The Lightning Conductor Discovers America

Of course, I should have ached to box Jimmy's ears, and all my loyalty would have flowed out in waves to Brown; so perhaps Pat – but to go back to Yonkers. It makes the name sound less unsympathetic and like a frog's croak to recall that it was given when the Yonk Heer Vredryck Flypse, or Philipse (he who called New York "a barren island"), the richest and most important man of his day, from New York to Tarrytown, built one of his manor houses there. It's still there, by the way, and lots of other historic things, if one bothers to stop and dig them up, instead of dashing through with an admiring glance at the jolly modern houses, more conspicuous than the old.

We had a full day before us, what with worshipping at Washington Irving's shrine, and sighing over Sing Sing, and arriving at West Point in time for dress parade and to hear the sunset gun. So we flew fast through lovely Hastings-on-Hudson, and Irvington, over a silk-smooth surface, under an adorable avenue of trees which perhaps remembered the Revolution; past exquisite places where only exquisite people ought to live, to Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown. It seems sacrilege to arrive in autos and a hurry at a town with a name so deliciously lazy, to say nothing of its associations. But one can't help being modern!

I wonder if the comfortable Dutch settlers who pottered along this old Albany Post Road ever dreamed nightmare dreams of creatures like us, tearing in strange machines over surfaces magnificently bricked or oiled, and covering in one day distances to which they would prayerfully have devoted weeks? Probably they would have pitied and despised rather than envied us; and maybe they'd have been right: for does the extra ozone and the thrill of speed quite make up for things missed or half seen? Still, impressions are wonderful; and I shan't forget the bluebell colour of distant hills, the silver-gray of rocks, and the diamond-dazzle of water glimpsed between feathery tree branches, or the jewelled gleam of wild flowers scattered by the roadside, and the pale flame of mulleins straight and tall as lighted candles in the grass.

Isn't it a sweet thing for the world that there should have been men who loved making the rock-bound fields of history blossom with delicate flowers, just as monks of ancient days illumined quite dull texts? – men like Washington Irving, for instance.

I always loved Washington Irving, and so I'm glad to say did Jack; but he came back to life and actually walked with us that day. Perhaps it sounds impudent and conceited to say this, but I don't mean it so, and if he knew how humble and happy we felt as we came under his spell, I do think he wouldn't have snubbed us. No, he would never have snubbed any one! He was much too human, and understanding. He wouldn't scornfully have called us "tourists," but would have realized that we were worshippers at a shrine. Of course I don't include Ed Caspian or Mrs. Shuster! C., when the time came to leave our cars outside the with-difficulty-found gates of Sunnyside, put on the airs of a grand seigneur who knows all that is to be known already. He said (so Peter told us later): "It's not much of a place; quite a small house, not worth getting out for." And he actually proposed that Patty should sit in the car with him while the others explored! Pat wasn't "taking any." She jumped out, and rather than see her walk away with Peter, C. had to follow. As for Mrs. Shuster, she can't bear to walk if there's a chance of sitting still, especially since she's taken to these fearfully tall-heeled, new-fashioned, high-necked boots which make our feet look like the hoofs of rather chic cows: incredible heels like the Venetian beauties used to wear. She, like Caspian, reminded her beloved of the blessing for those who only stand (sit!) and wait. But Larry said he'd something important to tell Pat; then strolled with Idonia Goodrich and never went near his daughter. Mrs. Shuster was reduced to her peace partner; and, oh, you can't think what she looks like when she pouts!

We had to thank Larry for an open sesame to the doors of Sunnyside, however; for he has some distant acquaintance with the grand-nephew of Washington Irving who has inherited the quaint, delightful house with its red gables and extraordinarily intelligent-looking windows. Anybody is allowed to peep inside the gates of the old place, but of course the house is only for friends or acquaintances, or it would be overrun and the family would have to take to the cellar. Pat had somehow forced Larry to write and ask permission, for he never puts pen to paper if he can help it!

Sometimes it's a blow to see where your favourite authors lived, but Washington Irving's dear old Dutch house is just right. It is like a beautiful living body with his memory for its soul: yes, a charming body with all his quaintnesses and unexpectednesses and dainty mysteries. It looks at least as old as the seventeenth century, but only a nucleus of the rambling, many-windowed, creeper-clad mansion is really old. There's a romance about that part, by the way, but perhaps you know it better than I do.

Once upon a time, when Washington Irving was very young, he visited the Pauldings in a house swept away now. He used to take a boat and row all alone, to think thoughts and dream dreams under the willow trees that even then roofed the brook in Sunnyside glen. He could see a tiny house called "Wolfert's Roost," and said to himself, "If I could live here and have that for mine I should be perfectly happy."

It didn't seem then as if his wish could possibly come true, but he always kept it in his heart, and years later, after he had lived in London and been American Minister in Madrid, he came back to his first love, with money he had been saving up, to make it his own. He added and added again to the house, but contrived to give it the lovely look of having just grown up anyhow, as trees and flowers grow. That's partly because of its cloaks and muffs and boas of trumpet-creeper and ivy. It has the look, too, even now, of being miles from anywhere – except the river and the creek, which sing the same song they sang long ago, under the trees. The trees of Sunnyside are somehow curiously individual, Jack and I thought, as if they knew the historic reputation they had to live up to, and were gently proud of it. There are trees graceful as ladies dancing a minuet, spreading out their green brocade skirts for a deep curtsey; trees as spicily perfumed as the pouncet boxes of those same ladies; thoughtful trees whose one mission in life is to give deep shade under showering branches, and gay trees like sieves for sunshine. Jack and I wandered among them and then gazed out upon them, as Washington Irving must often have gazed (in search of new inspiration), through the small square panes of his study windows.

His descendants have changed nothing there, in that dear little modest nest for a genius! It's close to the front door, as you go in from the deep porch, at the right-hand side of a fascinating corridor. Looking down that corridor you see a vista of rooms, delightful as rooms in dreams. They are furnished, but not crowded, with old and exquisite things – things which must have been intimate friends of the family for generations; and, oh, how much more attractive are the rooms than any royal suites I've seen in palaces!

In the study (I feel sure he called it that, not library) the master of long ago might have walked a moment ago, out into the garden, so entirely does the room seem impressed with his personality. There are his books, his manuscripts, his pens; his desk, and his writing-chair drawn up to it; his little table; the charming old prints he loved, given to him and signed by friends whose names are famous; pictures of the house when it was "Wolfert's Roost," and when it had grown larger. The green and golden light streaming through the windows, front and side, seems just the sort of light that Washington Irving would have loved to write in. He made it greener and more inspiring by bringing from Melrose Abbey slips of the ivy which now curtains the windows; and in the green-gold light he wrote his "Life of Washington" and many other things which we all love.

Coming out of the study when we were ready to go away, I looked through the open door of a beautiful room across the corridor, straight into an old-fashioned mirror. Never was a mirror so becoming. I felt as if I were seeing my own portrait painted by Romney; and behind me for an instant I seemed to catch a fleeting glimpse of another face, as though a man stood on the study threshold, smiling to me a kind good-bye. I adore my own imagination. After Jack, it is my best and dearest chum!

I think even if one didn't know that thrilling things had happened in Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow (heavenly names!) in old days, one would somehow feel it. What's the use of one's subconscious self if it doesn't nudge one's subjective self and whisper that it was born knowing? Why, I could see Sir Vredryck Flypse and his family streaming out of the old Dutch church, as gorgeous in their Sunday best as the church was simple; the ladies' stomachers embroidered with silver and seed pearls, their short, stiff brocade skirts swinging to show their silk stockings and high-heeled shoes, much as ours do now; the men taking a sly pinch of snuff, and brushing it hastily off their blue or gray coats; tie-wigs, silver buttons, and knee breeches glittering in the sunshine of such a day as this, away back in sixteen hundred and something. I can see neat, consciously aristocratic and good Dominie Mutzelius or Dominie Ritzema in irreproachable black, with a touch of white, going as guest to Sunday dinner at Philipsburg Manor, after the "great people" had listened to his eloquence, seated in their cushioned "boxes" in the seven-windowed church. There are only six windows now; but in those days you had to keep your window and weather eye open, even during the dominie's discourse, for Indians might take a fancy to scalp the congregation if it could be taken unawares. Luckily the lord of the manor, and his friends, and the sturdy farmers with their families, were not to be caught napping, even if the sermon were dull and the weather hot. Besides, in case of emergency, they could turn their church into a fort at a few minutes' notice. The walls were nearly three feet thick; the seven windows were barred with iron, and so high up that, if the Indians wanted to peep, they had to climb on each other's shoulders. As for the doors, they could hardly be knocked in with a battering ram; so you had no excuse to stop at home on Sunday, even in "Indian Summer." Of course we went to see the grave where all that is mortal of Washington Irving lies in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery; and the famous bridge – or, rather, the new edition of it built by William Rockefeller.

Do you remember that Major Andre was taken on the Albany Post Road at Tarrytown on his way to New York, with dispatches from the traitor Benedict Arnold hidden in his stockings? I've always had a sneaking sympathy with Andre, because he was gallant and young and good looking, but Tarrytown isn't the place, I find, in which to express any such sentimental feeling. He is still the villain of the piece there, a mere spy, travelling in disguise, a treacherous wretch who long and stealthily worked to corrupt a hitherto honourable general. He is the villain, and David Williams, John Paulding, and Isaac Van Waart, the scouting militiamen who took and searched him, are the heroes of that drama of 1780. Tarrytown people are delighted to this day that Andre was hanged, and they love the monument to his captors who wouldn't be bribed by horse, or watch, or money. I suppose if Andre hadn't offered those bribes, or said he belonged to the "Southern party," they might never have thought of his stockings, he would have got safely to the waiting ship, and on to New York; and Benedict Arnold would have surrendered West Point to the British!

Heaps of other exciting things helped to make Tarrytown historic: an Indian massacre, a big battle in the Revolution, Major Hunt's "bag of British soldiers at Van Tassel's Tavern when he won fame by his shout, 'Gentlemen, clubs are trumps!'" and so on. But we took even more interest in the old legends of Spook Rock, and Andre's ghost and Cuffy's Prophecy and the Flying Dutchman, who of course tacks back and forth across the Tappan Zee. Such things are so much more real than facts! Besides, we had to "get on – get on!" that war cry of motoring men.

We did get on, along the smooth brick road to Ossining, which is really Sing Sing, you know (or ought to, if you don't), only Ossining is the old Indian name, so they took it back to escape the blight. It's such a pretty town that it would have been a shame to associate it only with the state prison, whose high gray walls are the only grim thing in the landscape. It was for the sake of staring at them, though, and shivering down our spines that we took the detour to Ossining. When we had shivered enough we turned back to Tarrytown and drove our motors like docile cattle on board a steam ferryboat which took us across the river to Nyack, the dearest, quaintest of little Dutch towns. It looks as lazy as, and more obstinately old-fashioned than, Tarrytown, though Tarrytown is far more important and impressive.

There's a colony of frame houses in Nyack which makes you feel you've suddenly tripped and stumbled out of the twentieth century back into the early nineteenth; and we lunched in a charming little hotel that gave us things to eat equal to any restaurant in New York.

We had a divine run from Nyack, through a fairy forest, with Hook Mountain in sight and the Ramapo Hills on the horizon. Hook Mountain glowed a bright rose colour wherever its green cloak was torn; and when we came into sudden sight of the river there was a magical effect: a veil of silver mist, with boats big and little moving behind it, like white swans. We had woods all the way to Rockland Lake, where the great icehouses loomed like queer castles, until we ran down to lake-level and lost the illusion. Then we turned in the direction of Haverstraw, going through the nice old-fashioned village of Congers. The hills and tiny valleys were as gay and pretty as the summer day! We could hardly realize that we weren't very far from New York, it all seemed such lovely lost country, private and purposely hidden, as if strangers had no right to be there.

Soon the gay little hills were playing they were mountains, and almost making us believe that they really were. The roadsides were like rock gardens, spangled pink and gold and blue. Far below lay the river, but it looked vast enough to be a wide lake; and always the "surface" was so perfect we had the sensations of flying. At Haverstraw we were by the river, and even the brick-fields contrived to take on a gorgeous, glittering colour in the afternoon sun. Stony Point, a high rocky promontory just above, is the place where "Mad Anthony Wayne" stormed the fortress thought to be impregnable. The British called it "Little Gibraltar." Jack had been looking out for that and the ruins of the old fort, because daredevil Wayne is quite one of his heroes. The whole peninsula here is a public park, so no wonder everything is beautifully kept!

I think we got lost after this, owing to Ed Caspian, who led the procession and was sure he knew the way. However, we reached West Point somehow, after two or three wrong but delicious detours, returning on our own tracks each time. Jack and I didn't care, but we could see the back of Mrs. Shuster's head sulking itself almost off, and Patsey's hat looking careworn and sad. It must have been wretched for her, seeing all these heavenly things with nobody except Ed Caspian to say "Oh!" to: flowery meadows, weeping willows like waving fountains of silver, cedars stalking among them like tall black monks, dark bulks of near mountains, blue ghosts of far ones; ferns and wild flowers sprouting from every rock; here and there a shining streak of waterfall. What matter if we did go wrong, and risk missing West Point to reach Tuxedo, instead of saving the latter till next day? We spared ourselves that mistake, and came back to the right road after twice passing a glorified log cabin of an inn all balconies and rich brown wood on a stone foundation. Mountains seemed to reach toward each other across the shining river, and then to open out into a long corridor, dark walled and paved with silver. There was a lake with an island and a pavilion: Iona Island – too beautiful to pass as we did pass; a bridge over a steep rocky gorge, and a river-glimpse mysterious as the backgrounds of old Italian pictures. But we turned away from it into woods – deep forests of cedars fragrant as smoking incense, and at last – rather late because of side wanderings – we came to Highland Falls.

I remember your telling me that your first love was a West Point cadet, who proposed to you on your sixteenth birthday in "Flirtation Walk." Lucky you! But this was my first glimpse of the place as we drove through gates from Highland Falls into the Government Reservation. We meant to arrive, shed the dust at our hotel, and then saunter forth for dress parade, but instead of that we had to see the great sight of the day sitting in our motors. The poor Hippopotamus did look antediluvian among all the smart cars and carriages assembled! But the rest of us weren't so bad, even after a day's run, and, anyhow, we had no time to think of ourselves, there was too much else to think of.

I wonder if the place has changed much since that sixteenth birthday of my Mercédes? Of course it's only a very few years ago! Not being Aunt Mary, I won't make any remark about the number. But if you haven't quite forgotten that first love, doesn't it make your heart beat to think of those great terraced, castellated buildings of gray stone massed against the cliffsides above the sparkling river, almost Walhalla-like in grandeur, of the gracious elms and the prim soldierly barracks draped with ivy, of the vast parade ground and the wonderful grouping of mountains whose shapes lie reflected far down under the crystal water, Cro' Nest, haunted by the "Culprit Fay," and Storm King; and little Constitution Island which tried its best to stop the British ships.

I wish a cadet had fallen in love with me! I wish one would do it now! I adored them all as I sat in the motor watching the ranks of white-clad figures moving to music and looking, in the late sunshine against their green background, like hundreds of marble statues come alive. When they stood to "attention" they were like snow men. Oh, and what music it was, to which they moved! Jack said there couldn't be a scene of its kind half so fine and picturesque anywhere else in the world. I felt quite proud to have been born an American as I looked at it, and so, judging from their expressions, did crowds of pretty girls who gazed adoringly at all those soldiers in the making. It worried me a little, just when the music was at its noblest, that a man in a motor char-à-bancs or something huge and touristy should be telling his victims how West Point had been "the key to the Hudson," and what a fatal blow would have been dealt to hopes of independence if Benedict Arnold could have handed it over to the British. I thought he glared at Jack as he delivered this lecture, guessing perhaps by the shape of his particularly nice nose that he's a Britisher. But just then the sunset gun was fired, echoing again and again among the mountains. All the female victims squeaked and stopped their ears, and the man jumped, so that Jack was saved.

You, who have happy memories of Flirtation Walk, will pity Pat when I tell you that her sensitive conscience made her consent to walk there with Ed Caspian after dinner, Jack and Peter Storm and I following at a respectful distance. Peter could hardly bear it. I suppose the moonlight on the water glinting far under the high cliff walk and the bitter-sweet scent of the ferns went to his head. He forgot that we'd all planned together this way of disgusting Pat with what she thought her duty – throwing her so constantly with Caspian that she'd find out all his faults. But when Peter was leading up to some excuse for joining the pair in front, Jack reminded him that if ever the medicine could be beneficial to the poor little patient it would be in such a scene, and on such a night made for love and happiness.

Mrs. Shuster and Larry and Idonia were walking, too. I believe Larry had intended to take Idonia alone, having advised Lily to rest, but Lily passionately refused to rest. Fancy her on Flirtation Walk!

West Point is a witching place to spend a night in, even though a dance – or a "hop," or whatever they call it – is going on, and you're not invited!

Next morning, after lingering again at Battle Point to drink in as lovely a view as the world can give, we dashed off once more. It was just the hour of "Guard mount," and the cadets looked too fascinating. The girls gazed at them as if they were the heroes of a hundred battles, and so, in a way, they were and are: at least, as West Pointers they're heirs to those who fought a hundred battles. Jack read in some book that out of sixty battles in the Civil War fifty-six had for commanders men from West Point – and not all on one side! Of course, they fought in the old Mexican War as well, for West Point has been a training school ever since 1794. That seems a long time in America!

We had a gorgeous run to Tuxedo – a road that might make Europe jealous – among mountains of the Catskill family, too important and beautiful, I thought, to dismiss as foothills. What a pity Rip Van Winkle spent all his twenty years asleep in one place! I should have walked in my sleep, and changed my bed from mountain to mountain every night or so. Oh, I forgot to tell you, at West Point I heard a new legend of the Catskills. At least, it's so old that it's as good as new. Once when the Indians were just comfortably beginning to feel at home after one of those interrupting Ice Ages, there lived a fearful giant with a wife and children as terrible as himself. The only things they cared to eat were Indian babies; and after this horrid family had been vainly admonished for their ways by the Great Spirit they were suddenly, in the midst of a meal, turned into stone. Being so big, they became mountains, and as some tried to run away and escape the others' fate, they grouped themselves in a chain along the riverside. I don't quite believe this story, though! I'd rather think that a good family of giants asked the Great Spirit to let them become beautiful mountains when they died, and so be remembered lovingly forever, while the world lasts.

The Ramapo Valley is a dream of loveliness all the way, with its lakes like wide-open blue eyes of dryads, and its laced silver ribbon of river. Larry has a friend at court – I mean Tuxedo Park; so he was again useful as well as ornamental – a rare thing for him! We sailed in at the queer gates as confidently as if we owned a hundred acres of land and a lake inside the magic circle. Only the Hippopotamus balked. He had tire trouble just inside the entrance to Paradise; but I think he could have crawled in if Tom, Dick, and Harry had urged him a little. They, poor boys, are under a cloud since Pat's engagement was announced, and are only going on as a sort of mute protest against its irrevocability. If it were any one else except Caspian – Peter Storm, for instance – they would bravely retire from the field with congratulations for the victor, but they have a vague idea in their nice heads that Pat isn't happy and may have to be rescued when the time comes, but they must have felt that nothing so violent could happen in a place as "exclusive" as Tuxedo Park. By the way, don't you hate the expression "exclusive" in connection with society? I do think it quite naïvely snobbish, not to say un-Christian! How much more heart-warming to speak of an inclusive place or entertainment! However, we humans haven't mounted to that height yet; and "exclusive" being not only the word but the feeling at Tuxedo, the Boys felt themselves and the Hippopotamus unsuited to the occasion. Consequently they broke down outside the sacred precincts, and we glided past the gray-stone, red-gabled portals while they grouped round a tire to hide the fact that it was flat.

We spent the morning with Larry's friend for our guide, seeing one grand private place after another. His own is almost the grandest of all, and is on a lake fringed with feathery trees which weave a gold-green network across the blue. The golf course is perfectly beautiful, and made me for the first time want to learn. I never have, because it seems to me a middle-aged, pottering game; and I've always so hated staying at country houses with golf lovers who talk of nothing else. Anyhow, I don't want to have a golf complexion until I'm forced to be over twenty-six.