In town, my audiences have sometimes displayed a want of enthusiasm, which has been easily understood by everybody but myself; and in my earlier days in the country I used to console myself with the fact that if my entertainments did not go, the audience did, which was a comfort and a relief.
I wonder if my friend Frank Thornton will be offended if I repeat an oft-told story about him? I had the pleasure of knowing him in my early entertaining days, and he himself was remarkably clever in short sketches in character.
When I was first engaged at the Opera Comique to appear in The Sorcerer, F. Thornton was "specially retained" to understudy me. I believe he was very nearly engaged himself to play the part. Fortunately for me, he was not.
During the first week he used to come to me each night, and ask how I was. On my replying that I was "all right—never better," it appeared to me that he departed with a disappointed look. His kind enquiries were repeated, as I thought with extra anxiety; but still I kept well, and showed no signs of fatigue. Then he began to insist that I was not looking well; and I replied that, looks or no looks, I felt perfectly well. Finally he came to me with a pill, which he was certain would do for me. I was also certain that it would "do for me," and declined to take it; I played nearly two hundred consecutive nights of The Sorcerer, and nearly seven hundred of H.M.S. Pinafore, without missing a single performance.
About the third week of the subsequent piece, The Pirates of Penzance, I was called away from the theatre through a domestic affliction; and Frank Thornton, at literally a moment's notice, had to don the Major-General's uniform and play my part. It goes without saying that his was an excellent performance, as those who saw his excessively funny impersonation of the cramped old aesthete in Patience will easily understand.
The domestic affliction referred to was the sudden death of my father on April 24th, 1880. At the beginning of this book I stated that I should not deal with the shadows of my life. Nor shall I, beyond stating that the shock to me was so terrible that I often wonder now whether I have quite recovered it. My poor darling mother never did, and she followed him in a year and ten months after.
There was scarcely a paper in Great Britain and Ireland that did not refer to him in the most affectionate terms. If his loss was felt so much by people who knew him only slightly, what must it have been to his two sons, who idolised the very ground he walked upon? His last lecture was on "Dickens and his Works" (Dickens was his favourite subject), and was delivered at Wrexham on April 22nd, two days before his decease; and the kind clergyman who entertained him on the occasion wrote one of the first and sweetest letters of sympathy that I received.
I should like to say that my father was more than astonished at the result of my appearances in The Sorcerer, Pinafore, and Pirates, and was extremely proud of my stage appearances. He was easily pleased, no doubt; but it was a great source of comfort to me to know he was pleased.
Soon after the first production of The Sorcerer in 1887, I had occasion to go one morning to Maidenhead by train. I occupied a carriage with a lady and three gentlemen, all of one party. The conversation, which I could not help hearing—and unfortunately listeners never hear good of themselves—turned on Gilbert and Sullivan's new and original form of opera. Suddenly, one of the three gentlemen began to criticise my performance in no complimentary terms. The lady, to my joy, differed with my critic, and it appeared for a moment as if all would end happily. Not a bit of it. The two other gentlemen joined in, and began to find fault with my personal appearance as well as my voice (or want of it). The lady still gallantly defended me, but in doing so she only added fuel to the fire; and judging from the tone and manner in which the two last-named gentlemen contradicted her, I could only come to the conclusion that they were her brothers. I suppose I ought to have stopped them; but for the life of me I could not think of a method of doing so. The train, however, began to pull up at Slough; so I determined to change carriages. I took out my card-case, and wrote in pencil on one of my cards, "Thanks awfully," and placed it on the seat beside the two gentlemen previously to making my exit from the compartment. My only regret is, I am not in a position to describe what followed.
This incident reminds me of another, an occasion on which I indirectly denied myself. In 1878, when H.M.S. Pinafore was first produced at the Opera Comique, I always used to give a musical sketch at the piano at the Saturday afternoon performances after the opera. I had some appointment at Kensington, and went to the Temple Station at the conclusion of the performance and got into a first-class carriage of the Underground Railway. Opposite to me sat a middle-aged gentleman with a good-looking lad. The gentleman stared at me hard, and I saw at once that he had recognised me—an easy matter, considering my sketches were, and still are, always given in propria persona. He whispered to the boy, and the boy's eyes also became riveted on me. I felt like one of Madame Tussaud's waxworks; although, from the manner in which the gentleman and the boy sat and stared, they really resembled the effigies more than I did. At last the gentleman moved. He took from his pocket the book of the libretto of Pinafore and peered into it, taking good care to hold the outside cover with title towards me, so that I might see what he was reading. Of course, I took not the slightest notice of his actions; but I had great difficulty in restraining a smile as the boy began to whistle the air of "The Ruler of the Queen's Navee." The gentleman was not to be defeated: he handed me the book, and the following conversation took place between the Gentleman and the Clown: