He took it so very quietly that I was frightened, and said to his son Laurence who was on that tour:
"Do let's go to his hotel and see how he is."
We drove there and found him sitting eating his supper with the poor dead Fussie, who would never eat supper any more, curled up in his rug on the sofa. Henry was talking to the dog exactly as if it were alive. The next day he took Fussie back in the train with him to London, covered with a coat. He is buried in the dogs' cemetery, Hyde Park.
His death made an enormous difference to Henry. Fussie was his constant companion. When he died, Henry was really alone. He never spoke of what he felt about it, but it was easy to know.
We used to get hints how to get this and that from watching Fussie! His look, his way of walking! He sang, whispered eloquently and low—then barked suddenly and whispered again! Such a lesson in the law of contrasts!
The first time that Henry went to the Lyceum after Fussie's death, every one was anxious and distressed, knowing how he would miss the dog in his dressing-room. Then an odd thing happened. The wardrobe [cat], who had never been near the room in Fussie's lifetime, came down and sat on Fussie's cushion! No one knew how the "Governor" would take it. But when Walter was sent out to buy some meat for it, we saw that Henry was not going to resent it! From that night onwards the cat always sat night after night in the same place, and Henry liked its companionship. In 1902, when he left the theater for good, he wrote to me:
"The place is now given up to the rats—all light cut off, and only Barry[11] and a foreman left. Everything of mine I've moved away, including the Cat!"
"The place is now given up to the rats—all light cut off, and only Barry[11] and a foreman left. Everything of mine I've moved away, including the Cat!"
I have never been to America yet without going to [Niagara]. The first time I saw the great falls I thought it all more wonderful than beautiful. I got away by myself from my party, and looked and looked at it, and I listened—and at last it became dreadful and I was frightened at it. I wouldn't go alone again, for I felt queer and wanted to follow the great flow of it. But at twelve o'clock, with the "sun upon the topmost height of the day's journey," most of Nature's sights appear to me to be at their plainest. In the evening, when the shadows grow long and all hard lines are blurred, how soft, how different, everything is! It was noontide, that garish cruel time of day, when I first came in sight of the falls. I'm glad I went again in other lights—but one should live by the side of all this greatness to learn to love it. Only once did I catch Niagara in beauty, with pits of color in its waters, no one color definite—all was wonderment, allurement, fascination. The last time I was there it was wonderful, but not beautiful any more. The merely stupendous, the merely marvelous, have always repelled me. I cannot realize, and become terribly weak and doddering. No terrific scene gives me pleasure. The great cañons give me unrest, just as the long low lines of my Sussex marshland near Winchelsea give me rest.
