Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“There will be times when you might be afraid.”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Don’t give up,” said Darconville. “I’ll call you. I’ll write you. But you won’t give up, will you?”

“Shhhh,” whispered Isabel. She looked around through the dark inconvenient house. Darconville followed her eyes to a clock. “I’ll think of it — I’ll think of it all tomorrow.”

After all , thought Darconville, tomorrow is another day .

“The main thing is not to be alone.” The dark figure of Darconville, moving closer, shadowed her. “You aren’t, you know.”

Isabel swallowed her voice.

A sensation of the intensity of that thought curiously seemed to catch hold of her in an inexplicable way, his words, Darconville saw, sharply perforating her sensibility. She brought her thumb and index finger together, with the other fingers curved, and touched her lips.

“What — what do you mean?” Pale, Isabel traveled back on a foot. “I’m not, do you mean, alone with you? Without you I wouldn’t be alone? Say what, please?”

“I mean,” smiled Darconville calmly, carrying her identity so close to him that he couldn’t see a single expression of it, “that I’ll be with you always. I only ask you to trust me.”

“Whatever happens, you’ll—”

“Be with you, yes.”

Of such a compensatory philosophy was the ideal justice of his dream certainly compounded; they were the premises, not the conclusions, of his life. And then with what improportionate joy did she then knot his arms! “O, do you mean you’ll always understand, do you?” It was as if, quite suddenly, a gust of wind had swept up a mass of dead leaves, uncovering the verdure beneath: her whole face relaxed into a smile of disarming sweetness. “Do you? I’ll love you for that,” she pleaded.

“Understand what?” He was baffled. “I love you.”

There was a sudden silence.

“Sometimes — I’m afraid.” She pulled her thumb. “That’s all.”

“To take the step?” asked Darconville. Fright somehow came to stay with him as he talked it away from her. “Would you be afraid, perhaps, of coming?”

Isabel closed her eyes.

“It’s not that,” she said, voice unreliable. A kind of shutter fell as if she had returned again to some basic but incommunicable anxiety. “I–I only always sometimes wonder—” She turned completely away from him as if, by shifting, she sought to reduce the deliberate value of questions she felt only a lifetime could marshal to answer. “—what we will do. Where will we go?” Darconville turned her by the shoulders to comfort her, to answer, but he hadn’t the chance for as he lifted her chin it was suddenly the agonized face of post-lapsarian Eve he stared upon, only asking again with the accents of futility and despair, “ Where will we go ?”

Was there a response?

No; never. It was as if, not wanting one, Isabel swiftly acted to stop it, suddenly crowding upon him with a kiss heated with every last force of passion and sweetened by the tears now streaming down her face: it was a kiss that sobbed from the soul, never yielding, unrestrained, almost an immolation, a kiss imploring itself to the opportunity it feared but sought, needed but had long deterred, as if all at once it simultaneously tried to beg for forgiveness, impart a blessing, and resolutely attempt in one single moment to convey something beyond the powers of all explanation — and its ache piteously sang to Darconville’s heart all the goodbyes that could ever be and more by far than he knew he ever could bear. Goodbye! Goodbye !

It was with all deliberate speed that Darconville swung the van back down the driveway, shifted out of reverse — could that figure in the distance wearing a bandanna and gumboots and staring into his rear-view mirror possibly have been the cryptarch of Zutphen Farm? — and then bouncing over the Fawx’s Mt. road he headed out of the mountains, raced toward Charlottesville, and, after smiling down at Spellvexit, his cat, and up at God, his palinure, he turned north and drove into the world.

IT WAS STRAIGHT OUT, all highway, a perfect shaft toward the sunpolished horizon. Whistling along at a good clip, Darconville listened to the clattering rattles and backfiring of the van, a music uplifting him as mile after mile fell away in a momentum that seemed to gather up once more the impetus of his life. Already he felt Isabel’s absence and dearly wished her there with him if for no other reason than to toss her cares to the rushing wind and leave them all behind. Where will we go ? He knew. It would be his gift to her, for with the ecstasy of knowing they’d never outrun the mystery and majesty of that question, he also knew the answer lay hidden in the most varied, the most wondrous, the most divine harmonies possible, for no journey, he thought, is so delightful as that which leads no one knows whither nor whither why — and what journey ever ends when, waiting at the other end, one waits for love?

Where would they go!

Darconville, with the wind abaft his beam and the needle into red, flew across the Virginia border and was sailing free! The melodious racket of his conveyance somehow echoed the melodious racket in his head — everywhere, the Rising of the North! To live, to work, to love was the same thing! His heart exploded in joy and he cried out to Isabel! Come away and marry me under a skyblue tent in Coroman-del, dance a week and a day with the boggarts and bogles, and we’ll away on a moonbeam to the Isles of the Blest where winter all in flower humbles the spring! Where would you like to go? To see the white jaguars of Mustaghata? The petrified village in the Cyrenaica? The buried cities of Turkestan? The spectres glimmering on the Horselberg? Or the Mongolian land of Bielovodye where there is peace and plenty and never a soul has been? Or would you live a strange remote life in the gold-encrusted valleys of Ophir, the spice-land of Punt, the pepper forests of Malabar, the City of Mansa, or Cambalu, where in the treetops funny-faced ghosts sit twittering all the night? Come, hurry away with me to Quippishland, Mt. Yoop, and the secret City of Blinking! To Goshen, the far Moluccas, and Aspramont! To the porcelain abodes of Almansor, the Vale of Rephaim, the Land of Juba, Bean Island, and the Cataracts of Downcrash! Let us visit the weird towers of Klingsor, the excavations of Transoxania, and the deserted city of Fatephur Sikri! Drop what you’re doing and travel with me to Holy Mulberry, the Eden of Granusion, and climb to the top of Inchcape Rock where the abbot of Aberbrothock once fixed a bell or visit the Magdeburg Spheres where the pressure without makes a vacuum within and no one ever can tell!

Darconville bowled out of the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel just past noon and soon raised Wilmington.

Come, we’ll visit the sparkling Electrides and the Bitch’s Tomb at Capo Helles, the Cathedral of Quimper, the rubbish-mounds of Krokodopolis, and the magic goldfields of Nimis Sollicitaris! We’ll wrestle an angel in Penuel, chase hippocentaurs to the ends of Pluvalia, burrow into the vole holes of Mt. Radio, and sail into the strange Cirknickzersky Lake in Carniola whose waters gush so fast out of the ground its speed can overtake light! Or would you prefer to visit Mohenjo-Daro in Sind and Harappa in the Punjab, ride into the mists of Pellucidar, or follow the nomadic Hurrians into the sandcones of Mesopotamia? Done! Done! Or shall it be the Nonestic Ocean? The twin cities of Hieraconopolis? Or Castle Graveolent? The caves of Aber Cleddyf? The Court of the Boy King, the windswept plateau of Leng, or the rose-red lands of Araby, almost as old as time? Come, heart of my heart, take my hand, and we’ll trip through the firestorms of Mount Chimaera, the sandstorms of Yazd, the lost colony of Aphrodisium, Hither Spain, the promontory of the Cimbri, and into the haunts of coot and hern to watch old Mrs. Hickabout kick bold Mrs. Kickabout cold through the thickabout!