An Adventure with a Genius: Recollections of Joseph PulitzerIreland, Alleyne
General
An Adventure with a Genius: Recollections of Joseph Pulitzer
Ireland, Alleyne
Pulitzer, Joseph, 1847-1911
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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