Pale Fire Part 8

round bookshelf?] - No, wait a minute, you better just keep going west till you hit the Florence Houghton Room, and there you cross over to the north side of the building. You cannot miss it" [returning pencil to ear].

Not being a mariner or a fugitive king, he promptly got lost and after vainly progressing through a labyrinth of stacks, asked about the Icelandic Collection of a stern-looking mother librarian who was checking cards in a steel cabinet on a landing. Her slow and detailed directions promptly led him back to the main desk.

"Please, I cannot find," he said, slowly shaking his head.

"Didn't you -" he girl began, and suddenly pointed up: "Oh, there he is!" Along the open gallery that ran above the hall, parallel to its short side, a tall bearded man was crossing over at a military quick march from east to west. He vanished behind a bookcase but not before Gradus had recognized the great rugged frame, the erect carriage, the high-bridged nose, the straight brow, and the energetic arm swing, of Charles Xavier the Beloved.

Our pursuer made for the nearest stairs - and soon found himself among the bewitched hush of Rare Books. The room was beautiful and had no doors; in fact, some moments pa.s.sed before he could discover the draped entrance he himself had just used. The awful perplexities of his quest blending with the renewal of impossible pangs in his belly, he dashed back - ran three steps down and nine steps up, and burst into a circular room where a bald-headed suntanned professor in a Hawaiian s.h.i.+rt sat at a round table reading with an ironic expression on his face a Russian book. He paid no attention to Gradus who traversed the room, stepped over a fat little white dog without awakening it, clattered down a helical staircase and found himself in Vault P. Here, a well-lit, pipe-lined, white-washed pa.s.sage led hint to the sudden paradise of a water closet for plumbers or lost scholars where, cursing, he hurriedly transferred his automatic from its precarious dangle-pouch to his coat and relieved himself of another portion of the liquid h.e.l.l inside him. He started to climb up again, and noticed in the temple light of the stacks an employee, a slim Hindu boy, with a call card in his hand. I had never spoken to that lad but had felt more than once his blue-brown gaze upon me, and no doubt my academic pseudonym was familiar to him but some sensitive cell in him, some chord of intuition, reacted to the harshness of the killer's interrogation and, as if protecting me from a cloudy danger, he smiled and said: "I do not know him, sir." Gradus returned to the Main Desk.

"Too bad," said the girl, "I just saw him leave."

"Bozhe moy, Bozhe moy," muttered Gradus, who sometimes at moments of stress used Russian e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns.

"You'll find him in the directory," she said pus.h.i.+ng it towards him, and dismissing the sick man's existence to attend to the wants of Mr. Gerald Emerald who was taking out a fat bestseller in a cellophane jacket.

Moaning and s.h.i.+fting from one foot to the other, Gradus started leafing through the college directory but when he found the address, he was faced with the problem of getting there.

"Dulwich Road," he cried to the girl. "Near? Far? Very far, probably?"

"Are you by any chance Professor Pnin's new a.s.sistant?" asked Emerald.

"No," said the girl. "This man is looking for Dr. Kinbote, I think. You are looking for Dr. Kinbote, aren't you?"

"Yes, and I can't any more," said Gradus.

"I thought so," said the girl. "Doesn't he live somewhere near Mr. Shade, Gerry?"

"Oh, definitely," said Gerry, and turned to the killer: "I can drive you there if you like. It is on my way."

Did they talk in the car, these two characters, the man in green and the man in brown? Who can say? They did not. After all, the drive took only a few minutes (it took me, at the wheel of my powerful Kramler, four and a half).

"I think I'll drop you here," said Mr. Emerald. "It's that house up there." One finds it hard to decide what Gradus alias Grey wanted more at that minute: discharge his gun or rid himself of the inexhaustible lava in his bowels. As he began hurriedly fumbling at the car door, unfastidious Emerald leaned, close to him, across him, almost merging with him, to help him open it - and then, slamming it shut again, whizzed on to some tryst in the valley. My reader will, I hope, appreciate all the minute particulars I have taken such trouble to present to him after a long talk I had with the killer; he will appreciate them even more if I tell him that, according to the legend spread later by the police, Jack Grey had been given a lift, all the way from Roanoke, or somewhere, by a lonesome trucker! One can only hope that an impartial search will turn up the trilby forgotten in the Library - or in Mr. Emerald's car.

Line 957: Night Rote I remember one little poem from Night Rote (meaning "the nocturnal sound of the sea") that happened to be my first contact with the American poet Shade. A young lecturer on American Literature, a brilliant and charming boy from Boston, showed me that slim and lovely volume in Onhava, in my student days. The following lines opening this poem, which is ent.i.tled "Art," pleased me by their catchy lilt and jarred upon the religious sentiments instilled in me by our very "high" Zemblan church.

From mammoth hunts and Odysseys And Oriental charms To the Italian G.o.ddesses With Flemish babes in arms.

Line 962: Help me, Will. Pale Fire.

Paraphrased, this evidently means: Let me look in Shakespeare for something I might use for a t.i.tle. And the find is "pale fire." But in which of the Bard's works did our poet cull it? My readers must make their own research. All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens - in Zemblan! It certainly contains nothing that could be regarded as an equivalent of "pale fire" (if it had, my luck would have been a statistical monster).

English was not taught in Zembla before Mr. Campbell's time. Conmal mastered it all by himself (mainly by learning a lexicon by heart) as a young man, around 1880, when not the verbal inferno but a quiet military career seemed to open before him, and his first work (the translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets) was the outcome of a bet with a fellow officer. He exchanged his frogged uniform for a scholar's dressing gown and tackled The Tempest. A slow worker, he needed half a century to translate the works of him whom he called "dze Bart," in their entirety. After this, in 1930, he went on to Milton and other poets, steadily drilling through the ages, and had just completed Kipling's "The Rhyme of the Three Sealers" ("Now this is the Law of the Muscovite that he proves with shot and steel") when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals, his last words in his last delirium being "Comment dit-on 'mourir' en anglais?" - a beautiful and touching end.

It is easy to sneer at Conmal's faults. They are the naive failings of a great pioneer. He lived too much in his library, too little among boys and youths. Writers should see the world, pluck its figs and peaches, and not keep constantly meditating in a tower of yellow ivory - which was also John Shade's mistake, in a way. We should not forget that when Conmal began his stupendous task no English author was available in Zemblan except Jane de Faun, a lady novelist in ten volumes whose works, strangely enough, are unknown in England, and some fragments of Byron translated from French versions.

A large, sluggish man with no pa.s.sions save poetry, he seldom moved from his warm castle and its fifty thousand crested books, and had been known to spend two years in bed reading and writing after which, much refreshed, he went for the first and only time to London, but the weather was foggy, and he could not understand the language, and so went back to bed for another year.

English being Conmal's prerogative, his Shakspere remained invulnerable throughout the greater part of his long life. The venerable Duke was famed for the n.o.bility of his work; few dared question its fidelity. Personally, I had never the heart to check it. One callous Academician who did, lost his seat in result and was severely reprimanded by Conmal in an extraordinary sonnet composed directly in colorful, if not quite correct, English, beginning: I am not slave! Let be my critic slave.

I cannot be. And Shakespeare would not want thus.

Let drawing students copy the acanthus, I work with Master on the architrave!

Line 991: horseshoes Neither Shade nor I had ever been able to ascertain whence precisely those ringing sounds came - which of the five families dwelling across the road on the lower slopes of our woody hill played horseshoe quoits every other evening; but the tantalizing tingles and jingles contributed a pleasant melancholy note to the rest of Dulwich Hill's evening sonorities - children calling to each other, children being called home, and the ecstatic barking of the boxer dog whom most of the neighbors disliked (he overturned garbage cans) greeting his master home.

Through the trees I distinguished John's white s.h.i.+rt and gray hair; he sat in his Nest (as he called it), the arborlike porch or veranda I have mentioned in my note to lines 47-48. I could not keep from advancing a little nearer - oh, discreetly, almost on tiptoe; but then I noticed he was resting, not writing, and I openly walked up to his porch or perch. His elbow was on the table, his fist supported his temple, his wrinkles were all awry, his eyes moist and misty; he looked like an old tipsy witch. He lifted his free hand in greeting without changing his att.i.tude, which although not unfamiliar to me struck me this time as more forlorn than pensive.

"Well," I said, "has the muse been kind to you?"

"Very kind," he replied, slightly bowing his hand-propped head. "exceptionally kind and gentle. In fact, I have here [indicating a huge pregnant envelope near him on the oilcloth] practically the entire product. A few trifles to settle and [suddenly striking the table with his fist] I've swung it, by G.o.d."

The envelope, unfastened at one end, bulged with stacked cards.

"Where is the missus?" I asked (mouth dry).

"Help me, Charlie, to get out of here," he pleaded. "Foot gone to sleep. Sybil is at a dinner-meeting of her club."

"A suggestion," I said, quivering. "I have at my place half a gallon of Tokay. I'm ready to share my favorite wine with my favorite poet. We shall have for dinner a knackle of walnuts, a couple of large tomatoes, and a bunch of bananas. And if you agree to show me your 'finished product,' there will be another treat: I promise to divulge to you why I gave you, or rather who gave you, your theme."

"What theme?" said Shade absently, as he leaned on my arm and gradually recovered the use of his numb limb.

"Our blue inenubilable Zembla, and the red-capped Steinmann, and the motorboat in the sea cave, and -"

"Ah," said Shade, "I think I guessed your secret quite some time ago. But all the same I shall sample your wine with pleasure. Okay, I can manage by myself now." Well did I know he could never resist a golden drop of this or that, especially since he was severely rationed at home. With an inward leap of exultation I relieved him of the large envelope that hampered his movements as he descended the steps of the porch, sideways, like a hesitating infant. We crossed the lawn, we crossed the road. Clink-clank, came the horseshoe music from Mystery Lodge. In the large envelope I carried I could feel the hard-cornered, rubberbanded batches of index cards. We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse - I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten b.u.t.terfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment, I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky. I was holding all Zembla pressed to my heart.

Lines 993-995: A dark Vanessa, etc.

One minute before his death, as we were crossing from his demesne to mine and had begun working up between the junipers and ornamental shrubs, a Red Admirable (see note to line 270) came dizzily whirling around us like a colored flame. Once or twice before we had already noticed the same individual, at that same time, on that same spot, where the low sun finding an aperture in the foliage splashed the brown sand with a last radiance while the evening's shade covered the rest of the path. One's eyes could not follow the rapid b.u.t.terfly in the sunbeams as it flashed and vanished, and flashed again, with an almost frightening imitation of conscious play which now culminated in its setting upon my delighted friend's sleeve. It took off, and we saw it next morning sporting in an ecstasy of frivolous haste around a laurel shrub, every now and then perching on a lacquered leaf and sliding down its grooved middle like a boy down the banister on his birthday. Then the tide of the shade reached the laurels, and the magnificent, velvet-and-flame creature dissolved in it.

Line 998: Some neighbor's gardener Some neighbor's! The poet had seen my gardener many times, and this vagueness I can only a.s.sign to his desire (noticeable elsewhere in his handling of names, etc.) to give a certain poetical patina, the bloom of remoteness, to familiar figures and things - although it is just possible he might have mistaken him in the broken light for a stranger working for a stranger. This gifted gardener I discovered by chance one idle spring day. when I was slowly wending my way home after a maddening and embarra.s.sing experience at the college indoor swimming pool. He stood at the top of a green ladder attending to the sick branch of a grateful tree in one of the most famous avenues in Appalachia. His red flannel s.h.i.+rt lay on the gra.s.s. We conversed, a little shyly, he above, I below. I was pleasantly surprised at his being able to refer all his patients to their proper habitats. It was spring, and we were alone in that admirable colonnade of trees which visitors from England have photographed from end to end. I can enumerate here only a few kinds of those trees: Jove's stout oak and two others: the thunder-cloven from Britain, the knottyentrailed from a Mediterranean island; a weatherfending line (now lime), a phoenix (now date palm), a pine and a cedar (Cedrus), all insular; a Venetian sycamore tree (Acer); two willows, the green, likewise from Venice, the h.o.a.r-leaved from Denmark; a midsummer elm, its barky fingers enringed with ivy; a midsummer mulberry, its shade inviting to tarry; and a clown's sad cypress from Illyria. He had worked for two years as a male nurse in a hospital for Negroes in Maryland. He was hard up. He wanted to study landscaping, botany and French ("to read in the original Baudelaire and Dumas"). I promised him some financial a.s.sistance. He started to work at my place the very next day. He was awfully nice and pathetic, and all that, but a little too talkative and completely impotent which I found discouraging. Otherwise he was a strong strapping fellow, and I hugely enjoyed the aesthetic pleasure of watching him buoyantly struggle with earth and turf or delicately manipulate bulbs, or lay out the flagged path which may or may not be a nice surprise for my landlord, when he safely returns from England (where I hope no bloodthirsty maniacs are stalking him!). How I longed to have him (my gardener, not my landlord) wear a great big turban, and shalwars, and an ankle bracelet. I would certainly have him attired according to the old romanticist notion of a Moorish prince, had I been a northern king - or rather had I still been a king (exile becomes a bad habit). You will chide me, my modest man, for writing so much about you in this note, but I feel I must pay you this tribute. After all, you saved my life. You and I were the last people who saw John Shade alive, and you admitted afterwards to a strange premonition which made you interrupt your work as; you noticed us from the shrubbery walking toward the porch where stood - (Superst.i.tiously I cannot write out the odd dark word you employed.) Line 1000: [= Line 1: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain]

Through the back of John's thin cotton s.h.i.+rt one could distinguish patches of pink where it stuck to the skin above and around the outline of the funny little garment he wore under the s.h.i.+rt as all good Americans do. I see with such awful clarity one fat shoulder rolling, the other rising; his gray mop of hair, his creased nape; the red bandanna handkerchief limply hanging out of one hip pocket, the wallet bulge of the other; the broad deformed pelvis; the gra.s.s stains on the seat of his old khaki pants, the scuffed back seams of his loafers; and I hear his delightful growl as he looks back at me, without stopping, to say something like: "Be sure not to spill anything - this is not a paper chase," or, [wincing] "I'll have to write again to Bob Wells [the town mayor] about those d.a.m.ned Thursday night trucks."

We had reached the Goldsworth side of the lane, and the flagged walk that scrambled along the side lawn to connect with the gravel path leading up from Dulwich Road to the Goldsworth front door, when Shade remarked, "You have a caller."

In profile to us on the porch a short thickset, dark-haired man in a brown suit stood holding by its ridiculous strap a shabby and shapeless briefcase, his curved forefinger still directed toward the bell b.u.t.ton he had just pressed.

"I will kill him," I muttered. Recently a bonneted girl had made me accept a bunch of religious tracts and had told me her brother, whom for some reason I had pictured to myself as a fragile neurotic youth, would drop in to discuss with me G.o.d's Purpose, and explain everything I had not understood in the tracts. Youth, indeed!

Had I ever seen Gradus before? Let me think. Had I? Memory shakes her head. Nevertheless the killer affirmed to me later that once from my tower, overlooking the Palace orchard, I had waved to him as he and one of my former pages, a boy with hair like excelsior, were carrying cradled gla.s.s from the hothouse to a horsedrawn van; but, as the caller now veered toward us and transfixed us with his snakesad, close-set eyes, I felt such a tremor of recognition that had I been in bed dreaming I would have awoken with a groan.

His first bullet ripped a sleeve b.u.t.ton off my black blazer, another sang past my ear. It is evil piffle to a.s.sert that he aimed not at me (whom he had just seen in the library - let us be consistent, gentlemen, ours is a rational world after all), but at the gray-locked gentleman behind me. Oh, he was aiming at me all right but missing me every time, the incorrigible bungler, as I instinctively backed, bellowing and spreading my great strong arms (with my left hand still holding the poem, "still clutching the inviolable shade," to quote Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888), in an effort to halt the advancing madman and s.h.i.+eld John, whom I feared he might, quite accidentally, hit, while he, my sweet, awkward old John, kept clawing at me and pulling me after him, back to the protection of his laurels, with the solemn fussiness of a poor lame boy trying to get his spastic brother out of the range of the stones hurled at them by schoolchildren, once a familiar sight in all countries. I felt - I still feel - John's hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them, only to abandon them at once as if pa.s.sing to me, in a sublime relay race, the baton of life. One of the bullets that spared me struck him in the side and went through his heart. His presence behind me abruptly failing me caused me to lose my balance, and, simultaneously, to complete the farce of fate, my gardener's spade dealt gunman Jack from behind the hedge a tremendous blow on the pate, felling him and sending his weapon flying from his grasp. Our savior retrieved it and helped me to my feet. My coccyx and right wrist hurt badly but the poem was safe. John, though, lay p.r.o.ne on the ground, with a red spot on his white s.h.i.+rt. I still hoped he had not been killed. The madman sat on the porch step, dazedly nursing with b.l.o.o.d.y hands a bleeding head. Leaving the gardener to watch over him I hurried into the house and concealed the invaluable envelope under a heap of girls' galoshes, furred s...o...b..ots and white wellingtons heaped at the bottom of a closet, from which I exited as if it had been the end of the secret pa.s.sage that had taken me all the way out of my enchanted castle and right from Zembla to this Arcady. I then dialed 11111 and returned with a gla.s.s of water to the scene of the carnage. The poor poet had now been turned over and lay with open dead eyes directed up at the sunny evening azure. The armed gardener and the battered killer were smoking side by side on the steps. The latter, either because he was in pain, or because he had decided to play a new role, ignored me as completely as if I were a stone king on a stone charger in the Tessera Square of Onhava; but the poem was safe.

The gardener took the gla.s.s of water I had placed near a flowerpot beside the porch steps and shared it with the killer, and then accompanied him to the bas.e.m.e.nt toilet, and presently the police and the ambulance arrived, and the gunman gave his name as Jack Grey, no fixed abode, except the Inst.i.tute for the Criminal Insane, ici, good dog, which of course should have been his permanent address all along, and which the police thought he had just escaped from.

"Come along, Jack, we'll put something on that head of yours," said a calm but purposeful cop stepping over the body, and then there was the awful moment when Dr. Sutton's daughter drove up with Sybil Shade.

In the course of that chaotic night I found a moment to transfer the poem from under the booties of Goldsworth's four nymphets to the austere security of my black valise, but only at daybreak did I find it safe enough to examine my treasure. We know how firmly, how stupidly I believed that Shade was composing a poem, a kind of romaunt, about the King of Zembla. We have been prepared for the horrible disappointment in store for me. Oh, I did not expect him to devote himself completely to that theme! It might have been blended of course with some of his own life stuff and sundry Americana - but I was sure his poem would contain the wonderful incidents I had described to him, the characters I had made alive for him and all the unique atmosphere of my kingdom. I even suggested to him a good t.i.tle - the t.i.tle of the book in me whose pages he was to cut: Solus Rex, instead of which I saw Pale Fire, which meant to me nothing. I started to read the poem. I read faster and faster. I sped through it, snarling, as a furious young heir through an old deceiver's testament. Where were the battlements of my sunset castle? Where was Zembla the Fair? Where her spine of mountains? Where her long thrill through the mist? And my lovely flower boys, and the spectrum of the stained windows, and the Black Rose Paladins, and the whole marvelous tale?

Nothing of it was there! The complex contribution I had been pressing upon him with a hypnotist's patience and a lover's urge was simply not there. Oh, but I cannot express the agony! Instead of the wild glorious romance - what did I have? An autobiographical, eminently Appalachian, rather old-fas.h.i.+oned narrative in a neoPopian prosodic style - beautifully written of course - Shade could not write otherwise than beautifully - but void of my magic, of that special rich streak of magical madness which I was sure would run through it and make it transcend its time.

Gradually I regained my usual composure. I reread Pale Fire more carefully. I liked it better when expecting less. And what was that? What was that dim distant music, those vestiges of color in the air? Here and there I discovered in it and especially, especially in the invaluable variants, echoes and spangles of my mind, a long ripplewake of my glory. I now felt a new, pitiful tenderness toward the poem as one has for a fickle young creature who has been stolen and brutally enjoyed by a black giant but now again is safe in our hall and park, whistling with the stableboys, swimming with the tame seal. The spot still hurts, it must hurt, but with strange grat.i.tude we kiss those heavy wet eyelids and caress that polluted flesh. My commentary to this poem, now in the hands of my readers, represents an attempt to sort out those echoes and wavelets of fire, and pale phosph.o.r.escent hints, and all the many subliminal debts to me. Some of my notes may sound bitter - but I have done my best not to air any grievances. And in this final scholium my intention is not to complain of the vulgar and cruel nonsense that professional reporters and Shade's "friends" in the obituaries they concocted allowed themselves to spout when misdescribing the circ.u.mstances of Shade's death. I regard their references to me as a mixture of of journalistic callousness and the venom of vipers. I do not doubt that many of the statements made in this work will be brushed aside by the guilty parties when it is out. Mrs. Shade will not remember having been shown by her husband "who showed her everything" one or two of the precious variants. The three students lying on the gra.s.s will turn out to be totally amnesic. The desk girl at the Library will not recall (will have been told not to recall) anybody asking for Dr. Kinbote on the day of the murder. And I am sure that Mr. Emerald will interrupt briefly his investigation of some mammate student's resilient charms to deny with the vigor of roused virility that he ever gave anybody a lift to my house that evening. In other words, everything will be done to cut off my person completely from my dear friend's fate.

Nevertheless, I have had my little revenge: public misapprehension indirectly helped me to obtain the right of publis.h.i.+ng Pale Fire. My good gardener, when enthusiastically relating to everybody what he had seen, certainly erred in several respects - not so much perhaps in his exaggerated account of my "heroism" as in the a.s.sumption that Shade had been deliberately aimed at by the so-called Jack Grey; but Shade's widow found herself so deeply affected by the idea of my having "thrown myself" between the gunman and his target that during a scene I shall never forget, she cried out, stroking my hands: "There are things for which no recompense in this world or another is great enough." That "other world" comes in handy when misfortune befalls the infidel but I let it pa.s.s of course, and, indeed, resolved not to refute anything, saying instead: "Oh, but there is a recompense, my dear Sybil. It may seem to you a very modest request but - give me the permission, Sybil, to edit and publish John's last poem." The permission was given at once, with new cries and new hugs, and already next day her signature was under the agreement I had a quick little lawyer draw up. That moment of grateful grief you soon forgot, dear girl. But I a.s.sure you that I do not mean any harm, and that John Shade perhaps, will not be too much annoyed by my notes, despite the intrigues and the dirt. Because of these machinations I was confronted with nightmare problems in my endeavors to make people calmly see - without having them immediately scream and hustle me - the truth of the tragedy - a tragedy in which I had been not a "chance witness" but the protagonist, and the main, if only potential, victim. The hullabaloo ended by affecting the course of my new life, and necessitated my removal to this modest mountain cabin; but I did manage to obtain, soon after his detention, an interview, perhaps even two interviews, with the prisoner. He was now much, more lucid than when he cowered bleeding on my porch step, and he told me all I wanted to know. By making him believe I could help him at his trial I forced him to confess his heinous crime - his deceiving the police and the nation by posing as Jack Grey, escapee from an asylum, who mistook Shade for the man who sent him there. A few days later, alas, he thwarted justice by slitting his throat with a safety razor blade salvaged from an unwatched garbage container. He died, not so much because having played his part in the story he saw no point in existing any longer, but because he could not live down this last crowning botch - killing the wrong person when the right one stood before him. In other words, his life ended not in a feeble splutter of the clockwork but in a gesture of humanoid despair. Enough of this. Exit Jack Grey.

I cannot recall without a shudder the lugubrious week that I spent in New Wye before leaving it, I hope, forever. I lived in constant fear that robbers would deprive me of my tender treasure. Some of my readers may laugh when they learn that I fussily removed it from my black valise to an empty steel box in my landlord's study, and a few hours later took the ma.n.u.script out again, and for several days wore it, as it were, having distributed the ninety-two index cards about my person, twenty in the right-hand pocket of my coat, as many in the left-hand one, a batch of forty against my right nipple and the twelve precious ones with variants in my innermost left-breast pocket. I blessed my royal stars for having taught myself wife work, for I now sewed up all four pockets. Thus with cautious steps, among deceived enemies, I circulated, plated with poetry, armored with rhymes, stout with another man's song, stiff with cardboard, bullet-proof at long last.

Many years ago - how many I would not care to say - I remember my Zemblan nurse telling me, a little man of six in the throes of adult insomnia: "Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan" (my darling, G.o.d makes hungry, the Devil thirsty). Well, folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here.

Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. Gentlemen, I have suffered very much, and more than any of you can imagine. I pray for the Lord's benediction to rest on my wretched countrymen. My work is finished. My poet is dead.

"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.

G.o.d will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may a.s.sume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heteros.e.xual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an oldfas.h.i.+oned Melodrama with three princ.i.p.als: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out - somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a s.h.i.+p, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door - a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus.

Index The italicized numerals refer to the lines in the poem and the comments thereon. The capital letters G, K, S (which see) stand for the three main characters in this work.

A., Baron, Oswin Affenpin, last Baron of Aff, a puny traitor, 286. Acht, Iris, celebrated actress, d. 1888, a pa.s.sionate and powerful woman, favorite of Thurgus the Third (q.v.), 130. She died officially by her own hand; unofficially, strangled in her dressing room by a fellow actor, a jealous young Gothlander, now, at ninety, the oldest, and least important, member of the Shadows (q.v.) group. Alfin, King, surnamed The Vague, 1873-1918, reigned from 1900; K.'s father; a kind, gentle, absent-minded monarch, mainly interested in automobiles, flying machines, motorboats and, at one time, sea sh.e.l.ls; killed in an airplane accident, 71. Andronnikov and Niagarin, two Soviet experts in quest of a buried treasure, 130, 681, 741; see Crown Jewels.

Arnor, Romulus, poet about town and Zemblan patriot, 1914-1958, his poem quoted, 80; executed by the Extremists.

Aros, a fine town in E. Zembla, capital of Conmal's dukedom; once the mayors.h.i.+p of the worthy Ferz ("chessqueen") Bretwit, a cousin of the granduncle of Oswin Bretwit (q.v.), 149, 286.

B., Baron, involuntary father-in-law of Baron A. and imaginary old friend of the Bretwit (q.v.) family, 286.

Bera, a mountain range dividing the peninsula lengthwise; described with some of its glittering peaks, mysterious pa.s.ses and picturesque slopes, 149. Blawick, Blue Cove, a pleasant seaside resort on the Western Coast of Zembla, casino, golf course, sea food, boats for hire, 149.

Blenda, Queen, the King's mother, 1878-1936, reigned from 1918, 71. Boscobel, site of the Royal Summerhouse, a beautiful, piny and duny spot in W. Zembla, soft hollows imbued with the writer's most amorous recollections, now (1959) a "nudist colony" - whatever that is, 149, 596. Botkin, V., American scholar of Russian descent, 894; kingbot, maggot of extinct fly that once bred in mammoths and is thought to have hastened their phylogenetic end, 247; bottekin-maker, 71; bot, plop, and boteliy, big-bellied (Russ.); botkin or bodkin, a, Danish stiletto.

Bregberg. See Bera.

Bretwit, Oswin, 1914-1959, diplomat and Zemblan patriot, 286. See also under Odevalla and Aros.

Campbell, Walter, b. 1890, in Glasgow; K.'s tutor, 1922-1931, an amiable gentleman with a mellow and rich mind; dead shot and champion skater; now in Iran; 130.

Charles II, Charles Xavier Vseslav, last King of Zembla, surnamed The Beloved, b. 1915, reigned 1936-1958; his crest, 1; his studies and his reign, 12; fearful fate of predecessors, 62; his supporters, 70; parents, 71; bedroom, 80; escape from palace, 130; and across the mountains, 149; engagement to Disa recalled, 275; parenthetical pa.s.sage through Paris, 286; and through Switzerland, 408: visit to Villa Disa, 433; night in mountains recalled, 597, 662; his Russian blood, and Crown Jewels (q.v. by all means), 681; his arrival in the, U.S.A., 691; letter to Disa stolen, 741; and quoted, 768; his portrait discussed, 894; his presence in library, 949; ident.i.ty almost revealed, 991: Solus Rex, 1000. See also Kinbote.

Conmal, Duke of Aros, 1855-1955, K.'s uncle, the eldest half-brother of Queen Blenda (q.v.); n.o.ble paraphrast, 12; his version of Timon of Athens, 39, 130; his life and work, 962.

Crown Jewels, 130, 681; see Hiding Place.

Disa, d.u.c.h.ess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone; my lovely, pale, melancholy Queen, haunting my dreams, and haunted by dreams of me, b. 1928; her alb.u.m and favorite trees, 49; married 1949, 80; her letters on ethereal paper with a watermark I cannot make out, her image torturing me in my sleep, 433.

Embla, a small old town with a wooden church surrounded by sphagnum bogs at the saddest, loneliest, northmost point of the misty peninsula, 149, 433. Emblem, meaning "blooming" in Zemblan; a beautiful bay with bluish and black, curiously striped rocks and a luxurious growth of heather on its gentle slopes, in the southmost part of W. Zembla, 433.

Falkberg, a pink cone, 71; snowhooded, 149.

Flatman, Thomas, 1637-88, English poet, scholar and miniaturist, not known to old fraud, 894.

Fleur, Countess de Fyler, an elegant lady-in-waiting, 71, 80; 433. G, see Gradus.

Garh, a farmer's daughter, 149, 433. Also a rosy-cheeked goose-boy found in a country lane, north of Troth, in 1936, only now distinctly recalled by the writer. Glitterntin, Mt., a splendid mountain in the Bera Range (q.v.); pity I may never climb it again, 149.

Gordon, see Krummholz.

Gradus, Jakob, 1915-1959; alias Jack Degree, de Grey, d'Argus, Vinogradus, Leningradus, etc.; a Jack of small trades and a killer, 12, 17; lynching the wrong people, 80; his approach synchronized with S 's work on the poem, 120, 131; his election and past tribulations, 171; the first lap of his journey, Onhava to Copenhagen, 181, 209; to Paris, and meeting with Oswin Bretwit, 286; to Geneva, and talk with little Gordon at Joe Lavender's place near Lex, 408; calling headquarters from Geneva, 469; his name in a variant, and his wait in Geneva, 596; to Nice, and his wait there, 697; his meeting with Izumrudov in Nice and discovery of the King's address, 741; from Paris to New York, 873; in New York, 949 1; his morning in New York, his journey to New Wye, to the campus, to Dulwich Rd., 949 2; the crowning blunder, 1000.

Griff, old mountain farmer and Zemblan patriot, 149.

Grindelwood, a fine town in E. Zembla, 71, 149.

Hiding place, potaynik (q.v.) Hodinski, Russian adventurer, d. 1800, also known as Hodyna, 681; resided in Zembla 1778-1800; author of a celebrated pastiche and lover of Princess (later Queen) Yaruga (q.v.), mother of Igor II, grandmother of Thurgus (q.v.). Igor II, reigned 1800-1845, a wise and benevolent king, son of Queen Yaruga (q. v.) and father of Thurgus III (q. v.); a very private section of the picture gallery in the Palace, accessible, only to the reigning monarch, but easily broken into through Bower P by an inquisitive p.u.b.escent, contained the statues of Igor's four hundred favorite catamites, in pink marble, with inset gla.s.s eyes and various touched up details, an outstanding exhibition of verisimilitude and bad art, later presented by K. to an Asiatic potentate.

K, see Charles II and Kinbote.

Kalixhaven, a colorful seaport on the western coast, a few miles north of Blawick (q.v.), 171; many pleasant memories.

Kinbote, Charles, Dr., an intimate friend of S, his literary adviser, editor and commentator; first meeting and friends.h.i.+p with S, Foreword; his interest in Appalachian birds, 1; his good-natured request to have S use his stories, 12; his modesty, 34; his having no library in his Timonian cave, 39; his belief in his having inspired S, 42; his house in Dulwich Road, and the windows of S 's house, 47; Prof. H. contradicted and corrected, 61, 71; his anxieties and insomnias, 62; the map he made for S, 71; his sense of humor, 79, 91; his belief that the term "iridule" is S 's invention, 109; his weariness, 120; his sports activities, 130; his visit to S 's bas.e.m.e.nt, 143; his trusting the reader enjoyed the note, 149; boyhood and the Orient Express recalled, 162; his request that the reader consult a later note, 169; his quiet warning to G, 171; his remarks on critics and other sallies endorsed by S, 172; his partic.i.p.ation in certain festivities elsewhere, his being debarred from S 's birthday party upon coming home, and his sly trick next morning, 181; his hearing about Hazel's "poltergeist" phase, 230; poor who?, 231; his futile attempts to have S get off the subject of natural history and report on the work in progress, 238; his recollection of the quays in Nice and Mentone, 240; his utmost courtesy towards his friend's wife, 247; his limited knowledge of lepidoptera and the sable gloom of his nature marked like a dark Vanessa with gay flashes, 270; his discovery of Mrs. S 's plan to whisk S to Cedarn and his decision to go there too, 288; his att.i.tude towards swans, 319; his affinity with Hazel, 334, 348; his walk with S to the weedy spot where the haunted barn once stood, 347; his objection to S 's flippant att.i.tude towards celebrated contemporaries, 376; his contempt for Prof. H. (not in Index), 377; his overworked memory, 384; his meeting with Jane Provost and examination of lovely lakeside snapshots, 385; his criticism of the 403-474 lines section, 403; his secret guessed, or not guessed, by S, his telling S about Disa, and S 's reaction, 417; his debate on Prejudice with S, 470; his discussion of Suicide with himself, 493; his surprise at realizing that the French name of one melancholy tree is the same as the Zemblan one of another, 501; his disapproval of certain flippant pa.s.sages in Canto Three, 5022; his views on sin and faith, 549; his editorial integrity and spiritual misery, 550; his remarks on a certain female student and on the number and nature of meals shared with the Shades, 579; his delight and amazement at a portentous meeting of syllables in two adjacent words, 596; his aphorism on the slayer and the slain, 597; his logcabin in Cedarn and the little angler, a honey-skinned lad, naked except for a pair of torn dungarees, one trouser leg rolled up, frequently fed with nought and nuts, but then school started or the weather changed, 609; his appearance at the H------s, 629; his severe criticism of quotational t.i.tles, from The Tempest etc., such as "pale fire," etc., 671; his sense of humor, 680; his arrival at Mrs. O'Donnell's country house recalled, 691; his appreciation of a quodlibet and his doubts anent its purported authors.h.i.+p, 727;, his loathing for a person who makes advances, and then betrays a n.o.ble and naive heart, telling foul stories about his victim and pursuing him with brutal practical jokes, 741; his not being able, owing to some psychological block or the fear of a second G, of traveling to a city only sixty or seventy miles distant, where he would certainly have found a good library, 747; his letter of April 2, 1959, to a lady who left it locked up among her treasures in her villa near Nice when she went that summer to Rome, 768; divine service in the morning and ramble in the evening with the poet finally speaking of his work, 802; his remarks on a lexical and linguistic miracle, 803; his borrowing a collection of F. K. Lane's letters from the motor court owner, 810; his penetrating into the bathroom where his friend sat and shaved in the tub, 887; his partic.i.p.ation in a Common Room discussion of his resemblance to the King, and his final rupture with E. (not in the Index), 894; he and S shaking with mirth over tidbits in a college textbook by Prof. C (not in the Index), 929; his sad gesture of weariness and reproach, 937; a young lecturer in Onhava University vividly recollected, 957; his last meeting with S in the poet's arbor, etc., 991; his discovery of the scholarly gardener recalled, 998; his unsuccessful attempt to save S 's life, and his success in salvaging the MS, 1000; his arranging to have it published without the help of two "experts," Foreword.

Kobaltana, a once fas.h.i.+onable mountain resort near the ruins of some old barracks, now a cold and desolate spot of difficult access and no importance but still remembered in military families and forest castles, not in the text. Kronberg, a snow-capped rocky mountain with a comfortable hotel, in the Bera Range, 70, 130, 149.

Krummholz, Gordon, b. 1944, a musical prodigy and an amusing pet; son of Joseph Lavender's famous sister, Elvina Krummholz, 408.

Lane, Franklin Knight. American lawyer and statesman, 1864-1921, author of a remarkable fragment, 810.

La.s.s, see Ma.s.s.

Lavender, Joseph S., see O'Donnell, Sylvia.

Male, see Word golf.

Mandevil, Baron Mirador, cousin of Radomir Mandevil (q.v.), experimentalist, madman and traitor, 171.

Mandevil, Baron Radomir, b. 1925, man of fas.h.i.+on and Zemblan patriot; in 1936, K's throne page, 130; in 1958, disguised, 149.

Marcel, the fussy, unpleasant, and not always plausible central character, pampered by everybody in Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, 181, 691. Marrowsky, a, a rudimentary spoonerism, from the name of a Russian diplomat of the early 19th century. Count Komarovski, famous at foreign courts for misp.r.o.nouncing his own name - Makarovski, Macaronski, Skomorovski, etc. Ma.s.s, Mars, Mare, see Male.

Multraberg, see Bera.

Niagarin and Andronnikov, two Soviet "experts" still in quest of a buried treasure, 130, 681, 741; see Crown Jewels.

Nitra and Indra, twin islands off Blawick, 149.

Nodo, Odon's half-brother, b. 1916, son of Leopold O'Donnell and of a Zemblan boy impersonator; a cardsharp and despicable traitor, 171.

Odevalla, a fine town north of Onhava in E. Zembla, once the mayors.h.i.+p of the worthy Zule ("chessrook") Bretwit, granduncle of Oswin Bretwit (q.v., q.v., as the crows say), 149, 286.

Odon, pseudonym of Donald O'Donnell, b. 1915, world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot; learns from K. about secret pa.s.sage but has to leave for theater, 130; drives K. from theater to foot of Mt. Mandevil, 149; meets K. near sea cave and escapes with him in motorboat, ibid.; directs cinema picture in Paris, 171; stays with Lavender in Lex, 408; ought not to marry that blubber-lipped cinemactress, with untidy hair, 691; see also O'Donnell, Sylvia.