But Pnin was not listening. A faint ripple stemming from his recent seizure was holding his fascinated attention. It lasted only a few heartbeats, with an additional systole here and there--last, harmless echoes--and was resolved in demure reality as his distinguished hostess invited him to the lectern; but while it lasted, how limpid the vision was! In the middle of the front row of seats he saw one of his Baltic aunts, wearing the pearls and the lace and the blonde wig she had worn at all the performances given by the great ham actor Khodotov, whom she had adored from afar before drifting into insanity. Next to her, shyly smiling, sleek dark head inclined, gentle brown gaze shining up at Pnin from under velvet eyebrows, sat a dead sweetheart of his, fanning herself with a programme. Murdered, forgotten, unrevenged, incorrupt, immortal, many old friends were scattered throughout the dim hall among more recent people, such as Miss Clyde, who had modestly regained a front seat. Vanya Bednyashkin, shot by the Reds in 1919 in Odessa because his father had been a Liberal, was gaily signalling to his former schoolmate from the back of the hall. And in an inconspicuous situation Dr Pavel Pnin and his anxious wife, both a little blurred but on the whole wonderfully recovered from their obscure dissolution, looked at their son with the same life-consuming passion and pride that they had looked at him with that night in 1912 when, at a school festival, commemorating Napoleon's defeat, he had recited (a bespectacled lad all alone on the stage) a poem by Pushkin.
The brief vision was gone. Old Miss Herring, retired Professor of History, author of Russia Awakes (1922), was bending across one or two intermediate members of the audience to compliment Miss Clyde on her speech, while from behind that lady another twinkling old party was thrusting into her field of vision a pair of withered, soundlessly clapping hands.
Chapter Two
1
The famous Waindell College bells were in the midst of their morning chimes.
Laurence G. Clements, a Waindell scholar, whose only popular course was the Philosophy of Gesture, and his wife Joan, Pendelton '30, had recently parted with their daughter, her father's best student: Isabel had married in her junior year a Waindell graduate with an engineering job in a remote Western State.
The bells were musical in the silvery sun. Framed in the picture window, the little town of Waindell--white paint, black pattern of twigs--was projected, as if by a child, in primitive perspective devoid of aerial depth, into the slate-grey hills; everything was prettily frosted with rime; the shiny parts of parked cars shone; Miss Dingwall's old Scotch terrier, a cylindrical small boar of sorts, had started upon his rounds up Warren Street and down Spelman Avenue and back again; but no amount of neighbourliness, landscaping, and change-ringing could soften the season; in a fortnight, after a ruminant pause, the academic year would enter its most winterly phase, the Spring Term, and the Clementses felt dejected, apprehensive, and lonely in their nice old draughty house that now seemed to hang about them like the flabby skin and flapping clothes of some fool who had gone and lost a third of his weight. Isabel was so young after all, and so vague, and they really knew nothing about her in-laws beyond that wedding selection of marchpane faces in a hired hall with the vaporous bride so helpless without her glasses.
The bells, under the enthusiastic direction of Dr Robert Trebler, active member of the Music Department, were still going strong in the angelic sky, and over a frugal breakfast of oranges and lemons Laurence, blondish, baldish, and unwholesomely fat, was criticizing the head of the French Department, one of the people Joan had invited to meet Professor Entwistle of Goldwin University at their house that evening. 'Why on earth,' he fumed, 'did you have to ask that fellow Blorenge, a mummy, a bore, one of the stucco pillars of education? '
'I like Ann Blorenge,' said Joan, stressing her affirmation and affection with nods. 'A vulgar old cat I' cried Laurence. 'A pathetic old cat,' murmured Joan--and it was then that Dr Trebler stopped and the hallway telephone took over.
Technically speaking, the narrator's art of integrating telephone conversations still lags far behind that of rendering dialogues conducted from room to room, or from window to window across some narrow blue alley in an ancient town with water so precious, and the misery of donkeys, and rugs for sale, and minarets, and foreigners and melons, and the vibrant morning echoes. When Joan, in her brisk long-limbed way, got to the compelling instrument before it gave up, and said hullo (eyebrows up, eyes roaming), a hollow quiet greeted her; all she could hear was the informal sound of a steady breathing; presently the breather's voice said, with a cosy foreign accent: 'One moment, excuse me'--this was quite casual, and he continued to breathe and perhaps hem and hum or even sigh a lime to the accompaniment of a crepitation that evoked the turning over of small pages.
'Hullo!' she repeated.
'You are,' suggested the voice warily, 'Mrs Fire?'
'No,' said Joan, and hung up. 'And besides,' she went on, swinging back into the kitchen and addressing her husband who was sampling the bacon she had prepared for herself, 'you cannot deny that Jack Cockerell considers Blorenge to be a first-rate administrator.'
'What was that telephone call?'
'Somebody wanting Mrs Feuer or Fayer. Look here, if you deliberately neglect everything George--' [Dr O. G. Helm, their family doctor].
'Joan,' said Laurence, who felt much better after that opalescent rasher, 'Joan, my dear, you are aware aren't you, that you told Margaret Thayer yesterday you wanted a roomer?'
'Oh, gosh,' said Joan--and obligingly the telephone rang again.
'It is evident,' said the same voice, comfortably resuming the conversation, 'that I employed by mistake the name of the informer. I am connected with Mrs Cement?'
'Yes, this is Mrs Cements,' said Joan.
'Here speaks Professor--' There followed a preposterous little explosion. 'I conduct the classes in Russian. Mrs Fire, who is now working at the library part-time--'
'Yes--Mrs Thayer, I know. Well, do you want to see that room?'
He did. Could he come to inspect it in approximately half an hour? Yes, she would be in. Untenderly she cradled the receiver.
'What was it this time?' asked her husband, looking back, pudgy freckled hand on banister, on his way upstairs to the security of his study.
'A cracked ping-pong ball, Russian.'
'Professor Pnin, by God!' cried Laurence. "'I know him welclass="underline" he is the brooch--" Well, I flatly refuse to have that freak in my house.'
He trudged up, truculently. She called after him: 'Lore, did you finish writing that article last night?'
'Almost.' He had turned the comer of the stairs--she heard his hand squeaking on the banisters, then striking them. 'I will today. First I have that damned EOS examination to prepare.'
This stood for the Evolution of Sense, his greatest course (with an enrolment of twelve, none even remotely apostolic) which had opened and would close with the phrase destined to be over-quoted one day: The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.