Darconville's Cat (58 page)

  Secret he cannot quote?

        —W. H. AUDEN,
“Preface”

  HAD HE DREAMT IT? Darconville prayed not, and very
early the next morning—it was still pitch-black outside—he went,
still fully clothed from the previous night, into the dark
living-room, opened the door, and by match read the doorcard over
the knocker: “
Dr. and Mrs. Darconville
.” And a flock of
birds flew out of his heart.

  LX

  Harvard

  Fair Harvard! Thy sons to thy Jubilee throng,

  And with blessings surrender thee o’er,

  By these festival rites, from the age that is
past,

  To the age that is waiting before.

        —SAMUEL OILMAN,
Ode

  THE BELLS in the tower of St. Paul’s struck the
hour: bong-bong
bang
bong, bong
bing
bang bong,
bingbbang
bong
bong, bong-bingbang
bong
. It was
noon. This particular morning, Darconville had awakened and gone
back to sleep several times, but now he rose and followed a
procession of sunlight into the living-room which suddenly seemed,
like the great college to its founder, a “pocket of godliness in a
profane world,” for it was surely one of the most beautiful suites
in Adams House. The rooms were paneled in old and elegant wood, the
oak bookcases and rubbed leather furniture impressively set off at
one end with a large fireplace by which stood a rack of blackened
fire-tools. There was a sturdy Plymouth table in the center of the
room and several Windsor chairs, each stamped on the back with the
college insignia that was also replicated on the wall over the
hearth in a large, magnificent shield: giles three open books
argent, edges covers and clasps gold, on the books the letters
Ve Ri Tas
sable.

  Harvard! The oldest college in America. Darconville
simply stood there, considering the wonder of where he was.

  There were low windowseats into which one could
comfortably sit and look down, on one side, over the streetlamps to
the narrows of Plympton St. and on the other across the
slate-beveled roof and curious metal ibis atop that queer Dutch
castle on Mt. Auburn St. known as the “Lampoon” building, beyond
which one had a faint glimpse of the far river. Darconville threw
open a window, and Spellvexit leaped onto a seat. The traffic, the
various noises of Cambridge, braced him up, and everyone and
everything seemed at play in the bright air outside. Darconville
ranged the immediate area below on Bow St.—his van was still parked
there—and surveyed with a smile all the tiny intersecting streets,
the few quaint shops, and the vines of English ivy twining around
colonial buildings of deep red brick and white-trimmed windows
which evoked in simple, unpretentious glory the spirit of Good Old
Colony Times. They were extremely old houses, some of them, with
little winking windows, oeil-de-boeuf windows, and strange
lunettes, the low-arched doors, in some of the narrower ways, quite
overhanging the pavement.

  Darconville listened. Above him, some woodpeckers
were hammering on the slate-and-lead rooftop, and he wondered,
resolving to check later, about the exact shape of Adams House, for
it had seemed, as he stumbled through the darkness the previous
night, a Gothic maze of angles, bays, and strange alcoves. The sky
was as blue as eyebright, with just a hint of mellow smokedrift in
the air, prognostic, always, of the rich New England autumn soon to
follow. Sunshine caught the fickling leaves on some nearby poplars,
under which a group of children in knee-socks and caps passed
swinging satchels of books. The trees, with some leaves falling,
were just beginning to shed. The days were drawing in.

  The building was empty. In any case, Darconville had
seen no one about. What with the changed plans, it turned out he’d
come up a bit early, earlier, apparently, than anyone else, but it
gave him some added time and he took advantage of the quiet
afternoon to unload his clothes and books. He was, all at once,
happy, busy, and yet to be sure a trifle lonesome—a photograph of
Isabel immediately went up on the mantelpiece. Darconville
delighted in the fastness of privacy and warmth circumcluding the
little study he arranged by the kitchen, having already developed a
nice scheme of checks and balances on the facility of not only
writing there but of being able to eat quickly and, most important
of all, of maintaining a perpetual and unremitting vigil by the
telephone—which had yet to be connected.

  Several times, in fact, Darconville during that day
slipped out to a telephone booth, dialing and listening
expectantly, but the current, each time, hummed wastefully through
Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Washington, and Virginia bearing
only its own dullness. The other end rang on. No harm done; he
could wait.

  Later, he sat down and wrote Isabel a funny and
multifarious letter about his long trip, heading off an awkward
temptation to beg her to come up immediately—she needed the time
for herself, of course—by losing himself in long and colorful
description of their splendid rooms at Harvard. Then downstairs
over in C-entry, the superintendent directed him to the telephone
service, where minutes later the installation for his room was
arranged, and, after writing down his telephone number on a
postcard and posting both pieces off to Fawx’s Mt., he took his
dinner alone, contentedly watching the sun go down over the river.
It was a fairly humid night, and for cross-ventilation he opened a
front window and his apartment door. And to waste no time that very
evening in a battery of letters addressed to various English
authorities, civil and clerical, he reconfirmed their marriage
intentions, asking that they be revised according to the newer plan
he outlined and that a date be held open for late December for a
nuptial Mass. These letters had to be done well, and in sequence,
an orderly arrangement he knew he should have used before. But, in
spite of himself, he fell asleep over the typewriter. At some
point, however, in the middle of the night he was awakened by the
city noise, hoits, yells, traffic below. He shut the window and
went for the door—strange, he thought, he had been told he was the
only one in the building. He strained to listen.

  Could that have been a key chuckling in a lock
upstairs?

  The following days were spent by Darconville
acquainting himself with the layout of Harvard. He got a map. He
cut through the traffic on Massachusetts Ave., crossed down Quinsy
St., and went to the English department office in Warren House to
make himself known to the man who had hired him, but the secretary
(handing him his faculty card, class schedule, and a catalogue)
told him that Prof. McGentsroom hadn’t yet returned from his summer
vacation. She told him there was some mail for him. Darconville
almost misgave from expectation as she rooted around in a series of
letterboxes, all tabbed with professors’ names: McGoldrick,
Schreiner, Waxman, Stuart, Millar, Treadgold, etc., and then handed
him a postcard: a lavendulate “Miss ya!”—the dot an extravagant
circle—signed by Hypsipyle Poore. Well, well, thought Darconville,
tearing it in two and dropping it into a goody’s pail on the way
out. He spent an hour or so in the Fogg Museum, walked around the
commons in front of the law school, and circled back by Memorial
Hall, a huge Victorian Gothic vault with large windows of colored
glass stiffened dark with metalwork and stone tracery and
memorializing the Union dead in what, in another part of the
country—already thankfully forgotten—was generally considered to be
the last of romantic wars.

  Across the way, he entered the vine-webbed gates of
the Harvard Yard, an old commons of skinnybranched elms and
walkways surrounded by venerable red-brick college halls,
quadrangular in form, cloistral in intent, an enclosure as neat and
strict as a bowling green and isolating in time and space
traditions of an intellectual and spiritual probity, uncluttered as
a puritan psalmody.

  The figure of John Harvard sat, dignified and aloof,
staring across the Yard in a mood of piety and godliness.
Darconville walked back through several centuries under the
pleasant trees and had the strange feeling that, in peering up a
dim stairway or through an old window or into some dark
chamber-and-study, one just might happen to catch an anachronistic
glimpse of some students reading
The Tatler
by candlelight
instead of working their sophemes or construing their Demosthenes
or perhaps a group of lads, with wigs a-flap, skipping up out of
the buttery—the steam of hasty-pudding in the air—and balancing
tankards and sizings of bread and beer or maybe several young
blades drinking rumbullion and gowling against the excessive
measures of Lord North, Grenville, and Townsend until one of them
might leap up to shout, “Step outside and repeat that asseveration,
Villiers, you damned Tory!” He stepped over to look at Widener
Library, the beautiful white steeple of Memorial Church, and came
out again, under an old archway adorned above with crowned
lanterns, into the square.

  The congestion in Harvard Square, a maze of
stoplights and ringing commerce—almost island-contained—became a
singular source of delight, especially to someone pointedly tired
of the High and Main streets of Quinsyburg as the avenues of
sophistication. Darconville crossed the street, the kiosk of the
central subway entrance exhaling brakedust and stale air, and went
shopping: he mailed Isabel some jewelry and a Harvard T-shirt. In
the plaza of the Holyoke Center, he observed, were gathered all
manner of people: bearded fellows selling flutes and sandals;
drownbottles with split shoes sharing slugs of whiskey with each
other; wagoneers selling books and records; three or four pale
mystical girls offering bunches of dried-flowers from their trugs;
a dinger holding on a leash a capuchin monkey in a red bellboy’s
hat, snatching dimes; and everywhere, in the crowds, professors and
law-cats and transcorporating philosophers and other remnants of
academe who for the way they talked, gestured, and dressed might
have flown out of Baffin Land. It seemed one of the few places on
the earth where one could stand on a street corner for five minutes
and see and hear the world go by in a thousand fashions and in
fifty languages.

  When Darconville had time on his hands—there was a
great deal to share but no one to share it with—he’d several
afternoons left the square for Boston, aimlessly, meditatively,
circuitously riding the underground transit in and then back out,
with the seats crammed and the aisles crowded, and when the train
pulled into Harvard Station, always, the conductors, thumbpunching
buttons, called out, “End of the line, all change!”—the doors
leaped hissing open, dust rose, and tired sober-eyed commuters with
rolled newspapers hurried out in a rush, pushed up the ramps, and
left the subway to lose themselves in the larger crowds on the
street above. Darconville noticed the girls of greater Boston were
lovely, lithe, and elegant—one, however, always gleamed in their
ranks, her unassuming innocent self-withdrawal being brighter than
the lights that danced over the cities he explored. And she wasn’t
even there.

  The dewy sweet smell from the gardens of Brattle St.
drifted through the fencepickets. Darconville put his map into his
pocket and cut down Hawthorn St. where, walking along, he listened
to the sad, quiet rustle up in the red and golden beeches and
noticed the first decaying leaves, tawny and rusted, sprinkling
like the bridal colors of autumn from the chestnut trees, always
among the first to shed. He came out to the banks of the peaceful
river and slowly headed east along a pathway.

  The sun was beginning to go down, and a faint ring
of blue autumnal smokehaze could be seen over the playing fields
and boathouses across the Charles. He crossed the Larz Anderson
Bridge and then cut down a grassy slope to sit by the water and
consider the beauty of the college from another angle, a view
sweeping and magnificent. Again, he looked at his map and named to
identify the elegant brick houses he traced from left to right:
Eliot, Winthrop, Leverett, Dunster, all stately and knitted over
with withers and strands of ivy. Theirs was a spectacular
fenestration, the jigsaw cornices and windowed frontdoors facing
across the courtyards and crowned above in a little parade, beyond
the gates, of chimneys, turrets, and domed towers of green, gold,
and crimson.

  Trying to locate Adams House, Darconville found he
couldn’t. He tried to match map to terrain, following his finger
through one courtyard, out of an archway, and into a second court
at another distance. He lost his way and followed his finger back,
to pause. It waited. He checked the map. He moved his finger now to
count past turrets and a forest of chimneypots and mansards, but
dusk, falling, either doubled them or truncated or made indistinct
those that rose behind others. It was useless, for once again one
was back at an angle that couldn’t do anything but lead in a
direction that discouraged the logic of the whole enterprise. He
smiled. This person, he thought, is divided against himself: one
part overlooks the whole, knows that he is sitting there and that
the way is clear; but another part notices nothing, has at most a
divination that the first part
thinks
it sees all.
Darconville reflected, at that point, that these two could sit
waiting for years, pondering the parable. Then one part said: if
you know that, you have found your way. While another replied: but
unfortunately only in parable. Would that be a comment on art?

  Darconville almost laughed.

  He walked back then through the narrow streets and
turned into the iron gate on Linden St. that led into the courtyard
of Adams House, where the master’s residence, Apthorp House—a white
colonial dwelling—sat surrounded by the high wine-black brick of
what looked like an old deserted gashouse or Victorian railway
station, the roof edge of which, sloping down to gimmaled windows,
was interrupted at intervals by a series of beetle-browed gables
jutting out in sooty-stained façades that diminished in width after
the fashion of steps and seemed in the gloom of sudden dusk a
perfect perch for rooks and cormorants. There were perpendicular
rows of apertures crossed here and there by cantilever
fire-escapes. The shades were all drawn. He went in.