Sorrow in Sunlight

by Ronald Firbank

  “Some of dose bold women, dey ought to be shot through dair bottoms!” Mrs. Mouth indignantly said.

  “But I nebba answer nothin’.”

  “May our daughters respect dair virtue same as you!” Mrs. Mouth returned, focusing wistfully the vast flowery parterre of the Café McDhu’l.

  Little city of cocktails, Cuna! The surpassing excellence of thy Barmen, who shall sing?

  “See how dey spell ‘Biar,’ Mammee,” Miami tittered: “dey forget de i!”

  “Sh’o, Chile, an’ so dey do…”

  “Honey Jesus!” Edna broadly grinned: “imagine de ignorance ob dat.”

  VII

  Now, beyond the Alemeda, in the modish faubourg of Farananka, there lived a lady of both influence and wealth—the widow of the Inventor of Sunflower Piquant. The veto of Madame Ruiz, arbitress absolute of Cunan society, and owner, moreover, of a considerable portion of the town, had caused the suicide indeed of more than one social climber. Unhappy, nostalgic, disdainful, selfish, ever about to abandon Cuna-Cuna to return to it no more, yet never budging, adoring her fairy villa far to well, Madame Ruiz, while craving for the International-world, consoled herself by watching from afar European Society going speedily to the dogs. Art-loving, and considerably musical (many a dizzy venture at the Opera-house had owed its audition to her), she had, despite the self-centeredness of her nature, done not a little to render more brilliant the charming city it amused her with such vehemence to abuse.

  One softly gloomy morning, preceding Madame Ruiz’s first cotillon of the Season, the lodge-keeper of the Villa Alba, a negress, like some great, violet bug, was surprised, while tending the brightly hanging grape-fruit in the drive, by an imperative knocking on the gate. At such a matutinal hour only trashy errand-boys shouldering baskets might be expected to call, and giving the summons no heed the mulatress continued her work.

  The villa Alba, half-buried in spreading awnings, and surrounded by many noble trees, stood but a short distance off the main road, its pleasaunces enclosed by flower-enshrouded walls, all a-zig-zag, like the folds of a screen. Beloved of lizards and velvet-backed humming-birds, the shaded gardens led on one side to the sea.

  “To make such a noise at dis hour,” the negress murmured, going grumblingly at length to the gate, disclosing, upon opening, a gentleman in middle life, with a tooth-brush moustache and a sapphire ring.

  “De mist’ess still in bed, sah.”

  “In bed?”

  “She out bery late, sah, but you find Miss Edwards up.”

  With a nod of thanks the visitor directed his footsteps discreetly towards the house.

  Although not, precisely, in her bed when the caller, shortly afterwards, was announced, Madame Ruiz was nevertheless as yet in dishabille.

  “Tiresome man, what does he want to see me about?” she exclaimed, gathering around her a brocaded wrap formed of a priestly cope.

  “He referred to a lease, ma’am,” the maid replied.

  “A lease!” Madame Ruiz raised eyes dark with spleen.

  The visit of her agent, or man of affairs, was apt to ruffle her composure for the day. “Tell him to leave it and go,” she commanded, selecting a nectarine from a basket of iced fruits beside her.

  Removing reflectively the sensitive skin, her mind evoked, in ironic review, the chief salient events of society, scheduled to take place on the face of the map in the course of the day.

  The marriage of the Count de Nozhel, in Touraine, to Mrs. Exelmans of Cincinnati, the divorce of poor Lady Luckcock in London (it seemed quite certain that one of the five co-respondents was the little carrot-haired Lord Dubelly again), the last “pomps,” at Vienna, of Princess de Seeyohl née Mitchening-Meyong (Peace to her soul! She had led her life)… The christening in Madrid of the girl-twins of the Queen of Spain…

  “At her time, I really don’t understand it,” Madame Ruiz murmured to herself aloud, glancing, as though for an explanation, about the room.

  Through the flowing folds of the mosquito curtains of the bed, that swept a cool, flagged floor spread with skins, showed the oratory, with its waxen flowers, and pendent flickering lights, that burned, night and day, before a Leonardo saint with a treacherous smile. Beyond the little recess came a lacquer commode, bearing a masterly marble group, depicting a pair of amorous hermaphrodites amusing themselves; while above, suspended against the spacious wainscoting of the wall, a painting of a man, elegantly corseted, with a violet in his moustache, “Study of a Parisian,” and its pendant, “Portrait of a Lady,” signed Van Dongen, were the chief outstanding objects that the room contained.

  “One would have thought that at forty she would have given up having babies,” Madame Ruiz mused, choosing a glossy cherry from the basket at her side.

  Through the open window a sound of distant music caught her ear.

  “Ah! If only her were less weak,” she sighed, her thoughts turning towards the player, who seemed to be enamoured of the opening movement (rapturously repeated) of L’après-midi d’un Faune.

  The venetorial habits of Vittorio Ruiz had been from his earliest years the source of his mother’s constant chagrin and despair. At the age of five he had assaulted his Nurse, and steadily onward, his passions had grown and grown…

  “It’s the fault of the wicked climate,” Madame Ruiz reflected, as her companion, Miss Edwards, came in with the post.

  “Thanks, Eurydice,” she murmured, smilingly exchanging a butterfly kiss.

  “It’s going to be oh so hot to-day!”

  “Is it, dear?”

  “Intense,” Miss Edwards predicted, fluttering a gay-daubed paper-fan.

  Sprite-like, with a little strained ghost-face beneath a silver shock of hair, it seemed as if her long blue eyes had absorbed the Cunan sea.

  “Do you remember the giant with the beard?” he asked, “at the Presidency fête?”

  “Do I?”

  “And we wondered who he could be!”

  “Well?”

  “He’s the painter of Women’s Backs, my dear!”

  “The painter of women’ what?”

  “An artist.”

  “Oh.”

  “I wanted to know if you’d advise me to it.”

  “Your back is charming, dear, c’est un dos d’élite.”

  “I doubt, though, it’s classic,” Miss Edwards murmured, pirouetting slowly before the glass.

  But Madame Ruiz was perusing her correspondence and seemed to be absorbed.

  “They’re to be married, in Munich, on the fifth,” she chirruped.

  “Who?”

  “Elsie and Baron Sitmar.”

  “Ah, Ta-ra, dear! In those far worlds…” Miss Edwards impatiently exclaimed, opening wide a window and leaning out.

  Beneath the flame-trees, with their spreading tops a mass of crimson flower, coolly white-garbed gardeners, with naked feet and big bell-shaped hats of straw, were sweeping slowly, as in one rhythmic dance, the flamboyant blossoms that had fallen to the ground.

  “Wasn’t little Madame Haase, dear, born Kattie von Guggenheim?”

  “I really don’t know,” Miss Edwards returned, flapping away a fly with her fan.

  “This villainous climate! My memory’s going…”

  “I wish I cared for Cuna less, that’s all!” Miss Edwards said, her glance following a humming-bird, poised in the air, above the sparkling turquoise of a fountain.

  “Captain Moonlight… duty… (tedious word)… can’t come!”

  “Oh?”

  “Such a dull post,” Madame Ruiz murmured, pausing to listen to the persuasive tenor voice of her son.

  “Little mauve nigger boy,

  I t’ink you break my heart!”

  “My poor Vitti! Bless him.”

  “He was out last night with some Chinese she.”

  “I understood him to be going to Pelléas and Mélisande.”

  “He came to the Opera-house, but only for a minute.”

  “Dios!”

&nb
sp; “And, oh, dearest.” Miss Edwards dropped her cheek to her hand.

  “Was Hatso as ever delicious?” Madame Ruiz asked, changing the topic as her woman returned, followed by a pomeranian of parts, “Snob”; a dog beautiful as a child.

  “We had Gebhardt instead.”

  “In Mélisande she’s so huge,” Madame Ruiz commented, eyeing severely the legal-looking packet which her maid had brought her.

  “Business, Camilla; how I pity you!”

  Madame Ruiz sighed.

  “It seems,” she said, “that for the next nine-and-ninety-years I have let a Villa to a Mrs. and Mrs. Ahmadou Mouth.”

  VIII

  Floor of copper, floor of gold… Beyond the custom-house door, ajar, the street at sunrise seemed aflame.

  “Have you nothing, young man, to declare?”

  “…Butterflies!”

  “Exempt of duty. Pass.”

  Floor of silver, floor of pearl…

  Trailing a muslin net, and laughing for happiness, Charlie Mouth marched into the town.

  Oh, Cuna-Cuna! Little city of Lies and Peril! How many careless young nigger boys have gone thus to seal their Doom!

  Although the Sun-god was scarcely risen, already the radiant street teemed with life.

  Veiled dames, flirting fans, bent on church or market, were issuing everywhere from their door, and the air was vibrant with the sweet voice of bells.

  To rejoin his parents promptly at their hotel was a promise he was tempted to forget.

  Along streets all fresh and blue in the shade of falling awnings, it was fine, indeed, to loiter. Beneath the portico of a church a running fountain drew his steps aside. Too shy to strip and squat in the basin, he was glad to bathe freely his head, feet and chest: then, stirred by curiosity to throw a glance at the building, he lifted the long yellow nets that veiled the door.

  It was the fashionable church of La Favavoa, and the extemporary address of the Archbishop of Cuna was in full and impassioned swing.

  “Imagine the world, my friend, had Christ been born a girl!” he was saying in tones of tender dismay as Charlie entered.

  Subsiding bashfully to a bench, Charlie gazed around.

  So many sparkling fans. One, a delicate light mauve one: “Shucks! If only you wa’ butterflies!” he breathed, contemplating with avidity the nonchalant throng; then perceiving a richer specimen splashed with silver of the same amative tint: “Oh you lil beauty!” And, clutching his itching net to his heart, he regretfully withdrew.

  Sauntering leisurely through the cool, mimosa-shaded streets, he approached, as he guessed, the Presidency. A score of shoeblacks lolled at cards or gossip before its gilded pales. Amazed at their audacity (for the President had threatened more than once to “wring the public’s neck”), Charlie hastened by. Public gardens, brilliant with sarracenias, lay just beyond the palace, where a music-pavilion, surrounded by palms and rocking-chars, appeared a favourite, and much-frequented, resort; from here he observed the Cunan bay strewn with sloops and white-sailed yachts asleep on the tide. Strolling on, he found himself in the busy vicinity of the Market. Although larger and more varied, it resembled in other respect the village one at home.

  “Say, honey, say”—crouching in the dust before a little pyre of mangoes, a lean-armed woman besought him to buy.

  Pursued by a confusion of voices, he threaded his way deftly down an alley dressed with booths. Pomegranates, some open with their crimson seeds displayed, banana-combs, and big, veined water-melons, lay heaped on every side.

  “I could do wid a slice ob watteh-million,” he reflected: “but to lick an ice-cream dat tempt me more!” Nor would the noble fruit of the baobab, the paw-paw, or the pine turn him from his fancy.

  But no ice-cream stand met his eye, and presently he resigned himself to sit down upon his heels, in the shade of a potter’s stall, and consider the passing crowd.

  Missionaries with freckled hands and hairy, care-worn faces, followed by pale girls wielding tambourines of the Army of the Soul, foppish nigger bucks in panamas and palm-beach suits so cocky, Chinamen with osier baskets, their nostalgic eyes aswoon, heavily straw-hatted nuns trailing their dust-coloured rags, and suddenly, oh, could it be?—but there was no mistaking that golden waddle: “Mamma!”

  Mamma, Mammee, Mrs. Ahmadou Mouth. All in white, with snow-white shoes and hose so fine, he hardly dare.

  “Mammee, Mammee, oh, Mammee…”

  “Sonny mine! My lil boy!”

  “Mammee.”

  “Just to say!”

  And, oh, honies! Closse behind, behold Miami, and Edna too: the Miss Lips, the fair Lips, the smiling Lips. How spry each looked. The elder (grown a trifle thinner), sweet à ravir in tomato-red, while her sister, plump as a corn-fattened partridge, and very perceptibly powdered, seemed like the flower of the prairie sugar-cane when it breaks into bloom.

  “We’ve been to a Music-hall, an’ a pahty, an’ Snowball has dropped black kittens.” Forestalling Miami, Edna rapped it out.

  “Oh shucks!”

  “An’ since we go into S’ciety, we keep a boy in buttons!”

  Mrs. Mouth turned about.

  “Where is dat idjit coon?”

  “He stay behind to bargain for de pee-wee birds, Mammee, fo’ to make de taht.”

  “De swindling tortoise.”

  “An’ dair are no vacancies at de University: not fo’ any ob us!” Edna further retailed, going off into a spasm of giggles.

  She was swinging a wicker basket, from which there dangled the silver forked tail of a fish.

  “Fo’ goodness’ sake gib dat sea-porcupine to Ibum, Chile,” Mrs. Mouth commanded, as a perspiring niggerling in livery presented himself.

  “Ibum, his arm are full already.”

  “Just come along all to de Villa now! It dat mignon an’ all so nice. An’ after de collation,” Mrs. Mouth (shocked on the servants’ account at her son’s nude neck) raised her voice, “we go to de habadasher in Palmbranch Avenue an’ I buy you an Eton colleh!”

  IX

  “Prancing Nigger, I t’ink it bery strange dat Madame Ruiz she nebba call.”

  “Sh’o.”

  “In August-Town, S’ciety less stuck-up dan heah!”

  Ensconced in rocking-chairs, in the shade of the ample port of the Villa Vista Hermosa, Mr. and Mrs. Mouth had been holding a desultory tête-à-tête.

  It was a Sabbath evening, and a sound of reedy pipes and bafalons, from a neighbouring café, filled with a feverish sadness the brilliantly lamp-lit street.

  “De airs ob de neighehs, dat dair affair; what matter mo’ am de chillen’s schoolin’.”

  “Prancing Nigger, I hope your Son an’ Daughters will yet take dair Degrees, an’ if not from de University, den from Home. From heah.”

  “Hey-ho-day, an’ dat would be a miracle!” Mr. Mouth mirthlessly laughed.

  “Dos chillens hab learnt quite a lot already.”

  “‘Bout de shaps an’ cinemas!”

  Mrs. Mouth disdained a reply.

  She had taken the girls to the gallery at the Opera one night to hear “Louise,” but they had come out, by tacit agreement, in the middle of it: the plainness of Louise’s blouse, and the lack of tunes… the suffocation of the gallery… Once bit twice shy, they had not gone back again.

  “All your fambly need, Prancing Nigger, is social opportunity! But what is de good ob the Babtist parson?”

  Mr. Mouth sketched a gesture.

  “Sh’o, Edna, she some young yet… But Miami dat distinguée; an’ doh I her mother, b’lieb me dat is one ob de choicest girls I see; an dat’s de trute.”

  “It queer,” Mr. Mouth abstrusely murmured, “how many skeeter-bugs dair are ’bout dis ebenin’!”

  “De begonias in de window-boxes most lik’ly draw dem. But as I was saying, Prancing Nigger, I t’ink it bery strange dat Madame Ruiz nebba call.”

  “P’r’aps she out ob town.”

  “Accordin’ to de paper, she bin habing her back
painted, but what dat fo’ I dunno.”

  “Ah shouldn’t wonder ef she hab some trouble ob a dorsal kind; same as me gramma mumma long agone.”

  “Dair’d be no harm in sendin’ one ob de chillens to enquire. Wha’ you t’ink, sah?” Mrs. Mouth demanded, plucking from off the porch a pale hanging flower with a languorous scent.

  Mr. Mouth glanced apprehensively skyward.

  The mutters of thunder and intermittent lightning of the finest nights.

  “It’s a misfortnit we eber left Mediavilla,” he exclaimed uneasily, as a falling star, known as a thief star, sped swiftly down the sky.

  “Prancing Nigger,” Mrs. Mouth rose, remarking, “befo’ you start to grummle, I leab you alone to your Jereymiads!”

  “A misfortnit sho’ nuff,” he mused, and regret for the savannah country and the tall palm-trees of his village oppressed his heart. Moreover, his means (derived from the cultivation of the Musa paradisica, or Banana) seemed likely to prove ere long inadequate to support the whims of his wife, who after a lifetime of contented nudity appeared to be now almost insatiable for dress.

  A discordant noise from above interrupted the trend of his thoughts.

  “Sh’o, she plays wid it like a toy,” he sighed, as the sound occurred again.

  “Prancing Nigger, de water-supply cut off!”

  “It’s de Lord’s will.”

  “Dair’s not a drop, my lub, in de privy.”

  “‘Cos it always in use!”

  “I b’lieb dat lil half-caste Ibum, ’cos I threaten to gib him notice, do somet’in’ out ob malice to de chain.”

  “Whom de Lord loveth He chasteneth!” Mr. Mouth observed, “an’ dose bery words (ef you look) you will find in de twelfth chapter an’ de sixth berse ob de Book ob Hebrews.”

  “Prancing Nigger, you datways selfish! Always t’inkin’ ob your soul, instead ob your obligations towards de fambly.”

  “Why, wha’ mo’ can I do dan I’ve done?”

  Mrs. Mouth faintly shrugged.