Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli

by Ronald Firbank

  "What!"

  "Nothing classic—but, oh!"

  "Fresh and blonde? I've seen him."

  "Such sep..."

  "Santiago be praised!"

  The Marchioness of Macarnudo plied her fan.

  "Our hands first met at table ... yes, dear; but what I always say is, one spark explodes the mine!" And with a sigh she glanced rhapsodically at her fingers, powdered and manicured and encrusted with rings. "Our hands met first at table," she repeated.

  "And...and the rest?" the duchess gasped.

  "I sometimes wish, though, I resembled my sister more, who cares only for amorous, 'delicate' men—the Claudes, so to speak. But there it is! And, anyway, dear," the Marchioness dropped her voice, "he keeps me from thinking (ah perhaps more than I should) of my little grandson. Imagine, Luiza ... Fifteen, white and vivid rose, and ink-black hair...." And the Marchioness cast a long, pencilled eye towards the world-famous Pietà above her head. "Queen of Heaven, defend a weak woman from that!" she besought.

  Surprised, and considerably edified, by the sight of the dowager in prayer, Mother Saint-Mary-of-the-Angels was emboldened to advance: The lovely, self-willed donkey (or was it a mule?) that Our Lady was prodding, one could almost stroke it, hear it bray....

  Mother Saint-Mary-of-the-Angels could have almost laughed.

  But the recollection of the presence of royalty steadied her.

  Behind pink lowered portières it had retired, escorted by the mistress of the house. She wore a gown of ivory-black with heavy golden roses and a few of her large diamonds of ceremony.

  "I love your Englishy-Moorishy cosy comfort, Decima, and I love——" the Princess Aurora had started to rave.

  "An hyperæsthesia injection? ... a beaten egg?" her hostess solicitously asked.

  "Per caritad!" the Princess fluted, stooping to examine a voluptuous small terre cuite, depicting a pair of hermaphrodites amusing themselves.

  She was looking like the ghost in the Ballet of Ghislaine, after an unusually sharp touch of Boheara; eight-and-forty hours in bed, and, scandal declared, not alone.

  "A Cognac?... a crême de Chile?..."

  "Nothing, nothing," the Princess negligently answered, sweeping her long, primrose trailing skirts across the floor.

  It was the boudoir of the Winterhalters and Isabeys, once the bright glory of the Radziwollowna collection, which, after several decades of disesteem, were returning to fashion and favour.

  "And I love——" she broke off, nearly stumbling over an old blind spaniel, that resided in a basket behind the "supposed original" of the Lesbia of Lysippus.

  "Clapsey, Clapsey!" her mistress admonished. The gift of a dear and once intimate friend, the dog seemed inclined to outlive itself and become a nuisance.

  Alas, poor, fawning Clapsey! Fond, toothless bitch. Return to your broken doze, and dream again of leafy days in leafy Parks, and comfy drives and escapades long ago. What sights you saw when you could see; fountains, and kneeling kings, and grim beggars at Church doors (those at San Eusebio were the worst). And sheltered spas by glittering seas: Santander! And dark adulteries and dim woods at night.

  "And I love your Winterhalters!"

  Beneath one of these, like a red geranium, was Cardinal Pirelli.

  "Oh, your Eminence, the utter forlornness of Society!... Besides, (oh, my God!) to be the one Intellectual of a Town..." a wizened little woman, mistaken, not infrequently, for "Bob Foy," the jockey, was exclaiming plaintively.

  "I suppose?" Monseigneur nodded. He was looking rather Richelieu, draped in ermines and some old lace of a beautiful fineness.

  "It's pathetic how entertaining is done now. Each year meaner. There was a time when the DunEdens gave balls, and one could count, as a rule, on supper. To-night, there's nothing but a miserable Buffet, with flies trimming themselves on the food; and the champagne that I tasted, well, I can assure your Eminence it was more like foul flower-water than Mumm."

  "Disgraceful," the Cardinal murmured, surrendering with suave dignity his hand to the lips of a pale youth all mouchoir and waist.

  These kisses of young men, ravished from greedy Royalty, had a delicate savour.

  The One Intellectual smiled obliquely.

  "Your Eminence I notice has several devout salve-stains already," she murmured, defending her face with her fan.

  "Believe me, not all these imprints were left by men!"

  The One Intellectual glanced away.

  "The poor Princess! I ask you, has one the right to look so dying?"

  "Probably not," the Cardinal answered, following her ethereal transit.

  It was the turn of the tide, and soon admittance to the boudoir had ceased causing "heartburnings."

  Nevertheless some few late sirens were only arriving.

  Conspicuous among these was Catherine (the ideal-questing, God-groping and insouciant), Countess of Constantine, the aristocratic heroine of the capital, looking half-charmed to be naked and alive. Possessing but indifferent powers of conversation—at Tertulias and dinners she seldom shone—it was yet she who had coined that felicitous phrase: Some men's eyes are sweet to rest in.

  Limping a little, since she had sprained her foot, alas, while turning backward somersaults to a negro band in the black ballroom of the Infanta Eulalia-Irene, her reappearance after the misadventure was a triumph.

  "Poor Kitty: it's a shame to ask her, if it's not a ball!" the Inspector of Rivers and Forests exclaimed, fondling the silvery branches of his moustache.

  But, at least, a Muse, if not musicians, was at hand.

  Clasping a large bouquet of American Beauty-roses, the Poetess Diana Beira Baixa was being besieged by admirers, to "give them something; just something! Anything of her own." Wedded, and proclaiming (in vers libres) her lawful love, it was whispered she had written a pæan to her husband's "..." beginning Thou glorious wonder! which was altogether too conjugal and intimate for recitation in society.

  "They say I utter the cry of sex throughout the Ages," she murmured, resting her free hand idly on a table of gold and lilac lacquer beside her.

  The Duchess-Dowager of Vizeu spread prudishly her fan.

  "Since me maid set me muskito net afire, I'm just a bunch, me dear, of hysterics," she declared.

  But requests for "something; just something!" were becoming insistent, and indeed the Muse seemed about to comply when, overtaken by the first alarming symptoms of "Boheara," she fell with a long-drawn sigh to the floor.

  VI

  Repairing the vast armholes of a chasuble, Madame Poco, the venerable Superintendent-of-the-palace, considered, as she worked, the social status of a Spy. It was not without a fleeting qualm that she had crossed the borderland that divides mere curiosity from professional vigilance, but having succumbed to the profitable proposals of certain monsignori, she had grown as keen on her quarry as a tigress on the track.

  "It's a wearing life you're leading me, Don Alvaro; but I'll have you," she murmured, singling out a thread.

  For indeed the Higher-curiosity is inexorably exacting, encroaching, all too often, on the hours of slumber and rest.

  "It's not the door-listening," she decided, "so much as the garden, and, when he goes awenching, the Calle Nabuchodonosor."

  She was seated by an open window, commanding the patio and the gate.

  "Vamos, vamos!" Madame Poco sighed, her thoughts straying to the pontifical supremacy of Tertius II, for already she was the Pope's Poco, his devoted Phoebe, his own true girl: "I'm true blue, dear. True blue."

  Forgetful of her needle, she peered interestedly on her image in a mirror on the neighbouring wall. It was a sensation of pleasant novelty to feel between her skull and her mantilla the notes of the first instalment of her bribe.

  "Earned, every perra gorda, earned!" she exclaimed, rising and pirouetting in elation before the glass.

  Since becoming the courted favourite of the chapter, she had taken to strutting-and-languishing in private before her mirror, improvising occult d
ance-steps, semi-sacred in character, modelled on those of Felix Ganay at White Easter, all in the flowery Spring. Ceremonial poses such as may be observed in storied-windows and olden pietas in churches (Dalilaesque, or Shulamitish, as the case might be) were her especial delight, and from these had been evolved an eerie "Dance of Indictment."

  Finger rigid, she would advance ominously with slow, Salomé-like liftings of the knees upon a phantom Cardinal: "And thus I accuse thee!" or "I denounce thee, Don Alvaro, for," etc.

  "Dalila! You old sly gooseberry," she chuckled, gloating on herself in the greenish-spotted depth of a tall, time-corroded glass.

  Punch and late hours had left their mark.

  "All this Porto and stuff to keep awake make a woman liverish," she commented, examining critically her tongue.

  It was a Sunday evening of corrida, towards the Feast of Corpus, and through the wide-open window came the near sound of bells.

  Madame Poco crossed and recrossed her breast.

  They were ringing "Paula," a bell which, tradition said, had fused into its metal one of the thirty pieces of silver received by the Iscariot for the betrayal of Christ.

  "They seem to have asked small fees in those days," she reflected, continuing her work.

  It was her resolution to divide her reward between masses for herself and the repose and "release" (from Purgatory) of her husband's soul, while anything over should be laid out on finery for a favourite niece, the little Leonora, away in the far Americas.

  Madame Poco plied pensively her needle.

  She was growing increasingly conscious of the physical demands made by the Higher-curiosity upon a constitution already considerably far-through, and the need of an auxiliary caused her to regret her niece. More than once, indeed, she had been near the point of asking Charlotte Chiemsee, the maid of the Duchess of Vizeu, to assist her. It was Charlotte who had set the duchess's bed-veils on fire while attempting to nip a romance.

  But alone and unaided it was astonishing the evidence Madame Poco had gained, and she smiled, as she sewed, at the recollection of her latest capture—the handkerchief of Luna Sainz.

  "These hennaed heifers that come to confess!..." she scoffed sceptically. For Madame Poco had some experience of men—those brown humbugs (so delicious in tenderness)—in her time. "Poor soul! He had the prettiest teeth..." she murmured, visualising forlornly her husband's face. He had been coachman for many years to the sainted Countess of Triana, and he would tell the story of the pious countess and the vermin she had turned to flowers of flame while foraging one day among some sacks before a second-hand-clothes shop. It was she, too, who, on another occasion, had changed a handful of marsh-slush into fine slabs of chocolate, each slab engraved with the insignia of a Countess and the sign of the Cross.

  "Still, she didn't change him, though!" Madame Poco reflected dryly, lifting the lid to her work-box.

  Concealed among its contents was a copy of the gay and curious Memoirs of Mlle. Emma Crunch, so famous as "Cora Pearl";—a confiscated bedside-book once belonging to the Cardinal-Archbishop.

  "Ps, ps!" she purred, feeling amorously for her scissors beneath the sumptuous oddments of old church velvet and brocade that she loved to ruffle and ruck.

  "Ps."

  She had been freshening a little the chasuble worn last by his Eminence at the baptism of the blue-eyed police-pup of the Duquesa DunEden, which bore still the primrose trace of an innocent insult.

  "A disgraceful business altogether," Madame Poco sighed.

  Not everyone knew the dog was christened in white menthe....

  "Sticky stuff," she brooded: "and a liqueur I never cared for! It takes a lot to beat aniseed brandy; when it's old. Manzanilla runs it close; but it's odd how a glass or two turns me muzzy."

  She remained a moment lost in idle reverie before the brilliant embroideries in her basket. Bits of choice beflowered brocade, multi-tinted, inimitably faded silks of the epoca of Theresa de Ahumada, exquisite tatters, telling of the Basilica's noble past, it gladdened the eyes to gaze on. What garden of Granada could show a pink to match that rose, or what sky show a blue as tenderly serene as that azure of the Saint Virgin?

  "Vamos," she exclaimed, rising: "it's time I took a toddle to know what he's about."

  She had last seen the Cardinal coming from the orange orchard with a dancing-boy and Father Fadrique, who had a mark on his cheek left by a woman's fan.

  Her mind still dwelling on men (those divine humbugs), Madame Poco stepped outside.

  Traversing a white-walled corridor, with the chasuble on her arm, her silhouette, illumined by the splendour of the evening sun, all but caused her to start.

  It was in a wing built in the troublous reign of Alfonso the Androgyne that the vestments were kept. Whisking by a decayed and ancient painting, representing "Beelzebub" at Home, she passed slowly through a little closet supposed to be frequented by the ghosts of evil persons long since dead. Just off it was the vestry, gay with blue azulejos tiles of an admirable lustre.

  They were sounding Matteo now, a little bell with a passionate voice.

  "The pet!" Madame Poco paused to listen. She had her "favourites" among the bells, and Matteo was one of them. Passiaflora, too—but Anna, a light slithery bell, "like a housemaid in hysterics," offended her ear by lack of tone; Sebastian, a complaining, excitable bell, was scarcely better,—"a fretful lover!" She preferred old "Wanda" the Death-bell, a trifle monotonous, and fanatical perhaps, but "interesting," and opening up vistas to varied thought and speculation.

  Lifting a rosary from a linen-chest, Madame Poco laid the chasuble within. It was towards this season she would usually renew the bags of bergamot among the Primate's robes.

  "This espionage sets a woman all behindhand," she commented to Tobit, the vestry cat.

  Black as the Evil One, perched upon a Confessional's ledge, cleansing its belly, the sleek thing sat.

  It was the "ledge of forgotten fans," where privileged Penitents would bring their tales of vanity, infidelity and uncharitableness to the Cardinal once a week.

  "Directing half-a-dozen duchesses must be frequently a strain!" Madame Poco deliberated, picking up a discarded mitre and trying it absently on.

  With a plume at the side or a cluster of balls, it would make quite a striking toque, she decided, casting a fluttered glance on the male effigy of a pale-faced member of the Quesada family, hewn in marble by the door.

  "Caramba! I thought it was the Cardinal; it gave me quite a turn," she murmured, pursuing lightly her way.

  Being a Sunday evening of corrida, it was probable the Cardinal had mounted to his aerie, to enjoy the glimpse of Beauty returning from the fight.

  Oh, mandolines of the South, warm throats, and winged songs, winging ...

  Following a darkened corridor with lofty windows closely barred, Madame Poco gained an ambulatory, terminated by a fresco of Our Lady, ascending to heaven in a fury of paint.

  "These damp flags'll be the death of me," she complained, talking with herself, turning towards the garden.

  Already the blue pushing shadows were beguiling from the shelter of the cloister eaves the rueful owls. A few flittermice, too, were revolving around the long apricot chimneys of the Palace, that, towards sunset, looked like the enchanted castle of some sleeping Princess.

  "Bits of pests," she crooned, taking a neglected alley of old bay-tree laurels, presided over by a plashing fountain comprised of a Cupid sneezing. Wary of mole-hills and treacherous roots, she roamed along, preceded by the floating whiteness of a Persian peacock, mistrustful of the intentions of a Goat-sucker owl. Rounding a sequestered garden seat, beneath an aged cypress, the bark all scented knots, Madame Poco halted.

  Kneeling before an altar raised to the cult of Our Lady of Dew, Cardinal Pirelli was plunged in prayer.

  "Salve. Salve Regina...." Above the tree-tops a bird was singing.

  VII

  The College of Noble Damosels in the Calle Santa Fé was in a whirl. It was "Foundat
ion" day, an event annually celebrated with considerable fanfaronade and social éclat. Founded during the internecine wars of the Middle Age, the College, according to early records, had suffered rapine on the first day of term. Hardly, it seemed, had the last scholar's box been carried upstairs than a troop of military had made its appearance at the Pension gate demanding, with "male peremptoriness," a billet. "I, alone," the Abbess ingeniously states, in relating the poignant affair in her unpublished diary: "I alone did all I was able to keep them from them, for which they (the scholars) called me 'greedy.'" Adding, not without a touch of modern socialism in disdain for titles, that she had preferred "the staff-officers to the Field-Marshal," while as to ensigns, in her estimation, why, "one was worth the lot."

  Polishing urbanely her delicate nails, the actual President, a staid, pale woman with a peacock nose, recalled the chequered past. She hoped his Eminence when he addressed the girls, on handing them their prizes, would refer to the occasion with all the tactfulness required.

  "When I think of the horrid jokes the old Marqués of Illescas made last year," she murmured, bestowing a harrowed smile on a passing pupil.

  She was ensconced in a ponderous fauteuil of figured velvet (intended for the plump posterior of Royalty) beneath the incomparable "azulejos" ceiling of the Concert-room, awaiting the return of Madame Always Alemtejo, the English governess, from the printers, in the Plaza de Jesus, with the little silver-printed programmes (so like the paste-board cards of brides!), which, as usual, were late.

  "Another year we'll type them," she determined, awed by the ardent tones of a young girl rehearsing an aria from the new opera, Leda—"Gaze not on Swans."

  "Ah, gaze not so on Swan-zzz!..."

  "Crisper, child. Distinction. Don't exaggerate," the President enjoined, raising a hand to the diamonds on her heavy, lead-white cheeks.

  Née an Arroyolo, and allied by marriage with the noble house of Salvaterra, the head mistress in private life was the Dowager-Marchioness of Pennisflores.

  "Nosotros, you know, are not candidates for the stage! Bear in mind your moral," she begged, with a lingering glance at her robe of grey georgette.