“Hush! Come away!”—The Wilderness..sp 2

So I come to the end, so far as one can come to the end of recollections and memories, for each one brings with it many others; they crowd in upon me as I write, and I have to be very firm with myself and shut the door in the face of many.

I have tried to tell you some of the incidents which have amused and interested me; I have tried to make you see men and women as I have seen them; and have tried to make you walk with me down “life’s busy street”. I have tried to pay the tribute of affection and regard to the various “CÆsars” I have known, and if in this book any names are missing—names of men and women who have been, and are, my very dear and good friends—I can only tell them that they are not missing in my heart.

I look back over the years that are past, look back to the time when I first came to London, and looked on “leading ladies” and “leading men” as giants who walked the earth, when I used to wonder if I could ever hope to be one of them; and then, it seemed with wonderful swiftness, the years flew past and, behold! I was a leading lady myself. That is one of the wonderful tricks life plays for our mystification: the far-off hope of “some day” becomes the realisation of “to-day”.

To-day, as I sit writing this, I can look out on the garden of “Apple Porch”—the house that Harry and I almost built together; the garden which we turned, and changed, and planted, to make it what it has become, “our ideal garden”. And in that garden ghosts walk for me—not “bogeys”, but kindly spirits of men and women who lived and laughed with us as friends; not that in life all of them walked in this garden of ours, but because now they come to join the procession which moves there. With them are many who are still with me, and whose companionship still helps to make life very happy. They join the others, and walk in my garden, to remind me of the times we have laughed together, and to assure me that life in the future still has good things for me.

For, make no mistake, youth is very wonderful, youth is very beautiful, but it passes and leaves behind, if you will only try to cultivate it, something which can never pass away: that is the youth that is not a question of years, but of humanity and a young heart. If you can still feel the delight of the first primrose, if you can still feel your heart leap at the sight of the leaves throwing off their winter coats and showing the first vivid green of the spring; if you can stand in the glory of a sunny day in March and thank God for His annual proof of the Resurrection, the re-birth of what all through the winter had seemed dead and is “now alive again”—then you are one of those whom the gods love; you will die young, for you can never grow old.

So, in my garden, the procession of ever-young people passes.

Over in that far corner is Herbert Lindon, sitting at an easel, painting a picture of the house. “A plain man, my masters”, but the kindliest of friends, with the most helpful nature in the world. Behind him stands Forbes Robertson, with his beautiful face, his wonderful voice, and his courtly manners. Had he lived five hundred years ago, he would have ridden out, dressed in shining armour, to fight for the Right against the Wrongs of the World; but, dressed in the clothes of 1923, he is still a knight, the instinctive supporter of the weak against the strong, the good against the evil.

Lawrence Kellie passes my window, a cigar in his mouth, and pauses a moment to tell me that he is going in to play some of his own compositions, to my great delight. On the golf links, outside the garden, I can see Charles Frohman, looking like a kindly “brownie”; he is flying a huge kite, so big that he might be in danger of flying after the kite, were it not for two small boys, Jack and Bill, who are holding fast to his legs.

Arthur Collins, very spruce and dapper, passes with E. S. Willard; they tell me they are going to persuade Frohman to leave his kite-flying and come in to play poker with them and Fred Terry.

Fred Terry stops outside the window for a talk with me, and reminds me of the winter he came to stay with us here, when Harry would insist upon his going out, in a biting east wind, to see “the beauty of the night”! I ask him if he remembers the Bank Holiday when he was with us, when Harry had to go back to a rehearsal of some approaching production? How he (Fred) was taken ill with a bad heart attack, and that, rather than let me see how he was suffering, for fear the sight should frighten me, he shut himself up in a room and refused to let me enter. Fred Terry, large and genial, wearing eye-glasses, moves away, and I see him stop to speak to Lottie Venne, who on very high heels, looking like a very alert, very “wide awake” bird, is coming towards us, her heels tapping on the stones of the path.

That gentle-looking woman over there is Marion Terry, and with her Lena Ashwell, talking, I am certain, of some plan or scheme which she is preparing to “carry through” with her extraordinary capacity and originality.

You see that squarely built man yonder, who looks—what he is—a sailor? That is Ernest Shackleton. He comes over to me, bringing his book with him. He shows me the title—one word, South—and asks if I think Harry will consider making it into a film-play. I tell him that the day England publicly mourned his loss in St. Paul’s Cathedral, during the service a sudden ray of sunlight came through one of the painted windows and struck the wall, just under the dome; how I followed it with my eyes, and saw that it fell on the words “The glory of his works endureth forever”. I think he smiles a little, and says, as Englishmen do when praised for what they have done, “Oh, I didn’t do anything very great or glorious.”

Here is a man who, too, has done great things. An explorer also, but he has explored the depths of humanity; he has seen just how far his fellow-men and women can fall, and yet he still retains his faith in “the good that is in the worst of us”. It is W. T. Waddy, the Metropolitan magistrate. Burns’s prayer that we should “deal gently with your brother man, still gentler sister woman” has no application to Mr. Waddy; he “keeps the faith” that believes that fundamentally humanity is good, and each day in his work he testifies to it. I remind him that it was his father, Judge Waddy, who first escorted me to the House of Commons.

Over there is “Billy” Congreave, who gained the Victoria Cross and made the Great Sacrifice in the war. With him, telling his battles over again, is Dr. Leahy. He left his leg at the Marne, but that did not prevent him enjoying, as he does still, a round or two with the gloves. I should think he “enjoys” it more than his opponent, for “Micky” Leahy is an enormous man. He appears to be the last man in the world likely to possess, as he does, wonderful gifts of healing.

Who is that woman laughing at some joke made by the man walking with her? She is Dame May Whitty, and the man is Sir Alfred Fripp. You see him at his very best when surrounded by his wife and ’a large family of very healthy children. She, Dame Whitty, is a friend of thirty years, and her affection and goodness to me have never altered.

The woman who has just joined them is Susanne Sheldon. I parody the saying, “better twenty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay” when speaking of Suzanne, and say “better one day of Susanne than a month of the people who lack her understanding and great heart.” Some day go to the Children’s Hospital in Great Ormond Street, and hear of the work she has done there; they will tell you more than I can, for she does not talk of all she does.

The lame man, who looks so fierce, is Sydney Valentine. He looks fierce, and rather as though he had more brain than heart. His looks belie his nature. He leans on his stick by my window, and we talk of the early days of the Actors’ Association. I remind him of the splendid fight he made to gain the Standard Contract for the acting profession. I ask him, “Do you remember the Lyric Theatre meeting?”, and I add some hard things about the people who attacked him there. He smiles, and reminds me of our own Suffrage motto (and how he used to hate the Suffrage Movement, too!), “The aim is everything”, and adds “After all, we won our battle, didn’t we?”

J. L. Toole, coming up, hears the last sentence, and asks, “Battle, what battle?” Just as I am about to answer, he pops a “bullseye” into my mouth, as he used to years ago when I was playing with him on the stage. Toole laughs, and I laugh with him; but our laughter is checked by a tall man, with a heavy moustache, who, with a melancholy face, is filling a pipe from a tobacco-pouch like a sack—and not a very small sack, either! He brings an air of tragedy with him, and I ask, “What is the matter, Aubrey?”

It is Aubrey Smith, the “Round the Corner Smith” who took the first English cricket eleven to South Africa, and still, when his work on the stage allows him, will rush away to Lords or the Oval to watch a match. “Haven’t you heard?” he asks; and adds, “Dreadful, dreadful; I don’t know what England’s coming to.” “What has happened?” I ask again. He looks at me sadly and tells me—“England has lost the Test Match!” He wanders away, and a few minutes later I hear him laughing—a laugh which matches him for size. He is probably telling the woman he is talking to (Elizabeth Fagan) of the new pig-styes he has built at West Drayton.

There is Marie Tempest, and how fascinating she is! She has the cleverest tongue and the most sparkling humour of any woman I know. The woman near her is Julia Neilson, a dream of loveliness, and with a nature as lovely as her face. There, too, are Lady Martin Harvey and Lady Tree—Lady Tree, whom I first understood when I met her under circumstances which were very difficult for us both; and who showed me then what “manner of woman” she is, so that ever since I have loved and admired her. And Nell Harvey, who can face the rough patches of life with equanimity, and who can “walk with kings” without losing that “common touch” which gives her the breadth of vision, the tolerance, and kindness which have made her ever ready to give help to those who need it.

This man coming towards me, his hands clasped behind him, who looks as if he were meditating deeply, is Sir Charles Wyndham. When he was playing in London, and Harry was a very young actor in the provinces, and had heard of but had never seen Charles Wyndham, one paper said it was “a pity that Mr. Esmond has tried to give such a slavish imitation of the great actor”. He stands for a moment to ask me if I remember the evening he came to see The Dangerous Age, and repeats again his admiration and praise of the play. I tell him that I remember, also, how after the play he sat in Harry’s dressing-room for an hour and a half, delighting both of us with his stories of the stage, “past and present”.

He passes on, and you see him stop to speak to Anthony Hope, that delightful man who possesses a manner of joyous cynicism of which one never tires. George Alexander has joined them, perhaps speaking of the success of The Prisoner of Zenda. You notice his beautiful white hair. Once, in The Wilderness, he had to darken it, and as in the play he had to lay his head on my shoulder, my dress was gradually marked with the stain he used for his hair.

I stand and reach out to shake the hand of Lewis Waller, and ask him if he is still “putting square pegs into round holes”. He asks, in his beautiful voice that was the salvation of so many really poor plays, what I mean. I remind him of a play, many years ago, when Harry remonstrated with him and said that some of the parts in the production were played so badly, adding “Why do you engage such people? they are not, and never will be, actors”; and how Lewis Waller replied, “I know, I know, Harry, but I would sooner have round pegs in square holes than not have people round me who love me.” Dear Will! He moves away, speaking to this person and that person, and giving to each one something of his very gentle and infinitely lovable personality.

That beautiful woman, surely “God’s most wonderful handiwork”, to whom Will is speaking now, is Maxine Elliott; she is Jill’s God-mother, another of the lovely women whose faces are only the mirrors of the natures which lie beneath.

The sound of the piano reaches me, and I look to see if Lawrence Kellie is still playing, and have to look twice before I can believe that it is not he who sits playing, but Raymond Rose, who is so wonderfully like him. Perhaps he is at work composing, not this time for His Majesty’s Theatre, but, like Henry Purcell, for “that blessed place where only his music can be excelled”.

Then the gate at the end of the garden opens, and, carrying a bag of golf clubs, and clad in an old coat and equally old trousers which seem to be “draped” round his ankles, comes Harry. He comes up to the window, full of the joy of life and never-ending youth; leaning his arms on the window-sill, he looks at the men and women in the garden, and smiles.

“Our friends,” I tell him.

And he repeats after me, “Yes, our friends.” After a moment he goes on, thoughtfully: “I used to tell you that ‘Friendship was a question of streets’; I think I was wrong: it’s something more than that.” And, as if to prove his words, we both see Malcolm Watson walking in the garden, the kindly Scot, who never fails anyone, a real friend of countless years.

“I think it is—something more than that,” I answer.

As we talk, the sun suddenly blazes out, filling all the garden with light; Harry stretches out his hand, smiling, and says: “Sunshine! Let’s go out!”

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So the dream ends, but the garden and the sunshine remain; and not only the garden and the sunshine, but the knowledge that “these are my friends”; that these men and women have known and, I think, loved me, as I have known and loved them; and the fact that they have been and are, many of them, still in my life, making the world a finer and cleaner place in which to live.

That is how I should wish to look back on life: not always easy, or smooth, or always happy, but with so much that has been worth while, so much that has been gay and splendid.

Gradually everything falls into its right perspective; things which seemed so important, so tragic, so difficult “at the time”—why, now one can almost look back and laugh. Not everything: the things which were rooted in beliefs and convictions do not shrink with the years; and I am glad, and even a little proud, that I lived through the time which held the Boer War, the Suffrage Campaign, and the Greatest World Struggle that the world has ever seen—please God, the Last Great War of All!

My work, my own work, it has been hard—there have been difficult times, when lack of understanding made work less of a joy than it should have been—but, looking at it all as a whole, and not as a series of detached memories, it has been very good to do, and I have been very happy in doing it. It has kept my brain working, and, I think, kept my heart young; and never once since the front door of my father’s house closed behind me, and I left home in that storm of parental wrath, have I regretted that I chose the Stage as a profession.

I have tried to tell you something of what the years have brought, with no real thought except that it was a joy to me to remember it all. I have not tried to “point a moral or adorn a tale”, but simply to tell my story as it happened. Yet there is surely a moral—or, at least, some lesson—which has been learnt in all the years of work and play. I think it is this: Let God’s sunlight into your lives, live in the sunlight, and let it keep you young. For youth is the thing which makes life really worth living, youth which means the enjoyment of small things, youth which means warm affections, and which means also the absence of doubting and distrusting which, if you allow it, will take so much of the glorious colour out of life’s pictures.

So, in Harry’s words, I would end all I have tried to tell you by saying: