Well, Devonport in summer was very delightful, but Devonport in winter had long periods of fog and gloom. I had the blessing of another trip to Italy, this time with our eldest daughter, starting on a dark wintry day in early March, 1900. Sir William’s work prevented his coming with us. Viâ Genoa to Rome lay our happy way. Of course, it wasn’t the Rome I first knew, but the shock I received when revisiting it four years before this present visit had already introduced me into the new order, and I now knew what to see, enjoy, and avoid. There were several new things to enjoy: above all, the Forum, now all open to the sky! In the dear old days that space was a rather dreary expanse of waste land where some poor old paupers were to be daily seen, leisurely labouring under the delusion that they were excavating. They grubbed up the tufts of grass and scraped the dust with pocket-knives, and the treasures below remained comfortably tucked away from public view. Then the much-abused Embankment. The dignified sweep of its lines leads the eye up, as it follows the flow of the stream, to the dignity of St. Peter’s, whereas, formerly, in its place, unbeautiful masses of mouldering houses tottered over the Tiber and gave that long-suffering river the reflections of their drainpipes. Then, the two end arches of that most estimable Ponte Sant’ Angelo are now cleared of the old mud which blocked them up malodorously and docked the lovely thing of its symmetry. Then, finally, Rome is clean!
We had the good fortune to be present at two very striking Papal functions, striking as bringing together Catholics from a wide-flung circle embracing some remote nationalities unknown by sight to me. The first was the Pope’s Benediction in St. Peter’s on March 18th. We were standing altogether about three hours in the crowd at the Tomb, well placed for seeing the Holy Father. He was taken round the vast basilica in his sedia gestatoria, and blessed a wildly cheering crowd. I never saw a human being so like a spirit as Leo XIII. He looked as white as his mitre as he leant forward and stretched his arm out in benediction from side to side, borne high above the helmets of the Noble Guard. One heard cheers in all languages, and a curious effect was produced by the whirling handkerchiefs, which made a white haze above the dark crowd. I have often heard secular monarchs cheered, and that very heartily, but for a Pope it seems that more than ordinary loyalty prompts the cheerers. The people seem to give out their whole being in their voices and gestures.
The Diary says: “I am glad I have seen that old man’s face and his look, as though it came to us from beyond the grave. At times the cheers went up to the highest pitch of both men’s and women’s voices. A strange sound to hear in a church.”
A spring day spent at the well-known Hadrian’s Villa, under Tivoli, is not to be allowed to pass without a grateful record. It is a most exquisite place of old ruins, cypresses, olives and, at this time, flowering peach trees, violets and anemones. It is an enchanting site for a country house. Hadrian chose well. From there you see the delicately-pencilled dome of St. Peter’s on the rim of the horizon to the west, and behind you, to the north, rise the steep foot-hills of the mountains, some crowned with old cities. The ruins of the villa are all minus the lovely outer coating which used to hide the brickwork, and poor Hadrian would have felt very woeful had he foreseen that all the white loveliness of his villa was to come to this. But as bits of warm colour and lovely surface those brick spaces take the sun and shadow beautifully between the dark masses of the cypresses and feathery grey cloudiness of the olives. Nowhere is the “touch and go” nature of life more strikingly put before the mind than in dead Rome, where so much magnificence in stone and marble and mosaic and bronze has fallen into lumps of crumbling brick.
On March 26th we attended the Papal Benediction in the Sistine Chapel, which is a remarkable thing to see. It was a memorable morning. The floor of the chapel was packed with pilgrims, some of them rough men and women from remote regions of the north-east, whose outlandish costumes were especially remarkable for the heavy Cossack boots, reaching to the knee, worn by both sexes. One wondered how these people journeyed to Rome. What a gathering of the faithful we looked down on from our gallery! The same ecstatic cheering we had heard in St. Peter’s announced the entrance of Leo XIII. There he was, the holy creature, blessing right and left with that thin alabaster hand, half covered with a white mitten. With all their hoarse barbaric cheering, I noticed how those peasants, who had so particularly attracted me, remembered to bend their heads and most devoutly make the sign of the cross as he passed. They almost monopolised my study of the motley crowd, but I was aware of the many nationalities present, and the same enthusiasm came from them all. At such times a great consolation eases the mind, saddened, as it often is, by the general atmosphere of declining faith in which one has to live one’s ordinary life in the world. After the Mass came the presentation of the pilgrims at the altar steps. The Pope had kind words for all, bending down to hear and to speak to them, and often stroking the men’s heads. One huge Muscovite peasant knelt long at his feet, and the Pope kept patting the rough man’s cheek and speaking to him and blessing him over and over again. At the sight of this a wild “hourah!” broke from his fellow villagers. Where in the world was their village? In the mists of remoteness, but here in heart, unmistakably. Following the swarthy giant three sandy-haired German students, carrying their plumed caps in their hands and girt with rapiers, presented some college documents to receive the Papal benediction, and a great many men and women knelt and passed on, but the Pope seemed in no way fatigued. As he was borne out again he waved us an upward blessing with his white and most friendly countenance turned up to us.
Our Roman wanderings included a visit to the Holy Father’s Vatican gardens, which are part of the little temporal kingdom a Pope still possesses, and to his tiny “country house” therein, where he goes for change of air(!) in the summer, about two stonethrows from the Vatican. I note: “There are well-trimmed vineyards there; there are pet birds and beasts in a little ‘zoological gardens’; there is the arbour where he has his meals on hot days; and, finally, we were conducted to his little villa bedroom from whose window one of the finest views of Rome is seen, dominated by the Quirinal, within (let us hope) shaking hands distance.” We heard the “Miserere” at St. Peter’s on Good Friday—very impressive, that twilight service in the apse of the great basilica! The unaccompanied voices of boys sounded in sweetest music—one hardly knew whence it came—and the air seemed to thrill with the thin angelic sound in the waning light as one by one the candles at the altar were put out. At the last Psalm the last light was extinguished, and the vast crowd with its wan faces remained lighted only by the faint glimmer that came down from the pale sky through the high windows. Then good-bye to Rome. We left for Perugia on April 22nd. I certainly ought to be grateful for having had yet another reception by my Umbrian Hills! And such a reception that April afternoon, with the low sun gilding everything into fullest beauty! I did my best to secure that moment in miserably inadequate paint from the hotel window immediately on arrival. Better than nothing. But no more of Perugia, nor of dear old Florence on our way to academic Padua; no more of Verona. I have much yet to record on getting home, and after!
CHAPTER XXIII
A NEW REIGN
SIR William was asked by Lord Wolseley to take up the Aldershot command in the absence of Sir Redvers Buller, who was struggling very desperately to retrieve our fortunes in the Boer War; so to Aldershot we went from Devonport, where my husband’s command ran concurrently. How intensely England had hoped for the turning of the tide when Buller was given the tremendous task of directing our armies! We forget the horrors the nation went through in those days because the late War has made us pass through the same apprehensions multiplied by millions, but there the fact remains in our history that we nearly suffered a terrible catastrophe at the time of which I am writing. Buller, on leaving for the Cape, had said to my husband how fervently he wished he possessed his gift of imagination, and, indeed, that is a very precious gift to a commander. This truly awful state of things—our terrible losses, and the temporary lowering of our military prestige (thank heaven, so gloriously recovered and enhanced in the World War!)—were the answer to the repeated assertion made, when we were at the Cape, by those who ought to have known, that “the Boers won’t fight.” How this used to enrage my husband, whose “gift of imagination” made him see so clearly the danger ahead. Well, all this is of the long ago, and, as I have already noted, it is better to say little now; but the sense of injustice lives!
Buller had a great reception at Aldershot on his return from South Africa. I never saw a more radiantly happy face on a woman than poor Lady Audrey’s, who had been in a state of most tense anxiety during her dear Redvers’ absence. As the train steamed into the station the band struck up “See the Conquering Hero comes!” The horses of his carriage were unharnessed, and the triumphal car was drawn by a team of firemen to Government House. At the entrance gate a group of school children sang “Home, sweet Home”; my husband hauled down his flag and Buller’s was run up, and so that episode closed.