Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

His fat body shook like a balatron, as if his soul, biting for anger at a mouth inadequately circumferential, desired in vain to fret a passage through it. He blated. He blaterated. He blaterationed. Out blasted a flash of oratorical n-rays and impatient oons while the echoes of his voice, pitched high, strident, like the hellish sounds of Vergil’s Alecto, drumbeat through the auditorium and went right to the pit of the stomach.

“You see that majestic piece of dry goods with the stars-and-stripes hanging yonder? That speak to you of revolution? The deuce, I say! And it aggravokes me like you wouldn’t believe to see these pseudo-intellectual puddingheads — every one of them dumb as a felt boot — buddyin’ up to Moscow! Well, put you in mind, we don’t hold with this down South here. Eskimos eat the refuse out of their pipestems! Japs fry ice-cream! Them little puck-faced Zuni Indians from Mexico drink their urine! Polish dogs bark like this: ‘Peef! Peef!’ And instead of sayin’ hello in Tibet I’m told the poor jinglebrains just stick out their tongues and hold up their thumbs! That mean we do it? Huh? Think !

“The Southran way, cousins, is the way we aim to follow. Item: we study here. Item: we won’t walk around here lookin’ like boiled owls. Item: we’ll be sticking it through until we ain’t got enough strength to blow the fuzz off a peanut, and then we’ll work some more! Thread and thrumme! Don’t study and your chances of stayin’ here are between slim and none — and slim is on a plane-ride to Tahiti, you got it? I see any of them irritating thimbleheads, house-proud pippins, and intellectual willopus-wallopuses around here with signboards and complaints, and it’s goodbye Quinsy, hello world, and that’s a promise, sisters, that is a promise ! You have to get up early, remember, to get out of bed. Now, I always close with a quote from my favorite author of books, one Arthur de Gobineau, a European person who once said, ‘ Attaquez! Attaquez! Attaquez !’ which means attack, of course — in French. Gaze boldly into the past and put the future behind you. Don’t let your brains go to your heads. You’ll thank yourself someday — don’t mind thanking me, I don’t count. Now welcome to Quinsy College, hear?”

It was a rhetoric that would have taxed Quintilian himself: a few final admonitions, accompanied by several rumplestiltskinian stamps of anger — for the particular hardcore few who, he thought, could not understand an order unillumined by force — emphasized the need at the school of what his very manner contravened, but this was by the by, for he had clearly argued himself into a state of such broad magisterial cheek that he was virtually beyond not only the accusation of such vulgarity but also beyond its being adduced, in the same way that, philosophically, at the exact moment of offense defense is clearly immoment. Not Berosus with tongue of gold was he, neither silver-throated Solon, rather a moody-sankeyan yammerer from the old school who, finishing now, wound down to the conclusion that made up in volume what it lacked in finesse. He jerked his head forward with one last glare, beady as a vole’s, then picked up his clatter of clenches, abstersives, and céphalalgies and thumped out into the wings on his monstrous feet.

One daring little beast in the back row frowned, held her nose, and said, “ Puke .”

QUINSY COLLEGE, est. 1839, was a quaint old respectable school for girls. It stood in the seminary tradition of the female academy: a chaste academic retreat, moral as peppermint, built in semi-colonial red brick and set back in a deep green delling where, alone — at least so felt the Board of Visitors (ten FFVs with swimming eyes, three names, and hands with liverspots) — one’s daughter could be lessoned in character and virtue without the indecent distractions that elsewhere, everywhere else, wherever led to vicious intemperance, Bolshevism, and free thought. There were other girls’ schools in the area — Falcon Hall, Longwood College, St. Bunn’s — but none was quite so singular as Quinsy.

It had been strictly private years ago, one of those dame schools in the South, usually called something like Montfaucon or Thirlwood or Miss Tidy’s Establishment for Young Ladies and run by a woman with a name like Miss Monflathers, a bun-haired duchess of malfeasance from the English-Speaking Union who was given to wearing sensflectum crinolines and horsehair jupon and whipping her girls at night. At the turn of the century, however, Quinsy came under state receivership and, although suffering the shocks of democracy, remained yet blind to change. It was an institution, still, whose expressed intention was to diminish in distance and time the dangers of creeping modernity and with prudes for proctors and dowagers for deans to produce girls tutored in matters not only academic but on subjects touching on the skillet, the needle, and, though strangers yet to pain, even the nursery, a matter, it was confidentially given out, not unrelated to that regrettable but thankfully fleeting moment during which they would simply have to bite on a bullet and endure.

A legendary respect for the Southern lady — doubt it who dares! — was all through the histories. The War Between the States proved it. Robbed they might have been, subjected to privation, yes, and burned out of hearth and home, but NEVER once had they been set upon by masked outlaws, howling and rapacious Negroes, or drunken Yankee soldiers who couldn’t see straight anyway. And would you perchance like to know why? Their manners protected them. And those same standards of conduct would always prevail in the South.

The Quinsy handbook — a little bluebird-colored affair which bore on its cover the sphragistic of a dove rising through hymeneal clouds and carrying a banner with the college motto, “We Preach, You Teach”—codified behavior for the girls. They were not merely to have a type-and-file appearance. They were asked to wear white gloves pouring tea, to perfume the wrists, and to maintain custody of the eyes. They were advised to tithe, to avoid boisterous hats, and to use the neglected herb, cerfeuil. They were asked neither to lisp, squint, wink, talk loud, look fierce or foolish nor bite the lips, grind the teeth, speak through the nose, nor guffle their soup. They were encouraged, on the other hand, to sew turkeywork, to refer to their young men as “gentlemen callers,” and to accumulate, with a view to future use, egg-frames, salvers, muffineers, and knife-rests. Above all, they were to familiarize themselves with the history of the school.

The Virginian’s was a record of which to be proud. Tradition! Custom! History! — a meal of fresh heritables all to be washed down with flagons of the fermented wine of the past. It was a living heritage. There were no limits, furthermore, to the historicogeographical importance of Quinsyburg itself, and it had long been a matter of great pride to the townsfolk there to reflect on the fact that Mr. Jefferson, once stopping by overnight, had found the old Timberlake Hotel “clubbable” and that, in 1865, General Robert E. Lee with his brave soldiers, on the march from Saylor’s Creek to fateful Appomattox, straggled through this very town, at which time the little sisters of mercy in the college dorms flew with unspeakable horror to the sides of the wounded and selflessly gave of themselves, cradling their hurt heads, applying cupping glasses, plasters, and bandages, and humming strains of “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” But today?

Today was another story. Few even bothered to put flowers on the Confederate monument anymore. The historical society, its funds dwindling, had been removed to a room over the theatre. And who ever took time anymore to visit the rare-book room in Smethwick Library where Miss Pouce, not without effort, had carefully gathered in a row of glass cases all that Quinsy memorabilia? It was primarily a collection of old photographs, gum bichromate prints, and bent platinotypes preserving the memory of so many dear girls, a thousand blushing apparitions, who would later go on to make their mark in the world, whether in the cause of society, Stopesism, or the suffragettes: a group of languorous girls, sitting cross-legged with hockey sticks, staring into the middle distance with eyes pale as air and jelly-soft cheeks; one dear thing, oversized, rolling a hoop somewhere; two husky tsarinas posed humorlessly on the old athletic field pointing in mid-turn to a third with a faint mustache and a bewildered expression mis-gripping a croquet mallet, one high-buttoned shoe poised on a small striped ball; a marvelous wide-angle shot, none the worse for time, of forty or so students in bombazine — Quinsy girls all! — trooping like mallards in pious, if pointless, gyrovagation along the path of a field called now, as then, “The Reproaches”; and many many others. (Miss Pouce had secretly boxed three of the lot, offensive ones which she kept down with the discards in the basement: one, a girl in a droopy bag swimsuit à la Gertrude Ederle pitching off a diving board, certain of her parts having been circled in neurotoxified purple ink by some poor twisted Gomorrhite years ago; and two others, shamelessly thumbed, showing (1) three girls in chemistry lab smirking into the camera while they held up a guttapercha object of unambiguous size and shape and (2) the same girls but one — and she, in the distance, screaming with laughter, and the object gone.) Smethwick was open until 10 P.M. It would be 9 P.M. on Saturdays, the rare-book room, of course, by appointment only. Miss Pouce would be ever so pleased if you came by. Had no one such time for things anymore?