Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov [58]
“All right, I am ready. Give me the sign,” he avidly said.
Gradus, deciding to risk it, glanced at the hand in Bretwit’s lap: unperceived by its owner, it seemed to be prompting Gradus in a manual whisper. He tried to copy what it was doing its best to convey—mere rudiments of the required sign.
“No, no,” said Bretwit with an indulgent smile for the awkward novice. “The other hand, my friend. His Majesty is left-handed, you know.”
Gradus tried again—but, like an expelled puppet, the wild little prompter had disappeared. Sheepishly contemplating his five stubby strangers, Gradus went through the motions of an incompetent and half-paralyzed shadow-grapher and finally made an uncertain V-for-Victory sign. Bretwit’s smile began to fade.
His smile gone, Bretwit (the name means Chess Intelligence) got up from his chair. In a larger room he would have paced up and down—not in this cluttered study. Gradus the Bungler buttoned all three buttons of his tight brown coat and shook his head several times.
“I think,” he said crossly, “one must be fair. If I bring you these valuable papers, you must in return arrange an interview, or at least give me his address.”
“I know who you are,” cried Bretwit pointing. “You’re a reporter! You are from that cheap Danish paper sticking out of your pocket” (Gradus mechanically fumbled at it and frowned). “I had hoped they had given up pestering me! The vulgar nuisance of it! Nothing is sacred to you, neither cancer, nor exile, nor the pride of a king” (alas, this is true not only of Gradus—he has colleagues in Arcady too).
Gradus sat staring at his new shoes—mahogany red with sieve-pitted caps. An ambulance screamed its impatient way through dark streets three stories below. Bretwit vented his irritation on the ancestral letters lying on the table. He snatched up the neat pile with its detached wrapping and flung it all in the wastepaper basket. The string dropped outside, at the feet of Gradus who picked it up and added it to the scripta.
“Please, go,” said poor Bretwit. “I have a pain in my groin that is driving me mad. I have not slept for three nights. You journalists are an obstinate bunch but I am obstinate too. You will never learn from me anything about my king. Good-bye.”
He waited on the landing for his visitor’s steps to go down and reach the front door. It was opened and closed, and presently the automatic light on the stairs went out with the sound of a kick.
Line 287: humming as you pack
The card (his twenty-fourth) with this passage (lines 287-299) is marked July 7th, and under that date in my little agenda I find this scribble: DR. AHLERT, 3.30 P.M. Feeling a bit nervous, as most people do at the prospect of seeing a doctor, I thought I would buy on my way to him something soothing to prevent an accelerated pulse from misleading credulous science. I found the drops I wanted, took the aromatic draught in the pharmacy, and was coming out when I noticed the Shades leaving a shop next door. She was carrying a new traveling grip. The dreadful thought that they might be going away on a summer vacation neutralized the medicine I had just swallowed. One gets so accustomed to another life’s running alongside one’s own that a sudden turn-off on the part of the parallel satellite causes in one a feeling of stupefaction, emptiness, and injustice. And what is more he had not yet finished “my” poem!
“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