Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli

by Ronald Firbank

  Enough, according to some extreme anti-Pirellians, to be detrimental to her milk.

  "I'm told the Pope has sent for him at last," the laundress of the Basilica, Doña Consolacion, remarked to Sister June of the Way Dolorous.

  "Indeed, indeed; it scarcely does to think!"

  "Does anyone call to mind a bit of a girl (from Bilbao she was) that came once to stop as his niece?"

  "Inclined to a moustache! Perfectly."

  "Phoebe Poco protests she wasn't."

  "Ah, well; a little Don Juanism is good," the laundress said, and sighed.

  "She declares ..."

  "She tells the truest lies, dear, of anyone I know!"

  "Be that as it may it's certain he's getting increasingly eccentric. But Sunday last, entertaining his solicitor, it seems he ordered coffee after the merienda to be served in two chamber-pots."

  "Shameful—and he in his sunset years!" Mother Mary of the Holy Face commented, coming up with Tomás the beadle.

  "It wouldn't surprise me," he declared, drowsily shaking a heavy bouquet of keys, "if the thread of his life was about to break."

  "Hombre ..." The laundress expressed alarm.

  "Often now, towards Angelus, as I climb the tower, I hear the bell Herod talking with old Wanda in the loft. Eeeeeeee! Eeeeeeee! Horrible things they keep saying. Horrible things they keep saying."

  "Nonsense," Doña Consolacion exclaimed, bestowing a smile on Monsignor Cuxa. Old, and did-did-doddery, how frail he seemed beside Father Fadrique, the splendid swagger of whose chasuble every woman must admire.

  "Sent for to Rome; ah, sangre mio, I wish someone would send for me," a girl, with a rose in the hair beautifully placed, sighed romantically.

  "Be satisfied with Spain, my dear, and remember that no other country can compare with it!" Doña Generosa, an Aunt of one of the cathedral dancing-boys (who drew a small pension as the widow of the late Leader of applause at the Opera-house), remonstrated.

  "I've never travelled," Doña Consolacion blandly confessed: "but I dare say, dear, you can't judge of Egypt by Aïda."

  "Oh, can't I, though?" Doña Generosa sniffed, as the Father of an acolyte raised his voice.

  "Spain!" he exclaimed, exalted, throwing a lover's kiss to the air, "Spain! The most glorious country in God's universe, His admitted masterpiece, His gem, His——" He broke off, his eloquence dashed by the sad music of Monsignor Cuxa's hæmorrhage.

  An office in the Chapel of the Crucifix was about to begin, recalling to their duties the scattered employees of the staff.

  Hovering by the collection-box for the Souls in Hades, the Moorish maid from the College of Noble Damosels, bound on an errand of trust as ancient as the world, was growing weary of watching the people come and go.

  "I must have missed him beneath the trees of the Market Place," she ruminated, straightening on her head a turban wreathed in blossoms.

  It was the matter of a message from Obdulia and Milagros to the radiant youth whose lips they were so idyllically (if perhaps somewhat licentiously) sharing.

  "Fo' sh'o dis goin' to put dose heiresses in a quandry," she deliberated, oppressed by her surroundings.

  Eastern in origin like the Mesquita of Cordoba, it was impossible to forget that the great basilica of Clemenza was a Mosque profaned.

  Designed for the cult of Islam, it made her African's warm heart bleed to behold it now. Would it were reconverted to its virginal state, and the cry of the muezzin be heard again summoning men to Muhammad's house! Yes, the restitution of the cathedral to Allah was Muley's cherished dream, and it consoled her, on certain days when she was homesick, to stand before the desecrated mihrab in worship, her face turned towards Africa, and palm-girt Marrakesh across the sea.

  "I almost inclined to slip across to de Café Goya," she breathed, moving aside for a shuffling acolyte, bearing a crucifix on a salver.

  Led by the pious sisters of the noble order of the Flaming-Hood, the Virgin was returning to her niche.

  She was arrayed as though bound for the Bull-ring, in a robe of peacock silk, and a mantilla of black lace.

  "Santissima!..."

  "Elegantissima!" Devotees dropped adoring to the floor.

  Alone, the African remained erect.

  "Muhammad mine, how long?" she sighed, turning entreating eyes to the cabbalistic letters and Saracenic tracings of the azulejos arabesques.

  X

  Midnight had ceased chiming from the Belfry tower, and the last seguidilla had died away. Looking fresh as a rose, and incredibly juvenile in his pyjamas of silver-grey and scarlet (the racing colours of Vittoria, Duchess of Vizeu), the Cardinal seemed disinclined for bed.

  Surveying in detachment the preparatives for his journey (set out beneath an El Greco Christ, with outspread, delicate hands), he was in the mood to dawdle.

  "These for the Frontier. Those for the train," he exclaimed aloud, addressing a phantom porter.

  Among the personalia was a passport, the likeness of identity showing him in a mitre, cute to tears, though, essentially, orthodox; a flask of Napoleon brandy, to be "declared" if not consumed before leaving the Peninsula; and a novel, Self-Essence, on the Index, or about to be.

  "A coin, child, and put them for me on the rack," he enjoined the wraith, regarding through the window the large and radiant stars.

  The rhythmic murmur of a weeping fountain filled momentously the night.

  Its lament evoked the Chicklet's sobs.

  "Did I so wrong, my God, to punish him? Was I too hasty?" the Primate asked, repairing towards an ivory crucifix by Cano; "yet, Thou knowest, I adore the boy!"

  He paused a moment astonished by the revelation of his heart.

  "It must have been love that made me do it," he smiled, considering the incident in his mind. Assuredly the rebuff was unpremeditated, springing directly from the boy's behaviour, spoiling what might have been a ceremony of something more than ordinary poignance.

  It had come about so.

  There had been held previously during the evening, after the Basilica's scheduled closing hour, a service of "Departure," fastidiously private, in the presence only of the little Ostensoir-swinger "Chicklet," who, missing all the responses, had rushed about the cathedral after mice; for which the Cardinal, his sensitiveness hurt by the lad's disdain and frivolity, had afterwards confined him alone with them in the dark.

  "Had it been Miguilito or Joaquin, I should not have cared a straw for their interest in the mice! But somehow this one——" the Cardinal sighed.

  Adjusting in capricious abstraction his cincture, he turned towards the window.

  It was a night like most.

  Uranus, Venus, Saturn showed overhead their wonted lights, while in the sun-weary cloisters, brightly blue-drenched by the moon, the oleanders in all their wonder—(how swiftly fleeting is terrestrial life)—were over, and the bougainvillæas reigned instead.

  "It must have been that," he murmured, smiling up at the cathedral towers.

  Poor little Don Wilful. The chapter-mice, were they something so amusing to pursue? "I've a mind, do you know, to join you, boy; I declare I feel quite rompish!" he told himself, gathering up, with a jocund pounce, a heavy mantle of violet cloth-of-gold.

  "Tu-whit, tu-whoo."

  Two ominous owls answered one another across the troubled garden.

  "I declare I feel——" his hand sought vaguely his heart: it went pit-a-pat for almost nothing now! "The strain of the diocese," he breathed, consulting a pier-glass of the period of Queen Isabella "the Ironical."

  "The Court may favour Paul Orna, but in my opinion no one can rival Joey Paquin's 'line'; I should like to see him 'tailor' our Madonna; one of the worst and most expensively dressed little saints in the world," his Eminence commented, folding toga-wise the obedient tissues about his slender form.

  An aspect so correctly classic evoked the golden Rome of the Imperial Cæsars rather than the so tedious Popes.

  Repeating a sonorous line from Macrobius,
the Cardinal measured himself a liqueur-glass of brandy.

  Poor little Don Bright-eyes, alone in the obscurity. It was said a black dervish "walked" the Coro—one of the old habitués of the Mosque.

  "Jewel boy. Yum-yum," he murmured, setting a mitre like a wondrous mustard-pot upon his head. Omnia vanitas; it was intended for Saint Peter's.

  "Tu-whit, tu-whoo!"

  Grasping a Bishop's stave, remotely shepherdessy, his Eminence opened softly the door.

  Olé, the Styx!

  Lit by Uranus, Venus and Saturn only, the consummate tapestries on the stairs recording the Annunciation, Conception, Nativity, Presentation, Visitation, Purification and Ascension of the Virgin made welcome milestones.

  "... Visitation, Purification." The Primate paused on the penultimate step.

  On a turn of the stair by the "Conception," a sensitive panel, chiefly white, he had the impression of a wavering shadow, as of someone following close behind.

  Continuing, preoccupied, his descent, he gained a postern door. A few deal cases, stoutly corded for departure, were heaped about it. "His Holiness, I venture to predict, will appreciate the excellence of our home-grown oranges, not to be surpassed by those of any land," the Primate purred, sailing forth into the garden.

  Oh, the lovely night! Oh, the lovely night! He stood, leaning on his wand, lost in contemplation of the miracle of it.

  "Kek, kek, kex."

  In the old lead aqua-butt, by the Chapter-house, the gossiping bull-frogs were discussing their great horned and hoofed relations....

  "There was never yet one that didn't bellow!"

  "Kek, kek, kex."

  "Los toros, forsooth!"

  "A blessed climate...." The Primate pursued his way.

  It was in the face of a little door like the door of a tomb in the cathedral's bare façade (troubled only by the fanciful shadows of the trees) that he presently slipped his key.

  Olé, the Styx!

  He could distinguish nothing clearly at first beyond the pale forked fugitive lightning through the triple titanic windows of the chancel.

  "Sunny-locks, Don Sunny-locks?" the Cardinal cooed, advancing diffidently, as though mistrustful of meeting some charwoman's pail.

  Life had prepared him for these surprises.

  Traversing on his crozier a spectral aisle, he emerged upon the nave.

  Flanked by the chapels of the Crucifix, of the Virgin, of the Eldest Son of God, and of divers others, it was here as bright as day.

  Presumably Don April-showers was too self-abashed to answer, perhaps too much afraid.... "If I recollect, the last time I preached was on the theme of Flagellation," the Primate mused, considering where it caught the moon the face of a fakir in ecstasy carved amid the corbels.

  "A sermon I propose to publish," he resolved, peering into the chapel of Santa Lucia. It was prepared, it seemed, in anticipation of a wedding, for stately palms and branches of waxen peach-bloom stood all about. "Making circulation perilous," the Primate mused, arrested by the determined sound of a tenacious mouse gnawing at a taper-box.

  "An admirable example in perseverance!" he mentally told himself, blinking at the flickering mauve flowers of light in the sanctuary lamps.

  Philosophising, he penetrated the engrailed silver doors connecting the chapel of the Magdalen.

  The chapel was but seldom without a coffin, and it was not without one now.

  Since the obsequies of the brilliant Princess Eboli it had enjoyed an unbroken vogue.

  Besides the triumphal monument of the beloved of Philip II, the happy (though, perhaps, not the happiest) achievement of Jacinto Bisquert, there were also mural tablets to the Duchesses of Pampeluna (née Mattosinhos), Polonio (née Charona), and Sarmento (née Tizzi-Azza), while the urn and ashes of the Marchioness of Orcasitas (née Ivy Harris) were to be found here too, far from the race and turmoil of her native New York.

  "Misericordia! Are you there, boy?" the Cardinal asked, eyeing abstractedly the twin-hooded carytides that bore the fragile casket white as frozen snow containing the remains of the all-amiable princess.

  Folded in dainty sleep below, he perceived the lad.

  Witching as Eros, in his loose-flowing alb, it seemed profane to wake him!

  "... And lead us not into temptation," the Primate murmured, stooping to gaze on him.

  Age of bloom and fleeting folly: Don Apple-cheeks!

  Hovering in benison he had almost a mind to adopt the boy, enter him for Salamanca or, remoter, Oxford, and perhaps (by some bombshell codicil) even make him his heir.

  "How would you like my Velasquez, boy?..." His Eminence's hand framed an airy caress. "Eh, child? Or my Cano Crucifix?... I know of more than one bottle-nosed dowager who thinks she'll get it!... You know my Venetian-glass, Don Endymion, is among the choicest in Spain...."

  There was a spell of singing silence, while the dove-grey mystic lightning waxed and waned.

  Aroused as much by it as the Primate's hand, the boy started up with a scream of terror.

  "Ouch, sir!"

  "Olé, boy?"

  The panic appeared to be mutual.

  "Oufarella!..." With the bound of a young faun the lad was enskied amid the urns and friezes.

  The heart in painful riot, the Primate dropped to a chair.

  Ouching, Oléing and Oufarellaing it, would they never have done? Paternostering Phoebe Poco (shadowing her master) believed they never would. "Old ogre: why can't he be brisk about it and let a woman back to bed?" she wondered.

  Thus will egotism, upon occasion, eclipse morality outright.

  "And always be obedient, dear child," the Cardinal was saying; "it is one of the five things in Life that matter most."

  "Which are the others, sir?"

  "What others, boy?"

  "Why, the other four!"

  "Never mind now. Come here."

  "Oh, tral-a-la, sir." Laughing like some wild spirit, the lad leapt (Don Venturesome, Don Venturesome, his Eminence trembled) from the ledge of A Virtuous Wife and Mother (Sarmento, née Tizzi-Azza) to the urn of Ivy, the American marchioness.

  "You'd not do that if you were fond of me, boy!" The Cardinal's cheek had paled.

  "But I am fond of you, sir! Very. Caring without caring: don't you know?"

  "So you do care something, child?"

  "I care a lot!..."

  Astride the urn of Ivy—poised in air—the Chicklet pellucidly laughed.

  "Tell me so again," the Cardinal begged, as some convent-bell near by commenced sounding for office before aurora.

  For behind the big windows the stars were fading.

  "It's to-day they draw the Lottery, sir."

  "Ah; well, I had nothing in it...."

  "00050—that's me!"

  The Cardinal fetched a breath.

  "Whose is it, boy?" He pointed towards the bier.

  "A Poet, sir."

  "A Poet?"

  "The name though he had escapes me...."

  "No matter then."

  "Where would his soul be now, sir?"

  "Never mind, boy; come here."

  "In the next world I should like to meet the Cid, and Christopher Columbus!"

  "Break your neck, lad, and so you will."

  "Pablo Pedraza too...."

  "Who's that, boy?"

  "He was once the flower of the ring, sir; superior even to Tancos; you may recollect he was tossed and ruptured at Ronda; the press at the time was full of it."

  "Our press, dear youth, our press!!!..." the Primate was about to lament, but an apologetic sneeze from a chapel somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Eldest Son of God arrested him.

  It seemed almost to confirm the legend of old, Mosque-sick "Suliman," said to stalk the temple aisles.

  The Cardinal twirled challengingly his stave—Bible v. Koran; a family case; cousins; Eastern, equally, each; hardy old perennials, no less equivocal and extravagant, often, than the ever-adorable Arabian Nights! "If only Oriental literature sprawled less, was mo
re concise! It should concentrate its roses," he told himself, glancing out, inquiringly, into the nave.

  Profoundly soft and effaced, it was a place full of strange suggestion. Intersecting avenues of pillared arches, upbearing waving banners, seemed to beckon towards the Infinite.

  "Will you be obliged to change, sir; or shall you go straight through?"

  "Straight through, boy."

  "I suppose, as you cross the border, they'll want to know what you have to declare."

  "I have nothing, child, but myself."

  "If 00050 is fortunate, sir, I hope to travel, too—India, Persia, Peru!!... Ah, it's El Dorado, then."

  "El Dorado, boy?" The Cardinal risked an incautious gesture.

  "Oh, tral-a-la, sir." Quick as Cupid the lad eluded him on the evasive wings of a laugh; an unsparing little laugh, sharp and mocking, that aroused the Primate like the thong of a lash.

  Of a long warrior line, he had always regarded disobedience (in others) as an inexcusable offence. What would have happened before the ramparts of Zaragoza, Valladolid, Leon, Burgos, had the men commanded by Ipolito Pirelli in the Peninsular War refused to obey? To be set at defiance by a youngster, a mere cock-robin, kindled elementary ancestral instincts in the Primate's veins.

  "Don't provoke me, child, again."

  From pillared ambush Don Prudent saw well, however, to effect a bargain.

  "You'd do the handsome by me, sir; you'd not be mean?"

  "Eh?..."

  "The Fathers only give us texts; you'd be surprised, your Greatness, at the stinginess of some!"

  "...?"

  "You'd run to something better, sir; you'd give me something more substantial?"

  "I'll give you my slipper, child, if you don't come here!" his Eminence warned him.

  "Oufarella...."

  Sarabandish and semi-mythic was the dance that ensued. Leading by a dozen derisive steps Don Light-of-Limb took the nave. In the dusk of the dawn it seemed to await the quickening blush of day like a white-veiled negress.

  "Olé, your Purpleship!"