Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (487 page)

“No,” she answered.

Barrie made no comment. He went on with his dinner. At the end of the chicken
en casserôle
, curiosity overcoming her awe, she turned to him again.

“Have you?” she asked.

A far-away expression came into Barrie’s great deep eyes.

“No,” he answered.

After that they both lapsed into silence.

He and my wife found birds and animals a subject of never-failing wonder. I remember his explaining to her how much more intelligent lambs are than is generally supposed. He was thinking out a story, and coming to a stile had sat down and was making notes on the back of an envelope. Barrie rarely wasted an envelope, in those days. John Hare told me — to account for his having rejected “The Professor’s Love Story” — that half of it was written on the inside of old envelopes. “Half” I doubt, but an eighth to a sixteenth I can well believe. Barrie was then an unknown youngster. “How could I guess the fool was a genius?” growled Hare. “Took him, of course, for a lunatic.” But to return to our muttons.

In the field where Barrie sat there were lambs. One of them strayed away from its mother, turned round three times, and was lost. It was in a terrible to-do, and Barrie had to put down his story and lead it back to its mother. Hardly had he returned to his stile before another lamb did just the same. The bleating was terrific. There was nothing else to do, but for Barrie to put down his work and take it back to its mother. They kept on doing it, one after another. But the wonderful thing was that, after a time, instead of looking for their mothers themselves, they just came to Barrie and insisted on his coming with them and finding their mothers for them. It saved their time, but wasted Barrie’s.

Barrie was always the most unassuming of men, but he could be touchy. On one occasion, a great lady invited him to her castle in the country. The house-party was a large one. There were peers and potentates, millionaires and magnates. Barrie found himself assigned to a small room in a turret leading to the servants’ quarters. Perhaps the poor lady could not help it, and was doing her best. Barrie did not say anything, but in the morning he was gone. No one had seen him leave, and the doors were still bolted. He had packed his bag and climbed out of the window.

The Great Central Railway turned me out of Alpha Place to make way for their new line to London. A chasm yawns where it once stood; a pleasant house with a long dining-room and a big drawing-room looking out upon a quiet garden. When friends came my wife liked to receive them in the hall — she was a slip of a young thing then — standing on the bottom stair — to make herself seem taller. Wells was a shy diffident young man in those days, Rider Haggard a somewhat solemn gentleman, taking himself always very seriously. Mrs. Barry Pain was the only one of us who would venture to chaff him. George Moore was a simple kindly soul, when off his guard, but easily mistaken by those who did not know him for a poseur: he had the Balfour touch. Clement Shorter and his wife, Dora Sigerson the poetess, George Gissing, with his nervous hands and his deep voice, Hall Caine, Conan Doyle, Hornung — but the list only grows. I had better leave them over to another chapter, lest I seem garrulous.

From St. John’s Wood we went to Mayfair — to a little house, one of a row at the end of a
cul-de-sac
overlooking Hyde Park. George Alexander had told me of it. He had Number Four. It was there I first met Mark Twain. Hardly anyone knew he was in London. He was living poorly, saving money to pay off the debts of a publishing firm with which he had been connected. (Walter Scott’s story over again.) Our children had met at a gymnasium. I found there were two Mark Twains: the one a humorist, the other a humanitarian reformer poet. About these two there was this that was curious: the humorist was an elderly gentleman, dull-eyed, with a slow, monotonous drawl; while the humanitarian reformer poet, was an eager young man with ever-changing eyes and a voice full of tenderness and passion.

They say a man always returns to his first love. I never cared for the West End: well-fed, well-dressed, uninteresting. The East, with its narrow silent streets, where mystery lurks; its noisome thoroughfares, teeming with fierce varied life, became again my favourite haunt. I discovered “John Ingerfield’s” wharf near to Wapping Old Stairs, and hard by the dingy railed-in churchyard where he and Anne lie buried. But more often my wanderings would lead me to the little drab house off the Burdett Road, where “Paul Kelver” lived his childhood.

Of all my books I liked writing “Paul Kelver” the best. Maybe because it was all about myself, and people I had known and loved.

It changed my luck, so far as the critics were concerned. Francis Gribble, God bless him, gave me praise — the first I had ever tasted, and others followed.

I ought, of course, to have gone on. I might have become an established novelist — even a best seller. Who knows? But having “got there,” so to speak, my desire was to get away. I went back to the writing of plays. It was the same at the beginning of me. My history repeats itself. Having won success as a humorist I immediately became serious. I have a kink in my brain, I suppose I can’t help it.

Chapter VII

TRIALS OF A DRAMATIST

A lady, on one occasion, asked me why I did not write a play.

“I am sure, Mr. Jerome,” she continued with a bright encouraging smile, “that you could write a play.”

I told her I had written nine: that six of them had been produced, that three of them had been successful both in England and America, that one of them was still running at the Comedy Theatre and approaching its two hundredth night.

Her eyebrows went up in amazement.

“Dear me,” she said, “you do surprise me.”

George R. Sims told me that once he dined some friends at the Savoy. Over the coffee, he asked them if they would like to go to a theatre, and they said they would. He took them to a play of his own. For some reason that Sims could not explain, they did not like it. At the end of the first act, one of them, turning to him, said:

“Rather dull stuff this. Don’t you find it so?”

“Well, now you come to mention it, perhaps it is, a trifle,” agreed Sims.

“Let’s go on to the Empire,” suggested another.

The proposal was carried
nem. con.
; and leaving their programmes behind them, the troop arose and made their way out of the theatre noisily and cheerfully, followed by Sims, walking soberly.

“It used to annoy me,” added Sims, “that not one theatre-goer in a hundred ever takes the trouble to read the author’s name. That evening, I was glad of it.”

“Barbara” was my first play. I am informed that nowadays managers read plays by unknown authors. In my young days they didn’t. I read it to Rose Norreys, one evening, at her little flat in Chelsea Gardens; and good comrade that she was, she took it herself to Charles Hawtrey, and stood over him until he had finished it. He wrote me, asking me to come and see him the following Tuesday at twelve o’clock noon — he underlined “noon.” He was running “The Private Secretary” at the Globe. I got there at twenty minutes to, and walked up and down Hollywell Street until I heard Big Ben strike twelve. The stage door-keeper said Mr. Hawtrey wasn’t in. I said I would wait. The door-keeper — a kindly soul, I wish I could remember his name — put me a chair by the fire and gave me a thumbed copy of “The Talisman.” He said that, speaking for himself, he considered it the best of all Scott’s novels. Hawtrey turned up at a quarter past three. The stage door-keeper introduced us, and explained things.

“I’m so sorry,” said Hawtrey. “I thought it was Monday.”

His first wife told me that, the night before their wedding, his best man had — unknown to him — put his watch on an hour and a quarter, with the result that he got there five minutes too soon; and in the Bankruptcy Court he used to be known as “the late Mr. Charles.” But he was always so charming about it that one generally forgave him.

He told me that he liked my little play immensely. There was only one fault he had to find. It was too short. I record the fact as being the only known instance in the history of the stage of a manager suggesting to an author that his play was not long enough. I promised to write in an extra scene.

“My brother George will see you about terms,” he concluded as we shook hands. “He will want you to sell it outright. Take my tip and don’t do it. It’s just the sort of thing to catch on with the amateurs.”

The “producer” had not then arrived. He was an American invention. The stage manager, together with the promoter and the author, used to just worry it out. I have never been able myself to detect any difference. “Dot” Boucicault was one of the first, and for straightforward work is still among the best. If anything he is too painstaking. His method at rehearsal is to play all the parts himself, leaving the actor to copy him. On a certain occasion, he had been coaching Gertrude Kingston after this manner for about a fortnight; and then one morning, taking her aside, he asked her how she liked her part.

“What part?” asked Gertrude Kingston.

“What part?” repeated Boucicault, astonished. “Why,
your
part — the Countess.”

“Oh, that,” answered Miss Kingston. “I thought you were playing that.”

I take it Du Maurier’s dictum really sums up the matter: that a play that is worth producing, produces itself.

Cissy Grahame was my Barbara. She has not changed much, and I love her still. But she will never be quite as handsome as her mother. Their Sunday evening supper parties at Hammersmith make pleasant memories. I fancy that, when young, I must have had a face expressive of more sympathy than, perhaps, I really felt. People used to suddenly confide their troubles to me. The first time I met there Henley the actor, brother to W. E. Henley the poet, he beckoned me into a corner and poured out to me the secret history of his private life. What he wanted me to decide for him was: Should he strangle her or simply leave her? Weighing the matter as a whole, I chose for him the second alternative. He went off unexpectedly to America a short time afterwards, so I like to reflect that maybe I was of service to both parties. I have always wondered what became of him. He was a brilliant actor. He could get more passion over the footlights than any other actor I have known. McKinnel comes the nearest to him. Charles Whibley was another frequent guest there. I was a die-hard Tory at twenty-five, and Whibley was an anarchist of the reddest dye. We had some grand sets-to. John Burns was preaching revolution and the British Constitution was in danger. Whibley wanted to go a-rioting in Trafalgar Square. We had difficulty in restraining him. To make things safe, I joined the special constables and learnt to form fours and to turn my eyes right and left. Now I am a Vice-President, I believe, of the Oxford University Labour Party; while Whibley has become a pillar of the State, and writes for stodgy old
Blackwood
.

“Barbara” ran, on and off, for years, and amateurs still play it. Following Charles Hawtrey’s advice, I had refused to sell it, though his brother George went up to a hundred pounds, and the temptation was sore. Another one-act play, “Fennel,” I wrote for George Giddens, who had taken the Novelty, now the Kingsway — or rather adapted it from the French of François Coppée. Managers clamoured then for adaptations from the French. Sydney Grundy, one of the most successful authors on the English stage, never wrote an original play. He was quite frank about it. “Why should I cudgel my own brains,” he would say, “when I can suck other men’s?”

“Fennel” was chiefly remarkable for introducing Allan Aynesworth to the London stage. He played Sandro, the lover. I see that I describe him in the script as “a fine, dashing, good-looking young fellow.” Aynesworth was all that right enough; but on the first night he got stage fright. I was watching from the wings. I could see him getting more and more nervous; and when he came to his big speech, his memory snapped. I had prided myself upon that speech. I had done my best to put Coppée’s poetry into English blank verse. It was all about music and the sunrise, and Heaven and love: some two pages of it altogether. I could have forgiven him forgetting it, and drying up. But, to my horror, he went on. He had it fixed in his mind that until the old man returned home he had to stand in the centre of the stage and talk poetry. And he did it. Bits of it, here and there, were mine; most of it his own; a good deal of it verses and quotations that, I take it, he had learnt at his mother’s knee. I shouted to Stuart Dawson, who was playing the old man, to go on and stop him. But he would finish, and threw such fervour into the last few laps, that at the end he received a fine round of applause.

“Sorry I forgot the exact lines,” he said to me, as he came off. “But I was determined not to let you down.”

“Woodbarrow Farm” was my first full-sized play. Gertrude Kingston produced it at a
matinée
, playing herself the adventuress. The trial
matinée
was a useful institution. I think it is a pity it has dropped out. The manager would lend the theatre in return for an option on the play; and the leading parts could generally be arranged for on a like understanding. At the cost of about a hundred pounds, a play could be put before the public and judged: in the only way a play can be judged — through the test-like tube of an audience. Three out of four, in spite of friendly stalls, were seen to be no good: the fourth won the prize. Charles Hawtrey lent us the Comedy. Frederick Harrison, now the doyen of London Managers, was in it. He played a gentlemanly villain. And Eric Lewis made the small part of a valet the chief thing in the play. John Hare bought it. He wanted a play for young Sydney Brough, son of old Lal Brough, a bright handsome lad, full of promise then. He had been a pupil of mine when I was a schoolmaster at the “South Lambeth Road Academy. For Sons of Gentlemen.” I forget how it came about, but eventually Tom Thorne took it for his opening piece at the new Vaudeville. He played the valet. Bernard Partridge was the hero.