Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

7

Van had gone to bed, sandpaper-eyed, soon after ‘evening tea,’ a practically tea-less summertime meal which came a couple of hours after dinner and the occurrence of which seemed to Marina as natural and inevitable as that of a sunset before night. This routine Russian feast consisted in the Ardis household of prostokvasha (translated by English governesses as curds-and-whey, and by Mlle Larivière as lait caillé, ‘curdled milk’), whose thin, cream-smooth upper layer little Miss Ada delicately but avidly (Ada, those adverbs qualified many actions of yours!) skimmed off with her special monogrammed silver spoon and licked up, before attacking the more amorphous junkety depths of the stuff; with this came coarse black peasant bread; dusky klubnika (Fragaria elatior), and huge, bright-red garden strawberries (a cross between two other Fragaria species). Van had hardly laid his cheek on his cool flat pillow when he was violently aroused by a clamorous caroling — bright warbles, sweet whistles, chirps, trills, twitters, rasping caws and tender chew-chews — which he assumed, not without a non-Audubon’s apprehension, Ada could, and would, break up into the right voices of the right birds. He slipped into loafers, collected soap, comb and towel, and, containing his nudity in a terry-cloth robe, left his bedroom with the intention of going for a dip in the brook he had observed on the eve. The corridor clock tocked amid an auroral silence broken indoors only by the snore coming from the governess’ room. After a moment of hesitation he visited the nursery water closet. There, the mad aviary and rich sun got at him through a narrow casement. He was quite well, quite well! As he descended the grand staircase, General Durmanov’s father acknowledged Van with grave eyes and passed him on to old Prince Zemski and other ancestors, all as discreetly attentive as those museum guards who watch the only tourist in a dim old palace.

The front door proved to be bolted and chained. He tried the glassed and grilled side door of a blue-garlanded gallery; it, too, did not yield. Being still unaware that under the stairs an in conspicuous recess concealed an assortment of spare keys (some very old and anonymous, hanging from brass hooks) and communicated though a toolroom with a secluded part of the garden, Van wandered through several reception rooms in search of an obliging window. In a corner room he found, standing at a tall window, a young chambermaid whom he had glimpsed (and promised himself to investigate) on the preceding evening. She wore what his father termed with a semi-assumed leer ‘soubret black and frissonet frill’; a tortoiseshell comb in her chestnut hair caught the amber light; the French window was open, and she was holding one hand, starred with a tiny aquamarine, rather high on the jamb as she looked at a sparrow that was hopping up the paved path toward the bit of baby-toed biscuit she had thrown to him. Her cameo profile, her cute pink nostril, her long, French, lily-white neck, the outline, both full and frail, of her figure (male lust does not go very far for descriptive felicities!), and especially the savage sense of opportune license moved Van so robustly that he could not resist clasping the wrist of her raised tight-sleeved arm. Freeing it, and confirming by the coolness of her demeanor that she had sensed his approach, the girl turned her attractive, though almost eyebrowless, face toward him and asked him if he would like a cup of tea before breakfast. No. What was her name? Blanche — but Mlle Larivière called her ‘Cendrillon’ because her stockings got so easily laddered, see, and because she broke and mislaid things, and confused flowers. His loose attire revealed his desire; this could not escape a girl’s notice, even if color-blind, and as he drew up still closer, while looking over her head for a suitable couch to take shape in some part of this magical manor — where any place, as in Casanova’s remembrances could be dream-changed into a sequestered seraglio nook — she wiggled out of his reach completely and delivered a little soliloquy in her soft Ladoran French:

‘Monsieur a quinze ans, je crois, et moi, je sais, j’en ai dixneuf. Monsieur is a nobleman; I am a poor peat-digger’s daughter. Monsieur a tâté, sans doute, des filles de la ville; quant à moi, je suis vierge, ou peu s’en faut. De plus, were I to fall in love with you — I mean really in love — and I might, alas, if you possessed me rien qu’une petite fois — it would be, for me, only grief, and infernal fire, and despair, and even death, Monsieur. Finalement, I might add that I have the whites and must see le Docteur Chronique, I mean Crolique, on my next day off. Now we have to separate, the sparrow has disappeared, I see, and Monsieur Bouteillan has entered the next room, and can perceive us clearly in that mirror above the sofa behind that silk screen.’

‘Forgive me, girl,’ murmured Van, whom her strange, tragic tone had singularly put off, as if he were taking part in a play in which he was the principal actor, but of which he could only recall that one scene.

The butler’s hand in the mirror took down a decanter from nowhere and was withdrawn. Van, reknotting the cord of his robe, passed through the French window into the green reality of the garden.