American Adventures Part 14

The Poe professor of English at the university, when we were there, was Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, who has since taken the professorship of English at the United States Naval Academy. By a coincidence which has proved a happy one for those who love the stories of the late Sidney Porter (O.

Henry), Dr. Smith grew up as a boy with Porter, in Greensboro, North Carolina. Because of this, and also because of Dr. Smith's own gifts as a writer and an a.n.a.lyst, it is peculiarly fitting that he should have undertaken the work which has occupied him for several years past, the result of which has recently been given to us in the form "The O. Henry Biography."

Dr. Smith was Roosevelt exchange professor at the University of Berlin in 1910-11, holding the chair of American History and Inst.i.tutions.

While occupying that professorship he met the Kaiser.

"I talked with him twice," he said, "and upon the second occasion under very delightful circ.u.mstances, for I was invited to dinner at the Palace at Potsdam, and was the only guest, the Kaiser, Kaiserin, and Princess Victoria Luise being present.

"The Kaiser is, of course, a very magnetic man. His eyes are his most remarkable feature. They are very large, brilliant, and sparkling, and he rolls them in a manner most unusual. While he is always the king and the soldier, he can be genial and charming. One might expect a man in his position to be blase, but that, most of all, is what he is not. He is like a boy in his vitality and vividness, and he has a great and persistent intellectual curiosity. It is this, I think, which used to cause him to be compared with Colonel Roosevelt. Both would like to know all things, and both have had, and have exercised more, perhaps, than any other two living men, the power to bring to themselves the central figures in all manner of world events, and thus learn at first hand, from acknowledged authorities, about the subjects that interest them--which is to say, everything.

"He frankly admired America. I don't mean that he said so for the sake of courtesy to me, but that he has--or did have, then--an immense and rather romantic interest in this country. A great many Germans used to resent this trait in him. America held in his mind the same romantic position that the idea of monarchy did in the minds of some of us. I mean that the average American went for romance to stories of monarchy, but that the Kaiser, being used to the monarchial idea, found his romance over here. (I am, of course, speaking of him as he was five or six years ago.) He wished to come to America, but was never able to do so, since German law forbids it. And, perhaps because he could not come, America was the more a sort of dream to him.

"He asked me about some of the things in Berlin which I had noticed as being different from things at home, and when I mentioned the way that history was kept alive in the very streets of Berlin, his eyes danced, and he said that was one of the things he had tried to accomplish by the erection of the numerous monuments which have been placed in Berlin during his reign. He told me of other means by which history was kept alive in Germany: among them that every officer has to know in detail the history of his regiment, and that German regiments always celebrate the anniversaries of their great days.

"He speaks English without an accent, though we might say that he spoke it with an English accent. He told me that he had learned English before he learned German, and had also caused his children to learn it first.

He reads Mark Twain, or had read him, and he enjoyed him, but he said that when he met Mark Twain the latter had little or nothing to say, and that it was only with the greatest difficulty that he got him to talk at all. He subscribed, he told me, to 'Harper's Magazine,' and he was in the habit of reading short stories aloud to his family, in English. He admired the American short story, and I remember that he declared: 'The Americans know how to plunge into a short story. We Germans are too long-winded.'"

When Professor Smith talks about the Kaiser, you say to yourself: "I know that it is growing late, but I cannot bear to leave until I have heard the rest of this"; when he drifts presently to O. Henry, you say the same; and so it is always, no matter what his subject. At last, however, the grandfather's clock in the hall below his study sends up a stern message which is not to be mistaken, whereupon you arise reluctantly from your comfortable chair, spill the cigar ashes out of your lap onto the rug, dust off your clothing, and take your leave. Nor is your regret at departing lessened by the fact that you must go to your bilious-colored bedroom in the New Gleason, and that you will not see the university, or Professor C. Alphonso Smith, or Mrs. Smith again, because you are leaving upon the morrow.

So it must always be with the itinerant ill.u.s.trator and writer. They are forever finding new and lovely scenes only to leave them; forever making new and charming friends only to part with them, faring forth again into the unknown.

CHAPTER XVI

FOX-HUNTING IN VIRGINIA

Better to hunt in fields for health unbought Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.

The wise for cure on exercise depend; G.o.d never made his work for man to mend.

--DRYDEN.

It is my impression that the dining-car conductor on the Chesapeake & Ohio train by which we left Charlottesville was puzzled when I asked his name; but if he sees this and remembers the incident he will now know that I did so because I wished here to mention him as a humane citizen.

His name is C.G. Mitch.e.l.l, and he was so accommodating as to serve a light meal, after hours, when he did not have to, to two hungry men who needed it. If travel has taught my companion and me anything, it has taught us that not all dining-car conductors are like that. Nor, I judge, can all dining-car conductors play the violin, pleasantly, in off hours, as does Mr. Mitch.e.l.l. Better one merciful dining-car conductor than twenty who wear white carnations at their left lapels, but wear no hearts below them!

The road by which we drove from the railroad into the fastnesses of Loudon County, where, near the little settlement of Upperville, the race meet of the Piedmont Hunt was to be held, suggested other times and other manners, for though we rode in a motor car, and though we pa.s.sed another now and then, machines were far outnumbered by the horses which, under saddle, or hitched to buggies, surreys, and carts of all descriptions, were heading toward the meeting place.

On these roads, one felt, the motor was an outsider; this was the kingdom of the horse that we were visiting; soft dirt roads were there for him to trot and gallop on, and fences of wood or stone, free from barbed wire, were everywhere, for him to jump.

Throughout the week we had looked forward to this day, and even more, perhaps, to the party which, if we could get back to Washington that night, was to follow it; wherefore the first thing we did on reaching a place where information was obtainable was to inquire about facilities for leaving. Herein my companion had the advantage of me, for there was nothing to prevent his departing immediately after the races, whereas I must remain behind for an hour or two, to learn something of fox-hunting as practised in this region.

By motoring immediately after the races to a neighboring town--Bluemont if I remember rightly--and there taking an interurban trolley to some other place, and changing cars, and going without his dinner, my companion found that he could get to Washington by nine o'clock. My case was different. Should I be delayed more than two hours I could not get away at all that night, but must miss the much antic.i.p.ated party altogether; and, though my companion seemed to view this possibility with perfect equanimity, my memories of the charming lady whom we were to meet at the stage door, after the performance, were too clear to permit of indifference in me. The trolley my companion meant to catch was, however, the last one; my only hope, therefore, was to motor a distance of perhaps a dozen miles, over roads which I was frankly told were "middling to bad," and try to catch a train at The Plains station.

If I missed this train, I was lost, and must spend a solitary night in such a room as I might be able to find in a strange village. That possibility did not appeal to me. I began to wish that there was no such thing as fox-hunting, or that, there being such a thing, I had chosen to ignore it.

"Now," said my companion cheerfully, "we'll telegraph her."

At a telegraph office he seized the pencil and wrote the following message:

_Will call for you to-night after performance._

To this he signed his own name.

"What about me?" I suggested, after glancing over his shoulder at the message.

"Oh, well," said he, "there's no use in going into all that in a telegram. It's sufficient to let her know that one of us is coming."

"But I proposed this party."

"Well," he gave in, with an air of pained patience, "what shall I say, then? Shall I add that you are unavoidably detained?"

"Not by a jugful!" I returned. "Add that I hope to get there too, and will make every effort to do so."

He wrote it out, sighing as he did so. Then, by careful cutting, he got it down to fourteen words. By that time the operator couldn't read it, so he wrote it out again--gloomily.

This accomplished, we matched coins to see who should pay for the message. He lost.

"All right!" he said. "I'll pay for it, but it's all foolishness to send such a long telegram."

"No," I returned, as we left the office and got into the machine, "it is not foolishness. If I can make life a little brighter for a beautiful woman, by adding a few words to a telegram, and sticking you for it, I shall do it every time."

He looked away over the fields and did not answer me. So we drove on in silence to where stands the beautiful manor house called Huntland, which is the residence of Mr. Joseph B. Thomas, M.F.H. of the Piedmont Hunt.

There is, I have been told, no important hunt in the United States in which the master of foxhounds is not the chief financial supporter, the sport being a very costly one. Of American hunts, the Middles.e.x, in Ma.s.sachusetts, of which Mr. A. Henry Higginson is M.F.H., has the reputation of being the best appointed. The Piedmont Hunt is, however, one of the half dozen leading organizations of the kind, and it is difficult indeed to imagine a finer.

In a well-kept park near Mr. Thomas's house stand extensive English-looking buildings of brick and stucco, which, viewed from a distance, suggest a beautiful country house, and which, visited, teach one that certain favored hounds and horses in this world live much better than certain human beings. One building is given over to the kennels, the other the stables; each has a large sunlit court, and each is as beautiful and as clean as a fine house--a house full of trophies, hunting equipment, and the pleasant smell of well-cared-for saddlery. In a rolling meadow, not far distant, is the race course, all green turf, and here, soon after luncheon, gathered an extraordinary diversified crowd.

For the most part the crowd was a fashionable one: men and women of the type whose photographs appear in "Vogue" and "Vanity Fair," and whose costumes were like fashion suggestions for "sport clothes" in those publications. One party was stationed on the top of an old-time mail coach, the boot of which bore the significant initials "F.F.V."--standing, as even benighted Northerners must be aware, for "First Families of Virginia"; others were in a line of motors and heterogeneous horse-drawn vehicles, parked beside the course; and scattered through the gathering, like brushmarks on an impressionist canvas, one saw the brilliant color of pink coats. Handsome hunters were being ridden or led about by negro grooms, and others kept arriving, ridden in by farmers and breeders, while here and there one saw a woman rider, her hair tightly drawn back under a mannish derby hat, her figure slender and graceful in a severely-cut habit coat.

Jumbled together in a great green meadow under a sweet autumnal sun, these things made a picture of what, I am persuaded, is the ultimate in extravagant American country life. There was something, too, about this blending of fashionables and farmers, which made me think of the theater; for there is, in truth, a distinct note of histrionism about many of the rich Americans who "go in for" elaborate ruralness, and there is a touch of it very often, also, about "horsey" people. They like to "look the part," and they dress it with no less care than they exercise, at other seasons, in dressing the parts of opera-going cosmopolites, or wealthy loungers at the beaches. In other words, these fashionables had the overtrained New York look all over them, and the local rustics set them off as effectively as the villainous young squire of the Drury Lane melodrama is set off by contrast with honest old Jasper, the miller, who wears a smock, and comes to the Great House to beg the Young Master to "make an honest woman" of poor Rose, the fairest la.s.s in all Hampshire.

About the races themselves there was something fascinatingly nonprofessional. They bore the same relation to great races on great tracks that a very fine performance of a play by amateurs might bear to a professional performance.

First came a two-mile steeplechase, with brush hurdles. Then, after a couple of minor events, a four-mile point-to-point race for hunters ridden by gentlemen in hunt uniform. This was as stiff a race for both horses and riders as I have ever seen, and it was very picturesque to watch the pink coats careering up hill and down dale, now over a tall stone wall, now over a brook or a snake fence; and when a rider went head over heels, and lay still upon the ground where he fell, while his horse cantered along after the field, in that aimless and pathetic way that riderless horses have, one had a real sensation--which was the pleasanter for knowing, a few minutes later, that the horseman had only broken an arm.

Next was run a rollicking race for horses owned by farmers, and others, whose land is hunted over by the Piedmont and Middleburg foxhounds; and last occurred a great comedy event--a mule race, free for all, in which one of the hunting men, in uniform, made such a handsome showing against a rabble of white and colored boys, all of them yelling, all of them beating their long-eared animals with sticks, that he would have won, had he not deliberately pulled his mount and "thrown" the race.

The last event was not yet finished when my companion, who had become nervous about his interurban trolley, got into a machine to drive to Bluemont.

"Of course," he said as we parted, "we'll miss you to-night."

"Oh," I said, "I hope not. I expect to get there."

"I don't see how you can make it," said he. "You have a lot of material to gather."

"I shall work fast."

"Well," said he, trying to speak like the voice of Conscience, "I hope you won't forget your _duty_--that's all."