My altered version of the French play was a poor one, but it had, I suppose, sufficient merit to obtain me a commission from Mme. Modjeska, the noted Polish actress, for a free translation of the same play, which she performed first in London with Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson and afterwards throughout the United States.
The “youthful conceit” to which Joe was throughout his life so lenient as even to consider a virtue, led me presently to try my hand at a bigger task—no less than the dramatisation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. I was quite unequal to the attempt, and I only mention it because it proved the beginning of Joe’s dramatic work. He took the play in hand, refashioned the plot, only keeping portions of the dialogue as I had adapted it to stage necessity; and it was produced—with Marion Terry as the wilful and charming Bathsheba—first in the provinces and then in London.
Owing to circumstances needless to recall, the venture was a financial failure; but it served to start Joe on a new road; and it was not long before he scored a big success. He came home one night from a railway journey and gave me a little book which he had bought to read in the train: it was Called Back by Hugh Conway.
“See if you don’t think that an enthralling story?” he said.
There could be no doubt of this and the British public gave its verdict promptly. The book began to sell like “hot cakes” and Joe went down to Clifton, saw its clever author—until then unknown to literature—and arranged with him for its dramatisation.
The play was produced on May 20th, 1884, and I think there are still people who remember its first success and that, in the rôle of the Italian conspirator—Macari—Sir Herbert Tree scored one of his finest early triumphs; the piece was revived several times in London and the provinces and had the questionable compliment of being also pirated. But I shall not easily forget the dress-rehearsal!
I was comparatively new to such things then and I can well recall the chill of heart with which we got home to Blandford Square in the early hours and my inner conviction that the scenery could not possibly be finished nor, one at least, of the principal actors, know his part by the next night! But nothing could ever quell Joe’s hopeful spirit; he plied his somewhat less optimistic colleague with cold tongue and whisky-and-soda and made merry work of the stupidity of lime-light men and scene-shifters, to say nothing of others of higher degree; and then went to sleep at 6 a.m. and got up and returned to the theatre at 10 a.m. without turning a hair.
I wonder now if he was as strong as he seemed in those days or whether it was only his gay and excitable Celtic temperament that carried him through everything. Anyhow he enjoyed his life to the full and there were never any dull moments, whether he was at work or at play.
The radiant vitality which lasted him so long and so well—and to which there is such frequent testimony in letters from the various friends with whom he laboured in his many walks of life—seems to have had the power of so communicating itself to his fellow-workers that they would share his optimistic hopes and, if these were disappointed, generally be ashamed to utter reproach in the face of his urbane acceptance of failure. But on this occasion there was only rejoicing.