"'What time did you break in here?' he asked.
"'Let me see,' yawned the bluecoat; 'Seven o' clock it was. I remember because that alarm was going off just as I got inside.'
"'That's my story,' said Davis, and he began his account, touching and vivid, simply with: 'The man died at six-thirty. The alarm went off at seven. It was just half an hour too late.'"
"What impressed me," said the author, discussing the story subsequently, "was that impotent alarm clock jangling away when the owner was dead. A man's existence had been cut off because that fifty-cent clock could not give its alarm a few minutes earlier."
This illustrates what was meant when we said that Mr. Davis takes an objective view of life. His experience as a reporter was invaluable to him; and he took Dr. Hale's advice, and ended the experience at the right time. Doubtless many good writers have been spoiled by indulging too long in the fascinations of newspaper work.
A large part of his training as a reporter the creator of Van Bibber obtained in his native city, during his service on the Philadelphia Press, for which paper he went to work when he was a little more than twenty. There is a portrait of him taken at the age of twenty-three, in the disguise in which he worked while getting the information which drove the nest of thieves out of Wood street.
While Davis was working for the Philadelphia Press, by the way, he and his associates in the reporters' room fell in love with one of Stevenson's thrilling short stories, "A Lodging for the Night." They could not restrain their admiration; so they wrote an enthusiastic letter to the gentle sick man off there in Samoa. And to the spokesman of the admiring crew Stevenson replied:
Dear Sir:
Why, thank you very much for your frank, agreeable and natural letter. It is certainly very pleasant that all you young fellows wholly enjoy my work, and get some good out of it; and it was very kind in you to write and tell me so. The tale of the suicide is excellently droll; and your letter, you may be sure, will be preserved. If you are to escape, unhurt, out of your present business, you must be very careful, and you must find in your heart much constancy. The swiftly done work of the journalist, and the cheap finish and ready-made methods to which it leads, you must try to counteract in private by writing with the most considerate slowness and on the most ambitious models. And when I say 'writing'—O, believe me, it is re-writing that I have chiefly in my mind. If you will do this I hope to hear of you some day.
Please excuse this sermon from
Your obliged
Robert Louis Stevenson.
This letter, brought to light a short while ago by Mr. Sangree, in a magazine article, discloses an exchange of sentiments creditable to all the correspondents concerned.
For a time the promising journalist was overmastered by an ambition to be an editor, and he established a short-lived dramatic periodical called The Stage. In 1889 he reported the Johnstown flood for a Philadelphia paper, and then, the following summer, went abroad with the All-Philadelphia cricket team. Upon his return to this country, New York charmed him, and there, for the most part, he has lived ever since. At first he was connected with The Evening Sun. During this connection he wrote his delightful "Van Bibber" stories. But these were not his first stories. His first stories were written while he was editor of a paper at Lehigh College, in his student days. The stories numbered about a dozen, and Mr. Davis collected them and paid ninety dollars to have them published in book form. The book has scarcely ever been heard of since. Later, while at Johns Hopkins University, he wrote his first accepted story, "Richard Carr's Baby," a sort of foot-ball tale, which was published in St. Nicholas. However, the "Van Bibber" stories were his first work of any serious account; they were the first work to bring him popularity.