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.