When Ada shows to Van (Van Veen, the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) Ardis Hall, a toy barrel organ invitingly goes into action with a stumbling little minuet:
They went back to the corridor, she tossing her hair, he clearing his throat. Further down, a door of some playroom or nursery stood ajar and stirred to and fro as little Lucette peeped out, one russet knee showing. Then the doorleaf flew open — but she darted inside and away. Cobalt sailing boats adorned the white tiles of a stove, and as her sister and he passed by that open door a toy barrel organ invitingly went into action with a stumbling little minuet. Ada and Van returned to the ground floor — this time all the way down the sumptuous staircase. Of the many ancestors along the wall, she pointed out her favorite, old Prince Vseslav Zemski (1699-1797), friend of Linnaeus and author of Flora Ladorica, who was portrayed in rich oil holding his barely pubescent bride and her blond doll in his satin lap. An enlarged photograph, soberly framed, hung (rather incongruously, Van thought) next to the rose-bud-lover in his embroidered coat. The late Sumerechnikov, American precursor of the Lumière brothers, had taken Ada’s maternal uncle in profile with upcheeked violin, a doomed youth, after his farewell concert.
On the first floor, a yellow drawing room hung with damask and furnished in what the French once called the Empire style opened into the garden and now, in the late afternoon, was invaded across the threshold by the large leaf shadows of a paulownia tree (named, by an indifferent linguist, explained Ada, after the patronymic, mistaken for a second name or surname of a harmless lady, Anna Pavlovna Romanov, daughter of Pavel, nicknamed Paul-minus-Peter, why she did not know, a cousin of the non-linguist’s master, the botanical Zemski, I’m going to scream, thought Van). A china cabinet encaged a whole zoo of small animals among which the oryx and the okapi, complete with scientific names, were especially recommended to him by his charming but impossibly pretentious companion. Equally fascinating was a five-fold screen with bright paintings on its black panels reproducing the first maps of four and a half continents. We now pass into the music room with its little-used piano, and a corner room called the Gun Room containing a stuffed Shetland pony which an aunt of Dan Veen’s, maiden name forgotten, thank Log, once rode. On the other, or some other, side of the house was the ballroom, a glossy wasteland with wallflower chairs. ‘Reader, ride by’ (‘mimo, chitatel’,’ as Turgenev wrote). The ‘mews,’ as they were improperly called in Ladore County, were architecturally rather confusing in the case of Ardis Hall. A latticed gallery looked across its garlanded shoulder into the garden and turned sharply toward the drive. Elsewhere, an elegant loggia, lit by long windows, led now tongue-tied Ada and intolerably bored Van into a bower of rocks: a sham grotto, with ferns clinging to it shamelessly, and an artificial cascade borrowed from some brook or book, or Van’s burning bladder (after all the confounded tea).
The servants’ quarters (except those of two painted and powdered maids who had rooms upstairs) were on the courtyard side of the ground floor and Ada said she had visited them once in the explorative stage of her childhood but all she remembered was a canary and an ancient machine for grinding coffee beans which settled the matter.
They zoomed upstairs again. Van popped into a watercloset — and emerged in much better humor. A dwarf Haydn again played a few bars as they walked on. (1.6)
A dwarf Haydn (as Van calls a toy barrel organ) brings to mind Edward Hyde, a character in R. L. Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). A character in Stevenson's novella, Poole (Dr. Henry Jekyll's butler) tells Mr. Utterson (the lawyer) that his master is a tall, fine build of a man, while a masked man whom he saw (Mr. Hyde) was more of a dwarf:
"Sir,” said the butler, turning to a sort of mottled pallor, “that thing was not my master, and there’s the truth. My master” here he looked round him and began to whisper — “is a tall, fine build of a man, and this was more of a dwarf.” Utterson attempted to protest. “O, sir,” cried Poole, “do you think I do not know my master after twenty years? Do you think I do not know where his head comes to in the cabinet door, where I saw him every morning of my life? No, Sir, that thing in the mask was never Dr. Jekyll — God knows what it was, but it was never Dr. Jekyll; and it is the belief of my heart that there was murder done.” (Chapter 8 "The Last Night")
The action in R. L. Stevenson's novella takes place in London. An Austrian composer, Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) is the author of twelve London symphonies.
R. L. Stevenson's story The Bottle Imp (1891) brings to mind Bouteillan, the French butler at Ardis whose name comes from bouteille (bottle), and "any green imp" mentioned by Van when he describes his second summer at Ardis:
That frolic under the sealyham cedar proved to be a mistake. Whenever not supervised by her schizophrenic governess, whenever not being read to, or walked, or put to bed, Lucette was now a pest. At nightfall — if Marina was not around, drinking, say, with her guests under the golden globes of the new garden lamps that glowed here and there in the sudden greenery, and mingled their kerosene reek with the breath of heliotrope and jasmine — the lovers could steal out into the deeper darkness and stay there until the nocturna — a keen midnight breeze — came tumbling the foliage ‘troussant la raimée,’ as Sore, the ribald night watchman, expressed it. Once, with his emerald lantern, he had stumbled upon them and several times a phantom Blanche had crept past them, laughing softly, to mate in some humbler nook with the robust and securely bribed old glowworm. But waiting all day for a propitious night was too much for our impatient lovers. More often than not they had worn themselves out well before dinnertime, just as they used to in the past; Lucette, however, seemed to lurk behind every screen, to peep out of every mirror.
They tried the attic, but noticed, just in time, a rent in its floor through which one glimpsed a corner of the mangle room where French, the second maid, could be seen in her corset and petticoat, passing to and fro. They looked around — and could not understand how they had ever been able to make tender love among splintered boxes and projecting nails, or wriggle through the skylight onto the roof, which any green imp with coppery limbs could easily keep under surveillance from a fork of the giant elm. (1.34)
An imp is a European mythological being similar to a fairy or demon, frequently described in folklore and superstition. The word may perhaps derive from the term ympe, used to denote a young grafted tree. Describing the picnic on Ada's sixteenth birthday, Van calls Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) the imp:
Lucette ran up to Van and, almost kneeling, cosily embraced her big cousin around the hips, and clung to him for a moment, ‘Come along,’ said Van, lifting her, ‘don’t forget your jersey, you can’t go naked.’
Ada strolled up. ‘My hero,’ she said, hardly looking at him, with that inscrutable air she had that let one guess whether she expressed sarcasm or ecstasy, or a parody of one or the other.
Lucette, swinging her mushroom basket, chanted:
‘He screwed off a nipple,
He left him a cripple...’
‘Lucy Veen, stop that!’ shouted Ada at the imp; and Van with a show of great indignation, shook the little wrist he held, while twinkling drolly at Ada on his other side. (1.39)
A toy barrel organ brings to mind a wonderful office party at Muzakowski's Organs mentioned by Van when he describes the patio party in "Ardis the Second:"
The melancholy young German was in a philosophical mood shading into the suicidal. He had to return to Kalugano with his Elsie, who Doc Ecksreher thought ‘would present him with drip lets in dry weeks.’ He hated Kalugano, his and her home town, where in a moment of ‘mutual aberration’ stupid Elsie had given him her all on a park bench after a wonderful office party at Muzakovski’s Organs where the oversexed pitiful oaf had a good job.
‘When are you leaving?’ asked Ada.
‘Forestday — after tomorrow.’
‘Fine. That’s fine. Adieu, Mr Rack.’
Poor Philip drooped, fingerpainting sad nothings on wet stone, shaking his heavy head, gulping visibly.
‘One feels... One feels,’ he said, ‘that one is merely playing a role and has forgotten the next speech.’
‘I’m told many feel that,’ said Ada; ‘it must be a furchtbar feeling.’
‘Cannot be helped? No hope any more at all? I am dying, yes?’
‘You are dead, Mr Rack,’ said Ada. (1.32)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Forestday: Rack’s pronunciation of ‘Thursday’.
furchtbar: Germ., dreadful.
Lucette's music teacher who was poisoned by his jealous wife Elsie, Philip Rack (a composer of genius) dies in Ward Five (where hopeless cases are kept) of the Kalugano hospital. Patio (Van challenges Ada to find a rhyme of 'patio') rhymes with fellatio. In his lecture on dreams Van describes his erotic dream and mentions a mouth organ:
Van’s sexual dreams are embarrassing to describe in a family chronicle that the very is young may perhaps read after a very old man’s death. Two samples, more or less euphemistically worded, should suffice. In an intricate arrangement of thematic recollections and automatic phantasmata, Aqua impersonating Marina or Marina made-up to look like Aqua, arrives to inform Van, joyfully, that Ada has just been delivered of a girl-child whom he is about to know carnally on a hard garden bench while under a nearby pine, his father, or his dress-coated mother, is trying to make a transatlantic call for an ambulance to be sent from Vence at once. Another dream, recurring in its basic, unmentionable form, since 1888 and well into this century, contained an essentially triple and, in a way, tribadic, idea. Bad Ada and lewd Lucette had found a ripe, very ripe ear of Indian corn. Ada held it at both ends as if it were a mouth organ and now it was an organ, and she moved her parted lips along it, varnishing its shaft, and while she was making it trill and moan, Lucette’s mouth engulfed its extremity. The two sisters’ avid lovely young faces were now close together, doleful and wistful in their slow, almost languid play, their tongues meeting in flicks of fire and curling back again, their tumbled hair, red-bronze and black-bronze, delightfully commingling and their sleek hindquarters lifted high as they slaked their thirst in the pool of his blood. (2.4)
The pool of Van's blood brings to mind Poole (Dr. Jekyll's butler). The inspiration for Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was R. L. Stevenson's nightmare. In his essay A Chapter on Dreams (1888) R. L. Stevenson writes:
I can but give an instance or so of what part is done sleeping and what part awake, and leave the reader to share what laurels there are, at his own nod, between myself and my collaborators; and to do this I will first take a book that a number of persons have been polite enough to read, the STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man's double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature. I had even written one, THE TRAVELLING COMPANION, which was returned by an editor on the plea that it was a work of genius and indecent, and which I burned the other day on the ground that it was not a work of genius, and that JEKYLL had supplanted it. Then came one of those financial fluctuations to which (with an elegant modesty) I have hitherto referred in the third person. For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously, although I think I can trace in much of it the manner of my Brownies. The meaning of the tale is therefore mine, and had long pre–existed in my garden of Adonis, and tried one body after another in vain; indeed, I do most of the morality, worse luck! and my Brownies have not a rudiment of what we call a conscience. Mine, too, is the setting, mine the characters. All that was given me was the matter of three scenes, and the central idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary. Will it be thought ungenerous, after I have been so liberally ladling out praise to my unseen collaborators, if I here toss them over, bound hand and foot, into the arena of the critics? For the business of the powders, which so many have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all but the Brownies'. Of another tale, in case the reader should have glanced at it, I may say a word: the not very defensible story of OLALLA. Here the court, the mother, the mother's niche, Olalla, Olalla's chamber, the meetings on the stair, the broken window, the ugly scene of the bite, were all given me in bulk and detail as I have tried to write them; to this I added only the external scenery (for in my dream I never was beyond the court), the portrait, the characters of Felipe and the priest, the moral, such as it is, and the last pages, such as, alas! they are. And I may even say that in this case the moral itself was given me; for it arose immediately on a comparison of the mother and the daughter, and from the hideous trick of atavism in the first. Sometimes a parabolic sense is still more undeniably present in a dream; sometimes I cannot but suppose my Brownies have been aping Bunyan, and yet in no case with what would possibly be called a moral in a tract; never with the ethical narrowness; conveying hints instead of life's larger limitations and that sort of sense which we seem to perceive in the arabesque of time and space.
Like Lermontov's poem Son ("A Dream," 1841), VN's novel Ada is a triple dream (a dream within a dream within a dream).