After Besant’s death, the two men who were most prominent at the Authors’ Club were certainly Conan Doyle and Anthony Hope—Doyle especially, because he was for a long time chairman of the Club, and a frequent attendant at the dinners. I wish I could remember only a tithe of the interesting and amusing things he said at that dinner-table, for Doyle always says something memorable in his speeches. But once I was so interested that I kept a note of what he said written down on my menu card. It was about his famous pamphlet—The War; its Causes and its Conduct. He told his audience that it came to him in an instant, like all great things in life, which hit on the head like a bullet. He was reading some peculiarly diabolical misrepresentations by the German editors. “Yet these men,” he told himself, “were, in the ordinary affairs of life, honest men. Many books have been written from our standpoint; but, in the first place, a German editor cannot buy a book which costs six shillings or more, and in the second place, he has not got time to read through it. The only thing is to give him free of cost something which he can read in an hour. My materials were all to hand. I know how humane Tommy Atkins was to his enemies, and I had been flooded with letters on the subject in reply to an advertisement I had inserted in the newspapers. Half-a-dozen things which have occurred to me in my life must have been foreordained.
“At a small dinner that night I sat next to ——. I explained my project to him. ‘How will you get the money?’ he asked. ‘From the public.’ ‘Well, I’ll get a thousand pounds for you.’
“Chance had thrown me against the man who knew everything I wanted to know. He could even tell me the names of the people who could translate it into the various languages. Five months later I had the book on my table in twenty languages. Rich men gave their fifty pounds to the scheme, poor people scraped together their half-crowns to do their widow’s-mites’ worth for England. I sent that pamphlet to every man in Europe whose opinion counted. Leyds gave me the cue. It is astonishing how few people govern the public opinion of the world. In two countries an honest second edition was called for—Hungary and Portugal. In the latter, our old ally, there was a most kindly feeling for us, a genuine anxiety to learn the true facts of the case. In Germany the whole twenty thousand copies were distributed; twelve thousand of them gratis, and eight sold. The Swiss actually printed an edition for themselves.”
He told us this on the night that we entertained him and Gilbert Parker in honour of their knighthood, and he told us how that morning a letter of congratulation from his gunsmith had arrived, addressed to “Sir Sherlock Holmes.” The best thing he ever told us about Sherlock Holmes was its fate when he made a play of it, and sold it to a famous actor. The actor stipulated that he should be allowed to alter it as much as he liked, and when Doyle went to the rehearsals, he found that there was practically nothing of his play left except the title. That was all the actor really wanted to buy; he had made his own play out of the Sherlock Holmes stories before he went to Doyle.
It was at an Authors’ Club dinner that Hall Caine made his awful disclosure about Londoners’ insides. He said that no family could live in London for more than three generations unless its members went away for a change of air, and that the smoke-charged state of the atmosphere turned their insides from a healthy red to a slaty black. It was that same night that he recited his poem “Ellan Vannin” to us.
I remember, in the early days of the Authors’ Club, J. M. Barrie telling the Club a story in the American story-teller’s fashion. I don’t suppose for an instant that it had actually happened. I expect it was just a ben trovato, but it was none the less amusing. He apologised for being late. He had been to the wrong club. He had never been to the Authors’ Club before, he said (though he was a member of the committee), so he asked a policeman the way. From the way in which he pronounced the word, the policeman thought he meant Arthur’s, which was quite near the Authors’ Club when it was in its temporary premises in Park Place. When he got there he found it a very grand place, he said. The club porter looked him up and down, and said “The servants’ entrance is round the corner.”
It took the moral courage of a Scotsman to tell that story—true or untrue. It was inimitably funny, told in the broad Doric of The Little Minister.
Jerome actually had an experience of this sort in New York. But it was not due to the obtuseness of the club porter. He received a straight-out invitation from the servants of one of the great New York clubs to spend the evening with them. I suppose they have their story-tellers’ nights like the members. He said that he never enjoyed himself more in his life.[[3]]
[3]. The Authors’ Club, before it was reconstructed, contained a number of very representative members. Among them were Sir Walter Besant, Conan Doyle, Frankfort Moore, Hall Caine, Lindsay Bashford, R. D. Blumenfeld, F. T. Bullen, W. L. Courtney, S. R. Crockett, Sir Michael Foster, secretary of the Royal Society, J. Foster Fraser, Sydney Grundy, Charles Garvice, F. H. Gribble, H. A. Gwynne, the editor of the Morning Post, Major Arthur Griffiths, Rider Haggard, Cutcliffe Hyne, Anthony Hope, Clive Holland, Joseph Hocking, E. W. Hornung, Sir Henry Irving, J. K. Jerome, Henry Arthur Jones, Edward Jenks, who wrote that famous book Ginx’s Baby, and was once M.P. for Hull, Rudyard Kipling, Otto Kyllman, Archdeacon Sinclair, Norman McColl, editor of the Athenæum, Prof. Meiklejohn, father of the V.C. who was killed in putting a horse that could not jump at some railings in the Park to avoid running over a child; A. W. Marchmont, Bertram Mitford, J. Eveleigh Nash, Gilbert Parker, Barry Pain, J. M. Barrie, Max Pemberton, Sir J. Rennell Rodd, British Ambassador at Rome, Morley Roberts, Algernon Rose, who reconstituted the club, Bram Stoker, M. H. Spielmann, Prof. Skeat, the great etymologist, H. R. Tedder, the librarian of the Athenæum, Herbert Trench, Horace Annesley Vachell, W. H. Wilkins, Percy White, Lacon Watson, Horace Wyndham, and others.
But the Club could never rise much above three hundred members. Many a time have G. Herbert Thring, the secretary, and I discussed with our board, consisting from time to time of Besant, Oswald Crawfurd, Lord Monkswell, Tedder, the literary executor of Herbert Spencer, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Hall Caine, Frankfort Moore, Morley Roberts, and Percy White, projects for bringing in more members. The change from the temporary premises in Park Place behind St. James’ Street, to the pleasant rooms overlooking the river, did something for us. But we were faced by a dilemma, which was that we had to widen the basis of our membership to get enough members to pay the huge rent of the premises, which we had taken for a term of years. If, instead of having these premises, we had hired a reading-room, and a smoking-room, and a dining-room in a hotel, we could have got the accommodation for a hundred a year, and as only a tithe of the Club ever used it, except on the nights when they were brought together by notice for the Club dinners, any premises would have been large enough; the hotel would always have lent us a room of any size which we could fill for a dinner. The Whitefriars principle would have suited us admirably, and the Hotel Cecil would have made a good venue. But we had these premises on our hands, and we wanted a larger membership, not to fill them, but to make financial arrangements easier. I myself in my time enlisted no fewer than a hundred members for the Club. But that did not fill up the wastage.