I am so constituted that I absolutely must gulp down the juice of three oranges before confronting the rigours of day. So at seven-thirty I took a quick shower, and five minutes later was out of the house in the company of the long-eared and dejected Sobakevich.
The air was keen, the sky clear and burnished. Southward the empty road could be seen ascending a grey-blue hill among patches of snow. A tall leafless poplar, as brown as a broom, rose on my right, and its long morning shadow crossing to the opposite side of the street reached there a crenulated, cream-coloured house which, according to Cockerell, had been thought by my predecessor to be the Turkish Consulate on account of crowds of fez wearers he had seen entering. I turned left, northward, and walked a couple of blocks downhill to a restaurant that I had noted on the eve; but the place had not opened yet, and I turned back. Hardly had I taken a couple of steps when a great truck carrying beer rumbled up the street, immediately followed by a small pale blue sedan with the white head of a dog looking out, after which came another great truck, exactly similar to the first. The humble sedan was crammed with bundles and suitcases; its driver was Pnin. I emitted a roar of greeting, but he did not see me, and my only hope was that I might walk uphill fast enough to catch him while the red light one block ahead kept him at bay.
I hurried past the rear truck, and had another glimpse of my old friend, in tense profile, wearing a cap with ear-flaps and a storm coat; but next moment the light turned green, the little white dog leaning out yapped at Sobakevich, and everything surged forward--truck one, Pnin, truck two. From where I stood I watched them recede in the frame of the roadway, between the Moorish house and the Lombardy poplar. Then the little sedan boldly swung past the front truck and, free at last, spurted up the shining road, which one could make out narrowing to a thread of gold in the soft mist where hill after hill made beauty of distance, and where there was simply no saying what miracle might happen.
Cockerell, brown-robed and sandalled, let in the cocker and led me kitchenward, to a British breakfast of depressing kidney and fish.
'And now,' he said, 'I am going to tell you the story of Pnin rising to address the Cremona Women's Club and discovering he had brought the wrong lecture.'
The End