CHAPTER XXI
At Kerncliffe
THE moment the burdens of official position fell from his shoulders, Senator Kern’s heart turned to Kerncliffe with a longing to rest with the family to which he was ardently devoted, and from which he had been so long separated in the discharge of his senatorial duties. He had built the house upon the cliff in the hope of frequently joining Mrs. Kern and the children during the sessions of congress, but these visits were infrequent and almost invariably cut short by a telegram summoning him back to Washington. He loved this home in the Blue Ridge, where he could relax, ramble at will over the hills, and sit in the evenings holding the hands of his boys. The story of the making of a home on the cliff is interesting in itself.
The condition of John, Jr., had made it necessary for several years for the family to escape the inervating heat of the Indianapolis summers in Michigan, and one morning at the breakfast table, after his election to the senate, Mr. Kern remarked that if the summer sessions of the senate continued he did not see how he could be satisfied with the family two days and a night away from him. Looking up quickly, John, Jr., said: “Why not go to Grandfather Kern’s place in the mountains of Virginia? Perhaps it’s as cool there, and I would gain as much as in Michigan.” The thought had never occurred to the Kerns, but in ten minutes it was arranged that they should go to Virginia to test the practicability of the plan upon the ground. Many times, in other years, while strolling about over the thousand acres, they had noted a particular ridge as an ideal site for a home, but they had never so much as ascended to the top. The result of the inspection was a determination to build a “shack” and try it out one summer. Reaching the place at noon, where they were met by a man with a movable saw mill and a mountain carpenter, the contract had been let by 6 o’clock for the sawing of thirty thousand feet of lumber, the place for the house had been staked off and the carpenter had been engaged. Without blue prints or architectural plans, Mrs. Kern planned her house that afternoon, and when it was found that the lumber would cost so little it was decided to “spread the house all over the hill.” The rock for the foundation was found in their own mountain, beautiful white sand was to be had in abundance in their own creek bottom, and the sandstone for the fireplace, with shades of pink running through it, was found on their own ground—the thousand acres of woods, rocks and rough places. When Senator Kern’s term in the senate expired, a hundred acres—thanks to Mrs. Kern’s energy and initiative—had been cleared and ditched for cultivation. For a description of the house I am indebted to the pen of Mrs. Juliet V. Strauss, well known as “The Country Contributor” to the readers of The Ladies’ Home Journal and The Indianapolis News. This brilliant woman, an intimate friend of the Kerns, after a visit to Kerncliffe, wrote her impressions under the title, “The House That Araminta (Mrs. Kern) Built.”
“I have never been anywhere in my life,” she wrote, “where there are as many superlative comforts as there are at Kerncliffe, Araminta’s summer home in Virginia. My idea of comfort does not comprise the rich woman’s typification of luxury. I do not want things too fine—and I do not like a servant at my elbow. The presence of a great retinue of servants always hints of the undertaker.... Araminta is the best mixer I ever saw, and her ‘mixing’ is not affectation—it is greatness. For greatness finds its crucial test in knowing how to be common in the big sense of the word. If you are tried in the balance by a hair’s breadth of snobbery or of preference for the effeminacy of luxury, you are really further from being great than if you missed some of the finer points of art or the subtler qualities of kindness.
“Nobody who wasn’t great in spirit could have chosen this breezy wooded knoll between two mountain ranges and built a house with as many delectable things about it as Kerncliffe. It is a great thing to know what you want and get it—so many of us do not—but Araminta is that way—she knows what she wants.
“There is a living room forty feet long with a huge stone fireplace and wicker furniture, books and piano and a victrola—and doors and windows opening up vistas of tree tops and mountain and valley. There’s a dining room in blue and white—also with a big fireplace; there’s a sitting room for the boys with their own books and treasures and a big fireplace; there’s a kitchen that would do your soul good, where we all go and cook and eat if we want to; and there’s Sunset porch where we eat supper and watch the sun go down behind the mountain.
“But up-stairs! Up-stairs there are four sleeping porches, and the birds in the tree tops are always calling, and far into the tranquil night with the accompaniment of just the faintest leaf whisper the whippoorwill trills a contralto serenade.
“Just now a bob-white is about to drive me mad with his calling from the wheat field. I know he says ‘Judge White,’ because my brother, dead—long dead, long dead—seems somehow conscious of my spiritual altitude—my exultation in these lovely surroundings.
“How I love the wild things that grow on the mountain and along the waysides in the cove. The blooming laurel, the huckleberry brush, the sweet climbing and vining things, and the smell of the hot sun on the dwarf pines. Every little growing thing seems intimate to me as though my soul had wandered here for centuries and had just run back to welcome me.