Memories grave and gay

by Florence Howe Hall

To be considered as a being apart is flattering, even though fatiguing. That you are like other women, capable of physical weariness, does not always occur to your kind entertainers. To find that you are to be the chief guest at a large luncheon given in your honor, just preceding your address, is disturbing. At such moments I sympathize with Mrs. Deland’s desire for the barbaric solitude of the hotel bedroom. Again, at the end of an hour, when you’ve done your best to entertain the audience, you would almost prefer not to shake hands with a couple of hundred persons.

Still, it is a pleasure to meet your audience and to hear them say the lecture interested them. You look as animated as you can and try to vary the expression of your voice when you say for the hundredth time, “I’m glad you liked it.” For you are genuinely glad—of that there is no doubt.

I learned ultimately to ask for a time of absolute quiet before speaking. This is more difficult to procure than the uninitiated suppose. It is a maxim with the average clubwoman that the “talent” must be on hand in very good season. Some clubs who are very secret about their affairs put you in a remote waiting-room which may or may not be warm. Others, remembering that you also are a clubwoman and likely to sympathize in their doings, give you a comfortable chair on the platform. As I am thoroughly in sympathy with the club idea and spirit, I like to hear the reports, provided they are not too long. At one enthusiastic club I sat during an hour or more while they thoroughly and conscientiously amended their constitution.

For these reasons the lecturer sometimes weakly desires to delay her coming. She has a subconscious feeling that the program proper cannot begin until she gets there, and that therefore she could take a later train. This proves to be impossible, because of the necessity of personally meeting and guiding the “talent” (who might have the wandering tendencies characteristic of genius) to the right hall. The escort, being herself a member of the club, cannot, without sin, lose any crumb of the afternoon’s performance.

To be obliged to await your turn, in a very cold hall, while another speaker gives an address with stereoscopic illustrations, is not enlivening to the spirits. In spite of the assurance that the first talk will be very brief, you have a dreadful foreknowledge that it will not be. You grow more and more depressed as he goes on and on, for you know full well that your audience will be already wearying before you begin. Those who have no sense of the passage of time should not be expected to divide the program with others. Thomas Nelson Page, when reading his own stories, is as genial and delightful as they are. We went to hear him speak on the literature of the South with the pleasantest anticipations. Richard Watson Gilder and Sister Maud were also to make addresses—or so we hoped. But as Mr. Page went on and on, these hopes faded away. In his amiable desire to do justice to all the writers of his section of the country, he forgot the limitations of time and space. A gentleman in my vicinity became actually savage in his impatience and was with difficulty restrained from violence by his wife. Mr. Page must have spoken for two hours—or so it seemed,—the other speakers’ time being reduced to a few minutes. When we met him next day and complimented him on his address, he naïvely replied, “I could have done better if I could have had more time!”

Mr. Page is by no means the only person whom I have heard offend in this way. Hence the warning-bell of women’s conventions is an excellent institution. The local talent must sometimes be reckoned with. I am very fond of music, but, in my opinion, it is a mistake to present a mixed program, consisting half of concert and half of lecture, to a club audience. Such an occasion is of a mongrel order. A single song may pleasantly preface the literary exercises, but this it is difficult to have.

In the midst of a series of earnest talks on schools as social centers, or on votes for women, to have your train of thought suddenly interrupted by operatic quavers from the local soprano, with accompanying flower presentation, is disturbing.

Marion Crawford was a delightful speaker. It once happened, when we were in Boston, that several of us were to speak on the same day.

“Five of the family are going to make the platform creak to-night!” exclaimed Crawford.

At a lecture course which I arranged in Plainfield he was the great attraction. The talk was given in a hall of pleasant size, not too large to permit a certain intimacy between speaker and audience. Crawford was at his best. Feeling, as a lecturer so quickly does, the interest and sympathy of his hearers, he was as genial and delightful as if he had been talking to half a dozen of us in a parlor. Among those that surrounded him after the address was an enthusiastic lady who declared him to be the equal of Thackeray. The dear fellow deprecated this praise, yet he clearly liked it, as who would not?