[175]
]CHAPTER XV
MISCELLANEOUS
Arthur Henderson, M.P.—Lord Derby—Miss Elizabeth Robins—Frank Mullings—Harold Bauer—Emil Sauer—Vladimir de Pachmann
I quite forget what particular concatenation of circumstances brought me into personal touch with Mr Arthur Henderson, M.P., but I rather think that when I waited for him at Waterloo Station I was acting the part of messenger-boy. Perhaps I delivered a letter or telegram to him, or I may have given him a verbal message. All I remember is, that something very important had happened, and it was necessary that Mr Arthur Henderson should be apprised of this happening at the earliest possible moment. So I volunteered to meet him at Waterloo.
We walked across the station together, and I was depressingly aware of a rather bulky form with a Manchester kind of face. He spoke heavily and uttered commonplaces that fell dead on his very lips. I could feel his self-importance radiating from him, and I gathered that I was supposed to be in the presence of a very exceptional person indeed. But I did not feel that he was exceptional. There has never been a moment since I reached manhood that I haven’t known that my intellect is of finer texture than that of the five thousand who elbow each other on the Manchester Exchange, and it seemed to me that night at Waterloo Station that Mr
Henderson would be very much at home on the Manchester Exchange. I recollect most vividly that he bored me very much and [176] ]that, offering him some plausible excuse, I parted from him before we had crossed the river, and darted away to more congenial people.
A few weeks previous to this encounter I had heard Mr Henderson give an “address” in a Nonconformist chapel. An “address,” I am given to understand, is a kind of homely sermon in which the speaker talks to his audience in a friendly and distinctly unbending manner. He seeks to improve them, to lead them to higher and better things: in a word, to make them more like himself.... I have not the faintest recollection of what drove me inside this Nonconformist chapel, but I cannot conceive I went there of my own free will. I suppose that someone paid me to go there. But my mind retains a very clear picture of a pulpit containing a man with a face so like other faces that, sometimes, when I examine it, it seems to belong to Mr Jackson of Messrs Jackson & Lemon, the famous auctioneers of Boodlestown, and at other times it is owned by Mr Brownjonesrobinson who, I need scarcely point out, is known everywhere.... Really, I have no intention of being violently rude. This question of faces is important. A face should express a soul. No great man whose portrait I have seen possessed a commonplace face.
The address was heavy, obvious and dull. I was taken back twenty years to my boyhood when stern parents compelled me to go to a Wesleyan chapel one hundred and three times a year (twice every Sunday and once on Christmas Day); on most of those hundred and three occasions I used to hear exhortations to be “good,” not, so to speak, for the love of the thing, but because being “good” paid. Mr Arthur Henderson, Samuel Smiles redivivus, proved that it paid. He didn’t say: “Look at me!” but, all the same, we did look at him. The spectacle to most of his congregation was, I suppose, encouraging; me, it didn’t excite. I can well believe [177] ]that, as I stepped out of the building, I said to myself: “No, Gerald. We will remain as we are. The penalties of virtue are much too heavy for us to pay.”
. . . . . . . .
One Saturday evening I journeyed to Liverpool with twenty or thirty other newspaper men to dine with Lord Derby. Pressmen are accustomed to this kind of entertainment from public men, and their host generally contrives to be exceptionally agreeable. It would be putting it very crudely to state that these dinners are intended as a bribe: let me therefore say that they serve the purpose of smoothing the way for the dissemination of some propaganda or other. To the best of my recollection, Lord Derby had no other purpose in view than the laudable and kindly intention of making the journalists of Manchester and Liverpool better acquainted with one another.
After dinner, various ladies and gentlemen from the neighbouring music halls provided us with an excellent entertainment, and I can now see Lord Derby smilingly and courteously receiving these artists and making them feel that they, like ourselves, were honoured guests, and not merely paid mimes. He seemed to me then, as he has always seemed to me, our dearly loved, bluff but unfailingly courteous national John Bull. He is, I think, the most British man with whom I have ever spoken—honest, brave, resourceful, self-sacrificing, fond of good company and good cheer, hail-fellow-well-met yet a trifle reserved and not a little cautious, blunt but considerate of others’ feelings. Some of us collected signatures on the backs of our menus, but when Lord Derby had written his name on the top of mine I left it there alone, not caring to see other names mingling with his: perhaps feeling that no other name of those present was worthy to stand beneath his name.