Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

There were legends. It seemed that this Crucifer was the organizer of every last deviltry. Stories, passed along down the years, were many-handed, many-wintered, many-stemmed. He was evidently a genius, for which, of course, at Harvard nothing wasn’t forgiven. Actually, there was small firsthand information: students, who conspicuously avoided that stairway on their own initiative, had in fact been strictly prohibited by house rules from all suites beyond the fourth floor of F-entry. That didn’t, however, stem rumors. Dr. Crucifer’s courses, no longer being given, had apparently been quite famous — it was said, among other things, that in the heat of a rabidus furor the ingenious method he once took for conveying to a lax and ill-prepared student the importance of discipline was to administer stripes to the fellow while having him repeat the “Miserere” on his knees in front of the whole class — but that upon Radcliffe’s co-educational merger with Harvard he had immediately resigned. It wasn’t explained why. Afterwards, however, he supposedly never appeared in the community again, although the word was that sometimes he’d been seen walking the downstairs corridors of Adams House late at night. Alone. Slowly. That sort of thing. Some said he shot at targets in his living-room with an air pistol, others that he worked in the lofts upstairs on demonic experiments, and several that he was writing a history of Harvard.

It was offered one to select any of a thousand dubious reports: he dressed only in red; he owned a library of cutisbound books; he was never visible to mortal sight for twenty-four hours running; he was an ex-priest; he’d once caned Kittredge; he smoked only Sherman’s cork-tipped 100’s and drank only imported Pharaon liquor; he was Lampblack’s real father; and so on and so forth. His reputation reached everywhere. It was sworn that, once, he had been heard screaming from his upper window for a full ten minutes, that he purposely humiliated Jewish students in his classes, and that, with the remark “My bread, I think?” once dug his fork into the white hand of a lady who sat beside him at a faculty dinner. On another occasion he supposedly called to his table the patron of a local restaurant and ordered him to remove a consumptive from the doorway so that he could enjoy his meal without disgust. And a last flight of someone’s fancy actually had it that this creature, in order to elevate himself above the weakness of humankind, once traveled — this was unbelievable — to a remote place called Zawyel-Dyr where in the dead of night he willingly knelt on a mat, lit by stars and a lantern, while some byzantine with a shanked and serrated clamp, fitted to an oval ring, illegally performed a surgical peotomy on him and—

Excusing himself with a smile, Darconville left the room. It was preposterous.

The oaks in New England had now turned. Winds piled every gutter and dark doorway full of scraps of red, amber, and yellow leaves. The passing days were as empty to him as his mailbox, and now even his writing couldn’t take his whole attention. He developed headaches but managed to get hold of some amphetamines which temporarily cleared them up. It was not magical: the cure itself was a symptom, only confirmed what his headaches hinted at — his mind had become rigid in its preoccupations, and soon it seemed he was concentrating on concentration alone. Thought became a drama as an end in itself, with his mind both stage and audience. The packs of cigarettes he smoked left his lungs absolutely raw.

At the end of the week, he had his evening with Prof. McGentsroom, philosophical chat over wine in his sitting-room, a sensible and spontaneous amicability that built up in Darconville defenses against his weakness and took his mind off the intentionally brief letter, posing several distinct questions, he that morning mailed to Virginia. It had grown late and was soon time to start for home, the full harvest moon whitening the front porch where he thanked his host who accompanied him out.

“You’ve been very kind, the whole month. I can’t thank you enough.”

Prof. McGentsroom’s eyes twinkled.

“It’s true.”

“My dear child,” smiled the old scholar, gently bowing his white head, “we surely can’t do enough for the princely relative of Cardinal Théroux-d’Arconville now, can we?”

Darconville was astounded. It wasn’t important perhaps but it was something he thought no one knew, and yet, if known, it somehow bespoke an uncanny, even relentless investigation of him, a shadowing that, taking such a curious turn, now unsettled him.

“Please,” he swiftly asked, “who told you about that?”

“Oh dear,” cried McGentsroom, biting his thumb in embarrassment over the apparent blunder. “Does that bother you?”

“Who — could have known? And whoever it is,” asked Darconville, upset at his own stammering, “w-what has he to do with me? My goodness, is that why I’ve been brought to Harvard?”

There was an awkward silence.

“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I must know.”

Prof. McGentsroom blinked sadly, bewildered as to what he could now possibly do to explain what, for the reaction, he couldn’t understand. He became confused. Then he fumbled out a piece of paper and without a word — strangely, it seemed the best of the worst possibilities — wrote down the title of a book, waited, with trepidation added the author’s name, and then gave it over. It was as if he had written the names of sixty devils. He gravely, compassionately, took Darconville’s hand and, pausing to add something, found he couldn’t. A goodnight at that juncture, he felt, could only have sounded insolent.

LATER THAT NIGHT when Darconville returned to his rooms he found Spellvexit sitting on a telegram. He tore open the envelope and read:

SEPT. 26

YOU NEEDN’T COME I LOVE YOU LETTER FOLLOWS

ISABEL

He was still awake in his chair holding the message long after dawn had crept up Bow St. and pressed its haggard face against the window, and shortly thereafter the morning bells from the steeple of St. Paul’s pealed and promised a new day. But that morning at Mass he distractedly wondered why he wasn’t yet at peace. What was it?

Then he remembered.

WIDENER LIBRARY is closed on Sundays. The following morning, however, Darconville was waiting on the front steps, a coverlet of morning dew blanketing the Yard, and when the doors opened he went straight to the card-catalogue and began to thumb through the listings, his fingers still cold from the vigil outside. He wrote down a number but in the stacks, when he couldn’t find the particular title he wanted among several linguistic works by the same author, was told by a librarian that it was a special section book (an XR number), kept on the ground floor in a cage. Showing his faculty card, he was led downstairs, asked to wait, and eventually given the book: Christianity and the Ages Which It Darkened by Dr. Abel Crucifer. He took a seat, opened randomly to a chapter, and read:

The Socratic manner is not a game at which two people can play. I suggest he wanted it that way, transmogrifying, way back when, an aesthetic into a pseudo-ethical world and leaving as a legacy to western man the total betrayal of all degree, priority, and place. In this chapter, “ Womanity ,” let us consider how in the ultimate demonetization of old values he established a platform for radical feminism: the topsyturvification of the sexual order which has subsequently set in motion a growing regiment of Bluestockings, trousered females, and odier freaks of nature who happened to be born of a sex of which they failed to be the ornament. In the failed marriage of Socrates was man betrayed. Madame Defarge didn’t want justice, she wanted testosterone. Hello, Medusa, here are my stones.