In the winter we went to Sicily again, and in the summer to Salcombe again.
In the following winter my connection with Who’s Who ceased. My agreement with the publishers was only for three years in case the book was a failure, and the publishers pronounced it a failure.
Almost immediately afterwards I had an attack of jaundice, brought on, or not brought on, by the incident, and after a short stay at Brighton, went to recruit my health at Nice, from which I paid many visits to Monte Carlo, though I did not gamble much.
On our way back from Nice we did what not one Englishman in a hundred, among the thousands who winter in the Riviera, does, got off at Tarascon, and wandered about the cities of Troubadour-land, such as Tarascon, Arles, Nîmes, Avignon and Les Baux, the deserted capital of a dead principality, where the houses, instead of being built, are hewn out of the face of the rock. Provence is full of ancient Roman buildings, and of Romanesque buildings, hardly to be distinguished from them; and, in our day, in spite of the law against it, they used the Roman amphitheatres for the modern equivalent of gladiatorial games—bull-fights. Bull-fighting always began on Easter Sunday.
I registered a resolve, which I have never kept, to write a book about Provence.
That summer we spent at Cookham on the Thames. Since we were unable to go abroad, we went on the river, as being the most frankly “Continental” place in England. We had perfect weather, and Ostend itself did not give us more pleasure than the reach of the river between Cookham and Maidenhead. I found lying in a punt outside the lock at the Cliveden end conducive for finding incidents for fiction.
And I had not done sufficient creative work since I began Who’s Who. Indeed, The Admiral, my novel of the love of Nelson and Lady Hamilton, which I finished at Ostend, had been nearly my whole output, for Trincolox had been written ten years before, and published in Temple Bar. I was, of course, working at the materials for In Sicily all the time, and in the spring of 1900 we paid another three months’ visit to Sicily to see that all my facts were up to date.
We were at Syracuse during the darkest days of the Boer War. About half the people in the house were Germans, who were openly pleased at the succession of disasters which had befallen the British arms before they could get proper forces out to South Africa, to fight an enemy who was prepared in every single detail before he forced on the war. It seemed as if the disasters never would stop, and these amiable people told us so every day. But one fine day a British battleship, one of the largest then afloat, steamed into the great harbour of Syracuse, and anchored in the waters where the Athenians were annihilated in their last sea-fight against the Syracusans. We were down on the quay, and so was nearly every other foreigner in Syracuse, when a launch put off from H.M.S., and made towards us. The Captain, a typical sea-dog—it was Callaghan, now one of our chief Admirals—was in the stern. As he stepped ashore he said: “We have just had a wireless from Malta—Kimberley is relieved.” It was most dramatic to have the news brought to us by the biggest battleship in the Mediterranean, how French had introduced a new feature into warfare by raising a siege with a dash of five thousand cavalry riding all day as hard as they could. I shall never forget it.
We returned to Rome in time for the Papal Jubilee, the sixth centenary of the original Jubilee established by Boniface VIII in 1300. Some of the ceremonies were extraordinarily interesting, and the procession of Leo XIII in St. Peter’s was one of the most impressive things I ever saw. I think it was that which inspired me to write The Secrets of the Vatican, though I did not complete it for publication till nearly seven years afterwards.
That summer again we went to Cookham, which had serious results, for my son was thrown into contact with some charming boys who had just passed into the Army, and were spending their vacation from Woolwich at Bourne End, a mile up the river from Cookham. Nothing would do for him after this but to go into the Army. I did not oppose it, because he was an absolutely idle boy at school, and it seemed such a good thing that he should want to pass any exam., and further, I was almost as much under the glamour of those dear boys—poor St. John Spackman, who was afterwards killed in the polo-field, was one of them—as he was.