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.
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.