In the Beauty-Stone Joe was only responsible for the lyrics and parts of the plot. But I know that his idea of the man’s true love being first awakened after he became blind was dear to him, and he used it again in his adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde for H. B. Irving; but there it is the wife whose blindness hides from her all but the beautiful side of her husband.
Such were the chief of Joe’s plays. Tireless energy was given to the production of them all, for I think it was universally admitted that no one bore the strain of rehearsals as cheerily and patiently as Joe. But these attributes shone equally in his work upon the plays of others produced during his many years of management at the Comedy Theatre, at the Lyceum, after it was taken over by a company, at His Majesty’s when producing plays for Sir Herbert Tree, and lastly at Covent Garden, where he arranged the mise en scène for Parsifal at a time when he was already stricken by failing health.
Many strenuous hours were spent over each of these ventures in the most arduous of professions; but what I prefer to recall are the gay ones—the merry moments—the unfailing good humour, wit and pleasant jest by which my husband lightened the weary waits with which all who have laboured for the stage are familiar.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” I can hear him retort cheerfully to some impatient spectator who was grumbling at the long waits during the last rehearsal of Julius Cæsar at His Majesty’s Theatre; and none was so ready as his friend the actor-manager, with the appreciative laugh.
Lady Tree—Maud, to us—reminds me of his favourite attitude as he would stand watching the effects of the lighting of his scenes from the empty stalls with his stick passed through his arms behind his back, and his cheery tones uttering the most fearful anathemas against lime-light men and scene-shifters.
One day I said to him: “Don’t get so angry, Joe, it must tire you out.”
To which he replied with his usual promptness, “Angry, my dear! Why, I’m only using the language proper to lime-light men: they understand no other.”
Once at a Christmas rehearsal, when the stage-hands were all rather more tipsy than was generally allowable, he came from the stage, and as he sat down beside me in the stalls he said with a whimsical smile: “Poor old Burnaby! He keeps muttering, ‘Buried a wife o’ Toosday and now, s’elp me, can’t lay my ’and on a hammer.’”
He was held in firm affection by his stage-hands just as he was by his New Gallery staff, not forgetting the decorators, and those superior frame-gilders who were only induced by regard for “the boss” to work together in completing the balustrade of the balcony during the strenuous last days before the opening of that “Aladdin’s palace.”