Pnin

by moving his eyes up and down - snapping up an eyeful of words, reeling them off to his audience, and drawing out the end of the sentence while diving for the next. Pnin's worried eye would be bound to lose its bearings. Therefore he preferred reading his lectures, his gaze glued to his text, in a slow, monotonous baritone that seemed to climb one of those interminable flights of stairs used by people who dread elevators.
    The conductor, a grey-headed fatherly person with steel spectacles placed rather low on his simple, functional nose and a bit of soiled adhesive tape on his thumb, had now only three coaches to deal with before reaching the last one, where Pnin rode.
    Pnin in the meantime had yielded to the satisfaction of a special Pninian craving. He was in a Pninian quandary. Among other articles indispensable for a Pninian overnight stay in a strange town, such as shoe trees, apples, dictionaries, and so on, his Gladstone bag contained a relatively new black suit he planned to wear that night for the lecture ('Are the Russian People Communist?') before the Cremona ladies. It also contained next Monday's symposium lecture ('Don Quixote and Faust'), which he intended to study the next day, on his way back to Waindell, and a paper by the graduate student, Betty Bliss ('Dostoyevsky and Gestalt Psychology'), that he had to read for Dr Hagen, who was her main director of cerebration. The quandary was as follows: If he kept the Cremona manuscript - a sheaf of typewriter-size pages, carefully folded down the centre - on his person, in the security of his body warmth, the chances were, theoretically, that he would forget to transfer it from the coat he was wearing to the one he would wear. On the other hand, if he placed the lecture in the pocket of the suit in the bag now, he would, he knew, be tortured by the possibility of his luggage being stolen. On the third hand (these mental states sprout additional forelimbs all the time), he carried in the inside pocket of his present coat a precious wallet with two ten-dollar bills, the newspaper clipping of a letter he had written, with my help, to the New York Times in 1945 anent the Yalta conference, and his certificate of naturalization; and it was physically possible to pull out the wallet, if needed, in such a way as fatally to dislodge the folded lecture. During the twenty minutes he had been on the train, our friend had already opened his bag twice to play with his various papers. When the conductor reached the car, diligent Pnin was perusing with difficulty Betty's last effort, which began, 'When we consider the mental climate wherein we all live, we cannot but notice -'
    The conductor entered; did not awake the soldier; promised the women he would let them know when they would be about to arrive; and presently was shaking his head over Pnin's ticket. The Cremona stop had been abolished two years before.
    'Important lecture!' cried Pnin. 'What to do? It is a catastroph!'
    Gravely, comfortably, the grey-headed conductor sank into the opposite seat and consulted in silence a tattered book full of dog-eared insertions. In a few minutes, namely at 3.08, Pnin would have to get off at Whitchurch; this would enable him to catch the four o'clock bus that would deposit him, around six, at Cremona.
    'I was thinking I gained twelve minutes, and now I have lost nearly two whole hours,' said Pnin bitterly. Upon which, clearing his throat and ignoring the consolation offered by the kind grey-head ('You'll make it'), he took off his reading glasses, collected his stone-heavy bag, and repaired to the vestibule of the car so as to wait there for the confused greenery skimming by to be cancelled and replaced by the definite station he had in mind.

2
    Whitchurch materialized as scheduled. A hot, torpid expanse of cement and sun lay beyond the geometrical solids of various clean-cut shadows. The local weather was unbelievably summery for October. Alert, Pnin entered a waiting-room of sorts, with a needless stove in the middle, and looked around. In a solitary recess, one could make out the upper part of a perspiring young man who was filling out forms on the broad wooden counter before him.
    'Information, please,' said Pnin. 'Where stops four o'clock bus to Cremona?'
    'Right across the street,' briskly answered the employee without looking up.
    'And where possible to leave baggage?'
    'That bag? I'll take care of it.'
    And with the national informality that always nonplussed Pnin, the