My life and loves Vol. 3 Read online

  I had promised to go to the Dorias to lunch and to talk afterwards to their guests about the famous picture that was in the Doria galleries, the so-called Sacred and Profane Love by Titian. Every one interested in art knows the picture. At the left, in a charming Italian landscape, is a beautiful woman dressed in the utmost splendor of those great Venetian days; and seated on a round marble well-head, close to, is another woman, quite nude, wonderfully drawn and painted, realistically realized. Some idiot had christened it Sacred and Profane Love. I read it in a different way. It seemed to me plain that it was a characteristic Renaissance story: a Venetian aristocrat proud of the beauty of his wife, asked Titian to paint her in all her splendor of raiment, and at the same time to paint her as he saw her in her nude loveliness. It was plainly one and the same woman-figure, eyes and hair unmistakably alike.

  Looking forward to the luncheon and the talk, and tired with futile efforts to find a fox, I broke away from the crowd before noon and rode towards the city, towards the Porta Pia, along the wonderful road made sacred by the sufferings of Paul. As I rode into the city, I think by way of the south gate, I had to slow up and go carefully because of a crowd of three or four hundred people. When I got through the gate I saw from my horse that the center of attraction was a veiled woman seated at a plain table drawn up against the wall. The table was covered with some simple brown cloth. I said to one on the outskirts of the crowd: "What is it all about?"

  "A famous sorceress and soothsayer," he said, "who tells you the future," and he crossed himself as he spoke.

  Just then a girl went up to the woman, put down some silver, and showed her hands. I laughed. It seemed strange to me that there in Rome, the city of a thousand miracles, the heart of a dozen civilizations, this poor cheat should have won through all the centuries of skepticism.

  "A good way of getting rid of small change," I remarked, smiling, and some Italians echoed me, laughing. Suddenly the sorceress spoke:

  "If that foreigner on the horse would come down and dare the test he would find that I could tell him new truths. I can unfold the future to him."

  "It is the past I would like to know about," I answered. "If you can tell me about the past I'll believe your predictions."

  "Come down," she said, "I'll tell you about the past as well as the future."

  I looked at my watch and saw that I had half an hour to spare. There was an Italian boy already at my horse's head, promising to hold the cable-tow, so I

  dismounted and went through the crowd to the sorceress. I offered her a gold coin but she waved it aside. "Do not pay until you are convinced."

  I said, "Please understand that I want to know about the past."

  "What about the past?" she asked.

  "Oh, the most important thing to me in it."

  "That's easy," she replied. "Give me both your hands, please. The left one shows what your natural proclivities are, the right how they have been modified by the experiences of your life."

  I held out both my hands and stood feeling rather a fool to be wasting my time on such nonsense.

  "The most peculiar thing in your life," she said, "up to date, is the love and admiration you had for a man, an American."

  "Perhaps you can tell me the man's name," I suggested.

  "I will spell it for you," she said, "you begin."

  "Begin you-" said I, and she answered, "S-m-i-t-h-Smith."

  For a moment I was dumbfounded. How could she know anything about my life in Kansas University?

  "What was he like?" I asked.

  To my amazement she described him.

  "He had a great influence on you," she went on, "made you a student and writer. Am I right?"

  "Perfectly right," I said, "but how you got the information I do not know.

  Whatever you tell me about the future I shall think of and consider ripely."

  "The movement of your life," she said, "goes steadily upward, and you will realize all your ambitions. You will win money and fame, and have a very happy and full life. But the curve in later life begins to go down, and I cannot see the end; there is a sea of blood."

  "What do you mean," I cried, "blood cause by me?"

  "Oh, no, blood over half the world-a sea of blood."

  "Am I in it?" I asked. "I will say no more," she replied. "I oughtn't to tell you anything more."

  I laughed. "It is a very dramatic ending. Of course if you think you ought not to tell me, you won't."

  "Still you have no belief in it?" she asked, looking at me with sad eyes. None,"

  I said, "not a vestige of belief, not in my success nor in the sea of blood."

  She nodded her head several times as if in thought and then with a sigh, she said: "I can make you believe it all."

  "There I defy you," I laughed. "I do not think I would believe you if it occurred; if in the years to come all you have said turned out to be true, I still should not believe."

  "You will leave Rome this evening and go across the seas to England," she cried suddenly.

  "Oh, that's a shockingly bad guess," I replied. "I have my rooms in Rome for months: I have horses here and do not intend to leave until spring is changing into summer. Three months at least I shall stay here."

  "You will leave Rome this evening," she repeated, "for London. And in the train you will know that the soothsayer spoke truth."

  To cut the matter short, I asked her what I owed her.

  "What you please," she answered. "Nothing if you do not believe."

  I took out a couple of gold coins.

  "I believe the first part of what you said," I told her. "It was extraordinary. But nothing like you say is ever going to happen to me."

  "Tonight you will know more," she replied.

  I bowed and walked through the crowd to my horse and went off to the lunch.

  I gave my little talk to perhaps a hundred people in the Doria gallery. I had just finished and was being congratulated by the British ambassador and Doria, when a servant came up and said to Doria, "A telegram for Mr. Harris."

  With their permission I opened it and found that I was summoned back to London immediately-"Important!" The signature was that of a friend, Lord Folkestone, who would not have sent me such a telegram without absolute need. I showed the telegram to Doria, and, absorbed in the question of what could have happened, I hurried off to my hotel, sent a messenger to get my ticket, packed my clothes, settled my bill and caught the night express to London, getting a sleeping compartment all to myself. An hour later I went into the diner. In glancing out of the window into the gloom I saw that we were just leaving the campagna.

  The whole scene of noon came back to me in a flash. Here I was against all probability going to London, as the soothsayer had predicted.

  How could she have known? How much truth was there in it all? What did she mean by the "sea of blood" at the end? "A sea of blood," her words were,

  "a sea of blood over half the world."

  A couple of months later I was free again. I returned to Rome and did everything I could think of to find my soothsayer, but in vain. When I inquired of the police, they told me that the soothsayers and similar folk in Rome were legion. Could I give any description?

  I never heard of her again. I leave the story now to my readers as a problem. It is the one fact in my life which I am unable to explain in any way.

  I must now relate how I lost the editorship of the Evening News. All the while I was in Rome I received weekly statements from the Evening News and knew that it was going on all right, but without improving under the assistant whom I had picked, an Irishman named Ruble.

  When I reached England, Lord Folkstone told me that Mr. Kennard. the banker and director who supplied most of the money, had come to have a great opinion of Rubie, my assistant; thought he could do the work quite as well as I could, and, in fact, intended to make a row about my having prolonged my holiday in order to put Rubie in my place as managing editor. I was astonished and amused. I knew that Rubie could not
do the paper at all, and I had really worked with all my heart and soul at it, and hadn't taken breathing time or a holiday in the three years.

  I meant to take up the whole problem of journalism in a big way when I came back. I wanted to group all the police courts in London in sixes under able heads, and so fill up the whole paper from one end to the other with astonishing stories of London life. I dreamed of a morning paper as well and a million circulation for each; and I would have done it all, but when I came back, I found that success had turned Kennard's head. He would have to pay me a share of the profits; he would always have me as a master in his paper; and as I had prolonged my holiday without leave, I had given him the opportunity he needed. I was to be discharged-decently because of Lord Folkestone-still, to be got rid of.

  We had a board meeting at the Evening News and Kennard said he wanted to act quite fairly: he thought that I had made the paper successful, and he was quite willing to give me a thousand pounds as a solatium.

  One incident is perhaps worth relating here: I brought some friends together who offered Coleridge Kennard some forty thousand pounds for the paper- more than all the money spent on it during my editorship; he refused the offer. I thereupon accepted his offer of a thousand pounds and got up to leave the board room. At this Lord Folkestone rose also, reminded Coleridge Kennard that he had put a good many thousands of pounds in the paper, that he had selected me as editor, and declared now that he was perfectly satisfied with my work. He preferred, he said, to leave the paper with me and lose whatever money he had put into it. In the most charming way, he added,

  "Come on, Frank, they do not want us," and took me out to his mail-phaeton.

  Three months after I left the Evening News Kennard met me at the corner of Grosvenor Street and begged me to come back to my old position on the News. He told me that the circulation of the paper had fallen off in the most extraordinary way. I smiled at him. "I warned you, Kennard," I said, "that things quickly built up would fall down nearly as quickly, but I am quite happy in the editorship of the Fortnightly Review and I will not go back."

  Two months later Kennard confessed to me that he had sold the Evening News for a paltry two thousand five hundred pounds to Harms-worth: he had lost some thirty-eight thousand by discharging me.

  CHAPTER VII

  My pleasures: driving, food and drink, music and science

  All this while in London I had one passion: the desire to know and measure all the men of ability in art and literature I could meet. I had, however, a myriad pleasures, among which I must put first the love of horses, of riding and driving, I mean. I still kept up another dozen of athletic amusements; I ran and walked regularly and boxed for at least half an hour each morning, just to keep myself perfectly fit, as I shall explain later.

  A London newspaper once published the fact that I was the only editor who drove fine horses tandem down Fleet Street. From 1885 to 1895 or so I had, I think, some of the best driving horses in London. I should like to give the photo of one of them at the end of this chapter; the mare in question won first prize at the Richmond Horse Show, and was a very beautiful creature-wellformed with high spirit, and in her light American buggy an extraordinary mover; but alas! no picture could do her justice.

  All these ten or twelve years in London I had from three to six horses for riding and driving; and I had the carriages built in America simply for lightness and perfection of spring. English carriages are usually very heavy and strong because of the bad old roads of the past, but the good modern road allows one to have lighter carriages, and is therefore better for the horses. I had a mail-phaeton built in New York and sent across which weighed less than four hundred pounds, so that two horses could draw it without feeling its weight, and were therefore free to show perfect paces. I was often stopped by Englishmen in Hyde Park wishing to know where I got the horses and the featherweight phaeton.

  In a little portrait I wrote of Cunninghame Graham, I told of a race we had in Hyde Park one morning, in which I beat his Argentine pony rather easily with an English horse. Graham has written since that he has no recollection of such a race; perhaps if he had won he would have remembered it.

  Whenever I think of horses I cannot but recall Blue Devil, the mare I have told about when I was a cowboy in Texas. She was a wonderful companion! I could throw my hat down and send her back for it: after five miles or more she would go straight to the spot and bring it to me in her mouth. When I was at the University of Lawrence, Kansas, which lies outside the town on a hill, I used to ride her up without bridle or saddle, then dismount and turn her loose, and she would wander about, eating a little grass from time to time, and as soon as I whistled she would come racing to me.

  In her honor I must tell that I once made a bet in Lawrence that I could ride one hundred miles on this one horse and walk fifty in twenty-four hours.

  When it came to the trial, it was a hot July day and I was dreadfully afraid that I had over-rated what Blue Devil could do, so I picked the cool night for her and rode her without a saddle; but about the fiftieth mile she fairly ran away with me just to teach me that she could do what was required of her; and at the hundredth mile, which was completed under eleven hours, she bit me on the shoulder playfully and began to eat her oats as if she had just left the stable; her heart was nearly as big as her body. I almost came to grief walking the fifty miles because one of my boots gave out about the twentyfifth mile and I had to walk the rest of the distance in my stockings. However, the ride is on record; not a bad achievement for a boy of seventeen!

  The English know far more about horses than any other European people, but even in this cult they have been surpassed by the Americans, who first taught them that jockeys should sit as far forward on the withers as possible, and not in the small of the back. Even Fred Archer, great jockey though he was, was not nearly as good as some American jockeys who came after him and showed their skill on English race courses.

  Just in the same way, prize-fighting was further developed in America in ten years' time than in England in a hundred.

  I wish the English would understand how their love of tradition limits them in almost everything.

  I can't leave this talk about horses without mentioning the advent of the motor-car. It was in the winter of 1895-96 that I went from London as usual to the Riviera, and there saw a motor-car for the first time. A man had brought it to Monte Carlo, and having lost his money, offered it for sale: it was a Georges Richard, seven horse-power, driven by belts. At once I tried it and fell in love with the speed and smoothness of its motion; finally I bought it, giving, I think, fifteen thousand francs for it, or about six hundred pounds.

  I used it for almost a month to visit all the beauty spots of the Riviera, and they are numberless and wonderful. When I had drunk my fill of natural beauty, I started over Grasse and Digne to go to Paris. I remember dining late at Grasse and going on by night: we lost first one belt and then another on the road and had to hunt about in the dark for them before we could go on. Still it was evident to me that the motor-car would soon do away with horses: it was the most wonderful mode of traveling that man at that time had discovered.

  It took me over a week to reach Paris, and three days to go from Paris to Calais; and when I started out from Dover to go to London, my difficulties began: the very first policeman stopped me and took me to the station; it was there decided that I must have a man to walk in front of the motor with a red flag. I acquiesced apparently, but declared to the police inspector that I would not go beyond four miles an hour and would use all care; and so at last I was allowed to start out for London. On the way I met a gentleman with a pair of horses who turned back at once and began following my motor-car.

  He asked me numerous questions about it; and the end of it was that he paid me to bring it into his park and let him try it; which I did, and at the finish I sold him the car and went on to London endowed with my new experiences, the chief being the divine beauty of the Riviera, and the new power given t
o one by the motor-car.

  The motor-car enriched life like the discovery of two or three new poets. I always give one instance of its almost magical power. I think I was the first person who ever saw the four great cathedrals of France in one day. I was staying in Amiens, and after a last look at the west door of the cathedral, about seven o'clock in the morning I drove the car to Beauvais and spent some hours with its beauties; thence I drove to Paris. At Paris I just looked at Sainte-Chapelle and went on to Chartres, where I had a late lunch; after lunch and feasting my eyes again on the beauties of the cathedral, I drove on to Rheims and had another great impression.

  I suppose the day will come when one will see the four in a morning and fly to Monreale, near Palermo, for lunch, and then from Palermo to the Parthenon of Athens, and so on to the church of San Sofia at Constantinople, the inside of which is one of the wonders of the world.

  One other experience I had in the last years of the century which I want to put on record, for it taught me that a machine heavier than air might fly. It was, of course, an American who gave me the experience; I have forgotten his name, although I knew him very well. He talked to me about a flying machine: "The motor-car engine," he said, "was still very heavy," but he felt certain that if speed enough could be got up, it would be possible to fly in an airplane heavier than air. He took me down one day to his place in the country. He had rigged up there a sort of airplane with a motorcar engine and a long set of rails down a fairly steep hill. He told me that the rails were there in order to get sufficient speed in the descent for the airplane to fly; he asked me would I risk a flight with him. I said I should be delighted. We got in; he started the engine; we ran down the slope and to my wonder lifted into the air and went about three hundred yards, crossing a fence in our flight before descending in a grass field. 'Twasn't anything very brilliant, but it taught me, certainly, that man had conquered the air and would yet have a machine to wing the ether like a bird.