Various ladies’ clubs, and clubs to which both sexes were admitted, contributed not a little to the extraordinary amount of social intercourse which then was a feature of Bohemia. The Pioneer Club, the Writers’ Club, and the Women Journalists’ were, frankly, associations of working women. And there were many members interested in literature in the Albemarle and the Sesame, ladies’ clubs which admitted men as guests. Once a week at the Writers’ Club, and very often at the Pioneer, they had large gatherings at which literary “shop” filled the air.
Thus in a short time we came to know hundreds of authors and artists (male and female), actors and actresses, and kept open house for them every Friday night.
The Pioneer, the forerunner of the Lyceum, was a great institution in those days. Rich women, interested in woman’s work, established it and bore some of its expense for the benefit of women workers. It had a fair sprinkling of well-known authoresses, and the prominent women in all sorts of movements. Its afternoon and evening receptions—the latter generally for lectures—were most interesting affairs. There was no suffragist movement in those days to overshadow everything else. Women’s Rights were a joke like “bloomers,” which are now suggestive of something very different.
The Writers’ Club was more frankly literary, more frankly “shop.” You met non-writing workers too in those basement premises in Norfolk Street, which have seen the birth of so many reputations. I remember meeting there a suffragist whose name is known all over the world now, but when I was introduced to her it was only known to her fellow-workers. She asked me what I thought of the suffragists. Not knowing who she was, and not having thought anything about them, I replied, “Oh, I’ve nothing against them except their portraits in the halfpenny papers!” It made her my friend, for she had suffered from rapid newspaper reproduction that very morning.
I always enjoyed those gatherings of women workers very much, though many of them had ideas for the betterment of England which involved the destruction of all I cherished most, and some were terrifying in their earnestness like the she-Apostle of antivivisection, who had a hydrophobic glitter in her eye, which reminded me of a blue-eyed collie I once had, but had to give away because it bit.
This lady was the cause of my gradually dropping away from those pleasant receptions. It was no good going to them because no sooner had I been introduced to anybody interesting, than she came up and wanted me to start enlisting them for the cause, though I knew that I should never employ an antivivisectionist doctor in the case of a serious illness any more than I should employ a homœopathist. She afterwards became an advocatus diaboli—an apologist for the outrages of the Militants, which she said were necessary to draw attention to the wrongs of women.
In after days, when I had written a novel which became very popular (A Japanese Marriage), I was asked to lecture before the Pioneer Club on some subject connected with the book. Noticing that their lectures were generally rather of an abstract nature, and not having at all an abstract mind myself, I chose for my subject, “The Immorality of Self-Sacrifice.” The book was largely taken up with the unhappiness inflicted on the hero and the heroine because she was a good churchwoman, and his deceased wife’s sister, and would not marry him, though she was desperately in love with him, until long afterwards she was disgusted with the narrow-mindedness of a clergyman cousin.
I gave that lecture in the innocence of my heart. I imagined that the Club would be so anxious to pioneer for the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill, that I should carry the audience with me. I made the mistake of being too abstract. If I had contented myself with being “agin’ the Government” and delivered a technical diatribe in favour of the Bill, ladies with a mission on this particular subject would have started up on every side.
As it was, speaker after speaker found my idea immoral. Self-sacrifice was the order of the day; they preached self-sacrifice; they plumed themselves upon self-sacrifice. They did not approve of me at all. But what I objected to because it was self-sacrifice, they objected to because they were rebels, so the evening went off very well.
Bohemian Club evenings in those days differed from those of the present day because most of them were confined to men. The Playgoers’ Club was almost the only one which admitted ladies; and at that time it confined them mostly to lectures. The ladies’ Clubs certainly welcomed men, but the serious element was more conspicuous there. The idea of having a literary club at which ladies and gentlemen constantly dined together for pleasure had not been born.