Exits and Entrances

by Eva Moore

To-day, as I sit writing this, I can look out on the garden of “Apple Porch”—the house that Harry and I almost built together; the garden which we turned, and changed, and planted, to make it what it has become, “our ideal garden”. And in that garden ghosts walk for me—not “bogeys”, but kindly spirits of men and women who lived and laughed with us as friends; not that in life all of them walked in this garden of ours, but because now they come to join the procession which moves there. With them are many who are still with me, and whose companionship still helps to make life very happy. They join the others, and walk in my garden, to remind me of the times we have laughed together, and to assure me that life in the future still has good things for me.

For, make no mistake, youth is very wonderful, youth is very beautiful, but it passes and leaves behind, if you will only try to cultivate it, something which can never pass away: that is the youth that is not a question of years, but of humanity and a young heart. If you can still feel the delight of the first primrose, if you can still feel your heart leap at the sight of the leaves throwing off their winter coats and showing the first vivid green of the spring; if you can stand in the glory of a sunny day in March and thank God for His annual proof of the Resurrection, the re-birth of what all through the winter had seemed dead and is “now alive again”—then you are one of those whom the gods love; you will die young, for you can never grow old.

So, in my garden, the procession of ever-young people passes.

Over in that far corner is Herbert Lindon, sitting at an easel, painting a picture of the house. “A plain man, my masters”, but the kindliest of friends, with the most helpful nature in the world. Behind him stands Forbes Robertson, with his beautiful face, his wonderful voice, and his courtly manners. Had he lived five hundred years ago, he would have ridden out, dressed in shining armour, to fight for the Right against the Wrongs of the World; but, dressed in the clothes of 1923, he is still a knight, the instinctive supporter of the weak against the strong, the good against the evil.

Lawrence Kellie passes my window, a cigar in his mouth, and pauses a moment to tell me that he is going in to play some of his own compositions, to my great delight. On the golf links, outside the garden, I can see Charles Frohman, looking like a kindly “brownie”; he is flying a huge kite, so big that he might be in danger of flying after the kite, were it not for two small boys, Jack and Bill, who are holding fast to his legs.

Arthur Collins, very spruce and dapper, passes with E. S. Willard; they tell me they are going to persuade Frohman to leave his kite-flying and come in to play poker with them and Fred Terry.

Fred Terry stops outside the window for a talk with me, and reminds me of the winter he came to stay with us here, when Harry would insist upon his going out, in a biting east wind, to see “the beauty of the night”! I ask him if he remembers the Bank Holiday when he was with us, when Harry had to go back to a rehearsal of some approaching production? How he (Fred) was taken ill with a bad heart attack, and that, rather than let me see how he was suffering, for fear the sight should frighten me, he shut himself up in a room and refused to let me enter. Fred Terry, large and genial, wearing eye-glasses, moves away, and I see him stop to speak to Lottie Venne, who on very high heels, looking like a very alert, very “wide awake” bird, is coming towards us, her heels tapping on the stones of the path.

That gentle-looking woman over there is Marion Terry, and with her Lena Ashwell, talking, I am certain, of some plan or scheme which she is preparing to “carry through” with her extraordinary capacity and originality.

You see that squarely built man yonder, who looks—what he is—a sailor? That is Ernest Shackleton. He comes over to me, bringing his book with him. He shows me the title—one word, South—and asks if I think Harry will consider making it into a film-play. I tell him that the day England publicly mourned his loss in St. Paul’s Cathedral, during the service a sudden ray of sunlight came through one of the painted windows and struck the wall, just under the dome; how I followed it with my eyes, and saw that it fell on the words “The glory of his works endureth forever”. I think he smiles a little, and says, as Englishmen do when praised for what they have done, “Oh, I didn’t do anything very great or glorious.”

Here is a man who, too, has done great things. An explorer also, but he has explored the depths of humanity; he has seen just how far his fellow-men and women can fall, and yet he still retains his faith in “the good that is in the worst of us”. It is W. T. Waddy, the Metropolitan magistrate. Burns’s prayer that we should “deal gently with your brother man, still gentler sister woman” has no application to Mr. Waddy; he “keeps the faith” that believes that fundamentally humanity is good, and each day in his work he testifies to it. I remind him that it was his father, Judge Waddy, who first escorted me to the House of Commons.