Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“What, you just register — for the night ?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“It’s a no-tell motel.”

“And what about Miss Dessicquint, huh? Huh?” asked sitting-up-correctly Harriet Bowdler, chastely buttoned up in spite of the sun in her school blazer of sober watchet which displayed on one pocket the disc of the college insignia. “What about her?”

“She can go suck a blanket!” said Gerda Bean.

“And stop squinchin’ your eyes all up,” said Ravissa Deadlow. “You do manage to get all bitey, Bowdler, don’t you?”

“ I manage to get all bitey?” Harriet Bowdler wailed. “You do, you manage to get all bitey!” She looked about her for support. Calmly, Ravissa Deadlow openhandedly appealed to the same group, asking everybody who in fact was the one who got all bitey? “ You get bitey !” everyone screamed at Harriet, who burst into tears.

Berthalene Rhodie, meanwhile, was wondering if the authorities would let them all take rooms, offering for consideration the trouble they’d had in previous years when the townies and the boys from Hampden-Sydney College, all shoe-mouth deep in liquor, spent the night banging doors and running around the premises like whistlehogs.

The twins, Scarlett and Melanie Longstreet, agreed.

“Remember last year? Bambi Bargewell’s boyfriend got himself all yopped up with bourbon,” said Melanie, putting by her sun reflector, “and then flingin’ free as you please into one of them cabins went and daddied her baby right there on the pile carpet.”

Shrimpie De Vein gasped happily.

“I saw her all pooched up in Thalhimer’s last fall,” added Scarlett, rubbing an antbite on her calf with her left instep, “buyin’ kimbies.”

“While he ups and goes into the navy.”

“I don’t care,” said Tracy Upjohn, “I’m for the Bidey-Bi!”

“Ditto,” said Mehitabel Huntoon, with fluoroscopic eyes.

“Off the wall!” hooted Betty Ann Unglaub.

Shirley Newbegin, converted, carefully tied a fascinator over springing curls. Everybody looked at Harriet Bowdler. Was all settled? No, not yet, not quite.

“And if Quinsy revokes your degree, then ?” asked the outraged girl whose hippocrepiform legs — to assure the position of sagacious fakir— she crossed with difficulty. “ Then ?”

“Why, then, I’ll tell them to twist my diploma into a cone, Harriet dear,” pronounced “Pookie” Pumpgarten, her arm falling languidly over her eyes against the glare of the sun, “and shove it where the moon don’t shine.”

“My life !” said Harriet Bowdler.

In the meantime, Darconville was having no success. From the cemetery he went over to the Piggly Wiggly, bought some cigarettes— he was smoking himself into a state of near etiolation — and returned to campus by way of a gate that led to the indoor swimming pool. The empty pool smelled like an empty terrarium. He cut through a corridor with the gnome Umbriel astride his back repairing to search the gloomy cave of spleen that was the gym. It was also empty. He called out, “Isabel?” The echo called out again. Nothing.

The laboratories were next. Classes in that building, however, had been dismissed for the day, and the late afternoon rooms were tomblike, the silence broken only by the hysterical coughing in the main corridor of some blue-in-the-face squidgereen — all doubled-up and being thumped on the back by clappermaclawed Miss Porch-mouth — who had half-wittedly suctioned up through a retort, and swallowed, a half-litre of phenolphthalein solution. The anthropology department — where Mr. Bischthumb’s classroom (they had not re-hired) was commemoratively kept empty — showed the same end-of-the-year inactivity, except for one particular classroom where some swivel-chair tactician or other, back to view, was winding down a lecture on virvestitism in the Benelux countries to five girls: three fast asleep, one, gongoozled by boredom, refrogging a silver chain, and the last, in the front row, was the student body president, Xystine Chap-pelle, upholstering her 4.0 grade point average — and she was auditing.

Out a side door, across the mall, and Darconville was in the social sciences building. He took the stairs three-at-a-go to the first, the second, the third floor and paused, searching faces, at a classroom where a group of girls sat in the semi-darkness watching one of Dr. Knipper-doling’s gripping geographical filmstrips; the pictures flashed to a recorded voice:

“—Faletua Uliuli is still, of course, a poor Samoan village by our own standards. The daub-and-wattle hut here has served them for centuries, [beep] Irrigation methods, as used by their fathers and forefathers, were far too primitive to keep up with modern production. Not so, now, with the recently introduced flutter-wheel, [beep] American advisers, experimenting, have saved them an untold number of good harvests this way which is why, when revisiting, these men are invariably greeted by smiling peasants bearing armfuls of taro root, [beep] Miracles abound here now. The great crane you see here scooping up earth can do the work of fifty men. Pride and self-reliance have been restored, [beep] You can witness the results on the face of young Emilio here who is just learning to work with leather — to grow up a useful and happy citizen in his own country, a proud people, in a strange land, far away.”

The lights came up to long stretches and gulping yawns, and Dar-conville, peering skygodlin through the door window, searched intently from face to face as if he were candling eggs. He saw nothing— and no one — of consequence, left, and returned to the main building. It was getting late.

In the long lecture hall there some forty or so students, Darconville noticed, were slaving away on their final exam in American history under the eviscerating stare of peripatetic Mrs. DeCrow who, in expert fashion, managed not only to survey them all but monitor each at intervals of sudden command: “Eyes front, people!” “Sit around, Miss Nosy!” “Who in the second row in the white blouse wants her testpaper torn up?” Craning his neck under the half-pulled shade, Darconville saw no Isabel — only the shade snapped up and Mrs. DeCrow disgustedly glaring out. A turn by the registrar’s office was equally futile: no Isabel Rawsthorne — only ubiquitous Hypsipyle Poore, there to badger Mrs. McAwaddle for an extended curfew that night, suddenly turning to him with pursed lips and an acknowledgement, effected from the knee, by a dipsy-doodling of her index finger. Dark Angel, ever on the wing, who never reaches me too late, thought Darconville. He dragged himself downstairs.

At the English department office, he asked the secretary if any messages had been left for him. There were none. He slipped into an empty classroom next door to gather his thoughts, his eye randomly falling on a map of Europe on the wall: he fixed Venice. Will I ever go back there, he wondered, and will I return with more vices than I went forth with pence? How remote those days were! The dreams he had had! The attempts in mind to travel aux anges ! Was that perhaps a fault, the famous fall that infamous pride goes before? Original Sin, perhaps, was related not so much to the feeling that we must die but rather that we feel we can live too majestically. And what of the via negativa he had once chosen? Poustinia? The Empty Quarter? The subtle distinguo between loneliness and solitude? The remorse he began to feel came to suggest he hold himself back, purposely aloof from everything of implication, at bay in a lifelong quarantine of imagination — coopted by some unimposing anti-fate neither to write nor live but, chastened of all impulse, simply to stop. Nevertheless, he felt resources which buoyed him up in bewilderment. I could give her up, he felt, if necessary. But I love her, he thought, I love her so much.