Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“I believe I was. I do believe I was.” He turned to Isabel, knowingly. “Wasn’t I?”

“I can only disappoint you then,” said Darconville. “It is not a practice of mine to toast the memory of dead, ambisinistrous queens, and should I ever choose to make an exception, whatever your name is, I hardly think I’d do so in deference to that illegitimately-crowned Welsh sprunt with a face like witch’s butter named Bette Tudor.” Murmurs could be heard. “Now go back to what you were doing and don’t bother me again.”

There was a perceptible chill in the room. Unconcerned, Darconville turned once more to his small conversation with the blond young man who told him, however, that he thought Isabel — he used her name — was encouraging his antagonist. (Can this fellow, wondered Darconville, have made her acquaintance, too?) The party had turned quiet, but the mood went outright morfound as the fop, giving no ground, made a kisslike inward whistle and spoke again across the room. “Someone should learn a bit of respect,” he said, “ mister .”

This time there was no reply.

“You are a bore,” he added.

Whatever good intentions Darconville had now disappeared for just as he turned he saw the man smiling priggishly into Isabel’s eyes. His teeth were grey.

“And you are a self-satisfied, middle-class poofter,” shot back Darconville, “masquerading as a Febroniast.”

“What a lovely word!”

It was ridiculous. A theological debate ? thought Darconville, unsettled in the extreme at the idea of it. But it wasn’t in fact anything of the sort, rather only proof again, in the jealousy and insinuendo, that the world was early bad and the first sin, where reason was lost, the most deplorable of all, theological, perhaps, only in that all grief is. There should have been an end to it.

But Darconville’s better judgment utterly failed him.

“It is a lovely word, for those who aren’t. Unfortunately,” he said coldly, “the antinomy which lies at the root of Protestantism, however denominated — namely, that there can be no earthly authority in matters of faith and that yet there must be such an authority — forces you to jerk your knee at the mere mention of that pelf-licking zook whom Pope Pius V’s bull Regnans in excelsis , thankfully, allows me to abhor. I don’t doubt I appear humorless on this subject, but, I am sorry, I do not count myself among those in the Church-of-England-as-by-Law-Established, I’ve always rather wished that Queen Elizabeth’s dirty rebate had been a noose, and now I fondly hope the discussion is at an end.”

The room had become a tomb. The guests, appearing foolish now in their party hats, stood in the middle of this strange distress — prerupting conversation — either by faking incognizance or silently striking attitudes of scandalized defense.

“So,” came the inevitable reply, “the Pope has sent one of his papal boys encyclicaling down the streets of Charlottesville, has he?”

“I am not here by choice.”

It was unfair. Darconville knew it.

“You’d prefer to be,” asked the fop, drawing out the words with scorn, “—where, Quinsy College ?”

“I’d prefer to be,” said Darconville, “where the ancient traditions of Douay were still flourishing.”

“And where might that be?”

The question hung there, as Darconville looked from the hatred in his face to the girl he loved. Heretofore, Isabel might in her actions have bred melancholy or momentary indignation, but not doubt; sad he may have been, but not, at bottom, worried. Now as she stood there across the room, he had to wonder, thinking The shadow has the same outline as the body which, by obstructing the sunlight, casts the shade .

“I said , where might that be?”

Darconville pitied her in his heart for the burden she bore, standing there, head down, caught in the ignominy of the sudden crossfire and unable to move in the fear of what she might have set into play. Again he ignored the question. Mutter away, cypress, he thought.

“ No !” Darconville heard, and the fop, having become violent, was shrugging off all attempts to temper him. “I do not approve of dark foreign figures saying dark foreign things!” His face twitched. “Is that clear?”

Still, Darconville fought to keep calm, but contemplation can seem to the weary mind so much like despair. And, O, somehow all the failures of the summer, the disorder, the wasted days and enormous misunderstandings, all, all drew up into a single opponent, immediate and real. Then came a high whinnying laugh, full of contempt, from across the room.

“ Damn you! Damn your Romish opinions! And damn your Pope !”

And Darconville wheeled around.

“I am not used to being spoken to by drunk, mannerless sanct-seemers with mouthfuls of bad teeth,” he raged, “but enough: I will meet you here. This mediocre century, blasphemous as yourself, is apt to conceive of the Pope as some kind of remote, semi-diplomatic species of colporteur, petrified in outdated glory and nourishing pretensions the reformational skrellings and unholywater-swallowers who founded your own quaint faiths themselves embodied. You will do well to remember, however — and every other forty-faced Mason like you — that the Papacy is not the house of Orange-Nassau and that neither I nor any other coreligionist of mine sees anything whatever figurative, metaphorical, or extravagant in the exordium addressed to him at his investiture that he is, and always will be, the Successor to St. Peter, Bishop of Rome, Patriarch of the West, Spiritual Father of Kings and Nobles and Head of the Whole Church, Servant of the Servants of God, and the Sovereign Pontiff and Earthly Vicar of Jesus Christ, Our Lord, from Whom comes the power of his pontifical magisterium. I can expect neither you nor any advocate of some au-tofacient church for which false witness is the principle of propagation to understand such a thing, but you might have the grace, sententious pettifogging mediocrity that you are, to keep away from”—Darconville, pale, inhaled and pointed—”her.”

The fop slowly parted his way through the gathering and, coming up to Darconville, smiled — looking once back at Isabel — then whispered, “But why? I am no monk .”

It happened in a second. Darconville helped him a savage blow across the face, walked out of the house, and drove away.

SEVERAL WEEKS PASSED. There was no correspondence in that lapsed time, a period when Darconville, deliberating what he should do, where he should go, could imagine just about everything but a strong conception of God’s mercy; he compared his attempts at love to the fruit of the paradisaical tree: in the same chapter God forbade eating it, the plants were not yet grown!

The rift, a fault, separated him from everything. He reflected on that and, at the mercy of another relationship, prayed only that the object which ignited the ardent flame in his heart — a terrifying dependence — was also capable of extinguishing it, and yet the love principle inside his heart showed no such alternative: he could no more emerge from it voluntarily and reasonably now than he could fit it into everyday life which, curiously, ceased to be everyday life in relation to the repeated crises of separation and reunion forced upon it. Isabel inhabited him completely and yet was at the same time a stranger to him. At the very moment when losing her would have made him suffer a thousand deaths, he found himself — or some self — considering her in everyday life with a sardonic eye but noting down simultaneously that what was missing in their lives was, indeed, what also could be: a “beyondness” outside everyday life which yet, perversely, needed it for support. Briefly, Isabel was both the only means of access to love and not the means. Darconville drew it all out to this paradox, that on the one hand there are temporary beings whom we love but who are ever changing, and beyond them there is the eternal object of love itself which is incorruptible, permanent, and ideal. And yet it is not only through the former that we can take cognizance of the latter, we would, without the former, actually have no idea of the latter, the imperfect relative giving us our only idea of the perfect absolute, and we advance by the dangers of delay, shipwrecked from a boat to know the sea, where mildness, glassed in the fragments of storm, must be discerned. Time is the evil, usurping the semblance of eternity. Your prayer, your disappointment, are the same.