“Mister, I was in one of them whalers you talk about, and I know you have told the truth.” And he there and then gave me the most irrefragable proofs of his statement, mentioning names and dates and places which were utterly convincing. But chiefly I was delighted because of the corroboration of my statements, not that I felt they needed such buttressing, but you know what people are. It also established a fact which has since become a commonplace with me, that no matter how remote or unlikely the spot may be, a man who addresses an audience from a public platform is always most liable to have among his hearers some one who can testify to the truth (or falsehood) of his statements from actual personal experience, which should make all lecturers exceedingly careful not to give rein to their imaginative faculties.
This experience, though it launched me as a lecturer, was only profitable in so far as it provided me with slides and a certain understanding of a lecture audience. For although there was thenceforward a considerable demand for my services as a lecturer in the neighbourhood, there was never any pay attached to the business. In fact my good friends all seemed to think that they did me great honour by inviting me and they often carried this idea so far as to resent the mild suggestion, made by my friend the enthusiastic lanternist, that they should pay for the gas which he provided. But he, like myself, was of a cheerful as well as humble disposition and we went on with the work until we found that no effort was ever made to get an audience for us, and so we often addressed ourselves to a mere handful of people in a large chapel. In this connection I may say that one night when I was to lecture at a certain big chapel in Peckham, a stout roughish-looking man strolled in and asked my friend who was getting the lantern ready what was on.
“A lecture on Whales and Whale Fishing,” replied my friend.
“Ar,” said the enquirer, turning on his heel to go, “s’rimps is more in my line.”
It is only true to confess that I was getting seriously discouraged, for it seemed obvious that nobody wanted to hear me even for nothing, while my evangelical oratory was always appreciated. But on the advice of a friend I wrote to Mr. Christy asking if he would put me on his list on the strength of the entertainment I had to offer. Very wisely he demurred as not knowing anything about me, but he promised to see if he could get me any engagements and the result of them would guide his future conduct towards me. Meanwhile Mr. Reginald Smith of Smith, Elder & Co. invited me to give my lecture in his spacious drawing-room, and paid me a good fee. Probably all my hearers on that occasion had read the Cruise of the Cachalot, just published by my host, at any rate they were immensely appreciative and I immediately secured two engagements at what I then considered good fees.
This led me directly to the discovery of an old truth that what costs people nothing they do not value. For I found that as my fees rose so did the appreciation I met with increase until I found myself becoming quite a popular lecturer and compelled to raise my fees considerably in order to keep the engagements from overwhelming me. But this did not come for some time, two or three years, in fact. Yet I can honestly say that my efforts, which were a pure delight to me, were received with wonderful enthusiasm and appreciation, and I was always treated as if I were conferring favours instead of receiving them. Perhaps this was due in a great measure to the fact that I loved the business, that as soon as I opened my mouth upon the platform I felt as if the audience and I had known one another for years and I could just tell them confidentially all I knew about the matter in hand without taxing any of them unduly either to hear or to understand me. At any rate I did enjoy myself and I know, without any boasting, that I gave joy to others. And I am sure that the foundation of it all was those long years of open-air speaking and singing, when listeners had to be held by their interest in the speaker or not at all.
CHAPTER IV
THE LECTURE TOUR
May I very humbly intimate that in what follows I speak for myself alone, I have no experience whatever of my fellow-lecturers, many of whom I know and admire and love, but am entirely ignorant of their experiences on the platform or on the tour. So that I must beg the reader to remember that what I say may be and very probably is peculiar to myself alone and that other lecturers may have experiences of an entirely different nature.
In what I believe to have been my first public engagement at Glenalmond College, in Perthshire, I was notably handicapped in several ways. I was eager and excited at the honour, as I naturally felt it, but I was very poor both in money and time, so I booked from King’s Cross by the midnight train, third class, of course. Our compartment contained five, but one man, who had arrived early, had made himself comfortable with rug and pillow stretched full length upon the seat, and my share of that side was quite cramped. Yet I did not protest or claim that he was taking much more than his share, for I was diffident, inexperienced in railway travelling, and, moreover, of a peaceable disposition. But I spent a miserable night, sleepless, cold and painfully stiff, so that the cup of coffee at Newcastle which I obtained at the refreshment room came as a veritable elixir of life to me.
My seat companion had not wakened, nor did he until arrival in Edinburgh, and I am afraid I looked upon his prostrate form with bitter envy. Oh the bleakness of that dawn along the east coast of Northumberland! It struck a chill into my very soul, and the entry to Edinburgh seemed to sweat that coldness down. For as you all know, in common with most picturesque places, the railway approach to the Athens of the North is as if you were Dante being led by Virgil towards the hopeless Gate. And Waverley Station was in a state of chaos. They were building it and the pitiless sleet poured down upon a vast raffle of rafters and wreckage of every sort. Nevertheless I managed to get some more coffee and a Bap, then got me unto my carriage as a place of refuge from the all-pervading wretchedness of that morning.