Part 12

For Charleston does not change easily. She continues to be a city of yellow and of white. Other southern towns may claim distinction because of their red-walled brick houses with their white porticos, but the reds of Charleston long since softened, the green moss and the lichens have grown up and over the old walls--exquisite bits of masonry, every one of them and the products of an age when every artisan was an artist and full master of his craft. The distinctive color of the town shades from a creamy yellow to a grayish white. The houses, as we have already said, stand with their ends to the streets, with flanking walls hiding the rich gardens from the sidewalk, save for a few seductive glimpses through the well-wrought grillings of an occasional gateway. Charleston does not parade herself. The closed windows of her houses seem to close jealously against the Present as if they sought to hold within their great rooms the Past and all of the glories that were of it.

Builded of brick in most instances, the larger houses and the two most famous churches, as well, were long ago given plaster coatings that they might conform to the yellow-white dominating color of the town. Invariably very high and almost invariably very narrow and bald of cornice, these old houses are roofed with heavy corrugated tiles, once red but now softened by Time into a dozen different tints. If there is another town in the land where roof-tile has been used to such picturesque advantage we have failed to see it. It gives to Charleston an incredibly foreign aspect. If it were not for the Georgian churches and the older public buildings one might see in the plaster walls and the red-tiled roofs a distinct trace of the French or the Italian. Charleston herself is not unlike many towns that sleep in the south of France or the north of Italy. It only takes the hordes of negroes upon her streets to dispel the illusion that one is again treading some corner of the Old World.

Perhaps the best way that the casual visitor to Charleston can appreciate these negroes is in their street calls--if he has not been up too late upon the preceding night. For long before seven o'clock the brigades of itinerant merchants are on their ways through the narrow streets of the old town. From the soft, deep marshlands behind it and the crevices and the turnings of the sea and all its inlets come the finest and the rarest of delicacies, and these food-stuffs find their way quite naturally to the street vendors. Porgies and garden truck, lobsters and shrimp and crab, home-made candies--the list runs to great length.

You turn restlessly in your bed at dawn. Something has stolen that last precious "forty winks" away from you. If you could find that something.... Hark. There it is: Through the crispness of morning air it comes musically to your ears:

"Swimpy waw, waw.... Swimpy waw, waw."

And from another direction comes a slowly modulated:

"Waw cwab. WAW Cwab. Waw Cwa-a-a-b."

A sharp staccato breaks in upon both of these.

"She cwaib, she cwaib, she cwaib," it calls, and you know that there is a preference in crabs. Up one street and down another, male vendors, female vendors old and young, but generally old. If any one wishes to sleep in Charleston--well, he simply cannot sleep late in Charleston. To dream of rest while: "Sweet Pete ate her! Sweet Pete ate her!" comes rolling up to your window in tones as dulcet as ever rang within an opera house would be outrageous. It is a merry jangle to open the day, quite as remote from euphony and as thoroughly delightful as the early morning church-bells of Montreal or of Quebec. By breakfast time it is quite gone--unless you wish to include the coal-black mammy who chants: "Come chilluns, get yer monkey meat--monkey _meat_." And that old relic of ante-bellum days who rides a two-wheel cart in all the narrow lanes and permeates the very air with his melancholy: "Char--coal. Char--coal."

If you inquire as to "monkey meat," your Charlestonian will tell you of the delectable mixture of cocoanut and molasses candy which is to the younger generation of the town as the incomparable Lady Baltimore cake is to the older.

* * * * *

The churches of Charleston are her greatest charm. And of these, boldly asserting its prerogative by rising from the busiest corner of the town, the most famed is St. Michael's. St. Michael's is the lion of Charleston. Since 1764 she has stood there at Broad and Meeting streets and demanded the obeisance of the port--gladly rendered her. She has stood to her corner through sunshine and through storm--through the glad busy years when Charleston dreamed of power and of surpassing those upstart northern towns--New York and Boston--through the bitterness of two great wars and the dangers of a third and lesser one, through four cyclones and the most devastating earthquake that the Atlantic coast has ever known--through all these perils this solidly wrought Temple of the Lord has come safely. She is the real old lady of Charleston, and when she speaks the folk within the town stand at attention. The soft, sweet bells of St. Michael's are the tenderest memory that can come to a resident of the city when he is gone a long way from her streets and her lovely homes. And when the bells of St. Michael's have been stilled it has been a stilled Charleston.

For there have been times when the bells of St. Michael's have not spoken down from their high white belfry. In fact, they have crossed the Atlantic not less than five times. Cast in the middle of the eighteenth century in an English bell-foundry, they had hardly been hung within their belfry before the Revolution broke out--broke out at Charleston just as did the Civil War. Before the British left the city for the last time the commanding officer had claimed the eight bells as his "perquisite" and had shipped them back to England. An indignant American town demanded their return. Even the British commanding officer at New York, Sir Guy Carleton, did not have it within his heart to countenance such sacrilege. The bells had been already sold in England upon a speculation, but the purchaser was compelled to return them. The people of the Colonial town drew them from the wharf to St. Michael's in formal procession--the swinging of them anew was hardly a less ceremonial. The first notes they sang were like unto a religious rite. And for seventy years the soft voice of the old lady of Charleston spoke down to her children--at the quarters of the hours.

After those seventy years more war--ugly guns that are remembered with a shudder as "Swamp Angels," pouring shells into a proud, rebellious, hungry, unrelenting city, the stout white tower of St. Michael's a fair and shining mark for northern gunners. Charleston suddenly realized the danger to the voice of her pet old lady. There were few able-bodied men in the town--all of them were fighting within the Confederate lines--but they unshipped those precious bells and sent them up-state--to Columbia, the state capitol, far inland and safe from the possibility of sea marauders. They were hidden there but not so well but that Sherman's men in the march to the sea found them and by an act of vandalism which the South today believes far greater than that of an angered British army, completely destroyed them.

When peace came again Charleston--bruised and battered and bleeding Charleston, with the scars that time could never heal--gave first thought to her bells--a mere mass of molten and broken metal. There was a single chance and Charleston took it. That chance won. The English are a conservative nation--to put it lightly. The old bell-foundry still had the molds in which the chime was first cast--a hundred years before. Once again those old casts were wheeled into the foundry and from them came again the bells of St. Michael's, the sweetness of their tones unchanged. The town had regained its voice.

If we have dwelt at length upon the bells of St. Michael's it is because they speak so truly the real personality of the town. The church itself is not of less interest. And the churchyard that surrounds it upon two sides is as filled with charm and rare flavor as any churchyard we have ever seen. Under its old stones sleep forever the folk who lived in Charleston in the days of her glories--Pringles and Pinckneys; Moultries; those three famous "R's" of South Carolina--Rutledge and Ravenel and Rhett--the names within that silent place read like the roster of the colonial aristocracy. Above the silent markers, the moldering and crumbling tombs, rises a riot of God's growing things; in the soft southern air a perpetual tribute to the dead--narcissus, oleander, jessamine, the stately Pride of India bush. And on the morning that we first strolled into the shady, quiet place a red-bird--the famous Cardinal Crossbeak of the south--sang to us from his perch in a magnolia tree. Twenty-four hours before and we had crossed the Hudson river at New York in a driving and a blizzard-threatening snowstorm.

The greatest charm of St. Michael's does not rest alone within the little paths of her high-walled churchyard. Within the sturdy church, in the serenity of her sanctuary, in the great square box-pews where sat so many years the elect of Charleston, of the very Southland you might say; in the high-set pulpit and the unusual desk underneath where sat the old time "clark" to read the responses and the notices; even the stately pew, set aside from all the others, in which General Washington sat on the occasion of a memorable visit to the South Carolina town, is the fullness of her charm. If you are given imagination, you can see the brown and white church filled as in the old days with the planters and their families--generation after generation of them, coming first to the church, being baptized in its dove-crowned font at the door and then, years later, being carried out of that center aisle for the final time. You can see the congregations of half a century ago, faces white and set and determined. You can see one memorable congregation, as it hears the crash of a Federal shell against the heavy tower, and then listen to the gentle rector finishing the implication of the Litany before he dismisses his little flock.

Dear old St. Michael's! The years--the sunny years and the tragic years--set lightly upon her. When war and storm have wrecked her, it has been her children and her children's children who have arisen to help wipe away the scars. In a memorable storm of August, 1885, the great wooden ball at the top of her weather vane, one hundred and eighty-five feet above the street was sent hurtling down to the ground. They will show you the dent it made in the pavement flag. It was quickly replaced. But within a year worse than cyclone was upon St. Michael's--the memorable earthquake which sank the great tower eight inches deeper into the earth. And only last year another of the fearful summer storms that come now and then upon the place wreaked fearful damage upon the old church. Yet St. Michael's has been patiently repaired each time; she still towers above these disasters--as her quaint weather-vane towers above the town, itself.

* * * * *

After St. Michael's, St. Philip's--although St. Philip's is the real mother church of all Charleston. The old town does not pin her faith upon a single lion. The first time we found our way down Meeting street, we saw a delicate and belfried spire rising above the greenery of the trees in a distant churchyard. The staunch church from which that spire springs was well worth our attention. And so we found our way to St. Philip's. We turned down Broad street from St. Michael's--to commercial Charleston as its namesake street is to New York--then at the little red-brick library, housed in the same place for nearly three-quarters of a century, we turned again. The south portico of St. Philip's, tall-columned, dignified almost beyond expression, confronted us. And a moment later we found ourselves within a churchyard that ranked in interest and importance with that of St. Michael's, itself.

A shambling negro care-taker came toward us. He had been engaged in helping some children get a kitten down from the upper branches of a tree in the old churchyard. With the intuition of his kind, he saw in us, strangers--manifest possibilities. He devoted himself to attention upon us. And he sounded the praises of his own exhibit in no mild key.

"Yessa--de fines' church in all de South," he said, as he swung the great door of St. Philip's wide open. He seemed to feel, also intuitively, that we had just come from the rival exhibit. And we felt more than a slight suspicion of jealousy within the air.

The negro was right. St. Philip's, Charleston, is more than the finest church in all the South. Perhaps it is not too much to say that it is the most beautiful church in all the land. Copied, rather broadly, from St. Martins-in-the-Fields, London, it thrusts itself out into the street, indeed, makes the highway take a broad double curve in order to pass its front portico. But St. Philip's commits the fearful Charleston sin of being new. The present structure has only been thrusting its nose out into Church street for a mere eighty years. The old St. Philip's was burned--one of the most fearful of all Charleston tragedies--in 1834.

"Yessa--a big fire dat," said the caretaker. "They gib two slaves dere freedom for helpin' at dat fire."

But history only records the fact that the efforts to put out the fire in St. Philip's were both feeble and futile. It does tell, however, of a negro sailor who, when the old church was threatened by fire on an earlier occasion, climbed to the tower and tore the blazing shingles from it and was afterward presented with his freedom and a fishing-boat and outfit. Does that sound familiar? It was in our Third Reader--some lurid verses but, alas for the accuracy that should be imparted to the growing mind--it was St. Michael's to whom that widespread glory was given. St. Michael's of the heart of the town once again. No wonder that St. Philip's of the side-street grieves in silence.

In silence, you say. How about the bells of St. Philip's?

If you are from the North it were better that you did not ask that question. The bells of St. Philip's, in their day hardly less famous than those of the sister church, went into cannon for the defense of the South. When the last of the copper gutters had been torn from the barren houses, when the final iron kettle had gone to the gun-foundry, the supreme sacrifice was made. The bells rang merrily on a Sabbath morn and for a final time. The next day they were unshipping them and one of the silvery voices of Charleston was forever hushed.

But St. Philip's has her own distinctions. In the first place, her own graveyard is a roll-call of the Colonial elect. Within it stands the humble tomb of him who was the greatest of all the great men of South Carolina--John C. Calhoun--while nightly from her high-lifted spire there gleams the only light that ever a church-tower sent far out to sea for the guidance of the mariner. The ship-pilots along the North Atlantic very well know when they pass Charleston light-ship, the range between Fort Sumter and St. Philip's spire shows a clear fairway all the distance up to the wharves of Charleston.

* * * * *

There are other great churches of Charleston--some of them very handsome and with a deal of local history clustering about them, but perhaps none of these can approach in interest the Huguenot edifice at the corner of Queen and Church streets. It is a little church, modestly disdaining such a worldly thing as a spire, in a crumbling churchyard whose tombstones have their inscriptions written in French. A few folk find their way to it on Sunday mornings and there they listen attentively to its scholarly blind preacher, for sixty years the leader of his little flock. But this little chapel is the sole flame of a famous old faith, which still burns, albeit ever so faintly, in the blackness and the shadow of the New World.

That is the real Charleston--the unexpected confronting you at almost every turn of its quiet streets: here across from the shrine of the Huguenots a ruinous building through which white and negro children play together democratically and at will, and which in its day was the Planters' Hotel and a hostelry to be reckoned with; down another byway a tiny remnant of the city's one-time wall in the form of a powder magazine; over in Meeting street the attenuated market with a Greek temple of a hall set upon one end and the place where they sold the slaves still pointed out to folk from the North; farther down on Meeting street the hall of the South Carolina Society, a really exquisite aged building wherein that distinguished old-time organization together with its still older brother, the St. Andrews, still dines on an appointed day each month and whose polished ballroom floor has felt the light dance-falls of the St. Cecilias.

"The St. Cecilia Society?" you interrupt; "why, I've heard of that."

Of course you have. For the St. Cecilia typifies Charleston--the social life of the place, which is all there is left to it since her monumental tragedy of half a century ago. In Charleston there is no middle ground.

You are either recognized socially--or else you are not. And the St. Cecilia Society is the sharply-drawn dividing point. Established somewhere before the beginning of the Revolution it has dominated Charleston society these many years. Invitations to its three balls each year are eagerly sought by all the feminine folk within the town. And the privilege of being invited to these formal affairs is never to be scorned--more often it is the cause of many heart-burnings.

No one thing shows Charleston the more clearly than the fact that on the following morning you may search the columns of the venerable _News and Courier_ almost in vain for a notice of the St. Cecilia ball. In any other town an event of such importance would be a task indeed for the society editor and all of her sub-editresses. If there was not a flashlight photograph there would be the description of the frocks--a list of the out-of-town guests at any rate. Charleston society does not concede a single one of these things. And the most the _News and Courier_ ever prints is "The ball of the St. Cecilia Society was held last evening at Hibernian Hall," or a two-line notice of similar purport.

Charleston society concedes little or nothing--not even these new-fashioned meal hours of the upstart Northern towns. In Charleston a meal each four hours--breakfast at eight, a light lunch at sharp noon, dinner at four, supper again at eight. These hours were good enough for other days--ergo, they are good enough for these. And from eleven to two and again from five to seven-thirty remain the smart calling hours among the elect of the place. Those great houses do not yield readily to the Present.

Charleston society is never democratic--no matter how Charleston politics may run. Its great houses, behind the exclusion of those high and forbidding walls, are tightly closed to such strangers as come without the right marks of identification. From without you may breathe the hints of old mahogany, of fine silver and china, of impeccable linen, of well-trained servants, but your imagination must meet the every test as to the details. Gentility does not flaunt herself. And if the younger girls of Charleston society do drive their motor cars pleasant mornings through the crowded shopping district of King street, that does not mean that Charleston--the Charleston of the barouche and the closed coupé--will ever approve.

* * * * *

On the April day half a century ago that the first gun blazed defiantly from Fort Sumter and opened a page of history that bade fair to alter the very course of things, Prosperity slipped out of Charleston. Gentility, Courage, Romance alone remained. Prosperity with her giant steamships and her long railroad trains never returned. The great docks along the front of the splendid harbor stand unused, the warehouses upon them molder. A brisk Texas town upon a sand-spit--Galveston--boasts that she is the second ocean-port of America, with the hundreds of thousands of Texas acres turned from grazing ranges into cotton-field, just behind her. New Orleans is the south gate of the Middle West that has come into existence, since Charleston faced her greatest of tragedies. And the docks along her waterfront grow rusty with disuse.

She lives in her yesterdays of triumphs. Tell her that they have builded a tower in New York that is fifty-five stories in height, and she will reply that you can still see the house in Church street where President Washington was entertained in royal fashion by her citizens; hint to her of the great canal to the south, and she will ask you if you remember how the blockade runners slipped night after night through the tight chain that the Federal gunboats drew across the entrance of her harbor for four long years; bespeak into her ears the social glories of the great hotels and the opera of New York, and she will tell you of the gentle French and English blood that went into the making of her first families. Charleston has lost nothing. For what is Prosperity, she may ask you, but a dollar-mark? Romance and Courtesy are without price. Romance and Courtesy still walk in her streets, in the hot and lazy summer days, in the brilliancy of the southern moon beating down upon her graceful guarding spires, in the thunder of the storm and the soft gray blankets of the ocean mantling her houses and her gardens. And Romance and Courtesy do not forget.

9

ROCHESTER--AND HER NEIGHBORS

The three great cities of western New York--Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo--are like jewels to the famous railroad along which they are strung, and effectively they serve to offset the great metropolitan district at the east end of the state. They have many things in common and yet they are not in the least alike. Their growth has been due to virtually a common cause; the development of transportation facilities across New York state; and yet their personality is as varied as that of three sisters; lovely but different.

Of the three, Rochester is the most distinctive; one of the most distinctive of all our American towns and hence chosen as the chief subject for this chapter. But Buffalo is the largest, and Syracuse the most ingenious, so they are not to be ignored. Rochester is conservative. Rochester proves her conservatism by her smart clubs, and the general cultivation of her inhabitants. Certain excellent persons there, like certain excellent persons in Charleston, frown upon newspaper reports of their social activities. In Syracuse, on the contrary, the Sunday newspapers have columns of "society notes" and the reporters who go to dances and receptions prove their industry by writing long lists of the "among those present." Buffalo leans more to Syracuse custom in this regard. Rochester scans rather critically the man who comes to dwell there--unless he comes labeled with letters of introduction. In Syracuse and in Buffalo, too, there is more of a spirit of _camaraderie_. A man is taken into good society there because of what he is, rather than for that from which he may have sprung. So it may be said that Syracuse and Buffalo breathe the spirit of the West in their social life, while Rochester clings firmly to the conservatism of the East. Indeed, her citizens rather like to call her "the Boston of the West," just as the man from the Missouri Bottoms called the real Boston "the Omaha of the East."