The Flower Beneath the Foot

by Ronald Firbank

  “It would be better to do away I think next year with that bed of cinerarias altogether,” the Queen of Pisuerga remarked, “since persons won’t go round it.”

  Traversing the flower plat now, with the air of a black-beetle with a purpose, was the Countess Yvorra.

  “We had supposed you higher-principled. Countess,” her sovereign admonished.

  The Countess slightly flushed.

  “I’m looking for groundsel for my birds, Sire,” she said—“for my little dickies!”

  “We understand your boudoir is a sort of menagerie,” His Majesty affirmed.

  The Countess tittered.

  “Animals love me,” she archly professed. “Birds perch on my breast if only I wave… The other day a sweet red robin came and stayed for hours…!”

  “The Court looks to you to set a high example,” the Queen declared, focusing quizzically a marble shape of Leda green with moss, for whose time-corroded plinth the late Archduchess’ toy-terrier was just then shewing a certain contempt.

  The Countess’ long, slightly pulpy fingers strayed nervously towards the rosary at her thigh.

  “With your majesty’s consent” she said, “I propose a campaign to the Island.”

  “What? And beard the Count?”

  “The salvation of one so fallen, in my estimation should be worth hereafter (at the present rate of exchange, but the values vary)… a Plenary perpetual-indulgence: I therefore,” the Countess said, with an upward fleeting glance (and doubtless guileless of intention of irony), “feel it my duty to do what I can.”

  “I trust you will take a bodyguard when you go to St Helena?”

  “And pray tell Count Cabinet from us,” the King looked implacable: “we forbid him to serenade the Court this year! or to throw himself into the Lake again or to make himself a nuisance!”

  “He was over early this morning, Willie,” the Queen retailed: “I saw him from a window. Fishing, or feigning to! And with white kid gloves, and a red carnation.”

  “Let us catch him stepping ashore!” the King displayed displeasure.

  “And as usual the same mignon youth had the charge of the tiller.”

  “I could tell a singular story of that young man,” the Countess said: “for he was once a choir-boy at the Blue Jesus. But, perhaps, I would do better to spare your ears…”

  “You would do better, a good deal, to spare my cinerarias,” her Dreaminess murmured, sauntering slowly on.

  Sun so bright, trees so green, it was a perfect day. Through the glittering fronds of the palms shone the lake like a floor of silver glass strewn with white sails.

  “It’s odd,” the King observed, giving the dog Teddywegs a sly prod with his cane, “how he follows Yousef.”

  “He seems to know!” the Queen replied.

  A remark that so annoyed the Prince that he curtly left the garden.

  VIII

  BUT this melancholy period of crêpe—a time of idle secrets, and unbosomings, was to prove fatal to the happiness of Mademoiselle de Nazianzi. She now heard she was not the first in the Prince’s life, and that most of the Queen’s maids, indeed, had had identical experiences with her own. She furthermore learned, amid ripples of laughter, of her lover’s relations with the Marquesa Pizzi-Parma and of his light dealings with the dancer April Flowers, a negress (to what depths??) at a time when he was enjoying the waxen favours of the wife of his Magnificence, the Master of the Horse.

  Chilled to the point of numbness, the mortified girl had scarcely winced, and when on repairing to her room a little later, she had found his Weariness wandering in the corridor on the chance of a surreptitious kiss, she had bolted past him without look, or word, and sharply closed her door.

  The Court had returned to colours when she opened it again, and such had been the trend of her meditations, that her initial steps were directed, with deliberate austerity, towards the basilica of the Palace.

  Except for the Countess Yvorra, with an écharpe de décence drawn over her hair, there was no one in it.

  “I thank Thee God for this escape,” she murmured falling to her knees before the silver branches of a cross: “It is terrible; for I did so love him….and oh how could he ever with a negress?…. Pho…I fear this complete upset has considerably aged me….But to Thee I cling… Preserve me at all times from the toils of the wicked, and forgive him, as I hope to forgive him soon.” Then kindling several candles with a lingering hand, she shaped her course towards the Kennels, called Teddywegs to her and started, with an aching heart, for a walk.

  It was a day of heavy somnolence. Skirting the Rosery where gardeners with their slowly moving rakes were tending the sandy paths, she chose a neglected footway that descended towards the lake. Indifferent to the vivacity of Teddywegs, who would race on a little before her, then wait with leonine accouchements of head until she had almost reached him, when he would prick an ear and spring forward with a yap of exhortation, she proceeded leisurely, and with many a pause, wrapped in her own mournful thoughts.

  Alack! Among the court circle there was no one to whom in her disillusion she could look for solace, and her spirit yearned for Sister Ursula, and the Convent of the Flaming-Hood.

  Wending her way amid the tall trees, she felt she had never cared for Yousef as she had for Ursula… and broodingly, in order to ease her heart, she began comparing the two together as she walked along.

  After all what had he ever said that was not either commonplace or foolish? Whereas Sister Ursula’s talk was invariably pointed; and often indeed so delicately, that words seemed almost too crude a medium to convey her ethereal meanings, and she would move her evocative hands, and flash her aura, and it was no fault of hers if you hadn’t a peep of the beyond. And the infinite tenderness of her least caress. Yousef’s lips had seldom conveyed to hers the spell of Ursula’s; and once indeed lately, when he had kissed her, there had been an unsavoury aroma of tobacco and charcuterie, which, to deal with, had required both tact and courage… Ah dear Hood! What harmony life had held within. Unscrupulous and deceiving men might lurk around its doors (they often did) coveting the chaste, but Old Jane, the porteress, would open to no man beyond the merest crack. And how right they were the nuns in their mistrust of man! Sister Ursula one day had declared, in uplifted mood, that “marriage was obscene.” Was it —?…??… Perhaps it might be —! How appalling if it was!

  She had reached the lake.

  Beneath a sky as white as platinum it lay, pearly, dove-like, scintillating capriciously where a heat-shrouded sun kindled its torpid waters into fleeting diamonds. A convulsive breeze strayed gratefully from the opposite shore, descending from the hills that rose up all veiled, and without detail, against the brilliant whiteness of the morning.

  Sinking down upon the shingle by an upturned boat, she heaved a brief sigh, and drawing from her vanity-case the last epistles of the Prince, she began methodically to arrange them in their proper sequence.

  (1) “What is the matter with my Dearest Girl?”

  (2) “My own tender little Lita, I do not understand —”

  (3) “Darling, what’s this—?”

  (4) “Beloved one, I swear —”

  (5) “Your cruel silence —”

  If published in a dainty brochure format about the time of his Coronation, they ought to realise no contemptible sum, and the proceeds might go to Charity, she reflected, thrusting them back again carefully into the bag.

  Then, finding the shingle too hard through her thin gown to remain seated long, she got up, and ran a mournful race with Teddywegs along the shore.

  Not far along the lake was the “village,” with the Hôtel d’Angleterre et du Lac, its stucco, belettered-walls professing: “Garages, Afternoon Tea, Modern Comfort!” Flitting by this, and the unpretentious pier (where long, blonde fishing-nets lay drying in the sun), it was a relief to reach the remoter plage beyond.

  Along the banks stretched vast brown carpets of corn and rye, broken by an occasional olive-garth,
beneath whose sparse shade the heavy-eyed oxen blinked and whisked their tails, under the attacks of the water-gnats that were swarming around.

  Musing on Negresses—and Can-Can dancers in particular—she strolled along a strand all littered with shells and little jewel-like stones.

  The sun shone down more fiercely now, and soon, for freshness sake, she was obliged to take to the fields.

  Passing among the silver drooping olives, relieved here and there by a stone-pine, or slender cypress-tree eternally green, she sauntered on, often lured aside to pluck the radiant wild-flowers by the way. On the banks the pinkest cyclamens were in bloom, and cornflowers of the hue of paradise, and fine-stemmed poppies flecked with pink.

  “Pho! A Negress…” she murmured, following the flight of some waterfowl towards the opposite shore.

  The mists had fallen from the hills, revealing old woods wrapped in the blue doom of Summer.

  Beyond those glowing heights, towards this hour, the nuns, each in her cool, shuttered, cell, would be immersed in noontide prayer.

  “Ursula—for thee!” she sighed, proffering her bouquet in the direction of the town.

  A loud splash… the sight of a pair of delicate legs (mocking the Law’s requirements under the Modesty Act as relating to bathers)… Mademoiselle de Nazianzi turned and fled. She had recognised the Prince. [5]

  IX

  AND in this difficult time of spiritual distress, made more trying perhaps because of the blazing midsummer days, and long, pent feverish nights. Mademoiselle de Nazianzi turned in her tribulation towards religion.

  The Ecclesiastical set at Court, composed of some six, or so, ex-Circes, under the command of the Countess Yvorra, were only too ready to welcome her, and invitations to meet Monsignor this, or “Father” that, who constantly were being coaxed from their musty sacristies and wan-faced acolytes in the capital, in order that they might officiate at Masses, Confessions and Breakfast-parties à la fourchette, were lavished daily upon the bewildered girl.

  Messages, and hasty informal lightly-pencilled notes, too, would frequently reach her; such as: “I shall be pouring out cocoa after dinner in bed. Bring your biscuits and join me!”… or a rat-a-tat from a round-eyed page and: “The Countess’ comp’ts and she’d take it a Favour if you can make a ‘Station’ with her in chapel later on,” or: “The Marchioness will be birched to-morrow, and not to-day.”

  O, the charm, the flavour of the religious world! Where match it for interest or variety!

  An emotion approaching sympathy had arisen, perhaps a trifle incongruously, between the injured girl and the Countess Yvorra, and before long, to the amusement of the sceptical element of the Court, the Countess and her Confessor, Father Nostradamus, might often be observed in her society.

  “I need a cage-companion. Father, for my little bird,” the Countess one evening said, as they were ambling, all the three of them before Office up and down the perfectly tended paths: “ought it to be of the same species and sex, or does it matter? For as I said to myself just now (while listening to a thrush). All birds are His creatures.”

  The priest discreetly coughed.

  “Your question requires reflection,” he said: “What is the bird?”

  “A hen canary!—and with a voice, Father! Talk of soul!!”

  “H—m… a thrush and a canary, I would not myself advise.”

  Mademoiselle do Nazianzi tittered.

  “Why not let it go?” she asked, turning her eyes towards the window-panes of the palace, that glanced like rows of beaten-gold in the evening sun.

  “A hawk might peck it!” the Countess returned, looking up as if for one, into a sky as imaginative, and as dazzling as Shelley poetry.

  “Even the Court,” Father Nostradamus ejaculated wryly, “will peck at times.”

  The Countess’ shoulder-blades stiffened.

  “After over thirty years,” she said, “I find Court-life pathetic.…”

  “Pathetic?”

  “Tragically pathetic…”

  Mademoiselle de Nazianzi considered wistfully the wayward outline of the hills.

  “I would like to escape from it all for a while,” she said, “and travel.”

  “I must hunt you out a pamphlet, by and by, dear child, on the ‘Dangers of Wanderlust.’”

  “The Great Wall of China and the Bay of Naples! It seems so frightful never to have seen them!”

  “I have never seen the Great Wall, either,” the Countess said, “and I don’t suppose, my dear, I ever shall; though I once did spend a fortnight in Italy.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  The Countess became reminiscent.

  “In Venice,” she said, “the indecent movements of the Gondolieri quite affected my health, and, in consequence, I fell a prey to a sharp nervous fever. My temperature rose and it rose, ah, yes… until I became quite ill. At last I said to my maid (she was an English girl from Wales, and almost equally as sensitive as me): ‘Pack… Away!’ And we left in haste for Florence. Ah, and Florence, too, I regret to say I found very far from what it ought to have been!!! I had a window giving on the Arno, and so I could observe.… I used to see some curious sights! I would not care to scathe your ears, my Innocent, by an inventory of one half of the wantonness that went on; enough to say the tone of the place forced me to fly to Rome, where beneath the shadow of dear St Peter’s I grew gradually less distressed.”

  “Still, I should like, all the same, to travel!” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi exclaimed, with a sad little snatch of a smile.

  “We will ask the opinion of Father Geordie Picpus, when he comes again.”

  “It would be more fitting,” Father Nostradamus murmured (professional rivalry leaping to his eye), “if Father Picpus kept himself free of the limelight a trifle more!”

  “Often I fear our committees would be corvés without him…”

  “Tchut.”

  “He is very popular… too popular, perhaps…” the Countess admitted. “I remember on one occasion in the Blue Jesus, witnessing the Duchess of Quaranta and Madame Ferdinand Fishbacher, fight like wild cats as to which should gain his ear—(any girl might envy Father Geordie his ear)—at Confession next. The odds seemed fairly equal, until the Duchess gave the Fishbacher-woman, such a violent push —(well down from behind, in the crick of the joints)—that she overturned The Confessional Box, with Father Picpus within: and when we scared ladies, standing by, had succeeded in dragging him out, he was too shaken, naturally as you can gather, to absolve anyone else that day.”

  “He has been the object of so many unseemly incidents, that one can scarcely recall them all,” Father Nostradamus exclaimed, stooping to pick up a dropped pocket-handkerchief with “remembrance” knots tied to three of the corners.

  “Alas… Court life is not uplifting,” the Countess said again, contemplating her muff of self-made lace, with a half-vexed forehead. What that muff contained was a constant problem for conjecture; but it was believed by more than one of the maids-in-waiting to harbour “goody” books and martyrs’ bones.

  “By generous deeds and Brotherly love,” Father Nostradamus exclaimed, “we should endeavour to rise above it!”

  With the deftness of a virtuoso, the Countess seized, and crushed with her muff, a pale-winged passing gnat.

  “Before Life,” she murmured, “that saddest thing of all, was thrust upon us, I believe I was an angel…”

  Father Nostradamus passed a musing hand across his brow.

  “It may be,” he replied, “and it very well may be,” he went on, “that our ante-nativity was a little more brilliant, a little more h—m; and there is nothing unorthodox in thinking so.”

  “O what did I do then to lose my wings?? What did I ever say to Them?! Father, Father. How did I annoy God? Why did He put me here?”

  “My dear child, you ask me things I do not know; but it may be you were the instrument appointed above to lead back to Him our neighbour yonder,” Father Nostradamus answered, pointing with his b
reviary in the direction of St Helena.

  “Never speak to me of that wretched old man.”

  For despite the ablest tactics, the most diplomatic angling, Count Cabinet had refused to rally.

  “We followed the sails of your skiff to-day,” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi sighed, “until the hazes hid them!”

  “I had a lilac passage.”

  “You delivered the books?”

  The Countess shrugged.

  “I shall never forget this afternoon,” she said. “He was sitting in the window over a decanter of wine when I floated down upon him; but no sooner did he see me, than he gave a sound, like a bleat of a goat, and disappeared: I was determined however to call! There is no bell to the villa, but two bronze door-knockers, well out of reach, are attached to the front-door. These with the ferrule of my parasol I tossed and I rattled, until an adolescent, with Bougainvillea at his ear, came and looked out with an insolent grin, and I recognised Peter Passer from the Blue Jesus grown quite fat.”

  “Eh mon Dieu!” Father Nostradamus half-audibly sighed.

  “Eh mon Dieu…” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi echoed, her gaze roving over the palace, whose long window-panes in the setting sun gleamed like sumptuous tissues.

  “So that,” the Countess added, “I hardly propose to venture again.”

  “What a site for a Calvary!” Father Nostradamus replied, indicating with a detached and pensive air the cleft in the White Mountain’s distant peaks.

  “I adore the light the hills take on when the sun drops down,” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi declared.

  “It must be close on Salut. …”

  It was beneath the dark colonnades by the Court Chapel door that they received the news from the lips of a pair of vivacious dowagers that the Prince was to leave the Summer-Palace on the morrow to attend “the Manoeuvres,” after which it was expected his Royal Highness would proceed “to England.”

  X

  AND meanwhile the representatives of the Court of St James were enjoying the revivifying country air and outdoor-life of the Villa Clement. It was almost exquisite how rapidly the casual node of existence adopted during the summer villeggiatura by their Excellencies, withdrew themselves and their personnel together, until soon they were as united and as sans gêne as the proverbial family party. No mother, in the “acclimatization “period, could have dosed her offspring more assiduously than did her Excellency the attachés n her charge; flavouring her little inventions frequently with rum or gin until they resembled cocktails. But it was Sir Somebody himself if anyone that required a tonic. Lady Something’s pending litigation, involving as it did the crown, was fretting the Ambassador more than he cared to admit, and the Hon. Mrs Chilleywater, ever alert, told “Harold” that the injudicious chatter of the Ambassadress (who even now notwithstanding her writ, would say to every other visitor that came to the villa: “Have you heard about the Ritz?? The other night we were dining at the Palace, and I heard the King,” etc.) was wearing their old Chief out.