The Turquoise Cup, and, the Desert — A Closer Reading

(0 User reviews) 53

In Category - Classic Romance

Authors: Smith, Arthur Cosslett, 1852-1926 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2004 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Love stories; Sahara -- Fiction; Cardinals -- Fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 30,818

Reading time 134 min

Text sections 3

This digital edition of The Turquoise Cup, and, the Desert — A Closer Reading is described by source-level measurements including 30,818 words, 2 hr 14 min estimated reading time, and 3 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 13.5 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Love stories,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #10608

Two novellas contrasting a cardinal's refined Roman life with a caravan master's desert journey. Smith's precise diction and dialogue reveal character through small gestures—a pigeon's wink, a camel's load—without moralizing.

Editorial Edition Score 4.5/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg10608

Read the Text

There was a certain quality in the earl's voice--that quiet, even note of sincerity which quells riots, which quiets horses, which leads forlorn hopes, and the well-trained ear of the cardinal recognized it.

"Pietro," he said to the servant who answered the bell, "I am going out. My hat and stick. I will go a little way with you, my lord."

They went down the broad stairs together, and the earl noticed, for the first time, that his companion limped.

"No," said the cardinal; "the indiscretion of youth. I was with Garibaldi and caught a bullet."

"Take my arm," said the earl.

"Willingly," said the cardinal, "since I know that you will bring me into the presence of a woman worth seeing; a woman who can compel a peer of England to meditate a theft."

"How do you know that?" exclaimed the earl; and he stopped so abruptly that the cardinal put his free hand against his companion's breast to right himself.

"Because," said the cardinal, "I saw your face when you said good-by to me. It was not a pleasant face."

They went on silently and soon they came to the Piazza.

"I don't see her," said the earl; "perhaps she has gone back to the church."

They crossed the Piazza and entered St. Mark's.

"Not here," said the earl.

They walked up the south aisle and came to the anteroom of the treasury. Its door was open. They entered what had once been a tower of the old palace. The door of the treasury was also open. They went in and found the sacristan and a woman. She held the turquoise cup in her hands.

"Did you buy it, Bobby?" she exclaimed.

She turned and saw that the earl was not alone.

"Your grace," he said, "I present you to Lady Nora Daly."

She bent with a motion half genuflexion, half courtesy, and then straightened herself, smiling.

The cardinal did not notice the obeisance, but he did notice the smile. It seemed to him, as he looked at her, that the treasures of St. Mark's, the jewelled chalices and patens, the agate and crystal vessels, the reliquaries of gold and precious stones, the candlesticks, the two textus covers of golden cloisonné, and even the turquoise cup itself, turned dull and wan and common by comparison with her beauty.

"Your eminence," she said, "you must pardon Bobby's _gaucherie_. He presented you to me and called you 'your grace.' He forgot, or did not know, that you are a cardinal--a prince--and that I should have been presented to you. Bobby means well, but he is an English peer and a guardsman, so we don't expect much else of Bobby."

"He has done a very gracious thing today," said the cardinal. "He has brought me to you."

Lady Nora looked up quickly, scenting a compliment, and ready to meet it, but the cardinal's face was so grave and so sincere that her readiness forsook her and she stood silent.

The earl seemed to be interested in a crucifix of the eleventh century.

"While my lord is occupied with the crucifix," said the cardinal, "will you not walk with me?"

"Willingly," said Lady Nora, and they went out into the church.

"My dear lady," said the cardinal, after an interval of silence, "you are entering upon life. You have a position, you have wealth, you have youth, you have health, and," with a bow, "you have beauty such as God gives to His creatures only for good purposes. Some women, like Helen of Troy and Cleopatra, have used their beauty for evil. Others, like my Queen, Margarita, and like Mary, Queen of the Scots, have held their beauty as a trust to be exploited for good, as a power to be exercised on the side of the powerless."

"Your eminence," said Lady Nora, "we are now taught in England that Queen Mary was not altogether proper."

"She had beauty, had she not?" asked the cardinal.

"Yes," replied Lady Nora.

"She was beheaded, was she not?" asked the cardinal.

"Yes," said Lady Nora, "and by a very plain woman."

"There you have it!" exclaimed the cardinal. "If Elizabeth had been beautiful and Mary plain, Mary would have kept her head. It is sad to see beautiful women lose their heads. It is sad to see you lose yours."

"Mine?" exclaimed Lady Nora, and she put her hands up to her hat-pins, to reassure herself.

"Yes," said the cardinal, "I fear that it is quite gone."

Lady Nora looked at him with questioning eyes. "Yes," she said, "I must have lost it, for I do not understand you, and I have not always been dull."

Continue Reading →

Arthur Cosslett Smith opens The Turquoise Cup, and, the Desert with a cardinal on a shaded balcony, his feet stretched out to show six inches of scarlet silk stocking. The description is meticulous: the pigeon perched on the rail, the mate's coquettish flight, the cardinal's regret that he is not of the world. Smith's prose dwells on small, telling details—a rebellious lock of hair, the faint tinge of a shaved beard—to establish character without exposition. The cardinal's voice, when he addresses the pigeons, is wry and self-aware: 'You get nearer heaven than we poor mortals.' This opening sets the tone for a work that prizes observation over plot, where a visitor's card—'The Earl of Vauxhall'—prompts a quiet meditation on commerce versus contemplation.

Diction and the Weight of Objects

Smith's vocabulary is precise and tactile. The cardinal's biretta lies on a 'near-by chair'; the pigeon's flight is 'so swift that the eye could scarcely follow her.' Objects carry narrative weight. The turquoise cup of the title is not mentioned in the excerpt, but the cardinal's well-kept hands, the silver tray, the card with its engraved name—all are rendered with a jeweler's attention. In the desert section, the camel's hump is 'fat,' a condition declared mleh, 'the Arabic equivalent for fit.' Smith does not translate for the reader; he trusts the context. The faded, crumpled red oleander that Abdullah produces is a concrete token of desire, its condition—'faded, crumpled'—telling more than any declaration. The authorial choice to let objects speak, rather than characters, gives the prose a quiet authority.

Voice and the Illusion of Interiority

The cardinal's monologue to the pigeons is the most extended passage of direct speech in the excerpt, and it reveals his mind through indirection. He envies the birds their nesting, their feeding of young, and imagines himself as a stockbroker—'Could I not have been a stockbroker?'—before dismissing the thought. The voice is urbane, self-mocking, and solitary. In contrast, Abdullah's prayer is a childlike list of requests: 'Unchoke the wells at Okba. Strengthen the yellow camel. Make high the price of dates and low the price of hides.' The syntax is paratactic, the tone earnest. Smith gives each character a distinct register: the cardinal's balanced clauses versus Abdullah's imperative run-ons. Neither voice is explained; the reader infers character from rhythm and word choice.

Structure as Contrast: The Balcony and the Caravan

The two novellas are juxtaposed without explicit transition. The first is static—a cardinal on a balcony, a visitor announced—while the second is kinetic: a caravan loading, camels rising, a market clamor. Smith uses structural contrast to highlight thematic differences. The cardinal's world is interior, shaded, and measured in inches of scarlet silk; Abdullah's is exterior, sunlit, and measured in camel loads and prayer times. The mueddin's cry silences the market, and 'the camels were already kneeling, but they were facing the north and Biskra.' This detail—the camels facing the wrong direction for prayer—is a quiet joke, a reminder that the desert has its own rituals. The structure itself enacts the tension between contemplation and commerce that the cardinal muses on.

Recurring Details: Hands, Birds, and the Body

Smith returns to hands and birds as motifs. The cardinal's 'well-kept hands clasped upon his breast' open the story; later, he takes a card, puts on his biretta, assumes a more erect attitude. Hands are instruments of status and gesture. In the desert, Abdullah 'put his hand into the folds of his burnoose and brought out a faded, crumpled, red oleander.' The hand produces evidence of a hidden life. Birds appear in both sections: the pigeons on the balcony, coquettish and indifferent; the camels, described as 'uncouth beasts, twisting and snarling.' The contrast between the delicate pigeons and the laboring camels mirrors the shift from European refinement to North African pragmatism. Smith's eye for the body—the cardinal's lack of tonsure, the camel's fat hump—grounds his abstract themes in physical fact.

Smith's prose rewards attention to its surfaces. The cardinal's balcony and the desert caravan are not symbols but settings rendered with equal care. Readers who note the recurrence of hands, the precision of verbs like 'sheered off' and 'coquetted,' and the way dialogue reveals character through syntax rather than content will find the work's pleasures in its details. The two novellas do not resolve into a single moral; they simply present two ways of being in the world, each observed with the same steady eye.

This morning, reading the cardinal’s measured steps, I remembered sitting on my grandfather’s porch while he described a similar stillness in The Turquoise Cup—how a single gesture can hold a life’s weight. That same quiet ache returned with The Black Cross — Edition Insights, whose desert crossings felt like my own long waits, neither judged nor hurried.