The Vatican sculptural and art museums were equally astonishing. I had always heard of its eleven hundred rooms and its priceless collections; but it was thrilling and delightful to see them face to face, all the long line of Greek and Roman and medieval perfections, chiseled or painted, transported from ruins or dug from the earth—such wonders as the porphyry vase and Laocoon, taken from the silent underground rooms of Nero’s house, where they had stood for centuries, unheeded, in all their perfection; and the river god, representative of the Tiber. I was especially interested to see the vast number of portrait busts of Roman personalities—known and unknown—which gave me a face-to-face understanding of that astounding people. They came back now or arose vital before me—Claudius, Nerva, Hadrian, Faustina the elder, wife of Antoninus Pius, Pertinax, whose birthplace was near Monte Carlo, Julius Cæsar, Cicero, Antoninus Pius, Tiberius, Mark Antony, Aurelius Lepidus, and a score of others. It was amazing to me to see how like the modern English and Americans they were, and how practical and present-day-like they appeared. It swept away the space of two thousand years as having no significance whatever, and left you face to face with the far older problem of humanity. I could not help thinking that the duplicates of these men are on our streets to-day in New York and Chicago and London—urgent, calculating, thinking figures—and that they are doing to-day much as these forerunners did two thousand years before. I cannot see the slightest difference between an emperor like Hadrian and a banker like Morgan. And the head of a man like Lord Salisbury is to be found duplicated in a score of sculptures in various museums throughout the Holy City. I realized, too, that any one of hundreds of these splendid marbles, if separated from their populous surroundings and given to a separate city, meager in artistic possessions, would prove a great public attraction. To him that hath shall be given, however; and to those that have not shall be taken away even the little that they have. And so it is that Rome fairly suffocates with its endless variety of artistic perfection—one glory almost dimming the other—while the rest of the world yearns for a crust of artistic beauty and has nothing. It is like the Milky Way for jewels as contrasted with those vast starless spaces that give no evidence of sidereal life.

I wandered in this region of wonders attended by my motherly friend until it was late in the afternoon, and then we went for lunch. Being new to Rome, I was not satisfied with what I had seen, but struck forth again—coming next into the region of Santa Maria Maggiore and up an old stairway that had formed a part of a Medici palace now dismantled—only to find myself shortly thereafter and quite by accident in the vicinity of the Colosseum. I really had not known that I was coming to it, for I was not looking for it. I was following idly the lines of an old wall that lay in the vicinity of San Pietro in Vincoli when suddenly it appeared, lying in a hollow at the foot of a hill—the Esquiline. I was rejoicing in having discovered an old well that I knew must be of very ancient date, and a group of cypresses that showed over an ancient wall, when I looked—and there it was. It was exactly as the pictures have represented it—oval, many-arched, a thoroughly ponderous ruin. I really did not gain a suggestion of the astonishing size of it until I came down the hill, past tin cans that were lying on the grass—a sign of the modernity that possesses Rome—and entered through one of the many arches. Then it came on me—the amazing thickness of the walls, the imposing size and weight of the fragments, the vast dignity of the uprising flights of seats, and the great space now properly cleared, devoted to the arena. All that I ever knew or heard of it came back as I sat on the cool stones and looked about me while other tourists walked leisurely about, their Baedekers in their hands. It was a splendid afternoon. The sun was shining down in here; and it was as warm as though it were May in Indiana. Small patches of grass and moss were detectable everywhere, growing soft and green between the stones. The five thousand wild beasts slaughtered in the arena at its dedication, which remained as a thought from my high-school days, were all with me. I read up as much as I could, watching several workmen lowering themselves by ropes from the top of the walls, the while they picked out little tufts of grass and weeds beginning to flourish in the earthy niches. Its amazing transformations from being a quarry for greedy popes by whom most of its magnificent marbles were removed, to its narrow escape from becoming a woolen-mill operated by Sixtus V, were all brooded over here. It was impossible not to be impressed by the thought of the emperors sitting on their especial balcony; the thousands upon thousands of Romans intent upon some gladiatorial feat; the guards outside the endless doors, the numbers of which can still be seen, giving entrance to separate sections and tiers of seats; and the vast array of civic life which must have surged about. I wondered whether there were venders who sold sweets or food and what their cries were in Latin. One could think of the endless procession that wound its way here on gala days. Time works melancholy changes.

I left as the sun was going down, tremendously impressed with the wonder of a life that is utterly gone. It was like finding the glistening shell of an extinct beetle or the suggestion in rocks of a prehistoric world. As I returned to my hotel along the thoroughly modern streets with their five- and six-story tenement and apartment buildings, their street cars and customary vehicles, their newspaper, flower and cigar stands, I tried to restore and keep in my mind a suggestion of the magnificence that Gibbon makes so significant. It was hard; for be one’s imagination what it will, it is difficult to live outside of one’s own day and hour. The lights already beginning to flourish in the smart shops, distracted my mood.

CHAPTER XXXII
MRS. Q. AND THE BORGIA FAMILY

“I am going to introduce you to such a nice woman,” Mrs. Barfleur told me the second morning I was in Rome, in her very enthusiastic way. “She is charming. I am sure you will like her. She comes from America somewhere—New York, I think. Her husband is an author, I believe. I heard so.” She chattered on in her genial, talk-making way. “I don’t understand these American women; they go traveling about Europe without their husbands in such a strange way. Now, you know in England we would not think of doing anything of that kind.”

Mrs. Barfleur was decidedly conservative in her views and English in manner and speech, but she had the saving proclivity of being intensely interested in life, and realized that all is not gold that glitters. She preferred to be among people who know and maintain good form, who are interested in maintaining the social virtues as they stand accepted and who, if they do not actually observe all of the laws and tenets of society, at least maintain a deceiving pretense. She had a little coterie of friends in the hotel, as I found, and friends outside, such as artists, newspaper correspondents and officials connected with the Italian court and the papal court. I never knew a more industrious social mentor in the shape of a woman, though among men her son outstripped her. She was apparently here, there and everywhere about the hotel, in the breakfast-room, in the dining-room, in the card-room, in the writing-room, greeting her friends, planning games, planning engagements, planning sightseeing trips. She was pleasant, too; delightful; for she knew what to do and when to do it, and if she was not impelled by a large constructive motive of any kind, nevertheless she had a sincere and discriminating love of the beautiful which caused her to excuse much for the sake of art. I found her well-disposed, kindly, sympathetic and very anxious to make the best of this sometimes dull existence, not only for herself, but for every one else. I liked her very much.

Mrs. Q. I found on introduction, to be a beautiful woman of perhaps thirty-three or four, with two of the healthiest, prettiest, best-behaved children I have ever seen. I found her to be an intellectual and brilliant woman with an overwhelming interest in the psychology of history and current human action.

“I trust I see an unalienated American,” I observed as Mrs. Barfleur brought her forward, encouraged by her brisk, quizzical smile.

“You do, you do,” she replied smartly, “as yet. Nothing has happened to my Americanism except Italy, and that’s only a second love.”