The Red Cross Girl | Page 6

a free
conscience?). Loving, as he did, everything connected with a
newspaper, he would now pass by those on the hall-table with never so
much as a wistful glance, and hurry to his workroom.
He wrote sitting down. He wrote standing up. And, almost you may say,
he wrote walking up and down. Some people, accustomed to the
delicious ease and clarity of his style, imagine that he wrote very easily.
He did and he didn't. Letters, easy, clear, to the point, and gorgeously
human, flowed from him without let or hindrance. That masterpiece of
corresponding, "The German March Through Brussels," was probably
written almost as fast as he could talk (next to Phillips Brooks, he was

the fastest talker I ever heard), but when it came to fiction he had no
facility at all. Perhaps I should say that he held in contempt any facility
that he may have had. It was owing to his incomparable energy and
Joblike patience that he ever gave us any fiction at all. Every phrase in
his fiction was, of all the myriad phrases he could think of, the fittest in
his relentless judgment to survive. Phrases, paragraphs, pages, whole
stories even, were written over and over again. He worked upon a
principle of elimination. If he wished to describe an automobile turning
in at a gate, he made first a long and elaborate description from which
there was omitted no detail, which the most observant pair of eyes in
Christendom had ever noted with reference to just such a turning.
Thereupon he would begin a process of omitting one by one those
details which he had been at such pains to recall; and after each
omission he would ask himself: "Does the picture remain?" If it did not,
he restored the detail which he had just omitted, and experimented with
the sacrifice of some other, and so on, and so on, until after Herculean
labor there remained for the reader one of those swiftly flashed,
ice-clear pictures (complete in every detail) with which his tales and
romances are so delightfully and continuously adorned.
But it is quarter to eleven, and, this being a time of holiday, R. H. D.
emerges from his workroom happy to think that he has placed one
hundred and seven words between himself and the wolf who hangs
about every writer's door. He isn't satisfied with those hundred and
seven words. He never was in the least satisfied with anything that he
wrote, but he has searched his mind and his conscience and he believes
that under the circumstances they are the very best that he can do.
Anyway, they can stand in their present order until-- after lunch.
A sign of his youth was the fact that to the day of his death he had
denied himself the luxury and slothfulness of habits. I have never seen
him smoke automatically as most men do. He had too much respect for
his own powers of enjoyment and for the sensibilities, perhaps, of the
best Havana tobacco. At a time of his own deliberate choosing, often
after many hours of hankering and renunciation, he smoked his cigar.
He smoked it with delight, with a sense of being rewarded, and he used
all the smoke there was in it.

He dearly loved the best food, the best champagne, and the best Scotch
whiskey. But these things were friends to him, and not enemies. He had
toward food and drink the Continental attitude; namely, that quality is
far more important than quantity; and he got his exhilaration from the
fact that he was drinking champagne and not from the champagne.
Perhaps I shall do well to say that on questions of right and wrong he
had a will of iron. All his life he moved resolutely in whichever
direction his conscience pointed; and, although that ever present and
never obtrusive conscience of his made mistakes of judgment now and
then, as must all consciences, I think it can never once have tricked him
into any action that was impure or unclean. Some critics maintain that
the heroes and heroines of his books are impossibly pure and innocent
young people. R. H. D. never called upon his characters for any trait of
virtue, or renunciation, or self-mastery of which his own life could not
furnish examples.
Fortunately, he did not have for his friends the same conscience that he
had for himself. His great gift of eyesight and observation failed him in
his judgments upon his friends. If only you loved him, you could get
your biggest failures of conduct somewhat more than forgiven, without
any trouble at all. And of your mole-hill virtues he made splendid
mountains. He only interfered with you when he was afraid that you
were going to hurt some