For when the news arrived the city went immediately into mourning, and I was perforce compelled to refrain from giving my lecture that night. This was a very serious matter for me, for the expenses of each day, heavier in Auckland than in any town I visited, were about £80. And I was faced with that loss, because it was certain that I could not regain that lost day, as the theatre was let again immediately. I did try to get the company owning the theatre to meet me by cutting the enormous rental of the theatre for that unused night in half, but they would not hear of it, the loss was mine, and I must bear it, they said cynically. But that was not the worst. So great was the shock to the community that all businesses like mine felt it for a long time, and the three lectures I was able to give in Auckland did little more than cover expenses. The late Prime Minister of New Zealand had many sincere mourners, but none who showed their sorrow in a more practical manner than I did, even if the exhibition was quite involuntary.
Now the North Island of New Zealand is quite an earthly Paradise, and although it was mid-winter at the time of my visit, arum lilies were growing rankly in the ditches about Auckland. Yet at Gisborne, only about 100 miles south of Auckland, I felt bitterly cold on the platform, a thing that has never happened to me before nor since. So cold was it that the speculator who had engaged me for those two lectures, at a fee of £40, made a very severe loss, because hardly anybody came the second night. They would not sit in an unlined galvanized-iron building to be half frozen, no, not to hear the most eloquent speaker living, much less myself, and truly I could not blame them. It has, however, always been a mystery to me how it could be so cold in that genial part of the world.
Considerable mystery attaches to my visit to Nelson. As a trip it was delightful, giving me as it did the opportunity of verifying the existence of Pelorus Jack, the celebrated grey grampus which for some inscrutable cetacean reason meets and for a short time accompanies every steamer that enters or leaves Tasman Bay by the French Pass. Upon such a well-worn subject I am not going to expend space, but I must just notice one matter that is not touched upon usually by any of those who have written about this sociable whale. The Pateena was going a full sixteen knots, so her captain told me, yet “Jack” played round her bows without any apparent effort, and occasionally would put on a spurt that carried him a ship’s length ahead, when he would slow down, and allow the ship to overtake him again, and resume his favourite pastime of wallowing in the turbulent water just abaft her stern. And when he left her finally, which he did after about twenty minutes, he shot off at right angles from her, and almost immediately disappeared. I therefore cannot put his top speed at any less than thirty knots an hour.
But from a financial point of view Nelson was a dismal failure, and I do not see how from its population it could well have been otherwise. It may have been bad management, however; of that I know nothing. Still as my object was not a pleasant holiday, I was glad to get back to Wellington again, where I had an excellent reception, which partly consoled me. This was the more noticeable, because here again I lectured in the theatre, where I followed an excellent opera company, under the management of Henry Bracy, who were giving all Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas. Yet, despite this, I was very well patronised.
My hopes were now centred upon Dunedin, for I knew that practically everybody there knew me, and I felt very hopeful that my reception would go far to make up for what could only be classed as failure hitherto. I was to appear in the Garrison Hall, the largest auditorium in the city, and although it was not crowded it was well filled. One of my old Dunedin friends, a very prominent man of business and an expert accountant, at whose house I was a guest, congratulated me upon the audience, but when I told him the amount of the takings he was dumbfounded. Presently he said:
“My dear Bullen, you are being robbed. At the prices of the seats there should be fifty or sixty per cent more money in the house than that. Who have you attending to the front of the house?”
I replied that I did not know. My agent was in Wellington, and the very reliable and honest fellow who was acting for me could only be in one place at a time. My friend explained to me how easy it would be for dishonest people to keep a great deal of money from the takings at the doors, and then offered to come the following night and count the house, a thing he had often done before. Afterwards we would compare one another’s figures. We did so. I had £74, his count made £135! And now I could see how this thing must have been going on all the time, and I powerless to help it in any way. The best proof of the correctness of his counting was in the fact that on a return visit which I paid to Dunedin before leaving for home I gave a complimentary lecture for the benefit of a fund for helping stranded seamen. The house was about the same, but, after all expenses were paid, there was £110 net available for the fund.
These are details, however, which only show the difficulties under which a lecturer labours who has to put up with an inefficient agent or an inequitable agreement. The people were splendid. I enjoyed everything else in the country most thoroughly—the charming scenery, the delightful audiences, the home-like hotels, the thoroughly good newspapers. And the kindly hospitality of Messrs. Huddart Parker and the Union Steamship Co. and the N. Z. Government railways, which relieved me of all expenses of travel except for my agent and the advance man, was very welcome indeed. But for this and the kindness of the Steamship Company that gave me a free passage out and home, I am afraid that I should have had very little to show for my tour in cash, notwithstanding the fact that in Melbourne, in a hall which cost £4 a night, I grossed between five and six hundred pounds in six days. But I had no control over the expenditure, nor was any account ever shown me, and as for the weekly settlement, that was from the first a dead letter.
Afterwards I learned that I was supposed to come back over my tracks and revisit the cities I had given lectures in, supposed that is by those who knew me, wanted to hear me, and had been prevented. There were also many large places in Australia such as Ballarat, Bendigo and Brisbane to which I did not go, why I do not know. And so, as I began to feel very disheartened at the poor personal results from such great sums as were taken, I looked forward eagerly to my winter lecture tour at home, where, if the financial returns were modest, they were sure, and I never had the slightest reason to suspect that anybody wished to wrong me of a penny. So just when, as I afterwards learned, I ought to have been beginning the most successful half of my tour, I caught my ship at Melbourne, and started for home, where I arrived after an absence of seven months.
Looking backward over that period of my lecture career, I can see how good it was, and how well I should have been rewarded but for my ignorance in making the agreement I did. I might, it is true, have had bigger audiences in many places, but I could not have been better received than I was. And that not merely by the rank and file, but by all those in power of whatever political cast they happened to be. This was all the more delightful to me because I did not make the slightest attempt to push myself forward, and the kindly reception I got from governors and ministers was spontaneously tendered. One day in Wellington, when I was taking a walk, I thought I would leave my card at Government House, and write my name in the visitors’ book, which I had been led to believe was the correct thing to do. I had done so, and was strolling away down the carriage drive again, when a messenger came after me, and told me that the aide-de-camp wished I would return. Of course I complied, and was immediately taken into the aide’s room, who said that Lord Plunkett had seen me going away, and wished to have a chat with me.