I was interviewed by battalions of reporters who received me as a brother of their craft, and never once let me down by putting into my mouth words I did not wish to say. They were mostly young college men and, though I hate to say it, a keener, better-educated crowd, on the whole, than the average of their kind in English journalism.
I will record only one more of the wonderful things that happened to me as a representative of English journalism in New York.
On the eve of my departure, after my second visit, a dinner was given in my honor at the Biltmore. It was organized by Mrs. MacVickar, who has the organizing genius of a lady Napoleon, and a committee of ladies, and a thousand people were there. They included all the most distinguished people in New York, many of the most distinguished in America, and they were there to testify their friendship to England. They were there also to express their friendship, if I may dare say so, to me, as a man who had tried to serve England, and America, too, in speaking, and in writing, the simple truth. They wrote all their names in a book that was given to me at the dinner, and I keep it as a great treasure, holding the token of a nation’s kindness.
What added a little sauce piquante to the proceedings was the delivery from time to time during the dinner of notes from Sinn Feins parading outside the hotel. The first message I read was not flattering. “You are a dirty English rat. You ought to be deported.” Another informed me that I was a paid agent of the British Government. Another was a general indictment informing all American citizens that it was a disgrace to dine with me, and an act of treachery to their own nation. Another little missive described me as a typical blackguard in a nation of cutthroats. So they followed each other to the high table, where I was the guest of honor....
I had a great time in the United States on each of my three visits, but notwithstanding all I have said, I shall never make another lecture tour in that country. The fatigue of it demands the physique of an Arctic explorer combined with that of an African lion tamer. Several times I nearly succumbed to tinned tomato soup. Twice did I lose my voice in a wind forty below zero, and regain it by doses of medicine which destroyed my digestive organs. Nightly was I roasted alive in sleeping berths. Daily did my head swell to unusual proportions, not in conceit, but in a central heating system which is a terror to Englishmen. Visibly did I wither away as I traveled from city to city, received by deputations of leading citizens on arrival, after a sleep-disturbed night, with the duty ahead of keeping bright and intelligent through a long day’s programme, saying the right thing to the gracious ladies who entertained me at lunch, the bright thing to the City Club which entertained me to dinner, the true thing to all the questions asked about Europe, England, Lloyd George, Prohibition, Mrs. Asquith, the American flapper, Bolshevism, France, and the biological necessity of war, to business men, professors, journalists, poets, financiers, bishops, society leaders in Kansas City, or Grand Rapids, the President of the Mormon church, the editors of the local newspapers, the organizers of my lecture that evening, and the unknown visitors who called on me at the hotel all through the day, and every day.
One can’t keep that sort of thing up. It’s wearing....
I remember that in the Copley Plaza Hotel at Boston, a little old gentleman carrying a black bag tapped at my door and introduced himself by the name of Doctor Gibbs. He said that his hobby in life was to search out Gibbs in the United States, and he found thousands! He presented me with a copy of the Gibbs Family Bulletin, and opening his black bag produced a photograph of his great-grandfather.
It was my son Tony who called my attention to the fact that I was amazingly like that venerable man, who was toothless (he lived before the era of American dentistry) and with hair that had worn thin as the sere and yellow leaf. I decided that I should become exactly like him, “sans hair, sans teeth,” if I continued this career as an English lecturer in America. In order to avoid premature old age, I made a resolve (which I shall probably break) not to make another lecture tour in the United States.