Barrie could easily be the most silent man I have ever met. Sometimes he would sit through the whole of a dinner without ever speaking. Then, when all but the last one or two guests had gone—or even later—he would put his hands behind his back and bummeling up and down the room, talk for maybe an hour straight on end. Once a beautiful but nervous young lady was handed over to his care. With the sôle-au-gratin, Barrie broke the silence:
“Have you ever been to Egypt?”
The young lady was too startled to answer immediately. It was necessary for her to collect herself. While waiting for the entrée, she turned to him.
“No,” she answered.
Barrie made no comment. He went on with his dinner. At the end of the chicken en casserôle, curiosity overcoming her awe, she turned to him again.
“Have you?” she asked.
A far-away expression came into Barrie's great deep eyes.
“No,” he answered.
After that they both lapsed into silence.
He and my wife found birds and animals a subject of never-failing wonder. I remember his explaining to her how much more intelligent lambs are than is generally supposed. He was thinking out a story, and coming to a stile had sat down and was making notes on the back of an envelope. Barrie rarely wasted an envelope, in those days. John Hare told me—to account for his having rejected “The Professor's Love Story”—that half of it was written on the inside of old envelopes. “Half” I doubt, but an eighth to a sixteenth I can well believe. Barrie was then an unknown youngster. “How could I guess the fool was a genius?” growled Hare. “Took him, of course, for a lunatic.” But to return to our muttons.
In the field where Barrie sat there were lambs. One of them strayed away from its mother, turned round three times, and was lost. It was in a terrible to-do, and Barrie had to put down his story and lead it back to its mother. Hardly had he returned to his stile before another lamb did just the same. The bleating was terrific. There was nothing else to do, but for Barrie to put down his work and take it back to its mother. They kept on doing it, one after another. But the wonderful thing was that, after a time, instead of looking for their mothers themselves, they just came to Barrie and insisted on his coming with them and finding their mothers for them. It saved their time, but wasted Barrie's.
Barrie was always the most unassuming of men, but he could be touchy. On one occasion, a great lady invited him to her castle in the country. The house-party was a large one. There were peers and potentates, millionaires and magnates. Barrie found himself assigned to a small room in a turret leading to the servants' quarters. Perhaps the poor lady could not help it, and was doing her best. Barrie did not say anything, but in the morning he was gone. No one had seen him leave, and the doors were still bolted. He had packed his bag and climbed out of the window.
The Great Central Railway turned me out of Alpha Place to make way for their new line to London. A chasm yawns where it once stood; a pleasant house with a long dining-room and a big drawing-room looking out upon a quiet garden. When friends came my wife liked to receive them in the hall—she was a slip of a young thing then—standing on the bottom stair—to make herself seem taller. Wells was a shy diffident young man in those days, Rider Haggard a somewhat solemn gentleman, taking himself always very seriously. Mrs. Barry Pain was the only one of us who would venture to chaff him. George Moore was a simple kindly soul, when off his guard, but easily mistaken by those who did not know him for a poseur: he had the Balfour touch. Clement Shorter and his wife, Dora Sigerson the poetess, George Gissing, with his nervous hands and his deep voice, Hall Caine, Conan Doyle, Hornung—but the list only grows. I had better leave them over to another chapter, lest I seem garrulous.
From St. John's Wood we went to Mayfair—to a little house, one of a row at the end of a cul-de-sac overlooking Hyde Park. George Alexander had told me of it. He had Number Four. It was there I first met Mark Twain. Hardly anyone knew he was in London. He was living poorly, saving money to pay off the debts of a publishing firm with which he had been connected. (Walter Scott's story over again.) Our children had met at a gymnasium. I found there were two Mark Twains: the one a humorist, the other a humanitarian reformer poet. About these two there was this that was curious: the humorist was an elderly gentleman, dull-eyed, with a slow, monotonous drawl; while the humanitarian reformer poet, was an eager young man with ever-changing eyes and a voice full of tenderness and passion.
They say a man always returns to his first love. I never cared for the West End: well-fed, well-dressed, uninteresting. The East, with its narrow silent streets, where mystery lurks; its noisome thoroughfares, teeming with fierce varied life, became again my favourite haunt. I discovered “John Ingerfield's” wharf near to Wapping Old Stairs, and hard by the dingy railed-in churchyard where he and Anne lie buried. But more often my wanderings would lead me to the little drab house off the Burdett Road, where “Paul Kelver” lived his childhood.
Of all my books I liked writing “Paul Kelver” the best. Maybe because it was all about myself, and people I had known and loved.
It changed my luck, so far as the critics were concerned. Francis Gribble, God bless him, gave me praise—the first I had ever tasted, and others followed.
I ought, of course, to have gone on. I might have become an established novelist—even a best seller. Who knows? But having “got there,” so to speak, my desire was to get away. I went back to the writing of plays. It was the same at the beginning of me. My history repeats itself. Having won success as a humorist I immediately became serious. I have a kink in my brain, I suppose I can't help it.
Chapter VII
TRIALS OF A DRAMATIST
A lady, on one occasion, asked me why I did not write a play.
“I am sure, Mr. Jerome,” she continued with a bright encouraging smile, “that you could write a play.”
I told her I had written nine: that six of them had been produced, that three of them had been successful both in England and America, that one of them was still running at the Comedy Theatre and approaching its two hundredth night.
Her eyebrows went up in amazement.
“Dear me,” she said, “you do surprise me.”
George R. Sims told me that once he dined some friends at the Savoy. Over the coffee, he asked them if they would like to go to a theatre, and they said they would. He took them to a play of his own. For some reason that Sims could not explain, they did not like it. At the end of the first act, one of them, turning to him, said:
“Rather dull stuff this. Don't you find it so?”
“Well, now you come to mention it, perhaps it is, a trifle,” agreed Sims.
“Let's go on to the Empire,” suggested another.
The proposal was carried nem. con.; and leaving their programmes behind them, the troop arose and made their way out of the theatre noisily and cheerfully, followed by Sims, walking soberly.
“It used to annoy me,” added Sims, “that not one theatre-goer in a hundred ever takes the trouble to read the author's name. That evening, I was glad of it.”
“Barbara” was my first play. I am informed that nowadays managers read plays by unknown authors. In my young days they didn't. I read it to Rose Norreys, one evening, at her little flat in Chelsea Gardens; and good comrade that she was, she took it herself to Charles Hawtrey, and stood over him until he had finished it. He wrote me, asking me to come and see him the following Tuesday at twelve o'clock noon—he underlined “noon.” He was running “The Private Secretary” at the Globe. I got there at twenty minutes to, and walked up and down Hollywell Street until I heard Big Ben strike twelve. The stage door-keeper said Mr. Hawtrey wasn't in. I said I would wait. The door-keeper—a kindly soul, I wish I could remember his name—put me a chair by the fire and gave me a thumbed copy of “The Talisman.” He said that, speaking for himself, he considered it the best of all Scott's novels. Hawtrey turned up at a quarter past three. The stage door-keeper introduced us, and explained things.