








ADVENTURES AND LETTERS

OF

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS



EDITED BY

CHARLES BELMONT DAVIS




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

     I.  THE EARLY DAYS
    II.  COLLEGE DAYS
   III.  FIRST NEWSPAPER EXPERIENCES
    IV.  NEW YORK
     V.  FIRST TRAVEL ARTICLES
    VI.  THE MEDITERRANEAN AND PARIS
   VII.  FIRST PLAYS
  VIII.  CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA
    IX.  MOSCOW, BUDAPEST, LONDON
     X.  CAMPAIGNING IN CUBA, AND GREECE
    XI.  THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR
   XII.  THE BOER WAR
  XIII.  THE SPANISH AND ENGLISH CORONATIONS
   XIV.  THE JAPANESE-RUSSIAN WAR
    XV.  MOUNT KISCO
   XVI.  THE CONGO
  XVII.  A LONDON WINTER
 XVIII.  MILITARY MANOEUVRES
   XIX.  VERA CRUZ AND THE GREAT WAR
    XX.  THE LAST DAYS




CHAPTER I

THE EARLY DAYS

Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia on April 18, 1864, but,
so far as memory serves me, his life and mine began together several
years later in the three-story brick house on South Twenty-first
Street, to which we had just moved.  For more than forty years this was
our home in all that the word implies, and I do not believe that there
was ever a moment when it was not the predominating influence in
Richard's life and in his work.  As I learned in later years, the house
had come into the possession of my father and mother after a period on
their part of hard endeavor and unusual sacrifice.  It was their
ambition to add to this home not only the comforts and the beautiful
inanimate things of life, but to create an atmosphere which would prove
a constant help to those who lived under its roof--an inspiration to
their children that should endure so long as they lived.  At the time
of my brother's death the fact was frequently commented upon that,
unlike most literary folk, he had never known what it was to be poor
and to suffer the pangs of hunger and failure.  That he never suffered
from the lack of a home was certainly as true as that in his work he
knew but little of failure, for the first stories he wrote for the
magazines brought him into a prominence and popularity that lasted
until the end.  But if Richard gained his success early in life and was
blessed with a very lovely home to which he could always return, he was
not brought up in a manner which in any way could be called lavish.
Lavish he may have been in later years, but if he was it was with the
money for which those who knew him best knew how very hard he had
worked.

In a general way, I cannot remember that our life as boys differed in
any essential from that of other boys.  My brother went to the
Episcopal Academy and his weekly report never failed to fill the whole
house with an impenetrable gloom and ever-increasing fears as to the
possibilities of his future.  At school and at college Richard was, to
say the least, an indifferent student.  And what made this undeniable
fact so annoying, particularly to his teachers, was that morally he
stood so very high.  To "crib," to lie, or in any way to cheat or to do
any unworthy act was, I believe, quite beyond his understanding.
Therefore, while his constant lack of interest in his studies goaded
his teachers to despair, when it came to a question of stamping out
wrongdoing on the part of the student body he was invariably found
aligned on the side of the faculty.  Not that Richard in any way
resembled a prig or was even, so far as I know, ever so considered by
the most reprehensible of his fellow students.  He was altogether too
red-blooded for that, and I believe the students whom he antagonized
rather admired his chivalric point of honor even if they failed to
imitate it.  As a schoolboy he was aggressive, radical, outspoken,
fearless, usually of the opposition and, indeed, often the sole member
of his own party.  Among the students at the several schools he
attended he had but few intimate friends; but of the various little
groups of which he happened to be a member his aggressiveness and his
imagination usually made him the leader.  As far back as I can
remember, Richard was always starting something--usually a new club or
a violent reform movement.  And in school or college, as in all the
other walks of life, the reformer must, of necessity, lead a somewhat
tempestuous, if happy, existence.  The following letter, written to his
father when Richard was a student at Swarthmore, and about fifteen,
will give an idea of his conception of the ethics in the case:


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