Three generations

King Victor Emmanuel might be seen on a fine afternoon, driving a smart pair of horses in a high phaeton. He was a martial figure, full of dash, with a keen eye that saw more than most. His fierce mustache, twirled at a truculent angle, set the fashion for the military. We sometimes met him driving to the Villa Mirafiori, the home of his morganatic wife, often with a younger man who closely resembled him and was, I think, a son of this union. Rome was a city divided against itself; the King’s party were called the Whites, the followers of the Pope Pius Ninth were known as the Blacks. The two factions managed to rub along together somehow, as they have done ever since, though the King’s people talked of “the traitor at the hearthstone” and the Pope’s cursed “Perfidious Savoy.”

Francesco Crispi, Minister of the Interior, at that time played the first rôle in Italian politics. He had lately returned from a certain quiet journey whose results were to prove of vast importance to the whole world. With the object of sounding the great powers’ attitude towards Italy, Crispi visited England, France, Austria, and Germany. In Paris he was coolly received, London was friendly but indifferent, Vienna as hostile as ever; he returned to Italy feeling that Bismarck—and Bismarck then meant Germany—was Italy’s only friend. From this hour the Triple Alliance between Germany and those two irreconcilables, Italy and Austria, was assured.

Though there was some discussion of political matters at my aunt’s house, it appeared to me that the two serious things in life from the Palazzo Odescalchi standpoint were society with a small s, and art with a big A. Quick as a chameleon to take the local color, I entered the studio of Giovanni Costa to study painting. Costa, one of the young artists among the immortal Mille who sailed from Sicily with Garibaldi and made the great fight for Italian liberty, was the most interesting painter in Rome, with a large following among English and Americans. In order to be in time for his class I often stole away before breakfast to the studio in the Via Margutta, taking a roll in my pocket. I enjoyed my work and made some progress, learning how to prepare my canvas and lay on the under color in pale red in a way that satisfied my master. I was toiling over a study of a branch of lemons when my artistic career was interrupted by a severe attack of Roman fever, a scourge which then took its toll every year from the Americans wintering in Rome.

Two new figures now appear in “Memory’s Showcase”, Doctor Liberali, the old homeopathic physician, and Suora Teresa, the Spanish nun who nursed me.

Oh, the horrors of those long, sleepless nights when I lay staring at the shadows cast by the taper on the painted ceiling, waiting for the first faint gray, for the song of the caged bird outside the opposite window, for the moment when that casement would open and I could see the profile of a young monk in a white habit bending over the bird cage. At long last came a welcome tap at my door and Mariuccia, the merry little maid, tiptoed to my side with a cheery:

“Buon Giorno, Signorina. It will go better to-day. I made a petition for you at mass.”

Relapse followed relapse. The doctor grew graver, the Suora more careful, my mother paler.

“The girl will never recover in this room. She must have sun; she must have fire!” I heard the doctor declare to my aunt.

“It is the truth!” murmured the Sister.

My beautiful Nile-green room was deadly cold; the only heat it ever knew came from a charcoal brazier whose fumes gave me such a headache that I preferred the cold. A few hours later my bed was carried into one of the sunny south drawing-rooms, where an open fire blazed upon the hearth. I was too much absorbed in the fight for life that followed to think much of the trouble I was giving; since then I have grilled in my blood at the memory of that upsetting of the well-ordered existence at the Palazzo Odescalchi. The splendid sunny reception and living rooms opened en suite, one from the other; what happened on the Wednesday afternoon receptions and the more intimate Sunday evenings at home?

In preparation for my first sitting up, my mother went to buy some white cashmere to make a “Nightingale” for me. The clerk had just cut a length from a piece and was folding it up for another purchaser, a lady in whom my mother recognized a friend, whose young daughter had died of the fever the day before; the cashmere was for her last garment! Shuddering, my mother hurried from the shop.

“Not from that piece of cloth, no!” She would find her material elsewhere!

As soon as I could be moved, the doctor suggested change of air. On a mild day of early spring my mother and I, with Marion Crawford for escort, left Rome. I remember that the peach trees were all in bloom.

“Orvieto is the place indicated,” Marion declared. “Has not its wine been prescribed? I have an acquaintance at the Aquila Bianca who has the best rooms and best macaroni in the town.”

Memories of that fortnight at Orvieto remain, when so much is forgotten. The fine cathedral, the lovely Fra Angelico and Signorelli paintings, the Etruscan tombs, the view of the Valley of the Tiber and the Umbrian Mountains, the well of St. Patrizio, with its winding stairway cut from the rock for water-carrying donkeys, my mother’s delight in my renewed health, and Crawford’s extraordinary personality coloring everything with the roseate glow of his joie de vivre.

“To-night, I will make you, my aunt, a dish whose like you have never tasted!” he exclaimed one evening, when the macaroni was scorched, no lettuce was to be had, and it looked as if we must go to bed fasting. He called for white bread, olive oil, salt, pepper, and vinegar and compounded what he called “a bread salad.”

“Impossible to have anything better! Good wine, good oil, good company; what more do you want?” he cried in triumph, as we praised his dish. We adjourned to the terrace of the poor little inn.

“We only lack music,” some one suggested.

“I will sing you the song taught me by Amerigo, the old contadino, whose vines I helped prune this morning.”

Crawford put a new string on his guitar, tuned the instrument, and sang one of those touching songs of “the people” that are more melodious and more dramatic in Italy than in any other country.

Later, by his novels, Crawford was to teach the English reading world to love the simple Italian ways. He taught me so much of Italy that I am glad to find, from an old letter, that he learned something that was worth while from me,—the American point of view. I was frankly horrified at the lack of purpose in his life. This handsome, gifted, brilliant man of twenty-four seemed perfectly content to live at home, idle, and supported by his mother.

Crawford’s mother, for years “a leader” of the Anglo-American colony, was much beloved.

“Madama Terry is the most simpatica American I know!” I once heard Rudolpho Lanciani, the archeologist exclaim. Most people agreed with him. Her popularity was deserved, for her kindness was unfailing,

her generosity unstinted. She was the most romantic of women, always beautiful, always surrounded by admirers! Her marriage to Thomas Crawford, the sculptor, in 1846 carried her to Rome, a young bride; from this time Rome was her home. The four Crawford children were all more Italian than American. After Uncle Crawford’s death in 1857, my aunt married Luther Terry, an American painter also settled in Rome. There are two children of this marriage, Margaret (Mrs. Winthrop Chanler) and Arthur Terry.

“Every year I break off a bit of my heart and give it away!” my aunt said to me sadly at the end of a season that had brought several near relatives and friends to Rome. That was the fly in her ointment—the brilliant circle at the Odescalchi was inevitably a shifting one—she missed the intimacy of old friends and relatives; this was part of the price of exile. She was a faithful correspondent, writing long letters to her children and sisters, “holding the family together” by her system of “letter exchange.” They all wrote freely and frequently to her, and she was tireless in passing on the letters from one to another.

Her two married Crawford daughters, Annie, Baroness Erich von Rabé and Mimoli, Mrs. Hugh Fraser, came that winter to visit the Odescalchi. Annie was a unique person, witty, brilliant, and extraordinarily gifted. Her brother Marion writes of her at this time, “I saw Annie yesterday, and find her much changed—cordial and affectionate, but nervous and excitable. She has become much thinner, or I should say slimmer, for her figure is really almost absolute perfection. She was here for a few days with her really magnificent children, all affection and smiles, and has now gone back to her wolves and her Poles and her fine trees at Lesnian.” The Crawfords were all artistic like their father and romantic like their mother.

On the ninth of January of this year, 1878, Victor Emmanuel the Liberator died. I saw his strong face for the last time as he lay in state at the Quirinal. The cappella ardente was ablaze with candles, the air was heavy with the smell of incense and flowers. The dead king was dressed in uniform with the crown and scepter at his feet. Two Capuchin monks knelt beside him, telling their beads. From early morning till late night a silent grief-stricken crowd surged though the chapel.

“He received the sacrament! Yes, it was allowed,” a woman of the people murmured in my ear the words with which Rome rang. There had been some who doubted if the Church would permit the supreme unction to be administered. For several days it had been known that while the king lay dying at the Quirinal, across the Tiber at the Vatican, his old adversary, Pope Pius Ninth, had been stricken with mortal illness. With my mother I watched the wonderful funeral cortège pass the American Consulate. There were tears on the roses she threw before the crimson velvet funeral car drawn by six magnificent horses. In the great drama of the Risorgimento she too had played her part. She had, as a girl in her father’s house and as a wife in her husband’s home, received and comforted Italians exiled for Liberty’s sake; she had worked for the cause of Italian liberty with voice and pen. She had labored for Italy, she had rejoiced with her, and now she mourned with “the ransomed land.”

Chief among the mourners was Garibaldi, old and ill, who came up from rocky Caprera, where he had lived for some time rather in the shadow. I saw him pass, lying back in a landau, dressed in the traditional gray felt hat and red blouse. His bronze hair and beard were silver now, but his eyes had still the look of a seer. He never for an instant doubted that Italy would fill that larger destiny of which he dreamed. He saw in the death of Victor Emmanuel the opportunity to raise once more the cry for Italia Irredenta!

“The call of the patriots of Trieste and Trent must find an echo in the hearts of all Italians, and the yoke of Austria, no better than that of the Turk, must once for all be broken from off the necks of our brethren.”

Forty years were to pass before Garibaldi’s words were realized.

On this, his last visit to Rome, Garibaldi once more urged the Romans to make a supreme effort to banish the fever from their city by building the Tiber Embankment and thus preventing the river from rising and overflowing its banks. The Romans did for Garibaldi what they would not have done for any other man, and put through that splendid piece of engineering. Though to-day his statue rides in bronze on the Janiculum, Rome’s greatest monument to him remains the Tiber Embankment. To-day we recognize that he, the man of vision, saw the future truer than Crispi the statesman; it was not so in 1878, when the young King Umberto took the oath of office. Crispi, his trusted advisor, had fallen under the sway of the Iron Chancellor, and from that time stood for the Triple Alliance and German influence. Italy endured a great disappointment this year at the Congress of Berlin, from which the Italian envoy, Count Corti, returned to Rome empty handed, when by skillful diplomacy his country might easily have gained some substantial increase of territory. I remember Count Corti in the United States, when he was the Italian Minister. He was an insignificant looking man, with a very small nose, which may have had something to do with his failure! I recall a story of a heated argument between Count Corti and Vicenzo Botta, an Italian exile formerly a monk now married to an American wife. Botta spoke with great heat, pouring out a flood of invective against the church, the Pope, and the clerical party. Count Corti, a moderate man, with moderate ideas and gifts, waited for a pause in the fiery diatribe and then said with biting irony:

“And I was a Dominican Friar!”

The host changed color, hesitated, and dropped the argument!

King Victor was hardly cold when the German infiltration of Italy showed a marked increase, that quiet thorough system of penetration, which was to make Capri, Olevano, and certain other garden spots of Italy seem like German colonies. In the spring of 1879, the birthday of one of the royalties was celebrated by tableaux vivants at the German Embassy, the Palazzo Cafferelli on the Capitoline Hill.

“It makes me shudder to think that the Germans have gained a footing on the sacred soil of the Capitol!” a young American student said to me, as we climbed the long steps leading to the summit.

The tableaux were the important social event of that season, and I was pleased enough when asked to take part. A prize was offered by the German Ambassador for the best tableau, and the competition among the artists was intense. Each painter made a sketch of his subject and then proceeded to find the victims to illustrate it. I have forgotten the name of my artist, an energetic fellow who gave me my first ideas of German efficiency. His picture represented a scene in the studio of Phidias, when the sculptor shows his statue of Minerva to Pericles and Aspasia; from the hour the part of Aspasia was assigned to me, I was pursued by that artist, who insisted upon examining every minutest detail of my costume. A sketch of the dress was given me, and having followed it, as I thought, closely enough, I presented myself at the first rehearsal. My artist was far from satisfied:

“It is not enough to indicate the Greek border on the underdress,” he declared; “it must be carefully embroidered in gold. The hair has not been properly studied; the ornaments are three centuries late in style. The mantle is not the right color; it must be blue to harmonize with the slave’s drapery.”

The slave, Maud Broadwood, later Mrs. Waldo Story, a handsome dark girl, who was to sit at my feet, seemed discontented with her part. Used to the rough-and-ready American manner of getting up tableaux, I innocently exclaimed:

“Let me be the slave and you be Aspasia!”

The artist bristled with anger.

“The young lady has been chosen because Professor Helbig, the first archeologist in Rome, holds that Aspasia should be represented by one of her type.”

I was out of my depth and offered no more suggestions. The artist went on with his lecture:

“Signor Tale, the hairdresser of her Majesty the Queen, will make some studies from statues at the Vatican for the coiffure. He will first call upon the young lady, to become familiar with her type.”

Signor Tale, looking more like a prince than a hairdresser, called to observe my type; called again with half a dozen careful pencil drawings and measured my head for the golden net he would construct to bind over the blue fillet which must match the mantle. Rehearsals in hairdressing followed until both artists were satisfied.

My aunt took me to her friend, Mme. Ristori, to consult about the mantle.

“It is important it should be correct!” the great actress agreed. She called her daughter, the lovely Bianca Capranica.

“Ask my woman to bring the blue and gold mantle I wear as Phedra. That will satisfy even a German archeologue.”

On the Royal birthday, the cast assembled at the embassy. Mme. Ristori, dressed as Clio, the Muse of History, opened the evening with a recitation. She had not long retired from the stage; her majestic presence, her wonderful deep voice, her classic face, thrilled her audience, as I had known them thrill American audiences in “Marie Stuart” or in “Lucrezia Borgia.” I was still under the spell of her grand manner when she came to oversee the draping of her mantle on my shoulders. She called for a needle and thread and came towards me with a look so dramatic that I trembled; the needle might have been a dagger from the intensity of her face and gesture. She herself took the necessary stitch to stay the mantle’s folds upon my shoulder; as she left me to take my pose she whispered:

“Forget yourself; remember only that you are Aspasia, that Pericles is by your side, that Phidias and his statue are before you!”

Just before the curtain was raised, a queen’s jewels lately discovered in an ancient Etruscan tomb and belonging to Castellani, the great jeweler archeologue, were handed me. I put the earrings in my ears and clasped the bracelets on my wrists with a sense of awe.

Our tableau was much applauded, Queen Margherita, who sat in the front seats with the French Ambassadress, Mme. de Noailles, asked to have it repeated. We took the prize; this success was not wonderful when I remember that Adelaide Ristori, Herr Helbig, Guglielmo Castellani, Signor Tale, and I forget how many other masters of their craft had a share in it!

CHAPTER XII

Egypt. Palestine. Greece.

“What?” exclaimed the driver, who had a little French, “You eat those wild things? That is not well; they are only for birds and cattle.” He was much concerned for us, my mother was equally concerned for him. While I stood, as Emerson has it:

she tried to persuade him that blackberries were good food for human beings to eat.

“This is such a poor country! What a pity they do not know the value of their own fruits!” she exclaimed.

After Brittany came Switzerland; of this there remains the awe of the Alps, the chill breath of the Jungfrau, the edelweiss at Chamonix, the bear-pit at Berne. These were surface things, easily recalled; when it comes to memory’s substratum, that’s a different story. My mind is like a vast rubbish heap that covers some buried city; if I dig hard enough I uncover priceless treasures, temples, statues, long colonnades leading to forgotten altars where once the sacred fire burned.

My friend Giacomo Boni, who found the tomb of Romulus in the Roman Forum, showed me his method of excavation. The dust of ages was carefully skimmed off in layers. As each stratum represented a different epoch, it was isolated and sifted, and every bit of marble, glass, metal, or brick sorted and fitted together. I have helped him sort his treasures in the little workroom over the Forum, watched his skillful, nervous fingers put together the fragments of an exquisite vase three thousand years old. By a like method I too can find bits of jeweled glass and earthenware: can piece them together; the trouble is in choosing where to dig!

Among the spoils of these months of wandering three objects survive, treasured by my mother through all the years; a tiny clay statuette of the goddess Pacht, ravished from an Egyptian tomb, a small Greek terra cotta cup, and some pressed flowers in an envelope marked “Gethsemane.” Out of that shining past that I alone remember, let me snatch something worth preserving of the three countries which these, her little keepsakes, recall,—Egypt, Greece, Palestine!

If you look at the map of Egypt you will see something like a lily with a long curving stem, lying at the edge of the Mediterranean. The graceful stem is the river Nile, the cup is the Nile Delta, the lotus of Isis and Osiris.

We landed at Alexandria, November 27, 1878, and left the next day for Cairo, where we stayed at Shepheard’s Hotel, then a primitive place, where the turbaned fellaheen servants were summoned by clapping the hands. As we sat on that famous terrace of Shepheard’s, looking out at the motley crowd surging by, two figures with flowing white sleeves, carrying light wands in their hands, ran side by side down the street, before a victoria drawn by a pair of Arab horses. The flying figures were the sais or running footmen, who go before the carriage of a notable to clear away the crowd. At their low cry, “O Wai Yer Geddeh! O Wai Yer Geddeh!” (“Out of the way, you clever fellow!”) the water carriers, snake charmers, donkey boys, and camel drivers made way for the carriage to draw up before the hotel.

“That,” said Sir George Elliott, a new acquaintance, “is Stone Pasha, Chief of Staff to the Khedive. He has come to call on some one.”

He had come to call on us. Our cousin, Julia McAllister, who was traveling with us, was an old friend; to her we owed the good offices of this powerful friend at court. Stone Pasha was a handsome man with white hair and mustache and strong regular features. In spite of his Egyptian uniform and fez, he bore the stamp of West Point, and looked the typical Civil War general he was. Our first meeting with Stone Pasha was full of interest. Though he was most solicitous that we should receive every attention, he was preoccupied and wore a harried look. How should he not?

The curtain had rung up on the last act in the drama of Ismaïl Pasha’s life as Khedive of Egypt. The four million pounds England had paid for his interest in the Suez Canal were already spent, and Mr. Rivers Wilson was in Cairo looking after British interests. Stone Pasha must have known that the final catastrophe was near at hand, but he played the game to the end.

He introduced to us several other Americans in the Khedive’s service, General Loring who had lost an arm in the Civil War, Purdy Bey, and Inman Barnard, whom I remembered in Boston. We had crossed on the steamer with Consul General Farman; thanks to these friends we met many interesting people, among others Sir Samuel and Lady Baker, with whom my mother talked endlessly. In speaking of her native Egyptian servant, Lady Baker said:

“I assure you he is the best human being I have ever known.”

The Bakers were very friendly; I remember Lady Baker showing me a remarkable necklace of lions’ claws she wore. Mr. and Mrs. Rivers Wilson, though we had some talk with both, were reserved and extremely formal. A reception at Mr. Goschen’s house was one of the few private festivities I recall. It may have been here that we met Mariette Bey, the French Egyptologist, under whose guidance we made our first visit to the Bulak Museum, of which he was founder and moving spirit.

Robert Irwin of Japan and his sister Maisie, who were at Shepheard’s, added much to the pleasure of our stay. We made many excursions together, among others the ascent of the great pyramid. To each of our party the Sheikh of the desert Bedouins allotted two Arabs. My men, Hassan and Osman, two superb bronze figures, each gripped me by an arm and practically swung me up from tier to tier of the huge blocks. One of our party seemed bent on making record time; he made no pause, and seemed to fly up those awful steps. When the rest of us reached the top this friend lay gasping flat on his back.

“Those Bedouins tried to kill me,” he murmured; “I kept calling ‘yaller!’ ‘yaller!’ and the more I ‘yallered’ the faster they ran.”

“You used the wrong word; you should have said ‘shwaiyer!’ ‘Yaller’ means faster!” Mahomet, the dragoman, explained.

We lunched luxuriously on the summit of the great pyramid, on roast quail, fresh rolls, and pâté de foie gras! The wilted one was restored with iced champagne.

“Do not let us hurry down,” said the eldest of the party. “I, for one, shall never again get to the top of Cheops.”

So we lingered, watching the changing color of the Mokatten hills, the yellow sands of the desert, the immutable face of the Sphinx till the sky blazed with Egypt’s sublime sunset.

We came again to the Sphinx by starlight. Out there in the desert the constellations seemed nearer than ever before; Venus hung low, as if suspended by a thread from the heavens, her reflection in the Nile a full golden orb. Last and best of all we came on the night of the full moon to take farewell, and each of us tried to guess the ancient riddle.

One morning, “dressed in our best”, we three, my mother, my cousin, and I, drove in Stone Pasha’s carriage behind those flying sais to Abdin Palace, where the General had arranged an audience with the three Princesses, the Khedive’s royal wives. Outside the entrance was a guard of black eunuchs, dreadful creatures with animal faces, dull-eyed, and gross. Inside, the lofty entrance hall was ablaze with color. We were welcomed by a group of rainbow-clad girls.

“Naharak said!” they exclaimed, “May thy day be happy!”

“Naharak leben!” we answered, “May thy day be as white as milk!”

“Accept whatever is offered; to refuse is an insult.” This had been Mahomet’s last advice, as he left us to fend for ourselves in the harem of the Khedive.

A slender brown girl with almond eyes and henna-tipped fingers handed me a jeweled cup.

“Taffadali,” she said, “I beg you to take.”

I tasted the delicious sherbet and was about to drain the cup when my odalisque hastily took it from me and handed it to my cousin; it was meant for all of us!

“May it agree with you!” said the girl, raising her hand to her head. Having forgotten the proper response, I answered at random with that useful word, “Bismillah.”

I was thankful for my few phrases of Arabic; they made the women laugh and set us all at ease!

The girls examined our dresses and hats with childlike curiosity. They asked about our husbands. When told we were unmarried, they were scandalized. An embossed silver bowl filled with scented water was now presented; we dipped our fingers and dried them on linen towels embroidered in gold, fragrant with attar of roses, then they led us into another room for our audience.

Here was a strange medley of East and West! The eldest Princess in native costume of white satin, richly embroidered, sat on a low divan; there were chairs for the rest of us. The second Princess wore, wrong side before, a European frock meant to be fastened up the back. The youngest Princess, the “favorite”, was dressed like a Parisian, in blue silk, with many diamonds. She spoke a little French and acted as interpreter.

When we were seated, chibouks were handed us. Julia McAllister and I, who had rehearsed this part, managed our long pipes tolerably well; my mother made dreadful work of hers, coughing horribly, and blowing into her chibouk till she put it out. The elder Princess clapped her hands for a slave to relight it with a perfumed coal held in a pair of silver tongs.

“Do not trouble yourself to smoke, madam,” said the favorite. “It is evident you have not the habit.”

They were interested in our travels and asked endless questions about the places we had seen.

“What is the matter with those young women that at their age they are unmarried?” the first Princess asked my mother.

The explanation that we had not yet met our fates did not seem to satisfy her.

“Do you enjoy traveling?” one of us asked after a long pause.

“We should enjoy it,” the first Princess sighed, “but the custom of our country forbids us!”

As conversation was not easy, my mother cut the visit rather short, according to oriental ideas. We learned later from Mahomet that we had not made a bad impression, but that we had been expected to stay much longer.

Shortly after we received an invitation for the Khedive’s ball at the Abdin Palace; full dress was de rigueur. Before leaving Paris there had been a discussion as to what clothes we should take for our journey to the East. I recalled Aunt Louisa’s advice:

“Never go anywhere without a ball dress!”

I made room in my modest trunk for my best ball dress, though I was a good deal laughed at for my pains. When I stepped into Stone Pasha’s carriage and drove to that fairy ball at the Abdin Palace, dressed in the latest Parisian fashion, the laugh was on the other side!

We were presented to the Khedive and his son, Tewfik Pasha; both wore European dress with a large star on the breast and the inevitable fez. The Khedive made a deep bow and then turned to address my mother, to whom he made quite a speech, leaving me to talk with Tewfik. The Khedive was about fifty, rather stout, with grizzled hair and beard, a pleasant smile, and a magnetic presence. Tewfik was not half so attractive as his father; he had the smoldering eye and scornful gaze of the fanatical Mohammedan. He spoke of his new steam yacht lately arrived in Cairo and asked if we were going up the Nile.

“And where are the ladies we saw when we were last at the palace?” I asked indiscreetly enough. Tewfik glanced indifferently at a sort of trellised balcony at the end of the room, as he answered:

“It is not the custom of our country for our ladies to appear at a ball.”

I seemed to feel the eyes of those women of the harem looking down upon me from behind those screens.

No man of his time was more talked about than Ismaïl Pasha. Some people said of him, “He has ruined Egypt.” Others maintained, “He has created a new Egypt.”

Whatever place history may award him, these things remain to his credit. He completed the Suez Canal. He built the road from Cairo to the Pyramids. He protected the exploration of Sir Samuel Baker. He founded girls’ schools all over Egypt; and he commissioned Giuseppe Verdi to write “Aïda” for the opening of the Cairo Opera House. When I hear Caruso’s voice in “Celeste Aïda”, I remember Ismaïl Pasha, for whom Verdi’s masterpiece was written!

My mother’s journal notes that “Maud danced all night.” We did not get home much before four in the morning. One partner, the son of a prominent German banker, is recalled by a photograph of a handsome oriental looking man, that has somehow survived. It bears the inscription:

Among the Orientals, I should say, my cousin Julia was the admired one of our little party. Her tall, dignified figure and tendency to embonpoint filled them with delight.

Another of my partners, my old friend, Augustus Gurnee, writes me à propos of this ball of forty years ago:

The company at the ball was of many nationalities,—French, English, and German officers, the Americans of the Khedive’s staff, and representatives of all the powers, great and small. The diplomats and army officers knew the dreadful confusion of Ismaïl’s affairs. Though all were guarded in their talk, one felt that Cairo society was an armed camp, where France and England were engaged in a silent duel for the control of the Suez Canal, Germany was “out for trade”, and only the American Condottieri were for the Khedive!

The catastrophe came a few months later, when Ismaïl Pasha was deposed and left Alexandria for Naples with his harem, his suite, and his two sons, Hussein and Hassan, on the yacht Mahroussahl, leaving his uneasy throne to my friend Tewfik Pasha. When she read of this my mother exclaimed:

“Our friends the Princesses of the Abdin Palace have their wish at last; they are now traveling to a new country!”

In Egypt my mother seemed much of the time to be living a life quite apart from the sight-seeing and adventuring we shared. At the first glimpse of the river Nile she seemed to enter a world where I could not follow her. Moses, Joseph, the Pharaoh of the Exodus, all the figures in Bible history with whom she had been familiar since earliest childhood, stole between us like impalpable shadows, claiming her for their own. In Palestine this absorption increased. If all the rest of our long wandering was planned for my profit and pleasure, the trip to the Holy Land was for herself the realization of a life’s dream. For the only time in her life, so far as I know, she borrowed money to make what was then a very expensive journey.

“Those are the mountains of Judea,” a returning missionary pointed out, as we neared the coast. Soon the faint blue line grew stronger, we could make out the yellow beach, olive groves, palm trees, and the flags of many nationalities floating from the different consulates. We landed at Jaffa, not an easy matter, as the steamer anchored half a mile from shore, and we were compelled to clamber down to a small boat tossing like a cockleshell on the rough sea.

We traveled chiefly on horseback, over precipitous mountain trails, through the desert where we were told there was danger from the wild tribesmen. My mother was obliged to pay a large sum for an escort of Turkish soldiers to protect us from these wandering Bedouins. She made her arrangements so well that while we were camping in the desert near Jericho, Eugene Thayer, a rich young Bostonian, asked to join our party, his own men having proved untrustworthy.

My cousin Julia was so much admired by one of the Bedouin chiefs that we were advised not to linger in that locality lest he should attempt to carry her off. Another American girl we met in Egypt was sought for an exclusive harem.

“She is fairer than any Circassian!” her mother was told. After refusing a large sum of money, this lady was urged to set her own price upon her daughter.

By the river Jordan, on the banks of the Dead Sea, on the Plains of Boaz, wherever we went, my mother was preoccupied and withdrawn. She seemed to be living over the earthly life of her Master and those who had known and walked with him in these places.

“Christ has been here!” she murmured to herself over and over again, and seemed to think of little else.

One of the pictures of Jerusalem that rises before me is of the Via Dolorosa, where a poor madman walked each day, dressed in white, crowned with thorns, carrying a heavy wooden cross. She had some talk with this man, who had been a sailor. His story was strange and disjointed. He spoke of a terrible storm at sea when he was at the vessel’s helm. He was smitten by the sword of the Lord that came out of the sky and leveled him to the deck. After that his life work was clear; he must walk the holy streets of Jerusalem, for “Where the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together.”

We went to a church service in the little town of Bethlehem. Here my mother made friends with a well-known archeologist whose name I have forgotten, who told her he believed this to be the place where Jesus was born. He said that the inn where Mary and Joseph rested was the khan of the town, which in the natural order would remain unchanged for centuries. He saw no reason for doubting that when the Empress Helena came out to Palestine to find and preserve the holy places, this khan was exactly as it had been at the time of the nativity.

My mother was distressed to find a guard of Mohammedan soldiers at the Holy Sepulchre.

“These Moslems are here to keep you Christians from killing each other!” an acquaintance said to her rather brutally. “Riots are frequent, especially at Easter, when the church is crowded with pilgrims of every nationality.”

On the afternoon when we visited the Garden of Gethsemane, she was more silent than usual.

“Would you mind if I sang a hymn?” She raised her sweet voice and sang the hymn beginning:

We lingered under the garden’s immemorial olives and cedars. The Franciscan who was our guide gave her a handful of flowers,—the flowers I found the other day in the envelope marked “Gethsemane.”

From Jaffa we sailed for Beirut, skirting the storied African coast. A fellow passenger, an old sea captain, electrified us one morning by exclaiming, as carelessly as he might have said, “Yonder’s Nantucket Light”, “Tyre’s thereabouts—place where the purple dye came from—not much to see there now!”

Of Cyprus, I remember only the thrill of the great names,—Paphos, birthplace and shrine of Aphrodite, and Salamis.

The steamer made some stay at Smyrna, where we were entertained by Christy Evangelides, who could not do enough for my mother. As a boy he had escaped from a Turkish massacre and been carried to New York on an American vessel. Here my grandfather Ward had befriended him.

Christy was a vigorous intelligent man who seemed to hold a leading position in Smyrna. While calling at his house we were offered a delicious sweetmeat flavored with rose leaves, served in a crystal dish. You took a spoonful; then a glass of water was handed you. If that ambrosial conserve had a fault, it was a little oversweet; this made the water doubly welcome. In speaking of Smyrna’s claim to fame Christy said, “You doubtless know that this island was the birthplace of Homer?”

I thought of the old English round we used to sing:

At Jerusalem the grave of Adam had been pointed out to us; after that nothing surprised me. My mother however confirmed Christy’s statement.

Some of the saloon passengers were interested in a forlorn family in the steerage. The mother, an Egyptian, was very ill, and the children needed looking after. An Englishwoman who had lived long in Cairo gave this warning:

“Do not notice that fine baby too much! If you were a native, you would say to the mother, ‘What a poor, miserable little girl you have there!’”

“But why, when it is a boy, and the best of the lot?” was asked. The Englishwoman smiled and shook her head.

“I can’t explain—you couldn’t understand—it is not well to praise a child to these people; it brings bad luck.”

I understood! This was “the evil thing come out of Africa”, magic and fear of magic. In Hayti they call it voodoo, in Italy, jettatura!

As we neared the Dardanelles the old captain gave us another sensation. Pointing a blunt forefinger towards the faint blue coast, he said, “Troy once stood there!”

“Then Helen passed this way with Paris, Agamemnon, Achilles, and all the rest of them?” The captain nodded.

“So they say. There’s a deal more important happened since, though. My father fought the bloody Algerine pirates in these waters before I was born.—The Mediterranean wa’n’t exactly a tourist resort in those days!”

We made quite a stay at Constantinople. Much of what we did and saw on this wonder journey is lost to me now, but I have never lost the sympathy for the poetry and art of the Orient. “I heard the East a callin’”—it calls me yet!

While in Syria we had some disagreeable encounters with Turkish officialdom and formed a poor opinion of it. At the Constantinople customhouse the officers were incredibly insolent. One snatched a bouquet from my hand and threw it into the sea; another took from my ulster pocket a photograph of a Greek officer. The photograph was handed from one to another amid jeers and laughter.

We spent a delightful week at Constantinople as the guests of Captain—now Admiral—and Mrs. Frank Higginson. Captain Higginson’s ship was in the port and we met many of his officers, among others, Lieutenant John Jacob Hunker. These good friends arranged endless frolics and sight-seeing expeditions for us. Aside from our pleasure of being with such hospitable compatriots, Constantinople did not please me. I did not like the Turks or their capital. After the beautiful bronze and ebony people of upper and lower Egypt, the Turks looked a pale, ugly, washed-out race. I sighed for Hassan, our Bisharin guide at Assuan, with a patina of richest chocolate; for Abbas, our Theban donkey boy, whose color was like new-cast golden bronze. Hassan, who was twelve years old, was offered to us by his father as a gift, it being forbidden for a man to sell his son!

At that time Constantinople was infested by bands of mongrel scavenger dogs. They were so thick in the street outside my window that they looked like a moving yellow carpet. I have been told that shortly after this these poor creatures became such a nuisance that the authorities loaded them upon scows and transported them to a barren rocky islet where there was literally nothing to support life and where the stronger devoured the weaker, the survivors finally perishing from lack of food. I have been familiar with stories of Turkish atrocities all my life, but this has always lingered in my mind as one of the foulest.

It was at Constantinople that I discovered the secret of the mummy. My mother, who always had a catholic taste in curios, had bought, “unbeknownst” to me, a child mummy while we were at Luxor on the Nile. Thinking I might not like the purchase, she had concealed it from me by making each of her friends on the Nile steamer keep it for one night in their staterooms. My cousin, Julia McAllister, writes me à propos of this incident: