“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m going on the stage, little Anne, and it might be as well to pray for me to say the right thing as to pray for the ladies of the shoulder blades,” said Richard, smiling.
Little Anne at once closed her eyes, and obeyed him literally.
Richard came forth from the side of the curtain, the same calm, gentle Richard that little Anne knew at home, and she heard Ted Wilberforce draw in his breath sharply.
Richard stood bowing from left to right for a few minutes while the audience frantically welcomed him. The pathos of his blindness had never been more poignant.
Then silence fell, the impressive silence of a concourse of people.
“My friends,” Richard’s quiet, thrilling voice broke the silence, “it is not custom that makes me call you my friends. It seems to me that in your reception of my play there is a quality that means friendship for the man that wrote it. Or is it that I like to think so? I am deeply grateful to you. Having said that, I might stop talking, for what can I add? Truly, indeed, I thank you! The first night of his first play means a great deal to an author. It means pretty much what it must have meant to Wendy, John, and little Michael to be taken by Peter Pan into the Never Never Land. It means one’s dreams come true.
“For three years I carried ‛The Guerdon’ around with me in vague, mist-encircled thoughts of it, a waking dream. Gradually the characters in it emerged farther and farther out of the mist, taking shape as the events of that period of their lives with which the play deals evolved and developed them. I knew what happened to these people because I knew the people, and, again, I knew the people because of what happened to them.
“Perhaps we do not realize how much of us the events of our lives reveal. There are certain things that cannot befall people of a certain type, and the reverse is equally true: there are events almost sure to befall a certain type of people. The law of attraction, it seems to me, holds in all combinations, in all orders of creation. Circumstances develop from within outward. Though we are acted upon extraneously it is because we call forth and yield ourselves to the action.
“Thus I came to know the people in this play through what happened to them, and I understood what they must be to receive the particular guerdon that you are seeing come to them. Nor has it seemed to me that I caused these events of the play, nor created the people. It is an unending marvel to us who write how wilful our puppets become, how we stand aside and watch them make or mar their lives in spite of us, precisely as do our other friends who are clothed in flesh. I have had help in writing this play for which I shall be grateful all my life. It grew in a quiet room in Cleavedge, and its writing was a never-to-be-forgotten joy; a present joy that abides is mine, though the play is done. Whatever comes to me later, I can never write another first play, nor lose the happiness this one brought to me, crowned to-night by your great kindness to it.