A RARE OLD TOWN
The drive from Baltimore to the sweet, slumbering city of Annapolis is
over a good road, but through barren country. Taken in the crisp days of
autumn, by a northern visitor sufficiently misguided to have supposed
that beyond Mason and Dixon's Line the winters are tropical it may prove
an uncomfortable drive--unless he be able to borrow a fur overcoat. It
was on this drive that my disillusionment concerning the fall and winter
climate of the South began, for, wearing two cloth overcoats, one over
the other, I yet suffered agonies from cold. The sun shone down upon the
open automobile in which we tore along, but its rays were no competitors
for the biting wind. Through lap robes, cloth caps, and successive
layers of clothing, and around the edges of goggles, fine little frozen
fangs found their way, like the pliable beaks of a race of gigantic,
fabulous mosquitoes from the Arctic regions. I have driven an open car
over the New England snows for miles in zero weather, and been warm by
comparison, because I was prepared.
My former erroneous ideas as to the southern climate may be shared by
others, and it is therefore well, perhaps, to enlarge a little bit upon
the subject. Never, except during a winter passed in a stone
tile-floored villa on the island of Capri, whither I went to escape the
cold, have I been so conscious of it, as during fall, winter, and spring
in the South.
In the hotels of the South one may keep warm in cold weather, but in
private homes it is not always possible to do so, for the popular
illusion that the "sunny South" is of a uniformly temperate climate in
the winter persists nowhere more violently than in the South itself.
Many a house in Virginia, let alone the other States farther down the
map, is without a furnace, and winter life in such houses, with their
ineffectual wood fires, is like life in a refrigerator tempered by the
glow of a safety match. As in Italy and Spain, so in the South it is
often warmer outdoors than in; more than once during my southern voyage
I was tempted to resume the habit, acquired in Capri, of wearing an
overcoat in the house and taking it off on going out into the sunshine.
True, in Capri we had roses blooming in the garden on Christmas Day, but
that circumstance, far from proving warmth, merely proved the hardiness
of roses. So, in the far South--excepting Florida and perhaps a strip of
the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama--the blooming of
flowers in the winter does not prove that "Palm Beach suits" and panama
hats invariably make a desirable uniform.
Furthermore, I am inclined to believe that because some southern winter
days are warm and others cold, a Northerner feels cold in the South
more than he feels the corresponding temperature at home--on somewhat
the principle which caused the Italians who went with the Duke of the
Abruzzi on his polar expedition to withstand cold more successfully than
did the Scandinavians.
Of the southern summer I have no experience, but I have been repeatedly
assured that certain of the southern beaches are nearly, if not quite,
as comfortable in hot weather as are those of New Jersey or Long Island,
while in numerous southern mountain retreats one may be fairly cool
through the hot months--a fact which spells fortune for the hotel
keepers of such high-perched resorts as Asheville, White Sulphur
Springs, and the Hot Springs of Virginia, who have their houses full of
Northerners in winter and Southerners in summer.
* * * * *
The experience of arrival in Annapolis, delightful in any weather and at
any time of year, gives one a satisfaction almost ecstatic after a cold,
windy automobile ride such as we had suffered. To ache for the shelter
of almost any town, or any sort of building, and, with such yearnings,
to arrive in this dreamy city, whose mild air seems to be compounded
from fresh winds off a glittering blue sea, arrested by the barricade of
ancient hospitable-looking houses, warmed by the glow of their sun-baked
red brick, and freighted with a ghostly fragrance, as from the phantoms
of the rose gardens of a century or two ago--to arrive, frigid and
forlorn in such a haven, to drink a cup of tea in the old Paca house
(now a hotel), is to experience heaven after purgatory. For there is no
town that I know whose very house fronts hold out to the stranger that
warm, old-fashioned welcome that Annapolis seems to give.
The Paca house, which as a hotel has acquired the name Carvel Hall, is
the house that Winston Churchill had in mind as the Manners house, of
his novel "Richard Carvel." A good idea of the house, as it was, may be
obtained by visiting the Brice house, next door, for the two are almost
twins. When Mr. Churchill was a cadet at Annapolis, before the modern
part of the Carvel Hall hotel was built, there were the remains of
terraced gardens back of the old mansion, stepping down to an old spring
house, and a rivulet which flowed through the grounds was full of
watercress. The book describes a party at the house and in these
gardens. The Chase house on Maryland Avenue was the one Mr. Churchill
thought of as the home of Lionel Carvel, and he described the view from
upper windows of this house, over the Harwood house, across the way, to
the Severn.
Annapolis, Baedeker tells me, was the first chartered city in the United
States, having been granted its charter by Queen Anne considerably more
than two centuries ago. It is, as every little boy and girl should know,
the capital of Maryland, and is built around a little hill upon the top
of which stands the old State House in which Washington surrendered his
commission and in which met the first Constitutional Convention.
In its prime Annapolis was nearly as large a city as it is to-day, but
that is not saying a great deal, for at the present time it has not so
many inhabitants as Amarillo, Texas, or Brazil, Indiana.
Nevertheless, the life of Annapolis in colonial days, and in the days
which followed them, was very brilliant, and we learn from the diary of
General Washington and from the writings of amazed Englishmen and
Frenchmen who visited the city in its period of glory that there were
dinners and balls night after night, that the theater was encouraged in
Annapolis more than in any other city, that the race meets compared with
English race meets both as to the quality of the horses and of the
fashionable attendance, that there were sixteen clubs, that the women of
the city were beautiful, charming, and superbly dressed, that slaves in
sumptuous liveries were to be seen about the streets, that certain
gentlemen paid calls in barges which were rowed by half a dozen or more
blacks, in uniform, and that the perpetual hospitality of the great
houses was gorgeous and extravagant.
The houses hint of these things. If you have seen the best old brick
mansions of New England, and will imagine them more beautifully
proportioned, set off by balancing wings and having infinitely finer
details as to doorways, windows, porticos, and also as to wood carvings
and fixtures within--as, for instance, the beautiful silver latches and
hinges of the Chase house at Annapolis--you will gather something of the
flavor of these old Southern homes. For though such venerable mansions
as the Chase, Paca, Brice, Hammond, Ridout, and Bordley houses, in
Annapolis, are not without family resemblance to the best New England
colonial houses, the resemblance is of a kind to emphasize the
differences, not only between the mansions of the North and South, but
between the builders of them. The contrast is subtle, but marked.
Your New England house, beautiful as it is, is stamped with austere
simplicity. The man who built it was probably a scholar but he was
almost certainly a Calvinist. He habited himself in black and was served
by serving maids, instead of slaves in livery. If a woman was not
flat-chested and forlorn, he was prone to regard her as the devil
masquerading for the downfall of man--and no doubt with some justice,
too. Night and morning he presided at family prayers, the purpose of
which was to impress upon his family and servants that to have a good
time was wicked, and that to be gay in this life meant hell-fire and
damnation in the next.
Upon this pious person his cousin of Annapolis looked with something not
unlike contempt; for the latter, though he too was a scholar, possessed
the sort of scholarliness which takes into account beauty and the lore
of cosmopolitanism. He may have been religious or he may not have been,
but if religious he demanded something handsome, something stylish, in
his religion, as he did also in his residence, in his wife, his sons,
his daughters, his horses, coaches, dinners, wines, and slaves. He did
things with a flourish, and was not beset by a perpetual consciousness
and fear of hell. He approved of pretty women; he made love to them; he
married them; he was the father of them. His pretty daughters married
men who also admired pretty women, and became the mothers of other
pretty women, who became, in turn, the mothers and grandmothers of the
pretty women of the South to-day.
Your old-time Annapolis gentleman's ideas of a republic were far indeed
from those now current, for he understood perfectly the difference
between a republic and a democracy--a difference which is not now so
well understood. He believed that the people should elect the heads of
the government, but he also believed that these heads should be elected
from his own class, and that, having voted, the people should go about
their business, trusting their betters to run the country as it should
be run.
This, at least, is my picture of the old aristocrats of Maryland,
Virginia, and South Carolina, as conveyed to me by what I have seen of
their houses and possessions and what I have read of their mode of life.
They were the early princes of the Republic and by all odds its most
picturesque figures.
* * * * *
Very different from the spirit of appreciation and emulation shown by
the trustees of Johns Hopkins University with regard to the old house,
Homewood, in Baltimore, is that manifested in the architecture of the
Naval Academy at Annapolis, where, in a city fairly flooded with
examples of buildings, both beautiful and typically American,
architectural hints were ignored, and there were erected great stone
structures whose chief characteristics are size, solidity, and the look
of being "government property." The main buildings of the Academy, with
the exception of the chapel, suggest the sort of sublimated penitentiary
that Mr. Thomas Mott Osborne might, one fancies, construct under a
carte-blanche authorization, while the chapel, the huge dome of which is
visible to all the country round, makes one think of a monstrous wedding
cake fashioned in the form of a building and covered with white and
yellow frosting in ornamental patterns.
This chapel, one imagines, may have been inspired by the Invalides in
Paris, but of the Invalides it falls far short. I know nothing of the
history of the building, but it is easy to believe that the original
intention may have been to place at the center of it, under the dome, a
great well, over the parapet of which might have been seen the
sarcophagus of John Paul Jones, in the crypt. One prefers to think that
the architect had some such plan; for the crypt, as at present arranged,
is hardly more than a dark cellar, approached by what seems to be a
flight of humble back stairs. To descend into it, and find there the
great marble coffin with its bronze dolphins, is not unlike going down
into the cellar of a residence and there discovering the family silver
reposing in the coal-bin.
In this connection it is interesting to recall the fact that our
sometimes piratical and always brilliant Revolutionary naval hero died
in Paris, and that until a few years ago his resting place was unknown.
The reader will remember that while General Horace Porter was American
ambassador to France a search was instituted for the remains of John
Paul Jones, the greater part of the work having been conducted by
Colonel H. Baily Blanchard, then first secretary of the Embassy,
assisted by the ambassador and Mr. Henry Vignaud, dean of secretaries of
embassy. The resting place of Jones was finally discovered in an
abandoned cemetery in the city of Paris, over which houses had been
built. The body was contained in a leaden casket and was preserved in
alcohol so that identification was easily accomplished by means of a
contemporaneous likeness of Jones, and also by means of measurements
taken from Houdin's bust. The remains were accorded military honors in
Paris, and were brought to this country on a war vessel.
Why the crypt at Annapolis is as it is, I do not know, but in my own
purely imaginary picture of what happened, I see the architect's plans
for a heroic display of Jones's tomb knocked on the head by some
"practical man," some worthy dunce in the Navy Department, whom I can
imagine as protesting: "But no! We can't take up space at the center of
the chapel for any such purpose. It must be floored over to make room
for pews. Otherwise where will the cadets sit?"
So, although the grounds of the academy, with their lawns, and aged
trees, and squirrels, and cadets, are charming, and although the solemn
and industrious Baedeker assures me that the academy is the "chief lion"
of Annapolis, and although I know that it is a great school, and that we
need another like it in order properly to officer our navy, I prefer the
old town with its old houses, and old streets bearing such reminiscent
names as Hanover, Prince George, and Duke of Gloucester.
For certain slang expressions used by cadets I am indebted to a member
of the corps. From this admiral-to-be I learn that a "bird" or "wazzo"
is a man or boy; that a "pap sheet" is a report covering delinquencies,
and that to "hit the pap" is to be reported for delinquency; that
"steam" is marine engineering, and to be "bilged for juice" is to fail
in examinations in electrical engineering--to get an "unsat," or
unsatisfactory mark, or even a "zip" or "swabo," which is a zero. Cadets
do not escort girls to dances, but "drag" them; a girl is a "drag," and
a "heavy drag" or "brick" is an unattractive girl who must be taken to a
dance. A "sleuth" or "jimmylegs" is a night watchman, and to be "ragged"
is to be caught. Mess-hall waiters are sometimes called "mokes," while
at other times the names of certain exalted dignitaries of the Navy
Department, or of the academy, are applied to them.
* * * * *
I shall never cease to regret that dread of the cold kept us from seeing
ancient Whitehall, a few miles from Annapolis, which was the residence
of Governor Horatio Sharpe, and is one of the finest of historic
American homes; nor shall I, on the other hand, ever cease to rejoice
that, in spite of cold we did, upon another day, visit Hampton, the rare
old mansion of the Ridgelys, of Maryland, which stands amid its own five
thousand acres some dozen miles or so to the north of Baltimore. The
Ridgelys were, it appears, the great Protestant land barons of this
region as the Carrolls were the great Catholics, and, like the Carrolls,
they remain to-day the proprietors of a vast estate and an incomparable
house.