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.