"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,