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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of An Adventure With A Genius, by Alleyne Ireland
+
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+Title: An Adventure With A Genius
+
+Author: Alleyne Ireland
+
+Release Date: May, 2004  [EBook #5638]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on August 1, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, AN ADVENTURE WITH A GENIUS ***
+
+
+
+
+Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team.
+
+
+
+AN ADVENTURE WITH A GENIUS
+Recollections of JOSEPH PULITZER.
+
+BY ALLEYNE IRELAND
+
+AUTHOR OF
+"DEMOCRACY AND THE HUMAN EQUATION"
+
+
+
+
+
+DEDICATED
+BY KIND PERMISSION
+AND
+WITH SINCERE REGARD
+TO
+MRS. JOSEPH PULITZER
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+In the course of my wanderings about the labyrinth of life it has been
+my good fortune to find awaiting me around every corner some new
+adventure. If these have generally lacked that vividness of action which
+to the eye of youth is the very test of adventure, they have been rich
+in a kind of experience which to a mature and reflective mind has a
+value not to be measured in terms of dramatic incident.
+
+My adventures, in a word, have been chiefly those of personal contact
+with the sort of men whose lives are the material around which history
+builds its story, and from which fiction derives all that lends to it
+the air of reality.
+
+I have had friends and acquaintances in a score of countries, and in
+every station of society--kings and beggars, viceroys and ward-
+politicians, judges and criminals, men of brain and men of brawn.
+
+My first outstanding adventure was with a stern and formidable man, the
+captain of a sailing vessel, of whose ship's company I was one in a
+voyage across the Pacific; one of my most recent was with a man not less
+stern or formidable, with the man who is the central figure in the
+present narrative.
+
+The tale has been told before in a volume entitled "Joseph Pulitzer:
+Reminiscences of a Secretary." The volume has been out of print for some
+time, but the continued demand for it has called for its re-issue. The
+change in title has been made in response to many suggestions that the
+character of the material is more aptly described as "An Adventure with
+a Genius."
+
+ALLEYNE IRELAND.
+New York, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+  I. In a Casting Net
+ II. Meeting Joseph Pulitzer
+III. Life at Cap Martin
+ IV. Yachting in the Mediterranean
+  V. Getting to Know Mr. Pulitzer
+ VI. Weisbaden and an Atlantic Voyage
+VII. Bar Harbor and the Last Cruise
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+IN A CASTING NET
+
+
+A long illness, a longer convalescence, a positive injunction from my
+doctor to leave friends and business associates and to seek some spot
+where a comfortable bed and good food could be had in convenient
+proximity to varied but mild forms of amusement--and I found myself in
+the autumn of the year 1910 free and alone in the delightful city of
+Hamburg.
+
+All my plans had gone down wind, and as I sat at my table in the Cafe
+Ziechen, whence, against the background of the glittering blue of the
+Alster, I could see the busy life of the Alter Jungfernstieg and the
+Alsterdamm, my thoughts turned naturally to the future.
+
+It is not the easiest thing in the world to reconstruct at forty years
+of age the whole scheme of your life; but my illness, and other
+happenings of a highly disagreeable character, had compelled me to
+abandon a career to which I had devoted twenty years of arduous labor;
+and the question which pressed for an immediate answer was: What are you
+going to do now?
+
+Various alternatives presented themselves. There had been a suggestion
+that I should take the editorship of a newspaper in Calcutta; an
+important financial house in London had offered me the direction of its
+interests in Western Canada; a post in the service of the Government of
+India had been mentioned as a possibility by certain persons in
+authority.
+
+My own inclination, the child of a weary spirit and of the lassitude of
+ill health, swayed me in the direction of a quiet retreat in Barbados,
+that peaceful island of an eternal summer cooled by the northeast
+trades, where the rush and turmoil of modern life are unknown and where
+a very modest income more than suffices for all the needs of a simple
+existence.
+
+I shall never know to what issue my reflections upon these matters would
+have led me, for a circumstance, in the last degree trivial, intervened
+to turn my thoughts into an entirely new channel, and to guide me,
+though I could not know it at the time, into the service of Joseph
+Pulitzer.
+
+My waiter was extremely busy serving a large party of artillery officers
+at an adjoining table. I glanced through The Times and the Hamburger
+Nachrichten, looked out for a while upon the crowded street, and then,
+resigning myself to the delay in getting my lunch, picked up The Times
+again and did what I had never done before in my life--read the
+advertisements under the head "Professional Situations."
+
+All except one were of the usual type, the kind in which a prospective
+employer flatters a prospective employee by classing as "professional"
+the services of a typewriter or of a companion to an elderly gentleman
+who resides within easy distance of an important provincial town.
+
+One advertisement, however, stood out from the rest on account of the
+peculiar requirements set forth in its terse appeal. It ran something
+after this fashion: "Wanted, an intelligent man of about middle age,
+widely read, widely traveled, a good sailor, as companion-secretary to a
+gentleman. Must be prepared to live abroad. Good salary. Apply, etc."
+
+My curiosity was aroused; and at first sight I appeared to meet the
+requirements in a reasonable measure. I had certainly traveled widely,
+and I was an excellent sailor--excellent to the point of offensiveness.
+Upon an unfavorable construction I could claim to be middle-aged at
+forty; and I was prepared to live abroad in the unlikely event of any
+one fixing upon a country which could be properly called "abroad" from
+the standpoint of a man who had not spent twelve consecutive months in
+any place since he was fifteen years old.
+
+As for intelligence, I reflected that for ninety-nine people out of a
+hundred intelligence in others means no more than the discovery of a
+person who is in intellectual acquiescence with themselves, and that if
+the necessity arose I could probably affect an acquiescence which would
+serve all the purposes of a fundamental identity of convictions.
+
+Two things, however, suggested possible difficulties, the questions of
+what interpretations the advertiser placed upon the terms "widely read"
+and "good salary." I could not claim to be widely read in any
+conventional sense, for I was not a university graduate, and the very
+extensive reading I had done in my special line of study--the control
+and development of tropical dependencies--though it might entitle me to
+some consideration as a student in that field had left me woefully
+ignorant of general literature. Would the ability to discuss with
+intelligence the Bengal Regulation of 1818, or the British Guiana
+Immigration Ordinance of 1891 be welcomed as a set-off to a complete
+unfamiliarity with Milton's "Comus" and Gladstone's essay on the
+epithets of motion in Homer?
+
+On the subject of what constituted a "good salary" experience had taught
+me to expect a very wide divergence of view, not only along the natural
+line of cleavage between the person paying and the person receiving the
+salary, but also between one employer and another and between one
+employee and another; and I recalled a story, told me in my infancy, in
+which a certain British laboring man had been heard to remark that he
+would not be the Czar of Russia, no, not for thirty shillings a week.
+But that element in the situation might, I reflected, very well be left
+to take care of itself.
+
+I finished my lunch, and then replied to the advertisement, giving my
+English address. My letter, a composition bred of the conflicting
+influences of pride, modesty, prudence, and curiosity, brought forth in
+due course a brief reply in which I was bidden to an interview in that
+part of London where fashion and business prosperity seek to ape each
+other.
+
+Upon presenting myself at the appointed hour I was confronted by a
+gentleman whose severity of manner I learned later to recognize as the
+useful mask to a singularly genial and kindly nature.
+
+Our interview was long and, to me at any rate, rather embarrassing,
+since it resolved itself into a searching cross-examination by a past-
+master in the art. Who were my parents? When and where had I been born?
+Where had I been educated? What were my means of livelihood? What
+positions had I filled since I went out into the world? What countries
+had I visited? What books had I read? What books had I written? To what
+magazines and reviews had I contributed? Who were my friends? Was I fond
+of music, of painting, of the drama? Had I a sense of humor? Had I a
+good temper or a good control of a bad one? What languages could I speak
+or read? Did I enjoy good health? Was I of a nervous disposition? Had I
+tact and discretion? Was I a good horseman, a good sailor, a good
+talker, a good reader?
+
+When it came to asking me whether I was a good horseman AND a good
+sailor, I realized that anyone who expected to find these two qualities
+combined in one man was quite capable of demanding that his companion-
+secretary should be able to knit woollen socks, write devotional verse,
+and compute the phases of the moon.
+
+I remember chuckling to myself over this quaint conceit; I was to learn
+later that it came unpleasantly near the truth.
+
+Under this close examination I felt that I had made rather a poor
+showing. This was due in some measure, no doubt, to the fact that my
+questioner abruptly left any topic as soon as he discovered that I knew
+something about it, and began to angle around, with disturbing success,
+to find the things I did not know about.
+
+At one point, however, I scored a hit. After I had been put through my
+paces, a process which seemed to me to end only at the exact point where
+my questioner could no longer remember the name of anything in the
+universe about which he could frame an interrogation, it was my turn to
+ask questions.
+
+Was the person I was addressing the gentleman who needed the companion?
+
+No, he was merely his agent. As a matter of fact the person on whose
+behalf he was acting was an American.
+
+I nodded in a non-committal way.
+
+He was also a millionaire.
+
+I bowed the kind of bow that a Frenchman makes when he says Mais
+parfaitement.
+
+Furthermore he was totally blind.
+
+"Joseph Pulitzer," I said.
+
+"How in the world did you guess that?" asked my companion.
+
+"That wasn't a guess," I replied. "You advertised for an intelligent
+man; and this is simply where my intelligence commences to show itself.
+An intelligent man couldn't live as long as I have in the United States
+without hearing a good deal about Joseph Pulitzer; and, after all, the
+country isn't absolutely overrun with blind millionaires."
+
+At the close of the interview I was told that I would be reported upon.
+In the meantime would I kindly send in a written account of the
+interview, in the fullest possible detail, as a test of my memory, sense
+of accuracy, and literary style.
+
+Nor was this all. As I prepared to take my departure I was handed the
+address of another gentleman who would also examine me and make a
+report. Before I got out of the room my inquisitor said, "It may
+interest you to know that we have had more than six hundred applications
+for the post, and that it may, therefore, take some time before the
+matter is definitely settled."
+
+I was appalled. Evidently I had been wasting my time, for I could have
+no doubt that the gallant six hundred would include a sample of every
+kind of pundit, stationary or vagrant, encompassed within the seven
+seas; and against such competition I felt my chances to be just
+precisely nothing.
+
+My companion observed my discomfiture. and as he shook hands he said,
+"Oh, that doesn't really mean very much. As a matter of fact we were
+able to throw out more than five hundred and fifty applications merely
+for self-evident reasons. A number of school teachers and bank clerks
+applied, and in general these gentlemen said that although they had not
+traveled they would have no objection to living abroad, and that they
+might venture to hope that if they DID go to sea they would prove to be
+good sailors.
+
+"Most of them appeared to think that the circumstance of being middle-
+aged would off-set their deficiencies in other directions. There are
+really only a few gentlemen whom we can consider as being likely to meet
+Mr. Pulitzer's requirements, and the selection will be made finally by
+Mr. Pulitzer himself. It is very probable that you will be asked to go
+to Mentone to spend a fortnight or so on Mr. Pulitzer's yacht or at his
+villa at Cap Martin, as he never engages anybody until he has had the
+candidate with him for a short visit.
+
+"And, by the way, would you mind writing a short narrative of your life,
+not more than two thousand words? It would interest Mr. Pulitzer and
+would help him to reach a decision in your case. You might also send me
+copies of some of your writings."
+
+Thus ended my interview with Mr. James M. Tuohy, the London
+correspondent of the New York World.
+
+My next step was to call upon the second inquisitor, Mr. George Ledlie.
+I found him comfortably installed at an hotel in the West End. He was an
+American, very courteous and pleasant, but evidently prepared to use a
+probe without any consideration for the feelings of the victim.
+
+As my business was to reveal myself, I wasted no time, and for about an
+hour I rambled along on the subject of my American experiences. I do not
+know to this day what sort of an impression I created upon this
+gentleman, but I felt at the time that it ought to have been a favorable
+one.
+
+We had many friends in common; I had recently been offered a lectureship
+in the university from which he had graduated; some of my books had been
+published in America by firms in whose standing he had confidence; I
+paraded a slight acquaintance with three Presidents of the United
+States, and produced from my pocketbook letters from two of them; we
+found that we were both respectful admirers of a charming lady who had
+recently undergone a surgical operation; he had been a guest at my club
+in Boston, I had been a guest at his club in New York. When I left him I
+thought poorly of the chances of the remnant of the six hundred.
+
+Some weeks passed and I heard nothing more of the matter. During this
+time I had leisure to think over what I had heard from time to time
+about Joseph Pulitzer, and to speculate, with the aid of some
+imaginative friends, upon the probable advantages and disadvantages of
+the position for which I was a candidate.
+
+Gathered together, my second-hand impressions of Joseph Pulitzer made
+little more than a hazy outline. I had heard or read that he had landed
+in New York in the early sixties, a penniless youth unable to speak a
+word of English; that after a remarkable series of adventures he had
+become a newspaper proprietor and, later, a millionaire; that he had
+been stricken blind at the height of his career; that his friends and
+his enemies agreed in describing him as a man of extraordinary ability
+and of remarkable character; that he had been victorious in a bitter
+controversy with President Roosevelt; that one of the Rothschilds had
+remarked that if Joseph Pulitzer had not lost his eyesight and his
+health he, Pulitzer, would have collected into his hands all the money
+there was; that he was the subject of one of the noblest portraits
+created by the genius of John Sargent; and that he spent most of his
+time on board a magnificent yacht, surrounded by a staff of six
+secretaries.
+
+This was enough, of course, to inspire me with a keen desire to meet Mr.
+Pulitzer; it was not enough to afford me the slightest idea of what life
+would be like in close personal contact with such a man.
+
+The general opinion of my friends was that life with Mr. Pulitzer would
+be one long succession of happy, care-free days spent along the
+languorous shores of the Mediterranean--days of which perhaps two hours
+would be devoted to light conversation with my interesting host, and the
+remainder of my waking moments to the gaities of Monte Carlo, to rambles
+on the picturesque hillsides of Rapallo and Bordighera, or to the genial
+companionship of my fellow-secretaries under the snowy awnings of the
+yacht.
+
+We argued the matter out to our entire satisfaction. Mr. Pulitzer, in
+addition to being blind, was a chronic invalid, requiring a great deal
+of sleep and repose. He could hardly be expected to occupy more than
+twelve hours a day with his secretaries. That worked out at two hours
+apiece, or, if the division was made by days, about one day a week to
+each secretary.
+
+The yacht, I had been given to understand, cruised for about eight
+months in the year over a course bounded by Algiers and the Piraeus, by
+Mentone and Alexandria, with visits to the ports of Italy, Sicily,
+Corsica, and Crete. The least imaginative of mortals could make a very
+fair and alluring picture of what life would be like under such
+circumstances. As the event turned out it was certainly not our
+imaginations that were at fault.
+
+As time passed without bringing any further sign from Mr. Tuohy my hopes
+gradually died out, and I fixed in my mind a date upon which I would
+abandon all expectations of securing the appointment. Scarcely had I
+reached this determination when I received a telegram from Mr. Tuohy
+asking me to lunch with him the next day at the Cafe Royal in order to
+meet Mr. Ralph Pulitzer, who was passing through London on his way back
+to America after a visit to his father.
+
+I leave my readers to imagine what sort of a lunch I had in the company
+of two gentlemen whose duty it was to struggle with the problem of
+discovering the real character and attainments of a guest who knew he
+was under inspection.
+
+I found Mr. Ralph Pulitzer to be a slender, clean-cut, pale gentleman of
+an extremely quiet and self-possessed manner. He was very agreeable, and
+he listened to my torrent of words with an interest which, if it were
+real, reflected great credit on me, and which, if it were feigned,
+reflected not less credit on him.
+
+As we parted he said, "I shall write to my father to-day and tell him of
+our meeting. Of course, as you know, the decision in this matter rests
+entirely with him."
+
+After this incident there was another long silence, and I again fixed
+upon a day beyond which I would not allow my hopes to flourish. The day
+arrived, nothing happened, and the next morning I went down to the
+offices of the West India Royal Mail Steam Packet Company and made
+inquiries about the boats for Barbados. I spent the afternoon at my club
+making out a list of things to be taken out as aids to comfortable
+housekeeping in a semi-tropical country--a list which swelled amazingly
+as I turned over the fascinating pages of the Army and Navy Stores
+Catalogue.
+
+By dinner time I had become more than reconciled to the new turn of
+affairs, and when I reached my flat at midnight I found myself impatient
+of the necessary delay before I could settle down to a life of easy
+literary activity in one of the most delightful climates in the world
+and in the neighborhood of a large circle of charming friends and
+acquaintances.
+
+On the table in the hall I found a telegram from Mr. Tuohy instructing
+me to start next morning for Mentone, where Mr. Pulitzer would entertain
+me as his guest for a fortnight, either at his villa or aboard his yacht
+Liberty, and informing me that I would find at my club early in the
+morning an envelope containing a ticket to Mentone, with sleeper and
+parlor-car accommodation, and a check to cover incidental expenses.
+
+The tickets and the check were accompanied by a letter in which I was
+told that I was to consider this two weeks' visit as a trial, that
+during that time all my expenses would be paid, that I would receive an
+honorarium of so much a day from the time I left London until I was
+engaged by Mr. Pulitzer or had arrived back in London after rejection by
+him, and that everything depended upon the impression I made on my host.
+
+I left London cold, damp, and foggy; and in less than twenty-four hours
+I was in the train between Marseilles and Mentone, watching the surf
+playing among the rocks in the brilliant sunshine of the Cote d'Azur. In
+the tiny harbor of Mentone I found, anchored stern-on to the quay, the
+steam yacht Liberty--a miracle of snowy decks and gleaming brass-work--
+tonnage 1,607, length over all 316 feet, beam 35.6 feet, crew 60, all
+told.
+
+A message from Mr. Pulitzer awaited me. Would I dine at his villa at Cap
+Martin? An automobile would call for me at seven o'clock.
+
+I spent the day in looking over the yacht and in trying to pick up some
+information as to the general lay of the land, by observing every detail
+of my new surroundings.
+
+The yacht itself claimed my first attention. Everything was new and
+fascinating to me, for although I had had my share of experiences in
+barques, and brigs, and full-rigged ships, in mail boats and tramp
+steamers, only once before had I had an opportunity to examine closely a
+large private yacht. Ten years before, I had spent some time cruising
+along the northern coast of Borneo in the yacht of His Highness Sir
+Charles Brooke, Raja of Sarawak; but with that single exception yachting
+was for me an unknown phase of sea life.
+
+The Liberty--or, as the secretarial staff, for reasons which will become
+apparent later, called her, the Liberty, Ha! Ha!--was designed and built
+on the Clyde. I have never seen a vessel of more beautiful lines.
+Sailors would find, I think, but one fault in her appearance and one
+peculiarity. With a white-painted hull, her bridge and the whole of her
+upper structure, except the masts and funnel, were also white, giving to
+her general features a certain flatness which masked her fine
+proportions. Her bridge, instead of being well forward, was placed so
+far aft that it was only a few feet from the funnel. The object of this
+departure from custom was to prevent any walking over Mr. Pulitzer's
+head when he sat in his library, which was situated under the spot,
+where the bridge would have been in most vessels.
+
+The boat was specially designed to meet Mr. Pulitzer's peculiar
+requirements. She had a flush deck from the bows to the stern, broken
+only, for perhaps twenty feet, by a well between the forecastle head and
+the fore part of the bridge.
+
+Running aft from the bridge to within forty feet of the stern was an
+unbroken line of deck houses. Immediately afore the bridge was Mr.
+Pulitzer's library, a handsome room lined from floor to ceiling with
+books; abaft of that was the dining saloon, which could accommodate in
+comfort a dozen people; continuing aft there were, on the port side, the
+pantry, amidships the enclosed space over the engine room, and on the
+starboard side a long passage leading to the drawing-room and writing-
+room used by the secretaries and by members of Mr. Pulitzer's family
+when they were on the yacht.
+
+The roof and sides of this line of deck houses were extended a few feet
+beyond the aftermost room, so as to provide a sheltered nook where Mr.
+Pulitzer could sit when the wind was too strong for his comfort on the
+open deck.
+
+Between the sides of the deck houses and the sides of the ship there ran
+on each side a promenade about nine feet broad, unbroken by bolt or nut,
+stanchion or ventilator, smooth as a billiard table and made of the
+finest quality of seasoned teak. The promenade continued across the fore
+part of Mr. Pulitzer's library and across the after part of the line of
+deck houses, so that there was an oblong track round the greater part of
+the boat, a track covered overhead with double awnings and protected
+inboard by the sides of the deck houses, and outboard by adjustable
+canvas screens, which could be let down or rolled up in a few minutes.
+
+About thirty feet from the stern a heavy double canvas screen ran
+'thwartships from one side of the boat to the other, shutting off a
+small space of deck for the use of the crew. The main deck space was
+allotted as follows: under the forecastle head accommodation for two
+officers and two petty officers, abaft of that the well space, of which
+I have spoken; under the library was Mr. Pulitzer's bedroom, occupying
+the whole breadth of the ship and extending from the bulkhead at the
+after part of the well space as far aft as the companion way leading
+down between the library and the saloon, say twenty-five feet.
+
+A considerable proportion of the sides of this bedroom was given up to
+books; in one corner was a very high wash-hand-stand, so high that Mr.
+Pulitzer, who was well over six feet tall, could wash his hands without
+stooping. The provision of this very high wash-hand-stand illustrates
+the minute care with which everything had been foreseen in the
+construction and fitting-up of the yacht. When a person stoops there is
+a slight impediment to the free flow of blood to the head, such an
+impediment might react unfavorably on the condition of Mr. Pulitzer's
+eyes, therefore the wash-hand-stand was high enough to be used without
+stooping.
+
+In the forward bulkhead of the cabin were two silent fans, one drawing
+air into the room, the other drawing it out. The most striking feature
+of the room was an immense four-poster bed which stood in the center of
+the cabin, with a couch at the foot and one or two chairs at one side.
+Hanging at the head of the bed was a set of electric push-bells, the
+cords being of different lengths so that Mr. Pulitzer could call at will
+for the major-domo, the chief steward, the captain, the officer on
+watch, and so on.
+
+The bedroom was heavily carpeted and was cut off from the rest of the
+ship by double bulkheads, double doors, and double portholes, with the
+object of protecting Mr. Pulitzer as much as possible from all noise, to
+which he was excessively sensitive. A large bathroom opened immediately
+off the bedroom, and a flight of steps led down to a gymnasium on the
+lower deck.
+
+Abaft of Mr. Pulitzer's bedroom there were, on the port side, the cabins
+of the major-domo, the captain, the head butler, the chief engineer, an
+officers' mess room, the ship's galley, a steward's mess room, and the
+cabins of the chief steward and one or two officers.
+
+Corresponding with these there were, on the starboard side, the cabins
+of the secretaries and the doctor, "The Cells," as we called them. They
+were comfortable rooms, all very much on one pattern, except that of the
+business secretary, which was a good deal larger than the others. He
+needed the additional space for newspaper files, documents,
+correspondence, and so on. Each cabin contained a bed, a wash-hand-
+stand, a chest of drawers, a cupboard for clothes, a small folding
+table, some book shelves, an arm chair, an ordinary chair, an electric
+fan, and a radiator. Each cabin had two portholes, and there were two
+bathrooms to the six cabins.
+
+The center of the ship, between these cabins and the corresponding space
+on the port side, was occupied by the engine room; and the entrance to
+the secretaries' quarters was through a companionway opening on to the
+promenade deck, with a door on each side of the yacht, and leading down
+a flight of stairs to a long fore-and-aft passage, out of which all the
+secretaries' cabins opened.
+
+Abaft the secretaries' cabins, and occupying the whole breadth of the
+boat, were a number of cabins and suites for the accommodation of Mrs.
+Pulitzer, other members of the family, and guests; and abaft of these,
+cut off by a 'thwartships bulkhead, were the quarters of the crew.
+
+The lower deck was given over chiefly to stores, coal bunkers, the
+engine room, the stoke-hold, and to a large number of electric
+accumulators, which kept the electric lights going when the engines were
+not working. There were, however, on this deck the gymnasium, and a
+large room, directly under Mr. Pulitzer's bedroom, used to take the
+overflow from the library.
+
+The engines were designed rather for smooth running than for speed, and
+twelve knots an hour was the utmost that could be got out of them, the
+average running speed being about eight knots. The yacht had an ample
+supply of boats, including two steam launches, one burning coal, the
+other oil.
+
+During my inspection of the yacht I was accompanied by my cabin-steward,
+a young Englishman who had at one time served aboard the German
+Emperor's yacht, Meteor. Nothing could have been more courteous than his
+manner or more intelligent than his explanations; but the moment I tried
+to draw him out on the subject of life on the yacht he relapsed into a
+vagueness from which I could extract no gleam of enlightenment. After
+fencing for some time with my queries he suggested that I might like to
+have a glass of sherry and a biscuit in the secretaries' library, and,
+piloting me thither, he left me.
+
+The smoking-room was furnished with writing tables, some luxurious arm
+chairs, and a comfortable lounge, and every spare nook was filled with
+book shelves. The contents of these shelves were extremely varied. A
+cursory glance showed me Meyer's Neues Konversations-Lexicon, The Yacht
+Register, Whitaker's Almanack, Who's Who, Burke's Peerage, The Almanack
+de Gotha, the British and the Continental Bradshaw, a number of
+Baedeker's "Guides," fifty or sixty volumes of the Tauchnitz edition, a
+large collection of files of reviews and magazines--The Nineteenth
+Century, Quarterly, Edinburgh, Fortnightly, Contemporary, National,
+Atlantic, North American, Revue de Deux Mondes--and a scattering of
+volumes by Kipling, Shaw, Hosebery, Pater, Ida Tarbell, Bryce, Ferrero,
+Macaulay, Anatole France, Maupassant, "Dooley," and a large number of
+French and German plays. I was struck by the entire absence of books of
+travel and scientific works.
+
+I spent part of the afternoon in the drawing-room playing a large
+instrument of the gramophone type. There were several hundred records--
+from grand opera, violin solos by Kreisler, and the Gilbert and Sullivan
+operas, to rag-time and the latest comic songs.
+
+Before the time came to dress for dinner I had met the captain and some
+of the officers of the yacht. They were all very civil; and my own
+experience as a sailor enabled me to see that they were highly efficient
+men. I was a good deal puzzled, however, by something peculiar but very
+elusive in their attitude toward me, something which I had at once
+detected in the manner of my cabin-steward.
+
+With their courtesy was mingled a certain flavor of curiosity tinged
+with amusement, which, so far from being offensive, was distinctly
+friendly, but which, nevertheless, gave me a vague sense of uneasiness.
+In fact the whole atmosphere of the yacht was one of restlessness and
+suspense; and the effect was heightened because each person who spoke to
+me appeared to be on the point of divulging some secret or delivering
+some advice, which discretion checked at his lips.
+
+I felt myself very much under observation, a feeling as though I was a
+new boy in a boarding school or a new animal at the zoo--interesting to
+my companions not only on account of my novelty, but because my personal
+peculiarities would affect the comfort of the community of which I was
+to become a member.
+
+At seven o'clock my cabin-steward announced the arrival of the
+automobile, and after a swift run along the plage and up the winding
+roads on the hillsides of Cap Martin I found myself at the door of Mr.
+Pulitzer's villa. I was received by the major-domo, ushered into the
+drawing-room, and informed that Mr. Pulitzer would be down in a few
+minutes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+MEETING JOSEPH PULITZER
+
+
+Before I had time to examine my surroundings Mr. Pulitzer entered the
+room on the arm of the major-domo. My first swift impression was of a
+very tall man with broad shoulders, the rest of the body tapering away
+to thinness, with a noble head, bushy reddish beard streaked with gray,
+black hair, swept back from the forehead and lightly touched here and
+there with silvery white. One eye was dull and half closed, the other
+was of a deep, brilliant blue which, so far from suggesting blindness,
+created the instant effect of a searching, eagle-like glance. The
+outstretched hand was large, strong, nervous, full of character, ending
+in well-shaped and immaculately kept nails.
+
+A high-pitched voice, clear, penetrating, and vibrant, gave out the
+strange challenge: "Well, here you see before you the miserable wreck
+who is to be your host; you must make the best you can of him. Give me
+your arm into dinner."
+
+I may complete here a description of Mr. Pulitzer's appearance, founded
+upon months of close personal association with him. The head was
+splendidly modeled, the forehead high, the brows prominent and arched;
+the ears were large, the nose was long and hooked; the mouth, almost
+concealed by the mustache, was firm and thin-lipped; the jaws showed
+square and powerful under the beard; the length of the face was much
+emphasized by the flowing beard and by the way in which the hair was
+brushed back from the forehead. The skin was of a clear, healthy pink,
+like a young girl's; but in moments of intense excitement the color
+would deepen to a dark, ruddy flush, and after a succession of sleepless
+nights, or under the strain of continued worry, it would turn a dull,
+lifeless gray.
+
+I have never seen a face which varied so much in expression. Not only
+was there a marked difference at all times between one side and the
+other, due partly to the contrast between the two eyes and partly to a
+loss of flexibility in the muscles of the right side, but almost from
+moment to moment the general appearance of the face moved between a
+lively, genial animation, a cruel and wolf-like scowl, and a heavy and
+hopeless dejection. No face was capable of showing greater tenderness;
+none could assume a more forbidding expression of anger and contempt.
+
+The Sargent portrait, a masterpiece of vivid character-painting, is a
+remarkable revelation of the complex nature of its subject. It discloses
+the deep affection, the keen intelligence, the wide sympathy, the
+tireless energy, the delicate sensitiveness, the tearing impatience, the
+cold tyranny, and the flaming scorn by which his character was so
+erratically dominated. It is a noble and pathetic monument to the
+suffering which had been imposed for a quarter of a century upon the
+intense and arbitrary spirit of this extraordinary man.
+
+The account which I am to give of Mr. Pulitzer's daily life during the
+months immediately preceding his death would be unintelligible to all
+but the very few who knew him in recent years if it were not prefaced by
+a brief biographical note.
+
+Joseph Pulitzer was born in the village of Mako, near Buda Pesth in
+Hungary, on April 10, 1847. His father was a Jew, his mother a
+Christian. At the age of sixteen he emigrated to the United States. He
+landed without friends, without money, unable to speak a word of
+English. He enlisted immediately in the First New York (Lincoln) Cavalry
+Regiment, a regiment chiefly composed of Germans and in which German was
+the prevailing tongue.
+
+Within a year the Civil War ended, and Pulitzer found himself, in common
+with hundreds of thousands of others, out of employment at a time when
+employment was most difficult to secure. At this time he was so poor
+that he was turned away from French's Hotel for lack of fifty cents with
+which to pay for his bed. In less than twenty years he bought French's
+Hotel, pulled it down, and erected in its place the Pulitzer Building,
+at that time one of the largest business buildings in New York, where he
+housed The World.
+
+What lay between these two events may be summed up in a few words. At
+the close of the Civil War Mr. Pulitzer went to St. Louis, and in 1868,
+after being engaged in various occupations, he became a reporter on the
+Westliche Post. In less than ten years he was editor and part
+proprietor. His amazing energy, his passionate interest in politics, his
+rare gift of terse and forcible expression, and his striking personality
+carried him over or through all obstacles.
+
+After he had purchased the St. Louis Dispatch, amalgamated it with the
+Post, and made the Post-Dispatch a profitable business enterprise and a
+power to be reckoned with in politics, he felt the need of a wider field
+in which to maneuver the forces of his character and his intellect.
+
+He came to New York in 1883 and purchased The World from Jay Gould. At
+that time The World had a circulation of less than twelve thousand
+copies a day, and was practically bankrupt. From this time forward Mr.
+Pulitzer concentrated his every faculty on building up The World. He was
+scoffed at, ridiculed, and abused by the most powerful editors of the
+old school. They were to learn, not without bitterness and wounds, that
+opposition was the one fuel of all others which best fed the triple
+flame of his courage, his tenacity, and his resourcefulness.
+
+Four years of unremitting toil produced two results. The World reached a
+circulation of two hundred thousand copies a day and took its place in
+the front rank of the American press as a journal of force and ability,
+and Joseph Pulitzer left New York, a complete nervous wreck, to face in
+solitude the knowledge that he would never read print again and that
+within a few years he would be totally blind.
+
+Joseph Pulitzer, as I knew him twenty-four years after he had been
+driven from active life by the sudden and final collapse of his health,
+was a man who could be judged by no common standards, for his feelings,
+his temper, and his point of view had been warped by years of suffering.
+
+Had his spirit been broken by his trials, had his intellectual power
+weakened under the load of his affliction, had his burning interest in
+affairs cooled to a point where he could have been content to turn his
+back upon life's conflict, he might have found some happiness, or at
+least some measure of repose akin to that with which age consoles us for
+the loss of youth. But his greatest misfortune was that all the active
+forces of his personality survived to the last in their full vigor,
+inflicting upon him the curse of an impatience which nothing could
+appease, of a discontent which knew no amelioration.
+
+My first meeting with Mr. Pulitzer is indelibly fixed in my memory. As
+we entered the dining-room the butler motioned to me to take a seat on
+Mr. Pulitzer's right hand, and as I did so I glanced up and down the
+table to find myself in the presence of half-a-dozen gentlemen in
+evening dress, who bowed in a very friendly manner as Mr. Pulitzer said,
+with a broad sweep of his hand, "Gentlemen, this is Mr. Alleyne Ireland;
+you will be able to inform him later of my fads and crotchets; well,
+don't be ungenerous with me, don't paint the devil as black as he is."
+
+This was spoken in a tone of banter, and was cut short by a curious,
+prolonged chuckle, which differed from laughter in the feeling it
+produced in the hearer that the mirth did not spring from the open,
+obvious humor of the situation, but from some whimsical thought which
+was the more relished because its nature was concealed from us. I felt
+that, instead of my host's amusement having been produced by his
+peculiar introduction, he had made his eccentric address merely as an
+excuse to chuckle over some notion which had formed itself in his mind
+from material entirely foreign to his immediate surroundings.
+
+I mention this because I found later that one of Mr. Pulitzer's most
+embarrassing peculiarities was the sudden revelation from time to time
+of a mental state entirely at odds with the occupation of the moment. In
+the middle of an account of a play, when I was doing my best to
+reproduce some scene from memory, with appropriate changes of voice to
+represent the different characters, Mr. Pulitzer would suddenly break
+in, "Did we ever get a reply to that letter about Laurier's speech on
+reciprocity? No? Well, all right, go on, go on."
+
+Or it might be when I was reading from the daily papers an account of a
+murder or a railroad wreck that Mr. Pulitzer would break out into a peal
+of his peculiar chuckling laughter. I would immediately stop reading,
+when he would pat me on the arm, and say, "Go on, boy, go on, don't mind
+me. I wasn't laughing at you. I was thinking of something else. What was
+it? Oh, a railroad wreck, well, don't stop, go on reading."
+
+As soon as we were seated Mr. Pulitzer turned to me and began to
+question me about my reading. Had I read any recent fiction? No? Well,
+what had I read within the past month?
+
+I named several books which I had been re-reading--Macaulay's Essays,
+Meredith Townsend's Asia and Europe, and Lowes Dickinson's Modern
+Symposium.
+
+"Well, tell me something about Asia and Europe" he said.
+
+I left my dinner untasted, and for a quarter of an hour held forth on
+the life of Mohammed, on the courage of the Arabians, on the charm of
+Asia for Asiatics, and on other matters taken from Mr. Townsend's
+fascinating book. Suddenly Mr. Pulitzer interrupted me.
+
+"My God! You don't mean to tell me that anyone is interested in that
+sort of rubbish. Everybody knows about Mohammed, and about the bravery
+of the Arabs, and, for God's sake, why shouldn't Asia be attractive to
+the Asiatics! Try something else. Do you remember any plays?"
+
+Yes, I remembered several pretty well. Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra for
+instance.
+
+"Go on, then, try and tell me about that."
+
+My prospects of getting any dinner faded away as I began my new effort.
+Fortunately I knew the play very well, and remembered a number of
+passages almost word for word. I soon saw that Mr. Pulitzer was
+interested and pleased, not with the play as anything new to him, for he
+probably knew it better than I did, but with my presentation of it,
+because it showed some ability to compress narrative without destroying
+its character and also gave some proof of a good memory.
+
+When I reached the scene in which Caesar replies to Britannus's protest
+against the recognition of Cleopatra's marriage to her brother, Ptolemy,
+by saying, "Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that
+the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature," Mr. Pulitzer burst
+into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.
+
+I was about to continue, and try to make good better, when Mr. Pulitzer
+raised his hands above his head in remonstrance.
+
+"Stop! Stop! For God's sake! You're hurting me," very much as a person
+with a cracked lip begs for mercy when you are in the middle of your
+most humorous story.
+
+I found out later that, in order to keep in Mr. Pulitzer's good graces,
+it was as necessary to avoid being too funny as it was to avoid being
+too dull, for, while the latter fault hurt his intellectual
+sensitiveness, the former involved, through the excessive laughter it
+produced, a degree of involuntary exertion which, in his disordered
+physical condition, caused him acute pain.
+
+Mr. Pulitzer's constant use of the exclamations "My God!" and "For God's
+sake!" had no relation whatever to swearing, as the term is usually
+understood; they were employed exactly as a French lady employs the
+exclamation Mon Dieu! or a German the expression Ach, du liebe Gott! As
+a matter of fact, although Mr. Pulitzer was a man of strong and, at
+times, violent emotions, and, from his deplorable nervous state,
+excessively irritable, I do not think that in the eight months I was
+with him, during the greater part of which time he was not under any
+restraining influence, such as might be exerted by the presence of
+ladies, I heard him use any oath except occasionally a "damn," which
+appealed to him, I think, as a suitable if not a necessary qualification
+of the word "fool." For Mr. Pulitzer there were no fools except damned
+fools.
+
+After the excitement about Caesar and Cleopatra had subsided, Mr.
+Pulitzer asked me if I had a good memory. I hesitated before replying,
+because I had seen enough of Mr. Pulitzer in an hour to realize that a
+constant exercise of caution would be necessary if I wished to avoid
+offending his prejudices or wounding his susceptibilities; and whereas
+on the one hand I did not wish to set a standard for myself which I
+would find it impossible to live up to, on the other hand I was anxious
+to avoid giving any description of my abilities which would be followed
+later by a polite intimation from the major-domo that Mr. Pulitzer had
+enjoyed my visit immensely but that I was not just the man for the
+place.
+
+So I compromised and said that I had a fairly good memory.
+
+"Well, everybody thinks he's got a good memory," replied Mr. Pulitzer.
+
+"I only claimed a fairly good one," I protested.
+
+"Oh! that's just an affectation; as a matter of fact you think you've
+got a splendid memory, don't you? Now, be frank about it; I love people
+to be frank with me."
+
+My valor got the better of my discretion, and I replied that if he
+really wished me to be frank I was willing to admit that I had no
+particular desire to lay claim to a good memory, for I was inclined to
+accept the view which I had once heard expressed by a very wise man of
+my acquaintance that the human mind was not intended to remember with
+but to think with, and that one of the greatest benefits which had been
+conferred on mankind by the discovery of printing was that thousands of
+things could be recorded for reference which former generations had been
+compelled to learn by rote.
+
+"Your wise friend," he cried, "was a damned fool! If you will give the
+matter a moment's thought you'll see that memory is the highest faculty
+of the human mind. What becomes of all your reading, all your
+observation, your experience, study, investigations, discussions--in a
+rushing crescendo--if you have no memory?"
+
+"I might reply," I said, "by asking what use it is to lumber up your
+mind with a mass of information of which you are only going to make an
+occasional use when you can have it filed away in encyclopedias and
+other works of reference, and in card indexes, instantly available when
+you want it."
+
+I spoke in a light and rather humorous tone in order to take the edge
+off my dissent from his opinion, reflecting that even between friends
+and equals a demand for frankness is most safely to be regarded as a
+danger signal to impulsiveness; but it was too late, I had evidently
+overstepped the mark, for Mr. Pulitzer turned abruptly from me without
+replying, and began to talk to the gentleman on his left.
+
+This had the twofold advantage of giving me time to reconsider my
+strategy, and to eat some dinner, which one of the footmen, evidently
+the kind with a memory for former experiences, had set on one side and
+kept warm against the moment when I would be free to enjoy it.
+
+As I ate I listened to the conversation. It made my heart sink. The
+gentleman to whom Mr. Pulitzer had transferred his attentions was a
+Scotchman, Mr. William Romaine Paterson. I discovered later that he was
+the nearest possible approach to a walking encyclopedia. His range of
+information was--well, I am tempted to say, infamous. He appeared to
+have an exhaustive knowledge of French, German, Italian, and English
+literature, of European history in its most complicated ramifications,
+and of general biography in such a measure that, in regard to people as
+well known as Goethe, Voltaire, Kossuth, Napoleon, Garibaldi, Bismarck,
+and a score of others, he could fix a precise day on which any event or
+conversation had taken place, and recall it in its minutest details.
+
+It was not simply from the standpoint of my own ignorance that
+Paterson's store of knowledge assumed such vast proportions, for it was
+seldom opened except in the presence of Mr. Pulitzer, in whom were
+combined a tenacious memory, a profound acquaintance with the subjects
+which Paterson had taken for his province, an analytic mind, and a zest
+for contradiction. Everything Paterson said was immediately pounced upon
+by a vigorous, astute, and well-informed critic who derived peculiar
+satisfaction from the rare instances in which he could detect him in an
+inaccuracy.
+
+The conversation between Mr. Pulitzer and Paterson, or, rather,
+Paterson's frequently interrupted monologue, lasted until we had all
+finished dinner, and the butler had lighted Mr. Pulitzer's cigar. In the
+middle of an eloquent passage from Paterson, Mr. Pulitzer rose, turned
+abruptly toward me, held out his hand, and said, "I'm very glad to have
+met you, Mr. Ireland; you have entertained me very much. Please come
+here to-morrow at eleven o'clock, and I'll take you out for a drive.
+Good-night." He took Paterson's arm and left the room.
+
+The door, like all the doors in Mr. Pulitzer's various residences, shut
+automatically and silently; and after one of the secretaries had drawn a
+heavy velvet curtain across the doorway, so that not the faintest sound
+could escape from the room, I was chaffed good-naturedly about my debut
+as a candidate. To my great surprise I was congratulated on having done
+very well.
+
+"You made a great hit," said one, "with your account of Shaw's play."
+
+"I nearly burst out laughing," said another, "when you gave your views
+about memory. I think you're dead right about it; but J. P.--Mr.
+Pulitzer was always referred to as J. P.--is crazy about people having
+good memories, so if you've really got a good memory you'd better let
+him find it out."
+
+I was told that, so far as we were concerned, the day's work, or at
+least that portion of it which involved being with J. P., was to be
+considered over as soon as he retired to the library after dinner. His
+object then was to be left alone with one secretary, who read to him
+until about ten o'clock, when the major-domo came and took him to his
+rooms for the night. As a rule, J. P. made no further demand on the
+bodily presence of his secretaries after he had gone to bed, but
+occasionally, when he could not sleep, one of them would be called,
+perhaps at three in the morning, to read to him.
+
+This meant in practice that, when we were ashore, one, or more usually
+two of us, would remain in the house in case of emergency. This did not
+by any means imply that we were always free from work after ten o'clock
+at night, in fact the very opposite was true, for it was J. P.'s custom
+to say, during dinner, that on the following day he would ride, drive,
+or walk with such a one or such a one, naming him; and the victim--a
+term frequently used with a good deal of surprisingly frank enjoyment by
+J. P. himself--had often to work well into the night preparing material
+for conversation.
+
+I saw something of what this preparation meant before I left the villa
+after my first meeting with J. P. Two of the secretaries said they would
+go over to Monte Carlo, and they asked me to go with them; but I
+declined, preferring to remain behind for a chat with one of the
+secretaries, Mr. Norman G. Thwaites, an Englishman, who was secretary in
+a more technical sense than any of the rest of us, for he was a
+shorthand writer and did most of J. P.'s correspondence.
+
+After the others had gone he showed me a table in the entrance hall of
+the villa, on which was a big pile of mail just arrived from London. It
+included a great number of newspapers and weeklies, several copies of
+each. There were The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The
+Morning Post, The Daily News, The Westminster Gazette, Truth, The
+Spectator, The Saturday Review, The Nation, The Outlook, and some other
+London publications, as well as the Paris editions of the New York
+Herald and The Daily Mail.
+
+Thwaites selected a copy of each and then led the way to his bedroom, a
+large room on the top floor, from which we could see across the bay the
+brilliant lights of Monte Carlo.
+
+He then explained to me that he had been selected to read to J. P.
+whilst the latter had his breakfast and his after-breakfast cigar the
+next morning. In order to do this satisfactorily he had to go over the
+papers and read carefully whatever he could find that was suited to J.
+P.'s taste at that particular time of the day. During the breakfast hour
+J. P. would not have anything read to him which was of an exciting
+nature. This preference excluded political news, crime, disaster, and
+war correspondence, and left practically nothing but book reviews,
+criticisms of plays, operas, and art exhibitions, and publishers'
+announcements.
+
+The principal sources of information on these topics were the literary
+supplement of the London Times, the Literary Digest, and the literary,
+dramatic, and musical columns of the Athenaeum, The Spectator, and the
+Saturday Review.
+
+These had to be "prepared," to use J. P.'s phrase, which meant that they
+were read over rapidly once and then gone over again with some
+concentration so that the more important articles could be marked for
+actual reading, the other portions being dealt with conversationally,
+everything being boiled down to its essence before it reached Mr.
+Pulitzer's ear.
+
+As it was getting late, and as I knew that Thwaites would be on tap
+early in the morning, for J. P. usually breakfasted before nine, and the
+"victim" was supposed to have had his own breakfast by eight, I left the
+villa and went back to the yacht.
+
+As he said good-night, Thwaites gave me a copy of The Daily Telegraph
+and advised me to read it carefully, as J. P. might ask me for the day's
+news during the drive we were to take the following morning.
+
+Before going to sleep I glanced through The Daily Telegraph and came
+across an article which gave me an idea for establishing my reputation
+for memory. It was a note about the death duties which had been
+collected in England during 1910, and it gave a list of about twenty
+estates on which large sums had been paid. The list included the names
+of the deceased and also the amounts on which probate duty had been
+paid. I decided to commit these names and figures to memory and to take
+an occasion the next day to reel them off to J. P.
+
+Punctually at eleven o'clock I presented myself at the villa to find, to
+my dismay, J. P. seated in his automobile in a towering rage. What sort
+of consideration had I for him to keep him waiting for half an hour!
+
+I protested that eleven o'clock was the hour of the appointment. I was
+absolutely wrong, he said, half-past-ten was the time, and he remembered
+perfectly naming that hour, because he wanted a long drive and he had an
+engagement with Mr. Paterson at noon.
+
+"I'm awfully sorry," I began, "if I misunderstood you, but really..."
+
+He dismissed the matter abruptly by saying, "For God's sake, don't argue
+about it. Get in and sit next to me so that I can hear you talk."
+
+As soon as we had got clear of the village, and were spinning along at a
+good rate on the Corniche road, which circles the Bay of Monaco, high on
+the mountain side, Mr. Pulitzer began to put me through my paces.
+
+"Now, Mr. Ireland," he began, "you will understand that if any
+arrangement is to be concluded between us I must explore your brain,
+your character, your tastes, your sympathies, your prejudices, your
+temper; I must find out if you have tact, patience, a sense of humor,
+the gift of condensing information, and, above all, a respect, a love, a
+passion for accuracy."
+
+I began to speak, but he interrupted me before I had got six words out
+of my mouth.
+
+"Wait! Wait!" he cried, "let me finish what I have to say. You'll find
+this business of being a candidate a very trying and disagreeable one;
+well, it's damned disagreeable to me, too. What I need is rest, repose,
+quiet, routine, understanding, sympathy, friendship, yes, my God! the
+friendship of those around me. Mr. Ireland, I can do much, I can do
+everything for a man who will be my friend. I can give him power, I can
+give him wealth, I can give him reputation, the power, the wealth, the
+reputation which come to a man who speaks to a million people a day in
+the columns of a great paper. But how am I to do this? I am blind, I'm
+an invalid; how am I to know whom I can trust? I don't mean in money
+matters; money's nothing to me; it can do nothing for me; I mean
+morally, intellectually. I've had scores of people pass through my hands
+in the last fifteen years--Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, Welshmen,
+Germans, Frenchmen, Americans, men of so-called high family, men of
+humble birth, men from a dozen universities, self-taught men, young men,
+old men, and, my God! what have I found? Arrogance, stupidity,
+ingratitude, loose thinking, conceit, ignorance, laziness, indifference;
+absence of tact, discretion, courtesy, manners, consideration, sympathy,
+devotion; no knowledge, no wisdom, no intelligence, no observation, no
+memory, no insight, no understanding. My God! I can hardly believe my
+own experience when I think of it."
+
+Set down in cold print, this outburst loses almost every trace of its
+intensely dramatic character. Mr. Pulitzer spoke as though he were
+declaiming a part in a highly emotional play. At times he turned toward
+me, his clenched fists raised above his shoulders, at times he threw
+back his head, flung his outstretched hands at arms' length in front of
+him, as though he were appealing to the earth, to the sea, to the air,
+to the remote canopy of the sky to hear his denunciation of man's
+inefficiency; at times he paused, laid a hand on my arm, and fixed his
+eye upon me as if he expected the darkness to yield him some image of my
+thought. It was almost impossible to believe at such a moment that he
+was totally blind, that he could not distinguish night from day.
+
+"Mind!" he continued, raising a cautionary finger, "I'm not making any
+criticism of my present staff; you may consider yourself very lucky if I
+find you to have a quarter of the good qualities which any one of them
+has; and let me tell you that while you are with me you will do well to
+observe these gentlemen and to try and model yourself on them.
+
+"However, all that doesn't matter so much in your case, because there's
+no question of your becoming one of my personal staff. I haven't any
+vacancy at present, and I don't foresee any. What I want you for is
+something quite different."
+
+Imagine my amazement. No vacancy on the staff! What about the
+advertisement I had answered? What about all the interviews and
+correspondence, in which a companionship had been the only thing
+discussed? What could the totally different thing be of which Mr.
+Pulitzer spoke?
+
+In the midst of my confusion Mr. Pulitzer said, "Look out of the window
+and tell me what you see. Remember that I am blind, and try and make me
+get a mental picture of everything--everything, you understand; never
+think that anything is too small or insignificant to be of interest to
+me; you can't tell what may interest me; always describe everything with
+the greatest minuteness, every cloud in the sky, every shadow on the
+hillside, every tree, every house, every dress, every wrinkle on a face,
+everything, everything!"
+
+I did my best, and he appeared to be pleased; but before I had half
+exhausted the details of the magnificent scene above and below us he
+stopped me suddenly with a request that I should tell him exactly what
+had occurred from the time I had answered his advertisement up to the
+moment of my arrival at the villa.
+
+This demand placed me in rather an awkward predicament, for I had to try
+and reconcile the fact that the advertisement itself as well as all my
+conversations with his agents and with his son had been directed toward
+the idea of a companionship, with his positive assertion that there was
+no vacancy on his personal staff and that he wanted me for another, and
+an undisclosed purpose. Here was a very clear opportunity for destroying
+my reputation, either for tact or for accuracy.
+
+There was, of course, only one thing to do, and that was to tell him
+exactly what had taken place. This I did, and at the end of my recital
+he said, "It's simply amazing how anyone can get a matter tangled up the
+way you have. There was never a question of your becoming one of my
+companions. What I want is a man to go out to the Philippines and write
+a series of vigorous articles showing the bungle we've made of that
+business, and paving the way for an agitation in favor of giving the
+Islands their independence. There'll be a chance of getting that done if
+we elect a Democratic President in 1912."
+
+"Well, sir," I replied, "if the bungle has been as bad as you think I
+certainly ought to be able to do the work to your satisfaction. I'm
+pretty familiar with the conditions of tropical life, I've written a
+good deal on the subject, I've been in the Philippines and have
+published a book and a number of articles about them, and, although I
+don't take as gloomy a view as you do about the administration out
+there, I found a good deal to criticize, and if I go out I can certainly
+describe the conditions as they are now, and your editorial writers can
+put my articles to whatever use they may wish."
+
+"You're going too fast," he said, "and you're altogether too cock-sure
+of your abilities. You mustn't think that because you've written
+articles for the London Times you are competent to write for The World.
+It's a very different matter. The American people want something terse,
+forcible, picturesque, striking, something that will arrest their
+attention, enlist their sympathy, arouse their indignation, stimulate
+their imagination, convince their reason, awaken their conscience. Why
+should I accept you at your own estimate? You don't realize the
+responsibility I have in this matter. The World isn't like your Times,
+with its forty or fifty thousand educated readers. It's read by, well,
+say a million people a day; and it's my duty to see that they get the
+truth; but that's not enough, I've got to put it before them briefly so
+that they will read it, clearly so that they will understand it,
+forcibly so that they will appreciate it, picturesquely so that they
+will remember it, and, above all, accurately so that they may be wisely
+guided by its light. And you come to me, and before you've been here a
+day you ask me to entrust you with an important mission which concerns
+the integrity of my paper, the conscience of my readers, the policy of
+my country, no, my God! you're too cock-sure of yourself."
+
+By this time Mr. Pulitzer had worked himself up into a state of painful
+excitement. His forehead was damp with perspiration, he clasped and
+unclasped his hands, his voice became louder and higher-pitched from
+moment to moment; but when he suddenly stopped speaking he calmed down
+instantly.
+
+"You shouldn't let me talk so much," he said, without, however,
+suggesting any means by which I could stop him. "What time is it? Are we
+nearly home? Well, Mr. Ireland, I'll let you off for the afternoon; go
+and enjoy yourself and forget all about me." Then, as the auto drew up
+at the door of the villa, "Come up to dinner about seven and try to be
+amusing. You did very well last night. I hope you can keep it up. It's
+most important that anyone who is to live with me should have a sense of
+humor. I'd be glad to keep a man and pay him a handsome salary if he
+would make me laugh once a day. Well, good-by till to-night."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+LIFE AT CAP MARTIN
+
+
+There was no lack of humor in Mr. Pulitzer's suggestion that I should go
+and enjoy myself and forget him. I went down to the yacht, had lunch in
+solitary state, and then, selecting a comfortable chair in the smoking-
+room, settled down to think things over.
+
+It soon became clear to me that J. P. was a man of a character so
+completely outside the range of my experience that any skill of judgment
+I might have acquired through contact with many men of many races would
+avail me little in my intercourse with him.
+
+That he was arbitrary, self-centered, and exacting mattered little to
+me; it was a combination of qualities which rumor had led me to expect
+in him, and with which I had become familiar in my acquaintance with men
+of wide authority and outstanding ability. What disturbed me was that
+his blindness, his ill health, and his suffering had united to these
+traits an intense excitability and a morbid nervousness.
+
+My first impulse was to attribute his capriciousness to a weakening of
+his brain power; but I could not reconcile this view with the vigor of
+his thought, with the clearness of his expression, with the amplitude of
+his knowledge, with the scope of his memory as they had been disclosed
+the previous night in his conversation with Paterson. No, the fact was
+that I had not found the key to his motives, the cipher running through
+the artificial confusion of his actions.
+
+I could not foresee the issue of the adventure. In the meantime,
+however, the yacht was a comfortable home, the Cote d'Azur was a new
+field of observation, J. P. and his secretaries were extremely
+interesting, the honorarium was accumulating steadily, and in the
+background Barbados still slept in the sunshine, an emerald in a
+sapphire sea.
+
+During the afternoon I had a visit from Jabez E. Dunningham, the major-
+domo. I pay tribute to him here as one of the most remarkable men I have
+ever met, an opinion which I formed after months of daily intercourse
+with him. He was an Englishman, and he had spent nearly twenty years
+with Mr. Pulitzer, traveling with him everywhere, hardly ever separated
+from him for more than a few hours, and he was more closely in his
+confidence than anyone outside the family.
+
+He was capable and efficient in the highest degree. His duties ranged
+from those of a nurse to those of a diplomat. He produced, at a moment's
+notice, as a conjuror produces rabbits and goldfish, the latest hot-
+water bottle from a village pharmacy in Elba, special trains from
+haughty and reluctant officials of State railways, bales of newspapers
+mysteriously collected from clubs, hotels, or consulates in remote and
+microscopic ports, fruits and vegetables out of season, rooms, suites,
+floors of hotels at the height of the rush in the most crowded resorts,
+or a dozen cabins in a steamer.
+
+He could open telegraph stations and post offices when they were closed
+to the native nobility, convert the eager curiosity of port officials
+into a trance-like indifference, or monopolize the services of a whole
+administration, if the comfort, convenience, or caprice of his master
+demanded it.
+
+More than this; if, any of these things having been done, they should
+appear undesirable to Mr. Pulitzer, Dunningham could undo them with the
+same magician-like ease as had marked their achievement. A wave of Mr.
+Pulitzer's hand was translated into action by Dunningham, and the whole
+of his arrangements disappeared as completely as if they had never
+existed. The slate was wiped clean, ready in an instant to receive the
+new message from Mr. Pulitzer's will.
+
+Dunningham had come to offer me advice. I must not be disturbed by the
+apparent eccentricity of Mr. Pulitzer's conduct; it was merely part of
+Mr. Pulitzer's fixed policy to make things as complicated and difficult
+as possible for a candidate. By adopting this plan he was able to
+discover very quickly whether there was any possibility that a new man
+would suit him. If the candidate showed impatience or bad temper he
+could be got rid of at once; if he showed tact and good humor he would
+graduate into another series of tests, and so on, step by step, until
+the period of his trying out was ended and he became one of the staff.
+
+A man of my intelligence would, of course, appreciate the advantages of
+such a method, even from the standpoint of the candidate, for once a
+candidate had passed the testing stage he would find his relations with
+Mr. Pulitzer much pleasanter and his work less exacting, whereas if he
+found at the outset that the conditions were not pleasing to him he
+could retire without having wasted much time.
+
+One thing I must bear in mind, namely, that each day which passed
+without Mr. Pulitzer having decided against a candidate increased the
+candidate's chances. If a man was to be rejected it was usually done
+inside of a week from his first appearance on the scene.
+
+And, by the way, had I ever noticed how people were apt to think that
+blind people were deaf? A most curious thing; really nothing in it. Take
+Mr. Pulitzer, for example, so far from his being deaf he had the most
+exquisite sense of hearing, in fact he heard better when people spoke
+below rather than above their ordinary tone.
+
+Thus, Dunningham, anxious, in his master's interest, to allay my
+nervousness, which reacted disagreeably on Mr. Pulitzer, and to make me
+lower my voice.
+
+I went up to the villa during the afternoon to look at the house and, if
+possible, to have a talk with some of the secretaries.
+
+The villa lay on the Western slope of Cap Martin, a few hundred yards
+from the Villa Cyrnos, occupied by the Empress Eugenie. Seen from the
+road there was nothing striking in its appearance, but seen from the
+other side it was delightful, recalling the drop scene of a theater.
+Situated on a steep slope, embowered in trees, its broad stone veranda
+overhung a series of ornamental terraces decorated with palms, flowers,
+statuary, and fountains; and where these ended a jumble of rocks and
+stunted pines fell away abruptly to the blue water of the bay.
+
+The house was large and well designed, but very simple in its furniture
+and decorations. The upper rooms on the Western side commanded a superb
+view of the Bay of Monaco, and of the rugged hillsides above La Turbie,
+crowned with a vague outline of fortifications against the sky.
+
+In a room at the top of the house I found one of the secretaries, an
+Englishman, Mr. George Craven, formerly in the Indian Civil Service in
+Rajputana. He was engaged in auditing the accounts of the yacht, but he
+readily fell in with my suggestion that we should take a stroll.
+
+"Right-ho!" he said. "I'm sick of these beastly accounts. But we must
+find out what J. P.'s doing first."
+
+It appeared that J. P. had motored over to Monte Carlo to hear a
+concert, and that he wasn't expected back for an hour or more. As we
+stopped in the entrance hall to get our hats I struck a match on the
+sole of my shoe, intending to light a cigarette.
+
+"By Jove! Don't do that, for Heaven's sake," said Craven, "or there'll
+be a frightful row when J. P. comes in. He can't stand cigarette smoke,
+and he's got a sense of smell as keen as a setter's."
+
+We went into the garden and followed a narrow path which led down to the
+waterside. We talked about J. P. As a matter of fact, J. P. was the
+principal topic of conversation whenever two of his secretaries found
+themselves together.
+
+Craven, however, had only been with J. P. for a few weeks, having been
+one of the batch sifted out of the six hundred who had answered the
+Times advertisement. He was almost as much in the dark as I was in
+regard to the real J. P. that existed somewhere behind the mask which
+was always held out in front of every emotion, every thought, every
+intention.
+
+The life was difficult, he found, and extremely laborious. When it
+suited his book J. P. could be one of the most fascinating and
+entertaining of men, but when it didn't, well, he wasn't. The truth was
+that you could never tell what he really thought at any moment; it made
+you feel as though you were blind and not he; you found yourself groping
+around all the time for a good lead and coming unexpectedly up against a
+stone wall.
+
+"I've been with him a couple of months," he said, "and I haven't the
+slightest idea whether he thinks me a good sort or a silly ass, and I
+don't suppose I ever shall know. By Jove, there he is now!" as we heard
+the crunch of tires on the drive. "Excuse me if I make a run for it; he
+may want me any minute. See you later."
+
+At dinner that night Mr. Pulitzer devoted his whole attention to laying
+bare the vast areas of ignorance on the map of my information. He
+carried me from country to country, from century to century, through
+history, art, literature, biography, economics, music, the drama, and
+current politics. Whenever he hit upon some small spot where my
+investigations had lingered and where my memory served me he left it
+immediately, with the remark, "Well, I don't care about that; that
+doesn't amount to anything, anyhow."
+
+It was worse than useless to make any pretense of knowing things, for if
+you said you knew a play, for instance, J. P. would say, "Good! Now
+begin at the second scene of the third act, where the curtain rises on
+the two conspirators in the courtyard of the hotel; just carry it along
+from there"--and if you didn't know it thoroughly you were soon in
+difficulties.
+
+His method was nicely adjusted to his needs, for he was concerned most
+of the time to get entertainment as well as information; and he was,
+therefore, amused by exposing your ignorance when he was not informed by
+uncovering your knowledge. Indeed, nothing put him in such good humor as
+to discover a cleft in your intellectual armor, provided that you really
+possessed some talent, faculty, or resource which was useful to him.
+
+My dinner, considered as a dinner, was as great a failure as my
+conversation, considered as an exhibition of learning. I got no more
+than a hasty mouthful now and again, and got that only through a device
+often resorted to by the secretaries under such circumstances, but which
+seldom met with much success.
+
+J. P. himself had to eat, and from time to time the butler, who always
+stood behind J. P.'s chair, and attended to him only, would take
+advantage of an instant's pause in the conversation to say, "Your fish
+is getting cold, sir."
+
+This would divert J. P.'s attention from his victim long enough to allow
+one of the other men to break in with a remark designed to draw J. P.'s
+fire. It worked once in a while, but as a rule it had no effect whatever
+beyond making J. P. hurry through the course so that he could renew his
+attack at the point where he had suspended it.
+
+On the particular occasion I am describing I was fortunate enough toward
+the end of dinner to regain some of the ground I had lost in my
+disorderly flight across the field of scholarship. One of the
+secretaries seized an opportunity to refer to the British death duties.
+I had intended to arrange for the introduction of this topic, but had
+forgotten to do so. It was just sheer good luck, and I made signs to the
+gentleman to keep it up. He did so, and the moment he ceased speaking I
+took up the tale. It was a good subject, for J. P. was interested in the
+question of death duties.
+
+After a preliminary flourish I began to reel off the figures I had
+committed to memory the previous night. Before I had got very far Mr.
+Pulitzer cried.
+
+"Stop! Are you reading those figures?"
+
+"No," I replied. "I read them over last night in the Daily Telegraph."
+
+"My God! Are you giving them from memory? Haven't you got a note of them
+in your hand? Hasn't he? Hasn't he? ..." appealing to the table.
+
+Reassured on this point he said, "Well, go on, go on. This interests
+me."
+
+As soon as I had finished he turned to Craven and said, "Go and get that
+paper, and find the article."
+
+When Craven returned with it, he continued, "Now, Mr. Ireland, go over
+those figures again; and you, Mr. Craven, check them off and see if
+they're correct. Now, play fair, no tricks!"
+
+I had made two mistakes, which were reported as soon as they were
+spoken. At the end Mr. Pulitzer said:
+
+"Well, you see, you hadn't got them right, after all. But that's not so
+bad. With a memory like that you might have known something by now if
+you'd only had the diligence to read."
+
+My second score was made just at the end of dinner, or rather when
+dinner had been finished some time and J. P. was lingering at table over
+his cigar. The question of humor came up, and someone remarked how
+curious it was that one of the favorite amusements of the American
+humorist should be to make fun of the Englishman for his lack of humor--
+"Laugh, and all the world laughs with you, except the Englishman," and
+so on. The usual defenses were made--Hood, Thackeray, Gilbert,
+Calverley, etc.--and then Punch was referred to.
+
+This gave me the chance of repeating, more or less accurately, a
+paragraph which appeared in Punch some years ago, and which I always
+recite when that delightful periodical is slandered in my hearing. It
+ran something after this fashion:
+
+"One of our esteemed contemporaries is very much worked up in its mind
+about Mr. Balfour's foreign policy, which it compares to that of the
+camel, which, when pursued, buries its head in the sand. We quite agree
+with our esteemed contemporary about Mr. Balfour's foreign policy, but
+we fear it is getting its metaphors mixed. Surely it is not thinking of
+the camel which, when pursued, buries its head in the sand, but of the
+ostrich which, when pursued, runs its eye through a needle."
+
+It was a lucky hit. No one had heard it before, and our party broke up
+with Mr. Pulitzer in high good humor.
+
+So the days passed. I saw a great deal of Mr. Pulitzer and went through
+many agonizing hours of cross-examination; but gradually matters came
+round to the point where we discussed the possibility of my becoming a
+member of his personal staff. He thought that there was some hope that,
+if he put me through a rigorous training, I might suit him, but before
+it could even be settled that such an attempt should be made many things
+would have to be cleared up.
+
+In the first place, I would understand what extreme caution was
+necessary for him in making a selection. There was not only the question
+of whether I could make myself useful to him, and the question of
+whether I could be trusted in a relationship of such a confidential
+nature, there remained the very important question of whether I was a
+fit person to associate with the lady members of his family, who spent
+some portion of each year with him.
+
+This matter was discussed very frankly, and was then shelved pending a
+reference to a number of people in England and America at whose homes I
+had been a guest, and where the household included ladies.
+
+At the end of a week the yacht was sent to Marseilles to coal in
+preparation for a cruise, and I went to stay at an hotel near the villa.
+It was a change for the worse.
+
+By the time the yacht returned I had had some opportunity of observing
+the routine of life at the villa. After breakfast Mr. Pulitzer went for
+a drive, accompanied by one, or occasionally by two, of the secretaries.
+During this drive he received a rough summary of the morning's news, the
+papers having been gone over and marked either the night before or while
+he was having his breakfast.
+
+As he seldom let us know in advance which of us he would call upon for
+the first presentation of the news, and as he was liable to change his
+mind at the last minute when he had named somebody the previous night,
+we had all of us to go through the papers with great care, so that we
+might be prepared if we were called upon.
+
+On returning from his drive Mr. Pulitzer would either sit in the library
+and dictate letters and cablegrams, or he would have the news gone over
+in detail, or, if the state of his health forbade the mental exertion
+involved in the intense concentration with which he absorbed what was
+read to him from the papers, he would go for a ride, accompanied by a
+groom and by one of the secretaries. When he went to Europe he usually
+sent over in advance some horses from his own stable, as he was very
+fond of riding and could not trust himself on a strange horse.
+
+After the ride, lunch, at which the conversation generally took a more
+serious turn than at dinner, for at night Mr. Pulitzer disliked any
+discussion of matters which were likely to arouse his interest very much
+or to stir his emotions, for he found it difficult to get his mind
+calmed down so that he could sleep. Even in regard to lunch we were
+sometimes warned in advance, either by Dunningham or by the secretary
+who had left him just before lunch was served, that Mr. Pulitzer wished
+the conversation to be light and uncontroversial.
+
+Immediately after lunch Mr. Pulitzer retired to his bedroom with Herr
+Friederich Mann, the German secretary, and was read to, chiefly German
+plays, until he fell asleep, or until he had had an hour or so of rest.
+
+By four o'clock he was ready to go out again, riding, if he had not had
+a ride in the morning, or driving, with an occasional walk for perhaps
+half-an-hour, the automobile always remaining within call. As a rule he
+spent an hour before dinner listening to someone read, a novel, a
+biography, or what not, according to his mood.
+
+At dinner the conversation usually ran along the lines of what was being
+read to him by the various secretaries or of such topics in the day's
+news as were of an unexciting nature. The meal varied greatly in length.
+If J. P. was feeling tired, or out of sorts, he eat his dinner quickly
+and left us, taking somebody along to read to him until he was ready to
+go to bed. But, if he was in good form, and an interesting topic was
+started, or if he was in a reminiscent mood and wanted to talk, dinner
+would last from half-past-seven to nine, or even later.
+
+I shall deal in another place with the different phases of the
+conversation and reading which formed so large a part of our duties, but
+I may refer here to various incidents of our routine and to some things
+by which our routine was occasionally disturbed.
+
+Mr. Pulitzer was very fond of walking. His usual practice was to leave
+the villa in the automobile and drive either down to the plage at
+Mentone or up the hill to a point about midway between Cap Martin and
+the Tower of Augustus. When he reached the spot he had selected he took
+the arm of a secretary and promenaded backward and forward over a
+distance of five hundred yards, until he felt tired, when the automobile
+was signaled and we drove home.
+
+Each of his favorite spots for walking had its peculiar disadvantages
+for his companion. Speaking for myself I can say that I dreaded these
+walks more than any other of my duties.
+
+If we went on the hillside I had to keep the most alert and unrelaxing
+lookout for automobiles. They came dashing round the sharp curves with a
+roar and a scream, and these distracting noises always made Mr. Pulitzer
+stop dead still as though he were rooted to the ground.
+
+I understand that Mr. Pulitzer was never actually hit by an automobile,
+and, of course, his blindness saved him from the agony of apprehension
+which his companion suffered, for he could not see the narrowness of his
+escape. But I was out with him one day on the Upper Corniche road when
+two automobiles going in opposite directions at reckless speed came upon
+us at a sharp turn, and I may frankly confess that I was never so
+frightened in my life. Had we been alone I am certain we would have been
+killed, but fortunately Mann was with us, and it was on his arm that J.
+P. was leaning at the critical moment. Mann, who had the advantage of
+long experience, acted instantly with the utmost presence of mind. He
+made a quick sign to me to look out for myself, and then pushed Mr.
+Pulitzer almost off his feet up against the high cliff which rose above
+the inner edge of the road.
+
+The machines were out of sight before we could realize that we were
+safe. I expected an explosion from J. P. Nothing of the kind! He acted
+then, as I always saw him act when there was any actual danger or real
+trouble of any kind, with perfect calmness and self-possession.
+
+The intolerable nervous strain of these walks on the hillside was
+accompanied by a mental strain almost as distressing. It would have been
+bad enough if one's only responsibility had been to keep Mr. Pulitzer
+from being crushed against the hillside, or being run over; but this was
+only half the problem. The other half was to keep up a continual stream
+of conversation--not light, airy nothings, but a solid body of carefully
+prepared facts--in a tone of voice which should fail to convey to J. P.
+the slightest indication of your nervousness.
+
+When we walked on the plage at Mentone, the difficulties were of another
+kind. Here there was always more or less of a crowd, and as the paved
+promenade was narrow, and as very few people had the intelligence to
+realize that the tall, striking figure leaning on his companion's arm
+was that of a blind man, and as fewer still had the courtesy to step
+aside if they did realize it, our walk was a constant dodging in and out
+among curious gazers interested in staring at the gaunt, impressive
+invalid with the large black spectacles.
+
+Conversation was, of course, extremely difficult under such
+circumstances; and occasionally things were made worse by some stranger
+stopping squarely in front of us and addressing Mr. Pulitzer by name,
+for he was a notable personage in the place and was well known by sight.
+
+When accosted in this manner, Mr. Pulitzer always showed signs of
+extreme nervousness. He would stamp his foot, raise the clenched fist of
+his disengaged arm menacingly, and cry, "My God! What's this? What's
+this? Tell him to go away. I won't tolerate this intrusion. Tell him
+I'll have him arrested."
+
+More than once I had to push a man off the promenade and make faces at
+him embodying all that was possible by such means in the way of threats
+to do him bodily injury. It was impossible to argue with these impudent
+intruders, because anything like an altercation on a public road would
+have meant two or three days of misery for Mr. Pulitzer, in consequence
+of the excitement and apprehension he would suffer in such an affair. It
+was always with a feeling of intense relief that I saw J. P. safely back
+at the villa after our walks.
+
+Although Mr. Pulitzer's intellectual interests covered almost every
+phase of human life, there was nothing from which he derived more
+pleasure than from music. Once, or perhaps twice a week, he motored over
+to Monte Carlo, or even as far as Nice, to attend a concert. On such
+occasions he always took at least two companions with him, so that he
+never sat next to a stranger.
+
+He preferred a box for his party, but, failing that, the seats were
+always secured on the broad cross-aisle, so that he would not have to
+rise when anyone wished to pass in front of him. He liked to arrive a
+few minutes before the concert commenced, and one of us would read the
+program to him. He had an excellent memory for music, and his taste was
+broad enough to embrace almost everything good from Bach to Wagner. He
+was a keen critic of a performance, and in the intervals between the
+pieces he criticized the playing from the standpoint of his musical
+experience.
+
+One movement was played too loud, another too fast; in one the brass had
+drowned a delightful passage for the violas, which he had heard and
+admired the year before in Vienna; in another the brasses had been
+subdued to a point where the theme lost its distinction.
+
+It was his habit to beat time with one hand and to sway his head gently
+backward and forward when he heard a slow, familiar melody. When
+something very stirring was played, the Rakoczy March, for instance, or
+the overture to Die Meistersinger, he would mark the down beat with his
+clenched fist, and throw his head back as if he were going to shout.
+
+I was tempted at first to believe that, in the concert room, when one of
+his favorite pieces was being played, and his hand rose and fell in
+exact accord with the conductor's baton, or when, with his head in the
+air and his mouth half open, he thumped his knee at the beginning of
+each bar, he was absorbed in the music to the exclusion of all his
+worries, perplexities, and suffering.
+
+But, after he had once or twice turned to me in a flash as the last note
+of a symphony lingered before the outburst of applause and asked, "Did
+you remember to tell Dunningham to have dinner served a quarter of an
+hour later this evening?" or "Did Thwaites say anything to you about
+when he expected those cables from New York?"--I learned that even at
+such times J. P. never lost the thread of his existence, never freed
+himself from the slavery of his affairs.
+
+Twice during the ten days immediately preceding our long promised cruise
+in the Mediterranean we made short trips on the yacht. We went to bed
+some nights with all our plans apparently settled for a week ahead. At
+eight o'clock the next morning Dunningham would bring J. P. down to
+breakfast and then announce that everybody was to be on board the yacht
+by midday, as J. P. had slept badly and felt the need of sea air and the
+complete quiet which could be had only on board the Liberty.
+
+There would be a great packing of trunks, not only those devoted to the
+personal belongings of the staff, but trunks for newspaper files,
+encyclopedias, magazines, novels, histories, correspondence, and so on.
+
+The chef and his assistants, the butler and his assistants, the major
+domo, and the secretaries would leave the villa in a string of
+carriages, followed by cartloads of baggage, and install themselves on
+the yacht.
+
+Or the cause of our sudden departure might be that Mr. Pulitzer was
+feeling nervous and out of sorts and was expecting important letters or
+cables which were sure to excite him and make him worse. On such
+occasions Dunningham, who was one of the few people who had any
+influence whatever over Mr. Pulitzer, would urge an instant flight on
+the yacht as the only means of safeguarding J. P.'s health. He knew that
+if we stayed ashore no power on earth could prevent Mr. Pulitzer from
+reading his cables and letters when they arrived. Once out at sea we
+were completely cut off from communication with the shore, for we had no
+wireless apparatus, and Mr. Pulitzer would settle down and get some
+rest.
+
+More than once, however, I saw all the preparations made for a short
+cruise, everybody on board, the captain on the bridge, the table laid
+for lunch, a man stationed at the stem to report the automobile as soon
+as it came in sight, and at the last moment a messenger arrive
+countermanding everything and ordering everybody back to the villa as
+fast as they could go.
+
+These sudden changes were sometimes reversed. We would arrive at Mentone
+in the morning. J. P. would announce his intention of spending a week
+there. With this apparently settled, J. P. goes ashore for a ride, the
+procession makes its way to the villa, the trunks are unpacked, the chef
+begins to ply his art, the captain of the yacht goes ahead with such
+washing down and painting as are needed, the chief engineer seizes the
+chance of making some small engine-room repairs--no ordinary ship's work
+of any kind was allowed when J. P. was on board, the slightest noise or
+the faintest odor of paint being strictly forbidden--and later in the
+day the news comes that Mr. Pulitzer will be aboard again in two hours
+and will expect everything to be ready to make an immediate start.
+
+These short cruises might last only for a night, or they might extend to
+a day or two, Our custom was to steam straight out to sea and then
+patrol the coast backward and forward between Bordighera and Cannes,
+without losing sight of land.
+
+The life at Cap Martin was sufficiently arduous, even for those who had
+after long experience with J. P. learned to get through the day with
+some economy of effort. To me, new to the work, constantly under the
+double pressure of Mr. Pulitzer's cross-examinations and of the task of
+supplying, however inefficiently, the place of a secretary who was away
+on sick leave, the whole thing was a nightmare. I was in a dazed
+condition; everything impressed itself upon me with the vividness of a
+dream, and eluded my attempts at analysis, just as the delusive order of
+our sleeping visions breaks up into topsyturvydom as soon as we try to
+reconstruct it in the light of day.
+
+I spent in all about a month at Cap Martin, staying sometimes on the
+yacht and sometimes at an hotel, and during that time I worked
+practically every day from eight in the morning until ten or eleven at
+night. I use the word "work" to include the hours spent with Mr.
+Pulitzer as well as those devoted to preparing material for him. Indeed,
+the time given to meals and to drives and walks with J. P. was much more
+exhausting than that spent in reading and in making notes.
+
+The only recreation I had during this period was one day on leave at
+Nice and half a day at Monaco; but there was very little enjoyment to be
+got out of these visits, because I was under orders to bring back minute
+descriptions of Nice and of the Institute of Marine Biology at Monaco.
+
+Engaged on such missions, the passers-by, the houses, the shops, the
+fishes and marine vegetables in their tanks, the blue sky overhead, the
+blue sea at my feet assumed a new aspect to me. They were no longer
+parts of my own observation, to be remembered or forgotten as chance
+determined, they belonged to some one else, to the blind man in whose
+service I was pledged to a vicarious absorption of "material."
+
+I found myself counting the black spots on a fish's back, the steps
+leading up to Monaco on its hill, the number of men and women in the
+Grand Salon at Monte Carlo, of men with mustaches, of clean-shaven men,
+of men with beards in the restaurants, of vessels in sight from the
+terrace, of everything, in fact, which seemed capable of furnishing a
+sentence or of starting up a discussion.
+
+Once or twice I ran over late at night to Monte Carlo, and occasionally
+Thwaites and I met after ten o'clock at the Casino of Mentone to play
+bowls or try our luck at the tables; but the spirit of J. P. never
+failed to attend upon these dismal efforts at amusement. If I heard an
+epigram, witnessed an interesting incident, or observed any curious
+sight, out came my note book and pencil and the matter was dedicated to
+the service of the morrow's duties.
+
+Finally, after several false starts, we all found ourselves on the yacht
+with the prospect of spending most of our time aboard until Mr. Pulitzer
+sailed for his annual visit to America.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+YACHTING IN THE MEDITERRANEAN
+
+
+Taken at its face value a month in the Mediterranean, on board one of
+the finest yachts afloat, with visits to Corsica, Elba, Nice, Cannes,
+Naples, Genoa, Syracuse, and the Pirams, should give promise of a
+picturesque and entertaining record of sight-seeing, the kind of journal
+in which the views of Baedeker and of your local cab driver are blended,
+in order that the aroma of foreign travel may be wafted to the nostrils
+of your fresh-water cousins.
+
+What my narrative lacks of this flavor of luxurious vagrancy must be
+supplied by the peculiar interest of a cruise which violated every
+tradition of the annals of yachting, and created precedents which in all
+human probability will never be followed so long as iron floats on
+water.
+
+It was part of Mr. Pulitzer's scheme of nautical life to shroud all his
+movements in mystery. One result of this was that when we were on the
+yacht we never knew where we were going until we got there. The compass-
+course at any moment betrayed nothing of Mr. Pulitzer's intentions, for
+we might turn in at night with the ship heading straight for Naples and
+wake up in the morning to find ourselves three miles south of the Genoa
+lighthouse.
+
+Apart from Mr. Pulitzer's fancy, our erratic maneuvers were affected by
+our need to make good weather out of whatever wind we encountered, on
+the one hand because J. P., though an excellent sailor, disliked the
+rolling produced by a beam sea, since it interfered with his walking on
+deck, and on the other hand, because several of the secretaries suffered
+from sea-sickness the moment we were off an even keel.
+
+Mr. Pulitzer was not a man prone to be placated by excuses; but he had
+come to realize that neither a sense of duty nor the hope of reward,
+neither fear nor courage, can make an agreeable companion out of a man
+who is seasick. So, unless there was an important reason why we should
+reach port, we always made a head-wind of anything stronger than a light
+breeze, and followed the weather round the compass until it was fair for
+our destination.
+
+As soon as we left Mentone Mr. Pulitzer began the process of education
+which was designed to fit me for his service.
+
+"When you were in New York," he asked, "what papers did you read?"
+
+"The Sun and The Times in the morning and The Evening Sun and The
+Evening Post at night," I replied.
+
+"My God! Didn't you read The World?"
+
+"Nothing but the editorial page."
+
+"Why not? What's the matter with it?"
+
+I explained that I was not interested in crime and disaster, to which
+The World devoted so much space, that I wanted more foreign news than
+The World found room for, and that I was offended by the big headlines,
+which compelled me to know things I didn't want to know.
+
+"Go on," he said; "your views are not of any importance, but they're
+entertaining."
+
+"Well," I continued, "I think The World was excellently described a few
+years ago in Life. There was a poem entitled, 'New York Newspaper
+Directory, Revised,' in which a verse was devoted to each of the big New
+York papers. I believe I can remember the one about The World, if you
+care to hear it, for I cut the poem out and have kept it among my
+clippings."
+
+"Certainly, go ahead."
+
+I recited:
+
+"A dual personality is this,
+ Part yellow dog, part patriot and sage;
+ When't comes to facts the rule is hit or miss,
+ While none can beat its editorial page.
+ Wise counsel here, wild yarns the other side,
+ Page six its Jekyll and page one its Hyde;
+ At the same time conservative and rash,
+ The World supplies us good advice and trash."
+
+"That's clever," said Mr. Pulitzer, "but it's absolute nonsense, except
+about the editorial page. Have you got the clipping with you? I would
+like to hear what that smart young man has got to say about the other
+papers."
+
+I went to my cabin, got the poem, and read the whole of it to him--witty
+characterizations of The Evening Post, The Sun, The Journal, The
+Tribune, The Times and The Herald. As soon as I had finished reading,
+Mr. Pulitzer said:
+
+"The man who wrote those verses had his prejudices, but he was clever.
+I'm glad you read them to me; always read me anything of that kind,
+anything that is bright and satirical. Now, I'm going to give you a
+lecture about newspapers, because I want you to understand my point of
+view. It does not matter whether you agree with it or not, but you have
+got to understand it if you are going to be of any use to me. But before
+I begin, you tell me what YOUR ideas are about running a newspaper for
+American readers."
+
+I pleaded that I had never given the matter much thought, and that I had
+little to guide me, except my own preferences and the memory of an
+occasional discussion here and there at a club or in the smoking room of
+a Pullman. He insisted, however, and so I launched forth upon a
+discourse in regard to the functions, duties and responsibilities of an
+American newspaper, as I imagined they would appear to the average
+American reader.
+
+The chief duty of a managing editor, I said, was to give his readers an
+interesting paper, and as an angler baits his hook, not with what HE
+likes, but with what the fish like, so the style of the newspaper should
+be adjusted to what the managing editor judged to be the public
+appetite.
+
+A sub-stratum of truth should run through the news columns; but since a
+million-dollar fire is more exciting than a half-million-dollar fire,
+since a thousand deaths in an earthquake are more exciting than a
+hundred, no nice scrupulosity need be observed in checking the insurance
+inspector's figures or in counting the dead. What the public wanted was
+a good "story," and provided it got that there would be little
+disposition in any quarter to censure an arithmetical generosity which
+had been invoked in the service of the public's well-known demands.
+
+So far as politics were concerned, it seemed to me that any newspaper
+could afford the strongest support to its views while printing the truth
+and nothing but the truth, if it exercised some discretion as to
+printing the WHOLE truth. The editorial, I added, might be regarded as a
+habit rather than as a guiding force. People no longer looked to the
+editorial columns for the formation of their opinions. They formed their
+judgment from a large stock of facts, near-facts and nowhere near-facts,
+and then bought a paper for the purpose of comfortable reassurance. I
+had no doubt that a newspaper run to suit my own taste--a combination of
+The World's editorial page with The Evening Post's news and make-up--
+would lack the influence with which circulation alone can endow a paper,
+and would end in a bankruptcy highly creditable to its stockholders.
+
+This somewhat cynical outburst brought down upon me an overwhelming
+torrent of protest from Mr. Pulitzer.
+
+"My God!" he cried, "I would not have believed it possible that any one
+could show such a complete ignorance of American character, of the high
+sense of duty which in the main animates American journalism, of the
+foundations of integrity on which almost every successful paper in the
+United States has been founded. You do not know what it costs me to try
+and keep The World up to a high standard of accuracy--the money, the
+time, the thought, the praise, the blame, the constant watchfulness.
+
+"I do not say that The World never makes a mistake in its news column; I
+wish I could say it. What I say is that there are not half a dozen
+papers in the United States which tamper with the news, which publish
+what they know to be false. But if I thought that I had done no better
+than that I would be ashamed to own a paper. It is not enough to refrain
+from publishing fake news, it is not enough to take ordinary care to
+avoid the mistakes which arise from the ignorance, the carelessness, the
+stupidity of one or more of the many men who handle the news before it
+gets into print; you have got to do much more than that; you have got to
+make every one connected with the paper--your editors, your reporters,
+your correspondents, your rewrite men, your proof-readers--believe that
+accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman.
+
+"When you go to New York ask any of the men in the dome to show you my
+instructions to them, my letters written from day to day, my cables; and
+you will see that accuracy, accuracy, accuracy, is the first, the most
+urgent, the most constant demand I have made on them.
+
+"I do not say that The World is the only paper which takes extraordinary
+pains to be accurate; on the contrary, I think that almost every paper
+in America tries to be accurate. I will go further than that. There is
+not a paper of any importance published in French, German or English,
+whether it is printed in Europe or in America, which I have not studied
+for weeks or months, and some of them I have read steadily for a quarter
+of a century; and I tell you this, Mr. Ireland, after years of
+experience, after having comparisons made by the hundred, from time to
+time, of different versions of the same event, that the press of America
+as a whole has a higher standard of accuracy than the European press as
+a whole. I will go further than that. I will say that line for line the
+American newspapers actually ATTAIN a higher standard of news accuracy
+than the European newspapers; and I will go further than that and say
+that although there are in Europe a few newspapers, and they are chiefly
+English, which are as accurate as the best newspapers in America, there
+are no newspapers in America which are so habitually, so criminally
+stuffed with fake news as the worst of the European papers."
+
+Mr. Pulitzer paused and asked me if there was a glass of water on the
+table--we were seated in his library--and after I had handed it to him
+and he had drained it nearly to the bottom at one gulp, he resumed his
+lecture. I give it in considerable detail, because it was the longest
+speech he ever addressed to me, because he subsequently made me write it
+out from memory and then read it to him, and because it was one of the
+few occasions during my intercourse with him on which I was persuaded
+beyond a doubt that he spoke with perfect frankness, without allowing
+his words to be influenced by any outside considerations.
+
+"As a matter of fact," he continued, "the criticisms you hear about the
+American press are founded on a dislike for our headlines and for the
+prominence we give to crime, to corruption in office, and to sensational
+topics generally; the charge of inaccuracy is just thrown in to make it
+look worse. I do not believe that one person in a thousand who attacks
+the American press for being inaccurate has ever taken the trouble to
+investigate the facts.
+
+"Now about this matter of sensationalism: a newspaper should be
+scrupulously accurate, it should be clean, it should avoid everything
+salacious or suggestive, everything that could offend good taste or
+lower the moral tone of its readers; but within these limits it is the
+duty of a newspaper to print the news. When I speak of good taste and of
+good moral tone I do not mean the kind of good taste which is offended
+by every reference to the unpleasant things of life, I do not mean the
+kind of morality which refuses to recognize the existence of immorality-
+-that type of moral hypocrite has done more to check the moral progress
+of humanity than all the immoral people put together--what I mean is the
+kind of good taste which demands that frankness should be linked with
+decency, the kind of moral tone which is braced and not relaxed when it
+is brought face to face with vice.
+
+"Some people try and make you believe that a newspaper should not devote
+its space to long and dramatic accounts of murders, railroad wrecks,
+fires, lynchings, political corruption, embezzlements, frauds, graft,
+divorces, what you will. I tell you they are wrong, and I believe that
+if they thought the thing out they would see that they are wrong.
+
+"We are a democracy, and there is only one way to get a democracy on its
+feet in the matter of its individual, its social, its municipal, its
+State, its National conduct, and that is by keeping the public informed
+about what is going on. There is not a crime, there is not a dodge,
+there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which
+does not live by secrecy. Get these things out in the open, describe
+them, attack them, ridicule them in the press, and sooner or later
+public opinion will sweep them away.
+
+"Publicity may not be the only thing that is needed, but it is the one
+thing without which all other agencies will fail. If a newspaper is to
+be of real service to the public it must have a big circulation, first
+because its news and its comment must reach the largest possible number
+of people, second, because circulation means advertising, and
+advertising means money, and money means independence. If I caught any
+man on The World suppressing news because one of our advertisers
+objected to having it printed I would dismiss him immediately; I
+wouldn't care who he was.
+
+"What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its
+editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire,
+originality, good literary style, clever condensation, and accuracy,
+accuracy, accuracy!"
+
+Mr. Pulitzer made this confession of faith with the warmth generated by
+an unshakable faith. He spoke, as he always spoke when he was excited,
+with vigor, emphasis and ample gesture. When he came to an end and asked
+for another glass of water I found nothing to say. It would have been as
+impertinent of me to agree with him as to differ from him.
+
+After all, I had to remember that he had taken over The World when its
+circulation was less than 15,000 copies a day; that he had been for
+thirty years and still was its dominating spirit and the final authority
+on every matter concerning its policy, its style, and its contents; that
+he had seen its morning circulation go up to well over 350,000 copies a
+day; that at times he had taken his stand boldly against popular clamor,
+as when he kept up for months a bitter attack against the American
+action in the Venezuelan boundary dispute, and at times had incurred the
+hostility of powerful moneyed interests, as when he forced the Cleveland
+administration to sell to the public on competitive bids a fifty-
+million-dollar bond issue which it had arranged to sell privately to a
+great banking house at much less than its market value.
+
+Before leaving the subject of newspapers I may describe the method by
+which Mr. Pulitzer kept in touch with the news and put himself in the
+position to maintain a critical supervision over The World.
+
+An elaborate organization was employed for this purpose. I will explain
+it as it worked when we were on the yacht, but the system was maintained
+at all times, whether we were cruising, or were at Cap Martin, at Bar
+Harbor, at Wiesbaden, or elsewhere, merely a few minor details being
+changed to meet local conditions.
+
+In the Pulitzer Building, Park Row, New York, there were collected each
+day several copies of each of the morning papers, including The World,
+and some of the evening papers. These were mailed daily to Mr. Pulitzer
+according to cabled instructions as to our whereabouts. In addition to
+this a gentleman connected with The World, who had long experience of
+Mr. Pulitzer's requirements, cut from all the New York papers and from a
+number of other papers from every part of the United States every
+article that he considered Mr. Pulitzer ought to see, whether because of
+its subject, its tenor, or its style. These clippings were mailed by the
+hundred on almost every fast steamer sailing for Europe. In order that
+there might be the greatest economy of time in reading them, the
+essential matter in each clipping was marked.
+
+So far as The World was concerned a copy of each issue was sent, with
+the names of the writers written across each editorial, big news story,
+or special article.
+
+As we went from port to port we got the principal French, German,
+Austrian and Italian papers, and The World bureau in London kept us
+supplied with the English dailies and weeklies.
+
+Whenever we picked up a batch of American papers, each of the
+secretaries got a set and immediately began to read it. My own method of
+reading was adopted after much advice from Mr. Pulitzer and after
+consultation with the more experienced members of the staff, and I do
+not suppose it differed materially from that followed by the others.
+
+I read The World first, going over the "big" stories carefully and with
+enough concentration to give me a very fair idea of the facts. Then I
+read the articles in the other papers covering the same ground, noting
+any important differences in the various accounts. This task resolved
+itself in practice into mastering in considerable detail about half a
+dozen articles--a political situation, a murder, a railroad wreck, a
+fire, a strike, an important address by a college president, for
+example--and getting a clear impression of the treatment of each item in
+each paper.
+
+With this done, and with a few notes scribbled on a card to help my
+memory, I turned to the editorial pages, reading each editorial with the
+closest attention, and making more notes.
+
+The final reading of the news served to give me from ten to twenty small
+topics of what Mr. Pulitzer called "human interest," to be used as
+subjects of conversation as occasion demanded. As a rule, I cut these
+items out of the paper and put them in the left-hand pocket of my coat,
+for when we walked together J. P. always took my right arm, and my left
+hand was therefore free to dip into my reservoir of cuttings whenever
+conversation flagged and I needed a new subject.
+
+The cuttings covered every imaginable topic--small cases in the
+magistrates' courts, eccentric entertainments at Newport, the deaths of
+centenarians, dinners to visiting authors in New York, accounts of
+performing animals, infant prodigies, new inventions, additions to the
+Metropolitan Museum, announcements of new plays, anecdotes about
+prominent men and women, instances of foolish extravagance among the
+rich, and so on.
+
+Something of the kind was done by each of us, so that when Mr. Pulitzer
+appeared on deck after breakfast we all had something ready for him. The
+first man called usually had the easiest time, for Mr. Pulitzer's mind
+was fresh and keen for news after a night's rest. The men who went to
+him later in the morning suffered from two disadvantages, one that they
+did not know what news or how much of it J. P. had already received, the
+other that as the day advanced Mr. Pulitzer often grew tired, and his
+attention then became difficult to hold.
+
+I remember that on one occasion when he had complained of feeling
+utterly tired out mentally I asked him if he would like me to stop
+talking. "No, no," he replied at once; "never stop talking or reading, I
+must have something to occupy my mind all the time, however exhausted I
+am."
+
+This peculiarity of being unable to get any repose by the road of silent
+abstraction must have been a source of acute suffering to him. It is
+difficult to imagine a more terrible condition of mind than that in
+which the constant flogging of a tired brain is the only anodyne for its
+morbid irritability.
+
+My own experience of a morning on the yacht, when Mr. Pulitzer's nerves
+had been soothed by a good night's sleep, was that he walked up and down
+the long promenade deck and got from me a brief summary of the news.
+
+From time to time he pulled out his watch and, holding it toward me,
+asked what o'clock it was. He was always most particular to know exactly
+how long he had walked. We had arguments on many occasions as to the
+exact moment at which we had commenced our promenade, and we would go
+carefully over the facts--Mr. Craven had been walking with him from 9.30
+to 10.05, then Dunningham had been in the library with him for fifteen
+minutes, then Mr. Thwaites had walked with him for ten minutes, taking
+notes for a letter to be written to the managing editor of The World;
+well, that made it 10.30 when I joined him; but fifteen minutes had to
+be taken out of the hour for the time he'd spent in the library, that
+made three-quarters of an hour he'd been actually walking, well, we'd
+walk for another fifteen minutes and round out the hour.
+
+Often when the appointed moment came to stop walking Mr. Pulitzer felt
+able to go on, and he would then either say frankly, "Let's have fifteen
+minutes more," or he would achieve the same end by reopening the
+discussion as to just how long he had walked, and keep on walking until
+he began to feel tired, when he would say: "I dare say you are quite
+right, well, now we will sit down and go over the papers."
+
+The question of where Mr. Pulitzer was to sit on deck was not a simple
+one to decide. He always wanted as much air as he could get; but as he
+suffered a good deal of pain in his right eye, the one which had been
+operated on, and as this was either started or made worse by exposure to
+wind, a spot had to be found which had just the right amount of air
+current. Five minutes might show, however, that there was a little too
+much wind, when we would move to a more sheltered spot, or he might
+think we'd been too cautious and that he could sit in a breezier spot,
+or, after we had found the ideal place, the wind might change, and then
+we had to move again.
+
+Settled in a large cane armchair with a leather seat, a heavy rug over
+his knees if the weather was at all chilly, Mr. Pulitzer took up the
+serious consideration of the news which had been lightly skimmed over
+during his walk.
+
+An item was selected, and the account in The World was read aloud. Then
+followed the discussion of it from the standpoint of its presentation in
+the various papers. On what page was it printed in The World, in what
+column, how much space did it fill, how much was devoted to headlines,
+what was the size of the type, was the type varied in parts to give
+emphasis to the more striking features of the story, what were the
+cross-heads in the body of the article, were any boxes used, if so, what
+was put in them, what about the illustrations? And so on for each
+important item in each paper.
+
+One of the by-products of this reading of the papers was a stream of
+cables, letters and memoranda to various members of The World staff in
+New York. None of these were ever sent through me, but it was a common
+thing for J. P. to say: "Have you got your writing pad with you? Just
+make a note: Indianapolis story excellent, insufficient details
+lynching, who wrote City Hall story? and give it to Thwaites and tell
+him to remind me of it this afternoon."
+
+Mr. Pulitzer would take the matter up with Thwaites, and would send such
+praise, blame, reward, criticism, or suggestion as the occasion
+demanded.
+
+From time to time I was called upon to make a report on the day's
+papers, a task which usually fell to some more experienced member of the
+staff. My reports always covered the Sunday issues. They included an
+analysis of The Sun, The Herald, The American, The Times, The Tribune
+and The World, showing the number of columns of advertising, of news,
+and of special articles, a classification of the telegrams according to
+geographical distribution--how much from France, from Germany, from
+England, from the Western States, from the Southern States, and so on; a
+classification of the special articles on the basis of their topics--
+medicine, sport, fashions, humor, adventure, children's interests,
+women's interests.
+
+This was by no means the only check which Mr. Pulitzer kept upon The
+World and its contemporaries. He received regularly from New York a
+statistical return showing, for The World and its two principal
+competitors, the monthly and yearly figures for circulation and
+advertising; and the advertising return showed not only the amount of
+space occupied by advertising in each paper, but also the number of
+advertisements each month under various heads, such as display
+advertising, want ads., real estate, dry goods, amusements, hotels,
+transportation, to let ads., summer resorts, and whatever other classes
+of advertising might appear.
+
+Whatever Mr. Pulitzer wished to do in the way of business, whether it
+concerned the direction of the policy of The World, or the dictating of
+an editorial, or the handling of correspondence, was almost always done
+in the morning, and by lunch time he was ready to turn his attention to
+something light or amusing, or to serious subjects not connected with
+current events.
+
+Mr. Pulitzer generally lunched and dined with the staff in the dining
+saloon, unless he felt more than usually ill or nervous, when he had his
+meals served in the library, one or at most two of us keeping him
+company.
+
+When he sat with us he occupied the head of the table. At his side stood
+the butler, who never attended to any one but his master. A stranger at
+the table, if he were not actually sitting next to J. P., might very
+well have failed to notice that his host was blind, so far as any
+indication of blindness was afforded by the way he ate. His food was, of
+course, cut up at a side table, but it was placed before him on an
+ordinary plate, without any raised edge or other device to save it from
+being pushed on to the tablecloth.
+
+As soon as he was seated J. P. put his fingers lightly on the table in
+front of him and fixed the exact position of his plate, fork, spoon,
+water glass and wine glass. While he was doing this he generally spoke a
+few words to one or another of us, and as he always turned his face in
+the direction of the person he was addressing, the delicate movements of
+his hands, even if they were observed, were only those of a man with his
+sight under similar circumstances.
+
+Sitting next to him, however, his blindness soon became apparent. As he
+began to eat he simply impaled each portion of food on his fork, but
+after he had got halfway through a course and the remaining morsels were
+scattered here and there on his plate, he explored the surface with the
+utmost niceness of touch until he felt a slight resistance. He had then
+located a morsel, but in order that he might avoid an accident in
+transferring it to his mouth he felt the object carefully all over with
+almost imperceptible touches of his fork, and, having found the thickest
+or firmest part of it secured it safely.
+
+At times, if he became particularly interested in the conversation, he
+put his fork down, and when he picked it up again he was in difficulties
+for a moment or two, having lost track of the food remaining on his
+plate. On these occasions the ever-watchful butler would either place
+the food with a fork in the track of J. P.'s systematic exploration, or
+guide Mr. Pulitzer's hand to the right spot.
+
+Like many people in broken health Mr. Pulitzer had a very variable
+appetite. Sometimes nothing could tempt his palate, sometimes he ate
+voraciously; but at all times the greatest care had to be exercised in
+regard to his diet. Not only did he suffer constantly from acute
+dyspepsia, but also from diabetes, which varied in sympathy with his
+general state of health.
+
+He took very little alcohol, and that only in the form of light wines,
+such as claret or hock, seldom more than a single small glass at lunch
+and at dinner. Whenever he found a vintage which specially appealed to
+him he would tell the butler to send a case or two to some old friend in
+America, to some member of his family or to one of the staff of The
+World.
+
+After lunch Mr. Pulitzer always retired to his cabin for a siesta. I use
+the word siesta, but as a matter of fact it is quite inadequate to
+describe the peculiar function for which I have chosen it as a label.
+What took place on these occasions was this: Mr. Pulitzer lay down on
+his bed, sometimes in pyjamas, but more often with only his coat and
+boots removed, and one of the secretaries, usually the German secretary,
+sat down in an armchair at the bedside with a pile of books at his
+elbow.
+
+At a word from Mr. Pulitzer the secretary began to read in a clear,
+incisive voice some historical work, novel or play. After a few minutes
+Mr. Pulitzer would say "Softly," and the secretary's voice was lowered
+until, though it was still audible, it assumed a monotonous and soothing
+quality. After a while the order came, "Quite softly." At this point the
+reader ceased to form his words and commenced to murmur indistinctly,
+giving an effect such as might be produced by a person reading aloud in
+an adjoining room, but with the connecting door closed.
+
+If, after ten minutes of this murmuring, J. P. remained motionless it
+was to be assumed that he was asleep; and the secretary's duty was to go
+on murmuring until Mr. Pulitzer awoke and told him to stop or to
+commence actual reading again. This murmuring might last for two hours,
+and it was a very difficult art to acquire, for at the slightest change
+in the pitch of the voice, at a sneeze, or a cough, Mr. Pulitzer would
+wake with a start, and an unpleasant quarter of an hour followed.
+
+This murmuring was not, however, without its consolations to the
+murmurer, for as soon as the actual reading stopped he could take up a
+novel or magazine and, leaving his vocal organs to carry on the work,
+concentrate his mind upon the preparation of material against some
+future session.
+
+The siesta over, the afternoon was taken up with much the same kind of
+work as had filled the morning. By six o'clock Mr. Pulitzer was ready to
+sit in the library for an hour before he dressed for dinner. This time
+was generally devoted to novels, plays and light literature of various
+kinds. J. P. often assured me that no man had ever been able to read a
+novel or a play to him satisfactorily without having first gone over it
+carefully at least twice; and on more than one occasion I was furnished
+with very good evidence that even this double preparation was not always
+a guarantee of success.
+
+There appeared to be two ways of getting Mr. Pulitzer interested in a
+novel or play. One, and this, I believe, was the most successful, was to
+draw a striking picture of the scene where the climax is reached--the
+wife crouching in the corner, the husband revolver in hand, the Tertium
+Quid calmly offering to read the documents which prove that he and not
+the gentleman with the revolver is really the husband of the lady--and
+then to go back to the beginning and explain how it all came about.
+
+The other method was to set forth the appearance and disposition of each
+of the characters in the story, so that they assumed reality in Mr.
+Pulitzer's mind, then to condense the narrative up to about page two
+hundred and sixty, and then begin to read from the book. If in the
+course of the next three minutes you were not asked in a tone of utter
+weariness, "My God! Is there much more of this?" there was a reasonable
+chance that you might be allowed to read from the print a fifth or
+possibly a fourth of what you had not summarized.
+
+Dinner on the yacht passed in much the same way as lunch, except that
+serious subjects and especially politics were taboo.
+
+The meal hours were really the most trying experiences of the day. Each
+of us went to the table with several topics of conversation carefully
+prepared, with our pockets full of newspaper cuttings, notes and even
+small reference books for dates and biographies.
+
+But there was seldom any conversation in the proper sense; that is to
+say, we were hardly ever able to start a subject going and pass it from
+one to the other with a running comment or amplification, partly because
+any expression of opinion, except when he, J. P., asked for it, usually
+bored him to extinction, and partly because the first statement of any
+striking fact generally inspired Mr. Pulitzer to undertake a searching
+cross-examination of the speaker into every detail of the matter brought
+forward, and in regard to every ramification of the subject.
+
+I may relate an amusing instance of this: A gentleman who had been on
+the staff, but had been absent through illness, joined us at Mentone for
+a cruise in the Eastern Mediterranean. At dinner the first night out he
+incautiously mentioned that during the two months of his convalescence
+he had taken the opportunity of reading the whole of Shakespeare's
+plays.
+
+Too late he realized his mistake. Mr. Pulitzer took the matter up, and
+for the next hour and a half we listened to the unfortunate ex-invalid
+while he gave a list of the principal characters in each of the
+historical plays, in each of the tragedies, and in each of the comedies,
+followed by an outline of each plot, a description of a scene here and
+there, and an occasional quotation from the text.
+
+At the end of this heroic exploit, which was helped out now and then by
+a note from one of the rest of us, scribbled hastily on a card and
+handed silently to the victim, Mr. Pulitzer merely said, "Well, go on,
+go on, didn't you read the sonnets?" But this was too much for our
+gravity, and in a ripple of laughter the sitting was brought to a close.
+
+The trouble with the meals, however, was not only that we were all kept
+at a very high strain of alertness and attention, singularly inconducive
+to the enjoyment of food or to the sober business of digestion, but that
+they were of such interminable length. The plain fact was that by
+utilizing almost every moment between eight o'clock in the morning and
+nine o'clock at night we could fortify ourselves with enough material to
+fill in the hour or two spent with Mr. Pulitzer, hours during which we
+had to supply an incessant stream of information, or run through a
+carefully condensed novel or play.
+
+Under such circumstances an hour for lunch or dinner had to be accepted
+as an unfortunate necessity; but when it came, as it often did, to an
+hour and a half or two hours, the encroachment on our time became a
+serious matter.
+
+At about nine o'clock Mr. Pulitzer went to the library. One of the
+secretaries accompanied him and read aloud until, on the stroke of ten,
+Dunningham came and announced that it was bedtime.
+
+An extraordinary, and in some respects a most annoying feature of this
+final task of the day, viewed from the secretary's standpoint, was that
+from nine to ten, almost without cessation, Mr. Mann, the German
+secretary, played the piano in the dining saloon, the doors
+communicating with the library being left open.
+
+In a direct line the piano cannot have been more than ten feet from the
+reader's chair; and the strain of reading aloud for an hour against a
+powerful rendering of the most vigorous compositions of Liszt, Wagner,
+Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin was a most trying ordeal for voice, brain
+and nerves. Mr. Pulitzer could apparently enjoy the music and the
+reading at the same time. Often, when something was played of which he
+knew the air, he would follow the notes by means of a sort of subdued
+whistle, beating time with his hand; but this did not take his mind off
+the reading, and if you allowed your attention to wander for a moment
+and failed to read with proper emphasis he would say: "Please read that
+last passage over again, and do try and read it distinctly."
+
+Such was the routine of life on the yacht. It was little affected by our
+occasional visits to Naples, Ajaccio and other ports. Some one always
+landed to inquire for mail and to procure newspapers, one or two of us
+got shore leave for a few hours, but so far as I was concerned, being
+still in strict training and under close observation, my rare landings
+were made only for the purpose of having my observation and memory
+tested.
+
+I brought back minute descriptions of Napoleon's birthplace at Ajaccio,
+of his villa in Elba, of the tapestries, pictures and statues in the
+National Museum at Naples, of the Acropolis, of the monument of
+Lysicrates, of the Greek Theater and of the Roman Amphitheater at
+Syracuse, and of whatever else I was directed to observe.
+
+Mr. Pulitzer had had these things described to him a score of times. He
+knew which block of seats in the Greek theater at Neapolis bore the
+inscription of Nereis, daughter-in-law of King Heiro the Second; he knew
+up what stairs and through what rooms and passages you had to go to see
+the marble bath in Napoleon's villa near Portoferraio; he knew from
+precisely what part of the Acropolis the yacht was visible when it was
+at anchor at the Piraeus; he knew the actual place of the more important
+pictures on the walls of each room of the Naples Museum--such a one to
+the right, such a one to the left as you entered--he knew practically
+everything, but specially he knew the thing you had forgotten.
+
+My exhibitions of memory always ended, as they were no doubt intended to
+end, in a confession of ignorance. If I described five pictures, Mr.
+Pulitzer said: "Go on"; when I had described ten, he said: "Go on"; when
+I had described fifteen he said: "Go on"; and this was kept up until I
+could go on no more. At this point Mr. Pulitzer had discovered just what
+he wanted to know--how much I could see in a given time, and how much of
+it I could remember with a fair degree of accuracy. It was simply the
+game of the jewels which Lurgan Sahib played with Kim, against a
+different background but with much the same object.
+
+In the foregoing description of Mr. Pulitzer's daily life it has been
+made abundantly clear that his secretaries were worked to the limit of
+their endurance. It remains to add that Mr. Pulitzer never made a demand
+upon us which was greater than the demand he made upon himself.
+
+He was a tremendous worker; and in receiving our reports no vital fact
+ever escaped him. If we missed one he immediately "sensed" it, and his
+untiring cross-examination clung to the trail until he unearthed it.
+
+We had youth, health and numbers on our side, yet this man, aged by
+suffering, tormented by ill-health, loaded with responsibility, kept
+pace with our united labors, and in the final analysis gave more than he
+received.
+
+We brought a thousand offerings to his judgment; many of them he
+rejected with an impatient cry of "Next! Next! For God's sake!" But if
+any subject, whether from its intrinsic importance or from its style,
+reached the standard of his discrimination he took it up, enlarged upon
+it, illuminated it, until what had come to him as crude material for
+conversation assumed a new form, everything unessential rejected,
+everything essential disclosed in the clear and vigorous English which
+was the vehicle of his lucid thought.
+
+When I recall the capaciousness of his understanding, the breadth of his
+experience, the range of his information, and set them side by side with
+the cruel limitations imposed upon him by his blindness and by his
+shattered constitution, I forget the severity of his discipline, I
+marvel only that his self-control should have served him so well in the
+tedious business of breaking a new man to his service.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+GETTING TO KNOW MR. PULITZER
+
+
+As time passed, my relations with Mr. Pulitzer became more agreeable. He
+had given me fair warning that the first few weeks of my trial would be
+more or less unpleasant; a month at Cap Martin and a month on the yacht
+had amply verified his prediction.
+
+But this period of probation, laborious and nerve-racking as it was,
+enabled me to appreciate how important it was for J. P. to put to a
+severe test of ability, tact and good temper any one whom he intended to
+attach to his personal staff.
+
+His total blindness placed him completely in the hands of those around
+him, and, in order that he might enjoy that sense of perfect security
+without which his life would have been intolerable, it was necessary
+that he should be able to repose absolute confidence in the loyalty and
+intelligence of his companions.
+
+It was not with reference to his blindness alone that the qualifications
+of his secretaries were measured. Indeed, to the loss of his sight he
+had become, in some measure, reconciled; what really dominated every
+other consideration was the need of being able to meet the peculiar
+conditions which had arisen through the complete breakdown of his
+nervous system.
+
+I have spoken of his extreme sensitiveness to noise. It is impossible to
+give any description of this terrible symptom which shall be in any way
+adequate. Many of us suffer torment through the hideous clamor which
+appears to be inseparable from modern civilization; but to Mr. Pulitzer
+even the sudden click of a spoon against a saucer, the gurgle of water
+poured into a glass, the striking of a match, produced a spasm of
+suffering. I have seen him turn pale, tremble, break into a cold
+perspiration at some sound which to most people would have been scarcely
+audible.
+
+When we were on the yacht every one was compelled to wear rubber-soled
+shoes. When Mr. Pulitzer was asleep that portion of the deck which was
+over his bedroom was roped off so that no one could walk over his head;
+and each door which gave access to the rooms above his cabin was
+provided with a brass plate on which was cut the legend: "This door must
+not be opened when Mr. Pulitzer is asleep."
+
+With every resource at his command which ingenuity could suggest and
+money procure, the one great unsolved problem of his later years was to
+obtain absolute quietness at all times. At his magnificent house in New
+York, at his beautiful country home at Bar Harbor he had spent tens of
+thousands of dollars in a vain effort to procure the one luxury which he
+prized above all others. On the yacht the conditions in this respect
+were as nearly perfect as possible; but some noise was inseparable from
+the ship's work--letting go the anchor, heaving it up again, blowing the
+foghorn, and so on--though most of the ordinary noises had been
+eliminated.
+
+As an instance of the constant care which was taken to save Mr. Pulitzer
+from noise I remember that for some days almonds were served with our
+dessert at dinner, but that they suddenly ceased to form part of our
+menu. Being fond of almonds, I asked the chief steward why they had
+stopped serving them. After a little hesitation he said that it had been
+done at the suggestion of the butler, who had noticed that I broke the
+almonds in half before I ate them and that the noise made by their
+snapping was very disagreeable to Mr. Pulitzer.
+
+With the best intentions in the world, our meals were now and then
+disturbed by noise. A knife suddenly slipped with a loud click against a
+plate, a waiter dropped a spoon on a silver tray, or some one knocked
+over a glass. We were all in such a state of nervous tension that
+whenever one of these little accidents occurred we jumped in our chairs
+as though a pistol had been fired, and looked at J. P. with horrified
+expectancy.
+
+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 pass 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 circumstances 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 illustrate 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 circumstances.
+
+It will be readily understood that with his keen and analytic 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
+assigned 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 class 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
+passage after passage, carefully marked by Pollard, was greeted with,
+
+    "Stop! Stop! For God's sake!" or,
+
+    "Next! Next!" or,
+
+    "My God! 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 passages 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 pass 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 God! 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.
+
+Sometimes he would do this when we were at table, adopting a humorous
+tone as he said, "I'm afraid so-and-so will never forgive me for the way
+I treated him this afternoon; but I want to say that he really read me
+an excellent story and read it very well, and that I am grateful to him.
+I was feeling wretchedly ill and had a frightful headache, and if I said
+anything that hurt his feelings I apologize."
+
+Once, during my weeks of probation, when J. P. felt that he had carried
+his test of my good temper beyond reason, he stopped suddenly in our
+walk, laid a hand on my shoulder, and asked:
+
+"What do you feel when I am unreasonable with you? Do you feel angry? Do
+you bear malice?"
+
+"Not at all," I replied. "I suppose my feeling is very much like that of
+a nurse for a patient. I realize that you are suffering and that you are
+not to be held responsible for what you do at such times."
+
+"I thank you for that, Mr. Ireland," he replied. "You never said
+anything which pleased me more. Never forget that I am blind, and that I
+am in pain most of the time."
+
+A matter which I had reason to notice at a very early stage of my
+acquaintance with Mr. Pulitzer was that when he was in a bad mood it was
+the worst possible policy to offer no resistance to his pressure. It was
+part of his nature to go forward in any direction until he encountered
+an obstacle. When he reached one he paused before making up his mind
+whether he would go through it or round it. The further he went the more
+interested he became, his purpose always being to discover a boundary,
+whether of your knowledge, of your patience, of your memory, or of your
+nervous endurance.
+
+He never respected a man who did not at some point stand up and resist
+him. After the line had once been drawn at that point, and his curiosity
+had been gratified, he was always careful not to approach it too
+closely; and it was only on the rare occasions when he was in
+exceptionally bad condition that any clash occurred after the first one
+had been settled.
+
+I put off my own little fight for a long time, partly because I was very
+much affected by the sight of his wretchedness, and partly because I did
+not at first realize how necessary it was for him to find out just how
+far my self-control could be depended upon. As soon as this became clear
+to me I determined to seize the first favorable opportunity which
+presented itself of getting into my intrenchments and firing a blank
+cartridge or two.
+
+It was after I had been with him about a month that my chance came. I
+had noticed that his manner toward me was slowly but steadily growing
+more hostile, and I had been expecting daily to receive my dismissal
+from the courteous hands of Dunningham, or to find myself unable to go
+further with the ordeal.
+
+Finally, I consulted Dunningham, and was informed by him, to my great
+surprise, that I was doing very well and that Mr. Pulitzer was pleased
+with me. This information cleared the ground in front of me, and that
+afternoon when I was called to walk with Mr. Pulitzer I decided to put
+out a danger signal if I was hard pressed.
+
+Everything favored such a course. J. P. had enjoyed a good siesta and
+was feeling unusually well; if, therefore, he was very disagreeable I
+would know that it was from design and not from an attack of nerves.
+Furthermore, he selected a subject of conversation in regard to which I
+was as well, if not better, informed than he was--a question relating to
+British Colonial policy.
+
+The moment I began to speak I saw that his object was to drive me to the
+wall. He flatly contradicted me again and again, insinuated that I had
+never met certain statesmen whose words I repeated, and, finally, after
+I had concluded my arguments in support of the view I was advancing, he
+said in an angry tone, assumed for the occasion, of course:
+
+"Mr. Ireland, I am really distressed that we should have had this
+discussion. I had hoped that, with years of training and advice, I might
+hare been able to make something out of you; but any man who could
+seriously hold the opinion you have expressed, and could attempt to
+justify it with the mass of inaccuracies and absurdities that you have
+given me, is simply a damned fool."
+
+"I am sorry you said that, Mr. Pulitzer," I replied in a very serious
+voice.
+
+"Why, for God's sake, you don't mind my calling you a damned fool, do
+you?"
+
+"Not in the least, sir. But when you call me a damned fool you shatter
+an ideal I held about you."
+
+"What's that? An ideal about me? What do you mean?"
+
+"Well, sir, years before I met you I had heard that if there was one
+thing above all others which distinguished you from all other
+journalists it was that you had the keenest nose for news of any man
+living."
+
+"What has that to do with my calling you a damned fool?"
+
+"Simply this, that the fact that I'm a damned fool hasn't been news to
+me any time during the past twenty years."
+
+He saw the point at once, laughed heartily and, putting an arm round my
+shoulders, as was his habit with all of us when he wished to show a
+friendly feeling or take the edge off a severe rebuke, said:
+
+"Now, boy, you're making fun of me, and you must not make fun of a poor
+old blind man. Now, then, I take it all back; I shouldn't have called
+you a damned fool."
+
+It was from this moment that my relations with Mr. Pulitzer began to
+improve.
+
+A few days after the incident which I have just related we dropped
+anchor in the Bay of Naples, and Mr. Pulitzer announced his intention of
+sailing for New York by a White Star boat the following afternoon. He
+asked me to go with him; and I accepted this invitation as the sign that
+my period of probation was over.
+
+Everything was prepared for our departure. Dunningham worked
+indefatigably. He went aboard the White Star boat, arranged for the
+accommodation of our party, had partitions knocked down so that Mr.
+Pulitzer could have a private diningroom and a library, and convoyed
+aboard twenty or thirty trunks and cases containing books, mineral
+waters, wines, cigars, fruit, special articles of diet, clothes, fur
+coats, rugs, etc., for J. P.
+
+We all packed our belongings, telegraphed to our friends, sent ashore
+for the latest issues of the magazines, and sat around in deck chairs
+waiting for the word to follow our things aboard the liner.
+
+After half an hour of suspense Dunningham came out of the library, where
+he had been in consultation with J. P., and as he advanced toward us we
+rose and made our way to the gangway, where one of the launches was
+swinging to her painter.
+
+Dunningham, smiling and imperturbable as ever, raised his hand and said,
+"No, gentlemen, Mr. Pulitzer has changed his mind; we are not going to
+America. We remain on the yacht and sail this afternoon for Athens."
+
+He disappeared over the side, and an hour or two later returned with the
+chef and the butler and one of the saloon stewards, who had gone aboard
+the liner to make things ready, and some tons of baggage.
+
+We sailed just as the White Star boat cleared the end of the mole. When
+she passed us, within a hundred yards, she dipped her flag. I was
+walking with Mr. Pulitzer at the time and mentioned the exchange of
+salutes. He was silent for a few minutes. Then he asked, "Has she passed
+us?" "Yes," I replied, "she's half-a-mile ahead of us now." "Have you
+got your pad with you? Just make a note to ask Thwaites to cable to New
+York from the next port we call at and tell someone to send two hundred
+of the best Havana cigars to the captain. That man has some sense. Most
+captains would have blown their damned whistle when they dipped their
+flag. Have a note written to the captain telling him that I appreciated
+his consideration."
+
+Our voyage to Athens and thence, through the Corinth Canal, back to
+Mentone, was free from incident. J. P. discussed the possibility of
+going to Constantinople or to Venice, but our cabled inquiries about the
+weather brought discouraging replies describing an unusually cold
+season, and these projects were abandoned.
+
+About this time Mr. Pulitzer's health showed a marked improvement, which
+was reflected in the most agreeable manner in the general conditions of
+life on the yacht. He had been worried for some weeks about his plans
+for going to New York, and this had interfered with his sleep, had
+increased his nervousness and aggravated every symptom of his physical
+weakness. With this matter finally disposed of he could look forward to
+a peaceful cruise, during which he would be able to catch up with his
+careful reading of the marked file of The World, and thus remove a
+weight from his mind.
+
+He detested having work accumulate on his hands, but when his health was
+worse than usual this was unavoidable. He always drove himself to the
+last ounce of his endurance, and it was only when his condition
+indicated an imminent collapse that he would consent to drop everything
+except light reading, and to spend a few days out at sea without calling
+anywhere for letters, papers, or cables.
+
+It was during this, our last, cruise in the Mediterranean that I
+discovered that Mr. Pulitzer was one of the best and most fascinating
+talkers I had ever heard. Once in a while, when he was feeling cheerful
+after a good night's rest and a pleasant day's reading, he monopolized
+the conversation at lunch or dinner. He was generally more willing to
+talk when we took our meals at a large round table on deck, for he loved
+the sea breeze and was soothed by it.
+
+When he talked he simply compelled your attention. I often felt that, if
+he had not made his career otherwise, he might have been one of the
+world's greatest actors, or one of its most popular orators. In
+flexibility of tone, in variety of gesture, in the change of his facial
+expression he was the peer of anyone I have seen on the stage.
+
+To an extraordinary flow of language he added a range of information and
+a vividness of expression truly astonishing. His favorite themes were
+politics and the lives of great men. To his monologues on the former
+subject he brought a ripe wisdom, based upon the most extensive reading
+and the shrewdest observation, and quickened by the keenest enthusiasm.
+He was by no means a political bigot; and there was not a political
+experiment, from the democracy of the Greeks to the referendum in
+Switzerland, with the details of which he was not perfectly familiar.
+Although he was a convinced believer in the Republican form of
+government, having, as he expressed it, "no use for the King business,"
+he was fully alive to the peculiar dangers and difficulties with which
+modern progress has confronted popular institutions.
+
+When the publication of some work like Rosebery's Chatham or Monypenny's
+Disraeli afforded an occasion, Mr. Pulitzer would spend an hour before
+we left the table in giving us a picture of some exciting crisis in
+English politics, the high lights picked out in pregnant phrases of
+characterization, in brilliant epitome of the facts, in spontaneous
+epigram, and illustrative anecdote. Whether he spoke of the Holland
+House circle, of the genius of Cromwell, of Napoleon's campaigns, or
+sought to point a moral from the lives of Bismarck, Metternich, Louis
+XI, or Kossuth, every sentence was marked by the same penetrating
+analysis, the same facility of expression, the same clearness of
+thought.
+
+On rare occasions he talked of his early days, telling us in a charming,
+simple, and unaffected manner of the tragic and humorous episodes with
+which his youth had been crowded. Of the former I recall a striking
+description of a period during which he filled two positions in St.
+Louis, one involving eight hours' work during the day, the other eight
+hours during the night. Four of the remaining eight were devoted to
+studying English.
+
+His first connection with journalism arose out of an experience which he
+related with a wealth of detail which showed how deeply it had been
+burned into his memory.
+
+When he arrived in St. Louis he soon found himself at the end of his
+resources, and was faced with the absolute impossibility of securing
+work in that city. In company with forty other men he applied at the
+office of a general agent who had advertised for hands to go down the
+Mississippi and take up well-paid posts on a Louisiana sugar plantation.
+The agent demanded a fee of five dollars from each applicant, and, by
+pooling their resources, the members of this wretched band managed to
+meet the charge. The same night they were taken on board a steamer which
+immediately started down river. At three o'clock in the morning they
+were landed on the river bank about forty miles below St. Louis, at a
+spot where there was neither house, road, nor clearing. Before the
+marooned party had time to realize its plight the steamer had
+disappeared.
+
+A council of war was held, and it was decided that they should tramp
+back to St. Louis, and put a summary termination to the agent's career
+by storming his office and murdering him. Whether or not this reckless
+program would have been carried out it is impossible to say, for when,
+three days later, the ragged army arrived in the city, worn out with
+fatigue and half dead from hunger, the agent had decamped.
+
+A reporter happened to pick up the story, and by mere chance met
+Pulitzer and induced him to write out in German the tale of his
+experiences. This account created such an impression on the mind of the
+editor through whose hands it passed that Pulitzer was offered, and
+accepted, with the greatest misgivings, as he solemnly assured us, a
+position as reporter on the Westliche Post.
+
+The event proved that there had been no grounds for J. P.'s modest
+doubts. After he had been some time on the paper, things went so badly
+that two reporters had to be got rid of. The editor kept Pulitzer on the
+staff, because he felt that if anyone was destined to force him out of
+the editorial chair it was not a young, uneducated foreigner, who could
+hardly mumble half-a-dozen words of English. The editor was mistaken.
+Within a few years J. P. not only supplanted him but became half-
+proprietor of the paper.
+
+Another interesting anecdote of his early days, which he told with great
+relish, related to his experience as a fireman on a Mississippi
+ferryboat. His limited knowledge of English was regarded by the captain
+as a personal affront, and that fire-eating old-timer made it his
+particular business to let young Pulitzer feel the weight of his
+authority. At last the overwork and the constant bullying drove J. P.
+into revolt, and he left the boat after a violent quarrel with the
+captain.
+
+Whenever J. P. reached this point in the story, and I heard him tell it
+several times, his face lighted up with amusement, and he had to stop
+until he had enjoyed a good laugh.
+
+"Well, my God!" 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 documents sealed. As soon as he saw me he stopped short, as if he
+had seen a ghost, and said, "Say, ain't you the damned 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 hoarse 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 passage 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 passed 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 passed 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, massage, 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 circumstances 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 illustrated 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 bumped along its disjointed course, either in vain
+search or in careful avoidance of anything resembling a pleasant sound,
+turned to me and said: "My God! 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 circumstance 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 acumen, satire, neatness of phrase,
+apt comparisons and analogies, and shrewd analysis of character. Many
+passages 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 passing 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 passages 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 mass 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.
+
+After we had been a few weeks at Wiesbaden it became absolutely
+necessary for me to go to London for that purpose; and this led to a
+struggle with J. P. which nearly brought our relations to an end.
+
+As soon as I broached the subject of a fortnight's leave of absence J.
+P. set his face firmly against the proposal. This was due not so much to
+any feeling on his part that my absence would be an inconvenience to
+him, for both Paterson and Pollard had returned to duty, but to an
+almost unconquerable repugnance he had to any one except himself
+initiating any plan which would in the slightest degree affect his
+arrangements. His sensitiveness on this point was so delicate that it
+was impossible, for instance, for any of us to accept an invitation to
+lunch or dine with friends who might happen to be in our neighborhood,
+or to ask for half a day off for any purpose whatever.
+
+I do not mean to say that we never got away for a meal or that we were
+never free for a few hours; as a matter of fact, J. P. was by no means
+ungenerous in such things once a man had passed the trial stage; but,
+although J. P. might say to you, "Take two days off and amuse yourself,"
+or "Take the evening off, and don't trouble to get back to work until
+lunch-time to-morrow," it was out of the question for you to say to J.
+P.: "An old friend of mine is here for the day, would you mind my taking
+lunch with him?"
+
+No one, I am sure, ever made a suggestion of that kind to J. P. more
+than once--the effect upon him was too startling.
+
+J. P.'s favors in the way of giving time off were always granted subject
+to a change of mind on his part; and these changes were often so sudden
+that it was our custom as soon as leave was given to disappear from the
+yacht or the villa at the earliest possible moment. But at times even an
+instant departure was too slow, for it might happen that before you were
+out of the room J. P. would say: "Just a moment, Mr. So-and-So, you
+wouldn't mind if I asked you to put off your holiday till to-morrow,
+would you? I think I would like you to finish that novel this evening; I
+am really interested to see how it comes out."
+
+This, of course, was rather disappointing; but the great disadvantage of
+not getting away was that Mr. Pulitzer's memory generally clung very
+tenaciously to the fact that he had given you leave, and lost the
+subsequent act of rescinding it. The effect of this was that for the
+practical purpose of getting a day off your turn was used up as soon as
+J. P. granted it, without any reference to whether you actually got it
+or not; and the phrase, "until to-morrow," was not to be interpreted
+literally or to be acted upon without a further distinct permission.
+
+The only "right" any of us had to time off was to our annual vacation of
+two weeks, which we had to take whenever J. P. wished. If, for any
+reason, one of us wanted leave of absence for a week or so, the matter
+had to be put into the hands of the discreet and diplomatic Dunningham;
+and so when the time came when I simply had to go to London it was to
+Dunningham I went for counsel.
+
+Judging by the results, his intercession on my behalf was not very
+successful, for, on the occasion of our next meeting, J. P. made it
+clear to me that if I insisted on going to London it would be on pain of
+his displeasure and at the peril of my post. As I look back upon the
+incident, however, it is quite clear to me that the whole of his
+arguments and his dark hints were launched merely to test my sense of
+duty to those persons in London whom I had promised to see.
+
+A day or two later J. P. told me that as I was going to London I might
+as well stay there for a month or two before joining him in New York. He
+outlined a course of study for me, which included lessons in speaking
+(my voice being harsh and unpleasant) and visits to all the principal
+art galleries, theaters and other places of interest, with a view to
+describing everything when I rejoined him.
+
+On the eve of my departure Dunningham handed me, with Mr. Pulitzer's
+compliments, an envelope containing a handsome present, in the most
+acceptable form a present can take.
+
+It was not until I was in the train, and the train had started, that I
+was able to realize that I was free. During the journey to London my
+extraordinary experiences of the past three months detached themselves
+from the sum of my existence and became cloaked with that haze of
+unreality which belongs to desperate illness or to a tragedy looked back
+upon from days of health and peace. Walking down St. James's Street
+twenty-four hours after leaving Wiesbaden, J. P. and the yacht and the
+secretaries invaded my memory not as things experienced but as things
+seen in a play or read in a story long ago.
+
+I lost no time in making myself comfortable in London. Inquiries
+directed to the proper quarter soon brought me into touch with a
+gentleman to whose skill, I was assured, no voice, however disagreeable,
+could fail to respond. I saw my friends, my business associates, my
+tailor. I went to see Fanny's First Play three times, the National
+Portrait Gallery twice, the National Gallery once, and laid out my plans
+to see all the places in London (shame forbidding me to enumerate them)
+which every Englishman ought to have seen and which I had not seen.
+
+This lasted for about two weeks, during which I saw something of Craven,
+who had left us in Naples to study something or other in London, and who
+was under orders to hold himself in readiness to go to New York with J.
+P. We dined at my club one night, and when I returned to my flat I found
+a telegram from Mr. Tuohy, instructing me to join J. P. in Liverpool the
+next day in time to sail early in the afternoon on the Cedric, as it had
+been decided to leave Craven in London for the present.
+
+The voyage differed but little from our cruises in the yacht. J. P. took
+his meals in his own suite, and as Mrs. Pulitzer and Miss Pulitzer were
+on board they usually dined with him, one of the secretaries making a
+fourth at table.
+
+In the matter of guarding J. P. from noise, extraordinary precautions
+were taken. Heavy mats were laid outside his cabin, specially made a
+dozen years before and stored by the White Star people waiting his call;
+that portion of the deck which surrounded his suite was roped off so
+that the passengers could not promenade there; and a close-fitting green
+baize door shut off the corridor leading to his quarters. His meals were
+served by his own butler and by one of the yacht stewards; and his daily
+routine went on as usual.
+
+During the voyage I was broken in to the task of reading the magazines
+to J. P. So far as current issues were concerned I had to take the ones
+he liked best--The Atlantic Monthly, The American Magazine, The
+Quarterly Review, The Edinburgh Review, The World's Work, and The North
+American Review--and thoroughly master their contents.
+
+While I was engaged on this sufficiently arduous labor I made, on cards,
+lists of the titles of all the articles and abstracts of all the more
+important ones. I have by me as I write a number of these lists, and I
+reproduce one of them.
+
+The following list of articles represents what Mr. Pulitzer got from me
+in a highly condensed form during ONE HOUR: "The Alleged Passing of
+Wagner," "The Decline and Fall of Wagner," "The Mission of Richard
+Wagner," "The Swiftness of Justice in England and in the United States,"
+"The Public Lands of the United States," "New Zealand and the Woman's
+Vote," "The Lawyer and the Community," "The Tariff Make-believe," "The
+Smithsonian Institute," "The Spirit and Letter of Exclusion," "The
+Panama Canal and American Shipping," "The Authors and Signers of the
+Declaration of Independence," "The German Social Democracy," "The
+Changing Position of American Trade," "The Passing of Polygamy."
+
+I remember very well the occasion on which I gave him these articles. We
+were walking on one of the lower promenade decks of the Cedric, and J.
+P. asked me if I had any magazine articles ready for him. I told him,
+having the list of articles in my left hand, that I had fifteen ready.
+He pulled out his watch, and holding it toward me said:
+
+"What time is it?"
+
+"Twelve o'clock," I replied.
+
+"Very good; that gives us an hour before lunch. Now go on with your
+articles; I'll allow you four minutes for each of them."
+
+He did not actually take four minutes for each, for some of them did not
+interest him after my summary had run for a minute or so, but we just
+got the fifteen in during the hour.
+
+After all that was possible had been done in the way of reducing the
+number of magazine articles, by rejecting the unsuitable ones, and their
+length by careful condensation, we were unable to keep pace with the
+supply. When a hundred or so magazines had accumulated Mr. Pulitzer had
+the lists of contents read to him, and from these he selected the
+articles which he wished to have read; and these arrears were disposed
+of when an opportunity presented itself.
+
+At times Mr. Pulitzer did not feel well enough to take this concentrated
+mental food, and turned for relief to novels, plays and light
+literature; at times, when he was feeling unusually well, he occupied
+himself for several days in succession with matters concerning The
+World--in dictating editorials, letters of criticism, instruction and
+inquiry, or in considering the endless problems relating to policy,
+business management, personnel, and the soaring price of white paper.
+
+An interesting feature of his activity on behalf of The World was his
+selection of new writers. Although his supervision of the paper extended
+to every branch, from advertising to news, from circulation to color-
+printing, it was upon the editorial page that he concentrated his best
+energies and his keenest observation.
+
+It is no exaggeration to say that the editorial page of The World was to
+J. P. what a child is to a parent. He had watched it daily for a quarter
+of a century. During that time, I am told, he had read to him seventy-
+five per cent. of all the editorials which were printed on it, and had
+every cartoon described. Those who are interested in the editorial page
+of The World should read Mr. John L. Heaton's admirable History of a
+Page, published last year.
+
+J. P.'s theory of editorial writing, which I heard him propound a dozen
+times, called for three cardinal qualities--brevity, directness and
+style--and, as these could not be expected to adorn hasty writing, he
+employed a large staff of editorial writers and tried to limit each man
+to an average of half a column a day, unless exceptional circumstances
+called for a lengthy treatment of some important question.
+
+He watched the style of each man with the closest attention, examining
+the length of the paragraphs, of the sentences, of the words, the
+variety of the vocabulary, the choice of adjectives and adverbs, the
+employment of superlatives, the selection of a heading, the nicety of
+adjustment between the thought to be expressed and the language employed
+for its expression.
+
+If he chanced in the course of his reading to run across any apt phrase
+in regard to literary style he would get one of us to type a number of
+copies and send one to each of the editorial writers on The World. The
+following were sent from Wiesbaden:
+
+"Thiers compares a perfect style to glass through which we look without
+being conscious of its presence between the object and the eye." (From
+Abraham Hayward's "Essay on Thiers.")
+
+"Lessing, Lichtenberger, and Schopenhauer agreed in saying that it is
+difficult to write well, that no man naturally writes well, and that one
+must, in order to acquire a style, work STRENUOUSLY ... I have tried to
+write well."(Nietzsche.)
+
+J. P. was never tired of discussing literary style, of making
+comparisons between one language and another from the point of view of
+an exact expression of an idea, or of the different SOUND of the same
+idea expressed in different languages. For instance, he asked us once
+during an argument about translations of Shakespeare to compare the
+lines:
+
+     "You are my true and honorable wife,
+      As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
+      That visit my sad heart."
+
+with the German:
+
+    "Ihr seid mein echtes, ehrenwertes Weib,
+     So teuer mir, als wie die Purpurtropfen
+     Die um mein trauernd Herz sich drangen."
+
+and the opening words of Hamlet's soliloquy with the German:
+
+   "Sein oder Nichtsein, das ist hier die Frage."
+
+Of the former pair he greatly preferred the English, of the latter the
+German.
+
+Sometimes we discussed at great length the exact English equivalent of
+some German or French word. I remember one which he came back to again
+and again, the word leichtsinnig. We suggested as translations,
+frivolous, irresponsible, hare-brained, thoughtless, chicken-witted,
+foolish, crazy; but we never found an expression which suited him.
+
+But I have wandered away from the subject of editorial writers. During
+the time I was with J. P. he selected two, and his method of selection
+is of interest in view of the great importance he attached to the
+editorial page of The World.
+
+As I have said elsewhere, J. P. got practically all the important
+articles from every paper of consequence in the United States. If he
+read an editorial which impressed him, possibly from a Chicago or a San
+Francisco paper, he put it on one side and told Pollard, who read all
+this kind of material to him, to watch the clippings from that paper and
+to pick out any other editorials which he could identify as the work of
+the same man. Five years with J. P. had made Pollard an expert in
+penetrating the disguise of the editorial "We."
+
+As soon as a representative collection of the unknown man's writings had
+been made J. P. instructed some one on The World to find out who the
+author was and to request that he would supply what he considered to be
+a fair sample of his work, a dozen or more articles, and a brief
+biography of himself.
+
+If Mr. Pulitzer was satisfied with these an offer would be made to the
+man to join the staff of The World. Sometimes even these gentlemen were
+summoned to New York, to Bar Harbor, to Wiesbaden, or to Mentone,
+according to circumstances. I have met several of them, and they all
+agree in saying that the hardest work they ever did in their lives was
+to keep pace with Mr. Pulitzer while they were running the gauntlet of
+his judgment.
+
+There are few men highly placed on The World to-day who have not been
+through such an ordeal. I doubt if any man was ever served by a staff
+whose individual ability, temper, resources and limitations were so
+minutely known to their employer. He knew them to the last ounce of
+their endurance, to the last word of their knowledge, beyond the last
+veil which enables even the most intelligent man to harbor, mercifully,
+a few delusions about himself.
+
+To those who did not know Mr. Pulitzer it may appear that I exaggerate
+his powers in this direction. As a matter of fact I believe that it
+would be impossible to do so.
+
+When he had his sight he judged men as others judge them, and, making
+full allowance for his genius for observation and analysis, he was no
+doubt influenced to some extent by appearance, manners and associations.
+But after he became blind and retired from contact with all men, except
+a circle which cannot have exceeded a score in number, his judgment took
+on a new measure of clearness and perspective.
+
+As a natural weapon of self-defense he developed a system of searching
+examination before which no subterfuge could stand. It was minute,
+persistent, comprehensive and ingenious in the last degree. It might
+begin to-day, reach an apparent conclusion, and be renewed after a
+month's silence. In the meantime, while the whole matter was becoming
+dim in your mind, inquiries had been made in a dozen directions in
+regard to the points at issue; and when the subject was reopened you
+were confronted not only with J. P.'s perfect memory of what you had
+said but with a detailed knowledge of matters which you had passed by as
+unimportant, or deliberately avoided for any one of a dozen perfectly
+honest reasons.
+
+J. P.'s questions covered names, places, dates, motives, the chain of
+causation, what you said, what you did, what you felt, what you thought,
+the reasons why you felt, thought, acted as you did, the reasons why
+your thought and action had not been such-and-such, your opinion of your
+own conduct, in looking back upon the episode, your opinion of the
+thoughts, actions and feelings of everybody else concerned, your
+conjectures as to THEIR motives, what you would do if you were again
+faced with the same problem, why you would do it, why you had not done
+it on the previous occasion.
+
+Starting at any point in your career Mr. Pulitzer worked backward and
+forward until all that you had ever thought or done, from your earliest
+recollection down to the present moment, had been disclosed to him so
+far as he was interested to know it, and your memory served you.
+
+This process varied in length according to the nature of the experiences
+of the person subjected to it, and to the precise quality of Mr.
+Pulitzer's interest in him. In my own case it lasted about three months
+and was copiously interspersed with written statements by myself of
+facts about myself, opinions by myself about myself, and endless
+references to people I had known during the past twenty-five years.
+
+Mr. Pulitzer's attitude toward references was the product of vast
+experience. He complained that scores of men had come to him with
+references from some of the most distinguished people living, references
+so glowing that one man should have been ashamed to write them and the
+other ashamed to receive them, references of such a character that their
+happy possessors might, without being guilty of immodesty, have applied
+for the Chief Justiceship of the United States, the Viceroyalty of
+India, the Archbishopric of Canterbury, the Presidency of the Royal
+College of Surgeons, or the Mastership of Baliol, but that the great
+majority of these men had turned out to be ignorant, lazy and stupid to
+an unbelievable degree.
+
+When the question of my own references came up I begged in a humorous
+way that, having heard J. P.'s views about the value of testimonials, my
+friends should be spared the useless task of eulogizing me.
+
+"No, my God!" exclaimed J. P. "None of them shall be spared. What I said
+about testimonials is all perfectly true; but it only serves to show
+what sort of person a man must be who can't even get testimonials. No,
+no; if a man brings references it proves nothing; but if he can't, it
+proves a great deal."
+
+Our voyage to New York was marred by but one distressing feature, the
+behavior of two infants, one of whom cried all day and the other all
+night. J. P. stood it very well. I think he regarded it as one of the
+few necessary noises. He suffered from it, of course, but the only
+remark he ever made to me about it was:
+
+"I really think that one of the most extraordinary things in the world
+is the amount of noise a child can make. Here we are with a sixty-mile
+gale blowing and some ten thousand horse-power engines working inside
+the ship, and yet that child can make itself heard from one end of the
+boat to the other. I think there must be two of them; the sound is not
+quite the same at night. Now, Mr. Ireland, do, just for the fun of it,
+find out about that. Don't let the mother know--I wouldn't like to hurt
+her feelings; but ask one of the stewards about it."
+
+In due course we reached New York. The Liberty, which had crossed
+directly from Marseilles, met us at quarantine, and Mr. Pulitzer was
+transferred to her without landing. The rest of us joined the yacht the
+same evening. That night we sailed for Bar Harbor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+BAR HARBOR AND THE LAST CRUISE
+
+
+During the forenoon of the following day we dropped anchor opposite the
+water-front of Mr. Pulitzer's Bar Harbor estate. The house was situated
+right on the rocky foreshore, and was backed by extensive grounds which
+completely cut it off from the noise of the traffic on the main road.
+
+By means of a flight of granite steps, leading down from a lawn laid
+along the whole of the house-front, within containing walls, access was
+had to a pier to the end of which was attached a floating pontoon
+affording an easy means of boarding the yacht's boats or the launches
+which were kept at Chatwold for use when the house was occupied.
+
+Chatwold was a big, rambling place, which had been added to from time to
+time until it was capable of accommodating about twenty people in
+addition to J. P., whose quarters were in a large granite structure,
+specially designed with a view to securing complete quietness. This
+building was in the form of a tower about forty feet square and four
+stories high. On the ground floor was a magnificent room, occupying the
+whole length of the tower and two-thirds of its breadth, which served as
+a library and dining-room for J. P. On the side facing the sea there was
+a large verandah where Mr. Pulitzer took his breakfast and where he sat
+a great deal during the day when he was transacting business or being
+read to.
+
+The whole of the basement of the tower was taken up by a swimming pool
+and dressing rooms. The water was pumped in from the sea and could be
+heated by a system of steam pipes. The upper floors of the tower were
+given over to bedrooms, for J. P., for the major-domo and for several of
+the secretaries.
+
+Most of the servants were housed in a large building some distance from
+the main residence, and there were separate quarters for the grooms and
+stablemen, and for the heard gardener and his assistants.
+
+While we were at Chatwold there was a gathering of the Pulitzer family--
+Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer, a cousin of Jefferson Davis and a belle of
+Washington in her day, who married Mr. Pulitzer years before his success
+in life had been made and when the fight for his place in journalism was
+still in its early stages; Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Pulitzer and their young
+son, Ralph; Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Miss Edith Pulitzer, Miss
+Constance Pulitzer and Mr. Pulitzer's youngest child, Herbert, a boy of
+fifteen.
+
+The presence of the family had little effect upon the routine of Mr.
+Pulitzer's daily life. He saw as much of his wife and children as he
+could; but the intensity of his family emotions was such that they could
+only be given rein at the price of sleepless nights, savage pain, and
+desperate weariness. His interest in everything concerning the family
+was overwhelming, his curiosity inexhaustible. Everybody had to be
+described over and over again, but especially young Master Ralph, a
+bright and handsome child, born long after his grandfather had become
+totally blind, and Master Herbert, of whose appearance he retained only
+a memory of the dim impressions he had been able to gather years before
+when a little sight yet remained to him.
+
+It was at lunch and at dinner that Mr. Pulitzer saw most of the family.
+He almost always took his meals in the library at a table seating four;
+and the party usually included Mrs. Pulitzer, one of the other ladies or
+Master Herbert, and a secretary. I was present at a great many of these
+gatherings, partly because J. P. had gradually acquired a taste for such
+humor as I was able to contribute to the conversation, and partly
+because he relished a salad-dressing which represented my only
+accomplishment in the gastronomic field.
+
+A feature of the Bar Harbor life which Mr. Pulitzer enjoyed greatly and
+which he could not indulge in elsewhere were the long trips he made in a
+big electric launch on the sheltered waters of Frenchman's Bay. When the
+weather was fine these trips occupied two or three hours each day. J. P.
+sat in an armchair amidships, with two companions, very often his two
+older sons, to read to him or to discuss business affairs.
+
+On the occasions when I formed one of the party I had the opportunity of
+observing that so far as the quantity and the quality of work were
+concerned it was an easier task to be one of Mr. Pulitzer's secretaries
+than to be one of his sons. I have never seen men put to a more severe
+test of industry, concentration, and memory than were Mr. Ralph and Mr.
+Joseph, Jr., while they were at Bar Harbor or on the yacht.
+
+It is a pleasure to bear witness to the affectionate solicitude, the
+patience, and the good will with which they met the exacting demands of
+their father. They realized, of course, as every one who worked for J.
+P. realized it, that the weight of the burden he placed upon you and the
+strictness of the account to which you were called were the truest
+measure of his regard.
+
+Next to politics there was nothing which interested J. P. more than
+molding and developing the people around him; and what was no more than
+a strong interest when it concerned his employees became a passion when
+it concerned his sons. His activities in this direction ministered alike
+to his love of power and to his horror of wasted talents; they gratified
+his ever-present desire to discover the boundaries of human character
+and intellect, to explore the mazes of human temperament and emotion.
+
+What you knew and what you were able to do, once you had reached a
+certain standard, became secondary in his interest to what you could be
+made to know and what you could be taught to do. He was never content
+that a man should stand upon his record; growth and development were the
+chief aims of his discipline.
+
+His method was well illustrated in my own case. One of his earliest
+injunctions to me was that I should never introduce any subject of
+conversation connected, in however remote a degree, with my travels or
+with my studies in relation to the government of tropical dependencies.
+When, for instance, he happened to need some information about India or
+the West Indies, he always directed one of the other men to find it for
+him. This arrangement had, from his standpoint, the double advantage of
+making the other man learn something of which he was ignorant, and of
+leaving me free to work at something of which I was ignorant. Thus J. P.
+killed two intellectual birds with one stone.
+
+It was not only in regard to mental accomplishments, however, that J. P.
+pursued his plan of educating everybody around him. He insisted, among
+other things, that I should learn to ride, not because there was any
+lack of people who could ride with him, but because by means of
+application I could add a new item to the list of things I could do.
+After a dozen lessons from a groom I progressed so far that, having
+acquired the ability to stay more or less in the saddle while the horse
+trotted, Mr. Pulitzer frequently took me riding with him.
+
+We always rode three abreast--a groom on J. P.'s right and myself on his
+left; and conversation had to be kept up the whole time. This presented
+no peculiar difficulties when the horses were walking, but when they
+trotted I found it no easy task to keep my seat, to preserve the precise
+distance from J. P. which saved me from touching his stirrup and yet
+allowed me to speak without raising my voice, and to leave enough of my
+mind unoccupied to remember my material and to present it without
+betraying the discomfort of my position.
+
+During these rides, and especially when we were walking our horses along
+a quiet, shady stretch of road, J. P. sometimes became reminiscent. On
+one of these occasions he told me the story of how he lost his sight. As
+I wrote it down as soon as we got back to the house, I can tell it
+almost in his own words.
+
+We had been discussing the possibility of his writing an autobiography,
+and he said, throwing his head back and smiling reflectively:
+
+"Well, I sometimes wish it could be done. It would make an interesting
+book; but I do not think I shall ever do it. My God! I work from morning
+to night as it is. When would I get the time?" Then suddenly changing
+his mood: "It won't do any harm for you to make a few notes now and
+then, and some day, perhaps, we might go through them and see if there
+is anything worth preserving. Has any one ever told you how I lost my
+sight? No? Well, it was in November, 1887. The World had been conducting
+a vigorous campaign against municipal corruption in New York--a campaign
+which ended in the arrest of a financier who had bought the votes of
+aldermen in order to get a street railroad franchise."
+
+At this point he paused. His jaws set, and his expression became stern,
+almost fierce, as he added: "The man died in jail of a broken heart, and
+I .. and I ..." He took a deep breath and continued as though he were
+reciting an experience which he had heard related of some stranger.
+
+"I was, of course, violently attacked; and it was a period of terrible
+strain for me. What with anxiety and overwork I began to suffer from
+insomnia, and that soon produced a bad condition of my nerves. One
+morning I went down to The World and called for the editorials which
+were ready for me to go over. I always read every line of editorial
+copy. When I picked up the sheets I was astonished to find that I could
+hardly see the writing, let alone read it. I thought it was probably due
+to indigestion or to some other temporary cause, and said nothing about
+it. The next morning on my way downtown I called in at an oculist's. He
+examined my eyes and then told me to go home and remain in bed in a
+darkened room for six weeks. At the end of that time he examined me
+again, said that I had ruptured a blood vessel in one of my eyes, and
+ordered me to stop work entirely and to take six months' rest in
+California.
+
+"That was the beginning of the end. Whatever my trouble had been at
+first, it developed into separation of the retina in both eyes. From the
+day on which I first consulted the oculist up to the present time, about
+twenty-four years, I have only been three times in The World building.
+Most people think I'm dead, or living in Europe in complete retirement.
+Now go on and give me the morning's news. I've had practically nothing,
+so you can just run over it briefly, item by item."
+
+On another occasion he told me an amusing story of an experience he had
+had out in Missouri just after the end of the Civil War. He had spent
+some weeks riding from county-seat to county-seat securing registration
+for a deed making title for a railroad. One evening he was nearly
+drowned through his horse stumbling in the middle of a ford. When he
+dragged himself up the bank on the other side, drenched to the skin and
+worried by the prospect of having to catch his mount, which had started
+off on a cross-country gallop, he saw an elderly farmer sitting on a
+tree stump, and watching him with intense interest and perfect
+seriousness.
+
+This man put J. P. up for the night. They got along famously for a
+while, but presently all was changed.
+
+"The first thing he did," said J. P., "was to take me to the farmhouse
+and hand me a tumbler three parts full of whisky. When I refused this he
+looked at me as though he thought I was mad. 'Yer mean ter tell me yer
+don't drink?' he said. (It was one of the rare occasions when I heard
+Mr. Pulitzer try to imitate any one's peculiarities of speech.) When I
+told him no, I didn't, he said nothing, but brought me food.
+
+"After I had eaten he pulled out a plug of tobacco, bit off a large
+piece, and offered the plug to me. I thanked him, but declined. It took
+him some time to get over that, but at last he said: 'Yer mean ter tell
+me yer don't chew?' I said no, I didn't. He dropped the subject, and for
+an hour or so we talked about the war and the crops and the proposed
+railroad.
+
+"That man was a gentleman. He didn't take another drink or another chew
+of tobacco all that time. The only sign he gave of his embarrassment was
+that every now and then during a pause in the conversation he fell to
+shaking his head in a puzzled sort of way. Finally, before he went to
+bed, he produced a pipe, filled it, and handed the tobacco to me; but I
+failed him again, and he put his own pipe back in his pocket, firmly but
+sorrowfully.
+
+"Well, my God! it was nearly half an hour before he spoke again, and I
+was beginning to think that I had really wounded his feelings by
+declining his hospitable offers, when he came over and stood in front of
+me and looked down on me with an expression of profound pity. I shall
+never forget his words. 'Young feller,' he said, 'you seem to be right
+smart and able for a furriner, but let me tell YOU, you'll never make a
+successful American until yer learn to drink, and chew, and smoke.'"
+
+Chatwold being within telephone distance of New York, J. P. was
+constantly subjected to the temptation of ringing up The World in order
+to discuss editorial or business matters. He yielded too often, and the
+additional excitement and work incident to these conversations (which
+were always carried on through a third person) were a severe strain on
+his vitality. When he was absolutely worn out he would take refuge on
+the yacht and steam out to sea for the purpose of enjoying a few days of
+comparative rest.
+
+There is a matter which I may mention in connection with J. P.'s life on
+the yacht which, trivial as it seems when told at this distance of time,
+never failed to make a profound impression upon me. Of all the trying
+moments which were inseparable from attendance upon a blind man with a
+will of iron and a nervous system of gossamer, no moment was quite so
+full of uneasiness as that in which J. P. used the gangway in boarding
+or in leaving the yacht.
+
+Take the case of his going ashore. The yacht lies at anchor in a gentle
+swell; the launch comes up to the gangway; two or three men with boat-
+hooks occupy themselves in trying to keep it steady. First over the side
+goes Dunningham, backward, then Mr. Pulitzer facing forward, one hand on
+the gang-rail, the other on Dunningham's shoulder; then an officer and
+one of the secretaries, close behind J. P. and ready to clutch him if he
+slipped.
+
+Dunningham reaches the grating at the foot of the gangway, then J. P.,
+then there is a pause while the latter is placed in the exact position
+where one step forward will carry him into the launch, where the officer
+in charge is ready to receive him.
+
+In the meantime the launch is bobbing up and down, its gunwale at one
+instant level with the gangway-grating, at another, two or three feet
+below it. At the precise moment when the launch is almost at the top of
+its rise Dunningham says: "Now, step, please, Mr. Pulitzer." But J. P.
+waits just long enough to allow the launch to drop a couple of feet, and
+then suddenly makes up his mind and tries to step off onto nothing.
+Dunningham, the officer and the secretary seize him as he cries: "My
+God! What's the matter? You told me to step."
+
+Then follows a long argument as to what Dunningham had meant precisely
+when he said "Step!" This whole process might be repeated several times
+before he actually found himself in the launch.
+
+The whole thing inspired me with a morbid curiosity; and whenever J. P.
+was going up or down the gangway I always found myself, in common, I may
+add, with a considerable proportion of the ship's company, leaning over
+the side watching this nerve-racking exhibition.
+
+I have said that it was J. P.'s custom to seek repose on the yacht when
+he was worn out with overwork; but it would be more accurate to say that
+rest was the seldom realized object of these short cruises, for nothing
+was more difficult for J. P. than to drop his work so long as he had a
+vestige of strength left with which he could flog his mind into action.
+
+Starting out with the best intentions, J. P.'s cruises of recuperation
+were usually cut short by putting in to Portland, or New London, or
+Marblehead to get newspapers and to send telegrams summoning to the
+yacht one or another of the higher staff of The World.
+
+It was, however, when we anchored, as we often did, off Greenwich,
+Conn., that J. P. indulged himself to his utmost capacity in conferences
+with editors and business managers of The World and with one or two
+outsiders. We would drop anchor in the afternoon, pick up a visitor,
+cruise in the Sound for a night and a morning, drop anchor again, send
+the visitor ashore, and pick up another.
+
+Toward the latter part of September, 1911, J. P. left the yacht and
+moved into his town house in East 73d Street. It was a large and
+beautifully designed mansion, differing in three particulars from the
+ordinary run of residences which have been built, furnished, and
+decorated with the utmost good taste and without regard to expense.
+
+The room in which J. P. usually took his meals was a small but
+beautifully proportioned retreat so placed that it was completely
+surrounded by other rooms and had no direct contact with the outside
+world. It was in its ground plan an irregular octagon, and it drew its
+light and air from a glass dome. The most striking element in the
+decorations was a number of slender columns of pale-green Irish marble,
+which rose from the floor to the dome.
+
+Another unusual feature of the house was a superb church organ, which
+was built into a large recess halfway up the main staircase. J. P. was
+an enthusiastic lover of organ music, and heard as much of it as he
+could during his brief visits to New York.
+
+There are no doubt other houses which have an octagonal dining-room and
+a church organ; but no other house, I am sure, has a bedroom like that
+which Mr. Pulitzer occupied. Although it appeared to form part of the
+house, it did not, in fact, do so. It stood upon its own foundations and
+was connected with the main structure by some ingenious device which
+isolated it from all vibrations originating there. It was of the most
+solid construction, and had but one window, a very large affair,
+consisting of three casements set one inside the other and provided with
+heavy plate glass panels. This triple window was never opened when Mr.
+Pulitzer was in the room, the ventilation being secured by means of fans
+situated in a long masonry shaft whose interior opening was in the
+chimney and whose exterior opening was far enough away to forbid the
+passage of any sound from the street. At intervals inside this shaft
+were placed frames with silk threads drawn across them, for the purpose
+of absorbing any faint vibrations which might find their way in. In this
+bedroom, with its triple window and its heavy double-door closed, J. P.
+enjoyed as near an approach to perfect quietness as it was possible to
+attain in New York.
+
+I saw very little of J. P. when he was in New York. He was much occupied
+with family affairs; he was in constant touch with the staff of The
+World; and the deep interest he took in the prospects of the
+presidential election of 1912, which was already being eagerly
+discussed, brought an unusual number of visitors to the house.
+
+The extent of my intercourse with J. P. at this time was an occasional
+drive in Central Park, during which we talked of little else but
+politics, and on that topic of little else but Mr. Woodrow Wilson's
+speeches and plans.
+
+It did not take very long before the hard work and the excitement of the
+New York life reduced Mr. Pulitzer to a condition in which it was
+imperative that he should go to sea again and abandon completely his
+contact with the daily events which stimulated rather than nourished his
+mental powers.
+
+On October 20, 1911, the Liberty left New York with J. P., his youngest
+son, Herbert, and the usual staff. We headed south, with nothing settled
+as to our plans except that we might spend some time at Mr. Pulitzer's
+house on Jekyll Island, Ga., and might pass part of the winter cruising
+in the West Indies.
+
+As soon as we got settled down on board I was delighted to find that J.
+P. had apparently satisfied himself in regard to my qualifications and
+limitations. He abandoned the searching examinations which had kept me
+on the rack for nearly eight months, and our relations became much more
+agreeable.
+
+Apart from bearing my share in the routine work of dealing with the news
+of the day and with the current magazine literature my principal duty
+gradually assumed the form of furnishing humor on demand.
+
+The easiest part of this task was that of reading humorous books to J.
+P. When he was in the right mood and would submit to the process, I read
+to him the greater part of "Dooley," of Artemus Ward, of Max Adler, and
+portions of W. W. Jacobs, of Lorimer's Letters of a Self-made Merchant
+to His Son, of Mrs. Anne Warner's Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs.
+Lathrop, and of some of Stockton's delightful stories. My greatest
+triumph was in inducing him to forget for a while his intense aversion
+to slang and to listen to the shrewd and genial philosophy of George
+Ade.
+
+The work of the official humorist to J. P. was rendered particularly
+arduous because he carried into the field of humor, absolutely unabated,
+his passion for facts. To most people a large part of humor consists in
+the manner of presentation, in the trick of phrase, in the texture of
+the narrative. To J. P. those things meant little or nothing; what
+amused him was the situation disclosed, the inherent humor of the action
+or thought.
+
+As I have said, it was not difficult to read humorous material to J. P.
+when he deliberately resigned himself to it. What was exceedingly
+difficult was to rise to those frequent occasions when, tired, vexed and
+out of sorts, he suddenly interrupted your summary of a magazine article
+by saying: "Stop! Stop! For God's sake! I've got a frightful headache.
+Now tell me some humorous stories--make me laugh."
+
+In order to meet these urgent and embarrassing demands I ransacked the
+periodical press of England and America. I procured a year's file of
+Pearson's Weekly, of Tit Bits and of Life, and scores of stray copies of
+Puck, Judge and Answers.
+
+From these I cut hundreds of short humorous paragraphs, which I kept in
+a box in my cabin. Whenever I was summoned to attend upon J. P. I put a
+handful of these clippings in my pocket. I am afraid I should make
+enemies if I were to tell of the thousands of stories I had to read in
+order to get the hundreds which came within range even of my modest
+hopes; but I may say that line for line I got more available stories
+from the "Newspaper Waifs" on the editorial page of the New York Evening
+Post than from any other source.
+
+Even after I had labored long and heroically in the vineyard of
+professional humor, grape juice, and not wine, was the commoner product
+of my efforts.
+
+It was no unusual experience that after I had told J. P. one of the best
+tales in my collection he would say: "Well, go on, go on, come to the
+point. For God's sake, isn't there any end to this story?"
+
+On October 25, 1911, we put into the harbor of Charlestown, S. C. There
+was the usual business of collecting mail, newspapers, and so on, for J.
+P., after five days at sea, was eager to pick up the thread of current
+happenings.
+
+On the following day Mr. Lathan, editor of the Charleston Courier,
+lunched on the yacht. He and Mr. Pulitzer had an animated discussion
+about the possibilities of a Democratic victory in 1912. I had never
+seen J. P. in a more genial mood or in higher spirits.
+
+Whether it was due to the excitement of receiving a visitor whose
+conversation was so stimulating I do not know; but on Friday, October
+27, J. P. was feeling so much out of sorts that he did not appear on
+deck. On Saturday he remained below only because Dunningham, who always
+kept the closest watch over his health, persuaded him to have a good
+rest before resuming the ordinary routine. J. P. was anxious to take up
+some business matters with Thwaites, but Dunningham induced him to give
+up the idea.
+
+At three o'clock in the morning of Sunday, October 29, Dunningham came
+to my cabin and, without making any explanation, said:
+
+"Mr, Pulitzer wishes you to come and read to him."
+
+I put on a dressing gown, gathered up half a dozen books, and in five
+minutes I was sitting by Mr. Pulitzer's bedside. He was evidently
+suffering a good deal of pain, for he turned from side to side, and once
+or twice got out of bed and sat in an easy chair.
+
+I tried several books, but finally settled down to read Macaulay's Essay
+on Hallam. I read steadily until about five o'clock, and J. P. listened
+attentively, interrupting me from time to time with a direction to go
+back and read over a passage.
+
+About half-past five he began to suffer severely, and he sent for the
+yacht's doctor, who did what was possible for him. At a few minutes
+after six J. P. said: "Now, Mr. Ireland, you'd better go and get some
+sleep; we will finish that this afternoon. Good-bye, I'm much obliged to
+you. Ask Mr. Mann to come to me. Go, now, and have a good rest, and
+forget all about me."
+
+I slept till noon. When I came on deck I found that everything was going
+on much as usual. One of the secretaries was with J. P.; the others were
+at work over the day's papers.
+
+At lunch we spoke of J. P. One man said that he seemed a little worse
+than usual, another that he had seen him much worse a score of times.
+
+Suddenly the massive door at the forward end of the saloon opened. I
+turned in my seat and saw framed in the doorway the towering figure of
+the head butler. I faced his impassive glance, and received the full
+shock of his calm but incredible announcement: "Mr. Pulitzer is dead."
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, AN ADVENTURE WITH A GENIUS ***
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