Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Inhaling, Darconville pushed his head back into the pillow.

Dr. Crucifer studied his cigarette, looked at Darconville, shook his head, and continued staring at the cigarette. “You’re gentle,” he said, puffing. “Gentleness is nice — the very mood fair Isabel, I don’t doubt, is this minute showing Captain Poop of the Yankee Frigate.” He puffed. “And courteous, though it won you no hearts. Obedient, but blindly. And then, it seems, proud. Reverence to this! But of course when pride rides, shame lackeys. Or,” asked Crucifer, now drawing closer, “are you simply fearful? Darconville?”

What Darconville desired at that moment as he had never desired anything before was a place in which he could have lost himself forever. He drew a deep breath through his nose and tearfully turned away. “Darconville?

“Ah, it’s the justice, of course, the ethics of it, that’s it, isn’t it? The law. You are still in blind servitude to the inquisiturient bishops and shaven reverences of the Church! Come, Bocardo,” he snapped impatiently, “save your tears for the fumes that live in an onion! Law,” exclaimed Crucifer, “what is it if it can force itself against the faultless properties of nature? Laws? My word, no. Laws do not indicate what a people value but rather what seems to them foreign, strange, and outlandish. You mustn’t show them undue respect: they’re but exceptions to the morality of custom, that’s all — why, in another country my seinsembling and scrotiform-faced stepmother would have thrown off her bombazines-with-the-black-leg-of-mutton-sleeves for the scant-ies of a common tart.” He crushed out his cigarette. “There are, however, a few points of law to be gotten of your bitch’s falsehoods, in spite of her — forgive the oxymoron-genuine hypocrisy. I will remind you of poetry, if you let me. Will you listen?”

Crucifer rubbed his hands.

“The state, it could be argued, must be called to account as to one of its highest functions, that of law — the hubris of human ingenuity— and even possibly condemned by the standards implied in the Utopian idea of primal innocence, for hasn’t it taken upon itself one form of dominion after another,” asked Crucifer, crossing the room with his forefinger in the air, “and lorded it over all the others, pretending, as though it were the daughter of the gods, to a privilege beyond all other disciplines? Primal innocence?” He winked. “Dwale and delusion! So laws were grafted. Lawcraft? Sheepcraft! I won’t bore you with a history of all its agathokakological claptrap, Darconville, but simply point out that, at bottom, it owes its essential existence to the depraved and fallen nature of mankind — which it can never riddle, which it can never rectify — and in my considered opinion is styled, when at its most efficient, only to jingle at justice and to twill at truth, especially in matters touching on that curious but primal antagonism: the just thing versus the legal thing. The law and the gospel,” he glubbed with obvious delight, “are hereby made liable to more than one contradiction, and if a mooching and piety-faced forgiveness is all you know of either, where punishment you take to be a crime, I must then reinstruct you that all law has its beginning in that first crime of our first mother and her low tongue — Johannes Goropius Becanus (1519–1572) in his Origines Antuerpianae , Antwerp, 1569, maintained that the original language of Adam and Eve, and so the tongue of primal betrayal, was Dutch! — and thereby cry out that you might let your severe and impartial doom imitate divine vengeance and rain down your punishing force upon this temerarious strumpet, this mistress of the adroit lie, until like that fen-born serpent she resembles at the root of all our woe she eat the dust of her penalty for the rest of her life!”

Crucifer wiped his mouth and, walking like Agag with a mounting gait, stepped toward the bed where Darconville lay; coming closer and closer it seemed to him that the creature became more and more insubstantial. He backed away and Crucifer made a mimicry of tentative assistance but he was far too anxious to make a point to waste a motion.

“I sniff the air and find something wrong here yet. There’s an odor of virtue in this room. Could it be forgiveness ? But please,” asked Crucifer, “how serve virtues, tell me, other than merely to weaken? What in fact are they, my man? Old ladies’ litations? The desiderata used by saints to engender self-contempt in anyone who must witness them? Nasty little abstentions put about by society and religion for individuals with a fortress mentality to live by, always to their disadvantage, for the promotion and sales of the general good? My God, how one is always privately victim to the virtues the public sends down! It disgusts me!” said Crucifer in a shrill piping boon. “No, the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its value to serve the nature truth, as we know it, molests. Stricte dicte , there’s a stinking partisanthip at the heart of all definition! I am stocky, you are short and stout, he’s a fat little turd, isn’t that how it goes? Why do we have to die? Because we have to live. What the hell is life, then? — a long death! It’s all grimgribbing, Darconville! Good and evil are only the prejudices of God,” he continued, with a species of mad hilarity in his eye, “and the dreadful conclusion is that the ancient deadly sins, seven in number, are in fact, all of them, very close to virtues, just as the guilt you feel after committing a few of them is arguably nothing less than responsibility in a funny mask! And then if these so-called sins never existed, why, what great authors, tell me, could have written their masterpieces of humanity? Or whereby that they might be corrected could we otherwise discern another’s faults? And howso then maintain? Your enemy by any other standard, can’t you see, would be an ephydriad. But, wait, here’s latitude! It is precisely as tame animals that we show ourselves a shameful sight. I tell you, people need open enemies if they are to rise to the level of their own virtue, virility, and cheerfulness. I mean, if the end doesn’t justify the means, then what the hell does?”

Exulting in his intellectual power and dexterity he seemed to be one of the greatest sophists that had ever contended in the lists of declamation, his spirit of contradiction and perverse delight in presuming to be able in argument to maintain and even defend the wrong side of things with equal aggression and ingenuity somehow making error itself rich, permanent, and distinguished.

“The whole conception of man really sinning against God is intolerably puerile. Call it sin? Sin is no sin when virtue is forgot. Call it evil? Why, evil is only a freedom exercised by one and invidiously disapproved of by another, done as effortlessly and as naturally as time passing. Dirty oil in a car means it’s doing its job! Every great fortune is based on a crime, and fortunate crimes make heroes. Successful crime ceases to be crime. Success constitutes or absolves the guilty at its will. You have been thrust into this part, do not forget, and must remember of what you must contribute to it that if the scene, not the act, is the unit of construction of this Jacobean play, scenes lead to acts! If they call the reaper, whet thy scythe. No, I favor any skepsis to which one may reply, ‘ I am revenged !’ You needn’t put an unnecessarily persona] significance to it,” said Crucifer, smiling in his eyes. “The rationality of the universe itself suggests survival, and, my God, I’d rather live in any loathsome dungeon than in any paradise at her entreaty! Be only thorough! Fill the unforgiving minute! You can’t cure a personality. Teach the thing manners! Split her — how I adore the language that can tell you this — from coon-slit to cap!”