Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli

by Ronald Firbank

  The word "moral," never long from the President's lips, seemed, with her, to take on an intimate tinge, a sensitiveness of its own. She would invest the word at times with an organic significance, a mysterious dignity, that resembled an avowal made usually only in solemn confidence to a doctor or a priest.

  The severity of my moral. The prestige of my moral. The perfection of my moral. She has no dignity of moral. I fear a person of no positive moral. Nothing to injure the freshness of her moral. A difficulty of moral. The etiquette of my moral. The majesty of my moral, etc., etc.—as uttered by the President, became, psychologically, interesting dicta.

  "Beware of a facile moral!" she added, for the benefit of the singer's accompanist, a young nun with a face like some strange white rock, who was inclined to give herself married airs, since she had been debauched, one otiose noon, by a demon.

  "Ah, Madame Always." The President swam to meet her.

  British born, hailing from fairy Lisbon, Madame Always Alemtejo seemed resigned to live and die in a land of hitches.

  "The delay is owing to the Printers' strike," she announced. "The Plaza's thronged: the Cigar factory girls, and all the rag-tag and bobtail, from the Alcazaba to the Puerta del Mar, are going out in sympathy, and——"

  "The tarts?"

  "The t's from Chamont are on the way."

  It was the President's custom to lay all vexations before Nostra Señora de los Remedios, the college's divine Protectress, with whose gracious image she was on the closest footing.

  Consulting her now as to the concert-programmes, the President recalled that no remedy yet had been found for Señorita Violeta de las Cubas, who had thrown her engagement ring into a place of less dignity than convenience and refused to draw it out.

  "Sapphires, my favourite stones," the President reflected, wondering if she should ask "la Inglese" to recover it with the asparagus-tongs.

  But already a few novios, eager to behold their novias again, were in the Patio beneath the "Heiresses' Wing," exciting the connoisseurship of a bevy of early freshness.

  "You can tell that by his eyebrows!" a girl of thirteen, and just beginning as a woman, remarked.

  "Que barbaridad."

  "Last summer at Santander Maria-Manuela and I bathed with him, and one morning there was a tremendous sea, with terrific waves, and we noticed unmistakably."

  "I can't explain; but I adore all that mauvishness about him!"

  "I prefer Manolito to Gonzalito, though neither thrill me like the Toreador Tancos."

  Assisted by Fräulein Pappenheim and Muley, the President's negress maid, they were putting the final touches to their vestal frocks.

  "Men are my raging disgust," a florid girl of stupendous beauty declared, saturating with a flacon of Parfum cruel her prematurely formed silhouette.

  "Nsa, nsa, señorita," Muley mumbled. "Some know better dan dat!"

  "To hell with them!"

  "Adios, Carlo. Adios, Juan. Join you down dah in one minute." The negress chuckled jauntily.

  "Muley, Muley," Fräulein chided.

  "What wonder next I 'bout to hear?"

  Delighting in the tender ferocities of Aphrodite, she was ever ready to unite the novio to the novia. For window-vigils (where all is hand play) few could contrive more ingeniously than she those fans of fresh decapitated flowers, tuberose punctuated with inebriating jasmine, so beloved in the East by the dark children of the sun. Beyond Cadiz the blue, the beautiful, in palm-girt Marrakesh, across the sea, she had learnt other arts besides....

  "Since seeing Peter Prettylips on the screen the Spanish type means nothing to me," Señorita Soledad, a daughter of the first Marqués of Belluga, the greatest orange-king in the Peninsula, remarked.

  "How low. She is not noble."

  "I am noble."

  "Oh no; you're not."

  "Cease wrangling," Fräulein exclaimed, "and enough of that," she added sharply, addressing a novio less little girl looking altogether bewitching of naughtiness as she tried her ablest to seduce by her crude manoeuvres the fiancé of a friend. Endowed with the lively temperament of her grandmother, Conca, Marchioness of Macarnudo, the impressionable, highly amative nature of the little Obdulia gave her governesses some grounds for alarm. At the Post Office one day she had watched a young man lick a stamp. His rosy tongue had vanquished her. In fact, at present, she and a class-chum, Milagros, were "collecting petals" together—and much to the bewilderment of those about them, they might be heard on occasion to exclaim, at Mass, or in the street: "Quick, did you see it?" "No." "Santissima! I did!"

  "Shrimp. As if Gerardo would look at her!" his novia scoffed. "But let me tell you, young woman," she turned upon the shrinking Obdulia, "that social ostracism, and even, in certain cases" (she slapped and pinched her), "assassination attends those that thieve or tamper with another's lover! And Fräulein will correct me if I exaggerate."

  Fräulein Pappenheim was a little woman already drifting towards the sad far shores of forty, with no experience of the pains of Aphrodite caused by men; only at times she would complain of stomach aches in the head.

  "Dat is so," Muley struck in sententiously for her. "Dair was once a young lady ob Fez——"

  But from the Patio the college chaplain, Father Damien Forment, known as "Shiny-nose," was beckoning to the heiresses to join their relatives in the reception-hall below.

  Since that sanguinary period of Christianity, synchronising with the foundation of the institution of learning in the Calle Santa Fé, what changes in skirts and trousers the world has seen. Alone unchanging are women's ambitions and men's desires.

  "Dear child.... She accepts him ... but a little à contre-coeur," the President was saying to the Marchioness of las Cubas, an impoverished society belle, who went often without bread in order to buy lip-sticks and rouge.

  "With Violeta off my hands ... Ah, President, if only Cecilio could be suitably casada."

  "In my little garden I sometimes work a brother. The heiresses' windows are all opening to the flowers and trees.... The boy should be in polo kit. A uniform interests girls," the President murmured, turning with an urbane smile to welcome the Duquesa DunEden.

  She had a frock of black kasha, signed Paul Orna, with a cluster of brown-and-pink orchids, like sheep's-kidneys, and a huge feather hat.

  "I'm here for my God-girl, Gloria," she murmured, glancing mildly round.

  Incongruous that this robust, rich woman should have brought to the light of heaven no heir, while the unfortunate Marchioness, needy, and frail of physique, a wraith, did not know what to do with them!

  The President dropped a sigh.

  She was prepared to take a dog of the daughterless Duquesa. A bitch, of course.... But let it be Police, or Poodle! It would lodge with the girls. A cubicle to itself in the heiresses' wing; and since there would be no extra class-charge for dancing or drawing, no course in belli arti, some reduction of fees might be arranged.... "We would turn her out a creature of breeding.... An eloquent tail-wave, a disciplined moral, and with a reverence moreover for house-mats and carpets." The President decided to draw up the particulars of the prospectus by and by.

  "Your Goddaughter is quite one of our most promising exhibitioners," she exclaimed, indicating with her fan some water-colour studies exposed upon the walls.

  "She comes of a mother with a mania for painting," the Duquesa declared, raising a lorgnon, critically, before the portrait of a Lesbian, with dying, fabulous eyes.

  "Really?"

  "A positive passion," the Duquesa answered, with a swift, discerning glance at an evasive "nude," showing the posterior poudrederizé of a Saint.

  "I had no idea," the President purred, drawing attention to a silvery streetscape.

  "It's the Rambla from the back of Our Lady of the Pillar! It was rare fun doing it, on account of the pirapos of the passers-by," the artist, joining them, explained.

  "Dear child, I predict for her a great deal of admiration very soon," the President murmured, w
ith a look of reproach at a youthful pupil as she plied her boy-Father with embarrassing questions: "Who are the chief society women in the moon? What are their names? Have they got motor-cars there? Is there an Opera-House? Are there bulls?"

  The leering aspect of a lady in a costume of blonde Guadalmedina lace and a hat wreathed with clipped black cocks' feathers arrested her.

  Illusion-proof, with a long and undismayed service in Love's House (sorry brutes, all the same, though, these men, with their selfishness, fickleness and lies!) the Marchioness of Macarnudo with her mysterious "legend" (unscrupulous minxes, all the same, though, these women, with their pettiness, vanity and...!), was too temperamentally intriguing a type to be ignored.

  "Isn't that little Marie Dorothy with the rosebuds stuck all over her?" she asked her granddaughter, who was teasing her brother on his moustache.

  "To improve the growth, the massage of a novia's hand," she fluted, provoking the marchioness to an involuntary nervous gesture. Exasperated by resistance, struggling against an impossible infatuation, her Spanish ladyship was becoming increasingly subject to passing starts. Indeed only in excitement and dissipation could her unsatisfied longings find relief. Sometimes she would run out in her car to where the men bathe at Ponte Delgado, and one morning, after a ball, she had been seen standing on the main road to Cadiz in a cabuchon tiara, watching the antics of some nude muleteers: Black as young Indians—she had described them later.

  "My sweet butterfly! What next?" she exclaimed, ogling Obdulia, whose elusive resemblance to her brother was really curiously disturbing.

  Averting a filmy eye, she recognised Marvilla de las Espinafres, airing anti-patriotic views on birth control, her arms about an adopted daughter. "Certainly not; most decidedly no! I should scream!" she was saying as from the Concert-room the overture began thinning the crowd.

  "It's nothing else than a national disaster," the marchioness declared to her grandson, "how many women nowadays seem to shirk their duty!"

  "Well, the de las Cubas hasn't, anyway," he demurred.

  "Poor thing. They say she jobs her mules," the marchioness murmured, exchanging a nod with the passing President.

  Something, manifestly, had occurred to disturb the equilibrium of her moral.

  "Such a disappointment, Nostra Señora!" she exclaimed. "Monseigneur, it seems, has thrown me over."

  "Indeed; how awkward!"

  "I fear though even more so for his chapter."

  "He is not ill?"

  "Cardinal Pirelli has fled the capital!"

  VIII

  Standing amid gardens made for suffering and delight is the disestablished and, sic transit, slowly decaying monastery of the Desierto. Lovely as Paradise, oppressive perhaps as Eden, it had been since the days of the mystic Luigi of Granada a site well suited to meditation and retreat. Here, in the stilly cypress-court, beneath the snowy sierras of Santa Maria la Blanca, Theresa of Avila, worn and ill, though sublime in laughter, exquisite in beatitude, had composed a part of the Way of Perfection, and, here, in these same realms of peace, dominating the distant city of Clemenza and the fertile plains of Andalucia, Cardinal Pirelli, one blue mid-day towards the close of summer, was idly considering his Defence. "Apologia, no; merely a defence," he mused: "merely," he flicked the ash-tip of a cigar, "a defence! I defend myself, that's all!..."

  A sigh escaped him.

  Divided by tranquil vineyards and orange-gardens from the malice and vindictiveness of men it was difficult to experience emotions other than of forgiveness and love.

  "Come, dears, and kiss me," he murmured, closing consentingly his eyes.

  It was the forgetful hour of noon, when Hesperus from his heavens confers on his pet Peninsula the boon of sleep.

  "A nice nap he's having, poor old gentleman." Madame Poco surveyed her master.

  Ill at ease and lonely in the austere dismantled house, she would keep an eye on him at present almost as much for company as for gain.

  As handsome and as elegant as ever, his physiognomy in repose revealed a thousand strange fine lines, suggestive subtleties, intermingled with less ambiguous signs, denoting stress and care.

  "He's growing almost huntedish," she observed, casting a brief glance at the literature beside him—The Trial of Don Fernando de la Cerde, Bishop of Barcelona, defrocked for putting young men to improper uses; a treatise on The Value of Smiles; an old volume of Songs, by Sà de Miranda; The Lives of Five Negro Saints, from which escaped a bookmark of a dancer in a manton.

  "Everything but his Breviary," she commented, perceiving a soutaned form through the old flowered ironwork of the courtyard gateway.

  Regretting her better gown of hooped watered-silk, set aside while in retreat (for economy's sake), Madame Poco fled to put it on, leaving the visitor to announce himself.

  The padre of Our Lady of the Valley, the poor padre of Our Lady, would the Primate know? Oh, every bird, every rose, could have told him that: the padre of Our Lady bringing a blue trout for his Eminence's supper from the limpid waters of Lake Orense.

  Respecting the Primate's rest Father Felicitas, for so, also, was he named, sat down discreetly to await his awakening.

  It was a rare sweetness to have the Cardinal to himself thus intimately. Mostly, in the city, he would be closely surrounded. Not that Father Felicitas went very much to town; no; he disliked the confusion of the streets, and even the glories of the blessed basilicas made him scarcely amends for the quiet shelter of his hills.

  The blessed basilicas, you could see them well from here. The giralda of Saint Xarifa, and the august twin towers of the cathedral, and the azulejos dome of Saint Eusebio, that was once a pagan mosque; while of Santissima Marias, Maria del Carmen, Maria del Rosario, Maria de la Soledad, Maria del Dolores, Maria de las Nieves, few cities in all the wide world could show as many.

  "To be sure, to be sure," he exclaimed absently, lifting his eyes to a cloudlet leisurely pointing above the lofty spur of the Pico del Mediodia. "To be sure," he added, seeking to descry the flower-like bellcot of Our Lady of the Valley just beneath.

  But before he had discovered it, half concealed by trees, he was reminded by the sound of a long-drawn, love-sick wail, issuing out of the very entrails of the singer, of the lad left in charge of his rod by the gate.

  "On the Bridge to Alcantara."

  With its protracted cadences and doleful, vain-yearning reaches, the voice, submerged in all the anguish of a Malagueña, troubled, nostalgically, the stillness.

  God's will be done. It was enough to awaken the Primate. Not everyone relished a Malagueña, a dirgeful form of melody introduced, tradition said, and made popular in the land, long, long ago, beneath the occupation of the Moors.

  Father Felicitas could almost feel the sin of envy as he thought of the flawless choir and noble triumphal organ of the cathedral yonder.

  Possessed of no other instrument, Our Lady of the Valley depended at present on a humble guitar. Not that the blessed guitar, with its capacity for emotion, is unworthy to please God's listening ear, but Pepe, the lad appointed to play it, would fall all too easily into those Jotas, Tangos, and Cuban Habaneiras, learnt in wayside fondas and fairs. Some day, Father Felicitas did not doubt, Our Lady would have an organ, an organ with pipes. He had prayed for it so often; oh, so often; and once, quite in the late of twilight while coming through the church, he had seen her, it seemed, standing just where it should be. It had been as though a blinding whiteness.

  "A blinding whiteness," he murmured, trembling a little at the recollection of the radiant vision.

  Across the tranquil court a rose-red butterfly pursued a blue. "I believe the world is all love, only no one understands," he meditated, contemplating the resplendent harvest plains steeped in the warm sweet sunlight.

  "My infinite contrition!" The Cardinal spoke.

  A rare occurrence in these days was a visitor, and now with authority ebbing, or in the balance at least, it was singular how he felt a new interest in the concern
s of the diocese. The birth-rate and the death-rate and the super-rate, which it was to be feared that the Cortès——

  Sailing down the courtyard in her watered-silken gown, Madame Poco approached with Xeres and Manzanilla, fresh from the shuttered snowery or nieveria.

  "And I've just buried a bottle of champagne, in case your Eminence should want it," she announced as she inviolably withdrew.

  "As devoted a soul as ever there was, and loyal to all my interests," the Primate exclaimed, touched.

  "God be praised!"

  "An excellent creature," the Cardinal added, focusing on the grey high road beyond the gate two youths on assback, seated close.

  "Andalucians, though of another parish."

  "I should like much to visit my diocese again; it's some while since I did," the Cardinal observed, filling the Padre's glass.

  "You'd find up at Sodré a good many changes."

  "Have they still the same little maid at the Posada de la Melodia?"

  "Carmencita?"

  "A dainty thing."

  "She went Therewards about the month of Mary."

  "America? It's where they all go."

  "She made a ravishing corpse."

  "Ahi."

  And Doña Beatriz too had died; either in March or May. It was she who would bake the old Greek Sun-bread, and although her heirs had sought high and low no one could find the receipt.

  The Cardinal expressed satisfaction.

  "Bestemmia," he breathed; "and I trust they never may; for on the Feast of the Circumcision she invariably caused to be laid before the high-altar of the cathedral a peculiarly shaped loaf to the confusion of all who saw it."

  And the Alcalde of Ayamonte, Don Deniz, had died on the eve of the bachelors' party he usually gave when he took off his winter beard.

  "Ahi; this death ..."

  Ah, yes, and since the delicacies ordered by the corpse could not well be countermanded they had been divided among Christ's poor.

  Left to himself once more Cardinal Pirelli returned reluctantly to his Defence.

  Half the diocese it seemed had gone "Therewards," while the rest were at Biarritz or Santander....