Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Isabel, unsuccessfully, tried to touch him.

“I don’t seem ever able to communicate with anybody,” whispered Isabel as if she were breathing on glass, distractedly twicking her thumbnail, the cuticle of which, saw Darconville, was curiously wrinkled. The words almost broke his heart.

“Surely your mother and father—”

“I have no father.”

It was spoken so fast that Darconville, struck with it, could find nothing whatever to say. Isabel, it seemed, never said anything important to him except while making some physical movement to distract attention from her words, for simultaneously she held a cushion to herself and something jumped in her eyes, now tense with search. He couldn’t define it at once, but after watching her for a space, while his brain pressed for the right words to say, he thought perhaps suddenly he’d understood the meaning of her dream. But beyond that, his spirit extended outward, rising from stoical self-sufficiency and reaching, like sweet miracle, to a conscious concern not to flout the souls of the lonely on earth, and so Isabel went to Darconville’s heart by the very nearest road, which was the road of pity, smoothed by grace, and beauty, and a gentleness that seemed, at last, the one ray of light in the darkness of Quinsyburg.

Darconville sought a way to put her at ease, experiencing, however, an intimation of helplessness in the face of what he guessed to be a strange pride and almost exultant loneliness, for without a sigh, without a break, she pondered wildly, floating upon some inner sea of feeling while yet being frightened, it seemed, of suddenly drowning in it. He attempted to reach her, carefully, without trying to contribute to the invasion of forces that within her had clearly already begun. And in someone so young! Come, asked Darconville, wasn’t she only seventeen? No answer. Eighteen? She nodded. Where did she live? It was a place called Fawx’s Mt., about seventy miles north of Quinsyburg. And hadn’t she wanted to go to college?

“Isabel?”

“Everybody thought it best,” she replied, her grave reflective calm obviously masking an unsettled temperament in the matter. “My uncle, who lives with us, didn’t really care. My mother, I suppose, did. But I told my mother, no, I really wasn’t anxious to come. I wanted—”

But Isabel hurried across the passage, silently, leaving in the stead of whatever it was that slipped away simple resignation, and mechanically smiled at her hands. He looked for something to say.

“Did your mother drive you down to Quinsyburg?”

It was an ordinary question ordinarily asked, but she looked away, smoothing the nap of her dress over and over again. The poignancy of her shyness, or her hurt, or her fear — whatever — increased his awareness of the suspense between them.

“No,” whispered Isabel quickly, lowering her eyes, “a friend.” She glanced imperceptibly across her shoulder in a brief but distinct scrutiny. “Just a friend.”

Smiling, Darconville hurriedly looked round for something to do or say, anything to precipitate a change of subject and arrest not one, but two minds beating against the unknown, for a counterpoise had lowered: a friend —the commonest dysphemism in an affair of the heart — is always a member of the opposite sex. He saw the shadow of someone else cast across her life. It didn’t matter, he thought; inevitable things don’t. And in spite of his anticipation of that very possibility, he leaned forward, his hands under his chin, and quoted humorously,

”My maiden Isabel,

Reflaring rosabel,

The fragrant camomel.”

Isabel paused, left off biting her underlip in concentrated thought, and pulled her thumb. “Oh, I ruin everything,” she burst out. “I seem to ruin everything.” (She pronounced it “ru-een.”) “I do! I do!”

“No, not at all. No,” Darconville heard himself insisting, shaking his head, mad to absolve her of anything, “you don’t ruin everything.” She seemed so lost, outside the world looking in, divided from him in some way not as yet understood, drawing away and revenging herself on her own magnificence as if trying to distance the perfection she, by embodying, couldn’t know. She hunched down into herself, saddened, like a small batrachian in a hide-hole.

“I feel small, for some reason,” she said. “I feel like a little thing.”

Sympathetically, Darconville touched her chin and lifted her head. “Then I’ll call you that,” said he. “‘The Little Thing.’“ Isabel couldn’t stop the smile extracted from her, but at the words, automatically, she pulled her dress to cover her legs as best she could. Can’t you see it doesn’t matter ? thought Darconville. Can’t you see that ?

“The curfew,” said Isabel. “I must be getting back.”

Darconville drank some wine. “Oh,” he said, “but we haven’t told you anything about us?”

Isabel looked startled, hearing the plurality of plural pronouns, and said almost below her breath, “I thought you — were all alone.”

She pulled her thumb.

Suddenly, her eyes grew luminous with that special excitement of sympathy that can bring tears from something deeper than passion as Darconville lifted up Spellvexit — a twitching, bewhiskered explanation — from the top of the large trunk he then dragged from the corner of the room. And as he sketchily outlined the course of events that had brought him down South, filling in various facts of his past, both eccentric and ecclesiastical (she agreed, as he preferred it that way, to keep those religious adventures a secret between them: for privacy) he sorted through the trunk to show her what, over the years, he’d collected: a golden ikon; old flags and coins; a few of his own manuscripts; ancient books, several written by his ancestors; photographs of Europe — many of Venice and, of course, his grandmother — and other romantic bits-and-pieces evoking a thousand distant places all more exciting than the little town of Quinsyburg from which, suggested Darconville, his eyes sparkling mischievously, they could both secretly escape that very night! Isabel’s gay laughter rang like a peal of bells and, upon fleeting reflection, asked as if really to know, “Where will we go?”

Darconville was almost ready to pull out a map!

The assortment of odds-and-ends in the trunk, however, took Isabel’s attention, and as she delicately lifted out each object, attracted especially to a carved Russian fife, she seemed for the first time truly animated and excited. She found confidence. She asked questions. And always she was full of exclamations, charming Darconville by the cadences of her voice, now rising, then dropping to a rich whisper of roguishness in which a slight rural monotony of speech disappeared and a soul resounded.

“At my house — how could I forget ? — I have a real snakeskin and my grandmother’s diamond ring and an actual tintype, really, of Lee on his horse, let me see,” she continued breathlessly, “and a very old bracelet my grandfather found in China a long time ago.”

Darconville, impishly, asked: “Was he Chinese?”

Isabel laughed into her hand.

“Silly,” she said, clicking her tongue and tapping his nose with her finger, coming close enough for Darconville to feel the weblike softness of her hair and almost taste a breath like candy, Sweet William, golddrops. “He was in the navy.”

Amused, she feigned to strike him. “He’s been around the world, you know. Several times.”

“It must be lonely sailing around the world”—quickly, Isabel looked at Darconville to see if somewhere in his consciousness by obstinate resistance he were opposed to such a thing—”unless, of course,” shrugged Darconville, “you have nothing to keep you on land.”