Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/261

Rh his pronounced English accent and he could find no work. At length he returned to London to be greeted on all hands with, "My dear Barry, where in heaven's name did you acquire that vile American twang?"

On the seventh repetition of this query, Barrymore exclaimed, "I'll end up doing recitations on a transatlantic steamer."

He once was leading man for Mme. Bernard Beere, an English actress who was playing repertoire at Hammerstein's Opera House in Thirty-fourth Street. Like other of Hammerstein's Napoleonic conceptions, the house was a great barn, much too large for the drama. Business was poor, to the malicious delight of Wilton Lackaye, the bitterest Anglophobe in the club. Lackaye lay in wait for Barrymore at The Lambs to twit him of the failure of the visitor from perfidious Albion.

"Yes, I know," said Barrymore, "but the delicacy, the finesse of Madame's art is lost in that huge barn. It is a house that was built for broader effects."

Whereupon Lackaye suggested that some of the situations in Madame's repertoire were quite broad enough for any stage.

"True, true," agreed Maurice, "but there is a