The Lost Road | Page 5

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.'