An Adventure with a Genius: Recollections of Joseph Pulitzer Part 10

"Well, my G.o.d!" he would conclude, "about two years later, when I had learned English and studied some law and been made a notary public, this very same captain walked into my office in St. Louis one day to have some doc.u.ments sealed. As soon as he saw me he stopped short, as if he had seen a ghost, and said, "Say, ain't you the d.a.m.ned cuss that I fired off my boat?"

"I told him yes, I was. He was the most surprised man I ever saw, but after he had sworn himself hoa.r.s.e he faced the facts and gave me his business."

Mr. Pulitzer always declared that the proudest day of his life, the occasion on which his vanity was most tickled, was when he was elected to the Missouri Legislature. Things were evidently run in a rather happy-go-lucky fashion in those early days, since, as he admitted with a reminiscent smile, he was absolutely disqualified for election, being neither an American citizen nor of age.

Mr. Pulitzer's anecdotes about himself always ended in one way. He would break off suddenly and exclaim, "For Heaven's sake, why do you let me run on like this; as soon as a man gets into the habit of talking about his past adventures he might just as well make up his mind that he is growing old and that his intellect is giving way."

It was this strong disinclination for personal reminiscence which prevented Mr. Pulitzer, despite many urgent appeals, from writing his autobiography. It is a thousand pities that he adhered to this resolution, for his career, as well in point of interest as in achievement and picturesqueness, would have stood the test of comparison with that of any man whose life-story has been preserved in literature.

CHAPTER VI

WIESBADEN AND AN ATLANTIC VOYAGE

At last the time came when we had to leave the yacht and make a pilgrimage to Wiesbaden, in order that Mr. Pulitzer might submit to a cure before sailing for New York.

The first stage of our journey took us from Genoa to Milan. Here we stayed for five hours so that J. P. could have his lunch and his siesta comfortably at an hotel. Paterson had been sent ahead two or three days in advance to look over the hotels and to select the one which promised to be least noisy. On our arrival in Milan J. P. was taken to an automobile, and in ten minutes he was in his rooms.

Simple as these arrangements appear from the bald statement of what actually happened they really involved a great deal of care and forethought. It was not enough that Paterson should visit half-a-dozen hotels and make his choice from a cursory inspection. After his choice had been narrowed down by a process of elimination he had to spend several hours in each of two or three hotels, in the room intended for J. P., so that he could detect any of the hundred noises which might make the room uninhabitable to its prospective tenant.

The room might be too near the elevator, it might be too near a servants' staircase, it might overlook a courtyard where carpets were beaten, or a street with heavy traffic, it might be within earshot of a dining-room where an orchestra played or a smoking-room with the possibility of loud talking, it might open off a pa.s.sage which gave access to some much frequented reception-room.

Most of these points could be determined by merely observing the location of the room. But other things were to be considered. Did the windows rattle, did the floor creak, did the doors open and shut quietly, was the ventilation good, were there noisy guests in the adjoining rooms?

This last difficulty was, I understand, usually overcome by Mr. Pulitzer engaging, in addition to his own room, a room on either side of it, three rooms facing it, the room above it and the room beneath it.

Even the question of the drive from the station to the hotel had to be thought out. A trial trip was made in an automobile. If the route followed a car line or pa.s.sed any spot likely to be noisy, such as a market place or a school playground, or if it led over a roughly paved road on which the car would jolt, another route had to be selected, which, as far as possible, dodged the unfavorable conditions.

Our carefully arranged journey pa.s.sed without incident. We had a private car from Milan to Frankfort and another for the short run to Wiesbaden, where we arrived in time for lunch on the day after our departure from Genoa. Everything had been prepared for our reception by some one who had made similar arrangements on former occasions. We occupied the whole of a villa belonging to one of the large hotels, and situated less than a hundred yards from it.

In the main our life was modeled upon that at the Cap Martin villa; but part of Mr. Pulitzer's morning was devoted to baths, ma.s.sage, and the drinking of waters. Our meals were taken, as a rule, either in a private dining-room at the hotel or in the big restaurant of the Kurhaus; but when Mr. Pulitzer was feeling more than usually tired the table was laid in the dining-room of the villa.

Our dinners at the Kurhaus were a welcome change from our ordinary meals with their set routine of literary discussions. Mr. Pulitzer was immensely interested in people; but it was impossible for him to meet them, except on rare occasions, because the excitement was bad for his health. Whenever he dined in a crowded restaurant, however, our time was fully occupied in describing with the utmost minuteness the men, women, and children around us.

The Kurhaus was an excellent place for the exercise of our descriptive powers. In addition to the ordinary crowd of pleasure-seekers and health-hunters there were, during a great part of our visit, a large number of military men, for the Kaiser spent a week at Wiesbaden that year and reviewed some troops, and this involved careful preparation in advance by a host of court officials and high army officers.

Under these circ.u.mstances the dining-room of the Kurhaus presented a scene full of color and animation. Sometimes J. P. said to one of us: "Look around for a few minutes and pick out the most interesting- looking man and woman in the room, examine them carefully, try and catch the tone of their voices, and when you are ready describe them to me."

Or he might say: "I hear a curious, sharp, incisive voice somewhere over there on my right. There it is now--don't you hear it?--s s s s s, every s like a hiss. Describe that man to me; tell me what kind of people he's talking to; tell me what you think his profession is." Or it might be: "There are some gabbling women over there. Describe them to me. How are they dressed, are they painted, are they wearing jewels, how old are they?"

In whatever form the request was made its fulfilment meant a description covering everything which could be detected by the eye or surmised from any available clew.

Describing people to J. P. was by no means an easy task. It was no use saying that a man had a medium-sized nose, that he was of average height, and that his hair was rather dark. Everything had to be given in feet and inches and in definite colors. You had to exercise your utmost powers to describe the exact cast of the features, the peculiar texture and growth of the hair, the expression of the eyes, and every little trick of gait or gesture.

Mr. Pulitzer was very sceptical of everybody's faculty of description.

He made us describe people, and specially his own children and others whom he knew well, again and again, and his unwillingness to accept any description as being good rested no doubt upon the wide divergence between the different descriptions he received of the same person.

There were few things which Mr. Pulitzer enjoyed more than having a face described to him, whether of a living person or of a portrait, and as our table-talk was often about men and women of distinction or notoriety, dead or living, any one of us might be called upon at any time to portray feature by feature some person whose name had been mentioned.

By providing ourselves with ill.u.s.trated catalogues of the Royal Academy exhibitions and of the National Portrait Gallery, and by cutting out the portraits with which the modern publisher so lavishly decorates his announcements, we generally managed, by pulling together, to cover the ground pretty well. I have sat through a meal during which one or another of us furnished a microscopic description of the faces of Warren Hastings, Lord Clive, President Wilson, the present King and Queen of England, the late John W. Gates, Ignace Paderewski, and an odd dozen current murderers, embezzlers, divorce habitues, and candidates for political office.

The delicate enjoyment of this game was not reached, however, until, at the following meal, one of us, who had been absent at the original delineation, was asked to cover some of the ground that had been gone over a few hours earlier. Mr. Pulitzer would say: "Is Mr. So-and-So here? Well, now, just for fun, let us see what he has to say about the appearance of some of the people we spoke about at lunch."

The result was almost always an astonishing disclosure of the inability of intelligent people to observe closely, to describe accurately, and to reach any agreement as to the significance of what they have seen. It was bad enough when the latest witness had before him the actual pictures on which the first description had been based; even then crooked noses became straight, large mouths small, disdain was turned to affability and ingenuousness to guile; but where this guide was lacking the descriptions were often ludicrously discrepant.

While we were at Wiesbaden we seldom spent much time at the dinner table, as J. P. usually took his choice between walking in the garden of the Kurhaus and listening to the orchestra and going to the opera. One night we motored over to Frankfort to hear Der Rosenkavalier, but the excursion was a dismal failure. We had to go over a stretch of very bad road, and with J. P. shaken into a state of extreme nervousness the very modern strains of the opera failed to please.

At the end of the second act J. P., who had been growing more and more dismal as the music b.u.mped along its disjointed course, either in vain search or in careful avoidance of anything resembling a pleasant sound, turned to me and said: "My G.o.d! I can't stand any more of this. Will you please go and find the automobile and bring it round to the main entrance. I want to go home."

I saw a great deal of Mr. Pulitzer while we were at Wiesbaden, owing to the circ.u.mstance that Paterson was called to England on urgent private affairs and Pollard was away on leave. The absence of these two men was as much regretted by the staff as it was by J. P. himself. Paterson was, from his extraordinary erudition, seldom at a loss for a topic of conversation which would rivet J. P.'s attention, and Pollard, who had been a number of years with J. P., was not only, on his own subjects, the conversational peer of Paterson, but was in addition, from his soothing voice and manner and from his long and careful study of J. P., invaluable as a mental and nervous sedative.

It was at Wiesbaden that I first began to read books regularly to J. P.

I read him portions of the biographies of Parnell, of Sir William Howard Russell, of President Polk (very little of this), of Napoleon, of Martin Luther, and at least a third of Macaulay's Essays.

He was a great admirer of Lord Macaulay's writings and read them constantly, as he found in them most of the qualities which he admired-- great descriptive power, political ac.u.men, satire, neatness of phrase, apt comparisons and a.n.a.logies, and shrewd a.n.a.lysis of character. Many pa.s.sages he made me read over and over again at different times. I reproduce a few of his favorite paragraphs for the purpose of showing what appealed to his taste.

From the Essay on Sir William Temple, the following lines referring to the Right Hon. Thomas Peregrine Courtenay, who, after his retirement from public life, wrote the Memoirs of Temple and stated in his preface that experience had taught him the superiority of literature to politics for developing the kindlier feelings and conducing to an agreeable life:

He has little reason, in our opinion, to envy any of those who are still engaged in a pursuit from which, at most, they can only expect that, by relinquishing liberal studies and social pleasures, by pa.s.sing nights without sleep and summers without one glimpse of the beauty of nature, they may attain that laborious, that invidious, that closely watched slavery which is mocked with the name of power.

More often than any others I read him the following pa.s.sages from the Essay on Milton:

The final and permanent fruits of liberty are wisdom, moderation, and mercy. Its immediate effects are often atrocious crimes, conflicting errors, scepticism on points the most clear, dogmatism on points the most mysterious. It is just at this crisis that its enemies love to exhibit it. They pull down the scaffolding from the half-finished edifice: they point to the flying dust, the falling bricks, the comfortless rooms, the frightful irregularity of the whole appearance; and then ask in scorn where the promised splendor and comfort is to be found. If such miserable sophisms were to prevail there would never be a good house or a good government in the world.

There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces; and that cure is freedom.

The blaze of truth and liberty may at first dazzle and bewilder nations which have become half blind in the house of bondage. But let them gaze on, and they will soon be able to bear it. In a few years men learn to reason. The extreme violence of opinion subsides. Hostile theories correct each other. The scattered elements of truth cease to contend, and begin to coalesce. And at length a system of justice and order is educed out of the chaos.

If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.

I was surprised one day on returning to the villa after a walk in the Kurhaus gardens with J. P. to find an addition to our company in the person of the second gentleman who had examined me in London at the time I had applied for the post of secretary to Mr. Pulitzer.

This gentleman occupied what I imagine must have been the only post of its kind in the world. He was, in addition to whatever other duties he performed, Mr. Pulitzer's villa-seeker.

It was Mr. Pulitzer's custom to talk a good deal about his future plans, not those for the immediate future, in regard to which he was usually very reticent, but those for the following year, or for a vague "someday" when many things were to be done which as yet were nothing more than the toys with which his imagination delighted to play.

As he always spent a great part of the year in Europe, a residence had to be found for him, it might be in Vienna, or London, or Berlin, or Mentone, or in any other place which emerged as a possibility out of the long discussions of the next year's itinerary.

Whenever the arguments in favor of any place had so far prevailed that a visit there had been accepted in principle as one of our future movements it became the duty of the villa-seeker to go to the locality, to gather a ma.s.s of information about its climate, its amenities, its resident and floating population, its accessibility by sea and land, the opportunities for hearing good music, and to report in the minutest detail upon all available houses which appeared likely to suit Mr.

Pulitzer's needs.

These reports were accompanied by maps, plans, and photographs, and they were considered by J. P. with the utmost care. Particular attention was paid to the streets and to the country roads in the neighborhood, as it was necessary to have facilities for motoring, for riding, and for walking.

The next step was to secure a villa, and after that had been done the alterations had to be undertaken which would make it habitable for J. P.

These might be of a comparatively simple nature, a matter of fitting silencers to the doors and putting up double windows to keep out the noise; but they might extend much further and involve more or less elaborate changes in the interior arrangements. Even after all this had been done a sudden shift of plans might send the villa-seeker scurrying across Europe to begin the whole process over again in order to be prepared for new developments.

At the time I left London to join J. P. at Mentone I had stipulated that, if I should chance to be selected to fill the vacant post, I should not be called upon to take up my duties until I had returned to London and spent a fortnight there in clearing up my private affairs.