Free Glory by Vladimir Nabokov Page A

evening.”
    As soon as they were in the dark of the taxicab he embraced her, frenzied by the feel of her supple slenderness. She covered her face with her hands, giggling. Later, in the hotel room, when he awkwardly extracted his billfold, she said, “No, no. If you want, take me tomorrow to a fancy restaurant.” She asked where he came from, whether he was French, and at his behest started guessing: Belgian? Danish? Dutch? She did not believe him when he said he was Russian. Later he hinted that he lived by gambling on ocean liners, told her of his travels, embellishing a bit here, adding something there, and, as he described a Naples he had never seen, he gazed lovingly at her bare, childish shoulders and blond bob, and felt completely happy. Early next morning, as he slept, she dressed quickly and left, stealing ten pounds from his billfold. “Morning after the orgy,” thought Martin with a smile, slapping shut the billfold, which he had picked up from the floor. He doused himself from the pitcher, splashing water all over the place, and kept smiling as he thought of the blissful night. It was something of a pity that she had left so foolishly, that he would never meet her again. Her name was Bess. When he went out of the hotel and started walking the spacious morning streets, he felt like jumping and singing with joy and, to give release to his spirits, climbed a ladder leaning against a lamppost, and as a result had a long and comical argument with an elderly passer-by, who from below gestured threateningly with his cane.

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    A second scolding came from Olga Zilanov. The day before that lady had waited for him late into the night and, since she assumed for some reason that he was younger and more helpless than he actually turned out to be, she grew increasingly worried. He explained that on the previous day he had misplaced the address, had found it too late in a seldom-visited pocket, and had spent the night at a hotel near the station. Mrs. Zilanov wanted to know why he had not telephoned, and which hotel. Martin invented a good, uncommon name, Good-Night Hotel, explaining that he had looked for her number in the book but had not found it. “Shame on you,” said Mrs. Zilanov crossly, and suddenly smiled a marvelous, beautiful smile that completely transfigured her flabby, melancholy face. Martin remembered that smile from St. Petersburg days, and, as he had been a child then, and as women usually smile when addressing strange children, his memory had retained a radiant-faced image of Mrs. Zilanov, and he had at first been perplexed to find her so old and gloomy.
    Her husband, who had been a well-known public figure in Russia, happened to be out of town, and Martin was lodged in his study. The study and the dining room were on the first floor, the parlor on the second, and the bedrooms on the third. The whole quiet, residential street consisted of such narrow houses, indistinguishable from each other, with an identical, vertical configuration of rooms inside. A dash of color was contributed by a plump red letter-pillar at the corner. Behind the right row of houses were gardens where rhododendrons bloomed in the summer, and behind the leftrow a small park containing tall elms and a grass tennis court was growing yellow and bare of leaves.
    Zilanov’s elder daughter Nelly had recently married a Russian army officer who had arrived in England after captivity in Germany. Sonia, the younger daughter, was about to finish a London preparatory school to which she had transferred from the Stoyunin Gymnasium in St. Petersburg. There was also Mrs. Zilanov’s sister Elena and her daughter Irina, a poor hideous half-witted creature.
    The week he spent in that house, while getting used to England, seemed rather tiresome to him. The whole livelong day he was among strangers, and could not take one step alone. Sonia needled him, making fun of his wardrobe—shirts with starched cuffs and stiffish fronts, his favorite