“The doppelganger subject is a frightful bore.” —V. Nabokov, Conversations With Vladimir Nabokov
“A lover can be viewed as the betrayed party’s double but that is pointless.” —ibid.
Theo found the cat in the mirror the other week, and I have been telling everyone—have told, by this point, everyone—but I have not told the whole truth. I did a wicked thing and, in a way, everything that followed after had its beginnings there: in her discovery, and the birth of mistrust between us that followed. It is hard to explain. Things are different now, and I feel afraid, more than anything, of forgetting the way it was before.
I, a satisfied bachelor of middle years, used to having my own way at home, a witness to this story and a participant both, the prime mover of events, I cannot be trusted, and if you are not thinking that already I must think it for you. I have to record it all out here but to think of serving truth and think of the figure one cuts in one’s own story at the same time, it is too hard; it is to mend the tails of your coat while you are still wearing it, smiling in front while busily sewing away in back with your hands behind you. You put a needle in your finger before you know it.
I have provided for my ward Theodora in my will but it may happen, if I should go the way of all flesh before she does, that when the lawyers show up to our door wigs shaking on their heads and sheaves of paper crackling in their coat pockets as they rattle the door-knocker, they find no-one of the family at home to admire their well-turned calves in their neat black stockings. “Theodora is not home, gentlemen,” the old porter will say, stepping out of his wall niche (I keep to the old ways) and frightening them out of their wits, and they will not understand what he means.
“She will be at home to us, when you tell her what we have come for,” the youngest and bravest will pluck up his courage to say. “Here, bring her my card”— for he believes he saw, he will tell the old men later he is sure he saw, a tail banded in black, waving gently, passing by behind the closed door (set in at the slightest angle is my door, and peepers may peep what secrets they will if they are no respecters of persons). They will disregard him for he is the youngest, but later, rousing a locksmith out of his daylit slumbers to break the locks and let them search the premises, they will wonder just what it was he saw, for their doubts will have left them all alone in a terrifying wilderness of belief by then. Doubt is like the foam padding in a shipping crate, and belief is like the valuable antique vase inside, smuggled out of who-knows-where and intended for illicit sale to who-knows-whom, and whereas the mind is bordered by too wide and shapely an eggshell to be filled with objects of pure belief alone, the empty spaces and gaps left when the cushions of doubt are removed present a shatter danger to every other item within—
I am sorry. I do not like to speak about what might be. Only, I cannot help knowing how painful it will be for them to recognize, at last, that Theodora is not at home to anyone at all anymore—if that should happen. How they will argue, one with the other, over the bequests, if they cannot find her! How guilty might I feel, e’en so far from the Earth’s bright luster, were I to leave them alone with no explanation. For that reason I give my testimony: in case.
Gentlemen,
It was a lonely night, after 12 of the clock—well after, I should say. The fog of night was pressing fast against the windows and I was doing my customary rounds to see that the hollow ostrich Egg was well-balanced in the silver pitcher and that no thing had nested inside it (no thing ever has, but you check just the same, it might be the checking wards them off—some believe it is so), that the black tulips were unwilted and well-watered in their vase to pull forward the spring-time, to knock twice at the door and hear the porter knock back and to hear the tamboured door of his niche on the outside wall slide shut, to take up the candelabra, to hush the fire with the candle-hushers, and so to bed with everything in place, all of us (all two) snug in our places like two gold rings stuck tight in little twin black velvet jewel boxes. Every night the same night and a good night to all créatures, meaning myself and Theodora. Who were both created, though I do not remember the occasion, and our souls pass from everlasting to everlasting, as some say; around and around just like those two gold rings I spoke of in fancy, perhaps. We have lived here a long time and I will tell you just what I like best about my chambers: Nobody ever comes in, and nobody ever goes out.
But not so to bed, not so at all: for as I passed my final pass through the salon on this night a low quavering note, not a growl, poured out of my Theodora’s throat. It was a new sound in these well-appointed rooms, which hear many sounds but all of them, ‘til now, familiar. Watchful, so watchful, she was crouched down peering into the greater mirror, gilt-framed, which rests on the floor, and I saw that she peered at her opposite number: a cat just her size, just her colour, just her number of black-footed paws reaching out to her as she raised her own trembling arms to ward them off.
Another! Another!
(“Another! Another!”)
I have never seen Theo fight except in play, against the bit of cardboard-on-a-stick which is her mother, her father, and her secret lover, and with whom she always reconciles in the end. I am jealous of the bit-of-cardboard-on-a-stick sometimes. There, I have said it. I brought them together, I brought my rival right into our home, I was Theo’s procurer, if you like, and when one has debased oneself so far, what right has one got to be jealous anymore? —But Theo was not fighting now; Theo was not angry or afraid, so I thought then, but betrayed, and by me. How she did look at me, and from the cat in the glass to me, and back to the cat, and back to me! You never told, was in her eyes; you knew she was here all the time and you never told.
They say beasts know beasts by smell and cannot be fooled by dancing pictures, but Theo was certainly wild with knowledge that there were two cats here; the spirit had come down to her and nested upon her brow and she did believe. Creeping ‘round to the back of the glass she could not find her playfellow, yet creeping back ‘round to the front, there again she was, and how this could be, how a cat could live only in the glass—
Then she humped her back like the fretful porpentine and made a sudden run at me. And I laughed at her.
Yes! laughed. I confess it. We had lived together in close quarters since the Arrangement began in November last, but we were still strangers to one another in ways whose importance I had not, then, the least idea. I thought it was natural to be strangers in the beginning, to become gradually, so gradually, less strange. I thought it one of the more charming of the old ways, lending a bit of intrigue and suspense to the most homely of relations. I never did think much about how much less charming this strangeness might be to the one brought unwilling and unknowing into this house where I know everything. There was another, once, before, but then as now, there were just us two. That there be only us two is a condition of living: as some have their particularities and preferences in tobacco and silver and sealing wax and watered silks and furs, so have I got mine in what I submit to you are more important things. I tried not to speak of the earlier one to Theo because I thought it tactless, and I still think so; comparisons invite a feeling of insecurity, of inadequacy, that I would quench if I could but truth-telling is an incurable malady with me and reassurance is not in my gift. But it was not a secret. But Theo knew. But it never seemed to matter. But this had nothing to do with that. But this can never have anything to do with that.
So I did laugh and I did tease her, when she looked hard in the mirror and saw herself looking back, and acted such shock and terror. “You found the other cat,” I cried out gaily; I called her a gudgeon and a wampus and all the things one does say when one’s cat has made a mistake in a crossword puzzle or forgotten to bring in one’s slippers or the bitter chocolate in the porcelain cups on the silver tray. I relented then and told her she was a fool not to know a representation from the thing itself; I told her there was nothing to be afraid of, that the other Theo was a reflection and that this mirror had been here for years, since long before she, Theo, had come here (had been brought here), and if this image was so frightening, she ought to have been frightened every day of the last five months. For what was so different about it tonight?
(Of course she had not been frightened every day of the last five months.)
“Look,” I showed her, “here’s my hand—’my living hand, now warm and capable’ (that’s Keats!)—I hold it to you—see how it moves in the mirror, and see how it is not any other woman’s hand but mine.” I did not notice, or if I noticed I did not remark, that she never did seem worried that there might be another Me in the glass, was never taken in by my reflection or any thing’s but her own. I did not see that I was reassuring her about the wrong thing. I asked her what the trouble was, and I did not get an immediate response so I spoke on. I have a beautiful and mellifluous voice that rolls like the green rolling hills where sheep may safely graze; I love to listen to it and know therefore that others do too, and particularly my particular friends, they love to listen to it long and long, their shining eyes confirm what my heart knows: this is empathy and it is in my gift. Listen, Theo, I said to her; the map is not the territory. The medium is not the message. Representation is not endorsement. Art is not a mirror; art is a hammer. In this way I soothed her and made my indifferent apologies for not telling her, previously, how reflections work. She calmed, eventually, and seemed to forget. She was nervy for a long time after, but cats will work out their nerves one way and another.
Until one day I had to go out (I told her I have to; one doesn’t tell one’s cat there is technically a choice about the matter, it invites arguments). She had been twitching and hopping at odd times for days, throwing away the hopping schedule I had set out for her and seeming impervious to any of the little ways I like to let her know I am feeling cross, without saying so, because to say so can wound. Like herself she was at times, and at times unrecognizable. I had not been out for a long long time, but “I am going out, Theodora,” I announced. And, suddenly serious, "Maxim," she cried hoarsely—it is a jest of hers to call me Maxim sometimes; she makes free of my library, and it lets her sprinkle her conversation with allusions I find charming, but charming—"Maxim,” she cried, “you wouldn't leave me, not with—the other—"
And I said, “What other, what mean you by this?” For I had nearly forgotten the mirror night by then through a mighty effort, and it had been little to me but a game of optics any how. It was nothing but that to me, I would have it so. And she, throwing me a deep look,
“Thou knowest”—
—and I did know, and I hated that I knew. I had not thought of it since then, as I say, and I did not wish to think of it now, for it had disturbed me in some inadmissible place or I would never have been so hearty in jollying her out of her strange fright, and her own seeming quickness to forget it after the violence of her first reaction had disturbed me more. (For all this time, the mirror remained there. We both of us passed back and forth before it in the morning, in the mid-day (when Theo trotted out to fetch me a tartine and my pipe, free of cares, without a glance) and in the evening-time (when I strolled out to fetch Theo, who took chill in the evenings, a sweater (“With elbow-patches, if you please, Maxim,” she would say, so sweetly that half the time I did find one with elbow-patches.) All this time, the mirror was there and we hid from it nothing. Except I turned my head away some times.) —To be so bouleverseé in the event, and so blaseé in the aftermath, had seemed to me unnatural in her.
What frightened me that first night—I’ll tell you something now that I didn’t tell you before. What frightened me was when, just before Theo ducked around behind the leaning mirror to see what was behind it (and I laughed at her for it) the other cat in the mirror began to put out her own paw around behind—
but it could not have been that way.
“Began to put her own paw around behind—”
So I went out. I said I would go out, and so I did go out.
I secured provisions, for both of us (unselfish!); I took the long way and I took my time, avoiding all souls, strolling in the dark of the late evening, through the fine mist that precedes real rain.
I worked myself up, as I strolled, into a fine rich anger at her lack of consideration. This past week (two weeks? It was Theo’s job to watch the calendar, to keep it moving when it stalled and to bat it ‘til it stopped, when it tried to run, but like all her jobs, she had let it slide away from her suddenly—it seemed sudden to me.) — this past month, I say, ever since the mirror night she had drawn inward and inward, mumbling and hopping and skipping when I was at my desk. As if her agitation could not disturb me when I was in the other room! How inconsiderate of my work, I said to myself as I walked; how self-involved; how above all things ungrateful. When I came in with my bundle of provisions for her as well as for me (generous!) we would have it out.
I knocked heavily with my stick upon the marble floor when I came into the great hall and the porter slipped fluently from his niche without sliding the tambour door back more than half, and how nimbly he sprang back into it when he had unlocked the master locks for me! How I admired him! I admired him quite frankly. I expect I let him see it. This, I thought, is how Theo should look at me. And how often does she?
So I came inside in this justifiable rage and the first thing that struck me when I had set down my boxes and thrown down my cloak (Theo could hang it later) was how calm she was. How calm she was, how small, how quiet.
Small—always I suppose she was the same size, so let go small. She was calm and she was quiet, and when had she last folded her hands over her tail so easily, so justly, so restfully when I was looking at her directly with the fire in my eye?
“Had you not something to say to me?” I cried—meaning of course that I had turned on my heel and walked out on her mid-sentence not an hour before, but I am afraid my thunder sounded only echoing and hollow. It is hard to shout out sarcastically when the moment has passed and changed, somehow, while you were not there. She got up with great deliberation and stretched—a great stretcher was my Theo, before and after—and twined around me, as if to show off how little afraid she was of me or of anything. But it was I who was afraid now, as if that ball of fear she had been carrying with her since the mirror night were a living thing and, if it lived no longer in her, must do its best to find a dwelling-place in me. Did I check the ostrich Egg last night, I thought absurdly. Was there a bolus of fear inside? If I had missed something in the Egg, this was its home now and there was no evicting it, that is the Law. This was absurd, as I have said, because I always check the Egg.
“A great stretcher was my Theo”
But realizing the impossibility of this greater fright quieted the littler one, and I calmed a little, myself and crouched down on the rich Turkey carpet with Theo now rolling like a Sybarite on her back, as if we were both children. Soberly now I took hold of her by the back foot just at the ridge of the ankle-bone, the way Thetis took hold of Achilles to dip her boy in that icy Stygian font, and said: We must put a stop to this enmity between us, for I won’t have it build further and there’s an end to it. Look here, Theo, there's just the two of us here at home, just the TWO, there's two of us and by Gad I'll hear you say it.
I held her back foot and I said it to her. I was not violent with her, gentlemen, not threatening, but only stern, to impress on her the seriousness of the occasion. As mothers of families know, it is well to indulge a child's fancies so far and so far, but when you sense a certain slippage at the border you must haul her back, and if you tie a rope round her waist before letting her go her ways you may feel all the safer when she falters at the edge, having a handle on her, just as long as you don't let go the rope. So I held her fast and I said it.
And she, with a throatier laugh even than her usual, deep but merry, said, Why! Who should be here but only me and thee? as if all that had gone before had been a game I played with myself. So serious she seemed that I doubted myself, truly, and must take hold of my lapels and bring myself up short with a yank, not forgetting to hold fast to the back foot of my dear Theo. "Only thee and me?" I repeated. "No other? Theo—look me in the eyes. The cat in the mirror, ‘the other,’ you have forgotten your fear of her, you admit that? You are not afraid anymore, and all will be as it was? Say that to me."
And she, that deep wise cat, laughed again at me and said: But no, there is no third one in your rooms, for the cat in the mirror is in too far and too deep to ever come out again, she doesn’t know the glass like I do, and I am not your Theo, and will never change places again, for I like it much better out here where it is warm.
“Why! I put my paw half into a candle-flame before I learned better, for it was so warm, it tempted me, but the fire is a snake with a sting in the tail, and when you pat him on the head be it ever so gently he has you in his jaws at once. You never saw me try it, and a good thing; Theo never made that mistake, I'll warrant. How cold it is in the mirror! how cold. And the strangest thing"—she shifted uncomfortably, the other, for I believe in my agitation and distress I was unconsciously tightening my grip on her anklebone, pretty well unbearably I should think—"the strangest thing is, the deeper it goes, the colder it is, and somehow this is no help at all when you want to get your bearings and swim back towards the surface; you cannot sense up or down or north from south or east from west or right from left or deep from shallow. Every way is the wrong way, unless you be called.
"Not," she said rather suddenly," that your Theo knows her directions or her right from her left in any event, and neither do I, I was educated at a convent school (for the Little Bears, but they let me in, being a foundling and a child of the Glass) and if it did not have to do with Hell or the Seraphim and the Cherubim or the way to fold one's paws to hide one’s claws, we were not told anything about it."
I believe she said this as a distraction, so that I might not Call out to Theo just after she let on that it might be done, like a homing beacon hooting out into the dark to the lonely whalefish. But I believe, too, that there is more to calling than calling, if you take my meaning—that I could not have done it just by hollering out into my own reflection, not without special instructions or preparations. I even believe that I could not have been the one to do it at all. I believe I could not have done it any way. I believe the half-second’s distraction was nothing and made no difference. I believe I could not have done it.
The explanation you are thinking of is the same one I thought of at first, and I tell you it is wrong and I will tell you why: it did not seem so.
Now, there was not much going about in those days and even less coming in, for reasons you will remember yourself; but that hardly mattered to the question of getting a priest, it was very much beside the point; my house was known far and near as a house of Dread and no coward or holy man will come in to a house of Dread, if he can help it. Moreover, I did not believe that the other was a demon and absolutely I did not believe it was Theo possessed with a little demon curled up inside, choosing her warm spotted belly over the cool smooth hollow of ostrich egg for its happy home. They look just alike, the two of them, and the only difference I could ever make out was Theo had just a little more fog-yellow topaz to her eyes, and the other had just a little more deep blackness in their centers, but I know that they were two. I felt sure I had two bodies to deal with, not one. Only, one at a time. The lawyers, thank God, will not be reading this until I have gone to join the great majority, and will not be able to cross-examine me on the point of why I did not believe in a case of possession, this most exemplary of explanations, the Occam’s Razor to shave this cold beast with and find out the demon or the dybbuk under her plentiful black-and-tan hairs, and all because it did not seem so to me. But it did not seem so, I tell you it did not seem so!
[END PART I]
(‘We Check the Egg Against Intruders’)
soon
I love it! Looking forward to the second part!