Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis. Richard Harding Davis
pulse and heartsome glow in it. Remember, hereafter, you have by it put on the bars against yourself preventing you doing any work less good. You have yourself made your record, you can't lower it. You can only beat it.
Lovingly, DAD.
In the latter part of December, 1890, Richard left The Evening Sun to become the managing editor of Harper's Weekly. George William Curtis was then its editor, and at this time no periodical had a broader or greater influence for the welfare of the country. As Richard was then but twenty-six, his appointment to his new editorial duties came as a distinct honor. The two years that Richard had spent on The Evening Sun had been probably the happiest he had ever known. He really loved New York, and at this time Paris and London held no such place in his affections as they did in later years. And indeed there was small reason why these should not have been happy years for any young man. At twenty-six Richard had already accomplished much, and his name had become a familiar one not only to New Yorkers but throughout the country. Youth and health he had, and many friends, and a talent that promised to carry him far in the profession he loved. His new position paid him a salary considerably larger than he had received heretofore, and he now demanded and received much higher terms for his stories. All of which was well for Richard because as his income grew so grew his tastes. I have known few men who cared less for money than did my brother, and I have known few who cared more for what it could buy for his friends and for himself. Money to him, and, during his life he made very large sums of it, he always chose to regard as income but never capital. A bond or a share of stock meant to him what it would bring that day on the Stock Exchange. The rainy day which is the bugaboo for the most of us, never seemed to show on his horizon. For a man whose livelihood depended on the lasting quality of his creative faculties he had an infinite faith in the future, and indeed his own experience seemed to show that he was justified in this belief. It could not have been very long after his start as a fiction writer that he received as high a price for his work as any of his contemporaries; and just previous to his death, more than twenty years later, he signed a contract to write six stories at a figure which, so far as I know, was the highest ever offered an American author. In any case, money or the lack of it certainly never caused Richard any worriment during the early days of which I write. For what he made he worked extremely hard, but the reputation and the spending of the money that this same hard work brought him caused him infinite happiness. He enjoyed the reputation he had won and the friends that such a reputation helped him to make; he enjoyed entertaining and being entertained, and he enjoyed pretty much all of the good things of life. And all of this he enjoyed with the naive, almost boyish enthusiasm that only one could to whom it had all been made possible at twenty-six. Of these happy days Booth Tarkington wrote at the time of my brother's death:
"To the college boy of the early nineties Richard Harding Davis was the 'beau ideal of jeunesse doree,' a sophisticated heart of gold. He was of that college boy's own age, but already an editor—already publishing books! His stalwart good looks were as familiar to us as were those of our own football captain; we knew his face as we knew the face of the President of the United States, but we infinitely preferred Davis's. When the Waldorf was wondrously completed, and we cut an exam. in Cuneiform Inscriptions for an excursion to see the world at lunch in its new magnificence, and Richard Harding Davis came into the Palm Room—then, oh, then, our day was radiant! That was the top of our fortune; we could never have hoped for so much. Of all the great people of every continent, this was the one we most desired to see."
Richard's intimate friends of these days were Charles Dana Gibson, who illustrated a number of my brother's stories, Robert Howard Russell, Albert La Montagne, Helen Benedict, now Mrs. Thomas Hastings, Ethel Barrymore, Maude Adams, E. H. Sothern, his brother, Sam, and Arthur Brisbane. None of this little circle was married at the time, its various members were seldom apart, and they extracted an enormous amount of fun out of life. I had recently settled in New York, and we had rooms at 10 East Twenty-eighth Street, where we lived very comfortably for many years. Indeed Richard did not leave them until his marriage in the summer of 1899. They were very pleasant, sunny rooms, and in the sitting-room, which Richard had made quite attractive, we gave many teas and supper-parties. But of all the happy incidents I can recall at the Twenty-eighth Street house, the one I remember most distinctly took place in the hallway the night that Richard received the first statement and check for his first book of short stories, and before the money had begun to come in as fast as it did afterward. We were on our way to dinner at some modest resort when we saw and at once recognized the long envelope on the mantel. Richard guessed it would be for one hundred and ninety dollars, but with a rather doubting heart I raised my guess to three hundred. And when, with trembling fingers, Richard had finally torn open the envelope and found a check for nine hundred and odd dollars, what a wild dance we did about the hall-table, and what a dinner we had that night! Not at the modest restaurant as originally intended, but at Delmonico's! It was during these days that Seymour Hicks and his lovely wife Ellaline Terriss first visited America, and they and Richard formed a mutual attachment that lasted until his death.
Richard had always taken an intense interest in the drama, and at the time he was managing editor of Harper's Weekly had made his first efforts as a playwright. Robert Hilliard did a one-act version of Richard's short story, "Her First Appearance," which under the title of "The Littlest Girl" he played in vaudeville for many years. E. H. Sothern and Richard had many schemes for writing a play together, but the only actual result they ever attained was a one-act version Sothern did at the old Lyceum of my brother's story, "The Disreputable Mr. Raegen." It was an extremely tense and absorbing drama, and Sothern was very fine in the part of Raegen, but for the forty-five minutes the playlet lasted Sothern had to hold the stage continuously alone, and as it preceded a play of the regulation length, the effort proved too much for the actor's strength, and after a few performances it was taken off. Although it was several years after this that my brother's first long play was produced he never lost interest in the craft of playwriting, and only waited for the time and means to really devote himself to it.
BOSTON, January 22nd, 1891.
DEAR FAMILY:—
This is just to say that I am alive and sleepy, and that my head is still its normal size, although I have at last found one man in Boston who has read one of my stories, and that was Barrymore from New York. The Fairchilds' dinner was a tremendous affair, and I was conquered absolutely by Mr. Howells, who went far, far out of his way to be as kind and charming as an old man could be. Yesterday Mrs. Whitman gave a tea in her studio. I thought she meant to have a half dozen young people to drink a cup with her, and I sauntered in in the most nonchalant manner to find that about everybody had been asked to meet me. And everybody came, principally owing to the "Harding Davis" part of the name for they all spoke of mother and so very dearly that it made me pretty near weep. Everybody came from old Dr. Holmes who never goes any place, to Mrs. "Jack" Gardner and all the debutantes. "I was on in that scene." In the evening I went with the Fairchilds to Mrs. Julia Ward Howe's to meet the S——s but made a point not to as he was talking like a cad when I heard him and Mrs. Fairchild and I agreed to be the only people in Boston who had not clasped his hand. There were only a few people present and Mrs. Howe recited the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which I thought very characteristic of the city. To-day I posed again and Cumnock took me over Cambridge and into all of the Clubs where I met some very nice boys and felt very old. Then we went to a tea Cushing gave in his rooms and to night I go to Mrs. Deland's. But the mornings with the Fairchilds are the best. DICK.
In the spring of 1891 my mother and sister, Nora, went abroad for the summer, and the following note was written to Richard just before my mother sailed:
DEAR DICK:
This is just to give my dearest love to you my darling. Some day at sea when I cannot hear you nor see you, whenever it is that you get it—night or morning—you may be sure that we are all loving and thinking of you.
Keep close to the Lord. Your Lord who never has refused to hear a prayer of yours.
Just think that I have kissed you a thousand times.
MOTHER.
FRANKLIN SQUARE, NEW YORK.
June, 1891.
DEAR MOTHER: