29The door of the lighted bathroom stood ajar; in addition to that, askeleton glow came though the Venetian blind from the outside arclights;these intercrossed rays penetrated the darkness of the bedroom and revealedthe following situation. Clothed in one of her old nightgowns, my Lolita lay on her side withher back to me, in the middle of the bed. Her lightly veiled body and barelimbs formed a Z. She had put both pillows under her dark tousled head; aband of pale light crossed her top vertebrae. I seemed to have shed my clothes and slipped into pajamas with the kindof fantastic instantaneousness which is implied when in a cinematographicscene the process of changing is cut; and I had already placed my knee onthe edge of the bed when Lolita turned her head and stared at me though thestriped shadows. Now this was something the intruder had not expected. The wholepill-spiel (a rather sordid affair, entre nous soit dit) had had forobject a fastness of sleep that a whole regiment would not have disturbed,and here she was staring at me, and thickly calling me "Barbara." Barbara,wearing my pajamas which were much too tight for her, remained poisedmotionless over the little sleep-talker. Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Dollyturned away, resuming her initial position. For at least two minutes Iwaited and strained on the brink, like that tailor with his homemadeparachute forty years ago when about to jump from the Eiffel Tower. Herfaint breathing had the rhythm of sleep. Finally I heaved myself onto mynarrow margin of bed, stealthily pulled at the odds and ends of sheets piledup to the south of my stone-cold heels--and Lolita lifted her head and gapedat me. As I learned later from a helpful pharmaceutist, the purple pill didnot even belong to the big and noble family of barbiturates, and though itmight have induced sleep in a neurotic who believed it to be a potent drug,it was too mild a sedative to affect for any length of time a wary, albeitweary, nymphet. Whether the Ramsdale doctor was a charlatan or a shrewd oldrogue, does not, and did not, really matter. What mattered, was that I hadbeen deceived. When Lolita opened her eyes again, I realized that whether ornot the drug might work later in the night, the security I had relied uponwas a sham one. Slowly her head turned away and dropped onto her unfairamount of pillow. I lay quite still on my brink, peering at her rumpledhair, at the glimmer of nymphet flesh, where half a haunch and half ashoulder dimly showed, and trying to gauge the depth of her sleep by therate of her respiration. Some time passed, nothing changed, and I decided Imight risk getting a little closer to that lovely and maddening glimmer; buthardly had I moved into its warm purlieus than her breathing was suspended,and I had the odious feeling that little Dolores was wide awake and wouldexplode in screams if I touched her with any part of my wretchedness.Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidlysensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip theseessential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; tryto discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let'seven smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling. For instance (Ialmost wrote "frinstance"), I had no place to rest my head, and a fit ofheartburn (they call those fries "French," grand Dieu!) was added tomy discomfort. She was again fast asleep, my nymphet, but still I did not dare tolaunch upon my enchanted voyage. La Petite Dormeuse ou l'AmantRidicule. Tomorrow I would stuff her with those earlier pills that hadso thoroughly numbed her mummy. In the glove compartment--or in theGladstone bag? Should I wait a solid hour and then creep up again? Thescience of nympholepsy is a precise science. Actual contact would do it inone second flat. An interspace of a millimeter would do it in ten. Let uswait. There is nothing louder than an American hotel; and, mind you, this wassupposed to be a quiet, cozy, old-fashioned, homey place--"gracious living"and all that stuff. The clatter of the elevator's gate--some twenty yardsnortheast of my head but as clearly perceived as if it were inside my lefttemple--alternated with the banging and booming of the machine's variousevolutions and lasted well beyond midnight. Every now and then, immediatelyeast of my left ear (always assuming I lay on my back, not daring to directmy viler side toward the nebulous haunch of my bed-mate), the corridor wouldbrim with cheerful, resonant and inept exclamations ending in a volley ofgood-nights. When that stopped, a toilet immediately north of mycerebellum took over. It was a manly, energetic, deep-throated toilet, andit was used many times. Its gurgle and gush and long afterflow shook thewall behind me. Then someone in a southern direction was extravagantly sick,almost coughing out his life with his liquor, and his toilet descended likea veritable Niagara, immediately beyond our bathroom. And when finally allthe waterfalls had stopped, and the enchanted hunters were sound asleep, theavenue under the window of my insomnia, to the west of my wake--a staid,eminently residential, dignified alley of huge trees--degenerated into thedespicable haunt of gigantic trucks roaring through the wet and windy night. And less than six inches from me and my burning life, was nebulousLolita! After a long stirless vigil, my tentacles moved towards her again,and this time the creak of the mattress did not awake her. I managed tobring my ravenous bulk so close to her that I felt the aura of her bareshoulder like a warm breath upon my cheek. And then, she sat up, gasped,muttered with insane rapidity something about boats, tugged at the sheetsand lapsed back into her rich, dark, young unconsciousness. As she tossed,within that abundant flow of sleep, recently auburn, at present lunar, herarm struck me across the face. For a second I held her. She freed herselffrom the shadow of my embrace--doing this not consciously, not violently,not with any personal distaste, but with the neutral plaintive murmur of achild demanding its natural rest. And again the situation remained the same:Lolita with her curved spine to Humbert, Humbert resting his head on hishand and burning with desire and dyspepsia. The latter necessitated a trip to the bathroom for a draft of waterwhich is the best medicine I know in my case, except perhaps milk withradishes; and when I re-entered the strange pale-striped fastness whereLolita's old and new clothes reclined in various attitudes of enchantment onpieces of furniture that seemed vaguely afloat, my impossible daughter satup and in clear tones demanded a drink, too. She took the resilient and coldpaper cup in her shadowy hand and gulped down its contents gratefully, herlong eyelashes pointing cupward, and then, with an infantile gesture thatcarried more charm than any carnal caress, little Lolita wiped her lipsagainst my shoulder. She fell back on her pillow (I had subtracted minewhile she drank) and was instantly asleep again. I had not dared offer her a second helping of the drug, and had notabandoned hope that the first might still consolidate her sleep. I startedto move toward her, ready for any disappointment, knowing I had better waitbut incapable of waiting. My pillow smelled of her hair. I moved toward myglimmering darling, stopping or retreating every time I thought she stirredor was about to stir. A breeze from wonderland had begun to affect mythoughts, and now they seemed couched in italics, as if the surfacereflecting them were wrinkled by the phantasm of that breeze. Time and againmy consciousness folded the wrong way, my shuffling body entered the sphereof sleep, shuffled out again, and once or twice I caught myself driftinginto a melancholy snore. Mists of tenderness enfolded mountains of longing.Now and then it seemed to me that the enchanted prey was about to meethalfway the enchanted hunter, that her haunch was working its way toward meunder the soft sand of a remote and fabulous beach; and then her dimpleddimness would stir, and I would know she was farther away from me than ever. If I dwell at some length on the tremors and groupings of that distantnight, it is because I insist upon proving that I am not, and never was, andnever could have been, a brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regionsthough which I crept were the patrimonies of poets--not crime'sprowling ground. Had I reached my goal, my ecstasy would have been allsoftness, a case of internal combustion of which she would hardly have feltthe heat, even if she were wide awake. But I still hoped she might graduallybe engulfed in a completeness of stupor that would allow me to taste morethan a glimmer of her. And so, in between tentative approximations, with aconfusion of perception metamorphosing her into eyespots of moonlight or afluffy flowering bush, I would dream I regained consciousness, dream I layin wait. In the first antemeridian hours there was a lull in the restless hotelnight. Then around four the corridor toilet cascaded and its door banged. Alittle after five a reverberating monologue began to arrive, in severalinstallments, from some courtyard or parking place. It was not really amonologue, since the speaker stopped every few seconds to listen(presumably) to another fellow, but that other voice did not reach me, andso no real meaning could be derived from the part heard. Its matter-of-factintonations, however, helped to bring in the dawn, and the room was alreadysuffused with lilac gray, when several industrious toilets went to work, oneafter the other, and the clattering and whining elevator began to rise andtake down early risers and downers, and for some minutes I miserably dozed,and Charlotte was a mermaid in a greenish tank, and somewhere in the passageDr. Boyd said "Good morning to you" in a fruity voice, and birds were busyin the trees, and then Lolita yawned. Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months, perhapsyears, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores Haze; but bysix she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I amgoing to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me. Upon hearing her first morning yawn, I feigned handsome profiled sleep.I just did not know what to do. Would she be shocked at finding me by herside, and not in some spare bed? Would she collect her clothes and lockherself up in the bathroom? Would she demand to be taken at once toRamsdale--to her mother's bedside--back to camp? But my Lo was a sportivelassie. I felt her eyes on me, and when she uttered at last that belovedchortling note of hers, I knew her eyes had been laughing. She rolled overto my side, and her warm brown hair came against my collarbone. I gave amediocre imitation of waking up. We lay quietly. I gently caressed her hair,and we gently kissed. Her kiss, to my delirious embarrassment, had somerather comical refinements of flutter and probe which made me conclude shehad been coached at an early age by a little Lesbian. No Charlie boy couldhave taught her that. As if to see whether I had my fill and learnedthe lesson, she drew away and surveyed me. Her cheekbones were flushed, herfull underlip glistened, my dissolution was near. All at once, with a burstof rough glee (the sign of the nymphet!), she put her mouth to my ear--butfor quite a while my mind could not separate into words the hot thunder ofher whisper, and she laughed, and brushed the hair off her face, and triedagain, and gradually the odd sense of living in a brand new, mad new dreamworld, where everything was permissible, came over me as I realized what shewas suggesting. I answered I did not know what game she and Charlie hadplayed. "You mean you have never--?"--her features twisted into a stare ofdisgusted incredulity. "You have never--" she started again. I took time outby nuzzling her a little. "Lay off, will you," she said with a twangy whine,hastily removing her brown shoulder from my lips. (It was very curious theway she considered--and kept doing so for a long time--all caresses exceptkisses on the mouth or the stark act of love either "romantic slosh" or"abnormal".) "You mean," she persisted, now kneeling above me, "you never did itwhen you were a kid?" "Never," I answered quite truthfully. "Okay," said Lolita, "here is where we start." However, I shall not bore my learned readers with a detailed account ofLolita's presumption. Suffice it to say that not a trace of modesty did Iperceive in this beautiful hardly formed young girl whom modernco-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterlyand hopelessly depraved. She saw the stark act merely as part of ayoungster's furtive world, unknown to adults. What adults did for purposesof procreation was no business of hers. My life was handled by little Lo inan energetic, matter-of-fact manner as if it were an insensate gadgetunconnected with me. While eager to impress me with the world of tough kids,she was not quite prepared for certain discrepancies between a kid's lifeand mine. Pride alone prevented her from giving up; for, in my strangepredicament, I feigned supreme stupidity and had her have her way--at leastwhile I could still bear it. But really these are irrelevant matters; I amnot concerned with so-called "sex" at all. Anybody can imagine thoseelements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for allthe perilous magic of nymphets.
