II

One of the practical jokes of Toole and Irving is almost classical. One Sunday when they both happened to be playing at Liverpool at the same time they went to dine at an old inn at Wavertree celebrated for the excellence of its hospitality. They had a good dinner and a good bottle of port and sat late. When most of the guests in the hotel had gone to bed and when the time necessary for their own departure was drawing nigh, they rang and told the waiter to get the bill. When he had gone for it they took all the silver off the table—they had fine old silver in the inn—and placed it in the garden on which the room opened. Then they turned out the gas and got under the table. Hearing no answer to his repeated knocking the waiter opened the door. When he saw the lights out, the window opened, and the guests—and the silver—gone he cried out:

“Done! They have bolted with the silver.” Then he ran down the passage crying out: “Thieves, thieves!”

The instant he was gone the two men came from under the table, closed the door, lit the gas, and took in the silver which they replaced on the table. Presently a wild rush of persons came down the passage and burst into the room: the landlord and his family, servants of the house, guests en deshabille—most of them carrying pokers and other impromptu weapons. They found the two gentlemen sitting quietly smoking their cigars. As they stood amazed Irving said in his quiet, well-bred voice:

“Do you always come in like this when gentlemen are having their dinner here?”

Toole would even play pranks on Irving, these generally taking the form of some sort of gift. For instance, he once sent Irving on his birthday what he called in his letter “a miniature which he had picked up!” It came in a furniture van, an enormous portrait of an actor, painted nearly a hundred years before; it was so large that it would not fit in any room of the theatre and had to be put in a high passage. Again, when he was in Australia he sent to Irving, timed so that it would arrive at Christmas, a present of two frozen sheep and a live kangaroo. These arrived at Irving’s rooms in Grafton Street. He had them housed at the Lyceum for the night, and next day sent the sheep to gladden the hearts—and anatomies—of the Costermongers’ Club at Chicksand Street, Mile End, New Town. The kangaroo was sent with a donation to the Zoological Society as a contribution from “J. L. Toole and Henry Irving.” A brass plate was fixed over the cage by the Society.

Toole loved to make beautiful presents to Irving. Amongst them was a splendid gilt silver claret jug; several silver cups and bowls, the trophy designed by Flaxman which was presented to Macready in 1818—a magnificent piece of jeweller’s work; a “grangerised” edition of Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens—unique in its richness of material and its fine workmanship—which he had bought in Paris for £500.