delightful to me to hunt foxes where Paul and Peter had walked, where Caesar and Pompey had marched at the head of their legions, to take high wooden fences on a countryside peopled with the ghosts of forgotten worthies. I used to spend some hours every afternoon studying the antiquities and all the morning galloping across the campagna.
It was the double life that seduced me and gave me absolute health of both mind and body. Naturally, in the hunting field I got to know nearly all the Romans of position, and I knew most of the scholars and poets through my afternoons.
As sometimes happens, there was a blank day in our hunting. The sun was hot and strong and the dogs could take up no scent at all. The whole hunt moved from place to place, drawing every spinney blank. Once I rested beside a sprig of acacia.
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
