AN OLD COURTYARD AND A SUN-DIAL
For some time that little anchorage was our watery home acre. We came
to call it our sunrise harbour. The opening where creek and river met
faced to the east; and it was well worth while, if the morning was not
too chill, to have an eye on that opening when the sun came up.
Breaking through the mist veil that hung over the James, he cast a
golden pontoon across the river, and then came over in all his
splendour. He made straight for the mouth of our little creek, flooding
wood and marsh with misty glow, and fairly crowding his glory into the
narrow channel.
One morning, quite in keeping with the splendid burst of dawn, a loud
report rang out over the marshes like the sound of a sunrise gun. But
it was no salute to the orb of day. Somebody was poaching. More shots
followed; and ducks, quacking loudly, fluttered up out of the marshes.
Later, when we were at breakfast, a long rowboat, containing a man and
a pile of brush and doubtless some ducks with the fine flavour of the
forbidden, came out from a break in the marshes and went hurriedly up
the stream.
As we lay in our harbour, we found ourselves almost unconsciously
listening for a sound that seemed to belong to those chill, gray days.
At last, from somewhere high up in the air, it came ringing down to
us--the stirring "honk, honk" of the wild goose. Though our eyes
searched the heavens, we could see nothing of the living wedge of
flight up there that was cleaving its way southward with the speed of
the wind. But we felt the thrill of that wild, stirring cry and were
satisfied.
Whether the geese brought it or not, bad weather came with them. Half a
gale came driving the rain before it down the river. Gadabout lay with
her bulkheads closed tight about her forward cockpit, and must have
looked most dismal. But inside, dry and warm, she was a very cheery
little craft. We listened quite contentedly to the uproar, looking out
from our windows upon windswept marsh and scudding clouds and the fussy
little wavelets of our harbour. It added to our sense of coziness to
look through a stern window out upon the river where the waters piled
and broke white, in their midst an anchored schooner with swaying
masts, tipsy between wind and tide.
One day when the heavens had gone blue again, though tattered clouds
were still racing across, we hoisted anchor for another visit to
Westover. When Gadabout poked her head out of the creek, she saw a
queer looking craft busy on the James. It was a government buoy-tender,
an awkward side-wheeler with a derrick forward, and big red sticks and
black ones lying on deck.
As we passed the tender, it was moving the red buoy at the mouth of our
creek farther out into the river. Evidently the shoals were encroaching
upon the channel. Gadabout showed little interest in the strange boat
and its doings; and, unconcernedly turning her back, headed up the
river. Of course buoys were all very well and she found them quite a
help in getting about; but all this fussy shifting of them by a few
feet mattered little to her, for she was on the wrong side of them most
of the time anyway.
However, we thought of how differently the watchful buoy-tender would
be regarded by the heavy laden freighters that would pass that way,
their rusty hulls plowing deep. To them how important that each buoy,
each inanimate flagman of the river route, should stand true where
danger lies and truly point the fairway.
Reaching the little cove below the steamboat pier, Gadabout ran close
in and cast anchor. She may well have been proud of the quite
perceptible waves that she sent rolling to the shore and of the quite
audible swish that they made on the beach.
That morning we saw the landward front of Westover, and straightway
forgot all about the more pretentious river front. You step from the
house down into an old-time courtyard. At first you do not see much of
the courtyard itself, for you have heard of its noted entrance gates,
perhaps the first example of ornamental iron-work in the colonies, and
they stand quite conspicuously in front of you. These gates were
imported from England by Colonel William Byrd, whose initials, W.E.B.,
appear inwrought in monogram.
Two great birds standing on stone balls top the gate-posts. With a fine
disregard of both ornithology and heraldry these birds have often been
spoken of as martlets--the martlet appearing in the Byrd coat of arms.
They are evidently eagles, and pretty well developed specimens.
American eagles, we might call them, if they had not lighted upon these
gate-posts before the American nation adopted its emblem--indeed before
the American nation was born. When, in the days of the Civil War, the
Federal troops came along, the soldiers seem to have stood strictly
upon chronology, and to have determined that these fine
prerevolutionary birds were not entitled to any immunity as national
emblems nor even as kinsfolk of "Old Abe." And so their tough feathers
flattened many a bullet, and one eagle had to be sent to Richmond to
get some toes and a new tail.
Turning from the gates, your eyes follow down the courtyard toward the
garden. Walls, outbuildings, the quaint cellar-hut, even the
diamond-shaped stepping-stones along the way, all help to make up a
characteristic colonial scene.
And for what striking bits of colonial life has this old courtyard been
the setting! Now the exquisite Colonel and his ladies would visit the
little capital of Williamsburg; so, at his door, stands ready his
"lordly coach and six with liveried outriders in waiting." Again, the
great gates are thrown open to guests arriving on horseback and in
chariots and chairs. Pompous, beruffled dignitaries vie with gay
gallants in obeisances and compliments to the ladies, and in assisting
them to alight without harm to brocades and laces and rich cloaks and
wide-hooped petticoats. And, yet again, all is a-bustle here with
scarlet-coated horsemen and baying hounds and hurrying black boys and
all that goes to
"Proclaim a hunting-morning."
When the ancient courtyard is left empty again--the colonial coaches
rolled off through the gates; the colonial huntsmen up and away and now
but distant points of red, fading to the music of hounds and horns--we
fall to wondering about those early Virginians.
Such, largely, was their life--abundant leisure, elegant display,
exuberant merrymaking. Just such a life, by all the rules, as would
produce a useless race devoid of any solidity of mind or of character.
Just such a life as in fact produced a race of high-minded, intelligent,
and capable men; a race that gave us Washington, Jefferson, Henry,
Madison, Marshall, Monroe, and the scarcely lesser names on down the
long list of those wonderful sons of the Old Dominion.
It would do no good to ask even that colonial courtyard for an
explanation of all this. It simply recalled what it had seen and heard.
Nor could we of to-day understand the explanation were we to get it.
Unable to reconcile industry and leisure, we underrate the real work
that went with the idling of those early Virginians; and as to the
gayety, we long ago lost sight of the fact that merrymaking is
man-making.
Turning from the gateway, we went down the old courtyard. We followed a
walk that led past the kitchen and the dairy, skirted a wall, and then
turned through a box-shaded gateway into the garden.
Those December days were not the season of gardens, even in Virginia.
The paths led us not where bloom was, but where bloom had been. Yet,
truly all times are garden times where warm red walls shut you in with
shadowing trees and shrubs, and where ancient box and ivy hedge the
prim old ways.
How much our colonial forefathers thought of their gardens! and how
much their English forefathers thought of theirs! It was in the blood
to have a garden, and to have it walled, and to sit and to walk and to
talk in it.
[Illustration: THE COLONIAL COURTYARD GATES.]
Walking and talking that day with Westover's mistress in Westover's
garden, we soon came upon the tomb of the noted William Byrd.
Representative as was this master of Westover of all that was most
elegant in the colonial life of his day, he was much more than merely a
man of the fashionable world. Ability of a high order went with the
beauty and the ruffles and the powder. He was statesman, scholar, and
author; and in England he had been made, for his proficiency in
science, a fellow of the Royal Society.
[Illustration: TOMB OF COLONEL WILLIAM BYRD.]
We owe a great deal to this old-time grandee for the glimpses his
writings give us of colonial life in the South during the generation
just preceding that of Washington. Unlike the Northern colonists, the
Southern ones left little record of themselves. So much the more
valuable, then, the accounts given by this remarkable man of the times.
We seemed turning from an impressive text as we left the tomb; left the
old grand seignior in his little six feet of earth--six feet out of
175,000 acres! But, after all, it was a rueful text; not one for
morning sunshine and blue sky, for hearts that yet beat strong, that
yet gloried in a boundless estate--all the bright world ours. And the
birds were holding carnival over by the stone basin under the ram's
head on the wall; and the river was dancing in the sunlight; and
besides, we had caught sight of a sun-dial there in that old colonial
garden by the banks of the "King's River"! To he sure we were told that
this was not an ancient timepiece of the sun. We were much too late to
see the original sun-dial of this garden. That old colonial worthy had
found time too long for its marking. Worn with the years that it had
told, it had leaned and dozed, and lost count, and was gone.
But it is not so much that a garden should have an _old_ sun-dial, as
that it should have a sun-dial. For the matter of that, they are all
old. Venerableness is their birthright. Whoever thinks of youth in a
sun-dial? Were you unboxing one just from the maker would you not
expect to find it moss-grown?
Indeed, are these timepieces of sun and shadow made at all, or do they
just occur here and there like hoary rocks and mossy springs? And what
a charming provision of Nature it is that they so often occur in
gardens! Sun-dials and gardens! Sunshine-and-shadow time for plants to
grow by; sunshine-and-shadow time for flowers to bloom by. Surely this
is the only time by which a morning-glory should waken, by which a
four-o'clock should know its hour, by which an evening primrose should
time its fragrant bloom.
Sun-dials and gardens! Sunshine-and-shadow time for birds to sing by;
sunshine-and-shadow time for mortals to laze and dream by. Beautiful,
silent, peaceful time; where no clocks strike the passing hours, no
whistles scream the round of toil. What time like that of the
noiseless, scarce-moving shadow upon the dial for a sleepy old garden
and a day-dreamer in the sunshine? And if, perchance, the garden-lover
is not building castles in Spain, but has crept into the garden only
for brief rest from the fray, or to give a weary clock-driven soul an
hour with its Maker, then truly again--sun-dials and gardens! Sun-dial
time to rest the fainting heart by; sun-dial time for the troubled soul
to reach up to God by. Sun-dials and gardens!
Be the garden-lover what he may--day-dreamer, fainting heart, troubled
soul--how gently the shadow-finger on the dial points the time for him!
How softly, almost lingeringly, it lets the moments slip from gold to
gray, seeking to give him, to the full and unfretted, his little hour
in the sunshine!
And yet, the gentlest marker of time must mark. It may mark very softly
those passing moments of life's lessening span; but when we come to
look again, the shadow has moved on. Nor can childish interference
avail. Spread your rebellious hands upon the dial; you shall only see
the shadow come stealing through your fingers. Stand defiantly in the
path of the sunlight, and blot out the telltale dial shadow with your
own; it but waits until you step aside, then leaps across the moments
you have wasted. Not for you shall the boon to the sick and penitent
King of Judah be repeated; not for you shall the shadow turn backward
on the sun-dial of Ahaz.