Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“Him.”

“Though not—”

“No.”

Isabel’s face strained. “But I don’t know if he could be.”

“Could be?”

“Content.”

Mrs. van der Slang neither arched her brow nor blew on her tea this time but sat back autocratically, taking Isabel in with a sharp avizeful eye, and said, “You mean married .”

Always frustration, thought Isabel, pulling her thumb, fffruuustrationnnn! Always struggle, always life.

“So where then does all this put us?”

“I don’t know,” Isabel whispered.

“Well, wouldn’t you agree with me that time,” said Mrs. van der Slang, speaking from the lofty pedestal of Age, “will solve it?”

Preoccupied, however, Isabel had dislocated her attention and had turned to listen dolefully to the percussion of the driving rain outside. The Graeae and Gorgons seemed to be hailing in from the sea to distress her alone of all others, threatening the very last vestige of security in her being — and she who had so little!

“I say, wouldn’t you agree that—”

“Yes,” replied Isabel, her eyes rimming with bitter tears, “ oh yes .”

Mrs. van der Slang felt good.

“I find I must be candid, child. I think we should return to college — why, say as a kind of proof of intentions — just to see what transpires.” There was a long silence. “We must above all show we can maintain. Is that unfair?”

“And should I wait — and should I wait that long?”

Mrs. van der Slang’s face went surprised in a pout. “Perhaps you wish to suggest that I am not being kind? Well, you must see at a time like this one can’t stop to think of convenience. Especially other people’s. I asked only a simple thing of you. And am I being unfair? I don’t think I’m like that, really. And I mean, who knows, it may turn out perfect and this romance of yours may all work out fine, just like, I don’t know”—Mrs. van der Slang groped for an apt simile and then, finding one, looked up with one eyebrow drawn high in a whimsical vertex and smiled—”just like in a book?”

Isabel was now desolate. She knew she was alone but knew as well she couldn’t be, she hadn’t the strength. Walking home aimlessly on that terrible October day, she only felt the cirrus clouds, harbinger of even more rain, mist down into her isolation from the Blue Ridge mountains and then enter the confines of her heart, filled once with a hope of some kind but, alas, a hope no longer, for hope itself to tell the truth had now quite petered out.

September 5th . Blessed be God, near the end of this year, I am in very good stealth, without any sense of my old pain, but upon feeling sold. I live in hack’s yard, having my strife, and servant, Disdain, and no other family than us three.

6th . When did we three meet before?

That’s a fair question. It was neither before nor after the lost year in Quinsyburg — the Land of Ymagier, beyond the regions of who did it and why. Y: the forked path of Pythagoras. Crossroads. Free choice. Unity and division. Wasn’t he, by the way, the philosopher who put to school the idea that the opposition of the definite and the indefinite, working in concert, creates the world? (Check on this.)

10th . I saw that girl again on the stairwell; she smiled. What a fund of galleries, playhouses, museums. London! Call it Pariniban or Droiland, I am still Darconville.

N.B . Buy pens, lightbulbs, wine.

11th . This morning I went to Mass in the chapel-of-ease at St. Ethelreda’s in Ely Place, Holborn, and made thanksgiving I’d not have to teach for a while. Glasses would just be starting.

12th . Of what day is this the anniversary? (Dissembler!) P.S. But let it be. A Friday still buries a Thursday, a quart still drowns a tierce, and a quint a quart. Every new year executes the privileges of the old. I was never engaged to her, anyway. She was perfectly free.

I’ve decided to write both morning and afternoon.

14th . I will finish Rumpopulorum this year or sink into hell like a sheet-anchor. Q. Can you? A. I can. The cultivated life existed first; uncultivated life came afterwards, with the blight of the serpent, Satan. So it is a consolation to have to get back to vision, not create it anew. (I like your mode, Mr. Bulstrode: when the mind is a hall in which thought is like a voice speaking, the voice is somehow always that of someone else. Diaries diarticulate. The parrot’s amazed you can talk. Eurycles, the Athenian soothsayer, throwing his voice, placed many a jest on another’s lips. The paradoxical phenomenon of ventriloquist and dummy who, speaking simultaneously, never interrupt, always agree. The death of one is that of the other. Have I stumbled upon a parable of love?)

Ah, but now see the fitful subjects this anti-self can raise!

15th . I picked up my cat from quarantine at Heathrow this afternoon. That I brought him along, presently disporting with his shadow, is a constant delight.

Accept my gentle visionary, Spellvexit,

Sublimely fanciful & kindly mild;

Accept, and fondly keep for Friendship’s sake,

This favored vision, my poetic Child!

16th . Wrote.

17th . I met her again, holding the door for her. Viking hair, blue eyes, features carved out of the cliffs of Sarjektåcko. Must I remind myself not to get involved? The half, said Hesiod, is fuller than the whole. There is a perhaps cosmic strength in this otherwise vain truth: to have none is closer to having all than having one. Everything, perhaps, is the only thing. Late have I learned that. And there’s enough of distraction in this city to help me forget. (Marvelous, when you read back your own diary it gives an advice of its own!)

The trees are turning. Mass at Farm St.

18th . My room, shaped like the move of a chessknight, is situated in Pont St. at the very top of an old building built around 1702, just about the time William of Orange pipped. From my single window I can see chimneys, the wimble of a church steeple, and a big maple tree — why, I wonder, are those on the south side always the first to shed? — reminding me daily of the necessity of both shade and paper, the objective-correlative wants of a writer.

Wrote poorly, however, all day.

19th . The same. Resignation, resignation; it will come. Vulneratus non victus . The d’Arconvilles are Venetians, and do Venetians give up? No, he who so shall, so shall he who.

But bored, I invented a new kind of riddle. A Dutchman had three sons. The first, named Sllaf, is a mountain-climber; the second, Snrub, is a firefighter. The third became a sailor. What was his name?

21st . Postcard from Thelma Trappe. (No, dear Miss Trappe, I have never heard of the English herb “death-come-quickly,” and I suspect you shouldn’t have either.)

24th . The sky is leaden. Went to Mass: the Feast of St. Gregory, whom I pictured kneeling by candlelight in a cold medieval tower praying lauds. At the Gloria I felt such a new sense of resolve I almost wept for joy and thought of the Unes: “I Hafe set my hert so hye/Me likyt no love that lowere ys.” They came to me in a more mystical than antihuman sense, as only, of course — except for misinformed worldlings and Wyclifficals — they should. It is not enough to quit sin, we must attain virtue.

But, O, better and better! I will hate no one. There will be forgetting, there must be forgiving. (Why, however, must these always go together?) Forgive me, Frater Clement. I remember you for what I should have not forgotten.