According to Ada, at Marina’s funeral Demon Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father) promised her not to cheat the poor grubs:
‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’
‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums — which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" — whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Van, ‘they had been growing younger and younger — I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.’
‘You never loved your father,’ said Ada sadly.
‘Oh, I did and do — tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.’
‘I know, I know. It’s pitiful! And what use was it? Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you, but his visits to Agavia kept getting rarer and shorter every year. Yes, it was pitiful to hear him and Andrey talking. I mean, Andrey n’a pas le verbe facile, though he greatly appreciated — without quite understanding it — Demon’s wild flow of fancy and fantastic fact, and would often exclaim, with his Russian "tssk-tssk" and a shake of the head — complimentary and all that — "what a balagur (wag) you are!" — And then, one day, Demon warned me that he would not come any more if he heard again poor Andrey’s poor joke (Nu i balagur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich) or what Dorothy, l’impayable ("priceless for impudence and absurdity") Dorothy, thought of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect me from lions.’
‘Could one hear more about that?’ asked Van.
‘Well, nobody did. All this happened at a time when I was not on speaking terms with my husband and sister-in-law, and so could not control the situation. Anyhow, Demon did not come even when he was only two hundred miles away and simply mailed instead, from some gaming house, your lovely, lovely letter about Lucette and my picture.’
‘One would also like to know some details of the actual coverture — frequence of intercourse, pet names for secret warts, favorite smells —’
‘Platok momental’no (handkerchief quick)! Your right nostril is full of damp jade,’ said Ada, and then pointed to a lawnside circular sign, rimmed with red, saying: Chiens interdits and depicting an impossible black mongrel with a white ribbon around its neck: Why, she wondered, should the Swiss magistrates forbid one to cross highland terriers with poodles?
The last butterflies of 1905, indolent Peacocks and Red Admirables, one Queen of Spain and one Clouded Yellow, were making the most of the modest blossoms. A tram on their left passed close to the promenade, where they rested and cautiously kissed when the whine of wheels had subsided. The rails hit by the sun acquired a beautiful cobalt sheen — the reflection of noon in terms of bright metal.
‘Let’s have cheese and white wine under that pergola,’ suggested Van. ‘The Vinelanders will lunch à deux today.’ (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): comme etc.: shedding floods of tears.
N’a pas le verbe etc.: lacks the gift of the gab.
chiens etc.: dogs not allowed.
In October 1905, after the thirteen-year-long separation, Van and Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) meet in Mont Roux, Switzerland. Half a year earlier, in March 1905, Demon perished in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific (3.7). Van does not suspect that his father died, because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair. Demon finds out about his children’s affair by chance, when he visits Van at his Manhattan penthouse apartment to inform him about Uncle Dan’s death:
On that memorable morning, Van, after ordering breakfast, had climbed out of his bath and donned a strawberry-red terrycloth robe when he thought he heard Valerio’s voice from the adjacent parlor. Thither he padded, humming tunelessly, looking forward to another day of increasing happiness (with yet another uncomfortable little edge smoothed away, another raw kink in the past so refashioned as to fit into the new pattern of radiance).
Demon, clothed entirely in black, black-spatted, black-scarved, his monocle on a broader black ribbon than usual, was sitting at the breakfast table, a cup of coffee in one hand, and a conveniently folded financial section of the Times in the other.
He gave a slight start and put down his cup rather jerkily on noting the coincidence of color with a persistent detail in an illumined lower left-hand corner of a certain picture reproduced in the copiously illustrated catalogue of his immediate mind.
All Van could think of saying was ‘I am not alone’ (je ne suis pas seul), but Demon was brimming too richly with the bad news he had brought to heed the hint of the fool who should have simply walked on into the next room and come back one moment later (locking the door behind him — locking out years and years of lost life), instead of which he remained standing near his father’s chair.
According to Bess (which is ‘fiend’ in Russian), Dan’s buxom but otherwise disgusting nurse, whom he preferred to all others and had taken to Ardis because she managed to extract orally a few last drops of ‘play-zero’ (as the old whore called it) out of his poor body, he had been complaining for some time, even before Ada’s sudden departure, that a devil combining the characteristics of a frog and a rodent desired to straddle him and ride him to the torture house of eternity. To Dr Nikulin Dan described his rider as black, pale-bellied, with a black dorsal buckler shining like a dung beetle’s back and with a knife in his raised forelimb. On a very cold morning in late January Dan had somehow escaped, through a basement maze and a toolroom, into the brown shrubbery of Ardis; he was naked except for a red bath towel which trailed from his rump like a kind of caparison, and, despite the rough going, had crawled on all fours, like a crippled steed under an invisible rider, deep into the wooded landscape. On the other hand, had he attempted to warn her she might have made her big Ada yawn and uttered something irrevocably cozy at the moment he opened the thick protective door.
‘I beg you, sir,’ said Van, ‘go down, and I’ll join you in the bar as soon as I’m dressed. I’m in a delicate situation.’
‘Come, come,’ retorted Demon, dropping and replacing his monocle. ‘Cordula won’t mind.’
‘It’s another, much more impressionable girl’ — (yet another awful fumble!). ‘Damn Cordula! Cordula is now Mrs Tobak.’
‘Oh, of course!’ cried Demon. ‘How stupid of me! I remember Ada’s fiancé telling me — he and young Tobak worked for a while in the same Phoenix bank. Of course. Splendid broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, blond chap. Backbay Tobakovich!’
‘I don’t care,’ said clenched Van, ‘if he looks like a crippled, crucified, albino toad. Please, Dad, I really must —’
‘Funny your saying that. I’ve dropped in only to tell you poor cousin Dan has died an odd Boschean death. He thought a fantastic rodent sort of rode him out of the house. They found him too late, he expired in Nikulin’s clinic, raving about that detail of the picture. I’m having the deuce of a time rounding up the family. The picture is now preserved in the Vienna Academy of Art.’
‘Father, I’m sorry — but I’m trying to tell you —’
‘If I could write,’ mused Demon, ‘I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously — c’est le mot — art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet. Ada is marrying an outdoor man, but her mind is a closed museum, and she, and dear Lucette, once drew my attention, by a creepy coincidence, to certain details of that other triptych, that tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights, circa 1500, and, namely, to the butterflies in it — a Meadow Brown, female, in the center of the right panel, and a Tortoiseshell in the middle panel, placed there as if settled on a flower — mark the "as if," for here we have an example of exact knowledge on the part of those two admirable little girls, because they say that actually the wrong side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside, if seen, as it is, in profile, but Bosch evidently found a wing or two in the corner cobweb of his casement and showed the prettier upper surface in depicting his incorrectly folded insect. I mean I don’t give a hoot for the esoteric meaning, for the myth behind the moth, for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of his time, I’m allergic to allegory and am quite sure he was just enjoying himself by crossbreeding casual fancies just for the fun of the contour and color, and what we have to study, as I was telling your cousins, is the joy of the eye, the feel and taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him, or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice — but you are not following me, you want me to go, so that you may interrupt her beauty sleep, lucky beast! A propos, I have not been able to alert Lucette, who is somewhere in Italy, but I’ve managed to trace Marina to Tsitsikar — flirting there with the Bishop of Belokonsk — she will arrive in the late afternoon, wearing, no doubt, pleureuses, very becoming, and we shall then travel à trois to Ladore, because I don’t think —’
Was he perhaps under the influence of some bright Chilean drug? That torrent was simply unstoppable, a crazy spectrum, a talking palette —
‘— no really, I don’t think we should bother Ada in her Agavia. He is — I mean, Vinelander is — the scion, s,c,i,o,n, of one of those great Varangians who had conquered the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols — or whoever they were — who had conquered some earlier Bronze Riders — before we introduced our Russian roulette and Irish loo at a lucky moment in the history of Western casinos.’
‘I am extremely, I am hideously sorry,’ said Van, ‘what with Uncle Dan’s death and your state of excitement, sir, but my girl friend’s coffee is getting cold, and I can’t very well stumble into our bedroom with all that infernal paraphernalia.’
‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving. After all we haven’t seen each other — since when, August? At any rate, I hope she’s prettier than the Cordula you had here before, volatile boy!’
Volatina, perhaps? Or dragonara? He definitely smelled of ether. Please, please, please go.
‘My gloves! Cloak! Thank you. Can I use your W.C.? No? All right. I’ll find one elsewhere. Come over as soon as you can, and we’ll meet Marina at the airport around four and then whizz to the wake, and —’
And here Ada entered. Not naked — oh no; in a pink peignoir so as not to shock Valerio — comfortably combing her hair, sweet and sleepy. She made the mistake of crying out ‘Bozhe moy!’ and darting back into the dusk of the bedroom. All was lost in that one chink of a second.
‘Or better — come at once, both of you, because I’ll cancel my appointment and go home right now.’ He spoke, or thought he spoke, with the self-control and the clarity of enunciation which so frightened and mesmerized blunderers, blusterers, a voluble broker, a guilty schoolboy. Especially so now — when everything had gone to the hell curs, k chertyam sobach’im, of Jeroen Anthniszoon van Äken and the molti aspetti affascinati of his enigmatica arte, as Dan explained with a last sigh to Dr Nikulin and to nurse Bellabestia (‘Bess’) to whom he bequeathed a trunkful of museum catalogues and his second-best catheter. (2.10)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): c’est le mot: that’s the right word.
pleureuses: widow’s weeds.
Bozhe moy: Russ., good Heavens.
“Volatile boy” (as Demon calls Van) may hint at “I'm a volatile thing, with an exquisite wing,” the opening line of The Butterfly Beau, a poem by Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797-1839) in which the Grubs are mentioned:
I'm a volatile thing, with an exquisite wing,
Sprinkled o'er with the tints of the rainbow;
All the Butterflies swarm to behold my sweet form,
Though the Grubs may all vote me a vain beau.
I my toilet go through, with my rose-water dew,
And each blossom contributes its essence;
Then all fragrance and grace, not a plume out of place,
I adorn the gay world with my presence—
In short, you must know,
I'm the Butterfly Beau.
At first I enchant a fair Sensitive plant,
Then I flirt with the Pink of perfection:
Then I seek a sweet Pea, and I whisper, “For thee
I have long felt a fond predilection”
A Lily I kiss, and exult in my bliss,
But I very soon search for a new lip;
And I pause in my flight to exclaim with delight,
“Oh! how dearly I love you, my Tulip!”
In short, you must know,
I'm the Butterfly Beau.
Thus for ever I rove, and the honey of love
From each delicate blossom I pilfer;
But though many I see pale and pining for me,
I know none that are worth growing ill for:
And though I must own, there are some that I've known,
Whose external attractions are splendid;
On myself I most doat, for in my pretty coat
All the tints of the garden are blended—
In short, you must know,
I'm the Butterfly Beau.
Describing Ada’s dramatic career, Van mentions the current issue of The Beau & the Butterfly:
After some exploration, they tracked down a rerun of The Young and the Doomed (1890) to a tiny theater that specialized in Painted Westerns (as those deserts of nonart used to be called). Thus had Mlle Larivière’s Enfants Maudits (1887) finally degenerated! She had had two adolescents, in a French castle, poison their widowed mother who had seduced a young neighbor, the lover of one of her twins. The author had made many concessions to the freedom of the times, and the foul fancy of scriptwriters; but both she and the leading lady disavowed the final result of multiple tamperings with the plot that had now become the story of a murder in Arizona, the victim being a widower about to marry an alcoholic prostitute, whom Marina, quite sensibly, refused to impersonate. But poor little Ada had clung to her bit part, a two-minute scene in a traktir (roadside tavern). During the rehearsals she felt she was doing not badly as a serpentine barmaid — until the director blamed her for moving like an angular ‘backfish.’ She had not deigned to see the final product and was not overeager to have Van see it now, but he reminded her that the same director, G.A. Vronsky, had told her she was always pretty enough to serve one day as a stand-in for Lenore Colline, who at twenty had been as attractively gauche as she, raising and tensing forward her shoulders in the same way, when crossing a room. Having sat through a preliminary P.W. short, they finally got to The Young and the Doomed only to discover that the barmaid scene of the barroom sequence had been cut out — except for a perfectly distinct shadow of Ada’s elbow, as Van kindly maintained.
Next day, in their little drawing room, with its black divan, yellow cushions, and draftproof bay whose new window seemed to magnify the slow steady straight-falling snowflakes (coincidentally stylized on the cover of the current issue of The Beau & the Butterfly which lay on the window ledge), Ada discussed her ‘dramatic career.’ The whole matter secretly nauseated Van (so that, by contrast, her Natural History passion acquired a nostalgic splendor). For him the written word existed only in its abstract purity, in its unrepeatable appeal to an equally ideal mind. It belonged solely to its creator and could not be spoken or enacted by a mime (as Ada insisted) without letting the deadly stab of another’s mind destroy the artist in the very lair of his art. A written play was intrinsically superior to the best performance of it, even if directed by the author himself. Otherwise, Van agreed with Ada that the talking screen was certainly preferable to the live theater for the simple reason that with the former a director could attain, and maintain, his own standards of perfection throughout an unlimited number of performances.
Neither of them could imagine the partings that her professional existence ‘on location’ might necessitate, and neither could imagine their traveling together to Argus-eyed destinations and living together in Hollywood, U.S.A., or Ivydell, England, or the sugar-white Cohnritz Hotel in Cairo. To tell the truth they did not imagine any other life at all beyond their present tableau vivant in the lovely dove-blue Manhattan sky. (2.9)
Demon calls Van not only "volatile boy," but also "lucky beast:"
"...but you are not following me, you want me to go, so that you may interrupt her beauty sleep, lucky beast!" (2.10)
In a letter to Lolita Mona Dahl (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, Lolita's schoolmate at Beardsley) mentions "lucky beau:"
“As expected, poor Poet stumbled in Scene III when arriving at the bit of French nonsense. Remember? Ne manque pas de dire à ton amant, Chimène, comme le lac est beau car il faut qu’il t’y mène. Lucky beau! Qu’il t’y - What a tongue-twister! Well, be good, Lollikins. Best love from your Poet, and best regards to the Governor. Your Mona. P. S. Because of one thing and another, my correspondence happens to be rigidly controlled. So better wait till I write you from Europe.” (She never did as far as I know. The letter contained an element of mysterious nastiness that I am too tired today to analyze. I found it later preserved in one of the Tour Books, and give it here à titre documentaire . I read it twice.) (2.19)
Describing his scuffle with Percy de Prey at the picnic on Ada's sixteenth birthday, Van mentions the beau and the beast:
Presently Greg overtook them, bringing the cufflink — a little triumph of meticulous detection, and with a trite ‘Attaboy!’ Percy closed his silk cuff, thus completing his insolent restoration.
Their dutiful companion, still running, got first to the site of the finished feast; he saw Ada, facing him with two stipple-stemmed red boletes in one hand and three in the other; and, mistaking her look of surprise at the sound of his thudding hooves for one of concern, good Sir Greg hastened to cry out from afar: ‘He’s all right! He’s all right, Miss Veen’ — blind compassion preventing the young knight from realizing that she could not possibly have known yet what a clash had occurred between the beau and the beast.
‘Indeed I am,’ said the former, taking from her a couple of her toadstools, the girl’s favorite delicacy, and stroking their smooth caps. ‘And why shouldn’t I be? Your cousin has treated Greg and your humble servant to a most bracing exhibition of Oriental Skrotomoff or whatever the name may be.’ (1.39)
In 1901, when Van meets Greg Erminin in Paris (also known as Lute on Antiterra), both Van and Greg exclaim Bozhe moy (good Heavens):
‘I last saw you thirteen years ago, riding a black pony — no, a black Silentium. Bozhe moy!’
‘Yes — Bozhe moy, you can well say that. Those lovely, lovely agonies in lovely Ardis! Oh, I was absolyutno bezumno (madly) in love with your cousin!’
‘You mean Miss Veen? I did not know it. How long —’
‘Neither did she. I was terribly —’
‘How long are you staying —’
‘— terribly shy, because, of course, I realized that I could not compete with her numerous boy friends.’
Numerous? Two? Three? Is it possible he never heard about the main one? All the rose hedges knew, all the maids knew, in all three manors. The noble reticence of our bed makers.
‘How long will you be staying in Lute? No, Greg, I ordered it. You pay for the next bottle. Tell me —’
‘So odd to recall! It was frenzy, it was fantasy, it was reality in the x degree. I’d have consented to be beheaded by a Tartar, I declare, if in exchange I could have kissed her instep. You were her cousin, almost a brother, you can’t understand that obsession. Ah, those picnics! And Percy de Prey who boasted to me about her, and drove me crazy with envy and pity, and Dr Krolik, who, they said, also loved her, and Phil Rack, a composer of genius — dead, dead, all dead!’
‘I really know very little about music but it was a great pleasure to make your chum howl. I have an appointment in a few minutes, alas. Za tvoyo zdorovie, Grigoriy Akimovich.’
‘Arkadievich,’ said Greg, who had let it pass once but now mechanically corrected Van.
The phrase Bozhe moy is used by Pushkin at the beginning of Eugene Onegin (One: I: 6):
"Мой дядя самых честных правил,
Когда не в шутку занемог,
Он уважать себя заставил
И лучше выдумать не мог.
Его пример другим наука;
Но, боже мой, какая скука
С больным сидеть и день и ночь,
Не отходя ни шагу прочь!
Какое низкое коварство
Полуживого забавлять,
Ему подушки поправлять,
Печально подносить лекарство,
Вздыхать и думать про себя:
Когда же черт возьмет тебя!"
“My uncle has most honest principles:
when he was taken gravely ill,
he forced one to respect him
and nothing better could invent.
To others his example is a lesson;
but, good God, what a bore to sit
by a sick person day and night, not stirring
a step away!
What base perfidiousness
to entertain one half-alive,
adjust for him his pillows,
sadly serve him his medicine,
sigh — and think inwardly
when will the devil take you?”
Chyort (the devil) in the stanza's last line brings to mind k chertyam sobach'im (to the hell curs) of Jeroen Anthniszoon van Äken and the molti aspetti affascinati of his enigmatica arte, as Dan explained with a last sigh to Dr Nikulin and to nurse Bellabestia (‘Bess’) to whom he bequeathed a trunkful of museum catalogues and his second-best catheter.