Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux Read Free Book Online Page A

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