Part 9

A desire for air and solitude, led her towards the Recreation ground. After the hot refectory, sauntering in the silken shade of the old astounding cedars, was delightful quite. In the deserted alleys, the golden blossoms of the censia-trees, unable to resist the sun, littered in perfumed piles the ground, overcoming her before long with a sensation akin to _vertige_. Anxious to find her friend, Laura turned towards her cell.

She found Sister Ursula leaning on her window-ledge all crouched up--like a Duchess on “a First Night.”

“My dear, my dear, the _crowds_!”

“Ursula?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“Perhaps I’ll go, since I’m in the way.”

“Touchy Goose,” Sister Ursula murmured wheeling round with a glance of complex sweetness.

“Ah, Ursula,” Laura sighed, smiling reproachfully at her friend.

She had long almond eyes, one longer and larger than the other, that gave to her narrow, etiolated face, an exalted, mystic air. Her hair, wholly concealed by her full coif, would be inclined to rich copper or chestnut: Indeed, below the pinched and sensitive nostrils, a moustache (so slight as to be scarcely discernible) proved this beyond all controversy to be so. But perhaps the quality and beauty of her hands were her chief distinction.

“Do you believe it would cause an earthquake, if we climbed out, dear little one, upon the leads?” she asked.

“I had forgotten you overlooked the street by leaning out,” Laura answered, sinking fatigued to a little cane armchair.

“Listen, Laura...!”

“This cheering racks my heart....”

“Ah, Astaroth! There went a very ‘swell’ carriage.”

“Perhaps I’ll come back later: It’s less noisy in my cell.”

“Now you’re here, I shall ask you, I think, to whip me.”

“Oh, no....”

“Bad dear Little-One. Dear meek soul,” Sister Ursula softly laughed.

“This maddening cheering,” Laura breathed, rolling tormented eyes about her.

A crucifix, a text: _I would lay Pansies at Jesus’ Feet_, two fresh eggs in a blue paper bag, some ends of string, a breviary, and a birch, were the chamber’s individual, if meagre, contents.

“You used _not_ to have that text, Ursula,” Laura observed, her attention arrested by the preparation of a Cinematograph Company on the parapet of the Cathedral.

The Church had much need indeed of Reformation! The Times were incredibly low: A new crusade ... she ruminated, revolted at the sight of an old man holding dizzily to a stone-winged angel, with a wine-flask at his lips.

“Come, dear, won’t you assist me now to mortify my senses?” Sister Ursula cajoled.

“No, really, no--!--!--!”

“Quite lightly: For I was scourged, by Sister Agnes, but yesterday, with a heavy bunch of keys, head downwards, hanging from a bar.”

“Oh....”

“This morning she sent me those pullets’ eggs. I perfectly was touched by her delicate sweet sympathy.”

Laura gasped.

“It must have hurt you?”

“I assure you I felt nothing--my spirit had travelled so far,” Sister Ursula replied, turning to throw an interested glance at the street.

It was close now upon the critical hour, and the plaudits of the crowd were becoming more and more uproarious, as “favourites” in Public life, and “celebrities” of all sorts, began to arrive in brisk succession at the allotted door of the Cathedral.

“I could almost envy the fleas in the Cardinal’s vestments,” Sister Ursula declared, overcome by the venal desire to see.

Gazing at the friend upon whom she had counted in some disillusion, Laura quietly left her.

The impulse to witness something of the spectacle outside was, nevertheless, infectious, and recollecting that from the grotto-sepulchre in the garden it was not impossible to attain the convent wall, she determined, moved by some wayward instinct, to do so. Frequently, as a child, had she scaled it, to survey the doings of the city streets beyond--the streets, named by the nuns often “Sinward-ho.” Crossing the cloisters, and through old gates crowned by vast fruit-baskets in stone, she followed, feverishly the ivy-masked bricks of the sheltering wall, and was relieved to reach the grotto without encountering anyone. Surrounded by heavy boskage, it marked a spot where, once, long ago, one of the Sisters, it was said, had received the mystic stigmata.... With a feline effort (her feet supported by the Grotto boulders), it needed but a bound to attain an incomparable post of vantage.

Beneath a blaze of bunting, the street seemed paved with heads. “Madonna,” she breathed, as an official on a white horse, its mane stained black, began authoritatively backing his steed into the patient faces of the mob, startling an infant in arms below, to a frantic fit of squalls.

“Just so shall we stand on the Day of Judgment,” she reflected, blinking at the glare.

Street boys vending programmes, ‘Lucky’ horseshoes, Saturnalian emblems--(these for gentlemen only), offering postcards of ‘Geo and Glory,’ etc., wedged their way however where it might have been deemed indeed impossible for anyone to pass.

And _he_, she wondered, her eyes following the wheeling pigeons, alarmed by the recurrent salutes of the signal guns, he must be there already: Under the dome! Restive a little beneath the busy scrutiny, his tongue like the point of a blade....

A burst of cheering seemed to announce the Queen. But no, it was only a lady, with a parasol sewn with diamonds, that was exciting the rah-rahs of the crowd. Followed by mingled cries of “Shame!” “Waste!” and sighs of envy, Madame Wetme was enjoying a belated triumph. And now a brief lull, as a brake containing various delegates and “representatives of English Culture,” rolled by at a stately trot--Lady Alexander, E. V. Lucas, Robert Hichens, Clutton Brock, etc.,--the ensemble the very apotheosis of worn-out _cliché_.

“There’s someone there wot’s got enough heron plumes on her head!” a young girl in the crowd remarked.

And nobody contradicted her.

Then troops and outriders, and at last the Queen.

She was looking charming in a Corinthian chlamyde, in a carriage lined in deep delphinium blue, behind six restive blue roan horses.

Finally, the bride and her father, bowing this way and that....

Cheers.

“Huzzas”--

A hushed suspense.

Below the wall the voice of a beggar arose, persistent, haunting: “For the Love of God.... In the Name of Pity ... of Pity.”

“Of Pity,” she echoed, addressing a frail, wind-sown harebell, blue as the sky: And leaning upon the shattered glass ends, that crowned the wall, she fell to considering the future--Obedience, Solitude--death.

The troubling _valse_ theme from _Dante in Paris_ interrupted her meditations.

How often had they valsed it together, he and she ... sometimes as a two-step...! What souvenirs.... Yousef, Yousef.... Above the Cathedral, the crumbling clouds, had eclipsed the sun. In the intense meridian glare the thronged street seemed even as though half-hypnotised; occasionally only the angle of a parasol would change, or some bored soldier’s legs would give a little. When brusquely, from the belfry, burst a triumphant clash of bells.

Laura caught her breath.

Already?

A shaking of countless handkerchiefs in wild ovation: From roof-tops, and balconies, the air was thick with falling flowers--the bridal pair!

But only for the bridegroom had she eyes.

Oblivious of what she did, she began to beat her hands, until they streamed with blood, against the broken glass ends upon the wall: “Yousef, Yousef, Yousef....”

_July 1921_, _May 1922_.

_Versailles_, _Montreux_, _Florence_.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

CARL VAN VECHTEN, in _The Double Dealer:_ “It is high time that the world should know something of the works of Ronald Firbank. He is the Pierrot of the Minute. _Plus chic que le futurisme_. Aubrey Beardsley in a Rolls-Royce. Sacher-Masoch in Mayfair. ‘_A Rebours’ à la mode._ Aretino in Piccadilly. Jean Cocteau at the Savoy. The Oxford Tradition with a dash of the Paris _bains de vapeurs_.... Firbank plays Picasso’s violin.”

VAINGLORY

A NOVEL

WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY FÉLICIEN ROPS

TIMES:

“A perpetual sparkle.”

OBSERVER:

“An incessant sparkle.”

PALL MALL GAZETTE:

“A very clever book.”

BELFAST WHIG:

“Extraordinary clever.”

NEW WITNESS:

“The author of this book has a gift for trenchant satire ... one cannot help feeling that Mr Firbank must have gone straight to life for some of these people.”

INCLINATIONS

A NOVEL

WITH TWO DRAWINGS BY ALBERT RUTHERSTON (ROTHENSTEIN)

SCOTSMAN:

“The book is pleasant, vivacious and stimulating throughout.”

IRISH TIMES:

“Marked by a certain bizarre lightness of treatment.”

NEW WITNESS:

“The scheme of his new book is novel.”

GLASGOW HERALD:

“Mr Ronald Firbank’s fiction bears a strong resemblance to the work of the Futurists in painting.”

TIMES:

“There is humour.”

HARROGATE HERALD:

“A quiet vein of humour.”

FREEMAN’S JOURNAL:

“Pleasant and clever, _Inclinations_ is a book that won’t tax the patience of any reader.”

NEW STATESMAN:

“The result is amusing.”

VALMOUTH

A NOVEL

WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY AUGUSTUS JOHN

TIMES:

“All the characters are bizarre--as bizarre as the style.”

LONDON MERCURY:

“He has a certain gift for inconsequence and highly etherealised frivolity.”

SCOTSMAN:

“There is no particular plot.”

IRISH LIFE:

“It is a weird medley of Beardsleyesque chatter.”

LAND AND WATER:

“This is the real decadence: Huysmans and his friends were muscular giants, playing at bizarre senility, compared with Mr Firbank.”

LIVERPOOL POST:

“Had Shelley written nothing but _Julian and Maddalo_ and _The Cenci_, we might have called Mr Firbank a prose Shelley.”

DAILY NEWS:

“Mr Firbank, who can write really witty nonsense.”

ATHENÆUM:

“But Mr Firbank has talents--a gift of style, a capacity to write dialogue, an appreciation of the beautiful and the absurd. With such gifts he might produce a real comedy of manners. It is to be hoped that he will.”

THE PRINCESS ZOUBAROFF

A COMEDY

WITH A FRONTISPIECE AND DECORATION BY MICHEL SEVIER

LIVERPOOL POST AND MERCURY:

“In taking to play-writing he has obviously done the right thing. _The Princess Zoubaroff_ is artificial comedy of the uncommonly successful sort.... The brilliancy, suavity and vim of the dialogue.... No present-day social-satirist has parodied more cruelly the elegant verbal affectations, the malicious chatter and fashionable slang that passes for wit and wisdom in Mayfair.”

SPECTATOR:

“Mr Firbank has an extraordinary knack of writing dialogue, and his entirely odious people move and breathe and are completely real. Perhaps some day Mr Firbank will give us a comedy that is not all satire; when he does it might prove an exceedingly brilliant acting play.”

OUTLOOK:

“Possibly someone familiar with the English colony at Florence would regard it as a _roman à clef_.”

MANCHESTER GUARDIAN:

“He is a portent ... a black sheep among white ones....”

TIMES:

“A continuous sparkle of crisp dialogue.”

DAILY EXPRESS:

“Mr Firbank’s endeavours to be wicked are almost pathetic.... Young men with side-whiskers and maids in Assyrian jumpers are raving about Mr Firbank’s audacities....”

ODETTE

A FAIRY TALE FOR WEARY PEOPLE

WITH FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALBERT BUHRER

GLASGOW HERALD:

“The short story here published reveals a delicate descriptive power, a fine perception of the value of colour, and that restraint which is indispensable to the making of a good short story.”

CAPRICE

A NOVEL

WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY AUGUSTUS JOHN

_Out of Print._

SANTAL

OBSERVER:

“Mr Firbank always had a sense of style and a feeling for the mannered beauty of arranged words.... In _Santal_ the passion for beautiful writing is still evident, but it is used with greater simplicity to achieve an effect such as a more reticent Pierre Loti might manage.... Mr Firbank has emotion rather than passion, and his East is viewed through a slight haze of sentiment; but it is a real country, and has its own spiritual excitements.”

GLASGOW EVENING NEWS:

“Mr Firbank has acquired a reputation as a stylist which this work will enhance. Within its brief compass there is all the glamour, the colour, the heat, the smells, the vileness, the beauty, and the fervour of Islam. It is the sort of thing that Loti does on a grander scale, and, like Loti, Mr Firbank is an adept at the creation of atmosphere. He is guilty of a few affectations perhaps, but these are like precious flaws in a wondrous Turkish carpet--they are lost in the beauty of the design as a whole.”

LIVERPOOL DAILY POST:

“Mr Ronald Firbank has always had his own manner, and a very modish one. In _Santal_ the elegance, almost dandyism, of his style has given just a faint hint of flippancy to a tale in itself very dignified, and full of an unexpected warmth and delicacy of feeling. It is a _nouvelle_--who could call a thing of such distinction a long short story?--with the vivid richly-coloured background of the East.... Something there is, too, of irony and detachment, as though the Mr Firbank of _Valmouth_ and of _The Princess Zoubaroff_ were secretly smiling a little cynically at his unexpected tumble into sentiment.”

SOUTHPORT GUARDIAN:

“The incense of Santal pervades the book throughout. Mr Firbank is a discriminating artist; he has an exotic sense of words and of colour. Seldom have we met in so short a space so intense a characterisation of pilgrimage or so vivid a picture of the Algerian scene.”

TIMES:

“Mr Firbank here drops his artificiality and gives a vividly real study of an Eastern city ... a vivid glimpse of a world strange--to a European--but convincingly true.”

_IN PREPARATION_

A STUDY OF WEST INDIAN LIFE AND MANNERS

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The name by which the future saint was sometimes called among her friends.

[2] Always a humiliating recollection with her in after years. _Vide_: ‘Confessions.’

[3] _Winds_, pronounced as we’re told, “in poetry.”

[4] The Capital of Pisuerga.

[5] The recollection of this was never quite forgotten.

[6] _Vide_ Botticelli.

[7] In Pisuerga compliments are apt to rival in this respect those of the ardent South.

[8] The missing articles were:--

5 chasubles. A relic-casket in lapis and diamonds, containing the Tongue of St Thelma. 4¾ yards of black lace, said to have “belonged” to the Madonna.

[9] Although the account of Princess Elsie’s arrival in Kairoulla is signed “Green Jersey,” it seems not unlikely that “Eva Schnerb” herself was the reporter on this eventful occasion.

[10] The Théâtre Diana; a Music Hall dedicated to Spanish Zarzuelas and Operettes. It enjoyed a somewhat doubtful reputation.

[11] The Hon. ‘Eddy’ Monteith had succumbed: the shock received by meeting a jackal while composing a sonnet had been too much for him. His tomb is in the Vale of Akko, beside the River Dis. Alas, for the _triste_ obscurity of his end!

[12] Author of _In the Dusk of the Dawn_.

[Transcriber’s Note:

Obvious printer errors corrected silently.

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.]

End of Project Gutenberg's The Flower Beneath the Foot, by Ronald Firbank