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Fine Lines
Fine Lines
Vladimir Nabokov’s Scientific Art

Edited by Stephen H. Blackwell

& Kurt Johnson

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the foundation
established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMil-
lan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.
Copyright © 2016 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in
part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond
that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108
of the US Copyright Law and except by reviewers
for the public press), without written permission
from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in
quantity for educational, business, or promotional
use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@
yale.edu (US office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk
(UK office).
Designed and typeset by Chris Crochetière,
BW&A Books, Inc.
Printed in China.
Frontispiece: Color Plate 21 (detail)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015951601
isbn 978-0-300-19455-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso
z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Dieter E. Zimmer, an inspiration to all
who chase after Nabokov’s receding footsteps
Minister: No, you always draw such complicated things.
And look, you’ve even added shading. It’s revolting.
—Vladimir Nabokov, The Waltz Invention, 1938
Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Anatomical Diagrams xiii
Introduction 1

Black and White Figures

Old World 1–24 30
North America 25–43 54
Latin America 44–78 73
Evolution and Systematics 79–87 108
Wings 88–91 117
Measurements 92 123

Color Plates
Old World 1–27 126
North America 28–32 153
Latin America 33–36 158
Evolution and Systematics 37 162
Wings 38–56 163
Inscriptions to Véra 57–62 182
Plates to Essays E1–E13 188

Essays
Drawing with Words: The Toothwort White and Related Natural History Motifs
in Pale Fire | Robert Dirig 201
A Few Notes on Nabokov’s Childhood Entomology | Victor Fet 216
Chance, Nature’s Practical Jokes, and the “Non-Utilitarian Delights” of Butterfly
Mimicry | Victoria N. Alexander 225
Nabokov’s Evolution | James Mallet 235
Fictional Realism: Scaling the Twin Peaks of Art and Science | Dorion Sagan 243
Mountains of Detail: On the Trail with Nabokov’s Blues | Lauren K. Lucas,
Matthew L. Forister, James A. Fordyce, and Chris C. Nice 251
Nabokov’s Morphology: An Experiment in Appropriated Terminology |
Stephen H. Blackwell 260
 Swift and Underwing, Boulderfield and Bog: How Nabokov Drew the World from
Its Details | Robert Michael Pyle 269
Enchanted Hunting: Lolita and Lolita, Diana and diana | Brian Boyd 277
Nabokov’s Notes and Labels from the Museum of Comparative Zoology: Boon for a
Recondite Biographer or Data for a Serious Systematist? | Naomi E. Pierce,
Rodney Eastwood, Roger Vila, Andrew Berry, and Thomas Dai 285

Chronology of Nabokov’s Life 295

Bibliography 297
List of Contributors 305
Illustration Credits 307
Index 311

viii Contents
Preface

This book represents a landmark moment in the understanding of Vladimir Nabokov as

a scientist. After three decades of neglect and two decades of scientific confirmation and
revision, it is finally possible to present a comprehensive review of his achievement. The
collection of drawings gathered here also offers a rich window into his visual engagement
with the world of microscopic structures found inside butterflies. Nabokov’s visual passion
resulted in well over a thousand drawings, one hundred and forty-eight of which are in-
cluded here. These drawings, and the way Nabokov used them in his research, give import-
ant insight into how he perceived the world and attempted to know it, and these insights, in
turn, shed light on his artistic perception and creativity.
Never before has any appraisal of Nabokov’s research been based on a thorough review
of his laboratory notes, which, combined with his published scientific papers and the recent
DNA-based confirmations of two of his most controversial hypotheses, allow new clarity
in understanding the significance of his work and locating it in the contexts of evolution-
ary biology and systematics. Jotted notes accompanying many drawings reveal details of
his discovery process, showing how he sought to understand the evolutionary diversity of
Blue butterflies by means of morphology. The notes clarify Nabokov’s uncanny sense of the
interplay of temporal, spatial, and developmental factors underlying the major evolution-
ary and taxonomic questions of his day. Viewed in extended sequence across many cards,
the drawings allow an understanding of how he sought to trace the temporal—indeed the
evolutionary—history of the species he studied. Aesthetically, too, they present an unusual
temporal picture—one that brings to mind Nabokov’s habit of writing his novels on similar
note cards, working in nonlinear fashion, and thinking of novelistic time as a painted can-
vas or foldable magic carpet.
After an Introduction that provides a full historical and theoretical context for Nabokov’s
evolutionary work and its relation to his art, the captions to the drawings tell a fascinating
story of how Nabokov conducted his research, how he chose his comparison groups, and
how he identified new distinguishing features of butterfly genitalia. We place the draw-
ings together, in two groups (ninety-two black-and-white, fifty-six in color) between the
Introduction and the essays, so that the reader can view them all in close contiguity to one
another, much as Nabokov might have reviewed large groups of drawings as he worked to
discover relationships between butterfly species and construct hypotheses for their origins.
Extended contemplation of the drawings opens the opportunity for a cumulative aesthetic
impact, as the drawings’ composition and strange contents work their way into the view-
er’s perceptual framework. We intend this organization to facilitate the research of histo-
rians of science as well as that of those who undertake to study the drawings as aesthetic
artifacts.

ix
 The ten essays that follow the images, written by leading Nabokov specialists and by sci-
entists studying the same groups of butterflies he did, are intended as a first collective effort
to understand the significance of science in Nabokov’s life and art. Rather than exhausting
the topic of Nabokov as a scientist who also practiced art, or as an artist who happened to
pursue scientific knowledge, these essays demonstrate the rich soil for further sustained
attention and research. We hope that future writers will find inspiration in these essays.

x Preface
Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all the participants for their generous contributions of time and critical
acumen to this volume: more than many such collections, this one has involved a process of
constant communication and feedback among the participants, beginning with an online
symposium in November 2012. Almost every part of this book has been crafted in a collab-
orative spirit (not something Nabokov would have necessarily enjoyed!). Among the authors
in this volume, we wish to single out Victoria N. Alexander for her extra attention to all
the texts and her help resolving many early complexities, and Brian Boyd for his constant
support and encouragement, as well as his contribution of much more time and material
than he thought he would be able to provide. The Nabokov Estate and the Andrew Wylie
Agency have been extremely helpful and supportive at every stage of this project. We also
want to express our deepest gratitude to Dubi Benyamini and Zsolt Bálint, the first for his
photographs of Pseudolucia butterflies, and both for their groundbreaking work that made
this book possible, as well as for their help, patience, and indulgence throughout this proj-
ect. We also thank Dieter Zimmer and Steve Coates for their pioneering work in the field
of Nabokov’s science.
Generous financial support for this project was provided by the University of Tennes-
see, Knoxville’s Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures; its Exhibition,
Performance, and Publication Expense fund; and its Tennessee Humanities Center. Alan
Rutenberg of the Office of Research helped us refine our proposals. We also thank the Mc-
Guire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, University of Florida at Gainesville, which
houses Kurt Johnson’s Vladimir Nabokov Lepidoptera Archives.
The staff of the New York Public Library, including Isaac Gewirtz and his colleagues at
the Berg Collection, and Thomas Lisanti and his team at the Office of Permissions, were
extraordinarily helpful and efficient. To say that we could not have done this book without
them is a platitude that so vastly understates reality that one blushes to include it. Yet there
it is. Pam Hughes and the office staff of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages
and Literatures at the University of Tennessee were always gracious and helpful, especially
when we needed it most.
Sarah Funke Butler of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller was most obliging, securing generous
permission to use their reproductions of Nabokov’s inscription drawings. Doug Canfield
of the University of Tennessee Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures
assisted with technical features of the online symposium held November 5–9, 2012. We are
also grateful to friends and loved ones who watched, tolerated, and encouraged us, as well
as made suggestions about image choices and the book’s title.
Jean Thomson Black and the staff at Yale University Press have been extremely helpful
in their constant enthusiasm, patience, and flexibility as our project wended its way toward

xi
completion. We also thank our anonymous readers for their constructive and challenging
observations on our proposal and the essay manuscripts.
This project was begun with the kind approval of Dmitri Nabokov, who, sadly, passed
away too soon to see its completion. We certainly intend the book as something that would
have delighted him, and his father, and these pages embody our gratitude.

xii Acknowledgments
Anatomical Diagrams

Structures of the genital anatomy most frequently illustrated by Nabokov, assembled from
drawings on his laboratory cards.
Male: aedeagus, the penis; dorsal terminal elements (uncus, a dorso-terminal lobate ele-
ment; falx/humerulus, a contiguous but bent element, humerulus at base, falx bent at elbow
to make distinct forearm); furca, a U- or V-shaped structure supporting the penis; genital
ring (or vinculum), a ringlike structure holding the other genital parts; sagum, a variously
sized enfolded structure prominently surrounding the aedeagus in some Blues; the valve
(plural valvae) (=male clasper[s]), the male grasping organ, often with very specific termi-
nal structures.

Diagram 1: Structures of Male Genitalia

xiii
 Female: lamella (plural lamellae): terminal liplike elements surrounding the female gen-
ital opening; corpus bursa and ductus bursa, contiguous caudal and cephalic elements of the
female genital duct; papillae anales, paired terminal flaplike structures at the female genital
terminus.

Diagram 2: Structures of Female Genitalia

xiv Anatomical Diagrams

Fine Lines
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
Stephen H. Blackwell and Kurt Johnson

In a 1959 interview for Sports Illustrated, Vladimir Nabokov said to Robert H. Boyle, “I
cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of
knowing what it is.”1 Nabokov linked the driving force behind his two passions, artistic
literature and lepidoptery, in many ways. One especially apt method manifests itself in his
chosen research and writing medium: four-by-six-inch index cards. Nabokov saw his scien-
tific work as filling in gaps in knowledge about specific organisms, their interrelationships,
and their evolutionary course. In his artistic work, analogously recorded on note cards, he
would “just fill in the gaps of the picture, of this jigsaw puzzle which is quite clear in my
mind, picking out a piece here and a piece there.” Later on, he would qualify the phrase
“quite clear” with the more specific “utmost truthfulness and perception” of his effort to
copy on cards the “conceived picture . . . as faithfully as physically possible—a few vacant
lots always remain, alas.”2 In interviews, lectures, essays, and letters, Nabokov expresses
his sense that artistic creation is a matter of careful perception and also one of necessar-
ily incomplete understanding—just as science is also always incomplete. Knowledge and
artworks are continually in progress—and even the artist’s perception of inspiration and
the created artwork’s significance are necessarily gappy. As he wrote to the scholar Carl
Proffer on this very topic: “Many of the delightful combinations and clues [in Proffer’s Keys
to “Lolita”], though quite acceptable, never entered my head or are the result of an author’s
intuition and inspiration, not calculation and craft. Otherwise why bother at all—in your
case as well as mine.” 3 Just as the human quest for knowledge, of even the smallest corner of
the natural world, is “infinite . . . unquenchable, unattainable,” so also the artist—and the
reader or viewer of art—faces an infinite task of expanding depth.4 This affinity between
Nabokov’s views of artistic and scientific knowledge should give pause to those who feel
that he intended, desired, or ever believed it possible to control every facet of his works’
form, meaning, and interpretive history. His views also suggest that—to the extent that he
loved nature, its complexity and its elusiveness—he would wish his novels to participate in
and stimulate similarly unquenchable adventures.5
This book’s hybridity springs from two impulses: an intangible sense, on the one hand,
that everyone should have the opportunity to see these strange, often beautiful drawings;
and a recognition, on the other, that Nabokov ended up making a highly significant contri-
bution to the sciences of evolutionary biology and biogeography—one that these fields were
slow to recognize and appreciate. He did much more than name a few species and genera,
and the time is ripe to assess his complete scientific legacy. To that end, this volume pres-
ents ten essays by scholars: scientists who have continued or built on Nabokov’s lepidoptery
and humanists who probe links between his scientific work and his artistic explorations.
This volume offers a rare glimpse into the workshop of an explorer of inner space. For
the Nabokov enthusiast, these 148 illustrations offer a chance to accompany him as he jour-

1
neyed in the microscopic world of butterfly anatomy, seeking out structures and patterns
no one else had ever seen. To the historian of science, the drawings represent empirical
evidence of Nabokov’s research method, an approach that allowed him to erect ten genera
and name eleven species and subspecies.6 Though some viewed him as an overzealous tax-
onomic splitter—someone who sliced up groups into unnecessarily fine subdivisions—time
and subsequent research have shown that Nabokov’s proposals were predominantly accu-
rate and were, in fact, ahead of their peers in method and scope. These drawings and the
accompanying essays should help historians better delineate the precise benefits of mor-
phological research at a time when it was vying with other ascendant methodologies. To all,
they offer the vicarious thrill of watching an explorer at work, studying minute distinctions
in the natural world with extraordinary care—and discovering form, function, variety, and
beauty.
A handful of these drawings appeared in the compendium edited by Brian Boyd and
Robert Michael Pyle, Nabokov’s Butterflies, but due to the necessarily small selection, re-
ductions in size, and the limited number of high-resolution plates, that printing failed to
capture the depth of Nabokov’s visual passion for his object of study. Gennady Barabtarlo
has written that Nabokov exhibits “the ‘eye-thirsty’ love for the created world, in all its mi-
cro- and macro-forms, for things small and large, unnoticed or unworded before and thus
begging to be brought to life by precise and fresh description.”7 In his published works and
comments, Nabokov never specifically endorsed a “creator” other than “Nature”; he told his
sister that such work “enraptured” him and was “so enticing that [he] cannot describe it.”8
Whether love, obsession, or passion, the desire to see the never-before-seen drove Nabokov
in his effort to comprehend as much of the world around him as his physical body would
allow.
If we imagine these drawings, not just as artifacts, but as the result of hours of effort—if
we envision the careful preparation of the organs, the time-consuming process of fixing,
projecting, tracing, and refining each image—perhaps we get some sense of Nabokov’s deep
connection to each natural form. Subsequently, having considered each image carefully, we
can think of them all in series and contemplate the similarities, idiosyncrasies, and subtle
distinctions that hint at the flux of natural evolution. This alternation between frozen mo-
ments of time in evolution—“stopping places”—and an almost cinematographic contempla-
tion of time’s shadow, manifest in synchronic forms—rapid comparisons of many geograph-
ical variations—marks the distinctive component of Nabokov’s scientific methodology.

“
nabokov once said that he was “born a painter.”9 As a boy, he took drawing lessons
from Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, the renowned artist (to whom he wrote with a boy’s pride at
the age of forty-five of the five hundred drawings of butterflies he had made).10 Although the
drawings collected here were mostly produced with the aid of a camera lucida (a projection
device attached to a microscope), when we look at them we sense a rich exploration of com-
positional form in nature. In many, the precision, shading, ciliation, and asymmetry appear
to serve aesthetic ends in addition to real and anticipated scientific ones. The careful shad-
ing and the representation of cilia embody a heightened and extended attention to these
structures: it is as though Nabokov wished to stare at these objects for as long as possible,
to extract from them every iota of information and knowledge and aesthetic pleasure that

2 Blackwell and Johnson

his mind and visual acuity could discover. He did this for up to fourteen hours a day, even
to the point of severe eye strain and the possibility of damage to his vision.11
Although early on, from childhood into early middle age, Nabokov was keen to discover
an unnamed butterfly—to be a “first describer” and have his name attached to a species
name—he adopted a new perspective once he became engrossed in the study of micro-
scopic butterfly organs and their morphology in the laboratory. In this world of invisible
structures—things that “no one before [him] has seen”—he found a terra incognita to
explore, through the microscope, just as his real-life heroes, explorer-naturalists Grigory
Grumm-Grzhimaylo and Nikolay Przhevalsky, had marched off into Eurasia to describe
previously unknown parts of the natural world—“named the nameless . . . at every step,” as
Fyodor puts it in The Gift. In the genitalia of butterflies, Nabokov discovered an inner space
and forms of strange symmetry and asymmetry: beautiful hooks and hoods, forearms, pu-
gilists, and clasps and combs, spurs and brushes and elbows, even hints of Klansmen (Fig-
ures 1 and 20; Color Plate 35) and tiny caterpillars (Figure 14) or elephants (Figure 69)! He
valued careful depiction, greatly admiring Nikolai Kuznetsov’s study of butterfly morphol-
ogy, which he called “unsurpassed.”12
We follow Nabokov into this visual world both to experience his sense of wonder and
enthrallment before the amazing devices he found and to grasp, tangibly, how extensively
and diligently he labored, what extremes of careful delineation and distinction he recorded
between forms that might, to most other observers, appear essentially the same. All this
he did in the hope “by luck [to] hit upon some scrap of knowledge . . . that has not yet
become common knowledge,” scraps that lead to “inestimable happiness.”13 The drawings
probe nature’s extraordinary engineering as well as the aesthetic qualities inherent in such
perfection. In those with extra shading and colors and three-dimensional accuracy, he viv-
idly, irrepressibly, performs the kind of loving attention to these structures that he held
as the ideal form of knowledge quest. “Lovingly finger the links of the many chains that
connect [a] subject to the past and the future,” he exhorted his students at Wellesley Col-
lege, after a few years of his most productive research.14 These chains are characteristic,
for Nabokov always wanted to understand—even to experience directly—the connections
between objects in the present and their journey from the past to today; his attitude toward
the tangibility of the future appears to have moderated over the decades, if his novel Ada
is any guide, though he certainly remained interested in the possibility that future events
are not quite as indeterminate as they seem. But nature and art will, let’s hope, continue
far into the future, and following the links of the chain are a surety of that—even if, as he
wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson, his own scientific contribution might be eclipsed in
just twenty-five years.15
Just as Nabokov’s artistic writings inspire with their precision and originality of expres-
sion, their sensuous beauty, and their perceptual intricacy, so his scientific studies surprise
and energize with their discovery of minute detail, their attention to microscopic diff erence,
and their profoundly sustained engagement with tiny corners of the natural world. Through
this perseverance, the studies also uncover and explore new forms of natural beauty, and
these Nabokov analyzed obsessively through his six-plus years at the dissecting bench.
Not everyone will find a direct connection to Nabokov’s scientific passion by reading
his research articles. Nearly everyone, however, is drawn to the beauty of butterflies, and
Nabokov’s own engagement with that beauty is especially visible in his comparative draw-
ings of butterfly wings. We can follow his interest inward, zooming from the naked eye to

Introduction 3
the microscopic, as he examines wing patterns at finer and finer grain, ending with metic-
ulous analysis of exact locations of tiny individual wing scales, each about one twentieth of
a millimeter in width: pixels of color on the wing’s broad palette (about 250,000 dpi reso-
lution). This level of magnification then shifts to the insect interior and Nabokov’s chosen
evolutionary diagnostic tool: the male genitalia. These he figured in the hundreds, maybe
even thousands. Their general morphology was often critical to establish genera, and the
ratio of their component parts’ measurements could distinguish entities at the species and
subspecies level. Through this examination, Nabokov developed a keen ability to imagine
the evolution of many of the Blues, North American and South American—to picture the
flow of morphology in time and visualize evolution as if it were a film.
On seeing the drawings represented in this volume, one anonymous reviewer wondered:
Should we be troubled that Nabokov devoted so much energy to the depiction of butter-
fly sexual organs? As late as his story “Father’s Butterflies” (1939 or later), Nabokov cre-
ated a fictitious scientist who mocked the “genitalic” approach to butterfly taxonomy. Yet
at most two years later, he himself became a disciple of the practice, beginning in 1941
under the tutelage of William P. Comstock at the American Museum of Natural History in
New York. In his renowned 1945 article “Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae,” he expressed his
view that, for species with highly changeable and even unpredictable wing patterns—not
to mention those practicing mimicry—the genitalia were likely to evolve more slowly and
offered the most reliable clues to long-standing taxonomic relationships.16 Is it coincidental
that Nabokov penned his first treatment of pedophilia at around the same time (“The En-
chanter” [Volshebnik], 1939 [published posthumously in 1986])? Human sexuality is central
to at least three of his American works of fiction, Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada (and in the un-
finished The Original of Laura), and a few of his Russian ones (King, Queen, Knave, Laughter
in the Dark, and “The Enchanter”; one could add, controversially, Despair, especially in its
revised translation). There is scant evidence to support the idea that Nabokov was obses-
sively interested in sexuality, deviant or otherwise; more consistent with his life, career,
and works is the idea that he was intrigued by the important role of sex in human lives—as
in any sexually reproducing species—and the dominant place of sex in modern (Western)
commercial culture. Even without considering popular Freudianism and its broad influ-
ence, how could anyone ignore the world of Western sexual culture in the twentieth cen-
tury and consider themselves serious observers of life and humanity? It may be, in fact, that
Nabokov’s profound study of butterfly evolution through genitalic mutations heightened his
already acute artistic interest in the complex, troubling, often disruptive place of sex in hu-
man affairs. If sex leads evolution (at least among sexually reproducing entities), what does
human sexuality say about the future of the species? These would be pressing questions for
the artist-scientist with a passion to know and understand the chains linking the past to the
present and the future.
The drawings themselves vividly demonstrate the connection between aesthetic “see-
ing” and taxonomic “knowing”—some with almost startling clarity. Although a few of the
images appear essentially utilitarian and some are not so carefully drawn, an aesthetic prin-
ciple dominates in most. We see his attention to detail and also to form and perspective,
with its attendant variations on the perceived asymmetries. The often entrancing shapes
have formal beauty in themselves, but many of the drawings accentuate that beauty in a
way that seems unlikely to have been quite so clear through the microscope (for example,
Figures 26 and 66 and Color Plate 19). They represent not just seeing things that have never

4 Blackwell and Johnson

been seen before but also seeing them in a way most things have never been seen. Nabokov
appears to suggest (as in his comment about “inseparability,” above) that viewing with an
eye toward both structural exactitude and beauty can lead to a more complete form of
knowledge.
In the laboratory, Nabokov studied natural phenomena and their historical perception
by others, recording this information onto his note cards. He magnified things; he drew
them; he broke them into component parts and measured them. As an artist, he studied
the details of worlds that came into being through a mix of observation, mental effort, and
inspiration, added to these details the study of relevant documentary facts and philosoph-
ical opinions. Beginning after his time as a professional scientist, he recorded all of this
artistic material on numbered cards. This coincidence of the material of recording indicates
an important link, a commonality, between the two kinds of information being recorded.
Such a leap will provoke objections: index cards alone do not produce the unification of
science and art. But Nabokov’s belief in the specific reality of his artistic worlds emerges in
his explanation of the use of obscure vocabulary: “The main favor I ask of the serious critic
is sufficient perceptiveness to understand that whatever term or trope I use, my purpose is
not to be facetiously flashy or grotesquely obscure but to express what I feel and think with
the utmost truthfulness and perception.”17 The very fact that he sees creativity as a matter
of truth and of perception immediately suggests parallels with scientific work. At the very
least, the formulation indicates a scientific attitude toward what one may “feel and think.”
The idea of “utmost perception” reminds us that perception exists on a sliding scale: it can
be performed casually, even passively, and it can be performed to the utmost, actively, to the
extreme limits of human mental and physical capacity. As Nabokov acknowledged in his
“lily” quotation, even “utmost perception” in science is a paradoxical, tentative perception,
because “reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and
hence unquenchable, unattainable.” 18 Not surprisingly, the things of the mind—thoughts
and feelings—are no different.
Considering the close bond Nabokov saw between art and science, it seems inevitable
that his index card method would transfer laterally from his scientific research into his
artistic process. This major shift in work habits (at age forty-nine!) offered the ability to
transcend linearity, to change and manipulate chronology, to rearrange in order to high-
light connections between small, widely spaced sections. It also gives the manuscript the
feeling of a large rectangular block, yet one that evokes the systematized knowledge of the
scientific card file.
Ultimately, these drawings demonstrate attention to detail as a vital part of existence
in the world—and attention is the less noted but equally vital part of the formula. Just as
in nature, Nabokov insisted in art on perceiving “such combinations of details as yield the
sensual spark without which a book is dead.”19 These combinations abound in his work:
think of the swaying stalk of grass on page 344 of The Gift that connects to another from
page 133 and last memories of Fyodor’s father, and to Tolstoy; or the thirty-one tree species
named in Pnin and the surprising patterns they seem to form; or Brian Boyd’s discovery
that references to typing corrections in Ada encode a message from the beyond; or Dieter
Zimmer’s revelation that Pale Fire’s Queen Disa refers not only to a genus of orchids and to
one of butterflies but also to a tragic Queen Disa of Scandinavian mythology; or Alexander
Dolinin’s discovery that the jars of jelly in “Signs and Symbols” form a particular pattern
that correlates with the letters on a rotary telephone’s numbers.20 Or, of course, we can

Introduction 5
also simply concentrate on the beauty and aesthetic force of these minute pieces of natural
engineering, just as we can choose to pause and revel in the sensuous flow of Nabokov’s lan-
guage, the precision of his descriptions, and the intricacy of the compositional structures to
be found in his art.

“
nabokov was obsessed with time. He entered into adulthood simultaneously with the
full fame of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, an era saturated by modernist interest in
time through the works of Marcel Proust and Henri Bergson, and his own fascination can
only have burgeoned in response. Thrilled by the sensuous feeling of elapsed centuries in
the objects around him, he wandered the streets of Cambridge like a time traveler.21 The liv-
ing natural world and the artistic world are both particularly ripe for temporal exploration:
the first through the lens of evolution, the second through a similar lens that follows the
development (Nabokov even called it evolution) of artistic expression over human history.
Looking at his surroundings, he wanted to see into the temporal dimension: into the past
of such objects as trees, buildings, streets, and pencils. Working with thousands of butterfly
specimens in the 1940s, he turned the same attitude to their diversity and its evolution. To
figure out what a creature is, one often needs to have a good idea of what its ancestors were,
and where, in the distant past.
Although as a child and even as an adult amateur Nabokov dreamed of discovering and
naming a new species, once he took up professional work he quickly accomplished that
goal and recognized richer, more significant tasks that a zoologist could undertake. When
Nabokov looked at a group of species and studied their geographic diversity, he saw closely
related yet significantly varying details in their anatomy—patterns of similarity and differ-
ence, presence and absence. The more he worked, the less he focused on species as fixed
entities: he came to see them as a “relative category” within generic variation, with “peaks”
and “valleys” of morphological structure allowing more or less confident classification. He
was also interested in the related species or genera as conveying the appearance (illusion) of
consecutive development, imagining spatial variety as if it were temporal development (see
Figures 80–83). To this end, he compared anatomical features presumed to be of more re-
cent origin with those considered archaic or primitive (for example, in “The Nearctic Mem-
bers of the Genus Lycaeides Hübner”).22 Modern species sporting what appear to be primi-
tive structures served proxy for creatures from millions of years ago, as Nabokov imagined
morphological transitions and elaborations through time. That is, he tackled the diachronic
problem from two perspectives: through variations among modern, nonprimitive species
and along an imagined continuum extending from the appearance of forms in the deep
evolutionary past right up to the present. The first approach creates imaginary analogies of
evolution, while the second emphasizes spontaneous appearance of characters (mutations)
and their gradual elaboration and diversification.
Speaking to his students about the practice of good reading, Nabokov emphasized the
kind of deep familiarity that comes from repetition and review. Repetition allows the imag-
inative departure from strict chronological time. “Rereading” in his lectures refers to an
activity that builds up layers of reliable and useful memory—perhaps it is knowledge—of
an increasing body of facts and details.23 The benefit of this approach is that it allows one

6 Blackwell and Johnson

to consider the linear work along a new, atemporal axis—or even freed from any axis what-
soever. If first-time reading ties the reader to the text’s unidirectional flow and whatever
sequence of events and description it provides, the mental artifact produced by multiple
rereadings creates what Nabokov might have called a hypertext if the word had existed,
but which instead he compared to the perception of a painting: one can view a painting
in many ways, attend to its details in a variety of sequences, and move from part to whole
and back again in an instant. A text can be converted into a basis for that kind of mental
experience by mapping it into the brain through memory, where it can be manipulated at
will, its parts explored in large or small magnification, and its patterns and layers perceived
more readily. Nabokov’s analogy imagines the initial temporal experience of narrative as
a one-dimensional line and explicitly transforms it into something two-dimensional, al-
though the addition of still further dimensions is also implicit in the analogy. Some of these
extra dimensions appear through hidden allusions to literary, musical, or visual artworks or
through the discovery of yet more layers of encoded pattern that extend beyond the tradi-
tional locations of artistic meaning—such as anagrammatic typos, date-keeping mistakes,
“polygenetic” allusions (coined by Pekka Tammi) and “doubled italics” (James Ramey).24
The use of index cards for writing novels demonstrates the creative side of the same con-
cept: the cards and their nonsequential creation represent the author’s own liberation from
textual (and implicitly temporal) linearity.
Nabokov’s drawings invite the same kind of multiple experience: the more we look at
them and revisit them, the more their details coalesce into meaningful shapes and pat-
terns, sometimes with comical results. A nonscientist who invests the time can imagine
the researcher studying these drawings in multiple series, determining which features are
most important, which seem primitive and which more advanced, and how one structure
might have diversified into several variations or, possibly, evolved through several itera-
tions. Nabokov was looking at groups of specimens to determine how many genera and
species they represented—the classificatory question. But he felt that to do this well, he
also needed to imagine them as evolved and evolving forms, as mobile features in time. As
a spur to this imaginative attention, he composed fanciful phylogenetic trees from groups
of modern species, noting that these are “but the shadow of a [phylogenetic] tree on a plane
surface.”25 This is a characteristic move: Nabokov pushes a common heuristic tool or empir-
ical concept out of its standard cognitive mode. This “tree,” traditionally a two-dimensional
diagram, printed on any flat surface, is escorted back across the threshold from two dimen-
sions to three (the world of real trees), in which it can cast a shadow that has a definite,
but not necessarily obvious or predictable, relationship to the original. The transition also
crosses a temporal boundary, reimagining a synchronic series as if it were a diachronic one.
In the absence of a complete fossil record, his ersatz tree serves as a useful surrogate for
looking at real diachronic series. Taking that shadow-tree seriously may or may not lead to
accurate conclusions about evolution, but it does, like Nabokov’s description of re-reading,
create circumstances for discovering previously neglected perspectives on the organisms
under study. This troubled, unsure relationship between shadows and objects, between the
things in the world (including artworks) and their shadow in consciousness, is analogous
to the difficulty of surmising the evolutionary history of taxonomic groups—the problem
that fascinated Nabokov in his preparation of “Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae” and other
studies.

Introduction 7
 These creative heuristic tools also allowed Nabokov to imagine following a pathway of
evolution as one might watch a movie and to run the imaginary film forward or backward in
order to explore appearances and disappearances in both positive and negative directions:
A modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine with the purpose of
exploring the Cenozoic era in a “downward” direction would reach a point—
presumably in the early Miocene—where he still might find Asiatic butterflies
classifiable on modern structural grounds as Lycaenids, but would not be able
to discover among them anything definitely referable to the structural group he
now diagnoses as Plebejinae. On his return journey, however, he would notice at
some point a confuse adumbration, then a tentative “fade-in” of familiar shapes
(among other, gradually vanishing ones) and at last would find Chilades-like and
Aricia-like structures in the Palearctic region.26
This echo of time-lapse photography (moving here from the two- to the three-dimensional
but implicitly also to four-dimensional space-time) offers the possibility of an entirely un-
familiar sense of narrative and character: the protagonists are shapes (forms) and diversity,
the themes are ecological change, migration, population growth or decay, and mutation
(leading to biological success or failure). No wonder Nabokov told Wilson that one of his
research papers read like a roman d’aventures.27
There is also something to be considered in the care and detail invested in Nabokov’s
scientific drawings. The drawing process itself—whether by camera lucida or freehand—
demonstrably translates the structural forms into an aesthetic realm. The drawings show
scientific precision, to be sure, but they also show a level of detail, refinement, and compo-
sitional care—especially the ones that are colored—that appears to go beyond the scientific
utility of shape-recording and comparison, although Nabokov must have felt that anything
he could notice and record might become scientifically useful one day. Especially in those
drawings that clearly include more visual information than was the subject of Nabokov’s
research, one wonders: Did the extra contemplation, the surplus attention to shape, color,
and shadow, and the time spent reproducing them, deepen his ability to think about their
interrelations, their change and purpose across time and genera? Inevitably, such intensive
looking must have enabled him to see new synthetic features—like “pugilistic Klansmen”
and platonic triangles.28 It is also worth exploring whether, and how, such contemplation
might have added dimensions to the way he conceptualized and undertook artistic cre-
ation as a writer. At any rate, as he perhaps jokingly considered artists to be “God’s little
plagiarists,” as he wrote to his mother, he must have thought about the ways that strange
structures in nature might find analogs in strange variations in artistic form.29 If insect gen-
italia can look like pugilists “of the old school”—a very funny analogy, when one thinks of
the “struggle for existence”—surely a novel can mimic any biological apparatus one might
choose—even, as James Ramey shows, the parasitic maggot of a bot-fly.30

“
when nabokov left the American Museum of Natural History to take a position as re-
search fellow and de facto curator of Lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology
at Harvard, major questions were being debated regarding taxonomic methods and evolu-
tionary theory. Nabokov’s notes indicate that he was reading Bernhard Rensch’s theories

8 Blackwell and Johnson

on the coloration of birds (1925), Theodosius Dobzhansky’s Genetics and the Origin of Species
(1937), Julian Huxley’s 1938 essays on evolutionary biology and his book Evolution: The Mod-
ern Synthesis (1942), and Ernst Mayr’s Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942). Nabokov’s
musings regarding the biology, taxonomy, and evolution of Blues were particularly linked
to the writings of Rensch and Mayr, both ornithologists. In his notes, Nabokov often com-
pares the views of ornithologists and entomologists, especially regarding matters of close
species resemblance and mimicry. Blue butterflies, like many birds, showed confusing and
contradictory patterns of external resemblance, geographic distributions, and differential
interbreeding, the study of which Rensch had pioneered in his work on the “Rassenkreis,”
or circle of races phenomenon. This lack of clarity in the relationships of Blues was precisely
what had left many of them widely unstudied across most of the world’s continents.
For the insect taxonomist in the laboratory tasked with identifying, naming, and cre-
ating classification schemes for his subjects—in Nabokov’s case, butterflies—the obvious
questions were about species and speciation. What is a species, and how do species become
distinct through time? But more than this, how does a working scientist gather and deci-
pher information on his subject creatures—both in the laboratory and in nature—so that
there is a reasonable chance of recognizing the path of lineages that had actually occurred
through historical time? What made this a difficult matter for the incipient systematists
and taxonomists of Nabokov’s day was that quite different kinds of phenomena and data
were informing the process, and all at once. From before the time of Darwin’s work, and
sealed within Darwin’s concept of natural selection, everyone had agreed that some kind of
interaction between environment and essence informed what was happening in nature: or-
ganisms had basic internal fingerprints—what had loosely been called “genes” for decades;
then nature, by the processes of competition and survival of the fittest, selected which
organisms would survive and pass on the information of their germ plasm to succeeding
generations.
Varying perspectives on such questions brought many variables into the discussion. On
the one hand, data and understanding surrounding genetics were constantly expanding.
The melding of the emergent Mendelian view of genetics with Darwin’s view of evolution
by means of natural selection was creating the context for what would be a new or neo-
Darwinian synthesis. It was defined variously then, but driving the synthesis was the mar-
riage of genetic study (microevolution) with the study of wider patterns in nature (macro-
evolution). The scientists Nabokov was reading were exploring many pivotal questions.
Further, Nabokov himself, solidly confident of his own capabilities at such a transformative
moment, was contributing his views, including occasional new terms and definitions.
The questions vexing evolutionists all turn up in Nabokov’s notes. It was generally
agreed that a species was an entity that could not interbreed with a different species—but
what might be the reasons for the incompatibility? Was it just in the germ plasm (the genes),
or might there be other factors in the natural environment, too, such as factors creating
isolation—geography, subtle ecological conditions, or behavior of the organisms? Ento-
mologists certainly knew there was a rub here. Even in butterflies, entities never known
to interbreed in nature sometimes interbred voluntarily in the laboratory. Further, if you
hand-paired butterflies, you could get interbreeding which itself would never happen natu-
rally even in the lab. Still more unfortunate for entomologists of the time, the situation and
conditions in nature were sometimes at least as enigmatic as in the laboratory. Lepidopter-
ists had known for decades that across a wide distribution of what was generally agreed to

Introduction 9
be a species, if you looked at the scattered populations of some butterflies—including the
Blues—as if they were strings of beads, some of the populations making up those beads in-
terbred with others and some didn’t, and even some populations that interbred in one place
didn’t interbreed elsewhere.
Known in Europe for decades before Nabokov’s departure for the United States, this
enigma was known as the Rassenkreis, or circle of races dilemma. It created an even bigger
question for insect taxonomists. If the matter of interbreeding was so plastic, reflecting
so many contradictions, what was a good definition of species in the first place? Was the
interbreeding criterion (the biological definition of species) enough? Or, if that data became
a muddle, was the taxonomist doomed to create morphological—anatomical and wing-
pattern-based—definitions for species? The taxonomist in a museum or university might
not actually know what was interbreeding with what in nature, and so the question arose:
Weren’t morphological definitions of species perhaps better simply because they could be
more universally consistent?
Unfortunately, there were just as many fallibilities in attempts to find a consistent struc-
tural definition for species. What characteristics would one use—external? internal? . . .
both? Everyone who knew groups like the Blues—often neglected simply because they were
so perplexing—realized that a structural definition of a species by external characteristics
could result in a hodge-podge of entities sharing a general resemblance, but often simulta-
neously including entities that most lepidopterists readily knew didn’t interbreed in nature.
Where to draw the line? Relying on internal characteristics might create more fine-grained
groups, but what was known about these in nature? Did any of these interbreed? Or were
some of them just radically variant populations at the extreme edges of a widespread range
whose middle ground was simply unknown to lepidopterists?

“
most taxonomists of nabokov’s day came to agree that a biological definition of spe-
cies based on the criteria of differential interbreeding was desirable but also that it had to
be informed by knowledge of structural characteristics. Such a combined definition could
satisfy two needs. It could encourage discernment regarding the problem of inconsistent
interbreeding in nature and give scientists in a laboratory or museum collection criteria
available to the naked eye by which they could make at least some needed decisions.
Genetics itself, at the level of both the genetics of individual organisms and that of popu-
lations, was in ferment at the time, further confusing the landscape. Was genetic change it-
self enough to drive evolution down a path that would result in new species? Or did it always
need an intervention from selection? If so, what kind(s) of interventions were involved?
Models of speciation had been appearing in the scientific literature for decades. First of
all, if genetic change was in some sense driving evolution, at what point, and how, did a
population become separate from another such that eventually it might become reproduc-
tively distinct? Based on scientific definitions that organisms in the same distributional
range were sympatric and organisms with separate ranges were allopatric, this most obvi-
ous possible cause of differentiation over time—spatial separation leading to reproductive
incompatibility—became known as allopatric speciation. But what did it take to cause it?
The allopatric speciation process was particularly enigmatic in Nabokov’s day because
what we recognize now as plate tectonics was both little known and generally dismissed.

10 Blackwell and Johnson

As a result, the understanding so obvious today—that major cleavages of biological dis-
tributions break apart interbreeding populations on a massive scale—was simply not part
of the discussion. Scientists saw, or envisioned, allopatric speciation in smaller theaters—
mountain range changes, river course changes, and so on—but these were all equivocal
enough to complicate the confidence scientists had in their causal role in species evolution.
Since nearly all scientists of Nabokov’s day believed that landmasses were static, they en-
visioned that somehow both plants and animals had moved around the planet somewhat.
Thus, surely the obvious divisions of ranges apparent planetwide—as with the African and
Indian Elephants—meant that allopatric speciation had occurred, although its causation
was not well understood.
Another question remained. Could speciation occur with far less dramatic splitting
of ranges? This was a big question, particularly for anyone who worked with more vagile
(far-traveling) organisms, such as butterflies, birds, and fish. How much range division did
it really take, and how long, for species to arise in far less dramatic fashion? Some biologists
saw evidence for quite fine breakages in ranges that resulted in species—or no breakage at
all—what was called sympatric speciation, speciation among organisms that were still shar-
ing a general range. Others saw patterns of step-by-step, level-by-level speciation and from
that deduced parapatric and peripatric speciation, much as astronomers envision planets
slowly congealing within the rings of debris around the Sun.
In sum, taxonomic scientists in Nabokov’s day were engaged in a pivotal debate about
processes within organisms at the genetic level, genetics among groups of populations
of organisms (population genetics), and genetics in the sphere of environment-organism
interactions.

“
yet another set of practical problems faced Nabokov and his fellow biologists. In
studying evolution and making taxonomies and classifications, how should one retrieve,
record, and arrange information? Further, having retrieved information, how should one
systematically present it in a landscape of ideas and concepts? Even if there were agreement
about definitions in matters like species, natural processes, and philosophical underpin-
nings, how should a scientist work to retrieve and use data consistent with these views?
What if one disagreed with the consensus definitions? The problem of information retrieval
(what constitutes data and how it is obtained, formulated, stated, and then compared) has
always presented challenges.
Nabokov’s notes show that he did not shy from these puzzles. For example, what data
account for the biological definition of species? How does one get such data? How does one
know what entities interbreed in nature? What does it mean when they interbreed in a lab
or, more confusingly, interbreed freely in a lab but not in nature? Likewise, what structures
define a species based on morphology? If many structures, do they all have equal weight?
What about structures that accidentally look alike (analogy—analogous structures) versus
structures that resemble each other because of an actual evolutionary relation (homology—
homologous structures)? All of these dilemmas plagued the study of the Blues.
As a pioneer butterfly anatomist, Nabokov found himself uncovering new structures not
previously used for differentiating species. In fact, he discovered arrays of structures in the
genital apparatus of some Blues that were lacking in other Blues long assumed to be their

Introduction 11
closest relatives. In his 1945 publication naming new Latin American genera, he recognized
previously undiscerned structures at the terminus of the male clasper (valve). He also de-
scribed a structure (near the aedeagus, or penis) that he called the sagum, which occurred
in some, but not all, Latin American Blues that were otherwise confusingly alike externally.
He was confident that such structural differences meant that these Latin American Blues
could not actually be in the same genus.
Unfortunately, Nabokov’s contemporaries and subsequent lepidopterists ignored these
data for nearly fifty years. If contemporaries and later critics actually read his explanations
of the sagum and the structures at the terminus of the male valve, they appear to have made
an arbitrary decision not to consider these as data. Historically, in Blues, wing patterns and
(if anatomy was even consulted) the general overall shape of the male clasper were con-
sidered the sources of data. In fact, lepidopterists never discussed these newly discerned
features of Blues’ anatomy—especially the differential occurrence of the sagum—until the
1990s. Until then, the judgment of whether Nabokov’s classifications were right or wrong
revolved around evaluations of the known characteristics of traditional taxonomy.
Such anomalies exemplify the historicity of Nabokov’s work as judged by his critics, of
course, but there were larger general issues as well, relating to the determination of ac-
tual evolutionary relationships. For example, once homology is distinguished from analogy,
what characteristics help a scientist recognize which organism is most closely related to an-
other? And, once that is determined, how are the relationships best portrayed? Historically,
science has portrayed relationships of organisms in branching diagrams, often generally
called dendrograms, or evolutionary trees. It began to occur to scientists, at about the time
of the books Nabokov was reading in the early 1940s, that science had not taken sufficient
care to differentiate whether a particular branching diagram was a actually a statement
about characteristics or a statement about a lineage of organisms. And these are two very
different things. A statement about lineage is clearly a statement about evolutionary his-
tory. A statement about characteristics may, or may not, reflect the historical relationship
of organisms (like butterflies, birds, and bats all having wings). So, at about the time of
Nabokov’s active work, scientists began to differentiate between diagrams about charac-
teristics (sometimes called phenograms) and diagrams about evolutionary relationships
(variously called phylograms or cladograms), as well as to debate about when the two were
synonymous and when not.
All of these questions were pivotal to the developing science of systematics (the theoret-
ical construct of which taxonomy is a part). Two major transitions in systematics, during
and after the time of Nabokov’s active research career, would further affect and character-
ize both his work and his legacy.
The first was the international process of establishing a generally accepted rule book
for how to do taxonomy. What became the modern International Code of Zoological No-
menclature (published in French and English in 1953, updated 1958, and then in many
subsequent editions) evolved from a number of international rules books from as early as
1905. Like other taxonomists of his era, Nabokov followed general protocols drawn from
these earlier works, but there was no standard work clearly acknowledged as internation-
ally normative. Like the resolution of other upheavals in systematics and taxonomy, the
universally accepted international code postdated Nabokov’s active years. As it would turn
out (see below), this would affect the historical status of a number of the major names for
Blue butterflies he proposed.

12 Blackwell and Johnson

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 CHAPTER XXIX
TOTTIE TOYE

Miss Tottie Toye’s Renault was a beauty, and, after the old rickety
green car, it afforded Wynyard a real pleasure to handle it. He took it
for a trial turn to Bushey, in order to get accustomed to its
mechanism—for every motor has its peculiar little ways and its own
little tempers—and punctually at seven o’clock he was at
Rockingham Mansions, awaiting his employer, the dancer.
Presently, heralded by her high, shrill voice, she appeared,
accompanied by a melancholy young man, and bringing with her
such a reek of scent, that it almost deadened the petrol. Tottie was
wrapped in a magnificent pink velvet cloak trimmed with ermine, and,
as she stepped into the car, turned to her companion and said—
“Teddy boy, just look at my beautiful new chauffeur! Isn’t he like a
young duke?”
Teddy grunted some inaudible reply, slammed the door of the car
with unnecessary violence, and they were off. The London streets at
this hour were swarming with motor busses, cars, cabs, and
carriages—people going to dinners or the play. It was rather different
to the empty roads in the neighbourhood of Ottinge, but Wynyard
managed to thread his way to the theatre dexterously and speedily,
and, when the lady jumped out of the car at the stage door, she
clapped him on the back and said—
“You’ll do all right! Come round for me again at eleven—and don’t be
getting into any mischief.”
He touched his cap and moved away. Precisely at eleven o’clock he
was waiting, and after some delay Tottie reappeared, in a condition
of the highest excitement, screaming with laughter and carrying a
gigantic bouquet. She was accompanied by a very prononcée lady
and three young men. With a good deal of noisy talking and chaffing
they all packed themselves into the car, sitting on one another’s
knees, and fared to the Savoy, where they had supper. Here again
he waited outside until twelve o’clock and closing time; and as he
sat, a motionless figure, a great deal of London life drifted by him:
the rolling “Limousine,” emblem of luxury—broken-down, hopeless-
looking men—members of the dreadful army of the unemployed—
flaming women with the scarlet sign of sin in high relief. What a
diabolical existence!
At twelve his party reappeared—noisier and more hilarious than
ever. It struck him that Tottie’s lady friend and two of the young men
had had quite as much supper as was good for them. Once more
they crammed into the car, the party returned to the flat to play
bridge, and he at last was released!
So this was now his life! late hours, excursions into the country on
Sundays, trips to Brighton, to Folkestone, to Margate; he had no
leisure, for, when Tottie was not making use of the car, the good-
natured little creature—unlike Bella Parrett—lent it to her friends, and
her friends made unreasonable use of it. They were all of the same
class as herself: exuberant youths, who imagined that they were
seeing life; prettily painted, beautifully dressed young women, whom
the men called by their christian names; certain elderly gentlemen;
and now and then a portly dame, who was spoken of as “Ma.”
On one occasion, in Bond Street, Tottie and some of her vivacious
companions were shopping—a showy party, with loud voices and
louder clothes, scrambling into the motor at the door of a shop—
when who should pass by but Sir Richard Wynyard! He glared at
them, then glanced at the chauffeur. What! his own nephew in the
middle of such a rowdy crew! Owen touched his cap to him, but he
vouchsafed no notice, and, with a glassy stare, stalked on.
Another time, as Wynyard was waiting outside a theatre, Aurea
Morven and her uncle were coming out. She looked so pretty—
lovely, indeed—in a white cloak with a knot of silver ribbon in her
dark hair. Fortunately, she did not recognise him, for at the moment
Tottie dashed out of the stage door in a violent hurry, followed by two
women and a man, and called authoritatively—
“Go ahead, Owen, old boy! The ‘Troc.’ as hard as you can tear!”
Wynyard had been in the present situation for six weeks, and,
although the pay was good and punctual, he found the life wearing.
He never knew what it was to have a day off—or any time to himself;
other employés had Sundays—Sunday to him was the heaviest day
in the whole week. Tottie, besides her professional engagements,
appeared to live in an irregular round of luncheons, suppers, bridge,
and balls—of a certain class. She was madly extravagant, and
seemed to take a peculiar delight in throwing away her money. The
sallow-cheeked parlour-maid, who had a fancy for Wynyard, and
generally contrived to have a word with him when she came
downstairs with cloaks or shoes—informed him in confidence that
“the missus was a-goin’ it!”
“But what can you expect?” she asked, with her nose in the air. “Her
mother kept a tripe shop; she ain’t no class! Of course the money’s
good as long as it’s there; but I don’t fancy these sort of fast
situations. Give me gentry.”
“But Mrs. Foote’s all right,” protested Wynyard; “it’s her friends that
are such a queer lot—and, I’m afraid, they cheat her.”
“You bet they do! And as to her being all right—I should say she was
all wrong, if you ask me. She’s no more Mrs. Cavendish Foote than I
am; she was divorced three years ago. Cavendish Foote—he was a
young fool on the Stock Exchange; she broke him, and now he’s
gone to America.”
An exceedingly unpleasant idea had lately been born in Owen’s
mind; it was this—that his employer had taken a fancy to him. She
leant with unnecessary weight on his arm when she stepped in and
out of the motor; summoned him to her sitting-room on various
pretexts to give him notes; offered cigarettes, talked to him
confidentially, and begged him “to look upon her as a friend.”
“I like you, Owen, I swear I do, and I’d do a lot for you, so I would too
—and don’t you make any mistake about that!”
Wynyard found this state of affairs extremely embarrassing—
especially when they went for trips into the country alone, and,
wrapped up in furs, she would come and sit beside him, and tell him
of all her successes; stop at inns, order lunch, and invite him to
share the meal, and drink champagne! But this he steadily declined.
The cooler and more reserved he was, naturally the more empressé
she became; and one of her pals, in his hearing, had loudly chaffed
her on being “mashed on her chauffeur.”
Once or twice, she found some one to mind the car, and gave him a
ticket for the theatre, in order that he might witness her performance.
Tottie really was marvellous; it was no wonder that she was earning
two hundred pounds a week! Her dancing, her agility, her vivacity,
and her impudence, enraptured each nightly audience. There was
something in her gaiety and her unstudied animation that reminded
him of Aurea Morven; yet to think of the two in the same moment
was neither more or less than profanation—the one was a sort of
irresponsible imp, whilst the other resembled a beautiful and
benevolent fairy.
It was early in December, Tottie had run over to Paris with Mr.
Cloake and suitable pals, and Wynyard had got his neck out of the
collar for a few days. In fact, he had insisted on a holiday, and
treated himself to a dinner at his club. Here he met some old friends
—that is to say, young men of his own age, who had been at Eton, or
in the Service with him. He always looked well turned out, and none
of them ever thought of asking “What are you doing now?” except a
schoolfellow, who said—
“I say, old man, we don’t often see you here! What’s your job? I know
the uncle has cut up rusty, and that you are on your own. Fellows
say that you are down in some big steel works at Sheffield, and they
have seen you out with the hounds.”
“No, they’re wrong—that’s a bad shot. I don’t mind telling you, old
pal, that I’m a chauffeur.”
His friend stared, and then burst out into a roar of laughter.
“Yes, I’m the chauffeur of the well-known Tottie Toye.”
This information seemed to leave the other not only solemn, but
speechless—which being the case, Wynyard went on to impart to
him in confidence all the particulars of his uncle’s manifesto, and
how he was endeavouring to keep himself in independence, without
as much as a penny stamp from one of his relatives.
“I’ve done eight months,” he said, “and I’ve saved thirty pounds. I
seem to see the Winning Post.”
“By George!” exclaimed his friend, “I don’t know how you can stick it.
Fancy being mixed up with Tottie and her crowd!”
“Oh, for that matter, I’ve nothing to say to them. ‘Needs must when
the devil drives,’ and the pay is good.”
“I believe Tottie has a mania for spending money. She has been
twice married; her extravagance is crazy, and her generosity
boundless—of course, she is robbed all round. Now she has got into
the hands of a fellow called Cloake—and unless I’m mistaken the
end is near. Get out of it as soon as you can, Wynyard, my friend.”
“I believe I shall. I can’t say it’s a job I fancy.”
“Look here, I’ve an idea. There’s a friend of mine—Masham—an
enormously rich chap, a bachelor, mad keen about motoring—
racing, you know. He was in the Paris to Berlin race—and has been
over to Long Island—and on the slightest provocation would be off to
Timbuctoo! He’s looking for a man, not so much to drive—but, of
course, he must be a chauffeur—as to go about with him—a
gentleman. I should say it was the very billet for you—if he doesn’t
kill you! It’s not every one’s job; he is so confoundedly rash, and is
always ready to take risks.”
“I don’t mind that,” said Wynyard; “‘nothing venture—nothing have.’”
“He wants a smart chap—a well-bred ’un—with no nerves. Shall I
undertake the delicate negotiation? I expect you’d suit him down to
the ground!”
 CHAPTER XXX
MASHAM—THE MOTORIST

“I’ll go over and have a jaw with him; you stay here till I come back,”
said Wynyard’s friend, rising as he spoke.
Ten minutes later, he appeared accompanied by a clean-shaven,
bullet-headed little man—with a brick-coloured complexion, sleek
black hair, a pair of small, piercing grey eyes, and the shoulders of a
Hercules.
“Wynyard, let me introduce you to Masham, the celebrated motorist.
Masham, this is my old chum Wynyard; we were in the same house
at Eton. He is in want of a job—you are in want of a chauffeur—and
here you are!” Then, with a wave of his hand, he added, “Now, I’ll
leave you to worry it out between you. You will find me in the card-
room,” and he took his departure.
“Well,” said Masham, throwing himself back in an arm-chair, and
stretching out his legs, “our mutual friend has been telling me all
about you, and how you are an Army chap, awfully sportin’, and
have no nerves to speak of.”
“Yes, I shouldn’t call myself—er—nervous,” said Wynyard, lighting a
cigarette.
“I suppose Eustace has told you that I’m motor mad? Motoring is my
fad. I expect I’ve put in more miles than any man of my age in
England. On these long journeys I like to have a pal who can drive a
bit, is a gentleman, and has got his head screwed on the right way.
By the bye, are you a married man?”
“No.”
“Good! That’s all right. Well, the ordinary chauffeur palls a bit after a
time, and you can’t well have him to dine with you—and—er—in fact
—he’s not your own sort! On the other hand, there are one’s
relatives and chums; but some of these—and I’ve sampled a good
few—know nothing of the mechanism of a car—racer and runabout,
it’s all one to them—and they bar going with me. I put them in a first-
class blue funk when my speed is eighty miles an hour, and hats and
things fly out of the car. Of course, it’s not always possible; but
sometimes in the very early mornings on those long flat roads in
France I let her out! I tell you, it’s an experience. However, the last
time when I got her up to ninety kilometres, at the first halt, my
chauffeur got off and left me! I’m not a bad sort to deal with, as old
Eustace can tell you; you just let me alone, and you’ll be all right.
You live with me—same quarters, same table—and your billet will be
that of chauffeur-companion—compagnon de voyage—with an eye
to the car and to take the wheel now and then. If you can talk French
it will be an advantage; but I don’t suppose you picked up much
French at Eton?”
“I picked it up when I was a small boy. I had a French nurse,” replied
Wynyard, “and I can get along all right.”
“Good! My idea is to motor down to Biarritz, then across to
Marseilles, and afterwards, with a look in at Monte, take part in some
international racing. Who were you with last, or who are you with
now?”
“Just at present I’m chauffeur to Tottie Toye.”
“My great aunt!”
“Well, you see, when she engaged me from an advertisement, she
represented herself as Mrs. Cavendish Foote—the terms were
liberal, and I agreed.”
“Yes, and when you saw her?” His little eyes twinkled.
“I must confess I was rather taken aback; theatrical folk are not much
in my line—irregular hours and sudden odd jobs—sometimes I’ve
been out with the car till three in the morning. However, it was a
question of money, and I took it.”
“May I ask what she pays you?”
“Four guineas a week.”
“I’ll go one better than that. I’ll give you three hundred a year—
twenty-five pounds a month, and all found; but, mark you, you had
better insure your life, for I’ve had some uncommonly narrow
squeaks.”
“I’ll take the risk,” said Wynyard. “Would you mind telling me what is
your idea of a narrow squeak?”
“Well, once crossing a railway line an express missed me by twenty
seconds; another was when the car ran backwards down a pass in
the Tyrol, and over the bridge at the bottom; that time the chauffeur
was killed. I’m keeping his family, of course—and henceforth I bar
married men! I broke three ribs and a leg; however, we won’t dwell
on these unpleasant memories. Do you think you will be ready to
start in a week? The car is down at Coventry. I’ll fetch her up day
after to-morrow.”
“I shall be ready; but I have one stipulation to make.”
“All right—let’s have it.”
“As a chauffeur my name is Owen—not Wynyard.”
“Same thing to me. Uncle objects, eh?”
“I suppose Miss Toye will accept a week’s notice?”
“Of course she will,” declared Masham. “We will have a day or two at
Brookwood, to see how the car travels, and then cross the Channel.
Have a drink?”
“Thank you, a small whisky and large soda.”
Mr. Masham ordered for himself a large whisky and a very small
soda; indeed, the soda water in his glass was a negligible quantity.
“I don’t drink much—but I take it strong,” he remarked as he gulped it
down, “and I never smoke—bad for the nerves;” and then he began
to discourse of motors and the class and style he believed in. He
believed in single-cylinder machines, a short wheel base, wide
handle-bars, and a large petrol tank. He did not believe in the
aeroplane craze, and, indeed, became both hot and excited when
Wynyard introduced the subject.
“Madness! Wild goose business! Can come to nothing—look at the
accidents! Stick to Mother Earth, I say! I’m an earth man—a motor
man. The sea for fish, the sky for birds, earth for humans. I bar both
air and sea.”
After a few minor arrangements, Wynyard took leave of Mr. Masham,
went in search of his friend, and informed him that all was fixed up;
he had accepted the post of companion-chauffeur to the celebrated
Harry Masham, and was about to tender his resignation to the
equally celebrated Tottie Toye.

During Lady Kesters’ stay in the United States, she had kept up a
brisk correspondence with her brother, and written long and
enthusiastic descriptions of her impressions of New York,
Washington, and Boston; for his part, he had sent her somewhat
scanty news. The following, is one of his longest letters:—
“Dear Leila,—I am still with Miss T. Toye, and giving (I
hope) satisfaction and saving hand over fist. I can’t say,
however, that the berth is congenial. I am kept pretty busy,
taking Tottie to the theatre, fetching her home, motoring
her about town to shops and restaurants, and dashing into
the country for weekends. In Town, I wear my goggles as
much as possible. I tell her my eyes are weak—I dare say
she doesn’t believe me! I’m not proud, but I don’t want my
old friends to spot me as Tottie’s chauffeur. The other day I
was in Bond Street in the afternoon, with a car full of a
noisy painted crew, and they attracted the attention of no
less a person than Uncle Dick. He stared at them, and
then at me. I thought he was going to have an apoplectic
seizure, and I’m sure he thinks I’ve gone to the devil!
Perhaps you’d let him know that I’ve got to live, and Tottie
pays well, and her money is as good as another’s. All the
same, I am not sure that I can stand her much longer; she
and her particular lot are a bit too rowdy. The other night a
fellow dared her to kiss me as she got out of the motor,
 and, by Jove! she did. I was not at all grateful. I was nearly
stifled, and I’ve not got the better of her scented embrace
yet. She talks of buying another car—price fifteen hundred
pounds—simply because Vixie Beaufort has a better one
than hers, and she’s not going to be beat. She has a funny
way of asking all sorts of people to supper, and is
surprised when the crowd turns up; and sometimes she
forgets her party altogether, and sups out, then the boot is
on the other foot! She plays bridge of a sort, and loses her
money (and her temper), and throws the cards at her
partner. The frizzy parlour-maid is my informant; she
comes down with cloaks and furs, and generally contrives
to have a word with me. She says the place is getting too
hot, and if I will leave, she will! Think of that! I’m glad to
hear such good news of Martin. I expect you will both be
home by April, and by that time I should not wonder if I
were in another situation. Ryder Street will always find—
Your affectionate brother,
“O. W.”
To this he received a long reply from Florida. Martin was better,
shares were booming, and The Palm Branch was the most delicious
spot on earth. No wonder that Florida boasted the largest hotel in the
world; the climate, the tropical flowers and fruit, the bicycling and
bathing, and the immense variety of visitors were all a delightful
novelty.
She went on to say—
“I do wish you were with us; there are such charming girls
to be met and known—bright, well-bred, intellectual, and
fascinating. I am in love with several of them myself. I
hope we shall be back in Mount Street at the end of April;
meanwhile we are sunning ourselves here. Take my
advice, and give the vivacious Tottie notice, and try for
nice country place with some wealthy old squire who is not
exigeant with respect to work, and would only require to
be motored to the Sessions or to church; in such a place,
 you can lie perdue instead of flaring about town with Tottie
and Co. I would be perfectly happy if you were here, dear
old boy; the only drawback to my enjoyment is the fear
that you are hard worked, and hard up! Bear this in mind,
‘Time and tide run through the longest day;’ in ten months
you will be settled at Wynyard, and your own master.”
As it happened, there was no occasion for Wynyard to formally
tender his resignation to Miss Toye. The morning after his interview
with Mr. Masham, when he arrived at the garage where the car was
kept, another chauffeur came up to him with a sympathetic grin upon
his face.
“Hullo, Jack—your car is took! There’s an execution in your missus’
flat, and the men came round ’ere first thing. Very nippy, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” rejoined Wynyard. He
walked over to the place where the car was always garaged, and it
was empty; everything was gone—even to the oil cans!
“There, now, you see it’s a true bill,” said the other man, who had
followed him. “Tottie Toye is broke; there was a great burst-up at the
theatre, and she has cut it.”
This was true. Wynyard now remembered that the last time he had
driven Tottie from the hall there had been something of a scene at
the stage door—loud talking, an eager crowd, and Mr. Cloake, very
red and excited, had supported Tottie into the motor, apparently in
hysterics and tears. He went round to the flat, and discovered that
men were already in possession, busily making an inventory of its
contents. Tottie had effected her escape with all her jewels, her best
clothes, and her dog, and was reported to be at San Sebastian.
It seemed to Wynyard that something was bound to happen to
whoever employed him—one time it was a breakdown, now the
bailiffs.
Before he and his new employer went abroad, they spent several
days at Brookwood, and here the new chauffeur was first introduced
to the machine—a long, bare, business-looking car, built for speed,
not comfort, and painted a dull slate colour.
“She’s as ugly as she can stick!” admitted her owner; “but she runs
sweetly and is a magnificent machine; has won three big races, a
grand goer, and ab-so-lutely reliable!”
Flying round the track at Brookwood she certainly bore out her
reputation for speed; but as to whether she was absolutely reliable,
remained to be proved.
 CHAPTER XXXI
TAKING RISKS

Early in January Wynyard found himself on the Continent, roaming

hither and thither as dictated by the caprice of his employer. First
they went to Paris, then, leaving behind them the intricacies of the
traffic, departed from that gay city by the Port de Choisy for Mellun,
Sens, and Dijon. From Dijon (the Charing Cross of motors) they
sped across to Biarritz, over the Pyrenees to Madrid, then back to
the Riviera, via Carcassonne and Toulouse.
It was Masham’s custom to start at daybreak; the car was on the
wing as soon as the birds. They swept along the great straight
highways, by quiet sleeping farms, through low-hanging mists, and
now and then past an old white-faced château, staring sternly from
amidst its woods—or again, a gaudy red villa smothered in lime
trees. Masham had not overstated the case when he declared that
he “took risks.” Once or twice, when they hummed along wide,
empty roads, as the wind roared past their ears, and the engine
vibration was such that every nerve was ajar, it appeared to the
chauffeur that he was trusting his life to a madman! Speed, his
employer’s passion, seemed to grow insatiable with time—his
appetite for eating up, with furious haste, miles and miles and miles,
and ever hurrying onwards to the unattainable horizon, increased
with indulgence. The intoxication of motion appeared to lift him
completely out of himself—and to change his personality.
Wynyard had once quoted to his friend, “Needs must when the devil
drives!” Now at times he could readily believe that the old gentleman
himself was holding the steering-wheel!
Sometimes, as they tore through villages, they left a track of whirling
feathers—the remains of a flock of geese or poultry; and Masham
boasted, to his chauffeur’s disgust, that once, between Pau and
Biarritz, he and his machine had been the death of five dogs. On
more than one occasion, when his excitement was frenzied, and he
undoubtedly saw red, Wynyard had endeavoured to wrest the
steering-wheel from his employer. They had several narrow escapes,
and many of their skids were neither more nor less than hair-raising.
Wynyard’s face, which was tanned and weather-beaten, displayed
several new lines, and sometimes wore a very grim expression, as
the car whirled round a sharp corner with a single and defiant hoot!
But these risks were his price; it was all in the day’s work, for three
hundred a year.
It seemed strange that he was unable to find a commonplace
situation, which offered the happy medium; either he drove an old
doddering car at infrequent intervals, or he was bound to this grey
racer, like Ixion to his wheel.
Excepting on the occasions when Masham was specially reckless,
the situation was all right. They lived at the best hotels, and he sat at
the same table with his employer—whose talk was ever and always
of the car, or other people’s cars—of petrol, garages, tyres, and
racing. He was a man of one idea.
His companion-chauffeur was a good deal staggered by the large
quantity of cognac absorbed by his patron; but it never appeared to
affect his nerves, and merely rendered him unsociable and morose.
His one, all-devouring ambition was to win a race for the highest
speed, and to be known as the most daring and successful motorist
in Europe! When they stopped at hotels he herded with his kind—
after the manner of golfers and racing people—comparing cars,
speeds, weights, and prices, talking knowingly of “mushroom valves”
and the “new sliding sleeve engine.” On such occasions, instead of
being, as usual, somewhat stolid and glum, he became
extraordinarily animated and eloquent!
Masham was a man of good family, his own master, and the non-
resident owner of a fine property in the north of England, which, in
order to indulge his passion for speed, he neglected shamefully.
Arrived at Nice, he put up at one of the fashionable hotels, running
over daily to Monte Carlo, which, in the month of March, was
crammed. On these expeditions, he was accompanied by his
companion, and the car was garaged, whilst its owner took what he
called “a turn in the rooms.” He played for high stakes, generally put
down a mille note, and was uncannily lucky. This good fortune he
attributed to the little silver figure of a certain saint, which he clutched
in one hand, whilst he staked with the other; this saint was his
mascot. He never remained long in the Casino, being too impatient
and restless; and when he had made a round of his favourite tables,
would sally forth in search of refreshment, or to saunter about the
square and the exquisite gardens. His companion did not gamble—
strong as were inherited instincts, and hot as was the gambling fever
which ran in his blood;—he had no money to lose, and the prize he
wished to win was Aurea Morven.
Naturally, Masham came across many acquaintances in such a
cosmopolitan rendezvous as “Monte.” Wynyard also encountered
several familiar faces, and, one afternoon, as he was passing
through a great crowd at the “Café de Paris,” a light hand was laid on
his arm, and, looking down, he was astonished to meet the upturned
blue eyes of Mrs. Ramsay—Mrs. Ramsay in black, but no longer in
weeds; Mrs. Ramsay another woman, and ten years younger; Mrs.
Ramsay self-confident, prosperous, and handsome.
“Why, it’s Owen!” she exclaimed. “Who would have thought of seeing
you here?”
He smiled affirmatively, and glanced at her companions round the
tea-table. Ottinge was strongly represented: here were the Rector
and Miss Aurea, also General and Mrs. Morven, and a smart young
man in attendance on the younger lady.
“Hullo, Owen!” exclaimed Mr. Morven, rising and shaking hands; “this
is an unexpected meeting!” and he stared with puzzled interest at the
erect figure, high-bred face, unimpeachable grey suit, and Homburg
hat.
“I’m not over here to gamble,” he continued. “We are at Mentone,
and I’ve come to have a look at this pretty, wicked place.”
“It’s pretty wicked by all accounts!” replied Wynyard, speaking now,
as Mr. Morven noted, in the tone of equal to equal.
“Aurea,” he said, turning to his daughter, “don’t you see Owen?”
Miss Morven—who had entirely regained her beauty, and was
charmingly dressed—glanced up from underneath her immense
rose-wreathed hat, and coolly surveyed her former lover. She was, if
possible, prettier than ever, he said to himself, as he doffed his hat in
acknowledgment of her curt nod; but her eyes, as they met his,
resembled two dark pools—frozen. For some unknown and
unguessed-at reason, Aurea was no longer friendly to him—much
less anything nearer—and the discovery seemed to plant a dagger in
his throat. He found it desperately difficult to utter a word, much less
to carry on a brisk conversation with the Rector and Mrs. Ramsay.
General and Mrs. Morven were, he concluded, the important elderly
couple who sat at the other side of the table, and the young man,
who was engrossing Miss Morven’s sole attention, was some idle
ass, who wore his hair parted in the middle, and three rings on his
left hand. He hated him then and there!
Meanwhile, Miss Morven encouraged him, and kept up a
conversation in low, confidential tones. Her hat concealed her face,
and Wynyard realised, for the first time in his life, how rude a hat
could be! This black hat, garlanded with pink flowers, was but too
eloquently expressive of the fact, that its wearer desired to ignore the
existence—much less the presence—of her aunts’ late employé.
However, the Rector and Mrs. Ramsay were most anxiously
disposed to make amends for Miss Morven’s detachment.
“What do you think of the gardens?” inquired the former, indicating
the flower-beds that lay between them and the Casino—a blaze of
velvet violas. “Quite in your line, eh?”
Wynyard muttered an inarticulate assent—all his thoughts were
concentrated on Aurea.
“I’m glad to see you are getting on,” resumed the Rector cheerily;
“prospects improving, eh?”
“I’m afraid not,” answered the chauffeur; his mind full of this
gentleman’s only daughter, and the haughty little face which was so
studiously concealed.
“What are you doing now, eh?”
“I’m with Masham, a man who has a racing motor, as useful
companion.”
“Oh, by Jove, I know him!” broke in the General. “Masham’s the
wildest driver in England, or, indeed, Europe—a racing lunatic—wish
you safely out of his company! Is he here?”
“Yes, in the rooms; and I’m just loafing about till he is ready to go
back to Nice.”
“You have never asked about poor dear little Ottinge,” interposed
Mrs. Ramsay, with an injured air,—Mrs. Ramsay who had hitherto
been a silent and much interested spectator of Wynyard and Aurea.
What was the matter with the girl?
“And how is Ottinge?” he inquired, turning to the Rector.
“Oh, pretty well, thank you. Young Hogben is married to Dilly
Topham. I must say I never thought that would come off, but it has;
and they seem fairly happy. Old Mrs. Topham, however, gave no
dowry; she cannot bear to part with a penny, but she sent a present
of three jars of mouldy jam, and a broken-down lamp.”
“Miss Parrett has been dangerously ill,” supplemented Mrs. Ramsay,
“but is better. Old Thunder has bought a donkey and a bath-chair;
and oh, sad news indeed!—how am I to tell you?—Mackenzie is no
more.”
“I can bear up,” he answered, with a short laugh. This was
ungrateful, for was it not Mackenzie who had introduced him to
Aurea?
“He was kicked by a horse, and was killed on the spot,” said the
Rector; “I think, Mrs. Ramsay, you show a very unneighbourly spirit.”
“But I never considered myself the neighbour of Mackenzie!” she
argued, “just the opposite—and he was not an estimable character.
A good man should not own a bad dog.”
“Oh, well, give a dog a bad name——”
“And Mackenzie deserved it,” she interrupted; “he was the village
bully. If he met a smaller dog, it was death for the small dog; if one of
his own size, he passed on. You know, or you may not know, that, at
teas at the Rectory, he sat on the laps of timid ladies, devoured their
offerings, and intimidated them with growls—they dared not displace
him.” Then, turning her head, “Aurea, we are talking of Mackenzie
and his enormities.”
“Oh, are you?” she rejoined, with civil indifference.
“Yes,” resumed Mrs. Ramsay; “and is not it well known that he
attacked a solitary visitor in the Rectory drawing-room—whose furs
affronted him—and tore her muff to shreds with ferocious
satisfaction? I believe her screams could be heard at the Drum, and
she had to be restored with brandy and burnt feathers.”
“You would delight Dr. Johnson, my dear lady,” said the Parson; “he
loved a good hater.”
“Oh, if you only knew how he treated and maltreated my poor paying
guests,”—and she looked at Wynyard—“you remember the beagle,
and how you doctored him; only for you he would have died.”
“Yes; but the beagle survives—Mackenzie is no more. De mortuis nil
nisi bonum.”
To hear this chauffeur with a ready Latin quotation in his mouth!
What was the world coming to? thought Mrs. Morven, who had
finished her tea, and was now playing the part of a dignified
audience.
“We are all at the Hôtel des Montaignes, Mentone,” continued Mrs.
Ramsay; “I want you to come over and see me, will you?”
“I should be delighted, but my time is not my own—perhaps I can get
off on Sunday. May I write?”
“Do; and I shall expect to hear that you are coming to lunch.”
“Here is Masham,” he announced, as the muscular, brick-faced
gentleman pushed and elbowed his way towards them.
“Hullo, Owen, ready to start, eh? We must get a move on.”—“Oh,” to
the General, “glad to see you—splendid weather out here, eh?”
At this moment a party of compatriots arrived, and figuratively
swallowed up General and Mrs. Morven, the Rector, Mrs. Ramsay,
and even the celebrated Mr. Masham. Here was Wynyard’s
opportunity, and, as usual, he seized upon it without ceremony. It
was impossible that Aurea (who was rarely out of his thoughts),
whose little word, “perhaps,” had buoyed him up on many stormy
waters, meant what her looks and attitude implied. Resolutely he
came up to her, ignoring the glassy stare of her companion, and said
—
“Miss Morven—has forgotten me—perhaps?”
Miss Morven looked up at him with an expression of delicate disdain.
Could this self-possessed young lady, in a wonderful hat and
Parisian frock, be the self-same girl who had stood beside him on
Yampton Hill, with loosened hair and spattered habit?
After a reflective pause, she murmured—
“No, I’ve not forgotten my aunts’—er—chauffeur; but I do not think
we were ever—acquainted.”
Wynyard had wonderful self-command, but mentally he reeled; he
felt as if some one had suddenly dealt him a terrible blow between
the eyes. Outwardly he turned a sudden, pallid white, and drew
back, as Miss Morven rose, picked up her parasol, and said to her
companion—
“Now, if you like, I will go down to the Condamine and see the motor
boats.”
And, almost at the same moment, Mr. Masham claimed his
companion and hurried him away to the garage.
“I say,” said the General to his brother (he usually prefaced his
remarks with “I say”), “who was the young stranger who seemed to
know Ottinge? ’Pon my word, he deserves a medal for the discovery.
Wait, I seem to know his face! Yes, I’ve got it. Wynyard of the Red
Hussars—he went the pace—uncle cut up rough—he’s in my club.”
“No, for once you are a bit out! You will be amused to hear that that
good-looking, well-set-up young man was Bella’s chauffeur.”
“Nonsense!”
“It’s a sober fact. I liked him,” continued the Rector; “he has good
manners—manners make the man—I had him in the choir, and he’s
a first-class cricketer. I always, between you and me, believed him to
be a gentleman who was expiating some—er—mistake. I declare,
Susan was actually fond of him, and he turned the heads,
unintentionally—I’ll say that for him—of every girl in the village.”
“Well, I’m blowed! He is the very image of Dick Wynyard’s heir—next
to the baronetcy and property. Old Dick never speaks of him now,
and I’ve not seen him about for nearly two years. Mrs. Ramsay, what
do you say to a village romance, and a chauffeur being as like a
young swell as two peas?”
“Oh,” replied the lady, deliberately moulding on her gloves, “truth is
stranger than fiction; I’ve known some funny things in my life. I
always liked Owen, and I am glad to see he is getting up in the
world.”
“Up!” repeated the General; “if he is companion to Masham, he is
much more likely to leave the world altogether—and that at an early
date! Well, Edgar, Aurea has gone off with young Beauclerc and his
people to the boats. Shall we go to La Turbie as arranged, and have
the honour of escorting the two ladies?”
And then, with one consent, they rose with a loud noise of scraping
chairs, and passed into the square in single file.