Blue! she exclaimed. Violet blue. What are they made of?
Summer skies, I said, and plums and figs, and the grape-blood of emperors.
No, seriously please.
Oh, just Purpills. Vitamin X. Makes one strong as an ox or an ax. Want to try one?
Lolita stretched out her hand, nodding vigorously.
I had hoped the drug would work fast. It certainly did. She had had a long long day, she had gone rowing in the morning with Barbara whose sister was Waterfront Director, as the adorable accessible nymphet now started to tell me in between suppressed palate-humping yawns, growing in volume oh, how fast the magic potion worked! and had been active in other ways too. The movie that had vaguely loomed in her mind was, of course, by the time we watertreaded out of the dining room, forgotten. As we stood in the elevator, she leaned against me, faintly smiling wouldnt you like me to tell you? half-closing her dark-lidded eyes. Sleepy, huh? said Uncle Tom who was bringing up the quiet Franco-Irish gentleman and his daughter as well as two withered women, experts in roses. They looked with sympathy at my frail, tanned, tottering, dazed rose darling. I had almost to carry her into our room. There, she sat down on the edge of the bed, swaying a little, speaking in dove-dull, long-drawn tones.
If I tell you if I tell you, will you promise [sleepy, so sleepy head lolling, eyes going out], promise you wont make complaints?
Later, Lo. Now go to bed. Ill leave you here, and you go to bed. Give you ten minutes.
Oh, Ive been such a disgusting girl, she went on, shaking her hair, removing with slow fingers a velvet hair ribbon. Lemme tell you
Tomorrow, Lo. Go to bed, go to bed for goodness sake, to bed.
I pocketed the key and walked downstairs.
28
Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time! So this was le grand moment[127]. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her panties she had always been singularly absent-minded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked in after satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutes say, twenty, say half an hour, sicher ist sicher[128] as my uncle Gustave used to say I would let myself into that 342 and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key 342 at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere indeed, the globe that very same night.
Let me explain. I was not unduly disturbed by her self-accusatory innuendoes. I was still firmly resolved to pursue my policy of sparing her purity by operating only in the stealth of night, only upon a completely anaesthetized little nude. Restraint and reverence were still my motto even if that purity (incidentally, thoroughly debunked by modern science) had been slightly damaged through some juvenile erotic experience, no doubt homosexual, at that accursed camp of hers. Of course, in my old-fashioned, old-world way, I, Jean-Jacques Humbert, had taken for granted, when I first met her, that she was as un-ravished as the stereotypical notion of normal child had been since the lamented end of the Ancient World B. C.[129] and its fascinating practices. We are not surrounded in our enlightened era by little slave flowers that can be casually plucked between business and bath as they used to be in the days of the Romans; and we do not, as dignified Orientals did in still more luxurious times, use tiny entertainers fore and aft between the mutton and the rose sherbet. The whole point is that the old link between the adult world and the child world has been completely severed nowadays by new customs and new laws. Despite my having dabbled in psychiatry and social work, I really knew very little about children. After all, Lolita was only twelve, and no matter what concessions I made to time and place even bearing in mind the crude behaviour of American schoolchildren I still was under the impression that whatever went on among those brash brats, went on at a later age, and in a different environment. Therefore (to retrieve the thread of this explanation) the moralist in me by-passed the issue by clinging to conventional notions of what twelve-year-old girls should be. The child therapist in me (a fake, as most of them are but no matter) regurgitated neo-Freudian hash and conjured up a dreaming and exaggerating Dolly in the latency period[130] of girlhood. Finally, the sensualist in me (a great and insane monster) had no objection to some depravity in his prey. But somewhere behind the raging bliss, bewildered shadows conferred and not to have heeded them, this is what I regret! Human beings, attend! I should have understood that Lolita had already proved to be something quite different from innocent Annabel, and that the nymphean evil breathing through every pore of the fey child that I had prepared for my secret delectation, would make the secrecy impossible, and the delectation lethal. I should have known (by the signs made to me by something in Lolita the real child Lolita or some haggard angel behind her back) that nothing but pain and horror would result from the expected rapture. Oh, winged gentlemen of the jury!