The Red Cross Girl. Richard Harding Davis
he could write. That was the only habit he had. He was a slave to it.
Once I saw R. H. D. greet his old mother after an absence. They threw their arms about each other and rocked to and fro for a long time. And it hadn't been a long absence at that. No ocean had been between them; her heart had not been in her mouth with the thought that he was under fire, or about to become a victim of jungle fever. He had only been away upon a little expedition, a mere matter of digging for buried treasure. We had found the treasure, part of it a chipmunk's skull and a broken arrow-head, and R. H. D. had been absent from his mother for nearly two hours and a half.
I set about this article with the knowledge that I must fail to give more than a few hints of what he was like. There isn't much more space at my command, and there were so many sides to him that to touch upon them all would fill a volume. There were the patriotism and the Americanism, as much a part of him as the marrow of his bones, and from which sprang all those brilliant headlong letters to the newspapers; those trenchant assaults upon evil-doers in public office, those quixotic efforts to redress wrongs, and those simple and dexterous exposures of this and that, from an absolutely unexpected point of view. He was a quickener of the public conscience. That people are beginning to think tolerantly of preparedness, that a nation which at one time looked yellow as a dandelion is beginning to turn Red, White, and Blue is owing in some measure to him.
R. H. D. thought that war was unspeakably terrible. He thought that peace at the price which our country has been forced to pay for it was infinitely worse. And he was one of those who have gradually taught this country to see the matter in the same way.
I must come to a close now, and I have hardly scratched the surface of my subject. And that is a failure which I feel keenly but which was inevitable. As R. H. D. himself used to say of those deplorable “personal interviews” which appear in the newspapers, and in which the important person interviewed is made by the cub reporter to say things which he never said, or thought, or dreamed of—“You can't expect a fifteen-dollar-a-week brain to describe a thousand-dollar-a-week brain.”
There is, however, one question which I should attempt to answer. No two men are alike. In what one salient thing did R. H. D. differ from other men—differ in his personal character and in the character of his work? And that question I can answer offhand, without taking thought, and be sure that I am right.
An analysis of his works, a study of that book which the Recording Angel keeps will show one dominant characteristic to which even his brilliancy, his clarity of style, his excellent mechanism as a writer are subordinate; and to which, as a man, even his sense of duty, his powers of affection, of forgiveness, of loving-kindness are subordinate, too; and that characteristic is cleanliness.
The biggest force for cleanliness that was in the world has gone out of the world—gone to that Happy Hunting Ground where “Nobody hunts us and there is nothing to hunt.”
GOUVERNEUR MORRIS.
Chapter 1. THE RED CROSS GIRL
When Spencer Flagg laid the foundation-stone for the new million-dollar wing he was adding to the Flagg Home for Convalescents, on the hills above Greenwich, the New York REPUBLIC sent Sam Ward to cover the story, and with him Redding to take photographs. It was a crisp, beautiful day in October, full of sunshine and the joy of living, and from the great lawn in front of the Home you could see half over Connecticut and across the waters of the Sound to Oyster Bay.
Upon Sam Ward, however, the beauties of Nature were wasted. When, the night previous, he had been given the assignment he had sulked, and he was still sulking. Only a year before he had graduated into New York from a small up-state college and a small up-state newspaper, but already he was a “star” man, and Hewitt, the city editor, humored him.
“What's the matter with the story?” asked the city editor. “With the speeches and lists of names it ought to run to two columns.”
“Suppose it does!” exclaimed Ward; “anybody can collect type-written speeches and lists of names. That's a messenger boy's job. Where's there any heart-interest in a Wall Street broker like Flagg waving a silver trowel and singing, 'See what a good boy am!' and a lot of grownup men in pinafores saying, 'This stone is well and truly laid.' Where's the story in that?”
“When I was a reporter,” declared the city editor, “I used to be glad to get a day in the country.”
“Because you'd never lived in the country,” returned Sam. “If you'd wasted twenty-six years in the backwoods, as I did, you'd know that every minute you spend outside of New York you're robbing yourself.”
“Of what?” demanded the city editor. “There's nothing to New York except cement, iron girders, noise, and zinc garbage cans. You never see the sun in New York; you never see the moon unless you stand in the middle of the street and bend backward. We never see flowers in New York except on the women's hats. We never see the women except in cages in the elevators—they spend their lives shooting up and down elevator shafts in department stores, in apartment houses, in office buildings. And we never see children in New York because the janitors won't let the women who live in elevators have children! Don't talk to me! New York's a Little Nemo nightmare. It's a joke. It's an insult!”
“How curious!” said Sam. “Now I see why they took you off the street and made you a city editor. I don't agree with anything you say. Especially are you wrong about the women. They ought to be caged in elevators, but they're not. Instead, they flash past you in the street; they shine upon you from boxes in the theatre; they frown at you from the tops of buses; they smile at you from the cushions of a taxi, across restaurant tables under red candle shades, when you offer them a seat in the subway. They are the only thing in New York that gives me any trouble.”
The city editor sighed. “How young you are!” he exclaimed. “However, to-morrow you will be free from your only trouble. There will be few women at the celebration, and they will be interested only in convalescents—and you do not look like a convalescent.”
Sam Ward sat at the outer edge of the crowd of overdressed females and overfed men, and, with a sardonic smile, listened to Flagg telling his assembled friends and sycophants how glad he was they were there to see him give away a million dollars.
“Aren't you going to get his speech?”, asked Redding, the staff photographer.
“Get HIS speech!” said Sam. “They have Pinkertons all over the grounds to see that you don't escape with less than three copies. I'm waiting to hear the ritual they always have, and then I'm going to sprint for the first train back to the centre of civilization.”
“There's going to be a fine lunch,” said Redding, “and reporters are expected. I asked the policeman if we were, and he said we were.”
Sam rose, shook his trousers into place, stuck his stick under his armpit and smoothed his yellow gloves. He was very thoughtful of his clothes and always treated them with courtesy.
“You can have my share,” he said. “I cannot forget that I am fifty-five minutes from Broadway. And even if I were starving I would rather have a club sandwich in New York than a Thanksgiving turkey dinner in New Rochelle.”
He nodded and with eager, athletic strides started toward the iron gates; but he did not reach the iron gates, for on the instant trouble barred his way. Trouble came to him wearing the blue cambric uniform of a nursing sister, with a red cross on her arm, with a white collar turned down, white cuffs turned back, and a tiny black velvet bonnet. A bow of white lawn chucked her impudently under the chin. She had hair like golden-rod and eyes as blue as flax, and a complexion of such health and cleanliness and dewiness as blooms only on trained nurses.
She was so lovely that Redding swung his hooded camera at her as swiftly as a cowboy could have covered her with his gun.
Reporters