Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly (33 page)

Holmes had been too busy until the last day of his life to find time for putting such a mass of papers into order. Fortunately, I knew what I was after and soon came to a stiff white envelope, about eight inches by ten. From this I shook out several theatrical programmes. The first was for McVicker's Theater, Madison Street, Chicago. This ornamental structure had been rebuilt after the great fire of 1871 in that city. The cover of its programme for November 1880 announced “The Sassanoff Shakespeare Touring Company of London.” The drama to be played was
Romeo and Juliet
. Romeo was performed by Henry Caradoc Price and Juliet by Anna Weld. Among the supporting cast, the character of Mercutio was acted by “William Sherlock Scott Holmes.” At the Broad Street Theatre, Philadelphia, the programme for the Sassanoff company advertised
Othello
. The hero was once again personified by Caradoc Price and Desdemona by Miss Weld. The part of the hapless dupe Roderigo was taken by a young supernumerary, Carnaby Jenks, and the villainous Iago by “W. S. Holmes.”

These four actors played turn and turn about in
Macbeth
and
Twelfth Night
at the Lafayette Opera House in Washington, and
The Merchant of Venice
and
Hamlet
at the Garden Theatre in New York. From time to time they performed in front of university audiences at Princeton and Yale. Henry Caradoc Price invariably took the leading role, but “W. S. Holmes” seemed content to be Macbeth's porter or Shylock's servant, Hamlet's Horatio or any of Falstaff's unsavoury cronies.

I once asked Holmes why he had abandoned his career as a consulting detective and turned his back on forensic chemistry for a year. Was it merely to set off on this theatrical jaunt to America—as it seemed I must call it? He looked at me as if I should have known that he had not abandoned anything. It was imperative for an ambitious young “consulting detective” to add a thorough knowledge of acting and disguise to his other talents. In the end, as he boasted in the case of Colonel Moran, he could walk and crouch in such a manner as to take twelve inches off his height for several hours on end. His American tour was not a flippant diversion but the burnishing of an essential weapon in his armoury.

Nor did he abandon criminal science. He began in 1879 only as a part-time actor in London, almost two years before our first meeting in the chemical laboratory of St Bartholomew's Hospital. By day he was the self-taught student of scientific method. Every evening he attended the Lyceum Theatre, sometimes as a “supernumerary” spear-carrier, often as a “walking gentleman” without words to speak, occasionally as an understudy. After one or two small speaking parts it was evident that he had a voice of command and could silence an auditorium by his presence. He was allowed to understudy the part of Horatio in Irving's production of
Hamlet
. At least twice during that time he was called upon to act the part. In later years he could truthfully boast that he had played Horatio to Irving's Hamlet. It was a play for which he nourished a lifelong enthusiasm.

As for Caradoc Price, later to be a household name, he was first of all among the most promising of Irving's young men. Then, by resorting to the money-lenders, he bought for a song the effects and good will of the bankrupt Sassanoff Shakespeare Company. Within a week he announced to his friends that this “company” would seek its fortune in New York. He invited them to join him. You may judge the speed of his success by the fact that he repaid his entire loan within a year. Unfortunately, this convinced him that money would always be as easy to make.

Holmes seized this chance to see something of the New World. With the rest of the company, he spent about eight months there. Upon their return to London, the lease of the Herculaneum Theatre in the Strand had fallen vacant. Caradoc Price used his growing reputation to borrow or beg every penny needed to take it on. Not long afterwards, following a visit by the Prince of Wales and a supper party, this enterprise became the Royal Herculaneum Theatre.

Sherlock Holmes parted company with his theatrical friends on their return from America and went back to the chemical laboratory at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. There I found him in the spring of 1881.

He never lost touch with the arts of the theatre. His impersonations of “Captain O'Malley,” when investigating the Camden Town murder, or Peter Piatkoff the Anarchist during the siege of Sidney Street, were so lifelike that I met him on both occasions without recognising him as my closest friend.

It was not a matter of gumming whiskers to his face or assuming a theatrical tan. That would have done little. His personality would hold any audience because for that moment he was the very person he presumed to be. At the door of our lodgings I confronted the foreign ruffian who swore destruction to “Meester Sharelock Hoolmes,” as he called him. I never doubted that this was the terrorist Piatkoff, called “Peter the Painter,” until he burst out laughing in the unmistakable tones of my friend.

Of all the figures from Holmes's brief theatrical career with whom he grew acquainted in the Sassanoff Company, Henry Caradoc Price became by far the most famous. Even so, I do not think they met after 1881. A dozen times or so in the next ten years, Holmes and I sat in the stalls of the Royal Herculaneum, spellbound by the Celtic wizardry of Caradoc as Hamlet or Shylock or Falstaff. Yet there were no backstage visits and no admiring letters.

Because we must now come to the death of this great Shakespearean, it is necessary for me to say something about his life.

Those who recall the London theatre of thirty or forty years ago will need little reminding of Sir Henry Caradoc Price. At the height of his success, when his performances as Hamlet or Richard III were sold out long in advance, it was enough to speak simply of “Caradoc.” He was seldom out of the spotlight, whether as Bernard Shaw's “vibrant and melodious hero,” as the younger critics thought him, or Andrew Bradley's “meretricious showman,” as he appeared to the purists. Caradoc did not hesitate to adapt the words or the actions of Shakespeare's plays for his own purposes, often to superb effect. At the same time, he was not known for his humility. “The Bard of Avon may be a greater artist than I,” he replied to his detractors, “but I stand upon Shakespeare's shoulders.”

Caradoc's past was as romantic as any stage production. It was even said that his greatest performance had been as the central character in his own life. He had come from childhood destitution. Born in South Wales, among the collieries and blast furnaces of Merthyr Tydfil, he was an “underground” pauper child in the coal mines of the Dowlais ironworks. At seven years old, he was employed to guard an “air door,” against the danger of an explosion from fumes and flame. He liked to recall how he fell asleep one day from weariness during his ten-hour shift, after the rats ate his bread and cheese.

The supervisor, whose belt the children feared, caught him sleeping. Happily, this ogre was in company with Sir Josiah Guest. Sir Josiah owned the ironworks, collieries, railway, even the ships that carried his railway lines and wagon wheels round the world. Yet this liberal-minded patriarch had also been Member of Parliament for the Welsh industrial town since electoral reform in 1832.

Sir Josiah founded a school where the children of the collieries and blast furnaces might receive an education. Caradoc Price was one of its first pupils. By eleven years old, he had a “voice” and could sing. His father was blacksmith at the ironworks forge and both parents attended Bethesda Welsh Congregational Chapel. The family sat every Sunday before the pulpit of Rhondda Williams and his evangelists. The boy listened and, alone on the mountainside, practised their rhetoric.

England's new young monarch and her consort invited the children of the Dowlais school to Windsor Castle. Caradoc sang Felix Mendelssohn's “On Wings of Song” before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Each child was rewarded with a gold sovereign, which the future Sir Henry Caradoc Price wore on his watch-chain to the end of his life. The Prince heard the child piping “O for the Wings of a Dove,” and recognised an artist. By His Highness's patronage, the boy was elected to a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music.

The beauty of the childish voice did not survive the onset of manhood. But while his singing became mediocre, the speaking voice with its resonant inflections of the Welsh pulpit grew captivating. It had a rich, melodious tone in which critics claimed to hear the range of a cathedral organ. Better still, he could calm or excite an audience by a word or a gesture. He had only to stand upon a stage and look at them for the house to fall silent. When he spoke, one could hear a pin drop. By twenty-five, his natural feeling for words and a love of language marked him out. Robert Browning, himself the greatest living author of poetic drama, wrote that “No man could possibly be as wonderful as Caradoc Price seemed in the person of Falstaff or King Lear.”

At thirty he was lessee of the Herculaneum, one of the three fashionable theatrical houses in the Strand. He had probably borrowed far more money than he could ever repay but it made him one of the great actor-managers. Even his debts were equalised after the tercentenary revival of
The Spanish Tragedy
by Shakespeare's great rival Thomas Kyd. Reviewers swore that the like of Caradoc as the mad hero Hieronymo had not been seen on the London stage since Edmund Kean, seventy years before.

After the last performance, he rose as Sir Henry Caradoc Price. Among his rivals at that time, only Irving had been so honoured. As a Knight of the Order of the British Empire, Caradoc was also one of the first men invited to record his voice upon the new wax discs of Thomas Edison. He showed little gratitude. After listening to the result he replied to the inventor, “Sir, I have tested your machine. It adds a new terror to life and makes death a long-felt want.”

Now he could afford to be popular. Comedies like
The Corsican Brothers
by Alexandre Dumas and such sentimental melodramas as Du Maurier's
Trilby
or
The Bells
by Leopold Lewis ran at the Royal Herculaneum month after month. He threw down the gauntlet to Irving, a few doors away at the Lyceum, and the Gatti brothers at the Adelphi. “When I pass before the theatre and read my name in such large letters,” he once remarked, “I blush—but I instinctively raise my hat.” He was armed against all criticism. A notice above his dressing-room door read, “Every man is a potential genius—until he does something.” Elsewhere he answered those who denounced his “tampering” with the text and setting of Shakespeare, “A critic is merely one who uses dead languages to disguise his ignorance of life.”

There were by now many people who had reason to dislike Caradoc—or even to detest him. A mental crisis seemed to derail him after ten or twelve years of fame. He was more apt to take an evening off and let his understudy appear for him. He would be content to play King Claudius where once he must be Hamlet.

In money matters, his voice acquired a confident and jovial insincerity. It had the reassurance of a rogue who made common cause with you because his interest and yours were the same—and you were exhilarated to have him on your side rather than against you. Even those who subsequently counted their losses smiled at one another in the knowledge that they had Caradoc as their ally.

Saddest of all, he and Lady Myfanwy, the Celtic princess of his youth and the wife of his middle years, had grown apart from one another. Caradoc was apt to forget, as Holmes put it politely, where he should be sleeping. Yet he remained loyal to his childhood and his Welsh birth, if to nothing else. It was a point of honour that he should live in Hammersmith, only because it was the nearest London borough to Wales, a hundred and fifty miles away.

With the coming of the mass circulation newspaper and the monthly “society” magazine, far more people read about Caradoc than ever saw him on the stage. His photograph also appeared in the weekly sporting papers with their love of gossip and scandal. He was always ready to comment on any subject the reporters might put to him. Unfortunately, this opened the door to the most acrimonious public exchanges. The tongue that had been so mellifluous on the stage was apt to grow venomous in private quarrels.

Caradoc Price was a pitiless enemy, never more so than in his final vendetta with Oscar Wilde after 1890. The quarrel between the maverick Welsh actor and the egotistical Irish wit began during a long run of
Hamlet
at the Herculaneum. Robert Reynolds, a sycophant of Wilde, stole one of his master's witticisms and applied it as the headline of his review of Caradoc's characterisation of the Danish prince. “Price Without Value,” as the heading called it. Reynolds attacked what he called the vulgarisation of text and scene which Caradoc had inflicted upon Shakespeare's play.

It might have ended there, for Reynolds did not say much that other journalists had not said already. Unfortunately, Wilde himself visited the Herculaneum during the run of the play. By this time the great Welsh Shakespearean had grown thick-set. Wilde was witty in the circle bar. Worse still, he became louder as his companions fell respectfully silent around him. He intoned Hamlet's famous speech, “Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt.” It was “the lament of a man who can act the Prince of Denmark only by courtesy of the corsetier.” This pleasantry ran round until it hit its target. Caradoc recognised Wilde as his antagonist and flayed him as an example to others. To the sporting journalists he confessed, “I employ the services of a corsetier and perhaps should not. Wilde does not—and most certainly should—a middle-aged man who abandons his sex and casts himself as Salome.”

This would have been bad enough. Caradoc in his present mood apparently thought it fell short. He remarked to a wide circle of his own admirers at a green room supper after a performance of
The Second Mrs Tanqueray
that “Mr Wilde's tragedy is to become the creator of laughter on the public stage and of sniggering in private conversations.” He was too close to the mark, and the endangered playwright dared not retort on such a subject. Within a few days, Caradoc's epigram was quoted in the gossip column of
The Winning Post
. A fortnight later his portly antagonist was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel on charges of indecency.