Richard Harding Davis

The Red Cross Girl Richard Harding Davis

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 wasted. When, the night previous, he had been given the assignment he had sulked, and he was still sulking. Only a year before he had graduated into New York from a small up-state college and a small up-state newspaper, but already he was a "star" man, and Hewitt, the city editor, humored him."What's the matter with the story?" asked the city editor. "With the speeches and lists of names it ought to run to two columns.""Suppose it does!" exclaimed Ward; "anybody can collect type-written speeches and lists of names. That's a messenger boy's job. Where's there any heart-interest in a Wall Street broker like Flagg waving a silver trowel and singing, 'See what a good boy am!' and a lot of grownup men in pinafores saying, 'This stone is well and truly laid.' Where's the story in that?""When I was a reporter," declared the city editor, "I used to be glad to get a day in the country.""Because you'd never lived in the country," returned Sam. "If you'd wasted twenty-six years in the backwoods, as I did, you'd know that every minute you spend outside of New York you're robbing yourself.""Of what?" demanded the city editor. "There's nothing to New York except cement, iron girders, noise, and zinc garbage cans. You never see the sun in New York; you never see the moon unless you stand in the middle of the street and bend backward. We never see flowers in New York except on the women's hats. We never see the women except in cages in the elevators-they spend their lives shooting up and down elevator shafts in department stores, in apartment houses, in office buildings. And we never see children in New York because the janitors won't let the women who live in elevators have children! Don't talk to me! New York's a Little Nemo nightmare. It's a joke. It's an insult!"