The Lost Road | Page 7

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