Exits and Entrances

CHAPTER I HOME

As Mr. Wickfield said to Miss Trotwood—the old question, you know—“What is your motive in this?”

I am sure it is excellent to have a motive, and if possible a good motive, for doing everything; and so before I begin I want to give my motive for attempting to write my memoirs of things and people, past and present—and here it is.

Jack, my son, was on tour with his own company of Eliza Comes to Stay; and Jill, my little daughter, was playing at the St. James’s Theatre, her first engagement—and, incidentally, earning more each week than I did when I first played “lead” (and I found my own dresses). I thought that some day they might like to know how different things were in the “old days”; like to read how one worked, and studied, and tried to save; might like to know something of the road over which their father and mother had travelled; and perhaps gain some idea of the men and women who were our contemporaries. Perhaps, if they, my own boy and girl, would like to read this, other people’s boys and girls might like 2to read it also: it might at least interest and amuse them.

To me, to try and write it all would be a joy, to “call spirits from the vasty deep,” to ring up again the curtain on the small dramas in which I had played—and the small comedies too—and to pay some tribute to the great men and women I have known. It may all seem to be “my story,” but very often I shall only be the string on which are hung the bravery, kindness, and goodness of the really great people; not always the most successful, but the really great, who have helped to make life what it should be, and luckily sometimes really is!

So I determined to begin, and begin at the beginning.

Brighton! when it was Brighton; still retaining some of the glories of the long past Regency; with its gay seasons, its mounted police, and—no Metropole Hotel; when the only two hotels of any importance were the “Bedford” and the still-existing “Old Ship.” The old chain pier, standing when we went to bed one evening, and swept away when we got up the next morning by a terrific gale. The Aquarium, then a place which people really visited and regarded as something of a “sight worth seeing”—does anyone go there now, except on a very wet day? The Dome in the Pavilion, with its grand orchestral concerts, conducted by the famous Mr. Kuhe, whose son is now a musical critic in London. All these things belonged to Brighton of the—well, the exact date does not matter—but of the time when women did not ride bicycles or drive motor cars, 3because certainly the one, and certainly the other so far as women were concerned, did not exist. In those days men rode a high “single wheel” bicycle: the higher the wheel, the greater the Knut—only the word “Knut” was unknown then!

Those are some of the memories I have of Brighton at the time when we were a happy, noisy, large family living in Regency Square; a really large family, even as Victorian families went—nine girls and one boy. We had no money, but unlimited health and spirits.

My mother!—well, everyone says “Mine was the sweetest mother in the world,” but my mother really was. She had a most amazing amount of character hidden under a most gentle exterior. As pretty as a picture, adorable—just “Mother.”

And father—an austere, very good-looking man of uncertain temper; one of those tempers which periodically sweep through the house like a tornado. Absolutely upright, and deeply respected, but with a stern sense of his duties as a parent which we, his children, hardly appreciated.

My first recollection is of trying to climb into my mother’s bed, and finding the place that should have been mine occupied by a “new baby.” I heard years afterwards that when my mother was told that her tenth child and ninth daughter had arrived in the world, she exclaimed: “Thank God it’s a girl!” Such a nice feminine thing to say, bless her!

Six of the girls lived to grow up, and we each, as we grew sufficiently advanced in years, took turns at the “housekeeping”. I know I did double duty, as my sister Jessie distinguished herself by fainting one 4morning when preparing the breakfast, and so was not allowed to do it any more. I remember creeping down the stairs in the dark early mornings (when I think of “getting breakfast”, it seems to me that we must have lived in perpetual winter, the mornings seem to have always been cold and dark, never bright and sunny: I suppose the memory of the unpleasant things remains longer), going very softly past my father’s room, and putting the loathsome porridge—partially cooked the night before—on the gas ring, and, having stirred it, creeping upstairs again to dress.

I remember, too, at breakfast how I would watch my father’s face, to see by his expression if it was “all right”; the awful moment when, eyeing it with disfavour, he would give his verdict: “Lumpy!” The cook for the day, after such a verdict, generally left the table in tears.

It must have been before I was old enough to make porridge that I had my first sweetheart. His name was Johnnie; he was a small Jew, and we met in Regency Square; together we turned somersaults all round the Square, and it must have been all very idealistic and pleasant. I remember nothing more about him, so apparently our love was short-lived.

Up to the time that my sister Decima was six, my father kept a stick in the dining-room; the moral effect of that stick was enormous; should any member of the family become unruly (or what my father considered unruly), the stick was produced and a sharp rap on the head administered.

One day Decima was the culprit, and as my father leant back to reach the stick, she exclaimed cheerfully: 5“You won’t find the old stick, cos I’ve hided it.”

She had, too; it was not found for years, when it was discovered in a large chest, right at the bottom. It is still a mystery how Decima, who was really only a baby at the time, put it there. Looking back, I applaud her wisdom, and see the promise of the aptitude for “looking ahead” which has made her so successful in the ventures on which she has embarked; for the “stick” certainly affected her most. She was a naughty child, but very, very pretty. We called her “The Champion”, because she would take up the cudgels on behalf of anyone who was “underdog”. I loved her devotedly; and, when she was being punished for any special piece of naughtiness by being interned in her bedroom, I used to sit outside, whispering at intervals, “I’m here, darling”, “It’s all right, dear”, and so on.

Yet it was to Decima that I caused a tragedy, and, incidentally, to myself as well. She was the proud possessor of a very beautiful wax doll; a really beautiful and aristocratic person she was. We always said “Grace” before meals (I think everyone did in those days), and one morning I was nursing the doll. In an excess of religious fervour, I insisted that the wax beauty should say “grace” too. Her body, not being adapted to religious exercises, refused to bend with the reverence I felt necessary; I pushed her, and cracked off her head on the edge of the table. Now, mark how this tragedy recoiled on me! I had a gold piece—half a sovereign, I suppose—given to me by some god-parent. It lived in a box, wrapped 6in cotton wool, and I occasionally gazed at it; I never dreamt of spending it; it was merely regarded as an emblem of untold wealth. Justice, in the person of my father, demanded that, as I had broken the doll, my gold piece must be sacrificed to buy her a new head. If the incident taught me nothing else, it taught me to extend religious tolerance even to wax dolls!

Not only did we hate preparing breakfast, we hated doing the shopping, and called it “Sticking up to Reeves, and poking down to Daws”—Reeves and Daws being the grocer and laundryman respectively. It was in the process of “Sticking up to Reeves”, whose shop was in Kemptown, one morning, that Decima stopped to speak to a goat, who immediately ate the shopping list out of her hand.

Decima was the only member of the family who succeeded in wearing a fringe—openly—before my father. We all did wear fringes, but they were pushed back in his presence; Decima never pushed hers back! In those days so to adorn one’s forehead was to declare oneself “fast”—an elastic term, which was applied to many things which were frowned on by one’s elders. That was the “final word”—“fast!”

Our great excitement was bathing in the sea, and singing in the church choir. We bathed three times a week; it cost 4d. each. Clad in heavy serge, with ample skirts, very rough and “scratchy”, we used to emerge from the bathing machines. All except Ada, who swam beautifully, and made herself a bathing suit of blue bunting with knickers and tunic. My 7father used to row round to the “ladies’ bathing place” in his dinghy, and teach us how to swim. As there was no “mixed bathing” then, this caused much comment, and was, indeed, considered “hardly nice”. My brother Henry was the champion swimmer of the South Coast, and he and Ada used to swim together all round the West Pier—this, again, was thought to be “going rather far” in more senses than one!

Though I loved Decima so devotedly, we apparently had “scraps”, for I can remember once in the bathing machine she flicked me several times with a wet towel—I remember, too, how it hurt.

We all sang in the church choir; not all at once; as the elder ones left, the younger ones took their places. Boys from the boarding school in Montpelier Square used to be brought to church: we exchanged glances, and felt desperately wicked. Once (before she sang in the choir) Decima took 3d. out of the plate instead of putting 1d. into it.

At that time our pocket-money was 1d. a week, so I presume we were given “collection money” for Sunday; this was later increased to 2s. a month, when we had to buy our own gloves. Thus my mother’s birthday present—always the same: a pot of primulas (on the receipt of which she always expressed the greatest surprise)—represented the savings of three weeks on the part of Decima and me. It was due to parental interference in a love affair that I once, in a burst of reckless extravagance, induced Decima to add her savings to mine and spend 5d. in sweets, all at one fell swoop.

8I was 14, and in love! In love with a boy who came to church, and whose name I cannot remember. We met in the street, and stopped to speak. Fate, in the person of my father (who always seems to have been casting himself for the parts of “Fate”, “Justice”, “Law”, or “Order”) saw us; I was ordered into the house, and, seizing my umbrella, my father threatened to administer the chastisement which he felt I richly deserved for the awful crime of “speaking to a boy”. I escaped the chastisement by flying to my room; and it was there, realising that “love’s young dream was o’er”, I incited Decima to the aforementioned act of criminal extravagance. I know one of the packets she brought back contained “hundreds and thousands”; we liked them, you seemed to get such a lot for your money!

My life was generally rather blighted at that time, for, in addition to this unfortunate love affair, I had to wear black spectacles, owing to weak eyes, the result of measles. “A girl” told me, at school, that “a boy” had told her I “should be quite pretty if I hadn’t to wear those awful glasses.” The tragedy of that “if”!

I was then at Miss Pringle’s school, where I don’t think any of us learnt very much; not that girls were encouraged to learn much at any school in those days. I certainly didn’t. My eyes made reading difficult. Then the opportunity for me to earn my own living offered; it was seized; and I went to Liverpool. I was to teach gymnastics and dancing under Madame Michau.

9The original Madame Michau, mother of the lady for whom I was to work, had been a celebrity in her day. Years before—many, many years before—she had taught dancing in Brighton, where she had been considered the person to coach debutantes in the deportment necessary for a drawing-room. Her daughter was very energetic, and worked from morning to night. She had a very handsome husband, who ostensibly “kept the books”, which really meant that he lounged at home while his wife went out to work. Not only did she work herself, but she made me work too—from eight in the morning until eleven at night; in fact, so far as my memory serves me, there was a greater abundance of work than of food. I don’t regret any of it in the least; the dancing and gymnastics taught me how to “move” in a way that nothing else could have done. It taught me, also, how to keep my temper!

Only one thing I really resented; that was, among other duties, I had to mend Madame’s husband’s underwear. Even then I am overstating the case; I did not mind the mending collectively; what I minded was the mending individually—that is, I hated mending his (what are technically known, I think, as) pants. At the end of a year I “crocked up”—personally I wonder that I lasted so long—and came home for a holiday. I was then about 15, and I fell in love. Not, this time, with a small boy in the Square; not with a big boy; this was a real affair. “He” was at least twelve years older than I, very good to look at, and apparently he had excellent prospects on the Stock Exchange. My family, so far 10as I can remember, approved, and I was very happy. I forget how long the engagement lasted—about a year, I think—and for part of that time I was back in Liverpool. I know the engagement ring was pearl and coral. One day a stone fell out—so did the engagement. The picture “he” had drawn of us living in domestic and suburban bliss at West Norwood—me clad in brown velvet and a sealskin coat (apparently irrespective of times or seasons) vanished. He “went broke” on the Stock Exchange, and broke off the engagement—perhaps so that his love affairs might be in keeping with the general wreckage; I don’t know. I remember that I sat in the bedroom writing a farewell letter, damp with tears, when the sight of a black beetle effectively dried my tears and ended the letter.

I don’t know that this love affair influenced me at all, but I decided I was utterly weary of Liverpool. I came back to Brighton, and taught dancing there, partly on my own and partly in conjunction with an already established dancing class. It was there that I taught a small, red-headed boy to do “One, two, three—right; one, two, three—left.” He was the naughtiest small boy in the class; I used to think sometimes he must be the naughtiest small boy in the world. His name was Winston Churchill.

It was not a thrilling life—this teaching children to dance—on the contrary, it was remarkably dull, and once your work becomes dull to you it is time you found something else to do. I decided that I would. I would make a bid for the Stage.

We, or at least my elder sisters, gave theatrical 11performances at home—comedies and operettas—and it was during the production of one of these that I met Miss Harriet Young, the well-known amateur pianist, in Brighton.

The production was called Little Golden Hope, the one and only amateur production in which I ever took part. It was written by my brother-in-law, Ernest Pertwee, and the music by Madame Guerini, who had been a Miss Wilberforce, daughter of Canon Wilberforce. Miss Young used to come and play the piano at these productions, and I heard that she knew Mrs. Kendal! Mrs. Kendal was staying at Brighton at the time. A letter of introduction was given to me by Miss Young, and, accompanied by my sister Bertha, I went to see Mrs. Kendal.

No very clear memory of it remains. She was charming; I was paralysed with fright. If she gave me any advice about the advisability of taking up the stage as a profession, it was “don’t”—so I went back to my dancing class.

But hope was not dead! Florrie Toole, who was a pupil of my sister Emily, promised me an introduction to her father, and not only to him but to Tom Thorne of the Vaudeville Theatre as well. I made up my mind to go up to London and see them both. All this was arranged with the greatest secrecy, for I knew that my father would set his face sternly against “the Stage”. Though we might be allowed to have amateur theatricals at home, though we might teach dancing, singing, elocution, or indeed anything else, the Stage was something unthought of in the minds of parents. However, Fate was on my side. I was 12out teaching all day, and, once the front door had closed behind me in the morning, I was not actually expected back until the evening, so I slipped up to London. There, at the Vaudeville Theatre, I saw both Tom and Fred Thorne.

In those days there were no play-producing societies—no Play Actors, Interlude Players, or Repertory Players—and so new plays were “tried out” at matinées. One was then looming on the horizon of the Vaudeville—Partners—and it was in connection with a possible part in this play that my name and address were taken; I was told that I might hear from Mr. Thorne “in about a week”, and so, full of hope, I returned to Brighton. About a week later I received a letter which told me that I had been given a small part in Partners, and stating the days on which I should have to rehearse in London.

It was then that the question arose, “Should I tell father?” I thought it over, long and earnestly, and decided not to. I did not have to rehearse every day, and, as I had slipped up to London before, “all unbeknownst”, why not again? So, entering on my career of crime, and unheeding the words of—I think—the good Doctor Watts, who says “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive”, I used to come up to rehearsal, leaving my family happy in the belief that I was teaching dancing in Brighton!

During rehearsals I heard from Florrie Toole that she had arranged an interview for me with her father, who would see me on a certain day, at his house at 13Lowdnes Square. That was a real “red letter day”. For some reason, which I forget, I had taken Decima with me, and after the rehearsal I was asked if I would like to see the matinée performance of Hearts is Hearts, which was then playing at the Vaudeville. Would I like! I was given a box—a stage box at that—and there Decima and I sat, thrilled to the depths of our small souls.

Before this auspicious occasion I had seen three theatrical performances, and three only. One had been at the Adelphi, when I saw Harbour Lights, and the other two at the Brighton Theatre-Royal; from the upper circle, or the gallery, I had seen Faust, when a really very stout lady played “Marguerite”; and the other a pantomime, Cinderella, when Florence St. John played “Cinders” (and played it most delightfully, too) and Charles Rock played “Baron Hardup”. Even these two delightful events had been somewhat marred by the fact that father insisted that we should “come out before the end, to avoid the crush”—as though anyone minded a crush after a theatre, when you went only twice a year, and were only 14!

But to return to our stage box at the Vaudeville Theatre. The interview with Mr. Toole was fixed for 5.30, but rather than miss a moment of the play, we stayed until the very end, and were thus forced to be recklessly extravagant and take a hansom to Lowdnes Square. It cost eighteen-pence, but we both felt that it was worth it, felt that this was indeed Life—with a very large capital letter.

I do not think that the interview with the great 14comedian was impressive. Florrie took me in to her father, and said “This is Eva.” He said “How are you?” and murmured vague things about “seeing what we can do” and—that was all.

The matinée came, I played a little chambermaid. As “Herbert” says in Eliza Comes to Stay: “The characters bear no relation to life, sir. The play opens with the butler and the housemaid dusting the drawing-room chairs”—I was the “housemaid”.

I remember the fateful afternoon we first played Partners. I was in the Green Room—there were such things then—Maud Millet was learning her part between all her exits and entrances. During one of my waits, Mr. Scot Buest offered me a glass of champagne; I thought that I had plumbed the depths of depravity! It was Mr. Buest who later asked me to have dinner with him. I did, but felt sure that all London would ring with my immorality. What a little prude I must have been!

That afternoon Mr. Toole was in front, and so saw me play. A few days later I heard from him; he offered me a part in The Cricket on the Hearth, which he was going to produce at his own theatre. I was to receive “£1 a week, and find your own dresses”. Naturally, I accepted, and was then faced with the necessity of telling my father. I took my courage in both hands, and broke the news.

The expected tornado swept the house, the storm broke and the thunder of my father’s wrath rolled over our heads. My mother was held responsible for my wickedness; she was asked to consider what “her child” had done; for, be it said, when any of us did 15anything which met with my father’s disapproval, we were always “my mother’s children”; when we met with his approval, we were his, and apparently his only.

So my mother wept, and my father washed his hands with much invisible soap, ordering me never to darken his doors again—“To think that any daughter of his”, and much more—oh! very much more—to the same effect.

I remained firm; here was my chance waiting for me in the greatest city in the world, and I was determined to take it. I left Brighton for London—“the world was mine oyster”.

CHAPTER II THE START

“We ... never stopped in the old days to turn things over in our minds, and grow grey over counting the chances of what would or what wouldn’t happen. We went slap for everything like the healthy young devils we were.”

And so at Christmas I began to play “The Spirit of Home” in The Cricket on the Hearth at Toole’s Theatre, which was a small place, mostly underground, beside the Charing Cross Hospital. I was very happy; it was all new and exciting, and everyone was very kind to me. Kate Phillips, who played “Dot”, had been ill, and her dressing-room—the dressing-room provided for the leading lady—was underground; she couldn’t stand it, and, as mine was on the roof—or as nearly on the roof as possible—she came up to dress with me. It was in Kate Phillips’s (and my) dressing-room that I first saw Winifred Emery, who came on to Toole’s for tea from the Vaudeville. She was perfectly beautiful, with most lovely hands, and oh, so attractive!

In those days, after a matinée, there were only two things to do—either stay in the theatre or go out and walk about in the streets. Your rooms were generally 17a long way from the theatre, which meant ’bus riding (and every penny had to be considered), and there were no girls’ clubs then. No Three Arts Club, Theatrical Girls’ Club, no A.B.C.’s, no Lyons, nothing of that kind, so you stayed in the theatre.

Another person who was in the cast was George Shelton, the same George Shelton who was in Peter Pan this year—1922—when Jill made her first appearance. I can see no difference in him; after all these years he looks, and is, just the same. The children who went to see Peter Pan—so Mr. Lyn Harding assured us—“found Smee lovable”, as I found him so many years ago. Only then he wasn’t playing Smee!

The run ended, and I was engaged to play in a first piece by Justin Huntly Macarthy, called The Red Rag. I have no very clear recollection of the part, except that I played the girl who made love to a man “over the garden wall,” standing on a flowerpot. It was in this play, The Red Rag, that Decima asked, after noting that only the “top half” of the gentleman appeared over the wall, “As his legs don’t show, does he have to wear trousers? Because, if he doesn’t, it must be such a very cheap costume.” I had a new dress for the part, which is not really so impressive as it sounds, for in those days “Nun’s veiling” (thanks be to Heaven!) was 6½d. a yard, and, as in The Cricket on the Hearth I had been clad in white Nun’s veiling, so now for The Red Rag I wore a blue dress of the same useful material. Of course, I made both of them myself.

However, this play marked a “point in my career”—I 18began to have “notices” in the Press. The Punch critic of that date said: “If names signify anything, there is a young lady who is likely to remain on the stage a very long time—‘Quoth the Raven, Eva Moore’.” She has, too—a very long time. The People said he should keep his “critical eye on me, in fact both his critical eyes.”

At the end of the spring season, Mr. Toole asked me to go on tour for the summer and autumn, to play “leading lady”—this was a real leap up the ladder—appearing in fifteen plays. I was to receive £3 a week. I accepted (of course I accepted!), and took with me twenty-three dresses. I remember the number, because in order to buy the necessary materials I had to borrow £10 from my brother.

By this time the attitude of my father had changed; he no longer regarded me as “lost”, and no longer looked upon the Stage as the last step in an immoral life; he was, I think, rather proud of what I had done. So far had he relented that, when my sister Jessie decided that she too would go on the Stage, there was no opposition. She left home without any dramatic scenes, and went into the chorus of Dorothy, where she understudied Marie Tempest and Ben Davis’s sister-in-law, Florence Terry, afterwards playing the latter’s part.

I was staying then off the Strand, near the Old Globe Theatre, sharing rooms with the sister of a man—his name does not matter, he has since left the Stage for the Church—to whom I later was engaged. When Jessie came to London we arranged to have 19rooms together. One day we mounted a ’bus at Piccadilly, and found we could go all the way to Hammersmith for a penny. We were so struck by the cheapness of the journey that we rode the whole length of the pennyworth.

Eventually we found rooms in Abingdon Villas, two furnished rooms for 18s. a week; we took them and “moved in”.

I must go back here to record what might really have been a very tragic business for me. After I had been playing in The Red Rag for about five weeks, Mr. Toole was taken ill, and the theatre was closed for over a month—“no play, no pay”. Providence had ordained that I should have been given the money for a new winter coat; I had the money, and was waiting to buy the garment. The coat had to wait; I had to keep a roof over my head. I paid it over—in a lump—to the landlady, and knew I was safe to have at least a bed in which to sleep until the theatre re-opened.

The tour began; we went to Plymouth, Bath, Scarborough, Dublin, Edinburgh (where, for the first time, I slept in a “concealed bed”), and many other places I have forgotten; but, wherever we went, the audience was the same: Toole had only to walk on the stage and they howled with laughter. I very seldom spoke to him; in those days I was far too frightened to address the “Olympians”; I could only congratulate myself on being in the company at all.

Funnily enough, the position I held was originally offered by Toole to Violet Vanbrugh; I fancy—in 20fact, I am pretty sure—that I eventually was given it because she wanted “too much money”. She probably asked for £5, or even perhaps rose to the dizzy height of demanding £8, while I “went for £3” (it sounds like little David Copperfield selling his waistcoat!).

I think I enjoyed the tour; it was all new and strange to me. The sea journey to Ireland was distinctly an experience. I remember that a critic in Cork, a true son of Ireland, said of me in his paper, “Critics have been known to become dizzy before such beauty.” How I laughed at and enjoyed that notice! It was at Cork that poor dear Florrie Toole was taken ill. She had joined us some weeks before, to my great delight, for she had always been so very kind to me. It was from Florrie that I received a velvet dress, which was one of the most useful articles in my wardrobe; it was altered and re-altered, and finally retired from active service after having been my “stand-by” in many parts.

During the week we were at Cork, Florrie was ill—not very ill, or so it seemed; at any rate, she was able to travel with us to Edinburgh on the Sunday. There she became rapidly worse, and it was found that she had typhoid fever. We left her in Edinburgh, and heard the following week that she was dead. Such a beautiful life cut short! She was so brilliant, and so very, very lovable.

Photograph by C. Hawkins, Brighton. To face p. 21

Dora

“The Don”

21I shared rooms with Eliza Johnson, a capable but somewhat unrelenting elderly lady. She “dragooned” me effectively; young men who showed any tendency to gather round stage doors, or gaze at one in the street, were sternly discouraged. At Cambridge, I remember, I had a passionate love letter from some “undergrad.”, who said he refrained from signing his name, as his “trust had been broken before”, but, if I returned his affection, would I reply in the “agony” column of the Times to “Fido”! I did nothing of the kind, naturally; but so definite were the feelings of Eliza Johnson on “things of that kind” that she told me she could “not help feeling that I was, in some measure, to blame.”

At Birmingham, on the Friday night, after “treasury,” I left my money in my dressing-room, went on the stage, and returned to find the money gone! I went to the manager and told him, but he protested that he could do nothing. I managed to borrow money to pay for my rooms, and went on to the next town very downcast indeed. Three pounds was a lot of money. The following week I had a letter from Birmingham, telling how the writer, who was employed at the theatre, had stolen the money, but that the sight of my distress had so melted his heart that he had decided to return it to me intact. The £3 was enclosed. I concluded that it was one of the stage hands; it wasn’t, it was Mr. Toole. He had heard of my loss, and, in giving me the money, could not resist playing one of those practical jokes which he loved!

The tour ended and we came back to London, where Toole was going to put on a first piece called The Broken Sixpence before The Don. The cast included Mary Brough, Charles Lowne, the authoress 22(Mrs. Thompson)—who was a very beautiful woman, but not a strikingly good actress—and, among the “wines and spirits,” me.

My dress was the same that I had worn in The Butler (a play we had done on tour), or, rather, it was part of the dress, for, as I was playing a young girl, with short skirts, I only used the skirt of the dress, merely adding a yoke; in addition, I wore a fair wig.

I have it on good authority that I looked “perfectly adorable”, for it was in this play, though I did not know it for a long time, that Harry Esmond first saw me, and, apparently, approved of me!

Then I began to be ill; too much work, and, looking back, I fancy not too much food, and that probably of the wrong kind for a girl who, after all, was only about 17, and who had been playing in a different play every night for weeks.

I didn’t stop working, though I did feel very ill for some weeks, but finally an incident occurred which took the matter out of my hands and forced me to take a rest.

I was walking home from the theatre, with my salary and my savings (seven pounds, which I had gathered together to pay back to my brother for the loan I mentioned before) in my bag. In those days the streets were in the state of semi-darkness to which London grew accustomed in the war—at any rate, in all but the largest streets; some one, who must have known who I was, or at any rate known that I was an actress and that Friday night was “pay night”, sprang out of the darkness, struck me a heavy blow 23on the head, snatched my bag, and left me lying senseless.

After that, I gave in—I went home, and was very ill for a long time with low fever; not only was I ill, I was hideously depressed. However, I went back to Mr. Toole as soon as I was better, and he told me he was going to Australia, and asked me to go too. The salary was to be £4 a week, and “provide your own clothes”. I declined, though how I had the pluck to decline an engagement in those days passes my comprehension. However, I did, and Irene Vanbrugh went to Australia in my place—though not at my salary; she was more fortunate.

I began to haunt agents’ offices, looking for work, and a dreary business it was! At last I was engaged to go to the Shaftesbury to play in The Middleman with E. S. Willard, and it was here that I first actually met my husband. He was very young, very slim, and looked as young as he was; he was, as is the manner of “the powers that be”, cast for a villain, and, in order to “look the part”, he had his shoulders padded to such an extent that he looked perfectly square. His first words in the play were “More brandy!” I don’t think he was a great success in the part, though, looking through some old press cuttings, I find the following extract from The Musical World: “But a Mr. Esmond shows, I think, very high promise, together with faults that need to be corrected. His attitudes are abominable; his voice and the heart in it could hardly be bettered”—and that in spite of the padding!

I think we were at once great friends—at any rate, 24I know he had to use a ring in the play, and I lent him mine. In particular I remember one evening, when I was walking down Shaftesbury Avenue with the man to whom I was engaged, and we met Harry wearing my ring; I was most disturbed, lest my own “young man” should notice. However, we broke the engagement soon after—at least I did—and after that it didn’t matter who wore or who did not wear my ring. Then Harry, who lived at Empress Gate, used to take me home after the theatre; and if he didn’t take me home, he took somebody else home, for at that time I think he loved most pretty girls. It was a little later that he wrote in his diary: “Had tea with Agnes (Agnes Verity); took Eva home; she gave me two tomatoes; nice girl. How happy could I be with either!”—which, I think, gives a very fair idea of his general attitude at the time.

The Middleman ran well; it was a good play, with a good cast—E. S. Willard, Annie Hughes, Maude Millet, and William Mackintosh—the latter a really great actor. I understudied Annie Hughes—and played for her. In The Middleman, Willard wore his hair powdered, to give him the necessary look of age, and in one scene I had to comb it. I was most anxious to do well in Annie Hughes’s part, and was so zealous that I combed all the powder out of his hair at the back, to my own confusion and his great dismay.

Photograph by Elliott & Fry, London, W. To face p. 24


Harry

November 19th. 1891

25At the end of the run of The Middleman, I wrote to Mr. (now Sir) A. W. Pinero, and asked for an interview. His play, The Cabinet Minister, was shortly to be produced at the Court Theatre, and I hoped he might give me a part. He granted me the interview, and I remember how frightened I was. I met him some time ago, and he reminded me of it. He told me I struck him as being “such a little thing”. Anyway, he gave me a part. This was the first production in which I had played where the dresses were provided by the management, and very wonderful dresses they were.

It was a great cast—Mrs. John Wood (whose daughter and granddaughter were both with us in Canada in 1920), Allen Aynesworth (a very typical young “man about town”), Rosina Philippi, Weedon Grossmith, and Arthur Cecil.

Mrs. John Wood was a wonderful actress; she got the last ounce out of every part she played. Fred Grove says: “When she had finished with a part, it was like a well-sucked orange; not a bit of good left in it for anyone else.” The first act of The Cabinet Minister was a reception after a drawing-room. We all wore trains of “regulation” length; at rehearsals Mrs. Wood insisted that we should all have long curtains pinned round us, to accustom us to the trains.

Arthur Cecil, who had been in partnership with Mrs. Wood, was a kindly old gentleman who always carried a small black bag; it contained a supply of sandwiches, in case he should suddenly feel the pangs of hunger. “Spy,” of Vanity Fair, did a wonderful drawing of him, complete with bag.

I remember Rosina Philippi, then as thin as a lamp-post, having a terrific row one day with Weedon Grossmith—what about, I cannot remember. He was playing “Mr. Lebanon”, a Jew, and “built 26up” his nose to meet the requirements of the part. In the heat of the argument, Rosina knocked off his nose; he was so angry. The more angry he got, the more she laughed!

I think it was before the run of The Cabinet Minister that I became engaged to Harry. I know that during the run Harry was playing at the Royalty in Sweet Nancy, and was apparently rather vague and casual about the duties of an engaged young man. I remember he used often to send his best friend to call for me and bring me home from the theatre. If he had not been such a very attractive young man himself, one might have thought this habit showed a lack of wisdom. He was very attractive, but very thin; I found out, to my horror, that he wore nothing under his stiff white shirts! Imagine how cold, riding on the top of ’buses—anyway, it struck me as dreadful, and my first gift to him was a complete set of underwear. He protested that it would “tickle”, but I know he wore them, with apparently no grave discomfort.

I went to Terry’s to play in Culprits—a tragic play so far as I was concerned. I really, for the first time, “let myself go” over my dresses. I spent £40. (Imagine the months of savings represented by that sum!) We rehearsed for five weeks, and the play ran three.

By this time my sister Jessie had gone on tour, first with Dr. Dee, by Cotsford Dick, later with D’Oyley Carte’s Company. Decima and I were sharing rooms which Jessie had taken with me. Decima had been at Blackheath at the College of Music, where she had 27gained a scholarship. On her own initiative she came up to the Savoy Theatre, for a voice trial, and was promptly engaged for the part of “Casilda” in the forthcoming production of The Gondoliers. I remember the first night of the opera occurred when I was still playing in The Middleman. Not being in the last act, I was able to go down to the Savoy. I was fearfully excited, and filled with pride and joy; it was a great night. After the performance, Decima cried bitterly all the way home, so convinced was she that her performance could not have been successful. It was not until the following morning, when she was able to read the notices in the morning papers, that she was reassured and finally comforted. Far from ruining her performance, she had made a big success.

During the time we shared rooms we were both taken ill with Russian influenza—and very ill we both were. Geraldine Ulmar came to see us, and brought, later, Dr. Mayer Collier, who proved “a very present help in trouble”. He rose high in his profession, and never ceased to be our very good friend, nor failed in his goodness to us all.

On October 31st, 1891, I find the following Press cutting appeared: “Mr. Esmond will shortly marry Miss Eva Moore, the younger sister (this, I may say, was, and still is, incorrect) of pretty Miss Decima Moore of the Savoy”. I was then playing in The Late Lamented, a play in which Mr. Ackerman May, the well-known agent, played a part. Herbert Standing was in the cast, though I remember very little about what he—or, for the matter of that, anyone 28else—played, except that he was supposed to be recovering from fever, and appeared with a copper blancmange mould on his head, wrapped in a blanket. It would seem that the humour was not of a subtle order.

We were married on November 19th, 1891, on the winnings of Harry and myself on a race. We backed a horse called “Common,” which ran, I imagine, in either the Liverpool Cup or the Manchester November Handicap. Where we got the tip from, I don’t know; anyway, it won at 40 to 1, and we were rich! Adding £50, borrowed from my sister Ada, to our winnings, we felt we could face the world, and we did.

The wedding was to be very quiet, but somehow ever so many people drifted into the Savoy Chapel on the morning of November 19th, among them Edward Terry, who signed the register.

As Harry was “on his way to the altar”, as the Victorian novelists would say, his best man, Patrick Rose, discovered that the buttons of his morning coat had—to say the least of it—seen better days. The material had worn away, leaving the metal foundation showing. He rushed into Terry’s Theatre, and covered each button with black grease paint!

We both played at our respective theatres in the evening, and certainly the best laugh—for that night, at least—was when Harry, in The Times, said: “I’m sick of ’umbug and deception. I’m a married gentleman! Let the world know it; I’m a young married English gentleman”.

Photograph by Gabell & Co., London, W. To face p. 28

Wedding Bells

November 19th. 1891

CHAPTER III WEDDING BELLS

“A wedding doesn’t change things much, except that the bride’s nearest relations can shut their eyes in peace.”

And so we were married.... We had a funny wedding day. Harry, being an Irishman, and, like all Irishmen, subject to queer, sudden ways of sentiment, insisted that in the afternoon we should call on his eldest sister! I cannot remember that he had, up to then, shown any overwhelming affection for her, but that afternoon the “Irishman” came to the top, and we called on “herself”. We then dined at Simpson’s, and went off to our respective theatres to work.

I was rehearsing at the time for a musical play—The Mountebanks, by W. S. Gilbert. I went to him, rather nervous, and asked if I “might be excused the afternoon rehearsal”. He naturally asked “why?”; and blushingly, I don’t doubt, I told him “to get married”. He was most intrigued at the idea, and said I might be “excused rehearsals” for a week.

Three weeks after we were married, Edward Terry sent for Harry to come to his dressing-room—and I may say here that Terry’s Theatre only possessed 30three dressing-rooms: one, under the stage, for Edward Terry, one for the men of the company, and another for the women—the reason for this scarcity being that, when the theatre was built, the dressing-rooms were forgotten! I believe the same thing happened when the theatre was built at Brixton; if anyone has played at the theatre in question, and will remember the extraordinary shapes of the rooms, they will readily believe it! But to go back to Terry’s—Harry was sent for, and Edward Terry presented him with two books, which he said would be of the greatest use to him and me. They were Dr. Chavasse’s Advice to a Mother and Dr. Chavasse’s Advice to a Wife. I do not know if anyone reads Dr. Chavasse in these days, but then he was the authority on how to bring up children. Fred Grove assured me that he brought up a family on Dr. Chavasse.

Anyone who has seen my husband’s “evergreen play,” Eliza Comes to Stay, may remember the extract from the book—the very book that Edward Terry gave to us—which he uses in the play. I give it here; I think it is worth quoting:

“Question: Is there any objection, when it is cutting its teeth, to the child sucking its thumb?

“Answer: None at all. The thumb is the best gum-stick in the world. It is ‘handy’; it is neither too hard nor too soft; there is no danger of it being swallowed and thus choking the child.”

Photograph by Alfred Ellis, London, W. To face p. 30

Harry as Howard Bompas

“The Times” 1891

31It was during the run of The Late Lamented that I first met Fanny Brough, President and one of the founders of the Theatrical Ladies’ Guild, which has done so much splendid work. She worked with Mrs. Carson (wife of the then Editor of The Stage), who was the originator of the Guild. When the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild began, some years later, they ran their organisation on the same lines. Two of the founders, I think I am right in saying, of the Musical Hall Ladies’ Guild, were the unfortunate Belle Elmore (the Wife of Crippen, who killed her) and Edie Karno, the wife of Mr. Fred Karno, of Mumming Birds fame.

Speaking of Fanny Brough reminds me of others of that famous family. Lal Brough, who held a kind of informal gathering at his house, with its pleasant garden, each Sunday morning. It was a recognised thing to “go along to Lal Brough’s” about 10.30 to 11 on Sunday. About 1 everyone left for their respective homes, in time for the lunch which was waiting there. Looking back, thinking of those Sunday morning gatherings, it seems to me that we have become less simple, less easily contented; who now wants a party, even of the least formal kind, to begin in the morning? We have all turned our days “upside down”—we begin our enjoyment when the night is half over, we dance until the (not very) small hours, and certainly very very few of us want to meet our friends at 11 a.m. They were happy Sundays at Lal Brough’s, but they belong to a side of stage social life which is now, unhappily, over and done. They belong, as did the host, to “the old order”.

Sydney Brough, Lal Brough’s son, was a person of marvellous coolness and resource. I was once playing with him in a special matinée of A Scrap of Paper, in which he had a big duel scene. While the 32curtain was down, some thoughtful person had cleared the stage of all “unnecessary impedimenta”, including the daggers needed for the fight. When Brough should have seized them, they were nowhere in sight. Most people would have “dried up”—not Sydney Brough. He composed a long speech while he looked all over the stage for the missing daggers; he looked everywhere—talking all the time—and finally found them—on the top of a large cupboard, on the stage!

In 1892 I played in Our Boys with William Farren, who was “a darling”, and Davy James—he was very ill at the time, I remember, and very “nervy”. May Whitty (now Dame May Webster) and I used to dress above his room. We used to laugh immoderately at everything; poor David James used to hate the noise we made, and used to send up word to us, “Will you young women not laugh so much!” Speaking of May Whitty reminds me that one paper said of our respective performances in the play: “If these two young ladies must be in the play, they should change parts.”

Cicely Richards was in the cast too; she later played Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice, with Irving, at Drury Lane, and I took Decima—who, be it said, had never read or seen the play—to see it. Her comment, looking at Shakespeare’s masterpiece strictly from a “Musical Comedy” point of view, was “I don’t think much of the Rosina Brandram part”—the said part being “Nerissa,” and Rosina Brandram at that time the heavy contralto in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

33It was in A Pantomime Rehearsal that I first met Ellaline Terriss; we were the “two gifted amateurs” who sing a duet. She was as pretty as a picture, and as nice as she was pretty. I also sang a song, called “Poor Little Fay”, and at the revival “Ma Cherie”, by Paul Rubens, which, I think, Edna May sang later on in the music halls. I know she came one evening to hear the song, and sat in a box, which made me very nervous. She was very quiet and rather shy—at least so I found her when we met.

Charlie Brookfield was in the Pantomime Rehearsal, playing the part created by Brandon Thomas. He was a most perfectly groomed man, and always wore magnificent and huge button-holes, as really smart young men did at that time. The bills for these button-holes used to come in, and also bills for many other things as well, for he was always in debt; it used to cause great excitement as to whether “Charlie” would get safely in and out of the theatre without having a writ served on him.

There are hundreds of good stories about Charles Brookfield, some of them—well, not to be told here—but I can venture on two, at least. When Frank Curzon was engaged to Isabel Jay, someone—one of the pests who think the fact that a woman is on the stage gives them a right to insult her—sent her a series of insulting letters, or postcards—I forget which. Curzon was, naturally, very angry, and stated in the Press that he would give £100 reward to find the writer. Brookfield walked into the club one day and said, “Frank Curzon in a new rôle, I see.” Someone asked, “What rôle?” “Jay’s disinfectant,” 34replied Brookfield. He was walking down Maiden Lane one morning with a friend, and then Maiden Lane was by no means the most reputable street in London. “I wonder why they call it Maiden Lane?” said his friend. “Oh,” responded Brookfield, “just a piece of damned sarcasm on the part of the L.C.C.” At the time when Wyndham was playing David Garrick, he was sitting one day in the Garrick Club under the portrait of the “great little man”. Brookfield came up. “’Pon my word,” he began, “it’s perfectly wonderful; you get more like Garrick every day.” Wyndham smiled. “Yes,” went on Brookfield, “and less like him every night.” When Tree built His Majesty’s, he was very proud of the building, and used to love to escort people past the place and hear their flattering comments on the beauty of the building. One day he took Brookfield. They stopped to gaze on “my beautiful theatre”, and Tree waited for the usual praise. After a long pause, Brookfield said: “Damned lot of windows to clean.” He could, and did, say very witty, but bitter and cutting, things, which sometimes wounded people badly; yet he said pathetically to a friend once: “Can’t think why some people dislike me so!”

About this time, or perhaps rather earlier (as a matter of fact, I think it was in Culprits), I met Walter Everard, who, though quite an elderly man, did such good work with the Army of Occupation in Cologne; he is still, I think, doing work in Germany for the British Army.

In Man and Woman I met the ill-fated couple, 35Arthur Dacre and Amy Roselle. She was the first well-known actress to appear on the music halls. She went to the Empire to do recitations. She was much interviewed, and much nonsense was talked and written about the moral “uplift” such an act would give to the “wicked Empire”—which was just what the directors of the Empire, which was not in very good odour at the time, wanted. She was a queer, rather aloof woman, who took little notice of anyone. He, too, was moody, and always struck me as rather unbalanced. They went to Australia later, taking with them a bag of English earth. There they found that their popularity had gone, poor things! He shot her and then killed himself, leaving the request that the English earth might be scattered over them.

Lena Ashwell was in the cast. She was not very happy; for some reason, Amy Roselle did not like her, and did nothing to make things smooth for her. Lena Ashwell, in those days, was a vague person, which was rather extraordinary, as she was a very fine athlete, and the two qualities did not seem to go together. She also played in a first piece with Charles Fulton. One day her voice gave out, and I offered to “read the part for her” (otherwise there could have been no curtain-raiser)—a nasty, nerve-racking business; but, funnily enough, I was not nearly so nervous as poor Charles Fulton, who literally got “dithery”.

Henry Neville was also in Man and Woman. A delightful actor, he is one of the Stage’s most courtly gentlemen, one of those rare people whose manners are as perfect at ten in the morning as they 36are at ten at night. Writing of Henry Neville reminds me that later he was going to appear at a very big matinée for Ellen Terry at Drury Lane, in which “all stars” were to appear in the dance in Much Ado. Everybody who was anybody was to appear—Fred Terry, Neville, my husband, Ben Webster, and many more whose names I cannot remember at the moment. At ten each morning down they went to rehearse. Edith Craig was producing the dance, and put them through their paces. Apparently they were not very “bright”, and Edie was very cross. Finally she burst out: “No, no, no—and if you can’t do it any better than that, you shan’t be allowed to do it at all!” Evidently after that they really “tried hard”, for they certainly were allowed to “do it”, as the programme bears witness.

In a special matinée at the old Gaiety I met Robert Sevier. He had written a play called The Younger Son, which I heard was his own life when he was in Australia. I don’t think it was a great success—at anyrate, it was not played again—but Sevier enjoyed the rehearsals enormously. After the matinée he asked all the company to dinner at his house in Lowdnes Square. His wife, Lady Violet Sevier, was present. Sevier enjoyed the dinner, as he had done the rehearsals, but she—well, she “bore with us”; there was a frigid kindness about her which made one feel that—to put it mildly—she “suffered” our presence, and regarded the whole thing as an eccentricity of “Robert’s” (I cannot imagine that she ever called him “Bob”, as did the rest of the world).

Photograph by Alfred Ellis, London, W. To face p. 37

Pepita

“Little Christopher Columbus”

37The same year, 1893, I played in Little Christopher Columbus. Teddie Lonnen was the comedian. May Yohe played “Christopher”, and played it very well too; I impersonated her, in the action of the play. We had to change clothes, for reasons which were part of the plot. She was not an easy person to work with, and she certainly—at that time, at all events—did not like me. This play was the only one in which I ever rehearsed “foxy”—that is, did not put in the business I was going to play eventually. The reason was this: as I gradually “built up” the part, putting in bits of “business” during the rehearsals, I used to find the next morning that they were “cut”: “That line is ‘out’, Miss Moore,” or “Perhaps you’d better not do that, Miss Moore.” So “Miss Moore” simply walked through the rehearsals, to the horror of the producer. I used to go home and rehearse there. But on the first night I “let myself go”, and put into the part all I had rehearsed at home. The producer was less unhappy about me after that first night! However, it still went on after we had produced. Almost every night the stage manager would come to my room: “Miss Moore, a message for you—would you run across the stage less noisily, you shake the theatre”; would I stand further “up stage”; or would I do this, or that, or the other. Oh! May Yohe, you really were rather trying in those days; still, things did improve, and eventually she really was very nice to me. It was in Little Christopher Columbus that I wore “boy’s clothes”. I thought they suited me—in fact, I still think they did—a ballet shirt, coat (and not a particularly short coat either) and—breeches. 38But, behold the Deus ex machina, in the person of my husband! He came to the dress rehearsal, and later we rode home to our little flat in Chelsea on the top of a bus, discussing the play. Suddenly, as if struck by a bright thought, he turned to me and said: “Don’t you think you’d look awfully well in a cloak?” I felt dubious, and said so, but that did not shake him. “I do,” he said, and added: “Your legs are much too pretty to show! I’ll see about it in the morning.” He did! Early next morning he went up and saw Monsieur Alias, the cloak was made and delivered to me at the theatre that very evening, and I wore it too. It covered me from head to foot; with great difficulty, I managed to show one ankle. But Harry approved of it, very warmly indeed.

There is a sequel to that story. Twenty years after, I appeared at a big charity matinée at the Chelsea Palace as “Eve”—not Eve of the Garden of Eden, but “Eve” of The Tatler. I wore a very abbreviated skirt, which allowed the display of a good deal of long black boots and silk stocking. Ellen Terry had been appearing as the “Spirit of Chelsea”. After the performance she stood chatting to Harry and me. “Your legs are perfectly charming; why haven’t we seen them before?” I pointed to Harry as explanation. She turned to him. “Disgraceful,” she said, adding: “You ought to be shot.”

I was engaged to follow Miss Ada Reeve in The Shop Girl at the Gaiety Theatre. It was a ghastly experience, as I had, for the few rehearsals that were given me, only a piano to supply the music, and my 39first appearance on the stage was my introduction to the band. I had to sing a duet with Mr. Seymour Hicks—I think it was “Oh listen to the band”—at anyrate, I know a perambulator was used in the song. Mr. Hicks’s one idea was to “get pace”, and as I sang he kept up a running commentary of remarks to spur me on to fresh efforts. Under his breath—and not always under his breath either—he urged me to “keep it up”, to “get on with it”, until I felt more like a mental collapse than being bright or amusing. This was continued at most of the performances which followed; I sang, or tried to sing, accompanied by the band—and Mr. Hicks. Then, suddenly—quite suddenly—he changed. The theatre barometer swung from “Stormy” to “Set fair”. Even then, I think, I had learnt that such a sudden change—either in the barometer or human beings—means that a storm is brewing. It was!

I remember saying to Harry, when I got home one evening after this change, “I shall be out of the theatre in a fortnight; Seymour Hicks has been so extraordinarily pleasant to me—no faults, nothing but praise.” What a prophet I was!

As I was going to the dressing-room the next evening, I met Mr. George Edwardes on the stairs. He called to me, very loudly, so that everyone else could hear, “Oh! I shan’t want you after next Friday!” I protested that I had signed for the “run”. I was told that, though I might have done so, he had not, and so ... well!

It was before the days when Sydney Valentine fought and died for the standard contract, before the 40days when he had laboured to make the Actors’ Association a thing of real use to artists—a real Trades Union; so I did not claim my salary “for the run”, but the fact that I received a cheque from the management “in settlement of all claims” is significant.

Another rather “trying time” was many years later when I appeared “on the halls”. Let me say here that I have played the halls since, and found everyone—staff, manager, and other artists—very kind; but at that time “sketches had been doing badly”, and when the date approached on which I was to play at the—no, on second thoughts I won’t give the name of the hall—the management asked me either to cancel or postpone the date. I refused. I had engaged my company, which included Ernest Thesiger, Bassett Roe, and several other excellent artists, for a month, and the production had been costly, so I protested that they must either “play me or pay me”. They did the latter, in two ways—one in cash, the other in rudeness. How I hated that engagement! But even that had its bright spot, and I look back and remember the kindness of the “Prime Minister of Mirth”, Mr. George Robey, who was appearing at that particular hall at the time. He did everything that could be done to smooth the way for me.

I seem to have been unlucky with “sketches” at that time. I had a one-act comedy—and a very amusing comedy too; my son later used it as a curtain-raiser, and I played it at several of the big halls: as the Americans say, “It went big.”

41I thought I would strike out on my own and see an agent myself, without saying anything to anybody. This is what happened. (I should say that this is only a few years ago, when I had thought for some time that as an actress I was fairly well known.)

I called on the agent in question; he was established in large and most comfortable offices in the West End. I was ushered into the Presence! He was a very elegant gentleman, rather too stout perhaps. He sat at a perfectly enormous desk, swinging about in a swivel chair, and, without rising or asking me to sit down (which I promptly did), he opened the interview:

“Who are you?” I supplied the information.

“Don’t know you,” he replied. “What d’you want?” I told him, as briefly as possible. At the word “sketch” he stopped me, and with a plump hand he pounded some letters that lay on his desk. “Sketches,” he repeated solemnly, “I can get sketches three-a-penny, and good people to play ’em. Nothing doing.”

I stood up and walked to the door, then perhaps he remembered that he had seen me in a play or something—I don’t know; anyway, he called after me, “Here, who did you say you were?” “Still Eva Moore,” I said calmly, and made my exit.

All agents may not be like that; I hope they are not; but I fancy he is one of the really successful ones. Perhaps their manners are in inverse ratio to their bank balances.

Talking of agents, I heard of one who was listening 42to a patriotic ballad being sung at the Empire during the war. A man who was with him did not like it, and said, “You know, that kind of stuff doesn’t do any good to the Empire”—meaning the British Empire. “No,” was the reply; “they don’t go well at the Alhambra, for that matter, either.”

CHAPTER IV PLAYS AND PLAYERS

“A good deal more work for all of us, my lord.”

The year 1894 found me playing in The Gay Widow, the first play in which I ever worked with Charles (now, of course, Sir Charles) Hawtrey. I do not remember very much about the play except that I wore most lovely clothes, and that Lottie Venne played “my mother”.

This year does, however, mark a very important milestone in our lives—Harry’s and mine; it was the first time we attempted management on our own, and also his first play was produced. We, Harry and I, with G. W. Elliott, greatly daring, formed a small syndicate. We took the St. James’s Theatre for eight weeks while George Alexander was on tour, and presented Harry’s play Bogey. (In those days all big London managers went on tour for a few months, taking their London company and production.)

First, let me say that, whatever the merits or demerits of the play, we were unlucky. We struck the greatest heat wave that London had known for years; and that, as everyone knows, is not the best recipe in 44the world for sending up the takings at the box office. As for the play, George Alexander said—and, I think, perhaps rightly—the “play was killed by its title.” It was a play dealing with “spiritualism,” in a limited sense. I mean that it was not in any sense a propaganda play; it had, naturally, not the finish, or perhaps the charm, of his later work—he would have been a poor craftsman if it had been, and a less great artist if the years which came after had taught him nothing—but Bogey certainly did not deserve the hard things which one critic, Mr. Clement Scott, said of it. He wrote one of the most cruel notices which I have ever read, a notice beginning “Vaulting Ambition”—which, in itself, is one of the bundle of “clichés” which may be used with almost equal justice about anything. To say, as Mr. Scott did, that I saved the play again and again “by supreme tact” was frankly nonsense. No actress can save a play “again and again by supreme tact”; she may, and probably will, do her best when she is on the stage, but if she “saves the play” it is due to her acting capacity, and not to “tact”—which seems to me to be the dealing gracefully with an unexpected situation in a way that is essentially “not in the script”.

However, the fact remains that Mr. Clement Scott unmasked the whole of his battery of heavy guns against the play and the author, for daring to produce it while he was still under fifty years of age; and, after all, it was rather “setting out to kill a butterfly with a double-barrelled gun”. Still....

The following night another play was produced, at 45another theatre, and on this play (not at all a brilliant achievement) Mr. Clement Scott lavished unstinted praise. On the first night of a third play, as he went to his stall, the gallery—which was, as usual, filled largely by the members of the Gallery First Night Club—greeted him with shouts of “Bogey”, and continued to do so until, in disgust, he left the stalls. After that night, Clement Scott always occupied a box! But the sequel! Some days after the production of Bogey, the President of the Gallery First Night Club called at our little house in Chelsea. I remember his call distinctly: our maid was “out”, and I opened the door to him. He came to ask Harry to be the guest at the first dinner of the club. It was, I think, when that club held its twenty-fifth birthday, that we were both asked to be the guests of the club—a compliment we much appreciated.

The play Bogey was not a success, but I should like to quote the remarks of the dramatic critic of the Sporting Times, which seemed, and still seem, to me kind and—what is of infinitely greater importance—just: “Ambition is not necessarily vaulting, and it is a thing to be encouraged and not mercilessly crushed in either a young author or a young actor. Nor when the youngster figures in the double capacity of author and actor is the crime unpardonable.... This is all apropos of an ungenerous attack in a quarter from which generosity would have been as graceful as the reverse is graceless.... It was remarked to me by a London manager: ‘I don’t know any actor on our stage who could play the part better than Esmond does’, and, upon my word! I am inclined 46to agree with him.... Bogey is not a good play ... but it has a freshness about it, an originality of idea which is not unlikely to prove unattractive to a great many.”

However, Harry Esmond tried again; and the row of plays on a shelf in my study is proof that he was only “baffled to fight better”.

In Bogey we had a stage manager, I remember, who should, had the gods taken sufficient interest in the destinies of men, have been a maker of “props” and a property master. He played a small part, of a “typical city man”, and his one ambitious effort towards characterisation was to ask if he “might be allowed to carry a fish basket”. He evidently thought all city men call at Sweetings before catching their train home!

In The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown, which was my next engagement, I played with Fred Kerr, who wore a toupée. I remember at one place in the play, where I had to “embrace him impulsively”, he always said in a loud whisper, “Mind my toupée.”

Both Harry and I were in The Blind Marriage, at the Criterion. He and Arnold Lucy played “twins”, and Harry had to add a large false nose to the one with which nature had already very generously provided him. They wore dreadful clothes—knickerbockers which were neither breeches nor “plus fours” but more like what used to be known as “bloomers”. Herbert Waring and Herbert Standing were both in the cast, and on the first night the latter was very excited. Waring went on and had a 47huge ovation, while Herbert Standing, in the wings, whispered excitedly, “They think it’s me! they think it’s me!”

Herbert Standing was a fine actor, with more than a fair share of good looks. He was very popular at Brighton, where he used to appear at concerts. I remember he was talking one day to Harry, and told him how he had “filled the Dome at Brighton” (which was a vast concert hall). Harry murmured, “Wonderful; how did you do it?” “Oh,” said Standing, “recited, you know. There were a few other people there—Ben Davis, Albani, Sims Reeves,” and so on.

Mr. Standing came to see Harry one day, and was shown into his study, which was a small room almost entirely filled with a huge desk. Standing began to rail against the fate which ordained that at that moment he had no work. “I can do anything, play anything,” he explained, which was perfectly true—he was a fine actor! “Listen to this,” and he began to recite a most dramatic piece of work, full of emotion and gesture. As he spoke, he advanced upon “H. V.”, who kept moving further and further away from him. I came into the study, to find Harry cowering against the wall, which effectually stopped him “getting away” any further, and Standing, now “well away”, brandishing his arms perilously near Harry’s nose.

Standing was devoted to his wife, and immensely proud of his family. When she died, he was heartbroken. He met some friends one day, who expressed their sympathy with him in his loss. “Yes,” 48said Standing, “and what do you think we found under her pillow? This”—and he produced a photograph of himself, adding mournfully, “but it doesn’t do me justice!”

It was in Under the Red Robe that I first actually played with Winifred Emery (who used to give most lovely tea parties in her dressing-room). Cyril Maude, Holman Clark, Granville Barker, and Annie Saker (who were later to make such a number of big successes at the Lyceum, under the Brothers Melville’s management) were also in the cast. I only met the author, Stanley Weyman, once, but he was very generous to all the company and gave us beautiful souvenirs; I still use a silver cigarette box, engraved with a cardinal’s hat, which he gave to me. He was not one’s preconceived idea of a writer of romantic plays and books; as a matter of fact, he was rather like Mr. Bonar Law.

After this run, I went on tour for a short time with J. L. Shine, with An Irish Gentleman, and at one town—Swansea, I think—he gave a Press lunch. All kinds of local pressmen were invited, and, in comparison to the one who fell to my lot, the “silent tomb” is “talkative”. Soup, fish, joint, all passed, and he never spoke a single word. He was a distinctly noticeable person, wearing a cricket cap, morning coat, and white flannel trousers. I tried every subject under the sun, with no result, until—at last—he spoke. “I ’ave a sort of claim on you perfessionals,” he said. I expressed my delight and surprise, and asked for details. “Well,” he said, “in the winter I’m an animal impersonator, but in the summer I take up literature.” I have always wondered if he played the front or hind legs of the “elephant”!

Photograph by Gabell & Co., London, S.W. To face p. 48.

Madame de Cocheforet

“Under the Red Robe”

49Soon after I returned to London, my husband’s second play was produced by Charles Hawtrey, One Summer’s Day—and thereby hangs a tale! Harry had sent the play to Hawtrey and, calling a month later, saw it still lying—unopened—on his desk. He determined that Hawtrey should hear the play, even if he wouldn’t read it himself; Harry would read it to him.

“I’ll call to-morrow and read my play to you,” he said. Hawtrey protested he was very busy, “hadn’t a minute”, had scores of plays to read, etc. But Harry only added, “To-morrow, at ten, then,” and went. The next morning he arrived, and after some difficulty obtained entrance to Hawtrey’s room. Again Hawtrey protested—he really had not time to hear, he would read the play himself, and so on; but by that time Harry had sat down, opened the book, and began to read. At the end of the first act, Hawtrey made another valiant effort to escape; he liked it very much, and would read the rest that same evening. “You’ll like the second act even better,” H. V. said calmly, and went on reading. When the third act was finished, Hawtrey really did like it, and promised to “put it on” as soon as possible.

“In a fortnight,” suggested the author. Oh! Hawtrey wasn’t sure that he could do it as soon as that, and the “summer was coming”, and Harry had had one lesson of what a heat wave could do to a play. So he said firmly, “The autumn then.” Hawtrey gave up the struggle, and the play was put 50into rehearsal and produced in the autumn. One Summer’s Day was a great success; it was in this play that Constance Collier played her first real part. She had been at the Gaiety in musical comedy, where, I remember, she entered carrying a very, very small parcel, about the size of a small handkerchief box, and announced “This contains my costume for the fancy dress ball!”

Mrs. Calvert played in this production, which reminds me that in the picnic scene we used to have “real pie”, which she rather enjoyed. After we had been running for some time, the management thought, in the interests of economy, they would have a “property pie”—that is, stuffed not with meat, but with cotton wool. Mrs. Calvert, all unknowing, took a large mouthful, and was nearly choked!

In One Summer’s Day we had a huge tank filled with real water, sunk at the back of the stage, and Ernest Hendrie, Henry Kemble, and Mrs. Calvert used to make an entrance in a punt—a real punt. One day they all sat at one end, with most disastrous consequences; after that, they “spread themselves” better.

Henry Kemble was a delightful, dignified person, who spoke in a “rolling” and very “rich” voice. He used, occasionally, to dine well—perhaps more well than wisely. One night, in the picnic scene, he was distinctly “distrait”, and forgot his line. As I knew the play backwards, I gave his line. He was very angry. We were all sitting on the ground at a picnic. He leant over the cloth and said in a loud 51voice, “You are not everybody, although you are the author’s wife.”

In this play a small boy was needed, and we sought high and low for a child to play the “urchin”. A friend told us one day he knew of the “very boy”, and promised to send him up for inspection. The following morning the “ideal urchin” arrived at the Comedy Theatre. He was a very undersized Jew, whose age was, I suppose, anything from 30 to 40, and who had not grown since he was about twelve. This rather pathetic little man walked on to the stage, and looked round the theatre, his hands in his pockets; then he spoke. “Tidy little ’all,” was his verdict—he was not engaged!

My next engagement was in The Sea Flower. I remember very little about it except that I wore a bunch of curls, beautiful curls which Willie Clarkson made for me. On the first night, Cosmo Stuart embraced me with such fervour that they fell off, and lay on the stage in full view of the audience.

Then followed The Three Musketeers, a splendid version of that wonderful book, by Harry Hamilton, with a magnificent cast. Lewis Waller was to have played “D’Artagnan”, which he was already playing on tour; Harry was to go to the touring company and play Waller’s part. Then there came some hitch. I am not very clear on the point, but I think Tree had arranged for a production of the same play, in which Waller was engaged to play “Buckingham”, and that Tree or the managers in the country would not release him. Anyway, Harry rehearsed the part in London. Then Waller managed to get released 52for a week to come to London and play for the first week of the production, while Harry went to the provinces. Waller came up to rehearse on the Friday with the London company, ready for the opening on Monday. I had lost my voice, and was not allowed to speak or leave my room until the Monday, and therefore the first time I met D’Artagnan was on the stage at the first night. If you will try and imagine how differently Lewis Waller and Harry Esmond played the part, you will realise what a nerve-racking business it was. For example, in the great “ride speech,” where Harry used to come in absolutely weary, speaking as an exhausted man, flinging himself into a chair, worn out with his ride and the anxiety attached to it, Waller rushed on to the stage, full of vitality, uplifted with the glory of a great adventure, and full of victory, leading me to the chair before he began to speak. You may imagine that on the first night I felt almost lost. I am not trying to imply that one reading was “better” than the other; both were quite justified; only, to me, the experience was staggering.

Waller was always vigorous, and particularly as D’Artagnan. One night when he entered and “bumped” into Porthos, he “bumped” so hard that he fell into the orchestra and on to the top of the big drum! Nothing daunted, Waller climbed out of the orchestra, by way of the stage box, back on to the stage!

The first time I played with Tree was in a special performance of The Dancing Girl. I played the lame girl, and I remember my chief worry was how, 53being lame, to get down a long flight of stairs in time to stop Tree, who played the Duke, from drinking the “fatal draught” of poison.

I was then engaged by Tree to play in Carnac Sahib, a play by Henry Arthur Jones. It dealt with military life in India. The rehearsals were endless, and not without some strain between the author and Tree. Henry Arthur Jones used to come to rehearsals straight from his morning ride, dressed in riding kit, complete with top boots and whip; Tree didn’t like it at all!

The day before the production there was a “call” for “words” at 11 in the morning. The only person who did not know their “words” was Tree; he never arrived! The dress rehearsal was fixed for 3; we began it at 5, and at 6 in the morning were “still at it”.

After the end of one of the acts—the second, I think—there was a long wait. This was at 2.30 a.m.! The band played, and for an hour we sang and danced on the stage. Then someone suggested that it might be as well to find out what had happened to Tree. They went to his dressing-room and found him; he had been asleep for an hour! At last we began the final act. Tree reclined on a bed of straw, and I fanned him with a palm leaf. There was a wait, perhaps three or four seconds, before the curtain rose. “Oh God!” said Tree, in the tone of one who has waited for years and is weary of everything: “Oh sweet God! I am ready to begin!”

It was soon after, in Marsac of Gascony, at Drury Lane Theatre, I made my entrance on a horse—a real 54stage horse; the same one, I think, that Irving had used. I may say this is the only time that I had—as you might say—known a horse at all intimately. It was a dreadful play: the audience rocked with laughter at all the dramatic situations. It was short-lived, and I went soon after to Harry’s play, The Wilderness, which George Alexander produced at the St. James’s Theatre. Aubrey Smith appeared in this play, looking very much as he does now, except that his moustache was rather longer. Phyllis Dare played one of the children—and a very dear child she was; so, too, was her sister Zena, who used to call at the theatre to take her home.

There were two children in this play, who had a “fairy ring” in a wood. (If anyone does not know what a fairy ring is, they should go into the nearest field and find one, for their education has been seriously neglected.) To this “ring” the two children used to bring food for the fairies, which they used to steal from the family “dustbin”. One of the “dainties” was a haddock, and this—a real fish—was carefully prepared by the famous Rowland Ward, so that it would be preserved and at the same time retain its “real” appearance. A party of people sitting in the third row of the stalls wrote a letter of protest to Alexander, saying that the “smell from the haddock was unbearable”, and it was high time he got a new one!

I remember that during rehearsals George Alexander was very anxious that Harry should “cut” one of the lines which he had to speak. In the scene in the wood, Sir Harry Milanor (which was the 55character he played), in talking to his elderly uncle, has to exclaim, “Uncle Jo! Look, a lizard!” George Alexander protested that the line was unreal, that no man would suddenly break off to make such a remark, and therefore he wished Harry would either “cut” or alter it. One day, shortly before the production, Alexander was walking in Chorley Woods with his wife, who was “hearing his lines”. When they reached a bridge, he leant over the parapet, still repeating his words. Suddenly he broke off in the middle of a sentence to exclaim, “Look! A trout!” “Lizard, Alex.,” his wife corrected quietly; and henceforth he never made any objection to the line which had previously caused such discussion.

It was when he took The Wilderness on tour that I had what I always say was “the best week of my life”. We were not only playing The Wilderness, but several other plays in which I did not appear, which meant that I sometimes had nights on which I was free. There was at that time a bad smallpox scare, and when we were in Manchester the whole company was vaccinated.

Harry was then going to America to produce a play, and I was taking my baby, Jack (from whom I had never been parted before), to stay with his grandmother in Brighton, while I went to Ireland. I left Manchester, took Jack to Brighton, feeling when I left him (as, I suppose, most young mothers feel when they leave their babies for the first time in someone else’s care) that I might never see him again, and on the Saturday morning I saw Harry off to the States.

56I spent the evening with Julia Neilson and Fred Terry, who were playing Sweet Nell of Old Drury in Liverpool. They did all they could to cheer me—and I needed it! I left them to join the company on the landing-stage, to cross to Ireland. And what a crossing it was, too! The cargo boat which carried our luggage gave up the attempt to cross, and put into the Isle of Man, and the captain of our passenger boat seriously thought of doing the same thing. Finally we arrived at Belfast, to find the main drain of the town had burst, the town was flooded, and the stalls and orchestra at the theatre were several feet deep in most unsavoury water! There was no performance that evening—I remember we all went to the music hall, by way of a holiday—but the next evening we opened at the Dockers’ Theatre, the company which was playing there having been “bought out”. So the successes of the St. James’s Theatre—light, witty comedies—were played at the Dockers’ Theatre, where the usual fare was very typical melodrama.

The next day we all began to feel very ill—the vaccination was beginning to make itself felt—also I had developed a rash, and, in addition, I thought I must have hurt my side, it was so painful. I remember, at the hotel, George Alexander came to my door, knocked, and, when I opened it, said:

“Are you covered in spots?”

“Yes,” I told him.

“Don’t worry,” he begged; and, tearing open the front of his shirt, added: “Look at me!”

57He, too, had come out “all of a rash”—due, I suppose, to the vaccination. My side got worse, and I had to see a doctor, who said I had shingles—a most painful business, which prevented me from sleeping and made me feel desperately ill. The climax came on the Saturday night. Alexander was not playing, his rash had been too much for him, and his doctor advised him not to appear. The understudy played in his stead, and, however good an understudy may be—and they are often very good—it is always trying to play with someone who is playing the part for the first time. At the end of the play, The Wilderness, I had a scene with my first lover, in which I referred to “my husband”. Some wit in the gallery yelled “And where’s the baby, Miss?”. I was ill, I hadn’t slept for nights, my husband was on his way to America, I was parted from my baby, my sister was in the midst of divorcing her husband—which had added to my worries—and this was the last straw! When the play ended, I walked off the stage, after the final curtain, blind with tears—so blind, indeed, that I fell over a piece of scenery, and hurt myself badly. This made me cry more than ever, up to my dressing-room, in my dressing-room, and all the way back to the hotel, and, as far as I remember, most of the night.

When we reached Dublin, fate smiled upon me. I met Mr. W. H. Bailey (afterwards the “Right Hon.”, who did such good work on the Land Commission), and he took me to his own doctor—Dr. Little, of Merrion Square (may his name be for ever blessed!), who gave me lotions and, above all, a 58sleeping draught, and gradually life became bearable again.

One dreadful day (only twenty-four hours this time, not weeks) was while I was playing at the St. James’s in The Wilderness. I was driving in a dog-cart (this is before the days of motor cars) in Covent Garden, when the horse slipped and fell, throwing me out. I picked myself up, saw that the horse’s knees were not broken, and walked into the bank at the corner of Henrietta Street to ask for a glass of water. I found that, not only had I a large bump on my head, but that my skirt was covered with blood. Round I went to the Websters’ flat in Bedford Street and climbed up five flights of stairs. May Webster found that I had a huge gash on my hip, and said the only thing to do was to go to the hospital. Down five flights I went, and drove to Charing Cross Hospital. There a young doctor decided he would put in “a stitch or two”, and also put a bandage on my head. He was a particularly unpleasant young man, I remember, and finally I said to him: “Do you know your manners are most unpleasant? You don’t suppose people come in here for fun, do you?” He was astonished; I don’t think it had ever dawned on him that he was “unpleasant”, and I suppose no one had dared to tell him. I only hope it did him good, and that he is now a most successful surgeon with a beautiful “bedside manner”.

I drove to the theatre, where there was a matinée, with my hat, or rather toque, perched on the top of a large bandage, plus a leg that was rapidly beginning to stiffen. I got through the performance, and decided 59to stay in the theatre and rest “between the performances”. I was to have dinner sent to my dressing-room. Harry thought I had said “someone” would see about it; I thought that he said he would see about it; the “someone else” thought that we were both seeing about it, and so, between them all, I had no dinner at all.

By the end of the evening performance I was really feeling distinctly sorry for myself, with my head “opening and shutting” and my leg hurting badly. When, at the end of the play, I fell into Alexander’s arms in a fond embrace, I just stayed there. He was just helping me to a chair, and I had begun to cry weakly, when H. H. Vincent came up, patted me firmly—very firmly—on the back, and said: “Come, come, now; don’t give way, don’t give way!” This made me angry, so angry that I forgot to go on crying.

CHAPTER V MORE PLAYS AND PLAYERS

When Anthony Hope’s play, Pilkerton’s Peerage, was produced, the scene was—or so we were told—an exact representation of the Prime Minister’s room at 10 Downing Street. One Saturday matinée the King and Queen, then Prince and Princess of Wales, came to see the play, and on that particular afternoon we, the company, had arranged to celebrate the birth of Arthur Bourchier’s daughter—in our own way.

He was playing the Prime Minister, and we had been at considerable pains to prepare the stage, so that at every turn he should be confronted with articles connected with very young children. For instance, he opened a drawer—to find a pair of socks; a dispatch box—to find a baby’s bottle; and so on. The King and Queen could see a great deal of the joke from the Royal box, and were most interested. In the second act, a tea-time scene, Bourchier, on having his cup handed to him, discovered seated in his cup a diminutive china doll, and the thing began to get on his nerves. He hardly dare touch anything on the stage, for fear of what might fall out. In the last act, a most important paper was handed to him in the action of the play. He eyed it distrustfully, and you could see him decide not to take it, if he could avoid doing so, for fear of what might happen. He did everything in his power not to take that paper; he avoided it with an ingenuity worthy of a better cause, but “the play” was too strong for him, and he finally had to “grasp the nettle”. He took it as if he feared it might explode—a pair of small pink woollen socks fell out! It was a disgraceful business, but oh! so amusing, and we all enjoyed it.

Photograph by The Biograph Studio, London, W. To face p. 61

Kathie

“Old Heidelberg”

61In 1903 Alexander put on that great success, Old Heidelberg, at the St. James’s. We were rehearsed by a German, who had one idea which he always kept well in the foreground of his mind—to make us all shout; and the louder we shouted, the better he was satisfied. He was blessed with an enormous voice himself—as all Germans, male and female, are—and saw no difficulty in “roaring” lines. The whole of the rehearsals were punctuated with shouts of “Louder-r-r-r!”

In this play Henry Ainley played one of the students—quite a small part. I have a picture of him, wearing a student’s cap, and looking so delightful! I remember nothing particular which happened during the run, except that one evening, when I was hoisted on to the shoulders of the “boys”, one of them nearly dropped me into the footlights; and another evening, when someone had recommended me to use some special new “make up” for my eyes, and I did so, the result being that the stuff ran into my eyes and hurt so badly that I had to play practically 62all the last act with my eyes shut! “Kattie”, in this play, has always been one of my favourite parts.

Then my husband’s play, Billy’s Little Love Affair, was produced, and proved very satisfactory from every point of view. Allen Aynesworth, Charles Groves, and Florence St. John were in the cast. She was a most delightful comedienne, of the “broad comedy school”. A most popular woman, always known to all her friends as “Jack”; she died a few years ago, very greatly regretted by everyone.

One evening during the run of this play, Allen Aynesworth made an entrance, and Charles Groves, who was on the stage, noticed that his face was decorated with a large black smudge. Funnily enough, Aynesworth noticed that the same “accident” had happened to Groves. Each kept saying to the other, “Rub that smudge off your face”, and each thought the other was repeating what he said. Thus, when Aynesworth whispered “Rub the smudge off your face”, Groves apparently repeated “Rub the smudge off your face”! Both became gradually annoyed with the other, and when they came off they faced each other, to ask indignantly, in one breath, “Why didn’t you do as I told you?”—then discovering the truth that they both had smudges.

When this play was to be produced in America, an amusing thing happened. The man who was playing the leading part (his Christian name was William, but he was usually known as “Billy” by most people), his wife was just at that time bringing a 63divorce suit against him. A wire arrived one day for Harry, saying “Title of Billy’s Little Love Affair must be altered; impossible to use under circumstances”. It was altered and called Imprudence instead, thanks to the courtesy of Sir Arthur Pinero, who had already used that title.

Then came Duke of Killiecrankie, with Grahame Browne, Weedon Grossmith, and Marie Illington. She was a dignified lady; a very excellent actress, as she is still. Grossmith, who loved to have “little jokes” on the stage (and, let me say, not the kind of jokes which reduce all the artistes on the stage to a state of helpless imbecility, and leave the audience wondering what “Mr. So-and-so has said now”), one evening at the supper scene held a plate in front of Marie Illington, whispering in ecstatic tones, “Pretty pattern, isn’t it? Lovely colouring”, and so on—not, perhaps, a very good joke, but quite funny at the time. She was furious, and on leaving the stage, said to him in freezing tones, “Kindly don’t cover up my face. You’re not the only ornament on the stage, you know!”

Then followed a Barrie play—or, rather, two Barrie plays—one, Josephine, a political satire; the other, Mrs. Punch. I recollect working like a Trojan to learn an Irish jig, and that is about the extent of my memories of the play.

It seems rather remarkable how easily one does forget plays. For the time being, they are a very actual part of one’s life; but, once over, they are very quickly forgotten, with all the hopes and fears, the worries and uncertainties, attached to them. For 64example, I once played the leading part in The Importance of Being Earnest, learnt the part in twelve hours, and played without a rehearsal. I only “dried up” once during the play; I worked at top pressure to learn the part, and now (though I will admit it is some years ago) not a single line of the play remains in my mind.

In Lights Out, one incident certainly does remain very vividly in my memory. Charles Fulton had to shoot me at the end of the play. I wasn’t too happy about the pistol, and Harry was frankly nervous. He besought Fulton to “shoot wide”, so that there might be no danger of the “wad” (which was, or should have been, made of tissue paper) hitting me. At the dress rehearsal, the wad (which was made of wash-leather), flew out and hit me on the arm. I had a bad bruise, but that was all; and I remember saying happily to Charles Fulton, “That’s all right; now it will never happen again!” However, on the second night, the property man, who loaded the pistol, put in, for some reason best known to himself, another wad made of wash-leather. The fatal shot was fired: I felt a stinging pain in my lip as I fell. When I got up, I found my mouth was pouring with blood; the wad had hit me on the mouth and split my lip. Fulton turned to me on the stage, preparing to “take his call”, saying brightly and happily, “All right to-night, eh, Eva?”

Then he saw what had happened. The curtain went up for the “call” with poor Fulton standing with his back to the audience, staring at me. My old dresser, Kate, had a cloth wrung out in warm water ready, 65and I sat on the stage mopping my lip. Everyone seemed to forget all about me, the entire company gathered round the pistol, and I sat watching H. B. Irving and Charles Fulton alternately squinting down the barrel, as if some dark secret was contained in it. They went so far as to stick a bit of white paper on the fireproof curtain and shoot at it, to see how far either way the pistol “threw”. It all struck me as so intensely funny that I roared with laughing, which recalled my existence to their memory. A doctor was sent for, and I was taken to my dressing-room. Meanwhile the car was sent to the Green Room Club to call for Harry, who finished early in the play. The chauffeur (who was a very fat youth) met Charles Hallard coming out of the club; very nervously he stopped him and said, “Oh, sir, will you tell the master the mistress has been shot!” Hallard, trying to be very tactful, went into the cardroom, where Harry was playing, leant over him, and said in a dignified whisper, “It’s all right, don’t worry, Eva’s not badly hurt.” Harry rushed round to the theatre, to find poor Fulton walking up and down in great distress. He tried to stop Harry to explain “how it happened”; all he got was a furious “Curse you, curse you!” from Harry, who was nearly beside himself; no doubt picturing me dead.

I asked the doctor to give me “the same thing as he gave the prize-fighters”, to stop my lip swelling; and he did; but when I played the following night, which I had to do, as my understudy did not know the part, I felt that I had enough superfluous face easily to “make another”.

66I used to do a “fall” in Lights Out—which, by the way, I never rehearsed—which used to take the make-up off the end of my nose every night.

I have played in many costume parts—Powder-and-Patch—which I loved. There was “Lady Mary” (the “Lady of the Rose”, as she was called) in the famous play, Monsieur Beaucaire, when Lewis Waller revived that play. “Lady Mary” was not a very sympathetic part, but picturesque; and to play with Will (as he was lovingly called by all who knew him) was a joy. I had a lovely doll, dressed as “Lady Mary”, presented to me, and I have her still.

Sweet Kitty Bellaires, by Egerton Castle, was another Powder-and-Patch part; she was a delight to play, but, alas! that play was not one of those that ran as long as it deserved. In one scene, a large four-poster bed was required, in which Kitty in her huge crinoline and flowing train had to hide herself when she heard the arrival of unwelcome visitors; but it was not considered “nice” for a bed to be used, at anyrate in that theatre, so after the dress rehearsal the bed was removed, and Kitty had to hide behind window curtains.

Shortly after this play, Miss Jill Esmond made her first bow to the world; a wee but most amiable baby, all laughter and happiness; in fact, during one holiday at Puise, near Dieppe, where we spent a lovely family holiday, Jack used to make her laugh so much I quite feared for her.

Photograph by Alfred Ellis, London, W. To face p. 66

Lady Mary Carlyle

“Monsieur Beaucaire”

67When I played in Alfred Sutro’s play, John Glayde’s Honour, with George Alexander, Matheson Lang was playing, what I think I am right in saying was his first “lover” part in London, in the same play. My mother came to the first night, and watched me play the part of a wife who leaves her husband, going away with her lover. Her comment was: “I’m sure you were very clever, darling,” as she kissed me; “but I never want to see you play that part again.” “Muriel Glayde”, though not really a sympathetic character, was intensely interesting, and I loved playing her.

Which reminds me of another story of my mother, that I can tell here. After my father died, she came to live in London. She was then 73 years old. She had been up to town to see the flat which we had taken for her, and to make certain arrangements. She was going back to Brighton, and I was driving with her to the station, when she said, seriously: “Of course, darling, when I come to live in London, I shall not expect to go to a theatre every night.” To go to the theatre every night had been her custom during her brief visits to me when my father had been alive.

When I played in Mr. Somerset Maugham’s play, The Explorer, in 1908, I had a narrow escape from what might have been a nasty accident. Mr. A. E. George was playing my lover, and in the love scene he used to take from me the parasol which I carried and practise “golf strokes” with it to cover his (“stage”, not real, be it said) nervousness. One evening the parasol and its handle parted company; the handle remained in his hand, and the other half flew past my cheek, so near that I could hardly believe 68it had left me untouched, and buried itself in the scenery behind me. There was a gasp from the audience, then I laughed, and they laughed, and all was well.

That winter I played “Dearest” in Mrs. Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy. “Dearest” is a young widow, and I remember after Harry had seen the play his comment was: “Well, it is not given to every man to see his wife a widow!”

Earlier in that year I went to Drury Lane to play in The Marriages of Mayfair, one of those spectacular dramas for which the Lane was so famous. Lyn Harding and that delightful actor, Mr. Chevalier, who, alas! has lately died, were both in the play. There was one very dangerous—or, anyhow, very dangerous-looking—scene. Mr. Chevalier and I had to appear in a sledge which was supposed to be coming down the mountain-side. The platform—or, rather, the two platforms—on which Mr. Chevalier, myself, driver, horse, and sledge had to wait before appearing, was built up as high as the upper circle of the theatre. The horse, after a few performances, learned to know his cue for appearing, got very excited, and took to dancing, much to our alarm. The two platforms used slowly to divide, and we could see down to the depths of the theatre, right below the stage. Mr. Chevalier and I used to sit with one leg outside the sledge, in case it became necessary for us to make a hasty leap. Later, a horse that was a less vivid actor was given the rôle, much to our comfort. I remember it was suggested that Miss Marie 69Lloyd should appear and play herself, but Miss Lloyd did not fall in with the idea.

I have heard that she did not care for either pantomime, revue, or the drama, and did not consider herself suited to it. Which reminds me of a story which was told to me about an occasion when Marie Lloyd appeared in pantomime. Her great friend, Mrs. Edie Karno, came round after the performance, and was asked by the comedienne: “Well, dear, what do you think of me in pantomime?”

Edie Karno, who was nothing if not truthful, and who had herself been one of the greatest “mime” actresses of the last generation, replied: “I don’t think it suits you like your own work.”

“You don’t think I’m very good?” pursued Marie Lloyd.

“Not very, dear,” admitted the other.

“Not very good?” repeated Marie Lloyd. “You’re wrong; as a matter of fact, I’m damned rotten in it!”

Speaking of criticism reminds me of a story of the French authoress who went to see Sir John Hare rehearse “Napoleon” in her play, La Belle Marseilles. He did not look as she had expected, and she said, in broken English, “Oh! he is too old, he is too little, he is too sick, and besides he cannot act.” She had not seen him play in A Pair of Spectacles.

And again, when I was playing in The Dangerous Age, at the beginning of the war, a woman sent round a note to me, saying: “I have enjoyed the play so much. I can’t see at all, I’ve cried so much.”

70When Looking for Trouble was produced in 1910, at the Aldwych, there was some litigation over it, and the case came up for arbitration. The judge’s decision is (I think I am right in saying) in these cases placed in a sealed box. The contesting parties have to pay a fee of (again I can only say “I think”) of £100 for the box to be opened. In this case neither of them was willing to do this, so the box remained unopened; and, as far as I know, the decision remains unknown to this day.

It was while I was rehearsing in Looking for Trouble that the news of the loss of the “Titanic” came through. I shall always remember that afternoon. I came out, with no idea what had happened, to find the whole Strand hushed. There is no other word for it; people quite unknown to each other stood talking quietly, and everyone seemed stunned by the news of the frightful disaster, which seemed an impossibility.

Then came our first short American tour, and the War. I did a short tour, and then “War Work” kept me busy until 1918, when, under the management of Mr. J. E. Vedrenne, I went to the Royalty to play in Arnold Bennett’s delightful play, The Title, with Aubrey Smith. The whole ten months I was at the Royalty in this play were sheer happiness. I had a management who were considerate in every way; I liked the whole company enormously; I had a wonderfully charming part—what could anyone want more? Cæsar’s Wife followed at the Royalty, and I stayed there to play in it. I remember I had to knit on the stage, and the work I managed to get through, in the way of silk sports stockings, etc., was very considerable.

Photograph by Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd., London, W. To face p. 71

“Mumsie”

71Again under Mr. Vedrenne’s management, I played “Mumsie” in Mr. Knoblauch’s play of the same name. Mumsie was a great play. Some day it will be revived; some day, when the scars left by the war are somewhat healed, we shall be able to watch it without pain; but then the war was too near, we still felt it too acutely, the whole play was too real, too vivid for the audience to be able to watch it with any degree of comfort. Mumsie was short-lived, but I look back on the play with great affection. My part was wonderful, and I say, without any undue conceit or pride in my own powers, it was my tour de force. I worked at the part very hard, for I had to acquire a French accent, and, as I do not speak French, it was difficult. I had my reward for all my work in the satisfaction of knowing that the author liked my work. Perhaps the greatest compliment that was paid to my accent was one evening when the Baron Emile d’Erlanger came to see me. He poured out what was, I am told, a stream of praise in French; and when I explained, as best I could, that I had not understood one word, he refused to believe me.

Then came The Ruined Lady; again Aubrey Smith and I were together. It was during the run of this play that I first met Sir Ernest Shackleton. I found him, as I think I have said elsewhere, delightfully unaffected and modest. He had a plan that Harry should turn his book, South, into a film, but the scheme never materialised. Our Canadian tour 72followed, and when I came back I found Mr. Norman McKinnel waiting for me to play in Sir Ernest Cochran’s play, A Matter of Fact, at the Comedy Theatre, a strong part of emotion which I thoroughly enjoyed. This was followed by my first white-haired part at the St. James’s, in The Bat, the play that made everybody who saw it thrill with excitement. This play had a long run, and during that time I played in a film, Flames of Passion, which led to my recent visit to Berlin to play in Chu Chin Chow for the same firm.

There, then, is the account of my life, as truthfully as I can record it. For I have never kept diaries, and have had to rely on what, I find, is not always as reliable as I could wish—my memory. And yet sometimes it is too fertile, too ready to remind me, to prompt me to remember fresh stories. Now, when I feel that I have finished and made an end, other recollections come to me, and I am tempted to begin all over again.

I have at least two in my mind now, which I must give you, though they have no bearing on what I have been writing. Still, after all, I am not attempting to give an accredited autobiography; I am only trying to tell things that happened. So here are the stories which refuse to be left out, or be put in their proper place in another chapter:

Camera Study by Florence Vandamon, London. To face p. 72

Miss Van Gorder

“The Bat”

73Sir Herbert Tree.—One night, during a performance at His Majesty’s, he walked on to the stage just as the curtain was going up. Suddenly he saw, standing at the far side of the stage, a new member of his company; he crossed over to him and asked, “Is it true that you were once with Granville Barker?” “Yes,” replied the man, nervously, “it is true.” “Oh, my God!” said Tree; then, turning to the stage manager, said, “Ring up.”

Again: The day he was to receive his knighthood, a rehearsal was called in the afternoon. Everyone knew that Tree was being knighted on that day, and much astonishment was expressed. The company assembled on the stage, and after a short time Tree appeared in the full glory of his ceremonial dress. He looked round at the company, slowly, then said: “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen; I don’t think I need detain you any longer. Good-bye,” and left the theatre.

CHAPTER VI FOR THE DURATION OF THE WAR

On August 3rd or 4th, 1914, when war was declared, we were at Apple Porch. My sister Decima was with us, and I can remember her sitting in the garden drawing up on a piece of paper, headed “H. V. Esmond’s and Eva Moore’s Tour,” the details of her scheme for organising women’s work, so that it might be used to the best advantage in the coming struggle.

We went to London, and by the Saturday following the offices of the Women’s Emergency Corps were opened. Gertrude Kingston lent the Little Theatre, and it was there the work began. I was playing at the Vaudeville Theatre each evening, and working at the Little Theatre all day. Women enrolled in thousands; trained women were grouped into their proper classes, and untrained women were questioned as to what they “could do”. Weekly lists were sent to the War Office, containing full particulars as to the numbers of women we could supply for transport, cooks, interpreters, and so forth; and each week a letter was received in acknowledgment, saying that women “were not needed”. That was 75in 1914. Eighteen months later the Corps was found to be the “front door”, the place where women could be found to meet any emergency. It would be impossible to give one-tenth of the names of the women who worked for and with the Corps, women who gave time and money, brain and endurance, to the work. The Emergency Corps was the first body of women in this country regularly to meet the refugees from Belgium, find them hospitality, clothes, and food. It was the first organisation to make a definite attempt to supply British toys; it sent women, capable of teaching French, to most of the large training camps throughout the country. I remember we issued a small book, called French for Tommies, which was remarkably useful. The Corps sent thousands of blankets to Serbia, ran the first ambulances, organised canteens for the troops in France, provided cheap meals for workers, and a hundred other things which I cannot remember. When the cry for respirators was first raised, the Corps took a disused laundry, and supplied them in thousands; they were a pattern which was soon superseded, but that was the pattern supplied to us at the time.

When I went on tour, I undertook to enrol members in the provinces, and met with considerable success; and it was a year later, 1915, at Bournemouth, that I met Miss Marie Chisholm and Mrs. Knocker, who had been in Belgium with Dr. Munro, and who had the first Ambulance Corps out in Belgium and did such fine work in the early days of 1914. They were home on leave, to return when it was ended 76to their dressing-station on the Belgian front line. I was very interested in their work, and promised to do what I could to help. Through the kindness and generosity of the British public, I was able to send them money and many useful things. I should like to quote one instance—one of many—which shows how the public responded to any appeal. At Birmingham I heard from Miss Chisholm that the Belgian “Tommies” were suffering very badly from frost-bitten ears; the wind, coming over the inundated fields in front of the trenches, cut like a knife. “I would give anything,” she wrote, “for a thousand Balaclava helmets.” On the Thursday night, at the Birmingham theatre, I made my appeal, and in a week 500 had been sent to me, and 1000 followed in less than three weeks’ time. Sandbags, too, I was able to send out in thousands, through the interest and kindness of those who heard my appeals. It was through the Emergency Corps that I really first met them. Miss Chisholm had been my messenger in the very early days of the war, and, before I pass on to other matters, I want to say a last word about that organisation. It was the parent of practically all the other war societies. The Needlework Guilds formed their societies on the lines we had used; the various workrooms, in which women’s work was carried on, came to us to hear how it was done; the W.A.F. and W.A.A.C., and other semi-military organisations, were formed long after we had started the Women’s Volunteer Reserve. Much concern had been expressed at the bare idea of Women Volunteers; but Decima and Mrs. Haverfield 77stuck to their point, and Mrs. Haverfield carried on that branch finely. Nothing but a national necessity could have brought women together in such numbers, or spurred them on to work in the splendid way they did. The Corps was a “clearing house” for women’s work, and when women settled down into their proper spheres of usefulness, the Corps, having met the emergency, ceased as an active body to exist; but, before it did so, it had justified its existence a dozen times over.

Major A. Gordon, who was King’s Messenger to the King of the Belgians, proved himself a great friend to the “Women of Pervyse” and myself. It was through his efforts that I was able to pay my memorable visit to the Belgian trenches in 1918, and later I had the honour of receiving the Order de la Reine Elizabeth. All we five sisters worked for the war in all different branches at home and abroad, and we all received decorations: Decima, the Commander of the British Empire, Medallion de Reconnaissance, and Overseas Medals; Bertha, the O.B.E. for home service; Emily (Mrs. Pertwee), Le Palm d’Or, for Belgian work; Ada, the Allied and Overseas Medals for services with the French and British, in both France and Germany, also, through her efforts in endowing a room in the British Women’s Hospital for the totally disabled soldier, Star and Garter. Speaking of this brings back the memory of the wonderful day at Buckingham Palace, when the Committee of the British Women’s Hospital, founded by the Actresses’ Franchise League in 1914, were commanded by the Queen to present personally 78to her the £50,000 they had raised for that hospital. If I remember rightly, about 23 of us were there. The Queen, after the presentation, walked down the line and spoke to each one of us with her wonderful gracious manner, and to many referred to the pleasure she had received from seeing our various theatrical performances. Before the Queen entered the room, we were asked by Sir Derek Keppel to form ourselves in alphabetical order, and Lady Wyndham (Miss Mary Moore), my sister Decima, Lady Guggisberg, and myself (Mrs. H. V. Esmond) all promptly grouped ourselves under the M’s as Moores.

In the spring of 1918, when the Germans were making their last big advance, I was able to arrange to pay a flying visit to Belgium, to see the dressing-station at Pervyse. We had to pass Fumes, and found it in flames. The sight of that town being steadily bombarded, with the houses flaming against a brilliant sunset, was one of the most terrible but wonderful coloured things I have ever seen. We arrived at the H.Q. of the 2nd Division of the Belgian Army, to find the evening strafe in full swing. I can see now the Belgian Tommy as I saw him then, quite unconcerned by the guns, planting little flowers, Bachelor’s Buttons, outside the General’s hut. I wished that I could have shared his unconcern; I found the noise simply ear-splitting, and when a particularly noisy shell burst, and I asked the General if “it was going or coming”, he roared with laughter. I have never felt less amused than I did at that moment!

He sent us over to Pervyse in his car, to collect 79some papers which Mrs. Knocker, who was returning to England in a few days, needed. The dressing-station was a small and much-shelled house, on the very edge of the flooded land which lay between the Belgian trenches and the enemy—from the little house you could actually see the German sandbags. The dressing-station itself was anything but a “health resort”, and there is no question that these two women faced great danger with enormous fortitude.

Afterwards we motored to G.H.Q., where the staff were at dinner—or, rather tragically for us, where the staff had just finished dinner. I have the Menu still, signed by all who were present. It consisted of “Poached Eggs and Water Cress”, with Coffee to follow. We did not like to say we were “starving for want of food”, and so said we had dined. I was very glad to remember that in our car reposed a cooked chicken, which had been bought in Dunkirk. We—that is, Miss Chisholm, Mrs. Knocker (who had become by then Baroness T’Scerelles), her husband, and I—slept at a farmhouse some distance from H.Q. The only tolerably pleasant part of the night, which was noisy with the sound of shells, was the eating (with our fingers) of the cooked chicken. I do not think I have ever been so hungry in my life!

The following day I was taken to the trenches at Ramskeppelle. The men were very much astonished to see a woman in mufti. What struck me most was the beauty of the day, for the sun was shining, and birds singing, yet from behind us came the noise of 80the 15–inch guns, firing on the Germans, and back came the thunder of their replies. The sunshine, the birds, the beauty of the day—and war!

I stayed at Boulogne, on the way back, for the night, as the guest of Lady Hatfield at the Red Cross Hospital, and then returned home, bringing with me the Baroness, who was suffering from shock and the awful effects of gas. If it has seemed, or did seem at the time, that these two women had perhaps overmuch praise for what they did, I would ask you to remember that they worked in that exposed position, continually running grave risks, for three and a half years. It was the sustained effort that was so wonderful, which demanded our admiration, as well as the work which received the grateful thanks of the whole of the 2nd and 3rd Divisions of the Belgian Army.

To go back to the theatrical side of things. In 1914, the first week of the war, some 200 touring companies were taken “off the road”, and we—my husband and I—were advised to cancel our provincial dates at once. This we decided not to do, but to “carry on” as we had already arranged. The financial side was not very satisfactory, but I must say that the managers in the country appreciated our efforts; and, apart from that, we had the satisfaction of knowing that we were providing work for, at anyrate, a few artists and the staffs in the provincial theatres, at a time when work was very, very difficult to obtain.

I look back on those years of the war as a rather confused series of emotions and pictures, when one 81worked, spoke at meetings, played in the evening, read the casualty lists, and always “wondered why”; when each day seemed to bring the news that some friend had made the supreme sacrifice, when each day brought the knowledge that the world was the poorer for the loss of many gallant gentlemen. Pictures that remain—tragic, humorous, and soul-stirring. The first detachment of men I saw leaving for the front! It was about a quarter to twelve; I had been playing at Kennington Theatre, and stood waiting for a ’bus at the end of Westminster Bridge. As I stood, I heard the sound of marching men, “the men who joined in ’14”. Out of the darkness they came, still in their civilian clothes, not marching with the precision of trained men, but walking as they would have done to their work. Not alone, for beside almost each man walked a woman, and often she carried his bundle, and he carried—perhaps for the last time—a baby. I wondered if King Charles, riding his horse in Trafalgar Square, had seen them pass and realised that in them was the same spirit as lived in the Englishmen who sent him to the scaffold—that England and the English people might be free? Nelson, watching from the top of his column, must have known that the spirit that lived in his men at Copenhagen, the Nile, and Trafalgar was still there, burning brightly; and His Grace of Cambridge, once Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, did he too watch the sons and grandsons of the men who fought in the Crimea, going out to face the same dangers, the same horrors, as the men he had known? So they passed, in silence, for at such 82times one cannot find words to cry “Good luck” or “God bless you”. Out of the darkness they came, and into the darkness again they went, in silence—“the men who joined up in ’14”.

And Southampton in the early days! One night men began to march past the Star Hotel at six in the evening, and at six the next morning men were still marching past, and all the time the sound of singing went with them, all night long—“Tipperary”. I wonder what “Tipperary” meant to them all; did it mean home, the trenches, or Berlin? Who knows! but they never seemed to tire of singing it.

In May, 1915, we went to Ireland, and in Dublin we heard of the loss of the “Lusitania”. No one believed it was true. It seemed impossible that England’s super-passenger ship could have been sunk almost in sight of land.

We reached Cork on the Sunday evening. Charles Frohman was one of the missing passengers. Early on the Monday, Harry and I went to Queenstown, to try and find his body. The sight we saw in the shed on the Cunard quay is beyond description. Lying on the concrete floor, their hands all tied with thick pieces of rope, lay nearly a hundred victims of war and German civilisation! Men, women, children, and little babies. I shall never forget the pathos of the dead children and babies! Dragged into the awful machinery of war, the Holy Innocents of the Twentieth Century, butchered by the order of a Modern Herod. In one corner lay a little girl, about nine years old; her face was covered with a cloth; 83the terrible pathos of her poor little legs, wearing rather bright blue stockings, the limp stillness of her! We found poor Mr. Frohman—the man who made theatrical destinies, launched great theatrical ventures, who had been sought after, made much of, and was loved by all those who knew him—lying there alone, although he was surrounded by silent men and women. We took him flowers, the only flowers in all that dreadful shed. They went with him to America, and later his sister told us they were buried with him. Outside in the streets and in the Cunard office were men and women, white-faced and dry-eyed: it was all too big for tears: tears were dried up by horror. Later in the week the streets from the station to quay had on each side of the road a wall of coffins.

I read in the papers accounts of the disaster, of the “wonderful peace which was on the faces of the dead”. That peace can only have existed in the minds of the writers—I know I did not see it. Horror, fear, amazement, and, I think, resentment at being hurled into eternity; but peace existed no more in the faces of the dead than it did in my heart. I came away from that shed and cursed the German nation. Yet even little children had done great things. Lady Allen, from Montreal, was on board with her two little girls. I was told by their sister, who was over doing Red Cross work, that they stood all three hand in hand, wearing life-belts, when a woman friend came up to them; she was without a belt. One of the little girls took off her belt, saying as she did so, “You take mine, because I have learnt to swim”. 84Lady Allen and the two children, holding hands, jumped into the sea; neither of the children was ever seen again alive.

I met an Australian soldier, in a tiny hotel (for every place was full to overflowing), who had been on board. He told me that in his boat there was a woman who sang steadily for hours to keep up the spirits of her companions; she was, he said, “perfectly wonderful”. After they had been on the water for five hours, they saw a man on a small raft; they had no oars, and neither had he. The Australian jumped overboard, swam to him, and towed the raft back to the boat. He did this with three ribs broken! The thing which he told me he regretted most was the loss of his concertina, which he had saved up for years to buy!

I do not mind admitting that I hated the sea trip back to England; apart from my own feelings, I felt that I was in a great measure responsible for the rest of our company. We left Dublin with all lights out, and went full steam ahead all the time. It was the quickest passage the boat had ever made. Immediately on going on board, I collected enough life-belts for every woman of the company to have one, piled them on the deck, and sat on them!

So the war dragged on, and one did what was possible. It is of no interest to record the visits to hospitals, the work, and so forth; everyone worked, and worked hard. My feeling was always, when some wounded man gave me thanks out of all proportion to what I had been able to do, that I should have liked to quote to him words from my husband’s play, Love 85and the Man: “I have done so little, and you have done so much”. Only the Tommy, being British, would have been very uncomfortable if I had said anything of the kind.

Then, at last, came that wonderful morning in November, when, riding on the top of a ’bus in Piccadilly, I heard the “maroons”, and saw all the pent-up emotion of the British people break loose. They had heard of disasters, lost hopes, the death of those they loved best in the world, almost in silence, but now—“it was over”, and a people thanked God that “England might be Merrie England once again”. I went on to my Committee meeting, a meeting for the organisation of a scheme to raise funds for St. Dunstan’s Blind Soldiers, and I remember, when it was ended, walking up the Haymarket with Forbes Robertson, and noticing the change that had come over everything. If we lost our heads a little that day, who can blame us? For four years we had, as it were, lived in dark cellars, and now, when we came out into the light, it blinded us—we were so unaccustomed to “being happy”.

That night Harry was playing at Wyndham’s Theatre in The Law Divine. He told me that the audience certainly only heard about half of the play, owing to the noise in the street outside.

My sister Decima, after having been attached to the French Army in January, 1915, ran the Leave Club in Paris, which did such fine work and made a home for thousands of British soldiers in 1917; it continued there after the Armistice, till 1920. I shall not attempt to describe it, as I hope she may one day 86do so herself. When the Armistice was signed, she went at once to Cologne. She was one of the first women to get to the city, and began at once to organise a club for the Army of Occupation, on the same lines as the one in Paris. Before she left, the work of the club had come to an end, owing to the large reduction of the Army of Occupation. I went over, and together we did a tour of the battlefields. With my sister were her Commandant, Miss Cornwallis, Mrs. Carter, whose husband did fine work with the submarines and went down in the one he commanded, and Miss Fisher, who was my sister’s chauffeuse in Cologne. We took the same route as the Germans had taken into Belgium in 1914, and travelled over a thousand miles of devastated land. From Ypres to Verdun, everywhere the Graves Commission were busy. We saw cemetery after cemetery full of little wooden crosses, which Rupert Brooke said made “some corner in a foreign field ... forever England”. We saw the parties of Annamites who collected the dead from the battlefields; they were most repulsive looking, and I was told that they were the only people who could be persuaded to do the work. From Fort Fleure, in the valley, we saw the little village of wooden huts where they lived, under the direction of one British soldier, who lived there with his wife. Through all the battle area were dwarfed, distorted trees, twisted into almost sinister shapes; and among them moved the blue figures of the Annamites from Tonkin, looking for the dead.

It was spring-time, and on Vimy Ridge the cowslips were growing, and at Verdun the ground was 87thick with violets. I gathered bunches and placed them on lonely graves. Looking in my note-book, I see under “Verdun” the words, “miles of utter desolation”. I shall never forget those miles and miles of wasted land, torn and churned up by the guns, the ground still scarred by trenches and pitted with shell-holes, here and there a grave with a wooden cross, and often a steel helmet on it—a pathetic loneliness. I thought what England had escaped: we still had our green fields, our wonderful trees; our villages were still standing, and our factories still held machinery that was useful and might be worked:

England was unchanged. The memory of what I saw there in France made me understand why the French people demand reparations from the nation that wasted France.

Outside Arras we met an R.A.C. man and asked him to tell us of an hotel where we might stay for the night. He told us of one, and we went on our way. When we got to the town we could not find the hotel, and asked a Tommy near the ruined Cathedral if he could direct us. He offered to show us the way, and got on to the step of the car beside Miss Cornwallis, who was riding outside. She asked him what part of England he came from, and found he came from the same small place in Kent that she had lived in all her life. He gave her the additional information: “I 88know you quite well; I’ve driven your father’s cows scores of times!” We reached the hotel, which was a kind of large bungalow, with canvas walls, run by an Australian—and very well run, too. I went to my room, which I was sharing with my sister, and realised that every word which was said in the next room could be heard. The next room was occupied by the R.A.C. soldier who had directed us to come to the hotel. He was not alone, but was saying “Good-bye” to his French sweetheart. Poor girl, he was leaving for England the next day, and she wanted very much to come with him. It was rather pathetic, and I wished so much the walls had not been so thin.

When one thinks now of the “Lights out”, the marching men, the ambulances at the stations, the men in khaki, and the air raids, it all seems like something that happened hundreds of years ago! Talking of air raids reminds me that some time ago I was rehearsing with an American producer for an American play. Everyone on the stage had to be in a great state of tension, and, to convey his meaning, he said to me: “You’re all as if you were waiting for a bomb to drop. Do you understand what I mean? Have you ever heard a bomb drop?” I assured him that I had, and knew exactly what “it was like”. I thought, too, “What do some of you know of England, and England in war time!”

CHAPTER VII THE SUFFRAGE

I am not going to embark upon a long discussion as to the wrongs and rights of the question, I am not going to attempt to write a history of the movement; I am only going to try to tell you of some of the incidents, the thoughts, and personalities that remain with me.

Why did I become a Suffragist? Because all my life I had been a working woman; I had, and still have, a passionate love for England; I believed that I ought to be able to have a voice in the government of that country; and believed, too, that simply because I was a woman, there were certain very vital questions on which my opinion, and the opinion of my sister-women, might be of value—questions which affected “us” as women, and “us” as mothers.

I did not go to prison; but I had, and have, the deepest respect for the women who did. When you look back on the ordeals which women endured, and what they suffered, as suffer they did, remember that no woman who faced those ordeals or endured those 90sufferings did it for either notoriety, enjoyment, or bravado!

As for the “damage” they did, well, I am content to leave the wisdom of such methods to be justified by wiser heads than mine, and to believe, as I do firmly, that those methods were only resorted to when the leaders believed that all other means had failed. Were we not advised by Mr. Hobhouse to abandon a policy of “pinpricks”, and “do as the men had done”?

There were many funny incidents connected with the Suffrage Movement, and not the least funny was Mr. Austen Chamberlain’s reason why women ought not to have the vote: “Because women are women, and men are men.” It was Mr. Chamberlain who said that women ought not to mix at all in political affairs. My sister Decima wrote to him at once, to ask if by that statement he meant that he wished women to discontinue working for the Tariff Reform League, and she received a prompt answer “in the negative”.

My first public speech was made at the Queen’s Hall. They rang up at very short notice to ask if I would “say a few words”. Rather fearful as to my powers of oratory, I went. I remember Christabel Pankhurst was in the chair. I began to speak, and a small blood vessel broke in my lip. I stood there speaking, and between sentences mopping up the small but persistent stream of blood. When my own handkerchief was no longer of any use, Christabel passed me another. By the time I finished my speech a small pile of “gory” looking handkerchiefs lay at 91my feet, and not a woman on the platform had a handkerchief left. It was a horrible experience for a “raw hand”.

What a fighter Christabel Pankhurst was! The hall might be in an uproar, but it did not daunt Christabel; she spoke, and, if no one listened, she went on speaking until they did! She was a brilliant speaker, who never let her brilliance get above the heads of her audience, and never let them feel she was “talking down to them”. I have never known any woman, who was so ready-witted; no one ever “caught her out”.

A man once got up and asked, “Now, Miss Pankhurst, putting all the fun of talking in public on one side, don’t you really wish you were a man?” Miss Pankhurst gave the question a second’s consideration, looked carefully at the speaker, then gave her head that queer little jerk which always heralded some unexpected answer—the crowds knew it, and used to watch for it. “Don’t you?” was all she said. Another occasion a man got up and commenced a long, rambling question as to what would happen to “the home” if he got into Parliament and his wife got into Parliament too. It took him a long time to say it all, and he drew a really very touching picture. “I don’t know your wife, sir,” said Christabel; “I’ve never seen her; she might, of course, be returned for Parliament; but you—oh! (very soothingly) I don’t think you need worry!” Taking the audiences on the whole, they liked her. If there was a row that even she could not talk down, it was an extraordinary thing. They liked her humour, they 92liked her doggedness, her pugnacity, and her youthful enjoyment of any and every joke, even if one was turned against her. The famous Pantechnicon was Christabel’s idea. Everyone has heard of it, and it is exactly the same story as the “Wooden Horse of Troy”, only “the horse” was a furniture van, the occupants were Suffragists, and “Troy” was the sacred precincts of the House of Commons.

Mrs. Pankhurst had all the fighting spirit, but she lacked the quick humour of her daughter. She was a wonderful woman, who had worked all her life “for women”, and worn herself out bodily—not mentally—in doing so. I have seen and heard her often, but never without a sense of deep admiration for her brain and her endurance. Those of us who remember will recall the placards in those days: “Arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst”, followed a fortnight later by “Mrs. Pankhurst Released”—that was after hunger striking—then, “Illness of Mrs. Pankhurst”. About three weeks later, when she had regained a little of her strength, you saw, “Arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst”. (That was under “the Cat and Mouse Act”.) That weary round used to go on, until you wondered how human brain, let alone human body, could stand it. But stand it she did, and came back again and again. I wonder now if all that she suffered, and all that she gained, ever enters the minds of the women voters who go to the polling-booths on election days?

Not only may they remember Mrs. Pankhurst, there are other figures “that remain”—Flora Drummond, Annie Kenny, Mrs. Howe Martin, Lady 93Constance Lytton, and Mrs. Despard. The last was, as Mrs. Nevinson once said, “not a woman, but an inspiration”. She was born fifty years too soon; she was an old lady when the Suffrage Movement first began to be a real “thing” in practical politics. It was a living example of mind over matter that made it possible for her to work as she did. She was, I suppose, the most picturesque figure in the movement; she looked what she is—an aristocrat. You will find her type in the Spanish pictures of Tiapolo. I can think of one at the moment which hangs in the Scottish National Gallery; Mrs. Despard might have sat for the court lady on the left. Now she has become an Irish citizen, and lives outside Dublin, devoting her time to trying to alleviate the sufferings of her adopted countrymen. That I do not see eye to eye with her aims and methods does not shake my belief that those aims and methods are actuated from nothing but rooted beliefs. It was Mrs. Despard who said once, during the most strenuous part of the Suffrage campaign, “Oh! then ’twas good to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!” An idealist, even something of a fanatic, but with her eyes fixed on the stars and her heart full of high purpose and great faith in her cause—that is Mrs. Despard as I saw, and still see, her.

Of the sufferings (and I use the word advisedly) of the women who “dared greatly”, I will not write, and for two reasons—first, the fight is over, we gained our objective, and removed from the Statute Book the clause which classed women with “lunatics”; and, 94secondly, because if I did write, and write truly of the things I know, no one would believe me, and I even doubt if anyone could print what I could write, and write in all truth. So I leave that side, and ask you to believe that, even if we admit (and I reserve my own opinion) that many of the things which the Suffragists did were foolish, unnecessary, destructive, even wicked, they had punishment meted out to them in not only full measure, but “pressed down and running over”; and I can tell you only that the courage with which they met that punishment was worthy of the great cause for which they fought, whatever their methods—the Emancipation of Women.

The Actresses’ Franchise League was formed after the Women’s Social and Political Union, and after the Women’s Freedom League. It was “non-party and non-political”. Though it did not advocate the extreme measures, it did not condemn; its policy was “The aim is everything”. I remember our first meeting at the Criterion; Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson took the chair and spoke for us. He, like his mother before him, has been a warm supporter of anything which will lead to better conditions for women. The meeting was a great success, and from that time we, the Actresses’ Franchise League, took its place with the other franchise societies. I remember, in one of the processions which were organised from time to time, the Actresses sent a contingent. Cissy Loftus, May Whitty, Lena Ashwell, and I were marching four abreast. We all wore white dresses, with sprays of pink roses, except Lena Ashwell, 95who was in mourning. At the end of Northumberland Avenue there was a long wait; we were held up for some time. A man who was passing looked at us and recognised Lena Ashwell. He turned to his friend and said, “See ’er, that third one in that line? I’ll tell you ’oo she is; she’s the ‘Bad Girl of the Family’!”

I think in most of us the work cultivated a sense of humour, but it was certainly due to a lack of that valuable commodity in someone that I was asked to hand in my resignation to the A.F.L. My husband wrote a one-act play, called Her Vote, the story of a “fluffy” young woman who, after persuading everyone she meets that it is “their duty” to attend a big Suffrage meeting, does not go herself, because her “young man” has taken tickets for a fashionable ball. That, roughly, was the story. I played the sketch, and it really was very funny. Two days later, at a meeting of the League, “someone” got up and stated that they had seen the sketch, and that evidently “Eva Moore preferred Kisses to Votes”, and suggested that I should be told not to play the sketch again, or resign. I resigned; I felt that one could work as well for a cause outside a society as in one. I may say that I was asked to go back, which I did, still reserving the right to myself to play in any play, without the assumption that I was working anti-Suffrage propaganda. That line, “Prefers Kisses to Votes”, has always struck me as so very excellent, it should be used in a play.

I did, however, call down upon my head a terrible 96storm, and quite innocently. At a time when “forcible feeding” was being resorted to very much, two girls, who were Suffragists, were presented at Court. They were both of very good social position, and very charming. One of them, on being presented to the King, said “Your Majesty, won’t you stop forcible feeding?” She was promptly hustled out of the presence, and the Press the following day was full of “the insult offered to the King”. It may have been, probably was, the wrong time to do it; it was probably the wrong way to attempt to do it; but I did feel, and still feel, that the girl must have called up every ounce of courage she possessed to say what she did. At a meeting next day I ventured to say just what I have written here, ending with: “Whatever one may feel about the wisdom or the propriety of her action, you must take off your hat to the girl for her courage.” Then the storm burst. That evening I found headlines in the papers: “Eva Moore takes off her hat to the woman who insulted the King”, and so on; it was astonishing. The result was rather dreadful; men I had never seen wrote to me, wrote the most abusive, indecent letters I have ever read or even dreamed could be written, letters which left me gasping that people who could write at all should descend to using such epithets and expressions. Had I not already been a Suffragist, those letters would have made me one! However, it came to an end and I survived, though I admit at the time it distressed me very much indeed.

A disagreeable experience was when I was called 97to give evidence in the case of “Pankhurst and Pethick Lawrence v. the Crown”. Mrs. Pankhurst was alleged to have spoken against the Crown and His Majesty’s Government at the Albert Hall meeting, and the Pethick Lawrences, as chief organisers of the meeting, were involved. That, so far as my memory serves me, was the case. I was to give evidence for Mrs. Pankhurst. I was instructed not to answer too quickly, not to answer too slowly, and no first night has ever brought such a torture of nerves as did that cross-examination at the Old Bailey. I remember very little about it all, except the grim air which seemed to brood over everything, and the fear that I might “say something wrong”. Sir Rufus Isaacs was “for the Crown”, and I was in the witness-box. I remember after some time he said, “—and so you suggest so-and-so, Miss Moore?” It was a question very like the old story, “Do you still beat your wife?”—whichever way you answered, you were wrong. I admit frankly I was paralysed with fright; I tried to collect my wits, tried to think of some “really telling” answer; no inspiration came. At last I said, with what dignity I could muster, “I suggest nothing”, and heard him say the most welcome words which, I think, have ever struck my ears, “You may stand down!”

And we were told we went through that kind of ordeal because we liked it and loved the notoriety! What imagination some people have!

Some day, when we look back from a distance of years, the things will fall into their right perspective, and we shall be able to tell stories which will fire the 98imagination of those who hear them; such stories will be the Pantechnicon; the story of “Charlie” Marsh, lying hidden on the roof of Birmingham Town Hall, followed by three months’ imprisonment, during the whole of which time she was forcibly fed; the story of Lilian Lenton, who hid for two days in the organ loft in Leeds Town Hall; the story of Theresa Billington and the Dog Whip, and many others. We are still too near them as actual happenings, we still let our political opinions, on either side, colour our feelings; but in the future we shall see them for what they were: as brave attempts to fight whole-heartedly for a great cause.

I think of the great public funeral accorded to Emily Davidson, and remember that a martyr is “one who suffers death or grievous loss in defence or on behalf of any belief or cause”; the worthiness or unworthiness of the cause is a question which only the martyr can answer to his or her own soul. Emerson says: “A man does not come the length of the spirit of martyrdom without some flaming love”, and I believe that it was a “flaming love” for their sister-women which was the driving-force behind all they did.

I look back, no longer “dreaming dreams”, but seeing “visions”—and the visions I see are of women coming from all parts of England, from the factories of Lancashire, from Yorkshire, from the hunting-fields, from offices, schools, and from every place where women might be found, who wanted to see the dawn of the new era, giving up much which made life pleasant and easy, braving scorn, ridicule, 99and often bodily danger, to do what they might to “right a wrong”. I like to remember that “I did what I could” and was, at anyrate, one of the rank and file in that great army.

I go back to August, 1914, and think how all those women put aside their political ambitions, even their demand for recognition, and declared a truce, so that they might concentrate against a common enemy which threatened their country. “I hated war,” one of them said to me, speaking of ’14, “I was and always had called myself a pacifist, but, when the war came, well, I worked with the rest of us, to help to win it.”

The war was over, and at a luncheon given at the Savoy I met Mr. Lloyd George. I told him that I had not seen him for a long time, and reminded him that the last time was when I came, as a member of a deputation on behalf of Women’s Suffrage, to see him at 10 Downing Street. “Yes,” he said, “I remember. Well, I always told Christabel Pankhurst you should all have the vote, and I kept my word!” After nearly forty years of “constitutional methods”, of spade-work and propaganda, and after nearly a decade of active work—nearly ten years during which constitutional methods were flung to the winds, and the women fought for the franchise as “the men had fought”—they won that which they demanded: their political freedom—obtained, as all freedom has been obtained, “with a great price”, and that “great price” was years of self-sacrifice, culminating in the European War.

100So political swords were turned to ploughshares, for, as Mrs. Pankhurst used to say, “Remember when you have gained the vote your work is only beginning”; and the women of England were at last able to say, each one, “I am a citizen of no mean city.”

CHAPTER VIII PEOPLE I HAVE MET

If all these “impressions that remain” seem—what, indeed, they are—very disjointed, remember that Life as one lives it is, after all, a “patchy” and disjointed business.

Mrs. John Wood.—I have spoken elsewhere of Mrs. John Wood, and the following incident happened when I was playing under her management at the Court Theatre. I came to the theatre by Underground, and one night the train stopped and was held up between Kensington and Sloane Square Stations. I looked nervously at my watch, and saw the time was rapidly approaching when I ought to be in my dressing-room. Still the train remained stationary. I began to feel rather desperate, so decided to do all I could to “get ready” in the train. I was wearing buttoned boots—I undid the buttons; I was wearing a dress with many small buttons down the front—I undid them all, keeping my coat buttoned tight to hide the state of “undress”. (I remember an unfortunate man who was in the same carriage, gazing at me, evidently thinking I was a dangerous lunatic 102and wondering what I should do next.) At last the train moved, and I got out and rushed into the theatre, gained my dressing-room, and began to tear off my clothes. I did not attempt to “make up”—there was no time; I directed all my energies to getting into my stage frock—which, by the way, was a dress for a “drawing-room”, with train and feathers all complete. The stage manager, who was not blessed with the capacity for doing the right thing at the right moment, chose the moment when I was struggling into this very elaborate costume to come to the door and to begin to expostulate with me for being late. “What has made you so late, Miss Moore?”, “Do you know you should have been in the theatre half an hour ago?”, “Do you know you’ll be off?”, and so on, until in sheer exasperation I called to him (and I do not regret it), “Oh! for Heaven’s sake, go away, you fool!” He did. He went and told Mrs. John Wood that I had been very rude to him, and she sent for me, after the performance, to “know why”. I told her the whole story, and as it was unfolded to her I saw her lips begin to quiver and her eyes dance with amused understanding. When I finished, she gave her verdict. I know she felt the discipline of the theatre must be upheld at all costs, but she saw the humour of it. “I understand,” she said. “We will say no more about it, this time—but it must not happen again!”

Photograph by The Dover Street Studios, Ltd., London, W. To face p. 102

Eliza

“Eliza Comes to Stay”

103A Manager in the Suburbs.—I had been playing “Eliza”. We had played to capacity all the week, at a certain suburban theatre which shall be nameless. On the Saturday night the local manager came to me; he was very delighted at the “business”, and said so with great enthusiasm. The play was “great”, I was “great”, the business was equally “great”. “And now,” he concluded “you will have a little something with me, to drink to your return to this theatre.” I said it was very kind of him, but that I really didn’t want the “little something”; but he seemed rather hurt, and so I consented. I do not know exactly what nectar I expected him to send into my room, but I certainly did not expect a small bottle of Guinness’s stout, which was what he did send.

Simone le Barge.—She was playing in London with George Alexander, and was present at a very representative theatrical lunch. The thing which struck her most, so she told me, was that everyone was married or going to be married. There was George Alexander and his wife; Fred Terry and his wife; Cyril Maude and his wife; H. B. Irving and his wife; Martin Harvey and his wife; Oscar Asche and Sir Herbert Tree, both with their wives; Harry and I, and so on. It astonished her! She said, in the tone of one who sees “strange things and great mystries”: “Dans la France—c’est impossible!”

A Scotch Landlady.—I arrived in Glasgow one Sunday, and I feel rather about Glasgow as poor Dan Leno did. “They tell me this is the second city of our Empire; when I find a real ‘outsider’, I’m going to back it for a place!” However, when I 104arrived by the night train from the South, I found the landlady cleaning the house with the vigour of twenty women. I had to sit in her room until my own were cleaned. When finally this was accomplished to her satisfaction, I was allowed to take possession. I unpacked and took out some sewing, which was a series of small flannel garments I was making for Jack, then a baby. She walked into my room, and saw what I was doing; she fixed me with a “cold eye”. “Sewin’!” she ejaculated. I explained they were for my baby, etc., but the cold eye still remained cold. “On the Sawbath!” she said. “Weel, Ah ca’ it naething but impious,” and with that she walked out and left me alone with my “impiety”.

Dan Leno.—I have no real right to include Dan Leno. I never met him, but my sister Decima did, and someone else who did told me this story, which I think is worth repeating. Leno lived at Brixton (I am told that, as all good Americans go to Paris when they die, so all good music hall artists go to Brixton when they die), and he used on Sunday mornings to potter round his garden wearing carpet slippers, an old pair of trousers, his waistcoat open, and no collar; quite happy, and enjoying it immensely. He went round, on one of these Sunday mornings, to a “hostelry” for liquid refreshment, and met there a “swell comedian” who knew him. This gentleman, who appeared on the halls dressed rather in the manner of Mr. George Lashwood, was faultlessly dressed in a frock coat, the regulation dark 105grey trousers, and looked rather “stagily” immaculate. He looked at Dan with disapproval, and proceeded to expostulate with him. “Danny, boy, you shouldn’t come out dressed like that. After all, you are England’s leading comedian, and—well—you ought to make yourself look smart. Let people know who you are!” Then, with pride, he added: “Look at me, boy; why don’t you do like I do?” Leno looked at him gravely. “Like you?” he repeated. “Look like you?—I never come out in my ‘props’, old boy.”

Mr. Henry Arthur Jones years ago said a thing to Harry that has ever lived in my memory. They were discussing acting and plays, and Mr. Jones said “A play is as good as it is acted.” That remark sums up the whole question. A play can only be seen and valued through the acting; it’s the only art that has to be judged through the medium of other personalities, and not by the creator. When I once saw a revival of one of Harry’s plays, that had not the advantage of his personal supervision, I realised how completely true Mr. Jones’s remark was.

A Scottish Soldier.—It was during the war. I was walking up Regent Street, and there I saw him, fresh from France, hung round like a Christmas tree, obviously knowing nothing of London, and, being a Scot, far too proud to ask his way. I ventured to speak to him, for, as in the old days girls suffered from “scarlet” fever, during the war I suffered from “khaki” fever. “Do you want to get to a railway station?” I asked. “Aye; Paddington.” As it 106happened, I too was going to Paddington, and I said so. “I am going there myself; if you will come with me, I can tell you where to find the platform. We will get on the ’bus that comes along; I’ll show you the way.” He looked at me, not unkindly, but with the scorn of a true Scot for the simplicity of a Southerner who underrates the intelligence of the men from “over the Border”. “Ye wull, wull ye?” he said. “Aye—well—ye wull not. Ah’ve been warrrrned aboot lassies like you!” And he walked away with great dignity and self-possession.

Ellen Terry.—I have seen her, as you have seen her—and if by chance you have not done so, you have missed one of the things that might well be counted “pearls of great price”—on the stage, looking perfectly beautiful, with the beauty which did not owe its existence to wonderful features or glorious colouring, but to that elusive “something” that the limitations of the English language force me to describe as “magnetism”; but the most lovely picture I carry in my mental gallery is of her in her own house at Chelsea. A letter, signed by all the actresses of Great Britain, was to be sent to the Queen concerning a big charity matinée. It had been most carefully worded, and a most wonderful copy made. Mrs. Kendal had signed it, and I was deputed to take it to Ellen Terry for her signature. When I got to her house, she was ill in bed, neuralgia in her head, and I was shown into her bedroom. I don’t know if you could look beautiful with your head swathed in flannel, suffering tortures from neuralgia; I know 107I couldn’t; but Ellen Terry did. She looked rather as she did in The Merry Wives of Windsor. If you can imagine “Mistress Ford” sitting up in an old four-poster bed, still wearing her “wimple”, and looking sufficiently lovely to turn Ford’s head, and Falstaff’s head, and everybody else’s head a dozen times—that was Ellen Terry as I saw her then. I gave her the letter, this carefully made “fair copy”, for her to sign. She read the letter, slowly, pen in hand. Some phrase failed to please her, and saying “No, I don’t think that will do”, she took her pen, scored through some words, and substituted others, handing the letter back to me, with “I think that is better, don’t you?” Have you seen her writing? It is rather large, very black, very distinct, and very pretty; I did not dare to say that no letter could be given to the Queen with corrections—a Queen had made them, and it was not for me to remark on what she did. I said I was sure it was an improvement, and took my precious letter away for other signatures. What happened to the letter eventually, whether another copy was made or not—that has all vanished from my mind; but the picture of lovely “Mistress Ford” remains.

A ’Bus Driver.—In the old days I used to walk from the Strand to Piccadilly and catch my ’bus there. It saved a penny. One old ’bus driver—there were horse ’buses then, of course—used to wait for me. I used to climb on to the top of the ’bus, and he used to talk to me, and take an enormous interest in “how I was getting on”. Years afterwards I was at Paddington, and as I came out of the station I saw, seated 108on the box of a cab, my old friend of the ’bus. He told me he had “got on”, and had bought a cab, a four-wheeler; that he had never “lost sight of me”; and that he still thought of me, and always should think of me, as “his Miss Moore”. Bless his red face! I wonder what he is driving now. Taxis and motor ’buses may be very good things in their way, but they lost us the “real” ’bus driver and the “real” cab driver.

A “Tommy” from the Second London General Hospital.—I was playing “Eliza” at the Brixton Theatre, and on the Saturday the manager, the late Newman Maurice, asked a party of wounded boys from the London General Hospital to come, as our guests, to the matinée. I, in my turn, asked if they would come round to my dressing-room, at the end of the play, for tea and cigarettes; they came, and in a terrific state of excitement, too. All talking at once, they tried to tell me the reason, and after some time I began to understand. One of their number had been “shell-shocked”, and so badly that he had lost his speech; he had been watching the play that afternoon and suddenly began to laugh, and, a second later, to the delight Of his companions, to speak! I have never seen such congratulations, such hand-shakings, such genuine delight, as was expressed by those boys over their comrade’s recovery. One of the boys that afternoon was a mass of bandages; you could not see anything of his face and head but two bright eyes, so badly had he been wounded. When I went to Canada, two years ago, this man was waiting 109for me at the hotel at Vancouver. He was no longer wrapped in bandages, but he had been so certain that I should not know him again that he had brought photographs of himself, taken while still in hospital, “complete with bandages”, to prove his identity! As a matter of fact—how or why, I cannot say—I did remember him at once.

George Bernard Shaw.—I once rehearsed for a play of his at the Haymarket Theatre. I remember he used to sit at rehearsals with his back to the footlights, tilting his chair so far on its hind legs that it was only by the intervention of heaven that he did not fall into the orchestra. There he sat, always wearing kid gloves, firing off short, terse comments on the acting, and rousing everybody’s ire to such an extent that the fat was in the fire, and finally the production was abandoned, after five weeks’ rehearsal! It was produced later, and was a very great success, Henry Ainley playing the lead. When Bernard Shaw and Granville Barker went into management at the Court Theatre, Harry and I met Shaw one day, and Harry asked how the season “had gone”. “Well,” said Bernard Shaw, “I’ve lost £7000, and Barker’s lost his other shirt.”

Mrs. Kendal.—She came to a reception the other day at Sir Ernest and Lady Wilde’s, to which I had taken my little daughter, Jill. “Look, Jill,” I said, as she entered the room, “that is Mrs. Kendal.” She looked, and her comment is valuable, as showing the impression which “The Old General” made on the “new recruit”: “How perfectly beautiful she 110looks.” I lunched with her, not long ago, at her house in Portland Place, and I remarked how charming her maids looked. She nodded. “When anyone is coming to see me, I always say to my servants, ‘A clean cap, a clean apron, look as nice as you can; it is a compliment we owe to the visitors who honour this house’.” We sat talking of many things, and Mrs. Kendal said reflectively: “Think of all the things we have missed, people like you and me, through leading—er—shall we say, ‘well-conducted lives’! And, make no mistake, we have missed them!” What an unexpected comment on life from Mrs. Kendal! and yet, I suppose, true enough. I suppose, as “Eliza” says, one “can be too safe”, and perhaps it might be, at all events, an experience to “be in danger for once”.

Ella Shields.—I met her again in Canada. She had come from the States, where, in common with many other artists who are assured successes in England, she had not had the kindest reception. Canada, on the other hand, delighted in her work, and gave her a wonderful ovation wherever she went. One day we went out walking together, and she gave me the best lesson in “walking” I have ever had. I have never seen anyone who moved so well, so easily, and so gracefully. I told her that I wished I could walk with her every day, to really learn “how she did it”.

Arthur Bourchier.—When both Harry and I were playing in Pilkerton’s Peerage, Arthur Bourchier suddenly made a rule that no one was to leave their dressing-room until called by the call-boy, immediately 111before their entrance on to the stage. One night the call-boy forgot, and Harry was not called, as he should have been. Bourchier came off, and there was a bad “wait”. He turned to me and whispered, in an agonised voice, “Go on and say something”, which I declined to do. At that moment Harry rushed on to the stage, and, as he tore past Bourchier, very, very angry at missing his “cue”, shook his fist in Bourchier’s face, saying fiercely “Damn you!” After his scene he came off, still very angry, and went up to Bourchier. The storm burst. “There you are!” Harry said; “you see the result of your damned, idiotic rules——”, and much more in the same strain. Bourchier, in a soothing voice, said: “It’s all right, it’s all right, Harry—I’ve sacked the call-boy!”

The German Production of “Old Heidelberg.”—Before George Alexander produced this play, it was done at the old Novelty Theatre by a German company, under the direction of Herr Andresson and Herr Berhens. Alexander asked me to go and see it, with Mrs. Alexander, which we did. I have rarely seen such a badly “dressed” play. The one real attempt to show the “glory” of the reigning house of “Sachsen-Karlsburg” was to make the footmen wear red plush breeches. The “State apartments” were tastefully furnished in the very best period of “Tottenham Court Road” mid-Victorian furniture. After the performance was over, Herr Berhens came to see us in the box. I did not know quite what to say about the production, so 112I murmured something rather vague about the “back cloth looking very fine.” Herr Berhens bowed. “So it should do,” he said, “the production cost £25!”

Rudge Harding.—He is a “bird enthusiast”, and will sit and watch them all day long, and half the night too, if they didn’t get tired and go to roost. Rudge Harding was coming to stay with us at “Apple Porch”—our house in the country, near Maidenhead. Harry met him at the station, saying breathlessly, “Thank God you’ve come! We have a bottle-throated windjar in the garden; I was so afraid it might get away before you saw it!” Harding said he had never heard of the bird (neither, for that matter, had anyone else, for Harry had evolved it on his way to the station). Needless to say, on arriving at “Apple Porch”, the “bottle-throated windjar” could not be located, but Harry had “recollected” many quaint and curious habits of the bird. He possessed a large three-volume edition of a book on birds—without an index—and for three days Rudge Harding searched that book for the valuable additional information on the bird which Harry swore it must contain. He might have gone on looking for the rest of his visit, if Harry had not tired of the game and told him the awful truth!

Morley Horder.—He is now a very, very successful architect, and is, I believe, doing much of the planning for the re-building of North London. He designed “Apple Porch” for us, and when it was in process of being built we drove over one day with 113him to see it. We had then a very early type of car, a Clement Talbot, with a tonneau which was really built to hold two, but on this occasion held three—and very uncomfortable it was—Morley Horder, Phillip Cunningham, and I. Horder, a very quiet, rather retiring man, with dark eyes and very straight black hair, said not a word the whole journey. Cunningham chatted away, full of vitality and good humour. When we finally reached “Apple Porch”, Cunningham got out and turned to Morley Horder. “Now then,” he said, “jump out, Chatterbox!”

Eric Lewis.—There is no need to speak of his work, for everyone knows it, and appreciates the finish and thought which it conveys. He played “Montague Jordon” in Eliza for us, for a long time, and has been the “only Monty” who ever really fulfilled the author’s idea. Others have been funny, clever, amusing, eccentric, and even rather pathetic; Eric Lewis was all that, and much more. He is, and always has been, one of the kindest of friends, as time has made him one of the oldest.

Fred Grove.—Another of the “ideals” of the evergreen play, Eliza. He has played “Uncle Alexander” a thousand times and more, each time with the same care and attention to detail. He has evolved a “bit of business” with a piece of string, which he places carefully on the stage before the curtain goes up; never a week has passed, when he has been playing the part, but some careful person has picked up that piece of string and taken it away, under the impression that they were making the stage 114“tidy”. What a wonderful memory Fred Grove has, too! Ask him for any information about stage matters—any date, any cast—and the facts are at his finger-tips at once. He has made a very large collection of books on the stage, and among them a copy of the poems written by Adah Isaacs Menken, the “first female Mazeppa”, who married the famous Benicia Boy, a great prize-fighter of his day. The poems were considered so beautiful that some of them were attributed to Swinburne, who declared he had nothing to do with them beyond giving them his deep admiration. Fred Grove is one of the people who never forget my birthday; Sydney Paxton is another.

Clemence Dane.—My sister Ada knew her first, and it was at her suggestion that I went down to see “Diana Courtis” (the name she used for the stage) play at Hastings. We were about to produce Sandy and His Eliza, the title of which was changed later to Eliza Comes to Stay. I decided she was exactly the type I wanted to play “Vera Lawrence”, the actress, and engaged her at once. It was not until she began to write that she changed her name from “Diana Courtis” to “Clemence Dane”. I remember we were doing a flying matinée, to Southend, and I took Jill, then a very tiny girl, with me. All the way there she sat on “Diana Courtis’s” knee and listened to wonderful stories, Kipling’s Just So Stories. When they came to an end, Jill drew a deep breath and said, “What wouldn’t I give to be able to tell stories like that!” “Yes,” responded 115the teller of the stories, “and what wouldn’t I give to be able to write them!” She designed and drew our poster, which we still use, for Eliza—Cupid standing outside the green-door, waiting to enter. I have a wonderful book, which “Clemence Dane” made for me; all the characters in Eliza, everyone mentioned, whether they appear or not, are drawn as she imagined them. To be naturally as versatile as this—actress, artist, and writer—seems to me a dangerous gift from the gods, and one which needs strength of character to resist the temptation to do many things “too easily” and accomplish nothing great. Clemence Dane has three books, and what I shall always regard as a great poem in blank verse, to prove that she has resisted the temptation.

CHAPTER IX PERSONALITIES

The Pageantry of Great People! If I could only make that pageant live for you as it does for me! I know it is impossible; it needs greater skill than mine to make the men and women live on paper. It is only possible for me to recall some small incident which seems typical of the individual. In itself, that may be a poor way of drawing mental pictures; but it is the only way I can attempt with the smallest hope of success. Great people, whether great in art, wit, or greatness of heart, demand great skill to depict them, so, having excused myself for my inevitable shortcomings, I will set to work. If I fail utterly, I ask you to remember it is due to lack of skill, and not lack of appreciation. If I seem to recall these “big” people chiefly through incidents that seem humorous, it is because I like to remember the things which have made me, and others with me, laugh. If the stories do not appear very laughable, then you must make allowances again, and believe that they “were funny at the time”, perhaps because when they happened I was young. We all 117were young, and the world was a place where we laughed easily—because we were happy.

Sir Herbert Tree.—I begin my Pageant with Herbert Tree because he was a great figure; he stood for a very definite “something”. You might like or dislike him, but you had to admit he was a personality. He certainly posed, he undoubtedly postured; but how much was natural and how much assumed, I should not like to attempt to decide. There was something wonderfully childlike about him; he would suddenly propound most extraordinary ideas in the middle of a rehearsal—ideas which we knew, and for all I know Tree knew too, were utterly impossible. I remember during the rehearsals of Carnac Sahib, when we were rehearsing the scene in the Nabob’s palace, Tree suddenly struck an attitude in the middle of the stage and called for Wigley (who, by the way, he always addressed as “Wiggerley”), who was “on the list” as either stage manager or assistant stage manager, but whose real work was to listen to Tree and to prompt him when necessary—which was very often. Tree called “Wiggerley”, and “Wiggerley” duly came. “I’ve got an idea,” said Tree. “Wiggerley” expressed delight and pleasure, and waited expectant. “Those windows” (pointing to the open windows of the “palace”); “we’ll have a pair of large, flopping vultures fly in through those windows. Good, I think; very good.” The faithful “Wiggerley” agreed that the idea was brilliant, and stated that “it should be seen to at once”. Tree 118was perfectly satisfied. The vultures never appeared, and I have not the slightest belief that “Wiggerley” ever looked for any, or indeed ever had the smallest intention of doing so.

Tree was very fond of Harry, and used often to ask him to go back to supper, after the theatre, when Tree lived in Sloane Street. One evening he asked him to “come back to supper”, and Harry, for some reason, wanted to come straight home; probably he had a very nice supper of his own waiting. Tree persisted. “Oh, come back with me; there’s stewed mutton; you know you like stewed mutton”, and finally Harry gave way. They drove to Sloane Street, and walked into the dining-room. There was on the table a large lace cloth, and—a bunch of violets! That was all. Tree went up to the table, lifted the violets and smelt them, an expression of heavenly rapture, as of one who hears the songs of angels, on his face. He held them out to Harry (who smelt them), saying “Aren’t they wonderful?”, then, taking his hand and leading him to the door, he added “Good-night, good-night.” Harry found himself in the street, Tree presumably having gone back either to eat or smell the violets in lieu of supper.

When he produced Much Ado, playing “Benedick”, he introduced a scene between “Dogberry” and “Verges”, and also some extraordinary business when Sir Herbert sat under a tree and had oranges dropped on him from above. Harry and I went to the first night, and he resented each “introduction” more fiercely than the last. He sank lower and lower in his stall, plunged in gloom, and praying that Tree 119would not send for him at the end of the play and ask “what he thought of it all”. However, Tree did, and we found ourselves in the “Royal Room”, which was packed with people, Tree holding a reception. I begged Harry to be tactful, and Harry had made up his mind not to give Tree the opportunity of speaking to him at all, if it could be avoided. Tree saw him and came towards us; Harry backed away round the room, Tree following. Round they went, until Harry was caught in the corner by the stair. Tree put the fateful question, “What do you think of it?” By this time Harry’s “tact” had taken wings, and he answered frankly, if rather harshly, “Perfectly dreadful!” I fancy Tree must have thought the world had fallen round him; he couldn’t believe he was “hearing right”. He persisted, “But my scene under the tree?” Back came Harry’s answer, “Awful!” “And the scene between Dogberry and Verges?” Again, “Perfectly appalling!” Tree stared at him, then there was a long pause. At last Tree spoke: “Yes, perhaps you’re right.”

Here is a picture of Tree at a dress rehearsal of, I think, Nero. Tree, attired in a flowing gold robe, moving about the stage, with what was apparently a crown of dahlias on his head. The crown was rather too big, and, in the excitement of some discussion about a “lighting effect”, it had slipped down over one eye, giving Tree a dissipated appearance, not altogether in keeping with his regal character. Lady Tree (I don’t think she was “Lady” Tree then) called from the stall: “Herbert, may I say one 120word?” Tree turned and struck an “Aubrey Beardsley” attitude; with great dignity he replied, “No, you may not”, and turned again to his discussion.

A wonderful mixture of innocence and guile, of affectations and genuine kindness, of ignorance and knowledge, of limitations and possibilities, that was Herbert Tree as I read him. But a great artist, a great producer, and a very great figure.

William Terriss.—“Breezy Bill Terriss”, the hero of the Adelphi dramas. Handsome, lovable, with a tremendous breadth of style in his acting that we see too seldom in these days of “restraint”. His “Henry VIII.” to Irving’s “Wolsey” was a magnificent piece of acting. There is a story told of him, when Irving was rehearsing a play in which there was a duel—The Corsican Brothers, I think. At the dress rehearsal (“with lights” to represent the moon, which lit the fight), Irving called to “the man in the moon”: “Keep it on me, on me!” Terriss dropped his sword: “Let the moon shine on me a little,” he begged; “Nature is at least impartial.” Everyone knows of his tragic death, and his funeral was a proof of the affection in which he was held—it was practically a “Royal” funeral. When, a few months ago, Marie Lloyd was buried, the crowds, the marks of affection, the very real and very deep regret shown everywhere, reminded me of another funeral—that of “Breezy Bill Terriss”.

Marie Loftus.—One of the names which recall the time when there were still “giants” on the 121music hall stage. I don’t mean to imply that Variety does not still possess great artists, but there seems to be no longer that “personal” feeling, the affection, admiration—I might almost say adoration—which was given to the “giants”; and Marie Loftus was “of them”. I saw her years ago at the Tivoli, when she came on with a “baby” in her arms, playing a “comic-melodrama”. I remember she “threw snow over herself”, and finally committed suicide by allowing a small toy train to run over her. Perhaps it does not sound amusing, perhaps we have all grown too sophisticated; if so, we are losing something—and something very well worth keeping. The Second time I saw Marie Loftus was at the Chelsea Palace, about two years ago. I saw her do a “Man and Woman” act, one half of her dressed as a woman, the other half as a man. These “two” people fought together—it was a masterpiece. I shall never forget the unstinted praise which it called forth from Harry, who was with me. I saw her not long ago, not on the stage; she was then looking forward to an operation on her eyes, which she hoped would make it possible for her to “work” again. Whether she does so or not, I shall always look back on those two evenings—one at the Tivoli, the other many years later at Chelsea—as occasions when I saw a very brilliant artist at work.

Sir Henry Irving.—I saw him first when I stayed with Florrie Toole, when I first went on the stage, and Irving came to see her father. I do not remember anything he said or anything he did, but I do 122remember the impression which the appearance of the two men (and, after all, it was more truly an indication of their character than it is of most people) made upon me. Toole, short and eminently cheerful—you could not imagine him anything but what he was, a natural comedian, with all a comedian’s tricks of speech; and Irving, tall, thin, with something of the monastic appearance, which stood him in such good stead in “Becket”, dignified, and to all but his friends rather aloof. And the one attracted the other so that they were unchangeable friends. I have heard that Irving could be very bitter, very cruelly sarcastic: I know he could be the most truly courteous gentleman who ever stepped, and I will give an instance which was one of the finest illustrations of “fine manners” that I ever witnessed. A most wonderful luncheon was given at the Savoy to Mr. Joe Knight, a critic, on his retirement. The whole of the theatrical profession was there, and Irving was in the chair. Harry and I were present. He was rather unhappy at the time, because he had been “pilled” for the Garrick Club; he felt it very much—much more then than he would have done a few years later. He was quite young then, and took it rather to heart. After the lunch we went up to speak to Sir Henry, who, as he shook hands with Harry, said in a tone half humorous, half sardonic, and wholly kindly, “I understand you have been honoured by the Garrick Club as I have been”; adding, still more kindly, “only to me it happened twice.” If anything could have salved the smart in Harry’s mind it was to know he shared the treatment which had 123been given to Sir Henry Irving; that is why I cite this incident as an example of real courtesy.

H. B. Irving.—Often so detached that his very detachment was mistaken for rudeness or unkindness; with mannerisms which, to those who did not know him, almost blotted out the very genuine goodness of heart which lay underneath them. Yet again with a queer lack of knowledge of “who people were” and what went on around him, as the following story will show. This was told me by a man who knew him well and witnessed the incident. “Harry” Irving was playing Waterloo on the variety stage, and on the same “bill”, on this particular week, were George Chirgwin (the White-Eyed Kaffir) and Marie Lloyd. One evening there was a knock at the door of Irving’s dressing-room, and a dresser told him “Miss Lloyd would like to speak to you in her dressing-room, please, sir!” “H. B.” turned to James Lindsay, who was in the room, and asked blandly, “Who is Miss Lloyd, Jimmy? Ought I to answer the summons? I don’t know her, do I?” Jimmy explained that Miss Lloyd was certainly accustomed to people coming when she sent for them, and that “anyway she was distinctly a lady to meet, if the opportunity arose”. Irving went, and was away for over half an hour; when he returned he sat down and said earnestly, “You were quite right. She is distinctly a lady to know. Most amusing. I must meet her again. Her humour is worth hearing, perhaps a little—er—but still most amusing.” “But why did she want you at all?” Jimmy asked. 124“Ah!” said Irving, “that is the really amusing thing! She didn’t want me! She really wanted a man called George Chirgwin, who is apparently a friend of hers. The dresser mixed the names, poor fool.” The sequel is from Marie Lloyd herself. Someone asked her about the incident. “I remember,” she said, “I remember it quite well. I sent for Chirgwin, to have a chat, and in walks this other fellow. I didn’t know who he was, and he didn’t say who he was; and I’m certain he didn’t know me. He sat down and chatted; at least, I chatted; he seemed quite happy, so I went on, and presently he wandered out again. He seemed a nice, quiet fellow.” Try and read under all that the simplicity of two great artists, and you will realise that it is not only an amusing incident, but a light on the character of both.

Lawrence Irving.—I think—no, I am sure—that he would, had he lived, have been a very great actor; his performance in Typhoon was one of the finest things I have ever seen. He was a man full of enthusiasms. I can remember him talking to Harry of Tolstoi, for whom he had a great admiration, and being full of excitement about his work. Once he was at our house, and Harry and he were arguing about some writer as if the fate of the whole world depended upon the decision they came to. Harry offered Lawrence a cigar, and had at once poured upon his head a torrent of reasoned invective against “smoking” in general and cigars in particular. It was “a disgusting and filthy habit”, men who smoked were “turning themselves into chimneys”, and so on. The next morning Harry was going by the Underground to town, and on the opposite platform saw Lawrence Irving smoking a perfectly enormous cigar. Harry, delighted, called out, “What about ‘filthy habits’ and ‘chimney pots’ now!” in great glee. Lawrence took the cigar from his lips and looked at it seriously, as if he wondered how it got there at all. Then he climbed down from the platform, over the rails to the other side, where Harry stood, simply to give him an explanation, which, he said, he “felt was due”. He was smoking “to see how it tasted”!

Photograph by Bassano, London, W. To face p. 124

Harry as Lord Leadenhall

“The Rocket”

125W. S. Gilbert.—He was Jill’s God-father, and I have a photograph of him, which he signed “To Eva, the mother of my (God) child.” And that was typical of Gilbert; he could make jokes from early morning to set of sun—and did. Once, many years ago, when Decima was playing at the Savoy, I had hurt my knee, and for some reason she told Gilbert. I think it was because she wanted to be excused a rehearsal so that she might come back to be with me “when the doctor came”. Gilbert insisted that I should be taken to his own doctor, Walton Hood, and that at once. So, without waiting for my own doctor to arrive, off we went to Walton Hood. He looked at my knee, tugged at it, something clicked, and he said “Walk home”, which I did, putting my foot to the ground for the first time for a month. I am sure it is due to W. S. Gilbert that I am not now a cripple.

126Sir Charles Hawtrey.—Once upon a time (which is the very best way of beginning a story) Charles Hawtrey owed Harry some money—a question of royalties, as far as I remember. Harry was “hard up”—in those days we were all often “hard up”, and didn’t mind owning it, though I don’t suppose we really liked it any better then than we do now—so away went “H. V.” to see Charles Hawtrey at the Haymarket. He was shown into his room, and the question was discussed. Mr. Hawtrey decided that “of course you must have it at once”. He took Harry into an adjoining office, where upon a table were numbers of piles of money, all with a small label on the top of the pile, each label bearing a name. Hawtrey’s hand hovered above the piles of money, and alighted on one. “You shall have this one,” he said, and prepared to hand it over to Harry, when a voice called from an inner office, “You can’t take that one, sir; that belongs to So-and-so.” Again the actor-manager’s hand went wandering over the table, and he had just announced “You shall have this one”, when the same voice called out the same warning. This went on for several minutes, until at last Hawtrey turned to Harry. “They all seem to belong to somebody,” he said; “but never mind, I’ll go out now and borrow it for you!” This story might be called “A New Way to Pay Old Debts.”

Anthony Hope.—I might call him Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, but I knew him first (and shall always think of him) as Anthony Hope. I have 127met a good many brilliant authors, but very few who were as brilliant “out of their books” as in them. Anthony Hope is the exception. He used to give the most delightful supper parties at his flat in Savoy Mansions, supper parties where everyone seemed to shine with the brilliance inspired by their host. He—well, he talked as he wrote—polished, clever witticisms. Speaking of him reminds me of a holiday Harry and I spent at Hazleborough one summer, years ago. We were staying at a bungalow there, and soon after we arrived a note was delivered to Harry. It was from “The Mayor of Hazleborough”, and stated that he had heard of the arrival of the “well-known dramatist, Mr. H. V. Esmond”, and begged that the said “Mr. H. V. Esmond” would open the local bazaar, which was to be held in a few days’ time. I thought Harry ought to say “Yes”; Harry was equally certain that he should say “No”, and added that he had brought no suitable clothes with him. A note was finally dispatched to the Royal Castle Hotel, from which “the Mayor” had written, to say that “Mr. Esmond regretted, etc.” Later we were sitting in the garden. I was still maintaining that it had been a mistake to refuse, and Harry equally certain that he had done the best thing in refusing, when three heads appeared over the fence and three voices chanted in unison, “Ever been had?”—Anthony Hope, May and Ben Webster, who had sent the letter, and were indeed, combined, “The Mayor of Hazleborough”.

128Mrs. Patrick Campbell.—Harry knew her much better than I did. They had been at the same theatre for a long time, in different plays, and he admired her tremendously. He used to say that one of the most beautiful pictures he had ever seen was one evening when he went home to her flat, somewhere in Victoria, with her husband, Patrick Campbell. It was very late, and she had gone to bed, but she got up and came into the dining-room in her nightdress. She curled herself up in a large armchair, wrapped a skin rug round her, and, with her hair falling loose on her shoulders, Harry said she was one of the most lovely things he had ever seen in his life. He even railed at Kipling, after this incident, for daring to describe any woman as “a rag, and a bone, and a hank of hair”. The meeting with Mrs. Campbell that I remember was this: A matinée was to be given, Royalty was to be present, and I was asked to approach Mrs. Campbell if she would consent to appear. She was then playing, I think, at the Haymarket. I went, and Harry went with me. We were shown into her dressing-room. For some reason, which neither he nor I could ever quite fathom, she did not wish to remember who he was. She repeated his name in a vague, rather bored voice: “Mr. Esmond? Esmond?”; then, as if struck with a sudden thought, “You write plays, don’t you?” Harry, entering into the spirit of it all, said very modestly that he “tried to do so”. More inspiration seemed to come to her: “Of course—yes! Sisters—you have had an enormous success with Sisters in America, haven’t you?” (I should say 129here that he never wrote a play called Sisters in his life.) He smiled and agreed: “Tremendous!” “It is so interesting to meet clever people—who write successful plays,” she added. The conversation went on along these lines for some time. When we left, she said “Good-bye” to me, and turned to Harry with “Good-night, Mr.—er—Esmond.” An extraordinary incident, possibly an extraordinary woman, but a very great actress.

Marie Lloyd.—I can give two “flashlights” of Marie Lloyd. One, when I saw her at the Tivoli, when she wore a striped satin bathing-costume, and carried a most diminutive towel; the other, when I saw her at the Palladium, and spent one of the most enjoyable thirty minutes of my life. Was she vulgar? I suppose so; but it was a “clean” vulgarity, which left no nasty taste behind it; it was a happy, healthy vulgarity, and when it was over you came home and remembered the artistry which was the essential quality of all she said and did. I met her at a charity concert I arranged at the Alhambra during the war; I know she came all the way from Sheffield to appear. We had an auction sale of butter, eggs, pheasants, and so forth. Poor Laurie de Freece was the auctioneer, and he was suffering from a very bad throat; his voice was dreadfully hoarse. He stuck bravely to his work, and when he got to the pheasants Marie Lloyd could bear it no longer. She put her head round the side of the “back cloth” and said, “Five pounds, me—Marie Lloyd. I can’t bear to hear you going on with that voice; it’s awful.” 130When Harry died, she said to a woman who knew both Marie Lloyd and me, “I did think of sending her a wire, and then I thought of writing a letter (Marie Lloyd, who never wrote letters if she could avoid doing so!), then somehow—I didn’t do either. Will you just say to Eva Moore that you’ve seen me, and say, ‘Marie’s very sorry’?” Already she is becoming almost a legendary figure; men and women will tell stories of Marie Lloyd long after the songs she sang are forgotten. Personally, to me she will always rank as one of the world’s great artists, and I like to remember that, when I was given the sympathy of so many loving men and women, Marie Lloyd too was “very sorry”.

CHAPTER X STORIES I REMEMBER

“When you know as much of life as I do, you will see a jest in everything.”—Bad Hats.

“Tell me a story”—that was what we used to ask, wasn’t it? And when the story was told it was of knights, and lovely ladies, and giants who were defeated in their wickedness by the prince, and the story ended—as all good stories should end—“and they lived happy ever after”.

As we grew older we still wanted stories, but, because we found life lacked a good deal of the laughter we had expected to find, we wanted stories to make us laugh. I am going to try and tell you “true stories that will make you laugh”. If they are new, so much the better; but if they are old—well, are you too old yourself to laugh again?

Frank Curzon objected, and very rightly, to ladies wearing large hats at matinées. He objected so strongly that everyone heard of the fight to the death between Frank Curzon and the matinée hat, “The Lady and the Law Case”. One day, at a meeting of West End managers, when arrangements were being made for some big matinée, Frank Curzon proposed 132something which Herbert Tree opposed. There was some argument on the matter, and at last Tree launched his final bolt: “My friend, Frank Curzon,” he said, “is evidently talking through his matinée hat.”

George Edwardes had a servant who stuttered very badly. He had been with Edwardes, “man and boy”, for many years, and at last attended his master’s funeral. He was telling the glories of the ceremony to someone, and said: “It was a l-l-lovely funeral! S-s-some b-boy sang a s-s-solo; he s-ang it b-b-beautifully; I expected any m-m-minute to see the G-guvenor sit up and say, ‘G-give him a c-c-contract!’”

George Edwardes was once interviewing a lady for the chorus at the Gaiety; he asked her, “Do you run straight?” “Yes, Mr. Edwardes,” was the reply, “but not very far, or very fast.”

He once gave a supper party at the old Waldorf Hotel, which at that time was literally overrun with mice. G. P. Huntly was present, and, among others, Mr. Blackman, one of George Edwardes’s managers. All dined well—and many not wisely. Presently G. P. Huntly saw a mouse on the curtain, and the dreadful fear assailed him that perhaps “it wasn’t really a mouse—not a real mouse, anyway”. He turned to Mr. Blackman and said, “Did you see that?” “See what?” asked the other. Huntly pointed to the curtain. “That mouse on the curtain.” By that time the mouse had moved, and 133Blackman replied in the negative. In a minute Huntly asked the same question again: “See that mouse?” Blackman (who by this time had seen it), to “rag” him, said “No.” Poor Huntly turned very white, rose from his seat, and said, “Ah!—Good-night!” and went home.

Alfred Lester and Mr. W. H. Berry—at one time, at least—did not “get on”. One morning Lester was going to interview Edwardes about something, and Edwardes, knowing about this “rift in the theatrical lute”, warned Blackman before Lester came, “Now, on no account mention Berry! Let’s have a nice, quiet, pleasant interview; keep Berry out of it,” and so on. When Alfred Lester came into the room, Edwardes stretched out his hand and said cordially, “Well, Berry, how are you, my boy? Sit down.”

When we were married, W. S. Gilbert gave us a silver tea-set, and later a day came when we pooled our worldly wealth and found we had eighteen shillings in the whole world—and Gilbert’s tea-set. We debated as to whether the tea-set should find a temporary home with “uncle”, but decided to wait as long as we could before taking this step. Harry heard that a tour was going out from the Gaiety, and thought he would try for the “Arthur Roberts” part on tour. (Could anything have been more absurd!) He learnt a song, and set out, calling at the Websters’ flat to practise the song again. He arrived at the Gaiety, full of hope and—the song; was told to begin, opened his mouth, and found he 134had forgotten every note; and so—Arthur Roberts lost a rival, and he came home. Soon afterwards George Alexander gave him a contract, and Gilbert’s tea-set was saved!

A well-known producer of sketches and revues, who is noted more for his energy than his education, was once rehearsing a company in which a number of young men, chiefly from the Whitechapel High Street, were enacting the parts of aristocrats at a garden party. One of them advanced to a young woman to “greet her”, which he did like this: Raising his hat, he exclaimed: “’Ello, H’Ethel!” A voice came from the stalls—the producer: “Good Lord! That isn’t the way that a h’earl talks. Let me show you.” He rushed up on to the stage and advanced to the young lady, raising his hat and holding his arm at an angle of 45 degrees. “Ello! H’Ethel!” he began; “what are you a-doin’ ’ere?”; then turning to the actor, he said, “There you are! that’s the way to do it!”

H. B. Irving was manager at the Savoy Theatre during the air raids. One evening, when the news of an air raid came through, he went to warn his leading lady. He walked straight into her dressing-room, and found the lady absolutely—well, she had reached the final stage of undressing. Irving, quite absent-minded as usual, never even saw how she was dressed. “Take cover!” he said, and walked out again.

During the war I sat on many Committees—we all did, for that matter. This particular one was concerned 135with arranging work for women, work which needed “pushing through” quickly, and the secretary was reading the suggested scheme. It read something as follows: “It is suggested that the women shall work in shifts, etc., etc.” A well-known Peeress, who was in the chair, leant forward. “Quite good,” she said, “quite good, but I should like some other word substituted for ‘shifts’; it really sounds—not quite nice, I think.”

Another Committee—this time for providing work for women who had been connected either with art, music, or the drama—all of which, I may say, became elastic terms. It was a large Committee—much too large—and it consisted of many very well-known and charitably inclined ladies. There were—but no, I had better not give you names! The secretary was reporting on the case of a woman who had just been admitted to the workrooms—an elderly, self-respecting, very good-looking woman, who had years before played—and played, I believe, very admirably—in “sketches”, but in the days when £3 was considered a very good salary. The report finished, the secretary waited for comments. From the end of the table came a voice—a very full, rich, deep voice—which belonged to a lady swathed in sables, and wearing pearls which would have kept a dozen women in comfort for a year.

“And you say this lady has been working for many years?” The secretary replied that she had—many years.

“And she was receiving a salary all the time?” 136The secretary again explained that “in those days salaries were very small”.

“And now she wants work in our workrooms?”. A pause, the speaker pulled her sables round her, the pearls rattled with her righteous indignation. “Another improvident actress!” she said, in the tone of one who has plumbed the enormity of human depravity to its very depths.

During the war I used sometimes to go to a munition factory and, during the dinner-hour, to entertain the “boys and girls”. Such nice “boys and girls”, too, who apparently liked me as much as I liked them. I heard a story there about their “works motto”, which struck me as rather amusing. The owner of the works chose it—“Play for the side”—and had it put up in the canteen. When the workers were assembled for dinner, he took the opportunity to say a few words on the subject of the motto. “Play for the side,” he began, when a voice from the back of the canteen was heard: “That’s all right, Guv’nor, but whose side—ours or yours?”

Here is a story of Martin Harvey. He was playing The Breed of the Treshams in the provinces, and had in the company an actor who played a very small part, and who loved to talk in what is known as “rhyming slang”. It is a stupid kind of slang which designates “whisky” as “gay and frisky”, “gloves” as “turtle doves”. Martin Harvey was going on to the stage one evening, and met this actor rushing back to his dressing-room. Knowing that he should have been on the stage when the curtain 137went up, Harvey asked “Where are you going?” “It’s all right,” replied the man, “I’m just going back to my dressing-room for a second; I’ve forgotten my turtle doves.” “Well, be quick about it,” Harvey told him; “and please remember in future I don’t like you to keep birds in the dressing-rooms!”

After the war, a well-known “play-going” society gave a dinner to a representative section of the legitimate and variety stages who had done work for the soldiers in the war. Mr. George Robey was to respond for Variety. I sat opposite to him, with Mr. Harry Tate on my left, and almost opposite me, quite close to George Robey, sat Marie Lloyd. She was wonderfully dressed, with a marvellous ermine cloak; and it was quite evident, from the moment she arrived (which was very late), that she was in a very bad temper. (As a matter of fact, I heard later that she was upset at the death of an old friend, Mr. Dick Burge.) Mr. Robey got up to “respond for Variety”, and really I must admit that his speech was very much on the lines of “I have been very glad—er—er—that is, we have been very glad”, and so on. I watched Marie Lloyd’s face; it got more and more “black” as his speech went on. When he finished, she rose and said in that attractive, rather hoarse voice—which was at that moment a remarkably cross voice too—“I’m Marie Lloyd; I’ve done my bit for the “boys”; I haven’t had my photo in the papers for years; and what I want to know is—touching this speech we have just listened to—what’s 138Marie Lloyd and poor old Ellen Terry done?” She leant across to Harry Tate, said “Come on, Harry”, and walked from the room. Everyone gasped. It was all over in a few seconds, but it left its mark on the dinner.

When Brookfield took a company to America he lost a good deal of money over the venture. On his return he walked into the Green Room Club, and met Grossmith (“Old G. G.”), and began to tell him of his losses. “Can’t understand it,” said G. G., “you people take thousands of pounds of scenery, trainloads of artists, spend money like water, and come back and say ‘It hasn’t paid!’ Look at me: I take nothing to America with me but a dress suit, come back having made ten thousand pounds!” “Very likely,” said Brookfield; “remember everyone doesn’t look as damned funny in a dress suit as you do!”

Lionel Monckton was in the Green Room Club one evening, having supper. Mr. Thomas Weiglin, a well-developed gentleman, walked in, faultlessly attired in full evening dress; everyone applauded his entrance. Mr. Monckton looked up, and said in a voice of protest, “I have been coming to the club in evening dress for forty years, and no one has ever done that to me.”

Winifred Emery told me this. She and Cyril Maude were on their honeymoon. She was lying in bed, wearing a most engaging nightdress, and she thought that she was looking very nice. He stood 139at the end of the bed, watching her, and presently walked to her, took a small piece of the nightdress in his fingers, saying as he did so, “Don’t you think it would be better if it was made of stronger calico?”

Herbert Tree met Fred Terry in the Garrick Club one day, and said to him: “My new production—er—what do you think about my having your beautiful daughter, Phyllis, to play the leading lady’s part?”

Fred Terry said he thought it would be very admirable for all concerned, and that he approved entirely.

“What handsome remuneration should I have to offer her?” Tree asked. Mr. Terry named a sum, which he thought “about right”.

“What;” said Tree; “what!” Then came a long pause, and at last Tree said in a dreamy voice, “Do you know I can get Marie Lloyd for that?”

I was once playing a sketch at a hall in the provinces, where the population apparently come to the performance so that they may read their evening papers to the accompaniment of music. At the end of the week, the manager asked me how “I liked the audience”, and I told him. “You’re quite right,” he replied, “but I’ve got a turn coming next week that they will appreciate, that they will understand.” I asked what the turn was. “Roscoe’s Performing Pigs,” he told me.

A certain actor tells a story about himself when he first went on the stage. He had just sold out of the Army, and felt he was rather conferring a favour 140upon Henry Irving by joining his company at the Lyceum. They were rehearsing Coriolanus, and someone was wanted to “walk on” as a messenger. Irving looked round, and his eye lit upon our friend, who was wearing—as smart young men did in those days—a large white fluffy tie. “Here you, young man in the white tie,” he said. The product of the Army took not the slightest notice. “Here you,” Irving repeated; “come here, I want you.” Our friend, with offended dignity on every line of his face, advanced and asked, “Did you want me?” “Yes,” said Irving, “I did.” “Then,” said the budding Thespian, “my name is Gordon!” “Oh, is it?” Irving said, affably. “Mine is Irving; how are you?” Then, changing his tone, “Now I want you to come on here, carrying,” etc., etc.

When Barrie’s Twelve Pound Look was at the Coliseum, two “comedy sketch artists” were in the stalls. The play went very well—very well indeed. One of the comedians turned to the other: “Who wrote this?” “Fellow called ‘Barrie’,” was the reply. “Ah!” said the first, “he writes our next; he’s good!”

While rehearsing a scene in a film production, the producer described to the two artistes the Eastern atmosphere he wanted—the warmth, the amorous love conveyed in the love scenes. He read the scene, with all the usual Eastern language, such as “Rose of Persia”, “O, Light of My Desire”, “Look at me with your lovely eyes”, and other such remarks which might convey the “kind of acting” which he 141was trying to get. The actor listened to what the producer said in silence, then remarked cheerfully, “Yes, yes, I know—‘Shrimps for Tea’.”

Decima’s son was very young when the war broke out. He was a “Snotty” at Dartmouth, and saw a great deal of active service. After the Battle of Jutland he wrote home to us a short description of the fight, saying briefly that he had seen this or that ship sunk, adding: “And now to turn to something really serious; I owe my laundry thirty shillings, and until the bill is paid the blighter refuses to let me have my shirts. Could you loan me a couple of quid?”

When Flames of Passion, the film in which I appeared, was showing at the Oxford, a woman I knew went to see it, and was sitting in the gallery. Next to her was a flower-woman—one of the real old type, complete with shawl and small sailor hat. After a time they began to talk to each other. This is the conversation as it was reported to me later:

“It’s a good picture, dearie, ain’t it?” asked the “flower-girl”. “Very good.”

“I think Eva Moore’s good, don’t you?” “Very good.”

“She’s lorst ’er ’usband lately, pore thing; very ’ard for ’er. Though, mind yer, it’s a pleasant change, in one way: most of these ’ere actresses only mislay theirs.”

Which reminds me of another story. Some time after Harry died, a man I knew slightly called to see me. He came in, and began to say how grieved he 142was to hear of Harry’s death, and how much he sympathised with me in my loss. This went on for some time, then he said: “But the real thing I came to ask was—do you know of a good ‘jobbing’ gardener?”

An author once engaged an actor for a part, simply on account of his very ugly face and his exceeding bad complexion. At the dress rehearsal the author met the actor at the side of the stage, “made up”. “Who are you?” he asked. The actor gave his name. “Go and wash all the make-up off at once,” said the author; “I only engaged you for your ugly face.”

At Henley Regatta, years ago, Jack (about six years old, very fair and attractive) was watching the races from a balcony over Hobbs’ boathouse, which belonged to kind friends of ours, Mr. and Mrs. Pidgeon, who yearly invited us to see the wonderful view. After watching several races, Jack turned to our hostess and said, “Please, does the steamer never win?”

It was from their balcony, too, that I saw Mr. Graham White, when he flew right down the racecourse in his aeroplane, dipping and touching the water like a swallow, to the alarm of the crowds in their boats on either side of the course—a never-to-be-forgotten sight.

Photograph by Alfred Ellis, London, W. To face p. 142

Harry as Major-General Sir R. Chichele

“The Princess and the Butterfly”

CHAPTER XI ROUND AND ABOUT

“We’ve been to a good many places in the last few months, but we’ve had a very pleasant time.”

When we first went out to America together, Harry and I, in 1914, it was my first visit, though not his; he had been over before to produce several of his own plays. We took with us The Dear Fool, which was played in this country in 1914, and Eliza Comes to Stay. Personally, I did not enjoy the visit very much; and, to be quite candid, it was not the success we could have wished. The critics were not too kind, and, though American theatrical criticism may have changed since then, I found their articles such an extraordinary mixture of journalese, slang, and poker terms as to be almost unintelligible—at all events to my British intelligence. These articles may have been very amusing; perhaps if I could have read them “on this side”, I might have found them so, but in New York I admit the kind of writing—of which I give an example here—merely irritated me, as I imagine it must have irritated many other English artists: “After the first act there was a universal call for the water-boy, yet we all stayed; nobody raised the ante, 144so we all cheerfully drew cards for the second act. Alas, when it was too late, we discovered it was a bum deck. I don’t believe there was anything higher than a seven spot.” That may be very clever. I can almost believe it is very witty; but I still hold that it is not “criticism”.

I give one more example, and also the comment of another American newspaper upon the extract from the first journal. The extract concerns The Dear Fool, and is as follows:—“A pretty severe strain on one’s critical hospitality. Betty at best a cackling marionette made of sawdust. It is but a meaningless jumble of stock phrases and stock situations. Anything more feeble it would be hard to imagine. The ‘Dear Fool’ is one of the worst.” Now mark the pæan of thanksgiving which this criticism calls forth from another New York journal:—“Not only is this (referring to the extract given above) an accurate and intelligent account of last night’s play—healthy fearlessness which rarely gets into the New York criticisms. Let us have more of this honest and straightforward writing about the current drama.”

That is only the worst—may I say “the worst”, not only from “our” point of view, but also from the point of view of “criticism”—which I still maintain it was not, in any sense of the word. Some weeks ago I read a very admirable series of essays by Mr. Agate, and in writing of critics he says (and he is one of them) that every critic should be a “Jim Hawkins”, looking for treasure. Too often, I can believe, it is a weary search; but surely in every play 145there is something which calls for approbation, and which may point to possibilities in the author’s work. To find that streak of gold, to incite the author to follow it, and to perhaps point out in what manner he may best do so, coupled with a fair review of his play as a whole, giving faults as they appear and merits where they can be found—that seems to me the justification of criticism.

Another critic wrote with perhaps a less racy pen, but with more understanding:—“There was a literary quality in the writing and a neatness in the construction which were inviting, and there was a mellowness to the story of its middle-aged lovers which had real appeal. Over it all was the unmistakable atmosphere of English life. All these qualities and the fact that the play was extremely well acted, counted strongly in its favour.”

Alan Dale, the critic who was regarded as the critic of America, under whose pen actors and managers quaked in their shoes, wrote:—“It has the gentle, reluctant English atmosphere of other plays by this actor-author, and it is interesting by reason of its lines and its characterisation. After all the ‘shockers’ of to-day, with their red and lurid types, after the insensate struggle for garish effects and horrors, this play gives us a whiff of repose; it is unstagy, its characters are real human beings who talk like human beings; if they haven’t anything startling to say from the theatrical point of view, they are at least human.”

What a good thing it is we don’t all see things through one pair of glasses!

146But I am wandering from my story of the visit to America. I look back on it all now, and remember the series of untoward events and mishaps which occurred before our journey began. The week before we left England, a cable came from “C. F.” (Charles Frohman) to say that he had altered the theatre which was to be the scene of our production. Our theatre had been let to a big film company, and we were to be sent to the Garrick. A wretched little place it was, too; as the stage manager there said frankly: “Only fit for a garage.” As a matter of fact, I believe it now is one. Even before we left Liverpool a wave of depression came over me, when our ship met with an accident as she was leaving port. The sun—a wintry, pale sun—was sinking as we began to move, towed out of the river. The order to release was, I suppose, given too soon; on board we felt nothing—the only sign that anything was wrong was that we saw everyone on the landing-stage running for dear life, like frightened rabbits. Then we realised that our big ship was crashing into the landing-stage, crushing like matchwood a big dredger which was lying alongside, and also the iron gangway. All we felt on board was a slight shiver which seemed to run through the ship. We were delayed seven hours while the screws were examined. I am not a superstitious mortal, but the feeling that all this was a bad omen clung to me—and, be it said, proved true.

On board we were a happy party; many of the company had been with us before, and so were old friends. Jack and Jill (who was nearing her fifth birthday) loved their first experience of travelling a 147long distance; the Esmond family were out to enjoy the trip—and succeeded. The entrance to New York harbour filled me with interest. I still remember and wonder at those eight or nine tiny tugs, veritable cockle-shells they looked, which “nosed” our huge liner into dock. I remember, too, the ghastly business of the Customs! I am not a good sailor, and the moment I stood on solid earth again it seemed to heave up and down, and continued to do so for several days. The hours which we spent, waiting for our baggage to be examined, were absolute torture to me. Socially, we had a perfect time, kindness and hospitality were shown to us in every possible way; but our poor Eliza was abused up hill and down dale.

The first night was the most horrible I can remember. The theatre was boiling hot, and the hot-water pipes continually went off like great guns. I was as cold as ice. After playing Eliza everywhere in England to the accompaniment of roars of laughter, the coldness of the reception at the Garrick in New York was hard to bear.

For some reason, it was said that Eliza was copied from a play then in New York—Peg o’ My Heart—and which was an enormous success. It was stated, with almost unnecessary frankness, that for us to have presented Eliza in New York was an impertinence. Naturally there was not a word of truth in the statement; as a matter of fact, Eliza had been written some years before Peg, and there had been a suggestion (which had not materialised) that it should have been produced in America soon after it was written. We made no reply to these unjust and utterly untrue 148statements and suggestions; it would have been useless; but I am glad now to take this opportunity of referring to them. Eliza had been the cause of trouble before: it is a long story, but one which I think is worth recording here, and at this particular point.

When we produced Eliza at the Criterion, Miss Mabel Hackney came to see it, bringing with her Miss Simmons, the authoress of a play called Clothes and The Woman. This play had been sent to me to read some time before, and, having been very busy, I had not done so at once. Miss Simmons wrote to me, asking if I would return it, to which I replied that I should be glad to keep it for a little longer, so that I might read it. In all, I suppose the play was in my house for three months. At the end of that time the MS. was returned to Miss Simmons, with a letter in which I stated that I liked the play very much, “up to a point”, but that at the moment I was not producing anything. I read dozens of plays in the course of a year, and, having returned it, dismissed the matter from my mind. Eliza, as I have said, was produced, and a performance witnessed by Miss Simmons, who at once, without approaching Harry or myself, sent a letter to the Authors’ Society, demanding that they should apply for the immediate withdrawal of Harry’s play, on the grounds that it was plagiarism of her comedy, Clothes and The Woman. Harry, on receipt of the letter from the Authors’ Society, at once communicated with Miss Dickens, that efficient lady who has typed so many of his plays. Miss Dickens was able 149to prove conclusively to the Authors’ Society that Eliza Comes to Stay had been typed by her at least two and a half years before Clothes and The Woman had been sent to me by Miss Simmons. The Society was satisfied, and laid the facts before Miss Simmons, who, I regret to say, did not feel it necessary to offer an apology to Harry for the injustice she had done him.

To use an old joke, which I find the critics are still willing to use whenever Eliza is performed, “she” did not come to stay in New York, and we put on The Dear Fool. This play was as warmly praised as Eliza had been slated, and we both scored a great personal success. We later renamed the play, as Harry discovered that the title, The Dear Fool, means in America a kind of “silly ass”, which was not at all what he intended to convey. In consequence, he called it The Dangerous Age, and under that title it was produced in London.

I am reminded here of a story which Harry told me once when he came home after a trip to America. He had been to see Maud Adams and William Feversham playing Romeo and Juliet. Miss Adams, so he was told, believed that the love between Romeo and Juliet was strictly platonic, and would therefore have no bed in the famous bedroom scene. The two lovers were discovered, as the curtain rose, seated on a sofa reading a book of poems. Harry, in telling me of the play, said he was certain that the book was Dr. Chavasse’s Advice to a Wife, a book which is well known in this country to all families—at least those of the last generation.

150Our visit to America ended, and we went for three weeks to Canada before returning home to begin our own season at the Vaudeville Theatre in London.

Our next visit to Canada was in 1920, when we took with us Eliza—be it said, “by special request”—and The Law Divine. To tell one half of the kindness we received at the hands of the Canadian people would fill a huge book alone, and I must content myself with saying that it was nothing short of “wonderful”—quite, quite wonderful. Everywhere we went, people were anxious to do everything possible to make our visit pleasant, and how well they succeeded!

The Trans-Canada Company, with which we went, had formed a splendid idea, and one which I hope will meet with the success it deserves; this is, to bring from London, British plays with British players, and to visit, as far as is possible, every town in Canada, so that the people of Canada may be in touch with the Mother Country in her ideas and ideals, and so cement the affection between the two countries which has been so splendidly aroused by the Great War. We were delighted to be pioneers, or one of the sections of the pioneers, of the scheme; but in the smaller towns we found that the inhabitants had so long been accustomed to American farces (and “bedroom” farces at that) or the lightest of musical comedies, that an English comedy, spoken by English people with English voices, was almost Greek to them. As someone said to me one day, “Your accent is so difficult to understand”, and one could see that was true, for in the opening scene of The 151Law Divine, which should be played quickly, we had to decrease the pace to let the audiences get used to our voices. This only applied to the smaller places; in the larger towns the audiences loved the plays; the English home setting, the sailor and the Tommy, in The Law Divine, won all hearts, and the simplicity and directness of the acting astonished those of the audiences who had never seen a London production.

On arriving at Quebec, we were rushed off by a night train to Montreal, in order that we might be present at a big luncheon party, given by Lord and Lady Shaughnessy, to welcome us to Canada. There we met many people who became our warm friends, Sir Frederick and Lady Taylor, Mrs. Drummond (who is so well known in the amateur dramatic world), Mrs. Henry Joseph—to mention only a few of the friends we made in Canada.

That week we started our tour at Halifax (Nova Scotia), and visited 48 towns in four months, travelling right through Canada to Victoria, B.C. It was all tremendously interesting, and the hospitality we received was boundless—luncheons, dinners, suppers, given both by private friends and numerous clubs, such as the Canadian Women’s Club, The Daughters of the Empire, the Men’s Canadian Club, the Rotary, the Kyannias, and the various dramatic clubs.

At Toronto we were asked to speak in the new theatre at Hart Hall, the beautiful college that has been built on the lines of an Oxford College, and given by Deane Massey, Esq. This was the first time that a woman had been asked to speak there, and I believe some little anxiety was felt as to “what 152I should say”, but my subject was a safe one. I dealt with “Women’s Work during the War, and the Work for Her to do in the Future”. Harry, on this occasion, spoke of “The Drama”. It was an effort—a very real effort—as he hated and was really frightened of public speaking. On such occasions he usually recited, and used to make a tremendous effect with that great poem, The Defence of Lucknow. When I say “a tremendous effect”, I do not mean only from a dramatic point of view, but from the point of view that it was “Empire work”.

I remember at Edmonton, Alberta—the city that is built farthest north of Canada—we were invited to lunch at the big college. There in the big hall we met the students, and sat down with some four hundred men of all ages from 18 to 40—students who, I was interested to learn, were all learning Spanish as well as German in their course. In the middle of the hall hung a huge Union Jack, and under it Harry stood reciting The Defence of Lucknow to four hundred spellbound men and boys. I shall never forget the rousing cheers which went up from those who had listened to him when he ceased speaking. Professor Carr was the head of the College, and both he and his wife were charming to us. There we met Mr. Evans, who has done so much for the city. He and his wife gave a hockey match for us and the members of our company, which resulted in Harry “coming down” very hard on his gold cigarette case and squashing it quite flat.

At Winnipeg—“The Golden Gate to the West”, I believe it is called—we met more delightful people, 153among them the Hon. “Bob” Rogers, as he is called. At the Barracks, where “Princess Pat.’s Own” were quartered, I met many men who had been friends of Decima’s in France during the war. It was here that I saw what, up to that time, I had only read of—a real dog-sledge. It was a bitter day, with a howling wind off the prairies, and at least 29 degrees below zero. Suddenly I saw dashing up the main street nine dogs, dragging what looked to me like a small boat. Forgetting the biting wind, I stopped to watch. “The boat” stopped, and all the dogs lay down instantly in the snow, all looking as if they were grinning, and wagging their tails with vigour. Then a man got out of “the boat”, and lifted out a dog with a strap attached to it; this he harnessed to the rest of the team, stopping only to cuff one of the resting dogs, which had taken the opportunity to eat some snow. The man got back into the sledge, and they were off again at full tilt. I loved the sight, so strange and picturesque—so strange to English eyes, and yet enacted for me by some unknown man, who was yet “part and parcel” of the Empire, even as I was.

I never got over my feeling of depression when I looked at the prairies. Perhaps I saw them at a bad time, covered with snow—endless flat snow, which seemed limitless, seemed to stretch away to infinity. The only time I ever saw any beauty which brought joy in them, was one day when we had to leave Moose Jaw. We had a long journey to our next town, and left at three in the morning. I remember that through the night some of the company played 154bridge, the ever-cheerful Florrie Lumley, of course, being one of the players. I went to bed, to snatch what sleep I could after two performances. The morning was the most amazing sunrise I have ever seen; the sky full of rich mauves and pinks, melting into blues and yellows, over the vast expanse of flat ground, is something which I could never hope to describe. I only know that I felt more than repaid for my early rising by the joy, the wonderful colour, the beauty, and the happiness which that sunrise gave to me.

Again I seem to see Calgary, with its crowd of men of all nationalities; here a cowboy in full kit, with rattlesnake stirrups; there an Indian, incongruous with his hair in plaits and yet wearing European clothes, his squaw with him; a Japanese; even an Indian wearing a turban—all making a wonderful picture of East and West. And then, in the midst of all this cosmopolitan crowd, the huge hotel with all the most modern comforts—for all the C.P.R. Hotels are wonderful. It was from the roof garden of this hotel at Calgary that I had my first sight of the Rockies—and, oh! the joy of the Rockies. To me all those days of long journeys, the fatigues, the distress were nothing, were forgotten, in the joy of the sight of the mountains, the delight of feeling that one was actually “in” such beauty, and that the joy of looking at them would go on for days.

We stayed to play at two little towns in the mountains. Kamloops, one of them, made us laugh—as, indeed, did many of our experiences. Fortunately our company was a happy one, all being ready to 155make light of difficulties. On this occasion we had to dress for the performance under most uncomfortable conditions, for the theatre at Kamloops is just a “frame” or wood hall. Rooms—of sorts—are provided for the artists; for instance, Harry’s room was built on the ground, no floor boarding, just bare earth—and the temperature at 40 degrees below zero; no heating was provided except in one room. The lighting, too, left much to be desired; we all had about two very tiny electric lights to dress by, and, just before the curtain went up, a knock came to the door, and the request was made for “the electric-light globes, as they were wanted for the footlights”. When we did ring up, the seven or eight globes which were to assist the public to see us clearly were all backed by yellow posters, on which was printed “Cyril Maude as ‘Grumpy’”. If we had not all laughed so immoderately, I think the sight, facing us all through our performance, might have made us “Grumpy”.

At Vancouver we were very gay. Our visit was all too short, and accordingly many different societies joined forces, and by this means we succeeded in meeting as many people as possible in the short time we were able to spend in the city. I think I have never felt more nervous in my life than I did at the luncheon given to us by the Canadian Men’s Club at the vast Vancouver Hotel, the largest hotel I have ever seen. About five hundred men were present, and I was the only woman. My entrance was almost a royal one; I was led by the President of the Club down a big flight of stairs into the hall; all the men 156rose to their feet and gave us a tremendous reception; I found myself, half tearfully, saying, “Oh, thank you, thank you so much.” It was a wonderful feeling, to be so far away from home, and yet to find such a lovely welcome from people who were not only glad to see you, but told you so. Miss M. Stewart, the daughter of Mrs. and General Stewart, who did such great work in France, laughingly constituted herself my chauffeuse, and drove me everywhere. I look forward to seeing Vancouver again one day.

At Medicine Hat we played only one night, and, as I was walking down the main street, a frail little woman came up to me and asked, “Are you Eva Moore?” When I answered her, she said “I’m your cousin.” She had come countless miles from her prairie farm, which she ran with her son, to see me play. I had never seen her before; had not known, even, that I had a cousin in that part of the world!

It was at Revelstoke, again in the Rockies—a place that had once been very flourishing, but owing to vast forest fires had almost ceased to be a working town—that I had an amusing experience. At every theatre God Save the King had always been played at the end of each performance. Here, to my astonishment, not a note was played. I asked the reason, and was told that the gentleman who played the piano—the only instrument in the orchestra—was a German. I was furious, and, knowing that the following week the famous “Dumbells” were coming with their latest revue, Biff Bang, I wrote to the Major who was their manager, telling him what had happened, 157and asking him to see that the matter was put right. I knew I was safe in making the request, as the “Dumbells”, who had won all hearts on their tour through Canada, were all ex-Service men, all men who had served in the trenches. I also wrote to the Canadian Women’s Club, who had presented me with a bouquet, and to the manager of the theatre. All this had to be done very quickly, as we were only a few hours in the place. I never heard anything in reply until, by good fortune, the week we said “Good-bye” to Canada the “Dumbells” came to Montreal and I went to see them play, and after the performance went round to speak to the actors. It was then that their manager told me that, on receiving my letter, which was awaiting him, he had at once sent round to the stage to tell “the boys” that God Save the King would be sung twice before the play started and twice after the performance. He said, “Of course, the boys thought I was mad, but they did as I asked.” He went on to tell me that after the performance he went on to the stage and read them my letter, which was greeted with cheers. The next morning he went out and met the chief townsman, the butcher, who remarked how disgraceful it was that, though we called ourselves British, we had not had the Anthem played at the end of our performance. The Major again produced my letter and read it to him, asking that he would make its contents known in the town, which he promised to do. I hope he did, for it impressed me very much everywhere to see the staff of the theatres standing, hat in hand, while the Anthem was played, and I 158should hate any Canadian to think that we were less loyal than they.

Going west through the Rockies, we missed seeing the first part, as the train went through that section at night; but coming back, by staying one night at a town, we were able to do the whole of the journey by day—and this Harry and I determined to do. During the night more snow had fallen, and we woke to a spotless, glistening world of white; the eighteen inches of snow which had fallen during the night, on the top of what had already fallen during the long winter, made the country look beautiful. As we sledged to the wee station, right in the midst of vast white mountains, under a sky of sapphire blue, the ground seemed to be set with millions of diamonds. I shall never forget that day; it gave me the most wonderful joy. Later I sat on a chair outside the observation car, drinking in the beauty, until my feet became so cold that the pain was real agony, and I could bear it no longer. I went inside to thaw them on the hot-water pipes, sitting even then with my face glued to the window, so that nothing of the beauty might escape me. I did this all day. Harry did at last persuade me to lunch, but the moment it was over I went back to my chair. Later, as the sun went down, a huge moon, like a harvest moon, rose with its cold, clear light, picking out fresh peaks, showing up snow-covered mountains in a new light. I refused to move, and Harry had to dine alone, while I froze outwardly, but inwardly was all glowing with excitement at the beauty and joy of what I saw. Now I can close my eyes and think that I see it all 159again: the canvas tents where the men working on the C.P.R. live; the pathetic, lonely little graves; the Indians; the squaws on the frozen rivers, sitting by holes in the ice, fishing; then Kicking Horse Valley, the climb from Field, that marvellous engineering feat when the train goes twice through the mountain in a figure-eight to enable it to mount the height. You lose all sense of direction as you go up and up, for one moment you see the moon on one side of the train, a moment later you see her on the other. I am not sure that this part of the journey is not the best, and yet I don’t know; it is hard to say.

The Great Divide! All my life I had read and heard of it, and now at last I saw it. We got out at Banff and sledged to the hotel, where we stayed the night; next morning we wandered about until it was time to get the train. Perhaps we had seen too much beauty, seen too many wonders, and had become capricious, but I found Banff disappointing; the ice-run and the ice-castle seemed poor and out of place in their vast surroundings. The last stage of our journey was through the Park, where we saw herds of buffaloes, peacefully browsing in the snow, and an elk, too. We saw also the “Three Sisters” Canmore, and bade adieu to the snow mountains. I hope it’s only adieu. I have books of photographs which were taken there; one photograph is of the inveterate “punster”, Fred Grove, who was in Canada at the time, with Sir John Martin Harvey’s Company. He had it taken standing under a poster of Eliza, in which he had played “Uncle Alexander” so many 160times. On the back of it he wrote “Fred Grove at Regina—how he wishes he could re-jine ’er.”

Another picture illustrates what was a curious coincidence. Harry and I were taken standing under a poster of The Law Divine. There had been a heavy snowstorm, and the whole of the poster was obliterated except the two letters, “D ... V”. Soon after, Harry was taken ill at Saskatoon with pneumonia. I had to go on with the company, and play every evening a comedy! knowing that any moment might bring me the news I dreaded. But, “D.V.”—and I say it with all reverence—Harry pulled through, and joined us in time to return to England.

He was an amazing patient. Left there alone, very, very ill, his wonderful sense of humour never failed him. I remember one evening a wire came through for me, from Harry. It was a quotation over which we had often laughed, written by the late Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, at the time when King Edward lay ill with appendicitis. It ran:

With us in the company was Nigel Bruce, who regards a Test Match as one of the really important things of life, and who would, I believe, infinitely rather “play for England” in one of the Test Matches than be Prime Minister. One evening Harry wired to me:

“England lost both Test Matches. Get Willie (Nigel Bruce) oxygen.”

Both these wires were sent when he was very, very 161ill, when the majority of us would have been too much concerned over the probability of leaving the world to wish in the least to be amusing. I have, too, a packet of letters which he wrote to me. Written in pencil, and often the writing indicating great physical weakness, but still the fun is there in every one of them. Here are some extracts from his letters at that time:

“Holy Pigs, I am getting so fed up with this business.... Mrs. —— sent a note that if I wanted some cheery society would I ring her up, and the doctor would let her see me. I shall tell her my back is too sore! Cheerio to everybody. There’s a lot of fun to be got out of life.”

“... This goes to Toronto. I shall not do much there, I’m afraid. However, it might have been worse (his illness), and it’s given me a nice pair of mutton-chop whiskers anyhow. There is a wonderful monotony about these white walls, day in, day out; one needs the patience of Job not to throw the soap-dish at the Crucifix sometimes.... I daresay I may write a fairy play, and, as Jowett says in one of his letters to Mrs. Asquith, ‘the pursuit of literature requires boundless leisure’.... I don’t think I am a very good patient; there are moments when I seethe with impotent rage against everything and everybody, which is all very foolish; so I have a cup of orange-water, and try and keep my nails clean.... Play all the bridge you can, that you may be the expert at our week-end parties, and support the family at the gaming-table.”

The following is written when he was very ill, for 162he writes at the bottom, as a kind of postscript, “This took ages to write.” In this letter he enclosed a small tract, which I gave to “Florrie Lumley”, as he suggests. This is the letter:

“Another night and day wiped off—they all count. Love to everybody. Nobody is allowed to see me yet, but, to-day being Sunday, a nice old man pushed the latest news of Jesus through a crack in the door while he thought I was asleep. Perhaps it will do that worldly Florrie Lumley a bit of good.”

In another letter he says: “There is a devil in the next room that has done nothing but groan at the top of his voice all day; if I could get at him with a hat-pin, I’d give him something to groan for.”

The following must have been the first letter he wrote after the worst time was over, for he begins: “No more death-struggles, my dear. But I am still on my back, and it takes two of the nurses to move me. I can see telegraph poles out of the corner of my eye, if I squint; and the dawn rolls up each morning. People are very kind, and my room is full of daffodils—they remind me of little children playing. Bless you!”

So the tour which began so brightly, with us both speaking at huge meetings of the Empire League, with us both enjoying the wonderful new scenes, the trip through the Rockies (for which alone it would have been worth visiting Canada), with us both laughing at the discomforts of the theatres and some of the queer little hotels at which we had to stay, ended with Harry just able to join us before we sailed. Still, he did sail back to England with us.

163I was full of thanksgiving, not only for his recovery, but for the care and love that Dr. Lynch, who had had charge of his case, had given him. It was his care that had pulled Harry out of danger; both he and Mrs. Lynch had been so wonderful to him, and treated him as though he were an old friend and not as a chance visitor to their town; no one could have done more than they had done for Harry. Curiously enough, I found out later that Dr. Walker, who had been called in to give a second opinion on Harry’s case, had lived, during the war, close to “Apple Porch”, our house at Maidenhead. He had been at Lady Astor’s, and had attended the Canadian soldiers who were so badly gassed.

I am reminded of so many holidays and small travels we took together—to the sea, to Switzerland, to Ireland, Scotland: holidays which stand out as lovely pictures, as days which were crowded with laughter and sunshine. Were there days when the rain poured down, and the skies were not blue?... I have forgotten them.

I remember one holiday in Scotland, when every evening we used to play bridge, the minister—who, as he expressed it, “just loved a game o’ cairds”—joining us. One Saturday evening he came, and declined to play because the next day was the “Sawbath”, and he did not think it right. He explained this at some length, and then turned to me with a smile: “I’ll just sit by your side, Mrs. Esmond,” he said, “and advise ye.” During that same visit we had with us two dogs—one a real Scotch terrier, the other—just a dog. As a matter of fact, he was 164the famous “Australian Linger” to which Harry was so devoted, and which has been mentioned elsewhere. One Sunday we all set out for the Kirk, to hear our “minister” friend preach, first locking both dogs in a shed near the hotel. We arrived at the Kirk—Ada (my sister, who has always been with Harry and myself in our joys, helping us in our troubles and often with heavy work, just a tower of strength and understanding); Charles Maitland Hallard, in the full glory of the kilt; and Harry and I. During the service we heard a noise at the door, and one of the party went to investigate. There were our two dogs, guarded by the minister’s own Aberdeen, lying with their three noses pressed against the crack of the door, waiting for the service to end. The Aberdeen, with a proper knowledge of what is right and proper during divine service, had evidently prevented our two dogs from entering. We found, on returning to the hotel, that they had gnawed a large hole in the door of the shed in which they had been locked, thus making their escape. It was on that particular Sunday that poor Charles Hallard had his knees so badly bitten by a horse-fly—or, from their appearance, a host of horse-flies—that the kilt could not be worn again during the holiday.

As I write this, my boxes are still standing waiting to be unpacked, for I have just returned from Berlin, where I have spent the past ten weeks. Berlin! What a city! Wonderful, wonderful trees everywhere; a city which one feels is almost too big, too vast! The enormous buildings, the colossal statues, 165it seems a city built not for men and women but for giants. Gradually you realise that the wide streets, sometimes with four avenues of trees, have a definite purpose; that the city was so planned that the air might reach all who lived within its boundaries. The Tiergarten, which is a joy to behold, until you reach the Sesarsalle, which ruins the beauty with its endless and often ugly statues. Houses, big and beautifully kept, with real lace curtains, spotlessly clean, in almost every window; the whole city planted out with a wealth of flowers, roses by the million, cactus plants, lilac and syringa. Every spare piece of ground planted and laid out to perfection. When I came back to England, and on my way home passed Buckingham Palace, I was struck with the beds laid out there. The three or four hundred geraniums seemed so poor and inadequate after the streets of Berlin! I wondered why some of the money spent on street decoration could not have been paid in “reparation”; for the Germans it would mean fewer flowers, less beauty in their streets, but something towards the payment of their just debts.

Numberless theatres, some very beautiful, others glaringly hideous both in design and colouring. All places of amusement—theatres, picture palaces, concerts, and dance-rooms—are literally packed out at every performance. The interest in music is wonderful, no matter if the performance is operetta, opera, or concert; it is an amazing sight to see the audience surge up to the platform at the end of a performance and storm it, offering applause and congratulation to the artist or artists. After Act 1 at the theatre, the 166audience rise as one man, and pour out into the vestibule, where they walk round and round, eating heartily of dark-brown bread sandwiches, drinking beer or wine which they buy from the buffet. To one unaccustomed to the country, it is an amusing sight and rather astonishing, but it is a wise practice, as most entertainments begin as early as 7 p.m., and the latest hour for a performance to begin is 7.30.

I, personally, saw no lack of anything. The hotels are full, not only with people who are staying in them, but with casual visitors who come in for 5 o’clock tea; this begins at 3, and continues until about 8 o’clock. The dining-rooms are never closed, and meals seem to go on all day long. “Men with corrugated backs to their necks”, as Sir Philip Gibbs so aptly describes them, sit for hours partaking of sugar cakes, ices, and liquors.

Only once during my stay did I see the slightest hint of poverty, and that was where some wooden houses had been built outside the city during the war for poor people with families. Here the children were of the real gypsy type, played round us as we worked (for I was playing in a film), rolling and tumbling in the sand.

I was taken over The Schloss by a soldier who had served under Hindenburg, and done much fighting in the infantry and later as a gunner. He described vividly to me the Riots, when the Palace was stormed by the sailors, who took possession and lived a life of riotous enjoyment there for a short time, dancing each evening on the wonderful floor of the ballroom 167where so many crowned heads had gathered in other days. The sailors were finally turned out after forty-eight hours’ heavy fighting. The man who was my guide told me that the rioters managed their firing badly, as they fired from both sides of the Palace, thus wounding many of their own men. He told me also that many soldiers held the belief that the riots had been permitted by the authorities in order to draw attention from the Staff, as the feeling at the time against the Army was so strong. I can only give this as his own opinion, and cannot vouch for its correctness.

One drenching day I visited Potsdam, which seemed to me a perfectly hideous place, both inside and out, so ornate that it hurt. The much-vaunted Mussel Hall, a large room entirely covered with shells, seemed to me ghastly and a place in which no one could bear to remain for long. The one perfect room was the Kabinet, delightful in colour-scheme and construction. The Theatre, a small, beautifully designed place with a delightful stage, seats about four hundred people, and it was here that the Kaiser witnessed the performance of his own works.

On an April day in June, with sunshine, heavy rain, and lovely clouds, I took a long motor drive down the famous track, which is twenty miles long, with fir trees on either side, past a great lake and many big houses with perfectly kept gardens, to Sans Souci. Perfect, with its lovely Kolonade in a semi-circle, and the Palace which looks down and up a grassy slope to a ruin on the summit, surrounded by trees. The ruin is an artificial one, copied from 168one in Rome, but the effect is quite charming. I saw the narrow Gallerie, the cedar-and-gold writing-room, which is round in formation, its door concealed by a bookcase, where Fredrick Rex used to sit and write, looking out on to a pergola which is French in design. The reception-room with its perfect green walls and rose-covered furniture—each room seemed more delightful than the last. Lovelier still, the garden, with its six wonderful terraces leading down to the large pond filled with goldfish, many of which are so old that they have become quite white; in the centre of the pond a fountain, which when playing throws a jet as high as the flagstaff, six terraces up. The whole place gave me a feeling of poetry and romance, quite different to anything I had experienced in Berlin. I visited the church where the two coffins of Fredrick the Great and Fredrick Rex lie side by side, covered with flags. The church is a small but impressive building, but spoilt by a huge Iron Cross on one wall, which is made of wood and almost entirely covered with nails: a similar idea to the Hindenburg statue (no longer to be seen) into which people knocked nails, paying money to be allowed to do so.

My guide on this occasion was an ex-soldier who was decorated with the Iron Cross. He told me many interesting facts. He had been in the Crown Prince’s regiment—the King’s Hussars—first on the Western Front, and later at Verdun. He told me that the Crown Prince never left headquarters, nor led his regiment; that this was always done by General Gneiseuan, who refused to allow his name to 169appear as having led the troops, as he considered it an insult to the Prince. He said that at Verdun in 1917 no less than 366 men were shot dead on the field for refusing to advance.

I listened often to remarks made about the Kaiser by the men who had been his subjects, and never once did I hear one word of pity for him, one word of regret at his downfall. The fact that so many valuable articles, plate, jewels, pictures, were sent by him to Holland is a bitter pill to his people. So valuable were many of the articles that, had he allowed them to be sold, the proceeds might have paid off a considerable amount of the reparation debt. It seemed to me that any love which his people once had for William Hohenzollern was dead.

My mind went back to the time when my own country mourned the loss of a King, a King who had enjoyed as much lifetime as is given to many men, and who was deposed only by that strongest of all monarchs—Death. I saw the picture of the Great Hall at Westminster, with the crowds waiting to pay their last tribute to King Edward VII. I remembered how I stood, with many others, on the steps at the entrance, and, looking down into the hall, saw a solid, slowly moving mass of people, the representatives of a mourning nation. There in the centre stood the coffin, with the signs of temporal power laid upon it, and at each corner a soldier with bowed head, each representing one of Britain’s Colonies. Above the coffin, showing in the pale light of the candles, was a canopy, a cloud which floated over it. The breath of all the hundreds who had passed had gathered and 170hung there: the very life of his people had gone to make a canopy for the King. I thought how in the hall where the English people had won so much of their liberty, Edward the Seventh had held a last audience with his subjects; how he had lain there that everyone who wished might find him, for the last time, waiting for his people. For “the deposing of a rightful King” I had seen a nation mourn, mourning with a personal sorrow; and here in Germany I listened to the men who had been subjects of “The Peacock of the World”, and who for his passing, his degradation, his loss, had not one word of pity or regret.

The German people? I left Germany wondering, and even hoping. The breaking of the military party, the downfall of the house of Hohenzollern, with its brood of decadent, idle, pleasure-loving princes and the “Tinsel and Cardboard King” may mean ultimate salvation for the German people. Not perhaps in my lifetime, but in the wonderful “someday” when all the world will be wiser and happier than it is now. A country where the very waiters can discuss music, literature, and poetry; a country of beautiful towns, green trees, and great manufactures; a country where, because of the heights to which one realises it might have climbed, its fall is all the greater and more dreadful.

Not the least interesting feature of my visit has been the closer contact with the director of the film, and his wife—Mr. Herbert Wilcox, a short man with a great dignity and immense charm. He was one of the gallant youngsters of 1914, who joined up 171as a Tommy and later did great work in the Flying Corps. Through Mr. Wilcox I have had my first intimate knowledge of film direction, and it has filled me with great respect for that branch of the theatrical profession, which, because it is still comparatively new, is less well-known and understood.

CHAPTER XII A BUNDLE OF OLD LETTERS

To explain why I include this chapter at all, I want to give you the scene as it happened in my study in Whiteheads Grove. I think that will be a better explanation than if I were to tell you my ideas on letters and letter-writing, however fully and completely I might do so.

It was one of those days when the desire to explore drawers and boxes, the top shelves of cupboards, and brown paper parcels, comes over one; that desire came over me, and I began. I did not get on very fast—one never does—and the first obstacle was a parcel marked “Letters, Private”. I untied the string, and began to read them; that was the end of my exploring for the day, for as I read I went back to the times when those letters were written and turned over in my mind the happenings which had caused them ever to be written. I saw the writers, and heard their voices. So the afternoon went past very quickly, for when ghosts come to visit you they demand your whole attention, and will not be dismissed quickly, will not be told, as one can tell ordinary people, “I am so busy to-day, will you 173come and see me some other time?”; they demand attention, and you find most of them too dear to deny it to them.

Besides, does anyone ever really lose their fondness for letters? I write, I think, more than most people; sometimes I seem to spend my life writing letters, but—I still look forward to “to-morrow morning’s post”, and I think I always shall.

As I read these old letters, written to me and to Harry during the past twenty years, I found myself laying aside first this one, and then that one, because they seemed amusing, or very kind, or especially indicative of the character of the writer. When the afternoon was over, my heap of letters had grown, and I had determined to make them into a parcel again and give them to whoever cared to read them as “A Bundle of Old Letters”.

Listen to this one: I do not know why it was written, or when, except that it is headed “February 1st”—but it takes me back to the days of “The Gent., the Genius, and the Young Greek God”—the days when Harry Esmond, Charles Hallard, and Gerald du Maurier went holiday-making together:

My Dear Harry,

Expressing one’s thoughts in any way is a form of conceit, surely, isn’t it? If you speak them, or write them, you expect others to listen—therefore you must consider what you think of importance. Authors must all be of a conceit that is abnormal, and preachers, and—Good God—Poets!

Some people would rather not listen to the 174commonplace thoughts of others—for these there should just be a “news sheet”, giving generally what is taking place, with no garnishings and comments and “what we think”, etc.—for silent men like “Tug” Wilson, engineers, scientists, and equilibrists. Nowadays (do you agree with me?) too much expression is given to “feelings”, and little feeble feelings at that. There is no loud roar of a lion, no sweet song of a nightingale, and no great hush either—it is all sparrows, and a banging door. Everything is “tuppence”. You never read: “Death of A——”; it is always “Tragic Death”, “Splendid Death”, “Comic Death”; why not “Death”?

Love to you all.

Here is a letter dated “June 30th, 1898”; it is headed New York, and begins:

I accept your play. I suppose even a manager may give way to his feelings sometimes, and I am going to do it now. I cannot express to you sufficiently how much I like the play. If it meets with the same impressions on an audience as it has with me, we will both have a fine thing. However, independent of all that, in these times when a manager is compelled, regretfully, to refuse so many plays, it is a gratification to be able to say “I will accept and am glad of it”.

175That was a glimpse of the Charles Frohman (“C.F.”, as he was always called), whom Harry knew and loved.

This is a letter that Harry must have written out as a rough draft, for there are alterations and “cuts” in it. I cannot remember why or to whom it was written, but I am sure he wrote it very seriously, and chuckled over it after it was finished:

“If authors in engaging artists for plays allowed themselves to be biassed by the private life of each artist, I fear many theatres would close and many deserving people would starve. If Miss Smith, Jones, or Robinson suits the requirements of a play, it is not my business, or the manager’s, to enquire whether or no she murdered her mother. Is she the right person for the play?—that’s all one can consider.” There the letter—or, rather, the draft—ends; I do not know who the lady was—but I hope she made a great success.

I wonder why I have this next letter? Someone sent it to me, I suppose, with that great kindness some people show in “passing on” the really nice things that are sometimes said of one. And why not? If only everyone would forget the unkind things they hear, and only treasure and repeat the kind ones—well, the world would be a happier place for everyone. This letter is dated “May 19th, 1901”, so I feel I may be allowed to quote from it without being accused of undue conceit, because it is “so many years ago”:

176“You are right, and I think it is only fair to the ‘new lead’ to say so—Eva Moore is a revelation—and that delicious natural laugh, which is of all Nature’s inventions about the hardest to reproduce at will. I suspect that Alexander has discovered what we all want so much—the new ‘Madge Kendal’.” If there is one thing for which I have always striven, it is a natural laugh, and I like to think that I had attained it twenty-two years ago; I like to think I still retain it!

Here is a letter, in large, black writing, but such charming writing it is! Full of vigour, full of humour too. I do not know when it was written; the only date is “June 22”. It runs:

That letter brings another memory with it. Perhaps it was the time when she stayed “until she went away”, but I remember Ellen Terry in my garden, going up to my mother, who was seated there, and saying, “How are you, Mrs. Moore? My name is Ellen Terry.” The simplicity and beauty of that Great Lady is something to remember always.

177The next letter in my packet is very short, and its brevity and the fact that it is “very much to the point” appeals to me. It was written after seeing The Law Divine:

My Dear Harry Esmond,

Do you mind my saying your Play will live long after you—or I? That is the one thought I brought away with me.

Here is another, and again undated, except for “Feb. 19th”:

Dear Mr. Esmond,

Only a line to say how tremendously I enjoyed the play this afternoon. Why won’t you write me a play like that? I want to play “a mother”!!

What a contrast to another letter, from one of the worst actors I have ever seen, who begins by telling “My Dear Esmond” that he wants a play written for him, and proceeds to describe for six sheets of notepaper how the play is to be written and how the climax is to be reached; he ends with the words, “remember I want at least one great 178moment of passion”. I cannot remember that Harry ever embarked on this play, which, with its one “great moment” only insisted on, might not have held an audience for two and a half hours! Harry’s answer was, “My Dear X., God is in His Heaven.”

This letter interests me for many reasons; the writer herself had an arresting personality, and this letter, with its clarity of style, its beautifully clear and artistic writing, writing which never ceases for a single word to depict character and sensitive feeling, the sentiment bravely speaking what the writer felt, and yet never deteriorating into nothing but carping criticism; all these things go to give a very true idea of the writer:

Dear Mr. Esmond,

I followed every word and scene of your play with the deepest interest. I found it quite terrible. It would be absurd to say that such stories ought not to receive illustration on the stage. But I do say that, when they are presented, they should be told in the Shakespearean and not in the Ibsen manner. One requires poetry and music and every softening aid for tragedies so dismal, otherwise the whole thing is a nightmare. I am not older than you are, but I have had a great deal of sorrow, and I have been forced to see the squalid side of every ideal. Yet I thought you were unjust even to the worst in human nature. I know you won’t mind my saying this, because I have such an admiration for your great talents. There are so few dramatists in 179Europe that, where one recognises unusual ability, one may be pardoned for wishing to see it displayed to the highest advantage. Life, as it is, is quite “strong” enough; if you show it as it is not, it becomes inartistically weak from excess of horrors.—Then follows some criticism of the acting, ending with the words, “Its (the play’s) balance was so good, and it never halted or drooped. You have got the real gift.” The letter is signed “Yours sincerely, Pearl Mary-Teresa Craigie” (whom the world knew better as “John Oliver Hobbes”).

On a large sheet of very excellent paper, and somewhere near the bottom of the sheet, is written:

Dear Esmond,

Thanks very much for Grierson. I am devouring him—gloom and all—with great gusto.

This next letter must have been written concerning Grierson’s Way, and is in the queer irregular handwriting of William Archer, the great critic. He says: “Of course Messieurs of the Old Guard in criticism die, but never surrender. Never mind! You have scored a big victory, and I congratulate you with all my heart. The mantle of ‘Clemmy’ (Clement Scott) has certainly descended upon the Telegraph gentleman.”

The next item in my bundle is a photograph of the “Weekly Box Office Statement” of the Knickerbocker Theatre, New York, and at the bottom is 180printed “This theatre’s largest week’s business at regular prices”. The “attraction” was “Mr. N. C. Goodwin and Miss Maxine Elliott”, and the play was When We Were Twenty-One.

Letters here from Maxine Elliott! Black, rather wild writing, straggling over the pages, written with a soft, thick pen, and very “decided” ink. This one was written soon after Jill was born. Maxine Elliott is her godmother, hence the enquiries:

Dear Harry Esmond,

What is Miss Esmond’s Christian name? You didn’t tell me, and I have a little souvenir for her that I want to get marked. How proud you and Eva must be, and how secret you were! I almost believe you bought her at the Lowther Arcade! (once the Home of dolls).

Another letter from her begins: “Dear Harry Esmond,—Philadelphia the frigid, Philadelphia the unappreciative, has received us well, even at this inauspicious time to open, and I am full of hope and confidence in New York.”

Here is a third from the same source; this, I think, was written when Harry first agreed to write a play for her, which when completed was called Under the Greenwood Tree:

I am longing to hear the new play, and full of excitement over it, and what an angel you are to write it for me! I sail April 4th, and that means London—Blessed London—about the 11th.... I am doing the biggest business of my life this year, 181which is the only satisfaction to be derived from this laborious, monotonous, treadmill sort of grind that it is in this country of vast distances (America). I shall retire (ha! ha!) after we finish with the big play you are writing for me, you nice Harry Esmond!

My best love to you all.

Letters from busy men and women, how much they mean! Not the formal typewritten affair, but written with their own hands, and meaning moments snatched from the rush of work that they always have before them. This one from Mr. Robert Courtneidge, for instance, written from his office to Harry after The Law Divine was produced. And the sidelight that it gives to the character of the man who wrote it! Listen:

My Dear Esmond,

I saw The Law Divine yesterday, and enjoyed it more than I can express. It is a delightful play—admirably acted. It was quite a treat to me, who am not given to the theatre spirit nowadays. I didn’t go round to see you, for I’m as backward as a novice, and I tremble at “going behind” where I have no business.

Kindest regards,

P.S.—And I remember Miss Illington playing juvenile parts in Edinburgh—dear, dear! She was a braw young lassie then, but a delightful actress.

182That is the Robert Courtneidge I have met; with a twinkle in his shrewd, kindly eyes, and that more than a touch of his country’s humour always ready to appear—when rehearsals are over. He is one of the people who remain young, despite the fact that at a rehearsal he has been known to put on his hat and, shaking his head, say sadly, “I’m an old man, I can’t stand it”, and so walk away. Underneath it all, though actors may turn pale and actresses may shed tears in the dark recesses of the prompt corner, there is always the twinkle in Robert Courtneidge’s eye—if you look for it!

I should not wish to praise myself; I should never wish to be an egotist, even though this is an account of “My Life”; and that is why I have included in my bundle of letters only a few that have been written to me, but mostly those which were written to Harry. Here is one, however, which appealed to me then, and does still, as “high praise”. It is from a Frenchwoman—and is, therefore, “praise from Sir Hubert Stanley”—for it refers to the performance of Mumsie, by Edward Knoblauch—that dear, human, though unsuccessful play for which I had so much love:

I could see working in you all the feelings of a Frenchwoman. You are a great artist. You give me intense pleasure. I wish to thank you very much.

183This letter was written after Harry played “Touchstone”, when he was so severely criticised by some for his conception of the part:

My Dear Esmond,

Touchstone, Touchstone, Touchstone at last! A creation, a triumph, a delight; wit, fantasy, irony—that hint of the Great God Pan behind the motley—all unite to make the Touchstone I have always longed for but have only now seen for the first time.

Here is a letter which Harry wrote to me. He was arranging for a theatre at the time, though what theatre I cannot remember. He evidently feels that he has been successful in an absolutely business-like way—probably because he never was, and if he had made a fair “deal” over anything it was due entirely to the honesty of his associates and not to his own capacity, for, as I have said elsewhere, he was never “one of the children of this world”:

“Your poor husband,” he writes, “has been having a devil of a time. The evolving, the planning, the diplomacy, the craft!—but we rehearse Monday, and open in ten days. Jill had a lovely time in the garden to-day, as happy as a bumble bee. I think I’ve had the dreariest week I’ve ever had in my life, but all’s well that ends well.” Evidently all the “craft” had been taking all the colour out of life for him!

184When he died, I had so many wonderful letters from all our friends, and not only friends who were personally known to me, but dear people who wrote to me from all over the world, offering their sympathy and love; offerings of sympathy from their Majesties the King and Queen—one of those signal proofs of their kindly thought in and for their subjects which have helped to make them so dearly loved by the Empire; from men and women who had worked with us, who had known Harry as an actor, as a man, or as both; from people who had never known him, but loved him for his written and spoken word; from people who had known me, and wished to send me their loving help at such a time. Among these many letters there is one from Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson, a letter full of regret at Harry’s death, and of kind and cheering thoughts for me; it gives a picture of Harry, riding a bicycle past Buckingham Palace one morning. The night before Forbes Robertson had played in a new production, and the critics in some of the papers had not been too kind. The letter recalls how Harry, riding past Forbes Robertson that morning, called out cheerily, “Never mind what they say, you were fine.” The writer adds, “Wasn’t it just like him?” One of those happy pictures of Harry which did so much to bring rays of happiness to me at that time.

Not the least beautiful was one which consisted only of a single line, the letter of the best type of Englishman, the man who “cannot talk”, but whose very affection renders him dumb. It was just this: 185“Eva, dear, I am so sorry for you”—and so said everything that a kind heart could say.

The pleasant memories that many of those letters recalled! As Charles Hawtrey wrote, “I look back on One Summer’s Day as nearly the happiest, if not quite the happiest, of my stage life, and it is one of the ‘memories’ that seem to dwell in the minds of many of my audiences.”

The gift that some people have of putting so much into a few lines, all the tragedy of a lifetime in a few words! One dear woman wrote to me, she having lost her much-loved husband about a year previously: “I have such pleasant memories of him (Harry); always so kind and charming to me in the early days; and, since then, both of us with both of you—and now only you and me.”

And they gave me a great deal, those letters; and here is one which expresses all I want to say—a letter from Miss Sybil Thorndike—and so I give you her words, as an expression of what I feel and what I felt then: “Doesn’t it seem strange that out of a big personal grief comes sometimes a wonderful recognition of warmth that’s in the hearts of outsiders?”

So I finish my “Bundle of Letters”, tie up the parcel, and put them away—for I cannot bring myself to destroy them. They are part of one’s life; they came as an unexpected joy, or as something 186looked for anxiously; they came, bringing praise, good news, sympathy, and kindly thoughts. Letter-writing as an art may be lost; but I still say, with a feeling which has always something of a child’s expectancy and hope: “There is always to-morrow morning’s post.”

Photograph by Turner & Drinkwater, Hull. To face p. 187

Harry as Little Billee

“Trilby”

CHAPTER XIII HARRY, THE MAN

“The dearest, bravest, truest chap that ever stepped in shoe leather.”—When We Were Twenty-One.

“He’s such an odd sort of chap, always doing such rum things.”—The Wilderness.

If I was asked to describe Harry in one word, the one I should instinctively use would be “Youth”; youth with its happy joy in the simple things of life, youth with its hope and ambition, youth with its intolerance, feeling disappointment and unkindness so deeply, and yet with its tears so quickly dried by the laughter that was never very far away. That was Harry Esmond, who found the world a giant playroom full of toys of which he never tired.

An Irishman, with the true Irishman’s imagination, living so much in dreams that dreams became more real than reality. He saw everything in pictures, vividly and full of life. It would seem that the ideas, which were born in dreams, became the living things of reality. Once, I remember, when he told Charles Hallard, very excitedly, that something he said or did was “foul”, poor Charles protested, “My God! and in the morning he’ll believe it’s true!” We all laughed, Harry with the rest, but I realise how very truly he had judged Harry’s 188character. Not that he believed it in this particular instance, but, through life, what he said on impulse to-day became conviction to-morrow.

And with all his imagination his love of the fantastic went hand in hand. As little children love to play games in which there is a certain element of “fear”, so Harry loved the fantastic which bordered on terror.

I can see him, seated at dinner at Whiteheads Grove, arguing on the comparative merits of William Morris and Tennyson—he, and those who listened to him, utterly oblivious of the fact that the dinner was rapidly growing cold. To point his argument, he began to quote the Idylls of the King—Arthur’s return:

I shall never forget the horror he put into the words “a thing fell at his feet”, and how the whole tragedy was unrolled in two lines of verse.

Once, too, someone asked him to tell some spiritualistic experience, or some story he had heard from someone who had “seen a spirit”. “Tell us about it,” they asked. Harry, loving the terror which he felt the story would bring, answered in almost a whisper, “No, no, I daren’t; it terrifies me!”, and promptly went on to tell the whole story, enjoying the horror of it all, as children love a ghost story.

189The very people he knew were either, in his eyes, wonderful compounds of every virtue or there was “no health in them”. He would meet some individual who, in the first five minutes of their acquaintance, would say or do something which appealed to him: that person became for ever “a splendid chap”; while, on the other hand, some harmless individual who struck a “wrong note” (probably quite unwittingly) was referred to for months as “a terrible fellow”.

The name he took for the stage—Harry Vernon Esmond—was a tribute to romance and imagination. He was young—young in years, I mean—and he loved a wonderful lady, to whom he never addressed a single word. She was Harriet Vernon, who, attired as Gainsborough’s “Duchess of Devonshire”, used to thrill the hearts of the young men of the day every evening at the Tivoli, the Old Oxford, and other Temples of Variety. Harry, with others, worshipped at the shrine of Harriet Vernon. He never spoke to her; I doubt if he ever wanted to: it was simply the adoration of a very young man for a beautiful woman, whose life to him was wrapped in wonderful mystery. Night after night he watched her, and, when he took up the stage as a career, he, being a nineteenth century knight and so unable to “bind her gage about his helm”, openly avowed his admiration and allegiance by taking her name, and so became Harry Vernon Esmond.

Foolish? Ridiculous? I don’t think so; and it was rather typical of Harry’s feelings with regard to women all his life. He loved beautiful women as he 190loved the beautiful pictures, the beautiful books, and beautiful places of the world. Women, individually, he might—and often did—dislike; but women as women, en masse, he idealised. In all his plays he never drew a woman who was wholly unkind or entirely worthless. He might set out to draw a vampire, a heartless creature without any moral sense; but before the end of the play, the fact that she was a woman would be too strong for him, and in one sentence—perhaps only half a dozen words—he would make you feel that “she so easily might have been different, had fate been kinder”.

Perhaps you remember “Vera Lawrence” in Eliza Comes to Stay. She is mercenary, heartless, and throws over Sandy so that she may marry his rich uncle; but Harry Esmond could not give her to the world as nothing more than that—she was a woman, and a beautiful woman. Listen to the extenuating clause. She is showing Sandy a new umbrella, and says, “It isn’t meant for rain; once it was opened to the rain it would never go back and be slim and elegant again. Oh! Sandy, they opened me to the rain too soon!” That is the echo of some half-forgotten tragedy which had made Vera Lawrence what she was, instead of the woman “she might have been”.

He began to write when he was very young, and I have a manuscript at home of his first play, entitled Geraldine, or Victor Cupid. It is a rather highly coloured work, which has never been inflicted on the public, written in an exercise-book when he was fourteen.

191He used to recite, too, when he was a very small boy, and a man who knew him then described him as “a tiresome little boy who would recite long poems to which no one wanted to listen”. The tragedy of the prophet without honour!

We were very young when we married, and it was perhaps due to that fact that Harry was really a very casual lover. I have told elsewhere how his friend was sent to escort me home from the theatre, and there were many other instances which I could quote. After our marriage he changed entirely; he was the most perfect lover any woman ever had, and his letters to me, written when he was on tour and in America, are as beautiful, as full of tenderness and imagery, as anything he ever wrote.

We married with Hope as a banking account, and lived in a little studio flat in Chelsea. In the flat below us (and this is “by the way”, and has nothing to do with Harry as I am trying to depict him to you) lived another young married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Shortt. He became, as all the world knows, the “Right Hon.”, and I wonder if he held as harsh views on the subject of Women’s Suffrage then as he did later.

It was not for some time that Harry realised that he could write. He loved acting passionately, and in his plays you will find all the fire and life which he put into his spoken work. It was perhaps to him, as it has been to many, something of a disadvantage that he could do two things well, for it divided his powers, and he was torn between his desire to act and his desire to create characters which others should 192portray. Acting was his first love, and the knowledge that he had the power to write, and write well, came to him slowly; I think perhaps he almost distrusted it, as a possible menace to his career as an actor.

They were good days in the little flat, they were indeed “the brave days when we were twenty-one”. Troubles came and we shouldered them, hardly feeling their weight. The small happenings, which then were almost tragedies we were able soon after to look back upon as comedies, because we were young, and happy, and very much in love with each other. The dreadful day came when Harry, who wanted a new bicycle very badly, went to the bank and asked for an advance of eight pounds, which was refused by the manager—the day when our worldly wealth was represented by eighteen shillings, and two pounds in the bank (which we dare not touch, for it would have “closed our account”). Then Cissie Graham (now Mrs. Allen) played the part of the Good Fairy and saved us, though she does not know it. She offered me a special week at Bristol. In the nick of time I was engaged to play in Justin Huntly McCarthy’s Highwayman, and soon after Harry went to George Alexander on contract; and so fate smiled on us again!

Then came his first play—a one-act curtain-raiser called Rest. I suppose all young authors are excited when the first child of their brain is given to the world. I have never seen Harry so excited over any play as he was over Rest. It was played at a matinée for Mr. Henry Dana, who was with Sir Herbert Tree 193for so long, and died not long ago, to the deep regret of all who knew him.

When I speak of Harry’s excitement over this play, I do not want you to think that excitement was unusual with him. He was often roused to a great pitch of excitement by the small, pleasant things of life, because he loved them. He was the embodiment of Rupert Brooke’s “Great Lover”: for him “books and his food and summer rain” never ceased to bring joy and delight. To be blasé or bored were things unknown to him. No man ever needed less the Celestial Surgeon to “stab his spirit wide awake”! His joy in the lovely, small things of life was as keen at fifty as it had been at fifteen.

Once, after great difficulty, I persuaded him to go for a holiday on the Continent—for he hated to go far away from his own roof-tree. I always remember the effect the first sight of the Swiss mountains had on him. Do you remember the story of the great Victorian poet who, travelling to Switzerland with his friend, was reading The Channings?—how, when his friend touched him on the arm and said, “Look, the Alps”, he replied, without raising his eyes from his book, “Hush, Harry is going to be confirmed”! This is how differently the sight affected Harry: He had been sitting in the corner of the carriage, dreaming dreams; at last I saw the snow-covered Alps. “Look, Harry,” I said, “the mountains!” He woke from his dreams and looked out; there was a long silence, which I broke to ask if they impressed him very much. All his reply was, “Hush! don’t speak!”

194Three things never ceased to make an appeal to him—old people, young children, and animals. I shall never forget his beautiful courtesy to my mother, and in fact to anyone who was old and needed care. Children all loved him, and his relations with his own children were wonderful. Our first baby, Lynette, died when she was only a few days old, and Harry’s first experience of having a child was really when Decima’s little boy Bill came to live with us. When later Jack, and still later Jill, were born, the three were to all intents and purposes one family. Harry was never too busy or too tired to tell them wonderful stories—stories which were continued from night to night, year by year. He used to tell the most exciting adventures of imaginary people, always leaving them in the very middle of some terrible predicament, from which he would extricate them the next evening. I can remember him coming down one evening, after telling one of these adventures to Jill, with a frown of very real worry on his forehead, and rumpling his hair in distress, saying, as he did so, “I’ve left them on the edge of a precipice, and God only knows how I’m going to save them to-morrow night!”—“them” being the characters in the story.

His dogs! In Harry’s eyes, none of them could really do wrong. One I remember, a great Harlequin china-eyed Dane. She was a huge beast, and suffered from the delusion that she was a “lap dog”, and as Harry was the only person who existed in the world, so far as she was concerned, so his was the only lap on which she ever wished to sit. At those moments he was totally extinguished under the mass of dog.

Photograph by Miss Compton Collier, London, N.W.6. To face p. 194

Jill and her Mother

195But his best-loved dog was “Buggins”, who was an animal of doubtful ancestry, called out of courtesy by Harry an “Australian Linger”. He originally belonged to the Philip Cunninghams, and Harry, calling there one day and finding Buggins in deep disgrace for some misdemeanour, decided that our flat would be the ideal home for the dog. From that moment, until he died from eating another dog’s meal as well as his own (for, be it said frankly, Buggins was greedy), his life was as gorgeous as Harry could make it. He had a state funeral and lies at “Apple Porch”—the place which he, as well as his master, loved so dearly.

I wish I could tell you adequately of Harry’s humour, but the things he said were funny because he said them and because of the way in which he said them. Put down in black and white, they seem nothing, they might even seem rather pointless; but the memory of Bill sitting with his mouth open, ready to laugh at “Pop’s” jokes, and never waiting in vain, the memory of the roars of laughter which were the accompaniment of every meal—that has lasted while the jokes themselves are forgotten.

The jokes are forgotten, and the laughter remains! That is how Harry lives always for us, who knew and loved him; that is how he lives for Bill, and Jack, and Jill: as the finest playmate they ever had; the man who, though he might treat life as a jest, was desperately serious over games and the things of “make-believe”; who might laugh at the faults which the world thinks grave, and was grave over the faults at which the world too often laughs.

196And the sound of his laughter, and of the children laughing with him, brings me to the last picture; brings me to a scene in which Harry, though he did not appear, was the most actual personality in the memory. It was in the restaurant of the Gare du Nord in Paris, in the April of 1922. It was a perfect spring day, the sun was shining, birds were singing, all the trees were full of budding leaf and flowers. We had given his “body to the pleasant earth”; not, I felt, sleeping there alone, for France had become the resting-place of so many Englishmen who had been young, and brave, and beautiful. We had come back to Paris from St. Germain, the children and I. The restaurant was empty, and anyone entering would never have imagined from where we had come and what had been our errand that morning. The children spoke all the time of Harry, and spoke of him with laughter and smiles. It was “Do you remember what Pops said?”, and “What a joke it was that day when Pops did this, that, or the other”, until I realised that, though he had finished his work here, he would always live for the children and for me in the “laughter that remained”.

Graves are kept as green with laughter as with tears; but in our minds there is no feeling of “graves” or death, only the joy of looking back on the sunny days, which had been more full of sunshine because the figure which stood in the midst of the sunlight had been Harry.

Harry would have hated, almost resented, another illness, with all the attendant weariness; would have dreaded a repetition of all he went through in Canada. 197He, who loved to live every moment of his life to the full, always felt that “to pass out quickly” was the only way to hope to die. His wish was fulfilled when he died so suddenly in Paris. And yet, though he had loved his friends, loved his work, and loved, too, the public life which was the outcome of it, he loved best of all the quiet of his home; there, within its four walls, he would have, had it been possible, done all his work, and had all his friends gather round him.

A last token of the love which those friends bore him is being made to him now by “His Fellow-Craftsmen”; it is a bronze medallion, made by the sculptor, Mr. Albert Toft, and will be placed where Harry’s body lies, at the Cemetery at St. Germain-en-Laye. The beautiful thought originated with Mr. Cyril Harcourt and Mr. Dion Clayton Calthrop, and many who loved Harry have joined hands with them. As I write, a letter has just come to me from Mr. Harcourt, saying: “It is done, and we think beautifully. The face and hand, with the cigarette smoke curling up, are wonderful.” I can fancy that Harry sees it too, and says in that beautiful voice of his, full of all the tones and music I know so well:

Of his wonderful charm it is almost impossible to write, and yet it was essentially part of him, and a feature of his personality. Whatever his faults may 198have been—and he had them, as have all of us—it was his wonderful charm which made them so easy to forgive. As Fred Grove used to say of him:

His friends know, as I do, his generosity; that keen anxiety to help, either by money or kindness, anyone who was unfortunate. Harry never waited to wonder if his help was wise or judicious; a man or woman was poor, underfed, or unhappy, that was enough for him, and any help he could give was at once forthcoming, and given with such unfeigned pleasure at being able to help that I am convinced many of those who asked him for money went away feeling they had conferred a favour on Harry Esmond by borrowing his money.

On his work, both as a writer and an actor, I shall try to touch later. I have tried here to give you the man as I knew him: A boy with the soul of a poet; a man who always in his heart of hearts believed that most men were brave, and, unless life had been unkind, all women good; who evolved a philosophy which, though it may not have been very deep, was always gay; to whom life was full of small excitements, wonderful adventures, and splendid friends; who remained, after thirty years of married life, still a very perfect lover; and who understood his children and was their most loved playmate, because he never ceased himself to be a child; complex, as all artistic natures must be, and sometimes, if he seemed too ready to sacrifice the real to the imaginary, it was because the imaginary to him seemed so much more “worth while”.

Photograph by The Dover Street Studios, London, W. To face p. 199

Harry as Widgery Blake

“Palace of Puck”

199Perhaps the best summing-up of Harry that can be given is to quote Henley’s lines on Robert Louis Stevenson:

There, then, is the picture I have tried to make for you: Harry elated over the success of a play; Harry cast down over some unkind cut, grave for a moment, with his gravity turned to smiles at some happy thought which suddenly struck him; our hopes and fears; our good and bad times together; and over all, drowning all other sounds, comes the noise of Harry’s laughter and that of three happy children laughing with him.

CHAPTER XIV HARRY, THE PLAYWRIGHT

The last thing I wish to give you is a list of his plays, with the comment that they were a success or the reverse, adding what eminent critics said of them. I want only to tell you how he wrote his plays, and try to make you understand why he wrote as he did. If I quote what critics said of his work, it will not be because in this or that extract I find undiluted praise, but because that critic has—or, at least, so it seems to me—found truth.

Harry’s first play I have still; it is written in an exercise-book, and is called Geraldine, or Victor Cupid, or Love’s Victory. It is a highly coloured piece of work, which has never been inflicted upon the public; written, I imagine, when he was about twelve years old.

Not until we had been married for some years did Harry realise that he could write plays; he was passionately fond of acting, and wished to take up nothing that might interfere with his profession, but gradually the knowledge came to him that he could create characters on paper as well as on the stage.

201He made his plays long before he wrote them; I mean he thought the whole play out in its entirety, lived for weeks with the characters in his mind, came to know them intimately and to be absolutely at home with them, before he began actually to write the play in black and white.

I have known him to write the last act first, simply because he had planned the play so entirely before he put pen to paper. Often when at “Apple Porch” he would write for an hour, then go out on the golf course, knock a ball about for two or three holes, then return to his desk, and pick up the scene just where he had left it.

Grierson’s Way he wrote straight off in three weeks; there is hardly an alteration in the manuscript. He was intensely happy when writing; talked very little about his work, as a rule, but lived in two worlds—his friends in the play, and his family. He thought sad and gloomy plays were a mistake, and should not be written, or, if written, whatever the subject, the author “should be able to let in the sunshine somewhere”. He never wrote another Grierson’s Way.

The Wilderness was written under most difficult circumstances. Jack was three months old, he was frightfully ill for weeks, and I was up night after night nursing him. Harry used to sit in the study at the end of the passage, writing, writing, coming in now and again to see how we were getting on. Later, when Jack was better, Harry took a table and put it up in the loft over a wee stable we had, where the car was kept; there, daily, he and his big dog Diana, 202which George Alexander had given him, used to climb up the ladder that was flat up against the wall, and do his writing. The going up was all right, but the coming down was the difficulty. Harry put a heap of straw on the ground, and, after he had got half-way down the ladder, Diana used to put her fore paws on his shoulders, then Harry would drag her till her hind legs got to the edge of the trap-door, when she would drop on Harry, and together they would fall on to the straw; this went on for weeks.

His first play to be produced in London, with the exception of a one-act play called Rest, was Bogey; and here I must quote the Standard critic, who wrote of the play: “A fairy tale, if you will, but a fairy tale which deals with the passions of men and women.” That was so very true of so many of Harry’s plays; they were “fairy tales”, because that was how he saw life—as a wonderful fairy tale, with an ending that was intended to be happy, and, if it failed to be, was so because mortals had meddled with the story and spoiled it. A playwright should “hold the mirror up to Nature”, but the result must depend upon what he sees in the mirror; if he sees stories which have the gold and glitter of romance, then, in writing his play, which contains both, he is only depicting truly what he has seen.

Bogey was not the success that it might have been, but it was sufficient to prove finally to its writer that he had the power to write, a power which only needed developing. It lacked the concise beauty of his later work; he had not then learnt his craft; but, as many of the critics testified, it was the work of “a dramatist, 203a writer of plays, born, if as yet not fully made”.

He began to write other plays, and gradually, if you read them, you will find how he advances in his knowledge of words. He would seek for hours for the right word. He used to say that a word which was not exactly the one he wanted, and for which he was seeking, hurt him like a discord on the piano. From the actor’s point of view, Harry was generous; that is to say, every part he wrote was “worth playing”, and every part had a line which would appeal to the audience and stamp the actor on their minds, no matter how small the part might be. For example, in the first act of Eliza (a play for which Harry had no very great affection), the carman who brings in the rocking-horse has two lines to say, and two only, but one of them will gain a laugh from the audience, and lifts the part from being nothing but a “one-line part”.

Another point of his writing is that almost all the characters, where it is possible, have to depict a full range of emotions. Fun and pathos are in almost every part, every part is worthy of study, for by giving the time and thought to it the actor can come to realise the character in full, because behind the actual written word lies so much that may be found if it is sought for. That is due, I think, to the fact that Harry could, if necessary, have written the whole life of every character, because before he began to write he lived with them, as it were, for weeks.

In his plays—or, rather, in every act of his plays—you will find a great sense of completeness, not only in the actual “curtains” themselves, but in the construction 204of the act. As he says in The Wilderness, which George Alexander produced at the St. James’s Theatre, “the wheel has come full circle”. Take the second act of that particular play, which begins with Sir Harry Milanor bringing his uncle to the place in the woods where he, Sir Harry, played as a child. He begins to create an atmosphere of fairyland; he tells of how he stormed the pass, fought the elephants, killed the giants, and so won his kingdom. Then come the two children, who bring with them food for the fairies, and Sir Harry and his old uncle creep away. As the act goes on, mundane things come into the scene, but the curtain falls with the children again in the fairy ring, looking for the food which they brought the “good people”; it has gone, and the curtain falls with the children stating firmly, “I knowed they was hungry”. So, perhaps subconsciously, you wait for the next act with the spirit of fairyland and all that it means still with you. You have your belief in the good, simple, unquestioned things of life established, which is the author’s way of setting for his next scene.

Again, in the second act of Eliza, Monty Jordan sits reading plays for Vera Lawrence, whom Sandy is going to marry, and find her a theatre and a play to make her name, for she is an actress. You see Vera Lawrence as the centre of Sandy’s world; even his best friend is dragged in to work for her. So at the end of the act you find Vera Lawrence, her hair falling round her shoulders, to prove to Eliza that it is not a wig, while the latter stands nonplussed and dismayed. Vera is the “top note” all through the 205act, at the end as at the beginning; so your mind, holding the picture of the triumphant Vera, feels the same surprise as does Lady Pennybroke when in Act 3 Eliza enters, looking no longer a “sight, sticking in at the front and out at the back”, but quite charming, ready to conquer not only Monty Jordan, but Sandy Verrall. Act 2 has made the audience not only laugh at Eliza for what she is, but makes them contrast her with Vera, and realise how unlikely it is that she can ever enter successfully into the lists for Sandy’s affections, as she does eventually.

I suppose all playwrights have their favourite methods of gaining mental effects, and the “full circle” was one of Harry’s. He loved to have what are known as “good curtains”—that is, he loved a scene or act to end on a very high, strong note. Time after time you will find the act ends with some short sentence, but which is really the concentration of a long speech, so written that in a few words you get all the energy and determination, or all the pathos and tragedy, that a speech of many lines might have made less vivid.

For example, take the last act of Love and the Man (played by Forbes Robertson and Miss Kate Rorke), when Wagoneur comes to ask Lord Gaudminster if he may see his wife (who lies dead upstairs) and whom Wagoneur has loved.

“You won’t let me see her?” he asks, and Gaudminster answer simply “No.” Wagoneur turns and, half-blind with grief, gropes his way from the room. That is all! But could a speech of many pages be more eloquent?

206Again, the last lines of the second act of The Dangerous Age (played by Harry and myself). Jack lies hurt, perhaps dying, after an accident; Bill, his brother, sits with Egbert Inglefield waiting for news. His mother, Betty Dunbar, has gone to London to say good-bye to her lover. Egbert Inglefield, who also loves her, knows this, though of course Bill, her son, does not. Bill comes to Egbert and says, “Oh, Eggy, I feel rotten”; Egbert, knowing that all his hopes are falling in ruins, says “So do I, old man!” Very simple, but the tragedy of his answer touches you far more than a noble speech would do at that particular juncture.

With regard to the plays themselves, and again I do not want to give a long list of them, but only to touch one or two which seems to me particularly typical of the writer’s philosophy. I remember that after his death one paper spoke of him as the “gay philosopher”, and I should seek long before I found a better phrase in which to express his outlook. His own attitude was “valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck”, and so he drew his men and women. They may suffer, and you suffer with them; but it is healthy pain, which looks towards the east for the sunshine of to-morrow which will bring alleviation. There is no feeling in your mind, as you watch them, that “things can never be better”, that misfortune is inevitable; except in Grierson’s Way, which was one of his earlier works, when the critics were still waiting for “him to grow old, and sensible, and happy”, as one of them said after the production of My Lady Virtue, which Arthur Bourchier, 207Violet Vanbrugh, and myself played at the Garrick.

He calls certainly 75 per cent. of his plays “Comedies”, but they are comedies which touch very often on tragedy. And in a sense he was right in so calling them, for comedy, properly speaking, is a comment on the imperfections of human nature, which causes amusement to those who understand men and manners. So most of his plays are comedies, though some of them rely on tragic incidents for their story.

I have spoken before of Harry’s fondness for the “redeeming feature” in even his worst characters, and how few really bad people he ever tried to draw! I think as he wrote, or earlier still, when he began to think about his characters, he acquired a certain affection for them, which made him wish to make them something less than the villains he had at first intended. Added to that, his dislike of unpleasant things, and you get some idea of why he wrote the type of plays he did. Even Mr. Clement Scott, who disliked his first play, Bogey, so intensely, wrote of him later: “Believe me, his two last plays, When We Were Twenty-One and The Wilderness, will be English classics when all the mock Ibsenism and sham exercise in society salacity are buried in the dust of oblivion.” So he gave the world what I think are not only beautiful plays, but essentially kindly plays.

Eliza Comes to Stay he never liked very much; he thought it below the level of the rest of his work; and though this evergreen play has certainly been a 208very valuable property, yet I think Harry would have been better pleased by the same success of one of his other plays. Yet Eliza is lovable, even before she becomes “the new me”, even when she is still dressed to look “dreadfully respectable”. And what a part it is, too! what is called “an actress-proof” part—which means, in the vernacular of the stage, “it will play itself”; so it may, but what a difference when it is played—well, as it can be played by anyone who will take the trouble to study Eliza, and then, by the grace of God, is able to give her to the audience as, not a freak, but a very human, affectionate girl, standing rather breathless on the threshold of a world she does not know.

Perhaps his favourite play was The Dangerous Age, which we first played in America, where the audiences liked it enormously, and which, when we brought it to London, was not a great success. There is no character to which Harry has been more kind than to Betty Dunbar; she does ugly things, but you are never allowed to feel they have really touched her; she remains, after her indiscretions, still the same delightful and charming person; you are made to feel that the agony which she suffers, when she waits to hear if her little son will live or die, has wiped out all her foolishness—to give it no harsher name.

It was during a performance of this play that a young man turned to a friend who sat with him, and said “I can’t watch it; it’s terrible to see a woman’s soul stripped naked”; and a story he told later is of value here, because I think it gauges so correctly Harry’s attitude towards women. This man had 209been a sailor, and, talking over the play with a friend later, he took exception to his remark that “Betty Dunbar was a pretty worthless woman”, and to account for his defence of the character he told this story:—“I was once doing a Western Ocean trip, on a tramp steamer, in November. We struck a bad gale, and the Atlantic rollers stripped her of everything. Next morning I stood with the skipper on deck. There she was, rolling about, not rising to the rollers, but just lying there—down and out. I said to the skipper, ‘She looks what she is—a slut.’ He turned on me sharply and said, ‘Don’t you ever say that about a ship or a woman. If some man hadn’t scamped his job, and not done his best, she wouldn’t be looking as she does this morning’.” I think that was Harry’s feeling about women like his heroine in The Dangerous Age—that it was probably the fault of a very definite “someone” that they had not made a greater success of life.

He loved to write of children, and wrote of them with almost singular understanding and reality. The children in The Wilderness, the two boys in The Dangerous Age, the “Tommy” and the Midshipman in The Law Divine, the small caddie in A Kiss or Two, are all real children, full of humour and wonderful high spirits, who never—as do so many “stage children”—become tedious or boring.

A Kiss or Two was produced at the London Pavilion—a legitimate venture which followed years of variety. It was a charming play, and one speech from it—the legend—is one of the most delightful things Harry ever wrote. The character was an Irish 210soldier, Captain Patrick Delaney, and was played by Harry. I give part of it here:

“It’s a legend I’m tellin’ ye, an’ all true legends begin with ‘My Dear and My Judy.’ Well, My Dear and My Judy, one fine day Mother Nature, havin’ nothin’ better to do, she made a man. You know what a man is? That’s all right then—well, she made a man, and this mighty fine piece of work tickled her to death, it did, and so she went to bed devilish pleased with herself, had a beautiful dream, woke up next morning, went one better than the day before—she made a woman. Ye can’t say you know what a woman is, for she’s a mystery to the lot of us. Well, she made a woman, and then she sat down and looked at the pair of them, and the pair of them looked at each other, and mighty uneasy they felt, wondering what the devil it was all about. At last, after them two had been looking at each other till the perspiration was breaking out upon their foreheads, Mother Nature breaks the awful silence, and pointing to the woman, who was standing all of a quiver, with her eyes lookin’ anywhere except at the man, yet seein’ him all the time, Mother Nature pointin’ to the woman, say to the man, ‘That sweet lookin’ thing’s all yours,’ says she. ‘I can’t believe it,’ says the man with a gulp. Then Mother Nature, pointing to the man, who was looking at the woman as if there was nothin’ else in the wide, wide world worth looking at which there wasn’t—Mother Nature, pointing to the man, says to the woman, ‘An’ that fine looking thing’s all yours,’ says she. ‘Sure I know it,’ says the woman, bold as brass, and the fat was in the fire. 211But that’s only the beginning: it’s now that the trouble comes. At last, when everything had settled into its proper place between these two, the man came home one day and couldn’t find his collar stud. ‘Where’s that woman?’ says he. ‘Out walkin’ with another man,’ says they. ‘That won’t do at all,’ says he. ‘How’ll you stop it?’ says they. ‘I’ll make a law,’ says he, and that’s where the trouble began.... He sent for all the stuffy old men of his acquaintance, and they had a meeting by candle-light in the Old Town Hall. And he up an’ spoke to them: ‘Now all you gentlemen,’ says he, ‘have been casting sheep’s eyes at the girls. I’ve been watchin’ you at it the times I haven’t been busy doin’ it myself,’ says he. ‘Them girls have been casting them same sheep’s eyes back at you with interest,’ says he. ‘Can’t help it,’ says the old men. ‘It’s Nature,’ says they. ‘Nature is it?’ says he, ‘then there’s too much of this Nature about,’ says he, ‘and I’m goin’ to stop it.’ With that his eloquence carried the meeting, and they started in to make laws. Oh, them laws that they made, sure they forgot all about the days of their youth, when their blood was warm, and the sunshine was singin’ in their hearts. They just sat there on them cold stones in that old Town Hall, chilled to the marrow, and made them laws to stop love-making. And while they were at it, there came a tap at the door, and they all gave a jump which showed you they were doin’ something they were ashamed of. ‘What’s that?’ says they, and they all looked round and then there came another little tap, and the door slowly opened, 212and there in the sunlight stood a beautiful young woman, lookin’ in at them, her eyes all agog with wonder. ‘What the divil are you doin’?’ says she. ‘None of your business,’ says they. ‘True for you,’ says she. An’ she took them at their word, and slammed the door, an’ she’s been slamming the door on them same laws ever since!”

I have given that speech fully, because it seems to me to be so very much the spirit in which Harry wrote and to show so well his attitude towards life—fantastic, ideal, almost but not quite a fairy tale.

You will find it, too, in The Law Divine (which Harry played at Wyndham’s Theatre for so long with Miss Jessie Winter), when Edie tells her son about her honeymoon, when she says: “Ordinary people! We were the children of the moon, we were the spirits of sea mist and soft night air—Dads said we were.” The whole scene is full of that imagery which was so much part of the writer’s mental composition.

In Bad Hats, which play he renamed, having first called it The Rotten Brigade, and which at the production was called Birds of a Feather, he wrote another of those plays which, though called by the author “a comedy”, had all the elements of a tragedy. Harry intended to write another First Act, making the First Act the Second, in order that the existing circumstances would be more easy for the audience to grasp. It was, and is, a great play, and Jacob Ussher is one of the finest character-studies he ever created.

213I should have liked to have dealt more fully with many of his less-well-known plays; with One Summer’s Day, which Charles Hawtrey produced, and which was the first emotional part he had ever played, and of which I am asked so often, “When are you going to revive it?”; with Grierson’s Way, which caused so much comment when it was produced; with The Sentimentalist, with its wonderful first act, the play being the story of a man’s life, which was praised for its beauty and imagination by some, while others asked, “What’s it all about?”

Harry was accused of writing “sugary” plays, sentimental plays, plays which were thin, and the like; but, in answer to these accusations, I can only quote two critics and give my own opinion afterwards. One of them says: “This is what they call pinchbeck sentiment. I don’t know. It convinced me, and that was quite enough. This is the kind of human story that has elicited the art of a Frederic Robson, a Johnnie Toole, and a Henry Irving in England.” And the other: “Do you know what personal charm is? It is the effect produced by a man or a woman who enters a room, makes a few graceful remarks, says a few words very much to the point in an agreeable voice, and suddenly creates an atmosphere which wins everybody around. Mr. Esmond as a playwright possesses it.” And my own opinion, which is that, if Harry wrote of charming, simple, loving, and lovable people, it was because that was how he found his fellow-men; that his characters who go through three acts lightly, bravely, and gallantly, are just as real as the characters in those rather depressing 214plays which are hailed as “slices of life”—and much more entertaining.

He filled his plays with beautiful things about life, because he honestly thought life itself was beautiful; he made his men and women “straight” and with decent impulses, because he was convinced that was how God made real people; and he gave his plays, or nearly all of them, “happy endings”, because he thought that “those who were good shall be happy”. That was how Harry “held the mirror up to Nature”, and how he tried to do what no artist can do more than succeed in doing:

CHAPTER XV HARRY, THE ACTOR

“There comes a time in every man’s life when his own judgment is of greater use to him than other people’s.”

“I have been lectured a good deal during my career.”

No man in his time played more parts than Harry. To begin with, he started very young, started off from the bosom of a family which had no knowledge of the stage. So innocent were they of the life on which he was embarking, that his mother, hearing that he had joined a company of touring actors, asked, in all seriousness, “What time is the caravan calling for you, my dear?”

He started his career with a salary of ten shillings a week, and played anything and everything that was offered. He used to tell the story of “how he played a wave”—lying underneath a very dusty floor cloth, “billowing up and down”—and a nasty, stuffy business it must have been, too! Imagine the horror of the modern young actor, touring the provinces, if he were asked to lie on the stage and give an impersonation of that element which Britain is popularly reputed to rule!

216One of his first real parts—and I doubt if it was even a speaking part—was that of a waiter who had to carry on a basket of refreshments for the guests at a picnic. Harry was determined to make the part “stand out”. He took the script back to his rooms—rooms, did I say? Room, a combined room, at probably eight shillings a week—and thought over it very earnestly. Inspiration came to him—he would make the waiter a very lame man with an elaborate limp; and at rehearsal next day he entered limping. Mr. Fernandez, the producer, shouted from the stalls, “Here, here, my boy, what are you doing?”, and added very seriously, “never fool with a part, take your work seriously. Take it from him, give it to somebody else!” That was the result of Harry’s first attempt at characterisation. You must remember that at this time he was about 15 or 16, very slight and boyish-looking, and he went round the provinces playing heavy villains in The Stranglers of Paris, The Corsican Brothers, Uriah Heep, Oliver Twist, etc. Think of a boy of that age portraying “Bill Sykes”! However, he stuck to the provinces for some time, like many another actor who won his spurs in London after a long and perhaps rather dreary apprenticeship; though I cannot believe that Harry ever found any acting dreary, he loved it too well.

When at last he came to London it was to appear in The Panel Picture, in which he made an amazing success in the part of a boy who was shot on the stage and had a big death scene; and then the round of playing old men began. I have told how, when I 217first met him, he was playing the part of a villain, and so padded as to be almost unrecognisable. When, many years later, he went to George Alexander, it was to play “Cayley Drummle”, the old man in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, and it took George Alexander a long time to believe that Harry could make a success of a part which was suited to his years. This, in spite of the fact that he had already played the boy in Sweet Nancy, when Clement Scott (who disliked his first play so heartily) lifted his hands to the skies and “thanked Heaven for this perfect actor!” When George Alexander produced Much Ado, I remember he sent for Harry and asked him tentatively if he thought he could play “Claudio”. Harry was delighted at the prospect, and I remember, too, his disappointment when he was finally cast for “Verges”. Later came Henry Arthur Jones’s Masqueraders, when at last his chance came; he played a young man, and won not only the heart of George Alexander, but the heart of the public, by his performance.

I hesitate to use the word “genius”; but my excuse, if one is needed, must be that others used it before in referring to Harry. In the old days, when we all used to go holiday-making together, when Harry, Gerald du Maurier, and Charles Hallard were almost inseparable companions, they were known as “The Gent., The Genius, and The Young Greek God”—one of those happy phrases, coined under sunny skies, which, under all the fun that prompts them, have a sub-stratum of truth. The phrase has lived, for only a year ago Gerald du 218Maurier wrote to me, saying, “And when we meet, I will be the Young Greek God again, and we will talk of the Genius—bless him!” So I use the word in connection with Harry as an actor, and will only modify it by adding that he had one handicap—he was too versatile. As a young man he could play old men, and play them well, even brilliantly. As an older man he could still play young men, who were indeed young, not creatures born of grease paint and wigs, whose only attempt at being young came from affected movements and smart clothes.

His character-studies were real people, not bundles of eccentricities, with amazing and repulsive tricks; they were real old people, treated, where it was demanded, with humour, but a humour which was from the heart and spoke to the heart, and not only apparent to the eye of the beholder. His young men were charming, virile, and obviously enjoying life. He could play devout lovers, rakes (and what delightful rakes, too, they were!), old men, and mad men, and play them all with more than a touch of genius. There you had his handicap: from the very fact of the excellence of all he did, he was never allowed to specialise. He never became definitely associated with any special type of part. It never became a case of “No one can play that except Harry Esmond”, for there was probably a part in almost every play which Harry Esmond could have played, and played with charm and distinction.

Photograph by Alfred Ellis, London, W. To face p. 218

Harry as Major Blencoe

“The Tree of Knowledge”

219Consider for a moment some of the parts which he played, and consider the variety of them. There is “Little Billee”, a part which I find many people remember best; “Kean”, the mad musician, in Grierson’s Way; “D’Artagnan” in The Three Musketeers; “Sir Benjamin Backbite” in The School for Scandal; “Touchstone” in As You Like It; old “Jacob Ussher” in Birds of a Feather; and various characters in Dear Brutus, The Times, Lights Out, Chance, The Idol. They were all parts which were as different as could well be imagined, and every one worthy of notice, and played with sympathy and great understanding.

When the Royal Performance of Trilby was given, as far as possible it was attempted to present the original cast. Harry was asked to play the “young and tender Little Billee”. At first he refused, saying that he was too old, but finally he was persuaded to appear. Phyllis Neilson Terry was to play “Trilby”, and I remember hearing of her dismay when she was told who was to be “Billee”. She remembered seeing Harry in the part when she “was a little girl”! At the dress rehearsal her fears vanished. She came up to me and told me what she had feared. “But now,” she said, “well, just look at him; he’s straight from the nursery; my husband says I’m baby-snatching.”

Swing the pendulum to the other side, and recall his “Jacob Ussher” in his own play, Birds of a Feather—the old Jew, the modern Shylock, who sees himself bereft of the only thing he loves in life, his daughter. Ussher is no more ashamed of the way in which he has made his money than Shylock was, but he, with all his pride of race, is very definitely ashamed that his daughter should wish to marry such 220a poor “aristocratic fish” as “Rupert Herringham”. How the part includes every note in the scale of the emotions; how Ussher alternates between the over-indulgent father and the martinet who rules his women exactly as his forefathers did; how he bullies and cajoles; how he uses persuasion and force; how he raves, rails, and finally weeps; and who, when Harry played him, wept not as an Englishman, but as a Jew who sees, in the ruin of his daughter, the destruction of the Temple and the Holy City by those who “know not the Law and the Prophets”. After seeing the play, a Jew told him that the only disappointment, the only thing which seemed “unreal”, was to find Harry seated in his dressing-room “talking English and not Hebrew”; and yet a critic said of this performance that “as far as characterisation is concerned, Ussher might have been a Gentile”. Let that critic see to it that he knows well the sons of Jacob, and then let him recall the performance at the Globe Theatre, with Harry Esmond as “one of them”.

I have told you how he came to play “D’Artagnan” in the Musketeers, in the place of Lewis Waller, and I remember the doubts which were expressed everywhere as to whether Harry was sufficiently robust and virile to play the part of the Gascon soldier of fortune. How Harry, realising that so far as personal appearance went he was as unlike the traditional hero of Dumas’ romance as well could be imagined, set to work to give such a reading that his slimness, his boyishness, his delicate air of romance, might be changed from handicaps to assets. Lewis 221Waller was probably more the man Dumas had in his mind; he was outwardly the typical mercenary fire-eater with a love of adventure, and a great-hearted courage behind it all; Harry Esmond was more like the conventional “Athos”, but he made you feel that here was the “soldier in spite of himself”; here was the son of Gascony who might so easily have been made a courtier or even a priest, but for the love of adventure, the romance, the high-spirited courage, which had driven him out to join the King’s Musketeers at any cost. Speaking of this part reminds me that during the run of the play Harry allowed his hair to grow, so that he did not need to wear a full wig. He was riding down the King’s Road one morning on his bicycle, when two small boys caught sight of him. “’Ere, Bill,” shouted one, “’ere’s a poet.” The other gazed at Harry, and returned with scorn, “Garn wiv yer, that ain’t a poet, that’s a bloomin’ b——dy poem.”

When Lewis Waller produced Romeo and Juliet, Harry was cast for “Mercutio”, a part which called for all the gaiety, all the youth, all the gallantry which he knew so well how to portray. I find that one critic said of his performance that “it had that touch of mystery which Mr. Esmond has given before, a touch of aloofness, indefinably appealing and tragic”, which seems to me to sum up the performance admirably. I find, too, another critic who says “he cannot interpret that youthfulness which springs from the joy of living”—“the joy of living”, which was an integral part of the man all his life!

Speaking of “Mercutio” brings me to another 222Shakespearean part which Harry played—that of “Touchstone”. And here again he committed the crime of playing “Touchstone” as he felt he should be played, not as custom, convention, and tradition dictated. The first intimation that he was outraging the feelings of these three old gods came at rehearsal, when on the exit “bag and baggage, scrip and scrippage” the producer told him “Here you exit, dancing. You know what I mean: ‘the light fantastic toe’.” Harry did know, and he did not see why the exit demanded that particular method. He asked “Why?” “Why?” repeated the producer, Mr. H. H. Vernon; “why? Well, because it is always made like that.” Again Harry asked “Yes, but why? what’s the reason?” “Reason,” repeated Mr. Vernon, “I don’t know any reason; it’s always done like that.” “Give me a reason,” Harry begged, “and if it’s a good one, I’ll think it over”; but no reason was forthcoming, except the reiteration that “it had always been done so, etc.” Now, to Harry, “Touchstone” was a “jester”, not a “clown”, and he believed that when Shakespeare so designated him it was used in the sense of “one who clowns or jests”; he saw no reason to make “Touchstone” anything but a “clown” in name, for he held that his words prove him to be the cleverest man in the play, and that he is the forerunner of “Jack Point”, “Grimaldi”, and even poor dear pathetic Dan Leno and Charlie Chaplin—the great comedians who make you laugh with the tears never very far from your eyes, because they are so tragically funny; the comedians whose comedy is ever very nearly tragedy, and who, when they cease to convulse their audiences, look out at the world with eyes that have in them no mirth, but a great sadness, which springs from knowledge that they “are paid to be funny”; that feeling which makes W. S. Gilbert’s “Point” sing:

Photograph by Gabell & Co., London, W. To face p. 222

Harry as Touchstone

“As You Like It”

That is the cry of your jester all the world over, and that was the feeling which existed in Harry’s mind when he depicted “Touchstone” as a rather sardonic, melancholy person, with a great brain, the only use for which he can find is to make people laugh.

I will take only two instances to justify his idea of “Touchstone”. The first: Are the words

those of a “clown” or “a fool” in the ordinary sense?

Take also “Corin’s” words:

He is frankly puzzled by the Jester’s humour. Yet “Corin” is a typical shepherd of the times, and an English shepherd (for all we meet him in the Forest of Arden): as such, he was used to the jokes and witticisms of the ordinary clown; he had “roared his 224ribs out” at them at the village fairs. This “Touchstone” is no ordinary clown, and “Corin” finds his humour makes a demand upon the head; he is more than “funny”, he is the Court wit. Read the conversation which has gone before, and you will find that this is indeed “The Court Jester”, and a courtier before he was a jester—a man accustomed to sharpen his wits upon those of the men he met at Courts. And so Harry gave him—a wise man, a disappointed, cynical man, but a man who could afford to value the wit of those around him at its proper worth—less than his own.

When Sir Herbert Tree revived The School for Scandal, Harry played “Sir Benjamin Backbite”. Harry, Who loved sincerity, and truth, and simplicity, played the affected fop of the period, with his cane, his lace handkerchief, his fur muff, his bouquet, and his general air of affectation, and played him so that to watch and listen to it was a sheer delight.

These are but a few of his parts—the parts which, when he played them, were both praised and blamed. I want to touch on his method of playing, and call to your memory some of the features which characterised it. He was always sincere; he might, and did (as in Eliza), get bored with a part, but he was too good an actor, too proud of his work, ever to let it appear to an audience.

His voice was wonderful; he could put more tenderness, without the least touch of sentimentality, into his words than anyone I ever heard. To hear Harry say “My dear”, as he did in The Dangerous Age and again in The Law Divine, was to hear all 225the essence of love-making, with all the love in the world behind it, put into two words.

His gesture was superb; he was not, as so many actors are, apparently afraid of using a big sweeping movement; he (perhaps it was the Irishman in him) was never afraid that a big gesture would look ridiculous. He knew that anything, whether tone of voice or gesture or movement is very rarely ridiculous if it is prompted by real feeling. He knew that the real justification for anything an actor may do on the stage is “because I feel it”, not “because I think it will look effective”. As a producer—and he was one of the best producers I have ever seen—he got the very last ounce out of his company because he always, when asked “What do you want me to do here?”, answered “What do you feel you want to do?” He “nursed” his company, and watched them grow strong under his care.

All his movements were good. He could use his feet in a way that, if anyone had tried to copy, would have looked ridiculous. He had a little rapid trick of shifting from one foot to the other, when he was worried or uncertain, which I have never seen attempted by anyone else. He did it in the last act of Twenty-One, when the girl he loves is trying to get him to propose to her; he used it again in A Kiss or Two, and it gave you the keynote to the man’s mental attitude as much as his spoken words. In this latter play, during his telling of the “Legend”, which I have quoted in another chapter, he used that sweeping gesture of his arm of which I have spoken. Seated in a chair, leaning forward, carried away by 226the story he tells, he comes to the words, “and there in the sunlight stood a beautiful young woman”. Out went his arm, his eyes following it, the fingers outspread to take in the whole of the picture, until, when he looked behind him, looked to where his arm and hand pointed, you might almost have seen her, “her eyes all agog with laughter”.

He was curiously affected by the parts he played; I mean he actually became very much the man he depicted on the stage. When he played old men, he would come home in the evening still very much “in the part”, inclined to walk slowly and move rather stiffly. When he played young men—such as “Captain Pat Delaney”, for example—he was gallant, walked buoyantly, and very evidently was thoroughly in love with life. I have known him at such times, when we were out together, raise his hat to any girl we met who was young and pretty—not because he wanted to speak to her, certainly not because he knew her, but simply because he loved pretty girls, and wanted an excuse to smile at them, all from the pure joy of being alive.

So there is Harry Esmond, the actor, as I knew him—enjoying his work, never letting it sink to anything less than a profession of which he was very proud. He chose the Stage because he loved it, and he loved it as long as he lived. He studied each part with a kind of concentrated interest, and played them as he believed them to be meant to be played. I think for everything he did he could have given a definite and sufficient reason, and so believed in what he did. “He hath the letter, observe his construction of it”; 227and if his construction was new or strange, unconventional or untraditional, it was so because that was how Harry Esmond was convinced it should be.

His position as an actor was something of the attitude of “How happy I could be with either, were t’other dear charmer away”. He loved all his work, whether character-studies, gallant soldiers, or tender lovers; they all claimed the best that was in him, and, as the best was “very good”, it became not what he could play, but what he could not play. So I review them mentally, the parts that Harry played, and wonder if he had been less gifted, if he had not had in his composition that very big streak of genius, whether he might not perhaps have been one of the names which will be handed down to posterity as “the world’s greatest actors”. Then I ask myself in which direction should he have concentrated, and which of the big parts that he played would I have been willing to have missed. Which? I cannot decide. “D’Artagnan”, “Touchstone”, “Sandy”, “Kean”, “Jacob Ussher”, “Mercutio”, even that really poor part “Little Billee”, were all so good that I am glad he played them. I think, too, that the success of them all came from a great understanding as well as great observation, and that was why “one man in his time” played so many parts, and played them all with more than ordinary distinction and feeling.

CHAPTER XVI AND LAST

So I come to the end, so far as one can come to the end of recollections and memories, for each one brings with it many others; they crowd in upon me as I write, and I have to be very firm with myself and shut the door in the face of many.

I have tried to tell you some of the incidents which have amused and interested me; I have tried to make you see men and women as I have seen them; and have tried to make you walk with me down “life’s busy street”. I have tried to pay the tribute of affection and regard to the various “Cæsars” I have known, and if in this book any names are missing—names of men and women who have been, and are, my very dear and good friends—I can only tell them that they are not missing in my heart.

I look back over the years that are past, look back to the time when I first came to London, and looked on “leading ladies” and “leading men” as giants who walked the earth, when I used to wonder if I could ever hope to be one of them; and then, it seemed with wonderful swiftness, the years flew past and, behold! I was a leading lady myself. That 229is one of the wonderful tricks life plays for our mystification: the far-off hope of “some day” becomes the realisation of “to-day”.

To-day, as I sit writing this, I can look out on the garden of “Apple Porch”—the house that Harry and I almost built together; the garden which we turned, and changed, and planted, to make it what it has become, “our ideal garden”. And in that garden ghosts walk for me—not “bogeys”, but kindly spirits of men and women who lived and laughed with us as friends; not that in life all of them walked in this garden of ours, but because now they come to join the procession which moves there. With them are many who are still with me, and whose companionship still helps to make life very happy. They join the others, and walk in my garden, to remind me of the times we have laughed together, and to assure me that life in the future still has good things for me.

For, make no mistake, youth is very wonderful, youth is very beautiful, but it passes and leaves behind, if you will only try to cultivate it, something which can never pass away: that is the youth that is not a question of years, but of humanity and a young heart. If you can still feel the delight of the first primrose, if you can still feel your heart leap at the sight of the leaves throwing off their winter coats and showing the first vivid green of the spring; if you can stand in the glory of a sunny day in March and thank God for His annual proof of the Resurrection, the re-birth of what all through the winter had seemed dead and is “now alive again”—then you 230are one of those whom the gods love; you will die young, for you can never grow old.

So, in my garden, the procession of ever-young people passes.

Over in that far corner is Herbert Lindon, sitting at an easel, painting a picture of the house. “A plain man, my masters”, but the kindliest of friends, with the most helpful nature in the world. Behind him stands Forbes Robertson, with his beautiful face, his wonderful voice, and his courtly manners. Had he lived five hundred years ago, he would have ridden out, dressed in shining armour, to fight for the Right against the Wrongs of the World; but, dressed in the clothes of 1923, he is still a knight, the instinctive supporter of the weak against the strong, the good against the evil.

Lawrence Kellie passes my window, a cigar in his mouth, and pauses a moment to tell me that he is going in to play some of his own compositions, to my great delight. On the golf links, outside the garden, I can see Charles Frohman, looking like a kindly “brownie”; he is flying a huge kite, so big that he might be in danger of flying after the kite, were it not for two small boys, Jack and Bill, who are holding fast to his legs.

Arthur Collins, very spruce and dapper, passes with E. S. Willard; they tell me they are going to persuade Frohman to leave his kite-flying and come in to play poker with them and Fred Terry.

Fred Terry stops outside the window for a talk with me, and reminds me of the winter he came to stay with us here, when Harry would insist upon his 231going out, in a biting east wind, to see “the beauty of the night”! I ask him if he remembers the Bank Holiday when he was with us, when Harry had to go back to a rehearsal of some approaching production? How he (Fred) was taken ill with a bad heart attack, and that, rather than let me see how he was suffering, for fear the sight should frighten me, he shut himself up in a room and refused to let me enter. Fred Terry, large and genial, wearing eye-glasses, moves away, and I see him stop to speak to Lottie Venne, who on very high heels, looking like a very alert, very “wide awake” bird, is coming towards us, her heels tapping on the stones of the path.

That gentle-looking woman over there is Marion Terry, and with her Lena Ashwell, talking, I am certain, of some plan or scheme which she is preparing to “carry through” with her extraordinary capacity and originality.

You see that squarely built man yonder, who looks—what he is—a sailor? That is Ernest Shackleton. He comes over to me, bringing his book with him. He shows me the title—one word, South—and asks if I think Harry will consider making it into a film-play. I tell him that the day England publicly mourned his loss in St. Paul’s Cathedral, during the service a sudden ray of sunlight came through one of the painted windows and struck the wall, just under the dome; how I followed it with my eyes, and saw that it fell on the words “The glory of his works endureth forever”. I think he smiles a little, and says, as Englishmen do when praised for what they 232have done, “Oh, I didn’t do anything very great or glorious.”

Here is a man who, too, has done great things. An explorer also, but he has explored the depths of humanity; he has seen just how far his fellow-men and women can fall, and yet he still retains his faith in “the good that is in the worst of us”. It is W. T. Waddy, the Metropolitan magistrate. Burns’s prayer that we should “deal gently with your brother man, still gentler sister woman” has no application to Mr. Waddy; he “keeps the faith” that believes that fundamentally humanity is good, and each day in his work he testifies to it. I remind him that it was his father, Judge Waddy, who first escorted me to the House of Commons.

Over there is “Billy” Congreave, who gained the Victoria Cross and made the Great Sacrifice in the war. With him, telling his battles over again, is Dr. Leahy. He left his leg at the Marne, but that did not prevent him enjoying, as he does still, a round or two with the gloves. I should think he “enjoys” it more than his opponent, for “Micky” Leahy is an enormous man. He appears to be the last man in the world likely to possess, as he does, wonderful gifts of healing.

Who is that woman laughing at some joke made by the man walking with her? She is Dame May Whitty, and the man is Sir Alfred Fripp. You see him at his very best when surrounded by his wife and ’a large family of very healthy children. She, Dame Whitty, is a friend of thirty years, and her affection and goodness to me have never altered.

233The woman who has just joined them is Susanne Sheldon. I parody the saying, “better twenty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay” when speaking of Suzanne, and say “better one day of Susanne than a month of the people who lack her understanding and great heart.” Some day go to the Children’s Hospital in Great Ormond Street, and hear of the work she has done there; they will tell you more than I can, for she does not talk of all she does.

The lame man, who looks so fierce, is Sydney Valentine. He looks fierce, and rather as though he had more brain than heart. His looks belie his nature. He leans on his stick by my window, and we talk of the early days of the Actors’ Association. I remind him of the splendid fight he made to gain the Standard Contract for the acting profession. I ask him, “Do you remember the Lyric Theatre meeting?”, and I add some hard things about the people who attacked him there. He smiles, and reminds me of our own Suffrage motto (and how he used to hate the Suffrage Movement, too!), “The aim is everything”, and adds “After all, we won our battle, didn’t we?”

J. L. Toole, coming up, hears the last sentence, and asks, “Battle, what battle?” Just as I am about to answer, he pops a “bullseye” into my mouth, as he used to years ago when I was playing with him on the stage. Toole laughs, and I laugh with him; but our laughter is checked by a tall man, with a heavy moustache, who, with a melancholy face, is filling a pipe from a tobacco-pouch like a sack—and not a very small sack, either! He brings an air of 234tragedy with him, and I ask, “What is the matter, Aubrey?”

It is Aubrey Smith, the “Round the Corner Smith” who took the first English cricket eleven to South Africa, and still, when his work on the stage allows him, will rush away to Lords or the Oval to watch a match. “Haven’t you heard?” he asks; and adds, “Dreadful, dreadful; I don’t know what England’s coming to.” “What has happened?” I ask again. He looks at me sadly and tells me—“England has lost the Test Match!” He wanders away, and a few minutes later I hear him laughing—a laugh which matches him for size. He is probably telling the woman he is talking to (Elizabeth Fagan) of the new pig-styes he has built at West Drayton.

There is Marie Tempest, and how fascinating she is! She has the cleverest tongue and the most sparkling humour of any woman I know. The woman near her is Julia Neilson, a dream of loveliness, and with a nature as lovely as her face. There, too, are Lady Martin Harvey and Lady Tree—Lady Tree, whom I first understood when I met her under circumstances which were very difficult for us both; and who showed me then what “manner of woman” she is, so that ever since I have loved and admired her. And Nell Harvey, who can face the rough patches of life with equanimity, and who can “walk with kings” without losing that “common touch” which gives her the breadth of vision, the tolerance, and kindness which have made her ever ready to give help to those who need it.

This man coming towards me, his hands clasped 235behind him, who looks as if he were meditating deeply, is Sir Charles Wyndham. When he was playing in London, and Harry was a very young actor in the provinces, and had heard of but had never seen Charles Wyndham, one paper said it was “a pity that Mr. Esmond has tried to give such a slavish imitation of the great actor”. He stands for a moment to ask me if I remember the evening he came to see The Dangerous Age, and repeats again his admiration and praise of the play. I tell him that I remember, also, how after the play he sat in Harry’s dressing-room for an hour and a half, delighting both of us with his stories of the stage, “past and present”.

He passes on, and you see him stop to speak to Anthony Hope, that delightful man who possesses a manner of joyous cynicism of which one never tires. George Alexander has joined them, perhaps speaking of the success of The Prisoner of Zenda. You notice his beautiful white hair. Once, in The Wilderness, he had to darken it, and as in the play he had to lay his head on my shoulder, my dress was gradually marked with the stain he used for his hair.

I stand and reach out to shake the hand of Lewis Waller, and ask him if he is still “putting square pegs into round holes”. He asks, in his beautiful voice that was the salvation of so many really poor plays, what I mean. I remind him of a play, many years ago, when Harry remonstrated with him and said that some of the parts in the production were played so badly, adding “Why do you engage such people? they are not, and never will be, actors”; 236and how Lewis Waller replied, “I know, I know, Harry, but I would sooner have round pegs in square holes than not have people round me who love me.” Dear Will! He moves away, speaking to this person and that person, and giving to each one something of his very gentle and infinitely lovable personality.

That beautiful woman, surely “God’s most wonderful handiwork”, to whom Will is speaking now, is Maxine Elliott; she is Jill’s God-mother, another of the lovely women whose faces are only the mirrors of the natures which lie beneath.

The sound of the piano reaches me, and I look to see if Lawrence Kellie is still playing, and have to look twice before I can believe that it is not he who sits playing, but Raymond Rose, who is so wonderfully like him. Perhaps he is at work composing, not this time for His Majesty’s Theatre, but, like Henry Purcell, for “that blessed place where only his music can be excelled”.

Then the gate at the end of the garden opens, and, carrying a bag of golf clubs, and clad in an old coat and equally old trousers which seem to be “draped” round his ankles, comes Harry. He comes up to the window, full of the joy of life and never-ending youth; leaning his arms on the window-sill, he looks at the men and women in the garden, and smiles.

“Our friends,” I tell him.

And he repeats after me, “Yes, our friends.” After a moment he goes on, thoughtfully: “I used to tell you that ‘Friendship was a question of streets’; I think I was wrong: it’s something more than that.” And, as if to prove his words, we both see Malcolm Watson walking in the garden, the kindly Scot, who never fails anyone, a real friend of countless years.

Photograph by Miss Compton Collier, London, N.W.6. To face p. 237

Apple Porch

237“I think it is—something more than that,” I answer.

As we talk, the sun suddenly blazes out, filling all the garden with light; Harry stretches out his hand, smiling, and says: “Sunshine! Let’s go out!”

So the dream ends, but the garden and the sunshine remain; and not only the garden and the sunshine, but the knowledge that “these are my friends”; that these men and women have known and, I think, loved me, as I have known and loved them; and the fact that they have been and are, many of them, still in my life, making the world a finer and cleaner place in which to live.

That is how I should wish to look back on life: not always easy, or smooth, or always happy, but with so much that has been worth while, so much that has been gay and splendid.

Gradually everything falls into its right perspective; things which seemed so important, so tragic, so difficult “at the time”—why, now one can almost look back and laugh. Not everything: the things which were rooted in beliefs and convictions do not shrink with the years; and I am glad, and even a little proud, that I lived through the time which held the Boer War, the Suffrage Campaign, and the Greatest World Struggle that the world has ever seen—please God, the Last Great War of All!

238My work, my own work, it has been hard—there have been difficult times, when lack of understanding made work less of a joy than it should have been—but, looking at it all as a whole, and not as a series of detached memories, it has been very good to do, and I have been very happy in doing it. It has kept my brain working, and, I think, kept my heart young; and never once since the front door of my father’s house closed behind me, and I left home in that storm of parental wrath, have I regretted that I chose the Stage as a profession.

I have tried to tell you something of what the years have brought, with no real thought except that it was a joy to me to remember it all. I have not tried to “point a moral or adorn a tale”, but simply to tell my story as it happened. Yet there is surely a moral—or, at least, some lesson—which has been learnt in all the years of work and play. I think it is this: Let God’s sunlight into your lives, live in the sunlight, and let it keep you young. For youth is the thing which makes life really worth living, youth which means the enjoyment of small things, youth which means warm affections, and which means also the absence of doubting and distrusting which, if you allow it, will take so much of the glorious colour out of life’s pictures.

So, in Harry’s words, I would end all I have tried to tell you by saying:

APPENDICES — APPENDIX I PARTS PLAYED BY EVA MOORE — APPENDIX II SOME PARTS PLAYED BY H. V. ESMOND — APPENDIX III PLAYS WRITTEN BY H. V. ESMOND — SHORT PLAYS

INDEX

• 250Actors’ Association, 40, 233.
• Actresses’ Franchise League, 77, 94, 95.
• Adams, Maude, 149.
• Adelphi Theatre, The, 13.
• Ainley, Henry, 61, 109.
• Albani, Madame, 47.
• Aldwych Theatre, The, 70.
• Alexander, Sir George, 43, 44, 54–57, 59, 61, 66, 103, 134, 192, 202, 216, 235.
• Alexander, Lady, 111.
• Alhambra, The, 129.
• Allen, Lady, 83, 84.
• Ambulance Corps, The, 75.
• America, 55, 57, 62, 83, 138, 143, 145–147, 149, 150, 181.
• Andresson, Herr, 111.
• Apple Porch, 74, 112, 163, 201, 229.
• Archer, William, 179.
• Army of Occupation, The, 34, 86.
• Asche, Oscar, 103.
• Ashwell, Lena, 85, 94, 95, 231.
• Asquith, Mrs. H. H., 161.
• Astor, M.P., The Rt. Hon. Viscountess, 163.
• As You Like It, 219.
• Austin, Alfred, 160.
• Australia, 23, 35, 36, 84.
• Authors’ Society, The, 148, 149.
• Aynesworth, Allen, 25, 62.
• Bad Hats, 212.
• Bailey, Rt. Hon. W. H., 57.
• Barker, Granville, 48, 73, 109.
• Barrie, Bart., Sir James, 63, 140.
• Bat, The, 72.
• Beardsley, Aubrey, 120.
• Beerbohm, Max, 179.
• Belgium, 75.
• Belle Marseille, La, 69.
• Bennett, Arnold, 70.
• Bennett, Marguerite Arnold, 182.
• Berhens, Herr, 111, 112.
• Berlin, 164, 165.
• Berry, W. H., 133.
• Biff Bang, 156.
• Billington, Theresa, 98.
• Billy’s Little Love Affair, 62, 63.
• Birds of a Feather, 212, 219.
• Blind Marriage, The, 46.
• Bogey, 43–46, 202, 207.
• Bourchier, Arthur, 60, 110, 111, 206.
• Brandram, Rosina, 32.
• Breed of the Treshams, The, 136.
• Brighton, 2, 3, 9–12, 15, 17, 47, 55, 67.
• 251British Army, The, 34.
• Broken Sixpence, The, 21.
• Brooke, Rupert, 86, 193.
• Brookfield, Charles, 83, 34.
• Brough, Fanny, 30, 31.
• Brough, Lal, 31.
• Brough, Mary, 21.
• Brough, Sydney, 31, 32.
• Browne, Graham, 63.
• Bruce, Nigel, 160.
• Buest, Scot, 14.
• Burge, Dick, 137.
• Burnett, Mrs. Hodgson, 68.
• Butler, The, 22.
• Cabinet Minister, The, 24–26.
• Cæsar’s Wife, 70.
• Calthrop, Dion Clayton, 197.
• Calvert, Mrs., 50.
• Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 128, 129.
• Canada, 150, 151.
• Carnac Sahib, 53, 117.
• Carr, Professor, 152.
• Carson, Mrs., 31.
• Carte D’Oyley, 26.
• Carter, Mrs., 86.
• Castle, Egerton, 66.
• Cecil, Arthur, 25.
• Chamberlain, Austen, 90.
• Chance, 219.
• Channings, The, 193.
• Chaplin, Charlie, 222.
• Chelsea Palace, The, 121.
• Chevalier, Albert, 68.
• Chirgwin, George, 123, 124.
• Chisholm, Miss Marie, 75, 76, 79.
• Chu Chin Chow, 72.
• Churchill, M.P., The Right Hon. Winston Spencer, 10.
• Cinderella, 13
• Clark, Holman, 48.
• Clarkson, Willie, 51.
• Clothes and the Woman, 148, 149.
• Cochrane, Sir Ernest, 72.
• Collier, Constance, 50.
• Collier, Dr. Mayer, 27.
• Collins, Sir Arthur, 230.
• Comedy Theatre, The, 51, 72.
• Cooper, Gladys, 177.
• Copperfield, David, 20.
• Coriolanus, 140.
• Cornwallis, Miss, 86, 87.
• Corsican Brothers, The, 120, 216.
• Courtneidge, Robert, 181, 182.
• Court Theatre, The, 24, 101, 109.
• Craig, Edith, 36.
• Craigie, Pearl Mary-Teresa, 179.
• Cricket on the Hearth, The, 14, 16, 17.
• Criterion Theatre, The, 46, 148.
• Culprits, The, 26, 34.
• Cunningham, Philip, 113, 195.
• Curzon, Frank, 33, 131.
• Dacre, Arthur, 35.
• Dale, Alan, 145.
• Dana, Henry, 192.
• Dancing Girl, The, 52.
• Dane, Clemence, 114, 115.
• Dangerous Age, The, 69, 149, 206, 208, 209, 224, 235.
• Dare, Phyllis, 54.
• Dare, Zena, 54.
• Daughters of the Empire, The, 151
• David Garrick, 34.
• Davidson, Emily, 98.
• Davis, Ben, 18, 47.
• Dear Brutus, 219.
• Dear Fool, The, 143, 144, 149.
• Defence of Lucknow, The, 152.
• 252d’Erlanger, Baron Emile, 71.
• de Freece, Sir Laurie, 129.
• Despard, Mrs., 93.
• Dick, Cotsford, 26.
• Dickens, Miss Ethel, 148.
• Dockers’ Theatre, The, 56.
• Dr. Chavasse’s Advice to a Mother, 30.
• Dr. Chavasse’s Advice to a Wife, 30, 149.
• Dr. Dee, 26.
• Dorothy, 18.
• Drummond, Mrs., 151.
• Drummond, Flora, 92.
• Drury Lane Theatre, The, 32, 36, 53, 68.
• Dublin, 19, 57, 82, 84, 93.
• Duke of Killiecrankie, The, 63.
• Dumas, Alexandre, 220, 221.
• du Maurier, Sir Gerald, 173, 174, 17, 218.
• “Dumbells, The,” 156, 157.
• Edinburgh, 19, 20, 181.
• Edward VII., 169, 170.
• Edwardes, George, 39, 132, 133.
• Eliza Comes to Stay, 1, 14, 30, 102, 108, 113–115, 143, 147–150, 159, 190, 203–205, 207, 224.
• Elliott, G. W., 43.
• Elliott, Maxine, 180, 181, 236.
• Elmore, Belle (Mrs. Crippen), 31.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 98.
• Emery, Winifred, 16, 48, 103, 138, 139.
• Empire League, The, 162.
• Empire Theatre, The, 35, 42.
• Esmond, H. V. Passim.
• Esmond, Jack, 1, 142, 146, 194, 201, 230.
• Esmond, Jill, 1, 17, 66, 109, 114, 125, 146, 180, 183, 195, 236.
• Evans of Edmonton, Mr., 152.
• Everard, Walter, 34.
• Explorer, The, 67.
• Fagan, Elizabeth, 234.
• Farren, William, 32.
• Faust, 13.
• Feversham, William, 149.
• Fisher, Miss, 86.
• Flames of Passion, 72, 141.
• Frederick the Great, 168.
• French for Tommies, 75.
• Fripp, Sir Alfred, 232.
• Frohman, Charles, 82, 83, 146, 174, 175, 230.
• Fulton, Charles, 85, 64, 65.
• Gaiety Theatre, The, 38, 50, 132, 133.
• Gainsborough, Thomas, 189.
• Gallery First Night Club, The, 45.
• Garrick Club, The, 34, 122, 139.
• Garrick Theatre, The, 146.
• Gay Widow, The, 43.
• George, A. E., 67.
• George, M.P., The Rt. Hon. David Lloyd, 99.
• Geraldine, or Victor Cupid, 190, 200.
• Germany 34.
• Gibbs, Sir Philip, 166.
• Gilbert, W. S., 29, 125, 133, 134, 223.
• Gilbert and Sullivan Operas, 32.
• Globe Theatre, The, 220.
• Gneiseuan, General, 168.
• Gondoliers, The, 27.
• 253Goodwin, Maxine Elliott, 180, 181, 236.
• Goodwin, N. C., 180.
• Gordon, Major A., 77.
• Graham, Cissie (Mrs. Allen), 192.
• Green Room Club, The, 65, 138.
• Grierson’s Way, 179, 201, 206, 213, 219.
• Grossmith, George, 138.
• Grossmith, Weedon, 25, 63.
• Grove, Fred, 25, 30, 113, 114, 159, 160, 198.
• Groves, Charles, 62.
• Guerini, Madame, 11.
• Guggisberg, Lady, 78.
• Hackney, Mabel, 148.
• Hallard, Charles Maitland, 65, 164, 173, 187, 217.
• Hamilton, Harry, 51.
• Harbour Lights, 13.
• Harcourt, Cyril, 197.
• Harding, Lyn, 17, 68.
• Harding, Rudge, 112.
• Hare, Sir John, 69.
• Harvey, Sir John Martin, 103, 136, 137, 159.
• Harvey, Lady Martin, 103, 234.
• Hatfield, Lady, 80.
• Haverfield, Mrs., 76, 77.
• Hawkins, Sir Anthony Hope, 60, 126, 127, 235.
• Hawtrey, Sir Charles, 43, 49, 126, 185, 213.
• Haymarket Theatre, The, 109, 126, 128.
• Hearts is Hearts, 13.
• Hendrie, Ernest, 50.
• Henley, W. E., 199.
• Her Vote, 95.
• Hicks, Seymour, 39.
• Highwayman, The, 192.
• Hindenburg, Field Marshal Von, 166, 168.
• His Majesty’s Theatre, 34, 72, 236.
• Hobbes, John Oliver, 179.
• Hobhouse, M.P., Rt. Hon. Henry, 90.
• Hood, Dr. Walton, 125.
• Horder, Morley, 112, 113.
• House of Commons, The, 92.
• Hughes, Annie, 24.
• Huntly, G. P., 132.
• Idylls of the King, 188.
• Illington, Marie, 63, 181.
• Importance of Being Earnest, The, 64.
• Imprudence, 63.
• India, 53.
• Interlude Players, The, 12.
• Ireland, 20, 55, 56, 82.
• Irish Gentleman, An, 48.
• Irving, Sir Henry, 32, 120, 122, 140, 213.
• Irving, H. B., 65, 103, 123, 124, 134.
• Irving, Lawrence, 124, 125.
• Isaacs, Sir Rufus, 97.
• Isle of Man, The, 56.
• James, David, 32.
• Jay, Isabel, 33.
• John Glayde’s Honour, 66.
• Johnson, Eliza, 20, 21.
• Jones, Henry Arthur, 53, 105, 217.
• Joseph, Mrs. Henry, 151.
• Josephine, 63.
• Jowett, Professor Benjamin, 161.
• Just So Stories, 114.
• 254Karno, Edie, 31, 69.
• Karno, Fred, 31.
• Kellie, Lawrence, 230, 236.
• Kemble, Henry, 50.
• Kendal, Mrs., 11, 106, 109, 110 176.
• Kennington Theatre, The, 81.
• Kenny, Annie, 92.
• Keppel, Sir David, 78.
• Kerr, Fred, 46.
• Kingston, Gertrude, 74.
• Kipling, Rudyard, 114, 128.
• Kiss or Two, A, 209, 225.
• Knight, Joe, 122.
• Knoblauch, Edward, 71, 182.
• Knocker, Mrs. (Baroness T’Scerelles), 75, 78, 79.
• Lang, Matheson, 67.
• Lashwood, George, 104.
• Late Lamented, The, 27, 30.
• Law, M.P., the Rt. Hon. Bonar, 48.
• Law, Divine, The, 85, 150, 151, 160, 177, 181, 209, 212, 224.
• Lawrence, Mr. and Mrs. Pethick, 97.
• Leahy, Dr. M., 232.
• Leave Club, The, 85.
• Le Barge, Simone, 103.
• Leno, Dan, 103–105, 222.
• Lenton, Lilian, 98.
• Lester, Alfred, 153.
• Lewis, Eric, 113.
• Lights Out, 64, 66, 219.
• Lindon, Herbert, 230.
• Lindsay, James, 123.
• Little, Dr., 57.
• Little Christopher Columbus, 36, 37.
• Little Golden Hope, 11.
• Little Theatre, The, 74.
• Liverpool, 8, 10, 56, 146.
• Lloyd, Marie, 69, 120, 123, 124, 129, 130, 139.
• Loftus, Cissy, 94.
• Loftus, Marie, 120, 121.
• London, 12, 14, 18, 22, 74, 151, 180.
• London County Council, The, 34.
• Lonnen, Teddie, 37.
• Looking for Trouble, 70.
• Love and the Man, 84, 205.
• Lowne, Charles M., 21.
• Lucy, Arnold, 46.
• Lumley, Florrie, 154, 162.
• Lyceum Theatre, The, 48, 140.
• Lynch, Dr. and Mrs., 163.
• Lyric Theatre, The, 233.
• Lytton, Lady Constance, 93.
• Macarthy, Justin Huntly, 17, 183, 192.
• McKinnel, Norman, 72.
• Mackintosh, William, 24.
• Man and Woman, 34, 35.
• Marriages of Mayfair, The, 68.
• Marsac of Gascony, 53.
• Marsh, “Charlie,” 98.
• Martin, Mrs. Howe, 92.
• Masqueraders, The, 217.
• Massey, Deane, 151.
• Matter of Fact, A, 72.
• Maude, Cyril, 48, 103, 138, 139, 155.
• Maugham, Somerset, 67.
• Maurice, Newman, 108.
• May, Ackerman, 27.
• May, Edna, 33.
• 255Melville Brothers, The, 48.
• Menken, Adah Isaacs, 114.
• Merchant of Venice, The, 32.
• Merry Wines of Windsor, The, 107.
• Michau, Madame, 8, 9.
• Middleman, The, 23, 24, 27.
• Millet, Maude, 14, 24.
• Monckton, Lionel, 138.
• Monsieur Beaucaire, 66.
• Moore, Ada, 6, 7, 28, 77, 114, 164.
• Moore, Bertha, 11, 77.
• Moore, Decima, 4–8, 13, 17, 26, 27, 32, 74–78, 85, 90, 104, 125, 141, 153.
• Moore, Edward Henry, 3, 4:, 6–8, 11–13, 15, 67.
• Moore, Mrs. E. H., 3, 7, 14, 15, 67.
• Moore, Emily (Mrs. Pertwee), 11, 77.
• Moore, Eva, Passim.
• Moore, Henry, 7, 18, 22.
• Moore, Jessie, 3, 18, 26.
• Morris, William, 188.
• Mountebanks, The, 29.
• Mrs. Punch, 63.
• Much Ado About Nothing, 36, 118, 217.
• Mumming Birds, 31.
• Mumsie, 71, 182.
• Munro, Dr., 75.
• Music, The Royal College of, 26.
• Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, The, 31.
• Musical World, The, 23.
• My Lady Virtue, 206.
• Needlework Guild, The, 76.
• Neilson, Julia, 56, 234.
• Neilson-Terry, Phyllis, 56, 139, 219.
• Nero, 119.
• Neville, Henry, 35, 36.
• Nevinson, Mrs., 93.
• New York, 143, 144, 147, 149, 174, 179, 180.
• Novelty Theatre, The, 111.
• Old Bailey, The, 97.
• Old Heidelberg, 61, 111.
• Old Oxford, The, 109.
• Oliver Twist, 216.
• One Summer’s Day, 32.
• Oxford Theatre, The, 189.
• Pair of Spectacles, A, 69.
• Palladium, The, 129.
• Panel Picture, The, 216.
• Pankhurst, Mrs., 92, 97, 100.
• Pankhurst, Christabel, 90–92, 99.
• Pantomime Rehearsal, A, 83.
• Partners, 12, 14.
• Pavilion, The, 209.
• Paxton, Sydney, 114.
• Peg o’ My Heart, 147.
• People, The, 18.
• Pertwee, Ernest, 11.
• Peter Pan, 17.
• Philippi, Rosina, 25, 26.
• Phillips, Kate, 16.
• Pidgeon, Mr. and Mrs., 142.
• Pinero, Sir Arthur W., 24, 63.
• Pilkerton’s Peerage, 60, 110.
• Play Actors, The, 12.
• Press, The, 18, 33, 48, 96.
• Pringle, Miss, 8.
• Prisoner of Zenda, The, 235.
• Punch, 18.
• Purcell, Henry, 236.
• 256Queenstown, 82.
• Red Rag, The, 17, 19.
• Reeve, Ada, 38.
• Repertory Players, The, 12.
• Rest, 192, 202.
• Rex, Frederick, 168.
• Richards, Cicely, 32.
• Roberts, Arthur, 134.
• Robertson, Sir Johnston Forbes, 85, 94, 184, 205, 230.
• Robey, George, 40, 137.
• Robson, Frederick, 213.
• Rock, Charles, 13.
• Roe, Bassett, 40.
• Rogers, The Hon. “Bob”, 153.
• Romeo and Juliet, 149, 221.
• Rorke, Kate, 205.
• Roscoe’s Performing Pigs, 139.
• Rose, Patrick, 28.
• Rose, Raymond, 236.
• Roselle, Amy, 35.
• Rotten Brigade, The, 212.
• Royalty Theatre, The, 26, 70.
• Rubens, Paul, 33.
• Ruined Lady, The, 71.
• St. James’s Theatre, 1, 43, 54, 56, 58, 61, 72, 204.
• St. John, Florence, 13, 62.
• Saker, Annie, 48.
• Savoy Theatre, The, 27, 125, 134.
• School for Scandal, The, 219, 224.
• Scott, Clement, 44, 45, 179, 207, 217.
• Scottish National Gallery, 93.
• Scrap of Paper, A, 31.
• Sea Flower, The, 51.
• Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The, 217.
• Sentimentalist, The, 213.
• Serbia, 75.
• Sevier, Robert, 36.
• Sevier, Lady Violet, 36.
• Shackleton, Sir Ernest, 71, 231.
• Shaftesbury Theatre, The, 23.
• Shakespeare, William, 32, 222.
• Shaughnessy, Lord and Lady, 151.
• Shaw, George Bernard, 109.
• Sheldon, Susanne, 233.
• Shelton, George, 17.
• Shields, Ella, 110.
• Shine, J. L., 48.
• Shop Girl, The, 38.
• Shortt, The Rt. Hon. Edward and Mrs., 191.
• Simmons, Miss, 148, 149.
• Sims, George R., 47.
• Sisters, 128, 129.
• Smith, Aubrey, 54, 70, 71, 234.
• South, 71, 231.
• Sporting Times, The, 45.
• “Spy”, 25.
• Stage, The, 31.
• Standard, The, 202.
• Standing, Herbert, 27, 46–48.
• Stanley, Sir Hubert, 182.
• Stevenson, Robert Louis, 199.
• Steward, Miss M., 156.
• Strange Adventures of Miss Brown, The, 46.
• Stranglers of Paris, The, 216.
• Stuart, Cosmo, 51.
• Suffrage Movement, The, 90, 93, 233.
• Sutro, Alfred, 66.
• Sweet Kitty Bellaires, 66.
• Sweet Nancy, 26, 217.
• Sweet Nell of Old Drury, 56.
• Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 114.
• 257Tariff Reform League, The, 90.
• Tate, Harry, 137, 138.
• Tatler, The, 38.
• Taylor, Sir Frederick and Lady, 151.
• Tempest, Marie, 18, 234.
• Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 188.
• Terriss, Ellaline, 33.
• Terriss, William, 120.
• Terry, Edward, 28, 29, 30.
• Terry, Ellen, 36, 38, 106, 107, 138, 176.
• Terry, Florence, 18.
• Terry, Fred, 36, 56, 103, 139, 230, 231.
• Terry, Marion, 231.
• Terry’s Theatre, 26, 28–30.
• Theatrical Girls’ Club, 17.
• Theatrical Ladies’ Guild, 30.
• Thesiger, Ernest, 40.
• Thomas, Brandon, 33.
• Thompson, Mrs., 22.
• Thorndike, Sybil, 185.
• Thorne, Fred, 12.
• Thorne, Tom, 11, 12.
• Three Arts Club, 17.
• Three Musketeers, The, 51, 219, 220.
• Tiapolo, 93.
• Times, The, 21, 28.
• Times, The (Play), 219.
• Title, The, 70.
• Tivoli Theatre, The, 121, 129, 189.
• Toft, Albert, 197.
• Tolstoi, Count Leo, 124.
• Toole, Florrie, 11, 12, 14, 20, 121.
• Toole, J. L., 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, 23, 121–123, 233.
• Trans-Canadian Company, The, 150.
• Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm, 34, 51–53, 72, 73, 103, 117–120, 132, 139, 192, 224.
• Tree, Lady, 119, 234.
• Trilby, 219.
• Twelve Pound Look, 140.
• Typhoon, 124.
• Ulmar, Geraldine, 27.
• Under the Greenwood Tree, 180.
• Under the Red Robe, 48.
• Uriah Heep, 216.
• Valentine, Sydney, 39, 233.
• Vancouver, 109, 155.
• Vanbrugh, Irene, 23.
• Vanbrugh, Violet, 19, 207.
• Vanity Fair, 25.
• Vaudeville Theatre, The, 11–13, 16, 150.
• Vedrenne, J. E., 70, 71.
• Venne, Lottie, 43, 231.
• Verity, Agnes, 24.
• Vernon, Harriet, 189.
• Vernon, H. H., 222.
• Vincent, H. H., 59.
• Waddy, Judge, 232.
• Waddy, W. T., 232.
• Walker, Dr., 163.
• Waller, Lewis, 51, 52, 66, 220, 221, 235, 236.
• Ward, Rowland, 54.
• Waring, Herbert, 46.
• War Office, 74.
• Waterloo, 123.
• Watson, Malcolm, 237.
• Watts, Dr., 12.
• Webster, Ben, 36, 58, 127.
• 258Webster, Dame May (May Whitty), 32, 58, 94, 127, 232.
• Weiglin, Thomas, 138.
• Weyman, Stanley, 48.
• When We Were Twenty-One, 180, 207, 225.
• White, Claude Grahame, 142.
• Wilberforce, Canon, 11.
• Wilberforce, Miss, 11.
• Wilcox, Herbert, 170, 171.
• Wilde, Sir Ernest and Lady, 109.
• Wilderness, The, 54, 55, 57, 58, 201, 204, 207, 209, 235.
• Willard, E. S., 23, 24, 230.
• William Hohenzollern of Germany, 169, 170.
• Winter, Miss Jessie, 212.
• Women’s Air Force, 76.
• Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps., 76.
• Women’s Emergency Corps, 74–77.
• Women’s Freedom League, 94.
• Women’s Social and Political Union, 94.
• Women’s Volunteer Reserve, 76.
• Wood, Mrs. John, 25, 101, 102.
• Wright, Fred, 177.
• Wyndham, Sir Charles, 34, 235.
• Wyndham, Lady (Miss Mary Moore), 78.
• Wyndham’s Theatre, 85, 212.
• Yohe, May, 37.
• Young, Miss Harriet, 11.
• Younger Son, The, 36.

By STEPHEN McKENNA. 7s. 6d. net.

No one will be surprised that, when Mr. Stephen McKenna sets out to follow an old trail, he finds it a necessity of his artistic temperament to diverge into bye-paths. Last winter, finding London an uninspiring city of refuge, he set sail for the Bahamas. The result of his sojourn there is one of the most personal, the most individual books of this generation. It is not fiction though it contains stories; not a travel book though it talks of travel; not autobiography though written in the first person. It is a sort of literary confessional of a singularly attractive and communicative intellect.

By NORMAN DOUGLAS. 12s. 6d. net. With a special hand-made paper edition limited to 250 signed copies at £2 2s. net.

It is difficult at this late day to say anything new of Norman Douglas. His reputation as one of the most original writers of this generation is solidly established. A vast number of travel books is published every year, but there is to be found in none of them that quality of personal flavour that is the chief charm and characteristic of Mr. Douglas’s writing. His new book, “Together,” is as delightful as “Alone,” and it has the added attraction of being a piece of continuous narrative.

By C. LEWIS HIND. 25s. net.

Mr. Hind is the author of many volumes, but he has always looked forward to the writing of this particular book as one of the chief events of his career. Wherever he has gone, to the Shires of England, the States of America, to Italy or the provinces of France, he has always sought material for this volume. The book will be profusely illustrated.

By HELEN JEROME. 7s. 6d. net.

During the war men and women rushed recklessly into marriage. Now in the hour of post-war disillusion they are seeking to diagnose the symptoms of their troubles. Never before has there been such a demand for sane, clear-thinking books on the sex question; for books that are addressed not to the neurotic, nor the thin-blooded, nor the over-sexed; but to healthy-minded, healthy-bodied men and women who honestly desire to make each other happy. Such a book is Helen Jerome’s “The Secret of Woman.” It deals exhaustively, though lightly and wittily, with the relationships of men and women. Here are some of the chapter headings: “Wherein men are superior,” “Woman’s attitude to male beauty,” “Are women liars?” “Does woman know passion?”

By ANDREW DAKERS. 10s. 6d. net.

In spite of the assumed lack of sympathy between their rival interests, there are a great many publishers who are also authors. But to the best of our knowledge, the first literary agent to write books as well as sell them is Andrew Dakers, one of the youngest and most enterprising members of his profession. His critical and biographical study of Burns develops a new and distinctly provocative interpretation of Burns’s private life.

By EVA MOORE. 15s. net.

A light, witty, merry volume of reminiscence by one of the most fascinating and popular actresses the stage has ever known.

By GILBERT THOMAS. 6s. net.

The career of Gilbert Thomas as an essayist and a poet has been for a long time followed with attention by those who value taste and scholarship. His new book is certain of a warm welcome.

By W. L. GEORGE, Author of “A Bed of Roses,” “The Stiff Lip,” “The Confession of Ursula Trent.”

“One of the Guilty” is a romantic story, a novel of action; it is a study of the primitive human instincts that underlie the veneer of education and environment. In “The Confession of Ursula Trent” Mr. George told how a well-bred girl of county family became, through circumstances and influence, a demi-mondaine. In “One of the Guilty” he shows how a public schoolboy can become a criminal. Never before has the life of a thief, of a successful thief, been presented so graphically, so dramatically, so intimately. Every detail of the methods and implements of modern burglary is described, and yet throughout one’s sympathies, one’s affections, are with the thief; one hopes, in spite of oneself, that he will win through.

“One of the Guilty” is not, in the accepted sense of the word, a sex novel. But it is as much a love story as it is an adventure story, and in no other novel, perhaps, has W. L. George written more tender, more beautiful, more passionate love scenes that he has in this book.

By NORMAN DAVEY.

Norman Davey, the author of “The Pilgrim of a Smile,” is not one of those novelists who believe that it is necessary to produce a new book every autumn. Indeed, two years have passed since the successful appearance of “Guinea Girl,” his romance of Monte Carlo. His new novel, “Good Hunting,” is, as was “The Pilgrim of a Smile,” a series of stories grouped about one man; a fashionable and popular young man whom a number of girls endeavour to ensnare into marriage, and it is dedicated to the 1,337,208 superfluous women (last census)!

By G. B. STERN, Author of “The Room,” “The Back Seat,” etc.

A first collection of short stories by one of the most brilliant of our younger novelists.