In 1914 a motion-picture company arranged to make a feature film of the
play, and Dick and I went with their outfit to Santiago de Cuba, where,
twenty years earlier, he had found the inspiration for his story and
out of which city and its environs he had fashioned his supposititious
republic of Olancho. On that trip he was the idol of the company.
With the men in the smoking-room of the steamer there were the
numberless playful stories, in the rough, of the experiences on all
five continents and seven seas that were the backgrounds of his
published tales.
At Santiago, if an official was to be persuaded to consent to some
unprecedented seizure of the streets, or a diplomat invoked for the
assistance of the Army or the Navy, it was the experience and good
judgment of Dick Davis that controlled the task. In the field there
were his helpful suggestions of work and make-up to the actors, and on
the boat and train and in hotel and camp the lady members met in him an
easy courtesy and understanding at once fraternal and impersonal.
That picture enterprise he has described in an article, entitled
"Breaking into the Movies," which was printed in Scribner's Magazine.
The element that he could not put into the account, and which is
particularly pertinent to this page, is the author of "Soldiers of
Fortune" as he revealed himself to me both with intention and
unconsciously in the presence of the familiar scenes.
For three weeks, with the exception of one or two occasions when some
local dignitary captured the revisiting lion, he and I spent our
evenings together at a cafe table over looking "the great square,"
which he sketches so deftly in its atmosphere when Clay and the
Langhams and Stuart dine there: "At one end of the plaza the
President's band was playing native waltzes that came throbbing through
the trees and beating softly above the rustling skirts and clinking
spurs of the senoritas and officers sweeping by in two opposite circles
around the edges of the tessellated pavements. Above the palms around
the square arose the dim, white facade of the Cathedral, with the
bronze statue of Anduella the liberator of Olancho, who answered with
his upraised arm and cocked hat the cheers of an imaginary populace."
Twenty years had gone by since Dick had received the impression that
wrote those lines, and now sometimes after dinner half a long cigar
would burn out as he mused over the picture and the dreams that had
gone between. From one long silence he said: "I think I'll come back
here this winter and bring Mrs. Davis with me--stay a couple of
months." What a fine compliment to a wife to have the thought of her
and that plan emerge from that deep and romantic background!
And again, later, apropos of nothing but what one guessed from the
dreamer's expressive face, he said: "I had remembered it as so much
larger"--indicating the square--"until I saw it again when we came down
with the army." A tolerant smile--he might have explained that it is
always so on revisiting scenes that have impressed us deeply in our
earlier days, but he let the smile do that. One of his charms as
companion was that restful ability not to talk if you knew it, too.
The picture people began their film with a showing of the "mountains
which jutted out into the ocean and suggested roughly the five knuckles
of a giant's hand clenched and lying flat upon the surface of the
water." That formation of the sea wall is just outside of Santiago.
"The waves tunnelled their way easily enough until they ran up against
those five mountains and then they had to fall back." How natural for
one of us to be unimpressed by such a feature of the landscape, and yet
how characteristic of Dick Davis to see the elemental fight that it
recorded and get the hint for the whole of the engineering struggle
that is so much of his book!
We went over those mountains together, where two decades before he had
planted his banner of romance. We visited the mines and the railroads,
and everywhere found some superintendent or foreman or engineer who
remembered Davis. He had guessed at nothing. Everywhere he had
overlaid the facts with adventure and with beauty, but he had been on
sure footing all the time. His prototype of MacWilliams was dead.
Together we visited the wooden cross with which the miners had marked
his grave.
One is tempted to go choosing through his book again and rob its
surprises by reminiscence--but I refrain. Yet it is only justice to
point out that for "Soldiers of Fortune," as for the "Men of Zanzibar,"
"Three Gringos in Venezuela," "The King's Jackal," "Ranson's Folly,"
and his other books, he got his structure and his color at first hand.
He was a writer and not a rewriter. And another thing we must note in
his writing is his cleanliness. It is safe stuff to give to a young
fellow who likes to take off his hat and dilate his nostrils and feel
the wind in his face. Like water at the source, it is undefiled.