“Soldiers of Fortune” was “Dick” Davis’s biggest success. It brought him reservoirs of money, first as a serial, then as a novel, then as a drama, and finally as a movie. His other novels were like it, in that they dealt with members of the ruling class gloriously making or marrying fortunes. The next was called “The Princess Aline,” and told about a young, wealthy, handsome and aristocratic artist—so many elements of good fortune!—who falls in love with the photograph of a German princess. The model for this exquisite heroine was the future Empress of Russia; but Davis did not live to write a sequel, showing the final destiny of his heroine, her mangled body dumped into a well along with her husband and four exquisite daughters. Recalling these novels at the present hour, I see the international plutocracy with all its exquisite wives and daughters, crouched trembling upon the top of a mountain of gold and jewels, while all around them the handsome young hired heroes peer out over the sights of machine guns at the massed fury of the exploited millions of mankind—white, black, yellow, brown, red, and mixed.
Davis became a war correspondent and spent his time racing over the earth from one scene of excitement to another. I have run through the volume of his letters and jotted down a few date lines in the order they occur: Cuba, London, Egypt, Gibraltar, Paris, Central America, South America, Moscow, Budapest, Havana, London, Florence, Greece, Havana, Cape Town, Pretoria, Aix-les-Bains, Massachusetts, Madrid, London, San Francisco, Tokio, Manchuria, Havana, the Congo, New York, London, Santiago, Vera Cruz, Belgium, Plattsburg, Paris, Athens, Rome. If you know the history of the world for twenty-five years beginning with 1890 you can connect each of these geographical names with a coronation, a jubilee, a war, or other ruling-class recreation.
All through the letters runs the theme of money, the Aladdin’s tale of a soldier of literary fortune. He gets five thousand dollars for the serial rights of “Soldiers of Fortune” from “Scribner’s Magazine”; he gets five hundred dollars for reporting a foot-ball game; he gets three thousand dollars and expenses for a month’s reporting of the Cuban struggle with Spain, and when America enters the conflict, he gets ten cents a word from “Scribner’s Magazine” and four hundred dollars a week and expenses from the New York “Times.”
Everywhere he goes he is, of course, a lion, and moves only in the highest circles. His letters are full of diplomats and generals and lords and ladies and kings and queens, together with the most famous actors and literary lights. He is presented at Court—and by this, needless to say, I mean the Court of their Majesties the King and Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and Emperor and Empress of India. And all through the letters we note dinner-parties and banquets and champagne-suppers and cocktails—interrupted by a siege with sciatica, preparing us for the quick curtain, when our ruling-class hero departs his successful life at the age of fifty-two.
New York is a place of mean and envious gossip, and one of its diversions was telling anecdotes illustrating the snobbery and self-importance of Richard Harding Davis. It appears that in the days of his extraordinary prosperity he did not always recognize his former newspaper cronies when he met them on the street. Perhaps he had noted that so many of these former cronies took the occasion to borrow money from him. Anyhow, I have one anecdote to contribute to the collection.
It was early in 1914, a period of great depression in my own life and fortunes. Davis, of course, never had any depressions; he had just come back from Cuba, where he had turned “Soldiers of Fortune” into a moving picture film, and it was now being launched on Broadway with enormous éclat. I happened to know the manager, and was invited to the opening performance, where in the lobby I was introduced to the great author and lion of the occasion. When he heard my name his face lighted up, and he gave me a warm hand-clasp, exclaiming, “Ah, now! You write books because you really have something to say, while I write only to make money!” It was so different from what I expected that I was completely taken aback, and could only make a deprecating murmur. “It is true,” he said; “I know it, and so do you.”
The reader may say that in telling this story I do more credit to Davis than to myself. But that is not my concern. What I have to do here is to report the statement of America’s leading soldier of literary fortune concerning his own work and its reason for being.
CHAPTER CIV
THE BOWERY BOY
We come now to another one of those unhappy tales of young rebellious geniuses who cannot or will not fit themselves into the bourgeois world. This time it is Stephen Crane, who was the fourteenth child of a Methodist preacher and an evangelist mother, and was born in Newark, New Jersey; which goes to prove that a genius may spring up anywhere in the world.
There is an old saying that a preacher’s son always turns out to be a rake. I don’t suppose that statistically this statement could be justified, but psychologically we should expect such cases; for other children get religion once a week, but the children of clergymen get it all the time. The tragedy of poor “Stevie” Crane reveals to us the folly of attaching fundamental moral principles to incredible fairy tales. When the child grows up and finds that he no longer believes the tales, he is apt to conclude that the moral principles are equally false and superfluous.