Pnin

separated it from Professor Stowe's domain, the preceding century, where the lambs were whiter, the turf softer, the rill purlier, and from Dr Shapiro's early nineteenth century, with its glen mists, sea fogs, and imported grapes. Roy Thayer avoided talking of his subject, avoided, in fact, talking of any subject, had squandered a decade of grey life on an erudite work dealing with a forgotten group of unnecessary poetasters, and kept a detailed diary, in cryptogrammed verse, which he hoped posterity would someday decipher and, in sober backcast, proclaim the greatest literary achievement of our time - and for all I know, Roy Thayer, you might be right.
    When everybody was comfortably lapping and lauding the cocktails, Professor Pnin sat down on the wheezy hassock near his newest friend and said:
    'I have to report, sir, on the skylark, zhavoronok in Russian, about which you made me the honour to interrogate me. Take this with you to your home. I have here tapped on the typewriting machine a condensed account with bibliography. I think we will now transport ourselves to the other room where a supper ? la fourchette is, I think, awaiting us.'

8
    Presently, guests with full plates drifted back into the parlour. The punch was brought in.
    'Gracious, Timofey, where on earth did you get that perfectly divine bowl!' exclaimed Joan.
    'Victor presented it to me.'
    'But where did he get it?'
    'Antiquaire store in Cranton, I think.'
    'Gosh, it must have cost a fortune.'
    'One dollar? Ten dollars? Less maybe?'
    'Ten dollars - nonsense! Two hundred, I should say. Look at it! Look at this writhing pattern. You know, you should show it to the Cockerells. They know everything about old glass. In fact, they have a Lake Dunmore pitcher that looks like a poor relation of this.'
    Margaret Thayer admired it in her turn, and said that when she was a child, she imagined Cinderella's glass shoes to be exactly of that greenish blue tint; whereupon Professor Pnin remarked that, primo, he would like everybody to say if contents were as good as container, and, secundo, that Cendrillon's shoes were not made of glass but of Russian squirrel fur - vair, in French. It was, he said, an obvious case of the survival of the fittest among words, verre being more evocative than vair which, he submitted, came not from varius, variegated, but from veveritsa, Slavic for a certain beautiful, pale, winter-squirrel fur, having a bluish, or better say sizïy, columbine, shade - 'from columba, Latin for "pigeon ", as somebody here well knows - so you see, Mrs Fire, you were, in general, correct.'
    'The contents are fine,' said Laurence Clements.
    'This beverage is certainly delicious,' said Margaret Thayer.
    ('I always thought "columbine" was some sort of flower,' said Thomas to Betty, who lightly acquiesced.)
    The respective ages of several children were then passed in review. Victor would be fifteen soon. Eileen, the granddaughter of Mrs Thayer's eldest sister, was five. Isabel was twenty-three and greatly enjoying a secretarial job in New York. Dr Hagen's daughter was twenty-four, and about to return from Europe, where she had spent a wonderful summer touring Bavaria and Switzerland with a very gracious old lady, Dorianna Karen, famous movie star of the twenties.
    The telephone rang. Somebody wanted to talk to Mrs Sheppard. With a precision quite unusual for him in such matters, unpredictable Pnin not only rattled off the woman's new address and telephone number, but also supplied those of her eldest son.

9
    By ten o'clock, Pnin's Punch and Betty's Scotch were causing some of the guests to talk louder than they thought they did. A carmine flush had spread over one side of Mrs Thayer's neck, under the little blue star of her left ear-ring, and, sitting very straight, she regaled her host with an account of the feud between two of her co-workers at the library. It was a simple office story, but her changes of tone from Miss Shrill to Mr Basso, and the consciousness of the soiree going on so nicely, made Pnin bend his head and guffaw ecstatically behind his hand. Roy Thayer was weakly twinkling to himself as he looked into his Punch, down his grey porous nose, and politely listened to Joan Clements who, when she was a little high as she was now, had a fetching way of rapidly blinking, or even completely dosing her black-lashed blue eyes, and of interrupting her sentences, to punctuate a clause or gather new momentum, by deep hawing pants: 'But don't you think