Twenty Years of My Life

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

The Tragedy of the Pyramids was published in 1909, Queer Things about Egypt, and Oriental Cairo, in 1910, the same year which saw the publication of The Moon of the Fourteenth Night, the romance which I wrote in collaboration once more with Eustache de Lorey. As it had so much of the travel-book about it, it was not brought out in the form of a novel. It was, in fact, the biography of a dashing young French attaché, who is still alive, pretty faithfully told. He had no objection to our using it if we killed him off in the book, to throw the girl’s relations off the track, in case they should try to kill him in real life. The public never realised that it was actually reading a romance of real life, that there had been such a person as Bibi Mâh, that the escapades of Edward Valmont were not imaginary, but episodes in a career of gallantry. The book comes very near to being a journal of life in the Persian capital at the beginning of the revolution.

In the autumn of 1908 we went back to Italy to spend the six cold months in Rome, hoping that we should have one of those winters which you sometimes get in Rome, as full of sunshine as spring—only cold when you are in the wind and out of the sun. Yoshio Markino spent that winter with us at 12 Piazza Barberini. I got my friend Percy Spalding, one of the directors of Chatto & Windus, to give him a commission to do the illustrations for The Colour of Rome, and as I knew Rome so well, I conducted him to nearly all the beauty-spots which furnished the subjects of his illustrations. I showed him many others which did not appeal to him, for Markino will not begin a picture until some motif in the locality has appealed to his artistic temperament. He is an artist to the finger-tips. His fidelity is all the more extraordinary when you take into consideration his method of painting a landscape.

In those days he had written nothing but a short chapter in The Colour of London, and The Colour of Paris, but he used to show me the letters he wrote to Spalding and Ward, of Chatto’s, about the book,—most brilliant some of them were, and I saw that he was a born writer. I suggested to him as early as this that he should write his life in Japan—I had not then grasped what a story he had to tell of his life in England.

He felt the cold in Rome very severely. He used to consume quantities of the childish substitutes for fuel provided in Roman hotels.

In that first visit which he paid to Italy, he was not much interested in the architecture or the art, just as he never visited the Louvre while he was in Paris painting The Colour of Paris. And the scenes of historical events interested him little more, though often they played an important part in the history of the world. He was absorbed in the novel lines of buildings; the gay colours of Italy; the strangeness to him of the atmospheric effects of Rome; the subtle and ceaseless humours in the life of the Italian poor. And their clothes delighted him, with their gay, faded colours, their rags, and the fine abandon with which they were worn.

We were in Rome collecting materials for my book on How to See Italy, and I was writing the Tragedy of the Pyramids mostly in bed, before I got up in the morning. Between five and eight a.m. is a favourite time for writing with me. I seldom begin later than 5.45; I have a cup of tea brought to me at 6 a.m. I also wrote a good deal in periodicals about the great earthquake at Messina. The Italian papers were naturally full of details, which had not been telegraphed to England, and we used to get wonderful cinema films, which made one quite an eye-witness of the events. In Italy you can go to the cinema for twopence.

I was about to make a tour of the earthquake scenes in South Italy and Sicily, and to go on to Malta, where my son was then quartered, when I was suddenly called home by the alarming illness of my father, who was given up by the doctors, though he recovered and lived for nearly two years afterwards.

We re-visited a few favourite spots, such as Pisa and Lucca, on our way up, as we did not hope to see Italy again for some time.

As it chanced, it was little more than a year before we were back in Italy again, on the most interesting tour which we have ever spent in that country. I had a commission from Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. to write for them How to See Italy, which was destined to be so popular, and there were forty-five cities in Italy which I wished to visit or re-visit before writing this book. I wrote it for the Italian Government, as Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. were aware, and they had offered me many facilities. They had the blocks made for the illustrations. I went over their entire collection of photographs in making my choice, and where no photograph existed, they sent their special photographer to take one. Also they allowed me to travel about on their lines wherever my wish took me free of charge, so I was able to wander about Italy in a way in which the expenses would ordinarily have been too great for any book.

Markino went with us again on this journey, which lasted from July to November. This time I had got him a commission from Constable & Co. to illustrate a book by Miss Potter, which was published under the title of A Little Pilgrimage in Italy.