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

like a monkey and immediately start to annoy me with a series of obscurely immoral statements, related to Life, Death, or God, which he specially relished making because he knew that they annoyed me — although I never believed that he really meant what he said.
    'At last, about three or four in the afternoon, he would put on his dressing-gown and shuffle into the sitting-room where, in disgust, I would leave him, huddled up by the fire and scratching his head. And next day, as I sat working in my digs, I would suddenly hear a great stamping up the stairs, and Sebastian would bounce into the room, clean, fresh, and excited, with the poem he had just finished.'
    All this, I trust, is very true to type, and one little detail strikes me as especially pathetic. It appears that Sebastian's English, though fluent and idiomatic, was decidedly that of a foreigner. His r's when beginning a word, rolled and rasped, he made queer mistakes, saying, for instance, 'I have seized a cold' or 'that fellow is sympathetic' — merely meaning that he was a nice Chap. He misplaced the accent in such words as 'interesting' or 'laboratory'. He mispronounced names like 'Socrates' or 'Desdemona'. Once corrected, he would never repeat the mistake, but the very fact of his not being quite sure about certain words distressed him enormously and he used to blush a bright pink when, owing to a chance verbal flaw, some utterance of his would not be quite understood by an obtuse listener. In those days, he wrote far better than he spoke, but still there was something vaguely un-English about his poems. None of them have reached me. True, his friend thought that perhaps one or two....
    He put down the cat and rummaged awhile among some papers in a drawer,' but he could not lay his hand on anything. 'Perhaps, in some trunk at my sister's place,' he said vaguely, 'but I'm not even sure.... Little things like that are the darlings of oblivion, and moreover I know Sebastian would have applauded their loss.'
    'By the way,' I said, 'the past you recall seems dismally wet meteorologically speaking — as dismal, in fact, as today's weather [it was a bleak day in February]. Tell me, was it never warm and sunny? Does not Sebastian himself refer somewhere to the "pink candlesticks of great chestnut trees" along the bank of some beautiful little river?'
    Yes, I was right, spring and summer did happen in Cambridge almost every year (that mysterious 'almost' was singularly pleasing). Yes, Sebastian quite liked to loll in a punt on the Cam. But what he liked above all was to cycle in the dusk along a certain path skirting meadows. There, he would sit on a fence looking at the wispy salmon-pink clouds turning to a dull copper in the pale evening sky and think about things. What things? That cockney girl with her soft hair still in plaits whom he once followed across the common, and accosted and kissed, and never saw again? The form of a particular cloud? Some misty sunset beyond a black Russian fir-wood (oh, how much I would give for such a memory coming to him!)? The inner meaning of grass blade and star? The unknown language of silence? The terrific weight of a dew-drop? The heartbreaking beauty of a pebble among millions and millions of pebbles, all making sense, but what sense? The old, old question of Who are you? to one's own self grown strangely evasive in the gloaming, and to God's world around to which one has never been really introduced. Or perhaps, we shall be nearer the truth in supposing that while Sebastian sat on that fence, his mind was a turmoil of words and fancies, incomplete fancies and insufficient words, but already he knew that this and only this was the reality of his life, and that his destiny lay beyond that ghostly battlefield which he would cross in due time.
    'Did I like his books? Oh, enormously. I didn't see much of him after he left Cambridge, and he never sent me any of his works. Authors, you know, are forgetful. But one day I got three of