The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

  “Yet this consolation,” wrote Quarenghi, “sweet though it be, is but a human accident of love, and not to be compared with Love itself. As neither the color nor the perfume of a rose is the Veritable Rose, but merely suggests the perfect flower, so the mortal aspects of love serve only to remind us of Love’s immortal splendor.”

  Stephen was meditating one June evening on Quarenghi’s definition of love, when Milky Lyons popped into his room, waving a pair of theater tickets like a conductor’s baton. Theater tickets were enough of a rarity in Stephen’s life to warrant a decent curiosity.

  “Where’d you get them?” he asked.

  “Luck of the Irish,” exclaimed Milky. “I just dropped in at The Maiden News with a sodality announcement, and Leo McKinnon, the city editor, asked me if I could use a couple passes for tomorrow night.”

  “You are in luck. What’s playing?”

  “A revival of Victor Herbert’s The Only Girl. Gorgeous melodies.” Milky started to hum “When You’re Away, Dear,” the hit song of the show, accompanying himself on an imaginary violin. “Listen” …

  When you’re away, dear,

  How weary the lonesome hours!

  Sunshine seems gray, dear!

  The fragrance has left the flow’rs!

  Stephen smiled leniently at the sentimental lyrics … springes to catch woodcocks. “Whom are you taking?”

  Milky dropped his airy fiddle and pointed the tickets straight at Stephen. “Who but you, Father Fermoyle?”

  “N-nuh.” Stephen rumpled the manuscript on his desk. “I’ve got my work cut out for me here, Milky. This Italian prose is music enough for me. Try someone else.”

  Frank Lyons let his temper flare. “Now look, Steve,” he protested, “you just can’t keep on refusing civil bids from a pal. You’ll either come with me tomorrow night or—I’ll tear up these damn tickets right in front of you.” Milky held them aloft in the manner of a man about to keep his word. “Are you coming?”

  Steve wished that Milky Lyons would stop using the word “pal,” and stop waving invitations at him. Still, he hadn’t been inside a theater since his seminary days … it might be fun. …

  “Don’t be sacrilegious, Milky. I’ll come.”

  Next evening two expectant curates were sitting in row C, center aisle, when the orchestra struck into the lush overture of The Only Girl. Settling back in anticipation of the delightful sights and sounds ahead, Stephen forgot that certain eyebrows in the audience were raised askance at the Roman collars in the third row. Steve’s conscience was clear. He had his rector’s permission, and was in the decent company of a fellow priest. If a grown man couldn’t withstand the impact of some oversweet music! …

  Milky, however, was in a lyric heaven. Things musical affected him much as a plumber’s torch affects solder. At the end of the first act he was an unprotected, fluxing rod of sensation. Milky had never seen a musical comedy before; the standard libretto of lovers, romantically plighted and tragically parted, struck him with the raw force of novelty. But the book was merely the first rung on the ladder of Father Frank’s delight. The many-throated orchestra, now breathing tenderly with muted reeds, now swelling into bosomy yearning from the strings, transported him into a world of emotion never previously entered by the pallid curate. The frou-frou costumes and bare shoulders of Andrea Feme, the prima donna—a really handsome girl—added the final intoxicating elements to Father Frank’s glass of experience.

  During the intermissions, Stephen noticed Milky’s agitation, but chose not to comment on it. Even an inexperienced curate had a right to his private state of feeling. Father Frank would snap out of it in the open air. As for Steve himself, he felt a lulling overhang when the play was over. The music had seeped into his nerves, and visual images of the handsome prima donna moved delightfully through his mind. Refreshed, he stepped out onto Boylston Street as though returning from a long vacation in some never-never land of fantasy.

  “Feel like walking home?” he asked Milky.

  “Five miles?”

  “Do us both good. Let’s hit across the Common.”

  Milky had no objections. Something was on his mind, and a long intimate walk with Stephen would give him a chance to blow off some emotional steam. The two struck out across Boston Common; its summery foliage dimmed the city lights and spread a turfy enchantment across the grass. Stephen felt wonderfully elated.

  “What a performance!” he exclaimed. Romance sprayed by a full orchestra in music sugary but hummable. “ ‘When you’re away, dear, how weary the lonesome hours,’ da-da dum de-de—how does the rest of it go, Frank?”

  No answer from Milky. At the bottom of his adolescent soul he was framing an overwhelming question. Walking beside Stephen on this summer night, he wanted desperately to bring the conversation around to the important half of creation that had always baffled and bothered him. Girls! Milky made a timid opening move.

  “What did you think of Andrea Feme?” he asked.

  “Eye-filling. A positive beauty. What else could I think?”

  They walked under three elms in silence. Time for another try. “I wonder what they’re like, Steve.”

  “What who’s like?”

  The risk of offending Stephen was great, but Milky took it. “Girls,” he said compulsively.

  Stephen caught the green-sick odor, unpleasing in any grown man. He felt sorry for Milky, ashamed of himself for his cavalier comment on Andrea Feme. Pity, and refusal to develop the theme further, were in his reply.

  “There’s quite a literature on the subject, Frank. Experts from Ovid to Dante have described women in all moods and tenses.”

  A park lamp obscured by an elm trunk threw a corona of light over Milky’s tormented face. “That’s not what I mean, Steve. Books don’t tell me what I want to know. But hearing that girl sing tonight, looking up at her bare shoulders”—an ague shook him—“believe it or not, Steve, that’s the most I’ve ever seen of a woman—filled me with a, a—misery that I never felt before.” Frank’s voice was charged with loneliness and longing. “Why should I feel this way, Steve?”

  Surprised by his own question, Frank Lyons stood still; tears, blue under the park lamp, streamed down his cheeks. Until this moment he had slipped through nearly thirty years of life, scarcely aware that women were in the world. Taken young by the seminary, he had been shielded from the polar currents flowing between the sexes. Milky’s experience with women was simply nonexistent; he had never danced, played tennis, or swung in a hammock with a girl. He had never touched or kissed one. His only emotional release, other than a genuine devotion to the priesthood, was music. And now, suddenly, the power and mystery that stream from women had struck at him, and the hurt—shafted with Andrea Feme’s voice—was twisting in his nervous system.

  “Do you feel the way I do, Steve?”

  “No,” said Stephen honestly.

  Stephen Fermoyle was neither afraid nor ignorant of women. This evening he had looked with enjoyment upon Andrea Feme and seen her exactly as she was—a delightful creature gifted with feminine graces of voice and body. Happy for the world that such women existed! And happier yet for Stephen Fermoyle that their existence did not seriously disturb his greater love.

  But here was Frank Lyons tangling himself into emotional knots about the newly discovered wondrousness of women. Steve recognized Milky’s problem as one of those personal, never-quite-to-be-resolved matters that every man (priest or no) must solve for himself. The belated ferment now bubbling in Frank would doubtless make him a maturer person, and therefore a better priest. Yet right now, crossing Boston Common, Milky needed a bit of emergency treatment; Steve decided that the treatment of choice was to let his colleague talk freely till the throbbing pressure of his curiosity was reduced.

  In another setting, Stephen’s decision might have been wise. But around them on the darkened Common the night air reeked with aphrodisiacs of turf and summer. Human forms were stretched on the grass; lovers embraced on ev
ery bench. Stephen himself began to feel the earthy contagion of the place.

  “Let’s get out of here, Frank.”

  He struck westward, setting a rapid pace toward the Charlesway. His new plan was to walk Frank Lyons into sheer breathlessness, and for fifteen minutes Steve set such a clip that Milky was tagging half a length behind in a desperate attempt to keep up. Now they were stepping it out heel-and-toe, following the car tracks across the Mystic Marshes. This was familiar terrain to Steve; he felt secure here. Over these steel tracks, glistening under carbon arc lights, his father had driven Trolley No. 3 (curious, that Triune number) for a quarter of a century. As a boy, Stephen had often stood beside him at the controls; now his thoughts followed Din as an obedient obbligato follows a soloist. Memories of Din the Down-Shouter, Din the table-pounder, the no-sayer, the Lawgiver, the God-surrogate, filled his mind. Lighter, more laughing memories flocked, too. Din’s love of song and prayer, his old-fashioned wit and fondness for puns and wordplays came to mind. Steve remembered his father’s favorite conundrum, a kecksy-whinsy straight out of Dublin. He tried it out on Milky:

  “What opera reminds you of a trolley line?”

  “Give up,” gasped Milky.

  “Rose of Castile.” Stephen laughed aloud, more in remembrance of Din than at Milky’s puzzlement. “Rows of cast steel—get it?”

  The pun was doubly unfortunate because it brought up both the name of a woman and a musical performance. Milky snatched at it eagerly to reopen the conversation. Anything would have served; itched by devils of pruriency, he dug his fingernails into the theme once more.

  “Don’t you think, Steve, that priests should have—more firsthand experience of women?”

  “Why should they?”

  “Well, in order to understand them better.”

  “A sophist’s argument. You might as well say that a physician must have heart trouble himself before he can diagnose or treat it in others.”

  The road narrowed as they crossed a drawbridge over the Mystic. “Let’s lean on the rail a minute,” said Milky. “I’m too out of breath to think.”

  They leaned over the iron railing of the drawbridge, gazed down at the black tide slipping out to sea. A marshy smell, oldest of aphrodisiacs, rose from the brackish flatlands, assailing the membranes of their nostrils with associations more ancient than man. Frank Lyons struggled in vain against the suggestions of that primal odor. Then the inevitable question. “What are women really like, Steve?”

  The point-blank anguish in the question saved it from being a piece of outrageous impertinence.

  “I could give you half a dozen answers to that question, Milky. But none of them would have any bearing on the matter that’s really troubling you.”

  “Why not? If a pal won’t tell me anything about women, how am I ever going to know about them?”

  The hateful word “pal” irritated Stephen. Annoyance edged his voice. “Are you sure it’s women you want to know about, Frank? Aren’t you itching with curiosity about something else?”

  “What else? What else could it be?”

  Straight from Quarenghi’s pages, the answer came. “Love,” said Stephen, “and the need to love.”

  Milky was more puzzled than before. “But aren’t love and women the same thing?”

  “Not necessarily. Women are the usual objects of love—wonderful and essential objects to most men. Women have the power of reminding ordinary men that love exists. That’s as God intended it to be. But as priests, Frank, we are moved by another power—not the physical accidents of love, but Love itself.”

  They were walking again now. Frank Lyons, struggling to keep pace with Steve’s longer strides, was silent. Inside his narrow rib cage, his lungs and heart were gradually stretching to unaccustomed fullness as Stephen went on:

  “You said back there, Milky, that poets couldn’t tell you what you wanted to know about women. You’re wrong. Poets and artists have the remarkable power of changing love from flesh into idea. El Greco does it in paint; Dante in poetry—yes, and whoever wrote the Litany of the Virgin was flaming with love when he invented those glorious names for her: House of Gold, Morning Star, Mystical Rose. …”

  “Tower of Ivory, Singular Vessel of Devotion,” added Milky, realizing for the first time how beautiful the names were.

  “The artist is always part saint, part proselytizer for the ideal. In the Paradiso, Dante’s love for Beatrice is consummated, not in sweaty grapplings such as we saw tonight on the Common, but in a blinding vision of light. In that vision Beatrice appears to him as a petal of the Sempiternal Rose. And Dante, who had loved her and longed for her all his life, cries out:

  By virtue of love’s power

  From servitude to freedom thou hast drawn me.

  Preserve in me thy pure magnificence,

  So that my spirit, cleansed of all desire,

  May, thanks to thee, be loosened from my body.

  The difficulties of coming back to earth, of refraining from comment that would sound priggish or patronizing, were not lost on Stephen. He saw the dangers of descending into preachment and parable, but the fisherman’s net placed in his hands at ordination (or at birth) had already closed around Frank Lyons. Steve drew him in without a struggle.

  “Is not this the ideal to which we are both dedicated, Frank? Tonight you were reminded of it, if not for the first time, then more powerfully than ever before, by sensual beauty and music. No man is immune to such reminders. Count yourself lucky to have felt them this night. But remember, Frank, that these are the fleshly accidents of love, and not the Love which is our special study and pursuit.”

  Around a bend of the tracks, the lights of the Medford carbarn glinted. Bells clanged. “If we run, we’ll catch the last trolley to Maiden Square,” said Steve. They caught the moving car, swung aboard pantingly. Frank Lyons fell onto the cushion, mopped his forehead, and smiled •weakly at his companion.

  “The long-walk part of the treatment was fine,” he said.

  “Wait till you try the cold shower,” grinned Steve.

  They had a tall orange phosphate, double strength, at Morgan’s Drugstore, and reached the parish house just as the clock on Monaghan’s mantelpiece was striking twelve. At the top of the creaky stairs, Milky held out a frail hand.

  “Thanks, Steve, for helping me over a spot.” There was nothing mawkish about his gratitude.

  Alone in his room, Stephen stripped off his clothes, showered, and sat by the open window of his room to relax and cool off. But now the mixed tensions of the evening began to put in their delayed claim. The spiritual tourniquet, tightly applied for Frank’s benefit, was slowly released; a mortal tide flowed back into Stephen’s limbs and organs, bringing unbearable pain. Andrea Feme’s wonderful shoulders and seductive voice, the sweethearts sportive on the grass of the Common, the lofty (perhaps too lofty) discourse on Love—all these began to tumble and churn in Stephen’s blood stream. A persistent fugue, the theme song from The Only Girl, whirled through his brain:

  When you’re away, dear,

  How weary the lonesome hours!

  How lonely, indeed, the uncompanioned hours of a priest’s life!—hours that most men solaced with common love. All very well to fix one’s gaze upon a petal of the Veritable Rose, but meanwhile, what of the summery earth night and the flowers of here and now?

  Sunshine seems gray, dear!

  The fragrance has left the flow’rs!

  What flowers? Elbow on sill, Stephen gazed out upon Main Street; there, in full bloom under dreary arc lights, he saw a gray stretch of car tracks. Rows of cast steel. Unperfumed flowers of duty and obligation!

  Over the municipal gas tank climbed the pale profile of a new moon. Stephen remembered that moon climbing from another part of the heavens, gazing at another part of the earth. A fête de bal in the gardens of the Conte Falerni, a Roman nobleman. Ghislana, his wife, herself a noble beauty. Stephen remembered her gardenia-fleshed shoulders, bare against green chiffon. He ha
d walked barely thirty yards with her down a formal garden path fringed with ilex. What was he then? A young cleric in minor orders confiding to an older woman (two years older, maybe) his hopes and dreams. She had listened …

  Ever I hear you in seeming,

  Whispering soft love words to me …

  She had looked at him, and her eyes had filled Stephen with knowledge of an unsayable loneliness.

  A thirty-yard walk. An answered look. No more. But now in his celllike room, images of Ghislana Falerni, the only woman who had ever disturbed Stephen’s priestly ideal of love, wove through the melodies of The Only Girl.

  Stephen lay down to sleep. The melodies became a dream. Not a dream of platonic conversings, but of Ghislana Falerni moving toward him unshod across the grass.

  Ah, if I knew ’twere but dreaming

  Ne’er to be!

  From this happy-companioned sleep, Stephen Fermoyle was awakened by the wheels of the five A.M. trolley rattling across the tracks beneath his window.

  CHAPTER 7

  CAPTAIN GAETANO ORSELLI, commander of the Italian cruiser Garibaldi, locked the door of his cabin, spread an armful of newspapers on his bunk, and wept impotent tears of grief and shame.

  Caporetto … Catastrophe on the Isonzo …

  Orselli read the frightful details. Out of an Alpine mist, a mist made denser by clouds of poison gas, the Germans had struck a supposedly impregnable flank of the Italian 2nd Army on October 24, 1917. Within forty-eight hours the break-through had become a streaming rout. Twenty-five divisions of Italians—General Capello’s entire corps—threw down their weapons and fled into the interior of Italy. With drawn pistols, agonized Italian officers tried to stem the flight. But before Generalissimo Cadorna could reorganize his broken lines, the Germans had captured two hundred thousand prisoners, eighteen hundred guns, and millions of rounds of ammunition.