Darconville's Cat (50 page)

  
18th
. Fortune is never mentioned in
Scripture. The girl loves me, and if the time was brief, the time
was overcome. But I’d hear fortune. Be the devil’s advocate,
diary.

  DIARY: It’s thanks to the Romans we know the
Greeks.

  DARCONVILLE: So we know the Greeks. I can
distinguish one from the other.

  DIARY: But by the other.

  DARCONVILLE: Who valued them.

  DIARY: Say transvalued.

  DARCONVILLE: Therefore, to the Romans they are no
longer Greeks.

  DIARY: Who couldn’t have valued them.

  DARCONVILLE: Then let Greeks be known by a Roman
mistake.

  DIARY: The Romans endure.

  DARCONVILLE: But the Greeks prevail.

  
21st
. God is sitting on my pen. The pages
during these five days seem to have filled themselves. How I love
her! Isabel, she by reason of which the world below again becomes
the world above! As I scribble away, my hand flashes avian
shadowgraphs on the wall, falcons Spellvexit counts, his bottom
wagging, pouncing upon each and all. We are both chasing our
imaginations across spaces open for them. Enjoin me, joy! I am
beside myself, and I also belong!

  
23rd
. In love, my spirit, utterance, and
invention are better. Must I, therefore, love for my wit’s sake? To
conceive children of the word? Prophesy, some Melampus.

  Worked all day in the V&A, no lunch, and on the
way home mailed her letter (I mention the possibility of an
engagement).

  
28th
. Cold and windy. Two letters today.
The important one, signed with the colophon of two familiar
eyes—and a name as pure as morning prayer—a packet of sheets folded
so tightly in the envelope that lateral incision is necessary and
written on both sides in that spidery hand, dipped and backswept
and full of question sparks and looped i’s: passionate apology,
apologetic passion, and a colored feather. I hear the simple tender
words of an oath-worthy, a white candle in a white hand. Its small
companion, a letter in a monogrammed envelope the color of
angelica, a declaration of some and similar consequence—were it
consequential—and a photograph of the correspondent, supine, last
summer, on a dune at Virginia Beach: Hypsipyle Poore, peering over
her sunglasses. Cough on, Lady Malehaut.

  Thynke and thanke God.

  
30th
. I bolted breakfast, took a bus to
central London, and mailed Isabel some gifts: a book, a bracelet,
and a black velvet Russian dress, embroidered with flowers. Visited
the National Gallery. There was a Fuseli exhibition. I saw his
painting
The Nightmare
. It is said that this was a
portrait of Anna Landolt, whom he loved. (He’d written: “Last night
I had her in bed with me . . . anyone who touches her now commits
adultery.”) She tossed him aside and married a Mr. Schinz, a
businessman; an enraged and hateful Fuseli then painted this
canvas, an attempt to use black magic to give her frightening
dreams. Desperation crutched out on the stilps of art. Was his
hatred, I wonder, a function of preserving his dignity or an
attempt to deploy self-pity by confronting resentment lest, nursing
it, greater psychological imbalance ensue?

  Any explication of the thing is less than
approximate: perhaps hate loves to hate. It must, first. On the
other hand, a man, thinking himself in love, may only be trying to
understand that which is most strange to him; so strange, opposed;
opposed, then, never to be had. The lover too often doesn’t realize
he must make his contract with a degree of
ease—
disinvoltura
—by which he can deceive himself, at
least temporarily, of the real passion he feels and thus, that she
may be free to choose, courteously allow the loved one to deny what
of course he prays she won’t. More people drown from the torrential
rains in the desert than die of thirst.

  Do I sound smug? I confess to you, dear diary, dear
double, I could still let Isabel go. I do love her, and
desperately. But where, after all, was the trothplight? The
commitment? There is nothing in bad art that good art doesn’t have;
it’s all in the making—and what was done in the past was done in
the doing, not in the making, whereas now what is hoped for will be
made, not done. Isabel has
decided
! Is it a miracle or a
natural thing? Perhaps what we take sometimes for resurrections are
only syntheses. The only way to come back is to go.

  
31st
. Hallowe’en. I am still writing my
grimoire of dark invocations, mystic runes, mantic spells. The
Royal Library of Nineveh called my head is filled with books which
are being read. I wonder,
is
some black-hatted Strix right
now whistling on a pitchfork through the thick and thin of the
world to put calamities and ligatures among men and women? (Thought
of Mrs. DeCrow and her group of familiars! Quinsyburg=Thessaly. An
uncharitable remark, I suppose. “Thou shalt not bear false witness
against thy neighbor.” I’ve always wondered in this commandment
which word was supposed to be accented. ) I put up Isabel’s
photograph on my bureau.

  Later: I met Svarta at the Grove Pub where we drank
and spoke of spooky things. Smiling, she swore, quoting Wierus,
that the devil often married beautiful women by whom he had
countless children—easily recognizable, as she’d have it, by their
growing inexplicably fat, by their voracious appetites, and by some
exceptional flaw.

  
November 1st
. All Souls’ Day. I have mine
still and so thanked the Author of it at a High Mass at the
Brompton Oratory. Worked all day. Close on two. And so to bed.

  
5th
. A penny for the guy, more sinned
against than sinning. Fawkes’ Mountain, never built, perhaps should
have been. I get around this anti-commemoration, not forgetting in
the ruinous fires the increase of penalties against English
Catholics thereafter as before, by contributing my coin to his
memory. If a traitor betrays a trust, Guido’s had been stolen
outright. A prayer to Our Lady of Ransom, for the conversion of
England. Wrote all night into morning. The cock craw. The day
daw.

  
7th
. Letter from Isabel, who in a
postscript—somehow, always the substantific of a girl’s
letter—mentions she’s decided to return to Quinsy College for the
Spring semester. The Caudine Forks! Will they take her back? Could
she be happy there alone? Should I return, associate sole, or spend
my life wandering from place to place like some gormless Holy Roman
emperor in the fifteenth century? I can’t say what I think I
mean.

  
8th
. When the answer cannot be put into
words, neither can the question. The use of language, however,
compels me to measure my thoughts—so one’s journal becomes an
examination-of-conscience: I rub my fears and worries through a
sieve of days and up comes a pile of biography, brief as Solomon
Grundy’s. Where will I be a year from now?

  
9th
. Decided to find out.

  Wind, cutting and visible. Ran down to the hotel to
telephone Isabel. An hour lost for a connection, two pints of
Tennant’s, then, lo! so soft, so gentle a voice, faint over the
hornslate sea, asking, please, when she would see me again? I
believe I printed my fingers into the very instrument, telling her
how hopelessly I loved her and straining to hear over the quorks
and quirks of an astonished cable the cento God alone heard in full
but I can only approximate: “... so lonesome for (pause, crackles)
ever at Christmastime before it’s too (clicks, delay) me
especially, not worth anybody’s (delay, crackles) believe it, and
that now Govert knows (clicks, pause) feel better. Can you hear
what (crackles, clicks) love you forever and ever and ever?”

  
Dies creta notandus
! I’ve loved everyone
and everything this day, everyway and everywhere. I realized
suddenly I could have her over for Christmas for a fortnight but
that, in doing so—after one last celebratory drink and an inquiring
visit to Barclay’s—I might run out of money to stay on very long
thereafter finishing the book. The decision made itself: I would
both finish the book
and
invite her over. The second
possibility was arranged on the spot. And the first? I invoke no
foliots, no genii, no figures of augrim. I will but call on the
ancient name of d’Arconville, heroic in the cause of altar, sword,
and pen, and have done.

  
10th
. A ring from Isabel—her
grandmother’s—arrived in the mail today: size 5. I have a target to
size up now, Miss Ballhatchet.

  
11th
. Martinmas. The beginning of winter. I
went to a quiet restaurant for the traditional feastday goose,
outlined my final chapters, and on the way home mailed Isabel a
check for her airfare. I have enough money left for a ring, then
it’ll be near thé knuckle.

  Tonight, a knock on the door—the clandestine knock:
once—it was Svarta, with a bottle of cider and some Garibaldis. We
talked. “Tut-tut,” she said, upon seeing Isabel’s photograph with
its somnolent eyes but face of Pentelican marble, indirectly lit
from inside. “You have hypnotized her?” Then she told me, in that
kind of low whisper that always seems advice in itself, that the
idea of hypnosis as sleepy unconsciousness is a myth, for it’s
really a state of alert awareness. We talked awhile, sadly, then
she kissed my cheek, and said goodnight.

  
18th
. A week of writing, straight. No
recreation. Punk and plaster and cold tea. Spellvexit is
half-crazed with boredom.

  P.S. Dr. Dodypol sent me a postcard yesterday: “I
remain here in Quinsyburg where adders’ tongues still seek to talk
away that long-lost Eden vile Nature’s since replaced.”

  
21st
. I’ve spent three days in every shop
in Bond St. looking for a ring, avoiding Gaud and his taints.

  
23rd
. Found out Svarta Furstinna left for
Stockholm yesterday by means of a (sad) note thumbtacked to my
door; she said she couldn’t face goodbyes but that, who knew, she
might one day catch up with me again. Feel curiously alone tonight.
I think a final goodbye is more oppressive, because less natural,
than a death and the universe in which it happens so frightening,
that I don’t even want to think about its cause. Is that a
non-sequitur?

  
December 1st
. Another week enclosed in the
forcing-house of the spirit. The writing goes on, but even an army
of jokes, one after the other, is a cheerless thing. Christmas
already in the air. I must finish.

  
4th
. Telegram from Isabel: she’s arriving
Dec. 18th, to leave Jan. 2nd.
N.B. Be at Heathrow Airport at
5:45
P.M.!

  
5th
. Wrote, I find, some 2,000 words
yesterday—and will have a reasonably complete foul copy under hand
before the week is out. The last ten pages look ragged from the top
of the clock. A boast of despair cancels itself out. I spent the
day X-ing out sixteen pages, then rewriting four. X X X: thus the
millers of yore set the vanes of the windmill when they were home
for lunch, turning them cruciform when they were back at work. Now,
there’s
an analogue to art for who’d accept the grind!

  
6th
. Freezing cold. Laid in more tins, a
half-gallon of scrumpy, and cat food. I worked the day through.

  I wonder what I’ll say to her. Maybe she’s wondering
what she’ll say to me. “But the days of childhood they were fleet,
and the blooming sweet-briar breathed weather, when we were boy and
girl together.” Beddoes. O, the complicated and difficult dance of
lovers crossing and recrossing the wire in a high empty hall, hung
with tapestries and scutcheons, the moon through the lozenge-shaped
windows showing how far they can fall!

  
7th
. I found a ring I bought!

  
10th
. Hectic preparations: theatre tickets,
reservation for Christmas dinner at the Anchor Pub in Southwark,
New Year’s plans. I bought two blue mugs and had our names
inscribed on them. Returning home, I stopped to listen to the
carolers and bell-ringers, muffled up and top-hatted, in Trafalgar
Square:

        ”Once in royal
David’s city

        Stood a lowly
cattle shed,

        Where a mother
laid her baby

        In a manger for
his bed . . .”

  Tomorrow: order cake, piped: “
Welcome,
Isabel
”

  
13th
. Busy, as before.

  
14th
.
Ibid
.

  
16th
. The room’s a godawful mess still. A
quick dashover with the broom this morning for paperballs, dust,
grewsome ghosts. I boxed the presents, set out mugs, made a drawing
of greeting—two bright eyes, offset with a message of three little
words. Everything must be just right. Shall I wear my black coat to
the airport?

  No. (Was it for nothing that Pompey wore a
dark-colored garment at the Battle of Pharsalia?)

  
17th
. “Tomorrow to fresh woods . . .”

              
Caetura
desunt.

  
January 12th
. Goodnight, dear diary,
goodnight. I think it is good morrow, is it not? I have been
remiss. You have been in love. I have, and turn away no more. So
pray, then, turn to what? Two old monks were speaking of a flag.
One said, “The flag is moving.” The other said, “The wind is
moving.” An abbot who happened to be passing by told them, “Not the
wind, not the flag. The mind is moving.” Wind, flag, mind—we move
in concert toward that fortune which gives, it’s said, much to many
but less by far to more. Is life then in the loom? I don’t know. I
only know I accept my fortune and, with my cat and partial step,
leave tomorrow not to unlearn what I’ve learned here, rather to
seek a face remembered from another world which has been
longed-for, though how I can’t explain, which has been found and
lost and then refound again. I seek to survive by means of a
miracle I can’t believe in yet but on which I must rely, for as my
heart returns to my love, my love returns to Quinsyburg, where I
have been before and, blind for love, now will be again.