Darconville's Cat (51 page)

  And so I betake myself to that course, which is
almost as much to see myself go into my grave; for which, and all
the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God
prepare me!

  LII

  A Table Alphabeticall of Thinges Passynge

  It’s not in Nursery Rhymes? And yet I almost think
it is—

        —LEWIS CARROLL,
Hys Nouryture

  
A
is for Arrivals, which came—and, coming,
passed.

  
B
is for Back, to Quinsy, yes, but each
other at last.

  
C
is for Contrectation. Their love-play
lasted long.

  
D
is for Diagenesis: bless change—whatever
was, was wrong!

  
E
is for Engagement, a mutual act of
will.

  
F
is for Faculty, who physicked the masses
still.

  
G
is for Greatracks, his knickers no less
in a twist.

  
H
is for Hypocrisy, still shrouding the
college like mist.

  
I
is for Isabel, the pure, the loyal, the
good.

  
J
is for
Je Maintiendrai
, the
motto by which she stood.

  
K
is for Kalopsia, when a town, not the
best, seems better.

  
L
is for Love, the sweet debt to which they
were debtor.

  
M
is for Misgivings: O, the normal
wherefores and hows.

  
N
is for Nonillionth, the times they
repeated their vows.

  
O
is for Ouphes, the dear elphin girls in
their classes.

  
P
is for Poore, who still, though in
letters, made passes.

  
Q
is for Quinsyburg, less the plug in the
sink than the drain.

  
R
is for Rivals, who were never mentioned
again.

  
S
is for Strictures: the Shiftletts, the
sameness, the South.

  
T
is for Trappe, still down, alas, in the
mouth.

  
U
is for Unfortunately: her sorrows were
never few.

  
V
is for Velocity, the speed with which
tune flew.

  
W
is for Wedding, a hope in that strange
place sought.

  
X
is for Xenium, the gift that strangeness
wrought.

  
Y
is for Years, two passed as if but a
day.

  
Z
is for Zutphen, no longer a threat in the
way.

  LIII

  The Old Arcadia

  “Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,” said
the Rat. “And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you
or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either,
if you’ve got any sense at all. Don’t ever refer to it again,
please.”

        —KENNETH
GRAHAME,
The Wind in the Willows

  QUINSYBURG was pretty much the same old place after
two more years, but so very much in love were Darconville and
Isabel that, despite the confines of the town—and possibly because
of it—they lost cognizance of both temporal and spatial radii and
remained fixed in their chosen quadrant, the spirit level brought
to bear on which measured but the verticals of dreams, the
horizontals of passion. There were tribulations, of course, but
they were overcome, and when in difficulty the two of them seemed,
as if for it, to grow closer, heedless of setback or sorrow and
inured to any trouble blowing their way, as on the rugged surface
of the earth the daily revolution of the air encounters so many
obstacles that it is not felt. They’d turned with the rolling years
into a second cycle, like numbers in a periodic fraction, and
called it resurrection. Tomorrow keeps its promise merely by coming
today, and for them there were days time out of number, to be
counted no more, but lived.

  It was still a part of the South that constantly
grew away from the rest of the country—or, if you will, was left
behind by it—yet if its deadbright sun still raised up trees,
solisequious if somewhat stunted, and shrubs, blighted but
bearable, they had seen it all before and so the better could cope
with it now. Mrs. DeCrow still crew. Dr. Glibbery galumphed, and
pixilated Miss Pouce still pleaded from her library for patronage.
There was the full complement: Floyce flouncing, Wratschewe
writing, Shrecklichkeit scheming. Miss Sweetshrub had not married.
Miss Ballhatchet had put on weight and put off depilatories. Miss
Shepe and Miss Ghote weren’t speaking to each other anymore. And
dear old Dodypol still greeted everyone as he always had.
Greatracks remained
imperator
. Gone were the Culpas,
however, along with the Weerds, sometime since having decided to
leave together and sail to Byzantium where presumably, under that
very head, they’d proceed to write a poem with that very title. Ol’
Hinge-and-Bracket hadn’t changed—when Knipperdoling hyped, Pindle
still became chondriac. Miss Trappe still tended her garden,
troweling past her bushes of wind-tortured thorns. And Miss
Dessicquint still gave striking proof to the fact that, previous to
the time at which departed souls must be assigned final location,
there was a middle state after death when the spirit was still
allowed to wander the earth with a mouthful of admonitions for
everyone in sight. Excipuliform, Thimm, Porchmouth, Fewstone, even
the peculiar little Qwert Yui Op: these, thought Darconville,
became the faces that for so long now had lived and died next to
his own, in chaos, in celebration, in triumph, in tragedy—the old
academical fun-show of incompetents and ventripotents, crop-haired
goons and beghards with boring stories, mono-phthongs-in-bowties
who got up committees, the bunty women, wearers of camei, and
obtuse dowds with headmistress untouchability still flourishing
their mimic and pseudoethopoetical gestures, and all those parched
and juiceless prats with supercalendered skin and voices like tonks
who went panking up and down the corridors like quail-hawks making
sure the students were behaving.

  The students, ah yes!—the soft, lazy, unchangeable,
gracilescent, sweet-scented nixies-from-Dixie with their
half-vowels, Dolly Vardens, and cheeks like cupid’s buttocks, no,
the students, the students could not be discounted. Darconville met
them daily, teaching his classes, adapting as best he could, and
kindly, to their indigenous inatten-tiveness and far-too-casual
interest in matters alien because academic. He did his job, his
brain running now less to analysis than to good will, and he tried
his best, as if living in a museum, to walk softly and not trench
upon with applied logic or severe scrutation whatever came into
view; the galleries seemed straight-—but in fact they ran in secret
mysterious circles, curving furtively out, around, and then always
back through all pantochromatic creation to that one work of art he
valued most.

  
Clio Cliusque sorores
: Isabel
Rawsthorne—eighteen no more, neither nineteen, but now close to her
majority—gladsomely fell in with her classmates, seniors now, and
with vigor applied herself to the pursuit of her degree. She’d
majored in biology and, without any real native gifts for its
rigors, seemed forever perusing her chemistry textbook which she
carried about the way a Pakhtoon holds his Koran. Of grades, beauty
often assumes more perquisites than it should, very like the
attitude Southerners generally show toward the black waiter.
(“Shines? We always considered them
part
of a damned
julep!” Dr. Glibbery once boasted to Darconville. )

  Isabel did well enough. Miss Gibletts, not Tyrannus,
gave her an A in classics. Her oceanography course she loved, as
she did a few throw-away électives in printmaking. But the
possibility of a few good credits in piano went west, disappointing
Miss Swint, who mistakenly thought she could make something of
Isabel’s handspread. And microbiology gave her fits, and a dirty
pass. Math she flagged once, and then again, a related scandal
ensuing that very afternoon when Darconville cornered her
teacher—Miss Malducoit, unmarried, neither oblivious of Isabel’s
diamond, had dared to suggest
some
of us were doing all
right in life, weren’t we?—and, in Isabel’s defense, not only
decried the injustice but came within a hair of forgetting the
Fifth Commandment and throppling her on the spot. Oh, Darconville
was biased, but then wasn’t she his responsibility? And how could
her own folks intervene in such matters, living as they did way up
there in the pines and peesashes? Reason enough, thought he—if less
than justly—to have given her the highest grades possible in all
her English courses, which she naturally enrolled in with an eye to
the professor, the source of whose unspoken remorse lay less in his
situational ethics (a perioptometry heretofore uncharacteristic of
him) than in the fact that she’d promised repeatedly to write for
him, sometime, anytime, the term-papers she subsequently never did.
But he knew she loved him as he her, you see, and, what do they
say?—a February snowfall is as good as manure. A failed promise is
nothing to a lover if to him or her it is not the
thing-to-be-ascertained. A loved one’s every shape is an attitude
of prayer.

  Darconville’s book,
Rumpopulorum
, was
eventually published— and well received and discussed more or less
everywhere but in Quinsyburg, where to no one’s surprise, least of
all its author’s, it was met with a most aristarchean silence.
Every Homer has his Zoilists. He couldn’t have cared less.

  Speed contracts time. In the rarefied heights of
love Isabel and Darconville experienced over the short and
quickening years of plenitude impossible, but for the time-dilation
factor only travel in space sanctions, to explain. They both felt
they would live forever and ever—in manner, in mind, in mood—and
striding in Seven League Boots strode, before they looked, past
time itself. Is the infinitive strictly to be called a mood? No,
perhaps not, but so it seemed with them. Darconville didn’t
question it. During those years he often wondered, in fact, whether
thought
ever
really helped a man in any of the critical
ways of life; there seemed as little need to discern patterns as
there seemed use for them, for life seemed its own justification,
and he came to see the warp and woof contriving patterns made
difficult, often impossible designs not only outside one’s choosing
but also beyond one’s understanding, intricate elaborations in
which, although unknown to one, one was being inextricably and
fatefully bound but of which, even if known, one hadn’t the power
to reckon the significance. It was true, to seem to stand above the
accidents of existence was simply to enjoy in an uprush of fancy
the illusion that if you didn’t accept them they didn’t exist.
Hoping only that what would happen to him would happen on
their
behalf, he merely decided to allow what would, for,
well he knew, what would, will—and when it wished. And so
Darconville relinquished complications of thought that he might
better act and, acting, love, and as loving told him that thought
was a laziness that prevented action, he accepted what was said,
said what he felt, and gratefully found himself soon equal to the
fate encouraging him—it didn’t matter where—to complete
participation.

  They went on trips to Richmond, Charlottesville,
and, in contrast to a strangely uneasy visit several years before
to the same spot—they’d hardly known each other!—to Appomattox
Court House where in the green meadows that were fenced along with
old white palings they laughed and talked and had memorable picnics
of quiche and wine. Once they went to Williamsburg, driving back
after a weekend into a beautiful sunset that matched in richness
the gold of their young, uncomplicated hearts, beating, as if to
speak: “You are my donee, I give you my will. You are too my
devisee, I give you all the estate of my soul.”

  It might be mentioned that Darconville and Isabel
never lived together, formally, that is—which, of course, prevented
nothing save her summary expulsion from school—yet it was with
undisguised pride and even wider statement that they still shopped
together at the Piggly Wiggly, rarely, however, without the feeling
(for such were the super-visional stares) of both the legal and
local vulnerability of their consortium. They were, nevertheless,
inseparable. Not an odd day, it was an odd minute when they weren’t
together, both the objects and observers of love. They packed the
Bentley and often traveled to Washington, roaming around the
museums and monuments, and several summers even drove up to Cape
Cod where they hiked, took photographs, and often made love in the
ocean, but whenever school was in session, confining them somewhat,
they ranged the nearby countryside and enfiladed the small
neighboring towns around Quinsyburg for whatever turned their eyes
to chance marvels or any new adventure. What fimble on what gate
didn’t they unlatch? What side road not pass down?

  Few ever saw Darconville and Isabel together without
wanting to be in love with somebody. They were thick as thistles:
two distincts, division none. They joyed one joy, one grief they
grieved, one love they loved. They rose with the wonderful ductile
inflections of the seasons, school schedules, but most of all the
irrepressible
superlatio
of their twin spirits, for either
was the other’s, single nature’s double name, neither two nor one
was called—yet either neither, the simple was so well compounded.
Original, they escaped repetition and yet, free and
imprescriptible, learned to find the best of old emotions the most
beautiful. They went anywhen and manywhere, called the world
nicknames, and sang glorias at the very top of their voices. No,
not at the beginning of imagination because at the end of fact,
they simply renewed just by a glance what they looked upon and
wishing for nothing they didn’t have lived intently only for what
they did, for a while it truly might be said that never passed a
minute when that sublime and prevenient grace arresting their young
hearts to love didn’t assure them that to watch the morning star
one’s eyes must always be a little brighter, neither did it fail to
whisper low that once upon a time never comes again.