Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov [135]
A wise girl, she controlled herself.
Dick did not know a thing of the whole mess. He thought I was her father. He thought she had run away from an upper-class home just to wash dishes in a diner. He believed anything. Why should I want to make things harder than they were by raking up all that muck?
But, I said, she must be sensible, she must be a sensible girl (with her bare drum under that thin brown stuff), she must understand that if she expected the help I had come to give, I must have at least a clear comprehension of the situation.
“Come, his name!”
She thought I had guessed long ago. It was (with a mischievous and melancholy smile) such a sensational name. I would never believe it. She could hardly believe it herself.
His name, my fall nymph.
It was so unimportant, she said. She suggested I skip it. Would I like a cigarette?
No. His name.
She shook her head with great resolution. She guessed it was too late to raise hell and I would never believe the unbelievably unbelievable
I said I had better go, regards, nice to have seen her.
She said really it was useless, she would never tell, but on the other hand, after all”Do you really want to know who it was? Well, it was”
And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puckering her parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name that the astute reader has guessed long ago.
Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness? I, too, had known it, without knowing it, all along. There was no shock, no surprise. Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes, with the express and perverse purpose of renderingshe was talking but I sat melting in my golden peaceof rendering that golden and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recognition, which my most inimical reader should experience now.
She was, as I say, talking. It now came in a relaxed flow. He was the only man she had ever been crazy about. What about Dick? Oh, Dick was a lamb, they were quite happy together, but she meant something different. And I had never counted, of course?
She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredibleand somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessaryfact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood.
I just managed to jerk my knee out of the range of a sketchy tapone of her acquired gestures.
She asked me not to be dense. The past was the past. I had been a good father, she guessedgranting me that. Proceed, Dolly Schiller.
Well, did I know that he had known her mother? That he was practically an old friend? That he had visited with his uncle in Ramsdale?oh, years agoand spoken at Mother’s club, and had tugged and pulled her, Dolly, by her bare arm onto his lap in front of everybody, and kissed her face, she was ten and furious with him? Did I know he had seen me and her at the inn where he was writing the very play she was to rehearse in Beardsley, two years later? Did I knowIt had been horrid of her to sidetrack me into believing that Clare was an old female, maybe a relative of his or a sometime lifemateand oh, what a close shave it had been when the Wace Journal carried his picture.
The Briceland Gazette had not. Yes, very amusing.
Yes, she said, this world was just one gag after another, if somebody wrote up her life nobody would ever believe it.
At this point, there came