The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online Page A

us with the flicker of the fire reflected in the brass knobs of the hearth. My interlocutor had known him so intimately that I think he was right in suggesting that Sebastian's sense of inferiority was based on his trying to out-England England, and never succeeding, and going on trying, until finally he realized that it was not these outward things that betrayed him, not the mannerisms of fashionable slang, but the very fact of his striving to be and act like other people when he was blissfully condemned to the solitary confinement of his own self.
    Still, he had done his best to be a standard undergraduate. Clad in a brown dressing-gown and old pumps, carrying soap-box and sponge-bag, he had strolled out on winter mornings on his way to the Baths round the comer. He had had breakfast in Hall, with the porridge as grey and dull as the sky above Great Court and the orange marmalade of exactly the same hue as the creeper on its walls. He had mounted his 'pushbike', as my informant called it, and with his gown across his shoulder had pedalled to this or that lecture hall. He had lunched at the Pitt (which, I understood, was a kind of club, probably with horsey pictures on the walls and very old waiters asking their eternal riddle: thick or clear?). He had played fives (whatever that may be) or some other tame game, and then had had tea with two or three friends; the talk had hobbled along between crumpet and pipe, carefully avoiding anything that had not been said by others. There may have been another lecture or two before dinner, and then again Hall, a very fine place which I was duly shown. It was being swept at the moment, and the fat white calves of Henry the Eighth looked as if they might get tickled.
    'And where did Sebastian sit?'
    'Down there, against the wall.'
    'But how did one get there? The tables seem miles long.'
    'He used to step up 'on the outer bench and walk across the table. One trod on a plate now and then, but it was the usual method. '
    Then, after dinner, he would go back to his rooms, or perhaps make his way with some silent companion to the little cinema on the market place where a Wild West film would be shown, or Charlie Chaplin stiffly trotting away from the big wicked man and skidding on the street corner.
    Then, after three or four terms of this sort of thing a curious change came over Sebastian. He stopped enjoying what he thought he ought to enjoy and serenely turned to what really concerned him. Outwardly, this change resulted in his dropping out of the rhythm of college life. He saw no one except my informant, who remained perhaps the only man in his life with whom he had been perfectly frank and natural — it was a handsome friendship and I quite understood Sebastian, for that quiet scholar struck me as being the finest and gentlest soul imaginable. They were both interested in English literature, and Sebastian's friend was already then planning that first work of his, The Laws of Literary Imagination, which, two or three years later, won for him the Montgomery Prize.
    'I must confess,' said he as he stroked a soft blue cat with celadon eyes which had appeared from nowhere and now made itself comfortable in his lap, 'I must confess that Sebastian rather pained me at that particular period of our friendship. Missing him in the lecture hall, I would go to his rooms and find him still in bed, curled up like a sleeping child, but gloomily smoking, with cigarette ash all over his crumpled pillow and inkstains on the sheet which hung loosely to the floor. He would only grunt in reply to my energetic greeting, not deigning even to change his position, so after hovering around and satisfying myself that he was not ill, I would go off to lunch, and then call upon him again only to find him lying on his other side and using a slipper for an ashtray. I would suggest getting him something to eat, for his cupboard was always empty, and presently, when I brought him a bunch of bananas, he would cheer up