It happened that one of the nice women, who are occasionally to be met with in trains, shared a carriage with me from Holyhead. To her I irrepressibly spoke of Amélie-les-Bains. It may or may not be believed that she had, only the previous day, studied with, she said, the utmost interest and admiration, a collection of photographs of Amélie, taken by a brother, or a sister, who had spent the time of their lives there. (I now believe that the nice woman was herself the human embodiment of Amélie.) I went next day to Cook’s; they had never heard of Amélie. No one had ever heard of it, but I clung to Bradshaw and my nice woman, and in three days we started, in faith, for Amélie, Martin with bronchitis and a temperature, and I with tickets that could not be prevailed on to take us farther than Toulouse, and with more dubiety than I admitted. As I have, since then, met but one person who had ever heard of Amélie, it may not be considered officious if I mention that it is in South-Eastern France, Department Pyrenées Orientales, and that the Pyrenees stand round about it as the hills stand round about Jerusalem, and that “the confluence of the rivers Tech and Mondony” was all and more than Bradshaw had promised.
Martin and I have wandered through many byways of the world, and have loved most of them, but I think Amélie comes first in our affections. It is thirteen years, now, since we stayed at “Les Thermes Romains” Hotel. We went there because we liked the name; we stayed there for six delightful weeks, from the middle of March to the beginning of May, and irrational impulse was justified of her children. One feature “Les Thermes Romains” possessed that I have never seen reduplicated. It was heated throughout by the Central Fires of Nature. From the heart of the mountains came the hot sulphurous streams that gurgled in the pipes in the passages, and filled hot water jugs, and hot water bottles, and regenerated the latter, if of indiarubber, restoring to them their infant purity of complexion in a way that gave us great hope for ourselves. Hannibal had passed through Amélie. He had built roads, and dammed the river, and given his name to the Grotte d’Annibale. After him the Romans had come, and had made the marble baths in which we also tried, not unsuccessfully, to wash away our infirmities, and after them the Moors had been there, and had built mysterious, windowless villages of pale stone, that hung in clusters, like wasps’ nests, on the sides of the hills, and had left some strain of darkness and fineness in the people, as well as a superfluity of X’s in the names of the places.
While we were at Les Thermes, two little Englishmen strayed in, accidentally, but all the other guests were French. Among them was an old gentleman who had been in his youth a protégé of Georges Sand. He sat beside Martin, and joined with Isidore, the old head-waiter, in seeing that she ate and drank of the best and the most typical “du pays.” “C’est du pays, Mademoiselle!” Isidore would murmur, depositing a preserved orange, like a harvest moon in syrup, upon her plate; while Monsieur P. would select the fattest of the olives and tenderest of the artichokes for “Mees Violette.” Monsieur P. was ten years in advance of his nation in liking and believing in English people. He told us that Georges Sand was the best woman in the world, the kindest, the cleverest, the most charming; he loved dogs; “Ah, ils sont meilleurs que nous!” he said, with conviction, but he excepted Georges Sand and Mees Violette.
While we were at Amélie, we wrote the beginning of “Dan Russel the Fox,” sitting out on the mountain side, amidst the marvellous heaths, and spurges, and flowers unknown to us, while the rivers Tech and Mondony stormed “in confluence” in the valley below us, and the pink mist of almond blossom was everywhere. Dan Russel progressed no farther than a couple of chapters and then retired to the shelf, where he remained until the spring of 1909 found us at Portofino with my sister and a friend, Miss Nora Tracey. We worked there in the olive woods, in the delicious spring of North Italy, and although it was finished at home, it was Portofino that inspired the setting of the final chapter. It further inspired us with a sentiment towards the German nation that has been most helpful during the present war, and has enabled us to accept any tale of barbarism with entire confidence.
Northern Italy was as much in the hands of the Huns then as at any time since the days of Attila. Even had their table manners been other than what they were, Siegfried Wagner, striding slowly and splendidly on the Santa Margherita Road, in a grey knickerbocker suit and pale blue stockings, or Gerhardt Hauptmann, the dramatist, with his aggressively intellectual and bright pink brow bared to the breeze, posing on the sea front, each attended by a little rabble of squaws, would have inspired a distaste vast enough to have included their entire nation. One incident of our stay at Portofino may be recounted. An old Russian Prince had come to the hotel, a small, grey old man, feeble and fragile, in charge of a daughter. Gradually a rumour grew that he had been a great musician. There was a pertinacious fiddle-playing little German doctor, whose singular name was Willy Rahab, in the hotel; he had the art of getting what he wanted, and one evening, having played Mozart with my sister for as long as he desired to do so, he concentrated upon the old Prince. There was a long resistance, but at last the old Russian walked feebly to the piano, and seated himself on so low a stool that his wrists were below the level of the keyboard. I saw his fingers, grey and puffy, and rheumatic, settle with an effort on the keys. He looked like an ash-heap ready to crumble into dust. I said to myself that it was a brutality. And, as I said it, the ash-heap burst into flames, and Liszt’s arrangement of “Die Walkürenritt” suddenly crashed, and stormed and swept. There was some element of excitement communicated by his playing that I have never known before or since, and we shook in it and were lost in it, as one shakes in a winter gale, standing on western cliffs with the wind and the spray in one’s face. Then, when it was all over, the old ash-heap, greyer than ever, waited for no plaudits, resigned himself to his daughter, and was hustled off to bed. As for the hotel piano, till that moment poor but upright, after that wild ride it remained prostrate, and could in future only whisper an accompaniment to Doctor “Veely’s” violin. It transpired that the Russian had been the personal friend of Wagner, of Schumann, and of Liszt, in the brave days of old at Leipsic, and was one of the few remaining repositories of the grand tradition.
We were at Montreuil, a small and very ancient town, not far from Boulogne, when “Some Further Experiences of an Irish R.M.” was published. These had appeared in the Strand and other magazines, and had gradually accumulated until a volume became possible. We had had an offer from an Irish journal, then, and, I think, still, unknown to fame, which was, in its way, gratifying. The editor offered “to consider a story” if we would “write one about better society than the people in the Experiences of an Irish Policeman.” We were unable to meet this request. For one thing, we were unable to imagine better or more agreeable society than is the portion of an Irish Policeman. Our only regret was that the many social advantages of the R.I.C. were not more abundantly within our reach.
Montreuil was “a place of ancient peace,” of placid, unmolested painting in its enchanting by-streets (where all the children, unlike those of Étaples, had been confirmed in infancy), of evenings of classical music, provided delightfully at the studios of two of our friends, who were themselves musicians, and were so happy as to have among their friends a violinist, a pianist, and a singer, all of high honour in their profession. Few things have Martin and I more enjoyed than those evenings in the high, dim-lighted studio, with a misty, scented atmosphere of flowers and coffee and cigarettes, and with the satiating beauty of a Brahms violin sonata pouring in a flood over us.
It is a temptation to me to dwell on these past summers, but I will speak of but one more, of the time we spent on the Lac d’Anneçy. We stayed for a while in the town of Anneçy, whose canals, exquisite as they are for painting, are compounded of the hundred ingredients for which Cologne is famous. From Anneçy we moved across the lake to Chavoire, whence the artist can look across the water back to Anneçy’s spires and towers, and can try to decide if they are more beautiful in the white mists of morning or when the sun is sinking behind them.
That was in September, 1911, and when we got back to London, “Dan Russel” was on the eve of coming out. An industrious niece of mine, aged some four and a half years, toiled for many months at a woolwork waistcoat, a Christmas present for her father. It was finished, not without strain, in time for the festival, and Katharine said, flinging herself into a chair, with a flourish of the long and stockingless legs with which children are afflicted, even at Christmas time,
“Now I’m going to read books, and never do another stitch of work till I die!”