I was then taken into his Lordship’s room, and had a very pleasant interview with him for about half an hour, during which he expressed surprise that I had not been to see him before. He laughed heartily when I told him that my native modesty forbade me to take any advantage which calling on the great ones might give me, but though I knew I was often a loser from this diffidence, I could not alter it. But I have never been able to push myself forward in this way, and there’s an end of it.
There is another thing which causes me to look back upon my Australasian tour with complacency. The experience which I then gained came too late to be of any financial benefit to me, but I fondly believe that it has been of some use to others. I have been very glad to put my knowledge at the service of anyone asking for it to whom it was likely to be of use, and I do not think that any lecturer of standing has since been caught in such toils as I was. And that is well worth remembering, I think. But here, if it will be of any use, I would wish to add, for the benefit of any brother-lecturer going to the Antipodes, never allow your agent a free hand in spending, and insist upon a daily settlement. This can easily be done if the agreed terms are half the gross takings, the agent to pay all outgoings, except the lecturer’s personal expenses, out of his half. In my case I only had three-fifths of what was left, after all expenses were paid—I paid my own—and in too many cases there was nothing left for me at all. And I never had a settlement, that is with vouchers, duly presented and signed. So that I did not, nor do I now know what all those huge expenses were for.
Still, I cannot too emphatically repeat that this was nothing to do with the audiences, which were of the very best I ever lectured to, or with the welcome I received everywhere, which was the warmest conceivable.
CHAPTER XVI
SECRETARIES
For some time I have remained doubtful whether I would head one of my chapters Secretaries, for several reasons, which I will try to explain. In the first place my relations with these gentlemen have been almost uniformly pleasant, and that is a state of things which does not lend itself to picturesque writing. In the second place I am somewhat timid of being misunderstood, and as I know that secretaries are sensitive (and with justice), I do not want to say a word that can be misconstrued. But in common justice to a very estimable body of men (and some ladies) I feel that I ought not to issue these recollections without some extended reference to secretaries, and so having as I hope cleared the ground a little, I will take the plunge.
In all the vast body of unpaid work which is done by people in this country for the benefit of their fellows I do not think any is so onerous as that part which is involved in what are understood as a secretary’s duties. He is usually a man who is very busy in some trade or profession, but takes up the job of being secretary of his literary society in a spirit of pure altruism. If, as is often the case, he be a young and inexperienced man, he will soon discover that so far from assisting him in any way with his work (and the duties are by no means light), his colleagues usually confine themselves to finding fault with him, and finding more work for him to do. The busier he is, and the idler they are, the more critical will they be, until he will find in very many instances that he is doing all the work and getting none of the credit.
And it is very often niggling, exasperating work. The selection of a list of lecturers, say, half a dozen, from the lavish number upon all subjects provided by our friend Christy, really devolves upon him, although there is nominally a committee. At any rate, if any lecturer chosen should fall short of the general expectations, be a failure, to put it bluntly, the secretary will please to bear the blame, whether he had anything to do with the choice or not. If a certain lecture is a great success, and everybody feels pleased, as sometimes happens, in the universal satisfaction it is quite easy to forget that it was the secretary’s choice, pressed against the inertia of the committee. If, on the night of the lecture, there should chance to be some counter-attraction, impossible to foresee by any merely human secretary, what a fool he must have been not to have foreseen.
How well do we all know that woebegone look upon a secretary’s face as he says, “I hope we shall have a good muster, but there are two or three things on to-night, and we draw a mixed audience here, so that I am afraid many of them will go elsewhere.”
Happy secretary if he can then chuckle over the thought that all the tickets are sold, and consequently the financial success of the course is assured. Otherwise a wet night, or an uninteresting subject, may mean a big deficit in the funds, the takings being insufficient to pay the lecturer his fee, to say nothing of other expenses. And of course it is the secretary’s fault, he must be fully prepared for that. It is only very seldom that a secretary is found strong enough to rule his committee with an iron hand, and insist that if he must take the blame for untoward happenings, he shall have the main voice in all arrangements. Unfortunately, such a secretary is apt to develop into a tyrant with whom it is hard to deal, although I gratefully admit that the character is very rare.
Again, it is upon the secretary always falls the thankless task of negotiating with the lecture agency, when a change of previously arranged dates has to be made. Such cases will occur, but no one outside of the profession can realise what an enormous amount of troublesome correspondence they entail. The severe training of the agency staff in some little measure enables them to compete with this with more or less ease, but the secretary, unless he be a born business man, often finds himself in an amazing entanglement, from which he feels it almost impossible ever to emerge with the least credit. That these matters are straightened out at all is generally due to the kindly and methodical assistance given by the agency, and it is most pleasant to record that this is, as a rule, unstintedly acknowledged.