American Adventures Part 12

Two of our parties on this journey have been given in the bas.e.m.e.nt cafe of the Sh.o.r.eham Hotel in Washington. Both were supper parties. The first I gave in honor of my companion, for the reason that we both like the Sh.o.r.eham cafe, 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 cafe 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 pa.s.sageway 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 a.s.signed 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 pa.s.sage 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 cooperated 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 cooperation 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.smate 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 Dough.o.r.egan 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 princ.i.p.al 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 pa.s.sing out his information with a calm a.s.sumption that his hearers knew nothing about it whatever. This irritated my companion, who also knows all about the War, having once pa.s.sed 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 compet.i.tive 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.

CHAPTER XIV