THE CARDINALESSA
One day, as I was travelling through the island by rail, I lunched in the
restaurant-car and divided my attention between the colazione, the view
and the other lunchers.
At the table in front of me sat three gentlemen; beyond them, at a
separate table, sat a distinguished-looking lady, quietly but well
dressed in foamy white musliny stuff, with a good deal of lace and a few
touches of pale green. She had a lovely hat and a veil, which she wore
in such a way that I thought how well she would look in a motor-car. She
did not appear to be much over thirty, and she was alone except that she
had a little dog, whom she fed from her plate and who was evidently very
fond of her. She was not strictly beautiful, her face depended for its
charm more on its expression than on the regularity of its features, but
there was about her a certain indescribable combination of dignity and
vivacity that was curiously attractive, and that soon attracted the three
gentlemen, who, I presently became aware, had entered into conversation
with her. Possibly they had asked the waiter to introduce them while I
was looking out of the window. Certainly they cannot have met her
before, because I heard them ask her her nationality, and she told them
that her father was an Italian, a native of Rome, and that her mother was
French. And where was she going? To some place whose name I did not
catch. Then she must change at the junction. Yes, but there would be no
difficulty because she was accustomed to travelling, she had travelled in
China, India, Egypt and America. No doubt she was gifted by nature with
that happy temperament which enables its possessor to make friends
easily, and her extensive travels had provided opportunities for its
cultivation. I supposed the three gentlemen to be accountants or
advocates or perhaps engineers; but I thought from her manner that she
would have been just as much at her ease if they had been carabinieri. I
heard her tell them she was twenty-two; she must have been very young
when she began her travels.
While the waiter was making out our bills, one of the gentlemen begged
her to grant him a favour. She smiled in her frank open way as an
encouragement to him to name it, and he declared that he should consider
it an honour if she would permit him to pay for her luncheon. The lady
accepted his generosity, and granted his request with a smile of such
queenly condescension that I had a vision of great Elizabeth stepping
upon Raleigh's cloak.
Presently this gentleman went and sat by himself at a table for two and
the lady joined him. This appeared to me a little odd; he might just as
well have sat at her table, or have invited her to sit at his with the
other two gentlemen, there was room and it would have been less marked.
But they seemed to prefer to start a little colony of their own, as it
were, on neutral ground. The gentleman made another proposal: A glass of
wine? With pleasure. So the waiter brought it, and then the lady
accepted a cigarette.
At the junction the lady and the gentleman both got out, and I saw him
help her into her train, which started first for the place whose name I
had not caught. Then he got into his train, which was labelled
"Castellinaria," and I went on without changing. A few days later,
however, I returned to the junction, changed there and followed the
accountant to Castellinaria, where I was going to see my friend Antonio,
who happened to be engaged there on an engineering job. In the evening I
told him about the lady in the restaurant-car. He laughed and said:
"But this lady is a particular friend of mine. She is often here, she
returned two days ago and told me all this herself, only last night. If
you would like to make her acquaintance I will take you to see her."
So we went to her hotel, which was not the Albergo della Madonna. She
received us in her bedroom, for which she apologised charmingly--so
charmingly as to make it appear the most natural thing in the world to be
received by her in her bedroom. She remembered seeing me in the train,
and begged me to sit down. She had a visitor--a gentleman. It was the
gentleman who had paid for her luncheon in the restaurant-car. I was
introduced, and he was, as I had supposed, an accountant. The lady was
less elaborately clad than on the occasion of our previous meeting. Just
as her other costume was precisely what it should have been for a
restaurant-car, so this was precisely adapted to her present
surroundings. She evidently understood dress. And very pretty it was to
see her busying herself about the room, entertaining her guests and
playing with her little dog. He was not the only little dog she had ever
had. Her previous companion, who had been given her by a Neapolitan
gentleman, died, and she wept for six weeks and was inconsolable until
another friend gave her this one. She thought first of calling him
Vesuvio, which was the name of his predecessor, but could not bring
herself to do so. Then she had the inspiration to call him Etna, which
suited him better, because he was a trifle bigger; it was also a kind of
complimentary reference to her first love. While she told us this she
was making coffee with a spirit lamp on the chest of drawers. She had a
speciality for making coffee, and really it was quite drinkable.
She gave us the story of her life. She was the niece of a cardinal, in
whose person were accumulated all the apostolic virtues, and her mother
was a French lady of noble birth and almost incredible beauty, who, when
Mary, or Mery as she prefers to write it, was about two months old,
married the cardinal's coachman and had eleven more children. When one
draws a conclusion from insufficient data, it is always satisfactory to
discover, as one too seldom does, that one was right. I had been right
about the gentleman being an accountant, and here I was right again in my
surmise that the lady was exceptionally highly connected, so highly that
one could overlook her mother's mesalliance with the coachman. Her uncle
was only a bishop at the time of her birth, he became a cardinal soon
after Mery's mother married the coachman, and then he forced the coachman
to legitimise Mery, and in this way the coachman became Mery's legal
father; and all this was part of a scheme to accelerate the
ecclesiastical preferment of her uncle. Ah! but he was an ambitious man
and aspired to the throne of S. Peter. His scheme failed, however, owing
to the wicked intrigues of the Jesuits.
Parts of this might have borne, I do not say amplification, for it was
quite long enough, but a word or two of elucidation. I have no doubt
Mery would have been quite ready to explain everything, for she had
nothing to conceal and the subject would have done as well as any other
to display her feminine charm, but I did not interrupt, because I have
observed that when a thorough woman of business undertakes to elucidate a
point of law, she does it so much in the manner of Mrs. Nickleby that she
not infrequently leaves it more obscure than she finds it. Mery did not
expressly say she was a woman of business, she, in fact, disclaimed any
such pretension, but she did it with a delightful mock modesty that
forbade us to take her words literally.
No expense was spared over Mery's education. She was sent to a convent
at Marseilles and the nuns were very kind to her, not because of her
ecclesiastical connection, but because they were holy women with large
and noble hearts. Before her education was completed, however, she was
sent for to return home, and oh, what a home it was! Her mother's health
had broken down because the cardinal beat her, her legal father drank
instead of protecting his wife, the younger children were uncared-for and
the elder children, though they were growing up, had not Mery's business
capacity and powers of management. She put her shoulder to the wheel,
did the marketing, the cooking and the cleaning; she washed and mended
the children's clothes and saw to everything. She hated the life, but
woman was born to suffer and she did her duty.
In time her next sister married a music-hall singer--I should say a
dramatic artist. Mery, who was now entering upon the heyday of her youth
and beauty, was naturally introduced to the friends of her sister's
husband. Every man in the company fell in love with her; all the
bachelors proposed, and without her natural firmness, reinforced by the
teaching of the holy nuns, she could scarcely have escaped matrimony.
There was another thing that helped to save her--she was waiting for her
anima gemella. I may here say that her anima gemella has not yet crossed
her path and that her real age is twenty-seven. She told us this in
confidence and it is not to go any further. For people in
restaurant-cars she is any age she thinks proper at the moment, they do
not matter, but she will never deceive her friends.
Her sister's husband was a man of real insight; he divined that Mery was
a heaven-inspired dancer, and devoted himself to the development of her
genius. She did not say he had taught her to dance; she said he
encouraged and developed her natural genius for dancing. She made her
debut with a success which the newspapers declared to be even more
"phenomenal" than that which attends the debut of every artist.
Engagements followed, and soon she was dancing practically all over the
globe, creating a furore wherever she went and leaving the younger
children's socks to wash and darn themselves. Her mother was too ill and
her legal father too drunk to know what she was doing or where she was
doing it, but His Eminence heard and was so much scandalised that when
she danced into the Eternal City the doors of the Vatican were closed to
her. Cardinals are delightful men, most of them--and Mery knows because
she is on terms of intimacy with every member of the College--but too
frequently they have a fault; they do not understand the artistic
temperament. Nevertheless, if her uncle could have heard the cheers that
greeted her in Shanghai and New York, and the encores that called her
back in Cairo and Calcutta, if he could have seen the flowers that choked
the wheels of her carriage in St. Petersburg and the diamonds that were
showered upon her in Brazil, even his commonplace heart must have been
moved.
She did not dance for us because, it seems, they do not dance when they
are resting, which was perhaps the psychological reason, but there was
also a geographical reason in the want of space, for the room was small
and contained, besides Mery and Etna in one arm-chair, another arm-chair
and two ordinary chairs occupied by her visitors; also there was the
chest of drawers on which she had made the coffee and all such other
articles of furniture as one usually sees in a hotel bedroom, including
two beds. The extra bed was there because Mery was, she confessed it, of
luxurious habits and in the hot weather liked to be able to change and
finish the night in a cool bed.
Here there came a pause, not that she was exhausted, but something had
happened about the little dog, who required attention. When Etna's
business had been settled I thought it might be tactful if I suspended
the inconvenience, as they say, so I asked Antonio whether we ought not
to go and we begged leave to retire. She wished us good night in her
frank, open way, thanked me for my visit, inquired how long I was staying
in the town and concluded with the hope that I would call again, she
never went out, so I should be sure to find her at any time. It should
not be Addio, it should be Arrivederci.
There are few places where I am more at home than I am in Castellinaria,
but as I had come there this time expressly to see Antonio he considered
it his duty to look after me; he was engaged next day, however, so he
deputed two of his friends to amuse me, and they invited me to come for a
drive to the lighthouse. On the way, one of them said:
"And so Antonio took you yesterday to pass an intellectual evening with
the cardinalessa."
"Yes," I replied. "What a charming woman and what a strange life!"
They agreed, somewhat coldly as it seemed to me, and they rather markedly
refrained from developing the subject I had offered them; but they
proposed a counter subject. In a few days it would be Mery's onomastico
and they were going to send flowers. I should be in Palermo, would not I
send her a message on a picture post-card? Of course I would. So
between us we composed it:--
Auguri per l' onomastico. Ringraziamenti per la serata intellettuale
e per il caffe. Saluti--non piu, per timore di ingelosire nostro
amico Antonio.
Devotissimo suo Enrico. {183}
This was the address:--
ALL' EMINENTISSIMA CARDINALESSA,
MERY SO-AND-SO,
ALBERGO DELL' ALLEGRIA,
CASTELLINARIA.
I chose a card with a picture of St. Peter's; this seemed more
appropriate than una ballerina qualunque, which I might have had for the
same money, because her onomastico was the 8th September, the birthday of
the Madonna, and it was her uncle who had given her the name of Mery and
had himself baptised her.
I left Castellinaria next day with the card in my pocket ready to be
posted on the 7th September, and went to Palermo, where I know a young
doctor. I told him all about it and showed him the post-card. When he
saw Mery's real name he burst out laughing.
"Oh! that woman! Why, I know her quite well. She was here with a friend
of mine, who asked me to attend her professionally--I mean in my
professional capacity. Oh! nothing serious, but we had to communicate
with her people and I know all about her. She is not a normal woman. Of
course, that rigmarole about the cardinal is all nonsense. She is the
daughter of a fisherman of Siracusa. She did dance here once for a few
nights, but only at the Biondo, and no one noticed her, she was in one of
the back rows of the ballet. Did they tell you why she returned to
Castellinaria?"
They had said nothing about it, and my doctor, not being a friend of
Antonio and therefore not bound by any ties of omerta, gave me an account
of it.
It happened a few months previously: Mery was living in Palermo in a
hotel, and her room had a balcony; the next balcony belonged to a room
occupied by a young lady and her family, and the young lady was engaged
to an officer. One day Etna strayed on to the neighbouring balcony and
behaved in a manner that displeased the young lady whose betrothed
complained to the proprietor and Mery was requested to leave. She, of
course, saw that all this about her dog was merely a casus belli
concealing a conspiracy to insult her, and indignantly refused to go.
Next day, while the officer was sitting with his friends outside his
usual caffe, Mery happened to pass on her way to buy a stamp and post a
letter. She spoke to the officer, saying:
"You think a lot of yourself, don't you?"
The officer requested her not to address him, whereupon, taking the law
into her own hands, she went up to him and made a hole in her manners by
scratching his face. A crowd began to collect. Mery permitted herself
the use of an expression. It was a Sicilian word, my doctor told me what
it was and also its meaning; it appeared to me rather silly than
offensive, but he assured me that it is never used except by people of
the very lowest class. Mery then made more holes in her manners,
reducing them to the condition of one of her father's fishing-nets, and
was attempting to do the same with the officer's face when the crowd
interfered; Mery was hissed and handed over to the police, who prepared
her papers, took her to the railway station and turned her out of the
town.
Incidents such as this, by showing Mery that Sicily is no longer being
misgoverned by foreigners, may in time, perhaps, teach her not to
distrust professional justice. They also may in time, perhaps, teach
travellers not to trust to conclusions based upon insufficient data about
distinguished-looking ladies in restaurant-cars.
But I sent her the post-card all the same.