Darconville's Cat (47 page)

  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.

  XLIX

  Coup de Foudre

  That same hideous nightmare thing

  Talking, as it lapped my blood,

  In a voice cruel and flat,

  Saying forever, “Cat! Cat! Cat!”

        —ROBERT GRAVES,
“A Child’s Nightmare”

  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.

  One afternoon, however, Darconville chose to drive
up to Char-lottesville to apologize for everything. It was to be a
momentous day. He picked Isabel up after work at the telephone
company, and they went to her apartment and talked; perversely but
inevitably raising thoughts they deeply wished to keep away, they
scolded, contradicted, pished and pshawed, and tempered in a
sentence of sweet mercy justice stern. But Isabel could always free
his anger with a smile, and this time was no different. The pulled
shades made that awful flat much less objectionable than it was
when daylit, Lisa had since departed, and the place was now all
their own. Darconville had come to see that privacy beyond privacy
was necessary for Isabel to find any composure or, as she often put
it, to “feel safe,” and as her will was there, her will was met.
She had remembered to lock the door. She had remembered to put her
job out of her mind. And she had remembered, in spite of recent
recollections, to make love with all the feeling she seemed to have
before.

  But she had forgotten the letter on her bureau.

  Darconville mistakenly came by it while Isabel was
asleep. Stepping out to buy some cigarettes, not to disturb her, he
was himself about to leave her a note when the scrap-paper he
picked up turned out to be an unposted letter covered with that
familiar spidery penmanship. He should not have read it. He should
not have thought of reading it. But he did read it and read what
upon the glance—are things seen things as seen?—made talking a
pitiful invention. His heart club-fisted. He froze and, following
all esteem, sympathy, love, faith, and friendship out of the
world—there was no more of love, no more of friendship here—took up
Echo’s ghostly part and gave back the discord of those still
remembered sounds repeating on the page. Darconville read:

  Dear Govert,

  I’m so sorry I ignored you that night (! ), but I’m
like that I guess. What you must think of me! I don’t seem ever to
be able to communicate with anybody, especially, as I guess you
know, when they’re away (self-explanatory). I seem to ruin
everything. It’s just that I’ve been so confused these months which
is what’s behind it, I suppose, and which is why—as discussed—we
were stopping. On Love’s sweetest arrow is tipped a dart, I guess.
(Forgive my poetry.) Everything will turn out alright, don’t worry.
I’ll never forget—how could I?—that day in the middle of our fairy
forest and that beautiful moment in the field.

                    Love,
ISABEL

  
That moment? In the field
? Darconville’s
spirit utterly sank. He read the letter again: the thing unseen
became the thing seen. Why, thought he, all things that breed in
the mud are not efts! There was in the
we were stopping
the syntax of terror; it wasn’t the single photograph of the aorist
of discontinued time (
epausames
: we stopped) but rather
the successive motion picture of the imperfect of continued action
(
epavomes
; we were stopping)—continued, repeated, and
customary. And how imperfect! How tense! Ah, sluiced in my absence,
thought Darconville, and my pond fished by her neighbor, by Sir
Smile, her neighbor! So this was love, opaque to probability,
frac-tureproof, impermeable to death and disloyalty, immune to
lies, an answer to the spoof of duration, content and holy peace,
the twins of Eden, drawn round by the curtain between you and the
world?

  The observer infects the observed. Darconville read
the letter again, holding it down with his cold shaking fingers,
and it told him again that we are only deceived in what is not
discerned and that to err is but to be blind; think not, it read,
that always good which you think you can make good nor that
concealed which the sun does not behold. He began to tremble,
turning through the front room with his hands over his mouth, then,
swept over with nausea, he found himself in the bathroom, and,
whether whispering or shouting he couldn’t say— whatever, it awoke
Isabel—but an echo, interrupting him as echoes will, replied in a
wail, “I am unjustified, serving to deduce conclusions from
premises insufficient to imply me!” Thus the Devil played at chess
with him, and yielding a pawn while thinking to gain a queen,
did.

  Quickly, Darconville began bathing his face from a
sink filled with dead water, losing his breath only to look up to
see his face in the mirror, a mask of disbelief shallow,
bewildered, and unlovable. All is as St. John said on the path of
Mt. Carmel, he thought, nothing, nothing, nothing—even on the mount
was nothing! That which cannot be altered, he realized, must then
be borne, not blamed—and if borne, then altered perhaps—and follies
past should sooner be remembered, certainly, than be redressed.
There was a grace that he could still feel that way, squeezing the
last tear from poisonous sorrow. But what otherwise? Force someone
to decide to love you and thereby, proscribing choice, make of a
lover a slave? Then N’mosnikttiel, the angel of rage, suddenly
appeared and mouthed mockingly in Darconville’s ear:
so close
to glory! But at the center of both sits a zero, see? Now, where is
your damoyselle au joue tortue? And where are you? Oh yes, pray
where are you
?