Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis | Page 5

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