Free Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux

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