My Autobiography (13 page)

From Tonypandy we went to the mining town of Ebbw Vale, a three-night stand, and I was thankful it was not longer, for Ebbw Vale was a dank, ugly town in those days, with row upon row of hideous, uniform houses, each house consisting of four small rooms lit by oil-lamps. Most of the company put up at a small hotel. Fortunately I found a front room in a miner’s house, and, though small, it was comfortable and clean. At night after the play my supper was left in front of the fire to keep warm.

The landlady, a tall, handsome, middle-aged woman, had an aura of tragedy about her. She came in, in the morning, with my breakfast and hardly spoke a word. I noticed that the kitchen door was always shut; whenever I wanted anything I had to knock, and the door opened only a few inches.

The second night, while I was having my supper, her husband came in, a man about the same age as his wife. He had been to the theatre that evening and had enjoyed the play. He stood a while conversing, holding a lighted candle, ready for bed. He came to a pause and seemed to think of what he wanted to say. ‘Listen, I’ve got something that might fit your kind of business. Ever seen a human frog? Here, hold the candle and I’ll take the lamp.’

He led the way into the kitchen and rested the lamp on the dresser, which had a curtain strung across the bottom of it in place of cupboard doors. ‘Hey, Gilbert, come on out of there!’ he said, parting the curtains.

A half a man with no legs, an oversized, blond, flat-shaped head, a sickening white face, a sunken nose, a large mouth and powerful muscular shoulders and arms, crawled from underneath the dresser. He wore flannel underwear with the legs of the garment cut off to the thighs, from which ten thick, stubby toes stuck out. The grisly creature could have been twenty or forty. He looked up and grinned, showing a set of yellow, widely spaced teeth.

‘Hey, Gilbert, jump!’ said the father and the wretched man lowered himself slowly, then shot up by his arms almost to the height of my head.

‘How do you think he’d fit in with a circus? The human frog!’

I was so horrified I could hardly answer. However, I suggested
the names of several circuses that he might write to.

He insisted on the wretched creature going through further tricks, hopping, climbing and standing on his hands on the arms of a rocking chair. When at last he had finished I pretended to be most enthusiastic and complimented him on his tricks.

‘Good night, Gilbert,’ I said before leaving, and in a hollow voice, and tongue-tied, the poor fellow answered: ‘Good night.’

Several times during the night I woke up and tried my locked door. The next morning the landlady seemed pleasant and communicative. ‘I understand you saw Gilbert last night,’ she said. ‘Of course, he only sleeps under the dresser when we take in people from the theatre.’

Then the awful thought came to me that I had been sleeping in Gilbert’s bed. ‘Yes,’ I answered, and talked with measured enthusiasm of the possibilities of his joining a circus.

She nodded. ‘We have often thought of it.’

My enthusiasm – or whatever it was – seemed to please the landlady, and before leaving I went into the kitchen to say goodbye to Gilbert. With an effort to be casual I shook his large calloused hand, and he gently shook mine.

*

After forty weeks in the provinces, we returned to play eight weeks around the suburbs of London.
Sherlock Holmes
, being a phenomenal success, was to start a second tour, three weeks after the finish of the first one.

Now Sydney and I decided to give up our quarters in Pownall Terrace and take up more respectable ones in the Kennington Road; like snakes we wanted to slough our skins, shedding every vestige of the past.

I spoke to the management about Sydney for a small part in the next tour of
Holmes
, and he got it – thirty-five shillings a week! Now we were on tour together.

Sydney wrote to Mother every week and towards the end of our second tour we received a letter from Cane Hill asylum stating that she had fully recovered her health. This was indeed good news. Quickly we made arrangements for her discharge, and made preparations for her to join us in Reading. To celebrate the occasion we took a special apartment de luxe, consisting of two
bedrooms and a sitting-room with a piano, fixed up her bedroom with flowers, and arranged an elaborate dinner to boot.

Sydney and I waited for her at the railroad station, tense and happy, yet I could not help feeling anxious as to how she would fit into our lives again, knowing that the close ties of other days could never be recaptured.

At last the train arrived. With excitement and uncertainty we scanned the faces of the passengers as they left the carriages. Then at last there she was, smiling and walking sedately toward us. She displayed no great emotion as we went to meet her, but greeted us with affectionate decorum. She evidently was also undergoing an adjustment.

In that short ride in a cab to our rooms, we talked of a hundred different things, relevant and irrelevant.

After the first flush of enthusiasm of showing her the apartment and the flowers in the bedroom, we found ourselves in the sitting-room looking breathlessly at each other. It was a sunny day, and our apartment was on a quiet street, but now the silence of it was uncomfortable and in spite of my wanting to be happy I found myself fighting back a depression. Poor Mother, who wanted so little out of life to make her gay and cheerful, reminded me of my unhappy past – the last person in the world who should have affected me this way. But I did my best to hide the fact. She had aged a little and gained weight. I had always been proud of the way Mother looked and dressed and wanted to show her off to the company at her best, but now she appeared rather dowdy. She must have sensed my misgivings, for she turned inquiringly.

Coyly I adjusted a strand of her hair. ‘Before you meet the company,’ I smiled, ‘I want you to be at your best.’

She looked at me, then took out her powder-puff and rubbed it over her face. ‘I’m just happy to be alive,’ she said cheerfully.

It was not long before we were fully adjusted to one another and my dejection passed. That we had outgrown the intimacy she had known when we were children, she understood better than we did, which made her all the more endearing to us. On tour she did the shopping and catering, bringing home fruits and delicacies and always a few flowers. For no matter how poor we had been in the past, when shopping on Saturday nights she had always been able
to buy a pennyworth of wallflowers. Occasionally she was quiet and reserved, and her detachment saddened me. She acted more like a guest than our mother.

After a month she wanted to return to London, because she was anxious to get settled down so that she would have a home for us after our tour; besides, as she said, it would be less costly than travelling over the country and having to pay an extra fare.

She rented the flat over the barber’s shop in Chester Street where we had once lived, and with ten pounds bought furniture on the instalment plan. The rooms had not the spaciousness of Versailles, or its elegance; but she did wonders in the bedrooms by covering orange-crates with cretonne to make them look like commodes. Between us Sydney and I were earning four pounds five shillings a week and sending one pound five shillings of it to Mother.

Sydney and I returned home after our second tour and spent a few weeks with her. Although we were happy to be with Mother, we were secretly glad to get away on tour again, for Chester Street had not the requisite comforts that provincial apartments had – those little amenities to which Sydney and I were now accustomed. And Mother no doubt realized this. When she saw us off at the station she seemed cheerful enough, but we both thought she looked wistful as she stood on the platform smiling and waving her handkerchief as the train pulled away.

During our third tour Mother wrote to us that Louise, with whom Sydney and I had lived in the Kennington Road, had died, ironically enough, in the Lambeth workhouse, the same place in which we had been confined. She survived Father only by four years, leaving her little son an orphan, and he also had been sent to the same Hanwell Schools that Sydney and I had been sent to.

Mother wrote that she had visited the boy, explaining who she was, and that Sydney and I had lived with him and his father and mother in the Kennington Road. But he hardly remembered, as he had been only four years old at the time. He also had no recollection of his father. And now he was ten. He was registered under Louise’s maiden name, and as far as Mother could find out he had no relatives. She described him as being a handsome boy, very quiet, shy and preoccupied. She brought him a bag of sweets and some oranges and apples and promised to visit him regularly,
which I believe she did, until she herself became ill again and was sent back to Cane Hill.

The news of Mother’s relapse came like a stab in the heart. We never knew the details. We received only a curt official notice that she had been found wandering and incoherent in the streets. There was nothing we could do but accept poor Mother’s fate. She never again recovered her mind completely. For several years she languished in Cane Hill asylum until we could afford to put her into a private one.

Sometimes the gods of adversity tire of their sport and show mercy, as they did with Mother. For the last seven years of her life she was to live in comfort, surrounded by flowers and sunshine, to see her grown sons endowed with fame and fortune beyond anything she had ever imagined.

*

Because of our tour with
Sherlock Holmes
it was many weeks before Sydney and I could again see Mother. The tour with the Frohman company ended permanently. Then Mr Harry York, proprietor of the Theatre Royal, Blackburn, bought the rights of
Holmes
from Frohman to play the smaller towns. Sydney and I were engaged by the new company, but at reduced salaries of thirty-five shillings each.

It was a depressing come-down, playing the small towns of the North with an inferior company. Nevertheless, it enlivened my discrimination, comparing the company with the one we had just left. This comparison I tried to conceal, but at rehearsals in my zeal to help the new director, who would ask me about stage directions, cues and business etc., I would eagerly tell him how it was done in the Frohman company. This, of course, did not make me particularly popular with the cast and I was looked upon as a precocious brat. Later, a new stage manager had it in for me and fined me ten shillings for having a button missing from my uniform, about which he had warned me several times.

William Gillette, author of
Sherlock Holmes
, came to London with Marie Doro in a play called
Clarissa
which he had written. The critics were unkind to the play and to the manner of Gillette’s speech, which led him to write a curtain-raiser,
The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes
, in which he himself never spoke a
word. There were only three in the cast, a mad-woman, Holmes and his page-boy. It was like tidings from heaven to receive a telegram from Mr Postance, Gillette’s manager, asking me if I were available to come to London to play the part of Billie with William Gillette in the curtain-raiser.

I trembled with anxiety, for it was doubtful if our company could replace Billie in the provinces on such short notice, and for several days I was left in agonizing suspense. However, they did find another Billie.

Returning to London to play in a West End theatre I can only describe as my renaissance. My brain was spinning with the thrill of every incident – arriving in the evening at the Duke of York’s Theatre and meeting Mr Postance, the stage-manager, who brought me to Mr Gillette’s dressing-room, and his words after I was introduced to him: ‘Would you like to play in
Sherlock Holmes
with me?’ And my burst of nervous enthusiasm: ‘Oh very much, Mr Gillette!’ And the next morning, waiting on the stage for rehearsals, and seeing Marie Doro for the first time, dressed in the loveliest white summer dress. The sudden shock of seeing someone so beautiful at that hour! She had been riding in a hansom cab and had discovered an ink spot on her dress, and wanted to know if the property man had anything that would take it out, and to his answer of doubt she made the prettiest expression of irritation: ‘Oh, isn’t that too beastly!’

She was so devastatingly beautiful that I resented her. I resented her delicate, pouting lips, her regular white teeth, her adorable chin, her raven hair and dark brown eyes. I resented her pretence of irritation and the charm she exuded through it. Through all this querying between herself and the property man she was ignorant of my presence, although I stood quite near, staring, transfixed by her beauty. I had just turned sixteen, and the propinquity of this sudden radiance evoked my determination not to be obsessed by it. But, oh God, she was beautiful! It was love at first sight.

In
The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes
Miss Irene Vanbrugh, a remarkably gifted actress, played the madwoman and did all the talking, while Holmes just sat and listened. This was his joke on the critics. I had the opening lines, bursting into Holmes’s apartment and holding on to the doors while the
mad-woman beats against them outside, and then, while I excitedly try to explain to Holmes the situation, the mad woman bursts in! For twenty minutes she never stops raving incoherently about some case she wants him to solve. Surreptitiously Holmes writes a note, rings a bell and slips it to me. Later two stalwart men lead the lady off, leaving Holmes and me alone, with me saying: ‘You were right, sir; it was the right asylum.’

The critics enjoyed the joke, but the play
Clarissa
, which Gillette wrote for Marie Doro, was a failure. Although they raved about Marie’s beauty, they said it was not enough to hold a maudlin play together, so he completed the rest of his season with the revival of
Sherlock Holmes
, in which I was retained for the part of Billie.

In my excitement to play with the famous William Gillette, I had forgotten to ask about terms. At the end of the week Mr Postance came apologetically with my pay envelope. ‘I’m really ashamed to give you this,’ he said, ‘but at the Frohman office they said I was to pay you the same as you were getting with us before: two pounds ten.’ I was agreeably surprised.