I recollect the great beauty and the heat of that month of March at Florence. Giotto’s Tower, and the graceful dome of the Cathedral, seen from the plain at the foot of San Gervasio, looked more like flowers than like buildings in the March evenings, across vistas of early green foliage and the delicate pageant of blossom.
We went for many delightful expeditions: to a farmhouse that had belonged to Michael Angelo at Carregi; to the Villa Gamberaia with its long grass terrace and its tall cypresses—a place that belongs to a fairy-tale; and I remember more vividly than all a wine-press in a village with wine-stained vats, large barrels, and a litter of farm instruments under the sun-baked walls—a place that at once conjured up visions of southern ripeness and mellowness. It seemed to embody the dreams of Keats and Chénier, and took me once more to the imaginary Italy which I had built when I read in the Lays of Ancient Rome of “the vats of Luna” and “the harvests of Arretium.”
Then came a summer term at Scoones, distracted and dislocated by many amusements. I went to the Derby that year and backed Persimmon; to the first performance of Mrs. Campbell’s Magda the same night; I saw Duse at Drury Lane and Sarah Bernhardt at Daly’s; I went to Ascot; I went to balls; I stayed at Panshanger; and at Wrest, at the end of the summer, where a constellation of beauty moved in muslin and straw hats and yellow roses on the lawns of gardens designed by Lenôtre, delicious with ripe peaches on old brick walls, with the smell of verbena, and sweet geranium; and stately with large avenues, artificial lakes and white temples; and we bicycled in the warm night past ghostly cornfields by the light of a large full moon.
In August I went back to Germany, and heard the Ring at Bayreuth. Mottl conducted. But of all that sound and fury, the only thing that remains in my mind is a French lady who sat next to me, and who, when Siegfried’s body was carried by to the strains of the tremendous funeral march, burst into sobs, and said to me: “Moi aussi j’ai un fils, Monsieur.” Then in London I made a terrific spurt, and worked all day and far into the night to make ready for another examination which took place on November 14. I remember nothing of this long nightmare. As soon as the examination was over, I started with Claud Russell for Egypt. We went by train to Marseilles, and then embarked in a Messagerie steamer. I spent the time reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace for the first time. The passengers were nearly all French, and treated us with some disdain; but Fate avenged us, for when we arrived at Alexandria, we were, in obedience to the orders of my uncle (Lord Cromer), allowed to proceed at once, while the rest of the passengers had to wait in quarantine. We went to Cairo, and stayed at the Agency with my uncle. The day we arrived it was pouring with rain which, we were told, was a rare occurrence in Cairo.
We used to have breakfast on a high verandah outside our bedrooms, off tiny little eggs and equally small fresh bananas.
At luncheon the whole of the diplomatic staff used to be present, and usually guests as well. The news came to Cairo that I had failed to pass the examination, in geography and arithmetic. Claud Russell, I think, qualified, and was given a vacancy later.
In the evening my uncle used sometimes to read us passages of abuse about himself in the local press. One phrase which described him as combining the oiliness of a Chadband with the malignity of a fiend delighted him. He gave us the MSS. of his book, Modern Egypt, which was then only partly written, to read. He was never tired of discussing books: the Classics, French novels, the English poets of the eighteenth century. He could not endure the verse of Robert Browning. His admiration for French prose was unbounded and for the French gift of expression in general, their newspaper articles, their speeches, and, above all, their acting.
Sometimes we rode to the Pyramids, and one day we had tea with Wilfrid and Lady Anne Blunt in their Arab house.
We did not stay long in Cairo; we went up the Nile. The first part of the journey, to a station whose name I forget, was by train; and once, when the train stopped in the desert, the engine-driver brought Claud Russell a copybook and asked him to correct an English exercise he had just done. Claud said how odd we should think it if in England the engine-driver brought us an exercise to correct.
Then we embarked in the M.S. Cleopatra and steamed to Luxor, where we saw the sights: the tombs of the kings, the temple of Carnac, the statue of Memnon. We bathed in the Nile, and smoked hashish.