INTO THE OLD DOMINION
When two men are traveling together on an equal footing, and it becomes
necessary to decide between two rooms in a hotel, how is the decision to
be made? Which man is to take the big, bright corner room, and which the
little room that faces on the court and is fragrant of the bakery below?
Or again, which man shall occupy the lower berth in a Pullman
drawing-room, and which shall try to sleep upon the shelf-like couch? Or
when there is but one lower left, which shall take the upper? If an
extra kit bag be required for the use of both, who shall pay for it and
own it at the journey's end? Who shall pay for this meal and who for
that? Or yet again, if there be but one cheap heavy overcoat in a shop,
and both desire to own that coat, which one shall have the right of
purchase? Who shall tip the bell boy for bringing up the bags, or the
porter for taking down the trunks? Who shall take home from a dance the
girl both want to take, and who shall escort the unattractive one who
resides in a remote suburb?
Between two able-bodied men there is no uncomfortable complication of
politeness in such matters. On a brief journey there might be, but on a
long journey the thin veil of factitious courtesy is cast aside; each
wants his fair share of what is best and makes no pretense to the
contrary.
Upon our first long journey together, some years ago, my companion and I
established a custom of settling all such questions by matching coins,
and we have maintained this habit ever since. Upon the whole it has
worked well. We have matched for everything except railroad fares and
hotel bills, and though fortune has sometimes favored one or the other
for a time, I believe that, had we kept accounts, we should find
ourselves to-day practically even.
Our system of matching has some correlated customs. Now and then, for
instance, when one of us is unlucky and has been "stuck" for a series of
meals, the other, in partial reparation, will declare a "party."
Birthdays and holidays also call for parties, and sometimes there will
be a party for no particular reason other than that we feel like having
one.
Two of our parties on this journey have been given in the basement café
of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. Both were supper parties. The first
I gave in honor of my companion, for the reason that we both like the
Shoreham café, and that a party seemed to be about due. That party
brought on the other, which occurred a few nights later and was given by
us jointly in honor of a very beautiful and talented young actress. And
this one, we agree, was, in a way, the most amusing of all the parties
we have had together.
It was early in the morning, when we were leaving the café after the
first party, that we encountered the lady who caused the second one. I
had never met her, but I was aware that my companion knew her, for he
talked about her in his sleep. She was having supper with a gentleman at
a table near the door, and had you seen her it would be unnecessary for
me to tell you that my companion stopped to speak to her, and that I
hung around until he introduced me.
After we had stood beside her, for a time, talking and gazing down into
her beautiful world-wise eyes, the gentleman with whom she was supping
took pity upon us, and upon the waiters, whose passageway we blocked,
and invited us to sit down.
It was doubly delightful to meet her there in Washington, for besides
being beautiful and celebrated, she had just come from New York and was
able to give us news of mutual friends, bringing us up to date on suits
for separation, alimony, and alienation of affections, on divorces and
remarriages, and all the little items one loses track of when one has
been away for a fortnight.
"I shall be playing in Washington all this week," she said as we were
about to leave. "I hope that we may see each other again."
Whom did she mean by "we"? True, she looked at my companion as she
spoke, but he was seated at one side of her and I at the other, and even
with such eyes as hers, she could not have looked at both of us at
once. Certainly the hope she had expressed was shared by me. _I_ hoped
that "we" might meet again, and it seemed to me desirable at the moment
that she should understand (and that my companion should be reminded)
that he and I were as Damon and Pythias, as Castor and Pollux, as
Pylades and Orestes, and all that sort of thing. Therefore I leaped
quickly at the word "we," and, before my companion had time to answer,
replied:
"I hope so too."
This brought her eyes to me. She looked surprised, I thought, but what
of that? Don't women like to be surprised? Don't they like men to be
strong, resolute, determined, like heroes in the moving pictures? Don't
they like to see a man handle matters with dash? I was determined to be
dashing.
"We are off to Virginia to-morrow morning," I continued. "We are going
to Fredericksburg and Charlottesville, and into the fox-hunting country.
If we can get back here Saturday night let's have a party."
I spoke of the hunting country debonairely. I did not care what she
thought my companion was going to the hunting country for, but I did not
wish her to think that I was going only to look on. On the contrary, I
desired her to suppose that I should presently be wearing a pair of
beautiful, slim-legged riding boots and a pink coat, and leaping a
thoroughbred mount over fences and gates. I wished her to believe me a
wild, reckless, devil of a fellow, and to worry throughout the week
lest I be killed in a fall from my horse, and she never see me
more--poor girl!
That she felt such emotions I have since had reason to doubt. However,
the idea of a party after the play on Saturday night seemed to appeal to
her, and it was arranged that my companion and I should endeavor to get
back to Washington after the Piedmont Hunt races, which we were to
attend on Saturday afternoon, and that if we could get back we should
telegraph to her.
We kept our agreement--but I shall come to that later.
* * * * *
Next morning we took train for Fredericksburg.
The city manager who runs the town is a good housekeeper; his streets
are wide, pretty, and clean; and though there are many historic
buildings--including the home of Washington's mother and the house in
which Washington became a Mason--there are enough good new ones to give
the place a progressive look.
In the days of the State's magnificence Fredericksburg was the center
for all this part of northeastern Virginia, and particularly for the
Rappahannock Valley; and from pre-Revolutionary times, when tobacco was
legal tender and ministers got roaring drunk, down to the Civil War,
there came rolling into the town the coaches of the great plantation
owners of the region, who used Fredericksburg as a headquarters for
drinking, gambling, and business. Among these probably the most famous
was "King" Carter, who not only owned miles upon miles of land and a
thousand slaves, but was the husband of five (successive) Mrs. Carters.
Falmouth, a river town a mile above Fredericksburg, where a few
scattered houses stand to-day, was in early times a busy place. It is
said that the first flour mill in America stood there, and that one
Gordon, who made his money by shipping flour and tobacco direct from his
wharf to England, and bringing back bricks as ballast for his ships, was
the first American millionaire.
Besides having known intimately such historic figures as Washington,
Monroe, and Robert E. Lee, and having been the scene of sanguinary
fighting in the Civil War, the neighborhood of Fredericksburg boasts the
birth-place of a man of whom I wish to speak briefly here, for the
reason that he was a great man, that he has been partially overlooked by
history, and that it is said in the South that the fame which should
justly be his has been deliberately withheld by historians and
politicians for the sole reason that as a naval officer he espoused the
southern cause in the Civil War.
Every one who has heard of Robert Fulton, certainly every one who has
heard of S.F.B. Morse or Cyrus W. Field, ought also to have heard of
Matthew Fontaine Maury. But that is not the case. For myself, I must
confess that, until I visited Virginia, I was ignorant of the fact that
such a person had existed; nor have northern schoolboys, to whom I have
spoken of Maury, so much as heard his name. Yet there is no one living
in the United States, or in any civilized country, whose daily life is
not affected through the scientific researches and attainments of this
man.
Maury's claim to fame rests on his eminent services to navigation and
meteorology. If Humboldt's work, published in 1817, was the first great
contribution to meteorological science, it remained for Maury to make
that science exact.
While it is perhaps an exaggeration to say that Maury alone laid the
foundation for our present Weather Bureau, he certainly shares with
Professors Redfield, Espy, Loomis, Joseph Henry, Dr. Increase Lapham,
and others, the honor of having been one of the first to suggest the
feasibility of our present systematic storm warnings.
Maury was born in 1806. When nineteen years of age he secured a
midshipman's warrant, and, as there was no naval academy at Annapolis
then, was immediately assigned to a man-of-war. Within six years he was
master of an American war vessel. Before starting on a voyage to the
Pacific he sought information on the winds and currents, and finding
that it was not available, determined himself to gather it for general
publication. This he did, issuing a book upon the subject.
When a broken leg, the result of a stage-coach accident, caused his
retirement from active service at sea, he continued his studies, and, in
recognition of his services to navigation, was given charge of the Depot
of Charts and Instruments at Washington. There he found stored away the
log books of American naval vessels, and from the vast number of
observations they contained, began the compilation of the Wind and
Currents Charts known to all mariners.
A monograph on Maury, issued by N.W. Ayer & Son, of Philadelphia, says
of these charts:
"They were, at first, received with indifference and incredulity.
Finally, a Captain Jackson determined to trust the new chart absolutely.
As a result he made a round trip to Rio de Janeiro in the time often
required for the outward passage alone. Later, four clipper ships
started from New York for San Francisco, via Cape Horn. These vessels
arrived at their destination in the order determined by the degree of
fidelity with which they had followed the directions of Maury's charts.
The arrival of these ships in San Francisco marked, likewise, the
arrival of Maury's Wind and Currents Charts in the lasting favor of the
mariners of the world. The average voyage to San Francisco was reduced,
by use of the charts, from one hundred and eighty-three to one hundred
and thirty-five days, a saving of forty-eight days.
"Soon after this, the ship _San Francisco_, with hundreds of United
States troops on board, foundered in an Atlantic hurricane. The rumor
reached port that there was need of help. Maury was called upon to
indicate her probable location. He set to work to show where the wind
and currents would combine to place a helpless wreck, and marked the
place with a blue pencil. There the relief was sent, and there the
survivors of the wreck were found. From that day to this, Maury's word
has been accepted without challenge by the matter-of-fact men of the
sea.
"These charts, only a few in number, are among the most wonderful and
useful productions of the human mind. One of them combined the result of
1,159,353 separate observations on the force and direction of the wind,
and upward of 100,000 observations on the height of the barometer, at
sea. As the value of such observations was recognized, more of them were
made. Through the genius and devotion of one man, Commander Maury, every
ship became a floating observatory, keeping careful records of winds,
currents, limits of fogs, icebergs, rain areas, temperature, soundings,
etc., while every maritime nation of the world coöperated in a work that
was to redound to the benefit of commerce and navigation, the increase
of knowledge, the good of all.
"In 1853, at the instance of Commander Maury, the United States called
the celebrated Brussels Conference for the coöperation of nations in
matters pertaining to maritime affairs. At this conference, Maury
advocated the extension of the system of meteorological observation to
the land, thus forming a weather bureau helpful to agriculture. This he
urged in papers and addresses to the close of his life. Our present
Weather Bureau and Signal Service are largely the outcome of his
perception and advocacy."
Maury's "Physical Geography of the Sea," the work by which he is best
known, was published in 1855. He discovered, among other things, the
causes of the Gulf Stream, and the existence of the still-water plateau
of the North Atlantic which made possible the laying of the first cable.
Cyrus W. Field said, with reference to Maury's work in this connection:
"Maury furnished the brains, England gave the money, and I did the
work."
Maury was decorated by many foreign governments but not by his own.
Owing, it is said, to his having taken up the Confederate cause,
national honors were withheld from him, not only during the remainder of
his life, but until 1916, when one of the large buildings at the Naval
Academy--the establishment of which, by the way, Maury was one of the
first to advocate--was named for him, and Congress passed a bill
appropriating funds for the erection of a monument to the "Pathfinder of
the Sea," in Washington.
Maury died in 1873, one of the most loved and honored men in the State
of Virginia.
It is recorded that, near the end, he asked his son: "Am I dragging my
anchors?"
And when the latter replied in the affirmative, the father gave a brave
sailor's answer:
"All's well," he said.
* * * * *
Across the river from Fredericksburg stands Chatham, the old Fitzhugh
house, one of the most charming of early Virginian mansions. Chatham was
built in 1728, and it is thought that the plans for it were drawn by
Sir Christopher Wren at the order of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and
sent by the latter to William Fitzhugh, who had been his classmate at
Eton and Oxford. Not only does the name of the house lend color to the
tale, but so do its proportions, which are very beautiful, reminding one
somewhat of those of Doughoregan Manor. Chatham, however, has the
advantage of being (as the Hon. Charles Augustus Murray wrote of it in
his quaint "Travels in North America," published in 1839) "situated on
an eminence commanding a view of the town, and of the bold, sweeping
course of the Rappahannoc." Murray also tells of the beautiful garden,
with its great box trees and its huge slave-built terraces, stepping
down to the water like a giant's stairway.
In this house my companion and I were guests, and as I won the toss for
the choice of rooms, mine was the privilege of sleeping in the historic
west bedchamber, the principal guest room, and of opening my eyes, in
the morning, upon a lovely wall all paneled in white-painted wood.
I shall always remember the delightful experience of awakening in that
room, so vast, dignified, and beautiful, and of lying there a little
drowsy, and thinking of those who had been there before me. This was the
room occupied by George and Martha Washington when they stopped for a
few days at Chatham on their wedding journey; this was the room occupied
by Madison, by Monroe, by Washington Irving, and by Robert E. Lee when
he visited Chatham and courted Mary Custis, who became his wife. And,
most wonderful of all to me, this was the room occupied by Lincoln when
he came to Fredericksburg to review the army, while Chatham was Union
headquarters, and the embattled Lee had headquarters in the old house
known as Brompton, still standing on Marye's Heights back of the river
and the town. It is said that Lee during the siege of Fredericksburg
never trained his guns on Chatham, because of his sentiment for the
place. As I lay there in the morning I wondered if Lee had been aware,
at the time, that Lincoln was under the roof of Chatham, and whether
Lincoln knew, when he slept in "my" room, that Washington and Lee had
both been there before him.
War, I thought, not only makes strange bedfellows, but strange
combinations in the histories of bedrooms.
Then the maid rapped for the second time upon my door, and though this
time I got up at once, my ruminations made me scandalously late for
breakfast.
After breakfast came the motor, which was to take us to the
battlefields, its driver a thin dry-looking, dry-talking man, with the
air of one a little tired of the story he told to tourists day in and
day out, yet conscientiously resolved to go through with it. Before the
huge cemetery which overlooks the site of the most violent fighting that
occurred in the bloody and useless Battle of Fredericksburg, he paused
briefly; then drove us to the field of Chancellorsville, to that of the
Battles of the Wilderness, and finally to the region of Spottsylvania
Courthouse; and at each important spot he stopped and told us what had
happened there. He knew all about the Civil War, that man, and he had a
way of passing out his information with a calm assumption that his
hearers knew nothing about it whatever. This irritated my companion, who
also knows all about the War, having once passed three days in the
neighborhood of a Soldiers' Home. Consequently he kept cutting in,
supplying additional details--such, for instance, as that Stonewall
Jackson, who died in a house which the driver pointed out, was shot by
some of his own men, who took him for a Yankee as he was returning from
a reconnaissance.
Either one of these competitive historians alone, I could have stood,
but the way they picked each other up, fighting the old-time battles
over again, got on my nerves. Besides, it was cold, and as I have taken
occasion to remark before, I do not like cold motor rides. Indeed, as I
think it over, it seems to me I do not like battlefields, either. At all
events, I became more and more morose as we traversed that bleak
Virginia landscape, and I am afraid that before the day was over I was
downright sulky.
As we drove back to Fredericksburg and to the train which was to take us
to Charlottesville, my companion made remarks of a general character
about people who were trivial minded, and who didn't take a proper
interest in the scenes of great historical occurrences. When he had
continued for some time in this vein, I remarked feebly that I loved to
read about battles; but that, far from mitigating his severity, only
caused him to change his theme. He said that physical laziness was a
terrible thing because it not only made the body soft but by degrees
softened the brain, as well. He said that when people didn't want to see
battlefields, preferring to lie in bed and read about them, that was a
sign of the beginning of the end.
On various occasions throughout the week he brought this subject up
again, and I was glad indeed when, as the time for our party with the
beautiful young actress, in Washington, drew near, he began to forget
about my shortcomings and think of more agreeable things.