“My dear, I haven’t one. My ugliness has caused me so much pain in life that I have almost never let a camera be turned upon me. That was my second horror: ‘She is a great actress, but——’ And then down came the bricks upon my looks. God made me this way, but my critics have found it a personal sin.”
And she waxed warm on the subject. Her grey eyes were beautiful, however, they were so expressive; still her mouth was large, and her features heavy and bad. Her voice certainly had grated upon me when I first heard it. With those who found fault with her voice I had sympathy, but none with the beauty-seekers, for expression comes before everything, and Clara Morris’s expression was wonderful.
She wore her wedding ring upon her little finger, for whatever part she played through life she had never taken it off.
“You see how sentimental I have been,” she laughed.
In reply to a question, I replied that I had to be back in England for my boys’ holidays. Only once was I absent at holiday time, and on that occasion they were with my mother.
“Happy woman!” she exclaimed. “How I have always longed for children; though such happiness never came to me. But I have an old mother who still lives, thank God; and as long as a woman has a mother she can never grow old or feel lonely.”
Another remarkable figure in America, when I was over there in 1904, was Dowie the prophet, or as some on this side of the Atlantic more correctly termed him—the “Profit”; perhaps the biggest humbug that even his own vast country of adoption has produced.
Of course I went to see Dowie and Zion City; everybody did. The place lay within an hour’s railway journey of Chicago. Four years before it had been waste land. In the interval there had sprung up a railway station, an hotel called Elijah House, a whole town of residences, a huge tabernacle capable of holding seven thousand people, and a population of over ten thousand souls.
Knowing his gross life, the horrible language he used, knowing also that he was hounded out of England for his vituperation against King Edward—his King, for Dowie was born in Edinburgh and had lived only sixteen years in the States—I was surprised to find such a charming, kindly old gentleman. A man nearly seventy years of age, short and stout like Ibsen, with a large strong head and a grey beard; such was “Elijah,” as he pleased to call himself.
Dowie received me in a most magnificent, book-lined library; thousands of well-bound volumes—for which I have since heard he never paid—filled the shelves. Beside him on the table stood a machine that was clicking.