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Marse Henry (Vol. 1)

H >> Henry Watterson >> Marse Henry (Vol. 1)




These newspapers ring all the sensational changes. Now it is the wondrous
beauty with the cool million, who, having married some illegitimate of
a minor royal house, will probably be the next Queen of Rigmarolia, and
now--ever increasing the dose--it is the ten-million-dollar widow who is
going to marry the King of Pontarabia's brother, and may thus aspire to be
one day Empress of Sahara.

Old European travelers can recall many funny and sometimes melancholy
incidents--episodes--histories--of which they have witnessed the
beginning and the end, carrying the self-same dénouement and lesson.



IV


As there are women and women there are many kinds of adventuresses; not all
of them wicked and detestable. But, good or bad, the lot of the adventuress
is at best a hard lot. Be she a girl with a future or a woman with a past
she is still a woman, and the world can never be too kind to its women--the
child bearers, the home makers, the moral light of the universe as they
meet the purpose of God and Nature and seek not to thwart it by unsexing
themselves in order that they may keep step with man in ways of
self-indulgent dalliance. The adventuress of fiction always comes to grief.
But the adventuress in real life--the prudent adventuress who draws the
line at adultery--the would-be leader of society without the wealth--the
would-be political leader without the masculine fiber--is sure of
disappointment in the end.

Take the agitation over Suffragism. What is it that the woman suffragette
expects to get? No one of them can, or does, clearly tell us.

It is feminism, rather than suffragism, which is dangerous. Now that they
have it, my fear is that the leaders will not stop with the ballot for
women. They are too fond of the spotlight. It has become a necessity for
them. If all women should fall in with them there would be nothing of
womanhood left, and the world bereft of its women will become a masculine
harlotocracy.

Let me repeat that I have been fighting woman's battles in one way and
another all my life. I am not opposed to Votes for Women. But I would
discriminate and educate, and even at that rate I would limit the franchise
to actual taxpayers, and, outside of these, confine it to charities,
corrections and schools, keeping woman away from the dirt of politics. I do
not believe the ballot will benefit woman and cannot help thinking that in
seeking unlimited and precipitate suffrage the women who favor it are off
their reckoning! I doubt the performances got up to exploit it, though
somehow, when the hikers started from New York to Albany, and afterward
from New York to Washington, the inspiring thought of Bertha von Hillern
came back to me.

I am sure the reader never heard of her. As it makes a pretty story let me
tell it. Many years ago--don't ask me how many--there was a young woman,
Bertha von Hillern by name, a poor art student seeking money enough to take
her abroad, who engaged with the management of a hall in Louisville to walk
one hundred miles around a fixed track in twenty-four consecutive hours.
She did it. Her share of the gate money, I was told, amounted to three
thousand dollars.

I shall never forget the closing scenes of the wondrous test of courage and
endurance. She was a pretty, fair-haired thing, a trifle undersized, but
shapely and sinewy. The vast crowd that without much diminution, though
with intermittent changes, had watched her from start to finish, began to
grow tense with the approach to the end, and the last hour the enthusiasm
was overwhelming. Wave upon wave of cheering followed every footstep of the
plucky girl, rising to a storm of exultation as the final lap was reached.

More dead than alive, but game to the core, the little heroine was carried
off the field, a winner, every heart throbbing with human sympathy, every
eye wet with proud and happy tears. It is not possible adequately to
describe all that happened. One must have been there and seen it fully to
comprehend the glory of it.

Touching the recent Albany and Washington hikes and hikers let me say at
once that I cannot approve the cause of Votes for women as I had approved
the cause of Bertha von Hillern. Where she showed heroic, most of the
suffragettes appear to me grotesque. Where her aim was rational, their aim
has been visionary. To me the younger of them seem as children who need
to be spanked and kissed. There has been indeed about the whole Suffrage
business something pitiful and comic.

Often I have felt like swearing "You idiots!" and then like crying
"Poor dears!" But I have kept on with them, and had I been in Albany or
Washington I would have caught Rosalie Jones in my arms, and before she
could say "Jack Robinson" have exclaimed: "You ridiculous child, go and get
a bath and put on some pretty clothes and come and join us at dinner in
the State Banquet Hall, duly made and provided for you and the rest of you
delightful sillies."




Chapter the Ninth

Dr. Norvin Green--Joseph Pulitzer--Chester A. Arthur--General
Grant--The Case of Fitz-John Porter



I


Truth we are told is stranger than fiction. I have found it so in the
knowledge which has variously come to me of many interesting men and women.
Of these Dr. Norvin Green was a striking example. To have sprung from
humble parentage in the wilds of Kentucky and to die at the head of the
most potential corporation in the world--to have held this place against
all comers by force of abilities deemed indispensable to its welfare--to
have gone the while his ain gait, disdaining the precepts of Doctor
Franklin--who, by the way, did not trouble overmuch to follow them
himself--seems so unusual as to rival the most stirring stories of the
novel mongers.

When I first met Doctor Green he was president of a Kentucky railway
company. He had been, however, one of the organizers of the Western Union
Telegraph Company. He deluded himself for a little by political ambitions.
He wanted to go to the Senate of the United States, and during a
legislative session of prolonged balloting at Frankfort he missed his
election by a single vote.

It may be doubted whether he would have cut a considerable figure at
Washington. His talents were constructive rather than declamatory. He was
called to a greater field--though he never thought it so--and was foremost
among those who developed the telegraph system of the country almost from
its infancy. He possessed the daring of the typical Kentuckian, with the
dead calm of the stoic philosopher; imperturbable; never vexed or querulous
or excited; denying himself none of the indulgences of the gentleman of
leisure. We grew to be constant comrades and friends, and when he returned
to New York to take the important post which to the end of his days he
filled so completely his office in the Western Union Building became my
downtown headquarters.

There I met Jay Gould familiarly; and resumed acquaintance with Russell
Sage, whom I had known when a lad in Washington, he a hayseed member of
Congress; and occasionally other of the Wall Street leaders. In a small
way--though not for long--I caught the stock-gambling fever. But I was on
the "inside," and it was a cold day when I did not "clean up" a goodly
amount to waste uptown in the evening. I may say that I gave this over
through sheer disgust of acquiring so much and such easy and useless
money, for, having no natural love of money--no aptitude for making money
breed--no taste for getting it except to spend it--earning by my own
accustomed and fruitful toil always a sufficiency--the distractions and
dissipations it brought to my annual vacations and occasional visits,
affronted in a way my self-respect, and palled upon my rather eager quest
of pleasure. Money is purely relative. The root of all evil, too. Too much
of it may bring ills as great as not enough.

At the outset of my stock-gambling experience I was one day in the office
of President Edward H. Green, of the Louisville and Nashville Railway, no
relation of Dr. Norvin Green, but the husband of the famous Hetty Green. He
said to me, "How are you in stocks?"

"What do you mean?" said I.

"Why," he said, "do you buy long, or short? Are you lucky or unlucky?"

"You are talking Greek to me," I answered.

"Didn't you ever put up any money on a margin?"

"Never."

"Bless me! You are a virgin. I want to try your luck. Look over this stock
list and pick a stock. I will take a crack at it. All I make we'll divide,
and all we lose I'll pay."

"Will you leave this open for an hour or two?"

"What is the matter with it--is it not liberal enough?"

"The matter is that I am going over to the Western Union to lunch. The
Gould party is to sit in with the Orton-Green party for the first time
after their fight, and I am asked especially to be there. I may pick up
something."

Big Green, as he was called, paused a moment reflectively. "I don't want
any tip--especially from that bunch," said he. "I want to try your virgin
luck. But, go ahead, and let me know this afternoon."

At luncheon I sat at Doctor Green's right, Jay Gould at his left. For the
first and last time in its history wine was served at this board; Russell
Sage was effusive in his demonstrations of affection and went on with his
stories of my boyhood; every one sought to take the chill off the occasion;
and we had a most enjoyable time instead of what promised to be rather a
frosty formality. When the rest had departed, leaving Doctor Green, Mr.
Gould and myself at table, mindful of what I had come for, in a bantering
way I said to Doctor Green: "Now that I am a Wall Street ingénu, why don't
you tell me something?"

Gould leaned across the table and said in his velvet voice: "Buy Texas
Pacific."

Two or three days after, Texas Pacific fell off sixty points or more. I did
not see Big Green again. Five or six months later I received from him a
statement of account which I could never have unraveled, with a check
for some thousands of dollars, my one-half profit on such and such an
operation. Texas Pacific had come back again.

Two or three years later I sat at Doctor Green's table with Mr. Gould, just
as we had sat the first day. Mr. Gould recalled the circumstance.

"I did not think I could afford to have you lose on my suggestion and I
went to cover your loss, when I found five thousand shares of Texas Pacific
transferred on the books of the company in your name. I knew these could
not be yours. I thought the buyer was none other than the man I was after,
and I began hammering the stock. I have been curious ever since to make
sure whether I was right."

"Whom did you suspect, Mr. Gould?" I asked.

"My suspect was Victor Newcomb," he replied.

I then told him what had happened. "Dear, dear," he cried. "Ned Green! Big
Green. Well, well! You do surprise me. I would rather have done him a favor
than an injury. I am rejoiced to learn that no harm was done and that,
after all, you and he came out ahead."

It was about this time Jay Gould had bought of the Thomas A. Scott estate a
New York daily newspaper which, in spite of brilliant writers like Manton
Marble and William Henry Hurlbut, had never been a moneymaker. This was the
_World_. He offered me the editorship with forty-nine of the hundred
shares of stock on very easy terms, which nowise tempted me. But two or
three years after, I daresay both weary and hopeless of putting up so much
money on an unyielding investment, he was willing to sell outright, and
Joseph Pulitzer became the purchaser.

His career is another illustration of the saying that truth is stranger
than fiction.



II


Joseph Pulitzer and I came together familiarly at the Liberal Republican
Convention, which met at Cincinnati in 1872--the convocation of cranks,
as it was called--and nominated Horace Greeley for President. He was a
delegate from Missouri. Subsequent events threw us much together. He began
his English newspaper experience after a kind of apprenticeship on a German
daily with Stilson Hutchins, another interesting character of those days.
It was from Stilson Hutchins that I learned something of Pulitzer's origin
and beginnings, for he never spoke much of himself.

According to this story he was the offspring of a runaway marriage between
a subaltern officer in the Austrian service and a Hungarian lady of noble
birth. In some way he had got across the Atlantic, and being in Boston, a
wizened youth not speaking a word of English, he was spirited on board a
warship. Watching his chance of escape he leaped overboard in the darkness
of night, though it was the dead of winter, and swam ashore. He was found
unconscious on the beach by some charitable persons, who cared for him.
Thence he tramped it to St. Louis, where he heard there was a German
colony, and found work on a coal barge.

It was here that the journalistic instinct dawned upon him. He began to
carry river news items to the Westliche Post, which presently took him on
its staff of regular reporters.

The rest was easy. He learned to speak and write English, was transferred
to the paper of which Hutchins was the head, and before he was
five-and-twenty became a local figure.

When he turned up in New York with an offer to purchase the World we met
as old friends. During the interval between 1872 and 1883 we had had a
runabout in Europe and I was able to render him assistance in the purchase
proceeding he was having with Gould. When this was completed he said to me:
"You are at entire leisure; you are worse than that, you are wasting your
time about the clubs and watering places, doing no good for yourself, or
anybody else. I must first devote myself to the reorganization of the
business end of it. Here is a blank check. Fill it for whatever amount you
please and it will be honored. I want you to go upstairs and organize my
editorial force for me."

Indignantly I replied: "Go to the devil--you have not money enough--there
is not money enough in the universe--to buy an hour of my season's loaf."

A year later I found him occupying with his family a splendid mansion up
the Hudson, with a great stable of carriages and horses, living like a
country gentleman, going to the World office about time for luncheon and
coming away in the early afternoon. I passed a week-end with him. To me it
seemed the precursor of ruin. His second payment was yet to be made. Had I
been in his place I would have been taking my meals in an adjacent hotel,
sleeping on a cot in one of the editorial rooms and working fifteen hours
out of the twenty-four. To me it seemed dollars to doughnuts that he would
break down and go to smash. But he did not--another case of destiny.

I was abiding with my family at Monte Carlo, when in his floating palace,
the Liberty, he came into the harbor of Mentone. Then he bought a shore
palace at Cap Martin. That season, and the next two or three seasons, we
made voyages together from one end to the other of the Mediterranean,
visiting the islands, especially Corsica and Elba, shrines of Napoleon whom
he greatly admired.

He was a model host. He had surrounded himself with every luxury, including
some agreeable retainers, and lived like a prince aboard. His blindness had
already overtaken him. Other physical ailments assailed him. But no word of
complaint escaped his lips and he rarely failed to sit at the head of his
table. It was both splendid and pitiful.

Absolute authority made Pulitzer a tyrant. He regarded his newspaper
ownership as an autocracy. There was nothing gentle in his domination, nor,
I might say, generous either. He seriously lacked the sense of humor, and
even among his familiars could never take a joke. His love of money was by
no means inordinate. He spent it freely though not wastefully or joyously,
for the possession of it rather flattered his vanity than made occasion for
pleasure. Ability of varying kinds and degrees he had, a veritable genius
for journalism and a real capacity for affection. He held his friends at
good account and liked to have them about him. During the early days of his
success he was disposed to overindulgence, not to say conviviality. He
was fond of Rhine wines and an excellent judge of them, keeping a varied
assortment always at hand. Once, upon the Liberty, he observed that I
preferred a certain vintage. "You like this wine?" he said inquiringly. I
assented, and he said, "I have a lot of it at home, and when I get back I
will send you some." I had quite forgotten when, many months after, there
came to me a crate containing enough to last me a life-time.

He had a retentive memory and rarely forgot anything. I could recall many
pleasurable incidents of our prolonged and varied intimacy. We were one
day wandering about the Montmartre region of Paris when we came into a
hole-in-the-wall where they were playing a piece called "Les Brigands." It
was melodrama to the very marrow of the bones of the Apaches that gathered
and glared about. In those days, the "indemnity" paid and the "military
occupation" withdrawn, everything French pre-figured hatred of the German,
and be sure "Les Brigands" made the most of this; each "brigand" a
beer-guzzling Teuton; each hero a dare-devil Gaul; and, when Joan the Maid,
heroine, sent Goetz von Berlichingen, the Vandal Chieftain, sprawling in
the saw-dust, there was no end to the enthusiasm.

"We are all 'brigands'," said Pulitzer as we came away, "differing
according to individual character, to race and pursuit. Now, if I were
writing that play, I should represent the villain as a tyrannous City
Editor, meanly executing the orders of a niggardly proprietor."

"And the heroine?" I said.

"She should be a beautiful and rich young lady," he replied, "who buys
the newspaper and marries the cub--rescuing genius from poverty and
persecution."

He was not then the owner of the World. He had not created the
Post-Dispatch, or even met the beautiful woman who became his wife. He was
a youngster of five or six and twenty, revisiting the scenes of his boyhood
on the beautiful blue Danube, and taking in Paris for a lark.



III


I first met General Grant in my own house. I had often been invited to his
house. As far back as 1870 John Russell Young, a friend from boyhood, came
with an invitation to pass the week-end as the President's guest at Long
Branch. Many of my friends had cottages there. Of afternoons and evenings
they played an infinitesimal game of draw poker.

"John," my answer was, "I don't dare to do so. I know that I shall fall
in love with General Grant. We are living in rough times--particularly in
rough party times. We have a rough presidential campaign ahead of us. If I
go down to the seashore and go in swimming and play penny-ante with General
Grant I shall not be able to do my duty."

It was thus that after the general had gone out of office and made the
famous journey round the world, and had come to visit relatives in
Kentucky, that he accepted a dinner invitation from me, and I had a number
of his friends to meet him.

Among these were Dr. Richardson, his early schoolmaster when the Grant
family lived at Maysville, and Walter Haldeman, my business partner, a
Maysville boy, who had been his schoolmate at the Richardson Academy, and
General Cerro Gordo Williams, then one of Kentucky's Senators in Congress,
and erst his comrade and chum when both were lieutenants in the Mexican
War. The bars were down, the windows were shut and there was no end of
hearty hilarity. Dr. Richardson had been mentioned by Mr. Haldeman as "the
only man that ever licked Grant," and the general promptly retorted "he
never licked me," when the good old doctor said, "No, Ulysses, I never
did--nor Walter, either--for you two were the best boys in school."

I said "General Grant, why not give up this beastly politics, buy a
blue-grass farm, and settle down to horse-raising and tobacco growing in
Kentucky?" And, quick as a flash--for both he and the company perceived
that it was "a leading question"--he replied, "Before I can buy a farm
in Kentucky I shall have to sell a farm in Missouri," which left nothing
further to be said.

There was some sparring between him and General Williams over their
youthful adventures. Finally General Williams, one of the readiest and most
amusing of talkers, returned one of General Grant's sallies with, "Anyhow,
I know of a man whose life you took unknown to yourself." Then he told of a
race he and Grant had outside of Galapa in 1846. "Don't you remember," he
said, "that riding ahead of me you came upon a Mexican loaded with a lot of
milk cans piled above his head and that you knocked him over as you swept
by him?"

"Yes," said Grant, "I believed if I stopped or questioned or even deflected
it would lose me the race. I have not thought of it since. But now that you
mention it I recall it distinctly."

"Well," Williams continued, "you killed him. Your horse's hoof struck him.
When, seeing I was beaten, I rode back, his head was split wide open. I did
not tell you at the time because I knew it would cause you pain, and a dead
greaser more or less made no difference."

Later on General Grant took desk room in Victor Newcomb's private office in
New York. There I saw much of him, and we became good friends. He was the
most interesting of men. Soldierlike--monosyllabic--in his official and
business dealings he threw aside all formality and reserve in his social
intercourse, delightfully reminiscential, indeed a capital story teller. I
do not wonder that he had constant and disinterested friends who loved him
sincerely.



IV


It has always been my opinion that if Chester A. Arthur had been named by
the Republicans as their candidate in 1884 they would have carried the
election, spite of what Mr. Blaine, who defeated Arthur in the convention,
had said and thought about the nomination of General Sherman. Arthur, like
Grant, belonged to the category of lovable men in public life.

There was a gallant captain in the army who had slapped his colonel in
the face on parade. Morally, as man to man, he had the right of it. But
military law is inexorable. The verdict was dismissal from the service. I
went with the poor fellow's wife and her sister to see General Hancock at
Governor's Island. It was a most affecting meeting--the general, tears
rolling down his cheeks, taking them into his arms, and, when he could
speak, saying: "I can do nothing but hold up the action of the court till
Monday. Your recourse is the President and a pardon; I will recommend it,
but"--putting his hand upon my shoulder--"here is the man to get the pardon
if the President can be brought to see the case as most of us see it."

At once I went over to Washington, taking Stephen French with me. When
we entered the President's apartment in the White House he advanced
smiling to greet us, saying: "I know what you boys are after; you mean--"

"Yes, Mr. President," I answered, "we do, and if ever--"

"I have thought over it, sworn over it, and prayed over it," he said, "and
I am going to pardon him!"



V


Another illustrative incident happened during the Arthur Administration.
The dismissal of Gen. Fitz-John Porter from the army had been the subject
of more or less acrimonious controversy. During nearly two decades this had
raged in army circles. At length the friends of Porter, led by Curtin and
Slocum, succeeded in passing a relief measure through Congress. They were
in ecstasies. That there might be a presidential objection had not crossed
their minds.

Senator McDonald, of Indiana, a near friend of General Porter, and a man of
rare worldly wisdom, knew better. Without consulting them he came to me.

"You are personally close to the President," said he, "and you must know
that if this bill gets to the White House he will veto it. With the
Republican National Convention directly ahead he is bound to veto it. It
must not be allowed to get to him; and you are the man to stop it. They
will listen to you and will not listen to me."

First of all, I went to the White House.

"Mr. President," I said, "I want you to authorize me to tell Curtin and
Slocum not to send the Fitz-John Porter bill to you."

"Why?" he answered.

"Because," said I, "you will have to veto it; and, with the Frelinghuysens
wild for it, as well as others of your nearest friends, I am sure you don't
want to be obliged to do that. With your word to me I can stop it, and have
it for the present at least held up."

His answer was, "Go ahead."

Then I went to the Capitol. Curtin and Slocum were in a state of mind. It
was hard to make them understand or believe what I told them.

"Now, gentlemen," I continued, "I don't mean to argue the case. It is not
debatable. I am just from the White House, and I am authorized by the
President to say that if you send this bill to him he will veto it."

That, of course, settled it. They held it up. But after the presidential
election it reached Arthur, and he did veto it. Not till Cleveland came in
did Porter obtain his restoration.

Curiously enough General Grant approved this. I had listened to the
debate in the House--especially the masterly speech of William Walter
Phelps--without attaining a clear understanding of the many points at
issue. I said as much to General Grant.

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