NE afternoon in January, 1888, Mr. Charles E. Hurd, literary editor of
the "Boston Transcript," gave me two theater-tickets and asked if I had ever seen Jim Herne play. I told him I had not.
"Do so at once," said he; "for he is a realist after your own heart."
I accepted the tickets with pleasure, and that night witnessed the performance of "Drifting Apart," by James A. and Katharine Herne.
They were playing at that time on a second-rate, out-of-the-way stage in the South End, and their surroundings were cheap and tawdry, but I can still define the profound impression made upon me by their action and the play.
The plot of the piece was very simple. In the first act Jack, the middle-aged husband of Mary Miller, was shaving himself in preparation for a trip to the village to purchase some Christmas presents, and all through the scene, which was charmingly set. Herne moved unaffectedly, joking, chuckling, making quaint toilet preparations with a naturalism I had never before seen upon the stage; and Katharine was almost equally delightful as the wife. When at the close of the act her sailor husband returned with his arms full of bundles, helplessly intoxicated, the horror, the despair, which filled the heart of Mary formed a complete and piteous contrast to the delicious comedy which had preceded it.
The two acts which followed, being a dream, were less moving, but the fourth act, which brought Jack back to sobriety and restored the reality of the simple New England coast life of the opening scene, was almost equally colloquial. The play closed with satisfying glow, with Jack repentant and Mary forgiving.
This quiet naturalism, this unaffected humor, deeply moved and interested me. and I felt it my duty to write to Herne, thanking him for the pleasure he had given me. I also expressed my admiration of the acting of "Miss" Herne, and went on to say that by such writing as that in the first and last acts of "Drifting Apart" he had allied himself with the best local-color fictionists of New England, and deserved the encouragement and support of the same public.
A day or two later I received a modest and earnest letter from him in which he said:
"I am going on the road very soon, but when I return in May I shall be very glad to have you come out to my house."
The wish was fulfilled some months later, and in answer to a note of cordial invitation I hastened to call upon them at their home in Ashmont. It was a modest, unesthetic frame cottage such as a carpenter might live in, but Mrs. Herne met me at the door, looking quite like Mary Miller of the play, and presented to me her three little daughters, Julie, Crystal, and Dorothy, who made me instantly at home in the family sitting-room and library.
That first evening with them, filled with cordial explanations and tumultuous argument, is still vivid in my mind. It was in effect a session of congress, a religious revival, and a swift Irish comedy. Our clamor lasted far into the night, and I went away at last with a feeling that these people were my kind. I had never met such instant and warm-hearted understanding and sympathy. My head rang with their piquant phrases, their earnest and changeful voices.
At this time I was an active, I fear a pestiferous, advocate of 's land theories, and at our next meeting, after we had discussed the drama and the newer forms of acting to the dregs, I switched the conversation to the single tax. In the end I converted them both. Then we examined into the constitution of matter and Spencer's theories of evolution, and Mrs. Herne, who was not only a genuine humorist, but a thinker of intuitive subtlety and a lover of science, took the fullest part in all these excited debates. We beat our chairs and warred over the nebular hypothesis with entire unconsciousness of time.
This extraordinary family brought to me a wholly new world—a world of swift and pulsating emotion, a world of aspiration, of brave battle for an art. It is difficult for me to express in a few words how much they and their lovely children meant to me during the years which followed. They were at once a puzzle and an inspiration.