Photograph by The Dover Street Studios, Ltd., London, W. To face p. [102]
Eliza
“Eliza Comes to Stay”
A Manager in the Suburbs.—I had been playing “Eliza”. We had played to capacity all the week, at a certain suburban theatre which shall be nameless. On the Saturday night the local manager came to me; he was very delighted at the “business”, and said so with great enthusiasm. The play was “great”, I was “great”, the business was equally “great”. “And now,” he concluded “you will have a little something with me, to drink to your return to this theatre.” I said it was very kind of him, but that I really didn’t want the “little something”; but he seemed rather hurt, and so I consented. I do not know exactly what nectar I expected him to send into my room, but I certainly did not expect a small bottle of Guinness’s stout, which was what he did send.
Simone le Barge.—She was playing in London with George Alexander, and was present at a very representative theatrical lunch. The thing which struck her most, so she told me, was that everyone was married or going to be married. There was George Alexander and his wife; Fred Terry and his wife; Cyril Maude and his wife; H. B. Irving and his wife; Martin Harvey and his wife; Oscar Asche and Sir Herbert Tree, both with their wives; Harry and I, and so on. It astonished her! She said, in the tone of one who sees “strange things and great mystries”: “Dans la France—c’est impossible!”
A Scotch Landlady.—I arrived in Glasgow one Sunday, and I feel rather about Glasgow as poor Dan Leno did. “They tell me this is the second city of our Empire; when I find a real ‘outsider’, I’m going to back it for a place!” However, when I arrived by the night train from the South, I found the landlady cleaning the house with the vigour of twenty women. I had to sit in her room until my own were cleaned. When finally this was accomplished to her satisfaction, I was allowed to take possession. I unpacked and took out some sewing, which was a series of small flannel garments I was making for Jack, then a baby. She walked into my room, and saw what I was doing; she fixed me with a “cold eye”. “Sewin’!” she ejaculated. I explained they were for my baby, etc., but the cold eye still remained cold. “On the Sawbath!” she said. “Weel, Ah ca’ it naething but impious,” and with that she walked out and left me alone with my “impiety”.
Dan Leno.—I have no real right to include Dan Leno. I never met him, but my sister Decima did, and someone else who did told me this story, which I think is worth repeating. Leno lived at Brixton (I am told that, as all good Americans go to Paris when they die, so all good music hall artists go to Brixton when they die), and he used on Sunday mornings to potter round his garden wearing carpet slippers, an old pair of trousers, his waistcoat open, and no collar; quite happy, and enjoying it immensely. He went round, on one of these Sunday mornings, to a “hostelry” for liquid refreshment, and met there a “swell comedian” who knew him. This gentleman, who appeared on the halls dressed rather in the manner of Mr. George Lashwood, was faultlessly dressed in a frock coat, the regulation dark grey trousers, and looked rather “stagily” immaculate. He looked at Dan with disapproval, and proceeded to expostulate with him. “Danny, boy, you shouldn’t come out dressed like that. After all, you are England’s leading comedian, and—well—you ought to make yourself look smart. Let people know who you are!” Then, with pride, he added: “Look at me, boy; why don’t you do like I do?” Leno looked at him gravely. “Like you?” he repeated. “Look like you?—I never come out in my ‘props’, old boy.”
Mr. Henry Arthur Jones years ago said a thing to Harry that has ever lived in my memory. They were discussing acting and plays, and Mr. Jones said “A play is as good as it is acted.” That remark sums up the whole question. A play can only be seen and valued through the acting; it’s the only art that has to be judged through the medium of other personalities, and not by the creator. When I once saw a revival of one of Harry’s plays, that had not the advantage of his personal supervision, I realised how completely true Mr. Jones’s remark was.
A Scottish Soldier.—It was during the war. I was walking up Regent Street, and there I saw him, fresh from France, hung round like a Christmas tree, obviously knowing nothing of London, and, being a Scot, far too proud to ask his way. I ventured to speak to him, for, as in the old days girls suffered from “scarlet” fever, during the war I suffered from “khaki” fever. “Do you want to get to a railway station?” I asked. “Aye; Paddington.” As it happened, I too was going to Paddington, and I said so. “I am going there myself; if you will come with me, I can tell you where to find the platform. We will get on the ’bus that comes along; I’ll show you the way.” He looked at me, not unkindly, but with the scorn of a true Scot for the simplicity of a Southerner who underrates the intelligence of the men from “over the Border”. “Ye wull, wull ye?” he said. “Aye—well—ye wull not. Ah’ve been warrrrned aboot lassies like you!” And he walked away with great dignity and self-possession.
Ellen Terry.—I have seen her, as you have seen her—and if by chance you have not done so, you have missed one of the things that might well be counted “pearls of great price”—on the stage, looking perfectly beautiful, with the beauty which did not owe its existence to wonderful features or glorious colouring, but to that elusive “something” that the limitations of the English language force me to describe as “magnetism”; but the most lovely picture I carry in my mental gallery is of her in her own house at Chelsea. A letter, signed by all the actresses of Great Britain, was to be sent to the Queen concerning a big charity matinée. It had been most carefully worded, and a most wonderful copy made. Mrs. Kendal had signed it, and I was deputed to take it to Ellen Terry for her signature. When I got to her house, she was ill in bed, neuralgia in her head, and I was shown into her bedroom. I don’t know if you could look beautiful with your head swathed in flannel, suffering tortures from neuralgia; I know I couldn’t; but Ellen Terry did. She looked rather as she did in The Merry Wives of Windsor. If you can imagine “Mistress Ford” sitting up in an old four-poster bed, still wearing her “wimple”, and looking sufficiently lovely to turn Ford’s head, and Falstaff’s head, and everybody else’s head a dozen times—that was Ellen Terry as I saw her then. I gave her the letter, this carefully made “fair copy”, for her to sign. She read the letter, slowly, pen in hand. Some phrase failed to please her, and saying “No, I don’t think that will do”, she took her pen, scored through some words, and substituted others, handing the letter back to me, with “I think that is better, don’t you?” Have you seen her writing? It is rather large, very black, very distinct, and very pretty; I did not dare to say that no letter could be given to the Queen with corrections—a Queen had made them, and it was not for me to remark on what she did. I said I was sure it was an improvement, and took my precious letter away for other signatures. What happened to the letter eventually, whether another copy was made or not—that has all vanished from my mind; but the picture of lovely “Mistress Ford” remains.
A ’Bus Driver.—In the old days I used to walk from the Strand to Piccadilly and catch my ’bus there. It saved a penny. One old ’bus driver—there were horse ’buses then, of course—used to wait for me. I used to climb on to the top of the ’bus, and he used to talk to me, and take an enormous interest in “how I was getting on”. Years afterwards I was at Paddington, and as I came out of the station I saw, seated on the box of a cab, my old friend of the ’bus. He told me he had “got on”, and had bought a cab, a four-wheeler; that he had never “lost sight of me”; and that he still thought of me, and always should think of me, as “his Miss Moore”. Bless his red face! I wonder what he is driving now. Taxis and motor ’buses may be very good things in their way, but they lost us the “real” ’bus driver and the “real” cab driver.
A “Tommy” from the Second London General Hospital.—I was playing “Eliza” at the Brixton Theatre, and on the Saturday the manager, the late Newman Maurice, asked a party of wounded boys from the London General Hospital to come, as our guests, to the matinée. I, in my turn, asked if they would come round to my dressing-room, at the end of the play, for tea and cigarettes; they came, and in a terrific state of excitement, too. All talking at once, they tried to tell me the reason, and after some time I began to understand. One of their number had been “shell-shocked”, and so badly that he had lost his speech; he had been watching the play that afternoon and suddenly began to laugh, and, a second later, to the delight Of his companions, to speak! I have never seen such congratulations, such hand-shakings, such genuine delight, as was expressed by those boys over their comrade’s recovery. One of the boys that afternoon was a mass of bandages; you could not see anything of his face and head but two bright eyes, so badly had he been wounded. When I went to Canada, two years ago, this man was waiting for me at the hotel at Vancouver. He was no longer wrapped in bandages, but he had been so certain that I should not know him again that he had brought photographs of himself, taken while still in hospital, “complete with bandages”, to prove his identity! As a matter of fact—how or why, I cannot say—I did remember him at once.