THE DOCTOR: AN OLD VIRGINIA FOX HUNTER.
NOW the doctor was a Southerner of the old school. Nor was he merely a North Carolinan, a Tennesseean, a Kentuckian or a Georgian—not any, thank you! No; our friend was a Virginian—a real, “old-fashioned, blue-blooded, whole-souled, open-handed Virginian.” And this he was by virtue of eight or nine generations of forebears who had fought, physicked, speechified, fox-hunted, raised negroes and tobacco, in that immortal commonwealth. No day passed but the doctor, in his simple fashion, unconsciously thanked God that he was a Virginian. For did not virtue, valor, honor, gallantry, select the Old Dominion in the days of the Stuarts as their special depot, from whence, in modified streams, these qualities might be diffused over the less fortunate portions of the Western world? To the unsophisticated Englishman, to the ignorant Frenchman or German, an American is an American. If he is not rampantly modern, sensationally progressive, and furiously material, he is nothing at all. But the doctor would scarcely ever speak or think of himself as an American, except in the same sense as an Englishman would call himself a European. The doctor was every moment of the day, and every day in the year, a Virginian above everything; and as I have already said, he felt thereby that a responsibility and a glory above that of other mortals had been conferred upon him by the accident of his birth. I may add, moreover, that he was unquestionably non-progressive, that he was decidedly not modern, while to this day he is so reactionary that the sound of a railway irritates him; and finally, that he was, and I feel sure still is, eminently picturesque.
The doctor was about sixty-five at the time of which I write (not so very many years ago). He had never set foot outside Virginia, and never wanted to. That a country, however, or climate, or people, or scenery, existed that could be mentioned in the same breath with the old Cavalier colony, never for one moment was accounted within the bounds of possibility by that good and simple soul.
And yet, paradoxical as it may seem, the doctor was proud of his descent from pure English stock. “None of Scotch or Irish, or Scotch-Irish for me. No, I thank you, sir.” “My folks,” he was fond of relating, “were real English stock, who came over way back in early colonial days, and settled on the York River. They were kin to the nobility.” Whatever may have been the accuracy of this last claim, the doctor’s patronymic in Virginia genealogy was above reproach, and would have secured him an éntree (had he owned a dress coat, and had he felt a hankering after Eastern cities) into those small exclusive coteries in transatlantic society that still recognize birth as superior to wealth and even intellect. I should not like it to be supposed that my dear doctor, of whom I am excessively fond, was given to blustering about either his State or his descent. Your fire-eating, blowing, swaggering Southerner belongs either to a lower social grade, to the more frontier States of the South, or, to a greater degree perhaps than either, to the fertile imagination of Yankee editors and dime novelists. The doctor was a Virginian. His thoughts and his habits, which were peculiar and original, were simply those of Virginians of his class and generation somewhat strongly emphasized. He was just and unassuming, kindly and homely. There was about him a delightful, old-fashioned, if somewhat ponderous suavity of manner, that the rest of the Anglo-Saxon race have long, long outgrown. Even to hear a married female who was not black addressed as otherwise than “Madam” positively pained him. As for the children, the doctor had a separate greeting for every one of them, let his host’s quiver be ever so full. Ay, and generally something more than that; for the doctor’s capacious pockets were known by the little ones to be almost as inexhaustible in the way of chincapins, hickory-nuts and candy, as his well-worn saddle-bags were of less inviting condiments.
The doctor’s belief in his country (and by his country of course I mean Virginia) was the religion in which he was born. He would never have dreamt of intruding it on you. International comparisons he could not make, for he had never been out of the State. I feel perfectly sure, however, if the doctor had travelled over every corner of the earth, that his faith was of that fundamental description which was proof against mere sights and sounds. He would have returned to the shade of his ancestral porch, temporarily staggered, perhaps, but still unconvinced that any land or any people could compare with old Virginia.
The average American in London is a spectacle which has in it nothing inharmonious; on the contrary, in these days it is sometimes hard to distinguish him from the native. To picture the doctor in London, however, requires an effort of imagination from which the intellect shrinks. Of one thing I am sure, and that is, he would be very miserable. He would call in vain for glasses of cold water like that from the limpid spring under the poplar tree at home, of which the doctor consumes about a horse-troughful a day. He would hang over the apple-stalls, and groan over the deficiencies of a country that could do no better than that. He would get up two hours before the servants, and prowl about disconsolate and hungry till breakfast. What an apology, too, for a breakfast it would be without an “Old Virginia hot-beat biscuit!” In his despair of getting a “julep” he might take a whiskey punch before his early dinner. But here, again, how could the emblazoned wine-card, with its, for him, meaningless contents, supply the want of that big pitcher of foaming buttermilk for which his simple palate craves? The pomp and wealth, the glitter and glare of a great capital, would be simply distasteful to our patriarch. In his own land he and his have been for all time aristocrats—after their own fashion, it is true, but still aristocrats. They have been strongly inclined to regard themselves as the salt of the earth—and perhaps they are; a good sturdy British foible this, intensified by isolation and the mutual admiration atmosphere which isolation creates. At any rate, gold lace and liveries and coronets are not indispensable adjuncts of honor and breeding. The doctor, however—if we can imagine him gazing on the stream of carriages rolling past Hyde Park corner on a summer evening—would be sensible, for the first time in his life, to a feeling somewhat akin to insignificance creeping over him. He would hate and despise himself for it, but still it would make him uncomfortable, and he would want to get away home. A depressing suspicion would come over our good friend that the haughty squires and dames knew no more of Virginia’s history, or of Pages and Randolphs, and Pendletons and Byrds, than they knew of the obscure Elijahs and Hirams and Aarons that tilled the stony fields of New England. I fear, moreover, that the suspicion would be too well founded. As a Cumberland squire in the eighteenth century might have been disillusioned by a visit to the the capital, so to a much greater degree would our good Virginian friend have in all probability suffered by a similar transportation. Once home again, however, I can safely affirm of the doctor, that these uncomfortable sensations would have vanished in no time. Once more in his cane-bottomed rocking-chair on the shady porch; once more within sight of the blue mountains, the red fallows, and the yellow pine-sprinkled sedgefields of his native land, he would quickly recover from the temporary shocks that had irritated him. The sublime faith in “the grand old Commonwealth” would return, and he would thank God more fervently than ever he was a son of Virginia; not because of her present or her future—for he considered the Virginia he belonged to died with slavery—but on account of her people and her past. The doctor, happily, had been spared all these trials and his faith remained pure and unimpaired. The only capital he had ever visited was the charming little city of Richmond, where every third man or woman he met was his cousin; where most of society call one another by their Christian names, dine in the middle of the day, and sit out on chairs in the street after supper. Richmond is delightful, and so are its people; but its atmosphere would tend to confirm, not to shake, the doctor’s homely faith.
Perhaps the Southern States was the only part of the world where the practice of medicine has ever been looked upon as an honorable adjunct to the possession of considerable landed estates and an aristocratic name. As in England there were squire-parsons, so in Virginia there were squire-doctors, men of considerable property (as things go there) both in land and slaves, regularly practising in their own neighborhood. The slaves that constituted the bulk of their wealth have gone, but the lands and the practice remain—for those who still survive and are able to sit upon a horse.
The doctor is one of these survivals—and may he long flourish! He had only a moderate property—two farms—of which we shall speak anon. But then he was a Patton; and as everybody south of the Potomac knows, the Pattons are one of the first families in the State—none of your modern and self-dubbed F. F. V.’s are they, but real old colonial people, whose names are written on almost every page of their country’s history. Besides this, Judge Patton, the doctor’s father, was one of the greatest jurists south of Washington—”in the world,” Virginians said; but as a compromise we will admit he was one of the first in America, and quite distinguished enough to reflect a social halo over his immediate descendants, supposing even they had not been Pattons.
The original Patton mansion was burnt down in 1840. Nothing was left but the office in the yard, where in those days our friend the doctor pursued his youthful medical investigations and entertained his bachelor friends. The judge was a busy man, and much absent. He was always “laying out to build him a new house;” but death “laid him out” while the scheme was still in embryo. The doctor, who, as only son, became proprietor, had his hands too full, what with negroes, and farming, and physicking, and fox-hunting, to carry it out till the war was upon him, and with its results put an end, as he thought at the time, to everything which makes life sweet.
It must not, however, be supposed that the doctor and his father had gone houseless or camped out since 1840. Not at all. From the old brick office, whose isolation had saved it from that memorable conflagration, there had grown—I use the word advisedly, as applicable to Virginia architecture—there had grown a rambling structure, whose design, rather than whose actual weight of years, gave it an appearance venerable enough to command the respect and admiration of summer tourists from New York and Philadelphia. It was not often such apparitions passed that way, and when they did, it was generally in pursuit of filthy lucre suppositiously concealed in the fields or the forests. Nor are mining prospectors as a rule sentimental, but sometimes they are in America. When such rarae aves came by the doctor’s front gate, they would almost always pull up and gaze through it with that admiration and respect that Northerners are inclined to pay to anything in their own country that recalls the past.
“Oh, isn’t that too quaint for anything!” the ladies who sometimes accompanied them never failed to remark. “That’s a real old ramshackle Virginia house, by thunder! and a pretty heavy old fossil inside it, you bet!” said the more observant of the gentlemen.
The doctor would have gloried in such criticism had he heard it. He hated Yankees; he hated your new-fangled houses; he hated railroads; he hated towns; he hated breech-loading guns; sights and sounds and things that he was not familiar with at five-and-twenty he would have none of when he was between sixty and seventy.
The doctor’s house was unconventional, to be sure, while weather and neglect of paint or whitewash had given it an air of antiquity to which it had no real claim. It lay a hundred yards back from the road, and appeared to consist of four or five small houses of varying dimensions, and occupying relationships toward one another of a most uncertain kind. Two of these leaned heavily together, like convivial old gentlemen “seeing one another home.” The rest lay at respectful distances from each other, connected only by open verandahs, through which the summer breeze blew freshly, and lovingly fanned the annuals that spread and twined themselves along the eaves. Almost every style of Virginia rural architecture found places in this homely conglomeration of edifices, which even “old man Jake,” the negro, who has for twenty years looked after the doctor’s horses and stolen his corn, described as “mighty shacklin’, and lookin’ like as if they’d bin throwed down all in a muss.”
It was, however, a real old characteristic Virginia house of its kind. There were squared chestnut logs, black with rain and sun, against which the venetian shutters of the windows banged and thumped in gusty spring days as against walls of adamant. These same logs were got out of the woods and squared, the doctor would tell you, in days “when men had plenty of time and plenty of force (i. e., slaves) to do those things properly.” Then there were walls of pine weather-boarding, erected at a period when, the same authority would inform you, “people began to saw and season their lumber five or ten years before they started to build.” There were roofs of wooden shingles slanting and sloping in every direction—black, rotting, and moss-grown here, white and garish there, where penetrating rains had forced the slow and reluctant hand of repair. Dormer-windows glared out at you, patched as to their shattered panes with local newspapers of remote date, and speaking of stuffy attics behind, where hornets, yellow-jackets and “mud-daubers” careered about in summer-time over the apple-strewn floors. Then there was the old brick office—relic of a distant past; of a period when the Virginia planters, though surrounded by the finest clay, were so absorbed in tobacco that they sent to England for their bricks. It is probable, however, that these particular bricks were produced upon the spot. At any rate, their comparative antiquity and presumably mellow tone have been ruthlessly effaced, for this is the only part of the doctor’s mansion that he has selected for a coat of whitewash. It is used for professional purposes, and is known by the doctor’s patients as the “sujjery.” I know it is hopeless to try, by a bald description of timber and bricks and mortar, to give any idea of how the doctor’s rambling homestead appealed to the sense of the picturesque, and to the affections of those of us who were familiar with it and with its inmate. No doubt, however, the latter had something to do with this. Nor should the surroundings be forgotten. The stately oaks that towered high above the quaint low buildings, and covered with leaves and dèbris the greater portion of that domestic enclosure which in those parts was known as the yard. The straggling, branching acacias that grew close to the house, and spread their tall arms above the roof, littering it in autumn with showers of small, curly leaves, and choking the wooden gutters (for the doctor considered tin piping as a modern heresy) with fragmentary twigs. The fresh, green turf that had matted and spread for one hundred and fifty years around this house and the more stately one that preceded it. The aged box-trees that had once, no doubt, in prim Dutch rows lined some well-tended gravel path, but now cropped up here and there upon the turf, like beings that had outlived their time and generation. The clustering honeysuckles, bending their old and rickety frames to the ground. The silver aspens before the door, whose light leaves shivered above your head in the most breathless August days. The slender mimosa, through whose beautiful and fragile greenery the first humming-birds of early June shyly fluttered; and the long row of straw hives against the rickety fence, where hereditary swarms of bees—let well alone—made more honey than the doctor and all his neighbors could consume.
Yes! These objects are, and all and many more are, twined around my heart, but the doctor’s front gate occupies no such position at all. It was all very well for the people who stopped in the road and looked through its bars at the fine old oaks, the green lawn beyond, and the quaint, straggling structure, and then drove on their way. For those, however, whose duty or pleasure compelled them to penetrate that barrier, it was entirely another matter. It was a home-made gate—a real “old Virginia” gate—put up at the close of the war as a protest, it would almost seem, against Yankee notions of hurry. To look at the tremendous portal, you would have supposed that the doctor was the most defiant recluse, instead of the most hospitable of men. It was, however, a typical Virginia gate strongly emphasized, just as the doctor was a typical Virginia gentleman strongly emphasized. I couldn’t speak accurately as to its dimensions, but I have often had to jump for life as it fell, and from the way in which it hit the ground, I should say that it must have weighed nearly a thousand pounds. Its weight would have been of no importance whatever to anyone but the doctor and the posts which supported it, had it been properly hung with two hinges and a latch. No doubt it had commenced life with these advantages; but during all the years I struggled with it, there was no latch, and only a bottom hook-hinge. It was kept in its place by two ponderous fence rails being leaned up against it. The most elementary mathematician will at once arrive at the result which ensued on the removal of these rails (a herculean task in itself) and the opening of the gate, unless extraordinary skill was exercised. It was really a performance beyond a single man; so most visitors, unless they were “riding for the doctor”—in the most serious business sense—holloaed for assistance, or rode about till some of the hands came up to the rescue. It must not be supposed that the doctor’s establishment, though strongly typical in a sense, resembled to any extent the real old Virginia mansion. The Pattons, it will be remembered, had been burnt out, and the present pile had been originally intended only as a makeshift; but it was such a makeshift as would perhaps be seen nowhere out of Virginia. Of the more substantial family mansions there were plenty crowning the hills in the doctor’s neighborhood. Square blocks of brick, some many-windowed and green-shuttered, with huge Grecian porticoes supported by rows of white fluted pillars stretching along their face. Great big wooden barns, others with acres of roof and rows of dormer-windows, and crazy, crumbling porches, and stacks of red brick chimneys clambering up outside the white walls at the gable ends, or anywhere else where they came handy for that matter. There were plenty of these within range of the doctor’s house and the limits of his practice, and to the proprietor of every one the doctor was related. The stages of this relationship varied from the unquestioned affinity of cousins and nephews, to that which is described in Virginia by the comprehensive and farreaching appellative of “kin.” To be kin of the Pattons, moreover, was in itself a desirable thing in Virginian eyes. Though the doctor lived in such an unpretentious residence, and worked day in and day out as a country practitioner, there were people in the neighborhood holding their heads pretty high, who were always pleased to remember that their father’s first cousin had married the doctor’s mother’s brother.
With all the doctor’s quaint ideas and strong prejudices, I have said that he was a thorough gentleman. He was of the kind meant for use, and not for show. Good Heavens! What would your dashing British Æsculapius, in his brougham or well-appointed dog-cart, have said to my old friend’s appearance when setting out for a long winter day’s work? I can see him now, riding in at the gate on some wild January day, bringing hope in his kindly face, and good conservative, time-honored drugs in his well-worn saddle-bags. A woollen scarf is drawn round his head, and on the top of it is crammed an ancient wide-awake. A long black cloak, fastened round his throat with a clasp, and lined with red flannel, falls over the saddle behind. His legs, good soul, are thickly encased in coils of wheat straw, wound tightly round them from his ankles upwards. In his hand, by way of a whip, he carries a bushy switch plucked from the nearest tree, and upon one heel a rusty spur that did duty at Bull’s Run.
Now do not suppose that the doctor on such occasions was regarded as a scarecrow, or that his neighbors looked upon him as eccentric or even careless of attire; on the contrary, this was a good old Virginia costume. The doctor’s appearance as above described was not the desperate expedient of a frontier and transitory condition—not at all. It was a survival of two hundred years of a peculiar civilization; a civilization that had been wont to look inside the plantation fence for almost every necessary; a patriarchal dispensation whose simplicity was to a great extent the outcome of exclusiveness; a social organization wherein each man’s place was so absolutely fixed, that personal apparel was a matter of almost no moment, and personal display, such as engages the well-to-do of other countries in mischievous rivalry, was hardly known.
The general shabbiness of Virginia was not the temporary shabbiness of a pioneering generation—that condition everybody can understand—but the picturesque and almost defiant tatterdemalionism of quite an old and thoroughly self-satisfied community, unstimulated by contact with the outer world. It was a mellow, time-honored kind of shabbiness of which Virginians are almost proud, regarding it as a sort of mute protest, though an extreme one, against those modern innovations which their souls abhorred. The doctor had been a widower since the first year of the war. In accordance with local custom, he had buried his wife in the orchard. A simple marble shaft in that homely quarter spoke of her virtues and her worth to the colts and calves that bit the sweet May grass around her tomb, and to the inquiring swine that crunched the rotting apples as they fell in autumn from the untended trees. Neither had the doctor been blessed with sons or daughters. Who would he “’ar (heir as a verb) his place to” was a common subject of discussion among the negroes on the property. The doctor’s profession, no doubt, was his first care; but his heart was with his farms and his fox-hounds. The doctor had practised over, or, as we used to say there, “ridden” the south side of the country for nearly forty years. He had studied medicine with the intention only of saving the doctor’s bill in his father’s household of eighty negroes. He had soon, however, dropped into a regular practice, and for the last five-and-twenty years, at any rate, no birth or death within a radius of ten miles would have been considered a well-conducted one without his good offices. The doctor’s income, upon the well-thumbed scroll of hieroglyphics that he called his books, was nearly three thousand dollars a year. He collected probably about fifteen hundred. A considerable portion, too, of this fifteen hundred was received in kind payments, not conveniently convertible, such as bacon, Indian corn, hams, wheat flour, woollen yarns, sucking pigs, home-made brooms, eggs, butter, bricks, sweet-potato slips, sawn plank, tobacco-plants, shingles, chickens, baskets, sausage-meat, sole-leather, young fruit trees, rawhides, hoe-handles, old iron. To utilize these various commodities, it would have been necessary for the doctor to have had a farm, even supposing he had not already been the fortunate proprietor of two. Indeed, a farm to a Southern doctor is not only necessary as a receptacle for the agricultural curiosities that are forced upon him in lieu of payment, but for the actual labor of those many dusky patients who can give no other return for physic and attendance received. You could see a bevy of these Ethiopians almost any day upon the doctor’s farm, wandering aimlessly about with hoes or brier-blades, chattering and cackling and doing everything but work.
The doctor might have been called a successful physician. He had no rivals. There were two inferior performers in the district, it is true, who were by way of following the healing art—small farmers, who were reported to have studied medicine in their youth. One of these, however, had not credit sufficient to purchase drugs, and the other was generally drunk. So it was only their near relations, when not dangerously indisposed, who patronized them—or some patient of the doctor’s now and again, perhaps, who took a fancy the latter was too “aristocratic,” till he got badly sick, and returned with alacrity to his allegiance. There is no doubt, I fear, but that the doctor practised on the lines of thirty years ago. Tory to the backbone in every other department of life, it was hardly to be expected that he should have panted for light and leading in that branch of learning in which he had no rival within reach. Papers or magazines connected with the healing science I never remember to have seen inside the Patton homestead; and yet, after a great deal of experience of the good old man’s professional care, I have a sort of feeling that I would as soon place my life in his hands as in the hands of Sir Omicron Pi!
What time the doctor had to spare from physicking, I have said he devoted to farming and to fox-hunting. I should like to follow him for a bit on his long professional rounds, and listen to his cheery talk in homestead and cabin; to help him fill his long pipe, which he draws out of his top-boot when the patient has settled down to sleep or quiet; to hear him once again chat about tobacco and wheat, politics and foxes. I should like, too, to say something of the doctor’s farming—heaven save the mark—on his two properties; the one “’ard” him by his father, and the other one, the quarter place near by, that “cum to him with his wife, ole Cunnel Pendleton’s daughter.”
I must only pause to remark, however, that the doctor farmed, as he did everything else, in the good old Virginia fashion—or in what is now irreverently known as the “rip and tar (tear) principle.” He didn’t care anything about acres or estimates; and as for farm books, his professional accounts pestered him quite enough. Of rotations, he neither knew nor wanted to know anything. His great idea was to plough and sow as much land as he could scuffle over with all the labor he could scrape together. Of manuring, clovering, or fertilizing, he took little account. If he “pitched” a big crop only, he was a proud and happy man. When each recurring harvest brought results more insignificant than the last, a temporary disgust with the whole business used to seize on my old friend, and he would swear that the wheat crops had been of no account since the war; that tobacco had gone to the devil, and that he’d quit fooling with a plantation for good and all. In the eyes of those who knew him, however, such tirades meant absolutely nothing. A Virginian of his description could no more have helped farming than he could have altered any other of the immutable laws of nature. A younger generation, and many indeed of the older one, have learned wisdom and prudence in the management of land since the abolition of slavery. The doctor, however, and the few left like him, will be land-killers of the genial good old sort till they lie under the once generous sod they have so ruthlessly treated.
The doctor’s first care was of necessity his patients; but there is no doubt, I think, that his real affections were divided between his farm and his fox-hounds. That he did his duty by the former was amply testified to by the popularity he enjoyed. That he signally failed in the treatment of his lands was quite as evident. For while he healed the sores and the wounds of his patients, the sores, the wounds, the storm-rent gullies, the bare galls in his hillsides, grew worse and worse. The maize-stalks grew thinner, the tobacco lighter, the wheat-yield poorer, year by year. One has heard of famous painters, who perversely fancied themselves rather as musicians—of established authors who yearned rather to be praised as artists. So the doctor, who certainly had no local rival in his own profession, seemed to covet fame rather as the champion and exponent of a happily departing school of Southern agriculturists. In this case, the income derived from the profession just sufficed to make good the losses on the farm. So, though the doctor, in spite of his household expenses being almost nil, could never by any chance lay his hand on a five-dollar bill, he managed to keep upon the whole pretty free from debt. With a scattered practice, and an agricultural hobby extending over one thousand acres, including woods and old fields “turned out” to recover, it may be a matter of surprise that our old friend had leisure for a third indulgence, especially one like fox-hunting, which is connected in the British mind with such a large consumption of time. Nevertheless, the doctor, like most of his compeers, was passionately fond of the chase, and in spite of the war and altered times, had kept hounds round him almost without a break since he was a boy. It will be seen, however, that fox-hunting, as understood and followed by the doctor, was by no means incompatible with his more serious avocations.
Now, if the fashion in which the doctor pursued the wily fox was not orthodox from a Leicestershire point of view, it was for all that none the less, perhaps indeed so much the more, genuine. Around New York and Philadelphia, it is true, the sport is pursued by fashionable bankers, brokers, and lawyers in a style the most approved. All the bravery and the glitter, ay, and much of the horsemanship of the British hunting-field, is there. But, like polo and coaching, it is there as a mere exotic, transplanted but yesterday, to the amazement and occasionally indignation of the Long Island rustics and the delight of the society papers. Everything is there—hounds, huntsmen, whips, red coats, tops, splendidly mounted hard-riding ladies and gentlemen, sherry-flasks, sandwich-boxes, etc., etc.,—everything, in short, but the fox. So far, however, as I can learn, such an omission is of no great importance under the modern conception of hunting. That wouldn’t be the doctor’s way of thinking at all, though; for I must here remark, that that worthy sportsman’s love of hunting is entirely on hereditary principles and of native growth. Fox-hunting for two centuries has been the natural pastime of the Virginia gentry. They imported the chase of the fox and its customs from the mother country at a period when such things were conducted in a very different style from what they are now.
The hunting of the fox, as carried on in England early in the last century, let us say, offered, I take it, a very different spectacle from that seen in the elaborate and gorgeous cavalcades and the rushing fleet-footed hounds that race to-day over the trim, well-trained turf of the shires. No foxes were killed in those days in twenty-five minutes, I’ll warrant. Men started their fox at daybreak and pottered along, absorbed in the performance of their slow hounds, over the rushy, soppy, heathy country, from wood to wood, for hours and hours. They were lucky then, no doubt, if Reynard succumbed in time to admit of their punctual appearance at that tremendous three o’clock orgie, which the poet Thomson has so graphically laid before us.
Amid the glitter, the show, the dash, the swagger of modern fox-hunting, Englishmen who are not masters of hounds or huntsmen are apt to lose sight of the original ends and aims, the craft, and the science of the sport. It seems to me that fox-hunting nowadays, with the vast mass of its devotees, is simply steeplechasing over an unknown course. This is unquestionably a manly and a fine amusement, and far be it from me to breathe a word against it. I only wish to anticipate the sneers of your sporting stock-broker if he were to catch sight of the doctor and his hounds upon a hunting morning.
With the average Nimrod of modern days, I venture then to assert that fox-hunting is only a modified form of steeplechasing. With the Virginian, who is simply a survival of other days, it is nothing of the kind. The doctor knew nothing of bullfinches or double ditches, of post and rails or five-barred gates, in a sporting sense; but what he did not know about a fox was not worth knowing at all. As for his hounds, he could tell the note of each at a distance when the music of a whole pack was scarcely audible to the ordinary ear.
As far as I remember, the doctor used generally to keep about five couple of hounds. It is needless to say he always swore they were the “best stock of fox-dogs in the State.” Jim Pendleton, his cousin across the hill, and Judge Massey, on the north side of the county, who also kept hounds, were quite prepared to take an affidavit of the same kind with regard to their own respective packs. The doctor’s hounds lived as members of the family. A kind of effort was spasmodically made to keep them from appropriating the parlor, and so long as the weather was mild, they were fairly content to lie in the front porch, or in one of the many passages which let the air circulate freely through the Patton homestead.
If the weather was cold, however, and the doctor had a fire in the parlor, the older and more knowing dogs seldom failed eventually to gain a lodgment. By persistently coming in at one door, and when kicked out by the long-suffering M. F. H., slowly going round the house and slyly entering at the other, they invariably conquered in the long run, and established themselves on the warm bricks of the hearth before the great white-oak logs which blazed on the bright brass and irons.
Of course it was not often that the doctor and his hounds were all at home together on a winter’s day. If the latter were not hunting with him, they were out upon their own account, for, be it noted, they were absolutely their own masters, as is the way with Virginia fox-hounds. If the doctor chose to accompany them and do a great deal of tooting and some hallooing, I have no doubt a certain amount of satisfaction animated the breasts of the pack. But it made no difference whatever to the sporting arrangements they had planned among themselves, or to their general programme. Whatever happened, they were bound to have their hunt. As the doctor’s pride and joy was not in his own performance in the pigskin—for he never attempted any—but in the achievements of his dogs, this want of discipline and respect was no drawback whatever to his satisfaction.
I have said the doctor could combine his favorite sport with the exercise of his profession. That is to say, if he were going out in any likely direction, he would manage to keep his hounds around him till he had despatched his lamplight breakfast, and they would all start together. The pack, moreover, was easily increased, for the doctor had only to step around to the back porch, which looked across the valley to Cousin Jim Pendleton’s place, and to blow lustily on his tremendous cow-horn.
A very little of this music was sufficient to bring the greater part of the rival pack scrambling in a half-guilty way over the garden fence. After a little growling and snarling and snapping, the strangers would settle down among the doctor’s hounds as if they had been raised on the place.
See the doctor attired for the chase emerging with his hounds from that awful front gate of his, which is being held up and open by the combined efforts of two stalwart negroes. It is a mild and soft February morning, at about the hour when the sun would be seen mounting over the leafless woodlands to the east of the house, if it were not for the dark banks of clouds chasing one another in continuous succession from the southwest. The doctor is not quite such a scarecrow to-day. The weather is mild, and he has left the coils of straw behind, having his stout legs encased in grey homespun overalls, which he calls leggings. The long Bull’s Run spur is on his left heel. The black cloak with the red lining is on his back. The slouch hat upon his head, and spectacles upon his nose. A high standup collar of antique build and a black stock give the finishing touch to a picture whose “old-timiness,” as the Americans say, would have thrown a Boston novelist into convulsions of ecstasy.
The doctor this morning is combining business with pleasure. He has to visit the widow Gubbins, who fell down the cornhouse steps the week before, and broke her leg. But he has had word sent to him that there is a red fox in the pine wood behind the parsonage, hard by the Gubbins domicile. I need not say the saddle-bags and the medicine bottles are there; but, besides these, there is a great big cow-horn which the doctor carries slung round him, and blows long blasts upon as he goes “titupping” down the muddy lane. These blasts are rather with a view of personal solace than for any definite aims. The doctor loves the horn for its associations, and goes toot-tooting down the soft red road, and waking the echoes of the woods and fields solely for his own personal benefit and refreshment. Hector and Rambler, Fairfax and Dainty, and the rest—little wiry, lean fellows of about two-and-twenty inches—hop over the big mudholes, or creep around the dry fence corners waiting for the first bit of unfenced woodland to trot over and commence the day’s operations.
The doctor, however, is determined, if possible, to keep them in hand till they reach the haunt of that aforesaid red fox which is said to be lurking in the parson’s wood. He hopes to be able to exercise authority sufficient to keep these independent dogs of his from getting on the trail of a ringing, skulking grey fox in the first ivy thicket or open bit of forest they come to. It is no manner of use, however. The rutty, soppy road, soon after it leaves the doctor’s estate, straggles unfenced through half a mile of mazy woodland. Though it is a historic turnpike of old coaching fame—a road the memory of whose once bustling gaiety well-nigh brings tears to the eyes of the old inhabitants—it is scarcely visible to the rare wagoner or horseman in these degenerate times, from the wealth of autumn leaves that hide its rugged face. Into the wood plunge the eager and undisciplined hounds, the dry leaves crackling and rustling under their joyous feet as they scamper and race amid the tall oak and poplar trunks, and one by one disappear beyond the very limited horizon. The doctor toots and toots till not only the forest but the hills and valleys beyond echo to the appeals of the familiar cow-horn. Mighty little, however, care the dogs for such tooting. They look upon it as a harmless sign of encouragement, a pleasant accompaniment to the preliminaries until the more serious work begins. Nor do they care in the least when the doctor drops his horn and begins to halloo and shout and storm—not they. He might as well shout and storm at the wind. The doctor gets very mad. He doesn’t swear—Virginians of his class and kind very seldom do—but he uses all the forms of violent exhortation that his conscience admits of, and that belongs to the local vernacular. He calls the whole pack “grand scoundrels and villains.” In a voice grown husky with exertion, he inquires of their fast-fading forms if they know “what in thunder he feeds them for?” He roars out to little Blazer, the only one left within good speaking distance that he’ll “whale the life out of him;” whereupon little Blazer disappears after the rest. So he finally confides to the sorrel mare, which is ambling along under him at the regulation five-mile-an-hour gait of the Southern roadster, that these dogs of Cousin Jeems’ (the doctor says “Jeems,” not because he doesn’t know any better, but because it is a good old Virginia way of pronouncing the name) are the hardest-headed lot of fox-dogs south of the Potomac River.
But hark! There is a boom from the pine wood, the deep green of whose fringe can be seen far away through the naked stems and leafless branches of the oaks. The doctor pulls up; he “concludes he’ll wait awhile and see what it amounts to, any way.” The scoundrels are probably fooling after a rabbit, or, at the best, have struck the trail of a grey fox (the most common native breed, that won’t face the open or run straight). The doctor draws rein at the edge of the wood, where the straggling forest road once more becomes a highway, fenced in from fields of young wheat, pasture and red fallow. He thinks the widow Gubbins can wait a bit, and that old red fox at the parson’s can lay over for another day.
“That’s old Powhatan, cert’n and sure; and that’s a fox of some sort, I’ll sw’ar,” remarks our old friend to the sorrel mare, which pricks up her ears as another deep note comes echoing from the valley below.
It is late in February; and though February in Virginia is practically the same dead, colorless, leafless, budless, harsh winter month it is with us, yet there are sometimes days before it closes that seem to breathe of a yet distant spring with more witching treachery than the greatest effort that period can make in our more methodical clime. And this is one of them. The soft and balmy air is laden, it is true, with no scent of blossoms or opening buds. The odor of smouldering heaps of burning brush and weeds, or of tardily burnt tobacco-plant beds, is all that as yet scents the breeze. But after a month of frost and rain and snow and clouds, the breath is the breath of spring, and the glow of the sun, now bursting through the clouds, seems no longer the sickly glare of winter. The soft Virginia landscape, swelling in gentle waves of forest, field, and fallow to the great mountains that lie piled up far away against the western sky, is naked still and bare, save for the splashes of green pine woods here and there upon the land. But there is a light in the sky and a feel in the air that seems almost to chide the earth for its slow response. The blood courses quicker through the veins of even easy-going Virginia farmers at the thoughts of seeding-time. The negro’s head comes up from under his shoulders and his hands from his pockets, where they have each respectively spent most of the winter, and the air becomes laden with those peculiar dirges that mark the Ethiopian’s contentment of mind at the prospect of warm weather and of his limbs once more becoming “souple.” The soft breeze begins to coat the tops of the damp furrows with a thin, powdery crust that in a few days’ time will be converted into that March dust so universally beloved of farmers. The young wheat, smitten and scorched and beaten almost out of recognition, lifts its head once again and spreads a carpet of tender green to the sun. The early lambs, beginning to think that after all they were not sent into the world to shiver behind strawstacks, frisk and gambol in the fields. The blacksmiths’ shops at the cross roads and the courthouse villages are thronged with colored laborers and tenants, whose masters, now seeding-time is upon them, have suddenly remembered that every plow in the place is out of fix, and not a harrow has its full complement of teeth. The light breezes from the southwest moans softly in the pines; but among the deciduous trees not a withered shred of foliage is left for it to stir, and the silence is complete. The freshly awakened sunlight streams softly down between the leafless branches and the rugged trunks of oak and chestnut, hickory and poplar, and plays upon the golden carpet of wasted leaves that hides the earth beneath them.
The doctor, as he stands at the edge of the forest, would ordinarily upon such a day be deep in agricultural reveries of a most sanguine nature. But he is now waiting for one more note of evidence that there is a prospect of what he would call “a chase”—hesitating as to the widow Gubbins.
Suddenly there is a great commotion in the wooded valley beneath, and in a few seconds you might be in Leicestershire spinny, so busy and joyful are the little pack with their tongues. “That’s a fox, any way,” says the doctor to the sorrel mare, “and, likely as not, a red.” Two small farmers, jogging down the road, pull up their horses and yell with the peculiar shrill scream that is traditionally as much a part of Virginia fox-hunting as the familiar cries of the British hunting-field are with us. The doctor, though his voice is not what it was thirty years ago, catches the infection, and standing up in his wooden, leather-capped stirrups, halloos at his hounds in what he would call “real old Virginia fashion.”
“By G—d! it’s a red,” says one of the small farmers, who had perched himself on the top of the fence, so as to look down over the sloping tree-tops on to the opposite hill.
“The dogs are out of the wood, and are streakin’ it up the broom-sedge field yonder—dawg my skin if they ain’t!”
This is too much for the doctor.
“Pull down the fence, gentlemen, for God’s sake! and we’ll push on up to the old Matthews graveyard on top of the hill. We shall see right smart of the chase from there. I know that old fox; he’ll go straight to the pines on Squire Harrison’s quarter place.”
The four or five top rails are tossed off the snake fence; but the doctor can’t wait for the remaining six. The long spur is applied to the flank of the sorrel mare, the apple switch to her shoulder. Amid a crashing and scattering of rotten chestnut-rails, the doctor, cloak, and spectacles, saddle-bags, pills, medicine-bottles, and overalls, lands safely in the corn-stalk field upon the other side. The two farmers follow through the fearful breach he has made, and they may soon all be heard upon the opposite hill cheering and yelling to the hounds, which by this time are well out of reach of such encouraging sounds. Neither the country, nor the horse, nor the doctor is adapted for riding to hounds; nor, as I have before intimated, has the latter any idea of doing so. The good man wants to hear as much as possible—of the chase; but when he neither sees nor hears a great deal—which, when a strong red fox goes straight away, is generally the case—he will still take much delight in collecting the details from other sources.
If his hounds eventually kill their fox half-way across the county, friends and neighbors, who became accidental witnesses of various stages of the chase, and each of whom did their share of hallooing and cheering, will send round word to the “old doctor,” or “call by” the next time they pass his house, and cheer his heart with praises of his dogs. The doctor will probably have bandaged Mrs. Gubbins’s leg, and be half-way home by the time the death-scene takes place, in some laurel thicket possibly miles and miles away from the corner where we left our friend bursting through the fence. Not more than half a dozen, probably, of the fourteen or fifteen hounds with which the doctor started, will assist at the finish. Two or three of the puppies will have dropped out early in the day, and come home hunting rabbits all the way. Three or four more are perhaps just over distemper, and will fall in their tracks, to come limping and crawling home at noon. Rambler and Fairfax, however, having assisted at the finish, and being perhaps the most knowing old dogs of the lot, will have trotted round to old Colonel Peyton’s close by. They are mighty hungry—for Virginia hounds won’t touch foxes’ flesh—and they succeed in slipping into the log kitchen in the yard, while Melindy, the cook, is outside collecting chips, and abstracting from the top of the stove an entire ham. The said ham was just prepared for the colonel’s supper; but in fox-hunting all is forgiven. So after a little burst of wrath he reckons they are the old doctor’s clogs, shuts them up in the granary, and gives them a cake of corn-bread apiece. The following day is Saturday, and the colonel’s son, home from school for a holiday, thinks it an opportunity for a rabbit-hunt in the pines behind the house not to be missed. So Rambler and Fairfax are introduced to the proposed scene of action in the morning. After condescending to an hour of this amusement, they hold a canine consultation, and start for home, where they finally arrive about sundown, to be made much of by the doctor, who has already heard of the finish from a negro who was splitting rails close by.
The doctor’s satisfaction is quite as great as if he had cut down a whole Leicestershire field in the fastest thing of the season. His heart warms towards those undersized, harsh-coated, slab-sided little friends of his as he stands watching the negro woman breaking up their supper of hot corn-bread with buttermilk as a treat, on the back porch. They have all come in by this time, and scuffle and growl and snap around the board as the food is thrown to them.
The knowing ones take advantage of such an evening as this to assert, with more than usual assurance, their right of entry to the house. The doctor has had his supper, and hopes that no ominous shout from the darkness will, for this night at any rate, call him to some distant sick-bed. He has drawn up his one-armed rocking-chair to the parlor fire, and by the kerosene lamp is poring over the last oration on free trade by that grand old Virginia gentleman and senator, Mr. Jefferson Randolph Beverly Page. Conscious, as it were, that some extra indulgence is deserved on this night, the dogs begin to crawl in. One by one, beginning with the oldest and wiliest and ending with the timidest puppy, they steal into the room and become grouped in the order of their audacity from the glowing bricks of the hearth outward to the door.
Nor to-night has the doctor kicks or cuffs or anathemas for the very worst of them.
The great oak logs blaze and crackle and roar in the wide chimney, and the light of the flames flickers over the quaint, low-ceilinged room with its whitewashed walls, black wainscotting, and homely decorations; over the antlers on the door, that recall some early exploit of the doctor’s in West Virginia wilds; over the odds and ends of old silver on the sideboard, that have been saved from the wreck of the Patton grandeur; over the big oil-painting of the famous jurist, and the dimmer, smokier visages of less distinguished but remoter ancestors, who believed in the divine right of kings and knew nothing of republics and universal suffrage. Here, however, surrounded by his dogs, we must take leave of the doctor. There are few like him left now in Virginia, and fewer still who have clung to the good and bad of a departed era with the same uncompromising tenacity as our old friend. They were a fine race—deny it who will—these old Virginia squires; provincial and prejudiced perhaps, but full of originality and manly independence. Their ideas, it is true, are not those of the latter half of the nineteenth century, but the men themselves are passing rapidly away, and their ideas with them. Those who have known them can only regret that a strong, picturesque, and admirable type of Anglo-Saxon has disappeared forever from the ranks of our great family, unpainted by a single master-hand of contemporary date.
A. G. Bradley.
XX