Part 17

When finally a letter came, I found I had justification for my day of horror. For many hours there had been but little doubt in the minds of my father and brother that the family would have to take to the hills. But they were safe, our home was standing. The experience left me more nervous than ever about them, and now that my friends were gone it took all the resolution I could summon to keep my foolish alarms under control.

Although I was beginning my second year with no money in the bank I had friendly relations with two publishing firms that seemed to see a possible something in my work. There was Scribner’s Magazine, a relation of which I was justly proud; not only had they encouraged me about my book, but they had asked me to let them consider magazine subjects that interested me and that I was doing. But, while it was the relation on which I hoped to build serious work in the future, at the moment I must share it with something of quicker return; and that seemed to be the McClure Syndicate. I felt surer of this after my first meeting with its founder, S. S. McClure. That meeting had been just before my vacation in the summer of 1892; Mr. McClure had dropped into Paris in the meteoric fashion I found was usual with him, and came by appointment to see me at my new address in the Rue Malebranche. This crooked and steep passage off the Rue Saint-Jacques was unknown to half the cochers of Paris, but Mr. McClure found it and arrived bareheaded, watch in hand, breathless from running up my four flights—eighty steps.

“I’ve just ten minutes,” he announced; “must leave for Switzerland tonight to see Tyndall.”

A slender figure, S. S. McClure, a shock of tumbled sandy hair, blue eyes which glowed and sparkled. He was close to my own age, a vibrant, eager, indomitable personality that electrified even the experienced and the cynical. His utter simplicity, outrightness, his enthusiasm and confidence captivated me. He was so new and unexpected that practical questions such as, “Would you be interested in articles on ...” and “How much will you pay?” dropped out of mind. Before I knew it I was listening to the story of his struggle up. How as a peddler he had earned money for college—who could have let him go without buying?—his vast schemes of learning undertaken when a freshman at Knox College, one of which was to study every word in the English dictionary, its start, its development, its present stage, its possible future, his beautiful romance with Hattie, his wife, the story of the Syndicate and of John—always John this, John that, and last a magazine to be—soon. And here I was to come in. While he talked I was managing somehow to tell him the story of my life and hopes and to fit things together.

What was to have been ten minutes stretched to two hours or more. “I must go,” he suddenly cried. “Could you lend me forty dollars? It is too late to get money over town, and I must catch the train for Geneva.”

“Certainly,” I said. I had forty dollars there in my desk, the sum set aside for my farewell vacation. It never occurred to me to do anything but give it to him.

“How queer,” he said, “that you should have that much money in the house!”

“Isn’t it?” I replied. “It never happened before.” But I didn’t mention the vacation.

I had some bad moments after he was gone. “Will-of-the-wisp,” I said, “a fascinating will-of-the-wisp. I’ll never see that money. He’ll simply never think of it again. I’ll have to give up that vacation. Serves me right.”

I did see the money promptly, for Mr. McClure did not forget as I expected him to do, but wired his London office that night to send me a check.

What the new magazine would want from me, I gathered in my long and exciting interview with Mr. McClure, was articles on the achievements of the great French and English scientists. Not history, not literature, not politics, but science, discoveries, inventions, and adventures.

Here I was back to my college days. I found my natural enthusiasm for the physical world and its meanings which Professor Tingley had directed was not dead, only sleeping. I found that, little as I knew of all these things, I still had something of a vocabulary and knew enough to find my way about by hard work. There was Pasteur; there was Janssen, who was building an observatory on Mont Blanc; there was Bertillon, the inventor of the system of criminal identification then attracting the attention of the world. It took all my courage to talk with these gentlemen, but I was soon to find they were the simplest and friendliest of people. For two years I kept on hand popular scientific articles whose success depended on interviews with distinguished specialists, and in that time I met with only one rebuff; but that was a very contemptuous one. It was not from a man but from a gifted American woman who was doing valuable special work in one of the great French scientific institutions. The effect of scholarship on a woman, I told myself. She doesn’t ripen, she hardens. I know better now. It happens, but by no means to all women. Take Dr. Florence Sabin, a great human being as well as a great specialist.

The contacts I made on this work left me precious memories. There was my acquaintance with Madame and Monsieur Pasteur. One of the first articles Mr. McClure asked for was on the Institute, then but eight years old. Of course that meant an interview with Pasteur if it could be managed. It turned out to be easy enough.

The Pasteurs lived in a spacious apartment in the Institute: big rooms with heavy furniture, heavy curtains, dark soft rugs of the period. It was not until I was actually in the library where Madame Pasteur led me that I realized how sadly Pasteur was crippled by the paralysis of his left side which he had suffered twenty-five years earlier after three years of incessant and exhausting labor on the diseases of the silkworm. He moved with difficulty, he hesitated painfully over words; but his eyes were bright, curious, interested.

After a few more or less stumbling explanations on my part we fell to talking naturally. They made it so easy. Mr. McClure was insistent at that moment on what were called human documents, series of portraits of eminent people from babyhood to 1893. I must have a Pasteur series. Monsieur and Madame were delighted with the idea. The old albums were brought out, and the three of us bent over them exactly as we did now and then at home when the question of W. W. T. at one, S. A. T. at two, I. M. T. at three came up. Again and again they stopped to say: “Tiens! Voilà Pierre, comment il est drôle!” “Marie, comme elle est jolie!”

When the album was closed and we had talked long of his early life I made an effort to get some idea of what he was thinking of now, but he said: “No science. If you want that, go see Monsieur Roux.” And so reluctantly I went down the stairs that led from the apartment, the kindly old faces watching me, for Monsieur and Madame Pasteur had done me the honor to see me off, and Monsieur kept repeating as I went down, “Look out, the stairs are dark.”

When finally the article came out, in the second issue of McClure’s Magazine, September, 1893, I took a copy to him. He was as pleased as a boy with the pictures. On a later visit he complained that one of his colleagues had carried off the copy. Could I get him another? When I took this to him it was with the request that he write a maxim for the January, 1894, issue of the magazine.

Mr. McClure had had the happy idea of asking from leaders of science, industry, religion, literature a paragraph or two embodying their convictions as to the outlook for the world’s future, their hopes for it. There was need enough of encouragement. The world had been going through as bad a year as often comes its way, a year of despair, uncertainty, hopelessness. What was ahead? The replies which filled eighteen pages of the magazine included letters and sentiments from Huxley, Tyndall, Max Müller, Henry Stanley, Julia Ward Howe, Cardinal Gibbons, and a score of others: noble collection. It was published under the heading “The Edge of the Future.” It raised my interest in the venture to a high pitch of enthusiasm. It was for me the spirit, the credo of the new magazine. It meant something more than I had dreamed possible in magazine journalism.

For the “Edge of the Future” undertaking I was asked at a last moment to collect all the sentiments I could from distinguished Frenchmen. Pasteur, certainly, and he was easy. “Of course I will do it,” he said. “Come back, and I’ll have it ready.” But when I went back I found him in a flurry. He had written his pensée, and it was lost.

“Never mind,” comforted Madame Pasteur. “She’ll come back when you have it ready for her.”

And so I did; but it was unfinished, and Madame Pasteur had to stand over him, encouraging him with tender très biens and little pats while he wrote. He was peevish as a child; he didn’t like the looks of it, tried again, and finally with a pathetic look said: “I’m afraid you don’t want either. But if you do, take your choice.” And so I did.

What he had written was:

“In the matter of doing good, obligation ceases only when power fails.”

Before the time limit was up I had autographed sentiments from Alphonse Daudet, Zola, Alexandre Dumas, François Coppée and Jules Simon, as veil as a collection of impressions still clear. There was Zola.

I carried away from my visit with him an impression of a man agitated, confused, sulky, an impression emphasized by the amazing conglomeration of furnishings of all ages and all countries which cluttered the entry, stairway, and big salon of his house. I had to wind my way between suits of armor, sedan chairs, Chinese lacquered tables and seats, carved and painted wood to reach him standing at the end of the room. The whole house was like that, as is shown in a series of sketches McClure published in one of the early numbers. He talked long and violently about his enemies, defended his realism, hinted that he was a latter-day Balzac, also a great collector spending his leisure in Paris at art sales, which accounted for my difficulty in finding him in his own salon. The sentiment he gave me was a reflection of his talk and of the point of view of his school.

“War,” he wrote, “is the very life, the law of the world. How pitiful is man when he introduces ideas of justice and of peace, when implacable nature is only a continual battle field.”

Dumas fils was the only serene person in the group and was very courteous, the quietest Frenchman I ever met.

Jules Simon touched me deeply by what he wrote: