Two of the most successful dinners we ever had were to Captain Scott, the Antarctic explorer, and Ernest Thompson Seton. At the Scott dinner the great hall of the Hotel Cecil was packed to its utmost limits, though it was not due to any premonition that he might not come back. Before Scott perished the world had got into the idea that Arctic and Antarctic exploration was not really so dangerous as going out with a friend who was learning to drive a car. But Scott had such an irresistible personality; he looked the very type of man whose courage and resourcefulness and indomitable endurance would get him and those who depended on him out of the tightest place. And he would have got his party through if the supplies in the hut had been left at their proper strength. Scott was one of those blue-eyed men who can meet any danger with a smile, and are absolutely devoid of fear. I never knew a man for whom I had a more instinctive liking, or to whom I should so naturally turn for support when facing death. Few men are such an asset to their race as he was.
Ernest Thompson Seton held his audience as no other Vagabond guest has ever done. The born naturalist and the natural orator are combined in him. He made a lecture, which had probably done duty several times as a lecture, do duty for his personal reply to the proposal of his health; it did not betray its origin, and yet it was a moving plea for the whole brute creation; he invested the lower animals, probably unjustly, with all sorts of human traits and human feelings, and made the audience feel for them as they feel for the hero or heroine in a tragedy. It was really wonderful; I never heard such a mixture of ingenuity and eloquence, or a speech more thrillingly delivered. He is the apostle of animated Nature.
I was abroad when the Club entertained Lord Curzon and Winston Churchill and Lord Leighton, but I was present when Lord Willoughby de Broke made such a popular guest. The position was rather a difficult one; not having noticed the views which Jerome had been expressing on the House of Lords to the local yokels, I asked him to take the chair, because he was the most successful playwright in the club—he had just produced The Third Floor Back—and our guest was one of the best amateur actors. Jerome’s speech was not marked by his usual verve; like Balaam, he had come to curse, and he was so won over by the splendid manliness of the guest that he was unable to do anything but bless. Lord Willoughby de Broke would doubtless have given us a much more entertaining evening if Jerome had spoken of him to us as he spoke of his fellow-peers to the yokels, for no one is so ready with a retort. Who does not remember his retort at the meeting which he was addressing in favour of Mr. Balfour. He was saying something in praise of him, when a voice at the back called out “Rats!” He smiled sweetly—“I was speaking of Mr. Balfour,” he said, “not of the first Lord of the Admiralty.”
G. B. BURGIN
Drawn by Yoshio Markino
Later on, at that same meeting, a heckler asked him where he got his title, and was told “just where you got your d——d ugly face—from my father.”
He gave us some pretty flashes of wit that night, but not of the scathing order which makes him one of the protagonists who fight against Home Rule. With his physical strength and activity, his dauntless courage, and his power of swaying great assemblages with his speeches, he is a born leader.
There were few well-known literary men and women in the London of the time who were not guests of the Vagabonds Club. The best speech we ever had from a woman author was, I think, from Flora Annie Steel, who, contrary to the habit of most speakers, explained to start with that she was likely to make a very good speech because we had taken her unexpectedly, and she was very angry with the last speaker—whom she proceeded to mince.
But charming Mrs. Craigie, “John Oliver Hobbes,” made us a very fascinating one when she was our guest of the evening. That was the night on which she complained that people persisted in identifying her with her heroines, especially with the kind of heroine whom a woman does not wish to be suspected of drawing from herself, like her “Anne” (I think in The Gods, Some Mortals, and Lord Wickenham).
Anthony Hope, who was the next speaker, complained that he had never had such luck, that he had been hoping ever since he wrote The Prisoner of Zenda that somebody would confuse him with Rupert of Hentzau, but that no critic had ever obliged him.