SWARTHMORE, 1880.
[DEAR PAPA:]
I am quite on the Potomac. I with all the boys at our
table were called up, there is seven of us, before Prex. for
stealing sugar-bowls and things off the table. All the youths
said, "O President, I didn't do it." When it came my turn I
merely smiled gravely, and he passed on to the last. Then he
said, "The only boy that doesn't deny it is Davis. Davis, you
are excused. I wish to talk to the rest of them." That all
goes to show he can be a gentleman if he would only try. I am
a natural born philosopher so I thought this idea is too
idiotic for me to converse about so I recommend silence and I
also argued that to deny you must necessarily be accused and
to be accused of stealing would of course cause me to bid
Prex. good-by, so the only way was, taking these two
considerations with each other, to deny nothing but let the
good-natured old duffer see how silly it was by retaining a
placid silence and so crushing his base but thoughtless
behavior and machinations.
DICK.
In the early days at home — that is, when the sun
shone — we played cricket and baseball and football
in our very spacious back yard, and the programme of our
sports was always subject to Richard's change without notice.
When it rained we adjourned to the third-story front, where we
played melodrama of simple plot but many thrills, and it was
always Richard who wrote the plays, produced them, and played
the principal part. As I recall these dramas of my early
youth, the action was almost endless and, although the company
comprised two charming misses (at least I know that they
eventually grew into two very lovely women), there was no time
wasted over anything so sentimental or futile as love-scenes.
But whatever else the play contained in the way of great
scenes, there was always a mountain pass — the mountains being
composed of a chair and two tables — and Richard was forever
leading his little band over the pass while the band, wholly
indifferent as to whether the road led to honor, glory, or
total annihilation, meekly followed its leader. For some
reason, probably on account of my early admiration for Richard
and being only too willing to obey his command, I was
invariably cast for the villain in these early dramas, and the
end of the play always ended in a hand-to-hand conflict
between the hero and myself. As Richard, naturally, was the
hero and incidentally the stronger of the two, it can readily
be imagined that the fight always ended in my complete
undoing. Strangulation was the method usually employed to
finish me, and, whatever else Richard was at that tender age,
I can testify to his extraordinary ability as a choker.
But these early days in the city were not at all the
happiest days of that period in Richard's life. He took but
little interest even in the social or the athletic side of his
school life, and his failures in his studies
troubled him sorely, only I fear, however, because it troubled
his mother and father. The great day of the year to us was
the day our schools closed and we started for our summer
vacation. When Richard was less than a year old my mother and
father, who at the time was convalescing from a long illness,
had left Philadelphia on a search for a complete rest in the
country. Their travels, which it seems were undertaken in the
spirit of a voyage of discovery and adventure, finally led
them to the old Curtis House at Point Pleasant on the New
Jersey coast. But the Point Pleasant of that time had very
little in common with the present well-known summer resort.
In those days the place was reached after a long journey by
rail followed by a three hours' drive in a rickety stagecoach
over deep sandy roads, albeit the roads did lead through
silent, sweet-smelling pine forests. Point Pleasant itself
was then a collection of half a dozen big farms which
stretched from the Manasquan River to the ocean half a mile
distant. Nothing could have been more primitive or as I
remember it in its pastoral loveliness much more beautiful.
Just beyond our cottage the river ran its silent, lazy course
to the sea. With the exception of several farmhouses, its
banks were then unsullied by human habitation of any sort, and
on either side beyond the low green banks lay fields of wheat
and corn, and dense groves of pine and oak and chestnut trees.
Between us and the ocean were more waving fields of corn,
broken by little clumps of trees, and beyond these damp
Nile-green pasture meadows, and then salty marshes that led to
the glistening, white sand-dunes, and the great silver
semi-circle of foaming breakers, and the broad, blue sea. On all
the land that lay between us and the ocean, where
the town of Point Pleasant now stands, I think there were but
four farmhouses, and these in no way interfered with the
landscape or the life of the primitive world in which we
played.
Whatever the mental stimulus my brother derived from his
home in Philadelphia, the foundation of the physical strength
that stood him in such good stead in the campaigns of his
later years he derived from those early days at Point
Pleasant. The cottage we lived in was an old two-story frame
building, to which my father had added two small
sleeping-rooms. Outside there was a vine-covered porch and
within a great stone fireplace flanked by cupboards, from
which during those happy days I know Richard and I, openly and
covertly, must have extracted tons of hardtack and cake. The
little house was called "Vagabond's Rest," and a haven of rest
and peace and content it certainly proved for many years to
the Davis family. From here it was that my father started
forth in the early mornings on his all-day fishing excursions,
while my mother sat on the sunlit porch and wrote novels and
mended the badly rent garments of her very active sons. After
a seven-o'clock breakfast at the Curtis House our energies
never ceased until night closed in on us and from sheer
exhaustion we dropped unconscious into our patch-quilted cots.
All day long we swam or rowed, or sailed, or played ball, or
camped out, or ate enormous meals — anything so long as our
activities were ceaseless and our breathing apparatus given no
rest. About a mile up the river there was an island — it's a
very small, prettily wooded, sandy-beached little place, but
it seemed big enough in those days. Robert Louis Stevenson
made it famous by rechristening it Treasure Island, and
writing the
new name and his own on a bulkhead that had been built to
shore up one of its fast disappearing sandy banks. But that
is very modern history and to us it has always been "The
Island." In our day, long before Stevenson had ever heard of
the Manasquan, Richard and I had discovered this tight little
piece of land, found great treasures there, and, hand in hand,
had slept in a six-by-six tent while the lions and tigers
growled at us from the surrounding forests.
As I recall these days of my boyhood I find the
recollections of our life at Point Pleasant much more distinct
than those we spent in Philadelphia. For Richard these days
were especially welcome. They meant a respite from the
studies which were a constant menace to himself and his
parents; and the freedom of the open country, the ocean, the
many sports on land and on the river gave his body the
constant exercise his constitution seemed to demand, and a
broad field for an imagination which was even then very keen,
certainly keen enough to make the rest of us his followers.
In an extremely sympathetic appreciation which Irvin S.
Cobb wrote about my brother at the time of his death, he says
that he doubts if there is such a thing as a born author.
Personally it so happened that I never grew up with any one,
except my brother, who ever became an author, certainly an
author of fiction, and so I cannot speak on the subject with
authority. But in the case of Richard, if he was not born an
author, certainly no other career was ever considered. So far
as I know he never even wanted to go to sea or to be a
bareback rider in a circus. A boy, if he loves his father,
usually wants to follow in his professional footsteps, and in
the case of Richard,
he had the double inspiration of following both in the
footsteps of his father and in those of his mother. For years
before Richard's birth his father had been a newspaper editor
and a well-known writer of stories and his mother a novelist
and short-story writer of great distinction. Of those times
at Point Pleasant I fear I can remember but a few of our
elders. There were George Lambdin, Margaret Ruff, and Milne
Ramsay, all painters of some note; a strange couple, Colonel
Olcott and the afterward famous Madam Blavatsky, trying to
start a Buddhist cult in this country; Mrs. Frances Hodgson
Burnett, with her foot on the first rung of the ladder of
fame, who at the time loved much millinery finery. One day my
father took her out sailing and, much to the lady's
discomfiture and greatly to Richard's and my delight, upset
the famous authoress. At a later period the Joseph Jeffersons
used to visit us; Horace Howard Furness, one of my father's
oldest friends, built a summer home very near us on the river,
and Mrs. John Drew and her daughter Georgie Barrymore spent
their summers in a near-by hostelry. I can remember Mrs.
Barrymore at that time very well — -wonderfully handsome and a
marvellously cheery manner. Richard and I both loved her
greatly, even though it were in secret. Her daughter Ethel I
remember best as she appeared on the beach, a sweet,
long-legged child in a scarlet bathing-suit running toward the
breakers and then dashing madly back to her mother's open
arms. A pretty figure of a child, but much too young for
Richard to notice at that time. In after-years the child in
the scarlet bathing-suit and he became great pals. Indeed,
during the latter half of his life, through the good days and
the
bad, there were very few friends who held so close a place in
his sympathy and his affections as Ethel Barrymore.
Until the summer of 1880 my brother continued on at the
Episcopal Academy. For some reason I was sent to a different
school, but outside of our supposed hours of learning we were
never apart. With less than two years' difference in our ages
our interests were much the same, and I fear our interests of
those days were largely limited to out-of-door sports and the
theatre. We must have been very young indeed when my father
first led us by the hand to see our first play. On Saturday
afternoons Richard and I, unattended but not wholly unalarmed,
would set forth from our home on this thrilling weekly
adventure. Having joined our father at his office, he would
invariably take us to a chop-house situated at the end of a
blind alley which lay concealed somewhere in the neighborhood
of Walnut and Third Streets, and where we ate a most wonderful
luncheon of English chops and apple pie. As the luncheon drew
to its close I remember how Richard and I used to fret and
fume while my father in a most leisurely manner used to finish
off his mug of musty ale. But at last the three of us, hand
in hand, my father between us, were walking briskly toward our
happy destination. At that time there were only a few
first-class theatres in Philadelphia — the Arch Street Theatre,
owned by Mrs. John Drew; the Chestnut Street, and the Walnut
Street — all of which had stock companies, but which on the
occasion of a visiting star acted as the supporting company.
These were the days of Booth, Jefferson, Adelaide Neilson,
Charles Fletcher, Lotta, John McCullough, John Sleeper Clark,
and the elder
Sothern. And how Richard and I worshipped them all — not only
these but every small-bit actor in every stock company in
town. Indeed, so many favorites of the stage did my brother
and I admire that ordinary frames would not begin to hold them
all, and to overcome this defect we had our bedroom entirely
redecorated. The new scheme called for a gray wallpaper
supported by a maroon dado. At the top of the latter ran two
parallel black picture mouldings between which we could easily
insert cabinet photographs of the actors and actresses which
for the moment we thought most worthy of a place in our
collection. As the room was fairly large and as the mouldings
ran entirely around it, we had plenty of space for even our
very elastic love for the heroes and heroines of the
footlights.
Edwin Forrest ended his stage career just before our
time, but I know that Richard at least saw him and heard that
wonderful voice of thunder. It seems that one day, while my
mother and Richard were returning home, they got on a
street-car which already held the great tragedian. At the
moment Forrest was suffering severely from gout and had his
bad leg stretched well out before him. My brother, being very
young at the time and never very much of a respecter of
persons, promptly fell over the great man's gouty foot.
Whereat (according to my mother, who was always a most
truthful narrator) Forrest broke forth in a volcano of oaths
and for blocks continued to hurl thunderous broadsides at
Richard, which my mother insisted included the curse of Rome
and every other famous tirade in the tragedian's repertory
which in any way fitted the occasion. Nearly forty years
later my father became the president of the Edwin
Forrest Home, the greatest charity ever founded by an actor
for actors, and I am sure by his efforts of years on behalf of
the institution did much to atone for Richard's early unhappy
meeting with the greatest of all the famous leather-lunged
tragedians.
From his youth my father had always been a close student
of the classic and modern drama, and throughout his life
numbered among his friends many of the celebrated actors and
actresses of his time. In those early days Booth used to come
to rather formal luncheons, and at all such functions Richard
and I ate our luncheon in the pantry, and when the great meal
was nearly over in the dining-room we were allowed to come in
in time for the ice-cream and to sit, figuratively, at the
feet of the honored guest and generally, literally, on his or
her knees. Young as I was in those days I can readily recall
one of those lunch-parties when the contrast between Booth and
Dion Boucicault struck my youthful mind most forcibly. Booth,
with his deep-set, big black eyes, shaggy hair, and lank
figure, his wonderfully modulated voice, rolled out his
theories of acting, while the bald-headed, rotund Boucicault,
his twinkling eyes snapping like a fox-terrier's, interrupted
the sonorous speeches of the tragedian with crisp, witty
criticisms or "asides" that made the rest of the company laugh
and even brought a smile to the heavy, tragic features of
Booth himself. But there was nothing formal about our
relations with John Sleeper Clark and the Jefferson family.
They were real "home folks" and often occupied our spare room,
and when they were with us Richard and I were allowed to come
to all the meals, and, even if unsolicited, freely express our
views on the modern drama.
In later years to our Philadelphia home came Henry Irving
and his fellow player Ellen Terry and Augustin Daly and that
wonderful quartet, Ada Rehan, Mrs. Gilbert, James Lewis, and
our own John Drew. Sir Henry I always recall by the first
picture I had of him in our dining-room, sitting far away from
the table, his long legs stretched before him, peering
curiously at Richard and myself over black-rimmed glasses and
then, with equal interest, turning back to the ash of a long
cigar and talking drama with the famous jerky, nasal voice but
always with a marvellous poise and convincing authority. He
took a great liking to Richard in those days, sent him a
church-warden's pipe that he had used as Corporal Brewster,
and made much of him later when my brother was in London.
Miss Terry was a much less formal and forbidding guest,
rushing into the house like a whirlwind and filling the place
with the sunshine and happiness that seemed to fairly exude
from her beautiful magnetic presence. Augustin Daly usually
came with at least three of the stars of his company which I
have already mentioned, but even the beautiful Rehan and the
nice old Mrs. Gilbert seemed thoroughly awed in the presence
of "the Guv'nor." He was a most crusty, dictatorial party, as
I remember him with his searching eyes and raven locks, always
dressed in black and always failing to find virtue in any
actor or actress not a member of his own company. I remember
one particularly acrid discussion between him and my father in
regard to Julia Marlowe, who was then making her first bow to
the public. Daly contended that in a few years the lady would
be absolutely unheard of and backed his opinion by betting a
dinner for those present with my father that his judgment
would prove
correct. However, he was very kind to Richard and myself and
frequently allowed us to play about behind the scenes, which
was a privilege I imagine he granted to very few of his
friends' children. One night, long after this, when Richard
was a reporter in New York, he and Miss Rehan were burlesquing
a scene from a play on which the last curtain had just fallen.
It was on the stage of Daly's theatre at Thirtieth Street and
Broadway, and from his velvet box at the prompt-entrance Daly
stood gloomily watching their fooling. When they had finished
the mock scene Richard went over to Daly and said, "How bad do
you think I am as an actor, Mr. Daly?" and greatly to my
brother's delight the greatest manager of them all of those
days grumbled back at him: "You're so bad, Richard, that I'll
give you a hundred dollars a week, and you can sign the
contract whenever you're ready." Although that was much more
than my brother was making in his chosen profession at the
time, and in spite of the intense interest he had in the
theatre, he never considered the offer seriously. As a matter
of fact, Richard had many natural qualifications that fitted
him for the stage, and in after-years, when he was rehearsing
one of his own plays, he could and frequently would go up on
the stage and read almost any part better than the actor
employed to do it. Of course, he lacked the ease of gesture
and the art of timing which can only be attained after sound
experience, but his reading of lines and his knowledge of
characterization was quite unusual. In proof of this I know
of at least two managers who, when Richard wanted to sell them
plays, refused to have him read them the manuscript on the
ground that his reading gave the dialogue a value it did not
really possess.
In the spring of 1880 Richard left the Episcopal Academy,
and the following September went to Swarthmore College,
situated just outside of Philadelphia. I fear, however, the
change was anything but a success. The life of the big
coeducational school did not appeal to him at all and, in
spite of two or three friendships he made among the girls and
boys, he depended for amusement almost wholly on his own
resources. In the afternoons and on holidays he took long
walks over the country roads and in search of adventure
visited many farmhouses. His excuse for these calls was that
he was looking for old furniture and china, and he frequently
remained long enough to make sketches of such objects as he
pretended had struck his artistic fancy. Of these adventures
he wrote at great length to his mother and father, and the
letters were usually profusely decorated with illustrations of
the most striking incidents of the various escapades. Several
of these Swarthmore experiences he used afterward in short
stories, and both the letters and sketches he sent to his
parents at the time he regarded in the light of preparation
for his future work. In his studies he was perhaps less
successful than he had been at the Episcopal Academy, and
although he played football and took part in the track sports
he was really but little interested in either. There were
half-holidays on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and when my brother
did not come to town I went to Swarthmore and we spent the
afternoons in first cooking our lunch in a hospitable woods
and then playing some games in the open that Richard had
devised. But as I recall these outings they were not very
joyous occasions, as Richard was extremely unhappy over his
failures
at school and greatly depressed about the prospects for the
future.
He finished the college year at Swarthmore, but so
unhappy had he been there that there was no thought in his
mind or in that of his parents of his returning. At that time
my uncle, H. Wilson Harding, was a professor at Lehigh
University, and it was arranged that Richard should go to
Bethlehem the following fall, live with his uncle, and
continue his studies at Ulrich's Preparatory School, which
made a specialty of preparing boys for Lehigh. My uncle lived
in a charming old house on Market Street in Bethlehem, quite
near the Moravian settlement and across the river from the
university and the iron mills. He was a bachelor, but of a
most gregarious and hospitable disposition, and Richard
therefore found himself largely his own master, in a big,
roomy house which was almost constantly filled with the most
charming and cultivated people. There my uncle and Richard,
practically of about the same age so far as their viewpoint of
life was concerned, kept open house, and if it had not been
for the occasional qualms his innate hatred of mathematics
caused him, I think my brother would have been completely
happy. Even studies no longer worried him particularly and he
at once started in to make friendships, many of which lasted
throughout his life. As is usual with young men of seventeen,
most of these men and women friends were several times
Richard's age, but at the period Richard was a particularly
precocious and amusing youth and a difference of a few decades
made but little difference — certainly not to Richard. Finley
Peter Dunne once wrote of my brother that he "probably knew
more waiters, generals, actors, and princes than any man
who lived," and I think it was during the first year of his
life at Bethlehem that he began the foundation for the
remarkable collection of friends, both as to numbers and
variety, of which he died possessed. Although a "prep," he
made many friends among the undergraduates of Lehigh. He made
friends with the friends of his uncle and many friends in both
of the Bethlehems of which his uncle had probably never heard.
Even at that early age he counted among his intimates William
W. Thurston, who was president of the Bethlehem Iron Company,
and J. Davis Brodhead, one of Pennsylvania's most conspicuous
Democratic congressmen and attorneys. Those who knew him at
that time can easily understand why Richard attracted men and
women so much older than himself. He was brimming over with
physical health and animal spirits and took the keenest
interest in every one he met and in everything that was going
on about him. And in the broadest sense he saw to it then, as
he did throughout his life, that he always did his share.
During those early days at Bethlehem his letters to his
family were full of his social activities, with occasional
references to his work at school. He was always going to
dinners or dances, entertaining members of visiting theatrical
companies; and on Friday night my mother usually received a
telegram, saying that he would arrive the next day with a
party of friends whom he had inadvertently asked to lunch and
a matinee. It was after one of these weekly visits that my
mother wrote Richard the following:
