During their reunion in the public park near the small town in which Mary currently lives, the lovers converse, “in rapturous murmur,” about “the long time they had not seen each other, about the resemblance of a gloworm that shone in the moss to a tiny semaphore.” Later, after their failed tryst, Mary “stooped over the grass and picked up one of the pale green lampyrids they had noticed. She held it upon the flat of her hand, bending over it, examining it closely, then burst out laughing and said in a quaint parody of a village lass, ‘Bless me, if it isn’t simply a cold little worm.’”
Nabokov’s phallic punning here may be overly obvious; Ganin is the “cold little worm” who has been sending the wrong signals, unable to consummate his idealized romance in the “real world” of the public park. The signal to noise ratio that this passage touches upon is foreshadowed in the phone call that takes place upon Mary’s return: “Her voice crackled weakly from a great distance, a noise hummed in the telephone as in a seashell, at times an even more distant voice on a crossed line kept interrupting, carrying on conversations with someone else in the fourth dimension—the telephone in their country house was an old one with a hand crank—and between Mary and him lay thirty miles of roaring darkness” (71). Ganin hears Mary “through the buzzing, in miniature, as if she as if she were speaking from the wrong end of a telescope” (71); in this way, Nabokov brings together the failure of communication with the failed consummation of the relationship between Ganin and Mary. Note as well the synaesthetic effects: the the garbling and diminishing of Mary’s voice over the telephone’s crossed lines is aligned with the diminution of her image viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. For Nabokov, techne offers no assistance to romance, as suggested in the breakdown (twice) of Ganin’s bike as he pedals the thirty miles to Mary’s residence, and the inadequacy of the telephone service, then in its infancy.