Darconville's Cat (80 page)

  Darconville lay motionless, looking up as if
everything had gone out of his eyes. Everything he looked at, in
fact, out of the cursed necessity of looking at something, seemed
subject to the relentlessly unfolding and cruel paraphrase of what
had once been his life.

  “It’s hypothetical,” pleaded Crucifer, his voice
trembling in a little flutelike whistle. He stared at Darconville
with a jesting challenge— something deep within his eyes seemed
indulgently to flicker. “Just say yes. No one need know. Only yes.”
Slowly, he lifted his hand, his lips pursed to a careful kiss: the
impress of his fingers lay across Darconville’s mouth.

  “Yes,” sobbed Darconville.

  “
My child
,” whispered Dr. Crucifer.

  LXXX

  The Fox Uncas’d

  Who hath the power to struggle with an intelligible
flame, not in Paradise to be resisted, become now more ardent by
being failed of what in reason it looked for?

        —JOHN MILTON

  “THE QUESTION NOW,” declared Dr. Crucifer, “is what
to do. You are bitten, you are not all eaten. But it will be so
preached—I can hear the crabbed textuists and paraphrasts now—that
if you loved her once, you’ll therefore love her always and by
acting to ignore justice for peace so shall it be proved. The
method of custom is so glib and easy though, isn’t it? To prove you
loved her, though she doesn’t care a fig for you, you’re supposed
to spend a lifetime in silence with only a handful of glorious
memories to keep you from madness? To feast, to fart, to finally
forget?”

  He turned toward Darconville with a condescending,
slightly ironic indulgence but saw in that pale and chartaceous
face (which made him seem more ill-shaven) only two uncaring eyes
polished in grey staring indifferently, remotely, somewhere beyond
the room. There was a sudden diffidence about him that Crucifer
couldn’t bear.

  “What, shall you spare her? Let her spread among us
until with her shadow all your dignity and honor, all the glory of
your name, be darkened and obscured? Resist by what resistance
would surely kill you?
Simply ignore it
?” he asked in a
succlamation of outrage, “as if to say that if one were ill all
one’s life getting well might then be taken for another illness?
Can it be? You’d allow them, the most loathsome example of twinning
since Sodom and Gomorrah, to go scot free? Sit like a fool at home,
Don Pimp, and eye your rashers while open-eyed conspiracy is all
and everywhere about? I’d pray to Lucifuge Rofocale to set an edge
upon my pipes and chase the dusk of conscience back across her
face! I’d crack sixty axletrees to get at her! I’d be on her like
white on rice!” Crucifer’s angry face was in a torque. “And
you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “
Phluaria
!” screamed Dr. Crucifer.

  He swung through the bedroom, reaching up furiously
over his head as if he were going to pull down lightning, his lips
quivering like rubber-bands, and then became stationary. He
swallowed in embarrassment.

  “Look at me.” He tried to laugh and fumbled up a
cigarette. “The future—you shake your head in advance, I see, but
wait,
wait
—the future is memory, I was only going to say,
if we don’t overcome the past.” Where, Darconville wondered, had he
heard those words before? “The injury I insist you mustn’t fail to
dismiss without recompense, because you haven’t, is not therefore
entirely done away with, for to live still and not be able to
love—you don’t want that, do you? —is only to heap up more injury.
The woodcock is near the gin,” he prompted, puffing his cigarette,
“and, what, shall it now skip away? O hell, perhaps it should,”
quillwheeled Crucifer, feigning loss of interest and eyeing
Darconville surreptitiously, “perhaps it should.”

  Inhaling, Darconville pushed his head back into the
pillow.

  Dr. Crucifer studied his cigarette, looked at
Darconville, shook his head, and continued staring at the
cigarette. “You’re gentle,” he said, puffing. “Gentleness is
nice—the very mood fair Isabel, I don’t doubt, is this minute
showing Captain Poop of the Yankee Frigate.” He puffed. “And
courteous, though it won you no hearts. Obedient, but blindly. And
then, it seems, proud. Reverence to this! But of course when pride
rides, shame lackeys. Or,” asked Crucifer, now drawing closer, “are
you simply fearful? Darconville?”

  What Darconville desired at that moment as he had
never desired anything before was a place in which he could have
lost himself forever. He drew a deep breath through his nose and
tearfully turned away. “Darconville?

  “Ah, it’s the justice, of course, the
ethics
of it, that’s it, isn’t it? The law. You are still
in blind servitude to the inquisiturient bishops and shaven
reverences of the Church! Come, Bocardo,” he snapped impatiently,
“save your tears for the fumes that live in an onion! Law,”
exclaimed Crucifer, “what is it if it can force itself against the
faultless properties of nature? Laws? My word, no. Laws do not
indicate what a people value but rather what seems to them foreign,
strange, and outlandish. You mustn’t show them undue respect:
they’re but exceptions to the morality of custom, that’s all—why,
in another country my seinsembling and scrotiform-faced stepmother
would have thrown off her
bombazines-with-the-black-leg-of-mutton-sleeves for the scant-ies
of a common tart.” He crushed out his cigarette. “There are,
however, a few points of law to be gotten of your bitch’s
falsehoods, in spite of her—forgive the oxymoron-—genuine
hypocrisy. I will remind you of poetry, if you let me. Will you
listen?”

  Crucifer rubbed his hands.

  “The state, it could be argued, must be called to
account as to one of its highest functions, that of law—the hubris
of human ingenuity— and even possibly condemned by the standards
implied in the Utopian idea of primal innocence, for hasn’t it
taken upon itself one form of dominion after another,” asked
Crucifer, crossing the room with his forefinger in the air, “and
lorded it over all the others, pretending, as though it were the
daughter of the gods, to a privilege beyond all other disciplines?
Primal innocence?” He winked. “Dwale and delusion! So laws were
grafted. Lawcraft? Sheepcraft! I won’t bore you with a history of
all its agathokakological claptrap, Darconville, but simply point
out that, at bottom, it owes its essential existence to the
depraved and fallen nature of mankind—which it can never riddle,
which it can never rectify—and in my considered opinion is styled,
when at its most efficient, only to jingle at justice and to twill
at truth, especially in matters touching on that curious but primal
antagonism: the just thing versus the legal thing. The law and the
gospel,” he glubbed with obvious delight, “are hereby made liable
to more than one contradiction, and if a mooching and piety-faced
forgiveness is all you know of either, where punishment you take to
be a crime, I must then reinstruct you that all law has its
beginning in that first crime of our first mother and her low
tongue—Johannes Goropius Becanus (1519-1572) in his
Origines
Antuerpianae
, Antwerp, 1569, maintained that the original
language of Adam and Eve, and so the tongue of primal betrayal, was
Dutch!—and thereby cry out that you might let your severe and
impartial doom imitate divine vengeance and rain down your
punishing force upon this temerarious strumpet, this mistress of
the adroit lie, until like that fen-born serpent she resembles at
the root of all our woe she eat the dust of her penalty for the
rest of her life!”

  Crucifer wiped his mouth and, walking like Agag with
a mounting gait, stepped toward the bed where Darconville lay;
coming closer and closer it seemed to him that the creature became
more and more insubstantial. He backed away and Crucifer made a
mimicry of tentative assistance but he was far too anxious to make
a point to waste a motion.

  “I sniff the air and find something wrong here yet.
There’s an odor of virtue in this room. Could it be
forgiveness
? But please,” asked Crucifer, “how serve
virtues, tell me, other than merely to weaken? What in fact
are
they, my man? Old ladies’ litations? The desiderata
used by saints to engender self-contempt in anyone who must witness
them? Nasty little abstentions put about by society and religion
for individuals with a fortress mentality to live by, always to
their disadvantage, for the promotion and sales of the general
good? My God, how one is always privately victim to the virtues the
public sends down! It disgusts me!” said Crucifer in a shrill
piping boon. “No, the strength of knowledge does not depend on its
degree of truth but on its value to serve the nature truth, as we
know it, molests.
Stricte dicte
, there’s a stinking
partisanthip at the heart of
all
definition! I am stocky,
you are short and stout, he’s a fat little turd, isn’t that how it
goes? Why do we have to die? Because we have to live. What the hell
is life, then?—a long death! It’s all grimgribbing, Darconville!
Good and evil are only the prejudices of God,” he continued, with a
species of mad hilarity in his eye, “and the dreadful conclusion is
that the ancient deadly sins, seven in number, are in fact, all of
them, very close to virtues, just as the guilt you feel after
committing a few of them is arguably nothing less than
responsibility in a funny mask! And then if these so-called sins
never existed, why, what great authors, tell me, could have written
their masterpieces of humanity? Or whereby that they might be
corrected could we otherwise discern another’s faults? And howso
then maintain? Your enemy by any other standard, can’t you see,
would be an ephydriad. But, wait, here’s latitude! It is precisely
as
tame
animals that we show ourselves a shameful sight. I
tell you, people need open enemies if they are to rise to the level
of their own virtue, virility, and cheerfulness. I mean, if the end
doesn’t justify the means, then what the hell does?”

  Exulting in his intellectual power and dexterity he
seemed to be one of the greatest sophists that had ever contended
in the lists of declamation, his spirit of contradiction and
perverse delight in presuming to be able in argument to maintain
and even defend the wrong side of things with equal aggression and
ingenuity somehow making error itself rich, permanent, and
distinguished.

  “The whole conception of man really sinning against
God is intolerably puerile. Call it sin? Sin is no sin when virtue
is forgot. Call it evil? Why, evil is only a freedom exercised by
one and invidiously disapproved of by another, done as effortlessly
and as naturally as time passing. Dirty oil in a car means it’s
doing its job! Every great fortune is based on a crime, and
fortunate crimes make heroes. Successful crime ceases to be crime.
Success constitutes or absolves the guilty at its will. You have
been thrust into this part, do not forget, and must remember of
what you must contribute to it that if the scene, not the act, is
the unit of construction of this Jacobean play, scenes
lead
to acts! If they call the reaper, whet thy scythe.
No, I favor any skepsis to which one may reply, ‘
I am
revenged
!’ You needn’t put an unnecessarily persona]
significance to it,” said Crucifer, smiling in his eyes. “The
rationality of the universe itself suggests survival, and, my God,
I’d rather live in any loathsome dungeon than in any paradise at
her entreaty! Be only thorough! Fill the unforgiving minute! You
can’t cure a personality. Teach the thing manners! Split her—how I
adore the language that can tell you this—from coon-slit to
cap!”

  Darconville blanched, closing his eyes and trying to
expel a terrifying picture from his imagination. The words
literally seemed insane. He had finally come across a person, he
realized, who, in that mysterious mythopoetic world in which his
own imagination for so many years had insisted on moving, was a
serious antagonist, a madman butting at him through a baffle of
antilogic and embodying a depth of actual evil, the most terrifying
aspect of which seemed to be that his opponents were selected with
a sardonic delight in their incompatibilities.

  “I can read your face, Darconville. You’d abstain
from such action as you know it, there’s no doubt, out of mercy,
out of temperance, out of truth, indeed, out of love. Mercy’s all
very well, but what of holy cruelty, to disallow life for the
misshapen, the ill-begotten, the gormless? Temperance”—he spit a
pip sound—”is for nuns! If one continually forbids oneself the
expression of the passions as being rude and bourgeois, the result
can only bring about precisely what is not desired: the weakening
of them, the degeneration of power into shallow and hypocritical
etiquette! Truth? A logical or mathematical proposition such as
1+1=2 we say is true not because of prior ‘meanings’ or rules,
conventional or otherwise, much less because of some necessary
correspondence with reality. Such a proposition we take to be true
simply because, and in so far as, we choose to
regard
it
as true and merely select signs to suit the terms. Figure like the
Dutch: they have shaped their religion in the shape of their heads,
which explains why there are three hundred different forms of
worship over there, all supposedly Christian! True and false are
but a blind turned upon a pivot. In combat every man fights his own
war. There is no such thing as a rule.

  “But love?” Crucifer’s tongue seemed to sour on the
word. “What is this bit of jackasserie from the goliardic corpus of
pothouse verse other than lust for possession? The lover desires
sole and unremitting possession of the person for whom he longs,
seeking unconditional dominion over the soul and body of his
paramour, demanding it exclusively. But if one considers that this
in fact means nothing less than
excluding
the whole world,
my dear, from the so-called precious good, if one considers that
the lover aims at the impoverishment and deprivation of all
competitors—a wild and ^compromising avarice that has been deified
over the ages—then love is nothing more than the vilest expression
of egoism and greed! This is the good you’d preserve to love,
presume to lure, pretend to like?” His voice took on a tone of
expostulation. “Why, admit this silliness a virtue and, by Christ,
you’ll be but advocate to her crime
!” He joined his hands
and shook them with blurring speed. “Shall I reckon for you in the
law? Shall I? Then I shall tell you that the law is a blank to be
filled in by circumstance! To torture in Holland, for instance, is
considered as a favor to an accused person! Haven’t you read Dr.
Johnson on the subject? No man was put to the torture there, he
explained, unless there was as much evidence against him as would
amount to a conviction in England and therefore an accused person
among them had one chance more to escape punishment than those who
were tried in England. No, there is not one thing with another, but
Evil saith to Good, ‘My brother, my brother, I am one with thee.’ “
Then his eyes became as hollow as the unboweled winds and he spoke
low. “The concepts of good and evil merely address the idea of the
expedient and the inexpedient! One holds, so it goes, that what is
called evil harms the species, that what is good preserves. In
truth, evil instincts are expedient, species-preserving, and
indispensable to as high a degree as good ones—their function is
merely different. Abandon all thought of consequence, says Krishna,
for good and evil are essentially the same in a world which is an
emanation of a unitary spirit.” He quoted