When he left he gave us the stove, and when we left, some time later,
it was presented to one of our doctor friends out in a British
hospital, where I'm sure it is doing its best to thaw the Balkan chill
out of sick and wounded soldiers.
Davis was always up early, and his energy and interest were as keen as
a boy's. We had our meals together, sometimes in the crowded and
rather smart Bastasini's, but more often in the maelstrom of humanity
that nightly packed the Olympos Palace restaurant. Davis, Shepherd,
Hare, and I, with sometimes Mr. and Mrs. John Bass, made up these
parties, which, for a period of about two weeks or so, were the most
enjoyable daily events of our lives.
Under the glaring lights of the restaurant, and surrounded by British,
French, Greek, and Serbian officers, German, Austrian, and Bulgarian
civilians, with a sprinkling of American, English, and Scotch nurses
and doctors, packed so solidly in the huge, high-ceilinged room that
the waiters could barely pick their way among the tables, we hung for
hours over our dinners, and left only when the landlord and his
Austrian wife counted the day's receipts and paid the waiters at the
end of the evening.
One could not imagine a more charming and delightful companion than
Davis during these days. While he always asserted that he could not
make a speech, and was terrified at the thought of standing up at a
banquet-table, yet, sitting at a dinner-table with a few friends who
were only too eager to listen rather than to talk, his stories,
covering personal experiences in all parts of the world, were intensely
vivid, with that remarkable "holding" quality of description which
characterizes his writings.
He brought his own bread--a coarse, brown sort, which he preferred to
the better white bread--and with it he ate great quantities of butter.
As we sat down at the table his first demand was for "Mastika," a
peculiar Greek drink distilled from mastic gum, and his second demand
invariably was "Du beurre!" with the "r's" as silent as the stars; and
if it failed to come at once the waiter was made to feel the enormity
of his tardiness.
The reminiscences ranged from his early newspaper days in Philadelphia,
and skipping from Manchuria to Cuba and Central America, to his early
Sun days under Arthur Brisbane; they ranged through an endless variety
of personal experiences which very nearly covered the whole course of
American history in the past twenty years.
Perhaps to him it was pleasant to go over his remarkable adventures,
but it could not have been half as pleasant as it was to hear them,
told as they were with a keenness of description and brilliancy of
humorous comment that made them gems of narrative.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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