VIII
Those who are able to recall the symposium of these minds will no doubt always see the humorous face of Charlie Seymour as the center of the coterie, a young man with such aflairfor what was news, with such an instinct for word values, such real ability as a writer, and such a quaint and original strain of humor as to make him the peer of any, a young man who would have gone far and high could he have lived. An early fate overtook him, as it overtook Charlie Perkins and Charlie Almy and Ben King, but their fate had the mellowing kindnessof the fact that all who knew them can never think of them, with however much regret, without a smile at some remembered instance of their unfailing humor.
When I mentioned them, I had fully intended to give some instances of that humor, but when it was not of a raciness, it was of such a rare and delicate charm, such a fleeting, evanescent quality, that it is impossible to separate it from all that was going on about it. It is easy enough to recall if not to evoke again the scene in which Ben King and Charlie Almy, sitting for three hours at a stretch, gave a wholly impromptu impersonation of two solemn missionaries just returned from some unmapped wilderness and recounting their deeds in order to inspire contributions; it is not difficult either to recall the slight figure of Charlie Seymour, with his red hair, his comedian’s droll face, and to listen to him recounting those adventures which life was ever offering him, whether on one of his many journeys as a war correspondent to the region of the Dakotas when his friends among the Ogallalla and Brûlé Sioux were on the war-path again, or in some less picturesque tragedy he had been reporting nearer home—say a murder in South Clark Street; but, like so many of the keener joys of life, the charm of his stories was fleeting and gone with the moment that gave them.
His humor colored everything he wrote, as the humor of Finley Peter Dunne colored everything he wrote; and both were skilled in the art of the news story. We were all reading Kipling in those days,and Mr. Dunne was so clever in adapting his terse style to the needs of the daily reportorial life that when one night a private shot a comrade in the barracks at Fort Sheridan, and Mr. Dunne was detailed to report the tragedy, he found it in every detail so exactly like Kipling’s story “In the Matter of a Private,” that he was overcome by the despair of having to write a tale that had already been told. He resisted the temptation, if there was any temptation, nobly and wrote the tale with a bald simplicity that no doubt enhanced its effect. He had not then begun to report the Philosophy of Mr. Dooley, though there was a certain Irishman in Chicago responsive to the name of Colonel Thomas Jefferson Dolan, whom, in his capacity of First Ward Democrat, Mr. Dunne frequently interviewed for his paper without the cramping influences of a previous visitation on the Colonel, and these interviews showed much of the color and spirit of those Dooley articles which later were to make him famous. He already knew, of course, and frequently enjoyed communion with the prototype of Mr. Dooley, Mr. James McGarry, who had a quaint philosophy of his own which Mr. Dunne one day rendered in a little article entitled “Mr. McGarry’s Philosophy.” The familiarity so wounded Mr. McGarry, however (he was a man of simple dignity and some sensitiveness), that Mr. Dunne thereafter adopted another name for the personage through which he was so long and so brilliantly to express himself, though it was not until after the Spanish War that the wide public was to recognizethe talent which was already so abundantly recognized by Mr. Dunne’s friends.
Charlie Seymour did not read as much as some of his companions; perhaps it was that fact that gave such an original flavor to what he wrote. His elder brother, Mr. Horatio W. Seymour, was the editor of theHerald, a newspaper famed for the taste and even beauty of its typographical appearance. It looked somewhat like the New YorkSun, and under Mr. Seymour was as carefully edited. It was the organ of the Democracy in the northwest, and I suppose no direct or immediate influence was more potent in bringing on the wide Democratic victory in the congressional election of 1890 than the brilliant editorials on the tariff which Mr. Horatio Seymour wrote. They were, I remember, one of the delights of Frank Hurd, and it was through Hurd’s influence that I was on the staff of that paper, reporting political events.
We were all more or less employed in reporting political events in that stirring year, and were kept busy in following and recording the sayings of the orators of both parties. It was characteristic of Mr. Dunne that after a sober column giving the gist of a speech by Joseph B. Foraker, then lately governor, and afterward senator of Ohio, in which he waved the bloody shirt in the fiery manner which in those days characterized him, Mr. Dunne should have concluded his article sententiously: “Then the audience went out to get the latest news of the battle of Gettysburg.”
But it was typical of Charlie Seymour that whenhe was detailed to accompany Thomas B. Reed, Speaker of the Billion Dollar Congress, he should have been so fascinated by the whiskers of the Illinois farmers who crowded about the rear platform of the Speaker’s train, that he devoted half a column to a description of those adornments which long was celebrated as a classic in the traditions of Chicago reporters, to be recalled by them as they would recall, for instance, certain of the sayings of the late Joseph Medill.
Mr. Medill, of course, moved in an element far above that which was natural to the reporters, and the figure of the great editor of theTribunefilled the imagination completely. I used to like his low-tariff editorials, though they became high-tariff editorials during national campaigns, the rate of percentage of protection rising like a thermometer in the heat of political excitement,—a tendency the rate invariably reveals the nearer its objective is approached.
Mr. Medill, as was well known, was not an admirer of President Harrison, and there came down into our world an evidence of the fact in a story which Mr. Frank Brooks, a political writer on theTribune, told us. It was at the time that President Harrison made one of those speaking tours which, beginning with President Johnson’s “swing around the circle,” have grown increasingly familiar to those of the electorate who observe their presidents and rush to the railway station to hear them speaking as they flash by. His managing editor had assigned Mr. Brooks to go to Galesburg, catch thePresident’s special and make the journey with him, and just as he was giving directions as to the column or two which Mr. Brooks was to send in daily, Mr. Medill went shuffling through the editorial room, bearing a great pile of those foreign exchanges he was so fond of reading. The managing editor explained to Mr. Medill the mission he was committing to Mr. Brooks, and the old editor stood a moment looking at them, then raised his ear-trumpet and said in his queer voice:
“What did you say?”
“I said, I’d just been telling Mr. Brooks to go down to Galesburg to-night, catch the President’s special, and send us a column or so each night of his speeches.”
“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Medill, and then he drily added: “What for?”