clew's reviews: a book log

Soldiers of Fortune, Richard Harding Davis

One of my grandfathers was an engineer (civil, geophysical) who knocked around Central America and the Middle East, mostly, going in without maps and leaving roads and wells behind him. He and my grandmother eloped from her finishing school on midnight of her eighteenth birthday, were married the next morning in the next state, and went off to put sweat equity into a ranch in Colombia. Their stories got more dramatic from there.

All these tales of my grandparents ought to be taken with a lot of salt, as they were told me long after the fact, the art of the raconteur was an art my grandparents cherished, and I was a romanticizing little kid. But this is how I remember it.

They gave the impression that this was the sort of thing anyone did in the '30s, certainly anyone with nerve. Of course, all the expats they met had had wild lives, by definition, so I can see why they thought so after the fact. I have just been struck by how likely it is that they had read Richard Harding Davis' novels and been seduced into the belief that everyone had such a life before they chose to follow it. I haven't, to my massive relief, yet recognized a specific anecdote my grandfather told, but I'm pretty sure he used some of the jokes. And the physical copy I picked up for 25¢ is part of a 1907 Collected Edition, glazed cloth, six greyscale illustrations by C. D. Gibson himself; all this strongly suggests that libraries and uncles and used bookstores made Davis available to any plucky boy in 1925, when my grandfather was fourteen.

This particular novel is about three Soldiers of Fortune in a Ruritania-class South American republic. Only one is a professional soldier; he left some British regiment under clouded circumstances and is the head of the guard of the modestly-corrupt President. The other two are engineers, one a US orphan the other probably a US citizen but of Scottish extraction. The orphan Clay, especially, is a sharp-shooting natural leader of men, cunning and courageous, who does the work of twenty and loves with a pure heart. It's not a subtle novel.

It ameliorates the flaws of its kind. The worst is the unthinking racism of the whole plot; the Americans, soi-disant white men (Irish are still navvies with the Negroes), don't just build a mine and railroad but oversee the successful resistance to a dastardly coup. The mitigation is that all this exists to provide the heroes with noble work, not to let the reader delight in spite and cruelty. Bolivar is clearly a great hero to Clay, whose father died trying to free Cuba; he knows the local citizens want to defend their constitutional Republic, he just thinks they need leadership (and a call to the Great White Fleet) to do it.

The other plot is the Romance, which was much more surprising. The perfect débutante we meet on the first page, who has never quite been satisfied with the rich and titled men who offer for her, whose newsmagazine picture Clay has been carrying long before he met her—she doesn't marry him. He becomes gently disillusioned. He falls in love with her excellent little sister, who is informed about and fascinated by engineering. Little sister gets to rescue the hero, carriage-horses at the gallop, gunshots flying around her! The older sister has been ruined by social conformity, see. This is sort of delightful, and unconvincingly suggestive of Watch and Ward, and extremely suggestive of the upcoming Woman Question; their daughter is going to grow up knocking around the world with two competent parents, and it's no wonder she'll go back home and demand college degrees and the Vote.

On the other hand, the near-coup has been financed by a freelance professional insurgency-profiteer, Clay's evil twin. He loses this round, but the second engineer didn't get the girl (he's Scottish) and therefore must go off and become a revolutionary, sort of Locksley Hall. He starts with big theories about how grand it will be to free many oppressed little nations, but we know he's working with the conscienceless profiteer.

Clay says, as though everyone knows it, ...it takes two thousand bullets to kill a man in European warfare.... Contemporaneous supply-train knowlege? Useful explanation of how almost everyone survives the battle-scenes?

The pictures are odd. The women are a bit out of drawing, although they are as sumptuous and languid as we expect from Charles Dana Gibson. The men are as noble and clean of limb as Arrow shirt advertisements, but they have tiny heads and hands and feet. This probably suggested their natural aristocracy, but it looks funny now.

Davis also wrote a bunch of stories about New York/London stylish high life, all valets and footlights and Delmonico's; I haven't liked those at all.

Project Gutenberg text #403. PG has lots and lots of Richard Harding Davis.