Chatham, the old Fitzhugh house, now the residence of Mark Sullivan. Washington, Madison, Monroe, Washington Irving, Lee and Lincoln have known the shelter of its roofChatham, the old Fitzhugh house, now the residence of Mark Sullivan. Washington, Madison, Monroe, Washington Irving, Lee and Lincoln have known the shelter of its roof
In this house my companion and I were guests, and as I won the toss for the choice of rooms, mine was the privilege of sleeping in the historic west bedchamber, the principal guest room, and of opening my eyes, in the morning, upon a lovely wall all paneled in white-painted wood.
I shall always remember the delightful experience of awakening in that room, so vast, dignified, and beautiful, and of lying there a little drowsy, and thinking of those who had been there before me. This was the room occupied by George and Martha Washington when they stopped for a few days at Chatham on their wedding journey; this was the room occupied by Madison,by Monroe, by Washington Irving, and by Robert E. Lee when he visited Chatham and courted Mary Custis, who became his wife. And, most wonderful of all to me, this was the room occupied by Lincoln when he came to Fredericksburg to review the army, while Chatham was Union headquarters, and the embattled Lee had headquarters in the old house known as Brompton, still standing on Marye's Heights back of the river and the town. It is said that Lee during the siege of Fredericksburg never trained his guns on Chatham, because of his sentiment for the place. As I lay there in the morning I wondered if Lee had been aware, at the time, that Lincoln was under the roof of Chatham, and whether Lincoln knew, when he slept in "my" room, that Washington and Lee had both been there before him.
War, I thought, not only makes strange bedfellows, but strange combinations in the histories of bedrooms.
Then the maid rapped for the second time upon my door, and though this time I got up at once, my ruminations made me scandalously late for breakfast.
After breakfast came the motor, which was to take us to the battlefields, its driver a thin dry-looking, dry-talking man, with the air of one a little tired of the story he told to tourists day in and day out, yet conscientiously resolved to go through with it. Before the huge cemetery which overlooks the site of the most violent fighting that occurred in the bloody and useless Battle of Fredericksburg, he paused briefly; then droveus to the field of Chancellorsville, to that of the Battles of the Wilderness, and finally to the region of Spottsylvania Courthouse; and at each important spot he stopped and told us what had happened there. He knew all about the Civil War, that man, and he had a way of passing out his information with a calm assumption that his hearers knew nothing about it whatever. This irritated my companion, who also knows all about the War, having once passed three days in the neighborhood of a Soldiers' Home. Consequently he kept cutting in, supplying additional details—such, for instance, as that Stonewall Jackson, who died in a house which the driver pointed out, was shot by some of his own men, who took him for a Yankee as he was returning from a reconnaissance.
Either one of these competitive historians alone, I could have stood, but the way they picked each other up, fighting the old-time battles over again, got on my nerves. Besides, it was cold, and as I have taken occasion to remark before, I do not like cold motor rides. Indeed, as I think it over, it seems to me I do not like battlefields, either. At all events, I became more and more morose as we traversed that bleak Virginia landscape, and I am afraid that before the day was over I was downright sulky.
As we drove back to Fredericksburg and to the train which was to take us to Charlottesville, my companion made remarks of a general character about people who were trivial minded, and who didn't take a proper interest in the scenes of great historical occurrences. When he had continued for some time in this vein, I remarked feebly that I loved to read about battles; but that, far from mitigating his severity, only caused him to change his theme. He said that physical laziness was a terrible thing because it not only made the body soft but by degrees softened the brain, as well. He said that when people didn't want to see battlefields, preferring to lie in bed and read about them, that was a sign of the beginning of the end.
On various occasions throughout the week he brought this subject up again, and I was glad indeed when, as the time for our party with the beautiful young actress, in Washington, drew near, he began to forget about my shortcomings and think of more agreeable things.
When Virginians speak of "the university," they do not mean Harvard, Princeton, Yale, or even Washington and Lee, but always the University of Virginia, which is at Charlottesville.
The city of Charlottesville, in its downtown parts, is no more and no less dingy and dismal than many another town of six or seven thousand inhabitants, be it North or South. It has a long main street, lined with little shops and moving-picture shows, and the theatrical posters which thrill one at first sight with hopes of evening entertainment, prove, on inspection, to have survived long after the "show" they advertise has come and gone, or else to presage the "show" that is coming for one night, week after next.
Nor is this scarcity of theatrical entertainment confined alone to small towns of the South. Not all important stars and important theatrical productions visit even the largest cities, for the South is not regarded by theatrical managers as particularly profitable territory. It would be interesting to know whether anæmia of the theater in the South, as well as the falling off generally of theatergoing in lesser American cities—usually attributed to the popularity and cheapness of the "movies"—is not due in large measure to the folly of managers themselves in sending out inferior companies. Any one who has seen a theatrical entertainment in New York and seen it later "on the road" is likely to be struck by the fact that even the larger American cities do not always get the full New York cast, while smaller cities seldom if ever get any part of it. The South suffers particularly in this respect. The little "river shows," which arrive now and then in river towns, and which are more or less characteristic of the South, have the excuse of real picturesqueness, however bad the entertainment given, for the players live and have their theater on flatboats, which tie up at the wharf. But the plain fact about the ordinary little southern "road show" is that it does not deserve to make money.
The life of a poor player touring the South must be very wretched, for generally, excepting in large cities, hotels are poor. Before we had gone far upon our way, my companion and I learned to inquire carefully in advance as to the best hotels, and when we found in any small city one which was not a fire trap, and which was clean, we were surprised, while if the service was fairly good, and the meals were not very bad, we considered it a matter for rejoicing.
We were advised to stop, in Charlottesville, at the New Gleason, and when we alighted at the dingy old brick railroad station—a station quite as unprepossessing as that at New Haven, Connecticut—we began to feel that all was not for the best. A large gray horse hitched to the hack in which we rode to the Gleason evidently felt the same, for at first he balked, and later tried to run away.
The hotel lobby was a perfect example of its kind. There were several drummers writing at the little desks, and several more sitting idly in chairs adjacent to brass cuspidors. All of them looked despondent with a despondency suggesting pie for breakfast. Behind the desk was a sleepy-looking old clerk who, as we arrived, was very busy over a financial transaction involving change of ownership in a two-cent stamp. This enterprise concluded, he assigned us rooms.
Never have I wished to win the toss for rooms as I wished it when I saw the two allotted to us, for though the larger one could not by a flight of fancy be termed cheerful, the sight of the lesser chamber filled me with thoughts of madness.
Of course I lost.
Never shall I forget that room. It was too small to accommodate my trunks with any comfort, so I left them downstairs with the porter, descending, now and then, to get such articles as I required. The furniture, what there was of it, was of yellow pine; the top of the dresser was scarred with the marks of many glasses and many bottles; the lace window curtains were long, hard and of a wiry stiffness, and the wall-paper was of a scrambled pattern all in bilious brown. During the evening I persuaded my companion to walk with me through the town, and once I got him out I kept him going on and on through shadowy streets unknown to us, until, exhausted, he insisted upon returning to our hostelry. I fancy that there are picturesque old houses on the outskirts of the town, but with that wall paper and a terrible nostalgia occupying my mind, I was in no state to judge of what was there.
On reaching the hotel my companion went to bed, but I remained until late in the office, writing letters, doing anything rather than go up to my room. When at last I did ascend I planned to read, but the arrangement of the light was bad, so presently I put it out and lay there sleepless and miserable, thinking of foolish things that I have said and done during a life rich with such items, and having chills and fever over each separate recollection. How I drifted off to sleep at last I do not know; all I remember is waking up next morning, leaping out of bed and dressing in frantic haste to get out of my room. There was but one thing in it which did not utterly offend the eye: that was the steam pipe which ascended from floor to ceiling at one corner, and which, being a simple, honest metal tube, was not objectionable.
As we passed through the office on our way to breakfast, the bus man entered, and in a loud, retarded chant proclaimed: "Train for the South!"
The impressive tones in which this announcement was delivered seemed to call for a sudden stir, a rush for bagsand coats, a general exodus, but no one in the office moved, and I remember feeling sorry for the bus man as he turned and went out in the midst of a crushing anti-climax.
"I wonder," I said to my companion, "if anybody ever gets up and goes when that man calls out the trains."
"I don't believe so," he replied. "I don't think he calls trains for any such purpose. He only warns people so they will expect to hear the train, and not be frightened when it goes through."
Thomas Jefferson is most widely remembered, I suppose, as the author of the Declaration of Independence, the third President, the purchaser of Louisiana, and the unfortunate individual upon whom the Democratic party casts the blame for its existence, precisely as the Republican party blames itself on Washington and Lincoln—although the lamentable state into which both parties have fallen is actually the fault of living men.
It is significant, however, that of this trio of Jeffersonian items, Jefferson himself selected but one to be included in the inscription which he wrote for his tombstone—a modest obelisk on the grounds at Monticello. The inscription mentions but three of his achievements: the authorship of the Declaration, that of the Virginia statute for religious freedom, and the fact that he was "Father of the University of Virginia."
Regardless of other accomplishments, the man who built the university and the house at Monticello wasgreat. It is more true of these buildings than of any others I have seen that they are the autobiography, in brick and stone, of their architect. To see them, to see some of the exquisitely margined manuscript in Jefferson's clean handwriting, preserved in the university library, and to read the Declaration, is to gain a grasp of certain sides of Jefferson's nature which can be achieved in no other way.
Monticello stands on a lofty hilltop, with vistas, between trees, of neighboring valleys, hills, and mountains. It is a supremely lovely house, unlike any other, and, while it is too much to say that one would recognize it as the house of the writer of the Declaration, it is not too much to say that, once one does know it, one can trace a clear affinity resulting from a common origin—an affinity much more apparent, by the way, than may be traced between the work of Michelangelo on St. Peter's at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and in his "David."
Monticello stands on a lofty hilltop, with vistas, between trees of neighboring valleys, hills, and mountainsMonticello stands on a lofty hilltop, with vistas, between trees of neighboring valleys, hills, and mountains
The introductory paragraph to the Declaration ascends into the body of the document as gracefully and as certainly as the wide flights of easy steps ascend to the doors of Monticello; the long and beautifully balanced paragraph which follows, building word upon word and sentence upon sentence into a central statement, has a form as definite and graceful as that of the finely proportioned house; the numbered paragraphs which follow, setting forth separate details, are like rooms within the house, and—I have just come upon thecoincidence with a pleasant start such as might be felt by the discoverer of some complex and important cipher—as there are twenty-seven of the numbered paragraphs in the Declaration, so there are twenty-seven rooms in Monticello. Last of all there are two little phrases in the Declaration (the phrases stating that we shall hold our British brethren in future as we hold the rest of mankind—"enemies in war; in peace, friends"), which I would liken to the small twin buildings, one of them Jefferson's office, the other that of the overseer, which stand on either side of the lawn at Monticello, at some distance from the house. These office buildings face, and balance upon each other, and upon the mansion, but they are so much smaller that to put them there required daring, while to make them "compose" (as painters say) with the great house, required the almost superhuman sense of symmetry which Jefferson assuredly possessed.
The present owner of Monticello is Mr. Jefferson Monroe Levy, former United States congressman from New York. Mr. Levy is a Democrat and a bachelor, according to the Congressional Directory, which states further that he inherited Monticello from an uncle, Commodore Uriah P. Levy, U. S. N., and that the latter purchased the place in 1830 "at the suggestion of President Jackson."
Dorothy Dix, writing in "Good Housekeeping," tells a tale which I have heard repeatedly of the acquisition of Monticello by Uriah Levy. Says Miss Dix:
"Monticello was sold to a stranger, and Jefferson'sonly daughter, Mrs. Randolph, widowed and with eleven children, was left homeless.... A subscription of three thousand dollars was raised ... to buy back the house ... and this money was intrusted to a young relative of the Jeffersons' to convey to Charlottesville. Traveling in the stagecoach with the young man was Captain Uriah P. Levy, to whom he confided his mission. The young man became intoxicated and dallied, but Captain Levy hastened on to Charlottesville, and purchased Monticello for two thousand five hundred dollars. The next day the repentant and sober young man arrived and besought Captain Levy to take the three thousand dollars ... and let Monticello go back to the Jefferson family. Captain Levy refused to part with his bargain, but at his death he willed Monticello to 'the people of the United States to be held as a memorial of Thomas Jefferson'.... The Levy heirs contested the will, and it was finally decided upon a technicality that 'the people of the United States' was too indefinite a term to make the bequest binding, and the estate passed into the hands of the Levys, and so to its present owner...."
In a biographical note upon the latter, the Congressional Directory states that the house is "kept open to the public all the year." My companion and I were admitted to the grounds, but were informed that, though the building was unoccupied, no one was permitted to enter. While we were in the vicinity of the house we were attended by one of the men employed on the place, who told us that when people were allowed to roamabout at will, there had been much vandalism; ivy had been pulled from the walls, shrubbery broken, pieces of brick chipped out of the steps, and teeth knocked from the heads of the marble lions which flank them.
Of recent years there has been on foot a movement, launched, I believe, by Mrs. Martin W. Littleton, of New York, to influence the Government to purchase Monticello from its present owner. It is difficult to see precisely how Mr. Levy could be forced to part with his property, if he did not wish to. Nevertheless public sentiment on this subject has become so strong that he has agreed to let the Government have Monticello "at a price"—so, at least, I was informed in Charlottesville.
The opening of the University of Virginia was an event of prime importance for the higher education in the whole country, and really marks a new era.
The opening of the University of Virginia was an event of prime importance for the higher education in the whole country, and really marks a new era.
—Charles Forster Smith.
Like Monticello, the buildings of the University of Virginia are those of an intellectual, a classicist, a purist, and, like it, they might have been austere but for the warmth of their red brick and the glow of their white-columned porticos. But they are cheerful buildings, which, individually and as a group, attain a geometrical yet soft perfection, a supreme harmony of form and color.
The principal buildings are grouped about a large campus, called the Lawn, which is dominated by the rotunda, suggesting in its outlines the Pantheon at Rome. From the rotunda, at either side, starts a white-columned arcade connecting the various houses which are distributed at graceful intervals along the margins of the rectangular lawn, above which loom the tops of even rows of beautiful old trees. Flanking the buildings of the lawn, and reached by brick walks which pass between the famous serpentine walls (walls but one brick thick which support themselves on the snake-fence principle, by progressing in a series of reverse curves), are the "ranges": solid rows of one-story student dormitories built of brick and fronted by colonnades which command other lawns and other trees.
With a single exception, restorations and additions to the university have been made with reverence and taste, and the Brooks Museum, the one architectural horror of the place, fortunately does not stand upon the lawn. Since it is said that beauty could not exist were there not ugliness for contrast, this building may have its uses; certainly, after a glance at it, one looks back with renewed delight at the structures of the central group.
Most superb of all, always there hangs at night, above the buildings and the tree-tops, a glorious full moon. At least I suppose it always hangs there, for though it seemed to us very wonderful, every one else seemed used to it.
Like Venice, the University of Virginia should first be seen by moonlight. There could not have been a finer moonlit night, I thought, than that cold, crisp one upon which my companion stood for two hours beside the rotunda, gazing at the lawn and drawing it, its frosty grass and trees decked with diamonds, its white columns standing out softly from their shadow backgrounds like phosphorescent ghosts in the luminous blue darkness. Until I was nearly frozen I stayed there with him. That drawing cost him one of the worst colds he ever had.
Like Venice, the University of Virginia should first be seen by moonlightLike Venice, the University of Virginia should first be seen by moonlight
The university ought to have, and has, many traditions, and life there ought to be, and is, different from life in any other college. Jefferson brought from Italythe men who carved the capitals of the columns (the descendants of some of these Italian workmen live in Charlottesville to-day), and when the columns were in place he brought from Europe the professors to form the faculty, creating what was practically a small English university in the United States. Never until, a dozen years ago, Dr. E. A. Alderman became president, had there been such an office; before that time the university had a rector, and the duties of president were performed by a chairman of the faculty, elected by the faculty from among its members. This was the first university to adopt the elective system, permitting the students, as Jefferson wrote, "uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall attend," instead of prescribing one course of reading for all. No less important, the University of Virginia was the first college to introduce (1842) the honor system, and still has the most complete honor system to be found among American colleges. This system is an outgrowth of the Jeffersonian idea of student self-government; under it each student signs, with examination papers, a pledge that he has neither given nor received assistance. That is found sufficient; students are not watched, nor need they be. With time this system has been extended, so that it now covers not only examinations, but many departments of college life, eliminating professionalism in athletics and plagiarism in literary work, and resulting in a delightful mutual confidence between the student body and the faculty.
Madison and Monroe were active members of the university's first board of visitors; the first college Y. M. C. A. was started there; and among many famous men who have attended the university may be mentioned Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Nelson Page, and Thomas Woodrow Wilson, whose name appears thus upon the "University Magazine" for 1879-80, as one of its three editors. The ill-starred Poe attended the university for only one year, at the end of which time his adopted father, Mr. Allan, of Richmond, withdrew him because of debts he had contracted while acquiring his education in gambling and drinking champagne. Poe's former room, No. 13 West Range, is now the office of the magazine.
The clean, lovely manuscript in Jefferson's handwriting, of the first Anglo-Saxon grammar written in the United States, is to be seen in the university library; Jefferson was Vice-President of the United States when he wrote it; he put Anglo-Saxon in the first curriculum of the university, and it has been taught there ever since. In a note which is a part of the manuscript, he advocates the study of Anglo-Saxon as an introduction to modern English on the ground that though about half the words in our present language are derived from Latin and Greek, these being the scholarly words, the other half, the words we use most often, are Anglo-Saxon.
Before the war it was not uncommon for students at the university to have their negro body servants with them, and it has occasionally happened since that someyoung sprig of southern aristocracy has come to college thus attended.
Perhaps the most striking and characteristic feature of student life to-day, from the point of view of the stray visitor, is the formal attitude of students toward one another. There is no easy-going casualness between them, no calling back and forth, no "hello," by way of greeting. They pass each other on the walks either without speaking (men have been punished at the university by being ignored by the entire student body), or if they do greet each other the customary salutation is "How are you, sir?" or "How are you, gentlemen?" First-year men are expected to wear hats, and not to speak to upper classmen until they have been spoken to; and, though there is no hazing at the university, woe betide them if they do not heed these rules.
In the early days of the university there was an effort to exercise restraint over students, to make them account for their goings and comings, and to prevent their going to taverns or betting upon horse races. Also they were obliged to wear a uniform. The severity was so great that they appealed to Jefferson, who sided with them. He, however, died in the same year, and friction prevailed for perhaps a decade longer, with many student disorders, culminating in the shooting of a professor by a student. In 1840 the students were at last granted full freedom, and two years later the honor system was adopted.
During the university's first years young men fromthe far South, where dueling was especially prevalent, did not come in large numbers to the University of Virginia, but went, as a rule, to the northern colleges, but about the middle of the century, as feeling between North and South over taxation, States' Rights and slavery became more acute, these men began to flock to the college at Charlottesville. Between 1850 and 1860 the university almost doubled in size, and at about the same time there developed a good deal of dueling between students.
When the War ended many men who had gone into the Confederate army at sixteen or seventeen years of age came to Charlottesville to complete their education. The hard life of the army had made some of these into a wild lot, and there was a great deal of gambling and drinking during their time, and also after it, for several succeeding generations of students looked up to the ex-soldiers as heroes, and carried on the unfortunate traditions left by them at the university. In the nineties, however, a change came, and though there is still some drinking and gambling, it is doubtful whether such vices are now more prevalent at the University of Virginia than at many other colleges. The honor system has never been extended to cover these points.
It is related that, in Poe's time, gambling became such a serious obstacle to discipline and work that the university authorities set the town marshal after a score or so of gambling students, Poe among them, whereupon these students fled to the Ragged Mountains, near by,and remained for two weeks, during which time Poe is said to have mightily entertained them with stories and prophecies, including a forecast of the Civil War, in which, he declared, two of the youths present would fight on opposite sides.
The Poe tradition is kept vigorously alive at the university. Not long ago a member of the Raven Society, one of the rather too numerous student organizations, discovered the burial place of Poe's mother, who was an actress, and who died penniless in Richmond at the age of twenty-four and was buried with the destitute. By a happy inspiration a fund was raised among the students for the erection of a monument to her—an example of fine and chivalrous sentiment on the part of these young men, which, one feels, is somehow delicately intertwined with the traditions of the honor system.
The Poe professor of English at the university, when we were there, was Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, who has since taken the professorship of English at the United States Naval Academy. By a coincidence which has proved a happy one for those who love the stories of the late Sidney Porter (O. Henry), Dr. Smith grew up as a boy with Porter, in Greensboro, North Carolina. Because of this, and also because of Dr. Smith's own gifts as a writer and an analyst, it is peculiarly fitting that he should have undertaken the work which has occupied him for several years past, the result of which has recently been given to us in the form "The O. Henry Biography."
Dr. Smith was Roosevelt exchange professor at the University of Berlin in 1910-11, holding the chair of American History and Institutions. While occupying that professorship he met the Kaiser.
"I talked with him twice," he said, "and upon the second occasion under very delightful circumstances, for I was invited to dinner at the Palace at Potsdam, and was the only guest, the Kaiser, Kaiserin, and Princess Victoria Luise being present.
"The Kaiser is, of course, a very magnetic man. His eyes are his most remarkable feature. They are very large, brilliant, and sparkling, and he rolls them in a manner most unusual. While he is always the king and the soldier, he can be genial and charming. One might expect a man in his position to be blasé, but that, most of all, is what he is not. He is like a boy in his vitality and vividness, and he has a great and persistent intellectual curiosity. It is this, I think, which used to cause him to be compared with Colonel Roosevelt. Both would like to know all things, and both have had, and have exercised more, perhaps, than any other two living men, the power to bring to themselves the central figures in all manner of world events, and thus learn at first hand, from acknowledged authorities, about the subjects that interest them—which is to say, everything.
"He frankly admired America. I don't mean that he said so for the sake of courtesy to me, but that he has—or did have, then—an immense and rather romantic interest in this country. A great many Germans used to resent this trait in him. America held in his mind the same romantic position that the idea of monarchy did in the minds of some of us. I mean that the average American went for romance to stories of monarchy, but that the Kaiser, being used to the monarchial idea, found his romance over here. (I am, of course, speaking of him as he was five or six years ago.) He wished to come to America, but was never able to do so, since German law forbids it. And, perhaps because he could not come, America was the more a sort of dream to him.
"He asked me about some of the things in Berlin which I had noticed as being different from things at home, and when I mentioned the way that history was kept alive in the very streets of Berlin, his eyes danced, and he said that was one of the things he had tried to accomplish by the erection of the numerous monuments which have been placed in Berlin during his reign. He told me of other means by which history was kept alive in Germany: among them that every officer has to know in detail the history of his regiment, and that German regiments always celebrate the anniversaries of their great days.
"He speaks English without an accent, though we might say that he spoke it with an English accent. He told me that he had learned English before he learned German, and had also caused his children to learn it first. He reads Mark Twain, or had read him, and heenjoyed him, but he said that when he met Mark Twain the latter had little or nothing to say, and that it was only with the greatest difficulty that he got him to talk at all. He subscribed, he told me, to 'Harper's Magazine,' and he was in the habit of reading short stories aloud to his family, in English. He admired the American short story, and I remember that he declared: 'The Americans know how to plunge into a short story. We Germans are too long-winded.'"
When Professor Smith talks about the Kaiser, you say to yourself: "I know that it is growing late, but I cannot bear to leave until I have heard the rest of this"; when he drifts presently to O. Henry, you say the same; and so it is always, no matter what his subject. At last, however, the grandfather's clock in the hall below his study sends up a stern message which is not to be mistaken, whereupon you arise reluctantly from your comfortable chair, spill the cigar ashes out of your lap onto the rug, dust off your clothing, and take your leave. Nor is your regret at departing lessened by the fact that you must go to your bilious-colored bedroom in the New Gleason, and that you will not see the university, or Professor C. Alphonso Smith, or Mrs. Smith again, because you are leaving upon the morrow.
So it must always be with the itinerant illustrator and writer. They are forever finding new and lovely scenes only to leave them; forever making new and charming friends only to part with them, faring forth again into the unknown.
Better to hunt in fields for health unboughtThan fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.The wise for cure on exercise depend;God never made his work for man to mend.—Dryden.
Better to hunt in fields for health unboughtThan fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.The wise for cure on exercise depend;God never made his work for man to mend.
—Dryden.
It is my impression that the dining-car conductor on the Chesapeake & Ohio train by which we left Charlottesville was puzzled when I asked his name; but if he sees this and remembers the incident he will now know that I did so because I wished here to mention him as a humane citizen. His name is C. G. Mitchell, and he was so accommodating as to serve a light meal, after hours, when he did not have to, to two hungry men who needed it. If travel has taught my companion and me anything, it has taught us that not all dining-car conductors are like that. Nor, I judge, can all dining-car conductors play the violin, pleasantly, in off hours, as does Mr. Mitchell. Better one merciful dining-car conductor than twenty who wear white carnations at their left lapels, but wear no hearts below them!
The road by which we drove from the railroad into the fastnesses of Loudon County, where, near the little settlement of Upperville, the race meet of thePiedmont Hunt was to be held, suggested other times and other manners, for though we rode in a motor car, and though we passed another now and then, machines were far outnumbered by the horses which, under saddle, or hitched to buggies, surreys, and carts of all descriptions, were heading toward the meeting place.
On these roads, one felt, the motor was an outsider; this was the kingdom of the horse that we were visiting; soft dirt roads were there for him to trot and gallop on, and fences of wood or stone, free from barbed wire, were everywhere, for him to jump.
Throughout the week we had looked forward to this day, and even more, perhaps, to the party which, if we could get back to Washington that night, was to follow it; wherefore the first thing we did on reaching a place where information was obtainable was to inquire about facilities for leaving. Herein my companion had the advantage of me, for there was nothing to prevent his departing immediately after the races, whereas I must remain behind for an hour or two, to learn something of fox-hunting as practised in this region.
By motoring immediately after the races to a neighboring town—Bluemont if I remember rightly—and there taking an interurban trolley to some other place, and changing cars, and going without his dinner, my companion found that he could get to Washington by nine o'clock. My case was different. Should I be delayed more than two hours I could not get away at all that night, but must miss the much anticipated partyaltogether; and, though my companion seemed to view this possibility with perfect equanimity, my memories of the charming lady whom we were to meet at the stage door, after the performance, were too clear to permit of indifference in me. The trolley my companion meant to catch was, however, the last one; my only hope, therefore, was to motor a distance of perhaps a dozen miles, over roads which I was frankly told were "middling to bad," and try to catch a train at The Plains station. If I missed this train, I was lost, and must spend a solitary night in such a room as I might be able to find in a strange village. That possibility did not appeal to me. I began to wish that there was no such thing as fox-hunting, or that, there being such a thing, I had chosen to ignore it.
"Now," said my companion cheerfully, "we'll telegraph her."
At a telegraph office he seized the pencil and wrote the following message:
Will call for you to-night after performance.
Will call for you to-night after performance.
To this he signed his own name.
"What about me?" I suggested, after glancing over his shoulder at the message.
"Oh, well," said he, "there's no use in going into all that in a telegram. It's sufficient to let her know that one of us is coming."
"But I proposed this party."
"Well," he gave in, with an air of pained patience, "what shall I say, then? Shall I add that you are unavoidably detained?"
"Not by a jugful!" I returned. "Add that I hope to get there too, and will make every effort to do so."
He wrote it out, sighing as he did so. Then, by careful cutting, he got it down to fourteen words. By that time the operator couldn't read it, so he wrote it out again—gloomily.
This accomplished, we matched coins to see who should pay for the message. He lost.
"All right!" he said. "I'll pay for it, but it's all foolishness to send such a long telegram."
"No," I returned, as we left the office and got into the machine, "it is not foolishness. If I can make life a little brighter for a beautiful woman, by adding a few words to a telegram, and sticking you for it, I shall do it every time."
He looked away over the fields and did not answer me. So we drove on in silence to where stands the beautiful manor house called Huntland, which is the residence of Mr. Joseph B. Thomas, M. F. H. of the Piedmont Hunt.
There is, I have been told, no important hunt in the United States in which the master of foxhounds is not the chief financial supporter, the sport being a very costly one. Of American hunts, the Middlesex, in Massachusetts, of which Mr. A. Henry Higginson is M. F. H., has the reputation of being the best appointed.The Piedmont Hunt is, however, one of the half dozen leading organizations of the kind, and it is difficult indeed to imagine a finer.
In a well-kept park near Mr. Thomas's house stand extensive English-looking buildings of brick and stucco, which, viewed from a distance, suggest a beautiful country house, and which, visited, teach one that certain favored hounds and horses in this world live much better than certain human beings. One building is given over to the kennels, the other the stables; each has a large sunlit court, and each is as beautiful and as clean as a fine house—a house full of trophies, hunting equipment, and the pleasant smell of well-cared-for saddlery. In a rolling meadow, not far distant, is the race course, all green turf, and here, soon after luncheon, gathered an extraordinary diversified crowd.
One party was stationed on the top of an old-time mail-coach bearing the significant initials "F. F. V."One party was stationed on the top of an old-time mail-coach bearing the significant initials "F. F. V."
For the most part the crowd was a fashionable one: men and women of the type whose photographs appear in "Vogue" and "Vanity Fair," and whose costumes were like fashion suggestions for "sport clothes" in those publications. One party was stationed on the top of an old-time mail coach, the boot of which bore the significant initials "F. F. V."—standing, as even benighted Northerners must be aware, for "First Families of Virginia"; others were in a line of motors and heterogeneous horse-drawn vehicles, parked beside the course; and scattered through the gathering, like brushmarks on an impressionist canvas, one saw the brilliant color of pink coats. Handsome hunters werebeing ridden or led about by negro grooms, and others kept arriving, ridden in by farmers and breeders, while here and there one saw a woman rider, her hair tightly drawn back under a mannish derby hat, her figure slender and graceful in a severely-cut habit coat. Jumbled together in a great green meadow under a sweet autumnal sun, these things made a picture of what, I am persuaded, is the ultimate in extravagant American country life. There was something, too, about this blending of fashionables and farmers, which made me think of the theater; for there is, in truth, a distinct note of histrionism about many of the rich Americans who "go in for" elaborate ruralness, and there is a touch of it very often, also, about "horsey" people. They like to "look the part," and they dress it with no less care than they exercise, at other seasons, in dressing the parts of opera-going cosmopolites, or wealthy loungers at the beaches. In other words, these fashionables had the overtrained New York look all over them, and the local rustics set them off as effectively as the villainous young squire of the Drury Lane melodrama is set off by contrast with honest old Jasper, the miller, who wears a smock, and comes to the Great House to beg the Young Master to "make an honest woman" of poor Rose, the fairest lass in all Hampshire.
The Piedmont Hunt Race Meet—There is a distinct note of histrionism about many of the rich Americans who "go in for" elaborate ruralness, and there is a touch of it, also, about ultra-"horsey" peopleThe Piedmont Hunt Race Meet—There is a distinct note of histrionism about many of the rich Americans who "go in for" elaborate ruralness, and there is a touch of it, also, about ultra-"horsey" people
About the races themselves there was something fascinatingly nonprofessional. They bore the same relation to great races on great tracks that a very fine performance of a play by amateurs might bear to a professional performance.
First came a two-mile steeplechase, with brush hurdles. Then, after a couple of minor events, a four-mile point-to-point race for hunters ridden by gentlemen in hunt uniform. This was as stiff a race for both horses and riders as I have ever seen, and it was very picturesque to watch the pink coats careering up hill and down dale, now over a tall stone wall, now over a brook or a snake fence; and when a rider went head over heels, and lay still upon the ground where he fell, while his horse cantered along after the field, in that aimless and pathetic way that riderless horses have, one had a real sensation—which was the pleasanter for knowing, a few minutes later, that the horseman had only broken an arm.
Next was run a rollicking race for horses owned by farmers, and others, whose land is hunted over by the Piedmont and Middleburg foxhounds; and last occurred a great comedy event—a mule race, free for all, in which one of the hunting men, in uniform, made such a handsome showing against a rabble of white and colored boys, all of them yelling, all of them beating their long-eared animals with sticks, that he would have won, had he not deliberately pulled his mount and "thrown" the race.
The last event was not yet finished when my companion, who had become nervous about his interurban trolley, got into a machine to drive to Bluemont.
"Of course," he said as we parted, "we'll miss you to-night."
"Oh," I said, "I hope not. I expect to get there."
"I don't see how you can make it," said he. "You have a lot of material to gather."
"I shall work fast."
"Well," said he, trying to speak like the voice of Conscience, "I hope you won't forget yourduty—that's all."
"I proposed this party to-night. It is my duty to be there."
"You didn't make any definite engagement," said he, "and, besides, your first duty is to your editors and your readers."
Having tossed me this disgusting thought, he departed in a cloud of dust, leaving me sad and alone, but not yet altogether in despair.
The last race over, I hastened to Mr. Thomas's house, which, by this time, looked like an old English hunting print come to life, for it was now crowded with pink coats. For most of the technical information contained in this chapter I am indebted to various gentlemen whom I encountered there.
In Virginia—which is the oldest fox-hunting State in the Union, the sport having been practised there for nearly two centuries—the words "hunt" or "hunting" never by any chance apply to shooting, but always refer to hunting the fox with horse and hounds. A "hunter" is not a man but a horse; a huntsman is not a member of the hunt but a hunt-servant; the "field" may be theterrain ridden over by the hunt, or it may be the group of riders following the hounds—"hunt followers," "hunting men," and "hunting women."
The following items, from "Baily's Hunting Directory," a British annual, give some idea of certain primary formalities and practicalities of hunting: