The Red Cross Girl | Page 7

one else whom he also loved. Once I had a
telegram from him which urged me for heaven's sake not to forget that
the next day was my wife's birthday. Whether I had forgotten it or not
is my own private affair. And when I declared that I had read a story
which I liked very, very much and was going to write to the author to
tell him so, he always kept at me till the letter was written.
Have I said that he had no habits? Every day, when he was away from
her, he wrote a letter to his mother, and no swift scrawl at that, for, no
matter how crowded and eventful the day, he wrote her the best letter
that he could write. That was the only habit he had. He was a slave to
it.
Once I saw R. H. D. greet his old mother after an absence. They threw
their arms about each other and rocked to and fro for a long time. And

it hadn't been a long absence at that. No ocean had been between them;
her heart had not been in her mouth with the thought that he was under
fire, or about to become a victim of jungle fever. He had only been
away upon a little expedition, a mere matter of digging for buried
treasure. We had found the treasure, part of it a chipmunk's skull and a
broken arrow-head, and R. H. D. had been absent from his mother for
nearly two hours and a half.
I set about this article with the knowledge that I must fail to give more
than a few hints of what he was like. There isn't much more space at
my command, and there were so many sides to him that to touch upon
them all would fill a volume. There were the patriotism and the
Americanism, as much a part of him as the marrow of his bones, and
from which sprang all those brilliant headlong letters to the newspapers;
those trenchant assaults upon evil-doers in public office, those quixotic
efforts to redress wrongs, and those simple and dexterous exposures of
this and that, from an absolutely unexpected point of view. He was a
quickener of the public conscience. That people are beginning to think
tolerantly of preparedness, that a nation which at one time looked
yellow as a dandelion is beginning to turn Red, White, and Blue is
owing in some measure to him.
R. H. D. thought that war was unspeakably terrible. He thought that
peace at the price which our country has been forced to pay for it was
infinitely worse. And he was one of those who have gradually taught
this country to see the matter in the same way.
I must come to a close now, and I have hardly scratched the surface of
my subject. And that is a failure which I feel keenly but which was
inevitable. As R. H. D. himself used to say of those deplorable
"personal interviews" which appear in the newspapers, and in which the
important person interviewed is made by the cub reporter to say things
which he never said, or thought, or dreamed of--"You can't expect a
fifteen- dollar-a-week brain to describe a thousand-dollar-a-week
brain."
There is, however, one question which I should attempt to answer. No
two men are alike. In what one salient thing did R. H. D. differ from

other men--differ in his personal character and in the character of his
work? And that question I can answer offhand, without taking thought,
and be sure that I am right.
An analysis of his works, a study of that book which the Recording
Angel keeps will show one dominant characteristic to which even his
brilliancy, his clarity of style, his excellent mechanism as a writer are
subordinate; and to which, as a man, even his sense of duty, his powers
of affection, of forgiveness, of loving-kindness are subordinate, too;
and that characteristic is cleanliness.
The biggest force for cleanliness that was in the world has gone out of
the world--gone to that Happy Hunting Ground where "Nobody hunts
us and there is nothing to hunt." GOUVERNEUR MORRIS.
Chapter 1
THE RED CROSS GIRL
When Spencer Flagg laid the foundation-stone for the new
million-dollar wing he was adding to the Flagg Home for
Convalescents, on the hills above Greenwich, the New York
REPUBLIC sent Sam Ward to cover the story, and with him Redding
to take photographs. It was a crisp, beautiful day in October, full of
sunshine and the joy of living, and from the great lawn in front of the
Home you could see half over Connecticut and across the waters of the
Sound to Oyster Bay.
Upon Sam Ward, however, the beauties of Nature were