Lolita

of my age, somewhat resembling Gustave Trapp, a cousin of my father’s in Switzerland—same smoothly tanned face, fuller than mine, with a small dark mustache and a rosebud degenerate mouth. Lolita was studying a road map when I got back into the car.
    “What did that man ask you, Lo?”
    “Man? Oh, that man. Oh yes. Oh, I don’t know. He wondered if I had a map. Lost his way, I guess.”
    We drove on, and I said:
    “Now listen, Lo. I do not know whether you are lying or not, and I do not know whether you are insane or not, and I do not care for the moment; but that person has been following us all day, and his car was at the motel yesterday, and I think he is a cop. You know perfectly well what will happen and where you will go if the police find out about things. Now I want to know exactly what he said to you and what you told him.”
    She laughed.
    “If he’s really a cop,” she said shrilly but not illogically, “the worst thing we could do, would be to show him we are scared. Ignore him,
Dad.”
    “Did he ask where we were going?”
    “Oh, he knows
that”
(mocking me).
    “Anyway,” I said, giving up, “I have seen his face now. He is not pretty. He looks exactly like a relative of mine called Trapp.”
    “Perhaps he is Trapp. If I were you—Oh, look, all the nines are changing into the next thousand. When I was a little kid,” she continued unexpectedly, “I used to think they’d stop and go back to nines, if only my mother agreed to put the car in reverse.”
    It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick; and silently we travelled on, unpursued.
    But next day, like pain in a fatal disease that comes back as the drug and hope wear off, there it was again behind us, that glossy red beast. The traffic on the highway was light that day; nobody passed anybody; and nobody attempted to get in between our humble blue car and its imperious red shadow—as if there were some spell cast on that interspace, a zone of evil mirth and magic, a zone whose very precision and stability had a glass-like virtue that was almost artistic. The driver behind me, with his stuffed shoulders and Trappish mustache, looked like a display dummy, and his convertible seemed to move only because an invisible rope of silent silk connected it with our shabby vehicle. We were many times weaker than his splendid, lacquered machine, so that I did not even attempt to outspeed him.
O lente currite noctis equi!
O softly run, nightmares! We climbed long grades and rolled downhill again, and heeded speed limits, and spared slow children, and reproduced in sweeping terms the black wiggles of curves on their yellow shields, and no matter how and where we drove, the enchanted interspace slid on intact, mathematical, mirage-like, the viatic counterpart of a magic carpet. And all the time I was aware of a private blaze on my right: her joyful eye, her flaming cheek.
    A traffic policeman, deep in the nightmare of crisscross streets—at half-past-four P.M . in a factory town—was the hand of chance that interrupted the spell. He beckoned me on, and then with the same hand cut off my shadow. A score of cars were launched in between us, and I sped on, and deftly turned into a narrow lane. A sparrow alighted with a jumbo bread crumb, was tackled by another, and lost the crumb.
    When after a few grim stoppages and a bit of deliberate meandering, I returned to the highway, our shadow had disappeared.
    Lola snorted and said: “If he is what you think he is, how silly to give him the slip.”
    “I have other notions by now,” I said.
    “You should—ah—check them by—ah—keeping in touch with him, fahther deah,” said Lo, writhing in the coils of her own sarcasm. “Gee, you
are
mean,” she added in her ordinary voice.
    We spent a grim night in a very foul cabin, under a sonorous amplitude of rain, and with a kind of prehistorically loud thunder incessantly rolling above us.
    “I am not a lady and do not like lightning,” said Lo, whose dread of electric storms gave me some pathetic solace.
    We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001.
    “Judging by the terminal figure,” I remarked, “Fatface is already here.”
    “Your humor,” said Lo, “is sidesplitting, deah fahther.”
    We were in sage-brush country by that time, and there was a day or two of lovely release (I had been a fool, all was well, that discomfort was merely a