At the dinner with Ada’s family in the Bellevue Hotel Yuzlik (the director of Don Juan’s Last Fling, a film in which Ada played the part of the gitanilla) tells Van that he is delighted and honored to dine with Vasco de Gama:
Yuzlik was dying to say something. Van yielded to the well-meaning automaton.
‘I’m delighted and honored to dine with Vasco de Gama,’ said Yuzlik holding up his glass in front of his handsome facial apparatus.
The same garbling — and this gave Van a clue to Yuzlik’s source of recondite information — occurred in The Chimes of Chose (a memoir by a former chum of Van’s, now Lord Chose, which had climbed, and still clung to, the ‘best seller’ trellis — mainly because of several indecent but very funny references to the Villa Venus in Ranton Brooks). While he munched the marrow of an adequate answer, with a mouthful of sharlott (not the charlatan ‘charlotte russe’ served in most restaurants, but the hot toasty crust, with apple filling, of the authentic castle pie made by Takomin, the hotel’s head cook, who hailed from California’s Rose Bay), two urges were cleaving Van asunder: one to insult Yuzlik for having placed his hand on Ada’s when asking her to pass him the butter two or three courses ago (he was incomparably more jealous of that liquid-eyed male than of Andrey and remembered with a shiver of pride and hate how on New Year’s Eve, 1893, he had lashed out at a relative of his, foppish Van Zemski, who had permitted himself a similar caress when visiting their restaurant table, and whose jaw he had broken later, under some pretext or other, at the young prince’s club); and the other — to tell Yuzlik how much he had admired Don Juan’s Last Fling. Not being able, for obvious reasons, to satisfy urge number one he dismissed number two as secretly smacking of a poltroon’s politeness and contented himself with replying, after swallowing his amber-soaked mash:
‘Jack Chose’s book is certainly most entertaining — especially that bit about apples and diarrhea, and the excerpts from the Venus Shell Album’ — (Yuzlik’s eyes darted aside in specious recollection; whereupon he bowed in effusive tribute to a common memory) — ‘but the rascal should have neither divulged my name nor botched my thespionym.’ (3.8)
As a Chose student, Van performs in variety shows dancing on his hands as Mascodagama (Van’s stage name):
On February 5, 1887, an unsigned editorial in The Ranter (the usually so sarcastic and captious Chose weekly) described Mascodagama’s performance as ‘the most imaginative and singular stunt ever offered to a jaded music-hall public.’ It was repeated at the Rantariver Club several times, but nothing in the programme or in publicity notices beyond the definition ‘Foreign eccentric’ gave any indication either of the exact nature of the ‘stunt’ or of the performer’s identity. Rumors, carefully and cleverly circulated by Mascodagama’s friends, diverted speculations toward his being a mysterious visitor from beyond the Golden Curtain, particularly since at least half-a-dozen members of a large Good-will Circus Company that had come from Tartary just then (i.e., on the eve of the Crimean War) — three dancing girls, a sick old clown with his old speaking goat, and one of the dancers’ husbands, a make-up man (no doubt, a multiple agent) — had already defected between France and England, somewhere in the newly constructed ‘Chunnel.’ Mascodagama’s spectacular success in a theatrical club that habitually limited itself to Elizabethan plays, with queens and fairies played by pretty boys, made first of all a great impact on cartoonists. Deans, local politicians, national statesmen, and of course the current ruler of the Golden Horde were pictured as mascodagamas by topical humorists. A grotesque imitator (who was really Mascodagama himself in an oversophisticated parody of his own act!) was booed at Oxford (a women’s college nearby) by local rowdies. A shrewd reporter, who had heard him curse a crease in the stage carpet, commented in print on his ‘Yankee twang.’ Dear Mr ‘Vascodagama’ received an invitation to Windsor Castle from its owner, a bilateral descendant of Van’s own ancestors, but he declined it, suspecting (incorrectly, as it later transpired) the misprint to suggest that his incognito had been divulged by one of the special detectives at Chose — the same, perhaps, who had recently saved the psychiatrist P.O. Tyomkin from the dagger of Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, Id. (1.30)
The Golden Curtain separating Tartary (also known as the Golden Horde and the Sovietnamur Khanate, a country that occupies on Demonia, aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set, the territory of the Soviet Russia) from the rest of the world becomes the Golden Veil, when Van describes Victor Vitry’s film version of his novel Letters from Terra:
In contrast to the cloudless course of Demonian history in the twentieth century, with the Anglo-American coalition managing one hemisphere, and Tartary, behind her Golden Veil, mysteriously ruling the other, a succession of wars and revolutions were shown shaking loose the jigsaw puzzle of Terrestrial autonomies. In an impressive historical survey of Terra rigged up by Vitry — certainly the greatest cinematic genius ever to direct a picture of such scope or use such a vast number of extras (some said more than a million, others, half a million men and as many mirrors) — kingdoms fell and dictatordoms rose, and republics, half-sat, half-lay in various attitudes of discomfort. The conception was controversial, the execution flawless. Look at all those tiny soldiers scuttling along very fast across the trench-scarred wilderness, with explosions of mud and things going pouf-pouf in silent French now here, now there! (5.5)
Yuzlik is Uzbek for “veil.” Describing Ada’s fits of scratching, Van compares Ada’s skin to a stretch of Samarkand satin and mentions her dark eyes veiled as in an erotic trance:
The girl’s pale skin, so excitingly delicate to Van’s eye, so vulnerable to the beast’s needle, was, nevertheless, as strong as a stretch of Samarkand satin and withstood all self-flaying attempts whenever Ada, her dark eyes veiled as in the erotic trances Van had already begun to witness during their immoderate kissing, her lips parted, her large teeth lacquered with saliva, scraped with her five fingers the pink mounds caused by the rare insect’s bite — for it is a rather rare and interesting mosquito (described — not quite simultaneously — by two angry old men — the second was Braun, the Philadelphian dipterist, a much better one than the Boston professor), and rare and rapturous was the sight of my beloved trying to quench the lust of her precious skin, leaving at first pearly, then ruby, stripes along her enchanting leg and briefly attaining a drugged beatitude into which, as into a vacuum; the ferocity of the itch would rush with renewed strength. (1.17)
In his sonnet To Byron Keats mentions a cloud that doth veil the golden moon:
Byron! how sweetly sad thy melody!
Attuning still the soul to tenderness,
As if soft Pity, with unusual stress,
Had touch'd her plaintive lute, and thou, being by,
Hadst caught the tones, nor suffer'd them to die.
O'ershadowing sorrow doth not make thee less
Delightful: thou thy griefs dost dress
With a bright halo, shining beamily,
As when a cloud the golden moon doth veil,
Its sides are ting'd with a resplendent glow,
Through the dark robe oft amber rays prevail,
And like fair veins in sable marble flow;
Still warble, dying swan! still tell the tale,
The enchanting tale, the tale of pleasing woe.
Dying swan in the sonnet’s penultimate line brings to mind Les Trois Cygnes (Van’s hotel in Mont Roux) and Ada’s cygneous hand kissed by Van, when they meet in the main lounge of the Bellevue Hotel:
He stopped on the threshold of the main lounge, but hardly had he begun to scan the distribution of its scattered human contents, than an abrupt flurry occurred in a distant group. Ada, spurning decorum, was hurrying toward him. Her solitary and precipitate advance consumed in reverse all the years of their separation as she changed from a dark-glittering stranger with the high hair-do in fashion to the pale-armed girl in black who had always belonged to him. At that particular twist of time they happened to be the only people conspicuously erect and active in the huge room, and heads turned and eyes peered when the two met in the middle of it as on a stage; but what should have been, in culmination of her headlong motion, of the ecstasy in her eyes and fiery jewels, a great explosion of voluble love, was marked by incongruous silence; he raised to his unbending lips and kissed her cygneous hand, and then they stood still, staring at each other, he playing with coins in his trouser pockets under his ‘humped’ jacket, she fingering her necklace, each reflecting, as it were, the uncertain light to which all that radiance of mutual welcome had catastrophically decreased. She was more Ada than ever, but a dash of new elegancy had been added to her shy, wild charm. Her still blacker hair was drawn back and up into a glossy chignon, and the Lucette line of her exposed neck, slender and straight, came as a heartrending surprise. He was trying to form a succinct sentence (to warn her about the device he planned for securing a rendezvous), but she interrupted his throat clearing with a muttered injunction: Sbrit’ usï! (that mustache must go) and turned away to lead him to the far corner from which she had taken so many years to reach him. (3.8)
The father of Ada Lovelace, Byron is the author of Don Juan (cf. Don Juan’s Last Fling) and The Prisoner of Chillon. Describing his meetings with Ada in Mont Roux, Van mentions the Château de Byron (or ‘She Yawns Castle’):
A boxwood-lined path, presided over by a nostalgic-looking sempervirent sequoia (which American visitors mistook for a ‘Lebanese cedar’ — if they remarked it at all) took them to the absurdly misnamed rue du Mûrier, where a princely paulownia (‘mulberry tree!’ snorted Ada), standing in state on its incongruous terrace above a public W.C., was shedding generously its heart-shaped dark green leaves, but retained enough foliage to cast arabesques of shadow onto the south side of its trunk. A ginkgo (of a much more luminous greenish gold than its neighbor, a dingily yellowing local birch) marked the corner of a cobbled lane leading down to the quay. They followed southward the famous Fillietaz Promenade which went along the Swiss side of the lake from Valvey to the Château de Byron (or ‘She Yawns Castle’). The fashionable season had ended, and wintering birds, as well as a number of knickerbockered Central Europeans, had replaced the English families as well as the Russian noblemen from Nipissing and Nipigon. (3.8)
When Ada refuses to leave her sick husband, Van compares Andrey Vinelander to Keats:
As had been peculiar to his nature even in the days of his youth, Van was apt to relieve a passion of anger and disappointment by means of bombastic and arcane utterances which hurt like a jagged fingernail caught in satin, the lining of Hell.
‘Castle True, Castle Bright!’ he now cried, ‘Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!’
‘Perestagne (stop, cesse)!’
‘Ardis the First, Ardis the Second, Tanned Man in a Hat, and now Mount Russet —’
‘Perestagne!’ repeated Ada (like a fool dealing with an epileptic).
‘Oh! Qui me rendra mon Hélène —’
‘Ach, perestagne!’
‘— et le phalène.’
‘Je t’emplie ("prie" and "supplie"), stop, Van. Tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’
‘But, but, but’ — (slapping every time his forehead) — ‘to be on the very brink of, of, of — and then have that idiot turn Keats!’
‘Bozhe moy, I must be going. Say something to me, my darling, my only one, something that might help!’
There was a narrow chasm of silence broken only by the rain drumming on the eaves.
‘Stay with me, girl,’ said Van, forgetting everything — pride, rage, the convention of everyday pity.
For an instant she seemed to waver — or at least to consider wavering; but a resonant voice reached them from the drive and there stood Dorothy, gray-caped and mannish-hatted, energetically beckoning with her unfurled umbrella.
‘I can’t, I can’t, I’ll write you,’ murmured my poor love in tears. (ibid.)
"Satin, the lining of Hell," brings to mind the Samarkand satin of Ada's skin. Ad is Russian for "hell."