Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov [81]
How much happier the wide-awake indolents, the mon-archs among men, the rich monstrous brains deriving intense enjoyment and rapturous pangs from the balustrade of a terrace at nightfall, from the lights and the lake below, from the distant mountain shapes melting into the dark apricot of the afterglow, from the black conifers outlined against the pale ink of the zenith, and from the garnet and green flounces of the water along the silent, sad, forbidden shoreline. Oh my sweet Boscobel! And the tender and terrible memories, and the shame, and the glory, and the maddening intimations, and the star that no party member can ever reach.
On Wednesday morning, still without news, Gradus telegraphed headquarters saying that he thought it unwise to wait any longer and that he would be staying at Hotel Lazuli, Nice.
Lines 597-608: the thoughts we should roll-call, etc.
This passage should be associated in the reader’s mind with the extraordinary variant given in the preceding note, for only a week later Tanagra dust and “our royal hands” were to come together, in real life, in real death.
Had he not fled, our Charles II might have been executed; this would have certainly happened had he been apprehended between the palace and the Rippleson Caves; but he sensed those thick fingers of fate only seldom during his flight; he sensed them feeling for him (as those of a grim old shepherd checking a daughter’s virginity) when he was slipping, that night, on the damp ferny flank of Mt. Mandevil (see note to line 149), and next day, at a more eerie altitude, in the heady blue, where the mountaineer becomes aware of a phantom companion. Many times that night our King cast himself upon the ground with the desperate resolution of resting there till dawn that he might shift with less torment what hazard soever he ran. (I am thinking of yet another Charles, another long dark man above two yards high.) But it was all rather physical, or neurotic, and I know perfectly well that my King, if caught and condemned and led away to be shot, would have behaved as he does in lines 606-608: thus he would look about him with insolent composure, and thus he would
Taunt our inferiors, cheerfully deride
The dedicated imbeciles and spit
Into their eyes just for the fun of it
Let me close this important note with a rather anti-Darwinian aphorism: The one who kills is always his victim’s inferior.
Line 603: Listen to distant cocks crow
One will recall the admirable image in a recent poem by Edsel Ford:
And often when the cock crew, shaking fire
Out of the morning and the misty mow
A mow (in Zemblan muwan) is the field next to a barn.
Lines 609-614: Nor can one help, etc.
This passage is different in the draft:
609 Nor can one help the exile caught by death
In a chance inn exposed to the hot breath
Of this America, this humid night:
Through slatted blinds the stripes of colored light
Grope for his bed—magicians from the past
With philtered gems—and life is ebbing fast.
This describes rather well the “chance inn,” a log cabin, with a tiled bathroom, where I am trying to coordinate these notes. At first I was greatly bothered by the blare of diabolical radio music from what I thought was some kind of amusement park across the road—it turned out to be camping tourists—and I was thinking of moving to another place, when they forestalled me. Now it is quieter, except for an irritating wind rattling through the withered aspens, and Cedarn is again a ghost town, and there are no summer fools or spies to stare at me, and my little blue-jeaned fisherman no longer stands on his stone in the stream, and perhaps it is better so.
Line 615: two tongues
English and Zemblan, English and Russian, English and Lettish, English and Estonian, English and Lithuanian, English and Russian, English and Ukrainian, English and Polish, English and Czech, English and Russian, English and Hungarian, English and Rumanian, English and Albanian, English and Bulgarian,