He showed me over his two rooms--one of them a library
with book shelves on all sides filled with books that bore the
marks of wear and tear, and arranged on these shelves _ad libitum_,
or perhaps I should say disarranged. I asked him if he
had saved press notices of his various books. He took me
into the adjoining room and lifted the lid of a trunk which
was stuffed full of press cuttings, with the Romeike attachments.
(There must have been $500 worth.) He had been
in the habit of throwing them promiscuously into the trunk and
pressing them down or stamping on them, until it looked like
a trunk packed full of old waste paper or refuse packing material.
Zangwill had just got back from Jerusalem, and showed me
another trunkful of unmounted photographs of the great
paintings and architecture of all parts of Europe. There were
thousands of them,--most of them very beautiful too,--but
they were almost ruined by the rough way in which they had
been carelessly thrown into the trunk. One very peculiar
photograph was of the mummy of Pharaoh. I asked him to
let me take a snapshot of it, and got him to hold the photograph
up against the window-sill.
It seemed almost impossible to come to any kind of understanding
with Zangwill. He thought that there was a great
public waiting for him over here, and I also thought so to a
considerable extent. But he couldn’t understand why he
should come over to America and draw great crowds and I get
a third of the profits from his earnings; so nothing was definitely
settled at that interview. I came away knowing well
enough that he intended to visit the United States, and to get
all that there was in it if he did come. Weeks went by, and
nothing was satisfactorily arranged between us. He kept me
informed of his movements. He was to sail in August in the
steamship _Lucania_ in company with his friend Judge Sulzburger
of Philadelphia, whose guest he was to be while over
here.
He arrived on the morning of September 27th, and I met
him at the steamer. We had made no arrangement, and he was
not under my direction or under any obligation to me in any
way. Still, I knew he had made no other arrangements.
Several Jewish friends met him and took possession of him. I
asked him if he would see reporters, and he said that he would
be glad to meet them at any hour I might name. He went
with me to the Everett House, leaving his other friends to call
for him to go to Long Branch at five in the afternoon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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