"We Have With Us Tonight"
Public speaking is more or less of an ordeal even for those who have to undertake it constantly. Worse than all is speaking at a dinner, because you have to wait your turn and feel it coming for hours. Next time you are at a public dinner notice the men at the head table who sit and eat celery by the bunch and never stop. Those are the men who are going to speak.
I don't say that trained speakers are nervous. No. They wish the chairman would announce that the rest of the meeting is cancelled because of smallpox, or that the hotel would catch fire, or that there would be an earthquake. But they're not nervous.
But if speaking is an ordeal to them, what it is to those who have never spoken. Some men go through life and never have to speak; they rise to wealth and standing with the fear of it in the background—fear, with an element of temptation.
Such a one was my senior acquaintance of long ago, Mr. Gritterly—no harm to name him—general manager of one of the Toronto banks. He had just retired, without ever speaking in public, when a Bankers' Three Days Convention came to town and they invited Mr. Gritterly to speak at the dinner.
He accepted, hung in the wind, flew round the flame—and finally, on the opening day, sent a note that he was called out of town for the evening.
I saw him round the hotel next morning. He was telling me how sorry he was to have missed the opportunity. He told me a lot of things he could have said about branch banking. He said, too, that he would like to have had a sly joke, very good-natured of course, about the American Treasury system. It was too bad, he said, he'd been called out of town. He had even intended, just in an offhand way, to get off one or two quotations from Shakespeare (he had them in his pocket). One read—"I know a bank whereon a wild thyme grows—" Gritterly thought that would get a laugh, eh? Too bad, he said, that he couldn't get that off.
"But, Mr. Gritterly," I said, "you're making a mistake. They didn't have the dinner last night. The trains were so late they only had the inaugural address. The dinner's tonight. You'll probably get an invitation—"
And as I spoke a boy brought it to him on a tray.
"So you see you'll be able to tell them about branch banking."
"Yes," said Mr. Gritterly, "yes."
"And the jokes about the U. S. Treasury."
"Yes," said Mr. Gritterly, "quite so."
All day Gritterly was round the hotel pulling the little bits of Shakespeare out of his pocket.
But the thing beat him.
In due course at the dinner the chairman announced: "I regret very much that Mr. Gritterly will not be able to speak. His speech, of which he gave me an outline, would have been a great treat. Unfortunately he had to leave tonight"—the chairman consulted his notes—"for Japan. With your permission I will take on myself to cable our representatives and I am sure they'll be glad to get up a dinner for Mr. Gritterly at Tokio."
Gritterly got the invitation on board ship and went right on to Hong Kong. The bankers there received a cable and organized a lunch. Gritterly had gone on to Singapore but the bankers followed him up, and he left for Calcutta. They lost him somewhere in Thibet. He may have entered the monastery there. For many people that would be preferable to speaking.