CHAPTER VIII

NEWPORT

My mother sailed early in the spring of this year--1872--for England to hold her famous Peace Crusade, and until her return in August, my father and I were alone together. As usual I resented her absence, believing, with the egotism of youth, that I had a prior claim on every moment of both parents’ time, while holding myself perfectly free to give them as much or as little of my own company as I found convenient. As an illustration of the working of the law of compensation, those months brought me a close companionship with my father that only the _solitude à deux_ can give. I date from this period my increased interest in world politics, for while my father was the most ardent American imaginable, his life had inevitably given him the wider outlook of world citizenship.

I remember something of his talk about the Boundaries and Fisheries dispute, which twenty years before had loomed so large among the questions of the day. He impressed it upon me that while our differences with Great Britain had all the acrimony of a family quarrel, when all was said and done, despite the behavior of a certain portion of the English people during the Civil War, despite Carlyle’s Latter Day Pamphlets and other irritating utterances, Americans should recognize Great Britain as our nearest of kin in the family of nations, to whom we are bound by ties of blood, tradition, and a common language. I am thankful to have escaped the anti-British sentiment so carefully cultivated by certain interests in this country.

An anecdote touching the Boundary dispute seems worth preserving; it was told me years after the event by an Englishman.

At the time when the boundary between British Columbia and Washington Territory was under discussion by the two governments, a commission was sent out from England to report on the value of the land. One of the commissioners, a famous sportsman, made the following comment:

“This is a rotten country; the fish won’t rise to a fly!”

When I visited Washington State and saw the beautiful country awarded to us at that time, I wondered if the dictum of the young angler had carried much influence in the decision.

Perhaps the sharpest memory I have of this year of 1872 is that of the great fire, when sixty acres of buildings in the heart of the business quarter of Boston went up in smoke and flame. I watched the terrible conflagration from the window of the room in the Institution for the Blind, where eighteen years before I first saw the light. Hour after hour passed, as I sat at the open casement watching the flames devour whole blocks of the city. The crimson sky was reflected in the black waters of South Boston harbor; the white spire of Park Street Church was often threatened; over and over again we lost sight of it in the clouds of sooty smoke, the curtain of leaping flame. Each time that the wind blew back the smoke and fire, and I caught a glimpse of that white finger pointing heavenward, fresh hope sprang up; so long as the steeple stood, we knew that the fire had not crossed the Common, and that Beacon Hill and the State House were safe. At this time my Aunt and Uncle Wales had moved into their new house on Brimmer Street, their son Thomas living at his farm in Wayland. During the night my aunt more than once called her husband’s attention to the unusual noise in the streets, the constant ringing of the fire alarm, the toot of engines flying by. His only answer was:

“Be quiet. Go to sleep!”

The next morning, as Aunt and Uncle Wales sat at breakfast, Cousin Tom came in, bearing some large ledgers in his arms.

“What brings you to Boston so early?” demanded his father.

“I came in to save the books. Your office and half Boston burned down last night.”

“I thought there was a good deal of disturbance!” Aunt Jenny placidly remarked.

The fire occurred on a Saturday night. Sunday morning Miss Elizabeth Peabody was found trying to make her way across one of the danger zones roped off and guarded by the police.

“Where did you want to go, Ma’am?” asked a policeman.

“To Sunday school! Please let me pass--my class is waiting.”

“Nary a scholar is waiting for you, Ma’am. There ain’t no church, nor yet no Sunday school.”

The presidential election of this year was one of the most exciting I remember. General Grant was running for his second term; he had been first elected in 1868 with Schuyler Colfax as vice president. In 1872 Colfax withdrew in favor of our friend Henry Wilson. My father was a Grant man, and our house was, as usual, the center of much activity as the election drew near. My mother gave a reception for General and Mrs. Grant, where there was a great gathering of the Republican clan, and my father was constantly receiving committees and delegations. A section of the Republicans, dissatisfied with party politics during Grant’s first term, “split off” and nominated Horace Greeley for president, with Gratz Brown as his running mate, the Democrats indorsing the nomination. Greeley was then sixty-one years old. Judging by the portraits, he must have been rather rustic in appearance, wearing old-fashioned chin whiskers. The campaign was a bitter one. Greeley was unmercifully caricatured by Thomas Nast and other cartoonists. My parents, who had great respect for Greeley, resented the ridicule to which he was subjected. I remember, among other instruments of torture, an absurd portrait of him on a paper fan with a long white cotton fluff representing his beard. This was widely circulated. Greeley’s death, a few weeks after his defeat at the polls, was said to have been caused by the suffering he endured in this cruel campaign. As founder and for thirty years editor of the _New York Tribune_, as a patron of artists and men of letters, he might have hoped for better treatment at the hands of the press. The very papers whose ridicule broke his heart were full of handsome obituary notices after he was gone. It was deeply impressed on me at this time that to run the gantlet of a presidential election, a man must have more than common courage.

In Boston it seemed as if every waking hour of my father’s and mother’s existence was filled with labor for city, state, or nation. At Portsmouth the pressure was somewhat relaxed. I remember both parents as steadily at work here during the morning, but there were delicious afternoons when they were free to play with us. Those were the palmy days of the Newport catboats, small, steady, centerboard sloops, the best craft for pleasure sailing I have known. Memories arise of delightful summer days when a gay party of us drove to town in the old carryall, which was “put up” in the shed of the Newport Reading Room, of which my father was one of the founders. At Bannister’s wharf, if we were lucky, we engaged Cap’n Anthony and his boat, _The Two Sisters_, for the day. The ecstasy of the motion of that little cockleshell as she danced over the water is something unforgettable. If the wind were light, we steered our way out of the harbor towards Beaver Tail for a taste of the ocean; if there was too much sea on, the course lay within the landlocked waters of the bay. At high noon we landed at Conanicut Island just below old Fort Dumpling. Conanicut now goes mostly by the more prosaic name of Jamestown. Sometimes, when a householder of this pleasant summer resort drives me about the island, pointing out this or that view, a miracle happens! Some wind of memory blows Jamestown, with its hotels, its nice comfortable houses, clean away, and gives me back the bare rocky Conanicut of my youth that I loved as I can never love Jamestown. The commodious ferry boat from which I have just stepped disappears, I am sitting once more at the masthead of _The Two Sisters_, flying over Narragansett Bay, the salt taste on my lips, the salt wind in my hair. I am climbing the steep rough path to the old ruined fort, a lunch basket in one hand, a camp stool in the other. On the farther side of the Island is a little sheltered silver stretch of beach where one day, when the party is small and intimate, we make out to rig a shelter to shield us in our undressing and to slip into the delicious cool water. The joy of such a stolen sea bath, where there is no curious crowd to watch, can hardly be known to the ladies and gentlemen who now disport themselves on summer mornings at Bailey’s Beach.

These joyous outings were often shared by the young people from Vaucluse, where every summer “Shepherd Tom” (Thomas Hazard) gathered about him the clans of Hazard and of Minturn. Mr. Hazard’s wife, dead long before this time, was one of the beautiful Minturn sisters; from her Shepherd Tom inherited a large family connection, to every branch of which he showed endless hospitality. Beside the five Hazard children there were relays of Minturns, Mayers, Halls, Blacklers, Birckheads, and Hunters, who came and went in dazzling succession. Taken altogether, they were the handsomest family I have ever seen. Beside their beauty and charm, they had certain characteristics that set them apart from the rest of us. They seemed to hold some secret knowledge of and communion with nature that gave them a power over animals; they understood the language of horses, dogs, even insects; they had no fear of any living thing,--knew snakes, bees, spiders, toads, for their friends. They seemed more like a race of fauns and dryads than mere flesh-and-blood boys and girls. The four slim, graceful Hazard girls were overshadowed by their father, a rustic, vigorous man, who left his mark on his generation, and is remembered to-day by a volume of essays, “Johnny Cake Papers”, later handsomely reprinted by a nephew of the Peacedale branch of the clan. The Hazards were Friends; when I first remember him Shepherd Tom went regularly to Quaker Meeting. He was rough in manner, careless in dress, and thought too little about his appearance. One Sunday morning on his return from meeting, he was seen to go hurriedly to a mirror, where he gazed hard at his reflection. He quickly saw why the folks at meeting had looked at him so curiously. He had a thick crop of tiny blond curls. The mirror showed each of these curls tied up with a bit of scarlet wool. While he slept on the porch before going to meeting, some of the younger children had played this scurvy trick upon him. If it were meant as a lesson, perhaps he deserved it, for the relatives of his beautiful young wife remembered her mortification when he came into the drawing-room where she was receiving guests from Newport, fresh from killing a sheep, his white smock showing the telltale scarlet stains.

Mr. Hazard took some pains to win great influence in the Rhode Island Legislature. This was a puzzle to his friends till they learned that his object was the abolition of capital punishment in the State. He did not rest until the death penalty was done away with, after which he retired into private life, and, as I think, never again meddled with public affairs.

Vaucluse, originally laid out by a French landscape architect, was in those days the finest country seat I had ever seen, although already a good deal fallen from its high estate and not maintained as it should have been. The remains of a labyrinth could still be traced by the windings of its box-bordered paths. The long alley leading to the summerhouse was bordered by a neglected box hedge higher than a man’s head. The trees here seemed larger and handsomer than all other oaks, elms, or maples, and in the month of May two superb specimens of _Magnolia grandiflora_ were covered with enormous creamy white blossoms, whose perfume haunts me still. The house was of colonial design, with very large white columns at the entrance of the main building, flanked by two wings used in the olden time as servants’ quarters, but now devoted to seeds and bulbs and all sorts of quaint garden tools. Before the entrance a graveled path swept round a circle of greensward, in whose midst stood the old lichen-covered sundial, clasped by a scarlet honeysuckle. It was here one breathless midsummer afternoon that we gave the memorable amateur circus. As the crowning event, Sultan, the Mayers’ old Arabian pony, trotted round and round the ring, while Esther Hazard, in a blue bathing suit and scarlet cap, balanced lightly on his venerable back!

Mr. Hazard was a confirmed spiritualist. He read “The Banner of Light”, if, indeed, he did not contribute to that journal, then the chief organ of the spiritualists. I often went with him to _séances_, which had a great interest for me, though I was never for a moment shaken in my belief that the manifestations and materializations I witnessed were vulgar shams. Fannie Hazard, the eldest daughter, a girl of great sweetness and a good deal of will power, refused to allow mediums at Vaucluse; I remember some battles royal on this point. After her death, however, the mediums came, and a cabinet was arranged in one of the summerhouses, where the _séances_ took place. Once Frederick Myers of the London Society for Psychical Research was present with me at a _séance_. The medium was a dull one, the grossness of her manifestations, it seemed to me, could not deceive the veriest child. They deceived Mr. Myer, however, who was deeply impressed with all that he saw and heard. Later, when I read accounts of the impartial manner in which the investigations of psychical phenomena were carried on by the society of which Frederick Myer was the leading spirit, the testimony left me quite cold.

At the close of the evening sessions, Mr. Hazard used to walk in the mysterious old garden where, he told me, his dead wife often joined him, walked with him, leant upon his arm. On one occasion she allowed him to cut a small piece from the spirit lace drapery in which she was arrayed. He showed me the fragment the next day; it proved to be the same “wash blonde” I had bought at Edward Lawton’s shop in Thames Street. The materialized spirits allowed Mr. Hazard to cut off locks of their hair for remembrance. The last time I was in the parlor of Vaucluse, there hung on the wall a glass case with strands of hair of every shade and degree of fineness: the name of the friend or relative from whose head it had been cut while the medium was in trance was written beside each. I remember that in the glass case the hair of Uncle Jonas Minturn was dark red, though my impression is that in life it was of another shade!

Among the young faces that look at me from the old garden at Vaucluse, the fairest is that of my “Twin”, Edith Blackler, a tall girl with skin like a sunburnt peach, eyes like a clear brown brook, teeth like fresh peeled almonds, and a laugh that made the old feel young, and the young feel immortal. We were as nearly inseparable as the four miles that lay between Lawton’s Valley and Vaucluse allowed: together we tramped the country roads, swam the waters of Narragansett, waded the streams and sailed the seas that bound our island home. When I was not at Vaucluse, my Twin was with me at Lawton’s Valley. Here Mama was mistress of the revels, and here young and old, grave and gay, fashionable and unfashionable, gladly gathered when she waved her fairy wand. One afternoon when all Newport, both the “intellectuals” of the Point and the frivolous of the Avenue, mingled in a friendly crowd in the Valley for afternoon tea, we had some famous charades. The final scene represented Blondin crossing Niagara Falls. A plank was laid across the summit of the waterfall just below the old mill, the “middle fall”, we called it, for at that time there were three falls in Lawton’s Valley. A tiny camp chair was placed in the middle of the plank, and here one of my mother’s familiars (was it William Hunt or Hamilton Wilde?) proceeded to compound an omelette, while the brook sang, the silver birch rustled, and the insects trilled their evening hymn. Henry James was of the company that day; something of its magic always lingered in his tenacious memory, as it does in my random recollections.

At this time Newport’s summer colony was in the wooden age. Bellevue Avenue was thickly settled with pleasant, substantial cottages, some of which still survive. The word cottage was, however, always a misnomer; these commodious, well-furnished houses should more properly have been called villas. The first symptom of the impending change was the sudden transformation of the cottage from a simple, medium-sized country house to a large ambitious structure like the George Francis Train villa in the atrocious style of the early seventies, the darkest period of American architecture. After the wooden age, the brick, stone, and marble ages followed in quick succession.

The Emperor Caesar Augustus “found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.” Richard Hunt might well have said, “I found Newport a town of wood; I left it a town of marble.” At about the time I am writing of, Hunt built Linden Gate for Mr. Henry Marquand and the John N. A. Griswold house on Touro Park, now the home of the Art Association. While maintaining something of the cottage characteristics, both these are far handsomer and more substantial than the earlier houses, and mark the summer colony’s second stage of architectural evolution.

I spent part of one season with my mother’s friend, Mrs. Charles H. Dorr, in Newport, and entered more fully into the social life of the place than I had done before. Compared to our life in Portsmouth, Newport seemed formal, dull, cut and dried. Everybody bathed then on the First Beach, except the few people who lived near “Bailey’s.” The ladies’ hour was from ten to twelve. At noon a flag was run up on the bathing pavilion, announcing that the “gentlemen’s hour” had begun, when women and children were banished from the beach, and the men were free to take their swim dressed or undressed as they pleased. Most people dined early, though the seven or half-past seven o’clock dinner parties were beginning. In the afternoon society took its drive up and down Bellevue Avenue from five to seven. The horses, harnesses, carriages, lap dogs, ladies, and toilettes were the handsomest that money could buy. While I admired the style of it all, the artificiality fretted me, and after a few days of Bellevue Avenue I was glad to scurry home to Portsmouth to embrace my parents and go for a tramp with my Twin. The introduction of polo by James Gordon Bennett was a great boon to the colony. I can see him now on his swift broncho, tearing across the polo field after the ball, the blood streaming from a cut on his forehead, made by the mallet of one of the opposing players.

Among the distinguished people of summer Newport at this time were the George Bancrofts, old friends of my mother’s. Every summer we were invited to see Mr. Bancroft’s roses, held to be well-nigh miraculous. There was a tradition that Newport was not a good place for flowers, and beyond the formal blue hydrangeas that fashion demanded, few people made any attempt to grow them. Mr. Bancroft’s roses and artichokes became famous, people were quick to follow the fashion he set, and now Newport is rich in beautiful gardens.

In the early seventies my father bought Oak Glen. He had sold our beloved Lawton’s Valley a few years before, partly on account of the endless difficulties of transportation.

I think he regretted this lovely place, and partly because my mother grieved so for it, bought the small estate of five acres a little higher up on the stream that runs through the valley. He improved the property and built a large addition to the house, where he spent the last summers of his life. As long as she lived my mother made Oak Glen her summer home, and after her death it passed into our hands.