Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

There fell an odd silence. Darconville looked at her. But Isabel was staring enigmatically past him, her brown eyes fixed upon vacancy as if she were scrutinizing some faraway image on a distant horizon, trying to divine, as it were, and perhaps overcome its limits by some studious, some private act of the will. Darconville, at last, thought that he had met someone as romantic, as full of dreams, as unpractically and wondrously mad as himself. Then she looked up, her sad smile like the light of white candles shining from a quiet altar. Darconville reached for something in the trunk and asked her if she’d accept it as a small gift. It was the carved Russian fife.

Thanking him, Isabel folded it to her breast. She waited a moment, solemnly. “You—” She hesitated. “—you won’t mind if I ask you something?”

With precise thumb-and-forefinger she carefully picked up the fat pen lying on his desk.

“Would you, sometime, write a poem for me?”

“I promise,” said Darconville.

The piety of her expression, the peculiar intimacy of that mysterious girlishness anticipated in his imagination, nourished all his happiness. She exhaled so deeply that he was instantly reminded of the Elizabethan idea that each sigh costs the heart a drop of blood.

“Oh dear,” whispered Isabel, “I feel so safe here now.”

“Here? You mean, in Quinsyburg?”

The room grew strangely quiet as Isabel, coloring, bowed her head, her eyelashes sweeping down in a sedulously lowered glance. She paused.

“Near you.”

The candles, swipping, took their attention for a moment, throwing shadows this way and that. As she watched the flames, there was a complicated wistfulness in her expression until, in the solitude, itself almost predatory for the spell it threw, she turned to him. “We won’t meet again like this — for the first time. We won’t meet again, will we,” she asked, “when we’re strangers? We know each other now?”

Was it a question? A statement?

There was not a flicker of a doubt, however, as to the summons he received from this girl who for so long, or so it seemed, had insinuated herself into his life as an almost spectral apparition. Gently, touching the small of her back, he drew her body with scarcely perceptible pressure against his own, as she leaned forward, her heart beating fast, a certain virginal detachment in her awkwardness, and she came forth, as if collapsing, towards him, her flowing hair scented with a fragrance of almost immortal influence. Fairest of mortals, thought Darconville, thou distinguished care of a thousand bright inhabitants of air! They looked into each other’s eyes in an admixture of sudden beauty and confusion, and, in that pure light, Darconville clasped her almost to suffocation against his heart and kissed her until destiny, fulfilled, seemed no longer necessary. It is always the most beautiful moment in a love affair.

Isabel was already on the porch and down the steps when Darconville, in a hushed voice, called to her through the darkness, “What will you give me for a basket of hugs?”

And just before she disappeared into the night of fells and foxglove, silence and stars, Isabel turned and ran back several steps to lean forward and whisper with the inaudibility that is at the heart of joy itself, “I will give you a basket of kisses.”

HEAD: Stately

EYES: Brown demilunes (something too close together) proving Astrarche, Queen of Stars, a twin

NOSE: A nobility softening its slight acumination

MOUTH: Perfect, with the tremlet of a dimple at the edge. The tallest hyperboles cannot descry the beauty of its smile, which flashes, however, teeth too large.

LIPS: Full

EARS: A gynotikolobomassophile’s delight

FACE: Simonetta Vespucci’s, in the ecstasy of transverberation:

”A face made up

Out of no other shop

Than what nature’s white hand sets ope.”

The scar weeps once, forever.

HAIR: A beneplacit of God. Shode at the center, it falls in fine burnished gold either straight down or is worn, alternately, in a single bell-pull braid.

HEIGHT: Ca. 5’7”

BREASTS: Doe’s noses

HANDS: Big-boned. The fingers, with flattened tips, are long and strong.

WAIST: Clipsome, sized to Love’s wishes

ANKLES: Scaurous

LEGS: The one devenustation. What intrusive image will you have, swollen fetlock? Curb at the bank of the hock? Puffed gaskin? Thoroughpin? Stringhalt? They are “filled” legs, in the tradition of the round goblet which wanteth not liquor, an heap of wheat set about with lilies. There is nothing to forgive. The Venus de Milo wears a size 14 shoe.

THERE WAS A MUSIC in the world that night never before heard, strains reaching Darconville alone across moor and highland, field and common, cliff and vale and watercourse and piercing his heart in a sweet, impossible ache. Unable to sleep, he’d dressed hastily, run down the stairs, and driven to an out-of-way spot miles outside Quinsyburg. At the edge of an open field, rising to a wooded height, he for no particular reason came to a stop and got out.

It was well past midnight. The vault of black sky, its clear stars so sublime and infinite above him, seemed in its immensity to speak of what it was in his power to become. Darconville walked and walked, directionless, across the night-dark grass of the meadow, perfumed by the musk of the earth, and his heart beat in his chest as if it would burst. He soon found himself across the field. It was wooded now, wonderfully gloomy, somehow steeped in legend, and he imagined that every clump of trees, every hollow, every vine was a part of Brocéliande where the enchanter Merlin dwelt and that every boulder was a menhir behind which, secretly, a druid hid, spying on his joy.

A cold mist haunted the fallows, with the odor of trees, stubble, and seeds; dampness and earthmusk; and the spotted plage of decaying leaves. An owl pitchpiped. The trees were loaded with mast, their boughs pendulous and brown, and piles of leaves gave way to his tread. What was there in forests, representing more of mystery than light, that now promised to illuminate just where he must go?

And now he was climbing up over the rocks, the branches and leaves in the moonlight throwing strange pelicasaurian figures everywhere about him. A wild wind gusted at his coat at several points, only blowing up his fever to climb up even higher as if resolved to discover in the spectral, astropoetic light of some clearing above — a height, perhaps, fashioned from what he felt — the tall presences of aeons and archons, peris and paracletes, mystic thrones and twelve-winged kalkydri beckoning him forward less from where he stood than closer toward where she was. It was fated: their souls must have been in love before they had been born and were dreaming this dream they were living, a promise of love, though blind and slow like all prophecies, that participated in and so would last an eternity.

The moon, bright, blackened shadows, gave every green thing a fivefold addition to its greenness, and whitened out a way. The wind swirled and looped his coat as he reached the very height of the hill, and the uprushing of enchantment he felt flooding his arms, making him almost delirious, seemed to send him soaring past the regions of the earth where, giving to the wind the kisses it returned — high in the cataracts of air, beyond the running clouds — he pointed to the world that formed her face and cried out in ecstasy, “ I love you !”