An Adventure with a Genius: Recollections of Joseph Pulitzer Part 8

There could be no doubt whatever as to the effect these noises had upon him. He winced as a dog winces when you crack a whip over him; the only question was whether by a powerful effort he could regain his composure or whether his suffering would overcome his self-restraint to the extent of making him gloomy or querulous during the rest of the meal.

The effect by no means ceased when we rose from table. If by bad luck two or three noises occurred at dinner--and our excessive anxiety in the matter was sometimes our undoing--Mr. Pulitzer was so upset that he would pa.s.s a sleepless night. This in its turn meant a day during which his tortured body made itself master of his mind, and plunged him into a state of profound dejection.

Like most people who suffer acutely from noise Mr. Pulitzer was very differently affected by different kinds of noise. To any noise which was necessary, such as that caused by letting go the anchor, he could make himself indifferent; but very few noises were included in this category.

What caused him the most acute suffering was a noise which, while it inflicted pain upon him, neither gave pleasure to any one else nor achieved a useful purpose. Loud talking, whistling, slamming doors, carelessness in handling things, the barking of dogs, the "kick" of motor boats, these were the noises which made his existence miserable.

At the back of his physical reaction was a mental reaction which intensified every shock to his nerves. He complained, and with justice, that, leaving out of consideration an occasional noise which was purely the result of accident, his life was made a burden by the utter indifference of the majority of human beings to the rights of others.

What right, he asked, had any one to run a motor boat with a machine so noisy that it destroyed the peace of a whole harbor? Above all, what right had such a person to come miles out to sea and cruise around the yacht, merely to gratify idle curiosity?

He applied the same test to people who shout at one another in the streets, who whistle at the top of their lungs, or leave doors to slam in the faces of those behind them.

His resentment against these practices was made the more bitter by the knowledge that he was absolutely helpless in the matter whenever he came within hearing distance of an ill-bred person.

There was yet another element in this which added to his misery. He said to me once, when we had been driven off the plage at Mentone by two American tourists of the worst type, who at a hundred yards' distance from each other were yelling their views as to which hotel they proposed to meet at for lunch, "I can never forget that when I was a young man in the full vigor of my health I used to regard other people's complaints about noise as being merely an affectation. I would even make a noise deliberately in order to annoy any one who forced the absurd pretense upon my notice. Well, Mr. Ireland, I swear my punishment has been heavy enough."

To revert, however, to Mr. Pulitzer's dependence on those around him, it must be remembered that nothing could reach him except through the medium of speech. The state of his bank account, the condition of his investments, the reports about The World, his business correspondence, the daily news in which he was so deeply interested, everything upon which he based his relation with the affairs of life he had to accept at second hand.

It might be supposed that under these circ.u.mstances Mr. Pulitzer was easily deceived, that when there was no evil intention, for instance, but simply a desire to spare him annoyance, the exercise of a little ingenuity could shield him from anything likely to wound his feelings or excite his anger. As a matter of fact I have never known a man upon whom it would not have been easier to practice a deception. His blindness, so far from being a hindrance to him in reaching the truth, was an aid.

Two instances will serve to ill.u.s.trate the point. Suppose that I found in the morning paper an article which I thought would stir J. P. up and spoil his day: when I was called to read to him I had no means of knowing whether the man whom I replaced had taken the same view as myself and had skipped the article or whether he had, deliberately or inadvertently, read it to him. The same argument applied to the man who was to follow me. If I read the article to him I might find out later that my predecessor had omitted it, or, if I omitted it, that my successor had read it.

In either event one of us would be in the wrong; and it was impossible to tell in advance whether the man who read it would be blamed for lack of discretion or praised for his good judgment, as everything depended upon the exact mood in which Mr. Pulitzer happened to be.

It was an awkward dilemma for the secretary, for, if he did not read it and another man did, Mr. Pulitzer might very well interpret the first man's caution as an effort to hoodwink him, or the second man's boldness as an exhibition of indifference to his feelings, or, what was more likely still, fasten one fault upon one man and the other upon the other.

The same problem presented itself from a different direction. Often, Mr.

Pulitzer would take out of his pocket a bundle of papers--newspaper clippings, letters, statistical reports, and memoranda of various kinds.

Handing them to his companion he would say:

"Look through these and see if there is a letter with the London post mark, and a sheet of blue paper with some figures on it."

You could never tell what was behind these inquiries. Sometimes he was content to know that the papers were there, sometimes he asked you to read them, and as he might very well have them read to him by several people during the day he had a perfect check on all printed or written matter once it was in his hands.

In addition to all this his exquisite sense of hearing enabled him to detect the slightest variation in your tone of voice. If you hesitated or betrayed the least uneasiness his suspicions were at once aroused and he took steps to verify from other sources any statement you made under such circ.u.mstances.

It will be readily understood that with his keen and a.n.a.lytic mind Mr.

Pulitzer very soon discovered exactly what kind of work was best suited to the capacities of each of his secretaries. Thus to Mr. Paterson was a.s.signed the reading of history and biography, to Mr. Pollard, a Harvard man and the only American on the personal staff during my time, novels and plays in French and English, to Herr Mann German literature of all kinds. Thwaites was chiefly occupied with Mr. Pulitzer's correspondence, and Craven with the yacht accounts, though they, as well as myself, had roving commissions covering the periodical literature of France, Germany, England, and America.

This division of our reading was by no means rigid; it represented Mr.

Pulitzer's view of our respective spheres of greatest utility; but it was often disturbed by one or another of us going on sick leave or falling a victim to the weather when we were at sea.

Subject to such chances Pollard always read to Mr. Pulitzer during his breakfast hour, and Mann during his siesta, while the reading after dinner was pretty evenly divided between Pollard, Paterson, and myself.

If Mr. Pulitzer once got it into his head that a particular man was better than any one else for a particular cla.s.s of work nothing could reconcile him to that man's absence when such work was to be done.

An amusing instance of this occurred on an occasion when Pollard was sea-sick and could not read to J. P. at breakfast. I was hurriedly summoned to take his place. I was dumbfounded, for I had never before been called upon for this task, and Mr. Pulitzer had often held it up to me as the last test of fitness, the charter of your graduation. I had nothing whatever prepared of the kind which J. P. required at that time, and I knew that upon the success of his breakfast might very well depend the general complexion of his whole day.

In desperation I rushed into Pollard's cabin, and its unhappy occupant, with a generosity which even seasickness could not chill, gave me a bundle of Spectators, Athenaeums, and Literary Digests, with pencil marks in the margins indicating exactly what he had intended to read in the ordinary course of things. I breathed a sigh of relief and hastened to the library, where I found J. P. very nervous and out of sorts after a bad night.

He immediately began to deplore Pollard's absence, on the ground that it was impossible for anyone to know what to read to him at breakfast without years of experience and training. I said nothing, feeling secure with Pollard's prepared "breakfast food," as we called it, in front of me. I awaited only his signal to begin reading, confident that I could win laurels for myself without robbing Pollard, whose wreath was firmly fixed on his brow.

Alas for my hopes! My very first sentence destroyed my chances, for I had the misfortune to begin reading something which he had already heard. Nothing annoyed him more than this; and we all made a habit of writing "Dead" across any article in a periodical as soon as J. P. had had it, so that we could keep off each other's trails. I am willing to believe that this was the first and only time that Pollard ever forgot to kill an article after he had read it, but it was enough, in the deplorable state of Mr. Pulitzer's nerves that morning, to inflict a wound upon my reputation as a breakfast-time reader which months did not suffice to heal.

With such a bad start Mr. Pulitzer immediately concluded that I was useless, and he worked himself up into such a state about it that pa.s.sage after pa.s.sage, carefully marked by Pollard, was greeted with,

"Stop! Stop! For G.o.d's sake!" or,

"Next! Next!" or,

"My G.o.d! Is there much more of that?" or,

"Well, Mr. Ireland, isn't there ANYTHING interesting in all those papers?"

I bore up manfully against this until he made the one remark I could not stand.

"Now, Mr. Ireland," he said, his voice taking on a tone of gentle reproach, "I know you've done your best, but it is very bad. If you don't believe me, just take those papers to Mr. Pollard when he feels better; don't disturb him now when he's ill; and show him what you read to me. Now, just for fun, I'd like you to do that. He will tell you that there is not a single line which you have read that he would have read had he been in your place. I hope I haven't been too severe with you; but I hold up my hands and swear that Mr. Pollard wouldn't have read me a line of that rubbish."

This was too much! Carefully controlling my voice so that no trace of malice should be detected in it, I replied:

"I took these papers off Mr. Pollard's table a moment before I came to you, and the parts I have read are the parts he had marked, with the intention of reading them to you himself."

I thought I had J. P. cornered. It was before I learned that there was no such thing as cornering J. P.

Leaning toward me, and putting a hand on my shoulder, he said:

"Now, boy, don't be put out about this. I do believe, honestly, that you did your best; but you should not make excuses. When you are wrong, admit it, and try and benefit by my advice. You will find a very natural explanation of your mistake. Perhaps the pa.s.sages Mr. Pollard marked were the ones he did NOT intend to read to me, or perhaps you took the wrong set of papers; some perfectly natural explanation I am sure."

That night at dinner, when I was still smarting under the sense of injustice born of my morning's experience, J. P. gave me an opening which I could not allow to pa.s.s unused.

Turning to me during a pause in the conversation, he asked:

"And what have YOU been doing this afternoon, Mr. Ireland?"

A happy inspiration flashed across my mind, and I replied:

"I've been making a rough draft of a play, sir."

"Well, my G.o.d! I didn't know you wrote plays."

"Very seldom, at any rate; but I had an idea this morning that I couldn't resist."

"What is it to be called?" inquired J. P.

"'The Importance of being Pollard,'" I answered, whereupon J. P. and everyone else at the table had a good laugh. They had all been through a breakfast with J. P. when Pollard was away, and could sympathize with my feelings.

Mr. Pulitzer was very sensible of the difficulties which lay in everybody's path at the times when lack of sleep or a prolonged attack of pain had made him excessively irritable; and when he had recovered from one of these periods of strain, and was conscious of having been rough in his manner, he often took occasion to make amends.