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TALES FROM BOHEMIA
By ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS
ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS
A MEMORY
One crisp evening early in March, 1887, I climbed the three flights of
rickety stairs to the fourth floor of the old "Press" building to begin
work on the "news desk." Important as the telegraph department was
in making the newspaper, the desk was a crude piece of carpentry. My
companions of the blue pencil irreverently termed it "the shelf." This was
my second night in the novel dignity of editorship. Though my rank was the
humblest, I appreciated the importance of a first step from "the street."
An older man, the senior on the news desk, had preceded me. He was engaged
in a bantering conversation with a youth who lolled at such ease as a
well-worn, cane-bottomed screw-chair afforded. The older man made an
informal introduction, and I learned that the youth with pale face and
serene smile was "Mr. Stephens, private secretary to the managing editor."
That information scarcely impressed me any more than it would now after
more than twenty years' experience of managing editors and their private
secretaries.
The bantering continued, and I learned that the youth cherished literary
aspirations, and that he performed certain work in connection with the
dramatic department for the managing editor, who kept theatrical news and
criticisms within his personal control.
Suddenly a chance remark broke the ice for a friendship between the young
man and me which was to last unbroken until his untimely death. Stephens
wrote the Isaac Pitman phonography! Here had I been for more than three
years wondering to find the shorthand writers of wide-awake and progressive
America floundering in what I conceived to be the Serbonian bog of an
archaic system of stenography. Unexpectedly a most superior young man came
within my ken who was a disciple of Isaac Pitman. Furthermore, like myself,
he was entirely self taught. No old shorthand writer who can look back a
quarter of a century on his own youthful enthusiasm for the art can fail to
appreciate what a bond of sympathy this discovery constituted. From that
night forward we were chosen friends, confiding our ambitions to each
other, discussing the grave issues of life and death, settling the problems
of literature. Notwithstanding his more youthful appearance, my seniority
in age was but slight. Gradually "Bob," as all his friends called him with
affectionate informality, was given opportunities to advance himself, under
the kindly yet firm guidance of the managing editor, Mr. Bradford Merrill.
That gentleman appreciated the distinct gifts of his young protege,
journalistic and literary, and he fostered them wisely and well. I remember
perfectly the first criticism of an important play which "Bob" was
permitted to write unaided. It was Richard Mansfield's initial appearance
in Philadelphia as "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde," at the Chestnut Street Theatre
on Monday, October 3, 1887.
After the paper had gone to press, and while Mr. Merrill and a few of the
telegraph editors were partaking of a light lunch, the night editor, the
late R.E.A. Dorr, asked Mr. Merrill "how Stephens had made out."
"He has written a very clever and very interesting criticism," Mr. Merrill
replied. "I had to edit it somewhat, because he was inclined to be
Hugoesque and melodramatic in describing the action with very short
sentences. But I am very much pleased, indeed."
That was the beginning of Bob's career as a dramatic critic, a career in
which he gained authority and in which his literary faculties, his felicity
of expression and soundness of judgment found adequate scope.
In the following two or three years the cultivation of the field of
dramatic criticism occupied his time to the temporary exclusion of his
ambition for creative work. He and I read independently; but our tastes
had much in common, though his preference was for imaginative literature.
Meanwhile I was writing short stories with plenty of plot, some of which
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