The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Part 7

He banged his knee painfully. That black fence again. He could not help laughing as he recognized the vans beyond. There they stood, like gigantic coffins. Whatever might they conceal within? Treasures? The skeletons of giants? Or dusty mountains of sumptuous furniture?

Oh, I must have a look. Or else Klara will ask, and I shan't know.

He gave a quick nudge to the door of one of the vans and went inside. Empty. Empty, except for one little straw chair in the center, comically poised askew on three legs.

Mark shrugged and went out on the opposite side. Once again the hot evening glow gushed into sight. And now in front of him was the familiar wrought-iron wicket, and further on Klara's window, crossed by a green branch. Klara herself opened the gate, and stood waiting, lifting her bared elbows, adjusting her hair. The russet tufts of her armpits showed through the sunlit openings of her short sleeves.

Mark, laughing noiselessly, ran up to embrace her. He pressed his cheek against the warm, green silk of her dress.

Her hands came to rest on his head.

"I was so lonely all day, Mark. But now you are here."

She opened the door, and Mark immediately found himself in the dining room, which struck him as being inordinately s.p.a.cious and bright.

"When people are as happy as we are now," she said, "they can do without a hallway," Klara spoke in a pa.s.sionate whisper, and he felt that her words had some special, wonderful meaning.

And in the dining room, around the snow-white oval of the tablecloth, sat a number of people, none of whom Mark had seen before at his fiancee's house. Among them was Adolf, swarthy, with his square-shaped head; there was also that short-legged, big-bellied old man who had been reading a medical journal in the tram and was still grumbling.

Mark greeted the company with a shy nod and sat down beside Klara, and in that same instant felt, as he had a short time ago, a bolt of atrocious pain pa.s.s through his whole frame. He writhed, and Klara's green dress floated away, diminished, and turned into the green shade of a lamp. The lamp was swaying on its cord. Mark was lying beneath it, with that inconceivable pain crus.h.i.+ng his body, and nothing could be distinguished save that oscillating lamp, and his ribs were pressing against his heart, making it impossible to breathe, and someone was bending his leg, straining to break it, in a moment it would crack. He freed himself somehow, the lamp glowed green again, and Mark saw himself sitting a little way off, beside Klara, and no sooner had he seen it than he found himself brus.h.i.+ng his knee against her warm silk skirt. And Klara was laughing, her head thrown back.

He felt an urge to tell about what had just happened, and, addressing all those present-jolly Adolf, the irritable fat man-uttered with an effort: "The foreigner is offering the aforementioned prayers on the river...."

It seemed to him that he had made everything clear, and apparently they had all understood.... Klara, with a little pout, pinched his cheek: "My poor darling. It'll be all right...."

He began to feel tired and sleepy. He put his arm around Klara's neck, drew her to him, and lay back. And then the pain pounced upon him again, and everything became clear.

Mark was lying supine, mutilated and bandaged, and the lamp was not swinging any longer. The familiar fat man with the mustache, now a doctor in a white gown, made worried growling small noises as he peered into the pupils of Mark's eyes. And what pain!... G.o.d, in a moment his heart would be impaled on a rib and burst ... G.o.d, any instant now.... This is silly. Why isn't Klara here?...

The doctor frowned and clucked his tongue.

Mark no longer breathed, Mark had departed-whither, into what other dreams, none can tell.

THE THUNDERSTORM.

AT THE corner of an otherwise ordinary West Berlin street, under the canopy of a linden in full bloom, I was enveloped by a fierce fragrance. Ma.s.ses of mist were ascending in the night sky and, when the last star-filled hollow had been absorbed, the wind, a blind phantom, covering his face with his sleeves, swept low through the deserted street. In l.u.s.terless darkness, over the iron shutter of a barbershop, its suspended s.h.i.+eld-a gilt shaving basin-began swinging like a pendulum.

I came home and found the wind waiting for me in the room: it banged the cas.e.m.e.nt window-and staged a prompt reflux when I shut the door behind me. Under my window there was a deep courtyard where, in the daytime, s.h.i.+rts, crucified on sun-bright clotheslines, shone through the lilac bushes. Out of that yard voices would rise now and then: the melancholy barking of ragmen or empty-bottle buyers; sometimes, the wail of a crippled violin; and, once, an obese blond woman stationed herself in the center of the yard and broke into such lovely song that maids leaned out of all the windows, bending their bare necks. Then, when she had finished, there was a moment of extraordinary stillness; only my landlady, a slatternly widow, was heard sobbing and blowing her nose in the corridor.

In that yard now a stifling gloom swelled, but then the blind wind, which had helplessly slithered into its depths, once again began reaching upward, and suddenly it regained its sight, swept up and, in the amber apertures of the black wall opposite, the silhouettes of arms and disheveled heads began to dart, as escaping windows were being caught and their frames resonantly and firmly locked. The lights went out. The next moment an avalanche of dull sound, the sound of distant thunder, came into motion, and started tumbling through the dark-violet sky. And again all grew still as it had when the beggar woman finished her song, her hands clasped to her ample bosom.

In this silence I fell asleep, exhausted by the happiness of my day, a happiness I cannot describe in writing, and my dream was full of you.

I woke up because the night had begun cras.h.i.+ng to pieces. A wild, pale glitter was flying across the sky like a rapid reflection of colossal spokes. One crash after another rent the sky. The rain came down in a s.p.a.cious and sonorous flow.

I was intoxicated by those bluish tremors, by the keen, volatile chill. I went up to the wet window ledge and inhaled the unearthly air, which made my heart ring like gla.s.s.

Ever nearer, ever more grandly, the prophet's chariot rumbled across the clouds. The light of madness, of piercing visions, illumined the nocturnal world, the metal slopes of roofs, the fleeing lilac bushes. The Thunder-G.o.d, a white-haired giant with a furious beard blown back over his shoulder by the wind, dressed in the flying folds of a dazzling raiment, stood, leaning backward, in his fiery chariot, restraining with tensed arms his tremendous, jet-black steeds, their manes a violet blaze. They had broken away from the driver's control, they scattered sparkles of crackling foam, the chariot careened, and the fl.u.s.tered prophet tugged at the reins in vain. His face was distorted by the blast and the strain; the whirlwind, blowing back the folds of his garment, bared a mighty knee; the steeds tossed their blazing manes and rushed on ever more violently, down, down along the clouds. Then, with thunderous hooves, they hurtled across a s.h.i.+ny rooftop, the chariot lurched, Elijah staggered, and the steeds, maddened by the touch of mortal metal, sprang skyward again. The prophet was pitched out. One wheel came off. From my window I saw its enormous fiery hoop roll down the roof, teeter at the edge, and jump off into darkness, while the steeds, dragging the overturned chariot, were already speeding along the highest clouds; the rumble died down, and the stormy blaze vanished in livid chasms.

The Thunder-G.o.d, who had fallen onto the roof, rose heavily. His sandals started slipping; he broke a dormer window with his foot, grunted, and, with a sweep of his arm grasped a chimney to steady himself. He slowly turned his frowning face as his eyes searched for something-probably the wheel that had flown off its golden axle. Then he glanced upward, his fingers clutching at his ruffled beard, shook his head crossly-this was probably not the first time that it happened-and, limping slightly, began a cautious descent.

In great excitement I tore myself away from the window, hurried to put on my dressing gown, and ran down the steep staircase straight to the courtyard. The storm had blown over but a waft of rain still lingered in the air. To the east an exquisite pallor was invading the sky.

The courtyard, which from above had seemed to brim with dense darkness, contained, in fact, nothing more than a delicate, melting mist. On its central patch of turf darkened by the damp, a lean, stoop-shouldered old man in a drenched robe stood muttering something and looking around him. Upon seeing me, he blinked angrily and said, "That you, Elisha?"

I bowed. The prophet clucked his tongue, scratching the while his bald brown spot.

"Lost a wheel. Find it for me, will you?"

The rain had now ceased. Enormous flame-colored clouds collected above the roofs. The shrubs, the fence, the glistening kennel, were floating in the bluish, drowsy air around us. We groped for a long time in various corners. The old man kept grunting, hitching up the heavy hem of his robe, splas.h.i.+ng through the puddles with his round-toed sandals, and a bright drop hung from the tip of his large, bony nose. As I brushed aside a low branch of lilac, I noticed, on a pile of rubbish, amid broken gla.s.s, a narrow-rimmed iron wheel that must have belonged to a baby carriage. The old man exhaled warm relief above my ear. Hastily, even a little brusquely, he pushed me aside, and s.n.a.t.c.hed up the rusty hoop. With a joyful wink he said, "So that's where it rolled."

Then he stared at me, his white eyebrows came together in a frown, and, as if remembering something, he said in an impressive voice, "Turn away, Elisha."

I obeyed, even shutting my eyes. I stood like that for a minute or so, and then could not control my curiosity any longer.

The courtyard was empty, except for the old, s.h.a.ggy dog with its graying muzzle that had thrust its head out of the kennel and was looking up, like a person, with frightened hazel eyes. I looked up too. Elijah had scrambled onto the roof, the iron hoop glimmering behind his back. Above the black chimneys a curly auroral cloud loomed like an orange-hued mountain and, beyond it, a second and a third. The hushed dog and I watched together as the prophet, who had reached the crest of the roof, calmly and unhurriedly stepped upon the cloud and continued to climb, treading heavily on ma.s.ses of mellow fire....

Sunlight shot through his wheel whereupon it became at once huge and golden, and Elijah himself now seemed robed in flame, blending with the paradisal cloud along which he walked higher and higher until he disappeared in a glorious gorge of the sky.

Only then did the decrepit dog break into a hoa.r.s.e morning bark. Ripples ran across the bright surface of a rain puddle. The light breeze stirred the geraniums on the balconies. Two or three windows awakened. In my soaked bedslippers and worn dressing gown I ran out into the street to overtake the first, sleepy tramcar, and pulling the skirts of my gown around me, and laughing to myself as I ran, I imagined how, in a few moments, I would be in your house and start telling you about that night's midair accident, and the cross old prophet who fell into my yard.

LA VENEZIANA.

1.

IN FRONT of the red-hued castle, amid luxuriant elms, there was a vividly green gra.s.s court. Early that morning the gardener had smoothed it with a stone roller, extirpated a couple of daisies, redrawn the lines on the lawn with liquid chalk, and tightly strung a resilient new net between the posts. From a nearby village the butler had brought a carton within which reposed a dozen b.a.l.l.s, white as snow, fuzzy to the touch, still light, still virgin, each wrapped like a precious fruit in its own sheet of transparent paper.

It was about five in the afternoon. The ripe suns.h.i.+ne dozed here and there on the gra.s.s and the tree trunks, filtered through the leaves, and placidly bathed the court, which had now come alive. There were four players: the Colonel himself (the castle's proprietor), Mrs. McGore, the host's son Frank, and Simpson, a college friend of his.

A person's motions while playing, like his handwriting in quieter moments, tell a good deal about him. Judging by the Colonel's blunt, stiff strokes, by the tense expression on his fleshy face that looked as if it had just spat out the ma.s.sive gray mustache towering above his lip; by the fact that, in spite of the heat, he did not unb.u.t.ton his s.h.i.+rt collar; and by the way he served, legs firmly planted apart like two white poles, one might conclude, firstly, that he had never been a good player, and, secondly, that he was a staid, old-fas.h.i.+oned, stubborn man, subject to occasional outbursts of seething anger. In fact, having hit the ball into the rhododendrons, he would exhale a terse oath through his teeth, or goggle his fishlike eyes at his racquet as if he could not forgive it for such a humiliating miss. Simpson, his partner by chance, a skinny blond youth with meek but mad eyes that fluttered and glinted behind his pince-nez like limp light-blue b.u.t.terflies, was trying to play as best he could, although the Colonel, of course, never expressed his vexation when the loss of a point was the other's fault. But no matter how hard Simpson tried, no matter how he leaped about, none of his shots were successful. He felt as if he were coming apart at the seams, as if it were his timidity that kept him from hitting accurately, and that, instead of an instrument of play, meticulously and ingeniously a.s.sembled out of resonant, amber catgut strung on a superbly calculated frame, he was holding a clumsy dry log from which the ball would rebound with a painful crack, ending up in the net or in the bushes, and even managing to knock the straw hat off the circular pate of Mr. McGore, who was standing beside the court and watching with no great interest as his young wife Maureen and the lightfooted, nimble Frank defeated their perspiring opponents.

If McGore, an old connoisseur of art, and restorer, reframer, and recanvaser of even older paintings, who regarded the world as a rather poor study daubed with unstable paints on a flimsy canvas, had been the kind of curious and impartial spectator it is sometimes so expedient to attract, he might have concluded that tall, dark-haired, cheerful Maureen lived with the same carefree manner with which she played, and that Frank carried over into life as well his ability to return the most difficult shot with graceful ease. But, just as handwriting can often fool a fortune-teller by its superficial simplicity, the game of this white-clad couple in truth revealed nothing more than that Maureen played weak, soft, listless, female tennis, while Frank tried not to whack the ball too hard, recalling that he was not in a university tournament but in his father's park. He moved effortlessly toward the ball, and the long stroke gave a sense of physical fulfillment: every motion tends to describe a full circle, and even though, at its midpoint, it is transformed into the ball's linear flight, its invisible continuation is nevertheless instantaneously perceived by the hand and runs up the muscles all the way to the shoulder, and it is precisely this prolonged internal scintilla that makes the stroke fulfilling. With a phlegmatic smile on his clean-shaven, suntanned face, his bared flawless teeth flas.h.i.+ng, Frank would rise on his toes and, without visible effort, swing his naked forearm. That ample arc contained an electric kind of force and the ball would rebound with a particularly taut and accurate ring from his racquet's strings.

He had arrived that morning with his friend to vacation at his father's, and had found Mr. and Mrs. McGore whom he already knew and who had been visiting at the castle for more than a month; the Colonel, inflamed by a n.o.ble pa.s.sion for paintings, willingly forgave McGore his foreign origin, his unsociable nature, and his lack of humor in exchange for the a.s.sistance this famous art expert gave him and for the magnificent, priceless canvases he procured. Especially magnificent was the Colonel's most recent acquisition, the portrait of a woman by Luciani, sold to him by McGore for a most sumptuous sum.

Today, McGore, at the insistence of his wife who was familiar with the Colonel's punctiliousness, had put on a pale summer suit instead of the frock coat he usually wore, but he still did not pa.s.s his host's muster: his s.h.i.+rt was starched and had pearl b.u.t.tons, which was, of course, inappropriate. Also not very appropriate were his reddish-yellow half-boots and the absence of the trouser cuffs the late king had instantaneously made fas.h.i.+onable when he once had to traverse some puddles to cross the road; nor did the old straw hat with a gnawed-looking rim from behind which poked McGore's gray curls appear especially elegant. He had a somewhat simian face, with a protuberant mouth, a long gap between nose and lip, and a whole complex system of wrinkles, so that one could probably read his face as if it were a palm. As he watched the ball flying back and forth across the net, his little greenish eyes darted right, left, right, and paused to blink lazily when the ball's flight was interrupted. The vivid white of three pairs of flannels and one short, cheerful skirt contrasted beautifully in the brilliant sunlight with the apple-hued verdure, but, as we have already remarked, Mr. McGore considered life's Creator only a second-rate imitator of the masters whom he had been studying for forty years.

Meanwhile Frank and Maureen, having won five straight games, were about to win the sixth. Frank, who was serving, tossed the ball high with his left hand, leaned far back as if he were about to fall over, then immediately lunged forward with a broad arching motion, his glossy racquet giving a glancing blow to the ball, which shot across the net and bounced like white lightning past Simpson, who gave it a helpless sidewise look.

"That's it," said the Colonel.

Simpson felt greatly relieved. He was too ashamed of his inept strokes to be capable of enthusiasm for the game, and this shame was intensified by the extraordinary attraction he felt for Maureen. All the players bowed to each other as was the custom, and Maureen gave a sidelong smile as she adjusted the strap on her bared shoulder. Her husband was applauding with an air of indifference.

"We must have a game of singles," remarked the Colonel, slapping his son on the back with gusto as the latter, baring his teeth, pulled on his white, crimson-striped club blazer with a violet emblem on one side.

"Tea!" said Maureen. "I'm dying for some tea."

Everyone moved into the shadow of a giant elm, where the butler and the black-and-white maid had set up a portable table. There was tea dark as Munich beer, sandwiches consisting of cuc.u.mber slices on rectangles of crustless bread, a swarthy cake pocked with black raisins, and large strawberries with cream. There were also several earthenware bottles of ginger ale.

"In my days," began the Colonel, lowering himself with ponderous relish into a folding canvas chair, "we preferred real, full-blooded English sports: rugby, cricket, hunting. There is something foreign about today's games, something skinny-legged. I am a staunch advocate of manly holds, juicy meat, an evening bottle of port-which does not prevent me," concluded the Colonel, as he smoothed his large mustache with a little brush, "from enjoying robust old paintings that have the l.u.s.ter of that same hearty wine."

"By the way, Colonel, the Veneziana has been hung," said McGore in his dreary voice, laying his hat on the lawn by his chair and rubbing the crown of his head, naked as a knee, around which still curled thick, dirty gray locks. "I picked the best-lighted spot in the gallery. They have rigged a lamp over it. I'd like you to have a look."

The Colonel fixed his glistening eyes in turn on his son, on the embarra.s.sed Simpson, and on Maureen, who was laughing and grimacing from the hot tea.

"My dear Simpson," he exclaimed emphatically, pouncing on his chosen prey, "you haven't seen it yet! Pardon me for tearing you away from your sandwich, my friend, but I feel obligated to show you my new painting. The connoisseurs are going crazy over it. Come on. Of course I don't dare ask Frank."

Frank made a jovial bow. "You're right, Father. Paintings perturb me."

"We'll be right back, Mrs. McGore," said the Colonel as he got up. "Careful, you're going to step on the bottle," he addressed Simpson, who had also risen. "Prepare to be showered with beauty."

The three of them headed for the house across the softly sunlit lawn. Narrowing his eyes, Frank looked after them, looked down at McGore's hat abandoned on the gra.s.s by the chair (it exhibited to G.o.d, to the blue heavens, to the sun, its whitish underside with a dark greasy spot in the center, on the imprint of a Viennese hat shop), and then, turning toward Maureen, said a few words that will doubtless surprise the unperceptive reader. Maureen was sitting in a low armchair, covered with trembling ringlets of sunlight, pressing the gilt meshwork of the racquet to her forehead, and her face immediately became older and more severe when Frank said, "Now then, Maureen. It's time for us to make a decision...."

2.

McGore and the Colonel, like two guards, led Simpson into a cool, s.p.a.cious hall, where paintings glistened on the walls and there was no furniture other than an oval table of glossy black wood standing in the center, all four of its legs reflected in the mirrorlike walnut-yellow of the parquet. Having conducted their prisoner to a large canvas in an opaque gilded frame, the Colonel and McGore stopped, the former with his hands in his pockets, the latter pensively picking some dry gray pollenlike matter out of his nostril and scattering it with a light rolling rub of his fingers.

The painting was very fine indeed. Luciani had portrayed the Venetian beauty in half-profile, standing against a warm, black background. Rose-tinted cloth revealed her prominent, dark-hued neck, with extraordinarily tender folds beneath the ear, and the gray lynx fur with which her cherry-red mantlet was trimmed was slipping off her left shoulder. With the elongated fingers of her right hand spread in pairs, she seemed to have been on the point of adjusting the falling fur but to have frozen motionless, her hazel, uniformly dark eyes gazing fixedly, languidly from the canvas. Her left hand, with white ripples of cambric encircling the wrist, was holding a basket of yellow fruit; the narrow crown of her headdress glowed atop her dark-chestnut hair. On the left the black was interrupted by a large right-angled opening straight into the twilight air and the bluish-green chasm of the cloudy evening.

Yet it was not those details of stupendous umbral interplay, nor the dark-hued warmth of the entire painting, that struck Simpson. It was something else. Tilting his head slightly to one side and blus.h.i.+ng instantly, he said, "G.o.d, how she resembles-"

"My wife," finished McGore in a bored voice, scattering his dry pollen.

"It's incredibly good," whispered Simpson, tilting his head the other way, "incredibly ..."

"Sebastiano Luciani," said the Colonel, complacently narrowing his eyes, "was born at the end of the fifteenth century in Venice and died in the mid-sixteenth in Rome. His teachers were Bellini and Giorgione and his rivals Michelangelo and Raffaello. As you can see, he synthesized in his work the power of the former and the tenderness of the latter. It's true he was not overly fond of Santi, and here it was not just a matter of professional vanity-legend has it that our artist was taken with a Roman lady called Margherita, known subsequently as 'la Fornarina.' Fifteen years before his death he took monastic vows upon receiving from Clement VII a simple and profitable appointment. Ever since then he has been known as Fra Sebastiano del Piombo. Piombo means 'lead,' for his duties consisted of applying enormous lead seals to the fiery papal bulls. A dissolute monk, he was fond of carousing and composed indifferent sonnets. But what a master...."

The Colonel gave Simpson a quick glance, noting with satisfaction the impression the painting had made on his speechless guest.

It should again be emphasized, however, that Simpson, unaccustomed as he was to the contemplation of artwork, of course could not fully appreciate the mastery of Sebastiano del Piombo, and the one thing that fascinated him-apart, of course, from the purely physiological effect of the splendid colors on his optic nerves-was the resemblance he had immediately noticed, even though he was seeing Maureen for the first time. And the remarkable thing was that the Veneziana's face-the sleek forehead, bathed, as it were, in the recondite gloss of some olivaster moon, the totally dark eyes, the placidly expectant expression of her gently joined lips-clarified for him the real beauty of that other Maureen who kept laughing, narrowing her eyes, s.h.i.+fting her pupils in a constant struggle with the sunlight whose bright maculae glided across her white frock as she separated the rustling leaves with her racquet in search of a ball that had rolled into hiding.

Taking advantage of the liberty that an English host allows his guests, Simpson did not return to the tea table, but set off across the garden, rounding the star-shaped flower beds, and soon losing his way amid the checkerboard shadows of an avenue in the park, with its smell of fern and decaying leaves. The enormous trees were so old that their branches had had to be propped up by rusted braces, and they hunched over ma.s.sively like dilapidated giants on iron crutches.

"G.o.d, what a stunning painting," Simpson whispered again. He walked unhurriedly, waving his racquet, stooped, his rubber soles lightly slapping. One must picture him clearly: gaunt, reddish-haired, clad in rumpled white trousers and a baggy gray jacket with half-belt; and also take careful note of the lightweight, rimless pince-nez on his pockmarked b.u.t.tonlike nose, his weak, slightly mad eyes, and the freckles on his convex forehead, his cheekbones, and his neck, red from the summer sun.

He was in his second year at university, lived modestly, and diligently attended lectures on theology. He and Frank became friends not only because fate had a.s.signed them the same apartment (consisting of two bedrooms and a common parlor), but, above all, like most weak-willed, bashful, secretly rapturous people, he involuntarily clung to someone in whom everything was vivid and firm-teeth, muscles, the physical strength of the soul, which is willpower. For his part, Frank, the pride of his college, who rowed in a racing scull and flew across the field with a leather watermelon under his arm, who knew how to land a punch on the very tip of the chin where there is the same kind of funny bone as in the elbow, a punch that would put an adversary to sleep-this extraordinary, universally liked Frank found something very flattering to his vanity in his friends.h.i.+p with the weak, awkward Simpson. Simpson, incidentally, was privy to something odd that Frank concealed from his other chums, who knew him only as a fine athlete and an exuberant chap, paying no attention whatever to occasional rumors that Frank was exceptionally good at drawing but showed his drawings to no one. He never spoke about art, was ever ready to sing and swig and carouse, yet suddenly a strange gloom would come over him and he would not leave his room or let anyone in, and only his roommate, lowly Simpson, would see what he was up to. What Frank created during these two or three days of ill-humored isolation he either hid or destroyed, and then, as if having paid an agonizing tribute to his vice, he would again become his merry, uncomplicated self. Only once did he bring this up with Simpson.

"You see," he said, wrinkling his limpid forehead and forcefully knocking the ashes from his pipe, "I feel that there is something about art, and painting in particular, that is effeminate, morbid, unworthy of a strong man. I try to struggle with this demon because I know how it can ruin people. If I yield to it completely, then, instead of a peaceful, ordered existence with finite distress and finite delights, with those precise rules without which any game loses its appeal, I shall be doomed to constant chaos, tumult, G.o.d knows what. I'll be tormented to my dying day, I shall become like one of those wretches I've run into in Chelsea, those vain, long-haired fools in velvet jackets-harried, weak, enamored only of their sticky palettes...."

But the demon must have been very potent. At the end of the winter semester, without a word to his father (thereby hurting him deeply), Frank went off in third cla.s.s to Italy, to return a month later directly to the university, suntanned and joyous, as if he had rid himself once and for all of the murky fever of creation.

Then, with the advent of summer vacation, he invited Simpson for a stay at his father's and Simpson accepted in a burst of grat.i.tude, for he was thinking with horror of the usual return home to his peaceful northern town where some shocking crime occurred every month, and to his parson father, a gentle, harmless, but totally insane man who devoted more attention to his harp and his chamber metaphysics than to his flock.

The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us. That is why Simpson, in front of whom the long-dead Venetian girl had just risen in her cambric and velvet, now reminisced, as he ambled along the violet dirt of the lane, soundless at this evening hour; he reminisced about his friends.h.i.+p with Frank, about his father's harp, about his own cramped, cheerless youth. The resonant forest stillness was complemented now and then by the crackle of a branch touched one knew not by whom. A red squirrel scurried down a tree trunk, ran across to a neighboring trunk with its bushy tail erect, and darted up again. In the soft flow of sunlight between two tongues of foliage midges circled like golden dust, and a b.u.mblebee, entangled in the heavy lacework of a fern, already buzzed with a more reserved, evening tone.

Simpson sat down on a bench spattered with the white traces of dried bird droppings, and hunched over, propping his sharp elbows on his knees. He sensed the onset of an auditory hallucination that had afflicted him since childhood. When in a meadow, or, as now, in a quiet, already duskening wood, he would involuntarily begin to wonder if, through this silence, he might perhaps hear the entire, enormous world traversing s.p.a.ce with a melodious whistle, the bustle of distant cities, the pounding of sea waves, the singing of telegraph wires above the deserts. Gradually his hearing, guided by his thoughts, began to detect those sounds in earnest. He could hear the chugging of a train, even though the tracks might have been dozens of miles away; then the clanging and screeching of wheels and-as his recondite hearing grew ever more acute-the pa.s.sengers' voices, their coughs and laughter, the rustling of their newspapers, and, finally, plunging totally into his acoustic mirage, he clearly distinguished their heartbeat, and the rolling crescendo of that beat, that drone, that clangor, deafened Simpson. He opened his eyes with a shudder and realized that the pounding was that of his own heart.

"Lugano, Como, Venice ...," he murmured as he sat on the bench under a soundless hazelnut tree, and right away he heard the subdued plas.h.i.+ng of sunny towns, and then, closer, the tinkling of bells, the whistle of pigeon wings, a high-pitched laugh akin to the laugh of Maureen, and the ceaseless shuffling of unseen pa.s.sersby. He wanted to halt his hearing there, but his hearing, like a torrent, rushed ever deeper. Another instant and, unable now to halt his extraordinary plunge, he was hearing not only their footfalls but their hearts. Millions of hearts were swelling and thundering, and Simpson, coming fully to his senses, realized that all those sounds, all those hearts were concentrated in the frenzied beat of his own.

He raised his head. A light wind, like the motion of a silk cape, pa.s.sed along the avenue. The sun's rays were a gentle yellow.

He rose with a feeble smile and, forgetting his racquet on the bench, went toward the house. It was time to dress for dinner.

3.

"It's hot with this fur on, though! No, Colonel, it's only cat. It's true my Venetian rival wore something more expensive. But the color is the same, isn't it? A perfect likeness, in short."

"If I dared I'd coat you with varnish, and send Luciani's canvas up to the attic," courteously countered the Colonel, who, in spite of his strict principles, was not averse to challenging a lady as attractive as Maureen to a flirtatious verbal duel.

"I would split with laughter," she parried.

"I fear, Mrs. McGore, that we make a terribly poor background for you," said Frank, with a broad, boyish grin. "We are crude, complacent anachronisms. Now if your husband were to don a coat of armor-"