HIS ONE GREAT LOVE.

Waikato Times, Volume 104, Issue 17574, 1 December 1928, Page 17 (Supplement)

HIS ONE GREAT LOVE.

CHARLIE CHAPLIN'S MOTHER. SORROW AT HER PASSING. The other day a little, man with black hair thickly streaked with grey stood beside a grave. He was as lonely in his sorrow as he was lonely in his struggles and his success (says an American writer). It was a small grave, hardly larger than a child's. The woman who was buried there had been tiny of body but great of spirit—until the war, raining death from the skies upon her familiar London streets, had left her bewildered and lost. It was a small grave, but it held the great love of Charlie Chaplin's life. With his mother was buried his youth, all his ties with that long-ago life, when as a ragged urchin ka strutted through the slums imitirtlof, the gait of a pushcart pedler for nor amusement. Her Mind Clouded. There have been many bitter things in Charlie's life. One of the bitterest was the realisation that, when at last he could make up to his mother for the terrible years of struggle for existence, by an ironical twist of fate she could not understand that those years were over and that she need never want for anything again. At times, those who knew them say. his mother was distressed and frightened by the evidences of his wealth. She who had known the horrors of poverty in a London slum did not understand Chaplin's great house with its velvet hangings and soft rugs. All this grandeur could not belong to her boy Charlie. She would beg him piteously to give up work that couldn't he honest and turn to salvation. Twenty-five years before fhe had hoped that he would become a minister. A Passionate Love.

These few who knew her say, too, that she was passionately fond of The Little One, as she always called her youngest son. She was shown her grandchildren, but they made little impression. Her elder boys lavished affection on her, but it was Charlie she clung to.

In the last few hours she fell into a stupor, and the nurses at the hospital begged Charlie not to see her. "You can't do her any good," they told him, "and it would break your heart. It is much better to remember her as she was the other day when you came to see her." Chaplin has a horror of death. He listened to their advice and drove away. A mile from the hospital he stopped his car, turned and came back. As he entered his mother's room the heavy eyes opened. Recognition crept into them, and she reached out and caught his hand.