The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II

by William James Stillman

For the opening ceremony there was great rivalry amongst the leading papers of New York, and the "Herald" made very expensive arrangements to cable a full account; and, beside its European manager, John Russell Young, and its telegraphic manager, Mr. Sauer, it had Edmund Yates and a well-known European lady novelist to make up the report. The "Tribune" sent to my assistance an old friend, Bayard Taylor, and one of the staff from New York, E.V. Smalley. The "Herald" was prepared for practically unlimited expenditure on the occasion; the "Tribune" simply ordered me to telegraph 6000 words to Smalley at London, leaving the question of cabling open. Young thought me a rival to be held in poor account, and was careless. All the "Herald" staff took their places in the Exhibition building for the ceremony of opening by the Emperor, which was no doubt spectacular; but, as the doors were to be closed until the ceremony was over, and the Emperor rose to make the tour of the Exhibition, no one could get at the telegraph till all was complete. I stayed outside and sacrificed the spectacle. I had found who was to be the telegraph inspector for the day, and I went to him with an offer to hire a wire for the day. This was impossible, he said, as there was to be but one wire for all the foreign press. I put my case to him as that of a beginner in the service, to whom a success was of great importance for the future, and asked to be allowed to declare 6000 words to follow continuously; but this too, he said, was against the regulations. But I secured his sympathy, and he finally promised me that if I got first on the wire, and my message came without interruption, one section being laid before the operator before the other was finished, they should go on without interruption, as one message; but, if one minute lapsed and another message came in the interval, I must take my turn with the others.

As Taylor was an old hand, and wrote a most legible script, and style currente calamo, I told him to write what he could as the ceremony went on, and, the moment the doors were opened, to consign what he had written to a messenger whom I had hired for the day,—an American clerk of one of the exhibitors under some little obligation to me, a sharp Yankee, for whose use I had hired a cab, with the fastest horse I could find, to run back and forth between the Exhibition and the telegraph. Taylor was then to finish his account of the opening ceremonies and bring it or send it by the messenger to me at the telegraph office, the messenger waiting or returning for the first installment of Smalley's account of the imperial inspection, which he was to follow closely. After this he was to continue to write the incidents of the opening; and when the whole approximated to the 6000 words needed, he was to come himself to the telegraph. I, meanwhile, went into the streets and devoted myself to picking up incidents of the procession, the deportment of the population, and the weather; and when I supposed that the opening of the doors was about to take place I went to the telegraph office and deposited 1200 words. Long before these could be sent, Taylor's first installment came, and then Taylor himself with the second. Young, seeing my staff always present, and thinking me asleep, took his time.

When Taylor's second part had been deposited and paid for, I saw coming down the street in a furiously driven carriage Mr. Sauer, with the first part of his message. I slipped out at a back door and was not seen, and Sauer returned for the continuation of his telegram. When Smalley's first dispatch had been put on, I saw Sauer coming again with his second. Then I sat tight and saw that the message had been written in columns of words on large paper, so that the counting should be rapid. It made a huge packet, and he deposited it with evident satisfaction and turned to go out, when he saw Archibald Forbes, who was writing his telegram to the "Daily News" at the table in the office, and turned to speak to him. When leaving him he caught sight of me in the corner, and started as if he had been hit by a bullet, then made as if he had not seen me and was going out, but reconsidered and came to speak to me. "Well, what have you done?" he said. I replied that I had put about 5000 words on, and was only waiting for the odds and ends from Smalley. He flushed with surprise and vexation, and began to curse the telegraph officials "who never kept their engagements," and went off in a towering rage. My 6000 words went on before a single word of the message to the "Herald" could go.

Mr. Young had ordered for that evening a magnificent dinner for his staff, to which mine was invited to celebrate his unquestioned feat. While waiting for the dinner to come on, he took me apart and asked confidentially what we had really done. I told him, and he asked if we cabled, to which I replied that as to that I knew nothing, that I had wired G.W. Smalley in London, but what he had done I could not say. "Well," said he, "if you have cabled you have beaten us, and if you have not cabled you may have beaten us," and then he went on to say that if I would drop the "Tribune" and come over to the "Herald" he would give me a good post and good pay. "No," I replied, "I have taken service with the 'Tribune' for the campaign, and I cannot desert them." (My recompense was a curt dismissal from the "Tribune" as soon as the urgent work of the reporting of the opening was done.) Mr. Whitelaw Reid's nerve had failed him when it came to the question of the expense of cabling, and the 6000 words had gone by steamer from Queenstown. I had given the "Tribune" the best beat it had ever had except the Sedan report, if the editor had had the courage to profit by it. The "Herald" received 150 words of its report in time for the press the next morning, and had to make up its page of dispatches from matter sent by post in advance and by expansion of the 150 words received. Edmund Yates, in his autobiography, tells a story of the affair which is in every important detail untrue, and he probably knew nothing of it except what Young had admitted, and that was certainly very little, for Young was a very reticent man, and not likely to tell his defeat even to his staff.

Bennett was too fickle and whimsical an employer to suit me, and I had no disposition to expose myself to his whims. With Young I was always on the best terms, and he was disposed to employ me when a momentary service was required, but I had had one experience with his chief, which was sufficient. He had offered me the London agency of the "Herald" at a time when any constant occupation would have been acceptable, and we had come to terms, when suddenly he was taken with the notion that Edmund Yates, in addition to the service to the paper, would be of use to him in social ways, and he dropped me and appointed Yates, to drop him a little later, paying him a year's salary to break the contract.

One bit of work I did for the "Herald" which I remember with much pleasure. It was the reporting of Beaconsfield's Aylesbury speech, not a stenographic report, for that they had from the English press, but a letter on the occasion as a demonstration. I went to Aylesbury, and, as Beaconsfield was to speak twice,—once at the farmers' ordinary and then at the assembly rooms,—I dined at the ordinary; and as all the places in the assembly rooms had been taken before the dinner was over, I had to employ some assurance to hear the principal speech. As soon as the company rose from the table, I pushed through to where Beaconsfield was standing, and, presenting my card as correspondent of the New York "Herald," asked him to be kind enough to put me in the way of hearing him, explaining why I had lost my chance through remaining to hear him at the dinner. He turned to one of the young men who were with him, remarking that my card would take me anywhere, and said, "See that Mr. Stillman has a place near me," and to me, "Keep close to me," which I did, and took a seat on the edge of the platform, at his feet; and I certainly never heard a more effective speech. The lordly, triumphant manner with which he bantered Gladstone for his dealings in the Straits of Malacca, the demonstrative confidence with which he took victory for granted, and the magnetism of his personal bearing, made an impression on me quite unique in my experience of men. Gracious is the only word which I can apply to his manner to those around him, and it had a fascination over them which I could perfectly understand, and I could easily comprehend that he should have a surrounding of devotees. The serene, absolute self-confidence he evidently felt was of a nature to inspire a corresponding confidence in his followers. It was an interesting display of the power of a magnetic nature, and gave me a higher idea of the man than all his writings had given or could give. For his intellectual powers and their printed results I never had a high opinion, but his was one of the most interesting and remarkable personalities I ever encountered.

As Russie continued to hold his own against his terrible disease, Mr. Marshall thought that the operation of resecting the leg at the hip might save his life, and though such a maimed existence as his would then be was but a doubtful boon, the boy eagerly caught at the chance of life; and, to recruit strength for the operation, I decided to take him, by Marshall's advice, to America, and give him a summer in the woods, camping out. I took him to the Maine woods instead of my old haunts of the Adirondacks, because the rail served to the verge of the wilderness, and we had, on Moosehead Lake, the resource of a good hotel to take refuge in if matters went ill. They did go ill, and I found that life was too low in him to give the woodland air and the influence of the pine-trees power to help him. Hope left me, and we turned homeward again, sailing from Boston direct to London. It was in late December, and we had a terrific voyage, and one of the hairbreadth escapes of which I have had so many. In the height of the gale Russie and I were standing in the companion-way, watching the storm, for the boy loved the sea dearly and enjoyed the heaviest weather, when the captain called to me to say that we were not safe there and had better go below. Only a few minutes later an exceptionally heavy sea broke over the deck, took five boats out of the davits or crushed them, carried away in splinters the companion-way in which we had been standing, and swept the decks, the chief officer being saved only by being lashed to the railing of the bridge, and the fall of the mass of water on the deck breaking several of the deck beams. We had to lie to for the rest of the gale. We landed at Gravesend just before Christmas, Russie being in much worse condition than when we left England. Up to that time I had clung to hope, for to lose the boy was like tearing my soul in two. Mr. Marshall no longer held out a hope, but said if he had known the strength of the boy's constitution he would have operated when he first saw him, which was what Russie then begged for and had always looked forward to. Through five years he had resisted the pain of that most painful disease, hoping always, always reading, almost always cheerful.

Our lease expiring, I decided to leave London, and Mr. Spartali offered us a cottage on one of his estates in the Isle of Wight, where the children, Russie especially, might have sweet English air. Marie being engaged in finishing her pictures for the spring exhibition, I went down alone with the children, stopping at an inn at Sandown till the furniture was in the cottage. While so waiting Russie was taken with the first convulsion peculiar to his malady, and then I realized that Death had come, and, unwilling to face him in the semi-publicity of an inn, I took the boy in my arms to the railway, and from the station nearest to the cottage bore him thither.

I tried to prepare him for the impending death, by showing him that it was the end of pain, but his horror of it was inextinguishable, and he cried in agony, "Oh, no, no! Papa, I wish to live as long as you do;" and, though his faculties were fortunately failing, he beckoned me to lay my head by his on the pallet I had prepared for him on the floor, and offered me a last feeble caress and showed his pleasure in having me by him. He had loved me above all things on earth, even more than his loving mother, and to be with me had always been his dearest delight, and now we met Death alone, he and I, and I could only remember David's cry, "Absalom, my son!" I watched the fading life, the diminishing breath in the midnight silence of the solitary house, and almost desired Death to hasten, for the final struggle had begun, and the suspense was torture to me. And when the last long breath was drawn, and the limp, deserted body was all that was left to me of my thirteen years of passionate devotion, my pride and hope, and the nursing care of so many years, I walked out into the midnight and left my boy to Death. The long tension was over, and I could give way to tears.

It was only a child's death, a common thing, almost as common as family existence, but it gave a new color to my life, establishing forever a sympathy with the common grief, and a community of sorrow with all bereft fathers and mothers, in the premature dissipation of the hopes of their future, and the lapse of a dear companionship into the eternal void. This is the human brotherhood of sorrow, sacred, ennobling, sanctifying where it abides, the deepest lesson of the school of life. My feet have wandered far, and my thoughts still further from the places and beliefs of my childhood; but whatever and wherever I may be, this grief at times catches me and holds me in a pause of dumb tears, and every similar bereavement I witness renews the sympathetic grief. I have never been able to find a consolation for that loss, for it carried with it the future and its best dreams. When his mother died, I thought that any death were easier to bear than the sudden and terrible tragedy of that; but in the devastated youth and the lingering pain of Russie's leaving, I found that