CHAPTER IV
THE LECTURE TOUR
May I very humbly intimate that in what follows I speak for myself alone, I have no experience whatever of my fellow-lecturers, many of whom I know and admire and love, but am entirely ignorant of their experiences on the platform or on the tour. So that I must beg the reader to remember that what I say may be and very probably is peculiar to myself alone and that other lecturers may have experiences of an entirely different nature.
In what I believe to have been my first public engagement at Glenalmond College, in Perthshire, I was notably handicapped in several ways. I was eager and excited at the honour, as I naturally felt it, but I was very poor both in money and time, so I booked from King’s Cross by the midnight train, third class, of course. Our compartment contained five, but one man, who had arrived early, had made himself comfortable with rug and pillow stretched full length upon the seat, and my share of that side was quite cramped. Yet I did not protest or claim that he was taking much more than his share, for I was diffident, inexperienced in railway travelling, and, moreover, of a peaceable disposition. But I spent a miserable night, sleepless, cold and painfully stiff, so that the cup of coffee at Newcastle which I obtained at the refreshment room came as a veritable elixir of life to me.
My seat companion had not wakened, nor did he until arrival in Edinburgh, and I am afraid I looked upon his prostrate form with bitter envy. Oh the bleakness of that dawn along the east coast of Northumberland! It struck a chill into my very soul, and the entry to Edinburgh seemed to sweat that coldness down. For as you all know, in common with most picturesque places, the railway approach to the Athens of the North is as if you were Dante being led by Virgil towards the hopeless Gate. And Waverley Station was in a state of chaos. They were building it and the pitiless sleet poured down upon a vast raffle of rafters and wreckage of every sort. Nevertheless I managed to get some more coffee and a Bap, then got me unto my carriage as a place of refuge from the all-pervading wretchedness of that morning.
We crossed the Forth Bridge in a sleet storm so thick that much as I longed to make the acquaintance of that mighty structure I was only able to catch passing glimpses of the great tubes as we flitted between them. Opening the window was out of the question. So I settled down again until arrival at Perth, where the weather and the general outlook were as bad as ever. I was momentarily cheered by a sign which offered hot baths, for the prospect of one sent a glow all through me. Alas, the price was half a crown and I turned sadly away, wondering mightily why such elementary comforts should be available only for the rich. I owe that bathroom a grudge still, for I am sure that the charge was an abominably extortionate one.
Unfortunately I had arranged with the College authorities to send a conveyance for me to Methven Station in the afternoon, so I had the day before me. And such a day! You ladies and gentlemen who only know Perth in its summer garb can hardly imagine its bleakness to a poor stranger landing in it at 9 a.m. on a December day with only a few shillings and a return ticket to London in his pocket, and obliged to wait somewhere until the afternoon. I draw a veil over the misery of that morning although my experiences were quaint enough, involving as they did, the absorption of a “gless” of hot whisky at a coffee tavern, and the overhearing of some of the strangest sounds from customers who came into the room where I sat, and drank neat whisky with a mouthful of water after it, a fashion I had only seen before in America.
At last I could stand Perth and the sleet no longer and I fled to the station for Methven, arriving there to find, as I thought, a station only in the midst of a wide solitude. But there was Erchie, the old porter factotum, and he was a host in himself. I think he took pity upon the puir Southron bodie, certainly he took interest, for his questions were many and searching. The end of them was that I found myself in a “masheen,” in this case a dog-cart, trundling along the road towards Glenalmond, utterly weary and cold and wretched, but buoyed up by the feeling that I was near my journey’s end.
It was a long drive in the open, but the sleet had ceased and only the bitter wind searched my none too well clad form. But when we arrived at the College my amazement at the magnificent pile—it must be remembered that I had never seen a great Public School before—was so great that I almost forgot my physical discomfort in admiration. Then my hostess enwrapped me in her gentle hospitality, and having heard my brief account of the recent happenings she first gave me hot tea, then ordered me a hot bath, a warm bed, and laid upon me strict injunction not to appear until dinner-time. Now it is true that I had never been so received in my life before and that perhaps would account for the vivid impression it made upon my memory, but the thoughtful care of it all coming as and when it did would suffice to have made that first visit to Mrs. Skrine’s hospitable roof memorable.
I emerged at dinner-time from that luxurious bed a new man, feeling fit for any fate, and the rest of my visit there—I stayed the week-end—was sheer delight, for it was like a first glimpse of a new world. So that when my “masheen” came at 7.30 on Monday morning to take me to the station I faced the long bitter drive with the greatest equanimity and a feeling that fate could not harm me now. Erchie was waiting to shepherd me, and asked me many curious questions about my visit. Strangely enough he did not appear to be inquisitive, nor did I feel inclined to resent his curiosity, but I was not in the least surprised to learn, many years afterwards, that the old man was one of Ian Maclaren’s characters. There was undoubtedly much good “copy” in him.
Now although I never again made so long a journey for one lecture, and the expenses made a parlous hole in the fee, I could not help feeling that I was fairly launched, and that since my lecture had been well received by the assembled masters and uproariously hailed by the boys, I need no longer have any misgivings as to its reception anywhere. One resolution I then made which I have rigidly adhered to, and I am glad to know that through it many hundreds of schoolboys have blessed me. It was to avoid all appearance even of the pedagogue, of swot under the cloak of entertainment. I felt that since the boys had to come and had to pay to come, out of school hours too, the least I could do was to try and make my story as full of interest and fun as in me lay, and nothing has given me greater pleasure than to hear from old Public School boys all over the world when I have met them that I have succeeded.
When I reached home again I was much cheered to learn that the agency had secured me two engagements on consecutive days, one at Newcastle and the other at South Shields. This could only be looked upon by me as an opening into the larger lecture field, and I, who have always been the most diffident and self-distrustful of men, could not help feeling that I should be able to do full justice to my selection. My long experience in open-air preaching came to my recollection, those Sunday evenings on Peckham Rye, when thousands hung upon my words and I never had an angry voice raised against me, and I felt confident that as I knew all there was to be known about my subject, I could make it attractive to my audience. So that I never had the slightest mental trouble or foreboding about the result of these public lectures, while the fees marked against them struck me as being lavish gifts for what was going to be a most delightful holiday.
It must be remembered that up till this time I had belonged to that large stratum of society to whom the expenditure of a shilling for anything but the sternest necessaries of life is unthinkable—I gave up as hopeless the attempt to understand, for instance, how people could carelessly pay railway fares of pounds each when I could not have spared pennies for trams, often walking miles instead. As to those plutocrats who bought bicycles, watches, or hired cabs—well I realised that they moved in sublime regions far beyond my possible ken and dismissed them from my mind. But lecturing pushed me, without giving me time to think, into nearly all these things. I found myself buying a dress-suit, garments I had always associated with the idle rich, or waiters whom I had seen through the open doors of restaurants. I paid huge railway fares of nearly two sovereigns shudderingly, as if I were committing a crime, yet somehow remembering that these were part of the expenses which would be returnable. In fact, the whole of my outlook upon life was being changed.
Especially so in regard to what I may call the mainstay of my employment, the office. No one can ever know but myself how I loathed the place, how deeply sincere were the prayers I put up for deliverance from it. Yet I never could hope, for well I knew that the pay, though it remained at the same old two guineas a week for seventeen years and would, I knew, never be increased, was better than I could expect anywhere else as a clerk, and did I lose it, what prospect had I at between forty and fifty years of age of getting anything else? It is very likely that I was not worth more, indeed I dare say I was not, but then I knew the same of many others. That was not the trouble. It was the abominable system of petty persecution practised, the miserable tyranny exercised by those who were no higher in the social scale, had no reason to be ugly, except that they did no office work themselves and had perforce to make their juniors fill up the gap.
This it was that made me, when the first gleam of light came through the pall of cloud above me with the acceptance of the Cruise of the Cachalot, vow that at the very first opportunity given me I would take my courage in both hands and resign that magnificent appointment. Now all unknown to me that triumphant hour drew near. As usual several things combined to bring it about, but I believe the pre-eminent cause was this. My chief, before we were thus associated, had told me that he did not consider the writing of a private letter in office hours a wrong done to our employer the State. He might have added on his own behalf that the transaction of private business involving hours was venial, but he did not go as far as that. It happened, however, that one day when my correspondence was becoming heavier and more urgent than I could deal with at home that I was writing a private letter in office hours. My chief sternly invited me to put that private “work” away, refusing to look at it and see that it was a letter. I tried to explain and quoted his previous utterance on the subject. No use. He refused to discuss the matter, so I put the letter away and finished it in my luncheon three-quarters of an hour. It happened that it was an answer to a letter from the editor of a London newspaper offering me a salary exactly equivalent to my office pay for certain regular contributions. I made it an acceptance, and the next day I resigned.
Then I committed an unpardonable offence. For firstly, I had taken nobody into my confidence; and, secondly, I had dared to do that which others with treble my earnings had longed to do but dared not. And to-day I am in certain quarters more bitterly hated than any man alive for this wickedness. However it did not matter to me, what did matter was my freedom and such a difference in treatment as I could not have believed possible. In fact I always feel a certain pride in the fact that I did manage to suppress the sense of being, and the appearance of having been, a drudge afraid to call my soul my own for all those years, and that I took my place in Society as naturally as if I had been born thereto.
Yes, amidst all that has befallen me since and in my present worn-out condition I can still feel grateful for the spirit that prompted me to shake the dust of that place off my feet and to tell those who had combined to make my life a burden to me while there, as they now fawned upon me, that for decency’s sake they had better have kept silence, since nothing that they could say would ever efface the bitter impression of their utterly uncalled-for tyranny. Had I then known it, Nemesis was lying in wait for them, but I cared nothing for their future, having won clear of them and all their works I was content to ignore and as far as possible to forget them.