John M. Synge | Page 5

with huge delight about his adventures in the wilds. He had lodged in a cabin far from the common roads. There was no basin in his bed-room. He asked for one, so that he might wash. The people brought him a wooden box, worn smooth with much use. In the morning he was roused by his host with the cry, "Have you washed yourself yet? Herself is wanting the box to make up the bread in."
I remember asking him what sensations an author had when his play was being performed for the first time. "I sit still in my box," he said "and curse the actors." He was in a very gay mood that afternoon, though his health was fast failing. He spoke with his usual merry malice about his throat. With the trouble in his throat he could not tell when he would be in England again. He was only in England once more. That was in late May or early June, 1907, when the Irish players gave a few performances at the Kingsway Theatre. I met him in the foyer of the theatre just before the first London performance of The Playboy of the Western World.
I had some talk with him then. During the performance I saw him in his box, "sitting still," as he said, watching with the singular grave intensity with which he watched life. It struck me then that he was the only person there sufficiently simple to be really interested in living people; and that it was this simplicity which gave him his charm. He found the life in a man very well worth wonder, even though the man were a fool, or a knave, or just down from Oxford. At the end of the play I saw him standing in his box, gravely watching the actors as the curtain rose and again rose during the applause. Presently he turned away to speak to the lady who had read his plays on the night of his first success. The play was loudly applauded. Some people behind me--a youth and a girl--began to hiss. I remember thinking that they resembled the bird they imitated. I only saw Synge on two other occasions. I met him at a dinner party, but had no talk with him, and I called upon him at his old lodgings in Handel Street. He said:--
"Doesn't it seem queer to you to be coming back here?"
"It seems only the other day that we were here."
"Those were great days."
"I wish we could have them again."
"Ah," he said, laughing his hard laugh, half a cough,
"Nature brings not back the mastodon, Nor we those times."
Presently he told me that he had been writing poetry. He handed me a type-written copy of a ballad, and asked me what I thought of it. I told him that I felt the want of an explanatory stanza near the beginning. "Yes," he said; "But I can't take your advice, because then it would not be quite my own." He told me the wild picturesque story (of a murder in Connaught) which had inspired the ballad. His relish of the savagery made me feel that he was a dying man clutching at life, and clutching most wildly at violent life, as the sick man does. We went out shortly afterwards, and got into a cab, and drove to the Gourmets, and ate our last meal together. He was going to the theatre after dinner; I had to go out of town. After dinner we got into another cab. He said he would give me a lift towards my station. We drove together along the Strand, talking of the great times we would have and of the jolly times we had had. None of our many talks together was happier than the last. I felt in my heart as we drove that I should never see him again. Our last talk together was to be a happy one.
He was later than he thought. He could not come all the way to my station. He had to turn off to his theatre.
At the top of Fleet Street hill we shook hands and said "So long" to each other. The cab drew up just outside the office of a sporting newspaper. I got out, and raised my hand to him. He raised his in his grave way. The cab swung round and set off westwards, and that was the end.
When I heard of his death I felt that his interest in life would soon get itself into another body, and come here again to look on and listen. When a life ends, it is a sign that Nature's purpose in that life is over. When a personality has passed from us it is a sign that life has no further need of it.