Читать книгу American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' - Julian Street - Страница 14

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The drive from Baltimore to the sweet, slumbering city of Annapolis is over a good road, but through barren country. Taken in the crisp days of autumn, by a northern visitor sufficiently misguided to have supposed that beyond Mason and Dixon's Line the winters are tropical it may prove an uncomfortable drive—unless he be able to borrow a fur overcoat. It was on this drive that my disillusionment concerning the fall and winter climate of the South began, for, wearing two cloth overcoats, one over the other, I yet suffered agonies from cold. The sun shone down upon the open automobile in which we tore along, but its rays were no competitors for the biting wind. Through lap robes, cloth caps, and successive layers of clothing, and around the edges of goggles, fine little frozen fangs found their way, like the pliable beaks of a race of gigantic, fabulous mosquitoes from the Arctic regions. I have driven an open car over the New England snows for miles in zero weather, and been warm by comparison, because I was prepared.

My former erroneous ideas as to the southern climate may be shared by others, and it is therefore well, perhaps, to enlarge a little bit upon the subject. Never, except during a winter passed in a stone tile-floored villa on the island of Capri, whither I went to escape the cold, have I been so conscious of it, as during fall, winter, and spring in the South.

In the hotels of the South one may keep warm in cold weather, but in private homes it is not always possible to do so, for the popular illusion that the "sunny South" is of a uniformly temperate climate in the winter persists nowhere more violently than in the South itself. Many a house in Virginia, let alone the other States farther down the map, is without a furnace, and winter life in such houses, with their ineffectual wood fires, is like life in a refrigerator tempered by the glow of a safety match. As in Italy and Spain, so in the South it is often warmer outdoors than in; more than once during my southern voyage I was tempted to resume the habit, acquired in Capri, of wearing an overcoat in the house and taking it off on going out into the sunshine. True, in Capri we had roses blooming in the garden on Christmas Day, but that circumstance, far from proving warmth, merely proved the hardiness of roses. So, in the far South—excepting Florida and perhaps a strip of the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama—the blooming of flowers in the winter does not prove that "Palm Beach suits" and panama hats invariably make a desirable uniform.

Furthermore, I am inclined to believe that because some southern winter days are warm and others cold, a Northerner feels cold in the South more than he feels the corresponding temperature at home—on somewhat the principle which caused the Italians who went with the Duke of the Abruzzi on his polar expedition to withstand cold more successfully than did the Scandinavians.

Of the southern summer I have no experience, but I have been repeatedly assured that certain of the southern beaches are nearly, if not quite, as comfortable in hot weather as are those of New Jersey or Long Island, while in numerous southern mountain retreats one may be fairly cool through the hot months—a fact which spells fortune for the hotel keepers of such high-perched resorts as Asheville, White Sulphur Springs, and the Hot Springs of Virginia, who have their houses full of Northerners in winter and Southerners in summer.

The experience of arrival in Annapolis, delightful in any weather and at any time of year, gives one a satisfaction almost ecstatic after a cold, windy automobile ride such as we had suffered. To ache for the shelter of almost any town, or any sort of building, and, with such yearnings, to arrive in this dreamy city, whose mild air seems to be compounded from fresh winds off a glittering blue sea, arrested by the barricade of ancient hospitable-looking houses, warmed by the glow of their sun-baked red brick, and freighted with a ghostly fragrance, as from the phantoms of the rose gardens of a century or two ago—to arrive, frigid and forlorn in such a haven, to drink a cup of tea in the old Paca house (now a hotel), is to experience heaven after purgatory. For there is no town that I know whose very house fronts hold out to the stranger that warm, old-fashioned welcome that Annapolis seems to give.

The Paca house, which as a hotel has acquired the name Carvel Hall, is the house that Winston Churchill had in mind as the Manners house, of his novel "Richard Carvel." A good idea of the house, as it was, may be obtained by visiting the Brice house, next door, for the two are almost twins. When Mr. Churchill was a cadet at Annapolis, before the modern part of the Carvel Hall hotel was built, there were the remains of terraced gardens back of the old mansion, stepping down to an old spring house, and a rivulet which flowed through the grounds was full of watercress. The book describes a party at the house and in these gardens. The Chase house on Maryland Avenue was the one Mr. Churchill thought of as the home of Lionel Carvel, and he described the view from upper windows of this house, over the Harwood house, across the way, to the Severn.

Annapolis, Baedeker tells me, was the first chartered city in the United States, having been granted its charter by Queen Anne considerably more than two centuries ago. It is, as every little boy and girl should know, the capital of Maryland, and is built around a little hill upon the top of which stands the old State House in which Washington surrendered his commission and in which met the first Constitutional Convention.

In its prime Annapolis was nearly as large a city as it is to-day, but that is not saying a great deal, for at the present time it has not so many inhabitants as Amarillo, Texas, or Brazil, Indiana.

Nevertheless, the life of Annapolis in colonial days, and in the days which followed them, was very brilliant, and we learn from the diary of General Washington and from the writings of amazed Englishmen and Frenchmen who visited the city in its period of glory that there were dinners and balls night after night, that the theater was encouraged in Annapolis more than in any other city, that the race meets compared with English race meets both as to the quality of the horses and of the fashionable attendance, that there were sixteen clubs, that the women of the city were beautiful, charming, and superbly dressed, that slaves in sumptuous liveries were to be seen about the streets, that certain gentlemen paid calls in barges which were rowed by half a dozen or more blacks, in uniform, and that the perpetual hospitality of the great houses was gorgeous and extravagant.

The houses hint of these things. If you have seen the best old brick mansions of New England, and will imagine them more beautifully proportioned, set off by balancing wings and having infinitely finer details as to doorways, windows, porticos, and also as to wood carvings and fixtures within—as, for instance, the beautiful silver latches and hinges of the Chase house at Annapolis—you will gather something of the flavor of these old Southern homes. For though such venerable mansions as the Chase, Paca, Brice, Hammond, Ridout, and Bordley houses, in Annapolis, are not without family resemblance to the best New England colonial houses, the resemblance is of a kind to emphasize the differences, not only between the mansions of the North and South, but between the builders of them. The contrast is subtle, but marked.

Your New England house, beautiful as it is, is stamped with austere simplicity. The man who built it was probably a scholar but he was almost certainly a Calvinist. He habited himself in black and was served by serving maids, instead of slaves in livery. If a woman was not flat-chested and forlorn, he was prone to regard her as the devil masquerading for the downfall of man—and no doubt with some justice, too. Night and morning he presided at family prayers, the purpose of which was to impress upon his family and servants that to have a good time was wicked, and that to be gay in this life meant hell-fire and damnation in the next.

Upon this pious person his cousin of Annapolis looked with something not unlike contempt; for the latter, though he too was a scholar, possessed the sort of scholarliness which takes into account beauty and the lore of cosmopolitanism. He may have been religious or he may not have been, but if religious he demanded something handsome, something stylish, in his religion, as he did also in his residence, in his wife, his sons, his daughters, his horses, coaches, dinners, wines, and slaves. He did things with a flourish, and was not beset by a perpetual consciousness and fear of hell. He approved of pretty women; he made love to them; he married them; he was the father of them. His pretty daughters married men who also admired pretty women, and became the mothers of other pretty women, who became, in turn, the mothers and grandmothers of the pretty women of the South to-day.

Your old-time Annapolis gentleman's ideas of a republic were far indeed from those now current, for he understood perfectly the difference between a republic and a democracy—a difference which is not now so well understood. He believed that the people should elect the heads of the government, but he also believed that these heads should be elected from his own class, and that, having voted, the people should go about their business, trusting their betters to run the country as it should be run.

This, at least, is my picture of the old aristocrats of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, as conveyed to me by what I have seen of their houses and possessions and what I have read of their mode of life. They were the early princes of the Republic and by all odds its most picturesque figures.

Very different from the spirit of appreciation and emulation shown by the trustees of Johns Hopkins University with regard to the old house, Homewood, in Baltimore, is that manifested in the architecture of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, where, in a city fairly flooded with examples of buildings, both beautiful and typically American, architectural hints were ignored, and there were erected great stone structures whose chief characteristics are size, solidity, and the look of being "government property." The main buildings of the Academy, with the exception of the chapel, suggest the sort of sublimated penitentiary that Mr. Thomas Mott Osborne might, one fancies, construct under a carte-blanche authorization, while the chapel, the huge dome of which is visible to all the country round, makes one think of a monstrous wedding cake fashioned in the form of a building and covered with white and yellow frosting in ornamental patterns.

This chapel, one imagines, may have been inspired by the Invalides in Paris, but of the Invalides it falls far short. I know nothing of the history of the building, but it is easy to believe that the original intention may have been to place at the center of it, under the dome, a great well, over the parapet of which might have been seen the sarcophagus of John Paul Jones, in the crypt. One prefers to think that the architect had some such plan; for the crypt, as at present arranged, is hardly more than a dark cellar, approached by what seems to be a flight of humble back stairs. To descend into it, and find there the great marble coffin with its bronze dolphins, is not unlike going down into the cellar of a residence and there discovering the family silver reposing in the coal-bin.

In this connection it is interesting to recall the fact that our sometimes piratical and always brilliant Revolutionary naval hero died in Paris, and that until a few years ago his resting place was unknown. The reader will remember that while General Horace Porter was American ambassador to France a search was instituted for the remains of John Paul Jones, the greater part of the work having been conducted by Colonel H. Baily Blanchard, then first secretary of the Embassy, assisted by the ambassador and Mr. Henry Vignaud, dean of secretaries of embassy. The resting place of Jones was finally discovered in an abandoned cemetery in the city of Paris, over which houses had been built. The body was contained in a leaden casket and was preserved in alcohol so that identification was easily accomplished by means of a contemporaneous likeness of Jones, and also by means of measurements taken from Houdin's bust. The remains were accorded military honors in Paris, and were brought to this country on a war vessel.

Why the crypt at Annapolis is as it is, I do not know, but in my own purely imaginary picture of what happened, I see the architect's plans for a heroic display of Jones's tomb knocked on the head by some "practical man," some worthy dunce in the Navy Department, whom I can imagine as protesting: "But no! We can't take up space at the center of the chapel for any such purpose. It must be floored over to make room for pews. Otherwise where will the cadets sit?"

So, although the grounds of the academy, with their lawns, and aged trees, and squirrels, and cadets, are charming, and although the solemn and industrious Baedeker assures me that the academy is the "chief lion" of Annapolis, and although I know that it is a great school, and that we need another like it in order properly to officer our navy, I prefer the old town with its old houses, and old streets bearing such reminiscent names as Hanover, Prince George, and Duke of Gloucester.

For certain slang expressions used by cadets I am indebted to a member of the corps. From this admiral-to-be I learn that a "bird" or "wazzo" is a man or boy; that a "pap sheet" is a report covering delinquencies, and that to "hit the pap" is to be reported for delinquency; that "steam" is marine engineering, and to be "bilged for juice" is to fail in examinations in electrical engineering—to get an "unsat," or unsatisfactory mark, or even a "zip" or "swabo," which is a zero. Cadets do not escort girls to dances, but "drag" them; a girl is a "drag," and a "heavy drag" or "brick" is an unattractive girl who must be taken to a dance. A "sleuth" or "jimmylegs" is a night watchman, and to be "ragged" is to be caught. Mess-hall waiters are sometimes called "mokes," while at other times the names of certain exalted dignitaries of the Navy Department, or of the academy, are applied to them.

I shall never cease to regret that dread of the cold kept us from seeing ancient Whitehall, a few miles from Annapolis, which was the residence of Governor Horatio Sharpe, and is one of the finest of historic American homes; nor shall I, on the other hand, ever cease to rejoice that, in spite of cold we did, upon another day, visit Hampton, the rare old mansion of the Ridgelys, of Maryland, which stands amid its own five thousand acres some dozen miles or so to the north of Baltimore. The Ridgelys were, it appears, the great Protestant land barons of this region as the Carrolls were the great Catholics, and, like the Carrolls, they remain to-day the proprietors of a vast estate and an incomparable house.