The pleasant memories that many of those letters recalled! As Charles Hawtrey wrote, “I look back on One Summer’s Day as nearly the happiest, if not quite the happiest, of my stage life, and it is one of the ‘memories’ that seem to dwell in the minds of many of my audiences.”
The gift that some people have of putting so much into a few lines, all the tragedy of a lifetime in a few words! One dear woman wrote to me, she having lost her much-loved husband about a year previously: “I have such pleasant memories of him (Harry); always so kind and charming to me in the early days; and, since then, both of us with both of you—and now only you and me.”
And they gave me a great deal, those letters; and here is one which expresses all I want to say—a letter from Miss Sybil Thorndike—and so I give you her words, as an expression of what I feel and what I felt then: “Doesn’t it seem strange that out of a big personal grief comes sometimes a wonderful recognition of warmth that’s in the hearts of outsiders?”
So I finish my “Bundle of Letters”, tie up the parcel, and put them away—for I cannot bring myself to destroy them. They are part of one’s life; they came as an unexpected joy, or as something looked for anxiously; they came, bringing praise, good news, sympathy, and kindly thoughts. Letter-writing as an art may be lost; but I still say, with a feeling which has always something of a child’s expectancy and hope: “There is always to-morrow morning’s post.”
Photograph by Turner & Drinkwater, Hull. To face p. [187]
Harry as Little Billee
“Trilby”
CHAPTER XIII
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.