Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

The air outside felt good to Darconville who left the library with a particular sense of grief he’d not quite felt before, and, too melancholy after attending to the reading to make an accurate report of his reflections, he found himself walking out along the granolithic walk by the football stadium, the huge emptiness of which he entered to spend most of the afternoon sorting out the many questions in his mind. What, he wondered, had this haughty and disordered malefactor named Crucifer to do with him? Had the rumors been true of his extensive power there? Why in fact had he himself been asked to come to Harvard?

And the perverse book? It was spawl, a piece of violent deception, fatally fixed like a grotesque ornament that had been gradually molded in the cavern of someone’s head by the drip of calcareous water and hardened into a single point: the hatred of women. It was an introduction, oh yes. But to whom? To what ? A spectre waiting upon his past and fathering forth whispers, orders, commands? But why? Darconville smoked and walked, walked and smoked, circling round and round the upper ramparts of the arcaded Coliseum like a pale, deliberating renunciant high above the abyss that beckons him down. What was he supposed to know now? And what of what he knew was he then to apply to what he wanted to know? He didn’t know. There were only silences, echoes, detached voices on every front, and so he spent the day, brooding to no consequence, until it grew dark and he left the stadium, pitching a last cigarette through the dusk and crossing the Weeks bridge toward Adams House.

When he opened the door to his room, Darconville saw a note on the floor. He took it to the window and by the ghostly light of a streetlamp read what suddenly made him wonder whether there weren’t more efficients in nature than causes. What interanimates what, he wondered, in what is foreordained? It was sinister, all of it, coming for some reason, yet, as no surprise — the mind, defining reality, creates it! We bless to appear what to avoid we curse: to loathe too much in the mind is only to rehearse or ten times twice affirm in an act of wild denial a hated fact. Greetings, conscience! I shall make from fear, thought Darconville, a rendezvous with dread.

And so he could do nothing but accept the terrible sequence of ironies he believed, in compounding, he’d caused — as if, in having been more willful to learn than willing to abhor, he’d but burned one candle to seek another. Solon made no law for parricides because he feared he should put men in mind to commit such an offense! Chance was only the fool’s name for fate, thought Darconville, and by the eerie light coming in through the window of his lonely room once again read the words of the note:

Sir, this to entreat you to step up

to my study for a word. My occupations

are all indoor so that I am always at

home.

So I rest yours to serve,

CRUCIFER

THE LETTER Isabel promised never came. So Darconville, again, tried to contact her. He called the house at Fawx’s Mt.: there was no answer. He called the telephone company in Charlottesville, re-checked the number, again called the house in vain, and then thought that he might try the van der Slangs. He called that number and, identifying himself, expressed his worry but Mrs. van der Slang said she was sure everything was alright. He called Annabel Lee Jenks who hadn’t heard a word from her since graduation and Lisa Gherardini who wasn’t there herself. He called Miss Trappe who told him about a bad dream she’d had. He even called the general store in Fawx’s Mt.: they hung up. Later in the day he finally reached the Shiftlett house again and asked if Isabel were there, but the reply was only a single diaphonie mutter: “ thnaowr .” It meant no.

It can’t therefore be fully charged against Darconville for turning where he did — nor perhaps explained, on the other hand, how in setting out for nowhere in particular he proceeded straightway out to F-entry and then up the forbidden stairs.

THE ROOM UPSTAIRS looked forbidding. The door was solid, coopered to a great weight and blind-hinged. Its mullions stifled the sound of Darconville’s repeated knocks; he paused to listen, then knocked again harder— dmf, dmf, dmf —but there were only echoes down the atrocious passageway. On the other side, footsteps ran past back and forth. Again, he struck the panels smartly. Suddenly, a key sprung in the lock and, slowly, the door opened an inch: a pair of little eyes glared out. Crossly, Lampblack whispered that Dr. Crucifer was asleep. But Darconville, with his foot fast on the bottom stile, told the boy to wake him. Stuttering angrily, Lampblack tried to shove the door shut, unsuccessfully, for Darconville forcefully stepped it open and repeated with a cold voice, “Get him.”

Lampblack spat: he recoiled as if to strike, but Darconville, seizing his wrist, bounced him on a hop backwards into the room, whereupon, snarling, he disappeared through an inner door.

The living-room looked like a medieval oratory, communicating, apparently, with a bedroom behind it and running into a long narrow walkway to the right, embellished on both sides with framed atlases and prints, which led to more rooms. A cloister lamp hung in this main room. The royal purple plush of the walls descended four or five feet all around the room to old carved wainscoting, finely penciled wood waved and variegated with peculiar dramatic scenes and tetrastichs in middle English. The ceiling was beamed. The furniture was of black oak, a great sideboard answering strangely well to the monstrous elbow-chairs in each corner that rose to ornamental knobs and rounded around to the front in leonine fistclaws. An Egyptian dagger hung in the liripipe of the hood of an academic gown (Jesus College, Oxford) draped over one of them. There was a touch of blasphemy in the antique prie-dieu which had been cannibalized round the kneeler to hold a chamberpot, inscribed: “ Mingere cum bombis res est saluberrima lumbis .”

It was the room of a person whose taste was luxurious to the verge of effeminacy, a person, thought Darconville, utterly and absolutely selfishly solicitous about his own wants, some mad decretalist or Sardanapalian whose caprices ran simultaneously to both lust and asceticism, which, for all anyone knew, were perhaps both part of the same destitution. There were rich labels under the heavy cornices of the walls, recessed for curiosities and antiquities from old châteaux and abbeys, and a plan of shelves were set off, directly across from the door, by a fireplace flanked by a pair of imp-faced terms and above that, framed in dark box, hung the bizarre painting of Delville’s La Fin d’un règne . A Chinese screen stood against a wall. Between the two windows on the left stood a sofa of eupatorium purple, fitted at one end with a cellaret for decantered wines arid liquors. The large old desk intrigued Darconville, for on its center panel, under a built-in lamp, it bore the carved face of Osiris, and there on a pulled compartment — where a cigarette box held a portion of tailor-mades (with blind and foil stamping on the marque of each paper in the extravagant form of his initial) — lay an air pistol. At the top of the desk rested a blue ball inside of which a knight was strangling a nymph.

Darconville had gone but a few steps into the walkway and was peering at the series of lugubrious prints on the walls there — Gotch, Stuck, Degas, Cranach, Baldung, and others — when he heard the paroxysmal scream. It was a woman with a man’s voice and a hyena in her womb. The prevalent note was impossible to comprehend — it struck high C — for its thin wire-drawn pitch of ee-ee-ee somehow appropriated the shrillness of exasperation, pain, terror, and disgust all at once. Was it anger? Impatience? A protracted yowl of dismissal? Possibly. For all of a sudden a disarranged Lampblack flew through the living room, sucking his fist and sobbing for breath, and flung through the front door as if cast forever into the infinite leagues of black air. In his surprise, Darconville had turned in astonishment to follow the theatrical disorder of it all when behind him, suddenly, the tapestry curtains were drawn with a clash of rings over the windows. He wheeled around and through the comparative darkness saw himself under the surveillance of a figure standing across the room, someone whose footfall had attained the highest perfection of noiselessness.