Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis

by Richard Harding Davis

Lots of love,

DICK.

Of the many happy days we have spent together, I do not believe there were any much more happy than the three weeks Richard remained with me. It was his first long visit to Italy and from the day of his arrival he loved the old town and its people who gave him a most friendly welcome. He had come at a time when Florence was at its best, its narrow quaint streets filled with sunshine and thronged with idling natives and the scurrying tourists that always came with the first days of spring. The Cascine and the pink-walled roads of the environs were ablaze with wild roses and here, after his rather strenuous experience in Cuba, Richard gave himself up to long days of happy idleness. Together we took voyages of discovery to many of the little walled and forgotten towns where the tourists seldom set foot. Once we even wandered so far as Monte Carlo, where my brother tried very hard to break the bank and did not succeed. But the Richard Harding Davis luck did not fail him completely and I remember I greatly envied him the huge pile of gold and notes that represented his winnings and which we did our very best to spend before we left the land of the Prince of Monaco. However, having had his first taste of war, Richard felt that he must leave the peace and content of Florence to see how the Greeks, with whom he had much sympathy, were faring with their enemies the Turks. As it happened, this expedition proved but a short interruption, and in less than a month he was once more back with his new-found friends in Florence.

April 28, 1897

On the Way to Patras on a Steamer.

DEAR FAMILY:

It has been a week since I wrote you last, when I sent you the Inauguration article. Since then I have been having the best time I ever had any place ALONE. I have had more fun with a crowd, but never have been so happy by myself. What I would have been had I taken some other chap with me I cannot imagine. But the people of this part of Greece have been so kind that I cannot say I have been alone. I never met with strangers anywhere who were so hospitable, so confiding and polite. After that slaughter-yard and pest place of Cuba, which is much more terrible to me now than it was when I was there, or before I had seen that war can be conducted like any other evil of civilization, this opera bouffe warfare is like a duel between two gentlemen in the Bois. Cuba is like a slave-holder beating a slave's head in with a whip. I am a war correspondent only by a great stretch of the imagination; I am a peace correspondent really, and all the fighting I have seen was by cannon at long range. (I was at long range, not the cannon.) I am doing this campaign in a personally conducted sense with no regard to the Powers or to the London Times. I did send them an article called "The Piping Times of War." If they do not use it I shall illustrate it with the photos I have taken and sell it, for five times the sum they would give, to the Harpers who are ever with us. As I once said in a noted work, "Greece, Mrs. Morris, restores all your lost illusions." For the last week I have been back in the days of Conrad, the Corsair, and "Oh, Maid of Athens, ere We Part." I have been riding over wind-swept hills and mountains topped with snow, and with sheep and goats and wild flowers of every color spreading for acres, and in a land where every man dresses by choice like a grand opera brigand, and not only for photographic purposes. I have been on the move all the time, chasing in the rear of armies that turn back as soon as I approach and apologize for disappointing me of a battle, or riding to the scene of a battle that never comes off, or hastening to a bombardment that turns out to be an attack on an empty fort.

I live on brown bread and cheese and goat's milk and sleep like a log in shepherds' huts. It is so beautiful that I almost grudge the night. Nora and Mother could take this trip as safely as a regiment and would see things out of fairyland. And such adventures! Late in life I am at last having adventures and honors heaped upon me. I was elected a captain of a band of brigands who had been watching a mountain pass for a month, and as it showed no signs of running away had taken to dancing on the green. I caught them at this innocent pastime and they allowed me to photograph them and give them wine at eight cents a quart which we drank out of a tin stovepipe. They drank about four feet of stovepipe or thirty-six cents' worth, then they danced and sang for me in a circle, old men and boys, then drilled with their carbines, and I showed them my revolver and field-glasses and themselves in the finder of the camera; and when I had to go they took me on their shoulders and marched me around waving their rifles. Then the old men kissed me on the cheek and we all embraced and they wept, and I felt as badly as though I were parting from fifty friends. They told my guide that if I would come back they would get fifty more "as brave as they" and I could be captain. I could not begin to tell you all the amusing things that have happened in this one week. I did not want to come at all, only a stern sense of duty made me. For I wanted to write the play in Charley's gilded halls and get to Paris and London. But I can never cease rejoicing that I took this trip. And it will make the book, "A Year from a Reporter's Diary," as complete as it can be. That was why I came. Now I have the Coronation of the Czar, the Millennial at Hungary, the Inauguration at Washington, the Queen's Jubilee, the War in Cuba, and the Greco-Turkish War. That is a good year's work and I mean to loaf after it. You will laugh and say that that is what I always say, but if you knew how I had to kick myself out of Florence and the Cascine to come here you would believe me. I want a rest and I am cutting this very short.

Don't fail to cut anything Dad and Mother don't like out of the Inauguration article. You will have me with you this winter on my little bicycle and going to dances and not paying board to anyone. Remember how I used to threaten to go to Greece when the coffee was not good. It seems too funny now, for I never was in a better place, or had more fun or saw less of war or the signs of war.

DICK.