“We must have someone supremely beautiful,” said Forbes. “There are six women in the play; four of them have to be middle-aged, and my wife has to disguise herself. It's our only chance.”
I thought of Alice Crawford. Time was pressing. We sent her a wire. She had just left for a ball at the Piccadilly Hotel.
“You must go to the ball,” said Forbes.
I went as I was, in a blue serge suit, brown boots, and a collar that I had been wearing since eight o'clock in the morning. I made a sensation in the ballroom. I gathered that the people round about took me for a policeman in unnecessarily plain clothes; but I spotted Alice Crawford, and beckoned her outside. A gentleman came up and asked if he could be of any use. I take it the idea of bail was in his mind.
We produced the play at Harrowgate. The audience there mistook it for a farce. It was by the author of “Three Men in a Boat,” so they had been told. That evening the Robertsons and myself partook of a melancholy supper. It was Blackpool that saved the play. Forbes wired me—
“It's all right. Blackpool understands it and loves it.”
In London, on the first night, the curtain fell to dead silence which lasted so long that everybody thought the play must be a failure, and my wife began to cry. And then suddenly the cheering came, and my wife dried her eyes.
I was not present myself. I have shirked my own first nights ever since a play of mine that Willard produced at the Garrick. I thought the applause was unanimous, but was received with a burst of booing. The argument is that if an author is willing to be applauded, he must not object to being hissed. It may be logic, but it isn't sense: as well say that because a man does not mind being patted on the back, he ought not to object to being kicked. I remember the first night of one of Jones's plays. There was a difference of opinion and Jones very properly did not appear. In the street, I overheard some critics from the gallery talking:
“Why didn't he come out,” said one, “and take his punishment like a man?”
W. T. Stead used to gather interesting people round him, on Sunday afternoons, at his house in Smith Square. Soon after the production of “The Passing of the Third Floor Back” I received an invitation from him to discuss “The Gospel according to St. Jerome.” Another time, we discussed the chief motive power governing human affairs, and decided that it was hate: hatred of nation for nation, religious hatred, race hatred, political hatred. Just then the suffrage movement was in full swing, and sex hatred had been added to the list. Stead lived and died a convinced Spiritualist, in spite of the fact that his spirit friends once let him down badly. They urged him to start a daily newspaper and assured him of success. It was a grim failure, but he forgave them.
Forbes-Robertson was doubtful about taking the play to America. It was his sister-in-law, Maxine Elliott, who insisted. It was at her theatre in New York that he opened.
Matheson Lang took it East. In China, a most respectable Mandarin came round to see him afterwards and thanked him.
“Had I been intending to do this night an evil deed,” he said, “I could not have done it. I should have had to put it off, until to-morrow.”
Chapter VIII
I BECOME AN EDITOR
“ The Idler. Edited by Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr. An illustrated monthly magazine, Price sixpence,” was Barr's idea. But the title was mine. Barr had made the English edition of the Detroit Free Press quite a good property; and was keen to start something of his own. He wanted a popular name and, at first, was undecided between Kipling and myself. He chose me—as, speaking somewhat bitterly, he later on confessed to me—thinking I should be the easier to “manage.” He had not liked the look of Kipling's jaw. Kipling had been about two years in London, and had just married his secretary, a beautiful girl with a haunting melancholy in her eyes that still lingers.
By writers he was recognized as a new force, though his aggressive personality naturally made enemies. The critics and the public were more squeamish then. He was accused of coarseness and irreverence. The reason, it is said, that he was never knighted was that Queen Victoria would not forgive him for having called her “The Widdy o' Windsor.” He has not missed much. Lord Charles Beresford used to tell the story—and those who knew him could easily believe it—that King Edward on one occasion said to him:
“You remember L——, that fellow at Homburg. Well, I've just made him a knight.”
“Dirty little bounder,” said Beresford; “serve him damn well right.”
The Idler was a great success, so far as circulation was concerned. Our business manager was one Robert Dunkerley. I see from “Who's Who” that he himself explains that he “took to writing as an alleviation and alternative from business, and found it much more enjoyable.” He is now John Oxenham. We had pleasant offices in Arundel Street, off the Strand, and gave tea-parties every Friday. They were known as the “Idler At Homes,” and became a rendezvous for literary London. Burgin, G. B., was our sub-editor. He was a glutton for work, even then; and his appetite seems to have grown. He thinks nothing of turning out three novels a year. I once wrote two thousand words in a single day; and it took me the rest of the week to recover. Wells is even yet more wonderful. He writes a new book while most people are reading his last; throws off a history of the world while the average schoolboy is learning his dates; and invents a new religion in less time than it must have taken his god-parents to teach him his prayers. He has a table by his bedside; and if the spirit moves him will get up in the middle of the night, make himself a cup of coffee, write a chapter or so, and then go to sleep again. During intervals between his more serious work, he will contest a Parliamentary election or conduct a conference for educational reform. How Wells carries all his electricity without wearing out the casing and causing a short circuit in his brain is a scientific mystery. I mentioned once in a letter to him that I was a bit run down. He invited me to spend a day or two with him at Folkestone: get some sea-air in my lungs and a rest. To “rest” in the neighbourhood of Wells is like curling yourself up and trying to go to sleep in the centre of a cyclone. When he wasn't explaining the Universe, he was teaching me new games—complicated things that he had invented himself, and under stress of which my brain would reel. There are steepish hills on the South Downs. We went up them at four miles an hour, talking all the time. On the Sunday evening a hurricane was raging with a driving sleet. Wells was sure a walk would do us good—wake us up. While Mrs. Wells was not watching, we tucked the two little boys into their mackintoshes and took them with us.
“We'll all have a blow,” said Wells.
They were plucky little beggars, both of them, and only laughed. But battling up the Leas against the wind, we found the sleet was cutting their small faces. So we made them walk one each behind us with their arms around our waists, while we pressed forward with ducked heads. And even then Wells talked. But one day Nature got the better of him and silenced him. That was when he was staying with me at Gould's Grove near Wallingford. We climbed a lonely spur of the Chilterns, and half-way up he gave out, and never spoke again till we had reached the top, and had sat there for at least five minutes, looking down upon the towers of Oxford and the Cotswold Hills beyond. Southampton water gleamed like a speck of silver on the horizon, and at our feet we marked—now rutted and grass-grown—the long straight line of the old Roman way that led from Grimm's Dyke, past the camp on the Sinodun hills, and so onward to the north.
I can't remember, for certain, whether it was to Wells at Folkestone when I was staying with him, or to me at Wallingford when he was stopping with me, that there came one afternoon a company of garden city experts on the hunt for a new site. The head of the party was an American gentleman who had devoted most of his life to the building of garden cities. He had been invited over to assist with his experience. He never got further than the two words “garden city.” At that point, Wells took the matter in hand, and for twenty minutes he explained to the old gentleman how garden cities should be constructed; the inherent
imperfectability of all garden cities that had hitherto been built; the proper method of financing and running garden cities. The old gentleman attempted a few feeble interruptions, but Wells would have none of them.
“Your ideas are all right,” said the old gentleman, when Wells at last had finished, “but they are not practical.”
“If the ideas are right,” said Wells, “your business is to make them practical.”
Of Shaw, it is said that he is never at rest unless he is working. Shaw once told me that he only had three speeches. One about politics (including religion); one about art (together with life in general); and the other one about himself. He said he found these three—with variations—served him for all purposes.
“People think I am making new speeches,” he said. “I'm repeating things that I have told them over and over again, if only they had listened. I'm tired of talking,” he said. “I wouldn't have to talk one-tenth as much, if people only listened.”
He used to say there were two schools of elocution: one the Lyceum Theatre (in Irving's time) and the other Hyde Park. He himself had graduated in Hyde Park, mounted on a chair without a back, opposite the Marble Arch. There is only one way of countering Shaw on a platform. It is hopeless trying to cross wits with him. The only thing is to force him to become serious. Then I have known him to flounder. His mind works like lightning. I remember the then President of the Playgoers' Club coming to him one day. It was at the beginning of the cinema boom. He was an earnest young man.
“We want you to speak for us on Sunday evening, Mr. Shaw,” he said, “on the question: Is there any danger of the actor being eliminated?”
“You don't say which actor,” answered Shaw, “and, anyhow, why speak of it as a danger?”
Shaw is one of the kindest of men, but has no tenderness. His chief exercise, according to his own account, is public speaking; and his favourite recreation, thinking. He admitted to me once that there have been times when he has thought too much. He was motoring in Algiers, driving himself, with his chauffeur beside him, when out of his musings came to him the idea for a play.
“What do you think of this?” he said, turning to his chauffeur; and went on then and there to tell the man all about it.
He had usually found his chauffeur a keen and helpful critic. But on this occasion, instead of friendly encouragement, he threw himself upon Shaw and, wrenching the wheel out of his hands, sat down upon him.
“Excuse me, Mr. Shaw,” the man said later on; “but it's such a damn good play that I didn't want you to die before you'd written it.”
Shaw had never noticed the precipice.
Conan Doyle used to be another tremendous worker. He would sit at a small desk in a corner of his own drawing-room, writing a story, while a dozen people round about him were talking and laughing. He preferred it to being alone in his study. Sometimes, without looking up from his work, he would make a remark, showing he must have been listening to our conversation; but his pen had never ceased moving. Barrie had the same gift. He was a reporter on a provincial newspaper in his early days, and while waiting for orders amid the babel and confusion of the press room, he would curl himself up on a chair and, quite undisturbed, peg away at something dreamy and poetic.
A vigorous family, the Doyles, both mentally and physically. I remember a trip to Norway with Doyle and his sister Connie: a handsome girl, she might have posed as Brunhilda. She married Hornung the novelist. Another sister married a clergyman named Angel, a dear ugly fellow. They lived near to us at Wallingford, and next door to them happened to live another clergyman named Dam. And later on Dam was moved to Goring, and found himself next door to a Roman Catholic priest whose name was Father Hell. Providence, I take it, arranges these little things for some wise purpose.
We had a rough crossing to Norway. Connie Doyle enjoyed it: she was that sort of girl: it added to her colour and gave a delightful curl to her hair. She had a sympathetic nature, and was awfully sorry for the poor women who were ill. She would burst in upon them every now and then to see if she could be of any help to them. You would have thought her mere presence would have cheered them up. As a matter of fact, it made them just mad.
“Oh, do go away, Connie,” I heard one of her friends murmur, while passing the open door, “it makes me ill to look at you.”
Doyle was always full of superfluous energy. He started to learn Norwegian on the boat. He got on so well that he became conceited; and one day, at a little rest house up among the mountains, he lost his head. We had come there in stoljas—a tiny carriage only just big enough for one person, drawn by a pony about the size of a Newfoundland dog, but marvellously sturdy. They will trot their fifty miles in the day and be frisky in the evening. While we were lunching, with some twenty miles still in front of us, a young officer came into the room, and said something in Norwegian. Of course we turned him on to Doyle; and Doyle rose and bowed and answered him. We all watched the conversation. The young Norwegian officer was evidently charmed with Doyle, while Doyle stood ladling out Norwegian as though it had been his mother tongue. After the officer was gone, we asked Doyle what it was all about.
“Oh, just about the weather, and the state of the roads, and how some relation of his had hurt his leg,” answered Doyle carelessly. “Of course I didn't understand all of it.” He turned the conversation.
When we had finished lunch, and the stoljas were brought out, Doyle's pony was missing. It appeared Doyle had “lent” it to the young officer, whose own pony had gone lame. The ostler, who was also the waiter, had overheard the conversation. Doyle had said “Certainly, with pleasure.” He had said it once or twice. Also the Norwegian equivalent for: “Don't mention it.”
There wasn't another pony within ten miles. One of our party, who had taken a fancy to the view, and thought he would like to spend a day or two in the neighbourhood, let Doyle have his stolja. But for the rest of that trip, Doyle talked less Norwegian.
Leprosy is still a living terror in Norway. Eating bad fish is the cause of it. Round about the fjords, preserved fish is the chief article of food during the long winter. Doyle, as a doctor, got permission to visit one of the big leper hospitals and took me with them. Not till one has seen the thing can one understand the full meaning of that awful cry: “The leper, the leper.” The strange thing was the patience of the poor marred creatures, their quiet acceptance of their fate. Above the doors were texts of scripture. “His mercy endureth for ever,” was one of them. The bell was ringing for service when we thanked our guide for an interesting afternoon. We left them trooping towards the little cold grey chapel.
Doyle had always a bent towards the occult. He told me once a curious story. It led him to conclusions with which he may now disagree. He and another member of the Psychical Research Society were sent down to an old manor house in Somerset to investigate a “phenomenon,” as it is now termed—“ghost story,” our grandmothers would have said. There lived in this house a retired Colonel and his wife with their only daughter, an unmarried woman of about five and thirty. For some time past, strange noises had been heard: a low moaning, rising to a wailing sob, and a sound as of a chain being dragged across the floor. Night after night, the noises would be heard. Then, for a while, they would cease. And then they would come again. The servants—so the old gentleman explained—were being frightened out of their lives: most of them had left; and even the dogs were becoming jumpy. Doyle and his friend were to say nothing about the Psychical Research Society. They were to come merely as guests, friends of the Colonel's, that he had run across in London. He had not told his wife and daughter. His idea was that no woman could keep a secret. The Colonel himself pooh-poohed the whole thing. He put it down to rats. But his wife's health was becoming affected. He was evidently more worried than he cared to show.
It was a lonely house. Doyle and his friend arrived there in time for dinner. In the evening, they played a rubber of whist with the Colonel and his daughter. It was before bridge was invented. The old lady
looked on while knitting. They seemed a most devoted family. Doyle and his friend, pleading drowsiness, the result of country air, retired early. That night nothing happened. On the second night, Doyle, suddenly waking about two o'clock in the morning, heard the noises exactly as described: the low moaning, rising to a wailing sob, and the dragging of a chain. He was out of bed in a jiffy. The other man, whose turn it had been to keep watch, was in the gallery overlooking the hall, from where, he felt sure, the sounds had come. The old lady and gentleman joined them, almost immediately; and the daughter a few minutes later. The daughter, while comforting her mother, whose self-control seemed to be at breaking-point, declared she had heard nothing; and was sure it was all imagination, the result of “suggestion”; but admitted, after the old people had gone back into their room, that this was only pretence. She burst into a violent fit of weeping. Doyle's medical training came to his aid. The next night they laid their plans; and discovered, as Doyle had suspected, that the ghost was the daughter herself.
She was not mad. She protested her love both for her father and her mother. She could offer no explanation. The thing seemed as unaccountable to her as it did to Doyle. On the understanding that the thing ended, secrecy was promised. The noises were never heard again. The mysteries are with the living, not the dead.
From shining examples of industry and steadfastness I—being a lazy man myself—find it a comfort to turn my thoughts away to W. W. Jacobs. He has told me himself that often he will spend (the word is his own) an entire morning, constructing a single sentence. If he writes a four-thousand-word story in a month, he feels he has earned a holiday; and the reason that he does not always take it is that he is generally too tired. I once recommended him to try a secretary. I have found it so myself: the girl becomes a sort of conscience. After a time, you get ashamed of yourself, muddling about the room and trying to look as if you were thinking. She yawns, has pins and needles, begs your pardon every five minutes—was under the impression that you said something. A girl who knows her business can, without opening her mouth, bully a man into working.
My Life and Times Page 14
