When I came downstairs this morning full to the brim with the first chapters of "Clayhanger", I found a letter from Herbert Trench asking me to alter tremendously the third act of "The Honeymoon". My soul revolted, but of course I gradually gave way and then wrote him that I would.
I was occupied with letters till 11, and then I went out to recover myself for "Clayhanger" and I did so. The recuperative power of sea air. I worked till 1 0'clock and again after lunch, and again after dinner. So that now I have got the opening of the book pretty ripe.
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| Sir Sidney Low |
This afternoon we went to have tea with the Sidney Lows at the Metropole. Low told me how he discovered Kipling, and how his superiors on the Indian daily didn't think anything of him at all, but Low insisted on getting hold of his stuff. It seems he was very shy and young at the start. Low also insisted on Hall Caine's powers as a raconteur, as proved at Cairo when he kept a dinner party of casual strangers interested for an hour and a half by a full account of the secret history of the Druce case, which secret history he admitted afterwards was a sheer novelist's invention.When Caine was with Low in Egypt he saw everything as a background to "The White Prophet", which was originally meant as a play for Tree. When Low showed him the famous staircases in the Ghezireh Palace he said, "I can get three different entrances underneath that". And when he saw the pyramids, he said, "Tree can do simply anything with those". The Sidney Lows said he was the kindest, nicest sort of man in private life (but Low told me behind his hand that he was also apt to be tedious on the subject of himself, and naif). Present also, inter alia, the wife of T.H.S. Escott, who lives at Brighton but is paralysed. He still works and produces however, and has a new book just coming out.
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