Chapter II

The job invites. One reads regularly what magazine editors think of their contributors, but who ever reads what magazine contributors—of whom I, Hatteras, am one—think of their editors? A vast and adventurous field here enrolls itself, believe me. I know, more or less intimately, most of the editors of the great American periodicals, and I am constantly amused by the inaccuracy of the prevailing notions about them—notions diligently fostered, in many cases, by their own more or less subtle chicane. Consider, for example, the dean of the order, M. George Harvey, of the _North American Review_. His portrait shows a thoughtful old gentleman reading a book, his forefinger pressed affectionately against his right frontal sinus. Recalling the high mental pressure of his daily concerns, one concludes at once that he is struggling through Talboys Wheeler’s epitome of the Maha-Bhārāta, or Locke’s “Conduct of the Understanding.” But I have it from the Colonel himself—a confidence quite spontaneous and apparently sincere—that at the precise moment the photographer squeezed the bird he was thinking—what? Simply this: how much prettier Mlle. Mary Pickford would be if her lower limbs were less richly developed laterally. The book was the _Photoplay Magazine_.

Again, there is M. Robert H. Davis, editor of the Munsey publications. The official views of M. Davis depict him as a man of the great outdoors, a stalker of the superior carnivora, a dead shot, a fisher of tarpons and sharks, a rover of the primeval forests. He is dressed up like a cover of _Field and Stream_, a doggish pipe in his mouth, his tropics formidably encircled by cartridges and fish worms. But what are the facts? The facts are that Davis does all his fishing in the Fulton Market, and that the bear-skin which in his pictures he is seen holding triumphantly at arm’s length actually graces his library floor and was bought at Revillon Frères. He is a God-fearing, mild-mannered, and respectable man, an admirer of Elihu Root, a Prohibitionist, a member of the Red Cross and the S. P. C. A. The only actual hunting he ever does is to hunt for someone to agree with him that M. Irvin Cobb is a greater man than Mark Twain or Dostoievsky. And when it comes to fishing, he has said all he has to say when he brings up a couple of sardellen out of the mayonnaise.

Yet again, there are such fellows as Doty, of the _Century_; Towne, of _McClure’s_; Bok, of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_; Siddall, of the _American_; and Fox, of the _Police Gazette_. Doty prints Edith Wharton and Rabindranath Tagore—and reads, by choice, H. C. Witwer and Selma Lagerlöf. Fox collects Chinese jades and Sheraton chairs, and is a member of the Lake Mohonk Conference. Siddall used to be a hoochie-coochie sideshow ballyhoo with Ringling’s Circus. Towne, throwing off the editorial mask of moral indignation, writes tender triolets in the privacy of his chambers. Bok, viewed popularly as a muff—the wags of the National Press Club once put him down as one of the ladies entertained by them—is a rough, wild creature, a huge, knobby Hollander, with a voice like an auctioneer’s. And Eastman of the _Masses_, the prophet of revolt, the savior of the oppressed—what of Eastman? Eastman, _au naturel_, gives no more damns for the oppressed than you or I. His aim in life, the last time I met him in society, was to find a chauffeur who was not a drunkard and had no flair for debauching the parlor-maids. On this theme he pumped up ten times the eloquence he has ever emitted over Unearned Increments and Wage Slaves.