Part 13

A pretty girl spinning with a distaff asked shyly if she could help us. Patsy sent her for water while he set the table.

“We could not have her handling the food, you know,” he said; “but she is so decorative that we want to look at her while we eat and drink. Antonio has outdone himself (he knew I was coming), this ham really has been boiled in _vino di Montefiascone_, as I suggested. The girls of Palestrina _are_ as handsome as the girls of Præneste.” Armida, our girl, had come back, a dripping _conca_ poised on her head.

“How do you know so much about the girls of Præneste?” I asked.

“Go to the Kircheriano Museum and look at the Ficoronian Cista and you will know as much as I do,” Patsy confessed. “It was found near here in the necropolis. It is a green bronze toilet casket, with the most corking pictures from the story of the Argonauts engraved upon it you ever saw! Pollux has just licked Amycus, you know, for interfering with the Greeks preempting the spring of water, and tied him up to a tree, as he deserved. Then you have the Greeks drinking out of the spring. In the harbor lies the good ship Argo; on shore you see Jason and Hercules, one of the Argonauts in the attitude of boxing, a fat old Silenus mimicking him. Female beauty is represented by Athena and Niké, who seem to be offering a victor’s crown to the lucky Pollux. It’s up to date, I can tell you. The girls are no prettier than Armida there; but find me the man who can ‘do’ her like the fellow who engraved that Cista, and I will pay him to make her portrait!”

“How long ago was the casket made?” Helen asked.

“If you must have a date, 700 B.C. is as good as another. Heigh ho! The world’s grown lazy! All this talk about modern energy makes me tired! Where’s the energy in any race on earth to-day to build an _arx_ like this? to live on the top of a steep hill like this? to trundle itself and its chattels up and down? Our civilization compared to Præneste’s is barbarism by every standard I know.”

“You don’t know much,” said Helen. “_I_ know you have waited too long for your luncheon. Your views will improve directly.”

As we ate our luncheon, Armida awkwardly weaving a garland of oak leaves after a pattern Patsy made her, watched us with shy, hungry eyes. She and I exchanged glances (not a word was spoken) which said,--

“Signora, I have rarely tasted white bread--never such a _pasticcio_ as the _signorino_ is giving to the shepherd’s dog!”

“_Figlia mia_, all that remains of the feast shall be for you and the shepherd; you will divide with him?”

“_Stia sicura_ (Rest assured)!” said Armida’s honest eyes.

There was wine in an amphora--how had Patsy managed it?--he poured the first glass on the ground in libation.

Looking at Armida and raising his glass, “_Alle belle ragaze di Palestrina!_” he said. The shepherd’s dog sniffed the spilt wine scornfully.

“_Tutti gli Inglesi sono matti!_ (The English are all mad)!” muttered the shepherd.

PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, ROME, 1899.

June in Italy is heaven. The weather is delicious. Life is pleasant and calm. J. has found a small American ice-chest, the only one in Rome; we are as proud as peacocks about it; Pompilia shows it off as if it were the great kohinoor. It is an economy in ice, which has only lately been introduced, and is fabulously dear. Nena fetches a tiny slab of artificial ice every afternoon, it is wrapped in thick felt, put into the American ice-chest, where it keeps the milk and wine cool. Green nuts are part of the

summer bill of fare, fresh filberts in their jackets, green almonds and English walnuts as much nicer fresh than dried as fresh figs are better than dry, or grapes than raisins.

Ignazio, our gardener, handsome, sympathetic, with a timid laugh, a hesitating manner, a real passion for his calling, was recommended to us as knowing more about roses than any man in Rome. The burthen of caring for our beloved flowers had become too great. The improvement since the expert took hold and properly grafted our roses is astonishing. Ignazio has to be restrained from quite ruining us. To him the natural order would be to spend the greater part of one’s income upon one’s flowers--I am not so sure he is not right! For weeks he has been talking about a new rare flower--just the thing for the terrace--whose name he could not remember. When I asked him he took off his old cap, rubbed his head in a puzzled way, and complained that the English names were “too difficult.” I caught his enthusiasm, ordered some of these rare exotics, though the price was high. To-day arrived six fine specimens of the wild American purple aster, which overruns the fields and roadsides at home!

Signor Giacomo Boni, the architect in charge of the public buildings of ancient Rome, has a rival terrace on the roof of his house: we went to see his Japanese lilies the other day. Fancy, he has a cherry tree with ripe cherries on it, a peach tree with peaches, a tame starling in a cage, and quite the most wonderful collection of plants and flowers I ever saw in so small a space. Signor Boni has planted on the Palatine, in the Forum, and in the Baths of Caracalla, the flowers and shrubs mentioned in the classics as growing in those places. The good work is beginning to tell already; now there are roses and fleur-de-lis growing in the Forum. The vandalism which stripped the Colosseum of its glorious robe of flowered green and exposed its gaunt skeleton to view, is at an end, but the havoc it wrought is irreparable--at least in my lifetime. Fancy, there were five hundred different varieties of wild-flowers growing on that splendid old ruin. Many of these are unknown in other parts of Europe and are supposed to have sprung from seeds that were mixed in the various kinds of fodder imported from Africa to feed the wild beasts which fought in the old blood-soaked arena.

PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, ROME, August 3, 1899.

It was too hot for sleep last night, a rare thing in Rome. At half-past four this morning, when I went out on the terrace to water the plants, the smooth red tiles were still warm to bare feet. The Piazza of St. Peter’s was a sea of fog, out of which loomed the lantern of Angelo’s dome; no other part of the great church was visible. A white mist from the Tiber rose like a wall between us and Mt. Soracte; the river and the mountain Horace loved are still the dearest things in the wide view of the Roman landscape. When the plants had been watered it was half-past five, just the right time for bicycling, so we set out. At this hour few people are about, save the drivers of the heavy wains of hay--drawn by big, soft-eyed gray oxen with magnificent branching horns. These wagons of fragrant hay are not allowed in the streets after eight o’clock in the morning. Though the Forum was reached before six, Signor Boni and his aids were already hard at work. Swarms of men, like so many busy ants, were passing to and from the excavations, wheeling barrows full of earth, returning a little later with empty barrows.

“Where do you put the rubbish that you take out?” I asked. The _capo_ smiled indulgently. “Every particle of the earth of the Forum is sacred,” he said. “We skim it off carefully in layers, keeping each layer quite separate from the others. Then we sift it layer by layer, sort whatever it contains, examine each bit of broken glass, metal, pottery, and, where it is possible, piece the fragments together.”

In a sacrificial layer, composed chiefly of the ashes and bones of victims offered at the altars of the gods, the _capo_ lately found the jaw bones of several large dogs. These did not properly belong here, among the bones of beeves, sheep, and goats, the regulation sacrificial animals. The layer in which they were found proved to be of the time of Marcellus. Now, what were the bones of these big dogs doing there?

One dark night--it was in the days of Marcellus--the Goths descended for the first time upon Rome, the citadel came within an ace of being taken--would have been, but for the cackling of the silly geese which roused the sleeping guards. The silly geese became sacred geese, and the faithless watch-dogs, who had failed to bark and give the alarm, were slaughtered at the altar,--and that is how the big canine jaw bones turn up to-day in the sacrificial layer of Marcellus! The _capo’s_ dreamy blue eyes, the eyes of an enthusiast, glowed with an inner light as he unfolded this theory. Imagination, you see, is as important to the successful archæologist as it is to any other discoverer. He must have other things as well--a thorough knowledge of the classics, for instance. Did not Mme. Schlieman learn the whole of Homer by heart, to aid her husband in his search for the tomb of Agamemnon?

If in reading Tacitus or Livy the _capo_ finds mention of a missing building or statue, he goes and looks for it in the place where according to the historians it ought to be--and where, nine times out of ten, he finds it! While he talked to us his eyes never left the skilful hands of a workman patiently matching together pieces of brown terra-cotta from a large pile of shards.

“If we could only make up one complete tile!” he sighed.

We were in the temporary museum where the latest “finds” of the Forum are kept. The man at the next table was putting together a really beautiful vessel of dark-blue glass. It might have been the Myrrhene goblet of Petronius!

“The tiles are so ugly, so monotonous--why should you care? I could understand, now, if a piece of that enchanting blue glass were missing!” I said.

“The cup is only a cup,--beautiful if you will,--but what does it teach us? nothing new. If we could find a whole tile, now, it would fix the date of a building we are in doubt about.”

Scientific methods, you see; even in Rome we cannot escape them! Then we went and looked at the spot where the Jewish citizens of Rome piously burned the body of Julius Cæsar, and at what remains of the house where Cæsar lived, a corner of the dining-room, with the white mosaic pavement, and a piece of wall painted with a decoration of fruit, flowers, green trees, and a pointed bamboo trellis, in the same style as the Villa Livia, built by the widow of Augustus, who, perhaps, had admired Aunt Calpurnia’s dining-room, and when her time came to build imitated it!

In the house of the Vestal Virgins we saw some fine pavements lately uncovered. Vesta is by far the most interesting of the Roman divinities. Is there a shrine to her at Radcliffe? There should be; we owe Rome the “higher education,” as we owe her the law we live by, the army we conquer by. Close to the Temple of Vesta we saw the place where earthquakes were foretold by the simplest contrivance. On a white marble platform finely adjusted weights were placed so as to oscillate with the first, otherwise imperceptible, tremors of the earth; in this way the knowing ones were enabled to foretell the earthquakes to the populace. Not far from here is the point where lightning once struck, making a hole ever after held sacred. It was turned into a sacred well, wherein jewels, cups, and other precious offerings were thrown by the devout or the superstitious. Both these shrines are very near the Temple of Vesta. Was it by chance that the fanes of the three things primitive man fears most, fire, earthquake, and lightning, should be so near together? The _capo_ thinks not.

“Now come and see the Republican well I have just found,” he said, leading the way to a deep pit in the form of an _amphora_, with smooth rounded sides lined with cement.

“Notice the work they did in the days of the Republic; it is far better than the work of the Empire. See this cement, as perfect as the day it was laid.”

“What did you find in this well?” we asked.

“Come and see. Here are a great number of styluses--the Roman pens used for writing on wax tablets” (do you suppose some poor devil of a literary man threw them in in a moment of despair?) “and the entire contents of a Republican butcher’s shop. See, there is the great cleaver, these are the knives--even the wooden handles are intact. These round stones are the weights, here is the thigh bone of the last ox slaughtered before the shop came to grief, and here--take it carefully, it is of terra-cotta--is the butcher’s lamp. Do you make out the design? It is in the shape of an inflated oxhide.”

I never saw the like of that lamp! Of all the precious things the _capo_ has unearthed, I most covet the Republican butcher’s squat little earthenware lamp with the neck of the skin pursed together to hold the wick.

“Now come and look at the true Via Sacra; you see it lies several feet below the road we used to call the Sacred Way. Do you observe how much finer this early pavement is than the later paving? But wait, I shall show you better yet,--the earlier the work, the better the workmanship.”

As we stood on the large squares of smooth gray stone, a cloud veiled the hot August sun, a shadow crossed the pavement. Might it not have been just here that Horace tacked to avoid meeting that bore Crispinus? When midsummer comes and everybody goes away, and there remains only Rome, ourselves, and the mighty ghosts,--these grow so real that I wonder if I dreamed the tea-party-picnicking Rome of winter and spring.

“Here is the Basilica Emilia. We should not have been able to excavate this if it had not been for Mr. St. Clair Baddeley, who raised the money in England to buy the land and indemnify the owners of the houses we were obliged to pull down. Look at these two delightful bas-reliefs; have you ever seen such a treatment of the acanthus?”

The reliefs are the most florid--one might almost say “baroque”--acanthus designs I have ever seen. In one the flower in the centre of the “curly cue” ends in a prancing horse; the other terminates in some apochryphal beast, like a dragon.

“Wait, wait till I make a copy of this adorable white and green pavement,” I cried. It was a geometrical design in Emilia’s Basilica. A design that I have never seen either in Egypt or Greece.

“For that you will not need me,” said the _capo_; “it is growing late and hot; now for the Lapis Niger!” Like a child he had kept the best of the feast for the last. As we went, I picked up a small piece of iridescent glass, opal, rose, and pearl, a bit of heaven’s rainbow dug from the “sacred earth.”

“What might this have been?” I asked.

“That we shall see, perhaps part of a tear bottle, perhaps a fragment of the vessel in which the vestals daily brought lustral water for the altars from the Fountain of Egeria!” Was he laughing at me?

I shall not forget the sensation produced by the first sight of the Lapis Niger, the black stone of the so-called tomb of Romulus. Whether the smooth slab of black marble actually covered the ashes of Romulus, or was a later monument put up to his memory, has not yet, I believe, been established. They do know that the inscription on the cippus beneath the stone is written in the most ancient Latin which has yet come to light--the epigraphists are still cracking their brains trying to read it. Is it not pleasant to have the sceptical German historians routed? To have our Romulus and Remus given back to us, our Tarquins, our Numa Pompilius, and Egeria? To tell the truth, I never gave them up, I always kept a sneaking belief in demigods and heroes, took Hawthorne’s word against the Teutons. Now I am being justified right and left. Boni finds the Tomb of Romulus in the Roman Forum, Dr. Evans finds the palace of Minos, and the labyrinth of the Minotaur in Crete.

To comfort-loving persons Rome is the most satisfactory place in the world for the study of man--from the savage of thirty centuries ago in his tree coffin, fished up from the bottom of Lake Trasimeno (now at the Museum Papa Giulio), to Victor Emmanuel in his tomb at the Pantheon. Think of it, the first king of Young Italy sleeping in a temple of Ancient Rome which has been in use ever since it was built in the year 27 B.C. Athens is a thousand times more beautiful than Rome, but to the ultra modern Greece seems on the outskirts of “to-day.” Here, here in Rome, we fancy we are in the midst of things, and creature comforts are still to be had, as in the days of Lucullus (I recommend you an _omelette soufflée aux surprises à la Grand Hotel_! Outside an ordinary hot soufflée--the surprise is the heart, cold sublimated chocolate ice-cream)!

Not long since, while lunching at that luxurious restaurant, we became aware of a personage at the next table. Everybody looked at him; it was impossible not to look at him. He was a large, masterful man with a high color, young gray hair, and a look of power I have not often met. We began to guess his nationality. I immediately claimed him. “He is an American, a Western senator, from Montana or Washington State.”

There was something large and dauntless about him, the free look of one coming from a young country.

“Please find out who that gentleman at the next table is?” our host said to the waiter.

The man seemed surprised at the question.

“That is Cecil Rhodes, sir,” he answered.

After that we could not help catching some of his talk--perhaps we did not try very hard--it was brilliant, exhilarating, and cordial. His guests were hardly more _en rapport_ with him than the rest of us in the room. He was not unconscious that the people who sat near, the waiters, even the sphinx-like manager, hovering in the offing with impassive face, were thrilled by being in his company: nor could his attitude be called conscious. He merely seemed aware of us, could no more help dominating the chance crowd in a fashionable restaurant than his fellows in the Transvaal.

It happened that after lunch we took our friends “sightseeing” to the Kircheriano Museum, where we found one of the earliest Roman citizens and his wife, still lying side by side in the very earth the mourners threw over them, his rude stone weapons, her primitive household utensils close to their hands. There, you see, are the two ends of your chain of interest (there is not a missing link between),--the prehistoric man at the Kircheriano Museum and the man who is making history, Cecil Rhodes, on his way to South Africa, lunching at the Grand Hotel!

XII

THE ANNO SANTO

PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, ROME, February 7, 1900.

“If I am ever a rich man,--” Patsy began.

“Which heaven forfend--you have not the gift!” said the monsignore.

“Wait and see!--I shall build a great church.”

“Like St. Peter’s there?”

We were on the terrace. The sun was setting behind the chapel of the Vatican. There was still light enough for the yellow of the sun-soaked façade, the pale blue of the dome, to tell against the gray and rosy sky.

“Oh, make it the Parthenon! They both give a fellow the same sort of feeling as being in love does, or seeing Niagara.”

“It is not a bad use to put a fortune to,” the monsignore agreed.

“It is about time the artists had their innings!” Patsy declared. “I should like to be referee. Gladiators, prize-fighters wouldn’t be in it. What fun _can_ there be in backing such creatures, or even a horse? I would rather stake my fortune on an architect like Bramante--trust my future reputation to a painter like Pinturricchio than to a Flying Childers or a Goldsmith Maid.”

“First catch your hare,” said the monsignore.

“The woods are full of ’em. Give the artists a chance, and you’ll see the trouble is not with them! The opportunity must come first. A country has the art it deserves. When we Americans want beauty as much as we want rapid transit we shall get it.”

“There are _some_ signs,” said the monsignore. “We have art patrons who pay enormous sums for old masters.”

“Our art patrons lack imagination,” said Patsy. “It is so easy, so obvious, to buy ‘old masters,’ to patronize Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli! I should pick my men, give ’em the track, and let ’em show their paces. Wait till I build my cathedral: you will see an architect, a painter, and a sculptor or two.”

“‘The hand that rounded Peter’s dome, wrought with a sad sincerity,’” quoted the monsignore. He had come to tell us about the Pope’s opening the _Porta Santa_ on Christmas eve,--the first of the many functions of this _Anno Santo_.

Finally we “muzzled” Patsy, and the monsignore seized his chance to speak.

“As the ceremony was in the portico of St. Peter’s,” he said, “a comparatively small place, very few invitations were issued. The papal throne was erected near the _Porta Santa_,--the Jubilee door,--it is the one on the extreme right of the portico, you will remember it by the cross upon it. The Pope knocked three times upon the _Porta Santa_ with a mallet, saying as he did so, “_Aperite mihi portas justitiae_ (Open to me the door of justice).” At the words the door (which was last opened by Leo the Twelfth, in 1825) fell away as if by magic, and His Holiness walked alone into the vast empty church, where there was no other living being but himself. He tottered down the aisle, past the splendid tombs of his predecessors, beneath that unmarked sepulchre over the door, where Pius the Ninth lies waiting the day when he must make room for him in his tomb as he made room for him on his throne. At the shrine of St. Peter the Pope knelt and said a prayer. For me that was the great moment in the whole gorgeous ceremony.”

“It all comes back to the simple human situation of an old man passing the tomb where he soon must lie!” was Patsy’s comment.

“It is just the simple human situation that the Church always comes back to,” said the monsignore.

“Oh, I say! simple, you know! That’s putting it a little strong. The scene you describe is simple and touching, but, as a rule, the services over there are more gorgeous and theatrical than religious!”

“Granted,--St. Peter’s is the stage on which the dramas of the church are played. Why not? Why not use every art to the glory of God--music, the drama, all the rest? There are a hundred quiet parish churches where one can go for devotion and aspiration.”

Patsy’s company is always stimulating, but he rather interfered with my getting all the information I wanted from the monsignore. I did manage to extract the facts that the _Anno Santo_ was instituted by Boniface VIII., in 1300, that it was originally meant to celebrate it every hundred years; that the Romans petitioned to have the time shortened to every fifty years, then to thirty-three years (the supposed earthly life of Christ), and finally to every twenty-five years; that at the five other Basilicas in Rome ceremonies like those at St. Peter’s were celebrated on the same day--a cardinal opening the _Porta Santa_ in each, and that during the _Anno Santo_ plenary indulgence is obtainable by all Catholics who pass a certain number of times in a given number of days, through the holy doors of St. Peter’s, and the five other Basilicas, repeating the appointed prayers.

“Every twenty-five years, you say?” Patsy insisted, “and the last Jubilee was in 1825--how is that?”

“In 1850 and again in 1875 Rome was so unsettled that the observance of the _Anno Santo_ was not expedient,” said the monsignore, shortly.

“Let me see,” mused Patsy; “in 1850 Pius the Ninth was at Gaeta, trying a change of air for his health, and Mazzini was at the head of the Roman Republic. In 1875, Pius still thought that the Dukes of Savoy were only casual visitors and had not yet realized that they had come to Rome to stay. Isn’t that about the size of it?”

“My dear boy,” said the monsignore imperturbably, “_now_ you are talking about things you do _not_ understand.” He talked of other things for a few moments and then went away.