Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis | Page 6

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 molehill 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 arrowhead, 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