Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Darconville hesitated.

“ Shrabt! Shrabt !”

And they clinked glasses and drank.

What however, wondered Crucifer, had yet been established? The pitch of efficacy, yes, but of what inferential belief? He was not interested in the mere exercise of words, certainly, but rather the very movement of the spirit putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the avenging person of which it felt the presence. Now, he thought, I will bell the cat.

“There,” said Crucifer, sampling the winy aftertaste with his tongue. “I would call it an amusing bottle. A touch of smoke, with attractive mid-mouth flavors. Chewy but not sec, hmmm? Apropos, did you know it is possible to turn Madeira into port in the space of a single night?” He took Darconville in from the side of his fat-encircled eyes. “Do you follow me? I’ve told you before, a nice vice is really a virtue. The blow of a sword and the impact of an idea, according to the Bhagavad-Gita, reach to the same end and have the same justification in the eyes of God. If a claw be caught, the bird is lost — you can make pigeon-blood of rubies!” He paused. “Your brows are clouded,” he asked, leaning under Darconville’s face, “when will they thunder? No, don’t look away. The inescapable Aquinas is his best on ‘the right of spoil’ in a just war, and St. Isidore of Damietta, in fact, pointed out that when the chosen lean over from the heights of heaven to contemplate the torture of the damned they will feel unutterable joy at the spectacle: it’s the collaudation of infinite justice. Knowledge that fails to become action, I’ve said it before, is bestial perversity, didn’t I say that? I did. I did say that.”

He paused theatrically and then picked up the photograph of Gilbert van der Slang.

“Lions 1, Christians 0, is that fair?” Crucifer slowly turned the photograph around toward Darconville and pointed to it with his little finger. “Shall what poisons you prove mithridate to her?” He paused. “Or shall I hold the photograph so”—he turned it sideways—”the way he’d be in bed?”

There was silence.

“Darconville?”

“I am ready.”

“ Be Ravilliac !” charged Crucifer, moving quickly forward in his chair and squeezing its fistclaws. “Have zero pH! Put honor on the top of your tongue and a knife under it! Strangle her with her own tharms! I tell you, men who believe they can do anything they choose to do must presently believe they must do everything they can! What have you come out to see, a reed shaken in the wind? A moral temper has often to be cruel; it is a partisan temper, Valois, and that can be the crudest! I would have you see her an almanac that you might burn her every year ! Stab, strangle, burn — what does it matter? Work only swiftly, as aqua fortis eats into brass!”

Darconville followed him with his eyes.

“Don’t hesitate. Don’t think. God may forgive her, but you never can. The law for her is the law for you — tell me, what most resembles a roast gander?

“Why,” cried Crucifer, bounding up, “a roast goose! And, O, what an infinite variety of retaliation awaits us! In the Dantean underworld she’ll be whipped by devils as a panderer, for her hypocrisy draped in a leaded mantle, for her simony stood upsidedown in a hole — but first we must get her there! Let it go,” he winked, “under the soft name of satisfaction . Now,” he continued, sticking the photograph as a reminder into a corner of the Chinese screen, “propositions of all sorts must have occurred to you — what, countenance her deceit that by your magnanimity she come to acknowledge her mistake with despair? Ignore her crime that she fatally form the habit of acquitting herself of obligation and die friendless? Refuse her the nobility of suffering by which otherwise she piously seek a martyrdom?” Crucifer drew himself up like a bat, his ears almost growing points. “The trouble with this is it’s all insipid pacifistic bilge — and leaves her to make your back her footstool, the spawn’s lugs, and to force you to live sick as muck for the remainder of your days meeting circumferences, not angles, not corners, not rest. She wants to forget. But opposites— contraria con-trariis curantur —are cured by opposites. There’ll never be a forgetting! And you’ll never be at rest! The Palace of Revenge contains every delight but the power of leaving it. Revenge a hundred years old”—he bent over Darconville and siffled under his breath—”still has milk teeth! No, put her to the squeak,” he goaded. “A piece of churchyard fits everybody! But be thorough — a little wind kindles, much puts out the fire: she must learn in pain exactly what she’s lent.”

“Then we agree,” said Darconville, surprising himself with the remark as well as Grucifer, who almost squealed from joy. He quickly slipped off his jade ring and placed it on Darconville’s finger.

“As coins to Hebrews!”

But the singlemindedness, he thought, was yet to be confirmed, predisposing conditions yet to be, the mood as given not effectively received until.

“What to do now? Be cunning,” warned Crucifer, walking with his finger in the air, “for if motion is necessary because of the oppositions which evoke each other, motion must be subtle. Intervene as but a shadow. What I mean is, a lamprey is not killed with a cudgel but a cane, do you get me? Better pull a steady thirty-six than a jerky forty — the old Harvard motto, yes?”

He continued pacing the room restlessly, an uneasiness reduced to the simplest terms of cold reflection, deliberating in an anxious conviction that sifted and tested what he soliloquized within himself of war and cruelty and torment. He stopped suddenly at his desk.

“Stay,” he said, “I feel a sudden alteration — ah, lovely girl, trust no longer to your bloom; the white privets fall, the dark hyacinths are culled.” He wiggled his dimpled fingers. “Let her paint herself an inch thick, Darconville, to this favor”—he slowly picked up the air pistol— “she must come.”

He turned.

“And him.”

Darconville followed his pointing finger to the photograph.

“How can you put a hundred pounds of trash into two sacks so that each sack”—Crucifer’s hand began to scribble fast in the air—”contains a hundred pounds? By putting,” he gleeped, “one sack inside the other! Figurez-vous ? Go after them both!” He leaned forward in animated receptivity. “Have I not said that when you are lank again, seek the narrow chink where, when lank, you entered? Here.” He waved the gun. Darconville stepped back anxiously. “This is a Feinwerkbau E-12 Deluxe, caliber 177, recoilless operation with double piston construction, side-cocking lever, and a fixed barrel set with a micrometer peepsight. It’s a classic! The pellets”—he turned his head sideways and smiled crazily—”have been treated. Never put off ‘til tomorrow what you can wear tonight. She can be bleeding six bottles of alicant by dusk. Take it.”

He seemed to turn positively insane.

“Kill her!” cried Crucifer, impatiently. His fanaticism leapt forth like a sword drawn from its scabbard at any thought now of contradiction. “Where there are no guns, diplomacy must make not butter but time, not true? Too true. Too true, indeed. But here’s a gun! Shoot her and leave her until maggots are singing in her wounds! Not a record kill — only a good one-shot kill at twenty yards through her bedroom window!”

He fired without warning into the photograph: twaaaang !

“Kill the Dutchman — the receiver is as bad as the thief — and send him back feet first to the Straits of Ballambangjang or wherever it was he came from.” He aimed and blew a quarter of the photo away.