Look at the Harlequins! by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online Page B

consciousness identified as a clever burlesque of my voice and manner. I had the odd sensation of a piece of myself being ripped off and tossed overboard, of my being separated from my own self, of flying forward and at the same time turning away. The second action prevailed,and presently, under the holm oak, I joined Iris.
    The crickets were stridulating, dusk had filled the pool, a ray of the outside lamp glistened on two parked cars. I kissed her lips, her neck, her necklace, her neck, her lips. Her response dispelled my ill humor; but I told her what I thought of the idiot before she ran back to the festively lit villa.
    Ivor personally brought up my supper, right to my bedside table, with well-concealed dismay at being balked of his art’s reward and charming apologies for having offended me, and “had I run out of pyjamas?” to which I replied that, on the contrary, I felt rather flattered, and in fact always slept naked in summer, but preferred not to come down lest a slight headache prevent me from not living up to that splendid impersonation.
    I slept fitfully, and only in the small hours glided into a deeper spell (illustrated for no reason at all with the image of my first little inamorata in the grass of an orchard) from which I was rudely roused by the spattering sounds of a motor. I slipped on a shirt and leant out of the window, sending a flock of sparrows whirring out of the jasmin, whose luxuriant growth reached up to the second floor, and saw, with a sensual start, Ivor putting a suitcase and a fishing rod into his car which stood, throbbing, practically in the garden. It was a Sunday, and I had been expecting to have him around all day, but there he was getting behind the wheel and slamming the door after him. The gardener was giving tactical directions with both arms; his pretty little boy was also there, holding a yellow and blue feather duster. And then I heard her lovely English voice bidding her brother have a good time. I had to lean out a little more to see her; she stood on a patch of cool clean turf, barefooted, barecalved, in an ample-sleeved peignoir, repeating her joyful farewell, which he could no longer hear.
    I dashed to the W.C. across the landing. A few momentslater, as I left my gurgling and gulping retreat, I noticed her on the other side of the staircase. She was entering my room. My polo shirt, a very short, salmon-colored affair, could not hide my salient impatience.
    “I hate to see the stunned look on the face of a clock that has stopped,” she said, as she stretched a slender brown arm up to the shelf where I had relegated an old egg timer lent me in lieu of a regular alarm. As her wide sleeve fell back I kissed the dark perfumed hollow I had longed to kiss since our first day in the sun.
    The door key would not work, that I knew; still I tried, and was rewarded by the silly semblance of recurrent clicks that did not lock anything. Whose step, whose sick young cough came from the stairs? Yes of course that was Jacquot, the gardener’s boy who rubbed and dusted things every morning. He might butt in, I said, already speaking with difficulty. To polish, for instance, that candlestick. Oh, what does it matter, she whispered, he’s only a conscientious child, a poor foundling, as all our dogs and parrots are. Your tum, she said, is still as pink as your shirt. And please do not forget, darling, to clear out before it’s too late.
    How far, how bright, how unchanged by eternity, how disfigured by time! There were bread crumbs and even a bit of orange peel in the bed. The young cough was now muted, but I could distinctly hear creakings, controlled footfalls, the hum in an ear pressed to the door. I must have been eleven or twelve when the nephew of my grand-uncle visited the Moscow country house where I was spending that hot and hideous summer. He had brought his passionate bride with him—straight from the wedding feast. Next day at the siesta hour, in a frenzy of curiosity and