*****
Late in a pleasant afternoon all Washington seems to walk in F street. The little girls come out of the matinees, the bigger girls drift out from the tea-rooms, there is a swirl of motor vehicles—gasoline and electric—but the tourist knows not of all this. The gay flammeries of Pennsylvania avenue hold him fascinated. Souvenir shops rivet him to their counters. Post-cards—grave, humorous, abominable—urge themselves upon him. But if all these fail—they have post-cards nowadays of the high schools in each of the little Arizona towns—here upon a counter are the little statuettes of pre-digested currency.
Mr. Lincoln in $10,000 of greenbacks. And yet that money today could not buy one drop of gasoline, let alone an imported touring automobile, for once it has passed through the government's macerating machine it is only fit for the sculptor. Three thousand dollars go into a Benjamin Harrison hat, fifteen thousand into a model of the Washington Monument that looks as if it were about to melt beneath a summer sun. Twenty thousand doll—stay, there is a limit to credulity. And you refuse to buy without a signed certificate from the Treasury Department as to these valuations.
Most of the tourists do buy, however. They seem to be blindly credulous—these folk who feel their way to Washington. It was not so very many spring-times ago that a rumor worked afloat of a dull Sabbath to the effect that the Washington Monument was about to fall. That rumor slipped around the town with amazing rapidity—Washington is hardly more than a gossipy, rumor-filled village after all. Two or three thousand folk went down to the Mall to be present at the fall. No two of them could agree as to the direction in which the shaft would tumble and they all made a long and cautious line that completely encircled it—at a safe distance. After long hours of waiting they all went home. Yetno one was angry. They all seemed to think it part of the day's program.
*****
There is another side of Washington not so funny and tourists, even of the most sedate sort, who stop at the large hotels and who ride about in dignified motor-cars, do not see it. It is the side of heart-burnings. For in no other city of the land is the social code more sharply defined—and regulated. There are many cities in the country and we are telling of them in this book, who draw deep breaths upon exclusiveness. But in none of these save Washington do the folk who do obtain flaunt themselves in the faces of those who do not. The fine old houses of Beacon street, in Boston, and of the Battery down at Charleston may draw themselves apart, but they do it silently and unostentatiously. In the very nature of things in Washington much modesty is quite out of the question.
The stately dome of our lovely CapitolThe stately dome of our lovely Capitol
For here at our Federal capital we have a strange mixture of real democracy and false aristocracy as well as real—if there be any such thing as real aristocracy. The fact that almost every person in the town works, more or less directly, for Uncle Sam makes for the democracy. And that self-same fact seems to fairly establish the aristocracy—you can frankly call much of it snobbishness—of the place. To understand the whys and wherefores of this paradox one would need, himself, to be an employé of the government, of large or small degree. They are many and they are complicated. But an illustration or two will suffice to show what we mean:
A rule, which no one nowadays seems very desirous of fathering, but nevertheless a rule of long standing, states that when a department chief enters an elevator in any of the department buildings it must carry him without other stops to his floor. The other passengers in the car must wait the time and the will of the chief, no matter howurgent may be their errands or how short the time at their command. A gradual increase of this silly rule has made it include many assistants, sub-chiefs and assistants to sub-chiefs. Only the elevator man knows the rank at which a government employé becomes entitled to this peculiar privilege. But he does know, and woe be to that little stenographer who enters the Department of X—— at just three minutes of nine in the morning, with the expectation of being at her desk with that promptness which the Federal government demands of the folk in its service. The second assistant to a second assistant of a sub-chief of a sub-division may have entered. The little stenographer's desk is upon the third floor; the gentleman whose official title spelled out reaches almost across a sheet of note paper is upon the seventh. There are folk within the crowded elevator-car for the fourth and fifth and sixth floors as well. But they have neither title nor rank and the car shoots to the seventh floor for the benefit of the Mr. Assistant Somebody. If there is another Assistant Somebody there to ride down to the ground floor—and there frequently is—you can imagine the consternation of the clerks. And yet it is part of the system under which they have to work when they work for that most democratic of employers—Uncle Samuel.
The secretary of an important department who entered the cabinet with the present administration stayed very late at his office one evening, but found the elevator man awaiting him when he stepped out into the hallway of the deserted building. It was only a short flight of stairs to the street, and the secretary—it was Mr. Bryan—asked the man why he had not gone home.
"My orders are to stay here, sir, until the secretary has gone home for the night," was the reply.
It is hardly necessary to say that right there was one order in the State department that was immediately revoked, while some twenty thousand clerks and stenographers who form the working staff of official Washington sent up little prayers of thanksgiving. These clerks and stenographers make up the every-day fiber of the town life. They go to work in the morning at nine—for a half-hour before that time you can see human streams of them pouring toward the larger departments—and they quit at half past four. The closing hour used to be five, but the clerks decided that they would have a shorter lunch-time and so they moved their afternoon session thirty minutes ahead. Half an hour is a short lunch-time and so official Washington carries its lunch to its desk, more or less cleverly disguised. The owners of popular priced downtown restaurants have long since given up in utter disgust.
But official Washington does not care. Official Washington ends its day at half-past four and official Washington is such a power that matinées, afternoon lectures and concerts of any popular sort are rarely planned to begin before that hour. And on the hot summer afternoons of the Federal capital the wisdom of such early closing is hardly to be doubted. On such afternoons, matinée or concert, a cup of tea or a walk along the shop windows of F street are all forgotten. For beyond the heat of the city, within easy reach by its really wonderful transportation system, are playgrounds of infinite variety and joy. True it is that the really fine parts of Rock Creek Park are rather rigidly held for those folk who can afford to ride in motor cars, but there is the river, innumerable picnic-grounds in every direction, fine bathing at Chesapeake beach, not far distant—and the canal.
Of all these the old Chesapeake and Ohio canal is by far the most distinctive. And how the Washington folk do love that old waterway! What fun they do have out of it with their motor boats and their canoes. If thatold water-highway, almost losing its path in the stretches of thick wood and undergrowth, had been created as a plaything for the capital city, it could hardly have been better devised. The motor boats and the canoes set forth from Georgetown—on holidays and Sundays in great droves. They go all the way up to Great Falls—and even beyond—working their passage through the old locks, exchanging repartee with the lock-tenders, loafing under the shadows of the trees, drinking in the indolence of the summer days.
*****
But Shafer's Lock or Cabin John's Bridge is not the Chevy Chase Club and official Washington knows that. It reads in the daily papers of that other life, of the folk who wear white flannels and dawdle around great porches all day long; hears rumors brought, Lord knows how, from the gossipy Metropolitan Club; almost touches shoulders with its smart breakfasts and lunches and dinners when it comes in and out of the confectioners' and the big hotels. But it is none the less apart, hopelessly and irrevocably apart. Uncle Sam may take the office folk of his capital and give them the assurance of a livelihood through long years, but that is all. He gives them no chance to step out of the comfortable rut into which they have been placed. The good positions, the positions that mean rank and title and entrance to the hallowed places, rarely come through promotions. They are the gifts of fortune, gifts even to strange folk from Cleveland or Madison or Stockton. They are not the reward of faithful service at an unknown desk.
And so official Washington, as we have seen here, is quite helpless. The other official Washington—the official Washington of the society columns—little cares. It is not above noticing the twenty thousand, but it is mere notice and nothing more. And as for interest or graciousness or kind-heartedness—they are quite out ofthe question. Washington is being rebuilt, in both its physical and its social structure. The architects of its social structure are not less capable than those folk who are working out marvels in steel and marble. These first see the Washington of tomorrow, modeled closely after the structures of European capitals. Already our newly created class of American idle rich is establishing itshabitatalong the lovely streets of our handsomest town. That is a beginning. In some of the departments they have begun to serve tea at four of an afternoon—just as they do on the terrace of the House of Commons. That is another beginning. We are starting.
The structure of European capitals is largely built upon class distinctions. Washington is being builded close to its models.
For ourselves, we prefer the touch of Europe as the architects work them in steel and in marble. A man who has been to Washington and who has not returned within the decade will be astonished to see the change already worked in its appearance. From the moment he steps across the threshold of the fine new station—itself a revelation after the old-time railroad terminals of the town—he will see transformation. Washington is still in growth. They are tearing down the ugly buildings and building upon their sites the beautiful, weaving in the almost gentle creations of the modern architects, a new city which after a little time will cease to be modeled upon Europe but which will serve, in itself, as a model capital for the entire world to follow.
You can compare Richmond with Rome if you will, with an allusion upon the side to her seven hills; but, if you have even a remote desire for originality, you will not. Rather compare the old southern capital with a bit of rare lace or a stout bit of mahogany. Of the two we would prefer the mahogany, for Richmond is substantial, rather than diaphanous. And like some of the fine old tables in the dining-rooms of her great houses she has taken some hard knocks and in the long run come out of them rather well. She is scarred, but still beautiful. And she wears her scars, visible and invisible, both bravely and well.
But if a man come down from the North with any idea of the histories of that war, which is now fifty years old and almost ready to be forgotten, too sharply in his memory, and so imagines that he is to see a Richmond of 1865, with grass growing in the streets, ruins everywhere, mules and negroes in the streets, he is doomed to an awakening. There are still plenty of mules and negroes in the streets and probably will be until the end of time, but the Richmond of today boasts miles and miles of as fine modern smooth pavements as his motor car might ever wish to find. And as for ruins, bless you, Richmond has begun to tear down some of the buildings which she built after the war so as to get building-sites for her newest skyscrapers.
Do not forget that there is a new spirit abroad in the South—and Virginia, in many ways the most poeticand dramatic of all our states, has not lagged in it. There are Boards of Trade at Roanoke and Lynchburg that are not averse to sounding the praises of those lively manufacturing towns of the up-country, and as for Norfolk—let any Norfolk man get hold of you and in two hours he will have almost convinced you that his town is going to be the greatest seaport along the North Atlantic—and that within two decades, sir. But this chapter is not written of Roanoke or Lynchburg or Norfolk. This is Richmond's chapter and in it to be writ the fact that the capital of Virginia has not lagged in enterprise or progress behind any of the other cities of the state. In the transformation she has sacrificed few of her landmarks, none of that delightful personality that makes itself apparent to those who tarry for a little time within her gates. That makes it all the better.
It is the spirit of the new South that is not only bringing such wonderful towns as Birmingham, to make a single instance, to the front, but is working the transformation of such staunch old settlements as Memphis or Atlanta—or Richmond. Not that Richmond is willing to forget the past. There is something about the Virginia spirit that seems incapable of death. There is something about the Virginian's loyalty to his native state, his blindness to her imperfections, almost every one of them the result of decades of civic poverty, that cannot escape the most calloused commercial soul that ever walked out of North or South. And there is something about this bringing up of spirit and of loyalty with the spirit of the new America that makes a combination well-nigh irresistible.
Here, then, is the new South. The generation that liked to discuss the detail of Pickett's charge and the horrors of those days in the Wilderness is gone. The new generations are rather bored with such detail. The new generations are not less spirited, not less loyal thanthe old. But they are new. That, of itself, almost explains the difference. Now see it in a little closer light.
Volumes have been written of the loyalty of the old South. Richmond herself today presents more volumes, although unwritten, of that loyalty. You can read it in her streets, in her fine old square houses, in that stately building atop of Schokoe hill, which generations have known as the Capitol and which was for a little time the seat of government of a new nation. Within that Capitol stands a statue. It is the marble effigy of a great Virginian, who was, himself, the first head of a new government. The guide-books call it the Houdini statue of Washington, and keen critics have long since asserted that it is not only the finest statue in the United States but one of the most notable art works of the world. It was known as such in France at the time of the Civil War. And hardly had that very dark page in our history been turned before the Louvre made overtures to Virginia for the purchase of the Houdini statue. The matter of price was not definitely fixed. France, in the spendthrift glories of the Second Empire, was willing to pay high for a new toy for her great gallery.
Poor Virginia! She was hard pressed those days for the necessities of life, to say nothing of its ordinary comforts. Her pockets were empty. She was bankrupt. Her mouth must have watered a bit at thought of those hundreds of thousands of French francs. But she stood firm, and if you know Virginia at all, you will say "of course she stood firm." A Southern gentleman would almost repudiate his financial obligations before he would sell one of the choice possessions of his families. There are great plantation houses still standing in the Old Dominion, which were spared the torch of war by the mercy of God, and whose walls hold aloft the handiwork of the finest painters of England, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; rare portraits of the masters and mistresses of those old houses. In them, too, are furniture and silver whose real value is hardly to be computed, not even by the screw of a dealer in antiques. The folk in these old houses may be poor—if they come of the oldest Virginia stock they very likely are. They stand bravely, though, to the traditions of their hospitality, even though they wonder if the bacon is going to last and if it is safe for the brood to kill another chicken. But they would close their kitchen and live on berries and on herbs before they would part with even the humblest piece of silver or of furniture; while if a dealer should come down from Washington or New York and make an offer, no matter how generous, for one of the paintings, he would probably be put off the place.
Family means much to these Virginians. If you do not believe this go to Richmond, stop in one of its fine houses and make your host take you to one of the dances for which the city is famed. Almost any dance will do and from the beginning you will be charmed. The minor appointments will approach perfection, and you will find the men and women of the city worthy of its best traditions. Some places may disappoint in their well-advertised charm but the girls of Richmond never disappoint. Here is one of them. She gets you in a quiet corner of the place, meets a friend over there, and a conversation somewhat after this fashion gets under way:
"Miss Rhett, allow me to introduce my friend, Mr. Blinkins, of New York."
You bow low and ask Miss Rhett if by any chance she is related to the Rhetts of Charleston.
"Only distantly. My people are all Virginians. The Charleston Rhetts are quite another branch. My grandfather's brother married a Miss Morris, from Savannah and the Charleston Rhetts all come from them. If my papa were only here he would explain."
You say that you understand and murmur somethingabout having met a Richard Henry Rhett at the old Colonial town of Williamsburgh a few years ago when you were down for the Jamestown exposition.
"He was a Petersburgh Rhett," the young lady explains, "son of a cousin of my father. He married Miss Virginia Tredegar last year."
You remember hearing of a Miss Virginia Tredegar of Roanoke, and you slip out that fact. But this is Miss Virginia Tredegar of Weldon and a cousin of Miss Virginia Tredegar of Roanoke. Miss Virginia Tredegar of Weldon—now Mrs. Richard Henry Rhett, of course, is a delightful girl. The young lady who has you in the corner assures you that—and she, herself, is not lacking in charms. Mrs. Rhett was a sponsor for the state for several years, and you vaguely wonder just what that may mean as you have visions of large floats lumbering along in street parades, with really lovely girls in white standing upon them. And you also have visions of the Miss Virginia Tredegar, of Weldon, sitting in the other days upon the door-steps of an old red and white Colonial house, which faces a hot little open square, visions of her accomplishments and her beauty; of her ability to ride the roughest horse in the county, to dance seven hours without seeming fatigue, of the jealous beaux who come flocking to her feet. You find yourself idly speaking of these visions to your companion. She laughs.
"I've just the right girl for you," she says, "and she is here in this ball-room. She is all these things—and some more; the rightest, smartest girl in all our state—Miss Virginia Bauregard, daughter of Mr. Calhoun Bauregard, of Belle Manor in King and Queen county."
Apparently they are all named Virginia in Richmond, seemingly three-quarters of these girls who live in the nicer parts of the town are thus to bespeak through their lives the affectionate loyalty of their parents to the Old Dominion.
All these folk come quite easily to the transformation that has come over the South within the decade, since she ceased to grieve over a past that could never be brought back and overcome. The young boys and the young girls turn readily from fine horses to fine motor cars, the coming of imported customs causes few shocks, it is even rumored that the newest of the new dances have invaded the sober drawing-rooms of the place. But the New South is kind to Richmond. She does not seek to eliminate the Old South. And so the old customs and the old traditions run side by side with the new. And even the old families seem to soften and many times to welcome the new.
*****
If you wish to see the real Old South in Richmond go out to Hollywood cemetery, which is perhaps the greatest of all its landmarks. It is easy of access, very beautiful, although not in the elaborate and immaculate fashion of Greenwood, at Brooklyn, or Mount Auburn, just outside of Boston. But where man has fallen short at Hollywood, Nature has more than done her part. She rounded the lovely hills upon which Richmond might place the treasure-chest of her memories, and then she swept the finest of all Virginia rivers—the James—by those hills. Man did the rest. It was man who created the roadways and who placed the monuments. And not the least interesting of these is the strange tomb of President James Monroe, an imposing bronze structure, in these days reminding one of an enlarged bird-cage. It is interesting perhaps because nearby there is another grave—the grave of still another man who came to the highest office of the American people. The second grave is marked by a small headstone, scarcely large enough to accommodate its two words: "John Tyler."
But more interesting than these older monuments is the group that stands alone, at the far corner of the cemetery and atop of one of those little hillocks close beside the river. The head of that family is buried beneath his effigy. It is the grave of Jefferson Davis, who stands facing the city, as if he still dreamed of the days that might have been but never were. And close beside is the grave of his little girl, "The Daughter of Confederacy." When she died, only a few years since, the South felt that the last of the living links that tied it with the days when men fought and died for the Lost Cause had been severed. It was then that it set to work to build the new out of the old.
Nowadays the Old South does not come publicly into the streets of Richmond—save on that memorable occasion in the spring of 1907 when a feeble trail of aging men—all that remained of a great gray army—limped down a triumphant path through the heart of the town. The Old South sits in her dead cities, and perhaps that is the reason why the Southerner so quickly takes the stranger within his gates to the cemetery. It is his apologies for thirty or forty years lost in the march of progress. And it is an apology that no man of breadth or generosity can refuse to accept.
*****
Here, then, is the new Richmond, riding stoutly upon her great hills and shooting the tendrils of her growth in every direction. For she is growing, rapidly and handsomely. Her new buildings—her wonderful cathedral, her superb modern hotels, the fine homes multiplying out by the Lee statue—what self-respecting southern town does not have a Lee statue—all bespeak the quality of her growth. But her new buildings cannot easily surpass the old. It was rare good judgment in an American town for her to refrain from tearing down or even "modernizing" that Greek temple that stands atop of Schokoe hill and which generations have known as the Capitol. The two flanking wings which were made absolutely necessary by the awakening of the Old Dominion have not robbed the older portion of the building of one whit of its charm.
It typifies the Old South and the New South, come to stand beside one another. In other days Virginia was proud of her capital, it was with no small pride that she thrust it ahead when a seat of government was to be chosen for the Confederacy, that for a little time she saw it take its stormy place among the nations of the world. In these days Virginia may still be proud of her capital town—it is still a seat of government quite worthy of a state of pride and of traditions.
"You are not going to write your book and leave out Charleston?" said the Man who Makes Magazines.
We hesitated at acknowledging the truth. In some way or other Charleston had escaped us upon our travels. The Magazine Maker read our answer before we could gain strength to make it.
"Well, you can't afford to miss that town," he said conclusively. "It's great stuff."
"Great stuff?" we ventured.
"If you are looking into the personality of American cities you must include Charleston. She has more personality than any of the other old Colonial towns—save Boston. She's personality personified, old age glorified, charm and sweetness magnified—the flavor of the past hangs in every one of her old houses and her narrow streets. You cannot pass by Charleston."
After that we went over to a railroad ticket office in Fifth avenue and purchased a round-trip ticket to the metropolis of South Carolina. And a week later we were on a southbound train, running like mad across the Jersey meadows. Five days in Charleston! It seemed almost sacrilege. Five miserable days in the town which the Maker of Magazines averred fairly oozed personality. But five days were better than no days at all—and Charleston must be included in this book.
The greater part of one day—crossing New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the up-stretched head of little Delaware,Maryland—finally the Old Dominion and the real South. A day spent behind the glass of the car window—the brisk and busy Jersey towns, the Delaware easily crossed; Philadelphia, with her great outspreading of suburbs; Wilmington; a short cut through the basements of Baltimore; the afternoon light dying on the superb dome of the Washington Capitol—after that the Potomac. Then a few evening hours through Virginia, the southern accent growing more pronounced, the very air softer, the negroes more prevalent, the porter of our car continually more deferential, more polite. After that a few hours of oblivion, even in the clattering Pullman which, after the fashion of all these tremendously safe new steel cars, was a bit chilly and a bit noisy.
In the morning a low and unkempt land, the railroad trestling its way over morass and swamp and bayou on long timber structures and many times threading sluggish yellow southern rivers by larger bridges. Between these a sandy mainland—thick forests of pine with increasing numbers of live-oaks holding soft moss aloft—at last the outskirts of a town. Other folk might gather their luggage together, the vision of a distant place with its white spires, the soft gray fog that tells of the proximity of the open sea blowing in upon them, held us at the window pane. A river showed itself in the distance to the one side of the train, with mast-heads dominating its shores; another, lined with factories stretched upon the other side. After these, the streets of the town, a trolley car stalled impatient to let our train pass—low streets and mean streets of an unmistakable negro quarter, the broad shed of a sizable railroad station showing at the right.
"Charleston, sah," said the porter. Remember now that he had been a haughty creature in New York and Philadelphia, ebon dignity in Baltimore and in Washington. Now he was docility itself, a courtesy hardly to be measured by the mere expectation of gratuity.
The first glimpse of Charleston a rough paved street—our hotel 'bus finding itself with almost dangerous celerity in front of trolley cars. That unimportant way led into another broad highway of the town and seemingly entitled to distinction.
"Meeting street," said our driver. "And I can tell you that Charleston is right proud of it, sir," he added.
Charleston has good cause to be proud of its main highway, with the lovely old houses along it rising out of blooming gardens, like fine ladies from their ball gowns; at its upper end the big open square and the adjacent Citadel—pouring out its gray-uniformed boys to drill just as their daddies and their grand-daddies drilled there before them—the charms of St. Michael's, and the never-to-be-forgotten Battery at the foot of the street.
We sped down it and drew up at a snow-white hotel which in its immaculate coat might have sprung up yesterday, were it not for the stately row of great pillars, three stories in height, with which it faced the street. They do not build hotels that way nowadays—more's the pity. For when the Charleston Hotel was builded it entered a distinguished brotherhood—the Tremont in Boston, the Astor and the St. Nicholas in New York, Willard's in Washington, the Monongahela at Pittsburgh, and the St. Charles in New Orleans were among its contemporaries. It was worthy to be ranked with the best of these—a hotel at which the great planters of the Carolinas and of Georgia could feel that the best had been created for them within the very heart of their favorite city.
We pushed our way into the heart of the generous office of the hotel, thronged with the folk who hadcrowded into Charleston—followers of the races, just then holding sway upon the outskirts of the town, tourists from the North, Carolinans who will never lose the habit of going to Charleston as long as Charleston exists. In due time a brisk and bustling hotel clerk—he was an importation, plainly, none of your courteous, ease-taking Southerners—had placed us in a room big enough for the holding of a reception. From the shutters of the room we could look down into Meeting street—into the charred remnants of a store that had been burned long before and the débris never removed. When we threw up the window sash we could thrust our heads out and see, a little way down the street, the most distinctive and the most revered of all Charleston's landmarks—the belfried spire of St. Michael's. As we leaned from that window the bells of St. Michael's spoke the quarter-hour, just as they have been speaking quarter-hours close upon a century and a half.
We had been given the first taste of the potent charm of a most distinctive southern town.
*****
"... The most appealing, the most lovely, the most wistful town in America; whose visible sadness and distinction seem almost to speak audibly, speak in the sound of the quiet waves that ripple round her southern front, speak in the church-bells on Sunday morning and breathe not only in the soft salt air, but in the perfume of every gentle, old-fashioned rose that blooms behind the high garden walls of falling mellow-tinted plaster; King's Port the retrospective, King's Port the belated, who from her pensive porticoes looks over her two rivers to the marshes and the trees beyond, the live-oaks veiled in gray moss, brooding with memories. Were she my city how I should love her...."
So wrote Owen Wister of the city that he came to know so well. You can read Charleston inLady Baltimoreeach time he speaks of "King's Port" and read correctly. For it was in Charleston he spun his romance of the last stronghold of old manners, old families, old traditions and old affections. In no other city of the land might he have laid such a story. For no other city of the land bears the memory of tragedy so plaintively, so uncomplainingly as the old town that occupies the flat peninsula between the Cooper and the Ashley rivers at the very gateway of South Carolina. Like a scarred man, Charleston will bear the visible traces of her great disaster until the end of her days. And each of them, like the scars of Richmond, makes her but the more potent in her charm.
Up one street and down another—fascinating pathways, every blessed one of them. Meeting and King and Queen and Legare and Calhoun and Tradd—with their high, narrow-ended houses rising right from the sidewalks and stretching, with their generous spirit of hospitality, inward, beside gardens that blossom as only a southern garden can bloom—with jessamine and narcissus and oleander and japonica. Galleries give to these fragrant gardens. Only Charleston, unique among her sisters of the Southland, does not call them galleries. She calls them piazzas, with the accent strong upon the "pi."
The gardens themselves are more than a little English, speaking clearly something of the old-time English spirit of the town, which has its most visible other expression in the stolid Georgian architecture of its older public buildings and churches. And some of the older folk, defying the Charleston convention of four o'clock dinner, will take tea in the softness of the late afternoon. Local tradition still relates how, in other days, a certain distinguished and elderly citizen, possessing neither garden nor gallery with his house, was wont to have a table and chair placed upon the sidewalk and there take histea of a late afternoon. And the Charleston of that other day walked upon the far side of the street rather than disturb the gentleman!
Nor is all that spirit quite gone in the Charleston of today. The older negroes will touch their hats, if not remove them, when you glance at them. They will step into the gutter when you pass them upon the narrow sidewalks of the narrow streets. They came of a generation that made more than the small distinction of separate schools and separate places in the railroad cars between white and black. But they are rapidly disappearing from the streets of the old city. Those younger negroes who drive the clumsy two-wheeled carts in town and out over the rough-paved streets have learned no good manners. And when the burly negresses who amble up the sidewalks balancing huge trays of crabs or fresh fruits or baked stuffs smile at you, theirs is the smile of insolence. Fifty years of the Fifteenth Amendment have done their work—any older resident of Charleston will tell you that, and thank God for the inborn courtesy that keeps him from profanity with the telling.
But if oncoming years have worked great changes in the manner of the race which continues to be of numerical importance in the seaport city, it will take more than one or two or three or even four generations to work great changes in the manners of the well-born white-skinned folk who have ruled Charleston through the years by wit, diplomacy, the keen force of intellect more than even the force of arms. And, as the city now runs its course, it will take far more years for her to change her outward guise.
For Charleston does not change easily. She continues to be a city of yellow and of white. Other southern towns may claim distinction because of their red-walled brick houses with their white porticos, but the reds ofCharleston long since softened, the green moss and the lichens have grown up and over the old walls—exquisite bits of masonry, every one of them and the products of an age when every artisan was an artist and full master of his craft. The distinctive color of the town shades from a creamy yellow to a grayish white. The houses, as we have already said, stand with their ends to the streets, with flanking walls hiding the rich gardens from the sidewalk, save for a few seductive glimpses through the well-wrought grillings of an occasional gateway. Charleston does not parade herself. The closed windows of her houses seem to close jealously against the Present as if they sought to hold within their great rooms the Past and all of the glories that were of it.
Builded of brick in most instances, the larger houses and the two most famous churches, as well, were long ago given plaster coatings that they might conform to the yellow-white dominating color of the town. Invariably very high and almost invariably very narrow and bald of cornice, these old houses are roofed with heavy corrugated tiles, once red but now softened by Time into a dozen different tints. If there is another town in the land where roof-tile has been used to such picturesque advantage we have failed to see it. It gives to Charleston an incredibly foreign aspect. If it were not for the Georgian churches and the older public buildings one might see in the plaster walls and the red-tiled roofs a distinct trace of the French or the Italian. Charleston herself is not unlike many towns that sleep in the south of France or the north of Italy. It only takes the hordes of negroes upon her streets to dispel the illusion that one is again treading some corner of the Old World.
Perhaps the best way that the casual visitor to Charleston can appreciate these negroes is in their street calls—if he has not been up too late upon the preceding night. For long before seven o'clock the brigades of itinerantmerchants are on their ways through the narrow streets of the old town. From the soft, deep marshlands behind it and the crevices and the turnings of the sea and all its inlets come the finest and the rarest of delicacies, and these food-stuffs find their way quite naturally to the street vendors. Porgies and garden truck, lobsters and shrimp and crab, home-made candies—the list runs to great length.
You turn restlessly in your bed at dawn. Something has stolen that last precious "forty winks" away from you. If you could find that something.... Hark. There it is: Through the crispness of morning air it comes musically to your ears:
"Swimpy waw, waw.... Swimpy waw, waw."
And from another direction comes a slowly modulated:
"Waw cwab.WawCwab. Waw Cwa-a-a-b."
A sharp staccato breaks in upon both of these.
"She cwaib, she cwaib, she cwaib," it calls, and you know that there is a preference in crabs. Up one street and down another, male vendors, female vendors old and young, but generally old. If any one wishes to sleep in Charleston—well, he simply cannot sleep late in Charleston. To dream of rest while: "Sweet Pete ate her! Sweet Pete ate her!" comes rolling up to your window in tones as dulcet as ever rang within an opera house would be outrageous. It is a merry jangle to open the day, quite as remote from euphony and as thoroughly delightful as the early morning church-bells of Montreal or of Quebec. By breakfast time it is quite gone—unless you wish to include the coal-black mammy who chants: "Come chilluns, get yer monkey meat—monkeymeat." And that old relic of ante-bellum days who rides a two-wheel cart in all the narrow lanes and permeates the very air with his melancholy: "Char—coal. Char—coal."
If you inquire as to "monkey meat," your Charlestonian will tell you of the delectable mixture of cocoanut and molasses candy which is to the younger generation of the town as the incomparable Lady Baltimore cake is to the older.
*****
The churches of Charleston are her greatest charm. And of these, boldly asserting its prerogative by rising from the busiest corner of the town, the most famed is St. Michael's. St. Michael's is the lion of Charleston. Since 1764 she has stood there at Broad and Meeting streets and demanded the obeisance of the port—gladly rendered her. She has stood to her corner through sunshine and through storm—through the glad busy years when Charleston dreamed of power and of surpassing those upstart northern towns—New York and Boston—through the bitterness of two great wars and the dangers of a third and lesser one, through four cyclones and the most devastating earthquake that the Atlantic coast has ever known—through all these perils this solidly wrought Temple of the Lord has come safely. She is the real old lady of Charleston, and when she speaks the folk within the town stand at attention. The soft, sweet bells of St. Michael's are the tenderest memory that can come to a resident of the city when he is gone a long way from her streets and her lovely homes. And when the bells of St. Michael's have been stilled it has been a stilled Charleston.
For there have been times when the bells of St. Michael's have not spoken down from their high white belfry. In fact, they have crossed the Atlantic not less than five times. Cast in the middle of the eighteenth century in an English bell-foundry, they had hardly been hung within their belfry before the Revolution broke out—broke out at Charleston just as did the Civil War. Before the British left the city for the last time the commanding officer had claimed the eight bells as his "perquisite" and had shipped them back to England. An indignant American town demanded their return. Even the British commanding officer at New York, Sir Guy Carleton, did not have it within his heart to countenance such sacrilege. The bells had been already sold in England upon a speculation, but the purchaser was compelled to return them. The people of the Colonial town drew them from the wharf to St. Michael's in formal procession—the swinging of them anew was hardly a less ceremonial. The first notes they sang were like unto a religious rite. And for seventy years the soft voice of the old lady of Charleston spoke down to her children—at the quarters of the hours.
After those seventy years more war—ugly guns that are remembered with a shudder as "Swamp Angels," pouring shells into a proud, rebellious, hungry, unrelenting city, the stout white tower of St. Michael's a fair and shining mark for northern gunners. Charleston suddenly realized the danger to the voice of her pet old lady. There were few able-bodied men in the town—all of them were fighting within the Confederate lines—but they unshipped those precious bells and sent them up-state—to Columbia, the state capitol, far inland and safe from the possibility of sea marauders. They were hidden there but not so well but that Sherman's men in the march to the sea found them and by an act of vandalism which the South today believes far greater than that of an angered British army, completely destroyed them.
When peace came again Charleston—bruised and battered and bleeding Charleston, with the scars that time could never heal—gave first thought to her bells—a mere mass of molten and broken metal. There was a single chance and Charleston took it. That chance won. The English are a conservative nation—to put it lightly.The old bell-foundry still had the molds in which the chime was first cast—a hundred years before. Once again those old casts were wheeled into the foundry and from them came again the bells of St. Michael's, the sweetness of their tones unchanged. The town had regained its voice.
If we have dwelt at length upon the bells of St. Michael's it is because they speak so truly the real personality of the town. The church itself is not of less interest. And the churchyard that surrounds it upon two sides is as filled with charm and rare flavor as any churchyard we have ever seen. Under its old stones sleep forever the folk who lived in Charleston in the days of her glories—Pringles and Pinckneys; Moultries; those three famous "R's" of South Carolina—Rutledge and Ravenel and Rhett—the names within that silent place read like the roster of the colonial aristocracy. Above the silent markers, the moldering and crumbling tombs, rises a riot of God's growing things; in the soft southern air a perpetual tribute to the dead—narcissus, oleander, jessamine, the stately Pride of India bush. And on the morning that we first strolled into the shady, quiet place a red-bird—the famous Cardinal Crossbeak of the south—sang to us from his perch in a magnolia tree. Twenty-four hours before and we had crossed the Hudson river at New York in a driving and a blizzard-threatening snowstorm.
The greatest charm of St. Michael's does not rest alone within the little paths of her high-walled churchyard. Within the sturdy church, in the serenity of her sanctuary, in the great square box-pews where sat so many years the elect of Charleston, of the very Southland you might say; in the high-set pulpit and the unusual desk underneath where sat the old time "clark" to read the responses and the notices; even the stately pew, set aside from all the others, in which General Washington sat onthe occasion of a memorable visit to the South Carolina town, is the fullness of her charm. If you are given imagination, you can see the brown and white church filled as in the old days with the planters and their families—generation after generation of them, coming first to the church, being baptized in its dove-crowned font at the door and then, years later, being carried out of that center aisle for the final time. You can see the congregations of half a century ago, faces white and set and determined. You can see one memorable congregation, as it hears the crash of a Federal shell against the heavy tower, and then listen to the gentle rector finishing the implication of the Litany before he dismisses his little flock.
Dear old St. Michael's! The years—the sunny years and the tragic years—set lightly upon her. When war and storm have wrecked her, it has been her children and her children's children who have arisen to help wipe away the scars. In a memorable storm of August, 1885, the great wooden ball at the top of her weather vane, one hundred and eighty-five feet above the street was sent hurtling down to the ground. They will show you the dent it made in the pavement flag. It was quickly replaced. But within a year worse than cyclone was upon St. Michael's—the memorable earthquake which sank the great tower eight inches deeper into the earth. And only last year another of the fearful summer storms that come now and then upon the place wreaked fearful damage upon the old church. Yet St. Michael's has been patiently repaired each time; she still towers above these disasters—as her quaint weather-vane towers above the town, itself.