Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis. Richard Harding Davis
letters are a great delight to me but I think you are going entirely too quickly. You do not feel it now but you are simply hurrying through the courses of your long dinner so rapidly that when dessert comes you will not be up to it. A day or two's rest and less greed to see many things would be much more fun I should think, and you will enjoy those days more to look back to when you wandered around some little town by yourselves and made discoveries than those you spent doing what you feel you ought to do. Excuse this lecture but I know that when I got to Paris I wanted to do nothing but sit still and read and let "sights" go—You will soon learn not to duplicate and that one cathedral will answer for a dozen. And I am disappointed in your mad desire to get to Edinboro to get letters from home, as though you couldn't get letters from me every day of your life and as if there were not enough of you together to keep from getting homesick. I am ashamed of you. But that is all the scolding I have to do for I do not know what has given me more pleasure than your letters and Nora's especially. They tell me the best news in the world and that is, that you are all getting as much happiness out of it as I have prayed you would. I may go over in September myself. But I would only go to London. Now, then for Home news. I have sold the "Reporter Who Made Himself King" to McClure's for $300. to be published in the syndicate in August. I have finished "Her First Appearance" and Gibson is doing the illustrations, three. I got $175. for it.
I am now at work on a story about Arthur Cumnock, Harvard's football captain who was the hero of Class Day. It will come out this week and will match Lieut. Grant's chance. In July I begin a story called the "Traveller's Tale" which will be used in the November Harper. That is all I am doing.
So far the notices of "Gallegher" have been very good, I mean the English ones.
I went up to Class Day on Friday and spent the day with Miss Fairchild and Miss Howells and with Mr. H. for chaperone. He is getting old and says he never deserved the fuss they made over him. We had a pretty perfect day although it threatened rain most of the time. We wandered around from one spread to another meeting beautifully dressed girls everywhere and "lions" and celebrities. Then the fight for the roses around the tree was very interesting and picturesque and arena like and the best of all was sitting in the broad window seats of the dormitories with a Girl or two, generally "a" girl and listening to the glee club sing and watching the lanterns and the crowds of people as beautiful as Redfern could make them.
Half of Seabright was burnt down last week but not my half, although the fire destroyed all the stores and fishermen's houses and stopped only one house away from Pannachi's, where I will put up. I am very well and content and look forward to much pleasure this summer at Seabright and much work. I find I have seldom been so happy as when working hard and fast as I have been forced to do these last two weeks and so I will keep it up. Not in such a way as to hurt me but just enough to keep me happy. DICK.
NEW YORK, August 1891. From The Pall Mall Budget Gazette.
"The Americans are saying, by the way, that they have discovered a Rudyard Kipling of their own. This is Mr. Richard Harding Davis, a volume of whose stories has been published this week by Mr. Osgood. Mr. Davis is only twenty-six, was for sometime on the staff of the New York Evening Sun. He is now the editor of Harper's Weekly."
That is me. I have also a mother and sister who once went to London and what do you think they first went to see, in London, mind you. They got into a four wheeler and they said "cabby drive as fast as you can," not knowing that four wheelers never go faster than a dead march—" to—"where do you think? St. Paul's, the Temple, the Abbey, their lodgings, the Houses of Parliament—the Pavilion Music Hall—the Tower—no to none of these—"To the Post Office." That is what my mother and sister did! After this when they hint that they would like to go again and say "these muffins are not English muffins" and "do you remember the little Inn at Chester, ah, those were happy days," I will say, "And do you remember the Post Office in Edinburgh and London. We have none such in America." And as they only go abroad to get letters they will hereafter go to Rittenhouse Square and I will write letters to them from London. All this shows that a simple hurriedly written letter from Richard Harding Davis is of more value than all the show places of London. It makes me quite PROUD. And so does this:
"'Gallegher' is as good as anything of Bret Harte's, although it is in Mr. Davis's own vein, not in the borrowed vein of Bret Harte or anybody else. 'The Cynical Miss Catherwaight' is very good, too, and 'Mr. Raegen' is still better."
But on the other hand, it makes me tired, and so does this:
"'The Other Woman' is a story which offends good taste in more than one way. It is a blunder to have written it, a greater blunder to have published it, and a greater blunder STILL to have republished it."
I suppose now that Dad has crossed with Prince George and Nora has seen the Emperor, that you will be proud too. But you will be prouder of your darling boy Charles, even though he does get wiped out at Seabright next week and you will be even prouder when he writes great stories for The Evening Sun.
RICHARD.
The Players, 16 Gramercy Park.
24th, 1891.
DEAR FAMILY:
I had a great day at the game and going there and coming back. I met a great many old football men and almost all of them spoke of the "Out of the Game" story. Cumnock, Camp, Poe, Terry and lots more whose names mean nothing to you, so ignorant are you, were there and we had long talks. I went to see Cleveland yesterday about a thing of which I have thought much and talked less and that was going into politics in this country. To say he discouraged me in so doing would be saying the rain is wet. He seemed to think breaking stones as a means of getting fame and fortune was quicker and more genteel. I also saw her and the BABY. She explained why she had not written you and also incidentally why she HAD written Childs. I do not know as what Cleveland said made much impression upon me—although I found out what I could expect from him—that is nothing here but apparently a place abroad if I wanted it. But he thought Congress was perfectly feasible but the greatest folly to go there.
DICK.
CHAPTER V
FIRST TRAVEL ARTICLES
For Richard these first years in New York were filled to overflowing with many varied interests, quite enough to satisfy most young men of twenty-seven. He had come and seen and to a degree, so far as the limitation of his work would permit, had conquered New York, but Richard thoroughly realized that New York was not only a very small part of the world but of his own country, and that to write about his own people and his own country and other people and other lands he must start his travels at an early age, and go on travelling until the end. And for the twenty-five years that followed that was what Richard did. Even when he was not on his travels but working on a novel or a play at Marion or later on at Mount Kisco, so far as it was possible he kept in touch with events that were happening and the friends that he had made all over the globe. He subscribed to most of the English and French illustrated periodicals and to one London daily newspaper which every day he read with the same interest that he read half a dozen New York newspapers and the interest was always that of the trained editor at work. Richard was not only physically restless but his mind practically never relaxed. When others, tired after a hard day's work or play, would devote the evening to cards or billiards or chatter, Richard would write letters or pore over some strange foreign magazine, consult maps, make notes, or read the stories of his contemporaries. He practically read every American magazine from cover to cover—advertisements were a delight to him, and the finding of a new writer gave him as much pleasure as if he had been the fiction editor who had accepted the first story by the embryo genius. The official organs of our army and navy he found of particular interest. Not only did he thus follow the movements of his friends in these branches of