The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

  Chancellor Speed took it upon himself to utter the forthright speech the Cardinal wanted to hear. “The journey will be strenuous, and Your Eminence will probably arrive late. You may even be exposed to the Camerlengo’s derision. But these painful facts do not, in my opinion, outweigh your obligation—both to your sacred office and twenty million Americans—to make the journey.”

  “Brave words, Michael.” Irony masked Glennon’s appreciation of his Chancellor’s honesty. “Now that you’ve pointed out my duty, can you devise some mode of getting me to Rome? Shall I fly through the air in a Zeppelin or be translated as a pure spirit to the Eternal City?”

  “Seagoing vessels still sail from Boston, Your Eminence.” Mike Speed opened his Globe and turned to the shipping page. “Outbound steamers … let’s see. The Norumbega, flagship of the Atlantic Line, sails tomorrow at noon.”

  “I know the boat,” snapped Glennon. “’Tis little better than a raft. Thirteen days to Naples. No, thank you, Michael. If I must be late, I prefer to be late in comfort.”

  The Chancellor lifted humorous-regretful eyes. “Too bad you missed the Stromboli. She sailed at eight-thirty this morning.”

  Through a cottony fog Stephen heard a familiar name. “The Stromboli? That’s Orselli’s new ship.”

  “And who,” asked Glennon, “might Orselli be?”

  “An old friend of mine. He just broke the Atlantic record—ten days from Naples to Boston.”

  “Ten days?” Hope kindled the Cardinal’s voice; reality doused it. “Ah well, he’s sailed already.”

  Stephen got his brain turning at three-quarter speed. “If we sent Orselli a wireless—he might hold the Stromboli for Your Eminence.

  “Has a captain the authority to do that?” asked Glennon (significantly, he stressed the word “authority”).

  “We can ask him.” Stephen was on his feet. “Shall I try?”

  A gambler’s chance that an American cardinal might reach a conclave in time brought Glennon up fighting. “Try,” he urged. “Try with everything you’ve got, Stephen. Beg your friend Orselli to stand by. No need for him to turn back—we’ll catch up with him somehow.”

  The prospect of outfacing Giacobbi in conclave lifted Glennon to field-marshal stature. He spun to his aides. “You, Mike, take care of my credentials and diplomatic passport. Get five thousand cash and a letter of credit from the bank. Vincent, pack my regalia in a single trunk. Cappa magna, rochet, and mozzetta are all I’ll need. I can borrow the rest from Merry del Val. Stephen, stick to that phone till you get a wireless through to the Stromboli. Then pack a bag for yourself. I’m taking you with me to Rome as my conclavist.”

  Five hours later—five hours of the most brutal tension that Stephen had ever endured—the U. S. revenue cutter Dolbear drew alongside the Stromboli as she idled off the tip of Cape Cod. From the deck of the Coast-Guard cutter, skippered by Lieutenant Commander “Cuffy” Mc-Crear (whose brother was a curate in West Newton), the side of the Stromboli sheered upward like a portholed cliff. Before Glennon could ask, “How’ll we ever make it?” a boom swung outward from the top of the cliff, and a bo’sun’s chair came plummeting down like a spider on a slender thread.

  Glennon gingerly inspected the apparatus. “A practical-looking device,” he said. “Who goes up first?”

  “By marine usage,” advised Lieutenant Commander McCrear, “the highest in command is the last one off the ship.”

  “I like your sea rules,” said Glennon. “But wouldn’t it save time if”—he looked appealingly at Stephen—”if we went up together?”

  And that was the way they went, the Cardinal sitting like a great bald-headed baby in Stephen’s lap as the bo’sun’s chair swung over the Dolbear’s side and was reeled skyward by an electric winch “like a fish in a basket,” as Glennon said.

  Captain Orselli greeted them at the companionway. “Furfantino” he exclaimed, wringing Stephen’s hand. “Five days I wait in Boston to see you, then on the sixth you have a sudden whim.” Orselli surveyed Stephen’s gaunt pallor. “What have you been doing to yourself? No matter. Our Mediterranean sun will cure it.”

  The Captain’s gold-embroidered hat came off in a sweeping arc when Stephen presented him to the Cardinal. “Honored to have you aboard, Eminentissime.” Glennon extended his hand in frank gratitude. “You are most kind to stand by for us, Captain.” As Orselli bent to kiss the Cardinal’s ring, His Eminence forestalled that gesture of respect by twisting the diamond-crusted sapphire from his finger and thrusting it into Orselli’s hand.

  “A token of my appreciation, Captain Orselli. The Holy Father himself shall hear of your graciousness to the Archdiocese of Boston.”

  The Florentine’s experienced eye told him that the Cardinal’s ring was the most magnificent piece of jewelry he could ever hope to own. He murmured an astonished, “Thank you, Eminent Lord,” then glancing up from the princely sapphire, his eye caught Stephen’s. Neither the Captain nor the priest thought it fitting to share their private joke with the Cardinal.

  TO MAKE UP for lost time, Orselli really tested the Stromboli’s power plant. Twenty-four hours off Cape Cod the liner’s patent log recorded the record-breaking distance of 661 nautical miles. To the Cardinal’s query, “Do you think we’ll reach the conclave in time?” Orselli confidently replied: “Either Your Eminence will cast a vote in the Sistine Chapel, or the Stromboli will burst a boiler.”

  That was before the storm struck.

  An Atlantic gale shrieking out of the northeast quadrant of the compass buffeted Orselli’s nine-hundred-foot vessel like a fisherman’s dory. Mountainous combers piled across the Stromboli’s bow, their foamy crests flecking the Captain’s beard with spume as he sought an opening through the impenetrable windwall. A merciless shipmaster, Orselli was taking no unnecessary chances. Even half speed meant risking the Stromboli’s spine under the weight of those giant rollers. Moreover, the freezing spray on his beard suggested icebergs in the vicinity. Reluctantly Orselli set the bridge controls at “slow,” gulped black coffee, and decided to enjoy the ordeal by hurricane.

  He was confident that his new ship would ride out the storm. But every wallow and side slip of the great liner threatened the fulfillment of the Florentine’s pledge. Should the hurricane last more than twenty-four hours, the Stromboli would steam into Naples too late. Therefore, the Captain fumed into his freezing beard and blasphemed the luck that was robbing his vessel of three hundred miles a day.

  An officer in yellow oilskins handed Orselli a weather report: “Gales of hurricane velocity expected to continue for the next forty-eight hours. Icebergs reported south of fiftieth latitude. Clear and calm east of Azores.”

  Orselli tore the report into four pieces and threw them, one for each quarter of the compass, into the air. “What is this nonsense—‘calm east of Azores’?” he cried. “East of purgatory it is calm too, no doubt. Does that help us in this inferno of wind and iceberg?” A wave, ominous as a Dore engraving, rose off his port quarter. “Aiee—ee! Un cavallone!”

  Up the cliff of a gigantic sea the Stromboli climbed. Orselli felt his ship obeying the laws of buoyancy her designers had built into her. Up, up she went like a steel kite. At the ridge of a wave, just short of the sky, she flattened out and hung suspended in middle air while her four bronze propellers, indecently exposed, spun against nothingness. A terrible shiver racked the vessel until her propellers engaged the water again. Then she plunged hissingly downward, nose into the trough of the wave, just as her designers had planned.

  The performance of his ship filled Orselli with tenderness. “Che bella cosa! You beautiful thing,” he murmured. “A creature so well made deserves to be well manned.” For the next twenty-four hours, watch in, watch out, he remained on the bridge. So engrossing were his attentions, so sensitive her replies, that Orselli forgot he had a Cardinal on board. Only when the hurricane had cracked its cheeks and skulked away exhausted did Orselli discover that his ship was two days behind schedule on its
pilgrimage to Rome.

  Race as he might, not more than one of those days could ever be recaptured.

  THE HURRICANE’S ILL WIND blew the grief from Stephen’s heart. For three days he lay in his cabin, physically unable to stand. During an earlier phase of the blow he had managed to open the door between Glennon’s stateroom and his own, but a forlorn wave of the Cardinal’s hand told him that His Eminence was past caring for secretarial service. Back in his own bunk, Stephen surrendered to the torments of seasickness—and remembrance.

  Images lurched past like figures in a migraine dream: Mona writhing in the filthy room at 5 Stanhope Lane; sheeted on the delivery table; washed and decently laid out in her casket. The despairing hunch of Din’s shoulders at the cemetery; the rosary beads dangling from Celia’s numbed hands—round and round whirled the fantasies on a carrousel of anguish. Above the shrieking wind rose mixed echoes of accusation and remorse: Take me out of here, Stevie … A nickel for St. Anthony … I advise immediate termination of labor … foetus humani abortum procuraverint … Trust me once more, Monny.

  Most heartily sorry.

  While the cabin bounced like a cube tumbling down a rocky hillside, Stephen clung to his berth, sick beyond sorrowing. To pray, weep, or even groan was impossible. Physical wretchedness filled him.

  Odors assailed the membranes of memory: the carbolic stench of Gussie Lasquez’s stairway; the pomade on Gongaro’s hair; carnations withering in the funeral wreaths on Mona’s casket; the closet staleness of Celia’s ratty fur collar as she clung to him at the open grave—these surged up from his diaphragm in awful convulsions. Misery emptied him.

  When the storm had spent itself, Stephen came on deck more haggard-green than ever. But violence of grief had spent itself too, and he was ready to let sun and sea caress him with forgetfulness. Dozing in a deck chair under a blue-silk sky, Stephen’s strength and spirits rose. The Strombo’s prow cut the calm sea like a diamond, and as the lengthening wake healed the scar—first with foam, then in seamless peace—Stephen felt his own wounds healing, too.

  His principal chore was to keep Glennon occupied—a task that would have taxed the resources of an entertainment bureau and the patience of a governess handling a refractory child. Anxiety about getting to the conclave had turned Glennon’s soul into a weathervane pivoting on pure mercury: ceaselessly he boxed the emotional compass with fresh tantrums, and his fretting distrust of Giacobbi bordered on the irrational. Twenty times a day he would teeter along the edge of his monomania, then slip into a tirade against the Sicilian whom he regarded as the source of all his woes.

  To check these outbursts, Stephen laid out a full-time program. Every morning he assisted Glennon at Mass in the StromboWs exquisite little chapel. After breakfast they would promenade on the sun deck or play a game of shuffleboard to the accompaniment of Glennon’s nervous calculations about the speed of the ship. Then came a session of coaching the Cardinal in Italian—a language that he had once used with fluency but had long neglected. Now he needed conversational practice—“a brushing-up,” as he put it, “so that I won’t trip over any dangling participles when I speak my mind to Giacobbi.”

  Still harping on that string, thought Stephen. Was Glennon a prey to fantasies, or was Giacobbi really an ogre? Stephen decided to find out. One morning as they strolled on the promenade deck, he ventured to ask:

  “What do you think lies behind Giacobbi’s hostility?”

  The Cardinal launched into a rationalized explanation. “I could say that the Lord Camerlengo has a personal grudge against me—and it’s true enough, he has. The beginnings of the grudge go back to the reign of Leo XIII, when we were both domestic prelates in that great pontiffs household. Temperamentally, Giacobbi and I never liked each other. He didn’t care for my piano-playing, and I could never stomach his fondness for parrots.”

  “Parrots?”

  “Yes, his rooms were full of nasty birds, hook-nosed like himself, always screaming in some outlandish dialect—Sicilian probably. Some people found it amusing, but my observation about parrot lovers is that they’re usually queer birds themselves.”

  Stephen smiled. “Something more important than piano-playing and parrots must have come between you.”

  “Numberless things came between us. My being an American irked Giacobbi. He resented the fact that God had blessed the United States, His newest plantation in the West, with so much wealth and vigor. To put it in a sentence, Giacobbi is one of those Italians who have run the Church so long they think it belongs to them.”

  Glennon went off on a fresh tack: “Giacobbi was jealous of the warm friendship between Merry del Val and myself. How it chafed him when Merry and I would return from a tramping holiday through the Alban Hills! And what peasant grimaces he would make when he heard us playing a Bach toccata arrangement for four hands!” Glennon paused to relish the memory of his old adversary’s discomfiture. “But the iron really entered Giacobbi’s soul one day when Pius X smiled paternally at a little game called mandarino that Merry and I used to play.”

  “Mandarino? What kind of game is that?”

  “Merry and I invented it ourselves. It was played with four small oranges, or mandarini, that we’d toss back and forth at each other, keeping them in the air while we capped quotations from Horace.” Glennon made juggler motions with imaginary oranges and started to recite a verse:

  “Quis gracilis puer, perfusus—” As the Cardinal’s memory failed him, Stephen completed the line:

  “Liquidus odoribus, urget te, Pyrrha, in multa rasa …”

  Glennon glanced at his secretary in surprise. “I didn’t know you were a Horatian, Father.”

  “I’m one of Brother Felix’s boys,” said Stephen.

  “Ah, yes. Brother Felix had a passion for Horace, too.” Promptly Glennon went back to his gloatings. “Once we invited Giacobbi to play with us. Ha-ha—you should have seen him standing there—ho-ho—with his mouth empty—ho-ha—and his hands”—Glennon was a gelatine of laughter—“and his hands full of oranges—ha-ha-ha!”

  “No wonder he doesn’t like you,” said Stephen. “But there’s one thing I still don’t understand. If the Cardinal Camerlengo is such a boor, how did he get on in the Church?”

  “He got on,” said Glennon, “because no matter what you may think of him personally, he happens to be one of the shrewdest men in the service of Rome. His record as papal Secretary of State proves—and I admit it freely—that Giacobbi possesses the peculiarly Italian gift of combinazione—a mixture of ambush and chicane best known to diplomats. Yes, my boy, the Camerlengo knows European diplomacy as you know the Lord’s Prayer. How the subtle refinements of march and countermarch dwell in his thick body I can’t say. But there they are.”

  Having enjoyed his laugh and his bit of reminiscence, Glennon turned gloomy. “Perhaps God in His infinite wisdom has willed that I shall never cast my vote at a papal election. Nevertheless, I propose to find out exactly what His intentions are in the matter.”

  Then came the weathervane shift, the wheedling-voiced coda: “Like a good lad now, Stephen, run up to the bridge and ask the Captain if he can’t make the ship go a bit faster.”

  FROM Glennon’s tyranny Stephen sometimes escaped to Orselli’s sun deck for a chat and a game of Mühle. A change had taken place in Orselli; he was quieter, less eruptive. Grieving for his country’s postwar misfortunes (“Italy is a bootblack, an organ-grinder among nations,” he said mournfully), Orselli had lost much of his volcanic exuberance. Yet he had gained a positive magnetism thereby. The cells of his personality were charged with a profounder current, and the emotional exchange between Stephen and himself crackled with new intensity.

  Orselli’s Don Juanism, once the chief aspect of his character, seemed to have vanished; apparently he no longer felt the need to assert his maleness in terms of high-seas dalliance. At fifty, the Captain was still teeming with the energy that has never found a better name than love, but for some reason not clear to Stephen at
first, Orselli chose not to auction his charms among the female passengers—many of them attractive—who made the usual bids for attention. Though his stargazing act was still a feature of the voyage, and though he brought his usual professional zest to the performance, he showed almost nothing of old conquistador technique.

  It was after a dullish stargazing party that Stephen and Orselli tramped the veranda fronting the Captain’s quarters. From the Azores came flowering offshore airs; the sky, a tabard of midnight blue, was blazoned with spring constellations. On so perfect a stage Orselli might have strummed dolcemente on any of a dozen responsive lyres; instead he paced the deck with Stephen and chafed at a cigar while delivering himself of a diatribe against starshine, women passengers, and the unhappy lot of a shipmaster.

  “Astronomy is a science, not an aphrodisiac,” he raged. “How many times can one repeat the story of Cassiopeia”—Orselli’s cigar indicated an irregular W in the northern sky—“and always contrive to make her a queen in a cosmic beauty contest? What are the facts about Cassiopeia? She—it, I mean—is a vernal constellation of five visible stars, one of which is a sign to navigators because it forms part of the equinoctial colure. But do these languishing creatures with ermine draped over their naked shoulders—do they care about such matters?” The Captain snorted like a disillusioned bull seal. “No, they must have a tale of celestial bawdry, a titillating bit for the boudoir. And how they quiver deliciously when I serve it up to them!”

  Orselli veered into the confessional. “My way of life wearies me, Stephen. In the midst of these scented seductions I am lonely.” He spat out his disgust. “Had Casanova been master of a luxury liner, he would have entered a monastery at twenty-nine.”

  Stephen recognized the ferment churning in Orselli—the scurf of guilt and self-reproach that rises, sooner or later, in every libertine soul. Whether it was sentimental froth or the living yeast of conscience, Stephen had no way of telling. As a priest and friend he undertook to investigate.