Then a new interest came into my life—we were persuaded in 1895 to spend a summer and autumn at St. Andrews, and there I acquired the inevitable taste for golf, which has kept me interested and amused and healthful and unaging. Certainly this was one of the most fortunate inspirations we ever had for a holiday, since, after being devoted to games at school and College and in Australia, I had left off football and cricket and tennis, and even shooting, as soon as I settled in London.
Poor old Tom Morris never had a worse pupil, for I play everything wrong, and owe the prizes and medals I have won at golf to the straightness of eye which helped me to win every shooting challenge cup at Cheltenham and every shooting challenge cup at Oxford. At St. Andrews I not only had a glorious spell of golf, but fell deeply in love with romantic and historical Fifeshire. There are few places which combine so many attractions as St. Andrews. It is the capital of golf; its cliffs capped with old houses, and its ancient port, are beautiful enough for Sicily, and its great ruined castle and its immemorial cathedral make it architecturally the most interesting place in Scotland after Edinburgh and Stirling. Nor does it yield to many in historical interest. I should live there if it had a climate like Naples.
It gave us such a hunger for old architecture and romantic scenery that in the following summer we went to the old Breton towns on the Gulf of St. Malo. We stayed at St. Servan in a seventeenth-century manoir called La Gentillerie, which we had from the chaplain, my school-friend, William Vassall, who stayed with us as our guest in his own house.
From a point close by we could look across the harbour to St. Malo, with its mediæval walls and crane’s-bill steeple, and on the other side were no further from Dinan. From St. Servan we went on for a month in Normandy, which I much prefer to Brittany. Towns like Rouen and Caen, Coutances and Bayeux, Evreux, Lisieux and Falaise, are citadels of mediævalism.
During this holiday I wrote my third travel-book, published in England, Brittany for Britons, issued a year later, and put the final touches on my first acknowledged novel, A Japanese Marriage.
It was my two books on Japan, The Japs at Home and A Japanese Marriage, which helped me to gain a literary position; both went into several editions in their first year. Between them they have sold more than a quarter of a million copies.
But I was on the verge of a book-success of another kind, which could hardly be called a literary success, though more people connect my name with this than with any of my books. Messrs. A. & C. Black, who had published A Japanese Marriage and Brittany for Britons, approached me to know if I would expand Who’s Who, of which they had just purchased the copyright.
They showed it to me, and asked me if I could turn it into a book of reference—a sort of cross between the old Who’s Who and Men of the Time was the idea which shaped itself from our discussion.
The two visits which we paid to Salcombe in Devon, the second of them with Reginald Cleaver, have not yet furnished me with any subject for writing.
The year 1896, in which I compiled the new Who’s Who, was also a notable year for me from the travel point of view. At last I faced the exertion of taking my family to Sicily, which had been my ambition for exactly ten years. It was not such a stereotyped journey as it is now. I began to make inquiries about it when we reached Naples, and could not find an Englishman in the place—even the Consul-General—who had ever been to Sicily. But the Consul-General made inquiries, and said that he did not think travelling in Sicily was very difficult or dangerous. He, however, asked me if I had a revolver, and recommended me not to take out a licence for it at the Consulate, because in Sicily a licence is not available for the whole island, but only for one province, and there are seven provinces. He also told me that he was quite sure that no Sicilian ever took out a licence, though they all carried firearms. As for malaria, he did not know; he never troubled about it; he always spent the summer in or near Naples, and never felt any the worse for it. This Consul was my great friend, Eustace Neville-Rolfe, who had lately sold his ancestral estate of Heacham in Norfolk. Nelson students will remember allusions in the great Admiral’s letters to his uncle Rolfe at Heacham. But my friend hated the climate of Norfolk, and hated its politics, and settled at Naples, where a good many years afterwards they made him Consul-General for the unconstitutional reason that he knew more about Naples than any living Englishman. He had the unique distinction of joining the Consular Service as a Consul-General.