Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

It became impossible to think. Darconville could say nothing: so overcome with pity, he could find no words adequate to consolation and knew beyond reason that any poor stuttering attempt on his own part must fall terribly short, for touching things sometimes can only be felt, and yet before he could make any show of what he felt, she kissed him on the neck, turned her little crabapple of a head toward the westering sun, and then disappeared over the hill like a dot.

Were There Reasons to Believe That in

Quinsyburg

Visionaries, Fabulists, Hilarodists, and

Hermeneuts Would Suffer the Dooms,

Chastisements, and Black Draughts of a

Depression They Otherwise Didn’t Deserve

and Deteriorate Utterly?

Ample.

“College! There’s a little word for you, dear girls, college : neatly pronounced, pronounced as spelt, and correctly spelt s-a-c-r-i-f-i-c-e — the battle cry of the United States of God Bless America! And who’s telling y’all this, some up-spoutin’ no account dingdong in a string tie pointing his head out in the direction of his face and looking for to impress you? Exactly wrong! It’s a man who knows what sacrifice means, and costs! Now, button back your ears, little cousins, for I only aim to say it once — I know all the tricks, every last one of them, and unless someone out there can tell me how a brown cow can eat green grass, give white milk, and make yellow butter, she best just sit down tight and listen, OK? I been evywhere but the moon and seen evything but the wind. I been to the edge of the world and looked over. I mean, I can fight, shout, win, lose, draw, turn on a dime, and meet you coming back for change, you hear? Good, now you mark time on that and we gone get somewhere.”

IT WAS PRESIDENT GREATRACKS, the college headmaster, a man fat as a Fugger: a bun, a ham, a burgher. He was a charming and resourceful academic illiterate, politically appointed, his brain a pot-au-feu of boomism, bad grammar, and prejudice, his face very like that of the legendary Leucrota whose mouth opened as far as its ears. The school auditorium was decked out for the opening assembly, with all eyes fixed on the keynote speaker. He showed the conviction of a roundhead, and, having traversed the dais with an oafish and peasant-like lumber that betrayed his grim-the-collier background, he bulked now over the lectern around which had been slung a banner lettered in blue and white

QUINSY

WELCOMES

YOU

and then hamfistedly fussbudgeted back and forth in a suit the color of sea-fowl guano, wagging a finger like Elijah the Tishbite and trooping out his dockets, posits, and quiddits like a costermonger his pippins.

“When I was a little wagpasty of a lad back in Free Union, Va. in them days of the Depression, which you wouldn’t know about, my tiny ol’ mammy wore galoshes, used thorns for fishhooks, and buck-washed me in a hopper. We were so poor we couldn’t even pay attention, and it was a dang holiday, nothin’ else, just to go and play stoopball with the swivel-eyed halfwit next door or hop along down to the grocery to splurge on a box of penny chicle.

“I worked the nubs off my little fingers for wages the coloreds laughed at, trundled out of bed at dawn like a filthy sweep, blinking and looking for the life of me just as white and hairless as a egg, a little eyesore in my mussed overhalls and my sweater hind-side-to — so low I had to reach up to touch bottom — and not a soul, but for mammy, who had a good word to say to me. But you are what you are and you ain’t what you ain’t, right? We thanked the good Lord, and thanked Him and how! Schoolrooms? Who said anything about schoolrooms? Shoot, no one thought of them, sir! Only thing I knew was my 15¢ Dicky Deadlight picture book — that is, until mammy took me in tow to learn me my devotions and reading. And if I didn’t oblige the dear thing? Why, she caned me scarlet in the attic and set me to kneel on peppercorns for punishment, and if you think that tickles! I want to tell you, many’s the night — O, it seems like yesterday! — I sat up into the wee hours in my ripped jim-jams, my eyes pinched tight from candlesmoke, going over and over again the sentences in my mustard-colored copy of Edward Clodd’s Tom, Tit, Tot . But, dagnabbit, I got my sums, didn’t I? I got my Bible, didn’t I?”

Greatracks rose up like a huge fat glyptodont, capitalizing every word with his voice. He chop-gestured. He beckoned to the ceiling. He took oaths and blew air and circled his arms, all with a jumped-up and inquisitorious duncery that thumbfumbled truth and opened up a museum of bygone pictorial mediocrities which magnified puddles by rhetoric into blue fairy lakes and fobbed off hawks for handsaws.

“Now, I’m telling you all this for a mighty good reason, girls — and paying it no mind, you’ll find me as unsociable a creature as ever chawed gum, I guarandamntee you! At Quinsy College here, it’s either fish or cut bait. Ain’t enough insurance in this here world better than perspiration, which means nothin’ more than good ol’ sweat to right-thinkin’ folks, which is just what you better be aimin’ to be, hear? Yes? Then stand on it! I mean, I want everybody— evahbody ! — on automatic here! You mope. You get bounced. You get up to tomfoolery. You gone tom-foolerize yourself right out into the street, see?

“Why, only last year, now to mention it, one of those self-important little undergraduate cinderbritches with a cheek rubied like a dang poppy pads into my office fixin’ to have at me, see, stands there wheel-high to a rubbish truck, and then comes out with, ‘I’m fed up with college!’ I remember standing there amazed, thinking what the sam hill? What the tarnation hell ? O no. Said she was hangin’ it up. Said, shoot, she couldn’t care a straw for book-learnin’, not me, no, I’m a big shot — failin’ to realize, course, feelin’ sorry for herself and walkin’ around on her lip, that what she really wanted was a 7 X 9 patch over her mouth! The poor little trapes, obviously humble of brain, mistook college for the handball court or your Five County Fair. I about died— dahd ! Well, I read her the dang riot act for starters and then helped her into tomorrow with a kick strong enough to knock a billygoat off a gut-wagon! She spelled college f-u-n, see, which is no kind of spelling at all. It’s mis-spelling is what it is. Mis -dang-spelling! And if you yourself ain’t wrapped too tight, I best remind you to prepare for the same kind of treatment, girls, or there ain’t a hog in Georgia, ‘cause it’s only fifteen inches between a slap on the back and a swift kick on the place you wear no hat!”

Perspiring, President Greatracks — wailing like a preaching jebusite and orthonational — drove in with his industrie-protestant creedal formulations: a clattering windmill of cheerings up, pep tonics, across-the-fence chat, and general protrepticos, fanning, in crisis, all those who, in asking, seeking, or knocking would receive, find, or have it opened unto them. The volume of gas increased, according to physical principle, as his temperature did the same.

“At Quinsy, we have no truck whatsoever with those so-called Northern, well, views and, that being the case, aren’t so all-fired anxious for revolution, evolution, devolution or any other damn lution y’all want to come up with! I’ve seen the lot of them, sneakin’ around the campus at night with beards like Stalin had and sandwich-boards broadcastin’ ‘Freedom!’ or ‘Down with God and His Saints!’—all of them socialists, won’t-work liberals, and bleedin’ heart sombitches — high-steppin’ like coons and tryin’ to turn this place redder than a hawberry with their radical Commie bushwa! Sowin’ discord! Havin’ into the coop! Huh? Prit-near right, ain’t I? You better know it. Shoot, I could quote you chapter and verse!”