Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis | ||
BY AUGUSTUS THOMAS
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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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,"
Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis | ||