He was a man of considerable personal charm and no little intellectual weight: a man both kindly and stern: a man who could at all times be trusted to see the humour of things and who, on occasion, could be cruel to be kind.

. . . . . . . .

Not so very long before the war, my journalistic duties took me to the first night of Mr Temple Thurston’s The Greatest Wish in the World, a rather weak but quite innocuous play given by Mr Bourchier. If the play “succeeded,” the audience assuredly didn’t. When the curtain went down on the last act, there was a good deal [206] ]of applause, chiefly from the gallery, and we who were seated in the stalls waited a moment to discover what the verdict of the house was going to be.

Now, every close observer of theatre audiences knows well enough that among the many different kinds of applause there is one kind that is very sinister: it is a kind difficult to describe, but unmistakable enough when heard: to the uninterested listener it sounds sincere and hearty, but if you listen carefully you will catch, beneath the heartiness, a derisive note—something viciously eager in the shouts, something malicious in the whistles. There was this sinister sound, a kind of ground-bass, in the applause that followed the last fall of the curtain at the first production of Mr Temple Thurston’s play. The mimes had walked on and bowed their acknowledgments when, suddenly, there arose loud cries of “Author! Author!” Well did I know what those cries meant, and I told myself that the play had failed pitifully. I was edging my way out of the stalls when, to my amazement, I saw the curtain rise once more and disclose the nervous figure of Mr Temple Thurston. Instantly there went up from a section of the audience hisses and boos and cries of half-angry disappointment. Mr Thurston shrank and winced as though he had been struck in the face, and his exit was confused and awkward. It was as wanton an act of cruelty as I have ever witnessed: deliberate, heartless, stupid. This is not the place to discuss the propriety or otherwise of an audience insulting a writer who has failed to please it, but it is certain that in no other profession, in no other walk of life, do such savage traditions prevail as in the enticing and intoxicating world of the theatre.

Not long after this incident I was received by Mr Temple Thurston at his flat. I found him writing, and almost at once he began to talk most intimately about himself.

[207]
]“Never again,” said he, apropos of the episode I have just related, “shall I ‘take a call.’ I cannot even now think of those awful few moments on the stage without a shudder. It is distressing enough for an author to fail—distressing:

not only because of his own disappointment, but chiefly because of the disappointment he brings to the actors who have done their best for his play—without having his failure hurled in his face, so to speak. But though I shall never again take a call, I shall continue writing plays. I have never yet written a really successful play, and no work of mine has had a longer run than sixty performances. I have had many chances, of course, but I shall have more.”

He then told me of his early attempts to win fame. Like many other successful writers, he began in Fleet Street. The work there did not suit him, and he soon abandoned it. He married early, lived with his wife in a couple of rooms in Chancery Lane, and for a little time picked up a living as best he could. The story of his first wife’s extraordinary success with John Chilcote, M.P., is common knowledge. That success preceded his own by two or three years, but he had not long to wait before his own work found and pleased the public.

I saw Thurston on two or three other occasions, and found him a man avid of enjoyment, frank, a little bitter, combative, kindly, strong, sensitive, independent. He has a nature at once contradictory and baffling.

. . . . . . . .