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. Little “Stevie” was a frail and sensitive child. His father died when he was young, and then his evangelist mother died, and he was left to grope his way alone. We find him turning up at a military academy with a reputation as a baseball player, also with six pipes--which was six too many for a lad who was to die from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-nine. He picked up a living doing odd newspaper jobs, and then he went to Syracuse University. Most singular, prank of history, that James Roscoe Day, D.D., Sc.D., LL.D., D.C.L., L.H.D., Chancellor of the University of Heaven (see “The Goose-Step”), should have had in charge the intellectual and moral training of the author of “Maggie: A Girl of the Street”!