CHAPTER CIII
THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE
Having considered a fiction writer whom the great public rejected, let us now consider one whom it enthusiastically acclaimed.
Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia in 1864. His father was a famous editor, and he was raised among cultured people, with every advantage of prestige and social position. He was handsome, full of energy, and all his life made hosts of friends. After getting through college, he took a job with Arthur Brisbane on the New York “Evening Sun,” where his brother tells us he underwent “considerable privation,” his salary being only thirty dollars a week at the start, plus his earnings from short stories. During this same period the present writer was living in New York upon four and one-half a week, and never sure of having that; so you see that standards of “considerable privation” vary considerably.
Davis’s first stories dealt with a hero named Van Bibber, a scion of the Fifth Avenue plutocracy, handsome, debonair, wearing his clothes with irreproachable taste, and devoting his abundant leisure to the reforming of New York; Haroun-al-Raschid brought down to date, Sir Galahad in a dress-suit. Happy, care-free, he wanders, with innocent heart and open purse, making things right wherever he finds them wrong. He has the entrée behind the scenes of theatres, but not to seduce the chorus girls--ah, nothing like that, but to rescue a sweet, innocent child and carry her home to a cold, proud, cruel Fifth Avenue father who has refused to acknowledge his wild oat. That done, Van Bibber roams again, and jumps on the neck of a burglar, and kicks his pistol out of his hand, and then gets sorry for him, and buys him a ticket to Montana, where his wife and daughter wait for him to come and reform. Then he wanders to the Bowery, and sees a rowdy insulting a lady; it is not enough for him to demonstrate the natural superiority of the plutocracy by putting this one rowdy to flight, he must crown the demonstration by accepting a challenge from three of “the purest specimens of the tough of the East Side waterfront,” and routing them in the presence of the proud aristocratic beauty. The charm of the story lies in the truly elegant insouciance with which young Van Bibber does all these things--the manner of a juggler keeping six billiard-balls in the air.
Here, you see, is the perfect type of the ruling-class glorifier: Homer and the Arabian Nights, Don Quixote and King Arthur, Dumas, Ouida, Rudyard Kipling and Mrs. Humphry Ward all rolled into one. No wonder our grandfathers were captivated, or that the innocent souls who edited “Harper’s” and “Scribner’s” extended the freedom of their columns to this inspired creator of plutocratic romance! It is interesting to note that our “Dick” came from the most English place in the United States, and looked like an Englishman and, perhaps as a matter of instinct, dressed and talked like an Englishman. In his early writing days he lived for a few months at Oxford, and the students of Balliol College took him in on equal footing, an honor never before accorded to a non-student American.
The English ruling class had taken upon itself the task of colonizing and exploiting the rest of the world, and the American ruling class was following suit, and Richard Harding Davis became the prophet of both. Throughout Central America and the West Indies the process is invariable: American capitalists bribe the governments of these countries and get enormously valuable concessions, then they send in engineers and other handsome young heroes clad in khaki and puttees and with automatics in their belts. These heroes engage the natives of the country to exploit the natural resources and ship out the wealth of the country, to be spent upon monkey dinners at Newport and champagne suppers in Broadway lobster palaces. Sooner or later the natives become irritated at the sight of their natural resources being exported for such purposes, so they revolt against the native government which has sold them to the Yankees. Then the handsome young Yankee heroes draw their automatics and bring up machine guns, and gloriously defend the native government which they have bought and paid for. The ending comes triumphantly with a Yankee gunboat in the harbor, and some marines charging up the slope of a hill waving Old Glory, while the audience leaps from its seats and cheers for five minutes.
“Soldiers of Fortune” was “Dick” Davis’s biggest success. It brought him reservoirs of money, first as a serial, then as a novel, then as a drama, and finally as a movie. His other novels were like it, in that they dealt with members of the ruling class gloriously making or marrying fortunes. The next was called “The Princess Aline,” and told about a young, wealthy, handsome and aristocratic artist--so many elements of good fortune!--who falls in love with the photograph of a German princess. The model for this exquisite heroine was the future Empress of Russia; but Davis did not live to write a sequel, showing the final destiny of his heroine, her mangled body dumped into a well along with her husband and four exquisite daughters. Recalling these novels at the present hour, I see the international plutocracy with all its exquisite wives and daughters, crouched trembling upon the top of a mountain of gold and jewels, while all around them the handsome young hired heroes peer out over the sights of machine guns at the massed fury of the exploited millions of mankind--white, black, yellow, brown, red, and mixed.
Davis became a war correspondent and spent his time racing over the earth from one scene of excitement to another. I have run through the volume of his letters and jotted down a few date lines in the order they occur: Cuba, London, Egypt, Gibraltar, Paris, Central America, South America, Moscow, Budapest, Havana, London, Florence, Greece, Havana, Cape Town, Pretoria, Aix-les-Bains, Massachusetts, Madrid, London, San Francisco, Tokio, Manchuria, Havana, the Congo, New York, London, Santiago, Vera Cruz, Belgium, Plattsburg, Paris, Athens, Rome. If you know the history of the world for twenty-five years beginning with 1890 you can connect each of these geographical names with a coronation, a jubilee, a war, or other ruling-class recreation.
All through the letters runs the theme of money, the Aladdin’s tale of a soldier of literary fortune. He gets five thousand dollars for the serial rights of “Soldiers of Fortune” from “Scribner’s Magazine”; he gets five hundred dollars for reporting a foot-ball game; he gets three thousand dollars and expenses for a month’s reporting of the Cuban struggle with Spain, and when America enters the conflict, he gets ten cents a word from “Scribner’s Magazine” and four hundred dollars a week and expenses from the New York “Times.”
Everywhere he goes he is, of course, a lion, and moves only in the highest circles. His letters are full of diplomats and generals and lords and ladies and kings and queens, together with the most famous actors and literary lights. He is presented at Court--and by this, needless to say, I mean the Court of their Majesties the King and Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and Emperor and Empress of India. And all through the letters we note dinner-parties and banquets and champagne-suppers and cocktails--interrupted by a siege with sciatica, preparing us for the quick curtain, when our ruling-class hero departs his successful life at the age of fifty-two.
New York is a place of mean and envious gossip, and one of its diversions was telling anecdotes illustrating the snobbery and self-importance of Richard Harding Davis. It appears that in the days of his extraordinary prosperity he did not always recognize his former newspaper cronies when he met them on the street. Perhaps he had noted that so many of these former cronies took the occasion to borrow money from him. Anyhow, I have one anecdote to contribute to the collection.
It was early in 1914, a period of great depression in my own life and fortunes. Davis, of course, never had any depressions; he had just come back from Cuba, where he had turned “Soldiers of Fortune” into a moving picture film, and it was now being launched on Broadway with enormous éclat. I happened to know the manager, and was invited to the opening performance, where in the lobby I was introduced to the great author and lion of the occasion. When he heard my name his face lighted up, and he gave me a warm hand-clasp, exclaiming, “Ah, now! You write books because you really have something to say, while I write only to make money!” It was so different from what I expected that I was completely taken aback, and could only make a deprecating murmur. “It is true,” he said; “I know it, and so do you.”
The reader may say that in telling this story I do more credit to Davis than to myself. But that is not my concern. What I have to do here is to report the statement of America’s leading soldier of literary fortune concerning his own work and its reason for being.
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