RECOLLECTIONS




 LIST OF WORKS

 BY

 FRANK T. BULLEN


  THE CRUISE OF THE “CACHALOT”
  IDYLLS OF THE SEA
  THE LOG OF A SEA WAIF
  WITH CHRIST AT SEA
  THE MEN OF THE MERCHANT SERVICE
  A SACK OF SHAKINGS
  A WHALEMAN’S WIFE
  DEEP-SEA PLUNDERINGS
  THE APOSTLES OF THE SOUTH-EAST
  SEA WRACK
  SEA PURITANS
  SEA SPRAY
  CREATURES OF THE SEA
  BACK TO SUNNY SEAS
  A SON OF THE SEA
  ADVANCE AUSTRALASIA
  FRANK BROWN, SEA APPRENTICE
  A BOUNTY BOY
  THE CALL OF THE DEEP
  THE PIRATE HUNTERS
  TOLD IN THE DOG WATCHES
  THE BITTER SOUTH
  BEYOND
  CUT OFF FROM THE WORLD
  THE SEED OF THE RIGHTEOUS
  FIGHTING THE ICEBERGS
  A COMPLEAT SEA COOK
  FROM WHEEL AND LOOK-OUT
  THE SALVAGE OF A SAILOR
  THE CONFESSIONS OF A TRADESMAN
            _&c. &c._

 [Illustration: Very truly yours
 F T Bullen]




  RECOLLECTIONS

  _THE REMINISCENCES OF THE BUSY LIFE OF
  ONE WHO HAS PLAYED THE VARIED PARTS
  OF SAILOR, AUTHOR & LECTURER_

  BY

  FRANK T. BULLEN

  AUTHOR OF “THE CRUISE OF THE ‘CACHALOT,’” _&c._


  WITH PORTRAIT


  LONDON
  SEELEY, SERVICE & CO. LIMITED
  38 GREAT RUSSELL STREET
  1915




   CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                    PAGE

         INTRODUCTION                          11

      I. MY EARLIEST RECOLLECTIONS             19

     II. RANDOM MEMORIES                       33

    III. MY FIRST LECTURES                     51

     IV. THE LECTURE TOUR                      63

      V. THE REAL BEGINNING                    75

     VI. SCOTLAND                              89

    VII. JOURNEYS                             103

   VIII. HOSPITALITY                          121

     IX. HOSPITALITY (_continued_)            137

      X. HOTELS                               147

     XI. CHAIRMEN                             163

    XII. CHAIRMEN (_continued_)               181

   XIII. LANTERNISTS                          195

    XIV. AUDIENCES                            211

     XV. AUSTRALASIA                          227

    XVI. SECRETARIES                          241

   XVII. DISCURSIONS                          257

  XVIII. DIVAGATIONS                          275

    XIX. ART OR APTITUDE                      291

     XX. SUMMING UP                           305




INTRODUCTION


It may very well be that I am doing something now which is totally
unnecessary, indeed that is a foregone conclusion as far as many
omnivorous readers are concerned, for they never by any chance read a
Preface or an Introduction. But only the other day I was reading an
interesting volume of reminiscences, and the writer said that after the
publisher had received the manuscript he wrote sternly demanding the
reason why there was no Introduction. More, he said that one must be
written forthwith, and it was so.

Now I cannot honestly say that I, like that writer whom I have quoted,
am a novice at book writing, or have much to learn concerning the
ways of publishers, since this book will make about the thirty-sixth
that has been perpetrated by me during the last seventeen years. Too
many, far too many, I know (this to forestall the obvious remark), but
what I want to say is that in no case have I ever been asked for an
Introduction, or questioned why I had written one. Follows inevitably
the remark, “Why this one, then? Can’t you let your book tell its own
tale?”

And yet I feel very strongly that an Introduction to this book is
needed, if ever a book needed such a thing. For I really believe that
it may be my last; I dare not be more definite than that, though I
would dearly love to emulate those giants of literature who can calmly
announce that they have written their last page for publication, that
for good or ill their message has been delivered and they will say no
more. Ah no, fate has not dealt kindly enough with me for that, and
because the snarl of the proverbial wolf is never out of my ears and
the spoor of his stealthy footfall is but too clearly traceable near my
door, I must still be ready to take up my pen. This Introduction may
serve as my valedictory, if, as it is most reasonable to expect, this
book happens to be my last.

And now for the Introduction. For a good many years I have been telling
the stories that I have gathered here. It may very well be, of course,
that, as Kipling says, all that seemed so definite and amusing in
the spoken word has escaped when committed to paper. But I hope not,
because I have often been asked why I did not write my reminiscences of
the lecture platform, and I have always made some excuse, so that now
when I have done it at last, it would be a great pity for it to be a
failure.

Of course, the thing has been done before; it would be strange if
it hadn’t; but I have not had the pleasure of reading even the very
entertaining book written on the subject by the late Paul Blouet (Max
O’Rell), a veritable prince of humorists. I am inclined to think
that in one sense at any rate this is an advantage in that I cannot
consciously or unconsciously have copied any of their sayings, or
told of any of their doings, however interesting or funny. For the
same reason there cannot be any “chestnuts” in this book. Everything
told in it, except where the contrary has been expressly stated, is
an experience of my own. I am rather pleased about this, for I have
recently been more than a little disgusted to find how many oft-told
stories have been repeated in costly books of memoirs, the names
of whose writers should have been guarantee enough that they had
sufficient good stories of their own to tell without drawing upon
antiquities.

I hope I shall be given due credit for the fact that many really good
stories (as I think) have been omitted by me simply because the point
of them demanded that the actors should be known, and I would not give
those good people pain. Other stories I have had to leave out because I
was not looking for trouble and because I was somewhat doubtful of the
far-reaching operations of the law of libel. And that, I think, is all
I can say by way of Introduction to my book.

  FRANK T. BULLEN.

  BOURNEMOUTH,
  _Dec. 17, 1914_.




PUBLISHER’S NOTE


Since these pages were printed Mr. Bullen has passed away. He had been
in a precarious state of health for some years, and he himself was well
aware that the end might come at any time.

He died at Madeira on February 26th, 1915, in his fifty-seventh year.

 _March 4, 1915._




CHAPTER I

MY EARLIEST RECOLLECTIONS


A few years ago I was in the breakfast-room of the beautiful Hotel
Frontenac at Quebec awaiting my meal at a sunny table, when I caught
sight of the head waiter. He was so strikingly like the comedian
W. H. Berry, to whom I can never be sufficiently grateful for his
mirth-compelling performances, that I sent a waiter to request his
attendance. He came on the instant, and I immediately asked him if he
were any relation to Mr. Berry, although as I could not then recall
that gentleman’s name, it took me some time to explain whom I meant.
Smilingly the head waiter disclaimed the relationship, saying:

“There was never an actor in our family that I know of. I come from a
suburb of London called Paddington.” (“So do I,” I interjected.) “I was
born in a little turning off Jonson Place, Harrow Road, called Alfred
Road.” (“So was I,” I interrupted again.) “At number --.” “Ah,” I said,
“my number was next door.”

Why this chronicling of the smallest of small beer? Because I have
never seen anybody more delighted than that bright and able man at
meeting some one who was born in the same street as himself. We have
no choice in the matter, but I doubt very much whether any tie draws
men tighter when they meet abroad than that their place of birth was
near each other--even in the same town is often enough to set up a
friendship almost masonic in its intensity. Wherefore I recall the fact
that I first saw the light in that poor street off Jonson Place, but
have no recollection of its amenities. For before even I, precocious
as I undoubtedly was, grew old enough to know intelligently, or say
at eighteen months old, my father and mother quarrelled, the weaker
vessel was thrown out, and myself, as well as an elder sister of whom
I know nothing except that she did exist, were consigned to the care
of a maiden aunt by my father, with a promise, never redeemed, to pay
something towards the expense of keeping us.

That shadowy sister very wisely took the earliest opportunity of
becoming a shade, so I remember nothing of her but what I have been
told. I may say here that I have often, in the terrible years since,
had occasion to wish that I too might then have saved myself all
further trouble; but alas! a tenaciousness of purpose and a stock of
vitality which has not yet all gone have so far hindered me that,
although I am physically a very wreck and was twelve years ago given at
the outside three years to live, I am still topside. Well, as a cynical
American friend once told me, “That’s only one more mistake you’ve
made, I guess.” I cannot contradict him.

Thus it came about that my earliest recollections centre on a quaint
little house, No. 15 Desboro’ Terrace, now called Marlborough Street.
By careful comparison and enquiry I have no doubt that I do remember
as far back as 1859-60, when I would be 2½ years old. At the end of
Desboro’ Terrace, remote from the Harrow Road, ran the main line of the
Great Western Railway, and turning sharply to the right when you had
reached the blank wall that closed the terrace, you came into a row of
little houses called Desboro’ Place which fronted the line and were
only divided therefrom by a narrow roadway and a line of tall rails.
My aunt kept a maid--not, God knows, because she had any pride of that
sort, but because she was a dressmaker and could not do the housework
and attend to her business too, and also, I am ashamed to say, because
she usually had some of her brothers sponging upon her. How well I
remember once saying to her:

“Auntie, you used to have quite a lot of people to dinner. I can
remember Grandfather, Uncle John, Uncle George, Uncle Tom, Uncle Ted,
and Aunt Kitty.”

“Ah,” she replied, “yes, but you never knew that my poor fingers were
working for them all, except Aunt Kitty--she always worked hard enough
for her keep.”

So I said no more. And now I must return to one of my earliest
recollections. The maid, her work done, was permitted to take me out,
and she used to take me down Desboro’ Place and stand me on the coping
clutching the rails and looking down at the puff-puffs. There I saw the
wonderful engines of that day, the “Charles Dickens,” the “Robin Hood,”
and once the Queen’s special engine, the stately “Lord of the Isles,”
with the big gilt crown on the front. I knew the names of many engines
and never wanted to go and see the shops, the puff-puffs supplied all
my needs, until one day, in an evil moment for her, she took me over
the little wooden foot-bridge that still spans the line there. And a
passing engine sent a cloud of steam up through the crevices of the
planks of the bridge floor, passing up my little bare legs even unto my
waist under my frock. The sensation was a novel one, and thenceforward
I clamoured to be led thither. I did not know nor did I care if she,
my guardian, approved of it. I have since felt that I might have
been exacting, but peace be unto her whoever she was, she never made
complaint that I heard of.

Up till last year I often made journeys from Paddington, but never
without glancing up at the railings as we passed Desboro’ Place (if
that is what it is called now) and at once recalling those dim days.
They seem to belong to another life, but they had a quiet charm all
their own, entirely due to the good influence of my poor aunt,
who, amidst all her worries, always kept a cosy corner for me. My
education was her chief care, and happily for me we lived next door
to a dame-school kept by three maiden ladies. Of my experiences there
I have told at length elsewhere, so I will only say here that my
principal recollection of next door is of the ladies’ father, a nasty
old man whose chief delight seemed to be to get me on his knee in the
summer-house and puff strong tobacco smoke in my face. It was of no use
struggling or screaming, though I did both, he seemed to have no mercy.
I was taught by those gentle ladies that it was a deadly sin to hate
anybody, but I came as near hating that old man as made very little
odds.

Another curious fact emerges about this time when I would be between
four and five years old. I could read--indeed I do not know when I
learned, so easy did reading always seem--and from the kind of books
to the reading of which I was confined, I had a large and extensive
vocabulary, the use of which at inopportune moments often made some
of my uncles very angry and brought down upon my head many sarcastic
comments. But having no one to whom I could talk or play, I used to
march in stately fashion round the small garden, holding the grand
old Tom cat’s tail, as he paced majestically before me, and declaim
as if to gaping congregations my addresses upon--ah, I don’t remember
what! Of course, the themes were religious, could hardly be otherwise
remembering my reading, but I would like to know what I used to say
aloud then, and the neighbours’ opinions thereupon. As I never heard
the latter I must assume that I did not make much noise, not even when,
as it were, smitten by sudden madness, I varied my sermons with yells
of Murder! Fire! Thieves! No, it could not have been noisy, because I
remember that it never scared old Dick, the faithful cat. He was my
constant companion, so by that I know that I can never have been cruel.

Indeed the whole environment was as pure and cloistered as could be
imagined. A worse preparation for a rough-and-tumble with the world
could hardly be imagined, but my poor auntie did her best, the best
she knew for me, and kept me, as far as in her lay, unspotted from
the world. Of course there were, there always must be, occasions when
the primitive man comes to the surface, and I was no exception to the
rule. As, for instance, we once had visitors and I was ousted from my
aunt’s bed where I had always slept and put with a Mrs. Rawlins, a
large lady whom I had taken a vivid dislike to, for no reason, very
early in her visit. To please this person the sheets were taken off and
my tender skin was excoriated by the coarse blankets. And she wasn’t
a nice person. She took up most of the bed; she snored astoundingly,
and--well, it doesn’t matter now--but I did not sleep a wink all night,
and at the earliest opportunity besought my auntie not to let me sleep
with that old woman any more. I don’t know what was done, but I do
know that I was restored to my auntie’s bed the next night and said my
prayers twice through in sheer gratitude for the relief.

There was a wedding at our house; my Aunt Kitty was married and my
prospective uncle endeavoured to ingratiate himself with me. To no
purpose. I didn’t like him, and I wouldn’t be cajoled by him. I was not
a bit surprised to find in later years that all my childish aversions
were justified. But of that great upheaval one fact stands saliently
forward: I had a new muslin Garibaldi with bishops’ sleeves and round
pearl buttons, a bright plaid skirt, strap shoes and white socks. I
was then nearly six years old, but nobody so much as dreamed of a
masculine dress for me, and certainly I thought nothing of the matter.
But shortly after the wedding at Holy Trinity Church, Paddington, the
child of one of my uncles needed baptism, and my wedding garments being
fresh, it was deemed a good opportunity for me to be baptised too. Some
doubt existed as to whether I had ever been baptised at all, but my
poor mother was a Catholic, and I have since learned that, however low
she may have sunk, the priest would have insisted upon her child being
baptised in the Faith.

Auntie did not know that; she belonged, as she put it, to the
“Angelical” Church of England, and so I was baptised at Holy Trinity
Church with my infant cousin, and very well do I remember the whole
scene. The great empty echoing church and the little group of
godfathers and godmothers, the nervous young curate whose cool hand
shook so as he placed it on my head and made the sign on my forehead,
the clumsy, blundering way in which everybody seemed to behave, except
the baby who squalled lustily in the curate’s arms and made him go
crimson--ah yes--it is all so vividly present to me now. As is also the
astounding thought in my small brain that I could do the whole thing
so much better than any of them, conscious, mind you, that I was the
most self-possessed person in the little crowd. And that night, when
as usual I mounted to the top of the house and went to bed alone, for
auntie did not come till one a.m. sometimes, I felt singularly defiant
as I knelt to say my prayers. The hole in the palliasses made by their
being turned end for end, as sailors say, and the corners cut out for
the bedposts coming together, quite lost their power to frighten me
by the possibility of some evil thing coming out and doing me some
mysterious harm; nor did I any longer fear old Joe, Miss Moore’s great
macaw, with which she used to threaten us when we were naughty, though
he had hitherto always seemed to be lurking under the bed every night.

No; like the ’Badian and Jamaican nigger who considers that going to
church on the occasion of his marriage (though there is often a long
family by that time) gives him a clean bill of spiritual health for
all past and future soul-sicknesses, I had some dim idea that from
henceforth I was immune from the terror that walketh by night. I did
not put it that way, of course, but that certainly was the immediate
effect of my baptism. But it was a clean little soul, after all. Lack
of opportunity had prevented sin, and I did not even know the joy of
an occasional theft of jam or sugar. Then came an episode which I am
sure most people will find difficult of belief, and no one more so than
myself, for a reason presently to be given.

One of my uncles was a gentleman’s groom, and through lying in a damp
bed he had contracted some disease of the throat which made him an
invalid for five long years. All that time he lived with auntie, but
I believe his sweetheart, who was lady’s maid at the big house where
he had been employed, remained faithful to him and paid auntie for his
keep. He attended Dr. Sieveking at St. Mary’s Hospital, and always
took me with him on the days when he went. My recollections of those
days are all grey. He never joked, never even talked to me, and as for
giving me a penn’orth of sweets--I doubt if the idea ever occurred to
him. At last he died, and I, who did not know anything about death,
of course was banished from all the discussions which took place. Of
course, being a secretive and very quiet child, I asked no questions;
but I bided my time. It came. He was laid in his coffin in the next
room to ours--the bedroom which auntie and I occupied.

They sent me up to bed as usual and I went through all the usual
formulæ of retiring. And then I got up, crept out upon the landing,
listened intently, and, hearing nothing, fled into the death room.
There lay the coffin on its trestles covered with a sheet. The moon
shone through the white blinds as if they had not been there. I drew
the sheet back and looked upon that face. I do not believe I should
have been terrified at all, but a handkerchief was tied under his
jaw and over his head and it gave him an appearance that I cannot
describe. And one of his eyes was half open. I drew the sheet rapidly
back, I slid to the door, passed through it, closed it behind me,
listened again--no sound--crept into bed and covered my head with the
bedclothes. I lay for over an hour with thumping heart and panting
breath, but I slept at last. And I have never been able to look upon
the dead without terrible sensations since--indeed, I have not seen a
dead face since I lost my youngest boy fifteen years ago.

But I notice that I am lingering too long over those earliest days.
Yet I must just pause a moment over the change from my much-loved and
comfortable petticoats to trousers. My poor old grandfather had died
and been buried by my auntie, and from a pair of his best trousers
she made me my initial pair. Poor lady, she knew rather less than
most people of the make of masculine garments, but she did her best,
and presently, in the midst of a little group of giggling work-girls
I was endued with the tubes. That’s what they were, just tubes, and
my little legs felt as forlorn and distant in them as if they had no
connection with me. I draw a veil over other details as not being
seemly, but as I forlornly surveyed myself standing there, with those
tubes nearly reaching to my shoulders, the giggling of the girls burst
into unquenchable laughter and I nearly died with shame. No child likes
to be an object of laughter, but that I certainly was then, and all my
aunt’s well-meant efforts to stay the yells of laughter were fruitless.

They were taken off me then, but I wore them; oh yes, I wore them, and
what I endured from the street urchins who saw me in them I can never
tell--the trouble was too great. But as all those troubles were soon
to be merged in a much greater trouble, I must pass them over and get
on. Once and once only I had seen my mother. A heap of old clothing
like a pile of autumn leaves was shown me, and I was told that _that_
was my mother who had come to see me but had been taken ill. I was
frightened, and ran to hide myself. And I never saw her again. It was
not long after this that my poor auntie died, and I having no one, for
my father being a British workman with a strong desire to back horses
and play billiards, could not be expected to want me, I was flung upon
the streets.

I have told the story of that time fairly fully in different books, but
I may perhaps just pause here to point out that the position was not
common. For I had been brought up in a sheltered home without even the
faintest knowledge of evil, brought up more like a tender little girl
than a boy, and then suddenly, at the age of nine, I was flung into a
veritable maelstrom of vice. I don’t comment upon this; I just state
the fact that this happened in 1866, when I was barely nine years old.




CHAPTER II

RANDOM MEMORIES


So very minutely have I detailed in four different books the
various happenings in my life that I am confined to two periods for
recollections, but those two embrace what to me at any rate were full
of interest. The first of these was my officer time at sea, and the
second the period since my emancipation from the desk until now. It
is true that I have touched upon events in the first period in _With
Christ at Sea_, but very lightly, and there are many reminiscences
unconnected with that book which rush to the mind now.

For instance, there is a little matter connected with my visit to
Noumea, New Caledonia, when I was mate of a colonial barque, that for
some queer reason has been persistent in my memory lately. I’m sure
I wonder that I haven’t used it before, for it has all the elements
of a good story in it. It must be remembered that Noumea is a French
convict settlement, and while I say nothing about the treatment of the
convicts, I need not labour the point that any attempt to escape means
the shortest possible shrift to the escapee if caught in the act. Now
at the time of which I write there were five warships in the harbour,
a few schooners, my own barque and a French convict ship. I had been
ashore and found on coming down to the beach that I had, as we say,
“lost my passage,” i.e. my boat had gone without me.

Now I had a great dread of staying ashore at night in a foreign port
(oh, yes, I know that proves me to have been any opprobrious sort of
thing you like, but we’ll take that as read), and so it never even
occurred to me to go back to the hotel--at least that’s what they
called it. Nor did I dare to shout, for though the night was still we
were a long way out, and I was afraid of bringing the gendarmes down
upon me. But in the clear darkness I saw about a dozen boats moored
some hundred feet or so off the beach, and without thinking I waded
in and swam off to the nearest one. She was fastened at the bows by
a chain passing through a ring in the stern inside, and I started to
unreeve that chain. How many fathoms of it I hauled up I can’t imagine,
or why the rattle of it didn’t rouse all Noumea; but I came to the end
at last, and it wouldn’t pass the ring.

Obviously I had hauled in the wrong end and the whole dreary, noisy
process had to be reversed; but after hours of labour I got that big
boat adrift, and aroused nobody. She was down by the head with the
weight of chain, and there was much water in her, but the chief fact
evident to me when I got fairly adrift was that there were no oars! I
hadn’t thought of that before. So I got a bottom board and did the best
I could with that in the direction I supposed my ship to lie. Presently
a shadowy hulk loomed up ahead and a hoarse _Qui va là?_ greeted me.
Need I say that I did not reply. But I sweated hugely, expecting
every moment to be shot. Three ships I passed, the sentry hailing me
like that, and never an answer from me. And then, with the nyctalopic
eyesight of the sailor, I saw my ship ahead. I forgot the feeble tides
of the South Seas, and worked like a beaver to gain the gangway. I
did, and (I have grieved over the act ever since, but what was I to
do?) sent the boat adrift as I triumphantly climbed the side ladder
and sought my bunk. I have only to add that no echo of that night’s
exploit ever reached me, and I had to come to the conclusion that the
occasional escapes of convicts was comparatively easy when the escapees
were prepared to risk their lives in the operation.

Another adventure which was good to laugh at afterwards but very
unpleasant at the time befell me on the beach at Tamatave, Madagascar.
I was mate of a pretty little brig and went ashore one night to fetch
the captain, who was dining with somebody. It was a glorious night with
a full moon, but very late, and I do not know what prompted me to go
with the two good fellows who rowed. We were soon ashore and, the time
hanging heavily, we all decided on a bathe. A most enjoyable swim and
wallow in the tepid water followed, and we emerged to dress in our two
garments which lay on the beach near by. But as we came ashore a troop
of huge ferocious dogs such as then infested Tamatave suddenly rushed
at us, and we made for the first place of refuge that presented itself,
a huge pyramid of beef bones which lay near the sea, white under the
moon-rays. We fled up that pyramid, shedding blood and bad words at
every stumbling stride, but we gained the summit without a dog bite,
and from that eminence turned on our foes and bombarded them with bones.

It was very cold to our naked bodies, and the dogs looked horribly
fierce down there, but every now and then we rejoiced to hear a
well-aimed shin bone go bang against some mangy hide, and the following
yells were music to our ears. Our shying redoubled, and after a few
minutes we were able to descend from our captivity and chase the brutes
away. We had suffered many things to our bare feet and legs from the
jagged bones, but we took those bones on board for cargo, and I often
shuddered afterwards to think what our feelings would have been had we
then known that every hollow contained a centipede, a scorpion, or a
tarantula. Ugh! they furnished our ship for us, those beastly bones,
with these lethal vermin, and we had spent nearly a quarter of an hour
among that magazine of venom, naked.

Since, while I was mate of that vessel, the fever smote down every
member of the ship’s company except the bos’un and myself, and we
carried on the work of the ship in Zanzibar with slaves, there would
reasonably seem to be many opportunities for adventure. And that was
certainly the case; but the whole life was so strange and exotic, so
full of differences from the ordered life of our civilisation, that I
feel it impossible to select from it any salient incidents. Especially
as these are recollections, not inventions, and I don’t recall any
scenes of bloodshed on board. Only I once had the temerity to go ashore
on a Sunday at Zanzibar, when a wild mêlée was raging and crowds of
naked blacks were yelling at the pitch of their voices while slashing
furiously about them with their long butcher knives whose edges were
keen as razors.

I afterwards commented upon what I had seen to Ali, our Suahili cook,
who immediately waxed enthusiastic upon the joys of the English Sunday,
when, as he put it:--

“All mans plenty get dlunk, plenty fight, plenty play knife.” Yes, he
called it play: with a smile like a huge white gash across his ebony
face, he showed me his scars; my conscience, the fellow must have been
cut to ribbons in his time. One particularly ghastly scar he had on
his right thigh. It was a whitish knotted lump almost as big as a shut
fist. I enquired about it, and he nonchalantly informed me that it was
got one Sunday morning when the boys were playing.

“And what did you do to the man who gave it you?”

“Oh, I cut ’im belly orf,” with the most careless air.

“What happened to you then?” I enquired.

“Two year prison; s’pose kill man, Sultan make work in gaol two year.”

That was all, but it will be no matter for surprise that I sequestrated
the knives of both Sa’adi and Ali, our cook and steward, as well as
a particularly fine dagger belonging to the former. But one of those
Sunday morning “plays” must be seen to be believed possible.

And now I must make a long “fleet,” as we call it, to a time more
understandable by my readers, a time when I began to realise that
money might be earned by writing, not, that is, in the service of the
Government, but for myself. It was a wonderful discovery, for I made
it at a time when I sorely needed a little extra money. Not that I
might belong to two or three West End clubs, rent an expensive flat,
and entertain folks at restaurants where the bills were of fabulous
amounts, but for sheer necessities. That this is no figure of speech
may be understood from the fact that I wrote my first stories on my
shop counter while waiting for customers. Now I’m not going to ape the
usual conventional lie and say, “Ah, but they were happy days!” They
weren’t. They were very wretched days, full of trouble and apprehension
of trouble, even worse. It may be that the full story of that time will
never be told, but I have given as much of it to the world as I could
in the _Confessions of a Tradesman_, a book better reviewed than any I
have written; a book about which I have received double the number of
eulogistic letters evoked by any other of my books, but which has sold,
so my publishers tell me, less than 400 copies, and has now gone out of
print.

But I look back to that time with gratitude and joy because of the new
kind world to which it gave me entrance. Not all at once, that could
hardly be expected, but with far less preliminary than might have
been expected. And in spite of all that has been said about the poor
rewards of literature as a profession, most of which is, I believe,
quite true, I make bold to say that I do not believe there is any other
profession where the rewards are so immensely greater than the merit in
the majority of cases. There are dozens of writers now eating the fat
and drinking the sweet, lying soft and riding swift, who as far as any
merit in themselves is concerned, are worth exactly 0. They have caught
the public ear, that is all. True there are some, thank God, who have
attained a grand income by sheer gigantic merit, but they are few and,
alas! when they have made a fortune it is the most difficult thing in
the world to keep it from the clutch of the dishonest company promoter.

But to return. I am grateful to literature because it did for me what
no other form of money-getting could do save Charity, which, always
hateful, is usually utterly inadequate to the needs. But most of all,
it saved me from the Office. Here I must refrain, because otherwise I
could fall a-cursing like a very drab when I remember that place and
all that I endured there. I was forty-two years of age; I had four
children, and I had not a penny at my back; yet such was my horror of
the Office and all its works that as soon as I received an offer from a
London newspaper of a year’s engagement at £2 per week with six months’
notice on either side, I joyfully accepted it, and at once resigned the
situation I had endured so long. If this be not a measure of my hatred
of that place I do not know what is, and yet I am sure that many such
employments, though the salary be small, are as pleasant to the workers
as any occupation can be in this world. It entirely rests with the
superiors (_sic_).

But this is not anecdote, although it certainly is recollection. Now
and from henceforth my two avocations ran concurrently, lecturing and
writing, and I suppose I worked very hard. Looking back at those years
I am inclined to think so; most people who knew me and what I was
doing seemed to think so too; but I, accustomed to the most strenuous
physical life and breasting a stormy sea of worry at the same time,
felt that it was all play. I think I should have been entirely
happy but for the sad fact that I had no home. I was essentially a
home-lover, yet I had no home in the true sense of the word. More than
that I cannot say, except that one day I awoke to the fact that at last
and at great cost I had achieved a home and was about to enjoy life
as I had never done before. It is true that I was rapidly nearing my
jubilee, and that my health was permanently impaired, but--and oh! what
a huge but it is--I had emerged into the sunshine and, though that I
could not know, ten years of placid joy lay before me.

I had taken a house in the country about fifty miles from London, an
ideal place as I thought, the rent being low, £40 a year, for which I
had a good eight-roomed house and nearly two acres of land well laid
out as orchard, kitchen garden, flower garden, lawn, and plenty of
outbuildings. Oh, it was altogether charming, although I afterwards
found that the soil was cold and hungry. But that did not matter to me;
I was not farming, and I am not going to say a word in dispraise of the
place where I spent ten happy years. I must say, however, that they
would not have been so happy but that I gave explicit instructions that
none of the village talk was to be told me, nor did I do any visiting
whatever. You will say that I must have lived like a hermit. Oh no,
I had plenty of visitors from town; I often had to go away myself, so
that I did not feel at all isolated, and in any case I could never have
endured the venomous, slanderous small talk which is the mental pabulum
of most English village folk. Poor people, I can hardly blame them.
Talk is their only recreation, and it has been very wisely told us that
a “multitude of words wanteth not sin.”

However, before I had more than sampled the beauties of the place, and
when I had only tasted, as it were, the joys of the “harvest bugs” of
summer which made the place almost unbearable, I received an invitation
from the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company to be their guest, bringing
with me a secretary if I wished, for their West Indian and Central
American trip. At first I demurred, for a sea trip has long lost its
charms for me; but the offer was enhanced by the promise of a large
sum of money if I would write an account of my trip, so I immediately
set about finding a secretary. A young lady who did my typing agreed
to come, the facilities being so royal, a four-berth cabin each and
another cabin for an office, and we sailed from Southampton on what
I must always regard as the pleasantest voyage of my life. It is a
very long time since I have had any communication with the Royal Mail,
and I am never likely to meet Sir Owen Phillips again, therefore I am
the more free to say that in the Company’s treatment of me and my
secretary the adjective I have used above is the only adequate one.

We went all over the loyal island of Barbados, up to the Blue
Mountains of Jamaica, up to the capital of Costa Rica, where the
climate is of heaven and the death rate was then the highest in the
world, for reasons that I may not dwell upon; all along the line of
the Panama Canal from Colon to Panama and back, from La Guayra to
Caracas, President Castro’s stronghold, and to the pearl fisheries of
Margharita Porlomar. Yes, you may say, but surely you must have had
many adventures during such a trip as that. True, we did; and I have
recorded them all in a book now out of print, I believe, called _Back
to Sunny Seas_. The fine flavour of it all is there, but sitting here
in the sunny evenings I often think of those halcyon days and smile, a
pleasant happy smile, there was so little that called for anything but
happiness.

And yet, in pursuance of Pope’s profound maxim that “Man never is, but
always to be, blest,” I often yearned for home and wondered, wondered
how things were going there. And when at last, after nearly four
months’ joy, we sighted Plymouth one morning at dawn, I could only
point and use my handkerchief, for the dear land ahead took away from
me the power of speech. It was so when I was a child on my first return
to England--see _The Log of a Sea Waif_ (_passim_)--and it has grown
with the years. It was so good to get home again. It had been very
good to visit those strange exotic countries _en prince_, very good to
give much simple pleasure to another; but I have always felt and always
shall feel, I suppose, that the chief, the choicest charm of a holiday
is returning. I think that is how it ought to be. It may be necessary
to go, but it should be most delightful to return.

And, as should be the case, all had been well during my absence.
Nothing untoward had happened. So that I could sit down now to the
finishing of the book with a light heart, with the lecturing season
still some months ahead. Happy! happiness had only just come to me, and
I felt full of it. I had realised before that such fullness of life as
was vouchsafed to other men, though they did not seem to appreciate
it as I thought they should, was not for me, and upon the principle
of the Spanish proverb, “The best thing to do when it is raining, is
to let it rain!” I had “let on” to be content. But my word, the true
test of contentment, I am sure, is that the contentee won’t change his
condition. And I had never been in such a position. Now, however, I
felt that all was so well with me that it could never be better. That
I was blest above, far, far above my deserts. All that had ever gone
before was just drivel compared with the large joy that was now mine.

And thinking of those happy days, coming as they did after so much
storm and stress, I still hold the same opinion. I know that many wise
folk with their flats in town and their nightly symposia at the club
will sneer at me, but let them. I was getting closely on for fifty and
I had never known joy; now it lay all about me, and though my income
was never very much, I had the priceless reputation in the village
of “the gen’l’man as allus pays everybody soon’s they asks him.” My
heavenly Father, I would rather that were engraved upon my tomb than
that I had commanded troops that conquered half the world.

My friends knew where to come, and they always found open house, they
never wore out their welcome. How could they? I had known the want of
welcome, they never should. And I know to-day that none of them that
are alive will refuse me the meed of being a hospitable fellow, nor did
I do my hospitality at any poor tradesman’s expense.

I have said that the soil was a cold and hungry one. Well, so it was,
and my old gardener toiled over it in vain very often; but it did
produce many things, and especially did it bring forth the two things
I liked best in the way of eatables--green peas and new potatoes.
Food as a rule is to me an appalling nuisance. I don’t know which is
worse, taking it in or the process of assimilation, but I must make
an exception in favour of green peas and new potatoes and mint. And
these we had at Millfield in such profusion as I have never seen before
or since. True, I paid top price for seed, true, I spared nothing
in their production, but here in Bournemouth to-day I must needs pay
more directly, and never, no never get anything like the satisfaction
that I did then. Oh ye fat and greasy citizens, know ye the joy of
gathering green peas that ye have watched from the germination? Know
ye the delight of _shelling_ them and of passing them into the kitchen
(with appropriate comments anent the cooking), and then the supreme joy
of digging the spoon down deep in the piled-up dish and ladling them
out to your chums with much dish gravy--not hot water? Then you know
nothing at all of the joy of the table; and as for the Frenchman and
his _petits pois_ and butter, etc., bah! I’ve no patience, he doesn’t
know anything about it. I speak an alien tongue to him.

But the garden was a perennial delight. I could not do any
gardening, I couldn’t stoop, though of the thinnest, because my
constitutional ailment of the lungs wouldn’t let me, but I was death
on superintending; also I loved to patrol the garden and the hedges
before breakfast in the morning and watch the birds at their work, as
well as the little things growing. Oh yes, I have no pretensions to
scholarship; I cannot express myself like the late R.L.S., but I did
enjoy that most blessed time. And when I come to die I hope I shall
remember it just as well, for indeed we should all think gratefully of
the happiest time in our lives. If I wanted to fill many pages I could
easily do so with happenings down there that have never been noted
before--how could they? I dare say the village annals contain them,
but they are not published, thank God--none of my friends have written
them down--they were too happy to do more than enjoy. And if they ever
missed me, and they sometimes did when an article was due, one of them
would say, “Oh, he’s gone to write another novel, don’t disturb him.
Let’s have another.” And so the happy hours wore on.

But now I come to the point when I must confine myself more strictly to
the lecture reminiscences and leave my beloved Millfield for a while.
Though I would have you remember that every return was but a renewal of
ancient delights.




CHAPTER III

MY FIRST LECTURES


Perhaps this heading is not strictly accurate, and I should go back
another dozen years to the time when in response to an irresistible
call I first opened my mouth to speak in public. It was a memorable
occasion too. I lived in one basement room in Hazlewood Crescent,
Kensal New Town--I beg its pardon, Upper Westbourne Park--and sitting
one evening by my first baby’s cradle reading, my wife being absent
on an errand, a large piece of granite crashed through the window and
fell in the cradle. I was full of energy in those days, and although I
had no boots on I rushed out and up the area steps into the street in
time to see the young miscreant who had flung the stone scampering off.
Of course I caught him, I went like the wind, and equally of course I
landed one soul-satisfying clout on his head which sent him sprawling
across the road and into the kennel opposite.

It was enough, and I returned, panting but quite happy, to forget the
incident. The next evening at the corner of the Crescent I made my
debut as a member of an open-air band of preachers and was duly called
upon to testify. My knees knocked together, my mouth seemed filled with
dust, and when I did get a word or two out I did not know my own voice.
But I had a kindly tolerant audience, such as I am grateful to say I
have ever found, and I was beginning to gain confidence when a grimy
urchin, squeezing through the ring of listeners, gave one searching
glance at me and yelled to some unseen comrade:

“D’yer, Bill, that’s the bloke wot clouted my ear lars’ night.”

A great burst of laughter went up and I retired, feeling as if sudden
annihilation would be a great boon. I wonder now why I was not entirely
discouraged, but I only know that from that time forward my appetite
for open-air speaking grew until it was a passion with me, and, had I
known, became a splendid preparation for the lecture platform. Common
gratitude compels me to say here that this practice of speaking in
the open air speedily became to me a great and perfect compensation
for the sorrows and drawbacks of my daily life. The more so perhaps
because I stuck to it in spite of the most effective opposition of all,
an opposition which never weakened or failed and embittered the whole
of my home life. Yet I never--as far as I know--consciously preached
or uttered platitudes in an unctuous voice such as I have often heard
and sickened at. I gave my auditors the best I had, the results of
extensive and varied reading, common-sense outlook upon life, and a
totally unorthodox Christianity. I had a good though untrained singing
voice and an excellent memory, so I sang to my audiences, never using
a book; I recited chapters of Scripture without the Bible, and had
the untellable gratification of seeing masses of men and women, often
running into the thousands, swayed by my voice as the wind affects the
corn.

Is there any pleasure akin to this? I think not. At any rate, though
the above lines may seem somewhat vainglorious, I know that they tell
no more than the truth. Had I any doubts about that, the remembrance of
the hatred with which I was regarded by many old members of the various
open-air bands where I was invited to speak while they stood aside,
would reassure me. But I have no doubts. I knew that I was in my proper
element and my hearers knew it also.

This brings me naturally to my first lecture. I was associated with a
very humble little gathering of Christians at Peckham, a part of whose
activities was the providing of free teas periodically during the
winter. And it came about that winter befell and there was no money
wherewith to purchase any materials for these feeble banquets.

None of the members could help, for we were all living on the edge,
and we began to say to ourselves that this year the children must
go without. But a new convert was added unto us, filled with the
big desire of doing something, and he was mightily distressed at the
thought of such a backward stride as we were contemplating. So one
evening during a prolonged discussion of ways and means at our little
mission hall the thought suddenly occurred to me that if I could get
some slides made and we could hire a hall--our own little place not
being suitable, I might give a lecture on my experiences in the South
Sea Whale Fishery, which ought to bring in something for the Tea Fund.
Our new brother seized the notion at once and offered to advance £5
from his savings for the expenses. It was there and then decided to
take the Peckham Public Hall for the occasion and when the affair was
over, whatever the result, the slides were to be mine to use as I
thought fit afterwards.

Everybody worked with a will, and I remember that somebody wrote to Sir
John Blundell Maple, because they said as member for the division he
was good for a guinea, and he was. I must not forget either that the
proprietor of the hall let it to us at half-price and that a lantern
enthusiast, Mr. R. Sprules, operated free. Well, the great night came
and the hall was crowded. Unhappily here the only hitch occurred at the
outset. A highly respected local minister was asked to take the chair,
and he, spying a prominent member of his congregation in the audience,
said after a few preliminaries:

“Our brother Jones will now lead us in prayer!”

Remember it was a Public Lecture, composed of all sorts and conditions
of men and women, yet that old ass thumped his chair and roared out
what would have been blasphemous nonsense if he had known it, for
fifteen minutes. Oh dear good patient people, you stood it, or sat
it stolidly, but I tremble to think what you might legitimately have
done. At last I got started and I can freely confess that my relief
at the escape from disaster on that terrible opening was so great as
to overcome any stage fright that I might otherwise have felt. The
audience was splendid and I grew more and more at my ease with them
until I noticed that my slides were nearly finished. Then I had a small
panic. Had I given my listeners enough? Impossible, for I did not
seem to have been talking for forty-five minutes. So I leaned forward
and asked the time, in a stage whisper, of a friend whom I knew had a
watch. He said--his voice wouldn’t modulate and filled the hall, “Five
past ten, Tom!”

There was a sudden upheaval, lights were turned up by some wise watcher
and half the audience fled to catch trains, for they came from all
parts of London. And my superintendent, a genial little chimney-sweep,
coming to the front of the platform to “render thanks” cried sobbingly:

“I never knew we ’ad such a bruvver!”

A few of us adjourned to the local stewed-eel shop for refreshment and
mutual congratulations upon the wonderful success of the evening, most
wonderful of all in that the net proceeds, after all expenses were
paid, came to thirteen pounds, enough to provide, with tea at 1s. a
pound, milk at 4d. a tin, and cake at 3d. a pound, refreshment for a
noble army of children. Also the fragments were no mean consideration
to the parents, as we found later.

But before closing this description of my first lecture I must include
one out of the many startling coincidences of my life. Remember this
was in Rye Lane in 1896. After the lecture was over a man came up to me
and said:

“Mister, I was in one of them whalers you talk about, and I know
you have told the truth.” And he there and then gave me the most
irrefragable proofs of his statement, mentioning names and dates and
places which were utterly convincing. But chiefly I was delighted
because of the corroboration of my statements, not that I felt they
needed such buttressing, but you know what people are. It also
established a fact which has since become a commonplace with me, that
no matter how remote or unlikely the spot may be, a man who addresses
an audience from a public platform is always most liable to have among
his hearers some one who can testify to the truth (or falsehood) of
his statements from actual personal experience, which should make all
lecturers exceedingly careful not to give rein to their imaginative
faculties.

This experience, though it launched me as a lecturer, was only
profitable in so far as it provided me with slides and a certain
understanding of a lecture audience. For although there was
thenceforward a considerable demand for my services as a lecturer in
the neighbourhood, there was never any pay attached to the business. In
fact my good friends all seemed to think that they did me great honour
by inviting me and they often carried this idea so far as to resent the
mild suggestion, made by my friend the enthusiastic lanternist, that
they should pay for the gas which he provided. But he, like myself, was
of a cheerful as well as humble disposition and we went on with the
work until we found that no effort was ever made to get an audience for
us, and so we often addressed ourselves to a mere handful of people in
a large chapel. In this connection I may say that one night when I was
to lecture at a certain big chapel in Peckham, a stout roughish-looking
man strolled in and asked my friend who was getting the lantern ready
what was on.

“A lecture on Whales and Whale Fishing,” replied my friend.

“Ar,” said the enquirer, turning on his heel to go, “s’rimps is more in
my line.”

It is only true to confess that I was getting seriously discouraged,
for it seemed obvious that nobody wanted to hear me even for nothing,
while my evangelical oratory was always appreciated. But on the advice
of a friend I wrote to Mr. Christy asking if he would put me on his
list on the strength of the entertainment I had to offer. Very wisely
he demurred as not knowing anything about me, but he promised to see
if he could get me any engagements and the result of them would guide
his future conduct towards me. Meanwhile Mr. Reginald Smith of Smith,
Elder & Co. invited me to give my lecture in his spacious drawing-room,
and paid me a good fee. Probably all my hearers on that occasion had
read the _Cruise of the Cachalot_, just published by my host, at any
rate they were immensely appreciative and I immediately secured two
engagements at what I then considered good fees.

This led me directly to the discovery of an old truth that what costs
people nothing they do not value. For I found that as my fees rose so
did the appreciation I met with increase until I found myself becoming
quite a popular lecturer and compelled to raise my fees considerably in
order to keep the engagements from overwhelming me. But this did not
come for some time, two or three years, in fact. Yet I can honestly
say that my efforts, which were a pure delight to me, were received
with wonderful enthusiasm and appreciation, and I was always treated
as if I were conferring favours instead of receiving them. Perhaps
this was due in a great measure to the fact that I loved the business,
that as soon as I opened my mouth upon the platform I felt as if the
audience and I had known one another for years and I could just tell
them confidentially all I knew about the matter in hand without taxing
any of them unduly either to hear or to understand me. At any rate I
did enjoy myself and I know, without any boasting, that I gave joy to
others. And I am sure that the foundation of it all was those long
years of open-air speaking and singing, when listeners had to be held
by their interest in the speaker or not at all.




CHAPTER IV

THE LECTURE TOUR


May I very humbly intimate that in what follows I speak for myself
alone, I have no experience whatever of my fellow-lecturers, many of
whom I know and admire and love, but am entirely ignorant of their
experiences on the platform or on the tour. So that I must beg the
reader to remember that what I say may be and very probably is peculiar
to myself alone and that other lecturers may have experiences of an
entirely different nature.

In what I believe to have been my first public engagement at Glenalmond
College, in Perthshire, I was notably handicapped in several ways. I
was eager and excited at the honour, as I naturally felt it, but I was
very poor both in money and time, so I booked from King’s Cross by the
midnight train, third class, of course. Our compartment contained five,
but one man, who had arrived early, had made himself comfortable with
rug and pillow stretched full length upon the seat, and my share of
that side was quite cramped. Yet I did not protest or claim that he was
taking much more than his share, for I was diffident, inexperienced in
railway travelling, and, moreover, of a peaceable disposition. But I
spent a miserable night, sleepless, cold and painfully stiff, so that
the cup of coffee at Newcastle which I obtained at the refreshment room
came as a veritable elixir of life to me.

My seat companion had not wakened, nor did he until arrival in
Edinburgh, and I am afraid I looked upon his prostrate form with
bitter envy. Oh the bleakness of that dawn along the east coast of
Northumberland! It struck a chill into my very soul, and the entry to
Edinburgh seemed to sweat that coldness down. For as you all know,
in common with most picturesque places, the railway approach to the
Athens of the North is as if you were Dante being led by Virgil towards
the hopeless Gate. And Waverley Station was in a state of chaos. They
were building it and the pitiless sleet poured down upon a vast raffle
of rafters and wreckage of every sort. Nevertheless I managed to get
some more coffee and a Bap, then got me unto my carriage as a place of
refuge from the all-pervading wretchedness of that morning.

We crossed the Forth Bridge in a sleet storm so thick that much as I
longed to make the acquaintance of that mighty structure I was only
able to catch passing glimpses of the great tubes as we flitted between
them. Opening the window was out of the question. So I settled down
again until arrival at Perth, where the weather and the general outlook
were as bad as ever. I was momentarily cheered by a sign which offered
hot baths, for the prospect of one sent a glow all through me. Alas,
the price was half a crown and I turned sadly away, wondering mightily
why such elementary comforts should be available only for the rich. I
owe that bathroom a grudge still, for I am sure that the charge was an
abominably extortionate one.

Unfortunately I had arranged with the College authorities to send a
conveyance for me to Methven Station in the afternoon, so I had the
day before me. And such a day! You ladies and gentlemen who only know
Perth in its summer garb can hardly imagine its bleakness to a poor
stranger landing in it at 9 a.m. on a December day with only a few
shillings and a return ticket to London in his pocket, and obliged to
wait somewhere until the afternoon. I draw a veil over the misery of
that morning although my experiences were quaint enough, involving as
they did, the absorption of a “gless” of hot whisky at a coffee tavern,
and the overhearing of some of the strangest sounds from customers who
came into the room where I sat, and drank neat whisky with a mouthful
of water after it, a fashion I had only seen before in America.

At last I could stand Perth and the sleet no longer and I fled to the
station for Methven, arriving there to find, as I thought, a station
only in the midst of a wide solitude. But there was Erchie, the old
porter factotum, and he was a host in himself. I think he took pity
upon the puir Southron bodie, certainly he took interest, for his
questions were many and searching. The end of them was that I found
myself in a “masheen,” in this case a dog-cart, trundling along the
road towards Glenalmond, utterly weary and cold and wretched, but
buoyed up by the feeling that I was near my journey’s end.

It was a long drive in the open, but the sleet had ceased and only the
bitter wind searched my none too well clad form. But when we arrived at
the College my amazement at the magnificent pile--it must be remembered
that I had never _seen_ a great Public School before--was so great
that I almost forgot my physical discomfort in admiration. Then my
hostess enwrapped me in her gentle hospitality, and having heard my
brief account of the recent happenings she first gave me hot tea, then
ordered me a hot bath, a warm bed, and laid upon me strict injunction
not to appear until dinner-time. Now it is true that I had never been
so received in my life before and that perhaps would account for the
vivid impression it made upon my memory, but the thoughtful care of it
all coming as and when it did would suffice to have made that first
visit to Mrs. Skrine’s hospitable roof memorable.

I emerged at dinner-time from that luxurious bed a new man, feeling
fit for any fate, and the rest of my visit there--I stayed the
week-end--was sheer delight, for it was like a first glimpse of a new
world. So that when my “masheen” came at 7.30 on Monday morning to
take me to the station I faced the long bitter drive with the greatest
equanimity and a feeling that fate could not harm me now. Erchie was
waiting to shepherd me, and asked me many curious questions about my
visit. Strangely enough he did not appear to be inquisitive, nor did
I feel inclined to resent his curiosity, but I was not in the least
surprised to learn, many years afterwards, that the old man was one of
Ian Maclaren’s characters. There was undoubtedly much good “copy” in
him.

Now although I never again made so long a journey for one lecture, and
the expenses made a parlous hole in the fee, I could not help feeling
that I was fairly launched, and that since my lecture had been well
received by the assembled masters and uproariously hailed by the boys,
I need no longer have any misgivings as to its reception anywhere. One
resolution I then made which I have rigidly adhered to, and I am glad
to know that through it many hundreds of schoolboys have blessed me.
It was to avoid all appearance even of the pedagogue, of _swot_ under
the cloak of entertainment. I felt that since the boys had to come
and had to pay to come, out of school hours too, the least I could
do was to try and make my story as full of interest and fun as in me
lay, and nothing has given me greater pleasure than to hear from old
Public School boys all over the world when I have met them that I have
succeeded.

When I reached home again I was much cheered to learn that the agency
had secured me two engagements on consecutive days, one at Newcastle
and the other at South Shields. This could only be looked upon by me
as an opening into the larger lecture field, and I, who have always
been the most diffident and self-distrustful of men, could not help
feeling that I should be able to do full justice to my selection. My
long experience in open-air preaching came to my recollection, those
Sunday evenings on Peckham Rye, when thousands hung upon my words and I
never had an angry voice raised against me, and I felt confident that
as I knew all there was to be known about my subject, I could make it
attractive to my audience. So that I never had the slightest mental
trouble or foreboding about the result of these public lectures, while
the fees marked against them struck me as being lavish gifts for what
was going to be a most delightful holiday.

It must be remembered that up till this time I had belonged to that
large stratum of society to whom the expenditure of a shilling for
anything but the sternest necessaries of life is unthinkable--I gave
up as hopeless the attempt to understand, for instance, how people
could carelessly pay railway fares of pounds each when I could not have
spared pennies for trams, often walking miles instead. As to those
plutocrats who bought bicycles, watches, or hired cabs--well I realised
that they moved in sublime regions far beyond my possible ken and
dismissed them from my mind. But lecturing pushed me, without giving
me time to think, into nearly all these things. I found myself buying
a dress-suit, garments I had always associated with the idle rich, or
waiters whom I had seen through the open doors of restaurants. I paid
huge railway fares of nearly two sovereigns shudderingly, as if I were
committing a crime, yet somehow remembering that these were part of the
expenses which would be returnable. In fact, the whole of my outlook
upon life was being changed.

Especially so in regard to what I may call the mainstay of my
employment, the office. No one can ever know but myself how I loathed
the place, how deeply sincere were the prayers I put up for deliverance
from it. Yet I never could hope, for well I knew that the pay, though
it remained at the same old two guineas a week for seventeen years
and would, I knew, never be increased, was better than I could expect
anywhere else as a clerk, and did I lose it, what prospect had I at
between forty and fifty years of age of getting anything else? It is
very likely that I was not worth more, indeed I dare say I was not, but
then I knew the same of many others. That was not the trouble. It was
the abominable system of petty persecution practised, the miserable
tyranny exercised by those who were no higher in the social scale, had
no reason to be ugly, except that they did no office work themselves
and had perforce to make their juniors fill up the gap.

This it was that made me, when the first gleam of light came through
the pall of cloud above me with the acceptance of the _Cruise of the
Cachalot_, vow that at the very first opportunity given me I would
take my courage in both hands and resign that magnificent appointment.
Now all unknown to me that triumphant hour drew near. As usual several
things combined to bring it about, but I believe the pre-eminent cause
was this. My chief, before we were thus associated, had told me that
he did not consider the writing of a private letter in office hours a
wrong done to our employer the State. He might have added on his own
behalf that the transaction of private business involving hours was
venial, but he did not go as far as that. It happened, however, that
one day when my correspondence was becoming heavier and more urgent
than I could deal with at home that I was writing a private letter in
office hours. My chief sternly invited me to put that private “work”
away, refusing to look at it and see that it was a letter. I tried to
explain and quoted his previous utterance on the subject. No use. He
refused to discuss the matter, so I put the letter away and finished
it in my luncheon three-quarters of an hour. It happened that it was
an answer to a letter from the editor of a London newspaper offering
me a salary exactly equivalent to my office pay for certain regular
contributions. I made it an acceptance, and the next day I resigned.

Then I committed an unpardonable offence. For firstly, I had taken
nobody into my confidence; and, secondly, I had dared to do that which
others with treble my earnings had longed to do but dared not. And
to-day I am in certain quarters more bitterly hated than any man alive
for this wickedness. However it did not matter to me, what did matter
was my freedom and such a difference in treatment as I could not have
believed possible. In fact I always feel a certain pride in the fact
that I did manage to suppress the sense of being, and the appearance
of having been, a drudge afraid to call my soul my own for all those
years, and that I took my place in Society as naturally as if I had
been born thereto.

Yes, amidst all that has befallen me since and in my present worn-out
condition I can still feel grateful for the spirit that prompted me
to shake the dust of that place off my feet and to tell those who
had combined to make my life a burden to me while there, as they now
fawned upon me, that for decency’s sake they had better have kept
silence, since nothing that they could say would ever efface the bitter
impression of their utterly uncalled-for tyranny. Had I then known
it, Nemesis was lying in wait for them, but I cared nothing for their
future, having won clear of them and all their works I was content to
ignore and as far as possible to forget them.




CHAPTER V

THE REAL BEGINNING


And now behold me at the age of forty-two on the threshold of a new
life. Already I could count four separate stages of an objectless
career hopelessly leading nowhere, for even my sea-life, though I did
manage to pass for chief mate at twenty-two, offered me no prospects
save that of a drudge, a servant of servants at wretchedly inadequate
pay. For it was a very dark hour for ships’ officers. We walked the
docks and thronged the shipping offices looking for berths and as
often as not were driven to sea before the mast because we could not
get berths as officers. And when we did the pay was such as seems
incredible to-day. I have been offered (this was in 1881) £5 per month
as chief mate of a 3000-ton tramp bound to the Baltic, and would have
gladly accepted it but that a gentleman by the name of Gustave Shlum
forestalled me. Eventually I did get a berth as chief officer of a
brig sailing for the east coast of Africa at £5 15s. per month, but
then I had to sign an agreement to be responsible for all cargo short
delivered. And I worked harder than anybody else on board except the
splendid bos’un--carpenter--second mate, who was a Russian Finn and
was priceless--I have never seen so good a man except once and he was
filling a similar position and hailed from the same place, Helsingfors.

Still, as a dear friend, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, once told me, it
was all experience, and now I was to enjoy the ripened fruit of it,
although the marvel was that these soul-withering years that the
locust had eaten had not destroyed all memory of those exciting days.
It had not in the least, and I looked forward calmly and confidently,
without the least doubt of my ability to “make good,” even though I was
beginning at the very beginning and that too at a time of life when
most men are fixed for life. My new appointment was on the staff of the
_Morning Leader_, and my duty was to write three one-column articles a
week on nautical topics, my salary being £104 per annum. True I had an
empty home and a wife and four children dependent upon me, but I was
used to the burden, and, moreover, I could earn my salary by about two
hours’ work three times a week, never having the slightest difficulty
in finding topics, and able to work anywhere.

But best of all, I could fulfil lecture engagements without asking
leave of anybody, which I felt might be a great boon in the near future
when such engagements began to pour in. And another thing, I found work
at very remunerative rates flowing in upon me, so that I was soon able
to ask and receive better prices. Also, accumulating a little store of
money I was able to repay debts that my creditors had long before wiped
off their books as hopeless. So that, taking it by and large, as we
used to say, I commenced my lecturing career under the fairest auspices
and set off for the north to fulfil my first two engagements under the
Lecture Agency without any but the most pleasurable anticipations.

A couple of days before starting I received a very stiff and formal
invitation to accept the hospitality of a member of the Society for
which I was to lecture. It was simply signed “Wm. Lowrie,” and gave
me not the slightest intimation as to who the writer might be. But I
was in a most responsive mood, open to every kindly influence, and I
wrote accepting gratefully. And it was with a sense of real grateful
surprise that I found my host, a grave dignified man about twenty years
my senior, with shipmaster writ large all over him, awaiting my arrival
with a carriage. How we knew each other I cannot tell, that has always
been one of the mysteries to me, the numbers of times I have been
met by entire strangers who have picked me out from among a crowd of
passengers--but I know that in five minutes we were close friends.

I found to my amazement that I was the guest of one of the classic
figures of the old sailing-ship days. A man who had served his time in
the Arctic whalers out of Peterhead, had been officer in such historic
clippers as the _Marco Polo_, the _Schomberg_, _James Baines_ and
_Redjacket_ and also in the ship about which Dickens turned the vials
of his just wrath on the War Office authorities of the day for the
callous way in which they destroyed the lives of time-expired soldiers
from India on the passage home and on landing. She will remain evermore
infamous in history as the _Great Tasmania_, though Dickens expressly
exempts from his censure her crew.

Only an old sailor could understand my delight at meeting such a man,
who was withal so modest and kind. The only drawback I felt was in what
I considered the over-emphasis of his praise for what I had written
about the sea. But then seamen are all prone to overrate the value of
matter written about the life they know by men who have lived that
life. Their appreciation is in just proportion to their scorn of the
many modern writers who on the strength of a broken apprenticeship or a
homeward passage round Cape Horn thenceforth pose as nautical experts
and complacently allow themselves to be called Captain This or That
when they do not know enough seamanship to cross a royal yard.

I spent a most enjoyable three days in Newcastle for the lectures were
a great success, and my life in my host’s delightful company full of
such a pleasure as I have never experienced before. For in addition to
his great eminence in the world I knew so well, he was kindness and
considerateness itself and never once forgot to make my welfare his
first thought. I regret to cease talking about him, but must remember
the claims of others, so I will only add here that our friendship
lasted as long as he lived, about ten years. He left between £30,000
and £40,000, practically the whole of which has gone to the benefit of
seamen.

Now I have no knowledge of the means used by the Lecture Agency to
spread the fame of a lecturer and get him engagements, I only know
that after my performances at Newcastle and Shields engagements began
to pour in, some to my amazement and secret pride from the great
classic Public Schools. These engagements did not come singly either.
For instance, I received in one bunch bookings for eight different
institutes around Birmingham, all of which were within a short
distance, under half an hour’s journey from the centre of the City. I
afterwards learned that it was the highly commendable practice of the
secretaries of these institutes to meet and arrange their lecture dates
so that a lecturer could go from one to the other on successive nights,
thus giving him the minimum of travel and expense and enabling him to
take lower fees with no monetary disadvantage to himself. Unhappily
that good practice has come to an end for nearly all the institutes are
no more, at least so I was told by the secretary of one who claimed to
be the last survivor.

Speaking of Birmingham, an experience befell me there which is one of
the most salient memories of that interesting time. It also shows how
little I yet knew of what I may call the intricacies of railway travel
in my own country. I was booked to lecture at the Birmingham Town Hall
(I had never yet been to the City) at 7 p.m. one Sunday, and chose the
L. and N.W. I did not trouble to look at the G.W. time-tables or I
might have found, as I did recently, an incomparably better and quicker
train with a luncheon car attached. However, I joined the train at
Willesden at about 10 a.m. and giving a porter my bag asked him to put
me in the Birmingham portion of the train, although I did not then know
that any part of the train went anywhere else.

I found a comfortable seat, and when the train stopped at Rugby I went
to the refreshment room and bought a penny loaf, bread having been
omitted from the nose-bag I carried as suspecting no food arrangements.
I rejoined the train, lunched comfortably, and went to sleep
afterwards, waking up to find the train passing through Rugeley. Now
my scanty geographical knowledge of England told me that something was
wrong, an idea which was confirmed when the train drew up at Stafford.
Alighting in great trepidation, I sought an official who told me that
the next train back to Birmingham was due to arrive there at 8 p.m.--it
was then 2 p.m.--but he added abstractedly, “It generally don’t get
there much afore half-past.” And my lecture was at 7!

I am fairly well able to keep my head under any circumstances, but I
confess that I was really daunted now. Thirty miles from Birmingham on
a Sunday afternoon. I thought of a bike, madness! Taxis had not been
thought of yet, and a special train was out of the question. So I sat
down and allowed my mind to rest awhile--that is I didn’t think of
anything for a few minutes. But a genial porter came along who must
have seen a certain woe-begone look in my face, for he accosted me with
a cheery “What’s up, governor?”

I immediately poured my sad story into his ears as plainly as possible.
When I had finished he smiled brightly and said:

“You see our stationmaster, governor; he’ll put you right, you see if
he don’t. Fine old cock our stationmaster is.”

I confess that I did not feel hopeful, but the man’s manner was
infectious and, moreover, I was ready, like a drowning man, to catch
at any straw. So I begged him to lead me to the stationmaster. That
worthy was one of the jolliest-looking old men I have ever seen, and
his very appearance was comforting. He heard me tell my tale, then said
cheerfully:

“You’re all right, young man; Sunday is the very best day for getting
anywhere, although the time-table knows nothing about that. I’ve got no
less than four theatrical specials coming through this afternoon, any
one of which would drop you at Brum. I’ll stop the first one for you
and you’ll get to New Street about 3.30. How will that suit you?”

Well, I’ll leave it to you. I am glad to say that I tipped that good
porter a florin in my gratitude, and according to promise found myself
going up Corporation Street at half-past three. But when at about 6.40
I made my way to Chamberlain Square and saw it black with people all
making their way to the magnificent classical building in the centre,
I fell a-trembling to think that I might have disappointed that vast
crowd. In fact I had hardly recovered myself when the time came for
me to go on the platform. But the sight I then saw steadied me. The
vast building was crowded to its utmost capacity and I looked upon a
veritable sea of heads. The platform and orchestra were also crowded,
only leaving a small oblong for me.

After the singing of a hymn and the reading of some notices I was
introduced and the volume of cheering that greeted me brought a big
lump into my throat, for I was totally unprepared for it as well as
unused to such a greeting. My subject was “Romance and Reality at Sea,”
and I can say without boasting that not even the great Birmingham
orator could have held that audience better. I had been told to cease
at the hour, and obedient to instructions I did so, telling the
audience why. A mighty shout went up of “Go on, go on,” so I went on
for another half-hour, receiving such an ovation as I closed that I
was fairly stupefied. Many hundreds of lectures have I enjoyed since
then and have received as much appreciation as any man ought to have,
but that night in Brum overtops them all. And I was within an ace of
missing it altogether!

While I am on this topic I will say that in the fairly long time,
about fifteen years, that I have been lecturing I cannot say that I
have ever lost an appointment by the fault of the railway. I have been
late certainly, but on the one occasion when I missed my engagement
altogether it was entirely my own fault. No, many are the grievances
that lecturers have, and hold legitimately, against the railway
companies, but losing engagements by reason of railway unpunctuality is
not one of them. I may as well say here that it always has seemed to me
little short of an outrage that lecturers, who yearly spend enormous
sums in railway travelling, should have no concession whatever made to
them, while golfers and commercial travellers are allowed to travel at
such greatly reduced rates. Perhaps the most galling thing of all is to
take a ticket on Saturday for some distant place for which the ordinary
fare is high and because you must return the same night be compelled
to pay the full ordinary fare, while an ordinary week-end ticket will
be less than half the money. Or to book at the same time as a golfer,
pay nearly double the fare he does and go and return in the same
compartment. Not only so, but the train will stop at an unscheduled
station for him while the lecturer may plead for the same privilege in
vain.

In order to have my growl upon a particular instance, I should like
to state that once having a lecture at New Barnet and the time of its
close not allowing me to catch the 9.50 at Finsbury Park, I, holding
a first-class season ticket between London and Melbourn, Cambs, where
I lived, applied to the High Gods at King’s Cross for permission to
have that particular train stopped at New Barnet to allow me to get
home that night. I felt the more emboldened to ask this concession
because express trains were being continually stopped at Knebworth for
golfers and at Foxton for one gentleman who lived near the station. My
application was curtly refused without reason assigned. Yet only three
days afterwards I received from King’s Cross a touting letter stating
that as they had noticed that I was billed to lecture in Sheffield on
a certain date, they begged to call my attention to the advantages
of travelling by their line and would gladly book me a third- or
first-class seat, whichever I preferred.

I hope I did justice to the matter in my reply to that letter, but
as I had no reply from them I am not sure. One more anecdote of a
similar nature and I leave the subject for the time. I once booked on
a Monday two first-class return tickets to the Hague and round Belgium
and Holland for the following Saturday. Ultra-honest, I enclosed a
cheque for the full amount post-dated for Friday. I received the usual
post-card acknowledgment and dismissed the matter from my mind. On
arriving at Liverpool Street, fifteen minutes before the departure of
the train at 8 p.m., and applying for my tickets I was told that they
could not be issued without present payment and that my post-dated
cheque had been returned. It had not, and I have never since seen it,
but the salient fact was that I had not sufficient cash with me to meet
this large item and I had to give up my journey.

Since then I have never sent any money upon booking seats in a train
and I rejoice to say that the mutual confidence has never been
abused, the results have always been entirely satisfactory, which is
in startling contrast to continental practice, where no seat will be
booked for you unless you pay your fare at the time. But a truce to
railway matters for a time, although as they form so large a portion of
a lecturer’s experiences I make no apology for alluding to them at such
length.




CHAPTER VI

SCOTLAND


My second season was a very full one, but what I think gave me more
pleasure than anything connected with it was the fact that I had
about three weeks in Scotland. For I had only made one flying visit
to Scotland before except as a sailor and then very briefly, seeing
only the seamy sides of Glasgow and Dundee. But I had delightful
remembrances of Scotsmen the world over, and especially in New
Zealand; some of my most dearly loved shipmates had been Scotsmen
and I flattered myself that I could pass as a Scotsman anywhere in
any northern dialect except that of Glasgow, which I confess always
bothered me.

Now, not having had the advantage of conferring with any of my
fellow-lecturers I was just a little anxious to know whether my
countrymen’s notion had any ground for it, viz. that a Scotsman, or an
assembly of them, could not see a joke and were very chary of showing
any sign of appreciation. I had a fairly wide range for testing, for my
engagements ranged from Dumfries to Oban, Perth to Hawick. I do not
now remember which town or city I began in, but I think it was Oban.
My host was a local schoolmaster, of quite straitened means I should
judge, but a kindly gentleman if ever there was one. The lecture hall
was a drill shed and a very rough one at that, but it seemed exactly
suited to my audience, who struck me as being one and all working folk.
But the gravity of their demeanour, the intelligence they displayed
in taking up every point, and the whole-hearted enjoyment with which
they greeted even my feeblest jokes made me love them. Indeed I was
so carried away by their interest that I committed that well-nigh
unpardonable crime in a lecturer--I went on for two hours instead of
ending at one hour and a half, beyond which time it is wicked to expect
any person to be attentive.

When at last the lecture was over I was met in the stable-like
ante-room by a grave committee of poorly dressed men who quietly
thanked me for the pleasure I had given them, and one (who really
looked as if he did not earn so much in six months) produced a dingy
bag and counted out my heavy fee in gold upon the rough table,
producing at the same time a form of receipt. It was the first time I
had ever been paid for a lecture like that, and it made me feel rather
strange, the amount seemed so large compared with the surroundings and
its source. But I consoled myself with the thought that the committee
did not appear the sort of men who would purchase an article unless
they knew they were getting their money’s worth.

My next engagement was at Dundee, and as it was midwinter I was
confronted with a rough journey across Scotland of great length in
point of time. But I consoled myself with the knowledge that there was
to be a long wait at Dunblane, where I could rest in a warm room and
have a good hot meal, for the excellence of Scotch hotels had long been
known to me by repute. Also, but I do not know why, “Jessie, the flower
o’ Dunblane,” kept running through my mind, making the prospect of
visiting the place quite alluring.

The train arrived there in a blizzard of snow, and I lost no time in
transferring myself, making sure of the time of departure of my Dundee
train and securing information from the porter as to the whereabouts
of the principal hotel. I was chilled to the marrow when I got there,
for Dunblane seemed dead beyond resurrection and buried under snow.
And when I entered the hotel I saw no one, but following painted
instructions went upstairs, where I found a splendid room with a long
table laid for a banquet. I rang the bell and seated myself, rejoicing
in the thought of what was to come.

Alas, a veritable draggle-tailed Sally Slap-cabbage answered my call,
and her first words to me were:

“Ye maun c’way oot o’ that, it’s privaat.”

Law-abiding ever, I rose with alacrity, only asking where I could go
to be comfortable. She showed me into a dark, fireless, dirty cell, and
said nonchalantly:

“D’ye wish tea?”

I replied briskly, “No, I want dinner, and as quick as possible. Also a
fire or another room, this is as cold as the open air.”

“We’ve nae denner,” was the reply, “an’ I dinna ken if ther any cauld
meat, but ye can hae some tea, an’ I’ll see if ther’s ony meat.”

She departed and after twenty minutes’ absence returned with a dish
whereon were a few dirty scraps of cold mutton, obviously scraped
from the bone. Some tea and bread and butter of a parsimonious and
poverty-stricken sort completed the banquet, which, however it
disgusted me, was so certainly all there was obtainable that I made no
further protest but ate and shivered in silence. When I came to pay I
was charged two shillings, which the taciturn Moll accepted in silence
and I departed colder than when I arrived and extremely anxious never
to renew my acquaintance with Dunblane any more.

But all my discontent vanished upon arrival at Dundee. Though it was
snowing heavily my kind and thoughtful host, Bailie Robertson, was at
the station to meet me and I very soon found myself in his beautiful
house seated before a noble hot meal which was ready and waiting for
me, and at which that splendid old lady his sister presided with a
motherly grace that I can never forget. As both these grand old people
are dead I can speak of them with greater freedom than they would have
liked during their lifetime, for they were essentially of the kind who
“do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.”

Here again my lecture effort gave me the greatest possible
gratification. Not only was the fine Kinnaird Hall packed with
listeners, but a large portion of them were intimately connected
with the whale fishery and were therefore intensely interested in my
subject, although I spoke mainly upon the Southern Whale Fishery, a
totally different business. I cannot remember how many old whaling
skippers were introduced to me after the lecture, but I do remember
and shall always be grateful for their very warm appreciation and
the outspoken manner in which they gave it utterance. But I hope
and believe that I realised then, and always have done, that their
tribute was paid, not to any eloquence or oratory, but to practical
acquaintance with the great business with which I dealt, and that I
think will always be found to be the case with every subject. That it
should be so seems eminently reasonable.

Now lest it should appear that my lecture path was roses, roses all
the way, I must just interpose an experience in Scotland of a very
different character. I was booked to lecture at Borrowstounness
(Bo’ness) at a very low fee because it “fitted in” as we say; that
is because I had other lectures in Scotland round about that time,
obviating the necessity for making a long journey from London
specially. Now I had to come from Hull, leaving there at 6 a.m., and
in consequence when I arrived in Edinburgh, where I had to spend three
or four hours, I was very tired. Common prudence would suggest that I
should have a quiet meal and a rest, but I was not prudent, and, having
ascertained the time of a convenient train from Waverley to Bo’ness, I
used up my spare time in visiting friends in Edinburgh.

Therefore when I joined my train I settled down and went fast asleep,
so fast, that I did not awake to change at Manuel Junction. I did awake
at Falkirk, the next station, and there found that the next train back
to Bo’ness would not get me there much before nine o’clock, my lecture
being fixed for eight. Knowing that Falkirk was not far from Bo’ness
by road, I then begged the stationmaster to tell me where I could get
a “masheen,” as a wheeled vehicle is called up here, to take me the
nine miles, and how much the charge was likely to be. For all reply he
waved his hand in a lordly manner towards a row of cabs ranged outside
the station, and I, as it was then 6.30 o’clock and I felt that I had
no time to lose, immediately interviewed a cabman. But no inducement
that I could offer up to £2 had any effect upon the frozen stolidity of
those men, I could get nothing out of them but a surly “No.”

So at last I had to wire to the secretary, informing him of the state
of affairs, and saying that I could not hope to reach him before nine
o’clock. Of course I got no answer and when I arrived the little
platform was crowded with what would have been my audience, reinforced
by all the loafers and bad boys in the town. For the only time in my
life I was booed and hissed, but I feel grateful that nobody threw
anything or I should certainly have been pelted also. This, though
unpleasant, did not hurt me so much as the attitude of the secretary.
He did not actually call me a liar, but he said that though several
lecturers, notably Mary Kingsley, had missed that Manuel connection
before, none had ever experienced any difficulty in getting a masheen
to bring them from Falkirk. Drivers were always eager to take the job,
besides, there was a posting-house opposite the station, and the fare
was 10s. In vain I told him my experience, his only reply was, “It’s
verra strange.” And his look said quite plainly, “You are telling me
lies.” In the end I was compelled to make a journey from London some
months later to give that lecture, the expenses of which left me with a
slight balance on the wrong side when I had received my fee.

As a set off to this decidedly unpleasant experience I shortly
afterwards paid a visit to Penicuik, and became the guest of Mr. S.
R. Crockett. The whole of that visit is like a blissful dream, for
verily I never enjoyed myself more. The big genial novelist, then
in the heyday of his prosperity, was an ideal host and even outdid
his countrymen in his efforts to make his guest happy. But of all the
delights of that happy three days one experience stands out, salient,
from the rest. It was Mr. Crockett’s prayer at family worship on the
night of my arrival. As a general rule I dread to hear extempore
prayer, having often suffered many things from men who either maundered
or preached or raved and foamed and pounded for long periods of time
and assumed that they were _praying_! But that prayer was in my
mind all that a prayer ought to be and as a proof of this it is the
only one, out of the many thousands I have heard and mostly writhed
under, that I joyfully and gratefully remember. Only a few days ago I
heard that my good friend and host of that occasion had passed away
from us in the fullness of his powers and manhood. And though I only
forgathered with him once I have an aching sense of irreplaceable loss.

Following hard upon the heels of that came another delightful
experience, a lecture at Fettes College, when I had the privilege of
making the acquaintance of Dr. Heard, the headmaster, whose guest I
was. That acquaintance deepened into friendship, second of the many
headmasters whom it has been my fortunate lot to know and love and
about whom I hope to fill many pages. But on the very threshold of the
subject I must pause to note my astonishment, not that some headmasters
relegate the duty of showing hospitality to some person other than
themselves, but that any headmaster dares to invite such strangers as
lecturers and entertainers must be, to stay with him at all.

For I have heard such stories, not told in malice, but sadly, and
with an obvious effort to gloss over the worst features, as have
made me redden with shame, stories that have fully explained to me
the aloofness with which I have sometimes been regarded where I was
not known. Stories of hospitality abused, of persistent and vehement
begging, of equally persistent touting for employment, backed by
assurances that without that particular engagement the wheels would
come right off the applicant’s carriage--how can men, expecting to be
received and treated as gentlemen, and never expecting in vain, be
guilty of such behaviour? But then I have known tradesmen who, upon
receiving an order upon the fulfilment of which they have been promptly
paid, immediately proffer a request for a substantial loan. This, I
suppose, would be on the ground that a man who would pay lawful demands
like that _must_ have more money than he knew what to do with, and must
also be somewhat easy in his hold upon that money.

Now the gentry whom I have hinted at as abusing the confidence of
headmaster hosts would undoubtedly be indignant at being classed with
tradesmen, but if there be any truth in the grand old adage, _noblesse
oblige_, they are far more culpable. But I hold that the average
tradesman’s standard is higher than theirs and with less reason.

My visit to Fettes, following as it did upon the beautiful experience
of Penicuik, went far to confirm me in my opinion that the lecturer’s
life was a charming one, the people were all so pleasant, so eager to
make one happy and comfortable. Moreover, it was a delight to address
the lads. Of course it was impossible to tell how they would have
received the lecture had they been perfectly free agents, but that
is one of those things about which it is well never to show too much
curiosity. All one could do, and that was certainly obligatory in the
highest sense, was to give them one’s best and make it as interesting
as possible; as I have before hinted, that is, to allow no suspicion of
“swot” to creep in under the disguise of an entertainment.

But undoubtedly it is a little difficult sometimes to hold the
attention of the very youngest boys, whose minds are often incapable
of sustained effort. Occasionally this is manifested to the lecturer
in a startling manner, as the following experience of mine at a
preparatory school at West Drayton will show. I was speaking upon
“Romance and Reality at Sea,” amid an ominous quiet on the part of my
very juvenile audience which gave me the uneasy consciousness that I
was often outside their depth. A lecturer can always tell whether his
audience be with him or not, whatever be their ages or conditions.
Suddenly there broke from the boys a spontaneous peal of laughter, so
ringing, so universal that I almost fancied hysteria had seized upon
them, and wondered whether I was to blame. I could not imagine anything
I had said causing such an outburst. I stood facing the roaring lads
waiting for the merriment to subside and puzzled beyond belief, until
I suddenly turned and looked at the screen and the mystery was at once
cleared up.

A full-rigged sailing ship was being shown, and walking across her
maintopmast stay was a fly magnified to the size of an eagle. It had
evidently got into the condenser somehow, and finding it warm moved
about pretty briskly, but, of course, never out of the picture. It had
obviously come as a sweet boon, a heavenly relief from boredom, and
the children had welcomed it thus uproariously in consequence. And I
regret to say that neither my eloquence nor the commands of the masters
availed to restore the youngsters’ attention. So we presently gave it
up as a bad job, at which announcement the laughter burst forth again
as if irrepressible.

I leave any moral that may be drawn from this episode to those whose
interest it is to seek it, I have no concern with the matter now beyond
relating facts and uttering the platitude that it is unwise to expect
too much from young boys.




CHAPTER VII

JOURNEYS


There is one thing about a lecturer’s experiences which has always been
a mystery to me, though it has not been so much so since the advent
of the picture palace. It is that one continually finds oneself going
to places whose very names have hitherto been hidden from a fairly
intelligent, well-travelled man, while great towns with many thousands
of inhabitants seem to pass you by in silent disdain. I will not quote
the names of those big towns lest I should find that there is a reason
uncomplimentary to myself in their neglect of my services, but the fact
is as I have stated and is in no wise peculiar to my own experience.

But some of those out-of-the-way places; what a wealth of memories
they do recall; nearly all, I am happy to say, of a genial pleasant
character, albeit the journey to some of them was a pilgrimage of pain.
Indeed I have often wondered how it was that I, one of the frailest of
men, with especially weak bronchial apparatus, have never “cracked up”
on those wretched journeys. Recollections of them come crowding thick
and fast, but I think I must award the palm of discomfort to one that
was only difficult to reach by reason of a mistake, not on my part. I
was due to lecture at Masham in Yorkshire on a certain evening on the
morning of which I was at Huddersfield.

Trusting to information given me by a railway official at Huddersfield
instead of to the local time-table (a mistake of mine), I arrived
at Leeds to find that I could not make my connection through Ripon
to Masham in time. So I wired to the stationmaster at Ripon asking
him if he would kindly secure me a conveyance to Masham, distant ten
miles. I duly arrived at Ripon to find awaiting me a dog-cart with a
huge Yorkshire horse between the shafts and a typical Tyke holding
the reins. There was also, the time being December, a bitter blasting
north-east gale blowing over the moors, and of course I had left my
heavy fur-lined overcoat at Huddersfield. I may say in passing that
I dreaded to wear it for many reasons, but chiefly because of the
chivying of the small boy.

We started, and before we had gone a mile I was congealed. Cold! Well,
I don’t know exactly, but I was past feeling and only conscious of a
dull desire that the truly infernal wind would cease blowing for just
five minutes. But it never did, and at the end of one of the longest
hours I have ever known, much longer than a trick at the wheel off the
Horn, and God knows they were long enough (but I was young then), we
surged into Masham, arriving at the hall an hour before the lecture
was due. I was directed to the most hospitable abode of the local bank
manager, who had invited me to stay with him (only I had never received
the letter), and given such restoratives as kindness dictated.

He pressed me to stay the night, but I had booked my room at the hotel
in Ripon and the trap had to go back, so I, newly warmed and fed,
refused. The lecture went off with a bang as usual, and amid a chorus
of congratulations and commiseration I mounted the trap again--and
so home to the hotel, through a stronger wind and a light snowfall.
Arriving at the hotel I had to be lifted out of the trap and carried
into the bar parlour, where I was thawed out, while my driver, the
burly taciturn giant, drank cold ale and looked pityingly, albeit with
wonder, upon the weakling he had brought back.

A bonny fire was kindled in my room and boots and ostler carried me
upstairs. Native delicacy, I suppose, prevented them valeting me, so
it was with many a groan and much effort I got out of my clothes and
between the blankets. And my last thought was that I was booked for a
long stay--as to going to Sedbergh on the following day the idea was
too ridiculous to entertain. Yet on awaking in the morning I was up and
partly dressed before I remembered my parlous condition of the previous
night, and it is not one of the least strange things in my strange
life that this has ever been the case. Going to bed utterly beaten
and apparently in for a long illness and rising next morning able to
resume the war-path. I suppose it must be a remanet from the days when
I couldn’t give in, like so many men and women in the same toilful walk
of life.

Another journey of horror which comes into my mind at this time was
one I made to the favourite watering-place of Lytham, but owing to the
fact that I was also to speak on Sunday as well as lecture on Monday
it was necessary that I should leave London on Saturday. Not being
able to ascertain from the intricacies of Bradshaw anything definite
as to the time of my arrival, I enquired at Euston and was informed
that I could get a train at Preston for Lytham at about 4.30 a.m. (I
speak loosely as to time, it being so long ago), arriving at Lytham
somewhere about three hours later. Whereupon I booked and left Euston
about ten o’clock, arriving at Preston somewhere about 2 a.m. I sought
a first-class waiting-room, for in those palmy days I always travelled
first class, but I found it full of a foul crowd of men, smoking,
swearing, and spitting, and entirely resentful of my intrusion,
especially so of my fur coat.

I quietly retired to the farthest corner of the room, wondering much
but far too wise to say anything, and with my rug for a covering and my
bag for a pillow laid me down upon one side of a big table that stood
there. In spite of the devilish uproar I was soon asleep, but I was
rudely awakened by being jerked off the table on to the befouled floor,
amid a perfect tempest of delight. I picked myself up and silently
collected my belongings amid the hoots and jeers of the crowd. And
out upon that wind-swept platform I sought a resting-place on a bench
(shelter from the wind there was none) and lay there wide awake until
4.30 a.m. I may here interpolate that letters addressed to Euston on
the subject of this curious use of first-class waiting-rooms at Preston
and Chester never even met with the courtesy of a reply.

Somewhere about 4.30 a train came in, and I, feeling a spasm of hope,
made for it, finding a good fellow-porter who told me that it was going
to Manchester and furthermore volunteered his opinion that no train for
Lytham would go before ten o’clock.

“But,” he said, “I’ll make sure for ye, an’ if I’m right you might
go to the Park Hotel an’ be comfortable.” Judging by my fur coat he
doubtless thought that the expense didn’t matter. Of course he was
right, and I made the pilgrimage along that lengthy bridge to the
hotel, suitably rewarding (I hope) my friendly porter with a shilling.
Then I said to the night porter of the hotel:

“Please do not call me on any account until 9.30, as my train does not
go until 10.30, and I want to get warm. Bring me up a cup of tea and
some bread and butter and my bill at 9.30 and all will be well.”

He nodded and left me. I turned in, but sleep was out of the question.
I heard five strike and six and seven and then, whatever was that
diabolical knocking?

“What is it?” I roared. “Hot water,” was the reply. Then I realised
that I had been to sleep and I got out of bed, switched on the light,
looked at my watch and behold it was 7.40. I am not a hot-tempered man
and should have made an ineffectual despot, but if that night porter
had been at my absolute disposal then--I really would not like to say.
Of course I got no more sleep, and equally of course I had to pay full
charge for bed and breakfast. And I have hated Preston Station with
a perfect hatred ever since. I suppose all the fraternity are like
that--have their special likes and dislikes among stations as amongst
people.

Pocklington is a name branded upon my memory, not because of its
school, of which I have heard many excellent reports, but know nothing,
but because I have made two visits there to lecture and each time have
been filled with wonder and laughter. The secretary and mainstay of the
lecture society was (and is for all I know) a genial eccentric doctor,
a widower living with his daughter. The lecture hall might be a stable
or a barn or a shed of sorts, I only know that when I first entered it
the audience was clustered round the stove in the centre and the whole
scene was worthy of a picture by Rembrandt. I had a queer feeling that
none of my audience had ever heard a lecture before, which was absurd,
for I know that many of my colleagues had entertained them, but they
looked at me as though they thought I might bite, and I looked at them
cheerfully as I would have done at a mob of Australian blackfellows. Me!

Yet the lectures were a success. We had a good time together. By the
way, I often wonder what a leviathan of Johnson’s calibre would do with
a crowd like that. He would probably antagonise the bulk of them before
he had been speaking five minutes, because nothing annoys an audience
like that more than what they call “putting the pot on,” and I cannot
help feeling much sympathy for them. In fact the more I read Boswell’s
Johnson the more murderously I feel towards him, and the more prone I
am to regard him as the most wrongly puffed-up bully that ever lived.
That, however, is a mere matter of opinion and Johnson would probably
have disposed of it in one flatulent breath.

What, however, I could not get over in Pocklington was the hotel. It
was one of the old-timers and all its staff were genuinely anxious to
make the guest comfortable. But to go downstairs half dressed in the
morning, find after long enquiry a key, and then traverse a long wet
yard in search of relief, these were matters that left their indelible
trace, in England, where a man over forty gets soft and slack and
notices such things. Yet people go abroad and endure them and never
murmur. How is it, I wonder? I read endless encomia upon foreign ways,
foreign cooking, foreign politeness, but never a word about foreign
dirt, foreign stenches, foreign absence of sanitary arrangements. What
a mystery!

It will be a little relief to get my mind off this business of foreign
hotels to recall an experience which if it did not amuse me at the
time certainly did both interest and amuse my one fellow-passenger. I
booked first class as I usually did in those days from Huddersfield to
Manchester, where I was due to lecture at the Athenæum at eight, but
where I had no offer of hospitality. The train by which I travelled
was timed to arrive in Manchester at about seven, ample time for me to
find a hotel, change, get a meal, and arrive at the Athenæum by 7.50.
But by some accident or stupidity I got into the wrong part of the
train and after a long wait at Stalybridge I became disagreeably aware
that something was wrong. Indeed I was past the time I had reckoned on
arriving at Manchester before we left Stalybridge, and the train was
going very deliberately.

At last I saw plainly that if I was going to get to my lecture in time
it was all I should do, and turning to my sole fellow-passenger with
whom, after the custom of Englishmen, I had not as yet exchanged a
word, I said:

“Excuse me, sir, but do you mind if I change my clothes? I am due to
lecture at the Athenæum at eight and I fear that I have made a mistake
in the train.”

He replied instantly: “Go ahead, for this train isn’t due in until
7.55. Don’t mind me.”

I thanked him and began, but oh, just then the train began to cut
capers and my corresponding movements about that compartment must have
been amazing. My fellow-passenger laughed himself ill, especially
when, struggling into a “biled” shirt I was hurled, with both my arms
prisoned, from one side of the compartment to the other. Indeed his
merriment had little cessation, for similar evolutions took place as I
got into my trousers, fastened my collar, and made my white bow. When
at last I had finished and he lay utterly exhausted on the cushions, he
gasped out:

“Well, sir, I’ve never laughed so much in all my life and I’ll come to
hear you lecture, for I feel anxious to know how such a preparation
will affect you. Besides, I need a sedative and I guess a lecture is
the sort of thing to quiet the most edgy nerves.”

I nodded, smiling grimly at his awkward compliment, so typical of
the north, and just then the train rolled into the station on time.
Giving my bag to a porter and telling him to get me a cab, I bolted
to the refreshment room where I got a glass of port and snatched a
couple of hard-boiled eggs. The hall couldn’t have been many yards from
the station for half the second egg was in my fingers and the other
half in my mouth when we arrived there. And I am afraid I was still
swallowing when I stood up and faced the audience.

Of course the lecture went off all right, they always did somehow,
but my greatest triumph that night was being met by my railway
acquaintance, who lugged me off to his favourite hotel and insisted
upon footing my bill, because, he said, I’d given him the jolliest
half-day’s entertainment he’d ever had in his days, and one that would
serve him with experiences to tell at his club, etc., for the rest of
his life.

Another experience of a similar kind occurs to me, but the
preliminaries were even more painful or wearing than this last. I was
booked to lecture at Willenhall, a suburb of Wolverhampton, and came
from London to keep my appointment. But my train broke down at Roade
and by the time we got to New Street the connection for Willenhall had
vanished, of course. However, the courteous stationmaster arranged for
the train to be stopped at Willenhall to allow me to alight. So it
was, but a howling mob of colliers filled the platform and though my
bag got out I couldn’t. Vainly did the guard shout “keep back,” the
crowd pressed in and the train moved off. I sprang out at the first
opportunity, alighting on my back and rolling over several times,
feeling very foolish when at last I remembered where I was, without the
remarks of the stationmaster and porters, which tended to rub that fact
in.

When I was able to move off I did so without comment, for I felt
that any attempt of mine to reply would be entirely unworthy of the
occasion. Outside the station I was assailed by a mob of ragged urchins
competing for the job of carrying my bag, and selecting one, who was
escorted by the rest, I arrived at the hall in about five minutes.
I was met by the tired-looking secretary, to whom I commenced to
apologise for its being ten minutes past eight, but he cut me short by
saying:

“Don’t worry, the lanternist isn’t here yet!” Whereupon I suggested
that I would change into platform rig if a corner could be found for
me, and I was duly shown by the caretaker into his kitchen-living-room.
Whew! I then realised that I was in the land of cheap coal, for I
should think there must have been a couple of hundredweights on the
fire. The room was so hot that by the time I had finished dressing the
beautiful front of my dress shirt was limp as a piece of blotting-paper
and I was nearly suffocated.

And still poor Perry hadn’t turned up. If ever he sees these words
he’ll remember that awful night. I don’t know what the time was when
he arrived, but I know that when at last he was ready for me it was
past nine and the audience had been sitting patiently waiting--most
of them--since 7.30. I went on and apologised for Perry and myself,
putting all the blame where it belonged, on the railway company,
for Perry’s failure was due to his lantern and cylinders of gas
having been put off at some junction, Handsworth, I think, while he
went on sublimely unconscious to Willenhall. And it was all the more
reprehensible because, as he said, he was as well known on the lines
all around Brum as one of the railway officials themselves. I didn’t
suffer much, but it was a terrible experience for him, he being a man
of considerable weight and the night stuffy.

A curious reminiscence of mine is concerning a lecture I gave at Hebden
Bridge, one of those quaint, most picturesque manufacturing villages in
the northern part of the West Riding of Yorkshire. I was not offered
hospitality nor had I any previous correspondence with the secretary
of the society engaging me, but that was nothing out of the common
and after enquiry I made for the only hotel in the place (as far as I
know). I was feeling very fit and comfortable after dinner as I sat
smoking and awaiting eight o’clock, the hall being just across the road.

Suddenly, to me entered two men, with gloomy looks and an air of
embarrassment, who seeing me in evening dress at once concluded that I
was the lecturer and introduced themselves as secretary and treasurer
respectively of the society engaging me. Then the secretary stammered
out:

“We’ve come on rather a curious errand, Mr. Bullen. We’ve come to ask
you if you’ll take your fee and go away?”

“Of course, if you wish it,” I replied, with a smile of encouragement;
“but surely you don’t mind telling me why, though perhaps I ought not
to enquire.” (The treasurer had meanwhile stealthily placed a little
pile of gold at my elbow.)

“Well, you see, it’s like this,” grunted the secretary, with a
brick-red flush on his face, “there’s nobody there. An’ there’s nobody
to come, as far as I can see. The men folk are almost all gone and th’
women don’t care. So the society’s cracked up. Anyhow, I’m done with
it from to-night; I don’t like this kind of job at all. However, we’re
much obliged t’ye, Mr. Bullen.”

“Oh, not at all,” I chortled gaily, as I absent-mindedly slipped the
sovereigns into my breeches pocket. “But if anybody _should_ come
between now and half-past nine I’m quite willing to give the lecture,
even if there’s only half a dozen present.”

With more muttered thanks they left me, and I sat smiling at my own
thoughts, gazing at the fire and feeling very comfortable. At about
half-past eight, however, the secretary peeped in again and said very
apologetically:

“There’s a few people come, sir, so we thought perhaps you wouldn’t
mind----”

“Why, of course,” I cried gaily, and springing up I accompanied him
to the platform of the really fine hall (seating capacity about four
hundred, I should think) and gave my lecture to less than a dozen
people. What did it matter when the lights were turned down? And so we
parted on the best of terms with each other, and I to bed feeling very
virtuous.

Now this was Saturday night and I was due to lecture at Halifax on the
morrow at seven p.m. So I planned to have a comfortable midday meal
where I was and get on by a good train in the afternoon. But after
breakfast the waitress, a typical Yorkshire lass, enquired, but without
a trace of interest:

“When are ye goin’?”

I informed her courteously of my intentions and she replied, again with
that air of aloofness:

“Ye’ll have to go afore dinner.”

“But why?” I remonstrated. “I’m very comfortable here. And I don’t want
to go before dinner.”

“There’s no dinner served in this house on Sunday,” she responded
indifferently.

I looked at her abstractedly for a few moments as she finished clearing
the table, and then as she was leaving the room I asked her if she’d be
kind enough to ask the landlord or landlady to come and see me. She did
not answer, but in about a minute a stout, comely dame appeared with
the light of battle in her eye. To her I addressed myself, treating
the waitress’s communication as sheer irresponsible froth. But I was
suddenly cut short by the dame, who exploded:

“Thirty-five year I’ve kept this house and I’ve never served owt in it
of a Sunday except breakfast, an’ I never will.”

I began to feel a little warm myself now, and quietly suggested that
by the Innkeepers’ Act she was bound to keep me as long as I behaved
myself and showed willingness and ability to pay. It was unfortunate,
for she rose to a towering height of rage, avowing her intention of
sacrificing all she possessed in the world rather than break her
Sabbath rule.

Well, I am a man of peace, and have a certain amount of self-control,
so I left the house, caught an earlier train and found most comfortable
quarters at Halifax. But wasn’t it funny?




CHAPTER VIII

HOSPITALITY


Hospitality, as generally practised in the three kingdoms, is a
very delightful thing, but to the lecturer it is apt to be deadly,
unless indeed he is churlish and refuses to reciprocate at all to the
kindness shown him. Occasionally, of course, one meets with that most
objectionable person whose only reason for giving you an invitation is
that you may amuse his or her guests and incidentally shed lustre upon
your host as being able to catch such a lion and induce him to roar to
order. Happily such folks are rare and are becoming rarer, yet still
many lecturers have a well-founded fear of being “entertained within
an inch of their lives,” and make it a rule to refuse all invitations,
preferring to go to an hotel where they can have what they like to eat,
go to bed when they like, and get up ditto without fear of putting
anybody out or appearing faddish.

I cannot help feeling glad though that I never reached that stage, for
I cherish the most delightful memories of all my hosts and hostesses,
save two or three, and those only during the South African War, when
some of the best and most truthful of men seemed to lose their heads
and forget what the truth was, deeming any falsehood believable if it
would blacken the character of men who were giving their lives for
their country. I certainly did have some bad times with those people,
and have had to leave the company to avoid speaking my mind, but I hope
that will soon all be forgotten now.

What I chiefly prize about the hospitality which I received is the
numbers of good friends, not ephemera, but real friends that I made.
I have gone into a house one day and left it the next, having in the
meantime made friends whom I can never cease to love while I live and
who I feel humbly grateful to think will never cease to love me until
they can love no longer. But of all the hospitality I ever enjoyed the
quaintest was at Rishton, a suburb of Blackburn, and the manner of it
was as follows. I was lecturing at Blackburn in the Town Hall, and on
arrival went to the principal hotel with the secretary of the society
who met me at the station. There, however, I could only get a bathroom
to change in, for they were full, and my friend sent a man round with
my bag to another hotel, assuring me that I should be all right there.

After the lecture the secretary invited me to spend an hour at the
club, and as I felt fresh I readily consented. There I was introduced
to a number of genial clubmen, and the time flew rapidly by until one
of those present said:

“I don’t want to break up this happy gathering, but I understand Mr.
Bullen’s staying at the ----, and if he doesn’t go now he’ll get shut
out. It’s eleven o’clock, and they’re mighty particular.”

I rose at once and began to shake hands, when one of the members said
nonchalantly:

“Mr. Bullen isn’t stopping at the ----, he’s stopping with me. George,
go over to the ---- and ask for Mr. Bullen’s bag; tell ’em I sent you.”

There was some little, very little, palaver over this, but I laughed
and said I was quite happy whichever way it was, and so we settled down
again. It was something past two and only a few of the members remained
when my host said cheerily:

“Now, Mr. Bullen, if you’re quite ready, don’t let me hurry you, I
think we’ll be getting home.”

I rose with haste and professed my perfect readiness to go, indeed I
had been wondering slightly how much longer this club séance was going
to last. My host then shouted:

“George, call a hansom! An’ see what sort of a night it is, won’t ye?”

Anon George returned, having got a hansom, and the information that it
was raining in torrents. Bah, what did that matter? It was dry inside
the cab, and although I did feel some qualms about the driver being out
in that downpour through four dark miles, I was not in a pessimistic
mood, neither was my friend. So we bumped along, chatting gaily,
until suddenly my friend smote his knee and uttered a resounding
exclamation. Naturally I enquired what had bitten him. After anxiously
feeling in all his pockets he replied:

“I’ve left my key in my office in Manchester, my family are at
Bournemouth, and the old woman who does for me goes home at nine
o’clock. Funny thing, won’t it be, if I can’t get into my own house?”

I made some banal reply, but even this was not sufficient to disturb
my optimistic humour, and soon we were both laughing heartily at the
episode. Meanwhile the horse plugged steadily on, and at last drew up
outside the gate of a fine house. The rain was, if anything, worse, but
out jumped my friend, bidding me stay where I was in the dry. I think
I should have stayed there anyhow, for with all my good feelings I did
not see how I could help matters by getting wet. After quite a long
absence my friend returned to report that he had tried every possible
door and window within reach only to find them all securely fastened.
And the only thing to do now was to drive a mile further to the village
where the old caretaker lived, rouse her up, get the key from her, and
come back.

I acquiesced cheerfully, making no comment on my friend’s saturated
condition but thinking ruefully of the poor cabman from whom we had not
yet heard. When we arrived at the old lady’s house and while my friend
was battering at her door to the consternation of the neighbourhood, I
looked at my watch and found that it was 3.15. And I softly chuckled
to myself until I thought of the poor fellow in the dickey. However,
my friend got his key--I heard it fall from an upper window on to the
pavement--returned to the cab, and we again started for home. The
only reference to his condition made by my friend was that he felt as
if he’d been in swimming, but he didn’t care, he rather enjoyed the
adventure.

At last we reached his door and gained access without further trouble,
he giving the cabby a big drink of whisky and I hope paying him well.
He then made some coffee on the gas-stove and after we had drunk it we
scurried to bed just as the clock struck four. Yet, in spite of that,
he was up at seven, got breakfast ready, and we caught the Manchester
train at about 8.30, none the worse, as far as I was concerned.

As a contrast to this, let me set off an amazing experience I had
in the brave West Country. I was booked to lecture at Plymouth on
a certain date, and as I was visiting a relative at Crewkerne some
days previously, I was taking my father down with me. A lady wrote to
me--and a most charming letter it was--offering the hospitality of her
house during my stay in Plymouth, but as I was to have my father’s
company I regretfully refused, telling her why. A few posts later a
letter arrived from her saying that her husband had been suddenly
ordered off to Egypt by his doctor and in consequence she would be
unable to receive me. But she placed her house and servants and
carriage at my disposal, begging me to bring my father and not only to
treat the place as if it were my own as regarded us two, but to give
entertainment to as many friends as I liked. Indeed she stipulated that
I should give at least one dinner-party!

Well, what could I say to such a princely offer as this? Only accept it
gratefully, and in due course father and I arrived at the Great Western
Station to find a beautiful carriage and pair awaiting us. We were
driven to a stately house on the Hoe and received by the housekeeper
with the assurance that in accordance with her instructions she would
spare no pains to keep us comfortable. Nor did she. Never can I forget
the splendour of that dinner-party, all the guests being friends of my
hostess, or the agony of my father who having against my advice loaded
up with sandwiches and cake at the five o’clock tea was unable to touch
a slice of the noble turkey he carved so well at the head of the table.

I need hardly say that our stay of two days there was all too brief for
me, but business called me away, and I had to go. But now that I feel
elated when I have eaten one egg and two small slices of toast for my
breakfast, I often think of that board spread for us two the morning
we left. A noble uncut ham, an untouched glazed tongue, cooked on the
premises, and innocent of any tin or glass, half a dozen eggs, a huge
brawn, a great jar of Devonshire cream--it was a banquet for a boarding
school, and the sight of it almost satisfied our healthy hunger. That
was an episode to be remembered, yea, to carry with me, as Kipling
says, “to the hungry grave.”

It has often given me much food for wondering thought, this practice of
hospitality which is carried to a length of which I had never before
dreamed. For instance, I have known of quite fierce competition between
two families for the honour (?) of putting me up for one night only,
and in some cases the matter has only been settled by my consenting to
dine in one house and sleep in another. It was always my practice on
revisiting a place to stay with the same hosts, if it were convenient
for them to have me; indeed, I always had a standing invitation to
do so, but on several occasions I have received letters from other
parties, informing me that they had been in negotiation with my former
hosts, and had succeeded in inducing them to allow the writers to
entertain me this time! And, do what I would, the thought would assert
itself, How pleasant it is to be thus sought after, but why? I have
never found any definite answer.

But several times I have heard rumours to the effect that some lions
are not at all easy to cater for. Apropos of that, I remember reading
in an American skit upon William Elbert Hubbard, the eccentric genius
who founded the Roycroft Brotherhood of Aurora, New York, that upon
being offered a sandwich by his trembling hostess, he threw back his
mane and said loftily, “It is ten dollars extra if I eat.”

Then, without another word, he stalked from the room, and presently
there was heard a crash, he had flung a chambermaid downstairs. Humbly
asked why, he replied in effect, “It is my humour; let no one question
me.” Now this is obviously only a caricature, yet I have heard tales
which I could not refuse to credit of public men retiring to bed after
luncheon with a bottle of whisky; this in a temperance family too! And
of a man who is an exceedingly prominent Nonconformist minister who
treated his host and hostess with far less courtesy than was due to
any hotel-keeper, refusing to eat with them or associate with anybody
during his stay, save his secretary, who was accommodated in the same
house.

It hardly seems credible that such practices should, not to say endear
a man to his hosts, but admit of his being ever entertained again,
yet so strangely are people constituted, that behaviour of that kind
is condoned and excused as being the hall-mark of genius. On the same
principle I suppose as the being possessed of the poetical faculty is
held by some to excuse a man from behaving with either cleanliness,
decency, sobriety or honesty. Perhaps then it was because I always felt
grateful to my hosts and endeavoured to give them as little trouble as
possible, while making myself as agreeable as I knew how to be, that I
have so many happy recollections of hospitality received.

Once, indeed, my host failed me through no fault of his own, I am sure,
although the letter he wrote telling me of his sudden forced departure
for London did not reach me until some time after the trouble. The
lecture was at Abergwynfi, South Wales, and I arrived there in the
gloom of a winter evening, amid a drizzling rain. A less inviting
place I have never seen, for the station seemed to end in a black wall
of rock, and nothing could be seen around but the grimy cañon along
which we had come. Enquiry at the station whether anyone was waiting
for anybody only elicited a stare and a curt “no.” Further enquiries
presently as to whether I could find a hotel and where, brought the
stationmaster, who told me of two, and directed me to them.

So I climbed the steep, muddy stairs into the black, foul road, and
after a tiring drag, with my heavy bag, of a few hundred yards, I
reached a public-house, crammed with drunken miners, who were making
a tremendous noise. This surprised me, for I had always thought of
the Welsh miner as a quiet man, except in religious fervour, and
certainly given to temperance. However, I pushed through the reeking
crowd, and enquired at the bar if I could have a room. No! they had no
rooms to let, used to have two, but there was no call for them now.
Disheartened, I begged the landlord to let me know where the nearest
place was that I could get a room, and he directed me still farther
up that hopeless thoroughfare to another place, where they _did_ have
rooms.

I trudged up there, very wearily, noting as I went the fine Workmen’s
Institute, where I was to lecture, because of the posters displayed
outside and bearing my name. Alas, when I reached the hostelry, which
was even more dreary and deplorable looking than the first, but had
not so many drunken men in it, I was told that their two spare beds
were occupied by two young women with the smallpox, a daughter of the
landlord’s and a sewing-maid. Of course I lost no time in retreating,
and being thus driven, took refuge in the Institute, where I was
received by the caretaker with open arms.

I felt at once as if I had accidentally touched the right spring, for
my new friend summoned a myrmidon from below, giving him some orders in
fluent Welsh, which resulted in the appearance in a very few minutes of
a robust man whom I took to be a superior workman or foreman of sorts,
but who could not do enough for me. He took me to his home, apologising
volubly all the way, and in a very short time his good wife had loaded
the little kitchen table with tea, toast, cake, jam and sardines, to
all of which I did as much justice, I hope, as was reasonable.

At my suggestion of changing into dress clothes he turned a puzzled,
appealing look upon his wife, and a brief colloquy in Welsh passed
between them. Then he said that he hoped I would not trouble to change,
for as it was the first time they had ventured upon a lecture or
address in English, nobody would expect it. And would I please come
along to the Institute and meet the committee? I rose with alacrity,
and together we marched up the muddy street towards that building.

The strains of a brass band in the distance saluting my ears, I made
some trivial remark about it, to which he replied:

“Oh, yes. I quite forgot to ask you, do you mind the band playing for
a few minutes before you begin--by way of introduction like? You see,
they’ve offered, and they’re very keen--they do it all for love, and we
don’t like to discourage them.”

Well, what could I do but acquiesce with as much appearance of
heartiness as I could muster, though I did begin to wonder whither this
affair was tending. But we now met the committee, all working men, who
greeted me with enthusiasm, and did their best to make me feel welcome,
although the English that some of them spoke was quaint; and we chatted
on until that band played itself in and stopped all conversation. The
leader ranged his merry men on the stage behind the sheet, and as the
clock struck eight the band burst into a triumphal march. Merciful
powers, may I never have such an experience again! Every executant,
especially big drum, was determined that his instrument should be
heard, no matter what happened, and there were thirty of them! I felt
as if the drums of my ears would burst, but feared to offend by going
out.

Still, I hoped that the uproar would be brief, indeed, I had been told
of ten minutes as the limit. Alas, no! Though their faces were crimson
and streamed with sweat, they felt no fatigue, and they clashed, blared
and banged on until a quarter to nine, forty-five minutes. There was a
hubbub of Welsh congratulations, after which I bowed to the leader of
the band (his instrument was the bombardon), and said without emphasis,
“Thank you so much.” Then I went before the sheet, there being no
chairman.

The hall was packed, 600 I should think being present, and of them at
least 590 were miners. Not a sound was heard, every face was filled
with blank amazement. Not being used to such a reception, I was a bit
daunted, but plunged in and talked my best for an hour and a quarter.
Still not a sound nor a movement, until one of the committee went
before the screen and said something in Welsh, upon which the hall
emptied, noisily, it is true, but in most orderly fashion. On joining
the committee I expressed a fear that I had not pleased my audience,
but my host of teatime hastened to assure me that my efforts were
beyond praise.

“Only,” he said, “you must remember that very few of the chaps
understand English!”

And then, indeed, I was filled with admiration for their good
behaviour. To sit and listen to unintelligible explanations of pictures
representing something they had never even dreamed of before,--sit for
seventy-five minutes and make no protest, then go out in such orderly
fashion,--well, it spoke volumes for their characters in the direction
of self-restraint.

“Now, sir,” broke in my kind guardian again, “if you will come along
with us to Blaengwynfi, we have found you a hotel there. This village
has no public accommodation at all.”

Of course I signified my delighted acquiescence. What else could I do?
But I hoped it was not very far, and I was at once assured that it
was less than a mile. So we strolled, about eight of us, my bag being
carried by one of the party, and soon arrived at the hotel, where I
was solicitously attended to in the matter of food, and given quite
a decent room. My meal over, I was invited to join my committee, who
were evidently out for the evening. Well, what a gay crowd it was, to
be sure. They sang and they drank and they smoked--the eleven o’clock
rule having been suspended for their benefit apparently, until at about
midnight I begged off, and retired to my bedroom. But as it was next
to the room in which were the revellers, it was long before I got to
sleep, though I have no idea when the merry party broke up.

Next day, however, I found that my bill had been paid, and that
everybody was delighted with my behaviour and with the evening
generally. Also I found a good train from a station almost opposite to
the hotel, and passed away from the district never to visit it again,
but to bear it in memory all my life.




CHAPTER IX

HOSPITALITY--_continued_


While I am upon this subject of hospitality, I may as well say what
I really believe, that as far as my experience goes--and I am fully
aware that it does not go very far--I give the palm for knowing how to
be really hospitable to my own countrymen, with a slight reservation
in favour of the Scotch. But first of all it is necessary to define
exactly what I mean by hospitality. Let me say that I am considering it
entirely from the point of view of the lecturer. Of the man or woman
who has made a long journey, involving very likely all sorts of trying
inconveniences, in order to fulfil an engagement to entertain some
hundreds of people for a couple of hours or less, and whose first duty
is to those people, his employers for the time being.

When a local magnate invites a lecturer to accept his hospitality
during the lecturer’s stay, he should remember what the lecturer’s
business is, and that he has very likely to deliver another lecture
the following night at some town a long distance away. Most hosts and
hostesses do remember this, and act accordingly; some few, a very few,
act as if the lecturer simply came to entertain them and their guests,
and had no other business in life. They are not hospitable in the
present sense, if, indeed, they are in any other. No one has a right to
ask a lecturer to stay with him unless he has the means to make such a
public servant comfortable; no one should act as if the lecturer would
be homeless for the night if they do not give him a shelter, unless
indeed there be no place of public entertainment in the town, or means
of getting out of the town after the lecture.

For it should always be remembered that while lecturers are prepared to
put up with a good deal of inconvenience and fatigue in the course of
their business, it is not hospitable to add to their burdens in those
directions. But perhaps I shall better explain by giving an example of
what I mean by an ideal host, an actual experience of course, since
fiction finds no place in these pages.

I was booked to lecture in a quiet town not far from Edinburgh, and a
gentleman wrote to me some time before, offering me hospitality during
my stay, and asking me from what direction I should be coming, and
at what time I proposed to arrive. I replied that I should be coming
from Glasgow, where I had been staying for a few days with a friend,
and that I could come when it would be most convenient for him. He
appointed a time to meet him at his club in Glasgow, where I changed
and dined with him, then we drove to the station. I made to get my
ticket, but he stopped me, saying:

“We have a system of ‘guest’ tickets in Scotland, Mr. Bullen, and here
is yours,” putting the piece of pasteboard into my hand. Of course
we travelled first-class, and at our arrival were met by my host’s
carriage and pair. A happier time I never spent than with him and his
amiable family, but I was never _entertained_, I was one of themselves
without duties. On the day I was to leave my host took me into his den,
and said gravely:

“Mr. Bullen, I pay my servants well on the understanding that none of
my guests are to be taxed in tips. You will greatly oblige me, then, if
you will refrain from giving any money to anyone in my service. I ask
this as a personal favour.”

And having ascertained that my next visit was to be to Hawick, my
“guest” ticket was made available to that place, I was driven to the
station, accompanied by my hostess, and sent upon my way feeling
particularly happy. Now I must hasten to say that such treatment is
not, could not be, expected everywhere by me or anybody else. But
what a contrast to the behaviour of the man who invites you over an
undecipherable signature to be his guest at the Laurels, Edgbaston,
say, and leaves you to find your way there at the cost of an expensive
cab fare, has nobody to greet you when you arrive, invites ten or a
dozen people to dinner, at which you are expected to entertain his
guests, and after your return, fagged, from your lecture, expects you
to entertain a roomful of people until midnight! I needn’t go on. For,
as I say, such people are very rare, but I am sure they are the cause
of many lecturers declining all offers of hospitality whatever.

Not quite so bad as the gentleman I have just sketched was a
preparatory schoolmaster for whom I lectured once. The time of the
lecture and the distance from London both made it possible for me
to catch a train from home which gave me an opportunity not to be
missed, for at that time my nights at home during the winter were very
few, and therefore precious. So upon hiring my cab at the station I
made arrangements for it to call for me after the lecture, and thus
satisfactorily fixed for my return I went on gaily through a very jolly
lecture. When I had finished the headmaster advanced upon me, and
taking my arm, said:

“Come on, Mr. Bullen, dinner is all ready, and I am sure you must want
it, I do.”

“I’m sorry to say that meals are to me only a necessary evil,” I
replied, “but, apart from that, I have ordered my cab to catch the
London train, and I see I must be off at once if I am to do so.”

“Oh, nonsense,” he snapped. “It’s absurd for you to talk about
returning to London to-night. You mustn’t do it.”

“Very sorry,” I persisted, “but my plans are all made, and my people
are expecting me. Had you intimated to me beforehand that you would
expect me to stay the night, I should then have told you that I could
not under the circumstances.”

“Well, all I can say is, that if I had known I certainly would not
have engaged you. I don’t care twopence for the lecture; it was the
yarn afterwards that I was looking forward to, and I am extremely
disappointed.”

Now there was a nice state of affairs! I did the only thing I felt
possible--bade him good night, and got into my cab, feeling very angry
at what I thought was the perversity of the situation, and leaving my
would-be host doubtless very angry at what he considered to be _my_
perversity. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that I never got another
engagement at that particular school.

Speaking of cabs being retained for the homeward journey reminds me of
a wretched experience I had once in Surrey. I was engaged to lecture
at a preparatory school, the headmaster of which was a most kindly,
courteous gentleman. He warned me some time before I came that the
school was six miles from the nearest station, that I must engage a
cab to wait and bring me back, the lecture being arranged so that I
should have ample time to dine and return to catch a train somewhere
about 10.50. But when I was all ready to depart the cabman could not
be found--and by the time he did turn up, it was obvious that things
were being cut rather fine. And so I told him, but he only replied
nonchalantly that there was “plenty of time,” and did not hasten one
bit. Two or three times on the way I tried to liven him up, but he took
no notice, and we arrived at the station to find the train gone. A
belated porter came up and gave me the information that the next train
was about midnight, due at Waterloo about 1 a.m., and then my cabman
said, “How long’s she ben gone?”

I am glad to say that I do not remember what I said then. I know it was
copious and bitter, but it was utterly lost on the cabman, who simply
turned and drove off, leaving me to wait about on a bitter January
night in a fireless waiting-room or on a windswept platform until the
coming of the last train. I arrived at my hotel in London chilled to
the marrow at 1.30 a.m., and owe it to my extraordinary immunity from
chills and colds that I did not have a bad bout of illness.

But to return to this matter of hospitality. Taking it all round, I am
convinced that there is none so perfectly acceptable to a lecturer at
any rate as that in England and Scotland. Irish hospitality is warm,
effusive and well meant, but it is too casual, there are too many
discrepancies. These can be made fun of, and indeed enjoyed by the
young and vigorous, but to the middle-aged, who are none too strong,
they are apt to be trying. Such as, for instance, a peat fire in your
bedroom on a bitter winter night, which only smoulders and smokes, and
gives not the slightest heat. And then to find your pyjamas in the bed
wrapped round a leaking hot-water bottle, which has made it necessary
to perch precariously upon one edge of the bed, in order to keep dry,
but, of course, entailing the destruction of sleep.

But I am in honour bound to say that although I have enjoyed the
hospitality of several hundreds of families in this United (as yet)
Kingdom of ours, I could count my experiences that were unpleasant on
the fingers of one hand, so well is the virtue understood and carried
out. In the United States, where I once had a lecture tour, I was
never offered hospitality, beyond a meal, but once. And if that once
was a fair sample of the custom of the country in that direction, I am
very glad. For both my host and hostess regarded me as their property,
bound to go through certain performances as a sort of return for my
entertainment; and when I jibbed they were immensely surprised. They
seemed to think that addressing Boards of Trade, attending Clam Bakes,
and speaking pieces from my books to a drawing-room packed with guests
invited for the purpose, ought to please me beyond measure, and that
all arrangements of the kind might be made without any reference to me
or my personal affairs. I am quite willing to believe, however, that
such hospitality may be exceptional. Anyhow, I do not want, as Martin
Ross has it, to be “entertained within an inch of my life.”

Only once in Australia and New Zealand was I given hospitality--I beg
pardon, twice; but as both cases were exceptional, and the pleasure
they gave me of the deepest and most lasting kind, I will say no more
about them here. As far as I am concerned, hospitality in Australasia
and America has been non-existent for me, for the exceptions which
I have quoted only go to prove this rule. And now I must close this
chapter, not, indeed, that my matter on the subject is exhausted, but
because--well, because I want to get on to the burning topic of hotels.
And this is a discursive yarn at best, its only virtue, as far as I
can see, being its absolute truthfulness. So we will get on, if you
please, to a subject that is of the deepest interest to all travellers,
but especially to those who travel to earn a living, and to whom hotel
charges are a most serious item.




CHAPTER X

HOTELS


My first experience of hotels goes back to 1879, when I arrived in
Belfast as a seaman before the mast, and was invited by my good friend,
George Hunter, a gentleman who for motives of economy had worked his
way home with us before the mast, to dine with him at the Eglinton and
Winton Hotel. I was staying at the Sailors’ Home at the time, the best,
by the way, that I ever did stay in, but as we had not yet been paid
off, my wardrobe was not strictly according to shore ideas. I had a
good coat and waistcoat, but I had to wear a pair of moleskin trousers.
They were milk-white with energetic washing, but they must have looked
funny, for I remember a hilarious commercial after dinner asking me if
I was one of the Welsh miner-heroes (there had been a terrific colliery
accident in North Wales not long before, attended by the usual heroic
endeavours to save life).

I also remember that the food seemed to me the finest of which I had
ever dreamed, but then I was fresh from five months of forecastle grub.
That, however, was no excuse for my lifting the last cauliflower out
of the dish proffered me, even if it was no bigger than a duck egg. To
a seaman fresh from five months’ utter privation of vegetables, it was
but a mouthful, but something of the enormity of my offence was borne
in upon me when the waiter (he was an Irishman) proffered the empty
dish to my neighbour.

“Get me some cauliflower,” said that gentleman promptly, not without a
stern glance at my plate.

“There’s no more,” replied the waiter, and the silence that ensued
was thick enough to cut. For four persons had not been served with
cauliflower. Yet, British fashion, no man complained, and the dinner
proceeded in grim silence. And I felt bewildered, for my senses told me
that I had not been greedy, and yet I could not help feeling also that
I had annexed the cauliflower of four diners.

Two years afterwards I arrived at Dundee, and remembering my former
experiences, went to a hotel for the one night I was to stay there. And
when I sat down to the laden table and the waitress placed a 20-lb.
joint of cold roast beef before me to help myself, the hungry months
behind me faded away, and I fed blissfully. They only charged me 2s.
for my meal, but I am sure they were heavy losers, for I must have
eaten over a pound of meat, to say nothing of bread, butter, jam and
cake. But I feel that they could have few such appetites as mine then
was to cater for.

It was many years before I was a guest at a hotel again, and then,
alas! my appetite had gone. Gone so completely that I did not want any
breakfast at any time, and for my principal meal in the middle of the
day the smallest quantity of the plainest food. And if that food were
tough or badly cooked or unpleasant, I wanted nothing but a piece of
bread. This made me fiercely critical of hotel charges. I could not
remember that to keep up a great establishment it was necessary to
charge a fairly high price, and to cater for people with appetites, not
abnormalities like myself, satisfied with a cup of coffee and a slice
of bread and butter for breakfast, and fiercely resentful at having to
pay 2s. for it.

Nevertheless, it is possible to recognise facts that you cannot alter,
and I speedily became passive under the infliction of comfortless
splendour and high charges for meals that I couldn’t eat. I need hardly
say that I never by any chance took a table d’hôte dinner _so_ cheap
at 5s., or ditto luncheon at 3s. 6d., fulfilling the requirements of
the hotel, which threatened a fine of 2s. if I did not take meals in
the house, by paying 2s. for a cup of coffee and a slice of bread and
butter at breakfast-time. But in Scotland I found attached to every
large hotel a restaurant where the food was really excellent; quality,
quantity, variety and price being all that one could desire. There I
could dine or lunch for about 1s. 6d. as well as I desired, one plate
always serving me, always being sufficient. I know that some people on
reading this will esteem me mean, but I am really not so, only I do
hate having to pay for a succession of dishes whereof I can only eat
one.

I always found, too, that the better the hotel the more moderate were
the charges as compared with second- and third-rate places, with the
vile old system of charging for attendance, which benefits nobody but
the proprietor, and means that you have to pay twice or the attendants
get no tips. It is not a bit too emphatic to call the system vile,
for these places hire their servants for a few shillings a month, on
the distinct understanding that they, the servants, make up for their
scanty wages by tips, which the customer has already paid in the bill.
Nothing could well be more paltry, dishonest and irritating than such
a system, for even the seaside lodging-house keepers’ extras are
not nearly so annoying. Fortunately the better class of hotels have
abolished the system altogether. You know what you have to pay, and
even if you feel that the old extras are added in, that is not half so
irritating as the old system.

One of the strangest things that I have noted in my hotel experience is
the inferiority of the Temperance Hotel. There must be some exceptions,
of course, or how can the popularity of the huge Cranston Hotels be
explained; but, speaking generally, so far as my experience goes, in
a temperance hotel, food, attendance, accommodation, and civility are
all far below what is obtainable in licensed hotels. I do not pretend
to explain it, but I have known many men who were total abstainers who
shuddered at the thought even of going to a temperance hotel. Is it,
I wonder, anything to do with the fact that all temperance drinks are
vile, thirst-provokers and stomach-destroyers. Except perhaps water,
and even water in satisfying quantity is not good for the middle-aged.
It is a puzzle which I leave to wiser heads than mine.

Then there is the Commercial Hotel. If you are a commercial, nothing
can well be better. The food is of the best, the charges are
reasonable, and the tips exceedingly modest. But if you are not one
of the knights of the road, you are in parlous case. The worst room
in the house, the almost undisguised scorn of the attendants, the
quite undisguised dislike of the guests are yours without asking. The
very last hotel I stayed in was a Temperance Commercial Hotel, which
outside looked like a large and charming family villa--but my room was
positively filthy, with black rotten paper hanging off the walls, a bed
apparently made of dumplings, no fire-place, and for light a feeble
gas-jet in a remote corner, where it only served to show what a den the
room was. I asked for a fire to be made in my room, for the night was
bitterly cold, and the two public rooms downstairs were full of tobacco
smoke, which I cannot breathe for coughing, but I was told that it was
impossible, as there was no fire-place--I had not then seen the room.
Why did I go there? Well, the room was taken for me by the secretary of
the society I was to lecture for--I attach no blame to him--and when I
found out it was too late, in my weak condition, to go anywhere else.
But this was in a town of 200,000 inhabitants in the North of England.

Let it be understood once for all that I dislike hotels as necessary
evils, but that my sense of justice compels me to admit that one may
be made comfortable in a gigantic caravanserai where it would seem
impossible for the personal element to have any chance to express
itself, and, conversely, that one may be made abjectly miserable
in a very small hotel where it might naturally be thought that the
proprietor would make it his sole business to see that his guests
were comfortable. Management is the keynote of it all, but even that
is powerless against other advantages such as position, want of
competition, etc. Most gratefully do I bear tribute to one splendid
characteristic of all the great hotels owned by the Midland Railway
Company--the quality and get-up of their bed-linen. It must be an
education in comfort to some people, wealthy folks, too, who stay in
them; for I can honestly say that in no private house, however costly
in its appointments, have I ever enjoyed contact with such sheets and
pillow-slips as in any Midland hotel that I have ever stayed in, and I
think I have sampled them all.

For sheer magnificence, which does not always mean comfort by any
means, the Great Scottish Railway Hotels are easily first of all
the hotels I know, which, of course, does not mean anything of the
“Carlton” or “Ritz” type. Why is it, I wonder, that Edinburgh and
Glasgow can and do so easily excel our great metropolis in railway
stations and hotels? The finest terminus in London is a mere
undistinguished siding compared with Waverley, Princes Street or
Central Stations; nor, although St. Pancras Hotel is architecturally
very fine, does it compare with the castellated splendour of the North
British Hotel at Waverley.

But if only they could be found now I would infinitely prefer the old
English inns, with their plain roast and boiled, chops and steaks and
simple vegetables. Even now may be found in some of them, daily, alas!
growing fewer, the same high quality of meat and vegetables, and the
same almost reverent care in their simple preparation, a preparation
that did not depend upon some mysterious sauce to give flavour to
the meat, but brought out all the delicious qualities that the
unsophisticated food itself possessed. Unfortunately, even a wayside
inn will now give you a _menu_ written in amazing French, and dishes
more amazing still, concocted by people who doubtless would have been
good at plain boiled or roast, but who make an awful mess of a ragout,
an entrée, or a fricassee. Still, as they would very justly retort,
these unholy mix-ups are asked for and expected by their patrons, who
having eaten heartily of them, go away and growl that it is only in
France that you can get food decently cooked.

But I am reminded that tastes differ. I only wish that folks would
practise toleration in food matters as well as religion. To the latter
we are all coming--even the Catholics will, I understand, allow you
to do and believe anything you like, so long as you say you are a
Catholic, go to your duty once in a while and pay up--sure that’s all
easy. Then why shouldn’t men admit that what is one man’s meat is
another man’s poison, and let it go at that? They don’t, though. One
of the most frequent remarks made to me during my lecturing days by
hostesses was:

“Now, Mr. Bullen, tell me just what you would like before you lecture
and what afterwards. I only want to know, because I am aware how
necessary it is that a lecturer should have just what food agrees with
him and at the time he needs it.”

My invariable reply that whatever the family were taking for dinner
would suit me admirably, and that I wanted nothing after a lecture, was
always received with polite astonishment--I will not say incredulity,
but certainly there was conveyed to me an idea that I could not be
sincere, or, if so, that I must be a totally different subject from the
majority of lecturers and other public men. As far as lecturers go, I
hasten to say that I do not think that any with whom I am acquainted
are difficult to please or at all _tête montée_. Still, you never know.
But public men! Ah, there you have me. They may be a fearful sort of
wild-fowl to entertain, especially if they have only recently arrived.

Alas, I am wandering far away from my chapter heading, which is
hotels. And no hotel in which I ever stayed was at all concerned
about anything but what I chose to order and pay for. And if that was
served as I wanted it, well, glory! all was as happy as could be.
But of all the infernal places on earth to stay at, defend me from
a hotel whose iron-bound rules forbid any guest to have anything in
the nature of food or drink except at certain stipulated hours. These
dens, I can call them nothing else, flourish in the United States,
where the democracy submit to more tyranny than any place outside
of Turkey. Shall I ever forget an occasion when I lay groaning with
acute indigestion in a hotel in Chatauqua Lake summer resort? I was
parched with thirst, knotted up with pain, empty as a drum, but knew I
dared not eat. At last (it was Sunday morning about ten o’clock), at
something like the thirteenth ring, a youth came and slammed my door
open.

“Waal!” he said. “Waat ye want?”

I looked, at him with glazed eyes, and said faintly:

“A little milk and soda, please, as soon as you can.”

“Ye cain’t have nothin’ till dinner-time!” with an air of finality
perfectly Rhadamantine.

That did me good. I sat up in bed, the excruciating pain temporarily
forgotten, and enquired:

“In heaven’s name, why can’t I have a milk and soda?”

His answer was concise, and closed the discussion in one direction.

“Bekase th’ manager’s gone out, an’ he has th’ key of the kitchen, an’
nothin’ k’n be served till he comes back at one o’clock.”

Then I recognised, as they say, what I was up against, and I pleaded
hard. But it was of no avail, I had to wait until one o’clock, and
then--while milk could be had in plenty, there was no soda! So I was
as badly off as ever, for milk alone in the state I was enduring was
so much poison to me. I could not understand it, nor can I now. So
difficult is it to understand that I never expect to be believed when
I tell the following story. The next evening I was to lecture in the
auditorium, a huge, umbrella-shaped building set apart for the purpose,
and before the lecture I sought the janitor, and endeavoured to enlist
his sympathies in the matter of soda and milk, at any rate. I assumed
that he would be as surprised as I was that soda was not to be got
in so highly civilised a place, and apparently I was right, for he
responded at once with a snort of contempt for the fools, as he called
them, and assured me that he would get me my milk and soda in two
ticks. I gave him a dollar, and in less than ten minutes he returned
with a jug of milk and a pound of washing soda! I know I can never be
believed, but I declare that this is true.

But I can honestly say that I never but once had as good a meal
anywhere in America, and I always stayed at the best hotels I could
find (private houses I only know of two), as any workman can get in
London for eightpence. The exception was at President Roosevelt’s
table at Oyster Bay. We had lamb cutlets, potatoes and cauliflower,
with rice pudding to follow, and it was all delicious. It made me feel
quite homesick. But it was unique. I never got it again. In Canada it
is practically the same, though I will gladly admit of an exception in
the case of the Château Frontenac at Quebec, and, oh, yes, there is the
“Empress” at Victoria, Vancouver Island. The “Prince George” at Toronto
was better than any United States Hotel I ever stayed in, and quite
equal to any English hotel I know, but that is not saying a great deal.

As to the food in the trains, it makes me shudder to think of it. I
really cannot say all I know to be true about it, for fear of being
thought extravagantly biased, but in very truth I nearly starved on
the C.P.R. I have had lamb (so called) black and tough as leather, lake
trout that was positively putrid, and--but there, it is useless to make
a list. When I say that I was reduced to eating baked beans and bread
at every meal, and that I lost a stone in weight in one month, I best
convey the straits to which I was reduced. To my mind the strangest
thing about the whole business was that when we got on board the boat
to go from Vancouver to Victoria, although presumably the catering
arrangements were the same, the food was excellent. I could not wish
for anything better, but I tried in vain to discover any reason for the
difference.

As a matter of actual experience I never realised how good and
comfortable a place a hotel could be until I went to Australia seven
years ago. During my previous visits as a lad and a young man I
had learned to love and admire Australasia, because of its lavish
distribution of food at low prices. It will hardly be believed, but
it is a fact that when I went to Lyttelton in 1878 a carpenter could
earn 15s. per day, and could get board and lodging for 15s. per week,
the board meaning three huge meals with meat, vegetables, bread, and
pastry, also tea, and coffee and beer. Sixpence was the ordinary
workman’s price for a meal in an eating-house at all the ports in
Australasia, and better, more copious meals it would be hard to find.
But then Australasia had not, and never has, as far as I know, handed
over her food supply to a meat trust, and thereby bound her people,
no matter what their station in life may be, to eat whatever garbage
Chicago chooses to dole out to them.

Still, those early experiences of mine were only of eating-houses; I
never stayed in a hotel, of course. But on this last visit, after I
had become thoroughly well acquainted with hotels in Great Britain,
America and the Continent, I stayed in hotels all over Australasia, and
I firmly believe as a result of that experience that they can safely,
or that they could safely, be spoken of generally as the best hotels
in the world. But here arises a small difficulty. Every little pub,
no matter how small, ordinary or low class, calls itself a hotel, and
strangers are apt to be misled by the title. Still, titles are always
misleading people everywhere, so the hotel business in Australasia
cannot claim any monopoly in misnaming.

What I wish to point out from actual experience, and as entirely
unbiased as any opinion can ever be, is that in Australasia, as in
no other country that I have ever visited, may be found, in the
great cities as in remote country places, hotels which will give the
traveller an abundance of excellent food well and plainly cooked, with
a great variety of beautiful vegetables also in plentiful quantities,
such as a man would expect in his own comfortable home. Not only so,
but the tariffs charged were extremely reasonable, affording the
strongest possible contrast to Canada, where I believe the hotel
charges are the highest, and the treatment generally the worst, in
the world. But these were not the only matters I saw to admire in
Australasian hotels. In all my experience of them I was never charged
anything beyond the agreed daily tariff--there were no extras. And I
was always served with early morning tea and afternoon tea, while for
those who liked to eat between meals there was food at 11 a.m., no
table laid, and again at about 10 p.m. And baths were looked upon as a
necessary of life, and never charged for. Nor were there any tips.

Now I am perfectly well aware that hotel keepers everywhere else,
especially in my own beloved country, will, if they believe these
statements (a very large “if,” by the way), declare that such a
procedure on their part would only spell bankruptcy. Well, of course,
I do not know their business, but I may be permitted to disbelieve
such a statement entirely. In Australasia wages are higher, rent is
higher, food is certainly no cheaper, and hotel keepers certainly not
philanthropists, yet the thing is done, and done as I have said.




CHAPTER XI

CHAIRMEN


This ought to be a very long chapter, in spite of the fact that it has
been done supremely well before. But I have not read M. Paul Blouet’s
able work, nor have my experiences been his, so that I approach this
very interesting part of my subject with a light heart. Let me at the
outset declare that I by no means disapprove of chairmen, as so many
of my colleagues do. A chairman who knows his business, and confines
his share of the proceedings to a few well-chosen sentences, and the
appearance of his name on the bills, is a jewel of price, and I have
often been very glad to meet him. But I must admit that he is rare,
and the difficulty that a secretary is always in when inviting a local
celebrity to take the chair at a lecture is his inability to know
whether the L.C. will not consider it a part of his functions to make a
long rambling speech while the audience is waiting impatiently to hear
the lecturer. As for the latter, he doesn’t count, of course, but I
have often wondered what the chairman would have thought could he have
known what was beneath my placidly smiling exterior, as I sat facing
the audience, while the hands of the clock crept slowly round. And then
the crowning outrage at about 8.25.

“But you don’t come to hear me, you come to hear the lecturer, and so
I won’t stand between you and him any longer. But this I must say.”
And then another five minutes of vapid twaddle. It is impossible to
do justice to such people as that, and still more impossible for a
lecturer to realise that there are people who really like that sort of
thing. At least one would think so, judging by what they say aloud,
but what they think, who can tell? However, between a chairman of that
kind and no chairman at all there is a wide gap, and I cannot say that
I ever grew to like the growing practice of expecting the lecturer to
walk on the platform and begin his lecture as soon as eight o’clock
strikes. And yet there is a further great advantage in this, you miss
the absolutely nauseating votes of thanks at the end. What puny-minded
person ever devised that method of giving pain to a poor man who has
done them no intentional harm, to say nothing of making him and others
lose their train very often, I have never been able to ascertain, but
he was no friend of mine, whoever he was.

I suppose as I am writing about chairmen I ought to begin with
instances where there were none, in order to fulfil modern literary
requirements. Such instances, at any rate, will not take up much
time, but I very well remember the first experience I ever had of
the system. It was at Moseley or King’s Heath or Rotton Park, one of
those suburbs of Birmingham, at any rate, which used to be famous for
their Institutes, and to which we lecturers used to look forward for
a consecutive list of seven or eight engagements. On arrival at the
hall I saw no one except a bluff caretaker, who conducted me to a bare
room, and brought me a chair. I asked him if there were no officials
connected with the place whom I might expect to see before the lecture.
He replied that there was no one there except himself and the audience.

“They’re in their seats all right,” he said; “and if you go on up those
stairs when the clock strikes eight, you’ll find ’em before you. An’ a
jolly good audience, too, they are.”

“But surely,” I demurred, “this isn’t usual. Do the lecturers never see
anybody but the caretaker? And who do I look to for my fee?”

“Oh!” he laughed, “you’ll see the treasurer all right after the
lecture. But that’s eight striking. This way, sir.”

I went in the direction indicated, and found myself facing a packed
concourse of people, who gave me a rousing cheer. I began my lecture
straight away, and was at once on the best possible terms with my
audience, so that the hour and three-quarters passed like half an
hour. But immediately the lights were turned up the hall began to
empty, and by the time I was back in the little bare waiting-room again
I think the caretaker and I were almost the only persons left in the
building. He advanced towards me with a beaming smile, holding out an
envelope, which he said the treasurer had asked him to hand me, because
he was in a great hurry to get somewhere else.

“I suppose you can guess what’s in it,” he murmured, with a grin of
pure good-fellowship.

I found it contained my cheque and a note “with the treasurer’s
compts.,” and that was all. Still, although it was amply sufficient, I
couldn’t help feeling that it was just a little too business-like, and
said so. I was not at all surprised to hear that one lecturer who was a
very big gun indeed, and whose fee was three times mine, felt himself
so slighted, and his dignity so hurt, that upon meeting with similar
treatment, he promptly refused to deliver his lecture, and departed
as he had come. That, to my mind, was utterly indefensible conduct,
punishing as it did a large number of quite innocent people. Besides
the folly of it, for the lecturer would without doubt be blamed for
non-appearance, and would have no chance of setting his side of the
case before the audience.

I must admit, however, that such behaviour towards a lecturer is most
unusual, and, in any case, it implies a great compliment, for it
assumes that there is no chance of default on the part of the principal
figure in the entertainment. But I must get on to the positive side of
chairmen, and here I find myself embarrassed with riches. Strangely
enough, one of the very last lectures I gave was embittered by an
unwise chairman, who should have known better, since he was the pastor
of the chapel where the lecture was given. My host, who lived near, had
invited a wealthy friend to join us in the drive to the chapel--it was
a bitterly cold, foggy night--and on arrival I was asked at what time
the carriage should call for us, so as not to keep the coachman or the
horse waiting in such inclement weather. Of course I said 9.40, the
lecture being announced to begin at eight, and the coachman drove away.

Right here I find that I was just about to do a very worthy gentleman
a grave injustice. My chairman was his worship the Mayor, but his
functions were usurped by the parson, who led us on to the platform.
The proceedings were opened by the parson giving out a long hymn,
which was sung right through. Then followed a prayer, which lasted
twelve minutes. Then another hymn was sung, and on its completion the
pastor gave us an address about nothing in particular, but really, I
think, for the pleasure of hearing himself speak. After ten minutes
of this he introduced the chairman, who was commendably brief, but
still occupied another five minutes. Then we sang another long hymn,
after which that irrepressible parson introduced me with a great deal
of tiresome eulogy. Eventually I faced the audience at 8.40, the forty
minutes having been worse than wasted, for I was fretted almost beyond
endurance, and so, I am sure, were many of the audience. I did my best
to hurry through the lecture, but with the best will in the world
it was 10.5 when I had finished. I am glad to say that I protested
to the parson, in the interests of the next lecturer, but he only
seemed surprised that anyone should object to what he considered were
essential preliminaries. What my host and his guest said I leave to the
imagination, my host being especially angry because of his coachman and
valuable horse, condemned to endure that bitter fog for over half an
hour to no purpose whatever.

Still, I suppose I must be grateful for small mercies in this case,
for, owing to the Mayor saying that he must needs leave, we were
spared what I am sure would otherwise have been another half-hour’s
piffle, my undaunted parson being fully wound up to make three or four
speeches more. On other occasions I have not been so fortunate. I
have always tried my utmost to keep within the limits of an hour and
a half, believing, as I firmly do, that more than that must bore an
audience, besides rendering some of them liable to lose their trains in
many cases. But alas! I have often found that the persons responsible
for the lecture seemed to have no account of time or thought for
anybody’s convenience, much less comfort. One such occasion I remember
with considerable bitterness. The hall was immense, seating over two
thousand on one floor, and at the back the people’s heads touched
the ceiling. It was not ventilated at all, and packed with people,
and as many of them had been in their places since 7.30, it may be
imagined that the air was pretty thick when I marched on the platform,
escorted by eight of the committee. No time was lost by the chairman in
getting to work, but he had not been speaking for two minutes before I
recognised what I was in for.

I have not the least idea what his speech was about, except that it
had nothing to do with my lecture or lecturing in the abstract. After
about ten minutes of it the audience began to signify their uneasiness
by shuffling their feet, clapping and an occasional “sit down.” The
chairman, however, held steadily on, raising his voice, as it became
necessary, to make it heard above the growing hubbub, until at last
there was a veritable pandemonium of noise, and he had to stop. But he
waited only until the noise subsided, and then cried:

“Ye can mak’ all the noise ye’re a mind to. Ah’m goin’ ta deliver ma
speech if Ah stand here a’ neet.”

Well! One would have thought Bedlam had broken loose. The uproar was
terrific. I began to wonder what _was_ going to happen. But though I
hated that chairman violently, I could not help admiring him for his
pluck and tenacity. Every one of the seven committee men begged him to
sit down, but in vain, and at last, by sheer force of will and lung
power, he did finish his speech, at 8.25. It was a fine exhibition of
pertinacity, but it did me no good, for I was in momentary dread that
the platform would be stormed, so furious had the audience become. But
it was nothing short of wonderful to see how, directly the chairman
had retired, every one settled down in perfect quiet. I could not have
wished for a better hearing. But as soon as I had finished, which I did
at ten o’clock, the hall began to empty with much noise of scuffling
and chatter. That made no sort of difference to the committee. The
chairman at some length called upon Mr. So-and-so to propose a vote
of thanks to the lecturer. Eagerly Mr. So-and-so responded, also at
some length, and when he had resumed his seat the chairman called upon
Mr. Thingumy to second the motion. More speech--I may say that owing
to the hubbub in the hall and the “hushing” of the committee, not a
word of these addresses was heard, not that it seemed to matter to the
speakers--and when the seconder had finished, the motion was put in due
form, declared carried, and I was informed that the meeting unanimously
thanked me for my address.

I merely bowed. I could not trust myself to speak, for fear of
prolonging the proceedings. By now the hall was nearly empty, but still
the dreary business went on--the chairman and lanternist had to be
thanked, and, of course, the speaker could not be expected to curtail
the speech he had waited so long to deliver. And so the long evening
wore on until at 10.45 I emerged from the building, thoroughly weary,
and feeling that I had well earned my fee. To many people I know that
what I have stated will appear incredible, but I have no interest in
stating untruths, even if I would do so, and I hope that no one will
think me capable of so doing.

One quaint experience brings a smile even now, although I doubt very
much if the chief performer saw any fun in the matter, and I am sure
I hope that he was none the worse. Everything was very nice indeed as
regards the preliminaries, and I quite fraternised with the secretary,
a charming man. But as we were waiting for the chairman he said:

“I ought to warn you, Mr. Bullen, that our chairman is inclined to be a
little long-winded. He can’t speak for nuts, but he’s the mainstay of
the society, and most generous, and as all he expects in return is that
he shall be chairman, we can’t very well refuse. But I’ll own that he’s
a bit of a trial sometimes. Still, you’ll overlook that, won’t you,
seeing matters are as I tell you?”

I readily assented, more especially when the chairman came in, and I
was introduced to him. He was a fine soldierly-looking man, of about
sixty-five, I should judge, and though he spoke little, what he did say
was full of sense and to the point. Moreover, it was easy to see that
he had the welfare of the Lecture Society very much at heart, and was
anxious above all things that it should be a success. I was greatly
taken with him, so much so, indeed, that I began to feel sure that the
secretary was pulling my leg--it seemed impossible that such a man as
the chairman seemed to be could be as foolish as the secretary’s words
implied. However, eight o’clock struck, and we went on the platform, to
the usual accompaniment of applause, to which I bowed and sat down.

The chairman then advanced to the front of the platform, and began
the most extraordinary speech to which I have ever listened. I was
petrified with astonishment, for the man seemed in some mysterious
way to have changed. He gave utterance to an incoherent jumble of
words, that made me feel dizzy with my attempts to get a clue to their
meaning. Not for long, because I soon concluded that there was no
meaning, but that left other things entirely unexplained. Evidently
the audience were well used to him, for they sat quite still as he
rambled on, obviously prepared to endure him as long as they could.
And then another fact became evident: not only could the poor man only
talk nonsense, but he could not find a place to leave off. And I began
to worry myself seriously as the hands of the clock stole round, and
still the flood of fortuitous words rolled on.

Then I noticed that the lights were being turned out. The hall was lit
by large arc lamps, in pairs, and some unseen friend was switching
them off two by two, until only two were left, and they were in
such a position that the platform was nearly dark. And suddenly the
chairman disappeared! He had fallen off the platform! And the audience
applauded frantically, as if it had been a well-rehearsed effect
most successfully performed. But, stranger still, the unseen friend
switched off the remaining lights, the lanternist flashed on the first
picture, and I plunged into my lecture. I never was listened to with
more attention, nor have I ever been more appreciated, and the end of
the lecture came with a suddenness that surprised me. But there were
no votes of thanks, for--I never saw the chairman again. Nor to this
day do I know whether his sudden descent from the platform injured him
or not, for on my return to the anteroom, fully prepared to condole
or excuse, whatever, in fact, seemed indicated, not a word was said
by the secretary about the occurrence at all. Not that there was any
awkwardness or stiffness about our intercourse, the matter simply
wasn’t mentioned, that was all. But to this day it strikes me as the
funniest as well as the most dramatic ending to a chairman’s speech I
ever heard of or experienced.

But in this case I was warned, and consequently I did not feel at
all annoyed or worried. There was an occasion, not so very long ago,
though, when I was both, because in addition to what I suffered, the
chairman had previously assured me that he knew nothing about the
business, that it was his first time of officiating, and he begged me
to tell him just what he should do. I gave him a very candid outline of
what I considered to be the duties of a chairman, and he promised me
fervently that he would follow my directions implicitly, thanking me
heartily for what he was pleased to call my kindness. So I felt very
satisfied as I whispered to my host, the pastor of the chapel, what had
happened.

It is not, therefore, easy to judge of my disgust and annoyance when
after an opening that was a model of what a chairman’s address should
be, this worthy man slid into an anecdote about his one and only
voyage, which had neither point nor wit nor moral, and took twenty-five
minutes in the telling. After which the usual wicked insult about not
standing between the audience and the lecturer because they all wanted
to hear what Mr. Bullen had to tell them. Then the miscreant sat down,
at 8.30, and I got up, boiling with indignation, and extremely hard put
to it to refrain from telling them that it was impossible for me to go
on now. Only my strong sense of justice enabled me to act upon what I
always felt to be right, a refusal to punish all the audience for the
offence of one man.

By the time the lecture was finished I had recovered my equanimity, and
was quite prepared for a long and dreary period of moving, seconding
and carrying votes of thanks. But I was not in the least prepared to
hear my host, the parson, in moving the vote of thanks, include the
chairman, and make a long eulogy of the delightful and most interesting
reminiscence they had all enjoyed from the chairman! So now they were
doubly indebted to him, not merely for presiding at that gathering, but
for giving them so dramatic, so entertaining, so perfectly charming
a description of his own experiences, and he, the parson, earnestly
trusted that he, the chairman, would favour them again at the earliest
opportunity. Of course after that the chairman could do no less than
make another long, rambling speech, in the course of which he repeated
himself six times, and I sat simmering. I had acknowledged the vote
by a bow, I could not trust myself to speak, but as soon as I got the
parson by himself I asked him point-blank what on earth he could have
meant by what he said. His reply was somewhat incoherent, but the gist
of it was that the goodwill of the chairman was important to their
little community, while I didn’t matter. They might, and probably would
never see me again, and anyhow it was of no consequence what I thought.
He put it much nicer than that, but that was the sense of it, and I
could not help acknowledging the force of his contention. So we will
leave it at that.

Here it suddenly occurs to me that some folks will suppose that because
of the few cranks I have endeavoured to sketch, my experiences of
chairmen have been almost uniformly unpleasant. Now nothing could
well be further from the truth. The chairmen whom I have had the good
fortune to meet and to appear on the platform with have been with very
few exceptions gentlemen with a perfect conception of their duties to
the audience and the lecturer, and it has fairly often fallen to my lot
to enjoy the chairman’s speech so thoroughly that I have been sorry
when he has left off. But I suppose that only throws into higher relief
the few cranks about whom I am writing. At any rate, having made my
point clear, I hope, I will give a few more instances of chairmen who
have made me wish them (or myself) elsewhere.

One gentleman in particular I remember who made me feel desperately
uncomfortable, although I am sure that his intentions were as
benevolent as he knew how to make them. He told the intent audience
such things about me as made me go hot and cold all over. If he could
have been believed, I ought never to have been sitting upon that
platform, but enstatued in gold and set upon high, clear for all men
to see and take pattern by. I was the fine flower not only of a
blameless, strenuous and overcoming life, but the quintessence of the
best of the age. Never but once have I had to listen to such encomia
upon myself, and that was at second-hand in a theological college
near Gisborne, New Zealand. A Maori student orated at me, and one of
his fellows translated. But that was not so bad, for somehow we all
understood that at least ninety per cent must be deducted for rhetoric.
This Englishman, however, speaking of me--me who sat suffering there
by his side--ransacked all his obviously great reading for tropes and
metaphors wherewith to enrich his eulogy of me, with the net result
that I never felt more exquisitely uncomfortable.

When at last he had concluded, and I stood up to address my auditors, I
began by bewailing not merely my inability to justify the praises of me
they had heard, but that of any son of Adam to do so. Yet as nothing on
earth is evil unmixed, I had derived some benefit from the exceedingly
severe trial through which I had passed, in that I had learned that it
was still in my power to blush and feel uneasy at undeserved praise.
This was well worth a little inconvenience to learn, for already I
had heard as much flattery as any ordinary person could swallow, and
had hardly turned a hair. I suppose the long years of buffeting and
contumely through which I had passed--for I was over forty years of age
before I ever got any praise for anything--had made that sweet incense
almost savourless to me when it did come. At any rate, I can safely say
that I was so toughened against it that it did me very little harm. I
never grew to look for it as my due, and feel slighted if it were not
paid.

But this chapter is growing to an inordinate length, and I must, for
the sake of appearances, commence a new one, although it will still be
upon the topic of chairmen. But I hope in the next chapter to mingle
a good deal of praise with what has perhaps appeared like censure or
at least sarcasm. It is not really, for I am fully convinced that each
of the gentlemen I have described did his level best to fulfil what he
conceived to be his duty, and it was only because he had somehow got a
wrong idea of what that duty was that he made such obvious blunders.




CHAPTER XII

CHAIRMEN--_continued_


Only my fixed determination to avoid mentioning names prevents me from
giving the title of a noble chairman who filled that office for me in a
certain country town. Those of my late colleagues who do me the honour
to read these lines will quite understand what I mean when I say that
I had not the least idea, although I saw his name on the bills, that
the chairman would appear. The trick is a very old one, and so often
practised that it ceases to surprise. A good name brings the people,
and an apology for his _unavoidable_ absence and inability to keep his
engagement from some well-known substitute always seems to go down.
Therefore I was considerably astonished when the noble individual
arrived punctually, accompanied by his lady. He made a most charming
introductory speech, lasting barely ten minutes, during which he said
many pleasant things, but more especially made it evident that he had
carefully read my books, and so got up the subject on which I was to
lecture. And after the lecture was over he made another little speech,
to which I listened with extreme pleasure. In fact, I have rarely
enjoyed anything more than I did this noble gentleman’s two addresses,
so free were they from fulsome adulation on the one hand, and offensive
patronage on the other.

By way of contrast I recall a most unpleasant experience I had in a
Congregational church of all places. Now most of my lectures have been
given in connection with Nonconformist places of worship, and except
that they are rather given to lengthy proceedings at the end, when
everybody wants to get away, the lecturer most of all, I must say I
have always enjoyed them very much--especially Congregationalists.
Some of the other denominations are a bit inclined to be narrow
(though that is really personal), but I have always found among the
Congregationalists a broadness of toleration and outlook that is very
pleasant. It is no easy matter, then, to judge of my surprise when
during my lecture at this particular church of which I am speaking,
my chairman, who was the pastor, suddenly sprang to his feet and
flatly contradicted something I had said. The funny part was that it
was really a quotation I made, and the utterance of the chairman was:
“Professor So-and-so never said anything of the kind!”

This sudden outburst placed one in a grave difficulty. I had never
had a similar experience, and I, of course, did not carry books with
me to prove the correctness of my memory. For a few seconds there was
an utter silence and considerable nervous tension. Then I said very
quietly and distinctly:

“Perhaps the best thing to do under the circumstances, Mr. Chairman,
will be to allow the lecture to proceed, and at its close I will
endeavour to justify any statements I have made, and answer any of your
questions.”

The chairman just bobbed up and apologised, saying that he had
forgotten himself, and I proceeded. But at the close of the lecture,
though I professed my willingness to go freely into the matter, there
was no challenging word spoken by the chairman or anyone else, and the
matter then dropped, as they say in the House of Lords. But I have
often wondered since how far the chairman of a lecture is justified in
thus interrupting the lecturer, even when his knowledge of the subject
is far greater than that of the speaker. In this case it certainly was
not so, but the chairman was fanatic upon the subject of evolution, and
he was afraid that I was trying to teach evolution to his congregation
by a side-wind.

I had a great deal of fun out of one chairman, who was also my host, a
rough jewel, if ever there was one. It was in one of the dingy, dreary
Lancashire manufacturing towns, and my host was the Mayor as well as
being the biggest mill-owner in the place. He had risen literally from
the ranks, and his speech was hardly intelligible to me; also his
house, which was small, was so crammed with incongruous rubbish as to
be almost uninhabitable, while he and his good wife spoke their minds
to me and each other with a frankness that took a little getting used
to, as they say.

They were mightily amused at me, principally at my very small appetite.
Their table was loaded at meal-times with the most solid food, and I
specially remember the hot buttered toast, the hot, greasy cakes, the
great dish of fried fish at tea-time, the very thought of that mountain
of food gives me indigestion. That, however, is not the point. On the
day of my lecture the weather was very bad, and as the time approached
for us to go, the rain increased, until it was a regular tropical
downpour. His Worship’s carriage was at the door, and we scurried into
it, very nearly getting drenched in the passage. As soon as we had
started I said to his Worship: “It’s almost a pity to leave home, isn’t
it? There cannot be anybody there on a night like this.”

“They’ll be all there,” he replied sententiously. “The ’all’ll be full,
you’ll see. We don’t mind th’ weather up ’ere.”

I cannot hope to reproduce his Lancashire dialect, so do not try.
Indeed, it would be impossible, for most of the time he was quite
unintelligible to me, and I had previously prided myself on my ability,
not merely to pick up languages, but to assimilate any dialect of my
own tongue. Nothing more was said between us, and we duly arrived at
the hall, when his Worship at once asked the official who met us at the
side door if the audience were in their places, and was answered by a
laconic “Ay!” We entered the anteroom on the stroke of eight, and, to
my amazement as well as amusement, an official came forward with the
mayoral robes and insignia of office--very imposing and massive they
were too. Truly his Worship looked a gallant figure as he stalked on to
the platform, and I felt quite insignificant beside him in my evening
dress.

A great shout of welcome went up from the audience at which I bowed,
but his Worship stood stiffly erect, and then, taking my seat, I stared
with utter astonishment at the sight before me. The great hall was
packed from end to end, even to the standing room, and there was quite
a haze hanging over them, from the heat acting on their wet clothes.
Some one, I forget who, had told me that many of them had been in their
places since seven o’clock, and as I looked at them I felt full of
pity, for I thought how dull and drab their lives must be for them to
crowd like this to a lecture. There can be little else here to amuse
them.

But my chairman began to speak, and I listened with strained attention,
for, indeed, I had a difficulty in gathering the purport of what he
said. Presently it dawned upon me, though, that he was telling them
how interested he was in the lecture that was to come, because it was
on the subject of the catching of whales, and whale-oil was of so much
importance in his business of spinning. So far all was well, but now he
began to tell that audience, nearly all of whom were employed in his
mills, what whale-oil was used for, and how it was used. In fact, he
delivered a lecture on the subject, which did not conclude until 8.25;
and even then he only reluctantly made way for me. No doubt he knew his
subject thoroughly, and as time did not matter, I felt much entertained.

It was quite a pleasant experience, take it all round, but I had
another surprise the next morning. Coming down at eight, and entering
the morning-room, I saw there in conversation with my host a man whom
I should certainly have taken for the lowest kind of tramp, had I met
him on the road. Eccentricities in dress, I hope, make no difference
to me, poor clothes have been my own wear for many years, for while at
sea I often patched my raiment, until, as Jack said, “you couldn’t tell
which was the standing part,” and still I say that this man’s bodily
coverings were an offence to me. He hurt the eyes, he looked so dirty,
so unkempt, so regardless of all the decencies, cleanliness among them.
And he had on a pair of awful old boots, shapeless trotter cases, which
were unlaced, and into which the ends of his ragged trousers were
half-tucked, as if he had shuffled into them on tumbling out of his
lair, and had never thought of them since.

Seeing me come in, my host gave me a cheery good morning, and waving a
hand towards the nondescript, said:

“My brother Ben. He’s my manager down at th’ mills.”

Brother Ben muttered something I could not understand, finished his
colloquy with his brother, and went away, not being asked to stay to
breakfast. I have since heard that the two brothers possessed very
little short of a quarter of a million of money, and I have often
wondered what they did with it, or what good it was to them, or anybody
else. I saw no young people about the house, so I assume that there
were no children. But I don’t know. A lady who was my hostess in a
village near Bradford showed me a house and mill, and told me that
the owner had been a mill-hand, was now worth (as we say) nearly half
a million, and had three sons and two daughters, all of whom he made
work in the mill for wages. They wore the usual mill-hand’s dress, with
clogs, and lived in the basement of the fine house, as they had always
been accustomed to do, never spending or giving a penny towards the
gracious, gentle things of life. My host was much better than that, but
I don’t think he had any children.

Perhaps the most extraordinary experience I have ever had with a
chairman was at Christmastide a few years ago. I am very anxious to
give no clue to either the name of the gentleman nor the place, for I
would be deeply grieved to give him a moment’s pain, recognising as I
do how whole-souled and heartily he gave himself and his means for what
he considered the highest interests of his fellow men and women. So
I will only say that in that period of rest which lecturers usually
enjoy between the middle of December and the middle of January, I
received a letter, asking me what my fee would be to deliver a lecture
at a place about 450 miles distant, on a night shortly after Christmas,
beginning about 10 p.m. I had worked very hard that season, and did not
want to go at all, but, of course, I could not send a blunt refusal.
But I said that I was tired, it was my only period for rest, and that
if I came I should want twenty guineas for my lecture, and first-class
return fare. And I dismissed the matter from my mind with the posting
of my reply, for I never dreamed that such terms would be considered
for a moment.

My surprise, then, may be faintly imagined when I received a telegram
the next day, “Please come on date, specified terms agreed.” There
was now nothing to do but go, and go I did. On arrival at the place
it was evident at once that I was only one item in a long programme,
and my chairman was, at tremendous expense to his mental and physical
tissue, keeping the whole thing going. It was 10.45 p.m. before my turn
began, and it lasted exactly half an hour. For the mixed audience was
almost worn out, and many of them were over-fed as well. I afterwards
heard that the efforts to amuse them had been carried on continuously
from 8 p.m., the only stipulation being that none of them should leave
before midnight. I make no comment whatever on the wisdom or otherwise
of this stupendous altruistic effort; I can only hint at it, as I
am doing; but think of it for a moment, four hours of miscellaneous
entertainment, varied by eating and drinking tea, coffee and mineral
waters! I have seldom seen a man more weary than the host was--poor
fellow, he had lavished himself for what he felt was a good cause, and
as for the money--that was a mere detail, for he was a millionaire.
It is only now that I remember that I have not once alluded to his
efforts as a chairman. Well, he was as near my ideal as can be, but
such was the condition of the audience that, in spite of his lucid
little introduction, I am firmly convinced that the great majority of
them had not the least idea what to expect of me, did not in the least
know whether I was a conjurer or a vocalist or a politician. And, as
somebody said, it didn’t matter, anyhow, his great end was achieved if
he kept the people off the streets on that particular night, and if his
lavish expenditure in order to instruct as well as amuse them seemed
wasteful--well, it hardly mattered.

I will close these chairman reminiscences on a high note, one of the
pleasantest recollections of my life, as well as one of the greatest
privileges I ever enjoyed. In the summer of 1899 I was privileged to
act as special correspondent for a London newspaper on board H.M.S.
_Mars_ during the summer manœuvres, and I spent then the jolliest time
of my life. Towards the close of the manœuvres, however, things got
a bit tedious, and during some golden days we lay (the hostile fleet,
that is) somewhere off the Biscayan coast on a sleeping sea, awaiting
some orders or some development that never came. In order that the men
should not feel any lack of interest, much was done to amuse them, or
to help them amuse themselves in the way of athletic sports, etc., and
one morning Captain May asked me whether I would oblige him by giving
the crew a lecture.

Now I had never lectured before without my slides, and I need not say
how difficult such a task appeared to me, but I had not got them with
me, and I could not refuse a request so kindly made; so I at once
agreed, and was very graciously thanked. I may say that I was assured
that if I had brought my slides with me, the absence of the lantern
would have been no hindrance, for one would have been invented and
fixed up somehow. And I am perfectly sure from what I know of the naval
man that this feat would have been performed. However, I did not tax
their ingenuity so far, and with the customary promptitude the lecture
was fixed to come off that same evening.

Coming on deck after dinner, I was surprised to see in the middle of
the broad quarter-deck a high platform rigged and draped with bunting,
backed by the Union Jack. Right across the front of it chairs were
placed for the officers, and behind them, stretching far away to the
rear, rows and rows of mess benches neatly arrayed. A brief command,
a short bugle call, and with the muffled thunder of hundreds of bare
feet, my audience assembled, took their seats, and lit their tobacco.
Amidst perfect silence Captain May mounted the platform, and introduced
me in a brief speech which filled me with the deepest glow of pride and
humble gratitude I have ever felt. Of course, I cannot reproduce it,
but every syllable is indelibly printed on my heart, the more because
that good friend and brave man passed away not very long after.

Then, amidst a deep thunder of applause, I mounted the platform. But
for at least a minute I was unable to speak. The magnificence of the
whole scene overwhelmed me. I looked down upon nearly 800 young men,
the fine flower of our race, whose shrewd, strong faces looked keenly
expectant, but all kindly towards me. I looked around at the mighty
ship in all her beauty of strength and cleanliness, upon her seven
gigantic sisters lying motionless in their exact stations near, at the
soft splendours of the evening sky, and silken, many-coloured sea, and
I felt truly that, although such a moment comes to a man but once in
his lifetime, he cannot then appreciate all its wonders.

I did not attempt to lecture. I just fell back upon the well-known
vernacular, and talked pure sailor, giving them all the yarns in my
budget that were appropriate. And the time allotted me--an hour and
a half--sped like a dream, punctuated by laughter and applause as
generous and as full as only the handy man can give. And as soon as
I had finished uprose the stately figure of the commander, giving in
trumpet tones the formula to which I have so often listened in the
public schools:

“Three cheers for Mr. Bullen!”

I cannot say any more, except that the thunder of those cheers will
echo in my ears until my dying day. They had hardly died away when my
audience disappeared, mess benches and all, and the disciplined routine
of the great ship resumed its course. The sequel, however, remains to
be told, for it gives a keen insight to the tone of the navy man for
his joke. As was my practice, I went on the navigating bridge next
morning to glance at the signal log and greet the watch-keeper. The
chief yeoman of signals, always a very able man, saluted me, and asked
casually:

“Do you happen to know the ship’s steward, sir?”

“No, Flags,” I replied, “I can’t say I do. I know him by sight, but
that’s all.”

“Ah, well,” Flags rejoined, “he’s a funny man, but a great chum o’
mine. Last night, as we was a-goin’ down from the lecture, he says to
me, ‘Flags, from ’enceforth I regard you as a perfectly truthful man.’
I may as well say, sir, that I’ve ’itherto ’ad the reputation of bein’
the biggest liar in the fleet.”

And it was not until some time afterwards that I fully appreciated the
somewhat oblique compliment.




CHAPTER XIII

LANTERNISTS


Now while it is perfectly true that I have never given my lanternist
any trouble, and that all my slides are perfectly simple, and that I
never have any of them repeated, I do not for one moment suggest that
this is the reason why I have been so very fortunate in my experiences
of lantern operators. Only on the rarest of occasions have I had
any trouble, for which I am, I hope, duly grateful, for of all the
disconcerting things that can occur to a lecturer, I think anything
happening to his pictures through the incompetence of the lanternist
is about the worst. True, I have always had much sympathy with my
operators, looking upon them as very able men, who do a lot of hard
work for a very small fee, and whenever a picture has been put on
wrong, I have always, in asking the operator to change it, told the
audience that the mishap was my own fault, except on one occasion,
which you shall hear about.

I was to lecture in the Town Hall of a large town in the North of
England, and my most charming and agreeable host was chairman. Just
before we left the house for the hall he said to me gaily:

“We’ve got you a splendid lanternist. The last one wasn’t a success,
but this new one is super-excellent, I am told, and I am sure you’ll
find him so.”

I replied nonchalantly, for I was not accustomed to have any trouble,
and didn’t see why I should begin now. So on interviewing the
much-extolled lanternist I merely showed him which end of the box to
begin, told him that the slides were all upside down and faces forward,
and arranged the signal--all as usual. Then I thought no more about the
matter, but at the appointed time faced a very large and enthusiastic
audience, and after the chairman’s brief introduction plunged into my
subject. In time-honoured phrase, all went well until the fourth slide,
which should have been about the twentieth, and was, besides, upside
down. In a subdued tone I asked the lanternist to give me the next
slide, hoping that this inopportune appearance was just an accident,
probably an oversight of my own. Alas! no, the next slide was from
another part of the box, and was, moreover, on its side. Begging the
audience to bear with me a moment, I leapt off the platform, and ran to
the lantern--to find the lanternist stupid with drink, and my slides
mixed up in most gruesome fashion.

The sweat poured off me as I hurriedly replaced them in order, then
begging the operator to put them in just as I had left them, I regained
the stage, and was greeted with a hearty round of applause. I picked
up the thread of my discourse at once, and four slides succeeded each
other properly. Then chaos came again. Again I asked the audience
to excuse me, again I visited the lanternist. I found the slides
all jumbled up as before, and to add to my trouble, when I asked
indignantly what he was doing, he replied sturdily that he was putting
them in the carrier just as I gave them into his hands.

Well, that was a lecture, to be sure. Fortunately I did not lose my
temper or my head, and the audience rose to the occasion, treating
the whole business as a huge joke. Five times did I go down to that
lantern, and rearrange those slides, and always after the first one
or two placed correctly, the jumble would begin again. At last, with
the audience almost in hysterics, I gave up all hope of getting
anything shown that I wanted, and treated the rest of the lecture in
a go-as-you-please fashion, making as many jokes as I could, until I
found that the used pictures began to appear again, and, of course,
that meant a sort of circular arrangement which would not end. So,
finding that the time was up, I appealed to the man in charge of the
lights to turn them up, and, disregarding the lanternist altogether,
wound up with the audience rocking and shouting with laughter.

The chairman was as bad as the rest, so there were no votes of thanks,
and, still laughing, the crowd dispersed. Feeling utterly done up and
wet through with sweat, I made my way to the anteroom, where I was
received with great gusto by the committee, the chairman especially,
who said:

“Well, Mr. Bullen, we have never had a lecture before that we have
enjoyed so much. I have laughed until I am sore all over. And yet it
didn’t seem to be a funny subject.”

“I congratulate you,” I replied, “but as far as I am concerned it would
take a very few more of such lectures to be the death of me. I haven’t
a dry thread on me, and I feel as if I had been fighting for my life. I
can only hope that when the next lecturer comes you will endeavour to
see that the lanternist is sober. It is not at all just to the lecturer
to have such a burden thrown upon him as I have supported this evening.”

It is hardly credible, but, nevertheless, a curious tribute to
my ability in hiding the lanternist’s delinquencies, that all of
them disclaimed any idea that there had been anything wrong with
the lanternist, nor did a sudden searching aroma of whisky as that
individual brought my slides in enlighten them. Of course he had left
the last slide in the carrier, but that was only to be expected. What
I did not expect was a sudden coolness on the part of the committee
towards me after my statement, and I was never invited to that society
again.

An extraordinary thing befell me once at St. George’s Hall, London, on
a Sunday afternoon, showing how a little carelessness on the part of
an experienced man may cause much trouble. Those lectures were very
well paid, well patronised, and limited to an hour, which allowed
of no time being cut to waste. So I went ahead at my best, and was
three-parts through my address when the light went out. Having had
similar things happen to me before, I went on talking, thinking that a
picture would soon reappear, but the darkness remained, so I presently
stopped my address and asked the lanternist how long it would be before
the next picture came on.

“There’s no more gas!” he replied in hollow tones.

I will not repeat what I said when the lights were turned up, but it
was in the nature of condolence with the audience, and indignation
that for the sake of sixpennyworth of gas the lecture should have been
spoiled. For that was what it amounted to. The lanternist had brought
a partially emptied cylinder with him, the gauge of which indicated
barely enough gas for an hour’s work. A little waste for practice
reduced that, so that three-quarters of an hour finished it, and we
all had the mortification of being deprived of the sight of a dozen
pictures, and of feeling that we had been defrauded by an unfinished
lecture.

What would otherwise have been a very awkward business was put right by
the promptitude and ability of a friend of mine, Mr. Charles Hoddle,
who was among the audience, being my host for the night, and having
motored me over. It was at a chapel, and after the usual preliminaries
the lights were turned down, and--the first picture did not appear. In
answer to a confused murmur from the gallery where the lantern was, I
made some cheerful joking remark to the audience, and went on with the
lecture. Three times I stopped and ventured an enquiry if the picture
would appear now, and at last, feeling that if my patience wasn’t
exhausted, that of the audience was, I said:

“I wish you would let me know whether we are going to have any pictures
or not, because, if not, we’ll have the lights turned up.”

A voice, with tears in it, feebly exclaimed in the gloom:

“I’m very sorry, sir, I can’t get it to go anyhow. I’ve tried my very
best, but I----”

A great roar of laughter extinguished his voice, and I was just about
to ask my friend Hoddle if he could help us, when I saw him stealing
away from his seat in the gloom. In less than three minutes the picture
appeared, and there was no further trouble. Mr. Hoddle did tell me what
the trouble was, but I have forgotten, and it doesn’t matter, anyhow.
But I was never more grateful for the presence and help of a man with
presence of mind and who knew the business thoroughly.

What might have been a terrific disaster occasioned by the inexperience
of a lanternist was only just averted by a hair’s-breadth at one of
my lectures in Sydney, N.S.W. It was at the Lyceum Theatre, in Pitt
Street, a fine house, but very badly off for exits. In fact, the whole
of the great gallery, by far the largest part of the house, emptied
through the one door down a steep flight of steps into the very busy
but narrow thoroughfare of Pitt Street. It was an electric lantern,
a form of lighting for this purpose that I detest unless there are
certain arrangements made for keeping the slides cool. This is easily
done, as witness the safe and easy handling of cinematograph films,
which used to be highly inflammable, and yet very rarely ignited, as
they certainly would have done with an unadapted electric lantern.

It was the opening night of my season in Sydney, and the lanternist
was engaged from one of the best houses in the place, so that I had
a right to expect the best manipulation. Especially when the price
paid was considered. As soon as I began my lecture however, I saw that
something was wrong. As each slide came on it cracked, peeled, and was
destroyed, the sight of the process going on on the screen being a most
disquieting one for me. Still, I did not see what I could do without
alarming the audience and spoiling the show, so I saw six or seven
slides burn up one after another. Then I was just about to protest in
vigorous language against such wholesale destruction as I had never
seen before, when I noticed that the lanternist was in dire trouble.
Dense smoke was beginning to rise from the lantern, and even as I
looked the smoke burst into flame. People rose in their seats, and
looked with great anxiety towards the lantern and the door. There was a
general uneasy stir when the electrician, bless him, turned the lights
up, and I, raising my voice, said:

“Don’t mind the lanternist, friends, he’s in a bit of trouble. It’s all
right, if you’ll just sit quietly, and take no notice of him. I’ll go
on with the lecture, we can manage for a while without the pictures.”
And so we did; in fact we had to do without them pretty much altogether
for the rest of the evening, for that lantern was fairly used up. But I
am thankful to say that nothing worse occurred, and the lecture closed
in peace. After it was over, however, I told my agent that something
must be done about that lantern. I would not face the possibility of
another mishap of the same kind for all the expected receipts of the
tour. Besides, I could not afford to lose the slides, as I only had one
set of duplicates, and I carried no negatives.

So that matter was attended to, and all was well, as I fondly thought.
But next night, when I arrived at the theatre, the dismissed lanternist
was there, raising no end of a bobbery and threatening everybody
concerned with all sorts of dire revenge if he were not reinstated. He
had been a lanternist for so many years, and no one had ever found any
fault with him before, and so on, and so on. Finally he worked himself
up into a mad rage, and we were obliged to send for the police to
remove him. On their appearance he cooled down at once, and we saw that
it was only bluff on his part. Still, a watchful eye was kept upon him,
and we were not further molested. Neither was there any more trouble
with the lantern.

Away back at the beginning of my lecturing experiences, before I had
thought of lecturing as a source of income, I had conceived the idea of
giving a lecture at our little hall, the converted cowshed at Peckham,
which the irreverent called Troy Town Cathedral. It was a great effort
in which all our little band took part, and we proposed to have a
collection, which might, or more probably would not, pay for the gas.
A neighbouring chapel very graciously lent us a lantern, a magnificent
tri-unial, and our genial little chimney-sweep superintendent assured
us that he was a perfect lanternist. Ascertaining that twelve feet
of gas would be ample for a two hours’ show, I went to Brins’, in
Horseferry Road, purchased a cylinder of that size, and with great
pains conveyed it to the hall. We hired a blind organist who was
a street musician but had a wonderful repertoire of sacred music
and a very nice organ flutina, to be our orchestra, and issued our
invitations.

The honorary lanternist and his friends were well on time, and got
all the gear fixed up, so that when I arrived all was ready for the
pictures. And the audience turned up in very satisfactory numbers.
So far everything was splendid, and I commenced my address with great
confidence, getting everybody’s attention from the commencement. But at
the third slide I noticed that the light was so poor that the outlines
of the picture could not be seen, and the following colloquy between
the lanternist and myself ensued:

“Can’t you give us a little better light, Tommy?”

“I can’t, bruvver. I’ve tried all manner of ways, an’ I can’t get it no
better. I don’t know what can be the matter wi’ it.”

“Well, if the pictures can’t be seen, I can’t go on,” I argued. “It’s
no use me attempting to explain without the pictures.”

There was a hideous pause, which was improved by the organist softly
improvising, until suddenly the lanternist cried, with a despairing
note in his voice:

“There’s no more gas, that’s what’s the matter. I thought there was
some’ink wrong.”

“But twelve feet of gas ought to last two hours,” I protested.

“I don’t know anyfink about that, I only know there ain’t no more ’ere.
An’ that’s all there is about it.”

Voice from the audience: “Go on with the yarn, governor, never mind the
pictures. They’ll do another time.”

After explaining my difficulty at some length I did try and “go on
with the yarn”; but it was a poor attempt, for I had looked to the
pictures as a series of notes, in fact I had entirely relied upon them,
and I had not had sufficient experience to teach me how to do without
them. So I am afraid the lecture was a very poor thing indeed--and if
the collection was anything to go by, it was so--for the total amount
realised was one shilling and fourpence halfpenny.

As soon as the audience had gone an enquiry was held among ourselves as
to why the gas had given out. Apparently it still remained a mystery,
or the blame was put upon Brins Oxygen Company. But I knew full well,
and so did several of the others, I am sure, that the gas had all
been used in practising, owing to the inexperience of our lanternist.
So effective steps were taken to secure an operator of skill and
experience for our next attempt, and the trouble never occurred again.

I think when the few examples of incompetence that I have given are
remembered, and that they are all that I have had experience of during
a lecture period of sixteen or seventeen years, the conclusion must
be arrived at that my encomium upon lanternists is fully justified,
and that I have solid foundation for offering them my gratitude. But I
must add one more instance of trouble, not at all through incompetence,
but incredible folly, which occurred to me some years ago in a
large northern town. The secretary of the society for which I was to
lecture met me upon arrival at the station, and accompanied me to the
hotel where he had engaged a room for me, as hospitality had not been
offered. When he had seen me comfortably installed he left me, but just
as he was going he asked me for my slides, telling me that he had to
pass the hall on his way home, and he would leave them there. Now I
had never hitherto been parted from my slides like that, and did not
at all see the necessity, but a foolish dislike to appear distrustful
of him overcame my reluctance, and I allowed him to take them away. I
warned him, however, that they were all in order for use, and that he
was to tell the operator so, as well as that when I came I would myself
explain which end of the box I wished him to take first. It was also
arranged that the secretary should call for me and conduct me to the
hall shortly before eight.

In due time he arrived, and we set off gaily together, both in high
spirits, for it was a fine evening. I was feeling particularly fit, and
we both anticipated a good house. Arriving at the hall at five minutes
to eight, I went straight to the lantern, where I found two men, one of
whom greeted me cheerfully with:

“Good evening, sir. We’ve looked through your slides, and we’ve
arranged them all right for you!”

I felt as if a lump of ice had suddenly been laid upon my spine. In
fact I could hardly speak for a moment, but when I could, I grasped
the first half-dozen of the slides, exclaiming:

“You’ve surely never dared to alter the order of my slides!”

But they had. A glance was sufficient to show me that these two men,
acting under Heaven knows what impulse, had deliberately disarranged
my slides. I am usually proof against a sudden shock. But it was eight
o’clock, and the lecture due to begin, so I will admit that I was
upset. My hand shook so that I could not hold the slides, and I dropped
a number of them, breaking six. Then despairingly I lumped them all
into the box again, and bore them off to the anteroom, where I told the
secretary that he must put the lecture off for a quarter of an hour,
and that I would explain to the audience why they had been compelled to
wait.

But I was now cooler, and I soon had the slides rearranged; while I
recognised that I should do myself no good, and might, with two people
like that in charge of my slides, be subjected to a bad breakdown. So
I went on as usual, apologised for the delay, and had no more trouble.
After the lecture was over, however, I had a heart-to-heart talk with
the secretary, which was quite inconclusive, since neither he nor I
could form the faintest idea why the outrage had been committed. Nor
have I ever learned, for I could not get speech of the perpetrators.
I strongly suspect, though, that it was nothing more than careless
curiosity at first, and then, the slides not being numbered and many of
them not even spotted, the inquisitive ones could not put them right
again. The childish yarn about arranging the slides for me was uttered
on the spur of the moment, perhaps as a sort of impromptu explanation.
However, I suppose it is hardly necessary to say that never again have
I trusted anybody else with my slides until they were to be used.




CHAPTER XIV

AUDIENCES


I have often been asked which I consider my best audiences. It is not
an easy question to answer, for people vary so in different parts of
the same county even. But I have no hesitation in saying that the
northern folk, right away to Scotland, are almost uniformly good and
quick. And as far as my experience goes, though it may be true (not
in my experience) that the Scots joke with difficulty, I have never
known any audience quicker or keener to note every point, or more
generous with their applause than I have found in Scotland. Of course,
in common with every lecturer, I suppose, no matter how long or varied
his experience, I have affectionate recollections of certain audiences.
The thought of them is very cheering to me in my retirement. I think of
the sea of upturned faces now hanging on every syllable, now sending up
peal after peal of laughter, and withal by their intense sympathy with
me, urging me on to give them better words than I had ever known before
that I possessed.

For I learned many years ago the prime secret of the successful--I was
going to say orator, but the term is a bit fly-blown to me: it means
stilted high-falutin rubbish, meaningless, and leaving any audience
cold--lecturer. It is to get yourself on conversational terms with
your hearers. This I do not think is possible with obviously prepared
speech, and I am sure is impossible to the man who reads his address.
The latter course is no doubt necessary at the Universities before
a crowd of students with notebooks, seeking learning, and entirely
unenthusiastic, but for a popular lecturer it is fatal. Shall I ever
forget the look of woe with which I was greeted by a secretary at
a big hall near London. To my earnest enquiry as to what was wrong
he returned the astounding answer that the committee looked upon me
as their only hope. If I gave them as good a lecture as I had given
them on a previous occasion the society might survive, but if not it
must perish. I wanted to know more, naturally, and the secretary then
told me that with the laudable idea of giving their society the best
talent obtainable they had engaged at a fee of twenty-five guineas an
exceedingly big pot and eminent authority upon a certain subject.

He duly arrived, and appeared before a full house with a sheaf of
manuscript, no pictures, a feeble, mumbling voice, and very bad
eyesight. He could not decipher his notes, he was in trouble with
his glasses, and he could not make himself intelligible. Before he
had been on the platform fifteen minutes the hall was empty, and the
chairman was compelled to suggest to him that he might as well retire.
Within the week half the subscribers had indignantly resigned, and
I was now expected to save the remnant, if not to win back some of
the seceders. I think I should have been more than human if I had not
asked that secretary whether he thought it quite fair to pay one man
twenty-five guineas to destroy the society, and another ten guineas
to rehabilitate it, but the question was not quite fair, since he was
but the mouthpiece of the committee. Still, that question does arise
occasionally, and will do so until societies learn that enormous fees
to big pots do not always mean general satisfaction and increase of
membership.

This recollection brings another in its train, as usual--this time a
very delightful one for me. In the early days I went to a celebrated
lecture society in London to lecture, and the secretary in conversation
in the anteroom before the lecture told me, rather pompously I thought:

“We consider ourselves the best lecture audience in London. And our
people will not stay and listen to what they do not care for. So if you
find your audience melting away, don’t be discouraged; it may only mean
that your subject does not interest them, not any reflection on your
ability as a lecturer.”

I thanked him for his caution, but added that I thought I could have
done without it. However, I would do my best, as usual. But I was
piqued, and I believe I did strive to capture that audience. Anyhow I
did get them, and the result remains with me always. For they took me
to their collective heart, and together we romped through two hours of
delight, at least so the clock said, but when I came off the platform
I could not realise that I had been talking more than half an hour.
Malapropos to the last, that secretary said to me:

“I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much in my life, Mr. Bullen,
though, for the life of me, I don’t know what I’ve been laughing about.”

As if it mattered! The great fact was that even he, in whom a sense
of humour was absent from his mental equipment, had laughed even unto
physical disablement. Yes, that was a very pleasant evening, of a good
savour even now.

I have told in another place of the great evening of my life in the
Town Hall of Birmingham, and I am thereby precluded from adding very
much on that head. I must add, however, that then, as never before,
did I _realise_ the utter blessedness of being in complete sympathy
with a great company of one’s fellow-mortals, of being able to talk
with them as one of themselves, fearlessly, without any reserves or
sense of weakness, conscious only of simple truth-telling, and your
fellow’s acceptance thereof. That supreme joy had been mine before, but
unconsciously--that night in Birmingham was my first realisation of the
great fact. Many and many a time when I used to preach in the open air,
I have been enabled to forget overdue rent, shabby children, hardly
sufficient food and bullying seniors in the office, in the pure joy of
swaying a multitude of my fellow men and women, and taking them with
me for a while into a rarer and purer atmosphere, where the sordid,
irritating things of earth were forgotten in the better world of truth
and justice.

It may seem invidious of me to single out certain occasions from the
great multitude of happy lecturing hours that have been mine, but it
is not so meant. I cannot help the fact that these occasions have
impressed themselves indelibly upon my mind. Briarfield, Burnley! I
do not often permit myself the luxury of mentioning the name of any
place or person, but here I break what has become a rule with me most
gratefully.

This was a strong centre of the noble St. John Ambulance Association,
and my first experience connected with it was the hearty yet diffident
welcome of the stationmaster at the little station--who behaved as if
he would be genial, but did not wish to intrude. We speedily became
intimate, and he conducted me across some fields to the house of a
gentleman, who entertained me royally. When, accompanied by my host, I
made my appearance at the hall, I was immensely gratified to find it
full of eager folks, a large proportion of them in Red Cross uniform
for both sexes. This was the first time I had ever been brought into
contact with a centre of the Association, and I was much impressed
by the keenness and earnestness exhibited by everybody. It was not,
however, until I mounted the platform, and began my address, that I
realised the exceeding warmth of my reception, and the great sympathy
felt by those present for myself. This led me to devote a few minutes
to my own experiences in ambulance work on board ship, where native wit
had to supply the place of training, and extensive reading also helped
with medical knowledge.

Greater interest and enthusiasm could not possibly have been manifested
than by this audience at my anecdotes, and I was repeatedly interrupted
by vociferous applause. Here I feel bound to interpolate a statement
concerning a characteristic which, though personal to myself, I feel
cannot be singular, it must be shared with many other public speakers,
but whoever has the faculty of which I speak, surely must feel as
grateful for it as I do. I allude to the power of being able to devote
one-half or one portion of the mind to any other subject which may
present itself, while apparently wholly engaged in the subject upon
which the audience is being addressed. Kipling hints at this faculty in
one of the poetic chapter headings in _Kim_:

  “Something I owe to the soil that grew--
    More to the life that fed--
  But most to Allah who gave me two
    Separate sides to my head.

  “I would go without shirts or shoes,
    Friends, tobacco or bread
  Sooner than for an instant lose
    Either side of my head.”

I have often envied others the power of concentration, but, oh, the
sheer joy in being able to carry on two mental operations at once.
To be able to devote yourself most strenuously to the desires of
the audience, while at the same time reaching out with another most
prehensile section of mind into quite different regions, and bringing
back treasures long forgotten or unsuspected to lavish upon those
beloved hearers who are giving you one of the great joyous times of
your life. What I am writing may seem extravagant, but it is honestly
true and honestly felt. Between every member of some audiences and
myself there seems to be a chord of sympathy, a mental connection,
compelling the delivery not only of _my_ best, but of matter, the very
existence of which has until then been unsuspected by me.

And of all the occasions upon which I have felt and exercised that
delightful faculty, that night at Briarfield stands easily first. And
it was curious, too. For I was totally unfit to stand before them
at all, physically. Among the many mysterious things connected with
this fleshly habitation of mine is one that involves much pain and
discomfort, and for which I can never account. On that day I had been
very leisurely indeed. My journey from London had been most easy and
pleasant. I had read a gentle book, I had enjoyed a good meal. And
on arrival at my host’s house there was no excitement, for host and
hostess were unavoidably absent, and I rested in a charming room, in
one of the easiest of chairs, until their return two hours later. Yet
when I went up to dress, my legs and arms were covered with irregular
painful swellings and purple spots, which made any movement and
standing very painful to me.

The experience is in no way unusual to me, I have had it for years,
and when it attacks me nothing is of any use but a recumbent position.
I have gone a long and wearying journey to Scotland, and lectured in
some distant suburb of Glasgow, and never felt it, and on an occasion
like that of Briarfield I have been in agony throughout the lecture.
Yet, and this does give me pleasure, none of my audience knew, nay, I
was only subconscious of pain myself, it ran like a hot wire through my
thoughts. And I have often wondered whether bodily pain like that has
any effect upon the thought centres, as a stimulant, let us say! It may
be so, but I know that I should have been grateful to do without such a
stimulus.

In this connection I recollect on one occasion having to lecture at
Winchmore Hill, when, as the phrase goes, I was suffering from a severe
attack of neuritis. At least I suppose that is what it was, a pain
like an incandescent wire running from my shoulder down the inside of
my right arm to my finger-tips, paralysing my hand, and refusing to be
eased, no matter how my arm lay. I had a sling for my arm, but it was
of little use, for I had to be continually withdrawing the limb from it
when the pain grew unbearable. However, I got assistance in dressing,
and arrived at the hall, to find the secretary full of sympathy, but
very doubtful from my contortions and grimaces whether the lecture
would come off.

I endeavoured to reassure him, told him of that mysterious uplift we
get when we face the audience,--my brother-lecturers will know what
I mean--and think I succeeded in allaying the most severe of his
apprehensions. At any rate the time came, and I did face the audience,
who showed by their laughter and applause how much they appreciated the
lecture. But when I came off the platform I was chalky white, and wet
through with sweat, while the pain----But, there, that doesn’t matter.
What did matter was that the audience was not disappointed. For that is
the great thing to avoid. There are no valid excuses in the lecturing
business. If you let an audience down once, you may wipe that place out
of your expectations for the future. At least that is my belief.

But how hard it is on a lecturer. I remember once being engaged not
for a lecture, but to deliver an address to the Seventh Day Schools
Association, Severn Street, Birmingham. I gave a lecture the previous
evening at Dudley Port, and was in fine trim, never better. But when
I awoke in the morning I could not utter a sound, my voice had gone!
I had no trace of cold, soreness of the throat, or any feeling save
that of good health, but I was as dumb as a fish. I went to the
gentleman who had engaged me, and with the aid of some paper explained
my difficulty, offering to write out an address and give it to him to
read, since he was to be my chairman. Naturally he was staggered, could
hardly believe me. Nay, I am sure that he did not quite believe me, for
in the evening after he had read the address I had written--and, oh,
didn’t he read it badly!--he asked me to get up and say “just half a
dozen words.”

In vain I pointed out to him on paper that I was utterly incapable of
making the slightest sound. He still pressed me, until at last I stood
up and faced that audience, feeling like the champion fool of all the
world, for I was dumb. I made a few signs, and then with burning face
sat down. I felt then, and I feel still, that, grievous as my friend’s
disappointment was, he need not thus have humiliated me. I am sure,
though, that he did not think he was so doing, it was only his desire
that his friends should see for themselves that I could not speak to
them, much as I must have wished to exercise that privilege.

One audience that I addressed in a large northern town did fairly
puzzle me. The hall was full, and I was in good form, but those people
never gave a sign that they even knew what I was saying. They sat
stolidly looking at the screen, but never making a sound, and though
none of them went away until the whole thing was over, they preserved
the same uncanny silence all through. No! let me be just. They did
once applaud, and for that I was, and shall always be, grateful to
them. My chairman was a most amiable schoolmaster, head of an important
school in the vicinity, and he exercised his function as chairman in
the most praiseworthy way.

So far, so good, but from the commencement of my address I had noted
with growing disfavour the behaviour of the young men who occupied the
front row of seats. They were evidently out for a lark, and showed it
plainly by conversing with one another, gradually becoming more and
more audible, until there was a serious interference with the sound of
my voice. I grew more and more disturbed, until at last I could endure
it no longer, and suddenly ceased speaking. Of course they did so too,
so after waiting about a minute in a profound silence, I said gravely:

“I have been waiting patiently for you young gentlemen to finish what
must be a very important conversation, since you must needs pursue it
in a place like this, where it disturbs me in the performance of my
duty, and prevents people who wish to listen to me from hearing. But
I think it is very strange that you should come here to talk when you
could find so many better opportunities outside. If, however, you feel
that you must talk here, I must appeal to the audience whether they
want to hear you more than me, and I will abide by their decision.”

A vigorous burst of applause followed, and I had no more trouble, but
went on to the end of my lecture in perfect silence. After I had
returned to the anteroom my chairman said, pompously:

“I think you were much too severe in your remarks about the behaviour
of those young gentlemen.”

“Do you?” I retorted. “Well, all I have to say is that some audiences I
have addressed would have had them ejected long before. Their behaviour
was that of a pack of uneducated cads.”

He said no more, and I afterwards learned that those young gentlemen
were his prime scholars. Hence his defence of their conduct. On my way
home with my hostess I expressed my astonishment at the strange apathy
of my audience.

“Oh,” she replied, “that is easily explained. I doubt if ten of them
understood what you said. They were nearly all German Jews.”

Which set me wondering in another direction, although it did
satisfactorily explain the principal mystery.

I feel I cannot do better than close this chapter with an account of
an audience I once addressed in the Scotland Road, Liverpool, whither
I was sent by the Corporation Lectures Committee, who had engaged me
to give a series of free lectures in the city. I was accompanied by
my friend and host, Mr. Charles Birchall, who thus generously gave up
his valuable evening to keep me company, for he had heard the lecture
before. We got a bit of a shock on arriving at the fine hall, when we
saw the class of people that were going in, and my good friend took
the first opportunity afforded him in the anteroom of putting his
watch, chain and money in a place of safety before taking his seat.

On the stroke of eight I mounted the platform, and faced an audience of
I should say 1200, but such a congregation as I have never addressed
before, and hope never to again. It was evident at once that most of
them had come in there for shelter out of the bleak and bitter night,
for they were nearly all in rags or at any rate very poorly clad. And
they smelt. Poor things, they looked wolfish from hunger, scarred
with brutality, and desperate with want. And I was to lecture to them
upon Romance and Reality at Sea! My mind was made up in an instant.
A lecture in any ordinary acceptation of the term would have been
not only a farce, but a dire insult to these hapless people, and so
I drew upon my great stock of reminiscences of Liverpool Docks when
I was young, of the realities of sea-life, of things, in short, that
they could understand and appreciate. I don’t know whether I made them
forget my evening dress, I forgot it myself, I know, but it is certain
that I held them from the start, and was rewarded at the close of the
lecture, which lasted nearly two hours, with vociferous applause.

When I rejoined my friend he was almost speechless with amazement.
Knowing Liverpool so much better than I did, he had wondered mightily
what I could find to say to an audience like that, obviously hungry,
wretchedly clad, and vicious-looking. And then he had seen them
interested, and applauding heartily, forgetting their own very present
troubles in my recital of what they felt to be truly my own sad
experiences as an unwanted waif of the street, lurking about the docks
of that great city. I have since heard that some of my successors did
not fare so well as I did, and I am not at all surprised at that, I
should be more inclined to wonder if it were not so, when I recall the
antecedents and careers of the most of them.

In all my experience I never met with a really unjust or unkind
audience but once, and that was in a large town of Scotland. Through
some carelessness on the part of those in charge of the proceedings
the galleries had been allowed to become the playground of a number of
noisy, thoughtless children, who amused themselves during my lecture by
running about and jumping over the benches, accompanying their antics
by shrill cries. I stopped and protested, suggesting either that the
youngsters should be kept quiet or removed. To my utter surprise my
remarks were received with hisses. I promptly thanked the audience
and retired, saying that since they preferred rather to listen to the
racket overhead than what I had to say, that I had much pleasure in
leaving them to that enjoyment.




CHAPTER XV

AUSTRALASIA


After my visit to the United States on lecturing business, I gladly
embraced the opportunity to go to Australasia on a similar errand,
although, in the latter case, the venture was entirely my own. I mean
that I was not engaged by anyone. More than that. I had an agent whose
agreement with me was that he should have a free hand in spending money
on my behalf, but that of the net proceeds he should take two-fifths,
leaving the remaining three-fifths to me. My only safeguard was
that we should have weekly settlements, but as that was treated as
non-existent, it didn’t make any difference, and I had the pleasant
knowledge that all through my tour I was working to maintain three
people. That, however, is a mere detail.

As was to be expected, my audiences in Australasia were very much
smaller than they had been in America, but I gladly note that what
they lacked in numbers they made up in appreciation. Perhaps this was
to be expected, as I found that I was well and favourably known by
repute in the Antipodes, which was certainly not the case in America.
And besides the handicap of my being an Englishman was absent. This,
however, is not the pleasantest of my recollections of that tour.
At the time of my visit the total contributions of the whole of
Australasia towards the expense of the British Navy was only £240,000 a
year, or much less than the cost of a scout. One of my lectures (“The
Way they have in the Navy”) was an attempt to show my hearers what
the British Navy really was, and in it I spared no pains to convince
my Southern hearers that their attitude towards the Navy was not
only ridiculously penurious, but fraught with the greatest danger to
themselves. I very well remember impressing upon them, whenever I got
the opportunity, that the amount contributed by the British people for
the Navy was about £1 per head, and that if the Australasian people
would only tax themselves to the same extent they would in five years
have such a Navy as would afford them the protection of which they
were now destitute. Nor could they reasonably expect the British Navy,
if the mother-country was in danger, to spare a single modern warship
for the protection of the Antipodes, all of whose cities lay near the
coast, and liable to destruction by a single foreign war vessel of
modern design and armament.

What the Australasian Dominions have done since then is a matter
of common knowledge; if not quite as much as I recommended, still
gigantic strides have been made, and I am grateful to feel that what
I had the opportunity of saying by tongue and pen aided local effort
sufficiently to bring about such a desirable result. At the time of my
visit the obsolete cruiser _Powerful_ was the most up-to-date vessel
in Australasian waters, and the flagship of the Admiral, Sir Wilmot
Hawkes. Then there came into Sydney the Japanese training squadron,
three small gunboats, each of which mounted a twelve-inch gun, and
though about one-quarter of the size of the _Powerful_, with armament
sufficient to have sunk a whole fleet of _Powerfuls_ at her leisure.

The object-lesson could not have been better timed, and I hope I used
it for all it was worth. I know, at any rate, that I was severely
censured for plain speaking, but I felt and said that the welfare of
such cities as Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide was far before any
personal considerations. But I proved then that both Press and people
only wanted the facts pointed out to them for them to act. They were
not content simply to turn over in their sleep and mutter, “Oh, it will
last our time.” Not they. And the recent naval activity of the Southern
Dominions is the result.

Apart from this patriotic matter, the reception that I met with
everywhere was most encouraging. It is true that I often had the
misfortune in the smaller towns of coming immediately after or before
a theatrical company, which had either swept up all the “joy-money,”
or it, the cash, was awaiting the advent of the fun-makers. Also I had
to compete with the cinematograph in the large cities, which had just
arrived, and was scooping up all the money in sight. And beyond that I
was surely unfortunate in my time. Just after my arrival in Auckland
from Sydney, and on the very day that I was to give the first of four
lectures in Her Majesty’s Theatre, came the upheaving news of Mr. R.
J. Seddons’ death, which affected the whole community more than an
earthquake would have done. But not in the same way that it affected me.

For when the news arrived the city went immediately into mourning,
and I was perforce compelled to refrain from giving my lecture that
night. This was a very serious matter for me, for the expenses of each
day, heavier in Auckland than in any town I visited, were about £80.
And I was faced with that loss, because it was certain that I could
not regain that lost day, as the theatre was let again immediately. I
did try to get the company owning the theatre to meet me by cutting
the enormous rental of the theatre for that unused night in half, but
they would not hear of it, the loss was mine, and I must bear it, they
said cynically. But that was not the worst. So great was the shock to
the community that all businesses like mine felt it for a long time,
and the three lectures I was able to give in Auckland did little more
than cover expenses. The late Prime Minister of New Zealand had many
sincere mourners, but none who showed their sorrow in a more practical
manner than I did, even if the exhibition was quite involuntary.

Now the North Island of New Zealand is quite an earthly Paradise,
and although it was mid-winter at the time of my visit, arum lilies
were growing rankly in the ditches about Auckland. Yet at Gisborne,
only about 100 miles south of Auckland, I felt bitterly cold on the
platform, a thing that has never happened to me before nor since.
So cold was it that the speculator who had engaged me for those two
lectures, at a fee of £40, made a very severe loss, because hardly
anybody came the second night. They would not sit in an unlined
galvanized-iron building to be half frozen, no, not to hear the most
eloquent speaker living, much less myself, and truly I could not blame
them. It has, however, always been a mystery to me how it could be so
cold in that genial part of the world.

Considerable mystery attaches to my visit to Nelson. As a trip it
was delightful, giving me as it did the opportunity of verifying the
existence of Pelorus Jack, the celebrated grey grampus which for some
inscrutable cetacean reason meets and for a short time accompanies
every steamer that enters or leaves Tasman Bay by the French Pass.
Upon such a well-worn subject I am not going to expend space, but I
must just notice one matter that is not touched upon usually by any
of those who have written about this sociable whale. The _Pateena_ was
going a full sixteen knots, so her captain told me, yet “Jack” played
round her bows without any apparent effort, and occasionally would
put on a spurt that carried him a ship’s length ahead, when he would
slow down, and allow the ship to overtake him again, and resume his
favourite pastime of wallowing in the turbulent water just abaft her
stern. And when he left her finally, which he did after about twenty
minutes, he shot off at right angles from her, and almost immediately
disappeared. I therefore cannot put his top speed at any less than
thirty knots an hour.

But from a financial point of view Nelson was a dismal failure, and I
do not see how from its population it could well have been otherwise.
It may have been bad management, however; of that I know nothing.
Still as my object was not a pleasant holiday, I was glad to get
back to Wellington again, where I had an excellent reception, which
partly consoled me. This was the more noticeable, because here again I
lectured in the theatre, where I followed an excellent opera company,
under the management of Henry Bracy, who were giving all Gilbert and
Sullivan’s operas. Yet, despite this, I was very well patronised.

My hopes were now centred upon Dunedin, for I knew that practically
everybody there knew me, and I felt very hopeful that my reception
would go far to make up for what could only be classed as failure
hitherto. I was to appear in the Garrison Hall, the largest auditorium
in the city, and although it was not crowded it was well filled. One
of my old Dunedin friends, a very prominent man of business and an
expert accountant, at whose house I was a guest, congratulated me upon
the audience, but when I told him the amount of the takings he was
dumbfounded. Presently he said:

“My dear Bullen, you are being robbed. At the prices of the seats there
should be fifty or sixty per cent more money in the house than that.
Who have you attending to the front of the house?”

I replied that I did not know. My agent was in Wellington, and the
very reliable and honest fellow who was acting for me could only be in
one place at a time. My friend explained to me how easy it would be
for dishonest people to keep a great deal of money from the takings at
the doors, and then offered to come the following night and count the
house, a thing he had often done before. Afterwards we would compare
one another’s figures. We did so. I had £74, his count made £135!
And now I could see how this thing must have been going on all the
time, and I powerless to help it in any way. The best proof of the
correctness of his counting was in the fact that on a return visit
which I paid to Dunedin before leaving for home I gave a complimentary
lecture for the benefit of a fund for helping stranded seamen. The
house was about the same, but, after all expenses were paid, there was
£110 net available for the fund.

These are details, however, which only show the difficulties under
which a lecturer labours who has to put up with an inefficient agent
or an inequitable agreement. The people were splendid. I enjoyed
everything else in the country most thoroughly--the charming scenery,
the delightful audiences, the home-like hotels, the thoroughly good
newspapers. And the kindly hospitality of Messrs. Huddart Parker and
the Union Steamship Co. and the N. Z. Government railways, which
relieved me of all expenses of travel except for my agent and the
advance man, was very welcome indeed. But for this and the kindness of
the Steamship Company that gave me a free passage out and home, I am
afraid that I should have had very little to show for my tour in cash,
notwithstanding the fact that in Melbourne, in a hall which cost £4 a
night, I grossed between five and six hundred pounds in six days. But I
had no control over the expenditure, nor was any account ever shown me,
and as for the weekly settlement, that was from the first a dead letter.

Afterwards I learned that I was supposed to come back over my tracks
and revisit the cities I had given lectures in, supposed that is by
those who knew me, wanted to hear me, and had been prevented. There
were also many large places in Australia such as Ballarat, Bendigo and
Brisbane to which I did not go, why I do not know. And so, as I began
to feel very disheartened at the poor personal results from such great
sums as were taken, I looked forward eagerly to my winter lecture tour
at home, where, if the financial returns were modest, they were sure,
and I never had the slightest reason to suspect that anybody wished to
wrong me of a penny. So just when, as I afterwards learned, I ought
to have been beginning the most successful half of my tour, I caught
my ship at Melbourne, and started for home, where I arrived after an
absence of seven months.

Looking backward over that period of my lecture career, I can see
how good it was, and how well I should have been rewarded but for my
ignorance in making the agreement I did. I might, it is true, have
had bigger audiences in many places, but I could not have been better
received than I was. And that not merely by the rank and file, but by
all those in power of whatever political cast they happened to be.
This was all the more delightful to me because I did not make the
slightest attempt to push myself forward, and the kindly reception I
got from governors and ministers was spontaneously tendered. One day in
Wellington, when I was taking a walk, I thought I would leave my card
at Government House, and write my name in the visitors’ book, which I
had been led to believe was the correct thing to do. I had done so,
and was strolling away down the carriage drive again, when a messenger
came after me, and told me that the aide-de-camp wished I would return.
Of course I complied, and was immediately taken into the aide’s room,
who said that Lord Plunkett had seen me going away, and wished to have
a chat with me.

I was then taken into his Lordship’s room, and had a very pleasant
interview with him for about half an hour, during which he expressed
surprise that I had not been to see him before. He laughed heartily
when I told him that my native modesty forbade me to take any advantage
which calling on the great ones might give me, but though I knew I was
often a loser from this diffidence, I could not alter it. But I have
never been able to push myself forward in this way, and there’s an end
of it.

There is another thing which causes me to look back upon my
Australasian tour with complacency. The experience which I then gained
came too late to be of any financial benefit to me, but I fondly
believe that it has been of some use to others. I have been very glad
to put my knowledge at the service of anyone asking for it to whom
it was likely to be of use, and I do not think that any lecturer of
standing has since been caught in such toils as I was. And that is well
worth remembering, I think. But here, if it will be of any use, I would
wish to add, for the benefit of any brother-lecturer going to the
Antipodes, never allow your agent a free hand in spending, and insist
upon a daily settlement. This can easily be done if the agreed terms
are half the gross takings, the agent to pay all outgoings, except the
lecturer’s personal expenses, out of his half. In my case I only had
three-fifths of what was left, after _all_ expenses were paid--I paid
my own--and in too many cases there was nothing left for me at all.
And I never had a settlement, that is with vouchers, duly presented
and signed. So that I did not, nor do I now know what all those huge
expenses were for.

Still, I cannot too emphatically repeat that this was nothing to do
with the audiences, which were of the very best I ever lectured to,
or with the welcome I received everywhere, which was the warmest
conceivable.




CHAPTER XVI

SECRETARIES


For some time I have remained doubtful whether I would head one of
my chapters Secretaries, for several reasons, which I will try to
explain. In the first place my relations with these gentlemen have
been almost uniformly pleasant, and that is a state of things which
does not lend itself to picturesque writing. In the second place I am
somewhat timid of being misunderstood, and as I know that secretaries
are sensitive (and with justice), I do not want to say a word that can
be misconstrued. But in common justice to a very estimable body of men
(and some ladies) I feel that I ought not to issue these recollections
without some extended reference to secretaries, and so having as I hope
cleared the ground a little, I will take the plunge.

In all the vast body of unpaid work which is done by people in this
country for the benefit of their fellows I do not think any is so
onerous as that part which is involved in what are understood as a
secretary’s duties. He is usually a man who is very busy in some trade
or profession, but takes up the job of being secretary of his literary
society in a spirit of pure altruism. If, as is often the case, he be
a young and inexperienced man, he will soon discover that so far from
assisting him in any way with his work (and the duties are by no means
light), his colleagues usually confine themselves to finding fault with
him, and finding more work for him to do. The busier he is, and the
idler they are, the more critical will they be, until he will find in
very many instances that he is doing all the work and getting none of
the credit.

And it is very often niggling, exasperating work. The selection of a
list of lecturers, say, half a dozen, from the lavish number upon all
subjects provided by our friend Christy, really devolves upon him,
although there is nominally a committee. At any rate, if any lecturer
chosen should fall short of the general expectations, be a failure,
to put it bluntly, the secretary will please to bear the blame,
whether he had anything to do with the choice or not. If a certain
lecture is a great success, and everybody feels pleased, as sometimes
happens, in the universal satisfaction it is quite easy to forget that
it was the secretary’s choice, pressed against the inertia of the
committee. If, on the night of the lecture, there should chance to be
some counter-attraction, impossible to foresee by any merely human
secretary, what a fool he must have been not to have foreseen.

How well do we all know that woebegone look upon a secretary’s face as
he says, “I hope we shall have a good muster, but there are two or
three things on to-night, and we draw a mixed audience here, so that I
am afraid many of them will go elsewhere.”

Happy secretary if he can then chuckle over the thought that all the
tickets are sold, and consequently the financial success of the course
is assured. Otherwise a wet night, or an uninteresting subject, may
mean a big deficit in the funds, the takings being insufficient to pay
the lecturer his fee, to say nothing of other expenses. And of course
it is the secretary’s fault, he must be fully prepared for that. It
is only very seldom that a secretary is found strong enough to rule
his committee with an iron hand, and insist that if he must take the
blame for untoward happenings, he shall have the main voice in all
arrangements. Unfortunately, such a secretary is apt to develop into a
tyrant with whom it is hard to deal, although I gratefully admit that
the character is very rare.

Again, it is upon the secretary always falls the thankless task of
negotiating with the lecture agency, when a change of previously
arranged dates has to be made. Such cases will occur, but no one
outside of the profession can realise what an enormous amount of
troublesome correspondence they entail. The severe training of the
agency staff in some little measure enables them to compete with this
with more or less ease, but the secretary, unless he be a born business
man, often finds himself in an amazing entanglement, from which he
feels it almost impossible ever to emerge with the least credit. That
these matters are straightened out at all is generally due to the
kindly and methodical assistance given by the agency, and it is most
pleasant to record that this is, as a rule, unstintedly acknowledged.

It is of no use disguising the fact that the lecturers themselves
do often give the secretary a bad quarter of an hour. I am not now
thinking of those secretaries who seem to imagine that no one but
themselves has any idea of time, dates or engagements. Who will worry
with correspondence, both agency and lecturer, weeks ahead of an
engagement, as if other people had nothing else to do but write and
say, “Yes, I have your date noted, and if I live will be on hand as
arranged.” No, I am now thinking of the usual secretary, who, having
got his agreement signed, goes calmly on his way, until the day of the
lecture. He knows that he has done his part, knows that at eight there
will be in all human probability an eager crowd of some eight hundred
people or so to hear the lecturer, but, being human, he cannot help
wishing that he had just a line from the lecturer to say that it is all
right. Of course, if we were all perfect in every respect, he would
not worry, but--you never can tell, and a halfpenny post card is so
easily sent, and makes such an enormous difference to the peace of mind
of a man who is doing a lot of gratuitous work, and does not deserve
gratuitous worry as well.

Yet it does happen that the minute hand of the clock goes steadfastly
on towards the XII which will denote that it is VIII o’clock, and not a
sign is received from the lecturer. Then just as everybody is beginning
to wonder what the secretary will do, the lecturer strolls in, and is
calmly indignant to learn that there has been any anxiety about him.
Forgetfulness may explain, though it cannot excuse, such behaviour. I
have been guilty of forgetfulness myself, but I am glad to say that on
these occasions I have always arrived long enough before the time for
appearing to relieve the secretary of that gnawing worry that he must
feel if he is fit for his job when nothing has been heard from the
lecturer, and he does not appear until the clock has struck.

But there are deeper depths than these for the hapless secretary.
There are the occasions when the lecturer does not write and does
not appear? To my shame and sorrow be it said I was once guilty of
such a crime, and I can only plead for forgiveness on the following
grounds. I was booked to lecture at Croydon on a certain date which
fell on a Monday. Now on Friday I had travelled down to Altrincham,
having accepted an invitation to stay there with a dear friend until
Monday. Unhappily I caught a very severe cold going down, and on
Sunday night was delirious, the condition lasting over Monday. In
my lucid intervals I remembered my engagement, but, most strangely,
thought it was for Tuesday, and when on Tuesday morning I awoke
sane, though very weak, my first thought was a glad one--I should be
able to keep my appointment after all. I turned up my lecture slip
at breakfast-time for the secretary’s address, in order to send him
a wire, and then discovered that my engagement was for the previous
night! I cannot sufficiently blame myself for not letting the agency
know my whereabouts, for the outraged secretary had rung them up, and
they could not find me, my wife having accompanied me to Altrincham.

The condition of that secretary’s mind with that packed hall before
him, and not only no lecturer, but no news of him, I can never get out
of my mental vision, and I feel that it was such a fault as I could
never meet by any sufficient apology. I could not help falling ill,
and I was perfectly justified in visiting a friend, but nothing could
excuse my failing to let my agents know of my whereabouts when away
from home during the lecture season, except when keeping engagements
made for me by them. To finish the story. I was treated with the utmost
courtesy and forbearance. They made another appointment for me much
later on in the season, but the audience neither forgot nor forgave,
and when I did appear the hall was barely a quarter filled, which, of
course, penalised the wrong people altogether.

Another occasion I must refer to. Since I cannot find any fault, any
reasonable fault that is, with secretaries, it is only fitting that I
should admit some of my own. I was engaged to lecture at Ilford on a
certain evening at a Presbyterian Church. Carelessly glancing at the
engagement slip, I did not notice with sufficient precision where the
church was situated, but as I had for some years lived near Ilford I
did not trouble about that. I knew, or thought I knew, where the place
was. I lived in the country then, so I stayed at a hotel in London, and
in good time dressed and caught my train from Fenchurch Street. I had
hardly been in the train a minute before I realised that I had left
my engagement slip in the hotel. It did not trouble me at all, for I
felt sure of where to find the _Congregational_ Church. Now, why or
how the denomination got changed in my mind I cannot tell, but I know
that until past nine o’clock I scoured Ilford, vastly grown and changed
since I knew it, and could find no Congregational Church that was open
or where there were any signs of a lecture.

So I was fain to return, beaten and horribly ashamed of myself, because
I, being a Londoner, and withal well acquainted with that particular
neighbourhood, had failed to find the place where I was to lecture.
Also that I had been so careless as to leave my instructions in my room
at the hotel. I found immediately upon my return what a stupid mistake
I had made, and at once sat down to write the most complete apology I
could compose. I offered no excuse for myself, indeed, I don’t think I
could frame a decent one, and I also offered to agree to any proposal
that the secretary might make.

That gentleman replied very kindly and courteously, proposing that I
should deduct all the expense the society had been put to from the
amount of my fee, and fixing another date. I thankfully agreed, and I
am glad to say that the audience on my second date was a bumper one.
But the pastor, who was my chairman, did his duty by me as a faithful
friend. He produced a MS., which he flourished before my eyes, saying
that after his previous experience, when he had to rake in his memory
for something to tell the congregation, so that they should not go away
utterly disappointed, he had come prepared for any little forgetfulness
on the part of Mr. Bullen. After a few more pleasantries of the sort,
I stood up and confessed my offence, repeated my apologies, and then
said that I did not know whether it was or was not an aggravation or a
palliation of my offence that it should be the first time such a thing
had happened to me in a lecturing experience of sixteen years, and a
delivery of over a thousand lectures. I did not mention the Croydon
affair, for I was then ill, and had I not been I should certainly have
kept my engagement. And the rest was joy.

Three times in the course of my lecture career I have been approached
by secretaries, all, as I well remember, paid officials, to ask if I
would reduce my fee, _after_ the lecture. The excuse in every case
was the same: the low state of the society’s funds. My answer was
in all cases the same, i.e. had I been asked before the engagement
whether I would under the circumstances lecture for a reduced fee, the
opportunity of choice would have been afforded me. But I always went on
to ask on what grounds of equity could I, a single individual earning
my living, be expected to contribute several pounds to the funds of a
society consisting of several hundred people. And the answer was always
that my objections were perfectly just, and that had the secretary been
able to exercise his own option, he would not have put such a request
to me, but that, being a paid official, he had to do as he was told.

Now I would not for one moment attempt to dissuade any of my brethren
or sisters of the lecture platform from _giving_ their services in the
cause of charity, when asked to do so beforehand. But I would strongly
urge them always to insist upon their full fee being paid to them,
and then making it, or part of it, a donation to the funds. For if a
lecturer consents to give his services, he may be very sure that he
will get a very poor audience, no one will think it is worth their
while to work in order that his, the lecturer’s, efforts in the cause
of charity may be successful. In a word, what people get for nothing
they do not value, which is an old but much ignored axiom.

In this connection I would like to mention an experience of my own
in Scotland, although I may not give the names of the two places. It
was in bitter winter weather, very snowy, when I arrived, and the
town looked frost-bitten. But the hall where I was to lecture was
a beautiful one, warm and comfortable, and the great library and
reading-rooms attached were well filled. The secretary, a genial,
jovial gentleman, bade me heartily welcome, and introduced me to
several grave magnates as the members of his committee. As the clock
struck we all filed on to the platform, and to my consternation there
was just one more person in the audience than there was on the platform.

This might well have daunted the chairman, for the seating
accommodation stretching blankly away before him was for 800. But it
did not in the least that I could see. He took up his parable, and
performed his duties with just the same air of ponderous gravity as he
might have assumed in addressing an audience of thousands. And I could
do no less than follow his good example, though I did feel glad when
the lights went out, and enabled me to forget that great empty space.
After the tedious formality of votes of thanks had been performed to
the bitter end, I eagerly sought the secretary for an explanation. He
told me that it was quite a frequent experience, because the lectures
were well endowed and absolutely free, repeating the axiom which I
have quoted above. I unburdened myself to him, for he was exceedingly
sympathetic, and said that while I didn’t mind a small audience, there
were limits, and I earnestly hoped that I might never have that night’s
experience again.

Vain hope. The following night I went to another large neighbouring
town, the white weather still continuing, and again I faced an audience
of fourteen, all told--no committee this time--and again a pleasant
secretary told me the same disheartening tale. He, however, was more of
a philosopher than my friend of the previous night, for he said that
as long as our salaries were paid, and we did our best, the meagre
attendance ought not to affect our happiness in any way. I agreed that
it ought not, and yet--hang it all!--I couldn’t help feeling somehow
morally to blame. Utterly foolish, I know, but there it was.

It was some years before I visited those two places again, and when I
did I had a vivid recollection of my previous experience. So that as
soon as I met the secretary of the first place I said that I approached
the lecture with considerable reluctance, feeling that it was like
taking money under false pretences. He laughed cheerily and said:

“You’ll be all right to-night. The hall is already full, and it wants a
quarter of an hour yet to eight o’clock. And we shall be turning people
away the whole fifteen minutes.”

I stared at him amazed, and as soon as I got my breath demanded an
explanation of this extraordinary phenomenon. Very quietly he assured
me that the sole reason for it was that a charge of 2s. 6d. was now
made for tickets for the whole course of eight lectures, with the
gratifying result that the hall was now much too small to accommodate
the crowds that besieged its doors every lecture night. And we shook
hands over this patent endorsement of the theories we had both
enunciated. Next day I went on to the other town, full of curiosity and
eager hope that all would be well there too. So hopeful was I that the
fact that the town was in the furious throes of a by-election did not
trouble me at all. Yet we all know that if there is one thing more than
another that can bring all a secretary’s hopes and plans to the ground,
it is to have a by-election clash with a lecture. It even affects the
female part of his audience.

When, therefore, I met the secretary, and saw that his face wore
its usual unperturbed expression, I ventured to say something in a
commiserating tone about the by-election. He smiled gravely and replied:

“I don’t think you’ll find it make much difference to the meeting.”

I did not like to ask him whether that would be because the attendance
was so meagre, for I feared it would be, or might be personal, so I
said nothing more upon the subject. But when the time arrived, and I
made my way towards the hall, I was very much struck by the number and
excitement of the people in the streets, who all seemed to be going my
way. And when I reached the hall I was a bit excited myself to find the
entrance, which was a long corridor, filled with loudly talking people,
who did not in the least resemble a lecture audience. So much did this
impress me that before I had got very far through the crowd I asked one
of my neighbours why there was all this excitement about the lecture.
He promptly informed me that _this_ was a political meeting, and that
the lecture hall was _next door_!

So I lost no time in changing my direction, finding, to my intense
delight, that my audience was complete, and though sedate, evidently
highly expectant. Every seat was occupied, and there were over a
hundred standing. I afterwards learned that the reason for this change
was the same as at the neighbouring town, the change from a perfectly
free lecture to one for which a small charge was made. Still, I never
before had such a gratifying experience as to find that the attraction
of a political meeting next door was not sufficiently potent to attract
my audience away from me. And I felt, I must admit, proportionately
elated.

I think that by this time it must be sufficiently clear that my
opening remarks about secretaries were quite justified, that I have
little to say about them because I have found them so uniformly good.
It is really the case. I do not in the least know what the agency’s
experience of them may be, but I must speak as I found them. Three
secretaries I have known who were ladies, and they were perfect in
courtesy and business-like habits. We had in two cases some little
hilarity, owing to my addressing a lady as “M. Jones, Esq.,” but
then as I put it to them, if the word “Miss” is not put in brackets
before the initial of a Christian name, no blame can be attached to a
correspondent who assumes that the writer is of the male persuasion.

Let me close this chapter by assuring secretaries, one and all, that
I carry into my retirement none but the pleasantest recollections of
their uniform courtesy and kindness to me, often manifested under
most trying circumstances. I would also like to add my whole-hearted
admiration of the way in which these gentlemen (and ladies) perform
their, for the most part gratuitous, and certainly onerous, duties.




CHAPTER XVII

DISCURSIONS


Speaking generally, I have no doubt that it is true that an experienced
traveller is far less liable to get into trouble on his journeys than
a novice. But that any experience, no matter how great and varied,
can render a traveller immune from the troubles of travel is a fond
and vain superstition, only believed in by those who have had no
experience. Take a recent experience of my own, for instance, and with
it comfort, ye who have hitherto blamed your own inexperience for
trouble into which you have fallen on some journeys. I am a Londoner,
and I lived in London at the time of which I speak. I may say that
although my experience of travelling in London and elsewhere was
extensive and peculiar, I was handicapped by a great difficulty in
breathing which made it hard for me to get about in this rapid age.

It chanced that I was due to lecture at Charterhouse one Saturday
evening, and had, as usual, planned to return home after the lecture.
It had been foggy the previous day, and the South-Western system,
according to its wont in fog, had gone all to pieces, but twelve hours
of perfectly clear weather had been experienced since, and I trusted
therefore that my late afternoon train would be running as usual. But
when I arrived at Waterloo I was met by the all too frequent experience
of travellers whom a cruel fate condemns to use that most labyrinthine
of stations, viz. an utter ignorance on the part of the officials as to
when my train would start or which platform it would start from. Crowds
of bewildered passengers hurried from one gate to another, badgering
and exasperating the helpless officials with utterly futile questions,
until, I suppose in desperation, a whole lot of them were embarked
upon a train bound somewhere. How gladly they passed in through the
barriers, had their tickets clipped and took their seats. And how
wretched was their condition when, the train being full, an official
arrived from somewhere, took down the direction board, and replaced
it with a totally different one, resulting in the whole of them being
turned out and cast adrift again.

But that such things happen continually at Waterloo I might endeavour
to emphasise them, in order to be believed, but we all accept the
South-Western as we do any other affliction which we are powerless to
avoid, cease to wonder at its vagaries, and resign ourselves to them
with what philosophy we may. I shall only, therefore, add that I did
get a train to Godalming, starting only an hour late, but I learned
that it was a train which should have started an hour earlier than the
one I had intended to go by. However, I arrived at Charterhouse in time
for a little dinner and my lecture, and was hospitably offered a bed
by Mrs. Fletcher, as the running of the trains was so capricious. But
I had said that I would return that night, and there was, very wisely,
no ’phone at the school. However, it was arranged that the motor should
run me down to the station, where, if I found the time-table to be
still out of action, I was to ’phone home and return.

But when I arrived there I found the night beautifully clear, and an
official emphatically assured me that the 9.33 to Waterloo would run
on time, so I dismissed the car, and in due time, punctual to the
minute, caught my train. In hallowed phrase all went well until we
reached Woking, where a large number of passengers joined the train
for Waterloo. But it did not leave, and to all questions the officials
replied that they knew no more than their questioners the reason for
the delay. Suddenly the fatal cry resounded from end to end of the
train, “All change.” That packed train-load of people crowded the
platform again, and the train we had left was shunted into the middle
line of rails, where it remained to tantalise us by its ineptitude.

In cold and misery and apprehension we all waited on that platform
until at last a train came in which landed us at Waterloo at 11.45.
The tube served me well, but I was nearly exhausted after changing
at Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, and there I found the
Highgate Tube in an awful muddle. Platform and trains were alike jammed
with people, and the train men could not work. We were pulled out of
the trouble by the energy of the driver, who came to the rescue of
the guards, until at Mornington Crescent our load lightened a bit.
Eventually I arrived at Highgate at 12.25, in one of the densest fogs
of my recollection. All traffic was stopped, I was two miles from home,
all uphill, and hardly able to stand from pain and racking cough. And
it was bitterly cold. I battered at the door and rang the bell of the
Archway Tavern, but it had only recently closed, and my summons was
reasonably treated as that of some drunken wanderer.

I was very near collapse, and began to think of the immediate
possibility of this being my end, for every breath I painfully drew was
laden with death. Then a policeman hove in sight, to whom I addressed
an appeal to get me in somewhere, weighted with half a crown. But he
said there was nothing nearer than Finsbury Park, well over a mile
away, except a doss-house, to which he dared not send me. And then he
suddenly remembered having seen not far away a hansom cab with a poor
old driver who had made practically nothing all the week. So he left
me, and went in search of the cab, and in a very few minutes I had
offered that poor old cabman half a sovereign to get me home. To say
that we were both overjoyed is to put it very mildly. After seeing
me safe inside, and the front let down, he started his old horse on a
walk through the dense hedge of fog, but there was nothing in the way,
and between us we found my home in half an hour. And when I sank upon
a chair exhausted in my own room it was 2.20 a.m. But I was saved. I
am thus prolix only to show how all my experience and local knowledge
could not help me in these circumstances from having one of the very
worst times of my life, and it was a wonder that I was not found dead
upon the Highgate pavement.

A delightful recollection of mine is of an experience at the faithful
city of Londonderry, an experience which I can afford to laugh at and
enjoy now, but which at one time certainly began to look sinister.
I arrived at the Great Northern Hotel in excellent time, for my
lecture was not until eight, as usual, and my train was in about six.
The secretary being very hard driven did not meet me, there was no
need, for all was plain and straightforward. I had a chop, and while
consuming it enquired of the waiter the way to the Y.M.C.A. Hall, where
the lecture was given on my previous visit, but the way to which I
did not remember because I had been taken there by the secretary. The
waiter pointed to the old wall opposite to the hotel, showed me how to
get to the top of it, and assured me that if I followed it round for
about ten minutes I should arrive at my destination, for it was on the
wall.

So I set out, not without some misgivings, for the night was very dark,
and there was a high wind with driving rain. My breathing made the
going in that exposed position very difficult, and I did not meet a
single person of whom I could enquire, though I was certainly following
my instructions. At last, after I had walked for twenty minutes, I felt
sure I must be wrong, and looking over the wall into the street below,
I spied a man, of whom I enquired if I was going right for the Y.M.C.A.
Hall. He looked round him with that vacant air that in a citizen so
annoys the strange enquirer of his way, and was about to direct me
downhill or back again whence I had come. So I hastily said:

“All right, if you don’t know, never mind; but don’t you direct me back
down that hill, for I won’t go. If I do I can’t climb it again.”

“All right, sir,” he replied cheerfully. “I was only getting my
bearings. Ye’ll go this way.” And he pointed up a side street, giving
me a mass of intricate instructions, during which I noticed that he
was comfortably drunk. However, I had got halfway down the steps
towards him by this time, and I felt disinclined to ascend, so I
thanked him and followed the first part of his directions up the side
street. It led me to an open space--a kind of market-place, I think,
where I found two of those splendid fellows, the R.I.C., who speedily
directed me right. But even then I made a mistake, for of two large
buildings opposite each other I chose the one that was lit up, and into
which many people were going. As I mounted the steps I was assailed
by a host of ragged children, crying, “Taksinwiye, Taksinwiye,” so
loudly as almost to deafen me. I passed steadily on, saying, “I don’t
understand,” although it was gradually borne in upon my consciousness
that they meant, “Take us in with you.”

And then I found that it was not the hall at all, and that a concert
was about to commence! So I went, dubiously enough, to the dark,
unlighted building opposite, and entered the open door, to find it
deserted. And the clock struck eight! Utterly bewildered I stood in the
flagged corridor and consulted my form of instructions, but here, at
any rate, I could find no fault. Yet something was woefully wrong. As I
stood wondering a young man came in, who, though a member, knew nothing
about the lecture, and with that innate courtesy which is so pleasant a
trait of Irish character, immediately devoted himself to my service. He
bounded upstairs to the hall, to find it in darkness, and then offered
to take me to the secretary’s house, that being the only thing he could
think of doing.

By this time I was resigned to the thought that I had come from London
to the extreme north-west coast of Ireland to lecture, and by some
fiendish complication had missed it, so I walked down the street by his
side and said nothing. Suddenly a small boy, in a very smart scout
uniform, rushed up to me out of the darkness, saluted and asked:

“Please, sir, are you Mr. Bullen?”

“I am, my lad,” I replied wearily, almost too much spent to wonder at
this strange thing. Again he saluted and said:

“Please, sir, the lecture’s in the Town Hall, and I’ve been sent to
find you and show you the way there.”

“All right,” I answered. “Kindly hurry back and tell the
Deputy-Lieutenant (my chairman) that I have been lost, but am now on my
way, and will arrive shortly.”

And it was so. The lecture was the first to be held in the magnificent
new building which the good citizens of Derry have erected, but when
I arrived at its noble portals and found that it was practically
next door to the hotel whence I had issued three-quarters of an hour
before I felt confused in my mind. Fortunately, a most enthusiastic
scout-master had offered the services of his troop to act as stewards,
and when the lecturer did not turn up at the appointed time they were
delighted to go in search of him, with the result as described. And
we started the lecture only twenty-five minutes late after all. The
secretary had done his part; he had written to the agency to warn them
of the change of hall, but their letter had missed me, he had also
mentioned it at the hotel, but it was an Irish hotel, and that is
enough said upon the subject.

Apropos of Irish hotels, I am pleasantly reminded of an experience
at Cork. My dear old friend, Mr. Lane, wanted to put me up at Vernon
Mount, but I had to leave Cork for Belfast by a train at something like
6 a.m., and so he took a room for me at the Station Hotel. Then he
interviewed the boots or sub-deputy-boots, I should think, a wild kerne
who looked as if he had never got over the shock of being born. To him
Mr. Lane said, with tremendous mock severity:

“Now, look here, ye omadhaun, this gentleman _must_ be called with a
cup of tea at a quarter-past five to-morrow morning in order to catch
his train at six. If you let him lose that train I’ll kill ye as dead
as meat. D’ye mind me now?”

Trembling in every limb, and with his eyes fixed upon Mr. Lane’s
benevolent countenance till they seemed as if they would start from
their sockets, the poor wretch repeated several times:

“Yis, sorr, yis, sorr!”

Mr. Lane and I said farewell, and I turned in. Now I have always been
able to wake at will, at least since I left the sea, and I have only
to remember on going to bed at what hour I wish to rise and that time
I wake. So I had no fear. And I awoke at five, rising and making a
leisurely toilet. At 5.30, feeling that I should like that cup of tea
very much, I opened my bedroom door to go in search of it, when at
the first step I took in the dark corridor I fell headlong over the
prostrate form of the sub-deputy-boots, who was solidly asleep upon
the mat at my door. He had nothing to say that was intelligible, but
listened, as I thought, to my request for a cup of tea. Then he fled,
and I saw him no more, but happily I had only to cross the platform to
my train which had a breakfast car attached, so all was well.

Yet another Irish experience. I was staying with some very dear friends
at a delightful little town on the County Down Railway, and on a
certain evening was due in Belfast to lecture at eight o’clock. My
friend and his wife accompanied me, and very jolly we were. Suddenly
the train drew up at a large station, and I said cheerily, “Here we
are, then.”

“Oh, no,” chirruped my host, looking out of the window. “This is
Holywood. Next stop’s Belfast.” So as I had not seen the name-board,
and as my friend used that section of line twice nearly every day of
his life, I did not bother, but resumed the pleasant conversation.
After what I thought was a rather long wait, we began to move out of
the station, _but in the wrong direction_! Upon my remarking the fact,
my friend said airily:

“Oh, they’re only shunting. They often do that at Holywood, to get the
train on to its right platform at Belfast.”

But the rate of the train accelerated until suddenly we rushed through
Holywood, and my friend smote his knee forcibly, crying to his wife:

“That _was_ Belfast, and this is the fast to Bangor! We’ll not stop
till we get to Bangor!”

My thoughts flew to that great audience in the Grosvenor Hall awaiting
me, but I realised that I was in Ireland, where things have a way of
adjusting themselves, and nobody seems to mind. A great deal of the
personal element was to the fore during the next hour, and eventually
I turned up on the platform only half an hour late, to be uproariously
welcomed by two thousand people, who took the whole affair as a huge
joke.

With hardly an exception a lecturer is treated in this country with
every kindness and consideration, and if there are occasionally some
thorns in his lot, he has usually himself to blame. But, in spite
of Grish Chunder’s saying that there are no exceptions to no rules,
I do believe orthodoxly that every rule has its exception, and once
in this country I had the misfortune to meet with such an exception.
In accordance with my usual procedure I shall endeavour to veil the
identity of the place, and I hope to succeed, but I think any unbiased
person will agree with me that the treatment I experienced was most
cruel and inexcusable.

I came to this lecture from across the Irish Sea, and put up at a town
near, where there was a large hotel, capable of accommodating several
hundred guests, but at the time of my visit quite empty. The weather
was very bad, for it was blowing a gale of wind, with snow squalls,
and I did not stir out of doors until it was time for me to go to my
lecture. Of course I dressed first, I mean I got into evening dress
with a fine warm overcoat over all, and paying my bill, I took my
baggage with me, because places such as the one I was going to had
invariably put me up--it was the rule. I boarded the electric car, and
in due time was dropped, apparently, in the open country, everything
being hidden under a foot of snow. But the conductor directed me which
way I should go, and after a painful pilgrimage of a quarter of an
hour, during which I got wet to the knees, I found the buildings of
which I was in search. Even then I could not find my way in for some
time, and when at last I did, it was time for me to begin my lecture.

The gentleman who received me offered me dinner, but the audience was
waiting, and I declined, except for a hot whisky and water, for my feet
and legs were saturated with snow water. But I was buoyed up during the
lecture with the thought of a comfortable meal and a warm bed awaiting
me, so I hardly heeded the wretched state of my feet. When, then, the
lecture was over, and more refreshment was offered me, I replied gaily
that I would go to my room and change first, if they didn’t mind. Then
I was told that no provision had been made for me, and that I was
expected to retrace my way through that wretched night to the hotel
I had left several miles away. I was horror-struck. I protested that
it was surely impossible that in an institution of that enormous
size, where hundreds of people lived, room could not be found for one
stranger on a night like that. But my interlocutor was obdurate, and I
had to lug that great bag of mine back to the cross-roads through the
snow, and there await the electric car.

I reached the hotel after eleven o’clock, pitifully cold, but not
hungry. I was past that. And was shown at once to my room, where,
for the first time in my life, I was unable to sleep in a fairly
comfortable bedroom, on account of the cold. Indeed, after I had been
in bed some time, I got up, and, walking briskly up and down, tried
to restore my circulation. Yet I suffered no ill effects from the
treatment I had received, except that I felt, and still feel, what I
believe to be a righteous glow of indignation against the authorities
of such a place who could treat any fellow-creature who was their guest
in the way they treated me. But it was my first and last experience of
the kind.

A delightful yet almost disconcerting experience befell me once in
the early days of my lecturing, before I had learned not to be so
lavish in _giving_ my services, because of the harm I was doing those
whose living it was to lecture. I was invited to give a lecture
free to the members of the Pupil Teachers’ Association at Toynbee
Hall, and asked to choose my own subject. I accepted, and chose the
subject of “How Poetry has helped Me.” Now, being impressed by what I
considered the educational importance of the occasion, I did what I
have never done before or since--wrote out my lecture to the extent
of twelve close-packed foolscap sheets. When I came to the time and
place of meeting I was aghast to find that I was the only male person
present, my audience consisting, with the exception of several High
School mistresses, of blooming maidens between the ages of fifteen
and twenty--some hundreds of them. My chairwoman was that excellent
lady Mrs. Barnett, wife of the lamented Canon Barnett, then warden of
Toynbee Hall.

Well, what with my unusual audience and the unusual experience of
having a written lecture and no slides, I was rather ill at ease,
the only time that I can ever recollect feeling so upon a public
platform. After a few graceful words from Mrs. Barnett, I rose, amid
gentle hand-clapping, and plunged into my subject, reading steadily
down nearly to the bottom of the first page of my MS., and then a new
thought struck me. I looked up from my MS. and went on, forgetting all
about my written matter, until suddenly remembering it I was about to
resume where I had left off, when I noticed that my time was up! So I
wound up with a few sentences, in which I alluded pathetically to my
poor MS., and sat down amid really loud applause.

Then my chairwoman, during an interval of tea and cake, informed
me that my audience would now entertain me with a selection of old
English dances, if I cared to witness them, and naturally I said I
would be delighted. So after signing a few dozen autograph books, an
arm-chair was placed upon the dais for me, and there I lolled at my
ease, like any Eastern Khalif, watching those Houris threading the mazy
convolutions of the dance. I have a keen sense of the incongruous, and
I confess that never in my life have I felt it more strongly than then,
for, in the first place, dancing has never appealed to me, especially
ballet dancing, and in the next, I seemed to myself to be more
utterly out of place than I ever imagined I could be. Yet I can have
nothing but praise for the kindness, courtesy, and assiduity of all
present--who could none of them have known how utterly awkward I felt.
Indeed I was glad when the evening was over.

Only once more in my life have I had the same feeling, and that was
at the splendid Girls’ School at Cheltenham. My hostess, who was an
enthusiastic alumna of the school, told me that I must on no account
miss the wonderful sight of Miss Beale reading prayers in the morning
and the trooping in of the 1000 scholars more or less. By some means
that I do not remember I was got into the school, and given a seat upon
a small dais close to a reading desk, facing the great bare hall. At a
given signal the huge crowd of young ladies trooped in, filling every
available seat, and when they had all subsided, Miss Beale, a short,
stout lady in black, with a dreadfully bruised face and a black eye,
came in and stood at the desk.

She read the prayers and a chapter in a splendidly sonorous voice,
during which the silence and attention was quite painful in its
perfection. She ceased reading, and, turning sharply to me, whom to
all appearance she had not noticed before, said, in a voice that rang
deeply through that profound silence:

“You must go now.”

Ah, me! was ever worm so crushed. My face and neck burned. I wonder my
clothes didn’t catch fire, as, muttering something unintelligible, but
meant to be apologetic, I stumbled off the dais, and, pierced by those
two thousand merry eyes, found my way out. Then the revulsion set in,
and I felt hideously angry, because I felt sure I had been led into
that false position for a joke, and that I had no business there at
all. But I learned that the true reason was that the wonderful old lady
had just sustained a bad fall from her tricycle. She had recovered with
marvellous celerity, considering her age, but there could be no doubt
that the occurrence had affected her temper, and who could wonder if it
did? Still, I wished most sincerely that some other lightning-conductor
might have been found than myself, or that one other man might have
been there to lend me a little moral support. I felt just as if I
had been caught in some prohibited meeting and was being led off to
execution.




CHAPTER XVIII

DIVAGATIONS


Lecturing, as I believe I have said before in these pages, is a most
fascinating pursuit, though few who listen would imagine how it
exhausts its votaries. And by this I do not mean those astonishing
people of whom we are told that they come off the platform dripping
with sweat, necessitating their being stripped, bathed, and massaged
before they become normal again. I am inclined to think that such
lecturers must be very few indeed, and ought rather to be classed with
acrobats or gymnasts, than with professors of the essentially quiet
and peaceful art of speaking in public. And yet I do not know. I have
sometimes listened to public speakers whose efforts to make themselves
heard and to vocalise their ideas involved them in a struggle that it
was painful to witness, what it must have been for them to perform
must be left to the imagination. The saddest thing about these
contortions of mind and body is that the result of them is always in
inverse proportion to the amount of muscular and mental effort expended
upon them--indeed, I have several times been witness to a public
speaker producing an entirely unintelligible roar, who in ordinary
conversation was pleasant to listen to and quite easy to understand.

Unfortunately there are a large number of people who feel a fierce
longing to teach their fellows vocally, who, although they have
ideas in plenty, cannot realise at all that to make yourself heard
intelligibly it is not merely useless, it is fatal to shout, that the
only result of such folly is injury to the vocal organs, and that the
complaint known as “clergyman’s sore throat” is simply caused by not
knowing how to use the voice. And here, although it is a digression
(which I love) I will add that another very prevalent ailment known
as “writer’s cramp” or “pen paralysis” is caused not by the amount of
writing done by the sufferer but through ignorance of the proper method
of holding a pen while writing. Indeed, to see the way that most people
hold a pen when writing is enough to induce wonder that their hands are
not cramped without any writing but simply by holding the fingers in
such an outrageous position.

I believe that voice production can be taught and that some people can
learn it, but I know that some people whose vocation is public speaking
are always painful to listen to and always give a sympathetic hearer
the impression, true or false, that they are suffering very much also.
With such people, if their matter is good, and it often is, this is
a real affliction, and I condole with them very much, although I am
grateful to say that I have never, since I began lecturing, had any
difficulty in making myself heard distinctly, nor have I ever had a
lesson in voice production. But I did have a long apprenticeship to
open-air speaking and singing, some fifteen years altogether, and
besides the inestimable practice thus gained, there was also the
lesson, always to be learned from terrible examples, what to avoid.

Repeatedly secretaries and others have warned me that their hall was
very bad for speaking in and on some occasions I have been told that no
one had ever succeeded in making himself heard in a certain hall, but
I can gratefully record the fact that I have never yet failed to make
myself heard distinctly in every corner of the worst halls I have ever
used for the purpose of lecturing. Yet some places, notably places of
worship, are very trying to the voice, and after an hour and a half
speaking in them there is a sense of weariness which is entirely absent
after a similar effort in a good hall perhaps three times larger.
This peculiarity of acoustics is, I believe, one of the chief trials
of architects, and one that the greatest skill and care often fail to
compete with successfully.

But I started this chapter with the idea of the exhaustion consequent
upon a lecture. It varies, of course, according to the physical and
mental fitness of the lecturer, but it is one of the most insidious
forms of fatigue known. To the enthusiastic lecturer who rejoices
in his task, and to whom it appears not only easy but natural and
delightful, there is a strain upon the nerves that, unnoticed at the
time, is severely felt afterwards. Just as some people feel a long
train journey. “Surely,” say the unthinking, “you cannot be tired after
sitting for eight hours!” Can you not? I can answer for myself, who am
a fairly good traveller, that it is almost as tiring as a day’s manual
labour, while many robust people it will make absolutely ill. And it is
so with lecturing. In spite of the appearance of ease and the obvious
delight of the lecturer in his work, it is using up his nerve force at
a great rate, and he will do well to remember this afterwards, when
those who have been listening to him often expect him to entertain them
until midnight or after.

But there is another class of lecturer to whom every lecture is
a tremendous ordeal. Gifted persons, with an ability to express
themselves far above the average, the time that they are on their feet
facing the audience may almost be described as a period of torture.
What the interval of waiting for the time of the lecturer’s beginning
must mean to such unfortunate people I cannot tell, but I feel sure it
must be agonising. I have heard one splendidly muscular friend of mine
say that he would far rather do three days’ heavy labour than give a
couple of hours’ reading from one of his books. And I have no choice
but to believe him, the proof being that although the terms offered him
were glittering enough he only endured for one season.

Unfortunately there are to be found folks who can neither make
themselves heard nor say anything worth listening to if they could.
I should think they have few nerves to speak of, or they could never
survive one attempt to address an audience. Yet these are the very
people who are the most anxious to be heard. In my open-air experience
I suffered many things from them, because volunteers for that service
are always eagerly welcomed, the rule being among most religious
communities that if a man is fit for no other form of Christian service
he will do to preach the Gospel in the open air. If any proof of this
be needed it is only necessary to become an auditor at any open-air
meeting for the propagation of the Gospel. The Salvation Army, which
certainly does not follow the rule that anybody will do for the open
air that is unfit for anything else, because all the members are called
upon if willing, is no exception to the former rule. You will hear good
speakers in the open-air meetings of the S.A., but--they are nearly
always women. The men all seem to drop into a raucous, nauseous shout
to which it is painful and entirely unprofitable to listen. The painful
and pitiful thing is that people do listen, showing thereby that they
have never heard any good speaking and so do not know how bad that is
to which they are listening so intently.

I have taken the open-air preachers of the Gospel as my awful example,
because of the splendid opportunities they daily and nightly waste
through the ignorance of their leaders. If you want to hear good
open-air speaking, listen to the Socialist orator, or the Suffragette
speaker. They have no use for the duffers, and so none are employed. I
might go farther and say that they are in earnest--but I am afraid I
shall be misunderstood. However, I cannot help it, I know it is as I
say.

But the art of public speaking, simple as it may seem to be, is at a
very low ebb. Go to any public function you like, nay, go to church,
not chapel, and ask yourself what these people can be thinking of to
stand up and try the nerves of their fellows with such mumblings and
thought-mush. I know that there are some voices to which it is a sheer
delight to listen, even if what they say is not worth hearing. At any
rate, they do take the pains to make themselves audible, even if they
cannot impart any useful information, and if it be in church it will
hardly matter, because although all can hear, very few will heed, and
unless the sermon is reported and gets into the press the preacher may
say very nearly what he likes, and his congregation will not notice
anything amiss.

Fortunately the “Platform,” with a capital P, as lecturers love to
designate their own special _métier_, is not at all likely to fail in
making itself heard or understood. For in the first place, before a
lecturer can hope to get anything like a decent fee or a sufficient
number of engagements to-day he must have special qualifications, and
especially he must speak so as to be heard and understood. Either
he has made some subject peculiarly his own and is known as an
authority upon that subject, or he is a traveller with special gifts
of description and able to visualise the scenes he has witnessed for
his audience, or he is a humorist, rarest and best gift of all. Were I
offered my choice of a fairy’s catalogue of offerings to men I would
choose before all others the power of making men and women laugh--it
takes but very little talent to make them weep--I had almost said that
anyone can perform that sad feat. I look back upon the few occasions
when in freakish mood I have got my audience laughing, and becoming
imbued with their merry spirit have gone on in the same direction until
we were all laughing together; I look back upon them, I say, as the
golden hours of my life, hours that I rejoice to have lived and covet
to live again, only that I know it to be impossible.

Let me recall one somewhat similar experience, but pray do not accuse
me of irreverence in telling it since nothing can be farther from
my thoughts. In the earlier days of my lecturing I often used to be
engaged upon the understanding that I would preach in the local chapel
or hall on the Sunday, the lecture being arranged for either Saturday
or Monday night. On one such occasion I was booked to lecture in
Scotland (never mind the town) on a certain Monday, on condition that I
preached in the church the preceding morning and evening. From motives
of economy, for it was in the early days, I travelled up by the night
train, third class, and had the usual weary, cold, and sleepless
experience consequent upon a winter night, spent in a corridor
compartment with three others. I arrived at the church at about 9.30
and was shown by the caretaker into the vestry, where I had a wash and
brush up and then laid down upon the sofa and went sound asleep.

Shortly after ten I was aroused by the pastor, and at first had some
little difficulty in remembering where I was and what was expected of
me. But the little rest had done wonders for me, and in a few minutes
I felt quite ready for anything, my usual good spirits having fully
returned. The pastor then timidly enquired what my subject would be for
the morning’s address, and I frankly replied that I did not know. My
mind was a perfect blank as to topics, no new experience for me in such
a position, since if I did prepare an address it was never of any use,
never the one I delivered. He looked at me curiously when I told him
this, thinking no doubt that I was treating my responsibilities with
great levity, and then enquired if I had any wishes about the order
of service. I told him that I wished he would do everything but the
address.

At this he begged me most earnestly to let him off, telling me that he
had been promising himself a rare treat and, well, he said many other
things that I won’t record for modesty’s sake. These words had the
effect of making me consent, and I selected the hymns, portions, etc.,
going into the pulpit a few minutes before the time in order to give
the congregation what they always enjoy, a good look at the man who
is going to address them, without their being able to reply, for half
an hour or so. I sat in that elevated position looking straight down
the church into the street, watching the people streaming in. And I got
my subject--oh, yes, I got it splendidly. For the good folk approached
the kirk door greeting one another with smiling faces, and pleasant
words. In fact, all seemed as if the glorious morning had put them
in the best of humours with all the world. And then they turned into
the cool shade of the church door and a gloom fell upon their faces,
I might reasonably say a blight, as if the news had just reached them
of the loss of all they held dear. That sad frame persisted after they
had taken their seats, in almost ludicrous contrast to the bright faces
outside, still coming in and presently to assume the same lugubrious
cast.

The voluntary ceased, the service commenced. I had chosen joyful hymns
and psalms, but they were sung like dirges. At last I came to the
sermon, and facing my audience squarely, without opening the Bible,
said in a high, ecstatic voice,

  “Oh, enter into His gates with thanksgiving,
  And into His courts with praise.”

Another pause, and then I went on to ask them in an easy, colloquial
tone, smilingly, what was the matter with them. I spoke of the amazing
contrast between their faces outside the building and within, and
assumed that they had all been suddenly reminded of some poignant
sorrow. And soon, with all the sarcasm I could muster, I lashed their
assumed lugubriousness. They sat and stared as if uncertain whether
they could possibly be hearing aright, and once a middle-aged man burst
into an outrageous chuckle which very nearly infected the congregation.
As I proceeded, the time flying all too rapidly, I had the satisfaction
of seeing a natural expression beaming on all the faces, and when I
concluded with the splendid words,

  “In His presence is fulness of joy!
  And at His right hand are pleasures for evermore,”

I could see that nothing but tradition, steel-hard tradition, prevented
them from sending up a great shout of “Hallelujah.”

Following me into the vestry, the pastor gripped me by both hands,
saying:

“I would give a year of my life to be able to talk to my congregation
like that. But, alas! it is impossible for many reasons. I shall never
forget this morning though.”

I laughed happily, for my present trouble was over, and replied:

“Nor I either. I’ve had a very enjoyable time. You see I’m a firm
believer in the doctrine of “open thy mouth wide and I will fill it.”
I opened mine wide enough this morning, for surely there never was a
poor wretch who had to speak to a waiting, critical assemblage emptier
than I was. My head was like a bad nut, nothing in it but dust and
shucks. And even now I don’t know what I said, but your testimony and
the look of the folks as they went out seem to tell me that it wasn’t
half bad, as the schoolboys say.”

But somehow, owing, I suppose, to a certain freshness and
unconventionality in treating the subject (I can safely say
that now I shall never speak in public again), I was always a
success as a preacher. Not, thank God, that I ever adopted the
hat-on-back-of-the-head, cigar-in-mouth, hands-in-pocket style of
preaching, so popular in the United States. Oh no, I had a far deeper
idea of the sacredness of things than that. But there is a vast
difference between solemnity and stupidity, and that is what many
preachers do not seem to have found out yet.

The highest compliment upon my preaching that was ever paid me was at
Dollar, a pleasant health resort near Edinburgh. I had been preaching
in the Scotch Episcopal Church that morning, and I well remember
energetically refusing to wear the black gown that the dear old
minister fondly pressed upon me. As always, I did my best, but was not
conscious of having excelled in any sense. On my way home to my host’s
house, however, in company with a very charming man, Mr. Robert Annan,
I became aware of two small boys in Eton costume shyly waylaying me
and endeavouring to catch my eye. I stopped, saying to Mr. Annan:

“I believe those boys want to speak to one of us.”

He immediately turned to the boys, saying:

“Well, lads, what is it?”

“Please, sir, we’d like to speak to Mr. Bullen.”

“Certainly, my boys,” I answered instantly, “go ahead.”

“Are you going to preach again this evening, sir?” said one of them,
simply.

“I don’t think so,” I replied, “but suppose I was, what then?”

“Well, sir,” murmured the boy, looking down, “if you were, we wanted to
come and hear you again.”

Nothing that has ever been said to me or about me in connection with my
oratorical efforts has ever given me such unmitigated delight as those
few words, spoken, as I am convinced they must have been, with the most
absolute sincerity. But it is quite unnecessary to enlarge upon them,
their significance will be seen at once.

And now in order to close this chapter, already too long, let me say
that there is a class of public speaker, fortunately very small, who
neither in manner nor in matter is worth listening to, and yet these
men will hold an otherwise intelligent audience, nay, will compel
enthusiasm and subsequent adherence to the most fantastic or immoral
of causes. I have in mind two such men, widely differing in personal
character and aim but both indubitably possessed of this dangerous
power, call it what one may. Some twelve years ago I stood in the
Auditorium at Chicago and listened to John Alexander Dowie. I honestly
declare that I never looked upon a less attractive man. In spite of his
gorgeous robes (he was then posing as Elijah) all purple velvet and
gold, his face and form were mean and contemptible, looking only fit
for the taproom of a low public-house. And his address! It was beneath
contempt. Poor, shoddy, bad in delivery, sheer ungrammatical twaddle
meaning nothing and leading nowhere. Yet his audience hung upon those
banal words as if they had been the very oracles of God. In Heaven’s
name why?

The other man was Richard Seddon, Prime Minister of New Zealand.
I attended a banquet given in his honour at the Australia Hotel,
in Sydney, N.S.W., and sat among the élite of Southern journalism.
Indeed, the company present was a thoroughly representative one, for
the occasion was most important. I occupied the seat next but one to
Mr. Seddon, and can honestly say that no guest there could be less
biased than I was. I knew nothing of the man except common rumour, and
that was entirely favourable. Yet before he spoke I was fascinated by
the back of his head, which sloped forward from the neck without any
“bulge” at all. In common parlance he had no back to his head. And
I confess I felt doubtful. But when I heard him speak, and continue
speaking for one hour and a quarter, I was aghast. I have heard a
hundred times better matter from street-corner orators, in fact I have
rarely listened to more turgid rubbish. The most astounding thing of
all was that it literally hypnotised his audience. Had an archangel
been addressing them they could not have shown wilder excitement,
in fact whenever they got a chance they raved. And when the sorry
performance was over I said to my friend next to me, the Editor of one
of the great Sydney newspapers:

“In Heaven’s name, what does all this mean? What is the matter with all
these people?”

He had been just as bad as the rest, but he was now slightly ashamed
of himself, I think, for he passed off my question diffidently and did
not attempt to answer me. I could not call it turgid rhetoric, for it
was not rhetoric, it was simply noisy rubbish, the few grains of sense
that it contained being poured out within the first five minutes, and
afterwards the whole performance might well have been summed up in
Shakespeare’s immortal lines:

  “Like unto a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
  And signifying nothing.”




CHAPTER XIX

ART OR APTITUDE


At the risk of being severely snubbed for my presumption I venture to
add a few words for the benefit of that numerous class of persons who
feel an intense desire to address their fellows, but either do not
possess the confidence or ability to do so. But I do realise the great
difficulty of advising such people, because I am fully persuaded that
there are many of them that will never be able to address an audience
with any satisfaction to themselves or benefit to their hearers.
And there are others who will never have any difficulty beyond the
commencement. Nature has fitted them for public speakers, and the only
thing necessary to their complete equipment is that they shall be
thoroughly acquainted with their subject.

Now I am well aware that elocution and voice production are taught
both by book and voice, but I do not know anything of the results.
It has never been my lot knowingly to listen to a public speaker who
has studied elocution as an art, but I may have done so unknowingly.
I have, however, listened to men with a high reputation as public
speakers, and have wondered mightily how anybody, not compelled thereto
by any cause, could endure them for five minutes. And I have listened
with sheer delight to others whom I have known to be men and women
who had never even given a thought to training their voice or their
gestures, but who were filled with intense love and knowledge of their
subject, who apparently had only to open their mouths and let the
stream of eloquence flow.

Of course; and therein lies, I fully believe, the prime principle
and art of public speaking. At the same time I do fully recognise
that there is a third great class between the two I have mentioned
who without a little training or a little encouragement will never
deliver the message they undoubtedly possess. Shyness, indolence, want
of confidence in themselves: these are all heavy handicaps against a
budding public speaker, and it is for such as these that I would speak
now.

In the first place, I would say get rid of self-consciousness. Do not
dare to allow yourself to think of your personal appearance. If you
haven’t done your best for that in the solitude of your dressing-room
before your mirror you are hopeless, but if you have, and then continue
to wonder how you are appearing to the audience, you are equally
hopeless. Forget your appearance and believe what is undoubtedly true,
that if your message is worth listening to, all the better part of the
audience are attending to it and are not caring a bit what you look
like. At one of the most successful meetings I have ever had, one side
of my dress-shirt front had a big patch of oil on it, which compared
most strangely with the immaculate whiteness of the other half. My
chest was very queer, and I wore a chest-protector which I had too
liberally sprinkled with camphorated oil. This had come through my vest
and spoiled my shirt-front. But I didn’t know anything about it until
the affair was over, and then I realised that my audience didn’t know
either, or if they did, it hadn’t affected their enthusiasm.

Of course, I do not in the least mean to suggest or imply that
a speaker should be careless of or neglect his or her personal
appearance; on the contrary, I regard it as a duty to the audience you
have the honour to address that you should appear as neat and trim as
possible without showing yourself eccentric or bizarre. Any fool can
do that, and I may add with conviction that only fools will try by
means of long hair and quaint clothing to attract the attention they
could not gain otherwise. Of course, there are exceptions even to this
rule. But what I do mean is that no public speaker, having dressed
decently and reasonably, should thenceforth think about his appearance
but should devote the entire powers of his mind to the service of his
audience.

In the second place I would advise all young speakers to cultivate
unconsciousness of their audience as individuals. Rather look upon
and think of them as one individual with whom you are going to have
an earnest confidential chat. While always cultivating that cosy
air of confidence and conversational manner, beware of becoming
slipshod, slangy or allusive. I know that this sounds like a counsel
of perfection, but I know too how greatly it is needed. For although
I hate the ultra-pessimistic assumed by so many middle-aged men
with regard to manners and customs in general, it is impossible to
avoid the conclusion that among reasonably intelligent men of the
“hupper suckles” present-day conversation is largely made up of “I
meantersay, dontcherknow” and “what!” (explosive). And, alas! the upper
middle-class do ape this detestable habit. I have heard men, occupying
responsible positions, whose conversation was quite unintelligible
from this cause, and I could only think that they used the idiotic
convention because they did not want to talk--I knew that they were
highly intelligent.

A great friend of mine, who was at the time managing director of
a great Australasian newspaper, visited me some years ago and his
comments upon this habit among our otherwise intelligent classes were
continual and lurid.

“It seems to me,” he would say, “that the men I meet in England to-day
have never learned how to talk, or else they have nothing to say. Their
whole conversation seems to be made up of a few misapplied adverbs
such as ‘frightfully, beastly, awfully’ and ‘well, I meantersay,
doncherknow’ and ‘hwhatt!’ They drive me nearly crazy, and only that I
do occasionally find a man who talks rationally I would not stop in the
country another day.”

I told him what I gratefully acknowledged to be the fact, that the
people of whom he complained, though a far too numerous class, are
but the fringe of the intelligence of the nation. Still it may not
be denied that in spite of reason and nature, both men and women of
education and high position do cultivate this maddening convention.
I certainly would not have dealt with it at the length I have were
it not that I have advised a conversational manner with an audience,
and I must make it clear that I mean conversation and not the silly
ejaculations I have noted above.

And notwithstanding this real drawback I maintain that where a speaker
can get upon those confidential conversational terms with his hearers
he is absolutely sure of their attention, sure too of conveying his
meaning to their minds. His speech will not be oratory. That may at
once be admitted. Oratory has its distinct uses, its well-defined
place, but it is not for teaching or amusement. It belongs to great
occasions and to great orators. To the ordinary successful speaker or
preacher it is like the panoply of Saul upon the immature shoulders of
David. There may come occasions when the successful speaker will rise
to the sublime heights of oratory and carry his audience with him in a
torrent of enthusiasm, but with those peaks we have not to deal, we are
discussing the high road.

Next I would say, avoid all mannerisms of speech or gesture as you
would suggestions of the evil one. I once was told by a gentleman who
had heard me lecturing that I used rather too frequently the phrase “as
a matter of fact.” I am afraid I was not at all grateful, I know that
I flushed hotly, but I have since often recalled that quiet remark as
one of the most valuable hints I ever received. For thenceforth I was
on my guard, and if I found myself (as I often did) rolling a certain
expression caressingly under my tongue I immediately set a watch for
it and ruthlessly cut it out. Gesture is another pitfall for some
people. It cannot be taught satisfactorily, although rules for its use
are in all the books. I believe that the only effective gesture is the
natural one--any gesture that you have to learn and practise up is
unnatural, stilted, and stagey. That last word may be misunderstood;
let me explain what I mean. All great actors are nearly natural in
their gestures, those who miss greatness, those whom it is right to
call theatrical are not. The late Rev. Joseph Parker was an actor and
a very poor one; to my mind some of his theatricalities on the City
Temple platform would have got him hissed off the stage. I have known
him drop his voice until he was entirely inaudible, at the same time
solemnly wagging his great head from side to side, then suddenly
bounding forward with impassioned gesture he would roar like a lion. It
was all stagey and transpontine, but the magnetism of the man carried
it off triumphantly and the people to whom he preached felt that he was
the first of preachers and the rest nowhere.

In all of the foregoing I have assumed that you whom I am advising
have a good voice and have had some practice in using it. There may
be, yes, I remember that there are, some people who will try to speak
from a public platform without possessing that first requisite, a
voice. But I am not talking to idiots, but ordinarily sensible men and
women who are able to make themselves heard at a considerable distance
without shouting. If they have not had the opportunity as I had for
fifteen years of practising the art, I suppose I may call it, of voice
production in the open air, let them go to a professor of elocution,
who will teach them so to use their voices that they will not have
clergyman’s sore throat at the end of a short address, and feel as if
they can never speak again.

When I tell you that I bear the burden of chronic laryngitis, and have
done for a quarter of a century, yet never have known a “tired” throat
or a clergyman’s sore throat, I am sure that if you believe me you
will admit that practice has done great things for me. I have lectured
with an ulcerated throat, with a severe cold, with influenza; lectured
when the pain of inflammation in my throat was almost maddening; but
never once can I honestly say that speaking had anything to do with my
sufferings. Indeed, I have usually gone on addressing audiences each
night until quite well, although told at the beginning by medical men
that to address an audience in my then condition amounted to suicide.

Now this must be owing to my practical knowledge of voice production.
I cannot teach it, I wish I could, because it would help my meagre
finances very much just now, but I know it, and if it were necessary I
could produce a great cloud of witnesses to the fact. People who have
seen me crawling gaspingly up the steps of a lecture hall apparently
unable to speak. One of the commonest remarks I remember during the
last three or four years of my lecturing was:

“Why, Mr. Bullen, you’ll never be able to lecture to-night!” But
I always was, and I am grateful to recall that I never broke an
engagement for that cause, although I know that at the last I ran it
very fine indeed, because I could hardly speak for coughing. But the
ordinary individual with a good voice must be taught in some way how to
produce it, or he will never make an efficient speaker, never be able
to hit the happy mean between shouting and whispering, the audible mean
between two forms of unintelligibility.

Throughout it will be noticed that I have assumed a complete knowledge
of the subject in hand on the part of the would-be lecturer. That
would seem to go without saying, yet strangely enough it does not. It
is passing strange that any man should dream of addressing an audience
upon a topic about which it is dollars to doughnuts that they know as
much or more than he does, yet there are such people. Of course, they
do not go very far, still they exist. One such asked me if I would
kindly lend him my notes (I never had any, by the way) of the whaling
lecture, and the negatives of my slides, as he felt sure he could work
up quite a nice little connection for himself in South Wales. It was a
subject he said that had always interested him very much. I know this
hardly sounds true, but it is actually so in every detail.

Assuming then as I do that the would-be lecturer knows his subject
thoroughly, in what style should he deliver an address thereupon? This
is a matter upon which I hold very strong views. To copy anyone else’s
style is fatal, to strain after effect equally so, and I am firmly of
opinion that the only sensible plan is to tell your story naturally
as if you were just yarning to a chum. In doing so, however, one must
bear in mind all that I have said before, or else the talk will be a
jumble. It is little short of delightful to sit and listen to a speaker
who is telling you strange facts in an easy, confidential, colloquial
manner, compelling you to strain neither your hearing nor intellect,
but interesting you in spite of yourself; interesting you so much that
when the end is suddenly reached you start with amazement, hardly able
to believe that you have been listening for an hour and thirty or forty
minutes, so rapidly and easily has the time flown.

Here I feel moved to interpolate a remark which does not really
apply to the learner or beginner, but to men who are very fluent and
enthusiastic. Gentlemen, forgive me for saying so, but the human brain
is like a sponge, it will only hold so much at a time; afterwards you
can pour as much liquid as you like on it, it will not absorb another
drop. Also the average listener’s attention with the best of intentions
will flag after ninety minutes at the outside, much quicker than that
if he or she has a train to catch. I have often heard it said:

“Oh, yes, I like Mr. So-and-so very much for the first hour and a half,
after that I feel that I want to kill him. I’ll never go to hear him
again.”

For your own sakes, gentlemen, do not allow that to be said of you.
Do not let the curse of not knowing how to leave off descend upon you
and mar fatally what is otherwise your very delightful performance.
You may possibly think me unfit to advise you upon this or any other
subject, you may indignantly deny that you ever were or could be guilty
of overstaying your welcome, but you cannot imagine that in being thus
emphatic I have any other object in view than your good. And this is
especially the case as regards the beginner. When a man is always well
received, finds his audiences enthusiastic and listens to incessant
eulogies upon himself and his messages, then he needs especially to
keep his eye upon his watch. Never tire your auditors is an excellent
rule, and I am perfectly certain that more harm has been done to
themselves by individual lecturers in this way than in any other that
can be mentioned.

I must end this chapter as I began it by humbly disclaiming any idea of
presumption. I do not arrogate to myself any title to instruct except
that conferred by experience and success. But I will add that I do not
think that any man, however great his other qualifications as a public
speaker may be, can possibly succeed as a lecturer unless he enjoys
his work, unless he is able to feel that glorious thrill of sympathy
emanating from his audience lifting him on to a far higher plane than
he could ever reach otherwise. When he sees all those rows of faces
with their hundreds of eyes uplifted to him and realises that he for
the moment at any rate is the centre of attraction--well, I repeat, if
this does not inspire him and lift him out of himself I would give very
little for his elocution or knowledge or steadiness of nerve.

Of course, the highest form of all, when the message must be delivered
at whatever personal cost, is only possible to a few of us, and is
moreover not at all necessary for the equipment of a professional
lecturer. Amazing though it may seem, we do, in spite of so many
repetitions, maintain a great enthusiasm for our various messages,
nor can anyone say truthfully that such enthusiasm is manufactured or,
in vulgar parlance, pumped up. But even that is seen at its best where
aptitude has been assisted by art to present the message in the most
acceptable form to an eager audience.




CHAPTER XX

SUMMING UP


As I draw near to the close of this book I feel profoundly sad. There
comes over me a feeling like that of the invalid who takes to his bed
knowing that he will leave his room no more until he is carried out.
For I feel that I am now closing the door behind me upon a profession
which with all its manifold delights I did not enter upon until middle
age, and did not lay down until physical disability rendered it
impossible to carry it on any longer. I have never enjoyed anything
more than lecturing, except in America, where I felt that the people
might as well sit and chew gum anywhere else as sit there stolidly
before me and do so. For although in Great Britain and Australasia I
was always able to get on good terms with my audiences immediately I
never did succeed in doing so in America, and so that was the only
lecture season of which I grew thoroughly tired. Yet my experience may
be strictly personal; I have reason to believe that other men have
fared far differently--some, indeed, find it impossible to fill all
the lecture engagements they receive there and make very large sums of
money. I would rather then say that the fault is with me--some subtle
want of sympathy with the American character which reflects upon myself
in coldness and inattention.

Another matter upon which I must make a few remarks to avoid
misunderstanding is the avoidance in these pages of names, except in a
very few instances. I have purposely omitted names of fellow-lecturers
because I could not speak of them all from personal knowledge, and I
would not for the world cause any heart-burnings. It would be a pity,
for I firmly believe that lecturers as a class are the best of good
fellows, and never speak of each other but in the highest terms of
eulogy. They are naturally of many different talents, each a specialist
in his way, not all equally excellent or equally successful, that need
hardly be said, but all animated not only by a desire to please their
public, but to help one another. All of us have felt sincere difficulty
when asked by those who have the direction of societies and selection
of lectures which of our colleagues we would recommend for a succeeding
season. It is a tactless question, of course, but that does not make
the answer easier, and we are often driven to some quaint subterfuges
in reply. But when the secretary says, “We have got Mr. or Professor
or Miss ---- coming for the next lecture,” we get our opportunity,
and I know from much pleasant experience how eagerly those occasions
are seized and made full use of by all of us. And it is very pleasant
too--brings out the best that is in us. Sitting here beyond these
voices I rejoice to have none but pleasant recollections of those who
were on the “platform” at the same time as I was, of their helpfulness
and good-fellowship. Of course, we have all felt considerable annoyance
at the intrusion into the lecture sphere of the big fellows to whom
money was no object--they had already more than enough of that--who
could not want occupation, for Heaven knows they were busy enough, and
we could not help feeling that to those of us whose lecturing was our
business, our main support, they were not playing the game. In fact,
they were what the Trade Unionist would call blacklegs, and with far
greater reason than he ever uses the term.

And there were, nay there are others, not those who give up their
hard-won evenings to lecture to needy little societies, content if
they may only do some good and never asking for any recognition either
in money or praise, oh no, but those in high places whose names will
command an audience and who take money they do not need from those who
do. But except among ourselves we do not growl about these things. I
should not, were I still on the job; it’s only because I am now on the
further shore that I venture to say what has long been in my mind. It
has always seemed to me the sheerest injustice that any man who is
already earning a good income at a profession should butt into another
profession on the strength of his name and take from its genuine
professors so much of their hard earnings. But I suppose there will
always be a diversity of view upon this point, so I merely give mine
for what it may be worth; I ask no one to accept it.

But of those who belong to the inner circle whose names as I write
rise before me like welcome ghosts, how gladly would I, if it were
permissible, tell of your kindness to me on many occasions. That is
out of the question, however, because I do not know you all equally
well, and therefore I should be driven to make an unconscious selection
which would never do. I therefore speak in general terms, but only from
necessity of avoiding all appearance of discrimination, not because I
have any favourites.

As I sit here and muse of the few and stormy years of my past life I
remember with something approaching mild surprise how very easily I
have taken the many great changes that have overtaken me. Only the
first, when I was suddenly flung into a harsh and cruel world from
the sheltered haven of my aunt’s quiet home at the age of eight and a
half, was received by me with a storm of bitter grief. I remember how
fiercely I wept as I have never done before or since, and I now know
that could I but have foreseen what the next few years held in store
for me I should probably not have survived that sad night.

Then came at eleven and a half the sudden change from Street Arab to
Sea Waif, accepted with a philosophical calm that might have been
expected, I admit. Fifteen years later in my young manhood came the
great change from being first mate of a ship to holding a junior
clerkship ashore. Now that change by all the rules should have been
the hardest of all to bear calmly, but I protest that it came to me as
one of the most natural of transitions, and I never felt the slightest
desire to go to sea again. Only sometimes on a Saturday night, when my
means were all too small to furnish the Londoner’s sacrament, a nice
Sunday dinner for the family, I sighed for the irresponsible days at
sea where Saturday night was no different from any other night in the
week, for our bread was given us and our water was sure, even if both
were poor in quality and scanty in quantity.

Then came the great and momentous change at forty-two of resigning
my two-pound-a-week clerkship and embarking upon the stormy sea of
journalism and authorship. Late, very late in life, and indeed too late
to give me much joy, for the iron of poverty and struggle, of scorn and
failure had entered into my very soul. And to crown all, my youngest
son, my Benjamin, had died on the very day that my first book was
accepted. But such joy as I could feel I did. All my new acquaintances
and friends bade me welcome, helped me, said nice things about me, and
I earned a good deal of money. I paid all my debts and enjoyed to the
full what I had long sighed for, the power to pay cash for everything
as I received it, and the full determination that if possible to do so
should always be my rule while I lived. Most gratefully do I declare
that so far that rule has been realised.

But the change was easy, I felt no strangeness about it any more than
I had ever done since the first. And yet it was as great a change as
a man could well experience and live. Now, however, I have come to
another change which I feel is the final one, except, of course, the
closing of the book to which all of us must come. And as through this
month of November I sit by my fireside I do feel as I have never done
before, a sense of loss, of having looked my last upon the multitude of
friends I made while lecturing. I find myself recalling the upturned
faces in their serried rows, the bursts of applause, the involuntary
remarks made by some enthusiastic listener, the sense of power for good
in that I was interesting and amusing many of my fellow-creatures by
whom I should be remembered for many and many a day. Yes, even to their
lives’ end, for although thirty years have passed since I heard J.
Jackson Wray lecture, his image, his voice, his words are all as vivid
to me now as they were on that night in Sutherland Gardens Chapel when
I sat entranced to hear him.

And in like manner my heart has been rejoiced to be greeted in
Australia, in South America, in India, in Canada, by some friendly
voice telling me of keen recollections of my lecture at some place or
another long before. Now I often sit and think with mellow happiness
that scattered all over the world there are people who are thinking
kindly of me to-night as of one who spoke words to them pleasant to
recall, and the thought does in some measure compensate me for my very
great loss.

Yes, this is the greatest change of all, and the hardest to bear, and
that is principally why I have again taken up my now seldom used pen,
to recall and set down many of the well-remembered incidents of my life
and to bid all who loved me and knew me as a lecturer a quiet but tender


FAREWELL




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Transcriber’s Notes

In a few cases, obvious errors in punctuation and spelling have been
fixed.

Page 299: “interesting you you so much” changed to “interesting you so
much”