That inspired me to write My Son Richard, which is a story of river life and boys who want to serve their country. I took him to Captain James, the leading Army crammer, and said that he wanted to get into the Army. In a few home questions, James discovered that he had never done any work at school, and said he had better go into the Artillery—he could not get into the Line. I looked incredulous, and he explained that in the Artillery exams. there are papers in more subjects which boys do not learn at school, so that a boy who has not done any work has not lost time over this—such things, for instance, as “fortification” and “military topography.”
My son amply fulfilled his prognostications by securing ninety per cent. of the marks in the military subjects, and only sixteen marks out of two thousand in Latin. Still, he passed, but, to his great disappointment, was not allowed to go out to the war which had just begun, because he was too young.
In this year, 1901, in which both my big book In Sicily and my novel My Son Richard, first saw the light, I had plenty to do, for I was finishing and attending to the publication of Queer Things about Japan, which was the best received of all my books of travel. It owed its success largely to the timely moment at which I wrote it. Knowing Japan well, I was convinced that there was going to be a Russo-Japanese war, and Sidney Dark, the brilliant literary editor of the Daily Express, as alive a journalist and critic as there is in London, was at that time manager of the firm of publishers to whom I offered the book, because they had recently taken over the publication of the sixpenny edition of A Japanese Marriage. It was not hard to convince him that there was war in the air for Japan, and he commissioned the book with the happiest results. Much of it appeared serially in the papers connected with the Tillotson Syndicate, which at that time had Philip Gibbs for its editor. He accepted my offer to write him eight long instalments about Japan for the Syndicate. Just as I had finished and dispatched them, he wrote to tell me that he did not think that Japan was a sufficiently live subject, and asked me not to write the articles.
No sooner had he written the letter than he received the articles. He read them and thought them so good that he sent me a telegram cancelling his letter, and used them. They form the backbone of the book. He had asked me to be as humorous as possible. Other editors thought them very amusing, and when the approach of war made Japan the topic of the day, showered commissions on me.
Norma Lorimer, who was all through Japan with us, was of great assistance to me in recalling our life there, and I got her a good many commissions for articles, which were afterwards collected with some of the articles that I wrote during the war into More Queer Things about Japan.
In this same year, 1901, Hutchinson & Co. published My Son Richard, which, as I have said above, was a novel about boys who had just passed into the Army, and girls of the same age, spending the summer on the river at Cookham. As an instance of rapid printing, I may mention that Hutchinson got me all the proofs of this book in seven days, but he recently, in 1913, eclipsed this by making the printer give me all the proofs of Weeds in six days.
My Son Richard was very popular. A Duchess wrote to a newspaper which was collecting statistics about the popularity of books, that this was the nicest book she had ever read, and when it came out as a sixpenny, the village grocer at Cookham ordered hundreds and told me that every maidservant for miles round was buying it. I wish they would buy all my other sixpennies. To reach the servant class is a most difficult achievement.
As Miss Lorimer had broken her leg that year and still could not move about much, we went for August to Baveno on Lago Maggiore, to an hotel with a garden on the lake, where she had a room looking right over the exquisite Borromean Islands, Isola Bella and Isola dei Pescatori. Italy has always been her favourite subject for writing. She corrected the proofs of her By the Waters of Sicily here, which is as popular as ever, though it has been out for twelve years.
Baveno had the happiest effect on her. The air is lovely, and her window looked right over the finest sweep of Lago Maggiore, with the islands in front and the snow-tipped Alps behind. Heavy square-prowed barges with junk sails used to glide slowly across the eye-line, and light high-prowed fishing-boats with hoods like Japanese sampans darted about near the shore, which had long pergolas overhanging the lake and Passion-vines sweeping over every shed.
A month’s rest at Baveno made her leg quite well, and then we were able to spend a fascinating September in the mountain city of Bergamo; Brescia, with its history and monuments of a thousand years; and Venice, which is always most adorable in summer. The Feast of the Redentore in July is the crown of the year at Venice. We had learnt, and we have often made use of our knowledge since, that Italy is at her best in summer.