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

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