The Lost Road, etc.
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Richard Harding Davis >> The Lost Road, etc.
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17 This Etext prepared by Marleen Hugo
HugoMarl@aol.com
THE LOST ROAD
THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
TO
MY WIFE
Contains:
THE LOST ROAD
THE MIRACLE OF LAS PALMAS
EVIL TO HIM WHO EVIL THINKS
THE MEN OF ZANZIBAR
THE LONG ARM
THE GOD OF COINCIDENCE
THE BURIED TREASURE OF COBRE
THE BOY SCOUT
SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE
THE DESERTER
AN INTRODUCTION BY
JOHN T. McCUTCHEON
WITH DAVIS IN VERA CRUZ, BRUSSELS, AND SALONIKA
In common with many others who have been with Richard Harding
Davis as correspondents, I find it difficult to realize that he
has covered his last story and that he will not be seen again
with the men who follow the war game, rushing to distant places
upon which the spotlight of news interest suddenly centres.
It seems a sort of bitter irony that he who had covered so many
big events of world importance in the past twenty years should
be abruptly torn away in the midst of the greatest event of
them all, while the story is still unfinished and its outcome
undetermined. If there is a compensating thought, it lies in the
reflection that he had a life of almost unparalleled fulness,
crowded to the brim, up to the last moment, with those
experiences and achievements which he particularly aspired to
have. He left while the tide was at its flood, and while he still
held supreme his place as the best reporter in his country. He
escaped the bitterness of seeing the ebb set in, when the youth
to which he clung had slipped away, and when he would have to sit
impatient in the audience, while younger men were in the thick of
great, world-stirring dramas on the stage.
This would have been a real tragedy in "Dick" Davis's case, for,
while his body would have aged, it is doubtful if his spirit ever
would have lost its youthful freshness or boyish enthusiasm.
It was my privilege to see a good deal of Davis in the last two
years.
He arrived in Vera Cruz among the first of the sixty or seventy
correspondents who flocked to that news centre when the situation
was so full of sensational possibilities. It was a time when the
American newspaper-reading public was eager for thrills, and the
ingenuity and resourcefulness of the correspondents in Vera Cruz
were tried to the uttermost to supply the demand.
In the face of the fiercest competition it fell to Davis's lot to
land the biggest story of those days of marking time.
The story "broke" when it became known that Davis, Medill
McCormick, and Frederick Palmer had gone through the Mexican
lines in an effort to reach Mexico City. Davis and McCormick,
with letters to the Brazilian and British ministers, got through
and reached the capital on the strength of those letters, but
Palmer, having only an American passport, was turned back.
After an ominous silence which furnished American newspapers with
a lively period of suspense, the two men returned safely with
wonderful stories of their experiences while under arrest in the
hands of the Mexican authorities. McCormick, in recently speaking
of Davis at that time, said that, "as a correspondent in
difficult and dangerous situations, he was incomparable--cheerful,
ingenious, and undiscouraged. When the time came to choose
between safety and leaving his companion he stuck by his fellow
captive even though, as they both said, a firing-squad and a blank
wall were by no means a remote possibility."
This Mexico City adventure was a spectacular achievement
which gave Davis and McCormick a distinction which no other
correspondents of all the ambitious and able corps had managed to
attain.
Davis usually "hunted" alone. He depended entirely upon his own
ingenuity and wonderful instinct for news situations. He had the
energy and enthusiasm of a beginner, with the experience and
training of a veteran. His interest in things remained as keen
as though he had not been years at a game which often leaves a
man jaded and blase. His acquaintanceship in the American army
and navy was wide, and for this reason, as well as for the
prestige which his fame and position as a national character gave
him, he found it easy to establish valuable connections in the
channels from which news emanates. And yet, in spite of the fact
that he was "on his own" instead of having a working partnership
with other men, he was generous in helping at times when he was
able to do so.
Davis was a conspicuous figure in Vera Cruz, as he inevitably had
been in all such situations. Wherever he went, he was pointed
out. His distinction of appearance, together with a distinction
in dress, which, whether from habit or policy, was a valuable
asset in his work, made him a marked man. He dressed and looked
the "war correspondent," such a one as he would describe in one
of his stories. He fulfilled the popular ideal of what a member
of that fascinating profession should look like. His code of life
and habits was as fixed as that of the Briton who takes his
habits and customs and games and tea wherever he goes, no matter
how benighted or remote the spot may be.
He was just as loyal to his code as is the Briton. He carried his
bath-tub, his immaculate linen, his evening clothes, his war
equipment--in which he had the pride of a connoisseur--wherever
he went, and, what is more, he had the courage to use the evening
clothes at times when their use was conspicuous. He was the only
man who wore a dinner coat in Vera Cruz, and each night, at his
particular table in the crowded "Portales," at the Hotel
Diligencia, he was to be seen, as fresh and clean as though he
were in a New York or London restaurant.
Each day he was up early to take the train out to the "gap,"
across which came arrivals from Mexico City. Sometimes a good
"story" would come down, as when the long-heralded and long-
expected arrival of Consul Silliman gave a first-page "feature"
to all the American papers.
In the afternoon he would play water polo over at the navy
aviation camp, and always at a certain time of the day his
"striker" would bring him his horse and for an hour or more he
would ride out along the beach roads within the American lines.
After the first few days it was difficult to extract real thrills
from the Vera Cruz situation, but we used to ride out to El Tejar
with the cavalry patrol and imagine that we might be fired on at
some point in the long ride through unoccupied territory; or else
go out to the "front," at Legarto, where a little American force
occupied a sun-baked row of freight-cars, surrounded by malarial
swamps. From the top of the railroad water-tank, we could look
across to the Mexican outposts a mile or so away. It was not very
exciting, and what thrills we got lay chiefly in our imagination.
Before my acquaintanceship with Davis at Vera Cruz I had not
known him well. Our trails didn't cross while I was in Japan in
the Japanese-Russian War, and in the Transvaal I missed him by a
few days, but in Vera Cruz I had many enjoyable opportunities of
becoming well acquainted with him.
The privilege was a pleasant one, for it served to dispel a
preconceived and not an entirely favorable impression of his
character. For years I had heard stories about Richard Harding
Davis--stories which emphasized an egotism and self-assertiveness
which, if they ever existed, had happily ceased to be obtrusive
by the time I got to know him.
He was a different Davis from the Davis whom I had expected to
find; and I can imagine no more charming and delightful companion
than he was in Vera Cruz. There was no evidence of those
qualities which I feared to find, and his attitude was one of
unfailing kindness, considerateness, and generosity.
In the many talks I had with him, I was always struck by his
evident devotion to a fixed code of personal conduct. In his writings
he was the interpreter of chivalrous, well-bred youth, and his heroes
were young, clean-thinking college men, heroic big-game hunters,
war correspondents, and idealized men about town, who always did
the noble thing, disdaining the unworthy in act or motive. It seemed
to me that he was modelling his own life, perhaps unconsciously,
after the favored types which his imagination had created for his
stories. In a certain sense he was living a life of make-believe,
wherein he was the hero of the story, and in which he was bound
by his ideals always to act as he would have the hero of his
story act. It was a quality which only one could have who had
preserved a fresh youthfulness of outlook in spite of the
hardening processes of maturity.
His power of observation was extraordinarily keen, and he not
only had the rare gift of sensing the vital elements of a
situation, but also had, to an unrivalled degree, the ability to
describe them vividly. I don't know how many of those men at Verz
Cruz tried to describe the kaleidoscopic life of the city during
the American occupation, but I know that Davis's story was far
and away the most faithful and satisfying picture. The story was
photographic, even to the sounds and smells.
The last I saw of him in Vera Cruz was when, on the Utah, he
steamed past the flagship Wyoming, upon which I was quartered,
and started for New York. The Battenberg cup race had just been
rowed, and the Utah and Florida crews had tied. As the Utah was
sailing immediately after the race, there was no time in which to
row off the tie. So it was decided that the names of both ships
should be engraved on the cup, and that the Florida crew should
defend the title against a challenging crew from the British
Admiral Craddock's flagship.
By the end of June, the public interest in Vera Cruz had waned,
and the corps of correspondents dwindled until there were only a
few left.
Frederick Palmer and I went up to join Carranza and Villa, and on
the 26th of July we were in Monterey waiting to start with the
triumphal march of Carranza's army toward Mexico City. There was
no sign of serious trouble abroad. That night ominous telegrams
came, and at ten o'clock on the following morning we were on a
train headed for the States.
Palmer and Davis caught the Lusitania, sailing August 4 from New
York, and I followed on the Saint Paul, leaving three days later.
On the 17th of August I reached Brussels, and it seemed the most
natural thing in the world to find Davis already there. He was at
the Palace Hotel, where a number of American and English
correspondents were quartered.
Things moved quickly. On the 19th Irvin Cobb, Will Irwin, Arno
Dosch, and I were caught between the Belgian and German lines in
Louvain; our retreat to Brussels was cut, and for three days,
while the vast German army moved through the city, we were
detained. Then, the army having passed, we were allowed to go
back to the capital.
In the meantime Davis was in Brussels. The Germans reached the
outskirts of the city on the morning of the 20th, and the
correspondents who had remained in Brussels were feverishly
writing despatches describing the imminent fall of the city. One
of them, Harry Hansen, of the Chicago Daily News, tells the
following story, which I give in his words:
"While we were writing," says Hansen, "Richard Harding Davis
walked into the writing-room of the Palace Hotel with a bunch of
manuscript in his hand. With an amused expression he surveyed
the three correspondents filling white paper.
"'I say, men,' said Davis, 'do you know when the next train
leaves?'
"'There is one at three o'clock,' said a correspondent, looking
up.
"'That looks like our only chance to get a story out,' said
Davis. 'Well, we'll trust to that.'
"The story was the German invasion of Brussels, and the train
mentioned was considered the forlorn hope of the correspondents
to connect with the outside world--that is, every correspondent
thought it to be the other man's hope. Secretly each had prepared
to outwit the other, and secretly Davis had already sent his
story to Ostend. He meant to emulate Archibald Forbes, who
despatched a courier with his real manuscript, and next day
publicly dropped a bulky package in the mail-bag.
"Davis had sensed the news in the occupation of Brussels long
before it happened. With dawn he went out to the Louvain road,
where the German army stood, prepared to smash the capital if
negotiations failed. His observant eye took in all the details.
Before noon he had written a comprehensive sketch of the
occupation, and when word was received that it was under way, he
trusted his copy to an old Flemish woman, who spoke not a word of
English, and saw her safely on board the train that pulled out
under Belgian auspices for Ostend."
With passes which the German commandant in Brussels gave us the
correspondents immediately started out to see how far those
passes would carry us. A number of us left on the afternoon of
August 23 for Waterloo, where it was expected that the great
clash between the German and the Anglo-French forces would occur.
We had planned to be back the same evening, and went prepared
only for an afternoon's drive in a couple of hired street
carriages. It was seven weeks before we again saw Brussels.
On the following day (August 24) Davis started for Mons. He wore
the khaki uniform which he had worn in many campaigns. Across his
breast was a narrow bar of silk ribbon indicating the campaigns
in which he had served as a correspondent. He so much resembled a
British officer that he was arrested as a British derelict and was informed
that he would be shot at once.
He escaped only by offering to walk to Brand Whitlock, in Brussels,
reporting to each officer he met on the way. His plan was approved,
and as a hostage on parole he appeared before the American minister,
who quickly established his identity as an American of good standing,
to the satisfaction of the Germans.
In the following few months our trails were widely separated. I read
of his arrest by German officers on the road to Mons; later I
read the story of his departure from Brussels by train to
Holland--a trip which carried him through Louvain while the town
still was burning; and still later I read that he was with the
few lucky men who were in Rheims during one of the early
bombardments that damaged the cathedral. By amazing luck,
combined with a natural news sense which drew him instinctively
to critical places at the psychological moment, he had been a
witness of the two most widely featured stories of the early
weeks of the war.
Arrested by the Germans in Belgium, and later by the French in
France, he was convinced that the restrictions on correspondents
were too great to permit of good work.
So he left the European war zone with the widely quoted remark:
"The day of the war correspondent is over."
And yet I was not surprised when, one evening, late in November
of last year, he suddenly walked into the room in Salonika where
William G. Shepherd, of the United Press, "Jimmy Hare," the
veteran war photographer, and I had established ourselves several
weeks before.
The hotel was jammed, and the city, with a normal capacity of
about one hundred and seventy-five thousand, was struggling to
accommodate at least a hundred thousand more. There was not a
room to be had in any of the better hotels, and for several days
we lodged Davis in our room, a vast chamber which formerly had
been the main dining-room of the establishment, and which now was
converted into a bedroom. There was room for a dozen men, if
necessary, and whenever stranded Americans arrived and could find
no hotel accommodations we simply rigged up emergency cots for
their temporary use.
The weather in Salonika at this time, late November, was
penetratingly cold. In the mornings the steam coils struggled
feebly to dispel the chill in the room.
Early in the morning after Davis had arrived, we were aroused by
the sound of violent splashing, accompanied by shuddering gasps,
and we looked out from the snug warmth of our beds to see Davis
standing in his portable bath-tub and drenching himself with
ice-cold water. As an exhibition of courageous devotion to an
established custom of life it was admirable, but I'm not sure
that it was prudent.
For some reason, perhaps a defective circulation or a weakened
heart, his system failed to react from these cold-water baths.
All through the days he complained of feeling chilled. He never
seemed to get thoroughly warmed, and of us all he was the one who
suffered most keenly from the cold. It was all the more
surprising, for his appearance was always that of a man in the
pink of athletic fitness--ruddy-faced, clear-eyed, and full of
tireless energy.
On one occasion we returned from the French front in Serbia to
Salonika in a box car lighted only by candles, bitterly cold, and
frightfully exhausting. We were seven hours in travelling
fifty-five miles, and we arrived at our destination at three
o'clock in the morning. Several of the men contracted desperate
colds, which clung to them for weeks. Davis was chilled through,
and said that of all the cold he had ever experienced that which
swept across the Macedonian plain from the Balkan highlands was
the most penetrating. Even his heavy clothing could not afford him
adequate protection.
When he was settled in his own room in our hotel he installed an
oil-stove which burned beside him as he sat at his desk and wrote
his stories. The room was like an oven, but even then he still
complained of the cold.
When he left he gave us the stove, and when we left, some time
later, it was presented to one of our doctor friends out in a
British hospital, where I'm sure it is doing its best to thaw the
Balkan chill out of sick and wounded soldiers.
Davis was always up early, and his energy and interest were as
keen as a boy's. We had our meals together, sometimes in the
crowded and rather smart Bastasini's, but more often in the
maelstrom of humanity that nightly packed the Olympos Palace
restaurant. Davis, Shepherd, Hare, and I, with sometimes Mr. and
Mrs. John Bass, made up these parties, which, for a period of
about two weeks or so, were the most enjoyable daily events of
our lives.
Under the glaring lights of the restaurant, and surrounded by
British, French, Greek, and Serbian officers, German, Austrian,
and Bulgarian civilians, with a sprinkling of American, English,
and Scotch nurses and doctors, packed so solidly in the huge,
high-ceilinged room that the waiters could barely pick their way
among the tables, we hung for hours over our dinners, and left
only when the landlord and his Austrian wife counted the day's
receipts and paid the waiters at the end of the evening.
One could not imagine a more charming and delightful companion
than Davis during these days. While he always asserted that he
could not make a speech, and was terrified at the thought of
standing up at a banquet-table, yet, sitting at a dinner-table
with a few friends who were only too eager to listen rather than
to talk, his stories, covering personal experiences in all parts
of the world, were intensely vivid, with that remarkable
"holding" quality of description which characterizes his
writings.
He brought his own bread--a coarse, brown sort, which he preferred
to the better white bread--and with it he ate great quantities of
butter. As we sat down at the table his first demand was for
"Mastika," a peculiar Greek drink distilled from mastic gum, and
his second demand invariably was "Du beurre!" with the "r's" as
silent as the stars; and if it failed to come at once the waiter
was made to feel the enormity of his tardiness.
The reminiscences ranged from his early newspaper days in
Philadelphia, and skipping from Manchuria to Cuba and Central
America, to his early Sun days under Arthur Brisbane; they ranged
through an endless variety of personal experiences which very
nearly covered the whole course of American history in the past
twenty years.
Perhaps to him it was pleasant to go over his remarkable adventures,
but it could not have been half as pleasant as it was to hear them, told
as they were with a keenness of description and brilliancy of humorous
comment that made them gems of narrative.
At times, in our work, we all tried our hands at describing the
Salonika of those early days of the Allied occupation, for it was
really what one widely travelled British officer called it--"the
most amazingly interesting situation I've ever seen"---but Davis's
description was far and away the best, just as his description of
Vera Cruz was the best, and his wonderful story of the entry of
the German army into Brussels was matchless as one of the great
pieces of reporting in the present war.
In thinking of Davis, I shall always remember him for the
delightful qualities which he showed in Salonika. He was
unfailingly considerate and thoughtful. Through his narratives
one could see the pride which he took in the width and breadth of
his personal relation to the great events of the past twenty
years. His vast scope of experiences and equally wide
acquaintanceship with the big figures of our time, were amazing,
and it was equally amazing that one of such a rich and
interesting history could tell his stories in such a simple way
that the personal element was never obtrusive.
When he left Salonika he endeavored to obtain permission from
the British staff to visit Moudros, but, failing in this, he booked
his passage on a crowded little Greek steamer, where the only
obtainable accommodation was a lounge in the dining saloon.
We gave him a farewell dinner, at which the American consul
and his family, with all the other Americans then in Salonika, were
present, and after the dinner we rowed out to his ship and saw
him very uncomfortably installed for his voyage.
He came down the sea ladder and waved his hand as we rowed away.
That was the last I saw of Richard Harding Davis.
JOHN T. MCCUTCHEON.
THE LOST ROAD
During the war with Spain, Colton Lee came into the service as a
volunteer. For a young man, he always had taken life almost too
seriously, and when, after the campaign in Cuba, he elected to
make soldiering his profession, the seriousness with which he
attacked his new work surprised no one. Finding they had lost him
forever, his former intimates were bored, but his colonel was
enthusiastic, and the men of his troop not only loved, but
respected him.
From the start he determined in his new life women should have no
part--a determination that puzzled no one so much as the women,
for to Lee no woman, old or young, had found cause to be
unfriendly. But he had read that the army is a jealous mistress
who brooks no rival, that "red lips tarnish the scabbard steel,"
that "he travels the fastest who travels alone."
So, when white hands beckoned and pretty eyes signalled, he did
not look. For five years, until just before he sailed for his
three years of duty in the Philippines, he succeeded not only in
not looking, but in building up for himself such a fine
reputation as a woman-hater that all women were crazy about him.
Had he not been ordered to Agawamsett that fact would not have
affected him. But at the Officers' School he had indulged in hard
study rather than in hard riding, had overworked, had brought
back his Cuban fever, and was in poor shape to face the tropics.
So, for two months before the transport was to sail, they ordered
him to Cape Cod to fill his lungs with the bracing air of a New
England autumn.
He selected Agawamsett, because, when at Harvard, it was there he
had spent his summer vacations, and he knew he would find
sailboats and tennis and, through the pine woods back of the
little whaling village, many miles of untravelled roads. He
promised himself that over these he would gallop an imaginary
troop in route marches, would manoeuvre it against possible
ambush, and, in combat patrols, ground scouts, and cossack
outposts, charge with it "as foragers." But he did none of these
things. For at Agawamsett he met Frances Gardner, and his
experience with her was so disastrous that, in his determination
to avoid all women, he was convinced he was right.
When later he reached Manila he vowed no other woman would
ever again find a place in his thoughts. No other woman did.
Not because he had the strength to keep his vow, but because he
so continually thought of Frances Gardner that no other woman
had a chance.
Miss Gardner was a remarkable girl. Her charm appealed to all
kinds of men, and, unfortunately for Lee, several kinds of men
appealed to her. Her fortune and her relations were bound up in
the person of a rich aunt with whom she lived, and who, it was
understood, some day would leave her all the money in the world.
But, in spite of her charm, certainly in spite of the rich aunt,
Lee, true to his determination, might not have noticed the girl
had not she ridden so extremely well.
It was to the captain of cavalry she first appealed. But even a
cavalry captain, whose duty in life is to instruct sixty men in
the art of taking the life of as many other men as possible, may
turn his head in the direction of a good-looking girl. And when
for weeks a man rides at the side of one through pine forests as
dim and mysterious as the aisles of a great cathedral, when he
guides her across the wet marshes when the sun is setting crimson
in the pools and the wind blows salt from the sea, when he loses
them both by moonlight in wood-roads where the hoofs of the
horses sink silently into dusty pine needles, he thinks more
frequently of the girl at his side than of the faithful troopers
waiting for him in San Francisco. The girl at his side thought
frequently of him.
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