When we got to Sicily we found it perfectly easy and safe. The Whitakers of Palermo, to whom he gave us an introduction, at once became our friends, and told us all we ought to see and all we ought to do in the island. On that trip we paid fairly exhaustive visits to Palermo, Taormina, Syracuse, Girgenti, Marsala, Trapani, Selinunte, and Segesta, and flying visits to Catania and Messina.
Sicily is an adorable country. Grass, flowers and fruit-trees grow right down to the edge of the sea, where there is any soil, for half the island is rock. There are no brigands on the sea-coasts, and nearly every monument worth visiting is in sight of the sea. There is not a place in the island from which you cannot see a mountain. It is the land of the orange and the lemon; and possesses the rare charm of ancient Greek and mediæval Arab architecture.
Sicily inspired me to write the largest of all my books, In Sicily, and inspired a publisher to produce it in an édition de luxe, whose two volumes weighed fourteen pounds, and contained four hundred illustrations. I called it In Sicily because it was not until several years afterwards that I considered that I knew enough about the island to write a book with the more pretentious title of Sicily. A great French author paid me the compliment of appropriating my title, and a good deal of my information, a few years afterwards. I began to write In Sicily in 1896, but it was not published till 1901.
We spent the spring of 1896 in Sicily, and the summer at Lulworth, on a little round cove in South Dorset. We went there partly because it was said to be the mildest place in England, partly because Thomas Hardy told me that he had laid the scene of one of the chief episodes in Tess of the D’Urbervilles in an old farmhouse near the station which served Lulworth; it had a hopelessly unromantic name—Wool.
In the following summer we went to Ostend for the season, because I wanted to see the gambling and the fashions. The morals of the Ostend of that day may be gathered from this. A friend of mine who was staying at the principal hotel with her husband, was asked by the proprietor if they were properly married. She was most indignant, and said that of course they were.
“Very well,” he said coolly, “then I think you ought to go to some other hotel, because you are the only people in mine who have been married.”
That same hotel manager considered that things were no longer what they were, for an Indian Maharajah had that morning complained at being charged two pounds for a chicken—that the English and Americans were no longer fools, and, in fact, that the only fools left were the Austrians.
The late King of the Belgians was in residence at the chateau, and had not one, but three, notorious French actresses staying with him.
Apart from its plage and its gaming-tables, I should have found Ostend a dull place if it had not been for Henry Arthur Jones, who was there, off and on, writing a new play, and ready to discuss it. He had had a play at the St. James’s which had not gone too well, and he asked me if I could account for it. I suggested that allowing a hospital nurse to frustrate an elopement was more calculated to gratify the gallery than the stalls, and that the St. James’s was a stalls theatre.
Jones had one curious habit—whenever he felt at a standstill in writing his play he used to say he must have a change of air, and then fly away to Homburg or some other place which took many hours to reach. He was much interested in gambling, though he did not gamble seriously. I imagine that he found the gaming-tables full of “copy.”