Books by Alexander Theroux

THREE WOGS (A Novel), 1972

THE SCHINOCEPHALIC WAIF (A Fable), 1975
THE GREAT WHEADLE TRAGEDY (A Fable),
1975
MASTER SNICKUP’S CLOAK (A Fable), 1979
DARCONVILLE’S CAT (A Novel), 1981

ALEXANDER THEROUX
Darconville’s Cat

Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Garden City, New York
1981

ISBN: 0-385-I595I-X
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 80-629
Copyright © 1981 by Alexander Theroux
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America

Acknowledgment:
Copyright 1923 and renewed 1951 by Wallace
Stevens.
Reprinted from The Collected Poems of Wallace
Stevens, by Wallace Stevens, by permission of Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc.
Master Snickup’s Cloak was first published by
Dragon’s World, Ltd. Copyright © 1979 by Dragon’s
World, Ltd., and Alexander Theroux

THEY FLEE FROM ME

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek,

With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them, gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand, and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise,

Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
And therewith all sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

But all is turned, through my gentleness,
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindely am served,
I fain would know what she hath deserved.

Sir THOMAS WYATT

 Explicitur

THIS IS A STORY of murder, which, as an act, is as

apt to characterize deliverance as it is to corroborate
death. There are certain elemental emotions that touch
upon powers other and larger than our own discrete
wishes might allow—for every consciousness is
continuous with a wider self open to the hidden processes
and unseen regions created in the soul by the very nature
of an opposite effort—and while, taken together, each
may prove the other simply by contrast, considered
separately neither may admit of various shades in the law
of whichever whole it finds reigning at the time. That
which produces effects within one reality creates another
reality itself. I am thinking, specifically, of love and hate.
We cannot distinguish, perhaps, natural from
supernatural effects, nor among either know which are
favors of God and which are counterfeit operations of the
Devil. Who, furthermore, can speak of the incubations of
motives? And of love and hate? Are they not too often, in
spite of the comparative chaos within us, generally taken
to be little more than a set of titles obtained by the mere
mechanical manipulation of antonyms? I have no
aspiration here to reclaim mystery and paradox from
whatever territory they might inhabit, for there is, indeed,
often a killing in a kiss, a mercy in the slap that heats your
face.
 There is, nevertheless, a particular poverty in those
alloplasts who, addressing tragedy, seek to subdistinguish
motives beyond those we have best, because nearest, at
hand, and so it is with love and hate— emotions upon
whose necks, whether wrung or wreathed, may be found
the oldest fingerprints of man. A simple truth intrudes: the
basic instincts of every man to every man are known. But
who knows when or where or how? For the answers to
such questions, summon Augurello, your personal
jurisconsult and theological wiseacre, to teach you about
primal reality and then to dispel those complexities and
cabals you crouch behind in this sad, psychiatric century
you call your own. It is the anti-labyrinths of the world
that scare. Here is a story for you. Your chair.
A.L.T.

Contents

Darconville’s Cat
 I

The Beginning

Delirium is the disease of the night.

----St. PONTEFRACT

DARCONVILLE, the schoolmaster, always wore

black. The single tree, however, that shanked out of the
front yard he now crossed in long strides showed even
more distinct a darkness, a simulacrum of the dread
probationary tree—trapfall of all lost love—for coming
upon it, gibbet-high and half leafless in the moonlight,
was to feel somehow disposed to the general truth that it
is a dangerous and pagan notion that beauty palliates evil.
He was alone. It had always seemed axiomatic for
him that he be alone: a vow, the linchpin of his art, his
praxis.
The imperscrutable winds of autumn, blowing leaves
across the porch, had almost stripped the tree, leaving it
nearly naked and essential against the moon that shone
down on the quiet little town in Virginia. It was late as he
let himself into the house and walked up the creaking
stairs to his rooms where, pulling a chair to the window,
he sat meditatively in that dark chamber like a nomadic
gulsar—his black coat still unbuttoned—and was left
alone with those odd retrospective prophecies borne in on
one at the start of that random moment we, for some
reason, choose to call the beginning of a new life.
The night, solemn and beautiful, seemed fashioned to
force those who would observe it to look within
themselves. He watched awhile and then grew weary. He
took a late mixt of some rolls and a bottle of ale and soon
dropped asleep on his bed, dreaming out of fallen reason
the rhymes received with joy he shaped accordingly. It
was only early the following morning that he found on the
bedside table next to his pen and unscrewed cap—a huge
Moore’s Non-Leakable—the open commonplace book in
which, having arisen in the middle of the night to do so,
he had written a single question: “Who is she?”

II

Darconville

I thought I heard the rustle of a dress, but I don’t—I

don’t see anyone. No, I imagined it.
—Peter Schlemihl; or, The Man Who Sold His
Shadow

SEPTEMBER: it was the most beautiful of words,

he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and
regret. The shutters were open. Darconville stared out into
a small empty street, touched with autumnal fog, that
looked like the lugubrious frontispiece to a book as yet to
be read. His obligate room, its walls several shades of
distemper, was spare as the skite of a recluse—a postered
bed, several chairs, and an old deal desk he’d just left,
confident in the action of moderating powers, to ease his
mind of some congested thoughts. He looked at his watch
which he kept hung on a nail. The afternoon was to have
been spent, as the morning had, writing, but something
else was on his mind.
There was an unfinished manuscript, tentatively
called Rumpopulorum, spread out there, a curious, if
speculative, examination of the world of angels,
archistrateges, and the archonic wardens of heaven in
relation—he appropriated without question the right to
know both—to mortal man. The body of material,
growing over the last few months, was formidable, its
sheets pied with inky corrections and smudged with the
additions that overheated his prose and yet brought it all
to test.
The human skull, his pencils in its noseholes, that had
been ritually placed on that desk a week previous—his
first days in the South— seemed appropriate to his life, a
reminder, mysteriously elate, of what actually wasn’t,
something there but not, a memory of man without one,
for not only had he more or less withdrawn from the
world, long a characteristic of the d’Arconvilles, but the
caricatures of mortal vanity were as necessary to his point
of view as the unction of religious conventionality was
featureless.
Darconville’s cat leaped onto the windowsill and
peered up, as if collating the thoughts of his master:
where were they? How had they come to be here? What
reason, in fact, had they to be in this strange place? The
young man, however, continued leaning by the window
and reviewing what he saw. But there was another view,
for behind it, or perhaps beyond somewhere, in vague,
half-blind remembrances of wherever he’d been—sources
of endless pleasure to him—he dwelled awhile to find
himself, looking back in time, surprised at the absence in
it of any figure but his own. He felt no particular
responsibility to memory but accepted his dreams, to
which, living altogether as a twin self in the depths of
him, he could speak in inviolable secrecy.
It had long seemed clear, commandmental: to seek
out a relatively distant and unembellished part of the
world where, in the solitude he arranged for himself—
rather like the pilgrim who lives on lentils, pulses, and the
tested modes of self-denial—one might apply himself to
those deeper mysteries where nameless somethings in
their causes slept. He sought the obol of Pasetes, the
mallet of Daikoku, the lamp of Aladdin. There were
difficulties, often, in the way of carrying out his plans.
But he overbore them and, hoping to fall prey to neither
fascination nor fatigue, sought only to stem distraction, to
learn the secrets beyond the world he felt belonged to
him, and to write. It was the Beatitude of Destitution.
Alaric Darconville—insurrect, courteous, liturgical—
was twenty-nine years old. He had the pointed medieval
face of a pageboy, which showed less of mature
steadiness than innocent deliberation, an expensive
coloring backlit with a kind of intangible grace, and his
eyes, of a strange tragic beauty, dark and filled with
studying what’s represented by what is, could light up like
a monk at jubilee when rounding the verge of a new idea
and sparkle up in happy conviction as if to say
“Excelsior!” He dreamed, like Astrophel, with his head in
the stars. His mind was like one of those Gothic
cathedrals of which he was so fond, mysterious within,
and filled with light, a brightness at once richer and less
real than the light of day, flashing accompaniment, on
occasion, to the long satirical tirades of which he was also
capable and yet wakefully aware, in gentleness, of what
in matters of difficulty he felt should either be removed,
pitied, or understood. He was six feet tall. His hair he
wore long, like the Renaissance prince at his lyre, and it
matched in color his coat of jet which was of an obsolete
but distinct cut and as black as the mundus where Romans
communed with their dead.
The book he was working on—a grimoire, in the old
style— recapitulated such communication. He scribbled
away in the light of his gooseneck lamp that not only left
the rest of the room in darkness but at such times
rendered insignificant any matters of consequence beyond
that. There was a private quality about him as he worked:
a wizard in conical hat conjuring mastertricks; the
sacristan jing-jing-jingling the bells of sext; the alchemist,
counsel to caliphs, shuttling in a cellar enigmatic beaker
to tort for rare demulcents and rubefacients. It was a
closed world, his, arresting thoughts for words to work, to
skid around, to transubstantiate: the writer is the ponce
who introduces Can to Ought. He crafted his writing and
loved listening to those tiny explosions when the active
brutality of verbs in revolution raced into sweet
established nouns to send marching across the page a
newly commissioned army of words-on-maneuvers, all
decorated in loops, frets, and arrowlike flourishes.
Darconville was bedeviled by angels: they stalked and
leaguered him by night and day, and, when sitting at his
desk, he never failed to acknowledge Stimulator, the
angel invoked in the exorcism of ink, for the storm and
stress of making something from nothing partook no less
of the supernatural than Creation itself. Was doubt the
knot in faith’s muscle? And yet faith required to fill the
desert places of an empty page? Then this was a day in
September no different from any others on which he
wrote, the mind making up madness, the hand its little
prattboy hopping along after it to record what it could of
measure—but there was one exception.
Darconville anxiously kept seeing the face of one of
his students, someone he had noticed on the first day of
class. She was a freshman. He didn’t know her name.
He might have spent an inattentive afternoon in
consequence but, subdued by what had no charm for him,
instead vexed himself to write as a means of serving
notice to a mischief he’d been uncertain of now for too
many days. Beauty, while it haunted him, also distracted
him; unable to resist its appeal, he, however, longed to be
above it. There is a will so strong as to recoil upon itself
and fall into indecision: a deliberate person’s, often, who,
otherwise prompt to action, sometimes leaves everything
undone—or, better, assumes that whatever has been done
is something already charged to an appointed end,
relieving him then of calling into question by subsequent
thought the meaning of its worth. Did Darconville’s mind,
then, obsessed and overwhelmed by images and dreams
of the supernatural, crave at last for the one thing stranger
than all these—the experience of it in fact? It is perhaps
easy to believe so.
He was born—of French and Italian parentage—on
the reaches of coastal New England where the old
Victorian house that was the family seat stands to this day
in a small village hard by the sea. It was always a region
of spectacular beauty, infinite skies and meadows and
ocean, and all aspects of nature there seemed drawn
together in a tie of inexpressible benediction. His youthful
dreams were always of a supernatural cast, shot through
with vision, and nothing whatsoever matter-of-fact could
avail against the propagation of his early romantic ideals.
It had been instilled in him early—his Venetian
grandmother fairly threw her hands over her ears at the
suggestion of any aspiration less noble—that the goal of a
person’s life must naturally afford the light by which the
rest of it should be read, a doctrine that paradoxically
created in him less a strength against than a disposition to
a belief in unreal worlds, a condition somehow making
him particularly unsuited for the heartache of real life.
The facts of one’s childhood are always important
when touching on a genius. Darconville was an ardently
religious boy, much attracted to ritual. At six, he won the
school ribbon for a drawing of the face of God—it
resembled a cat’s—and illustrated a juvenile book of his
own dramatic making which ended: “But wait, there is
something coming toward me—!” There were illnesses,
and a double pneumonia in childhood following a nearly
fatal bout with measles left his lungs imperfect. He would
never forget his father who read to him or his mother who
kissed him goodnight, for he lost both of them before he
was fourteen, whereupon, becoming wayward and
discontented with everything else, he cut short his
schooling to join the Franciscan Order, less on the advice
growing out of the newly assumed regency of his
grandmother, though that, than on the investigation of a
dream: a nostalgia for vision, if commonly absent in
others, then not so for a little boy whose earliest memory
was of trying to pick up pieces of moonlight that had
fallen through the window onto his bed.
Seminary life in those early years led to strange and
unaccountable antipathies. It was not that he didn’t feel he
fit, but if particulars went well—in everything, save,
perhaps, for the occasional youthful temptation he
suffered during lectio divina while reading Lucretius on
the terminology of physical love—general acceptance
came hard. He improvised piano arrangements at
midnight, claimed he could work curses, and put it about
that he believed animals, because of a universal language
from which we alone had fallen, could understand us
when we spoke. He astonished his fellow students,
furthermore, with several rapturous edificial schemes few
shared: to rebuild the tomb of St. John at Ephesus; to set
up birdhouses for Christ through upstate New York; and
to reconstruct—he actually stepped off the dimensions on
the ballfield and began to assemble planks—Noah’s Ark.
Throughout these years he showed a splendid but
innocent sense of fun.
Darconville owned a great fat pen he called “The
Black Disaster” —an object, he demoted, no other hand
dare touch! His classmates were solemnly, ceremoniously,
assured it was magic, and it was coveted by all of them
only in so far as stealing it might render its owner a less
vivid, if not less bumptious, antagonist. He managed
never to relinquish it, however, and drew angels all over
his copybooks; wrote squibs about some of his colleagues
which, signed “Aenigmaticus,” he secretly distributed in
various library books; and one day, for drawing a fresco
—his capolavoro—of St. Bernard excommunicating a
multitude of flies at Foigny, where each little creature
ingeniously, but undisguisedly, bore the face of one of the
college prefects, he was slapped so hard by a certain
Father Theophane that it effected a stammer in him that
would be activated, during moments of confrontation, for
the rest of his life. Hostility eventually built up, and his
unconventional conduct became the subject of such
unfavorable comment in the college that it was suggested
he leave. A few defended him. (He believed it was
because there had once been a cardinal in his family, as
indeed there had been.) The rest, some silently abusive,
naggingly malevolent, or outright vindictive, more or less
concurred in the bizarre if hard to be seriously taken fiat
that he not only vacate the premises but withdraw,
meditate, and summarily impale himself on the same
wretched object that had been the source, in several ways,
less of any black disaster than of their own humorless and
over-pious objections.
As it happened, he never attained to the priesthood—
not, however, because he didn’t again try. For try again he
did, but failed once more. And yet with what reckless
audacity, with what fierce, uncompromising passion did
he always charge and fight and charge again! Resignation
to appointed ends? He was not of an age for that. And as
there hovered before him, always, a sense of disgust in
resigning the soul to the pleasures and idle conveniences
of the world, his aspirations, individual and metaphysical,
led abruptly to another decision. He entered a Trappist
monastery at eighteen and yet, again, before long fell into
confusion and a particular variety of quarrels there for
which he was never directly responsible but to which, as
we’ve seen, even the most saintly precincts are liable. The
principal agent of the worst of them was a priggish
anathemette named Frater Clement who, without the gift
of reason, much less the gift of faith, had as his goal not
the salvation of his soul but the acquisition in matrimony
of a blond boy, another novice, who thought the world
was run and possibly owned by the Order of Cistercians.
His submission was naïveté, but Darconville grew
impatient with the other’s venal disability. And one
afternoon as the monks were proceeding to nones, he
snared the hypocrite by the cowl, pulled him into a side-
cloister, and—not without stuttering—adroitly gave him
the lecture on spiritual discipline he found later, much to
his own grief, he himself couldn’t follow, for he saw he
couldn’t forgive Frater Clement, whose jug ears alone at
chant and chapter phosphorized his charity on the spot.
Dismal depression followed. He received the blessing of
the Abbot, who repeated the famous words of the old
desert fathers: “fuge, tace, et quiesce” and, leaving the
following day in an egg truck—with one suitcase, a great
fat pen, and all his limitations—went bouncing over the
hill in the direction of the declining sunshine.
At twenty, in what was probably the climactic event
of his life, Darconville discovered writing, the sole
subject of his curiosity at this time being words and the
possibility of giving expression to them. Now, among
those fragile loves to which most men look back with
tenderness and passion, certain must be singled out as of
special importance: in young Darconville’s life it was to
be his proud and irrepressible grandmama whose
affection for him was always on the increase and who—
never once having failed to give fortitude to his
individuality, although in quaint deference to his family’s
nobility on the paternal side she used only his surname in
matters of address, a habit he would continue all his life
—with rising emphasis that gave words to his inward
instincts encouraged him at this critical juncture of his life
to go live with her in Venice. At every point she was
replete with wise suggestions, the value of which he
recognized and the tenor of which he followed. Did he
want to write? she had asked and upon the instant
answered Darconville, who had but to follow the
direction of her raised and superintendent cane to a corner
where sat a beautiful desk.
It wasn’t long before his grandmother passed away.
The palazzo, immediately becoming the object of what
had even long before been a curious litigation, was locked
up. And so with a certain amount of money earmarked for
his education, belated for the clerical years, he took her
cat, Spellvexit—his sole companion now—and set sail
back to the United States, looking once more for the
possibilities of the possible as possible. The spirit of his
youthful dreams, long, strangely enough, having retarded
his purposes rather than advancing them, he studiedly
refused to renounce: of justice and fair play, of living
instead of dying, of loving instead of hating. Single
virtue, he always believed, was proof against manifold
vice. And yet all the caprices and aspects of human life
that gratified curiosity and excited surprise in him
continued only as incidents on the way to Glory.
Darconville—wherever—quite happily chose to live
within his own world, w’thin his own writing, within
himself. The thickest, most permanent wall dividing him
from his fellow creatures was that of mediocrity. His
particular sensibility forbade him to accept unquestioned
society’s rules and taboos, its situational standards and
ethics, syntheses that to him always seemed either too
exclusive or too inclusive. His domineering sense of right,
as sometimes only he saw it, and his ardent desire to keep
to the fastness of his own destiny, set him apart in several
ways. Reclusive, he shrank from all avoidable company
with others—it was the prerogative of his faith to
recognize, and of his character to overpower, objection
here—and chose to believe only that somewhere, perhaps
on the footing of schoolmaster, he could inoffensively
foster sums, if modest, then at least sufficient to allow
him the time to write. He sought the land of Nusquamia, a
place broadly mapped out in James 4:4, and whether by
chance or perchance by intention one day, wasting no
time balancing or inquiring, he selected a school for the
purpose, was hired, and disappeared again into the arcane.
It didn’t really have to have a name. In fact, however, it
did. It was a town in Virginia, called Quinsyburg.
The train whistle there every evening seemed to
beckon, dusk, precreating a mood of sudden melancholy
in a wail that left its echo behind like the passing tribute
of a sigh. And Darconville, while yet amply occupied,
was by no means so derogate from the common run of
human emotions as not to share, upon hearing it—
Spellvexit always looked up—a derivative feeling of
loneliness, a disposition compounded, further, not only by
the portentous evidences of the season but also by the
bleakness of the place upon which it settled. The town
was the quotidian co-efficient of limbo: there was no
suddenness, no irresistibility, no velocity of extraordinary
acts. He found hours and hours of complete solitude
there, however, and that became the source, as he wrote,
not of oppressive exclusiveness but of organizing
anticipations he could accommodate in his work: the
mystic’s rapture at feeling his phantom self. He had
assumed this exile not with the destitution of spirit the
prodigal is too often unfairly assigned, nor from any
aristocratic weariness a previous life in foreign parts
might have induced, but rather to pull the plug of
consequence from the sump of the world—to avoid the
lust of result and the vice of emulation.
There are advantages to being in a backwater, and at
the margins, in the less symphonic underground,
recriminations were few, ambition didn’t mock useful toil,
and the bald indices of failure and success became
irrelevant. The man beyond the context of hope is equally
beyond the context of despair, and the serious vow
Darconville had once made to himself, medievally sworn
in the old ipsedixitist tradition of silent knights, holy
knights, aimed to that still point; so it was with love as
with loneliness: to fall in love would make him a
pneumatomachian—an opponent of the spirit which,
however, to him disposed to it, nightly blew its
unfathomable afflatus down the cold reaches of the
otherwise impenetrable heavens to quicken man to magic.
It didn’t matter where he was. No, the best attitude to
the world, he felt, unless the Patristics belied us, was to
look beyond it. Darconville was below envy and above
want. And what pleasures a place denied to the sight, he
hoped, were given necessarily to the imagination. He
sought the broom of Eucrates, the sword of Fragarach, the
horse of Pacolet. Prosperity, furthermore, had perhaps
killed more than adversity, an observance fortified in him
by what was not only the d’Arconville motto but also his
grandmother’s most often repeated if somewhat overly
enthusiastic febrifuge: “Un altro, un altro, gran’ Dio, ma
più forte!” And so he had come to this plutonial grey area,
a neglected spot, where passersby didn’t look for art to
happen as it might and when it would—to lose himself for
good, in both senses, and realize the apocalypse that is
incomprehensible without Patmos. The passion for truth
is unsociable. We are in this world not to conform to it.
It had grown dark.
Darconville had finished a day’s writing, took some
cigarettes from his suitcase, still as yet unpacked, and
walked through the disheveled light down the flight of
stairs to the porch—the night was positively beautiful—
when past the hedges, through the rustling leaves by the
large tree, he thought he saw a girl, looking
apprehensively side to side, walk quickly across the street
like a tapered dream-bird in fragile but pronounced strides
and then disappear. But he noticed something else. He
reached down to pick up from the doorstep a small round
object, studded with a hundred cloves, its pure odor a
sweet orange like September. It was a pomander ball.
Darconville, by matchlight, slipped the accompanying
card out of its tiny envelope. It read simply: “For the
fairest.”
They were the three words that had started the Trojan
War.

III

Quinsyburg, Va.

Death hath not only particular stars in Heaven, but

malevolent Places on Earth, which single out our
Infirmities and strike at our weaker Parts.
—Sir THOMAS BROWNE, A Letter to a Friend

RULE A LINE from Charlottesville, directly through

Scottsville and its lazy river, and draw it down—a straight
180°—into the southside, fixing it to a terminal in the
heart of Prince Edward County, Va. Follow scale to
measure the low point. Now, drive that sixty miles of
narrow godforsaken road past old huts and shacks, scrub
pines and blasted forests into a desolation the crossed
boundaries of which, though not silent to your eyes, one
feels more in the depth of imagination, the kind of
anxiety, a foreboding, of a guilt within not traceable to a
fact without; turn then and trail slowly on a wind across a
tableland of sallow weeds and sunken dingles into flat
tobacco country where the absence of perspective seems
as if offered in awful proof of what suddenly, crouching
in a perfect and primitive isolation, becomes a town. Stop
your car. Your hesitations are real. You can hear yourself
breathing. You can hear your hands move. You are in
Quinsyburg.
It is immediately a terrible letdown, a dislocation,
solitary in the framework of its rigid and iconoclastic
literalness, which yet sits in the exact center of the
Commonwealth of Virginia, a state commemoratively
named—if we may charitably disregard for a moment her
biological interMdes with everyone from the royal
dancing master to the beetle-faced Duke of Anjou[1]—
after the twenty-third British sovereign, Elizabeth I, she
of the judas wig: bastard, usurper, excommunicate,
baldpate, heretic, murderess, schismatic, and willing
copulatrix. The sharp and instinctive disappointment you
feel, that this must be the capital city of all failure,
wrongheadedness, and provinciality, does not subside—it
increases, intensifies, heightens. The approach that
announces with sadder and sadder emphasis its sterility
leads only to a confirmation of its deeper afflictions: for it
amounts to, infringes on, nothing, shares npthing with the
prospect of the sky but, deathshot with monotony, lies
like a shroud wrapped around itself as if, so determined, it
refuses to be inhabited by even so much as the relative
humanity of a corpse. It is infinitely liker hell than earth,
the proper place to feel the first hint of the decay of the
fall. It appears to have extracted from beauty the piety
given to it and, keeping that, dismissed the rest as
ignominious accident to build a town. A sign tells you
where.

[[1] Greetings here might also be extended to

Alençon; Charles Blount; Hatton; De Vere; Heneage; Sir
Walter Raleigh; Admiral Thomas Seymour; Robert
Dudley, Earl of Leicester; Eric, King of Sweden; Robert
Devereux, Earl of Essex; Archduke Charles of Austria;
and any number of others.]

The place—nothing surrounded by nowhere—is

rigorously confined within its own settled limits, huddled,
as if on its knees searching the corners of its rural
conscience for some sin of omission or commission
whereby, to ratify the truth of natural depravity, every
pleasure, every recreation, every trifle scratched out of the
dust might then be magnified into a great offense, and
less for its severe white churches than a general mood of
dissent do you feel that the deepest solicitudes of its
inhabitants must have nothing to feed on except by what
either outraged godliness or gave the devil his due. Crete
had no owls, Thebes no swallows, Ithaca no hares, Pontus
no asses, Scythia no swine. Quinsyburg had no hope. It is
overpowering to realize and worse suddenly to accept,
you fight it, and only the muteness of apprehension stifles
an immediate impulse to cry out in despair, “Of all the
loveless, lifeless things that quail beneath the wrath of
God, commend Quinsyburg to it!”
 IV

He Enters the House of Rimmon

My child, how didst thou come beneath the murky

darkness, being still alive?
—Odyssey, XI, 155-156

MISS THELMA TRAPPE, spinster, had a pitted

nose. An ex-schoolmistress from Quinsy College, having
been forced because of age to retire, she could often be
seen walking eccentrically up and down the streets of the
neighborhood in her wide straw hats, peering over her
spectacles and repeating like a mantra to the sun, “Let me
suffer, just keep shining. Let me suffer, just keep
shining.”
One Saturday morning, she simply walked over to
Darconville, who was sitting on a porchswing, and with
her little pyewacket of a head turned sweetly to the side
asked him, as he was new there, would he care to see the
town? A little walking tour, perhaps?
It was the first friend Darconville had made in
Quinsyburg. An exile herself, she had come down from
New Hampshire many years ago, stayed on to teach, and
now lived by herself in rented rooms at the top of the hill
where the loneliness, she said, always seemed worse. She
wore a dress like a teepee, loved frequently to quote from
her favorite literary piece, “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on
Whist,” and although she once had red hair and fair skin,
with the passage of time and more than periodic though
secret infusions of parsnip wine they had reversed,
creating a face rather like a crabapple. It was a glorious
day, and so they went off together on the jaunt,
exchanging confidences freely from the very start.
Quinsyburg was the county seat. The old courthouse
stood behind a short lawn in the square. The place hadn’t
changed much since the long-gone days of the Civil War,
and its townsfolk—ardent lifelong drys—lived out their
small agonies or quietly went to the dogs in the proper
behind-the-curtains manner of shabby genteel
respectability. There was an odor of decay there, of
custom, of brittle endurance, a sort of banality, with yet
something sinister, waiting below the bleak checkerwork
of vacant yards, used-car lots, gas stations, and the
panmoronium of faded motels (the “Bide-A-Wee,” the
“Sleepy Hollow,” etc.), to the rooms of which, studiously
obliterative of every trace of pretense, came the intrepid
Polos and pan-animated wanderers of America who, in
point of fact, had usually taken the wrong road, missed
the right bus, blinked the incidentals of a highway sign, or
somehow got delayed or waylaid at the eleventh hour. It
was a little world unpardonably misled by fundamentalist
drivel, a stronghold of biblicism, and one drowned in the
swamp of its execrable simplicities. Nowhere could be
found anything in the way of adornment. It was a place
that liked its coffee black, its flapjacks dry, its adjectives
few, its cheeses hard, its visits short, its melodies
whistleable, and its dreams in black and white—
preferably the latter.
 Darconville was amused to find Miss Trappe setting a
good pace, her hat so large, wagging, that she looked like
a tip under a plate. “ ‘I like a thorough-paced partner,’ “
quoted Miss Trappe, “as Mrs. Battle would say.” They
crossed through the nicer part of town, an area of well-
treed properties and rows of colonnaded houses,
handsomely appointed in old brick that served also the
formal front walks, chimneys, and no-longer-used slave
quarters out back. The patrician section of Quinsyburg
was small.
This was not the doo-dah South of the Camptown
Races, good bourbon, and the smell of honeysuckle in old
shambling yards where at dusk one heard the sound of
risible Negroes pocking out “Dixie” on hand-hewn
banjos. It was far more dreadful and far less eloquent: a
kind of cimmeria, a serviceable huggermugger of old
wooden tobacco sheds; auction barns; too many hardware
stores; a dismal shoe factory; and a run-down dairy bar
into whose neon “foot-long hotdog” sign, at night, sizzled
bugs blown in by the stale breezes of the dung-drab
Appomattqx River which sludged along its fosses of
spatterdock and alligator weed and milfoil. The freight
train Darconville had heard but hadn’t yet seen chugged
through town once in a while on its way to Cincinnati, but
as it had long ago stopped taking on passengers, the
station had fallen into disrepair. The town came to an
abrupt halt at both ends, a foolish watertank marking the
limits on one side and the other giving way to a region of
fat-farms and open fields which, several times a year,
suddenly sprouted up tents soon to be all faffed up with
the trivialities of the camp-meeting and the chatauqua
harangue, the county fair and the vote-rousing picnic. But
these were special events.
 During most of the year, the brass-jewelry tastes of its
citizens—you knew them by string ties, brutal haircuts,
and snap-brim hats, with fishhooks and lures, .advertising
things like “Funk’s Hybrid” or “Wirthmore Feeds”—ran
to little more than a general enthusiasm for church bake-
offs, barbershop gossip, and all that hand-me-down
bumpkinry touching on Bryanism, vice-crusading, and
prohibition. It was a town nonascriptive, nonchalant, and
nonentitative, one of those places that lent itself to uneasy
jokes or gave rise to dismissive quips, like “I spent a
whole week there one Sunday” or “It’d be a great place to
live if you were dead” or “I visited there once, but it was
closed.”
“Look,” pointed Miss Trappe, coming to a halt. “I
never see him without thinking, for some reason, of my
father.” The statue of a sinople-green Confederate soldier,
so common in Southern communities, stood above them
on a granite pediment, surrounded by cannonballs, with a
dapper Van Dyke beard, a bandolier, a rifle-at-the-ready,
and a chivalric squint into the heart of the legitimacy of
states’ rights, honoring those who died—so read the
inscription—”in a just and holy cause.” He was the
Defender of State Sovereignty. He stood there in all
weather, unphased by birdlime or pigeons. He never
flinched. “My father left us, you know. I was only a child,
but almost died of shame. Oh yes, but that was long ago,
and, besides,” she sighed, “that, as they say, was in
another country.”
The main buildings of Quinsy College could now be
seen across the street, a cloister of white columns running
along by way of a portico. Disquisiting, somewhat
abstractly, on the college’s history, Miss Trappe stepped
off the sidewalk. Suddenly leaping back to the curb—
peevishly screeching, “You!”—she saved her toes, just, as
a green pickup truck with an armament rack at the back
window whipped out onto High St. and raced toward
Main, pedal to the metal. The driver, an underscullion
with a face like a knife, called out something vile.
Miss Trappe and Darconville continued walking, a
strange little mock-up—a skeptical Dante, a wizened
Beatrice—in a most un-paradisaical world: a matchbox-
sized theatre, an ice-cream shop, and the old Timberlake
Hotel, with its chintz curtains, upon whose shaded
veranda sat several cut-to-the-pattern townies slumped in
black-lacquered wicker chairs and several careworn
arteriopaths, hunched up like angry hawks, fussily
presiding over a game of dominoes. “Percy,” came a
squawk, “you ain’t got enough strength to pull a greasy
string out of a goose’s ass.” A slam followed. “Move!”
Miss Trappe shook her head. “I had a brother,” she said,
out of the blue, “who always played chess with me. We
wouldn’t consider dominoes.” She paused. “He married,
lost his wife to another, took to drink—” A distinct
sorrow came into her eyes.
“And is he—”
Miss Trappe made a cataphatic nod. “By his own
hand. He was twenty.” She sighed and stumped along. “
‘The rigor of the game,’ “ she said, “as Mrs. Battle would
say.”
They came to Quinsyburg’s main street. It was a
contingent, down both sides, of shoulder-to-shoulder
shops, a frontage dull and repetitious but saved from the
blight of uniformity by cute mercantile jingles painted on
each window—the poetic effusions of various local
struld-brugs and place-proud retailers—which in small
towns, for some peculiar reason, become such a rich
source of humor: United Dixiebelle Cup Co. (“Even Our
Name Begins with You”); Quinsyburg Bedding Co. (“We
Give You a Lot of Bunk”); The Old Dominion Outlet (“If
Your Clothes Aren’t Becoming to You, You Should Be
Coming to Us”); Stars ‘N’ Bars Exterminating Co. (“All
Our Patients Die”); Piedmont Travel Service ( “Please Go
Away” ); Southside Rug and Linoleum ( “The Best Floor
Show in Town” ); The Virginia Shook Co. (“We’ll Stave
You In”); The Quinsyburg Gun Shop (“The First to
Last”); and The Prince Edward Lumber Co. (“May We
Strike a Cord for You?”)
The Southern town, a parody of itself, is the
prototype from which every other one is copied. Where is
the one, for instance, that doesn’t have a radio announcer
named Don Dale; a private white academy; Muddy
Creek; a chili-dog emporium; the State theatre; Jaycees
with berry-knotted ties; a sheriff called “Goober”;
something like the ol’ Shuckcorn Place (it’s always
supposed to be haunted by J. E. B. Stuart); a popular
delivery boy-cum-halfwit named Willis Foster; and a
local NRA enclave that meets upstairs in the gunshop
every Friday night to tell lies and make up stories about
niggers, nymphomania, and New York City?
Darconville and Miss Trappe took time for tea at the
Seldom Inn (“A Place to Remember for Cares to Forget”)
—a popular meeting place downtown for the professional
tie-and-jacket faction (booths) who rotated matchbooks
and told loud interminable tales and various peckerwoods
(stools) who gripcruppered their coffee cups from the
non-handle side and stared into a stippled wall-mirror at
their chinless faces and pointed ears. The jukebox was
blaring country music— Kitty Wells, “Honky Tonk
Angels”—making it impossible to talk, so Darconville
and Miss Trappe together watched through the window as
the Quinsyburg townsfolk passed by, peculiar people on
the hop, remarkably alike all, with faces like the trolls on
German beer mugs, the curious result, perhaps, of
poultry-like inbreeding (farmers, farmers’ daughters,
farmers’ daughters’ farmers) that had transmogrified a
once vital eighteenth-century Protestant Celtic stock into
a hedgecreeping lower-class breed of joltheads and jusqu’
aubouts and then metastasized into one huge gene pool
which seemed to reach from the bulletheaded truckers of
Mississippi to the triple-named senators of Virginia,
slackjawed and malplasmic to a one. It seemed an orgy of
kin, with everybody anybody’s cousin.
It was a burlesque subordinating individuality to a
constant reference of type. Quaeritis habitantes?
Rotarians; wood-hewing gibeonites; 32° Masons and their
ball-jars; pushing tradesmen; zelators and zélatrices; Odd
Fellows of indecipherable worth; Hemerobaptists; racist
Elks (B!P!O.E.) and their shovelmouthed wives, usually
named Lorinda or Moxone; psalm-snufflers; longnosed
umbrella-carrying joykillers; widows with
applepandowdy faces; Volsteaders; rattle-toothed
almsters; gout-footed Shriners; tiny birdheaded clerks in
red suspenders; supposititious chamberers of commerce;
pullulating boosters; and cretinous, peasant-like Colin
Clouts on every street corner who slunched against poles
squinting and chewing down toothpicks in a slow
watchful rhythm.
Growing depressed, Miss Trappe suggested she
resume showing Darconville the town she simultaneously
warned him against, arguing, convincingly, that a writer
in staying too long would go mad there. The suicide rate
in Quinsyburg, she said, was—she stopped and, in the
reflection of a window, retied under her chin the wide
straw hat.
“High?”
The crabapple wrinkled. “Astronomical.”
I will stay here for only a year, thought Darconville,
and try to do my work. He told Miss Trappe he’d take the
chance, but she told him that Mrs. Battle said chance is
nothing. And yet, he reasoned, wasn’t the price for
privacy anonymity? Un altro, un altro, gran’ Dio, ma più
forte.
They now stood in front of the Wyanoid Baptist
Church, a plain white affair with the usual homiletic
menu out front and at the peak of its steeple, spiritual
guerdon to a whole community, a weathervane in the
shape of a metal cricket (has anyone ever figured that one
out?).
Quinsyburg, Va. was one of those places where pulpit
and drum ecclesiastick were beat with a fist instead of a
stick, and whatever the persuasion—whether Wycliffites,
Old Order Bunkers, Stundo-Baptists, or the International
Church of the Foursquare Gospel— religion was religion
as long as it had been scoured of any whim or wishet that
flirted with Rome or ritual or racial equality. It was, in
fact, a reactionary little town filled with stiff-nosed
Galatians, circuit-riders, and reformers with upsidedown
bibles, all looking up hill and down dale for a chance to
save someone’s soul. The place teemed with Presbyters
Writ Large, and on every Sunday this very church,
become a hotbed of tracasseries and dissent, swelled to
overflowing with singing, ringing wonglers, diehards
from the U.D.C. looking for fellowship, and hundreds of
bag-in-hand geriatrics with voices like hoopoes who
preferred their theology muscular, their ministers mousy,
and their church quite definitely in the majority.
Darconville bent forward to read the little marquee—
and cocked an eyebrow. It read:

Sermon
”Did God Wink?” (Acts 17:30)
W. C. Cloogy, Pastor and Evangelist
Wyanoid Baptist Church
Bethel of Blessings

God help us, thought Darconville, who quite frankly,

if somewhat surprisingly, had yet to be convinced that the
Edict of Nantes hadn’t perhaps caused more trouble on
earth than original sin.
Darconville and Miss Trappe hadn’t gone two feet
when a woman came suddenly shooting out of the side-
door of the church. She looked like the wife of a
manciple, frazzled, with shocked eyes. Clutching a fistful
of pamphlets, she identified herself as an evangelist’s
helper and quickly began batsqueaking about God’s love,
in support of which topic she swiftly presented to each
one of her little tracts: “Crumbs from My Table” by W. C.
Cloogy, Evangelist. As all three stood there, two
bewildered, the third—intense with eyeshine—
spontaneously improvised a wee sermonette on The
Deluge, she playing Noah, her voice the animals it knew,
and the air was soon filled with a most ingenious array of
barks, oinks, croaks, snarls, cheeps, and moos, all
articulating the same curious complaint, that this world
was too corrupt and wretched to live in, the unavoidable
implication of which seemed to be that the lesser
creatures of this earth shared, if not the same size or
shape, then at least the same agony and accent. And
when, she asked, would they make their assent to faith?
Did they know Jesus for their personal savior? Were they
willing to be born again?
And, pray, were they in need of revival?
Revival? The word sprouted a capital letter. It was
bad enough, thought Darconville, to suggest anything to
perfect strangers, but to dare to suggest one of those punk
kick-ups and premillennial antihomologoumena? He had
a sudden vision of all those bible-thumping wompsters,
unscrupulous sharpers, and pigeon-faced decretalicides
who, having weaseled into the narrow existentialate of the
American South, had for so long impunitively burked
reason, honesty, and truth and set up false gods to whom,
like rats toward platters of meazled pork, the illiterate
faex populi had swarmed only to be bilked, beggared, and
buccaneered right on the spot. Was that religion? Miss
Trappe, agreeing, said she would rather take her own life
—at least that way, she added, she would not need to be
scared anymore about what would happen if she didn’t.
They walked away in silence.
Then Miss Trappe adjusted her spectacles, waited
until her optic axes grew coincident, and took one last
painful look to the far end of Main St. She shook her
head.
“You know,” she said, “a thought just crossed my
feeble old mind, dear.”
“Yes?”
“Well,” offered Miss Trappe, “the act of committing
suicide may be very easy.”
Darconville gently took her arm.
“When you do it,” she said, shrugging and looking up
at him with eyes pale as air, “just simply pretend it isn’t
you!”
There was nothing Darconville could find to say,
search his heart though he might. They slipped behind the
courthouse and walked through an alley past the
Quinsyburg jail where, high above their heads, they both
noticed a series of black fists gripping the bars of the
grills. A lonesome song drifted from one of the cells
across the afternoon.

”What a beautiful mornin’ that will be,

Let my people go;
When time breaks up in eternity,
Let my people go.”

Miss Trappe halted again on the edge of a thought,

the shadow of the building darkening her face. She looked
up at him like Van Eyck’s pinchfaced Amolfini in
horizontal hat, and as Darconville again took her arm—
the skin seemed to crumble between his fingers, like
burial earth—she stared past him and placed a finger on
her chin.
“And you know, the strangest thing of all is,” said
she, “you may not even have to pretend.”
It was clear, Darconville now saw, that from her
lugubrious pronouncements Miss Trappe had seen to
more terrible depths than the town at first glance afforded,
and, asking her various questions, he began to learn more
of what oppressed her. Quinsyburg was a closed account.
It was a place, apparently, reduced to total irrelevance, to
terms that, while having fallen to the category of the
tedious and the negligible, were yet maintained in the
hollowness of their churchianity, the religion,
deportmentalized and moralistic, of the Prodigal Son’s
brother, and reinforced in a terrible irony of reciprocity by
the cynical and nonconformist whingeings of Luther,
Melanchthon, Bucer, Pomeranus, Knox, Flacius Illyricus,
and various other sons of revolt. If it seemed, at first, the
kind of town that customarily salted its appeal with a sort
of grassroots neighborliness, the notion didn’t last.
Insiders were in, outsiders out. When and if friendship
were shown, she said, it was the type of loving-kindness
that uncomfortably verged on tyranny. They wanted not
so much to convince you of their opinions as to deprive
you of your own, and typical of so many other one-crop
regions that had taprooted out of the normal world—
pockets of homogeneity bypassed by culture and change
—most of its townsfolk were in the grip of an acute
xenophobia that filled the vocabularies of their villageois
language with a repetition of paranoid they/them
pronouns and convinced them that beyond the particular
borders of their town spread the etceterated sloughs of
godlessness where people drank swipes, backslid, and
gambled away their wives. They stuck together in the
same way that piranhas, seeing certain maculate spots of
identification, would not attack each other. Politically, the
community was so far to the Right it jimmied the Left. In
terms of actual religious belief, Quinsyburg’s,
oxymoronically, was in fact a civic faith, for spiritual
obligation had devolved to the concept of good citizenry,
a quo ad sacra invariably performed as an endorsement
for, and in the name of, the American Way of Life.
Knowledge to them was the parent of malice. Ideas they
met with derision, truth with suspicion, and differences
with fear. For any other way of life one couldn’t raise
their temperatures a therm. They lived, they knew, the
way it was done, and the devil, the great disturber of our
faith in this world, couldn’t raise in the townsfolk there
one scruple whatsoever leading to alternatives. They will
be there yesterday. They were there tomorrow. They are.
Miss Trappe dodged into a dark overheated little
store, bought her paper, and they continued on past the
Quinsyburg post-office—the walls within painted over in
flat WPA murals: frigid square-jawed men in overalls,
holding trowels and staring off at horizons—and cut over
by a semi-residential area toward the back of the college.
The houses, large and desolate, were all clapboarded egg-
brown affairs with sunken porches overcome with
wisteria, an eruption of domiciliary pasteboards rising up
in shingled capuches, far too close together, and although
the curtains were always pulled one could almost look
through them by way of imagination to see hooded
furniture; engravings of stags in the hallways; perhaps an
obsolete oil stove; a clawfoot bathtub upstairs (with
elongated orange stains under the faucets); a single
bookshelf, with copies of Law’s Serious Call,
Doddridge’s Rise and Progress, Orton’s Discourse on the
Aged, etc., and some poor someone sitting in a calico
apron, shelling peas, or all alone in the darkness of a
backroom, desperately praying for forgiveness.
The streets suddenly were then no longer paved.
There were, in fact, no streets at all, only stamped-out
paths of red Virginia soil winding through low scrubby
bushland into an outdistrict, poor, rundown, aimless, that
dropped away to an alfalfa field ballpark, where the trees
were the color of dirty money and the dust sifted into
your shoes like talc. Rusted old cars were humped on
blocks in narrow driveways. Tarpaper hatcheries were
wired smack up to the tilted wooden shacks that had
either dirt or puncheon floors, no front doors, and through
the dim breezeways drifted the odors of frying bread,
simmering collards, and sweet potato pone. It was the
black ghetto.
Most of the shacks had no indoor plumbing, and the
listing outhouses in the back of each yard had simply
been clapped together with dull, misshapen planks. There
were pipe chimneys, makeshift windows, covered in
plasti-sheet, and broken stairs, a pauperization— the
direct result of racism in Quinsyburg—that kept the
blacks, because poor, servile. It was a little world of
fatigue, inanition, and wasted minds. Quinsyburg, only a
few years previous, had closed its schools for half a
decade rather than integrate, simultaneously building a
private white academy, notwithstanding federal pressure,
to maintain racial purity. The blacks were forced into
separate schools, separate churches, and even a separate
cemetery. The rents were adjusted: if a black family
aspired to fix up its house, that meant it had money; if it
had money, that meant not only a decrease in servility
—”uppityness”—but also that it could pay more rent. An
adjusted rent cured that. It was a “ceiling” theory, for
people who had no ceilings. Indeed, they hadn’t much of
anything. They lived out their lives as they had for
centuries, cutting up logs, washing toilets, scrubbing
doorways, and quietly knocking on white folks’
backdoors with a nickel to ask if the noise of their old
gear-hobbing lawn-mowers would disturb the peace of the
nobles inside.
The afternoon sun began to turn coppery as
Darconville and Miss Trappe crossed downhill toward the
ring-road. Old sambos, with napkins on their heads, sat on
their warped cane-chairs and waved, while out front little
black girls—their hair braided in corn-row tight plaits,
their legs ashen—either played with their pedaps or
skipped barefoot, hand in hand, to the Piggly Wiggly for
gumballs. A few young men sloped back from the A.B.C.
liquor store with bottles of fruit wine in crinkled bags and
joked as they passed doorways where buxom young
mothers in bandanas, looking away as they smiled, rocked
their carriages with one foot and gave pieces of fatback to
their children for pacifiers. There was a life here that
would forever go on unchanged, immutable to pain, to
policy, to the passing of pleasure, and there was perhaps
in the constancy of it all, if finally in nothing else, at least
something on which they could depend.
A loud chorus of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” could
be heard from the small mal-shingled Negro church that
suddenly came into view between several live-oaks and
beyond which, as Darconville and Miss Trappe turned,
the two large dormitories of Quinsy College rose across a
half mile or so of woodland. The bell in the church’s
squat steeple was bonging slowly, a mournful, solitary
peal that seemed, echo upon echo, to get lost in the
sunshine and become, ironically, the more forsaken. A
group of phantom ladies in weepers, supporting each
other, began to leave the church. They were crying, trying
to stifle sobs with their handkerchiefs. What could have
happened?
Detective, Miss Thelma Trappe stood stock-still in
the middle of a hunch. She went suddenly skewbacked,
unflapping her copy of the Quinsyburg Herald, and ran
her eyes over the front page. She turned to page two. She
turned to page three. She turned to page four, bent down,
newt-eyed, and sighed. Looking over her shoulder,
Darconville followed her finger—for she never said a
word—to a simple photograph. It was the quizzical face
of a spoon-headed black boy, about thirteen years old, and
underneath were given brief reportorial facts: name, age,
address, place of burial. He had been struck and instantly
killed the day previous by a hit-and-run pickup truck at
the corner of Main and High streets. The several
witnesses from the Timberlake, dominoists by avocation,
could give no description of the driver, so the sheriff
closed the investigation. It was only God’s way, he no
doubt felt, of turning a leaf in the Book of Eternal
Decrees.
“Precisely,” said Miss Trappe.
Darconville heard the irony but kept counsel, feeling
only the vibrations of her increased step in awkward
silence as she stumped along homeward, pausing only to
eye the sky at intervals from under her wide hat as if
searching the heavens for any indication of justice or
balance, a clue, of any degree, to the moderating power of
the universe, some kind of proof of the stamp celestial.
They were soon not far from the street where they’d first
begun their walk when Darconville’s companion decided
to speak,
“I lost my stepmother in the same way,” said Miss
Trappe, her little mouth trembling. She tried,
unsuccessfully, to shape her hands— carelessly hopping
up—to an attitude of resignation. “She was coming home
at dusk with several just-packed jars of autumn honey and
was run down by a passing motorist, who simply drove
on.” Her eyes were filling up, her hat quivering. “She was
not killed right away—the report from the hospital was
that she kept feverishly repeating, ‘My honey. My honey.’
Just that. ‘My honey.’ I mustn’t fail to tell you,
Darconville,” sobbed Miss Trappe, “I was neither the
pretty nor the favored child, but how I ran—” She gasped
to breathe out pain. “—ran to her.” She smiled up through
a runnel of tears. “Hearts,” she said, “was Mrs. Battle’s
favorite suit.” And wiping a tear from her pitted nose, she
repeated, “ ‘My honey.’ “ She swallowed. “I wanted to
believe, you know, that she was asking for me.”
“She was calling you.”
Miss Trappe lifted up two little gerbil eyes and
simply shook her head. Her nose was dripping. And as
Darconville took her hand, soft as bird’s-eye, she heaved
up the sorrow weltering in her heart. “No,” she wept, “she
said she never loved me, then screamed it, Darconville,
laying there like dead metal, she sere—” Darconville’s
heart almost misgave. “I was s-so ashamed,” she
whispered into his chest with a tiny humiliated voice,
shattering with sobs, “I completely w-wet myself, all
over.”
Weeping to her feet, she suddenly turned her face up
defiantly toward the sky and looked with a hideous
grimace into infinity, as if to say not balanced yet, O
crafty universe, not balanced yet.
It became impossible to think. Darconville could say
nothing: so overcome with pity, he could find no words
adequate to consolation and knew beyond reason that any
poor stuttering attempt on his own part must fall terribly
short, for touching things sometimes can only be felt, and
yet before he could make any show of what he felt, she
kissed him on the neck, turned her little crabapple of a
head toward the westering sun, and then disappeared over
the hill like a dot.
 V

Were There Reasons to Believe That in

Quinsyburg
Visionaries, Fabulists, Hilarodists, and
Hermeneuts Would Suffer the Dooms,
Chastisements, and Black Draughts of a
Depression They Otherwise Didn’t Deserve
and Deteriorate Utterly?

Ample.

VI

President Greatracks Delivers

“He hath builded towers of superarrogation in his

owne head.”
—Gabriel Harvey, Pierces Supererogation

“College! There’s a little word for you, dear girls,

college: neatly pronounced, pronounced as spelt, and
correctly spelt s-a-c-r-i-f-i-c-e—the battle cry of the
United States of God Bless America! And who’s telling
y’all this, some up-spoutin’ no account dingdong in a
string tie pointing his head out in the direction of his face
and looking for to impress you? Exactly wrong! It’s a
man who knows what sacrifice means, and costs! Now,
button back your ears, little cousins, for I only aim to say
it once—I know all the tricks, every last one of them, and
unless someone out there can tell me how a brown cow
can eat green grass, give white milk, and make yellow
butter, she best just sit down tight and listen, OK? I been
evywhere but the moon and seen evything but the wind. I
been to the edge of the world and looked over. I mean, I
can fight, shout, win, lose, draw, turn on a dime, and meet
you coming back for change, you hear? Good, now you
mark time on that and we gone get somewhere.”

IT WAS PRESIDENT GREATRACKS, the college

headmaster, a man fat as a Fugger: a bun, a ham, a
burgher. He was a charming and resourceful academic
illiterate, politically appointed, his brain a pot-au-feu of
boomism, bad grammar, and prejudice, his face very like
that of the legendary Leucrota whose mouth opened as far
as its ears. The school auditorium was decked out for the
opening assembly, with all eyes fixed on the keynote
speaker. He showed the conviction of a roundhead, and,
having traversed the dais with an oafish and peasant-like
lumber that betrayed his grim-the-collier background, he
bulked now over the lectern around which had been slung
a banner lettered in blue and white

QUINSY
WELCOMES
YOU

and then hamfistedly fussbudgeted back and forth in

a suit the color of sea-fowl guano, wagging a finger like
Elijah the Tishbite and trooping out his dockets, posits,
and quiddits like a costermonger his pippins.

“When I was a little wagpasty of a lad back in Free

Union, Va. in them days of the Depression, which you
wouldn’t know about, my tiny ol’ mammy wore galoshes,
used thorns for fishhooks, and buck-washed me in a
hopper. We were so poor we couldn’t even pay attention,
and it was a dang holiday, nothin’ else, just to go and play
stoopball with the swivel-eyed halfwit next door or hop
along down to the grocery to splurge on a box of penny
chicle.
“I worked the nubs off my little fingers for wages the
coloreds laughed at, trundled out of bed at dawn like a
filthy sweep, blinking and looking for the life of me just
as white and hairless as a egg, a little eyesore in my
mussed overhalls and my sweater hind-side-to—so low I
had to reach up to touch bottom—and not a soul, but for
mammy, who had a good word to say to me. But you are
what you are and you ain’t what you ain’t, right? We
thanked the good Lord, and thanked Him and how!
Schoolrooms? Who said anything about schoolrooms?
Shoot, no one thought of them, sir! Only thing I knew
was my 15¢ Dicky Deadlight picture book—that is, until
mammy took me in tow to learn me my devotions and
reading. And if I didn’t oblige the dear thing? Why, she
caned me scarlet in the attic and set me to kneel on
peppercorns for punishment, and if you think that tickles!
I want to tell you, many’s the night—O, it seems like
yesterday!—I sat up into the wee hours in my ripped jim-
jams, my eyes pinched tight from candlesmoke, going
over and over again the sentences in my mustard-colored
copy of Edward Clodd’s Tom, Tit, Tot. But, dagnabbit, I
got my sums, didn’t I? I got my Bible, didn’t I?”

Greatracks rose up like a huge fat glyptodont,

capitalizing every word with his voice. He chop-gestured.
He beckoned to the ceiling. He took oaths and blew air
and circled his arms, all with a jumped-up and
inquisitorious duncery that thumbfumbled truth and
opened up a museum of bygone pictorial mediocrities
which magnified puddles by rhetoric into blue fairy lakes
and fobbed off hawks for handsaws.

“Now, I’m telling you all this for a mighty good

reason, girls—and paying it no mind, you’ll find me as
unsociable a creature as ever chawed gum, I
guarandamntee you! At Quinsy College here, it’s either
fish or cut bait. Ain’t enough insurance in this here world
better than perspiration, which means nothin’ more than
good ol’ sweat to right-thinkin’ folks, which is just what
you better be aimin’ to be, hear? Yes? Then stand on it! I
mean, I want everybody—evahbody!—on automatic here!
You mope. You get bounced. You get up to tomfoolery.
You gone tom-foolerize yourself right out into the street,
see?
“Why, only last year, now to mention it, one of those
self-important little undergraduate cinderbritches with a
cheek rubied like a dang poppy pads into my office fixin’
to have at me, see, stands there wheel-high to a rubbish
truck, and then comes out with, ‘I’m fed up with college!’
I remember standing there amazed, thinking what the sam
hill? What the tarnation hell? O no. Said she was hangin’
it up. Said, shoot, she couldn’t care a straw for book-
learnin’, not me, no, I’m a big shot—failin’ to realize,
course, feelin’ sorry for herself and walkin’ around on her
lip, that what she really wanted was a 7 X 9 patch over
her mouth! The poor little trapes, obviously humble of
brain, mistook college for the handball court or your Five
County Fair. I about died—dahd! Well, I read her the
dang riot act for starters and then helped her into
tomorrow with a kick strong enough to knock a billygoat
off a gut-wagon! She spelled college f-u-n, see, which is
no kind of spelling at all. It’s mis-spelling is what it is.
Mis-dang-spelling! And if you yourself ain’t wrapped too
tight, I best remind you to prepare for the same kind of
treatment, girls, or there ain’t a hog in Georgia, ‘cause it’s
only fifteen inches between a slap on the back and a swift
kick on the place you wear no hat!”

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.
Virginia is famous for its many military academies.
All, in point of fact, are one. It is at best a technique mine
of Prussian fanaticism, an encampment of stibnite-colored
barracks and halls sticking up dolefully in the middle of
acres of castrate lawns, and, as advertised, usually in the
rearward pages of national magazines—always showing
either a little chevalier midway over a baffle or some lost,
disappointed boy, too old for his age, staring out in parade
dress—it is invariably named something like Stirrup-and-
Halter Hall or St. Bugle’s Academy or Furlongville and
run by a man called Colonel Forksplit, a vole-eyed
martinet with a back straight as a Hepplewhite chair and a
mouthful of sententious stories, all lies, about Stonewall
Jackson’s boyhood. His charges—you can always see
them standing alone, glum, in the Washington, D.C. bus
terminals after holidays—must adhere to the regimental
uniform which is nothing more than a bit of jerry jingle
stolen from the Yeomen of the Guard. But uniforms have
plenty of buttons, and Southern girls, whose adoration for
uniforms must be listed, after amour-propre, as the most
pronounced regional hobble against the First
Commandment, always hold you by the button when they
speak to you.
Were Quinsy girls, then, familiarized with all the
social graces, schooled to realize that by a failure of either
fashion or forthputfulness it might very well cost them an
M.R.S. degree?
The handbook, encouraging power without
aggression, covered all contingencies. The caveats were
long and letter-perfect. They were never to dip sippets,
lap stamps, or chew gum, and upon the occasion of being
invited to dine out to wear dotted Swiss, eat little, and
remember that one variety of meat and one kind of
vegetable was the maximum. At least one half of the fare,
a sop of grace to gluttony, must be left in the plate. They
were told that game bones must never be lifted to the
mouth nor strenuously attacked, scraped, or twirled. They
were always to use palliatives when giving opinions of
consequence and yet, at the same time, encouraged to
shape the gentlemen callers who were over-saucy with
them, or who had small respect in their talk, such an
answer that they may well understand they were offended
with them, not so sharply, however, that the escort be
irrevocably turned away. They were asked not to crake or
boast, not to use any fond sauciness or presumption but, if
dancing, say, to dance well without over-nimble footings
or too busy tricks—and it was advised they neither
reverse in waltzing nor dip.
Curtseying was encouraged, as long as every girl
remembered that there have been many women who have
owed their ruin to an awkward attempt at such. She was
counseled against shingling the hair, sipping audibly,
effecting a need in public for toilet facilities, and always,
in instance without number, to take heed that she give
none the occasion to make ill report of her, whereupon,
for example, if she went riding, she must never ride
astride, whoop untowardly, or button the third button of
the hacking jacket. The carriage of a young lady must, at
all times, be respectful without meanness, easy without
familiarity, genteel without affectation, and insinuating
without design. Finally, they were asked not to speak of
themselves, for nothing could ever be said to varnish
one’s defects nor add luster to one’s virtues, whereas, on
the contrary, it would only make the former more visible
and the latter more obscure. She who lived upon talk
would die fasting. Good manners will minister to the
shop, and the shop will minister to thee. “Industry,” as
Stonewall Jackson once precociously lisped to his mother
from his bassinet, “needs not wish.”
Quinsy College would not only endure, but prevail. It
had before in times of trial and would again. Its policies,
fashioned out of an impatience with this new age of
permissiveness, said it all, with this hope expressed, this
continuity dearly wished, that in such schools—with the
laws of both discipline and decorum meted out by the best
teachers of bienséance—there would surely be an
eventual return to the good old American Way. Had times
changed? They had, yes, they had indeed, but if President
Greatracks himself, as he so often said, had to patrol the
campus by night in specially made sneakers snooping for
socialists, so be it! Had customs changed? They had, yes,
but if one could no longer catch a glimpse, as in days of
yore, of Southern belles holding parasols, wearing frilled
bonnets, and tripping across lawns in fragile blue-and-
white prints with handkerchief-pointed tiers of feminine
chiffon and cascades of quivering ruffles, it didn’t matter
—they were still worshipfully kept alive in the
rotogravure section of every true Virginian’s heart. Had
laxity set in? Yes, yes, yes, laxity, slackness, looseness! It
was the age. But if ideals were honored more in the
breach than in the observance nowadays, it took nothing
more than a quick look up at the college rotunda to have
one’s faith restored, for there the flag still flew. The
American flag, sir!
The flag, indeed, still flew. And yet a paradox
presented itself, for the democracy which that flag
represented was somehow the same democracy that the
admission board, the administration, and the alumni were
under jurisdiction, sometimes, in fact, by federal writ, to
oblige—resulting in a perceptible latitudinarianism which
included, among other things, extended curfews,
widening of student privileges, faculty raises, the
lowering of entrance requirements (two new highrise
dorms had to be filled) and now a consideration for the
actual admission of black students!
The South was trying to rise again. But where was the
yeast? “Freedom,” as President Greatracks had said on
many occasions, “is all very well and good, but—”

VIII

Hypsipyle Poore

Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so,

Dark Angel! triumph over me:
Lonely, unto the Lone I go;
Divine, to the Divinity.
—LIONEL JOHNSON, “The Dark Angel”

“I NEED IT’!”
“That’s a lot of pudding, miss.”
“I’m signing up, anyway.”
“The course, I told you yesterday, is not open to
seniors,” exclaimed Mrs. McAwaddle, the registrar, her
mouth cemented shut against the possibility of further
discourse.
“My daddy,” the girl drawled, charging through in
interruption and waving a slip of paper, “had the dean on
the telephone last night. Now, y’all want to read this?”
The student, obviously used to exacting compliance,
was an arresting young beauty in sunglasses with a soft
pink sweater, raven-black hair cut to perfection, and a
pout of wet lipstick that made her mouth look like a piece
of candy. She stepped back, unvanquished, and seemed
satisfied to wait, speaking to no one but admiring from a
corner the indisposition of the other girls there who were
trying to arrange their schedules during the first
discouraging days of registration. They shuffled about in
determined little squads with drop/add cards, course
syllabi, and countless papers to have signed and stamped.
The room was warm, sticky, from the crowding
bodies, but the girls, somehow, all smelled of fresh soap
and mint-flavored gum. They were Southern girls, after
all, and unlike their counterparts in other sections of the
country whose morning beauty, from the normal wear-
and-tear of a day, too easily faded only to be carelessly
ignored, they tried to keep powder-room perfect and as
presentable as possible. And, after all, this time there was
a man present in the room.
“Some people can just whistle and wait,” snapped
Mrs. McAwaddle, going jimmy-jawed. A mite of a thing,
resembling the perky little owl commonly depicted
resting on the hand of Minerva, she was wearing a dress
covered with hearts. She spindled a card angrily and
looked up at the man who’d been standing there for some
time. And now. His name? His business?
“Darconville,” he said, smiling.
The girl with the black hair, waiting behind him, took
a crystal vial out of her handbag (tooled in studs: “H.P.”)
and, closing her eyes, sprayed a musky lavender fragrance
around her perfect, prematurely formed silhouette, waxen
as a delicate shell.
“Ah, of course,” beamed the owl of Minerva, “the
new professor.” They laughed together. “And I do believe
I detect a Yankee accent?”
Darconville asked about his courses. He had met his
freshmen already but hadn’t yet been given the list.
 “Your freshman class list? O dear,” muttered Mrs.
McAwaddle. Apparently, it had been forced into more
revisions than a Dixiecrat caucus and so laid aside. She
searched a tray, lifted up a snow water-ball of glass, and
then shot open an acidgreen file-cabinet, finally
rummaging up the sheets for English 100. He read the
first few names on the list:

Muriel Ambler
Melody Blume
Ava Caelano
Wroberta Carter
Barbara Celarent
Analecta Cisterciana

“Would you let me,” smiled Mrs. McAwaddle, her

little head at a prayerful angle, “admire your coat?”
Several girls nearby exchanged glances and winked.
Darconville’s coat people loved. Cut to princely lines, it
was an English chesterfield as black as the black swan of
Juvenal. “I do declare, if this isn’t the most dashing—but
here,” she added, hunching up to the desk, “there’s an
ever-so-small tear here, by that button.” She patted his
hand. “Now you have your wife mend that and—”
Darconville leaned forward and, like Wotan
consulting a weaving norn, whispered with a close smile,
“I am not married.”
Mrs. McAwaddle stared a moment—and then, with a
conspiratorial wink, motioned him into a side-room off
the registrar’s office where under a portrait of Jefferson
Davis a purple-stained mimeograph machine went bwam-
bwam-bwam, spitting out single sheets of copy.
Conventicle gave way to conclave. “Always remember,”
she said, gripping his wrist, “to a handsome boy like you
—how old are you?”
“Twenty-nine.”
She made the sound of a pip. “—to a handsome boy
like you something wonderful will happen. You’ll find a
girl to love you as sure as wax candles have wicks.” She
had lost her own husband, she told him, eight years ago
(tainted knockwurst, Jaycee picnic), and now it was just
hell dipped in misery. To live alone? When the good Lord
created someone for everybody? Ridiculous! “But now,”
she added, folding his hands in her own, “you be careful:
these girls at Quinsy College can work the insides out of a
boy without him having a clue and, simple yokums
though they may seem, can be the untellinest little
commodities on earth. You saw that child out front
fussing at me? I could have spit nails. They have nerve to
burn.”
For the advice of this little hole-in-corner sibyl
Darconville was grateful, though he couldn’t help but
attribute her suspicions to the exigencies of her job, and,
excusing himself, he worked his way out of the office,
looking up only once: but then to catch, above a blur of
fluffy pink, a perfect face unblindfolding slowly from a
pair of sunglasses the fire-flash of two beautiful but
dangerous eyes in which, he thought, he detected a sly,
premeditated smile. He paused in the outer corridor and
once again looked at the names entered alphabetically on
the list; it read like a spice chart:

Ailsa Cragg
Childrey Fawcett
Galveston Foster
Scarlet Foxwell
 Opal Garten
Marsha Goforth
LeHigh Hialeah
Elsie Magoun
Sheila Mangelwurzel

A single name there meant something more than it

was: a symbolum —both a “sign” and a “confession.” But
which one was it? Which one was hers? It was curious,
his preoccupation, for he’d seen her only once.
Inexplicably, however, it mattered, if only for the hardly
momentous irony that by knowing it he could then
immediately dismiss it and put an end to it all. Her look
had injured a silence in his life. The known name might
somehow injure the look, and with the look gone the
silence could continue, allowing him in consequence and
inducing, for diversion, the equanimity to create out of
the dormitive world the something out of nothing we call
art. There was actually scant attention being paid to this
unnamed girl in the upper part of his mind, but in the
lower reaches she several times appeared, a thing, rather
like the libration of the moon, alternately visible and
invisible.
He flipped a sheet and read more names.

Christie McCarkle
Trinley Moss
Glycera Pentlock
Hallowe’ena Rampling
Isabel Rawsthorne
Cecilia Sketchley
 Darconville couldn’t help but smile. The names
seemed absurd, but one didn’t really have to spend very
much time down South to realize the regional compulsion
for this particular extravagance, daily coming upon such
weird examples as: Cylvia, Olgalene, Marcelette,
Scharlott, Coquetilla, Mavis, Latrina, Weeda and Needa,
Mariedythe, Romiette, Coita, Vannelda, Moonean, Rhey,
Flouzelle, Balpha, Erdix, Colice, Icel, and Juella, all
desperate parental attempts to try to work some kind of
sympathetic magic upon their daughters from the very
start. And yet how was it that upon hearing them one saw
only majorettes, waitresses, and roller-derby queens?
Darconville passed by the refectory (and the odor of
mercilessly boiled brussels sprouts) and sat down in a
circular room where in the center stood a sculpture of
Chapu’s Joan of Arc, the college patron. This was known
as the Rotunda. The main building at Quinsy College, its
egg-shaped interior was a respectable cream-and-green
color, open, as it took one’s attention higher and higher
past two circular balustrades, to a voluminous inner dome
covered with fake but sumptuous, over-elaborate, neo-
biblical murals in rose and gold. On several walls at
ground level, a series of past college presidents, bald and
severe, glowered out of their frames. He was still
reviewing the list, empty pier-glasses, and pronouncing
names, all but hers hostile to him because not hers, but
yet none hostile because to him any might be.

Butone Slocum
Millette Snipes
April Springlove
Lately Thompson
DeDonda Umpton
 The memory had persisted. On an otherwise
unexceptional day, for the first time, he’d met that class of
freshmen, silent little elves bunched-up and sitting
terrible-eyed as they contemplated the four years of
college to come. No one had spoken or said so much as a
syllable, but all took down the assignment and then the
name he’d chalked on the board by way of introduction as
if they were borrowing it for some felonious purpose.
And then, turning, he had seen the girl, a face out of
Domenichino declaiming itself with the supremacy of a
mere look that rose like an oriental sun not announced by
dawn and setting left no twilight—only the persistent
memory of two brown eyes, soft and fraught with soul,
imparting a strange kind of consecration. Darconville,
looking through the mist of his reverie, then turned from
his own idle thoughts and read the last names on the list:

Shelby Uprightly
Martha Van Ramm
Poteet Wilson
Rachel Windt
Laurie Lee Zenker

“Yoo-hoo!” Halfway down the front stairs,

Darconville turned back to the voice. It was Mrs.
McAwaddle, scooting after him on her tiny slue feet. She
was relieved she’d caught up with him, she said, puffing,
her hand pressed to her heart. “I’m doing my level best to
keep your classes down to a minimum, especially from
those”—she handed him a piece of paper—”who have no
business being there. The dean has decided to leave the
matter up to you.”
 The particular piece of paper, the formal request of a
senior to take his freshman course, was signed by the
dean and countersigned in an affected paraph of lavender
ink with the name: Hypsipyle Poore.
“You remember that child out front fussing at me?”
Mrs. McAwaddle shook her head. “They have nerve to
burn.” And she squeezed Darconville’s hand, turned, and
trundled away toward her office, one shoulder lower than
the other. “Yoo-hoo!” Darconville looked up again to see
Mrs. McAwaddle standing on the landing. “Be careful.”
Dear Mrs. McAwaddle, wise Mrs. McAwaddle,
widowed Mrs. McAwaddle, owlish Mrs. McAwaddle,
compassionate Mrs. McAwaddle, Mrs. McAwaddle in her
dress of hearts! But how could she know, poor soul, that it
was entirely someone else who was on his mind and to
whom that stricture better applied: be careful. But of
what? Of whom? For still, of the many names she could
have, she had none.
Darconville, however, consigned her to the obscure
and folding the class list into his pocket walked out into
the lovely afternoon, the rarefactions in the air opposing,
however pleasantly, his general conviction that the state
of art should be in constant panic. The artistic nature, he
knew, had an inborn proneness to side with the beauty
that breaks hearts, to single out the aristocratic contours
of what in human glory quickens the impulses of life to
mystic proportions. He found himself, again, absent-
mindedly thinking of the effect of that look in which
everything that was most obscure in the relation between
two people rose to the surface, and yet he could find no
possible expression of it in words. But curiosity, he
thought—the weakest form of solicitude, even if it was
the beginning of it—was not love.
 And crossing the lawn he only hoped that he’d gain
somehow in veracity what he lost in mystery—a
compromise, it also occurred to him, he wasn’t always
ready to make. But what was he ready for? He didn’t
know. And so laughing he headed home, walking without
so much as a touch of regret up the street to his house, his
book, and the supra-mundane.

IX

A Day of Writing

Exercise indeed we do, but that very forebackwardly,

for where we should exercise to know, we exercise as
having known.
—Sir PHILIP SIDNEY, Defence of Poesy

IT WAS TOO EARLY to rise. But Darconville, long

before dawn, couldn’t refrain from literally jumping out
of bed, the excitement in the sense of well-being he felt
serving as the best premonition possible for a full,
uninterrupted day of writing, and when the sun bowled up
over Quinsyburg—which Spellvexit, somersaulting,
always greeted with a glossoepiglottic gurgle of joy,
something like: “Gleep!”—he welcomed its appearance
with three finished pages and an emphatic resolve to write
a few more.
 After his coffee, he smoked awhile, and then set to
work again, his desk cluttered with notebooks, pens, and
piles of paper. The skull, norma frontalis, was even
smiling its approval this morning, for before long
Darconville was fully re-engaged in that silent and
solemn duel in which the mind sits concentrated in the
most fearless of disciplines, the tidiness of which, he felt,
life could never hope to emulate and the wonderful and
deep delight of which nothing whatsoever else could hope
to match. It was worth the loneliness. It was worth the
time. And if the blazing rockets of his imagination came
whistling down mere sticks, as occasionally they did, it
was worth it still, for truth indeed was fabulous and man,
he’d always thought, best knew himself by fable.
Was truth, however, discovered or constructed?
Darconville, actually, was never really sure, and, of so-
called “experience,” well, when he thought of it he tended
to believe that it had to be avoided in order to write—a
matter, in fact, that couldn’t have been given clearer focus
than during these last few weeks in Quinsyburg when up
in those rooms, conjugating the games of speech and
light, writing pages racily colloquial, classically satirical,
stinging and tender in robust and ardent sequence, be had
been interrupted with a frequency that almost bordered on
devotion: students-in-crisis; evangelists—two ruby-nosed
Baptanodons, especially, whose particular theory of
disputation was that one should aim, not to convince, but
rather to silence one’s opponent; and even several locals
who knocked to inquire, alas in vain, about the possibility
of buying his car, the black 1948 Mark VI Bentley in
front of the house whose tires they invariably kicked,
crying, “What a mochine!” So he had his telephone pulled
out. He kept his shades pulled. He locked his door. And
the Lords of Pleroma stood by.
When not teaching, Darconville worked very hard on
his manuscript and, in doing so, was entirely free from
any feeling of having committed sacrilege against the
vow he had made with himself before coming there. His
was a kind of asceticism. The writer was not a person,
Darconville felt, rather an amanuensis of verity, who
would only corrupt what he wrote to the extent, that he
yielded to passion or shirked the discipline of objectivity.
The noon bell sounded from the library clock, work
continued, and before too long it was midafternoon,
reminding him quite poignantly of how slow the
imaginative struggle was—for were not artists those few
of us flung down from the heavens into mortal garments?
—and how difficult it was to return. To do, however, was
not necessarily to make, nor to shape, to shape correctly.
A maniacal stylist, Darconville worked to shape what he
wrote—contour of form with respect to beauty, coherence
of matter with respect to blend—and to dig in matter the
furrows of the mind, for in all creation matter sought
form, form matter, and that was as profound an
exhortation to the artist as any: form matter! The Greeks,
he reminded himself, designated the world by a word that
means ornament, koruos[greek], and the Romans gave it
the name of mundus for its finish, its grace, its elegance.
And caelum? The word itself meant a tool to engrave!
The horizontal sun, shooting its rays through great
dark banks of western clouds, sent a last coppery glow
under the shade, the fiery reflection of what was left of a
good day. Dareonville closed his eyes, strained from
concentration, and leaned back. With a furtive movement
of his shoulders, he turned, feeling suddenly a girl’s
phantom presence in the room. But he ignored it and
continued working on into the night, his face a shadow
above the gooseneck lamp—the cat snoring—rewriting
the pages he’d spent the day on. It was abundance, to be
alone, in the solitude of night, watching what you
fashioned and fashioning by the miracle of art what was
nothing less than giving birth by parthenogenesis. At last,
in the middle of the close and quiet night, he saw he was
done. He looked up at the old watch hanging on the nail:
late, late—the tortoise of the hour hand, the hare of the
minute hand epiphanizing the ambivalence of time that
both weighed on him and bore him up. But then there on
the desk, completed, lay the finished pages, washed with
silver, wiped with gold. And the phantom?
The light was out, and he was fast asleep, happier
than anyone deserved to be, and the only phantoms he
could see were the benevolent ones he found in the
fleeting fancies of his dreams. And that was fine with
him. Accident he would leave to life which specialized in
it.

Bright Star

The unthrift sun shot vital gold, a thousand pieces.

—HENRY VAUGHAN, Silex Scintillons
 THE CLASSROOM was old. It seemed in dark and
incongruous contrast to the delicate femininity it both
isolated and yet protected with a fastness like that of some
battlemented watchtower. On the wall hung a portrait of
the Droeshout Shakespeare and a canvas map of Britain,
pocked with red pins. This was English 100, a freshman
section of girls who were almost all dressed à la
négligence in the present-day fribble-frabble of fashion,
mostly jeans and wee pannikins.
Darconville strode in and sat down. He placed his
books on the desk, and, as he smiled, the girls
straightened around to squeaks, the click of shoes, the
scent of earth-flowers. The moment was immediately
memorable, for instantly aware at the corner of his eye of
a sparkle, the fluorescence, of a jewel, he looked up with
sudden confusion, as if bewildered to discover art in
nature’s province. It was she: a faery’s child, the nameless
lady of the meads, full beautiful, sitting in the front-row
seat at the far right with her eyes lowered to the desk in a
kind of fragrant prayer, her chin resting gently on the
snowy jabot of her blouse and her hair, tenting her face,
golden as the Laconian’s. Prepared for her, he saw he
really wasn’t. The heart in painful riot omitted roll-call.
“Shall we look at the Keats?” asked Darconville,
quietly. It had been their first assignment: to analyze one
poem. There was a marked self-consciousness in the
straightening of shoulders, in the coughs, as the students
settled down resolutely to consider the poem.
“As one must pronounce a Chinese ideograph in
order to understand it,” said Darconville, “so also must a
poem be read aloud. Would anybody care to do so?” He
waited.
Silence.
 “Anyone?”
The girls remained earnestly hunched over their
books, submissive to the idea that obscurity can be found
in the solemnity of well-aimed concentration.
“Anyone at all?”
The linoleum snapped.
Darconville was amused. It seemed like vesper hour
at the Shaker Rest Home for Invalid Ladies. The
discomfort was palpable, with not an eye on him. Then a
hand shot up.
“Miss—” Darconville looked at his roll-book.
“Windt,” the student provided.
It was a girl in the third row who resembled
Copernicus, the shape of her pageboy, its two guiches
coming forward like tongs and swinging at the jawline,
making her look small as a creepystool. She turned to one
of her girlfriends for confidence, then stood up, and
began.

”Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient, sleepless, um—”

“Eremite,” said Darconville. “Hermit.”

Rachel Windt, wrinkling her nose, squinted at the
word. Darconville, repeating the word, prodded her.
“E-eree-ereem—”
“Just pronounce the consonants,” Darconville said,
laughing, trying to relax her, “and the vowels will fall into
place.” Two girls in the back row exchanged cold glances;
they didn’t find that particularly funny. Rachel Windt
bewilderedly twisted up a noil of her hair, shrugged, and
continued.

”The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure, um, ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—”

“Perfect. Let’s stop there,” said Darconville, “where

the octave and sestet hinge. This is a sonnet—composed,
if you’ll notice, in one sentence—in which the poet
expresses a wish. And what, let’s ask ourselves, is that
wish?” He paused. “Anybody?”
“He’s wishin’ he was a star?”
Wishin’. Your thlipsis is showing, thought
Darconville, looking in the direction of the voice.
It was a long-nosed piece of presumption in the last
row, wearing an armory of Scandinavian nail-jewelry,
who was less concerned with a Romantic poet’s tragic
wishes than after-shampoo flyaways if the comb she
simultaneously shuttled through her hair to the repetitious
snaps of chewing gum meant anything. Darconville
smiled and kindly suggested that she was, even if a trifle
so, somewhat wide of the mark. Snap. Another hand?
Anyone?
“Miss?”
This voice came from the direction of—but it was not
hers. Darconville, with no small difficulty, fixedly tried to
keep his eyes focused on this student alone, a moon
radiant only for the proximity of that adjacent sun whose
beauty, even in a condition of reflected light, seemed
startling enough to destroy his sight on the instant.
 “Trinley Moss,” answered the girl, standing up, her
six bracelets jangling, in an opera blue turtleneck sweater
and plaid wrap-around, safety-pinned at the thigh. “Well,
I believe he’s right unhappy,” she said, “and that this star
he mentions, symbolizin’ brightness, is drivin’ this poor
child here, I don’t know, to wishin’ he could either touch
it or, I don’t know, just plain ol’ flop down and become
a”—she shrugged—’’a eremite?”
Darconville began to feel like St. Paul, watching
errors creep in at Colossae. It wasn’t all that bad, hardly a
matter for despair. He took teaching to be a mission, not a
trade, and sought to avoid the by-the-numbers Drillschule
technique that, for one reason or another, had apparently
long been held in vogue there by various pompous
doodles and burgraves-of-fine-print on the Quinsy faculty,
teachers, for whom students were the little limbs of Satan,
who bored the girls to distraction repeating opinions
seamed by cankerworm and reading from lecture notes
long since parched by the Dog Star. He would be patient.
At Quinsy it was an essential requirement, for although
the state constitution laid claim to its being a school of
higher learning, he from the very first day of arrival
wondered just what level they were measuring from, and
if they took salt tablets when doing so.
Darconville ranged the room with his eyes for a better
answer— they couldn’t as yet settle on la femme
d’intérieur—and noticed a girl, her pencil poised above
her notebook, a response in her eyes, an answer on her
lips. He nodded to her.
“I am Shelby Uprightly,” she said, neatly pressing her
glasses to her zygomatic arch with one finger. “John
Keats in his sonnet, ‘Bright Star,’ wishing to be steadfast,
as he states, but not alone, is quite painfully expressing,
as he often did, the particular tension of feeling he
suffered when torn between a desire for the Ideal, the
lovely star, in this case, and the Real, the girl mentioned
in the last lines, someone he must have—”
“Excellent. You outdo yourself,” exclaimed
Darconville. “And would you read those lines?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid I won’t,” she replied,
confidentially lowering her voice. “I do not read well
enough for declamation.” She tilted her head. “Is that
acceptable?”
Darconville was nodding but continued to listen
intently long after the girl had finished speaking, as if
struggling with an idea encountered, not in the classroom,
but at the innermost of his being, one he was unable to
comprehend—then, suddenly embarrassed, he looked up
from the fanciful call of that mysterious girl in the right
front row whose beautiful hair, like that of the Graces,
enshrined the face he couldn’t see. Who then, asked
Darconville quickly, would like to read the lines? He
found a girl sitting directly in front of him, bent down,
and smiled into her eyes.
“You are—?”
She was speechless.
It was Millette Snipes, a girl whose comic little face,
perfectly round, looked like a midway balloon. She
blushed, tapping one of those pencils-with-funheads, and
with a farm-bright smile looked up with huge oval eyes
that told instantly just how deeply she’d been smitten
with love for her teacher.
“Shall I thay the whole poem, thir?” she asked,
brushing aside a cinnamon curl that had stuck to her nose.
A wave of giggles broke over the class, until
Darconville, soberly, tapped the desk once with his
pointer like Orbilius plagosus. Then Scarlet Foxwell, her
eye inset with something of a humorful character, leaned
over to show her where to begin, but not before glancing
back at DeDonda Umpton and Elsie Magoun who were
both pinching their noses to keep from exploding with
laughter.
Then Millette Snipes, her elbows akimbo, her book
high, spoke in a voice from the family Cricetidae.

”No—yet thtill thteadfatht, thtill unchangeable,

Pillowed upon my fair love’th ripening breatht,
To feel forever itth thoft fall and thwell,
Awake forever in a thweet unretht—”

“Crisper, child,” said Darconville.

Inevitably, she spoke louder.

”Thtill, thtill to hear her tender-taken breath,

And tho live ever—or elthe thwoon to death.”

The girl tenderly pressed the open book to her bosom

and looked up soulfully, her wopsical eyes moist and
glowing. Darconville thanked her.
“Very good. Now, the poet here, as Miss Uprightly
earlier pointed out, aspires to the star’s steadfastness but,
you see, not at the cost of hermit-like loneliness. He is in
a state of suspicion about what must be sacrificed in the
pursuit of the Ideal. It is the problem, perhaps,” said
Darconville, “of the paradoxical man who wants to move,
say, but not migrate. Fanny Brawne, a coquette of sorts,
was the woman Keats loved, and while she was not
specifically the subject of the poem—it could be anyone
—the poet wanted to live forever with whomever it was,
such was his passion, or else swoon to death.”
“Thwoon in the thenthe of thuccumb?”
“Precisely, Miss—”
“Thnipeth.”
“The Romantic, you see,” said Darconville, “is a man
of extremes.”
“It’th tho thimple,” said Millette Snipes, “a thad
poem, but tho very very thimple.”
“The greatest lines in English poetry,” replied
Darconville, “are always the simplest.” He lifted a lectern
onto his desk and leaned forward on it. “I have something
for you—call it, if you will, ‘The Principle of Trim.’ The
poet, you see, is rather like the seagull who has a perfect
process for desalting water, although no one can explain
how it works: he baffles out of a given line, if he’s the
enchanted metaphorsician we hope he is, that which
otherwise would directly explain it.”
Darconville wanted to make this clear.
“The simple line seeks to outwit, not merely resist,
the complexity of thought it noncommittally grows out of
and, by definition, filters out the ideas it must
nevertheless, to be great, always raise, do you see?”
As he felt the presence of that one girl near him, he
listened distractedly to the voice that didn’t seem his.
Who are you? thought Darconville. Who are you? He tried
to concentrate his whole nature in one terrific effort to
summon up, that he might dismiss it for once and all, the
formidable magnetic mystery on his right that drew him
so relentlessly off the subject.
“And therefore the greatest lines always imply the
longest essays, discourses, metaphrases which the poet
quite happily leaves to the agitation of critics, schoolmen,
all those academic Morlocks who study the brain of a line
after its face has come off in their hands.” Darconville
looked around. “Do you want me to repeat that?” (cries of
“yes, yes”)
Darconville thought for a moment. “The ring of a
mighty bell,” he explained, “implies, logically, a technical
if less melodic success in the shift and whirr of its
gudgeons, a secondary sound that can be muffled only in
proportion to the genius of the campanologist.”
Glycera Pentlock, throwing an exasperated glance at
her neighbor, Martha Van Ramm, recklessly resumed
scribbling away in her notebook. But Ailsa Cragg,
chumbling the tip of her pen, gasped and blurted out,
“What is a campanologist?”
“Use,” said Darconville, “your definitionary. It’s one
of the last few pleasures left in life.”
Poteet Wilson looked aggravated. Wroberta Carter
spun her pencil. And Barbara Celarent whispered a slang
word which, though unbeknownst to her, was once held in
common usage by the daughters of joy in fifth-century
Babylon.
“Language,” continued Darconville, “often disguises
thought. The successful poetic line, never discursive, is
always thought extensively profound—and surely, upon
the examination that is our burden, will be—but at its
very essence it is the furthest thing from it. Beauty only
implies truth, as fuit implies est. The poet doesn’t say so,
however; the factophile does. Poetry is the more
imperfect when the less simple. The nature of great poetry
—a perfect art attempted by imperfect people— prevents
the direct concern with truth and can only suggest by
singing what it secretly shields by showing. The greater
the simplicity stated the greater the complexity implied,
you see?” Several girls put up their hands. “And putting
aside for now the implications this has in the human
personality, in affairs of the heart, know only that the
reader is left to assume whether or not what the poet
stated in Beauty he knew as Truth.”
A yawn was heard, followed by the jingling of some
Scandinavian nail-jewelry.
“Bear with me? God alone is pure act, never in
potency, whereas finite things ar.e metaphysically
composed of act and potentiality. But, in poetry, Beauty is
act, you might say, Truth the potency involved by
inference in that act, and of course there follow many
attendant questions that can be raised: will Beauty wane
as Truth waxes? Is one the synonym, or the antonym, of
the other? And what of the old idea that Beauty, meeting
Truth, must always corrupt it—the Beauty that turns
Truth, as Hamlet said, into a bawd? What are the
implications—the essential question must be asked—of
the Ideal?” A heavy inert apathy settled over the class.
“We must consider the final lines of another poem of
Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ “
The students, exhaling sighs, actually seemed to
decompress. It didn’t matter. Darconville, perhaps not
even aware of it himself, was busy sorting out matters in
the depths of his own mind.
“ ‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’: I call this Keats’s
Comfort—he is saying his prayers and, embarrassingly, is
overheard. It is a correct epistemological utterance, you
might say,” continued Darconville, “made aesthetically
incorrect at the very moment it is introduced into the
poem. Beauty is Truth, Keats forgot, only if and when the
didactician is there to say so by whatever means he can.
Arguably, Beauty is Truth precisely when it does not say
so, just as, turn about, a holy man disproves his holiness
as soon as he asserts it. Ironically enough, then, this, the
most famous line of Keats, while starkly simple—indeed,
it is generally accepted as the classic example of such—
denies exactly what a simple line must be valued for,
asserting what should be implied, attesting to what it
can’t. The line expresses what it does not embody—or,
better, embodies what it has no right to express: a
beautiful messenger appears delivering ugly news. It’s a
paradox in the same way that—”
Darconville paused, turned to the blackboard, and
chalked out a wide rectangle. He wrote something and
backed away for perspective.

--------------------------------
| This boxed sentence is false |
--------------------------------

“The paradox here is clear,” asserted Darconville, “is

it not? If the sentence is true, then it is false; if false, then
it is true.” Various eyes roved in troubled scrutiny over
the board. “Do you see? A liar says that he lies: thus he
lies and does not lie at the same time. The jeu de mots is
fun grammatically,” warned Darconville with a smile,
“but imagine how vulnerable would be your philosophical
calm if this translated into the behavior of a human being?
Careful,” said Darconville, “with your boyfriends.”
The girls tittered.
It was an academic matter, of course, and yet,
incredibly, Darconville found himself thus preoccupied,
searching to apprehend a figure in the distance, an
interval so wide, for a thousand reasons, it dulled the edge
of consequence but a distance nevertheless that also
warned, by its very remoteness, that no real exchange of
feelings was possible, a morbid underbreath, as if
aloofness itself, whispering, told him to desist from that
which he must inevitably be excluded. And yet how
often, even from childhood, had this been the case in his
life! And so he listened to what he thought, serving to
clarify a matter at the heart of things and verify a
falsehood. It formulated his final remarks.
“The artist,” concluded Darconville, going to the
window and staring out at a group of hardy catalpas,
“when a logical paradox to himself becomes, I suppose,
the most unpoetical of men.” A cardinal went snip-snip-
snip in the trees. “I don’t know, perhaps Keats had one
glass of claret too many, loitered palely, and was
overcome with the necessity of writing a line that could
acknowledge two simultaneous but incompatible forces
within him: poet and priest. He becomes a pomologist”—
Ailsa Cragg looked frostily at Darconville and sucked a
tooth—”trying to get fruit back to its paradisaical best.
‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’? It’s a concio ad clerum:
a sermon to the clergy, wherein the poet is attempting to
cheer himself up—in a fit of un-steadfastness, say?—and
is at the same time begging us to accept not only what we
should but also that which, poor poet, he more than
sufficiently allowed us without special pleading. The
poet’s own voice has interrupted him. He is awakened by
his own snore. The line, which I disgressed to explain, is
only a false bottom, collapsing an otherwise beautiful
poem—and one which provides, perhaps, the best single
commentary we have on the sonnet, ‘Bright Star.’“
Darconville was finished. “Are there any questions?”
There was silence.
 “We’re clearer then,” asked Darconville, “on the
meaning of the poem?”
“It hath to do with the thufferingth and thorrowth of
life.”
Everybody groaned.
“I believe that young boy,” came a sudden voluptuous
drawl from near the back of the room, a low magical level
of loveliness which absorbed with a kind of absoluteness
any rival utterance that might have been offered against it,
“was just sayin’ the most obvious thing in the whole wide
world.”
It was the kind of female voice that Juvenal
somewhere naughtily describes as having fingers.
“He was talkin’“—she touched her tongue to her
upper lip— “about love.”
Most of the girls, in icy silence, stared straight ahead.
“I’m sorry,” said Darconville who, although not taken
in—he’d seen her back there at the beginning of class and
almost with amusement had been waiting for her to speak
—nevertheless feigned surprise, “but I can’t seem to find
you here in my roll-book. You are a senior, aren’t you,
Miss Poore?”
It was too much. Every head in the entire class—
excepting one student’s, whose head was lowered—
abruptly shifted from the teacher to her, the only student’s
name he had known! And there she sat, confident and
cool, wearing a nubby placket-front shirt trimmed in
beige to match a black velvet dirndl.
Then, very slowly, Hypsipyle Poore lifted off her
sunglasses and, with one lingering provocative glance,
revealed eyes as limpid as the pools in Heshbon by the
gate of Bathrabbim—and everyone there could have
sworn she winked as with a cryptic smile she breathed
softly, “Well, should I see you after class?”
“Love has been mentioned,” said Darconville, who
saw he had a minute or two. “And suffering, as well. The
history of romantic disappointment, I don’t doubt, often
does nothing more than document the schism between
Beauty and Truth or, better, proves that Beauty, when it
becomes an end in itself, often yields no Truth. The
simple line, in such cases, had no complexity within it—
there can, of course, never be too much. A knowledge of
many things is possible, it’s been said, but one can never
know everything about one thing, though, sadly, one
perhaps tries. The relationship with a boy or girl you
spontaneously took for perfection-in-beauty but didn’t
sequentially know by examination-in-truth can result in
disaster. The implications of the Ideal? Who can really
know? It is the chance one takes when one falls in love—
the discussion of which,” smiled Darconville, “is perhaps
beyond the province of the classroom here, agreed?”
The girls laughed—and prepared to leave. But
Darconville, alert to the chance, quickly took up his class
roll and began to call attendance.
“Muriel Ambler”
“Here”
“Melody Blume”
“Here”
The students, by turn, acknowledged their names. But
for the suspense it might have been interminable, the list
seemed so long. Here. Here. Here. But which was hers?
Was it there?
“Sheila Mangelwurzel”
“Here”
“Christie McCarkle”
 A carrot-top put up her hand.
“Glycera Pentlock”
“Over here”
“Isabel Rawsthorne”
A thunderclap!—then a flashing light across his book.
Dazed, almost unconsciously, Darconville called out the
remaining non-names, reflecting on this alone: only love
makes the pain of lifting a shy head a grace. It equally
unlocks a silent throat with the knowledge in the plaintive
soul of what must be done, and so was, in the tender-
taken breath he suddenly heard, soft as a swoon, say:
“Present.”
And sculptured Aphrodite, in loose-flowing alb,
stepping slow and fragile under the loops of dripping ring
willows, puts a finger to her lips, shakes out tearshaped
petals from her flasket, and then holds high her holy
lights which silver and bewitch the common wood where
two, long asleep, sweetly wake under the baldric of a new
heaven to blush at the silence, pause, and faintly hear a
goddess whisper in a voice lower than leaf-fall:
“Tomorrow shall be love for the loveless, and for the
lover tomorrow shall be love.”
In short, Isabel Rawsthorne looked up and smiled.

XI

Ghantepleure

Repetition is the essence of conjuration.

 —St. NEOT OF AXHOLME

“ISABEL, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel,

Isabel, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel.” Darconville
repeated the name into the unintelligibility we call sleep
—and dreamt of desperadoes.

XII

The Garden of Earthly Delights

There foamed rebellious Logic, gagged and bound,

There, stripped, fair Rhetoric languished on the
ground.
—ALEXANDER POPE, The Dunciad

FACULTY MEETINGS are held whenever the need

to show off is combined with the imperative of
accomplishing nothing. It was the case at Quinsy College.
There were five every year—a rump parliament of
“educators,” all bunged up with complaints and full of
prefabricated particulars, who sat around on their buns for
several hours trying to correct various problems, whether
of school business or personal bagwash, and to confront
problematical variables, every one of which was always
greeted with a salvo of idle questions, nice distinctions,
sophisms, obs and sols, and last-ditch stratagems. The
presiding genius? Brizo, goddess of sleep. The style?
Extemporaneous. The participants? Teachers, who, like
whetstones, would make others cut that could not cut
themselves.
There were some preliminary matters, first. President
Greatracks, sitting up front like Buddha in a bad mood
with his hands clasped in front of his belly as indifferently
as tweezers, was being presented a gift (an unidentifiable
rhomboid of pewter)—for his “unswerving leadership”—
in the name of the senior class whose metonym, Miss
Xystine Chappelle, student body president and
sweetheart-of-the-school, after tweaking the tips of an
organdy the color of an orange fruit-jumble, curtseying,
and delivering her message with cute little eye-rolls,
breathlessly concluded:

“. . . as a class we really couldn’t think of a more

deserving leader. The real meaning of college, hopefully,
will remain with us even when we have to face the reality
of the world after graduation, the realization of which, I
realize, is not very realistic now. Anyway, I’m really
proud to bestow this gift in behalf of all of us who can
never thank you enough for helping us reach our
realizable goals.” [Applause]

The agenda was full: it was the first such meeting of

the year, and there was a great deal to do. Swinging his
nose, President Greatracks motioned to her feet his
secretary, a blinking anablept with mis-mated eyes and
slingback shoes who read the minutes from the previous
spring and then handed out the updated “Faculty Profile”
booklets, after which Greatracks, his cheeks puffed out
like a Switzer’s breeches, stepped forward on his huge
drawbridge feet and said he wasn’t going to be wordy
because where was the damfool percentage in it? No, his
only grouse, he said, was about the budget. Money, he
pointed out, didn’t grow on trees, was the root of all evil,
lost one friends, and talked!—too damned much, he said.
This year, he continued—it was prolegomenon to every
faculty meeting—money was going to keep its little
mouth shut, and they could all paste that in their hats,
OK? Mr. Schrecklichkeit, an assistant biology professor
with a white squill of a nose, leaned over to Darconville
and snapped, “There goes my course in Vegetable
Staticks, that son of a bitch!”
The meeting, then, was called to order—with several
raps of the gavel by President Greatracks, appearing
rather like the Turk of legend who, ready to drink a bottle
of wine, first made loud noises and screwed out filthy
faces to warn his soul of the foul anti-Koranic act he was
about to commit. First, Dean Barathrum, a born
remittance man and author of several out-of-date
arithmetics, introduced the newest members of the
faculty. They were received, Darconville and several
others, with eye-watering yawns. One man was
continuously tracing the sweephand of his watch with his
fingers. Another, staring out a window, was actually
sucking his thumb.
Darconville’s attention, however, had been drawn to
the shiny-paged faculty booklet, alphabetically listing
everyone with photo and credentials. It looked like a
medieval bestiary: skipjacks, groutnolls, hysterical-
looking circumferentors, frumps and filiopietistic
longheads, micelings, whipsnades, and many another
whose eyes showed a very short limit of accommodation.
Several had actually taken no college degrees. Others
were part-time evangelists, ex-army colonels, and car
salesmen. And the various titles of their scholarly
publications—books, articles, monographs, etc.—were
scarcely believable: “English Nose Literature”; Stephen
Duck: More Rhyme Than Reason; “The American
Disgrace: Overabuse of the Verb ‘To Get’“; “Fundavit
Stones in Crozet, Va.”; Much Ado About Mothing; “The
Psychopathological Connection Between Liquid Natural
Gas and Agraphia”; The Story of Windmill Technology;
“The Significance of Head Motions in Peking Ducks”;
“Infusions as Drinks”; “Abraham Lincoln, Quadroon?”
and several other inventions, thought Darconville, of
which necessity was hardly the mother.
Finally, the Great Consult began. They discussed
tenure procedure. They revised policy on sabbaticals.
They rehearsed, to palsied lengths, curriculum changes,
cross-registration, crises in enrollment. It suddenly
became a great din of objections, fierce denials, and loud
peevishness all expressed in noises like the farting of
laurel in flames with everybody going at it head to head
as if they were all trying right then and there to solve the
problem of circular shot, perpetual motion, and
abiogenesis!
Staring in disbelief, Darconville looked on in a kind
of autoscopic hallucination as each of the faculty
members rose in turn to make a point that never seemed
to have an acute end. It was all queer, makeshift, and
unpindownable, for all the cube-duplicators, angle-
trisectors, and circle-squarers seemed to keep busy
avoiding any question that hadn’t sufficient strength to
throw doubt on whatever answer couldn’t have been
offered anyway lest an inefficacious solution only prove
to muddle a problem that couldn’t be raised in the first
place. The discussion, rarely deviating into sense, grew
round with resolutions and amendments as they sacrificed
the necessary to acquire the superfluous and did
everything twice by halves, for, like Noah, they had two
of everything—two, it might be said, they didn’t need so
much as one of: two policies, two excuses, two faces and,
always, forty-eleven reasons to prop up both.
There was, for instance, Miss Shepe the witty, Miss
Ghote the wise —educatresses both, departments
sociology and art education respectively—who fell
swiftly to reviewing the college motto: should it be “We
Preach to Teach” or “We Teach to Preach”?—a rabid
grace/ free-will discussion growing out of their sudden
but sustained failure to settle on the primacy of one over
the other. They squared off, adjusting their plackets and
glaring into each other’s pinched and penny-saving faces.
“I’m for less grapes and more fox,” exclaimed Miss
Shepe, confusing everybody. Furious, Miss Ghote—
brekekekekek!— snapped her pencil in two.
“So much for your deduction,” said Miss Ghote.
“I deduce nothing,” sniffed Miss Shepe. “You’ve
simply induced that yourself.”
“Induced, yes, what you’d implied.”
“You dare,” snapped Miss Shepe, twisting her cramp-
ring, “you dare infer I’ve implied what you yourself have
induced, Miss Ghote?”
“Put it this way,” replied Miss Ghote with an icy-
sweet smile, “you’ve only surmised I infer what you’ve
implied I induced—and I do believe your bra strap’s
showing.”
Miss Shepe banged down her heel. “Then you
conclude wrongly, Miss Nothing-in-the-World-Could-
Make-Me-Care-Less, that I surmised you infer what you
think I’ve implied you’ve induced!”
“But you only assume that I conclude wrongly that
you’ve surmised what—”
“Elephant balls!” howled President Greatracks, the
fat in his eyeballs quivering. A group of old fishfags from
the home economics department, dosed to sleep by their
own heavy perfume, immediately woke to clap their
mouths in horror.
“I’m not certain I heard what he said,” whispered
Miss Swint to someone behind her. It was a faint voice,
some staring ghost suddenly exclaiming upon
Rhadamanth. The world to Miss Swint, piano teacher, her
face two subtle shades of oatmeal, backlit both by a
monocle, consisted merely of music, her collection of
wheat-sheaf pennies, and the responsibility of playing the
organ every Sunday at the Presbyterian church, the very
place in which, years ago, she’d long since become
convinced that maidenhead and godhead were indivisible.
There were soon other matters on the docket: dining-
hall duty, election to committees, chaperon assignments.
And some few raised questions about general reform, and
yet while only a mere fraction of the lot were actually
concerned with change—it was a subject met by children,
with reform as the wicked uncle—they all jumped up like
minorités, jurisprudentes, and tub-thumping Sorbonnists
to debate it, all reinforcing the “yo-he-ho”
protoglottological theory that words initially began as
shouts. No aspect was overlooked, no fine point ignored,
no issue diminished. It was complete havoc once again as
they stood in coalition or squatted in caucus, breaking
down every proposition like reformational hairsplitters
into partitions, sections, members, subsections,
submembral sections, submembral subsections and
denouncing each other with mouthfuls of rhetoric warped
by quiddling, diddling, and undistributed middling. One
third believed what another third invented what the other
third laughed at. Quid the Cynic argued with Suction the
Epicurean, Suction the Epicurean argued with Sipsop the
Pythagorean, Sipsop the Pythagorean argued with Quid
the Cynic, and the whole afternoon dwindled away with
one saving at the spigot and another letting out at the
bunghole.
It occurred to Darconville that the expression,
“ignorance is bliss,” was a perception curiously
unavailable to the ignorant as he considered, with great
misgivings, the sad and inarticulate desperviews there
whose identities had gone soft on them and whose grasp
of reality was so slight and so arbitrary and so grotesque
that each could have easily stepped from there into the hot
pornofornocacophagomaniacal set of Bosch’s unmusical
hell and fit, snugly.
The meeting, finally, adjourned. A partition was
rolled back, revealing at another section of the long room
several tables with bottles of soft drinks (no liquor) and
plates of cookies, candy, and cake. Papers rattled, people
coughed, and chairs shifted as everyone withdrew.
“Y’all ever see so dang much shuck for so little
nubbin?” complained President Greatracks who—a fake
giant among real pygmies —stomped toward the food in
the company of several pipe-smoking lackeys, all dodging
about in his circumference. No, no, they agreed, no, they
hadn’t. His arms upon the boobies’ shoulders, you
quickly saw the gudgeon bite. No, no, they repeated, not
at all. “Sombitches,” he said, picking up five
thumbprinted marshmallows and stuffing them into his
mouth. “I can hear their brains rolling about like B-B’s in
a boxcar.”
The Quinsy faculty, during the refreshments, took the
occasion to gossip, but faction didn’t really constitute
disunity. It was as if, somehow, they had all been destined
by some temporal and spatial anti-miracle of history to
come together at the same place and time and to know
each other on the instant by some mystic subtlety for
mates, perhaps in the paradox of peculiar faces which,
while each was different, all looked as though God had
smeared them when still wet. They didn’t have to talk.
They weren’t speakers, really. But they were experts at
malversation.
“I know about budgets,” said Miss Throwswitch, the
drama teacher, with a scrawl of mockery under the rims
of her eyes as she poured a soda. “This year, you watch,
we’ll be doing Chekhov in clothesbags and clunkies.”
“They are saying”—Prof. Fewstone’s standard
opening line, never without its veiled threat—”they are
saying that over in Richmond the legislature is cutting us
off without a dime unless we put some Mau-Maus on the
faculty.” A history professor, Fewstone always kept to
that one note, like a finch; his sour doctrines,
masquerading as brands of economics and politics, fit his
reputation as a miser far better than the hackberry-colored
jacket he never took off, perhaps for that elegant pin
(compass, square) awarded him by some Brotherhood of
Skinks or other who worshipped trowels and pyramids.
“Now in my book, The Rehoboths: Reform or
Reglementation? I put forth the theory—”
“Attitudinizing,” murmured Miss Gibletts, the Latin
teacher whose thin, dry, hectic, unperspirable habit of
body made her somewhat saturnine. She looked like St.
Colitis of the Sprung Chair. Turning away to find another
conversation, she carefully managed to avoid the dark
stranger with the French name who’d just been introduced
and who was standing all alone.
Miss Dessicquint, the assistant dean, looked like
Nosferatu—a huge mustachioed godforgone, inflexible as
a Dutch shoe, who was given to lying about her age
before anybody asked her. She closed her eyes and begun
to hum. “Look,” she sneered, nudging her secretary and
sometime bowling partner, Miss Gupse, an unhealthy-
looking little poltfoot with one of the longest noses on
earth. “There, by the table, in harlequin shorts.”
“Oh no. Floyce.”
“The flower of fairybelle land.”
“He irks me, that one.”
“He?”
Miss Gupse, smiling, caught the irony and licked her
nose. “She.”
“It!” said Miss Dessicquint, wagging a tongue long as
a biscuit-seller’s shovel. Her secretary had to turn around
to stop the smile glimmering down the flanks of her steep
nose. “He looks like a Mexican banana-split.”
“I wonder,” swallowed little Miss Gupse, “how those
people”—she looked up over a cookie—”well, do it.”
“Have you ever had the occasion,” asked Miss
Dessicquint, pausing for dramatic effect, “to look at the
east end of a westbound cow?”
Floyce R. Fulwider, reputedly a ferocious
alcibiadean, was a balding, fastidious art teacher—he
pronounced Titian, his favorite painter, for instance, to
rhyme with Keatsian—who could often be seen skipping
across the Quinsy campus holding by his fingertips the
newly wet gouaches and undernourished para-menstrual
creations of his students or, as he called them, his
“popsies.” The college teemed with stories about the
felonious gender-switching parties he threw, when he’d
paint his windows black, put on his Mabel Mercer
records, and encourage everyone to don feather boas and
run around naked. He couldn’t have liked it more. But
Miss Dessicquint didn’t like it and told Miss Gupse,
confidentially, that he was getting a terminal contract this
year. “Rome,” she whispered into her companion’s ear,
“wasn’t burnt in a day.”
Then, turning, they saw Darconville.
“I hope he isn’t a bumbie.”
“He looks normal to me,” said Miss Gupse.
“Well, you know what they say. And it’s true,” said
Miss Dessicquint, with eyes like frozen frass, “there’s a
thin line between madness and insanity.”
Miss Gupse, never strong, secretly thought herself the
object of this cut and that very evening would proceed to
call her sister in Nashville to inquire tearfully about a job
there. True, that particular afternoon she had been in the
midst of her mois. But the memory of having a big nose
from childhood is perhaps at the bottom of more havoc
than one can ever know.
In one corner of the room, occupying much of it,
stood Dr. Glibbery, a walrus-arsed microbiology professor
with a face, spanned by a dirty ramiform mustache, that
had the nasty whiteness of boiled veal. His body
resembled the shape in microcosm and odor in fact of one
of those nineteenth-century lamps, the kind with a
reservoir that gurgled periodically, emitted a stench of oil,
and often exploded. A fanatical right-wing at-once-ist, he
bullied his students—calling them all “Dufus”—with
incredible lies about the difficulty of taking a doctorate
and how, in pursuit of his own, he’d lived on ketchup
sandwiches, got hookworm from going barefoot, and had
to study upsidedown to keep awake. In point of fact, he
had taken his degree from one of those just-about-
accredited polytechnical millhouses in Virginia, identified
usually by its initials, where the only requirements for
graduation were to belong to the DeMolay and have two
thumbs and a reasonably erect posture.
“None of these here dufuses work anymore. Well,”
pontificated Dr. Glibbery, “I’m going to knock their tits
right into their watch-pockets for them, OK? You won’t
spy no grade of A in my roll-book,” he said, “for love nor
money.”
He mumped a fistful of horehound drops and winked.
“Or money,” corrected Prof. Wratschewe, doyen of
the English department and proud author of several
monographs, still, alas, awaiting the recognition of an
indifferent world: “Bed-Wetting Imagery in Chatterton”;
“Packed Earth as Anti-Resurrection Symbol in
Wordsworth”; “The Caesura: Rest Home of Rhetoric”;
and one slim book, Menus from Homer (o.p.).
But Dr. Glibbery only farted and grinned.
Miss Pouce, standing there, almost died of
embarrassment—and, turning quickly, banged into a wall.
Great snorts of laughter accompanied this, then grew—
the lackeys, going beetred, doubled over with hilarity—as
Greatracks, mimicking her, waddled yoketoed into the
same wall, went crosseyed, and grabbed his nose. Qwert
Yui Op, a midget Tibetan-Chinese, and Miss Malducoit,
of the dirigible hips, both in math, applauded—and she
spilled her drink. Darconville went to pick up her cup.
“Thank you very much,” said Miss Malducoit coldly,
stepping in front of him, “I can do it myself.”
 Darconville, unwittingly, backed into a group of old
ladies. It was the delegation, each old enough to carbon-
date, from home economics. In the midst of them,
studiously arranged that way, loomed a huge
unproliferative boffa with tied oviducts and blimp-like
breasts which sagged according to the law of S=½vt2
named Mrs. DeCrow, associate professor in American
history and local U.D.C. chairwoman, who was blowing a
loud ranz des vaches across the room, subject: her
summer in Biloxi. She had a voice like a faulty drain.
There was a cruel pin in her hat, and she wore an
eighteenth-century brooch with a painting of a litter of
pigs on it. Famously disagreeable, at least so Dr.
Dodypol, a colleague, told Darconville, she harbored a
monomaniacal loathing—something not a few
Southerners shared—for Abraham Lincoln.
“I know you but you don’t know me,” Mrs. DeCrow
announced to Darconville, hoping she was wrong.
An arrangement, thought Darconville, that suits me
fine.
“Wait,” she suddenly exclaimed, holding a finger to
her nose and turning to the other ladies, “but now who
does this boy remind me of?”
Everyone dutifully waited.
“Not that awful Edwin Albert Poe who wrote horror
poetry?” asked a sagcheeked lady cretinously mis-
shoving a wedge of cake into her face.
“No,” said bossy Mrs. DeCrow, cocking a quick
snook at the lady. “I know,” she said, interrupting herself,
“Sir Thomas More.”
“Saint Thomas More,” corrected Darconville, for
whom such distinctions meant something. But he was
smiling.
 Mrs. DeCrow, arching an eyebrow, didn’t care. That
remark, though she smiled a hard smile, immediately cost
him—and irrevocably—any invitation whatsoever to one
of her Fridays, even if he lived to be a hundred. She knew
where to stick the knife in.
Darconville submitted to his uneasiness and in the
contending noise, the rambling incoherent flow of talk,
found that the most delectable social delight there seemed
to be the quarrel that stopped just short of violence,
discussions ending in repeated barks and loud flat
interrobangs. It was a tragedy of language. There was no
dialogue, only monologue, wherein each of the
thimbleriggers and pathologically self-defensive
opsimaths gathered there, most of them educated on the
fly at one of those narrow and sectarian chop-and-chance-
it swot factories in that region which was named after
some square-capped fifteenth-century Protestant joykiller,
only kept to a mad and self-referent fixity of subject and
blathered on to no consequence.
Suddenly, there was a buzz of intrigue by the
doorway: someone reporting a car accident. Xystine
Chappelle, calling from the Quinsyburg Hospital, had
reported that, while driving them home, Miss Shepe and
Miss Ghote, sitting in the back seat, had willfully
resumed their “I-think-that-you-think-that-I-think”
argument, whereupon Miss Ghote leaped in frustration
from the moving car and broke her femur.
“Them ol’ beangooses,” muttered Dr. Glibbery,
fingering through the candies, “I do believe they gone get
married one day.”
“Are you?” Darconville, surprised, looked behind
him. “Are you married?” It was the German instructor,
Miss Tavistock (a.k.a. “The Clawhammer”), a flat-chested
girl with a cataleptic smile who had the curious habit of
suggesting to perfect strangers that, frankly, she thought
they were in love with her.
“No, I’m not,” answered Darconville who, suddenly
noticing Mrs. DeCrow empty-handed, offered her some
cookies, but she would have none of it and walked past
him in a snit—the snit that would last a lifetime.
“The writer,” sighed Miss Sally Bull Sweetshrub, the
tournure of her phrases as precise as cut glass, “has no
time whatsoever for such things as marriage. No, I’m
afraid she has not. The devotion which asks her to feel the
deliberation of art asks also that she choose the single
life.” A senior member of the creative writing department,
Miss Sweetshrub carefully lifted off her half-glasses and,
patronizingly turning her head from person to person,
lectured the few people nearby on the difficulty in
question. She was—how to put it?—an “unclaimed
blessing.” “I am a novelist, you see,” she said, “which is
spelled d-e-v-o-t-i-o-n.”
“I see,” said Mrs. McAwaddle, the registrar, who
passing by with a tidy of licorice-whips on a napkin and a
paper cup of purple soda unintentionally got hooped into
the conversation.
“But do you? Do you really?” asked Miss
Sweetshrub.
Mrs. McAwaddle, to be kind, gave the mandatory
sign of ignorance by pretending to reconsider and said,
“Mmmmmmm.” Long having been a fretful auditor to
Miss Sweetshrub’s explicit polysemantic chats, she knew
the hopelessness of trying to extricate herself. “Well,” she
reflected, charitably, “I have no doubt but that I might
not.”
 Prof. Wratschewe, ducking his head in, interjected.
“Excuse me, Mrs. McAwaddle? The word ‘but,’ I believe,
is used unnecessarily after the verbs ‘to doubt’ and ‘to
help.’ Strunk & White, Book Four, I think you’ll find.”
“I wouldn’t have made that mistake,” riposted Miss
Sally Bull Sweetshrub, bowing her head and fluttering her
eyelids with the advantage Prof. Wratschewe’s old, but as
yet inconsequential, crush on her allowed.
Miss Sally Bull Sweetshrub, aet. 50 or so, was
classically affected and wore out-of-date dresses that
looked like Morris wallpaper. She had a perched Jacobean
nose, like a dogvane, a waltzing oversized bottom, and
wore her pissburnt-colored hair in an outlandish bun at
the back anchored by several severe combs that matched
in horn her conversational brooches. A bottomless fund of
clarifications and cruelly sharpened pencils, she was
known for giving strawberry teas and answering all her
mail on Featherweight Antique Wove, Double Royal 90
when she couldn’t attend a function, which, of course, she
always could—and, when so doing, always did in the
company of her pet beagle, “Howlet,” and a monstrous
alligator friend who some years ago left its native land in
the form of a handbag. She was the pillar of Quinsy
College, a woman both impregnable and unbearable
(what she might have borne were she pregnable would,
indeed, be unimaginable!)—one of those starboard-
leaning High Anglicans, famous and innumerable in the
Old Dominion, whose factitious sense of vanity in a
private conversation makes it frankly public: the raised
and punishingly assertive voice of the insane queen which
includes, willingly or not, everybody within earshot.
“You perhaps know my work?”
 She was looking at Darconville with her eyes shut,
her lavender gloves buttoned shut and crossed
immaculately in her lap.
“Possibly. Could you name—?”
“My novels? Let me see. My first was Answer Came
There None, then, respectively, I, a Stranger; Also but Not
Yet the Wombat Cries; The Big Regret; The Interrupted
Woman; The Same, Only Different; and The Black
Duchess.” It was the genre of course of Hoodoo,
Hackwork, and Hyperesthesia, the popular dustjacket for
which always showed a crumbling old mansion-by-
moonlight and a frightened beauty in gossamer standing
before it, tresses down, never knowing which way to turn.
Darconville, listening in spite of himself, was trying
to repress an image of the prattling angel, Glossopetra,
who reputedly had fallen from heaven to spend his eternal
punishment wagging like a human tongue.
“There was a volume of my early verse, Naps Upon
Parnassus. I followed that,” continued Miss Sweetshrub,
“with a critical work on Robert Browning called The
Snail on the Thorn.” Miss Throwswitch, standing behind
her, periscoped two little fingers over her head and
wiggled them, while Mr. Schrecklichkeit and Qwert Yui
Op smiled into their sleeves.
“Mmmmm,” said Mrs. McAwaddle, breathing her
hum back in, a sound more of fatigue than recognition.
“Thankfully nothing on Abraham Lincoln!” piped in
Mrs. DeCrow, making a loud transition to the powder
room.
Miss Sweetshrub chastely crossed her legs. “My most
widely reviewed book? Difficult to say. I guess I’d have
to say it was my Tlot! Tlot! The Biography of Alfred
Noyes.”
 “My,” said Mrs. McAwaddle, hooing low but wisely,
like Minerva’s owl, “you’ve sure written a lot.”
“Permit me? A lot is a parcel of land. I have
written”—she drew her little finger fastidiously across her
eyebrow—”much.” Then she smiled around sweetly at
everyone, especially Prof. Wratschewe whose approval
was never in doubt if the handful of tiny white valentine
candies (inscribed “Skidoo,” “Be Mine,” “Kiss Me,” etc.)
he solicitously extended to her meant anything. For
eleven years there had run the possibly not unfounded
rumor they’d be married any weekend now—who knew,
perhaps the five-hundred-and-seventy-third would be it?
“Good grief,” cried Prof. Wratschewe over his
pocket-watch. “It’s late—and I’ve a lecture to prepare this
weekend.”
“Weekends few,” sighed Miss Sally Bull Sweetshrub,
recrossing her hands and anticipating, perhaps, only the
title of another novel she’d one day write, one she saw
somewhat wistfully that there’d be plenty of time for as
she sat there silently, as if straining to hear the celesta of
wedding bells she felt could now peal only across the
landscape of her fiction.
And so it went.
The last rays of the afternoon sun brought a feeble
light through the meeting-room, and Darconville, heading
toward the doorway, found a last group of teachers to
meet. He was introduced to Miss Ballhatchet, a muscular
valkyrie from the physical ed department; Dr.
Excipuliform, a history professor with afflicted eyes and a
Transylvanian hop in his speech who despised the left-
wing American press (“Intellectschultz! Velfare!
Gummonism! Rewolt! Neekroes!”); cheery Miss Skait,
from physics, who, immune to paradox, bouncingly
assured him that Quinsy College was actually one big
family; the Weerds—Aldo and Dodo—a young Pekinese-
faced couple in the English department who spoke only to
each other, wore rucksacks, and had occasional bouts of
purpura haemorrhagica which they insisted on calling
poetry; a six-foot maliarda named Miss Porchmouth,
chemistry, who had a handshake that felt like pebbledash-
siding; a certain Mr. Bischthumb, head of anthropology,
who, tucking into an enormous piece of cake, bit off half
the doily which got stuck in his weasand—and, wheezing
tearfully, had to be raised by four men and lifted out of
the room kicking skyward cataleptically in one of the
most indecent postures Darconville had ever seen.
There were others. Darconville met Mr. Thimm,
government department, who told him, several times,
about his wife’s egg-in-the-armpit deformity; Drs.
Knipperdoling and Pindle, two sententious ballachers
from economic geography, who in a little vaudeville skit
of theirs constantly pitched back and forth various adages
and truisms about life, invariably beginning, “Well, I’ve
learned one thing from the rough-and-tumble . . .” or
“Now, I’ve been shinnying up this old stick for forty
some odd years, and . . .”; and, finally, Dr. Speetles from
the general education department, an anti-intellectual
gepid who claimed the study of Skakespeare to be
completely worthless, preferring instead the applied
sciences and confessing wittily, “I teach all my classes,
see, using only a toy fire-engine. It’s a multi-concept
factor, you know? With this as a point of departure,” he
said, sucking a candy-spangle from his thumb, “I can
teach sociology, government, civics, visual and
environmental studies—hell, you name it.” He tapped the
side of his nose and nudged Darconville, who at that point
was seriously on the brink of calling upon the angel,
Hodniel, who supposedly had the power of curing
stupidity in men. Instead, he put on his coat.
Walking out, one of the unaligneds of the faculty who
may have stood, perhaps, for the several Darconville
hadn’t yet managed to meet, confided to him, “You know,
when ol’ Greatracks bangs down the gavel in these
meetings and says, ‘Begin!’ well, I always think, shoot,
that’s about the longest word in the damn books—and
ain’t that the truth.”
The thought hadn’t been uttered a second when Prof.
Wratschewe, grammarian, suddenly jumping-jacked out
of nowhere and said, “Actually, I think you’ll find that the
longest word found in literature, Aristophanic in origin,
is: Lopadotemachoselacogaleokranioleipsano-
drimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichl
epikossypho-
phattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoisir
aiobaphetrago-nopterygn.”
Somehow, it summed up the day.

XIII

A Lethiferous Letter

And, behold, there came a great wind from the

wilderness.
—Job 1:19
 Dear President Greatracks,

I feel I have made a mistake in coming to teach at

Quinsy College. My intention here is not to sit in
judgment, but your failure in my opinion to recognize the
true ends of academic life—a circumstance I can’t yet
believe you are disinclined to preserve—raises questions
less to the extent than to the source of the trouble, and
since I shall be foolish in saying more to this purpose,
while trusting you to understand, may I trust with more
reason to ask pardon for these remarks? We seem to have
lost our way, becoming righteous rather than virtuous,
rigid in form but lax in substance, and, not secondary but
rather accessory to the urgency of my decision, reconciled
to the old idea that vision is perilous where vision is
profound, a fact leading not only to a singular want of
refinement but to the kind of fatal ignorance, excusable
only where it cannot be overcome, that has put us at
variance with ourselves and advanced the cause of
various griffon-like promoters and apparitors on the
faculty whose names I would in all places esteem it an
honor openly to abhor.
I have been forced by deliberation, therefore, to
weigh advantage against loss in a matter touching not
only my students and myself but also a book I am
presently under obligation to complete, whence I here
mean by conscience to advise you that, upon the firm
setting of this persuasion, I believe it my duty to resign—

Thinking of Isabel, however, Darconville

reconsidered and, running his great black pen over the
words, registered a rainbow over the Universal Deluge.
 XIV

The Witchery of Archery

All myths are attempts to explain contradictions in

nature.
—CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS

“FIRE!” cried Miss Ballhatchet, the forty-nine-year-

old physical education teacher—her body, in the vintner’s
phrase, orotund—and she waved her arms, megaphoning
her way in a ballooning duck gym-suit through the front
line of cherry-cheeked freshmen, their bows at the ready.
Suddenly, she blew her whistle in a flutter of angry pips.
“Wait!”
“Must I repeat? The cock feather,” she fumed, her
muscles tense, “must be at right angles to the nock and
away from the bow! Miss Moss here must have thought I
said left angles.” She glowered at Trinley Moss and
pointed. “Is this what you mean by a left angle, or what?”
The girl’s bow was canted ridiculously.
“Your bow is canted ridiculously.”
Miss Moss murmured.
Miss Ballhatchet again blew her whistle and closed
her eyes. It had been broiling on the archery field earlier
but the day had darkened by afternoon, a pewter-like sky
settling in with full clouds. “Now, remember, a bow fully
drawn is seven-eighths broken, hear?” She pointed, nose
to nose, down the line. “This is a sport, I shouldn’t have
to remind you, in which women have excelled—far
better,” she snorted, “than men—for thousands of years,
so shall we let up now, tell me? Well, we won’t, pure and
simple.” She blew her whistle. “OK, go for your golds.
Position! Aim! Draw!”—and, pausing dramatically, she
pointed like a bellwether to the ten old targets (the broom-
corn stuffing in each bulging out of the rips) which rose at
one end of the long sward expanse like striped comic
moons and boomed, “Fire!”
Snap! Twing! Whirr! And to squeaks and squawks a
sluice of twenty or so arrows—apterous some, most
snapping off in slices and hooks—were released, heftily,
in a fluttering of novice-like bowshots. No more than two
or three hit the targets. Some flew sideways. Several
twirled right around the bowstrings. And one deposited in
a lateral whistle not four inches from Miss Ballhatchet’s
manfully emplanted feet, whereupon, almost swallowing
her whistle, she hopfrogged up with a piglike squeal.
“Beautiful!” she barked. “Oh, just beautiful!”
Each girl, her six shot, trooped out after her spent
arrows, all of them waddling like dabchicks, stooping,
wading around, hopping. The successful few dawdled at
the targets, delaying the sweet necessity, for the benefit of
all the others, and notably Miss Ballhatchet, of
unplugging their shafts from the blue treble bed or the
near-perfect red.
The archery class was almost finished, the grey light
creeping slowly toward the west. A few more clouds
bulled up in the northern sky, darkening, making it cooler.
From a distant knoll at the verge of the field, having
strolled over after his classes, Darconville sat and
watched the girls at play, trying at the same time to finish
writing a letter, a deposition to the Venetian court, at least
his tenth, in reply to various interrogatories touching on
the litigation of his grandmother’s palazzo. It felt good to
be outside. He hummed quietly, content in his solitude.
The ritual across the archery field, a kind of dumb-show
being acted out wordlessly, he sporadically studied:
especially hirsute Miss Ballhatchet marching
amphitheatrically to and fro, like Lady Paramount,
waving her special self-nocked lemonwood bow and
bellowing outraged but indistinguishable commands that
reverberated off the dormitory wall of Clitheroe and
shook out croaks of crows. A thought, with one of them,
flew across Darconville’s head: onto a shaft the bird’s
own feathers are grafted as fletches, and what must that
bird think whose own quills, shafted and sped, strike it a
fatal wound in mid-sky?
The lesson down on the field continued. Miss
Ballhatchet explained the technicalities of the Sioux
Draw, the Mongolian Draw, the Pinch Draw. She fiddled
out a timberhitch, dissertated on fletching glues,
distinguished between various bow woods, and finally
showed how to wax a string correctly, at which point—
her breasts walloping up and down to the vigorous action
—she told the girls they had damned well better stop
laughing, stop immediately, she didn’t mean maybe, or
someone was going to find herself with a fat lip, did they
understand? —good!
“Now together,” clapped fit Miss Ballhatchet, “which
eye do we sight with?” She placed her hand to her ear.
They shouted in unison: “The right!”
“And on which side of the bow is the arrow placed?”
“The left!”
 So. Miss Ballhatchet marched down the landskip,
turned, and blew her whistle; came the bellowed orders:
“Position! Aim! Draw! Loose!—Loose, for godsakes!”
But it was of a sudden a mis-exploded fireworks of
tackle, shaft, feathers, and bows. Elsie Magoun overdrew.
Martha Van Ramm didn’t anchor and wobbled her arrow.
Twosie Kelter closed her right eye instead of her left and
then looked up, at the cost of a bulbous thumb, too soon.
Sheila Mangelwurzel’s shooting tab flew off. Grace
Lerp’s nose wasn’t touching the string, her arrow
spinning off like a pinwheel. One girl’s string—it was
Bertha Tinkle— unlooped from the nock, and she sprang
forward onto her head, tripping in a ricochet over her
ground-quiver to a burst of laughter and, clattering her
arrows, just missing a fatal impalement on one of the
several parallel-pile target points sticking up. Sarah Lou
Huckpath, never very bright, moronically jerked out her
bow with a bending-load of such vengeance that it
immediately went crackkk!—and she just stood there,
bewildered, holding it up like a poorly yerked wishbone.
And fat little Millette Snipes, her abundant forearm
unable to accommodate the conventional leather arm-
guard, missed by seconds Miss Ballhatchet’s initially
sage, but belated, howl—”You, your arm is kinked too far
into the arrow!”—screamed, bent over double (no mean
feat in itself), and then zigzagged off the field with her
mouth open and a flaming welt on her inner arm the
shape of a nasty smile.
“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-
“Sawmilling: Why It’s Important to Us” by Melody
Blume C
“A Look at Tarot Packs” by Wroberta Carter D
“My Summer in Chincoteague” by Ava Caelano B-
“Freshman Worries!” by Barbara Celarent C
“Three Wogs: My Favorite Novel” by Analecta
Cisterciana A
“How to Candy Shoups” by Ailsa Cragg C
“Fidelity in Penguins” by Childrey Fawcett B+
“The Legend of Kali Pátnï” by Galveston Foster B
“The Life and Works of Kate Douglas Wiggin” by
Scarlet Foxwell B
“Jesus Christ: My Personal Savior” by Opal Garten B
 “The Day We Lost Our Dog, Pee Wee—and Found
Him
Again!” by Marsha Goforth C
“My Pet Peeve: Pet Peeves” by LeHigh Hialeah C-
“My Life Eats Shit” by Elsie Magoun [nervous
breakdown] Inc.
“Quinsy College: That First (Gulp!) Glimpse” by
Sheila Mangelwurzel D
“Was Shakespeare Shakespeare?” by Christie
McCarkle C
“My First Batch of Potato Cookies” by Trinley Moss
B-
“Dating vs. Non-Dating” by Glycera Pentlock D
“Love at First Sight” by Hypsipyle Poore B
“Areopagitica” by Hallowe’ena Rampling
[plagiarism!] F
“An Embarrassing Occurrence at Zutphen Farm” by
Isabel
Rawsthorne
“My Prize Hen” by Cecilia Sketchley B
“A Poetic Analysis of ‘The Pig Lady’ “ by Butone
Slocum B
“Coiffures Through the Ages, 1936-1970” by Millette
Snipes B-
“Pellagra: Blight of the South” by April Springlove C
[missing] by Lately Thompson F
“4-Hing Can Be Fun” by DeDonda Umpton D
“A Short Study on ‘The Essay of
Megalanthropogenesis, or,
the Art of Producing Intelligent Children Who
Will Bear
Great Men’ “ by Shelby Uprightly A
 “Quain’s Fatty Heart: A New Disease?” by Martha
Van
Ramm B+
“Dinky, My Favorite Rabbit” by Poteet Wilson D
“Menopause: It’s Closer Than You Think” by Rachel
Windt D
“‘Traveler’: General Lee’s Loyal Steed” by Laurie
Lee Zenker D-

Darconville dropped in his drawer the thirty or so

little maimed and undermedicated projects, roughly eight
to fifteen pages in length each, stapled, bradded, corner-
crimped, and of course those several gathered together
feminologistically with a punched hole and a loop of
yarn.
The one paper he’d set aside—after shooing
Spellvexit away—he now had a chance to review in
peace. The calligraphy was spidery, a thin arachnoid
scrawl, but unique in its own way and, he thought, rather
beautiful, with somewhat of a forward slant, long t-bars,
and the overuse of hyphens, along with perpendicular
ascending final sweeps and, well, the rather choleric
preference for red ink. It wasn’t, frankly, either a hand or
a prose style comfortable with language, nor was it, upon
the reflection of several re-readings, a person perhaps
very comfortable with herself. The pity of it! He found
himself—queerly, he was not certain why—loath to give
it a grade. It was strange: a judgment of any kind seemed
presumptuous. Nettled only in that, while logic told him
the paper was flawed, truth told him it wasn’t,
Darconville delayed.
Although exhausted, he lit up another cigarette and
went to the window. He wouldn’t grade it: no one is equal
to only one thing she does. He went to bed. But he had to
grade it—so he got up, turned on the light, and read it
again.

XVII

“An Embarrassing Occurrence at Zutphen Farm”

We had but one interview, and that was formal,

modest, and uninteresting
—OLIVER GOLDSMITH, She Stoops to
Conquer

Précis: The Disquisition recounts how Isabel

Rawsthorne, upon the Occasion of being invited to dine at
the large farm of her Wealthy Neighbors—surstyled van
der Slang—was overtaken with nerves, and, giving
Further Particulars concerning that, is then wholly
devoted to a Full and Faithful Report of what befell the
subject in mid-meal when, twiddling her plate in a
vigorous attempt to separate for consumption an obdurate
chop, she embarrassingly jerked her portion of peas
across the table, a Lapse in Elegance she begs leave to
offer, while confessing no other motive which her heart
had informed her of, as caused by finding herself in
Unnatural Surroundings, after which the Narrative reverts
to the High-Dutch pedigree of her Neighbors (q.v.),
containing under Different Heads everything Illustrative
and Explanatory of a social class disquiparant to her own,
superadded to which is not only a Digression on the
current value of the Angus cattle they owned but also an
Episode, provided for comic relief, that treats of Diverse
Little Matters anent the reactions of the Boys in that
family, how they laughed, &c &c, appending then a
Touching Moment when the adjudged delectus personne,
though pulsing by secret oath to refuse it, is given an
Open Invitation to return, this comprising a Final Exit
concluded to the satisfaction of Practically Everybody,
intended all, as so put, less as a rehearsal of the Scanty
and Defective social graces of the author than an example
of the Voluminous Essay, indeed Book, which she implied
could but never would be written on same because of her
insignificance. It was signed: Isabel Her Mark—and
graded A.
Awkwardness is the prerogative of kaleidogyns.

XVIII

Isabel

Art thou that she than whom no fairer is?

—Christ Church ms.

THE NIGHT finally came. A porchlight was lit.

Upstairs, Darconville sat at his desk, a single finger in
cogitative support of his head, flinging arbitrarily between
one thought and another and staring into space. It was
Thursday.
He wasn’t worried. He felt apprehensive, but he
noticed: it wasn’t his kind of apprehension. She was
coming to visit him this night, and, although he tried to
work, driven by the fact that for several nights he hadn’t,
he couldn’t and, furthermore, perversely deemed it of no
consequence. He had of course often written scribble
before, but that wasn’t it—now, nothing came.
There was, he supposed, a secret logic to it all, as
there was to so much in his particular life thus far, but he
suspected that the man who has faith in logic is always
cuckolded by reality, and so his brow was drawn with this
worry: that he wasn’t worried—an apprehension neither
diminished nor temporized during those long hours of
silence that eventually passed and, after the faintest
knock, brought Isabel Rawsthorne into his rooms with all
her bravery on, and tackle trim, sails filled, and streamers
waving. Instinctively, Darconville kissed her cheek
(surprising even himself!), the only displacement activity
he could manage for the hitch in his throat that kept him
from speaking. He set out some candles. Silently, he went
to pour some wine and, after standing in the kitchen with
eyes closed for a moment, returned. Taking her glass,
Isabel thanked him.
They both stood silent in obscure embarrassment,
facing each other. No mood was ever more subdued in
relation to what was felt, yet etched with those graceful
and tiny observances that somehow connote aspiration
and make every ferial act festal.
Darconville who couldn’t speak tried.
“I’ve often wondered—whether you can see my light
from Fitts.”
 “And I’ve often wondered,” she whispered, “which of
the lights I’ve seen from my window in Fitts were yours.”
There was silence.
“We neither of us know.”
“Neither of us,” she echoed, looking up. Any look
with so much in it never met his eyes before.
It was a face—ecce, quam bonum! quam
pulchritudinem!— sweeter than Nature’s itself, her soft
eyes full of light. She was wearing a slight summery buff-
pink dress, low cut in front, with a design of cherrysprigs
and long sleeves flounced out at the shoulders, a fashion
that did not adorn so much as it was adorned. A pink
lutestring ribbon matched one wrapped in a bandeau
around a weft at the back of her flowing hair. She was
like a beautiful apparition of heather, white, pink, and
rose.
There was a radiance in the unspoiled face which
glowed, as Darconville looked at her through the clouds
of golden hair, above the swip of the flickering candle. It
was a flesh, sculpturally considered, whiter than new-
sawn ivory. Her eyes, fawn’s—clear and agatescent at the
edges—were the gentle brown of woodsmoke (if a trifle
too close) showing a light as if the heart within were sun
to them, with the trace of a smile there, a sparkle, her lips
in a second renewed, a sweet aristocratic curve which
drew a faint line by the cheek at a perfect angle of
incidence, creating on one side an ever-so-slight dimple.
She had a positively perfect mouth, with yet a curious
concordia discors to that face.
It was a scar—a slight pale dartle, once stitched, like
an elongated teardrop coming down the left cheekbone, a
small disfigurement as if a tiny, tiny dagger sat there, as
if, perhaps, the Devil, his breath black as hellebore, had
shadowed her birth-bed, stepped through the valance and,
astonished for envy, leaned down and paid her the
exaction of a poisoned kiss. But what awful conjectures it
gave rise to! Had she been knived? Had someone thrown
something at her? Had she been imped by a wicked
family? And yet, Darconville recalled, hadn’t Helen
herself had a scar which her lover, Paris, called Cos
Amoris, the whetstone of love?
“Are you—a writer?”
“Yes,” said Darconville, turning from his thoughts.
She only smiled, her girlishly soft hands lying
motionless in her lap. She seemed so different from other
girls he’d known, her unmeretricious eyes, her face full of
messages one had to read in a single flash. Intrigued, he
felt he would never know her fully but that, somehow, she
would always enjoy the compromise of exception—an
exception that proved the rule of what beauty was and is
and yet but once seemed a dream for us only for want of
being seen. Standing up, she looked around Darconville’s
room with curiosity, pausing at certain objects she
touched with fleeting taps—the skull, the fat pen, the
watch on the nail—exclaiming over them with a kind of
knowing sympathy for his strange, perhaps cracked
romantic life. She bent over his manuscript.
“I was going to say,” said Darconville quickly, a
feeling of sudden embarrassment and undeniable
discomfort emanating from what she in nature embodied
compared to what he in art attempted, “that since I first
saw you in class I’ve found myself—”
Ecstatic? Miserable? It would have sounded
ridiculous, whatever he said. He poured some more wine
with innocent confusion.
 “—I don’t know,” he stammered, “I guess I found
myself wondering if you were anymore at h-home here
than I.”
He wanted to tell her that he couldn’t sleep or write,
that there was, in spite of that, a lovely inevitableness to
the suddenly unmeasurable and reasonless order of his
life now, a supernatural sort of coexistence with angels
who left him with no choice, somehow, only alternatives
and often confusing him to such a degree that he couldn’t
tell the evil from the good, demons from daevas, satans
from seraphim as they crisscrossed through an
imagination given over before now only to fiction. And so
he wondered who are you, Shekinah? Who are you,
Emanation? Who are you, Anima, who framed such
another ideal?
“Here? You mean, in Quinsyburg?”
“Yes.”
“It’s lonesome at school. But,” she said, pulling her
thumb, “not— here.” She looked up, her color high. “In
this room.”
As Isabel paused at the mantelpiece, Darconville
noticed more clearly what before he’d but briefly noticed:
a peasant-like thickness in her legs, a flesh of babyfat
(touched here and there by pink arborescent veins) which
overloaded the lower body somewhat and forced her into
a kind of affrighted retention of movement, a defensive
posture in which, so poised, she seemed always ready to
back away, all to contect what, by accepting, might have
made her even more beautiful because less self-conscious.
Argive Helen with fat thighs? It didn’t matter: he prayed
she could see for herself he knew it didn’t matter at all.
Trees grew more out of the air than out of the ground,
didn’t they?
 There were long silences, the kind where everything
seems to be being said but nothing at all is uttered. She
was faithful in her attention, but there wasn’t a sound.
Such a strange tenderness reached him, but no one said a
word.
“I haven’t thanked you, Isabel,” said Darconville
suddenly, “for your gift.”
“My gift?”
“That.”
“Ooooh, yes,” Isabel laughed softly and gently picked
up from the mantel the pomander ball. He could see it
pleased her to have done an action by stealth only to have
it found out by accident. Darconville also noticed that she
always picked up things delicately with the exclusive
precision of only thumb and index-finger, a seraphically
nimble sleight-of-hand with all the other fingers (ringless,
he saw) spread out fan-wise and tapering to the flattest of
fingertips.
“It has the scent of a fairy-forest,” said Isabel,
breathing in the orange and cloves and regarding
Darconville, sideways, with a covertly wistful smile. And
then, foreshadowing a “changeling” fantasy he’d soon see
was often hers, she quietly told him of a dream she’d with
abiding continuity had from childhood: she was a solitary
princess, wandering barefoot, lost in a desolate land
whose perspective slid down into lonely valleys and
empty meadows where people were cruel and no one
understood her or who she was until one day she came to
her fairy-forest, an enchanted world of flowers, castles,
animals—
A knock at the door interrupted her. It was Miss
Trappe, tiny under a huge straw hat, holding an armful of
—but it triple-somersaulted with a whine out of her
hands, rucked up a rug, and went skidding beneath it only
to the point of its blinking eyes and pink nose, parts all
recognizably Spellvexit’s. That, then, became the happy
occasion for Darconville of introducing Isabel
Rawsthorne to Miss Trappe who, excusing herself,
mentioned she only wanted to be sure the cat got in (she
swore he mewed “Why, good evening, madam!” from the
front porch ), but before she left—exclaiming upon
Isabel’s beauty— she invited her, anytime, to come visit a
lonely old woman. And then she was off. Darconville told
Isabel how much she would like Miss Trappe, as he
himself did, and encouraged her to accept that invitation.
“And this”—Darconville’s lap was suddenly filled with
an agitated creature, flumping its paws and eyeing Isabel
suspiciously—”is Spellvexit, who walks by himself and
all places are not alike to him. He talks.”
Isabel, unsuccessfully, tried to touch him.
“I don’t seem ever able to communicate with
anybody,” whispered Isabel as if she were breathing on
glass, distractedly twicking her thumbnail, the cuticle of
which, saw Darconville, was curiously wrinkled. The
words almost broke his heart.
“Surely your mother and father—”
“I have no father.”
It was spoken so fast that Darconville, struck with it,
could find nothing whatever to say. Isabel, it seemed,
never said anything important to him except while
making some physical movement to distract attention
from her words, for simultaneously she held a cushion to
herself and something jumped in her eyes, now tense with
search. He couldn’t define it at once, but after watching
her for a space, while his brain pressed for the right words
to say, he thought perhaps suddenly he’d understood the
meaning of her dream. But beyond that, his spirit
extended outward, rising from stoical self-sufficiency and
reaching, like sweet miracle, to a conscious concern not
to flout the souls of the lonely on earth, and so Isabel
went to Darconville’s heart by the very nearest road,
which was the road of pity, smoothed by grace, and
beauty, and a gentleness that seemed, at last, the one ray
of light in the darkness of Quinsyburg.
Darconville sought a way to put her at ease,
experiencing, however, an intimation of helplessness in
the face of what he guessed to be a strange pride and
almost exultant loneliness, for without a sigh, without a
break, she pondered wildly, floating upon some inner sea
of feeling while yet being frightened, it seemed, of
suddenly drowning in it. He attempted to reach her,
carefully, without trying to contribute to the invasion of
forces that within her had clearly already begun. And in
someone so young! Come, asked Darconville, wasn’t she
only seventeen? No answer. Eighteen? She nodded.
Where did she live? It was a place called Fawx’s Mt.,
about seventy miles north of Quinsyburg. And hadn’t she
wanted to go to college?
“Isabel?”
“Everybody thought it best,” she replied, her grave
reflective calm obviously masking an unsettled
temperament in the matter. “My uncle, who lives with us,
didn’t really care. My mother, I suppose, did. But I told
my mother, no, I really wasn’t anxious to come. I wanted
—”
But Isabel hurried across the passage, silently, leaving
in the stead of whatever it was that slipped away simple
resignation, and mechanically smiled at her hands. He
looked for something to say.
 “Did your mother drive you down to Quinsyburg?”
It was an ordinary question ordinarily asked, but she
looked away, smoothing the nap of her dress over and
over again. The poignancy of her shyness, or her hurt, or
her fear—whatever—increased his awareness of the
suspense between them.
“No,” whispered Isabel quickly, lowering her eyes, “a
friend.” She glanced imperceptibly across her shoulder in
a brief but distinct scrutiny. “Just a friend.”
Smiling, Darconville hurriedly looked round for
something to do or say, anything to precipitate a change
of subject and arrest not one, but two minds beating
against the unknown, for a counterpoise had lowered: a
friend—the commonest dysphemism in an affair of the
heart —is always a member of the opposite sex. He saw
the shadow of someone else cast across her life. It didn’t
matter, he thought; inevitable things don’t. And in spite of
his anticipation of that very possibility, he leaned forward,
his hands under his chin, and quoted humorously,

”My maiden Isabel,

Reflaring rosabel,
The fragrant camomel.”

Isabel paused, left off biting her underlip in

concentrated thought, and pulled her thumb. “Oh, I ruin
everything,” she burst out. “I seem to ruin everything.”
(She pronounced it “ru-een.”) “I do! I do!”
“No, not at all. No,” Darconville heard himself
insisting, shaking his head, mad to absolve her of
anything, “you don’t ruin everything.” She seemed so
lost, outside the world looking in, divided from him in
some way not as yet understood, drawing away and
revenging herself on her own magnificence as if trying to
distance the perfection she, by embodying, couldn’t
know. She hunched down into herself, saddened, like a
small batrachian in a hide-hole.
“I feel small, for some reason,” she said. “I feel like a
little thing.”
Sympathetically, Darconville touched her chin and
lifted her head. “Then I’ll call you that,” said he. “‘The
Little Thing.’“ Isabel couldn’t stop the smile extracted
from her, but at the words, automatically, she pulled her
dress to cover her legs as best she could. Can’t you see it
doesn’t matter? thought Darconville. Can’t you see that?
“The curfew,” said Isabel. “I must be getting back.”
Darconville drank some wine. “Oh,” he said, “but we
haven’t told you anything about us?”
Isabel looked startled, hearing the plurality of plural
pronouns, and said almost below her breath, “I thought
you—were all alone.”
She pulled her thumb.
Suddenly, her eyes grew luminous with that special
excitement of sympathy that can bring tears from
something deeper than passion as Darconville lifted up
Spellvexit—a twitching, bewhiskered explanation—from
the top of the large trunk he then dragged from the corner
of the room. And as he sketchily outlined the course of
events that had brought him down South, filling in
various facts of his past, both eccentric and ecclesiastical
(she agreed, as he preferred it that way, to keep those
religious adventures a secret between them: for privacy)
he sorted through the trunk to show her what, over the
years, he’d collected: a golden ikon; old flags and coins; a
few of his own manuscripts; ancient books, several
written by his ancestors; photographs of Europe—many
of Venice and, of course, his grandmother—and other
romantic bits-and-pieces evoking a thousand distant
places all more exciting than the little town of
Quinsyburg from which, suggested Darconville, his eyes
sparkling mischievously, they could both secretly escape
that very night! Isabel’s gay laughter rang like a peal of
bells and, upon fleeting reflection, asked as if really to
know, “Where will we go?”
Darconville was almost ready to pull out a map!
The assortment of odds-and-ends in the trunk,
however, took Isabel’s attention, and as she delicately
lifted out each object, attracted especially to a carved
Russian fife, she seemed for the first time truly animated
and excited. She found confidence. She asked questions.
And always she was full of exclamations, charming
Darconville by the cadences of her voice, now rising, then
dropping to a rich whisper of roguishness in which a
slight rural monotony of speech disappeared and a soul
resounded.
“At my house—how could I forget?—I have a real
snakeskin and my grandmother’s diamond ring and an
actual tintype, really, of Lee on his horse, let me see,” she
continued breathlessly, “and a very old bracelet my
grandfather found in China a long time ago.”
Darconville, impishly, asked: “Was he Chinese?”
Isabel laughed into her hand.
“Silly,” she said, clicking her tongue and tapping his
nose with her finger, coming close enough for
Darconville to feel the weblike softness of her hair and
almost taste a breath like candy, Sweet William,
golddrops. “He was in the navy.”
Amused, she feigned to strike him. “He’s been around
the world, you know. Several times.”
 “It must be lonely sailing around the world”—
quickly, Isabel looked at Darconville to see if somewhere
in his consciousness by obstinate resistance he were
opposed to such a thing—”unless, of course,” shrugged
Darconville, “you have nothing to keep you on land.”
There fell an odd silence. Darconville looked at her.
But Isabel was staring enigmatically past him, her brown
eyes fixed upon vacancy as if she were scrutinizing some
faraway image on a distant horizon, trying to divine, as it
were, and perhaps overcome its limits by some studious,
some private act of the will. Darconville, at last, thought
that he had met someone as romantic, as full of dreams,
as unpractically and wondrously mad as himself. Then
she looked up, her sad smile like the light of white
candles shining from a quiet altar. Darconville reached for
something in the trunk and asked her if she’d accept it as
a small gift. It was the carved Russian fife.
Thanking him, Isabel folded it to her breast. She
waited a moment, solemnly. “You—” She hesitated. “—
you won’t mind if I ask you something?”
With precise thumb-and-forefinger she carefully
picked up the fat pen lying on his desk.
“Would you, sometime, write a poem for me?”
“I promise,” said Darconville.
The piety of her expression, the peculiar intimacy of
that mysterious girlishness anticipated in his imagination,
nourished all his happiness. She exhaled so deeply that he
was instantly reminded of the Elizabethan idea that each
sigh costs the heart a drop of blood.
“Oh dear,” whispered Isabel, “I feel so safe here
now.”
“Here? You mean, in Quinsyburg?”
 The room grew strangely quiet as Isabel, coloring,
bowed her head, her eyelashes sweeping down in a
sedulously lowered glance. She paused.
“Near you.”
The candles, swipping, took their attention for a
moment, throwing shadows this way and that. As she
watched the flames, there was a complicated wistfulness
in her expression until, in the solitude, itself almost
predatory for the spell it threw, she turned to him. “We
won’t meet again like this—for the first time. We won’t
meet again, will we,” she asked, “when we’re strangers?
We know each other now?”
Was it a question? A statement?
There was not a flicker of a doubt, however, as to the
summons he received from this girl who for so long, or so
it seemed, had insinuated herself into his life as an almost
spectral apparition. Gently, touching the small of her
back, he drew her body with scarcely perceptible pressure
against his own, as she leaned forward, her heart beating
fast, a certain virginal detachment in her awkwardness,
and she came forth, as if collapsing, towards him, her
flowing hair scented with a fragrance of almost immortal
influence. Fairest of mortals, thought Darconville, thou
distinguished care of a thousand bright inhabitants of air!
They looked into each other’s eyes in an admixture of
sudden beauty and confusion, and, in that pure light,
Darconville clasped her almost to suffocation against his
heart and kissed her until destiny, fulfilled, seemed no
longer necessary. It is always the most beautiful moment
in a love affair.
Isabel was already on the porch and down the steps
when Darconville, in a hushed voice, called to her
through the darkness, “What will you give me for a
basket of hugs?”
And just before she disappeared into the night of fells
and foxglove, silence and stars, Isabel turned and ran
back several steps to lean forward and whisper with the
inaudibility that is at the heart of joy itself, “I will give
you a basket of kisses.”

XIX

Effictio

How to name it, blessed it.

—GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

HEAD: Stately
EYES: Brown demilunes (something too close
together) proving Astrarche, Queen of Stars, a twin
NOSE: A nobility softening its slight acumination
MOUTH: Perfect, with the tremlet of a dimple at the
edge. The tallest hyperboles cannot descry the beauty of
its smile, which flashes, however, teeth too large.
LIPS: Full
EARS: A gynotikolobomassophile’s delight
FACE: Simonetta Vespucci’s, in the ecstasy of
transverberation:

”A face made up
 Out of no other shop
Than what nature’s white hand sets ope.”

The scar weeps once, forever.

HAIR: A beneplacit of God. Shode at the center, it
falls in fine burnished gold either straight down or is
worn, alternately, in a single bell-pull braid.
HEIGHT: Ca. 5’7”
BREASTS: Doe’s noses
HANDS: Big-boned. The fingers, with flattened tips,
are long and strong.
WAIST: Clipsome, sized to Love’s wishes
ANKLES: Scaurous
LEGS: The one devenustation. What intrusive image
will you have, swollen fetlock? Curb at the bank of the
hock? Puffed gaskin? Thoroughpin? Stringhalt? They are
“filled” legs, in the tradition of the round goblet which
wanteth not liquor, an heap of wheat set about with lilies.
There is nothing to forgive. The Venus de Milo wears a
size 14 shoe.

XX

A Wandering in Brocéliande

Wrapt in my careless cloke, as I walke to and fro, I

see love can
shew what force there reigneth in his bow.
—HENRY HOWARD, Earl of Surrey
 THERE WAS A MUSIC in the world that night never
before heard, strains reaching Darconville alone across
moor and highland, field and common, cliff and vale and
watercourse and piercing his heart in a sweet, impossible
ache. Unable to sleep, he’d dressed hastily, run down the
stairs, and driven to an out-of-way spot miles outside
Quinsyburg. At the edge of an open field, rising to a
wooded height, he for no particular reason came to a stop
and got out.
It was well past midnight. The vault of black sky, its
clear stars so sublime and infinite above him, seemed in
its immensity to speak of what it was in his power to
become. Darconville walked and walked, directionless,
across the night-dark grass of the meadow, perfumed by
the musk of the earth, and his heart beat in his chest as if
it would burst. He soon found himself across the field. It
was wooded now, wonderfully gloomy, somehow steeped
in legend, and he imagined that every clump of trees,
every hollow, every vine was a part of Brocéliande where
the enchanter Merlin dwelt and that every boulder was a
menhir behind which, secretly, a druid hid, spying on his
joy.
A cold mist haunted the fallows, with the odor of
trees, stubble, and seeds; dampness and earthmusk; and
the spotted plage of decaying leaves. An owl pitchpiped.
The trees were loaded with mast, their boughs pendulous
and brown, and piles of leaves gave way to his tread.
What was there in forests, representing more of mystery
than light, that now promised to illuminate just where he
must go?
 And now he was climbing up over the rocks, the
branches and leaves in the moonlight throwing strange
pelicasaurian figures everywhere about him. A wild wind
gusted at his coat at several points, only blowing up his
fever to climb up even higher as if resolved to discover in
the spectral, astropoetic light of some clearing above—a
height, perhaps, fashioned from what he felt—the tall
presences of aeons and archons, peris and paracletes,
mystic thrones and twelve-winged kalkydri beckoning
him forward less from where he stood than closer toward
where she was. It was fated: their souls must have been in
love before they had been born and were dreaming this
dream they were living, a promise of love, though blind
and slow like all prophecies, that participated in and so
would last an eternity.
The moon, bright, blackened shadows, gave every
green thing a fivefold addition to its greenness, and
whitened out a way. The wind swirled and looped his coat
as he reached the very height of the hill, and the
uprushing of enchantment he felt flooding his arms,
making him almost delirious, seemed to send him soaring
past the regions of the earth where, giving to the wind the
kisses it returned—high in the cataracts of air, beyond the
running clouds—he pointed to the world that formed her
face and cried out in ecstasy, “I love you!”

XXI

“The Little Thing”

 What a tyranny, what a penetration of bodies is this!
Thou drawest with violence, and swallowest me up,
as
Charydis doth Sailors with thy rocky eyes.
—PHILOSTRATUS LEMNIUS

FOR WEEKS THEREAFTER, Darconville found the

small notes left everywhere for him always infested with
little one-dimensional sets of peepers, like the two eyes of
Horus; thus:

(..)

They were signed, “The Little Thing.”

XXII

The Clitheroe Kids

Like moody beasts they lie along the sands.

—JOHN GRAY, Femmes Damnées

“ ‘Rafe, throbbing, thought: I’ll fix you, sweetheart—

and, hitting that dame a good smack, he flung her onto the
bed and prepared to throw his hot gooms into her,’ “
 read Jessie Lee Deal, licking her upper lip.

“ ‘O brother, he thought, as she jiggled lasciviously in

her scanties, this is some brawd! And not exactly
overdressed! And then, hornmad, he drilled his lust-
hungry tongue deep into Rhoda’s ear and hissed, “O.K.,
boobsie, show me some of your tricks!” She arched her
back and writhed about. O beautiful! thought Rafe, this
kiddo is wide-open, no buts about it.’ “

It was a cold winter night, and in one of the rooms on

the fourth floor of Clitheroe, a senior dorm, the girls from
several adjoining suites had gathered together, as was
their habit, for a general bull-session of gab and gossip:
sitting around in pajamas, swapping stories, and, on this
occasion, listening to random installments being read
from a currently popular and exhilarating fuel-burner
called I Knew Rhoda Rumpswab by 16 People (Troilism
Press, N.Y.)—a paperback, slightly damp and fungoid
from overuse, that sprouted open if left on a table to
several well-reviewed passages. The room was filled with
an eye-watering canopy of cigarette smoke. A couple of
girls were yawning. But it was better than studying.
“I declare,” said Cookie Crumpacker, with a
wimbling tongue, “I’m about to just plain boil over
listening to that thing, honey, and you can believe it if you
think you can’t!” She rubbed her hand over her gluteus
médius and whistled out in two beats the commonly
understood flirtatious iamb:u —!
Anaphora Franck, sitting on the edge of the bed,
grabbed the book. “I have fifty reasons I’d like to be
Rhoda Rumpswab. Want to know one?”
 “Hey, but isn’t that a pseudonysm or something?”
asked slew-eyed Celeste Skyler, the bulb of her head
voodooed with bobby pins, pink rollers, and metal clips,
and she pointed to the book cover (Woman, Leg up on
Chair, Unhooking Fishnet Hose). The herb wisdom at
Quinsy, let it be said, did not grow in everyone’s garden.
It was a question, however, given small attention. No
one was listening. No one ever listened. Added to that, it
was just the very worst time of year. Christmas had come
and gone, and even the picturesque dusting of light snow
on campus gave short relief to the students, now facing
exams. The night-to-morning processus during Finals
Week rarely varied, obligations were unrelieved, and the
faculties of concentration lagged. And then of course the
girls all knew each other— usually by chummy
diminutives like Muffie, Mopsy, Sissy, Missy, etc. —and
any new habits, opinions, or quirks at this late date could
only come as a surprise. So they just lazed about doing
what girls together have been doing from time
immemorial, primping, talking about boys, and raising, as
only groups in dorms can, those neo-ethical, quasi-
theological questions usually reserved for the wee hours,
you know, famous old topoi like: Would You Confess
Under Torture? Which of the Five Senses Would You
Rather Lose? How Would You Commit Suicide? Would
You Ever Eat a Human Being? (And, of course, its
ancillary: Which Part?) What Would Be Your One Wish
If You Had Only One? What If You Were Alone at Night
and a Weirdo Came into Your Room?
Mimsy Borogroves was ironing her hair. Sally Ann
Sprouse, smoothing gouts of depilatory cream over her
saber-shinned legs, wondered out loud if erections hurt
boys. Glenda Barrow, visibly keratoconjunctivine, said
she was going to sue the college linen service and asked if
anybody wanted to take bets on it. One fat little puella,
Thomasina Quod—a girl, reputed to be an ovarian dwarf,
who was often disparagingly called “Buns”—lay back
eating a poptart and reading a pamphlet of intimate advice
with her feet up on the wall in tiny slippers trimmed with
moth-eaten squirrel fur. Holly Sunday, a folksinger with a
macrobiotic complexion and straight blond hair, was
strumming a guitar and singing with exquisite purity to a
darkened window. Aone Pitts, wimpled in a towel, sat in a
corner tossing a beanbag frog up and down and claimed
she once heard of an unmarried girl transvestite who fell
in love with a married homosexual man! Well, interposed
Donna Wynkoop, there was a guy on her street back
home who was famous for stopping the interior opening
of his nostrils with his tongue! And what, Robin Winglet
wanted to know, did they think she found that morning on
a wheat biscuit in the Quinsy dining-hall? No one asked.
And so she tried, unsuccessfully, to tell lovely, spoiled,
rich Pengwynne Custis who was not listening but who
had been for some time confiding to everyone, while
blowing her nails dry, that she had lost her virginity in the
Zakopane Forest to a Polish officer with sideburns when
she was fourteen—and she loved it, she said, she didn’t
regret it one bit, she’d do it again, and they could all eat
their hearts out for all she cared, OK? But to care was,
logically, to have listened. “I lost it the night of the
sophomore prom, in a car,” said Mona Lisa Drake, with a
broad smile. “I just kicked my yellow satin pumps out the
window, yanked up my organdy, and got tagged. It was
called ‘The Spring Bounce.’ “ She winked. “The prom,
that is.”
 A spate of rape stories followed. Sex, of course, was
by far the most popular subject in Clitheroe 403, but it
was equally understood, in that particular room at least,
that bragging about one’s sexual adventures with any kind
of conceit or competition was simply not done, and most
of the girls there generally talked about sex as if to avoid
it or exorcise it, as Eskimos, say, use refrigerators to keep
food from freezing. The reason wasn’t difficult to figure
out. It was Hypsipyle Poore’s room.
“A cockroach,” said Robin Winglet, to no one.
A knock, an entry.
The room went silent. Loretta Boyco—tall, ill-
complexioned, homely as a winter pear—stood in the
doorway with her hair-dryer and, explaining that the hum
was bothering her roommate, asked if she could plug it in
in their outlet.
“Plug it in—right over there.”
“You can plug it in anywhere,” pitched in Cookie
Crumpacker, smirking and stroking her tummy
underneath the football jersey she wore which showed, to
her advantage, a rather extreme case of bouncy
overendowment. She crossed her legs and winked at
Loretta, who glowered back. They weren’t friends.
Loretta, not one of the “regulars” there, was of a
somewhat different stripe: secretary of the Tidy Lawn
Club at Quinsy, proctor at Fitts, and ex-president of the
Baptist Student Union at Consolidated High School in
Chattanooga, she toed the mark. She used pink sponge-
rubber breasts and kept a picture of God in her room. Her
hobby was twirling. As she clicked on her dryer, sniffed
serenely, and began to read the book she had brought with
her—Caroline Lee Hentz’s Linda, or The Young Pilot of
the Belle Creole—several girls behind her raised their
hands in claws.
Charity was scant. It was of course a critical time of
the year and nerves were on edge. Day in, day out, there
had been nothing but one long round of work for two
weeks: getting up in the morning, walking through the
grey dawn to a classroom, waiting with faces like piggy
banks for some fanatic to hand them an impossible exam,
and then, what? Returning to the dorms for another night
of study and sweat? Horrible! It was like prison! They
murmured. They made faces. They moped about like the
defiled Moabite women of Shittim and all the while
suffered from things like bad bowel rotation, eyesquint,
omphalocele, swelled hummocks, and pinworm! For a
stupid degree? They didn’t need? When they were all
going to get married anyway?
Certain girls, however—the “scroops!”—loved it and
the better to study hid themselves in out-of-the-way
places like airshafts and broom closets making lists,
writing out mnemonics, and underlining their textbooks in
red with massive felt pens. But this was a rare group.
Most of the girls at Quinsy, braless and indifferent, either
sat around drinking coffee or just went simpling from
room to room with a thousand stinks and curses about the
impossibility of cramming an infinity of knowledge into
the finity of mind in one single night!
Ah, but for the copesmates in Clitheroe 403? It was
considered by most of them vulgar to worry. Tomorrow?
A pother, a pox! A feather, a fig! For if for them the night
grew short, the morning was a world away, that was that,
and no amount of pressure could ever hope to lessen the
conviction beating in their little hearts that had been
established there for all time in the immortal words of
Miss Scarlett O’Hara, the Belle of Tara, who, when
bravely standing against the world, deathlessly
pronounced, “I’ll think of it all tomorrow . . . after all,
tomorrow is another day.” It was the true materia poetica
of Dixiedom, a regional quintessential, the primal scream
of the South.
“O gross!” cried Anaphora Franck. “Listen to this!”

“ ‘. . . the diddling was hot, hot, hot. Rhoda, utterly

enslaved, was sobbing, moaning, gasping and rolling her
eyes. How hard, thought Rafe, can a dame press up to a
guy, huh? Bro-ther! And why, he wondered, do a dame’s
tears taste so good? He squeezed her ninnies and humped
in heaves, like a crazed rabbit, while the little sextress,
groaning low in the throat, dug her enamelled nails into
his hairy back. “O baby, this is positively maddening,”
squealed Rhoda, even though she felt like 20, “you’re
driving me crazy, you hear me, crazy!” The sexcapade
continued. She had spunk. He liked that. And so Rafe
took his huge lubricated engine and

“I’m going to get wet,” said Mimsy Borogroves,

revolving her torso.
Sally Ann Sprouse made revving noises like an
engine.
“Y’all shush, will you?” screamed Loretta Boyco
who, dropping her book, leaped up and, nearly garroting
herself on the cord, was yerked backwards like a yo-yo.
Panfuriously unplugging her hair-dryer, she stomped out
of the room bristling like a hedgehog. Mona Lisa Drake,
cellotaping her wet-locked hairdo, simply fluttered her
eyelids and stuck out her tongue at the door Loretta
Boyco summarily slammed.
 “Who’s she, somethin’ on a stick?”
“Straight arrow,” said Donna Wynkoop.
“A wonk.”
“I am the Queen of England,” proscribed Hester
Popkin, pointing a regal finger at the door, “and you are
dismissed!”
“St. Loretta,” said Jessie Lee Deal who took the book
which, giggling, Aone Pitts grabbed only to have it
snatched from her by Géraldine Oikle who read:

“ ‘. . . like a wild stud, suctioning her tongue, gasped

on a wave of ecstasy, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, sister,”
and he lunged at horny Rhoda whose skin was foxing
with lustful chills. They kissed ravishingly. The kiss
snapped. And then he made quick little feelies all over her
body with his expert tongue, ranging over her diamond-
hard nipples, and down, down, down to the fringed
secrets below. “Oh yes, yes, Rafe, yesss,” husked Rhoda,
“Touch me there!” Ho-ly bananas, thought Rafe. What a
brawd! What bliss! What a sextravaganza!’ “

“She must be killing him,” skreeked Celeste Skyler.

Donna Wynkoop clapped. “Ain’t it the bees’ knees!”
“Well, shoot,” interjected lovely, spoiled rich
Pengwynne Custis, lighting a cigarette and blowing
smoke at the lot of them. “I was fourteen when all that
happened to me, fancy. Which gives y’all a considerable
something to think about, doesn’t it?” The sentence had
been arranged for distribution as periodic. “You better
believe it does.”
“Not really, honeychile,” came a sudden reply, cool
as camphor. It was beautiful Hypsipyle Poore, stepping
pink and fresh and stark-naked out of the shower. She
slowly walked to the mirror and, unembarrassed, began to
towel off, dabbing, patting, and caressing each limb, her
perfect curves, like a luscious and legendary Narcissa. It
was a body as smooth and soft as nainsook. She stretched
and stepped lithely into a tight pair of silk pale-green
panties which fit her too perfectly. “Why, Pengwynne
honey,” breathed Hypsipyle with an over-sweet smile, “at
fourteen I could have written me a damn ol’ book I’d
have blushed to read.”
Splashing on friction lotion, Hypsipyle Poore paused
and looked around at the other girls to see if anybody
doubted it: even so much as the hint of a raised eyebrow,
a smile not softened by belief, would not only have cost
the transgressor—and immediately—her friendship but
would have launched a campaign of rumor, as if of itself,
whereby particular faults suddenly attributed to such a
one would become, within an afternoon, distinct faits
accomplis. Hypsipyle was strong-willed, did not like to be
contradicted, and, if Xystine Chappelle, the class
brownie, had been singled out as most likely to succeed,
she enjoyed the reputation of being the most beautiful girl
on campus. Teachers asked her out. She often made the
claim, publicly, that she could seduce any male in the
state of Virginia, six to sixty. You didn’t fool with her.
The room was her domain. It was, in fact, not
remarkably unlike the others—save that, concomitant
with a recent financial gift to the college from her daddy,
Hypsipyle had no roommate. The décor, best described as
eclectic, was a combination of toyshop, brothel parlor,
and theatrical green room. A mobile of crotal bells, wired
together, hung from the ceiling. A Mexican jar held
several peacock feathers. Three silver fraternity mugs sat
on the bookcase, half filled with texts and half with rat-
romances, tepid glucose-and-water things like: The Killer
Wore Nylon; Color Me Shameless; Miss Juliette’s
Academy, or Variety Was Their Byword, etc.—and, of
course, a foot-high stack of Bride’s magazines, the college
favorite.
Collegiate banners hung everywhere. An orange-and-
purple University of Virginia pennant (with two football
ticket-stubs stapled to it) was pinned over her bed, next to
which stood a table: a stiff gold postiche sat on a dummy
head. Stuffed animals, beribboned, were scattered about
the room. There was a box of billet-doux.
Coolly, Hypsipyle Poore sat down before her bureau,
straightening out the photographs of several boyfriends at
the edges of the mirror which was bright with cute, goofy
decals. It was her favorite place in the whole wide world,
an arsenal of cosmetic powers: toning sprays, hair
lacquers, bath oils, body unguents and creams, gums,
pomatums, flacons of rosewater, barbaric ceroborants,
vaginal gels, creme rinses, perspiration arresters, rouge
sticks, eyeliner pencils, lipsticks, cuticle oil and nipple
blush, eyelash curlers, bone combs, tissue boxes, and pin-
trays. A jewel box, découpaged red, was filled with rings,
neck-chains, and bracelets, all gold. Hypsipyle walked her
fingers over the phalanx of bottles, lifted out a vial of
perfume, and touched a drop to her neck and inner thigh.
She then took up a comb and, with the tracelet of a lewd
smile in her eyes, tapped the lurid novel Sally Ann
Sprouse was holding and now—to oblige her—reading:

“ ‘Rhoda was no little chickerino. She knew the

game, the little she-cat —and how! And when they—’ “
 Hypsipyle, interrupting, shook her head and told her
precisely the page she wanted to hear. Sally Ann Sprouse
flashed back the pages.

“ ‘Tantalizingly she pranced—’?”

Smiling, Hypsipyle nodded.

“ Tantalizingly she pranced around on her mules in a

filmy peignoir, her pendulous breasts swinging like bell-
tongues. Rafe, part Turk, was sure going to get all he
damned well wanted—and then some! He’s a real heel,
thought Rhoda, but he really grows on you: I’ve got
something for this guy. Meanwhile, Rafe’s plans had
worked to perfection, no soft soap required, thank you: he
knew he’d be throwing hot gooms into her all night.
Swiftly he cornered her and, overcome by passion, Rafe
tore her flouncies off in one rip and coaxed her into
unspeakable acts, but she drank them in greedily,
howling, “Whip me! Nip me! Use me! Slap me! Bite me!
Goose me!” Rafe dove headlong—’“

“Gooms,” said Cookie Crumpacker. She snapped the

elastic of her panties. “I love that word.”
But Sally Ann Sprouse held up her hand, a
semaphore to command undivided attention for the
fantastic bit about to follow. She rattled the book and,
screaming kinkily, raced on.

“‘—dove headlong into her, wallowing in her creamy

flesh. He bounced up and down waggling his inflamed
root. What Rhoda felt for the hot bulging muscles, the
hairiness of this brainless, insatiable, gin-befunked
seaman couldn’t be described. What the merchant marine
hadn’t taught him hadn’t been taught! He’d been in and
out of every port from Libya to Hong Kong, running girls,
white-slaving, putting the boots to every dame who hit the
deck! The sweat poured down him in rills as he pounced,
re-pounced, and re-pounced again with that throbbing,
pulsating, jiving, expanding spark-plug of his—’ “

“Neat!” screeched Aone Pitts, looking up lively from

the letter she’d begun to write—on illustrated stationery,
the kind graphed with doodads (dancing mice, kittens
peering over floral baskets, etc.) and contrasting envelope
liner.
Geraldine Oikle smiled secretively, a little amative
fang sticking out. “He must have—” She held her hands
two feet apart.
“I’m soaked!” giggled Mimsy Borogroves.
“Readin’ trash,” came a sudden outraged voice from
somewhere, “ain’t no better than bein’ trash!” It was
Loretta Boyco, standing on a desk in the next room with
her mouth to the heating vent.
“Hey, Boyco,” shouted Hester Popkin, hoisting up to
her side of the vent, “how would you like it if I grabbed
your legs and made a wish?” She listened a moment. “Or
broke you damn ah-glasses?”
Cookie Crumpacker said: “That child, I swear, don’t
menstruate. She defrosts.”
“But I wonder,” asked Robin Winglet, soberly, “if
men like them Turks really do make the best lovers, you
know?”
“Y’all know which men make the best lovers,
honey?” asked Hypsipyle Poore, rabbeting her beautiful
black hair in long strokes. She turned from the mirror,
closed her eyes, and sucked a tooth. “The ones you have
in bed with you.”
The girls all exploded into smutty giggles.
The bells from the clock-bearing cupola of
Smethwick struck three, but having long since settled
back, inert, open-thighed, sleepy, no one showed any
interest in going to bed. What could they do now? Misty-
eyed, Holly Sunday continued to strum her guitar. Gladys
Applegate, coiling an arm over her head, asked if
anybody wanted to sniff glue. Thomasina Quod said she
was dying for a ham-’n’-cheese on a bulkie. “O, butter a
bun, will you!” said Glenda Barrow, quickly cupping her
mouth for the blunder. “Thanks!” snapped little
Thomasina Quod, wapperjawed, her voice snarping like a
grig’s. “Really. Thanks a lot!” Straddling a cuckoo-
flowered white chair, Mona Lisa Drake asked the other
girls what they would do if they were alone at night and a
weirdo came into the room.
A mood of spookiness suddenly settled in. Voices
went low and glances were exchanged in a ghostly hush.
Someone lit a stick of incense. The girls grouped closer
together on pillows, sag bags, and throw rugs, somewhat
uneasy—poised at any moment to give in to the
screaming meemies—and covertly began to speak about
peeping toms, whispering idiolects of the midnight
phonecall, and Breughel-like howbeits with things on
their minds who crept about the late-night shrubbery. It
wasn’t funny. Hadn’t they, any one of them, ever heard
noises outside? They admitted they had and turned
morbid and immediately began to rehearse for one
another those self-ramifying and shuddersome myths,
habitually passed down from class to class, from
generation to generation, that recounted how in the distant
past at Quinsy College maimed half-wits, gub-shites with
pointed ears, and deranged creatures who left no shadow
had actually been seen at night on the ramparts of the
buildings and sometimes dragging a gimp leg down the
corridors of the dorms, wheezing, cross-eyed, and
dripping! And that wasn’t all! They returned every single
year, different ones, things with names—Grippo!
Hoghead! The Four-Eyed Man of Cricklade!—and icy
grips, bulbed heads, and pee-stains all over them!
It was then given out that many, many years ago a
certain girl at Quinsy actually woke up in the middle of
the night and saw standing right next to her bed a
refulgent something with flippers for feet named
“Thimbleballs” who clawed his way up the bricks, crept
across the roof, depended in a crazy hang, and then
dashed himself howling through a window—to try to bite
off her head! The authorities then found her the next
morning, a blithering idiot, with her hair gone completely
white, and, according to common report, she was said to
be still alive to this day but not moving a finger, just
sitting with folded hands in a rooming-house somewhere
down in the Tidewater and repeatedly muttering only a
single word, “Wurble! Wurble! Wurble!”
“I’m having the creeps,” said Géraldine Oikle.
Jessie Lee Deal held up her arm. “Look. Goose skin.”
“O poo,” said Hypsipyle Poore calmly, carefully
tracing on some brown eyeliner—lurking with strange
synthetic perfumes, she always went to bed as if the
Chevalier Bayard were there awaiting her—and so her
weary, decosmeticized visitors, partially because they
were sapping with terminal fatigue, put away their fears.
Hypsipyle clapped her eyeliner into her make-up box and
with the emory board she picked up, for one last swynk at
her nails, pointed toward the door. It was time for them to
go. Yawping and yawning, the girls wobbled up on their
feet. Some stretched and groaned.
Cookie Crumpacker, tweaking a slice of underwear
from the moist rictus of her buttocks, picked up the
paperback.
“I believe I’ll take this and read me some more about
big ol’ Rafe here—just,” Cookie added, looking about
like a little sly-boots putting out feelers, “just for a bit of a
titty-pull. You mind?”
Most of the Clitheroe kids, on their way out, were too
tired to comment.
“Well, I’ll tell you who I’d like to have a titty-pull
with,” said Donna Wynkoop, working her eyes over a
wide smile.
The girls stopped in their tracks. And just before they
went to their respective rooms, sent down like
insubordinate nuns to their low crypts to meditate
punitively on their sins among the bones of their
predecessors, they turned.
“Who?”
“Come on!” prodded Celeste Skyler, she of the
porpentine head.
“Yeah, who?”
Tenders, in a pause, for all? Tenders, in a pause,
accepted.
“Darconville.”
There was, for the first time that evening perhaps,
universal agreement, and, although laughing, they fluked
Donna Wynkoop mercilessly and told her not to hold her
breath. She wasn’t alone. Charlotte Bodwell, a junior
psych major, for instance, sat outside of his office all day
every day! Sabrina Halliburton over in Truesleeve, they
all knew, claimed that he had asked her out twice. And
Brenda Workitt supposedly told her whole sorority right
out that she’d like to cover his whole body with honey
and lick it off!
“I’d use hot fudge.”
“I’d use syllabub,” said Robin Winglet, who majored
in home economics.
“And what about that person-thing over in Fitts—
what’s-her-face with the long hair?”
“The girl with the fat legs.”
Nobody knew her name. But the better to hear, they
all moved closer, coming together not to praise but to
bury. She couldn’t live in Fitts. That meant she was—
“A freshman?”
The cats perked their ears, ear-trumpeting in the
direction of whatever noise anyone wanted to make.
Beautiful Hypsipyle Poore, alone of all the others, didn’t
say a word. She simply sat there, silent, touching up her
lips with a bullet of cherry-frost lipstick. Hypsipyle, of
course, made it an art. Before putting on the lipstick, for
instance, she blotted her lips with a tissue, powdered
lightly, then used a lip pencil along the natural contours of
her lips, and finally with a lipstick of a similar color filled
in the lip area—exactly! But she was listening all the
while, listening harder than usual, for Darconville and
Isabel Rawsthorne—especially to those who gave
attention to such things— had not gone unnoticed. They
had been seen together more than once, constituting a
thousand times. Eyebrows, questions, had been raised.
And the gossip raced, ab hoc et ab hac et ab illa. . . .
“Well, y’all can go run around the hoo-hum-hah,”
moued lovely, spoiled, rich Pengwynne Custis, “because
I’m invitin’ that boy to my recital next week and—”
 “And, you watch, he won’t come,” challenged Mona
Lisa Drake, laughing and golfing Pengwynne on the knee.
The girls all agreed and, with their pillows under their
arms, turned to leave.
“Wait,” ordered Hypsipyle Poore, suddenly breaking
her long silence and turning her flashing black eyes upon
lovely, spoiled, rich Pengwynne Custis. “Shall I tell you
why he won’t come?”
The silence was deafening. Everybody turned to her.
“Well,” questioned Pengwynne, closing her eyes
haughtily, “why?”
Hypsipyle Poore put off her mask of burning gold.
“Because, honeychile,” said she, harder than usual,
“you look like batshit!”
And, unsettled, Hypsipyle kicked everybody out of
the room, crawled into bed, and snapped off the light—
harder than usual.

XXIII

A Promise Fulfilled

It can not be, nor ever yet hath beene

That fire should burne, with perfect heate and flame,
Without some matter for to yeeld the same.
—EDWARD DYER
 THERE WAS TIME during the suitable interval of
Finals Week for Darconville to write out the promised
poem for Isabel. It went as follows:

Love, O what if in my dreaming wild

I could for you another world arrange
Not known before, by waking undefiled,
Daring out of common sleep adventure strange
And shape immortal joy of mortal pain?
Art resembles that, you know—the kind of dare
Nestorians of old acknowledged vain:
”No, what human is, godhead cannot share!”
But what if in this other world you grieve,
Undone by what in glory is too bright,
Remembering of humankind you leave
That which pleased you of earthly delight?
Out then on art! I’ll sleep but to wake—
Never to dream if never for your sake.

That night he ran over to the student union, slipped it

into her mailbox—number 120—and walked home
delighted with himself.

XXIV

Giacomo-lo-Squarciatore

It is the nature of women to be fond of carrying

weights.
 —FRANCIS GALTON

THE TELEPHONE CALL seemed urgent: some

student named Betsy, the unromantic praenomen
matching her disposition, asking if Darconville minded
very much giving her and her girlfriends some advice, so
would he? It was a voice of shrill little bleats warring
against, but intervenient with, the background noise of a
dormitory corridor that sounded like Mafeking. Sitting in
his office, Darconville could almost see her, squinched
over, one ear plugged with a finger, nervously rubbing her
left instep against the gastrocnemius of her right calf: she
was in a dither. The girls at Quinsy College had hearts
like chocolate bars, scored to break easily. Come ahead,
said Darconville, come over.
So Darconville waited for them long after his classes
had ended, his feet propped up on his desk. He was
reading an old novel from his grandmother’s library—
Giacomo-lo-Squarciatore (1888)—to pass the time.
“We’re ripping mad!” puffed Betsy Stride, breathless
from the stairs, appearing in the doorway like a rising
moon. She turned out to be one of his sophomores, a
pompion-shaped grouchbag in a brown dress A-lined and
middle-kneed who, in happier moods, was given to
entertaining her girlfriends in the back row of
Darconville’s class by ingeniously shooting elastic bands
from the braces on her teeth. And then she motioned in
four others—a group Darconville had seen together more
than once slouching around campus like walking morts—
who, obviously whelped together on a mission, one,
Darconville saw, that would soon be his, stood before the
desk. It looked as if they were going to group-step, kick,
and burst into a Victorian music-hall number.
“Tell him, go ahead.”
Betsy judiciously castled two of her friends and
moved a pawn forward with an impatient shove.
“It’s all right,” exclaimed Betsy, “tell him what
happened. Well, aren’t you going to tell him? Mary
Jane?”
They made a perfect quincunx, all standing in place,
with faces like apostle spoons, all deferring to each other
as to who should present their petition, for it was clearly
one of those irredentist ventures to restore a right or
rectify a wrong, something invariably to do with library
privileges, curfew extension, or some breach of the
student moral code which at Quinsy was stricter than the
Rites of Vesta. Darconville, now six months into the year,
was becoming familiar with it all. The girls, most of
them, actually worried about these rules, an anxiety, in
fact, that over the year caused a good many of them to
become overweight, and not a few who had come in
September as thinifers would leave hopeless fattypuffs in
June. The starchy comestibles in the Quinsy refectory,
however, better construed to account for the condition of
Betsy Stride, a girl so fat that were she wearing a white
dress one could have shown a home-movie on her.
Briefly, she had a beef—and, again, poked Mary Jane in
the ribs.
“Well, I was studyin’ real late over at Smethwick last
night,” began Mary Jane Kelly, shifting feet, “working on
my project on shade-pulls. You know? Anyway, I—”
Darconville blinked.
“Shade-pulls?”
 “My term paper. For Dr. Speetles’ education course.
‘The Effect of Insufficiently Pulled Shades in Classrooms
on 4th-Grade Underachievers.’ “
“Continue.”
“I finished up for the night, see, and started walking
back to my room—”
“Alone,” Betsy reminded her.
“Alone,” agreed her friend.
“All alone.”
“Yes,” sighed Mary Jane, “all alone. I was right tired,
I guess, and” —she shrugged—”I don’t know, maybe I
just imagined the whole thing.”
“You didn’t,” sniffed Betsy, shifting and looking
away hurt as if suddenly betrayed.
Darconville looked at his watch. “And you saw a
man,” he said, “following you.”
The girls all looked amazed, confirmed in their fears
but astounded at the sudden conjecture: how did he
know? This was a constant: the fumblingly speculative
association in girls’ schools of any mysterious or
unexplained mis-illumination with some foul and
forbidden chthonian, male of course, wreaking havoc
among them, and any apparition, whatever the
circumstance, desperately cried out for immediate
rehearsal, redressai, and report.
“Did he,” asked Darconville, “touch you?”
“No, not exactly. But, um, he shone a”—she made a
gesture—”a thing at me.”
“A thing?” asked Darconville, as the three girls who
hadn’t yet spoken grabbed their mouths, snorting back
laughter. It was the vaguest word in the language and so
the most deceptive. “What do you mean, a thing?”
 “It was a flashlight!” cried Betsy Stride, barging
forward with a hieratic hip-roll. “And he held it up to this
real creepy face, like he was mental or something!” She
looked desperately around. “It’s really great, huh, the
protection we have? What are they waiting for, for cry-
eye, a bunch,” she said, a trifle optimistically, “of
undecent rapings? We want more lights on campus!”
Strange, thought Darconville. How many tragedies in
this chiaroscuro world were related precisely to that: light
when it was needed, darkness when it wasn’t; darkness
when it was needed, light when it wasn’t. The same
gardens that grow digitalis for heart patients also grow the
devil’s oatmeal. Vinegar is the corpse of wine. Thus spake
Zarathustra.
“Well,” confessed Mary Jane Kelly in a near-whisper,
“he didn’t actually hold it up to his face.”
Betsy Stride covered her eyes. “O my God.”
“It’s just that passing that spooky glade by the old
tennis courts I saw a foot behind a tree. It had a sneaker
on it. Not the tree,” clarified Mary Jane, “the foot.” The
three girls, giggling, were pinching their noses to stop.
“And then, I swear, it moved. Not the foot—”
Bursting, the three girls quickly turned around and
exploded in laughter.
“The tree?”
“Well, see, I saw two eyes peering out by a branch,
sideways, like they was—I don’t know, burning or
something! So I started to run and he started to run.”
“And to scream, right?” interjected Betsy. “Tell him,
tell him!”
“He screamed? What did he scream?” asked
Darconville. He prompted her, ready to hear the fiercest
Asiatic curses, the vilest obscenities.
 Mary Jane Kelly hesitated, surveying her feet, and
then, resigned, put her hands to her mouth and tried as
best she could to mimic in two hoots the tuba horribilis
she’d heard with such alarm the previous night:
“Socialists! Socialists!”
The three girls, doubled over and quacking, had gone
purple.
There may indeed have been a lunatic running amok
on campus, or possibly a prankster, no one could say—
although the reign of terror, it might be said, had in fact
coincidentally taken place with the letting out of a
Chekhov dress rehearsal for which a number of girls, to
comply with the wishes of Miss Throwswitch, had been
required to wear fake beards.
The fat, however, was in the fire. Betsy Stride,
flashing her metal teeth, told Darconville that Marsha
D’amboni almost got blackjacked a month ago, that
Weesie Ralph found a man standing once in her gym
closet bare as a baby, and that Shirley Newbegin once got
whistled at by coloreds! And who cared? Xystine
Chappelle, the wimp? Dean Barathrum? President
Greatracks who kicked them out of his office and called
them “pee-oons”?
With lampoon-lit eyes, Darconville promised he’d
mention it all to Someone Important and, asking for their
names, slipped them a piece of paper. One of the girls
sorted through her handbag, clumping on the desk
pretzels, lip-balm, five jawbreakers, a ring of keys, a
penny-in-an-aluminum-horseshoe, and a snap-wallet thick
as a fist, and shook out a molar-dented pen. They all
signed their names:

Mary Ann Nichols

 Annie Chapman
Elizabeth Stride
Catherine Eddowes
Mary Jane Kelly

Profuse in their thanks, one of the girls pushed back a

twist of flocky hair and quickly kissed Darconville on the
cheek.
At that very moment, Isabel Rawsthorne appeared at
the office door. It had become her habit, often, to stop by
with something, a bag of candy, a box of exotic tea, and if
Darconville happened to be busy she usually left a
whimsical little note in that delicate spidery penmanship
of hers, always signed “The Little Thing.” But on this
occasion when he looked up—she was wearing, typically,
a half-length fur coat, pink hush-puppies, and jeans with
three mushrooms (multi-colored) sewn over the left knee
—he saw only two sad basset eyes. “Oh, excuse me,” she
said with a face like sudden night—then disappeared.
O no, thought Darconville. He got up, stepped past
the girls, and called down the stairwell. But she had gone,
out of the light and into the darkness. By slow degrees it
dawned on him what she must have felt, even if absurdly,
for jealousy, lineament by lineament, feature by feature,
needs no scene or sentence but actually creates itself from
what it fears.
The male professor at Quinsy College, in fact,
whether attached or not, symbolized a plenitude he hadn’t
but by his very presence precipitated a thousand desperate
necessities, a particular situation, needless to say, that
often put in ludicrous but privileged ascendance those
who would be gentlemen that late were grooms. He could
act like a churl, use his hands for purposes of locomotion,
or look like the Expansible Pig, the girls didn’t care—
instans instanter, he became a combination of father
confessor, confidant, marriage counselor, friend, adept,
and phantom lover.
Anxious to see the girls out, Darconville asked if
there was anything else. They didn’t think so and shuffled
out, dolefully trailing a length of reluctant gratefulness
behind them as they waved.
“Oh yes,” said Betsy Stride, turning back. The moon,
setting, rose again. “My last exam, remember?” She
popped a peppermint into her mouth. “It was a 78. I was
close to a B, right?”
“Close,” replied Darconville, looking at his watch
nervously, “only counts in horseshoe-pitching and
necking.”
“Necking?” she asked salaciously—and, grinning,
snapped off the light-switch with her elbow. Her teeth-
braces gleamed in the darkness.
“As you say,” Darconville said quietly, “we want
more lights on campus.”
Whereat Elizabeth Stride thrust out her underlip,
turned, and slowly walked away, the undissolved
peppermint still undissolved in her cheek.
The sound of Isabel’s light-running footsteps had
made Darconville’s heart, echoing them, feel empty,
ineffectual, and made equally futile the hurried
explanation—of what?—he saw he had to give. He
quickly dialed her number: 392-4682.
“Fitts!” came a voice on the other end like Stentor the
Bellower’s.
“May I please speak to Isabel Rawsthorne?”
“Canyouholdonjessaminuteplease?”
 The telephone receiver, summarily dropped, bonked
against the dorm wall several times—clonk! clonk! clonk!
—but Darconville waited intently. Had he been lax, he
wondered, or scrupulous, seeing those he shouldn’t have
or seeing those he should? What had he done? He didn’t
know. Who pre-plots with intelligence? Hazard, he
thought, itself was creative.
Still waiting, Darconville looked down the corridor
which ran straight from his office to a water bubbler at the
far end. On the bulletin boards lining the walls of that
corridor had been thumbtacked various grammatical
projects which the education-majors there, being trained
—as opposed to educated—to teach the lower grades, had
prinked out; they were sort of visual rebuses, narrative
cut-outs on oak-tag paper, with titles like: “Miss Question
Mark has her Period”; “An Apostrophe takes Two Pees”;
“Old Mr. Bracket falls on his Asterisk”; “Little Cedilla
has a bout of Diaresis,” and so on and so forth. So much
for the trivium, thought Darconville, so much for the
quadrivium.
“Hello again, mister?”
“Yes.”
“Did you say Isabel Rawsthorne was whom was
wanted?”
“Yes,” he said.
There was giggling on the other end, muffled by a
hand. “Excuse me,” asked the voice, “but is this Govert?”
Govert? It was a shadow that seemed stronger than
the substance that threw it.
“No. No, it isn’t.”
“Oh,” said Miss Blunder. “Well, I can’t seem to find
her.”
 Darconville stammered. He felt ridiculous. Govert:
wasn’t he the no-see-um she once mentioned who lived
near her somewhere in Fawx’s Mt? At Zutphen Farm or
some such thing? O lax, thought Darconville, angel of
thwarting demons, are you there? Quickly, he asked the
girl to check again.
“She’s definitely not in. Can y’all try again later?”
“But are you certain?”
The girl hung up.
Darconville lowered the receiver, thought a moment,
then called her name down the corridor. The name echoed
back. It was imperative he find her, but where now should
he look? He felt an appalling lack of energy as he dragged
on his black coat, shut the office door, and, turning to
avoid the nearest poster—”Mr. Comma empties his
Colon” or whatever—went out.
Fog, with the smell of February. The dampness,
settling in with dusk over the patches of snow, could be
sharply felt by an easterly wind. The sky was a slate slab.
Darconville walked slowly across the grounds, catching
his muffler to his neck, and—but who was that?
“Hello.”
It almost seemed a question.
Isabel, huddled up, was sitting on the wooden bench
under the magnolia tree in front of the English building,
her brown eyes moist like beautiful Israfel’s and other
angels who carry misfortune in their wings. Darconville
kissed and hugged her, and she handed him a packet of
photographs of herself—long requested, longer postponed
— which, she said, smiling wistfully, was why she’d
come. Then they simply sat together, preferring to keep
silent, their two hands clasped like lost children in a
world only suddenly found.
 He couldn’t define it all at once, but the feeling of her
there next to him, a grateful one, gave way to a strange,
almost sensual spasm of sympathy for all she was. Isabel
Rawsthorne’s loyalty—he should have known she’d be
there waiting for him—kept faith with her humanity. It
was precisely what he had ignored all his life, the
humanizing redemption of someone else for whom he
dearly cared. Her silence spoke volumes. He thought how
little he’d written since meeting her. Very well, he
thought, I haven’t written. But darkness had become light.
Love, he saw, manifested itself not so much in the desire
as in the need, and, who knew, perhaps less in the
learning than in the loyalty. For the sudden recollection of
his banter with the five girls, he felt chastised, for his lack
of sympathy, ashamed.
To keep away from humankind, he suddenly saw, was
to be its murderer. Dehumanized man was capable of
enormities indescribable, and he bethought himself of
what, in the absence of this child whose radiance
outshone a Delia Robbia angel, he could become—what,
some psychopath, caped in black, scuttling with a hook
before his face like a soiled shadow through the fog of his
imagination only to wound victims hatched from the
disaffiliations of his cruel and selfish solitude?
Horrifying! And although hatred was not so much beyond
Darconville’s capabilities as beyond his comprehension,
he trembled at the thought, as happens in nightmares, of
what is left a heartless and inhuman force pursuing pure
illusion.
O Isabel, O love, thought Darconville, turning to her,
his heart swollen with what, because too overpowering,
he couldn’t express. Instead, they both held hands, fearing
to say what each thought the other knew but hoping that
each would feel what both of them knew the other might
be afraid to say.

XXV

Miss Trappe’s Gift

And how reliable can any truth be that is got

By observing myself and then just inserting a Not?
—W. H. AUDEN, “The Way”

THAT PARTICULAR DAY, Darconville found a

surprise waiting for him upon returning from classes, for
just as he opened the porch-door—with Spellvexit, as
usual, in attendance on the upper landing and crying out
—the cat skittered over something that came bouncing
down the stairs. It was a cylinder, the contents of which
he carefully fingertwisted out to find a rare Masanobu
pillar-print of the eighteenth century, entitled Kuroi
Koshaku Fujin—a black half-woman/half-bird, all beak
and talons, plummeting downward. There was a note
attached.

Dear Darconville,

I’d like to be a could-be

If I could not be an are,
For a could-be is a may-be
 With a chance of reaching par;
I’d rather be a has-been
Than a might-have-been by far,
For a might-have-been has never been
But a has-been was an are.
THELMA TRAPPE

P.S. I wanted you to have this, being an artist (an

“are”), not like me (a “might-have-been”). I have a cameo
for Isabel. Maybe she can come visit me? But, oh, she
must be busy.

Glad for the chance, Darconville underlined the

postscript, put the note in an envelope, and posted it all to
Isabel for her good attention. He stopped by Miss
Trappe’s at the top of the hill to thank her and then
hurried home to the mysterious packet.

XXVI

The Nine Photographs

Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze.

—EDGAR ALLAN POE

ISABEL was always mysterious. The prospect, then,

that Darconville had of looking at the photographs she’d
given him filled him with high expectation. The idea of
formulating them, however, to the fancies he had of who
she was only accentuated the premonition he had that he
already knew, at least abstractly, for, although only a
newly baptized considérant in her religion, he loved her.
And yet it was with some misgivings that he prepared to
pit the prosperous freedom of his partisan imagination
against revelations already cross-examined by the facts
and fingerprints of the past, a still world, while too small
for her secret and his curiosity, belonging to quite another
day.
Darconville locked the door. It had to be quiet. He
had no idea what he was about to see but felt a sensuous
pleasure as exciting as the intense rushing in his heart
experienced whenever he met her. It may have seemed a
packet of trifles, worth nothing, but it was a trifling part
of the world where she lived, and that made the
difference. He opened the envelope and out fell eight
photographs—all different shapes and sizes—of Isabel at
various ages. He bent forward under the light, extending
his hands so that both stood against the coping of each
picture, and studied them.
(1.) Isabel as a little tweeny: of the “adorable” genre,
it shows her in a white hair-bow and frothy white
pinafore, plump, clutching an ingot of chocolate and
hopscotching over a manhole cover, twice the width of
her size in height. Part sylphid, part crammed poultry, her
legs even then are more Saxon than Norman.
(2.) Isabel as a premenstrual: her face, pigtails, and
big milk-teeth show a comic sunniness and a kind of
rubbernecking innocence, though there can be detected a
sad fleer playing at the edge of her mouth. There is a
noticeable birthmark beneath her eye (the answer to the
question of her scar! ). She doesn’t know she misses the
father she knows is missing. The sleep in her eyes might
seem to reflect, unfairly, on her I.Q. At this age, she’d
have had a favorite ring with a pyrite stone, an imaginary
friend named something like “Mr. Koodle,” and a tiny
patent leather purse in which could be found five pennies,
gum, and a skate-key.
(3.) Isabel as a high-school cheerleader: here she’s
waving from an open car, after an Albemarle High School
football game, and showing herself, if artificial, abloom.
The chenille “A” on her sweater is just detectable under
her heavy fur coat. In Adam’s fall we sinned all. The
smile is forced, the drive for popularity uncharacteristic,
the birthmark gone. (“I, without artifice, taught artifice.”
St. Augustine)
(4.) Isabel as a blur: an operator’s giggle shook the
camera. Was that blob in the lower right-hand corner a
figure standing in a boat? This is the only photograph
with writing on the reverse side, the connotative
hieroglyphic: “G v d S.”
(5.) Isabel as a prom queen: spruce Miss Darklips, an
eyebrow slightly raised, her hair styled and sprayed, her
face overpowdered white like a femme entretenue, is
wearing a white short-sleeved evening gown of Holland
silk with a single green stripe at the Plimsoll line of her
breasts, long gloves, and lyre-like shoes. She poses before
a stone fireplace (hers?) on the mantel of which stands a
model of a red-sailed, black-hulled ship and the demotic
pénates of the owner, not a Medici: a duck-spout pitcher,
gimcrack bottles, a pewter cup. The hearth is surrounded
in blue and white mock-Delft tiles and the tacky, mass-
produced print of a rainy marinescape-with-ship-in-
distress hung in glass behind her is, thanks to the witless
photographer, ludicrously given a sun by the reflection of
his lightbulb. (His light-bulb?)
(6.) Isabel as stout Cortez: a white farmhouse with a
hip-and-valley roof and hippie-related fence lies within
view of the beautiful subject standing hind-side-foremost.
The photo has a Sinnbald character, with the back, awful
and mysterious thing, impossible to speak about—that
part of us we know nothing about, like an outlying waste
forgotten by God. The photographer’s elongated and
fractured shadow—he would be just abaft her port beam
—covers her in part. The ear of the sphinx is 4½ feet
long.
(7.) Isabel as a party guest: a candid shot of the
subject sitting on the floor, a Nike amidst a group of
yegg-faced teenagers, playfully mussing a blond boy’s
hair, which action effectively disprizes one from a
consideration of his face—but not, by any means, his
ears! Her eyes are animated. It is strange to see her beauty
so incongruously annexed, even if momentarily, to some
kind of affection for this dolt-headed pube, a cobbler,
clearly, who got beyond his last.
N.B. Wrong. The photograph compendiates a
rapprochement of note. She leans toward him with such
contentment fond, as well the sweetheart sits, would well
a wife. The only photograph of hers thumbed.
(8.) Isabel as a non-acquaintance: a wallet-size
rendering, from the shoulders up, of vacant
preoccupation. A study of Van Der Weyden’s lady. The
lips are too full. The turtleneck sweater misuses her
delicacy of clavicle. The mouth is winterset. That is not
benevolence in the eyes. They look beyond you, more
toward vanity than vision. The photographer missed. He
will be taken out at dawn, blindfolded, and shot.
 A long, long insearch—then Darconville shuffled up
all the photographs together, and, inevitably, the jack-of-
knaves came up on top. It was, supervening all, the
thumbed and creased one: number seven ( this, no doubt,
in some kind of social apposition to the intentions implied
in number five). Darconville wished, as did Momus of
Vulcan’s created man, that every person had a window
placed in his or her breast. Murmur, fallen angel and
father of ill report, whispered, “Govert is covert! Govert
is covert!”
Quickly, Darconville slapped his hand over it. It was
as if it had become another photograph, creating a fear in
him, by way of diseased imagination, as inconstant as the
shadows he surveyed. Who was this fellow? A name too
little mentioned to suspect yet mentioned just enough to
heed or learn to disregard. He looked at the photograph
again. Weren’t these simply the facts of certain events?
And weren’t events always the same as their significance?
It was incredible for Darconville to see how swiftly
he could fall to torturing, tormenting thoughts, to scribble
a biting and incoherent tragedy out of the restive
suppositions he poorly fought. It was only to conceive
one of those sticky, ring-swapping high-school junkets for
the clang of mistrust: he threw a faithless cipher of moon
into the sky, put beneath it a fatherless girl craving
affection, and then helpless before the doom of his own
contrivances watched in his mind, possibly on that very
prom night or in a car parked on an overlook up in the
Blue Ridge mountains, the hideous pyroballogy of some
vile teenager with a hanging lip, his suspenders
disengaged, prying off her gown with his grice-fingered
hands and then bucking away like a country stink-cat,
whereupon she—
 But cruel! Cruel! Darconville, clapping the
photographs back into the envelope, instantly grew
disgusted with himself. He was scandalized by thoughts
transported into the very deeds he disbelieved. If I create
loveliness, he determined, there is loveliness. If I create
monstrosity, there is monstrosity. Away with it! To play
the part of accuser, one had to be word-perfect in that of
hypocrite as well!

XXVII

Master Snickup’s Cloak

The routes of ideas in history were also the routes of

contagion.
—G, M. TREVELVAN

THERE WERE MANY DISAPPOINTMENTS

during these months for Darconville but many, indeed, for
Isabel herself, and not one, somehow, that didn’t
compound another. She was only eighteen —”the age of
the duck,” in his grandmother’s phrase—a period of
diffidence and confusion, generally, but in her case
somewhat exacerbated by her keeping to herself and
refusing to share her problems with anyone at Quinsy she
wasn’t scrupulously sure of, a situational irony that only
sent effects back to causes.
 It was not much help, beyond that, to be suffering the
vicissitudes of freshman year. One of the deans, for
instance, had several tunes summoned Isabel to her office,
inquiring after the propriety of her seeing too much of a
certain professor, especially in view of the fact that she
had flunked almost all her courses for the first semester,
with one glaring exception: a grade of A in English. And
then certain enterprising girls in the dorms, unspeakable
in malice, had been making her life miserable, a self-
appointed group of spitesowers manufacturing stories,
shaping hexes and false rumors, and blowing their green
cornets across her every hope. It was whispered that she
was above her station as Darconville was below his, and,
as time passed the apocryphal, simply by repetition,
became the apodictic.
Isabel, initially undecided, eventually chose to major
in art. A singular disappointment with this as its source
took place one particular night when tapping on
Darconville’s door—her eyes swollen from weeping and
want of sleep—she appeared holding up between thumb
and forefinger two prints she had worked weeks on and
on which, for both, she’d been graded F. One showed a
square of ribbed wheels interlocking on foil. The other,
also abstract, was a thinly proven and just-about-
detectable sunburst squashed into a background the color
of the jellied broth of a canned ham. No, they were not
good—and were, in fact, quite bad. But what did it
matter? He looked from the morbid prints to Isabel’s own
soulful beauty and to indicate without ado the condition
of true art asked her only to accept herself, a good at once
appropriated, a glory-in-itself by virtue of but a moment’s
reflection. It is to judgment, he told her, that perception
belongs: true eloquence makes light of eloquence, to
make light of philosophy was to be a true philosopher!
Why, to fail to accept her own originality, not by force or
exactness but by comprehension, she could never accept
his own, could she? Ordinary persons, he said, smiling,
found no differences between men. The artist found them
all.
Not to undercut his own argument, he continued.
But he thought: what was art next to her? It was a lie,
he explained (aware of this implication, however, that the
book he was writing would become, increasingly, a more
difficult task), a contrivance to find the mind’s
construction only where it looks and how it will.
Darconville looked into her eyes, and beyond. In the
selfish state of the human heart, he thought, to consign to
the exercise of the wayward imagination those facts,
correspondent at hand but held as contrary, was possibly
to lose everything. The imagination was, after all, only
that poor faculty that strived to make the ideal real, wasn’t
it? There was once a medieval tournament, Darconville
told her, where favors to the victors were bestowed by the
Queen of Beauty: the third prize was a silver rose, the
second gold, but the highest award—given to the best
knight of all—was a genuine rose.
Thinking of his own response to the photographs, he
began, uncharacteristically, to dwell on the possible havoc
that resulted from facts fully falling prey to the
imagination.
Darconville suddenly had an idea. He wiped her tears
and, shutting off the lights, took Despondency’s daughter,
Much-Afraid, by the hand toward the bed where he
cradled her head on a large pillow, loopholed her arm to
his, and tried, for catharsis, to work the only witchcraft he
knew: he would tell her a story. Isabel, closing her eyes
and snuggling up to him, felt better already. “It’s a sad,
sad story.”

Master Snickup’s Cloak

One morning, it was the Middle Ages.

The sun shone down on the foundling home at the end
of Duck’s-foot Lane in the quiet little dorp of Sleutel in
the Netherlands. The year was 1307 ( by Pope Hilarius’s
corrected calendar, of course ).
Master Snickup, a tiny ward there—wearing the
black and red uniform of the home—gleefully played
punchball against the cobbled wall beneath a yew tree
near the town weigh-house.
It was a feast day: the Pardon of St. They. Cattle were
blessed. Children processed. You heard litanies.
”Wat is Uw naam?” asked a new little orphan girl
who suddenly appeared at his side, smiling, plumcheeked,
and wearing a chaste wimple. Her beauty put to shame
the roses of Paestum.
Superfecta—for this was the name of the flax-haired
frokin—immediately stole Master Snickup’s heart quite
away.
The two children, thereafter, spent day after day
playing games of noughts-and-crosses, ducking mummy,
backy-o, all the winkles, stickjaw, egg-in-cup, stitch-
away-tailor
And skiprope, when they frisked and jumped to the
jingle

”Do you love me,

Or do you not?
 You told me once,
But I forgot.”

Happily, Master Snickup even did her chores for her,

scowring cups, dipping tallow, and decoaling the
squinches; he even did the washpots. She played the
dulcimer.
A decade passed, just like that.
Superfecta, who’d bloomed into indescribable
loveliness, now drew smiles from each and all. There is no
potential for permanence, Master Snickup told his heart,
without a fear of threat.
And so they were betrothed one day at the shrine of
St. Puttock of Erpingham—and swapped gifts: he gave
her two white pigeons and received from her a wonderful
blue cloak.
Now, there lived on the verge of the village at that
time one of the richest burghers in all Gelderland—the
ill-living Mijnheer van Cats, an unctuous cheesegobbling
fat pants who smoked a clay pipe and wanted sons.
But who’d be his wife? A purse of 2000 gulden was
put up.
In vain, however, did the merchants of the guild offer
up their daughters, a group of off-sorts who had pointed
noses and pointed caps.
”Knapweed! Hake! Twisses!” screeched van Cats
and hurled other unprintable names at them. Modest
pious folk covered their eyes.
One winter dusk, it so turned out, the orphans were
given a special dispensation to go to the Haymarket to
watch the “illuminations.” Mijnheer van Cats, in
attendance, sat up high on the balustrade of the guildhall,
whereupon his gaze fell—fatefully—upon Superfecta.
That little boompjes, thought he, will soon be mine.
An ouch of heavy gold was hers the day following;
his, a sealed envelope, which he slit open with his
pipestem. What could be the decision?
”Yaw, yaw,” guffawed the fat Dutchman.
A record of the wedding can be found to this day as a
small entry in the old chronicle of Nuewenburgensis. You
will do, as the diverb has it, what you are.
Master Snickup, disedged with grief, took up scrip
and staff and, wearing only his blue cloak, set out to pick
his way across Europe. He sought the antipodes.
Hither was yon, yon hither.
Mountains were climbed, mazes thrid. He crossed a
sea that had no motion on the ship, “What is
Pseudonymry?” and came to a desert where he said
penances and fed on caper buds, dormice, and lentils.
Still he pilgrimaged,
Reading the footprints of geese in the air,
To reach eventually the Black Sea where, living alone
on an uncharted shale island, he chastized himself with
thongs and subsisted only on air and dew. Rain fell on his
blue cloak, which he sucked supplying himself with
vitamin Bu.
Swallows sang upon his wrists.
“Sero te amavi,” whispered Master Snickup to God—
and prayed constantly with perfectly folded hands, a
shape best fitted for that motion. Small furious devils
hated that
And visited him in a variety of shapes and torments:
six-fingered Anaks, freexes, nasicornous beetles, chain-
shaking kobolds, Saûba ants, red-eyed swads, sorcerers
who could disconnect their legs and flap about like bats,
and pin-headed Hippopods, with reversed feet, who leapt
instead of walked.
Master Snickup soon fell ill. But who could help? For
ships in sight there were none.
The town of Sleutel, meanwhile, rang with news.
Superfecta van Cats was delivered of a son. “A witty
child! Can it swear? The father’s dearling! Give it two
plums!” boasted its sire, butterballing it with his gouty
feet.
But hear of more. Mijnheer van Cats, now fattened on
perfidy itself, had turned syphilitic and even more hateful
than before. He sang curses against his wife in the
taproom and, roiling and hissing, streeled home drunk.
He locked her nights in the black windmill. He chased her
through town slashing her with timothies.
Sadism and farce are always inexplicably linked.
The orphanage, in the meantime, closed down—
without so much as two coppers snapped together to
prevent it, despite the bulging wallets of all the snap-
boilers, razor-makers, brewers, and guilder-grubbing
rentiers who lived thereabouts. O events! God could not
believe man could be so cruel.
Winter settled hard over the Black Sea. The soul of
Master Snickup now grew pure—a hagiographical
commonplace—as his body grew diseased. He never
washed his bed save with tears. The tattered blue cloak
had become infested with worms and rotifers,
Which also battened on his holy flesh.
It snew. And on that desolate shale island, since
fabled, Master Snickup one day actually looked into the
heart of silence, rose and—with a tweak-and-shake of
finger and thumb toward the sky—died. Rats performed
the exequies.
 The moon, suddenly, was o’ercast blood-red in an
eclipse. Thunder rumbled. Boding?
Ill.
A rat flea, black in wing and hackle, flittered out of
the shred of blue cloak and flew inland—as if carried
along by destiny—toward the Crimean trading port of
Kaffa. The infamous date was 1346.
Stinks were soon smelt—in malt, barrels of sprats,
chimney flues. Physicians lost patients in spates.
“The plague! The plague!” squealed the chief
magistrate, biting his thumb, his fauces black, the streaks
of jet vivid along his wicks and nose, and then dropped
dead as a stone. Fires were lighted. The harbor was
sealed.
But it was too late. Ships, laden with produce, had
already set sail in the pestiferous winds and headed out
along the trades to Constantinople, to Cyprus, to
Sardinia, to Avignon, and points beyond—
Sleutel, among them: a town that, recently, had
expanded and grown to the clink of gold in the guilds, the
crackle of flames in the tile-kilns, and the mercantile
sermons in the new protestant kerks.
Why, there was even entertainment.
The town brothel, formerly the orphanage,
represented the major holding of a certain Mijnheer van
Cats who lived alone with his son, a dissolute half-wit
seen once a year moping into town to paint its shutters
and touch up the wooden sign out front that read: De
Zwarte Hertogin.
It became famous. Merchant sailors, visiting in
droves, always wept with laughter at the idle boast of its
madam, that she had once been the village beauty.
Or was Time, indeed, the archsatirist?
 For the place was run by an ooidal-shaped sow with
chin hairs, a venomous breath, and grit-colored hair who
always carried a ladle and trounced her girls. They called
her “Mother Spatula.”
The legacies passed on by the sailors were worse
than the legacies they received. It began with the
“sweats.”
The town of Sleutel was soon aflame with flews, black
spots, boils, pink eye, and the stinking wind that
broadcast one to another. Lost souls screamed aloud to be
crimped with knives like codfish.
A whole Arabian pharmacy could do no good.
Nothing could stop the contagion, neither chanters
nor flagellants. The townsfolk spun into dancing fits, cat-
concerts, and fell to biting each other and frying jews.
Men castrated themselves and flung their severed genitals
into the hopeless sky to placate an angry God.
”The Black Death” struck, and struck, and struck.
Bodies fell like the leaves of Vattombrosa. It beggared
rhetoric: recorded only by historians as the worst disaster
that had ever visited the world.
Mijnheer van Cats, staring upon his son’s flapping
tongue and hopeless insanity, waddled up high into the
black windmill, took off his clogs, and—pinching his nose
—stepped past the revolving vanes and cowardly made
his quietus.
They both went to their accounts impenitent.
But more. Mother Spatula ran into her dank room,
made mouths in a glass—and shrieked! Her drazels,
horrified at the telltale nosebleed, held to her lips a little
statue of St. Roch, the Plague Saint; but she went deaf as
a beetle to their pleas, curled up into a fork and died,
notwithstanding the fact that to her black feet—in order
to draw the vapors from her head—they had applied two
dead pigeons.
She didn’t seem to attach a good deal of importance
to them before she went.

Darconville whispered, “Isabel?”

But she was fast asleep in his arms, her face still
smeared with dry tears, her complexion washed of its
color and showing a slight an-timonious tint. He
noiselessly raised himself on one elbow and, watching
over her in the darkness, first blew softly on her forehead
and cheeks and then stanched with an ever-so-slight kiss a
single tear that sparkled at the edge of one eye like a tiny
drop of chalcedony. He felt the physical ache of love as
he watched her perfect mouth, slightly open, exhaling the
sighs of sleep. They had never made love, but the
synecdoche of desire, he knew, waited crucially upon the
larger understanding of love in whose fiefdom, until
proven true, it always walked a stranger. And, then, he
wasn’t even certain she was in love with him! Or ever
could be!
There was so much he wanted to tell her, and it
seemed a perfect time to confess it, to hear matters
spoken which up to that time he hadn’t, but privately,
dared even acknowledge, and yet he hesitated lest the
tiniest utterance break the spell of that beautiful moment
and, somehow, end it—like the angels called Ephemerae
who lived merely for the twinkle of an instant, expiring
upon the second they recited the Te Deum. Only let me
live, prayed Darconville, as he watched Isabel there, no
longer than I might love.
 A sleepy voice, then, murmured something. It was
inaudible. Isabel suddenly swirked up in alarm. “Oh, if I
miss my curfew—”
Darconville placed a finger to her lips, assuring her
he’d have her back to Fitts in plenty of time. She smiled,
hugging him, and in a sleep-enthralled voice told him
about the strange dream she’d had; she was a princess in a
beautiful white dress, living all alone in a kind of fairy-
forest where she was safe, and then one day—but Isabel
clapped her mouth. How thoughtless of her, she said, to
have missed his story! Darconville laughed.
Story, tale, book: what were these, he thought, next to
the gentle creature whose waist he now took, whose eyes
he now searched—and it shamed him to have held back
the words of passion, born in his heart, that still beat
against his consciousness for deliverance. But what,
asked Isabel, could she do to make up for her
thoughtlessness? Tell me you love me. Darconville,
pushing her back, insisted the story he told was nonsense
and that she didn’t have to do anything.
“Oh please.”
Tell me you love me.
“Well, let me see.” Darconville paused. “All right,”
he said. “Have you visited Miss Trappe yet?”
“That’s what I’ll do!”
“Do you promise? She wanted to see you, you know.”
Isabel took Darconville’s face in her hands and kissed
him, her eyes, sending out sparkles like a carcanet of
jewels, brightening with resolution. She witched him in
one set gaze, and they fell against each other, giving and
taking kisses, with Isabel pausing only to add, by
repetition, to the weight of her vow.
“I promise.”
 XXVIII

A Promise Unfulfilled

Ascend above the restrictions and conventions of the

World, but
not so high as to lose sight of them.
—RICHARD GARNETT, De Flagella Myrteo

A WEEK LATER Darconville met Miss Trappe in the

street. She mentioned in passing, again, that she had a
special present she wanted to give to Isabel: the cameo.
But, asked Darconville, hadn’t she yet come by for a
visit? Miss Trappe smiled sadly. That night when
Darconville inquired of Isabel why she hadn’t gone to see
Miss Trappe, it was with some surprise that he heard her
reply. “I don’t want to dominate her,” said Isabel.
That seemed very odd, indeed.

XXIX

“Sparks from My Anvil”

 Vain are the documents of men
And vain the flourishes of the pen
That keep the fool’s conceit.
—CHRISTOPHER SMART, “A Song to David”

Rumpopulorum, meanwhile, was going poorly. The

manuscript had lost its kick, and Darconville, as late as
March, flashing back through the accumulation of sheets,
found only an unedited mess of junk and logomachies, a
collection of pages pierced by arrows of afterthought,
marginal loops, and harebrained squirts and scribbles
twad-dleized out of doubt and belated reflection: a
penman’s alibi. It was, he felt, as if his ability to write
were now only a tiny, fitful flame, no, not a flame even, a
scarcely visible vapor flickering over a chaos of
conflicting wishes, purposes, and hopes that were so
disorganized as ut-terly to cancel one another. A line here.
A line there.
It was wounding not to be able to write easily,
upgathering what of life seemed barren without the
expression of it, but Darconville hadn’t written well for
months and recently had almost begun to grow ill when
walking into the room to work, a dull nausea overcoming
him at the prospect, troubling his mind as a touch of lust
might trouble a soul only half-escaped from it. Write,
wrote, written: it was the most painful verb in the
language. He somehow couldn’t believe in it anymore.
There was nothing to be done. He pulled out a
cuesheet and randomly set to for half an hour with his
pencil, tentative tool, but the words sat on the lines like
disgusted birds forming and fulgurating in a cacophonous
gamut along a washwire. Doodled mimicries pulled faces
at him from the margins. Furious, Darconville x’ed out
three trial pages, clicked off the light, and smoked in the
dark thinking of Isabel’s photographs and how, perhaps,
he should never have seen them. Did he mean that?
Maybe. Eurydice is impossible if Orpheus looks away.
No, it was a stupid blasphemy. He wouldn’t think of it
again.
At best, Darconville now coped. He who once wrote
with beauty and speed, who in the late hours of creation,
even after those long walks in Venice from his home out
to the Isola di San Pietro and back, could almost forgo
any illumination as his fingers gave out the necessary
light, now found himself in the grip of woeful indolence
— not writing, nor organizing to do so, but waiting
around idly leafing through lexicons and coming to resent
the fat cast of characters alphabetically lined up there as if
in some melodramatic pre-theatrical to defy his direction
and so challenge his art.
Verrine, one of the evil Thrones, had begun to tempt
him with long and unrelieved bouts of impatience: “the
lyf so short, the craft so long to lern.” Words! They
seemed his only experience, his only sophistications. And
yet what were they? Merciless little creatures, crowding
about and eager for command, each with its own physical
character, an ancestry, an expectation of life and a hope of
posterity. And yet how he wanted to scream or stamp his
foot and scatter them away, terrorizing them into
disappearance letter by letter, all those clicks, bangs,
buzzes called consonants and vowels that howled and
ululated and cooed! It was frustrating, for he believed in
the word-as-written, those sweet puncts, safe from the
dangers of loss and paralalia, which alone rendered ideas
clearly, and until words were written, formulated, he felt,
they couldn’t even be considered properly thought out.
No, previous to the word, Darconville had always
thought, one couldn’t argue that even the most elementary
relationships existed. But if they expressed, he wondered,
did they communicate? He didn’t know anymore. He put
out his cigarette, stubbornly to go back to work, and
clicked on the light. The skull on his desk was still
smiling.
Darconville set out a bottle of ink and filled “The
Black Disaster,” the pen that had served him so long: it
seemed labor in itself. He felt a sudden dread in the suck
of the drawing nozzle—it sputtered “Govert”! He ignored
it. And consulting the watch on the nail he resumed, with
obsessive intensity, trying to write, with this insane fancy
taking possession of him, however, that at that moment he
knew something of what the lonely Power behind life
must have known as it drove towards the purpose of a
creation which then and thereupon, in the form of two
humans, refused to ascribe any benevolence to the act. He
hovered over his desk, the pen motionless. But nothing
came. In an absurd kind of game he then systematically
tried to force himself to believe he was totally
incompetent to the task of writing, a methodic dialectic he
used with himself on occasion taken from homeopathic
therapy in which, to reverse a mood, he dosed himself
with a relentless and pitiless exaggeration of it in order to
reconstruct its opposite. For who is always what he is at
any instant? And so, hopeful, he went profitably hopeless,
to remind sickness of health, evil of good, and hunger of
abundance, but for it all he made small headway and saw
out the profitless forepart of the day with only a single
ragged paragraph, one split in two by a particularly
inexact image that reflected in the mirror of his craft
exactly what he feared he had become—and so he drew
his pen in a looping circumlitio over the page and walked
out of the room.
The afternoon went poorly, as well. Darconville sat in
another room, drinking, wishing to detach himself from
the pressure of reflection, the better to mock memory and
the misery it made in a mind to worry it to words. Parody
of anticipation, parody of meditation: slouching on a sofa,
he found the mindless darkness to be even more venal
than his own disabilities, the room a Piranesian cell where
he sat in demented soliloquy, an examination of his own
self-disobedience which, even if it clarified the sense of
order at the core of his worst outrages, still kept him from
work. He drank more and smoked until his lungs, never
strong, ached, thinking, for some reason, of the strange
people roaming the world called Coords who, though
hating the devil, worshipped him lest, unplacated, he
destroy them utterly in the fullness of his malice.
Spellvexit, butting about between his legs, was whining—
a sound, terribly, like “Govert! Govert!” It was ridiculous.
Darconville drank even more and, borne up like the duck
who floats on what he drinks, put back his head,
concentrating on trying to improve accident by
meditation, and closed his eyes for what seemed more
hours than idleness warranted or despair ever deserved.
It was late when Darconville woke up, his head light,
his body cold, the colder, somehow, for the March winds
blowing outside. He went to the front window, gazed at
the leafless hedges under the huge tree that still retained a
few withered leaves, and returned to his desk. He took up
his pen, which seemed to parch like a martyr in his hand.
He began to write, nevertheless, addressing the nine-and-
ninety lies of the moment he hoped to bargain with for a
night of saloperie at the side of the twisted strumpet,
Fiction, who lasciviously rolled her eyes at him, hised up
her skirt, and beckoned him on. He had come to detest
every aspect of that chair and desk which began to
assume the shape of a scaffold and found now in the
repetition of each failure there a spirit of corruption and
death which only confirmed that they were the end of all
endeavor, rendering effort itself absurd. The room with its
old-fashioned wallpaper seemed an illusion of life, a
shadow-scenery of disorganization. And the skull! The
skull, making sardonic commentary on his predicament,
seemed to cry, “I am still alive, you fool of folly, while
you are dead! Hoodoo! Hoodoo! The most beautiful
things in life blossom and fade, while only ugly things
like ice-floes, boulders, and the brainless ooze remain.
What is to be preserved forever? The attributes of
immortality are cruelty, greed, and the dogs of war—the
serpent with its deathless coil round the concept of
Eden!”
But Darconville wrote, and wrote while he doubted to
write, and as he wreaked his harms on ink’s poor loss,
there was nothing for the trouble in his head, and more,
for always—scratch, scratch—the pen went whispering
across the page, “Govert! Govert! Govert!” He wrote,
erased, and wrote. A line here. A line there. He worked
for an hour and, weary, leaned back to look at the dead
syntax and désuète word-groupings. A face loomed up,
grey. With angry joy, he erased its filthy ears—and began
again.
But it was impossible: he saw only an incomplete and
unwieldy aftergrief in front of him. Sentences were
pulling out of paragraphs, phrases didn’t fit, and words
got lost, slip-sliding about in baffling arrangements all
their own like those emanations of God we are doomed
now to curse, now to bless, in eternal alternation, yet
never fully to understand. The tragedy of writing was that
its hiding place was its habitat, those secret and
inaccessible desert places we seek to violate, like tombs,
for miracles we’d have but can only blaspheme in the
touching. It was hopeless to know and nowhere to be had.
I have divided my life into pages and pilcrows, thought
Darconville: a squid’s brain is only one-sixth the size of
his ink sack.
Refusing to abide the futility and fakery, the fear, of
ritually waiting to write, trying in surviving the world to
transfigure his survival, he resumed—until he thought he
heard a noise. He listened a moment, then went back to
work. But again there came a sudden knocking at the
door. He went to the window, threw it up, and called,
“Isabel?” The world, he thought, is always as near as my
doorknocker is loud. “Isabel?”
There was no answer.
Darconville walked downstairs, wiping his eye, and
opened the door. It was iniquitous: in the doorway—
tacita sudant praecordia culpa—stood two pedantic
ushers from the School of Anabaptism who nightly went
trudging about Quinsyburg, house to house, looking for
converts. He went to shut the door, impossible for an
interposed foot.
“I have in my hand here,” said one of them, “a
personal love-letter from God, and—”
Darconville almost came at him. The speaker’s face
fell, seeing danger, and became a patch of wavering
greyness against the blanket of night into which, the
better to avoid this gothic adversary and his mood of
incorrigible refusal, both suddenly fled. A pamphlet
fluttered down in the vacuum of their sudden departure—
reading “Sparks from My Anvil” by W. C. Cloogy,
Evangelist.
Shutting the bolt to, returning upstairs, Darconville
roamed the room in maniacal pursuit of what became
only confused and scrambled thoughts that left only
shadow within shadow, and, although his poor heart was
beating at the time for quite another cause, he took a long
hard look, one out of which all sentiment had fled, in the
direction of his desk. No doom, thought Darconville, is
ever executed in the world, whether of annihilation or any
other pain, but the Destroying Angel is in the midst of
that visitation, and, not ignorant, not blinded to
supernatural horror, he could hear the overhead thrashing
of evil Exterminans and his bat-colored wings, on parole
through the uni-verse, sickening the air with his logocidal
wails.
A vision rose up before him. It was Cacotopia,
suddenly, all around him, a land of nightsoil swept over
by aboriginal winds and lit by a dim moronic moon under
which, songless and illiberal, the only tribe of humans left
on earth sat around shouting and mocking all that
language could, a cultureless people who, having looked
back into the past, saw there was no future. Agitprop
throttled fable, libraries had been torched, and in the
rubble of what once was were enacted scenes better
imagined than described, with words, no longer lovely
magical influences on nature anymore but now bleats of
perversion serving only as a means of evil report, slander,
strife, and quarrel.
The final day of pollution had come, and everywhere
crowds of the disaffected gathered together in an
earsplitting din to smash printing-presses, incinerate
books, and befoul manuscripts in an orgy of violence,
with everyone spitting, shitting, and bouncing up and
down on his heels. Impatience was upon them! Where can
we go, they screamed, never to hear or read a word again?
They clapped in chant to be led somewhere. But where,
where?
Suddenly, political sucksters and realistic
insectivores, shoving to the front, puffed up their
stomachs and blew lies out of their fingers! A parade was
formed! It was now an assembly on the march, an
enthusiastic troop of dunces, pasquil-makers, populist
scribblers and lick-penny poets, anti-intellectual hacks,
modernistic rubbishmongers, anonymuncules of prose
and anacreontic water-bibbers all screaming nonce-words
and squealing filthy ditties. They shouted scurrilities!
They pronounced words backwards! They tumbled along
waggling codpieces, shaking hogs’ bladders, and bugling
from the fundament! Some sang, shrill, purposely
mispronouncing words, snarping at the language to mock
it while thumping each other with huge rubber phalluses
and roaring out farts! They snapped pens in half and
turned somersaults with quills in their ears to make each
other laugh, lest they speak and then finally came to the
lip of a monstrously large hole, a crater-like opening
miles wide, which, pushing and shoving, they circled in
an obscene dance while dressed in hoods with long
earpieces and shaking firebrands, clackers, and discordant
bells! A bonfire was then lit under a huge pole, and on
that pole a huge banner, to hysterical applause, was
suddenly unfurled and upon it, upsidedown, were written
the words: “In the End Was Wordlessness.”
And as the night grew darker, the noise reached a
more deafening level than ever, a thunderous earth-
shaking explosion of curses, imprecations, and
terricrepant screams which worked the crowd up to such a
pitch of frenzy that, suddenly, everyone began leaping
into the hole, plummeting into the yawning darkness,
flying in feet first as if crazed by oblivion itself! And then
it was over. A few harpies and birds of Psapho circled
overhead. But not a word, not a note, not a sound was
ever heard on earth again.
There was such hopelessness suddenly felt in the
room that night that Darconville, who took
anthropomorphic devils seriously, snatched up a page in a
paroxysm of utter despair and ripped it in half; snatched
up another and did the same; then with a spasm of savage
relief, he swept the entire manuscript off his desk and
without a pause violently kicked the wastebasket into the
air. It bounced like a shot across the room—”Govert!”—
and rebounded upsidedown—”Govert!”—and then rattled
toward a single spot, foolishly spinning to the sound,
again, of that enigma variation—”Govert!” And then
unable to bear it anymore, Darconville cried out like some
adenoidal moron in a gulf of high winds with a voice that
collapsed all his grief at once into a blind lamentation that
could have been the question he might have asked but, for
fear of knowing, was afraid to: “Why must one’s double
always be one’s devil?”

XXX

Examination of Conscience
 From the suffering of the world you can hold back,
you have permission to do so, and it is in accordance with
your nature; but perhaps this holding back is the one
suffering you could have avoided.
—FRANZ KAFKA

ST. TERESA’S, the small Catholic church in

Quinsyburg, was the one place above all others where
Darconville could always find peace. The following
morning found him sitting alone in a back pew and, while
regarding the crucifix hung over the altar with its
battered, twisted corpus, feeling humiliated by the
perfection of form he sought, ignoring life, in his art. Was
it possible, had he taken his own personality merely as a
debt to discharge that he might sublimate his humanity,
seeking to acquire through the vanity of high aesthetic the
power of becoming that which he felt threatened him in
the beyond? It was a terrible mistake, to be seen as truth
only by the gaslamp from which Gérard de Nerval hanged
himself.
It had been for more than half a year now that
Darconville, long beyond reconsidering the question as to
whether language as such was capable of expressing
anything of the meaning of life, actually wondered if he
himself were. The particular gifts which he had formerly
possessed seemed to vanish as he grew in consciousness,
as though his very attempts to understand himself, to
accept himself, in relation to Isabel, had dried up the
springs of his creativity.
Writing, he’d come to see, was the spiritual disease of
which it considered itself to be the cure. His “real”
jealousy of this person called Govert he aligned, with
increasing conviction, to the “ideal” coruscations of his
writing, antipodal and, for that, curiously related extreme
points of dehumanization, both, with each a fussiness that
failed to comprehend that the most important thing for
lovers, as for writers, was to know how love, how writing,
can be kept vital, not what must exist without it. It was
almost a revelation. He had been for so long increating,
looking into his artistically nihilitic heart, or otherwise
excreating, looking beyond the stars for further promises
of the sky and demanding, with romantic arrogance, all
suit him, that he had failed to see just what was in front of
him—stretched out, as he was, in a hopeless parody of
Vitruvian man, his arms unable to close in anything like
an embrace. Thaïes had fallen into a well while gazing at
the heavens, as Pliny had, into a volcano, while searching
the fires. Was there a lesson here?
There was.
It wasn’t that Darconville perceived the world and its
meaning differently—he had, in fact, found more
meaning—but he could no longer put that meaning into
words, nor could he find reason to. The embellishments,
the slippered voluptions of his prose? It was praying into
a mirror, he saw, in which, reflecting only what was
outside it, could be found only the mock and pockless life
within the symmetry of its frame. The mirror reversed
nature! He knew now why he couldn’t write, for art, like
jealousy—living upon what they must deny—considered
a sphere of facts altogether distinct from a sphere of
values. Darconville looked long at the terrible figure of
Christ. Perfection of form, unpronounceable artifice was,
he realized, insufficient, and concepts and images without
any genuine relation to existence could never any longer
for him convey what was most important in life. The
Word was made flesh! And yet what had he made it?
Darconville considered his idolatry: the imagination
peopling a vain theogony with creatures it is satisfied to
stand back and watch bombinate in the vacuum of art.
And so was it with jealousy. A photograph hadn’t come
alive, a fancy had. The artist, rarely emerging from
himself, so deceives—a man who tries to bribe God with
examples of what he means by that deception, offering to
a coterie world what he has fashioned by staring at the
universe through an eyecard and arranged in fussy
selection of what life offers to avoid: an agglomeration of
methodically ordered masterproductions in paint and
plaster, marble and music, sheetpads and stagecraft which
assume the bounds of the conceivable to be the limits of
the actual. The more orderly the art, thought Darconville,
the more dishonest. The more methodic? Then did it
render less the complexities that hide in the causes of
man, his love, his astonishment, the stunning shocks
which await him in the savage forest of equivocations and
inscrutabilities. The very nature of art—failures by which
man sought to memorize his experience—spiritually
underdeveloped the very disciples who most needed to
know what it wasn’t, could not be, able to do. The symbol
of art is the tombstone, thought Darconville, an obelisk
sticking up out of the earth with the inscription, “I count!”
It was blasphemy, concluded Darconville, who’d long
been a student of meanings that stole out in subtle replies,
a sacrilege to bang gold, hammer silverswirls, and fashion
anti-vital faces with blank and pitiless eyes squinting out
cold and one-dimensional from niches cozily recessed
from the flux of the world where suffering, if inevitable,
at least proved life real. The aesthetic mode, he saw, was
that of anti-renunciation! And even as he sat there under
that crucifix, before those flickering candles, in that
silence, Darconville fully assumed this mandate, that the
man who entered a church to get out of the heat or cold
lived closer to the spirit of God than he who came there
for reasons aesthetic. Darconville prayed. Shall I, he
wondered, shall I become some ikonodule, tall and white
as a paschal candle, its aesthetic feet folded in prayer? A
simulacrum of Mme. de Maupin, that he-she-or-it draped
in jumbles of jewels and flowrets, skirting out of the
world and begging entrance of the doorman of the ideal?
One of those anti-social geniuses of refusal, pteriopes
wrapped in procinian cloaks, or pale spectres who, with a
delicate extremity of leg put forward and wrists turned
after the manner of Parmigianino, floods the world with
perfect tears and sighs with pampered weariness, “O
come to me, Death! Come, lovely wanton death, to me!”?
Away with drawn pentacles! Away with my pretty
pages! Away with formed perfections, compounded
electuaries, phoenixes raised out of hypocritical flames!
If he didn’t write, Darconville determined, so be it.
He was in love, and the lover who didn’t prove selfless
committed a solecism with his heart. And if his writing
became poorer in image, it would become more human,
he felt, in intent. Away with a prose squeezed free of the
real! The shallow jealousies he’d felt low in his soul ate
through to his conscience, shot through with self-
indulgence and merciless egotism where the difficulty of
writing—even the attempt—had its origins. He had
committed, he saw, Durtal’s sin of “Pygmalionism”:
corruptly falling in love with his own work while bearing
a grudge against anything that went against it. Onanism!
Onanism and incest! It was a new sin, the exclusive crime
of artists, a vice reserved for priests of art and princes of
gesture, the father violating his spiritual child,
deflowering his dream, and polluting it with a vanity that
was only a mimicry of love. Was that one not mad,
thought Darconville, who draws lines with Archimedes
whilst his house is ransacked and his city besieged? The
slogan of the artist is eritis sicut dii. The Anatomy Lesson
of Dr. Tulp is a dissection scene of the physicians.
Darconville prayed harder. He saw that jealousy was
not the obverse of vanity, rather its ugly twin, the failure
in full sumptuousness of one’s private aesthetic, and that
was what he suddenly came to loathe in the aesthetician
—antagonism by exaggeration for what of nature he
couldn’t realize in himself. Jealousy! Jealousy! Was it the
cause or the symptom of his madness? What did it matter,
for mad it was, the madness that parodied love. A
monster! Other’s harm! Self-misery! Beauty’s plague!
Virtue’s scourge! Succor of lies, which to one’s own joys
one’s hurt applies! It proved a faithlessness, not a
devotion, to the girl he loved—and fed on the solitary
weaknesses and perverse images of those symbolist
projecticians and chimerical madmen for whom language,
immoderate, diseased, cabalistic, was an entity, not an
activity. To love Isabel was to live for Isabel, for what
sculpture casts a shadow that can be touched, what
shadow, empty as shade, thin as fraud, that doesn’t
recapitulate the static figure throwing it? Were his fictive
characters then the servants who’d live for him? Foolish
in the conception, twice foolish in the extreme!
Sorrowfully, Darconville looked up at the beaten,
traduced Christ, crowned with thorns, stabbed and naked,
omnivisual over all the tragedies of mankind that were as
real as sin and as heartless as betrayal.
 I will polish no massebah with my kisses, vowed
Darconville, nor suffîtes will I light to myself. He rose
and, walking to the front of the church, lighted a votive
candle. Reflected in the shiny obsidian foundation there
he saw his face. It was sculpted to shape affectation and
to peddle vanity, like one of those hieratic or royal
effigies in relief on the antique medals of the Medes. He
wished to pray as he watched the asterisk of fire touch the
wick aglow and so prayed more deeply for simple
selflessness than he had ever prayed before—and, feeling
an uprush of grace in the very intention, shed the night in
his heart and called it light. And walking out of the little
church he felt confirmed in not only the worth of his
whispered prayer but in the realization, as well, that
Christ had become man and not some bell-shaped
Corinthian column with volutes for veins and a mandala
of stone foliage for a heart.

XXXI

A Gnome

Hang up philosophy.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Romeo and Juliet

“I WANT TO BE what I was when I wanted to be

what I am now,” said Darconville to his cat after he got
home. Spellvexit, with one eye raised in a slight
circumflex, rather wished his master might descend into
particulars, as aphorisms tended to be vague. But
Darconville said no more, locked his manuscript into the
trunk, and went out for a long walk in the bright sunshine,
stopping several times to listen to the nightingales, for
spring was advancing rapidly, with multitudes of
primroses, a prevalence of crocuses, and on some trees,
sycamores, chestnuts, blackthorns, the lower buds were
already opening into leaf.

XXXII

Fawx’s Mt.

I slept and dreamt

That life was joy;
I awoke and saw
That life was duty;
I acted and beheld
Duty was joy.
—RABINDRANATH TAGORE

“MY UNCLE is deformed,” said Isabel quietly and

kept staring straight ahead. Although it was the first time
she’d ever mentioned that, Darconville said nothing in
reply. The Bentley wound through several verdant
declivities, bumped over a small wooden bridge, and
slowly took the hill when the loaftops of the Blue Ridge
mountains came into view. It was pine country with
faintly Augean smells, a rolling landscape running into
lopsided barns, tiny sikes, and dark groves. This was only
one of several trips that year along that familiar
serpentine road through Scottsville, into Charlottesville,
then north over the pummeled turns to where Isabel lived,
but Darconville had, for some reason, never met the
family. It seemed to be more of a consolation, somehow,
for Isabel finally to have got shut of her news— how long
she’d kept silent!—than suddenly to hear Darconville say
it didn’t matter. And then they arrived.
A tiny man in a queer peddler’s hat was thrashing in
the turnips down behind the house. The name on the
mailbox read: Shiftlett.
“O Lord!” squealed Isabel’s mother, snatching at her
haircurlers and bouncing up from the sofa, the springs of
which flexed with the noise of Homerican Mars, “why,
welc—” she barked her shin “—come to Fawx’s Mt.”
Rushing to snap off the television set (a buzzer show) and
clapping a bottle (cheap gin) into an under cabinet, she
revocif-erated her boisterous welcome. She took
Darconville’s hand and squeezed it damply. The striped
housecoat she wore—of a croquet-ball pattern—billowed
behind her. She explained to Isabel, while dumping an
ashtray sprouting a bouquet of long butts, explicitly what
she wanted Darconville to forgive and implicitly forgave
Isabel what Darconville didn’t really need explained. It
was Saturday, she said. A good ol’ reason, she said, just
to take it easy. She said not to mind her one bit. “We’ve
sure heard right much about you from Isabel, my,” she
exclaimed, straightening on the wall a dime-store painting
(browsing horse ignoring sunset), “I declare we have.
Now you make yourself right at home here, y’hear?”
Isabel seemed embarrassed. But Darconville was
frankly relieved. The magic flute of his imagination had,
previous to this visit, blown a few melancholy notes: the
High Priest Sarastro caught out trying to rescue Pamina
from her wicked mother, the Queen of Night. It was not
perhaps to be overlooked, least of all by the subject, that
he was a Northerner, older, a Catholic, an artist, and that
he drove a foreign car! And he never wanted to put in a
position of having to be civil to him anyone who’d have
to be; it seemed discourteous. It would have been perfect
simply to state that he loved Isabel right then and there, if
not to justify his presence then at least to free his mind,
but he knew Isabel felt awkward about expressing
intimate words in front of anyone, especially, as she once
confided to him, her mother.
“Call me Dot,” smiled Isabel’s mother, lighting a
cigarette and covering with that commodious housecoat
most of the kitchen chair upon which she perched. She
was a comic but slightly nervous woman, a mudsill whose
English was a queer gumbo of mispronounced words and
faulty grammar. Suddenly, the filter of her cigarette, to
her great amusement, burst into flames: she’d lit the
wrong end. Her face lost its modest attractiveness when
she laughed, less for the grin that was too wide than for
the myocardial ischemia one heard at the height of
risibility.
A tall long-footed woman, she had short perked hair
and her eyes, too close together, almost oriental, hesitant
enough at times to suggest an affrighted conscience, had a
protuberant root-vegetable look which under certain
conditions was more exaggerated than, but slightly
resembled, her daughter’s. Her cheekbones were
pronounced. It was a kind enough face which, however,
became queerly distressed and almost cootlike when she
was drunk or made a stupid remark—the frutex and
suffrutex, surely, of keeping herself too long to the strict
boundaries of Fawx’s Mt.—and she spoke, gesturing with
secretarial hands which looked like tough bast fiber, in a
slovenly Southern accent that refaned even the most
regular words into small indistinguishable poverties. Her
conversation consisted only, always, of misdis-tributed
stresses, spoonerisms, and other ingenuities that extended
to using the word “city” as an adjective and even to the
founding of a new state, “Massatoochits.” It was,
nevertheless, the stupidity that endears. And she had
suffered.
Mrs. Shiftlett loved to talk. Her surname—a not-royal
one—had been legally reassumed following the
dissolution of her marriage, an acidulous failure she
hoped to forget in the process of lifting herself out of
general disenfranchisement into local respectability. The
axiom that has it that there is one good interview in
everyone held true in this case. The story was, however,
an old one. A Scotch-Irish trimmer who’d wandered out
of Arkansas with only one change of socks and even less
principle than education, Mrs. Shiftlett’s husband—
Isabel’s father—decamped almost at the very moment she
was born and then remarried soon after. (“He had no
conscience,” confessed his ex-wife, who added not only
that she’d never marry again but vowed, somewhat
cynically, that grand and mighty visions were sure as hell
visions not of this world. ) The hapless mother, sans
wedbed and getting even further separated from her
alphabet, scrooped about as best she could from Norfolk
to Richmond to Petersburg trailing along her daughter
through an inclement world of hunger, disappointment,
and recession for more than a decade. They lived for
periods with relatives, struggled and saved, and then
rented a listing farmhouse on the edge of the woods
adjoining Fawx’s Mt. whereupon, it so fell out, her only
brother, having initially come to the hospital in
Charlottesville for a perilous operation—it was explained
he’d been shot in the face during a card-game—
eventually moved down from over the mountains, some
three or four years previous, and settled in with them.
They pooled what money they had for a somewhat better
house. Life, such as it was, continued. And Isabel kept her
father’s name.
Mrs. Shiftlett bird-wittedly gaped through the
window down to the turnip patch and gulped a drink from
another bottle that suddenly appeared. “You know he’s
—”
“Yonder,” interrupted Isabel, nervously. They hadn’t
been in the house ten minutes, but she turned to
Darconville with pained, pleading eyes. “But let’s go,
anywhere,” she whispered, “please?”
And so they did.
Fawx’s Mt. was a jerkwater—a little rustic
boosterville running in a crazy thalweg along the base of
the Blue Ridge chain and hedged in by slonks and dark
deciduous forests of rotting logs, leaf-mold, and eaten-
away pines. The village consisted of a single street—a
woodcart rut brimming with rainwater, wisps of fallen
hay—where hunched together were a midget post-office,
one general store-cum-gas-station, and two sad old
churches of indeterminable denomination. It was a place
sunk in blind ignavia, a chaos, a nulliverse of stifling
monotony, little movement, and a zipcode of ee-i-ee-i-o.
Nature itself, weirdly, seemed not to have existed there in
any shape of health. A terrible seriousness breathed
through the place, a grim deutero-canonical uneasiness in
which, with suspicion their mood and subjection their
lodestar, the townsfolk all trod the particular path that
paradoxically led to isolated houses, to isolated lives, and
to isolated fears. It was as if the people there felt
preternatural powers spied down on them with evil intent,
with each haunted, whether in the ghost of blight or the
spectre of depression, by whatever dismal fantasy he
chose as penalty for his puppet sins. There was a subtle
mood of guilt there, of unproductive renunciation, of
anger. People kept to themselves. And there was usually
never a soul in sight. You might have heard the sound of a
buzz-saw somewhere, a pigsqueal from a faraway farm,
wind. But that was all.
On one particular day, however, the hamlet was all
astir. This was Saturday—the day of exception in the
South that can repel the heaviest stone melancholy can
throw at a man and which alone among others, even in the
hazy-mazy stillness of a Virginia heat that breeds flies,
sloth, and humidity in the scuppernong vines, can relieve
responsibility and somehow refer it to fun. And with what
joy is it met! With what excitement! Suddenly, everybody
appears. The tools and trials of the workaday week are
put away, inhibitions are forgotten, and all tumble-belly
together—in feed-hats and hickory-staved bonnets, chinos
and calicos, crocheted shawls and cracked leather jerkins
—for a bit of community: ice-cream socials, barbecues,
country sings, quilting bees, barn dances, or, hell, just an
afternoon of plain ol’ hanging around. It was the one day
in Fawx’s Mt. when all the good ol’ boys who worked
their truck patches or humped pulpwood all week could
put on their boots and boiled jeans—the original straight
stovepipes—and come into town to suck beers, ogle girls,
punch each other with mock sidewinders, and swap
stories in terms generally borrowed from the category of
human evacuations. But best of all they preferred just to
sit around and gawp.
These were the “hearties” of Fawx’s Mt., not a great
deal different, truth to tell, from the other wonderful
sapsuckers down South that might be classified under
ordo squamata: yomp heads, mountain boomers,
rackensacks, hoopies, haw-eaters, snags, pot-wallopers,
buckras, goober goopers, scataways, pee-willies, wool
hats, pukes, rag-geds, boondockers, dug downs, tackies,
crackers, and no-lobes. It’s a kind of club—300-pound
dipshits, always named something like “Hawg,” Kincaid,
or Harley-—who drink flask bourbon, have chigger-bites
on their arms, and wear their hair either short or slicked
back (the comb tracks are always visible) to reveal faces
like those reversible trompe-l’oeil funheads you snip from
the Sunday paper to fool someone with. They have no
chins, are inclined to be goitral, and are always chewing
down a blade of grass fiercely and absentmindedly. They
are given to wearing suntans, white socks, work boots,
and cheap acetate shirts, the sleeves of which are always
rolled up to a point higher than the triceps brachii in tight
little knots. They like whiskey with good bead, respect
Shriners, whistle a lot, drive with one hand, slide crotch-
first onto barstools, and—just “funnin’ “—love to hang
around butt-slapping and goosing each other, punctuating
certain remarks of course with that significant nudge just
before they’re going to fart. They like to wade into
swamps and jacklight rats, are big lodge-joiners, and
know everything about guns which they always handle,
silently, with phallic reverence. They have hands like
cow-horn, with nails bitten to the quick. They have spools
of rusting cable in their backyards, nail coons to the walls,
adore rodeos, and their execrable grammar is half
informed by protective coloration, half by rank stupidity.
Chainsaws are their toys. They’re given to sheep
jokes, often engage in games with each other like “Squail
the Pig” or rustic variations of “Detur Tetriori: or, The
Ugliest Grinner Shall Be the Winner,” and are fond of
spitting contests. But the favorite redneck recreation is
incest. They fear women, so hate them, but as most are
latently homosexual they fear that even more, and so fifty
times a day boastfully and loudly proclaim for each
other’s benefit that they’d hump a rockpile if they thought
a snake were under it. They invariably refer to their
penises as “Big Sid.” They are usually married, but each
willfully keeps confined to home his jittery gap-toothed
wife, always either pronouncedly fat or thin—they all
look as if they support nature on a diet of lucifer matches
and gin—who, when not peeking half-wittedly around the
doorframe of a dogtrot cabin, squats on her porch
dandling a big thick-necked gosling of a child with a
purple hairbow and an I.Q. that doesn’t even register,
repeatedly telling it, “Wave to the street!”
They loathe sentiment but thrive on sentimentality,
violently beat their women with pony-leads on Saturday
night but weep with guilt at Sunday-Go-to-Meeting
during the singing of “The Old Rugged Cross,” their
favorite. In groups, they’re dangerous; each, alone, is a
simpleton. Fanatically patriotic, they’re all knee-jerk
defenders of state sovereignty and go blubbery at the
mere sight of the Confederate Battle Flag. They’re either
whispering sideways about Jesus or bawling obscenities,
georgic in imagery, with stentorophonic might. They’re
handy, can always tell one car from another, know the
right weights of oil, love to use the word “ratchet,” and
always know when to use baling wire and when to use
bagging wire. They know everything about loggerheads,
trace-chains, and hames and can always be found driving
the backroads in trucks, filled with wood, wedged with
chocks, toward a sawmill shed in the mountains. They all
smoke, snite from the nose with the forefinger, and suffer
from very particular ailments: Basedow’s Disease; gleet;
fishskin itch; furunculosis; rodent ulcer; pyorrhea of the
gums; Walking Typhoid; mucous patches; and tic
douloureux. They all know shortcuts through the woods.
They lurk.
It was a Saturday, then, much like the others, and all
the feebs-in-overalls and donkeyphuckers one saw
pitching hay in meadows during the week—they stand
stock-still, with upright pitchforks, and stare out of
expressionless faces as you pass—were now in high
report. They’d met to be. And the best place was the
general store.
Darconville and Isabel pulled up in front. The big car
resembled a hearse, with Darconville undertaking, this
time, to buy some cigarettes: he looked out the car
window and, although torn between feelings of suspicion
and frank amusement, got out and shut the door. A crow
rased out of the eaves of the store.
The Diet of Schmalkalden had convened: there sat
the country gnoofes, Hob, Dick, Hick, and a few others
all perched on palings, eating cheese with clasp knives
and whittling and spitting in the direction of a battered
expectoroon behind them. Darconville couldn’t take it in
all at once. It looked like a group of people—quocumque
modo —who’d somehow just about managed to survive
the Permian extinction: sowskins, ferox-faced oaves,
hedge-creepers, pig-slopping curmudgeons, bungpegs and
lickspittles, scummers-of-pots, and low ve-nereals with
red-nosed papier-mâche faces gumming chaws of Mail
Pouch tobacco. But what seemed incredible was that each
and every one of them—minds, clearly, unviolated by the
slightest idea—all looked remarkably the same, wearing
in their faces the fatal traces of degeneracy and the
physiological signs of the consanguineous parentage that
caused it. Not a word was spoken.
Custodially, Darconville walked by Isabel into the
creepy low-lit store, a sheet-iron stove prominent, its half-
filled shelves a wilderness of canned abominations and
pioneeriana: fishing tackle, diuretic pills, jerked beef,
tires, secondhand rifles, tractor parts, wholesale tins of
peas, hoses, galvanized pails, tins of fish roe, flypaper,
thistle seed, and a magazine rack—Darconville stepped
closer to look—crammed with back-issues of Midnight
Cry; Watson’s Magazine, The Christian Banner, American
Opinion, Menace, The Searchlight and, sanspareil of the
lot, The Fiery Cross. Taking Isabel by the finger,
Darconville nodded to that last magazine; she closed her
eyes, smiled, and shrugged. How, Darconville wondered,
could there be such innocence, such beauty, in the midst
of such ugliness? She was a perfect lotus springing from a
swamp. The greatest balsams, he’d heard, lie enveloped
in the bodies of the most powerful corrosives; poisons
contain within themselves their own antidote. He kissed
her quickly, thinking but pray, not the reverse, and made
his purchase.
 The proprietor—someone, to Darconville’s
astonishment, addressed him as Mr. Shiftlett!—stood
behind the counter, serving notice on him with an
arsonist’s eye, like the squint of one polyplectronic cock
eyeing another; he was about three feet high and had the
face of a barn-owl, angry, surprised, harelipped. He
ignored Darconville’s pleasantries and, turning away,
ended them with a rude fnast of disgust down his nose.
And so they left.
Out front, as Isabel got into the car, Darconville heard
from behind him one of the peckerwoods make a snort,
followed by a dry ster-corous whistle—and he turned. No
one moved. Darconville got into the car. Quickly, a young
bumswink with hair the color of jackass stepped forward;
it was a face full of mother-wit—the perfect redneck’s—
with a long nose and a voluted nostril, and, turning to grin
at his partners, he revealed a mouthful of imperfect teeth,
pegged and pumpkin-seed shaped. Thin, tattered, and
lousy, he scarcely retained a human semblance; in his
filthy face two minute glittering eyes squinted furiously
inwards at his nose. He hitched up his trousers with his
wrists, spat sideways, and nodded toward Isabel. “I like a
good milk cow myself, Captain,” he said, “don’ mean,
yowever, I got to sleep with one.” Darconville kicked
open the door but saw it was no good: he was suddenly
looking down the barrels of two rusty shotguns, wagging
impatiently up and down—and meaning go. He backed
slowly into the car, where Isabel sat ashen, and then
thundered away up a small road, driving as if behind them
lay not a hill-town of twisted pines, broken fences, and
scutch-grass but the Abomination of Desolation itself.
Without a word, Darconville drove on, cradling
Isabel’s head to his shoulder while she kept repeating
through her tears, “It’s unfair! It’s unfair!”
They wound through country roads, a repetition of
gimp fences, quirked barns, and fields with dead rusted
machinery, for what seemed like hours, riding into and
then around the low hills. Cattle, skewbald, roan, and
dappled, drowsily munched tall grasses and meadow
weeds as field upon field led past woodlands toward the
mountains that, upon approach, seemed indefinitely
prolonged. The mountains, however, surprising him,
turned out to be more low hills, unimpressive and empty
except for an occasional farmer or two who, never
saluting, rolled by in old buckboards with sawn-oak
wheels. Out of the hills now, they swung around returning
by backroads eroded by spring branches and runs all
bubbling along, an area at several points of which,
Darconville noticed, stood small signs directing the way
to: Zutphen Farm.
It was, Darconville remembered, the van der Slang
property— Govert’s house.
Silently, Darconville kept to those directions. They
jounced onto a fairly good road and, heading straight
west, soon got clear of the woods when a large farm came
into view. Isabel crouched lower, her mood of oppression
seeming to darken here even more. The farm was larger
by far than any in Fawx’s Mt, but grand, he thought, only
by comparison, for on the mountain side of it were
nothing but grim little shacks and hovels-with-tin-
chimneys, whereas on the town side, though not much
better, could be found a few normal but still insignificant
spit-and-brick affairs of the modern stamp—the Shiftletts’
house was an example—built soon to bury. A white
wooden fence by the dirt road circled the grounds of the
van der Slangs’ where grazed some horses, goats, a herd
of black cattle, and set back in a dim glade stood the main
house, white and cold and silent. Surrounded by fat whin-
blown meadowlands, it was one of those spacious
farmhouses with high-ridged but sloping roofs and low
projecting eaves under which hung flails, harnesses,
various bits of husbandry. So, thought Darconville, there
in that stronghold farm lived that broad-skirted and
faceless Dutch urchin he feared; he saw himself as
Ichabod Crane: a New England country schoolmaster and
worthy-wight—in form and spirit like a supplejack
(yielding but tough)—sojourning in that by-place of
nature, in love, but somewhat out of his element and
exposed to the commonness of rantipole heroes given to
boorish practical jokes and rough country swains and
bumpkins, standing back, envying his person, his address,
and his girl.
A bowlegged woman in a bandanna and high rubber
boots appeared in the near distance of that property
feeding a goat. Darconville intended to say nothing but
found he couldn’t.
“Could that,” he asked, driving past, “possibly have
been Mrs. van der Slang?”
Slouched down, Isabel slowly peered up and then
back in the direction of the receding figure. Are there
silences, wondered Darconville at that moment, in which
if one listens closely may be heard screams?
“Really?” she asked. “I didn’t even notice.”
“Maybe not.”
“Maybe—” Isabel’s eyes flashed in anger.
“Not maybe you didn’t notice,” said Darconville,
surprised, “maybe it wasn’t Mrs. van—”
“But,” repeated Isabel, exasperated, almost as if
wanting of him what she wouldn’t of the figure, “I didn’t
even notice.” Strange, thought Darconville, strange. And
so there was nothing more said on the subject, which of
course, he knew, was a good deal.
They spent much of the afternoon driving,
exchanging small talk. Darconville would often ask ‘
innocent, almost childlike questions dealing with things
Isabel might know and things she could never be
expected to know, leading her through entire dialogues
before arriving not at truth as such, but at some final
irresolvable question of which, perhaps, they together—
curiously—both loved to be ignorant. Actually, Isabel
said rather little on such occasions, far less indeed on
others, those predominantly of the social stamp. She
never directly approached people: if she came upon
people she wanted to know, she allowed herself only a
smile to bridge the distance, and invariably they
approached her, with Isabel feeling then the boon of
sudden value she initially suspected neither of them had.
Fair is not fair, he thought, but that which pleases. Helen
was not, but whilst she was.
Darconville wanted badly to know her, her successive
selves—why, in fact, he loved her. In a way, he wanted to
be her, that much better to know. Perspective as seen, he
thought, is never reality. Wasn’t a stopped clock correct
twice a day? In fact, perspective was anti-creative, for if
we painted what we actually saw—reality, say—we’d
literally have to paint double images. Compensating,
compromising, we look toward dead center only to
contect what we’d know, to scrutinize the inscrutable.
Isabel was inscrutable. Was he, for instance, Darconville
wondered, charmed only by the fact that she lived a life of
which essentially he knew nothing? Where so little was
given, he thought, much was left to the imagination. The
man in love, he knew, often constructed his beloved from
the compilation of small data he was insistently delighted
was so small. On the other hand, perhaps, maybe she was
simply the product of his own temperament, the image,
the reversed projection and “negative” of his own
sensibility, opposed and complementary? Did she lead a
life unknown to him to which he could gain right of entry
only by loving her? Was he merely unloading on her the
state of himself, the worth of the girl not in question, but
only the quiddity of that state? And did her silences
simply feed his own vanity whereby, giving him the
illusion of intelligence, he saw reflected only the worth he
pompously assumed he himself had?
Well, Darconville didn’t know, you see. He wanted
only that she come to believe in the sublimity he felt, feel
enough to believe the sublimity possible. Hope, after all,
was as cheap as despair, and vision? Vision! It was
perhaps nothing more than believing it could be arranged.
Isabel was silent, yes, and mysterious beyond that. But
those who saw in their loved one only what was obvious
or actually present, concluded Darconville, were
incapable of understanding the select activity of love and
—fools curial! fools primipile!—addressed it with a
solecism. The romance of imprecision is not the elision of
the tired romance of the precise. Mint, in a glass of water,
exhausts pounds of it. Whoso feels the meaning of
eternity is in it. Q.E.D.
J’adoube, thought Darconville.
The sun fell behind the mountains, an income of cold
breezes and blue dew now being felt along the high
countryside of Fawx’s Mt. The woodlands of pin-oaks,
sour gums, and box elders darkened. Clutching his arm,
Isabel moved closer to Darconville, sleep drawing her
head toward his chest. He drove on a bit further through
gloomy dimbles and boggy slades and little unnamed
places with boondock courthouses, then circled around
near the funny little airport, a red wind-sock over a barren
tract, on the outskirts of Charlottesville, and passing back
through Stanardsville under a sky filled with clouds like
weasel tracks bounced over narrow, lonely roads along
which bordered tumbled-down stone walls and desolate
dray-horse farms sticking up out of moss and moor, holt
and hill, and then came again to the edge of Fawx’s Mt.
where Darconville saw a roadhouse in a stand of pines —
and pulled over.
It was a shabby place.
The hairy wabblefat at the grill—you couldn’t see at
the neck where the head adhered—had an acromegalic
jaw and a five o’clock shadow; he took a toothpick from
his mouth and half turned. One of his eyes was milky
with trachoma. The close air, as Darconville and Isabel
sat down, smelled of sawmill gravy and fried meat. A
jukebox was playing a country song about adultery. The
waitress, a slatternly blonde with orange lipstick and a
severe case of underbite, came over to the booth and
unhooked an order pad from her hip. Darconville,
ordering a coffee for himself and a hot chocolate for
Isabel, asked the time. The waitress scratched a tiny spot
in the nest of her hair with the sharp fingernail of her
medical finger and, with a pencil, stabbed behind her in
the direction of the clock. It was with unexpressed
disbelief but a suddenly profound sense of mis-wish that,
finding the time, he also read in faded letters pericycloid
with the clockface the name of the establishment:
Shiftlett’s—incontrovertible proof, thought Darconville,
that demons were rife on earth. It was a Land of Sub-
multiples!
The roadhouse was like all others in the South. The
pattern never varies. A crusty exhaust-fan, wafting out the
bacon smoke, whines in a high pigeon-flecked window. In
a cubby-like pantry off at one end slouches the plongeur
—a bindlestiff, working his way down to Chattanooga or
Mobile, in a paper hat, ripped T-shirt, and apron tied
gracelessly low—who has his mouth pursed to a perpetual
whistle (nothing ever comes out) and is dunking in and
out of the cold, soap-less water thick white cups and
bowls washed over the years almost to fossils. The owner,
of course, works the grill, clarifying his drippings and
juicing alive the comestibles—fat snaps, grease cracks,
oil spats— but he’s a windmill of efficiency, jackflipping
burgers, whiffling batter, and sieving oil out of the fries,
his ear professionally cocked to the laconic input of
orders barked by the waitress, his perspiring eye on the
dusty moon of the clock on the flame-scorched ceiling
above him, next to that pair of antlers you love, and the
calendar printed up by the local dairymen’s association
showing in front of a red barn a freckled girl-child in
pigtails and overalls hugging a cow, its caption reading,
“Let’s Bring the Curtain Down on Mastitis.”
That tone held here. There was one addition, however
—an unpredictable variant—on a side-wall by the door. It
was a framed photograph, frilled around in the crushed
bunting of the Stars ‘n’ Bars, of a group of thirty or so
country jakes in string ties, identified collectively on a
plaque underneath as “Knights of the Great Forrest.”
Darconville, always curious, wondered who they were.
The Prophets of Zwickau? Contra-Remonstrants of the
Old Dominion? The Second Synod of Dort? “Bunkum,”
he demoted.
Darconville took Isabel’s hands on the table and
smiled, for he saw she was justifiably uneasy about the
place. He wanted to avoid saying something from the it’s-
important-that-you-understand-that-you-must-trust-me-if-
you-want-me-to-help-you school but, as she seemed
distraught, he gave her full attention. This, she said,
peeping her eyes sideways and lowering her head, was
exactly what she wanted to avoid in her life. Please, said
Darconville. No, she said, her eyes filming over, she
meant it, really, she meant it. And then out of the blue, for
the first time, she explained—her heart now a hotpond of
regrets—how she’d grown up in the midst of such, such
—she fought for words—
“Lower-class—things!” she whispered hoarsely.
Isabel thrust out her underlip, blew up at her hair, and
then told Darconville in language a shade too vehement
how, how, how weak, really weak, her mother was,
although she loved her, naturally, who wouldn’t love their
own mother? O, said Isabel, couldn’t he see? She
bemoaned the fact that her mother rattled dishes in the
sink early in the morning, that she drank too much, that
she mispronounced words, and on and on. Why, her uncle
never even flushed the toilet after using it! They were
poor, uneducated, didn’t even talk right!
Darconville listened to her, who seemed now so out
of charity with almost everything, as if all joy had
suddenly passed out of the world, as if God, and
simultaneously with Him all creation, had suddenly
bowled up on the horizon, angry, revengeful, and cruel.
Isabel had a woman’s worries, but the child lingered on in
her complexion and in the sweetness of her mouth.
Apparently, for Isabel, her mother’s failed marriage was a
crushing blow—her thunderbolt, her Stotternheim—
which dropped her into such darkness of soul that she saw
herself doomed. No, she didn’t hate her uncle; see, it was
what he represented. And what was that? How, Isabel fell
to an even lower whisper, how could she know where to
begin?
Poor simple voice, thought Darconville, she fails, and
failing grieves, and grieving dies; she dies—and leaves
her life the victor’s prize, falling upon his lute. O fit to
have, that lived so sweetly, dead, so sweet a grave.
The confession was diffident, scrambled, and unclear.
Darconville, however, pieced together what he could:
Isabel’s mother worked in Charlottesville, the source, she
granted, along with her uncle’s job in a local parts factory,
of her college tuition, but on weekends, apparently, both
of them were foolishly given to inviting pig-ignorant
loons and locals over to their house for potlatches of
excessive drinking, loud music, card playing, and—with
Isabel sitting quietly in her bedroom absolutely mortified
—frivolous and nearly insane displays of laughter and
vulgarity that lasted into the wee hours of the morning. O
yes, said Isabel ruefully, she owed a great deal to them, it
was true, but nevertheless she still resented them and the
desperateness in her they wouldn’t, couldn’t, even
recognize! Why, her mother, added Isabel, the scar on her
cheek whitening, her mother even considered her to be a
snob for placing herself above the neighbors. Neighbors?
asked Isabel with fire, metonym of war, in her eyes.
Neighbors?
Silently, Darconville listened to her descriptions of
them—I shall never have any trouble from her neighbors,
he felt—and, looking around him, ironically discovered
there in that very roadhouse the perfect illustrations of her
running text.
On the long row of stools by the counter and in the
booths sat old whiskerandos blowing their whit-flawed
fingers; baleful giants with narrow eyes and unijugate
ears; a cowboy out of nowhere; interstate truckers with
pussle-bellied paunches and split shoes; tiny women
wearing baseball caps; and in general an entire assortment
of culex-ridden farmers, bust-hogs, and chawbacons,
most banging in and out for coffee, some doped from
stupidity into motionlessness, and others synoptically
eyeing the waitress and making gawky, insinuative
reverences whenever she bent over to flap away the pack
of cats snooping the local accumulations on the floor and
anybody’s inflamed feet.
The patrons ranged over their plates like nimble
spaniels, each using his primary utensil—an aggressive
fork, pointed down—to cut, saw, shear, shape, and worry
around his food. They buttered their bread in the air,
folded it, and held it out, bitten in gouges. They shook salt
onto the counter by their plates, dropped sops into their
gravy, slurped soup from the front of their spoons. They
masticated, smacking, with open mouths. They ate
asparagus and celery by the fist, spat out the hulls of
peanuts, and twitched bones onto the table or cracked
them for marrow at the back of their teeth. They tongued
icecubes, while talking and grunting, from glasses
stippled white with lip-prints and drank with their spoons
in their cups, elevating the vessels as if, rather than
drinking, they were trying to stand them inverted on their
noses. Finishing their meals, they tipped up their plates
for any spilled chankings, fingered up any, and then,
burping, banged down a few coins, shoved backwards
from the counter—pausing maybe to catch on the jukebox
the last clanging, twanging offerings about store-brought
happiness, careless love, and women either living on the
cheat-in’ side of life and/or takin’ their love to town—and
went out. You were looking for the overture to Xerxes?
This was the Vale of Tempe?
O Fawx’s Mt., Fawx’s Mt.! thought Darconville.
Behold, your house is forsaken and desolate.
“You see? What it’s like? I don’t know what I’d do”
cried Isabel, her hands beseech-side up, “if I hadn’t found
you—be thrown to the wolves, I suspect, I really do. I
don’t think I can live here another day. I have nothing.”
Darconville heard in her words the locutions of her
mother. He didn’t know what to say in response, but he
who at one clap would have summoned from above all
the Angels of the Triplicities to help her knew it fell to
him alone. The prospect frankly delighted him, for he
loved her, although in that, he feared, perhaps he wasn’t
alone. “I have only the woods and fields,” she said with a
forlorn look. She pulled her thumb. “And animals.”
Darconville saw his chance.
“At Zutphen Farm?”
Isabel looked away. There was nothing there for her,
she promised. Yes, it was true she would walk over to
visit when she had nothing else to do; the little farm-
related chores there gave her pleasure, she said, but she
didn’t do it for money, even though they were wealthy.
She never really liked that family, she added, nor
respected them very much.
And as she talked, Darconville put together what
fragments he could: Captain van der Slang, rarely at
home, was a semi-diplomatic species of merchant
profiteer-with-schemes who, thunderballing the watery
world in his blaue Schuyte from Libya to Newport News
and shifting barrels of oil, natural gas, and pig-iron hither
and yon, nourished pretensions of great significance.
They were of the rentier class, the van der Slangs,
supposititious zee-drainers who’d recently moved from
somewhere in Delaware to Fawx’s Mt. and this particular
farm the captain bought to keep his wife and family of
idle boys busy. The mother, it was clear, was a hex-faced
busybody who, while studiously avoiding the Shiftletts of
low degree down the road, nevertheless patronized Isabel
not only to help her with the farmwork but also because
she harbored secret hopes of moral advancement for her
foolish sons, both roughly of Isabel’s age, whose
ambitions thus far, apparently, proved less than complete.
(But Isabel gave no details on either of them.) The farm,
in any case, was a going concern, and more, with great
profits realized in selling livestock and breeding Black
Angus cattle. The family, the richest in Fawx’s Mt., was
nevertheless somewhat unpopular with the common serfs
and chapped hands who hired out to that farm; rumor had
it, said Isabel, rather circumspectly, that they cheated on
their taxes, arbitrarily manumitted the help, and were
remorseless in the matter of buying up more and more
land. Their niggardliness was legendary. “You did
mention once,” said Dar-conville quietly, wondering if,
when a bullet traces a line, every point in that line
sustains it, “that one of the sons—”
Isabel, watching his eyes, kissed him quickly and
said, “I want you. I need you.”
Need, thought Darconville: the quaestor that sells
indulgences love buys. It was true, however, that they
hadn’t yet confessed their love, which, under the
circumstances, nevertheless, seemed only a formality.
There was more need for time to know than pressure to
convince, in any case, wasn’t there? No, it was good that
he’d come to Fawx’s Mt. For no reason, Darconville
thought of Hypsipyle Poore, whose beauty somehow
always outran her grace, and he thought of Aeneas’s
passion for Dido, sudden and not sanctioned by the gods
or favorable auspices, whereas the ultimate union with
Lavinia, for whom he formed no such violent or hasty
attachment, would have recommended itself to every
noble Roman.
It was time to go, with Isabel yawning into her hand
as Darconville got up to pay. The mesomorph turned from
the grill and, wiping his hands on his pants-seat, took
Darconville’s money—but not before suddenly and
suspiciously tracing that stranger’s eye back to the
photograph of the Knights of the Great Forrest,
supplefaced in their framed repository. The proprietor
never took his eyes off Darconville, not in ringing the
cash register, not in returning the change.
Darconville said, “Thank you, Mr. Ayak.”
The man munched in a bronchiospasm—then
crouched up menacingly into Darconville’s immediate
vision, squinting like a mole through a musit. “Don’
mention it, boy,” he drawled cruelly, one eye coldly
galvanizing into a hard marble, and then repeated slowly,
“Don’ mention it.”
The night outside seemed fierce, inquisitive, with
heavy masses of shapeless vapor working through the
woods. The upper segment of the arch of the sky was all
purple, blotched purple, and descending on all sides were
bleak clouds thrusting their heads into the purple in
mountain shapes. They drove away and weren’t a mile up
the road before Darconville turned to Isabel to put her
curiosity at rest: that road-house, he told her, was a
meeting place for the Ku Klux Klan. Isabel arched an
eyebrow, dubiously. But Darconville’s close friendship
with a black minister in Quinsyburg, who’d once nearly
been hoisted by them during the tense period when the
public schools there had been closed (and a few hours of
disbelief thereafter reading in the library), had some time
ago put him in the picture. Not surprisingly, it was in just
such small sheriffwicks and timber- and box-producing
outbacks as Fawx’s Mt.—the land of the piney-wood folk
—that they set up their hate factories and bigotoriums.
Darconville told her about the Klan’s early playful pranks
in Pulaski, Tennessee, and then recounted how that small
group of unreconstructed bushwhackers, ill-concealed
populists, and cut-rate anti-alienists who rode out hooded
and nightied in the witchlight through lonely dingles and
phantasmal swamps had grown into a nationwide klavern
of “brothers-beneath-the-robe.” Theirs was a perpetual
hallowe’en. They paid the initiation fee—the klectoken—
and then, whenever they spied anything whatever alien,
Catholic, wet, black, nullificationist, or remotely anti-
American, they officially klonvokated, paraded, and
clashed. There were four stages of klankraft, explained
Darconville and, after due deliberation there back at the
roadhouse, he found he could name them: K uno, duo,
trio, and quad, or ordinary Klansmen, Knights Kamelia,
Knights— Darconville tapped Isabel on the knee—of the
Great Forrest, and at the top of the pyramid Knights of the
Midnight Mystery. Ooooo-eee-ooo! Darconville could
picture them: the little hoodoos creeping through low
brush toward the midnight lodge, listening for noises, and
then, after a few gymnastic handshakes, sitting around in
their pinheaded cowls pantomancing each other by
candlelight with stories of Communist carpetbaggers,
secret hatchet factories run by niggers, and disgusting
Romish excesses, for the actual proof of which they
thrillfully displayed to each other little gingham bags-
with-drawstrings especially manufactured for conveying
out of convents the fruits of priestly lust.
They passed in silence the little collapsed
schoolhouse (The Brig. Gen. Cadmus Wilcox School)
where Isabel, on a former visit, once mentioned she
attended the early grades, a pentecostal church painted
red, and, finally, on the road to her house, a wooden
building set back in a foliage of evergreens in front of
which, in plaid shirts and neckerchiefs, a handful of Fawx
Mountaineers smoked pipes while fiddlers inside were
playing a medley of square-dance tunes: “Rats in the
Meal Barrel,” “Frog Mouth,” “Got a Chaw of ‘Baccy
from a Nigger,” etc.
“Who knows,” laughed Darconville, “that chap back
there might have been a Kleagle, a Wizard, a Kligrapp, or
a Kludd perhaps. Maybe even the Imperial Emperor
himself!”
Isabel said, “You still haven’t explained why he
seemed so angry. Maybe it was because you called him,
what was it?—that name.”
“Ayak?”
“Yes.”
“Ayak,” said Darconville. “ ‘Are you a klansman?’
The response to which is Akia: ‘A klansman I am.’ “ Then
Darconville dramatically swung out his arm and bowed.
“Kigy! ‘Klansman, I greet you!’ “
Those words weren’t out of his mouth a second when
straightway he was up and into the gravel driveway of the
Shiftletts (the ones who weren’t the others) and shut off
the motor. Suddenly a face—O brutafigura!—ballooned
up at the car window out of the pitch-darkness. It was a
fish-white pretext of eyes, nose, and mouth which, mis-
aligned in God knows what tragic hypocaust of fate,
instantly turned the roots of one’s hair to ice-needles.
Horror dorsifixed Darconville. Immediately he felt—
why?—a stab of profound love for Isabel but in the grip
of sudden shock only heard her spool down the window
to ask her uncle, in a diffident whisper, if he would like to
meet Darconville.
“Thnairsz,” came a voice like a toy air-horn, with a
hole in it.
It meant yes.

XXXIII

Gloss

I am bound to you beyond expression

—GEORGE LILLO, The London Merchant

DARCONVILLE would hear that man’s tiny,

thumbtongued voice— saying “thnaowr”—only one more
time.
And then it would mean no.
 XXXIV

Hansel und Rätsel

If you were April’s lady

And I were lord in May . . .
—ALGERNON SWINBURNE, “A Match”

Fortunati ambo: they fooled around most of the

spring, wandering, in joyous twinship, with Isabel
laughing always and Darconville feeling there wasn’t a
happier person than he, anywhere. They went on picnics,
roamed through the woods, and drove in and around the
countryside with Spellvexit perched regally in the back
seat, whenever they could get away from the college.
They went to movies, walloped tennis balls, swapped
useless gifts, and in high spirits always chased down
whatever curious fatamorganas could be found in the
Quinsyburg Darconville now, for Isabel’s presence there,
almost grew to love. How primal, thought Darconville,
the secondary can become!
After classes, habitually, Darconville would wait on
his porch for her: and how often, sitting there, had he
worn out his eyes trying to grasp in the distance a certain,
undeceitful form coming toward him, which by failing to
come only became an uncertain figure going away! More
often than not, they left each other notes before lunch,
hailed each other on the run in midafternoon, and, leaving
behind the little Pittenweem witches of the dorm, hand in
hand escaped that deinspir-ing world to follow the endless
caravan of fascinations their own delight, their love, daily
afforded. The mind defining reality creates it. The sun
was hot all spring. The world sang.
“O, you’re going to leave me, I know,” Isabel would
cry, laughing, whenever he might be late, her arm flung,
Camille-like, melodramatically across her brow—then
she would burst into even wilder laughter, light silver
peals flying up like a flash of swallows. It was a favorite
joke, a riddle posed as a catharsis, documenting perhaps
the early fears of their delicately exigible love but
becoming a humorous catchphrase from then on, one
never used without a lilt and a laugh.
“Never!” Darconville would reply with comic
feverishness. “You’re going to leave me.”
It has been said by some and several that Desire
wishes, Love enjoys, and that the end of one is the
beginning of the other. That which we love is present; that
which we desire is absent. But it was not so with smitten
Darconville. He felt he would never know enough of her,
present or absent, so little, in fact, he knew. His love only
compounded his desire. And, as he wished to enjoy, he
enjoyed this wish: his love to desire. And yet his wishes,
even in her presence, were not misapplied, for there was
so little of Isabel known in so much of Isabel seen: Queen
Enigmatica of Quinsyburg. The Little Thing, indeed! She
herself was a riddle.
There were matters, for instance, on which she was
close as an oyster: her poor grades, her occasional
disappearances on weekends, Govert (neither mentioned
him: not him, not her), and the inexplicable secrecy she
seemed to assume whenever they went to Fawx’s Mt. —
but part of her beauty was her mystery, thought
Darconville, who went about his business in the face of
such conditions, immortalizing her, like Surrey’s
Géraldine, in dew-besprent complaints she never heard.
She was that ineffable factor whose precise definition—if
one should avoid in definition the word of words one’s
trying to define— could maddeningly be put in no other
terms. She was equal only to herself. It was her first glory.
But there was no disclosure. She could not be found in the
line of a palm or explained in conclusion to a series of
formal donations. She was not in the tarot, untraceable
through pounce paper, incommensurable—a flash like a
flame in an opal. Nothing was really applicable. But if no
name was put to their happiness, still it was abundance.
They were both frankly in love.
Subrationally, they needed each other, with each
making the other proud and worthwhile in the way lovers
do when attention is freely given, when one is loved less
because he or she deserves to be than because he or she
creates, is created by, the other’s grace and both become
transfigured not as opposites but as reverse images of the
same character. It was a pact, to save each other from
trouble, to protect every consideration come to them in
the inaudible glory of each other’s trust, to find,
miraculously, in the sudden emptiness of one heart the
beautiful contents of another’s filling the void.
They packed lunches and took trips, the sunroof of
the Bentley thrown back, its radio playing, driving to
Richmond, to Appomattox, to Charlottesville, telling
stories, taking pictures, and always laughing, laughing
from horizon to horizon, as if space were endless and
they’d triumphed over time. They locked themselves in
the music rooms of the college and danced, acted out
scenes with the skeletons in the labs, and delivered funny
speeches to each other in empty lecture halls. One night
they were returning from the movies. Walking by a
hydrant, Isabel found sitting on top of it a filthy old
discarded seaman’s cap, but feeling silly she picked it up
(typically, with exaggerated thumb and forefinger), stuck
it on her head and, with her face rubberized into a foolish
grin, said, “I think I’ll join the navy!” “O my God,”
exclaimed Darconville, “take it off—you may get
cancer!” And Isabel was overcome with uncontrollable
laughter, a rat-a-tat-tat of lovable, bubbable squeaks. It
was Spellvexit’s noise exactly. My wonderful cats,
thought Darconville, my—
At that very moment, he happened to glance up:
about ten feet ahead of him—near his house and in the
exact pose of the cat from the curious drawing he’d done
as a child—stood Spellvexit, looking sorrowfully at him.
It was strange. It looked so much like a look of pity.
And then, together, they often crept at night into the
Episcopal church in Quinsyburg where Darconville,
under a pinlight—with Isabel, lusorious in a pew, giggling
and clicking her tongue (always a colophon of her joy)—
worked melodies on the organ out of its dusty wheezes.
Still, Isabel was always apprehensive there. The pastor of
that church had once invited both of them to a dinner
party, their first social affair in Quinsyburg together, but
Isabel, sitting on a central divan and wearing a dress
insufficiently volumetric to cover her poundage of leg,
self-consciously went the entire evening without saying a
word and still thereafter sought to avoid him: she never
wore a short skirt again.
They even made several films with Isabel’s old 1940
plug of a camera, often spending days together walking
around town and per-iscoping everywhere for subjects:
smews in flight, misspelled signs, rosydactylate sunrises-
and-sets. One of their films, a plotted four-or-five-minute
comic drama shot on location among the bent stones in
the wisteria-strewn Quinsyburg cemetery, was a
masterpiece of creative irreverence. It was Isabel’s
capolavoro, shot in perfect sequence: Darconville,
funebrist, motors slowly in his Bentley through the main
gates; cuts to Darconville, memorialist, stepping from the
car holding a myrtle wreath; cuts to Darconville,
sobrietist, who halts before an odd gravestone hewn to the
shape of a ship; cuts to Darconville, dadaist, suddenly
clutching his heart and dropping down dead; cuts to
Darconville, karcist, rising up creepily, slowly, from
behind the stone with a gleam in his impish eyes.
Blackout. They almost died from laughter every time it
was shown.
But their most memorable film?
It was most certainly the Day of the Kite, one golden
afternoon out on the Quinsyburg golf course over which,
limitless, a perfect blue sky from mid-heaven down
opened for the sun, heating its own shining light, to
transfigure a rolling field to the Garden of Shiraz, the air
holding the promise of dreams in it and blowing around
the scent of flowers in washed wind.
“I’ll let out slack, you tug the mainline,” Darconville
called out to her. The wind ghosted. She clicked her
tongue and ran, tipping and toeing down the staircarpet of
grass.
A jet-colored scalene affair, with little orange eyes
and the contours of a bat, the kite staggered and upcut
brainlessly across the air, then swooped in several
tendentious circles, and suddenly shot straight up on
tightening line. It shimmied out further and jiggered up to
a tiny size. Isabel turned to Darconville, thirty yards or so
behind her, and clapped her hands like a child, then
suddenly racing after the floating string as he let go to
pick up the camera. She leaped and got it, as Darconville
whispered to himself:

”Followe thy faire sunne, unhappy shaddowe,

Though thou be blacke as night
And she made all of light.”

Quickly, he began to film her: gamboling, circulating,

snudging the distant kite. Her shoulders jived with every
puff and gust. Isabel wore a red jersey, white trousers, no
shoes. The wanton air in twenty sweet forms danced after
her fingers and flashed its transparent song about her
golden hair, blowing as blond as once in the same light
blew that of Helen, Polyxena, Guithera. The natural light,
thought Darconville, that showed Socrates one God and
disclosed to Democritus the atoms now epiphanized this
dancing, peddling child whose laughter almost broke his
heart. She skipped and ran and stretched up, actions
revealing her more-than-a-moiety of thigh. It didn’t
matter what wasn’t seen. Darconville had simply
conceived light visible and found the girl he loved. He
would have gone barefoot to Jerusalem, to the Great
Khan’s Court, to the Far Indies to fetch her a bird to wear
on her finger. She never seemed more beautiful.
“Look! It’s umpteen miles high!” cried Isabel, her
untied hair drifting aerially behind her as she ran.
Darconville was now filming her shadow.
“That cloud, up there. Isn’t it beautiful! It’s shaped
like a bird—a swan, look.” She turned and came over to
him. “Is that true, that the swan sings when it dies?”
“I don’t know.”
 He brought the camera close and shot her nose.
“No, really. What do you think?”
“The swan,” said Darconville, smiling, “remains
silent all its life in order to sing well a single time.” A
parable of art, he thought—and a perfect excuse, it
delighted him to think, for having put aside my writing
for you. Good: there was more piety in being human than
human in being pious.
“What does it sing about, anyway, if it’s dying?”
Darconville happily replied, “It sings about, O, what
of heaven it was always reminded of—but couldn’t have
—on earth. Glaciers: clouds. The sea,” he said, “is the
nightmare of the sky, you’ve heard that, haven’t you?”
“The sea?”
It was unbelievable. She seemed to freeze in a
reverie, blankly studying a spot of nothing in the far
distance, as if all of a sudden, to solve a riddle imposed
on her from without, she were waiting for the answer she
was incapable of giving to come. It was undeniably like
something of unhappiness moving in her spirit, the look
of a person who had discovered, not something she hadn’t
known before, but something she had known before and
didn’t want to hear again. He came over next to her and,
as she turned abruptly, almost kissed her on the lips: an
effleurage suddenly reminding her of where she was. She
lowered her head with a slight blush.
“I mean,” said Darconville, taking her arm, “there is a
sort of consolation in seeing that little thing squittering
around up there, you know? It jigs, you could say, to
synthesize worlds that have been separated, folding its
wings and shooting upon its errand out of the Valley of
Funnel and connecting even for a brief interval the five
elements.”
 “Five elements?”
“Earth, air, fire, water—”
“And?”
You, thought Darconville.
“And ether,” he said. “The quintessential.”
The kite caromed in the faraway air. As if
preoccupied with one of her thoughts, Isabel tweaked the
line and silently watched the tiny vessel plaintively
tossing in the vast and mighty ocean above her.
Preoccupied himself now, Darconville took the
conversation a bit further.
“Sometime, Isabel,” he said, “open the Bible to the
book of Genesis. There is a little fright there amid its
exegetical thickets: the phrase, ‘And God saw that it was
good,’ is for some reason omitted after the second day of
Creation. You know what I mean?” Isabel wasn’t sure. “I
mean, no one has ever figured that out. I’ve often thought,
however, that—”
A gust of wind sent the kite into a lunatic figure-
eight, whereupon, looking up, Isabel opened her mouth
expectantly.
“—well, that on that particular day came the first
disuniting of what God had created. The elements, if now
separate, were once all one, an unindividuated world
become multiple only in that it might be comprehended,
and, say, in one thunderclap that hitherto indivisible ur-
world suddenly banged into a vast network of
intermundia: gases, air, flame, and huge chunks of
smoking telluric mole flew out into a gravity-locked
exosphere!” He waved his arms up. “The One became the
Many.”
“What a pessimist you are,” said Isabel.
 Darconville said: “But can’t you see that that is
optimism? There,” he said, pointing up past the kite, “is
our exit, inspected from an ingressive angle, camouflaged
only by our fear of taking it. Vision overwhelms us! I
don’t think vision is anything more than daring to seek
unity, no matter the—”
Isabel put her hand on his mouth and said shhhh . . .
“You remind me of poetry,” she said.
The black kite suddenly spiked out sideways,
shivered, and then hooking started on a plummet to hell.
Isabel cried out, her nates tightening. Reaching over,
Darconville swiftly yanked the string. The kite swooped
up, listed deferentially, and then nosedived almost on an
aim down, downward, across the field into a tangled web
of treelimbs, hanging upsidedown there as if brained.
Isabel, disconsolate, her hands dropping, pulled her
thumb. Tears sprang to her eyes.
Darconville, lifting her chin, hugged her close, a
photogenic gold-blue mirage of that beautiful day. They
walked slowly over toward the surrounding woods and
silently inspected the ruined kite, dangling in pieces. A
why sat in her eyes which he kissed, finding them grum,
now gleaming with high-wrought inexpressibles. They
stood silent, watching each other, Listening to the real
words of the imaginary dialogue being whispered from
heart to heart, and a very special closeness was theirs that
afternoon, an eternal bond shaping itself in the late sun,
the flower-scents of Eden, the windsong. Still, no name
was put to their happiness, although a new happiness was
understood as Darconville and Isabel, associate sole, left
the field together hand in hand. A low-flying bird, trailing
its legs across the sky, pulled in its wake the sunset and
all the heat of its fire. Dusk crept in.
 They returned to Darconville’s rooms, without a
word.
It was so still: Darconville’s thumping heart, as he
opened the door, was interrupted by a whisper not to turn
on the light. He kissed her quickly, turned, and then
turned back again desperately as if at last all the words
lost on the desk behind her might now be spoken; but
Isabel would have no words and, giving up in his arms,
leaned into him with a long kiss, the obscure surrounding
them as the flesh enclosed the soul, as if simply to explain
how, in the course of love, the body took part in its
affections. They couldn’t get close enough to each other,
sucking out both breath and being as if to gain time for
the merciful recognition between them both knew now
they could never give up; and, needing suretyship no
more, they together passed over questions like riddles not
ignored but solved rather in the quiet but beseeching
assurance of each other’s promised faith: did love yield or
was it conquered? Was to rule by love to dominate by
emotion? Did love fulfilled cease then to be love? Was to
remove the mystery to take away the wonder? May one
love only what one knows, or was love that which made
knowledge possible? Did love have to have a meaning?
No, no, not if it meant what it was.
“I love you,” said Darconville.
“Oh, I love you, too.”
And they made love in the naked darkness, two lost
children looking for rebirth in the glory of each other,
struggling upward, like their wayward kite, toward the
cold particulates of one world where, joining sky and sea
by song, they found another, and then reaching up higher
still to behold in the frost and starlight the very beauty of
very beauty, neither begotten nor made but being of the
substance and essence which is beautiful unto all eternity,
they made a wish, stretched forth and—poof!—blew out
the birthday sun, and were blind at the climax of vision,

Coda

Those were the carefree, intimate days they shared

together before the weird and fateful turn that wound its
intricate way back to a certain letter—not even a letter, in
fact. It was a questionnaire.

XXXV

A Questionnaire

Time’s fatal wings doe ever forward flye,

Soe ev’ry day we live, a day wee dye.
—THOMAS CAMPION

THE QUESTIONNAIRE caused a lot of trouble. It

was quite common, now, that Darconville often found
little gifts left for him in his office, presents—it was
typical at a girls’ school—offered up during the course of
the year by gentle giglots, maidens blushworthily abud,
and softhearted flouts whose dear heads Love had turned,
whose dear hearts Love had wrung, whose dear hands
Love had moistened and who, most of the time, tripped in
and out of his shadow as quietly as mice, walking by his
house, watching him from windows, and generally
bearing the agues, itches, stones, cramps, and colics of
cruel and anonymous passion as best they could.
It was common enough, and harmless: at the oblique
of a given hour, up to the second floor of the English
building and into the silent corridor the little pixiarda
would steal, arrange her gift—boxed, bottled, or bowed—
and then according to the law of self-denying ordinance
secretly hurry away to an outlying willow tree under
which she sat, a bundle of regrets, listening to a bobolink
in the branches above mocking the pity of human passion.
It was indeed harmless and easily explained, the
consequence, in most cases, of an infirm social calendar,
the overabuse of spices in the college diet, or simply the
love-philtre that is the muskrose season we know as
spring.
And sometimes there were notes. And so it was on
one particular Friday. Taking a brief respite before his
four o’clock class, Darconville walked into his office and
stepped on what he picked up. It was a lilac envelope. He
slit it open, took out a sheet of matching stationery—out
of which slipped, along with a heady lavender fragrance,
a small red-green gem: a bloodstone—and read the
following:

1. hate me?
Do you 2. like me?
3. love me?
4. feel indifferent to me (the worst) D?
Yours forever,
H.P.
 There would have been no doubt as to the identity of
the pollster here, initialed or not. No, even if Darconville
had not recognized the lush hue of paper, or breathed in
its deep perfume, or identified the feminine slant of those
semi-uncials, he knew the correspondent well. Of course,
Hypsipyle Poore was not alone. There were other girls de
la faute fatale during the year—quoits homesick for
spikes—who also left behind little gifts and select
remember-me-bys. These were not all shy. Neither were
they all anonymous.
Sprightly, unforgettable Mercy Tattycoram once left
him a robin’s egg with her name signed on it in lemon
juice. Tadzia di Lido sent to his house biweekly letters, of
the saga genre, with envelopes coming three at a batch
(marked %1, %2, %3) and the stamps on each always
arranged amorously tête-bêche. A senior English major,
Iva Ironmonger Dane, was wont to leave tucked in the
carriage of his typewriter intense little poems, each,
usually, a one-sentence tranche written in pedantic
sentimeter, arbitrarily spaced, and given a title something
like “Mouse,” “Rain,” “Loneliness,” or “Untitled,” that
special one too ineffable in content to be named. For the
monthly jar of gooseberry preserves, all thanks to the
annual-editor, popular Pepper Milltown, who once
snapped a photograph of Darconville in his Bentley
which, later, Isabel pointedly requested her to remove
from her dormitory mirror, but she wouldn’t, she said,
until she had good reason to, which that afternoon, sitting
in the infirmary with a swollen foot, she had. Cygnet
Throwt brought him a reproduction of an eighteenth-
century clay pipe from Williamsburg. Michelle
Arcangiolo gave him a glass pistol filled with candy.
Then Hazel Anne Glover, whose paintings he once
complimented, presented him her favorite osmiroid pen
with its ancillaries, a box of titquills spilt on his desk and
so arranged to spell 1-o-v-e. And Fanny Appleton’s, one
couldn’t forget, was the tie-clasp and the foot-high card at
Easter. Finally, Yancy Dragonwagon, offering herself,
simply spent every day of the week sitting loyally on the
dimly lit stairwell outside his office.
The obliviscible on this day was, of course, like all
the others in intention. It differed only in its effect,
becoming swiftly the protarchos ate—the crime that sets
other crime in motion. No, there was no question as to its
author; no doubt as to the type of epistle, indited, as an
attorney might bonds, by leaving blanks; and no
hesitation as to what must be done. Smiling, Darconville
put the bloodstone in his pocket. He ripped up the letter,
dropped the pieces into the waste-basket, and went off to
class thinking no more about it. About such matters—
over protestation, over evasion, over repetition—
Darconville had long expressed a dear wish to have less
ceremonial and more understanding. Or, at least more
attempts at understanding. Or, better still, more insistence
at making understanding explicit and verbal. But little had
come of it. And so he began to take it all in stride. You
see, it was about the twentieth time that year he’d
received such a note.
On the other hand, it was Isabel’s first.

XXXVI

The Deipnosophists
 What mighty Contests rise from trivial Things.
—ALEXANDER POPE, The Rape of the Lock

THE INCIDENT was memorable. It fell out this way.

A party, thrown annually, was always held in late May—a
retrospective at end of term—and the faculty, every year,
generally took it to be the party “to end all parties,” a
mode of expression, of course, that had to be taken—
along with so much else at Quinsy College, especially in
matters of education—figuratively. Traditionally, it was
held at the home of one of the faculty members, some
professor or other chosen for it, one customarily hot for
advancement in the royal court of deipotent Greatracks le
roi who, let it be said, never disallowed his subjects any
chance to screw themselves into whatever new little
dignities they coveted and his grace-and-favor might
allow. All vied for his wink, the mere wave of his sceptre,
and a subsequent ho-ho-ho raised, it was common
knowledge, many a low academic from vassal to knight to
baronet to lord to viscount to earl and, with luck, even put
him right next to the Higher Who.
College presidents love meacocks. So everyone tried
to please President Greatracks in every way he could. He
was wined and dined at every turn by little jellybones and
psychobiological suckeggs who, never missing a chance,
scraped, climbed, snatched, glozed, cozened, and
collogued. Inside every faculty member beats the heart of
a merry andrew. The word of kings is the queen of words.
The ambitious there were captives.
 The hosts were chosen. The many-called who were
overlooked, disgruntled, nevertheless appeared on Friday
night and found that no expense had been spared. There
was music, dancing, and no end of delicious food. As
darkness fell, long white candles were set out in every
room, while in the capacious gardens out back a string of
paper-lanterns rattled in the warm wind, to which later in
the evening, if things went as usual, a good deal of
caution would be thrown—at least so the bets went, for
this particular year the host-couple, from the psychology
department, was a stylish and exciting coprolaliac-
écouterist two who’d come in September with
Darconville named Felix and Felice Culpa.

”When I take the plunge

I drink like a sponge,
No bladder holds liquor like mine—”

sang irrepressible Felice Culpa, flinging the door

open, standing there in purple slacks and gold shoes, her
wig ablaze with jewels, and continuing, much to the
shock of the guests behind her, to round off in near-
perfect numbers her romantic roulade:

”So would you get hot

For my sweet little twat
If I peed the most excellent wine?”

It was Darconville, surprised, at the doorstep, and

Felice, laughing mightily thereat, stroked down her thighs
in a parody of mock-preparation, mock-lust, and yanked
him in with a big and most felicitous kiss of welcome.
Where was Isabel? she asked, taking his coat. He
promised she would come.
Darconville rather liked the Culpas who, few among
many, certainly could not be numbered at Quinsy in the
taxonomy of academic mumpers, wirepullers, and
bootlickers. The two of them, independent and carefree,
were simply a commedia dell’arte of pranks, bog-jokes,
and liberal thought, the kind of free-spirited teachers who
for no particular reason came to these small towns, taught
a spell, and then dropped out of sight for good. They were
certainly not long for Quinsy College, less for holding
spécule views on the equality of races than teaching the
virtue thereof. It didn’t go down, and with it they were
humming their recessional. President Greatracks,
nevertheless, had once been a guest at one of their famous
dinners, a copious and mouthwatering manicotti imbottiti
à la Culpa, with homemade bread, cannoli, and bottles of
sparkling asti spumante, a celebration, in fact, for Isabel’s
birthday (Dec. 30). They were both wonderful cooks, and
lavish, and so on that occasion, though unbeknownst to
them, they were earmarked as the host designate for the
May bash. Pushing himself away from the table that
particular evening, Greatracks had belched and with
perfect seriousness declared, “Lordy, I love Hawaiian
food!”

* * * * *

Friday 12:30 P.M.: The débouchement from the

Quinsy dining hall is loud. “O, I knew there was
something else. I won’t be going up with you to
Charlottesville,” exclaims Isabel with a secret smile to her
tablemate, Annabel Lee Jenks, who’d given her open
invitations for weekend rides. In her excitement, she
forgoes dessert: snowcones. She doesn’t lag but scooping
up a fardel of books rounds out of the doors (thewm,
thewm) on a zip to the library: not, however, before
dancing up the stairway to Darconville’s office to try to
catch him—catch? kiss!—and assure him that she will (a)
hurry to finish her termpaper, (b) call for Miss Trappe
who, as understood, would go with her, and (c) meet him,
according to plan, at the Culpas’ party the minute ev-
erything was done. Drat, the office is empty and—but,
wait, what is here? How often the slip between objective
cup and subjective lip! But what does it matter? Isabel’s
face drops, almost as if she had never in her life seen a
letter, or at least one colored lavender.

* * * * *

Pouring a drink, Darconville shoehorned himself into

a noisily buzzing crowd that reached to several rooms. It
was a large omnium gatherum composed for the most part
of the Quinsy administration, faculty, and staff, along
with a handful of other Lumpengesindel from downtown
Quinsyburg: town officials, local voivodes, and
influential porkers from the mayoralty, all grouped
together—hale-heartedly chattering, jingling the ice-
cubes in their glasses, blinking at each other through a
vast smokering—to concelebrate the end of the school
year. People embraced each other like orchestra
conductors. Allocutive Jill-tipplers and firedrakes with
tight permanents hissed salutes of sudden recognition,
while gorbellied husbands-in-tow, wearing bright red
faces and outlandish sport jackets, barrellassed across the
room, napping their hands, to announce themselves and
yawp out greetings. A few businessmen in sudoriferous
shoes snuffled and snorted, while their pert wives, all
bowlegged, stood around with menacing smiles pricing
the furniture. Jackdaw perched beside jackdaw. It was not
unexpected, for this was not an age for the piety of
hesitation, the which, alas, in Quinsyburg at least would
have to wait another century or two to come from its
ossuary and be recognized. It was the Age of Smirk. It
was the Age of Intrusion.
“Hah, har yew!”
Good grief, thought Darconville, what language was
that? Pushtu? Wolof? Gic-Goc? He turned.
“Over here.”
Darconville turned again.
“Dang it, son, over here!”
It was President Greatracks, shinyjowled, hunkering
low on his elbows and snickering through the funkhole of
the bar. His face ballooned out comically. He stuffed a
roll-mop herring into his mouth, then another, and
another, and then with a loud thoop sucked a huge gobbet
of sour cream from the fat of his wrist. “I saw y’all—” He
swallowed hard and wiped his chin. “I say, I saw ya’ll day
or two ago, you ol’ coon hunter, with just the prettiest
little ol’ gal ever, steppin’ out of that big au-to of yours,
huh?” He winked a wink of fat-bound comprehension,
eased back, and swung his rumbling, drumbling body
around the side of the nook. His tie was stuffed into his
trousers, the belt of which, tight, squeezed him just above
mid-point like a trans-vected sugar bag. “A mighty tall
drink of water, and cute as pie. Mm, mmm, cute as pah!”
“Yes,” said Darconville.
“Beautiful as a o-riole.”
“Thank you.”
 “Shoot, you was grinnin’“ he wheezed, “like a
unwarshed mule eatin’ briars—and then some.” He fished
for a crumb in his teeth. “Well, good. Longhair or no
longhair, you still ain’t one of them sad little bumboxes
around here about to drive me crazy with damfool
requests and extracurricular thises and thats, no you ain’t,
son, and I’ll give you that!” Ironically enough, Greatracks
liked his people soaped and regimented, a tour years back
in the navy having taught him, he repeatedly pointed out,
not only spiffiness—here, he always raised his voice in
contribution to the betterment of the proximate world—
but discipline! “These touchholes,” said Greatracks,
gloomily looking around, “they’re all arse and pockets!
Some of these bastards have been on their knees so long,
they’ve forgot what it’s like to have feet!”
He grabbed a bottle of bourbon, filled Darconville’s
glass, and tapping a toast hausted right from the bottle in
one long suck. “We right in hopin’ you find Quinsy here
to your likin’?” He burped. “Hell, sure you do, we all do,
right?” His tongue was resting on his lower lip in half-
witted expectation. “Right?”
For confirmation, President Greatracks leaned over to
grab Qwert Yui Op, but he was explaining to Miss
Porchmouth and Dr. Excipuliform—unfortunately, in
Tibetan-Chinese—about the method used for sowing
soybeans in his country: they stored seeds in their ears, if
his charade meant anything, and hopped through the
fields at a 30° angle. So, reaching out, Greatracks hooped
in the then passing Dodypols to reassure Darconville how
happy they all were. Dr. Dodypol, a friend of
Darconville’s, was a short little fellow from the English
department with a sad starched pallor and bloodless,
nickel-sized ears and, upon seeing him, always waved at
pocket level with a little flap and said, “Hello,
Darconville. Fair grow the lilies on the riverbanks?” But
on this occasion he said nothing, nothing at all. Twice his
height, Mrs. Dodypol carelessly pushed her husband aside
and, holding with exaggerated care a fuel-smelling drink
at arm’s length to protect a dress the color of winter
cabbage, on long morbid feet moved leering up to
President Greatracks with a face salacious and rouged to a
Grock-like mask, her eyes smiling like moonfish. She
playfully squibbled his cheek.
It was a blatant rudeness, not to Greatracks, of
course, who loved it, but to her husband, for common
report had it that she was Greatracks’s mistress, that he
had finagled her the managership of the Piggly Wiggly,
and that on more than one Saturday night their twin, fully
unambiguous shadows had been seen thrown against the
indiscreet shades of the otherwise irreproachable
Timberlake Hotel.
“Honey,” exclaimed Mrs. Dodypol, slightly
inebriated and turning to Darconville the countenance of a
bummish down-and-out clown, the umbo of her nose
scarlet and her general features flaking like an old moist
Roman fresco, “think. No crime. Country air. Plup-plup-
pl,” she hiccuped, “plain folks.” Her eyes swam, crossed,
reddened. She was all mops and brooms, and as the heat
rose to her face, frazzling her hair, she seemed to
reinforce Casanova’s theory that any woman over fifty-
six need no longer be considered among the living. “And
then what about that shweet child,” her tongue thickened,
“you take out walkin’?” She tapped his heart. “Solid.
Loyal. Faithful.” It was the common, amplified anti-
rhetoric of the drunk: brief, non-discursive, laconic.
 “And cute as pah,” pitched in Greatracks, putting her
drink vertical.
“You stay on,” breathed the Dodypol Better Half
through her powder and fucus. “That right?”
“Sunshine,” said Greatracks, beaming, “you as right
as rain!”
Lowering her mottled face, Mrs. Dodypol took a
thriftless slug of fruity domestic. “And so,” she hiccuped,
“will you will or won’t you won’t?” She waited with the
drunk’s fussy care, the ungainsayable doggedness. “Yes,
sugar pie?”
“Now don’t go crowdin’ him, dumperling,” said
Greatracks, jogging Darconville in the ribs. “He be back,
shinin’ like a nigger’s heel. Right?”
Deliberating, Darconville thought: yes, I will be back.
It was suddenly strange, for of the many times he had
heard the question this was the first time he had heard the
answer. Was to agree to yield? he wondered. He didn’t
know. He had been fearful for so long that if he came to
like Quinsyburg he might not hate it anymore, the fear
faded: the act committed by not acting. He thought of a
related question: precisely what of that freedom which,
exercised, relinquished itself? And that led to still
another: may one be consoled in the absolute that
everything is relative? It immediately occurred to
Darconville, then, that to allow for the absence of danger
was somehow to acknowledge the possibility of slavery.
And yet he was in love! He had opted forever, and for
something to be entirely romantic, he thought, it had to be
irrevocable. So choice itself had been made irrelevant.
His freedom, paradoxically, was the deliverance from it:
the choice, chosen, never to choose again.
Darconville, nodding, said he would be back.
 “That is a joy,” brayed Mrs. Dodypol, almost
bleaching Darconville’s hair in a spatter-spray of drunken
yux and wet-cupping her mouth. She turned merrily and
pronged President Greatracks in the bullseye of his navel
with a fingernail the color of potassium permanganate.
“Isn’t it, skeezix? Just a ol’ joy?” There was no response,
however, other than that of a great dopplerian whoop of
laughter, for having caught sight of a tray of ham slabs
and a mess of wallop-sized buns Greatracks was now
more than halfway across the room and moving fast.
Without a pause, Mrs. Dodypol, part-time grisette and
supremo of the Piggly Wiggly—spilling her drink—
bounced into the air and sprang after him through the
room with a scream like that of a crazed woodfreak.
Darconville just stood there. Colorless as an etching,
resigned, Dr. Dodypol looked up at him. He blinked.
Then he silently picked up several crackers from a plate
and put them into the pygmean side-pocket of his
graveclothes and walked aimlessly through the smoke of
the noisy room, looking back only once: to smile sadly at
Darconville, hold up a cracker over his head, and then,
inexplicably, bite it in two in one ferocious turtle-like
snap—after which he turned through the crowd and,
solitary, followed himself out to the garden where the
Chinese lanterns were. Darconville looked on until he
disappeared. And then he looked at his watch.

* * * * *

Friday 4:03 P.M.: The Smethwick library, though

open, is virtually empty, not a rare thing, alas, on
weekends at Quinsy College. Isabel is there, however,
sitting noiselessly and alone in the tomb of the reference
room, surrounded by shelves of maroon encyclopedias,
newspapers racked in binding-shafts, globes. (That is
Miss Pouce rearranging the art oversizes in the next room
by the window with the mixed bowl of maypop and
bunchberry. ) Isabel stares through a blank notebook to
the face of mournful Ate rising in a page, faintly frowning
back at her with expressionless lavender lips and profane
eyes; her pencil waits in her fist, her fist on her cheek, her
cheek pale. Thesis: apprehension is foreknowledge.
Antithesis: what we see is what we sometimes by mistake
think we foresee. Synthesis: Isabel, knocking on her head,
subdues a wish to probe further and determinedly turns to
her index cards, fact-filled with notes for her art
termpaper on the subtle and artfully worked technique in
Dutch potting of concealing dull earthen pottery in pretty
white glaze and decoration: “Decoys in Delftware.”

* * * * *

Soon, the party was in full swing. The flint was

struck, a spark flew out, and the dry little birdnests that
were the hearts of the participants, once ignited, now
crackled, then spread. The crowd grew, as if the guests in
some kind of ridiculous fission seemed to double at every
turn. It was a Wimmelbilder: a teempool, now in high
report, of party goons, noisome dowds and doodles,
truffatores, pusspockets, stoop-nagels, and a whole crazy
retinue of hoopoes-in-fine-fettle.
Guests, being introduced, were rotated like tops.
These were the Ho’s, those were the Hum’s. Those were
the Go’s, these were the Come’s. The Snipps met the
Snapps and the Snapps met the Snurrs. It was endless. But
Felice Culpa, who had no end of energy, loved the
combinations. Dr. Roget, Miss Carp; Miss Carp, Dr.
Roget. “Delighted,” said motograph-voiced Dr. Roget,
one of the pawns on the Board of Visitors, “overjoyed,
highly-pleased, gratified.” “Peachy,” replied ninety-year-
old Miss Carp, her long cigarette wagging up and down
on the two syllables. A former teacher at Quinsy, she was
one of those outspoken choleric old sticks down South
who smoked three packs a day, said anything she damned
well pleased, and was given a wide berth—in this case, a
wider one than most, ostracized as she’d been in the
Quinsyburg community ever since casting that irreligious
vote in 1928 for Al Smith. The Culpas, her neighbors,
liked her and thought to do something about it, but not
everyone approved, and Mrs. DeCrow, looking like
Vrouw Bodolphe come alive, thought the invitation
disgraceful, clacked her teeth, and turned her back to the
room.
Others couldn’t be introduced. Dr. Glibbery was
searching for hot sauce in the kitchen. The Weerds, alone,
were talking to each other in the backyard. And Dean
Barathrum was in the bathroom. In two cane chairs on the
porch, side by side, Misses Shepe and Ghote were sitting
like pharaohs, their hands on their knees. They noticed
Darconville. “Forget the black clothes,” muttered Miss
Ghote. “It’s the long hair gives me the dreads.” “Well,
long hair,” sniffed Miss Shepe, “is sanctioned in the
Bible, Miss Ghote.” She smiled. “Judges 13:5.” Miss
Ghote arranged her fingers into a reef knot. “I hate to
disappoint you, Miss Shepe,” said Miss Ghote, who
hadn’t the slightest intention of sitting passively by and
allowing her neighbor the luxury of placing the teapot of
her Episcopalian proclivities on her Baptist trivet, “but
long hair is not sanctioned in the Bible.” She shifted
indignantly on her sapless buttocks. “You want to re-read
I Corinthians 11:14, I’m afraid.” It was only another one
of those pull-devil, pull-baker affairs that would last long
into the night, good old ecclesiastical coun-teravouchings,
each felt, having both source and sanction in such great
biblical priestesses of yore as Euodias, Syntyche,
Priscilla, Phoebe the deacon, and all the other spoof-proof
little charmers who traveled across the sacred pages of
Scripture in numbers too big to ignore.
“And these,” said host Felix Culpa, perspiring into
his ascot, for though he was big of heart, his almost thrice
three times thrice three feet in breadth sometimes got the
better of it, “these are the Thisbites.”
“I’m sure,” smiled a few dears from the personnel
office, gentle souls with shell-pink complexions, precise
hairnets, and steel girdles, the type of women at parties
who are always, for no particular reason, just leaving—
and never, somehow, without a brown package tied with
string under their arms and seventy-five goodbyes at the
door.
Miss Thisbite, a Dixiebelle, was one of those girls of
the beauty-pageant variety, with that typical Southern
smile that is always just a bit too high. She had baby-blue
eyes, a round face—piefacedness has always been the
Southern ideal of feminine beauty—and had just come
down from Richmond for the weekend, driven by her
brother, a young blond ephebe with a perfect head and
skin the color of moonlight who was also in attendance.
She was being interviewed for an opening in the English
department. “A real armful, huh? I know the type,” Felice
said, playfully tapping Darconville and nodding in the
direction of the girl whose short skirt revealed long lithe
legs and stockings worked like the marquisette of a
butterfly net. “Shapelier than Isabel in the legs, OK. But
I’ll give you two to one she’d be harder to get into than
the Reading Room of the British Museum.” Then she
tweaked his nose and pranced away on an arc, very like
the smile she sent him on the way out.
Southern women, it occurred to Darconville, were a
case-study in extremes. They were in fact like sausages:
some—the minority—were so soft and pink and moist
they could be spread with a pliable knife; the others were
as hard and dry as corundum, a kind of thin indurate
Landjaeger, its groats tied off tight and cold as marble in
the bung of a fierce, almost unbreakable coil. There
seemed to be no other kind. In any case, most of the men
at the party, old dodders, young dudes, immediately
honed in on Miss Thisbite. They lit up trick bowties. They
puffed the college’s reputation. They subjected her to
rustic stories, pseudodoxies, tall tales.
“They are saying”—it was Prof. Fewstone, of course,
sidling up to Miss Thisbite with his overfilled shirt and
yogibogeybox-shaped head, the strange hairdressing of
which gave him a big roach in front and a curled effect at
the rear which he tucked under a roll—”they are saying
you want to join the team, yes? First-rate! I tell you,
we’re thick as three in a bed here at Quinsy. Wonderful!
But now tell me, have you been told about the cutbacks
over at the legislature, the budget, all ther—”
Miss Thisbite, kindly refusing his offer of a
wheatcracker smeared with lobster pâté, .circled the
button of his jacket with her finger and softly asked if
money was scarce.
“Scarce? Why, non-existent, gal, non-existent! Listen,
I was around this place when they paid you through a
bean-blower, shoot yes, and it ain’t no better now. Thing
is,” he said, moving closer, “I happen to have my foot in
the door with the governor, see, and—”
He suddenly felt cold and looked up.
Mrs. Fewstone, standing across the room in hard
brown shoes and wearing a dress that looked as if it had
been cut out of zinc, had him transfixed with her snake-
like eyes in a cruel fascinatio.
At this juncture, Darconville worked his way to the
front room to see if Isabel had come. Mrs. DeCrow,
noticing him, continued the shabby game of studied
indifference she had played for almost a year now and
turning cock-a-hoop, her nose sharp in the air, whisked
past him with a face like the Uffizi Medusa. Shaking his
head, he lit a cigarette: the tinker, his dam. But as the
Great Snibber looked back—she had snibs in her, and
snibs, and more snibs!—she banged smack into a bureau,
eliciting a snoot of glee from the for-the-moment
uncharacteristically joyous Mr. Schrecklichkeit who, not
that he could know it, immediately joined both
Darconville and Abraham Lincoln as a funeral urn in the
necropolis of her mind. Bristling, she shoved the bu-reau
with one swipe of her pipefitter-like arms. Schrecklichkeit
was a simp, everybody knew that. But Darconville? He
tasked her, he heaped her. She adjusted her breasts. She
glowered around. She stepped to the table. Correct her,
would he? She stabbed into a bowl of smoked oysters
with a toothpick, spitted three, and, poor little beasts, they
were mollusks no longer but now part and parcel of Mrs.
DeCrow.
Meanwhile, Darconville looked around the dim front
room, and looked, and looked.

* * * * *
 Friday 5:40 P.M.: The shaft of light from the
overhead lamp bleaches out a spot on the front steps of
the library, where a figure is standing. Are you going to
dinner? No. Have you finished your term-paper? No, no.
Isabel Rawsthorne is staring through a nightfall thick as a
fault to the outline of the tree in front of Darconville’s
house, only a largeness of indifférence—not good, not
evil—the pendulous boughs of which the wind jostles
with the feverish excitement of a sacrilegious thief. All
are not abed that have ill rest, and one of them, lacking
most because longing most, begins to pace out notions.
Of these notions one lodges itself finally in her mind with
cautious exactitude as the very thing indicated by the
occasion. It’s a cat’s walk, a little way up and back. Then
it’s not a cat’s walk. The figure is gone.

* * * * *

Darconville soon began to get restless. At sixes and

sevens, he wandered through the hall and went into the
library; he half-pulled a book out of a shelf—The Gnomes
of Zeeland by Rex Hout—and uninspiredly pushed it
back. He stepped out on the veranda and looked at the
sky. Strangely, an intuitional hindsight occurred to him,
but it passed as he strained to count the distant peal of
bells coming from the library. Nine o’clock. Thank God,
Isabel would be coming soon.
“Titbits?”
“Kickshaws?”
“Kitcats?”
It was three horae from the home economics
department at the veranda doors offering the hors
d’oeuvres they’d brought. Impossible to avoid, these
fructatory genii and inveterate tray-passers with fat
dimpled elbows, polished faces, and smelling of soap and
starched linen had been shoggling through the party since
they’d got there, the ball-like contours of their heads
revolving as they bowed and dipped from guest to guest
with plates of airfoods. One of them who’d flunked Isabel
first semester for absenteeism thought the grade
confirmed in not seeing her there. She went on about it
with some concern, embarrassing Darconville, having
become her father-by-proxy, his proxy-by-placement. An
hour passed. He checked his watch. It was 9:04.
The guests, meanwhile, circulated, mooning from
room to room, discovering each other again in a different
place but under the same circumstances to resume their
similar chat. Taken altogether, it was not unlike any other
faculty party, archetypal, to be sure—if more pronounced
at Quinsy—with its predictable cast of poltroons, gum-
beating fibsters, and others whose brains were kept in jars
above the moon; to wit: the Funster with the double-
jointed thumb which also serves—to everybody’s dismay
—as a finger-puppet; the Trendy Wife (always from
California) wearing hoop earrings and a bandanna who’s
found the most fantastic recipe for sharksfin soup; the
Good Ol’ Boy, a fox-snouted churl in a perpetual sulk
who sits alone in the den misanthropically crunching
pretzels and flipping through a five-year-old issue of
Knife Digest; the Female Poet, smoking a cheroot, who
has a cat named “Cat” and calls her poems “friends”; the
Foreigner, coddled by all, who is perfectly willing to talk
about agrarian reform in his country; the Chubby-in-
Residence who, after twenty-seven visits to the dog-
whelk dip, publicly—and virtuously—refuses her dessert
at dinner; the Etymologist, thoroughly bottomed in his
Skeat, who is silent in any given conversation until that
crucial point when he interrupts with, “Actually, I think
you’ll find that—”; the Televisioniste, somebody’s
boyfriend, who with more confidence than brains
deathlessly mis-recapitulates for everyone the
interminable plot of last night’s late movie; the
Convenientologist who at some moment or other always
comes striding out of the bathroom saying, “Why, Felice,
you never told us you installed a bidet!” and then always,
of course, the Favorite Child, the little towser with the
cowlick dragged down from upstairs in his pajamas-with-
feet, blinking and clutching a truck, who is called upon to
sing in a voice like a puppetoon—and reluctantly—”Jesus
Wants Me for a Sunbeam.”
Darconville, who didn’t want to, noticed everything.
He fought not to notice. If the people there, however,
could have known with what punctilious accuracy their
every movement and mannerism was recorded by him,
not through viciousness, not smugness, nor any
premeditation, they’d have sued him on the spot. He
couldn’t help it. Behavior is comment, the articulation of
action, and these nopsters? With their fipple-fluting
tongues? Their pretentious piety? Any satirist worth his
salt would have banished them forthwith in a jingle, not
as victims but as executioners: an authorized punishment,
seeking to cure disease by remedies which produce
effects similar to the symptoms of the complaint, for what
to correct as hangmen they’d have to know as the hanged.
There is not a bauble thrown by the silly hand of a dunce,
thought Darconville, that may not be caught with
advantage by the hand of art. Pausias, in painting a
sacrifice, foreshortened the victim and threw his shade on
part of the surrounding crowd to show its height and
length, an offense that exaggerates a mood where defense,
sickened, lies and, stricken, dies, for are we not all
implicated in what we hate by what we otherwise might
love? But I am no writer anymore, reasoned Darconville,
so how would I know?
It was less for the observations he made, however,
than the emotions he felt that gave Darconville an
indication how extremely anxious he was that Isabel
should come, so both of them could leave. The party was
ridiculous. It was one fantastical opinion after another,
mad fugitive theorizing-on-naught from bore to batman to
boobie, and behind everybody, everywhere, was
somebody, somewhere, making signs with his or her eyes
which he or she meaningfully manipulated for another,
anywhere, to meet and mock.
Miss Malducoit—the kind of woman who always
says she’s going to make a long story short but doesn’t—
stood in the middle of the dining-room, meanwhile, and
not surprisingly de-edified her listeners as she plucked
from the damnum fatale of her new feminist
consciousness this remarkable theory, that, if women
would become more like the men who thought they were
better than women, then those men would become more
like the women who thought they couldn’t become men
than those women who, thinking they could, already had
— a remark that Miss Ballhatchet, the college sapphonic,
thought ironically aimed at her, whereupon she withdrew,
reached into her pocket, and furiously began squeezing a
handball, an action, misinterpreted, that took the attention
of Drs. Knipperdoling and Pindle, who nudged each other
knowingly, long having learned, both, from no less a
hallowed shrine than their mothers’ knees that the wages
of refusing “to make a decision for Christ” were clear,
i.e., a faint mustache, an abridged haircut, and the
penchant for wearing gym shorts with a zipper-fly.
“I wanna tell ya,” said Pindle.
“Breaks your heart,” agreed Knipperdoling, tossing
some hazelnuts into his mouth.
“This mortal coil,” said Pindle.
They exchanged glances.
“Life,” they said in unison—and shook their heads.
Mr. Schrecklichkeit, blowing his huge white nose,
heard the word. “That’s my field, life,” he muttered,
“which is only another word for mortality.”
“Maybe that’s why”—everybody turned to this voice
—”why everybody has an M on the palm of his hand?”
faintly offered Miss Swint, peeking over her glasses, but
the gentlemen to whom she was speaking all breezed past
her and went to the foodtable.
Religion, of course, was the favorite staple of
conversation at Quinsy College. Indeed, it has always
been a subject that could touch off Southerners faster
than’ anything else, creating a fellowship, however, that
had less to do with binding them to a disposition to truth
or Christian charity than with allowing them to turn with
grateful relief to the one totally subjective, squibcrack-
proof topic they could all pursue—every last self-
ordained half-wit who wanted to—without the attendant
personal humiliation of having to explain, clarify, or
reconcile what the strict tests of either an informed
intelligence or thinking heart, put into play, might serve to
disprove and so disparage.
Miss Sally Bull Sweetshrub told everyone that art
was religion. The Weerds, now upstairs in the attic, were
each jointly confessing the other to be his and her
religion. Crouching, Mr. Thimm was in the pantry being
threatened by an infuriated Baptist minister with a raised
fire-shovel for blasphemously having claimed that the
greatest book on religion ever written was the privately
printed (and, needless to say, dictated ) edition worked
out of his father’s deathbed confession, called Crows as
Foreboders. And by the rosy punchbowl, Prof.
Wratschewe, syntactitian and local authority on the
shall/will rules, visibly disturbed several in a circle of
blue-haired ladies gathered around him by posing to them
the question that also happened to be the subject of a
monograph he was only that afternoon swotting up:
“Where Is the Christian Homer?”
Include me out, thought Darconville, hearing the
question. Resigned that his own book would never be
completed, he kept silent. But that was all right, he felt,
for next to him who can finish is he who has hid that he
cannot. Still, he wondered how long it had been since
he’d last sat down and finished a page, the answer to
which speculation, if there was one, immediately
destructed in an explosion of sudden dismay at his elbow.
“O poo, I don’t believe it.”
“I thought everybody knew.”
“A fiction.”
“A fact,” snapped Miss Gibletts, her neutral
articulations rendered none the more fetching for the plain
brown shift she wore that sagged from her like a
punctured windsock.
“But, Lord,” asked Mrs. McAwaddle, snatching
nervously at her pearls, “how in the world could she have
done that?”
Miss Gibletts, closing her eyes, simply shrugged. She
knocked back a small tumbler of Southern Comfort, then
one more, and another— respectively her eighth, ninth,
and tenth that evening—rather annoyed that Mrs.
McAwaddle didn’t believe her. She set down the glass,
audibly. “It is said, you know, that the poet Ovid—
Publius Ovidius Naso —had the longest one in the world.
It cast a shadow. It could accommodate pigeons.”
“I simply can’t believe it.”
“Read your Roman history.”
“No, I mean I can’t believe”—Mrs. McAwaddle
swallowed— “that.”
Darconville believed it when he’d heard it, however
—and since he heard it everywhere he went, he walked to
the far windows, leaving the subject of this conversation,
along with the two ladies, behind. The topic was
disturbing: fortuneless and dripstick-nosed Miss Gupse,
the previous March having been asked to resign—the
verdict was “overtired”—had been found apparently by
the odor, stiff, on the business-end of a halter in the
backroom of a Nashville doss house with a note safety-
pinned to one of her anklesocks reading only “Because.”
The police later gave out the information that, tied round
her head on a string, had been found an item crocheted by
her own hand—a pointed nose bag.
Peering out expectantly, Darconville could not see
Isabel through the darkness of the window. He saw only
Miss Gupse, somewhere, now beyond anyone’s poor
power to add or detract, and bent over there, his hands on
the panes like blinders, he thought: you can never love
too early, you can only love too late.

* * * * *
 Friday 8:58 P.M.: Tableau: Girl, With Door Ajar.
Artist unknown. Round-eyed in fright, Isabel steps into
Darconville’s dark office and seems to feel the room
waiting and aeroferic with suspicion, that strange
disturbing noise which sits at the heart of utter silence:
white noise. Closing her eyes, she hears wounds in the
doleful sounds of the bell tolling out nine leaden bongs
from the old Smethwick clock and pauses in her cold
shoes: no candle gutters, no shutters bang, no suit of
armor creaks. Swallowing, she steps quietly out of her
footprints— and waits again. O interminable! She decides
to leave. The wireworm that has crept into her ear now
moves: “Why then was this forbid? Why but to awe, why
but to keep ye low and ignorant, His worshippers.” There
is some shame and remorse, less for finding the letter
removed from the desk than in pinching out the fragments
from the bottom of the wastebasket; thereafter, not so—
the moves of the operation are then all swift and precise:
excogitating, a vein like an S raised on her forehead,
Isabel oops piece to piece, piece to piece. She inhumes a
hot sigh. A letter comes up in lavender. A low moan rises
up through Isabel to echo in a shrill piercing cry of agony
matched only by the proclamation of the angel Hadraniel,
dropping from somewhere, his voice penetrating through
a million firmaments to plead, “Come back, come back!”
But the door of the English building is already slamming,
slams.

* * * * *

“I’ve ate rook pie.”

“Rook? Pie?”
 “The ruddy duck, yessir!” deblaterated Dr. Glibbery
with a smattering of mustard on his nose, his cheeks huge
walletfuls of pork. “The most scabrous and torn-downest
little of birds what am, let me tell you.” He aimed the
barrel of his fat finger into a wall-mirror. “I potted messes
of ‘em smack out of the air back in college just to keep
alive. With prices skyhootin’ like they was? In my day—
matriculatin’ and all?—christ, it was pronto dogs and
blinky srimp from one day to the next, take it or leave it.
We didn’t have rubber assholes in my day, jack. And
nobody, excusin’ God, can know to the number of them
rooks I ate to this day, nobody—and I mean,
nodamnbody!” Porkfaced Glibbery then began sucking
the pig grease from his fingers as vigorously as the pig
itself had ever sucked its parent. The whole mode of
piggery itself, in fact, applied to him—the very kind of
face, arguably, that had turned Islam against pork. “What,
these sophomore dufuses backin’ and forthin’ around here
going to tell me? Sowballs!” he cried, ripping away half
of another sandwich in one thyestean bite and speaking
through a smacking medley of loud champs and chews.
“Rooks, for chrissakes? They’d be havin’ the living doits
scared out of them, these people, they so much as looked
at one!” He mowsed the rest of the sandwich. “Sowballs!”
Everybody laughed.
“And sowballs again!” Dr. Glibbery repeated,
through a mouthful of food.
“Excellent,” chuckled Mr. Roget, pulling his
perspicacious nose. “Perfect. First-rate. Flawless.”
The dining-room looked magnificent. A long table,
set off in the center by a huge beef roast stabbed entrecôte
with a miniature of the Quinsy College flag, was spread
out with bowls of conch gumbo, cheese wheels, platters
of Virginia ham, potato salad, buns. The guests swarmed
around, wolfing sandwiches, gobbling meats, drinking.
“As paprika is to a Hungarian so am I to esoterica,”
lisped Floyce R. Fulwider. He plucked a twist of candied
Metzelsuppe, ate it, and, closing his eyes, delicately
wiggled his fingers over the heavenly taste. Miss
Dessicquint, standing behind him, mimicklingly pursed
her lips, went limp in the wrists, and stuck her bum out
like a poodle. Miss Shepe and Miss Ghote, having their
ginger-ales in lovely stemmed glasses, both agreed that
the highlight of the party had been the appearance of the
little Culpa boy who’d been brought down to sing that
adorable song; unfortunately, twisting his pajama string in
an initial moment of nervousness, he’d managed to pull it
out.
“It didn’t seem to faze Mrs. Culpa, did you notice,
that everybody could see—” Miss Ghote paused and
looked away.
“His bow-wow.” Miss Shepe had a brother.
They sat silent momentarily.
“It was—”
“Yes.”
“Flying expressly in the face of Galatians 5:2?” asked
Miss Ghote, archly. “O my.”
“Circumcision, Miss Ghote,” said Miss Shepe,
whispering, “was condoned in Genesis 17:10. Ask your
Rev. Cloogy.”
“Lapser!” cried Miss Ghote, with a muttlike snap.
Dr. Speetles, munching some rolled-sprat, cavalierly
presented a plate of leafalia—winter-rocket, cress, endive
—to his ample wife who, adding five slabs of roast beef,
roundly told everybody she wouldn’t be having dessert.
Lately arrived, Miss Pouce took a jam roly-poly and tea.
And Mrs. Fewstone, her unforgiving shoulders tense, was
facing the wall nipping a cayenned egg, but when her
husband offered to make her a drink she wheeled around,
her mouth hardening into pliers, and bent him like cheap
wire, hissing, “You—pimp!”
Miss Swint, sitting on the piano stool and eating
spooms-in-a-cup, said she didn’t think she heard
anything.
“Actually, I think you’ll find,” pipped in Prof.
Wratschewe, turning from the discussion he’d been
having with a now thankful, now disappearing
Darconville, “that the etymon of our word ‘pimp’ is taken
from the Greek verb pempeiu: to send.” He beamed and
bowed.
“I theash clatherx,” said Miss Gibletts, listing.
“Yes, Miss Gibletts, I know. I know you teach
classics,” said Prof. Wratschewe, looking behind him. “I
say, Darconville?”
But Darconville was in an upstairs bedroom, trying to
telephone, with some apprehension, the third floor of
Fitts. It rang and rang and rang. What could be wrong?
Then he began to fear that she might have felt unwanted
at the party, for it had been reported several times during
the past year by a scandalized handful of faculty vestals—
with Miss Sweetshrub i/c and a few other shades of Orcus
in the rear— that the two of them had been spotted
“marketing together” (ipsis-simus verbis) at the local
Piggly Wiggly with only one pushcart. Dean Dessicquint
once nearly bit her head off for signing out on an “all-
night,” learning only afterwards of the anthropology class
field-trip to Assateague—a coal-run to Newcastle—to
study these people’s dialect. And once at the movies with
Trinley Moss Isabel overheard Miss Tavistock, sitting
behind her, tell someone that a psychic had recently told
her that she would soon be marrying “a dark handsome
stranger” and then—mistakenly?—bumped Isabel with
her umbrella. Guileless as she was, Isabel, a mere
freshman, had managed to exercise just about every bitch
and barge-wife in the Quinsyburg locality. It is the
Cyclops’ thumb, thought Darconville, by which the
pigmy measures its own littleness. Perhaps she was right
in not coming to the party. He hung up the phone.
Spotting Miss Pouce at the foot of the stairs,
Darconville asked her if, earlier, she’d seen Isabel
Rawsthorne in the library. Miss Pouce only sighed and
said that, oh, no one had time for libraries anymore. He
pressed her no further, but his head was as filled with
worry as his heart was filled with love. How he missed
her! He sat down momentarily on the stairs. Grand old
Miss Carp was watching him.
“The apple of your eye, is it, dear?”
Darconville nodded, and then explained not only
what was bothering him but what might have been the
occasion of it, a matter she herself understood only too
well.
“So the pair of you are currently dating? Good,” said
Miss Carp, puffing her cigarette. “You have your reasons.
I’m plumb fed up with these old kumquats around here
who want to throw lime in your eyes for it. The policy on
faculty/student dating—rules that should have been
pruned long ago—was a lemon even when I taught here.
You just give ‘em the old raspberry, y’hear? Me?” She
blew out a cannonade of smoke. “I couldn’t give a fig for
them.” She tapped his nose three times. “Not. One. Fig.”
The dining-room table was in chaos. It looked as if
the Harpies had descended and flown, leaving a disorder
of nutshells, slubbered glasses, cherry stems, and half-
bitten macaroons. Gastronomes blouted. Hip-pophages
belched. Fruitarians burped. And all the low candles,
flickering, seemed to wink a final notice to all those
guests who doggedly remained and in whose eyes, now,
sensitivity and sobriety were so comfortably abed.
“They used to call me ‘Temptation Eyes’ in high-
school,” muttered bedraggled Mrs. Dodypol who, in the
obvious grip of Korsakoff’s Psychosis, rocked shakily
past Darconville and walked straightway into a linen
closet. She might have spent the rest of her life there had
not two hundred pounds plus of lubberly self-assurance—
with a stink-pot cigar and a suit splurched with the orts of
a cream bun—tiptoed by. It was President Greatracks
who, wheezing with laughter, hammered on the door.
There was no answer. He squatted, giggling behind his
hand, and began bouncing up and down and crooning in
the manner of a jump-rope song, “Your baby wants his
happy! Your baby wants his happy! Your baby wants his
happy!”
“This is hilarious,” said one of his lackeys.
“What fun.”
“I’m about to split my si-hi-hi-hides,” said another.
But the door tipped open—and Mrs. Dodypol pitched
out backwards, her hair sticking out like a wig created by
Klimt, and fell supple as a tobacco pouch into the
outspread arms of President Great-racks, who wabbled
backwards on his ill-smelling feet and angrily looked
about him and wondered out loud just who the hell in the
dang a-rea, goddamit, aimed to grow themselves enough
backbone to get a poor child a drink of water? The pipe-
smoking lickgolds, each cautious as a medieval guard
watching over the king’s nef, all hopped to. “I will,” said
one. “Leave it to me,” said another. “No, me,” said still
another.
“I think I know what to do,” said Miss Skait’s date,
appearing from nowhere. “I saw this here movie on
television last night where someone got shot, see, and the
victim’s brother, no, his father from, I don’t know,
someplace where they wear those fur hats, what,
Czechoslovania or something, the Orient anyway, said to
elevate his feet, I mean head, and—”
Checking his watch, Darconville took advantage of
the distraction and ran upstairs again to the telephone. He
dialed several numbers. The ghost in Isabel’s dormitory
wouldn’t answer. The infirmary nurse, doing her bedpans,
rudely told him to call back. And the sheriff was out.

* * * * *

Friday 10:20 P.M.: Isabel solus is sobbing on a bed

too real, covered with a quilt too narrow. She writhes, she
twists, she toils, perspiring and spiked from within. The
sleeping pill she took sustains but a periodic
unconsciousness, easing neither the dying out of life nor
the living out of pain. A black dream enacts itself in her
fever: a telephone, locked on its rack, is screaming and
screaming for help, as if being tortured alive. Isabel’s
shadow comes at her bellowing, “She won’t pick it up!”
Isabel cries in reply, “She can’t pick it up!” “She won’t
pick it up!” But Isabel cries, “She can’t pick it up with a
hand that wants to!” “She won’t pick it up! She won’t! She
won’t!” The screaming then stops, the telephone is dead.
Trembling, Isabel wakes and tries to call Annabel Lee
Jenks, who has gone. Her puffed face burns back at her
from the night window in a foolish swollen reflection.
Everyone has left her. Everyone hates her. Everyone has
gone to sea. In a sudden wingstroke of will, Isabel,
standing on her shadow, brutally shakes the telephone to
life, dials another number, and—as the Incidental leaps up
to throttle the Essential—whispers low to the party at the
other end, “Govert?”

* * * * *

A painting of Mt. Vernon took pride of place in the

living room. Floyce had done it for the Guipas earlier in
the year, and now as the various members of the faculty
sat around there, drinking, it came under discussion,
meeting with drunken abuse from the men and, from the
women, unfeminine swipes that in the eighteenth century,
the Virginian’s favorite, would at least have been
whispered behind fans, an uncharitable belowting that
ridiculed the beginnings of skill and the ends of art. Miss
Throwswitch called it untheatrical. Dr. Glibbery asked if a
nigger done it. And Mrs. DeCrow, snickering, pretended
to look at it sideways and yet still had to admit it honored
a great American, no, not Floyce, she added, putting an
objurgatory sibilance to his name—but George
Washington. “First in war, first in peace,” she quoted
pompously, “and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
“Still,” said Felice, her eyes smiling, “he married a
widow.”
Mrs. DeCrow, her eyes going ablaze with
prosecutional bitchery, turned cat-a-pan and marched out
of the room. “Terribly earnest,” murmured Felix Culpa,
unwrapping another bottle of bourbon. “Well, you know,”
said Felice to Darconville, “the poor old pelican hasn’t
been the same since the operation. The cosmetic work,
not the tubes she had twisted. Her plastic surgeon grafted
skin in the damnedest way. I won’t tell you where, but
every time she gets tired,” Felice winked, “her face wants
to sit down.” Felice wet her forefinger, nicked the air,
and, screaming with laughter, took Felix by his belt and
pulled him out into the garden.
“You want to know what I think? I think these people
are revolting and disgusting, that’s what I think,” said
Miss Malducoit to Miss Porchmouth, who was with her
enormous hands trying unsuccessfully to worm a cherry
out of a bud-vase she’d filled with gin. She looked down
censoriously at only half of stone-blind Qwert Yui Op
who, rendered hors de combat from milk—a digestive
indisposition characteristic of that race—was lying under
the sofa, with only his little twig-like legs sticking out.
But Miss Malducoit couldn’t believe what was going on
at the other side of the room.
For Miss Ballhatchet, her eyes wide as a lovesick
potto, had wangled a place on the couch with Miss
Thisbite and, chatting her up with a few choice
misandrous asides, asked the girl—who politely
overlooked the deltoid massage—if she didn’t agree with
her that one man made a market, two a mob? Meanwhile,
Floyce R. Fulwider, equally zealous, excused himself to a
group of old ladies wearing necklaces strung as if with the
teeth of peccaries and gynandromorphosed past them in
short, mincing steps, holding high a couple of overly
befruited drinks and singing, “Coming through! Coming
through!” He set one, gently, into the hands of the slim
blond boy who was Miss Thisbite’s brother and told him
he looked like the young Louis XVII. The old ladies were
not quite sure how they felt about it, and, closing into a
circle, proceeded to commit several sins against the
Eighth Commandment. Dr. and Mrs. Speetles,
philoprogenetists, then began passing around to
everybody there—saving, of course, the Weerds, who
were down in the cellar talking to each other—several
photographs of their hydrocéphalie baby playing with a
fire engine, a little meldrop of snot shining under its nose
in every one. Dr. Glibbery said he looked like a dufus and
handed them to Darconville who passed them to Miss
Tavistock who thanked him, stared at him steadfastly a
full minute, then asked, “Are you in love with me?” There
was an awkward silence, broken by a whistle—Felice
calling Darconville into the kitchen.
Darconville excused himself just as Dr.
Knipperdoling, loaded to the scuppers, was remarking
how good old Mr. Bischthumb of recent memory would
have enjoyed the party, bringing to mind, with significant
pauses, both the doily of his undoing and the irony of
death-by-laughter. Touching on the odds and ends of life,
he pointed out that life was odd and yet that, funnily
enough, it would have only one end, you know? The
profundity struck him, and he blew a long unmusical note
of grief into his handkerchief. Dr. Pindle turned to his
partner with an I-suppose-we-in-a-way-expected-it-but-
how-horrible-just-the-same face, drawing an arrow out of
his sententious quiver. “In one way,” he philosophized,
“life is pointless, but a needle isn’t.” He paused. “You
know?” His friend knew. Oh, his friend knew very well.
And Dr. Knipperdoling burst into tears.
“Forgive me,” Felice said to Darconville. “I saw you
over there being pried by ‘The Clawhammer’ and
couldn’t bear to see you trapped.” He smiled. “I wasn’t
really trapped, but—” Darconville stopped short. He
snapped his fingers at the sudden idea. Miss Trappe!
 Swiftly, Darconville got to the bedroom, shut the
door, and made his call. Of course! Isabel, making that
long-delayed visit, had forgotten all about the party. But
Miss Trappe had been asleep. He could see her at the
other end—it almost broke his heart—just wakened,
confused in the dark, wearing an elfin nightcap and
groping for an identifiable chair. Her voice sounded far
away, as if it were underwater, old and tired as hope.
“And she didn’t call you at all?”
“Not really,” came the distant voice.
The palliative expressed her charity. Darconville,
perspiring, shifted the receiver to his other ear.
“Wait. I think I know,” said Miss Trappe, trying. The
voice faded, returned, faded. “Perhaps she concentrated
on trying to remember instead of concentrating on
remembering—and forgot.”
Apologizing, Darconville thanked her and said
goodnight. Quickly, he dialed the infirmary again: the
bark of discord on the other end identified Nurse Bedpan
and both—the bark, the discord—disclaimed with the
punctuation of a double-negative that it knew anything
about anybody named Isabel Rawsthorne. She hung up.
He sat by the telephone in the dark, thinking that the lover
possessing a luxury with which merit had so little to do
must perhaps stand a constant penitent to such arbitrarily
dispensed grace. And anxious in the vitals, he felt an even
more profound love for Isabel coming upon him, swift as
a wish: the knowledge of good bought dear by fearing ill,
the value of gain bought dear by feeling loss. But what
ill? he wondered. How lost? He reviewed fifty
inevitabilities and, selecting none, was now the owner of
all.
The door moved.
 Darconville looked up at the shadow.
“Hello, Dr. Dodypol.”
“Hell-o, Darconville. Fair grow the lilies on the
riverbank?” He paused, then came noiselessly into the
room. “I’m just pecking on a cracker.” He peered closer.
“Are you—all right?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“I like a cracker now and again.”
Darconville nodded.
“My wife isn’t big for them, crackers. But she bakes
them.”
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Dodypol? O yes. She actually bakes them. Few
wives, taking it all together, do nowadays. No, I can’t
complain.”
A silence fell. Only the tight little crunches could be
heard in the darkness. Then Dr. Dodypol, alone like
Darconville, sat by him on the bed. He sighed and folded
his hands, prayer-like, as if in supplication to Coquage,
god of cuckolds.
“Drudgery? O boy, you wouldn’t believe it. Harder
by much than me making my verse. She first sets out her
tins, whisks, cutters, the lot. You know how women are.
Then she does her sifting, salts to taste, proofs the batter,
does Mrs. Dodypol. Well, you want them natural, see. To
get the benefit. It’s all in the books, about nature, I mean.
Isn’t it? Wholesome, they say. They do say that, don’t
they? Oh yes, scrupulous about doughs, my wife, but the
kneading gets her here, in the back, right”—he motioned
—”here. Well, you can imagine. Anyway, she cooks them
to paper-thin on preheated tiles, and, mmm, when offered
up warm—” He looked at Darconville, who noticed tears
rolling down his cheeks. “I’m sorry. I’m lying. I hate
crackers. I hate nature. And I hate my wife. I’d like to
take a pair of shears and snip off her cruel merciless tits.
Well, goodnight.” And he left.

* * * * *

Friday 11:43 P.M.: The light of the full moon,

burglarious, steals through an eagre of dart-shaped
clouds, shifting west. A blue car, dented, winds onto the
ring-road that curves around to the front of Fitts
dormitory. The mausoleum is not empty. There is a face at
a third-floor window, watching out in the autarchy of an
isolation no worse than dreams. A wistfulness awaits—
Isabel, throatcramped, apprehensively twicking her
thumbs over a thought: what does my sorrow matter if I
can’t be happy? Suddenly, she stirs up, pale, on her feet as
the car pulls up out front, its headlights flashing on-and-
off. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair! Out of the
building, into the car she runs, her odd cheerless
expression transforming to resignation; gunned, the car
backfires and races toward the Quinsyburg line, not to it,
for turning off the main road, it bumps over a dirt drive
into a glade, and stops. A fatidic stir of wind is blowing
across several obsolete fields. A dog howls, somewhere.
Matter-of-fact Govert van der Slang, chauffeur and
zielverkooper, turns to Isabel. There is, he says, no
alternative: he, Fawx’s Mt., and the time is each,
respectively, tired, far, and late. They sit there, coevals in
the night. ‘Tis not so much the gallant who woos as the
gallant’s way of wooing. He is walking now, flanked by a
silent girl on one side and her robin’s-egg-blue valise on
the other, both safe in his omnivicarious hands. The glow
above her is, she thinks, at least a personal glimmer in the
impersonal darkness and, reaching to palpate a stray cat
glowing eerily now red, now blue, she manages
successfully to avoid a second look above her at the
blinking neon-lights—mistakeproof in the night—of the
Bide-A-Wee Motel. An agreement is made: “witness our
hands.” The goddesses of Greece became the goddesses
of Rome.

* * * * *

Posthumia, mistress of revels, eventually brought

most of the guests outdoors, and under the magic of the
paper lanterns everyone’s inhibitions gave way to a
variety of feats and games and pranks: chairing the
member, guessing-which-hand, and pulling faces in skits
and foolish charades that looked as if they were trying to
act out scenes taken from a series of Thraco-Pelasgian
wall-paintings. Behavior became ridiculous. They cut
capers, yelped at the moon, and chased each other around
the hedges, shrimp-whistling and bum-goosing anything
that moved.
Dr. Speetles, one over the eight, gave a vigorous if
implicit endorsement for the necessity of laxatives by
delivering—upsidedown on a picnic table—his own
rendition of “The Lass That Loved a Sailor.” Blissful Mr.
Thimm danced blissom Miss Swint squealing over a ha-
ha. Miss Porchmouth, her eyes red, white, and
pinwheeling, screamed from a tree that a beaver she
couldn’t see was chasing her. Miss Pouce who’d got into
the pokeberry wine was meanwhile wandering round the
house in a circle, reciting the rules of the Dewey Decimal
System —and every three or four minutes, as she passed,
her exultant monologue would swell out and decrease
again. An empty shandy glass had rolled just out of reach
of Dr. Excipuliform who lay unconscious under the porch
in a strange facioscapulohumeral cramp. Someone walked
by with a wastebasket over his head. And then came a
shriek to wake the very dead—Miss Gibletts, looking like
the devil before daylight, tearing down the backstairs in
her underpinnings and screeching at the top of her lungs,
“Flammeum video venire! Ite, concinite in modum ‘Io
Hymen Hymenaee, io Hymen Hymen-aeeeeeeeee!’“
“A u.f.o.!”
“It’s only batwoman.”
“She looks like Pharaoh’s mother’s mummy,” said
Felice.
Darconville only watched. At a window, he
impassively sipped a drink, the velvet bite of vodka a
small anodyne to lessen the pain of a truth foremost in his
mind, that fortune alone is victorious. To know something
was wrong was to argue, perhaps, that he didn’t know
something more important—just what, of course, he
couldn’t say; but speculate he could, and he began to
understand that his love for Isabel, so new in the
declaration, was bound to walk upon the tiniest hurts: the
cards of a new deck, so judges the cartomant, have been
insufficiently shuffled if two people immediately hold the
Royal Flush. Cynical, he thought. Un altro, un altro,
gran’ Dio, ma più forte? Difficult, he thought, difficult.
Perversely, he felt rather glad he’d thrown up his
writing. Not so much vanquished, he began to feel—this
night more than ever—a gathering despair over the very
nature of communication itself, a desolation growing out
of hearing so much so remarkably unwritedown-able: the
gossip, the laborious stories, the twice-told tales, and the
scrappet-like micromonologues, forbidding conversation,
which assumed that to be frank was to be rude. Here
sighed a jar, there a goose-pye talked. At every word a
reputation died. And writing? The true writer, thought
Darconville, must not only be a man whose Christ shows
no discontinuity between Creator and Redeemer—a
perfection, he knew, he failed—but a man with faith in
that perfection. One couldn’t write in a chimney with
charcoal. But for Isabel, he thought, this would be my
personal farewell party. Suddenly, the dragoman,
Abactha, one of the genii of confusion, shook him and
cat-whispered into his ear, “But she isn’t here! She isn’t
here!”
The Culpas’ backyard now looked like the
Shevardino Redoubt. Here and there, bodies lay sprawled
around the grounds like dead cuddies. Dr. Glibbery, his
periodic guffaws echoing out of the darkness, was
creeping around the backwoods trying to siphon-bottle
sleeping birds. Prof. Wratschewe, who’d earlier in the
evening frankly told Miss Sweetshrub to go marry her
beagle, was now engaged in a game of belly-blind with
Mrs. McAwaddle, who dearly hoped it wouldn’t offend
her husband, despite the fact that he’d been eight long
years in pectore Abraam. And Miss Gibletts was now
handspringing naked and discalced through the shrubbery,
which Miss Ghote said—though Miss Shepe disagreed—
was the Unpardonable Sin and for that disagreement hit
her with a pie, splat! the force of which knocked Miss
Shepe dumfounded and fenderless right over the picnic
bench where she sat in a pile and began to cry. To the
loud music of the phonograph several couples—bartered
brides, groping grooms—shifted back and forth in the
upright position of neo-copulative thrall. Back in the
dining-room, Mrs. DeCrow, ravenously cro-magnoning a
last platter of beef, saw no one about, shoved a ham into
her handbag, and disappeared. The Weerds, ready to go
home, together decided they’d collaborate on a poem
about the party and call it “Party.” And President
Greatracks, puffing his mugwumpist cheeks, fought
exertion and tried as best he could to get Mrs. Dodypol
from under the table where she was so often found to the
top of it where she was so often left. He bent over, his
buttocks sticking out like two curious faces—or a single
hideous one—and grabbed her by her skulled toes and
pulled. It was impossible. She was stiff as a knout.
“A pity,” said Darconville. He couldn’t get Dr.
Dodypol’s words out of his mind. Hell hath no fury like a
husband horned. Standing beside him at the window,
Felice quietly stirred her drink with a finger. “Does she
always get carried away with herself?”
“Only,” said Felice, “when there’s no one else to do it
for her.”
Darconville wondered. He looked out across the
garden past the lanterns and saw Dr. Dodypol, to hide,
presumably, his bereaved wits, pacing up and down a path
ignoring the flowers and struggling no doubt to get out of
his head a horned syllogism: the syllogismus cornutus. He
was waiting for his wife, of course. He would wait until
the crack of doom. Blind endurance, thought Darconville,
was a kind of faith, and in the bewildered souls of those
cuckolds who, like watermen, row one way and yet look
another, was a strange bravery. Dodypol had it—and yet
against what odds? Darconville knew Dodypol’s black
view of nature both directly and in a little poem he’d once
read of his:

Your eyes please keep

 Above the puppet man—and weep,
For when he nods
The operator’s wrist is God’s.

How many such caitiff-ridden husbands and traduced

wives were there, walking around aimlessly, each
carrying his or her metaphorical sandwich-board reading
“wittol”—creatures who wrapped their cracked and heavy
hearts in the disguise of jests and tiny poems? It was all
odd, as if he, Darconville, were reflecting on himself who
was so much luckier than they. Was it perhaps because
Love itself cuckolds the man who, left alone, can’t
express it?
As often happened, Felice Culpa knew more or less
what he was thinking. “Isabel is tired,” she said,
attempting to console him. The beautiful name, uttered,
filled his heart. Why haven’t you come, my chrysopoetic
girl? Why haven’t you called?
“What hurts, teaches.” She paused. “Do you believe
that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You will, my darling, you will.”
Darconville couldn’t smile. She kissed his cheek and
repeated, “Isabel is tired.”
Hearing that, Darconville wondered: and does that
bode well? And does that bode ill? The present tense, he
thought, overflows categories of past, present, and future
and drifts into the unreal, timeless realm of ideation. The
present tense argues, lexically, the habitual mode, reflects
that which is essentially unlimited and a-substantial.
Isabel is tired, Isabel is forever tired, Isabel is tired four
hundred years ago, per omnia saecula saeculorum, amen.
There was no time, for there was no creation, no
movement, only the sepulchral mode. It did not designate
a temporal coordinate as the “past” or “future” did and
remained as vague and unassailable as a killer virus, a
stasis, a settled vision unto itself. Vision? There was no
vision, for in the present tense there could be no
development. It thwarted change, revision, growth,
alteration, rehabilitation, and hope. What, marching into
its depths, could be made in the way of progress? And
what, he wondered, might there be to change in her that
he might be unable to change, ever? But time and change,
he reasoned, were existential proofs of each other, weren’t
they? It was precisely, thought Darconville, what Dr.
Dodypol banked on over there, walking with eyes
askance through the midden of that dark garden of his
life, asprout with caveats: poison poppies, dwarfed tulips,
deathful lilies. Dr. Dodypol’s faith was as rare as the
horns on a rabbit—but faith it was. And Darconville knew
he must learn from that.
Darconville chastised himself, for, cross-examining
his fears about Isabel, he had willfully assumed the worst.
The opposite of faith, he realized, was not believing in
nothing but rather believing in anything. And so home
through the night he walked, resolved any error
whatsoever to contain lest by more truth he find in
himself more pain.

XXXVII

Expostulation and Reply

 None but himself can be his parallel.
—LEWIS THEOBALD, The Double Falsehood

THE NOISE was unmistakable: thissst—something

had been slipped under his door, and, not asleep,
Darconville quickly rolled up and forward, bouncing
Spellvexit in a high bumbershot from the top of his chest
into a hollow of the blanket where he lay low and
pouched for safety. A little vimbat of a face slowly
appeared, with whiskers twitching. “ ‘Swowns!”
squeaked the cat, who’d been brought up better than that.
Ignoring him, Darconville grabbed his bathrobe, stumbled
to the door—the noise from the party still in his head—
and called Isabel’s name several times. There was an
envelope on the floor. Perhaps this explained—?
But it was a poem, written by Dr. Dodypol.

HAVES AND HOLES

Like a novel, like its sequel,

Marriage is that equal:
Halves, but one half previous;
The other, somewhat devious,
A counterpart, say, in the following way—
As a workweek equals a Friday’s pay.
Two stones grind in an ancient quern,
One stays static, one will turn.
Nothing in nature is equal quite;
Jaws don’t match in a single bite.
Your ear on the right, your ear on the left—
Some will say “reft,” some will say “cleft”:
The words to that queer inner-porch both apply.
The cave from the darkness who can descry?
The terms are the same, but not so the ears,
With shapes as different as smiles from tears.
A push, you say, is only a pull?
A glass half empty is a glass half full?
The riddle’s the riddle of number two;
The one call me, the other you.
But a couple, alas, is not a pair.
Love’s disappointment’s precisely there!
If a simple kiss is what one wants
Turning the cheek is the other’s response.
The vision you’d share can never be,
Not to another who cannot see.
For the singular act of one’s creation
Absolves the other of obligation.
Love-letters sent, countless and grand,
Parch the pen in the other’s hand.
The fair, they say, requires foul;
An owl is cognate to its howl.
And if with love you see your fate,
Why, be prepared to suffer hate!
In the duchess you woo at the midnight hour
Claws a black-faced bitch mad to devour.
You seek to select and select what you see,
But is what appears what then must be?
The nature of choice itself is sin.
Where one must lose and one must win!
One eye’s inaccurate. Two we need
To watch, to learn, to know, to read.
One image is gotten of those two:
But is it real? And is it true?
Distinctions! Differences! All life long!
 You can’t do right if you can’t do wrong.
The bride, the groom on a nuptial bed?
Spills one white, spills one red.
Yet each fulfills defect in each,
The epistemology of stone and peach.
(But when it comes to the hungry lip,
Are equally praised, the flesh, the pip?)
A paradox, say, that can never be:
The strange conundrum of lock and key.
Man’s “too much” he boasts to show;
Woman’s “too little” down below
Incorporates as best it can
The larger half of her messmate, Man.
A larger half? Yes, there’s the catch!
It’s the deathless quintessential,
The flint, the strike, the spark sequential
That fires every human match.
—D. I. DODYPOL

Darconville put it on the desk—a mouse-colored

paper with the thirty or so jumping jingles pecked out so
hard that the typed letters, snap-riveted and bitten full into
the page, made the verso side read like a lunatic cantrip in
braille. He read it several times. What could he reply?
Wasn’t keeping faith a cause, not an effect? And the irony
of love, who knew, perhaps it gave us the relative
dimension we needed to experience it without being fully
consumed by either the absolute or the agony of it, no?
Axioms, axioms. Darconville picked up his pen and
spent most of the day writing to his friend an essay that
had been growing within him for some time. It had a
simple title.
 XXXVIII

Love

—I pursued
And still pursue, the origin and course
Of love, but until now I never knew
That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.
—WALLACE STEVENS, Le Monocle de Mon
Oncle

“LOVE,” wrote Darconville, “is as rare as the

emotion of hate. I pray your divided attention: they are
the extreme antipodes of each other in temperament but
never in endowment, and so bear a strange
complementarity. Every time someone executes the action
of one of them, the other, specifically, becomes the victim
of not being executed. Each is of each a mirror-image, yet
explicitly looking at each we implicitly look at both, as
when looking in water face then answers to face. To be in
the grip of one is to relish precisely not being in the grip
of the other. A yes is valued only because it could have
been a no, and vice-versa, for the philosophical upshot of
freedom, shaped by choice, is that we would not be able
to love in act if we were not also able to hate in potency.
The lowest number is two which, lying down together in
the sum it incorporates, pips the child, Relativity. The
mirror is, indeed, the parable of love, but you will
remember this also: what one sees in the mirror is not in
the mirror at all. The anagram of ‘Determination:
thorough evil!’ is ‘I mean to rend it through love!’—the
perfection of equation being the missing i that must
necessarily be lost for salvation in another.
“Love is the thirst which vanishes as you drink. It is,
however, always in a state of becoming, moving from one
definiteness to another, a synthesis of both identity and
otherness. Approaches solely rationalistic or empirical
fail in the face of it. We fall through such formulae
weightless, for love often declines as fast as reason
grows: it is not a what but a that. To ask questions of love
is to commit the sin of avarice, for it yields nothing of
sense to those intellectual quackshites, daubers of logic,
and gowned vultures and spies who, with rule, glass, and
compass, surround it in some kind of official jingbang to
try to finger out answers and prod it into comprehension.
The emotion is not subject to the imperatives of
Cartesianism nor is it kind to men of literal minds, but, on
the other hand, see it only as figurative and you die
starved on theories, impaled on promises. The colors of
love are hues. And yet we will never cease to hear noises
made, as they were of old, when in the white dust of the
Agora, the philonoetic Greeks sat with legs crossed, feet
decussated, and raised endless questions on “the
unbridled delirium”: does love love for love? Does love
love to love? Does love lack what it loves? Does love like
what it loves? Love loves to love love, it occurred to
them, as hate hates to love love. ‘Therefore,’ exclaims
Prometheus, ‘hate loves to hate love!’ ‘Hate loves?’ gasps
Epimetheus. ‘Why, ‘tis impossible, sir!’ ‘Say you so?’
replies Prometheus. ‘Then hate, hating, cannot desire
itself?’ And so they grapple, and so they will.
 “Knowledge is often used, mistakenly, in the sense of
wisdom. Of such ideas let us soon hope to be rid, for no
brainsick questions, mythical intricacies, or the froth of
human wit can probe love—you cannot explain it. You
point to it with a question exactly when it hasn’t an
answer for you. It mocks the academic efforts of men.
Medicine talks mere folly. Theology must hold its peace.
And Logic, that parody of human reasoning, must
positively die of embarrassment in the face of it, for one
cannot pound arithmetic like a drench of yew. Love is not
simply what it is, for in this matter, strictly speaking, what
it is implies also what it ought to be, and as it exists
always in a state of becoming, when it exists at all, it is
never fully in a state of being. You define it only by
preventing its development and preventing its
development you hazard its loss. You circumscribe it only
by limiting it. Persecute the syllable, logical positivists!
Shift it about your mechanic paws, polyhistors and
polymaths! Does it lisp? Did it cry out? Pinch it, cuff it,
tweak it, employ the bastinado, and squeeze it for moots
and lessons! But come, come, I will see the barometer
wherein, that it might be read, will squat a typhoon. lago
is more rational than Othello. And thereby hangs a tale.
“True love is the dolce nemico of daily life, for love
deals not with what is happening but with what ought to
happen. The L of love is not the L of logic. For how many
centuries has the air of the earth been refrigerated by the
tears and heated by the sighs of ruined suitors who failed
to realize this? You cannot buy it, make it, fake it, steal it,
or ever expect it to appear, for, like can over may, it is
only a question of possibility, not permission. It is a grace
all hear of, none deserve, few understand; it owes little to
merit, less to honor, and, queerly, more often than not
finds a home in those sad, shipwrecked, and unready
hearts not proud for the expectation. You can only hope
for it, which is to say you must shed tears and keep boxes
of alexipharmics in your pocket to support you in your
loss, for the very imagination that informs hope inflicts
the horror, always, of alternative.
“A lover hopelessly in love is not only a lover
impatiently in love but a lover impatiently hoping. There
is no declaration of love which is completely true, true in
the sense of complete; it is always a declaration of hope,
with equation the paradigm—a phenomenon of projection
that seeks to become a phenomenon of equation, the only
settlement of which rests in the meaningless but mystical
tautology: A=A. The proposition of identity translates ‘I
am’ and ‘I am’ to ‘we are.’ The finding is in the seeking.
But you are never fulfilled, satisfied only in that other
satisfactions await and with an equable temperament
content only by dint of approaching in mystery but not
reaching in fact an equation that never is solved. A real
gambler always returns the money he’s won.
“Love, like flotsam, floats. It is proposal, not
proposition. There is no doubt but that it is through the
ineffability of its glory that men first feel the awakening
of their own real nature, becoming convinced, with
overpowering clarity, that they have a soul. Vision makes
room for vision. Everything is transcendent in love. The
little Vatican of truths within us—even those stupid,
inelegant fibs which, when told, at least give us an idea of
what we’re trying to become—whisper to us by hints of
just how they may be confirmed, and confirmed, held,
and held, maintained. Lovers move asymptotically toward
the paradise the relative implies is to come in the
absolute. Man loves in order to live in another a life
missing in himself, for perhaps love does love what it
lacks: we want to be what we love, even if what we love
wants us to be, when we love, what we are. A couplet we
may recall from the celebrated Welsh erotikon, Duges
Ddu, goes:

Our life? Our love. Or else indict us

With merciless quotes from Heraclitus.

“In one way, the lover is the purest autobiographer,

for he must attend to his personality for another beyond
his own, all to shake out, shore up, and shape in an art
that’s ideal what he can in truth of his life that’s real.
Love, in any case, means union and what is not union is
not love. You will either build a bridge or build a wall. In
building a wall you remain the despicable crunchfist you
always were, interested in neither projection nor equation
but only in acquisition. You are priap. You will pray to St.
Unicycle and use your nose for erotical labors and your
unloving hands shall be avaricious as horns. You shall be
called hard names: we shall call you Manchineel and
perceive you more and otherwise than you think. In
building a bridge, then what? Neither then, alas, can you
be certain any will pass over. But you shall be called
Chevalier, for you are brave.
“It is an emotion, love, the moral implications of
which quicken out of time, passing the clouds, to touch
the instant of Creation. Love murders the actual. (Reverse
the sentence, it’s still true, but terrifying.) You must be
what you are, always, however, in the hope that what you
can be is exactly what you pursue in love; and ideally, of
course, you shouldn’t be anything but what you should
be, a difficulty which the thought itself raises. Loved,
nevertheless, you find yourself favored with the greatest
of all possibilities for transfiguration, assisted,
paradoxically, by what you would attain, but failing that,
a kind of devastation few can know. Cave amantem! It
carries the full weight of your soul with it. Our ideals are
our perils. The heart of the loved one is an autoclave in
which you have placed your own. Ravens bleed from
their eyes during coition.
“Love! Say the word: how the velarized tongue
drops, astonished, to the sigh of a moanworthy O that
comes from low in the throat and trembles into the frail
half-bite that closes on it like a kiss! The word is not
spoken, it is intoned, proselytizing both the one who
breathes it and the one upon whom it is breathed. What
indeed has this to do with mortals? Whose spoor is this
tracked so inexorably and so repeatedly toward it—can it
be mere man’s? What supernatural flame leaps from the
darkness of man’s soul that it can not only conceive, not
only imagine, but somehow attain to such beauty? The
philosopher increases in wisdom as he grows old and rots.
Oysters are generated in scummy foam, medlars savored
only if eaten when decayed, and ambergris is taken from
the whale’s rectum. Ovid explains that the sweetest
Roman cosmetics came from that part of the wool where
sheep sweated most. The wolf-spider impairs her womb
to furnish the material for its beautiful silk. The worst soil
yields the best air. In the slopped and muddied palette of
Botticelli patiently sat The Birth of Venus. Isn’t there a
metaphysics in the making here?
“Woman’s beauty is the love of a man: they are not
two things but one and the same thing, for love is the very
shadow of the monument it creates. ‘I am to each,’ says
Love, ‘the face of his desire.’ Now love creates beauty
because love needs beauty—the symbol of this act of
worship—and the greater the projected image of one’s
ideal the greater the glory that settles on the loved one.
Love has to do with the comprehension of paragons; it
tempts one forward, and that the object of love, in reality,
serves only as the point of departure for incomparably
greater vision, lambent, beyond our very nature, should
come as no surprise, for the nature of the ideal is that it
inspires what it isn’t. Where it isn’t, it suggests to those
disposed to it, it can be. The actual desire for love,
resident in so many hearts, is in fact only a tiny parody of
the emotion it seeks and proves this as it tries to bridge
the gap between what we have and what we want, what
we are and what we want to become. The beauty that love
creates is precisely the ideal it would realize. You receive
—not the paradox it seems—what you have given, the
colophon of which, perhaps, is best expressed in the
matter of sexual congress. The beauty that love creates,
the ideal you would realize: this can be the foundation of
real union only when two people, irrevocably, find and
maintain it in the face of all odds, which is principally
why so few people successfully fall in love and live in it.
“A love affair, easily, can be doomed the moment it
begins, due to a whole series of misconceptions, for of
course one believes or wants to believe that the other
person is the dream-complement of oneself; but, no, the
other person mightn’t be—the other person, after all, is
only himself or herself. Only the aspiration in each to be
the dream-complement of the other, effected always by
sacrifice (the only way to prove one’s love), can establish
the basis upon which true love can be structured. The
statistical probability of an equal, exactly mutual love
existing is arguably next to impossible, and yet if both the
conception of and the will to the ideal, as exerted by each
with respect to the other, is jointly shared, then love, like
death, makes all distinctions void. Real love, to be
successful, must move each to each equally, an
amphiclexis of souls wherein the giving by one generates,
not taking, but a natural impulse by the other to give in
return. It has been argued, nevertheless, that the
individuals involved may be—and possibly will be, and
possibly must be—unequal. All joy worth the name, some
say, is in equal love between unequal persons, that the
entire disclosure of love, even its necessity, becomes
irrelevant when, for instance, equals meet. Real
friendship, thought Bacon, is mostly between superior
and inferior, where degrees are dissolved, willingly, in the
sudden miracle of the emotion. But then what is
predictable of this disease that, attacking the heart, the
soul, the mind, and the spirit all at once, has no remedy
but to love the more? It wants no cad or elf but is a
perfect witchcraft of itself, promising nothing less than a
new life, giving you the chance to lead another’s and to
multiply hers by your own.
“We have considered the projection of beauty and the
pursuit of the ideal as indivisible. Beauty in se is kinetic;
the idea of beauty is static, however, and to understand
the distinctions and differences here is paramount. The
only true paradise for us is the paradise we could lose—
and the nature of all significant attachment is that, when
that bond is broken, we are destroyed to that degree. The
state of love, curiously, generates both the fear of such
loss and destruction and yet simultaneously creates the
only hope to prevent it. The song of love is always a cry
for immortality: the permanence we’d have of love is
only the perfection we would attain in the completion and
utter fulfillment of ourselves and a projection of the idea
of beauty. The idea of beauty is permanent, while every
beautiful thing, every part of nature, such as it is, is
perishable. Man has an upright face and advances his
countenance toward the stars. Love looks seaward,
outward, upward through the eyes of the kind of people in
whom wonder never flickers down to a doubt, teaching
the soul to dwell not where it lives but where it loves.
“We create what we love as we love what we want to
become, our dreams, queerly, acting our temptations, for
the higher men can raise their ideals the greater is the
reflected glory which they feel at their devotions. Indeed,
love, it might be said, is not directed toward beauty but
toward the procreation of beauty, creating a new woman
for man instead of a real woman and for woman a new,
not a real, man. It does not solve, it contemplates; it does
not examine itself, it awakens. We are reborn, as it were,
in the mind of another, a perishable transubstantiated—hi
substance, not accidents—into an imperishable. This fully
unattainable goal of all longing, love, cannot be totally
realized in experience, in fact, and much of it must
forever remain an idea, immaculate, which is why it is
almost always associated with the awakening of the desire
for purification and a disposition to inexpressible
kindness. The idea forever beckons, tempts, ecstasizes,
and the star-gazer’s toe is often stubbed. Whom the gods
wish to render harmless they first afflict with love. A
lover is utterly and totally defenseless.
“The strongest pulsation of the will towards the
supreme good, directing the true being of man to a state
between body and spirit, between the bald senses and the
moral nature, between God and the beasts, is the direct
result of loving. One can never directly experience the
emotion without changing, and thus it comes about that
only when they love do many men and women realize the
existence of their own personality and of the personality
of another, that ‘I’ and ‘thou’ become for them more than
merely grammatical expressions. The greater a man is, the
more he yearns for full identity, extending himself toward
the reaches of the immortal where the experience of love,
like the sounds of a city heard on the height of a
skyscraper, is compressed into a single note. A man truly
has just as much arrogance as he lacks self-realization,
and true love always ends all arrogance altogether, for the
sacrifices it implicitly requires—it requires nothing else
—allow one to ‘selve’ for another and yet in doing so
serve oneself. Love is centrifugal, hate centripetal.
Demons must hilarify as they watch while we are drawn
to someone unable, or unwilling, to love us. It is easy to
be cruel. One need only not love.
“Caritas, agape, eros, amicitia: love inspires us in the
many ways it’s defined. And yet the whole apparat of
formal understanding is foreign to it—in fact, a human
being perhaps cannot love another whom he fully
understands or effectively comprehends because the very
nature of the ideal discommends the empirical or
rationalistic approach to wisdom through analysis, always
a felony in matters of love. (To comprehend something
fully is to be beyond or above it, no?) On the other hand,
one can project and pursue the idea of beauty relentlessly,
intuiting the possibility of it, this constantly renewed
endeavor to embody the highest form of value, as a
prisoner in the darkness of solitary confinement might
determine the season outside by seining through the
vegetables in his daily soup. And yet while union depends
on duality, the lover who does not seek his own soul in
his loved one will never find his own soul in himself, for
the lover is a person whose quaesitum desperately exists
in, and indeed is—is—another. A transition beckons.
“Love is not contagious, only the idea of it is. And
yet, again, is it not fabled that for everyone there is
someone, that, as in the epistolary novel—its traditional
subject, of course, always being love—we need but post a
letter to receive one, whereupon, then, is issued a sweet
and confident outlay of intimacy that documents the ratio
of priority and subsequence and so leads to the perfect
ending we bank on? Who can’t want to believe it?
Everybody aspires to fall in love. We look to see the
candidates and find multitudes, multitudes. But the
chosen? A minority. So overpowering is the emotion,
however, so mighty the reputation, that it sends back,
echoing down its hypostyle, sufficient echoes of its living
renown only for the shouting—and yet to what good if no
one is there to make it real?
“The mere postulate of love creates in its
mythopoetic wake a throng of pursuivants whose desire
for it, if going no further, only parodies what lies
tragically beyond its grasp. And yet how the world,
perversely to encourage our hopes that way, seeks to
oblige us with its suddenly and slubbering-over-with-
whitewash conceits—the magic of mood and music—that
we all might upon an instant wake to find not illusion but
rather our heart’s desire in the form of Venus
Mandragoritis holding out a love-apple. Look! There
assembles a host of would-be lovers and laplings who,
seeing Cupid in a jar-owl and sweetness in a colicinth,
would have it gospel that one man’s yawn makes another
yawn, one man’s pissing makes another piss! They
fashion fancies and pull impressible faces and, smugging
themselves up in pomade and passion-flowers, step out
into the moonlight poets write of to project their
disposition to desire upon another, as rich in the
confusion of intent as that person who judges a party a
success because he himself has been charming. There
may be music with imposing lyrics, wine, the tuition of
promises. But then where is love? Make it. But is it love?
Fake it. But is not this a lip and that a lip? And can she
not shape her elbow to my arm? O euros Chymicorum! O
cuantum in pulvere inane! Faults are thick where love is
thin. The sting of the reproach is the truth of it.
“The passion of love is like a parable, by which men,
often, still mean something else. It is a step away from
reality, conceived, among other things, to improbabilize
low aims and soar into a participation with whatever
divinity presents itself. The lover, however, is a person
never unaware of the frightful dualism of nature and
spirit; desire, characteristically, partakes of the former,
love of the latter—and with that recognition the morality
play of Mutability and Constancy performs a dress
rehearsal in your head. Consider love and desire: are they
often not perfectly antagonistic? Man projects his soul
onto woman and she onto him with this hope, always, that
the beauty of bodily image embodies morality, only one
of the variations of expectation having to do with love.
“But the kinesis of beauty (as opposed to the stasis of
the idea of beauty)—res aptus studendo—is, indeed, often
nothing but a blocking agent to the continuity of love,
annulling it by either change or alteration. It is this that so
often surprises and saddens a lover when it is revealed
that beauty does not necessarily imply morality in the
object of love; one, in fact, often feels that the nature of
the offense is actually increased by the conjunction of
beauty and depravity, unaware, perhaps, that up to that
time the woman in question only seemed beautiful to him
because he still loved her. All aesthetics are created by
ethics; and beauty, more often than not, is a bodily image
in which morality is archetypally felt to be represented.
The less transcendental the beauty is, the less permanent
we are usually convinced it will be, in direct proportion,
for our faith resides here, that we love what we esteem, a
usufruct of heaven beckoning us to the bettermost, and so
to preserve in spirit what we’ve captured in nature it often
falls out that love and desire are sometimes two unalike,
mutually exclusive conditions. If love, for instance, is
only true, as has been written, in proportion as it is pure,
what then is the ideal?
“Thumb your histories. Xenocrates, passing nights
with Lais of Corinth, never touched her. Socrates, who
doted on Alcibiades, sent him away precisely at a moment
when the opportunity to lie with him presented itself. And
Petrarch, sempiternally burning for his Laura, did not take
her to himself when she was offered to him and, even
losing her, somehow possessed her more. If it be the case
that there is no adoration utterly free from desire there is
no reason why the two should be identified. What, in fact,
are realities worth compared to the mirages we would
know? Shall the true lover be satisfied to comprehend his
intoxication only by sensation? The very rapture of one’s
love, surely, no longer limits him only to earth. ‘Reality,’
it’s been written, ‘is the only word in the language that
has no meaning without quotation marks.’
“Have you then understood me to say to love only in
the mind? I summon a thousand angels to disprove such a
thing, charging you to love with your hands, your heart,
your paper and poems, whistles and whispers, the light of
your soul, its pathetical prayers, and the candle that sits in
your head pointing its flames toward the goblin perched
over your head called night. O, illustrious Trismegist, you
who love, you yourself are the very miracle you seek to
keep! You have been given the gift of love!
“Go and love! The exhortation must be shouted in
twos, else for you shall the world be dark as Lycophron.
Lovers, you move toward the completion thankfully never
complete. You are the denial of denials. You would do all
and dare outdo what, done, deems yet more to do. You
would practice months of refusals and scoff in the teeth of
exhaustion but to comfort her! You would, like
Alexander, burn to the ground the entire city of Persepolis
if it stood in the way of your love! You would pull down
an entire sky only to present her with a supply of
calliblepharies for her eyes! You would tremble in the
night at the sound of far-off bells, fearing the merest
implication of new events and change, for you have been
given the gift of love. You would heal the pottage of
Gilgal, suck up the Nile at a single haust yet still cry out
for thirst, and watch through tempests of provocation to
see it snow eryngoes and shower down the sun! You
would willingly die tomorrow only that she might kill you
with her own hands! You would be drugged with Spanish
licorice and let your bones be used for hell-dice only to
look into her eyes and see yourself reflected there! For
you have been given the gift of love!
“Proud would you be her phaeton, her gig, her shoe-
latchet snapped shut to walk her safely in the fittest steps
toward paradise, to the snows of Monte Rosa, to the
heights of Horeb where each dream dreamt is only yet
another dream dreamt among dreams. You have been
given the gift of love. You believe it only when you
realize it, and yet at that very stroke you cannot but have
removed its momentous secret far beyond the hollow
formulae, abstract terms, and words such as these that
since the beginning of time have stammered after it,
pitifully, in the desolation of vain human syllables.”

XXXIX

The Cardinal’s Crotchet

The lioness had torn some flesh away,

Which all this while had bled.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, As You Like It

DARCONVILLE that afternoon took the essay to Dr.

DodypoPs house and turned by Fitts on his way back:
Isabel, apparently, had gone to Charlottesville for the
weekend. And so he returned to his rooms and, with
nothing else to do, began sorting through his trunk. He
found something at the bottom he’d long forgotten he’d
put there: an old book.
It was a rectangular folio—soiled, plates missing,
bisected at the spine—whose tight biscuity signatures and
stiff pages, each a pointillisme of brown spotting, could
hardly be turned, and the lower corner of each recto was
polished to yellow horn from its many long-ago
encounters with curious and inquisitive thumbs. A page
was turned to a symphony of crepitations. It was a relic of
the sixteenth century, something of a gradus then, but
handed down through the centuries it bore, increasingly,
the characteristic of a strange little joke within the family.
What value, then, if any, might be assigned it? The
question, somehow, always posed itself to Darconville on
those few occasions when he’d ever bothered to look at it.
What value? Historical, at least, he thought.
He puffed dust from the cover and smoothed his hand
down the buckled vellum. He marveled at it. The book
had been indited in the Year of Our Lord 1574 by that
common ancestor of the illustrious “writing
d’Arconvilles,”[2] the learned grammaticus and saintly
but uncompromisingly tough old mumblecrust—whose
blessed memory we recall, annually, in the glorious
martyrology of the Church—named Pierre Christophe
Cardinal Théroux-d’Arconville (1532-1601 ).

[[2]Dame Marie Geneviève Charlotte d’Arlus

Théroux-d’Arconville (1720-1805), author of Vie de
Marie de Médias, princesse de Toscane, reine de France
et de Navarre (1774); Des Passions (1764); Discours sur
l’amour propre (1770) and many notable others. The first
French translator of Chaucer, Prior, and Pope, she also
acted in a theatrical production of Mérope, directed by
Voltaire himself. Jean Thiroux (1691-1740?) in his Gallia
Christiana in Provincias Ecclesiasticus Distributa (1715)
documented current monastic studies at that time. Louis
Théroux de Crosne d’Arconville (1736-1789), lieutenant
general of the Paris constabulary, wrote the classic
monograph, still in use, called “Les Interprétations
criminelles des oreilles” before losing his life to the
Jacobins and their despicable peasant revolt. (“Après la
prise de la Bastille, il se démit de sa charge entre les
mains de Bailly le 16 juil. 1789,” La Grande
Encyclopédie, trente et unième, Paris.) Charles Victor
Théroux-d’Arconville (1803-1862), captain of artillery
and theoretical militarist at the Ecole Militaire de Saint-
Cyr, attacked in his polemic La Flotte marchande (1853),
for abuses, all the parasitical birds-in-hand of the
merchant marine who, educated at government expense,
greedily sought to acquire private fortunes in civilian life
in lieu of military service. It will be here pointed out, in
discommendation of any such charge, that none of the
above writers falls into the strict category of the
professional, a vulgar correption to which true nobility
need not, and must never, submit, especially those
through whose veins pounds the blood of the heroic
Valois.]

Born in Rouen, he entered the priesthood and,

distinguishing himself in canon law at a quite young age,
was raised to the cardinalate at thirty-three. An age of
apostasy had set in. It was decided, so legend went, that
he be sent with speed to England—so horribly
crowtrodden there was the ancient faith—where, even
before his arrival, a clandestine one (as nuncios from a
hundred sees were being slain in their innocence on the
very shores), he had become simply from reputation the
scourge of several pernicious Tudors and more than one
profligate, not to say schismatic, court, the most
significant, for our record, being that of the mongrel
queen, Elizabeth I, the essential tenet of whose religion
proved to be little more than prestidigitation.
The facts are scant. It is known, however, that
Cardinal Théroux-d’Arconville had at one period secretly
worked with the holy pamphleteer, Robert Southwell, and
had personally seen to the welfare of both the Jesuits,
Campion and Parsons, upon their arrival in England in
1581. It was a dangerous time for Catholics. It was
perfectly murderous for priests. Great bonfires, fed with
roods, pyxes, and sacred images, were burning in the
streets, and execrations were being heaped upon the
names of those guilty of no crime but that of showing
fidelity to what had been honored in England for a
thousand years. The Grey Friars of Greenwich, the Black
Friars of Smithfield, the priests and nuns of Syon and the
Charterhouse, the abbot and monks of Westminster, all
were deposed, and, with their sees confiscated, countless
holy bishops—Watson of Lincoln, Thirlby of Ely, Bonner
of London, Bourne of Bath and Wells, Turberville of
Exeter, Scott of Chester, Pate of Worcester, Heath of
York, and many loyal others—were thrown headlong into
prison (most of them never to be delivered) so that
Elizabeth, with her overriding ambition and underriding
conscience, and all the exoletes, dunces, procumbents,
and unpalteringly ugly bagmen she called her councillors
could begin to carry out their scheme of relieving the
emptiness of the Exchequer.
The cause of Catholicism in that lapsed country, of
course, had long been closely bound up with the claim of
Mary Queen of Scots to the English throne. If the
illegitimacy of Elizabeth were granted—and there was no
doubt whatsoever of that—Mary, as the granddaughter of
Margaret Tudor, was the lawful sovereign. Consequently,
the cardinal soon became a vigorous, but secret, friend of
the Duke of Norfolk, whom he sought personally to wed
to Mary, hoping that with the support of Spain and such
prominent English Catholics as the Earl of
Northumberland; the Throckmortons; the Stourtons; the
Berkeleys; the Arundells; the Scropes; the Vauxes of
Harrowden; and the deposed Suffragan Bishop of Hull,
Robert Purseglove (who sheltered the cardinal for several
years), he might restore the country to the Mother
Church, but then, with the uncovering of the Ridolfi plot
by Burghley in 1571, Norfolk in due course was brought
to the block, and Cardinal Théroux-d’Arconville was
thereupon hunted throughout the country like a dog.
We hear of him wandering, starved and exhausted,
through Yorkshire, Herefordshire, and Chester, which
probably had the largest aggregation of ardent Catholics
within the realm, and then, shortly after the harsh
enactments of Elizabeth’s sixth Parliament of 1586-1587,
finally being captured in Lancashire, “the very sincke of
Poperie,” and sent with other recusants to the gloomy
dungeon in the casde of Wisbeach on the Isle of Ely. The
charges were clear: civil disobedience, disobedience to
the statutes of Parliament regulating public worship, and
deliberately undermining the Protestant orientation of the
realm, the penalty for which was death.
One need go no further than the nearest non-sectarian
history to read the facts of his brutal execution, the direct
order for which was given by that stork-faced malphoebe,
Betsy the Bawd, she of the thousand fright wigs, who—
with a drop of the cruel blood of the Visconti in her veins
—found nevertheless her hysterical proscriptions could
do everything, apparently, but curb truth. She could stint
the victuals of her hard-fighting soldiers. She could shop
up in the Tower her caracoling courtiers. She could
bumfondle any lackey in sight, sink her black teeth into
thousand-year-old dogmas, and hound holy priests into
ignominy, exile, and death. But she would never kill the
spirit of one noble cardinal, who, although his pen was
wrested from his hand and his tongue silenced,
nevertheless glorified God and edified the Church by
patient suffering and invincible constancy as the opponent
of heresy and schism. His name will ever be in
benediction in the Catholic Church in England as one of
the last and not degenerate successors of St. Hugh and St.
George.

Apologists, generally, believe Cardinal Théroux-

d’Arconville to have written a good deal more than the
two works of his extant, the less famous one—for which
in his fifty-seventh year the then Holy Father, Sixtus V,
presented him the cross of the Order of the Holy Spur
with a diploma and patent bearing the great pontifical seal
and declaring him in his quality of doctor of laws
pronotarius apostolicus extra urbem—the exact but brief
animadversion in flawless Latin, dated 1584, in defense
of the assassination of that goofball in the orange helmet,
mouthy William the Silent of Dutchland. The by-far-
greater work, one rare copy of which Darconville now
perused, was the uncompromisingly frank propaedeutics
he had written, in English, for the students of the school
he had secretly re-established at the plundered monastery
at Wednesbury.
This book was called The Shakeing of the Sheets: A
Yare Treatise on ye Englissh Tongue and Sage Counsel on
Clinches, Flashes, Whimzies, and Prick-Songs with
Regards to Stile; or, Put Not More Inke on thy Paper
Than Thou Hast Brains in thy Head. It was now witty,
now rather heavily doctrinal, showing the rhetorical
power of Gorgias but, often, the herpetical glower of the
Gorgon. And how so? Its advice as to how to achieve an
understanding of, and a respect for, language was indeed
formidable—yes, and this was commendable—for the old
cardinal saw, wisely, that correctness in language was the
foundation of clear thinking, that clear thinking would
lead to right reason, and that right reason would not only
shed light on the quidditive perfections of Catholic
dogma, proving the inexorability of the Roman
persuasion, but also that, for once and all, it would put
paid to all the lies and willful deceptions of the faithless
clerical secun-digravidicals thereabouts with long faces
and square hats who, though living in England, were
breathing the air of Geneva and Wittenberg.
Sitting there, turning the pages, Darconville
nevertheless found one particular aspect of the treatise
disagreeable—its misogyny. That bias rose like a poison
fume from almost every paragraph, and Darconville, who,
even in his early teens, had been somewhat scandalized
the first time he read it, was no less so now—and,
possibly for being in love, more. How, he wondered,
could anyone hate women? What, he thought, had the
contrivances of that nail-spitting abishag called the Virgin
Queen wrought in this poor priest? And yet in spite of
that what validity value could ever be given to such an
unfair, out-of-hand denunciation of the most beautiful
half of the human race? The fault was not larger than the
fault was fine—but nevertheless a fault. It was foolish and
sad, long having been the cause of Darconville’s keeping
silence, sensitively, on both the subject and the saint.
Darconville knew from his heart what to reject in the
book, shut his thumb on a page, and then put it away, glad
at bottom not only that no one ever bothered to read it
nowadays but that no one had ever even heard of it
anymore.
 XL

Oudemian Street

We do not feel terror because we are threatened by

the Gorgon;
we dream of the Gorgon in order to explain the terror
we feel.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES

DARCONVILLE, meanwhile, was living solitary as

a waldgrave. His days seemed as empty as the window
frame he often paused before, staring out, intermittently,
for almost two weeks now. Isabel seemed to have
vanished. Hopeful, he had waited for her to come,
initially to have it explained to him why she’d dropped
out of his life, but then simply to have her with him again,
a secret, if not divulged, that at least should have been
understood. He either slept too much or stayed awake too
long, listening for the slightest noise and smoking, so
much, in fact, that when smoking one cigarette it became
a strange source of misery to him that he wasn’t smoking
another.
It seemed almost diabolical, her never appearing. Oh,
I know, he thought, you’re going to leave me—but he
dared not laugh at the irony. God might misunderstand it.
 One more day passed, then two again, and another.
Darconville claimed to himself in the mirror that he was
being haunted by a suc-cubus who crept into his bed
every night and that, though he flogged her, it was his
own body every morning found full of welts, but the
unshaven face in the mirror, showing havoc and rueful
lines, spoke back to him: “A true lover doesn’t mind
being disappointed. But he cannot bear the thought of his
loved one being disappointed, and it frustrates him
beyond all else, for disappointment, worse than mere
complaint, is blackmail.” Spellvexit, who despised
philosophy, showed an utter disregard for Darconville’s
neautontimoroumenotic pain and preferred to stay outside
clacking his teeth at birds until all this blew over.
It was time to do something: graduation week,
Darconville realized, meant time was running out. But the
telephone calls were all the same: seven numbers dialed, a
slight quietus in the swallowing phone, several expectant
rings, and then the apology of each correspondent— pal,
protectress, prothonotary of the Queen’s bench—
whereupon, opening the door of that close booth at the
Timberlake, Darconville held out the receiver at arm’s
length, deliberating what to do and letting whatever little
impotent voice it was squeak on and on. Forfex,
commander of thirty legions of devils, had become a
ventriloquist. The conspiracy seemed school-wide. It was
a concert of deceit.
The alternative was search-and-seizure. Classes at
Quinsy College, excluding those for seniors, were still in
session, and Darconville hoped that, rather than be found
waiting for her at some door, he might meet her in a
casual encounter. He roamed out by the hockey and
archery fields, looked into the old tennis courts, and then
walked out along, and then back by, “The Reproaches.”
He stepped into the art building and went upstairs where
in one classroom six narcoleptics, fast asleep on their
notebooks, were missing the pointer-to-board lecture of
Floyce R. Fulwider:

“This [tap] is a pot-walloper of the Flemish rubricator

who called himself Pieter De Hooch, the grandfather of
American gin. For his dates you’ll want 1629 and 1677.
You may or may not be disheartened to know that he
wanted nothing heroic [tap] in his art. His dry, domestic,
explicit-as-arithmetic masterpukes [tap] tend nevertheless
to narrative. Now let us look at this bit of scrumpy [tap]:
Courtyard of a Dutch House. Notice the light archway
with a woman in shadows staring off? Where is she
facing? And why? The shading here is . . .”

Darconville left the building and crossed over to the

music building. He checked all the piano rooms: nothing.
The auditorium was locked. He wandered over to
Smethwick, going floor to floor, aisle to aisle, and found
no one but two girls, upstairs, flipping through old Bride’s
magazines and Miss Pouce, down in her office, pasting a
concealing strip of paper over two blasphemous lines in
the fourth stanza of Atalanta in Corydon. Where could
she be? He cut across the street to the English building—
opening doors, closing doors—and went through the
history department to the Rotunda and then down to the
dining hall. She was nowhere in sight. He was outside
again, on the run now back around the ring-road by Gund
and Truesleeve, heading toward the high-rise dorms
which led, past the woods, toward the cemetery where in
certain moods that had become all too characteristic of
what in her frightened him Isabel was wont to go, to read,
to think. But he saw only the memory of himself rising up
creepily, slowly, from behind a gravestone with a gleam
in his impish eyes—but this time of ridicule.
The seniors, during these days of grace, were
sunbathing on dormitory steps, by the student union,
across almost every lawn that Darconville crossed. They
sprawled about in the sunshine like delicious confections
in a sweetshop: tarts in wicked shorts; cupcakes in halters
and cut-away jeans; and turnovers in swirl skirts up to the
hips and brief shirts without so much as the hint of a bra.
The main topic of conversation, of course, was the
graduation dance to be held that night. It was the social
event of the year.
“I’m about to blow up from excitement,” exclaimed
Tracy Upjohn.
“Me too,” squeaked Berthalene Rhodie, catching her
hands.
“Forget the dance,” said “Pookie” Pumpgarten, rising
an inch to unpinch her shorts grown moist from the dewy
grass. She winked at Mehitabel Huntoon and Betty Ann
Unglaub. “It’s what’s for later!”
“Well, it just dreads me to death,” confessed Shirley
Newbegin, unchambering a mouthful of bobby-pins and
twirling out a set of pink, snailshaped rollers
—”spoolies”—from her hair. Her fears, not to the dance,
were rather being addressed to arrangements then being
made for a midnight party at the Bide-A-Wee Motel.
“Dean Barathrum will shit feathers,” said Shrimpie
De Vein.
“Hush your mouth!” shouted Harriet Bowdler, prick-
me-dainty and whilom Sunday-school teacher at the
Wyanoid Baptist Church. Harriet’s, alas, wasn’t a lucky
life: she had trout’s eyes, a bad case of pimples, and an
unfortunate walk—she toed in—which the girls
constantly mimicked.
“O turn blue, Bowdler,” muttered Divinity Jones,
slipping on her sunglasses. “You want a little damn
confidence is what you want.”
“Exactly. Like this girl here,” said Quandra Tour, who
snapped back a page in the book she was reading and
declaimed for everyone:

“‘—to receive his instructions in psalmody was

Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and only child of a
substantial Dutch farmer. She was a blooming lass of
fresh eighteen; plump as a partridge; ripe and melting and
rosy-cheeked as one of her father’s peaches; and
universally famed, not merely for her beauty but her vast
expectations. She was, withal, a little of a coquette—’ “

“ ‘Vast expectations’?” repeated Harriet Bowdler. “I

believe that’s dirty.”
Everybody groaned.
“It means she’s on the lookout for boys, for cry-eye,”
said Gerda Bean, “nothin’ else.”
Harriet, near tears, explained. “ ‘She was with all,’ it
says. You heard it, same as me.”
“O, put a sock in it!” snapped Cookie Crumpacker.
“Confidence, that’s all he means,” said Quandra Tour,
shrugging. She turned to the twins, Scarlett and Melanie
Longstreet. “It’s symbolism.”
“Who means?”
Quandra Tour jerked the book to the opening page
and showed Mehitabel Huntoon. The frontispiece
pictured a man resting his cheek, authorially, on two
fingers. “Irving,” she replied. “One of America’s greatest
authors.”
“Sounds like a little ol’ jewboy to me,” said Divinity
Jones, cracking her gum.
Ravissa Deadlow, lying face down on a towel,
muttered into her armpit, “And she sounds like a fat little
bitch to me.”
“With a whole lot of boyfriends,” said Quandra Tour,
tapping the page with a little plic-plac of authority, “so
don’t knock it.”
“I want to get knocked,” giggled Tracy Upjohn,
reaching out insatiably with both hands and salaciously
wadgeting the tips of her fingers in a charade of manic
intemperance.
“An evening of sex!” screeched Betty Ann Unglaub.
“Kissy-poo! Huggy-poo! And—”
Harriet Bowdler, wincing, had her ears plugged.
“You name it,” cried Cookie Crumpacker, joyfully
shaking her moon-shaped earrings and proudly adjusting
the maroon-striped jersey she wore to punctuate the
comment, twice, with what natural increments were hers.
“And if I die tonight, hey,” she added with twinkling
eyes, “they’ll have to bury me in a Y-shaped coffin!”
The day was glorious, with honeysuckle dangling
about in festoons, the syringas thickets of sweets, all
perfuming the sunshine that elevated moods all over
campus and increased the general excitement. The girls
were all making careful preparations to look
spontaneously beautiful, sampling scents, swapping
pearls and purses, and chinning up to the shimmering rays
as their skin turned from the airiest, fairiest tones of straw
to the awfulest, tawniest fawns. The dance mattered
deeply to the girls. No detail was too small to hold their
interest, no project too large for them to entertain—and
both, the detailed project and the interest they entertained,
were keenly seen to by no less an arbiter elegantiae than
Hypsipyle Poore who, though not now among the group,
with slow love from her room looked at the scattered
colors of the afternoon, pleased to lose herself in those
intricate dreams of hers where desire and possession
somehow became one. Hypsipyle exacted the very kind
of personal adoration and attendance-dancing from her
following that Isabel missed. She lived raptly in a play-
world and could find romantic adventure every time she
walked down the street. She softly taught her coterie the
art of making drama from the most ordinary everyday
events, and so with indescribable delectation her girls
generally kept mental trysts, had revelations and
premonitions, saw miracles flowering under their very
eyes, and, ready to find mystic excitement in the most
casual occurrence, always looked for magic in a mood.
The motel idea was Hypsipyle’s, and each of the four
years she’d organized it. And so plans were afoot.
“What, you just register—for the night?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“It’s a no-tell motel.”
“And what about Miss Dessicquint, huh? Huh?”
asked sitting-up-correctly Harriet Bowdler, chastely
buttoned up in spite of the sun in her school blazer of
sober watchet which displayed on one pocket the disc of
the college insignia. “What about her?”
“She can go suck a blanket!” said Gerda Bean.
“And stop squinchin’ your eyes all up,” said Ravissa
Deadlow. “You do manage to get all bitey, Bowdler, don’t
you?”
 “I manage to get all bitey?” Harriet Bowdler wailed.
“You do, you manage to get all bitey!” She looked about
her for support. Calmly, Ravissa Deadlow openhandedly
appealed to the same group, asking everybody who in fact
was the one who got all bitey? “You get bitey!” everyone
screamed at Harriet, who burst into tears.
Berthalene Rhodie, meanwhile, was wondering if the
authorities would let them all take rooms, offering for
consideration the trouble they’d had in previous years
when the townies and the boys from Hampden-Sydney
College, all shoe-mouth deep in liquor, spent the night
banging doors and running around the premises like
whistlehogs.
The twins, Scarlett and Melanie Longstreet, agreed.
“Remember last year? Bambi Bargewell’s boyfriend
got himself all yopped up with bourbon,” said Melanie,
putting by her sun reflector, “and then flingin’ free as you
please into one of them cabins went and daddied her baby
right there on the pile carpet.”
Shrimpie De Vein gasped happily.
“I saw her all pooched up in Thalhimer’s last fall,”
added Scarlett, rubbing an antbite on her calf with her left
instep, “buyin’ kimbies.”
“While he ups and goes into the navy.”
“I don’t care,” said Tracy Upjohn, “I’m for the Bidey-
Bi!”
“Ditto,” said Mehitabel Huntoon, with fluoroscopic
eyes.
“Off the wall!” hooted Betty Ann Unglaub.
Shirley Newbegin, converted, carefully tied a
fascinator over springing curls. Everybody looked at
Harriet Bowdler. Was all settled? No, not yet, not quite.
 “And if Quinsy revokes your degree, then?” asked the
outraged girl whose hippocrepiform legs—to assure the
position of sagacious fakir— she crossed with difficulty.
“Then?”
“Why, then, I’ll tell them to twist my diploma into a
cone, Harriet dear,” pronounced “Pookie” Pumpgarten,
her arm falling languidly over her eyes against the glare
of the sun, “and shove it where the moon don’t shine.”
“My life!” said Harriet Bowdler.
In the meantime, Darconville was having no success.
From the cemetery he went over to the Piggly Wiggly,
bought some cigarettes— he was smoking himself into a
state of near etiolation—and returned to campus by way
of a gate that led to the indoor swimming pool. The empty
pool smelled like an empty terrarium. He cut through a
corridor with the gnome Umbriel astride his back
repairing to search the gloomy cave of spleen that was the
gym. It was also empty. He called out, “Isabel?” The echo
called out again. Nothing.
The laboratories were next. Classes in that building,
however, had been dismissed for the day, and the late
afternoon rooms were tomblike, the silence broken only
by the hysterical coughing in the main corridor of some
blue-in-the-face squidgereen—all doubled-up and being
thumped on the back by clappermaclawed Miss Porch-
mouth—who had half-wittedly suctioned up through a
retort, and swallowed, a half-litre of phenolphthalein
solution. The anthropology department—where Mr.
Bischthumb’s classroom (they had not re-hired) was
commemoratively kept empty—showed the same end-of-
the-year inactivity, except for one particular classroom
where some swivel-chair tactician or other, back to view,
was winding down a lecture on virvestitism in the
Benelux countries to five girls: three fast asleep, one,
gongoozled by boredom, refrogging a silver chain, and
the last, in the front row, was the student body president,
Xystine Chap-pelle, upholstering her 4.0 grade point
average—and she was auditing.
Out a side door, across the mall, and Darconville was
in the social sciences building. He took the stairs three-at-
a-go to the first, the second, the third floor and paused,
searching faces, at a classroom where a group of girls sat
in the semi-darkness watching one of Dr. Knipper-
doling’s gripping geographical filmstrips; the pictures
flashed to a recorded voice:

“—Faletua Uliuli is still, of course, a poor Samoan

village by our own standards. The daub-and-wattle hut
here has served them for centuries, [beep] Irrigation
methods, as used by their fathers and forefathers, were far
too primitive to keep up with modern production. Not so,
now, with the recently introduced flutter-wheel, [beep]
American advisers, experimenting, have saved them an
untold number of good harvests this way which is why,
when revisiting, these men are invariably greeted by
smiling peasants bearing armfuls of taro root, [beep]
Miracles abound here now. The great crane you see here
scooping up earth can do the work of fifty men. Pride and
self-reliance have been restored, [beep] You can witness
the results on the face of young Emilio here who is just
learning to work with leather—to grow up a useful and
happy citizen in his own country, a proud people, in a
strange land, far away.”

The lights came up to long stretches and gulping

yawns, and Dar-conville, peering skygodlin through the
door window, searched intently from face to face as if he
were candling eggs. He saw nothing— and no one—of
consequence, left, and returned to the main building. It
was getting late.
In the long lecture hall there some forty or so
students, Darconville noticed, were slaving away on their
final exam in American history under the eviscerating
stare of peripatetic Mrs. DeCrow who, in expert fashion,
managed not only to survey them all but monitor each at
intervals of sudden command: “Eyes front, people!” “Sit
around, Miss Nosy!” “Who in the second row in the white
blouse wants her testpaper torn up?” Craning his neck
under the half-pulled shade, Darconville saw no Isabel—
only the shade snapped up and Mrs. DeCrow disgustedly
glaring out. A turn by the registrar’s office was equally
futile: no Isabel Rawsthorne—only ubiquitous Hypsipyle
Poore, there to badger Mrs. McAwaddle for an extended
curfew that night, suddenly turning to him with pursed
lips and an acknowledgement, effected from the knee, by
a dipsy-doodling of her index finger. Dark Angel, ever on
the wing, who never reaches me too late, thought
Darconville. He dragged himself downstairs.
At the English department office, he asked the
secretary if any messages had been left for him. There
were none. He slipped into an empty classroom next door
to gather his thoughts, his eye randomly falling on a map
of Europe on the wall: he fixed Venice. Will I ever go
back there, he wondered, and will I return with more
vices than I went forth with pence? How remote those
days were! The dreams he had had! The attempts in mind
to travel aux anges! Was that perhaps a fault, the famous
fall that infamous pride goes before? Original Sin,
perhaps, was related not so much to the feeling that we
must die but rather that we feel we can live too
majestically. And what of the via negativa he had once
chosen? Poustinia? The Empty Quarter? The subtle
distinguo between loneliness and solitude? The remorse
he began to feel came to suggest he hold himself back,
purposely aloof from everything of implication, at bay in
a lifelong quarantine of imagination —coopted by some
unimposing anti-fate neither to write nor live but,
chastened of all impulse, simply to stop. Nevertheless, he
felt resources which buoyed him up in bewilderment. I
could give her up, he felt, if necessary. But I love her, he
thought, I love her so much.
Across the way, Darconville suddenly heard a
recitation in progress. He leaned forward, looking, to find
Miss Sally Bull Sweetshrub’s four o’clock class—Great
Southern Writers—now under way. With her eyeglasses
low on her nose, she was giving a passionate rendition of
Maria J. Mclntosh’s poem, “Frown Not,” as a consolatory
prelude to the final exam the girls were about to take. He
went to check the class —Isabel, who should have been
among that number, wasn’t—but, before he left,
sidestepping glum Howlet, who sat doggo by the door,
took up a mimeographed copy of the exam from a stack
of them on a chair outside. He read the following:

Great Southern Writers

(1.) Confute the charge that Almira Lincoln Phelps’s

“Southern Housekeepers” is narrowly regionalistic. (Be
careful. Be honest.)

(2.) Develop my view that Emma D. E. N.

Southworth’s Sybil Brotherton, or The Temptation is “the
most perfect plot in the American novel.” (Illustrate by
example.)

(3.) Identify: a. Samuel Minturn Peck

b. Henry Lynden Flash
c. Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar
d. Sallie Ada Reedy
e. Stringfellow Barr
N. B. Hard part: which of the five is greatest?

(4.) How is Henry Timrod’s brilliant poem

Ethnogenesis in the same epic tradition as Milton’s
Paradise Lost?

(5.) I prefer a) Caroline Lee Hentz’s “Aunt Patty’s

Scrap-Bag”; b) Rosa Vertner Johnson’s Hasheesh Visions;
c) Sally Bull Sweetshrub’s The Big Regret; or d) Una
Altera Hint’s The Black Duchess. Dissertate amply.

(6.) Write a cogent essay (using only one side of the

paper please) discounting the efforts of Mr. William
Faulkner as contrasted to Jane T. H. Cross’s Wayside
Flowerets; Anna Peyre Dinnies’ Wedded Love; and the
prose-pieces of fascinating Octavia Walton LeVert, the
“sweet rose of Florida.”

(7.) Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie’s “Armand’s Love”

is/is not in the cavalier tradition. Why? Why not?

(8.) Compare and Contrast: Mary Windle and John

Banister Tabb; Eleanor Percy Lee and St. George Tucker;
William Byrd of Westover and Edward Coote Pinckney.
How discouraged would you be to hear that they were all,
at one time or another, tempted to rip up their
manuscripts?

Name

Pledge

I am both low and down South, a redundancy,

thought Darconville, if a poetic turn of phrase. South is
down, isn’t it? South means down. He shaped the exam
sheet into a tiny futuristic airship and launched it,
somewhere, on the breath that was the exhalation of his
disgust—and walked dolefully up to his office.
“She’s not good enough for you, sir.”
Darconville, surprised, turned to see a figure step out
of a shadow. It was Winnie Pegue, an overweight
sophomore whom he had known for an F in his novel
course the previous semester. She had hair both the shape
and color of dulse and chubby legs, now quakebuttocking
under her as she moved forward.
“I can imagine how it feels to be deserted,” said
Winnie Pegue, the words rushing out as if memorized.
She stood before him, a little mont-de-piété nervously
hugging her buldering armpits and perspiring frightfully.
Then she asked him if he thought she had any right, being
as she was nothing, to ask him if he had any right, seeing
he was everything, to throw it all away. Staring at her
saddle shoes, she snuffled up a sob and said, “If I were
you, sir, I’d forget her. You’re— you’re too good for her,
for anybody!” She scooped her handbag further up her
arm and broke down completely. “All life,” she wept, “all
life is ahead of you! The sun, the stars—!” She couldn’t
go on for the tears, however, and, turning, flew pigeon-
toed down the corridor, around the corner, and out of
sight.
Philosophy major, thought Darconville.
He shut the office door. He sat down at his desk. A
fact couldn’t be ignored: he had been for some time now
looking for signs—revelations, of a sort—to determine
what direction he should take in the coming year.
Perhaps, now, a sign had come. Or symptoms of a sign.
He loved a girl much younger than he, for one thing, and
what could one really expect of it? Obscure gestes, lost
love, short commons in the midst of plenty. He had been
jealous, intemperate, weak of faith, and, suffering both in
action and consequence, unproductive—doing everything
but what, in fact, he’d come there for. That was the truth
of the thing, for sure, suiting the word to action, not
action to the word. Goodnight, sweet print.
And then what of Isabel? Was it one and the other?
Or one in the other? Was it one for, through, or against the
other? Against? Was it possible?
Darconville looked up on the office wall to see his
favorite photograph of her. It was technically one of the
poorest, a large black-and-white blowup of her head and
shoulders, the brown seeksorrow eyes, the hair like
clarified honey pulled back to a beautiful knot, and the
gentle mouth, almost happy, yet not quite ripening into a
smile. (No photograph ever quite caught her: each of the
many taken spoke of the one that got away—with El
Dorado, maddeningly, waiting just outside every frame. )
He loved this one photograph, however. It had absorbed
more vows than he thought admissible to admit, and yet
he felt absolved, for he had come to believe, under that
head, that he couldn’t live without her morally, that her
faults, in fact, were both what he himself must personally
overcome for his own benefit and yet not overcome at the
risk of damnation. Almost literally, he was she.
What Chrysostom could explain, what Cassiodorus
write, the story of this love? It began, simply, with
diffidence, followed by sudden devotion, and then the
thought that he might ruin her life if he left her, a pressure
she transmitted by implying that his life might be ruined
if she stayed, for in the intensity of their deepening love
the sweet confessions left unspoken were too often
interpreted as hesitation and doubt. She seemed to believe
that passion overstated the love she didn’t, for some
reason, deserve, while he believed her loving soul needed
what he could only give insufficiently. What, wondered
Darconville, what if he had held back? What if in
dreaming we have actually entered another world, daring
to commit all but our consciousness? Why, journeys and
dreams went together like two people very much in love.
Overcome with weariness, Darconville laid his head
on his folded arms and shut his eyes. I love her, he
thought, and yet I want to leave: a plural I and a single
gloom. Or was the gloom merely a plural I? Whatever,
two antagonistic Darconvilles, smitten to death, had fallen
desperately in love with her. Duples imply choice. He was
double-damned. Park your ka, Egyptian. Yes, he thought:
the possible that did not become reality was impossible.
No, he thought: it was possible. Cumaea Sibylla
horrendas canit: nothing which will not be in reality is
possible. Let the ambiguity stand, concluded Darconville
in a last sleepy reflection, for in the dungeon of our
dreams images embody the sensations they can also
cause.
He was soon fast asleep, when beating forward
through the darkness to the front of his mind came the
poisonous archlucifer, Satan himself, who, ready to kill
what he wouldn’t yet devour, squatted down by his ear
like a foul gryllus and whispered:
“I am Gog’s ghost, come alive, to pipe to you! Here,
would you see it? My porphyritic hoof? I rode up in a
dogboat now to boot your god. I pun to amuse you, poet.
Pay attention to me! I talk unlike you want to hear,
upsidedown and backwards, with a nice repetition of G’s
—the hump in them is the hump in your gunzel: tumorous,
a gold cancer, the load you bear on your back. Isabel!
There she is! Mistress Gummigutt! I know you are
ashamed to feel this way about someone you love, but,
look, the girl’s legs are a proximate occasion of sin to a
cannibal! And that’s your ideal? Laugh with me at her,
can’t you? Yaw, yaw. No, with more conviction! O, how I
hate her, her mammoth legs, her vanity about her hair
which she has either just washed or is about to. I hate the
back of her head as she rides in your car with her collar
turned up. She eats a lot: snacks. She doesn’t know
whether her arsehole is punched or bored. She weeps in
the most unconvincing way I’ve ever seen. She repeats
what you say and rarely offers anything to a
conversation. Your ideal? I hear you call an ideal what I
take to be a personified inconceivability. A galeopsis is
nothing but a thing with a cat’s face! But, soft, she troops
by with her mother! Par-nels march by two and three
saying, Sweetheart, come with me! Pay attention to me, or
you shall not see all I see! I love you, Maher-shalal-hash-
baz. Too partial a piece of piety? I love you but I pity you,
for is it not written: ‘Before the child shall have
knowledge to cry “My father and my mother,” the riches
of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken
away’? I will remind you of poetry if you let me, I
promise. Not so she. She takes too much humoring and
requires more attention than a rosebush with greenfly!
Are you laughing? O yes, laugh! That is wonderful!
Reverence to this! Stand beside me and watch. I knooow
you have a conscience. Look! She is holding your book!
She is reading! She is going to pronounce about it!
‘Blap,’ she says—can you hear her?—’that’s a great
verb!’ O she is wise. Isn’t she wise? Yaw, yaw. The
father’s chuckling! Give it two balls! But trust her,
whorepouncer? Touch pitch and be defiled, for isn’t a
vision grim when a vision is great? She wants to be safe. I
want you to hurt her. Please, I love you! Accept her
rejection, for he who won’t when he may, when he will he
shall have nay! I talk unlike you hear, but does one go to
Greece by Rome, riddler? Pay attention to me! Leave her!
Hurt her! Dispatch her to the land of Ganabim! I used a
G for you just now, now you do something for me. A ruse.
A sprat to catch a mackerel. I won’t put up a wall between
us, I promise. Ask her something I know about now but
your face won’t see! Ask her about me! I will whisper it
again for you. Ask her—”
A crash! Darconville shot up out of his chair, in a
cold sweat, his mouth open in terror. Wavering, he
steadied himself on the desk to watch the nightmare
dissolve like water in water, having dreamt, he felt, what
he feared but feeling he caused what he dreamt. His hand
was trembling. How long had he slept?
The windowpanes were dark. Darconville went
downstairs, his mind stammering down to reality, and left
the building. It felt good to be outside. The sky, made
exotic by a sickle of moon, was so clear and black it
seemed to fetch one toward it, and, looking up, he could
almost feel the nutation of the earth, the swing of the
universe. On the other side of town a train rocketed
through the night, leaving behind a few spotballs of
smoke and a disembodied wail. Essences were in the
spring wind. He could feel the warm breezes chuffing the
leaves of the magnolia tree which stood sentinel-like, an
Urpflanze, over the lonely bench that sat more than one
memory in it. But it all saddened him.
The tall live-oaks and elms like black-cloaked
prophets muttering urgent warnings of the vanity of all
flesh seemed to represent some kind of extinct symbolism
—with any interpretation made owed more, perhaps, to
the homiletic power of the mind observing it than
anything else. But every focus of concentration,
regardless, seemed only to serve that mind for purposes of
dejection, of apprehension: he looked out dolefully across
the grounds and, turning one way, then turning another,
set out again like a Rufa’iyah dervish in his black coat,
searching for a trace of his promised but lost and
unadaptive child.

XLI

The Turner

As falcons to the lure, away she flies,

The grass stoops not, she treads on it so light.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Venus and
Adonis
 THE CURTAINS BILLOWED SOFTLY in and out
with the night breezes that also carried the music of the
dance across campus into the front parlor of Fitts. Isabel
Rawsthorne, waiting by herself, had her chair set up
halfway between, and faced around from, the two open
windows and the door which she had locked. She sat
unobserved, wearing a smock-with-flowers, jeans, and
pink canvas shoes and staring without reaction into the
flame on the far wall she had studied for more than an
hour now: a reproduction of one of those Turners where
the ocean seems on fire. The proctors had disappeared,
the girls had gone, and the room was perfectly dark,
silvered to ghostliness, however, by the streetlights
outside.
It was a complete solitudinarium. The empressement
of the parlor’s interior, old and distinctly Southern, was
also the source of its gloom: the moquette carpets, sofas
the color of asparagus rust, a grandmother clock severely
ticking. There was a defeated grace to the room,
somehow worse than the oppressive silence made by the
sudden evacuation of the gentlemen callers who’d come,
picked up their dates, and disappeared. Fixed to the flame
growing out of the sea, Isabel was only waiting and
listening to the slight flutter of the velivolent curtains
behind her, thinking neither of gentlemen callers nor
addressing with despair the feeling that time is too short.
There’s no end to nothing, she thought; there’s always an
end to something, but there’s never an end to nothing. So
if I can just be nothing, she thought, I can even be bigger
than something. She twicked her thumbs. I am nothing.
Now she knew that without the shadow of a doubt:
that afternoon she had been summoned to the registrar’s
office only to be told by Dean Barathrum, as Mrs.
McAwaddle handed her her grades—with each one lower
than those of the first semester—that, as probation no
longer applied, she couldn’t return to Quinsy College
unless she took the fall semester off, reapplied, and hoped
for the best, understanding, of course, that there would be
no guarantee, without a full review by the admissions
board, she could even be readmitted. Her reaction,
strangely, was almost ceremonious, subdued, as she was,
less by shame than by the simple ineluctability of fate.
She remembered walking to her room, packing her
clothes, and now—it was so sad and simple— she was
waiting only to go home. What medium is the darkness,
she wondered, that one can lean on it?
“Isabel?”
The voice, a familiar one, called through the window.
Isabel’s scar whitened: she froze in her chair and,
motionless, shut her eyes only to feel tears roll down her
cheeks. There’s always an end to something, she thought.
“Hello? Isabel?”
She experienced a sudden sensation in her arms and
legs of terrifying lightness, a suspension effected by the
mind to feign invisibility, and immediately she felt she
would disappear. She took refuge in interior mystery, a
forest appeared to her, a magic world where as a princess
she—
“Are you there, Isabel? Please?”
Determined, covered in the dark robe of her closed
eyes, the night, the shadowed room, Isabel sat perfectly
still until the voice called out no more, and she knew
beyond all truth that there was never an end to nothing.
And she never moved but only rested her head against the
back of the chair, resigned in will, and continued to stare
toward the wall at the impossible, paradoxical flame
splitting up through the darkness of the canvas like some
pale and lovely summoner beckoning her beyond her
failures and broken dreams into the safety of nothingness,
a place where there were no consequences, no grades, no
plans, no expectations, nothing to live up to or long for or
even love, for love was not only over but love was the
worst something of all.
She was waiting, she remembered, and she was
waiting, she knew, for someone. But who? she wondered.
But who?

XLII

The Jejune Dance

A hall, a hall! give room! and foot it, girls.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and
Juliet

THE QUINSY DANCE—sound lutes! tabrets!

bombardons!—had begun. The large ballroom of the
student union, decorated with flowing blue-and-white
bunting, was brightly lit, and a felt oriflamme proclaiming
the year (apostrophe, two digits) of the graduating class
rose in the shape of a Q behind the main table, where
stood hundreds of paper cups filled with red punch. There
was to be no tippling. The previous night, President
Greatracks had delivered to the class his usual Levitical
caveat on the subject, a flat denunciation for the most
part, complete with anecdotes, of that prince of winepots,
General Ulysses S. Grant, “a dang winebibbin’ dipsofreek
who couldn’t wake up of a morning without walkin’
sideways!”
“The girls are quiet as question marks now,” said
Mrs. McAwaddle to Prof. Wratschewe, the other
chaperon, “but I fancy they’ll all be running us jakeleg
around here later on.” She was dressed in a blue double-
knit, a necklace of huge dead turquoises, and serviceable
shoes. “I trust you’ll prove, being the senior member here,
to have the eyes of a potato?”
“Potato,” observed Prof. Wratschewe, graciously
bowing a cup of punch to his colleague. “Did you ever
stop to think that if ‘gh’ stood for ‘p’ as in ‘hiccough’;
‘ough’ for ‘o’ as in ‘dough’; ‘phth’ for ‘t’ as in ‘phthisis’;
‘eigh’ for ‘a’ as in ‘neighbor’; ‘tte’ for ‘t’ as in ‘gazette’;
and ‘eau’ for ‘o’ as in ‘beau’ “—he snapped out his ball-
point and scribbled on a flattened cup—”then the correct
spelling of potato would be ghoughphtheightteeau?” He
looked up smiling.
But Mrs. McAwaddle was already on the other side of
the room.
The band—a blotch-complexioned group from
Charlottesville named The Uncalled Four—ripped it all
open with a muscular rendition of “Dixie,” always so
popular, always so malapropos, and then settled into its
repertoire of out-of-date tunes and shopworn
instrumentais, abuses made even more frightful by the
almost parturifacient din coming from the direction of
that one great guy with big ears in the schnitz-pie-colored
tux (that’s him on the electric guitar) who has a voice like
a toad under a harrow. But his money paid for most of the
instruments. And they travel in his car.
At first, no one would dance, some shy, some not yet
ready, but eventually they moved: a general forth-issuing
onto the floor, with all le donne mobile e nubile in their
long white gloves and flouncing dresses looking like so
many ortelans-in-papillotes, bell-flowered, orange-
flowered, poppy-flowered, curl-flowered. Her eyes star-
shining, Alphia Centauri sighed and whispered to
Pengwynne Custis at the cloakroom that, gosh, everyone
sure looked as fetching as fetching could be. “Bull,” said
lovely, spoiled, rich Pengwynne Custis, thrusting her
wraps at the black attendant, “I’ve seen prettier faces on a
damn oP iodine bottle.” “Why, I just love your gown,”
came a voice from behind Pengwynne. She turned. It was
beautiful Hypsipyle Poore, mysterious, enveloped in
black faille, with a blood-red rose at her waist and a
Gainsborough hat framing her perfectly oval face. “But,
tell me, where were you when they fitted it?” And,
smiling, Hypsipyle tinkled her finger across the room at
several boys.
The boys—young beaux sabreurs in the Southern
tradition—were mostly overappareled little rakehells
from nearby colleges, dashing bucks and guys with names
like Reggie Deuceaces, S. Waverly Carter, Guggenheim
Grant, Fern Hill, Sheraton Commander, Hampton Court,
and Schuyler Colfax or, perhaps, Colfax Schuyler—it
didn’t matter. They idled about, smoking and chatting
and, periodically, dancing their dates woodenly across the
floor toward the outer balcony where they either fell
abruptly into gourmandizing kiss sequences or produced
flasks which appeared at the ends of their fingers, out of
nowhere, like conjurers’ doves. And some couples—some
couples went out to their cars.
There was a general mood of excitement, waltzing
and whirling, swinging and swirling. Behind, four years
of work! Ahead, the future! But now, fun! Most of the
girls conservatively kept to the punch, others didn’t, but
some, already flown with insolence and wine, were
squealing and running niminy-piminy through the
arcades, putting the come-hither on their boyfriends and
scooting like little grunions into the side-rooms for
fumbling but passionate embraces. Heather Tilt’s date, his
urgent hand rummaging hopefully toward her dra-geoir,
got himself a good slap in the face for it. Mona Lisa
Drake and her date were engaged in a long, deep kiss in
the shadow of a column when she looked up soulfully and
whispered, “Be careful, it’s my heart.” One yahoo with a
juggler’s face—her blind date from Washington and Lee
—actually proposed to Charlotte Rumpelmeyer who, in
spite of his altiloquence, thought it might be a happier
marriage if they knew each other longer than five
minutes. And in one dark room Poppy Mandragora
ineffectually tried to struggle up, as her hot-blooded
boyfriend nailed her down on the couch with kisses,
sucked her sighs, and cannonaded her with dabs at the
lower neck, and she just about managed to gasp through a
space in his arm-hold, “Ashley, please, let’s not spoil it.”
It was a perfect night in Quinsyburg; warm and
romantic, with the scent of honeysuckle, yarrow, and
beebalm heavy in the air. Solitary as a substantive,
Darconville crossed the campus, circling as unobtrusively
as possible by Bryerly, Harrop, and Fitts dormitories—
and noticing, in the latter, the darkness of one particular
room. He stood awkwardly by the front walk outside the
parlor of Fitts for a moment and called out Isabel’s name
several times, but his voice, hollow as the soul of an echo,
came back and embarrassed him. He went round behind
the building, emerged through a walkway by the
greenhouse and saw the lights, heard the music, coming
from the student union. All along the street, couples sat in
their cars croodling, sipping from bottles, or shifting
about with exasperated cries like “You’re on my hair!” or
“I’m hitting my head!” or “It’s not a snap, for godsakes,
it’s a hook!”
As Darconville crossed the street, he heard from an
adjacent car a little squeal, monarticulated and lubricious,
which posited, by dint of accompanying coos and whuffs,
a diabolicating two, exercitants, clearly, in the rites of
Venus Pornokrate. Suddenly, the girl, coming up for air,
looked out the car window and skreeked, “O lord!”
It was Robin Kreutznaer in high apostrophe, mussed,
looking unavoidably at—and straight into—Darconville’s
face. Both were embarrassed. Her flowery anadem was
askew, her long dress unambiguously bunched and
disarranged. Beside her, buckling up his suspenders, sat
some fat-witted bedmaster or other with a mouth like a
cigar-fish and a plastic bowtie clipped to one side of his
limp, open collar. Darconville’s student was disconcerted,
it turned out, less for having been nobbled not ten seconds
previous than for another reason; she produced a rat-tail
comb and spoke, apologetically, between shuttles.
“I sure am sorry,” she said, “for not submittin’ my
poetry paper, sir. I clean forgot last week, layin’ off, see,
to bring it by this week, but then what hap—” Robin
hiccuped “—pens? Right. Didn’t I get to ailin’ something
awful, sir? Monthlies. You know? Oops!” Robin’s date,
snapping open an imperial-size can of beer, sucked in half
the can, wheezed manfully and, grinning, lustfully
climped her on the thigh, but she pulled away—a
bobolink sitting beyond a cat’s jump— and continued.
“Point being, I gave out to Dean Barathrum that I’d
finished up my work for graduation, see? And what with
his notions, I mean, uptrippin’ me tellin’ a lie and all? See
what I mean? God, I’m wicked embarrassed!” She
groaned and slapped her head back onto the seat. “The
question is, see, when can I hand it in, bein’ as tomorrow
is Sunday and we all around here”—she gestured
backwards with her comb in the direction of Cagliostro
—”well, we were plannin’ to cut for Richmond, see, I
mean, you dp see, don’t you? Like I say, last week, shoot,
I was all intentions. Then Friday came and—”
“Have you seen Isabel Rawsthorne?” asked
Darconville with tears in his eyes.
The dance, at a discreet interval, was called to a halt.
It was time for some matters of great pith and moment.
The student body president, Miss Xystine Chappelle,
wearing a honeysuckle-colored linsey dress with puffed-
out sleeves and a full-gathered skirt, appeared in a
trembling spotlight. Sweetly, she welcomed everybody
with a prepared speech, fashioning a metaphorical vase,
as it were, into which poetess Iva Ironmonger Dane,
clearing her throat, placed a meditative/descriptive flower
for the whole class entitled “Where?”—a little piece that
ended with a bit of advice:

”Do not follow where the

Path may lead.
Go, instead, where
There is no path
And leave a trail.”
 Commemorations followed. Miss Quinsy—
Hypsipyle Poore herself, escorted by two white-gloved
young men (the others, all watching in silence with
thoughts uniform: no more than the delightful sporting of
the intellect with the flesh that is its master)—was called
upon to do the honors. First, she presented a set of two
walleyed Staffordshire dogs to the class adviser and
assistant dean, Miss Dessicquint, and then the belated
retirement gift of a Jefferson Cup to Miss Thelma Trappe,
not in attendance, and who couldn’t have been reached,
certainly, if upon such a thing depended the volume of
applause. All of this was followed by the Longstreets
ambo who, swaying, sang a duet of “Carry Me Back to
Old Virginny.” The special sentimental finale having
concluded, the young people began to drift away for more
dancing, but wait—who was that puffing in through the
fire-door, shod in sneakers, a flashlight bulging out of his
back pocket?
It was President Greatracks himself who, finger-
popping the inside of his acoustical cheek three or four
times, recommanded everyone’s attention for a sudden,
impromptu speech:
“Here, y’all!” he clapped. “It’s only me who clum up
here, not to preach, not to teach, but only to put in my
jerp’s worth about this here dance, OK? Now, I don’t
want to be accused of bein’ nar-ruh but I’m in charge here
at Quinsy for you outsiders who mayhap have got another
im-pression, your college president, the straw that stirs
the drink! These is facts, in horsetradin’ lingo. I’m feelin’
like a bull moose tonight! And why? Wha? Well, I cain’t
hardly memorize, lemme tell you, the last time I set my
peepers on gals lookin’ so mightily good appearanced,
mmm-mmm! Glo-rious! We folks from the upbrush,
‘course, never had anything near as good a time as this,
bein’ poor as Job’s turkey and all, but then, see, we don’t
count long as y’all in high fettle here at the graduation
dance, hear? Delivered.
“But now pay me some mind: I naturally don’t expect
y’all to be in low cotton tonight, do I, and I want that put
in capitals, see?—yow-ever, I hear tell been some liquor-
tipplin1 going on here, yes? That right? Look around, this
kind of thing prelavent? Huh? That Southern quality? You
been raised up—where, Paree? Babylon, for cry-eye? I
only just now put my hand on one wimpbucket here in his
dang shirttails, I want you to know, walkin’ around
slantindicular and actin’ like a field-nigger at a weekend
funeral! You can wipe off them phony Miss-Little-What-
Me? faces, girls, ‘cause, I can tell you, I been all the way
there and back again! I took him a twist by his ear, that’s
right, and showed him into the middle of next week
where that oP boy goin’ to be wakin’ up famous with the
collywobbles and a nice pro-nounced case of kitney
trouble, bet on it! OK? Now you can set your foot down
on this, people: I ain’t gonna buy this kind of thing! Not
here, not there, not nowhere! You got it?” He pulled his
mouth. “Good, now keep it. I’m hot as a sunburnt sheep
up here, them lights is in-tense and like to give me
pinwheels in the eyeball, and I need me a Co’-Cola.”
There were murmurs. President Greatracks, stepping
down, gulped a cup of punch so quickly it splashed down
his chin and squittered all over the paper tablecloth and
then, making a battery of reluctant handshakes, he drew
out his flashlight, waved it, and went charging back into
battle. Whereupon Xystine Chappelle, as the applause
died down, motioned everyone forward to hold hands and
sing the school song, “Pledge We to You, Quinsy, All Our
Troth.” The lights dimmed, the band again flouted up a
medley of slow uningenious waltzes, and in the semi-
darkness couples once more closed in, groin to groin,
clutching in tenacious spasms of ardor but showing now,
at least it seemed to Mrs. McAwaddle, too much in
vertical behavior of what seemed, clearly, horizontal
intentions. After giving one couple the benefit of the
doubt—had they caught buttons?—she stepped onto the
floor, touched a boy who had his head buried in his
partner’s neck like a hatchet, and whispered too loudly,
“Elbow room!”
Returning to her place, she sought a collaborative
response in the face of the other chaperon, who merely
blinked.
“Elbow room,” repeated Prof. Wratschewe,
interlacing his fingers. “Do you realize, Miz McAwaddle,
that Shakespeare was the first person ever to use that
expression?”
Mrs. McAwaddle was utterly adsorbed.
The clock bonged its lonesome numbers from the
library. Darconville, a multitude of one, had positioned
himself at some distance on a hill rising up toward
Truesleeve dormitory and wished, as he watched the
lights of the college and outlying Quinsyburg below, that
they were the lights of Venice, a city that now seemed
further away in time than in space. The palazzo,
remaining under a writ of quo warranto, was still stuck in
the courts and yet he didn’t care—there was London,
Paris, Rome—as he thought for the first time of going
away, anywhere. The student union, noisy and aglow,
stood below him on the phenomenal level, but what, he
wondered, but where, my interdimen-sional love, shall I
search for you on the noumenal level, down or up? What,
he asked himself, could he want with such a will to want
it? What, he thought, that I need it with such intensity?
Darconville ached, he believed, to know the ineffable
thing-in-itself! I am in love, he thought, with the Ding-an-
Sich! To postulate, yet not perceive: it was a doom that
now began to ask too much of him. O artif actual game!
O artificial pastime! He longed for her, for Isabel, for the
prepredicative heart without which he felt, truthfully, he
couldn’t live, but his knowledge was conscious of its own
insufficiency, a “learned ignorance” to which, even with
the bribe of desperation, truth saw fit to supply little or
nothing, suffering forth only a spate of murderous
questions: what was the part of the subject, the object, in
knowledge? Did man’s limited ability to know necessarily
deform objects according to his own subjective nature?
Was truth the concordance of knowledge with itself or
with that which is? Did we have in all domains of
knowledge the same certitude? Darconville was not even
convinced that the question, whether they were important
questions, was itself an important question. They were
questions, clearly, not to be solved without immortality, in
which state all philosophy was once only one philosophy,
and mortals had only a handful of fragments like puzzle-
pieces to prove it true. Who knows what will happen? Do
we know Who knows but not know what? Perhaps,
thought Darconville, the doubter was the true savant—to
prescind from judgment and know, by default, that which
you wouldn’t judge. There is no Doubt but Doubt, and
Aenesidemus is his prophet!
The trees soughed in several rushes of night wind,
blowing as if off an invisible sea upon which sailed only
that which sailed, was meant to sail, and meaning nothing
more, and Darconville, imagining himself, the while, at
some point in the future recalling this particular moment,
found it restful to think that somewhere some things
existed without significance, without dreams, without
memory. But that was memory, wasn’t it? And what had
memory wrought of joy? Memory wounded. We must
free what we are in time, he thought, from memory and
live toward the future which, second upon second, made
memory irrelevant even if it increased its size!
It was well past midnight now, and the band, at a
primordial pitch, challenged the Quinsy girls, the
drumlike beating in their blood leading with incredible
rapidity to various misadventures. Ariadne Naxos swirled
toilet paper around her and, vamping from one boy to
another, danced her smoldering “Veil of the Béguines.”
Trudy Look-ingglass, having punted away her silk pumps,
sat perched over the balcony dangling one of her garters
and rotating her shoulder à faire provoquer while a dozen
or so boys went scrambling—bookety-bookety!—through
the doorway and up the stairs, howling with
encouragement. Dancing a sexy shuffle on one of the
tables to a clap-chant below, Sabrina Halliburton slowly
hoisted her gown almost to her hips, revealing a pair of
legs smooth and delicious as a pawpaw. And all the while,
her beautiful eyes narrowed in black disapproval,
Hypsipyle Poore watched from a distance, being made no
happier, certainly, by finding her escort, a blond cavalier-
in-uniform from V.M.I., staring at those legs. She puffed
exasperatedly through her nose and shifted position. The
young man, turning to her, asked if anything was wrong.
Hypsipyle merely sighed, loath to establish another’s
credibility by a criticism that could only be misapplied,
for Southern girls, actually, alarm each other quite easily:
such is their homogeneity, in fact, that one’s particular
actions are always another’s in potency, and so, with each
a simulacrum of the next, they must all sustain in constant
reflection what approving of themselves within they must
hate in others without—while the concomitant virtue,
paradoxically, of admiring in another for self-esteem what
the burden should logically reverse is curiously absent. It
is often common for them, in fact, to make friends in
order to avoid enemies, a contradiction, in this instance,
that could no more be eliminated by explanation than it
could be diverted by disapproval or reversed by ruse.
“Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”
Hypsipyle sighed again, looked searchingly into her
escort’s eyes, and leaned over to whisper softly—with a
breath oversweet from pastilles—into the shell of his ear,
“My silk panties are too tight.”
The night grew more perilous as the night grew late,
with passions being fueled by liquor and liquor being
passed around now, openly, like love-philtres at a sabbat.
Alicia Lutesinger, nimptopsical, was skipping in a circle
and swinging by a loop half a six-pack of beer still
attached to its polypropylene zeros. Rebecca Lemp, at her
wit’s end, was losing the grip she had on the shins of her
boyfriend, a big-bellied snewf from Hampden-Sydney
who, goaded on by the rebel yells of his fraternity
brothers, was hanging upsidedown from a balcony in the
Trendelenburg position and trying unsuccessfully to chug-
a-lug the full bottle of grain alcohol that was splashing
below like a fifty-foot waterfall in a loud clapotage. And
of course there were casualties. Olivia Oona Osborne,
going stone cold, suddenly dropped her jaw and her tenth
cup of cheap bourbon and reeled over backwards at the
top of the staircase, the egglike alliteration of her name
matching the echoing wail as she bounced, bum over
beezer, all the way downstairs with a loud dopplerian
“Ooooooooooooo!” And then in perfect sequence came
another crash. Nora Buncle’s date, mousing her thigh,
never knew what hit him—for, unprepared for it, she
squealed and kicked up with a whoop of surprise catching
him a desperate shot full in the corpus spongiosum and,
instantly, he snapped shut into a fierce genupectoral vise,
unflexioned, and then wheeled about and hit the floor
where he lay stiff as a stoolball in the rising fumes of
whiskey and friable bits of glass from the shattered hip-
bottle underneath him.
“O my weak heart!” cried Mrs. McAwaddle,
shrieking in owl-blasted anguish. “Is there a doctor in the
house?”
“House,” said Prof. Wratschewe, reflectively. “You
hear yourself, Mrs. McAwaddle? The most curious
pronunciation in the idiolect of the Virginian. I believe its
phonemic transcription”—he drew signs in a dribble of
spilled whiskey—”is best rendered /h3ous/. Hoose: the
voice hoots.” He looked up. “Mrs. McAwaddle?”
But she was in the powder room, gulping a handful of
strain-abaters.
Meanwhile, Darconville had decided he could wait
no longer. And although he could not shake off the
feeling that his soul had become a drifting multiplicity
without any nucleus—indeed, he began furtively trying to
annihilate with his imagination his very life there—he
walked down the hill from Truesleeve and around to the
front of the student union. Three pale roreres from the
University of Virginia, all wearing varsity shirts and
nothing else, stood on the landing outside chanting
“Wahoo-Wa! Wahoo-Wa! Wahoo-Wa!” and then wended
their spiflicated way, arm in arm, down the front steps
beside which some poor child, pinching her nose
clothespin-fashion and urging her sick self forward,
doubled up like a foot-rule and passed out. The campus
police were called in, and after searching the grounds,
strewn everywhere with gartering, inkles, nonesopretties,
and gloves, they marched the drunks they collared and the
vandals they nabbed right over to the chaperons.
Mrs. McAwaddle, all in a dither, hadn’t appeared on
the steps ten seconds before Darconville stopped her
short. Please, had she seen Isabel Rawsthorne?
Anywhere? No, he knew she hadn’t attended the —But
Mrs. McAwaddle, her dead turquoises clicking, squeezed
his hand, told him to be calm, and reassured him: Isabel
wasn’t ill, no, and in fact that very afternoon had been
over to the registrar’s office. Although Darconville had
more questions, she stopped his lips with a finger and
turned momentarily elsewhere.
The police, inquisitively shining flashlights at thirty
or so college identity cards all at once, were trying to
prevail on Mrs. McAwaddle to help them match owners
to face. It must have been a frightful day for her, thought
Darconville, as she seemed to have nothing left. It was
only partially true, however, for in spite of the furor there,
Mrs. McAwaddle, having excused herself to Darconville
more to deliberate her response to him than anything else,
had bad news—how could she tell him that the girl he
loved had cashed in her three Fs, one D, and an
Incomplete for a job in support of which she, Mrs.
McAwaddle, had only that afternoon, begged for it,
written a letter of recommendation? Isabel, going home,
was to take a job as a telephone operator. She had flunked
out. The ball was over.
 And, somehow, Darconville knew it.
“The grades, why I couldn’t half understand them.
But they weren’t good, I’m afraid. They weren’t”—Mrs.
McAwaddle, closing her eyes, shock-absorbed his
unbelief—”sufficient?”
The moonlight whitened the grounds. He crossed the
dark street, the dead sound of his footsteps making his
heart feel desolate and empty. Crickets stopped chirping
as he passed. There was no one in sight as he left the area
of the student union, where the dance had broken up. The
long year, soon finished, was on his mind. At once he
pitied Isabel, and then never had he felt less inquisitive,
less concerned, for the hopelessness of it all and the
questions asked that never seemed to have answers,
adequate or enough. He was tempted to walk forward,
past his house and past the town, and let the whole thing
go, disposed to let the night fall about him in that place of
memory and seal the dwelling shut.
The beech trees and maples whispered overhead. An
owl hooted. And he began to feel that he himself shared
those nocturnal movements and sounds, that he was no
stranger among them but rather a secretive and lonely
earth-life removed from self-respect, an incompetent at
fostering hope in another, and a would-be lover open to
the whimseys of what he’d never understand. He passed
by the low brick wall in front of Fitts—how many times
that day had he done so?— where over the doorway, set
some thirty feet back, the front lamp was lit. Darconville
stopped, and his leg jumped as he looked. He looked
again. He dropped low and cocked his head to spy into a
serendipity he wouldn’t yet believe. A figure was
standing in the morning-glory vines.
 The night itself seemed to hold its breath. Darconville
moved closer, not daring to turn salutation into irruption,
drawn only toward the luminous darkness that revealed
her golden hair and flesh as white as elder pith, and
extending his hand he heard only a slight exhalation. Was
it a sigh for a yes, a sigh for a no, or a sigh for an I-can’t-
bear-it? The figure stepped forward once, the moisture in
her throat moving to her eyes, clear as the tears of a
penitent. They did not demand, or plead, but simply said
understand me, please understand me?
And they turned into the parlor, Darconville and the
girl who, as she turned, left behind in the shadows her
suitcase the color of the dented blue car (a guitar in the
back seat) that suddenly roared up there and waited in
front, waited for five minutes in front, then waited in front
no longer but, blowing a sneer on its horn, disappeared on
a furious curvet into the night.
“Forgive me?” asked Darconville to Isabel. “I know
not what I did.”
Adversity always made him epigrammatic.

XLIII

The Unfortunate Jilts

Little pitchers have wide ears.

—GEORGE HERBERT
 LORETTA BOYCO pressed in another piece.
Clapping her hands, Harriet Bowdler squealed in
excitement and reached for another bottle of grape soda.
The puzzle was hah0 done. Left on the shelf, so to speak,
while the others did the sprint, the two seniors, wearing
quilted housecoats and scuffie-wuffies, had spent the
evening of the graduation dance in a sitting room off the
front parlor of Fitts. What fun!
The girls, earlier, had bathed, creamed their faces,
twirled up their hair, and together gone to the front desk
to sign out the puzzle—it had a hermeneutic theme, one
of the many donated to the college by the Southern
Baptist Outreach Association, and was entitled: The
Rivalry of the Brothers Absalom and Ammon. They had
worked on it all evening. And now they sat, cross-legged,
first trying this, then trying that from the mess of little
pieces left on the floor and nibbling from the bag of
sweetchews they brought along for reinforcement. They’d
done the edges, of course, the easiest part, and were just
starting on the sky, always the hardest.
It was late, with Harriet and Loretta fingering a few
last nookshotten pieces, when, alerted by a noise, Loretta
quickly put her finger to her lips as a sign for silence.
Closing their eyes, they listened: those were voices.
Loretta, unable to control it, squelched juice from the
candy in her mouth, when Harriet, midway across the
room on tiptoe, turned and gritted her teeth to chastise her
—and then continued in high exaggerated steps to the
door of the front parlor where she peered through the
keyhole.
There stood a couple facing each other, talking.
 XLIV

Heroic Couplet

Much speche they ther expoun of druries greme and

grace.
—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

DARCONVILLE
Your hand is of a temperature, my love,
As to persuade me now against my hope
That you, indeed, must hate me always—
(pause)
If I hadn’t but been promised otherwise
With what life and limb I still believe.
I love you. I can tell you that again.
ISABEL
You put it well, but then you always do.
DARCONVILLE
I shouldn’t then, and always shouldn’t?
Stammer no such words? Pouch up my mouth?
And stand away from love as best I can,
Mum like Mumphezard, hanged for saying nothing?
I have questions that outnumber themselves.
ISABEL
You can be as cold as winter light—
DARCONVILLE
A light, then, very like your hand.
ISABEL
—or mild and warm, exactly as you choose.
DARCONVILLE (ironic bow)
As my crippled heart wills, you mean.
That logical distinction serves more true
In choice or will (or is and seem!)
For, tell me, when is not, with both, one first
That mistakenly seems joint with the other?
(pause)
I fixed upon your hand just now with guile
And you addressed with passion, nothing less,
For can one better greet what turns a smile
From hot to cold than that which turns it so?
Who in sorrow speaks of choice? O cruel!
For you, to make your absence now a studied one?
For me, to take it so to win myself
What proverbs like to call a fonder heart?
I pray I’m less a blackguard than a fool,
Yet here I spy an artifice in art:
For on Love’s sweetest arrow’s tipped a dart.
But when with passion, please, had choice to do
Which, improvising, turns and turns and turns about
To disavow methodically that pleasure for this pain?
No matter now: my mind begins to shout.
So here, Necessity, allow what more weeks will.
I’ll be resigned to play it well until
I’m told to shift about a mood again.
I see, if I’m to keep my love for you,
(moves closer)
I may, I must, I can, I will, I do.
ISABEL
You are more and more to me a stranger.
DARCONVILLE
 “What a strange man is Chichikov,” thought
Tententikov.
“What a strange man is Tententikov,” thought
Chichikov.
ISABEL (almost inaudibly)
And sometimes you’re—you’re frightening.
DARCONVILLE
Yes? Is it so? Or does it simply seem?
Does passion invigorate expression, then, to grimace?
Why then surely here it greets itself—
Think, however, not so with surprise,
For passion passion meets with a rolling in the eyes.
It cues its own posture over nothing in fact,
And though a comrade it wants, a double in spleen,
It self-begets selves unnaturally
And worships what cannot be put in a creed,
Yet wants when it isn’t what it wants to be.
The nature of passion’s the nature of strife, as well,
Where in thinking a thought it makes it a deed;
Who can actually speak of its brutish routine?
When it is what it wants then it’s also in hell.
Between passion and another way of life
There is no question of choice at all—
Only between passion sought and madness seen;
Its heights are high, from heights we fall.
True enough, indeed, but more truth worth.
Passion and madness are one regardless, quite:
The putting off of both, this desperate relation,
Is as much an accident as their birth.
But madness holds fast with no end in sight,
While passion’s a mock, a spoof of duration.
The triumph of passion is found in its defeat;
And victory’s won by honest love’s retreat.
 (pause)
The defeat of passion, just between us, is inevitable.
ISABEL (archly)
It seems we know what’s between us, then.
DARCONVILLE
Or between you and anyone else.
ISABEL (her scar whitening)
Yes? Yes? Tell me more.
(pause)
You can make so much of what’s never been done,
Raising up issues like raising the dead!
You can make a person feel ever so small!
You always never stop writing a book in your head!
I promise I’ve nothing to tell you at all.
You can make a trifling relation with anyone—
DARCONVILLE
Or someone.
ISABEL
Or someone, yes, if you insist on that.
DARCONVILLE
Although it could be anyone, yes?
This to clarify: for since no one is anyone,
Until of course he’s someone, see,
Why then someone is equal to one and won
(shrugs)
And everyone else can anyone be.
ISABEL
What are you saying?
DARCONVILLE
I hear a footfall in my head, moving in circles.
ISABEL
I hear whispers that girls exchange in rooms,
Of jealousy, scorn, reproaches, and hate,
Injuries, words of deceit, matters of doom.
DARCONVILLE (to himself)
And early believe what never comes too late?
ISABEL
I don’t believe everything I hear.
DARCONVILLE
But judge, is it possible otherwise? I’d know
Of that wily mouse that breeds in a cat’s ear.
I smell reformationists
(pause)
And betrayal.
(pause)
You weep at the word? It’s that accurate?
ISABEL
There may be someone here. Outside.
DARCONVILLE (darkly)
The devil.
ISABEL
You frighten me, you frighten me.
DARCONVILLE
The creature causes what affects you still.
I say I love; you stall.
Why are you troubled? Have you felt ill?
ISABEL
No.
DARCONVILLE
Not ill, is it, because not at all?
(pause)
There is something I must ask you now:
Has anything happened, intentionally or not,
Whereby you should suspect I do not love you?
ISABEL (lowers eyes)
No.
 DARCONVILLE
Brief.
ISABEL
Too brief is what you mean, isn’t it, and
You’ll insist on that, won’t you, forever and ever?
Just absolutely forever and ever, won’t you!
A stupid victory is what you want.
DARCONVILLE
I want you
And would only ask the same of you for me.
ISABEL (pleading)
I want you to know I want what you want
When you may want to think I want what I don’t.
DARCONVILLE
Dark. As a thief s pocket.
ISABEL (twicking her thumbs)
I want to be safe. I can’t say it any better, I can’t think
anymore, I feel something will happen to me, I failed my
courses and now have to take a terrible job, I have no
friends but you, and you’ll go away, I know you will, I
would want to go with you but couldn’t, I know, what
bothers me is missing you and wanting to be with you,
like everyone does, yes, I appreciate you trying to find out
what’s wrong with me, most people wouldn’t do that,
which is why I’m afraid of them, and, O, I know I’m
lucky about so many many things and shouldn’t be sad, I
know that, but then I think of all the wasted opportunities
in my life and begin to believe I actually deserve so much
trouble for that and all the unhappiness I’ve caused in the
past—
DARCONVILLE (swallowing)
The past?
(pause)
I feel about me the presence of something
Not of this world, a bleak forbidden remnant
Standing in this room.
ISABEL (stirs up)
In this room?
DARCONVILLE
A shadow.
ISABEL (frightened)
A shadow?
DARCONVILLE
I hear a perfect echo, making dialogue a mock.
It now arises you must tell me what
Not asked would truly send me mad, in shock.
Please don’t give to me an answer, though,
Born of a desire less than mine,
No answer of deliberation, nor answer fine,
I beg you neither from a page of fairy,
Fantasy, silly fescue, or of formal wit,
Your name below a paraph lovely writ
That might distract me from a truth you owe.
But only give to me an answer. So.
(pause)
Speak it plain. Are you in love with Govert?
(shaking uncontrollably, Isabel cries out)
I have named the name then? Govert.
The simple truth, miscalled simplicity.
ISABEL
You simply do not understand.
DARCONVILLE
I think I’ve not been asked to understand.
ISABEL
The person that you mentioned—
DARCONVILLE
 Govert.
ISABEL
Govert, yes! Govert van der Slang! I do not love him!
I do not! I do not! I do not! I never did!
(pause)
A few years ago, that family moved down the road
from us to a farm at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains,
in Fawx’s Mt, as you know. It’s hard to recollect how I—.
I remember only seeing them at school, the boys, well,
not all of them, I don’t know. I would just visit Zutphen
Farm, they were like a family to me, but what does it
matter anyway? I guess I—pitied Govert, who was the
outsider of the family and different; no one understood
him or cared or took the time to listen to him, no, not his
mother and his father was always somewhere else. They
ridiculed his music, he plays the guitar, and so I tried to
do what little I could, although I know what you’re going
to think, but it’s not true and never was. So anyway he
depended on me, I guess, and I grew closer to him and he
to me because his brother, more successful supposedly,
were never at home eidier but were always away at—
(pause)
sea.
DARCONVILLE
That would be the coast guard?
ISABEL
The navy.
DARCONVILLE
In which case, you didn’t see any of them.
ISABEL
Not when they didn’t visit.
DARCONVILLE
 Which however they sometimes did and sometimes
do?
(pause)
Come, any news nourishes the gnawer of himself.
ISABEL
Sometimes, yes.
DARCONVILLE
Whereupon you knew it. You are close to this family.
ISABEL (softly)
I would say—I don’t know.
DARCONVILLE (ruefully)
Every division of a line produces another line.
(pause)
My God, will jealousy make questions of itself?
I’m deuce-eyed. I’m shillaber and shaman.
I never metamorphosis I didn’t like.
Creeps in the dusk, it’s true, before
One begins to look about for it.
I can imagine lovers trooping out
To you in afternoons of any weather,
Stealing as they did in Sparta old,
Legally, carelessly, and turning me, dumb,
Beruffianized, an out-fooled fool, sold,
The stupid, unpiperly make-bate I’ve become.
They come to kneel before you, penitential,
Or crouch in the spawl and wood and bits!
I flash a light and look to see lice—
Then look again and find their nits!
Look! Trillions of them, fawning and bowed!
The color of their eyes? Bice. Bice.
(pause, to himself savagely)
Will many be burnt? Crowds. Crowds.
ISABEL
Dreams! Dreams! You talk like a book!
DARCONVILLE
I promise you, I am no dreamer,
For destiny will pass the dreamer by,
Because for nothing ever does he ask
But sits at peace within his very dream;
Whereas, you see, it must be more than clear
That even on a night as this one is
I would freely barter all my soul,
My body, mind, and disappointed hands
To free a mere smile in your lovely face.
But can’t you see that? Can’t you tell?
(pause)
What then, pray, has he to do with dreams
Who wakes away the night he wants to see
In sleep alone: but sleep alone so deems
The restful dreams I see it keeps from me.
I can report what takes the place of dreams:
Red magic, a witch that’s howling a filthy cry,
Helldogs barking in contrapuntal,
A taloned pig that slits its throat to die!
I fear in the night what’s always the same
And descry through the darkness, coming frontal,
Suddenly poising to squat on my chest,
Its eyes dirty gems, its sticky wings high,
A grinning monstrosity that’s flown up from hell
To rasp in my ears one word, only “Govert!”
“Govert!” it rasps; it rasps again “Govert!”
It queaks. It spits. It chatters in fits.
The image will harden and then be dispelled.
I reach to throttle what disappears;
In midstroke, there, I swipe at its face
And there again, again, the same face sits!
It forks out a tongue it wimbles in hate—
In a rush of murder I behead only space.
(pause)
The noctambule? The thing doesn’t stay.
It recedes of course like its antitype true
To some grey shoreline of fierce unrest
And out on the Straits of Lurking abides
Where, if a vow will bind in the modern world
And luck of design a residue, test
Me by holy relic and then by oath
If someday I don’t contrive to meet both.
ISABEL
That “someday” has a cruel ring to it.
DARCONVILLE
Cruel to devildom, sweet frail?
(pause)
There is irony, the figure of speech
Which spits like a bivalve from its cackpipe.
I have an enemy, lady.
(pause)
Forgive me. That dissatisfacts.
ISABEL
He—
(pause)
—is not your enemy.
DARCONVILLE
He is not my enemy, and I am Jack Ketch:
And that is two lies, to tell the truth.
(pause)
But there is, I see, Dutch comfort either way.
It is you for safety, me for fright—
And yet a fear my rashness renders lax,
For with gimp-legged Vulcan I would limp tonight,
Hobble out on stilts like poor Amphionax,
Sit along the yawning edge of hell
Lest otherwise in safety’s reasoned spell
Or in the bland assurances of tidiness
A sacrifice of limit be imposed on us.
But then do we then balance each other so well
That as one of us must love the more
One of us shall love the less?
Does here some existential burden sore—
Fidelity, it seems—frighten you so much?
That you must tempt me with a fruit
That I can never touch? But always need?
Shall love then die as dreams that die
With the very sleep they feed?
Shall I please to love you then
Just enough that I don’t tell you so,
A mysterious veil concealing my face,
My hidden face concealing its thoughts,
With each of us destined so to live
As if the other, not won by love but caught,
Knew nothing whatsoever of its grace?
(pause)
This is this, then, and that is that.
It is as the unmanipulable moon to the fixed
Eye of my indivinable cat.
ISABEL
O this is—! I said nothing, I admit,
Because you’d seek what was no worth to know,
To rehearse each moment, to analyze all,
And inquire, inquire, and then inquire more!
DARCONVILLE
It was not that you didn’t say anything;
You may have said two different things, you see,
Of unsimilar worth but at a similar time,
As astrologers will to kings and zanies
Mutter forth one horoscope for both.
The tragic fault, perhaps, is—what?
(pause)
Doubtless. That indeed they both inquired,
And more inquired, and inquired so again:
Cast our nativities, Chaldean!
Is it pleasure that awaits? Or pain?
ISABEL
I cannot answer everything you ask:
Who learns all of everything that’s sought?
DARCONVILLE
But for me, sage, only this unmask:
Has anything happened, intentionally or not,
Whereby you should suspect I do not love you?
ISABEL
No.
DARCONVILLE
Considered, declared, exclaimed, indeed. But meant?
How so, if once again flits out at night
That sudden and unholy bat-eared pervert
Whose boisterous face out-blackens black itself
And caws at me repeatedly the curse of “Govert!”
ISABEL
You’re raving, just as if it so fell out
You lost yourself and lost, as claimed, not me.
DARCONVILLE
I’ve watched madness too long untransfigured in face
And to you here confess that evil, defined,
Is more than that which so cruelly distorts;
Whoso allows distortion is evil in kind.
So to the transition that must follow suit:
How in method illogic a cruel fact can disport,
Where’s found consolation in murdered grace
And fate is unshaped at the branch and the root.
For this I believe, that you wanted to find,
Or felt that finding was needful for you,
Some faithless transgression you feared in mind,
And, finding, confirmed what most you’d rue.
Thus knowledge is bought of a certain kind:
The suspension which kills is killed instead
And respite’s achieved in the midst of dread.
(pause)
Our first desire is what will last.
ISABEL
And the future’s only memory
If we don’t overcome the past.
DARCONVILLE
Perhaps. And yet I must pause in reflection to ask
Whether me you consider as future or past
And how just continuance must keep me so
If on me the former you now do bestow.
And yet there’s another who must feel the same:
A face I don’t know, but a name I can name.
ISABEL
Why, why must you raise an issue that’s dead,
Never really begun, and I’ve told you so!
Must you hate someone you don’t even know?
DARCONVILLE
The countercheck quarrelsome won’t save his head
(pause)
I could—
ISABEL
O say it! Whatever it is will please you, I think!
DARCONVILLE
If my delight be the cause of your wrath
Why is not, let me ask, this sorrow I feel
An equal occasion of your solace, pray?
(pause)
And counterpart Govert? I don’t hate him, no,
Though not because my soul wouldn’t try,
For seeing me here he surely would know
My own mirror-image at seeing him so;
And what here’s said he too could simply say:
“There but for the grace of you go I.”
And so this irony that irony compounds
As echoes will echo with the same resound.
ISABEL
It’s foolish this—and only sorrow brings.
You were a monk? Then let me say right now,
Better that monks should analyze such things.
DARCONVILLE (soberly)
That’s a secret no one knows but us,
To the keeping of which you gave your solemn vow.
And no one else will hear of it, I trust.
ISABEL
O how can this suffering come to an end?
DARCONVILLE
When not me, but Govert, is only a friend.
ISABEL
This rival, know, has sanction none from me.
DARCONVILLE
So from all rivals am I then set free?
(pause)
No, fairness, we’ll see what waits in store,
To accept whatsoever fate will be ours.
If love, then love. There’s need of no more.
But if to our lot a passion brief does fall
 Where as rubies rare brought side to side
We gleam to the bad and each other do stain,
You and I will win experience unique,
Finding gain is loss and loss the only gain
And then to lose again what’s found in pain
And for a lifetime merely seek to seek.
Passion’s a bondage where’s no planned release;
You will the pacific, until you’ve found peace.
A simulacrum of love, so from it estranged,
Passion’s the madness that is not deranged.
ISABEL
I don’t understand you so much of the time.
In all human actions are there reasons and rime?
Then why do my grandest hopes also impart
This fear in my soul which puts fear in my heart:
That vision is faulty when vision’s sublime.
DARCONVILLE
If words were threads those very ones could weave
A perfect shroud for the corpse you’ve made, now
leave.
(pause)
I will neither tilt with reason nor defend to you
The use to which are put to solve or appease
Matters too complex you say for minds to see,
But if you leave tonight with any reason true,
Please God, search for a reason other than me,
And if it’s true you don’t love me, then please
Don’t hate me enough to tell me you do.
ISABEL (with strange vagueness)
My departure tonight I think is best for all,
To dream away what dreams cannot be seen
And live in sleep, in sleep to find my ease:
There heights are scaled, but one can never fall.
 And this will sound foolish to you, I know,
To pretend I’ve found some fairy forest green
Where as a solitary princess, through the trees
I’d wander—
(pause, embarrassed)
O, I only want to be safe!
DARCONVILLE
Say no more to it then, if more you can.
You put in six words the epitaph of man.

XLV

Sounds of the Fundament

If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this

world,
let him become a fool, that he may be wise.
—I Corinthians 3:18

THE PARLOR DOOR suddenly flew open.

It was an errand of mercy, anybody could see that, as
Mistresses Boyco and Bowdler, quillbristled in curlers,
came pittypatting into the room and stood by Isabel,
hovering over her like ministering angels. Homely,
angular Loretta Boyco lapwinged down beside her and
solicitously took her hand while Harriet Bowdler,
smoothing the nap of her buffy white nightie, turned her
trout’s eyes toward Darconville with a lot less tenderness:
talking was one thing, but this child had been weeping!
Confusion gave way to consensus. The fellowshippers
smiled at each other knowingly, and then Loretta said to
Isabel, “Why don’t you take up all your troubles, put
them in a big oP tow sack and give them over to Jesus?”
“We did,” quacked Harriet, looking beatific.
“Amen,” added Loretta.
Darconville asked: “Do you know this girl?”
“I’ve seen you in P.E., right?” said Harriet to Isabel
who, bent over almost double, almost exanimate, didn’t
respond one way or the other. Harriet looked up at
Darconville. “We’ve howdied, but we haven’t shook.”
She closed her eyes. “I know the characteristics of the
unconverted heart.”
“It is prone to error,” said Loretta.
“Idleness, tippling, profanity.”
“And contention.”
“ ‘My sin is ever before me, neither is there rest in
my bones because of sin,’ “ quoted Harriet Bowdler.
Darconville sighed. He felt tired, unsplendid, and
null, bewildered by this visitation and divided as to
whether he should just apologize to everyone and leave or
stay there and somehow try to give honorable and ethical
form to something that had ended as abruptly as a page
torn in half. Instead, he stepped back as the girls
administered to Isabel—two Serbs, one beautiful Croat—
with a vocabulary of Bible gems and the slightly
dictatorial attitude that vigorous religious conviction
curiously assumes, especially in the proving, preaching,
and perfricative mind of the Pentecostal. Like
fundamentalists, like poppies, thought Darconville: the
more they are trodden on, the more they flourish.
 I will not ridicule them, he determined, for he
himself, he knew, had accomplished nothing in the way of
helping Isabel and felt that nothing accomplished left
everything therefore to be. Further, was it not said that
God often wished His glory to appear in the dulling of the
wise, in the fall of the mighty, in the bewilderment of the
alert? And so he kept to the shadows, an outlaw,
logiciannaire, the acute and distinct Arminius.
Although a crescent moon could still be seen through
the window of Fitts, the pale traces of early morning just
touched the lower sky on the eastern outskirts of
Quinsyburg, out toward Richmond. Darconville went to
the window, the mild breeze through the rapfull curtains
cooling his brow and in a semi-arrested, inefficient state
closed his eyes as he listened to Harriet Bowdler—Loretta
had momentarily disappeared—supplicating with Isabel
to accept Christ Jesus and be “bom again” lest,
unconverted, she die unredeemed and so caper about for
eternity like the maroonest devils in hell, the particular
area, Darconville knew, which the evangelical mind took
to be God’s chiefest handiwork.
As he listened, he wondered. Was it all so simplistic
and dim? It was and it wasn’t, thought the divided self.
Darconville the rationalist: reality was not thinkable but
in relation to an activity by means of which it becomes
thinkable. Darconville the nominalist: but wasn’t truth
suprarational? Incommunicable in the language of
reason? Analyze, analyze, analyze! Isabel was correct.
Surely one must enter love with a degree of folly which
he can deceive and so, by deceiving, make wise. That was
wisdom. I must become a fool, thought Darconville, I
who have been so vain to know.
 Suddenly, Loretta Boyco came padding back into the
parlor and, smiling (a bit manically), short-armed each of
them with a pamphlet —copies of “Glints from My
Mirror” by W. C. Cloogy, Evangelist. Harriet then quickly
dink-toed over to whisper something to Loretta, whose
eyes, as she listened, shut tightly in holy mirth. And then
she clapped! Would they both come to church tomorrow,
it being Sunday, asked Loretta, to see Rev. Cloogy? To
know him? asked Harriet. To hear him? asked Loretta. An
opportunity, Harriet breathlessly assured them—rising
and shaking a finger like Jael wagging a tentnail —that
may be given to them only once! The accusative/dative,
thought Darconville: the Accusation that is a Gift.
But to the Baptist church? That was a kind of
Accusative of Place to Which, thought Darconville, with
himself the object, and he almost smiled, reflecting on
how, formerly, it would have taken a miracle of the first
rank for him even to acknowledge the existence of that
steeple-hatted communion of nescients and nincompoops
called Baptists, a religion, broadly, only by reason of
numbers and the obfusc light of twentieth-century lamps.
He looked at Isabel. But she sat silent: in fact, somehow
removed from it all, she seemed, the princesse lointaine,
to enjoy the efforts of those two dumbledores attentively
buzzing around her. In any case, perhaps a miracle was
necessary to bring them together. For where had facts got
them? And in how many a holy synaxarion had he read as
a youth of even greater wonders—of dearths forestalled,
serpents extirpated, rods embudded, courtesans converted,
fluxes cured, tyrants mortified, cadavers translated, and,
yes, minds completely changed! Darconville didn’t know
what to say. He looked at Loretta, who stood with her hip
sprung out. Well? He looked at Harriet, who folded her
arms and asked again. Would they come? Ordinarily not
given to habits of sudden adaption, Darconville
nevertheless again heard sounded the depths of his own
spiritual bankruptcy and intellectual obstinacy, and so just
when one girl, again, was about to echo her coreligionist’s
question, he who had come within a finger-breadth of
saying no turned thereupon and said, “Yes.”
Struck like a duck in thunder, Loretta Boyco
suddenly gooched Harriet Bowdler in the ribs and,
shooting their hands up, both hysterically shrieked,
“Praise the Lord!”
The town of Quinsyburg still slumbered. It was quite
early yet, and, though on the horizon the edge of dawn
promised to widen, the greyish darkness held. It had been
one of the longest nights of his life, and that he’d survived
it seemed to Darconville a miracle in its own right. He
crossed the Quinsy lawns and, exhausted, came to his
house. He entered and pulled the bolt; it syllabified a
dactyl—mlr a. k’l!
It was only then, dragging himself wearily up the
flight of stairs that creaked with the pain that doubled
them up in the middle, that Darconville realized the
implications of his promise to go to the Wyanoid Baptist
Church, a perturbation of spirit weighing on him not so
much for the denomination as for another fact, suddenly
remembered, that no miracle of Christ’s ever took place in
the Temple of Jerusalem.

XLVI
 The Wyanoid Baptist Church

One can know what God is not; one cannot know

what He is.
—St. AUGUSTINE

THE WYANOID BAPTIST CHURCH—a box-

shaped affair surrounded by catbriars and scrubby,
asymmetrical rows of chinabeny trees—stood on the main
street. There was a faint odor of mundungus in the
Sunday morning air, but the sun shone brightly. Southern
Baptists, who had separated from their Northern
counterparts in 1845, were generally to be found a
congregation of thin-lipped believers in immersion,
closed communion, and total teetotalism, and, while it did
not share his own ancient religion’s boast eternal of
semper eadem—neither was it, at once, holy, catholic, and
apostolic— Darconville, standing on the front steps there,
turned his back on the history of sacrilege in its shingles
and determined to try to be more altruistic.
The parishioners, stepping out of their old
automobiles and dented pickup trucks, all had something
flat about them, and as they walked into church, moved,
each, perhaps by the thought of future glory which he or
she fought in himself as too worldly and so rechristened
duty, the mood was made manifest in the general
soberness of appearance. It was all flat. They had flat
heads, flat shoes, flat chests, flat faces, flat clothes, and
flat, very flat voices.
Darconville felt a bit guilty for such prejudgments
and vowed, with a smile, to discontinue “satirizing,” the
penance for which the great medieval Church of Rome
prescribed twelve genuflections at every canonical hour,
three hundred blows with a leather cat, and a cross-vigil.
At that very moment two black girls, wearing their
Sunday best, hesitated in front of the church, when
suddenly a sanctimonious busybody with pegged teeth
came running down the front stairs, took them by the
shoulders, and, smacking through a hole of lipstick, told
them they shouldn’t be there, should they, that they had
their own church, hadn’t they, and that they knew that
very well, didn’t they, mmm? The girls, wounded, looked
past the woman to Darconville and hurried away. The
woman’s face stank with virtue, he thought, as his own
inaction stank with vice, but what could he do? There was
nothing to be done, he reasoned, that would actually do
anything, for we are renegades all, he thought, unfair
each, every one a fool. What ever changed? The blacks
are the invisibles of the whites. The poor are the wealth of
the rich—but the thought, swiftly addressed by some
words of St. Paul, only reflected the madness of all men:
“For that which I do, I allow not; for what I would, that
do I not; but what I hate, that do I.” Slowly, it came to
him that the enemy of Christ was not the atheist but rather
the bankrupt Christian, and with great disappointment he
soon felt part of all he heard and what he saw, for he
himself was how it was, overwhelmed in the the of being
there and making not a jot of difference by the fact. And
then, as recognition caught hold of remorse, he suddenly
realized that it had been on this very spot not a year ago
that, speaking to Miss Trappe, he had smugly assured
himself that the price for privacy was anonymity. And O,
how anonymous he had become! Buffoon of my own
ruins, thought Darconville, miscalled Quinsyburg! I have
become what I am!
Then, there was Isabel. The flower-de-luce looked
pale from little sleep but no less beautiful than ever, her
hair pulled back à la vierge, her fingers playing high in a
little resigned wave. She managed a small smile. The sun
seemed to be shining out of her rather than onto her, a fact
confirmed now in the semi-darkness as they entered the
church. Isabel remarked the dry, punkwoody, almost tense
smell reaching throughout the place. “Schism,” said
Darconville.
There was no altar. It was a neo-funeral-home décor
with faked stained-glass and buckets of ferns and tubs of
cycads placed around the enormous stage up front in the
middle of which was a high rostrum which held a gigantic
red-leather Bible, its silk purple page-marker hanging out
like a weary tongue. The two of them sat down
immediately to find staring at them from the reserved
seats at the side of the stage a group that looked less like
the officials of a church synod than the botched
supernumeraries from the Bosch Bearing of the Cross: a
row of sour elders, civic schmalkaldics, and scowling
proto-puritans swollen with the honor of wardenship. As
the choir began its first hymn, “My Lord Our Pinkies
Nice Can Tweak,” Darconville hoped he didn’t know
what to expect but rather expected he did, only too well.
He recalled, for instance, one particular night the
previous winter when, called upon for it, he had gone
over to Dr. Dodypol’s house to cheer him up but, when he
arrived, found that little fellow reeling around drunk as a
lord, his lower lip hanging so low it looked as if he were
wearing a turtleneck sweater. The Piggly Wiggly had
been closed six hours or so and his wife hadn’t yet come
home. It had grown later and later when Dr. Dodypol,
fidimplicitary no more, burst into a crazy fit of laughter
and with one low wheeple from the throat asked, “What
does one need more than anything else in the world?” But
when his visitor quite properly answered love, the poor
poet, murderously squeezing his glass into a fist of bits,
squawked, “For Mrs. Dodypol, I could make it air!”—
and then passed out. Darconville had covered him with a
blanket, he remembered, and, watching guard, turned on
the television set. Network programming had just ended.
At that instant, however, morning devotions—”Nitey Nite
Necessities” or something like that—slotted in, a quiet
organ Schlummerlied in the background supplying
inspiration, when suddenly an aggrieved clerical demivir
dropped, ripe as a medlar, into the nasty little orchard that
was everyone’s life. Looking up from his busy ministerial
desk, the evangelist swung off his glasses—candor—and
immediately began gasconading about this here being the
free-est country on earth and, friend, the most decent, an
assertion he underscored with the unusually colorful
heresies, explicitly implied, that Christ had signed the
Declaration of Independence, personally translated Robert
E. Lee’s horse, “Traveler,” to the reaches of heaven, and
was temporarily living in Crozet, Virginia (not
uncoincidentally the preacher’s hometown), where,
carpentering a new church, He might be very, very
pleased if one morning, you pick it, neighbor, He
sauntered down the hill to find five dollars tucked into his
R.F.D. mailbox just so’s He could see to that new
weatherproof siding! And tenpenny nails! And heating
ducts! And ten dollars would buy twice as much! And
twenty, why, four times that! An address for mailing was
flashed on the screen, not before, however, those out there
in televisionland were sent scurrying for a pencil. The
preacher then flipped open his Bible, raced through a text,
kissed the page, and then with his head lowered— caught
looking up, his eyes custodiously emended—he slowly
metamorphosed into a flapping Old Glory upon which
was superimposed a montage, in sequence, of cumulus
clouds, a squadron of jets, grannies-at-prayer, the
murmuring pines and the hemlocks, a towheaded tiny
licking a raindrop from her nose, the fruited plains, and,
finally, the Raising of the Flag at Iwo Jima, this
accompanied all the while by the crescendo of an out-of-
tune choir humming “I Love to Steal Awhile Away,” after
which a thunderclap and then the basso profundo voice of
God the Father demoting from on high, “I Am with You
Always, Even Unto the End of the World!” At which
point, miraculously, Dr. Dodypol rose on a drunken
elbow, claimed that was only the voice of a fat man
bellowing into an empty keg, and then fell back again
unconscious.
“May the Lord love you reeeeal good!”
It was the heartfelt, if ungrammatical, wish of
welcome boomed over a microphone—and suddenly
waking Darconville to where he was—by a jug-eared
rapscallion wearing a string-tie, a raspberry shirt, and a
woefully carpentered hairstyle. Clamor flew with huge
flapping wingclaps from wall to wall. The service was
ready to begin.
“I come up here”—he wiped his nose on his sleeve
and, snuffling, grinned—”I come up here in front of all
you good folks and feller Christians to welcome you to
our sixth-in-a-row doorbuster revival Sunday, is what it
is, with the world-famous man, evangelist, and pastor of
the Wyanoid Baptist Church, Dr. W. C. Cloogy, who you
gonna see in jess a minute, but first—”
Doctor? Doctor? Darconville was surprised, but then
understood: for what preacher, teacher, or sinister minister
could ever course among his flock peddling his scriptural
exta and exegetical guesswork without the security of
some kind of honorific, unfurled over him like an
umbrella? Doctor was the favorite. Reverend would do.
Saint was too pretentious, Kalokagathiate not true. Arch-
Rabbi was impossible. Misters just abound. And, finally,
Metropolitan had a European sound.
The interlocutor, meanwhile, asking for everyone’s
undivided attention, went straight into the preliminary
segment of the program. Darconville looked around him
to see people knuckling into their pews, snorting for
excitement, ready to be entertained. Revival fires,
burning, somehow recapitulated the klieg-lights of the
Grand Ole Opry. It was a land of revue!
Miss Gelda Lou Glikes, a girl of excessive
beribbonment, blew out on her trumpet the old winner,
“He Touched Me,” blushed, and skipped into the wings.
An ex-football star from the Cincinnati Bengals (30”
neck, 5½” hat) mesomorphically loped to the podium and
said that it may sound corny but he was lonesome for
Jesus, a remarkable heresy, thought Darconville,
contravening the orthodox argument that He is
everywhere, but there was little time to reflect on this,
what with the swift entrance of The Marvy Twins, male
regulars, who swayed and harmonized to the favorite,
“The Flame on My Wick Is Bright Tonight,” the last
chorus of which one hummed while the other narrated a
poem about motherhood from an anniversary greeting
card. Then a former dipsomaniac second-grade
schoolteacher, choking back the tears—”witnessing”—
told her story, God help her, about a spinfit she once
threw after drinking only one highball, God forgive her,
when she forced an unruly seven-year-old to eat a whole
jar of mucilage and two pink erasers. And then a high-
school boy in a wheelchair, waving the Confederate
Battle Flag, was pushed out on stage to recite a snatchet
from “The Conquered Banner”:

”. . . Keep it, widowed, sonless mothers,

Keep it, sisters, mourning brothers,
Furl it with an iron will,
Furl it now, but—keep it still;
Think not that its work is done . . .”

The showcase opened even wider. An octogenarian,

garbed out in an American Legion uniform, was led out to
wave just before what was clearly imminent cardiac
arrest, one that would nevertheless proudly enroll him
among the Army of Heaven. A dwarf named Larry
appeared and spoke in tongues, the supernatural aspect of
his delivery not untransvalued for strangeness by his
harelip. And the last act belonged to one Roy LeRoy,
billed as, and generally recognized to be, W. C. Cloogy’s
“best friend,” for the evangelist, like the King of the
Cowboys, always keeps such a foil: it implies a
disposition to gregariousness, Roman amicitia, and cuts
down for the ensainted preacher on the inevitable
speculation the presence of wives causes. A kind of
swagman, stooge, and jovial boy-friday, he sang in one of
those parodically classical, out-of-fashion voices a
medley of laxatives touching on the Jordan; chariots
swinging low; Rolls Being Called Up Yonder; Loving
Mysterious Strangers (age 33!); golden slippers; and
Columbia, the Gem—as the famous mixed metaphor has
it—of the Ocean, these being interspersed, narratively,
with a didactic mess of “Why, Daddy?” stories; criminal-
sons-and-saintiy-moms stories; the Worm Turns stories;
instant conversion stories; money-can-never-make-you-
happy stories (always a signal for the collection), and,
testantibus actis, a whole rosary of patriotic yarns.
The Americanistic pitch, of course, was old hat on the
Bible circuit, as were subterranean virility fears common,
the latter always animating the former in the extra-
defensive and recurrent dream of the evangelist in which
he sees himself, in full color and cinemascope, a lantern-
jawed begrenaded U. S. Marine leaping out of a trench to
beat the living shit out of the Devil who, widespread was
the assumption, wore perfume, spoke Russian, and carried
a purse.
“I must have your attention now, Lies and
German”—it was the mannerbereft in the string-tie again,
raising his eyes like Enoch Translated—”for to welcome
the shepherd of you sheep, God’s chosen minister and,”
he winked cutely, “the best li’l oP buddy around—Dr. W.
C. Cloogy!”
The star appeared in the east wing. And then he
rumbled out, threw out his arms, and drew a bead directly
on the ceiling overhead.
“The text for today, brothers and sisters, is: ‘Why do
you boast of your valleys, O faithless daughter?’ Jeremiah
49:4.”
Everyone crouched.
“Sex! I’m puttin’ in here today to talk to you about
sex! Utter that blackest of words, neighbors, speak its two
little syllables compared to which, dear, dear brethren,
nothin’ll give you the fantods quicker, hear? It’s been the
world’s favorite word since tune began, from Lot’s wife
to Pharaoh to the Queen of Sheeby, and yet as I speak I
know full certain that half of you sorry pieces of plunder
ain’t in no more mood to give it up than to cross the
Rivanna River in a hollow tooth! The Lord axin’ you to
be pure of flesh was axin’ back small change on the
dollar, see, but what? You smug as barncats, huh? Actin’
like Nebuckadunsaw, right? Givin’ in to your cravin’s?
Don’t look around! I talkin’ to you, not someotherbody! I
talkin’ to you out there, all stinking feathers and no hat,
who say ‘I’m mone live forever!’ who say ‘Not me!’ who
say ‘Bull!’ until you wake up one day to find the Devil
hoppin’ on you like a duck on a June bug, OK? Eyes
closed, ears deef, lips silent, fanny stopped up, yes, yes,
yes! O God, help! O God, rescue! O God, I seen it all
before!”
The Rev. W. C. Cloogy, Doctor Fundatus, took his
mumping cant right to the lip of the stage. There was
about his face a more than passing resemblance to Ulrich
Zwingli: a nose like a doorknob, round and brassy, poked
out of an odd rutabaga-shaped head, while under his
hooded eyelids two distrustful eyes constantly shifted
back and forth black and snapping like a jackdaw’s.
Farcically he jigged in his smoldering clothes, flaring his
nose, thrashing the language in accents penacute and
rude, and, with deep and ominous wefts of breath, sidling
up toward the congregation in jits. The Abbot of
Unreason was loose.
“Mo-tels! Pa’back books! Sippin’-liquor! Goosedown
pillows! Supposed hayrides! Men in bulgin’ pants from
magazines! Girlies with eyelashes like dang rakes!
Profanity, that’s how I pronounce it! But shall I put you in
the picture, friend? Ain’t never been a soul tumblin’
through them Gates of Eternity but wadn’t first a li’l heap
of trash, born in shame, and set on magnetic north to grab
at every pair of glands in sight, pawin’ flesh and doin’
like hawgs! You proud of it? You aim to be just another
one of these crapmouses? That what I get for
confabulatin’ with y’all up here every Sunday of a
morning? No? Well, you best get saved, boy, Ephesians
2:2, or don’t come runnin’ to me, ‘cause ain’t nobody
nohow better plan on eatin’ fish muddle n’ shoe-fly pie
forever, clear? You vaporin’ with the Lord, you and you?
And plannin’ on gettin’ away with it? Why, you gonna get
jerked up, every last one of you! The wages of sin is
death! The wages of sin, don’t bet your chewing gum
otherwise, is that you gonna die, die, die, die, you with
me? Everything from figpecker to philosopher gonna
dah! Hosea 9:7. Why, on the Day of the Great Dividin’,
Jack, you’ll be pawnin’ your crisping pins, big-city suits,
mantles, fancy duded-up hats, and you name what-all
from the Montgomery Ward, Habakkuk 3:7, and why, you
ask? Go no farther’n here, I’ll tell you, why just to buy
your greedy profane little self one minute from Hell’s
black flames which can burn, sear, blister, spit, bubble,
and boil, but too late, you dracs and sorcerers and
fornicators, because by then the fahrenheit will have shot
through the nipple of the thermometer like you wouldn’t
believe and be scorchin’ out your spatchcock and
gizzards, which’ll be a thousand times worse if you took
liquor ‘cause that catches! And do you think the Lord is
gonna care two diddlies if you fry—frah!—wipin’
hellsmoke out of your eyes and dobbin’ your body with
ashes to dink the heat? Not if you ain’t willin’ to walk
down Redemption Avenue! Not if you sloppy-kissin’ the
foot of Pharaoh! Not if you ain’t right with Him—but
that’s either here or there, ain’t it, ‘cause if you was right
with Him, you things of Gomorrah, you’d-a not been
there in the first damn place!”
Darconville couldn’t believe it. He looked about him.
It was a limbus fatuus of devotees: old horsefaced ladies
in absurd hats; various paralytici; hominids and
monorhines; dishlicking Hutterites; tobacco farmers, their
necks cracked and veneered by sun and wind; goosecaps
with bowl haircuts; crofters and their wives, both with
toothless Punch-and-Judy profiles; and, of course, the
little foxes who spoil the vines, little teratogenic kids with
wide mouths, round simpleton faces, and water-parted
hair. And naturally there were those two bedizened
women-in-orchids (there always are) sitting together and
complaining they couldn’t hear a thing. Most of the
people, stiff as pipes, sat non-introspectively upright with
the orthodox stares of faces on church windows, but
others, perhaps reaffirming the idea that the human mind
is more easily unhinged in matters of divinity than
anything else, began jerking back and forth like
woodpeckers. A few wept. And one or two tremebundi
were knotted up in prayer, like frogs poised for a jump.
There was the sprawler, the huncher, the croucher, the
percher, the squatter, and one lady, either daft or in the
“rapture” —the boundaries touch—was coiled around
herself in a side-aisle and flapping in an arc de cercle, the
characteristic posture of the hysteric.
Cloogy the concionator, meanwhile, saw he had them
where he wanted them, mustn’t lose them, and so wanned
to the task, a hot scaldabanco now cuffing his assailant’s
shadow on the wall, wringing his fingers, and verjuicing
his sermon with every fright he could, he spit his wrath
and spanked the vices of his age without a break or
breath.
“I seen the end and the beginning! I seen fallen
women, painted up like baboons, who could sweet-talk a
cat into a doghouse and, hopin’ to God never to see more,
sportin’ men in zoot suits shagging them at the dance hall.
But what really cracks my acorns is to see young folks
leavin’ their little truck patches nowadays just to go
mousin’ around the city with cigarettes like the ten-
horned fiends of Revelations, and for what?—sexual
monkeyshines! Misfits, that’s all! Misfits and compost-
sniffin’ neathogs who don’t give a pin’s fee or a penny for
the Lord Jesus, born in the winter of the year i, died in the
spring of 33! Joshua ben Joseph they called Him back
then, bein’ Jews of course and too blamebusted ee-literate
to ascertain He was callin’ Hisself by the name of Jesus,
El Shaddai if you want to be fancy, which I don’t!
‘Course, I know nothin’, you know it all, huh? So go
ahead, smoke yourself into fidgets! Coat your belly with
the devil’s drink! Fashion yourself out as friends of pope-
worshippers and fai-ries! Pinch up your waist in calico,
half nekkid, and take your love to town under them bright
city lights and honky-tonks, Sirach 34:4! But put you in
mind, you nasty little trapes, come the last trump of
thunder—O mercy, mercy on your souls!—you’ll have no
wheel to spin, no loom on which to weave, no sickle to
harvest with, no well-sweep to draw up precious water!
And then what a scouring! What an upturnin’! Lordy,
what a dee-molition!”
The brimstone rained down, but it didn’t matter.
Evangelism is to Southerners what valerian is to a cat.
The congregation whuffed appreciatively, their
Demosthenes, they felt, being as brilliant an orator as ever
the Pnyx had cheered. Not for them, if for Darconville—
Isabel was only bewildered—was it the trashiest piffle
and most intolerable bit of fustian since the days of
thundering Whitfield, circulating Summerfield, and
weeping Payson. No, this for them was the Word, and its
speaker—with hewing arms, a face pot-liquor green, and
a mouthful of indicavits—might just as well have been
preaching from a fishing-smack dead center in the Sea of
Galilee or sending the Divine Message through the penal
bars of the Mamertine dungeon. Cloogy banked on that as
he pointed a finger straight into their faces.
“I be takin’ up a collection momentarily and will be
axin’ you to reach down deep in your pockets to pull out
some faith which in this part of the Holy Land, for
outreach work and general upkeep, is colored green and
crackles, ‘cause on your deathbed or, well, pallet, which
is the same as a bed only narrower, you subscribers of sex
and malfeasance, you ain’t gonna own nothin’, you ain’t
gonna take nothin’, you ain’t gonna hear nothin’, not the
thrum of a harp, not the carol of a bird, not the howl of a
coon, not the whoooole doxology of congregations—
doxology a big-city word for praise and glory, nothin’
else—so be warned, you fleshpeddlin’ spackies and shut-
wallets and tithin’ nigglers! ‘You conceive chaff, you
bring forth stubble!’ Isaiah 33:11. But listen to me! Did I
just say you gonna prance into heaven ‘cause you e-void
honky houses? Did I just say you gonna prance into
heaven ‘cause you ain’t backslidin’ but twicet a week?
Did I just say you gonna prance into heaven, you
rinsepitchin’, fist-clinching, pennypinching dah-warves,
‘cause you blow the horn in Gibeah and sound the
trumpet in Ramah? I didn’t say any such of a thang! No!
No, no, no! You got to have faith, which means only trust
—in God— a mot-to found on every dollar in the
American mint! ‘Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe!’
Joel 3:13. Here now, do I hear you reachin’ down now or
is wickedness sweet in your mouth? O wheelbarrows, full
of hates and hisses! O hard as stwones! I hear no jingle! I
hear no jangle!”
Cloogy pulled no stops now as, before the
congregation, he pumped and wheezed and bellowed. He
hopped, capricornified, across the stage, glaring. When he
put one foot down, he lifted the other up. He drove his fist
down through the air as if knocking, peg-wise, every last
metaphorical demon who dared lift his head. Barging up
to the proscenium, he flung up his hands and with cheek-
shaking fury let himself loose in bombs of rhetoric that
hadn’t been felt in that part of the world since Calhoun
addressed himself to the doctrine of state sovereignty. It
was all advertisement, no news: the theatrically
“shattered” voice, moistened with sobs; the S’s altered to
Th’s; the farm analogies; the bird perch finger, wagging;
the faraway look on the radiant face on the glorious
horizon; and, of course, the slow but efficient whining
that built up like feeding in small-arms ammunition which
culminated, suddenly, in the rapid-fire of machine-gun
prooftexting.
“I can’t believe it! The Lord can’t believe it! You
tryin’ to abridge the Lord above, you hangdogs, you open
compurgators of Satan, you soupsnufflin’ excuses of Og
and Zedekiah and Tubal-Cain, whose face was black as
soot! ‘Wail, O gate! Cry, O city! Melt in fear, O Philistia,
all of you!’ Isaiah, 14:31. There is your faith? Is Hell
havin’ a banquet? Do I see you shootin’ into your pocket
for contribution? Don’t Jesus count? I want every man,
woman, boy, and girl to lift their hand high if they want
Jesus to come hoppin’ into their flinty hearts! Lift them
high! I ain’t gone be up here all day, friends, having work
in the Holy Vineyard enough for a squadroon and
outnumberin’ arithmetic itself! So hands up, c’mon, high
—hah, hah, haher! I cain’t haft see them, widow-ladies! I
cain’t see them, poor oP gentmin in over-hauls! Or are
you just a cootie? A stinkard? A inglorious piece of fat
ram-mutton? Hah! Wag your fingers! Hah! Shoggle your
wrists or somethin’! How many out there cain’t lift his
hand to Goddlemighty? O how many! O! O! And now
may we pray?”
Every hand, as if shot, suddenly fell as the organ
began to swell. All grabbed hands tightly in a display of
tactile prayer. A symphrase of indistinguishable nonsense
ended up front punctuated with a burplike “amen,” and
Rev. W. C. Cloogy, striding magnanimously forward—
just minutes, presumably, before his Bethany-like
ascension—made available to everyone there his
pouchable goods, sundries, pigges’ bones, holy relikes.
The purchases, came the assurance, were all in-structible,
indestructible, and tax-deductable. Gimme that Ol’ Time
Revision!
While Cloogy piously knelt, the collection baskets
were passed, and Roy LeRoy sang, “If You Take Two
Steps Toward Jesus, He’ll Take Three Steps Toward
You.” The interlocutor in the raspberry shirt came
forward and advised each and every soul—before the
offers were either suspended or depleted—that he or she
could personally own in his own home any one of the
following: a glossy snapshot of Pastor Cloogy riding a
dromedary across The Plains of Sharon ($1.25); a real
pinion wrestled from an angel in the Land of Penuel
($6.00@); The Marvy Twins’ LP Album, Hymns for Her,
featuring the much-requested national hit, “My Dropsy
Cured One Night It Was” ($7.95); cigarette lighters with a
microdot of Mt. Vernon on the strikeflint ($6.50@); a
holy tablecloth showing Ishbosheth, King of Israel, Being
Assassinated ($16.00); an actual vessel of bottled
darkness from the plague visited by Moses upon Pharaoh
($12.75); stone piecelettes nicked from the Rock of Ages,
glued to a card underneath the legend “America: Right or
Wrong!” ($2.25); and, confirming, perhaps, the idea,
widely held, that the evangelical mind is obsessed much
more with bowel irregularity than anything else, packets
of lenitive powders ground from Palestinian pistachio
shells for the diagnostically restringent ($5.45 for twelve).
There were free hams, a gift only to those, however,
who made offerings of over $20 or whose contributions
exceeded the mean of the per capita tally that day as
certified by the public accountant who, at that very
moment, was collecting the envelopes at the end of each
pew. Certificates of honor would be awarded, of course,
to special contributors: Soul Winners ($500); Prayer
Warriors ($300); Scripture Seekers ($100); and Youth
Year-Arounds ($50).
As the choir sang “Arphaxad from the Flood He
Swam,” the envelopes—a very small pile—were brought
worshipfully forward and placed on the lip of the stage,
where W. C. Cloogy, spying the size, had to bite his
knuckles he was so angry, and then in one last fit of
entheomania he came howling out at them in heat like the
craven, great-gullied gastrolator he was, roaring
horrisonously and, with nictating eyes, seeking for a final
time to make mad mystery out of ignorance and
inspiration out of dread. It was the high point of the show:
the Decisions for Christ.
 “Quail, O sinners! Cringe, O bedwarfed sons and
daughters, and pray for dear life that the yield on the
baskets will be bigger’n the envelopes ‘cause these here
are lookin’ slimmer than a three-day fast! I don’t know
from the next who’s holdin’ back, I swear. But take the
Lord—you fancy He don’t know who tiddlywinkin’
buttons and pewter pennies my way in the name of tithes?
That He don’t feel you weevilin’ your checkbook around
in the dungeon of your filthy pockets? That He don’t see
you peppin’ up on nekkid pictures in the corncrib or
cropin’ down the backstairs at night like a red Commonist
with your guilty little face all jellied up with lipstick and a
dress on you tighter than a nigger’s thumbprint? Shoot,
He don’t!—and the mercy is He don’t snipe you right
there in your socks! For what’s He bound to think? Why,
no evangel of Christ Jesus, you! No fellow-shipper of the
Lord, Who died for your raggedy sins! No prophetess of
adequate wardrobe, you! No advocate of Christian
endeavor, you! No wise virgin with her range-oil lamp
full, you! Well now, I’m about to give you one last chance
to accept Christ Jesus as your personal savior, because,
failing that, you poor bumblades, you lay whippin’
straight into Hell where you gone be roasted into a snuff-
stick the second you arrive by flames cat-lappin’ up to
your chin and head! Ezekiel 40:2. You ask is hell hot, and
I’ll ask is a bullfrog waterproof, OK? I tell you, you gone
be stir-fried! Barbecued! Whipsawed back and forth by
unnatural devils and squeezed ‘til your pips squeak! But
you don’t cotton to all this ruckin’ and raisin’ sand back
there, do you? Gettin’ creepy-bumps all over your flesh,
ain’t you? Then stand up! Stand up, you pathetic
examples of homo dumbiens! Stand up, you insolent
arrogant sharpies! Grasshopper down here to the front of
this church and in this year of Restored Salvation accept
Christ Jesus into your life or you be swallowed up in
perdition quicker nor an alligator can claw a puppy! Is
there sin come between you and the Lord? Are you man
enough to kneel down here with me and pray? Then come
on down! O, come! Come!”
The organ swelled up in a chord and burst into that
old staple, “Just as I Am.” And toward the front of the
church came the inevitable parade of hobblers and tame
villatic fowl: weeping girls; the semi-cancroid; Malchians
with severed ears; cured demoniacs; the now thankfully
upright hemorrhoidal; the luckless, with bad draughts of
fishes; the entrussed, the encrutched, and the enfeebled,
all tapping, jerking, and lurching altarwards in the owl-
light like the Beggars Come to Town.
Beaming, Dr. Cloogy stroked his huge nose. He
greeted each soul with a congratulatory handquake and
then aimed them quickly on a beeline into a backroom
behind an ellipse there where each was given a fistful of
leaflets and brochures—not unlike those, in fact,
commonly distributed year round by Harriet Bowdler and
Loretta Boyco—illustrated with pictures (lions nuzzling
up to lambs, idealized couples-in-profile staring into a
nebula, etc. ) and chronicled by various physeters-of-lies
who warned against the wicked system of things and
generally proscribed: two-tone shoes, beards, polysyllabic
words, ecologists, ritual, enemies of the N.R.A., educated
blacks, corn liquor, long hair, the word whom, wayside
shrines, uneducated blacks, actors, Harvard University,
stickpins, Bolsheviks, and pomeranians.
The recessional at the Wyanoid Baptist Church went
off without a hitch: Cloogy asked all ladies in the
congregation who wished to engage in family-planning to
please see him in his study, a last hysterical hymn was
sung so loud it rocked the floor, and bonking out of their
pews the little folks put on their sparrowbill caps and
departed. Pastor Cloogy decamped to someone’s house
for dinner. The doors were then locked tight.
And God? Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit.
Darconville felt that Isabel—of no denomination
herself and knowing nothing of religion—could never
take it seriously again and so accepted the fact that,
although he’d long fondly wished for her baptism, any
commitment that way after this inefficacious Sunday
must only be the first symptom of a great betrayal to
which for her personal integrity she’d never consent to be
party. That day would pass away, thought Darconville,
with Isabel lost to the grace she deserved if only for
showing that steadfastness so much less pronounced
thousands of years ago when Mother Eve she span.
At the same time, the lapse of principle touching on
his own failure to defend the black girls earlier caused
him deep remorse. He tried to tell her what he felt, but
before he could strangely she put a finger to his lips as if,
expressing an impulse which exists only by opposition to
the fear that ostensibly oppresses it, humbly to stifle the
praise she wouldn’t, couldn’t, deserve.
“I will always love you,” said Darconville, taking her
by the finger. She simply smiled.
“Me too.”
And they went to Darconville’s rooms and made love.

XLVII
 A Fallacy of the Consequent

Can reason untwine the line that nature twists?

—St. ALEXIS, the Vagabond of God

DARCONVILLE’S CAT peered from one to another

in the darkened room, to Isabel asleep for her rhythmical
breathing, to Darconville awake for his eyes moving
down the rungs of a syllogism. It was the end of the year,
a time for reckoning, and in consequence of his perhaps
marvelous but certainly tenuous affair with a student it
had been judiciously pointed out to him—by certain
colleagues, to intercept fate—that no Quinsy girl was able
to love. Interesting, thought Darconville, for because of
her poor academic showing Isabel by rights was no longer
a Quinsy girl. And yet, having just made love, wasn’t she
then a lover? And so what, he wondered, from that given
value were the values of other propositions immediately
inferred by opposition and education?

1. No Quinsy girl is a lover. (GIVEN)

2. Some lover is a Quinsy girl. (False)
3. Some Quinsy girl is a lover. (False)
4. Some lover is not a non-Quinsy girl. (False)
5. Some Quinsy girl is not a non-lover. (Fabe)
6. No lover is a Quinsy girl. (True)
7. Every Quinsy girl is a non-lover. (True)
8. Every lover is a Quinsy girl. (False)
9. No lover is a non-Quinsy girl. (False)
10. No non-Quinsy girl is a lover. (False)
 11. Every non-Quinsy girl is a non-lover. (False)
12. Every Quinsy girl is a lover. (False)
13. Some lover is not a Quinsy girl. (True)
14. Some lover is a non-Quinsy girl. (True)
15. Some non-Quinsy girl is a lover. (True)
16. Some non-lover is a Quinsy girl. (True)
17. Some Quinsy girl is not a lover. (True)
18. Some non-lover is a non-Quinsy girl. (?)
19. Some Quinsy girl is a non-lover. (True)
20. Every lover is a non-Quinsy girl. (True) No!

A paw stopped Darconville, almost sitting up in

panic; he’d tripped, unbalancing himself, over proposition
%18 and fell with a wild clutch at the question mark: the
value was impossible to determine. It was the one
proposition—her very age, at that—not available to
formal inquiry. Words that cannot exceed where they
cannot express enough cannot succeed when they try to
learn too much. Yet mightn’t that matter unillumined by,
or contrary to, be above reason? He looked at Isabel. She
sometimes smiled in her sleep like a cat whose upcurvital
mouth showed perpetual joy. A non-lover? Verbatim ac
literatum. Ridiculous, thought Darconville, for when with
logic, he asked himself again, had love to do? If green is
unripe, why then blackberries are red when they’re green.
And in that very same darkness that muddled his poor
thoughts hadn’t been consummated that sweet warfare
having victors only? True enough, one needn’t necessarily
be in love in order to—
Darconville frowned.
No value could be inferred. Better count the pulses of
Methuselah. Thank you, logic.
 XLVIII

Charlottesville

Now are they come nigh to the

Bowre of blis,
Of her fond favorites
So nam’d amis.
—EDMUND SPENSER, The Faerie Queene

THE FIRST DAYS of June, fickle, were cooled and

freshened by a touch of rain and then lapsed back again to
a .languorous warmth, the shivelights of bright sun
teasing out of every throughway and thicket the pale first
fruits; mead blew, feed grew, sounded the cuckoo, and
summer, a-coming, came in.
The school year ended, forcing neither Darconville
nor Isabel to any decision of consequence concerning the
future. With his help she vacated her room at Quinsy and
without any fanfare—save for the last-minute appearance
of doting Miss Ballhatchet who, puffing across the lawn
for a farewell, presented her with a gift (The Poems of
Sappho)—they drove away, Isabel silent, her collar up,
and Darconville feeling quite sad and empty.
Isabel took a job as a telephone operator in
Charlottesville. And Darconville stayed on in
Quinsyburg. He lived alone as usual, making occasional
visits to Miss Trappe’s house, and after some
consideration took up writing his book again, not with the
vigor he’d once known, rather with the comportment of
the crane of legend who, to keep awake, gripped a stone
in its footclaw. He felt vigor: it was not that he didn’t: but
his vigor was divided, a bilocation of spirit he felt
necessary to support the half he loved more, and she was
now sixty miles away.
Although the writer is a man who, paradoxically,
must have nothing to do to do what nothing intimates he
must do, Darconville felt he stole for art—”You always
never stop writing!”—what life owned, hesitating too
often before the thought of now trying to repay some
fraction of his debt to her by offering her a book that was
meant to be and then feeling she had nothing whatsoever
to do with it at all. It was not so much a question of where
commitment should lie in facing the divided self as to
who should be the judge. It was with sadness, when he
wrote, that he saw each page come up violent, with every
loop a gallownoose, every period a bullethole, every
break between sentences a crawlspace into which guilt
crept home to hide; the words themselves sank down into
the inkcrimped paper and perversely seemed to have an
existence only on the other side of the page: a
bebeloglyphics of revolt and refusal, backwards in dead
black.
Isabel became his constant preoccupation. Strangely,
he feared her loneliness, and, whenever he thought such a
thing probable for her, he lived it himself, as lovers will,
with twice the anguish. There were troubles—crises often
coming simultaneous with letters from her, answers to the
ones required of him to have hers (was this pride or
humility?) which revealed, in attempts to hide her
unhappiness, her unhappiness: family discord, the need
for her own apartment, a roommate to share expenses, etc.
How often we express what we can’t, thought
Darconville. A game is not won until it’s also lost. The
exclamation mark is always a digression. And so to
assuage his own fears as much as her own, though moved
more out of love than duty, Darconville would often put
away his work and drive up to Charlottesville to visit.
The potholed road winding out of the seventh circle
of Quinsyburg and its scrubpine forests takes a turn for
the better just at that point where the James River
debouches on a silly curve through low swampland and
passes by the hog-soaping community of Scottsville. A
swift change in tone is noticed: dirt-farms give way to
orchards; farting pigs transform into sleek horses; and
goose-faced peasants—lo!— are now sporting colonels in
plus-fours banging away at birds. The grass of a sudden
rolls away to smooth expanses of green, no longer
anymore tall and shapeless twists of brome and
creekthatch. Now in the air is the perfume of blooms, not
tobacco, and one hears the content weedio-weedio of
whistling quails instead of scraping whiffletrees and hens
screeching through backyards draped over in hand-wrung
laundry. There the northern part of Virginia begins to
detach itself from the southern. Exit Calvin-, enter
Pelagius. Enthusiasm is out, neo-Stoicism in. The rod is
put away, to be replaced by sweetmeats. You bank a
wooden bridge some miles along and weave up and out of
a last dingle to discover finally below you at the eastern
foot of the Blue Ridge—always with surprise—the city of
Mr. Jefferson.
Charlottesville was a city that loved prerogative. It
was, in fact, one of those quaint places on earth where
most of the inhabitants, emphasizing the value of
ancestral origins, spent a lifetime zealously devoted to the
cause of trying to correct the several mistakes, owing to
their absence, committed during the events described in
the first chapter of Genesis. This was the land of Wishes,
Wirtses, and Weems, where every last ferblet in the
county had the distinct impression he was a born
gentleman and she a well-bred lady, and that was that.
Theirs was that great legacy of the Southern elite, dames
and colonels still, so it went, all in solid support of a
proud slaveholding but benevolent republic—purified of
Free-Soilers, locofocos, parlor pinks, realists, supporters
of the Wilmot Proviso, and advocates of the League of
Nations —which stretched majestically from
Pontchartrain to the Potomac: not the United States, but
the States United!
The Virginians in this particular area, briefly, had a
marvelous idea of themselves. What was past was
perfect! They doggedly held to a caste mentality. They
kept a strict and incurable devotion to postures they felt
couldn’t be misinterpreted at Windsor or Schônbrunn.
They still tried to register wills by regnal years, used
seltzer bottles, and habitually went on ancestor hunts (
flatly refusing to accept the lie that everybody had as
many ancestors as anyone else ) and while obsessed by
lineage many philoprogenitive parents in the South, to fix
on a bygone era by intra-family “arrangements,” preferred
to marry kin rather than those unrelated by blood. It was
of course inevitable some would eventually have to take
the bit between the teeth in relation to the occasional,
slightly plumulaceous child who came along—a
congenital drooler, a nimfadoro in white boots, a little
shovelmouthed surd whose blood was so bad it was all he
could do to keep from falling down. But this too was sort
of charming, see?—only one more touch of regional,
aristocratic cachet in that world of moonlight-and-
magnolia which, in a similar context, made every tree a
dueling-oak, every house a plantation, and every asshole
in a string tie a colonel.
Myth, of course, flouted history. The tradition that all
white men in Virginia were “cavaliers”—a boast in
Charlottesville put about by even the lowest of
dungcrunchers—was true only in that there had been a
general 17th-century disposition in that flyblown colony
against English parliamentarianism; at that time the
humblest plowjogger in the territory could be so
identified, and was. Whenever a Southerner dreamt of
improving his lot, he kept “niggers”—stationed either on
his property or in a class, below him. Every owner of two
Negroes, therefore, however dubious his own origin or
squalid his existence, came to be considered a cavalier. So
was it then, such was it now. Facts, needless to say, didn’t
get in their way, and it was with enormous pride and an
almost martial zeal that the revisionist citizens of
Charlottesville cooperated to perpetuate the image of their
forefathers as dashing, emplumed gallants-with-
mustaches out of Lord Rupert’s dragoons protecting
women, daring battle, and running to hounds—when the
truth of it was they had been almost to a man nothing but
a bunch of lackeys, cacochymical scroyles, and middle-
brow merchants who spoke near-Gutnish and worked the
head-right system, accumulated “seats,” and lived out
their whiggish lives pocketing quitrent, hustling slaves,
and selling snuff. But who cared? No one. Did it matter?
Not a bit. It was not in the image, never mind the interest,
of the Old Dominion. Thus the queer little mystery
perpetually continued, for, blow high, blow low,
everytime a Southerner got à vau-l’eau he needed only
spread his sails to the winds of his own foolish fibs and
flatulencies and another start was made down-sun.
The fabulous traditions held firm in Charlottesville.
The days of ye old carriage houses, stirrup cups, and bag-
wigged royal governors shirted in frills and Mechlin lace
were still commemoratively preserved in the hearts of the
throwbacks there who, hunting foxes all day and tracing
genealogies all night, were locked on the crotchets of
Tory caricature: pinch-mouthed Federalists; titless Junior
Leaguers from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; frigid
bluestockings with matching hair; snudges with hip-gout;
lords of rice-tierce and cotton bale, of sugar box and
human cattle; civic bona-robas and bores; fatuous hip-
pomants from country clubs; and incontrovertible bitches
from the English-Speaking Union with saurian skin and
faces that looked like they’d been cut on a catstick who—
suspendens omnia naso—spoke to no one who wasn’t
someone and then only in the pluperfect. The men all had
recurrent dreams of shooting each other for disrespectful
remarks or having an affair with Sally Fairfax; the
women, of being observed in the waxlight through frosty
bowed windows dancing quadrilles or minuets in lovely
eighteenth-century poses and saying things like, “It was
simplytooshattering FOR words!” or “Why, Lord
Cornwallis, you say such things!” or “O Macheath! Was it
for this we parted? Taken! Imprisoned! Try’d! Hang’d—
cruel Reflection! I’ll stay with thee ‘till Death!”
This was a species unto itself. They were the kind of
people who sat around trying to imagine Patrick Henry, a
close and familiar friend, stopping by for a visit and
explaining between sips of Blind Pineaux what a frightful
day he’d had with the burgesses! They hired amahs and
black grooms. They gave cute toponyms to their houses
like “Wit’s End,” “Ranelagh,” or “Quivering Aspens.”
They didn’t commit sins, of course, but only made faux
pas and believed that creativity lay in things like
arranging flowers and furniture or in knowing how much
powdered sugar went into a mint julep. They talked
constantly of hunting boxes and stables and gunrooms
and went riding a lot-it was so inarguably aristocratic.
They often made references to the game of cricket,
without the remotest idea of how it was played. They
imported English nannies to take care of their pinguid
children who were always named something like Pruitt or
Denison or Brawley. They loved to read—nobiliaires,
especially; the most important books shelved in
Charlottesville were, of course, Burke, Debrett, the
Almanach de Gotha, Ruvigny, Fairbairn, and the
Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels for such of those
who, for whatever reason, couldn’t pass muster in that
Anglo-Saxon stronghold. The men were actually too
gracious to women and the women too ingracious not to
call it off, and so the summum bonum of their lives was
to sit collectively in planters’ chairs in front of columned
porticos covered with creepers, drinking bourbon,
watching a distant game of polo, and muttering down
their chins, their general conversation being of the sort
that’s almost always wholly narrative (and, alas,
autobiographical), coming at you in those over-
pronounced declarative sentences which are usually
reserved for out-and-out simpletons, nonagenarians, or
myna birds and are filled with prejudices that are almost
all ineradicable, being based on that kind of ignorance
which is fully impenetrable to information coming from
the real world. Every Charlottesvillian wanted to die in
his own arms and conceived himself, upon the act, as
entering Paradise by walking in genteel fashion down the
Duke of Gloucester St. in Williamsburg. Each lived in a
vacuum his nature positively adored. Each windowed
well his head.
Good manners in Charlottesville had long ago
degenerated into etiquette, which of course thrived on
those social occasions when one had to have the right
enthusiasms, the right prejudices, the right indignations.
But that bogus aristocracy—feudal reactionaries,
seigneurial land-owners-in-rubber bowties, Dukes of
Omnium, horse fanciers, Epis-copocrats, paid-up-in-full
members of the Colonial Order of the Acorn, University
of Virginia trustees, the Dames of 1890, etc.—was in fact
only a kind of club, a stuffy composite of thrusting atti-
tudinarians who managed in a general and well-disguised
parvenuism to throw for the charming people who
dressed just too divine the marvelous parties they simply
adored! They were nice without being nicer. Downward
they climbed, backward they advanced. Venal, they were
obsequious; obsequious, insecure; and insecure, they
overstated themselves, out-anglicizing the English in that
feeble mimicry which, born of inferiority, ironically made
them even less secure. Dignity in the South became once
again only a peculiar manifestation of gall.
Scenario: the Blacks invite you to their house,
“Duchessa”; you accept and, appearing the following
evening, are met under the porte-cochere by the small,
sharplipped hostess herself—an overdressed grympen in
peak shoes—who theatrically leads you by hand into the
drawing room. There are paintings of celebrated race-
horses on the wall, a Brown Bess over the hearth, its
mantel a moonscape of old plate, and all of it surveyed
from above by the glassy stare of a mounted buck’s head,
the huge beam-and-times sticking out in a stiff blessing.
Two black maids—”reliable help”—offer you hors
d’oeuvres. The host hands you a drink.
It’s a fête worse than death. The room is full of
people with faces like borzois, most of them drinking 8-
to-1 ratio martinis and asserting one opinion after another
with high-declarative candor, that subtlest form of
deception. A group of over-perfumed fussocks, gossiping,
and bilious old soldiers, chiming the gold in their
crammed pockets, are standing around sipping—not just
drinks—but the real Virginia possets: Col. Byrd’s Capital
Night Cap, King William’s Toddy, and Daniel Parke
Custis’s Original Floster.
The introductions are made. It’s the usual group of
uniques and antiques. You meet the cheerful latitudinarian
divine-cum-poacher and his young male friend. You meet
the master of hounds who whispers a small salacity into
your ear and wheezes good-naturedly into his cup. You
meet the unsalvageable narcissist, a twenty-year-old
blonde—her name is usually something like Grey
Fauquier or Summer Bellerophon —who rides sidesaddle,
infixes in every Southern male a compulsive desire to be
flayed by her riding crop, and despises her mother for
stealing her daddy with whom she is passionately in love.
You meet the agitateuse-with-political-interests, wearing
logic and fake jewels. You meet the Dear Ol’ Thing, a
fusty dowager who, decaying beneath piles of old-
fashioned clothes, is chairwoman of projects like “Save
the Peakferns” and dares say anything she damn well
pleases between puffs of her tiny green cigar. They’re all
there, the blue-rinse set, city toparchs, university snobs,
thorn-eyed starkadders with offensive orchids,
gynecocrats from the hintermath of time, and all those
over-advantaged rhetoricalists-in-ascots from Albemarle
County who, gathered under one roof, would rather talk
than breathe.
Then it’s time for dinner. At the table of candles and
wine, one experiences plenitude itself: the fruit-motif
silver, the napkins folded tricesimosecundo, the plates
heaped full, and the fat-rolls of the generous-waisted
barguests bulging in expectation through the small spaces
in the heartbacked Hepplewhite chairs. A black in a white
jacket, answering the bell, dishes no meat but in silver:
pies of carp’s tongue, the carcasses of several ample
wethers bruised for gravy, pig in sauce sage, and then
flummery, jellies, and sweetmeats of twenty sorts,
followed by cigars and cock-ale. The ladies and
gentlemen then rise and retire to sit around the hearth and
chat, your blissful if feigned half-sleep—a long vacation,
no doubt, to Finibus Mundi—safeguard enough from
having to have clarified for you, once again, the rubrics of
dressage, the facts about racial inferiority, the virtues of
Republicanism, and so forth and so on. It is only when
they start—again— trotting out their parentals that you
excuse yourself graciously and depart, not with any
grudge or grievance, neither on the other hand with envy,
but merely with the growing conviction, as you look back
through the Charlottesville night, that there are some
people in this world who are going to be gravely
disappointed, indeed, on the Easter Sunday following
their death.
But, oh, it went badly for Isabel and Darconville that
summer. It wasn’t so much the terrible meaninglessness
of Charlottesville. Isabel seemed to be finding a charm in
the very vanities Darconville had given up. She
reacquainted herself, for instance, with a former high-
school chum, the daughter of a crapulous woman novelist
from Charlottesville. The girl’s name was Lisa
Gherardini, a dark-haired kakopyge with fat hands, an
insipid smile, and the morals of a musk-cat. (Darconville
suspected she was pregnant.) She had pretensions to art—
of the craft-and-hobby sort—something Isabel both
shared and admired, and when they took an apartment
together Darconville tried as best he could to keep from
bothering them, although it taxed him a bit, when he
visited, to hear them giggling over secrets—of course
there were secrets—from which he was excluded, only
because good manners somehow forced him into the
awkward position of having to inquire what they were.
The taste for guessing puzzles he’d had enough of, God
knows. But he was involved. St. Anthony, in the third
century, offered the idea, Darconville knew further, that a
seeker of God or any significant ideal, in spite of all his
intentions, is doomed to community and in the end must
intervene in the disputes of the world from which once
he’d sought to flee. The commitment, in any case, had
long been made.
The two girls were now working for the telephone
company; for Lisa, with her gumball brain and
strawberry-bright nails, a boon, indeed—but for Isabel?
Why, her interests, as she’d often confided to Darconville,
were wider by much. The possibilities—anything, she
said, but a dull life in Fawx’s Mt.!—were infinite; she’d
shown a desire at different times to become an actress, a
flautist, a veterinarian, an oceanographer, a
harpsichordist, an artist, a biologist, a zookeeper, an
archaeologist, a stone-jewelry artisan, a model, and a
thousand other freaks that died in the thinking,
notwithstanding—this, always with a knowing smile—a
wife. And added to this random list might be that curious
infantilism not forgot: a princess! But aspirations at that
time were not very high for either, and so were high for
neither. There was a good deal of aimlessness and
inactivity. They were either washing their hair or were
about to. They ate a lot: snacks.
The summer misresolved itself in a hundred ways. In
spite of the countless efforts made to unify, splits took
place. Darconville felt changes come upon them,
divisions which, because they happened, seemed
inevitable: he grave; she gamesome; he studious; she
careless; he without mirth; she without measure.
Despising himself for it, Darconville began to resent what
seemed to him to be the effusive attention (“I dislike
people,” said Isabel, “who stare”) the almost uniformly
blond undergraduates (“I dislike blond guys,” she added,
“they seem to have no character in their faces”) from the
University of Virginia (“I dislike wealthy little snobs”)
paid to her in the street. The messages were welcome
enough, thought Darconville, but the tone, the tone—and
the values, if reversed, somehow would have been more
agreeable. Isabel confused him. When she wasn’t
nervous, she seemed smug; when not happy, subdued; and
when not gentle, sarcastic, the pain provoked in their
various misunderstandings seeming to brace her up, as if
to assent to the beauty of pearls she had to assent to the
irritations that produced them. Each wanted to give, it
was true, tried to give, tried desperately to give, but it
seemed that as each gave the coordinate disposition to
receive—how?—just vanished. I can prove on my
fingers’-ends, thought Darconville, that a dicto secundam
quid ad dictum simpliciter. They fit each other like two
torn halves of a sheet of paper ripped from the book he
couldn’t write—belonging to each other, but unable to
join. The same sensibility that brought her pleasure could
always cause her pain, for being unhappy with what she
was she couldn’t then accept him for what he loved, or
was it something else? He wasn’t really sure, for often
beyond each other’s reach they sometimes perversely
seemed less acquainted with each other now than when
first they met. How exactly does that happen in love?
They tried nevertheless to see each other as often as
they could, and when, for whatever reason, they couldn’t
meet at the apartment the two of them found a convenient
rendezvous not far from the University of Virginia at the
statue of George Rogers Clark—a public
commemoration, perhaps, for his having by connivance
obtained from the Georgia legislature an immense
personal land grant on the Mississippi near the mouth of
the Yazoo?—but at such times there were often
disagreements and, just as often, they seemed to have
little to say. To her way of thinking he seemed
preoccupied; she to him preoccupied his thoughts.
Resentment succeeded bewilderment. Her withdrawals
evoked his reproaches, and his reproaches her anger.
Sometimes each found cutting words for the other. I love
her, thought Darconville. And Isabel thought she loved
him. But it was as if these were the very worst emotions
to feel that summer.
The periodic visits to Fawx’s Mt. were peculiar, as
well; Isabel—-Darconville had now come to notice it
several times—grew nervous there, balked at being seen,
avoided the street that crossed by the yard, looking only
toward places where whatever she sought or sought to
avoid was absent and catching herself up in the sudden
half-turns by which, others notwithstanding, she even
seemed to frighten herself, as if Tubriel, the unholy
sefiroth of summer, shimmered towards her through the
Virginia heat in waves of flame—but boding what? What
was she afraid of? Or who? There was nothing to know,
he found out, once meeting her on that head. Generally,
they returned to Charlottesville that same day. And often
in the bedroom of that low washed-out apartment—before
Lisa returned, all thumbprints and reek, from visiting the
hairy Idumean-from-UVa. she slept with—they made
love, beautiful twins complected in the anonymous
darkness they at once both needed and yet both feared.
But that was all by the way.
An event took place that put the entire affair on the
shelf. It began with a party that was not significant and
ended with a letter that was. But it was not really the
party, not really the letter. Destiny, it might be said,
simply opened its mouth to speak and, for reasons no one
really knew, fambled to a halt.
It so happened that Lisa Gherardini, having suddenly
decided to go to Hawaii, was given a farewell party (one
made conspicuous notably by the absence of her
boyfriend ) on one of those flat-gold late summer
evenings in Charlottesville when, shining down on things
unlawfully begotten, the moon merely smiles and winks.
Lisa’s parents, of course, invited Isabel, and Isabel,
importuning him, asked Darconville to come up from
Quinsyburg to attend. File, which ever attends to Rank,
obliged. It was of course one of those gatherings in the
mode heretofore described, a kind of social vivisepulture
with whole platoons of things-in-orchids coming youward
with bourbons in hand and vicious, premeditated smiles.
The guests on this occasion, people predominantly from
the horse-latitudes, still proved to be less homogeneous
than usual—Mrs. G (pitifully born that way) so wanted to
be open-minded—and one had the redoubtable pleasure,
this time, of meeting not only the ubiquitous gongster-
voiced matron and mahogany-faced whipper-in but also
several jimkwims from the University of Virginia, some
fraternity boys and their brother bungs, two terminal
poets, a few telephone operators, and a lot of other
spunky nots-and-dots from the neighborhood who’d
spoiled around at one time or other with the Pineapple-
Princess-to-Be. This particular party was characterized by
that mood of horrid democracy one so loathes; disparate
factions didn’t separate but actually tried to relate to each
other—and while old farts, trying to dance, flapped about
like wounded birds, self-assured teenagers—in whom
confidence is such a vile characteristic— pontificated
above the noise about politics, careers, and money-
schemes. Here, a fifteen-year-old was revealing his plan
for a nationwide megalopolization of paper-routes; there,
Mr. Gherardini, bald as a Dutch cheese, was twirling
around like a buffoon and trying to learn the intricate
steps of a dance being taught him by a high-school girl in
short shorts. Mrs. Gherardini, weaseling through a
network of balloons, came up to Darconville and said,
“You’re a writer.” “No, I’m not,” he replied and
disappeared. It was a wonderful party.
As the evening wore on, Darconville noticed a man
was flirting with Isabel across the room. Flirting perhaps
was wrong: say pluming. The species was unmistakable,
one of those over-pronounced middle-aged microlipets
having some connection or other with the university—
Charlottesville was full of them—who had never married,
waved his hair in a fussy marcel, and had a handshake so
ornate as to persuade you on the spot that you must hate
him always: only another one in that grand group of
prissy, theatrically erudite Episcopal hyperemians down
South with his thousand-and-one stories about mother,
Mozart, and miscegenation. He fit to type in his suit of
rather ministerial cut, white shirt and black tie and kid
slippers with soles as thin as dancing pumps, bold in the
nose and given to whispering catty asides in little sibilants
about everybody he met for the amusement of the
maidenly young men from UVa. whom he loved to keep
within a foot’s-length of himself wherever he went. He
isn’t precisely homosexual—he is too passionless for that
—but consistently worried about the size of his gibbals,
he always drinks too much and, becoming sweetly nasty,
affects to offer his rudeness as a general defense of style
and good taste of which he invariably sees himself high-
priest. He wears jewelry, keeps a British blue cat, and
simply adores the novels of Jane Austen. Strangely, the
type attracts women.
Fear is an eye. Darconville, nevertheless, stayed
where he was, striking up a casual conversation with a
pale, somewhat avitaminotic young man there whose
ample ears jutted out of his long blond hair. He was rather
plain and not very intelligent but likable enough, and,
since both were alone, they quietly sipped their drinks and
made small talk, quickly coming to agree that neither of
them belonged there. Meanwhile, Isabel kept to her end,
assiduously avoiding in her byerespects and bavarderie
that part of the room where Darconville and friend
waited; it was impossible to get her attention. The fop,
vaunting, would occasionally take her waist and, leaning
over, whisper whatever pretty-wilted thing it was that
caused her, just as occasionally, to lower her head and,
biting her lip, stifle laughter. But she seemed
embarrassed. When a girl once began to be ashamed of
what she ought not to be, thought Darconville, was it not
perhaps then possible that she might not one day be
ashamed of what she ought? A woman constantly
blushing, thought Darconville, must be terribly well
informed. Growing disgusted, he looked away. Then
everything took a distinct turn for the worse.
Tapping on his glass for silence—clink! clink!—the
fop stepped forward, calling for attention. “Here’s glasses
then to our Lisa,” he sang, smiling over at the party girl,
“the namesake, I trust, of that best-remembered of
Elizabeths, the first so-named of English sovereignty and
patroness of the Old Dominion, mmmm?” He spoke in
the key of G-flat, like a mouse in cheese, and kissed her
hand. “Bon voyage!”
Darconville gave out with a schwa of disgust.
Suddenly, the exquisite held up his hand, the poniards
of his eyes fast on Darconville; he had been waiting for
the opportunity all evening.
“Aren’t you drinking, handsome?” he called out,
sarcastically. He repeated the question again, louder.
Everyone slowly turned toward Darconville.
“I’m sorry, were you addressing me?”
“I believe I was. I do believe I was.” He turned to
Isabel, knowingly. “Wasn’t I?”
“I can only disappoint you then,” said Darconville.
“It is not a practice of mine to toast the memory of dead,
ambisinistrous queens, and should I ever choose to make
an exception, whatever your name is, I hardly think I’d do
so in deference to that illegitimately-crowned Welsh
sprunt with a face like witch’s butter named Bette Tudor.”
Murmurs could be heard. “Now go back to what you were
doing and don’t bother me again.”
There was a perceptible chill in the room.
Unconcerned, Darconville turned once more to his small
conversation with the blond young man who told him,
however, that he thought Isabel—he used her name—was
encouraging his antagonist. (Can this fellow, wondered
Darconville, have made her acquaintance, too?) The party
had turned quiet, but the mood went outright morfound as
the fop, giving no ground, made a kisslike inward whistle
and spoke again across the room. “Someone should learn
a bit of respect,” he said, “mister.”
This time there was no reply.
“You are a bore,” he added.
Whatever good intentions Darconville had now
disappeared for just as he turned he saw the man smiling
priggishly into Isabel’s eyes. His teeth were grey.
“And you are a self-satisfied, middle-class poofter,”
shot back Darconville, “masquerading as a Febroniast.”
“What a lovely word!”
It was ridiculous. A theological debate? thought
Darconville, unsettled in the extreme at the idea of it. But
it wasn’t in fact anything of the sort, rather only proof
again, in the jealousy and insinuendo, that the world was
early bad and the first sin, where reason was lost, the
most deplorable of all, theological, perhaps, only in that
all grief is. There should have been an end to it.
But Darconville’s better judgment utterly failed him.
“It is a lovely word, for those who aren’t.
Unfortunately,” he said coldly, “the antinomy which lies
at the root of Protestantism, however denominated—
namely, that there can be no earthly authority in matters
of faith and that yet there must be such an authority—
forces you to jerk your knee at the mere mention of that
pelf-licking zook whom Pope Pius V’s bull Regnans in
excelsis, thankfully, allows me to abhor. I don’t doubt I
appear humorless on this subject, but, I am sorry, I do not
count myself among those in the Church-of-England-as-
by-Law-Established, I’ve always rather wished that
Queen Elizabeth’s dirty rebate had been a noose, and now
I fondly hope the discussion is at an end.”
The room had become a tomb. The guests, appearing
foolish now in their party hats, stood in the middle of this
strange distress—-prerupting conversation—either by
faking incognizance or silently striking attitudes of
scandalized defense.
“So,” came the inevitable reply, “the Pope has sent
one of his papal boys encyclicaling down the streets of
Charlottesville, has he?”
“I am not here by choice.”
It was unfair. Darconville knew it.
“You’d prefer to be,” asked the fop, drawing out the
words with scorn, “—where, Quinsy College?”
“I’d prefer to be,” said Darconville, “where the
ancient traditions of Douay were still flourishing.”
“And where might that be?”
The question hung there, as Darconville looked from
the hatred in his face to the girl he loved. Heretofore,
Isabel might in her actions have bred melancholy or
momentary indignation, but not doubt; sad he may have
been, but not, at bottom, worried. Now as she stood there
across the room, he had to wonder, thinking The shadow
has the same outline as the body which, by obstructing
the sunlight, casts the shade.
“I said, where might that be?”
 Darconville pitied her in his heart for the burden she
bore, standing there, head down, caught in the ignominy
of the sudden crossfire and unable to move in the fear of
what she might have set into play. Again he ignored the
question. Mutter away, cypress, he thought.
“No!” Darconville heard, and the fop, having become
violent, was shrugging off all attempts to temper him. “I
do not approve of dark foreign figures saying dark foreign
things!” His face twitched. “Is that clear?”
Still, Darconville fought to keep calm, but
contemplation can seem to the weary mind so much like
despair. And, O, somehow all the failures of the summer,
the disorder, the wasted days and enormous
misunderstandings, all, all drew up into a single
opponent, immediate and real. Then came a high
whinnying laugh, full of contempt, from across the room.
“Damn you! Damn your Romish opinions! And damn
your Pope!”
And Darconville wheeled around.
“I am not used to being spoken to by drunk,
mannerless sanct-seemers with mouthfuls of bad teeth,”
he raged, “but enough: I will meet you here. This
mediocre century, blasphemous as yourself, is apt to
conceive of the Pope as some kind of remote, semi-
diplomatic species of colporteur, petrified in outdated
glory and nourishing pretensions the reformational
skrellings and unholywater-swallowers who founded your
own quaint faiths themselves embodied. You will do well
to remember, however—and every other forty-faced
Mason like you—that the Papacy is not the house of
Orange-Nassau and that neither I nor any other
coreligionist of mine sees anything whatever figurative,
metaphorical, or extravagant in the exordium addressed to
him at his investiture that he is, and always will be, the
Successor to St. Peter, Bishop of Rome, Patriarch of the
West, Spiritual Father of Kings and Nobles and Head of
the Whole Church, Servant of the Servants of God, and
the Sovereign Pontiff and Earthly Vicar of Jesus Christ,
Our Lord, from Whom comes the power of his pontifical
magisterium. I can expect neither you nor any advocate of
some au-tofacient church for which false witness is the
principle of propagation to understand such a thing, but
you might have the grace, sententious pettifogging
mediocrity that you are, to keep away from”—
Darconville, pale, inhaled and pointed—”her.”
The fop slowly parted his way through the gathering
and, coming up to Darconville, smiled—looking once
back at Isabel—then whispered, “But why? I am no
monk.”
It happened in a second. Darconville helped him a
savage blow across the face, walked out of the house, and
drove away.

XLIX

Coup de Foudre

That same hideous nightmare thing

Talking, as it lapped my blood,
In a voice cruel and flat,
Saying forever, “Cat! Cat! Cat!”
—ROBERT GRAVES, “A Child’s Nightmare”
 SEVERAL WEEKS PASSED. There was no
correspondence in that lapsed time, a period when
Darconville, deliberating what he should do, where he
should go, could imagine just about everything but a
strong conception of God’s mercy; he compared his
attempts at love to the fruit of the paradisaical tree: in the
same chapter God forbade eating it, the plants were not
yet grown!
The rift, a fault, separated him from everything. He
reflected on that and, at the mercy of another relationship,
prayed only that the object which ignited the ardent flame
in his heart—a terrifying dependence—was also capable
of extinguishing it, and yet the love principle inside his
heart showed no such alternative: he could no more
emerge from it voluntarily and reasonably now than he
could fit it into everyday life which, curiously, ceased to
be everyday life in relation to the repeated crises of
separation and reunion forced upon it. Isabel inhabited
him completely and yet was at the same time a stranger to
him. At the very moment when losing her would have
made him suffer a thousand deaths, he found himself—or
some self—considering her in everyday life with a
sardonic eye but noting down simultaneously that what
was missing in their lives was, indeed, what also could
be: a “beyondness” outside everyday life which yet,
perversely, needed it for support. Briefly, Isabel was both
the only means of access to love and not the means.
Darconville drew it all out to this paradox, that on the one
hand there are temporary beings whom we love but who
are ever changing, and beyond them there is the eternal
object of love itself which is incorruptible, permanent,
and ideal. And yet it is not only through the former that
we can take cognizance of the latter, we would, without
the former, actually have no idea of the latter, the
imperfect relative giving us our only idea of the perfect
absolute, and we advance by the dangers of delay,
shipwrecked from a boat to know the sea, where
mildness, glassed in the fragments of storm, must be
discerned. Time is the evil, usurping the semblance of
eternity. Your prayer, your disappointment, are the same.
One afternoon, however, Darconville chose to drive
up to Char-lottesville to apologize for everything. It was
to be a momentous day. He picked Isabel up after work at
the telephone company, and they went to her apartment
and talked; perversely but inevitably raising thoughts they
deeply wished to keep away, they scolded, contradicted,
pished and pshawed, and tempered in a sentence of sweet
mercy justice stern. But Isabel could always free his anger
with a smile, and this time was no different. The pulled
shades made that awful flat much less objectionable than
it was when daylit, Lisa had since departed, and the place
was now all their own. Darconville had come to see that
privacy beyond privacy was necessary for Isabel to find
any composure or, as she often put it, to “feel safe,” and
as her will was there, her will was met. She had
remembered to lock the door. She had remembered to put
her job out of her mind. And she had remembered, in
spite of recent recollections, to make love with all the
feeling she seemed to have before.
But she had forgotten the letter on her bureau.
Darconville mistakenly came by it while Isabel was
asleep. Stepping out to buy some cigarettes, not to disturb
her, he was himself about to leave her a note when the
scrap-paper he picked up turned out to be an unposted
letter covered with that familiar spidery penmanship. He
should not have read it. He should not have thought of
reading it. But he did read it and read what upon the
glance—are things seen things as seen?—made talking a
pitiful invention. His heart club-fisted. He froze and,
following all esteem, sympathy, love, faith, and friendship
out of the world—there was no more of love, no more of
friendship here—took up Echo’s ghostly part and gave
back the discord of those still remembered sounds
repeating on the page. Darconville read:

Dear Govert,
I’m so sorry I ignored you that night (! ), but I’m like
that I guess. What you must think of me! I don’t seem
ever to be able to communicate with anybody, especially,
as I guess you know, when they’re away (self-
explanatory). I seem to ruin everything. It’s just that I’ve
been so confused these months which is what’s behind it,
I suppose, and which is why—as discussed—we were
stopping. On Love’s sweetest arrow is tipped a dart, I
guess. (Forgive my poetry.) Everything will turn out
alright, don’t worry. I’ll never forget—how could I?—that
day in the middle of our fairy forest and that beautiful
moment in the field.

Love, ISABEL

That moment? In the field? Darconville’s spirit utterly

sank. He read the letter again: the thing unseen became
the thing seen. Why, thought he, all things that breed in
the mud are not efts! There was in the we were stopping
the syntax of terror; it wasn’t the single photograph of the
aorist of discontinued time (epausames: we stopped) but
rather the successive motion picture of the imperfect of
continued action (epavomes; we were stopping)—
continued, repeated, and customary. And how imperfect!
How tense! Ah, sluiced in my absence, thought
Darconville, and my pond fished by her neighbor, by Sir
Smile, her neighbor! So this was love, opaque to
probability, frac-tureproof, impermeable to death and
disloyalty, immune to lies, an answer to the spoof of
duration, content and holy peace, the twins of Eden,
drawn round by the curtain between you and the world?
The observer infects the observed. Darconville read
the letter again, holding it down with his cold shaking
fingers, and it told him again that we are only deceived in
what is not discerned and that to err is but to be blind;
think not, it read, that always good which you think you
can make good nor that concealed which the sun does not
behold. He began to tremble, turning through the front
room with his hands over his mouth, then, swept over
with nausea, he found himself in the bathroom, and,
whether whispering or shouting he couldn’t say—
whatever, it awoke Isabel—but an echo, interrupting him
as echoes will, replied in a wail, “I am unjustified, serving
to deduce conclusions from premises insufficient to imply
me!” Thus the Devil played at chess with him, and
yielding a pawn while thinking to gain a queen, did.
Quickly, Darconville began bathing his face from a
sink filled with dead water, losing his breath only to look
up to see his face in the mirror, a mask of disbelief
shallow, bewildered, and unlovable. All is as St. John said
on the path of Mt. Carmel, he thought, nothing, nothing,
nothing—even on the mount was nothing! That which
cannot be altered, he realized, must then be borne, not
blamed—and if borne, then altered perhaps—and follies
past should sooner be remembered, certainly, than be
redressed. There was a grace that he could still feel that
way, squeezing the last tear from poisonous sorrow. But
what otherwise? Force someone to decide to love you and
thereby, proscribing choice, make of a lover a slave?
Then N’mosnikttiel, the angel of rage, suddenly appeared
and mouthed mockingly in Darconville’s ear: so close to
glory! But at the center of both sits a zero, see? Now,
where is your damoyselle au joue tortue? And where are
you? Oh yes, pray where are you?
I am here now and then will be gone, thought
Darconville, dispelling the grey dominion, and if I am
robbed of a deep love I am spared at least a moderate one.
A sign had been given. There was nothing more to say, he
was determined on it.
Darconville was already telephoning the dean’s office
at Quinsy College when Isabel appeared in the doorway
with contorted hands and begging-bowl eyes which
seemed somehow to have surmised everything. She took
a step forward in her shift, alarmed, no longer conscious
of her heavy legs. She hadn’t been listening a minute
when, aware suddenly of the letter, the extremity of the
moment, her metallic screams tore holes in his chest. But
of course it was too late—Darconville immediately
resigned from his teaching post. The following day he
was packed. And before the week was out he departed for
England, resolved now to believe he had been spared the
duty but denied the pleasure of hearing her lie and yet
wondering as the thousands of miles were being fast put
behind him if in some century long past he and Spellvexit
hadn’t stopped one final time in a place called Fawx’s Mt.
and whether he and the girl he loved so much had actually
gone into the woods across the street where, upon a tree,
they carved the word “Remember” and how the loveliest
pair that ever stood between heaven and earth begetting
wonder—a figure all gold, a figure all black—could
possibly have said goodbye in what had been a last
Zoroastrian kiss.

Dialogue on a Dank October

Ah, mon Dieu! how is it I didn’t think of it before?

It’s the gipsy girl with the goat.
—VICTOR HUGO, Notre Dame de Paris

“I TELL YOU,” exclaimed Mrs. van der Slang,

rowing a spoon through her tea, “this could happen only
in a book! I knew of course you were thick as thieves for
a while in high-school, and of course that was then. But
now, tell me, are you certain? Him?”
“Yes.”
“And not—”
“No,” said Isabel, “not really. Not anymore, I’m
afraid.” She looked away. “But I don’t know if he will
be.”
“Will be?”
“Certain.”
Mrs. van der Slang arched a brow and blew on her
tea. “You mean interested.”
 Isabel nodded.
“Well, I’m sorry to say, I don’t know myself. We
don’t see him much, there’s that. Then, he’s young and
frankly hasn’t fulfilled our ambitions for him nor his own
for us. Sugar?” It was one of Isabel’s privileges to take
sugar. Mrs. van der Slang moved closer and continued; it
was a voice like dishwater gurgling through a sink. “Now
I’m a practical woman. I’m a businesswoman. So I’ll be
frank. I must say, you seemed to drop the whole business
last year, didn’t you, when you went off to college—and,
gracious me,” added Mrs. van der Slang, crossing her
bowed legs and making a slight bleat of nasal peevishness
for the benefit of the responsible party, “we didn’t do
entirely well there, did we?”
Isabel fixed her eyes on the woman’s feet.
“There you are, you see. And I do think,” said Mrs.
van der Slang, her forehead filling with centripetal
furrows, “a young woman should maintain. Oh,
schooling, general efficiency, what-not—I don’t mean,”
she smiled coldly, “the telephone company, hm?” She
smiled a great deal, smiled angrily, but her mouth was
large and when she smiled she tried to hide her teeth,
which were large and yellow. It wasn’t scolding but
innuendo: the scolding of innuendo. “I don’t know, it
could become a condition in this whole matter, not, Lord
knows, because I want it that way, but, heavens, I’ve
asked it of my own boys.” Isabel nervously began
twicking her thumbs. “I mean, wouldn’t you? Want us to
know you could, well, maintain? Of course you would.
He would. I promise, he is not insensitive to things. He’s
realistic. His feet are on the ground. For instance, I
remember—”
 Squinting suddenly, Mrs. van der Slang rose to nudge
out of an italic position the marinescape hung askew over
the fireplace.
“It is lovely, isn’t it. Storm on the Zuider Zee, it’s
called. Pricey though.” She popped her eyes. “In the
hundreds.” Mrs. van der Slang, a woman with that loud
persistent eloquence of an auctioneer in the slave-market,
was the typical polder peasant; wealthy, humorless, clever
in business, indifferent to the impatience or irony of those
annoyed by her crafty reticence and facial games, she had
perhaps sturdy visions of one day returning to live on the
Heerengracht, pulling close the shutters, and locking
herself in to count her gold. She was one of those women
who in moving from room to room carried one hand
floating in mid-air, limp off the wrist, in a charade of
what for some wildly inexplicable reason is assumed by
such people to indicate grace.
“Anyway, as I was saying, I remember he told me he
put a wall up between you and him: didn’t want to
interfere, see? ‘I put a wall up, Mother,’ he said.” She
sniffed. “I’ll say he did, don’t believe he ever came home
much afterwards—well, but that was mostly summers.
All this, in any case, not without reason, my poor angel.
Mind you, it’s all the same to me, the mother in all this,
but I mean, after all, you had been seeing—” Mrs. van der
Slang made foolish eyes.
“Him,” Isabel freely acknowledged.
“Him, yes. But not—”
“No.”
“And he’s the one you want now.” Her malerect ears
twitched. “You’re convinced?”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “But I don’t know if he might be.”
“Might be?”
 “Convinced.”
Mrs. van der Slang blew on her tea and arched a
brow. “You mean available.”
“Yes.”
“Now I understand. We women always do it; no one
ever notices it, but we must always create a small flaw in
every image—it’s for safety, right?” And then came the
ringing antistrophe. “Look, I told you I am a
businesswoman, didn’t I? Good. Then let’s put the foot to
the fire. You don’t know if you can take the chance of
assuming he cares for you enough to wait for him, do
you?” She took a sip of tea, swallowed, and looked up.
“Do you?”
The rain outside continued. Gusting around the
chimney at Zutphen Farm, it seemed almost wild enough
to blow down the pipe and launch from the mantelpiece
the little model ship with red sails and black hull sitting
there. A fire crackled in the fireplace and played
glowingly in crimson reflection on the cute blue-and-
white Dutch tiles surrounding it. It had been an awful day,
and, feeling low and lonely, Isabel had dropped by—she
found she’d done so more and more of late—to talk to
Mrs. van der Slang who on this particular day, in spite of
the weather, had just finished dropping her bulbs. (“I
always try to get them in by Columbus Day,” said the
mud-spattered mevrouw, waving a graip in greeting. “It
worked out, as you can see, to the very day.” ) Having
come inside, shrugging off the rain, they’d removed as
usual to the living room, not so much for the fire as for
the endless opportunities afforded Mrs. van der Slang to
fish out in succession, while announcing their
significance and price, the variety of objects she kept
there for that specific reason. The visits, initially, had
been short. They’d sit and converse on charming nullities,
with Mrs. van der Slang most of the time, though polite
enough, essentially uninterested: in a masquerade of
attention she’d either put her nose out like a projecting
horn, the beak of a shoebill, pointing upward and simply
wait it out or, slumped down, raise single strands of grey
hair, vacantly draw them along her fingertips to their limp
extremity, and every once in a while mutter, “hmm,
hmm.” This continued for a time. It wasn’t long however,
as things go, before Isabel eventually raised a subject
which not only cut its complex way across her own life
but reached into the lives of several others, specifically
the boys of the family van der Slang. Then—and
thereafter—Mrs. van der Slang’s sharp ears, like a goat’s,
displayed their pointed conches high up among the
indiscreet tufts of grizzled hair. After all, there was the
good of the family. There were her sons. There was the
farm. And so tea was poured and patience employed
against the comfortless and reverie-inducing rain that the
inquisitive might attend to the declarative and, by
acquainting itself with the question at hand, come to solve
it—correctly.
“I said, you don’t know if you can take the chance of
assuming he—”
“No.”
Isabel’s voice, low and embarrassed, actually seemed
to consummate itself. But Mrs. van der Slang felt much
better. She maneuvered Isabel’s eyes back to her face.
“There, was that so difficult, hmmm? Ideal visions,
you’ll find in this life of ours, are unreal visions. Fact,
huh? What is. What happens. What is the case. So let’s be
practical, but, at all costs, let us not be too hasty, advice,”
said Mrs. van der Slang, affecting one of her large
assortment of miniature faces and pouring more tea,
“your own mother, you’ll forgive me, might have passed
along to you with more authority at several critical
junctures of late. Sugar?”
Isabel shook her head.
The older woman, balancing her teacup, looked up
with portentous concentration. Her gothic eyes locked on
Isabel. Her ears seemed to arch backwards. Her ruminant
jaw shifted.
“You see, we can’t yet say there aren’t others
involved.”
A color like a rosy infusion in medicine flooded
Isabel’s cheeks.
“He mentions—other people?”
“He mentions, my girl, nothing of the sort. He’s not
home enough to mention anything of the sort. And I
wouldn’t tell you anything of the sort,” she pronounced
with throaty complacency, “if I thought it would wound
you so. I’m only obliged, I believe, to tell you frankly that
this wait of yours may not”—Mrs. van der Slang’s nose-
tips flared —”pay off.”
“I see.”
“I so hate to be blunt. But girls aren’t reluctant, you
must know, to telephone him at all hours when he’s home.
Why, only this summer—”
Isabel turned to her with swan-necked alarm.
“—but why bother going into it.”
“Does he ever mention—me?”
Mrs. van der Slang stood up, conspicuously turned
for the machinery of effect to the grey weeping window,
and sighed. “ ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘I’ve put up a wall.’ You
can almost hear him say it.” Wistfully, she sipped her tea.
She scrutinized Isabel, however, through half-closed eyes
as though measuring the perspective in a painting with
which she was not completely satisfied. “Can’t you?”
Isabel closed her eyes.
“Well, can’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Listen, why hedge? He’s realistic. Let us be. We
both of us, you and I, each want to see what we can get
out of this. Forget me—now I’ll come frank—the captain
would love grandchildren, by all our sons, oh positively,
no matter who or which or when. Then of course you’ve
always been a help around the farm here, I can’t deny
that. On the other hand, you know, I’m sure, you could do
worse than, well, join the team here at Zutphen. Indeed,
you seem to want that. You’ve as much as said it.
Certainly you know we’re—comfortable, taxes
notwithstanding. This Libyan rug?” Mrs. van der Slang
closed her eyes in artificial grief and held up five fingers.
“Ah, but that’s all for later, isn’t it, now it seems we must
settle on a plan whereby everyone concerned will be as
content as possible. Some, we know, won’t be. But some
will. You of course and especially—”
“Him.”
“Though not—”
“No.”
Isabel’s face strained. “But I don’t know if he could
be.”
“Could be?”
“Content.”
Mrs. van der Slang neither arched her brow nor blew
on her tea this time but sat back autocratically, taking
Isabel in with a sharp avizeful eye, and said, “You mean
married.”
 Always frustration, thought Isabel, pulling her thumb,
fffruuustrationnnn! Always struggle, always life.
“So where then does all this put us?”
“I don’t know,” Isabel whispered.
“Well, wouldn’t you agree with me that time,” said
Mrs. van der Slang, speaking from the lofty pedestal of
Age, “will solve it?”
Preoccupied, however, Isabel had dislocated her
attention and had turned to listen dolefully to the
percussion of the driving rain outside. The Graeae and
Gorgons seemed to be hailing in from the sea to distress
her alone of all others, threatening the very last vestige of
security in her being—and she who had so little!
“I say, wouldn’t you agree that—”
“Yes,” replied Isabel, her eyes rimming with bitter
tears, “oh yes.”
Mrs. van der Slang felt good.
“I find I must be candid, child. I think we should
return to college —why, say as a kind of proof of
intentions—just to see what transpires.” There was a long
silence. “We must above all show we can maintain. Is that
unfair?”
“And should I wait—and should I wait that long?”
Mrs. van der Slang’s face went surprised in a pout.
“Perhaps you wish to suggest that I am not being kind?
Well, you must see at a time like this one can’t stop to
think of convenience. Especially other people’s. I asked
only a simple thing of you. And am I being unfair? I don’t
think I’m like that, really. And I mean, who knows, it may
turn out perfect and this romance of yours may all work
out fine, just like, I don’t know”—Mrs. van der Slang
groped for an apt simile and then, finding one, looked up
with one eyebrow drawn high in a whimsical vertex and
smiled—-”just like in a book?”
Isabel was now desolate. She knew she was alone but
knew as well she couldn’t be, she hadn’t the strength.
Walking home aimlessly on that terrible October day, she
only felt the cirrus clouds, harbinger of even more rain,
mist down into her isolation from the Blue Ridge
mountains and then enter the confines of her heart, filled
once with a hope of some kind but, alas, a hope no longer,
for hope itself to tell the truth had now quite petered out.

LI

Conspectus Temporum; or
Short Excerpts from a London Diary

All places are distant from heaven alike.

—ROBERT BURTON, Anatomy of Melancholy

September 5th. Blessed be God, near the end of this

year, I am in very good stealth, without any sense of my
old pain, but upon feeling sold. I live in hack’s yard,
having my strife, and servant, Disdain, and no other
family than us three.
6th. When did we three meet before?
That’s a fair question. It was neither before nor after
the lost year in Quinsyburg—the Land of Ymagier,
beyond the regions of who did it and why. Y: the forked
path of Pythagoras. Crossroads. Free choice. Unity and
division. Wasn’t he, by the way, the philosopher who put
to school the idea that the opposition of the definite and
the indefinite, working in concert, creates the world?
(Check on this.)
10th. I saw that girl again on the stairwell; she
smiled. What a fund of galleries, playhouses, museums.
London! Call it Pariniban or Droiland, I am still
Darconville.
N.B. Buy pens, lightbulbs, wine.
11th. This morning I went to Mass in the chapel-of-
ease at St. Ethelreda’s in Ely Place, Holborn, and made
thanksgiving I’d not have to teach for a while. Glasses
would just be starting.
12th. Of what day is this the anniversary?
(Dissembler!) P.S. But let it be. A Friday still buries a
Thursday, a quart still drowns a tierce, and a quint a quart.
Every new year executes the privileges of the old. I was
never engaged to her, anyway. She was perfectly free.
I’ve decided to write both morning and afternoon.
14th. I will finish Rumpopulorum this year or sink
into hell like a sheet-anchor. Q. Can you? A. I can. The
cultivated life existed first; uncultivated life came
afterwards, with the blight of the serpent, Satan. So it is a
consolation to have to get back to vision, not create it
anew. (I like your mode, Mr. Bulstrode: when the mind is
a hall in which thought is like a voice speaking, the voice
is somehow always that of someone else. Diaries
diarticulate. The parrot’s amazed you can talk. Eurycles,
the Athenian soothsayer, throwing his voice, placed many
a jest on another’s lips. The paradoxical phenomenon of
ventriloquist and dummy who, speaking simultaneously,
never interrupt, always agree. The death of one is that of
the other. Have I stumbled upon a parable of love?)
Ah, but now see the fitful subjects this anti-self can
raise!
15th. I picked up my cat from quarantine at Heathrow
this afternoon. That I brought him along, presently
disporting with his shadow, is a constant delight.

Accept my gentle visionary, Spellvexit,

Sublimely fanciful & kindly mild;
Accept, and fondly keep for Friendship’s sake,
This favored vision, my poetic Child!

16th. Wrote.
17th. I met her again, holding the door for her. Viking
hair, blue eyes, features carved out of the cliffs of
Sarjektåcko. Must I remind myself not to get involved?
The half, said Hesiod, is fuller than the whole. There is a
perhaps cosmic strength in this otherwise vain truth: to
have none is closer to having all than having one.
Everything, perhaps, is the only thing. Late have I learned
that. And there’s enough of distraction in this city to help
me forget. (Marvelous, when you read back your own
diary it gives an advice of its own! )
The trees are turning. Mass at Farm St.
18th. My room, shaped like the move of a
chessknight, is situated in Pont St. at the very top of an
old building built around 1702, just about the time
William of Orange pipped. From my single window I can
see chimneys, the wimble of a church steeple, and a big
maple tree —why, I wonder, are those on the south side
always the first to shed? —reminding me daily of the
necessity of both shade and paper, the objective-
correlative wants of a writer.
Wrote poorly, however, all day.
19th. The same. Resignation, resignation; it will
come. Vulneratus non victus. The d’Arconvilles are
Venetians, and do Venetians give up? No, he who so shall,
so shall he who.
But bored, I invented a new kind of riddle. A
Dutchman had three sons. The first, named Sllaf, is a
mountain-climber; the second, Snrub, is a firefighter. The
third became a sailor. What was his name?
21st. Postcard from Thelma Trappe. (No, dear Miss
Trappe, I have never heard of the English herb “death-
come-quickly,” and I suspect you shouldn’t have either. )
24th. The sky is leaden. Went to Mass: the Feast of
St. Gregory, whom I pictured kneeling by candlelight in a
cold medieval tower praying lauds. At the Gloria I felt
such a new sense of resolve I almost wept for joy and
thought of the Unes: “I Hafe set my hert so hye/Me likyt
no love that lowere ys.” They came to me in a more
mystical than antihuman sense, as only, of course—
except for misinformed worldlings and Wyclifficals—
they should. It is not enough to quit sin, we must attain
virtue.
But, O, better and better! I will hate no one. There
will be forgetting, there must be forgiving. (Why,
however, must these always go together?) Forgive me,
Frater Clement. I remember you for what I should have
not forgotten.
27th. Wrote poorly. When one is tired, one’s
sentences are always the first to suffer. Seven pages of
bumph for one paragraph and a polysyllable. “Will I have
to use a dictionary to read your book?” asked Mrs.
Dodypol. “It depends,” says I, “how much you used the
dictionary before you read it.” Witty. But cruel. We are all
too cruel.
Long letter to Dodypol. Just gone twelve. And so to
bed.
30th. My lungs hurt. Smoking. And the weather is up.
I chose England arbitrarily, would have chosen Venice
were I a freeholder—cold, but better air—and yet, the
courts, the courts! Slower than Quin-syburg justice. And
this sad, old month.
October 1st. The girl’s name is Svarta Furstinna, a
Swede, and she lives across the hall. She looks like the
beautiful girl Ronsard once saw in the Château of Blois,
bending over her lute and singing the branle de
Bourgogne. Spellvexit himself was flirting. Shall I ask her
over for a glass of wine?
Later: the courage necessary for the execution killed
the sentiment. Wrote all night, so write this another day.
3rd. Spent the day in the Victoria and Albert Museum
reading room, farming through the stacks for books on
angelology. Darconville Pseudangelos, wanting to be
one? I checked, for the record, for The Shakeing of the
Sheets; not a copy. I looked, however, into the Pythagoras
question; to sum up: the opposition of the limiting (odd
and perfect) and the limited (even and imperfect)
organizes the world. The categories one, right, male, at
rest, straight, light, good, and square belong to the sphere
of the former; to the sphere of the even and imperfect
belong the opposites: many, left, female, moving, bent,
darkness, bad, oblong. The science of cutting pies! Art
shouldn’t classify, but declassify. A misogynist’s
ontology. Boring. Meditabund.
 The idea that limitation poses a definiteness,
nevertheless, warrants further study. I’ve survived for
that, perhaps, because to know the worst is still to know
what, having never known, is worse than worst by far—
indeed, to know the worst is to know you’ll never know
the worst again. When you know the worst, in short, you
don’t. So truth is then fortified by wrongs?
N.B. I love the confusion of trichotomies. They turn
me into enough of a fool to confirm by embarrassment the
rejection in which she left nothing otherwise to
understand. Furthermore, I think I’m insane.
4th. The imagination consumes some part of reality.
That would be the essential salvation of writing, wouldn’t
it? Bark is cinnamon: therapy.
5th. Today, I bought two tickets to the opera. Went
across the hall and redeemed the time. Wrote until late:
nulla dies sine linea. ( Cello-tape that to the wall!)
6th. “Who can’t say, I may be some part of your
destiny?” Thus pretty Svarta, at one point in a general
discussion of lost love over a post-and-rail tea in a tiny
cellar of a Beauchamp Place restaurant. I’d sketched,
prompted to it, an abstract of the past year, following of
course the parliamentary custom of avoiding reference to
any particular member by name. But the sublime
intoxication of recovered divinity was in the conversation
only; women can be too wonderful in their mystery to
need to know as individuals. I want nothing to matter
anymore, not even enjoyment, the mystical truth near but
not next to the heresy that everything human in us is an
obstacle in the way of holiness. Henceforth, in any case,
like the Stuarts I will govern without a Parliament. (“In an
uneven number heaven delights.” Eclogue VIII.75)
 We walked through Kensington Gardens, saw the
statue of Peter Pan, then home.
7th. Wrote.
8th. We attended a performance of The Flying
Dutchman at Sadler’s Wells. Catharsis, I suppose. I
wonder, is that grizzled Ahasuerus of the sea correct in
thinking, since Senta is recreant to her former lover, that
she’ll be so to him? If so, death must be exacted to prove
faithfulness unto death. Novel, isn’t it? “Antilogy; or
How I Relinquished What I Loved Because I Loved So
Much.” (A cutisbound edition, of course.)

Whoso would love

Must make headway
On a ship ever windward
Of Table Bay.

God bless us out of it! Excessive joy, I’ve read, has

killed men. I kissed Svarta goodnight.
9th. Wrote.
10th. The leaden sky puts its very own weather into
my sentences: “With the sun a reminding touch upon their
frozen hair the winged phagones of evil flashed out of
Heaven into the fumerole of empty space, screaming,
‘No, no! Not now! Not yet!’ “
Not too bad. Not too good.
11th. Wrote. The book looms up. Spellvexit asleep by
the shilling heater all day. Rain for four straight days.
12th. Spirit of the Pities! I woke tonight in the middle
of a frightful nightmare, a profane vision with a girl,
outbawling with joy, being dragged by her long hair to a
high wall as a sacrifice where perched the goat god, Pan,
whose pointed ears wagged lasciviously in anticipation of
—Drank until morning. Wine is poison to hemlock.
The question is, has part of me stayed behind to
retrace what I thought I should otherwise have missed?
Puritanical! Learning may be the enemy of thinking, and
thinking, of learning. I have never known which I wanted
and so am left with oneirotic circuses: fiction —the other
barber in the mirror, shaving the other you.
Mem. Never drink in afternoon.
14th. Feel grey as a badger. Haven’t been out of bed
for two days. It’s been raining longer than Louis XIV.
Cramps from overdepres-sants of smoke, drink,
malneirophrenia. I’ve begun to lose the habit of attention
that is strong and extreme because I can think only of
things, God forgive me, I hold in contempt. The thing that
will fail me first when I get old will be my patience, a
malefaction of Verrine, one of the Thrones.
I must up burtons and break out.
15th. Worse, pre-eminently so. And so slept.
16th. Dies notandus. This morning I found several
letters for me down in the foyer, one—how I, an
inventory of every anxiety, approached that little thing—a
cablegram from Fawx’s Mt., postmarked, to be
Petrarchally exact, October 12 and reading: “I love you.”
I will not drag Pyrrho from Elis to figure on this
page. Things belong to the past quite quickly, that’s all.
(Ridiculous. The present, the past, the future are
happening at once! ) But I am thinking: to know the truth
one must start by not believing in anything. I am thinking:
and so I sit here, doubting everything. I am thinking: I
think something, and then I think, ‘I doubt that,’ and so it
is false. I am thinking: that means I am sitting here and
thinking ‘I don’t think I am doubting everything,’
meaning there is something I don’t doubt. O God, don’t
disappoint me! Don’t stop time! O angels, clap your
wings upon the skies, and give this virgin crystal
plaudities! I am loved!
17th. How decisions aren’t decisions at all! How we
believe what we don’t quite realize! I’ve spent the day
shaking ink over a dozen unposted letters, read all, liked
some, mailed none. Transatlantic phone calls from the
Cadogan Hotel (Charlottesville number: no longer in
service; Fawx’s Mt. number: no one at home), but the
place triggers the mind to create the place. Sent telegram
from Knightsbridge, repeating hers to the word. Only
abide, rich Penelope!
Noctuarial entry: I can’t eat for happiness. I can’t
write. I am the masked Touareg, brigand from the desert;
the Bishop of Fun, in wonder of tabret and chimer of
solisequious gold; Zeus with effulgent forehead and
attributes. The sparkle in the tail of my eye could light up
the world!
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.
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.
And, as time passed, they soon came to know how
very serious they had become.
It became a matter of course, then, for them to spend
their weekends in Fawx’s Mt. Darconville didn’t really
mind. The farming community remained as
misenunciated as ever, and one rarely drove through those
depressing doles and secluded ravines without a sudden
feeling of subjugation, an inexplicable sadness, but as the
years passed he’d found, surprisingly, he’d adapted not
only to the folks in those parts who looked like itinerant
blackthorn sellers, what with their low-vaulted brows and
cluttoned joints, but also to the land they worked and its
parquetry of odd, misallotted fields where stupid large-
bodied cattle with shiny red hides and massive horns
ambled about. How often he’d heard the sounds of
reapers skitching near a hedge or fence by the road!
Slash, rustle, slash! Slash, rustle, slash. And, in fact, he
actually came to measure the frequency of his trips up
there—along with the parallel lapses of time—by
alterations in the fields he passed: the tedding after the
swathe of the scythes, then rowing, then the foot-cocks,
then breaking, then the hubrows gathered into hubs,
sometimes another break, then turning again, to the
rickles, the biggest of all the cocks, which were
eventually run together into placks, shapeless heaps from
which the harvesters carted their hay away. Autumns it
rained, the stubble soon took the snow, and before long
spring had come again. But what distributions—
irrotational, solenoidal, lunar—really mattered? Where
was that in a world of mutability that must apply to him?
The plug-uglies of Fawx’s Mt., the eupatrids of
Charlottesville, the quidnuncs of Quinsyburg? They were
of no consequence anymore, for behind what people on
this earth, thought Darconville, were shadows cast not
black?
The weekends rarely varied. They talked. They took
occasional drives. They often walked through the woods
across the way and once or twice to their initially slight
embarrassment but secret understanding found the tree
where, the day before Darconville left for London several
years ago, they’d in a far less assured mood carved the
word “Remember.” Generally, however, Darconville sat
in the backyard reading—he didn’t write, he never wrote
when he was with her —while Isabel, either washing her
hair or listening to records, waited to fix dinner. Mr.
Shiftlett, who never said a word, seemed to have no end
of work—Darconville never figured this out—down in
the cellar. And his imperseverant and preposterous sister,
her hah- pinched into rollers, was always puttering about
in the pseudo-carbuncular excrescence out front she
called a flowerbed—it was less expensive than a
psychiatrist—leaving off at successive intervals either for
a stiff drink or the by now familiar roundelay-like
exchange with her prospective son-in-law on the subject
of noble intentions: for her daughter, now at her
accidence, the fond illiterate mother wished only, if
querimoniously, that she be thinking “aboot the footure.”
Darconville, of course, agreed. But as he felt that Isabel,
for her own benefit, should finish her education and
avoid, at the same time, any inordinate pressure attendant
on future speculation, he preferred not to harry her in any
way whatsoever. The flying arrow, at a given moment in a
given place, is also at rest. They were content.
There was, nevertheless, the habitual Saturday night
party when the Shiftletts and their neighbors (minus: the
van der Slangs) put their workaday worries into a blender
and shook out the concoctions of Lethe—a group of
country skimpleplexes on dress parade whose ardor from
low squeals rose eventually to the din of an Abyssinian
thunderstorm. Darconville, by retiring early, avoided it.
But in the next room, Isabel, with all that thumping,
hooting, and laughter, lay face-up in the darkness most of
the night, burning with shame. Morning, then, never
broke in Fawx’s Mt. without Darconville being suddenly
awakened by the explosion of the 6 A.M. farm report
coming over the clock-radio next to his bed; it was all
agri-business: a rustic gaffoon with the diction of a
guinea-hen, full of voiceless consonants and twangs,
grackling his information out with such spitting, blowing,
and hawking it sounded like a five-minute repetition of
something like mustaherttuatarmustaherttuatar—in fact,
it was the price-per-bushel rundown on red winter wheat,
soybeans, and yellow shell corn which was then always
followed by a familiar essay on the problems of pinkeye,
parasite control, bull cross comparison, and hog-spraying.
There were other country matters, as well. Sundays,
for instance, usually found Darconville and Isabel alone.
No one there went to church. The Shiftletts, a somber two
in low-crowned black hats, always set that day aside as a
ticket-of-leave for a spin in the family truck to replenish
themselves with the aimless but prolonged mouse-hunt
that is the Sunday drive. Little varied thereafter in the
wave goodbye, the locked door, the silence.
Transcendental prolepses, or anticipations of thought:
under the color of sudden opportunity then, interwished,
they would turn like aimcriers to behold their chance, not
with spoken words, but simply eyes that meet to seek
what seeking always find. Mumbudget is the slogan.
Isabel steps quietly to her room; a shirt’s unbuttoned, off
comes an umbeclip, and down flows her hair; and then a
girl with tresses shining like that of a faxed star and a
figure bioluminescent beneath a black diaphanous gown
sprinkled with flowers turns with a gentle smile to the
doorway and leads her lover, under a slowly twirling
mobile, toward the familiar red-and-cream bed. There are
kisses short as one, one long as twenty, and they make
love, recapitulating with considerable skill what they’d
done a thousand times in a passion now as restless and
urgent as that need which into words no vertue could ever
digest. Fire makes gold shine. In the swelter, Isabel is
proof of it, always in the same way—she pushes herself
forward in blind suspension, her arms lowered behind her,
her hands locked tightly under the bed panel, her breath
catching in soft aromatic yoops as if astonished,
inexpressibly, at the wonder now of other impossibilities
ever being found as true as that. And Darconville? Now
in the floods, now panting in the meads, Darconville
could not be found to ask, so lost for joy was he in those
always indelible, compellable, but untellable hours of
drury which nevertheless the stupid quack of a clock, set
against invasion, always served to end.
“O, you’re going to leave me one day, I know it,”
Isabel, raised on an elbow, habitually teased.
For they talked, often—yes, and hoped, and dreamed,
and planned. Indeed, it had been one such chance remark
on one such occasion, sometime during that first year
after he’d returned from London, that one particular
quodvultdiabolus was fully, and finally, put to rest; the
topic of infidelity having been raised in the whimsical
way that had become typical of her, Darconville would
thereafter never forget how Isabel, cajoled, suddenly
laughed out that Govert van der Slang, not only someone
now to whom she never gave a passing thought, had also
been all along none other than Darconville’s
unprepossessing and inoffensive conversant at the
nefarious Gherardini party the previous year! It was, if a
belated confession, a disclosure at once explaining why,
fearful at the prospect of suddenly finding two rivals side
by side, she had kept to the other side of the room and
how, in fact, she’d suffered so, a matter thereby
encouraging her shocked, then relieved listener to try to
effect greater efforts at a truce with him whenever they
met, which they did, and a mutual understanding
developed as the years passed to the degree that they
might even have broached old subjects, which they didn’t.
Govert van der Slang was harmless. The name, Ignaro,
did his nature right ahead even if once he’d loved her. “I
never loved him, I don’t love him now,” said Isabel
Rawsthorne, “and I will never love him.”
 Fawx’s Mt. however, unlike that problem, never quite
lost its inscrutability, nor had Isabel her mystic fancies.
(What was it about that place, for instance, that made her
so nervous and always looking about from port to stern?)
Smitten, nevertheless, Darconville found her a child of
the sun, to be faulted less in what she lacked than for all
he could never know of her or ever have enough of: the
incautious afternoons of love, her secret kisses pressed
upon his hand, the closeness she felt sleeping in his shirts,
and of course her many childlike exaggerations—”I know
you’re going to leave me.” “Are we being ‘lascivious’?”
“I must go back to my kingdom one day, you know,
because I’m really a princess.” “If we ever parted I’d
come back one day and you’d recognize me by—”
O, could one write her paralipomena!
It would be incorrectly given out, however, to call
Isabel perfect. Loyal? That she was, and that for
Darconville mitigated matters otherwise not always
positive. She often took a great deal of humoring. She
never sent thank-you notes, never read enough, and never
visited Miss Trappe. She lagged a lot. She had a
monstrous vanity about her hair, the combing of which
became a particular hobble of hers exercised to death.
Young, she was disinclined to keep promises, take
chances, or, except in the woes of antipaternal lament,
ever really be frank—and, even when driven to it, her
responses were often too understated to match
Darconville’s enthusiasms which tended less to stifle
them, often to her consternation, than to fan. She often
said things out loud that most people generally preferred
to think ( “I know what I’m going to do—” or “I’m
decided now—”) but was just as often a talker to no
purpose. The talker, by definition, is not a listener, but
wasn’t listening, deliberating, the key to the thought
understanding requires? Then, she always said her worst
fault was that she was always trying to please people, and
yet she somehow failed to understand that, in doing so,
she inevitably came to resent them, a fault that had its
worst ramifications in the matter of jealousy.
Isabel loved Darconville, he was certain of it, but
through her behavior often proved to need him even more
—and suspicion is often an ugly, if habitual, facet of
need. There were at times hysterical telephone calls.
Several times, she read his mail—”I just looked, I didn’t
see anything!”—which upset him terribly only because it
threatened him with implications of a disloyalty he never
felt, quite the reverse, in fact, and so he would end up
paradoxically insisting on his loyalty with wrath and on
his love with anger. At such times, she wept in the most
unconvincing way—she never hid herself to weep—but
when Darconville, appalled at the vulgarity of such
groundless suspicion yet terrified at the same moment that
his presence far exceeded her need of him or
underrepresented what need of hers he could meet, then
made the suggestion he always swore within himself he’d
honor (“Would you like to date anyone else?”), she
always refused, always firmly and always finally.
Stubbornness, one of the worst manifestations of
weakness, here made him grateful. Yes, she was loyal.
But our virtues, indeed, are our vices. She never
entertained a single thought about the mysteries of God,
man, or the universe yet for that seemed innocent. If she
had few convictions, kept her opinions at half-mast, and
simply repeated what Darconville said, easy acceptance
replenished serenity. Threatened by mediocrities much
closer to her than to others—or at least she so feared—she
effortfully aspired to graces others of her age ignored, and
yet when she acquired them she too often failed, in terms
of sympathy, those who hadn’t acquired them—and far
too often, in the light of those requirements where the
social demands of Quinsy College, such as they were,
refracted off the relatively advanced status her association
with Darconville gave her, Isabel more and more began to
feel her participation in them less a favor received than
one conferred. That people with atrocious manners should
now have to be polite and considerate in their dealings
with her, that people whose habit was to stand aloof
should now have to be at her service, that the priggish and
self-assured should have to defer to her, all of this pleased
her just a little too much—and yet, while sometimes it
cankered him, Darconville could no more by
unconscionable criticism be disloyal to her than St. Paul
who, ready to anathematize even an angel if it preached
another gospel, proved a model of steadfastness.
There was not a lot to forgive, really, for while what
she was exacerbated what she wasn’t—the fairer the
paper, the fouler the blot— her faults were few. Isabel
could be amusing, as well. Hers was a sweet
wiseacreishness. She made claims: that she never had a
headache, never drank a cup of coffee, and never—a
howler of Southern etiquette—went to the bathroom. She
boasted she could tell by smell if it were going to snow
and that she knew jiujitsu. She suffered an acute
haptodysphoria in relation to peaches. She carried French
sweets loose in her pocket, stuck together with lint more
often than not. She wore a cheap perfume called
“Figment” which was much less attractive than her
particular way of lowering her eyes in a smile when he
flatteringly acknowledged it. The girl was difficult in the
extreme to know, a fact brought home to Darconville
many times in the process, lately begun, of recording for
fun what she said, and did, and felt, memos, then notes
and random observations, and finally long reflective
essays that eventually grew into a box of papers on a
subject whose wonderful inconsistencies he hoped never
to resolve only if they led her to the larger, deeper self he
knew she had it in her power to become.
In Isabel’s senior year, it so happened that
Darconville encouraged her, as a confidence boost, to
enter the Miss Quinsy contest. Now, despite petty
annoyances, there was no question but that over the few
short years they’d grown closer and closer. Difficulties
attend upon adjustment. Perennials, unlike annuals, seem
less attractive perhaps only because open to longer
scrutiny, but they endure, they do endure, and if the
splendor of their lives was occasionally overcast by
shadow, neither of them was so confused as either to
accede to the mundane or assume happiness was habit.
And so every day they spent together, and every day, no
matter the cast, was too short—morning leaped high-
noon, bounded on a step to mid-overnoon, and always
night came far too fast. She stopped by his house every
day, confided in him when she needed that, and even if
poorly read—she found allusions to Darconville’s book,
not having read it, disconcerting—nevertheless remained
for him a refreshing alternative to the dire extremes of
academic dullness. He still invented and told her little
fables. She still slept in his shirts, still left notes at his
office, and always of course exclaimed in her childlike
way of princesses, fairy forests, and supernatural
intercepts. They still played with Spellvexit, went on
picnics, and flew kites out in the meadow, where, still, her
tresses broke free in the wind which absorbed into its
length her trailing ribbons and in a special wayward way,
as always, seemed to claim her for its own by means of an
adoption no more complex than simply taking her away.
What was Darconville’s surprise, then, when in the face
of all that joy and seasoned understanding the Miss
Quinsy affair exploded—a crisis, reaching to proportions
he hadn’t thought possible, that touched upon that one
point of delicacy long unspoken of and which now ran
arrow-straight to a single, unavoidable confrontation. It
had to do with the size of Isabel’s legs.
Isabel loved to eat. It was an expression of joy, a
mode less of glut than of celebration. The weight she put
on, however, unfortunately sank—to drop hopelessly,
perversely, relentlessly into the crural sheath where
eventually began to slumber, with little to be done that
could reverse it, a fatty deposit of incipient cellulite,
touched in places with arborescent naeves daintily
penciled blue. Volumes, alas, grow faster than surfaces.
The birth-control pills she took only worsened the
condition. She was extraordinarily beautiful but low
slung: not the Marquesse of Pantagruel, not Assumpta
Corpuscularia, neither did her legs reach to the fabled size
of a Samoan’s, but she was frankly supracoxal and
whatever counterefforts she employed to diminish the
problem failed. An inceptive gammer was ever pushing
from within to get out and create havoc. Each of her legs
rather recalled the condition of Dr. Johnson’s goose—too
much for one, not enough for two! Cute, below, became
cunning.
The long dresses and bell-bottoms she habitually
wore—obsessively, as if her thighs were an approximate
occasion of sin to a cannibal— she saw as a defense not
so much advantageous perhaps as appropriate. Mind
bifurcates: and often, with jaw muscles tensing, she
suffered the torments of the damned from the
observations she self-defeatingly ascribed to any onlooker
in sight, coming to resent not only the observer but, sadly,
the observed. Sometimes, her response was self-mocking
laughter, the ironic kind, which, having to do with
nothing, only makes the face lose its attractiveness in a
paralytic ache, ossifying natural feelings in a ritualistic
grimace, feigning fun, and so flatly refusing anyone who
cares the reason he must have graciously to show
compassion. Darconville was such a one. He loved her
precisely for everything she was and wasn’t, and, if
sometimes he worried her worries, he simply assumed the
compositional view, like that of the Japanese print, by
favoring the pictorial elements gathered in the upper part
of the picture and leaving the rest either empty or out of
view. But nothing could diminish his love. There was too
much else for which to be grateful. One crow didn’t make
a winter.
So the Miss Quinsy subject had been raised and,
raised, dealt with, and Isabel’s self-disappointment,
running headlong from the challenge —misinterpreted
mock—led to the humiliation she swore, she adjured, she
insisted lay bound up with the mere mention of that
public event she so came to abhor. She became
convinced, utterly, that she had to meet “standards” for
Darconville, in spite of his repeatedly denying it. “I’m not
Hypsipyle Poore!” she cried, a terrible chaudfroid in her
heart. She wept. “It’s impossible! I just can’t be what you
want!” And several times she turned pridefully on her
heel, her eyes flashing, with: “You watch! I know what
I’m going to do, I’m going to lose thirty pounds and
become a model!”
It was bewildering. Her tempestuous emotions merely
burst into occasional flame that consumed but could not
illumine. And it was ridiculous. Darconville wished he’d
never mentioned the foolish pageant but having done so
mistakenly tried to outface her fears and suspicions by
further pleading—maximum efforts to minimize—and so
only compounded the problem, stretching consequent
hours of debate and clarification to limits beyond the
powers of even Arabic notation to express. Finally, like so
much else during those years, it sputtered, wound down to
a whimper, and was heard again no more.
Darconville, the lover, put the matter behind him. But
Darconville, the writer, lingered on awhile, remaining
behind to retrace for some reason what otherwise he
should have missed. And what he found he filed, for the
better to know her impressions, her preferences, her
remarks, her joys, even her outrages, the better to
understand, he felt, and so better love. With lovers: with
enemies—how strange!—there, in each, can one always
find both a stimulus and a lesson.
And what exactly were they? The stimulus? Oh, the
stimulus he knew. But of all the many lessons over the
many years, Darconville came to learn, above all, that
love mightn’t be easy and yet still be love, that love might
fade or fall or stumble or stoop yet still be love, that love
might have to dodge and pivot through every scarp,
counterscarp, demi-bastion, pinfold or covered way,
glacis, ravelin, half-moon, ditch, sap, mine, and palisado
yet still be love! And he learned even more, and was glad
for that, for too easily we come to love love first and not
initially love that from which it comes.
 And so aware of that Darconville came to learn about
his lover.

LIV

Odi et Amo

A quirked vessel never falls from the hand.

—ANONYMOUS

Her Likes: ballet-slippers; salt; purple ink; abstract

prints; mushrooms; jiujitsu; fairy tales; the novel,
Wuthering Heights; herring roe for breakfast; combing
her hair; movies; scented candles; découpage; spinach;
unattractive girls; jeeps; tiny candies; the pronunciation of
the word “lascivious”; gin-and-tonics; all animals,
especially lions and ti-gers; straw hats; illusion; getting
mail; rings; the consolation following failure; halter-type
dresses; rock music; flattery; seed catalogues; the
endearment “Doo Doo”; Rima, the Bird Girl; wick-
erwork; clam chowder; the South; cookies; stories of
waifs; the flute; nudity; solitude; plucking her eyebrows
manually; money; the color blue; mobiles; hope; thick
shoes; pomander balls; snakes; long dresses; antiques;
stone jewelry; exotic shampoos; princesses; heat;
security; herb gardens; fine-point pens; her first name;
ice-cream; batiks; illustrated books; fields; venison; hoop
earrings; feigning; horses; fossils; root beer; safety;
movies; to be looked at; the known; photos of herself;
things cute; balloons and kites; fiddler crabs; ginger ale;
Charlottesville summers (?); Darconville.
Her Dislikes: mathematics; sand on the bottom of her
feet; country music; peach fuzz; children; long tunnels;
her relatives; coffee; poodles; the appellation “Honey”;
reading; frankness; Quinsyburg; films; blond guys;
poverty; beer; intellectual discussion; cities; writing
letters; religious devotions; nakedness; feigners; the
thought of deer being killed; her legs; tomatoes; exercise;
literature; hard peas; loneliness; having her nostrils
pinched; shorts; men with long fingernails; cigarette
smoke; rednecks; study; things cunning; Mrs. van der
Slang’s lack of ethics; cold; farmers; the unknown; the
responsibility following success; chemistry; to be stared
at; scholars; her real father; expectation; geraniums; her
thumbnails; card-playing; Fawx’s Mt.; eccentrics; the
South; diners; Hypsipyle Poore; declarations of love in
anyone’s presence; college; attractive girls; analytical
talks; Dr. Glibbery; standing up; references to storge;
maternal inanilo-quence; the past; the future; sailors;
insecurity; words; square dances; running; beauty
pageants; the name Shiftlett; Charlottesville summers (?);
Govert van der Slang.

LV

The Timberlake Hotel

 Sweet boadments, good!
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth

THERE WAS A LOT TO KNOW, more to

remember, but remembering to forget became the
significant self-protective feature for each of them that
last year. It became policy, for Isabel’s graduation—and
its afterwending consequences—loomed up for them as
an abrupt question as to what, then and thereafter, they
would do. Characteristically, both lived with the
piepondering but unexpressed hope that nothing for them
would change, and yet while they postponed whatever
decision it was the continued silence on that subject
insured against their raising, hoping, perversely, became
an obstacle to hope, for each and every fulfillment of
theirs, no matter how small, seemed to contain in itself an
impulse to further commitment, which somehow instantly
ruined the purity of fact by theory. It was as if, while Dar-
conville was waiting for something to happen, Isabel was
waiting for something not to. Queerly, it came to the same
thing.
Whatness translated into wlatness. It wasn’t working,
for both of them came to feel, painfully, that the
avoidance of pressure recapitulated with considerable
skill, analytic and mimetic, precisely the pressure they
both sought to avoid. Graver by far than the problem
became the solution. How answers, like effects, become
the consequence of questions, like causes! It was baleful.
Would they go? Where would they go? And would they
go together? One decision, of course, hinged on another,
then that to another, and so on, serving, eventually, to
hasp the door so tight that, if once neither of them quite
dared open it, they couldn’t work it now at all.
It all came to an end—or a beginning—rather
suddenly one morning very much like any other when the
risk of Darconville’s having given up everything for the
sake of his love, for that love, seemed as inconsequential
as ever. From class Darconville was called down to the
English office to take a long-distance telephone call. The
office secretary couldn’t quite distinguish, at least at that
moment, the difference between a groan of pleasure and a
groan of pain—isn’t more than inflection involved?—as
she searched his face for a clue. Though having forsaken
much—a humiliating charge he privately leveled against
himself for abrogating, during the Quinsyburg years, so
many former ideals—Darconville nevertheless held fast
to what he still felt the best attribute of character: the
power to refrain. The telephone call was brief. He said
only one word: yes.
Darconville checked his watch, left the office, and
quickly headed toward the dining-hall. The door of the
classics department suddenly opened as he passed, and
Miss Gibletts, interposing herself, tried to stop him. “A
curious schoolprint,” she said, “how would you translate
the Greek phrase soukissa melaiva?” She sniffed. “I’m
working up an article.” Darconville, in mid-stride, said he
was sorry, he was rushed, he really was. Miss Gibletts,
stamping her foot, honked tearfully at him as he hastened
down the corridor, “Don’t mind me, nobody does, I’m just
a snirt!” Darconville turned to explain but heard only,
“Go back from wherever you came from and your ugly
cat!”—and a door slammed. We just may, thought
Darconville, smiling, we just may.
 Now he was running, down the buckling linoleum,
past the framed row of Quinsy presidents, and into the
Rotunda where the odor of brussels sprouts still hung in
the air. A student was standing in front of the statue of
Joan of Arc. Darconville, almost out of breath, asked her
if perchance she knew Isabel Rawsthorne and, as she did,
requested that she go into the dining-hall and get her.
When Isabel appeared, somewhat surprised, he took her
by the hand to a far corner.
“We’re going to dinner at the Timberlake Hotel
tonight—to celebrate!”
“We are?” Isabel bunked. “Why are we?”
Darconville seemed to remember everything he’d
ever forgotten at that moment, and, with his eyes
positively gleaming, he quickly explored her face to see
exactly where her joy, matching his, would express itself.
The sun, clamping wide, streamed into the Rotunda.
“We can say goodbye to Quinsyburg,” he said. “If
I’m not going to leave you, you see, I’m afraid you’ll
have to come with me.”
“To the Timberlake?”
“Guess again.”
The Timberlake Hotel, through some error or other of
inadvertence, had never been torn down. It perched over a
walk-up, behind high trees, off the main street and wanted
paint badly. The shades in the upper rooms, most of
which hadn’t been used for years, were always pulled.
The old-fangled shutters slanted. There was an old,
ghostly character to the place, its suffering points at
immediate evidence to the eye and as close as the gloom
in the main foyer—one stood in the middle of the worn
carpet and heard only the sound of waits—which was
dark, weird, and smelled like long-used prayer-books.
Behind the massive front desk hung a keyrack, always
full, and along the back-wall were replicated rows of
mail-hutches, always empty. Sometimes someone was
behind the desk, sometimes someone wasn’t. It didn’t
matter. You hung up your wraps, waited in vain by the
dining-room to be seated, and then eventually walked in.
“It’s a miracle—a wonderful secret just between you
and I,” said Isabel, giggling and sipping more champagne.
She looked up. “Or should it be me?”
“Should what be me?”
“Should I be me?” Isabel twirled a finger in her drink
and laughed. “You know.”
Darconville smiled. “Could you possibly be anyone
else?”
The secret had been divulged, and they were both in
high spirits, an exuberance fully as bright and as antic as
the candleflames that lighted up the table and sparkled out
of the silver and twinkled in the wine. Darconville refilled
the glasses, and again they toasted the future that had just
been offered them. But there was Doubt in the Mind of
Royalty. “Harvard! Harvard University! But it’s you,” she
added, playfully pushing his arm, her diamond ring
spurtling with tiny lights, “it’s you they want. Me,
whatever would I do there? You know me, I don’t seem to
be able to communicate with anybody.” She paused,
reflectively. “I seem to ruin everything”—always, that
quaint pronunciation—”but to ruin your career? To
disappoint you? To not measure up?”
It was absurd, such talk. Loyalty? The virtue, going
to such lengths, only turned upon itself, making faith as
fickle as a lee tide trying to run against the wind. Oh,
could she only have seen herself, for she sat as for a
portrait, her honeycolored hair falling around a face as
exquisite as noonshine and her long black dress leaving
her shoulders bare and whiter than purity. Praise praises.
Thanksgiving gives thanks. Couldn’t she see that?
“What,” asked Darconville, “could you possibly
ruin?”
The smile died. For a minute Isabel seemed not to
know, struck as if she’d somehow forgotten on opening
night the dialogue that had gone too long assumed or
unquestioned in her monologous lines of rehearsal. She
grew silent, thinking she didn’t want to remember what
she, in fact, had forgotten. Darconville, watching her for a
response, remembered all of a sudden a queer dream he’d
once had: a couple, standing on each side of a dead beast,
were bid to live together ‘til death did them part and so,
shaking hands, the wedding was ended. Who was that
couple? What was that beast? Isabel, meanwhile, seemed
for no apparent reason utterly shent and powerless,
staring at, then into, and now through Darconville to the
reaches of blackest orphny. It frightened him, that mood-
change, and he touched a shiver in her arm. She looked
up and around as if looking for something to do.
“How much they must have loved your book! Look!”
She nervously pulled from her handbag a copy of
Rumpopulorum, the formal cause of his being asked to
teach at Harvard and so brought along as a guest, flipped
it open, and read: “‘With the sun a reminding touch upon
their frozen hair the winged, um, phagones of evil flashed
out of heaven—’“ She looked up. “‘Flashed,’“ she said,
“that’s a great verb.” The voice was happy but it wasn’t
her voice. It seemed a terrible echo of something even
worse than false cheer: terror.
Darconville wasn’t fooled.
“Please,” he asked softly, “what’s the matter?”
 Isabel’s face collapsed as if she’d just been stabbed—
then, clutching his two hands, she pulled herself to his
face and sobbed desperately, “My God, do you really love
me?”
The dining-room itself seemed to fall away, the
shadows thrown across it becoming now more ominous,
its huge radiators like headstones and the faded perse
drapes like shrouds over the windows effectively
providing a last funereal touch. It seemed to transform
back to the sepulchre it always was, not that the owner,
were he ever brought that complaint, would have given a
damn—and he’d damned well tell you so, too; but he
spoke to no one, least of all strangers: he only stood
around, tut-mouthed in his baseball cap, listening to his
swine-toned radio, reading the paper, or maybe slouching
out to that dad-docky veranda, knotted with grey wisteria,
to play checkers with a few other old smouchers and
layabouts who seemed to have spent a lifetime devoted to
smoking bags of filthy shag and patching grief with
proverbs out front. That was the way it was. You didn’t
like it, you could goddamn well go down the road, OK?
The Timberlake did no business to speak of. The
students never went there, the faculty rarely, and Negroes
weren’t welcome. It was a place for Quinsyburg’s old
people—veiled like outdated fabrics and wrapped in
woolen stuffs—who stopped in, wordlessly hung up their
coats, and then took their plates of boiled fish and glasses
of water alone. On this particular evening, the dining-
room was empty as usual but for one black waiter, several
old ladies crunching breadsticks, and the unmistakable
figure, hunched in a bib, of President Greatracks alone in
a corner gulching a mound of meat. He had seen
Darconville come in but only winked, wiped his oily chin,
and fell again upon his meats and puddings as if to defeat
them. Ordinarily, he would have come over and talked the
runners off a pung. He obviously had other plans. But
congeniality, even at the best of times, was not a big
number at the Timberlake Hotel. Nor had Darconville
chosen the place by chance. You see, it was absolutely
impossible to have a celebration there, so it was the
perfect place to have a celebration if you were never
coming back. For Darconville, incidentally, there was no
question whatsoever about that. But unfortunately he was
now facing another.
“I’m sorry.”
“You must be tired,” said Darconville. Was it a joke?
If so, it was a joke that hurt him badly. But he smiled.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’ve been overexcited by it all.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Please,” asked Darconville, leaning forward, “what
is the matter with you?”
“You.”
“What’s the matter with me?”
“Me,” she whispered.
Darconville touched her hand and frowned, feeling
clownish and homely and old. He was embarrassed. He
didn’t know what to say. Do you really love me? When
love isn’t proof of itself, it is suddenly impossible to
prove—and words, which fit to fill the mouths of myst
and mummer alike, cheapen on the tongue. And how
many of them, to mock about meaning with
mendaciloquence! No, if weeds were orchids, thought
Darconville, people would come to hate orchids rather
than cultivate weeds. But words were weeds, weren’t
they? They can mean their opposite! If I should cleave,
must I then embrace this girl or be let to cut her into
twigs? Let? Choose, it can mean both hinder and allow.
Avaunt beckons and banishes, both, and hostis, why, it
indicates a guest and indicates an enemy! Foundlings are
lostlings! Do you really love me? I do, and so must loathe
her, he thought, fashioning thus the truth that grows
expedient, becoming Cato’s lie. Question: Are you
faithful to your husband? Answer: I wouldn’t be with you
—there, for manifold ambiguity to say that one deserved
condign punishment is tautological; to say that one does
not deserve it is a contradiction in terms. What of
language, then, when opposites pip each other into life as
faith will doubt and love will hate? If Moses was the son
of Pharaoh’s daughter, then he must have been the
daughter of Pharaoh’s son. Why, pluck out words that
mean what they are, and language shan’t have a tooth left
to mump on beans! Do you really love me? It was a
question, thought Darconville, that fully deserved the
wrong answer—but, what, making it then, if language
interpreted as it did, the right one? O wonderful world,
when we can’t mean what we say! But wait, perhaps she
asks what she too well knows and therefore doesn’t know
at all, as a person goes blind to the riddle of familiar
landscapes or sits deaf as a post listening in the depths of
that infirmity to try to hear more of the promiscuous roar
she can’t see has caused and now prevents it. Good! I will
outparadox paradox, thought Dar-conville, juggle
intentions like balls, and make foundlings of lostlings all
over again! Opportunity is being ready for it! Checkmate!
“I want to marry you,” said Darconville.
The statement was simple. It didn’t subdichotomize.
It didn’t subdivide. It seemed to Isabel as far from danger
as she was from reason and as near to love as she was
now from folly. She felt strangely calm, almost in the
swoon of satisfaction that is at the last stage of penance
fully made. It was a moment to cherish, there in that
ghastly hotel, when perhaps for the first time in her entire
life that vision which she feared waited for her forked and
misanointed in the middle distance now came to the fore
an angel of deliverance, its open hand gentle to the
possibility of it. It was so easy. There was suddenly
confusion in neither concern nor context: here was a
person who loved her, a friend to console her, a protector
to keep her safe from the close world of mouse-fretting
worries and major disappointments she’d lived with so
long but could no more. If one did something, she saw,
one didn’t have to wait anymore. She wouldn’t—she
couldn’t—wait anymore. There was nothing to remember.
The statement was simple. There was nothing to forget.
“Wait,” said Darconville, swiftly interrupting himself
to comply with apprehension before it rose to overwhelm
him, “if you want to. You may want to spend some time
alone, you may want more schooling, your parents—”
Isabel’s head was lowered, shadowed in a slant of
candleshade. It has been said that the happiest
conversation is that of which nothing is remembered, and,
if so, whether a longer reply led up to what he heard,
Darconville couldn’t say, but he would never forget that
moment when she looked up suddenly with moist brown
eyes, paused, and whispered softly, “I want—what you
want.”
“When?”
“September.”
“Where?”
Isabel fixed her eyes on him tenderly, her bosom
upwelling with the tears she tried in vain, by swallowing,
to absorb. “Where we were engaged.”
A stone suddenly rolled away from his heart.
“I have to confess something,” she said, smiling
through the tears that fell and pressing the back of her
fingers against his cheek. “I’ve always wanted since I was
little to make my own wedding dress.”
The driving rain outside—a sudden gowkstorm had
blown up during the evening—turned the lobby of the
Timberlake even darker than usual, the heavy curtains
over the windows flapping about now in the room like the
huge wings of angry birds. They had stayed on rather late,
and Darconville, concerned about Isabel’s curfew, was
wondering how they’d get to the car. Hugging two empty
champagne bottles, Isabel laughed that she didn’t care and
that she didn’t mind getting wet and that, having claimed
earlier at Fitts that she planned to go to Fawx’s Mt., she’d
signed out for an “overnight” anyway.
They waited on in some merriment, with Isabel
gladdened to the heart and Darconville feeling a certain
continual power, a sense of being attentive enough to a
minute survey of the worth of real life that he might have
been perpetually a poet. At that moment he looked
through the window and saw a woman outside in the
midst of the downpour. She was running up the front
steps holding up a pink umbrella and an overnight bag. It
was Mrs. Dodypol! Whether Isabel recognized her he
couldn’t say, but as the poor woman stumbled through the
front door of the hotel with an alcoholic lurch and a fright
of hairloops stuck messily to a face the color of margarine
he saw how very much she evoked Isabel’s sympathy—
Isabel pressed close to Darconville.
“I love you for that. You care,” he said, thinking of
his own general indifference to that faculty wife,
“sometimes far more, I’m sorry to say, than I.”
Mrs. Dodypol, signing the register, quickly
disappeared upstairs when Isabel turned to Darconville
and, winking, whispered playfully, “Or is it me?”

LVI

The Wedding Is Banned

And all is done that ye looked for before.

—JOHN SKELTON, “Though Ye Suppose
All Jeopardies Are Passed”

THE SUMMER began with much to do. It was June

already, and Isabel had passed her courses, was
graduated, and had been driven back to spend an
unemphatic summer—her last—in Fawx’s Mt, not
Arcady, no, but home. There had been a happy
coincidence in her graduation gifts: her parents gave her a
sewing machine, Darconville several hundred dollars for
the nuptial silks-and-satins they together chose in
Charlottesville for her gown and a blanket chest in which,
with sprigs of rosemary, to fold it when finished. She also
bought a small, blue used car. Now, as they’d determined
to be married in London come September, time was
pressing. When the particular discrimination called
hesitation long exists, the reverse discrimination of haste
must offset it, and so with that in mind Darconville
returned to teach two five-week sessions of summer
school at Quinsy and to organize as best he could what
promised to be a frantic few months.
It was imperative, right off, to secure living quarters
at Harvard and to find out when in the fall they were
required to be there. There were other letters of inquiry, as
well, one immediately to Westminster Cathedral to set a
wedding day and another, also to London, to ascertain
from the General Registry Office at Somerset House what
procedures were required on the civil side. They would
need reservations, licenses, certificates of a hundred kinds
—and above all luck. (A less pactitious consideration—
one no less, however, involving Isabel—was squaring
away the matter of faith: he began to think about her
baptism. ) The hope, of course, was that all would go
smoothly. His was to do, then report, and it became his
habit to dodge down to the Timberlake at night to
telephone any news of consequence. Sometimes Isabel
wasn’t at home.
The comfort, he knew, was that every effort in
Quinsyburg that summer would be an effort finally put to
rest and the occasion, finally, of putting that place behind
him. Who’d have believed he would have stayed so long?
Constancy was a word too hollowpampered to express so
extraordinary a behavior; it wasn’t patience; it wasn’t
longanimity. It was love—a wooing, leading only to one
end, that had followed the same time-honored steps, the
shared laughter, the wantsum misunderstandings, fearful
and explorative, and all the other fits of uncommon
passion for so many centuries displayed in the tempests
between Father Weather and Mother Earth.
Struggle, of course—what else?—informs success,
and there were those of Darconville’s friends who,
hearing now of his marriage plans, left him that summer
somewhat in the dark less as to the wisdom of his new
venture than as to the interpretation they placed on it.
Quinsyburg was a lonely place, and loneliness often
becomes the sole source of protection against the
comparatively worse desolation passing friendship
causes. Lonely they lived—why, wondered Darconville,
do people have to have no money to spend less?—and
lonely they would die; but pitifully he could find no
words of consolation for such as those who, meeting him
in the streets or at school during those final months,
stopped forlorn as if to ask, not so much from him as of
themselves, why bother to marry and beget when the
search for union is doomed by implication in the very act?
Why part a whole heart into halves if it is required to
break it? Why not acknowledge, finally, that union is one
and disappointment the alternative?
No, it wasn’t that the remarks were put in such direct
terms; Quinsyburgisms seldom were. There were hesitant
glances, often, silly nods, comments odd and elliptical.
For instance, one day Mrs. McAwaddle stopped him on
the front steps of the library, sighed lugubriously, and —
what byzantine warning was this in aid of?—tapped the
side of her nose. Another incident as inexplicable
occurred one afternoon in the college post-office. “Hello,
Darconville,” came a voice, “fair grow the lilies on the
riverbanks?” It was of course Dr. Dodypol who, banging
a stamp on a letter, then pointed at him with a quote:

”If Nature’s a vision, Art’s a re-

How can you write what you cannot see?”
 Then he popped his letter in the slot and said good-
day.
But Miss Trappe’s, perhaps, was the queerest.
Walking up the street one day under one of her boisterous
hats, she suddenly reversed direction and on a detour
came up to knock on Darconville’s door. Disheartened to
hear that Isabel hadn’t stopped by to say goodbye to her
—the old cameo lay still unclaimed—he was only
confounded by what followed. “I was reading your book,”
she said cryptically, “and on page sixty-five I suddenly
remembered, though I couldn’t recall where, something I
wanted to re-read.” A worried smile quickened up to her
temples as with a run of light. “Now, tell me, what page
did I turn to?” Darconville didn’t know what to say.
“Why, page fifty-six,” exclaimed Miss Trappe, her pitted
nose pushing forward. “Page fifty-six!” And quickly
kissing his cheek, she turned, and walked away. There
wasn’t in any of these encounters, either by word or
gesture, that which raised so much as a hint of
disapproval about his marriage and yet each referred, he
was convinced, to nothing else.
It was that kind of summer.
Darconville soon found, with Isabel still unbaptized,
he needed a dispensation from “disparity of worship”
which had to be obtained from the Bishop of Richmond
and then forwarded to the Chancellor at the Archbishop’s
House in London to have it cleared for execution in that
diocese. Harvard University, meanwhile, notified him he
was to be in Cambridge by September 10. So he busily set
to coordinating matters. But in late June he was informed
that he was required to obtain a special license for the
dispensation of the residency requirements in England,
and to that end he immediately wrote, as directed, to the
Registrar of the Court of Faculties. He was busy as a
piper: teaching, boxing books and clothes, writing letters,
and preparing in the interim —he’d have no time later-—
his courses for the fall. The prospects were exciting.
Would that he’d the time to dwell on them!
There were still to be obtained sérologie tests, birth
certificates, and letters of permission as well, and another
matter involved the telephone calls to Fawx’s Mt. where
Isabel, presumably, was working away in as much of a
dither, measuring patterns, cutting, and sewing away like
the Three Fates all at once. By midsummer her letters fell
off in frequency, but Darconville gamefully placed upon
those that did come an even greater value, reserving in his
heart only the spirited longing that such accidents might
happen again and again. Contact with her kept him vital.
And when the Adams House secretary at Harvard notified
him of a vacancy there (a suite at $250 per month) his
acceptance brought home just how crucial contact in
whatever form would now become, for, as money now
was critical, he was forced to sell his car. The trips up to
Fawx’s Mt. were over.
Ah, dear Bentley, thought Darconville, such a deed as
from the body of contraction plucks the very soul!
It wasn’t a week before another car appeared—a
sleek foreign racer, chrome and plumcolored, screeching
up to Darconville’s house with a triple blast of its hom.
The door opened, and then, wearing a lavender tube-top
and demoniacally tight jeans, out stepped Hypsipyle
Poore! “It’s a Hulksaek Kongjak Puin! A present from
daddy!” she called up to his window, snapping off her
driving gloves and pointing to her initials printed on the
fender. She blew him a kiss, stepped under the big tree,
and said in a low breathy voice, “Only one thing faster ‘n’
better than this au-to, baby boy. Hint, hint.” Laughing,
Darconville came downstairs and explained for her, again,
the situation she’d long known, only too well. “Good
lord,” exclaimed undaunted Hypsipyle Poore, scribbling
her telephone number on a napkin and tucking it firmly
into his pocket, “but don’t mean, surely, you can’t
promise to call me sometime by and by, now, does it?”
Darconville said nothing. She smiled into his eyes. “You
promise. I can tell.”
Darconville that same day (almost as if to counteract
that assumption) went down to Main St. and bought
Isabel a pretty ring.
The whole plan, then, was struck a terrible blow
sometime around the middle of July. Darconville uttered a
round, mouth-filling oath at the post-office and left
trailing in the air behind him a language which burnt it
coppery all the way to the bench under the magnolia tree
where he sat down to re-read, again in disbelief, the
special delivery letter from London he’d just received.
The residency requirement couldn’t be waived. The
qualification for an English marriage registration meant
either (a) a seven-day residence in Westminster before
notification of marriage, plus a further clear twenty-one
days before a marriage certificate could be issued—a total
of thirty days including the day of arrival and the day of
collecting the certificate, or (b) a fifteen-day residence
plus one full day before a marriage license could be
issued—a total of eighteen days, including, again, days of
arrival and collecting the license. For the certificate, both
parlies had to put in the residency, for the license only one
—but the other party had to be in England on the day
notification was to be given to the Registrar.
 As if that weren’t enough, when later Darconville
called Isabel to explain she wasn’t home. He tried again,
several times, and finally reached Mrs. Shiftlett who,
outpacing herself in mutters and non-sentences, explained
to Darconville how, that morning negotiating a curve on
the road to Charlottesville, Isabel had skipped out of
control —she always drove too fast—and rolled her car
into a verge. She had been taken to the hospital. Yes, she
thought the car was wrecked; no, she thought Isabel
wasn’t hurt. Thought? Darconville made five telephone
calls to the University of Virginia hospital, only to find
she had been released. Thought? That night he telephoned
Fawx’s Mt. Isabel answered and lightheartedly assured
him she had been unharmed; he sagged, but fearful,
worried, overwrought—in the knitting of himself so fast,
himself he had undone—he cried out fitfully against all
the tergiversations of love he could think of, which of
course were only the tergiversations that stood in the way
of love. But the telephone went dead. Isabel had hung up.
He called back: no answer. An hour later there was no
answer. There was no answer the following morning.
There was no public transportation north from
Quinsyburg. The buslines in the Piedmont area, through
either subterfuge or evasion, skirted completely around
the poor but direct road that ran up to Charlottesville. For
a simple trip north, then, this meant—in twice the time—
the double, double toil and trouble of an hour busride east
to Richmond and then back again west, another hour to
Charlottesville. But Darconville was desperate. He
jumped the Richmond bus which, stopping for passengers
at every snab and dole-house along the way, gave him his
connection in that city, the return run shuddering along at
about ten miles per hour into Charlottesville where,
luckily, he hitchhiked a ride and followed the late
afternoon sun into the fluecolored hills of Fawx’s Mt. He
appeared, dusty, at the front door. Isabel hurried him
inside, not shutting the door, however, before taking
several of those by now familiar half-turns,
apprehensively looking toward places where the object
she seemed to seek had turned into a ghost, disappeared
in a puff of smeech, or flew into a tree. Darconville never
knew which.
A television set was blaring in the small dark living-
room, where the Shiftletts, submersed into the sofa, sat
snoring upright and holding cans of beer in their
respective laps. Darconville quickly looked at Isabel: she
hadn’t been hurt—and her car out front, dented
somewhat, was still operable. In her bedroom, they sat on
her red-and-cream bed where he tried to apologize for his
thoughtlessness the day before by reading her what he felt
was the cause of it—the bad news from London.
Isabel, curiously undistracted, listened calmly
enough, but Darconville turned to the arithmetic of it all:
the Quinsy summer courses ended on August 22 and yet
the faculty were required to be at Harvard on September
10. The residency requirement—the shortest one—was
eighteen days in London. The return flight back to the
States canceled the ninth, which meant, if he could find
someone to administer his final exams, they could leave
on August 21. It was the only alternative. The tunnel of
possibilities had narrowed to that. Darconville kissed her.
It would be wonderful! It would be madness! What did
she think? Isabel, twicking her thumbs, froze. She
couldn’t, she said: she hadn’t finished making her dress!
He laughed. And what, she asked, about all the other
matters? Why, packing, invitations, and, and—she raised
her eyes suddenly—she had decided she wanted to be
baptized. Into the Catholic Church? Yes, that was what
she wanted! Deliberating, Darconville wiped his
forehead. He took her arm. He paused.
Then he asked her if they really shouldn’t be married
in Fawx’s Mt. after all.
“No,” said Isabel, disconcertedly wringing her hands.
She looked out searchingly through her window, across
the turnip patch, and past the old fences which the falling
of dusk made nearly indistinguishable, creating an
illusion of unbroken access even to that farthest house
hunched under the aeviternal mountains whose ridges,
Darconville saw for the first time, were inaptly called
blue. They were in fact quite grey.
“It would be easier.”
“It seems so.”
“It is so,” said Darconville.
“Yes,” said Isabel, “it does seem so, doesn’t it.”
The following week in Quinsyburg Isabel stood
holding a candle in the chancel of St. Teresa’s Church,
and, with Darconville as witness, was washed, oiled, and
salted at the baptismal font. He felt very proud of her. He
hadn’t either encouraged or discouraged her but was
happy, nevertheless, she stuck to her plans with deliberate
speed and firm resolution; the process, to hasten it, took a
bit of doing—Darconville had instructed her—and, while
the emphases of time weighed no less heavy on them, he
still managed to counterconvert the obstructions, delays,
and postponements on other fronts to final satisfaction. It
was only after the ceremony that he gave her the surprise
that became her baptismal present. Kissing her, he
mentioned the invitations could now be engraved. She
looked at him, eyes questioning. (What blushing notes did
he in the margin see? What sighs stolen out?) Then he
told her: the wedding day was set for two o’clock on
September 8—almost the exact date on which, four years
before, they had first laid eyes on each other.
It wasn’t easy for either of them. The strain told. In
late July, in fact, Isabel wrote that she was too rushed
with it all—the reasons, not given, she said were various
—and thought they should call it off. Not to worry,
thought Darconville.
August obliterated. The first few weeks sped by with
temperatures soaring and Darconville rushing around in a
feverish va-et-vient struggle with last-minute things: he
had to register officially at Caxton Hall, reserve rooms at
the Eaton Court Hotel in Belgravia, and, having changed
plans, reserve his airline ticket from Boston a day earlier,
the flight he’d now be taking alone. It was hairline
procedure to observe, chaos to watch. It would pass,
thought Darconville. Bread was made from panic, wasn’t
it? Sometimes the speed of it all almost exhilarated him.
The gallop is a pace in which the sequence of steps,
supposing the off fore to lead, is near hind, off hind, near
fore, off fore, with a period of suspension—and there
Darconville rested, content, pondering the joys that were
to come in a race at the finish. And then one day that
happened. And it was all over. It was done.
Darconville climbed in his rented van and left
Quinsyburg as inconspicuously as he’d come. It was
goodbye! Goodbye to Quinsyburg and its sapsuckers with
feedhats and teardrop heads! Goodbye to its
dacryopyostic onion patches and citizens with faces like
leeks! Goodbye to its buckish slang and pickpocket
eloquence! Goodbye to its vat-icides, its dunces, its
trelapsers of gossip! Goodbye to the farms on that
Bebrycian coast and its water-tower! Goodbye, Your
Foxship! Goodbye, Your Wormship! Goodbye, Your
Gibship!
The winds were brisk off the mountains. A strange
calenture came over Darconville, banking the wooden
bridge into Fawx’s Mt., and as he looked the cilicious
weedgrasses and cowquake seemed to turn to waving
water, a wisping in the meadows of sea-sounds as if
blowing from some beautiful but lonely marinaresca. It
made him long for the haven, that harbor he wanted, but
knew still wasn’t his; no, not yet; not even now.
Isabel and her mother, sitting at the back of the house,
both waved. Parking the van, Darconville crossed the
short lawn and came over to them. Without a word, Isabel
handed him a card; it was one of the wedding invitations.
She pointed to it twin-fingeredly—there were two
flagrant errors: a misspelling and a botched date.
Darconville looked at Isabel who looked at her mother
who said, “And the whole job-lot’s the same way.
Fotched.”
“We can do without them,” said Darconville, looking
from one to the other. “It’s a formality, for friends. We
can do without them.”
Isabel, turning away, looked back at him with one
eye, as if peering round a corner.
“Can’t we?”
“I don’t know what to say.” She sheered away with
what seemed utter indecision, tears rippling down her
cheeks. “I do love you, do you know that?”
“Invitations?” laughed Darconville.
“It ain’t only that. Sit down,” said Mrs. Shiftlett.
Suddenly Darconville was given a turn. “Something
is wrong.”
 “Oh,” cried Isabel, sobbing and bearhugging
Darconville as if she’d squeeze out his very life. “My
wedding dress, I’ve gone and ruined it, I’ve ruined my
car, I’ve ruined the invitations—and all your hard work,
gone! Gone up in smoke, just like it never was!”
Darconville, bewildered, could make no immediate
sense of what now prevented their going ahead with plans
any more than he could explain what mother and daughter
had already accepted as accomplished fact. He cradled
her head to his neck, breathing her libanoph-orous hair
and looking off miserably and inarticulately beyond her
only to see Mrs. Shiftlett wink with risible eyes and
mouth something —apologetic, if those converting
bowlips meant to indicate a pout of shared
disappointment. Trembling in fright, Isabel almost killed
Darconville on the spot with the innocence of the
question that followed: would the wedding now be off for
good? Off? For good? The sky went dull, lowering like a
metal dishcover. Darconville was beneaped.
The two figures just waited there, unmoving, as
confused as if each stood at the opposite ends of eternity
itself. Mrs. Shiftlett had disappeared. Darconville’s throat
constricted: it was hopeless and he knew it. Bowled! The
whole summer! The wedding had comperendinated. The
end was now in the middle.
Speechless with disappointment, he couldn’t rehearse
what he wanted to say, for questions kept intruding: what
had happened to the dress? Was she frightened at the
prospect of marriage? Why had she let him know at the
last minute? And then Mrs. Shiftlett reappeared and,
beaming, bumped them both with a large cardboard box
—it was filled with a crazy array of five-and-dime forks,
knives, and spatulas—which she proceeded ostentatiously
to place in the van, as Spellvexit dodged out; she winked
on her way back, “Householdry.” He interproximated a
word of thanks. Hand in hand, then, he and Isabel walked
across the backyard and looked away over the cowfield to
the woods.
There is an unhappiness so awful that the very fear of
it becomes an alloy to happiness. Darconville whispered
that he loved her; Isabel whispered the same. Isabel
whispered that she wanted to marry him but needed more
time. More time, Darconville whispered, to think about
it? More time, Isabel whispered, to prepare for it. He
whispered one more question. She looked up at him and
kissed him, and he felt her tongue on his lips, swift and
cold, an infrigidation that perhaps reminded her, as she
answered, of what to say. Isabel then—with conviction—
whispered, “December.”
It was with simple gratitude that Darconville accepted
the facts as they were—it didn’t matter, truth seemed
thievish for a prize so dear —and that night he was only
strengthened in his resolve to hold on, finding constant
vigilance perhaps the part of vision that most was love,
for just before sleep overtook him he caught in the
bedroom a faint glimpse of Isabel silently sitting by him
in the darkness, stroking his cat, and watching sentinel
lest anything creep in from the dark am-bisinistrous night
to discover him there in that room.

LVII

Where Will We Go?

 Why should the mistress of the vales of Har
utter a sigh?
—WILLIAM BLAKE, The Book of Thel

IT WAS THE DAY of departure. The van, loaded to

the doors, was ready to go, and after breakfast there
seemed nothing else to do for Darconville and Isabel but
make their farewells. Before the morning sun peeped over
the mountains, the Shiftletts had gone off to work: that
made the goodbyes less troublesome but somehow more
awkward, for nothing could dissemble, nothing displace,
nothing divert what by accepting they had to seem to
condone. Isabel, in actions quick and acute, moved about
with dispatch as if, in trying to bury in the camouflage of
time the fact of pain, to say goodbye was not necessarily
to see him go, and she preferred to leave it there like the
maiden Marpessa who, choosing Idas over Apollo for her
fear of immortality, was willing to renounce the sun as
long as she didn’t have to think about the consequences.
Darconville felt her uneasiness. And yet the
intervening months, he saw, if keeping her yet in durance
vile would at least modify the bad luck impetuosity had
caused them and simultaneously increase the delight of
sweet premeditation. It pained him to see her troubled,
busy with the efficiency of preoccupation, but he sat her
down—wasn’t Genius the clerk of Venus?—and told her
a hundred tales of the wonderful life they’d have, no
matter where! But sometimes, she confessed, that very
thing made her afraid, she didn’t know why: where would
they go? Trying to dispel her worry, he became playful.
He asked where she’d like to go, Mt. Woodwose, Catland,
the Island of Poke Pudding?—wherever, whereverever,
she’d be loved!
Isabel tried to smile. Lifting her chin, he asked if he
could see her wedding dress; that would be a bad omen,
she said, and blushed nervously. Would she like to take a
walk? No, she shook her head, no. It was a difficult hour.
Omissions relating to his departure became more
oppressive than any reference to it, and yet,
apprehensively, she kept glancing at the clock. They took
time to make love in her bedroom: it was cold and
compensatory, faisonless, a sequence of tenses; usually,
he loved the way she loved the way he loved her, but now,
it seemed, she was worried the way she loved he didn’t—
and he could tell. It was clear, not quilts filled high with
gossamer and roses, neither poppies nor mandragora,
could have put Isabel at rest. The time had come to go.
At the door, Darconville turned, took from his pocket
the gold ring he’d bought in Quinsyburg—two birds
interclasped on a moonstone— and slipped it on her right
hand. She handed him a box she’d pulled from under a
chair: a gift of a blue shirt. He wished he hadn’t had, that
she hadn’t bought, a going-away gift—it seemed too
formal in the preparation. No one, he felt, should ever be
ready for such things. They hugged each other for a full
minute, silently.
“There will be times when you might be afraid.”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“Don’t give up,” said Darconville. “I’ll call you. I’ll
write you. But you won’t give up, will you?”
“Shhhh,” whispered Isabel. She looked around
through the dark inconvenient house. Darconville
followed her eyes to a clock. “I’ll think of it—I’ll think of
it all tomorrow.”
After all, thought Darconville, tomorrow is another
day.
“The main thing is not to be alone.” The dark figure
of Darconville, moving closer, shadowed her. “You aren’t,
you know.”
Isabel swallowed her voice.
A sensation of the intensity of that thought curiously
seemed to catch hold of her in an inexplicable way, his
words, Darconville saw, sharply perforating her
sensibility. She brought her thumb and index finger
together, with the other fingers curved, and touched her
lips.
“What—what do you mean?” Pale, Isabel traveled
back on a foot. “I’m not, do you mean, alone with you?
Without you I wouldn’t be alone? Say what, please?”
“I mean,” smiled Darconville calmly, carrying her
identity so close to him that he couldn’t see a single
expression of it, “that I’ll be with you always. I only ask
you to trust me.”
“Whatever happens, you’ll—”
“Be with you, yes.”
Of such a compensatory philosophy was the ideal
justice of his dream certainly compounded; they were the
premises, not the conclusions, of his life. And then with
what improportionate joy did she then knot his arms! “O,
do you mean you’ll always understand, do you?” It was
as if, quite suddenly, a gust of wind had swept up a mass
of dead leaves, uncovering the verdure beneath: her
whole face relaxed into a smile of disarming sweetness.
“Do you? I’ll love you for that,” she pleaded.
“Understand what?” He was baffled. “I love you.”
 There was a sudden silence.
“Sometimes—I’m afraid.” She pulled her thumb.
“That’s all.”
“To take the step?” asked Darconville. Fright
somehow came to stay with him as he talked it away from
her. “Would you be afraid, perhaps, of coming?”
Isabel closed her eyes.
“It’s not that,” she said, voice unreliable. A kind of
shutter fell as if she had returned again to some basic but
incommunicable anxiety. “I—I only always sometimes
wonder—” She turned completely away from him as if,
by shifting, she sought to reduce the deliberate value of
questions she felt only a lifetime could marshal to answer.
“—what we will do. Where will we go?” Darconville
turned her by the shoulders to comfort her, to answer, but
he hadn’t the chance for as he lifted her chin it was
suddenly the agonized face of post-lapsarian Eve he
stared upon, only asking again with the accents of futility
and despair, “Where will we go?”
Was there a response?
No; never. It was as if, not wanting one, Isabel swiftly
acted to stop it, suddenly crowding upon him with a kiss
heated with every last force of passion and sweetened by
the tears now streaming down her face: it was a kiss that
sobbed from the soul, never yielding, unrestrained, almost
an immolation, a kiss imploring itself to the opportunity it
feared but sought, needed but had long deterred, as if all
at once it simultaneously tried to beg for forgiveness,
impart a blessing, and resolutely attempt in one single
moment to convey something beyond the powers of all
explanation—and its ache piteously sang to Darconville’s
heart all the goodbyes that could ever be and more by far
than he knew he ever could bear. Goodbye! Goodbye!
 It was with all deliberate speed that Darconville
swung the van back down the driveway, shifted out of
reverse—could that figure in the distance wearing a
bandanna and gumboots and staring into his rear-view
mirror possibly have been the cryptarch of Zutphen
Farm?— and then bouncing over the Fawx’s Mt. road he
headed out of the mountains, raced toward
Charlottesville, and, after smiling down at Spellvexit, his
cat, and up at God, his palinure, he turned north and drove
into the world.

LVIII

Over the Hills and Far Away

Let there be pie.

Why else a sky?
—D. J. ENRIGHT

IT WAS STRAIGHT OUT, all highway, a perfect

shaft toward the sunpolished horizon. Whistling along at
a good clip, Darconville listened to the clattering rattles
and backfiring of the van, a music uplifting him as mile
after mile fell away in a momentum that seemed to gather
up once more the impetus of his life. Already he felt
Isabel’s absence and dearly wished her there with him if
for no other reason than to toss her cares to the rushing
wind and leave them all behind. Where will we go? He
knew. It would be his gift to her, for with the ecstasy of
knowing they’d never outrun the mystery and majesty of
that question, he also knew the answer lay hidden in the
most varied, the most wondrous, the most divine
harmonies possible, for no journey, he thought, is so
delightful as that which leads no one knows whither nor
whither why—and what journey ever ends when, waiting
at the other end, one waits for love?
Where would they go!
Darconville, with the wind abaft his beam and the
needle into red, flew across the Virginia border and was
sailing free! The melodious racket of his conveyance
somehow echoed the melodious racket in his head—
everywhere, the Rising of the North! To live, to work, to
love was the same thing! His heart exploded in joy and he
cried out to Isabel! Come away and marry me under a
skyblue tent in Coroman-del, dance a week and a day
with the boggarts and bogles, and we’ll away on a
moonbeam to the Isles of the Blest where winter all in
flower humbles the spring! Where would you like to go?
To see the white jaguars of Mustaghata? The petrified
village in the Cyrenaica? The buried cities of Turkestan?
The spectres glimmering on the Horselberg? Or the
Mongolian land of Bielovodye where there is peace and
plenty and never a soul has been? Or would you live a
strange remote life in the gold-encrusted valleys of Ophir,
the spice-land of Punt, the pepper forests of Malabar, the
City of Mansa, or Cambalu, where in the treetops funny-
faced ghosts sit twittering all the night? Come, hurry
away with me to Quippishland, Mt. Yoop, and the secret
City of Blinking! To Goshen, the far Moluccas, and
Aspramont! To the porcelain abodes of Almansor, the
Vale of Rephaim, the Land of Juba, Bean Island, and the
Cataracts of Downcrash! Let us visit the weird towers of
Klingsor, the excavations of Transoxania, and the
deserted city of Fatephur Sikri! Drop what you’re doing
and travel with me to Holy Mulberry, the Eden of
Granusion, and climb to the top of Inchcape Rock where
the abbot of Aberbrothock once fixed a bell or visit the
Magdeburg Spheres where the pressure without makes a
vacuum within and no one ever can tell!
Darconville bowled out of the Baltimore Harbor
Tunnel just past noon and soon raised Wilmington.
Come, we’ll visit the sparkling Electrides and the
Bitch’s Tomb at Capo Helles, the Cathedral of Quimper,
the rubbish-mounds of Krokodopolis, and the magic
goldfields of Nimis Sollicitaris! We’ll wrestle an angel in
Penuel, chase hippocentaurs to the ends of Pluvalia,
burrow into the vole holes of Mt. Radio, and sail into the
strange Cirknickzersky Lake in Carniola whose waters
gush so fast out of the ground its speed can overtake
light! Or would you prefer to visit Mohenjo-Daro in Sind
and Harappa in the Punjab, ride into the mists of
Pellucidar, or follow the nomadic Hurrians into the
sandcones of Mesopotamia? Done! Done! Or shall it be
the Nonestic Ocean? The twin cities of Hieraconopolis?
Or Castle Graveolent? The caves of Aber Cleddyf? The
Court of the Boy King, the windswept plateau of Leng, or
the rose-red lands of Araby, almost as old as time? Come,
heart of my heart, take my hand, and we’ll trip through
the firestorms of Mount Chimaera, the sandstorms of
Yazd, the lost colony of Aphrodisium, Hither Spain, the
promontory of the Cimbri, and into the haunts of coot and
hern to watch old Mrs. Hickabout kick bold Mrs.
Kickabout cold through the thickabout!
 He left route 95, rumbled over the Delaware
Memorial Bridge, and swung onto the New Jersey
turnpike.
Cry ahoy! Open scuttles! Our rendezvous are
appointed! We’ll journey to Smyrna, Cyme, the Land of
Fount, the Sepulchres of Zenu, and the foggy forests of
Ermenonville! We’ll go hand in hand to Quadling
Country, the Oracle of Trophonius, the River of January,
the Shapeless Magma of Nun, and then to the Dark Mere
of Locmariaquer which vouches antiquities no body can
know! And then to the State of Swat! Walvis Bay! The
Land of Dictionopolis! The black pagodas of Kanarak!
Come, we’ll disappear in the Hills of the Rubber Pig, the
hidden islands of Tarquinium, Fairytown, and the pit
called Because! We’ll look at the crocodiles of
Arabastrae, the white elves of Alfheim, the detestable Ore
of Ebuda, the guebers of the Kerman Desert, and the
Glumms of Nosmnbdsgrsutt who use their wings for both
flying and for clothes! We’ll go to Great Blasket,
Nantasket, and the Valley of Casket, run through the
Polyglot Garden, stroll about Sumatra under the
manchineel trees, and listen to the clashing of holy kettles
at Jupiter’s brazen oracle at Dodona!
During the long stretch of highway Spellvexit
complained of the heat, and, after setting him on a box to
ride shotgun by the window, Darconville put his foot to
the floor passing Bordentown and was out front and
flying.
The earth does not withhold! Delve! Mold! Listen to
the words of the world! Come, come, return with me in
time to the Kingdom of Rimsin, Quatna, the bejeweled
land of Palaikastro, the shaft-graves of Argolid, the
underwater remains of Nora, the Panionion of Mt.
Mycale, the bazaar of Dioscurias, the medieval thorp of
Joiry, the Department of Tarragon, and the Isle of
Apedefts! We’ll row over Atlantis in triremes, splash into
the Gulf of Dews, drop wishing pennies into the sacred
Zem-Zem, and watch the palms wave in Hispan-iola and
the bird-headed Zwings of the African deserts who make
geometry of sunshine and peck words in the air with their
beaks! We’ll dance little rigadoons with the water-
sorcerers of Vitziputzli, play bowls with the gnomes of
Lint, march off to Dipsody, and chase flashes of light all
the way from the seven-fold Nile to far Taprobany!
Come, let’s pitch our tents in Sechem, in the emerald
meadows of Thuringia, at the reaches of Scrabster, on the
Island of Usedom, above the high plateaux of
Cundinamarca and Mount Two Breasts and the sky-
ypointing rocks of mystical Wak-Wak which are
transfigured by dawn into huge gem-bright amethysts!
Run along with me to the land of Whimzies and
Phantasms, the Points of Chance, the Closed City of
Thera, ancient Regulbium and Rutupiae, Xuntain, Zawi
Chemi Shanidar, and the duckmarshes of weird little
Quailalia where trees bear fruit in the form of tiny geese
who drop full-grown from the branches and proceed to
waddle away!
Darconville wheeled into New York City, following
the rays of the late afternoon sun.
Penetrate us, minstrelsy! Unfold our hands! Let us
sojourn together in Mesach and dwell a spell in the tents
of Kedar or on the man-made mountains of Cholula and
ride submersibles down to the sunken harbors of
Caesarea, Apollonia, Chersonesos! Come, we’ll fly
through muspel-light to the planet Tormance and
somersault over the stars into the Bay of Rainbows, then
paddle in a silly fat all the way to the Mare Frigoris, out
to the Oceanus Procellarum and squeak tiny horns, and
dunk in a puddle the Man-in-the-Moon who carries a
bundle of thorns! Let’s take the secret highway to
Mezzoramia, pay our chimi-nage and visit the Eatalls in
Ethiopia, the noseless tribes of Aetheria, the magic sheat-
fish of Baggade and the pea-headed people of Par-ticuous,
and then trace the high coasts along the lands of the
Strap-foots who have feet like leather thongs and the
Blackcloaks that do live in the curves of the Caucasus!
Courage, now, and we’ll strike a match and peek at the
poison hayfields of Crustimium, the Green Sea of Gloom,
the toxic trees of Macassar, the bone-strewn cemeteries of
Megatherium, the piggeries of Sljeme, dogless Sygaros,
the dank-venom-dripping hall of Nastrand, the smoke-
holes of Sittacene, and Jotunheim, the abode of giants,
then tiptoe round the tower of the deceitful Witch of
Sokótska Dama, avoid the naked night-traveling
troglodytes of Moppinland who put away their dead amid
laughter, tightropewalk the circular precipice that
encloses Malebolge, and then pondering that put a hole in
our hat and take a trip through our mind on a hunchback’s
back or a jampot smack or a walloping window-blind!
Night fell as Darconville crossed the Bronx and
speeding into the New England Thruway he thought: O
rising stars! O Isabel! Perhaps the one I want so much
will rise, will rise with some of you!
Unravel the maps! Raise your eyes! Point! Where
was your finger, on the tropical island of Samburan? The
Palace of the Kyabazinga of Busoga? Heliopolis? East
Harptree, Thrapston, Much Wenlock? The Seven Cities of
Cibola? Wherever! To the endless announcements!
Wherever! Come with me to the Bridge of Whangpoo, the
Land of Shinar, the Valley of Jehosaphat, the Isle of
Robbers, the vast chaotic gulf of perpetual twilight at
Ginungagap, the wilds of Barbagia, Weenieville, or
Quintana Roo or Jamberoo or Timbuctoo or Waterloo or
Fernando Poo! Let’s poke into the jungles of the
Ptoemphani who have a dog for a king, stare upon the
headless Blemmyae, race the ostriches of Numidia,
sample the delicious hotcakes of Naraka, sing riddles to
each other in the Lantern language spoken only in the
Isles of Nowhere, skip along to the Promontory of Figs
and converse with the twenty philosophical recluses of
Ulubrae, eat the fossil meats of Diplodocus, and sit in the
briarpatch at teatime in West Barnstable with Old Mother
West Wind and the Merry Little Breezes! Come, we’ll
watch the doltheads playing at skittles on the top of the
Land of Magog, the dragons on the plains of Lop, the
white sheep of Cephisus, and the alligators of distant
Thorax who have pouches for eyes and snap their jaws
when they sing! Will you come to visit the Gillygaloo
who lays square eggs? Or question the Eternal Man who
reclines on the Couches of Beulah? Tickle under their
chins microscopical djinns or tease geloscopical dwales
who live in The Tree That Can Never Be and fish for
chocolate whales?
The lights of Bridgeport and New Haven flashed by,
the sea air freshening Darconville but putting Spellvexit
to sleep. Don’t sleep, cat, he thought—live with me to
love!
Welcome, space! Speed, time! Our fancies scheme
for aspiration! Would you live with me in the Grotto of
Sybils, Aleppo, Bantam, Laguna de los Xarayes, the
darklands of Cabul or the blade of Laurasia or the
Thousand Isles of Spicery? What matter where? Wish but
with a wink and enter the wheels of the Mundane Egg,
ride in a dirigible over Rippleland, pass through the green
Cimmerian Forest where things pushed into the ground
can never come out again, or enter the Land of Brass, the
untamed parts of Tzucox, Mosquitia, the Monastery of
Altamura, east Griqualand, Ingatestone, the Kingdom of
Stern, the Temple of Dobayba, and then watch pigmies
battle the cranes in Upper Egypt, perch on the Siege
Perilous at Camelot, visit the Knights Templars of
Warpsgrove and the Crutched Friars of Whaplode, swim
in Lake Chogagogmanchegegagogchbunagunga-maug,
listen to stories of the Qarlugs and the Ghuzz and the Fat-
imids, make love under a Javanese thunderstorm in the
ramparts of Bogor, summon carps with a clap in Kyoto,
and then hand in hand we’ll kick up the sand and travel to
see the woman and man who killed the blue spider in
Blanchepowder Land!
Halfway through Connecticut, Darconville pipped on
his flashlight and looked at his watch: 10:30 P.M.
Advancing, let us tramp for what, undreamed of, has
long awaited us in shapes, horizons, passages! Come,
wander with me to the capital of Amaurote, Obulcula, the
Continent of Mu, the campestral landscapes of
Montfontaine and Loisy, the regal seat of Abdalazis, the
horse boxes of Megiddo, the temple of Nisroch at
Nineveh, the Island of Chaneph, the sparkling fountains
of Mnemosyne, and the Mouse Tower near Bingen where
cruel Archbishop Hatto was devoured by mice! We’ll
visit the Tartar shamans who can summon snow, the fools
of Aegipotami, Queen Zixi of Ix, Og of the Iron Scales,
the Great Lew Chew, the suppository traders from the
Kingdom of Zuy, and the ornithocratic world of the
Madonna of Goldfinches! All of them! The malevolent
Octodecemajiences, the black Fungs of Baghdad, the
faceless pirates of Strongolo, and the Ninox Owls who
wear gaiters and live above the land that loses its shadow!
Come, we’ll splash down in Alienville, Concupium, and
the sea of Sugar Cane Juice, question the Sick King in
Bokhara, gather cat-thyme in Cilicia and attar of roses in
Phaselis, take a sail in a ship with Jack Sixpip and Tom
Bunyip and Dick Wishlip, then go and see old Pillicock
sit on Pillicock Hill and sing “Hallo, Hallo!”
Darconville drove into Massachusetts.
We shall rise forever and drift over quintillions of
things and thrust our beautiful faces into dawn after
dawn! We’ll go on long mysterious quests to see the
magnetic rock on the Klebermeer, the black knulps of
Shantung, Mt. Nebo where Moses is buried, the City of
Humpbacked Women in India, and the three trees of
Hudimesnil! And then to Tyde Castle, Fumeland, the
Valley of Cheviot, the underworld Garden of Deduit, the
land of Nod, the savannahs of Blodd, and the faraway,
faraway extra-faraway all out-glittering stairwells of God!
We shall clasp hands and walk the dizzy heights of
Wenchwan and Aucanguilca, then cross down the fried
roads of Al ‘Aziziyah and Dallol, wrun around in
Wroxeter, slide down the falls of the Sabbatic River in the
Kingdom of Agrippa that runs only on Saturdays and call
upon the Choromandacians who have no speech but only
can scream or the one-eyed Arimaspians or the Keakles
who teach rabbits their prayers! And on and on to
Kurdistan, the lost Lyonesse, the monastery of
Disembodenburg, Winkie Country, the wooden palace of
the King of Tonga in Nukualofa, Opis, and the Shalimar
Gardens, and if the wind is up and the evening clear coast
in a blue-sailed shell down the Guadalquivir to hop on the
Harpasian Rock a mere finger can twiddle, then stop by
Yedo, the Thymbran temple, and hide in the Riphaean
mountains right in the middle! And then to Klang and the
secret abodes of the blessed in Twat and if you’re not
tired I’ll tell you what, we’ll creep out at night with one
and all and when the moon is shining and bright trip out
to trot and trot to dance and dance a jig at the Jellicle
Ball!
It was then into Boston, and Darconville soon caught
the lights of Cambridge, reflecting like drops of gold in
the river Charles.
Welcome, fate! The future shall be greater than all the
past! It shines with prophecies, unborn deeds, liberty and
love! Come, finally, with me to the Land of Cinnamon,
the olive yards by the river Alpheus, the Isles of Orcades
and the promontory of the Cimbri, Aneroid and
Gravelburg, the medieval castle of Broglio, the empire of
Lugalzaggisi and the masses of Negropont, Maleventum,
and Orinoco! Come away with me and wander through
the Upper Valley of Greater Zap, eat the ten-pound
peaches of Chinaland, climb the spires of the foursquare
city of Golgonooza, wave to the gold-guarding griffins in
the Deserts of Gobi, pray with the holy apocalypts in the
ancient monasteries of St. Neot, Pill, Axholme,
Stixwould, Drax, Tip-tree, and Burnham-on-Crouch, then
watch the Plow of Jehovah and the Harrow of Shaddai
pass over the dead, and then maybe sit on a dune in the
month of June by the amber waters of the Syllabub Sea
where the tide comes in in an opal mist, splashing in
sweetly like the sound of a kiss, and we’ll trip upon
trenches and dance upon dishes and see whither the hither
of yon, but if without reason you should find me gone, I
won’t be buried among the dead—no, go instead and look
for me where eternity goes, in another world where the
rain makes bows, for there’ll be restored by the hand of
art whatever’s lost in the human heart, for something of
us will always be, and forever-more I’ll live for you if
forevermore you’ll live for me.
It was long past midnight and very dark when,
awakening the night-porter at Harvard, Darconville was
let into his rooms, and, exhausted, he fell down on his bed
and went immediately to sleep.

LIX

The Doorcard on F-21

Well, who in his own backyard

Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he cannot quote?
—W. H. AUDEN, “Preface”

HAD HE DREAMT IT? Darconville prayed not, and

very early the next morning—it was still pitch-black
outside—he went, still fully clothed from the previous
night, into the dark living-room, opened the door, and by
match read the doorcard over the knocker: “Dr. and Mrs.
Darconville.” And a flock of birds flew out of his heart.
 LX

Harvard

Fair Harvard! Thy sons to thy Jubilee throng,

And with blessings surrender thee o’er,
By these festival rites, from the age that is past,
To the age that is waiting before.
—SAMUEL OILMAN, Ode

THE BELLS in the tower of St. Paul’s struck the

hour: bong-bongbangbong, bongbingbang bong,
bingbbangbongbong, bong-bingbangbong. It was noon.
This particular morning, Darconville had awakened and
gone back to sleep several times, but now he rose and
followed a procession of sunlight into the living-room
which suddenly seemed, like the great college to its
founder, a “pocket of godliness in a profane world,” for it
was surely one of the most beautiful suites in Adams
House. The rooms were paneled in old and elegant wood,
the oak bookcases and rubbed leather furniture
impressively set off at one end with a large fireplace by
which stood a rack of blackened fire-tools. There was a
sturdy Plymouth table in the center of the room and
several Windsor chairs, each stamped on the back with
the college insignia that was also replicated on the wall
over the hearth in a large, magnificent shield: giles three
open books argent, edges covers and clasps gold, on the
books the letters Ve Ri Tas sable.
 Harvard! The oldest college in America. Darconville
simply stood there, considering the wonder of where he
was.
There were low windowseats into which one could
comfortably sit and look down, on one side, over the
streetlamps to the narrows of Plympton St. and on the
other across the slate-beveled roof and curious metal ibis
atop that queer Dutch castle on Mt. Auburn St. known as
the “Lampoon” building, beyond which one had a faint
glimpse of the far river. Darconville threw open a
window, and Spellvexit leaped onto a seat. The traffic, the
various noises of Cambridge, braced him up, and
everyone and everything seemed at play in the bright air
outside. Darconville ranged the immediate area below on
Bow St.—his van was still parked there—and surveyed
with a smile all the tiny intersecting streets, the few
quaint shops, and the vines of English ivy twining around
colonial buildings of deep red brick and white-trimmed
windows which evoked in simple, unpretentious glory the
spirit of Good Old Colony Times. They were extremely
old houses, some of them, with little winking windows,
oeil-de-boeuf windows, and strange lunettes, the low-
arched doors, in some of the narrower ways, quite
overhanging the pavement.
Darconville listened. Above him, some woodpeckers
were hammering on the slate-and-lead rooftop, and he
wondered, resolving to check later, about the exact shape
of Adams House, for it had seemed, as he stumbled
through the darkness the previous night, a Gothic maze of
angles, bays, and strange alcoves. The sky was as blue as
eyebright, with just a hint of mellow smokedrift in the air,
prognostic, always, of the rich New England autumn soon
to follow. Sunshine caught the fickling leaves on some
nearby poplars, under which a group of children in knee-
socks and caps passed swinging satchels of books. The
trees, with some leaves falling, were just beginning to
shed. The days were drawing in.
The building was empty. In any case, Darconville had
seen no one about. What with the changed plans, it turned
out he’d come up a bit early, earlier, apparently, than
anyone else, but it gave him some added time and he took
advantage of the quiet afternoon to unload his clothes and
books. He was, all at once, happy, busy, and yet to be sure
a trifle lonesome—a photograph of Isabel immediately
went up on the mantelpiece. Darconville delighted in the
fastness of privacy and warmth circumcluding the little
study he arranged by the kitchen, having already
developed a nice scheme of checks and balances on the
facility of not only writing there but of being able to eat
quickly and, most important of all, of maintaining a
perpetual and unremitting vigil by the telephone—which
had yet to be connected.
Several times, in fact, Darconville during that day
slipped out to a telephone booth, dialing and listening
expectantly, but the current, each time, hummed
wastefully through Connecticut, New York, Maryland,
Washington, and Virginia bearing only its own dullness.
The other end rang on. No harm done; he could wait.
Later, he sat down and wrote Isabel a funny and
multifarious letter about his long trip, heading off an
awkward temptation to beg her to come up immediately
—she needed the time for herself, of course—by losing
himself in long and colorful description of their splendid
rooms at Harvard. Then downstairs over in C-entry, the
superintendent directed him to the telephone service,
where minutes later the installation for his room was
arranged, and, after writing down his telephone number
on a postcard and posting both pieces off to Fawx’s Mt.,
he took his dinner alone, contentedly watching the sun go
down over the river. It was a fairly humid night, and for
cross-ventilation he opened a front window and his
apartment door. And to waste no time that very evening in
a battery of letters addressed to various English
authorities, civil and clerical, he reconfirmed their
marriage intentions, asking that they be revised according
to the newer plan he outlined and that a date be held open
for late December for a nuptial Mass. These letters had to
be done well, and in sequence, an orderly arrangement he
knew he should have used before. But, in spite of himself,
he fell asleep over the typewriter. At some point,
however, in the middle of the night he was awakened by
the city noise, hoits, yells, traffic below. He shut the
window and went for the door—strange, he thought, he
had been told he was the only one in the building. He
strained to listen.
Could that have been a key chuckling in a lock
upstairs?
The following days were spent by Darconville
acquainting himself with the layout of Harvard. He got a
map. He cut through the traffic on Massachusetts Ave.,
crossed down Quinsy St., and went to the English
department office in Warren House to make himself
known to the man who had hired him, but the secretary
(handing him his faculty card, class schedule, and a
catalogue) told him that Prof. McGentsroom hadn’t yet
returned from his summer vacation. She told him there
was some mail for him. Darconville almost misgave from
expectation as she rooted around in a series of letterboxes,
all tabbed with professors’ names: McGoldrick,
Schreiner, Waxman, Stuart, Millar, Treadgold, etc., and
then handed him a postcard: a lavendulate “Miss ya!”—
the dot an extravagant circle—signed by Hypsipyle
Poore. Well, well, thought Darconville, tearing it in two
and dropping it into a goody’s pail on the way out. He
spent an hour or so in the Fogg Museum, walked around
the commons in front of the law school, and circled back
by Memorial Hall, a huge Victorian Gothic vault with
large windows of colored glass stiffened dark with
metalwork and stone tracery and memorializing the
Union dead in what, in another part of the country—
already thankfully forgotten—was generally considered to
be the last of romantic wars.
Across the way, he entered the vine-webbed gates of
the Harvard Yard, an old commons of skinnybranched
elms and walkways surrounded by venerable red-brick
college halls, quadrangular in form, cloistral in intent, an
enclosure as neat and strict as a bowling green and
isolating in time and space traditions of an intellectual
and spiritual probity, uncluttered as a puritan psalmody.
The figure of John Harvard sat, dignified and aloof,
staring across the Yard in a mood of piety and godliness.
Darconville walked back through several centuries under
the pleasant trees and had the strange feeling that, in
peering up a dim stairway or through an old window or
into some dark chamber-and-study, one just might happen
to catch an anachronistic glimpse of some students
reading The Tatler by candlelight instead of working their
sophemes or construing their Demosthenes or perhaps a
group of lads, with wigs a-flap, skipping up out of the
buttery—the steam of hasty-pudding in the air—and
balancing tankards and sizings of bread and beer or
maybe several young blades drinking rumbullion and
gowling against the excessive measures of Lord North,
Grenville, and Townsend until one of them might leap up
to shout, “Step outside and repeat that asseveration,
Villiers, you damned Tory!” He stepped over to look at
Widener Library, the beautiful white steeple of Memorial
Church, and came out again, under an old archway
adorned above with crowned lanterns, into the square.
The congestion in Harvard Square, a maze of
stoplights and ringing commerce—almost island-
contained—became a singular source of delight,
especially to someone pointedly tired of the High and
Main streets of Quinsyburg as the avenues of
sophistication. Darconville crossed the street, the kiosk of
the central subway entrance exhaling brakedust and stale
air, and went shopping: he mailed Isabel some jewelry
and a Harvard T-shirt. In the plaza of the Holyoke Center,
he observed, were gathered all manner of people: bearded
fellows selling flutes and sandals; drownbottles with split
shoes sharing slugs of whiskey with each other;
wagoneers selling books and records; three or four pale
mystical girls offering bunches of dried-flowers from
their trugs; a dinger holding on a leash a capuchin
monkey in a red bellboy’s hat, snatching dimes; and
everywhere, in the crowds, professors and law-cats and
transcorporating philosophers and other remnants of
academe who for the way they talked, gestured, and
dressed might have flown out of Baffin Land. It seemed
one of the few places on the earth where one could stand
on a street corner for five minutes and see and hear the
world go by in a thousand fashions and in fifty languages.
When Darconville had time on his hands—there was
a great deal to share but no one to share it with—he’d
several afternoons left the square for Boston, aimlessly,
meditatively, circuitously riding the underground transit
in and then back out, with the seats crammed and the
aisles crowded, and when the train pulled into Harvard
Station, always, the conductors, thumbpunching buttons,
called out, “End of the line, all change!”—the doors
leaped hissing open, dust rose, and tired sober-eyed
commuters with rolled newspapers hurried out in a rush,
pushed up the ramps, and left the subway to lose
themselves in the larger crowds on the street above.
Darconville noticed the girls of greater Boston were
lovely, lithe, and elegant—one, however, always gleamed
in their ranks, her unassuming innocent self-withdrawal
being brighter than the lights that danced over the cities
he explored. And she wasn’t even there.
The dewy sweet smell from the gardens of Brattle St.
drifted through the fencepickets. Darconville put his map
into his pocket and cut down Hawthorn St. where,
walking along, he listened to the sad, quiet rustle up in the
red and golden beeches and noticed the first decaying
leaves, tawny and rusted, sprinkling like the bridal colors
of autumn from the chestnut trees, always among the first
to shed. He came out to the banks of the peaceful river
and slowly headed east along a pathway.
The sun was beginning to go down, and a faint ring
of blue autumnal smokehaze could be seen over the
playing fields and boathouses across the Charles. He
crossed the Larz Anderson Bridge and then cut down a
grassy slope to sit by the water and consider the beauty of
the college from another angle, a view sweeping and
magnificent. Again, he looked at his map and named to
identify the elegant brick houses he traced from left to
right: Eliot, Winthrop, Leverett, Dunster, all stately and
knitted over with withers and strands of ivy. Theirs was a
spectacular fenestration, the jigsaw cornices and
windowed frontdoors facing across the courtyards and
crowned above in a little parade, beyond the gates, of
chimneys, turrets, and domed towers of green, gold, and
crimson.
Trying to locate Adams House, Darconville found he
couldn’t. He tried to match map to terrain, following his
finger through one courtyard, out of an archway, and into
a second court at another distance. He lost his way and
followed his finger back, to pause. It waited. He checked
the map. He moved his finger now to count past turrets
and a forest of chimneypots and mansards, but dusk,
falling, either doubled them or truncated or made
indistinct those that rose behind others. It was useless, for
once again one was back at an angle that couldn’t do
anything but lead in a direction that discouraged the logic
of the whole enterprise. He smiled. This person, he
thought, is divided against himself: one part overlooks the
whole, knows that he is sitting there and that the way is
clear; but another part notices nothing, has at most a
divination that the first part thinks it sees all. Darconville
reflected, at that point, that these two could sit waiting for
years, pondering the parable. Then one part said: if you
know that, you have found your way. While another
replied: but unfortunately only in parable. Would that be a
comment on art?
Darconville almost laughed.
He walked back then through the narrow streets and
turned into the iron gate on Linden St. that led into the
courtyard of Adams House, where the master’s residence,
Apthorp House—a white colonial dwelling—sat
surrounded by the high wine-black brick of what looked
like an old deserted gashouse or Victorian railway station,
the roof edge of which, sloping down to gimmaled
windows, was interrupted at intervals by a series of
beetle-browed gables jutting out in sooty-stained façades
that diminished in width after the fashion of steps and
seemed in the gloom of sudden dusk a perfect perch for
rooks and cormorants. There were perpendicular rows of
apertures crossed here and there by cantilever fire-
escapes. The shades were all drawn. He went in.
There wasn’t a sound inside of Adams House. One
corridor led to another, communicating to ever more and
more shadowy rooms, and, all in all, it seemed to be one
of those places that had been kept, swept, and oiled, but
locked up for ages and never to be used again. Gothic-
shafted windows let in grey light. There were more exits
and entrances, unexpected turnings and angles, than
Darconville had ever seen—including the many Venetian
palazzi he’d known famous for them. He was intrigued.
He looked down—and listened—into stone stairwells that
wound down and around as if into sunken, desolate
dungeons. He started up the stairs, turning from landing
to landing, higher and higher, and he came out of the
surprising changes of level to the top floor of F staircase.
It appeared to be the top floor. At the end of the staith
there, however, just out of conventional view, a glimpse
of some nearly hidden balusters invited further
inspection; it was obviously a bam—the corners white
with the striggles of spiders— of the stairbuilders of yore.
Curious, Darconville kept on up, entering a gallery
that seemed contained in the thickness of the wall, an
interior space which consisted of another winding ascent,
not quite an inclined plane, yet not by any means a
regular stair, the edges of stones, neat but primitive,
having been suffered to project irregularly to serve for
rude steps or a kind of assistance. Through this narrow
stairwell Darconville crept to the top of the house, which
was partly ruinous and full of nooks. There was a good
deal of hooded furniture and old stuffed chairs,
upsidedown and shrouded with linen antimacassars turned
inside out, all blocking spare rooms reserved for lumber
and empty portmanteaux. The dust was formidable.
There, branching off at irregular intervals, horizontal
galleries—full man height, but narrow—went round the
whole building, or so it appeared, and received air from
circular holes, wheel-windows that fell open from their
peaks and were held by a chain. There were—rooms up
there! Inhabited rooms!
Then came the sound of a sudden step. Darconville’s
heart squeezed in fright as, turning, he found himself
staring at a delicate, slack-twisted boy of indeterminate
age—fourteen or forty, it was impossible to say—whose
complexion was the color of a slug. He had one of those
faces, ellipsoidal and cricket-like, which resembled one’s
reflection when looking closely into a shiny spoon or
doorknob. Blowing up fitfully at a wisp of his ashy-blond
hair, he shifted, the better to grip the box of books and
bottles he tightly held with nailbitten hands, and pointing
from the wrist to a nearby door stammered in angry panic,
“I’m t-telling Dr. Crucifer about this, y-you wait!”

LXI

A Telephone Call
 If love should call, and you were I
And I were you, and love should call,
How happy I could be with I
And you with you, if love should call.
—S. J. PERELMAN

—ISABEL?
—This is Dot. Good lord!—hush up, y’hear!—some
folks here neighborin’ a spell but carryin’ on like they
was clappin’ their feet in the air. Hello?
—This is Darconville.
—Darconville!
—I’m sorry to be calling so late. It’s midnight.
—Midnight? Shoot, I didn’t think it was 5:30. My
watch was upsidedown, for cry-eye. But listen to you: too
late don’t count on Saturday night, not here, (pause) Will
somebody turn that damfool thang down? (pause) You
still up yonder in Massatoochits?
—Yes. Yes, I am.
—Isn’t that nice? That’s right nice.
—Sort of. I wonder, may I speak to Isabel?
—What in the world? O law, here I am holdin’ a
glass in one hand and, fool that I am, nearly proceeded to
try to drink out of the telephone receiver! (pause) Hello?
—Isabel. May I speak to her, please?
—Is she here?
—Um, don’t you—know?
—Funny, you know, I don’t know if I don’t know.
Here, you hold on, I’ll be back in a breath, (long pause)
Out, wouldn’t you know it. Fickle, fidgety thing.
—Fickle?
 —Well, fidgety, really, (sigh) I bleeve she got her a
part-time job. Days, that child been ugly as homemade
soap to me. I mostly let her be, Darconville, plain out. I’m
at my end of the rope, I’m telling you. We habm’t seen a
sign of her much lately. She’s been takin’ to goin’ on long
walks night and day. All that. You know? In the woods.
Off down the path. Hands deep in her pockets. All that
kind of—quiet!— thing.
—Hands deep?
—All that.
—At night? Alone?
—Or maybe with someone else.
—Someone else? No.
—Well, I mean with someone else if she ain’t alone,
see? Hello? Your voice sounds s’small.
—Was she alone tonight?
—I haven’t a clue. That’s the point. It’s difficult to
say.
—When she’s alone?
—When it’s too dark to see. Hello? (pause) Wait, this
is going to kill you—I was just talkin’ into my beer glass!
—You mentioned that.
(pause)
—Did I call you?
—I called you, Mrs. Shiftlett.
—Please, call me Dot? Besides I have a small
headache.
—Listen, perhaps I should give you my telephone
number so Isabel can call me. All right? Now, I’m giving
you my telephone number: 1-617-495-3612.
—A mess of numbers? Lordy! I can cold out tell you,
Darconville, they’re sure to come out, whaddyacallit,
added wrong me takin’ them down now. (pause) Was that
a a-tomic bomb out there? (sigh) A few folks is by, is all,
turnin’ some sweet potato vines. Sound like a bunch of
aborgirines, though, don’t it? I bleeve I cain’t hear m’self
think.
—I’m sure it’s fun.
—Tyin’ on favors? Steppin’ on big ol’ balloons?
Puttin’ up the RCA? O.
—You’re enjoying yourself.
—Enormously, (pause) Enormously.
—Please. How is Isabel getting along?
—So well.
—Would you tell her I called?
—I will. I pointedly will—to use one of your big
writin’ words.
—I called all last week. I rang and rang.
—Pet.
—I miss her.
—We all do.
—
—You’ll have to speak up louder.
—I—love her.
—You cain’t bleeve how much that’ll mean to you
when I tell her.
—I’m sorry?
—Don’t be. Maybe it’s female trouble, this mopin’
about. That’s my p’effunce. Thrums or something, that
kind of thing. The thrums come on me, I take a drink—
—Mrs. Shiftlett? Hello?
—Did you ring off? I thought you rang off, until I
saw myself, what, fussin’ with my glass where the
receiver was. Hello?
— (sigh) I’m right here.
—Isn’t it wonderful.
 —What?
—Bein’ there. Harvard? I just say the name.
—You couldn’t look again, Mrs. Shiftlett, for Isabel,
perhaps again in her bedroom? (pause) Are you there?
—Oh yes, but I’m afraid I cain’t talk to you now,
Darconville, I’m on the phone.
—So—so am I.
—Why, of course, don’t mind me. I’m a-sloppin’ and
a-sloshin’ about here like a rubber pig in a winter suit.
But hold on, let me first put down this fool drink. (dial
tone)

LXII

A Judgment in Italy

I don’t envy your happiness very much if the lady can

afford no other sort of favors but what she has bestowed
upon you.
—GEORGE FARQUHAR, The Recruiting
Officer

A LITIGATION, in the meantime, had been resolved

in the province of Veneto. The attorney-in-fact, appointed
by a magistrate of the Court of Appeal, conducted an
investigation by locating not without difficulty and
eventually obtaining the most recent judgments rendered
in a dispute between the alleged heir of a small estate
located in the City of Venice and the State of Italy and
then sent the results ahead which from Quinsyburg were
forwarded to Cambridge, Mass.
The affair began long ago, at the outset of the
eighteenth century, when in 1718 and within that republic
a certain “benefizio semplice di patronale- laicale”
dedicated to San Marco, patron saint of Venice, had been
created. In essence, the so-called benefit (benefizio) was
established by one or more owners of certain lands
(patroni) by execution of a deed assigning forever their
income from said lands to an ecclesiastical entity, such as
a church, in return for the perpetual obligation of the
priests, as designate by the patroni and from time to time
in charge of said church, to say Masses for the souls of
the owners, their families, and successors. The church
(capellano) was entitled to receive from the cultivation of
the owners, fishermen in this case, a share of the produce
(normally 1/5 ) and to administer the land for this
purpose; the pescatori, i.e., the fishermen, were entitled to
retain the residual 4/5ths share of the produce. An
inspection of this benefizio by ecclesiastical authorities
ascertained that, with the seizure of the city in 1797 by
the French, destroying its independence, it ceded to the
state. The patroni were sent down that judgment, the deed
was dissolved, and their names faded into oblivion.
At the union of the republic of Venezia with the
Kingdom of Italy, several new laws were then enacted,
principally aimed at suppressing the old ecclesiastical
entities and transferring their rights to the state demesne.
Soon thereafter, law No. 1464 of August 17, 1873,
established, in the absence of any notarial deeds, owners,
or assignees, various civic tenancies in the benefizio in
question—a piece of land with dwellings located, as it
was, off the Canale della Misericordia. The particular
palazzo on the Corte del Gatto, one division, was declared
by favor of the above law, and in suppression of the full
benefizio, an orfanotrofio di stato—an orphanage—in
settlement. A Venetian notary fixed its yearly allocation at
Lir. 200.000 (about $230). The foundlings taken in were
given uniforms and arbitrarily assigned surnames that
were taken from herbs.
A corrupt official during those years, channeling the
annual apportionment of the orphanage to his own ends—
engaging, all the while, in a scandalous liaison with one
of the young girls there—arranged to close the home with
the claim that the lost (read: stolen) assets disallowed by
default any settlement pursuant to the 1873 law, and not
only for the sudden eviction of its charges but also in
view of the brisk maritime trade through the Adriatic, he
schemed a graft, attributed the grantorship to his own
office, and proceeded to open a house of assignation off
the large canal. It flourished.
In the meantime, a certain Alessandro Dittami, a boy
randomly named from an aromatic plant which grows in
the area of Mount Dicte, found his way to the United
States, specifically to New York City, where, in his teens
and insolvent, he slept in what Italian immigrants there
called the “Hotel Pepino” (i.e., beneath the stars under
Garibaldi’s statue in Washington Sq. Park) and assumed
the trade of a tailor. He taught himself English, worked
hard, and saved his money. With the passing years he
came to learn the dark fate of the orphanage in which he
had once lived—the child of a romantic and illegitimate
love between a local senator there and a girl in service—
and to which, after his own small success abroad, he had
in the best of faith sent back charitable sums. The monies,
unknown to him, were being converted of course to foul
ends, still, however, under the guise of state control.
Alerted, eventually, to the misappropriation of his gifts,
Dittami worked desperately to re-establish the orphanage
to the proper powers, less in the name of justice than as a
simple act of compassion growing out of his childhood
memories, and yet, while he learned that there was no
way to effect this other than by looking back into the
original benefizio, it was brought to his attention that, as
the initial claim of anyone to the benefit had long ago
dissolved, the state had every right to continue to assert
title to the realty, unless, of course, a patrono could be
proved to exist as to matters of letters-patent, grant, lease,
custodiam, or recognizance.
Vigorously, he cast around to find ways to vindicate a
claim, to free the estate of scandal and taint, and to accede
now to full ownership which he sought to do not only by
dint of his contributions but also because, as the benefit
was essentially of a lay nature (laicale), it could not
legally have been appropriated by the state in the first
place under whatever jurisdiction or for any reason
whatsoever. The issue was debated for the following half-
century in several suits brought before different courts
which rendered conflicting judgments, until the dispute
was temporarily settled by the Court of Appeal at Veneto
in a decision which gave full force and effect to the
original compact between clergy and laity—but not
before Dittami passed away. But what, in fact, had been
decided? His widow—Darconville’s maternal
grandmother—was judicially prevented from the
satisfactory conclusion of her husband’s dream, for while
it was adjudged that the state demesne had wrongly
subrogated the patroni years back and taken possession of
their rights, an unlawful abridgment of the formal laicale,
there could be given no final resolution of tenancy and/or
ownership for want of evidence as to legal continuance.
An irony of a legal nature followed: the appellant was
awarded temporary jurisdiction, but it was over little
more than a financially exhausted, debt-ridden,
overspoliated palazzo, a large account duty—substantial
charges and assessments—falling upon it coincident with
the enormously devaluated lire of several terrible wars.
She returned nevertheless to Venice upon her husband’s
death where, for the memory of her husband and in the
interest of Darconville, her sole heir, she reactivated the
dispute on her own, both as to claim and cadastre.
Continuance followed continuance.
Finally, the Supreme Court of Italy (Corte di
Cassazione), determining to resolve the controversy and
dispose of the case in judgment once and for all, suddenly
disregarded the form of the transaction in favor of its
substance and confirmed the decision rendered pro tern
by the Court of Appeal of Veneto, and the matter became
res adjuticata, a conclusion reached in respect of
centuries of litigation. The documents evidencing the
decision were duly recorded, barring any other claimants
in the light of this last decision, exact copies thereof
bearing the proper seal were forwarded, and Darconville
became the owner of a Venetian palazzo.

LXIII

Figures in the Carpet

 But while my lids remained thus shut, I ran over in
my mind my reason for so shutting them.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, The Oval Portrait

DARCONVILLE took out his black coat. A spell of

bad weather, cold hard rains, set in about the middle of
September. There was a torn and anxious quality to the
sky. Days noticeably foreshortened: the season when
warmth lay low upon the land, smothering it, was gone.
The coolness in the air gave more than a hint that the last
rose of summer, tired of blowing alone, had put on its hat
and gone home. Cambridge now seemed small, dark, and
strepitous.
It seemed a bleak, haunted Congregational world
these days, and Darconville came to descry in the black-
hooded clouds overhead the lofty pulpits of the Mathers,
in the drizzle their gloomy and irritable prophecies. Fall
classes had now begun at the university.
The first week there had been interviews to give: a
long procession of ponderously uncertain students making
application for his courses. Darconville’s office was on
the second floor of a secluded, rickety house on Kirkland
St., and there he sat listening to their concerns, the usual
olla-podrida of undergraduate worries and boasts, hoping
no one noticed how hard he found it to concentrate. No,
not hoping. Hoping allowed the possibility of hindrance,
resistance, opposition—prophecies he refused to allow as
the principal cause of events foretold, for we hope, so
pray, only to lose our comfort in the marshaled
expectation that creates a guilt, in which, feeling
ashamed, we fall afoul of hope and populate a hell.
Darconville could no longer, in fact, be numbered among
those men whom obstacles attract. All experience now
seemed vanquished by one that had already taken place—
and he withdrew to her, now a refuge in all things; he
waited; he sat still in the sweet paralysis of the past. The
temptation to change or fully abide by new adjustments,
of whatever sort, seemed only a closely reasoned
paraphrase of rashness, and he didn’t dare do what, in the
doing, might be undone. He refused to acknowledge
sorrow and at the same time tried to blunt his eagerness,
lest eagerness sharpen the condition of that hope he now
superstitiously held to be antithetical to faith: don’t we
hope for what we also fear we mightn’t have? And that,
of course, was unimaginable.
No, Darconville was only rational—and grateful.
Without Isabel, however, his happiest moments became
his saddest because he could not share them with her, and
yet, while he kept it all to himself, he still saw fit—as he
had for some time now—to record his every feeling for
her in a notebook, adding, as well now, what he could
remember of themselves, as far back as he could
remember. It seemed a way of keeping in touch. At the
end of each day at Kirkland St., he waited until the
corridors were deserted and then walked home alone,
usually by way of the Yard, sometimes so late that the
wickets had been swung shut for the night, with the lights
in the old halls long extinguished and only the striking of
a lonely clock somewhere far away a reminder that
beyond the black and impenetrable shadows was someone
very close to him. And then he would whisper to her
every single secret in his heart.
 Prof. McGentsroom, an old scholar at Harvard,
proved to be indispensable in those early weeks,
becoming for Darconville not so much the person who’d
hired him but rather instead a good friend who eased the
transition, explained the rubrics of the university, and
suggested—always kindly and usually in language that
referred itself to the middle of the last century—how to
go about things. At their first meeting, he’d presented to
his young friend a volume of his own poetry, expressing
only gracious regrets, as he inscribed the book to both of
them, to hear that Isabel wouldn’t be coming up until
December. They still, of course, intended to marry?
Darconville smiled. “The faith of man,” said the kindly
scholar, taking Darconville’s arm, “is itself the greatest
miracle of all the miracles that faith engenders.” It was
true, and, for strengthening him in his resolve, truer than
ever. Only endure, thought Darconville, endure, rich
Penelope.
A Harvard classic, McGentsroom—almost old
enough to carbon-date—looked like a real pottle-fiend (at
times, in fact, he did rather moisten his clay, as the phrase
goes, somewhat copiously): he was thready, wore salt-
and-pepper suits, and was always stuffing filthy old shag
—the genuine Bull Durham—into his pipe. His ties were
stained. There was awn sticking out of his ears and nose.
He looked as though he couldn’t find the holes in a
bowling ball, but in point of fact he was a great polyglot
and was currently being considered for another Pulitzer
Prize, not so much for his masterful biography, rendering
others obsolete, of Weef VI, as for his brilliant translation
of a recently discovered tenth-century Russian manuscript
called Chornaya Gert-zoginia. He couldn’t remember the
carfare to Boston from Cambridge but could quote
chapter and verse from the works of Defensorius,
Synodite of Ligugé, and Baudonivia, the Nun of Poitiers.
Darconville often took Prof. McGentsroom to lunch. He
always got sauce on his nose.
Despite the fact that he was getting on—the previous
year he had yawned and dislocated his hip—Prof.
McGentsroom was widely held to be a wonder in the
classroom. In he bumped, replete with umbrella and beret,
looking as if he’d shaved with a scarificator, and without
so much as a note began to lecture. He taught courses in
comparative literature, but Homer was his love, and
several generations were often given to regale each other
with stories of how he always chuffed on fumicable feet
across the front of the classroom, the standard opening
since 1915 to his famous classics course in which he
demonstrated that Homer sang in the rhythm of a choo-
choo train! Classics: a course which teaches you how to
live without the job it prevents you from getting. But to
such complaints McGentsroom was oblivious. Lecturing,
he was liable to nod off or perhaps reach into his pocket
and take out something like a telephone-pole insulator,
stare at it, then put it back. As he talked, he pulled on his
pipe, slurped it, chewed the stem in deliberation. Of
course he was a bit bunty, but the students loved him,
especially those who, answering a question correctly,
earned his ritualistic praise: he would step out from
behind the lectern, extend his hands cardinalationally, and
clap them down upon the fellow’s shoulders, saying, “Oh,
it is grand to be young.” It was reported that he got angry
only once—this was years and years ago—when he
simply walked out of the classroom, shouted “Suffering
Columbus, no!” and then returned, smiling and
composed. Female students worshipped him and on the
last day of each semester always brought him a balloon.
McGentsroom was one of those people rare today who
adored his wife, whom he invariably called “Little
Mother.” You always saw him leave Widener Library at
9:10, when he walked home —often the wrong way—for
a small glass of scrumpy, the late news on his overheating
old Philco cathedral, and then to bed.
At the beginning of the second week, Prof.
McGentsroom invited Darconville over on Saturday night
for drinks. It was something to look forward to, for the
young teacher had been spending his nights alone
working on a piece of satiric fiction which showed the
ironic contradictions between the characters’ confidence
in themselves and what the reader knew about them, a
kind of writing at which recently he’d became extremely
adept. Writing he could manage; nothing else much
interested him. There was in F-21 only the whisper of his
pen, a familiar silence broken only occasionally down in
the street by roaring students addicted to asserting in
chorus that they wouldn’t go home ‘til morning, a
needless vaunt in that, more often than not, it had usually
arrived. As time passed, the pointless spaciousness of his
rooms came to oppress Darconville, and he proceeded to
move his bed, his desk, and his lamp into one room. He
began to talk to himself, avoid the dining-hall, feel a
fatigue he could only ascribe to—what? His apprehension
to know suddenly explained it: apprehension. He wished
Isabel would write. He tried to ignore that she hadn’t.
But as night followed night it turned out the same:
when darkness fell he always found himself facing
auspiciously south, gazing through the windows of his
room, yet observing nothing, only reaching with one hand
to clasp the opposite shoulder, drawing it inward and
sitting, as it were, cupped within himself. And it was
quaint, for when the windowpane misted over with his
breathing, he would wipe it with a handkerchief as if
prepared, for some reason, to find in a breathless moment
something terrifying looking in, very like the child who
displaces fright and apprehension onto monsters and other
imaginary creatures in order to preserve the indispensable
belief, deep in his heart, that someone loving will then
intercede.
His classes provided some diversion. The lecture
room assigned to Darconville was located over in Sever,
an old smutted brickbat-with-turrets in the quad—its main
entrance a black gaping mouth—whose twists and coils of
ivy, running down from its slateshell roof to the
whispering Norman arch out front, were now turning the
colors of autumn. The building enclosed within it ages of
stifled air, musty, overoiled, dead, and when one opened
the windows, wobbling on corbels, it was only to smell
the rot in the stone outside.
The students, most of them, were confident, wellborn,
and poised, and their determined eyes, straight Yankee
mouths, and Back Bay inflections told the story of what it
was within their power to become —indeed, several of
them made no pretense at hiding either the fact that they
bore the very same names that once made George III
tremble or could trace their gametal descent from the
lines of Dolgoruky, Edward the Pacemaker, or Pepin the
Short. They were quick, forthright, and generally studious
—and bore a refreshing dissimilarity to their
preterimposterous counterfoils down South who for
reasons known only to them took great pride in having
enrolled in such schools as Sewanee, Vanderbilt, Baylor,
and other sectarian watering-holes where the teachers
were all history-whipped alcoholics who calculated the
date of the End of the World to have been April 9, 1865,
and whose intellectual concerns had less to do with the
study of Shakespeare than as to why Longstreet delayed
at Gettysburg or how in the subsequent surrender the
infamous result for the Union had much less to do with a
new birth of freedom than with several generations of
piebald babies.
Darconville’s seminars usually went well—they’d
only met a couple of times—and all the students, crowded
together in heaps of bookbags and bunched-up coats,
seemed attentive. He would walk in, wheel out a
perambulant blackboard, and deliver his lecture with
dispatch, pausing only to answer questions or perhaps
look out at the leaves fluttering from the trees across the
Yard. Unlike most of the Quinsy girls, the students here
worked with determination and results, studiously rack-
and-snailing over their assignments with the precision of
a clock, their ambitions, high, extending simply to honors
or, in some cases, to the even higher aspiration of making
the punching lists for A.D. or Porcellian, felicity supreme
for many of those stouthearted leptorrhins with triple
names and disposable incomes who leaned that way.
During those first classes, Darconville managed to
establish a decent sort of rapport with most of them—
owlish overachievers, bearded scholars, manic-depressive
divinity students, sun-streaked blondes in parkas—and
many a discussion, full of quibbles and amphibologies,
vigorously continued outside on the steps, along through
the Yard, and right on up to the brick sidewalks of
Plympton St. where, late though it might be, he patiently
stood talking to whatever concerned group was there until
such time as he had to excuse himself for dinner. But
invariably he wouldn’t go to dinner. Nor, for
interruptions, would he go to his room. He would wait
until he was alone and then, for privacy, hurry over to a
walkway in the Lowell House courtyard where there was
a telephone box.
On the evening of September 20, he connected. It was
a brief conversation, for all that depended on it, at least so
he felt, after three silent weeks. It seemed that it took
Isabel forever to answer the telephone, the explanation for
which, when given, being that she’d been outside sitting
under a tree, thinking. About? Nothing, everything.
Darconville thought: say all, and all well said, still say
the same. She asked him if he missed her or had he, well,
met someone else in Cambridge smarter and prettier than
she? She gave credibility to the question that, with a
hollow laugh, she repeated, but he refused to accept the
callowness it seemed he was being forced, that he might
understand, to assume, and though more hurt than
indignant he pretended to be neither—and went on, as he
swallowed his emotion, asking her if she’d received his
gifts, which she had, and if she’d write to him, which she
promised she would, that very night. There followed an
awkward silence. “I love you,” said Darconville. He
listened, hard, and heard a low, indistinguishable
something, but whether of ardor or alarm or aphilophrenia
he couldn’t say.
Clearly, her mother was still in the room.
The following days Darconville spent writing,
leaving his desk only sporadically either to eat or to check
the mailbox—which still remained empty—and the time
dragged, for after the telephone call he missed Isabel
more than ever, wealth breeding want, the more blessed,
the more wretched having grown. The woodpeckers
rapping relentlessly on the lead roof of Adams House,
mocking his routine, demoralized him; it was ridiculous.
Then the weather cleared, and he began to take walks, sit
whole afternoons dreaming by the river, or perhaps take
the train to Boston where he spent hours going about the
streets until he was satisfied that a sufficient amount of
tune had passed to justify the mail delivery he ludicrously,
illogically, came to expect as being somehow causally
aligned to his absence: he would return, find the box
empty, and then sit in his room in an agony of remorse at
the thought of the day wasted. Such accidents with
Darconville became weirdly consistent, and, more
demoralized than ever, he’d read in his guilt an obligation
to redeem the time and then proceed with murderous
efficiency to write until long after the three o’clock bells
tolled pages he’d throw away, for they somehow always
curiously transessen-tiated into letters to Isabel—of love,
of grief, of passion, of worry— sometimes in words as
beautiful and enchanted as prayers but too often as remote
and frenzied dispensations, bungled by lovesickness,
which gibbered unmentionably outside the ordered
universe where no dreams reach, no hearts touch, no love
takes place. And then with yet another night almost gone,
he would place another sheet before him and take up his
pen. He’d lean to the right and then to the left. He’d sit
forward. He’d sit backward. He’d sit tête baissée, bowing
his head to the page, blank as silence, and then mercifully
nod off to sleep in the holiness of his ignorance, fatigue
becoming at last the very narcotic needed to cure itself.
The lively bustle in the streets outside eventually
became a temptation Darconville couldn’t bear to ignore.
Distinction, implying a difference, only meant isolation,
and while he still felt a general indifference to the
suffrage of the public he took again to roaming about,
often observing in the streets a face, or a fraction of a
face, which seemed to reveal to a hairsbreadth in mutable
flesh what at that time he yearned to find in durable
shape. Strangely, he felt so bad about Isabel’s silence and
her absence that it became almost like having her there!
And yet he tried not always to think about her. There
were, at first, small conversatioas with the yardcops. Then
he accepted the invitations of several students to visit
their final clubs, affairs called “rum sociables,” during
which he sat uncomfortably by himself in discreet
paneled rooms watching beautiful arrogant children—
golden-haired phaeacians with perfect heads and
supercilious preppies in striped ties—as they smoked
bulldog pipes, sang ribald songs, and played poker for
exorbitant stakes.
There were also faculty parties at Harvard, a pinched
hour or so once a week in some upper room or other
where vile little caphtorim for whom ideology, like
science, put a ring around the world and professors of
both sexes, working their rubber faces, stood around in
the pavisade of closed circles, sipping sherry and
earnestly trying to solve the vexata quaestio of who
shouldn’t be given tenure, while their voices, a blend of
the servile and the congratulatory, the deferential and the
condescending, rose at moments of histrionic laughter or
dropped at moments for serious inquiry—conversations,
in fact, that proved to be little more than the gossip of
swivel-chair tacticians and the less-than-witty
exaugurations of academical women hardfaced as
execution, crafty little critics, and anxiety-ridden
sculptresses from Radcliffe with complexions like
drakonite who taught art and somehow all specialized in
phallic and mammary bronzes. The men stuttered; the
women mimped; and the cumulative effect, often rising to
a pitch of sensibility hardly to be distinguished from
madness, only seemed to recapitulate in the babble what
tragic consequences lay in store for those who would
build towers to the heights of their Goddamned
ambitions. Most of them had reputations, not for any
particular wisdom, but for having authored with
indefatigable manufacture books of eighth-rate criticism
which they approached like cutting serge, getting their
thruppence ha’penny change, and writing “settled” at the
bottom of their manifests with the pencil that had blacked
their teeth.
There was for instance the head of the English
department, a showboat-fat idler in American Lit.—a
salesman disguised as a catalogue— who, with his hands
in his pockets, rocked back and forth on the balls of his
feet and upon being introduced to Darconville said, “Ah,
the scrivener.” Another one, expert on Wordsworth,
simply snorfled sherry and talked about His Book. A
group of men, introduced collectively as the Personnel
Committee, tidily kept themselves to the rule of
proportion and excluded anyone else from their charmed
circle. It was all in all a gathering of self-important and
inaccessible fame-suckers who ate too much, rarely
taught classes, and had more sabbaticals in their lives than
Saturdays—copyright pirates, purveyors of secondhand
sunshine, and empiriocritical yahoos all ferreting and
rummaging in the quis-quiliae of time, making books out
of a judicious mixture of other books, and carrying owls
to Athens. They were all at once silly, unimportant, and
ambitious, minds which were logical and positive without
breadth, without suppleness, and without imagination and
their scholarship was nothing but a school of peculation
which suffered less in the lack than in the excess of
attention. The laurels about which one dreamt wouldn’t
let the other sleep; another dreamt that his laurels
wouldn’t let yet another sleep; and that one couldn’t sleep
because only another dreamt of the very laurels he
himself was disallowed.
Darconville would remember one particular afternoon
at such a party: a colleague in his department happened,
dared, to introduce herself as Isabel, and he was suddenly
astonished to see how immeasurably sad he grew—
excusing himself, in haste, to run immediately over to
Adams House for a look into his mailbox, with no luck.
There was, of course, an outer edge of vanity and
pretension to these occasions, these people, but the
distractions were welcome. Anything that came to his
mind became a preoccupation. A rough sea, he thought,
leaves a smooth beach. And one morning that idea
seemed confirmed in a wonderful way. A letter arrived:
the wedding date was set in London at Westminster
Cathedral for December 23! He called that night to tell
Isabel. There was no answer. Quickly, he wrote her a
letter asking her if he could come down to see her.
The master of Adams House, meanwhile, had noticed
that Darconville not only kept aloof at the faculty parties
but also took his meals alone in the dining-hall and so
encouraged him to come to the Wednesday open-houses
up in the Senior Common Room—a weekly get-together
for associates, tutors, and affiliated professors where one
had the opportunity to meet other members, chat, and
have a drink. It was enjoyable, a versatile group of
scholars, musicians, and lovely intelligent girls who,
brimming with laughter and smelling of hot puffs of
hairwash, effortlessly stood in to discuss their studies,
vivisect the worth of a movie, or explain what they
wanted to achieve in their careers. Several—the master
among them—had read Darconville’s book, which even
became the subject of some discussion there. He began to
look forward to these occasions, the congeniality and
quiet civility in that room, with its noble bust of John
Adams, keeping his spirits up. By happenstance, one
afternoon, Darconville noticed a person who looked like a
pale slug crossing furtively along the wall to the exit of
that room, walking with a kind of hop in his gait and
frowning at the floor. It was none other than the blond
shabrag of a lad who had so nervously accosted him in
the dark that night on the top floor of Adams House.
“Excuse me,” asked Darconville, interrupting
someone, “who is that?”
A few people turned: then they all knowingly
exchanged glances. There were raised eyebrows,
excipient whistles of sarcasm, and one or two exaggerated
reviews of the ceiling. One girl, sucking her tongue in
disgust, looked away. The senior tutor smiled and shook
his head.
“That,” he replied, “is part of the caricaturama of
Harvard. His name is Lampblack.”
And he ran errands. But no one knew much of
anything else about him, whether he was a graduate
student or how long he’d lived in Adams House or in fact
where he’d come from. Nobody could guess his age. The
only incontrovertible fact, it seemed, common knowledge
apparently, was that he was a lackey, a little aide-de-camp
of sorts whose services at some time or other had been
secretly (and, it was suggested, diabolically) given over—
if one could believe the report— to one of the strangest
human beings on the face of the earth: some mad apple, a
creature few had ever really seen, they said, in fact, a
professor emeritus at Harvard who lived his life out alone
on the interdicted reaches of the top floor of Adams
House. As those in the common room spoke of him, it
was as if of ruin or disgrace, as if some diseased and
unpentecostal wind had suddenly blown up in that room
to scandalize their young tongues and yet somehow force
them to pronounce, not without an uneasy, almost
disbelieving hitch in the throat, the discreditable
confession that was his name: Dr. Crucifer.
It was whispered that this remote figure held an
absolute and malevolent jurisdiction at Harvard and, to
Darconville’s skeptical amusement, that he not only
controlled everything there but that a good many
members of the faculty, about whom he supposedly knew
everything, had been brought to the university on the
strength of nothing less mysterious than the power of his
own secret command. “I take it he’s a wizard?” asked
Darconville, smiling. But no one laughed—in fact, as he
spoke, he happened to notice the senior tutor, closely
watching him, suddenly look away.
There were legends. It seemed that this Crucifer was
the organizer of every last deviltry. Stories, passed along
down the years, were many-handed, many-wintered,
many-stemmed. He was evidently a genius, for which, of
course, at Harvard nothing wasn’t forgiven. Actually,
there was small firsthand information: students, who
conspicuously avoided that stairway on their own
initiative, had in fact been strictly prohibited by house
rules from all suites beyond the fourth floor of F-entry.
That didn’t, however, stem rumors. Dr. Crucifer’s
courses, no longer being given, had apparently been quite
famous—it was said, among other things, that in the heat
of a rabidus furor the ingenious method he once took for
conveying to a lax and ill-prepared student the importance
of discipline was to administer stripes to the fellow while
having him repeat the “Miserere” on his knees in front of
the whole class—but that upon Radcliffe’s co-educational
merger with Harvard he had immediately resigned. It
wasn’t explained why. Afterwards, however, he
supposedly never appeared in the community again,
although the word was that sometimes he’d been seen
walking the downstairs corridors of Adams House late at
night. Alone. Slowly. That sort of thing. Some said he
shot at targets in his living-room with an air pistol, others
that he worked in the lofts upstairs on demonic
experiments, and several that he was writing a history of
Harvard.
It was offered one to select any of a thousand dubious
reports: he dressed only in red; he owned a library of
cutisbound books; he was never visible to mortal sight for
twenty-four hours running; he was an ex-priest; he’d once
caned Kittredge; he smoked only Sherman’s cork-tipped
100’s and drank only imported Pharaon liquor; he was
Lampblack’s real father; and so on and so forth. His
reputation reached everywhere. It was sworn that, once,
he had been heard screaming from his upper window for a
full ten minutes, that he purposely humiliated Jewish
students in his classes, and that, with the remark “My
bread, I think?” once dug his fork into the white hand of a
lady who sat beside him at a faculty dinner. On another
occasion he supposedly called to his table the patron of a
local restaurant and ordered him to remove a consumptive
from the doorway so that he could enjoy his meal without
disgust. And a last flight of someone’s fancy actually had
it that this creature, in order to elevate himself above the
weakness of humankind, once traveled—this was
unbelievable—to a remote place called Zawyel-Dyr
where in the dead of night he willingly knelt on a mat, lit
by stars and a lantern, while some byzantine with a
shanked and serrated clamp, fitted to an oval ring,
illegally performed a surgical peotomy on him and—
Excusing himself with a smile, Darconville left the
room. It was preposterous.
The oaks in New England had now turned. Winds
piled every gutter and dark doorway full of scraps of red,
amber, and yellow leaves. The passing days were as
empty to him as his mailbox, and now even his writing
couldn’t take his whole attention. He developed
headaches but managed to get hold of some
amphetamines which temporarily cleared them up. It was
not magical: the cure itself was a symptom, only
confirmed what his headaches hinted at—his mind had
become rigid in its preoccupations, and soon it seemed he
was concentrating on concentration alone. Thought
became a drama as an end in itself, with his mind both
stage and audience. The packs of cigarettes he smoked
left his lungs absolutely raw.
At the end of the week, he had his evening with Prof.
McGentsroom, philosophical chat over wine in his sitting-
room, a sensible and spontaneous amicability that built up
in Darconville defenses against his weakness and took his
mind off the intentionally brief letter, posing several
distinct questions, he that morning mailed to Virginia. It
had grown late and was soon time to start for home, the
full harvest moon whitening the front porch where he
thanked his host who accompanied him out.
 “You’ve been very kind, the whole month. I can’t
thank you enough.”
Prof. McGentsroom’s eyes twinkled.
“It’s true.”
“My dear child,” smiled the old scholar, gently
bowing his white head, “we surely can’t do enough for
the princely relative of Cardinal Théroux-d’Arconville
now, can we?”
Darconville was astounded. It wasn’t important
perhaps but it was something he thought no one knew,
and yet, if known, it somehow bespoke an uncanny, even
relentless investigation of him, a shadowing that, taking
such a curious turn, now unsettled him.
“Please,” he swiftly asked, “who told you about
that?”
“Oh dear,” cried McGentsroom, biting his thumb in
embarrassment over the apparent blunder. “Does that
bother you?”
“Who—could have known? And whoever it is,”
asked Darconville, upset at his own stammering, “w-what
has he to do with me? My goodness, is that why I’ve been
brought to Harvard?”
There was an awkward silence.
“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I must know.”
Prof. McGentsroom blinked sadly, bewildered as to
what he could now possibly do to explain what, for the
reaction, he couldn’t understand. He became confused.
Then he fumbled out a piece of paper and without a word
—strangely, it seemed the best of the worst possibilities—
wrote down the title of a book, waited, with trepidation
added the author’s name, and then gave it over. It was as
if he had written the names of sixty devils. He gravely,
compassionately, took Darconville’s hand and, pausing to
add something, found he couldn’t. A goodnight at that
juncture, he felt, could only have sounded insolent.

LXIV

September 26

That strain once more; it bids remembrance rise.

—OLIVER GOLDSMITH, The Captivity

LATER THAT NIGHT when Darconville returned to

his rooms he found Spellvexit sitting on a telegram. He
tore open the envelope and read:

SEPT. 26
YOU NEEDN’T COME I LOVE YOU LETTER
FOLLOWS
ISABEL

He was still awake in his chair holding the message

long after dawn had crept up Bow St. and pressed its
haggard face against the window, and shortly thereafter
the morning bells from the steeple of St. Paul’s pealed
and promised a new day. But that morning at Mass he
distractedly wondered why he wasn’t yet at peace. What
was it?
Then he remembered.
 LXV

Odor of Corruption

I shall teach thee terrible things.

—WILLIAM HALLGARTH

WIDENER LIBRARY is closed on Sundays. The

following morning, however, Darconville was waiting on
the front steps, a coverlet of morning dew blanketing the
Yard, and when the doors opened he went straight to the
card-catalogue and began to thumb through the listings,
his fingers still cold from the vigil outside. He wrote
down a number but in the stacks, when he couldn’t find
the particular title he wanted among several linguistic
works by the same author, was told by a librarian that it
was a special section book (an XR number), kept on the
ground floor in a cage. Showing his faculty card, he was
led downstairs, asked to wait, and eventually given the
book: Christianity and the Ages Which It Darkened by Dr.
Abel Crucifer. He took a seat, opened randomly to a
chapter, and read:

The Socratic manner is not a game at which two

people can play. I suggest he wanted it that way,
transmogrifying, way back when, an aesthetic into a
pseudo-ethical world and leaving as a legacy to western
man the total betrayal of all degree, priority, and place. In
this chapter, “Womanity,” let us consider how in the
ultimate demonetization of old values he established a
platform for radical feminism: the topsyturvification of
the sexual order which has subsequently set in motion a
growing regiment of Bluestockings, trousered females,
and odier freaks of nature who happened to be born of a
sex of which they failed to be the ornament. In the failed
marriage of Socrates was man betrayed. Madame Defarge
didn’t want justice, she wanted testosterone. Hello,
Medusa, here are my stones.
It is no secret that this low-bred male concubine of
Archelaus named Socrates (469-399 B.C.) had an extreme
influence on philosophy. That is the central miracle of the
man. Born on the 6th of Thargelion of the sculptor,
Sophroniscus, and midwife, Phaenarete, he was ill-
shaped, ridiculous in carriage, and habitually dressed like
a craptoad, his general appearance, no doubt, best put
somewhere between a wishnik and a Jewish candy-store
proprietor. He was almost certainly a pedicator. Juvenal
refers to “the foulest sewer of Socratic sodomy.” Firmicus
speaks of “Socratic buggery.” It is of course the modern
fashion to doubt the pederasty of the master of Hellenic
sophrosyne, the “Christian before Christianity,” but even
if we are overapt to apply our twentieth-century
prejudices and prepossessions to the morality of ancient
Greeks who would have specimened such squeamishness
in Attic salt such a worldwide term as Socratic love can
hardly be explained by the lucus-a-non-lucendo theory.
The man had no special education. He was an
autodidact—and was very probably unable to read. A
pedant, nevertheless, he knew that he knew nothing (Ap.
23 AB, Symp. 216 D) which did not prevent him,
however, from seeking the reaches of an Atopia that
actually was never there. His dissatisfaction with natural
philosophy is well-known, less so, perhaps, his utter
rejection of natural science (Xen. Mem. I, i, llff., Arist.
Met. XIII, 4). He claimed he heard voices—the classical
smokescreen—and, with imperturbable serenity,
explained he took his mission in life from a reply of the
Delphic oracle: to set in man an inner unrest and bring
him into embarrassment (aporeis, Theaet. 149A), his
attempt to recoin current values developing into a kind of
barren and allocritical eristic that took pleasure in the
invention of clever but worthless fallacies, berced, every
one of them, by his own vile insecurity and then sent out
on a spin to brain the human race like a disselboom!
Poor in fortune, unlucky with women, hopelessly
unfit for any office in the Republic, he spent most of his
days working his trade (making claypots), bumsucking
about for friends, and drinking neck to neck with anybody
who’d listen to him. He craved the acceptance of society
— especially women—and would go to any lengths to
insinuate himself with them, even if the transvaluation of
current thinking itself was required to do so. What then,
specifically, did he transvalue? Pay attention, I will
bequeath you a funny story if you prove to misunderstand
the following argument. It is offered less for your
edification than for my own sense of well-being. Say
survival. I see your brain jailed by a Skuld.

Darconville laughed. It was iconoclastic, comic,

absurd.

The philosophy of the West owes its origin chiefly to

the Greeks of the late Hellenic period. Your average
schoolboy will testify, correctly, to the fact that although a
slight state of decline was evident in fifth-century Athens
—the City That Loved Beauty—a wonderfully simple
view of man still held: he was taken to be whole, with no
distinction made between his visible and invisible aspects.
The traditional Greek view would never have conceded
that men and women could be valued on the strength of
their so-called invisible or “psychological” characteristics
as considered separate, say, from visible or bodily ones.
(The classical Greek dramatists never brought into the
amphitheatre characters with inexplicable psychological
problems: aprioristic madness never went unexplained,
and critical mental states, always given with sufficient
evidence as to how they came about, were related to
demonstrable tragedy.)
The general pre-Socratic view of life as they knew it,
therefore, was monistic, Unitarian, whole. There is no
dispute whatsoever about that And although the
handwashing, departmentalized little scientists and seers
of today now regard man as a psycho-physical twin of
himself, a psychosome—some kind of metaphysical
chest-of-drawers composed of soul, mind, and body—the
early wholesome Greeks made no such arbitrary
divisions. The “wholeness” of man! Can anyone disagree
that it was a healthy and fully salvific view of what he
aspired to be, shoring up identity and mocking the
currently fashionable bit of legerdemain which condones
and excuses, almost automatically, a score of revolting
human excesses committed in the name of lofty
intentions? The brainless incompetence we forgive! The
philosophical idealism we cite lest we censure! To the
pre-Socratics those tidy distinctions would have been
dismissed as a counterproductive fragmentation which
could only lead to the kind of society we have today,
where, thanks to that little ill-born, thrusting Father of
Abstract Definitions, forcible-feebles can now accede to
high political office, the poor are twigged of their money
in the name of religion, and screeching amazonians-in-
pantsuits, shitfitsresses, and children-hating
ballockscourers can legitimately go larking about the
world with more complaints than Job and a bellyful of
abortifacients all in pursuit of a freedom they can’t temper
with responsibility and as an excuse for a higher
liberation they’ve never deserved! Blindfolded, you can at
least see the blindfold, can’t you? It’s only to witness
what your wit won’t see.

A librarian walked by rolling a bookcarrier.

Darconville looked up and, turning a page, went back to
the mad polemic in front of him, amused and fascinated
and disgusted.

The Greek expression for a good man—kalos

kagathos—explied both good-looking and morally good,
a notion at once attic, simple, and undevious, with the
body and soul fully integrated, valued as one, unseparated
in wholeness: boul or, say, sody. There were no pea-and-
thimble tricks effected to propagate the careers of
incompetents, liars, or faith-thumping dwales who spoke
of what perversely they either couldn’t or wouldn’t do.
Man’s integrity, as we use the term, is not unrelated to the
etymological denotation it more strictly conveys. You
work out the syllogism yourself. I’ve a philosopher to
kill.
During the fifth century, under Pericles, the Greeks
reached an order of highest perfection—in art, poetry,
sculpture, architecture, medicine, history, drama, and
science; it was plenitude, a paradise in terms of man’s
effort that was the closest thing to the eye of God where
the expression to kalos kagathos served: the union of the
beautiful and the wise (so one translation might be),
which gives birth to the good. Then sometime about 428
B.C. Socrates, patron saint of equivokes, fartwhooshed
onto the scene with his little grab-bag of famous
questions, the type of which, when asked, perversely
became answers (iezetazeis eautos kai tous allous Ap.
28E, 38A). I look back to Maieuticville and see a self-
absolving bore, an inkle-beggar with his pockets full of
Crito’s money, a farting whaw-drover with ears like a
question mark and more gall than bladder. The problem
now was to ingratiate himself, advance, become accepted.
He stole his method from Zeno of Elea. He hung around
young and impressionable people. And he claimed that he
had supernatural monitors and was open to some kind of
divine pipeline, the source of which inspiration history
might better trace to the dark den of his occasional
companion-in-arms, the hetaira Diotema of Man-tinea, to
whose symposia, one imagines, everyone was invited
save other women and wives, possibly making of them—
termagants?
The silly revisionism bewildered Darconville. He
shook his head over the compounded lunacies, wondering
just where all this went. What nonsense! What nothings!

Socrates began to preach duality, and except for

several contemporary quacks of disapproval—
Aristophanes, among others, and now mine, thank you
very much—he got away with it for two thousand years!
Think of it! He turned philosophical contemplation into
enigma, called ignorance real wisdom, sabotaged
tradition, ended no dialogue but in disillusionment, and
yet all the while actually claimed that he knew nothing,
taught nothing, learned nothing! Curiously, this didn’t
stop him—or others. Unhappily, he had two apprentices
—you know them as Xenophon and Plato, the Hellenic
Mutt and Jeff—both of whom ingeniously saw fit to
transmit to following generations the quintessence of
what diat misinformed little bum-biter [in the near
margin someone had written the word “blasphemous”]
left behind, the which may be put in five philosophical
headings:
1. The soul’s independence of the body
2. The soul’s superiority over the body
3. The worthlessness of the body
4. The immortality of the soul
5. The duality of man, i.e., the two-sided existence of
body and soul (rouma, psischon)
And what precisely have these tenets wrought? Stop
up your mouth if you’d say little and say little if you’d
say much. They raised everyone to indiscriminate
equality. They effeminized society, leveled excellence,
diluted the Greek ideal, and—our immediate concern in
this chapter— put a megaphone into the hands of certain
women whose hysterical neesings have deafened the ears
of logic ever since in spite of the fact that the difference
between the sexes happens to be a little matter Nature, I
suggest, will never be so obliging as to alter.
Enter the feminists, however, gravid with this thesis,
that if the body could be considered negligible, if
physiological differences didn’t really matter, if men and
women were equal where it really counted—inside, you
see—why, clearly it was the sudden solution to their
persistently gnawing feeling of inferiority! And how
swiftly women snatched at the idea! Witchwives, whores,
all womanity! For if the body was negligible, equality
was assured and the struggle for domination and
sovereignty was theirs to win! The logic was as simple as
sophistry, for if woman, essentially and chiefly of the
body, could now ignore her bodily role in society —and
with lofty philosophical reasons!—she would be that
much more elevated to the very positions to which she
aspired but from which, by every other standard, she’d
been judiciously and legitimately prevented from holding,
the remarkable first step, this, in allowing them to
disassociate themselves from the unilaterally despicable
and patently unfair obligation, reactionary and
patrivincialistic in intent, of bearing children, suckling
them, and dutifully standing by them in trial and trouble.
Thus do they act as acted Mother Eve whose unnatural
and vaulting ambition for equality took her to the fruit
and bade her eat, destroying every one of us in the sudden
committing at once of all sin: disobedience, covet-
ousness, pride, unbelief, mistrust of divine veracity,
gluttony, vainglory, parricide, jealousy, theft, invasion,
sacrilege, deceit, presumption to godly attributes, fraud,
arrogance, and sloth of thought. Nothing is less different
from a woman than the very woman herself. There is only
one woman, though there are a million versions of her.
Ask my mother.

Darconville read on in disbelief, quite wondering as

he turned the profane pages whether the author of this
thing were actually human!

Socrates’ philosophy at its very conception bore the

seeds of its own corruption for it immediately gave birth
to those whose existence rendered it worthless: he himself
created his termagant wife—and in his pathetic defense of
that marriage with his late espoused saint (Xen. Symp. II,
10) proceeded to make of the married philosopher a
music-hall joke. The little catosopher created millions of
catosophresses who went on to catosophrize: the soul is
the only essential part of a human being, the soul can
have no sex, so the body shall no longer discriminate
against the soul! Does a woman betray you, murder,
deceive? Her excuses sit in the soul, pure, inviolate, a law
unto itself. Her excuse is the soul, the one you had no
reason to enjoin to that body you mistakenly assumed it
animates.
Feminism inevitably arises out of a body-despising
doctrine. To the envious, the bitchy, the grasping, the
iniquitous, and the congenitally dissatisfied, Socraticism
was a philosophy cut to measure. Indeed, in almost every
example of the vile sisterhood, Goody Rickby and her
noisy forges, the flight from domesticity and motherhood
—never mind from one’s very self—is always aligned to
the flight to a “higher sphere.” The Socratic doctrine,
animating the impulse to emancipation which of course
animates the mood to androphobia, becomes a free-ticket
to Cloud Cuckoo Land where the mind/soul nexus
relegates the distinguishing body to a pile of excess
baggage.
The feminist of the radical stamp, however, is moved
not by a concern for her own sex, public spirit, or female
self-identity but rather, ironically, by the very grudge she
bears against herself—the male element in her, perhaps,
that lies at the actual source of her craving for
emancipation— and yet if self-belittlement can be
reduced by belittling what we compare ourselves to, it is
not surprising to see to just what extent women act to
belittle men. A nowt to catch a naught: it is advanced that
to be anti-male is to be pro-ideal; sex becomes either the
enemy of female virtue or, in war-like fashion, is used
manipulatively to subject the weakest males to the female
point of view which with the feminist, as it was with
Socrates, turns out to be nothing more than self-loathing,
the refusal to accept themselves as philosophically one,
whole, complete—a calumny against themselves I find
myself too ill-disposed to modern terminology to
investigate here. A divided woman, simply, is a tautology.

Madness, thought Darconville, madness!

Socrates, often asked to absent himself from duplicity

awhile, was soon accused by citizens Lycon, Meletus, and
Anytus of corrupting youth; tried; and then sentenced to
death by a majority far greater than diat by which he had
been pronounced guilty—and this during a period of time
when, sadly, almost as a sop to the contemporary mood,
female statues were curiously becoming altered: the leg-
torso ratio grew to resemble that of the male! Indeed, the
whole of Greek art progressively began to reveal a
gradual increase in the length of the female leg relative to
the torso and the modification of the female form. Or was
it satire? A sudden decadence? A last vigorous outcry for
the old stability and order that became revenge? Or was it
simply a general acquiescence to the upheaval that soon
put paid to the glory that was Greece? Conjectures are
welcome. The philosopher, in any case, was given his cup
of hemlock, died, and three days later there wasn’t so
much as a peep heard from the tomb!
 But what of that hemlock on the skirt you paw at,
reader? Beneath it a body, within it a soul, above it a head
that titters? It is a Socratic labyrinth you have the choice
of either entering or refusing to enter. I leave you this
Pantagruelian advice, in any case, if enter you must:

When you dwell in Satan’s arms,

Should his wife prefer your charms
Taking it into her noodle
To enjoy your great whangdoodle
And accept a few fell stitches
From the awl inside your breeches,
Pluto surely will not wrangle
While you and his lady brangle.
So, live happy and fare well
In your marriage bed in hell.

On the other hand, you can escape that hell and

manifest in a terrible freedom what you’d save yourself
from, lest otherwise you become determined by the very
value you are not indiffèrent to! To be attached is to
depend on, and to depend on something is to have one’s
freedom restricted. If women are the force that
figuratively deny the body, perhaps he who literally
denies it denies them and in so doing finds the freedom
he’d seek. As in all ages of luxury, women usurp the
functions of men and men take on the offices of women.
Ours is a poor, weak age, with the sexes nearly assimilate
and neither known by the knowledge of what they were.
The epoch of viragoes was ever the epoch of eunuchs.
Irony, finally, used to interest me when I was younger
and more impressed by the hollowness of the thing it
castigates, but perhaps it should be pointed out that to
become whole again man must take up a part: what
depends, de-pend; what is attached, disattach. “I hunted
the beaver who, giving up, got away,” once riddled a
Skopt. (You see, I’m much more fun, may I say, than I
seem?) The scriptural commonplace that has it that to find
oneself one must lose oneself is true. I vouch for it
myself. But I can go further. I can personally testify—O
castigat ridendo mores!—to what you surely rnust see is
the only essential lesson Socrates ever left us: sacrifice is
self-interest. Sacrifice must be self-interest!

The air outside felt good to Darconville who left the

library with a particular sense of grief he’d not quite felt
before, and, too melancholy after attending to the reading
to make an accurate report of his reflections, he found
himself walking out along the granolithic walk by the
football stadium, the huge emptiness of which he entered
to spend most of the afternoon sorting out the many
questions in his mind. What, he wondered, had this
haughty and disordered malefactor named Crucifer to do
with him? Had the rumors been true of his extensive
power there? Why in fact had he himself been asked to
come to Harvard?
And the perverse book? It was spawl, a piece of
violent deception, fatally fixed like a grotesque ornament
that had been gradually molded in the cavern of
someone’s head by the drip of calcareous water and
hardened into a single point: the hatred of women. It was
an introduction, oh yes. But to whom? To what? A spectre
waiting upon his past and fathering forth whispers, orders,
commands? But why? Darconville smoked and walked,
walked and smoked, circling round and round the upper
ramparts of the arcaded Coliseum like a pale, deliberating
renunciant high above the abyss that beckons him down.
What was he supposed to know now? And what of what
he knew was he then to apply to what he wanted to know?
He didn’t know. There were only silences, echoes,
detached voices on every front, and so he spent the day,
brooding to no consequence, until it grew dark and he left
the stadium, pitching a last cigarette through the dusk and
crossing the Weeks bridge toward Adams House.
When he opened the door to his room, Darconville
saw a note on the floor. He took it to the window and by
the ghostly light of a streetlamp read what suddenly made
him wonder whether there weren’t more efficients in
nature than causes. What interanimates what, he
wondered, in what is foreordained? It was sinister, all of
it, coming for some reason, yet, as no surprise—the mind,
defining reality, creates it! We bless to appear what to
avoid we curse: to loathe too much in the mind is only to
rehearse or ten times twice affirm in an act of wild denial
a hated fact. Greetings, conscience! I shall make from
fear, thought Darconville, a rendezvous with dread.
And so he could do nothing but accept the terrible
sequence of ironies he believed, in compounding, he’d
caused—as if, in having been more willful to learn than
willing to abhor, he’d but burned one candle to seek
another. Solon made no law for parricides because he
feared he should put men in mind to commit such an
offense! Chance was only the fool’s name for fate,
thought Darconville, and by the eerie light coming in
through the window of his lonely room once again read
the words of the note:

Sir, this to entreat you to step up

to my study for a word. My occupations
 are all indoor so that I am always at
home.
So I rest yours to serve,
CRUCIFER

LXVI

Accident or Incident?

I would know whether she did sit or walke,

How cloth’d, how waited on, sighed she or smiled,
Whereof, with whom, how often did she talke.
—Sir PHILIP SIDNEY

THE LETTER Isabel promised never came. So

Darconville, again, tried to contact her. He called the
house at Fawx’s Mt.: there was no answer. He called the
telephone company in Charlottesville, re-checked the
number, again called the house in vain, and then thought
that he might try the van der Slangs. He called that
number and, identifying himself, expressed his worry but
Mrs. van der Slang said she was sure everything was
alright. He called Annabel Lee Jenks who hadn’t heard a
word from her since graduation and Lisa Gherardini who
wasn’t there herself. He called Miss Trappe who told him
about a bad dream she’d had. He even called the general
store in Fawx’s Mt.: they hung up. Later in the day he
finally reached the Shiftlett house again and asked if
Isabel were there, but the reply was only a single
diaphonie mutter: “thnaowr.” It meant no.
It can’t therefore be fully charged against Darconville
for turning where he did—nor perhaps explained, on the
other hand, how in setting out for nowhere in particular
he proceeded straightway out to F-entry and then up the
forbidden stairs.

LXVII

Dr. Crucifer

It is a point of cunning to borrow the name of the

world.
—FRANCIS BACON

THE ROOM UPSTAIRS looked forbidding. The

door was solid, coopered to a great weight and blind-
hinged. Its mullions stifled the sound of Darconville’s
repeated knocks; he paused to listen, then knocked again
harder—dmf, dmf, dmf—but there were only echoes down
the atrocious passageway. On the other side, footsteps ran
past back and forth. Again, he struck the panels smartly.
Suddenly, a key sprung in the lock and, slowly, the door
opened an inch: a pair of little eyes glared out. Crossly,
Lampblack whispered that Dr. Crucifer was asleep. But
Darconville, with his foot fast on the bottom stile, told the
boy to wake him. Stuttering angrily, Lampblack tried to
shove the door shut, unsuccessfully, for Darconville
forcefully stepped it open and repeated with a cold voice,
“Get him.”
Lampblack spat: he recoiled as if to strike, but
Darconville, seizing his wrist, bounced him on a hop
backwards into the room, whereupon, snarling, he
disappeared through an inner door.
The living-room looked like a medieval oratory,
communicating, apparently, with a bedroom behind it and
running into a long narrow walkway to the right,
embellished on both sides with framed atlases and prints,
which led to more rooms. A cloister lamp hung in this
main room. The royal purple plush of the walls descended
four or five feet all around the room to old carved
wainscoting, finely penciled wood waved and variegated
with peculiar dramatic scenes and tetrastichs in middle
English. The ceiling was beamed. The furniture was of
black oak, a great sideboard answering strangely well to
the monstrous elbow-chairs in each corner that rose to
ornamental knobs and rounded around to the front in
leonine fistclaws. An Egyptian dagger hung in the liripipe
of the hood of an academic gown (Jesus College, Oxford)
draped over one of them. There was a touch of blasphemy
in the antique prie-dieu which had been cannibalized
round the kneeler to hold a chamberpot, inscribed:
“Mingere cum bombis res est saluberrima lumbis.”
It was the room of a person whose taste was
luxurious to the verge of effeminacy, a person, thought
Darconville, utterly and absolutely selfishly solicitous
about his own wants, some mad decretalist or
Sardanapalian whose caprices ran simultaneously to both
lust and asceticism, which, for all anyone knew, were
perhaps both part of the same destitution. There were rich
labels under the heavy cornices of the walls, recessed for
curiosities and antiquities from old châteaux and abbeys,
and a plan of shelves were set off, directly across from the
door, by a fireplace flanked by a pair of imp-faced terms
and above that, framed in dark box, hung the bizarre
painting of Delville’s La Fin d’un règne. A Chinese
screen stood against a wall. Between the two windows on
the left stood a sofa of eupatorium purple, fitted at one
end with a cellaret for decantered wines arid liquors. The
large old desk intrigued Darconville, for on its center
panel, under a built-in lamp, it bore the carved face of
Osiris, and there on a pulled compartment—where a
cigarette box held a portion of tailor-mades (with blind
and foil stamping on the marque of each paper in the
extravagant form of his initial)—lay an air pistol. At the
top of the desk rested a blue ball inside of which a knight
was strangling a nymph.
Darconville had gone but a few steps into the
walkway and was peering at the series of lugubrious
prints on the walls there—Gotch, Stuck, Degas, Cranach,
Baldung, and others—when he heard the paroxysmal
scream. It was a woman with a man’s voice and a hyena
in her womb. The prevalent note was impossible to
comprehend—it struck high C—for its thin wire-drawn
pitch of ee-ee-ee somehow appropriated the shrillness of
exasperation, pain, terror, and disgust all at once. Was it
anger? Impatience? A protracted yowl of dismissal?
Possibly. For all of a sudden a disarranged Lampblack
flew through the living room, sucking his fist and sobbing
for breath, and flung through the front door as if cast
forever into the infinite leagues of black air. In his
surprise, Darconville had turned in astonishment to follow
the theatrical disorder of it all when behind him,
suddenly, the tapestry curtains were drawn with a clash of
rings over the windows. He wheeled around and through
the comparative darkness saw himself under the
surveillance of a figure standing across the room,
someone whose footfall had attained the highest
perfection of noiselessness.
“Welcome to Mother Sulphur’s bagnio,” said a tall
and unat-tenuated shadow. It was Dr. Crucifer.
The form of the man, gradually, in little minor details,
shaped to an outline in the emphatic darkness which
immediately had something indecent about it.
“What do you want with me?”
“Will you sit down?” asked the voice in the darkness.
The figure didn’t stir. “You won’t sit down? That’s as it
is.”
“Tell me.”
“Your visit is really most opportune, for I wanted
badly to have a few minutes’ chat with you.” It was a
voice unlike any other on earth. “You know I know
you’re a Darconville. But hold thumbs on that. I admire
your beautiful face.” Darconville could hear him smile. “I
want to put on your coat. I believe Abelard had you in
mind when he composed his Pari pulchritudine re present
ans.”
Darconville gesticulated disgust.
“You’ll have heard that countless times, of course.
But you haven’t heard it from me. I’m giving you a plain
answer to a plain question, Al Amin.”
The voice was a soprano’s, with a little glub-glub
sound in the throat like coffee boiling in a percolator, but
there was a piping up higher in his birdlike syrinx, as if in
a dry whistle it were fluting through a beak. It had no
timbre, not at all what one would expect from such a big
man, a hovering, elongated man. And, what, was that an
accent? Mere phrasing? A glottal defect? As Dr. Crucifer
continued speaking, the words in the darkness seemed
disembodied, hanging in the air. “I have imagined us
together having tea on dark afternoons with oatcakes and
double Gloucester and then a late stroll on the misty
common to give our swordsticks an airing.” He added a
word. “Alone.”
Darconville said nothing.
“Now, what may I offer you? Some tobacco or tuck?
Shall I chill a Muscadet? A glass of brown October?”
There was no reply.
“Sincerely yours?” asked Crucifer, earnestly. “Please.
Let it fit gravity if it can’t friendliness?”
Still Darconville said nothing.
“I admire your work, mon fifils.”
“Do you.”
“I’ll try again: I believe you’re troubled.” Darconville
moved toward the door, but Crucifer, stepping forward,
made a swift vibra-tiuncle with his left hand. “Permit me,
it takes two to tell the truth— one to speak, one to listen.”
A wheeze of satisfaction followed. “How I should love to
be your confessor! There, but enough. May I only hope to
see you often?”
“You may hope,” said Darconville, “whenever you
please.”
“Contentious,” muttered Crucifer.
Again, Darconville went to leave.
“Wait,” said Crucifer, his voice glimmering in fun. “I
adore that. Why shouldn’t Stromboli dispute with
Vesuvius? A mountain and a mountain cannot meet, of
course—but individuals can. Your style is like mine. We
are co-supremes.”
 “Your flattery disgusts me.”
“I assure you,” said the voice, lowering significantly,
“I don’t want to bother you, only advise. It is not in my
interest to persuade men to virtue nor to compel men to
truth—in that, I’m typical. You forget, I am a teacher in
America. I have a faculty, that’s all, of seeing what I feel
you should share. Call me a philosopher of error
prevented if not of progress facilitated—you’re a writer,
aren’t you curious about it?— and that being the case I
am prompted only to wonder whether you believe that the
true liberation of the spirit is to empty it of the thought of
liberation, that one can legitimately espouse the
destruction of nature, that your personality and its worldly
obligations are no more than the sins you must absolve
yourself from if you would remain an artist. I am
compelled to declare that anyone—no, we don’t need the
light just yet—that anyone who shall dissent must either
be very foolish or very dishonest and will make me quite
uncomfortable about the state of his mind.” Glub-glub: an
attempt at laughter. “I’m like the Boeotian lynx. I can see
under the skin.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Everything.”
“Everything,” said Darconville, “is a subject on
which there is not much to be said.”
Dr. Crucifer took a step forward. “I mean by
‘everything’ the essential mistake you must avoid. A
glorious love is created in the artist by the least sign of
respect.” His dry lips smacked. “Breviloquentem,” he
said, “I believe you intend to marry.”
So that was it.
“You know so much,” smiled Darconville ruefully,
“who lives up here in obscurity.”
 “I love cross-wits,” the creature whispered gleefully.
“Pray sit down. You won’t sit down? That’s as it is, dear
Darconville. Am I too solicitous? Yours to hand?
Embrasse ta maman? Forgive me, mothers and those
without balls bleat with similar voices. But then would
you understand that? I wonder, you see, for the more
manly a man, the less, I’m afraid; he will understand
women—whether beautiful or not.”
“She is beautiful,” shot back Darconville.
“You can’t admire what is beautiful,” said the
grotesque voice, “without becoming indifferent to what is
wrong.”
“And you confirm as you speak what I see I needn’t
fear as I listen.”
“Blister upon heat!” said Crucifer, laughing.
“Reverence to this. You have the gift of impudence.
Enjoy it. Every man has not the like talent.”
Solid line played against stipple. Standing there in the
darkness, Darconville at first scolded himself at putting
up with this sudden familiarity, the forward remarks, but
then thought if he bowed to the vexation he might
somehow divert the force of it, so faint was the image of
the implication of this passing visit upon his still as yet
uninformed imagination.
“I must admit, I have always found it easier to
understand women, frankly, than those who are interested
in them. The which brings the meeting to order: why, may
I ask, do you need a woman in your life? Give it over,
Darconville, please. Women slacken the combustion of
pure thought—they are analogous to nitrogen in pure air.
Thinking and feeling are identical for them, whereas for
men they are in opposition. I don’t mean to offend you.
You must only emerge from an illusion,” he said, his
tongue rasping around the word. “I am afraid for you.”
“Your sympathy touches me.”
“Sympathy? Sympathy is a non-logical sensation and
has no claim to respect. It is a thing at the center of
feminine ethics, a quasi-ethical phenomenon built on
feelings like shame and pride. It’s ready-made. Don’t trust
it. Surely you’ve read your great and revered ancestor on
the subject?”
“Ah yes! Thus drops the other shoe!”
It was as if a veil had suddenly been torn away from a
foolishness he’d called mystery: some perverse fealty
owed to an ancient in his family was being paid to him in
some kind of insane transferral or reciprocity centuries
old.
“A Prince of the Church, murdered in the red of his
robes,” said Crucifer, adding a reverence intercalated with
an Italian phrase while in the same breath sniping at the
woman who in killing that old man could kill again—
such was the madness up there—in the proxy of
Darconville’s bride-to-be.
“Be careful,” said Darconville coldly.
“I can see in the dark,” replied Crucifer.
“You don’t see enough, and you assume more than
you see.” The foulness of it was indescribable but
frightening. “You know nothing about her.”
“Her,” echoed Crucifer. “That word again. I haven’t
heard it for a long time. The possessive case of she, you
mean. Not ‘hirr! hirr!’—the international order urging a
dog forward to attack.”
Darconville’s eyes blazed. “You—”
“—are mad?” He drew a breath, his voice whistling
like a teal’s. “No, mon gogosse, I would say that I’m
different than most only in that I’m simply ashamed to be
human. I know the jollification of indifference. I am
indifference. I have cheekfuls of words. I talk. They come
out.” The strange body of Dr. Crucifer was meanwhile
becoming more distinct, still overshadowed, but the
concealed, the unseen, slowly metamorphosed to contours
discernible as human and yet oddly globoidal and
unnatural. “ ‘I am a man and everything that deals with
women disgusts me,’ might have said Terence,” said
Crucifer.
And then suddenly came a pronouncement spent as
though merely to exercise a long-held fetish of abuse and
falsity and perversion, a dark extravagance, however, that
seemed to excite in the person of the speaker an hilarity
that belied its intended worth.
“I despise the sex!” he exclaimed. “Bedswervers!
Painted trulls! Dupes of limericks! The tragedy of having
to waste uncounted priceless hours in chasing what,
according to Frater [Psi]2, ought to have been brought to
the back door every morning with the milk! The word
woman, my friend, is a lipogram of the letter E, and he
who marries one commits the philosophical stupidity of
trying to subsume the Many in the One. Marriage is
cannibalism! Pauciplicate vanity! Men hunting for
bargains in chastity and triumphantly marrying a
waistline!” Crucifer’s voice was whining like a twanged
wire—and he moved to the center of the room in high
giraffe-like steps in the most awkward simulacrum of
motion Darconville had ever seen. But there was no
noise! And then he reached up—he was wearing red
slippers and a billowing red robe tied at the middle with a
cincture of silk— and lighted the cloister lamp.
 My God, thought Darconville, souls are on the
outside of things, not within!
“Marriage is for inchlings, stinkards with mops, cats
and mice! It is a reluctant concession to human frailty
where the efficacy of ignorance in the experiment has not
produced the consequence expected except for the single
lesson of its history, collateral or appendant, that proves
only once again that blackest midnight succeeds meridian
sunshine. You’d dedicate yourself to this? To one, of one,
still such, and ever so? Matrimony is matronymry! And if
it gave you the smile which you, in contempt of your
conscience, haven’t used, reflecting on the ludicrous
means by which two people have become five billion,
then for godsake put the filthy thought out of your mind!
My God, can’t you hear me? Can’t you tell?”
“It’s true,” said Darconville calmly, “what they say
about you, isn’t it?”
“What do they say?”
“They say you believe in nothing.”
“It is true,” answered Crucifer, his hands fluttering
like spiders in their lairs within the voluminous folds of
his robe. A green jade ring worn on the left thumb
suggested a great scarab held captive by one of the
spiders. “I believe nothing to know everything, to anti-
crusade, to accept the fact that wisdom must bow down to
necessity.” He paused. “ ‘Ay, ay, Antipholus, look strange
and frown.’ “ Then he turned his head madly to the side
and whispered, “I believe love is what people don’t mean
by it.”
“I believe,” replied Darconville, “that love is better
than what you believe.”
And with a mocking whoop of execration, Dr.
Crucifer, stepping under the lamp, spat with glee and
threw back his head, which with an involuntary stir of
horror Darconville saw for the first time was as pale and
round and little as a dirty boule-de-gomme.
Dr. Crucifer could have come from another planet.
His was a face of grue, a little balloon of dead-white
cheeks and jowls with eyes, ringed in black, which
seemed to have fixed the features they no longer
animated: two windows, shades drawn. It was a head that
Darconville perhaps had seen only once before—the bust
of Niccolô Strozzi in the Dahlem Museum. There was no
beard or bodily hair, only a parchmentlike, pasty skin
which wasn’t mat-white, neither the Chinese white of oil
pigment, nor of that hue which leprosy had bleached out,
but a sleek shiny fat with the tint of gambroon.
He was tall and cold and white, showing the same
peculiar mis-configuration of body that was George
Washington’s, a pinball-sized head in striking contrast to
the tall elongated trunk of the obesus which suggested a
kind of blown-out gigantism and ran into swollen breasts,
fat pads, and affluent buttocks that seemed to be
pinguefying on their own steaks. The thyroid cartilage
was inconspicuous. He had tits. He had a buffalo hump in
his shoulders. His hands were pudgy, with dimpled
knuckles, and his fingers were long and groomed like a
woman’s, the nails left sharp and cut almost to a triangle.
The hair on his head was black, shiny, and hard, belying
an advanced age that could be seen only in his teeth. The
effect was that of seeing a great lubberly boy who
resembled—forgive the unpicturable image—a giant
dwarf: the pendulous belly, a low abdomen big as a
budget, a draffsack with short ineffectual arms that
implied poor muscular development, demineralized
bones, and extreme fatigability. A malodorous
perspiration could be detected as he came closer.
He smiled uncannily, glowered suddenly in a fit:
there was no easy passage in his face from one mood to
another. When he spoke he whistled through his nose, his
ogival head moving slowly from side to side, and yet the
expression on his face was generally blank, mobile only
in so much as speaking demanded it. His mouth looked
like a baby’s, puckered out like a file-fish, and incredibly
there was no salivation associated with it, for his tongue,
mouth, and lips were dry—with no moisture in evidence
at all—and the sounds of his speech, like cornshucks
rustling, came out in rasps. It was a creature from the
moonlight world.
“Love?” he screeched. “Love?” He looked as if he
had been whipped in the face. “The impatient disease?
The poor man’s grand opera? That desert of loneliness
and recrimination? The stinkingest word, you mean, in
the Schimpftexicon of song and sentiment?” Crucifer
banged the table furiously, the sudden and violent
response turning his eyes white in an ophthalmic roll.
“That thing which boys and girls spin tops at? The mood
that can comment on every woe? The delusion, you mean,
that one woman differs from another? That set of alcove
manners, the demand for which hatred owes all its
meaning, is this what you have in mind? That thing of
dark imaginings that shapes by chance the perils it by
choice can escape? The emotion that makes you leer like
a sheepbiter, fawn like a spaniel, crouch like a Jew?”
Crucifer swallowed. “Love—pronounced, I believe,
looove,” he mocked, “in the southern part of this country
—is a state of mind sustained by a variety of imbecile
distractions, the divisor of two solitudes shoved into the
dividend of desperation for a quotient of what? Division!
The inverse of multiplication!
“Can you eat love?” Crucifer spat air and waltzed
vulgarly forward. “Can you cook love? Can you sit on
love? Can you crawl under love when it’s raining? Can
you drive love to the Leucadian groves? Can you wear
love when it’s cold out? Can you taste it? Touch it? Feel
it? Smell? Or depend on it? Can you do anything besides
breed with it? Can you? Well, tell me, can you?”
For a moment, Darconville was actually frightened.
“Desire,” whispered Crucifer, “is a sad thing, and
love is all the foolish know to lighten the burden. You can
alter a cat, perhaps, but not the stupidities of mankind.
No, there is no authority but Milton’s for Adam and Eve
having left the Garden of Paradise hand in hand. I suspect
he beat the living shit out of her”—as he laughed he
covered his face with his hand—”and was left alone.”
There was a long silence.
“Who—are you?”
Dr. Crucifer heard the question with one eyebrow
raised in a whimsical vertex. He paused, as if about to
take measures almost fatal to himself, then suddenly his
face changed to an expression that bespoke the obvious
pleasure of perhaps adding a welcome touch of
understanding between them.
“I am a man of principles, and one of my principles is
expediency. But what did you come out to see?” he asked.
Darconville only looked at him. “It’s not that I’m what
nobody else in the world ever was,” he continued, “for
you could say the same. Sit down, won’t you? You won’t
sit down? That’s as it is, my dear.”
Darconville made to leave.
 “Wait,” interjected Crucifer. “I shall be as cogent, to
use the rhetoric of college examinations, as is
reconcilable with completeness. But let’s have everybody
christened before we begin, shall we?” He closed his
eyes, and like some prehistoric fish, quite white from the
aboriginal darkness, of enormous size, and stone blind, he
pipped his lips. “I am, I’m told, of the ancient Egyptian
family named Quirtassi, englished Crucifer. I am male. I
am. a dark article. I am a human truffle which springs up
and exists without any root, unstrengthened by fibers or
filaments. (No one, incidentally, can actually tell whether
truffles are alive or not, did you know that?) I am the
Wanderer in the Wilderness, the solar glyph, a design on a
Gnostic gem. I have huge great breeches full of sin and
air and a face like a cutwaist: it buzzes. I sing hells. I fuck
around with the black arts.” He smiled. His smile was the
dimmest thing in nature. “I wants to make your flesh
creep. But what did you come out to see? I am a
gynophagite, a dragontamer, a simple fatiloquent. I sin
doubly because I sin exemplarily and have never read a
description of any heaven I would not have left upon the
very instant of my arrival. I pray to Nodina, goddess of
knots. My laughter is deceptive. I can bite wires. I have
no goatstones, no sweetstones, no peepstones. I live in
Middlesex. I am betwixt and between. But what did you
come out to see? I am a pigment of your imagination, a
lucifer to light your fag, a scream with breasts. I am a
wicked pack of cards,” he hissed. “But, please, won’t you
come into the library?” He waited.
Darconville didn’t move.
“There’s more to know, I’m afraid.”
 LXVIII

The Misogynist’s Library

This is the place must yield account for him.

—MIDDLETON and ROWLEY, The Changeling

Burton on Infidelity: Speeches in the Star Chamber

(1637); Juvenal, Satire VI; Rozanov’s Solitario; Der
Krebs: A Study of Invertebrates and Monstrous Women by
Dr. Crouch; André Gide’s Et Nunc Manet in Te; The
Works of Aeneas Silvius; Angus Wilson’s “Mother’s
Sense of Fun”; The Pilgrim’s Scrip; Sir John Suckling’s
The Tragedy of Brennoralt; Ploss and Bartels, Woman; a
pamphlet in boards called “Dr. Rondibilis on Cuckoldry,
Wittols, and Gulls”; Kipling’s The Betrothed; Görres’s
Mystique naturelle et diabolique (Vol. V); The Influence
of Women—and Its Cure by John Erskine; The Very Revs.
Kraemer and Sprenger’s Malleus male fie arum; Hans
Baldung’s Hexenbilder; The Merry-Thought, or, the
Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany (1731); The
Gnomes of Zeeland by Rex Hout; Quevedo’s Pintura de
la mujer de un abogado, abogado ella del demonic
(1608); Tertullian’s De cultu feminarum; St. Augustine’s
Soliloquies; Wedekind’s Death and the Devil; The Ascetic
Works of St. Basil.
Andrew the Chaplain’s De reprobatione amoris; the
fragment, Interludium de clerico et puella; W. C. Brann’s
Woman as Hypnotist; The Epistulae of Pope Pius II;
Esther Vilar’s The Manipulated Man; Schopenhauer’s
Parerga und Paralipomena (1851); Sherlock Holmes’s
Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, With Some
Observations Upon the Segregation of the Queen
(privately printed, Sussex Downs, 1912); Oliver
Brachfeld’s Die Furcht vor der Frau (1928); Pierre du
Moulin’s Anatomie de la messe (1624); The Ribald Rib;
the fourteenth-century “Pucelle Venimeuse”; How to Tell
Your Mother from a Wolf by Roland X. Trueheaxe;
Talmudic She-Things; George Shorb’s Mental Nuts to
Crack; The Deceyte of Women (1490); The Works of
Alexander Neckham; Calderon’s “El Mâgico prodigioso”;
Thomas Dekker’s The Raven’s Almanac; “La Légende des
eaux sans fond” by A Gynakophobe; Max Beerbohm’s
The Pervasion of Rouge; Psellus’s De operations
daemonum; the tracts of La Société des Ré-Théurigistes
Optimales; The Bannatyne Ms.; N. M. Penzer’s Poison-
Damsels; John of Salisbury’s “Frivolities of Courtiers and
Footprints of Philosophers” from the twelfth-century
Policraticus; The Agenbite of Inwit (ca. 1340); Noel
Coward’s The Kindness of Mrs. Radcliffe; Xenophon’s
Memorabilia and Oeconomicus; Ovid’s Remedies of
Love; St. Paul’s Epistles; Sir Richard Burton’s Abeokuta
and the Cameroons; Gregory of Nyssa’s “On the Making
of Man” (Nicene Fathers, Sermon 2, V); De nugis
curialium (1200) by Walter Map; Adrian Beverland’s A
Discovery of Three Imposters, Turd-sellers, Slanderers,
and Piss-sellers ( 1709 ).
Bernard de Moraix’s De contemptu mundi; the
Sermons of Bishop Golias; Sigmund Freud’s Das
Medusenhaupt; the monkish chronicle Gesta romanorum;
“Das nervöse Weib” by Albert Moll; William H. Smyth’s
Did Man and Woman Descend from Different Animals?
(1927); the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville; The Jilts:
or, Female Fortune Hunters (1756); Somerset
Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence; “I Shall Teach Thee
Terrible Things” by William Hallgarth; the Pseudo-
Cyprian’s De disciplina et bono pudicitiae; H. X. Route’s
The Cliteroid Ladies; The Chinese Book of Odes; “Alice,
An Adultery” by Alistair Crowley; Djuna Barnes’s The
Book of Repulsive Women; The Opera of Pietro Aretino;
Secretum secretorum: The Letters of Aristotle to
Alexander the Great; I Own a Vagina Dentata by L. A.
Burton; Arthur Schopenhauer’s Aphorismer zur
Lebensweisheit; The Harlot’s Ledger by Kshemendra;
Rev. Cotton Mather’s Memorable Providences; Edward
De Vere, Earl of Oxford’s “Fair Fools”; Frederick Rolfe
(Baron Corvo), Women of a Woman Hater; Wolfgang
Lederer’s The Fear of Women; An Almond for a Parrot by
Thomas Nashe; The Works of Cillactor; M. Titfist’s White
and Pink Tyranny; “Handlyng Synne” (1303) by Robert
of Brunne; Erasmus’s Senatulus; Hugh Walpole’s The Old
Ladies; the Songs of the Carmina Burana; Thorstein
Veblen’s The Place of Women and Pets in the Economic
System; Thomas O’Brien’s, The Tarts of Medford.
Grimmelshausen’s Die Landstörzerin Courasche
(1670); Saki’s “The Sex That Doesn’t Shop”; Crashaw,
On Marriage; The Decretals of Pope Soter ( 175-179
A.D.); Arabella Kenneally’s Feminism and Sex Extinction
(1920); Platina’s Fire Is Not Sated with Wood; the Gaelic
poem “An Fear Brónach d’éis a Phosda; Die
Schlusselgewalt der Hausfrau (Diss. zur Erlangung der
Doctorwürde, Jena); Wallace Rayburn’s The Inferior Sex;
Fiancées Financed by Lex and Xoe Heartrue, Ph.D.s; E.
Belfort Bax’s The Fraud of Feminism; The Works of
Simonides; John Milton’s The Doctrine and Discipline of
Divorce; Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Swineherd”;
Dr. Jacobus X’s Célibat et célibataires; Mahieu le
Bigame’s Lamentations; Baudelaire’s “Mon Coeur Mis A
Nu”; The Chastisement of Mansour by Hector France;
Thomas Middleton’s Blurt, Master Constable; Fra
Domenico Cavalca’s Specchio de peccati (1340).
Boccaccio’s Corbaccio; the Marquis de Sade’s
Oxtiern, ou les malheurs de libertinage; The Withered
Punk by Joseph Addison; Nosros Thinleia; Tertullian’s
“On the Veiling of Virgins”; John Lydgate’s “Bycorne and
Chichevache”; Montherlant’s Sur les femmes; the Jewish
apocryphal Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs; Durtal’s
History of the Maréchal Gilles de Rais; John Knox’s The
First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous
Regiment of Women (1558); Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey’s “The Frailtie and Hurtfulnes of Beautie” (1535);
Jacques Le Clercq’s The Case of Aristide de Saint
Hemme; Pere Torrellas’s “Copias de las Calidades de las
Donnas” ( 1458); Aristotle’s Master Piece; William
Acton’s The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive
Organs; the sixteenth-century sermon, “Slovo Zlykh
Zhenach”; Alistair Crowley’s Confessions; Martino
Schurigio’s Muliebra Historico-Medica; Odo of Cluny’s
Collations; K. Dalton’s Menstruation and Crime.
Antoine de la Sale’s Les Quinze Joyes de mariage;
Sâr Peladen’s How to Become a Fairy; the Works of
Gazeus; Ronald Firbank’s The Wavering Disciple; The
Poems of Sir Edward Sherburne; Franco Sacchetti’s Il
Trecento Novette; Max Funke’s Are Women Human?; Der
Misogyne, oder Der Feind des weiblichen Geschlechts by
Gotthold Lessing; William Blake’s “My Spectre”; The
Koran; E. J. Dingwall’s The American Woman; The
Monographs of the Pseudo-Clementine; The Cluniac
Manifestos; A. Audollent’s Defixionum Tabettae (1904);
Strato’s “Musa Puerilis”; C. L. Moore’s Shambleau; The
Alexicacon ( 1668 ); Li Yü’s J’ou Pou Tuan (1705); Livre
des manières by Henry II’s Chaplain; The Most
Delectable Nights of Straparola (“Piacevolissime Notte”);
Shponka’s Dream by Nikolai Gogol.
Ercole Tasso’s Of Mariage and Wiving; The Analects
of Confucius; John Bremer’s Asexualization; Hugh of St.
Victor’s De bestiis et aliis rebus; Rev. R. Polwhele’s The
Unsex’d Females (1798); Solomon’s Proverbs; the sixth-
century poem, “Bandiúc Dubh”; The Neurotic Choice of
Mate by L. Eidelberg; Orientus, the Bishop of Auch’s
Monitoria; Samuel Rowland’s “Tis Merrie When Gossips
Meete” (1602); Richard Steele’s Spectator %510; P. J.
Mobius’s Ausgewählte werke; Pierre Christophe Cardinal
Théroux-d’Arconville’s The Shakeing of the Sheets
(1574); John Skelton’s “The Tunnyng of Elynour
Rummying”; Sir Comyn Berkely’s Ten Teachers; Joseph
Swetnam’s The Arraignment of Leivde, Idle, Froward,
and Unconstant Women (1615); St. John Chrysostom’s
“Homily 26 on I Corinthians,” “Homily 15 Concerning
the Statutes,” and “An Exhortation to Theodore After His
Fall” (Nicene Fathers, 2, v); Robert Herrick’s Waste;
Bruno’s De gli eroici furori (1585); Martial d’Auvergne’s
Arrests d’Amour; J. P. Jacobsen’s Marie Grubbe (1876);
August Strindberg’s En häxa (1890); Alexander Pushkin’s
Gavriliada.
John Cordy Jeaffreson’s A Woman in Spite of Herself
(1872); The Fairy Tales of Fouqué; Paracelsus’s Werke;
Mach’s “Anti-Metaphysical Remarks”; George
Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois (1607); Lorenzo Veniero’s La
Puttana errante; Tom Tyler and His Wife; St. Clement of
Rome’s “Two Epistles Concerning Virginity”; John
Marston’s The Insatiate Countess; a chaplet of
Weddirburne’s “My Love Was False and Full of Flattery”;
John Heywood’s A Merry Play Between Johan Johan, the
Husband, Tyb, his Wife, and Sir Johan, the Priest (1533);
Richard de Bury’s Philobiblion; Quevedo’s Mujer
puntiaguda con enaguas ( 1608 ); Otto Weininger’s
Geschlecht und Charakter (1903); Jean de Meung’s
Roman de la Rose (ca. 1300); Andrew Peto’s “The
Demonic Mother Imago in the Jewish Religion”;
Stobaeus’s Florilegium; He? by Guy De Maupassant;
Richard Baxter’s A Just and Seasonable Reprehension of
Naked Breasts and Shoulders (1675).
Jacopo Passavanti’s “The Mirror of True Penance”;
The Precepts of Alfred; Henry of Saxony’s De secretis
mulierum; Sir Philip Sidney’s “Fifth Song”;
Aristophanes’s Thesmophoriazusae; Dr. John Gregory’s A
Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774); Alberti’s
Satires; The Contagious Diseases Act of 1869; Ouida’s
Held in Bondage; Anton Chekhov’s The Grasshopper;
The Female Parson, or Beau in the Sudds (1730);
Machiavelli’s Clizia; The Works of Nicolas Edme Rétif
de la Bretonne; Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata; Alexander
Pope’s Epistle to a Lady; Pietro Aretino’s / Ragionamenti;
Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s The Unknown Woman; S.
Purchas’s Microcosmus ( 1619); “Sadism in Women” by
R. Allendy; The Complete Works of Guibert of Nogent;
Jorge Luis Borges’ The Intruder; De ventre inspiciendo,
or, Of the Right to Determine the Pregnancy of Widows;
Roald Dahl’s Someone Like You.
Peter Abelard’s The Story of My Misfortunes;
Waverly Root’s “Women Are Intellectually Inferior”; Erin
Catharine: A Pornographic Novel by the Duke of
Promesse; Edward Gosynhill’s The Schole House of
Women (1541); Gustav Theodor Fechner’s Nanna; Ned
Ward’s Female Policy Detected (1716); Rudyard
Kipling’s “The Female of the Species”; Boussuet’s
Elévations sur les mystères; Politeuphia (1597); Gratien
Dupont’s “Controversy between the Masculine and
Feminine Sex” (1534); John Donne’s Juvenilia; Géza
Roheim’s “Psychoanalysis of Primitive Cultural Types”;
P. M. Kaberry’s Aboriginal Women Sacred and Profane;
Heinrich von Kleist’s Kätchen von Heilbronn; The Happy
Ascetic (1693) by Anthony Horneck; A Satyr Against
Wooing (1698); Jonathan Swift’s “The Furniture of a
Woman’s Mind”; Diogenes Laertius’s Life of Thales
Milesius; Charles Bansley’s Treatyse Shewing and
Declaring the Pryde and Abuse of Women Now a Dayes;
Say It with Oil by Ring Lardner; Robert W. Service’s The
Ballad of the Brand.
St. Jerome’s “Against Helvidius”; Reliquiae
antiquae; Theophrastus’s On the Disadvantage of
Marriage; Edmund Goncourt’s La Fille; Ludovico
Sinistrari’s De la démonalité et des animaux incubes et
succubes (1688); Sir Thomas Overbury’s “A Very, Very
Woman”; Golias de conjuge non ducenda; Everard
Guilpin’s Skialethia ( 1598 ); The Rabbinical Origin of
Women by Thomas Moore; William Dunbar’s “The Tretis
of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo”; Pierre de
l’Ancre’s Le Livre des princes and L’Incrédulité et
mescreance du sortilège (1622); David Lindsay’s A
Voyage to Arcturus; Thomas Cooke’s Love and Revenge,
or the Vintner Outwitted (1729); the Works of Wilma
Meikle; A. Memmi’s L’Homme dominie; the medieval
ms. “Fraus, Fraude”; Crowne’s Sir Courtly Nice (1685);
Joannes Henricus Pott’s Specimen juridicum de nefando
lamiarum cum diabolo coitu (1689).
 Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy; The
Inevitability of Patriarchy by Steven Goldberg; Friedrich
Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil; The Works of the
Honorable Henry Cavendish; Philippe von Hartmann’s
Philosophie der ein Bewusten; “Cackle of the Confined
Women” (1663); Dr. Abel Crucifer’s Christianity and the
Ages Which It Darkened[3]; Hipponax’s On the Things
We Must Pass Over in Silence; Wieth-Knudsen’s
Feminism; Juris cancnici compendium; Tippu, the Sultan
of Mysore’s “Letters to Burohau-Ud-Din”; Robert
Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy; Jacques Loubert’s
La Femme devant la science; Anti-Suffrage Essays by
Massachusetts Women by Ernest Bernbaum; the Albanian
epic, Dukeshë e Zezë; H. T. Finck’s Romantic Love and
Personal Beauty; Patrologiae Cursus Completus;
Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women; St.
Jerome’s Book Against Jovinian; The Masque of Queen
Bersabe; the Holy Bible; Horace Walpole’s The
Mysterious Mother; Grausame Frauen by Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch.

[[3]Darconville lifted down this volume and, as he

did so, a sheet of paper fluttered out of it—one he quickly
saw was covered with a curious language. Unobserved, he
put it in his pocket.]

Algernon Swinburne’s “The Triumph of Time”; J. J.

Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht; The Book of a Thousand
and One Nights; The Works of André Tiraqueau; Clement
of Alexandria’s Paedagogus; Coventry Patmore’s Religio
Poetae; The Women Who Bark by A Cynophobe; Le
Solitaire’s La Femme ne doit pas travailler;
Westermarck’s History of Human Marriage; Nathaniel
Ward’s The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam (1647); The
Dutch Courtezan by John Marston; Tuteur and Glatzes’s
“Murdering Mothers”; E. Jacobson’s The Wish for a Child
in Boys; E. J. Dingwall’s The American Woman; Thomas
Campion’s The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres; Les
Prières des Picards; The Works of Andreas Salernitanus;
Hieroglyphic Tales by Horace Walpole; Modern Woman:
The Lost Sex by Lundberg and Farnham; Women Beware
Women by Thomas Middleton; Hans Magnus
Enzensberger’s “Misogynie.”
Apollinaire’s The Debauched Hospodar; F. Lee
Utley’s The Crooked Rib; The Lyrics of Archilochus;
Gelett Burgess’s The Maxims of Noah and The Maxims of
Methuselah; The School for Reform by Thomas Morton;
Gascoigne’s The Steele Glas (1576); Dr. Magnus
Hirschfield’s Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and
Geschlechtskunde; Reveries of a Bachelor by Ik. Marvel;
François Villon’s “La Belle Heaulmière aux filles de
joie”; Karen Horney’s The Dread of Women; Sex
Antagonism by Walter Heape; The Difference Between a
Man and a Woman by Theodore Lang; Lord Bemers’s Six
Requirements for a Happy Marriage; Théodore Joran’s
La Trouvée Féministe; John Webster’s The White Devvil;
The Chinese Book of Odes; J. D. Unwin’s Sex and
Culture; Thomas Gisbourne’s An Enquiry into the Duties
of the Female Sex (1797); Walter Besant’s The Revolt of
Man; H. Fuseli’s Aphorisms; Religio Medici by Thomas
Browne; Correa M. Walsh’s Feminism; John Betjeman’s
An Oxford University Chest; Dr. Heilborn’s The Opposite
Sexes; James Corin’s Mating, Marriage, and the Status of
Women; P. J. Proudhon’s La Pornocratie, ou Les Femmes.
Philip Wylie’s A Generation of Vipers; John Lyly’s
Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit; Tertullian’s On Monogamy
and On Pudicity; Why She Wouldn’t Marry (1948) by C.
Linda; Thomas Otway’s The Orphan; Rudyard Kipling’s
Mary Postgate; The Enemies of Women by Vicente
Ibanez; “Men and Women Speak Different Languages”
by Col. Thomas Stott; George Farquhar’s Sir Harry
Wildair ( 1701 ); L’Homme-femme by Alexandre Dumas,
fils; Theodor Reik’s The Creation of Women; The
Fundamental Error of Woman Suffrage by William
Parker; Euripides’s Hippolytus; L. Ron Hubbard’s
Dianetics; William Blake’s “How Sweet I Roam’d”; The
Female Offender by Prof. Caesar Lombroso; Ford Madox
Ford’s No More Parades; The Fear of Being a Woman by
Joseph Rheingold; Dr. Fritz’s Wittels die sexuelle Not;
The Seven Sages of Rome; Karl Krause’s Werke ( 14 vols.
); Remy de Gourmont’s L’Histoire tragique de la
princesse Phénissa.
Thomas Dekker’s The Batchelars Banquet ( 1603 );
Stephen Gosson’s Quippes for Upstart Newfangled
Gentlemen ( 1595 ); The Works of Barbey d’Aurevilly;
W. S. Gilbert’s Gentle Alice Brown; Heinrich Schurtz’s
Urgeschichte der Kultur; William Shakespeare’s King
Lear; Paul Theroux’s Girls at Play; Life with Women and
How to Survive It by Joseph Peck, M.D.; Pierre Janet’s
L’Automatisme psychologique; William Prynne’s The
Unlovelinesse of Love-Lockes (1628); Ben Jonson’s
“Epigram on the Court Pucell”; Benjamin Constant’s
Adolphe; Plato’s Apology; Oskar Vogt’s Altindische
Dichtung und Weisheit; John Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas
(1639); Alexis, the Attic Comedian’s “On the Numerous
Beauty Aids Used to Fit Young Ladies Out as Shiny
Snakes”; Rumplestiltskin; The Complete Strindberg;
Massinger’s The Duke of Milan; Anonymous, The Praise
and Dispraise of Women; John Fowles’s The French
Lieutenant’s Woman; Ulrich Molitor’s De lamiis et
phitonicis muliebribus ( 1489); J. S. Redfield’s Modern
Women and What Is Said of Them; Aeschylus’s
Eumenides; T. X. Hoeur’s Die schwarze Herzogin;
Thomas Otway’s The Orphan; The Works of the Knight
of La Tour Landry; the Topica Legalia of Claude
Chansonnette.
Augustus Wolff’s Die Frauenfeindleichen Literatur;
Some of the Reasons Against Women’s Suffrage by
Francis Parkman; James McGrigor Allan’s “On the Real
Differences in the Minds of Men and Women” (1869) and
The Intellectual Severance of Men and Women; T. W. H.
Crosland’s Lovely Woman ( 1903); The Works of
Chrysippus; Charles Reade’s The Woman-Hater; On
Wives and Wiving by Alexander Nicchols; George
Gilder’s Sexual Suicide; A Briefe Anatomie of Women
(1653); “Viraginity and Effemination” by James Weir, Jr.,
M.D.; Edward Young’s The Universal Passion (1725);
Adnil Notrub’s The Kept Woman Who Didn’t Keep Long;
Montherlant’s Les Jeunes Filles; Aristotle’s Generation of
Animals; Douglas Jerrold’s Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain
Lectures; Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle; The Works
of Nevisanus; Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its
Discontents.
P. J. Mobius’s “L’Inferiorità mentala délia donna”;
Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys; The Works of Jean
Weir; James Thurber’s Men, Women, and Dogs; The
Works of Procopius; John Donne’s “Loves Alchymie”;
Tolstoy’s Father Sergius; Thomas Middleton’s Micro-
Cynicon ( 1599 ); Aristophanes’s Ecclesiazusae; Her
Royal Highness Woman by Max O’Rell; P. J. Proudhon’s
Amour et Manage; G. J. Romanes’s Mental Differences
Between Men and Women; The Works of St. Bonaventure;
Matrimony: A Novel Containing a Series of Interesting
Adventures by John Shebbeare; Ben Jonson’s Epicoene,
or The Silent Woman (1609); Alistair Crowley’s White
Stains; The Corridors of Time by Poul Anderson; A.
Conan Doyle’s John Barrington Cowles; Ernest
Dowson’s The Pierrot of the Minute; Richard Sibbes’s
Bowels Opened (1641). Francis Bacon’s “On Marriage
and the Single Life.”
St. Bernardino of Siena’s Prediche Volgari; Darwin’s
The Descent of Man; The Poems of William Cartwright;
On Sleeping with Women by Roger Lawson; The Epic of
Gilgamesh; The Embattled Male in the Garden, or Why
Women Are Queer in the Country by Dwight Farnham; G.
E. Moore’s Celibates; Philipp Mainländer’s Philosophie
der Erlösing (1876); the thirteenth-century Coutumes du
Beauvoisis; Bronislaw Malinowski’s Sexual Life Among
the Melanesians; Semonides Amorgos’s Elegy and
Iambus; Axel, Thane O’Droxeur’s Love and Hate;
Francesco Barbara’s De re uxoria; The Works of Paraeus;
August Strindberg’s Giftas; the Tomes of La Croix; De
legibus connubialibus; Les Opères de Cretin; the Doulaq
Papyrus of 1400 B.C.; The Works of Palladis of
Alexandria; Miroir de Manage by Eustace Deschamps;
the Speculum of Vincent de Beauvois.
Bram Stoker’s The Squaw; The Works of St. Louis;
The Sullens Sisters by A. E. Coppard; Feminine Frailty
by Horace Wyndham; Smith by W. Somerset Maugham;
The Widow That Keeps the Cock Inn; John Wilkes’s An
Essay on Women (1763); the Divinae Institutiones of
Lactantius (c. A.D. 250-c.317); Johannes Adelphus
Muling’s Margarita Facetiarum; Henri Brieux’s
Damaged Goods; Manon Lescaut by L’Abbé Prévost; The
Samayamatrika of Kashmiri Kshmendra; François-
Charles-Nicholas Racot de Grandval’s Agathe, ou les
deux biscuits; William King’s The Toast (1732); Gilbert
and Sullivan’s The Sod’s Opera (ms. only); Portrait of
Crispa by Ausonius (4th c. A.D.); Robert Frost’s A
Masque of Reason; The Orestautocleides of Timocles;
Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille; The Whore’s
Rhetorick (1683) by Ferrante Pallavicino; the Works of
Asopodorus of Phlius; Songs Compleat, Pleasant, and
Divertive (1719) by Mr. D’Urfey; Francisco Gomez de
Quevedo’s From One Horned Man to Another; Alberto
Moravia’s Bitter Honeymoon and Other Stories; the
works of Simonides; Henry James’s Longstaff’s Marriage
and The Story of a Masterpiece; Kara Düses by A Turk;
The Eroticon of Paul the Silentiary.

LXIX

Biography of a Eunuch

And Jehu lifted up his face to the window, and said,

“Who is on my side? Who?”
—II Kings 9:32

“I AM A SPADO. I am gibbed. I am only a part of

myself, a maenad, a gelding. I live without heat or light,”
continued Dr. Crucifer, shutting the library door. “I am to
the animal kingdom what good celery is to the vegetable,
white and succulent. I have vowed myself to chastity, like
the Jesuits or the Samurai. I don’t speak to women, look
them in the face, eat with, shake hands, or tolerate. I
prefer ducats to daughters. I am like a Bosch painting: my
secret is told in a single spot at the bottom. Will you
look?” he asked, his fat white tongue, with its fissures and
hypertrophied papillae, protruding and withdrawing into
his open mouth. “I have no vagina. I have no penis. Auf
der Gräntze,” he smirked, munching the German, “liegen
immer die seltsamsten Geschöpfe, nein? But does that
shock you?” There followed a whining involuntary sound
under his chewing, a weird noise like that of a spring
peeper or pinkletink whose flatulence vibrates its wiry
tail, and with hands fluttering madly at his throat, he
cacked in exaltation, “I am a eunuch!”
Darconville had been prepared for anything up in
those rooms, and no outrage, he felt, couldn’t have been
perpetrated there, no excess lessened, no profanity
unexplored. But this he couldn’t quite believe.
The library was elegant. At the center of one wall
hung an original Palma Vecchio. There was one stained-
glass window, and a woodcut in a wall space showed a
Maori carving of the Great Daughter of Night, eating her
son. The rest of the room was taken over by long oak
shelves filled with books on all sides that went right to the
ceiling, and a wooden ladder attached to runners on the
top could be slid on bearings right around to reach
specific heights. The one small table between two leather
chairs held a large fishbowl, filled with tiny, eerie
transparent things moving in rounds of weak-finned and
aimless nosing of the dirty glass.
“Blind cave tétras,” said Crucifer, meticulously
seeing to them with pinchfuls of tetron squidflakes. “I
prefer them to houseplants—the queers of nature, don’t
you agree?” He hissed in laughter. “That is what they say
I am, all the little worms and protists out there, don’t they,
a homosexual? A tiptoe? Un entrouducuter? A dash of
lavender?” He rolled open the diamond-paned window
and peered with disgust into the darkness outside. “No, I
am not queer, my dear Darconville, although I do hail
from the sotadic zone—you know, Medi-terra, North
Africa, the Middle East, that area. But I do not collect
ephebai or cabana boys, neither do I engage in what Lord
Alfred Douglas referred to as ‘the familiarities.’
Lampblack?” asked Crucifer, yanking a bell-pull by the
curtain. “He is my servant, for pay. I kick him, and he
does my bidding,” he smiled cruelly, “to show that what
he knew, he knows. No,” he added, “I am an anorchid, an
autotome, an androcrat. Pedicating is not my line. Je
marche à la voile et à la vapeur.” He pulled shut the
window and meditatively drew a finger down the
mullion-panes of armorial glass. “I am indifferent to both
sexes, for to love man is possibly to love women by
sentimental transfer. The essential trouble with sex, you
see, is that it brings one close to people. And I personally
find people irritating.”
Dr. Crucifer sprinkled in some more fishfood.
“The asexual male, of course, is the original sex.
Adam and Eve had first been created sexless, according to
Gregory of Nyssa, and the phrase ‘male and female
created He them,’ I believe, referred to a subsequent act
necessitated by Eve’s disobedience,” explained Crucifer,
his eyes narrowing into pouches of flesh and making him
look like an elderly cretin. “Had not that taken place the
human race might have been propagated, I don’t doubt,
by some harmless mode of vegetation—and far more
happily. Sex? I am not empressed. After a meal, tell me,
who remembers the spoon?” He raised his little arms
questioningly. “But here, how do you find Harvard?”
“I must be careful with my answer,” said Darconville,
“mustn’t I? After all, it was you who brought me here.”
“ ‘O world, world, world!’ “ mocked Crucifer,
holding his hand across his face—a gesture without which
he never laughed—” ‘thus is the poor agent despised!’ “
“You’re mad,” said Darconville.
“That’s a bit hearty, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”
“I can save you.”
“From what?”
“From a wasted life, from misery, from error. Try
those.” He moved closer. “The subjugation of the
Amazons was one of the labors of Hercules. Why it
should have become one of yours I can’t pretend to
fathom,” said Crucifer. “I heard you were living down
South, teaching a school of ribbon-wearing slawbunks
their grammar—the local mechanical college of Laputa, I
gather.”
“And at Harvard, what had you in mind for me?”
Dr. Crucifer slapped his moist palms together. “In all
the books of etiquette I have read,” he said, “it is
explained that the tactful host does not map out the day
too precisely for his guest in advance. Please, there will
be time for everything, insh’allah bukra mumkin.” He
paused. “I must tell you right off, however, I have one
weakness: I am a kalokaitaphe—I admire the upper ten,
the bonton, the real elite, see? You are royalty. I wish only
to serve you.”
“Not if I know it.”
There was no motion in the strange creature’s face:
neither hurt, nor surprise. “My heart is as cold as the
northside of a gravestone,” continued Crucifer, running a
finger horizontally along a row of books, and he selected
one. “But for you—?”
Bowing, he handed it to Darconville, who turned past
the bookplate (a dike-faced Aphrodite thumbing a snub-
nose at a crouched aspirant to her favors) and read on the
frisket-printed title page of the sixteenth-century folio in
sixes the name in black letter he knew: Pierre Christophe
Cardinal Théroux-d’Arconville.
“You honor me in bearing the name you see there. It
wasn’t his Church won me. I am part of his point of view,
that’s all. But here, the eggs are teaching the hen! Have
you no ancestral memory? I would have him you and
seeing you revise a world that killed what once I might
have been.”
“And that was?”
He looked meaningfully at Darconville for a few
seconds.
“A saint.”
It was as if that had been the most obvious answer in
the world. Again, petulantly, he yanked the bell-pull and
looked toward the door. And then, insinuating himself
into a chair, Dr. Crucifer lolled back like an Eastern
pasha, and as his low slouching stomach ran into his lap
out slorbed three balconies of flesh over which, as he
closed his eyes, he porrected his fingers and, so satisfied,
began.
“The village of Girga lies at a bend on the Nile. I was
born there one tedious and diaphoretic afternoon too long
ago—the inauspicious child d’un autre lit—and directly
given over by my father, a famous actor at the Khedivial
Opera House who wouldn’t publicly acknowledge me, to
his brother for an undisclosed sum of money. I never saw
him again. My mother was buried alive: the local penalty
for adultery. Good day, goodbye. So much for gaps in
pedigree,” said Dr. Crucifer, his eyes remaining shut. He
was talking. He was listening. “Understand, right away,
we were not Mohammedans but Christians. I am a
Nasrani, of Lower Egyptian Copts, the most civilized
people on earth—with the exceptions just named—and
the direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians. The
rancor which we have so long cherished has generally
embittered our character while the persecutions of the
Mohammedan and the Byzantine Supremacy have taught
us to be at one time cringing and at another arrogant and
overbearing.
“We’re both acid and alkaline.” He humped his back
to smirk behind his hand. “I can fart rainbows—but
would just as happily give a scalding-hot penny to an
organ grinder’s monkey or stub out my black cigar on the
forehead of a street urchin. I can both howl out a rat’s
hole or cower like a priest.” He tried to smile. “The
power’s in my tits.”
Then his eyes went cold.
“My vicious uncle, a Copt whose hereditary aptitude
for mathematics manifested itself in his personally
counting out my barley, had a wife—dear aunt, dear
stepmother—whose cruelty could take the polish out of a
mirror. It was an acquaintanceship at best that had nothing
but the sterility of mutually exclusive interests. I
remember them for very little, her for the vanity of ever
having to punctuate her face with rouge, him for beating
her for it and forever screeching, ‘Sitt al-sawad! Sitt al-
sawad!’ And so into this marriage, wherein they perhaps
still founder as I speak this sentence, was I dragged—a
mere child. Mere,” he breathed. “What else is a child? In
any case, heaven, as they put it, having denied them
offspring of their own, they fell against me with an
unnatural virulence. I remember the Caramanian fallâh
habitually brought in to bathe me often looking at my
genitals and muttering, ‘How ugly, how ugly!’ “ He
shook his head. “Darconville, we are ruled by hags from
birth: nurses, mothers, teachers. ‘Behave, you little
phalloggle, or you’ll get no love from me!’ ‘Buy me a
hoop, runt, to put in my ears, and I’ll promise you
anything!’ Our almae matres, my friend? A figment. Life
comes at us in her creaking shoes, with a cruel birch
hidden in the folds of her skirt.” Darconville looked at
Crucifer’s hands. They were knotted.
“This family, in any event, showed little interest in
my doings, exceptis excipiendis—for it wasn’t long
before I started to wet the bed. What a disgusting crime,
don’t you agree? Oh, evil! It was a case of eternal
recurrence: I was the more incontinent the more they
screamed which caused it in the first place. I couldn’t
stop. Volition? It had nothing to do with it. I soon saw it
was impossible to avoid committing a sin—that, in fact,
sin happened to you without your wanting to commit it,
without knowing you committed it, and whether you were
contrite in committing it or not had small bearing on the
fact. I thought I could forget about it. But I was wrong. I
had reckoned without any idea of the commercialization
of Lethe water. I had reckoned without acknowledging
the array of goats which, in every letter and article and
speech, butted into my life during that terrible period of
sheepish ignorance. That was not all. I felt it was my fault
I had lost my parents and could not choose but weep to
have back that which, still hoping for, I always feared
again to lose,” he said with trembling voice, “but they
never came back, they never came back, they never came
back, they never came back to me.” He looked across at
Darconville, his face sick with memory. “I came to see I
was guilty of not resisting illegitimacies, guilty of
possessing a will bereft of the usual resources by which it
can justify itself, guilty of not having done anything
wrong. I was guilty of innocence.
“Briefly, I loved, wasn’t loved in return, and so was
shunted off again—this time to be raised in a burnt-brick
convent outside the village under the Arabian mountains.
It was a Roman Catholic holding, the oldest but one in
Egypt, for let it be parenthesized here that we had been
converted in those parts by Franciscan missionaries at the
end of the seventeenth century.
“It was the custom of the monks, now, to take in
wayward boys— yes, there were others, most born o.w.
and unwanted, some insane, all with the grave disposition
of the pharaohs. There were specimens of every kind of
child, fellahin, captive Dervishes, Dinkas and Shilluks,
Cushites, Abbasides, Bisharin, Ruwenzori dwarves,
nilotics and niggers of a thousand tints. I wanted to be the
flower of the playground, O Darconville, the glory of the
palaestra! What didn’t I dream, love, hope for! I took
readily to certain subjects and acquired a precocious
proficiency in languages, ponying for others and able to
do Greek Unseen better than the form-master himself. I
could have done my Collections, Determining in Lent,
and proceeded to the Great Go at Oxford at fourteen years
old, there’s my hand on it, there is my hand. But the
extreme of joy is the beginning of sorrow, isn’t it? And
Arcadia”—he looked away—”is brief.” He closed his
eyes for a minute. “Brief.
 “My chief delight as a boy, however, was to go down
to the west bank to watch the tourist-steamers pull in or to
run around in the ancient rock-tombs which once
belonged to the high-priest of This.” A smile disinterred
from the stern grave of Crucifer’s face. “Not That.” He
took his hand down from his mouth. “Even then I was
struck by the fact that Egyptian art hardly ever essayed to
represent a woman, save with her legs pressed together as
in a sheath. I particularly remember one time running
back from a day rummaging over the walls of those
tombs, meeting a monk, and asking him right then and
there about the mysteries of generation—sex. He sat
down and answered my question; it seemed to pique his
interest. His reply, I shall never forget, involved the most
revolting and disgusting tale I’d ever heard.” Crucifer
looked up, his eyes like caves.
“What,” asked Darconville, almost surprised at the
croaking sound of his own voice, “what did he tell you?”
“The truth.”
Dr. Crucifer hissed. It was his way of smiling. It was
his way of saying yes. It was his way of saying see?
“I wasn’t a featous boy. I was a fat boy. Disciples not
elephantine can’t know the pain of it. They used to call
me ‘Bum Cheeks’ in school, spill my bowls of milk, whip
me across the legs with their nâbuts. They made up rude
songs about me and pilfered from my tuck-box. They
would thieve my rusks. They drew saucy pictures of me
and chevied me out of my battels and conduct money and
ridiculed me about my size and left me behind when they
went tubbing or playing at bats, taws, or ducking-stones.
They threw balls of camel dung at me in games of
kherubgeh. To take me seriously became for others a form
of insanity. The genius at school—not a gasconade,
Darconville, I was —is usually a disappointing and often
ignored figure, for as a rule one must be commonplace to
be a successful boy. In that preposterous world, however,
to be remarkable was not to be overlooked. The barber, as
they say, learns to shave on the orphan’s face. And
although I cried out to them the pitiful error they were
making, I saw with horror I’d become the visual quotation
of the bad dreams I feared and so felt I was being treated
as the vile scoundrel whom I represented deserved to be!
“For Christ’s sake,” he hooted through the library, “I
only wanted an excuse in the eyes of the world for
existing! I was a weakling, a trembling mouse of a boy
with dirty hands and eyespots and yet growing in me was
this readiness to substitute the hand of God for any whim
of my persecutors. I gorged myself with sticky sweets.
My schoolmates, broadcasting it, avoided touching the
books I’d been using and spat upon my very shadow. Fat?
Awkward? Seine Figur lacht ihn aus? That kind of thing,
exactly. I escaped a good deal of painful attention, I
confess, by the periodic aegrotat of the school physician,
but then I was always released, wasn’t I? And, always,
there they were waiting for me. They put me in the
middle of circles and pulled down my pants—I was so
frightened I could have killed them—and taunted me with
archabominational threats and heaped up such obscenities
upon this subhuman body you see here, even then as
white and plump as that of some fat woodboring larva,
that in that dreadful macédoine at the heart of all
adolescent confusion I found I myself came to agree with
them! But did I complain? Would I run to the Prior to
weep, to peach, to accuse? I did not, I would not. My
altruism, inversely proportionate to my low esteem of
myself, knew no bounds.
 “It had come to this pass, you see, that I began to love
my neighbor more than myself. Now what theology, may
I ask, supports that, what paradosis, what transmission of
spirit? To love your neighbor more than yourself? Can
you understand? I saw no fault in others that I might not
have committed myself and forgave in them for doing
what I for causing couldn’t absolve in myself!”
Crucifer’s mouth was distended terribly, stretching as
if it would separate. The severe grip he had on the arms of
the chair gradually loosened then, and he paused for
composure.
“I slept in fear, woke in terror, lived in anxiety. I
spent every night of my childhood listening. Yes,
Darconville, all the spiteful, vile, stupid, cruel, vulgar,
petty, errant human acts I’d seen from the day I was born
taxed me for the explanation I saw I myself
simultaneously provided in the question the vanity in my
very own mind was asking! I knew it was committing a
sin if I continued to think I had sinned, but I thought, at
the risk of presumption of course, I could only not despair
by failing to think, the which paradoxically preoccupied
my every waking hour. A guilty conscience is the mother
of invention. So I took another refuge. I became ashamed.
I wanted not to be human, to be non-human, to be
unhuman! I wanted to repudiate myself to the degree that
in that self-repudiation I would necessarily repudiate the
very self repudiating me! The you that is seeing yourself,
you see, is the you that is seen. But one would be all,” he
said, leaning back, “and, in that one cannot be, here is
loneliness. I’d done nothing actually to be ashamed of—
except it made me ashamed to have had to think so. When
I tried to become ashamed to be ashamed to be human, I
then felt the ultimate shame—and became stationary.
And, pray, in all this what age do you suppose this boy to
be, Darconville? Name it now before I tell you. Why,
twelve or fourteen. Or say eleven. No such thing: he is
not quite nine years old!”
Dr. Crucifer drew his hands, pausing in a grim clench
at the eyes, down his face.
“I craved release from the world—was it from pride
or from humility?—and found it. I soon fell under the
influence of a Nubian hieromonk named Fâdi, the very
same holy man who had once answered my prurient
question. (The name is Arabic for empty.) His austere and
ruthless intelligence was allied, I noticed even then, to a
certain melancholy. Living alone on an eremitic
dependency on the river brink, though still on cloistered
ground, he was a Christian, as we all were, but with a
secret: a subtle dogmatic difference from the orthodoxy of
the neighboring monastic community who, in
countenancing, ignoring, really, what seemed to them to
be the traditional isolation and excesses of the anchorite,
bothered never to learn more— unlike me, who did. But
I’m ahead of myself. I worried about Fâdi, always. He
lived on bean-flour bread, onions and water, and long
hesychastic vigils, intervals of prayer he several times a
night imposed on himself, despite broken sleep. Fâdi
alone understood my sorrow; correctly, he saw that the
twentieth-century crisis was the worship of life; and one
day he revealed to me how all could be overcome—
briefly, simply, by the rigors of self-denial which I came
to call ‘The Naught One Can’t Untie.’ He told me that the
highest spiritual knowledge led to the union of the
knower, the known, and knowledge itself. How, I
wondered, might that be achieved? ‘By privation,’ said
Fâdi, ‘for no spirit can rest until it is naughted of all
things that are made.’ A mystical commonplace? Perhaps.
But with what joy did I receive his words, I who felt in
sequent toil all sorrow did contend, I who had long
known it was impossible to seize life without violating it,
I who held humanity to be so spotted, so tragic a failure. I
wanted to be nothing. A circle. A round straight line with
a whole in the middle. I wanted to hear the inner sound
which perforce kills the outer. I wanted to be eyeless and
thouless—to reach le point vierge: the inmost center of
the soul, the diamond essence, an absolute poverty. The
Funklein!
“The existence of a perfect being, you know,” said
Crucifer, ad-monishingly tapping the side of his nose with
his ring-finger, “is comprised in the idea of it alone. It
became for me, somehow, the one universal element in a
world of unsatisfying particulars.
“I abrogated humanity, then. I realized that
everything human in us is an obstacle in the way of
holiness. You turn away, do you? You sneer at me? But
are you aware of Ibn Roshd’s double truth wherein
something may be theologically untrue but
philosophically true at the same time? I found proof of
my hope, comfort in my decision. Will you hear how?
Good. Now, realize here that few nations in the East
embraced the Gospel more zealously than the dwellers on
the Nile. Accustomed as they had long been to regard life
as a pilgrimage to death, as a school of preparation for
another world, and weary of their motley and confused
pantheon of divinities, whose self-seeking priesthood
designedly disguised the truth, they eagerly welcomed the
simple doctrines of Christianity. But, like Eutyches, they
revered the divine nature of the Savior only, in which they
held that every human element was absorbed; and when
the Council of Chalcedon in 451 sanctioned the doctrine
that Christ combined a human with a divine nature, the
Egyptians, with their characteristic tenacity, adhered to
their old views and formed a sect termed Eutychians, or
Monophysites, to which the Copts of the present day still
belong. Such a one was Fâdi.
“I learned his Gospel by heart—and lived it,
emptying myself of values generally identified as worldly.
Salacities, during my post-adolescent years, occurred to
me. I fought them, violently. I abounded in youthful
cupidity of every sort in my mind, and as I imagined my
wickedness, wailed over what mentally I wallowed in, I
wished I had wilted in my cradle! I was nightly fitted out
at my own pious request with an Onaniebandagen—a
little suit of armor fitted over my genitals and attached as
a prophylaxis for masturbation to a locked belt, for the
body, as time passed, was the only part of the world, I
felt, which my thoughts alone could alter. A virtue cannot
be said to exist, they say, until it is expressed in nature,
correct? I thought about nothing else: wouldn’t the
ultimate action, I wondered, lead then to the ultimate
virtue? But what was ultimate action? Ultimate virtue?
Was it wrong to believe that being is not and that non-
being must be? That to die out is distinguished?
Absterben ist vornehm! Between volition and nolition
there is a middle thing: non-volition. O, the sweet
nothings I whispered in my ears! I desired in the strangest
way to elevate myself above human weakness—from
jealousy, voluptuousness, even the need for joy! I craved
to emerge from the illusion and instincts of the universe, a
pretense, a mask, I knew, of the secret beyond it. And
Fâdi knew it—who, finally urged by the impulse of grace
to approximate in me the divinity of his Lord, no longer
withheld his final sacramental, and in a cave one night at
the age of sixteen, while morphiated with an admixture of
yagé, hyascin, and anti-convulsant sedatives, I willingly
submitted to the mutilation of my ‘precious.’ Annihilation
obtained a foothold on a living body in one rapid knife-
slash. The keys to hell dropped off the lock. I lost my
stones.”
Darconville gasped.
“There, there,” responded Dr. Crucifer, wagging a
chubby finger at his guest. “We are pussycats. We are
little slubs. We are only people whose sense of fun has
fed on queer food—and not a one of us who isn’t supple
as a pair of Italian shoes and harmless as the wing of a
chicken in the pip. We’re round and open as wells. I can
push my thumb into myself. You really mustn’t wince,
my friend.”
Struggling up out of his chair, Dr. Crucifer went to
the desk for a cigarette, walking, without free and
vigorous use of those long malign limbs, as if he were
being carried along by a balloon. Darconville waved
away the proffered box of them, and Crucifer again sat
down.
“Angels are all alike,” he said, leering horribly, “but
devils are various, huh? Nevertheless, to place the eunuch
in a category of real perverts is to share the ignorance of
ancient times.” He sucked on the cigarette. “Because I
‘left the family’—as the Chinese euphemistically describe
my condition—doesn’t mean therefore I’m some kind of
incomprehensible bonze and consequently emotionless. In
how many far more terrible ways has figurative eunuchry
in the sexes ruined the world! Faugh! The
Kastrationskomplex has fathered forth more pain than all
the spiders in Christendom, has peopled the very fucking
university in which you now sit, has—!” He swallowed
smoke in the apoplexy of wrath and fought, with
swimming arms, for breath. “And romantic love?” He
spat. “It has been responsible for more human misery than
any other notion on the face of this pocked earth.
Anything lower, more obscene, or feculent the manifold
heavings of history have not cast up! And that is why in
one blow”—he snapped his fingers in a fillip between his
legs—”I have murdered my own posterity!
“I have dared the supreme ordeal!” he cried, grinning
through teeth that looked like a crossword-puzzle. “I
despise purposivism! I have sneaked out of an exit
Mother Nature hadn’t quite planned on! I vail my hat to
the Third Sex—Essenes, Valesians, Skoptsy, Rappites,
Gynaecomasts, Tribades, Semivirs, Thlibs, Clisti, the
Priests of Attis, and any other participles you wish to
name neither split nor dangling!”
The creature seemed too fantastic to believe for
Darconville seriously to acknowledge, a puzzle-headed
caricature of spite with a large share of scholarship but
with little geometry or logic in his head and yet a figure
of method and merciless egotism, possessing a sinister
genius.
“Proudly, I wear the imperial seal: ‘the mounting of
the spotted horse.’ Tell me, have you ever looked closely
at the pontil mark on the bottom of a hand-blown bottle?
There! That’s the badge of my lost, my crushed
cremasters! I am a gold pencil, tipped with lead. And, O,
but haven’t we been colorful as eringoes? Tricky as
thixotrops? Saturn was gelded, Origen became a human
abstraction to save his soul, and Xerxes, King of Persia,
would never act without the advice of his chief eunuch,
Hermotinus. The proud tribe of eunuchs almost single-
handedly brought down the Ming emperors of China—
my God, I think of the magnificent Li Lien-ying in his
dragon robes standing on the foredeck of his barge and
addressing under a flying black flag twelve full cohorts of
neuters! Farinelli, the famous castrate of the eighteenth
century who frequently aroused such enthsuiastic
admiration that of him it was often exclaimed ‘One God
and one Farinelli!’ sang four songs to the Spanish King
Philip V every night and was given his portrait set in
diamonds by Louis XV of France. And Heliogabalus
himself so loved his eunuch, Jeroles, that he nightly
bowed and kissed his groin, swearing that he was
celebrating the sacred festival of Flora.” He pulled on the
cigarette one last time and ground it out. “On the
accession of Pope Leo XIII, in 1878, the practice of
castrating small boys for church choirs, alas, came to an
end. More’s the pity, I suppose. We can still be found,
however. We’re international in a kind of silly secret way
and will occasionally sprout up —look closely—in every
place from Harvard to Chihli to Ho-chienfu. But the fact
is to most of the world we are now obsolete as buggies.
“We’ve multiplied in palaces, ruthlessly acquired the
knowledge of secret councils, and instigated the direst
court intrigues, often by having been privy to the foulest
secrets of women, which is of course a matter not
unrelated to our traditional profession. We are, you
understand, authorized in the New Testament—in fact,
Pope Siricius (385-398 A.D.) actually advocated self-
mutilation. Are you scandalized? And gay old Galen in
his book, Of Sperm, roundly avers that to possess no heart
would be a lesser evil than to be destitute of genitories.
I’ve managed both, you say?” asked Crucifer, his arms
bent the wrong way, almost tortue, as he leaned forward
with a malicious wink. “Too true. No gimlet to drill, no
beatlet to beat.” His eyes were now glittering like a
basilisk’s. “I’ve always considered it the Devil’s greatest
feat to have succeeded in getting himself denied.
“Now, I am asexuated. I can neither enter the
Crooked Gate of the female nor”—he cacked—”can I
Make Fire Behind the Mountain. But, you see, there are
those of us—some with kit and no kaboodle, others with
kaboodle and no kit—who can practice the manifold
plaisirs de la petite oie (masturbation, irrumation, feuille-
de-rose, etc. ). Me, I keep a traditional discretion about
that which may best be left unsaid. I am docked utterly. I
suffered the cut. I am pegless, shaven and shorn—entirely
rasé. I answer the call of nature with a silver quill I keep
in my pocket. But I once knew of a woman who lived
near the Crocodile Grotto at Ma’abdeh who had a eunuch
for a husband; he’d dry-bob her and at the point of
orgasm—this would be a secondary discharge from the
urethra—the great bitch’d wisely hold up a little pillow
for her husband to bite lest he tear apart her cheeks and
breasts with his teeth! When I was a university student in
Cairo? A slovenly berber girl in an imperfectly lighted
hall once grabbed my yardless body and leaping back in
disbelief screamed, ‘Ma fîsh! Ma fish!’ She was looking
for a clinch. But what did she find?” Crucifer, his voice
whistling in laughter, put his hand along his mouth.
“Pudding!” He leaned forward. “But then why not? I was
snapt. I had out-Potiphar’d Potiphar. I am as smooth as
the front of your knee. I am a hollow stoutness, a human
abstraction, a contralto. I am empty as Vanity Fair.”
Crucifer suddenly stormed up and, fumbling for the
bell-pull by the curtain, jerked it several times. He shook
his head in disgust.
 “There are minuses,” he continued, sitting down
again. “Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not all fun. We are
easily susceptible to infection. We for no reason break
into hot flushes and sweats and often, though we don’t
fly, suffer airplane earache for weeks on end, although
under this head I can tell you our bodies are at the same
time unfailing barometers, thermometers, manometers,
and hygrometers. We prematurely wrinkle, the origin of
what years ago became our vulgar nickname, ‘Lao
koun’—impotent old roosters. We have the pale
complexion of pederasts, so obviously the sun can’t be
good for us. Eunuchs, like children, often can’t pronounce
the letter R. It is often required of certain of us to insert
india-rubber sardes or zinc or lead nails to prevent us
from leaking. We are fanatical gamblers. We are inclined
to have oedematous feet, and we despise Jews to such a
degree that it actually affects our health. An intolerable
Jew is, for us, intolerable twice. My penishole aches in
the damp and the rain. My anus is lost in my weight.
Unfortunately, it has fallen to our lot to have had
repeatedly to see women at their least readiness—it
sickens me to fix on an image—and this doubtless
explains the eunuch’s longstanding reputation for having
a capricious and nasty temperament. We can be peevish
as barn-cats. But the malevolence? Ah, malevolence
keeps one alive. It’s a preservative, like alcohol!” Crucifer
saw the look of pity, bewilderment, and great sadness on
his guest’s face. He leaned forward to intercept that
glance and said wistfully, “Here, but is it not the vice of
distinctiveness to become queer?”
As Darconville did not reply, Crucifer pulled himself
forward, awkwardly, by his toes and reaching out to touch
him in a friendly way whispered, “La ilaha illa anta
subhanaka inni kuntu mizzalimin!”— but his visitor
pulled away in horror at the familiarity.
“On the other hand,” continued Crucifer, refusing the
insult, unsurprised, his ambition for momentary equality
testing affection in a gesture that would be, he knew,
either endured by clemency or condescension or, more
probably, repelled by custom, breeding, and restraint,
“there are pluses—more visible,” he laughed, “than what
isn’t, may I add?” It was the humor of the embarrassed
man. “We are seldom bald. We sing with voices sweeter
than the music of Pachelbel. We look adorable in pants.
And then castration, by extending the period of
adolescence, prolongs the springtime of beauty. We are
skilled to perfection in the art of flattery, I admit it.
Languages, for us, are cake. I have not only Arabic but
the Berber group, Kabyle, Shilha, Zenaga, Tamashek,
plus Amharic, Ethiopian, Cushitic, including Agao, Beja,
Bilin—are you impressed?—and inscriptive Numidian,
he said humbly. Harvard values this sort of thing, you
see? Chat, chat, mumble, mumble. Please,” said Crucifer,
looking up suddenly, “you mustn’t think ill of me.” He
waited. “Darconville?”
But Darconville said nothing. And so there was
nothing to do but keep on talking.
“The eunuch, as well, is marvelously cut out for
employment; for the cash register, as for the harem, he is
the perfect guardian—in all embezzlements, Darconville,
and in all irregularities of accounts, a woman will have
influenced a man—but we are also masters at organizing
squeezes and douceurs as perquisites for what we do. We
are geniuses in the science of observation, accumulators
of gossip, and authorities on the art of poisoning. I am,
like all of us, a gourmand.” He jostled his belly with both
hands. “It’s a fat bird who bastes itself, isn’t it? I love
white truffles, shellfish, and pedroximenes wines. Finally,
we don’t futter anything, the source, I needn’t have to tell
you, of more buboes and bacteria than bad butter. In any
case, my dear, I do not conduct sultanas to their baths.
But then you didn’t think I did, did you?”
Dr. Crucifer grinned horribly and pointed toward the
void between his hamlike thighs. “When you do this, it is
not only men who become eunuchs”—a clucking
laughter, interrupting him, sounded as though his trachea
were rapidly opening and shutting—”but women also!”
His thin shoulders collapsed. “Revolting, isn’t it? When
the terrible mutilations of one sex are necessary to keep
the other pure?”
“The exigencies, of course,” said Darconville, “of
your Christianity.”
The big protruding joints, the long bones, stirred, and
Crucifer, in two efforts, rose out of his incomprehensible
belly like a drommeler, his face a wax mask framed to a
somber shape. He twisted close his robe and began to
advance on tiptoe with outstretched neck and listening
ears.
“Priestianity, you say?” He touched a finger to his
nose, meditatively. “But of course!” his voice glubbed. “I
see I’ve omitted the best part of my story, digressing as a
man with a grievance always does. Shall I pronounce
about it?
“My life in Girga continued without occurrence. I
loved God. I worked, read, and maintained a singular
fidelity, as I said, to the promises I’d made to Fâdi,
seeking but to patrizate myself in his holy shadow.” His
lips parted, inhaled. “Then in the eighth year of my
devotion and donkeyboyhood—my twentieth in life—I
suffered the reversal of faith, which, to be brief, after the
completion of my education at Cairo and Oxford,
haphazardly enjoined me to the secular profession you
know me by today: Eunuch-in-Residence, Collegium
Harvardiensis, at the sign of the motto, ‘Va-Ni-Tas.’
“But that’s as it is, isn’t it? You want to know what
happened to me, of course, back in Girga, and because I
want to save you from the same disappointment, I will tell
you.” The eyes of most persons converged when they
looked at you, but Dr. Crucifer’s, by some habit he had
acquired for effect, remained parallel. It gave the
impression that he was looking straight through you to a
wall beyond. “As I said, I wanted nothing from life but to
strive for distinguished inconspicuousness and to live to
the letter the lessons of saintly Fâdi. O, but Nature knows
terrible and dire ways, doesn’t it? I won’t elaborate. It
was, I remember, Holy Week in Lent—Crucover, when
Christ was pacified—and I one afternoon on an
inconsequential visit happened by Fâdi’s closure”—he
took a few steps toward Darconville and paused
dramatically—”and in that ultra-violet doorway before I
died saw the vidame of all my soul—a civet-cat bent on a
stealthy errand of flesh—scumming around on the floor
on top of a naked woman!” Crucifer’s fingers knotted
angrily. He was staring blankly before him into a distant
point. “It was as if the Archangel Gabriel had suddenly
visited earth and married a ravening cuckquean. I
withdrew, weeping, by a tree, when later the two of them
appeared in the darkness—for night is the paradise of
cowards—and crept away hand in hand, hers in his, and
his the left which even in Egypt couldn’t have been used
for a less honorable function.” He leaned over his chair,
almost gagging. “My dégringolade from grace can be
charted from that day. No human being has ever lived up
to the ideal my imagination created out of what I wasn’t
for what they should be.” Crucifer’s eyes, as he looked
up, were savage. “I hate them all.”
There had never been such silence in that room, with
Darconville now bewildered to the soul as to whether that
remark were proof of a defect in his understanding or the
depravity in his heart. Crucifer twirled in the fishbowl
with his finger.
“What’s there to add? Faitery throttled faith. I had
seen in an instant of cerebral death what I’d sought from
birth and as that magic-muttering, instinct-bound piece of
pawkery called Christianity vanished I knew I had learned
Fâdi’s lesson with a vengeance: I had reached the no-
number, the root of the monad, a light-robe. I was
naughted! There is a limit of ignominy in the
consciousness of one’s own nothingness and impotence
beyond which a certain kind of man can go,” said
Crucifer, the roundels of colored light from the stained
glass playing on his face as he crossed by the window,
“and beyond which he begins to feel immense satisfaction
in his very degradation. I arrived there! I saw Christianity
for what it was, a religion expressing its piety in bows,
fawnings, and prostrations of servility that went no deeper
than themselves! I saw through God!” Darconville went
mute, his tongue clave to his throat. “Mysticism, you see,
and hoaxes go well together. I can’t tell you how frightful
a longing I have to revile God aloud,” whispered Crucifer,
“always.”
“ ‘Woe unto him,’ “ said Darconville, his mouth
smacking from dry-ness and gone completely hoarse, “
‘that striveth with his Maker.’ “
 “I hear you call a Maker what I take to be a
Personified Inconceivability,” cried Crucifer, his voice
like the sound of wind through a patch of dead cat-o’-
nine-heads. “God, Zeus, Iddio, Bog, Dieu, Jubmal, Utixo,
Bott, Bung, Zung, Gudib, Zenc, Jee, or the Great Kazoo,
call him whatever you will—everything suggestive of
metaphysical unity disgusts me. Mine is a world
essentially manifold! In every man there is a vacuum in
the shape of God, but where is he? What is he? That
which is not sense! Exactly. Non-sensical. Literally,
nonsense! I just adore the clemency he exacts that wears
so flatly commercial an aspect, don’t you? The fruit of
actual purchase? The literal and cogent quid pro quo duly
in hand paid? I tell you, all Christian victuals stink of fish,
and his glory depends upon the antagonism of his
creature’s shame, degrading all of us whom he owns
absolutely—we who re-create him of whom we are
creatures—with every one of us, Mnogouvazheamyi
Darconville, bound to him by every last goddamned
tenure on earth but spontaneous affection! I tell you, the
best proof for the tragedy of existence is the proof that is
derived from the contemplation of what is said to be its
glories! You will see!” The odd lines by Crucifer’s cheeks
drew out like isobars. “God being all things is contrary
unto nothing out of which were made all things, and so
nothing became something and omneity informed nullity
into an existence: now I call that a nice trick, don’t you?
And then was he even acquainted with himself? All he
could utter was ‘I Am Who Am’—a tautology, excuse
me, I take to be the essence of deceit.”
“Your soul,” whispered Darconville.
“What’s the good of having a soul,” asked Crucifer,
grinding his teeth, “if you have a mind? And what need is
there in heaven of my humility? No, you must listen to
me! Can’t I simply be devoured without being expected
to praise what devours me? I am no French poet. I mean,
does a creator necessarily become a master? And what
about a creator not in right but only in might? Then, is a
creator necessarily superior? Does a world that has a
beginning, in fact, necessarily have a creator? And is a
creating God necessarily an authorized God? Can a
judging God be an object of love? What kind of diabolical
God can create cats with dreams of satanic mice and
simultaneously by some royal exequatur and placet give
mice dreams of like cats? No, He Who smites without
sword and scourges without rod I shall always remember,
my friend, with an ingenuity worthy of a better cause—
and forever revile! God, I tell you, is the center of the
pathetic fallacy.” Crucifer pushed his head out of his robe
with a little twist and twitched it. “Thus, did Fâdi teach
me well—and still of what he wouldn’t did.”
Standing close to Darconville, Crucifer gave off a
foul odor.
“The fact of betrayal, finally, also abolished woman
for me. It eliminated her utterly. She disappeared from the
face of the world, for through Fâdi hadn’t been revealed
to me in the simplicity that is at the heart of all mystical
truth the one and only lesson to be extracted from the
doctrine of Original Sin?” Crucifer’s fat arms shot
victoriously out of the red robe, an almost aposematic
coloration, it seemed, warning of a frightful attack, and he
whistled through his nose. “World loathing,” spat
Crucifer, “is woman loathing!”
The cry echoed throughout the room.
“The shadow of the deformed,” said Darconville in a
low voice, “is deformed also.”
 Crucifer’s mouth twisted. He couldn’t abide being
told that. He was that terrible figure now whose tyranny
did not consist in trying to make himself bigger than his
surroundings but in shrinking the surroundings. He
claimed eirpson—divine afflatus, inspiration. Humanly
speaking, he was out of his mind.
“Be warned, my chevalier,” Crucifer answered.
“Disanthropize chance, I tell you. It is your own goodness
that is the ideal you imagine. ‘To fall in love is to worship
at the shrine of a fallible god.’ “
“You mistake yourself for a prophet.”
“I keep abreast,” he grinned. “I told you, I can see in
the darkness.” He pointed to his eyes. “It’s a special gift,
the reward in part of a pact I once made with myself”—he
paused—”and someone else.”
“Someone else?”
“Those were my words. It is a story, I’m afraid, over
which the Muse of History must draw a veil. Inquire no
further.”
For the last time, Dr. Crucifer fell onto the curtain
and jerked the bell-pull so hard it snapped out of the orlo.
As quickly, the library door flew open and in ran
Lampblack, out of breath. He looked up, pitifully, with
that little nasolabial funhouse-mirror of a face.
Completely out of control, Crucifer went flashing at him
like a fire-zouave, thumping him mercilessly on the ears
and kicking him for failing to appear earlier to make
drinks for them, himself and the guest Lampblack was
forced to acknowledge as Crucifer held him fast by the
hair, twigging him backwards. Lampblack cowered, his
open hands fluttering before his eyes to ward off further
blows. Crucifer smiled up at Darconville. “My tapster,”
he said, “my turnspit, my child o’ the bottles.”
 “I see hate comes easily enough to you,” said
Darconville, who, paradoxically, could have killed
Crucifer on the spot.
“But they’re related, of course,” mocked Crucifer,
“love and hate, aren’t they?” He bent down over
Lampblack and peered into his face. “Aren’t they,
millstones?” His eyes shifted to Darconville. “As I’ve
said, hate owes all its meaning to the demand for love—
got of themselves, I don’t doubt, but far better got of a
tutor.”
He shoved Lampblack away.
“There nevertheless remains, of course, the
argument-—it’s gone on for thousands of years—that one
alone of the two perhaps adhibits more naturally to
human nature.” As Crucifer’s rapid changes of front were
incredible, Darconville for a moment wondered which of
the emotions in Crucifer’s perverse mind benefited more
by the reservation. “The question, however, is which.
Love,” asked Crucifer, putting his tiny head sideways in a
mockery of riddling, “or hate?”
There was no answer.
“Voilà, mon candidat. Entre deux selles le cul à terre,
n’est-ce pas?”
Then Darconville said, “Love.”
“Catshit. Duckshit. Birdshit,” said Dr. Crucifer.
“Dogshit.”

LXX

Sic et Non
 Suddenly ghosts walked
And four doors were five.
—MARK VAN DOREN, The Story Teller

YES, SAID ISABEL, everything was fine. No, no

one had given her any message. Yes, she had been busy.
No, honestly. Yes, she knew she hadn’t written. No, nor
called. Yes, she did realize it was October 2. No, it
seemed to her to have passed quickly. Yes, there were
some problems, to tell the truth. No, not over the
telephone. Yes, they were complicated. No, what did he
mean did she mean? Yes, she did think of him. No, she
didn’t need him to come down. Yes, she could come up to
Cambridge. No, it would be easier. Yes, she’d received
his gifts. No, she wasn’t ill. Yes, she knew he loved her.
No, she’d come up there if she could. Yes, he could call
back later if he wanted to. No, she’d be home for sure.
Yes, she promised this time she would. No, she’d wait
right by the telephone. Yes, at 7 P.M. then.

LXXI

The Deorsumversion

The best way to make your dreams come true is to

wake up.
 —Bishop QUODVULTDEUS

DARCONVILLE immediately called the airport. The

next flight to Washington, D.C. from Boston would be
leaving at 2130 P.M., and he booked it, hoping to connect
with one of the Piedmont flights continuing on to
Charlottesville. There wasn’t much time. He called Prof.
McGentsroom and, explaining that he had to go to
Virginia, asked him if he’d take his Tuesday afternoon
class. Then he telephoned for a cab, packed a few things,
and, putting his cat under his arm, went flying downstairs
to leave him with the superintendent.
Suddenly, on the way down, Spellvexit slipped from
his grip and skirted out of the inner door that let out into
the courtyard of Adams House! Darconville called him, in
vain. Dropping his suitcase, he ran around after him, with
increasing desperation as he heard the repeated blast of
the taxi out on Bow St. It was hopeless. He watched sadly
as the little form disappeared around the corner of
Apthorp House. A cat never says goodbye. It just walks
away.
The plane finally lifted off—and none too soon, for
Darconville hoped, instead of calling at seven, to be
actually in Fawx’s Mt. proper at that very hour. It wasn’t
that there had been small effort made in behalf of his
appearing, rather too much in behalf of his not. What
would he find? The facts at his disposal, maddeningly,
couldn’t be hammered into truth. Concept wrestled with
data. Could one so solicitous not have written, so loyal
not have kept faith? And what, he wondered, had it to do
with those strange and apprehensive glances she stole—
from what? for what?—especially last summer? Was
gravitational pull inversely proportionate to the square of
the distance that, as the distance increased, the pull
decreased? Why hadn’t Isabel explained anything? He
didn’t know, he didn’t know, and he sought to stifle
several aprioristic frights that occurred to him. Lawyers,
he decided, could never be jurors—and thought itself, in
fact, is the product of a kind of paranoia. His own mind
repelled him, a sort of autoimmune reaction in which he
categorically rejected his own thoughts, for matter, he
felt, only comes to life, life becomes thought, thought
will, and will goes back to matter. I love you, was his
only thought. So he settled back into
contradictionlessness, resigned to this conviction,
however, that their wedding again might be postponed—
he had no idea why but knew she reasonlessly feared
telling him so—and before long he was fast asleep, as if
taking refuge from what, by simply accepting, he then
needn’t seek to avoid: the awful struggle to deny that
anything beautiful is nothing else but dream. And there on
the plane he slept back a full three years in time to what
was suddenly London, dreamlit by memory.

* * * * *

Bis repetita placent: it had been one of the worst cold

snaps in England, that Christmas. Nothing, however,
would ever match it for the happiness he felt, especially
during those hours at Heathrow airport waiting for
Isabel’s plane to arrive—then there she was, breathless,
snug in a short fur coat, her face shining! His throat filled,
he loved her so much. It had been five long months since
they’d last seen each other, and in this new, sudden
context, for all her excitement, she’d grown silent, even
shy. The bus-ride into London, a cab to Pont St., the
walkup of four floors, it all tired her out, and in her
exhaustion she but barely acknowledged the cake, the
inscribed cups, and the welcoming trappings before she
was soon asleep. Undaunted, Darconville sat by her in the
dark almost all night, feeling himself to be the luckiest
person alive.
The following week was a glorious round of dinners,
plays, and sight-seeing, and, as Isabel had never been
abroad before, Darconville took the occasion to
rediscover all the places and things he loved through her
young and happy eyes. It was blowing cold, and in boots,
mufflers, and tightly buttoned coats they walked
everywhere, down old crooked lanes, through quaint side-
streets, and into off-beat lamplit passageways lined with
bookshops and antique-and-junk stalls, galumphing home
later in the darkness with all kinds of jumble. They visited
museums, boated up to Greenwich and down to Hampton
Court, and went on long strolls through parks strung
around with sparkling lights where carolers-with-cherry-
cheeks, gathered together, intoned white puffs of air
which turned, magically, into the sweet songs of
Christmas. They often went to the zoo—Isabel’s favorite!
— and fed the tigers bits and pieces of cookies from the
bag of them Isabel bought every morning in a special
shop of hers on Beauchamp Place, and everywhere
Darconville snapped pictures of her: not there, wait, over
a bit, grand! And then at nightfall, alone at last, always,
they’d light the gas-heater, bury themselves in each
other’s arms under a huge pile of blankets, and shiver in
the close darkness until they met in each other’s eyes
enough warmth to heat all the cold rooms in the British
Isles and then some. “When you become a famous
writer,” asked Isabel, “will you mention a night like this
in your book?” They were children. It was paradise.
“Yes,” he said.
The first snow fell on Christmas Eve. The city of
London took it beautifully, becoming in the pure white
snow a panstereorama of powdered buildings, glistening
streets, frosted windows, and not a light shining anywhere
without its attendant corona. They went out in the
afternoon, with Isabel wearing positively huge mittens,
and attended a lovely festival service at St. Giles
Cripplegate, singing Christmas carols, with each of them
holding a candle, and in the beauty of each and every
moment they grew even closer and more in love. At dusk
they had drinks at the Cadogan Hotel where, happier than
Darconville had ever seen her, Isabel wore her golden
hair down and the black velvet Russian dress he’d once
given her, with multicolored flowers sewn in panels down
the front. She was beauty appurtenant to grace itself, and
for a moment he feared that a mortal such as she might,
upon a thunderbolt, be suddenly spirited away from him
and enviously taken up to the laps of the bosky gods.
And then they set off through the snow in the
direction of Southwark for their Christmas dinner at the
old Anchor Tavern, situated on an obscure but romantic
waterside lane by the dark-working Thames. It was a
night like nothing else on earth, not so much for the
crackling fire and candles, nor the traditional rejoicing,
nor the delicious fare of roast beef, Yorkshire, and
Christmas pudding, but rather because it all touched to the
heart of symbol itself, foreordained somehow by fate as if
to assure at least two small insignificant people that the
possibility of a supreme incomprehensible peace had not
gone from the world and so perhaps never would: it was
one with the other, one through the other, one in the other,
one for the other, always. It wasn’t only love. God had
visited them.
It was very cold and late when Darconville and Isabel
left the inn and stepped into a blowing snowy wind that
glanced even colder off the river. Inexplicably, he
suggested that they walk up to London Bridge, but Isabel,
as her feet were freezing, suggested they could postpone
that and laughingly pulled him in the opposite direction;
urging her, however, he somehow prevailed—and so up
they went and, once there, looked over the water toward
the reflecting lights of the dark city across the way.
Without a word, he placed a small box in her hand. Her
eyes filled with tears as she opened it: it was a diamond-
ring. “I love you,” she whispered, her face outshining it
by far, as he slipped it on her finger. “I will always love
you.” And flushed with ardor, she kissed him, wrapping
herself around him in an embrace, as ivy does an oak, so
long it seemed she might get the heart out of him, and
there they remained, hovering forever, holding each other
so close no one could have known they lived, unmoving
in the past perfect tense until the bells of Southwark
pealed midnight to wake them to a new birth, whereupon,
walking slowly across the bridge in a snowfall of fable,
they went home together in silence hand in hand.
The time inevitably came a week or so later for Isabel
to leave, a prospect that both of them, characteristically,
preferred not only not to mention but to ignore entirely
during the course of her stay. Darconville, however, could
bear the thought of her absence no more, no longer; he
needed her; and as long as he lived he would never forget
how simply the fact of her needing him manifested itself
and confirmed in him the decision he’d come so
resolutely to make, for in the airport, as he watched Isabel
from a distance walk through the crowds to embark, he
saw almost despairingly, until he pointed, that she had
turned the wrong way.

* * * * *

Darconville woke up with the roar of the plane

taxiing into Washington, D.C. It was just past five, with
the sun westering. There was no time to lose if he was to
keep his appointment in Fawx’s Mt., and he went quickly
to the Piedmont terminal, where he found out, luckily, a
flight south—stopping at Charlottesville—would be
leaving at 6:05 P.M. He waited at the departure door, grip
in hand: not thinking of Spellvexit, not thinking of
Harvard or his class, not thinking at all. And then he was
aboard again, airborne, and after a short flight was soon
coasting down over the Blue Ridge mountain range into
the tiny airport on the outskirts of Charlottesville,
Virginia. As he disembarked, Sol went dead on the
horizon and sputtered angrily out, leaving a dirty light
behind in the sky. At dusk, the trees, transfixed, stiffened.
His hot heart hurt, so intensely did he want to see Isabel,
and that she was suddenly near him caused a flood of
indrawn, in-winding, inseverable emotions he couldn’t
quite sort out. He forgot his suitcase and only because
there had been so few passengers on the flight was that
noticed. An attendant ran it out to the cabdriver who was
asking double-the-fee to take him into Fawx’s Mt., but,
thrusting a handful of bills through the window,
Darconville banged the door shut—and the taxi shot off.
There was always a nameless air of desolation on that
backroad to Fawx’s Mt. It was a stretch of gloomy,
uninhabited land where life in whatever form seemed
long ago to have become extinct, and yet if one looked
closely—up the fire-roads, beyond the pamets, into the
woods —certain wretched dwellings could be spied:
shotgun shacks; ax-mortised cabins with flour-sacking in
the windows; rabbit-box houses with wooden wings
sticking out and draped over with old blankets and faded
clothes. And there, Darconville noticed, was the infamous
roadside diner: Klansman, I greet you! They passed into a
semi-populated area where some fiddleheaded horses
were cropping the mow-burnt fields, stubbled with straw
and bits of corn-nubbin. Shikepokes flew across the sky
which was growing ever greyer. The lowering October
twilight silhouetted the ravines of rampikes, corruption,
and bog, making a derisive comment, somehow, on the
idea that the force that guided nature was benign. In the
west, the very last of the tender light disappeared and was
replaced by a misty belt of grey-green. Dar-conville was
somehow only able to discern in the spooky hillsides and
clawing branches styxes, birds of ill-omen, alastors. It
could have been a rookery of pterodactyls or
humpbacked, be-shawled creatures with red eyes, spined
wings, and torturous cries, a world of agelasts and
executioners and cannibals who sat ready to spring. If
God created nature, thought Darconville, perhaps He
Himself is not in nature, that depraved place, for want of
another, wherein are foolishly fumbled up the apports of
that bleak séance over which perhaps we credulously
preside only to know Him. Another landmark. They were
close now. Darconville rolled down the window. “Hurry,”
he said, when over the hill a dusty little village came into
view.
It was Fawx’s Mt.
 A few hambacked townies in swamper hats, looking
like Chalco-lithic forerunners, were sitting on nailkegs in
front of the general store, eating moon-pies and drinking
cups of parched-corn coffee. But Darconville kept to his
directions: left at the fork, first right—stop. He got out.
The moon was auriform, in its first quarter. A spreading
pool of nightwind wet the air. The blue dusk chilled
Darconville’s sweatdamp ears as he wondered, for the
first time now, whether Isabel would take this appearance
to be an expression of his passion, a compromise with it,
or a violation against it: whatever, it was too late. He saw
lights in the house and checked his watch—seven
o’clock, exactly. There was a woodsmoke aroma down by
the hollows, and the croak of frogs, a variable plunk,
clung, or jug-a-rum, could be heard across the street in the
glades where old hickory pines and dark stands of
junipers sent a terebrinthic musk out of the shadows. He
picked up his suitcase and started to walk toward the
house.
Suddenly, Darconville stopped short. He peered
forward. Isabel’s blue car was parked in the driveway,
slightly dented as before, but with an uncharacteristic
addition on the back fender: it was a bumper-sticker. His
mouth went dry as a limebasket as he read the words on it
—”Sailors Have More Fun.”
Then night fell like a guillotine blade.

LXXII

Who?
 The nightingale and the cuckoo sing both in one
mouth.
—Old Proverb

THE RURAL CLOAK of blackness slowly dwindled

down to a single figure stepping out of the shadows.
Swallowing, Isabel Rawsthorne staggered back from the
door and clapped both hands over her mouth, her face
pale as if paralyzed by the flash of a lightbulb: a ghost
wearing a body. All her life seemed to have taken refuge
in her eyes. She couldn’t speak but with a gesture
suggestive of caution, the alarmed maneuver he’d so
often seen before, quickly saw him inside to shut the door
as fast as possible. Who are you with, thought
Darconville, from whom you turn away, at whom you
dare not look? She shut her mouth tightly, her face
flushing with heat, the enhanced beauty which this
warmth might have brought being killed by the rectilinear
sternness of countenance that came therewith.
It was a bewilderment that became awkwardness:
somehow every move and motion of hers made her legs,
even more over-essex’d in the thigh now than he’d
remembered, a perverse caricature of what once she
feared, waterbulge, keech, a symmelian effect as if the
lower limbs had literally fused from rumprowl to root.
Her hair had lost its gloss. There are no faults, however,
in something we want badly, and Darconville hugged her
desperately, closing his eyes only to avoid seeing again
what had immediately come to his attention.
Isabel was not wearing her ring.
 Instinctively, Darconville wanted to tell her he loved
her, but her face had changed—there was now a force of
irony in it, the almost malignant joy of some sudden but
unshared surprise, yet there was still that dreadful pallor,
like some kind of psychic face in a photograph. He
followed her into the kitchen where, greeting him with a
note of hollow but booming effusiveness, her mother
clapped her ironing board shut and discreetly withdrew to
another room, the complicated significance of the look
that passed between the two people, however, not being
lost on him. They were alone now. Isabel did not speak.
Darconville tried to smile. They both seemed to be
judiciously waiting out the hesitation of some mutually
pre-accepted worry or doubt or embarrassment that
perhaps it might somehow vanish to ease the historical
import the moment seemed to hold.
It wasn’t the fatigue of the long trip down, it wasn’t
that he hadn’t eaten all day, it wasn’t the studied formality
he felt all about him, no, it was nothing he could actually
name—but Darconville began to experience a melancholy
that drained his bones to vacuums. He smiled lovingly at
her nevertheless and gently tried to lift her chin; it
wouldn’t lift. The note of the note of a thing is a note of
the thing itself: he mentioned the bumper-sticker on the
car. It seemed ludicrous. The air in the kitchen, however,
loaded with the phlogiston of unspoken words, seemed
about to explode. Had someone, he asked, given it to her?
Isabel’s profoundly lowered head suddenly came up
fast with an almost diabolical half-smile in its eyes—a
look of hers he’d never seen before. She’s a complete
stranger to me, he thought. She seemed to be trying to
control a happiness within her, despite the fact that he was
suffering, despite the fact that she saw that, and, more, it
seemed to confess with a kind of premeditated felicity to
her own lack of power to please him with whatever reply
he became increasingly more desperate to know,
confirming the face to be its own fault’s book. Dar-
conville began to hear devils crisscrossing over his head.
He experienced a sensation of starting to fall.
The dizziness began to overtake him. And all of a
sudden the angel, Rikbiel, in the company of his Holy
Wheels descended to try to minister to him, saying: You
will struggle up from green valleys into the mountains.
You will recognize another valley on the other side, when
suddenly the mountain whereupon you stand shall melt
away under you. Then the two valleys will become just
one wider lowland with you standing there in the middle
of it. You shall travel thence to mountains far away to
discover them likewise into disappearing, suddenly find
that there is no end to the mountains, and realize that all
the leveling of mountains outside yourself has caused a
leveling within. You don’t know where you are any longer,
but you mustn’t fall, my child. No, you musn’t fall, can you
hear us? But Darconville knew he was falling. He could
feel himself falling into a monstrous vortex, reverberant
with noise, loud with light. He couldn’t stop.
He remembered falling a million miles away. He
remembered as he fell slowly through the air how the
known strangely became the unknown. He remembered
trying to fix his falling attention on Isabel’s lips to catch
her words quicker than his ears might as he asked her a
direct question. He was smiling, reaching out for her—but
suddenly something was wrong with her face, a hardness
in the eyes, a coarseness of expression flickering over her
lips. Her scar whitened. And then a bubble burst, and then
a world. Isabel said, “I love someone else.”
 Darconville went pale as a dishclout. His head
detonated, like Goliath who took the stone—thud!—flat
in the sinciput, and perspiration, like lace, broke upon his
face. His hands began to tremble uncontrollably as
blindly he reached for the table to steady himself. But he
was falling slowly, slowly falling, and, as he fell, he felt
his soul fly out of his mouth making a sound like, “W-
who?”
Isabel turned to him the three-quarter profile the
Dutch invented. Her lips curved into a sharp, foxlike
smile as if under the pressure of some inner merriment or
delight remorselessly beyond her power to suppress, for
its triumph, for the force in the authenticity of its abusive
truth, for the opportunity at last of its unexpected release,
and then calmly spoke the words of his execution.
“Gilbert van der Slang,” she said.

[[BLACK PAGE]]

LXXIII

The Supreme Ordeal

And if I loved you Wednesday,

Well, what is that to you?
I do not love you Thursday—
So much is true.
 And why you come complaining
Is more than I can see.
I loved you Wednesday, yes,
But what is that to me?
—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

“IT ALL BEGAN a long time ago,” said Isabel,

smiling wistfully at Darconville, “before I met you. I
guess it was just fate.” She seemed to turn his body into
the frame of a doorway through which, though speaking
of the past, she gazed out into the future. “I was first
attracted to his brother, Govert, you know all that, in my
classes in high school, but with him inviting me over to
Zutphen Farm and all, well, it wasn’t long before I
eventually met”—she looked at Darconville who was
obmuted into a shocked and fearful silence, his eyes
frozen onto her—”Gil.”
She paused. “Don’t just look at me, please? It doesn’t
help.” She waited, then shrugged exasperatedly and
continued speaking with an increasing urge of mounting
indiscretion and the kind of monotony in her voice which
assumed that he, like herself, had rehearsed it all before.
The tongue and the taste had memorized it for her.
“We dated a few times, not much. Then he went away
to school,” she smiled. “The Naval Academy? You know?
I didn’t break off with Govert, and, although I always
liked his brother more, I tried to put him out of my mind.
See? I had to, to survive.” She was not speaking to him,
she was speaking to people who were not there,
approving people, people who understood her and liked
her and would believe her. “Summers, he returned to visit
with his family at Fawx’s Mt., I knew that, but even
though it turned out that he secretly cared, he
intentionally stayed away from me,” she said with an
admiring rale in her voice, “because of—well, us. He
didn’t want to interfere, you could say,” she beamed,
“he’s like that. And neither did his mother who didn’t
know how I felt anyway, though I’m sure you think she
did, don’t you?” Knowing herself to be a traitor, she read
the accusation in Darconville’s eyes. “Well, you wanted
to hear this. You wanted to know.”
A horrible noise, like that of something breaking,
issued from Darconville’s mouth. It flashed suddenly into
his head: My God, theologians know something they
can’t tell us—Adam and Eve chose knowledge over life!
And instantly he knew where, in those nervous halts in
Fawx’s Mt., she’d been staring all those years!
“Last summer, he told me later, he’d built a wall
between us. Me,” she clarified, “and him. I’d always
sensed that, I think. Somehow”— Isabel’s eyes flowered
into a smile—”you just know. Anyway, I saw him around
Labor Day, he was in uniform, when I was helping out at
the farm—” She stopped short. “I see what you’re
thinking, that all this had been planned way back during
the summer and that like my real father I have no
conscience! Well, it wasn’t in July! Or June!” A tragic
contralto note came into her voice. “How could it have
been those months,” she asked illogically, “I spent them
trying to make my wedding dress! Oh, it doesn’t matter
now, anyway. The point is, he could understand my
doubts like no one else ever could, including—”
Darconville closed his eyes.
It all seemed like some resistless, inexorable evil,
with the contrast in Isabel of what she once was as
pronounced as the front of a portrait is from the back.
Darconville’s skin was stone cold as she continued her
explanation in a tone of concentrated resolution.
“He told me about a friend of his who’d just recently
gotten married but was miserable. Miserable! Don’t you
see, inevitably I had doubts about us? We talked. We
talked a lot, about simple things: in plain language, no big
visions, no big words—just walking around the farm, I
don’t know, under the trees, with a few little animals
around.” She lowered her head to contain a smile. “I’m
just a country girl, I guess.” An expression of foolish
diffidence and utter relief struggled for mastery in her
face as she looked up. “I felt a kind of security I’ve
wanted all my life. I felt safe,” she said with a supple-
mouthed smile. “I guess I should have told you all this
before, shouldn’t I?”
Darconville uttered a long sentence but no words
were produced. As she spoke, she seemed by leaps to ruin
the words that plodded in bewilderment out of his heart.
There was an exaggerated eloquence in her
confession, as if it were necessary to focus in her mind,
with indisputable fixity, on those satisfactions, adulterated
by her own proofs, she spoke to savor—a story made the
more incontrovertible, at least so she felt, by the very fact
of its being recounted and yet one somehow bootless in
the telling, so closely knit was it all with instincts of
which, in having been accepted as so irrevocably true, her
brain had in fact long ceased to take account. It was as if
the facts became such only in collusion with their being
told, reaching, nevertheless, to a greater degree of
importance as they were, with an exactness forced upon
each and every detail by nothing more than the formal
decision that not only informed them but indeed had
given them birth. She prepared what could have been to
serve what should have been, so was.
“O my G-God,” whispered Darconville, from whose
face every vestige of color had been drained. He was
hunched in place, motionless, his fingers held so tightly
they were but splints of pain. Struggling for words, trying
to formulate a proposition, he began to stammer. She
asked him what he was saying.
She sighed. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to
say.”
Darconville felt ashamed, almost invisible. “I’m a-
afraid.” He sank his face into his thin hands.
“That would be silly,” she said, frostily.
“But you’re my life,” he said in a strangled voice.
“You’re all I have in the world.”
Isabel pulled her thumb—and without closing her
mouth, which with the droop of her underlip took on an
almost vacant look, she frowned a little as she fixed her
steady gaze full open on him.
“Not you! Not you!” He looked up. “I can’t believe
it. It’s not true, I know it isn’t.”
“I’m afraid it is.”
“Don’t,” pleaded Darconville, searching her eyes
desperately. “Please d-don’t?”
She looked deedily into his face.
“I heard you were seeing another girl in Quinsyburg
this summer.”
“No,” he said with low parentilism, “no, d-don’t say
that.”
With full composure, Isabel got up and placed a glass
of water and a blue pill in front of him. “You won’t say
that again?” he pleaded.
“Drink that.”
 Darconville took the pill with hands trembling. He
wanted to, but couldn’t, ask exactly who Gilbert was, how
in all these years she never once mentioned him; he was
trying to shake free, literally extricate himself, from the
horror of what was happening to him. With half-shut,
malignant eyes, full of strange inward unction, she
weighed him. As she removed the glass, he saw with utter
disbelief that her face had been fully dispossessed of its
natural sweetness by that mask of intransigence which,
with the arrest of desire, horrifyingly implies a secret
point de repère to a world forbidden to him and so
reserved for another. It hadn’t been a choice between, but
of. She turned sideways in her chair, waiting.
“Will you 1-look at me, Isabel? Please?”
“This just isn’t the end of the world,” she said, the
contours of her countenance as imperturbable to his
emotions as dark, slippery rocks to the wash of the sea.
“Why can’t you see that?”
“I’ll leave Harvard.” She held her head very high at
this, and her eyes grew defiant. “I’ll do anything for you.
I’ll move down here, if you’d like, to live.” Coldly, she
said that she was no longer living at home, that, in fact, he
was lucky to have found her there when he did. The
Watsons, down the street, had offered her a small house
behind theirs to live in. He asked if he could live there
with her. Isabel closed her eyes and exasperatedly
whistled air. When will he go, she wondered, when will he
go?
It all seemed to Darconville like some weird,
stupefying story that had been told to him long, long ago
—a tale, ignored as fiction, so fashioned to be lived: the
revenge of real dreams upon fake sleep. We can actually
cause to exist, in the very act, what irrationally we fear, as
perhaps we write less to get a second chance in life than
to exorcise the demons peopling our minds. There was no
real person named Dr. Crucifer, thought Darconville, I
have created him!
The knowledge for Darconville that it was too late to
offer apologies to Isabel suddenly became a haunting
penance for him that exceeded the sin itself. But what
sin? What had he done? Surely something! Or was this
happening to someone else? Again, he thought of
Crucifer: was this guilt by innocence? Oversight?
Presumption? It has long been observed that men do not
suspect faults which they themselves would not commit;
so it was with Darconville, who nevertheless, too wracked
with guilt to disallow the possibility of his personal hand
in this, too deeply in love to want to discern it elsewhere,
assailed himself in a fit of remorse and self-accusation
that he mightn’t absolve in himself what he wouldn’t
accuse in another. He spoke in a daze of baseless,
unanswerable self-reproach, admitting his faults,
proclaiming his regrets, but all to no avail—for she
looked away—and even the joys in their lives he
rehearsed suddenly seemed never to have happened as he
recalled them. There was nothing to say he could manage,
with but one exception.
“I love you,” he said.
She deigned not to answer.
“Yet you wanted me. Didn’t you? Why, you must
have wanted me to be with me so long. She assumed a
lethargic sulkiness. “I know you love me.” He spoke into
the hands that covered his face, a stammerer, literally
afraid of what he might say. “I b-beg you to love me.
Please?”
“Don’t lose your pride. Lord.”
 Darconville looked up ashen and startled, for he
suddenly saw that two personalities coming together can
create a third, with each becoming different yet together
making up one they are both surprised at separately.
“What have I got left?”
“Your genius.” She shrugged. “Everything.”
“I don’t want everything that’s nothing. I want
anything that’s something.” His head was splitting. “I
love you.”
“None of that matters now.”
“By the truth of your right hand,” asked Darconville,
searching her mind through her eyes, “do you mean that?”
She nodded. Her eyes were clear and well-opened.
Was there no history? No memory? No continuity or
meaning to love? They were questions the weight of
which Darconville, weakened to the heart, hadn’t now the
strength to bear asking. He had grown yellow and pasty
with fatigue, his face perspiring so much it looked as
though it had just been raised from a basin, and his
swollen eyes seemed to have taken their moisture directly
from his lips which were now dry to smacking.
“After four years? You mean”—his throat stuck shut
—”everything’s g-gone?”
Isabel was unmoved. She turned away, exhaling in
irritation and thinking to herself: is this to go on forever?
Her hands were ice-cold. She touched the back of her left
hand with the fingers of her right: gelid. Confecta res est:
it was hopeless, for as she could no longer see in him
what by the new dispensation she could not understand,
she could consequently feel no sympathy for what she
could not imagine. Where there is no imagination, there
can be no horror. There was nothing to be done. The girl
was gone.
 “May I,” asked Darconville, like a statue whose fixed
stare corresponds to a once genuine reality but reflects in
its cold and empty sockets no understanding at all, “may I
sleep here tonight?”
“I don’t think that would be right.”
Reasoning, Isabel scrutinized him. She looked
disgustedly at his trembling hands, then sighed, and
relented—with the stipulation, however, that he
understood it would only be this one night. It seemed a
kindness to Darconville whose complete exhaustion,
coupled with the sedative she’d given him, almost
prevented him from walking. She proceeded with him to
an empty bedroom where, overcome with shock,
bewilderment, and grief, he fell onto the bed and let the
darkness roll over him. Something rose out of him and
actually looked down at himself from the ceiling, from
the sky, and then from beyond the universe, making him
feel smaller than anything that ever was in the world.
The exigencies of life quickly resumed control of
Isabel. Excusing herself, she assured him she’d be right
back; she shut the bedroom door, listened a moment, and
quickly disappeared into the kitchen. And then with an
efficiency that seemed a distorted echo, an ironic
recurrence, of a previous but now long forgotten
dénouement—one characterized as much by opportunity
as desire—she acted with dispatch. She looked
apprehensively back to the bedroom and then picked up
the telephone to share with the only person that mattered
now the sudden good-fortune she could only express in
breathless, disconnected whispers which, while the
consequence of her elation, nevertheless seemed to
recapitulate in composition what only the most skillfully
malignant and exitial of changelings could have
transformed into a rhetoric of joy from the fragments of
another’s broken heart. She had not forgotten her stamp
this time. The die was cast. It was over.
The facies hippocratica: Darconville’s face, as he lay
there semiconscious, had lost its subjective expression; it
did not reflect his thoughts, he had none, but only the
objective fact of the approach of death-in-sleep. It
belonged to the supraindividual sphere of the ancestral
life of the body, and had Isabel returned to him, which she
didn’t, she would have seen, in his sunken eyes, taut
forehead, and leaden skin color, how that face in no
longer resembling itself had but vacated the premises,
going blank, in a gape of sudden fatality: the shroud in
which, mercifully, one lies down to relax the heart. He
spiraled down into unconsciousness. There was slowly no
end of agony, the dance of unutterable sorrow and pain
within causing him to writhe and twist in ceaseless
turmoil as he wondered over and over again how Divine
Providence could allow for such a cruel absurdity as God.
The suffering grew unbearable, the sensations too
ungraspable, too immense to handle, and in an instant,
helpless, he sank to the terrible depths of what night
really means, descending far, far below the reaches of
mere sleep to perpetual delirium where flocks of ravaged,
scissor-winged angelbats with pointed ears thrashed each
other in turn to perch upon his toes, suck his blood, and
fan him into further unconsciousness in order to continue
the profanity of complete possession in a darkness that
would never disembogue. Darconville suddenly screamed
—and sat bolt upright!
He was alone in a room.
It was early morning, about six o’clock by the fading
darkness outside the window. Reflecting on the events of
the previous night, he wasn’t certain of what to do. His
first impulse was to wake Isabel with a kiss, or had what
happened really happened? Reality, he thought, was too
varied, too abundant, to be mirrored in anything smaller,
narrower, less varied than itself, but comprehension on
any plane, of any size, was impossible. It was all he could
do to keep in mind who he was at that moment, for
dialogues within him were stumbling doubles out in a
profusion that by reminding him he was no one suggested
he be all.
Darconville dressed and walked outside to the fence
in back of the house where mists hung over the distant
cowfields and the air smelled of deep pools of rain. Some
stars were still shining coldly in the sky. Should he leave?
He deliberated, rubbing his eyes which were dry and
inflamed. Should he try to stay? He walked around to the
outside of her bedroom window and softly called to her.
There was no answer. He thought

Only the false are falsely true,

Only the true are truly false;
You are false and you are true,
Sweet child. Sweet song.

He decided, to urge her to the moment, to prepare to

leave and so returned to his room, packed his suitcase,
and let himself—not noiselessly—out the front door. It
was a vapor-smoked morning, and although the lethal
dark still sat full on the uparching hills the east was
gradually whitening. There was no one in sight and not a
sound as he headed some ways up the lonely road. Surely,
thought Darconville, this is a dream. This road? The
silence? Miles away from where I’m supposed to be? He
turned, hesitantly, and waited. The light in Isabel’s room
came on for a moment—and his heart leapt. He hadn’t
returned a few steps when the light went off, when the
room, significantly, was dark again. He began to write
sentences with his tongue on the top of his mouth. The
panic he felt literally immobilized him. And she? She
didn’t want to know he was leaving, only that he was
gone.
In an instant, Darconville was suddenly standing in
her room—and then desperately shaking her with pleas
repeated to convince her of her mistake. Please, he
begged. Please, he ordered: did she really love someone
else? Wasn’t it all a mistake? Was she going to marry
him? Had he touched her? Did she believe that one could
love two people at the same time? Could he still hope?
Had she ever worked on a wedding dress? Would she let
him see it? Could he stay with her, talk to her, just be with
her?
“No, no, no,” cried Isabel, pounding the bed, “no, no,
no, no!” And in spite of the fact that blind belief in one
thing is often founded upon disbelief in another,
Darconville at last could see in her face how much an
object of detestation he had become for her, how
constrained and oppressed he made her. She fell sobbing
onto the blanket, trying to convince him now she wasn’t
worth it, while of course, in spite of this piece of formal
theater, believing she was, and when she looked up—for
he’d grown silent from humiliation—her eyes were dry.
She stood up and told him she would drive him to the
airport. That was it.
“You said you’d be understanding,” said Isabel,
wheeling her car back out of the driveway, stopping, and
screeching forward in a lurch.
 “Don’t call me you,” said Darconville.
She stared straight ahead, her eyes small and
malignant now like bullets, close-set, with that
protuberant root-vegetable look of her mother’s.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I think you’re the worst
person in the world.”
“I doubt it,” he replied. “That would be too much of a
coincidence.”
The fingers of her left hand spread on the wheel and
tightened into a fist. Her eyes glittered cruelly.
“No,” interjected Darconville, fear vibrating in his
voice, “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I love
you more than my own life, more than life itself. Please
listen to me?” The car careened out of Fawx’s Mt. and
turned north by way of the backroad. “But you don’t want
to listen, do you? You want to be safe,” he said, “the
bourgeois need to get through life with the least
unpleasantness, is that it? That’s it, isn’t it? Even though
you know you love me?” He turned to her, but there was a
solitude within her now inaccessible to praise or blame,
affection or accusation, a justice of her own devising
completely beyond appeal.
“Please don’t. Don’t do this,” he implored, rocking
forward to claim her attention. He fell back. “How could
you have just met someone else, Isabel? I should like to
know how, you know? Even if you convinced me, I
wouldn’t believe it.” Isabel kept her eyes trained to the
road. “Do you think I can live? Seriously. I will not live. I
have been given another man’s life and cannot use it. I
cannot live. Speak to me!”
Darconville was frustratedly clasping and unclasping
his hands. “What can I say? What can I do? There’s no
time left!”
 They were speeding now.
“I’ve been trying to call you for a month, you, your
parents, that nightmare down the road named Mrs. van
der Slang, and where were you? Betraying me?” cried
Darconville, his tear-blinded eyes blurring the landscape.
“You said you loved me. Was that an explanation? An
excuse? I think you should offer that bit of logic to the
Museum of Human Imbecility.” He paused. “Look, I
know love can be confusing. I know that. But it doesn’t
matter, why should—”
Isabel banked a corner, swiftly, rushing the car
dangerously off a shoulder and quickly into the road.
Darconville saw how recklessly determined she was to be
free of him.
“I should denounce you to the world, you”—he
almost choked on the emotional throat-note—”you
hypocrite.” He turned to her. “Your adrift-in-a-world-I-
never-made pose disgusts me.”
One of Isabel’s eyebrows rose humorously, twitched
a little, but, always, she gazed ahead with an expression
of both relief and satisfaction on her face, and she seemed
more like a professor of the equivocal sciences than
anything else, showing an impassive, almost
contemptuous air as she listened to the last of his
desperate entreaties with an absent-minded smile.
“Isabel, forgive me,” cried Darconville, “I-I love you
so much, I love you so much!” They turned into the
airport road. He reached over and pulled her arm. “Do
you believe me? When I say that, do you believe me?” He
gripped her arm. She looked at him. Had he gone mad?
He was praying, but it was a hopeless sort of thing—
words spoken but without any sense or understanding.
“Tell me, tell me you love me!” But they had reached the
front of the terminal and stopped. Isabel, dreading this
moment, wasn’t sure what to do; she didn’t move. He
fumbled for her hand and took the white, spatulate,
always slightly cold fingers. He waited in agony, but he
had no more words, and overcome with the pity of it all,
he kissed her with what almost seemed a question—one
she alone, in returning, might have answered. But she did
nothing. They false and fearful did their hands undo. And
he was out of the car.
Isabel turned her head away, paused a moment, and
drove away. With his throat constricted, Darconville stood
staring after her into the blank and pitiless morning. The
loss of love loured overhead. He was abandoned.

LXXIV

The Empty Egg

The nothing experienced in anguish reveals

eventually also the being.
—BARSANAPHIUS, the Recluse of Gaza

THERE WAS A DESERT PLACE in Isabel, he saw

for the first time, an emptiness smaller than Nauru and
more lethal than the steady application of artifice or
fraud: a cimmeria, a coomb, a cess. It sat below intuition
in a theoretical sphere of fundamental brainlessness
where nothing ever grew, ever existed, was ever felt, and
no sally of genius or wit could be conveyed to the mind of
whatever by it might be understood for its fatality lay
precisely in its vacancy and ghastly implenitude. When
she spoke from there or listened from there, she could
agree with anything or not, say anything or deny it—it
didn’t matter. Its residues of ashes and cinders had
nothing in common with fire but lay slaglike in the deep
of its pure apophatica, a not-something excommunicating
both pleasure and pain from the zone of its utter
barrenness. No awe gripped her there, and no grief—no
emotion, no concern, no plaints, no wheedlings, no
needlings; it had no reticule of tricks; it devoured every
variable by its own abiogenetic instincts and lived on the
unlimited possibilities of inconstancy and contradiction. It
was a deathmouth, mortally neuter, with killing its
ceremonial, mean-inglessness its motive. It was an empty
egg. And there he was betrayed.

LXXV

Lacerations

Nature is negative because it negates the Idea.

—FRIEDRICH HEGEL

THE QUINSYBURG ROAD always left one with the

distinct impression he had taken the wrong direction, a
suspicion, even for habitual travelers, impossible to allay.
A feeling of uneasiness sharpened at every curve of that
lonely tract, a sense of oppression in no way commuted
along the straight stretches that ran between russet slopes
patched with twisted pines and stunted oaks into even
wilder and bleaker downlands. The absolute stillness
always seemed a preliminary, a shadowy presentiment, to
some perilous undertaking of which one was unaware,
and nothing perhaps better corroborated the threat than at
that one point down the road where, blundering up in a
kind of meretricious finale, was the wooden sign of the
town which, instead of welcoming you, seemed to warn
you off.
“Nature,” sighed Dr. Dodypol, peering out of his car
window, “you know—to me, it’s evil.” He turned to
Darconville, whose head lay fallen back, his eyes open
but lifeless. It almost broke Dodypol’s heart.
“It frightens me just to say the word. Look,” he
waved his hand, simultaneously downshifting to urge his
old car up a hill, “trees wormed out, sloked ponds,
ravaged groves and dark and forbidding swales. Do you
realize that the real name of Treasure Island was Skeleton
Island? Nature is at constant war—something fails as
something prevails. And then half of the species that have
survived the long ceaseless stupid struggle are parasitic in
their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on
higher sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted
for slaughter, hooks and suckers molded for torment,
claws and cusps sculptured all for death—everywhere a
reign of terror, hunger, and sickness, with oozing blood
and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of
innocence that dimly close in agonies of brutal torture.
Take these woods. I never drive this road when I don’t
think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the secret
wickedness, that goes on in there, year in, year out, and
none the wiser. I mean, think of all the men whose bones
have been bleached by the relentless blue of that cynically
smiling sky. How manifold the dooms of earth! How
singular that of the sea! A burst of gunfire—have you
ever thought of this?—has all the colors of the rainbow.
Nature? It’s grotesque, with confusion its intent and
accident its specialty, a constant reminder—remember,
Eve bore no children in Paradise—of what, having once,
we had and yet having had we lost.” He paused. “There,
lean back. Get the benefit. Are you all right?”
Darconville merely closed his eyes.
“It’s in the tilt of the planet,” continued Dr. Dodypol,
a man with one of those special natures whose inner
processes take place in that holy land of sensibility me
border of which so often touches the marches of the
kingdom of insanity. He was talking to himself. He didn’t
mind. He was worried about his friend. “Figure, with no
tilt, there’d be no seasons: no seasons, so no migrations,
no color lines, no language differential, no land grabbing
—no war!” He shrugged. “It’s all in the books. I mean,
we’re all arse over tip, aren’t we? Swinish? Mechanically
and sinfully dogged? Knitting guilty wool into the night?”
Suddenly, Dr. Dodypol began waving crazily to the
countryside. “Hello, Hobbes!” he shouted through the
window. “Hello, La Rochefoucauld! Hello, Mandeville,
fair grow the lilies on the river-bank? Hello,
Vauvenargues! Hello, Schopenhauer! Christ, Darconville,
they all said it. Jansen, Bayle, Buffon, all of them. Emeric
de Crucé? St. Augustine? Dr. Foster of Gloster? The
whole shooting match said it. I myself said it.

Nothing in nature is equal quite:

 Jaws don’t match in a single bite.

My line. Doggerel, no doubt. Still, I suppose, it

shows imagination of some sort.
“No, there’s no route back to the Garden of Eden,
Darconville, except by the imagination. That’s why I
believe in you”—Darconville felt Dodypol’s hand steal
into his to give it a reassuring shake—”and why I set off
for Charlottesville the very minute you called. I may be
speaking out of turn, but you weren’t the only one she let
down, my friend, not by half. It wasn’t as long as two or
three weeks ago that Thelma Trappe was asking the very
same question: ‘Why didn’t Isabel ever visit me?’ She
doted on her, for some reason. You’d know. Parents,
wasn’t there something peculiar that way with both of
them?” He shook his head and sighed. “A goosegirl
ermined is a goosegirl still.” He touched his friend’s knee.
“It’s too late now anyway, I should say.” Dodypol glanced
over at Darconville and picked up speed. “Point taken?”
This further recognition of Isabel Rawsthorne’s
disregard compounded his hurt, and yet, strangely, as one
report followed another in such detestable proportion, it
only seemed a cruel attempt by spiteful and fathomless
rumor to effect a revision of her which was sham and not
her at all; one day trying to lynch four years? It was not
going to happen.
“I don’t think you understand what I’m talking
about,” said Dr. Dodypol, staring straight on.
Darconville looked up.
“Last night Miss Trappe committed suicide.”
 It was late afternoon when they pulled into
Quinsyburg, with the last red streaks fading away in the
western sky. Darconville never bothered to ask himself
why he had returned, although he began to feel he found
the recollection of her to be more pleasing than her
presence; something he remembered of her seemed to be
missing when he’d encountered her again, not only
yesterday, he reflected, but over the last months back to
June. But here he was in this bizarre world, again.
Perhaps he hoped to experience again the feelings
associated with a happiness he’d known there in time
past? It was possible, but he began to realize, passing the
countryside which bore so clearly the mark of the waning
year, that the nature of time is loss, to be reviewed in
memory, perhaps, but never to be regained, and suddenly
he couldn’t put himself to review those memories that
conspired for attention on every street, at every corner, for
the past, once taken to be so immutable, had instantly
been transmogrified by the present to the point of
disfigurement—and what memory could now be singled
out that didn’t lead in a single inflexible line straight
toward the dissolution of it? The exertions of trying to
probe into the purposeless series of tragedies so weighed
on him that, to escape them and to avoid the bald
amiabilities and questions which were sure to follow hard
upon meeting anybody from the college, he asked
Dodypol to put him up in a room at Ms house, where,
after writing a swift retaliatory letter to Gilbert van der
Slang—declaring with what industry he would fight for
Isabel—he fell exhausted from thinking onto the bed and
slept.
Later that night, there wasn’t a sound when Dr.
Dodypol peeked into the bedroom. Darconville was so
still he might have been dead, but as his friend was
concerned that he hadn’t eaten for days he touched him
awake. It was too late, whispered Dodypol, as
Darconville immediately rose to telephone Isabel—but
when he cried out in agony, Dodypol said no, no, he only
meant it was midnight.
It was intolerable, this waking into facts, and
Dodypol suggested a walk. The night air was heavy with
the odors of fall, with rifts in the racing clouds that
showed watery patches of color in the dark sky.
Darconville mailed his letter, and they set off, Darconville
walking swiftly, Dodypol trying to keep pace with his
companion who was speaking now with a euphoria which
revealed itself in unjustified optimism and grandiose
plans, a compulsive chatter switching from one subject to
another so rapidly that his listener couldn’t follow, and
then slowing down in spells of ominous reflection. He
would halt, deliberating. Then he would suffer a kind of
hypomania, his thought processes, like film, running
along at incredible speed: did she love him, not want
marriage, or not love me? Or love me, fear marriage, so
love him? Perhaps hate me, love him, and so want
marriage? Did she love one more as she loved another
less? If she loved me, he wondered, how could she love
him? Then did she ever love me if she always knew him?
If he didn’t love her, would she then have loved me still?
Half-truth is a despot. By entering into the arena of
argument and counterargument, of technical feasibility
and tactics, by accepting the presumption of the
legitimacy of debate, Darconville felt he was only
foundering more.
But why had she agreed to marry him? When exactly
did she meet this other person and with what disposition
informed by what cause? How was it he had never once
seen her wedding dress? And what was behind those
ridiculous errors in the wedding invitations? The paucity
of her visits, when she had the only car, last summer? The
months of unbearable silence when she could have simply
told him the truth? But what was the truth? Why, for
instance, had she bothered to be baptized? Engaged? And
why that recent telegram expressing her love? Elle
m’aime, un peu, beaucoup, passionnément, à la folie, pas
du tout? It was impossible. The torch casts no light upon
its base.
They circled around the outer side of Quinsy College,
walking down the empty streets in silence. The copses
moaned and swung in the rising wind, and it wasn’t long
before, up on that small hill overlooking the train tracks,
Darconville stopped in front of the dead dark bulk of a
house outlined against the sky and looking ghostly and
barren under the leafless trees that stretched out their
black fingers over its roof. It was Miss Trappe’s place.
They paused by her garden patch where in the crooked
drills lay the brown and lifelessly twisted stalks of her
plants. Without a word, despite Dodypol’s pleas,
Darconville was up on the porch and inside. He wanted to
say goodbye.
The rooms were plain, with a stillness in them that
bespoke the probity and simplicity of its lost tenant: an
old bureau, faded rag rugs, and bargain-net curtains.
There was always a painful temperance about the place,
but now, in a way, it seemed overfurnished and musty
with the absence of human life. Darconville clicked the
switch: the electricity had been shut off. He lighted a
candle. There in the back room was a tiny bed next to
which stood a table holding a vaporizer, a sinus mask, and
a snore-ball. A print of Latoney’s Funeral hung on the
wall, and by either side of a window were shelves of
books, most of which held leaves between the pages, or
little round rings of dried larkspur blossoms pressed
within. In the cramped kitchen quarters were rows of
empty bottles, pincushions, tidies, and a pair of grape-
scissors hooked to a little chart detailing frost dates and
shrinkage ranges. The doorknobs were woolen with dust.
He opened a closet: a bag of inactive shoes and piles of
huge hats. And there on a bureau was a photograph of
Isabel he had given her several years ago; by it lay the
cameo—uncollected, unseen—she had promised the girl
who had never come by, who had not kept faith, who
perhaps in concentrating on trying to remember instead of
remembering forgot. His sadness, as was often the case
with Darconville, made him feel suddenly cold.
The last days of Miss Trappe, according to Dr.
Dodypol, had been as lonely as ever. He said she simply
went wandering about town in larger and larger hats
meeting no one and stopping in the street only to look up
at the sun and repeat, “Let me suffer, just keep shining!
Let me suffer, just keep shining!” And then it happened.
As no one had seen her for weeks, eventually they
checked. They apparently found her, her old-fashioned
nightgown with its high neck covering her slight frame
with decent circumspection, buttoned to the full and
sitting on a chair in a flexion of resignation, her skin in
rigor and her grey lips buttered with light flecks; one of
her thrawn hands was clutching a straight razor while the
other, nearly severed, rested on the open Bible in her lap
where a twiglike finger was still pointing to the text of
Ephesians 6:12—
 For our contention is not with the flesh and blood, but
with dominion and authority, with the world-ruling
powers of this dark age, with the spirit of evil in things
heavenly.

The shadows, as he blew out the candle, closed in

upon Darconville like a caress that killed. That night he
crawled into a bed that seemed hot-forged in the furnaces
of the lost angels. Eternity went by in an instant, and a
second lasted forever. He looked for faces and saw masks.
He sought nepenthe and found nitriol. The universe
expanded and his heart contracted. Light utterly
disappeared. And then all the heavens crashed headlong
into hell, displacing sheets of flame that burnt him down
into the unconsciousness of sleep for three whole days. It
was time completely lost.

Darconville, upon awakening, found a revelation in

the very act: time didn’t stop; it continued; and so what he
lost, mightn’t then another? Stupor, which benignant fate
sends by the side of extreme pain, conditioned him—and
possibly deceived—but it cut through the hesitation of
reason: it let him act. Defensively, his conception of self
became consciously enormous. How? Why? To borrow
some time from a part of the eternity to which it tends? To
convince desperation, perhaps, that love is its reward? It
was hard to say. But he became inspired with the absolute
necessity for instant action. Miss Trappe was only Isabel
who hadn’t been loved! He was no longer restrained by
any sense whatever of modesty or decorum. He knew it;
in one way, he needed it; and he was suddenly wakened to
deal with the distress he could once but now no longer not
deal with, for a blast blown to the hounds is no less a blast
blown to the fox. He prepared for violent activity, to
snatch out of the formal malfeasance that had taken place
behind him what in refusing to see as treachery
committed he could only see as innocence withheld.
It seemed a monomania, the fact becoming almost
more important than its significance. He loved her! And
all the gods, aerial and aquatic, would never prevent him
from loving her! He rose quickly and once again asked
Dr. Dodypol to drive him—this time, back to Fawx’s Mt.
—and so away they went, racing once more up the road to
Charlottesville and over those ragged hills where no
phenomena, however uncanny, however evil, could now
prevent him from reaching out to the one he loved. The
morning dew, before settling, left rainbows shimmering in
the tender light within various glades they passed. Dr.
Dodypol, who’d have none of it, explained them away as
nothing but concentric arcs with the common center on
the line connecting the eye of the observer and the light
source. Dr. Dodypol said, “A person cannot really stand at
the rainbow’s end. Not at all.” It was a strange remark,
perhaps, but no stranger a remark than the fact that no one
else in the car would yet believe it.
They banked the wooden bridge and turned onto the
road leading into the Blue Ridge mountains, but when
they got to the Shiftlett house they found it empty—then
Darconville remembered Isabel’s new lodgings down the
road. There they proceeded, with one voice hushed and
one spirit subdued, until Dr. Dodypol at some distance
from the Watsons’ house stopped the car.
There was Isabel. She was wearing sneakers, jeans,
and a green-and-white striped jersey and was carrying
some articles into the small back house there when she
happened to look up: she gave a violent start. Darconville
crossed the lawn. He looked ghastly. From his gaunt
wasted face his eyes showed the brightness of fever, and
when he spoke to her his voice was crackling and
spasmodic. He stepped to her; she bridled—the only time
he had ever seen that verb. It was a deplorable spectacle,
for she clearly wished he were a thousand miles away and
conveyed it in her cold attendance to the few duties she
refused to set aside (throwing unusables into a
wastebasket: old letters, school notebooks, a carved
Russian fife, etc. ) while studiedly moving around him
and, with a civility more deadly than violence, answering
his questions with a poisonous gentleness of speech.
There was an intensity of hatred in her white, set face.
She took a handful of books—on nautical subjects, he
saw—into the small house; he went to follow; she
abruptly stepped out. She flung back her hair. What did he
want? No, she would tell him nothing about Gilbert van
der Slang! Darconville mentioned he’d written to him.
Isabel pushed her face at him like a dark, blue thumbtack
and said if he ever dared hurt him she’d—! The muscles
of her mouth contracted, making her ugly. She lost her
breath for a moment, but then self-contained and
inflexible once again she showed the ethereal other-
worldly face of the fanatic whose distant thoughts become
the more remote as they become the more intransigent
and replied nothing, did he hear, nothing was going to
change! Let him do his worst, it was too late.
Her face lost its attractiveness in a smile of triumph
that he saw no love, no pleading, no words, no peine forte
et dure would ever change, and, although he loved her, a
condition that might formerly have absolved in her
personality whatever lessened it, he suddenly saw himself
in the light of her aversion and actually began to share it.
His lungs began to ache in the apprehension. An
explanation, asked Darconville, would she give him that?
For an instant, a convincing animation came into her
countenance that prevented him from realizing how far
away her thoughts had flown. He tried to take her arm,
but, groaning, she waved his hand away—not touching
him. She continued to regard him, beginning to feel that
the moment was not only tense now but possibly
dangerous. Yes, she answered, if he left she would send
him an explanation. But, she added in a voice like wind
from an iceberg, he must go! How extremes call to each
other! It was flame and ice face to face. She went to step
into the house. Darconville intercepted her. He took her
waist, asking for one more minute, when Isabel tore away
from him with cold cutting contempt, her eyes like a glass
snake’s.
“I promised to go riding with Col. Watson,” she said
in a spitting whisper.
As the car sped away, Darconville turned back one
final time and watched her disappear into the blurred,
discolored distance that receded so fast into the blighted
world it seemed literally gone even before it could say: I
am the last picture of your life.

LXXVI

Abomination of Desolation
 A great horror and darkness fell upon Christian.
—JOHN BUNYAN

THE LAST SIGHT of Fawx’s Mt. became too much

to bear, and Darconville cried out terribly upon it. May it
be cursed forever! May it wither into the grin of the dead!
May flowers and children die in its shadow! May the
birds of the air refuse to fly over it! May it henceforth
stand a desert of recrimination, spawning hunchbacks to
eat ashes for bread and to mingle tears with drink! May
Satan pinch into the faces of its inhabitants the pain of
hell that by them it be sown with salt and continue ever an
abomination to sight! May the maiden that passes it
become barren and the pregnant woman that beholds it
abort! May its crops be given to the caterpillar and the
fruits of its labor to the locust! May the winged monsters
be reaved out of the infernal pit to dwell therein and
demons sit high forever in its rébarbative trees to scourge
it in satire and song! May the light of the sun be withheld
therefrom and the light of the moon be hidden from it
forevermore, with accursedness its perpetual condition
and doom its eternal reward!

LXXVII

The Nowt of Cambridge

Deux fois deux quatre, c’est un mur.

 —DOSTOEVSKY, Voix souterraine

ADAMS HOUSE: the one accommodation with its

shades drawn night and day had a melancholy fixedness
about it, an aura of prohibition as if something terrible,
having once taken place there, must now never be
disclosed. There was neither light nor movement nor
noise from within, and if the rooms were inhabited it was
as though someone, in trying to acquire the power of
invisibility, had lost sight of himself as he disappeared
from the sight of others. It was like an impatible vacancy
in the building, a statement of the saddest isolation,
intimacy without commitment.
The rooms, in fact, were not empty. Someone still
lived there who, keeping to the darkness all day, was
waiting—he couldn’t explain it—for waiting to end. And
when night fell it was always the same. Dar-conville rose
and went out alone to wander through the deserted streets
of Cambridge looking for his cat.
The search became an obsession, a desperate
compulsion, only one of several he experienced after he
returned to Harvard. At first, he looked by day, the search
no less real for the parallel quest of which he was
unaware, a desperate attempt at invalescence—an
objective, however, separated totally from the
consciousness of the subject who in the passing days was
no longer sure what he was seeking, a cat, lost love, or
himself. It became hardly bearable. He found himself
walking mile after mile, astonished and saddened,
wandering in a state of mind that seemed a parody of all
value between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless
to be born; worth disappeared. He would aimlessly pass
his students in the street, leave his change behind in
stores, and in the most unlikely situations actually begin
to pray out loud. He often stopped before shopwindows
he didn’t look into. Careless and sloven, he started to
attract the attention of boys in the neighborhood. It soon
became not only unbearable but frightening. He began to
look for cars trailing him and to tremble suddenly for no
reason and then he began to be afraid he’d start screaming
in public places: often in the middle of crowded
sidewalks he’d start to weep, biting his hands to stop. So
time reversed: he disappeared from view, completely,
leaving his room now only at night to roam through the
Yard, wander along the banks of the Charles, or go miles
out into old factory yards and back alleys and outlying
areas of Cambridge. Several times, he sat up all night in
Longfellow Park, and one morning in a puddle, rising in a
mist, he saw Isabel’s face, now flushed with excitement,
now mournful and pensive, but when he looked again it
was gone.
Isabel Rawsthome’s face haunted him. He put a vigil
light in front of her picture in his room, slept by it during
the day, sat by it when he returned in the morning.
There were periods of delirium—from eating nothing,
smoking too much, walking hour upon hour—when he
dreamt he was moving through time into eternity, but in
lucid moments, then, he saw he was going nowhere
wherever he went, for just as eternity is not prolonged
time, rather its negation, he realized in wandering he
might extend his area but never abolish space, and the
efforts, he saw, only became foolish failures. But the
persecutory delusions haunted him, the morbid wariness,
the unspeakable forebodings. The night seemed to distend
reality even more. Streets sped under him, cars went
motionless, bridges stretched out and broke in the middle
of their arches—even noises began to become removed
from their sources. Things seemed not to live but to exist
all the same. He began to pore over Isabel’s letters and
photographs, hundreds of them, trying to close out the
actuality of time and change which he saw, however,
simultaneously destroyed the possibility of expectation.
Rapture without hope: it led either to desolation or a
frightening kind of credulity; he experienced little fugues
now—one in particular that touched a ghostly world
whose symbols represented potentiality rather than
reality: somehow, somewhere, he felt, his cat lived;
somewhere, somehow he was loved— a superposition he
repeatedly, self-hypnotically, began to construct for
himself by projecting a hypothetical world where all
possible outcomes could exist! He tried to will the
fulfillment of his every desire by supreme efforts of
concentration and at such moments would quickly hurry
back to his rooms to see if his cat had returned, if the vigil
light was still burning, if his telephone might ring, but it
hadn’t, it wasn’t, it didn’t.
There was never any change—only the photograph of
Isabel on the shelf, his enemy twin looking in cold
penetrance through his emptiness toward someone else.
Gilbert van der Slang, the merchant semen. But who was
he? A great fly of Beelzebub’s, the bee of hearts, which
mortals name Cupid, Love, and Fie for shame! And
weren’t brothers, having carnal knowledge of the same
woman, damned by Scripture? What found King Henry
VIII but Arthur drowned in the depths of Catherine’s
well, forcing him to spawn a dying nephew on his aunt
and then sire in the belly of a six-fingered whore a most
unnatural daughter as an excuse? A most unnatural act,
then! But then what response? There but for the grace of
God go I? But wasn’t the grace of God, thought
Darconville, available to all? It wasn’t! It wasn’t!
The long days passed, each instant hideously
widening the fact of separation, multiplying its
significance, leaving him more and more isolated. He
rehearsed everything over and over again in his mind—a
mind that whatever its sorties into the world of experience
always returned to sleep only with its dreams. He was
literally sick with love. Obscurely, it had never really
occurred to Darconville that Isabel would leave him, the
purity of which assumption, with the passing days, he
sadly came to reinterpret—for he began to borrow from
the delights of love its implements of torture—as being
motivated less by love or any medieval sense of courtesy
than by the promptings of his own self-esteem. He hoped
for what he needed to believe, aspiring to the measure of
what he believed from the very measure of where he was,
almost as if to prove to himself that one can see stars
during the day from the bottom of a well. Still he would
not abide a single thought against her but continued to
wait, convinced somehow that waiting itself—as though
to obtain love we need but confess our own, as though to
perpetuate love we need only strangle jealousy—would
bring her back. Bring her back! Bring—! He tried to set
his face against emotion but broke down and wept
bitterly, his tears blinding him not only for his own vanity
and presumption but for the terrifying reoccurrences now
of sudden, irrational behavior: he began to speak to
whoever it was that lived in the same body with him, for
there were two of them now talking to one another, a dual
form paradoxically shaping to an individual he didn’t
know!
 Darconville declined to be seen anymore—for real
abnormalities, seriously convincing him he was losing his
mind, began to appear— and he locked himself in his
rooms. During the first few days he had tried to write,
savagely, but didn’t, coming to welcome interruptions and
obstacles because they could be held responsible for his
crude failures, then the delay, and finally his
mercilessness; now, he fully refused to see anyone, to
leave the rooms, or to answer any of the knocks on his
door, delicately holding his breath under such
circumstances until whoever it was went away. An
appalling disorder soon prevailed up there, and school
papers became misplaced, communications went
unanswered, as he fell into more prolonged fits of mental
and physical torpor. The atmosphere of the rooms was
now like a little self-contained and closed universe, a kind
of ambiguous gloom in which almost immediately it
became hard to distinguish with certainty between the
menacing and the merely ludicrous. Nothing was real or
of any significance except that which went on in his
mind, and over everything hovered a subdued air not only
of constant expectancy but also of sibylline
disappointment, of promises kept to the ear but broken to
the hope.
Whole days blotted out. He would sit in the darkness
feeling a weird urethral chill, frozen in silence, or go
maundering up and down for hours whispering to himself
and trying to follow his torturous thoughts over every
incident of the long four years as if in thinking, like
surpassing the speed of light, he might move backward in
time, but time is a curve, and, rounding around on him, it
only brought him back once more to the immediacy of his
own great grief. The coexistence of his despair with her
joy became a hideous paradox. Did she feel nothing for
him? Could there be nothing between two people? On the
one hand, he reasoned, if there is strictly not anything
between two things, then they are together! Or adjacent,
perhaps—so joined? But what that is joined can then be
two? A distinction thus emerged for Darconville between
nothing and a nothing—and yet can you “have” a
nothing? My God, he thought, there’s proof of the thing in
my very own heart!
One night he tried, unsuccessfully, to telephone Isabel
sixteen times. He spoke, several times, into the dead
receiver.
The terrible sin of tristitia set in. Darconville felt
guilty now about his intellectual aspirations to probe, and,
although in his heart he knew the conspiracy in Fawx’s
Mt. had been long in the making, he prayed: let me only
understand, not judge. But why had it happened? What,
he wondered, did losing a father mean to a girl? What
immeasurable insecurity, what anxieties, had to be
relieved? What unknowns did she fear she’d face in
leaving that small town? What kind of love could
instantly become so brutal, mocking him with his own
words that once so loosely prophesied that one emotion
by the other might be read? What had she feared in him,
then? It occurred to him suddenly that perhaps Isabel
inspired in him a desire for much more than herself! What
if she knew, somehow, that she was only that inspiration
and nothing more—even to herself—an insubstantial
creature empty as the light by which someone else sought
to find the very meanings she herself, merely hinting at,
never embodied and never possessed and never would?
Could that be? The beloved object not a beloved object
but only a means of loving? The thought stabbed him. He
sagged, driven and derided by the ridiculous and
incompetent creature he’d become, by the derangement
erotic passion had caused in him. It had been more than a
week since he’d eaten, and if physical movement had
become difficult now even the simplest reasoning seemed
to require enormous effort. The persistently gnawing
feeling of inferiority he felt, living as he now was
between insignificance and silence, might itself be a clue,
he thought, for perhaps she saw she couldn’t be all that he
loved, coming to hate in herself what he expected and yet
needing at the same time to destroy the possibility of what
she felt she could never achieve. Expectation is
temptation. Where there’s a won’t there’s a way. And yet
could such things be?
Darconville looked at her photograph, faintly lit by
the flickering candle: had that face, he wondered, been an
inspiration or a challenge to his love? The composition of
beauty could not have been more classical; it reflected
what it had promised, yet in what had been shown was the
utter moral defeat of its form. Content and form were at
loggerheads. There were two simultaneous but
incompatible forces within her—a classical love,
embodied, and the disruptive insight, expressed, that that
was precisely what she couldn’t bear. Were both equally
real and yet each unaware of the other? Was it possible?
Can the mind prod itself into deciding which value it will
observe in a universe where those unobserved, but
equally real, have also actually happened? Could she hate
the very legs she used to walk away and wish in the ones
she never had to have come? The picture reflected exactly
what it wasn’t, as if framed in a paradox that seemed to
ask “Who speaks of the failure of vision?” and implicitly
answering “I.”
 The close reasoning somewhat deranged Darconville,
and it became the point of departure for another one of his
fugues, a theory whereby, in trying to re-establish his
hope, he formulated an approach to experience in which
radically opposed and yet equally total commitments to
whatever event might be able to coexist in a single
harmonious vision, and with painstaking exactitude he
tried to make an existence assertion out of exhibitive but
seemingly irresolvable paradoxes and contrarieties: a
realibus ad reliora. Every negation, he concluded, is also
a determination! And in that dismal set of rooms he
resumed again that strange and willful attempt at
psychokinesis—trying to move something by the power
of the mind—and as if convinced that miracles must exist
and didn’t only for want of someone around to be amazed
by them (for wasn’t opportunity but chance favoring the
prepared mind?) he this time began to reason that there
must be an alternate universe that constructs the opposite
decision points of those made in this universe, for if what
doesn’t happen could have, so somewhere, in-
determinism says, it must! Desperately he tried to reason
logical necessity into his love, for reality, he decided, was
not thinkable but in relation to an activity by means of
which it becomes thinkable: nothing that couldn’t come to
happen is unthinkable; nothing could come to happen that
won’t; nothing that could come to happen doesn’t. I am
who am not, thought Darconville, walking in circles and
mounting fertile and despairing explanations for his own
barrenness, for who can affirm, he concluded, that
meaning does not exist in terms which don’t also imply it
does? Am I ignored, he wondered then, only that I might
love the more, to savor in the breach what I can’t in the
observance? How else could Laura have been Petrarch’s
when she married someone else?
It was insane, Darconville suddenly saw, all of it! To
try to divine exactly and scientifically the ultimate reality
which is not? With a raw glare of grief into these
monstrous distortions, he saw the tangle of logic for what
it was, a confusion which pointed only toward itself as an
example of the silence it feared and the truth it cowered
before. The humiliation of not-knowing: it was a black
fast of the mind, for what he knew was little, and
worthless in the face of what he tried to believe without
knowing, and still less in respect of that which he had
been prevented from finding out. There was no light.
There was no noise. There was nowhere to turn. He felt
only the ceaseless thumping of his heart under the
bedclothes, the rigid stillness of what passed for repose,
and, occasionally, the absurd begging whisper in the
darkness, “Un altro, un altro, gran’ Dio, ma meno forte.”
He soon began to go to the sheds. It was a condition
of one anorec-tic day after another, exacerbated by
furious smoking—and then drinking. He was now afraid
to call Isabel, fearing in an irrational way the grief of fact
more than the nothing of fantasy, wishing as he fell to
remembering recollected visions of her face—laughing,
sad, consenting, surprised, indifferent, affectionate, etc.—
for a suspension of that mindless oblivion, if at all, then
quickly, the waiting somehow for the worst news of all,
the news that does not kill hope because there is none to
kill, but merely ends suspense. It was a terrifying
freedom, where to be free was to be alone, to be alone to
be imprisoned and so to be imprisoned not to be free. The
smirking folds in the curtains, the bedsheets, a coat
thrown over a chair seemed at moments to leer at him. He
sometimes thought he heard whispers, that someone was
standing beside him in the darkness there. He would
confuse one event with another, beginning to think of one
thing as a consequence of something else which had in
fact occurred only in his imagination, often the product of
nightmares that were followed by an overwhelming
apathy which formed, so to speak, the reverse side of his
previous terror, all leaving him in utter bewilderment with
neither spirit to spend nor resolution to spare. He began to
suffer severe attacks of diarrhea for days on end and to
experience the illusion of water everywhere—on his bed,
on his arms, on the floor. One night he unexpectedly
caught his reflection in the bathroom mirror—frightening
himself—a matter that gave way to supernatural fears and
speculations, the worst of which was that he began to
think by performing various acts in combination, no
matter how banal, he might, by inadvertence, summon up
the Devil. He lost all track of time. Once, when the
secretary of the English department telephoned to ask if
he knew he had a class waiting for him he hung up on her.
He only prayed for day to end, for night to fall, drinking
heavily now to stem the tortures of insomnia which he
actually began to believe someone was doing to him, and
dawn never broke that he didn’t awake—lassatus sed non
satiatus—with a weltering grief at the very first start of
consciousness. He was in Cambridge no more. He was in
the depths of Malebolge, where the pains are not felt if
you’re half-dead unless you’re also half-alive.
The agony came to him in tenfold terror one night
when, after downing half a bottle of liquor and howling a
repetition of wild, importunate cries to heaven-—prayers
only in the broadest sense, for they grew increasingly
more isolated from anything touching on need or belief—
he fell upon the bed into a haphazard heap like a dust-
devil. It was then that he had the nightmare: he was alone
and threading through the weeds of an old graveyard, past
half-veiled urns, when he saw an angelic stone figure with
flowing hair averting her eyes with a regretful hand and
gesturing in pain as she stooped for eternity to lay a
stone-wreath on a barely traceable tumulus, woven over
with wild witch-grass, in front of which a lichen-covered
cross leaned desolately off-true; a crone, her face like an
old tin peck-measure, with smears of dough left sticking
to its sides, inexplicably appeared nearby and pointing to
the angel cackled, “Is it me? Or is it I?” He shrank from
her and approached the stone figure slowly on dread feet
and suddenly froze in fright, for upon closer inspection he
saw the angel’s face fixed in a hateful smile, its cruelty
sharpened by a livid scar down the cheek just below the
eye! And then, underneath a hathi-grey sculpture of
himself, he read the legend on the tomb—

Darconville
Le Rival Donc

[[SKULL AND CROSSBONES]]

And then he was sitting up, breathless, his eyes loops

of fright. The bedpost assumed the face of a Dutch
sooterkin!
Welcome, Sir Diomed!
And, leaping at it, Darconville would have effected
the brutal elimination of Gilbert van der Slang right on
the spot had not the spectre within his throttling grasp
dwindled back just as suddenly into a bedpost. The rage
he felt! He had thought he’d heard enough of this
shadowy creature in the ostensive reduction Isabel
favored him with back in Fawx’s Mt., an ill-concealed
pretext lisped as if she were wooing a cat and yet
revealing what?—a little baggy-trousered midship-mite
with his thumb plugged into his nether land and a mouth
shaped like Flanders, the land that traded in many
tongues! It was impossible to ignore this creature, as he
had his brother, and Darconville now absolutely thirsted
for information about him. But the regrets! During all
those years when it would have been of capital
importance to pay attention, everything conspired to the
opposite, with both of them, lover and cuckolder, flying
flags of convenience until it was too late. To know him,
nevertheless, would surely be to know her! It wasn’t
enough that what had happened was true; it had to be
explained! And yet only to hear a banal commentary on
this thing which was incomprehensible—what was to be
learned by that? What would he be told, falsehoods told
against one suitor only to be reversed for another, that
both might come to believe with a strength proportionate
to the inaccuracy or even the unlikeliness of the
information what Isabel provided? Come, tell a pin! And
then what would he learn? Deceptions pried out of a score
of shattering discoveries only to create, in the unchecked
bluntness of a nimble investigation, a sudden new value
for them they never had and so bring the two closer
together in the fierce protection of it? No, strike not a
stroke, he thought, for dexterity will obey appetite when
the time is right. Govert! Gilbert! The princes orgulous!
Newts and blindworms! Jackanapes with scarves! What
didn’t they deserve? Thank pity, thought he, if you would
keep your ears!
 Darconville’s mind, however, now became his eye.
He felt as love seemed to die, hate seemed to come alive,
as if the very emotions fed on each other for proof, but
still determined to it he refused to accept what had taken
place and strove, almost superstitiously, to dedicate
himself to an ideal of patient clearheadedness lest the
demands of fanaticism, coming headlong and malicious,
kill the sweetness he saw he needed for Isabel to come
back to him. He prayed his pathetic prayers, staying up
late and engaging in rigorous nights of exomologesis and
palm-thumpings, and then one night found that waiting
was no longer enough. It was finished. Had he not
tarried? Aye, the grinding, but one must tarry the bolting.
Had he not tarried? Aye, the bolting, but one must tarry
the leavening. Had he not tarried? Aye, aye, the kneading,
the making, the heating, the baking, and the cooling, aye,
the cooling, for one may chance to burn one’s lips, but
tarry he could no more. Shivering, he felt a sensation of
physical cold coming upon him, the kind strangely
associated with, and coincident to, either sadness or
amorous expectation, and so he picked up the telephone.
The time had come.
He dialed: closing his eyes, he clasped the receiver
with both hands. When suddenly he heard Isabel’s voice
he literally couldn’t speak—the long days gone by, the
pointless suffering, the awful love for this girl
misassembled in thought’s astonishment all he wanted to
say. He could only see her gentle eyes, her mouth, her
sun-shot hair. She asked who it was; he whispered her
name. The silence that followed reached to forbidding
degrees, an incalculable suspension like that moment of
unknown consequence that comes when time, by a stare,
seems to drop away in the intensity of trance. What, she
asked with an overtaxed edge in her voice, what was it he
wanted?—a question that became the sudden rectification
fact imposes on memory, transforming his desire now into
the terrible obsession he expressed and then forcing the
answer she used, in a kind of grace, to slay with speed:
“It’s too late— you’d better face it now! You’re mad as a
hatter!” And she banged down the phone.
And then suddenly a hideous scream filled the room
—the most dreadful and abject sound Darconville had
ever heard: he sat white with terror, quivering, as it rang
in his ears with inflexible steadiness until a silence, like
denial, fell about him telling him what he could not feel
and still could not believe. It had been his very own
voice.
He sat there, in the darkness, shivering in the dreadful
chill of his diarrhea. Then he stumbled over to the mantel,
blew out the vigil light, and took a bottle over to his desk
where he slowly prepared the moment—he artfully
composed a letter to the Naval Academy on official
Harvard stationery requesting a photograph of Gilbert van
der Slang on the pretext of his having been selected by
the college for some special award of merit: a sprat to
catch a mackerel. He drank from the bottle in long pulls,
gulping more, then finished it all, wishing he would die—
not that he faced death with fortitude, he merely faced life
without any. Laboriously, he proceeded to dress and for
the first time in weeks went out of his room, the effort in
simply descending the stairs—where he called and called
and called his cat—leaving him weak to the bones and
whiter than a corpse.
He made his way to the corner of Mt. Auburn St. and
mailed the letter: extinctus pudor. It was a very cold
night, making the simple act of walking—a struggle in
illness and fatigue and drunkenness— next to impossible.
Crossing back to Adams House, he looked up toward the
morbid rooms with the pulled shades and tears of
bitterness sprang to his eyes. You are crueler, you that we
love, he thought looking toward the sky, than hatred,
hunger, or death. He reeled. “You have eyes and breasts
like a dove, and you kill men’s hearts with a breath.” A
group of students stood in the Adams doorway on Bow
St., and the gaunt unkempt figure pushed past them.
“You could say excuse me,” exclaimed one of them
with disdain. Darconville turned slowly.
“I would have,” he said, seriously, “if I didn’t have to
speak to you.”
The door closed, and he was no sooner inside before
the hallway suddenly moved; the floor seemed to buckle.
A strange black light leapt in front of his eyes.
Darconville reached for the nearest wall to steady himself
but fell to the floor, his face a greyslick, and lay there in a
state of obdormition, more dead than alive, but alive still,
alive nevertheless, relentlessly alive to the mysterious and
deathless reality in which for no known reason he was
living.

LXXVIII

The Prodigal Son

But now experience, purchased with grief, has made

me see the difference of things.
 —CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, The Jew of
Malta

IT WAS with Darconville now as with wastrels, left

with thoughts such as sue and send, and send and sue
again, but to no purpose, the evil of policy and plot
having rained down like a plague upon everything of
value he’d once owned. His was the compunction of one
fallen from grace, whose wounds were of a nature to be
cured no longer with balms but corrosives.
The folly! The sacrilege! The loss! The inheritance
he’d squandered when, forsaking his father’s house, he
came down from Galilee and wandered south toward
Moab, over to Edom, and then into Goshen itself! The
wasted dreams! The pens, inkcakes, and writing palettes
sold for a fistful of silver to buy rings and baubles and
toys on night-walks through the shadowy sûks of
Rephidim! Cheated at Damascus! Burnt with fire at
Shushan! Robbed in the leaping-houses of Al-duqa as-
sawda! The pagan idols and teraphim on whom he threw
away whole fortunes in rubies and gold! The self-
satisfaction in the face of fate! The feasts and banquets
given over to whole cities, the drinking out of full bowls,
the dancing in silver-soled sandals to obscene flutes and
timbrels! What truth hadn’t been forfeited, what trust not
mislaid? Beaten in Jezreel! Drugged in Bubastis! The
excesses in the abiding places of Babylon, attainted of
outrages on morals and perfumed with calamus and
onycha, where to amuse herself one night a whore
swallowed his richest pearl and, to flatter her, he
wallowed in her flesh as if there to find it! The emptiness!
The trivialities! The turmoils of weeping before the
ghosts of what he couldn’t have! All, all had profited him
nothing! The profane songs sung to unkempt shepherds in
the Wilderness of Zin, the dice-throwing with the soldiers
of Porcius Festus, the wasted years dabbling in
Gnosticism! Ridiculed in Gath! Corrupted in Philistia!
The dissipation in the brothels of Megiddo where fops
smeared themselves with malobathrum and ate
pomegranates watered with silphium and collop-bellied
tarts danced naked before the graven images of Baal! The
fools and Marduk-faced losels and malefactors on whom
he gambled away entire fleets of Cilician horses! The
recklessness! The presumption that he deserved to be
loved! The love he foreswore while, ignoring his faith, he
sucked up to thralls and hirelings and read in counterfeit
books and riddled wit with the high-priests and
intellectuals of Ecbatana and Zebulun! The silences he
took for adoration! The extravagance! Perverted in
Admah! Condemned in Zeboim! The chances he had
thrown away! Who hadn’t loved enough could now not
love at all! All, all lay dead upon his hands!
Crying out, Darconville struggled to get up—then fell
back flat onto the floor, totally unconsciovts. It was late at
night, gone quiet now, and there was no one around to
help him who might have for who could have been found
in the hallways at such an hour? That night God and
Satan fought long hours for his soul. And God conquered.
It was only left to be determined which of the two was
God.

LXXIX
 Keeper of the Bed

A brave scholar, sirrah; they say ... he can make

women of devils, and he can juggle cats into
costermongers.
—ROBERT GREENE, Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay

“UNE NUIT BLANCHE, VIEUX?”

Darconville opened his eyes.
“It’s cognac. 1884,” said Dr. Crucifer, solicitously
hovering over the bed and holding out a round goblet.
“Please, won’t you allow me to lead you beside distilled
waters?”
They were in a bedroom of a portentous size, with a
barreled ceiling crisscrossed with oak slats in a pattern
something like a cat’s cradle. A rich Burgundian tapestry
hung on a far wall: two medieval figures hurrying out of a
garden at the behest of a stern pointing angel. Below it
stood a phonograph. There were silver sconces by the
door, ginger jars, mirrors. A beautifully quilted
counterpane heavily worked with a design of gold
fishbones and anthropolatric-faced pentagrams had been
neatly folded on a Jacobean cross-legged chair next to the
four-poster bed in which, inexplicably, Darconville now
found himself. It was a cumbrous load of oak—the sheets
yellow silk sprigged in black—so tall to reach from floor
to ceiling and wide enough that it appeared to be designed
for three.
 “What is this? Where am I?” asked Darconville,
trying to sit up.
“You were found—drunk enough to piss through
your shirt collar. Ill. Delirious. I don’t doubt you’ve had a
bad experience. I see you went down South, the Albania
of America, mmm?”
“What—?”
“Lie back, my dear. Don’t misunderstand me: the
airplane ticket in your room—I went to fetch your
pajamas—spoke volumes. It’s irrelevant, anyway. You’ve
been raving out loud about little else since last night, so I
shan’t pretend not to know what’s happened. Fawx’s
Mt.,” pronounced Crucifer with a snort. “Village life and
peasants with water-buckets? Flown over by a bird of
paradise? Heading towards the sun? How goes it down
there—are men still men, women women, and the sheep
glad of it?”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” said Darconville,
attempting to rise but falling back, weakly.
“I should tell you,” explained Crucifer, his babylike
mouth puckering and making little glub-glubs, “there is a
doctor’s order involved. Your lungs, I’m told, aren’t as
they should be. And it’s left for me to see that you eat and
rest. Trust me, now, won’t you?” Darconville waved aside
the drink. “There is a bottle of tablets next to your bed:
benperidol. It will relax you,” he smiled, “—to say
nothing of completely eliminating sexual desire. Take
two.” He waited. “No? Then keep them handy. You’ve
been hurt, Al Amin. You went down there to the
outreaches, like Alexander the Great, to find yourself
surrounded by enemies on all sides: the licentious
members of the Confederacy of Corinth; the tributary
splacknucks of the province of Thrace; the inveterately
hostile Illyrians with their steeple-hats and peaked shoes
and dental preterites—and what happened to you?
Futuata!” Dr. Crucifer removed the counterpane from the
chair and in one belswaggering move sat down,
awkwardly. It looked as though he could have taken up
the slag of his belly and wiped his eyes with it. “Like a
wood tick,” he smirked, covering his mouth, “I grow big
when I sit down. Now, tell me everything. The true riddle,
remember, always asks a question that can be answered.
I’m yours to the rattle, my child. Give me your hand.”
“That,” answered Darconville in an exhausted voice,
“is a favor, I’m afraid, you must grieve to be denied.”
“What are you thinking?” giggled Crucifer coyly,
lilting the phrase musically and wagging a finger. “I wish
but to console you. I am chaste, you forget. I have no
feelings below the waist, although to that,” he added,
crudely grabbing his empty crotch, “I cannot testify. Gone
are my ding-dongs,” he said, laughing until his ears grew
quite red, “my pair of dear indentures, king of clubs,
dainty duckers, rose-nobles, myrmidons. I experience the
Hang zum Tiefen in mind alone. I am as hollow as a
chicken’s vent. My temptations exist only in dreams.”
“The reality is otherwise for me. Leave me alone.”
Then Crucifer’s face dropped as if the smile had been
struck from his mouth by some invisible hand. His
diminutive fingers twisted, whitening the dimpled
knuckles. “Reality is never otherwise!” he screamed.
“And the attempt to realize one’s ideal in a woman—the
expression is as unfortunate as the undertaking—instead
of the woman herself, is a necessary destruction of the
empirical personality of the thing. Love is murder,” he
said, blinking furiously. “As for the higher platonic love
of man, women do not want it; it flatters them and pleases
them, but it has no significance for them, and if your
sweet little homage on bended knee to some doxy o’er the
dale lasts too long, as it apparently has, Beatrice will
transmogrify into a Medusa, as she apparently did.” He
smiled cruelly, his ordinary discourse as grave and
sententious as ever abounding with those aphorisms and
apologues so popular among the Arabs. “One signature,
as they say in the book trade, is sprung. Call yourself a
departee. You have been deserted.”
Darconville peered sorrowfully over the coverlet.
“She is gone.”
Crucifer passed him the glass again, and this time
Darconville drank, greedily. He held it out for a refill,
drank that, and then in a monotone characterized more by
lassitude than sorrow or distress—his lips dry, his head
back on the pillow—he took the whole confused story,
almost as if he were trying to clarify it for himself, from
the previous summer down to the present. But when he
had finished, he wondered why he’d even bothered to tell
it, for the abdominous creature beside him only fleered
and nodded, dumbly and arrogantly, and it seemed more a
blasphemy of the sacrament of confession than a shared
confidence. Crucifer sat meditatively, blind as his fish,
being urged on, or so Darconville now feared, to the
lunacy of one of his enantiopathic remedies and the
consideration, as a response, of perhaps trying to obtain
an effect opposite to the symptoms of the disease. And
yet a disease it was. Darconville was dying for love.
“I see it all now,” muttered Dr. Crucifer. “The frame
gives the picture perspective. She had a divided uterus,
like a seal, ready to carry a pup in one horn one year and
in the other the following year.” He leaned back. “It was
too late, of course, to grab her by the hypogaster and clap
on a chastity belt. The Unfaithful Foul! She may not be
the best girl in the world, but at least she’s the worst,
mmm?”
Crucifer went to the étagère by the window and took
a cigarette from a box.
“She did not believe her own belief, from what you
tell me, had doubts even as to her own doubts. She was
never absorbed by her own joy or engrossed by her own
silly sorrow. Casual, she pretended to be intimate, like all
the smouch-faced Hebrews and Ibrim and Terachites from
o’er the Euphrates with whom in guile she bears more
than a passing resemblance.” He lighted his cigarette, spat
out a ball of smoke, and shook his fist at the ceiling. “Le-
Al-tahrir filistin! With that selective memory, I think she
was half-Jew! You know, forget the Palestinian diaspora,
but remember the Holocaust, right? O Christ yes,
Darconville, women in mischief are wiser than men. She
never took herself in earnest and so never took anyone
else in earnest—was neither enthusiastic nor indifferent,
neither ecstatic nor cold, reached neither the heights nor
the depths. Her restraint became meagerness, her
copiousness bombast, don’t tell me, I know, and I trust
when trying to reach into the boundless realms of inspired
thought—for her enjoyed no sooner, like sex, than
despised straight—she seldom reached beyond pathos,
right? No, she couldn’t embrace the whole world but was
forever covetous of it, correct? Believing in nothing,
however, she took refuge in materialism, an avarice put
on to convince herself, leaving you to die, that something
had permanent value, and what value, what wonderful
wonderful value! The Southpaw! And yet how many tales
the while to please you had she coined, dreading your
love, the loss whereof still fearing? But when she chose
another—assured, of course, that whom she chose chose
her—chose as well to rob you of your choice!” He drew
on his cigarette. “‘I, Helen, holding Paris by the lips,’ “ he
purled smoke at Darconville, “ ‘smote Hector through the
head!’ And you won’t call it hateful? Why, not all the
subur-bicarian churches of Latium, Campania, Apulia,
and Bruttium could send enough prayer through the sky
to forgive the most harmless act of this smiling
psychocorrupter whom you call a woman but I call cat
whore! Do you hear me? Cat whore!”
Darconville closed his eyes in anguish.
“I can see her now. Can’t you see her?” he asked as if
trying to show the speakable by clearly displaying the
unspeakable. “Walking with stretched-forth neck, and
wanton eyes, and mincing as she goes to Maître Gilbert
Grippeminaud, making a tinkling with her feet,
anticipating his every move, and then coming out with a
little moue— the hypocrite! the glozer!—’O, I am
mithunderthtood!’ And while you are spending a month
up here suffering the tortures of the damned for her, what
is she doing?” Dr. Crucifer, grinding out his cigarette,
smiled angrily at his friend—then bounced at him and in a
lewd geste à l’appui drove Ms thumb into the well of his
fist. “Hardly the work of a lady, my friend, but I suppose
one should always applaud initiative.” He turned to the
tapestry. “No, Darconville, I take it to be axiomatic, a
matter of breviary, that Eve, being a mere woman, was
less like Adam than a serpent with a woman’s face was
like Eve.”
Crucifer sat down again.
“But why,” he asked, folding his hands over his
layers of puppyfat and hunching into himself, “why did
she wait for you to come up to Harvard to end it?”
 “I don’t know.”
“You waited. You rejected immediate satisfactions
with a view to obtaining subtler. Marriage.”
“She told me she needed more time.”
“Her presumption, yes. Your reply?”
“I told her to take that time. I loved her. I love her,”
whispered Darconville.
“A proposition you’ll think she took the liberty of
doubting—but you’d be gravely mistaken. Right there,
that was the camel’s nose under the tent. There was a plan
in the making, can’t you see? She knew what she wanted
and only wanted to keep her promise abreast of reality
until such time as she could with impunity do a quick
hundred-and-eighty in the other direction! She always
wanted to insinuate herself into that family, it would
appear, and to that end always kept her alternatives dry,
you see, so as to be able to follow in future what you
might call the Golden Rule: she who has the gold, rules!
The father’s footling! Give it two thralls!” He laughed.
“Amazing, isn’t it, how but farting can engender little
men? But this brother, that,” shrugged Crucifer, “strange
all this difference should be ‘twixt Tweedledum and
Tweedledee. As one was in the navy it’s evident he did
everything on the double—o’erleaping his brother, yes?
But whether Ferrex or Porrex, Hengist or Horsa, or any
other unphiladel-phian two you wish to name or number
she had best watch out: the wrath of lovers is much less
the wrath of devils than is the wrath of brothers!” He
winked. “Point taken? In any case, it was all as reasoned
as geometry for them, with no sudden passionate
expeditions on a stormy night to a waiting boat and then
by muffled oarlocks to Calais, oh no, don’t fall for that.”
He paused. “But the plot—”
 “I don’t think she ever planned to come.”
“You focus on details only to miss the whole,” said
Crucifer, blowing out his tongue to remove a flake of
tobacco. “It’s simple. She hoped you’d find enough
distraction in Cambridge to decide for both of you to end
it—and, ironically, like you she was waiting for nothing
but the very result your waiting explicitly forbade. It’s
hardly a matter of Minoan complexity. She thought that
you whose soul she stole to break would get over what
she herself never got involved in in the first place—and
never understood—a relationship that was an ideal she
was vain enough to flirt with, cunning enough to
acknowledge, but too small-souled to pursue, except, of
course, in terms of this relatively brief and temporary
romantic lavolta—a light bounding kind of waltz? In
which the woman is assisted by her partner? To make
frequent high springs? Oh yes! She was the deed’s
creature, I tell you, and by her female parent you lost your
first condition.
“I can see her, can’t you? No sooner a fornicator than
a whore, giddy for the mere exchange of arms, with all
expenses paid? It was a mind, Darconville, that could
hold only one idea at a time, never proceeding to
consequences felt in others and doing nothing in relation
to anyone but itself. It made a promise to stay and in a
winky-winky it was gone—once a pawn has moved,
remember”—he leaned forward and snapped the words
out-—”it can never turn back. She hasn’t fallen in love: it
was a realistic decision she made, after straightening her
seems, to live without the vision she feared because of her
shallowness would make her even more common than she
is.” Crucifer sucked a knuckle. “Have you ever noticed
that women who abuse men are always those whom men
have found unattractive? They confess to their own lack
of power to please.”
“She is beautiful,” said Darconville, almost inaudibly.
“O, the very queen of curds and cream,” replied Dr.
Crucifer, mockingly clearing his throat with a rapid
rumble. “I so happened”— he paused, making a comic
glime sideways—”to see her photograph, several of them,
in fact, when I stopped by your room.” His breasts
wobbled as he leaned forward. “Frankly, she has a low
frontotemporal hairline, close-set eyes—with a marked
trace of lubricity, I might add —a slight case of
oxycephaly, tits like griggles, and a scar on a face, I’m
sorry, that over-goes my blunt invention to say more.
Lascivious grace in whom all ill well shows! You claim to
love her. I smell the fallacy of praemissis particularibus
nihil probatur.”
Delighted, Crucifer cocked his little head forward
questioningly. It twitched.
“You defend her because you love her—’tis a pity
you can’t do so because she deserves it,” he breathed,
drowning his suspirations in the long draw of another
cigarette. “Love is too partial a piece of piety, you see, for
just as a man carrying a heavy bucket of water
compensates to walk by cantilevering a leg, so you must
alter your posture in order to keep your own balance, no,
my friend? And speaking of legs!” He held his hand in
front of his mouth, hideously, to laugh. “Darconville,
Darconville, Darconville. Honeysuckle is a weed. We are
deceived in what is not discerned, and to err is but to be
blind. I saw nothing but a pudgy self-preening angel of
banality with ankles like bottles, scarce twenty-odd years
above the girdle, some fifty beneath. Hodgepudding!
Globuliferous pig’s-trotters! A pippin grown upon a crab!
My God, it could diminish venery in a Turk! And I was
going to tell you to keep a contemplative distance from
beauty?” Smoke sifted through his teeth. “I looked at
those lubberlegs and it made me wish birth-control were
retroactive.”
“You don’t know what you sound like,” cried
Darconville. “You don’t know the girl. You don’t know
anything.”
“I know something,” said Crucifer forcefully. “And
of that something, much.”
“You know much of little then.”
“Let’s just say, I don’t know enough.” He leaned
forward. “Yet.”
Crucifer smiled in his face.
“I do know she was as deficient in good looks as she
was in intelligence and, yes, all right, dexterous enough to
realize her own inferiority, I’ll give her that, but ten
ducats to a dime she went and left you precisely because
she felt you’d one day leave her, having concluded in a
final assessment of what she really was that she lived
closer to her deficiencies than to her dreams. I know
more. I know she is a woman and that all women walk in
the sandals of Theramenes. And, finally, I know that if
she had been brought up as—but whist, whist! You say
she had no father?”
“Her father left her when she was a child.”
“Interesting.”
“She never knew him.”
“Fascinating,” said Crucifer, his voice squeaking.
Then his face underwent one of its sudden alterations.
“And I suppose I should now grow soft who with the
same piece of luck years ago was packed off in the
direction of my face to the Monastery of Monte Cretini?
Do not hope it, Al Amin: my heart was broken, I broke
none.” He paused. “But it’s curious, isn’t it? Elizabeth I,
bynempt Isabel—a woman who had more pricks in her
than a secondhand dartboard—killed a lover because of
her father.” He spat in disgust. “I remember the riotous
superlatives inscribed under her picture in the hall of the
post-Reformation Jesus College, Oxford. The Virgin
Queen, laughable soubriquet! The woman was the devil’s
quilted anvil, fashioning sins on herself and yet the blows
were never heard! King Harry the Fat’s murder of her
polydactylic mother-cum-whore, however, was not forgot
but flourished again in her daughter’s anti-paternal
slaughter of Essex. It was not only a revenge but a
repetition, the murdered mother finally emerging in her to
overthrow manhood in that dark inevitability and ghastly
satisfaction by no means unrelated to her father’s cruelty
which, in a kind of bizarre chiasmus, was repeated in her
own: it was no marvelous coincidence that Robert
Devereux—or the cardinal who bore your glorious name
—followed Anne Boleyn to the block. There was no
husband. Belphoebe had her own balls! And there was no
macBeth, although the entire realm cried out for one, but
in any case she’d have strangled the boy in his crib, not so
much that he might have grown up to kill a sovereign as
that he’d have been pricked out in the sex she’d so
proficiently come to hate. I’ve always thought it a pity,”
sneered Dr. Crucifer, “that the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew didn’t cross the channel to scour out a
throne and turn that red-haired bitch back into the
whibling she always was, ripping away that tallith of local
religion she used to hide under and crushing underfoot
that box of fortune-cookies called phylacteries she called
her laws!”
 Suddenly, he rang a bell by the side of the bed. “And
yet how like sits upon like. Isabel: Elizabeth—one’s a
wonder, the other’s a Tudor! Virginians two and two less
than a deuce. When they meet in hell they can shout
‘Snap!’ How things come round at last.”
Lampblack, tugging his forelock, appeared in the
doorway. “Lunch, Master Numps,” ordered Dr. Crucifer,
who before the boy went out explained with sharp
directives that he was first to pour him an apéritif and to
bring Darconville anything he wanted over the next few
days. “My bum-boy,” said Crucifer, smiling at
Darconville, “my clerk of the hanaper, my exécuteur des
hautes oeuvres.” The boy quickly obliged. Crucifer took
his glass and, standing, held it aloft to intone:

”A lexical man came to marry

And erred for the trull’s mood did vary;
The rosy cheeked bride, feared a
Uxoricide.
Prevail, worthy man, but be wary.”

“Get my clothes.”
“You aren’t well.”
“I have no intention of staying here.”
“Tut-tut,” warned Crucifer.
Darconville struggled to move up in the bed. “I do
not like you,” he said. “I do not acquiesce. I will never
like you. I will never acquiesce. Now I’ll say it once
more: my clothes, get them.” But he felt tired,
disoriented, and, troubled by an elusive interdiction there,
couldn’t help but sense that everything for which he’d
ever hoped or striven had somehow been relinquished in
the confines of that room. His chest ached, and even in
the dimmest light his eyes consistently hurt.
“You’re not going to be ungrateful, now, are you?”
asked Crucifer. He screamed for Lampblack. “You
mustn’t stir, in any case, not certainly until you’ve eaten
and—”
Crucifer’s eyes smiled, sheepishly.
“And?”
“—well, until the chlorpromazine wears off.”
Smiling, Dr. Crucifer held up the empty cognac
inhaler from which Darconville had drunk, twirled it
between his clubbed fingers, and set it down.
“And so, you see, we can continue without fear of
having to choose between other courses.” Darconville
slowly rolled over onto his face and breathed out in deep
agony as the keeper of the bed took the occasion, swiftly,
to refill the empty goblet from a special decanter he was
keeping under the table. “Now, we were discussing
motives, not ours, rather Mistress Commodity’s. It would
seem—”
But Lampblack suddenly appeared in the doorway
balancing a tray at eye-level; it held two steaming bowls,
some glasses, and a litre of wine. The boy carried it to the
table by the bed. Darconville, however, refused to eat
even as Dr. Crucifer, humped forward in hunger, told the
fare: bush of crayfish in Viking herbs and frog cream,
fingers of toast, and a sturdy Côtes de Montravel.
Lampblack—it was his habit —waited, biting his nails,
until Crucifer, waggling a bit of delicacy out of the bowl
with his fingers, held out the trifle to the boy which he
snapped up, and then he disappeared. Crucifer poured the
wine and raised his glass: “Confusion to ladies!”—and he
began to eat.
 “I was saying,” he continued, abrodietically licking
his fingers, “it would seem to be impossible to consider
this new mésalliance except in reference to you—the
simple logistics of a ladder: touching points. It was a
relationship, yes, but one of those relationships of
contradiction whereby the error of illogical distribution—
and of course,” he paused, “in love,” he sneered, “there is
never enough equality to go around—-prevented any
logical conclusion. Why, even the proposition that hides
in her name—I-A-E—serves no logical mood.
“We’re agreed,” said Crucifer, sucking in two fish
from the spoon and waving some toast, “there was a plot.
But why. See? How. She either came to look at herself
through your eyes, in my opinion, and, flattering herself
by what she saw in them, while at the same time not
uncoincidentally making you indispensable, was driven to
have that adoration confirmed elsewhere—a woman is
repeatedly compelled to call herself a reward—or, as I
say, your vision of the world frightened her to this point,
that she came to take a realistic view of things and,
reverting to type, capitulated for security! Money! Jews’
butter! Fric! A fellaheen habit, I’ve seen it before.
Semele, remember, prayed for a visit from Jupiter in all
his splendor, but when he came his lightning killed her.”
He smiled gruesomely and grugeoned at the food. “I love
that story.” He wiped away the smile. “You of course
asked very little of her, but hers, you mustn’t forget, was a
quest-in-reverse, an attempt to shed the meaning of her
life rather than find it, see? Emptiness is the female form
of perdition.” He squelched, chewing his food, and
breathed laboriously through his nose as he did so; the
cult of the belly as an ethic appeared to him as perfectly
natural, and it was obvious as he ate that he retained a
predilection for such celibates who displayed the good
sense of preferring gluttony to love. “Put a light load on a
donkey, you see, and it thinks it can lie down, literally, in
this instance —for women, like Egyptians, well know the
principle of the inclined plane—and so she gilt up her
eyebrows with arsedine, put on a tight sweater, and trotted
off down the road.”
“No.”
“And notice when she acted: precisely when it would
pay off. Good and evil in a woman’s mind, I tell you,
mean simply money and no money. Forgive me, but I
suspect unless one promised her marriage it’d have been
harder to plug her than to sneak daybreak past a rooster!
What, you don’t think he fucked her?” Crucifer grolched
noisily. “This is embarrassing.” He pressed his cheeks.
“I’m not being wrong enough. I’m too correct.”
“No!” insisted Darconville into the pillow.
“Very likely,” replied Crucifer, “exceedingly likely.
Very exceedingly likely.”
He calmly lapped some cream off the spoon.
“And for a Dutchman! The Pilgrims, remember, left
Leyden for America not for religious reasons—simply,
their children were becoming Flemings! I’ve been to
Holland. What, a sail down the Amstel, a box of sugar
cookies, and an afternoon listening to the horrible
rhythms of the Froth-Blowers’ anthem?” Crucifer poured
more wine and drained the glass. “Have you ever met this
rival?”
Darconville said nothing.
“No answer.”
He leaned forward.
“Did you ever try?” He waited. “No answer.
 “The Dutch dog, tell me, is he—wealthy? His
family?”
“Yes.”
“A color card! I tell you,” said Crucifer, fussing
through some green sprigs to pull out another crayfish
which he devoured like a bor-borygmite, “a woman’s
virtue is always in greater danger from opportunity than
desire. Ambition has an intellect that runs like a rat
through all the scrutinous possibilities here—and, I think,
has snouted a hole! She wouldn’t have been—”
Darconville turned questioningly to Crucifer.
“—promiscuous?’ ‘
“No.”
“No,” snapped Crucifer, sourly. “Pride! It is the very
one that will tolerate none of the other Deadly Sins—not
stinking, neither faltering, nor loosening its grip. It is self-
contained, protectively secretive, and so poised between
envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable to reason, that
as one monster seeks to predominate the personality the
other cries it back, and wantonness is mitigated in the
vain pursuit of self-esteem.” Crucifer clacked through his
bowl with a spoon for the last traces of cream. “Its
disguises are not pretense but fact, revealing not sanity
but concealing folly. Arrogance exacts seeming
perfection! It acts a lawyer to the will, which, while
appearing outwardly harmless,” said he, looking suddenly
strange, “conceals a most genuine depravity. I know about
depravity,” he whispered, never taking his cold eyes off
Darconville as he rang the bell. “I can see in the dark,
haven’t I told you? When most I wink, then do mine eyes
best see.” He rang the bell again. “I have told you that,
haven’t I?”
Lampblack, breathless, hopped into the room.
 “The tray, whetstone.” Crucifer smiled at
Darconville. “My amah, my sizar, my valet de chambre.”
The table was cleared quickly. Crucifer lighted
another cigarette and, behind the smoke, watched
Darconville carefully.
“Now, talk to me. Learn to confide. I shan’t say a
dicky-bird, I promise. Did she ever tell you she ever
wanted to go out with other men? Once even?”
“Never. No.”
“Exactly, you see?” Dr. Crucifer spat out a ball of
smoke and offhandedly held out another glass of cognac
to Darconville, which he took and drank. “The
kleptophobe is cousin to the kleptomaniac! When any
message is preached by a lover that makes its major claim
to virtue the assertion that she wants to go out with no one
else, it bears the poison of its essential destruction within
its own breath. She only knew that, when she acted, she
would act for good. There is always some brutish nether
fault in starved vanity, deep and gleaming like the eyes of
a shrew, almost hidden in its fur, yet when that shrew
decides to move, no matter in which direction it goes, its
hair will never muss. You would perfume, it appears,
what stinks like a hoatzin. The thing is now Greek and
now Roman. But during this four-year contrectation, tell
me, was she ever given the freedom to choose other than
you?”
“Often. Many times.”
“Specifically.”
“I went to London,” said Darconville. “Then.”
“You came back.”
“Encouraged to it. We were engaged to be married.”
“When precisely?”
“Three years ago.”
 “Why didn’t you marry her then?”
“She wanted to finish school. We agreed on it. She
was—” Crucifer nodded, saying, “Inexperienced. Say it.
But gentle and kind, right? She was kind in the beginning,
of course she was. The tare in its early stages looks
exactly like wheat. Inexperienced, gentle, kind—yes, and
young. But of canonical age,” Crucifer winked, “right?
But, tell me,” he whispered salaciously, “was she of
imperforate sex?” He leaned forward. “I mean, when you
first—”
Darconville’s eyes lowered sorrowfully.
“Dot dot dot,” said Crucifer, smiling. He folded his
arms. “This engagement, whose idea was it?”
Darconville looked piteously across the room,
confused in the salvo of questions that made reflection
impossible. “I can tell you this: I very much desired it, but
when I was in London she wrote not only that she loved
me but mailed me her grandmother’s ring—unasked for,
freely sent, yet happily received—to size another ring,
another finger of the same dimension.”
“A nimble finger.”
Dr. Crucifer stood up, a belly-dance contortion that
took three or four distinct moves, and poured some more
wine. “A nimble finger, a thimble brain, and a fimble for
a mouth. But did she talk much?” He arranged a few
pieces of toast left there. “Conversation?”
Darconville shook his head.
“Precisely,” said Crucifer. “And when she did?”
“It was—not always—”
“Remarkable? Of course not. On the contrary.
Distinguo. Like all silent people when she opened her
mouth she was a nag, thinking nothing of course but all
the while speaking like Bumbastis. A woman’s
conversation is always an anaphrodisiac, and no one
knows it better than they.” He swirled toast around in his
wine to remove the bubbles which gave him a headache
and set his neutral groin on fire. “I know that silence from
years in the classroom. Pigritia: plain slackness. But was
it silence? I wonder. Dumbness, perhaps-a situation as
regards women when they are at their most dangerous:
men are only too apt to take their silence as quiescence or
inactivity. But what an error in the estimate! The bitch
had moves and countermoves. No one ever leaves
somebody for nobody. She was the very Vicar of Bray.”
He glubbed more wine. “She told you she loved you.
To the last?”
Darconville nodded.
“Stories to delight your ears, favors to allure your
eyes? She touched you here and there? Oh yes. The
adverse party, with a suitable amount of proleptic irony,
was your advocate. But the time that went by! Is it any
wonder that Vulcan fashioned creaking shoes for Venus
that he might hear her when she stirred?” Crucifer swept
his arm from him. “She loved you—pish! She was loyal
—bubble! Fair proportioned—mew! Gentle of heart—
wind!”
Dr. Crucifer, meditatively, then began to walk,
watching the unsteady outthrow of his feet in front of him
as he paced the room with that awkward gait of his, left,
right, left.
“Yet digged the mole,” he murmured, “and lest its
ways be found worked underground. Fickle, false, and
full of fraud, this breeding jennet, in which with its
pluming and fakery the South is apparently rich, ill-
annexed opportunity and yet was still the owner of her
face! It’s astounding! My God, I am almost with child to
get to the bottom of this. She was a speaking cat. The girl
was a veritable Guicciardini.” He moved back and forth
on those premeditated feet. “To question is the answer.
Quaere: why did her relationship with you coincide
exactly with the years she spent as a student? Quaere:
how could she chance to confirm your replacement
almost on the very day you departed and not before?
Quaere: what was her original resolve in having decided
to tell you absolutely nothing of him while at the same
time hazarding his disaffection in the cultivation of your
love? Quaere: when exactly did she decide she needed
you for leverage? Quaere: where had she spent all those
days, weeks, months in your absence? Lies! Abominable
lies! The adulteress’s tenth muse!” hooted Crucifer.
“Fornication, spying, trespassing, lying, duplicity, bribery,
procuring, and conspiracy! She munched vacuity and
excreted fibs. Why, it’s a whore deep as a ditch! And then
take the dike-louper,” he asked, “—this nautical neighbor
—had she ever once mentioned him, even at the outset,
years ago, or referred to him in your presence? During a
row, say? After some balls-up or other?”
Darconville’s closed eyelids trembled, his nostrils
quivered, and he shook his head.
“And why?” asked Crucifer. “Why, but to keep you
ignorant!” He was standing in front of the tapestry with
his misshapen back towards Darconville, and then he
turned, that ghostly unnatural face working hopelessly to
try to animate itself with conviction, desperate, it seemed,
to try to reach, to shape, to appoint the life in another he’d
come to lose in his own but one, it was clear, he’d retrieve
not for the purpose of remorse but for the purpose of rage.
“A fact, it appears,” said Crucifer, “never went in
partnership with the miracle you saw as her.”
 He took the remark across the room to Darconville
and lowered over the bed, arranging the sheet to his
feverish shoulders. He looked at the tender concave
temple and would have kissed it but instead whispered,
“Did it?”
Dr. Crucifer stared into his eyes.
“The number of vibrations,” he breathed, “varies
inversely as to the length of a string; thus half the length
gives twice the vibrations, don’t you see? The less she
gave, Darconville, the more you imagined—and she
couldn’t leap an inch from a slut.” He sat down and
moved closer. “To live without facts, you felt, was to be at
the beginning of imagination. The artist, I don’t doubt,
may learn a wealth of lessons in this connection but,” he
glubbed, “the lover?—O dear me!”
Crucifer minimized nothing. A chronic oppositionist,
he had to depart every majority and to attack every
authority. When in argument he often refused to allow his
antagonist the chance to state his own case but would do
it for him, suddenly, and perhaps even fairly— and then
demolish it, gravely and frequently with an expression of
sympathetic regret. Curiously, he tried carefully to
conceal the way he secretly demanded things be
understood, so that swiftly, inexplicably, he could become
upset upon instantly being offended, and yet somehow,
with a tongue laced with proverb and sermon, strap and
ferrule, he never gave up one element of a problem for the
sake of coming to a comfortable solution. He railed by
precept and detracted by rule, seeking not to contemplate
truth but rather to subjugate it. He made precedence out
of example, underaccommodated, and wheedled. He
entered every hole.
 “That’s not all. The robbery of one age becomes the
chivalry of the next. She’ll be seen a heroine for what she
did.”
“Do you believe that?” asked Darconville,
astonished.
“As you come from the holy land of Walsingham.”
It was insupportable: but there was more.
“I can see her. Can’t you see her?” asked Crucifer,
wiggling his fingers in front of his eyes and
stutterstepping again forward. “There’s a gathering of
shagpats and semi-imbeciles in Fawx’s Mt. in the midst of
which, all smothered up in shade, she and her Dutch dunt
sit with juggling eyes, and when called upon to explain
the bravery of her decision, to keep it affronted,
unassailed, she blushes as if a fulgence had gone into her
womb, but when asked how they met, she curiously
forgets all her scheming, plotting, and dissembling—for
whatever guilt soever years should afford her is of course
all prevented in her select and aboriginal ignorance—and
putting her whorish hand on Gilbert Gooseboot’s knee
this object of common licitation lowers her eyes and
sweetly replies, ‘O, just fate.’ “ Crucifer squeezed his
hands and squatted a bit. “You see, she aspires, she
ascends. She’s attentive, she’s—”
An unnatural heat shot to Darconville’s heart.
“Ambitious,” he said.
“A grievous fault!”
Crucifer was almost beside himself.
“I can almost hear her: even now the turtle pants! She
spreads and mounts like arithmetic! Sex upon victory!
When cedars are shaken where shrubs do feel no bruise?”
asked Crucifer. “The delight she must feel! The she-
hippo! How she must have shrieked to see it done! She
thinks you’ll do nothing, of course—what, steal off to one
of the square states of Middle America? Join the
Carthusians to apply the cat, eat black radishes, and dig
your own grave? Lose your wits in some peaceful
province in Acrostic Land? Good, let her be right; it will
console her for being nothing else,” he said, “and yet—”
A subintelligitur crouched in the pause. Secredy he
took Darconville in from the comer of his eye.
“Yes?”
“It was only a foolish idea.”
“An idea?”
“An irrelevant idea,” he replied. He waited. “But you
do know I care infinitely for you, don’t you? That I
brought you here for no other reason? That the sheikh’s
tent is always pitched on that side from which the enemy
is expected?”
“What is it?” asked Darconville wearily.
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“No, it’s none of my business. God alone knows what
you’d find if you started turning over stones—though you
can be sure he’d hold it against you if you did.”
Darconville rolled his head back.
“But since you ask,” said Crucifer, catapulting
quickly on his hunkers by Darconville’s ear. “We can
change the meaning of a thing by seeing it in a different
aspect. Do you understand? What I’m saying?”
Darconville’s fever-weakened eyes registered nothing.
“As one object becomes warmer, an adjacent object must
necessarily become cooler,” Crucifer pointed out, “isn’t
that a law?” He began to look suddenly wild, and his ears,
bemedaled with heavy lobes, actually shook. “I assure
you, it is! There is a doing of right out of wrong, is what
I’m saying, if”—he winked and touched a finger to his
nose— “the way be found. I mean, if nothing is to be
attempted in which there is danger, we must all sink into
hopeless inactivity. You must look at my face: my
explanations are bound up with the way I put them. Listen
to me,” he hissed excitedly, looking behind him as if to be
certain they were there alone, “next to truth, confirmed
error may serve as well, and if a wrong must be made
right, why so it must even if the logic of it should lead
you,” he looked grave, then whispered under his breath,
“to do something.”
Crucifer fixed him with a knowing look.
“Do something,” asked Darconville, swallowing, “to
her?”
“You infer with acumen.”
He hadn’t a second to react before Dr. Crucifer
suddenly placed a hand over his mouth. It was jelly-cold.
“Wait. I say, if a wrong must be made right, if a way be
found, if it should lead you to, could you? Do something?
If,” repeated Crucifer who, constrained by the fullness of
his robe, clumsily bent to listen for the answer. “Say yes.”
Darconville lay motionless, looking up as if
everything had gone out of his eyes. Everything he looked
at, in fact, out of the cursed necessity of looking at
something, seemed subject to the relentlessly unfolding
and cruel paraphrase of what had once been his life.
“It’s hypothetical,” pleaded Crucifer, his voice
trembling in a little flutelike whistle. He stared at
Darconville with a jesting challenge— something deep
within his eyes seemed indulgently to flicker. “Just say
yes. No one need know. Only yes.” Slowly, he lifted his
hand, his lips pursed to a careful kiss: the impress of his
fingers lay across Darconville’s mouth.
 “Yes,” sobbed Darconville.
“My child,” whispered Dr. Crucifer.

LXXX

The Fox Uncas’d

Who hath the power to struggle with an intelligible

flame, not in Paradise to be resisted, become now more
ardent by being failed of what in reason it looked for?
—JOHN MILTON

“THE QUESTION NOW,” declared Dr. Crucifer, “is

what to do. You are bitten, you are not all eaten. But it
will be so preached—I can hear the crabbed textuists and
paraphrasts now—that if you loved her once, you’ll
therefore love her always and by acting to ignore justice
for peace so shall it be proved. The method of custom is
so glib and easy though, isn’t it? To prove you loved her,
though she doesn’t care a fig for you, you’re supposed to
spend a lifetime in silence with only a handful of glorious
memories to keep you from madness? To feast, to fart, to
finally forget?”
He turned toward Darconville with a condescending,
slightly ironic indulgence but saw in that pale and
chartaceous face (which made him seem more ill-shaven)
only two uncaring eyes polished in grey staring
indifferently, remotely, somewhere beyond the room.
There was a sudden diffidence about him that Crucifer
couldn’t bear.
“What, shall you spare her? Let her spread among us
until with her shadow all your dignity and honor, all the
glory of your name, be darkened and obscured? Resist by
what resistance would surely kill you? Simply ignore it?”
he asked in a succlamation of outrage, “as if to say that if
one were ill all one’s life getting well might then be taken
for another illness? Can it be? You’d allow them, the most
loathsome example of twinning since Sodom and
Gomorrah, to go scot free? Sit like a fool at home, Don
Pimp, and eye your rashers while open-eyed conspiracy is
all and everywhere about? I’d pray to Lucifuge Rofocale
to set an edge upon my pipes and chase the dusk of
conscience back across her face! I’d crack sixty axletrees
to get at her! I’d be on her like white on rice!” Crucifer’s
angry face was in a torque. “And you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Phluaria!” screamed Dr. Crucifer.
He swung through the bedroom, reaching up
furiously over his head as if he were going to pull down
lightning, his lips quivering like rubber-bands, and then
became stationary. He swallowed in embarrassment.
“Look at me.” He tried to laugh and fumbled up a
cigarette. “The future—you shake your head in advance, I
see, but wait, wait—the future is memory, I was only
going to say, if we don’t overcome the past.” Where,
Darconville wondered, had he heard those words before?
“The injury I insist you mustn’t fail to dismiss without
recompense, because you haven’t, is not therefore entirely
done away with, for to live still and not be able to love—
you don’t want that, do you? —is only to heap up more
injury. The woodcock is near the gin,” he prompted,
puffing his cigarette, “and, what, shall it now skip away?
O hell, perhaps it should,” quillwheeled Crucifer, feigning
loss of interest and eyeing Darconville surreptitiously,
“perhaps it should.”
Inhaling, Darconville pushed his head back into the
pillow.
Dr. Crucifer studied his cigarette, looked at
Darconville, shook his head, and continued staring at the
cigarette. “You’re gentle,” he said, puffing. “Gentleness is
nice—the very mood fair Isabel, I don’t doubt, is this
minute showing Captain Poop of the Yankee Frigate.” He
puffed. “And courteous, though it won you no hearts.
Obedient, but blindly. And then, it seems, proud.
Reverence to this! But of course when pride rides, shame
lackeys. Or,” asked Crucifer, now drawing closer, “are
you simply fearful? Darconville?”
What Darconville desired at that moment as he had
never desired anything before was a place in which he
could have lost himself forever. He drew a deep breath
through his nose and tearfully turned away. “Darconville?
“Ah, it’s the justice, of course, the ethics of it, that’s
it, isn’t it? The law. You are still in blind servitude to the
inquisiturient bishops and shaven reverences of the
Church! Come, Bocardo,” he snapped impatiently, “save
your tears for the fumes that live in an onion! Law,”
exclaimed Crucifer, “what is it if it can force itself against
the faultless properties of nature? Laws? My word, no.
Laws do not indicate what a people value but rather what
seems to them foreign, strange, and outlandish. You
mustn’t show them undue respect: they’re but exceptions
to the morality of custom, that’s all—why, in another
country my seinsembling and scrotiform-faced
stepmother would have thrown off her bombazines-with-
the-black-leg-of-mutton-sleeves for the scant-ies of a
common tart.” He crushed out his cigarette. “There are,
however, a few points of law to be gotten of your bitch’s
falsehoods, in spite of her—forgive the oxymoron-—
genuine hypocrisy. I will remind you of poetry, if you let
me. Will you listen?”
Crucifer rubbed his hands.
“The state, it could be argued, must be called to
account as to one of its highest functions, that of law—the
hubris of human ingenuity— and even possibly
condemned by the standards implied in the Utopian idea
of primal innocence, for hasn’t it taken upon itself one
form of dominion after another,” asked Crucifer, crossing
the room with his forefinger in the air, “and lorded it over
all the others, pretending, as though it were the daughter
of the gods, to a privilege beyond all other disciplines?
Primal innocence?” He winked. “Dwale and delusion! So
laws were grafted. Lawcraft? Sheepcraft! I won’t bore
you with a history of all its agathokakological claptrap,
Darconville, but simply point out that, at bottom, it owes
its essential existence to the depraved and fallen nature of
mankind—which it can never riddle, which it can never
rectify—and in my considered opinion is styled, when at
its most efficient, only to jingle at justice and to twill at
truth, especially in matters touching on that curious but
primal antagonism: the just thing versus the legal thing.
The law and the gospel,” he glubbed with obvious
delight, “are hereby made liable to more than one
contradiction, and if a mooching and piety-faced
forgiveness is all you know of either, where punishment
you take to be a crime, I must then reinstruct you that all
law has its beginning in that first crime of our first mother
and her low tongue—Johannes Goropius Becanus (1519-
1572) in his Origines Antuerpianae, Antwerp, 1569,
maintained that the original language of Adam and Eve,
and so the tongue of primal betrayal, was Dutch!—and
thereby cry out that you might let your severe and
impartial doom imitate divine vengeance and rain down
your punishing force upon this temerarious strumpet, this
mistress of the adroit lie, until like that fen-born serpent
she resembles at the root of all our woe she eat the dust of
her penalty for the rest of her life!”
Crucifer wiped his mouth and, walking like Agag
with a mounting gait, stepped toward the bed where
Darconville lay; coming closer and closer it seemed to
him that the creature became more and more
insubstantial. He backed away and Crucifer made a
mimicry of tentative assistance but he was far too anxious
to make a point to waste a motion.
“I sniff the air and find something wrong here yet.
There’s an odor of virtue in this room. Could it be
forgiveness? But please,” asked Crucifer, “how serve
virtues, tell me, other than merely to weaken? What in
fact are they, my man? Old ladies’ litations? The
desiderata used by saints to engender self-contempt in
anyone who must witness them? Nasty little abstentions
put about by society and religion for individuals with a
fortress mentality to live by, always to their disadvantage,
for the promotion and sales of the general good? My God,
how one is always privately victim to the virtues the
public sends down! It disgusts me!” said Crucifer in a
shrill piping boon. “No, the strength of knowledge does
not depend on its degree of truth but on its value to serve
the nature truth, as we know it, molests. Stricte dicte,
there’s a stinking partisanthip at the heart of all
definition! I am stocky, you are short and stout, he’s a fat
little turd, isn’t that how it goes? Why do we have to die?
Because we have to live. What the hell is life, then?—a
long death! It’s all grimgribbing, Darconville! Good and
evil are only the prejudices of God,” he continued, with a
species of mad hilarity in his eye, “and the dreadful
conclusion is that the ancient deadly sins, seven in
number, are in fact, all of them, very close to virtues, just
as the guilt you feel after committing a few of them is
arguably nothing less than responsibility in a funny mask!
And then if these so-called sins never existed, why, what
great authors, tell me, could have written their
masterpieces of humanity? Or whereby that they might be
corrected could we otherwise discern another’s faults?
And howso then maintain? Your enemy by any other
standard, can’t you see, would be an ephydriad. But, wait,
here’s latitude! It is precisely as tame animals that we
show ourselves a shameful sight. I tell you, people need
open enemies if they are to rise to the level of their own
virtue, virility, and cheerfulness. I mean, if the end
doesn’t justify the means, then what the hell does?”
Exulting in his intellectual power and dexterity he
seemed to be one of the greatest sophists that had ever
contended in the lists of declamation, his spirit of
contradiction and perverse delight in presuming to be able
in argument to maintain and even defend the wrong side
of things with equal aggression and ingenuity somehow
making error itself rich, permanent, and distinguished.
“The whole conception of man really sinning against
God is intolerably puerile. Call it sin? Sin is no sin when
virtue is forgot. Call it evil? Why, evil is only a freedom
exercised by one and invidiously disapproved of by
another, done as effortlessly and as naturally as time
passing. Dirty oil in a car means it’s doing its job! Every
great fortune is based on a crime, and fortunate crimes
make heroes. Successful crime ceases to be crime.
Success constitutes or absolves the guilty at its will. You
have been thrust into this part, do not forget, and must
remember of what you must contribute to it that if the
scene, not the act, is the unit of construction of this
Jacobean play, scenes lead to acts! If they call the reaper,
whet thy scythe. No, I favor any skepsis to which one
may reply, ‘I am revenged!’ You needn’t put an
unnecessarily persona] significance to it,” said Crucifer,
smiling in his eyes. “The rationality of the universe itself
suggests survival, and, my God, I’d rather live in any
loathsome dungeon than in any paradise at her entreaty!
Be only thorough! Fill the unforgiving minute! You can’t
cure a personality. Teach the thing manners! Split her—
how I adore the language that can tell you this—from
coon-slit to cap!”
Darconville blanched, closing his eyes and trying to
expel a terrifying picture from his imagination. The words
literally seemed insane. He had finally come across a
person, he realized, who, in that mysterious mythopoetic
world in which his own imagination for so many years
had insisted on moving, was a serious antagonist, a
madman butting at him through a baffle of antilogic and
embodying a depth of actual evil, the most terrifying
aspect of which seemed to be that his opponents were
selected with a sardonic delight in their incompatibilities.
“I can read your face, Darconville. You’d abstain
from such action as you know it, there’s no doubt, out of
mercy, out of temperance, out of truth, indeed, out of
love. Mercy’s all very well, but what of holy cruelty, to
disallow life for the misshapen, the ill-begotten, the
gormless? Temperance”—he spit a pip sound—”is for
nuns! If one continually forbids oneself the expression of
the passions as being rude and bourgeois, the result can
only bring about precisely what is not desired: the
weakening of them, the degeneration of power into
shallow and hypocritical etiquette! Truth? A logical or
mathematical proposition such as 1+1=2 we say is true
not because of prior ‘meanings’ or rules, conventional or
otherwise, much less because of some necessary
correspondence with reality. Such a proposition we take
to be true simply because, and in so far as, we choose to
regard it as true and merely select signs to suit the terms.
Figure like the Dutch: they have shaped their religion in
the shape of their heads, which explains why there are
three hundred different forms of worship over there, all
supposedly Christian! True and false are but a blind
turned upon a pivot. In combat every man fights his own
war. There is no such thing as a rule.
“But love?” Crucifer’s tongue seemed to sour on the
word. “What is this bit of jackasserie from the goliardic
corpus of pothouse verse other than lust for possession?
The lover desires sole and unremitting possession of the
person for whom he longs, seeking unconditional
dominion over the soul and body of his paramour,
demanding it exclusively. But if one considers that this in
fact means nothing less than excluding the whole world,
my dear, from the so-called precious good, if one
considers that the lover aims at the impoverishment and
deprivation of all competitors—a wild and
^compromising avarice that has been deified over the
ages—then love is nothing more than the vilest
expression of egoism and greed! This is the good you’d
preserve to love, presume to lure, pretend to like?” His
voice took on a tone of expostulation. “Why, admit this
silliness a virtue and, by Christ, you’ll be but advocate to
her crime!” He joined his hands and shook them with
blurring speed. “Shall I reckon for you in the law? Shall
I? Then I shall tell you that the law is a blank to be filled
in by circumstance! To torture in Holland, for instance, is
considered as a favor to an accused person! Haven’t you
read Dr. Johnson on the subject? No man was put to the
torture there, he explained, unless there was as much
evidence against him as would amount to a conviction in
England and therefore an accused person among them had
one chance more to escape punishment than those who
were tried in England. No, there is not one thing with
another, but Evil saith to Good, ‘My brother, my brother, I
am one with thee.’ “ Then his eyes became as hollow as
the unboweled winds and he spoke low. “The concepts of
good and evil merely address the idea of the expedient
and the inexpedient! One holds, so it goes, that what is
called evil harms the species, that what is good preserves.
In truth, evil instincts are expedient, species-preserving,
and indispensable to as high a degree as good ones—their
function is merely different. Abandon all thought of
consequence, says Krishna, for good and evil are
essentially the same in a world which is an emanation of a
unitary spirit.” He quoted

“The dart of Izdabel prevails!

’Twas dipt in double poison.”

“Then think: in a world where penitence is

boastfulness—is this virtue?—and giving an expression
of hostility whereby, the crudest form of bondage, a
person is incapable of repayment—is this virtue? I smell
only cadaver in a living body. Is this the zeal you’d have
surround your cause? Think on ‘quietism’—the gift of
virtue she’d have you get. The slave accepts the kindness:
it dulls the edge of rebellion and wins the donor a lifetime
of subservience. The virtue that violates, the kindness that
kills!” He shook his head. “Is it any wonder, my God, that
the gospel of Laodicea urges people to be temperate in
what they call goodness as in everything else?”
Dr. Crucifer took a breath, folding his tongue in the
mouth that constricted in an ugly munch.
“I tell you, hard cases make bad law and where the
law is so broad as to be applicable to all circumstances
there is no obligation to obey it in any circumstance. A
man must sometimes rise above principle!” he said with
an angry smile. “Law, as I say, is ultimately the
consequence of man’s fallen nature. Hence came first the
law of corrupted nature, which they call jus naturale or
natural law, and among its excellent principles and rules
—hope, ye miserable; ye happy, take heed—can be found
these: vim vi repellere licet, violence may be driven out
with violence; frangentem fidem fides frangatur eidem,
there is no need to keep trust with one who does not keep
trust; falsa causa non nocet, an error in motive does not
effect the validity of an injury in those who deserve it for
another just reason; fallere fallentem non est fraus,
swindling a swindler is no swindle; volenti non fit injuria,
to one who asks for it, there can be no injury; si te vel me
confundi apport eat potius eligam te confundi quam me, if
one of the two of us must come to harm, you or I—this,
of course, to be applied,” said Crucifer, his eyes taking on
a lurid look as if lit by the fires of hell, “to whom it fits—
then rather you than I. Oh yes, and much more of the
same kind which must be reckoned among the laws. Why,
tongues I could hang on every tree that might civil
sayings show, but that’s as it is, isn’t it? I don’t think you
have to hear more, Al Amin.” Crucifer touched Dar-
conville’s arm, confidentially, as if to bring him further
under his influence and with slippery eyes moved even
closer. “You know what I’m asking for, don’t you?” He
looked over his shoulder like a conspirator in a play and
with sudden evaporating cheerfulness directly asked in a
low, low whisper, “tell me, have you no rasp in your
farrier’s kit?”
Darconville looked up at him.
“You smell.”
Crucifer’s rigid eyes shot contempt, and he stumbled
up, caught by reason of its bunchiness, on the hem of his
robe and almost sprang to the far side of the room where
as if seized convulsively he sought to expel, and expel
again, and expel once again his sudden breath which,
rattling, seemed to indicate a valvular disease of the heart.
The indurated pause that followed did not last long. He
made a forlorn show of jauntiness, and, as he turned, his
face became more insinuatingly piggy.
“I told you,” he smirked, walking to the étagère, “we
‘leaked’—an inadvertence causative to my operation.
Repellent, you’re thinking.” He took up a Stiegel-type
bottle and, unstoppering it, quickly perfumed various
parts of his body. “But you wouldn’t intentionally insult
me, would you? Because I have no dowsets? Have a care,
Sir Formal. I am inexact, I told you. I have no will. I have
no tail. I am like the New England Primer,” he said, “
‘adorn’d with Cuts.’ I’m—incomplete.” Amused, he held
the stopper between his legs and dropped it. “Here,” he
pointed, “I do not stand; I cannot do otherwise. It’s a
wound, you see, I cannot help. But yours,” he said, “you
can.”
 Vainly, Crucifer waited for Darconville to say
something.
“Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame,” he whispered,
coming forward in a hunch and depressing himself into a
third of his normal displacement. “I must say this, and I
wish I might underline it. A nullity and an entity, with
like eliminands, yield an entity in which the nullity-
retinend changes its sign. Shall I put it flatly? Clip the
bitch, Darconville! Send her to hell with the lie in her
teeth! Lap her in lead!”
“Never.”
“Never say that,” said Crucifer, his hands
coquettishly demential, held high and apart. He pleaded,
“You are complete. You don’t need her. You do not need
her!” He turned his head sideways to listen. “All right?”
Appeased, he tapped the bed three times and rose smiling
to himself.
“I do,” Darconville then said softly. “I do need her.”
Dr. Crucifer wheeled around, his face spinach-blue
and reptilian, and huffing as if in his rage he would blow
a monstrous bubble out of his mouth like the soul which
the old artists painted flying from the mouths of the dying
he screamed at the top of his lungs, “You liar! You liar!”

LXXXI

Oratio Contra Feminas

I’ll set her on the stove and then she’ll melt.

 —HANS C. ANDERSEN, The Snow Queen

RISING to his full height, Dr. Crucifer split the air

with a kind of anonymous shriek and jerked his head with
a nervous tic as if he were trying to pull it off his
shoulders, and then gasping backed away almost
comically on those little pherecratian feet to shake out of
his pocket a tiny bottle from which he took a pill. He
stumbled agitatedly to the semisecurity of a dark corner
where, composing himself, he raised his robed arms like
angular fulvous wings and spoke:

Exordium

“The time is come, Darconville, to the confusion I

hope of the propagators of this slanderous imputation,
that women are necessary, when I find I must address you
in a more ceremonious form of speech and submit to your
judgment this deliberate exhortation—for what avails the
best intentions with the worst administration? —that you
may weigh the nearly inexpressible baseness into which,
but for this selfsame persuasion, exigi facias, you shall
otherwise surely sink. I shall make no commands. I shall
ask nothing of you I myself, in celebrating, do not believe
and you cannot give, in spite of the fact that with
Egyptians the obtaining of victory is a point of honor, for
where would be the wisdom in giving such a command to
an honorable young man, of illustrious birth, of an ancient
family, or to try to interpose a jurisdictive power over the
inward and irremediable judgments which in this, as in
most cases, must fall to your choosing alone? I shall be
witness for the prosecution. I shall plead and squeeze. I
sense even now that I am about to come out with violent
declarations, but to regulate, to rule? That would, indeed,
be righteous overmuch, for forced virtue is as a bolt
overshot, going neither forward nor backward and doing
no good as it stands. No, I beg you only to think, which
like the act of diving is simply to fight the natural
tendency towards the surface and to make an exertion to
get to the bottom. Pay attention then! Empanel a jury!
Prorogue a parliament! I come to prove a crabbed cudgel
fits a f roward whore!
“I have heard enough of this serpent who made you
eat the apple of your heart! I have felt the Decian
persecution of her silence! I have tasted of her inconstant,
concocted, and venial sighs and smelt on her a stink of
bitchery that not opopanax, nor jasmin d’Espagne, nor all
the multi-toned scents on Carmel’s flowery top could
perfume. I have seen, finally, more than polite and
attentive gravity should require of anyone, what is, I shall
not much waver to affirm, far less in appearance a girl
than a bass-fiddle of adipose, a steatopygous bulk, a
contentious self-conjugating dirigible swollen with its
own piety and blown with an appetite that, more greatly
to be satisfied, might better betake itself to share in the
fate of the dicteriads in the ancient Potters’ Quarter or
those shameless courtesans soliciting in the sulks and
stews of Desvergonia!

Propositio

“I see you before me free! Give me the liberty to say

what I must ask you to learn not to question to believe.
You are unrestricted, unrestrained, unreserved! Can you
be blamed for this recent piece of inconvenience thrown
at you as if a gift anymore than you should be praised,
allured by the need to feed the pistrix of a carnal heart, for
overvaluing another and pursuing in her the mortal
incapacities and shifting but all-too-human flaws of your
own personality? Rhetoric asks what logic must answer.
No. No, you cannot be blamed! Two notes an octave apart
can sound like the same note! You were not in love with
her, only with the desire to win her, for colluctation grows
out of concupiscence as quickly as the stricken hydra of
old did sprout another head. I would not medicine your
eyes, Darconville, for what’s to gain there? But, reason, it
is by acknowledging his own sexuality that man denies
the absolute in himself, turns to the lowers, and proceeds
to give woman existence. When man became sexual he
formed woman—that woman is at all, in fact, has
happened simply because man has accepted his sexuality,
her very creation being the result of that terrible
affirmation. Man has a sex; woman is a sex. Woman is
only sexual; Man is also sexual. The lares and pénates of
a woman reside below the navel—she is sexuality itself,
the objective correlative of your weakness. They arrogate
to themselves, padlocking upon your neck their
multipartitioned grip, the honor you give them and
flagitiously conspire to transpose into a deferential
treatment toward themselves the weakness usurped from
you in the first place in that shameless, false-dealing,
thumb-on-the-scale bit of joint-stockery involving only
tummies, tushies, and thighs! Bottomry and respondentia!
“There are two sexes, yes, but the perhaps-for-you
unpalatable truth of it must be faced: one’s attempt at a
merger can only end in heartbreak. When God saw how
lonely man was, he tried again and made woman; as to
why he gave up there are two opinions—one of them is
woman’s. No, the difference between the sexes is a little
matter which nature will never be so obliging as to alter.
But bless it! You’re free of her! There is no longer an owl
perching in your sunshine! Ya, imshi imta, ya bint al-gatt?
O, if only one could be without the things that one should
have convinced oneself one could do without, don’t you
see? There indeed is the hope, but if her weakness and
stupidity should prove to bias you in her favor in spite of
my words, I shall gain this point, nevertheless, to have
made it apparent to whatever lords of shouting preside
over our miserable lives that what was wanting in this
case was not a criminal, nor a prosecutor, but only the
terrible swift sword of a just and condign punishment to
see it through! I shall rise and plead the case, then, and
not restrained by the limits of your comprehension, nor
aware of any of mine, my friend, I shall kick open the
gates—stand aside!—and lose the gynaikopoinarian dogs,
for a woman always respects a word she cannot spell.

Partio

“I am overwhelmed by the dire need to take

immediate steps and of the many proposals attendant
upon, and coincident to, your renewed health and
benediction would press upon your attention and
energetically prosecute several of greater value, urging
myself to the necessity of these several causes: ( 1 ) to
counsel you on the inefficacy of worldly love; (2) to
admonish you against the sin of mulierosity and the
sorrow of marriage; (3) to prove that malice and lechery
were ever indigenous to the second sex; (4) to define the
nature of this apex predator; (5) to encourage you to live
the single life and to avoid women who, although made
for man, upon him yet were never thrust; and, finally, (6)
to advocate that you draw from her lurking hole this
skulking neutral behind whose every virtuous act lay only
voracious self-interest and pay the crime a punishment!

Narratio

“Woman is the sin of man. He tries to pay the debt by

love. It should come as no surprise that woman was
nothing before the Fall and yet she cannot be understood
without it: man does not rob her of anything she had
before. The tragedy man has committed in creating
woman, and still commits in assenting to her purpose, he
excuses to woman by his eroticism, for of all the paths
that lead to a woman’s love guilt is the straightest!
(Whence comes it, by the way, that a child cannot love
until love coincides with sexuality, the stage of puberty?)
Figuratively, woman is nothing but man’s expression and
projection of his own sexuality; man merely creates
himself a woman in which he embodies that disposition to
carnality and guilt at being incomplete she initially
caused. The woman who resembles us is always
antipathetic—what we seek in the opposite sex is indeed
the opposite of ourselves, a quasi-electrical phenomenon
in which to find satisfaction we’re attracted by resistance,
driving away, at the same time, the things we truly need.
And thus remorse follows. The vagina is a human
denunciation box, I tell you, into which men drop then-
grief, their complaints, their guilt.
“You say you love. Let that stand, momentarily. First,
however, tett me, in relation to that falsehood iterated
succinctly in the famous Eclogue X of Vergil’s—’Omnia
vincit amor’—what has ever worked, won, conquered, or
in your behalf called up recompense that you’d still swear
it true? Or shall you let it serve a Dutchman just to keep
that oath? And yet, wooh!—the thing does conquer, for
there you lie to copartner the assault where’s suborned
your very own defeat! Feign love, would you? It’s all
very well if you’ve a mate to feign co-equally. But where
is she? I’ll tell you, Al Amin, that hybrid, ambiguous, and
scheming shape—strutting in the vizard of the very
Queen of Sorrows —is wedding her perishable breath to
another’s and making overpoli-tic fetches with her tongue
at the very minute you see fit to chafe and pine over her
with your beggarly love! Whispering impudence! And
paddling in his hands! You speak as if forsooth you knew
not the facts! A woman is like your shadow: follow her,
she flies; fly from her, she follows. Resistance, man?
Why, resistance is proof of her experience, not proof of
her virtue, and the pity of it all shall never be otherwise
despite whatever despicable little frauenlobs you may
hale in to shake their heads and mutter, ‘Jub, jub!’ You
need only look under this head at the Homeric epics
behind the action of which in both, notice, is to be found
the question of fidelity: what are the women doing —it’s
implicitly asked—while we’re here? And all the fighting,
adventure, and sex with goddesses in distant lands is
pitted against the potential betrayal by women of the male
world. (All religion, I suspect, is created to minimize the
fear men have of being betrayed.) When Odysseus and
Penelope go to bed—Book XXIII, line 296—it’s the real
end of the song. Give the woman no credit, however. The
loyalty got lax. Penelope was only Helen hounded by a
son.
“Love strives to cover guilt, instead of conquering it;
it elevates woman instead of nullifying her. In women
love becomes an importunate superstition that will not
hearken to the fact that they have no comprehension of
paragons, and with no sense of a man’s love as a superior
phenomenon they only perceive that side of him which
unceasingly desires and appropriates—the more brutally,
I’ve heard, the better they like it: an instinct, nevertheless,
I can’t hope to think you’d share. The pathetic creatures
are always happier in the love they inspire than in that
which they feel—that is if they feel anything at all! But,
oh my yes, women do often imagine that they love, and
with all that faded and pettifogulizing ammunition of
theirs—lipstick, rouge, pomade, and no end of swabbings
from the stybian pot—pointedly set out to do so. But
what? I can’t think of a more desperate attempt, funerary
sculpture excepted, at the gratification of vanity! The joke
lies in what they are, doesn’t it, in the very act of what
they’d cover up? Why, at the very minute a woman vows
she’ll never flirt, she’s flirting not only in the mention of
it but with the very painted mouth by which
simultaneously she denies it—only another one of those
so-called ‘secrets,’ miracle only to the ignorant, on which
they pride themselves and to which, although they don’t
know it themselves, they must give the alluring
impression it’s possible to discover the key! And yet how
these creatures, built strongest where the strain is greatest,
wish to appear to give unwillingly what in fact they’re
ravenous to give! The occupation of an intrigue, the
emotional charge gallantry gives them, the natural bent
for needing affection and the fear of its refusal, all
persuade these sectaries of the god Wunsch that they have
passion, when really they have only coquetry, a sexual
hyperaesthesia that wanders singly up and down the town
without pale or partition like a biologically hampered she-
pope or some indefatigable sectary in the rank and
borrowed garb of Anteros, female in sex, mortal in
condition! Darconville, Darconville, here below in this
dark region is not love’s proper sphere—wasn’t, isn’t, and
never shall be!
“What is love? We meet someone we paradoxically
want to need, call this bum little blueprint ‘love’ and
hoping such a thing means something when it doesn’t are
trapped into the fallacy of believing that irony has
meaning. All expectation is temptation! It’s a pity at the
heart of life itself, I tell you. A lover is a gambler reciting
‘Morituri te salutamus’ before his chips. We’ve all
jumped out of a rotten potato!
“Womanishness! Look at this mother-right society of
ours—witches, woe-men, windigos painted in wode!
Universal inchoate sexuality, the source of all irrationality
and chaos in the world! The battle of the sexes is hardly a
battle anymore. It is not even a rear-guard action. It is a
rout. I tell you, degree, priority, and place went out of
fashion with personal privacy and the runcible spoon, and
all the brass-titted Thermodontines in the ascendance now
are not simply satisfied to lean their backs against their
marriage certificates and spit defiance at the world, no,
for they haven’t appropriated one thing with the spare
cutlery of their loving fingers before they’re looking
around for more— and, taking everything, they’ve set
their pugging teeth on edge to consolidate their gains and
move man to the downside! The bitches are marching to
Spaneria! Have you never heard of the foolish Wanzo
peoples and their women who, frustrated, tied
woodpeckers to their twats and pretended to have
phalluses?
 Concessio

“I say they’re everywhere. You say they’re a

minority. Women are only a minority, my friend, when
they are treated as one! Oh, but you will call them kind,
won’t you, for thinking them frail, gentle because having
no defenses, and nicer than the fruit of sweetsop, for in
the unwinking vigilance of gentlemanliness what
solicitude, I think you suppose he, she, or it feels, can be
too great in the preservation of meekness to refine, exalt,
and perpetuate affection? O excellent falsehood! Kind?
You mean ig-nivomous. Nice! It could apply to a dog, a
sermon, or a jam-tart! Gentle, I agree, when their piss
doesn’t etch glass and defenseless utterly when they’re
not veneered and secretive as a Venetian demirep with
domino and spiked ring. But frail? Frail, sir? Then you
admit to knowing nothing of the female turnix,
phalaropus, cassowary, emeu, and other monstrosities of
nature whose maliciousness and size point to, and are
certainly best allegorized by, the sexual turns of habit
observed in the black widow spider? And how widows,
peradventure? Why, they are widows in the same context,
by the very reason, and at the explicit moment that they
couple—he fucks her, she bites off his head—and for this
and similar reasons I must here plead and adjure you
never to love if only to tell you never to marry! Jobs cost
money to keep, can’t you see? There’s scarce a thing both
loved and loathed. When loved, satis, satis. But if
loathed, my dainty duck, my dear-a? O me! O me, O my!

Argumentatio
 “I come to the subject of marriage, then, resolved,
lest I offend you, to avoid the rhetoric of exaggeration,
which is, nevertheless, not only inseparable from great
oratory but which punctuates information with the kind of
infuriating finality I fear, in this matter, you still show
yourself so deeply in need of being doctored. I shall speak
to the wound, however. If you find the subject wearisome,
I suggest you seek in yourself the weariness, and if my
bouncing candor you can’t stand bethink yourself then of
the frankness you once asked of someone in a dress! I
have spoken words, now, dehortatory, expostulatory, and
supplicatory, but of marriage, confess, need I heap up
here, accumulate, misrepresent on the side of greater size,
or caricature? O laugh it out, you laughsters! O laugh it
up belaughably to the last laughed-out bit of laughter and
then laugh again!
“Holy deadlock? Why, the observation of married
couples is a postgraduate course in pessimism itself!
Never mind that hard by the temple of Hymen, in the
florid words of Hippel, lies the graveyard of love —if you
must insist, of course, that love exists—the very act of the
male stooping to marry the female makes the mere
concept of marriage morganatic! And yet can a man
actually devote himself to such a trifle? He can. He will.
He does. How, you ask? Why, it’s easy. The moral
misconduct necessary for intimacy, you see, subsequently
fosters in the male a desperation for justice in relation to
his enemy twin—he seeks to check his precipitancy—and
so in a reckless excess of duty-grafted-to-guilt, for next to
happiness confirmed misery does well, he connupts for a
lifetime someone who, ironically enough, is absolved by
that very act of excess from the need or obligation to love
in return! Marriage? It is a dualism beyond
comprehension, the plot of the story of the Fall, the
primitive riddle, a ghastly public confession, the binding
of the unlimited in the bonds of space, of the eternal by
time, of the spirit by matter. The State calls it legal, for
revenue. The Church sees it indissoluble, for dynasty—
and yet when the deep and ghastly disjunctures of nature
native to it inevitably occur, both serve to detain by
compulsion such of those who from that oppressive and
unpredestined misery would suddenly flee! Marriage? It
is nothing more than a slavery to brief pleasure leading to
the lengthy slavery of one another. The debate is not
closed, only the question. The legend that matrimony is a
lottery, in fact, has almost ruined the lottery business! The
world’s reformers, have they not all been married men?
And death on the wedding night, is it not one of
literature’s immortal themes? The Iliad, that bible of war,
did it not begin with a wedding? Had Theseus any need of
Ariadne’s thread to find his way into the labyrinth? Didn’t
St. Peter himself—Matthew 8:14—drop his wife flat in
the pursuit of what she clearly prevented him otherwise
from seeking? And what that we own, further, have we
ever valued as much as what once we didn’t have? Aren’t
possessions generally diminished by possession, where
even the most fetching person is no longer assured of our
slightest concern after we’ve known her for a simple few
months? Marriage? It is a contract, not a commitment,
nothing but an act of propitiation by men for first having
thought ill of women. Women don’t marry men, they
adopt them—to carry baggage, to hail cabs, to fetch! And
to what end does this proprietary institution serve other
than to effect the introduction of order into chaotic sexual
relations and to establish every assurance in behalf of
those sweet little apostles of pairing you so love for the
formal acquisition of alimonious funds and a ticket to Rio
for a lifetime of comic viduity? Marriage? What is it,
finally, but a tyrannous routine of unanswerable female
quibbling, enervating habit, and plaguey amorism, no
more a warranty of happiness than prison and no more
natural to us than a cage is to a cuckoo-bird—a modus
vivendi that is as incompatible as free-love with the
highest interpretations of the moral law, making the
remarks of St. Ambrose, fourth-century bishop of Milan,
perfectly in order when he asserted that married people
ought to blush at the state in which they were living as it
prostituted the members of Christ! No, Darconville,
remove, remove that marriage hearse! And thus remove
that ancient curse!
“Can you imagine what domestic life with a woman
must be and still gamble away your life for a mere toss at
such a perishable being? It is the single sex for whom
marriage for love is so rare that a vow of obedience,
arguable antonym of love, is still exacted in the nuptial
contract, and what they bring to the hearth must be
limited, I’m afraid, to what are their only natural gifts,
three in number: deceit-fulness, spinning, and the
capacity to weep at will. Now, a family’s happiness, it’s
been said, is always in proportion to the cultivation of its
female members, but as they’re congenitally unable to be
satisfied— save only by movable property or the
proximity of some male neighbor, mustachioed like a
Circassian, to compare you to—the hygienic penalty that
must be paid, for woman’s denial of her real nature
becomes inescapable, is the hysterical self-dissatisfaction
inherent in striving to be what, to get, they who weren’t
once convinced you they were! The saint then—poof!—
becomes a scold. The portcullis drops! The more a
woman’s made an occupation of torturing her husband,
you see, the less right she thinks she has to lose him, her
hold over him increasing to the measure of her coldness.
Wanting always comes to an end with having. They nag.
They gripe. They breed infidelity. It is impossible, for
instance, to speak of one woman with another without her
betraying the one who’s absent; the Chinese symbol for
war is two women under the same roof. They aren’t even
friends—there is no word in the Latin language that
signifies a female friend: arnica means mistress. No, what
they are, Darconville, are born lackeys—the word
‘employee,’ remember, is always spelled with two e’s—
serving only to censor. They have no relation to man and
no sense of man, but only to maleness. The periods of
matriarchy have always been periods of polyandry! And
although the Koran says that heaven is at the feet of a
mother most men still mutter Karram Allah before even
mentioning such a worthless subject as women in
conversation. And yet how quickly they seek to assume
sovereignty, fearing that their husbands will be successful
while at the same time insisting they achieve wondrous
things and accepting the fruitless but heroic efforts of the
poor fools to give them their souls while failing, for want
of comprehension, to strive for that same virtue in
themselves. And the polluting sadness of it all, as you
look to escape, can be neither diminished nor abridged,
for no matter where you go or how far you withdraw,
there she is—bored, nagging, censorious—peering like a
divedapper through a wave! Domesticity? Happy
domesticity? It’s a Victorian pipe-dream! Why, even then
when those spindle-and-broom deities performed no more
banal an act than merely putting a foot to the treadle the
very motion kindled appetites in them they were too
stupid to realize they already had! But then what has ever
curtailed the sexual frenzy of a woman?
“Don’t say children! As no woman is the perfect type
of mother— something she shares with the penguin,
catfish, shark, and stickleback, among others—how could
that be? In fact, the female essentially seeks in the
existence of children nothing more than a satisfaction to
dominate.

Girls have mothers

Upon their necks to bite ‘em,
So girls grab boys
And so ad infinitum.

There’s nothing very subtle here, is there? Their

daughters are sexual rivals, on the one hand, and
everyone knows, on the other, that there is always
something sexual in the relationship of mother and son—
in fact, the husband of a mother is always a cuckold.
“Sexual frenzy? O, when that itching begins, my
friend, how far flung are the perimeters of intrigue and
assassination! It’s the Bottomless Pit! The Fire Not Sated
With Wood! Can it come as a surprise to anyone to see in
the Scrovegni Chapel—for there is no wife who has not
been untrue to her husband in thought—that Lust is led
around on a halter by a woman no bigger than your
thumb? Cato believed in fact that kissing among relatives
was a custom maintained only to keep women under
control in this matter. The natal day of Blessed Pudens —
as much a warning as an example—was purposely placed
on the church calendar in May, the month of lust. And
because of lust St. Pius V had to foliate the genitals of
every single statue in Vatican City in 1569. No,
Darconville, infidelity is the mulier puisne to the bastard
eigne that is the state of marriage, but there’s no stopping
it, for when any of these sabre-toothed tarts who has
chained herself to someone’s bed for a mere band of
miniature ice-cubes round her finger decides to act, no
longer letting the ‘I would’ wait upon the ‘I dare not,’ it’s
open communion to every passing dunce and dancing
master. Nothing can halt it. You can cringe, swagger,
weep, or lie doggo. You can motion for an Act of
Sederunt or read her passages from the life of Pelagia the
Harlot. You can even die. (How many women, however,
would actually laugh at the funerals of their husbands if it
were not the custom to weep?) But whatever you do to try
to dissuade her won’t make the smallest particle of
difference—it’s like trying to rub the smell of nickels off
a Jew’s hands: an honest woman is unfair to the entire
female race. And that applies to the lot of them, whether
it be Jane Bedknickers, Marie Royne d’Escosse
douayrière de France, or this birding-piece new scoured
called Isabel Rawsthorne.
“But take heart, Prince Darconville, and weigh well
the time—for death comes from life, not life from death.
It is but a small step between weariness and hate in a
woman, and there is not much to choose between a
woman who deceives us for another and a woman who
deceives another for ourselves. Reality increases in direct
proportion to the length and proximity of contact and
when her retractile heart withdraws again—? Look to
your sheets, Dutchman. This whore of yours can count
beyond two.

Confirmatio
 “What is woman, anyway? A mere collection of
similar individuals, each cast in the same mold, the whole
forming as it were a continuous plasmodium. Googlies
with bisque hearts! Rash, inconsiderate voluntaries with
dragons’ spleens! Pies with the devil’s finger in them! But
all women are at bottom one woman. I mean, you’ve been
presenting this bechangeable flouter of yours as if she
were the chryselephantine statue of Athena, convincing
me then, before all else, that men never want to see
women as they are, but if you must insist upon showing in
both face and sentiment the grace of the troubadours, you
must then coquet with truth after their fashion; the reality,
I make free to say, is quite otherwise— men either
despise women or they have never thought seriously
about them, although the chap who does successfully
study them must of necessity be an amphibologist.
“Look at them! The sight of an upright female form
in the nude makes most patent her purposelessness—if
pretty, briefly pretty, and yet how many abortions for one
Helen, how many Gothones for one Aphrodite? No, the
caricature of a woman isn’t one! Their greasy faces! Their
buttered hair! Their fucused breasts! My God, they’re
ugly as dubbs! A very, very woman is a dough-baked
man! They were the very last thing God made—evidently
he did so on Saturday night: she reveals his fatigue—and
the very first to betray him. Their brains, their hearts, are
tinier than those of men. Of the one face they’ve been
given they must make themselves another, and, mobbling
it, they come flying out at you behind that ill-befitting
clownage of false fingernails, chinstraps, mudpacks,
padded asses, and toenail polish and then dare to ask man,
‘Are you real?’ To hear such a thing! To hear anything
like it! To hear anything! Can you, for example, think of a
more revolting sound on earth than a woman rummaging
in her handbag? No, face it, woman is supreme only as
woman: ‘vapourizing, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless,
and oversensitive,’ as Carlyle said of France.
“What is the definition of gross incompetence? 144
women! They don’t live in the grip of envy only for
others—no, most girls, incredible as it may sound, are
actually jealous of their own bodies, coming to hate the
very tits-’n’-bums superficially used to attract men in the
first place. They can’t be grateful, conceptualize, or
exercise heavy pressures with their arms raised above
shoulder height. Their acrobatics of excretion could bring
a smile to the face of Muscular Dystrophy. And the nap of
the female skin? It would vex a dog to see a pudding
creep! The sinewy walk is only a condition relating to a
built-in instability in the thighbones whereby they tend to
lose their balance easily and stumble. Their menstrual
flux can sour wine, curdle milk, dim mirrors, and wilt
young plants. And, finally, food for her is but a few
seconds in the mouth, a few hours in the belly, and the
rest of her life on the hip, for, like medlars, they are no
sooner ripe than rotten, and when St. Jerome went to
Scotland to find cannibals there, it turned out that it was
only male flesh that they’d eaten because the female flesh
—insipid and characterless as banana—was stringy and
vile, flowing with unsavory streams. Overbodied? Well-
punctured? With small irregular holes? Wherein, for
chrissake, does woman differ from a Tilsit cheese?
“It made Byron sick to see a woman eat. Zeuxis
claimed he needed all the beauties of Agrigentum to
compose the image of a female, and then he died in a fit
of laughter after contemplating the face of the hag he’d
painted, And then was it not said by the only rare poet of
that time, the Wittie, Comicall, Facetiously-Quicke and
unparalleled John Lilly, Master of Arts, that if you take
from them their perywigges, their paintings, their Jewells,
their rowles and boulstrings, thou shall soone perceive
that a woman is the least parte of hir self? The rest of
them—and it’s a good deal—lies on the dressing table!
The traditional idea of them being a riddle wrapped in a
mystery inside an enigma is a joke! A sphinx without a
secret is a minx! It is of course no secret that they hate
men for the talents they have, partially because they’re
covetous and partially because they don’t know how it’s
done. Behind every great man, believe me, stands an
astonished woman! ‘Let the vain sex dream on,’ wrote
Swift, ‘their Empire comes from us.’ But the more
women aspiring to the arts who dominate the women’s
movement, the more the unnatural and long-frustrated
desire for equality—mental, physical, aesthetic—
translates into the totally misleading equation of
emancipation with creativity. Woman has never created
anything, and will never create anything, as beautiful as
she has destroyed, for one thing. And then there could
never be anything but an ideologically imposed equality
of the sexes anyway, for the artistic and intellectual
incompetence of women, with the singular exceptions you
could name only to reinforce that rule, is the most
embarrassing fact of human history—an utter void in
music, philosophy, sculpture, history, literature, and
science for three thousand years! I’m afraid you must
look for the book Significant Women Thinkers in the same
library where you’ll find Great Chinese Comedians, The
Encyclopedia of Dutch Etiquette, and The Jewish Book of
Charity. But, you ask, weren’t they lacking in education?
The mind is school. Or wanting in leisure? Vision makes
room for vision. Then what about duress? You will argue,
reductively, that women were held down, calumniated,
and oppressed over the centuries until you stop to
consider, with some shock perhaps, that such conditions
are more often than not the very linchpin of all
meaningful achievement!
“Here, but this is tiring. Have you ever seen a woman
try to throw a ball?
“No, nature, I’m afraid, has been very unkind to
women—indeed, it perhaps best explains their
vindictiveness. They have small sense of humor, less of
continuity, and constantly live in the throes of morbidly
excitable hysteria—female tear ducts, scientifically, are
almost twice as active as men’s—the attributive
demonstration of which, while doubtless the result of
their constitutional irrationality and its boiteuses journées,
is especially felt in the presence of high-principled,
essentially masculine men. They can panic most mightily
under such circumstances—and of course when a woman
loses her hypnotic power, then what? Of course. She
straddles a bike, becomes a religious crank, and proceeds
to teach Latin. Their so-called meekness, however, is
usually the result of finding discretion more necessary to
them than eloquence because, as thinking and feeling for
them are in opposition, they have less difficulty in
speaking little than speaking well. Mind, in fact, cannot
really be predicated of her at all—only the sexual instinct,
and yet it is virtually impossible for women, because they
are only sexual, to recognize their sexuality or the
indiscriminate dispensation thereof, for the recognition of
anything requires a kind of duality which they can only
understand, experientially, in the thoughtless and brazen
act of cozening two men at the same time. But what of it?
By the very nature of being what they are, they
consequently need never inquire what they should be,
refusing the gambit right out and generously leaving that
task to the philosophical speculations of the male, whose
uncertainty about it all is at once both the source of his
romance and the germ of his malady. Women aren’t called
whores, you see, in the same way penguins aren’t called
homely: all aren’t only because all are.

Reductio ad absurdam

“Sex! I hear no echo in this briefest word that could

ever make it song. Sex is merely lust—the
batrachomyomachia of bunghole and battery from which
love, apparently, can do anything but shelter one! It is the
lowest form of communication, the vilest expression of
need, and the most brainlessly discerptible action in the
entire realm of human behavior. Coitus is the price men
have to pay to women for their oppression. Their sex
organs—a passive pot for fools to spend in—are nothing,
emptiness itself, the jar of the Arabian Nights into which
every Solomon tries in vain to pack his genie. What is
their twammy, however, that you need to know it? How
value what you can partake of without loving and yet love
without partaking of? Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail
a week or sells eternity to get a toy? Love as passion is a
scam, the invention of the Provencal knight-poets to
justify their verse! There is, moreover, no distinguishing
haecceitas in the glands: they are all the same,
functioning in witless independence of that self we vainly
believe to be loved, for any one part of an extended
substantive is existentially other than any other part.
Leave such things for the sexly sex! The Hindus correctly
look upon sexual intercourse as a victory for woman, the
degrading passion, in my opinion, by which Adam and
the serpent were actually tempted by Eve, for, ask
yourself, was there any betrayal by the former two until
the introduction of the latter? Any contentiousness? Any
lack of trust, excess, disobedience?
“No, copulation is abomination—you become
susceptible in the act to your own venom like the pigmy
rattlesnake that dies when it bites itself on the lip during
its frenzy to swallow mice! The violence! It’s a biological
fact that peaceful matings are nearly always sterile. The
vice! Who, in reference to this beastly whingeing, has
ever dared admit the crucial and contradictory paradox
involved in taking by giving? Then the vulgarity of it!
The sparrow stands erect in coition, the hen crouches,
whales swoop up vertically, bears hug one another,
hedgehogs go at it face to face—only monkeys and
women fall into any posture whatsoever! H-o-double-r-i-
b-l-e spells horrible! Democritus of Abdera, who plucked
out his eyes to avoid the sight of female skirts, called it
‘the short epilepsy.’ Odysseus refused to couple with
Circe on the grounds that his vigor would be impaired.
Hector went straight from Andromache’s bed to battle—
and was butchered! And both Ambrose and Tertullian
declared that the extinction of the human race was
preferable to its propagation by sexual intercourse. Sex?
O, Darconville, it is there in the womb that we have all
been taught cruelty and fitted for works of darkness, fed
with blood, deprived of light, and blinded and warpled
and set upsidedown in the cerements of our burial scene.
We live—inter urinam et faeces nascimur—between
graves! We wake only to celebrate our own funeral cries,
perpetually driven to abysses as if instinctively burdened
with the true and terrible knowledge that looking into a
hole is nothing more than looking into the future we, all
of us, must share!

Admonitio

“Stop to think where they are now, your desertrice

and her impe-trating, impenetrating groom! Who have
known each other so briefly must then want each othef so
well. Lichens liken: about her he disapproves nothing, nor
does she anything of him, for to be overestimated is the
only real appreciation. And so it is a Dutch concert of lies
—and, my, but they do lie a lot! But, here, can castwhores
pulladeftkiss if oldpollocks forsake ‘em? With relish, my
man! But, wait, is it limited to kisses? Cry broom! Were
kisses all the joys in bed, why one woman would another
wed! No, don’t turn away! Look, picture her, there she is
noting his every want and, mad to forestall it, tears away
her clothes—she quivers, she pants, she clucks, squealing
now in language grown greasier than her pigs and
waggling in the air two legs turned to a shape more
crooked than a judas tree! Why, a woman, like a cat,
could calmly walk over your dead face! And will you still
talk to me about ideals, when then- ideals, like mantles,
cover up their palfreys so that two beasts seem to move
beneath one skin? Yes? Than take the fie out of fo and
fum for you have paid the fee!
“A new period of history is aborning! I would have
you free! Freedom and idleness—Allah’s greatest gifts! I
would have you join the 144,000 virgin males in
Revelations undented by women! Why, tell me, must a
man’s qualifications as a male become identical with that
sole and lowly value so esteemed by women? To but
acknowledge himself proud in the eyes of a tribe of
blowsy she-dowds, repulsive skates, and drabs? The
moral sanction that has been invented for coitus, in
supposing that there is an ideal attitude to the act in which
only the propagation of the race is thought, is hardly
sufficient defense. It is no defense. It is defenseless. St.
Paul, remember—who was blessed with his vision only
after the daughter of the high priest of Jerusalem had
rejected his ill-considered offer of marriage—says that the
single life is the only perfect one. He countenanced
marriage of necessity and against his own conviction, and
his views on the subject show at best a reluctant sanction,
as I’m sure you know, for he knew well the confusion,
dullness, and strife apposite to that way of life. Eris is
only Eros with an eye. On the other hand, don’t be
confused. The term ‘virginity’ when applied to women is
merely a geographic expression—to them, little more than
a point of commerce—and the outward endeavor on their
part to try to correspond to man’s demand for physical
purity must not be taken for anything but a fear lest the
buyer fight shy of the bargain. I hardly think you can be
unaware of the view women actually take of virginity, can
you? It’s the drats! They not only disparage and despise
virginity in other women; they are nothing less than
terror-fraught at the thought of their own—except, of
course, that men prize it so highly. Spry? O yes, they’re
spry. Spry as a sprint of sprue! But don’t be fooled—the
Queen, remember, unites the power of both the Rook and
Bishop in her movements and, commanding both the
straight and the oblique, can get behind you faster than
wind. But that’s as it is, isn’t it? Simply, you must avoid
them. Let them alone to sprout up sins somewhence,
somewhither, and somewhere else! Take to heart the
wisdom of the holy ancient saints, Jerome, Anthony, and
Hilarion who, along with your own holy martyred
kinsman, left no doubt as to what women really are:
obstacles to spiritual piety. Whoever, that lived its
tragedies, says that life must be propagated? That it must
continue? Why, that’s nothing but the worship of life, the
foulest of heresies! The prophet Jeremiah—16:2-4 of that
book—was actually commanded to remain single.
Virginity, you’ll note, was essential for success in the
search for the Holy Grail, and if it comes as no surprise to
you to learn, parenthetically, that after the destruction and
dissolution of the Round Table all the surviving knights
became hermits, how then even in the absence of explicit
statement should I ever hope to expect, my friend,
anything less of you? The sole purpose of radiators is to
lose heat. No, I’ll vouch you up a chastity, my child, if to
it you’re disposed, and there shall by a virgin be a viragin
deposed!

Confrontatio

“Do I seem cruel? Then better is by evil thus made

better. Do I seem critical? And yet to tell you little more
than would suffice is something in a warning less than
either. Do I seem cold? Yes, I’m cold —cold enough, I
promise, to take the mother out of crymotherapy, for
there’s nothing quite like frost to single out the weak
points in a stone. I’m ugly. I stink. Yes, I can breed in
winter like a whelk. But call me a misogynist? Why,
woman has hitherto been most despised by woman
herself!— an assertion that couldn’t have been more
vigorously confirmed than by the testimony of Madame
de Staël when she remarked that what most consoled her
in being a woman was that she’d never have to many one!
Who says misogynistic, says biblical! But I needn’t cite
Paul, sing like a goliard, nor gape back to the
gynekophobic 1500s. The Mishmi people will trade one
woman for a pig, the Abipona for a handful of glass
pearls, and the Island Caribs actually use two languages
—one for men, another for women. You can buy a pigmy
woman on the Congo border at the boma in Bundibugyo
for 200 shillings. I’ve always said that the famous
equation of women with livestock—Semonides Amorgos,
fragment 7 of his Elegy and Iambus— warrants further
study. The Chinese don’t count girls as children,
Mohammed excludes them from Paradise, and the Synod
of Macon actually debated whether women could be
termed human beings at all! No, I offer no more than
enough.
“I see how this modest dehortation on the
vulgivaguability of women saddens you, Darconville. If
you think it loud, however, it is because you are deaf. If
too large, it is because you are blind. If you think it false,
then consider the maxim falsa démonstratio non nocet
which refers to the general rule that where there is a
description which fixes the identity of that which is
referred to, a misdescription elsewhere will not vitiate it,
mmmm? I could pull the law out of my codpiece all day.
But that’s not the question.
“The question is, what will you accept, and in
accepting do, and by doing rectify? This late sweetheart
of yours—an eviscerating tit-shower between whose yes
and no it was impossible to slip a needle— was crooked
enough to hide behind a corkscrew. What lived inside her
apparently functioned by something outside but let her
move about as quietly and efficiently as a bird of prey.
Huaman (pronounced ‘woman’ ) is Inca for falcon. She
simply had craft, however. It wasn’t intelligence—don’t
be a fool—only the alertness of exaggerated egotism!
Those who lack character, you see, must always rely
heavily on method. And in the matter of method, nothing
shows more of a difference, not one woman from another,
but between a given woman and that very woman herself,
whether Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores, Félise, Yolande,
and Juliette! Or Isabel, sweet, my coz!
“What pharisee, tell me, ever scoured the outside of
cup and platter more assiduously than she? She declined
to be alone, I gather, from your very first meeting—a
woman refuses the condition of solitude and knows
neither the love of it nor the worth of it—and battened on
to you, I can see it, with more woeful stories than a
Victorian buy-a-broom girl, weeping, like all women,
only with those she knows will pity her and so
intensifying her self-pity by the thought of the pity of
others and then slowly, subtly, forcing you into a détente
with her unreserved and shameless readiness to shed tears
and to sham love. A spider’s silk, you forgot, has a tensile
strength greater than steel. You had, in fact, no more
reason to believe her than you had to believe that winged
game argues in favor of angelology—but you did. You
cared. Pitifully, you showed in truth what she shammed
which, ironically, unbelievably, allowed the damn traitor
who was waiting for that enough courage and self-esteem
not only to grab someone else but actually to bump you in
the process, for a clever woman never acknowledges she
has fallen in love until the man has formally avowed his
passion and so cut off his retreat—and then virtue
disappears like heather obliterated by bracken! The less
the splash, the better the dive, see?
 “She was forbearing and obliging and yielding like
any other fortune-hunting footpad—different, you felt, of
course, than all the other earth-reeking soubrettes and
dress-envious daughters of instinct you’d known—but
you failed to understand that women are always the
kindest to those they deceive. You listened to her; you
didn’t watch. And Miss Poxtakeher? Miss Pennyquick?
Ya zift! Ya sharmuta! Ya sheitan khalida! She employed
sincerity only when she thought every other form of
deception might fail, but her intention to marry you
vanished the instant it was formed because she had heard
those wooden shoes clopping along in the distance. The
voice was Jacob’s voice but the hands were the hands of
Esau! You thought she was an ermine; you didn’t know
she was a weasel, failing, again, to realize that they’re the
same thing. And all the while you kept faith. You spent
almost four years to be near her in a place that even the
Centuriators of Magdeburg would have found dull! You
danced, you dipped, you doffed your hat. And although
you left for London at one point, you returned to marry
her. Birds never limed, you see, no secret bushes fear. But
as the argument for loyalty in women is always a
hysteron-proteron it wasn’t enough for her. A neurotic,
she was still dissatisfied—a kind of sloth, tristitia de bono
spirituali, see?—for in spite of you and all your efforts,
not because of you and none of your efforts, she could
never be freed of herself. She was both deliberately the
maid who serves and instinctively the woman who
commands, the shrew in her detesting everything, the
servant detesting itself—like the society Jew who in
putting on a new nose, a new name, a new servility but
proceeds to loathe himself the more! ‘When Adam delved
and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ Why Adam,
of course; how could it have been Eve? So she chose, the
potato cook, what she was—whatever, I suspect, she
actually, wasn’t, i.e., what she hadn’t. And why? For
purpéses of increased security and sovereignty. Perhaps
she was bitter that she had to model herself on your
estimable image of her for so many years. Perhaps in
knowing herself so well she couldn’t accept anybody who
would have her so readily. Perhaps your genius frightened
her; the why is not explained: substantive pauses after
verbs of fearing, say? And what did she choose? A family
disinclined to risk its middle-class prosperity for abstract,
Utopian ideas. What did she feel pity for? Nothing. She
had poison in the very knops of her tits. And what does
she regret? The deed, I tell you, only becomes a mirror
for self-admiration. The hand is the whore’s second face.
O Darconville, Darconville, every woman has
Clytemnestra’s address. What change of heart other than
the pirouetting bit of fantoccini constant to this sex I
admonish you against believing in ever took place? Isn’t
the futility of washing an Ethiopian proverbial? Can you
get thigs from fistules?

Peroratio

“This last word—and I shall have done. I urge you to

the work of your left hand! I call upon Lycurgus,
Hyperides, Dinarchus, Hortensius, Calvus, Chrysostom,
and Aristides to inspirit you with the ardor of my words
and to quicken you to revenge! A period of grieving is
also a period of healing and zeal as necessary in every
cause as prudence. What then shall be done? What sport?
How flap this bifarious bitch whose faculties ran to being
in two places at once? She must be forced to remember!
Insensitive people must especially be sent to that kind of
hell whose flames must teach exactly what sensitivity
means! Look you, I am here to inspire, not to gratify. Will
you simply pray her to rehabilitation? Recommend a
thatched nunnery? Love those you’ll come to hate and be
an ally to your enemies? No, never! Hurl her after the
fault to learn how she likes her own compulsion! Bring
justice to Jedburgh! Wax your black sword, Darconville,
and slaughter them all!
“The temptation, of course, is to wait. And how easy
to prevail by doing nothing more than that, for nothing
forbids you from reflecting that with every passing
minute she is growing older, fatter, homelier. You are
avenged 1440 times a day! How old is the puffin—
twenty-three? Why, for a girl that’s late autumn! She’s got
two more years to be loved, ten more to love herself, and
the rest to pray to God! But why wait? Will she not
strout? She will. Did she not spitrack you? She did. Was
she not a spot-powdered, downsical-bearing cat of
convenience? She was. So, being on land, settle; being at
sea, sail. Why hesitate? To suit a natural action to a most
unnatural crime? You were her victim; must you be her
dupe? No, my child, the past is the adversary of the
future, and past mirth will have future laughter, don’t you
see? A few luminous and fervent hours are enough to give
meaning to an entire lifetime, the honor of which is at
stake and the outcome hanging in the balance. The very
voices of your forebears cry to you from the ground, ‘My
son, scorn to be a slave!’
“Heed to consent! Hearken to comply! Follow not the
dictates of a sloven and unmerited mercy but enlist
yourself under the sacred banner of justice to play out its
ends and prevent the curses of posterity from being
heaped upon your memory that both by this trial and its
swift redressai we shall be delivered, that we shall have
deliverance at last, and until the last shock of time shall
bury her memory in ignominious and undistinguished
ruin! Datum serva! Cognatus cole! There alone shall be
peace for you, and otherwise there won’t, for what makes
a person noble? Not a continued false and smothered
love, surely, for love if it’s real never refuses what love
sends. Neither pity, for that is nothing more than a
disagreeable impulse of the instinct for appropriation at
the sight of what seems to be weaker. What makes honor?
A person brave? Constitutes perfection? I will venture to
say that no man ever rose to any degree of perfection but
through obstinacy and an inveterate resolution against the
stream of mankind!
“I want a platter—listen to me—and I want a head on
that platter! Inaction itself must otherwise assume the
proportions of a crime. I see a demon behind you standing
in the midst of her own noise, the biology of whose
shadow cannot and will not be studied! Examine it no
further! But there is a reality pitched above that shadow.
It’s yours alone to feast on in ill-will! Stand upon her—
and prevail, overcoming the hound that bays and rejoicing
only that you’ve lived to say, ‘The dog is dead!’ She was
your hell in perspective, was she not, and is it not written
that justice is the punishment of sin? Rack her soul for it
then! There is always more that you can be than what you
are! Thaw out thunder! Dun the reality for what it is!
When are you going to learn that Satan isn’t a
metaphor?”
 LXXXII

The Unholy Litany

Daughters of calumny, I summon you!

—RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN

[Note: in the lists that follow, the paper edition

contains
ditto marks (") to indicate repetition of the words
“libera nos, Domine” after each entry. It is hoped
the reader will mentally supply these and forgive
their ommission here for the sake of simplicity.
—remz]

THE WORDS were so terrifying that they precluded

any possibility of interruption, anaesthetizing Darconville
where he lay in a silence of sustained disbelief. Dr.
Crucifer’s face was bloodless white, like the underside of
a sole, his mouth writhing with unintelligible words,
when suddenly proceeding to the phonograph he set in a
record which came up slowly in the mournful rhythm of
plain chant. It was the “Dies Irae”—the saddest, emptiest,
most melancholy determination of sorrow on earth. He
seemed as he closed his eyes to be listening to something
beyond him, as if in bizarre and unhallowed colloquy
with his inner self, and then he turned, moving now
around the ancient relics of the room, and in the falsetto
modulations of that impossible voice began to recite in a
cold drawn-out prolation the queerest litany ever heard:
“—from Eve and her quinces, libera nos, Domine
—from Jael, the jakesmaid,
—from Pasiphaë, the Cretan motherlord,
—from Venus Illegitima, goddess of
unnatural acts,
—from Alice Trip-and-Go, who wardeleth,
—from Dejah Thoris, princess of helium,
—from Beatrice Joanna, the changeling,
—from Galinthia, who was turned into a
cat,
—from Belestiche, mistress of Ptolemy II,
—from Fanny Abington and her harlotries,
—from Lupa, the wife of Faustulus,
—from Queen Gertrude of Denmark,
frampold and feak,
—from Kaulah, the sister of Derar,
—from Old Mother Whummle and her
Winchester geese,
—from Jezebel and her 50¢ womb,
—from Signera Bubonia and her poxes,
—from La Dolcequita, cara de vinagre,
—from Umm Kulsum, the hag procuress,
—from the Marquise de Brinvilliers,
poisoner and viragint,
—from Mad Meg and her shittle-witted
gixies,
—from Temba-Ndumba, child-eater of
the Jagas,
—from all Sirens, Hirens, and Pampered
Jades,
—from Agrippinilla, mother of Nero,
 —from Lysistrata and her antianeirai,
—from Hyacinthe Chantelouve,
the gernative backstress,
—from the Ghats of the Indian Ocean,
—from Lady Midhurst, the gongoon,
—from Seraphina Feliciano, Contesse de
Cagliostro,
—from Linda Ne Touchez Pas, the tit
of turncoats,
—from Angerona, goddess of melancholy,
—from Unakuagsak, the Great Mother
of Eskimos,
—from Mistress Libuschka and her
slit-piece,
—from Urganda, the fairy neckbite,
—from the Fifty Daughters of Danaus,
—from Pudicitia and her mattress
knights. . .”

Dr. Crucifer deambulated, walking in rogational

fashion now, and the drone became perceptibly higher
and higher as he moved. He was overcrowing with hatred
and disgust, his mouth becoming absurdly puckered and
puffed as he began a funeral clap.

“—from Iolanthe the impositrix, libera nos, Domine

—from Sycorax, the black poozle,
—from Venus Calva, who was bald,
—from Medea, the craven sluck,
—from Lady Caroline Lamb, whose
clicket was ever clacking,
—from Efna Koloi, the Queen of Ashanti,
—from Miss Dubedatandshedidbedad,
—from Lucrezia del Sarto,
la scapepuzzano,
—from Mother Atkins of Pinner,
—from Mme. Britannica Hollandia
of Hollands Leaguer,
—from Anactoria the anispix,
—from Cleopatra VII, high-priestess
of rashers,
—from Rahab the harlot,
—from Melinda Goosestrap, hussy and
cheatstress,
—from Sue Lozo, the sheela-na-gig,
—from Queen Hatshepsut, bint al-bazra,
—from Lambito the pintleless,
—from Khatun, Queen of the Mongols,
—from Isabel Burton, the ballacher,
—from Azazel, inventress of jewelry,
—from Paphian Aphrodite, the pocket
thief of hearts,
—from Charybdis and her voracious
mouth,
—from Lady Macbeth, the missing lynx,
—from Jane ‘Boo’ Faulkner, the nurse
for a prayer,
—from Eurygale and her fat colworts,
—from Calypso the croshabell,
—from Isadora Klein, the Hebrew
shortheel,
—from Thuvia, Maid of Mars,
—from Parisina Malatesta, the princess
of cats,
—from the Maiden All Forlorn
That Milked the Cow with the
 Crumpled Horn,
—from Gawrey, the flying scrunch,
—from Atalanta the advoutress,
—from Medusa and her forked hair,
—from Lady Bercilak, the baggage
of babliaminy,
—from Lamia the hellhag,
—from Telesâ, the aitu auleaga of Samoa,
—from Mother Middle, the factor
of mediocrity,
—from Sassia, the criminal bimbo,
—from Delilah of Sorek,
the philoepiorcian philistine,
—from Famiglietta, the Neapolitan
drazel. . .”

Darconville’s heart hammered in his ear as the

grotesque incantation, relentless with the music,
summoned up a terror in him that wiped his countenance
clear of all emotions but the signature of overmastering
fear that chilled him up to his hair and down to his feet.
Was he asleep: Was this a bad dream?

“—from Queen Endoxia of Alexandria, libera nos,

Domine
—from Angiola Pietragwa,
nymphe du pavé,
—from disc-headed Hathor, goddess of
Urt,
—from Adnil Notrub, the Falcon
Countess,
—from Taitu, the Mote in the Sunbeam,
—from Cressida, the dreadful she-Ghul,
—from Gothone, the shilpit,
—from Frédégunde, the Frankish frisgig
and assassin,
—from Agrat bat Mahlah, the axwaddle,
—from Kikimora, the objurgatrix,
—from Clytemnestra, the cullisance
of scabiosity,
—from Princess Aura, lustful daughter
of Ming the Merciless,
—from Salome and her shaking rags,
—from Tituba, the human tractatrix,
—from Queen Zinga of Angola,
—from Pasht, the cat-headed woman,
—from Anna Maria Zwanzigar,
pucelle venimeuse,
—from the Women of Lemnos,
—from Mother Gruel, the elvish shrew,
—from Irene Adler, the immoderatrix,
—from Stheno the Gorgon and her
wanton franions,
—from Lais the Corinthian snake,
—from Miss Lookingbothways,
the laiscarpotic,
—from Laverna, goddess of thieves,
—from the Wasawahili Women
of Madagascar,
—from Shub-niggurath, craftress of love,
—from Sylvia Tietjens and her enameled
cruelty,
—from Mistress Tomasin, Queen
Elizabeth’s dwarf,
—from Ulrike von Levetzow and her
organs of increase,
—from Mutter Erde and her foolish
fecundity,
—from Ann Partridge, schoolmastercide,
—from Cottina, whore of the Levant,
—from Myrtium the frigstress,
—from Ninhursag, the Mesopotamian
matrix,
—from Black Annis of Leicester,
—from Natasha Rostova,
the Woman Who Couldn’t Wait a
Year,
—from Eris, goddess of discord,
—from Lulu the Wunderkind,
—from Chrysis, Corone, Ischas,
and Antycra, the Homeric harlots,
—from Gabrina, the pounding waive,
—from Zenobia, the Arab magliaia,
—from Bess Broughton’s unbuttoned
smock,
—from all the Amalekite bitches,
—from Lesbia, titular mistress of Martial,
—from Aphrodite Kalligluttus, the
strumpet,
—from the Thumblings of Daeumlinge,
—from Gonorilla and her buzzard
women,
—from Nana the nysot,
—from Mère Guettautrou and her
chagatte,
—from the Women of Midia,
—from Crobyle the Hairbuckle,
—from Echidna the half-snake,
—from Kwotsxwoe, the Quinault
 Indian quaedam,
—from Decreto the Moon Maid,
—from Sechmet, the Egyptian
bloodmonger,
—from Miss Funderburk, la malheureuse,
—from Skogfrau, the Woman
of the Thicket,
—from Mistress Birdlime, Moll
Tenterhook, and Mabel Wafer,
the loosened drawlatches . . .”

Crucifer, side-stepping the furniture, was traveling as

well around the ramparts of his own madness, telling it all
in a shower of pain as if he’d stored up such phrases over
a lifetime for such eventualities to proscribe the destinies
of souls in a vocabulary that pretended to exhaust
elements for which even the reaches of uncommon
brutality had no interest, no access, and no words.

“—from Asherah of Ugarit, libera nos, Domine

—from Hine-nui-te-po, goddess of death,
—from Erzulie Mapionne, voudounist,
—from Mary Baker Eddy and her
M.A.M.,
—from Trulla, Bradamante,
and Radigund, warriors of woe,
—from Monhigan, the crow-shaped
enchantress,
—from Dippthese the doxy,
—from La Belle Ferronnière, la greluche,
—from Cynara the Scorta,
—from Pontianek the Amboira Witch,
—from the Empusai vampires,
—from Mayavel, 400-breasted goddess
of the Agave,
—from Dinah the gadabout,
—from Rhodopis, the insatiable punk,
—from Ishtar, deceiver of Gilgamesh,
—from Keres, eater of corpses,
—from La Gambogi and her ivory teeth,
—from Phanostrate Phtheropyle,
Queen of Ceronicus,
—from Friga, mistress of Mars,
—from Izanami, Japanese goddess
of putrefaction,
—from Dark Anu of Ireland,
—from Archidice the lupanarette,
—from Claria Leonza of Venezuela,
stupefier of men,
—from Nut, goddess of the goetic,
—from Venus Vulgivaga, the wandering
womb,
—from Blodeuwedd the Celtic runnion,
—from all the Potniae, Maniac,
and Praxidikae,
—from Marguerite de Bourgogne,
la pavute,
—from Louiatar, the blind whore
of Pohjola,
—from Manosa, goddess of cobra bite,
—from Madame Pochet and Madame
Gibou, beastettes,
—from Hathor-Sekhmet, exterminator
of mankind,
—from Chicomecoatl, the empress of
devils,
 —from the Danish Ellefruwen
and Swedish Skogsnufua,
—from Ignoge, Daughter of Albion,
—from Mère Castratrice the trancist,
—from Aphrodite Androphonous,
the Sodomite vixen,
—from the Women of Goes,
—from Lilith, the Woman-Who-Invites,
—from Archippe and Theoris, the
spoffokins of Sophocles,
—from Linda Lubberlegs, the Woman
Who Never Showed Up,
—from Tekla Degener, scold,
—from Sumerian Inanna, the sender
of plagues,
—from Cleine, Mneside, Pothyne,
Myrtia, and all Egyptian gavials
and rannels. . .”

The crescendo was ritualistic, an arithmetic of

blasphemy and cruelty borne along on the inexorability of
its own logical laws made instantly incompatible with any
changing, revising, or rejecting opposition that might
have been brought forth to prosecute against it and wailed
in the sensation of those utterances that were always
pitched antiphonally to the musical deathcry as if to deny
that evil, without this archabominational chant, couldn’t
either be recognized or understood.

“—from Mother Cresswell and her claps, libera nos,

Domine
—from Canidia, the human dreep,
—from Anna Arkadyevna Karenina,
 the woman of dinge,
—from Maria Grubbe, sadist,
—from Levidulcia and her inclinations,
—from Arachne, originator of spinning,
—from Juoda Hercogiené,
the Lithuanian bonce,
—from Emma Bridemann, elected vessel
of the Mormons,
—from Poppeia, the sexual swill of Nero,
—from the Baroness de Nucingen,
die Alte Hexe,
—from Mathilde Mauté, vaticide,
—from Joan Trash, the lady of the
basket,
—from Elizabeth I, who died without
hair in 1603,
—from Miss Fudpucker the fecalist,
—from Eisheth Zenunim, the common
stale,
—from Ann Hathaway, the wappened
widow,
—from the 33 Wicked Daughters
of Diocletian,
—from Aspasia and her four-doored
womb,
—from Thubui, the happy hierodule,
—from Nyctimene, who metamorphosed
into an owl,
—from Mother Uphill, underfonger and
venerilla,
—from Kriemhild and her
hollowpampered hoors,
—from Linda Maestra, the hag of Goya,
 —from Argive Helen, the deceitful
swawmx,
—from Queen Draga Maschin of Black
Head,
—from Xanthippe, the conjugal scold,
—from Biddy the Clap,
—from Deianire of Pyrite, the ravening
prickamouse,
-—from Marianne and her caprices,
—from Catherine Earnshaw, the
bouncing ramp,
—from Kullikrahvinna,
the Estonian pedicatress,
—from Dame Jinx and her catch-coin
justice,
—from Mylitta, the Babylonian
rumbelow,
—from Faustina the spermologress,
—from Aurelia Orestilla, the ginch
of Catiline,
—from Cina Grofica, the Serbocroatian
sunt,
—from Suzanne Valadon, the obstinate
minx,
—from Mère Folle, the cock-brained
fribble,
—from all Frows, Drabs, Ogresses,
Ralaratri, and Ponderous
Nopsters. . .”

The dirgeful hymn of the dead continued as Crucifer,

pausing again for breath, could now even ignore
Darconville suffering in his bed so intent was he upon the
frenzy of names that so hollowly echoed through the
room. He only puffed out his cheeks, humped his back,
and hissed on:

“—from Joanna of Naples, the nonpareil

of bawds, libera nos, Domine
—from Praxagoras, the angry bellows,
—from Antonina Miliukova Tchaikovsky,
the nieve,
—from Queen Cecropia the hypersubtle,
—from the Witch of Endor and her broth,
menses, and materials,
—from Maria Beadnell, the pinchpin,
—from La Belle Heaulmière, la catin,
—from the Sibyl of Panzoult, who spoke
lies,
—from Valeria Messalina, the notorious
stew,
—from Dame van Winkle, the whiniling
dastard,
—from Mother Prat, the fat woman
of Brainford,
—from all Troll Madams, Titifulls,
and Tattlers,
—from Glycera, the painted trullabub,
—from Diana Trapes, the walking mort,
—from Lady Fricarelle, the duchess
of malfeasance,
—from Una the Fairy Queen,
—from Smêraldine and her hairpins,
—from Catherine Alexeyevna Romanov I,
called ‘Figgy,’ the kozlonogaia,
—from Giralda, the weathercock,
—from Berte au grant pié, la conasse,
—from Old Mother Gothel and her
gamps and slatterns,
—from Elizabeth Bathory,
the trugging-house truepenny,
—from Hecate the Attic drench,
—from Mahboobeh the slave-girl,
—from Watere Wytches, crownede
wythe reytes,
—from Fanfan la Tulipe and her
bumrowls,
—from Empress Agrippina, the orgiac,
—from Notre-Dame des Parcs, the saint
of the smock-fair,
—from Wjera Sassulitch, the human
skate,
—from Henda, the wife of Abu Sofian,
—from La DuBarry and her ligbies
and lightskirts,
—from Lynda Raxa, the rixatrix,
—from La Sorellacia and her sausage
legs,
—from Dido and all her dutzbetterins
and biltregerins,
—from Jane Medlar, the Dutch Widow,
—from Pohjola’s Daughters,
—from Madame Miracola, the zook of
hell,
—from Argante, the giantess of
prostitution,
—from Dame Wiggins of Lee, the female
mandrake,
—from Venus Pandemos, the queen of
 tarts,
—from Naamah, Noah’s crosseyed wife,
—from Senta the spiggot-wench,
—from Paulina Bonaparte, la pettegola
maligna,
—from Queen Aigle of Dreiviertelstein,
who could fly,
—from Harriet Wilson, the blackmailing
waistcoateer,
—from the Mother of St. Edward
of Corfe, the mullipod of villainy,
—from Queen Dollalolla, the slatterpiece,
—from Isobel Gowdie the Strix,
—from Akko and Alphito and all giglots
and jillivers,
—from My Own Middle-Wicketed
Mingwort of a Mother . . .”

Stung with anger, Crucifer went suddenly into a full

hue and cry, alive with self-inflicted hurt, and he rose up,
grey, like Banquo’s ghost, heaping even greater
contumely on each and every name he uttered with each
dart of that sarcastic tongue that looked like a foul pistil
issuing from a huge calyx.

“—from Libitana and her dead eyes, libera nos,

Domine
—from Dipsias and her flying wheels,
—from Lady Alice Kyteler, virago and
voriander,
—from Aholibah the aplestous,
—from Miss Farabutto, the quarrelsome
fratcher,
—from Pythia the oracularia,
—from Ilmator, Creatrix of the World,
—from Cybele, the Phrygian goddess
of fustilugging,
—from Al Lat, the false idol,
—from She Who Must Be Obeyed,
—from Francesca Bassington, the
belittling bersatrix,
—from Mary of Brabant, pavior and
rumbold,
—from Albertine Simonet, la disparue,
—from Waila, the Koranic nag,
—from the Wretched Magpies
of King Pieros,
—from Hélène de Surgères and her cool
hands,
—from Evelyn Bedstead, the wanton
bedswerver,
—from Athalie, the child butcher,
—from Columbine, the construpratress
of all those commode ladies who
lend out their beauty for hire,
—from Madame Guyon, the gotch-bellied
tart,
—from Drusilla, the chamberer,
—from Gagool, the evil crone of
Zimbabwe,
—from Anna Sage, the Lady in Red,
—from Ninon de Lenclos, notre dame
des amours,
—from Elsche Nebelings, the
Mouse-Maker,
—from Dame La Voisin, philtre-seller
 and whore,
—from Morgan le Fay, the fuxlady,
—from Penelope Devereux, richest
of bitches,
—from Goody Rickby and her noisy
forges,
—from Herodias, the jewified bestialator,
—from Mademoiselle de Maupin and her
pet muggins,
—from Philtra, the money stinkard,
—from La, queen of the Atlantean colony
of Opar,
—from Acrasia and her bowery wiles,
—from Ethel le Neve, snipe and mistress,
—from Jane Nightwork, the pox-ridden
fireship,
—from Centectl, maize mother
of Mexico,
—from Syntyche, the sharny-faced
scrubber,
—from fierce Camilla, o’er the plain,
—from Omm Jemil, the scoffing bardash,
—from the American South and its
stinking girleries,
—from Lady Clara Vere de Vere, the
proud mincing peat,
—from Cunizza da Romano, la zitella
inacidita,
—from Hilde Bobbe, the old witch
of Haarlem,
—from Mothers Twaddle and Twitchett
and all weeping culls and drabs,
—from Gara Gertsoginia, the gueuse
 of Gazag,
—from Gricka Vjestica, the Witch of
Gric,
—from Laverna, goddess of impostors,
—from Cicely Yeovil, the yawde,
the yode, the yade, the yaud. . .”

The select and cynically imaginative incantation

exceeded by far the black medieval hymn in conjuring,
almost to fantasm, the meaning of the day of wrath and
yet the furious and driving relentlessness of both
proclaimed equally in the full moon of Dr. Crucifer’s
blowing face, its morphs of color increasingly going to
dark as he droned the long profanity out in dry
arundinaceous whistles.

“—from Atropos and her glittering forfex, libera nos,

Domine
—from Empusa the succubus,
—from Potiphar’s Wife, who hadn’t
even a name,
—from Linda Pallant, the finished
product,
—from Assma, the sheeny poetess,
—from Mother Brownrigg, the despicable
rudas,
—from Giulia Farnese, concubine
di Papa Alessandro VI,
—from Zipporah the Desertable,
—from Kali the Black Mother,
—from Mesdames Goursey and Barnes,
the Abington scrubbers,
—from Anne Boleyn, the princess of
 plackets,
—from Lady Pecunia and her encomium,
—from Queen Tiy, who did her thutmose,
—from Marozia, la grande horizontale,
—from La Belle Dame Sans Merci,
the terrible frictrix,
—from Madame la Mort and the xvi
gromettes in her stable,
—from Lady Giacoma Rodogina,
the engastrimythion prophetess,
—from Dame Trot and her basket of
eggs,
—from Aloysia Weber the Unavailable,
—from the Wife of Bath and her yvel
preef,
—from Franceschina, tanakin of the
Low Countries,
—from Miss Flannigan, the Winnipeg
Whore,
—from the Great Whore of Revelations,
—from Signora Cianculli, the soapmaker
of Reggio,
—from Roxana, Countess of Wintelsheim,
—from Mary Powell Milton,
the troublesome hindermate,
—from Proserpina, Crowned Empress
of the Nether Clefts of Hell,
—from Queen Athaliah, court wanton,
—from Boadicea, the bullying bubble,
—from Katherine de Vausselles,
the wheencat,
—from Aerope the andromaniac,
—from Mademoiselle Maximum
 the maculate,
—from Volumnia, iron-boweled mother
of Coriolanus,
—from Penelope Whorehound, harlot
of Bridewell,
—from Madeleine Amalaric, the nativity
caster,
—from The Red Queen and her scarlet
queynt,
—from Vidosava, wife of Vojvoda
Momcilo,
—from Procne, filiocide,
—from Anna Keller Haydn,
the spoonpinching greedigut,
—from Melusine, the kitchen malkin,
—from Creseide, the cold-hearted
enjôleuse,
—from Tubby Ursula, the Fatness
of the Fair,
—from Erichtho the Karcist,
—from bat-eyed Madame du Deffand,
notre dame de lorette,
—from Vittoria Corombona, the devil
in crystal,
—from Lucilla and her curious curio,
—from Mamaloi, the twigger of the
West Indies,
—from Athé, heron-thighed goddess
of peevishness,
—from Livia Augusta, the leporine,
—from Mother Laquedem the Yenta,
—from Niphleseth, queen of the
chitterlings,
 —from the Phrygian Cybele and her
eunuch pontifesses,
—from Mademoiselle Scudéry, the urning,
—from the Lady Dunya, the land-frigate,
—from Isis, the female pope of secret
religions,
—from the Princess Badroulbadour,
out of the tomb,
—from Madame de Maintenon
and her beavroys and
ridinghoods. . .”

Then the “Lacrymosa” began: the grief in the musical

flats of the long mournful lament, like fatal heartache,
repeatedly sobbing themselves out like ancient questions,
and Crucifer now, almost as if turning away from himself,
as if now leaving the exequies involved in the burial of a
thousand corpses to the unearthly infection of the music
alone, revolved, drifted, around the room, almost
hypnotized himself, his hands down by his sides as
though they were both dead, but he never stopped the
murmuring. It was incessant, brutal, eternal.

“—from the Blue Hag of Leicester, libera nos,

Domine
—from Asenath Waite, the psychovore,
—from Queen Hiera, the cuckquean,
—from Ramping Alice and her riggish
zooks and mawks,
—from Aello, Ocypete, and Celeno, the
triple extract of infamy,
—from Roxalana, the quean
of bawdreaminy,
—from Hélène Kuryagin, the otorva,
—from the Women of the Sidhe,
—from Queen Quintessence and her
rhubarb soul,
—from Undine, the wayward watersprite,
—from Baba Yaga, bronzestrops
and blowze,
—from Elizabeth Sawyer, the Witch
of Edmonton,
—from Alcina, the flatbacker,
—from the Duchess of Wonderland,
—from the bandit Lara and her cyprian
patrol,
—from Amine, the wicked inquisitrix,
—from Lizzie Eustace, the sorceress
unsorcelled,
—from Termagant, Mohammed’s
shrewish wife,
—from Julie de Lespinasse, la liaisonesse,
—from Europa who diddled a bull,
—from Mutter Frauenwelt, die Herrinnen
der Herren,
—from the Yakshas of the Himalayas,
—from Thel, the small-souled theme,
—from the Lady Governors of the Old
Men’s Home at Haarlem,
—from Gabrina the jillet,
—from Mistress Alice Arden, stabfiend,
—from Sappho, the silly gousse,
—from Lucretia Estense Borgia,
the lycanthrophile,
—from Alyona Ivanovna the pawnbroker,
—from Yolara of the moon pool,
—from the Comtesse d’Orgueil,
the Duchesse d’Argent, and Madame
de Grandes Titres, the unpartial
daughters of necessity,
—from Gulfora, Queen of the Sabbat,
—from Odette de Crécy and her
cotqueanity,
—from Ixtab, Mayan goddess of suicide,
—from Minerva and her celestial trollops,
—from Belphoebe, the perforated virgin,
—from Gort à Bhaile, the femina of
famine,
—from Madame Anima and her firehaired
procuresses,
—from Queen Draga of Serbia,
the belly-bumper,
—from Eriphilem, the callat of boundless
tongue,
—from Mother Waterhouse the Spaewife,
—from Blouzelinda, the princess
of pillicocks,
—from Dame Hulda and her apparitions,
—from Jeannie Alexander, the wheezing
arrhenopiper,
—from Circe, the chaterestre, the chevese,
the chydester,
—from Locusta, poisoner
of the Roman court,
—from Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera,
the fustilarians,
—from Gnathenion, who pillaged poets’
pockets,
—from Isabel Rawsthorne, than whom none
 here is more loathsome. . .”

The window had grown almost dark in the dusk, the

faintest twilight throwing lengthening shadows across the
unlit room. As he heard her name, profaned so familiarly
in the mouth of this huge creature built like an oversized
marabout, Darconville lost his heart in a downrush of
total despair and he looked away, tears now running down
his cheeks.

“—from Clepsydra and her hourglass, libera nos,

Domine
—from Mother Shipton of
Knaresborough,
—from Beatrice Ambient, the dewclaw,
—from Umm al Samim, mother of poison,
—from Mephitis, goddess of sulphur,
—from Juno whose clitoris was
a thunderbolt,
—from Phaedra, the shameless sot,
—from Rhea and her midget dactyls,
—from Madame Box, the ranting meretrix,
—from Phyllis Grewsome, the
Washington protopopsha,
—from Bathsheba, druggard and drazel,
—from Queen Tomyris, the beheading
kite,
—from Catherine de Medici, the
monstriferous matelot,
—from Eudoxia and her equipolances,
—from the Baroness Klara Ungnad,
weenie-trundler,
—from Maidhdeanbuain and her
 superstitions,
—from Rapunzel the rampish-hearted,
—from Charlotte Corday, hysterical
virgin,
—from Baubo the Bawdstrot and her girls
whom none call maidens,
—from Januatica and her horrible old
sempiternal trots,
—from all the Little Pops of Hoggland,
—from Empress Theodora, harlot queen
of Byzantium,
—from Mariamne, the dawkin for a dolt,
—from Belides, the dragonian doxy,
—from Actoria Paula, peripole
and paranymph,
—from Hiberina, the bottomless well,
—from Grognon, the ill-willed
Stiefmutter,
—from Catherine Bora, the lutheran duck,
—from Penthisilea, the Amazonian bunt,
—from Eryphile, the low betrayer,
—from the Empress Dowager Tsu Hsi
of Imperial China, the Scourge of
God,
—from Thais, the trugmullion of
Alexander the Great,
—from Lady Bertalda and her lavenders
and leaping-housewives,
—from Typhaon the tallywoman,
—from Guinevere, the spiteful solicitrix,
—from the seductress Phrynne and all
pamels everywhere who march by
two and three,
—from Pheretrina, the crudest of
connivers,
—from Fulvia and Arsinoë, bumfondlers,
—from Sofya Andreyevna Bers, who
stole toys,
—from Pythionice the pallaptern,
—from Jennyanydots and her Gumbie cats,
—from Barbara Muehleck Kepler,
the left-handed jilt,
—from Clorinda, the chattel of sullen
memory,
—from Ulin, the false enchantress,
—from the Grandmother of Ghosts and
her woolen effigies,
—from the Princess Papulie with plenty
papaya,
—from Cytheris, the jade prophet,
—from Miss Emily Faithful, man-hating
amazon,
—from the Weird Sisters and their
wheyfaced wirepulling,
—from Anteia the inallegiant,
—from Madame Arcadina, pinnace
and pythoness,
—from Princess Sumru of Sirdhana,
the sunck, who smoked her hookah
over the graves of men buried alive,
—from Solange Dudevant, the deywife,
—from Olympias, the Greek hen,
—from Semiramis the Assyrian punk,
—from Hypatia, pagan philosophress,
—from Fiametta, bastard of the King
of Naples,
 —from Dian L. Rotbun, hedonomaniac,
—from Ge Panmeter and all the whorage
of wifkin,
—from Marie Duplessis de Camellias,
la baiseuse, la chouquette, la
gisquette, la gonzesse, la punaise, la
travailleuse, la racoleuse, la caliche,
la pétasse, la poufiasse.”

Dr. Crucifer in one move shut off the phonograph

and, caracoling belly-forward, countermarched to the bed
with the mouth of a bell and the heart of hell and the head
of a gallows tree, but the day of toil for Darconville, his
ashen eyes no longer staring into space, had fortunately
ended several minutes before when with an inexplicable
stabbing in the lungs from a last indrawn breath he passed
the threshold of pain now into a deep coma.

LXXXIII

Gone for a Burton

When I loved you and you loved me,

You were the sky, the sea, the tree;
Now skies are skies, and seas are seas,
And trees are brown and they are trees.
—CHARLES A. WAGNER
 STILLMAN INFIRMARY was white and antiseptic,
the room on the seventh floor nothing more than a table, a
chair, and a high wheel-footed bed. There was no flourish
of architecture, no ornament, only chrome, silence, and a
monotony of windows. Doors, opening, shut. Lights,
coming on, went out. There was no sky beyond the
window. The view, looking westward, was too high for
one to see the trees.
The doctors had been worried. They might have lost
him, they said, charging Darconville where he lay,
forfoughten, with contributory negligence not only for
excessive smoking but for an acute tension due to some
kind of overexertion or apprehension he’d ignored. Where
had he been this past week? And how long had he gone
without food? The quick hard pulse and convulsive
motions had frightened them, along with the obvious
weight loss, dyspnea even at rest, and the labored use of
accessory muscles for respiration; his chest was hyper-
resonant to percussion. He had to lean forward, while
sitting, to brace himself. An inept intern, searching for a
cardiac murmur (known only to himself), had initially
forced him through a valsalva maneuver: the sudden
stabbing pain was so severe that Darconville became
hypoxic and, past his limitation, fell into hypotensive
shock. The intern quickly called an emergency code.
Several resident doctors ran in and gave him a saline
infusion—wide-open—of 1500 cc’s over three hours.
They found a bounding right ventricular pulse in the chest
beneath the sternum and the sound of wet rattling rhonci
on the right but, more ominously, on the left side of the
lung only a seashell hollowness. There followed
prolonged expiration through pursed lips, profuse
sweating, and flailing movements in the chest. An
emergency X ray revealed scattered lucencies throughout
the lung fields, and now they knew what they had—a
congenital condition of bullous emphysema, with an
episode of spontaneous pneumothorax.
It called for immediate intervention: one or several
bullae had ruptured, causing air, leaking from one lung, to
rush into the chest and being trapped there to increase the
pressure from outside the lung to collapse it. The harder
he tried to breathe, the more the lung collapsed. Quickly,
the doctors punched a hole in the chest wall and through
the ribs inserted a tube attached to a Gomco machine to
suck out air in order to reinflate the collapsing lung,
prevent it from closing down, and allow scarring to seal
the rupture.
Darconville spent several days on a respirator while
being fed intravenously, and his pulmonary competence
was restored to a fragile but stable state. No visitors were
allowed—not black lameth; not Hasmed, angel of
annihilation; not Af, ruler over the death of mortals. He
slept fitfully. When he awoke, the sweat had stenciled his
hair to his forehead and his head rocked with conflicting
swing and spin, a relentless hammering between the eyes
as if, with importunate questions, someone to solve
justice yet not knowing how desperately sought release to
find and punish the criminal who belonged there instead.
He had almost gone for a burton—he didn’t care, for it
was better to die than live some death too bitter to fear—
but he was still alive. He remembered nothing of how he
got there, but for all he knew the university had already
issued a writ de lunatico inquirendo, scheduled as he was,
before a week was out, to undergo a required bit of
zoopery with a psychiatrist.
 “It would of course be taken as healthier—more
normal—for you to hate her,” the psychiatrist muttered,
sitting back and meditatively circling his foot. It was
absurd: hate Isabel? Darconville loved her. He wouldn’t
say it again. But he wouldn’t pray for it anymore, either,
for God now seemed to him the refuge to whom men only
turned to avoid any homage to their neighbor. And then
how did Christ expect us to love as we were bidden to do
in this life when the very chance for it was taken away?
The heavens? No, to seek solutions there—whether of a
crime, or a code, or a criss-cross puzzle—was to have
your questions not solved but dissolved. To solve it all, on
the other hand, he was nevertheless determined (he
simply didn’t know how!) for love was somehow inside
him, giving him no rest; it was not a pursuit to which he
could turn his attention or not as he chose. In any case,
she had promised she’d send him an explanation, hadn’t
she?—he would wait for it, then. It would help. It must
help.
There must be more to love than death, thought
Darconville during those long empty days, feeling he
wanted only to find something he needed or needed to
find something he wanted-—to step on the moon and say,
to the cagastric night, “Be day!” No, something would
come that would save him from hate, and if it wasn’t
death it had to be love, didn’t it?
Darconville told the psychiatrist he missed his cat.
Yes, that’s right, his cat—because he believed, as he said,
that we partially died, all of us, through sympathy at the
death or disappearance of each of our friends; memories,
even if one wished it, couldn’t be forgotten. It became a
thought that literally upon the thinking brought an ache to
his wounded lung, compressing his chest. (Secretly, he
began to take the benperidol.) He asked the psychiatrist,
describing him, if by any chance he had ever seen
Spellvexit. He badgered him to make inquiries. And
repeatedly he begged him if he would telephone Isabel on
his behalf. Would he? Why wouldn’t he? But there was
no reply, the foot merely continuing meditatively to
circle, now this way, now the other. It must have been a
Saturday, at one such session, when Darconville strained
across the bed to peer down at the street: the distant
marching music, attracting him, was that of the Harvard
band escorting a football crowd through the streets below.
They all looked so happy, the boys in topcoats and
flannels hugging blankets in one hand and beautiful
slender girls in crimson tarns and scarves waving fishtail-
pennants in the other, all of them limber, alive, in the
bright sword-cold October air and kicking through
autumn leaves toward the grey arcade of the stadium
across the river. It made Darconville feel more isolated
than ever. Would he telephone, please? Would he call?
No, decided the psychiatrist, he must simply learn to
forget her; he was worried: the largest number of inmates
in bedlam, he pointed out, were people, unresigned to it,
who’d been rejected in love. The psychiatrist, however,
asked what he was going to do, lest he end up among
them. (Instantly, Darconville felt an overwhelming
compulsion to write a book in defense of them all. I
wonder why? he thought. I? Perhaps, he thought, there
isn’t an I at all and we’re simply the means of expression
of something else. Wonder? What is wonder but the
imagination seeking what it hasn’t. Why? Y: the past tense
of antique verbs resurrected to predicate present
behavior.) His reply was that he was waiting—Isabel was
going to send an explanation. But the psychiatrist
frowned and continued to express concern, remarking
again on the curious absence of a normal heteropathic
symptom of improvement: relief by rage. Why did he not
hate her? Then Darconville turned to him, not with
rebuke, not with ridicule, neither with irony nor sarcasm,
but rather with the kind of childlike and simple-hearted
ingenuousness that suddenly lit up his eyes with
innocence as he softly asked, “Do you think she’d believe
I loved her then?”
The days passed. Morning brought emptiness, ink
flooded the sky beyond the window, and night crept in
again, earlier and earlier now, the cold winds outside
crying and sobbing like a child in a chimney and blowing
out the faraway lights of Boston one by one. Visitors were
still prohibited him. Late one night, however, Darconville
was awakened when the door of his room, gradually
opening, sent a diagonal fan of light across the bed. He
sat up quickly and clicked on the lamp. There stood
Lampblack of all people—alone—gesturing nervously
with a handful of mail he dropped on the bed just before
he rushed out. The largest piece, postmarked New York,
was an official-looking manila envelope. Darconville slit
it open, and an angry blush suddenly filled his head as
with a sinking heart he saw what he held in his hands—a
photograph of a blond fellow in a naval uniform, the
subject’s rank and identification below. It was Gilbert van
der Slang, himself.
Swiftly, Darconville took up a pencil nearby, crossed
out the name with a petulance that broke the lead in
midstroke, and shut off the light. The weighty darkness
bore in on him in a sudden synathroismus, crowding a
million terrible particulars upon him and paralyzing him
head to foot, and though he opened his mouth to gasp he
was prevented from either calling or crying out under the
action of the crippling inexplicable force pressing him to
death. He lay motionless in the dark, with tears rippling
down his cheeks, waiting for the rest of his life to show
him what it would be. Then he could suddenly breathe.
Then the darkness began to dissolve. Then he could again
discern necessary shapes out of unnecessary shadows.
And then he knew that the detective to solve a crime must
become an accessory to it. He turned on the light again.
And he picked up the photograph.

LXXXIV

What Is One Picture Worth?

If the Devil did ever take good shape, behold this

picture.
—JOHN WEBSTER, The White Devil

GILBERT VAN DER SLANG, Ensign (USNR)—it

would be a graduation photo—stands at attention in the
full dress of regimental commander in the boy navy:
white gloves, a sash at the waist, the shoddy-for-
broadcloth jacket with its ventral rows of brass-buttons.
The subject is stiff as a stork—poker-backed, eyes front,
arse tight as a trapdrum—but the martial stance,
nevertheless, fails to supply the proper pointing, not for
want of high-seriousness certainly—the little chin juts out
niet zander arbljt—but for the uniform, impressive indeed
were it not the type that conventionally attracts ice-cream
vendors, doormen, and South American officials. It’s the
pose of a smugly pretentious deluxe: the Count of
Trumpet on maneuvers from the stage of sugarplum
opera! The picture, were it hung in a museum, would be
entitled, “Are You Proud, Mother?”
The student medals and sigla are very nice, but it’s
the kind of military respectability with which vulgarity is
always on speaking terms, for the white ducks,
foreshortened like a clumperton’s, are in painful
collaboration with those black government-issue shoes—
the sort that never seem to be fellows—and the sleeves
mooch down too far over the hands. Alongside the left
leg, facing oddly inward and suggesting a slight
effeminacy, hangs a toy sword with which by optimistic
transfer he doubtless seeks to counteract that impression.
It’s a sallow face, plain as the way to market, one of
those drawn yellow lamplit complexions best exemplified
in the work of minor Dutch painters of the seventeenth
century. The small blunket-colored eyes, cold as a
boomslang’s, are looking straight, if unseeingly, toward
Cape Disappointment where those who graduate from
service academies are of course doomed, for want of
imagination, to spend the rest of their lives. He has a bifid
chin and the sharp grypanian nose of a logical positivist.
The lank hair characteristic of him has always been
considered indicative of pusillanimity, enough so to
advance by way of suggestion a distinct androgen
deficiency—or even possible impotence.
There is a humorless and hard-natured line to the
mouth, Protestant in cast, shaped to the possibility of
generating inauspiciously vexatious abuse like sending
common seamen for non-existent tools (still deemed wit
at sea) or ordering a battue of porpoises as a holiday
diversion on some dull cruise to the Leeward Islands or
the Hawaiian chain of Kukeke Eleele. It would be a high
immature voice, slick with alloquia and sea-bop and
nautical drunts in the quasi-linguistic bluff of logbook
narrative about jackstays ‘n’ jumper struts ‘n’ jibbin’ the
kibber. The head is capitalupine, the hands thin and
spidery, deft at small tasks. There is a sapped but
inflexible tonality to the general appearance of this brisk
little fart, the lack of repose conveyed especially in the
adolescent legs, elongating the outline, which run out of
the effortfully dovetailed imposture of uniform and down
to feet long as kippers—the body actually taking on the
appearance of having issued from the feet themselves! He
is, in fact, quite short.
This is a figure of fun—a cross-grained, long-waisted
clockcase of opposability with the generic temperament
of a satrap and a talent for extrapolating cues from
postures with indefatigable readiness. He loves
bandmusic, probably ran cross-country (les Pays-Bas,
certain!), and would have had the best “cargo project” at
the Academy—the kind of officious little pickstraw
who’d go into a complete shitfit if anyone in his presence
ever failed to refer, for instance, to a ship as a boat. He’s a
dog to procedure. There is in that bast and Nankeen-
yellow mask a sunken and repugnant mood of refusal—
spitefully incloistered— showing a person in whom
secrecy would erroneously be taken for reserve and for
whom everything drops into categories made familiar
only by his indifference, as a makeweight to a scale
adjusts a gain. An underbutler squats in an esquire: he
finds meaningful what he can verify by counting on his
fingers, discerning no limit between achievement and
ambition, and thus is beauty duly converted by that
transubstantiating process of the functionist, once again,
to use. There are, however, more wheels and
counterpoises in this engine than are easily imagined. His
thoughts are executed only to matters of dogged purpose,
his emotions but to formulate accumulations—and Either
piggybacks Or, the while, for the acquisition of both.
Here is Ambidexter, for good or for the time being,
whichever comes first.
We discern a sharp composite picture of a prattboy so
null in effect —his mind an abode of anything—that in
nothing isn’t something to which he wouldn’t promise all
he seemed for everything he lacked. And if a girl?
Occasion is his cupid. He is what is his shadow: it is and
it is not; he’d strut and fleer and fumble with his hat with
untaught fists and with a smile that aches to shield his
mouth as glasses would his eyes proceed to peep love
ditties in her neck and seek to mirror lies—until such time
when promises reflect what’s far too malcon-formed for
sight to see he’d turn and gaze inward with the lost half of
his double face, and then would turpitude purvey to
malice in a flash! It is a photograph of utter vacancy.
Vain, pale, fragmentary, silly, indeed almost nothing—
wait!—O my God, but what about those ears?
His ears are absolutely monstrositous! No, it’s not
simply that they stand noticeably away from the head—
lobeless, horizontal, shaped like eraserwheels!—they
actually shoot out of the haircut like those xanthodermic
warballs made of Hoggland clay with which van Tromp
and his sullen brabantois sought to obliterate the English
and establish the legitimacy of that cheesemongering,
guilder-grubbing, tulip-sniffing, drainage-scheming
Gomorrah of the North where people live below sea-
level, exact payment from guests, and sport footwear
made of trees! His ears?
Are you in quest of comparisons?

LXXXV

A Digression on Ears

To strike at eares is to take heed there bee

No witnesse, Peter, of thy perjury.
—RICHARD CRASHAW

THE EARS, which master the face of a dunce, are

that part of the head which most publishes stupidity. It
was into none other than these, fluting up moronically
like foolish squills—penchant à la réception de
suggestions négatives—wherein was poured, thought
Darconville, more venomous lies than even Hearsay of
Satinland and all his polyotical side-intelligencers could
accommodate! It was astounding: they seemed both to
strain away from the cheeks in such vicious inflexions of
helix and anti-helix and yet draw up to such devilish
points that ugliness was announced instantly and
absolutely, as if in those oversized dirt-traps, shutting out
all melodies and comprehending only discord, no plot
could hatch fouler than themselves. The pinna looked
hard and mollusk-shaped, the tragus hemorrhoidal, and
the conch darker than the keyhole to hell. There were no
lobes.
What is there in the malformed ear that is so
revolting? It is the ideographic mark of perverts, penny-
simples, and Puritans, and be disarranged in whatever
way they might, nothing better indicates a blemished soul.
Contour—whether prick-eared, flap-eared, tulip-eared,
lop-eared, or jug-eared—does not establish periphery, for
what it is is only a poor remnant of what it means: small
ones announce madness; flat, brutishness and rusticity;
spheroidal, talkativeness; twisted, silliness or imbecility;
pointed, cunning, deceit, and that hypocritical kind of lust
commonly associated with those face-pulling and
dissenting Anabaptists and Allobrogensians with their
bowl-haircuts and venereal poxes who were ever ready to
club quotations and descant on bare supposais and bantle
scripture about in order to preach the dresses off the
neighborhood girls, until, you’ll recall, King Charles II
took the matter in hand—toy those twin appendages, in
fact, which he found could be gloriously cropped or
notched or slit to fit several fashions of contrition. But
large ears? They are the sumps of rumor and redundance,
each a whirlpool fierce to suck in fabrications of a
thousand sorts. These are the penetralia of the body,
known to every Dumbo, Jumbo, and woebegone basset
hound of a detractor who’s tripped on them—flags that
semaphore treachery—which historically denote flight
before spiritual responsibility, natures playing at modesty
while working hard at things like ruses, and those meager,
choleric, inconstant, and unethical schemes observable
from without yet confined within the twisted and
grotesque mule-pulleys of people like Wycliffe, Prynne,
Calvin, Vickers, Wither, Cranmer, Herr Ludder and other
nasal Protestant archdapifers who’d have left the world a
far, far better place had they all been immediately
banished to the infamous island of Panotiorum where the
cruel aboriginals of that place are so monstrously fluked
that they live out their lives actually wrapped in their
ears! “A long-ear’d Beast and Flanders College,” wrote
Swift, “is Dr. Tisdale to my knowledge.” To big ears we
owe our universal death. Eve, the first macrotus, wished
to hearken only to what she heard she wanted. Acousticus
first brought wickedness into the world.
There is more to the ear than meets the eye. It looks
awful, for one thing—the asymmetrical non-whorls and
misvolutions of its general format showing a factual
resemblance to nothing whatsoever on earth, except
perhaps for that one striking correspondence to Dutch
landscape. A simile is applied to it as schnaps to a
Voortrekker: one is never sufficient. Is it an air-
conditioner? A love-lure? A gravity ball? It is a human
question mark with a cochlea like a snail, a center like a
diphthong, and a rim like a last quarter moon or the
symbol for a suffruticose shrub. It never trumpets, though
it resembles one. Sound goes through it perforating
nothing—as theologians explain the Virgin birth—like
saffron through a bag. Its squashed-up shape is a poor
vestige of the mobile catchment-cup of many other
mammals. It cannot be hid. (The contraptions, in fact,
contrived for whatever good reason to cover them
temporarily—oreillettes, muffs, earcaps—are more
hideous than the ears themselves!) It is the only aperture
impossible to shut by itself. It is forever open to fungi,
otosis, and the mendacities of talebearers, false delators,
and tare-sowing dogs. It cannot discriminate between
noises it will and will not hear.
 It is a vicious circle, like all circles. It has no other
one like it. It begins to hum for no apparent reason. It
aches at simple heights and depths. It cannot move. Insert
an insect: there sounds a deafening heavy-footed tread—
and yet it is unable to hear higher pitches commonly
available to the lower beasts. It can claim no exact
certitude in relation to distance, space, and often time. It
cannot determine truth. Of itself it can retain and
remember nothing, and nothing produces, save an ignoble
dirty mulch called “cerumen” which gathers in the dark
like mushrooms and deafens before it disgusts. It is
therefore the worst tool to grasp philosophical knowledge.
It freezes, it shrinks, it sprouts hairs, it turns color, and,
worst of all perhaps, it repeatedly reports—for if one
sleeps on one ear, the other can always bring bad news.
By our ears our hearts become tainted! We speak of being
up to one’s ears, meaning involved or implicated, in debt,
or in trouble; or on one’s ear as captiously or excessively
irritated or irritable; or all ears, indicating ambitiously
opportunistic or vulgarly eager; or by the ears as entering
into a state of strife or discord. It is a noun with as many
contemptuous and derogatory implications in English as
has the word “Dutch.” The ears of people do not follow
suit with the rest of them as they age, remaining not only
large, if initially so, but the efflorescence of ugliness until
the very moment of death. There is little loveliness,
indeed, even for the normal ear, often failing to
correspond regularly between the tip of the nose and
eyebrow line at the base of the forehead. It is the single
tragic constant on the head of man.
But what of those ears of Gilbert les Grands
Écoutilles? They were goosewings—tegumentary
expansions of skin, suggesting the distinct possibility of
aerial flight, stretched from head side to the elongated
digits of their points as if ready to crow and flap away. It
was a comic set of volutes, each proof against each, one
slightly forward of the other, like an owl’s. They flew up
only to be pulled down, ballasted by the priapic weight
that wouldn’t let them leave and, wallowing unwieldy,
enormous in their gait, stuck out while infolding to a flat
welt as if not belonging to their bearer. The placement
was no better than the spread which was worse than the
shape, a contortion best put somewhere between a potato
chip and a reporter’s logograph for the word “impostor”=
p. It was volume, nevertheless, without bounty, size
without grandeur, bulk without any aura of command, an
enlargement, though empty, enouncing far more than
exceeds enough. They shot up suddenly from ears to
shears to sheaths to wreaths! He himself almost narrowed
in the competition. He was as if pinned to them, his weak
face left in a posture of gawk like a Doofes Vogelscheuche
seeming to refuse the outlandish ascendancy they
simultaneously usurped. He looked like a taxi going down
the street with both doors open.
Phrenology claims that certain undeveloped organs of
the brain, combined with others abnormally developed,
show a tendency toward criminality. The external ear
receives the terminal branches of so many classes of
nerves and concentrates in such a small space the lines of
communication from various centers of sensation that the
otyog-nomist may readily recognize such tendencies.
Here, the large circumference where the ear joined the
head showed an incorrigible spirit, the coarse and
thickened texture denoting destructive tendencies, and the
marginal line of the anti-helix establishing an inclination
toward rashness. The width at the base of the conch
showed a lack of sympathy, with a plane of
comprehension very very small. The incisura intertragica,
very wide, showed an almost animal covetousness, and
the lobelessness, attaching the ear to the face, as it were,
made a limitrophe of a complete head. They might have
been boxed shut, thought Darconville, but not boxed
enough! I shall be called Ukhovyortov!
The memory, according to Pliny, is seated in the lobe
of the ear. But these of course were lobeless and
exappendiculate—unable then to retain any recollection
of that to which, once covetous to hear, they’d been
filthily privy—like the barren habitat of two planets
sealed off, mindless and instinctive, from sentient life and
reduced to the basic elements of the physical universe
which, in fact, they incorporated: earth (the loam in the
conch); water (the endolymph and perilymph fluids); air
(the sonoric puffs that touched the tympanic membrane)
—but fire? Where was the fire?
As Darconville studied the labyrinths of those ears, he
assessed them. They were colossal, he saw, but large
enough, he wondered, to contain the vehemence of my
accusations? They provided spatial orientation but
balance enough, he wondered, to sustain any gravity
against the onslaught I should mount? They stood rigidly
attentive, but were they vigilant enough, he wondered,
against shrieks of destruction that could pierce more
wheels of wax than could Odysseus supply for his men?
Finally, they were rooted firmly there but tight enough, he
wondered, to remain when fastened to the tenacious grist-
bite of my hands?
Fire? thought Darconville. O, that could be provided.
That could be arranged.
 LXXXVI

The Tape Recording

All that’s spoke is marred.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Othello

IT WAS A GREY AFTERNOON, smelling of rain,

several weeks later when the long-awaited explanation
from Isabel finally arrived— a primitive
misaccomplishment not unrelated, if the truth be told, to a
brief telephone conversation Darconville had had with her
mother just prior to his release from the hospital when to
that solution-proof but suddenly suspicious soul it was
quite soberly vouched, and repeatedly so, that though it
were the very day of her daughter’s wedding, that though
the world itself flew off its supports, that though he
himself had to crawl back from the dead trawling a sheet
of flame, he would have it. And then it finally turned up,
in a sealed envelope with insufficient postage, at the
Harvard post-office. There was no letter, nothing written
down—only a small cassette.
There was a sick color in the sky. The wind was up
and the pale undersides of the few leaves left on the trees
were layered to windward as, frantically, Darconville set
off on the run to find a recording machine—across to
Langdell, over to Paine Hall, into the Science Center, and
then cutting back through the Yard he found one upstairs
on the fifth-floor of the Lamont Library where,
conveniently, no one was about. The librarian pointed to a
machine. Darconville tore off his coat, clicked the tape
into place, and—holding his breath—pushed the button to
play. Isabel’s voice was cool.
“I found it impossible to write. I’ll try, anyway, to
explain as much as I can here. You said you wanted the
truth, well, I doubt that my truth will satisfy you. And you
might as well know right now that there’s really no point
in trying to see me. I guess I can’t actually blame you
[sigh] for the way you must feel now, but it doesn’t matter
anymore, you see, because I’ve too long listened to what
you’ve said to me. It hasn’t been good for me. I’m afraid
I’ve let you dominate me.”
Darconville closed his eyes.
“I don’t exactly blame you for that as I suppose, oh,
I’ve let myself be dominated. I can’t tell you, I guess,
when this whole thing began, but you might say it began
from the beginning. There were—little things—always:
the trust thing we, you know, had a big conflict over. If
you don’t know what I mean, it’d be pointless to explain.”
“You might condescend to try,” said Darconville.
The voice on the tape was assured and complacent,
with a touch of weary finality to it implying its wisdom,
and the mature pain that informed it, might be just a trifle
too incomprehensible to those of less spiritual provision,
and yet it bore the stamp of set-speech, typically found in
that kind of parvenu whose sudden confidence,
determining the self-congratulatory tone which adopts
clarity of diction to express itself, is so flown with the
conviction of its own new respectability that it becomes
in itself the worst kind of hauteur, as merciless as it is
recent.
 “I didn’t really trust you. I assumed you were seeing
other people, right from the beginning. That’s when it
began, I think. I mean, I knew you lied to me. I didn’t
blame you, I honestly didn’t, I should have been more
mature about it all, and maybe it was my own fault for not
trusting. But my first year at Quinsy? All that business
with Hypsipyle Poore? As you—”
Horrified, Darconville shoved the stop button, pushed
rewind, and pressed the machine to play.
“—trusting. But my first year at Quinsy? All that
business with Hypsipyle Poore?”
What the devil in hell?
“As you know I was completely taken with you. It
didn’t matter what you did. Like when you went away, I
was completely faithful to you and didn’t see anyone, not
when you were in England (I don’t suppose I can ever
really go back there again, you know?) or anytime. And I
knew even then that both Govert and Gil, well, I don’t
know [audible grinning], wanted to be with me, you
could say.”
“Forty thousand brothers could not with all their
quantity of love make up my sum,” said Darconville,
quoting another disappointed friend.
“But I suffered a lot, just like it was with Hypsipyle. I
knew there was something there—a person can tell. In
school people talk. Girls: about your looks, your car, your
being unmarried. I didn’t believe a lot of it, the rumors
and what all. [yawn] And of course I didn’t even know
what was going on until I found some of the notes. That
was when the doubts came back. And pressures, like you
wouldn’t believe. You know?”
It was totally unanswerable: vox, et praeterea nihil—
a piece of faery almost flowing with the lewd heat of
anticipation for the third party in whose defense she was
forced to reach back four years for an excuse that was
non-existent. The habit of lying did beget credulity in the
liar! She was talking like a tour-guide, perjuring like
Epaminondas, but she was so fully pretentious she
seemed not to be! Were bad actors, wondered
Darconville, only good actors playing bad actors? Yet he
couldn’t move, so fixed was he to travel along with the
words that raveled off with such a routine and
premeditated sense of convenience. He could see her: she
was obviously lying down—probably at night—feet
crossed, speaking her little penny-repentance into the
microphone in one hand and maybe eating tiny hard
candies with the other, while the slowly turning mobile
overhead sent its slow heliocometrical shadows across the
cream-and-red bed.
“This past summer those pressures were gone. I was
alone—getting in touch with my feelings. Though I
needed you, I resented you too. I know you sold your car,
I know you were teaching to earn money for the wedding,
I know you couldn’t get up from Quinsyburg to see me,
still—and you can see I have faults, like anybody else—I
resented you. [giggle] It’s almost, you know, like a
love/hate relationship. It’s so painful, all this reviewing—
but [sigh] I have to, for you. I see that.”
“Trowel on, Mason,” said Darconville.
“Then I had my car accident that time. And for you to
tell me I drove too fast, I always drove too fast? I didn’t
need that then—I needed a shoulder! That’s when it
began, I think. That just stripped away everything that
was left and just ruined, rueened, all I ever felt for you,
though I can’t explain why. That wasn’t all. There was the
sewing—the money? you gave me? remember?—well, I
never really wanted to make my wedding dress. I felt
confused about that, [long pause] I guess I’m happy with
myself—except in the way I’ve treated you, which I think
you know you caused as much. It’s just that you made me
feel small. I would have always felt unimportant if we
were ever—together—that I was, I don’t know, lacking a
lot. You’re probably laughing even now—to be hearing
all this, to see how sensitive I can be. I’m just a country
girl, really, who wants to live close to nature and animals
and things, [sigh] I guess you forced me to look at myself,
to make me see things I didn’t want to see. I mean, maybe
I should see a psychiatrist. (Of course I can’t afford one.)
But sometimes I wonder if it’s just not better going
through life not so concerned with your faults. I have
faults, I admit, if you look closely they’re there. Please
don’t think I’m making you out to be an ogre or, I don’t
know—you know—’cause I think you’re basically a good
person, as, um, you are well aware of.”
It was rhetorical higry-pigry: a language in which
Darconville heard the rude and rustic paratragediations of
Fawx’s Mt.—the legacy of living down there with all
those truckfarmers, sheep-fucking insouciants, and raw-
wristed moonlings with their flails and rakes—and from
nothing more than the sounds of this meaningless
monologue, in which linguistic incorrectness grappled
with illogical inadvertency, was he able to summon to
mind with almost ritual wretchedness those long wasted
years of his life and to see at last the sudden poverty of
those once-cherished memories smelted out of the dross
heap of the past.
“I can be very independent and want to be. I let
myself lose that. I felt you didn’t respect me. That’s when
it began, I think. I felt I couldn’t be myself. I always felt I
had to be—to do—something; it was important to you, I
think, even though you told me the opposite. I felt like I
had to live up to something—that was a pressure. But,
you know, maybe this is good: it points up, like, I’m not
what you thought I was. Maybe if you thought I was too
good—which I wasn’t—it’ll help you get over this,
[yawn] You know? I’m not perfect. I know you love me,
but, lord, people get over things like this, and you will
too. I don’t blame you for hating me, I guess. I don’t
know, maybe you can think back on all the good. I know
you’ll always resent me— but maybe it’ll provoke great
writing on your part [audible grinning] at the expense, I
suppose, of myself. But, who knows, maybe I’ve given
you a motive.”
The first side of the tape ran out.
It was a bolus of mendacities. There was no strict line
of conciliation to thought or duty or affection, only a
post-posited and out-of-sequence rehearsal to avoid
explanation, un pièce radiophonique recorded with an
overdeveloped theatrical flair—careless, stupid, and
anaphrodisiac—in order to present herself as a sloe-eyed
Blakean infant in touch with the dark para-rational world
of animals and forests, one of those fake innocenti who’d
like you to believe she kissed fog or slept with a felt
rabbit, and yet those few sequences not ceremoniously
spent in buying her virtue by selling her guilt were
squandered in a fatuous half-hour of perfect
indistinguishableness, cruelly disregarding any ratio of
priority to subsequence and leaving unillumined by the
concentrated light of any single defining concern the real
facts of her iniquity which she dismissed, typically, by
way of the formulaics of heroineism—the “brave” smile
in the face of tragedy; the pos-terosuperior piety; the
studio-finish profile framed in modest contrition; and the
jolly heads-up tone, making versicle response, that
victory will always use in lessoning defeat. It was
rubbish. What had really happened? When did it actually
begin? Why had she kept up a sham for four years?
Sitting forward, Darconville slapped in side two and
the voice continued its disclosures, as hypocritical and
excusive as were those of the smooth, deceitful
chatelaines of yore. Remembrance fallen from heaven!
Madness risen from hell!
“I put off writing to you after you left because I
couldn’t cope with it. That’s one thing I guess I can’t be
forgiven for: not writing. I started several letters and they
just came out wrong, but you’ll be happy to hear, anyway,
that it’s bothered me; and that’s one good thing that’s
come out of all this—you remember our talks about it?—I
knoooow I have a conscience. That’s almost a relief to
me. Yes, I’ll admit, I’ve been happy, very happy, these
past few weeks, it really’s nice now, but it’s somehow
been tainted, too. I know that because of me you can
never really be happy.”
“Canaille!” shouted Darconville.
The librarian looked up.
“In June—I don’t remember the sequence—that’s
when it began, I think. I was really excited about getting
married and had no intentions of not marrying. Ask my
mother. Then I remember I got scared —I panicked. It
was incredible! But by then, I forget exactly when, you
had left for Massa—”
Stop.
The time-frame? It was crucial! What was the time-
frame? Darconville felt an entire period had passed with
Isabel waiting not only for him to leave but to see
whether this neighbor of hers would propose to her! He
was certain they had made their rendezvous sometime
during the summer, long before the fall. She was always a
coward and cunning all the time, but while September
made her fickle, July made her a liar!
Perspiring, Darconville quickly tapped the rewind
button, pushed play, and strained with every fiber of his
being to listen beyond the nonversation to the exact
words. But she hopped the hole.
“—got scared—I panicked. It was incredible! But by
then, I forget exactly when, you had left for
Massatoochits. And, you know, I think if you had said
that day, ‘Please come,’ you know, ‘I beg you,’ I almost
wonder if I wouldn’t have come. I remember exactly
when I was thinking that—I was wearing that violet
jersey with things, flowers, little ones, on it.”
“Resign your purple, Pretender,” said Darconville,
who knew that a liar could always be detected by that one
ridiculous use of detail.
“When you left I missed you, I did. I worried or
wondered—I don’t know—you’d get up there and find—
oh, I don’t know. I have this picture of Harvard, all those
tremendous people, and I always thought I was never
quite [smile] enough. So [yawn] a couple of days after
you left, I didn’t miss you as much. I wanted to, I guess—
miss you, I mean. But after a week had passed, I just
knew. That’s when it began, I think. I just—I don’t know
—knew.”
It was frightening. Darconville was almost now
unable to recognize actual truth as separate from the
violence of her fictions, for she had by her new lights
turned revisionary and set upon and savaged fact, like the
voracious Terrare who can seize a live creature with its
teeth, eventrate it, suck its blood, and, devouring it, leave
only the bare skeleton behind. Furthermore, the mode of
speech, all borrowed apocalypse, was itself a fabrication
—at once, honeyed and perfidious. It was more than a
crazy dysphasia fighting ataxaphasia. There was both a
fake voice and a real, with neither, curiously, able to hide
the kind of muflisme that is fascinated with the analysis of
itself, but while the former was a sort of mistily gentle
babytalk, a canting simulation of virtue spoken as if
offered like scented incense to evaporate in this harsh and
brutal world not of her making, the real voice, cold as
proof, might have been muttered in covens, weaving low
in a shuttle of bitter contempt that was full of unseen and
unpropitious events in the throat. She had a soul like a
jackknife, the kind that opened everywhichway.
There was more, however, and constant observer
continued confronting inconstant object.
“I’ve told you what I remember. And so we come—to
Gilbert, and if you dare to come down here to try to talk
to any of these people, I’ll not be here, and that’s a
promise! I’ve heard about your letters and telephone calls.
I knew in a way they’d be coming, [cruel laugh] You
didn’t think I was very perceptive, did you?”
Darconville found that perceptive. In her words he
could see her scar whiten and the ugly close-set bullet
eyes protruding.
“Well, do your worst! You’re mad as a hatter, that’s
what I think. But it doesn’t matter, you and I have
absolutely nothing to say to one another, [long pause] I
admit it, look, you were nice—that’s not the right word—
[sigh] gracious, I suppose, about being willing to let me
go out with other guys if I wanted to. Well, to be honest
about it, there were times back in Quinsyburg when I did
want to be with someone else—him. That’s when it
began, I think. I suppose I should have told you. But don’t
you see? They were neighbors, it was nothing, Mrs. van
der Slang was like my second mother. I was close to that
family, I knew them so well, but as I think back,
everytime I was with Govert—it’s funny, really—I
actually wanted to be [audible grinning] with Gilbert. He
was home, anyway, for a couple of days at Christmas and
a couple of days in July—”
Darconville, mentally correcting her own emotional
appraisal with hard fact, suddenly jerked his head
forward. Naked discourse can imply the image it lacks.
Keep talking, he thought, stay tired and keep talking.
“—although this past year-and-a-half he was on a
ship, nineteen months to be exact. I didn’t see him when
he came home this summer. He didn’t get off the ship
until the last week in July and afterwards he went up to
New York for—”
He swiftly jammed stop, rewind, and listened to the
replay.
“—summer. He didn’t get off the ship until the last
week in July and—”
The mind whose preoccupation prevents it from
grasping wholes, Darconville knew, must sooner or later
focus on details, and this one detail, out of the blandest
and dullest pantomime of truth he’d ever heard, fairly
flew. Again: stop, rewind, play.
“—the last week in July—”
Darconville snapped off the machine and quickly
bolted down the stairs of the library, running out across
Mass. Ave. and through the dismal rain that had begun to
fall dashing over to Adams House. He went to his room,
pulled the top drawer entirely out of the bureau, and
began rummaging through the assortment of odds and
ends. It was a jumble: an old watch, photographs, the
inscribed blue cups from England, notebooks, pens and
pencils, the bloodstone Hypsipyle had given him, a
Cloogy pamphlet (“Glints From My Mirror”), rough
drafts of several stories, a missal, and among all the
papers, along with that queer illegible manuscript from
Dr. Crucifer’s library, a pile of correspondence in an
elastic band. He sorted out the few she’d written to him
the past summer, some four or five, and set aside the very
first one—suggesting the postponement of their wedding
— ever to broach that subject. His heart fell into his
trousers, as every last one of his aspirations and
enthusiasms suddenly transferred from the upper to the
nether regions. The letter was postmarked Fawx’s Mt.,
Thursday, July 23!
The falcon had come to the fist. Isabel seemed all of a
sudden to grow material, a superficies of flesh and bone
merely, a creature of lines and surfaces, a language in
living cipher no more.
It was goodbye to curtains and crowns, goodbye to
the roses of Thalia and the laurels of Melpomene. It was
the end of all journeys and joyfulness. Darconville saw
her as the very antichrist of deceit, false not through
forgetfulness but while remembering, a figment of his
imagination with no mercy, no meaning, and no memory.
To see the creature who has hitherto been nearly perfect,
divine, lose under your very gaze the divinity which has
informed her, defined her, given her life, suddenly grow
commonplace, turn from flame to ashes, from a radiant
vitality to a corpse? It was a sorrow almost literally
unable to be borne, a spectacle without measurable
dimensions in this world, for in an instant, she became a
complete—complete—mediocrity.
Through the pouring rain, Darconville walked back to
the library. A poisoned taint was on everything: the
poisoned air, the poisoned buildings, the poisoned city.
He shoved through the doors, the contorted grimace on
his face intended to mimic the satisfaction of the
discovery he had made, but he of course knew otherwise,
as he who by being poisoned does poison know. He sat
down directly to the machine again, a hatred in his heart
more deadly than the potions of Exili, and turned it on.
“—and afterwards he went up to New York for
almost a month which carried him to the end of August
practically, getting the license —his second mate’s license
—and so in spite of what—”
Darconville punched stop and replayed it.
“—his second mate’s license—”
Once again he hit the buttons.
“—his second mate’s license—”
Darconville suddenly burst into loud ironic laughter,
for there are passions the choice of which extend way
beyond man’s volition. It revved up to such a high
comical pitch that there might have been local
consequences—the librarian looked up again—had it not
as suddenly wept down to vexation and died into the
supplication of a long, pitiable, and despairing sob.
He banged the machine and the voice continued.
“—and so, in spite of what you may think, there was
absolutely nothing whatsoever going on here last summer,
even if you decide to think so, which makes me feel
nothing is on my conscience. I didn’t see him when all
this trouble was going on. It had nothing to do with it.
That’s the truth.”
 The truth? Pistols without cocks! Helmets without
vizards! A damnable lie! It stuck like corruption in her
throat and could be recognized under whatever
complexion, contour, accent, height, or carriage it might
choose to masquerade! It would dog and chain her,
invigilate at her deathbed, and be cast into the nativities
of her children or else impartial Justice wore a blindfold
round her eyes to shield her shame! False spoken! False
sworn!
The final words that were heard, as Darconville—-his
mind a box of cats—reset the machine to play, were now
no longer Isabel’s, but increasingly the terrible and
insistent repetition of certain others from the recent past,
drowning hers out, which somehow in their echo
awakened more evil than had that hideous falsetto-like
whisper in which formerly they’d first been uttered: if a
wrong must be made right, if a way be found, if it should
lead you to, could you? Do something?
“I saw Gilbert, anyway, on September 2, I remember
it well, because I asked him if I could come over to
Zutphen Farm. I had a real nice time that day, I just had
fun, but I’ve already told you that. (I don’t think you
really ever paid attention to details, I really don’t.) And
the next day when I went back over there, there was this
horse who had this awful cut, and I’d gotten some
medicine—and in a way [smiling gurgle] that’s when it
began, I think. I don’t think you understand: I’d known
Gilbert before; there was no reason to hide anything; we
could talk to each other, don’t you see, openly? [pause] I
saw him just about every night after that. We had—fun.
Not just fun. Fun, you know, isn’t the most important
thing in life.”[4]
 [[4] The value assigned the abstract notation (Fun) in
this rigorous proposition, while it may seem only
putatively factual, actually extends itself here to a
philosophical calculus of common truth-functions beyond
ostensive definition (isn’t the most important thing) to the
suggestion of an unsubstitutable and immutable absolute
(in life) by which, had it never been uttered, the
straightforwardly empirical protocol established in the
pursuit of sufficient linguistic assessment might otherwise
be distorted.]

Those were the last words she ever spoke to him.

The tape, ending abruptly, would stop forever there.
There was no more. It was all gone, lost, swallowed like a
mineral: his love, belief, time and trust, self-respect, gifts,
all efforts and energy, kisses and cares. And neither
heaven nor hell, gold nor God, could make it good again.
Dreams, he saw, were for devils, not for men. He put the
cassette into his pocket and walked aimlessly into the
absurd streets outside, the rain-smudged sky overhead
looking as if it had been roofed with the oldest lead. He
raised a fist. Spirit of the Sky, remember! Spirit of the
Earth, remember!
When Darconville returned to his rooms not one of
the many objects scattered about failed to shriek its scorn
at the whole false enterprise. She had lived for years
beside him apparently on terms of hatred and
incomprehension, but where had been the art to read that
mind’s construction in that face? He didn’t know now and
no longer had the chance to see. But the consciousness
that the insult was not yet avenged, that his rancor was
still unspent, weighed on his heart and poisoned the
artificial tranquillity he once tried to obtain by other
distractions but could again no more. Darconville was a
Venetian. He looked from one empty memory to another
and found nothing lasting or loving in them of the girl
whose soul once touched them all—a person so free from
conviction, so totally dependent on the temptations and
conditioning of her immediate environment that to
understand her now required nothing more complicated
than a look. There was an image of special desolation in
the two blue cups that lay on the floor: in them he seemed
to locate all his grief. A whole cloud of experience
condensed into a drop of hatred—again, he had given her
exactly what she wanted—as he picked them up, whirled
like a cornered animal striking out, and threw them with a
violent curse into that fireplace, above which the Harvard
shield now seemed the color of arterial blood, where they
shattered to pieces in a sooty explosion of tongs, dogs,
and trammels.
The succeeding moments seemed but an imitation of
life. Whereas once Darconville had no bond with the
darkness for loving alone in the upper light, that changed
—radically now, for as he stood in the mess of that room
he happened to pick up the strange piece of paper which
upon his first visit to that enfer of a library had slipped
from one of Dr. Crucifer’s books. Was it—a code? He
turned it sideways, then upsidedown. At first it seemed
nothing more than a piece of illogical scribia with lines of
miscast letters running on meaninglessly, irrespective of
whence or whither. It was written in a kind of bizarre
agraphia going right to left, he saw, in looking-glass
letters—with the words spelled backwards!
For some reason he suddenly felt the room grow cold
as ice.
 LXXXVII

The Diabolical Pact

These pacts with the Devil are not only vain and
useless: they are also dangerous and evil.
—FRANCESCO GUAZZO, Compendium
maleficarum (1608)

WITHOUT HESITATION, Darconville took the

sheet of paper to the mirror and held it at right angles to
the glass: it was still unreadable. He tried in vain, as well,
to read it through the back of the sheet. So he began to
figure it as it had presumably been written, reading
withershins letter by letter what turned out to be Latin. It
came up slowly in the curial style and seemed to be a
formal—what? Suddenly, his face fell, a witness to
malfeasance, and went pale as paper.

alligiS

te mued et reficuL euqretsigam enimoD

erivres ibit roedllop te ,ocsonga mepicnirp
oicnuner tE .ereviv oretop uidnauq eridebo te
te soila te mutsirhC museJ te mueD muertla
macilotsopA maiselccE suispi ainmo te manamoR
tiussop seledif subiuq senoitagor te senoitaro senmo
maicaf diuq roedllop ibit te;em orp eredecretni
 rep alam da erehartta te ,oretop mulam touqtouq
,mumsitpab te mamsirhc oicnunerba te;senmo
:murotcnas suispi te itsirhC useJ atirem ainmo te
:inoitaroda te iutivres eaut oreed is te
,orecef suispi iem menoitalbo non is te
.rnaut tucis maem mativ od ibit ,eid euqouq
.ceD sumisecirt;eid te onna coh iceF
.LMCM
.reficurC
,sinrefni xe mutcartxE
.munomead ailisnoc retni

His eyes forked in comprehension as he read it to the

end with a preying ache, moving his head as though
punctuating with self-directed nods secret decisions of
sympathy with it, his fingers twittering with the thrill of
such evil, and then shutting it like a clapstick, as though
some faculty or prevision in him were unexpectedly
proved, he felt something suddenly pass through him—
whereupon, freeing his heart, he burst into a cruel
laughter of recognition that never seemed to end.

LXXXVIII

Week of the Sabbat

There are certain crimes which the law cannot touch

and which therefore, to some extent, justify private
revenge.
 —SHERLOCK HOLMES,
The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton

A GRIM WEEK BEGAN. There was a roar of rain

on the slate roof, blown by a wind of such power and
purpose as almost to shatter the windowpanes against
which the raindrops burst like stars. And all through the
first night Darconville brooded, torn between a decision
— living for a hating or dying for a love. It was, needless
to say, no longer a question informed by any hope, either
of enchantment or exorcism, of winning back Isabel
Rawsthorne but rather one of related options touching on
the summary execution-by-evil of the spectre whose
photograph he once again set up on the mantelpiece: the
crime that would make him happy or the scaffold that
would prevent him from being unhappy. He held up his
candle to the photograph as he listened to the wind
outside, the whistling, the violent rattling of a window-
catch, and his interrupted heart-pulse swam in death: he
recognized nothing: it was the face of the Queen of Spit.
To one man in a million dreadful knowledge is
revealed. There is, it is true, a kind of psychic
poikilothermism when the mind, like the body, must
assume the temperature of its surroundings. But
Crucifer’s black pact with the devil seemed only to
awaken in his own mind certain secret knowledge that
had long lain dormant, figures of every adjunct to the
heavens and characters of signs and evening stars by
which the spirits are enforced to rise. There was a
harpocratic oath made that night in the silence where,
dosed with benperidol, he sat waiting to prey. It would be
a revenge Kydian, fierce, and immediate. Darconville
chose the way.

* * * * *

Monday. In the morning, he was fully resolved. It

would be a matter of diligent preparation, sedulous care,
and finally celerity of execution. He would never give up,
nothing would stop him. Hunger eats through walls of
stone. He first arranged all her letters, photos, the
cassette, all the notebooks he’d kept on her. Why? He
didn’t know. But it didn’t matter. He would head her off
on fronts both natural and supernatural, for who, he
wondered, was so stupid and foolish as to think that all
the things done by the body have no effect on the spirit?
She could not have found a more ruthless and persequent
enemy: he stomped into the haft of his shoe, the heel
dropped home snug and positive, and he drew a figure in
the air with his finger in front of the photograph which he
then turned upsidedown. “Asmo-deus,” whispered
Darconville, “I utterly forsake thee!” And immediately he
went out and bought a new carving knife.

* * * * *

Tuesday. The weather, turning, brought cold sunlight,

but Darconville saw none of it. He pulled the shades,
intentionally put his desk out of the light, and, secretive in
whatever he did now (for, in the doing, none but himself
knew why), spent the morning for some reason compelled
to write—facts only—of everything he could remember
of her; the estimate of all she wasn’t looked fulsome in a
list. A bora was blowing up in the Adriatic of his soul,
and, patience, the only virtue left there, became a pleasant
timekeeper. He baited his fishhooks.
First, he had no trouble learning from van der Slang’s
grandmother —a boastful and polyphagous old bat who
lived near them down there—what he had feared: they
were already engaged. (Scarce manumised and already
his!) She, however, knew nothing else. And so under false
pretenses he wrote to the Naval Academy again for
information as to the Dutchman’s screwship and its
nautical itinerary, hoping thus to determine by logical, if
general, conjecture in which month or months in the
coming annus deliberandi the wedding day might be set.
That wasn’t all. He wrote to several Quinsy girls in
Charlottesville, well-disposed to him, he remembered,
because ill-disposed to Isabel, requesting them to monitor
the local papers there for any announcements of
consequence.
The concrete acts of maléfice had just begun. One
ingenuity mothered another. Darconville worked with the
morbid logic of an inquisitor not only to learn more of
this witch and her repeating frauds but also to emperor
outrages to serve his pain and so to fright all pity from the
world withal where killing the living to regenerate death
alone fit the ways of the woes he felt. To know more? To
dig more deeply? It was of course folly, reasonless—
motus without motive, motive not motivirt!—and yet a
wish, the wish a desire, the desire an uncontrollable
longing perversely perpetrated upon him because he felt
he should not, an act soliciting only the absolution of hell
unless by sulphuring himself in the sins he learned and so
converting to vapor in the heat of his throes to ascend
upon her in an infamy unseen he somehow mitigate the
strategy of evil involved in the terrible but just
equivalence of pain awaiting her. Who would boast a
victory that cost no chance of loss? Who would bulletin
such success as that which, in the field of mind, took only
random memory for an assailant? No, it was too late. No
sweet behavior now, no soft minioning could ever hope to
turn him from where his appetite was fixed.
I’ll draw you to a particular, vowed Darconville, and
have you look in a glass! He snatched up the photograph
and angrily pressed it flat upon the mirror. There, he
thought, now bathe your finger-ends and bat your eyes
and load your bum with a farthingale! Could it move
distraction in the heart of a Minotaur it should find me
quartz! What, do you beg for clemency? Resisted,
madam! Generosity? Forbearance? Come, I am in haste;
be brief. Charity? Kindness? Favor? Pity? Pity? He
replaced the photograph on the mantel, upsidedown. Card
your wool, Eve, thought Darconville—and fell again to
writing.
He wrote to Isabel’s real father through the district
attorney in Little Rock, Arkansas, affecting, with a view
to learning of his whereabouts and perhaps more of her, to
be leaving them a huge sum of money. He wrote to Mrs.
McAwaddle at the registrar’s office for a photocopy of
Isabel’s dossier in which he hoped to descry—it didn’t
matter what—some irregularity of birth, a reference to
family lunacy, any kind of extralegal ganancial trickery in
her parents’ divorce that might serve as a blocking agent
to her marriage. He wrote a handful of vituperative
postcards to everyone in Fawx’s Mt. whom he suspected
of being involved in the conspiracy, composing in a
sudden coup d’essai, then calling in, one special telegram
to Zutphen Farm in which it was warned that, short of an
interplanetary cataclysm, he’d appear at the forthcoming
wedding in the company of Abaddon, the angel of ice,
and sixty other apparitions from the abhorred deep. And
then he wrote out an envelope to Gilbert van der Slang,
stuffing it with duplicates of those of Isabel’s letters from
the previous year in a nuptial mood—diploid, deceptive,
devious—and went out at day’s end to mail the lot of
them, making an effort as he walked back through the tin-
colored dusk to ascertain the location, in back of one of
the Wigglesworth houses, of what he marked in his mind.
It was a young wild-nut tree.

* * * * *

Wednesday. It was time for further action.

Darconville took from his pocket an object that had
caught his eye some few days previous, a simple gem,
green as jealousy, spotted with blood, that seemed in
some kind of mnemonic resurrection both to contain and
to conceal the mystery of the whole plot. But the luck? To
traverse the world in thought where were swarming, by
moderate computation, some five billion souls indifferent
to his needs only because ignorant of them and then to
remember, suddenly, the deepest accomplice of all who
by some strange and inexplicable metonymy not laid
down in books alone can turn captor into captive and
make of the hunter game? How provident was nature in
such matters! The chrysalis does not burst until there is a
wing to help the gauze-fly upward. He immediately
telephoned Hypsipyle Poore.
It has been observed that it’s a desperate thief that a
thief lets in, but quickly Darconville in his brief
conversation with her found a partner whose desires ran
before her honor, whose wishes burned hotter than her
faith, and when penalties were mentioned so also was a
name. Darconville smiled darkly. The long explanation
led to the only expectation: as the venality of
Vanderdecker, the Flying Dutchman, was legend, he
asked, then why couldn’t she devise a plan to prove it?
Hypsipyle said she didn’t understand. (The complexity of
language, he thought to himself, lies not in its subject
matter but in our knotted understanding.) Why, form
schemes, plans, designs! Make him tell the tale anew,
where, how, how often, how long ago, and when! Seduce
him! Then Hypsipyle clucked through the telephone like a
wizard and jingled it with a laugh. She whispered an idea.
O banquet of foul delight, prepared by thee, dark
paraclete! “I love to say yes,” said Hypsipyle Poore,
kissing him goodbye through the receiver.
Then Darconville put the bloodstone back into his
pocket.

* * * * *

Thursday. But there was more to be done. It required

vigilance, for the speed of her moves, elucidating
duration, had to be measured in velocity—direction was
involved—and yet as Darconville continued to trace out,
track, and trip toward the unbroken trail to target,
inquiries yielded full-fold. He learned, for instance, with
the help of a co-operator at the Charlottesville telephone
company—an acquaintance he remembered from the days
when Isabel herself worked there—that there had been a
spate of phone calls from New York to Isabel’s number,
with charges transferred to the van der Slang household,
between July 10 and August 21. He found out that she
had registered in a Charlottesville shop for china
(“Kensington” pattern by Noritake) and silver
(“Chippendale” pattern by Towle) in early September!
And then he managed to contact, after an elaborate and
roundabout series of calls, several ex-farmhands from
Zutphen Farm—three disgruntled, but patriotic, illiterates
—who without so much as a question proudly felt it a
duty to help out the F.B.I.: yes, they said, Isabel and
Gilbert van der Slang were together in Fawx’s Mt. during
July, and, yes, they were shoot sure, officer, because it
was a small town and—
Darconville put down the receiver. He was, by now,
more surprised that he was astonished than astonished
that he had cared so much. The darkness that had sat him
down despondent in his solitary chair for days together,
weaving bitter fancies, dreaming bitter dreams, now grew
light and thin, almost as if chased by the sudden desperate
longing to be free of this prostitute of figment and fable.
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.

* * * * *

It was all in the readiness now. Mistakes, misdates;

exaggerations, lies, distractions; all manner of misseeings
and misnotings—they were gone. Darconville went out
for a walk. And as he walked he thought and, in thinking,
could not recall of Isabel a single pleasure with her. It was
as true as he’d been told: if people found the recollection
of her more pleasing than her presence, something they
remembered of her seemed always to be missing when
they encountered her again. He muttered various of her
phrases in her own voice yet found that language could
but extol, not reproduce, the beauties of the sense, if
beauties ever there were. He walked and walked,
brooding, thinking a thought of wrath and quickening his
step, thinking a thought of kindness and fending it aside
with his hand. There was a luminous smear of starlit mist
over the Charles and the river lights along the banks
reflected as mysteriously in the dark water as in the
depths of his mind, again, were mirrored figures of every
adjunct to the heavens and characters of signs and
evening stars by which the spirits are enforced to rise. It
had grown late when he returned under the streetlights to
Adams House, and, once in his rooms, he lost no time in
beginning his preparations. He moved some furniture to
the walls, secured the shades, and then assembled—
nothing more—his implements of ghostly justice: chalk,
dish, bloodstone, and candles. He finished well after
midnight, but did not retire, and instead went downstairs.
It was Sunday now, but there would be no rest.
With twenty devils at each ear whispering their
approval, Darconville played the piano all night with a
knife on top of the Steinway.

LXXXIX

Malediction!

There is a foule great cat sometimes in my barne

which I have no liking unto.
—GEORGE GIFFORD,
A Dialogue of Witches and Witchcraft
 BEFORE DAWN, Darconville went out and at the
exact moment that the sun appeared on the horizon cut
with his virgin knife a wild-nut tree that had never borne
fruit. Then he returned to the seclusion of his rooms and
chose a spot for the operation, placing the photograph of
Isabel in the brass dish in front of which he set the
bloodstone. He next traced a triangle with chalk and
arranged the two consecrated candles nearby, putting the
sacred name of Jesus in position to prevent the spirits
from inflicting harm on him. Finally, he stood in the
middle of the triangle with the mystic wand of twig in
hand, spat thrice, and began to chant the great clavicule.

“I, Alaric Darconville, do desire, call upon, and

conjure thee, Lord of Evil, Suzerain of the scornful,
Depository of cherished hatreds, who dost whisper in my
ears thoughts of vengeance and sore retaliation, to appear
before me and fulfill what I command thee by spells
whose unrecognized traces baffle human reason and by
the most dreadful names that shout you honor at the
Northern Gates of Hell: Asbeel, Jeqon, Belphegor,
Forças, Gaap, Gadreel, Dagon, Rimmon, Senciner,
Zavebe, and Uraka-barameel. Fiat, fiat, fiat.
“Emperor Lucifer, Master of all the Rebellious
Spirits, I beg you to be favorable in the invocation that I
make to your exalted minister, Lucifuge Rofocale, as I
wish to make a pact with him. I beg you also, Prince
Beelzebub, to protect me in my enterprise. Come, lod,
Eheieh, Gibor, Eloah Va-Daath, Esytion, Samsaweel, and
Atarculph.
 “I beseech thee, Evil Spirit, Cruel Spirit! I call thee,
who sittest in the cemetery and takest away healing from
man! Go and place a knot in Isabel Rawsthorne’s head, in
her eyes, in her mouth, in her throat, in her windpipe, and
put poisonous water in her belly. If you do not go and put
water in her belly, I shall send against you the evil angels
Puziel, Guziel, Psdiel, Prsiel. I call thee and those six
knots that you go quickly to Isabel Rawsthorne and kill
Isabel Rawsthorne because I wish it. I conjure thee within
this circle. Come hither. Come hither. Come hither,
because I wish and will it. Amen. Amen. Selah,
“O Count Astorath, Sataniel, Mastema, Angel of
Edom, be propitious and bring it to pass that this very day
you include me in your mysteries, wherefore I most
earnestly adjure you and by the four beasts before the
throne come in this place without noise, deformity, or
murmuring and fulfill this pact, removing my sighing and
learning my supplication. Xilka, Xilka, Besa, Besa, Besa.
Come Aglon, Vaycheon, Stimulamaton, Ezphares,
Retragrammaton, Olyaram, Irion, Existion, Mazm.
“Obey promptly or I shall torture thee with the force
of the words of power from the Key of Solomon; or I
shall constrain you by the power of the Twelve Tables,
moon swells, and threads. So come forth instanter! Or I
shall denounce you endlessly by the force of unparalleled
Jehovam Sabaoth! Come from whichever place in the
world thou art and give answers to my questions: answers
that shall be true and reasonable. Come, Yomyael, Marut,
Gressil, Busasejal, Artaqifa, Moloch, Azaredal.
“I do dance my wand left in the sigils to call thee
visibly before this circle to obey me utterly. Each
impediment remove thou, and the doorposts move
asunder. Bend thou the Creator’s castle. Come, come,
why stay you? Blow knots upon her, forward and
backward, anagramma-tized: ENROHTSWAR LEBASI.
Leap from hell with hax, pax, max, Deus adimax! Come,
Magots, Silphae, Rabost, Salamandrad, Tabost, Gnomus,
Esmony, and Fabelleronthou.
“Appear in black and yellow livery, Pentomorph! I
will be avenged! Come here, all of you who like the
places and times in which duplicity and trickery are done!
Deceive those who see things, that they may appear to see
what they do not. Ascend alive from hell, ye imprisoned
in sheet flame, and scream me promises! Come,
Eparinesont, Oriet, Clam-eron, Casmiel, Sodirno, Premy,
and Peatham.
“Rule her with fumigations. Turn her upsidedown and
bewilder her with hests of mine, pitchy breath! I
propitiate you, Demogorgon from blackest hell, to create
ill-will, terror, and sorrow. Oppress, torture, and harass
her body, soul, and five senses. Smite her with your left
hand and escort her with cruel ministrations beneath the
earth and curse in her face with eternal doom! Veer with
me! Come, Peunt, Slevor, Dorsamot, Janva, Zariatnctmik,
Arios, and Yod.
“You demons, born of black exudings, of black pores,
of black skin, of black flesh, blood, veins, sinews, and
black bones, howl out from the bottom of all damnation
the cries of your signal disobedience. Work for me, Night-
Wraiths and Handmaids of Phantom! Come, Tistator,
Abac, Iat, Guthac, Derisor, Destator, and Gomeh.
“Ascend alive from hell to where she is and flash out
from your fingers jujus, spells, and wails! O Beelzebub,
cause her bones to crack and grate against one another,
displace her bowels, confuse her, cover her with botches
and boils, bulges, and blebs! Come, Agla, Tagla, Mathon,
Oarios, Almouzin, Membrot, Varvis, Pithona, and
Anexhexeton.
“Smooth Devils, Horned Devils, Sullen Devils, Arch
Devils, Shorn Devils, Hairy Devils, Foolish Devils,
Devilesses, and Young Devils, all the offspring of
Devildom, come with your devilish tricks, quicker than
light, and sport with her. May she be smitten down and
given a bed beneath some lockjawed hell until the end of
time brings eternity upon it and in the doing thereof shall
I allow you my inthronization in fire for as long. Aliseon,
Hone, Vermios, Erin Catharines. Galbas, galbât, galdes,
galdat, Earl Astaroth—

”Venite, venite, venite!

Palas aron azinomas.
Bagahi laca Bachabe.”

He stood there for some time, watching, lost in a

fixed and prolonged gaze that seemed to track the
smoke’s course to his thoughts as the photograph in the
dish curled up in fire, its smiling face turning from the
smooth color of lawsheep to dark red murray and then to
cancer in the accumulation of flames. It seemed, as it
burned, to burst forth in a torrent of abuse. Then there
were ashes. The room was suddenly strange and solemn
and lonely, like an empty but profaned sepulchre after an
attempt to muster the disaffected, and in the stink, heat,
and cafard he who made that attempt knew he now lived
at the heart of cruelty, now lived where the light goes
when it is put out. He knew he must seek friends of the
darkness now and, with that terrible truth, watching his
own shadow sway on the floor with the flickering
candles, snuffed them and crept upstairs to Dr. Crucifer’s
rooms in a stupor of—not of confusion, nor of agitation.
And it wasn’t remorse or cynicism or fear. A blackness
sucked at his heart. There was only one word for it.

XC

Hate

I study hatred with great diligence for that’s a passion

in my own control.
—W. B. YEATS, “Ribh Considers
Christian Love Insufficient”

“HATE,” said Dr. Crucifer, “is love’s other face: they

are complements, not opposites. The emotion owes all its
meaning, as I’ve told you, to the demand for love, each
expressing an impulse which exists only by an
antagonism to the fear that oppresses it, for one can never
be a hater without having had this ideal, that one, always
loving, will always be loved in return. There lies not a
grain of sand between the loved and the detested. With
everything right, wrong is always somehow involved,
and, like bifronted Janus, we love with the dread of hate
in us. Buried in every yes there is a no. It is a Manichean
delight: all the time you hate you steal it from love, its
sole provocation, for it does not precede the facts that call
it forth; it nourishes itself on them. Dichromatism always
extends to the complementary colors. You commit in one
exactly everything you simultaneously omit in the other.
They exist side by side to kill each other, like the
heterosporous combination of cedar and chokecherry.
What, after all, is the precise morphological distinction
between an embrace and a strangulation? L’amour, la
mort: every kiss muffles a bite. Inside every lover is
manacled Taras Bulba. The anagram of ‘The heart’s
desire’ is ‘hate strides here’—the imperfection in the
transposition being the apostrophe you can’t cry out.
“Hatred is the appetite which increases as you eat. It
is, nevertheless, always in a state of being, a substantial
definiteness unto itself. There are many passions which
we are condemned to feel only in a reduced form: never
love or hate. Both flirt with the impossible, the due
practical conceding of each as to inevitability, however,
amounting to much, indeed to the sure promise of all.
Lovers are half-enemies in the first place, and hatred
between half-enemies, often deeper than between
opposites, aches for completion.
“The thing confounds scrutinoids absolutely; no more
than love does it concern itself with reason but goes
through life fixed on delirious hope in order to pledge
allegiance to an inverted form of the same ideal. It is not
shaped to common recognita nor bounded by the cir-
cumvallations of vulgar experience, and the feeble and
obvious piety which announces indifference to define the
essential polarity to the proposition of love I can only
assign to the retarded virtuosity of those unguentarians
and barely audible paracoits-of-footwork who, fearing to
penetrate into other spheres, higher or lower, in ways
allowed or forbidden, must live life either on their knees
or in a crouch like a dog fucking a football! Hate wears a
capital letter. Its colors are as bright as poisonous reptiles.
It quickens to bolder action than diffidence or dumbness
and chafes as motion conquers cold to run full-tilt at an
indifferent world screaming that rather than be less one
would rather not be at all! We have long considered views
on the subject so general as to be trite, so idiosyncratic as
to be useless. We overestimate it and underestimate it. Do
you ask why?
“Men, in the mass, are amply content to take life as
they’re given it, finding the world to be so very
comfortable they have no inclination either for its stark
ascents and descents. They are a little of one thing and a
little of the other and nothing for any length of time:
ignoble mediocrities of the Rank and Vile! The common
wantwit, further, confines the spiritual world to the
supremely good. Mr, and Mrs. Bumb from Main St.,
America, and all their little tits in mittens at Sunday-Go-
To-Meeting? Oh yes, but what of the supremely wicked?
Mustn’t they necessarily have their portion in it as well?
And why not? Why should sanctity alone, and not
sorcery, be permitted the children of the earth? I tell you,
there are multitudes of us who, thrown headlong into the
valley of tears and sightless with rage at the mere premise
of creation, eat black pulses and drink wormwood with a
joy infinitely sharper than anything within the experience
of an epicure! And why? It is the best way of allowing
reality to live up to the imagination! Hatred, indeed, is
rare! It is the infernal miracle as love claims to be the
supernal, a withdrawal from the mediocrity of things as
they’re theologically supposed to be, an ecstasy of
scorched devotion unavailable to the muddled, second-
rate masses with untenanted souls who have no
comprehension of the inner sense of things, a
transcendental effort to surpass the ordinary bounds and,
by so doing, surpassing the common understanding
which, nevertheless, still foolishly hobbles after it with
notebook in hand to address, then adjudge it imagined.
Malevolence! Wrath! Hatred! I hereby muster all the
Hierarchs of Tophet to prove them real!
“Hate is old wrath, fire built to correct the
inclemency of air, a monodeism of total aversion coupled
with hopelessly settled detestation —and the luxury of
knowing whom or what one hates is to experience one of
the greatest feelings of elation on earth. It is, in fact, a
faith, an intuitive certainty beyond the plane of discourse
enforcing an experimental right, one which cannot be
extended to the common run of mortals without danger,
that seeks to renounce in fury what was once expected
from others in kindness and locating entirely what,
delivered of, alone is cleansed. One hates in order to rob
from another a life stolen from himself, for hate not only
hates what it lacks, but lacks what it loved, and in its grip
—an oxbrake in which you’re completely shod of mercy
by the very creature you’d swiftly gore to pieces if but
freed—the only possible pleasure attains to its secret
illusions and intentions of vengeance. The formula of
rupture takes place. Every former excellence of your
victim becomes every conceivable fault, every promise an
impervestigable lie, and every memory of her a viper
eating through the bowels of your benefits, all to set in
motion such a fell and deadly hate that through a sea of
sins you’d wade to your revenge to drive a rivet in her
sconce and hang her up for a sign, reading: ‘Obit anus,
abit onus!’
“Hate, like jetsam, sinks. It is proposition, not
proposal. It lurks below the rounds of habit wherethrough
in any age men canvass and toil, and yet while
everywhere the average man when finished will reckon
up results, the hater, if no closer to his retribution for his
work, feels nothing accomplished, still labors in mind,
and with implacable consistency refuses to acknowledge
of process completed what is nullified in thought not.
How little is achieved by him though other problems be
solved! Nothingness is immanent in hatred. Its horrors
defy the words of mouth or pen to set it down. Your craw
bugles. You become a thermidor of pure pain. Your feet
turn to roots, your heart to lead, and yet, while the
imagination sprouts more goblins to molest it than the
witchlight of night itself, the creative evil at the
fountainhead of hate is a lonely and terrible thing, a
passion of the individual soul living low and solitary as a
bucket in a well, for whereas the lover endeavors to
obtain something which he does not have, the man who
hates paradoxically tries to recover by an act of supreme
alienation and anger that which has been taken from him
—and which, constantly fleering, mowing, and ridiculing
by the very nature of its existence, mocks the mind to
murder! Haters vote in the rain.
“The smoldering aspect of hatred, often, is in direct
proportion to the degree in which the person’s right to
exist as a human being has been taken away. And more. It
is impossible for a human being to give up his freedom,
or be robbed of it, without something coming in to restore
the inner balance—something arising from inner freedom
when outer freedom has been denied. Now, in
conventional circles, in the eyes of the benign, self-
contented, ever-poised, well-adjusted bourgeoisie, one is
not supposed to admit one’s hatred, just as, for instance,
for decades past even the admission of one’s sexual
impulses was considered unseemly. But a few men there
are who must remain true to a single extreme character,
and for such men, disgusted to insult at the thought of a
stinking and cowed swallowing of resentment or any like
repression, there abides a paramount truth at the core of
all hatred— the re-establishing of one’s freedom! A man
isn’t rich unless he’s making money while he sleeps. The
profoundest urge of mankind is to fly.
“Hatred is that extreme fixation—not, like love, an
emotion from those rude and simple times when tall
bonnets were in fashion but one predating Cain in the
blackness it shares with original chaos—which liquidates
the reality of both victim and executioner, for in an absurd
irony of contagion the negative qualities it effects in the
self become proof positive of the cause; to make your
victim undergo the sort of thing which troubles and
overwhelms your existence so cruelly is to have to sustain
your own hurt. Respirit domino pro tempore: the
prosecutor becomes star witness for the defense!
“Hate wakens to the actual. You may be accepted for
what you are only until what you are is what you
shouldn’t be, becoming then, in what you shouldn’t, what
the lover-as-hanging-judge tells you you can’t.
Provocation—who will deny it?—creates what it
provokes! The Law of Talion cries out to its cognate,
‘Retaliate!’ Enslaved from the start, however, by his very
own laws—the pawn of their very enactment—the hater
will always be the first among its casualties unless he
finds release, and since the only way of ridding himself of
the passion can no longer consist in verifying, in
experiencing once again, its intolerable character, in spite
of the affective presence of what is physically absent, it
falls to the purest and most ancient compensation
therefore to rectify the wrong, for, as in exorcism, one can
never cast out anything but what was first cast in. The
best—the only—way is to hate.
“Hate! Say the word: how the mouth, shaped to
sarcasm, fakes in an adventitious bark what, exhaled,
becomes a râle of shuddering repugnance swiftly cut in
two by the rapiered T that snaps the entire face shut
without one movement of the lips. It blasphemes in a
single brief gasp, a respiration incessant and increasing. It
is the best verbal equivalent of human ache, thrippling
just too high in the throat for a scream and becoming
almost a stutter in awe of what can’t be spoken, bleaching
the heart, darkening the shafts of the sun, and removing
the fragrance from flowers.
“The man who hates has lost in the extreme the
whole concept of the ideal—or, to put it another way, he
has not so much lost an ideal as he has transferred the
whole concept of one ideal to the furthest extreme of
another—and yet, in either case, exalting, as he must, the
necessity of injustice existing in a brutal God, he proceeds
to write in his own bitter soul not just a complaint but an
entire destructive theology! No man loves, says Aristotle,
but he that is first delighted with comeliness and beauty.
Now, forbear and listen. As this fair object varies, so does
love. There’s of course no determining law to love what is
beautiful, and the beautiful does not present itself to
humans with any imperative to respond to it. Beauty,
however, appeals—and yet all forms of beauty which
appeal to man, by reason of the aesthetic function, are at
bottom attempts on his part to realize the ideal! Now,
follow whither my finger points: beauty is created by
love. It will not and will never have any meaning for you
other than the meaning you give to it, a pretext for the
expansion of consciousness to beguile the despair you
have without it. Sleep is only the bogus we use for
dreams, with repose our intention, Eleutheropolis our
goal. Man struggles to realize his own ideal, to sound out
the highest possible self. Who doubts it? He projects his
ideal of an absolute worship-worthy existence—the ideal
that he is unable to isolate within himself—and with it
crowns another human being, the loss of whom, if and
when it happens, becomes of necessity the loss of the
ideal, but there is your aspiration as long as there is your
ideal and the struggle for it counts for nothing. Mecca is
situated in the midst of barren and stony country.
“The ideal! Doesn’t it write itself into our weak and
insufficient hearts in the wittiest of fictions? Who can say
what imp ghosts it, what telchin is its genius? Quisquis
amat ranam, ranam putat esse Dianam: the blindness of
love is precisely the vision of the ideal! O pretty, pretty,
pretty but how, you ask, for there grunts Parmeno’s sow!
The huge hairy smellfungus named Polyphemus won the
admiration and love of beautiful Galatea, whiter than the
white withy-wind! Venus herself pursued Vulcan,
fascinated in the limp of the filthy smith. I could cite the
Egyptian salinaries who couched with cadavers, draw
parables in the lust for decaying cheese, the poverty of
misers, and the gods who are worshipped in silly glyphs.
And, tell me then, what strange algebra lurks in the proud
father’s mind who flashes for approval that snapshot of,
what—a vegetable? a wombat? a puffpile of insipid
dough?—no, rather his own two-week-old baby, a little
puckfisted nobblyblat with forty assorted leaks, soiled
buns, and a face like a stump pudding! Love, unlike hate,
makes all distinctions void. Every book is about its own
author. Beauty, simply, is an emanation of the
requirements of love, and hate refuses them. I would give
you a wealth of italics here.
“Then the ideal—what does it matter how?—
disappears, the provocation to hate we spoke of. So enter
hate. (Isn’t it odd that this sharpest response to someone
occurs just when it isn’t asked for?) We once wanted to
have what we now abhor—so what we love always tells
us what we aren’t—but as what we loved wanted us to be
what we couldn’t be when we loved, the haste of
departure following the huff of dissatisfaction, it proves
by the law of subtraction, if my mathematics is better than
your judgment, not only that love wasn’t sufficient but
that the object of it was nothing but a disastrous splodge
not worth the tmesis of what value soever in the first
place! Orals, I’m afraid, imply but do not posit aurais.
Hate, having entered, now puts its feet up. It becomes a
boarder! Then you understand one of the first lessons of
hate, that we know each other best, not by strength, but by
weakness, not as surpassing but as lacking such and such
of the ideal —know each other, I say, but do I say more?
For example, do I say that weakness makes people kin,
creates accord, fosters alliance? The answer is yes when
you speak of love. But when you speak of hate? Christ,
man, when you speak of hate you speak of hell!
Prevention becomes the heart of the policy! Swiftly, we
do not wish to appear good so as not to be pitied, so, not
to be pitied, wicked—why, even as satisfied as possible,
so that our satisfaction may be truly hateful, the more
quickly to ulcerate the soul not only of our occasional or
permanent enemy, my friend, but of God himself! Yes,
God! Have you understood me to say that the hater is an
average man?
 “Are you then like all the other fools and pseudo-
podiospores who’d have indifference the antonym of
love? Indifference disgusts me! I am what I know and, to
prove it, hate what I am—which at least gives me life.
Indifference does not prompt us, sir, to unkind actions!
You want hatred here. Hatred—if nothing else—is meant
to be a provocation to an absent God, a thrust, you see, as
though scandalous, frenzied, inexpiable, raging, and
unutterable provocations were a way of forcing that God
who’s let a love be lost to witness his will, with the hater
thinking: if there were a God who possessed power,
would he allow that virtue which supposedly honors him
(even if by means of the shameless and pathetic proxy of
it invested in another human being) to be sacrificed to
such exotic uncompromising vice? The greater the
punishment he feels merited by his action, the greater the
value which the hater attributes to his crime! The extreme
hater is always a dualist, polymath to ways both good and
evil. But which is Sybaris? Which Crotona? Ha! Ha! Ha!
No one knows, my friend, neither theologian nor thinker
nor thrip, for just as once passionate sinners are claimed
—according to biographical cliché—to make the greatest
saints, the hater’s conscience is always activated by the
remorse of what otherwise might have been; indeed, the
remorse actually provides the energy for the crimes he
dreams. He is afraid of discovering that the world is well-
contrived and yet constructs the revolution of his
abhorrence upon the reason of it, for since he is forced to
accept the fact that love, lost, is evil the alternative of
hate, found, must perforce be the only good at hand to
address it—and so the breach actually becomes the
observance in a desperate attempt to settle a matter of
contradiction by means of conflicting evidence! There is
no better poacher than an ex-gamekeeper. The ultimate
profanity is the Black Mass.
“It was William Blake who wrote,

Mutual in one another’s love and wrath

all renewing
We live as One Man.

“To detest! To abhor, abominate, execrate! To hate!

This becomes religion: an answer to the pansophistical
lie, as rendered in the Gospels, that one must love, for the
hater who unsuccessfully has tried now sees successfully
he shouldn’t have. The astonished reason—if it wishes to
articulate the dogma in action which also conveys its
sense of scandal—is obliged to substitute the material of
hatred for the revealed matter of God who in all matters,
permissive, if not actually directive, is involved, face it!
In that way it gives an exact expression to the impression
made by the mystery on a reasoning faculty which has
been abandoned, both naturally and supernaturally, to its
own resources. All the ills with which God afflicts him
can thus be considered as the ransom God—the
Ontological Scold—exacts before he allows man the right
to inflict suffering on others and to be unlimitedly
vicious. To the extent that God, the arch-layer of plots,
can be viewed as the original guilty party who attacked
man before man could attack him, to that extent man has
acquired the right and the strength, even as blind
misosopht, to attack his neighbor: ‘I am pleased by the
evil I do to others as God is pleased by the evil he has
done to me.’ I mean, if knowledge ends by becoming a
crime, what is called crime must therefore in some sense
contain the key to knowledge! As a result, it is only by
extending the sphere of crime further and further, even to
its most inelastic limit—the disposition for someone’s
utter annihilation—that the mind, reaching to these
extraordinary crimes, will recover not only what has
heretofore been prohibited knowledge, that knowledge
infinitely greater than that which now we have, but also
recover from a long servitude-of-revenge that any
Supreme Being worth the candle must be forced
thereafter to consider as a simple matter of res inter alios
acta alteri nocere non debet, the evidence of which in
earthly courts—as it then must be in celestial—is
inadmissible. In-ad-missible! I am with you, impenitent! I
spit upon the injustice of the universe!
“But who can speak of the injustice of hatred? O say
otherwise! It’s almost comical, isn’t it, that somehow our
sense of justice never turns in its sleep until long after the
sense of injustice, nudging it half the night, has been
thoroughly roused? What makes so many applied
Salvationists and advowees-of-nicety think so highly of
love is that it hides their defects in the observer’s eye. But
hate, disabused of such notions, sees those defects—and
wakes to act! It douses the fairy lamps! It chooses direct
verbs over substantives! It screams for the Lord of the
Psalmist who breaks the ships of Tarshish with an east
wind to pull someone apart! It multiplies its pain. The
very nature of such a hunger is that it’s forever
unappeased. The morrow of every victory is an-
ticlimactic. It is a step toward reality, a spasm of will, a
shout in the face of all violation of rights to equalize. Feel
no guilt, then, Nes-torian. Blows break, that’s all. The
shattering is only the natural contre coup of the strike.
“I have asserted that hatred is only love outraged, for
the privation of something presupposes being accustomed
to it (privatio presupponit habitum), and that between
these two natures, so antipathetic, something essential is
shared: each remains, by definition, the single and sole
reservation of the other without which its own grandeur
carries no weight—whom we love more than are
indifferent to we are never far from hating. What other
lesson can be found in the vine and the bays, the burr and
the lintle? But then what is abstractly taught of the two
that is ever heard, ever touched, ever seen? How
miserably one ignores the other in the passion of what it
wants, dismisses the other in the heat of what it seeks!
But the tragedy is not that hatred is love outraged, nor that
it is love gone by, but that an ideal has been squandered in
innocence only to have to buy another to redeem it in
guilt. How mistakenly can a person have wanted what,
taken away, repudiates the meaning of life itself!
“And what exactly does love engender? Self-
realization? A shameful paradox. A found ideal? The
nature of the ideal is that it is never found. Gratefulness?
Why, it is arguable that for a man to feel grateful to a
woman is actually injurious to his love for her: he so
hates himself for being unable to do for her all he would
like to do that he comes to curse himself as small in the
reflection of the consequent generosity she, in simply
acknowledging as beyond her worth, refuses to blame
him for not showing. (We love someone not for what she
can actually do for us but for what in fact she allows us to
do for her! ) No, the spirit is always the heart’s dupe.
Hatred realizes, finally, that love has its source in the need
either to find one so gullible that he can lie to her or to
love someone so blindly that she can lie to him. And what
best—because most incontrovertibly—does it do? You
can prove one from the other by algebra. Love engenders
hate!
“You are now so stricken! You lie below in the
flashing storm so deep in pain in its violet light the
brightness of day seems an ancient dream in perpetual
darkness, perpetual night, but blasted, dying, you now
perceive a fateful something that is yours by right. All
things, however, struck by a thunderbolt fall in the
opposite direction! ‘O true believers,’ says the Koran, ‘the
law of retaliation is ordained to you for the slain: the free
shall die for the free!’ Tune for you has stopped! Gone is
peace of mind! You have become fixed forever—
sulphured—in the explosion, alive only in that you would
now kill, happily, if only to be given the chance to say
why!
“But all will be well! It is the lot of genius,
remember, if to be opposed, then also to be invigorated by
opposition. Reverence to this! Hatred is meant for those
who establish standards, not those who follow them. Ours
is a Vatinian hate: the supremest. We behold our enemies
in an eternal vigil, like the lifeless cobra in whose eye the
murderer’s image is forever imbedded, and actually crave
to hate that constant hallucination of face—whether
smirking through the attack it signals or the absolution it
seeks—which becomes, in fact, almost a badge of those
enemies, for we attribute to them not that state of normal
human happiness shot through with the common moods
of mankind that should move us to entertain for them a
feeling of kindly sympathy but a species of arrogant
delight which merely pours oil upon the furnace of our
rage. Hate, indeed, transfigures people no less than does
love. It boils and concocts into poisonous nourishment all
the facts and fictions it compounds from the lives of its
enemies and fuels the delight it abhors. On the other hand,
since it can find satisfaction only in destroying that
delight, it imagines it, it believes it to be, it sees it in a
perpetual condition of destruction—not unlike yourself,
for you are also dead! Dead to pardon! Dead to mercy!
Dead to harmony, forgiveness, relief, liberty, and trust!
Why, isn’t it clear? No living creature has ever been burnt
by lightning without being killed! But, now, you’ve
become the burning itself!
“Give your enemy no credit, by reflected glory, for
rousing the flame -—the passion, the power, the fire is in
the flint that is struck, not in the steel that strikes. You
alone are consumed. Wherever you go, nevertheless, your
enemy is with you. You are baptized now in the Fountain
of Ardenne which has the power of changing love to hate
for those who drink its waters—you are born in it,
confirmed in it, devoted to what can break into open
madness even fifty years later in a pain so absolute and
unbearable it approaches the most dizzying heights of
pleasure, for your grief has found the one thing on earth
that ruins it. You shall have no peace before its name.
Alive, it is your plague, instigates against you, throttles all
you are—you must leave yourself, in fact, to get at it. It is
a vice whose name is comprehended in a monosyllable
but in its nature not circumscribed by a world. You’re like
the chimera—nothing will satisfy you. You would dwell
happily within the skirts of Jericho and dare the blast of a
ram’s horn if upon it depended her death! You would
tattoo crucifixes on the soles of your feet to trample the
Savior who has refused your salvation if you could but
barter hers! You become the Dog of Montargis! You
would rip out your own heart to hurl at her! You would
sell your birthright, forfeit an inheritance, and suffer no
end of ill-repute simply to spit forth in the spirit of
Juvenal whatever Latin hexameters could tell her what
she was! You would live in a nightsweat and breed horns
and stand a bear and a lion in the way of Assur only to
have at her once, cramping your own fortune to mal-
promulgate hers and breathing hope but to fly into
convulsions of joy that the world be destroyed if only she
can suffer in the process!
“The obsession is upon you. You never feel it is
accomplished, killing her always, until you never wish it
ever had begun, for while perfectly instructed in the
tribulation there’s no surcease of trial, and though pausing
now and then to wonder of the marvelous once flashed to
us and then withdrawn behind black veils and
concealments if both might not perhaps exist less in lars
and lemurs than in another of ourselves, you are driven
hard upon the deed again, and again, and again, until over
the waste void that bounds our thoughts and yawns
profound between two worlds a bridge of fire has leapt
from earth to the unknown shore, and the abyss is
spanned.”

XCI

A Carthaginian Peace

“There are four sweets in my confectionary—sugar,

beauty, freedom, and revenge,” said Egyptiacus.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Journal
 “I RUB A SORE, I see,” said Dr. Crucifer, picking a
cigarette out of his box, “whose pain will make you mad.
I should take heed. You’ll bruise her to jelly.” He paused,
raising an eyebrow, for a moment of exquisite
registration. “Won’t you?”
Darconville almost smiled.
“You will be forgiven many sins on account of her,
let me vouch for it. Now, Al Amin,” he said, his left hand
feeling to scratch the bottom of his chair with a
questioning matchtip, “put me in the picture.”
“I don’t know where to begin.”
“Speak to the problem anywhere you’d like and
speak without pretexts. Crucifer can hear.”
The cloister lamp was lit. Its eerie glow, however,
actually darkened rather than illuminated the large living
room; the purple walls became shrouded, and the pieces
of black oak furniture were drawn out to such long and
forbidding shadows that it seemed as if each was
determined to revert in shape to the ghostly length of its
original state, while the great sideboard loomed up like
some ancient and evil deathship run aground against the
obscurity of the far wall. It was, for the medieval
panelwork, the dap-joint beams above, and the oddities of
acquisition placed here and about, every bit as curious
and remote a folly as the creature who habitually kept
himself confined there and who now sat back to listen—
his eyes closed and directed straight up— in a pose of
exaggerated deliberation.
It was without hesitation, having been confirmed to
the policy by the speech on hatred, that Darconville now
made his disclosures: about the tape-recording, the letters
he’d written, and the details—excepting the curse—of
what had recently taken place. The front of Crucifer’s
throat, as he listened, was very long, untenanted, dead
white. As he heard his each and every suspicion
corroborated, he blew out a ball of smoke but kept stone
silent: the conviction he showed by showing no reaction
whatsoever made manifest what did not require assertion.
Then Darconville showed him the photograph of Gilbert
van der Slang.
“The proud wooer?” asked Crucifer, smiling and
sitting up. He put his hand in front of his mouth and
shook with mirth. He actually took time off to laugh; he
devoted himself to it. “A hole in his chin. Ugly beast-ears.
Effeminate. But shall we forgive him?” he asked, biting
his lip, his heavily lidded eyes mocking his own remark.
He spat in sarcasm. “Why, a bat could see he couldn’t be
a chum of ours if he chuckled. It looks as though he
suffers from suprasellar craniopharyngioma—the
affliction of having a less-than-thimblesized penis. I am
reminded of the featherless White Orpington—this being
one, I have no doubt,” said he, smiling viciously and
puncturing the groin in the photo with the hot tip of his
cigarette, “you’ll soon caponize.” He dropped the photo.
“Here, but this is an IQ 60 Epsilon Minus in a circus suit.
She’s the one you want. The blowing datura-apple! The
cozening coypu! The culling spick! The mock-humble,
footprintless cvoirth! Qui facit per alium facit per se: she
who does a thing through another does it through herself.”
His face went suddenly cold. “But tell me, have you
answered the lies on the tape—or the one that allowed a
complete lifetime of them?”
“She loved me once,” whispered Darconville. “I
believe that, first of all. I feel she—”
 “You feel?” sneered Crucifer. “Then direct intuition is
capable of discerning a priori truths as adequately as the
inductive method of intellect reveals them a posteriori?”
He sat back. “You outdo the Egyptians, probably the
vainest people in the world.” He wiped his mouth. “She
loved you? She loved you?”
“You can’t think that a lie, can you?”
“The Monch!” said Crucifer. “The Eiger! The
Jungfrau!”
Disbelieving, Darconville just stood there. It was
useless to disagree, for, as with all censors, it was
impossible to discuss; the only position possible was
acquiescence, a mood increasing with the diffidence he
felt standing there under that high lamp and its
paradoxical light which didn’t eclipse the darkness but
rather somehow made it visible.
“I’ll ask you again: the lies, have you answered
them?”
“No.”
Crucifer looked away. “Inference: that you listened to
it, that you approved it? O, but she’ll like that.”
“Approved it,” snapped Darconville, disgustedly.
“What do you mean?”
That was better. Crucifer wanted the confrontation.
“What are you talking about?”
“O do don’t, will you.”
“Tell me.”
It was simple.
“Revenge,” said Crucifer, point-blank.
Darconville slowly walked to the window, stood there
a moment, then softly made a vow to his reflection. “I
will wait,” he said, “I will bide my time. But I will never
rest until—I don’t care when or how or where—she
comes, in seeing what she has done, to have as heavy a
heart as I have now.”
“Wait?” asked Crucifer, puckering his right eye in a
malicious wink. “While she gobbles chocolates and
makes play with her eyes and fans like the fast women of
Paris? Stoicism is the disease of young men, isn’t it?” He
sighed. “Time is on your side, I don’t doubt—what there
is of it. I’ve always said that the best reason for
disbelieving in God is that he never gave us enough time
in life to pursue enough knowledge to find sufficient
truth. That we find it at all—as you,” he cried, pointing at
Darconville and raising his voice to an angry trill in
which he couldn’t prevent a slight trace of madness from
creeping, “apparently have—should always be taken, one
would assume, as a welcome if miniature surprise.” He
gulped bile. “But you don’t deign to think so, do you?”
“I should explain—”
“Bullfuck!” shrieked Crucifer, pounding out his
cigarette and struggling out of his chair in fury. “The only
explanation is a bad one! You’re at war! You will have a
cripple’s temper until you have found your feet! You
think you should ignore this owl’s pellet simply because
she is low, stupid, and insignificant?” The question
whistled out of his nosehole.
“Power is subtle. Fiddler crabs can wear away whole
jetties. A pin-worm fells an elephant, as Dutch beetles can
an elm. The rat flea, not the rat, causes bubonic plague.
Cancer chews out the heart of a hero; a kiss in the open
air betrays a prophet. And a knife”—he yanked the
Egyptian khangar out of his academic hood and violently
stabbed the air—”a knife flashes and an emperor dies.”
“And what,” asked Darconville, his voice almost
inaudible, “is the lesson here?”
 “It’s not enough to raise a storm, you poor fool,
unless you follow it with a bolt of thunder and a blow of
lightning.” He gestered to the photograph. “I’d send that
Geryoneo down to the house of dole. And her? Blood
revenge! The Islamic Thar! Shit fire and save matches!
‘Hier steh ich treu Dir bis zum Tod’—her oath, I believe?
Then help her out! What goes round comes round. Now is
the time your face should form another.”
“My face,” said Darconville, unambivalently looking
at Crucifer, “is facing revenge.”
“Yes?” returned Crucifer. “And to be further educated
to it is to hazard a loss, in the delay, of the joy of
discovery?” He breathed into Darconville’s face. “I’d
send her disappearing back into her navel like a black
hole. I’d huddle her into the wormy earth. I’d
quadrifurcate her fat limbs and feed her parts of herself in
choice cuts.” Darconville closed his eyes. “But I see your
position: she’s her own worst enemy, that’s it, isn’t it?”
“Not while I’m alive.”
“Then why do you linger with that which you know?
It is obsolete. The known is a symbol of the death of the
mind! After what she’s done to you, will you now sit by
until she’s a worthless old bushrag in her nineties, some
stinking bale of cadaverous goods best consigned
immediately to Pluto, and then let death come to her as a
friend?” His eyes flashed. “We’re talking about a bitch
here—a word, granted, which hasn’t the authority of
classical usage, but it certainly has the indubitable
authority of fitness, no? No? And safe? Safe? She wanted
to be safe?” Grotesquely pursing his mouth into a girlish
bow, Crucifer hitched up his robe in a cute little tricot,
curtseyed primly, and mocked, “Why, thank you,
Darconville, I’ll really miss you”—his face fell—”every
chance I get.”
“I’ve done something about it.”
“Overmuch clack,” spat Crucifer.
“I’ve taken steps. I—”
“What, you’ve sent a few letters? Is that your idea of
revenge? Sandpapering the anchor? Complaining,
inactive, and bored like the endlessly munching ungulates
I spoke of who know not hot nor cold? You beat the sack
and mean the miller. You’re not going to act,” said
Crucifer, blowing disgust out of his great clay cheeks.
Darconville clenched his fists against his eyes and
cried out in pain.
“Into each life,” said Crucifer, shrugging
unsympathetically—and he pretended to lose himself in a
fastidious study of the Delville, touching his little finger
to a non-existent speck on the canvas and blowing it
away. He arranged some papers on his desk. He tidied up.
“I despise her.”
“Touching.”
“I thirst to see her lifeless.”
“A dried sentence”—Crucifer tossed his head
—”stuffed with sage.”
“I mean it.”
“And I’m the Queen of Romania.”
“I promise you.”
“Oh, to be sure, yes indeed.”
Then Darconville dropped his arms, his moist eyes
wide open, and desperately confessed, “I am killing her in
my mind repeatedly. If I owned a hotel with a thousand
rooms in it, I’d like to see her dead in every one of them.”
“The mind,” replied Crucifer, with a pout of
displeasure, “is a hotel room, I’m afraid, where only one
person can die.”
He began to walk back and forth, then, stroking that
huge witcher-bubber of a belly which seemed to propel
him forward on a high drift, as if in caricatured pursuit of
something elusive and just out of reach.
“I am constrained, I see,” he said, turning, “to a
seeming digression. It is an indisputable fact, right off,
that thought in movement seeks thought at rest in
resolution. Beliefs are rules for action, and the function of
thinking is to step toward thought’s practical
consequences, mmmm? Reverence to this! Now you have
an enemy, my dear misguided boy—a bitch with a rubber
heart who in a recent confustication more like a
Goldonian drama than a love story used her smile for
make-up and her twam for a Dutch bargain all in pursuit
of a marriage founded in deceit and against the long
continuance of which I wouldn’t bet a pound to a pinch of
shit! ( Of course it won’t last: when someone leaves a
room, those who remain immediately see themselves
differently and always move around to register that
difference. ) But the point is: you loved her. The point is:
she left you to die—the lowest of betrayals of the many
there are, the swart crow! A predator, unseen and
unseeable, she kept to the night with multiple disguises,
using shadow-elimination, outline disruption, and
counter-shading all at once! I should have added to my
litany Myrionyma, the creature with a thousand names!
But, hell, you’ve heard what she’s said, haven’t you? And
isn’t the tongue the neck’s enemy? So what could
absolve, who acquit, how cleanse this thing who not only
hates you but is sitting to virtue in Virginia this very
minute as demure as an old whore at a christening?
Nothing! No one! Not balsam from mecca, neither musk
from the deer, nor civet from the civet’s arsehole! But an
enemy provides both a stimulus and a lesson, I repeat, and
I wish only for the final time to point out—monstrare—
make clear —ostentare—predict—praedicere—and
portend—portendere—what henceforth you must simply
no longer ignore: force destroys enemies!”
Crucifer paused to swallow his anger.
“Survival is not a desperate affair; it is a natural
process! Lost battles,” he shrugged, “make not Pompey
less. But shall you either by pointless idling or non-
resistance cut off the chance for your own survival in the
face of the possibility of it? Forgo justice? Counterpoise
evil by silence? Excuse yourself and accuse yourself?
You’re standing in your own light!” Crucifer shook his
fist, which grew a warning finger. ‘“Tis time; descend; be
stone no more! Civilization and murder are compatible,
Darconville. Haven’t you read your political history? Is it
not better that a life should contract dirt-marks and abuse
rather than forfeit usefulness in its despicable efforts to
remain unspotted? ‘The dead do not praise the Lord,’ said
the Psalmist, ‘nor any that go down in silence.’ Mercy,
without retributive punishment, is sentiment! Worst points
to best!
“There is no worse lie,” howled Crucifer, wildly
waving his arms— the cloister lamp actually trembled
—”than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, but,
no matter the brand of cant putting it otherwise,
reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and
quacking appeals to sympathy or mercy or pardon are
folly when we are dealing with vile and corrupt deceivers
and the beaked and taloned graspers of the world! I mean,
he who doesn’t oppose, attack, or even execute such
creatures is as though the creator of them! Oh yes, our
sympathies are always evoked through ultra vires
considerations, aren’t they? For pussyfooting? Piety? A
pitying tolerance for our oppressors?” He touched his
forehead, wearily. “The ages greatly differ. Your
magnificent relatives—the heroic fashion of them,” he
sighed, “has passed away. Wherein lies very obviously a
truth: did they lie chained, subordinate by this world’s
insult; coerced by the Elizabethan brank and block; and
then go whimpering into their due subterranean abodes to
beat hemp and repent? Or did they walk openly abroad,
the envy of a general valet-population, bear sway, and
profess war to the death with the very dogs who snapped
at their heels? Love your enemies?” choked Crucifer.
“Why, it invokes such a breach with our own instinctive
springs of action as a whole that I take it to be nothing
more than an oriental hyperbole which castrates poverty
and pain and gives over the control of the world to
criminal fools, proselytes of capital, and the Set fatuously
dubbed Smart! If there be any pretension more
philosophically absurd than another, it is that any person
or thing can act contrary to his own nature. And if there
be any pretension more practically immoral, it is that any
person or thing ought to act in that manner! Whom
therefore ye ignorantly worship, her declare I unto you!
Une Grue! Une Goulue! Une Grognew! She was what she
was—and so has done what you must undo. Love, lost,
breeds death, found. It’s the very lesson at the heart of
that hideous and twofold penalty of blindness and
eviration that we have come to call Adam and Eve! And
can you then now admit you shall do nothing? Creed love
for a foe crippled with miscreed? Believe someone who
could perjure through a six-inch board? Can you actually
sit there,” he screamed in an extended wail of
monochromatic denial, “and try to tell me there’s to be
found a level of emotion so unifying, so obliterative of
differences between two enemies, that enmity may
proceed to such irrelevant circumstances that one might
crawl on his hands and knees to stoop, to kneel, to grovel
to kiss the feet of one’s eternal persecutor?” He gave the
word “persecutor” four clear vowels. The echo
punctuated the question Darconville, pale as jute, couldn’t
answer. “The Trojan Horse has foaled!”
Dr. Crucifer saw he’d touched a nerve yet waited
some minutes for better advantage, his eyes roaming
morosely about the room in fake self-objurgation for
having gone and wasted his words in an effort that
seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. He continued to wait.
But the knife was in. So he turned it. “You love her.”
Darconville’s eyes blazed.
“She is panting for someone else like a cat after
seafish,” he sneered, “and you positively adore her.”
It was intolerable.
“I hate her!” shrieked Darconville, gasping for air,
frightening himself in the ultrasonic scream to the point
of trembling, and he began to bang his head bloody
against the wall. “I hate her! I hate her! I hate her! I hate
her!” He turned in convulsed supplication. “I love to hate
her. I’ve cursed her to hell!”
Crucifer’s mouth fell open. With the fingertips of
both small white hands fluttering bewilderedly to his
neck, he stared in disbelief, thinking: how you must have
loved her. But he was fast upon Darconville. Had he? Had
he, he asked, actually put a curse on her? And unable to
contain his joy—he literally appeared to inflate—he rose
huff-shouldered and victorious, bowling in to overpower
Darconville in an awkward and obscene embrace while
hissing lewdly in his ear, “You are me!”
It all called for a drink. Crucifer reached into a corner
and pulled a bell, as Darconville, shaken, felt for a chair
and sat down in silence, the wound under his bandaged
chest throbbing. Then Lampblack—the face that always
seemed its own reflection looking out of a lens— after
appearing from nowhere to unwrap and pour a bottle of
wine, was told to get out. With a tiny glitter in his spider’s
eyes, Crucifer then made a toast, singing, “La illaha ila
Darconville, Crucifer Resoul Darconville!”
Darconville hesitated.
“Shrabt! Shrabt!”
And they clinked glasses and drank.
What however, wondered Crucifer, had yet been
established? The pitch of efficacy, yes, but of what
inferential belief? He was not interested in the mere
exercise of words, certainly, but rather the very movement
of the spirit putting itself in a personal relation of contact
with the avenging person of which it felt the presence.
Now, he thought, I will bell the cat.
“There,” said Crucifer, sampling the winy aftertaste
with his tongue. “I would call it an amusing bottle. A
touch of smoke, with attractive mid-mouth flavors.
Chewy but not sec, hmmm? Apropos, did you know it is
possible to turn Madeira into port in the space of a single
night?” He took Darconville in from the side of his fat-
encircled eyes. “Do you follow me? I’ve told you before,
a nice vice is really a virtue. The blow of a sword and the
impact of an idea, according to the Bhagavad-Gita, reach
to the same end and have the same justification in the
eyes of God. If a claw be caught, the bird is lost—you can
make pigeon-blood of rubies!” He paused. “Your brows
are clouded,” he asked, leaning under Darconville’s face,
“when will they thunder? No, don’t look away. The
inescapable Aquinas is his best on ‘the right of spoil’ in a
just war, and St. Isidore of Damietta, in fact, pointed out
that when the chosen lean over from the heights of heaven
to contemplate the torture of the damned they will feel
unutterable joy at the spectacle: it’s the collaudation of
infinite justice. Knowledge that fails to become action,
I’ve said it before, is bestial perversity, didn’t I say that? I
did. I did say that.”
He paused theatrically and then picked up the
photograph of Gilbert van der Slang.
“Lions 1, Christians 0, is that fair?” Crucifer slowly
turned the photograph around toward Darconville and
pointed to it with his little finger. “Shall what poisons you
prove mithridate to her?” He paused. “Or shall I hold the
photograph so”—he turned it sideways—”the way he’d
be in bed?”
There was silence.
“Darconville?”
“I am ready.”
“Be Ravilliac!” charged Crucifer, moving quickly
forward in his chair and squeezing its fistclaws. “Have
zero pH! Put honor on the top of your tongue and a knife
under it! Strangle her with her own tharms! I tell you,
men who believe they can do anything they choose to do
must presently believe they must do everything they can!
What have you come out to see, a reed shaken in the
wind? A moral temper has often to be cruel; it is a
partisan temper, Valois, and that can be the crudest! I
would have you see her an almanac that you might burn
her every year! Stab, strangle, burn—what does it matter?
Work only swiftly, as aqua fortis eats into brass!”
 Darconville followed him with his eyes.
“Don’t hesitate. Don’t think. God may forgive her,
but you never can. The law for her is the law for you—
tell me, what most resembles a roast gander?
“Why,” cried Crucifer, bounding up, “a roast goose!
And, O, what an infinite variety of retaliation awaits us!
In the Dantean underworld she’ll be whipped by devils as
a panderer, for her hypocrisy draped in a leaded mantle,
for her simony stood upsidedown in a hole—but first we
must get her there! Let it go,” he winked, “under the soft
name of satisfaction. Now,” he continued, sticking the
photograph as a reminder into a corner of the Chinese
screen, “propositions of all sorts must have occurred to
you—what, countenance her deceit that by your
magnanimity she come to acknowledge her mistake with
despair? Ignore her crime that she fatally form the habit
of acquitting herself of obligation and die friendless?
Refuse her the nobility of suffering by which otherwise
she piously seek a martyrdom?” Crucifer drew himself up
like a bat, his ears almost growing points. “The trouble
with this is it’s all insipid pacifistic bilge—and leaves her
to make your back her footstool, the spawn’s lugs, and to
force you to live sick as muck for the remainder of your
days meeting circumferences, not angles, not corners, not
rest. She wants to forget. But opposites—contraria con-
trariis curantur—are cured by opposites. There’ll never
be a forgetting! And you’ll never be at rest! The Palace of
Revenge contains every delight but the power of leaving
it. Revenge a hundred years old”—he bent over
Darconville and siffled under his breath—-”still has milk
teeth! No, put her to the squeak,” he goaded. “A piece of
churchyard fits everybody! But be thorough—a little
wind kindles, much puts out the fire: she must learn in
pain exactly what she’s lent.”
“Then we agree,” said Darconville, surprising himself
with the remark as well as Grucifer, who almost squealed
from joy. He quickly slipped off his jade ring and placed
it on Darconville’s finger.
“As coins to Hebrews!”
But the singlemindedness, he thought, was yet to be
confirmed, predisposing conditions yet to be, the mood as
given not effectively received until.
“What to do now? Be cunning,” warned Crucifer,
walking with his finger in the air, “for if motion is
necessary because of the oppositions which evoke each
other, motion must be subtle. Intervene as but a shadow.
What I mean is, a lamprey is not killed with a cudgel but
a cane, do you get me? Better pull a steady thirty-six than
a jerky forty —the old Harvard motto, yes?”
He continued pacing the room restlessly, an
uneasiness reduced to the simplest terms of cold
reflection, deliberating in an anxious conviction that
sifted and tested what he soliloquized within himself of
war and cruelty and torment. He stopped suddenly at his
desk.
“Stay,” he said, “I feel a sudden alteration—ah,
lovely girl, trust no longer to your bloom; the white
privets fall, the dark hyacinths are culled.” He wiggled his
dimpled fingers. “Let her paint herself an inch thick,
Darconville, to this favor”—he slowly picked up the air
pistol— “she must come.”
He turned.
“And him.”
Darconville followed his pointing finger to the
photograph.
 “How can you put a hundred pounds of trash into two
sacks so that each sack”—Crucifer’s hand began to
scribble fast in the air—”contains a hundred pounds? By
putting,” he gleeped, “one sack inside the other! Figurez-
vous? Go after them both!” He leaned forward in
animated receptivity. “Have I not said that when you are
lank again, seek the narrow chink where, when lank, you
entered? Here.” He waved the gun. Darconville stepped
back anxiously. “This is a Feinwerkbau E-12 Deluxe,
caliber 177, recoilless operation with double piston
construction, side-cocking lever, and a fixed barrel set
with a micrometer peepsight. It’s a classic! The pellets”—
he turned his head sideways and smiled crazily—”have
been treated. Never put off ‘til tomorrow what you can
wear tonight. She can be bleeding six bottles of alicant by
dusk. Take it.”
He seemed to turn positively insane.
“Kill her!” cried Crucifer, impatiently. His fanaticism
leapt forth like a sword drawn from its scabbard at any
thought now of contradiction. “Where there are no guns,
diplomacy must make not butter but time, not true? Too
true. Too true, indeed. But here’s a gun! Shoot her and
leave her until maggots are singing in her wounds! Not a
record kill—only a good one-shot kill at twenty yards
through her bedroom window!”
He fired without warning into the photograph:
twaaaang!
“Kill the Dutchman—the receiver is as bad as the
thief—and send him back feet first to the Straits of
Ballambangjang or wherever it was he came from.” He
aimed and blew a quarter of the photo away.
“Kill their children, if they should have any! There’s
to be no pity: nits will be lice!”
 He shot off the face.
“Kill her parents—a murder of total elimination—for
the soul of the offspring, say the Traducians, originates by
transmission. Nothing exceeds like excess! Send them to
Azrail, the angel of death, and let Munkar and Nakeer
inquisition them in hell.” He fired: twiiiiing! And again:
twoooong! Howling, he emptied the entire gun into the
screen.
“Kill them all!” he screamed, biting the air in the
fullness of his malice. “Kill them all!”

XCII

Revenge! Revenge!

For Rage now rules the reynes:

Revenge, revenge, my Muse, Defiance trumpet blow
—
Threaten what may be done, yet do more than
you threaten.
—Sir PHILIP SIDNEY, “Fifth Song”

“R-R-REVENGE!” cried Dr. Crucifer, his voice

resembling the tearing of a strip of calico. He was almost
unable to pronounce the word from happiness as he
pressed the pistol into Darconville’s hands. “It is a
wonderful witty word much disliked by those to whom
the thing signified by it is nevertheless dear. Harden your
heart. What good is kindness now? All delight comes to
an end, hence the chief pleasure in the next beginning:
spill the thing’s blood and water a mandrake! It’s only
justice! White, to use the parlance of chess, is always
morally justified in attacking, so let black see to black—
remember, in describing a capture only the capturing and
captured pieces are mentioned, never slyness of method
or means. Say nothing and you won’t have to repeat it.
But be chaos: fast in action, dirigible in absence. She
doesn’t have the right to own the area she’s in.
“Come, do you hesitate?” Crucifer looked wounded.
“Didn’t Alexander destroy the oldest cities on earth
without a qualm—Tyre, Cyprus, Gaza, Boeotia, and a
thousand more? Or Ferdinand Alvarez de Toledo, Duke
of Alba, did he shrink from answering with fire and
sword the question of Dutch perfidy? And had Louis XIII
any doubts about the justice of fitting out Protestant
Huguenots as blackbirds and shooting them just for the
sport of it as they leaped about and exploded in puffs of
feathers? I mean, if you have a problem, and you know
the answer to it, isn’t the problem immediately
eliminated?
“The comfortablest revenge is when you can kill to
pardon.” He winked. “There’s sugar in salt, I tell you.
But, here, don’t hoard your grief—you have someone to
divide it with! It’s as easy as witches bottling air! You can
summon demons from the hell-light pale! You can appeal
to Fornax, god of ovens! You can even pray for it, for in
several secret chapels in North Wales you can actually
make supplication to vengeance and, with one carnaficial
kiss, offer up your enemy to Sts. Llan Elian in Anglesea
and Chynog in Carnarvonshire! But you must act! Intense
device! Superflux of pain! Nothing is worse for the soul
than struggling not to give play to feelings it cannot
control. Revenge is a dish best served up cold—have at
her swiftly before she tries to make amends! Do it now!
Kill her! A promise to do so in the past was not
redeemed, Darconville—the thought, I daresay, having
too much play in the expression of it.
“All that’s real,” hissed Crucifer, sitting down heavily
on the sofa, “is rational! Black magic, with all its grim
theatricals, is all very fine and large yet nothing more than
exploiting lost angels with impunity. You must not simply
cut off from your agony all that is superfluous but
necessarily impart a shape to what is left: be avenged
here,” he pointed, “in this life. Scupper her right there in
her stained and mousy sheets, rank with twice-dyed
blood! Or do you prefer, tell me, other than a pistol?” he
asked, taking it and setting it aside. “Are there no longer
racks, wheels, strappadoes? Bilboes, feral engines, iron
collars? Or pikes, the tyrants of the wat’ry plain?” His
face turned the color of craft paper. “I mean, precisely
what are the other ways to skin a cat?”
Dr. Crucifer’s soul seemed to come waveringly
forward, like a grey vapor, out of his eye-sockets, until it
formed itself into a shadowy double of a person.
“Poleax her! Bang her on the toenails with dowels
and mallets as they do to Indian elephants! Sfregia la?” he
giggled, drawing a finger along his throat. “Death has a
thousand doors to let out life!” He threw out a series of
short paratactic suggestions. “Scorch her with ultraviolet
light! Truss her up in ropes and thraw her jerking in all
directions! Slip her a funny-tasting pie! Pick any of the
three swords of Mohammed: Medham the Keen or Hatef
the Deadly or al Battar the Trenchant! In Iceland”—he
clapped his hands—”they beat codfish into powder for
bread. Or shall it come as it did for Adonibezec, King of
Bezek, who had his thumbs and big toes amputated? How
about eserine? Physostigmine? Ovabain? Bouillon d’onze
heures?
“The quickest poison is the barbiturate thiopentone:
one choice in-tracardiac shot”—Crucifer blew a kiss
—”and cheery-bye! Or you might consider aconitine or
digitalin, which can’t be detected. A more colorful
alternative? Try 1000 cc’s of scoline, not only swift but
the state of horror and intense fear before excruciating
suffocation is indescribable. The Borgias adored white
hellebore, thorn-apple, and Christmas-rose. Then there’s
always our old friend curare, which relaxes the abdominal
muscles to the point where breathing will just simply stop
and, as it’s soluble, if the body were then immersed in
water—have they bathtubs in Fawx’s Mt.?—all traces
will disappear. But what? Raw rice, pounded glass,
ribstone pippin, Bean of St. Ignatius, fool’s parsley,
Godfrey’s cordial, sesquisulphuret of arsenic—it’s God’s
plenty! Paralysis from buttercups, stupor from buckeye
seeds, agony from mistletoe berries! All natural, all nice.
In irritant poisoning, the pain usually comes on gradually,
and slowly increase in severity. Neurotic poisons, whether
spinal, narcotic, or cerebrospinal, of course rarely leave
any well-marked traces in the stomach or bowels, and any
pretenders to minute analytical accuracy will invariably
apply their tests in vain. I personally favor anything, for
elegance, that addresses the spinal marrow.” Crucifer,
smiling, crossed his legs and pick-a-backed his hands.
“But I love them all.
“The poisoner is, I must confess, of all others the
genius. He must have the confidence of the person he is
killing; he must appear amiable; he must be willing to
give from his own hand those drops that mean death. And
yet all the while,” smiled Crucifer, “the victim sits as
helpless as an egg about to be tapped! But it doesn’t
matter how, does it? Death conjugates all tenses. It
matters why, first of all. Then, it matters when.” He
paused. “I am an Arab, you forget. Revenge is almost a
religious principle among us.” He leaned toward
Darconville. “The only point is: when you bite, make
your teeth meet.”
The silence that followed indicated a pause that
seemed too much like moral deliberation. Couchant
immediately became rampant: Dr. Crucifer fought up off
the sofa and, as if his delight in caricature sprang from his
own unfortunate condition, played out not only with fists
and faces but in terrible detail the rest of his
indoctrination.
“There is a various plenty in slaying of constants and
parameters. Proficient? Freeze her to death, then thaw her
out—the perfect murder. Ingenius? Perform a
transabdominal laparohysterosalpingo-oôphorectomy on
her, unsuccessfully! Historical? Double her up like a small
compass in the ‘Scavenger’s Daughter.’ Slow? Try the
Thousand Piece Execution: the idea of this is to cut out
from her body one tiny square bit the size of a cough
lozenge, say, every few minutes or so until bit by bit—all
of them selected with discrimination so as to have her live
to the nine-hundred-ninety-ninth piece—her whole body
has been removed. Amusing? Tickle her to death with the
tassels of her wedding card. Suitable? Brank her like a
shrew by padlocking a sack over her head—the virtue
here being that, unlike a cucking, the tongue is not given
liberty ‘twixt dips—and dunk her in a gum-stool until she
drowns to death. Ethical? Place a lethal snake in one
corner of her house and at the same time place the exact
amount of antitoxin to cure the bite in another—then walk
away. Patriotic? Smother her to death in the Virginia state
flag. Metaphysical? Dream her to death in a mind-war
and watch her combust in a nasty puff of smoke.
Colorful? The Chinese dai sh’pin comes to mind, a
particular treat where you feed her bits of paper pulp—it’s
nutritional, briefly—which, absorbing moisture, sit
humectant in the digestive tract, making it increasingly
more difficult to defecate as each day passes, and in the
process renders vain any attempt on her part to try to stick
her fingers up her anus to pry out the dry lumps.” Crucifer
glinked sideways. “Are these yet too elaborate? Too
venturesome? Inapposite? Overcon-ceptualized? Explicit?
Jeopardous?” He touched a finger to his brow in a pose of
self-consultation. “Mmmmm, sad. Then why don’t you
—”
The expression, as he amassed them, sat loosely on
his thoughts.
Then he spoke.

XCIII

“Why Don’t You-?”

I’ll teach you differences.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
King Lear
 “STAB HER with a bung-starter! Mail her a poison
suit! Employ the scaphism! Hurl her down the Gemonian
steps with tincans tied to her ears! Whittle her nose into a
dowel! Exenterate her with an oilcloth-cutter’s knife!
Glume back her scalp and paint the skull with a crimson
A! Incrassate her into jellies! Conglutinate her buttocks
with hot solder! Bake her a pie made from castor beans,
pokeweed, tomato plant foliage, black locust bark,
rhubarb leaves, and wisteria pods! Ablende her eyeballs!
“Burn radix pedis diaboli in her bedroom! Force her
to have buccal coition with a yak! Deliver her over for
lewd sport to hordes of ferocious Khonghouses! Snop her,
snackle her, smore her in picrotoxin! Tie her down on a
nest of dermestid beetles! Pickle her in natron! Replace
her nose with a headlight and drive her into a plate-glass
window painted the color of money! Inject her with fox
mange, nasal gleet, poultry mites! Lock her away forever
into the charnel-vault of Montf aucon! Fouch off her
buttocks!
“Place Q-wedges in her eyes! Cauterize her cervix
with strychnia! Nail her name down with Punic wax and
pour acid on it! Sew her up inside a hippo! Bore a hole in
her throat and draw down the tongue, for comic effect, to
pull it through her neck! Cut the fingers off her first-born
and fashion them into a necklace for a cross-eyed pigmy!
Grill her on cashielawis! Thropple her with your wet
hands! Notch her nostrils! Drip plutonium into her open
eyes! Roll her tongue up like a bruggioli and transfix it
with a mail-opener! Feed her out of a lead footpan into
which several Hassidic Jews have just vomited! Plug up
her Bowlahoola!
 “Beat her senseless with her boiled shoes!
Scrobiculate her with a pair of tailor’s shears! Hang a
wreath of fruitbats around her neck! Put a rocket up her
anus and light the touch-paper! Vaginoexcavate her with a
hot coal spoon! Put a stone fish into her bathing cap! Bas-
ton her with heated gisarmes! Lib off her ears! Shove
tacks into her fold of Houston! Upend her into a moldy
fust! Crimp her epidermis into artistic sunbursts and
slivers with an Eskimo ulu! Sulp her! Feague her! Gaum
her! Hamesuck her! Waterzoutch her!
“Strangle her with a numbat’s tongue! Coat her with
hot creosote, hollow her out, and use her in your garden
as a drainbarrel! Beat her into a j-particle! Hang her in a
bottle like a cat! Shoot Dutch bric-a-brac off her head
with a shotgun! Tack a pocket to her libbard skin! Make
stone jewelry out of her distals, terminals, unguals! Give
her a felon-wort sandwich! Behead her with a rusty
coffee-can lid! Pitch sorb-apple hoops into her face!
“Yerk her on the lip with a gorilla’s scrotum-stones!
Smother her in her own midden! Force her at knife-point
to shinny naked up a locust tree! Contrive to make her
feel torment without the luxury of sorrow! Spackle up her
mouth! Lay pipes in her you’ll scald! Clap her into a pair
of hames and take her for a run on a string! Hogcomb her
back! Fit a whipworm into her ear! Slingshot a
brookstone into her forehead! Stick her toes into
Bullivant’s Stopper and twist! Roll her in smilax
rotundifolia! Dunch her in the belly! Duntle her in the
teeth! Dub her in the face!
“Raft off her head! Throw her to a Zanzibar tiger!
Hire her out to a sideshow where she’ll be backscuttled
by a Bulgar in a conical hat! Venenate her vegetation!
Coat her with meat sauce and release fifty starved
Molossian hunting dogs! Send her around Cape Horn in
an ill-caulked fat! Reverse her fingers! Thrast her temples
with a filter-wrench! Slither a taipan through her bath tap!
Hautpin her through the ears!
“Vivisepult her! Snawle her! Titscrew her! Sheer off
her right mammary prominence and throw it to a Maltese
spaniel! Snip her weasand! Jackflip her into Appleby’s
self-knotting binder! Bang her hard on the occiput with a
copper stewpan! Saw off the top of her skull and use it as
a whistle-tankard from which to drink juleps! Boil her
buttocks! Crucify her on the front of a barndoor while
wearing a duncecap listing her crimes! Blowtorch her hair
off and scald her like a sow!
“Melt her down into a kitty-litter tray! Fustigate her
with an eel-ferret! String a zither with her vastus lateralis
tendons and play ‘A Nautical Man Came By’! Tear out
her umbles, reins, and kidneys and replace them with her
lying tapes! Give her an overdose of chloral and force her
to do unnatural acrobatics! Chop her into messes with an
ax-wedge! Fill her calyx with duocide chucks! Place
cannonballs on each of her feet and hang her by the
tongue from the clock of the Soestdijk Palace! Graft her
thumb onto her chin!
“Rip out her temperomandibular joints! Sever her
stapes! Brank off her wrists with hoof-nippers!
Mammock her into bacon! Bite her on the neck and give
her the gleep! Inject her with the Black Formosa
Corruption! Grant her the xi pains of hell! Foin off her
thumbtips! Suggilate her with night-visits from goblins,
bugbears, and tenebrions! Garrote her with corned beef
string! Celebrate a mass inhumation with her and her two
friends! Duckpop her by grabbing her asshole and
snapping her inside out!
 “Pack furballs of her own hair into her by suction!
Miniaturize her! Decapitate her during the recitative of
Fidelia! Hand her a bouquet of amanita mushrooms,
Persian kerza flowers, Jerusalem cherry plant, pyrethrum
daisies, Javanese upas leaves, and tell her to breathe
deeply! Snip off her eyelids! Inject potassium under her
armpit! Gore her in the temple with a suction trocar!
Force her to grab an active propeller! Order her to
memorize Zumpft’s Latin Grammar while bonking her on
the head with a hammer! Dye her black! Devil her into a
pâté! Dash her against a wall of dolerite!
“Bimster off her flesh! Tap croquet balls down her
throat one by one! Feed her the gets of cupped and
goitrous Jewgirls! Sit her in a footstool made of Perunite
B and throw a lit match at her navel! Suspend her naked
from a dree-draw! Fashion a parrot cage out of her sternal
ribs! Slip a gluey penny into her glottis! Lower her into
filthy sewage! Electroplate her and hang her as a bauble
in a burlesque house in Clinch Valley, Va.! Slit her snout!
Wish her a case of sheeprot! Fit a barlow knife into her
nasopharynx! Crunt her on the skull with a cudgel!
“Sling a schist into her belly! Pewke into her pockets!
Thrack her with anvils up to Pantops Mt.! Insert the
nozzle of a bellows into her touchhole and pump hard!
Pour all over her skin a devouring escharotic! Bombard
her with calcium atoms! Turn her upsidedown and let
bongo apes depucelate her bum! Split her head with a
pike at the lambdoid suture and use them for woks!
Upholster your house with her verminous dermis! Whack
off her lower lip with an imperfect blade! Attach
drawstrings to her and hanfangle her from the vanes of a
windmill by ‘The Hottentot Apron’! Fetch the rymme out
of her throat!
 “Adnexopex her! Burke her! Crooch her in the face!
Put her to the hot-water ordeal! Roomal her with her
lover’s dogstones and rope-theats! Hide a spincop in her
knitting ball! Drape a mulebell on each of her ears and
parade her duck-squatting through the village of s’Her-
togenbosch! Whip her about like a bumming-top! Assoil
her with rude fists of offal! Thrammle her to a leaking
nuclear-reactor! Splashfeed her with phenyl cyanide!
“Glaive off her ears! Hurl Montenegrin shepherds’
curses at her through a megaphone! Spray hive-bomb
down her throat! Clap her into a casket with a vicious
ounce! Mule-pulley off her back from her front! Drop live
geckos into her hair! Sproat her through the tongue and
lower her into a sharkpool. Cruddle her fibula bones into
matchwood! La plongez dans lessive faicte d’estrons et de
pissat de juifvre! Vault her down the street with a wagstaff
inside her! Behead her with a dull thixle!
“Brangle her by the ears! Swage her legs to a
perpetual 180°! Afflict her with the scabadoo, dry
serpigos, roup, gaffkyremia, and white diarrhea! Put
casting-counters in her eyeholes! Haust her with higry-
pigry! Clap a fistful of Yucatan habanera chilies into her
mouth and hold tight! Depeditate her and force her on a
stump pilgrimage to the Mount of Deceit! Cut her to the
rames! Bace her to death with rubber drubbers! Caboche
off her head and use it for a glowball!
“Impissocrapigate all over her! Crosshatch her face
with a pie-crimper! Make her bite down hard on a chunk
of Hawaiian coral! Massage her with a currycomb,
abrading the flesh, then rub her with alcohol, ignite it,
resume combing, rub again, and relight! Stuff her lover’s
severed cullions into her podex! Jangle puppets who look
like her real father outside her night-window! Set vicious
ichneumons loose at her heels! Sit her in a bed of flaming
hot gleeds!
“Comminute her into snuff! Keel-haul her backwards
through a pond of aqua toffana! Dress her up like Satan
and walk her into the Valley of Mina to be pelted by
outraged Muslims! Carve a perpetual pumpkin-like smile
into her face! Put a fire-alarm inside her and excite it with
a jab every five minutes! Skin her alive and roll her in
salt! Catch her a whisterpoop on the face with a birchrod!
Chain her in gimmaces from a balloon and pot-shoot her
with glass bits! Shove her into a jam-pan! Make her swim
into a cave of beach voles! Batter her with a wanion!
Thrash her with a hame strap!
“Acupunctuate her! Swindge her! Thunderstone her!
Feed her a full bag of creep ration! Deartuate her with a
pair of calipers! Dose her simultaneously with huge
amounts of Sinequan and Mebroin, Pertofrane and
Panwarfin, Mellaril and Esidrix! Infibulate her with a
curved seton needle! Pack her bathtub-deep in dough and
harden her into a human Beef Wellington! Tug a
sailneedle through her nose-points! Anchor her down by
her byssal hairs and roger her arseways!
“Feed her poison garbongs! Cryogenize her into a
glacial dirt-band! Flame up a hornbeam into her eye!
Cripple her and give her a 16th-century larder pan to slide
herself about like a cul-de-jatte! Pinch the back of her
neck white with a tension forceps! Fuse her legs together
into a tail! Lock her into the Bull of Phalaris! Gamahuch
her with the tip of a pompier ladder! Take out her twenty-
eight miles of intestines and with them hang her parents
from the storefront in Fawx’s Mt.!
“Funnel lobster dung into her eyes! Ganch her with
razor-sharp hooks through the clavicles and attach it to a
dirigible! Wither her like Jeroboam’s hand! Exoculate her
with a spoon and feed the balls of her eyes to your pet
mandrill! Crush the tips of her toes in a grésillon! Send
shrews skittling up her anus! Stick her head between her
thighs —the seat of dishonor—and jab her to death with a
firefork! Beat her to death with an elderstick that was cut
the minute the sun entered Mars! Roll her about in yucca
leaves! Send her wedding veil to an insane asylum in the
Tidewater to be used as a volleyball net! Set gongs to
work under her bed and when she jumps cut off her
ankles! Gar-rote her with her heartstrings! Pour six quarts
of ipecac down her gullet—and gag her!
“Probang her with liquor of ammonia! Blind her with
hot pins and place a fat padlock through her eyes! Void on
her! Tie her onto the Lowell House bells and gong them!
Hang, draw, and quarter her with the tied sheets of her
marriage bed! Swing up a hidden steel chungool and
swipe off her labiae! Pincer her occicles with pliers!
Hamble her in the feet and force her to walk on stilts
made out of her lover’s bones! Frottage her head with a
drill-sander!
“Tamp percussion caps into her ears and explode
them! Sponge her in the midriff with sulfuric acid! Turn
the killing gaze of a Catablepas on her! March her on the
run, backwards, into a forest barbed with sharpened punji
sticks! Inflate her with hydrogen gas through a clyster
pipe! Squirt burgundy pitch into her ears! Cement her
alive into the dungeons of Kasr el-Nihaye! Shake a can of
wireworms into her face! Cover her with thistle-seed and
unleash seventy-five bags of diseased crows!
“Give her a bath in hot naval jelly! Expose her
strapped down on an iron grating in the Dokhma!
Puncture her heart with an etching-point needle! Flatten
her feet into trays with a spalling hammer! Shoot her with
a phosphorus gun and leave a huge circle-burn for a halo
on her heart! Take watermelon-sized bites out of her
oxter! Tie her with clew lines, furl her, and bash her
unconscious into the deadlight of a ship! Fuse her with
sulphur into a human candle! Screw an ear-trumpet into
her mouth and pour in chloride of zinc!
“Truss her haunches! Switch out her brains! Flog her
with a cabman’s whip! Nail her face up under a thick
woolen drugget riddled with bedbugs! Extract all her
teeth and replace each one with a red-hot nail! Allow a
candle to burn down in her sphincter! Flay her with a
rhino whip tipped with bent pins, knotted cords, switches
of heather, and a bull’s pizzle! Screw a spout into her
mouth and porcelainize her for a men’s room in Kabool!
“Request her to play ‘Aschosos paizeis! Snatch out
her eyes, harden and varnish them, and use them for
hacking chestnuts! Ream off one of her buttocks and
make her wear it as a fur tippet! Split her lip like a bunny
with one snip and make her hop after carrots! Funnel
pounds of nephrocatarticon into her and scorch her
kidneys! Beat her knuckles with a hickory ferrule! Throw
a rabid kinkajoo into her bathwater! Quadrifurcate her
and set the meat on four staves in the Rub’al Khali!
“Rowel her lips with scissors! Gavage her in the neck
with a dental lancet! Infect her with blotch, fire blight,
pink rot, smut, bacterial wilt, leaf spot, black leg, hopper
burn, and anthracnose! Pull Christmas crackers next to
her ears! Rake her cheeks with a dry rice root brush!
Force her to eat a banana stuffed with MAO Inhibitor
drugs! Cut her throat with a thrush searcher! Thwack her
in two with a whinyard!
 “Conculcate her! Bugle her! Stone her with fistfuls of
coprolite! Ram the big toe of an ostrich foot into her
temple! Scotchtape three-hundred pigeons to her arms
and then hurl sacks of popcorn into a rocky gorge! Order
her to sew the intricate Peking stitch by remote
candlelight in a dungeon for one year! Tip her
upsidedown and conquassate her! Punch her with a left
hook to the solar plexus, the fiercest punch to absorb!
Give her a panclastic sandwich!
“Pound hand-fids into her nociceptors! Tattoo her
down the spine with Symmes’ Abscess Knife! Rasp her
around the neck with a xyster! Enter her in a marathon to
run with a silver thimble between her buttocks! Fit her out
lodgings on the Mont Saint-Michel sandflats or in
Tunguska, Siberia or by the Bay of Fundy! Bash her with
a nache! Suffocate her with a wet windsock! Sprinkle
seed weevil into her breakfast food! Give her a frightful
case of the bots!
“Bash her on the thinkball with Ubaldo’s Wand!
Remove her cochlea, attach an electromechanical driving
unit to the oval window there, and bounce her across the
room at will. Hurl her onto a set of maiming caltrops!
Pack her mouth with nostrilcress! Knot her around the
neck with her lover’s cremasters and pull them tight! Snip
her psoas muscle and make her run up a slide, sideways!
Freeze her in quicksilver and tap her apart into little
chunks! Pitch her into a pool of lampreys, and watch
them suck her faint! Smyte her in pecys! Langle her by
the neck on a leaping-house flagpole!
“Press her into a torture cravat, pump helium into her
mouth, and force her to sing, ‘I Love You Truly’!
Embroider obscene words on her cheeks with red thread!
Hammer her into bone ash and round it all into a cupel!
Hobble her to her mother and force them to play Wipe the
Scut, Donkeyshines, and Sow to Her Pen! Drench her in
elder vinegar and chase her naked through the Ragged
Mts. in the dead of whiter! Frush her! Pettuse her!
Bumrowl her! Cuff her! Spancel her like a cow!
“Pickle her as a voucher specimen! Invultuate a
waxen image of Beelzebub and with it plug up her
jakeshole! Send her an immortelle and develop the
obvious meaning! Force her to absterge herself with a
swatch of her own hair! Inject her with black mamba
distillates until she assumes the nature of a snake! Whip
her with the winter branch of a whiffletree! Throw her
into a stewpool to fatten up your caribes! Grill steaks out
of her baby’s feet!
“Shower her with burbolts! Set her impossible tasks,
like sorting out an infinite mixture of millet and barley!
Make her suck on a musket-barrel, fire it, and send her to
hell with her clothes on! Truss her, rub salt on the soles of
her feet, let goats lick it off, and watch her die from
laughter! Glue a sinapism on her mouth after a hearty
meal of drastics and peristalts! Press her between two
wheels of gritstone and breccia! Make her peer into the
boiler of a steaming locomotive, then nudge her! Stitch
her into a sack and wing her into the Bosphorus! Douche
her with slacked lime, borax, and alkaline flux!
“Pisk her! Smout her! Minge her! Whinge her! Drop
her into a revolving water-screw! Decartilage her
completely and make her tap-dance! Reverse her eyes,
then place her lover’s picture in front of her, and watch
her leap for it the wrong way! Sit her in a tub filled to the
brim with Dutch Mordant! Swipe open her mouthends
with a billhook! Cut a spot in her breast and place a
window before her heart as an aquarium for stinging
butterfly cods! Sigmoidoscope her with a harpoon, heated
white!
“Drop balls of rattlesnakes down her chimney! Sew
her ears to her inner thighs and, staring into her anus, let
her beslubber her face! Incinerate her alive at 2000° F.
and dust a brothel floor in Tirana with her cremains!
Scald the bottom of her feet with a candle until the fat
drops down to fan the flame! Fill your library with books
fashioned with skin provided by her first child!
Decapitate her, mesh her mouth, and make her head into a
radio!
“Pour hot clay into her vagina and make little ceramic
witches of her! Drive a yataghan into her brainbox! Drill
holes into each of her teeth, wire them, and drag her over
miles of naming bitumen! Paint her skin with belladonna,
morphia, drachms of King’s Yellow, thring-sene and
cause dermal asphyxia! Assault her with Japanese moon-
chucks! Deploy an envoûtement and hex her! Pour ice-
water into her ear and set massive fans to work! Force her
at gunpoint to geek the head off a puffer-fish! Gut her
facial cords, temple to jawbone, and watch the character
of her face collapse—and, as in all cases of
disfigurement, keep mirrors around her!
“Vapulate her! Wherret her! Sneg her! Bash her on
the panbone! Thwitch out her innards! Strip off portions
of her skin, paint them, and then use them for tiny kites!
Abacinate her by placing a red-hot basin near her eyes!
Take her first-born infant by the ankle and flog her with it
until both are dead! Carve an Eskimo tupelak with her
face on it and blaspheme it, scomfitting it with whispers,
obscenities, and dark curses! Throw her into a huge
thirlpool! Break a needle in her finger and watch her die
of lockjaw!
 “Estrapade her with jerking ropes! Stuff her every
orifice with grain, strap her down, and let her be pecked
alive by 117 marabout storks, the ugliest birds on earth!
Cut her heart into a thousand gammons! Drop raccoons
full of diphtheria viruses down her chimney! Pry off her
fingernails with metal turkas! Draw off quarts of her
blood to use for ink to correct the first drafts of your next
book! Stuff her ears with her lobes! Lower her alive into a
sarcophagus made of limestone quarried at Asas! Exile
her to the island of Pandataria! Send her wandering into
the fogs of Exmoor! Beat her to death with mop-sticks!
Seal her into a room with mygales, bushmasters, and
coral snakes and amplify her screams! Hoise her! Souse
her! Bounce her! Trounce her! Punch her! Stunch her in
the umbo! Pull out her throatball!”

XCIV

Journey to the Underworld

Let it be at last; give over words and sighing; vainly

were all things said.
—ERNEST DOWSON, “Venite Descendamus”

THERE WAS AN END to it only when Darconville,

suffering more than tongue could tell or heart could hold
in silence—a ridiculous figure, a failure, a fool—packed
that night to leave Cambridge with complete disagreeable
detachment of soul from every earthly sentiment,
possession, hope, and desire, for having no proper
defense against the anguish of human relationships
anymore he simply turned away from them,
spontaneously writing his feelings in a brief note that
became a minute, then a short confession, and finally an
explanation of fuller statement he could finish only to the
point when it was thrown, despairingly, after a heap of
consequential letters, photos, and papers into the suitcase
he banged shut.
The demeanor of the d’Arconvilles in direst straits
had long been the demeanor of men who had no doubt
regarding their own integrity; it applied no longer. He
couldn’t care again; neither explore; nor feel; and
succumbing to whatever doom was now his with no more
sense of responsibility than of that meted out to him by a
destiny he took to be nothing more than the terrible
intensification of chance, he accepted what he thought
about no more.
Goaded by insult, heaped by lies, despoiled by
injustice, tried beyond his strength, beyond all patience,
he left his rooms for the last time and mounted the stairs
to receive both a final malediction and the means to carry
it out. He reached the top floor of Adams House. As
prearranged, someone was waiting for him, someone at
the far end of the dark corridor, coming no closer but
standing back out of the feeble light, and then the
moment, almost interminable in apprehension, was upon
him. He hugged his shadow to him like a warm fear.
Darconville stood for the final time before Dr. Crucifer.
(Of the third he felt in this company? It was a matter God
alone understood, if His mercy allowed Him to think
about it. )
 A sudden and desperate impulse at that moment, a
longing to love somebody, anybody, anything not imbued
with wickedness overcame Darconville. He stopped. He
shook his head. He moved a few steps backwards. There
wasn’t yet a word spoken.
“He who will not when he may,” Crucifer then
whispered from the shadows, the voice respirating low in
its unsleeping malevolence, “when he will he shall have
nay.”
“Are you talking about me—or G-God?” asked
Darconville, his voice pleading as inconfidently he went
further forward. But it was too late.
The glare of Crucifer’s boiled eyes in their unnatural
flush and the severe fat line of his mouth determined to
mirror what they themselves wouldn’t reflect on, and
Darconville saw himself in the corruption: two negatives
made an affirmative. They never shook hands. There were
no goodbyes. A shadow merely handed him a pistol. And
Darconville turned and was gone.
The singlemindedness of love? It can pursue a single
aim with a concentration of energy, with a fullness and
pertinacity of unwavering will near matchless in power.
The wheel of feeling, however, makes an unerring
revolution, and, lo, there is hatred. For Darconville,
wasted by illness and discredited by disaster, the infection
was upon him; his face was like no human face and
nearly unrecognizable. Life at its highest and best, such as
he himself once enjoyed, offered the possibility of its
alternative which as it replaces the other none can escape.
Curbed by no limitations, he made no pretensions
anymore to the discovery of new and striking facts; out of
savage pain, then, out of reckless mockery and loss and
long weeks of self-abandonment was wrought a new
resolve—and so like the black princes of the Renaissance
who would step not a foot in the streets until they had
buckled on a sword or sharp dagger by their sides,
Darconville set off alone, bought his butcher’s ticket at
the airport, and began his journey to the underworld
where no darkness, however close, could either save or
shelter one from that fate in which victim and executioner
would alike be instruments. He felt for the pistol: Tartars
gave as gifts to the tortured the canes with which they’d
been flogged. It would be like the algebra of love, what
he was now about to do, suddenness in passion fit to
matters of eternal consequence, with one lover firing and
another lover dying—shot, unexpectedly, straight through
the heart.

XCV

The Night of Power

The Night of Power is better than a thousand months.

—JACOB BOEHME

THE WOODS in Fawx’s Mt. were wet and cold.

Darconville stirred through the leaves, cut through the
water-rat-smelling underbrush, and quickly crossed down
a dark path, shadowed by funeral pines, that ran parallel
to Isabel’s street where in a hidden spot he parked the car
—stolen at the Charlottesville airport—which he’d
spotted from the rainy booth while making a certain
telephone call: Hypsipyle Poore, breathing low through
the receiver, confided that she had managed to sleep with
van der Slang, twice, and with words like that of a sweet-
natured child drawn into a game it was ready to play
without full understanding reported the details to
Darconville which he recorded in a little notebook with
one hand while the other opened and shut on the
instrument as if it were galvanized. He did not pity
himself. He did not hate himself. He just endured himself,
waiting until darkness fell.
It was windy. The moon was like a golp sitting in the
rainy sky, disappearing now and again in the fog, lifting
the weight of darkness from the earth while turning the
world, the woods, into a place of phantoms and shadows,
and finally the pale sickly gleam over the Blue Ridge
mountains threw a last ambivalent shadow down the
valley to beckon the night he’d been waiting almost all
day for, leaving the entire area under the full cloven hoof
of darkness. The whipping, but intermittent, rain had
chilled Darconville to the flesh, congesting his lungs to
the point of actual pain. It didn’t matter, he thought, as he
ducked, thrashing, through limbs and branches. Hill and
valley scarcely seemed to be step and landing for him;
rooted trees seemed but as sticks he could smite down.
There were only his footsteps— fiends in the fog coming
after him—each one nulling the last, as fate overtakes free
will, steps past chance toward destiny, and halts at
predetermination. He would fix her forever to the very
spot on which when last he’d seen her she stood—then
bang! It would be her last night on earth.
As had been the case all day, hiding in the car, he kept
turning over and over Hypsipyle’s description of Gilbert
van der Slang, which confirmed almost everything—it
was astounding with what accuracy —he’d conjectured:
pinched nose; scrawny neck; wiry hair; a nasal, airy
voice; a motionless cast of features, with rabbity teeth
showing when he smiled; and the habit, when making a
point, of jerking his mouth in an ugly way, a twitch on the
right side as if upon whatever pronouncement to be
adding something of force or authority to it. It was, she
said, like making love to a broomstick.
There was nobody yet home in the little house where
Isabel was living: the lights were out, the driveway
empty. Darconville swatted through the brush, rank with
patches of scabious knapweed and the mold of wet
decaying leaves, crouching along toward the sound of
water, and there by a familiar stream, a thing that could
barely name itself, he chose a spot. It was a covert in a
folding bracket of bushes, set back and out of the way, yet
with a direct view through the trees, bare except for the
last foliar bundles of late fall, to the conventional little
house some hundred odd yards away. A scared bird
whistled away. He took out his pistol—and waited, the
sound of the ghastly susurration in his chest the only
evidence of life in those woods.
It was absurd for the necessity of it: thrilled with the
evil of where he was, Darconville could nevertheless
exclude himself—out of the inexorability of fortune—
from a matter one part of him could not conceive, not
acknowledge, not treat as a thing of possibility, never
mind reason, and to try to behold himself dwelling in the
midst of it, to imagine this was he, became impossible.
An assassin? With leaky shoes? In a mottled wood by
night? Yet there in fact he was, the claustrophile-with-a-
vengeance his students so briefly knew—never ultimate,
never emphatic, never settled, never in sight. His
reclusive disposition was at the extreme. The night
brought the forest closer; it was no longer the place
where, as lovers, they’d walked a million years ago; it
was in the interior chilliness of the darkness, and the
moving trees whose every action, travestied by
moonlight, almost made him fire proved every time he
looked up to be only the wind and the rain whispering in
repetitious echo of her, “You’re mad as a hatter! You’re
mad as a hatter!”
An hour passed, and another. The covert grew darker
about him, and pulse by pulse Darconville felt time grow
weaker in his veins. He kept still, not stirring,
concentrating on the destruction of her memory and
trying to block out all motive, sense, intention, and
consequence— for thought is fatal to action—sometimes
seeing no ground beneath him and then noticing,
suddenly, the serrations in every leaf and every blade of
grass. And then whence the smell of sulphur, of burning
and smoke, rising out of fissures in the earth? A
subterranean fire. It had been burning, like dream into
fact, for four years. He blew on his hands. He felt
cramped. Where was she? Where was she?
He listened. It was getting late; there was still no sign
of her: perhaps, he thought, she might never appear. Then
he would have to stalk her—who knew?—even to
Zutphen Farm and blast her away through a window.
Overhead a few dry and shrunken leaves rustled, having
points like stars and rising and falling delicately as fingers
playing sad music. Along the bed of the slanting ground,
all between the stools of wood, there were heaps of dead
brown leaves, and sheltered mats of lichen, and drifts of
spotted stick gone rotten, and tufts of rushes here and
there, full of fray and feathering. Darconville stumbled
about, shifting in his wet coat, into several positions until
it all became hopeless: the rain came thundering down
now in sheets. He was freezing and, unable to stifle the
coughing from his aching lungs, leapt away with a train
of curses sufficient to poison the light of the moon. The
volume of rain beat eastward into the trees, and
shuddering—the ice-cold water rippling down his collar
and into the bandages—he squelched through the bracken
and brakes and thickets of undergrowth, where the moss
held the falling rain like sponges. He took refuge in
disgust under a huge pine by which, still, the little stream
ran like diverted hope and listened to the water brawling
darkly along banks napped with that soaked moss, though
he was still able to see the house.
It was then that it happened. Darconville, while he
squatted there, hunched and inert, his stiff fingers folded
around the pistol, was suddenly alert to something in the
woods, undeniably like something moving. Turning, he
felt his heart shut like a stopper; he froze—and, instantly,
it was as if he had come there only to understand what he
must immediately come to know he could never learn to
forget, for in that moment foreordained his gaze had
fallen upon that simple tree, standing alone across the
water, upon the midrib of which in thin serifs had long
ago been carved a single word: Remember.
He stood before it in the pouring rain.
What hand made it? Whose carved? The very hand,
he saw without elaborate calculation, that would now
mock memory by murder. It was quietly, an overpowering
accumulation, in the midst of that storm—with the feeling
of what was impending swiftly opening to him in violent
contrast the intensity of past consciousness and the idea
that it might cease forever—that Darconville suddenly
realized that the source of all error in life was failure of
memory! A recept, made of many precepts, exploded into
concept—and the past, formerly thought adversary to the
future, spoke to him. Remember! Remember! Remember
the king’s words in the old story: which arrow flies
forever? The arrow that has found its mark! All
forgetfulness, he understood, almost on the edge of
exultation, was in itself immoral, for the permanence with
which experiences stay with a man is proportional to the
significance which they had for him: memory must be
preserved from time! A thing has the more value, it came
to him, the less it is a function of time, and the effort of
men to probe the past? Why, it was nothing less than an
exertion toward immortality, for the consciousness and
vision of the past but pointed to a desire to be conscious
in the future, didn’t it? And if, he suddenly reasoned, we
do not free what we have known from time by memory,
can we have any knowledge of remembrance any more
than we can have one jot more of time? Memory was
eclogue! “What have I got left?” asked Time. “Your
genius,” answered Eternity.
The moon was dancing in Darconville’s eyes through
a mist of tears, raining from heaven, half blinding them—
and he wiped them so as quickly to obtain the knowledge
of what in that small carved word he feared otherwise
must fade.
It was a duty to forget nothing! The first of faults,
Adam’s and Eve’s, was not disobedience but failure of
memory—and the concomitant want of understanding that
memory is only another perspective on immortality, for
inasmuch as one is without continuity, he can have no
true reverence for what of life, in pain or pity, in
happiness or hope, he owns to utter and utters to shape
and shapes to know if he would redeem the time.
Memory, rendering the past obsolete, nevertheless relies
on it. Continuous memory was not only the vanquisher of
time, the logical and ethical phenomenon saving one,
Darconville saw almost in ecstasy, from having to bear
the grave burden of living one’s own life under the same
fault by which, through the very person he’d destroy, he
was faulted, but it was also linked to morality, for only
through memory were repentance and the rehabilitation of
the past possible—the salvation of one’s poor self!
Destruction? No, there must be preservation! The past!
The past! The past, thought Darconville, was the artist’s
playground! The past was the birthplace of the future! He
took off Crucifer’s jade ring and threw it as far as he
could into the woods. To satisfy our now with the
memory of then, to shape to know: that was how Petrarch
attained to Laura in the field of eternal light! And if
reality were too varied, too abundant, to be mirrored in
anything smaller, narrower, less varied than itself? Then?
Suddenly upon Darconville’s heart fell one drop of
Brahmic bliss, illuminating what it struck and telling him
a truth: Rise up, prophet, see and understand, the death of
what is is the birth of what’s to be!— and instantly the
outward circumstances of his life transformed into a
consciousness of moral exaltation, an indescribable
feeling, invincible to all effects of time and change, an
elevation, elation, and joyousness passing the very portals
of grace itself as the seraph Uriel, with diffraction lights
glowing from his face, stood above him. I hear, I forget. I
see, I remember. I do, I understand. And he cried out
through the woods in astonishment, as if, upon the stroke
of creation, he suddenly understood that the occasion is
the nothing from which everything comes!
At that very moment, a car’s headlights swept across
the trees, beamed away, and then the soft crackling of
tires coming through the darkness by the driveway was
heard no more. The engine was shut off. As the car doors
slammed, the very night seemed to hold its breath, as
even the sound of wind and rain had ceased. But there
was never any noise, for, unable to move, Darconville
was facing away into the forest, remaining completely
still, his eyes closed to everything but the light that had
flashed upon his soul. He couldn’t see her again. She
didn’t exist.
It was done, then, what wasn’t, as in the resolution of
dreams, and so what can be recorded of what never took
place may, for who looked back in another direction never
looked back at all and who was given another life never
knew how swiftly one was lost (or how close she came to
death that night) and what failed of love in time
disappeared into the timelessness of love to return never
again. He couldn’t see her again, who would. She didn’t
exist anymore, who did. And what had long been done
had never been that now would have to be.

XCVI

Quire Me Some Paper!

I’ll write, but with my blood, that

 she may see
These lines come from my wounds
and not from me.
—GEORGE CHAPMAN, Bussy d’Ambois

“QUIRE ME SOME PAPER!” cried Darconville.

“Shear me a sheep for vellum! Nail me out a desk with
the timber of redwoods! A quill pluperfect shoots from
the sky to occupy my hand! Sound me the Dorian mode! I
am alive, O sunset, come back from the dead, and from
Thy crucible dost Thou call me forth, even as I am! All is
in movement! There are angels come to bandage the
wounded angels of battle and bend to lift me from the
darkness to the light! Beauséant! Silence is full of
execution, and intuition and desire lie undestroyed! I will
squeeze secrets through the tips of my fingers! I will
bring noses to windowpanes! I am still Darconville,
master of my fate, captain of my soul!”

XCVII

Venice

Happy were he could he finish forth his fate

In some unhaunted desert, where, obscure
From all society, from love and hate
Of worldly folk, there should he sleep secure.
—ROBERT DEVEREUX, Earl of Essex
 VENICE is a city of yesterdays. There is in the
ancient stone, the narrow and coarsing lagoons, the dark
immemorial sea slapping at its very steps an aspect of the
eternal which seems to say, in a strange paradox of
finality, that time shall endure only if once it comes to an
end, a concept reversing the very nature of what it is.
There should be no surprise in that. It is a city, in fact,
where the natural does not exist, not in St. Mark’s
glittering dome, neither in the implacable white of the
Doge’s Palace, nor in the cold churches, old museums,
and silent galleries with their ikons and golden mosaics:
Byzantine madonnas, infant sibyls with electric eyes, and
hierogrammarians standing head downward with their
feet folded in prayer.
The city, born of art, has long existed more as a
measure of the artist’s contemplative imagination than the
reality of life in the labyrinth of narrow streets and lanes,
smelling of ruin and the sea, might otherwise indicate.
At once conveyed in the deserted gondola stations,
however, along the slimy steps, past the empty
warehouses and listing palazzi that rise on either hand in
the northerly district of the Sacca della Misericordia is a
particular destitution, and, leaving the busier, more
central quays and piazzetti off the Canal Grande where
rows of fantastic façades can be seen with Gothic curved
and pointed arches surmounted by circles containing
equilateral crosses all rising above grillwork balconies in
the Ducal gallery pattern, the tourist becomes suddenly
bewildered. The area turns darker, dirtier, more dismal.
The water, sucking the walls and welling up in the
remotest crevices and steps, is black and foul. The houses
on each side rise to great heights still, their lowest stories
forming a double line of insignificant shops into which
the light of the sun, however, never enters and the dark
recesses of which, set so far back from the close rughetti,
are poorly illuminated by the flickering rays of the oil
lamps which alone are used to serve for light there.
Gloomier cells than these are perhaps hard to imagine—
being made no less pitiful, to be sure, if viewed through
the contrasting light of former days when many of them
enjoyed, if not richness of adornment, then at least the
comparative wealth of human habitation. Now, many of
them were deserted—but not all. Several were still
inhabited, by those who, out of either determination or
dereliction or both, remained yet undeterred by the
dampness, the vermin, or the prospect of a coming
Venetian winter.
The old palazzo, for instance—formerly his
grandmother’s, now his own—in which Darconville was
living was such a one. It was a grey narrow house of
stone in the Corte del Gatto, a dead-end street set off the
Canale della Misericordia which looked across the
Laguna Morta on the north side and lay open to its
ferocious squalls and winds. All three floors were
unheated. There were fireplaces in only four of the twelve
rooms. Wood was available in the trainyards at the
Ferroviaria, when he could spend the money.
The weather in northern Italy had been bleak, the
sudden changes of temperature giving way to a searching
cold, and the skies, scarlet in the morning, always turned
a dark variegated africano by afternoon, leaving the
fastlands sunless and the seawater slick and grey almost
without exception. The first few weeks in November had
taxed Darconville sorely: he had landed as he was with
little in the way of provisions, his one suitcase filled less
with clothes and personal articles than with notebooks,
letters, and papers relating to the book (how long, in
retrospect, had been the preparation! ) he’d already begun
to write in earnest—not, however, before having made a
solemn dedication to the task upon the same day of
disembarkation before the high altar of St. Mark’s. There
would be no income anymore, and much of the money
he’d set aside for the wedding, along with the few
paychecks earned at Harvard, had been spent on rent for
the full year at Adams House, several wasted nights
south, and the trip abroad. The city had also dunned him
for a host of back taxes on the property. The remaining
monies had to be rationed for food and fuel and, as ill-
luck would have it, several doctor’s bills right from the
start, for a cold caught in the woods at Fawx’s Mt.—one,
exacerbated by the dampness of his rooms, he couldn’t
shake—pulled him down considerably with a sore throat,
shortness of breath, and a persistent cough. The doctor, at
the very first examination, said flatly that it was worse
than a cold, couldn’t he tell?—and he fumed at the
irregularity of the entire situation. Did no one know
where he was? Couldn’t he give any other information?
Was there no forwarding address in case of emergency?
“Imbecille!” cried the doctor, who was also worrying
about his fees.
The symptoms were indisputable: anemic pallor,
coarse wheezing, and a cough that had already scored the
larynx. There was further evidence, above and beyond the
recent rupture, of chronic bronchial infection, probably
acquired from a neglected pneumonia in childhood. He
was in a late and aggravated stage of chronic bronchitis
with resulting bronchiectasis.
 An unaccountable figure in black, unkempt and
unshaven, Darconville—fixed to no hope now but
completing his book—soon became a curiosity to the
neighborhood in those first weeks, before, that is, he
retreated more and more into extreme austerity. The
children liked him, and he several times took them to the
Campo della Abbazia for balloons upon which, to their
delight, he carefully inked their faces. He seemed to
possess a curious influence over cats, as well, and on
several occasions he was seen standing in the moonlight
in front of his house and apparently talking to ten or a
dozen cats from far and near who were all looking at him.
He kept to himself and could admit to no acquaintances
save with an old toothless squalcira across the way who,
remembering him from earlier years, sometimes brought
him over bags of biscotti. The rather saturnine and
avaricious doctor who periodically happened by for
reasons as much inquisitive as professional refused to
understand why he was spending the winter there. Why
didn’t he go to one of the southern provinces? Wasn’t he
an American? Hadn’t he the money? (The doctor, at the
doubt, debated further visits. ) A good listener only
because an intrigued one, he often sat muddled while the
young man’s extraordinary talk flowed on—talk that
scaled the heavens and ransacked the earth, talk in which
memories of a curious past mingled preposterously with
doctrines of art, comic mimicries, and prevaricating
theories about love and hate—and yet this visitor .could
not help feeling that as soon as he was alone he would
sink down, fatigued and listless, with all the spirit gone
out of him. The few neighbors in the corte called him “Il
Monaco.” They had no idea what he did, although at night
from the top room of that grey palazzo, dimly lit, they
could sometimes hear coils of unnatural laughter or the
sounds of phantasmagorical tears, a monodrama that
seemed, for all they knew, to have its source in some kind
of secret and inscrutable theopathy impossible to fathom.
Darconville, in fact, was writing.
The month of November came in and went out in a
pitiless drench of rain, decades of days, uncounted and
ignored, in which he rarely left that upper room but
worked steadily on, hour upon hour, galvanized into
concentrated exertion and punching his head hard with
resolutions to restrain his nerves against inner warnings of
the exhaust-ibility of human patience. The manuscript
grew, quickly. No longer meditating the direst revenge
nor passing from one crazed project to another, with each
one no less cowardly than extravagant, he wrote down
everything he could remember—for victory without
blood, he saw, was twice achieved—filling page after
page of what had happened to him, not lying, telling the
truth, writing to record rather than to imagine, not
inventing what never existed by trying to discover the
meaning of what had, and as he worked, distinguishing
between the impulse to impose a meaning (animus
impotentium) and the impulse to interpret (animus
interpretantium), language became the objective of which
self-consciousness was the subjective. The bee had
fertilized the flower it robbed. Words were all he had left.
The story was simple, a fable about Isabel
Rawsthorne and himself: doubt is double. He loved her.
He hated her. There was a peculiar agony, however, to
this counterbalancing anti-miracle, as if at the precise
moment one was well pleasure alone became too
insufficient fully to define a man, so one sought pain. The
truth of each, incompatible with that of the other, fed
from whichever wrong or right was posited by what one
had to believe to keep the other real to avoid. What other
story in life was there?
Darconville’s art seemed to rise superior to its own
conditions in that Venetian palazzo, endowing even the
dross with a sense of mystery he watched to solve. He
was perfectly cognizant of the difficulty of the task of
writing this book, its unpleasantness, the uncertainty of
achievement, but with that awareness he only redoubled
his efforts and scratched into his work a useful refractivity
of theme and theory out of the very doubts and fears
anterior to it—almost unable, always, to control his
impatience over, his devotion to, the need for furnishing
proof of himself, denied by pain, and to change that pain
into considered prose: a prose of love, a prose of hate.
This was his perpetual twilight. He retained his inventive
powers only by subordinating himself to them, and yet, so
fragile was his hold upon his work, he dared not tie
himself to any other engagement whatsoever lest even the
foreknowledge of it upset a whole day’s work. He began
to write up to ten pages a day, pausing only for meager
meals or to throw another piece of wood onto the fire or
to consult his notebooks, rehearsing exact chronology,
rifling out a detail, reckoning a fact in the light of delayed
revelation. It would be impossible, of course, to
understand the fire with which he wrote unless one also
understood the passion with which he’d sought that bond
of rare and divine love, too rare, too divine perhaps, even
for the realization of the one he loved herself. But work
he did. His output increased and, somehow, seemed
inversely proportionate to his physical discomfort, now a
violent perspiration, now a dry and sinister stiffness, but
always the ache in his lungs that left a palpable feeling of
cavitation there. He determined to leave out nothing of
the four years spent with her, and while he lived no more
in thrall of what she did or didn’t, would or wouldn’t, he
repeatedly reviewed the photographs and read and re-read
all the letters, notes, and messages she lived in once but
inhabited no more, a spirit as infinitely far away in time
now as she was in space, flash frozen in a past as old as
memory was strong, but a past, a memory, calling him
back to search and remember what in the knowledge that
is revealed at the heart of all violation can be transfigured
by the hand of art. The real, engulfed once in the unreal,
emerged, and there was rebirth by water. Laurel was the
first plant that grew after the Flood.
It was mid-December now, with winterkill in the air.
As on every Friday—the only day of the week he stopped
working—Darconville set off through the cold-faced city
to visit his grandmother’s grave. It was a habit he had
formed from the first week of his arrival, initially with
only the complication of money spent he couldn’t afford,
later against a doctor’s orders. He faced away from the
wind and hurried across a few blocks to the Fondamenta
Nuove, paid the rampino, an old silent scaramouche there
who, recognizing the black muffler and familiar black
coat (threadbare now), unhooked the gondola from the
steps, and they sloomed out in long lateral pushes toward
the island-contained graveyard offshore, the Cimitero
Communale.
The gravestone was a simple one, crowded into a
shamble of sunken burial plots and old blackened tombs,
many of them with skulls on the entablature and
inscriptions relating to both plague and poison, open all to
the melancholy requiem of wind and water. A spiked iron
gatehouse, set in the circular wall, gave entrance.
Darconville walked to the grave and, standing against the
rapacious gusts of wind, tried to settle his thoughts around
her memory. He tried to offer up a prayer, an attempt that
became only a self-conscious reflection defeated by the
hypocrisy he found in himself—in his failed love—which
required forgetting to overcome and forgiving to absolve.
I can’t forget, I can’t forget! he thought. No! No! No! And
what of forgiving, he thought bitterly, wasn’t
circumscribed and so contravened by reinventing the
imagination to acknowledge in art the questions life
refused? He whispered to his grandmother but realized
that the condition of our nature was such that we lived
only to see those whom we love drop successively away,
our circle of relation growing less until finally we are
almost unconnected with the world. All union with the
inhabitants of earth must in time be broken, he realized,
and all hopes that terminate here must end in
disappointment in spite of what by the desperate
intercession of the heart we seek to keep.
The impossibility of being able to discover the results
of prayer by any merely human test plagued Darconville.
How, he wondered, could one determine when a true
prayer was offered? If so much depends on the character
and spirit of the suppliant, how could anyone who is
unable to read the heart tell when the request which a
seeker presents is such as God can approve? And how
could any external observer take cognizance of such
spiritual considerations as those which must enter into the
determination of the questions whether, and in what form,
a prayer has been answered? Where were the delicate
instruments to measure the results in the suppliant
produced, sometimes by the denial and sometimes by the
granting of his requests? There were no answers given
that didn’t force one to have to find them. And so he
walked for hours into the darkening afternoon, the winter
light disappearing abruptly as if the cover of the universe
had suddenly banged shut, and he brooded over the
questions interrogating him by the echo created in the
void of his poor prayers.
The strong winds, snatching at his coat, almost took
away his breath. He ducked into the chapel of San
Michèle to get out of the weather, overcome as he entered
by a severe tetany of coughing, strange in the silence, and
he sat down in a pew and tried again to pray. His prayer
became dreams, a slow wandering to an upper level of
consciousness beyond the preteressential candlelight and
scent of wax, and the dreams in their measurelessness
showed him by way of his failed effort in what form a
prayer might be answered: yes, he thought, I will make
the ultimate confession! It must be the story of all lovers,
with the ethical and aesthetic sense in the work leaving no
means of reaching the truth uninvestigated. Not a simple
reproduction of the sensible appearance of things but a
representation of their inner reality, embodying and
illustrating the truth by the laws of general validity! No, I
shall write, thought Darconville—but to forget, and so by
forgetting, forgive. It was almost as if he had never
known what a certainty was until that night. Prayer, he
realized, is utterance! The answer was in itself. Art
creates the Eden where Adam and Eve eat the serpent.
Suddenly, Darconville was bending over, almost
motionsick, with something fluttering in his chest, and,
dizzy, his arms drawing in, he caught himself over a
cramp, coughing violently from the lungs—and a
spattering of black blood dropped onto the marble floor. It
was the first sign of his indisposition, a second new truth
to cope with but ignored, fatally, by the splendor of the
one that came before.
The gondolier told him to hurry—it was late enough,
he complained, to be asking double the fee—for the sea
had grown choppy and a nightfog had blown in,
ominously closing down over them. They rowed back to
the city over the ebony swells, the bluish watery lights of
Venice showing dimly through the vaporous night, and
the clanking of invisible buoys, with their pitiful lack of
resonance, sounded more lost and lonesome in the
obscurity of the sea than ever could be imagined. The city
from this approach had an aspect of death, as livid as a
drowned person. Washed, undermined, and long worn by
the lapping waters that rose each day with the powerful
flow of the tide, working as a prisoner files his chains, the
north side was being slowly eaten away. The façades of
the palazzi, their rough coats faded and discolored by the
salty air, were many of them blacked, the stucco astragals
crumbling off them like sugar. The slick cobblestones
under the lamplight shone and were strewn here and
about with dead bits of calamaretti and scampi which had
fallen from the boats, sails unfurled now, cordage stacked,
all jerking in their moorings. The Merceria clock struck
ten. It was late and the streets were nearly empty, except
for a few old women wearing black shawls who hobbled
through the shadows with bread and produce in net bags.
There was the rattle of a descending shop shutter. A
herring-gull screeched.
Darconville walked back over the narrow and acute
streets and sudden bridges to the Corte del Gatto, a tired
gallery of ancient chimneys and leaning walls: dwellings
of different styles and epochs and states of preservation
all jostled together but comfortable enough, he
remembered, to have made him happy years ago. What
had happened? Had he changed or had they? Now it was
all an appalling, proliferating entrapment of hulks, with
no interruption of line-building, haunted by class
disability and poverty and fetid contamination, a phantom
street of oppressive silence, a rioterra of dark mysterious
doors that once opened straight upon the water but now
crouched down behind the dwellings on the dockside of
the more respectable Corte della Miseri-cordia, blind to
them on the other side.
The grey palazzo—Darconville’s—stood at the very
end, the sot-toportico, bolted by a door, once having led
straight through to a walled courtyard at the back where
now could be found only broken statuary, weeds, and
several metal pergolas, rusting away. The voices of
orphans out there, once raised in play, had long gone into
the stone.
He let himself in, to a rush of dampness and Roman
cement; the door, booming shut, echoed through three
floors. He stood down in the antichiesetta, looking up.
The walls were cold and thick and bare. The rooms were
empty, long ago having been despoiled of their furniture
and drapes and wall-fixtures, along with the beautiful
desk on which, it seemed so long ago, he’d first begun to
write. The lofty windows, half-covered with pieces of
linoleum, could only be secured by renewing the cross-
irons that had been pulled away, and the stone arches,
with open fissures, had been clumsily buttressed by poor
plastering. He took the flight of stairs, by cornices carved
with flowers and broken walls open to brick facings, to
the second-floor landing—where the rain had found its
way between the arch-stones and was there arrested by
the frost, operating like a wedge and dislocating the
stones—and climbed to the upper floor. He quickly built a
fire and cut up four lemons to add to the boiling water in
the huge kettle hanging in the fireplace, an old massive
chimney grate with half-dogs for wood or coal. By the
feeble light of the fire, after drinking the weak toddy, he
wrote until three in the morning, his inspiration dying
with the last embers in the hearth. The manuscript had by
now grown to more than three hundred pages, much of it
taken directly from his notebooks, and what had already
been done, a kind of commitment, gave him strength to
do more, although this particular night’s work he couldn’t
re-read for want of energy and a terrible ache in his
diaphragm. He felt feverish, so drew a pile of blankets
onto the bed of gamy old wood got at a priory, and slept.
That night he had a frightful nightmare; it was as
though someone were handling him secretly, locating the
place to drive a knife into him. The touch seemed to
spread lightly, fluttering over him delicately, until it
gripped him in the small of his back. Darconville woke up
shouting, snatching at the point on his back where the
hand was—and then leapt up, shivering in horror. It was a
rat.
Unable to shake off the frisson, he dragged the
blankets to the window and sat up, beside himself,
searching the floor. The wind that had earlier been
howling outside as if it would tear the very festoons off
the pediment had died down. How long had he slept? He
rubbed the window. Then he noticed for the first time,
falling beyond the cracked and dirty panes, the light
flaughts of snow.
 XCVIII

Wear Red for Suffering

The soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d,

Lets in new light through chinks which time has
made.
—JOHN CLARE

THE WINTER settled in hard, descending in ice and

sleet that chilled the waste of snow around Darconville’s
palazzo, looming spectral in the feeble light like the last
human dwelling at the end of the habitable world. It was a
place uncheered by a touch of changing light or a solitary
ray of sun, where the gloomy vault of darkness above and
beyond the fire in his room seemed in collusion with the
dismal recollections, distinct in ferocity, he wrote with
unrestrained gratitude to be free of. There was no relief in
the weather; the days were brief, dark, and frigid. He
stopped up the wide chimneys, reinforced cracks where
he could, and closed himself off in one room.
It was with some pains, initially, that Darconville
placed before himself the undeniable advantages to be
gained by way of novel occupation for his senses from the
coldness of the room. And yet he scarcely made the
adjustment before he realized the terrible depth that could
be reached by such penetrating cold. At a pace adapted to
his waning strength, however, he continued writing
morning and night, alive, as time passed, to this new
possibility, that figures, originating in the disease of
delicate nerves, actually ministered to functions of the
imagination unconscious of one’s affliction, and whatever
he dreamed of, when lethargy got possession of him,
something importunate in the pages underhand called out
of those dreams and made use of, like the infractions of a
law that are dragged in only to prove it. There was often
dreadful loneliness. Still, the loneliness was not the old
loneliness, because there was a term put to it, however
long to look forward to— and while his poor thoughts
constantly reverted to those remote but rapturous early
days spent with Isabel (the kite-flying, the engagement on
London Bridge, the kisses and cares of so long ago) he
found them briefer than the beauty of trees that only
blossom to fertilize to reproduce, and so he shook out of
his wasted hands every miracle of memory ever beheld or
thought of, as if, instantaneous in passage, it might
otherwise disappear and never come back again.
Christmas Day was, perhaps, the loneliest of them all.
He walked out into a morning that was so cold that one
could have cracked it with one’s fingers, the first breath
taken coincident with a sharp feeling of diffusion and
dilation in his chest. It seemed to him that he could see
his past in the ornateness of the palazzi and his
abandonment in other dead romances of that city as he
made his way on foot to St. Mark’s for Mass.
The whiteness of the huge piazza, as he entered it,
hurt his eyes, and the cold sun, refracting off the snow
and houses of whitest stone, somehow cast a cruel
objective light onto that dark disheveled self, shaped to
shadows, walking into the pitiless glare. The pigeons flew
double, bird and shadow, against the Campanile. He stood
a moment before the great cathedral, its façade flat as a
drop-scene, golden with old mosaics, the four fantastic
horses in gilded bronze galloping over the five byzantine
domes into the winter light. There was almost no room
inside, the close air dispelled only in the extremity of
sudden drafts from doors opening and shutting. The
enormous crowd of people, visitors and tourists, reached
all the way back to the atrium where Darconville,
listening to the anthems, prayers, and then the solemn
chant of the Puer Natus Est, thought back on a Christmas
three years before, tears filling his eyes as he looked up at
the thirteenth-century vestibule mosaics on the small
domes overhead and portentously focused on the first, the
Adam and Eve group, with Eve, a curiously forbidding
figure, summoning to mind in an instant of phantom
paradox the terrible machinations of Dr. Crucifer.
Remorse flooded Darconville’s soul. His throat swelled
with a cough he couldn’t expel. He suddenly heard the
constant pushing and pulling of his own breath in the
crowded darkness there and, turning in panic, quickly
staggered outside where he was overcome with an attack
of violent hemorrhage.
There was no question whatsoever now that
Darconville was chronically ill. Repeated infections, in
destroying the bronchi, essentially left only arteries and
veins of the lungs encased in scar tissue, and because a
constant stream of mucus ran through the bronchioles to
the mainstream bronchi, swollen now, no longer clear,
and almost useless in terms of elasticity, particularly
severe episodes of coughing threatened to rupture the
already frail bullae. He had grown accustomed to the
situation, however—with almost every day during the
month of January being spent over basins and slops—and
would accept nothing but the most random and cosmetic
attention (often, with threats to the doctor) lest greater
distractions prevent the work he was almost maniacally
driven to finish. Time! He wanted only more time!
It seemed less important, somehow, to be well than to
write well. To require two things, he felt, was to have
them both undone. So he was inspired to feverish activity,
and his forsakenness brought a renewed flowering of
language when nothing of sickness could make him stop
and nothing could swerve his pen, the very one, he could
not forget, of which in the dramatic boast of his youth it
was said no other hand dare touch—”The Black
Disaster.” He felt in his fingers that magic pen which,
explaining the void, filled it, and taking it up repeatedly
returned to work. In pages of violent beauty, slashed
across with fierce bitterness, he poured out his threnody.
The worse he grew the more furiously he wrote, the
words of love and hate snapping into place about this girl
—deceitful, common, infantile, cruel, and yet utterly
necessary to him—who, in fact, was herself the formal
cause of the entire, unpremeditated enterprise, an action
she hastened as did Penelope, who supplied the weapon
for her suitors’ downfall, for although it was Odysseus
who took on the more than one hundred able-bodied men
it was she, not he, who remembered the big hunting bow
that had been hanging in the inner room. And of method?
Darconville only kept fixed to his desk—like Odysseus,
again, who sent each bowshot through the holes of the ax-
heads while seated—triumphing over the pains of the
living to discover thoughts trembling to be born, a
situation, oddly enough, that rendered only time for him,
not health, the single want in that room.
The month of February, its skyscape dark as thunder,
brought no relief. A storm in mid-month left Venice to the
mercy of the bitter northwind, the wind-chill factor
plummeting temperatures to below zero, splitting brass,
stiffening clothes, and forming ice across the pan of the
faces of those who dared to try to make their way out over
the blast-broken crusts of snow, gelid streets, and ice-
choked canals where mere sounds in the air were as sharp
and crackling as artillery.
A snowstorm followed. It was a blizzard of incredible
dimension, the white winds blowing in havoc and
flooding at the crest of the tide and driving monstrous
drifts into houses half-tilting into the sea over the battered
seawalls. The shrieking winds, rattling windows, blew
down every corte and calle, with great drifts rolling and
curling beneath each violent blast, tufting and combing
with rustling swirls and twisting up into vertical spirit-
spouts that tore down chimneys, rang bells, and shattered
glass. For days the storm wreaked havoc, snatching little
whiffs from the edges of the sea, twirling them round, and
making them dance into the chines and chinks of the piles
of the old city, pointed with barbs of frost. Darconville
was almost unable to control his patience in the
maddening cold. Blowing smoke, suffering severe
headaches, he worked on steadfastly with a kind of
desperate courage, clinging to the thing whose worth,
increasing, could now only be realized through the
knowledge that it would soon be taken away, and, finding
a degree of force and enthusiasm that is given alone to the
doomed man, he never gave up. A death sentence
concentrates the mind wonderfully. He knew he had no
time to lose.
The room got colder and colder, its mold fusty in
spite of the fire, and the black east wind, having changed,
was now striking off the raw Adriatic. By now, the
lattices were quite blocked up with snow, sifting in where
the lead in the iron-frame had failed, and water stains
spread down the inner walls. Darconville began not to be
able to bear it. His feet, freezing, began to sting. He
rubbed oil into his leg joints. He covered himself with
blankets and went through the house, trying to walk the
stiffness out. Downstairs, he saw that the frost had
pierced through the ribs of the old house, striking to the
pith of hollow places, and in several places the frost-blow
had burst the walls. The windows, coated with ice like
ferns and flowers and dazzling stars, were opaque where
they hadn’t fallen weakly inward from the weight of the
snow against them, and in the empty front room a mere
whisper of wind through the chimney had come to the old
kettle upon the hearth-cheeks and cracked it in two.
After five days, from over across the Lido the sun
burst forth upon the world of white, but what it brought
wasn’t warmth, only a clearer shaft of cold from the violet
depth of sky. The temperature never rose a degree outside,
and the sunless rooms of the palazzo thawed not a whit.
Darconville, utterly frail, his body almost attenuated to
pure spirit, looked more like a forpined ghost than a
living man, his face thin, the long hands once so full of
power now drawn and pale. He sought to distract his
mind by several quick excursions from priory to priory
for wood, begging for fuel to stay alive. The icy air made
him giddy and lightheaded, his feet feeling like weights as
he plodded through the thick snow. As he walked the
streets, it seemed to him that passers-by looked at him
malevolently or suspiciously, and each step somehow
became a step toward the sharp edge of the grave, each
corner more unreachable, and every bridge a bleak wicket
to Elysium. But of all things the very gravest to his
apprehension was that he wouldn’t finish his book, the
completion of which, he felt, waited now on less than
several weeks, possibly sooner. And so driven, he would
get his necessities, return, and immediately go back to
work.
The body’s distresses often made Darconville restless
and irritable, and yet, while gathering ills assailed him, he
found serenity of spirit in his writing—no longer an
attack now on the nature of someone who, three thousand
miles west of his writing hand, was so wayward she was
without peer but a cosmic perspective on love and hate
which, while relating to a personal subject, reached to the
nature of man himself. The quest overrode the goal, in
fact. The manuscript had changed, developed, and the
death of every tender sentiment in him, as brought home
by the mute but marshaling evidence he was forced to
discover about her in retrospect, miraculously gave birth
to a freedom from her—a release to see that ends touch
beginnings, for if a necessary function of the imagination
is to imagine its own absence, that absence allows one a
glimpse into a world even more excessively interior than
even fancy can devise, a desert of contemplation, a
retreat, in which, with one’s senses atrophied or
impoverished, truth is no longer created but divulged. The
familiar is too familiar to know. And so living in solitude
as he had been for so long, he saw with increasing
amazement that universal thoughts were infinitely richer
to reflect upon than the particular people who engendered
them were to study. Every word is a metaphor for a
deeper truth that sign hides. Description is interrogative.
The old lady in the Corte del Gatto, guessing the
serious nature of Darconville’s illness, came to increase
her visits and toward late February, shocked at the
extreme disorder of his condition—a wasting diarrhea had
begun and the room took on a noticeable malignancy—no
longer felt she could leave him alone. She carted firewood
up to the room, left him various nostrums, and scolded
him apprehensively, muttering with various but
incomprehensible signs of resignation. His moods
changed. He became impatient and fretful. When she
considered how ill he was and what allowance should be
made for the influence of sickness upon his temper she
tried to indulge. He went from seeming imperturbability
to sudden explosions of anger to bouts of sighing. Then
on February 27 he had another frightful hemorrhage —
one might have tracked his path from one cold room to
another, the bleeding was so profuse. She immediately
notified the doctor.
There was nothing to be done anymore to dissuade
Darconville by argument from further exhaustion, and the
imminence of dire peril only increased his resolve to
work down to the last pages, but then all this went over
as, vomiting blood and yellowish-green sputum, he could
no longer muffle alarm with still another effort. The
doctor, wailing in impatience, forced him by compulsion
to his bed, administering some old tetracycline pills
which, having lost their effectiveness if not their color,
he’d found in the musty reaches of a samples drawer and
pressing him, all the while, to go immediately to the
hospital on the Rio dei Mendicanti as the weather would
be getting worse. Darconville refused. The doctor asked
him where he would be willing to go, to Kreuznach or
Soden? Bagneres-de-Bigorre or Luchon? Bournemouth or
Brindisi? Darconville, coughing, struggled up and banged
the bed. “I will stay here,” he cried, almost in tears, “in
this Capharnaum! In this Capharnaum!”
 The winter days, darkening early, seemed
interminable, and all the following week the feeble light,
swallowed up in swift successive shadows, left the
sloping snowdrifts machined hard against houses frozen
to the inner stones. The skies looked sick, and at the end
of the week the soft and silent snow again began to fall.
Darconville’s bed, to stem the chill, was pulled
around to the fireside. A salamander, filled with oil—
sitting next to a pail in which, repeatedly, his poisonous
effusions were spent—had been secured to supplement
the loss of heat that seemed to evaporate so quickly
through the cold-packed walls. The wind whistled
through rags stuffed into the windows. The air, confined,
was unwholesome but worked somewhat against the night
air, the damp bed, and the swelling in his feet and legs,
lately come to a continuously aggravated condition. He
would not stop writing. Nor would he permit himself to
be undressed out of apprehension of the pain he would
have to suffer in being dressed again. He felt cold and
then complained of a more than usual degree of heat, a
pain and oppression of the chest, especially after motion;
his spittle was of a saltish taste and sometimes mixed with
blood, especially after long fits of coughing which were
all invariably proven dangerous now, with increasingly
severe hemoptysis. He became hoarse. Water was
steamed in pans to foment his lungs and ease breathing,
and yet all the while, in spite of the cold sweats, the
nausea, and the apostemes which appeared in the lower
body, he shaped his last and best efforts in a shaky
calligraphy around the work at hand for yet another page.
Another page. And another. Un altro, un altro, gran’ Dio,
ma più forte, thought Darconville, ma più forte!
 Paper is patient. The creative pen kept to the
receptive paper—it leapt to use, through every phase of
perception, with thoughts, unsummoned and
unannounced, pensioned out of the blandishments of
common reality, constantly stealing upon him for
inclusion, transmitted down through the memory of those
who lived in ancient times, races illimitable, to be
resumed across the years in all the emotions, passions,
experiences of the millions and millions of men and
women whose lives of love and the loss of it insensibly
passed into his own and so composed it. The room itself
was a lesson compacting his goal: there was absolutely
nothing else to do but write. He wrote doggedly, stopping
only to rotate his wrist to relieve a graphospasm or to try
to press an ache out of his diaphragm. He wrote
desperately, searching the past, as fear picks out objects in
the dark, to identify what would otherwise forever loom
as phantoms to his sight. When there seemed to be
nothing left, he slept, then rose again to write—no, not
with an elevation available at will, but through the
whispering of innumerable responsive spirits within him
that stirred like the invisible motions of the mind
wavering between dreams and sleep to remind him that
out of fatal mortality could be snatched something in the
life of the world that did not participate in disintegration
but could transfigure it. The end, indeed, was near. And
then one night, alone, with only the Holy Logoi standing
above him in a thousand diaphanous shades of ether,
Darconville looked under his hand and found that from
disorder—from the spectacle of order that was so vast it
only resembled disorder—a civilization had emerged.
Future became a fiction. The work was finished at last.
 It was March by now. A deep peripneumonia had set
in, causing pooling of secretions in Darconville’s lungs,
the exudation of pus, and the dissolution of already
scarred mucosa. Small blood vessels were rupturing,
sending up viperish clots of black blood in remorseless
acceleration. The inadvertent swallowing of clots
produced nausea and retching which the doctor sought to
check by drastically limiting his food. At first, he thought
he would utterly go mad from hunger, but soon he could
eat nothing solid without suffering immediately, neither
the loathly bowls of milksop which appeared at every
meal nor the whimsical remedies—jills of broth, lac
ammoniacum, and the mixtures of vulnerary roots of
plants—which the old lady credulously hoped might
overcome this terrible illness that by now had set all
medicines at defiance. He lay silent, flushed with fever,
the only sound being his labored breathing and the clup-a-
clup of tongue upon arid palate. Curiously, he kept the
manuscript by him, as if reluctant to surrender it,
sometimes reaching weakly for a page to add a note, to
turn a phrase, to knock off the waste marble. Suddenly the
fever, denominated ardent and inflammatory, rose higher,
ushering in a bounding pulse and a hammering pain in the
head. There was a coarse twitching of his muscles and
impossible congestion. The manuscript was placed in a
black tin box.
Darconville had now come under the shadow. His
body was completely extenuated by the hectic fever and
colliquative sweats which mutually succeeded one
another, the one towards night, the other in the morning—
and then he was cold, a chill creeping over him like
another emotion sent to temper one already there, too
absolutely there, a terrible and unresolvable
complementarity in which radically opposed but equally
total commitments to the meaning of life seemed to
coexist in what became a single phenomenon that,
irreconcilably, was also and was at the same time
nevertheless the secret at the center of all truth. Under his
bedclothes at night he shook like jelly, unable to think for
cold. He was no longer able to turn in the bed. An
unpleasant odor, like dissolution itself, emanated from his
cold sweat. His mouth was cold. His cheeks were cold,
hollow, withering into themselves. He could feel an
inrush of bitter cold from the window through which,
silently, he watched the night-by-night movement of the
moon eastward through the stars. Distance was a mocking
vision to his fever-lurden eyes, but he said nothing, for
when a person’s trouble comes down to the final intimacy
he gives no one access to it. Custodi nos, custodi nos, he
thought as he lay there awaiting the resolution of the
mystery, for the lights of heaven itself were dim. The very
stars wandered.
It was a windy, whispering moonlit night in Venice,
the frost-fog looping around the lower sky in mid-March
when Darconville was hit with a sudden eruption in the
forepart of his chest, a slam that gave him such violent
pain when he sprang up to gasp for breath that he quickly
drew in his bowels to prevent the motion of the
diaphragm. He screamed out in agony, as his back seemed
to break. The old lady, praying the rosary in a corner,
crashed over a chair spilling a posset of tea as she rushed
to wash his mouth of spittle, at first thin, then becoming
grosser and streaked with blood, now filling his throat as
infection eating through the weakened wall of a bronchial
artery tore through a rupturing bulla, fragile from
repeated coughing spasms, and boiled into his lungs. He
clutched for the old lady’s hand, impossibly trying to say
something—but, heaving, vomited up a tremendous rush
of bile and blood and, completely beyond himself,
incapable of explanation, he suddenly couldn’t speak.
Confusion, utter and horrible, surrounded him, because
confusion was complete within.
Astonished, he leapt to his feet in the grip of massive
shock.
It was as if, evacuating at every step—his wild
protesting hands streaming with blood—he were being
driven backwards with each violent convulsion. But the
hands were reaching out as his brain, fleeing the
onrushing hypoxia, was rapidly flashing images he was
unable to control, and with memory distorted in the
replaying reflexes of acute cerebral damage he for an
instant actually looked into the past! He seemed to be
struggling out of the hematosis in an attempt to describe
or call upon something he couldn’t yet see, and then with
a terrible snorting noise which seemed, as it rose through
the phlegm filling his throat, to burst his nose in a lethal
explosion of bright blood that spattered all over the bed
and sheets and cold floor, he tried to speak— mouthing
words that wouldn’t form. Groping blindly, he made a
motion with his hands as if something were coming
towards him and stumbling forward, just before he fell,
reached up in a last fatal moment of blindness to cry out
inexplicably and desperately and loud, “My cat! My cat!”
Then something came towards him at last.

XCIX
 The Black Duchess

Like as it was with Aesopes Damosell, turned from a

Catt to a Woman, who sate very demurely, at the Boards
End, till a Mouse ranne before her.
—FRANCIS BACON

The Black Duchess, a 15,000-h.p. tanker built

specifically to carry liquid cargoes, was meanwhile
steaming back up the Atlantic with Gilbert and Isabel van
der Slang on board. They had been married, on deck, by
the ship’s captain on March 13 with no relatives in
attendance and spent their honeymoon on the island of St.
Maarten by the Virgin Islands. There had been no
announcement of the wedding beforehand. A small notice
of the event appeared one week later on page six of a
Charlottesville newspaper with no other details, no
mention of witnesses, and no accompanying photograph.

The End

Attired with stars, we shall forever sit triumphing

over Death and Chance and Thee, O Time.
—JOHN MILTON
 IT WAS FIVE O’CLOCK in the morning, the earth’s
shadow still undisturbed by dawn, when a municipal
traghetto took Darconville’s body across the grey Rio dei
Mendicanti to the mortuary of the Ospedale Civile for the
post-mortem examination. The chimes of the Campanile
sounded the hour through the fog. The burial took place
after a fortnight’s delay on the cemetery island of San
Michèle in a reused gravesite, dug out of the frozen
ground when the sketching of clouds on the dismal
horizon, after that interval, blew in a cold rain. There
were no mourners, no rites, and no funerary exequies
other than that of a recitation over the coffin by a
Capuchin friar who read from a simple hymn:

”Veni, Creator Spiritus,

Mentes tuorum visita,
Impie superna, gratia,
Quae tu creasti, pectora . . .”

The official report was filed of fact-finding,

documents’ inquiry, and the medical investigation
performed within the limits of the state, with several
questions, stemming from the lack of information of the
papers supplied, unsatisfactorily answered. The palazzo
was locked and boarded up. The deceased’s clothing,
including a black coat faded and soiled and ripped more
or less at intervals of its seams, was burned. A pen, a
watch, and a suitcase of papers were confiscated by the
proper authorities, while the black tin box containing a
large manuscript was suborned by the doctor, in the stead
of due fee, with a view to adding a penny to his
competence.
There alone was epitaph.
There was nothing more: only the transfiguration of a
soul, in memory remembered, lying buried in the ink that
writes. But memory had its birthplace in those words, not
the other way round, for creation is to memory what
resurrection is to death, reversing pain to send it back
again to ask of the momentarily incomplete idiom of that
which prompted it—that feeble analogue, called reality,
overflowing itself in every direction—what is meant in
the terrible paradox at the heart of that truth which has
two forms, each of them indisputable, yet each
antagonistic to the other: loving and hating. The question
stops on the threshold of what cannot be investigated. It
can only be felt; felt, then faced; and so faced, redeemed
in the work of art that, taking the hint nature suspended,
proceeds to detach itself from, and then maintain, the past
against the influence of the present, which is only another
approach to immortality—to make an image out of the
force with which one has struggled to survive where
finally one, transformed, has been created by what has
been endured and mastered in the past, the fashioning of
an incomprehensible beauty that slowly but finally
emerges from the endless ceremonials of sadness. The
confusions, misunderstandings, and mistakes, wafered on
your forehead, will never disappear. One perishes from
cold, kneeling for illumination outside the bed, in order to
give life to the artifice of prayer.
But the survival is in the art—for there the heart
begins to measure itself, not by its constraints but by its
fullness, its poor baffled hopes dim now in the light of
those infinite longings which spread over it, soft and holy
as day-dawn. Thus it must be while the world lasts, the
very misprisions against the spirit coming only to test and
reveal the power of exaltation. Sorrow is the cause of
immortal conceptions.

West Barnstable, Mass.

1978

Alexander Theroux was born in Medford,

Massachusetts. A professor of English Literature,
currently writer-in-residence at Phillips Academy,
Andover, he has taught at the University of Virginia and
at Harvard. Dr. Theroux is the author of essays, short
stories, poetry, plays, children’s books, and novels. His
portrait of Darconville appears on the jacket of this book.