Recollections of a Varied Life

by George Cary Eggleston

I was very weary and I went to bed. The next morning—or I supposed it to be so—I waked, and looked at my watch. It told me it was six o'clock. I tried to woo sleep again, but the effort was a failure. I knew that breakfast would not be served for some hours to come, but I simply could not remain in bed longer. I knew where a certain dear little lad of the family kept his fishing tackle and his bait. I decided that I would get up, take a cold plunge, pilfer the tackle, and spend an hour or two down on the rocks fishing.

Mr. Pulitzer's Kindly Courtesy

With this intent I slipped out of my room, making no noise lest I should wake some one from his morning slumber. The first person I met was Mr. Pulitzer. He gleefully greeted me with congratulations upon the prolonged sleep I had had, and after a brief confusion of mind, I found that it was two o'clock in the afternoon, and that my unwound watch had misled me. In his anxiety that I should have my sleep out, Mr. Pulitzer had shut off the entire half of the building in which my bedroom lay, and had stationed a servant as sentinel to prohibit intrusion upon that part of the premises and to forbid everything in the nature of noise.

Mr. Pulitzer himself never rested, in the days of my association with him. His mind knew no surcease of its activity. He slept little, and with difficulty. His waking hours, whether up or in bed, were given to a ceaseless wrestling with the problems that belong to a great newspaper's conduct. I have known him to make an earnest endeavor to dismiss these for a time. To that end he would peremptorily forbid all reference to them in the conversation of those about him. But within the space of a few minutes he would be in the midst of them again, and completely absorbed. But he recognized the necessity of rest for brains other than his own, and in all kindly ways sought to secure and even to compel it. I remember once at Bar Harbor, when for two or three days and nights in succession I had been at work on something he greatly wanted done, he said to me at breakfast:

"You're tired, and that task is finished. I want you to rest, and, of course, so long as you and I remain together you can't rest. Your brain is active and so is mine. If we stay in each other's company we shall talk, and with us talk means work. In five minutes we'll be planning some editorial crusade, and you'll get to work again. So I want you to go away from me. Let Eugene drive you to the village, and there secure an open carriage and a pair of good horses—the best you can get—and drive all over this interesting island. Get yourself rested. And when you come back, don't let me talk newspaper with you, till you've had a night's sleep."

It was in that kindly spirit that Mr. Pulitzer always treated his lieutenants when he invited them to pass a time with him. So long as he and they were together, he could not help working them almost to death. But, when he realized their weariness, he sent them off to rest, on carriage drives or yachting voyages or what not, with generous consideration of their inability to carry weight as he did night and day and every day and every night.

Sometimes his eagerness in work led him to forget his own kindly purpose. I remember once when I had been writing all day and throughout most of the night in execution of his prolific inspiration, he suddenly became aware of the fact that I must be weary. Instantly he said:

"You must rest. You must take a carriage or a boat and go off somewhere. Think out where it shall be, for yourself. But you sha'n't do another thing till you've had a good rest."

Then, as we strolled out into the porch and thence to the sea wall against which the breakers were recklessly dashing themselves to pieces, he suddenly thought of something. In a minute we were engaged in discussing that something, and half an hour later I was busy in my room, with books of reference all about me, working out that something, and it was three o'clock next morning before I finished the writing of what he wanted written on that theme. At breakfast next morning I was late, and the fact reminded him of the plans he had formed twenty-four hours before for a rest for me. He refused even to light a cigar until I should be gone.

"If we smoke together," he said, "we shall talk. If we talk we shall become interested and you'll be set to work again. Get you hence. Let me see no more of you till dinner to-night. In the meantime, do what you will to rest yourself. That's my only concern now. Drive, sail, row, loaf, play billiards—do whatever will best rest you."