Smith’s beautiful sister, Mrs. Cosmo Hamilton, who latinised her name into Faber when she went on the stage—she told me so herself—was only just coming into her own when she died—cut off in her very flower. There was no more genuinely liked and esteemed woman on the stage.
Granville Barker, the typical clever, red-headed boy, though he was not then old enough to have been promoted to dress-clothes, used to come with an extremely intelligent and charming mother, the mother of a large family, I always understood, though she looked far too young. They were brought by Edwin Waud, the artist, as far as I remember, and they were friends of Gleeson White’s. Granville was a very bright boy when you spoke to him, but he was never much in evidence; he left his mother, so that she might enjoy herself, instead of having to keep him amused. He may have gone to the sandwiches and lemonade in the dining-room—more probably, he was not allowed to smoke, and went to do that.
I fancy that Acton Bond, who now runs the British Empire Shakespeare Society, must have been a friend of Gleeson White’s, because he came into our life so very early. Bond was an institution in Bohemia. He was a singularly handsome and distinguished-looking actor, who took Shakespeare and other “costume” parts. He was one of the most courteous men I ever met, and I knew that I could confer pleasure on anybody by introducing Bond. This was an important consideration to a host who made a point of keeping all his guests introduced and amused for all the evening. Bond knew all the denizens in Bohemia, and had a fund of conversation about them, in addition to being personally very interesting; and, as a fair golfer, a good man in a boat, a good dancer, and so on, was a “find” for a country house. Even when he was acting most, his heart inclined to the other side of his profession—to training people for the stage and running the Actors’ Association—a sort of Union for Actors. He did an immense amount of useful work. He married the charming Eve Tame comparatively lately. A tall man, with a graceful figure, he carried himself extremely well, and, with his fine classical head, perpetuated the tradition of the Kembles.
Ray Rockman was one of our Argonaut friends, and became a very intimate friend indeed. She stayed with us at Salcombe and elsewhere, besides being constantly at our house. With her tall, slight, aristocratic figure, the face of a marquise of Louis XV’s court, and her wonderful Oriental eyes, she had the presence of the greatest tragédiennes who have adorned our stage. When you see her in a drawing-room, you think instinctively of Sarah Bernhardt’s great parts, and rightly, because she was Sarah’s understudy in them in Paris before she came to England. If any actor-manager had wanted a leading lady for tragedy, she would have been one of the most famous actresses on our stage to-day, for she had the divine fire. But London does not run to tragedies, except for the glorification of an actor- or actress-manager, so she had to descend to being the villainess of melodramas generally finishing up with suicide in the last act. In the Great Ruby she showed her real dramatic power. But she has never had the chance of becoming the leading lady at one of our chief theatres like His Majesty’s, where she could have taken London by storm with her magnificent presence and carriage and the passion she can put into her acting with her marvellous Oriental eyes and coal-black hair. These she owes to her being a South Russian. I am not sure whether she was born in Russia or the United States, where her father is a doctor in Montana—a friend of the Copper King. If any one were to make a play out of Sarah Siddons, Ray Rockman would be the ideal actress to cast for the leading part.
It was Ray who introduced me to the wonderful Annie Russell, the most temperamental of American actresses. I say American, though she was born in Liverpool, because practically all her work has been done on the other side, and it was Ray who introduced me to Sarah Bernhardt. Unfortunately, Sarah does not like talking English, and I am not equal to saying anything very interesting in French, though I read it with facility, and know plenty of “kitchen” French for use at hotels and railway-stations. Sarah sent me seats to see her in Hamlet, which she pronounced “omelette.” I found it rather wearisome, to be quite honest, because I hear French so badly, and when I went down to see Ray and her in her dressing-room at the end of the first act, I gladly accepted her invitation to spend the rest of the evening in her dressing-room, “if I could not follow her easily.”
It was extremely interesting to watch her dressing, and she did not take any more notice of my presence than if I had been a fly, while she was actually being got ready for the stage, though she made herself extremely pleasant during the acts when she was off the stage. She could divest herself of the personality of Hamlet, and resume it at a moment’s notice. Ray speaks French as well as English, so everything was quite simple, with her there to interpret. During the longest interval a message came down for her that the Prince of Wales (afterwards King Edward VII) was in the house, and Sarah went off to see him for a long time; it seemed like half-an-hour. She invited me to go with Ray to visit her at that wonderful rock island off the Breton coast, but for some reason or other I did not make the effort. I think I had made arrangements to go to St. Andrews.
Elizabeth Robins I met at the Idler. One always thought of her as the actress in those days, and not, as one now thinks of her, as the novelist. Elizabeth Robins is a tall, spare, Western woman, with a very eloquent face. She is the greatest Ibsen actress we have had in England. She had the unusual courage, for the stage, to think that good looks and elegance in dress were of no consequence, when she was presenting Ibsen’s characters. Her one desire was to fulfil his conception exactly, and she did it most convincingly.
A few people, like myself, knew that she was the “C. E. Raimond” who wrote George Mandeville’s Husband for that series of Heinemann’s, but we imagined it to be a passing phase with her, instead of the prelude to a series of great novels on burning questions.
I do not know who brought Gertrude Kingston to us first, but she often came. She was the accomplished violinist mentioned in Lord Roberts’ dispatch of September 13, 1901, as having rendered special service during the war in South Africa. Mrs. Silver, for this is her real name, is an authoress as well as an artist and a collector, as I discovered when we were going over the old things in Phillimore Lodge together before the sale.
Alice Skipworth was a lovely woman with a gorgeous voice, whose fortunes on the stage were made in an extraordinary way. An actor-manager engaged her without any experience of acting to understudy his wife, who financed his plays, in an American tour. When they got to Philadelphia, I think it was, on the second night his wife took ill, and Mrs. Skipworth duly took her place. Philadelphia went wild over her beauty and her voice, and the actor-manager found himself in the unpleasant predicament of having to decide whether he would close his doors, or persuade his wife to let Mrs. Skipworth go on taking her place. His wife, who was, I believe, very charming herself, was a sensible woman, and thought it would be better to coin money by doing nothing than to bankrupt herself by acting, so the understudy acted and sang throughout the tour, and came back a leading lady in musical comedy. She was a very clever woman; she could have written an excellent novel about Bohemian life; she had the knowledge; and she was both witty and epigrammatic.