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One spring afternoon in 1889 a member brought into the Lambs Club
house—then on Twenty-sixth Street—as a guest Mr. Richard Harding
Davis. I had not clearly caught the careless introduction, and,
answering my question, Mr. Davis repeated the surname. He did not
pronounce it as would a Middle Westerner like myself, but more as a
citizen of London might. To spell his pronunciation Dyvis is to
burlesque it slightly, but that is as near as it can be given
phonetically. Several other words containing a long a were sounded
by him in the same way, and to my ear the rest of his speech had a
related eccentricity. I am told that other men educated in certain
Philadelphia schools have a similar diction, but at that time many of
Mr. Davis's new acquaintances thought the manner was an affectation. I
mention the peculiarity, which after years convinced me was as native
to him as was the color of his eyes, because I am sure that it was a
barrier between him and some persons who met him only casually.
At that time he was a reporter on a Philadelphia newspaper, and in
appearance was what he continued to be until his death, an unassertive
but self-respecting, level-eyed, clean-toothed, and wholesome athlete.
The reporter developed rapidly into the more serious workman, and
amongst the graver business was that of war correspondent.
I have known fraternally several war correspondents—Dick Davis, Fred
Remington, John Fox, Caspar Whitney, and others—and it seems to me
that, while differing one from another as average men differ, they had
in common a kind of veteran superiority to trivial surprise, a tolerant
world wisdom that mere newspaper work in other departments does not
bring. At any rate, and however acquired, Dick Davis had the quality.
And with that seasoned calm he kept and cultivated the reporter sense.
He had insight—the faculty of going back of appearances. He saw the
potential salients in occurrences and easily separated them from the
commonplace—and the commonplace itself when it was informed by a
spirit that made it helpful did not mislead him by its plainness.
That is another war-correspondent quality. He saw when adherence to
duty approached the heroic. He knew the degree of pressure that gave
it test conditions and he had an unadulterated, plain, bread-and-water
appreciation of it.
I think that fact shows in his stories. He liked enthusiastically to
write of men doing men's work and doing it man fashion with
full-blooded optimism.
At his very best he was in heart and mind a boy grown tall. He had a
boy's undisciplined indifference to great personages not inconsistent
with his admiration of their medals. By temperament he was impulsive
and partisan, and if he was your friend you were right until you were
obviously very wrong. But he liked "good form," and had adopted the
Englishman's code of "things no fellow could do"—therefore his
impulsiveness was without offense and his partisanship was not
quarrelsome.
In the circumstance of this story of "Soldiers of Fortune" he could
himself have been either Clay or Stuart and he had the humor of
MacWilliams.
In the clash between Clay and Stuart, when Clay asks the younger man if
the poster smirching Stuart's relation to Madame Alvarez is true, it is
Davis talking through both men, and when, standing alone, Clay lifts
his hat and addresses the statue of General Bolivar, it is Davis at his
best.
Modern criticism has driven the soliloquy from the theatre, but modern
criticism in that respect is immature and wrong. The soliloquy exists.
Any one observing the number of business men who, talking aloud to
themselves, walk Fifth Avenue any evening may prove it. For Davis the
soliloquy was not courageous; it was simply true. And that was a place
for it.
When "Soldiers of Fortune" was printed it had a quick and a deserved
popularity. It was cheerily North American in its viewpoint of the
sub-tropical republics and was very up to date. The outdoor American
girl was not so established at that time, and the Davis report of her
was refreshing. Robert Clay was unconsciously Dick Davis himself as he
would have tried to do—Captain Stuart was the English officer that
Davis had met the world over, or, closer still, he was the better side
of such men which the attractive wholesomeness of Davis would draw out.
Alice and King were the half-spoiled New Yorkers as he knew them at the
dinner-parties.
At a manager's suggestion Dick made a play of the book. It was his
first attempt for the theatre and lacked somewhat the skill that he
developed later in his admirable "Dictator." I was called in by the
manager as an older carpenter and craftsman to make another dramatic
version. Dick and I were already friends and he already liked plays
that I had done, but that alone could not account for the heartiness
with which he turned over to me his material and eliminated himself.
Only his unspoiled simplicity and utter absence of envy could do that.
Only native modesty could explain the absence of the usual author pride
and sensitiveness. The play was immediately successful. It would have
been a dull hack, indeed, who could have spoiled such excellent stage
material as the novel furnished, but his generosity saw genius in the
dramatic extension of the types he had furnished and in the welding of
additions. Even after enthusiasm had had time enough to cool, he sent
me a first copy of the Playgoers' edition of the novel, printed in
1902, with the inscription:
TO AUGUSTUS THOMAS:
Gratefully, Admiringly, Sincerely.
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.
And then, as if feeling the formality of the names, he wrote below:
DEAR GUS,
If you liked this book only one-fifth as much as I like your play, I
would be content to rest on that and spare the public any others. So
for the sake of the public try to like it.
DICK.
In 1914 a motion-picture company arranged to make a feature film of the
play, and Dick and I went with their outfit to Santiago de Cuba, where,
twenty years earlier, he had found the inspiration for his story and
out of which city and its environs he had fashioned his supposititious
republic of Olancho. On that trip he was the idol of the company.
With the men in the smoking-room of the steamer there were the
numberless playful stories, in the rough, of the experiences on all
five continents and seven seas that were the backgrounds of his
published tales.
At Santiago, if an official was to be persuaded to consent to some
unprecedented seizure of the streets, or a diplomat invoked for the
assistance of the Army or the Navy, it was the experience and good
judgment of Dick Davis that controlled the task. In the field there
were his helpful suggestions of work and make-up to the actors, and on
the boat and train and in hotel and camp the lady members met in him an
easy courtesy and understanding at once fraternal and impersonal.
That picture enterprise he has described in an article, entitled
"Breaking into the Movies," which was printed in Scribner's Magazine.
The element that he could not put into the account, and which is
particularly pertinent to this page, is the author of "Soldiers of
Fortune" as he revealed himself to me both with intention and
unconsciously in the presence of the familiar scenes.
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 cocked hat the cheers of an imaginary populace."
Twenty years had gone by since Dick 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 Dick 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.
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