HARRY, THE MAN
“The dearest, bravest, truest chap that ever stepped in shoe
leather.”—_When We Were Twenty-One._
“He’s such an odd sort of chap, always doing such rum things.”—_The
Wilderness._
If I was asked to describe Harry in one word, the one I should
instinctively use would be “_Youth_”; youth with its happy joy in the
simple things of life, youth with its hope and ambition, youth with its
intolerance, feeling disappointment and unkindness so deeply, and yet
with its tears so quickly dried by the laughter that was never very far
away. That was Harry Esmond, who found the world a giant playroom full
of toys of which he never tired.
An Irishman, with the true Irishman’s imagination, living so much in
dreams that dreams became more real than reality. He saw everything in
pictures, vividly and full of life. It would seem that the ideas, which
were born in dreams, became the living things of reality. Once, I
remember, when he told Charles Hallard, very excitedly, that something
he said or did was “foul”, poor Charles protested, “My God! and in the
morning he’ll believe it’s true!” We all laughed, Harry with the rest,
but I realise how very truly he had judged Harry’s character. Not that
he believed it in this particular instance, but, through life, what he
said on impulse to-day became conviction to-morrow.
And with all his imagination his love of the fantastic went hand in
hand. As little children love to play games in which there is a certain
element of “fear”, so Harry loved the fantastic which bordered on
terror.
I can see him, seated at dinner at Whiteheads Grove, arguing on the
comparative merits of William Morris and Tennyson—he, and those who
listened to him, utterly oblivious of the fact that the dinner was
rapidly growing cold. To point his argument, he began to quote the
_Idylls of the King_—Arthur’s return:
“And as he climbed the castle stair, _a thing_ fell at his feet,
And cried ‘I am thy fool, and I shall never make thee smile again’.”
I shall never forget the horror he put into the words “a thing fell at
his feet”, and how the whole tragedy was unrolled in two lines of verse.
Once, too, someone asked him to tell some spiritualistic experience, or
some story he had heard from someone who had “seen a spirit”. “Tell us
about it,” they asked. Harry, loving the terror which he felt the story
would bring, answered in almost a whisper, “No, no, I daren’t; it
_terrifies_ me!”, and promptly went on to tell the whole story, enjoying
the horror of it all, as children love a ghost story.
The very people he knew were either, in his eyes, wonderful compounds of
every virtue or there was “no health in them”. He would meet some
individual who, in the first five minutes of their acquaintance, would
say or do something which appealed to him: that person became for ever
“a splendid chap”; while, on the other hand, some harmless individual
who struck a “wrong note” (probably quite unwittingly) was referred to
for months as “a terrible fellow”.
The name he took for the stage—Harry Vernon Esmond—was a tribute to
romance and imagination. He was young—young in years, I mean—and he
loved a wonderful lady, to whom he never addressed a single word. She
was Harriet Vernon, who, attired as Gainsborough’s “Duchess of
Devonshire”, used to thrill the hearts of the young men of the day every
evening at the Tivoli, the Old Oxford, and other Temples of Variety.
Harry, with others, worshipped at the shrine of Harriet Vernon. He never
spoke to her; I doubt if he ever wanted to: it was simply the adoration
of a very young man for a beautiful woman, whose life to him was wrapped
in wonderful mystery. Night after night he watched her, and, when he
took up the stage as a career, he, being a nineteenth century knight and
so unable to “bind her gage about his helm”, openly avowed his
admiration and allegiance by taking her name, and so became Harry Vernon
Esmond.
Foolish? Ridiculous? I don’t think so; and it was rather typical of
Harry’s feelings with regard to women all his life. He loved beautiful
women as he loved the beautiful pictures, the beautiful books, and
beautiful places of the world. Women, individually, he might—and often
did—dislike; but women as women, _en masse_, he idealised. In all his
plays he never drew a woman who was wholly unkind or entirely worthless.
He might set out to draw a vampire, a heartless creature without any
moral sense; but before the end of the play, the fact that she was a
woman would be too strong for him, and in one sentence—perhaps only half
a dozen words—he would make you feel that “she so easily might have been
different, had fate been kinder”.
Perhaps you remember “Vera Lawrence” in _Eliza Comes to Stay_. She is
mercenary, heartless, and throws over Sandy so that she may marry his
rich uncle; but Harry Esmond could not give her to the world as nothing
more than that—she was a woman, and a beautiful woman. Listen to the
extenuating clause. She is showing Sandy a new umbrella, and says, “It
isn’t meant for rain; once it was opened to the rain it would never go
back and be slim and elegant again. Oh! Sandy, they opened me to the
rain too soon!” That is the echo of some half-forgotten tragedy which
had made Vera Lawrence what she was, instead of the woman “she might
have been”.
He began to write when he was very young, and I have a manuscript at
home of his first play, entitled _Geraldine, or Victor Cupid_. It is a
rather highly coloured work, which has never been inflicted on the
public, written in an exercise-book when he was fourteen.
He used to recite, too, when he was a very small boy, and a man who knew
him then described him as “a tiresome little boy who _would_ recite long
poems to which no one wanted to listen”. The tragedy of the prophet
without honour!
We were very young when we married, and it was perhaps due to that fact
that Harry was really a very casual lover. I have told elsewhere how his
friend was sent to escort me home from the theatre, and there were many
other instances which I could quote. After our marriage he changed
entirely; he was the most perfect lover any woman ever had, and his
letters to me, written when he was on tour and in America, are as
beautiful, as full of tenderness and imagery, as anything he ever wrote.
We married with Hope as a banking account, and lived in a little studio
flat in Chelsea. In the flat below us (and this is “by the way”, and has
nothing to do with Harry as I am trying to depict him to you) lived
another young married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Shortt. He became, as all the
world knows, the “Right Hon.”, and I wonder if he held as harsh views on
the subject of Women’s Suffrage then as he did later.
It was not for some time that Harry realised that he could write. He
loved acting passionately, and in his plays you will find all the fire
and life which he put into his spoken work. It was perhaps to him, as it
has been to many, something of a disadvantage that he could do two
things well, for it divided his powers, and he was torn between his
desire to act and his desire to create characters which others should
portray. Acting was his first love, and the knowledge that he had the
power to write, and write well, came to him slowly; I think perhaps he
almost distrusted it, as a possible menace to his career as an actor.
They were good days in the little flat, they were indeed “the brave days
when we were twenty-one”. Troubles came and we shouldered them, hardly
feeling their weight. The small happenings, which then were almost
tragedies we were able soon after to look back upon as comedies, because
we were young, and happy, and very much in love with each other. The
dreadful day came when Harry, who wanted a new bicycle very badly, went
to the bank and asked for an advance of eight pounds, which was refused
by the manager—the day when our worldly wealth was represented by
eighteen shillings, and two pounds in the bank (which we dare not touch,
for it would have “closed our account”). Then Cissie Graham (now Mrs.
Allen) played the part of the Good Fairy and saved us, though she does
not know it. She offered me a special week at Bristol. In the nick of
time I was engaged to play in Justin Huntly McCarthy’s _Highwayman_, and
soon after Harry went to George Alexander on contract; and so fate
smiled on us again!
Then came his _first play_—a one-act curtain-raiser called _Rest_. I
suppose all young authors are excited when the first child of their
brain is given to the world. I have never seen Harry so excited over any
play as he was over _Rest_. It was played at a matinée for Mr. Henry
Dana, who was with Sir Herbert Tree for so long, and died not long ago,
to the deep regret of all who knew him.
When I speak of Harry’s excitement over this play, I do not want you to
think that excitement was unusual with him. He was often roused to a
great pitch of excitement by the small, pleasant things of life, because
he loved them. He was the embodiment of Rupert Brooke’s “Great Lover”:
for him “books and his food and summer rain” never ceased to bring joy
and delight. To be blasé or bored were things unknown to him. No man
ever needed less the Celestial Surgeon to “stab his spirit wide awake”!
His joy in the lovely, small things of life was as keen at fifty as it
had been at fifteen.
Once, after great difficulty, I persuaded him to go for a holiday on the
Continent—for he hated to go far away from his own roof-tree. I always
remember the effect the first sight of the Swiss mountains had on him.
Do you remember the story of the great Victorian poet who, travelling to
Switzerland with his friend, was reading _The Channings_?—how, when his
friend touched him on the arm and said, “Look, the Alps”, he replied,
without raising his eyes from his book, “Hush, Harry is going to be
confirmed”! This is how differently the sight affected Harry: He had
been sitting in the corner of the carriage, dreaming dreams; at last I
saw the snow-covered Alps. “Look, Harry,” I said, “the mountains!” He
woke from his dreams and looked out; there was a long silence, which I
broke to ask if they impressed him very much. All his reply was, “Hush!
don’t speak!”
Three things never ceased to make an appeal to him—old people, young
children, and animals. I shall never forget his beautiful courtesy to my
mother, and in fact to anyone who was old and needed care. Children all
loved him, and his relations with his own children were wonderful. Our
first baby, Lynette, died when she was only a few days old, and Harry’s
first experience of having a child was really when Decima’s little boy
Bill came to live with us. When later Jack, and still later Jill, were
born, the three were to all intents and purposes one family. Harry was
never too busy or too tired to tell them wonderful stories—stories which
were continued from night to night, year by year. He used to tell the
most exciting adventures of imaginary people, always leaving them in the
very middle of some terrible predicament, from which he would extricate
them the next evening. I can remember him coming down one evening, after
telling one of these adventures to Jill, with a frown of very real worry
on his forehead, and rumpling his hair in distress, saying, as he did
so, “I’ve left them on the edge of a precipice, and God only knows how
I’m going to save them to-morrow night!”—“them” being the characters in
the story.
His dogs! In Harry’s eyes, none of them could really do wrong. One I
remember, a great Harlequin china-eyed Dane. She was a huge beast, and
suffered from the delusion that she was a “lap dog”, and as Harry was
the only person who existed in the world, so far as she was concerned,
so his was the only lap on which she ever wished to sit. At those
moments he was totally extinguished under the mass of dog.
[Illustration:
_Photograph by Miss Compton Collier, London, N.W.6._ To face p. 194
JILL AND HER MOTHER
]
But his best-loved dog was “Buggins”, who was an animal of doubtful
ancestry, called out of courtesy by Harry an “Australian Linger”. He
originally belonged to the Philip Cunninghams, and Harry, calling there
one day and finding Buggins in deep disgrace for some misdemeanour,
decided that our flat would be the ideal home for the dog. From that
moment, until he died from eating another dog’s meal as well as his own
(for, be it said frankly, Buggins was greedy), his life was as gorgeous
as Harry could make it. He had a state funeral and lies at “Apple
Porch”—the place which he, as well as his master, loved so dearly.
I wish I could tell you adequately of Harry’s humour, but the things he
said were funny because he said them and because of the way in which he
said them. Put down in black and white, they seem nothing, they might
even seem rather pointless; but the memory of Bill sitting with his
mouth open, ready to laugh at “Pop’s” jokes, and never waiting in vain,
the memory of the roars of laughter which were the accompaniment of
every meal—that has lasted while the jokes themselves are forgotten.
The jokes are forgotten, and the laughter remains! That is how Harry
lives always for us, who knew and loved him; that is how he lives for
Bill, and Jack, and Jill: as the finest playmate they ever had; the man
who, though he might treat life as a jest, was desperately serious over
games and the things of “make-believe”; who might laugh at the faults
which the world thinks grave, and was grave over the faults at which the
world too often laughs.
And the sound of his laughter, and of the children laughing with him,
brings me to the last picture; brings me to a scene in which Harry,
though he did not appear, was the most actual personality in the memory.
It was in the restaurant of the Gare du Nord in Paris, in the April of
1922. It was a perfect spring day, the sun was shining, birds were
singing, all the trees were full of budding leaf and flowers. We had
given his “body to the pleasant earth”; not, I felt, sleeping there
alone, for France had become the resting-place of so many Englishmen who
had been young, and brave, and beautiful. We had come back to Paris from
St. Germain, the children and I. The restaurant was empty, and anyone
entering would never have imagined from where we had come and what had
been our errand that morning. The children spoke all the time of Harry,
and spoke of him with laughter and smiles. It was “Do you remember what
Pops said?”, and “What a joke it was that day when Pops did this, that,
or the other”, until I realised that, though he had finished his work
here, he would always live for the children and for me in the “laughter
that remained”.
Graves are kept as green with laughter as with tears; but in our minds
there is no feeling of “graves” or death, only the joy of looking back
on the sunny days, which had been more full of sunshine because the
figure which stood in the midst of the sunlight had been Harry.
Harry would have hated, almost resented, another illness, with all the
attendant weariness; would have dreaded a repetition of all he went
through in Canada. He, who loved to live every moment of his life to the
full, always felt that “to pass out quickly” was the only way to hope to
die. His wish was fulfilled when he died so suddenly in Paris. And yet,
though he had loved his friends, loved his work, and loved, too, the
public life which was the outcome of it, he loved best of all the quiet
of his home; there, within its four walls, he would have, had it been
possible, done all his work, and had all his friends gather round him.
A last token of the love which those friends bore him is being made to
him now by “His Fellow-Craftsmen”; it is a bronze medallion, made by the
sculptor, Mr. Albert Toft, and will be placed where Harry’s body lies,
at the Cemetery at St. Germain-en-Laye. The beautiful thought originated
with Mr. Cyril Harcourt and Mr. Dion Clayton Calthrop, and many who
loved Harry have joined hands with them. As I write, a letter has just
come to me from Mr. Harcourt, saying: “It is done, and we think
beautifully. The face and hand, with the cigarette smoke curling up, are
wonderful.” I can fancy that Harry sees it too, and says in that
beautiful voice of his, full of all the tones and music I know so well:
“And I, in some far planet, past the skies,
I shall look down and smile;
Knowing in death I have not lost my friends,
But only found in death their lasting love.”
Of his wonderful charm it is almost impossible to write, and yet it was
essentially part of him, and a feature of his personality. Whatever his
faults may have been—and he had them, as have all of us—it was his
wonderful charm which made them so easy to forgive. As Fred Grove used
to say of him:
“Though to the faults of mortals he may fall,
Look in his eyes, and you forget them all.”
His friends know, as I do, his generosity; that keen anxiety to help,
either by money or kindness, anyone who was unfortunate. Harry never
waited to wonder if his help was wise or judicious; a man or woman was
poor, underfed, or unhappy, that was enough for him, and any help he
could give was at once forthcoming, and given with such unfeigned
pleasure at being able to help that I am convinced many of those who
asked him for money went away feeling they had conferred a favour on
Harry Esmond by borrowing his money.
On his work, both as a writer and an actor, I shall try to touch later.
I have tried here to give you the man as I knew him: A boy with the soul
of a poet; a man who always in his heart of hearts believed that most
men were brave, and, unless life had been unkind, all women good; who
evolved a philosophy which, though it may not have been very deep, was
always gay; to whom life was full of small excitements, wonderful
adventures, and splendid friends; who remained, after thirty years of
married life, still a very perfect lover; and who understood his
children and was their most loved playmate, because he never ceased
himself to be a child; complex, as all artistic natures must be, and
sometimes, if he seemed too ready to sacrifice the real to the
imaginary, it was because the imaginary to him seemed so much more
“worth while”.
[Illustration:
_Photograph by The Dover Street Studios, London, W._ To face p. 199
HARRY AS WIDGERY BLAKE
“Palace of Puck”
]
Perhaps the best summing-up of Harry that can be given is to quote
Henley’s lines on Robert Louis Stevenson:
“A streak of Ariel, a hint of Puck,
Of Hamlet most of all, and something of
The Shorter Catechist.”
There, then, is the picture I have tried to make for you: Harry elated
over the success of a play; Harry cast down over some unkind cut, grave
for a moment, with his gravity turned to smiles at some happy thought
which suddenly struck him; our hopes and fears; our good and bad times
together; and over all, drowning all other sounds, comes the noise of
Harry’s laughter and that of three happy children laughing with him.