Darconville's Cat (92 page)

  There was a glare of suitable vulgarity in the
upsidedown photograph. It was not the beastly eye, weighing one’s
appearance; it was not the assayer’s eye, weighing one’s worth, nor
even the trading eye, weighing one’s purse. It was simply the
worldly eye, weighing
position
. Isabeau of Fawx’s Mt.!
Darconville found that her presence, even in memory, far exceeded
his need of her and saw now only a worthless, self-perpetuating
piece of fatback—vile, ambitendentious, thirty pounds
overweight—who did nothing but in relation to herself and never
gazed at a man if a looking-glass were handy, a functor with the
heart of a dotbox, a face like an excuse, and a soul as
insubstantial as a whiffle-ball. The remorse he felt! It was not
only that he had pursued fancy. It was far worse. It was, he
reflected, less to have loved someone with a cast of head as apt
and artful as the dexterous cast of a trout-rod and legs blown to a
size of almost advanced elephantiasis —a condition, making her body
so disparate, it seemed to argue the possibility of a bisectional
physique whose parts actually moved on separate axes—than actually
to have forsaken reason itself! By what incredible fallacy of
accident, he wondered, had he ever come to love her? But his
interest in the question faded as soon as it was raised, and,
putting on his coat, he went out to Harvard Sq. to try to find a
wide brass dish.

  *  *  *  *  *

  
Friday
. There bore so little resemblance in
his investigation to what Darconville once loved, however, that a
wide and ready interest in the deeper mysteries of his subject sent
him to the library where he spent the morning poring over volumes
of mystic science and divination, trying, like a sorcerer, to cast
precognitive facts out of her bulk and shadow and birthdate.

  It was a little hell-hole of black magic and goety
up there in that carrel in Widener, but students, peering in, drawn
by all the mewing and muttering, so disturbed Darconville that he
returned with an armful of selected books to study them in his room
and to scrutinize as many as there were of her and all of her as
many as there were. He stopped in a stationery store on his way
back to buy two candles.

  Isabel Rawsthorne, it turned out, had been born on
the very day of treachery—Judasmass! The astonishment that
Darconville felt could hardly be imagined. It was black nativity
(December 30), falling in the decan of those who betray with a kiss
and who, according to prophecy, will not be saved at Armageddon.
The winter sign, Capricorn, was a zodiacal horror, its ecliptic
gloomy, its portents caprice and lust, its symbol in ligature
(
V3
) combining the first two letters of the Greek word for
tragedy; and these goats, ridden by Saturn, were, while always
associated with climbing proclivities, all of a type: calm and
deliberate in method and action, addicted to practical things, and
limited in outlook, with a morbid fear of ridicule which often
curtailed the expression of their views, making them secretive,
procrastinating, and treacherous. The creature was confirmed in her
signs.

  Then, Darconville cast her numerological chart.
First, he found the number of personality—the quickest to disclose
its traits—to be
3
, indicating unalterability, fixed
position, the need for security. The number of development, riddled
out of her name, totaled
60
; he made his reductions, while
reckoning up the numbers of both the added (5) and underlying (2)
influences, and came up with 9. It represented the need for
achievement in a chosen object, regardless of the moral issues
involved. My God, thought Darconville, the thorn comes into the
world point foremost. Here was a bride for Machiavelli!

  There’s not enough if there’s never too much.
Darconville meddled and mumbled, probed and pried. He sought to
confirm various omens and oddities by applying his wit to the
practices of alomancy, rhap-sodomancy, capnomancy, spodomancy,
sortilege, and especially—for her flesh to him was a map
well-known—physiognomy. There was about her, it turned out, a
stricter consecution from body to behavior than from lameness to
limping: this defect fit that disposition, this flaw that foolery.
The phrenological characteristic of a low, comic facial formation
meant quarrelsomeness, with slanting eyes and a weak head line
indicating an untrustful, petulant nature. Moleosophy assigned a
shrewd and petty acquisitiveness to that predominant, dark-colored
spot on her clavicle. And metoposcopy proved her trivial in the
forehead, the wavy cross lines there forecasting a voyage by sea—a
pleasure trip, according to the line of Venus. The chirognomic
profile suited her to perfection: the thumbs, indexing the
essential character of the hand, were “waisted,” disclosing
selfishness; the fluted nails, irritability; the knotted knuckles,
deviousness; and the hands themselves, large and spatulate, were
the hands of mingy pursuers, unusually obdurate ones adapted to the
suddenness of the grasp and the snatch.

  Night was falling, but Darconville was not quite
finished. He went to the kitchen, brewed some china tea, and after
drinking it from a white cup he swirled the grouts around three
times with a left to right motion—the leaves, he saw, formed a
windmill
. He checked the symbol against the
tasseographical values given in the book and read the portent: “a
scheme of gigantic magnitude, turning industrious plans into
money.” Well-pushed, nun, he thought, well-pushed.

  Darconville’s smile was ghostly as he put on his
coat. It was the smile one has in feeling he knows the future by
looking at the past. Cracking down all the riddles and fanciful
demonstrations was secondary, nevertheless, to other essentials
he’d separately but simultaneously pursued all week, undertaken,
each one, with an intensity that seemed not only to make claims
upon or compel but almost
create
whatever it was he
sought. Was he himself aware of it? The answer Darconville left to
the mystery of the night through which he now walked, taking the
two candles across the dark and empty street to St. Paul’s to have
them blessed, as he told the priest, for a funeral.

  *  *  *  *  *

  
Saturday
. The celesta of sweet bells from
the Lowell House tower, pealing when Darconville awoke, did nothing
to soften his heart. He took more benperidol and went down to his
mailbox, pushing through a group of milling students without care.
A canting letter from the English department chairman inquiring
about his lack of attendance in the classroom he ripped up. The
first of the few reports on Isabel— his only concern now—arrived in
much the same way she told the truth, not all at once, but
gradually, and sometimes not at all. He filed the facts he had; but
little changed. The treason had been done, and the clues he found,
serving more to sicken than to solve, accordingly were understood
as neither here nor there, for what is manifest in a proposition
cannot also be stated exactly. A problem is always less complex by
nature than the solution it requires.

  The story was simple: there once lived a girl who
was poor. She was burdened with deep insecurity, hippopotamine
legs, and the memory of a putative father who spending but a minute
on her mother to get her would spend no more time with either. She
grew to hate what she missed: not feeding the anger,
however—starving made it fat. The dreams of the riches her family
hadn’t in the wealth of a family nearby, proving more substantial,
alas, than did the attentions of its two eligible sons, led her to
temporize with someone else in a romantic
Schmockerei
got
of starved vanity and self-aggrandizement-by-association, an
amusement by proxy that cost her less trouble than being alone. It
was a subterfuge of convenience, with passion its pretext and the
mock adoption of values its mask, for she chose what she couldn’t
imagine to test what she couldn’t be, setting out, as it were, not
to survey the boundary of ocean but rather to measure the coast. He
fell in love; simply, she wouldn’t—it reminded her precisely of
what she couldn’t give to get. But when that particular opportunity
arose, she lived to betray what she feared to love and opted to
have what she hoped to own. She was
safe
at last. The
wedding would not take place in Fawx’s Mt., for tripwires had been
set. It would be held in secret, very soon, and somewhere else. The
announcement would only be made afterwards.

  Isabel Rawsthorne! It was a name to conjure with, a
creature who fell into the heart of space like a stone in a vacuum,
with no attraction and no purpose. The speed of such a fall,
multiplied only by the ideal weight, is impossible to measure—hi
fact, is no longer anywhere. It is noiseless, mindless,
nullibiquitous. She would never pine under any regrets, because she
had no appreciation of any loss. She would chafe at no
indifference, because it was her art. She would not be worried with
jealousies, because she was ignorant of love. She who measured her
wit by the triumphs of fashion and face-play and smiled away
falsity even to herself was silent precisely when she thought and
faithfully spoke when she didn’t.

  She alternated between surrender to foreign
influences and a vengeful longing for originality, finding there to
be as much weakness in the former, however, as there was futility
in the latter. She had no pity in success and self-pity, always, in
the case of failure. In victory, her eye was dry and glittering,
for repentance of what cunningly she won was rendered moot in
relation to an opponent who thereby had no rights. A facile
follower, she assumed servility toward the approved and arrogance
toward the rejected. She knew, of course, that there was truth and
untruth, that right and wrong existed, but did not feel the
asperity of such notions because her indifferent and cowardly heart
led to a total ineptitude for grasping differences between ideas
and values, and if her trouble was due less to positive vice than
to the feverish absence of altruism, both nevertheless enabled her
to concentrate on any commodity whatsoever—one was like another—and
then to appropriate by lies what in the possession, that she might
save face, she had to call love, taking it away from one she could
not trust and handing it to a trustee whose loyalty she’d see
remained assured. Her lack of discrimination—a lack, not a
lapse—was accompanied, all the while, by a tenacity that might have
been a quality had she any character. But she was characterless.
The humane and the advantageous she calmly identified, the teacher
becoming the lesson it refused to obey in the face of acquisition.
She was hypocritical because empty, clothing destruction in a kiss,
feeling hate for love, and was a serpent most when most she seemed
a dove. The void was always there. Had it been filled by judgment,
she would long since have sat in judgment on herself. She broke her
word because it was always meaningless when she gave it, and she
broke it so easily that she could never fathom the anger of her
dupe. She could veer like a weathervane in a minute. She overlooked
significant wholes and yet had that passion for detail that is so
often the mark of the small mind and the cankered soul, choosing
always what measured to her empty conceit and disposing of what was
left like the dramatist who finds a useless character left over at
the end and simply kills him off.

  With no soul, only moods, she knew not love that
kissed her nor indifference that soon walked by: glad, but not
flushed with gladness since joys go by; sad, but not bent with
sadness since sorrows die. She could do nothing but in relation to
herself. Gifts given to her never made one dearer, for the excess
of love imparted absolved her of the obligation to love in return.
Inconsistencies seldom bothered her. She did not ponder them, but
merely denied. Her docility was cowardice. She was arrogant in
prosperity and independence but once defeated came crawling to
one’s feet like a dog, being kept to heel by choice in that faked
humility that was only in fact the fear of herself. Determined to
stay innocent, however, she who could love so easily because she
had nowhere to love from would offer herself indefinitely in this
hope, that her takers might know what to make of her and put her to
use. Seeking her fortune rather than awaiting it, she had to take
every possible chance—and this, of all her fears, became the worst.
She had to be loved to acknowledge all she was not and so, winning
lovers, was able to dismiss them for showing her so: a
self-contained revenge.

  Subtlety of thought always tainted her honesty and
vanity her friendship. Naturalness she copied and she scorned. She
who understood marriage not as the great absorbent of a heart’s
love and life but as a feasible and orderly conventionality to be
played with, bargained for, and finally to be accepted as a cover
for her emptiness like the shifting makepiece of a stage scene was
herself the model after whom she strove to shape her own life. She
had no memory whatsoever. A lethal compound of the plodding and the
hysterical, she guided herself by the simple expediency of one
forgiving the other. Venal, cunning, constant in patterned deceit,
she understood good and evil merely as failure or success. You
could tramp as far as you liked into her and still only be marking
time, for, though change seemed to characterize her, she never
changed and was only capable of what she ever was. A vision, she
did not know; a passion, she could not imagine. With no conception
of the soul in its strength and fullness, she saw no lack of its
demands. Joy was a name; sorrow was another. She exhausted
mercy.

  The Lowell House bells rang their carillon again, as
if to appease, to calm, to pacify him. But poignancy is not so
abiding or so cumulative as hate, and the day became cankerous life
again. Was it wished for? Or if not wished for, was not the
not-wishing wicked? The questions were of no significance now.
Forgiveness? I will see her face in the pit of Eldon first, thought
Darconville who, without a shred of pity, was only certain before
the day was out to secure a stick of red chalk.