Davidson

“ While he listened, the Frenchman, whose immobility might have but cloaked an internal struggle; moved forward a pace, then another. Davidson, entranced, watched him advance one leg, withdraw his right stump, the armed one, out of his pocket, and swinging his body to put greater force into the blow, bring the seven-pound weight down on the hammock where the head of the sleeper ought to have been. ”

“ Mr Davidson stood still. With his tall, spare form, and his great eyes flashing out of his pale face, he was an impressive figure. His sincerity was obvious in the fire of his gestures and in his deep, ringing voice.
"I expect to have my work cut out for me. I shall act and I shall act promptly. If the tree is rotten it shall be cut down and cast into the flames."
And in the evening after the high tea which was their last meal, while they sat in the stiff parlour, the ladies working and Dr Macphail smoking his pipe, the missionary told them of his work in the islands. ”

“ “'Ah, Davidson, woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love—and to put its trust in life!'
“As we stood there, just before I left him, for he said he wanted to be alone with his dead for a time, we heard a snarly sort of voice near the bushes by the shore calling out:
“'Is that you, governor?'
“'Yes, it's me.'
“'Jeeminy! ”

“ Davidson was a man of extensive reading, and possessed a taste for natural science. His moral character, however, more than his intellectual, renders him worthy of notice. “He was one of the most guileless and pure-minded men I ever knew,” writes the friend we have before quoted. ”

“ The sight set Davidson upon his favourite irritation—the decay of his farm Daisy Burn, under its present owner.
'He's an a'thegither gude-for-naething,' was his conclusion respecting Captain Armytage. 'Such men as he hae nae mair business settlin' in the bush than he wad hae in tryin' the life o' a fish. A mon may come without land, or money, or freends, an I'll warrant him to get on; but there's ane thing he must hae, the willingness to work hard. That will bring him the lands, and money, and freends, as plenty as blackberries. Sae far as I can see, your gentlefolk dinna do weel in the bush ”

“ Even at that time Davidson had bulk. We warned him he would get callosities on his shoulders and elbows because of the tight fit of his command. And Davidson could well afford the smiles he gave us for our chaff. He made lots of money in her. She belonged to a portly Chinaman resembling a mandarin in a picture-book, with goggles and thin drooping moustaches, and as dignified as only a Celestial knows how to be. ”

“ Davidson felt a profound pity for the child. She laid her hand on his knee and whispered an earnest warning against the Frenchman. Davy must never let him come to close quarters. Naturally Davidson wanted to know the reason, for a man without hands did not strike him as very formidable under any circumstances.
“‘Mind you don’t let him—that’s all,’ she insisted anxiously, hesitated, and then confessed that the Frenchman had got her away from the others that afternoon and had ordered her to tie a seven-pound iron weight (out of the set of weights Bamtz used in business) to his right stump. ”

“ I shall never lift a little finger again. At one time I thought that intelligent observation of facts was the best way of cheating the time which is allotted to us whether we want it or not; but now I, have done with observation, too.”
Imagine poor, simple Davidson being addressed in such terms alongside an abandoned, decaying wharf jutting out of tropical bush. He had never heard anybody speak like this before; certainly not Heyst, whose conversation was concise, polite, with a faint ring of playfulness in the cultivated tones of his voice. ”

“ The English organiser or secretary of the still unformed Davidsonian Fellowship was Percival Chubb, then a young clerk in the Local Government Board, and subsequently a lecturer and head of an Ethical Church in New York and St. Louis. Thomas Davidson was about to leave London; and the company he had gathered round him, desirous of further discussing his suggestions, decided to hold another meeting at my rooms. I was at that time a member of the Stock Exchange and lived in lodgings furnished by myself. ”

“ Davidson thought she had not heard him even, when with an unchanged expression she spoke under her breath.
“‘The Frenchman would, in a minute. The others shirk it—unless you resist. He’s a devil. He keeps them going. Without him they would have done nothing but talk. I’ve got chummy with him. What can you do when you are with a man like the fellow I am with now. Bamtz is terrified of them, and they know it. He’s in it from funk. Oh, Davy! take your ship away—quick!’
“‘Too late,’ said Davidson. ”

“ The singing stopped suddenly, but the gramophone continued to bray out its vulgar tune. They heard Davidson's voice and then the noise of something heavy falling. The music stopped. He had hurled the gramophone on the floor. Then again they heard Davidson's voice, they could not make out the words, then Miss Thompson's, loud and shrill, then a confused clamour as though several people were shouting together at the top of their lungs. Mrs Davidson gave a little gasp, and she clenched her hands more tightly. Dr Macphail looked uncertainly from her to his wife. ”

“ John Davidson, then, is a genuine son of his age; free in his thought, wide in his sympathies, eager for the amelioration of man's estate, divided between the hopes of science and the regret for a lost religion, compelled to fall back on the everlasting consolations of [Pg 131] love and nature, an ardent lover of the country and its sights and sounds, constrained to draw word-pictures of the things which thus delight him, and drawing them with the consummate skill of the man who keeps his eye on the essentials of the thing he draws. ”

“ Fight, blood, scalps, they thirsted for, and those they would have.
Perceiving that no pacific measures would avail, Lieutenant Davidson tried the effect of powder and lead. Many of the warriors fell dead, but the savages were so many and so fierce, that the odds were against the troops. In danger of being surrounded and of thus sacrificing the whole of his little army, Davidson decided to retreat down the mountains. Being hotly pursued he was obliged to contest every foot of his way. Trees, rocks, stumps were, as usual, Indian breastworks. ”

“ She had a presentiment of some misfortune, and notwithstanding Davidson’s painstaking explanations, she could not see why her presentiments were to be disregarded. On the very last evening before Davidson went away she asked him in a suspicious manner:
“‘Why is it that you are so anxious to go this time?’
“‘I am not anxious,’ protested the good Davidson. ‘I simply can’t help myself. There’s no one else to go in my place.’
“‘Oh! There’s no one,’ she said, turning away slowly. ”

“ Upon such questions the many-sided poet, whose sympathies are wide, and whose moods are varied, will touch with a certain suggestiveness; he will flash a ray of cheerfulness into the haunts of pessimism, or throw a new pathos into common situations. And Mr. Davidson possesses a large measure of this many-sidedness, this versatility of sympathy. He appears a very human man, a man unfettered by cant or creed, observing men and things from various sides, and entering into their circumstance. ”

“ Dr Macphail looked at his companion with misgiving. Davidson's programme oppressed him. They were eating Hamburger steak again. It seemed the only dish the cook knew how to make. Then below the gramophone began. Davidson started nervously when he heard it, but said nothing. Men's voices floated up. Miss Thompson's guests were joining in a well-known song and presently they heard her voice too, hoarse and loud. There was a good deal of shouting and laughing. The four people upstairs, trying to make conversation, listened despite themselves to the clink of glasses and the scrape of chairs. ”

“ Davidson is in some respects the most richly endowed of all the younger poets. The grand manner comes more easily to him than to any other: and if he can cultivate a sense of form and use this sense as a curb upon his wit, he has all the qualities that take a poet far. ”

“ Riviere's death, when he looked round again, had given him his freedom. In that disordered life there had been sanity as well as folly. Davidson was left by will a sufficient sum to meet all future needs. It was securely invested, but he could not touch the capital, or mortgage this income in advance. A child might have despoiled him, and Riviere knew that and had provided against it.
When the old landmarks go, a man is driven in upon himself, and from his own resources he must create the morrow. So, in this hour of need, Davidson turned to Weimar. ”

“ We find the signature and seal of Pierpont, the latter stamped with the poet's almost living countenance. What a pleasant device for a seal is one's own face, which he may thus multiply at pleasure, and send letters to his friends,—the Head without, and the Heart within! There are a few lines in the school-girl hand of Margaret Davidson, at nine years old; and a scrap of a letter from Washington Allston, a gentle and delicate autograph, in which we catch a glimpse of thanks to his correspondent for the loan of a volume of poetry. ”

“ James's Gazette—This volume may serve as an introduction to a poet of noble and distinctive utterance.
New Age—The book contains much that Mr. Davidson's warmest admirers would best wish to remember him by. There is a subtle charm about these poems which eludes definition, which defies analysis.
T. P.'s Weekly—Mr. Davidson is one of the most individual of living poets; he has a rare lyrical faculty.
Morning Post—Mr. Davidson is as true a poet as we have now among us ... he has included nothing that we do not admire. ”

“ Wade repeated it very patiently. Davidson shut his eyes, and pressed his hands upon his forehead. "Yes," said he. "It's quite right. Now my eyes are shut I know you're right. That's you, Bellows, sitting by me on the couch. I'm in England again. And we're in the dark."
Then he opened his eyes. "And there," said he, "is the sun just rising, and the yards of the ship, and a tumbled sea, and a couple of birds flying. I never saw anything so real. And I'm sitting up to my neck in a bank of sand."
He bent forward and covered his face with his hands. Then he opened his eyes again. ”

“ Dickinson, I appeal from the conflicting testimony of the Reverend D. R. Austin and the venerable Mrs. (Spaulding) Davidson, to the Davidson statement itself as evidence that it is not the product of "an aged woman, and very infirm." [80] I ask any person capable of forming any kind of a literary judgment, to take the statement signed with Mrs. Davidson's name, and then say, honor bright, if that is the statement of a woman in private life, much less of one "aged and infirm." Its introduction, almost ideal from a literary standpoint, when the purpose of the document is considered ”

“ She has the fineness of a stock outworn, a little too much fineness; but the indwelling rare spirit of her is unmistakable, the sweetness, too. Beauty shadowed by a cloud might partly describe her; and looking deeply into that face, one sees a mirrored fear. Life presses on such people; they lack the strength to cope with it or with themselves. Small wonder that a brain thus overborne had proved uncertain.
Davidson saw the threadbare lodging in which she lived. ”

“ Mrs Davidson's ears rang still with the harlot's mocking laughter.
"She's gone too far."
"Too far for the mercy of God?" His eyes lit up suddenly and his voice grew mellow and soft. "Never. The sinner may be deeper in sin than the depth of hell itself, but the love of the Lord Jesus can reach him still."
The girl came back with the message.
"Miss Thompson's compliments and as long as Rev. Davidson don't come in business hours she'll be glad to see him any time."
The party received it in stony silence, and Dr Macphail quickly effaced from his lips the smile which had come upon them. ”

“ Davidson expected in his heart to have some comfort out of him. In his placid way he's a man who needs affection. Well, Tony has grown into a fine youth--but there you are! He wants to be a priest; his one dream is to be a missionary. The Fathers assure Davidson that it is a serious vocation. They tell him he has a special disposition for mission work, too. So Laughing Anne's boy will lead a saintly life in China somewhere; he may even become a martyr; but poor Davidson is left out in the cold. He will have to go downhill without a single human affection near him because of these old dollars. ”

“ A boat had landed overnight to get penguins’ eggs, had been delayed, and a thunderstorm drifting up, the boat’s crew had waited until the morning before rejoining the ship. Atkins had been one of them, and he corroborated, word for word, the descriptions Davidson had given of the island and the boat. There is not the slightest doubt in any of our minds that Davidson has really seen the place. In some unaccountable way, while he moved hither and thither in London, his sight moved hither and thither in a manner that corresponded, about this distant island. How is absolutely a mystery. ”

“ It paused, with the one goggle eye immovably gazing down the whole length of the room and through the door opening on to the "piazza." It paused, then went on in the same low pitch:
"There was even one English girl."
"Poor devil!"--said Davidson, "I suppose these women are not much better than slaves really. Was that fellow with the dyed beard decent in his way?"
The mechanism remained silent. The sympathetic soul of Davidson drew its own conclusions.
"Beastly life for these women!" he said. "When you say an English girl, Mrs. Schomberg, do you really mean a young girl? ”