Free Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux Page B

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.
     
     
     
     
      X
     
      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