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The Novels and Stories of Richard Harding Davis

THE EXILES AND OTHER STORIES

by

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

With an Introduction by Charles Dana Gibson

Illustrated

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1919

"The Exiles" and "The Boy Orator of Zepata City" from "The Exiles,"
copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
"The Other Woman" from "Gallagher," copyright, 1891, by CHARLES
SCRIBNER'S SONS; "On the Fever Ship," "The Lion and the Unicorn," and
"The Last Ride Together" from "The Lion and the Unicorn," copyright,
1899, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS; "Miss Delamar's Understudy" from
"Cinderella," copyright, 1896, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS; "The
Reporter Who Made Himself King" from "Stories for Boys," copyright,
1891, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.







[Illustration: Instead she buried her face in its folds.]





TO MY FRIEND

J. DAVIS BRODHEAD




THE FIRST GLIMPSE OF DAVIS


Dick was twenty-four years old when he came into the smoking-room of
the Victoria Hotel, in London, after midnight one July night--he was
dressed as a Thames boatman.

He had been rowing up and down the river since sundown, looking for
color. He had evidently peopled every dark corner with a pirate, and
every floating object had meant something to him. He had adventure
written all over him. It was the first time I had ever seen him, and
I had never heard of him. I can't now recall another figure in that
smoke-filled room. I don't remember who introduced us--over
twenty-seven years have passed since that night. But I can see Dick
now dressed in a rough brown suit, a soft hat, with a handkerchief
about his neck, a splendid, healthy, clean-minded, gifted boy at play.
And so he always remained.

His going out of this world seemed like a boy interrupted in a game he
loved. And how well and fairly he played it! Surely no one deserved
success more than Dick. And it is a consolation to know he had more
than fifty years of just what he wanted. He had health, a great
talent, and personal charm. There never was a more loyal or unselfish
friend. There wasn't an atom of envy in him. He had unbounded mental
and physical courage, and with it all he was sensitive and sometimes
shy. He often tried to conceal these last two qualities, but never
succeeded in doing so from those of us who were privileged really to
know and love him.

His life was filled with just the sort of adventure he liked the best.
No one ever saw more wars in so many different places or got more out
of them. And it took the largest war in all history to wear out that
stout heart.

We shall miss him.

CHARLES DANA GIBSON.




CONTENTS


The First Glimpse of Davis Charles Dana Gibson

THE EXILES

THE BOY ORATOR OF ZEPATA CITY

THE OTHER WOMAN

ON THE FEVER SHIP

THE LION AND THE UNICORN

THE LAST RIDE TOGETHER

MISS DELAMAR'S UNDERSTUDY

THE REPORTER WHO MADE HIMSELF KING




ILLUSTRATIONS


INSTEAD SHE BURIED HER FACE IN ITS FOLDS (Frontispiece)

STOPPING FOR HALF-HOURS AT A TIME BEFORE A BAZAAR

THE BOAR HUNT

CONSUMED TEA AND THIN SLICES OF BREAD

"I NEVER SAW A KING," GORDON REMARKED




THE EXILES

I


The greatest number of people in the world prefer the most highly
civilized places of the world, because they know what sort of things
are going to happen there, and because they also know by experience
that those are the sort of things they like. A very few people prefer
barbarous and utterly uncivilized portions of the globe for the reason
that they receive while there new impressions, and because they like
the unexpected better than a routine of existence, no matter how
pleasant that routine may be. But the most interesting places of all
to study are those in which the savage and the cultivated man lie down
together and try to live together in unity. This is so because we can
learn from such places just how far a man of cultivation lapses into
barbarism when he associates with savages, and how far the remnants of
his former civilization will have influence upon the barbarians among
whom he has come to live.

There are many such colonies as these, and they are the most picturesque
plague-spots on the globe. You will find them in New Zealand and at
Yokohama, in Algiers, Tunis, and Tangier, and scattered thickly all
along the South American coast-line wherever the law of extradition
obtains not, and where public opinion, which is one of the things a
colony can do longest without, is unknown. These are the unofficial
Botany Bays and Melillas of the world, where the criminal goes of his
own accord, and not because his government has urged him to do so and
paid his passage there. This is the story of a young man who went to
such a place for the benefit he hoped it would be to his health, and
not because he had robbed any one, or done a young girl an injury. He
was the only son of Judge Henry Howard Holcombe, of New York. That was
all that it was generally considered necessary to say of him. It was
not, however, quite enough, for, while his father had had nothing but
the right and the good of his State and country to think about, the
son was further occupied by trying to live up to his father's name.
Young Holcombe was impressed by this fact from his earliest childhood.
It rested upon him while at Harvard and during his years at the law
school, and it went with him into society and into the courts of law.
When he rose to plead a case he did not forget, nor did those present
forget, that his father while alive had crowded those same halls with
silent, earnest listeners; and when he addressed a mass-meeting at
Cooper Union, or spoke from the back of a cart in the East Side, some
one was sure to refer to the fact that this last speaker was the son
of the man who was mobbed because he had dared to be an abolitionist,
and who later had received the veneration of a great city for his
bitter fight against Tweed and his followers.

Young Holcombe was an earnest member of every reform club and citizens'
league, and his distinguished name gave weight as a director to
charitable organizations and free kindergartens. He had inherited his
hatred of Tammany Hall, and was unrelenting in his war upon it and its
handiwork, and he spoke of it and of its immediate downfall with the
bated breath of one who, though amazed at the wickedness of the thing
he fights, is not discouraged nor afraid. And he would listen to no
half-measures. Had not his grandfather quarrelled with Henry Clay, and
so shaken the friendship of a lifetime, because of a great compromise
which he could not countenance? And was his grandson to truckle and
make deals with this hideous octopus that was sucking the life-blood
from the city's veins? Had he not but yesterday distributed six
hundred circulars, calling for honest government, to six hundred
possible voters, all the way up Fourth Avenue?--and when some flippant
one had said that he might have hired a messenger-boy to have done it
for him and so saved his energies for something less mechanical, he
had rebuked the speaker with a reproachful stare and turned away in
silence.

Life was terribly earnest to young Holcombe, and he regarded it from
the point of view of one who looks down upon it from the judge's bench,
and listens with a frown to those who plead its cause. He was not
fooled by it; he was alive to its wickedness and its evasions. He would
tell you that he knew for a fact that the window man in his district
was a cousin of the Tammany candidate, and that the contractor who had
the cleaning of the street to do was a brother-in-law of one of the
Hall's sachems, and that the policeman on his beat had not been in the
country eight months. He spoke of these damning facts with the air of
one who simply tells you that much, that you should see how terrible
the whole thing really was, and what he could tell if he wished.

In his own profession he recognized the trials of law-breakers only as
experiments which went to establish and explain a general principle.
And prisoners were not men to him, but merely the exceptions that
proved the excellence of a rule. Holcombe would defend the lowest
creature or the most outrageous of murderers, not because the man was
a human being fighting for his liberty or life, but because he wished
to see if certain evidence would be admitted in the trial of such a
case. Of one of his clients the judge, who had a daughter of his own,
said, when he sentenced him, "Were there many more such men as you in
the world, the women of this land would pray to God to be left
childless." And when some one asked Holcombe, with ill-concealed
disgust, how he came to defend the man, he replied: "I wished to show
the unreliability of expert testimony from medical men. Yes; they tell
me the man was a very bad lot."

It was measures, not men, to Holcombe, and law and order were his twin
goddesses, and "no compromise" his watchword.

"You can elect your man if you'll give me two thousand dollars to
refit our club-room with," one of his political acquaintances once
said to him. "We've five hundred voters on the rolls now, and the
members vote as one man. You'd be saving the city twenty times that
much if you keep Croker's man out of the job. You know _that_ as
well as I do."

"The city can better afford to lose twenty thousand dollars," Holcombe
answered, "than we can afford to give a two-cent stamp for
corruption."

"All right," said the heeler; "all right, Mr. Holcombe. Go on. Fight
'em your own way. If they'd agree to fight you with pamphlets and
circulars you'd stand a chance, sir; but as long as they give out
money and you give out reading-matter to people that can't read,
they'll win, and I naturally want to be on the winning side."

When the club to which Holcombe belonged finally succeeded in getting
the Police Commissioners indicted for blackmailing gambling-houses,
Holcombe was, as a matter of course and of public congratulation, on
the side of the law; and as Assistant District Attorney--a position
given him on account of his father's name and in the hope that it
would shut his mouth--distinguished himself nobly.

Of the four commissioners, three were convicted--the fourth, Patrick
Meakim, with admirable foresight having fled to that country from
which few criminals return, and which is vaguely set forth in the
newspapers as "parts unknown."

The trial had been a severe one upon the zealous Mr. Holcombe, who
found himself at the end of it in a very bad way, with nerves unstrung
and brain so fagged that he assented without question when his doctor
exiled him from New York by ordering a sea voyage, with change of
environment and rest at the other end of it. Some one else suggested
the northern coast of Africa and Tangier, and Holcombe wrote minute
directions to the secretaries of all of his reform clubs urging
continued efforts on the part of his fellow-workers, and sailed away
one cold winter's morning for Gibraltar. The great sea laid its hold
upon him, and the winds from the south thawed the cold in his bones,
and the sun cheered his tired spirit. He stretched himself at full
length reading those books which one puts off reading until illness
gives one the right to do so, and so far as in him lay obeyed his
doctor's first command, that he should forget New York and all that
pertained to it. By the time he had reached the Rock he was up and
ready to drift farther into the lazy, irresponsible life of the
Mediterranean coast, and he had forgotten his struggles against
municipal misrule, and was at times for hours together utterly
oblivious of his own personality.

A dumpy, fat little steamer rolled itself along like a sailor on shore
from Gibraltar to Tangier, and Holcombe, leaning over the rail of its
quarter-deck, smiled down at the chattering group of Arabs and Moors
stretched on their rugs beneath him. A half-naked negro, pulling at
the dates in the basket between his bare legs, held up a handful to
him with a laugh, and Holcombe laughed back and emptied the cigarettes
in his case on top of him, and laughed again as the ship's crew and
the deck passengers scrambled over one another and shook out their
voluminous robes in search of them. He felt at ease with the world and
with himself, and turned his eyes to the white walls of Tangier with a
pleasure so complete that it shut out even the thought that it was a
pleasure.

The town seemed one continuous mass of white stucco, with each flat,
low-lying roof so close to the other that the narrow streets left no
trace. To the left of it the yellow coastline and the green
olive-trees and palms stretched up against the sky, and beneath him
scores of shrieking blacks fought in their boats for a place beside
the steamer's companion-way. He jumped into one of these open wherries
and fell sprawling among his baggage, and laughed lightly as a boy as
the boatman set him on his feet again, and then threw them from under
him with a quick stroke of the oars. The high, narrow pier was crowded
with excited customs officers in ragged uniforms and dirty turbans,
and with a few foreign residents looking for arriving passengers.
Holcombe had his feet on the upper steps of the ladder, and was
ascending slowly. There was a fat, heavily built man in blue serge
leaning across the railing of the pier. He was looking down, and as
his eyes met Holcombe's face his own straightened into lines of
amazement and most evident terror. Holcombe stopped at the sight, and
stared back wondering. And then the lapping waters beneath him and the
white town at his side faded away, and he was back in the hot, crowded
court-room with this man's face before him. Meakim, the fourth of the
Police Commissioners, confronted him, and saw in his presence nothing
but a menace to himself.

Holcombe came up the last steps of the stairs, and stopped at their
top. His instinct and life's tradition made him despise the man, and
to this was added the selfish disgust that his holiday should have
been so soon robbed of its character by this reminder of all that he
had been told to put behind him.

Meakim swept off his hat as though it were hurting him, and showed the
great drops of sweat on his forehead.

"For God's sake!" the man panted, "you can't touch me here, Mr.
Holcombe. I'm safe here; they told me I'd be. You can't take me. You
can't touch me."

Holcombe stared at the man coldly, and with a touch of pity and
contempt. "That is quite right, Mr. Meakim," he said. "The law cannot
reach you here."

"Then what do you want with me?" the man demanded, forgetful in his
terror of anything but his own safety.

Holcombe turned upon him sharply. "I am not here on your account, Mr.
Meakim," he said. "You need not feel the least uneasiness, and," he
added, dropping his voice as he noticed that others were drawing near,
"if you keep out of my way, I shall certainly keep out of yours."

The Police Commissioner gave a short laugh partly of bravado and
partly at his own sudden terror. "I didn't know," he said, breathing
with relief. "I thought you'd come after me. You don't wonder you give
me a turn, do you? I _was_ scared." He fanned himself with his
straw hat, and ran his tongue over his lips. "Going to be here some
time, Mr. District Attorney?" he added, with grave politeness.

Holcombe could not help but smile at the absurdity of it. It was so
like what he would have expected of Meakim and his class to give every
office-holder his full title. "No, Mr. Police Commissioner," he
answered, grimly, and nodding to his boatmen, pushed his way after
them and his trunks along the pier.

Meakim was waiting for him as he left the custom-house. He touched his
hat, and bent the whole upper part of his fat body in an awkward bow.
"Excuse me, Mr. District Attorney," he began.

"Oh, drop that, will you?" snapped Holcombe. "Now, what is it you
want, Meakim?"

"I was only going to say," answered the fugitive, with some offended
dignity, "that as I've been here longer than you, I could perhaps give
you pointers about the hotels. I've tried 'em all, and they're no
good, but the Albion's the best."

"Thank you, I'm sure," said Holcombe. "But I have been told to go to
the Isabella."

"Well, that's pretty good, too," Meakim answered, "if you don't mind
the tables. They keep you awake most of the night, though, and--"

"The tables? I beg your pardon," said Holcombe, stiffly.

"Not the eatin' tables; the roulette tables," corrected Meakim. "Of
course," he continued, grinning, "if you're fond of the game, Mr.
Holcombe, it's handy having them in the same house, but I can steer
you against a better one back of the French Consulate. Those at the
Hotel Isabella's crooked."

Holcombe stopped uncertainly. "I don't know just what to do," he said.
"I think I shall wait until I can see our consul here."

"Oh, he'll send you to the Isabella," said Meakim, cheerfully. "He
gets two hundred dollars a week for protecting the proprietor, so he
naturally caps for the house."

Holcombe opened his mouth to express himself, but closed it again, and
then asked, with some misgivings, of the hotel of which Meakim had
first spoken.

"Oh, the Albion. Most all the swells go there. It's English, and they
cook you a good beefsteak. And the boys generally drop in for table
d'hote. You see, that's the worst of this place, Mr. Holcombe; there's
nowhere to go evenings--no club-rooms nor theatre nor nothing; only
the smoking-room of the hotel or that gambling-house; and they spring
a double naught on you if there's more than a dollar up."

Holcombe still stood irresolute, his porters eying him from under
their burdens, and the runners from the different hotels plucking at
his sleeve.

"There's some very good people at the Albion," urged the Police
Commissioner, "and three or four of 'em's New-Yorkers. There's the
Morrises and Ropes, the Consul-General, and Lloyd Carroll--"

"Lloyd Carroll!" exclaimed Holcombe.

"Yes," said Meakim, with a smile, "he's here." He looked at Holcombe
curiously for a moment, and then exclaimed, with a laugh of
intelligence, "Why, sure enough, you were Mr. Thatcher's lawyer in
that case, weren't you? It was you got him his divorce?"

Holcombe nodded.

"Carroll was the man that made it possible, wasn't he?"

Holcombe chafed under this catechism. "He was one of a dozen, I
believe," he said; but as he moved away he turned and asked: "And Mrs.
Thatcher. What has become of her?"

The Police Commissioner did not answer at once, but glanced up at
Holcombe from under his half-shut eyes with a look in which there was
a mixture of curiosity and of amusement. "You don't mean to say, Mr.
Holcombe," he began, slowly, with the patronage of the older man and
with a touch of remonstrance in his tone, "that you're _still_
with the husband in that case?"

Holcombe looked coldly over Mr. Meakim's head. "I have only a purely
professional interest in any one of them," he said. "They struck me as
a particularly nasty lot. Good-morning, sir."

"Well," Meakim called after him, "you needn't see nothing of them if
you don't want to. You can get rooms to yourself."

Holcombe did get rooms to himself, with a balcony overlooking the bay,
and arranged with the proprietor of the Albion to have his dinner
served at a separate table. As others had done this before, no one
regarded it as an affront upon his society, and several people in the
hotel made advances to him, which he received politely but coldly. For
the first week of his visit the town interested him greatly,
increasing its hold upon him unconsciously to himself. He was restless
and curious to see it all, and rushed his guide from one of the few
show-places to the next with an energy which left that fat Oriental
panting.

[Illustration: Stopping for half-hours at a time before a bazaar.]

But after three days Holcombe climbed the streets more leisurely,
stopping for half-hours at a time before a bazaar, or sent away his
guide altogether, and stretched himself luxuriously on the broad wall
of the fortifications. The sun beat down upon him, and wrapped him
into drowsiness. From far afield came the unceasing murmur of the
market-place and the bazaars, and the occasional cries of the priests
from the minarets; the dark blue sea danced and flashed beyond the
white margin of the town and its protecting reef of rocks where the
sea-weed rose and fell, and above his head the buzzards swept heavily,
and called to one another with harsh, frightened cries. At his side
lay the dusty road, hemmed in by walls of cactus, and along its narrow
length came lines of patient little donkeys with jangling necklaces,
led by wild-looking men from the farm-lands and the desert, and women
muffled and shapeless, with only their bare feet showing, who looked
at him curiously or meaningly from over the protecting cloth, and
passed on, leaving him startled and wondering. He began to find that
the books he had brought wearied him. The sight of the type alone was
enough to make him close the covers and start up restlessly to look
for something less absorbing. He found this on every hand, in the lazy
patience of the bazaars and of the markets, where the chief service of
all was that of only standing and waiting, and in the farm-lands
behind Tangier, where half-naked slaves drove great horned buffalo,
and turned back the soft, chocolate-colored sod with a wooden plough.
But it was a solitary, selfish holiday, and Holcombe found himself
wanting certain ones at home to bear him company, and was surprised to
find that of these none were the men nor the women with whom his
interests in the city of New York were the most closely connected.
They were rather foolish people, men at whom he had laughed and whom
he had rather pitied for having made him do so, and women he had
looked at distantly as of a kind he might understand when his work was
over and he wished to be amused. The young girls to whom he was in the
habit of pouring out his denunciations of evil, and from whom he was
accustomed to receive advice and moral support, he could not place in
this landscape. He felt uneasily that they would not allow him to
enjoy it his own way; they would consider the Moor historically as the
invader of Catholic Europe, and would be shocked at the lack of proper
sanitation, and would see the mud. As for himself, he had risen above
seeing the mud. He looked up now at the broken line of the roof-tops
against the blue sky, and when a hooded figure drew back from his
glance he found himself murmuring the words of an Eastern song he had
read in a book of Indian stories:

"Alone upon the house-tops, to the north
I turn and watch the lightning in the sky,--
The glamour of thy footsteps in the north.
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!

"Below my feet the still bazaar is laid.
Far, far below, the weary camels lie--"

Holcombe laughed and shrugged his shoulders. He had stopped half-way
down the hill on which stands the Bashaw's palace, and the whole of
Tangier lay below him like a great cemetery of white marble. The moon
was shining clearly over the town and the sea, and a soft wind from
the sandy farm-lands came to him and played about him like the
fragrance of a garden. Something moved in him that he did not
recognize, but which was strangely pleasant, and which ran to his
brain like the taste of a strong liqueur. It came to him that he was
alone among strangers, and that what he did now would be known but to
himself and to these strangers. What it was that he wished to do he
did not know, but he felt a sudden lifting up and freedom from
restraint. The spirit of adventure awoke in him and tugged at his
sleeve, and he was conscious of a desire to gratify it and put it to
the test.

"'Alone upon the house-tops,'" he began. Then he laughed and clambered
hurriedly down the steep hill-side. "It's the moonlight," he explained
to the blank walls and overhanging lattices, "and the place and the
music of the song. It might be one of the Arabian nights, and I Haroun
al Raschid. _And_ if I don't get back to the hotel I shall make a
fool of myself."

He reached the Albion very warm and breathless, with stumbling and
groping in the dark, and instead of going immediately to bed told the
waiter to bring him some cool drink out on the terrace of the
smoking-room. There were two men sitting there in the moonlight, and
as he came forward one of them nodded to him silently.

"Oh, good-evening, Mr. Meakim!" Holcombe said, gayly, with the spirit
of the night still upon him. "I've been having adventures." He
laughed, and stooped to brush the dirt from his knickerbockers and
stockings. "I went up to the palace to see the town by moonlight, and
tried to find my way back alone, and fell down three times."

Meakim shook his head gravely. "You'd better be careful at night,
sir," he said. "The governor has just said that the Sultan won't be
responsible for the lives of foreigners at night 'unless accompanied
by soldier and lantern.'"

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