Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

26

For their correspondence in the first period of separation, Van and Ada had invented a code which they kept perfecting during the next fifteen months after Van left Ardis. The entire period of that separation was to span almost four years (‘our black rainbow,’ Ada termed it), from September, 1884 to June, 1888, with two brief interludes of intolerable bliss (in August, 1885 and June, 1886) and a couple of chance meetings (‘through a grille of rain’). Codes are a bore to describe; yet a few basic details must be, reluctantly, given.

One-letter words remained undisguised. In any longer word each letter was replaced by the one succeeding it in the alphabet at such an ordinal point — second, third, fourth, and so forth — which corresponded to the number of letters in that word. Thus ‘love,’ a four-letter word, became ‘pszi’ (‘p’ being the fourth letter after ‘l’ in the alphabetic series, ‘s’ the fourth after ‘o,’ et cetera), whilst, say ‘lovely’ (in which the longer stretch made it necessary, in two instances, to resume the alphabet after exhausting it) became ‘ruBkrE,’ where the letters overflowing into the new alphabetic series were capitalized: B, for instance, standing for ‘v’ whose substitute had to be the sixth letter (‘lovely’ consists of six letters) coming after it: wxyzAB, and ‘y’ going still deeper into that next series: zABCDE. There is an awful moment in popular books on cosmic theories (that breezily begin with plain straightforward chatty paragraphs) when there suddenly start to sprout mathematical formulas, which immediately blind one’s brain. We do not go as far as that here. If the description of our lovers’ code (the ‘our’ may constitute a source of irritation in its own right, but never mind) with a little more attention and a little less antipathy, the simplest-minded reader will, one trusts, understand that ‘overflowing’ into the next ABC business.

Unfortunately, complications arose. Ada suggested certain improvements, such as beginning every message in ciphered French, then, switching to ciphered English after the first two-letter word, switching back to French after the first three-letter word, and reshuffling the shuttle with additional variations. Owing to these improvements the messages became even harder to read than to write, especially as both correspondents, in the exasperation of tender passion, inserted afterthoughts, deleted phrases, rephrased insertions and reinstated deletions with misspellings and miscodings owing as much to their struggle with inexpressible distress as to their overcomplicating its cryptogram.

In the second period of separation, beginning in 1886, the code was radically altered. Both Van and Ada still knew by heart the seventy-two lines of Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ and the forty lines of Rimbaud’s ‘Mémoire.’ It was from those two texts that they chose the letters of the words they needed. For example, l2.11. l1.2.20. l2.8 meant ‘love,’ with ‘l’ and the number following it denoting the line in the Marvell poem, and the next number giving the position of the letter in that line, l2.11, meaning ‘eleventh letter in second line,’ I hold this to be pretty clear; and when, for the sake of misleading variety, the Rimbaud poem was used, the letter denoting the line would simply be capitalized. Again, this is a nuisance to explain, and the explanation is fun to read only for the purpose (thwarted, I am afraid) of looking for errors in the examples. Anyway, it soon proved to have defects even more serious than those of the first code. Security demanded they should not possess the poems in print or script for consultation and however marvelous their power of retention was, errors were bound to increase.

They wrote to each other in the course of 1886 as often as before, never less than a letter per week; but, curiously enough, in their third period of separation, from January, 1887, to June, 1888 (after a very long long-distance call and a very brief meeting), their letters grew scarcer, dwindling to a mere twenty in Ada’s case (with only two or three in the spring of 1888) and about twice as many coming from Van. No passages from the correspondence can be given here, since all the letters were destroyed in 1889.

(I suggest omitting this little chapter altogether. Ada’s note.)