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!”