Lord Charles Beresford was another of our guests, and so was Admiral Lambton. Both of them made a violent attack on Bridge, which they said was sapping the energy of the nation by the awful waste of time to which it led.
Beresford was very amusing. He said, “The Navy is the finest thing in the world for a man. If I hadn’t been in the Navy, I should have been in prison.”
I only once saw Beresford seriously put out, and that was when he had to speak after that great man, Seddon, the Premier of New Zealand, whose patriotic attitude about the Boer War counted for so much in making the democratic colonies support the mother country so splendidly against the Boers. Seddon, like other New Zealanders I have known, could make a great speech, but did not know when he had used up all he had to say. In the first part of that speech for the Vagabonds, he began with great éclat, and then maundered on and on about “Womman,” as he pronounced her generic name, while Beresford grew so impatient that when his turn came to speak he excused himself with a few witty sentences about their having heard so much good speaking.
Seddon brought two charming daughters with him, and one of them made a felicitous retort to a maladroit person who condoled with her on her father’s not having been knighted like the leader of the Conservative Opposition in New Zealand, Sir William Russell, whose name had appeared in the Gazette of the day before.
“I don’t mind,” she said; “Billy’s a darling.”
Norman Angell, the apostle of peace, in books like his famous The Great Illusion, and also the Daily Mail correspondent of Paris, was our guest on one occasion.
The most unexpected turns happened at times. One night we had an athletic dinner, with C. B. Fry and Eustace Miles for our chief guests, and Pett Ridge in the chair. There was hardly a word talked about athletics the whole evening, for Pett Ridge is most interested in work among the poor, and so are Fry and Miles, and the speeches related almost entirely to the serious side of the humorist and the athletes. The world at large did not know how earnest Fry is about good works until he refused to go to Australia in the all-England Eleven because he could not leave his work on naval training for boys until a certain sum was raised for the training-ship. In those days it regarded him merely as one of the greatest batsmen ever seen, and the only man who had ever had five blues at the university, and been captain or president of the university in three different kinds of games. Some of them remembered too, that he was a Scholar of his College, and got a First. None of them, I am quite sure, knew that he would have been unable to go to Oxford at all, because he had no money to go on, except his scholarship at Wadham, if he had not borrowed the money, and repaid it out of his own earnings after he left the university. Could anything be more magnificent than that the man who holds the record of all Englishmen, and for that matter, that of all recorded men, for achievements in games, should have paid for himself at the university? Yet there were some people in the Club that night who expressed their disapproval to me at the Club’s entertaining a mere athlete!
But there were many more who expressed their disapproval of our entertaining Christabel Pankhurst as our guest of the evening—most of them ardent Radicals, who disliked the practical jokes of the suffragettes upon Cabinet ministers. We Conservatives felt no more sympathy for people who do idiotic damage, but were more tolerant. I did not propose the toast, although I was in the chair, and have always desired to give the vote to women with the proper qualifications. I called upon an old friend, a very successful barrister, whom I suspect of being an ardent Liberal, though he is an ardent suffragist—Fordham Spence—to propose it. He made the kind of points which could not fail to enlist the sympathies of a popular audience—asking which of the men who were present would have the pluck to go to prison and starve themselves for a principle, as these women did. He pointed dramatically to our guest, a pretty, slim girl, who hardly looked out of her teens, and told us what she had done. He was the clever advocate all through; he begged the question almost as flagrantly as Miss Pankhurst herself, when she got up to reply to the toast.
I prefer to hear the arguments of the suffragists stated in the dispassionate way in which Mrs. Fawcett states them, pure appeals to reason and justice, stated without any attempts to draw red herrings across the trail—in fact, stated by a judge, instead of pleaded by an advocate. I think they would be difficult to resist. The weak point of the militant suffragettes is that they not only do things of which moderate people cannot approve, to attract the public attention, but they have no consideration for our commonsense; they talk to us like Socialists talk to a mob in Trafalgar Square, not as a great Scientist, like Lord Kelvin, would address the British Association. That is the convincing way.
I do not know if Miss Pankhurst made many converts to the cause that night; she certainly made many personal friends. An hour or two later I met her at a supper given by Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Mappin at the Savoy, and had the good fortune to sit next to her once more. She was off duty then, and saying that she really must begin to play games again to keep her “fit” for her work.