This was how the students of a delightful college not very far from Philadelphia treated myself when I was almost ready to sink through the floor from sheer terror of facing so many young women, being a sisterless and daughterless man, and I wish to thank one young lady who sat in the front and smiled encouragement upon me until I lifted up my head and took heart.
I have never utterly collapsed, and have never fled from the platform, but I was reduced to confusion and incoherence of speech when I opened a clubhouse for a company of women students at a certain American University, and my whole audience suddenly flopped down upon the floor as I began my little speech. As the floor had a beautiful carpet and there were no chairs, the young ladies no doubt did well for themselves, but as I looked down upon that fair flower-garden all my thoughts vanished, and I do not think that I uttered a grammatical sentence.
American young women do not know that an Englishman is the most bashful creature on the face of the earth, and that he would rather face an audience of two thousand men from the streets than address twenty young women, every one as sharp as a needle and as pretty as a flower.
My experience of chairmen is wide and varied, and I have lectured under the Presidency of some very distinguished and able men, but on the whole I would rather be without a chairman. There was one who introduced me in a single sentence of five minutes' length, in which he stated that as he would treasure every word I said more than pure gold he did not wish to curtail my time by a single minute. He then fell fast asleep, and I had the honour of wakening him at the close of the lecture. Had he slept anywhere else I should not have had the smallest objection, but his restful attitude in the high estate of the chair had an unedifying and discomposing effect on the audience.
On the whole, I preferred that chairman to another who introduced me to the extent of twenty-five minutes, and occupied the time in commending to the exasperated audience the claims of a foundling asylum with which he had some charitable connexion. This time it was the lecturer who fell asleep and had to be wakened when the audience drove the chairman to his seat.
A lecturer is also much refreshed amid his labour by the assurance of the chairman that he has simply lived upon his books for years, and has been looking forward to this evening for the last three months with high expectation, when after these flattering remarks he does not know your name, and can only put it before the audience after a hurried consultation with the secretary of the lecture course.
My memory returns also with delight to a chairman who insisted that one object had brought them together, and that I was no stranger in that town because the whole audience before him were my friends, and then having called me Doctor Maclaren and Ian Watson, besides having hinted more than once at Mr. Barrie, introduced me to an uproarious audience as Mr. Ian John Maclaren Watson.
It is, of course, my gain, and the loss of two more distinguished fellow-countrymen, that I should be hopelessly associated in the minds of many people with Mr. Crockett and Mr. Barrie. But when one speaker declared that I would be remembered by grateful posterity as the Stickit Minister, I was inclined to protest, for whatever have been my defects as a preacher, I still have succeeded in obtaining a church; and when another speaker explained he had gone three times to see my “Little Minister,” I felt obliged to deny myself the authorship of that delightful play.
Allusions on the part of the audience, when they shook hands with me afterwards, I allowed to paas because there was not time to put things right; merely smiling at the mention of “A Window in Thrums,” and looking modest at the adjectives heaped upon “The Raiders.” My cynical humour was greatly tickled with the chairman, who had been very cordial with me in private, and who was understood by the public to have been closely identified with my visit to his city, when he not only escaped from the stage after he had introduced me, but also immediately left the theatre and cheerfully betook himself to his office without hearing one word of the lecture. Perhaps he had discovered from some casual remark of mine that I was not Mr. Barrie, and was at a loss to make out who I could be.
With mayors and other public functionaries who have to speak six times a day on six different subjects, and who get a little confused as to which meeting they are attending, I have the utmost sympathy, and never have been discomposed by any reference to the management of hospitals or the fallacy of bimetallism, even though the references were very indifferently connected with the lecturer and his subjects.