“Don’t desert us now, Harry!” It was so that they put it, one after another, in those letters.  “Ah, Harry—­there is so much woe and grief and pain in the world that you, who can, must do all that is in your power to make them easier to bear!  There are few forces enough in the world to-day to make us happy, even for a little space.  Come back to us, Harry—­make us laugh again!”

It was when those letters came that, for the first time, I saw that I had others to consider beside myself, and that it was not only my own wishes that I might take into account.  I talked to my wife, and I told her of those letters, and there were tears in both our eyes as we thought about those folks who knew the sorrow that was in our hearts.

“You must think about them, Harry,” she said.

And so I did think about them.  And then I began to find that there were others still about whom I must think.  There were three hundred people in the cast of “Three Cheers,” at the Shaftesbury Theatre, in London.  And I began to hear now that unless I went back the show would be closed, and all of them would be out of work.  At that season of the year, in the theatrical world, it would be hard for them to find other engagements, and they were not, most of them, like me, able to live without the salaries from the show.  They wrote to me, many of them, and begged me to come back.  And I knew that it was a desperate time for anyone to be without employment.  I had to think about those poor souls.  And I could not bear the thought that I might be the means, however innocent, of bringing hardship and suffering upon others.  It might not be my fault, and yet it would lie always upon my conscience.

Yet, even with all such thoughts and prayers to move me, I did not see how I could yield to them and go back.  Even after I had come to the point of being willing to go back if I could, I did not think I could go through with it.  I was afraid I would break down if I tried to play my part.  I talked to Tom Valiance, my brother-in-law.

“It’s very well to talk, Tom,” I said.  “But they’d ring the curtain down on me!  I can never do it!”

“You must!” he said.  “Harry, you must go back!  It’s your duty!  What would the boy be saying and having you do?  Don’t you remember, Harry?  John’s last words to his men were—­’Carry On!’ That’s what it is they’re asking you to do, too, Harry, and it’s what John would have wanted.  It would be his wish.”

And I knew that he was right.  Tom had found the one argument that could really move me and make me see my duty as the others did.  So I gave in.  I wired to the management that I would rejoin the cast of “Three Cheers,” and I took the train to London.  And as I rode in the train it seemed to me that the roar of the wheels made a refrain, and I could hear them pounding out those two words, in my boy’s voice:  “Carry On!”