Darconville's Cat (13 page)

  “O my God!” groaned Miss Ballhatchet who threw her
bow spinning into the air like a boomerang. “O my God! O my God!
Will you all
look
at you?”

  From afar Darconville watched the girls: their
youthful and soft-sinewed bodies warm from activity, perfect,
shaped to full and nubile curves within the close-fitting white
uniforms, like Greek maidens, heedless of time, sporting on the
ancient plains of Lyrcea. They weren’t all awkward. Several were
quite efficient. They ingled their arrows into place, strained
against their cinctures, and, leather-wristleted, with golden legs
forming now to a wide stride, their valentine-shaped buttocks round
and taut and full, they drew back their bowstrings slowly, the
wings of their shoulder-blades peaking and tense in the sudden
stasis, and then release—
thwink! thwink! thwink
! —and it
rained arrows, some dudding in short arcs, many jiggery-pokery,
but, again, those distinct few whizzing into the targets with firm,
authoritative splats. Defter than the others, more consistent, was
one lustrous bow, drawing, releasing, and whistling arrow after
arrow into the bullseye as if she owned it.

  The archer?

  It was Isabel Rawsthorne, the chaste huntress, a
golden Phrygian in white tunic, her hair knotted behind in a bun of
attic beauty by an oxhide thong. The girl, plainly sought after,
wooed, admired, seemed to breed idolatry among her classmates who
consistently coupled up to her for conversation. She was the best
in the field. Everyone knew it, the students, the teacher. Oh,
certainly the teacher. The teacher, indeed! As stared the famished
eagle from the Digentian rock on a choice lamb that bounds alone
before Bandusia’s flock Miss Ballhatchet stared on Isabel.

  Darconville, even at that distance, isolated her and
watched her graceful movements—she worked as dexterously as a Mede,
a Scyth, a Lycian. He could almost feel the sweet perspiration on
the glistening down of her cobnut-colored arms, flushed with each
triumph, shot after shot. Splat! A gold. Splat! Splat! A red. A
gold. Splat! A gold. So pleased was she that fit Miss Ballhatchet,
otherwise aggressing from one to another to stay the trembling
hand, to thread the wobbling shaft, to mutter an apt warning, never
failed to circle this girl by the waist, take her to herself, and
sapphonically whisper a soft word of praise into the belomant’s
golden hair, as if to say with Kalliphonos of Gadara: “O love, thy
quiver holdeth no more winged shafts, for all thine arrows are into
me.”

  The thought, however, was not Darconville’s. It
couldn’t
be: fate, as he took it, had long ago convinced
him, if of the magic of earthly and mortal beauty, then also of its
dangers. One, he knew, could not infer the existence of a reality
which departed from the idea one had of it, and it was not enough
to have the idea of a beautiful woman to conclude that it also
existed. Gentle she seemed, breathtaking and mysterious, yes. A
child of his daydreams, one glorious flower of many and glorious, a
girl of fierce midnights and famishing morrows, no doubt, yes, yes,
yes! But the artist’s love of beauty, he also knew, should be
totally separated from his desire, no? Yes! And between the soul
and its abilities who, that would look into the heart of all
vision, would admit a difference?

  Darconville, smiling, signed his letter, stuck it
into an envelope, and getting up—he noticed it was becoming
overcast now, the sky above the color of claret—walked like a stag
around the far edge of the field toward the Quinsy post-office, but
glancing back once in the direction of the archers, he thought he
saw one particular girl, standing off from the group, turn and look
up long at him across the expanse of green— an irradiated
countenance that now, for a month or more, had shone upon him at
sudden, heart-stopping, and unlooked-for moments, like spirits
meeting air in air.

  It was all quite strange but, if a fantasy, nothing
more than that. Darconville had no
intention
of anything
more than that. They had never exchanged a word, and mightn’t, and
it didn’t matter. Darconville felt a sacred thrift in the
convenience of the Great Abstract, rather like Drayton who
addressed his lady under the name of “Idea,” fearing in relation to
his dreams to lose wonder in losing faith. The aesthetician,
thought Darconville, is mystical, his the mysticism which has no
need to believe in objectivity, in the reality of the object: it
was pure mysticism. And despite the fact that the distinguishable
affections for her that came to him in the obscure of night gave
him pause, when, at unsettling moments, he began to think of
Earthly Paradise as a social possibility instead of a geographical
dream, he piffled all away—because not accustomed to doing anything
else—as a glorious if inviting nothing and ascribed all to that
preternatural somnolence in which man, immanent with his earthly
dreams, seeks for platonic support by unconscious melodious
pleading in the equivalence of angels. Thus, thought Darconville,
are
we
open to arrows. It is the nostalgic sigh of air
that supports the whistling shaft, shooting at us precisely from
nowhere; such, like a waiting target, is the pervious heart. And so
not at first sight, nor with a dribbed shot, did Love give the
wound. He saw and liked, he liked but did not love.

  Crossing the street, Darconville heard the distant
sounds from the archery field: the harsh voice still issued
commands, the commands still echoed off the dormitory, the
dormitory still echoed the crows.

  The post-office was ready to close. The student
union, the corridors, the rows of numbered mailboxes—all were
empty. Darconville managed to shove his letter under the hatch just
before the postmistress was ready to bring down the window-roller.
He paid the lady, abruptly turned, and his heart quopped: Isabel
Rawsthorne stood directly in front of him. She smiled faintly,
lowering her eyes, and almost voicelessly asked past him for a
stamp. Then the roller hurtled down for good. And in that empty
corridor, they found themselves together, for the first time in
history, alone.

  Darconville swallowed: she was positively beautiful,
her skin luminous, glowing with perspiration, her hair pure flax
drawn back from her youthful temples showing slight blue veins, and
her eyes as clear as the waters of the Dircaean spring. She was
still wearing her archery clothes, wristlet, and arm-brace, and,
while she seemed mortal enough, he might have been staring upon the
angel Zagzagel, flaming above the burning bush.

  It was whimsical and fatal, at once.

  “Could you c-come to my house tomorrow, Isabel?”

  The reply, positive, was almost inaudible.

  “I live—”

  Her eyes sparkled. “—in the old white house?”

  And she was gone, and had been for five minutes—or a
year— before Darconville, waking to fact, noticed she had forgotten
her stamp.

  The weather had fully turned. Darconville walked out
of the building under the skirts of a promising thunderstorm, the
sky britannia, the clouds ruined at the edges in black mist. A wind
came up, cool, smelling of rain. As he passed along the street,
heading toward his house, he looked down over the archery field,
now empty, and thought: what will happen now? Curiously, he
wondered if she were simply the result of his own curiosity about
himself, as he might be for her. The trees shushed in the wind, as
mist could be felt in the air, and he saw several crows squirt from
a gigantic maple, one of which swung high over him like a half-born
thought, squawking in loud cracks:
actaeon! actaeon
!

  A line of poetry suddenly came to him from nowhere:
“Therefore that he may raise, the Lord throws down.” He recognized
the line, thought for a minute, and closed his eyes.

  “I am Donne,” quoth he.

  XV

  Tertium Quid

  Sir, say no more.

  Within me ‘tis as if

  The green and climbing eyesight of a cat

  Crawled near my mind’s poor birds.

        —TRUMBULL
STICKNEY

  THE OVERHANGING WOODS around campus were lovely, a
shiny black-green in the fine mist blowing, swirling, in the warm
wind that fluttered the poplars and swept yellow leaves from the
tall maples across the dark wet walk of Fitts dormitory. A skyful
of sullen clouds, piling out of each other, promised a glut of
rain. The dorms, their hundred hundred windows lighted against
nightfall, shed a fictitious glow over the landscape growing
obscure now toward outlying Quinsyburg.

  “Where all is Isabel?” asked her roommate, Trinley
Moss, to several of her suitemates there who at the last minute
were fitting on earrings, brushing out their hair, and touching on
lipstick before running off to the dining-hall. It was dinnertime.
“Out walking?” asked Glycera Pentlock. “Beats me,” shrugged
Childrey Fawcett, trying on a transparent rain hat. “Probably,”
said Sheila Mangelwurzel. “I haven’t seen her since archery, have
you?” Annabel Lee Jenks, who’d seen her coming out of the
post-office earlier, said she mentioned she might not be going to
Charlottesville with her this weekend.

  Squinting through the dark window, her hands clapped
to her temples as blinders, Trinley spied down three floors and
suddenly exclaimed, “Now, if that don’t beat all!”—for there was
Isabel, still wearing archery tunic and wristlet, skipping
heartfree through a cut-path and joyfully kicking up leaves and
crunching acorns all the way up the front steps. Trinley shook her
head, laughed, and left the window on a charge to join the others
scampering out in slickers, raingear, and old trenchcoats faded to
white and soiled to brown.

  Suddenly, Isabel heard a shout—and, turning to the
street, she felt her heart sink.

  An old blue car, dented and of an indistinct make,
was parked across the way. It was not so much the familiar eyes
scowling over the driver’s window, befogged and lowered halfway,
that upset her so much. It was the crooking finger that beckoned
her. It was the imperious crooking finger. It was the crooking
finger.

  The sky dissolved in heavy rain. Squealing, the
Fitts girls scattered through the puddles in their galoshes,
drenched for the farcical umbrellas that had blown inside-out.
Winnie Pegue, Castoria Fletcher, Ghiselaine Martin, Shirley Lafoon,
Lorinda and Lucinda Belltone, Hallowe’ena Rampling all ran ahead.
Late, Childrey Fawcett and Trinley Moss, clutching their rubber
hats to their ears for dear life, tore from the doorway and happily
spatterdashed in high boots across the lawn toward the archway of
the dining-hall. They ran past the mall, hardly looking up at the
blue car where two people, sitting within, seemed ghostly
silhouettes behind the steamed windows—one motionless, one
gesturing wildly as if the entire world was hostile to him and he
to the world, as if, as he talked, waging continuous warfare
against everything around him.

  “Was
that
the boy,” yelled Childrey through
the downpour, giggling, licking driblets from her face, and running
as fast as she could, “who drove Isabel down here?”

  “Yes,” hooted Trinley.

  “What is his name?”

  They were running furiously, squelching in long hops
across the grass.

  “Govert.”

  “I said,” gurgled Childrey, just out of earshot,
“what is his
name
, stupid?”

  The rain was hammering down in sheets. Trinley,
running hard, turned exasperatedly, put her hands into a foghorn,
and shouted, “I told you. Govert!
Govert van der
Slang
!”

  XVI

  Quires

  I met gnomes

  In a garden with many-colored flowerbeds.

        —MARIA
LEUBERG

  FRESHMAN PAPERS, phenotypically, leave something to
be desired. The stack of them on Darconville’s desk, a bundle of
odd-cum-shorts, seemed fathomless as he worked them over with a red
pencil long into the night. The work took his full attention: for
some reason, Isabel, leaving him a note, had postponed her visit to
the following night.

  So on he read. It was dreary prose, indeed, a
sententious parade of marrow-pea wisdom, garbled quotation, and
fractured syntax, the more frightful, most of them, for having been
written out in longhand. Niggards separated words. Ideorealists
upslanted. The morbid girls intertwined lines; the vain whorled;
the corkscrew hand seemed to indicate a kind of obstinacy.
Everyone’s handwriting had a physiognomy of its own. It was a
revelation of sorts, those, of course, that could be read, for
there were a few specimens of the hook-and-butt-joint variety which
looked as though they’d been written with a spitsticker mis-gripped
between two non-opposable toes.

  But the subject matter—there was the fascination!
The girls were Southerners, uncompetitive in terms of mind, and
while each approached her topic, alien because academic, with
buffleheaded equivocation and ineptitude, the papers almost all
digressed into an autobiography of dreamy fancy, teasing
indulgence, and orphie posturing: a high-souled but predatory tone
of flirtation which reduced everything of intellection to a
floating and eddying mistfall wherethrough each author’s face could
be found cutely peeking with batting eyelashes and that
romantically illuminated look usually reserved for meeting one’s
lover.

  Darconville sighed and looked, sighed and looked,
sighed and looked, and sighed again—then finished. He entered the
grades in his class book.

  “Martha Washington, Hemstitcher” by Muriel Ambler
B-