The Club would not stand it; it transformed itself into a New Vagabonds Club without the offending members. I took a leading part in the transformation. I became associated with Burgin in the honorary secretaryship because I persuaded a hundred well-known men, like Crockett and Weyman and Reginald Cleaver, to join the Club, and we retained the old committee, minus the impossibles, and strengthened by the inclusion of Frankfort Moore and Joe Hatton. And this was a well-behaved committee, because I do not think it met once during its whole existence of not far short of twenty years. Burgin and I were the honorary secretaries and managers, and we used to decide everything, without even thinking of the committee, who, as reformed, had only one idea in their heads, which was that they were not to be bothered unless there was some real necessity for it.
Our most successful dinner, at which about six hundred people were present, was held in honour of Field-Marshal Lord Roberts—the idol of the nation. Lord Roberts has a wonderful memory, not only for faces, but for the records which go with the faces. When I met him the other night at the Authors’ Society dinner, of which likewise he was the guest, he took me by the arm, and whispered, “Isn’t Who’s Who getting very fat?” which was his way of showing that he remembered that I was the author of Who’s Who in its present form—or, rather, in the form which it bore from 1897 to 1899, when its figure was not so middle-aged.
That Vagabond dinner to Lord Roberts was in honour of the publication of his celebrated Forty-One Years in India, and the Authors’ Society dinner to him was also in its honour, though so many years later.
Jerome took the chair to Lord Roberts at the Vagabonds. He was very interested in Forty-One Years in India. He had commissioned me to write the long review of it in the Idler, and I am sure that he and the Field-Marshal, V.C., though looking at everything from an exactly opposite standpoint, got on like a house on fire.
The dinner to Lord Roberts was the very largest we ever had, though the lunches to Sarah Bernhardt and to Sir Henry Irving were about as numerously attended. Irving made himself perfectly charming, but when he came to reply to the toast to his health, the audience were confronted by the curious phenomenon that the first actor in Europe was totally unable to make himself heard even half-way across the hall, and if they could have heard what he said, they would have been confronted by the equally curious fact that he was no speaker. That, however, is nothing—very few actors can speak, always excepting my friend, Tree, who, if he is in the mood, brings the house down time after time with his naïveté.
There were few eighteen-carat dramatic celebrities whom we did not entertain at the Vagabonds—Irving and Sarah Bernhardt, Wyndham and Mary Moore, the Trees and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the Bourchiers and the Maudes, the young Irvings, and Lena Ashwell, occur to me first.
Sarah Bernhardt’s appearance was a very memorable one. Mr. Balfour was in the chair. He was Prime Minister at the time, and had important business at the House of Commons that afternoon. Sarah was three-quarters of an hour late. I, who had charge of the guests, while Burgin was making sure that all his orders for a banquet of five hundred people had been carried out, felt more nervous than I had ever felt in my life at the slight which was being offered to so great a man. I racked my brain for adequate apologies, but Mr. Balfour said, with his perfect manners, “Please don’t worry yourself about that, Mr. Sladen. Tell me about Japan.”
If Sarah was as great as he was in other respects, she certainly was not as great in this respect, for a day or two afterwards, T. P. O’Connor asked Sarah and Mortimer Menpes, and Norma Lorimer and myself, to have tea with some M.P.s on the terrace of the House of Commons. We duly arrived—even Sarah was fairly punctual—and were herded in the lobby of the House, like people waiting to see the editor in a newspaper office, while a search was made for T. P. O’Connor. He could not be found anywhere, and a long time passed. I do not know how long it was, but it seemed years, because Sarah was so angry. She had expected to be met at the door with due ceremony—perhaps the leaders of both parties, the Lord Chancellor, and the Speaker—but nobody met her at all, and none of us could speak French well enough to understand the unmeasured language she was using about O’Connor. Finally, she lost her temper altogether, and though she had told me on several occasions that she could not speak English, she was quite equal to telling us in our own language what she thought of T. P. Finally, some wholly unsuitable member of the Irish party—Dillon, or somebody just as gloomy—came, waving a telegram. O’Connor, it appeared, had been caught in a railway accident coming back from the Henley Regatta, miles from a telegraph office. As soon as he got to a place where he could telegraph from, he did telegraph, but Sarah was not appeased, even though Menpes offered to go to her island off the coast of Brittany and arrange a Japanese room for her.
I remember a similar contretemps, almost equally amusing, when George Cawston, one of the directors of the Chartered Company, gave a great supper at Willis’s rooms in honour of a South African millionaire. He invited a number of eminent people to meet him—politicians, soldiers, authors, actors, artists and public people generally, most of whom knew each other. The millionaire, who was very “swollen-headed,” was shamelessly late. So, finally, Cawston decided to begin without him. The people made up parties, and sat down at the various little tables, and enjoyed the munificent supper, and finally went away not knowing or caring whether the millionaire had been there or not. They had most of them never heard of him.
Sarah came to us a year later to a huge afternoon reception, which we got up in her honour, and she honoured us by giving us a long and magnificent recitation from L’Aiglon (which she had just produced), in which she was supported by her leading man.