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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