11Exhibit number two is a pocket diary bound in black imitation leather,with a golden year, 1947, en escalier, in its upper left-hand corner.I speak of this neat product of the Blank Blank Co., Blankton, Mass., as ifit were really before me. Actually, it was destroyed five years go and whatwe examine now (by courtesy of a photographic memory) is but its briefmaterialization, a puny unfledged phoenix. I remember the thing so exactly because I wrote it really twice. FirstI jotted down each entry in pencil (with many erasures and corrections) onthe leaves of what is commercially known as a "typewriter tablet"; then, Icopied it out with obvious abbreviations in my smallest, most satanic, handin the little black book just mentioned. May 30 is a Fast Day by Proclamation in New Hampshire but not in theCarolinas. That day an epidemic of "abdominal flu" (whatever that is) forcedRamsdale to close its schools for the summer. The reader may check theweather data in the Ramsdale Journal for 1947. A few days before thatI moved into the Haze house, and the little diary which I now propose toreel off (much as a spy delivers by heart the contents of the note heswallowed) covers most of June. Thursday. Very warm day. From a vantage point (bathroom window)saw Dolores taking things off a clothesline in the apple-green light behindthe house. Strolled out. She wore a plaid shirt, blue jeans and sneakers.Every movement she made in the dappled sun plucked at the most secret andsensitive chord of my abject body. After a while she sat down next to me onthe lower step of the back porch and began to pick up the pebbles betweenher feet--pebbles, my God, then a curled bit of milk-bottle glass resemblinga snarling lip--and chuck them at a can. Ping. You can't a secondtime--you can't hit it--oh, marvelous: tender and tanned, not the leastblemish. Sundaes cause acne. The excess of the oily substance called sebumwhich nourishes the hair follicles of the skin creates, when too profuse, anirritation that opens the way to infection. But nymphets do not have acnealthough they gorge themselves on rich food. God, what agony, that silkyshimmer above her temple grading into bright brown hair. And the little bonetwitching at the side of her dust-powdered ankle. "The McCoo girl? GinnyMcCoo? Oh, she's a fright. And mean. And lame. Nearly died of polio." Ping.The glistening tracery of down on her forearm. When she got up to take inthe wash, I had a chance of adoring from afar the faded seat of herrolled-up jeans. Out of the lawn, bland Mrs. Haze, complete with camera,grew up like a fakir's fake tree and after some heliotropic fussing--sadeyes up, glad eyes down--had the cheek of taking my picture as I satblinking on the steps, Humbert le Bel. Friday. Saw her going somewhere with a dark girl called Rose.Why does the way she walks--a child, mind you, a mere child!--excite me soabominably? Analyze it. A faint suggestion of turned in toes. A kind ofwiggly looseness below the knee prolonged to the end of each footfall. Theghost of a drag. Very infantile, infinitely meretricious. Humbert Humbert isalso infinitely moved by the little one's slangy speech, by her harsh highvoice. Later heard her volley crude nonsense at Rose across the fence.Twanging through me in a rising rhythm. Pause. "I must go now, kiddo." Saturday. (Beginning perhaps amended.) I know it is madness tokeep this journal but it gives me a strange thrill to do so; and only aloving wife could decipher my microscopic script. Let me state with a sobthat today my L. was sun-bathing on the so-called "piazza," but her motherand some other woman were around all the time. Of course, I might have satthere in the rocker and pretended to read. Playing safe, I kept away, for Iwas afraid that the horrible, insane, ridiculous and pitiful tremor thatpalsied me might prevent me from making my entrиe with any semblanceof casualness. Sunday. Heat ripple still with us; a most favonian week. Thistime I took up a strategic position, with obese newspaper and new pipe, inthe piazza rocker before L. arrived. To my intense disappointment shecame with her mother, both in two-piece bathing suits, black, as new as mypipe. My darling, my sweetheart stood for a moment near me--wanted thefunnies--and she smelt almost exactly like the other one, the Riviera one,but more intensely so, with rougher overtones--a torrid odor that at onceset my manhood astir--but she had already yanked out of me the covetedsection and retreated to her mat near her phocine mamma. There my beauty laydown on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in myeyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along theincurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow natesclothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs. Silently, theseventh-grader enjoyed her green-red-blue comics. She was the loveliestnymphet green-red-blue Priap himself could think up. As I looked on, throughprismatic layers of light, dry-lipped, focusing my lust and rocking slightlyunder my newspaper, I felt that my perception of her, if properlyconcentrated upon, might be sufficient to have me attain a beggar's blissimmediately; but, like some predator that prefers a moving prey to amotionless one, I planned to have this pitiful attainment coincide with thevarious girlish movements she made now and then as she read, such as tryingto scratch the middle of her back and revealing a stippled armpit--but fatHaze suddenly spoiled everything by turning to me and asking me for a light,and starting a make-believe conversation about a fake book by some popularfraud. Monday. Delectatio morosa. I spend my doleful days in dumps anddolors. We (mother Haze, Dolores and I) were to go to Our Glass Lake thisafternoon, and bathe, and bask; but a nacreous morn degenerated at noon intorain, and Lo made a scene. The median age of pubescence for girls has been found to be thirteenyears and nine months in New York and Chicago. The age varies forindividuals from ten, or earlier, to seventeen. Virginia was not quitefourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra.Je m'imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla."Monsieur Poe-poe," as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert's classesin Paris called the poet-poet. I have all the characteristics which, according to writers on the sexinterests of children, start the responses stirring in a little girl:clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice, broad shoulder. Moreover,I am said to resemble some crooner or actor chap on whom Lo has a crush. Tuesday. Rain. Lake of the Rains. Mamma out shopping. L., Iknew, was somewhere quite near. In result of some stealthy maneuvering, Icame across her in her mother's bedroom. Prying her left eye open to get ridof a speck of something. Checked frock. Although I do love that intoxicatingbrown fragrance of hers, I really think she should wash her hair once in awhile. For a moment, we were both in the same warm green bath of the mirrorthat reflected the top of a poplar with us in the sky. Held her roughly bythe shoulders, then tenderly by the temples, and turned her about. "It'sright there," she said. "I can feel it." "Swiss peasant would use the top ofher tongue." "Lick it out?" "Yeth. Shly try?" "Sure," she said. Gently Ipressed my quivering sting along her rolling salty eyeball. "Goody-goody,"she said nictating. "It is gone." "Now the other?" "You dope," shebegan, "there is noth--" but here she noticed the pucker of my approachinglips. "Okay," she said cooperatively, and bending toward her warm upturnedrusset face somber Humbert pressed his mouth to her fluttering eyelid. Shelaughed, and brushed past me out of the room. My heart seemed everywhere atonce. Never in my life--not even when fondling my child-love inFrance--never-- Night. Never have I experienced such agony. I would like to describeher face, her ways--and I cannot, because my own desire for her blinds mewhen she is near. I am not used to being with nymphets, damn it. If I closemy eyes I see but an immobilized fraction of her, a cinematographic still, asudden smooth nether loveliness, as with one knee up under her tartan skirtshe sits tying her shoe. "Dolores Haze, ne montrez pas vos zhambes"(this is her mother who thinks she knows French). A poet ю mes heures, I composed a madrigal to the soot-blacklashes of her pale-gray vacant eyes, to the five asymmetrical freckles onher bobbed nose, to the blond down of her brown limbs; but I tore it up andcannot recall it today. Only in the tritest of terms (diary resumed) can Idescribe Lo's features: I might say her hair is auburn, and her lips as redas licked red candy, the lower one prettily plump--oh, that I were a ladywriter who could have her pose naked in a naked light! But instead I amlanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrowsand a queer accent, and a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slowboyish smile. And neither is she the fragile child of a feminine novel. Whatdrives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet--of every nymphet,perhaps; this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kindof eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads andmagazine pictures, from the blurry pinkness of adolescent maidservants inthe Old Country (smelling of crushed daisies and sweat); and from very youngharlots disguised as children in provincial brothels; and then again, allthis gets mixed up with the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping throughthe musk and the mud, through the dirt and the death, oh God, oh God. Andwhat is most singular is that she, this Lolita, my Lolita, hasindividualized the writer's ancient lust, so that above and over everythingthere is--Lolita. Wednesday. "Look, make Mother take you and me to Our Glass Laketomorrow." These were the textual words said to me by my twelve-year-oldflame in a voluptuous whisper, as we happened to bump into one another onthe front porch, I out, she in. The reflection of the afternoon sun, adazzling white diamond with innumerable iridescent spikes quivered on theround back of a parked car. The leafage of a voluminous elm played itsmellow shadows upon the clapboard wall of the house. Two poplars shiveredand shook. You could make out the formless sounds of remote traffic; a childcalling "Nancy, Nan-cy!" In the house, Lolita had put on her favorite"Little Carmen" record which I used to call "Dwarf Conductors," making hersnort with mock derision at my mock wit. Thursday. Last night we sat on the piazza, the Haze woman,Lolita and I. Warm dusk had deepened into amorous darkness. The old girl hadfinished relating in great detail the plot of a movie she and L. had seensometime in the winter. The boxer had fallen extremely low when he met thegood old priest (who had been a boxer himself in his robust youth and couldstill slug a sinner). We sat on cushions heaped on the floor, and L. wasbetween the woman and me (she had squeezed herself in, the pet). In my turn,I launched upon a hilarious account of my arctic adventures. The muse ofinvention handed me a rifle and I shot a white bear who sat down and said:Ah! All the while I was acutely aware of L.'s nearness and as I spoke Igestured in the merciful dark and took advantage of those invisible gesturesof mine to touch her hand, her shoulder and a ballerina of wool and gauzewhich she played with and kept sticking into my lap; and finally, when I hadcompletely enmeshed my glowing darling in this weave of ethereal caresses, Idared stroke her bare leg along the gooseberry fuzz of her shin, and Ichuckled at my own jokes, and trembled, and concealed my tremors, and onceor twice felt with my rapid lips the warmth of her hair as I treated her toa quick nuzzling, humorous aside and caressed her plaything. She, too,fidgeted a good deal so that finally her mother told her sharply to quit itand sent the doll flying into the dark, and I laughed and addressed myselfto Haze across Lo's legs to let my hand creep up my nymphet's thin back andfeel her skin through her boy's shirt. But I knew it was all hopeless, and was sick with longing, and myclothes felt miserably tight, and I was almost glad when her mother's quietvoice announced in the dark: "And now we all think that Lo should go tobed." "I think you stink," said Lo. "Which means there will be no picnictomorrow," said Haze. "This is a free country," said Lo. When angry Lo witha Bronx cheer had gone, I stayed on from sheer inertia, while Haze smokedher tenth cigarette of the evening and complained of Lo. She had been spiteful, if you please, at the age of one, when she usedto throw her toys out of her crib so that her poor mother should keeppicking them up, the villainous infant! Now, at twelve, she was a regularpest, said Haze. All she wanted from life was to be one day a strutting andprancing baton twirler or a jitterbug. Her grades were poor, but she wasbetter adjusted in her new school than in Pisky (Pisky was the Haze hometown in the Middle West. The Ramsdale house was her late mother-in-law's.They had moved to Ramsdale less than two years ago). "Why was she unhappythere?" "Oh," said Haze, "poor me should know, I went through that whenI was a kid: boys twisting one's arm, banging into one with loads ofbooks, pulling one's hair, hurting one's breasts, flipping one's skirt. Ofcourse, moodiness is a common concomitant of growing up, but Lo exaggerates.Sullen and evasive. Rude and defiant. Struck Viola, an Italian schoolmate,in the seat with a fountain pen. Know what I would like? If you, monsieur,happened to be still here in the fall, I'd ask you to help her with herhomework--you seem to know everything, geography, mathematics, French." "Oh,everything," answered monsieur. "That means," said Haze quickly, "you'llbe here!" I wanted to shout that I would stay on eternally if only Icould hope to caress now and then my incipient pupil. But I was wary ofHaze. So I just grunted and stretched my limbs nonconcomitantly (le motjuste) and presently went up to my room. The woman, however, wasevidently not prepared to call it a day. I was already lying upon my coldbed both hands pressing to my face Lolita's fragrant ghost when I heard myindefatigable landlady creeping stealthily up to my door to whisper throughit--just to make sure, she said, I was through with the Glance and Gulpmagazine I had borrowed the other day. From her room Lo yelled shehad it. We are quite a lending library in this house, thunder of God. Friday. I wonder what my academic publishers would say if I wereto quote in my textbook Ronsard's "la vermeillette fente" or RemyBelleau's "un petit mont feutrи de mousse dиlicate, tracи sur le milieud'un fillet escarlatte" and so forth. I shall probably have anotherbreakdown if I stay any longer in this house, under the strain of thisintolerable temptation, by the side of my darling--my darling--my life andmy bride. Has she already been initiated by mother nature to the Mystery ofthe Menarche? Bloated feelings. The Curse of the Irish. Falling from theroof. Grandma is visiting. "Mr. Uterus [I quote from a girls' magazine]starts to build a thick soft wall on the chance a possible baby may have tobe bedded down there." The tiny madman in his padded cell. Incidentally: if I ever commit a serious murder . . . Mark the "if."The urge should be something more than the kind of thing that happened to mewith Valeria. Carefully mark that then was rather inept. If and whenyou wish to sizzle me to death, remember that only a spell of insanity couldever give me the simple energy to be a brute (all this amended, perhaps).Sometimes I attempt to kill in my dreams. But do you know what happens? Forinstance I hold a gun. For instance I aim at a bland, quietly interestedenemy. Oh, I press the trigger all right, but one bullet after anotherfeebly drops on the floor from the sheepish muzzle. In those dreams, my onlythought is to conceal the fiasco from my foe, who is slowly growing annoyed. At dinner tonight the old cat said to me with a sidelong gleam ofmotherly mockery directed at Lo (I had just been describing, in a flippantvein, the delightful little toothbrush mustache I had not quite decided togrow): "Better don't if somebody is not to go absolutely dotty." InstantlyLo pushed her plate of boiled fish away, all but knocking her milk over, andbounced out of the dining room. "Would it bore you very much," quoth Haze,"to come with us tomorrow for a swim in Our Glass Lake if Lo apologizes forher manners?" Later, I heard a great banging of doors and other sounds coming fromquaking caverns where the two rivals were having a ripping row. She had not apologized. The lake is out. It might have been fun. Saturday. For some days already I had been leaving the doorajar, while I wrote in my room; but only today did the trap work. With agood deal of additional fidgeting, shuffling, scraping--to disguise herembarrassment at visiting me without having been called--Lo came in andafter pottering around, became interested in the nightmare curlicues I hadpenned on a sheet of paper. Oh no: they were not the outcome of abelle-lettrist's inspired pause between two paragraphs; they were thehideous hieroglyphics (which she could not decipher) of my fatal lust. Asshe bent her brown curs over the desk at which I was sitting, Humbert theHoarse put his arm around her in a miserable imitation ofblood-relationship; and still studying, somewhat shortsightedly, the pieceof paper she held, my innocent little visitor slowly sank to a half-sittingposition upon my knee. Her adorable profile, parted lips, warm hair weresome three inches from my bared eyetooth; and I felt the heat of her limbsthrough her rough tomboy clothes. All at once I knew I could kiss her throator the wick of her mouth with perfect impunity. I knew she would let me doso, and even close her eyes as Hollywood teaches. A double vanilla with hotfudge--hardly more unusual than that. I cannot tell my learned reader (whoseeyebrows, I suspect, have by now traveled all the way to the back of hisbald head), I cannot tell him how the knowledge came to me; perhaps myape-ear had unconsciously caught some slight change in the rhythm of herrespiration--for now she was not really looking at my scribble, but waitingwith curiosity and composure--oh, my limpid nymphet!--for the glamorouslodger to do what he was dying to do. A modern child, an avid reader ofmovie magazines, an expert in dream-slow close-ups, might not think it toostrange, I guessed, if a handsome, intensely virile grown-up friend--toolate. The house was suddenly vibrating with voluble Louise's voice tellingMrs. Haze who had just come home about a dead something she and LeslieTomson had found in the basement, and little Lolita was not one to miss sucha tale. Sunday. Changeful, bad-tempered, cheerful, awkward, gracefulwith the tart grace of her coltish subteens, excruciatingly desirable fromhead to foot (all New England for a lady-writer's pen!), from the blackread-made bow and bobby pins holding her hair in place to the little scar onthe lower part of her neat calf (where a roller-skater kicked her in Pisky),a couple of inches above her rough white sock. Gone with her mother to theHamiltons--a birthday party or something. Full-skirted gingham frock. Herlittle doves seem well formed already. Precocious pet! Monday. Rainy morning. "Ces matins gris si doux . . ." Mywhite pajamas have a lilac design on the back. I am like one of thoseinflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of aluminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. My webis spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like awily wizard. Is Lo in her room? Gently I tug on the silk. She is not. Justheard the toilet paper cylinder make its staccato sound as it is turned; andno footfalls has my outflung filament traced from the bathroom back to herroom. Is she still brushing her teeth (the only sanitary act Lo performswith real zest)? No. The bathroom door has just slammed, so one has to feelelsewhere about the house for the beautiful warm-colored prey. Let us have astrand of silk descend the stairs. I satisfy myself by this means that sheis not in the kitchen--not banging the refrigerator door or screeching ather detested mamma (who, I suppose, is enjoying her third, cooing andsubduedly mirthful, telephone conversation of the morning). Well, let usgrope and hope. Ray-like, I glide in through to the parlor and find theradio silent (and mamma still talking to Mrs. Chatfield or Mrs. Hamilton,very softly, flushed, smiling, cupping the telephone with her free hand,denying by implication that she denies those amusing rumors, rumor, roomer,whispering intimately, as she never does, the clear-cut lady, in face toface talk). So my nymphet is not in the house at all! Gone! What I thoughtwas a prismatic weave turns out to be but an old gray cobweb, the house isempty, is dead. And then comes Lolita's soft sweet chuckle through myhalf-open door "Don't tell Mother but I've eaten all your bacon."Gone when I scuttle out of my room. Lolita, where are you? My breakfasttray, lovingly prepared by my landlady, leers at me toothlessly, ready to betaken in. Lola, Lolita! Tuesday. Clouds again interfered with that picnic on thatunattainable lake. Is it Fate scheming? Yesterday I tried on before themirror a new pair of bathing trunks. Wednesday. In the afternoon, Haze (common-sensical shoes,tailor-made dress), said she was driving downtown to buy a present for afriend of a friend of hers, and would I please come too because I have sucha wonderful taste in textures and perfumes. "Choose your favoriteseduction," she purred. What could Humbert, being in the perfume business,do? She had me cornered between the front porch and her car. "Hurry up," shesaid as I laboriously doubled up my large body in order to crawl in (stilldesperately devising a means of escape). She had started the engine, and wasgenteelly swearing at a backing and turning truck in front that had justbrought old invalid Miss Opposite a brand new wheel chair, when my Lolita'ssharp voice came from the parlor window: "You! Where are you going? I'mcoming too! Wait!" "Ignore her," yelped Haze (killing the motor); alas formy fair driver; Lo was already pulling at the door on my side. "This isintolerable," began Haze; but Lo had scrambled in, shivering with glee."Move your bottom, you," said Lo. "Lo!" cried Haze (sideglancing at me,hoping I would throw rude Lo out). "And behold," said Lo (not for the firsttime), as she jerked back, as I jerked back, as the car leapt forward. "Itis intolerable," said Haze, violently getting into second, "that a childshould be so ill-mannered. And so very persevering. When she knows she isunwanted. And needs a bath." My knuckles lay against the child's blue jeans. She was barefooted; hertoenails showed remnants of cherry-red polish and there was a bit ofadhesive tape across her big toe; and, God, what would I not have given tokiss then and there those delicate-boned, long-toed, monkeyish feet!Suddenly her hand slipped into mine and without our chaperon's seeing, Iheld, and stroked, and squeezed that little hot paw, all the way to thestore. The wings of the diver's Marlenesque nose shone, having shed orburned up their ration of powder, and she kept up an elegant monologue anentthe local traffic, and smiled in profile, and pouted in profile, and beather painted lashes in profile, while I prayed we would never get to thatstore, but we did. I have nothing else to report, save, primo: that big Haze hadlittle Haze sit behind on our way home, and secundo: that the ladydecided to keep Humbert's Choice for the backs of her own shapely ears. Thursday. We are paying with hail and gale for the tropicalbeginning of the month. In a volume of the Young People'sEncyclopedia, I found a map of the states that a child's pencil hadstarted copying out on a sheet of lightweight paper, upon the other side ofwhich, counter to the unfinished outline of Florida and the Gulf, there wasa mimeographed list of names referring, evidently, to her class at theRamsdale school. It is a poem I know already by heart. Angel, Grace Austin, Floyd Beale, Jack Beale, Mary Buck, Daniel Byron, Marguerite Campbell, Alice Carmine, Rose Chatfield, Phyllis Clarke, Gordon Cowan, John Cowan, Marion Duncan, Walter Falter, Ted Fantasia, Stella Flashman, Irving Fox, George Glave, Mabel Goodale, Donald Green, Lucinda Hamilton, Mary Rose Haze, Dolores Honeck, Rosaline Knight, Kenneth McCoo, Virginia McCrystal, Vivian McFate, Aubrey Miranda, Anthony Miranda, Viola Rosato, Emil Schlenker, Lena Scott, Donald Sheridan, Agnes Sherva, Oleg Smith, Hazel Talbot, Edgar Talbot, Edwin Wain, Lull Williams, Ralph Windmuller, Louise A poem, a poem, forsooth! So strange and sweet was it to discover this"Haze, Dolores" (she!) in its special bower of names, with its bodyguard ofroses--a fairy princess between her two maids of honor. I am trying toanalyze the spine-thrill of delight it gives me, this name among all thoseothers. What is it that excites me almost to tears (hot, opalescent, thicktears that poets and lovers shed)? What is it? The tender anonymity of thisname with its formal veil ("Dolores") and that abstract transposition offirst name and surname, which is like a pair of new pale gloves or a mask?Is "mask" the keyword? Is it because there is always delight in thesemitranslucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh andthe eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or isit because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom aroundmy dolorous and hazy darling: Grace and her ripe pimples; Ginny and herlagging leg; Gordon, the haggard masturbator; Duncan, the foul-smellingclown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola, of the blackheads and the bouncing bust;pretty Rosaline; dark Mary Rose; adorable Stella, who has let strangerstouch her; Ralph, who bullies and steals; Irving, for whom I am sorry. Andthere she is there, lost in the middle, gnawing a pencil, detested byteachers, all the boys' eyes on her hair and neck, my Lolita. Friday. I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake.Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanentlyeliminated, along with everybody else for miles around. Lolita whimpers inmy arms. A free man, I enjoy her among the ruins. Her surprise, myexplanations, demonstrations, ullulations. Idle and idiotic fancies! A braveHumbert would have played with her most disgustingly (yesterday, forinstance, when she was again in my room to show me her drawings,school-artware); he might have bribed her--and got away with it. A simplerand more practical fellow would have soberly stuck to various commercialsubstitutes--if you know where to go, I don't. Despite my many looks, I amhorribly timid. My romantic soul gets all clammy and shivery at the thoughtof running into some awful indecent unpleasantness. Those ribald seamonsters. "Mais allez-y, allez-y!" Annabel skipping on one foot toget into her shorts, I seasick with rage, trying to screen her. Same date, later, quite late. I have turned on the light to take down adream. It had an evident antecedent. Haze at dinner had benevolentlyproclaimed that since the weather bureau promised a sunny weekend we wouldgo to the lake Sunday after church. As I lay in bed, erotically musingbefore trying to go to sleep, I thought of a final scheme how to profit bythe picnic to come. I was aware that mother Haze hated my darling for herbeing sweet on me. So I planned my lake day with a view to satisfying themother. To her alone would I talk; but at some appropriate moment I wouldsay I had left my wrist watch or my sunglasses in that glade yonder--andplunge with my nymphet into the wood. Reality at this juncture withdrew, andthe Quest for the Glasses turned into a quiet little orgy with a singularlyknowing, cheerful, corrupt and compliant Lolita behaving as reason knew shecould not possibly behave. At 3 a.m. I swallowed a sleeping pill, andpresently, a dream that was not a sequel but a parody revealed to me, with akind of meaningful clarity, the lake I had never yet visited: it was glazedover with a sheet of emerald ice, and a pockmarked Eskimo was trying in vainto break it with a pickax, although imported mimosas and oleanders floweredon its gravelly banks. I am sure Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann would have paid mea sack of schillings for adding such a libidream to her files.Unfortunately, the rest of it was frankly eclectic. Big Haze and little Hazerode on horseback around the lake, and I rode too, dutifully bobbing up anddown, bowlegs astraddle although there was no horse between them, onlyelastic air--one of those little omissions due to the absentmindedness ofthe dream agent. Saturday. My heart is still thumping. I still squirm and emitlow moans of remembered embarrassment. Dorsal view. Glimpse of shiny skin between T-shirt and white gymshorts. Bending, over a window sill, in the act of tearing off leaves from apoplar outside while engrossed in torrential talk with a newspaper boy below(Kenneth Knight, I suspect) who had just propelled the RamsdaleJournal with a very precise thud onto the porch. I began creeping upto her--"crippling" up to her as pantomimists say. My arms and legs wereconvex surfaces between which--rather than upon which--I slowly progressedby some neutral means of locomotion: Humbert the Wounded Spider. I must havetaken hours to reach her: I seemed to see her through the wrong end of atelescope, and toward her taut little rear I moved like some paralytic, onsoft distorted limbs, in terrible concentration. At last I was right behindher when I had the unfortunate idea of blustering a trifle--shaking her bythe scruff of the neck and that sort of thing to cover my realmanхge, and she said in a shrill brief whine: "Cut it out!"--mostcoarsely, the little wench, and with a ghastly grin Humbert the Humble beata gloomy retreat while she went on wisecracking streetward. But now listen to what happened next. After lunch I was reclining in alow chair trying to read. Suddenly two deft little hands were over my eyes:she had crept up from behind as if re-enacting, in a ballet sequence, mymorning maneuver. Her fingers were a luminous crimson as they tried to blotout the sun, and she uttered hiccups of laughter and jerked this way andthat as I stretched my arm sideways and backwards without otherwise changingmy recumbent position. My hand swept over her agile giggling legs, and thebook like a sleigh left my lap, and Mrs. Haze strolled up and saidindulgently: "Just slap her hard if she interferes with your scholarlymeditations. How I love this garden [no exclamation mark in her tone]. Isn'tit divine in the sun [no question mark either]." And with a sign of feignedcontent, the obnoxious lady sank down on the grass and looked up at the skyas she leaned back on her splayed-out hands, and presently an old graytennis ball bounced over her, and Lo's voice came from the house haughtily:"Pardonnez, Mother. I was not aiming at you." Of course not,my hot downy darling.12This proved to be the last of twenty entries or so. It will be seemfrom them that for all the devil's inventiveness, the scheme remained dailythe same. First he would tempt me--and then thwart me, leaving me with adull pain in the very root of my being. I knew exactly what I wanted to do,and how to do it, without impinging on a child's chastity; after all, I hadhad some experience in my life of pederosis; had visually possesseddappled nymphets in parks; had wedged my wary and bestial way into thehottest, most crowded corner of a city bus full of straphanging schoolchildren. But for almost three weeks I had been interrupted in all mypathetic machinations. The agent of these interruptions was usually the Hazewoman (who, as the reader will mark, was more afraid of Lo's deriving somepleasure from me than of my enjoying Lo). The passion I had developed forthat nymphet--for the first nymphet in my life that could be reached at lastby my awkward, aching, timid claws--would have certainly landed me again ina sanatorium, had not the devil realized that I was to be granted somerelief if he wanted to have me as a plaything for some time longer. The reader has also marked the curious Mirage of the Lake. It wouldhave been logical on the part of Aubrey McFate (as I would like to dub thatdevil of mine) to arrange a small treat for me on the promised beach, in thepresumed forest. Actually, the promise Mrs. Haze had made was a fraudulentone: she had not told me that Mary Rose Hamilton (a dark little beauty inher own right) was to come too, and that the two nymphets would bewhispering apart, and playing apart, and having a good time all bythemselves, while Mrs. Haze and her handsome lodger conversed sedately inthe seminude, far from prying eyes. Incidentally, eyes did pry and tonguesdid wag. How queer life is! We hasten to alienate the very fates we intendedto woo. Before my actual arrival, my landlady had planned to have an oldspinster, a Miss Phalen, whose mother had been cook in Mrs. Haze's family,come to stay in the house with Lolita and me, while Mrs. Haze, a career girlat heart, sought some suitable job in the nearest city. Mrs. Haze had seenthe whole situation very clearly: the bespectacled, round-backed HerrHumbert coming with his Central-European trunks to gather dust in his cornerbehind a heap of old books; the unloved ugly little daughter firmlysupervised by Miss Phalen who had already once had my Lo under her buzzardwing (Lo recalled that 1944 summer with an indignant shudder); and Mrs. Hazeherself engaged as a receptionist in a great elegant city. But a not toocomplicated event interfered with that program. Miss Phalen broke her hip inSavannah, Ga., on the very day I arrived in Ramsdale.
