Later on, at that same meeting, a heckler asked him where he got his title, and was told “just where you got your d——d ugly face—from my father.”
He gave us some pretty flashes of wit that night, but not of the scathing order which makes him one of the protagonists who fight against Home Rule. With his physical strength and activity, his dauntless courage, and his power of swaying great assemblages with his speeches, he is a born leader.
There were few well-known literary men and women in the London of the time who were not guests of the Vagabonds Club. The best speech we ever had from a woman author was, I think, from Flora Annie Steel, who, contrary to the habit of most speakers, explained to start with that she was likely to make a very good speech because we had taken her unexpectedly, and she was very angry with the last speaker—whom she proceeded to mince.
But charming Mrs. Craigie, “John Oliver Hobbes,” made us a very fascinating one when she was our guest of the evening. That was the night on which she complained that people persisted in identifying her with her heroines, especially with the kind of heroine whom a woman does not wish to be suspected of drawing from herself, like her “Anne” (I think in _The Gods, Some Mortals, and Lord Wickenham_).
Anthony Hope, who was the next speaker, complained that he had never had such luck, that he had been hoping ever since he wrote _The Prisoner of Zenda_ that somebody would confuse him with Rupert of Hentzau, but that no critic had ever obliged him.
Once, at any rate, he was the guest of the Club, and he occupied the chair, I should say, nearly every year during its existence. I wish I had kept a record of the _bons mots_ which never failed to adorn his speeches. One of them comes to my mind as I write these words; he said that the reason why England and the United States were not better friends arose from their inability to understand each other’s humour.
He and Conan Doyle were the mainstays of our chair at the New Vagabonds. Doyle may have taken it even oftener than he did. He was the chairman we instinctively chose for a great occasion, like that on which we had Lord Roberts for our guest, though he did not actually take the chair that night, for we could rely upon him to say the generous and dignified words which would express the feelings of the Club, as he did in proposing the health of Lord Roberts at the Authors’ Society dinner, when he said that Lord Roberts was the one guest who, short of royalty, must always take the first place in any gathering of his countrymen, the first, not only in rank and distinction, but in the grateful love and veneration of Englishmen.