dropped in. For his sitting-room at night, after theater hours, was a kind of club or dramatist's depot. One night I was telling Frohman admiringly about Chambers's new house, which Frohman had not yet seen. I was saying how charming it all was, but how surprising, too, since Chambers had been silent so long; it was puzzling how he could afford it.

"How does he do it?" I asked. "Are things so cheap over here, or is his credit limitless? And he entertains so lavishly," I went on, "as well as, of course, being entertained everywhere."

"Yes, he does entertain a lot," Frohman answered; "but Haddon could do that well in the Desert of Sahara. All he needs is a cigarette and somebody to listen to him."

"He must have a very good social position," I went on. "The best, I suppose, of any of these authors that come in here."

Now, social position, society, titles, and all that were like so many red rags to Frohman, as irritating as the sound of a Scotchman's name to Dr. Johnson.

Hence references to Chambers's really remarkable London entrée, or anybody's for that matter, only provoked Frohman to scorn. At that particular time his way of accounting for Chambers's social success and unaccountably luxurious Park Lane production went like this:

"Yes, everybody likes to have Haddon about. I do, you do, because Haddon is one of those men who never wear out; he 's always new and never repeats himself. They ask him everywhere dukes, duchesses, baronets, duchesses, baronets, and members of the cabinet. And Haddon goes; he loves to. The Duchess of Cheeseganes asks Haddon

down to Cheeseganes Manor, on the Cheeseganes, Cheeseganes - Cheeseganes, over the holidays, and Haddon and Hogg go. After they are there a while, the duchess shows Haddon through the rose garden, and while Haddon is going through the rose garden, Hogg is going through the house. That 's the only way I can explain it; and, anyhow, it's what ought to happen to all dukes and duchesses."

§3

In these chance gatherings at Frohman's rooms at night the most amusing thing was to watch the little rivalries among these famous authors, always politely or obliquely expressed, but often as petty as the sayings or doings of the smallest characters in their plays. Maugham hated Shaw, because Shaw had once silenced him with the retort discourteous when Maugham was opposing the election of Hall Caine to the British Dramatists Club, which had periodic meetings, apparently just to quarrel, in the Cecil Hotel. They all shot arrows at Barrie because of his unvarying success. Most of them disliked Galsworthy because of his aloofness, family, and Oxford background, and everybody was terrified into silence by the mere sight of Hichens, because, as Chambers once told me, "Hichens would make copy out of his own mother's deathrattle." Chambers was the most well rounded of them all. Pinero was always very austere, dictatorial, only occasionally turning up, never to discuss his plays in the making with Frohman, but to tell him what he must have. His pieces were always meticulously written out in long hand, then printed with the unshakable under

standing that they were to be acted exactly as written, without the change of a syllable of dialogue or a single stage direction; so that they were virtually pre-acted plays, leaving nothing for the actor to do but to obey Pinero's directions.

Barrie was around oftenest of all, more talkative there than in his own rooms; generally on his feet, leaning on the back of a chair, smoking an old brier pipe.

One night Frohman, Barrie, and I were seated in a box at the Gaiety Theatre, London, waiting for the curtain to go up on the première of a George Edwardes musical comedy. There was a long delay, as at all Gaiety first nights. We were filling it in by naming the celebrities in the audience.

"I see Pinero and Lady Pinero in the third or fourth row down below,' said Barrie.

"Yes, you 've been looking down on him ever since "The Little Minister,' Barrie, have n't you?" remarked Frohman.

But of all these men, Frohman was fondest of Chambers. He was dazzled by Barrie, irritated by Shaw, periodically aggrieved by Maugham, because he would frequently jump his demands for royalties and advance payments (which Frohman would report to me, always at such times referring to the playwright as "your friend, Maugham"). Frohman was always glad to see Alfred Sutro, who, as the brotherin-law of Baron Reading, possessed all sorts of legal Home Office gossip. Pinero's masterfulness annoyed and tired Frohman, but Chambers was to Frohman balm of Gilead. He loved Chambers's knack at story-telling, his accounts of prize-fights, when he would turn up nights from a bout at the

Sporting Club, his endless store of theater gossip, but he especially relished Chambers's cynicism.

Chambers loved to toy with Frohman, just as much as Frohman loved to listen to Chambers's mental antics. Or they would both join in grilling me, especially if I revealed the slightest sign of the greenhorn or anything bordering on idealistic talk. Once, for example, I had written an article on Sir James M. Barrie for THE CENTURY MAGAZINE, entitling it "The Charm That Is Barrie." It came out while we were all in London. I had said nothing about it, suspecting it would be a good chance for guying or "spoofing," as Chambers used to say; and, in fact, the number of the magazine containing it was on the book-stalls for so many days I thought it had escaped the attention of Frohman and Chambers and that I was safe. But I was wrong. As I entered Frohman's sitting-room late one night there was THE CENTURY among some papers on the centertable. I put my hat on it, thinking out of sight, out of mind; but that was no good. Suddenly Frohman and Chambers, returning from the theater, were in the room. Frohman's doors here, and everywhere I ever knew him, were always unlocked. That and the fact that he never carried a watch

"don't need to; everybody else you meet has one"-were lifelong traits. Chambers, seeing my hat, put his also on the center-table, thereby shoving aside mine and exposing THE CENTURY.

"Oh, yes, John, the article; we were talking about it just now, were n't we, Charlie [Doubtless with winks between them]? And what was that you were saying, Charlie-yes and no, was n't it? It 's good, but it is n't; eh, what?

Sort of a succès manqué, would n't the French say, eh? But, mind you, John, I think it very good; but Charlie here, just now, as we were coming along the corridor, was wondering is the good the same thing as the right; or should I say that the quintessential extract of the one is foreign-”

"Just a minute, Haddon," interrupted Frohman, always hating Chambers's mock philosophic turns. "You can tell what we were saying quicker than that, and it was n't that you were saying anyhow. Tell Williams the true Barrie story. He's got it all wrong."

"Well, as a matter of fact, John, when you are older you will realize that you never can get the real story of a man until you see him in complete distress or complete success. You remember the story of the philosopher in 'Rasselas' whose life's philosophy was only irony to him when, on the death of his son, his friends urged him to comfort himself with his own philosophy? Distress exposed his philosophy as a thing for other men, not for himself. Well, Charlie and I happen to have seen Barrie in distress. You, I take it, never have. But it happened in this very room. You remember the play, "Chains"? It was written by Miss Baker, who once had been a public typist, copying all our plays, Barrie's among the rest. One day, when she was delivering some manuscripts to Barrie, she timidly told him that she had written a play herself and would be grateful if Barrie would read it. He was very nice about it, not only read it, but persuaded C. F. to accept it; and so it was rehearsed, and the opening night arrived. We three were here, Barrie, Frohman, and I, about to dine and go

to the play when a messenger arrived with a note for C. F. It was from Miss Baker, and it read: "Thank you, Mr. Frohman, for the enclosed tickets, but I feel I should return them because I haven't the proper clothes one should wear sitting in the stalls.' I remember you read it, C. F., in silence and then handed it to Barrie. And Barrie became very much upset over the message.

""That 's verra pathetic, Frohman,' he exclaimed, 'verra moving, verra, verra touching. To think that real talent should suffer thus! We must do something aboot it at once, Frohman. Let's send her two seats for the balcony to-morrow night.'

84

But the best fun about these midnight sessions was the way Chambers and I would end them. On a signal I would say, "Good night," and leave; but instead of going to my room, I would hurry down to the courtyard and wait for Chambers to effect his escape. We had to do it this way, Frohman was so sensitive about being left out of any sort of party. Then Chambers and I would taxi to the Bath Club on Dover Street, the most interesting club not as an institution, but because of its varied membership, I have ever seen anywhere. We would turn up a little after midnight, just as Parliament was thinning out, and fall in with a group eager to talk till dawn.

There was Sir Alfred Vesey, who might have posed for the image of John Bull. He was Ex-Lord Mayor of London, a genial, almost lovable soul, but curiously awkward. It was he who first could not mount his horse and then fell off during the coronation of Edward VII. There were the Ross

brothers, both extraordinary in medical research, and endowed, oddly enough, by the late John McFadden of Philadelphia. About twenty years ago McFadden overheard the Ross brothers talking together in a café in Liverpool, where they were medical students, classmates of W. Somerset Maugham, by the way. The brothers were lamenting the lack of funds for a certain experiment in surgical research, and were about to go out when McFadden stepped up, introduced himself, and volunteered to finance them, which he continued to do for years after. Then there was old "Kim," The Earl of Kimberly,-looking very like Charles Francis Adams, but very much a fire-eater, and would not have a telephone in his house.

"No, sir, no matter how much my daughters coax me, I won't have the things about. When I sit down to the table, sir, I sit down to dine and talk, not to be nagged at by the telephone. Damned nuisances, sir; they 've made servants of us all."

Talk at this club was as varied as the character of its members, with no one person monopolizing the floor, except occasionally Sir Reginald Preston, and yet with almost complete silence held by only one, Sir Alfred Vesey. There was an enormous double divan in the middle of the main room just as one entered; it was capable of holding four men on a side. This special group used to perch upon the divan, and, with Chambers setting the pace, the talk generally held to literature, music, and some politics. Chambers had an extraordinary memory for prose and verse. Swinburne, Coleridge, and Francis Thompson were his favorite poets. He could recite Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven" entrancingly,

beautiful as the poem is in itself. And Chambers was accuracy itself as to the word habits of the poets he knew, as, for example, the night that Kimberly said, "Who would not weep for Lycidas'?"

Whereupon Chambers said, "Sing!” "Weep!" roared Kimberly.

"Sing," Chambers reiterated, and there was much scurrying to the library; but Chambers was right.

Just as keen was Chambers's discernment and discrimination, as on the night he waited until the younger Ross finished reciting Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," and then pulled the deadly parallel by quoting "The Shropshire Lad" and parts of "The Ancient Mariner."

He also got great glee, as well as imparted it, out of repeating his pet definitions from the first edition of Johnson's dictionary: "Window, an orifice in an edifice for the admission of luminous particles of atmosphere"; "oats, food for horses and Scotchmen"; "patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel," etc. Except for Conrad and the Russians, Chambers did not have a high opinion of the modern writers, though he had read them, and at the sound of their names he could characterize them in their own words. Meredith he would sum up in that writer's sentence, "The eccentricity of the individual is the entertainment of the multitude," adding, "true of Barnum, but not of Meredith."

I remember, among his offhand club sayings, his description of New York— "power by day and dignity only by night." When he first saw Washington, he called it "the Lillian Russell of American cities." Shaw was to Chambers "an English Voltaire on the loose." "Great stuff, my boy, eh?"

was the invariable pat on the back he gave each of his favorites, Keats, Shelley, Swinburne, Thompson, and Conrad, after quoting them.

But far more extraordinary than the things said at these nightly gatherings at the Bath Club was a thing done; it was humorous, incredible, and touching. Sir Alfred Vesey, rubicund, jovial, generally silent, or, if he spoke, strewing the floor with H's, always settled himself, newspaper in hand, on that side of the divan opposite the talkers. There he would sit, never turning a page of his paper, but, with ear cocked, catching every word. Then as soon as an author strange to him was quoted, or a verse or bit of prose spoken and the author's name not mentioned, he would bound up, turn the corner of the divan, and face the speaker.

"Addon, hold boy, would you mind telling me the name of the hauthor of that book hor poem?"

"Certainly, Sir Alfred. Walt Whitman, 'Leaves of Grass.""

"Thanks so much."

So saying, Sir Alfred would carefully copy out the information. He carried two sets of cards in his waistcoat-pockets. Those in the left pocket were blank, ready for new learning; those in the right contained memoranda of all sorts of picked-up knowledge. No matter how frequent or disconcerting the interruptions, the man's earnestness and candor were so fine that his quaint little device of gathering literary roses while you may never provoked a smile, much less a comment, among his club-fellows.

85

A walk from the Bath Club to Aldford Street takes one through the

smartest, certainly the most storied, part of London, so far as homes and houses go. Chambers and I always took to the middle of the streets, he a little in advance, telling me who lived in the most interesting places, the pictures they owned, the cellars they had, the skeletons they closeted. He was a fascinating guide, never touching the same story twice, and with an extraordinary knack of lifting off a roof and acquainting one with everybody and everything in a house.

Chambers himself was capable of the kindly, chivalrous act toward the helpless of any grade of life. Some of this instinct came from his constant curiosity about the variations of character. He loved to study and note individual eccentricities, partly for "copy," but largely because he was an unusual humanist. He would gladly fall in with any adventures that promised to turn up new layers of human nature.

One blindingly foggy night he and Paul Arthur were trudging from an evening spent at a theater to Chambers's quarters with no more exciting prospect than a hand or two at cards. Suddenly out of the fog loomed what Chambers afterward called a "smear, a stain on humanity"-a typical London tramp, a species quite different from the American product; pale of face, with straw-colored, virginal beards, and with eyes deep, luminous and yearning, faces modeled by poverty, sorrow and disease, usually consumption, giving them the look of ascetics. Chambers and the tramp collided. But the tramp was quick with apologies, well worded and gently spoken. The man so interested the dramatist that he finally invited him home for a bite of supper, to the amaze