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.”