Vladimir Nabokov Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle 7 страница

‘Look here, ’ said Van, ‘if you do not stop now when I say one, two, three, I shall open this knife’ (opening the knife) ‘and slash my leg to match yours. Oh, please, devour your fingernails! Anything is more welcome. ’

Because, perhaps, Van’s lifestream was too bitter — even in those glad days — Chateaubriand’s mosquito never cared much for him. Nowadays it seems to be getting extinct, what with the cooler climate and the moronic draining of the lovely rich marshes in the Ladore region as well as near Kaluga, Conn., and Lugano, Pa. (A short series, all females, replete with their fortunate captor’s blood, has recently been collected, I am told, in a secret habitat quite far from the above-mentioned stations. Ada’s note. )

Not only in ear-trumpet age — in what Van called their dot-dot-dotage — but even more so in their adolescence (summer, 1888), did they seek a scholarly excitement in establishing the past evolution (summer, 1884) of their love, the initial stages of its revelations, the freak discrepancies in gappy chronographies. She had kept only a few — mainly botanical and entomological — pages of her diary, because on rereading it she had found its tone false and finical; he had destroyed his entirely because of its clumsy, schoolboyish style combined with heedless, and false, cynicism. Thus they had to rely on oral tradition, on the mutual correction of common memories. ‘And do you remember, a tï pomnish’, et te souviens-tu’ (invariably with that implied codetta of ‘and, ’ introducing the bead to be threaded in the torn necklace) became with them, in their intense talks, the standard device for beginning every other sentence. Calendar dates were debated, sequences sifted and shifted, sentimental notes compared, hesitations and resolutions passionately analyzed. If their recollections now and then did not tally, this was often owing to sexual differences rather than to individual temperament. Both were diverted by life’s young fumblings, both saddened by the wisdom of time. Ada tended to see those initial stages as an extremely gradual and diffuse growth, possibly unnatural, probably unique, but wholly delightful in its smooth unfolding which precluded any brutish impulses or shocks of shame. Van’s memory could not help picking out specific episodes branded forever with abrupt and poignant, and sometimes regrettable, physical thrills. She had the impression that the insatiable delectations she arrived at, without having expected or summoned them, were experienced by Van only by the time she attained them: that is, after weeks of cumulative caresses; her first physiological reactions to them she demurely dismissed as related to childish practices which she had indulged in before and which had little to do with the glory and tang of individual happiness. Van, on the contrary, not only could tabulate every informal spasm he had hidden from her before they became lovers, but stressed philosophic and moral distinctions between the shattering force of self-abuse and the overwhelming softness of avowed and shared love.

When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of an impeccably narrowing corridor. Ada saw herself there as a wonder-eyed waif with a bedraggled nosegay; Van saw himself as a nasty young satyr with clumsy hooves and an ambiguous flue pipe. ‘But I was only twelve, ’ Ada would cry when some indelicate detail was brought up. ‘I was in my fifteenth year, ’ sadly said Van.

And did the young lady recall, he asked, producing metaphorically some notes from his pocket, the very first time she guessed that her shy young ‘cousin’ (their official relationship) was physically excited in her presence, though decently swathed in layers of linen and wool and not in contact with the young lady?

She said, frankly no, she did not — indeed, could not — because at eleven, despite trying numberless times to unlock with every key in the house the cabinet in which Walter Daniel Veen kept ‘Jap. & Ind. erot. prints’ as seen distinctly labeled through the glazed door (the key to which Van found for her in a twinkle — taped to the back of the pediment), she had still been rather hazy about the way human beings mated. She was very observant, of course, and had closely examined various insects in copula, but at the period discussed clear examples of mammalian maleness had rarely come to her notice and had remained unconnected with any idea or possibility of sexual function (such as for example the time she had contemplated the soft-looking beige beak of the Negro janitor’s boy who sometimes urinated in the girls’ water closet at her first school in 1883).

Two other phenomena that she had observed even earlier proved ridiculously misleading. She must have been about nine when that elderly gentleman, an eminent painter whom she could not and would not name, came several times to dinner at Ardis Hall. Her drawing teacher, Miss Wintergreen, respected him greatly, though actually her natures mortes were considered (in 1888 and again 1958) incomparably superior to the works of the celebrated old rascal who drew his diminutive nudes invariably from behind — fig-picking, peach-buttocked nymphets straining upward, or else rock-climbing girl scouts in bursting shorts —

‘I know exactly, ’ interrupted Van angrily, ‘whom you mean, and would like to place on record that even if his delicious talent is in disfavor today, Paul J. Gigment had every right to paint schoolgirls and poolgirls from any side he pleased. Proceed. ’

Every time (said unruffled Ada) Pig Pigment came, she cowered when hearing him trudge and snort and pant upstairs, ever nearer like the Marmoreal Guest, that immemorial ghost, seeking her, crying for her in a thin, querulous voice not in keeping with marble.

‘Poor old chap, ’ murmured Van.

His method of contact, she said, ‘puisqu’on aborde ce thè me-là, and I’m certainly not making offensive comparisons, ’ was to insist, with maniacal force, that he help her reach for something — anything, a little gift he had brought, bonbons, or simply some old toy that he’d picked up from the floor of the nursery and hung up high on the wall, or a pink candle burning blue that he commanded her to blowout on an arbre de Noë l, and despite her gentle protests he would raise the child by her elbows, taking his time, pushing, grunting, saying: ah, how heavy and pretty she was — this went on and on until the dinner gong boomed or Nurse entered with a glass of fruit juice and what a relief it was, for everybody concerned, when in the course of that fraudulent ascension her poor little bottom made it at last to the crackling snow of his shirtfront, and he dropped her, and buttoned his dinner jacket. And she remembered —

‘Stupidly exaggerated, ’ commented Van. ‘Also, I suppose, artificially recolored in the lamplight of later events as revealed still later. ’

And she remembered blushing painfully when somebody said poor Pig had a very sick mind and ‘a hardening of the artery, ’ that is how she heard it, or perhaps ‘heartery’; but she also knew, even then, that the artery could become awfully long, for she had seen Drongo, a black horse, looking, she must confess, most dejected and embarrassed by what was happening to it right in the middle of a rough field with all the daisies watching. She thought, arch Ada said (how truthfully, was another question), that a foal was dangling, with one black rubber leg free, out of Drongo’s belly because she did not understand that Drongo was not a mare at all and had not got a pouch as the kangaroo had in an illustration she worshipped, but then her English nurse explained that Drongo was a very sick horse and everything fell into place.

‘Fine, ’ said Van, ‘that’s certainly fascinating; but I was thinking of the first time you might have suspected I was also a sick pig or horse. I am recalling, ’ he continued, ‘the round table in the round rosy glow and you kneeling next to me on a chair. I was perched on the chair’s swelling arm and you were building a house of cards, and your every movement was magnified, of course, as in a trance, dream-slow but also tremendously vigilant, and I positively reveled in the girl odor of your bare arm and in that of your hair which now is murdered by some popular perfume. I date the event around June 10 — a rainy evening less than a week after my first arrival at Ardis. ’

‘I remember the cards, ’ she said, ‘and the light and the noise of the rain, and your blue cashmere pullover — but nothing else, nothing odd or improper, that came later. Besides, only in French love stories les messieurs hument young ladies. ’

‘Well, I did while you went on with your delicate work. Tactile magic. Infinite patience. Fingertips stalking gravity. Badly bitten nails, my sweet. Forgive these notes, I cannot really express the discomfort of bulky, sticky desire. You see I was hoping that when your castle toppled you would make a Russian splash gesture of surrender and sit down on my hand. ’

‘It was not a castle. It was a Pompeian Villa with mosaics and paintings inside, because I used only court cards from Grandpa’s old gambling packs. Did I sit down on your hot hard hand? ’

‘On my open palm, darling. A pucker of paradise. You remained still for a moment, fitting my cup. Then you rearranged your limbs and reknelt. ’

‘Quick, quick, quick, collecting the flat shining cards again to build again, again slowly? We were abominably depraved, weren’t we? ’

‘All bright kids are depraved. I see you do recollect —’

‘Not that particular occasion, but the apple tree, and when you kissed my neck, et tout le reste. And then — zdravstvuyte: apofeoz, the Night of the Burning Barn! ’

A sort of hoary riddle (Les Sophismes de Sophie by Mlle Stopchin in the Bibliothè que Vieux Rose series): did the Burning Barn come before the Cockloft or the Cockloft come first. Oh, first! We had long been kissing cousins when the fire started. In fact, I was getting some Châ teau Baignet cold cream from Ladore for my poor chapped lips. And we both were roused in our separate rooms by her crying au feu! July 28? August 4?

Who cried? Stopchin cried? Lariviè re cried? Lariviè re? Answer! Crying that the barn flambait?

No, she was fast ablaze — I mean, asleep. I know, said Van, it was she, the hand-painted handmaid, who used your watercolors to touch up her eyes, or so Lariviè re said, who accused her and Blanche of fantastic sins.

Oh, of course! But not Marina’s poor French — it was our little goose Blanche. Yes, she rushed down the corridor and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase, like Ashette in the English version.

‘And do you remember, Van, how warm the night was? ’

‘Eschchyo bï! (as if I did not! ). That night because of the blink —’

That night because of the bothersome blink of remote sheet lightning through the black hearts of his sleeping-arbor, Van had abandoned his two tulip trees and gone to bed in his room. The tumult in the house and the maid’s shriek interrupted a rare, brilliant, dramatic dream, whose subject he was unable to recollect later, although he still held it in a saved jewel box. As usual, he slept naked, and wavered now between pulling on a pair of shorts, or draping himself in his tartan lap robe. He chose the second course, rattled a matchbox, lit his bedside candle, and swept out of his room, ready to save Ada and all her larvae. The corridor was dark, somewhere the dachshund was barking ecstatically. Van gleaned from subsiding cries that the so-called ‘baronial barn, ’ a huge beloved structure three miles away, was on fire. Fifty cows would have been without hay and Lariviè re without her midday coffee cream had it happened later in the season. Van felt slighted. They’ve all gone and left me behind, as old Fierce mumbles at the end of the Cherry Orchard (Marina was an adequate Mme Ranevski).

With the tartan toga around him, he accompanied his black double down the accessory spiral stairs leading to the library. Placing a bare knee on the shaggy divan under the window, Van drew back the heavy red curtains.

Uncle Dan, a cigar in his teeth, and kerchiefed Marina with Dack in her clutch deriding the watchdogs, were in the process of setting out between raised arms and swinging lanterns in the runabout — as red as a fire engine! — only to be overtaken at the crunching curve of the drive by three English footmen on horseback with three French maids en croupe. The entire domestic staff seemed to be taking off to enjoy the fire (an infrequent event in our damp windless region), using every contraption available or imaginable: telegas, teleseats, roadboats, tandem bicycles and even the clockwork luggage carts with which the stationmaster supplied the family in memory of Erasmus Veen, their inventor. Only the governess (as Ada, not Van, had by then discovered) slept on through everything, snoring with a wheeze and a harkle in the room adjacent to the old nursery where little Lucette lay for a minute awake before running after her dream and jumping into the last furniture van.

Van, kneeling at the picture window, watched the inflamed eye of the cigar recede and vanish. That multiple departure... Take over.

That multiple departure really presented a marvelous sight against the pale star-dusted firmament of practically subtropical Ardis, tinted between the black trees with a distant flamingo flush at the spot where the Barn was Burning. To reach it one had to drive round a large reservoir which I could make out breaking into scaly light here and there every time some adventurous hostler or pantry boy crossed it on water skis or in a Rob Roy or by means of a raft — typical raft ripples like fire snakes in Japan; and one could now follow with an artist’s eye the motorcar’s lamps, fore and aft, progressing east along the AB bank of that rectangular lake, then turning sharply upon reaching its B corner, trailing away up the short side and creeping back west, in a dim and diminished aspect, to a middle point on the far margin where they swung north and disappeared.

As two last retainers, the cook and the night watchman, scurried across the lawn toward a horseless trap or break, that stood beckoning them with erected thills (or was it a rickshaw? Uncle Dan once had a Japanese valet), Van was delighted and shocked to distinguish, right there in the inky shrubbery, Ada in her long nightgown passing by with a lighted candle in one hand and a shoe in the other as if stealing after the belated ignicolists. It was only her reflection in the glass. She dropped the found shoe in a wastepaper basket and joined Van on the divan.

‘Can one see anything, oh, can one see? ’ the dark-haired child kept repeating, and a hundred barns blazed in her amber-black eyes, as she beamed and peered in blissful curiosity. He relieved her of her candlestick, placing it near his own longer one on the window ledge. ‘You are naked, you are dreadfully indecent, ’ she observed without looking and without any emphasis or reproof, whereupon he cloaked himself tighter, Ramses the Scotsman, as she knelt beside him. For a moment they both contemplated the romantic night piece framed in the window. He had started to stroke her, shivering, staring ahead, following with a blind man’s hand the dip of her spine through the batiste.

‘Look, gipsies, ’ she whispered, pointing at three shadowy forms — two men, one with a ladder, and a child or dwarf — circumspectly moving across the gray lawn. They saw the candlelit window and decamped, the smaller one walking à reculons as if taking pictures.

‘I stayed home on purpose, because I hoped you would too — it was a contrived coincidence, ’ she said, or said later she’d said — while he continued to fondle the flow of her hair, and to massage and rumple her nightdress, not daring yet to go under and up, daring, however, to mold her nates until, with a little hiss, she sat down on his hand and her heels, as the burning castle of cards collapsed. She turned to him and next moment he was kissing her bare shoulder, and pushing against her like that soldier behind in the queue.

First time I hear about him. I thought old Mr Nymphobottomus had been my only predecessor.

Last spring. Trip to town. French theater matiné e. Mademoiselle had mislaid the tickets. The poor fellow probably thought ‘Tartuffe’ was a tart or a stripteaser.

Ce qui n’est pas si bê te, au fond. Which was not so dumb after all. Okay. In that scene of the Burning Barn —

Yes?

Nothing. Go on.

Oh, Van, that night, that moment as we knelt side by side in the candlelight like Praying Children in a very bad picture, showing two pairs of soft-wrinkled, once arboreal-animal, soles — not to Grandma who gets the Xmas card but to the surprised and pleased Serpent, I remember wanting so badly to ask you for a bit of purely scientific information, because my sidelong glance —

Not now, it’s not a nice sight right now and it will be worse in a moment (or words to that effect).

Van could not decide whether she really was utterly ignorant and as pure as the night sky — now drained of its fire color — or whether total experience advised her to indulge in a cold game. It did not really matter.

Wait, not right now, he replied in a half-muffled mutter.

She insisted: I wannask, I wannano —

He caressed and parted with his fleshy folds, parties trè s charnues, in the case of our passionate siblings, her lank loose, nearly lumbus-length (when she threw back her head as now) black silks as he tried to get at her bed-warm splenius. (It is not necessary, here or elsewhere, there was another similar passage, to blotch a reasonably pure style with vague anatomical terms that a psychiatrist remembers from his student days. In Ada’s later hand. )

‘I wannask, ’ she repeated as he greedily reached his hot pale goal.

‘I want to ask you, ’ she said quite distinctly, but also quite beside herself because his ramping palm had now worked its way through at the armpit, and his thumb on a nipplet made her palate tingle: ringing for the maid in Georgian novels — inconceivable without the presence of elettricità —

(I protest. You cannot. It is banned even in Lithuanian and Latin. Ada’s note. )

‘— to ask you... ’

‘Ask, ’ cried Van, ‘but don’t spoil everything’ (such as feeding upon you, writhing against you).

‘Well, why, ’ she asked (demanded, challenged, one flame crepitated, one cushion was on the floor), ‘why do you get so fat and hard there when you —’

‘Get where? When I what? ’

In order to explain, tactfully, tactually, she belly-danced against him, still more or less kneeling, her long hair getting in the way, one eye staring into his ear (their reciprocal positions had become rather muddled by then).

‘Repeat! ’ he cried as if she were far away, a reflection in a dark window.

‘You will show me at once, ’ said Ada firmly.

He discarded his makeshift kilt, and her tone of voice changed immediately.

‘Oh, dear, ’ she said as one child to another. ‘It’s all skinned and raw. Does it hurt? Does it hurt horribly? ’

‘Touch it quick, ’ he implored.

‘Van, poor Van, ’ she went on in the narrow voice the sweet girl used when speaking to cats, caterpillars, pupating puppies, ‘yes, I’m sure it smarts, would it help if I’d touch, are you sure? ’

‘You bet, ’ said Van, ‘on n’est pas bê te à ce point’ (‘there are limits to stupidity, ’ colloquial and rude).

‘Relief map, ’ said the primrose prig, ‘the rivers of Africa. ’ Her index traced the blue Nile down into its jungle and traveled up again. ‘Now what’s this? The cap of the Red Bolete is not half as plushy. In fact’ (positively chattering), ‘I’m reminded of geranium or rather pelargonium bloom. ’

‘God, we all are, ’ said Van.

‘Oh, I like this texture, Van, I like it! Really I do! ’

‘Squeeze, you goose, can’t you see I’m dying. ’

But our young botanist had not the faintest idea how to handle the thing properly — and Van, now in extremis, driving it roughly against the hem of her nightdress, could not help groaning as he dissolved in a puddle of pleasure.

She looked down in dismay.

‘Not what you think, ’ remarked Van calmly. ‘This is not number one. Actually it’s as clean as grass sap. Well, now the Nile is settled stop Speke. ’

(I wonder, Van, why you are doing your best to transform our poetical and unique past into a dirty farce? Honestly, Van! Oh, I am honest, that’s how it went. I wasn’t sure of my ground, hence the sauciness and the simper. Ah, parlez pour vous: I, dear, can affirm that those famous fingertrips up your Africa and to the edge of the world came considerably later when I knew the itinerary by heart. Sorry, no — if people remembered the same they would not be different people. That’s-how-it-went. But we are not ‘different’! Think and dream are the same in French. Think of the douceur, Van! Oh, I am thinking of it, of course, I am — it was all douceur, my child, my rhyme. That’s better, said Ada. )

Please, take over.

Van stretched himself naked in the now motionless candlelight.

‘Let us sleep here, ’ he said. ‘They won’t be back before dawn relights Uncle’s cigar. ’

‘My nightie is trempé e, ’ she whispered.

‘Take it off, this plaid sleeps two. ’

‘Don’t look, Van. ’

‘That’s not fair, ’ he said and helped her to slip it up and over her hair-shaking head. She was shaded with a mere touch of coal at the mystery point of her chalk-white body. A bad boil had left a pink scar between two ribs. He kissed it, and lay back on his clasped hands. She was inspecting from above his tanned body the ant caravan to the oasis of the navel; he was decidedly hirsute for so young a boy. Her young round breasts were just above his face. I denounce the philistine’s post-coital cigarette both as a doctor and an artist. It is, however, true that Van was not unaware of a glass box of Turkish Traumatis on a console too far to be reached with an indolent stretch. The tall clock struck an anonymous quarter, and Ada was presently watching, cheek on fist, the impressive, though oddly morose, stirrings, steady clockwise launch, and ponderous upswing of virile revival.

But the shag of the couch was as tickly as the star-dusted sky. Before anything new happened, Ada went on all fours to rearrange the lap robe and cushions. Native girl imitating rabbit. He groped for and cupped her hot little slew from behind, then frantically scrambled into a boy’s sandcastle-molding position; but she turned over, naï vely ready to embrace him the way Juliet is recommended to receive her Romeo. She was right. For the first time in their love story, the blessing, the genius of lyrical speech descended upon the rough lad, he murmured and moaned, kissing her face with voluble tenderness, crying out in three languages — the three greatest in all the world — pet words upon which a dictionary of secret diminutives was to be based and go through many revisions till the definitive edition of 1967. When he grew too loud, she shushed, shushingly breathing into his mouth, and now her four limbs were frankly around him as if she had been love-making for years in all our dreams — but impatient young passion (brimming like Van’s overflowing bath while he is reworking this, a crotchety gray old wordman on the edge of a hotel bed) did not survive the first few blind thrusts; it burst at the lip of the orchid, and a bluebird uttered a warning warble, and the lights were now stealing back under a rugged dawn, the firefly signals were circumscribing the reservoir, the dots of the carriage lamps became stars, wheels rasped on the gravel, all the dogs returned well pleased with the night treat, the cook’s niece Blanche jumped out of a pumpkin-hued police van in her stockinged feet (long, long after midnight, alas) — and our two naked children, grabbing lap robe and nightdress, and giving the couch a parting pat, pattered back with their candlesticks to their innocent bedrooms.

‘And do you remember, ’ said gray-moustached Van as he took a Cannabina cigarette from the bedside table and rattled a yellow-blue matchbox, ‘how reckless we were, and how Lariviè re stopped snoring but a moment later went on shaking the house, and how cold the iron steps were, and how disconcerted I was — by your — how shall I put it? — lack of restraint. ’

‘Idiot, ’ said Ada, from the wall side, without turning her head.

Summer 1960? Crowded hotel somewhere between Ex and Ardez?

Ought to begin dating every page of the manuscript: Should be kinder to my unknown dreamers.

Next morning, his nose still in the dreambag of a deep pillow contributed to his otherwise austere bed by sweet Blanche (with whom, by the parlor-game rules of sleep, he had been holding hands in a heartbreaking nightmare — or perhaps it was just her cheap perfume), the boy was at once aware of the happiness knocking to be let in. He deliberately endeavored to prolong the glow of its incognito by dwelling on the last vestiges of jasmine and tears in a silly dream; but the tiger of happiness fairly leaped into being.

That exhilaration of a newly acquired franchise! A shade of it he seemed to have kept in his sleep, in that last part of his recent dream in which he had told Blanche that he had learned to levitate and that his ability to treat air with magic ease would allow him to break all records for the long jump by strolling, as it were, a few inches above the ground for a stretch of say thirty or forty feet (too great a length might be suspicious) while the stands went wild, and Zambovsky of Zambia stared, arms akimbo, in consternation and disbelief.

Tenderness rounds out true triumph, gentleness lubricates genuine liberation: emotions that are not diagnostic of glory or passion in dreams. One half of the fantastic joy Van was to taste from now on (forever, he hoped) owed its force to the certainty that he could lavish on Ada, openly and at leisure, all the puerile petting that social shame, male selfishness, and moral apprehension had prevented him from envisaging before.

On weekends, all three meals of the day were heralded by three gongs, small, medium and big. The first now announced breakfast in the dining room. Its vibration suscitated the thought that in twenty-six steps Van would join his young accomplice, whose delicate musk he still preserved in the hollow of his hand — and affected Van with a kind of radiant amazement: Had it really happened? Are we really free? Certain caged birds, say Chinese amateurs shaking with fatman mirth, knock themselves out against the bars (and lie unconscious for a few minutes) every blessed morning, right upon awakening, in an automatic, dream-continuing, dreamlined dash — although they are, those iridescent prisoners, quite perky and docile and talkative the rest of the time.

Van thrust his bare toe into a sneaker, retrieving the while its mate from under the bed; he hurried down, past a pleased-looking Prince Zemski and a grim Vincent Veen, Bishop of Balticomore and Como.

But she was not down yet. In the bright dining room, full of yellow flowers in drooping clusters of sunshine, Uncle Dan was feeding. He wore suitable clothes for a suitably hot day in the country — namely, a candy-striped suit over a mauve flannel shirt and piqué waistcoat, with a blue-and-red club tie and a safety-goldpinned very high soft collar (all his trim stripes and colors were a little displaced, though, in the process of comic strip printing, because it was Sunday). He had just finished his first buttered toast, with a dab of ye-old Orange Marmalade and was making turkey sounds as he rinsed his dentures orally with a mouthful of coffee prior to swallowing it and the flavorous flotsam. Being, as I had reason to believe, plucky, I could make myself suffer a direct view of the man’s pink face with its (rotating) red ‘tashy’, but I was not obliged (mused Van, in 1922, when he saw those baguenaudier flowers again) to stand his chinless profile with its curly red sideburn. So Van considered, not without appetite, the blue jugs of hot chocolate and baton-segments of bread prepared for the hungry children. Marina had her breakfast in bed, the butler and Price ate in a recess of the pantry (a pleasing thought, somehow) and Mlle Lariviè re did not touch any food till noon, being a doom-fearing ‘midinette’ (the sect, not the shop) and had actually made her father confessor join her group.

‘You could have taken us to see the fire, Uncle dear, ’ remarked Van, pouring himself a cup of chocolate.

‘Ada will tell you all about it, ’ replied Uncle Dan, lovingly buttering and marmalading another toast. ‘She greatly enjoyed the excursion. ’

‘Oh, she went with you, did she? ’

‘Yes — in a black charabanc, with all the butlers. Jolly good fun, rally’ (pseudo-British pronunciation).

‘But that must have been one of the scullery maids, not Ada, ’ remarked Van. ‘I didn’t realize, ’ he added, ‘we had several here — I mean, butlers. ’

‘Oh, I imagine so, ’ said Uncle Dan vaguely. He repeated the internal rinsing process, and with a slight cough put on his spectacles, but no morning paper had come — and he took them off again.