_Fussie_
How did I come by Fussie? I went to Newmarket with Rosa Corder, whom
Whistler painted. She was one of those plain-beautiful women who are so
far more attractive than some of the pretty ones. She had wonderful
hair,--like a fair, pale veil,--a white, waxen face, and a very good
figure; and she wore very odd clothes. She had a studio in Southampton
Row, and another at Newmarket, where she went to paint horses. I went to
Cambridge once and drove back with her across the heath to her studio.
"How wonderfully different are the expressions on terriers' faces," I
said to her, looking at a painting of hers of a fox-terrier pup. "That's
the only sort of dog I should like to have."
"That one belonged to Fred Archer," Rosa Corder said. "I daresay he
could get you one like it."
We went out to find Archer. Curiously enough, I had known the famous
jockey at Harpenden, when he was a little boy, and I believe used to
come round with vegetables.
"I'll send you a dog, Miss Terry, that won't be any trouble. He's got a
very good head, a first-rate tail, stuck in splendidly, but his legs are
too long. He'd follow you if you went to America."
Prophetic words! On one of our departures for America, Fussie was left
behind by mistake at Southampton. He found his way back from there to
his own theatre in the Strand, London.
Fred Archer sent him originally to the stage door at the Lyceum. The man
who brought him out to my house in Earl's Court said:
"I'm afraid he gives tongue. Miss, he don't like music anyway. There was
a band at the bottom of your road, and he started hollering."
_Fussie and "Charles I."_
We were at luncheon when Fussie made his début into the family circle,
and I very quickly saw that his _stomach_ was his fault. He had a great
dislike to "Charles I.," we could never make out why. Perhaps it was
because Henry wore armour in one act--and Fussie may have barked his
shins against it. Perhaps it was the firing off of big guns. But more
probably it was because the play once got him into trouble. As a rule,
Fussie had the most wonderful sense of the stage, and at rehearsal would
skirt the edge of it, but never cross it. But at Brooklyn one night when
we were playing "Charles I.," the last act, and that most pathetic part
of it where Charles is taking a last farewell of his wife and children,
Fussie, perhaps excited by his run over the bridge from New York,
suddenly bounded on to the stage! The good children who were playing
Princess Mary and Prince Henry didn't even smile; the audience remained
solemn; but Henry and I nearly went into hysterics. Fussie knew directly
that he had done wrong. He lay down on his stomach, then rolled over on
his back, a whimpering apology, while carpenters kept on whistling and
calling to him from the wings. The children took him up to the window at
the back of the scene, and he stayed there cowering between them until
the end of the play.
America seems to have been always fatal to Fussie. Another time when
Henry and I were playing in some charity performance in which John Drew
and Maude Adams were also acting, he disgraced himself again. Henry
having "done his bit" and put on hat and coat to leave the theatre,
Fussie thought the end of the performance must have come; the stage had
no further sanctity for him, and he ran across it to the stage door
barking! John Drew and Maude Adams were playing "A Pair of Lunatics."
Maude Adams, sitting looking into the fire, did not see Fussie, but was
amazed to hear John Drew departing madly from the text:
"Is this a dog I see before me,
His tail towards my hand?
Come, let me clutch thee."
She began to think he had really gone mad!
[Illustration: _From the collection of Robert Coster_