The Life of Bret Harte Part 20

And then comes an example of that extraordinary keenness of observation with which Bret Harte was gifted:--"I have said that the dog was generally sincere in his efforts. I recall but one instance to the contrary. I remember a young collie who first attracted my attention by his persistent barking. Whether he did this, as the plough-boy whistled, 'for want of thought,' or whether it was a running protest against his occupation, I could not determine, until one day I noticed that, in barking, he slightly threw up his neck and shoulders, and that the two-wheeled barrow-like vehicle behind him, having its weight evenly poised on the wheels by the trucks in the hands of its driver, enabled him by this movement to cunningly throw the centre of gravity and the greater weight on the man,--a fact which the less sagacious brute never discerned.... I cannot help thinking that the people who have lost this gentle, sympathetic, characteristic figure from their domestic life and surroundings have not acquired an equal gain through his harsh labors."

Of his Consular experiences at Crefeld the following is the only one which found its way into literature: "The Consul's chief duty was to uphold the flag of his own country by the examination and certification of divers invoices sent to his office by the manufacturers. But, oddly enough, these messengers were chiefly women,--not clerks, but ordinary household servants, and on busy days the Consulate might have been mistaken for a female registry office, so filled and possessed it was by waiting Madchen.

Here it was that Gretchen, Liebchen, and Clarchen, in the cleanest of gowns, and stoutly but smartly shod, brought their invoices in a piece of clean paper, or folded in a blue handkerchief, and laid them, with fingers more or less worn and stubby from hard service, before the Consul for his signature. Once, in the case of a very young Madchen, that signature was blotted by the sweep of a flaxen braid upon it as the child turned to go; but generally there was a grave, serious business instinct and sense of responsibility in these girls of ordinary peasant origin, which, equally with their sisters of France, were unknown to the English or American woman of any cla.s.s."

Bret Harte remained nearly two years at Crefeld, but his wife did not join him there, and, so far as the world knows, they never met again. In May, 1880, he was transferred to the much more lucrative and more desirable Consuls.h.i.+p at Glasgow. It was one of the last cases in which government bestowed public office as a reward for literary excellence,--a custom so hallowed by age and a.s.sociation that every lover of literature will look back upon it with fond regret.

CHAPTER XVI

BRET HARTE AT GLASGOW

After a month in London, Bret Harte took possession of the Consulate at Glasgow in July, 1880, and remained there five years. His annual salary was three thousand dollars.

In September he wrote to a friend: "As I am trying to get up a good reputation here, I stay at my post pretty regularly, occasionally making a cheap excursion. This is a country for them. The other day I went to Staffa. It was really the only 'sight' in Europe that quite filled all my expectations. But alas! that magnificent, cathedral-like cave was presently filled with a howling party of sandwich-eating tourists, splas.h.i.+ng in the water and climbing up the rocks. One should only go there alone, or with some sympathetic spirit."[100]

How far the Consul's good intentions were fulfilled it is difficult to say. London attracted Bret Harte as it attracts everybody of Anglo-Saxon descent. That vast and sombre metropolis may weary the body and vex the soul of the visitor, but, after all, it remains the headquarters of the English-speaking race, and the American, as well as the Canadian or the Australian, returns to it again and again with a vague longing, never satisfied, but never lost.

Another reason for the absenteeism of the Consul was that he lectured now and again in different parts of England, and that he paid frequent visits to country houses. Mr. Pemberton quotes a letter from him which contains an amusing ill.u.s.tration of the English boy's sporting spirit:--

"MY DEAR PEMBERTON,--Don't be alarmed if you should hear of my nearly having blown the top of my head off. Last Monday I had my face badly cut by the recoil of an overloaded gun. I do not know yet beneath these bandages whether I shall be permanently marked. At present I am invisible, and have tried to keep the accident a secret. When the surgeon was st.i.tching me together, the son of the house, a boy of twelve, came timidly to the door of my room. 'Tell Mr. Bret Harte it's all right,' he said, '_he killed the hare_.'"

However, the reports made by the Consul to the State Department seem to indicate more attention to his duties than has commonly been credited to him. One of these communications, dated May 4, 1882, gives a detailed account of the peculiar Glasgow custom according to which the several flats or floors of tenement houses are owned by separate persons, usually the occupants, each owner of a floor being a joint proprietor, with the other floor-owners, of the land on which the building stands, of the roof, the staircase and the walls. Another letter states, in answer to a question by the Department, that there were at the time probably not more than six American citizens resident in Glasgow, and that only one such was known to the Consul or to his predecessor. This, in an English-speaking city of six hundred thousand people, seems extraordinary.

The most interesting of Bret Harte's communications to the State Department is perhaps the following:--

"On a recent visit to the Island of Iona, within this Consular District, I found in the consecrated ground of the ruined Cathedral the graves of nineteen American seamen who had perished in the wreck of the 'Guy Mannering' on the evening of the 31st of December, 1865, on the north coast of the island. The place where they are interred is marked by two rows of low granite pediments at the head and feet of the dead, supporting, and connected by, an iron chain which encloses the whole s.p.a.ce. This was done by the order and at the expense of the Lord of the Manor, the present Duke of Argyle.

"I venture to make these facts known to the Department, satisfied that such recognition of the thoughtful courtesy of the Duke of Argyle as would seem most fit and appropriate to the Department will be made, and that possibly a record of the names of the seamen will be placed upon some durable memorial erected upon the spot.

"In conclusion I beg to state that should the Department deem any expenditure by the Government for this purpose inexpedient, I am willing, with the permission of the Department, to endeavor to procure by private subscription a sufficient fund for the outlay."

It is a pleasure to record that these suggestions were adopted by the State Department. A letter of acknowledgment and thanks was sent to the Duke of Argyle, and a shaft or obelisk with the names of the seamen inscribed thereon was erected by the United States Government in the latter part of the year 1882.

Bret Harte's Consular experiences with seamen recall those of Hawthorne at Liverpool, and he appears to have acted with an equal sense of humanity.

In one case he insisted that two sailors who had been convicted of theft should nevertheless receive the three months' pay due them, without which they would have been penniless on their discharge from prison. He took the ground that conviction of this offence was not equivalent to desertion, and therefore that the wages were not forfeited. He adds: "The case did not appear to call for any leniency on the part of the Government toward the s.h.i.+p-owners. The record of the s.h.i.+p's voyage was one of unseaworthiness, brutality and inefficiency."

In another case, the Consul supplied from his own pocket the wants of a s.h.i.+pwrecked American sailor, and procured for him a pa.s.sage home, there being no government fund available for the purpose.

A glimpse of his Consular functions is given in the opening paragraph of _Young Robin Gray_:--

"The good American bark Skysc.r.a.per was swinging at her moorings in the Clyde, off Bannock, ready for sea. But that good American bark--although owned in Baltimore--had not a plank of American timber in her hulk, nor a native American in her crew, and even her nautical 'goodness' had been called in serious question by divers of that crew during her voyage, and answered more or less inconclusively with belaying-pins, marlin-spikes, and ropes' ends at the hands of an Irish-American Captain and a Dutch and Danish Mate. So much so, that the mysterious powers of the American Consul at St. Kentigern[101] had been evoked to punish mutiny on the one hand, and battery and starvation on the other; both equally attested by manifestly false witness and subornation on each side. In the exercise of his functions, the Consul had opened and shut some jail doors, and otherwise effected the usual sullen and deceitful compromise, and his flag was now flying, on a final visit, from the stern sheets of a smart boat alongside. It was with a feeling of relief at the end of the interview that he at last lifted his head above an atmosphere of perjury and bilge-water and came on deck."

When the Consul reached the deck he saw, for the first time, Ailsa Callender, one of the most charming of his heroines, and as characteristically Scotch as M'liss was characteristically Western. The Reader will not be sorry to recall the impression that Ailsa Callender subsequently made upon the young American, Robert Gray:--

"'She took me to task for not laying up the yacht on Sunday that the men could go to "Kirk," and for swearing at a bargeman who ran across our bows. It's their perfect simplicity and sincerity in all this that gets me! You'd have thought that the old man was my guardian, and the daughter my aunt.' After a pause he uttered a reminiscent laugh. 'She thought we ate and drank too much on the yacht, and wondered what we could find to do all day. All this, you know, in the gentlest, caressing sort of voice, as if she was really concerned, like one's own sister. Well, not exactly like mine,'--he interrupted himself grimly,--'but, hang it all, you know what I mean. You know that our girls over there haven't got _that_ trick of voice. Too much self-a.s.sertion, I reckon; things made too easy for them by us men. Habit of race, I dare say.' He laughed a little. 'Why, I mislaid my glove when I was coming away, and it was as good as a play to hear her commiserating and sympathizing and hunting for it as if it were a lost baby.'

"'But you've seen Scotch girls before this,' said the Consul. 'There were Lady Glairn's daughters whom you took on a cruise.'

"'Yes, but the swell Scotch all imitate the English, as everybody else does, for the matter of that, our girls included; and they're all alike.'"

The shrewd, solid, genial, even religious Sir James MacFen, in _The Heir of the McHulishes_, and the porter in _A Rose of Glenbogie_, are native to the soil, and have no counterparts in America, east or west.

These three stories dealing with Scotch scenes and people prove the falsity of the a.s.sertion sometimes made that Bret Harte could write only about California:--he could have gone on writing about Scotland all his life, had he continued to live there, and the tales would have been as readable, if not so nearly unique, as those which deal with California. He liked the Scotch people, and was received by them with great kindness and hospitality. "On my birthday," he wrote, "which became quite accidentally known to a few friends in the hotel, my table was covered with bouquets of flowers and little remembrances from cigar-cases to lockets."

At this period Bret Harte made the acquaintance of William Black and Walter Besant, and with the former he became very intimate. In the life of William Black by his friend, Sir Wemyss Reid, there are many references to Bret Harte. The two story-writers first met as guests of Sir George Wombwell, who had invited them and a few others, including Mr. Shepard, the American vice-Consul at Bradford, to make a driving trip to the ruined abbeys of Eastern Yorks.h.i.+re. The party dined together at the Yorks.h.i.+re Club in York, which was the meeting point. "I remember few more lively evenings than that," writes Sir Wemyss Reid. "Black and Bret Harte, whose acquaintance he had just made, vied with each other in the good stories they told and the repartees they exchanged."

Shortly afterward Black wrote to Reid, "Bret Harte went down to us at Brighton, and if we didn't amuse him he certainly amused us. He is coming again next week."

Later he wrote again from the Reform Club in London, to Reid: "In a few weeks' time don't be surprised if Bret Harte and I come and look in upon you--that is, if he is not compelled for mere shame's sake to go to his Consular duties ( ! ! ! ) at once. He is the most extraordinary globule of mercury--comet--aerolite gone drunk--flash of lightning doing Catherine wheels--I ever had any experience of. n.o.body knows where he is, and the day before yesterday I discovered here a pile of letters that had been slowly acc.u.mulating for him since February, 1879. It seems he never reported himself to the all-seeing Escott [the hall porter], and never asked for letters when he got his month's honorary members.h.i.+p last year.

People are now sending letters to him from America addressed to me at Brighton! But he is a mystery and the cause of mystifications."

In the following July there is another mention of Bret Harte in one of Black's letters. "Bret Harte was to have been back from Paris last night, but he is a wandering comet. The only place he is sure not to be found in is the Glasgow Consulate."

But the Consul's wanderings were not so frequent as Mr. Black supposed.

Bret Harte had almost a monomania for not answering letters; and his absence from Glasgow could not safely be inferred from his failure to acknowledge communications addressed to him there. A rumor as to the Consul's prolonged desertion of his post had reached the State Department at Was.h.i.+ngton, and in November, 1882, the Department wrote to him requesting a report on the subject. He replied that he had not been away from Glasgow beyond the usual limit of ten days,[102] at any one time, except on holidays and Sundays. This report appears to have been accepted as satisfactory, and the incident was closed.

At one time Bret Harte was to have dined with Sir Wemyss Reid and William Black at the Reform Club; "but in his place," says the biographer, "came a telegram in which I was invited to ask Black and Lockyer, who had just spent a few days with him in Scotland, their opinion of the game of poker--evidence that they had not spent all their time in Scotland in viewing scenery."

The damp climate of Glasgow did not agree with Bret Harte, and so early in his residence there as July, 1881, he wrote to the State Department requesting leave of absence for three months, with permission to visit the United States, on the ground that the state of his health was such that he might require a complete change of scene and air. The request was granted, but the Consul did not return to his native country.

In March, 1885, Bret Harte wrote to Black as follows:--

"My DEAR BLACK,--I was in the far South, trying to get rid of an obstinate cold, when your note reached me, and haven't been in London for some time. I expected you to drop in here on your way up to 'Balnagownie's arms'--whoever she may be. I'm afraid I don't want any 'Ardgay' in mine, thank you. Why any man in this damp climate should want to make himself wetter by salmon-fis.h.i.+ng pa.s.ses my comprehension. Is there no drier sport to be had in all Great Britain? I shudder at the name of a river, and s.h.i.+ver at the sight of any fish that isn't dried. I hear, too, that you are in the habit of making poetry on these occasions, and that you are dropping lines all over the place. How far is that place--anyway? I shall be in Glasgow until the end of March, and if you'll dry yourself thoroughly and come in and dine with me at that time, I'll show you how 'the laboring poor' of Glasgow live. Yours always,

"BRET HARTE."

But, alas for Bret Harte! when this letter was written, his labors at Glasgow were about to cease. In the year 1885 a new Administration entered upon its duties at Was.h.i.+ngton, and many Consuls were superseded, perhaps for good cause. Bret Harte was removed in July, and another man of letters, Mr. Frank Underwood of Boston, reigned in his stead.

CHAPTER XVII

BRET HARTE IN LONDON

In 1880, during one of his many visits to London, Bret Harte made the acquaintance of M. Arthur and Mme. Van de Velde, who were already enthusiastic readers of his works, and it was not long before they became his most intimate friends in England if not in the world. From 1885, when he went to London to live, until the death of M. Van de Velde in 1895, he was an inmate of their house for a great part of the time. Afterward, Bret Harte took rooms at number 74 Lancaster Gate, which remained his headquarters for the rest of his life; but he was often a guest at Mme.

Van de Velde's town house, and at her country home, The Red House at Camberley in Suss.e.x.

M. Van de Velde was a Belgian whose life had been spent in the diplomatic service of his country. For many years he was Councillor of Legation in London. Mme. Van de Velde, his second wife, is of Italian birth, an accomplished woman of the world, and a writer of reputation. She translated many of Bret Harte's stories into French, and is the author of "Random Recollections of Court and Society," "Cosmopolitan Recollections,"

and "French Fiction of To-day." A quotation has already been made from her discriminating essay on Bret Harte. Her influence upon him was an important factor in the last twenty years of his life. Mme. Van de Velde led him to take himself and his art more seriously than he had done since coming to England. He settled down to his work, put his shoulder to the wheel, and kept it there during the remainder of his life. For a man naturally indolent and inclined to underrate his own writings, this well-sustained industry was remarkable. Bret Harte was always more easily influenced by women than by men. He showed his best side to them, and they called out the gentleness and chivalry of his nature. No woman ever spoke ill of him, and among his most grateful admirers to-day are the California women who contributed to the "Overland Monthly," and who testify to the uniform kindness and consideration with which he treated them.