With hardly an exception a lecturer is treated in this country with every kindness and consideration, and if there are occasionally some thorns in his lot, he has usually himself to blame. But, in spite of Grish Chunder’s saying that there are no exceptions to no rules, I do believe orthodoxly that every rule has its exception, and once in this country I had the misfortune to meet with such an exception. In accordance with my usual procedure I shall endeavour to veil the identity of the place, and I hope to succeed, but I think any unbiased person will agree with me that the treatment I experienced was most cruel and inexcusable.
I came to this lecture from across the Irish Sea, and put up at a town near, where there was a large hotel, capable of accommodating several hundred guests, but at the time of my visit quite empty. The weather was very bad, for it was blowing a gale of wind, with snow squalls, and I did not stir out of doors until it was time for me to go to my lecture. Of course I dressed first, I mean I got into evening dress with a fine warm overcoat over all, and paying my bill, I took my baggage with me, because places such as the one I was going to had invariably put me up—it was the rule. I boarded the electric car, and in due time was dropped, apparently, in the open country, everything being hidden under a foot of snow. But the conductor directed me which way I should go, and after a painful pilgrimage of a quarter of an hour, during which I got wet to the knees, I found the buildings of which I was in search. Even then I could not find my way in for some time, and when at last I did, it was time for me to begin my lecture.
The gentleman who received me offered me dinner, but the audience was waiting, and I declined, except for a hot whisky and water, for my feet and legs were saturated with snow water. But I was buoyed up during the lecture with the thought of a comfortable meal and a warm bed awaiting me, so I hardly heeded the wretched state of my feet. When, then, the lecture was over, and more refreshment was offered me, I replied gaily that I would go to my room and change first, if they didn’t mind. Then I was told that no provision had been made for me, and that I was expected to retrace my way through that wretched night to the hotel I had left several miles away. I was horror-struck. I protested that it was surely impossible that in an institution of that enormous size, where hundreds of people lived, room could not be found for one stranger on a night like that. But my interlocutor was obdurate, and I had to lug that great bag of mine back to the cross-roads through the snow, and there await the electric car.
I reached the hotel after eleven o’clock, pitifully cold, but not hungry. I was past that. And was shown at once to my room, where, for the first time in my life, I was unable to sleep in a fairly comfortable bedroom, on account of the cold. Indeed, after I had been in bed some time, I got up, and, walking briskly up and down, tried to restore my circulation. Yet I suffered no ill effects from the treatment I had received, except that I felt, and still feel, what I believe to be a righteous glow of indignation against the authorities of such a place who could treat any fellow-creature who was their guest in the way they treated me. But it was my first and last experience of the kind.
A delightful yet almost disconcerting experience befell me once in the early days of my lecturing, before I had learned not to be so lavish in giving my services, because of the harm I was doing those whose living it was to lecture. I was invited to give a lecture free to the members of the Pupil Teachers’ Association at Toynbee Hall, and asked to choose my own subject. I accepted, and chose the subject of “How Poetry has helped Me.” Now, being impressed by what I considered the educational importance of the occasion, I did what I have never done before or since—wrote out my lecture to the extent of twelve close-packed foolscap sheets. When I came to the time and place of meeting I was aghast to find that I was the only male person present, my audience consisting, with the exception of several High School mistresses, of blooming maidens between the ages of fifteen and twenty—some hundreds of them. My chairwoman was that excellent lady Mrs. Barnett, wife of the lamented Canon Barnett, then warden of Toynbee Hall.
Well, what with my unusual audience and the unusual experience of having a written lecture and no slides, I was rather ill at ease, the only time that I can ever recollect feeling so upon a public platform. After a few graceful words from Mrs. Barnett, I rose, amid gentle hand-clapping, and plunged into my subject, reading steadily down nearly to the bottom of the first page of my MS., and then a new thought struck me. I looked up from my MS. and went on, forgetting all about my written matter, until suddenly remembering it I was about to resume where I had left off, when I noticed that my time was up! So I wound up with a few sentences, in which I alluded pathetically to my poor MS., and sat down amid really loud applause.
Then my chairwoman, during an interval of tea and cake, informed me that my audience would now entertain me with a selection of old English dances, if I cared to witness them, and naturally I said I would be delighted. So after signing a few dozen autograph books, an arm-chair was placed upon the dais for me, and there I lolled at my ease, like any Eastern Khalif, watching those Houris threading the mazy convolutions of the dance. I have a keen sense of the incongruous, and I confess that never in my life have I felt it more strongly than then, for, in the first place, dancing has never appealed to me, especially ballet dancing, and in the next, I seemed to myself to be more utterly out of place than I ever imagined I could be. Yet I can have nothing but praise for the kindness, courtesy, and assiduity of all present—who could none of them have known how utterly awkward I felt. Indeed I was glad when the evening was over.
Only once more in my life have I had the same feeling, and that was at the splendid Girls’ School at Cheltenham. My hostess, who was an enthusiastic alumna of the school, told me that I must on no account miss the wonderful sight of Miss Beale reading prayers in the morning and the trooping in of the 1000 scholars more or less. By some means that I do not remember I was got into the school, and given a seat upon a small dais close to a reading desk, facing the great bare hall. At a given signal the huge crowd of young ladies trooped in, filling every available seat, and when they had all subsided, Miss Beale, a short, stout lady in black, with a dreadfully bruised face and a black eye, came in and stood at the desk.
She read the prayers and a chapter in a splendidly sonorous voice, during which the silence and attention was quite painful in its perfection. She ceased reading, and, turning sharply to me, whom to all appearance she had not noticed before, said, in a voice that rang deeply through that profound silence:
“You must go now.”