So the dream ends, but the garden and the sunshine remain; and not only the garden and the sunshine, but the knowledge that “these are my friends”; that these men and women have known and, I think, loved me, as I have known and loved them; and the fact that they have been and are, many of them, still in my life, making the world a finer and cleaner place in which to live.
That is how I should wish to look back on life: not always easy, or smooth, or always happy, but with so much that has been worth while, so much that has been gay and splendid.
Gradually everything falls into its right perspective; things which seemed so important, so tragic, so difficult “at the time”—why, now one can almost look back and laugh. Not everything: the things which were rooted in beliefs and convictions do not shrink with the years; and I am glad, and even a little proud, that I lived through the time which held the Boer War, the Suffrage Campaign, and the Greatest World Struggle that the world has ever seen—please God, the Last Great War of All!
My work, my own work, it has been hard—there have been difficult times, when lack of understanding made work less of a joy than it should have been—but, looking at it all as a whole, and not as a series of detached memories, it has been very good to do, and I have been very happy in doing it. It has kept my brain working, and, I think, kept my heart young; and never once since the front door of my father’s house closed behind me, and I left home in that storm of parental wrath, have I regretted that I chose the Stage as a profession.
I have tried to tell you something of what the years have brought, with no real thought except that it was a joy to me to remember it all. I have not tried to “point a moral or adorn a tale”, but simply to tell my story as it happened. Yet there is surely a moral—or, at least, some lesson—which has been learnt in all the years of work and play. I think it is this: Let God’s sunlight into your lives, live in the sunlight, and let it keep you young. For youth is the thing which makes life really worth living, youth which means the enjoyment of small things, youth which means warm affections, and which means also the absence of doubting and distrusting which, if you allow it, will take so much of the glorious colour out of life’s pictures.
So, in Harry’s words, I would end all I have tried to tell you by saying:
“Sunshine! Let’s go out!”
FINIS