Chapter 30 fourth quarter

Cook Castle is a three storey brick and timber building built around 1860, part of which was rebuilt fifty years later when Susan's father took it from the Dudley-Green family. It was bought in order to build an elegant resort hotel, specially for the rich to come to Onque Vedo Hot Springs to recuperate.It was a fine and ugly building, a mishmash of styles, with Gothic spires rising among the remaining French and Florentine buildings, which the designer Samuel Sloan probably thought of when he first designed it. The building is classified as an informal form of northern house "well suited to the highest demands of social life", so called "northern" because of "its tendency to be lofty and lofty with its roof and spire".The mansion consisted of a number of smaller Northern style houses, with a cheerful and almost mesmerizing look, huddled together in a haphazard heap, with spiky spires standing in mid-air, and other buildings of a different format. The roofs, the half-finished gables, the eaves, the rustic exterior corners, and other projections that sprang in all directions, all, alas, attracted the visitor only for a short while.By 1920, Uncle Vieto Springs had lost all of its charm without anyone noticing; To find a more comfortable house, he tried every means to sell Song Mansion, but without success.At any rate, they were now in the habit of using the castle for the entertainment of their many friends, and Susan was glad that the docile and lovable monster had found no buyer.

The inside of the house is as diverse as the outside.Downstairs there are four spacious great rooms leading to a hall with a generous fireplace which still retains more or less the traces of the inn.The balustrades, at least one of the spindles, date from 1720, when the house was built from another, much older house whose exact location no one can name.The beautiful wainscoting in the dining room with hunting and fishing scenes is also very old.In the six rooms on each floor and in the two wing rooms at the rear, among the misfits you can find satinwood writing desks, romantic blue dragon sofas, and all sorts of clumsy and clumsy things. Well, things like broken chairs, dusty marble-topped tables, stupid multi-tiered shelves with dark glass mirrors like the melancholy eyes of old monkeys.Pnin was accommodated in a comfortable room in the southeast corner of the upper floor: there were remnants of gold wallpaper on the walls, and besides an army cot, a plain washstand, assorted bookcases, sconces, and scrollwork lace lines.Pnin pushed open the window hard, smiled at the smiling woods, and recalled the scene of his first day in the country in the distant past; after staying for a while, he came downstairs, wearing a newly bought Tibetan coat. A cyan bathrobe and a pair of ordinary rubber overshoes for bare feet are advisable if you plan to walk through wet grass where snakes may appear.He found Shado on the garden balcony.

Konstantin Ivanich Shadow, a sensitive and lovely scholar of pure Russian origin, despite a different surname (I hear it is derived from a Russified French surname), taught at a fairly large institution in New York, and had not seen Pnin, whom he was so fond of, for at least five years.They hugged happily and affectionately.I myself have to admit that there was a period when I was fascinated by this angelic Konstantin Ivanich - it was in the winter of 1935 or 1936, when we lived in Grasse in the south of France He met every morning when he was walking in the shade of laurel and nettle trees in the city, when he shared a small villa in the suburbs with several other Russian exiles.His soft voice, the trembling guttural sound of a gentleman in St. Petersburg when he pronounced r, the melancholy and gentle look he cast like a reindeer, his long and slender fingers twirling the Blonde goatee--in short, everything about Sandow (to use a literary idiom as old-fashioned as himself) earned him a rare favor among his friends.Puning chatted with him, exchanging ideas with each other.This is not uncommon in the circle of principled exiles, who, whenever they meet again after being separated for a while, must not only try to understand each other's past period, but also use a few quick code words, which are almost impossible in other foreign languages. Allusion and tone of expression—to sum up the course of recent Russian history: after a century of struggle for justice and a vague hope, followed by thirty-five years of hopeless injustice.Then they change the subject and talk about the business of expatriate European faculty, ignorant of geography and indifferent to the noise of the "typical American college student" who thinks education is all about eventually getting a well-paying career It was just a means, and both of them sighed and shook their heads over and over again.Then, they inquired about the progress of each other's work, and both of them showed a very humble attitude towards their respective research projects, just talking a few words.Finally, as they walked along a meadow path past yellow flowers to a rocky creek beyond the woods, the two flaunted their health: sandy and stylish, with one hand in white In the flannel pockets of his trousers, with his shiny coat open neatly to reveal a flannel vest underneath, he said cheerfully that he would soon have an abdominal examination; Pnin laughed and said that he During the first X-ray, the doctors tried in vain to figure out what they called the "shadow behind the heart."

"That's a good title for a bad novel," said Sandow. Before they entered the woods, they were passing a small grassy slope when suddenly a respectable old man with a red face came down the slope with big strides.Dressed in crepe and striped linen, with a mop of white hair and a swollen purple nose that looked like a big strawberry, he came toward them with a displeased face. "I've got to go back and get my hat," he said dramatically, as he approached. "Do you two know each other?" Shado murmured, waving his hands to introduce, "Timophy Bavrich Pnin, Ivan Ilyich Graminiyev."

"Moyo pochtenie (Long Admire, Long Admire)." They both said at the same time, nodding and shaking hands vigorously. "I thought," Graminiev, who was a rambunctious man, continued, "that it was going to be cloudy like early in the morning. I foolishly (Po gluposti) came out naked I am. Now the sun is burning my brains. I have to stop my work." He waved his hand towards the top of the hill.There stood his painting stand, elegantly silhouetted against the blue sky.He had been painting a panorama of the valley below from the top of the hill, and the grotesque old barn, the crooked apple tree, and the cows had all been painted.

"I can lend you my Panama hat," said the friendly Shadow, but Pnin had already pulled out a bright red handkerchief from the pocket of his bathrobe, and expertly tied all four corners in a knot. "Great...thank you so much," Graminiev said, putting on the tiara. "Wait a minute," said Pnin, "you've got to get all these bumps in." When he was done, Graminiev climbed up the hill again and walked towards his easel.He was a well-known and veritable academic painter, and his soulful canvases—The Volga, Three Old Friends (Boy, Pony, Dog), April Marshes, etc.— —and now graces a Moscow museum.

"I've been told," Shadow said, as he and Pnin continued on toward the creek, "that Lisa's son is gifted at drawing. Is it true?" "Yes," replied Pnin, "more annoying (tem bolee obidno) is the mother, who I think is about to marry for the third time, suddenly takes Victor to California for the rest of the summer; if According to the original plan, if the child comes here with me, he will have a rare opportunity to ask Graminiev for his advice." "You're exaggerating." Sha Duo replied softly. They came to the babbling, shining stream.Between the series of higher and lower cascades was a sunken pool, forming a natural swimming pool just under the alder and pine trees.Sha Duo couldn't swim, so he sat down comfortably on a round stone.Pnin had spent so much of his school year under the sunlamp that he took on a deep russet when he stripped down to his swimming trunks in the dappled sunlight of the trees by the river.He took off the crucifix around his neck, and the galoshes.

"Look, how beautiful it is." said Sha Duo, who had keen observation skills. Twenty or more small identical butterflies perched on a patch of wet sand, their wings raised and closed, revealing gray bellies with dark spots and bright spots on the orange-edged hindwings; After seeing a few of them, they flapped their wings and flew around for a while, revealing the sky blue color of their upper bodies, like blue snowflakes flying in the air, and then falling to the ground. "It's a pity that Vladimir Vladimirovich isn't here," Shadow said. "He'll tell us all there is to know about these fascinating insects."

"His entomology always strikes me as mystical." "Oh, you can't say that," said Shadow.Then he pointed to the gold chain with the Orthodox cross on a branch that Pnin had just removed from his neck and said, "You will lose it one day." The flying dragonfly was at a loss. "I probably don't care if I lose it," Pnin said. "You know very well that I wear it for purely emotional reasons, and that emotion is becoming a burden. Trying to keep a small object from my childhood pressed to my breastbone is not enough for the body after all. what."

"You're also someone who reduces faith to a sense of touch," Schadow said.Still a Greek Orthodox Christian, he lamented the agnostic attitude of his friend. A horsefly, the dazed fool, landed on Pnin's bald head, and was knocked unconscious with a slap from his fat hand. Pnin slipped cautiously out into the blue-yellow water from a smaller boulder than the one on which Sadow sat.Finding that the watch was still on his wrist, he took it off and put it in a golosh.Pnin slowly shook his dark shoulders, wading forward in the water, circles of tree shadows trembled on his broad back, and then slid down.He stopped, smashed the flashes and dark shadows around his body with his hands, moistened his forward head, rubbed the back of his neck with two wet hands, and bubbled the armpits on both sides in turn, then put his hands together and swam into the water, His majestic breaststroke created fine waves on both sides of his body.Puning swims around majestically in this natural pond.As he swam, he made a rhythmic splash of spittle—half a guttural gurgle, half a gasping puff.He spread his legs methodically, bent his knees, and then split them, flexing and extending his arms at the same time, like a gigantic frog.After swimming like this for two minutes, he waded out to the surface and sat on a rock to dry himself.Then he put on the gold cross chain and watch, overshoes and bathrobe.