Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis Part 2

For three weeks, with the exception of one or two occasions when some local dignitary captured the revisiting lion, he and I spent our evenings together at a cafe table over looking "the great square,"

which he sketches so deftly in its atmosphere when Clay and the Langhams and Stuart dine there: "At one end of the plaza the President's band was playing native waltzes that came throbbing through the trees and beating softly above the rustling skirts and clinking spurs of the senoritas and officers sweeping by in two opposite circles around the edges of the tessellated pavements. Above the palms around the square arose the dim, white facade of the Cathedral, with the bronze statue of Anduella the liberator of Olancho, who answered with his upraised arm and c.o.c.ked hat the cheers of an imaginary populace."

Twenty years had gone by since d.i.c.k had received the impression that wrote those lines, and now sometimes after dinner half a long cigar would burn out as he mused over the picture and the dreams that had gone between. From one long silence he said: "I think I'll come back here this winter and bring Mrs. Davis with me--stay a couple of months." What a fine compliment to a wife to have the thought of her and that plan emerge from that deep and romantic background!

And again, later, apropos of nothing but what one guessed from the dreamer's expressive face, he said: "I had remembered it as so much larger"--indicating the square--"until I saw it again when we came down with the army." A tolerant smile--he might have explained that it is always so on revisiting scenes that have impressed us deeply in our earlier days, but he let the smile do that. One of his charms as companion was that restful ability not to talk if you knew it, too.

The picture people began their film with a showing of the "mountains which jutted out into the ocean and suggested roughly the five knuckles of a giant's hand clenched and lying flat upon the surface of the water." That formation of the sea wall is just outside of Santiago.

"The waves tunnelled their way easily enough until they ran up against those five mountains and then they had to fall back." How natural for one of us to be unimpressed by such a feature of the landscape, and yet how characteristic of d.i.c.k Davis to see the elemental fight that it recorded and get the hint for the whole of the engineering struggle that is so much of his book!

We went over those mountains together, where two decades before he had planted his banner of romance. We visited the mines and the railroads, and everywhere found some superintendent or foreman or engineer who remembered Davis. He had guessed at nothing. Everywhere he had overlaid the facts with adventure and with beauty, but he had been on sure footing all the time. His prototype of MacWilliams was dead.

Together we visited the wooden cross with which the miners had marked his grave.

One is tempted to go choosing through his book again and rob its surprises by reminiscence--but I refrain. Yet it is only justice to point out that for "Soldiers of Fortune," as for the "Men of Zanzibar,"

"Three Gringos in Venezuela," "The King's Jackal," "Ranson's Folly,"

and his other books, he got his structure and his color at first hand.

He was a writer and not a rewriter. And another thing we must note in his writing is his cleanliness. It is safe stuff to give to a young fellow who likes to take off his hat and dilate his nostrils and feel the wind in his face. Like water at the source, it is undefiled.

DAVIS AND THE ROUGH RIDERS

BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

I knew Richard Harding Davis for many years, and I was among the number who were immediately drawn to him by the power and originality of "Gallegher," the story which first made his reputation.

My intimate a.s.sociation with him, however, was while he was with my regiment in Cuba, He joined us immediately after landing, and was not merely present at but took part in the fighting. For example, at the Guasimas fight it was he, I think, with his field-gla.s.ses, who first placed the trench from which the Spaniards were firing at the right wing of the regiment, which right wing I, at that time, commanded. We were then able to make out the trench, opened fire on it, and drove out the Spaniards.

He was indomitably cheerful under hardships and difficulties and entirely indifferent to his own personal safety or comfort. He so won the esteem and regard of the regiment that he was one of the three men we made honorary members of the regiment's a.s.sociation. We gave him the same medal worn by our own members.

He was as good an American as ever lived and his heart flamed against cruelty and injustice. His writings form a text-book of Americanism which all our people would do well to read at the present time.

BY IRVIN S. COBB

Almost the first letter I received after I undertook to make a living by writing for magazines was signed with the name of Richard Harding Davis. I barely knew him; practically we were strangers; but if he had been my own brother he could not have written more generously or more kindly than he did write in that letter. He, a famous writer, had gone out of his way to speak words of encouragement to me, an unknown writer; had taken the time and the pains out of a busy life to cheer a beginner in the field where he had had so great a measure of success.

When I came to know him better, I found out that such acts as these were characteristic of Richard Harding Davis. The world knew him as one of the most vivid and versatile and picturesque writers that our country has produced in the last half-century, but his friends knew him as one of the kindest and gentlest and most honest and most unselfish of men--a real human being, firm in his convictions, steadfast in his affections, loyal to the ideals by which he held, but tolerant always in his estimates of others.

He may or may not have been a born writer; sometimes I doubt whether there is such a thing as a born writer. But this much I do know--he was a born gentleman if ever there was one.

As a writer his place is a.s.sured. But always I shall think of him as he was in his private life--a typical American, a lovable companion, and a man to the tips of his fingers.

BY JOHN FOX, JR.

During the twenty years that I knew him Richard Harding Davis was always going to some far-off land. He was just back from a trip somewhere when I first saw him in his rooms in New York, rifle in hand, in his sock feet and with his traps in confusion about him. He was youth incarnate--ruddy, joyous, vigorous, adventurous, self-confident youth--and, in all the years since, that first picture of him has suffered no change with me. He was so intensely alive that I cannot think of him as dead--and I do not. He is just away on another of those trips and it really seems queer that I shall not hear him tell about it.

We were together as correspondents in the Spanish War and in the Russo-j.a.panese War we were together again; and so there is hardly any angle from which I have not had the chance to know him. No man was ever more misunderstood by those who did not know him or better understood by those who knew him well, for he carried nothing in the back of his head--no card that was not face up on the table. Every thought, idea, purpose, principle within him was for the world to read and to those who could not know how rigidly he matched his inner and outer life he was almost unbelievable. He was exacting in friendship because his standard was high and because he gave what he asked; and if he told you of a fault he told you first of a virtue that made the fault seem small indeed. But he told you and expected you to tell him.

Naturally, the indirection of the j.a.panese was incomprehensible to him.

He was not good at picking up strange tongues, and the j.a.panese equivalent for the Saxon monosyllable for what the j.a.panese was to him he never learned. For only one other word did he have more use and I believe it was the only one he knew, "hyaku--hurry!" Over there I was in constant fear for him because of his knight-errantry and his candor.

Once he came near being involved in a duel because of his quixotic championship of a woman whom he barely knew, and disliked, and whose absent husband he did not know at all. And more than once I looked for a j.a.panese to draw his two-handed ancestral sword when d.i.c.k bluntly demanded a reconciliation of his yea of yesterday with his nay of today. Nine months pa.s.sed and we never heard the whistle of bullet or sh.e.l.l. d.i.c.k called himself a "cherry-blossom correspondent," and when our ship left those sh.o.r.es each knew that the other went to his state-room and in bitter chagrin and disappointment wept quite childishly.

Of course, he was courageous--absurdly so--and, in spite of his high-strung temperament, always calm and cool. At El Paso hill, the day after the fight, the rest of us scurried for tree-trunks when a few bullets whistled near; but d.i.c.k stalked out in the open and with his field-gla.s.ses searched for the supposed sharpshooters in the trees.

Lying under a bomb-proof when the Fourth of July bombardment started, I saw d.i.c.k going unhurriedly down the hill for his gla.s.ses, which he had left in Colonel Roosevelt's tent, and unhurriedly going back up to the trenches again. Under the circ.u.mstances I should have been content with my naked eye. A bullet thudded close to where d.i.c.k lay with a soldier.

"That hit you?" asked d.i.c.k. The soldier grunted "No," looked sidewise at d.i.c.k, and muttered an oath of surprise. d.i.c.k had not taken his gla.s.ses from his eyes. I saw him writhing on the ground with sciatica during that campaign, like a snake, but pulling his twisted figure straight and his tortured face into a smile if a soldier or stranger pa.s.sed.

He was easily the first reporter of his time--perhaps of all time. Out of any incident or situation he could pick the most details that would interest the most people and put them in a way that was pleasing to the most people; and always, it seemed, he had the extraordinary good judgment or the extraordinary good luck to be just where the most interesting thing was taking place. Gouverneur Morris has written the last word about Richard Harding Davis, and he, as every one must, laid final stress on the clean body, clean heart, and clean mind of the man.

R. H. D. never wrote a line that cannot be given to his little daughter when she is old enough to read, and I never heard a word pa.s.s his lips that his own mother could not hear. There are many women in the world like the women in his books. There are a few men like the men, and of these d.i.c.k himself was one.

BY FINLEY PETER DUNNE

In the articles about Mr. Davis that have appeared since his death, the personality of the man seems to overshadow the merit of the author. In dealing with the individual the writers overlook the fact that we have lost one of the best of our story-tellers. This is but natural. He was a very vivid kind of person. He had thousands of friends in all parts of the world, and a properly proportionate number of enemies, and those who knew him were less interested in the books than in the man himself--the generous, romantic, sensitive individual whose character and characteristics made him a conspicuous figure everywhere he went--and he went everywhere. His books were sold in great numbers, but it might be said in terms of the trade that his personality had a larger circulation than his literature. He probably knew more waiters, generals, actors, and princes than any man who ever lived, and the people he knew best are not the people who read books. They write them or are a part of them. Besides, if you knew Richard Davis you knew his books. He translated himself literally, and no expurgation was needed to make the translation suitable for the most innocent eyes. He was the identical chivalrous young American or Englishman who strides through his pages in battalions to romantic death or romantic marriage.

Every one speaks of the extraordinary youthfulness of his mind, which was still fresh at an age when most men find avarice or golf a subst.i.tute for former pastimes. He not only refused to grow old himself, he refused to write about old age. There are a few elderly people in his books, but they are vague and shadowy. They serve to emphasize the brightness of youth, and are quickly blown away when the time for action arrives. But if he numbered his friends and acquaintances by the thousands there are other thousands in this country who have read his books, and they know, even better than those who were acquainted with him personally, how good a friend they have lost. I happened to read again the other day the little collection of stories--his first, I think--which commences with "Gallegher" and includes "The Other Woman" and one or more of the Van Bibber tales.

His first stories were not his best. He increased in skill and was stronger at the finish than at the start. But "Gallegher" is a fine story, and is written in that eager, breathless manner which was all his own, and which always reminds me of a boy who has hurried home to tell of some wonderful thing he has seen. Of course it is improbable.

Most good stories are and practically all readable books of history.

No old newspaper man can believe that there ever existed such a "copy boy" as Gallegher, or that a murderer with a finger missing from one hand could escape detection even in a remote country village. Greed would have urged the constable to haul to the calaboose every stranger who wore gloves. But he managed to attach so many accurate details of description to the romance that it leaves as definite an impression of realism as any of Mr. Howells's purposely realistic stories. The scene in the newspaper office, the picture of the prize-fight, the mixture of toughs and swells, the spectators in their short gray overcoats with pearl b.u.t.tons (like most good story-tellers he was strong on the tailoring touch), the talk of cabmen and policemen, the swiftness of the way the story is told, as if he were in a hurry to let his reader know something he had actually seen--create such an impression of truth that when the reader finishes he finds himself picturing Gallegher on the witness-stand at the murder trial receiving the thanks of the judge. And he wonders what became of this precocious infant, and whether he was rewarded in time by receiving the hand of the sister of the sporting editor in marriage.

To give the appearance of truth to the truth is the despair of writers, but Mr. Davis had the faculty of giving the appearance of the truth to situations that in human experience could hardly exist. The same quality that showed in his tales made him the most readable of war correspondents. He went to all the wars of his youth and middle age filled with visions of glorious action. Where other correspondents saw and reported evil-smelling camps, ghastly wounds, unthinkable suffering, blunders, good luck and bad luck, or treated the subject with a mathematical precision that would have given Clausewitz a headache, Davis saw and reported it first of all as a romance, and then filled in the story with human details, so that the reader came away with an impression that all these heroic deeds were performed by people just like the reader himself, which was exactly the truth.

It is a pity that the brutality of the German staff officers and the stupidity of the French and English prevented him from seeing the actual fighting in Flanders and Picardy. The scene is an ugly one, a wallow of blood and mire. But so probably were Agincourt and Crecy when you come to think of it, and Davis, you may be sure, would have illuminated the foul battle-field with a reflection of the glory which must exist in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the soldiers.

The fact is, he was the owner of a most enviable pair of eyes, which reported to him only what was pleasant and encouraging. A man is blessed or cursed by what his eyes see. To some people the world of men is a confused and undecipherable puzzle. To Mr. Davis it was a simple and pleasant pattern--good and bad, honest and dishonest, kind and cruel, with the good, the honest, and the kind rewarded; the bad, the dishonest, and the cruel punished; where the heroes are modest, the brave generous, the women lovely, the bus-drivers humorous; where the Prodigal returns to dine in a borrowed dinner-jacket at Delmonico's with his father, and where always the Young Man marries the Girl. And this is the world as much as Balzac's is the world, if it is the world as you see it.

BY WINSTON CHURCHHILL

On that day when I read of Mr. Davis's sudden death there came back to me a vivid memory of another day, some eighteen years ago, when I first met him, shortly after the publication of my first novel. I was paying an over-Sunday visit to Marion, that quaint waterside resort where Mr.

Davis lived for many years, and with which his name is a.s.sociated. On the Monday morning, as the stage started out for the station, a young man came running after it, caught it, and sat down in the only empty place--beside me. He was Richard Harding Davis. I recognized him, nor shall I forget that peculiar thrill I experienced at finding myself in actual, physical contact with an author. And that this author should be none other than the creator of Gallegher, prepossessing, vigorous, rather than a dry and elderly recluse, made my excitement the keener.

It happened also, after entering the smoking-car, that the remaining vacant seat was at my side, and here Mr. Davis established himself. He looked at me, he asked if my name was Winston Churchill, he said he had read my book. How he guessed my ident.i.ty I did not discover. But the recollection of our talk, the strong impression I then received of Mr.

Davis's vitality and personality, the liking I conceived for him--these have neither changed nor faded with the years, and I recall with grat.i.tude to-day the kindliness, the sense of fellowship always so strong in him that impelled him to speak as he did. A month before he died, when I met him on the train going to Mt. Kisco, he had not changed. His enthusiasms, his vigor, his fine pa.s.sions, his fondness for his friends, these, nor the joy he found in the pursuit of his profession, had not faded. And there come to me now, as I think of him filled with life, flashes from his writings that have moved me, and move me indescribably still. "Le Style," as Rolland remarks, "c'est l'ame." It was so in Mr. Davis's case. He had the rare faculty of stirring by a phrase the imaginations of men, of including in a phrase a picture, an event--a cataclysm. Such a phrase was that in which he described the entry of German hosts into Brussels. He was not a man, when enlisted in a cause, to count the cost to himself. Many causes will miss him, and many friends, and many admirers, yet his personality remains with us forever, in his work.

BY LEONARD WOOD