Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“That’s not all. The robbery of one age becomes the chivalry of the next. She’ll be seen a heroine for what she did.”

“Do you believe that?” asked Darconville, astonished.

“As you come from the holy land of Walsingham.”

It was insupportable: but there was more.

“I can see her. Can’t you see her?” asked Crucifer, wiggling his fingers in front of his eyes and stutterstepping again forward. “There’s a gathering of shagpats and semi-imbeciles in Fawx’s Mt. in the midst of which, all smothered up in shade, she and her Dutch dunt sit with juggling eyes, and when called upon to explain the bravery of her decision, to keep it affronted, unassailed, she blushes as if a fulgence had gone into her womb, but when asked how they met, she curiously forgets all her scheming, plotting, and dissembling — for whatever guilt soever years should afford her is of course all prevented in her select and aboriginal ignorance — and putting her whorish hand on Gilbert Gooseboot’s knee this object of common licitation lowers her eyes and sweetly replies, ‘O, just fate.’ “ Crucifer squeezed his hands and squatted a bit. “You see, she aspires, she ascends. She’s attentive, she’s—”

An unnatural heat shot to Darconville’s heart.

“Ambitious,” he said.

“A grievous fault!”

Crucifer was almost beside himself.

“I can almost hear her: even now the turtle pants! She spreads and mounts like arithmetic! Sex upon victory! When cedars are shaken where shrubs do feel no bruise?” asked Crucifer. “The delight she must feel! The she-hippo! How she must have shrieked to see it done! She thinks you’ll do nothing, of course — what, steal off to one of the square states of Middle America? Join the Carthusians to apply the cat, eat black radishes, and dig your own grave? Lose your wits in some peaceful province in Acrostic Land? Good, let her be right; it will console her for being nothing else,” he said, “and yet—”

A subintelligitur crouched in the pause. Secredy he took Darconville in from the comer of his eye.

“Yes?”

“It was only a foolish idea.”

“An idea?”

“An irrelevant idea,” he replied. He waited. “But you do know I care infinitely for you, don’t you? That I brought you here for no other reason? That the sheikh’s tent is always pitched on that side from which the enemy is expected?”

“What is it?” asked Darconville wearily.

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“No, it’s none of my business. God alone knows what you’d find if you started turning over stones — though you can be sure he’d hold it against you if you did.”

Darconville rolled his head back.

“But since you ask,” said Crucifer, catapulting quickly on his hunkers by Darconville’s ear. “We can change the meaning of a thing by seeing it in a different aspect. Do you understand? What I’m saying?” Darconville’s fever-weakened eyes registered nothing. “As one object becomes warmer, an adjacent object must necessarily become cooler,” Crucifer pointed out, “isn’t that a law?” He began to look suddenly wild, and his ears, bemedaled with heavy lobes, actually shook. “I assure you, it is! There is a doing of right out of wrong, is what I’m saying, if ”—he winked and touched a finger to his nose— “the way be found. I mean, if nothing is to be attempted in which there is danger, we must all sink into hopeless inactivity. You must look at my face: my explanations are bound up with the way I put them. Listen to me,” he hissed excitedly, looking behind him as if to be certain they were there alone, “next to truth, confirmed error may serve as well, and if a wrong must be made right, why so it must even if the logic of it should lead you,” he looked grave, then whispered under his breath, “to do something.”

Crucifer fixed him with a knowing look.

“Do something,” asked Darconville, swallowing, “to her?”

“You infer with acumen.”

He hadn’t a second to react before Dr. Crucifer suddenly placed a hand over his mouth. It was jelly-cold. “Wait. I say, if a wrong must be made right, if a way be found, if it should lead you to, could you? Do something? If,” repeated Crucifer who, constrained by the fullness of his robe, clumsily bent to listen for the answer. “Say yes.”

Darconville lay motionless, looking up as if everything had gone out of his eyes. Everything he looked at, in fact, out of the cursed necessity of looking at something, seemed subject to the relentlessly unfolding and cruel paraphrase of what had once been his life.

“It’s hypothetical,” pleaded Crucifer, his voice trembling in a little flutelike whistle. He stared at Darconville with a jesting challenge— something deep within his eyes seemed indulgently to flicker. “Just say yes. No one need know. Only yes.” Slowly, he lifted his hand, his lips pursed to a careful kiss: the impress of his fingers lay across Darconville’s mouth.

“Yes,” sobbed Darconville.

“ My child ,” whispered Dr. Crucifer.

“THE QUESTION NOW,” declared Dr. Crucifer, “is what to do. You are bitten, you are not all eaten. But it will be so preached — I can hear the crabbed textuists and paraphrasts now — that if you loved her once, you’ll therefore love her always and by acting to ignore justice for peace so shall it be proved. The method of custom is so glib and easy though, isn’t it? To prove you loved her, though she doesn’t care a fig for you, you’re supposed to spend a lifetime in silence with only a handful of glorious memories to keep you from madness? To feast, to fart, to finally forget?”

He turned toward Darconville with a condescending, slightly ironic indulgence but saw in that pale and chartaceous face (which made him seem more ill-shaven) only two uncaring eyes polished in grey staring indifferently, remotely, somewhere beyond the room. There was a sudden diffidence about him that Crucifer couldn’t bear.

“What, shall you spare her? Let her spread among us until with her shadow all your dignity and honor, all the glory of your name, be darkened and obscured? Resist by what resistance would surely kill you? Simply ignore it ?” he asked in a succlamation of outrage, “as if to say that if one were ill all one’s life getting well might then be taken for another illness? Can it be? You’d allow them, the most loathsome example of twinning since Sodom and Gomorrah, to go scot free? Sit like a fool at home, Don Pimp, and eye your rashers while open-eyed conspiracy is all and everywhere about? I’d pray to Lucifuge Rofocale to set an edge upon my pipes and chase the dusk of conscience back across her face! I’d crack sixty axletrees to get at her! I’d be on her like white on rice!” Crucifer’s angry face was in a torque. “And you?”

“I don’t know.”

“ Phluaria !” screamed Dr. Crucifer.

He swung through the bedroom, reaching up furiously over his head as if he were going to pull down lightning, his lips quivering like rubber-bands, and then became stationary. He swallowed in embarrassment.

“Look at me.” He tried to laugh and fumbled up a cigarette. “The future — you shake your head in advance, I see, but wait, wait —the future is memory, I was only going to say, if we don’t overcome the past.” Where, Darconville wondered, had he heard those words before? “The injury I insist you mustn’t fail to dismiss without recompense, because you haven’t, is not therefore entirely done away with, for to live still and not be able to love — you don’t want that, do you? — is only to heap up more injury. The woodcock is near the gin,” he prompted, puffing his cigarette, “and, what, shall it now skip away? O hell, perhaps it should,” quillwheeled Crucifer, feigning loss of interest and eyeing Darconville surreptitiously, “perhaps it should.”