Darconville's Cat (6 page)

  Perspiring, President Greatracks—wailing like a
preaching jebusite and orthonational—drove in with his
industrie-protestant creedal formulations: a clattering windmill of
cheerings up, pep tonics, across-the-fence chat, and general
protrepticos, fanning, in crisis, all those who, in asking,
seeking, or knocking would receive, find, or have it opened unto
them. The volume of gas increased, according to physical principle,
as his temperature did the same.

  “At Quinsy, we have no truck whatsoever with those
so-called Northern, well,
views
and, that being the case,
aren’t so all-fired anxious for revolution, evolution, devolution
or any other damn lution y’all want to come up with! I’ve seen the
lot of them, sneakin’ around the campus at night with beards like
Stalin had and sandwich-boards broadcastin’ ‘Freedom!’ or ‘Down
with God and His Saints!’—all of them socialists, won’t-work
liberals, and bleedin’ heart sombitches—high-steppin’ like coons
and tryin’ to turn this place redder than a hawberry with their
radical Commie bushwa! Sowin’ discord! Havin’ into the coop! Huh?
Prit-near right, ain’t I? You better know it. Shoot, I could quote
you chapter and verse!”

  His fat body shook like a balatron, as if his soul,
biting for anger at a mouth inadequately circumferential, desired
in vain to fret a passage through it. He blated. He blaterated. He
blaterationed. Out blasted a flash of oratorical n-rays and
impatient oons while the echoes of his voice, pitched high,
strident, like the hellish sounds of Vergil’s Alecto, drumbeat
through the auditorium and went right to the pit of the
stomach.

  “You see that majestic piece of dry goods with the
stars-and-stripes hanging yonder? That speak to you of revolution?
The deuce, I say! And it aggravokes me like you wouldn’t believe to
see these pseudo-intellectual puddingheads—every one of them dumb
as a felt boot—buddyin’ up to Moscow! Well, put you in mind, we
don’t hold with this down South here. Eskimos eat the refuse out of
their pipestems! Japs fry ice-cream! Them little puck-faced Zuni
Indians from Mexico drink their urine! Polish dogs bark like this:
‘Peef! Peef!’ And instead of sayin’ hello in Tibet I’m told the
poor jinglebrains just stick out their tongues and hold up their
thumbs! That mean we do it? Huh?
Think
!

  “The Southran way, cousins, is the way
we
aim to follow. Item: we study here. Item: we won’t walk around here
lookin’ like boiled owls. Item: we’ll be sticking it through until
we ain’t got enough strength to blow the fuzz off a peanut, and
then we’ll work some more! Thread and thrumme!
Don’t
study
and your chances of stayin’ here are between slim and none—and slim
is on a plane-ride to Tahiti, you got it? I see any of them
irritating thimbleheads, house-proud pippins, and intellectual
willopus-wallopuses around here with signboards and complaints, and
it’s goodbye Quinsy, hello world, and that’s a promise, sisters,
that is a
promise
! You have to get up early, remember, to
get out of bed. Now, I always close with a quote from my favorite
author of books, one Arthur de Gobineau, a European person who once
said, ‘
Attaquez! Attaquez! Attaquez
!’ which means attack,
of course—in French. Gaze boldly into the past and put the future
behind you. Don’t let your brains go to your heads. You’ll thank
yourself someday—don’t mind thanking me, I don’t count. Now welcome
to Quinsy College, hear?”

  It was a rhetoric that would have taxed Quintilian
himself: a few final admonitions, accompanied by several
rumplestiltskinian stamps of anger—for the particular hardcore few
who, he thought, could not understand an order unillumined by
force—emphasized the need at the school of what his very manner
contravened, but this was by the by, for he had clearly argued
himself into a state of such broad magisterial cheek that he was
virtually beyond not only the accusation of such vulgarity but also
beyond its being adduced, in the same way that, philosophically, at
the exact moment of offense defense is clearly immoment. Not
Berosus with tongue of gold was he, neither silver-throated Solon,
rather a moody-sankeyan yammerer from the old school who, finishing
now, wound down to the conclusion that made up in volume what it
lacked in finesse. He jerked his head forward with one last glare,
beady as a vole’s, then picked up his clatter of clenches,
abstersives, and céphalalgies and thumped out into the wings on his
monstrous feet.

  One daring little beast in the back row frowned,
held her nose, and said, “
Puke
.”

  VII

  Quinsy College

  A hen is only an egg’s way of making another
egg.

        —SAMUEL
BUTLER

  QUINSY COLLEGE, est. 1839, was a quaint old
respectable school for girls. It stood in the seminary tradition of
the female academy: a chaste academic retreat, moral as peppermint,
built in semi-colonial red brick and set back in a deep green
delling where, alone—at least so felt the Board of Visitors (ten
FFVs with swimming eyes, three names, and hands with
liverspots)—one’s daughter could be lessoned in character and
virtue without the indecent distractions that elsewhere, everywhere
else, wherever led to vicious intemperance, Bolshevism, and free
thought. There were other girls’ schools in the area —Falcon Hall,
Longwood College, St. Bunn’s—but none was quite so singular as
Quinsy.

  It had been strictly private years ago, one of those
dame schools in the South, usually called something like Montfaucon
or Thirlwood or Miss Tidy’s Establishment for Young Ladies and run
by a woman with a name like Miss Monflathers, a bun-haired duchess
of malfeasance from the English-Speaking Union who was given to
wearing sensflectum crinolines and horsehair jupon and whipping her
girls at night. At the turn of the century, however, Quinsy came
under state receivership and, although suffering the shocks of
democracy, remained yet blind to change. It was an institution,
still, whose expressed intention was to diminish in distance and
time the dangers of creeping modernity and with prudes for proctors
and dowagers for deans to produce girls tutored in matters not only
academic but on subjects touching on the skillet, the needle, and,
though strangers yet to pain, even the nursery, a matter, it was
confidentially given out, not unrelated to that regrettable but
thankfully fleeting moment during which they would simply have to
bite on a bullet and endure.

  A legendary respect for the Southern lady—doubt it
who dares!— was all through the histories. The War Between the
States proved it. Robbed they might have been, subjected to
privation, yes, and burned out of hearth and home, but NEVER once
had they been set upon by masked outlaws, howling and rapacious
Negroes, or drunken Yankee soldiers who couldn’t see straight
anyway. And would you perchance like to know why? Their
manners
protected them. And those same standards of
conduct would always prevail in the South.

  The Quinsy handbook—a little bluebird-colored affair
which bore on its cover the sphragistic of a dove rising through
hymeneal clouds and carrying a banner with the college motto, “We
Preach, You Teach”—codified behavior for the girls. They were not
merely to have a type-and-file appearance. They were asked to wear
white gloves pouring tea, to perfume the wrists, and to maintain
custody of the eyes. They were advised to tithe, to avoid
boisterous hats, and to use the neglected herb, cerfeuil. They were
asked neither to lisp, squint, wink, talk loud, look fierce or
foolish nor bite the lips, grind the teeth, speak through the nose,
nor guffle their soup. They were encouraged, on the other hand, to
sew turkeywork, to refer to their young men as “gentlemen callers,”
and to accumulate, with a view to future use, egg-frames, salvers,
muffineers, and knife-rests. Above all, they were to familiarize
themselves with the history of the school.

  The Virginian’s was a record of which to be proud.
Tradition! Custom! History!—a meal of fresh heritables all to be
washed down with flagons of the fermented wine of the past. It was
a living heritage. There were no limits, furthermore, to the
historicogeographical importance of Quinsyburg itself, and it had
long been a matter of great pride to the townsfolk there to reflect
on the fact that Mr. Jefferson, once stopping by overnight, had
found the old Timberlake Hotel “clubbable” and that, in 1865,
General Robert E. Lee with his brave soldiers, on the march from
Saylor’s Creek to fateful Appomattox, straggled through this very
town, at which time the little sisters of mercy in the college
dorms flew with unspeakable horror to the sides of the wounded and
selflessly gave of themselves, cradling their hurt heads, applying
cupping glasses, plasters, and bandages, and humming strains of
“The Bonnie Blue Flag.” But today?

  Today was another story. Few even bothered to put
flowers on the Confederate monument anymore. The historical
society, its funds dwindling, had been removed to a room over the
theatre. And who ever took time anymore to visit the rare-book room
in Smethwick Library where Miss Pouce, not without effort, had
carefully gathered in a row of glass cases all that Quinsy
memorabilia? It was primarily a collection of old photographs, gum
bichromate prints, and bent platinotypes preserving the memory of
so many dear girls, a thousand blushing apparitions, who would
later go on to make their mark in the world, whether in the cause
of society, Stopesism, or the suffragettes: a group of languorous
girls, sitting cross-legged with hockey sticks, staring into the
middle distance with eyes pale as air and jelly-soft cheeks; one
dear thing, oversized, rolling a hoop somewhere; two husky tsarinas
posed humorlessly on the old athletic field pointing in mid-turn to
a third with a faint mustache and a bewildered expression
mis-gripping a croquet mallet, one high-buttoned shoe poised on a
small striped ball; a marvelous wide-angle shot, none the worse for
time, of forty or so students in bombazine—Quinsy girls
all!—trooping like mallards in pious, if pointless, gyrovagation
along the path of a field called now, as then, “The Reproaches”;
and many many others. ( Miss Pouce had secretly boxed three of the
lot, offensive ones which she kept down with the discards in the
basement: one, a girl in a droopy bag swimsuit à la Gertrude Ederle
pitching off a diving board, certain of her parts having been
circled in neurotoxified purple ink by some poor twisted Gomorrhite
years ago; and two others, shamelessly thumbed, showing ( 1 ) three
girls in chemistry lab smirking into the camera while they held up
a guttapercha object of unambiguous size and shape and (2) the same
girls but one—and she, in the distance, screaming with laughter,
and the object gone.) Smethwick was open until 10 P.M. It would be
9 P.M. on Saturdays, the rare-book room, of course, by appointment
only. Miss Pouce would be ever so pleased if you came by. Had no
one such time for things anymore?

  That was a fair question, for if Quinsyburg had a
wealth of anything it was certainly time, and, beyond that—as the
handbook so sagely put it—didn’t sloth, like rust, consume faster
than labor wears, with the key that’s often used remaining always
bright?

  The girls in that little gradus, if they paid
attention, had their rules for life. The most trifling actions,
they were reminded, if good, increased their credit but if bad
became a matter, when done, no apology could rectify. They were not
to fork for bread, dry their underpinnings by the fire, leave
lip-prints on drinking glasses, touch the teeth with the tines of a
fork, use rampant witticism, stipple the shower stalls, nor effect
shadowgraphs with the fingers at the Saturday movie, neither were
they ever to thrust out the tongue, sigh aloud, gape, swap
underwear, eat fish with the knife, use French words as that is apt
to grow fatiguing, nor cultivate mimicry which was the favorite
amusement of little minds. They must never strike out wantonly nor
snip their nails in public, neither hawk, spit, sniff, crack fleas
nor drum their fingers. They were asked not to jerk their hair out
of their eyes nor sip audibly nor effect the branch of a tree for
walking purposes nor indicate assent or dissent by motions of the
head, as was the wont of Northern girls. Neither must they spit on
their irons, crunch on cracknels, use primroses for floral
decoration, say rude things like “Stir your stumps!” or
“Tarnation!” or mutter anything whatsoever disrespectful about the
universe. In sharply turning a corner, coming suddenly in contact
with another, they had already abused a right. They were not to
whistle, toast cheese in their rooms, make memorandum knots in
their handkerchiefs, wangle their fingers during conversation, or
indulge in parades of learning, for they would surely live to see
verified that a woman who is negligent at twenty will be a sloven
at forty, intolerable at fifty, and at sixty a hopeless mental
case. To flee affectation and to be circumspect that she offend no
gentleman caller in her jesting and taunting, to appear thereby of
a ready wit, was, above all, paramount.

  There was, of course, this business of young men, a
matter nearest their hearts because most agreeable to their
ambitions, for a Southern girl without a man was like a
pushwainling without wheels. Southern boys, superintended parent
and patron alike, must be polished at all points and trained
correctly lest they flag in those battles for which they were now
in the very preparation, whether against the enemy agents of this
country or in behalf of Southern ideals, of which the girls at
Quinsy College, and like schools, were the most charming
synecdoche, and while there was a generous plenty—an epidemic, in
fact—of prep schools and Presbyterian colleges all over Virginia,
anti-intellectual rest homes which taught overadvantaged quidnuncs
how to wear rep ties and smile, the closest parallel to the female
academy, juxtaposing chivalry with charm, was the military
academy.