Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov [62]
“Planning to travel?” I asked, smiling and pointing at the bag.
Sybil raised it by the ears like a rabbit and considered it with my eyes.
“Yes, at the end of the month,” she said. “After John is through with his work.”
(The poem!)
“And where, pray?” (turning to John).
Mr. Shade glanced at Mrs. Shade, and she replied for him in her usual brisk offhand fashion that they did not know for sure yet—it might be Wyoming or Utah or Montana, and perhaps they would rent somewhere a cabin at 6,000 or 7,000 feet.
“Among the lupines and the aspens,” said the poet gravely. (Conjuring up the scene.)
I started to calculate aloud in meters the altitude that I thought much too high for John’s heart but Sybil pulled him by the sleeve reminding him they had more shopping to do, and I was left with about 2,000 meters and a valerian-flavored burp.
But occasionally black-winged fate can display exquisite thoughtfulness! Ten minutes later Dr. A.—who treated Shade, too—was telling me in stolid detail that the Shades had rented a little ranch some friends of theirs, who were going elsewhere, had at Cedarn in Utana on the Idoming border. From the doctor’s I flitted over to a travel agency, obtained maps and booklets, studied them, learned that on the mountainside above Cedarn there were two or three clusters of cabins, rushed my order to the Cedarn Post Office, and a few days later had rented for the month of August what looked in the snapshots they sent me like a cross between a mujik’s izba and Refuge Z, but it had a tiled bathroom and cost dearer than my Appalachian castle. Neither the Shades nor I breathed a word about our summer address but I knew, and they did not, that it was the same. The more I fumed at Sybil’s evident intention to keep it concealed from me, the sweeter was the forevision of my sudden emergence in Tirolese garb from behind a boulder and of John’s sheepish but pleased grin. During the fortnight that I had my demons fill my goetic mirror to overflow with those pink and mauve cliffs and black junipers and winding roads and sage brush changing to grass and lush blue flowers, and death-pale aspens, and an endless sequence of green-shorted Kinbotes meeting an anthology of poets and a brocken of their wives, I must have made some awful mistake in my incantations, for the mountain slope is dry and drear, and the Hurleys’ tumble-down ranch, lifeless.
Line 293: She
Hazel Shade, the poet’s daughter, born in 1934, died 1957 (see notes to lines 230 and 347).
Line 316: The Toothwort White haunted our woods in May
Frankly, I am not certain what this means. My dictionary defines “toothwort” as “a kind of cress” and the noun “white” as “any pure white breed of farm animal or a certain genus of lepidoptera.” Little help is provided by the variant written in the margin:
In woods Virginia Whites occurred in May
Folklore characters, perhaps? Fairies? Or cabbage butterflies?
Line 319: wood duck
A pretty conceit. The wood duck, a richly colored bird, emerald, amethyst, carnelian, with black and white markings, is incomparably more beautiful than the much-overrated swan, a serpentine goose with a dirty neck of yellowish plush and a frogman’s black rubber flaps.
Incidentally, the popular nomenclature of American animals reflects the simple utilitarian minds of ignorant pioneers and has not yet acquired the patina of European faunal names.
Line 334: Would never come for her
“Would he ever come