The one member of the staff besides Mr. McClure whom I knew, when I began to find myself so to speak absorbed, was already by virtue of his unusual gift for comradeship a friend as well as a species of boss—that was Auguste F. Jaccaci, a brilliant artist and art editor as well as one of the most versatile and iridescent personalities I have ever known. I first met Jac, as he was called by everybody, in Paris, when as an advance agent of the new magazine he was sounding out possibilities for writers and illustrators. He took me out to dinner and paid the _addition_. We talked until late, then he simply put me on my omnibus and let me go back to the Latin Quarter alone. Here was established the _modus operandi_ for our frequent visiting in the future, in Paris, in New York, in Washington—with one revision. After that first dinner I paid my share of the check, save on special occasions when Jac, a knowing epicure, selected the dinner and treated me.
It was he who showed me the first copy of _McClure’s_, that of August, 1893, showed it to me at five-thirty in the morning, at a café across the square from the Gare Saint-Lazare where he had ordered me by cablegram from London to meet him. For nobody in the world excepting a member of my family should I have been willing at that hour to cross Paris. But I couldn’t afford to show a lack of interest. Moreover, I must confess that this preposterous order flattered me a little. It was taking me man to man, I said to myself. And so I was there. He had to bully the garçon to get a table out on the sidewalk and make us coffee.
All this was a good basis for a comradeship which lasted to his death. It lives in my memory as something quite apart in my relations with men. Jac had a certain superior appreciation and wisdom never quite put into words, but which you felt. I for my part was always straining to understand, never quite reaching it. Part of his charm was his confidence in his own superiority and his anxiety lest we didn’t quite realize it. And then there were his rages. They came and went like terrible summer thundershowers. He would roar down the corridor of the office while I sat and watched him enthralled. Those rages, whether directed at me or somebody else, never made any other impression on me than that of some unusual natural phenomenon.
Here then were the leaders in the crowd to which I had been admitted by virtue of a hasty sketch of Napoleon Bonaparte done on order.
Thank God I had sense enough to realize that here were three rare personalities, and that to miss such associations would be sheer stupidity. Also to know that I was an unusually lucky woman to be accepted.
Then there was the magazine they were making. There was something youthful, gay, natural about it which captivated me. Often, too, it achieved a most precious thing. Mr. Phillips called it a “lift.” To be youthful, gay, natural with a “lift”—that was an achievement.
And then I found the place so warmly and often ridiculously human. Mr. McClure was incapable of standing up before a hard-luck story, with the result that he brought into that overcrowded office a string of derelicts ranging from autocratic scrub ladies to indigent editors—brought them in and left them for J. S. P. to place. But J. S. P. was not far behind in his sympathy for those who were down and out. I watched him more than once rescue an author who perhaps out of sheer discouragement had taken to drink and landed in jail. Mr. Phillips saw that he was bailed out, his debts paid, work given him. I never ceased to wonder that these two men loaded with work and responsibility should seemingly consider it part of their daily job to rescue the wastrel and the disheartened.
There was reason enough for me to stay with _McClure’s_.
9 GOOD-BYE TO FRANCE
The Napoleon sketch had not been finished before Mr. McClure was urging me into a new job—not writing this time, but editing, editing according to his recipe. “Out with you—look, see, report.” Abraham Lincoln was the subject. My heart fell. “If you once get into American history,” I told myself, “you know well enough that will finish France. It will also finish your determination to solve the woman question and determine the nature of revolutions. They will go the way of the microscope and your search for God. Are you to spend your life running, now here, now there, never follow a path to its end?” Or was I taking my ambitions too seriously? It seemed probable. However, I was to have five thousand a year if I went along. There was no question in my mind but it was my duty to earn that money.
Lincoln was one of Mr. McClure’s steady enthusiasms. I once saw him, in puzzled efforts to find the reason for the continued life of a certain great American magazine, going through the file from the Civil War on, solely to find out what attention had been given to Lincoln. “Not a Lincoln article in this volume, nor in this,” he cried. “It is not a great magazine, it has overlooked the most vital factor in our life since the Civil War, the influence of the life and character of Abraham Lincoln.”
His insight told him that people never had had enough of Lincoln. Moreover, he believed that there was to be had for the seeking a large amount of “unpublished” reminiscences. It was on this conviction that he started me off.
He was right about “unpublished” material. Lincoln had been dead only about thirty years, and hundreds of those who had known him in one connection or another were still living. His secretaries Nicolay and Hay had finished their great documentary life of their chief. They should have personal material not in their volumes. There were members of his Cabinet still living, members of Congress of his time, editors like Joseph Medill of the Chicago _Tribune_, Horace White of the Chicago _Tribune_ and later of the New York _Evening Post_, Colonel McClure of the Philadelphia _Inquirer_. There were scores of men in Illinois towns who had traveled the circuit with him, for whom he acted as counsel, scores of people who had as a youth heard the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and had been stirred to say, “Lincoln’s got it right.” They had followed him in his fight against the extension of slavery and later into the war to save the Union. There was indeed no point of his short trail from birth to death where living men and women had not known him as colleagues, friends, opponents, critics.
Also, there had never been a time from the day he had become a Presidential candidate to the hour of his assassination that his life had not been under scrutiny. Yet it had been difficult to find out much about him. “There is not much of me,” he told a friend searching for biographical material. But there had been enough always to touch deep springs in American hearts and consciences. Men like William Dean Howells and J. G. Holland, later to occupy high places in our literary life, had written campaign lives of him. Hardly was he in his coffin before his brilliant, if unstable, law partner William Herndon was gathering from all sources reminiscences, estimates, documents on his life up to the Presidency; and from his gathering Herndon made a story of extraordinary vitality and color. Most important—always to remain most important—was the collection of his Letters and Speeches and the ten-volume “Abraham Lincoln: A History” by Nicolay and Hay.
Why do more? What was there to be had? Mr. McClure insisted that there was plenty if one searched.
I went to talk it over with John Nicolay, who as well as his fine daughter Helen was an honored member of the famous old Washington Literary Society where I was a frequent guest. I told him what Mr. McClure proposed. Did he not have something he could give me? He was emphatic in saying there was nothing of importance to be had. The collection of letters and speeches he and Mr. Hay had made was complete; they had told all there was worth telling of Lincoln’s life. He would advise me not to touch so hopeless an assignment. I think Mr. Nicolay never quite forgave me for going ahead. Later when the results of my search began to appear and gradually to shape themselves into a Life of Lincoln he came to me one evening to protest. “You are invading my field. You write a popular Life of Lincoln and you do just so much to decrease the value of my property.”
I was deeply distressed. He thought me a poacher. I told him I believed he was mistaken. I pleaded that if I could write anything which people would read I was making readers for him. To know a little of Lincoln was for the serious a desire to know more. He and Mr. Hay had written something that all students must have. I could never hope to make an essential lasting contribution. But he went away unconvinced.
Mr. Nicolay’s point of view, if not generous, was certainly honest. I understand it better now than I did then. He had lived through the great years of the Civil War always at Lincoln’s elbow. He had been the stern, careful, humorless guardian of a man who carried his mail in his hat and a laugh on his lips. His reverence for him was a religion. He had given years of conscientious hard labor to the editing of the “Complete Works” and the writing of the history, and now he was retired. Lincoln was his whole life. We all come to rest our case on the work to which we have given our best years, frequently come to live on that, so to speak. When the time comes that our field is invaded by new workers, enlarged, reshaped, made to yield new fruit, we suffer shock. We may put up a “No trespassing” sign, but all to no use.