“Mr. Barry Sullivan!”
The tragedian entered, bowing right and left, and shaking hands with his host.
“Go on with your recitation, Johnny!” cried Sothern.
But Maclean had collapsed and taken refuge behind the chair of a friend. Nor was he greatly reconciled to the situation when it was discovered that the new-comer was not Sullivan at all, but a brother comedian made up for the part.
Another of Sothern’s practical jokes was carried out with the assistance of Sir Charles Wyndham—in those days innocent of any pretensions to the accolade. This particular experiment was six months in the working, and by the elaborate means adopted its victim was kept on the tenterhooks of suspense during all that time. The late Mr. Edgar Bruce, then lately joined to the ranks of “the profession,” was the unfortunate dupe. Bruce was an ambitious young gentleman, and the joke was so contrived as to play on this characteristic. It commenced in this way: Sothern had it put about that he had been approached by the Russian Minister on the possibility of getting together a company of English comedians to play in St. Petersburg. He personally could not accept the flattering command. He pretended to offer it to Wyndham, and Wyndham handed the proposal on to Bruce. Bruce jumped at it, and then, and for a period of six months, the fun waxed fast and furious. Bruce was invited to meet the Minister. An old nobleman smothered in orders, but having no language but French and his native tongue, was introduced to Bruce at a luncheon given for the purpose. At that time Bruce had no French, and the conversation was carried on with Wyndham as interpreter. Preliminaries were settled. An agreement was signed. There remained nothing now but to engage a company. Here again his good friends Wyndham and Sothern came to the rescue. They made a careful selection of actors and actresses who were let into the secret.
Eventually the affair got paragraphed in the newspapers. The public was as greatly duped as Bruce himself, and those interested in theatrical matters gossiped knowingly about the visit of the English comedians to Russia. Constant devices were adopted to raise, and sometimes to dash, the hopes of the victim. Once Sothern borrowed a thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds from his jeweller, and lent them to Miss Edith Chalice—one of the supposed Bruce Company—who exhibited them to the deluded victim as a gift from the Minister, asking him to name any little souvenir he would desire for himself from the same potentates. Bruce made his desires known; but that was as far as the matter ever went in that particular direction.
I was at a Bohemian party given by Val Bromley one night at his studios in Bloomsbury Square, when there was an amusing exhibition of the system adopted by Sothern and Wyndham to arouse the anxiety of poor Bruce. All three of them happened to be at this jolly function. At about one o’clock in the morning a sudden altercation broke out between Sothern and Wyndham; they stood in the middle of the studio in attitudes of menace, their voices were raised. “Never dare to speak to me again!” shouted one of the angry men. “You are a contemptible scoundrel, sir!” roared the other. The war of words grew hot, the gestures more threatening, and Bruce ran from friend to friend in the room, crying: “For Heaven’s sake pacify them! My whole future is ruined if those two men quarrel!” He spoke with the greatest emotion, and his face was deadly pale. At length one of the disputants cried out: “A friend of mine will wait upon you in the morning, sir!” and strode out of the room, speedily followed by his brother-conspirator. Soon after this the whole thing was “given away” by one or other, or by both, of the authors of the joke. But the curious part of the thing is that Edgar Bruce had for six months so convinced himself that he was a manager that he could not rid himself of the character. He had achieved the reputation. He had, moreover, made openings for himself among performers, costumiers, authors, and musicians. In six months he had gained experience of the managerial methods, and, being a manager in imagination, he crystallized into a manager in reality. His first managerial experiment was, I think, at the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, Soho. Here he engaged as his representative in front of the house a comparatively unknown young man called Augustus Harris, little imagining that he was employing an Augustus Druriolanus in the making. He subsequently built the Lyric Theatre, and he died a comparatively rich man. The theatrical career of Edgar Bruce is the only practically good thing that I have known to result from the playing of a practical joke.
These carefully-devised experiments on a large scale, becoming known, naturally fired the ambition of imitators and a number of gabies, whose only indication of humour consisted in the fatuous smirk with which they greeted one in season and out of season, set up as professors of the game. Certain of these misguided young men formed themselves into a nomadic club called “The Who-bodies.” But a better name for them was invented by Wallis Mackay, who lashed them unmercifully in his “Captious Critic” under the name of “Theodore Hooklings.”
The humour which is not of a practical kind appears to have died away out of our literature, our legislature and our judicature alike. Nay, it is fading out of our street life with the disappearance of the omnibus cad and the driver of the hansom. Even the gamin is losing his characteristic gaiety in the solving of puzzles in his favourite publications or in calculating the odds in turf handicaps. The last of the Parliamentary wits was Bernal Osborne. He scintillated before I entered on a journalistic career, but I well remember the stimulation which the newspaper reports of his utterances afforded me in my younger days. In contesting Waterford at a General Election, he was opposed by Sir Patrick O’Brien, a very old man whose enunciation was not of the clearest. Following the revered Baronet on the hustings, Osborne, exactly mimicking the tones of his rival, commenced: “Pity the sorrows of a poor old man whose trembling limbs have borne him to these hustings!” Then, addressing himself to one of the nasty points of the other candidate’s attack, he said: “But when the honourable Baronet describes me as the rejected of seven constituencies, I hurl the accusation back in his teeth—if he has any!” In the House he was equally ready. Liskeard was among the constituencies that had rejected him. A question arising regarding that now happily disfranchised borough, it was referred to Bernal Osborne. He immediately rose and said: “I regret, sir, that I am unable to recall any particulars respecting that highly respectable street!” Viscount Amberley was a small, baby-faced man. When he sat in Parliament, and when Bernal Osborne was at the Admiralty, Amberley asked some inconvenient question regarding that Department. Osborne smilingly informed the House: “That is a matter which was settled when the honourable Viscount was in his—er—perambulator!”
Bernal Osborne’s patronymic was Bernal. He was a Jew and the son of Mr. Ralph Bernal, who was for many years Chairman of Committees in the House of Commons. He added the name Osborne to his own on marrying Lady Osborne, with whom he did not always agree. When he married he was a dashing young officer and Aide-de-Camp to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. I suppose he was not quite so successful in the dull domestic round, for he and his wife led a cat-and-dog life. They soon separated, and during the period of this first grass-widowhood the lady wrote a novel in which her husband was depicted, under a thin disguise and in very lurid colours. Society was greatly diverted. Bernal begged his wife’s forgiveness. A reconciliation was effected, the novel was withdrawn from circulation, and Bernal settled down once more as the model married man. The vivacity of his disposition, however, and his great extravagance, occasioned fresh quarrels. There was another separation, succeeded shortly after by a reissue of the wife’s literary caricature of her refractory husband.