CHAPTER XIV

LITERARY CLUBS: THE SAVAGE CLUB

I WAS for a number of years a member of the Savage Club, and I was an honorary member there for a long time at an earlier period, when I first came home from Australia and the waiting list was full.

I sometimes hinted to the then secretary that I had out-lived my month of honorary membership several times over. His answer was invariably the same: “Rules are intended to be enforced against disagreeable people.” I remained an honorary member till I went away to America in 1888. Some years afterwards, when I returned from America, I became an ordinary member.

At first I loved the Savage. There were not many author-members, it was true, who ever put in an appearance, except Christie Murray and Patchett Martin—Barrie was a member, but he was never there. The Club did not run to authors. What celebrities there were were chiefly actors and artists. But it was a club that consisted more of the admirers of the arts than their professors, men who packed the dinner-table every Saturday night, and made an enthusiastic audience for the actors and musicians and reciters, who did “turns” to amuse the company and get their names known to the public, if they were not already popular favourites, like W. H. Denny, Fred Kay, Odell, Willie Nichol and Reggie Groome.

I have known the Savage Club long enough to remember Brandon Thomas and Seymour Hicks being regarded as brilliant amateurs, who never would be anything more. But both were very favourite performers at giving sketches accompanied by the piano. Penley was often there, but never would perform. One of the favourite _jeunes premiers_ of musical comedy—I forget which—used to sing “I’ll sing thee Songs of Araby” every Saturday night.

Before I went to America, while I knew hardly any one in Bohemia, and it was all new to me, I loved those Saturday nights. We had a bad half-crown dinner, in which I generally sat between quite uninteresting people—well-off furniture dealers and that kind of thing, who were most of them, however, keen and intelligent patrons of music and the drama, and belonged to the Savage for that reason. Most of them, too, were old members, with a large number of friends at whom they fired good-humoured banter across the tables. I found them willing to take one into their good-fellowship in the readiest manner, and occasionally one was rewarded by finding oneself near an affable celebrity.

But the conversation was seldom in the least bit intellectual. Books were treated as non-existent in the Savage of that day. There were hardly any, even in the library, except poems given by the poets themselves. I was always heartily glad when the dinner was over, and the fusillade of ordering drinks was over, and the performance began.

The club-house was situated then, as now, in Adelphi Terrace, a fine row of Georgian houses standing on a sort of marine parade above the bank of the Thames. If you looked over the railings on the opposite side of the road, you would expect to find a beach like Brighton’s. I have never yet looked over these railings, so I don’t know what there is below, but there must be vaults, which are used for something, under the road, in such a valuable locality.

The room where we held the dinners and these brilliant club concerts was only separated by a wall from David Garrick’s dining-room. He made the mistake of living in the wrong house.

The theory why we dined at 6.30, was that popular actors and singers could dine with us, and give us a turn before they went to their theatre. In practice, they very seldom came, unless they were having a holiday, voluntary or otherwise. But there were always enough of them “resting” to give us a brilliant evening.

For some little time after dinner the Club did not settle down sufficiently to make its favourite performers willing to give their turns. It made too much noise over diluting whisky with soda, and manœuvring to get the waiter’s attention. This gave the new aspirant his chance. If he was timid and low-voiced, he did not always get the attention of the room, but it was not difficult to get the chairman to call on him. I know by experience how difficult it was to get any old “hand” to sing first. I called upon the bores first, when I was in the chair. There were several of them, whom the Club had grown into the habit of tolerating every Saturday night, so they had earned a right to be called on. They all said that they had colds, and afterwards, when the performance was at its height, sent round notes that they felt better, and would try to give a turn if I called upon them now. But I ignored the notes so long as I had any one else to call on. They were mostly reciters; almost any kind of song will go in a club which takes up a chorus.

Some of the humorous reciters were very good. The club was never tired of hearing Robert Ganthony give a scene in a Metropolitan Police Magistrate’s Court; or that youthful octogenarian, Fitzgerald, the artist, mimicking a rehearsal at Astley’s in the old days; or Odell, the idol of the Savage, going through his wonderful repertoire. Early in the evening, Walter Hedgcock, the Crystal Palace organist, would give us the song he never could publish, because he was blocked by an earlier setting—Kipling’s “Mandalay.” It was delightful music, and was eventually published as the “Mousmee,” with words which I wrote for him in the metre of “Mandalay.” Hedgcock did not mind coming on early, because he could always pick up the audience with the first bars of “Mandalay.”

Townley, who was Registrar of Births and Deaths at St. Pancras, I think—except on Saturday nights and Sundays—was our funniest singer; he was a natural comedian. The Club always insisted on its favourites singing the same songs. He had to sing a song called “Hoop-la,” or something of the kind. Willie Nichol had to sing “Loch Lomond”; Cheesewright had to sing “The Three Jolly Sailor-Boys”; Denny, who was afterwards our honorary secretary, did generally give us something recent from the music-halls. But the old “hands” eyed him half resentfully while he did it.

I soon came to regard Odell as an oasis, because, though the Club made him sing and recite the same things Saturday after Saturday, he had a blessed gift of gag. In the midst of his ballad about the Fleet, the one Warham St. Leger wrote for _Punch_, he stopped one night to tell us how he lost his last engagement. It was in a piece based on the wreck of the _Princess Alice_, the Thames steamer in which so many lives were lost. Odell played the part of captain of the steamer, and all went well till one night, as he expressed it, just at the fatal moment, when the people in the stalls were taking off their coats because they were so perspiring with excitement, he could stand the tension no longer, so he took out his watch and said, “It’s just five o’clock. I wish I had gone back by the penny ’bus.” The audience rose in their places, and stoned him with whatever came handy, and he pretended that after that he never could get an engagement.

As I don’t drink after dinner, and don’t smoke at all, I began to find these concerts very tiring as soon as I knew all the performances by heart. But there was no other place of meeting except the bar. We badly needed a smoking-room, adjoining the dining-room and the bar, where those who had brought interesting people with them could introduce them to interesting Savages, without losing touch with the evening, as they did if they went up to that melancholy library, which has probably been given over to some legitimate purpose, like _Bridge_, long ago.

I frequently agitated for this smoking-room, and I believe that they got it eventually. The bar did too good a business; you did not see people getting intoxicated; its habitués carried their liquor too well. But I have seen one man drink as many as thirty-three whiskys-and-sodas in a single evening, and I saw him the other day—twenty years afterwards—looking as fit as possible.

Gradually I came to the conclusion that as there were so many other interesting things happening on Saturdays, it was not wise to give my Saturday evenings up to the Savage, and there was “nothing else to” the club in those days. It had not then become the favourite lunching-place of the great editors, an important venue for authors.

So I retired from the Savage, as I retired from the Devonshire a few years afterwards. When one of the committee of the Devonshire asked me why I retired from it, I said that I only used it for funerals, and that I was retiring because they had made that an extra. This was a fact. The windows of the Devonshire Club are one of the best places for seeing a royal funeral—or, of course, any other royal procession. The committee discovered this, and put on a charge of ten pounds a seat, to pay for the decorations of the Club. So many people wanted these seats that they had to be balloted for. The action of the committee was justified. But, as I had not used the Club since the funeral of Queen Victoria, when I found that I could not see the funeral of King Edward from its windows without balloting for the privilege of paying ten pounds for it, I sent in my resignation, and paid a guinea for a seat from which I could see the funeral for the whole length of Oxford and Cambridge Terrace. I went with Norma Lorimer and Markino, who painted a wonderful picture of it. The people on whose roof we hired the seats from the contractor, asked us to lunch, and became quite intimate friends. They proved to be Mr. Sanderson Stuart and his daughter—the youthful genius of sculpture.

We used to get most notable guests at the Savage—was not the list headed by Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. I was in the chair the night that Nansen was the guest of the evening. It was on the eve of his departure for the North Pole, and I hammered the table and asked the Club if they would allow me to invite our guest to write his name on the wall behind his seat, to remain there till he came back again. They assented with rapturous applause, and the name is there still, glazed over. I have told in another chapter what he said to the “Savage” who wished to accompany him to the Arctic Circle.

The Savage Club is, undoubtedly, one of the institutions of London, and every literary visitor to these shores should see one of its Saturday nights.