Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Darconville blanched, closing his eyes and trying to expel a terrifying picture from his imagination. The words literally seemed insane. He had finally come across a person, he realized, who, in that mysterious mythopoetic world in which his own imagination for so many years had insisted on moving, was a serious antagonist, a madman butting at him through a baffle of antilogic and embodying a depth of actual evil, the most terrifying aspect of which seemed to be that his opponents were selected with a sardonic delight in their incompatibilities.

“I can read your face, Darconville. You’d abstain from such action as you know it, there’s no doubt, out of mercy, out of temperance, out of truth, indeed, out of love. Mercy’s all very well, but what of holy cruelty, to disallow life for the misshapen, the ill-begotten, the gormless? Temperance”—he spit a pip sound—”is for nuns! If one continually forbids oneself the expression of the passions as being rude and bourgeois, the result can only bring about precisely what is not desired: the weakening of them, the degeneration of power into shallow and hypocritical etiquette! Truth? A logical or mathematical proposition such as 1+1=2 we say is true not because of prior ‘meanings’ or rules, conventional or otherwise, much less because of some necessary correspondence with reality. Such a proposition we take to be true simply because, and in so far as, we choose to regard it as true and merely select signs to suit the terms. Figure like the Dutch: they have shaped their religion in the shape of their heads, which explains why there are three hundred different forms of worship over there, all supposedly Christian! True and false are but a blind turned upon a pivot. In combat every man fights his own war. There is no such thing as a rule.

“But love?” Crucifer’s tongue seemed to sour on the word. “What is this bit of jackasserie from the goliardic corpus of pothouse verse other than lust for possession? The lover desires sole and unremitting possession of the person for whom he longs, seeking unconditional dominion over the soul and body of his paramour, demanding it exclusively. But if one considers that this in fact means nothing less than excluding the whole world, my dear, from the so-called precious good, if one considers that the lover aims at the impoverishment and deprivation of all competitors — a wild and ^compromising avarice that has been deified over the ages — then love is nothing more than the vilest expression of egoism and greed! This is the good you’d preserve to love, presume to lure, pretend to like?” His voice took on a tone of expostulation. “Why, admit this silliness a virtue and, by Christ, you’ll be but advocate to her crime !” He joined his hands and shook them with blurring speed. “Shall I reckon for you in the law? Shall I? Then I shall tell you that the law is a blank to be filled in by circumstance! To torture in Holland, for instance, is considered as a favor to an accused person! Haven’t you read Dr. Johnson on the subject? No man was put to the torture there, he explained, unless there was as much evidence against him as would amount to a conviction in England and therefore an accused person among them had one chance more to escape punishment than those who were tried in England. No, there is not one thing with another, but Evil saith to Good, ‘My brother, my brother, I am one with thee.’ “ Then his eyes became as hollow as the unboweled winds and he spoke low. “The concepts of good and evil merely address the idea of the expedient and the inexpedient! One holds, so it goes, that what is called evil harms the species, that what is good preserves. In truth, evil instincts are expedient, species-preserving, and indispensable to as high a degree as good ones — their function is merely different. Abandon all thought of consequence, says Krishna, for good and evil are essentially the same in a world which is an emanation of a unitary spirit.” He quoted

“The dart of Izdabel prevails!

’Twas dipt in double poison.”

“Then think: in a world where penitence is boastfulness — is this virtue? — and giving an expression of hostility whereby, the crudest form of bondage, a person is incapable of repayment — is this virtue? I smell only cadaver in a living body. Is this the zeal you’d have surround your cause? Think on ‘quietism’—the gift of virtue she’d have you get. The slave accepts the kindness: it dulls the edge of rebellion and wins the donor a lifetime of subservience. The virtue that violates, the kindness that kills!” He shook his head. “Is it any wonder, my God, that the gospel of Laodicea urges people to be temperate in what they call goodness as in everything else?”

Dr. Crucifer took a breath, folding his tongue in the mouth that constricted in an ugly munch.

“I tell you, hard cases make bad law and where the law is so broad as to be applicable to all circumstances there is no obligation to obey it in any circumstance. A man must sometimes rise above principle!” he said with an angry smile. “Law, as I say, is ultimately the consequence of man’s fallen nature. Hence came first the law of corrupted nature, which they call jus naturale or natural law, and among its excellent principles and rules — hope, ye miserable; ye happy, take heed — can be found these: vim vi repellere licet , violence may be driven out with violence; frangentem fidem fides frangatur eidem , there is no need to keep trust with one who does not keep trust; falsa causa non nocet , an error in motive does not effect the validity of an injury in those who deserve it for another just reason; fallere fallentem non est fraus , swindling a swindler is no swindle; volenti non fit injuria , to one who asks for it, there can be no injury; si te vel me confundi apport eat potius eligam te confundi quam me , if one of the two of us must come to harm, you or I — this, of course, to be applied,” said Crucifer, his eyes taking on a lurid look as if lit by the fires of hell, “to whom it fits— then rather you than I. Oh yes, and much more of the same kind which must be reckoned among the laws. Why, tongues I could hang on every tree that might civil sayings show, but that’s as it is, isn’t it? I don’t think you have to hear more, Al Amin.” Crucifer touched Dar-conville’s arm, confidentially, as if to bring him further under his influence and with slippery eyes moved even closer. “You know what I’m asking for, don’t you?” He looked over his shoulder like a conspirator in a play and with sudden evaporating cheerfulness directly asked in a low, low whisper, “tell me, have you no rasp in your farrier’s kit?”

Darconville looked up at him.

“You smell.”

Crucifer’s rigid eyes shot contempt, and he stumbled up, caught by reason of its bunchiness, on the hem of his robe and almost sprang to the far side of the room where as if seized convulsively he sought to expel, and expel again, and expel once again his sudden breath which, rattling, seemed to indicate a valvular disease of the heart. The indurated pause that followed did not last long. He made a forlorn show of jauntiness, and, as he turned, his face became more insinuatingly piggy.

“I told you,” he smirked, walking to the étagère, “we ‘leaked’—an inadvertence causative to my operation. Repellent, you’re thinking.” He took up a Stiegel-type bottle and, unstoppering it, quickly perfumed various parts of his body. “But you wouldn’t intentionally insult me, would you? Because I have no dowsets? Have a care, Sir Formal. I am inexact, I told you. I have no will. I have no tail. I am like the New England Primer ,” he said, “ ‘adorn’d with Cuts.’ I’m — incomplete.” Amused, he held the stopper between his legs and dropped it. “Here,” he pointed, “I do not stand; I cannot do otherwise. It’s a wound, you see, I cannot help. But yours,” he said, “you can.”