Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [161]
His misery was intense. “The year closed, with the one before, represent more suffering than all the rest of my life brought me—ten times as much—I honestly think fifty times as much. And the year which opens with this day—I cannot finish the sentence.” Alone, at sea, he poured out his fear that he would never again regain his health. “Travel will not cure me—no more than Metzger [his German doctor]. I am miserable, I cannot trust myself to write more whatever I feel, however, you are still the only being in this world who fills my heart and mind and hope and receives my love and tenderness and affections.”
Under the new plan, the men would remain on the ship until Calcutta. There they would change to a series of other vessels that would eventually bring them to Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Japan, and then across the Pacific to San Francisco. But it was not to be. Shortly after mailing his despondent letter to Kate, Pulitzer stood on the deck of the ship with Ponsonby. The bright Indian sun beat down on the two men as they looked out over the water. “How dark it is getting,” remarked Pulitzer.
His remaining functioning retina had become detached. The darkness had set in.
Chapter Twenty-One
DARKNESS
Although he had plenty of newspaper experience, fifty-nine-year-old George W. Hosmer had never gotten an assignment quite like the one he drew in the summer of 1890. A doctor who never practiced medicine and an attorney who never practiced law, Hosmer had put in almost thirty years with Bennett’s New York Herald before joining the World. None of this, however, prepared him for the task he faced. He was to accompany Kate Pulitzer to Europe and return with her nearly blind, bedridden husband.
That spring, the stacks of telegrams from Pulitzer that usually greeted editors at their desks ceased. For months the paper had drifted along, cautiously guided by Cockerill, Davis, and Turner. The few telegrams that did come provided little or no direction. “Silence gives consent and when you do not hear from me assume that I am satisfied,” Pulitzer wrote.
Earlier in the year, when the retina in Pulitzer’s remaining good eye detached while he was on board a ship bound for India, he and Ponsonby had returned to Europe, where doctors recommended more time in dark rooms. The two men drifted to Paris and eventually to St. Moritz. Pulitzer was entirely in Ponsonby’s care, since Kate was no longer in Europe. She and the children had left for the United States shortly after the men had embarked on the ill-fated cruise. She did not rush back across the Atlantic. Kate had learned that the consequences of showing up uninvited could be severe.
But over the succeeding weeks discouraging reports reached Kate. Ponsonby telegraphed that Joseph had contracted acute bronchitis, a dangerous problem in the era before antibiotics, and was growing weak. Kate decided to launch a rescue mission, and departed with Hosmer in late July. By the time the two reached Joseph, he had been moved to a sanatorium in the Swiss city of Lucerne. They found him so weak that he was spending entire days on the sofa. “He was very ill—in a state so feeble that he could scarcely get around on foot,” Hosmer said. “Physical collapse had assumed the form of nervous prostration.”
For two weeks, Hosmer and Kate tended him until he was well enough to travel. They went to Paris; after a few more weeks the group moved to a vacation house in Trouville, a summer resort in Normandy. “In the pleasant atmosphere of the seaside,” Hosmer said, “a place which was very quiet—for the gay world was already