During the twenty years that I knew him Richard Harding Davis was
always going to some far-off land. He was just back from a trip
somewhere when I first saw him in his rooms in New York, rifle in hand,
in his sock feet and with his traps in confusion about him. He was
youth incarnate--ruddy, joyous, vigorous, adventurous, self-confident
youth--and, in all the years since, that first picture of him has
suffered no change with me. He was so intensely alive that I cannot
think of him as dead--and I do not. He is just away on another of
those trips and it really seems queer that I shall not hear him tell
about it.
We were together as correspondents in the Spanish War and in the
Russo-Japanese War we were together again; and so there is hardly any
angle from which I have not had the chance to know him. No man was
ever more misunderstood by those who did not know him or better
understood by those who knew him well, for he carried nothing in the
back of his head--no card that was not face up on the table. Every
thought, idea, purpose, principle within him was for the world to read
and to those who could not know how rigidly he matched his inner and
outer life he was almost unbelievable. He was exacting in friendship
because his standard was high and because he gave what he asked; and if
he told you of a fault he told you first of a virtue that made the
fault seem small indeed. But he told you and expected you to tell him.
Naturally, the indirection of the Japanese was incomprehensible to him.
He was not good at picking up strange tongues, and the Japanese
equivalent for the Saxon monosyllable for what the Japanese was to him
he never learned. For only one other word did he have more use and I
believe it was the only one he knew, "hyaku--hurry!" Over there I was
in constant fear for him because of his knight-errantry and his candor.
Once he came near being involved in a duel because of his quixotic
championship of a woman whom he barely knew, and disliked, and whose
absent husband he did not know at all. And more than once I looked for
a Japanese to draw his two-handed ancestral sword when Dick bluntly
demanded a reconciliation of his yea of yesterday with his nay of
today. Nine months passed and we never heard the whistle of bullet or
shell. Dick called himself a "cherry-blossom correspondent," and when
our ship left those shores each knew that the other went to his
state-room and in bitter chagrin and disappointment wept quite
childishly.
Of course, he was courageous--absurdly so--and, in spite of his
high-strung temperament, always calm and cool. At El Paso hill, the
day after the fight, the rest of us scurried for tree-trunks when a few
bullets whistled near; but Dick stalked out in the open and with his
field-glasses searched for the supposed sharpshooters in the trees.
Lying under a bomb-proof when the Fourth of July bombardment started, I
saw Dick going unhurriedly down the hill for his glasses, which he had
left in Colonel Roosevelt's tent, and unhurriedly going back up to the
trenches again. Under the circumstances I should have been content
with my naked eye. A bullet thudded close to where Dick lay with a
soldier.
"That hit you?" asked Dick. The soldier grunted "No," looked sidewise
at Dick, and muttered an oath of surprise. Dick had not taken his
glasses from his eyes. I saw him writhing on the ground with sciatica
during that campaign, like a snake, but pulling his twisted figure
straight and his tortured face into a smile if a soldier or stranger
passed.
He was easily the first reporter of his time--perhaps of all time. Out
of any incident or situation he could pick the most details that would
interest the most people and put them in a way that was pleasing to the
most people; and always, it seemed, he had the extraordinary good
judgment or the extraordinary good luck to be just where the most
interesting thing was taking place. Gouverneur Morris has written the
last word about Richard Harding Davis, and he, as every one must, laid
final stress on the clean body, clean heart, and clean mind of the man.
R. H. D. never wrote a line that cannot be given to his little daughter
when she is old enough to read, and I never heard a word pass his lips
that his own mother could not hear. There are many women in the world
like the women in his books. There are a few men like the men, and of
these Dick himself was one.