The young Passionist father who showed us through the church and the house under it made us wait half an hour while he finished his lunch, but he was worth waiting for. He was a charming enthusiast for both, radiantly yet reverently exulting in their respective treasures, and justly but not haughtily proud of the newly introduced electricity which lighted the darkness of the underground rooms and corridors. He told us he had been twenty years a missionary in Rumania, where he had possibly acquired the delightful English he spoke. When he would have us follow him he said, “All persons come this way,” and he politely spoke of the wicked emperor whose bust was somehow there as Mr. Commodus. With all his gentleness, however, that good father had a certain smiling severity before which the spirit bowed. He had made us wait half an hour before he came to let us into the church, and during the hour we were with him there he kept the door locked against an unlucky lady who arrived just too late to enter with us. Not only this, but he utterly refused to go back with her singly and show her the things we had seen. Perhaps it would not have been decorous; they do not let ladies, either singly or plurally, into the garden of the convent, which is memorable among many other facts as being the retreat of Mr. Commodus when he suffered from sleeplessness, and where he once carelessly left his list of victims lying about, so that his friend Marcia found it and, reading her name in it, joined with other friends in his assassination. The sex has indeed had much restraint to bear from the Church, but in some respects it has been rendered fearless in the assertion of its rights. With poor women one of these is the indefeasible right to ask alms, and I admired the courage, almost the ferocity, of the aged crone whom I had promised charity in coming to the place and who rose up as I was being driven past her, in going away, and stayed my cabman with a clamor which he dared not ignore. Her reproaches continued through the ensuing transaction, and followed him away with stings which instinct and experience taught her how to implant in his tenderest sensibilities.
A chapter much longer than any I have written here might well be devoted to the study of the clerical or secular guides in the minor churches of Rome. They are of every manner and degree of kindliness, mixed with a fair measure of intelligence and a very fitting faith in the legends of their churches. You soon get on terms of impersonal intimacy with them, and you cannot come away without sharing their professional zeal, and distinguishing for the moment in favor of their respective churches above every other. It did not matter whether it was that newest church in the Quartiere dei Prati, or that most venerable among the oldest churches, the Church of San Gregorio: I found a reason for agreeing with the sacristan upon its singular claims. These were especially enforced by the good dame, the only woman sacristan I remember, who would not spare us a single object of interest in San Gregorio's, which is indeed for the visitor of Anglo-Saxon race supremely rich in its associations with the conversions of his ancestors from heathenism.
Being myself of Cymric blood, and of a Christianity several hundred years older than that of the ordinary Anglo-Saxon traveller, I am afraid that it was from a rather patronizing piety that I visited the church where the great St. Gregory dismissed to their mission in England St. Augustine and his fellow-apostles on one of the greatest days of the sixth century. I might have stayed to imagine them kneeling among the people who then thronged the genially irregular piazza, but as we came up some ecclesiastical students were playing ball there, their robes tucked into their girdles for their greater convenience, and we made our way at once into the church. It forms one of a consecrated group of edifices enshrining the memory of the best of the popes, who was also the greatest; and here or in the adjacent convents a score of miracles were wrought through the heavenly beauty of his life. Of these miracles, of whose inspiration you must feel the poetry even if you cannot feel their verity, the loveliest has its substantial witness in one of the little chapels next the church. There you may see with your eyes and touch with your hands the table at which St. Gregory fed every morning twelve poor men, till one morning a thirteenth appeared in the figure of Christ the Lord, as if to own them His disciples. The chapel which enshrines the table is one of three, quaint in form and rich in art, standing in the garden called St. Silvia's, after the mother of St. Gregory. As we came out through it the westering sun poured the narrow court before the chapel full of golden light and threw the black shadow of a cypress across the way that a file of Comaldolese monks were taking to the adjoining convent. They were talking cheerily together, and swung unheeding by in their white robes so near that I could almost feel the waft of them across the centuries that parted their faith and mine.
We had come to St. Gregory's from the Baths of Caracalla, which we had set out to see on the first of our Roman holidays, and, after turning aside for the Coliseum, had now visited on next to the last of them. The stupendous ruin could scarcely have been growing in the ten or twelve weeks that had passed, but a bewildering notion of something like this obsessed me as I saw it bulking aloof in overhanging cliffs and precipices, through the cool and bright April air, against a sky of absolute blue. As if it had been cast up out of the earth in some convulsive throe of nature, it floundered over its vast area in shapeless masses which seemed to have capriciously received the effect of human design in the coping of the inaccessible steeps, in the arches flinging themselves across the spaces between the beetling crags, in the monstrous spring and sweep of the vaults, in the gloom of the cavernous apertures of its Titanic walls. For the moment its immensity dwarfed the image of all the other fragments of the Roman world and set definite bounds to their hugeness in the mind. It seemed to have been not so much a single edifice as a whole city, the dwelling instead of the resort of the multitudes that once thronged it. The traces of the ornamentation which had enriched it everywhere and which it had taken ages of ravage to strip from it, accented its savage majesty, and again the sentiment of spring in the fresh afternoon breeze and sunshine, and the innocent beauty of the blooming peach and cherry in the orchards around, imparted to it a pathos in which one's mere brute wonder was lost. But it was a purely adventitious pathos, and it must be owned here, at the end, that none of the relics of ancient Rome stir a soft emotion in the beholder, and, as for beauty, there is more of it in some ivy-netted fragment of some English abbey which Henry's Cromwell “hammered down” than in the ruin of all the palaces and temples and theatres and circuses and baths of that imperial Rome which the world is so well rid of.
VII. A WEEK AT LEGHORN
We left Rome with such a nostalgic pang in our hearts that we tried to find relief in a name for it, and we called ourselves Romesick. Afterward, when we practised the name with such friends as we could get to listen, they thought we said homesick. Being better instructed, they stared or simpered, and said, “Oh!” That was not all we could have asked, but Rome herself would understand, and, while we were seeking this outlet for our grief, she followed us as far as she could on her poor, broken aqueducts. At places they gave way under her, and she fell down, but scrambled up again on the next stretch of arches, like some fond cripple pursuing a friend on crutches; when at last our train outran them, and there was no longer an arch to halt upon, she gave up the vain chase and turned back within her walls, where we saw her domes and bell-towers fading into the heaven to which they pointed.
It was a heaven of better than absolute blue, for there were soft, white clouds in it, and the air that our Sunday breathed under it was, at the beginning of April, as bland as that of an American May-end. The orchard trees were in bloom—peach and plum, cherry and pear—whenever you chose to look at them, and all nature seemed to rejoice in the cessation of the two days' strike which had now enabled us to drive to the station instead of walking and carrying our bags and bundles. There were so many of these that we had taken two cabs, and at the station our drivers attempted to rejoice with nature in an overcharge that would have recouped them for the loss suffered in their recent leisure. But as we were then leaving Koine, and were not yet melted with the grief of absence, I had the courage to resist their demand. Long before we reached Leghorn I was so Romesick that I would have paid them anything they asked.