the paddock where he and Van had once happened to discuss a lame horse and Riverlane. Ada overtook the young man in a patch of sudden sunlight; he stopped, and she stood speaking to him and tossing her head in a way she had when nervous or displeased. De Prey kissed her hand. That was French, but all right. He held the hand he had kissed while she spoke and then kissed it again, and that was not done, that was dreadful, that could not be endured.

Leaving his post, naked Van went through the clothes he had shed. He found the necklace. In icy fury, he tore it into thirty, forty glittering hailstones, some of which fell at her feet as she burst into the room.