Eliza Comes to Stay he never liked very much; he thought it below the level of the rest of his work; and though this evergreen play has certainly been a very valuable property, yet I think Harry would have been better pleased by the same success of one of his other plays. Yet Eliza is lovable, even before she becomes “the new me”, even when she is still dressed to look “dreadfully respectable”. And what a part it is, too! what is called “an actress-proof” part—which means, in the vernacular of the stage, “it will play itself”; so it may, but what a difference when it is played—well, as it can be played by anyone who will take the trouble to study Eliza, and then, by the grace of God, is able to give her to the audience as, not a freak, but a very human, affectionate girl, standing rather breathless on the threshold of a world she does not know.
Perhaps his favourite play was The Dangerous Age, which we first played in America, where the audiences liked it enormously, and which, when we brought it to London, was not a great success. There is no character to which Harry has been more kind than to Betty Dunbar; she does ugly things, but you are never allowed to feel they have really touched her; she remains, after her indiscretions, still the same delightful and charming person; you are made to feel that the agony which she suffers, when she waits to hear if her little son will live or die, has wiped out all her foolishness—to give it no harsher name.
It was during a performance of this play that a young man turned to a friend who sat with him, and said “I can’t watch it; it’s terrible to see a woman’s soul stripped naked”; and a story he told later is of value here, because I think it gauges so correctly Harry’s attitude towards women. This man had been a sailor, and, talking over the play with a friend later, he took exception to his remark that “Betty Dunbar was a pretty worthless woman”, and to account for his defence of the character he told this story:—“I was once doing a Western Ocean trip, on a tramp steamer, in November. We struck a bad gale, and the Atlantic rollers stripped her of everything. Next morning I stood with the skipper on deck. There she was, rolling about, not rising to the rollers, but just lying there—down and out. I said to the skipper, ‘She looks what she is—a slut.’ He turned on me sharply and said, ‘Don’t you ever say that about a ship or a woman. If some man hadn’t scamped his job, and not done his best, she wouldn’t be looking as she does this morning’.” I think that was Harry’s feeling about women like his heroine in The Dangerous Age—that it was probably the fault of a very definite “someone” that they had not made a greater success of life.
He loved to write of children, and wrote of them with almost singular understanding and reality. The children in The Wilderness, the two boys in The Dangerous Age, the “Tommy” and the Midshipman in The Law Divine, the small caddie in A Kiss or Two, are all real children, full of humour and wonderful high spirits, who never—as do so many “stage children”—become tedious or boring.
A Kiss or Two was produced at the London Pavilion—a legitimate venture which followed years of variety. It was a charming play, and one speech from it—the legend—is one of the most delightful things Harry ever wrote. The character was an Irish soldier, Captain Patrick Delaney, and was played by Harry. I give part of it here:
“It’s a legend I’m tellin’ ye, an’ all true legends begin with ‘My Dear and My Judy.’ Well, My Dear and My Judy, one fine day Mother Nature, havin’ nothin’ better to do, she made a man. You know what a man is? That’s all right then—well, she made a man, and this mighty fine piece of work tickled her to death, it did, and so she went to bed devilish pleased with herself, had a beautiful dream, woke up next morning, went one better than the day before—she made a woman. Ye can’t say you know what a woman is, for she’s a mystery to the lot of us. Well, she made a woman, and then she sat down and looked at the pair of them, and the pair of them looked at each other, and mighty uneasy they felt, wondering what the devil it was all about. At last, after them two had been looking at each other till the perspiration was breaking out upon their foreheads, Mother Nature breaks the awful silence, and pointing to the woman, who was standing all of a quiver, with her eyes lookin’ anywhere except at the man, yet seein’ him all the time, Mother Nature pointin’ to the woman, say to the man, ‘That sweet lookin’ thing’s all yours,’ says she. ‘I can’t believe it,’ says the man with a gulp. Then Mother Nature, pointing to the man, who was looking at the woman as if there was nothin’ else in the wide, wide world worth looking at which there wasn’t—Mother Nature, pointing to the man, says to the woman, ‘An’ that fine looking thing’s all yours,’ says she. ‘Sure I know it,’ says the woman, bold as brass, and the fat was in the fire. But that’s only the beginning: it’s now that the trouble comes. At last, when everything had settled into its proper place between these two, the man came home one day and couldn’t find his collar stud. ‘Where’s that woman?’ says he. ‘Out walkin’ with another man,’ says they. ‘That won’t do at all,’ says he. ‘How’ll you stop it?’ says they. ‘I’ll make a law,’ says he, and that’s where the trouble began.... He sent for all the stuffy old men of his acquaintance, and they had a meeting by candle-light in the Old Town Hall. And he up an’ spoke to them: ‘Now all you gentlemen,’ says he, ‘have been casting sheep’s eyes at the girls. I’ve been watchin’ you at it the times I haven’t been busy doin’ it myself,’ says he. ‘Them girls have been casting them same sheep’s eyes back at you with interest,’ says he. ‘Can’t help it,’ says the old men. ‘It’s Nature,’ says they. ‘Nature is it?’ says he, ‘then there’s too much of this Nature about,’ says he, ‘and I’m goin’ to stop it.’ With that his eloquence carried the meeting, and they started in to make laws. Oh, them laws that they made, sure they forgot all about the days of their youth, when their blood was warm, and the sunshine was singin’ in their hearts. They just sat there on them cold stones in that old Town Hall, chilled to the marrow, and made them laws to stop love-making. And while they were at it, there came a tap at the door, and they all gave a jump which showed you they were doin’ something they were ashamed of. ‘What’s that?’ says they, and they all looked round and then there came another little tap, and the door slowly opened, and there in the sunlight stood a beautiful young woman, lookin’ in at them, her eyes all agog with wonder. ‘What the divil are you doin’?’ says she. ‘None of your business,’ says they. ‘True for you,’ says she. An’ she took them at their word, and slammed the door, an’ she’s been slamming the door on them same laws ever since!”
I have given that speech fully, because it seems to me to be so very much the spirit in which Harry wrote and to show so well his attitude towards life—fantastic, ideal, almost but not quite a fairy tale.
You will find it, too, in The Law Divine (which Harry played at Wyndham’s Theatre for so long with Miss Jessie Winter), when Edie tells her son about her honeymoon, when she says: “Ordinary people! We were the children of the moon, we were the spirits of sea mist and soft night air—Dads said we were.” The whole scene is full of that imagery which was so much part of the writer’s mental composition.
In Bad Hats, which play he renamed, having first called it The Rotten Brigade, and which at the production was called Birds of a Feather, he wrote another of those plays which, though called by the author “a comedy”, had all the elements of a tragedy. Harry intended to write another First Act, making the First Act the Second, in order that the existing circumstances would be more easy for the audience to grasp. It was, and is, a great play, and Jacob Ussher is one of the finest character-studies he ever created.
I should have liked to have dealt more fully with many of his less-well-known plays; with One Summer’s Day, which Charles Hawtrey produced, and which was the first emotional part he had ever played, and of which I am asked so often, “When are you going to revive it?”; with Grierson’s Way, which caused so much comment when it was produced; with The Sentimentalist, with its wonderful first act, the play being the story of a man’s life, which was praised for its beauty and imagination by some, while others asked, “What’s it all about?”