I need not explain who Murray Carson is. He was a very great light in those circles, because he was an actor-manager, and as such had the distinction of giving Lena Ashwell one of her first chances in Gloriana. In addition to his successes as an actor and a manager, he was joint author with Louis Napoleon Parker in that delightful play Rosemary, since which he has written many plays. He is quite a well-known figure at various literary clubs, noted for his remarkable resemblance to the first Napoleon. The collaboration of these two Napoleons was, I imagine, a mere coincidence.
My last meeting with Decima Moore I am never likely to forget. She was very fond of watching polo, and we were sitting together in the pavilion at a club to which I belong, when a man was thrown from his pony, and dragged along the ground for several yards on his face, his nose ploughing a regular furrow till it was broken. I went down to where he was lying. Every one thought he was killed, because he lay insensible for so long. When he did come to, he said, “Is my nose broken, doctor?” The doctor said it was, and then he said, in my hearing, “Then I hope you will make a better job of it than God did,” which seemed to me the most extraordinary piece of sang-froid for a man who, the moment before, had been almost across the threshold of life and death.
Sir Charles Wyndham, whose real name I cannot for the moment remember, and “Mary Moore,” I have seen chiefly on the Riviera at Cimiez. I make it the excuse for my forgetfulness that he forgot what he was forgetting once, when, coming up cordially to shake hands with me, he said, “I remember your name quite well, but I can’t recall your face.”
Wyndham fought in the war between North and South in the United States, and he was a member of the company of John Wilkes Booth, the actor, at the time that the latter assassinated President Lincoln in the theatre; I have never heard if he was actually on the stage at the time. He was brought up, I understood, as a doctor.
As an instance of Wyndham’s lapses of memory, I may quote that one day at Ranelagh he asked me if I was a member of the Club. I said “Yes.” “Can I telephone from here?” “Oh, yes.”
When we got to the telephone, he began turning up the name of his man of business, who had a name, which I will not mention, as ordinary as Skinner; there might have been a couple of score of the name in the telephone book. He read down the list. “I can’t remember his initials,” he said. I looked at him as if to say, “Don’t you often see him?” He caught my eye. His actor’s intuition told him my thoughts. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Yes, I do ’phone to him every day, but I can’t for the life of me tell which of all this lot he is.”
Irving once told me at lunch a story which he probably told many others. He was touring in the United States, and staying either at St. Louis or Cincinnati. One morning at breakfast a large rat ran across the room. As he had been up till past five that morning, being entertained by the local Savage Club—I forget its name—he was feeling rather cheap, and gave a little start. “You needn’t mind him, Mis’ Irving,” said the negro waiter; “he’s a real one.”
The Trees I have known for a long time. It is an undiluted pleasure to meet Tree out at lunch—like all actors, he affects lunches more than dinners. There are few men so witty. When most of the great actors and actresses were exhausting their powers of polished vituperation on the unhappy Clement Scott for his generalisations upon the morals of the stage, Tree’s reply as to what he thought of the matter was, that nothing Clement Scott had said made him think any less of him, and Lady Tree’s rejoinder to the late W. T. Stead is historical.
Cyril Maude always gives me his smile when we meet at a certain polo club, and often “passes the time of day” to me very pleasantly. But I know that he is another of the people who remember your name, when they meet you, but cannot recall your face. Still, I forgive him for the sake of that Major in The Second in Command. His charming wife, Winifred Emery, whose triumph I saw the night she won her place in the first rank as Marguerite in Irving’s Faust—she was the understudy—always remembers my face as well as my name. There never was an actress on our stage who showed more spirit, unless it is Lena Ashwell turning on a bully, for Lena turns to bay like the lion “on that famed Picard field.”
The Maudes’ daughter is now rapidly coming to the front. I saw her as one of Portia’s ladies in the Merchant of Venice looking (intentionally, I suppose) for all the world like the exquisite Tornabuoni heiress in the choir frescoes of Santa Maria Novella at Florence, and could hardly believe that it was the same merry, everyday girl that I meet at the Adrian Ross’s.