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Henry Fielding - "From This World to the Next"

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The Red Cross Girl

R >> Richard Harding Davis >> The Red Cross Girl



This etext was prepared by Aaron Cannon of Paradise, California






THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

THE RED CROSS GIRL

BY RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GOUVERNEUR MORRIS




CONTENTS

Introduction by Gouverneur Morris

1. THE RED CROSS GIRL

2. THE GRAND CROSS OF THE CRESCENT

3. THE INVASION OF ENGLAND

4. BLOOD WILL TELL

5. THE SAILORMAN

6. THE MIND READER

7. THE NAKED MAN

8. THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF

9. THE CARD-SHARP




INTRODUCTION

R. H. D.

"And they rise to their feet as he passes, gentlemen
unafraid."

He was almost too good to be true. In addition, the gods
loved him, and so he had to die young. Some people think that
a man of fifty-two is middle-aged. But if R. H. D. had lived
to be a hundred, he would never have grown old. It is not
generally known that the name of his other brother was Peter
Pan.

Within the year we have played at pirates together, at the
taking of sperm whales; and we have ransacked the Westchester
Hills for gunsites against the Mexican invasion. And we have
made lists of guns, and medicines, and tinned things, in case
we should ever happen to go elephant shooting in Africa. But
we weren't going to hurt the elephants. Once R. H. D. shot a
hippopotamus and he was always ashamed and sorry. I think he
never killed anything else. He wasn't that kind of a
sportsman. Of hunting, as of many other things, he has said
the last word. Do you remember the Happy Hunting Ground in
"The Bar Sinister"?--"Where nobody hunts us, and there is
nothing to hunt."

Experienced persons tell us that a man-hunt is the most
exciting of all sports. R. H. D. hunted men in Cuba. He
hunted for wounded men who were out in front of the trenches
and still under fire, and found some of them and brought them
in. The Rough Riders didn't make him an honorary member of
their regiment just because he was charming and a faithful
friend, but largely because they were a lot of daredevils and
he was another.

To hear him talk you wouldn't have thought that he had ever
done a brave thing in his life. He talked a great deal, and
he talked even better than he wrote (at his best he wrote
like an angel), but I have dusted every corner of my memory
and cannot recall any story of his in which he played a
heroic or successful part. Always he was running at top
speed, or hiding behind a tree, or lying face down in a foot
of water (for hours!) so as not to be seen. Always he was
getting the worst of it. But about the other fellows he told
the whole truth with lightning flashes of wit and character
building and admiration or contempt. Until the invention of
moving pictures the world had nothing in the least like his
talk. His eye had photographed, his mind had developed and
prepared the slides, his words sent the light through them,
and lo and behold, they were reproduced on the screen of your
own mind, exact in drawing and color. With the written word
or the spoken word he was the greatest recorder and reporter
of things that he had seen of any man, perhaps, that ever
lived. The history of the last thirty years, its manners and
customs and its leading events and inventions, cannot be
written truthfully without reference to the records which he
has left, to his special articles and to his letters. Read
over again the Queen's Jubilee, the Czar's Coronation, the
March of the Germans through Brussels, and see for yourself
if I speak too zealously, even for a friend, to whom, now
that R. H. D. is dead, the world can never be the same again.

But I did not set out to estimate his genius. That matter
will come in due time before the unerring tribunal of
posterity.

One secret of Mr. Roosevelt's hold upon those who come into
contact with him is his energy. Retaining enough for his own
use (he uses a good deal, because every day he does the work
of five or six men), he distributes the inexhaustible
remainder among those who most need it. Men go to him tired
and discouraged, he sends them away glad to be alive, still
gladder that he is alive, and ready to fight the devil
himself in a good cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the
same effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could
distribute energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had
some intuitive way of knowing just when you were slipping
into a slough of laziness and discouragement. And at such
times he either appeared suddenly upon the scene, or there
came a boy on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a book to
sign, or the postman in his buggy, or the telephone rang and
from the receiver there poured into you affection and
encouragement.

But the great times, of course, were when he came in person,
and the temperature of the house, which a moment before had
been too hot or too cold, became just right, and a sense of
cheerfulness and well-being invaded the hearts of the master
and the mistress and of the servants in the house and in the
yard. And the older daughter ran to him, and the baby, who
had been fretting because nobody would give her a double-
barrelled shotgun, climbed upon his knee and forgot all about
the disappointments of this uncompromising world.

He was touchingly sweet with children. I think he was a
little afraid of them. He was afraid perhaps that they
wouldn't find out how much he loved them. But when they
showed him that they trusted him, and, unsolicited, climbed
upon him and laid their cheeks against his, then the
loveliest expression came over his face, and you knew that
the great heart, which the other day ceased to beat, throbbed
with an exquisite bliss, akin to anguish.

One of the happiest days I remember was when I and mine
received a telegram saying that he had a baby of his own. And
I thank God that little Miss Hope is too young to know what
an appalling loss she has suffered....

Perhaps he stayed to dine. Then perhaps the older daughter
was allowed to sit up an extra half-hour so that she could
wait on the table (and though I say it, that shouldn't, she
could do this beautifully, with dignity and without
giggling), and perhaps the dinner was good, or R. H. D.
thought it was, and in that event he must abandon his place
and storm the kitchen to tell the cook all about it. Perhaps
the gardener was taking life easy on the kitchen porch. He,
too, came in for praise. R. H. D. had never seen our Japanese
iris so beautiful; as for his, they wouldn't grow at all. It
wasn't the iris, it was the man behind the iris. And then
back he would come to us, with a wonderful story of his
adventures in the pantry on his way to the kitchen, and
leaving behind him a cook to whom there had been issued a new
lease of life, and a gardener who blushed and smiled in the
darkness under the Actinidia vines.

It was in our little house at Aiken, in South Carolina, that
he was with us most and we learned to know him best, and that
he and I became dependent upon each other in many ways.

Events, into which I shall not go, had made his life very
difficult and complicated. And he who had given so much
friendship to so many people needed a little friendship in
return, and perhaps, too, he needed for a time to live in a
house whose master and mistress loved each other, and where
there were children. Before he came that first year our house
had no name. Now it is called "Let's Pretend."

Now the chimney in the living-room draws, but in those first
days of the built-over house it didn't. At least, it didn't
draw all the time, but we pretended that it did, and with
much pretense came faith. From the fireplace that smoked to
the serious things of life we extended our pretendings, until
real troubles went down before them--down and out.

It was one of Aiken's very best winters, and the earliest
spring I ever lived anywhere. R. H. D. came shortly after
Christmas. The spireas were in bloom, and the monthly roses;
you could always find a sweet violet or two somewhere in the
yard; here and there splotches of deep pink against gray
cabin walls proved that precocious peach-trees were in bloom.
It never rained. At night it was cold enough for fires. In
the middle of the day it was hot. The wind never blew, and
every morning we had a four for tennis and every afternoon we
rode in the woods. And every night we sat in front of the
fire (that didn't smoke because of pretending) and talked
until the next morning.

He was one of those rarely gifted men who find their chiefest
pleasure not in looking backward or forward, but in what is
going on at the moment. Weeks did not have to pass before it
was forced upon his knowledge that Tuesday, the fourteenth
(let us say), had been a good Tuesday. He knew it the moment
he waked at 7 A. M. and perceived the Tuesday sunshine making
patterns of bright light upon the floor. The sunshine
rejoiced him and the knowledge that even before breakfast
there was vouchsafed to him a whole hour of life. That day
began with attentions to his physical well-being. There were
exercises conducted with great vigor and rejoicing, followed
by a tub, artesian cold, and a loud and joyous singing of
ballads.

At fifty R. H. D. might have posed to some Praxiteles and,
copied in marble, gone down the ages as "statue of a young
athlete." He stood six feet and over, straight as a Sioux
chief, a noble and leonine head carried by a splendid torso.
His skin was as fine and clean as a child's. He weighed
nearly two hundred pounds and had no fat on him. He was the
weight-throwing rather than the running type of athlete, but
so tenaciously had he clung to the suppleness of his
adolescent days that he could stand stiff-legged and lay his
hands flat upon the floor.

The singing over, silence reigned. But if you had listened at
his door you must have heard a pen going, swiftly and boldly.
He was hard at work, doing unto others what others had done
unto him. You were a stranger to him; some magazine had
accepted a story that you had written and published it.
R. H. D. had found something to like and admire in that story
(very little perhaps), and it was his duty and pleasure to
tell you so. If he had liked the story very much he would
send you instead of a note a telegram. Or it might be that
you had drawn a picture, or, as a cub reporter, had shown
golden promise in a half column of unsigned print, R. H. D.
would find you out, and find time to praise you and help you.
So it was that when he emerged from his room at sharp eight
o'clock, he was wide-awake and happy and hungry, and whistled
and double-shuffled with his feet, out of excessive energy,
and carried in his hands a whole sheaf of notes and letters
and telegrams.

Breakfast with him was not the usual American breakfast, a
sullen, dyspeptic gathering of persons who only the night
before had rejoiced in each other's society. With him it was
the time when the mind is, or ought to be, at its best, the
body at its freshest and hungriest. Discussions of the latest
plays and novels, the doings and undoings of statesmen,
laughter and sentiment--to him, at breakfast, these things
were as important as sausages and thick cream.

Breakfast over, there was no dawdling and putting off of the
day's work (else how, at eleven sharp, could tennis be played
with a free conscience?). Loving, as he did, everything
connected with a newspaper, he would now pass by those on the
hall-table with never so much as a wistful glance, and hurry
to his workroom.

He wrote sitting down. He wrote standing up. And, almost you
may say, he wrote walking up and down. Some people,
accustomed to the delicious ease and clarity of his style,
imagine that he wrote very easily. He did and he didn't.
Letters, easy, clear, to the point, and gorgeously human,
flowed from him without let or hindrance. That masterpiece of
corresponding, "The German March Through Brussels," was
probably written almost as fast as he could talk (next to
Phillips Brooks, he was the fastest talker I ever heard), but
when it came to fiction he had no facility at all. Perhaps I
should say that he held in contempt any facility that he may
have had. It was owing to his incomparable energy and Joblike
patience that he ever gave us any fiction at all. Every
phrase in his fiction was, of all the myriad phrases he could
think of, the fittest in his relentless judgment to survive.
Phrases, paragraphs, pages, whole stories even, were written
over and over again. He worked upon a principle of
elimination. If he wished to describe an automobile turning
in at a gate, he made first a long and elaborate description
from which there was omitted no detail, which the most
observant pair of eyes in Christendom had ever noted with
reference to just such a turning. Thereupon he would begin a
process of omitting one by one those details which he had
been at such pains to recall; and after each omission he
would ask himself: "Does the picture remain?" If it did not,
he restored the detail which he had just omitted, and
experimented with the sacrifice of some other, and so on, and
so on, until after Herculean labor there remained for the
reader one of those swiftly flashed, ice-clear pictures
(complete in every detail) with which his tales and romances
are so delightfully and continuously adorned.

But it is quarter to eleven, and, this being a time of
holiday, R. H. D. emerges from his workroom happy to think
that he has placed one hundred and seven words between
himself and the wolf who hangs about every writer's door. He
isn't satisfied with those hundred and seven words. He never
was in the least satisfied with anything that he wrote, but
he has searched his mind and his conscience and he believes
that under the circumstances they are the very best that he
can do. Anyway, they can stand in their present order until--
after lunch.

A sign of his youth was the fact that to the day of his death
he had denied himself the luxury and slothfulness of habits.
I have never seen him smoke automatically as most men do. He
had too much respect for his own powers of enjoyment and for
the sensibilities, perhaps, of the best Havana tobacco. At a
time of his own deliberate choosing, often after many hours
of hankering and renunciation, he smoked his cigar. He smoked
it with delight, with a sense of being rewarded, and he used
all the smoke there was in it.

He dearly loved the best food, the best champagne, and the
best Scotch whiskey. But these things were friends to him,
and not enemies. He had toward food and drink the Continental
attitude; namely, that quality is far more important than
quantity; and he got his exhilaration from the fact that he
was drinking champagne and not from the champagne. Perhaps I
shall do well to say that on questions of right and wrong he
had a will of iron. All his life he moved resolutely in
whichever direction his conscience pointed; and, although
that ever present and never obtrusive conscience of his made
mistakes of judgment now and then, as must all consciences, I
think it can never once have tricked him into any action that
was impure or unclean. Some critics maintain that the heroes
and heroines of his books are impossibly pure and innocent
young people. R. H. D. never called upon his characters for
any trait of virtue, or renunciation, or self-mastery of
which his own life could not furnish examples.

Fortunately, he did not have for his friends the same
conscience that he had for himself. His great gift of
eyesight and observation failed him in his judgments upon his
friends. If only you loved him, you could get your biggest
failures of conduct somewhat more than forgiven, without any
trouble at all. And of your mole-hill virtues he made
splendid mountains. He only interfered with you when he was
afraid that you were going to hurt some one else whom he also
loved. Once I had a telegram from him which urged me for
heaven's sake not to forget that the next day was my wife's
birthday. Whether I had forgotten it or not is my own private
affair. And when I declared that I had read a story which I
liked very, very much and was going to write to the author to
tell him so, he always kept at me till the letter was
written.

Have I said that he had no habits? Every day, when he was
away from her, he wrote a letter to his mother, and no swift
scrawl at that, for, no matter how crowded and eventful the
day, he wrote her the best letter that he could write. That
was the only habit he had. He was a slave to it.

Once I saw R. H. D. greet his old mother after an absence.
They threw their arms about each other and rocked to and fro
for a long time. And it hadn't been a long absence at that.
No ocean had been between them; her heart had not been in her
mouth with the thought that he was under fire, or about to
become a victim of jungle fever. He had only been away upon a
little expedition, a mere matter of digging for buried
treasure. We had found the treasure, part of it a chipmunk's
skull and a broken arrow-head, and R. H. D. had been absent
from his mother for nearly two hours and a half.

I set about this article with the knowledge that I must fail
to give more than a few hints of what he was like. There
isn't much more space at my command, and there were so many
sides to him that to touch upon them all would fill a volume.
There were the patriotism and the Americanism, as much a part
of him as the marrow of his bones, and from which sprang all
those brilliant headlong letters to the newspapers; those
trenchant assaults upon evil-doers in public office, those
quixotic efforts to redress wrongs, and those simple and
dexterous exposures of this and that, from an absolutely
unexpected point of view. He was a quickener of the public
conscience. That people are beginning to think tolerantly of
preparedness, that a nation which at one time looked yellow
as a dandelion is beginning to turn Red, White, and Blue is
owing in some measure to him.

R. H. D. thought that war was unspeakably terrible. He
thought that peace at the price which our country has been
forced to pay for it was infinitely worse. And he was one of
those who have gradually taught this country to see the
matter in the same way.

I must come to a close now, and I have hardly scratched the
surface of my subject. And that is a failure which I feel
keenly but which was inevitable. As R. H. D. himself used to
say of those deplorable "personal interviews" which appear in
the newspapers, and in which the important person interviewed
is made by the cub reporter to say things which he never
said, or thought, or dreamed of--"You can't expect a fifteen-
dollar-a-week brain to describe a thousand-dollar-a-week
brain."

There is, however, one question which I should attempt to
answer. No two men are alike. In what one salient thing did
R. H. D. differ from other men--differ in his personal
character and in the character of his work? And that question
I can answer offhand, without taking thought, and be sure
that I am right.

An analysis of his works, a study of that book which the
Recording Angel keeps will show one dominant characteristic
to which even his brilliancy, his clarity of style, his
excellent mechanism as a writer are subordinate; and to
which, as a man, even his sense of duty, his powers of
affection, of forgiveness, of loving-kindness are
subordinate, too; and that characteristic is cleanliness.

The biggest force for cleanliness that was in the world has
gone out of the world--gone to that Happy Hunting Ground
where "Nobody hunts us and there is nothing to hunt."
GOUVERNEUR MORRIS.



Chapter 1

THE RED CROSS GIRL

When Spencer Flagg laid the foundation-stone for the new
million-dollar wing he was adding to the Flagg Home for
Convalescents, on the hills above Greenwich, the New York
REPUBLIC sent Sam Ward to cover the story, and with him
Redding to take photographs. It was a crisp, beautiful day in
October, full of sunshine and the joy of living, and from the
great lawn in front of the Home you could see half over
Connecticut and across the waters of the Sound to Oyster Bay.

Upon Sam Ward, however, the beauties of Nature were wasted.
When, the night previous, he had been given the assignment he
had sulked, and he was still sulking. Only a year before he
had graduated into New York from a small up-state college and
a small up-state newspaper, but already he was a "star" man,
and Hewitt, the city editor, humored him.

"What's the matter with the story?" asked the city editor.
"With the speeches and lists of names it ought to run to two
columns."

"Suppose it does!" exclaimed Ward; "anybody can collect
type-written speeches and lists of names. That's a messenger
boy's job. Where's there any heart-interest in a Wall Street
broker like Flagg waving a silver trowel and singing, 'See
what a good boy am!' and a lot of grownup men in pinafores
saying, 'This stone is well and truly laid.' Where's the
story in that?"

"When I was a reporter," declared the city editor, "I used to
be glad to get a day in the country."

"Because you'd never lived in the country," returned Sam. "If
you'd wasted twenty-six years in the backwoods, as I did,
you'd know that every minute you spend outside of New York
you're robbing yourself."

"Of what?" demanded the city editor. "There's nothing to New
York except cement, iron girders, noise, and zinc garbage
cans. You never see the sun in New York; you never see the
moon unless you stand in the middle of the street and bend
backward. We never see flowers in New York except on the
women's hats. We never see the women except in cages in the
elevators--they spend their lives shooting up and down
elevator shafts in department stores, in apartment houses, in
office buildings. And we never see children in New York
because the janitors won't let the women who live in
elevators have children! Don't talk to me! New York's a
Little Nemo nightmare. It's a joke. It's an insult!"

"How curious!" said Sam. "Now I see why they took you off the
street and made you a city editor. I don't agree with
anything you say. Especially are you wrong about the women.
They ought to be caged in elevators, but they're not.
Instead, they flash past you in the street; they shine upon
you from boxes in the theatre; they frown at you from the
tops of buses; they smile at you from the cushions of a taxi,
across restaurant tables under red candle shades, when you
offer them a seat in the subway. They are the only thing in
New York that gives me any trouble."

The city editor sighed. "How young you are!" he exclaimed.
"However, to-morrow you will be free from your only trouble.
There will be few women at the celebration, and they will be
interested only in convalescents--and you do not look like a
convalescent."

Sam Ward sat at the outer edge of the crowd of overdressed
females and overfed men, and, with a sardonic smile, listened
to Flagg telling his assembled friends and sycophants how
glad he was they were there to see him give away a million
dollars.

"Aren't you going to get his speech?", asked Redding, the
staff photographer.

"Get HIS speech!" said Sam. "They have Pinkertons all over
the grounds to see that you don't escape with less than three
copies. I'm waiting to hear the ritual they always have, and
then I'm going to sprint for the first train back to the
centre of civilization."

"There's going to be a fine lunch," said Redding, "and
reporters are expected. I asked the policeman if we were, and
he said we were."

Sam rose, shook his trousers into place, stuck his stick
under his armpit and smoothed his yellow gloves. He was very
thoughtful of his clothes and always treated them with
courtesy.

"You can have my share," he said. "I cannot forget that I am
fifty-five minutes from Broadway. And even if I were starving
I would rather have a club sandwich in New York than a
Thanksgiving turkey dinner in New Rochelle."

He nodded and with eager, athletic strides started toward the
iron gates; but he did not reach the iron gates, for on the
instant trouble barred his way. Trouble came to him wearing
the blue cambric uniform of a nursing sister, with a red
cross on her arm, with a white collar turned down, white
cuffs turned back, and a tiny black velvet bonnet. A bow of
white lawn chucked her impudently under the chin. She had
hair like golden-rod and eyes as blue as flax, and a
complexion of such health and cleanliness and dewiness as
blooms only on trained nurses.

She was so lovely that Redding swung his hooded camera at her
as swiftly as a cowboy could have covered her with his gun.

Reporters become star reporters because they observe things
that other people miss and because they do not let it appear
that they have observed them. When the great man who is being
interviewed blurts out that which is indiscreet but most
important, the cub reporter says: "That's most interesting,
sir. I'll make a note of that." And so warns the great man
into silence. But the star reporter receives the indiscreet
utterance as though it bored him; and the great man does not
know he has blundered until he reads of it the next morning
under screaming headlines.

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