American Adventures Part 7

It is my recollection that none of them had seen it. Certainly not more than one of them had, for I remember my feeling of disappointment that any one present should have missed so strange a circ.u.mstance. Some one may have asked what I had seen; at all events I was full of the idea, and, indicating the open door, I began to tell what I had seen, when--exactly as though the thing were done deliberately to circ.u.mstantiate my story--with the slow, steady movement of a heavy door pushed by a feeble hand, the other portal of the huge cabinet swung open.

This time all four of us were looking.

Presently, as we moved across the wide hall to go downstairs again, Bryan came from one of the other chambers, whither, I think, he had carried the young lady's supper on a tray.

"Are there supposed to be any ghosts in this house?" I asked him.

Bryan showed his white teeth in the semi-darkness. Whether he believed in ghosts or not, evidently he did not fear them.

"Yes, sir," he said. "We're supposed to have a ghost here."

"Where?"

"In that room over there," he answered, indicating the bedroom from which we had come.

We listened attentively to Bryan while he told how the daughter of Governor Swan had come to attend a ball at Hampton, and how she had died in the four-post bed in that old shadowy guest room, and of how, since then, she had been seen from time to time.

"They's several people say they saw her," he finished. "She comes out and combs her hair in front of the long mirror."

However, as we drove back to Baltimore that evening, we repeatedly a.s.sured one another that we did not believe in ghosts.

CHAPTER IX

ARE WE STANDARDIZED?

Almost all modern European critics of the United States agree in complaining that our telephones and sleeping cars are objectionable, and that we are "standardized" in everything. Their criticism of the telephone seems to be that the state of perfection to which it has been brought in this country causes it to be widely used, while their disapproval of our sleeping cars is invariably based on the a.s.sumption that they have no compartments--which is not the fact, since most of the great transcontinental railroads do run compartment cars, and much better ones than the best _wagons lits_, and since, also, all our sleeping cars have drawing-rooms which are incomparably better than the most comfortable European compartments.

The charge of standardization will, however, bear a little thought. It is true that most American cities have a general family resemblance--that a business street in Atlanta or Memphis looks much like a business street in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee, St.

Paul, Kansas City, or St. Louis--and that much the same thing may be said of residence streets. Houses and office buildings in one city are likely to resemble those of corresponding grade in another; the men who live in the houses and go daily to the offices are also similar; so are the trolley cars in which they journey to and fro; still more so the Fords which many of them use; the clothing of one man is like that of another, and all have similar conventions concerning the date at which--without regard to temperature--straw hats should be discarded.

Their womenfolk, also, are more or less alike, as are the department stores in which they shop and the dresses they buy. And the same is true of their children, the costumes of those children, and the schools they attend.

Every American city has social groups corresponding to similar groups in other cities. There is always the small, affluent group, made up of people who keep butlers and several automobiles, and who travel extensively. In this group there are always some sn.o.bs: ladies who give much time to societies founded on ancestry, and have a Junkerish feeling about "social leaders.h.i.+p."

Every city has also its "fast" group: people who consider themselves "unconventional," who drink more than is good for them, and make much noise. Some members of this group may belong to the first group, as well, but in the fast group they have a following of well-dressed hangers-on: unmarried men and women, youngish rather than young, who, with little money, yet manage to dress well and to be seen eating and drinking and dancing in public places. There is usually to be found in this group a hectic widow or two--be it gra.s.s or sod--and a few pretty girls who, having been given too much freedom at eighteen, begin to wonder at twenty-eight, why, though they have always been "good fellows," none of the dozens of men who take them about have married them. To this aggregation drift also those restless husbands and wives whose glances rove hopefully away from their mates, a few well-bred drunkards, and a few men and women who are trying to forget things they cannot forget.

Then there is always the young married group--a nice group for the most part--living in comfortable new houses or apartments, and keeping, usually, both a small automobile and a baby carriage. They also go to the Country Club on Sat.u.r.day nights, leave their motors standing in the drive, eat a lukewarm supper that tastes like papier-mache, and dance themselves to wiltedness.

Another group is entirely masculine, being made up of husbands of various ages, their mutual bond being the downtown club to which they go daily, and in which the subjects discussed are politics, golf, and the evils of prohibition. To this group always belong the black-sheep husbands who, after taking their wives to the Country Club, disappear and remain away until they are sent for because it is time to go home, when they come back shamefaced and scented with Scotch.

Every American city has also what Don Marquis calls its "little group of serious thinkers"--women, most of them--possessed of an ardent desire to "keep abreast of the times." These women belong to clubs and literary societies which are more serious than war. They are always reading papers or attending lectures, and at these lectures they get a strange a.s.sortment of "cultural" information and misinformation, delivered with ghastly a.s.surance by heterogeneous gentlemen in cutaway coats, who go about and spout for pay. If you meet these ladies, and they suspect you of being infested by the germs of "culture," they will open fire on you with a "thought," about which you may detect a curious ghostly fragrance, as of Alfred Noyes's lecture, last week, or of "the New Republic" or the "Literary Digest." The most "liberal" of them may even take "The Ma.s.ses," precisely as people rather like them used to take "The Philistine," a generation or two ago. Among the members of this group are the women who work violently for suffrage--something in which I personally believe, but which, merely because I believe in it, I do not necessarily like to take in my coffee as a subst.i.tute for sugar, on my bread as a subst.i.tute for b.u.t.ter, and in my ear as a subst.i.tute for pleasant general conversation.

I do not wish to seem to speak disparagingly of women of this type, for they are doing good, and they will do more good when they have become more accustomed to possessing minds. Having but recently discovered their minds, they are playing with them enthusiastically, like children who have just discovered their new toys on Christmas morning. It is delightful to watch them. It is diverting to have them pop ideas at you with that bright-eyed, efficient, a.s.sertive look which seems to say: "See! I am a liberal woman--a woman of the new type. I meet men on their own ground. Do you wish to talk of birth control, social hygiene, and s.e.x attraction? Or shall we reverse the order? Or shall I show you how much I know about Brieux, and household economics, and Ellen Key, and eugenics, and George Meredith, and post-impressionism, and "Roberts'

Rules of Order," and theosophy, and conditions in the Sixteenth Ward?"

When one thinks of these city groups, and of mail-order houses, and Fords, one may begin to fear it is indeed true that we are becoming standardized, but when one lets one's mind drift over the country as the eye drifts over a map; when one thinks of the quant.i.ties of modest, thoughtful, gentle, generous, intelligent, sound American families which are to be found in every city and every town, and thinks again, in a twinkling, of sheriffs and mining-camp policemen in the Far West, of boys going to Harvard, and other boys going to the University of Kansas, others to the old Southern universities, so rich in tradition, and still others to Annapolis or West Point; when one thinks of the snow glittering on the Rocky Mountain wall, back of Denver; of sleepy little towns drowsing in the sun beside the Mississippi; of Charles W. Eliot of Cambridge, and Hy Gill of Seattle; of Dr. Lyman Abbott of New York and Tom Watson of Georgia; of General Leonard Wood and Colonel William Jennings Bryan; of ex-slaves living in their cabins behind Virginia manor houses, and Filipino and Kanaka fishermen living in villages built on stilts beside the bayous below New Orleans; of the dry salt desert of Utah, and two great rivers meeting between green rocky hills, at Harper's Ferry; of men working in offices at the top of the Woolworth Building in New York, and other men working thousands of feet below the ground, in the copper mines of b.u.t.te and the iron and coal mines of Birmingham--when one thinks of these things one quickly ceases to fear that the United States is standardized, and instead begins to fear that few Americans will ever know the varied wonder of their country, and the varied character of its inhabitants, their problems, hopes, and views.

If I lived somewhere in the region of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia and wished quickly to learn whether the country were really standardized or not, I should get into my automobile--or into some one else's--and take an autumn tour through Baltimore, past Dough.o.r.egan Manor, some miles to the west of Baltimore, on to Frederick, Maryland (where they dispute, quite justly, I believe, the truth of the Barbara Frietchie legend), and thence "over the mountain wall" and down into the northeastern corner of the most irregularly shaped State in the Union, West Virginia. I should strike for Harper's Ferry, and from there run to Charles Town, a few miles distant (where John Brown was tried and executed for the Harper's Ferry raid), and after circulating about that corner of the State, I should go down into Virginia by the good highway which leads from Charles Town to Berryville--"Bur'v'l," they p.r.o.nounce it--and to "Winchester twenty miles away" (where they say that Sheridan's Ride was nothing to make such a lot of talk about!), and then back, by way of Berryville, and over the Blue Ridge Mountains into the great fox-hunting counties of Virginia: Clark, Loudon, and Fauquier.

Here I should see a hunt meet or a race meet. There are many other places to which I might go after that, but as I meant only to suggest an easy little tour, I shall stop at this point, contenting myself with saying that not far to the south is Charlottesville, where Jefferson built that most beautiful of all universities, the University of Virginia, and his wonderful house Monticello; that Staunton (p.r.o.nounced as without the "u"), where Woodrow Wilson was born, lies west of Charlottesville, while Fredericksburg, where Was.h.i.+ngton's mother lived, lies to the northeast.

Some such trip as this I should take instead of a conventional New England tour. And before starting I should buy a copy of Louise Closser Hale's delightful book, "Into the Old Dominion."

One beauty of the trip that I suggest is that it isn't all the same. In one place you get a fair country hotel, in another an inn, and somewhere along the way you may have to spend a night in a private house. Also, though the roads through Maryland, and the part of West Virginia I speak of, are generally good, my experience of Virginia roads, especially through the mountains, leads me to conclude that in respect to highways Virginia remains a backward State. But who wants to ride always over oiled roads, always to hotels with marble lobbies, or big white porches full of hungry-eyed young women, and old ladies, knitting? Only the standardized tourist. And I am not addressing him.

I am talking to the motorist who is not ossified in habit, who has a love of strangeness and the picturesque--not only in scenery but in houses and people and the kind of life those people lead. For it is quite true that, as Professor Roland C. Usher said in his "Pan Americanism," "the information in New York about Buenos Aires is more extended, accurate, and contemporaneous than the notions in Maine about Alabama.... Isolation is more a matter of time than of s.p.a.ce, and common interests are due to the ease of transportation and communication more often than geographical location."

CHAPTER X

HARPER'S FERRY AND JOHN BROWN

Mad Old Brown, Osawatomie Brown, With his eighteen other crazy men, went in and took the town.

--EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN.

Three States meet at Harper's Ferry, and the line dividing two of them is indicated where it crosses the station platform. If you alight at the rear end of the train, you are in Maryland; at the front, you are in West Virginia. This I like. I have always liked important but invisible boundaries--boundaries of states or, better yet, of countries. When I cross them I am disposed to step high, as though not to trip upon them, and then to pause with one foot in one land and one in another, trying to imagine that I feel the division running through my body.

Harper's Ferry is an entrancing old town; a drowsy place, piled up beautifully, yet carelessly, upon terraced roads clinging to steep hills, which slope on one side to the Potomac, on the other to the Shenandoah, and come to a point, like the prow of a great s.h.i.+p, at the confluence of the two.

There is something foreign in the appearance of the place. Many times, as I looked at old stone houses, a story or two high on one side, three or four stories on the other, seeming to set their claws into the cliffs and cling there for dear life, I thought of houses in Capri and Amalfi, and in some towns in France; and again there were low cottages built of blocks of shale covered with a thin veneer of white plaster showing the outlines of the stones beneath, which, squatting down amid their trees and flowers, resembled peasant cottages in Normandy or Brittany, or in Ireland.

It is a town in which to ramble for an hour, uphill, down and around; stopping now to delight in a crumbling stone wall, tied together with Kenilworth ivy; now to watch a woman making apple b.u.t.ter in a great iron pot; now to see an old negro clamber slowly into his rickety wagon, take up the rope reins, and start his skinny horse with the surprising words: "Come hither!"; now to look at an old tangled garden, terraced rudely up a hillside; now to read the sign, on a telegraph pole in the village, bearing the frank threat: "If you Hitch your Horses Here they will be Turned Loose." Now you will come upon a terraced road, at one side of which stands an old house draped over the rocks in such a way as to provide entrance from the ground level, on any one of three stories; or an unexpected view down a steep roadway, or over ancient moss-grown housetops to where, as an old book I found there puts it, "between two ramparts, in a gorge of savage grandeur, the lordly Potomac takes to his embrace the beautiful Shenandoah."

The liaison between the rivers, described in this Rabelaisian manner by the author of "The Annals of Harper's Ferry," has been going on for a long time with all the brazen publicity of a love scene on a park bench.

I recommend the matter to the attention of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which once took action to prohibit a novel by Mr.

Theodore Dreiser. A great many people wish to read Mr. Dreiser's books yet no one has to read them if he does not want to. But it is a different matter with these rivers. Sensitive citizens of Harper's Ferry and pure-minded pa.s.sengers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad are obliged daily to witness what is going on.

Before the days of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and of the late Anthony Comstock, when we had no one to make it clear to us exactly what was shocking, little was thought of the public scandal between the Potomac and the Shenandoah. Thomas Jefferson seems to have rather liked it; there is a point above the town, known as Jefferson's Rock, at which, it is said, the author of the Declaration of Independence stood and uttered a sentiment about the spectacle. Everybody in Harper's Ferry agrees that Jefferson stood at Jefferson's Rock and said something appropriate, and any one of them will try to tell you what he said, but each version will be different.

A young lady told me that he said: "This view is worth a trip across the Atlantic Ocean."

A young man in a blue felt hat of the fried-egg variety said that Jefferson declared, with his well-known simplicity: "This is the grandest view I ever seen."

An old man who had to go through the tobacco chewer's pre-conversational rite before replying to my question gave it as: "Pfst!--They ain't nothin' in Europe ner Switzerland ner nowheres else, I reckon', to beat this-here scenery."

The man at the drug store quoted differently alleging the saying to have been: "Europe has nothing on this": whereas the livery stable man's version was: "This has that famous German river--the Rhine River don't they call it?--skinned to death."

Whatever Jefferson's remark was, there has been added to the spectacle at Harper's Ferry, since his day, a new feature, which, could he have but seen it, must have struck him forcibly, and might perhaps have caused him to say more.

At a lofty point upon the steep wall of Maryland Heights, across the Potomac from the town, far, far up upon the side of the cliff, commanding a view not only of both rivers, but of their meeting place and their joint course below, and of the lovely contours of the Blue Ridge Mountains, fading to smoky coloring in the remote distance, there has, of late years, appeared the outline of a gigantic face, which looks out from its emplacement like some Teutonic G.o.d in vast effigy, its huge luxuriant mustaches pointing East and West as though in symbolism of the conquest of a continent. A blue and yellow background, tempered somewhat by the elements, serves to attract attention to the face and to the legend which accompanies it, but the thing one sees above all else, the thing one recognizes, is the face itself, with its look half tragic, half resigned, yet always so inscrutable: for it is none other than the beautiful brooding countenance of Gerhard Mennen, the talc.u.m-powder gentleman.