Within, the diversity was as great as without. Four spacious rooms opened from the large hall that retained something of its hostelic stage in the generous dimensions of the grate. The hand rail of the stairs, and at least one of its spindles, dated from 1720, having been transferred to the house, while it was being built, from a far older one, whose very site was no longer exactly known. Very ancient, too, were the beautiful sideboard panels of game and fish in the dining-room. In the half a dozen rooms of which each of the upper floors consisted, and in the two wings in the rear, one could discover, among disparate pieces of furniture, some charming satinwood bureau, some romantic rosewood sofa, but also all kinds of bulky and miserable articles, broken chairs, dusty marble-topped tables, morose йtagиres with bits of dark-looking glass in the back as mournful as the eyes of old apes. The chamber Pnin got was a pleasant south-east one on the upper floor: it had remnants of gilt paper on the walls, an army cot, a plain washstand, and all kinds of shelves, brackets, and scrollwork mouldings. Pnin shook open the casement, smiled at the smiling forest, again remembered a distant first day in the country, and presently walked down, clad in a new navy-blue bathrobe and wearing on his bare feet a pair of ordinary rubber over-shoes, a sensible precaution if one intends to walk through damp and, perhaps, snake-infested grass. On the garden terrace he found Chateau.
Konstantin Ivanich Chateau, a subtle and charming scholar of pure Russian lineage despite his surname (derived, I am told, from that of a Russianized Frenchman who adopted orphaned Ivan), taught at a large New York university and had not seen his very dear Pnin for at least five years. They embraced with a warm rumble of joy. I confess to have been myself, at one time, under the spell of angelic Konstantin Ivanich, namely, when we used to meet every day in the winter of 1935 or 1936 for a morning stroll under the laurels and nettle trees of Grasse, southern France, where he then shared a villa with several other Russian expatriates. His soft voice, the gentlemanly St Petersburgan burr of his r's, his mild, melancholy caribou eyes, the auburn goatee he continuously twiddled, with a shredding motion of his long, frail fingers--everything about Chateau (to use a literary formula as old-fashioned as he) produced a rare sense of well-being in his friends. Pnin and he talked for a while, comparing notes. As not unusual with firm-principled exiles, every time they met after a separation they not only endeavoured to catch up with a personal past, but also to sum up by means of a few rapid passwords--allusions, intonations impossible to render in a foreign language--the course of recent Russian history, thirty-five years of hopeless injustice following a century of struggling justice and glimmering hope. Next, they switched to the usual shop talk of European teachers abroad, sighing and shaking heads over the ' typical American college student' who does not know geography, is immune to noise, and thinks education is but a means to get eventually a remunerative job. Then they inquired about each other's work in progress, and both were extremely modest and reticent about their respective researches. Finally, as they walked along a meadow path, brushing against the golden rod, toward the wood where a rocky river ran, they spoke of their healths: Chateau, who looked so jaunty, with one hand in the pocket of his white flannel trousers and his lustring coat rather rakishly opened on a flannel waistcoat, cheerfully said that in the near future he would have to undergo an exploratory operation of the abdomen, and Pnin said, laughing, that every time he was X-rayed, doctors vainly tried to puzzle out what they termed' a shadow behind the heart'.
'Good title for a bad novel,' remarked Chateau.
As they were passing a grassy knoll just before entering the wood, a pink-faced venerable man in a seersucker suit, with a shock of white hair and a tumefied purple nose resembling a huge raspberry, came striding toward them down the sloping field, a look of disgust contorting his features.
'I have to go back for my hat,' he cried dramatically as he drew near.
'Are you acquainted?' murmured Chateau, fluttering his hands introductively 'Timofey Pavlich Pnin, Ivan Ilyich Gramineev.'
'Moyo pochtenie (My respects),' said both men, bowing to each other over a powerful handshake.
'I thought,' resumed Gramineev, a circumstantial narrator, 'that the day would continue as overcast as it had begun. By stupidity (po gluposti) I came out with an unprotected head. Now the sun is' roasting my brains. I have to interrupt my work.'
He gestured toward the top of the knoll. There his easel stood in delicate silhouette against the blue sky. From that crest he had been painting a view of the valley beyond, complete with quaint old barn, gnarled apple tree, and kine.
'I can offer you my panama,' said kind Chateau, but Pnin had already produced from his bathrobe pocket a large red handkerchief: he expertly twisted each of its corners into a knot.
'Admirable.... Most grateful,' said Gramineev, adjusting this headgear.
'One moment,' said Pnin. 'You must tuck in the knots.'
This done, Gramineev started walking up the field toward his easel. He was a well-known, frankly academic painter, whose soulful oils--'Mother Volga', 'Three Old Friends' (lad, nag, dog), 'April Glade', and so forth-still graced a museum in Moscow.
'Somebody told me,' said Chateau, as he and Pnin continued to progress riverward, 'that Liza's boy has an extraordinary talent for painting. Is that correct?'
'Yes,' answered Pnin. 'All the more vexing (tem bolee obidno) that his mother, who I think is about to marry a third time, took Victor suddenly to California for the rest of the summer, whereas if he had accompanied me here, as had been planned, he would have had the splendid opportunity of being coached by Gramineev.'
'You exaggerate the splendour,' softly rejoined Chateau.
They reached the bubbling and glistening stream. A concave ledge between higher and lower diminutive cascades formed a natural swimming pool under the alders and pines. Chateau, a non-bather, made himself comfortable on a boulder. Throughout the academic year Pnin had regularly exposed his body to the radiation of a sun lamp; hence when he stripped down to his bathing trunks, he glowed in the dappled sunlight of the riverside grove with a rich mahogany tint. He removed his cross and his rubbers.
'Look, how pretty,' said observant Chateau.
A score of small butterflies, all of one kind, were settled on a damp patch of sand, their wings erect and closed, showing their pale undersides with dark dots and tiny orange-rimmed peacock spots along the hindwing margins; one of Pnin's shed rubbers disturbed some of them and, revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they fluttered around like blue snow-flakes before settling again.
'Pity Vladimir Vladimirovich is not here,' remarked Chateau. 'He would have told us all about these enchanting insects.'
'I have always had the impression that his entomology was merely a pose.'
'Oh no,' said Chateau. 'You will lose it some day,' he added, pointing to the Greek Catholic cross on a golden chainlet that Pnin had removed from his neck and hung on a twig. Its glint perplexed a cruising dragonfly.
'Perhaps I would not mind losing it,' said Pnin. 'As you well know, I wear it merely from sentimental reasons. And the sentiment is becoming burdensome. After all, there is too much of the physical about this attempt to keep a particle of one's childhood in contact with one's breast bone.'
'You are not the first to reduce faith to a sense of touch,' said Chateau, who was a practising Greek Catholic and deplored his friend's agnostic attitude.
A horsefly applied itself, blind fool, to Pnin's bald head, and was stunned by a smack of his meaty palm.