Darconville's Cat (56 page)

  Darconville climbed in his rented van and left
Quinsyburg as inconspicuously as he’d come. It was goodbye! Goodbye
to Quinsyburg and its sapsuckers with feedhats and teardrop heads!
Goodbye to its dacryopyostic onion patches and citizens with faces
like leeks! Goodbye to its buckish slang and pickpocket eloquence!
Goodbye to its vat-icides, its dunces, its trelapsers of gossip!
Goodbye to the farms on that Bebrycian coast and its water-tower!
Goodbye, Your Foxship! Goodbye, Your Wormship! Goodbye, Your
Gibship!

  The winds were brisk off the mountains. A strange
calenture came over Darconville, banking the wooden bridge into
Fawx’s Mt., and as he looked the cilicious weedgrasses and cowquake
seemed to turn to waving water, a wisping in the meadows of
sea-sounds as if blowing from some beautiful but lonely
marinaresca. It made him long for the haven, that harbor he wanted,
but knew still wasn’t his; no, not yet; not even now.

  Isabel and her mother, sitting at the back of the
house, both waved. Parking the van, Darconville crossed the short
lawn and came over to them. Without a word, Isabel handed him a
card; it was one of the wedding invitations. She pointed to it
twin-fingeredly—there were two flagrant errors: a misspelling and a
botched date. Darconville looked at Isabel who looked at her mother
who said, “And the whole job-lot’s the same way. Fotched.”

  “We can do without them,” said Darconville, looking
from one to the other. “It’s a formality, for friends. We can do
without them.”

  Isabel, turning away, looked back at him with one
eye, as if peering round a corner.

  “Can’t we?”

  “I don’t know what to say.” She sheered away with
what seemed utter indecision, tears rippling down her cheeks. “I
do
love you, do you know that?”

  “Invitations?” laughed Darconville.

  “It ain’t only that. Sit down,” said Mrs.
Shiftlett.

  Suddenly Darconville was given a turn. “Something is
wrong.”

  “Oh,” cried Isabel, sobbing and bearhugging
Darconville as if she’d squeeze out his very life. “My wedding
dress, I’ve gone and
ruined
it, I’ve
ruined
my
car, I’ve
ruined
the invitations—and all your hard work,
gone! Gone up in smoke, just like it never was!”

  Darconville, bewildered, could make no immediate
sense of what now prevented their going ahead with plans any more
than he could explain what mother and daughter had already accepted
as accomplished fact. He cradled her head to his neck, breathing
her libanoph-orous hair and looking off miserably and
inarticulately beyond her only to see Mrs. Shiftlett wink with
risible eyes and mouth something —apologetic, if those converting
bowlips meant to indicate a pout of shared disappointment.
Trembling in fright, Isabel almost killed Darconville on the spot
with the innocence of the question that followed: would the wedding
now be off for good? Off? For
good
? The sky went dull,
lowering like a metal dishcover. Darconville was beneaped.

  The two figures just waited there, unmoving, as
confused as if each stood at the opposite ends of eternity itself.
Mrs. Shiftlett had disappeared. Darconville’s throat constricted:
it was hopeless and he knew it. Bowled! The whole summer! The
wedding had comperendinated. The end was now in the middle.

  Speechless with disappointment, he couldn’t rehearse
what he wanted to say, for questions kept intruding: what had
happened to the dress? Was she frightened at the prospect of
marriage? Why had she let him know at the last minute? And then
Mrs. Shiftlett reappeared and, beaming, bumped them both with a
large cardboard box —it was filled with a crazy array of
five-and-dime forks, knives, and spatulas—which she proceeded
ostentatiously to place in the van, as Spellvexit dodged out; she
winked on her way back, “Householdry.” He interproximated a word of
thanks. Hand in hand, then, he and Isabel walked across the
backyard and looked away over the cowfield to the woods.

  There is an unhappiness so awful that the very fear
of it becomes an alloy to happiness. Darconville whispered that he
loved her; Isabel whispered the same. Isabel whispered that she
wanted to marry him but needed more time. More time, Darconville
whispered, to think about it? More time, Isabel whispered, to
prepare for it. He whispered one more question. She looked up at
him and kissed him, and he felt her tongue on his lips, swift and
cold, an infrigidation that perhaps reminded her, as she answered,
of what to say. Isabel then—with conviction—whispered,
“December.”

  It was with simple gratitude that Darconville
accepted the facts as they were—it didn’t matter, truth seemed
thievish for a prize so dear —and that night he was only
strengthened in his resolve to hold on, finding constant vigilance
perhaps the part of vision that most was love, for just before
sleep overtook him he caught in the bedroom a faint glimpse of
Isabel silently sitting by him in the darkness, stroking his cat,
and watching sentinel lest anything creep in from the dark
am-bisinistrous night to discover him there in that room.

  LVII

  Where Will We Go?

  Why should the mistress of the vales of Har

        utter a
sigh?

              —WILLIAM
BLAKE,
The Book of Thel

  IT WAS THE DAY of departure. The van, loaded to the
doors, was ready to go, and after breakfast there seemed nothing
else to do for Darconville and Isabel but make their farewells.
Before the morning sun peeped over the mountains, the Shiftletts
had gone off to work: that made the goodbyes less troublesome but
somehow more awkward, for nothing could dissemble, nothing
displace, nothing divert what by accepting they had to seem to
condone. Isabel, in actions quick and acute, moved about with
dispatch as if, in trying to bury in the camouflage of time the
fact of pain, to say goodbye was not necessarily to see him go, and
she preferred to leave it there like the maiden Marpessa who,
choosing Idas over Apollo for her fear of immortality, was willing
to renounce the sun as long as she didn’t have to think about the
consequences.

  Darconville felt her uneasiness. And yet the
intervening months, he saw, if keeping her yet in durance vile
would at least modify the bad luck impetuosity had caused them and
simultaneously increase the delight of sweet premeditation. It
pained him to see her troubled, busy with the efficiency of
preoccupation, but he sat her down—wasn’t Genius the clerk of
Venus?—and told her a hundred tales of the wonderful life they’d
have, no matter where! But sometimes, she confessed, that very
thing
made her afraid, she didn’t know why: where would
they go? Trying to dispel her worry, he became playful. He asked
where she’d like to go, Mt. Woodwose, Catland, the Island of Poke
Pudding?—wherever, whereverever, she’d be
loved
!

  Isabel tried to smile. Lifting her chin, he asked if
he could see her wedding dress; that would be a bad omen, she said,
and blushed nervously. Would she like to take a walk? No, she shook
her head, no. It was a difficult hour. Omissions relating to his
departure became more oppressive than any reference to it, and yet,
apprehensively, she kept glancing at the clock. They took time to
make love in her bedroom: it was cold and compensatory, faisonless,
a sequence of tenses; usually, he loved the way she loved the way
he loved her, but now, it seemed, she was worried the way she loved
he didn’t—and he could tell. It was clear, not quilts filled high
with gossamer and roses, neither poppies nor mandragora, could have
put Isabel at rest. The time had come to go.

  At the door, Darconville turned, took from his
pocket the gold ring he’d bought in Quinsyburg—two birds
interclasped on a moonstone— and slipped it on her right hand. She
handed him a box she’d pulled from under a chair: a gift of a blue
shirt. He wished he hadn’t had, that she hadn’t bought, a
going-away gift—it seemed too formal in the preparation. No one, he
felt, should ever be ready for such things. They hugged each other
for a full minute, silently.

  “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.

  LVIII

  Over the Hills and Far Away

  Let there be pie.

  Why else a sky?

        —D. J.
ENRIGHT

  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!