American Adventures Part 6

Of the southern summer I have no experience, but I have been repeatedly a.s.sured 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 Was.h.i.+ngton surrendered his commission and in which met the first Const.i.tutional 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 Was.h.i.+ngton and from the writings of amazed Englishmen and Frenchmen who visited the city in its period of glory that there were dinners and b.a.l.l.s 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 p.r.o.ne 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 h.e.l.l-fire and d.a.m.nation 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 h.e.l.l. 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 cla.s.s, 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 fas.h.i.+oned 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 amba.s.sador to France a search was inst.i.tuted 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 Emba.s.sy, a.s.sisted by the amba.s.sador and Mr. Henry Vignaud, dean of secretaries of emba.s.sy. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sures 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.

CHAPTER VIII

WE MEET THE HAMPTON GHOST

There's nothing ill can dwell in such a temple; If the ill spirit have so fair a house, Good things will strive to dwell with 't.

--THE TEMPEST.

Hampton is probably the largest of Maryland's old mansions, and the beauty of it is more theatrical than the beauty of Dough.o.r.egan Manor; for although the latter is the older of the two, the former is not only spectacular by reason of its s.p.a.ciousness, the delicacy of its architectural details, and the splendor of its dreamlike terraced gardens, but also for a look of beautiful, dignified, yet somehow tragic age--a look which makes one think of a wonderful old lady; a belle of the days of minuets and powdered wigs and patches; a woman no less wonderful in her declining years than in her youth, but wonderful in another way; a proud old aristocrat, erect and spirited to the last; her bedchamber a storehouse of ivory lace and ancient jewelry, her memory a storehouse of recollections, like chapters from romantic novels of the days when all men were gallant, and all women beautiful: recollections of journeys made in the old coach, which is still in the stable, though its outriders have been buried in the slaves' burying ground these many years; recollections of the opening of Hampton, when, as the story goes, gay Captain Charles Ridgely, builder of the house, held a card party in the attic to celebrate the event, while his wife, Rebecca Dorsey Ridgely, a lady of religious turn, marked the occasion simultaneously with a prayer-meeting in the drawing room; of the ball given by the Ridgelys in honor of Charles Carroll's granddaughters, the exquisite Caton sisters; of hunt meets here, long, long ago, and hunt b.a.l.l.s which succeeded them; of breakneck rides; of love-making in that garden peopled with the ghosts of more than a century of lovers; of duels fought at dawn. Of such vague, thrilling tales the old house seems to whisper.

Never, from the moment we turned into the tree-lined avenue, leading to Hampton, from the moment when I saw the fox hounds rise resentfully out of beds which they had dug in drifts of oak leaves in the drive, from the moment when I stood beneath the stately portico and heard the bars of the shuttered doors being flung back for our admittance--never, from my first glimpse of the place, have I been able to dispel the sense of unreality I felt while there, and which makes me feel, now, that Hampton is not a house that I have seen, but one built by my imagination in the course of a particularly charming and convincing dream.

Stained gla.s.s windows bearing the Ridgely coat of arms flank the front doorway, and likewise the opposing doorway at the end of the enormous hall upon which one enters, and the light from these windows gives the hall a subdued yet glowing illumination, so that there is something spectral about the old chairs and the old portraits with which the walls are solidly covered. There are portraits here by Gilbert Stuart and other distinguished painters of times gone by, and I particularly remember one large canvas showing a beautiful young woman in evening dress, her hair hanging in curls beside her cheeks, her tapering fingers touching the strings of a harp. She was young then; yet the portrait is that of the great-grandmother, or great-great-grandmother, of present Ridgelys, and she has lain long in the brick-walled family burying ground below the garden. But there beneath the portrait stands the harp on which she played.

One might tell endlessly of paneling, of the delicate carving of mantels and overmantels, of chairs, tables, desks, and sofas of Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Phyfe and Sheraton, yet giving such an inventory one might fail utterly to suggest the feeling of that great house, with its sense of homelike emptiness, its wealth of old furniture and portraits, blending together, in the dim light of a late October afternoon, to form shadowy backgrounds for autumnal reverie, or for silent, solitary listening--listening to the tales told by the soughing wind outside, to the whisper of embers in the fireplace, the slow somber tick of the tall clock telling of ages past and pa.s.sing, the ghostly murmur of the old house talking softly to itself.

From the windows of the great dining-room one looks away toward Hampton Gate, a favorite meeting place for the Elkridge Hunt, or, at another angle, toward the stables where the hunters are kept, the old slave cabins, and the overseer's house, with its bell tower--a house nearly two hundred years old. But the library is perhaps the more natural resting place for the guest, and it looks out over the garden, with its enormous descending terraces, its geometrical walks and steps, its beautiful old trees, and arbors of ancient box. Such terraces as these were never built by paid labor.

We were given tea in the library, our hostess at this function being a young lady of five or six years--a granddaughter of Captain John Ridgely, present master of Hampton--who, with her pink cheeks, her serious eyes and demeanor, looked like a canvas by Sir Joshua come to life, as she sat in a large chair and ate a large red apple.

Nor did Bryan, Captain Ridgely's negro butler, fit less admirably into the pervasive atmosphere of fiction which enveloped the place. In the absence of his master, Bryan did the honors of the old house with a style which was not "put on," because it did not have to be put on--nature and a good bringing-up having supplied all needs in this respect. There was about him none of that affectation of being a graven image, which one so often notices in white butlers and footmen imported from Europe by rich Americans, and which, of all shams, is one of the most false and absurd, as carried out on both sides--for we pretend to think these functionaries the deft mechanisms, incapable of thought, that they pretend to be; yet all the time we know--and they know we know--that they see and hear and think as we do, and that, moreover, they are often enough observant cynics whose elaborate gentility is a.s.sumed for hire, like the signboard of a sandwich man.

Bryan was without these artificial graces. His manner, in showing us the house, in telling us about the various portraits, indicated some true appreciation of the place and of its contents; and the air he wore of natural dignity and courtesy--of being at once acting-host and servitor--const.i.tuted as graceful a performance in a not altogether easy role as I have ever seen, and satisfied me, once for all, as to the verity of legends concerning the admirable qualities of old-time negro servants in the South.

After tea, when fading twilight had deepened the shadows in the house, we went up the stairway, past the landing with its window containing the armorial bearings of the family in stained gla.s.s, and, achieving the upper hall, crossed to a great bedchamber, the princ.i.p.al guest room, and paused just inside the door.

And now, because of what I am about to relate, I shall give the names of those who were present. We were: Dr. Murray P. Brush, A.B., Ph.D., acting Dean of Johns Hopkins University; Dr. John McF. Bergland of Baltimore; my companion, Wallace Morgan, ill.u.s.trator; and myself.

The light had, by this time, melted to a mere faint grayness sifting like mist through the many oblong panes of several large windows.

Nevertheless I could discern that it was a s.p.a.cious room, and from the color of it and certain shadowy lines upon the walls, I judged that it was paneled to the ceiling in white-painted wood. I am under the impression that it contained a fireplace, and that the great four-post bed, standing to the right of the doorway, was placed upon a low platform, a step or two above the floor--though of this I am not quite certain, the bulk of the bed and the dim light having, perhaps, deceived me. The rest of the furniture in the room was dark in color, and ma.s.sed in heavy vague spots against the lighter background of the walls.

Directly before the door, at about the center of the wall against which it was backed, stood something which loomed tall and dark, and which I took to be either a gigantic clothespress or a closet built into the room. Looking past the front of this obstruction, I saw one of the windows; the piece of furniture was therefore exhibited sidewise, in silhouette.

I do not think that I had definitely thought of ghost stories before, and I know that ghosts had not been spoken of, but as I looked into this room, and reflected on the long series of persons who had occupied it, and on where they were now, and on all the stories that the room must have heard, there entered my mind thoughts of the supernatural.

Having taken a step or two into the room, I was a little in advance of my three friends, and as these fancies came strongly to me, I spoke over my shoulder to one of them, who was at my right and a little behind me, saying, half playfully:

"There ought to be ghosts in a room like this."

Hardly had I spoken when without a sound, and swinging very slowly, the door of the large piece of furniture before me gently opened. My first idea was that the thing must be a closet, built against the wall, with a door at the back opening on a pa.s.sageway, or into the next room, and that the little girl whom we had met downstairs had opened it from the other side and was coming in.

I fully expected to see her enter. But she did not enter, for, as I learned presently, she was in the nursery at the time.

After waiting for an instant to see who was coming, I began to realize that there was no one coming; that no one had opened the door; that, like an actor picking up a cue, the door had begun to swing immediately upon my saying the word "ghosts."

The appropriateness of the coincidence was striking. I turned quickly to my friends, who were in conversation behind me, and asked:

"Speaking of ghosts--did you see that door open?"