The Life of Bret Harte Part 6

And yet there is nothing that savors of coa.r.s.eness, much less of levity, in these abrupt romances. When Bret Harte's heroes and heroines meet, it is the coming together of two souls that recognize and attract each other.

It is like a stroke of lightning, and is accepted with a primeval simplicity and un-selfconsciousness. The impression is as deep as it is sudden.

What said Juliet of the anonymous young man whom she had known something less than an hour?

"Go, ask his name: if he be married My grave is like to be my wedding bed."

So felt Liberty Jones when she exclaimed to Dr. Ruysdael, "I'll go with you or I'll die!"

It is this sincerity that sanctifies the rapidity and frankness of Bret Harte's love-affairs. Genuine pa.s.sion takes no account of time, and supplies by one instinctive rush of feeling the experience of years. Given the right persons, time becomes as long and as short as eternity. Thus it was with the two lovers who met and parted at midnight on the hilltop.

"There they stood alone. There was no sound or motion in earth or woods or heaven. They might have been the one man and woman for whom this goodly earth that lay at their feet, rimmed with the deepest azure, was created.

And seeing this they turned toward each other with a sudden instinct, and their hands met, and then their lips in one long kiss."

But this same perfect understanding may be arrived at in a crowd as well as in solitude. Cressy and the Schoolmaster were mutually aware of each other's presence at the dance before they had exchanged a look, and when their eyes met it was in "an isolation as supreme as if they had been alone."

Could any country in the world except our own produce a Cressy! She has all the beauty, much of the refinement, and all the subtle perceptions of a girl belonging to the most sophisticated race and cla.s.s; and underneath she has the strong, primordial, spontaneous qualities, the wholesome instincts, the courage, the steadfastness of that Pioneer people, that religious, fighting, much-enduring people to whom she belonged.

Cressy is the true child of her father; and there is nothing finer in all Bret Harte than his description of this rough backwoodsman, ferocious in his boundary warfare, and yet full of vague aspirations for his daughter, conscious of his own deficiencies, and oppressed with that melancholy which haunts the man who has outgrown the ideals and conventions of his youth. Hiram McKinstry, compared with the masterful Yuba Bill, the picturesque Hamlin, or the majestic Starbottle, is not an imposing figure; but to have divined him was a greater feat of sympathetic imagination than to have created the others.

It is characteristic, too, of Bret Harte that it is Cressy's father who is represented as acutely conscious of his own defects in education; whereas her mother remains true to the ancestral type, deeply distrusting her husband's and her daughter's innovations. Mrs. McKinstry, as the Reader will remember, "looked upon her daughter's studies and her husband's interest in them as weaknesses that might in course of time produce infirmity of homicidal purpose and become enervating of eye and trigger finger.... 'The old man's worrits hev sorter shook out a little of his sand,' she had explained."

Mr. McKinstry, on the other hand, had almost as much devotion to "Kam" as Matthew Arnold had to Culture, and meant very nearly the same thing by it.

Thus he said to the Schoolmaster: "'I should be a powerful sight more kam if I knowed that when I was away huntin' stock or fightin' stakes with them Harrisons that she was a-settin' in school with the other children and the birds and the bees, listenin' to them and to you. Mebbe there's been a little too many scrimmages goin' on round the ranch sence she's been a child; mebbe she orter know sunthin' more of a man than a feller who sparks her and fights for her.'

"The master was silent. Had this selfish, savage, and literally red-handed frontier brawler been moved by some dumb instinct of the power of gentleness to understand his daughter's needs better than he?"

Alas that no genius has arisen to write the epic of the West, as Hawthorne and Mary Wilkins and Miss Jewett have written the epic of New England!

Bret Harte's stories of the Western people are true and striking, but his limitations prevented him from giving much more than sketches of them.

They are not presented with that fullness which is necessary to make a figure in fiction impress itself upon the popular imagination, and become familiar even to people who have never read the book in which it is contained. Cressy, like the other heroines of Bret Harte, flits across the scene a few times, and we see her no more. Mrs. McKinstry is drawn only in outline; and yet she is a strong, tragic figure, of a type now extinct, or nearly so, as powerful and more sane than Meg Merrilies, and far more worthy of a permanent place in literature.

CHAPTER VI

PIONEER LIFE

To be successful and popular among the Pioneers was something really to a man's credit. Men were thrown upon their own resources, and, as in Mediaeval times, were their own police and watchmen, their own firemen, and in most cases their own judge and jury. There was no distribution of the inhabitants into separate cla.s.ses: they const.i.tuted a single cla.s.s, the only distinction being that between individuals. There was not even the broad distinction between those who worked with their heads and those who worked with their hands. Everybody, except the gamblers, performed manual labor; and although this condition could not long prevail in San Francisco or Sacramento, it continued in the mines for many months. In fact, any one who did not live by actual physical toil was regarded by the miners as a social excrescence, a parasite.[27]

An old miner, after spending a night in a San Francisco lodging house, paid the proprietor with gold dust. While waiting for his change he seemed to be studying the keeper of the house as a novel and not over-admirable specimen of humanity. Finally he inquired of him as follows: "Say, now, stranger, do you do nothing else but just sit there and take a dollar from every man that sleeps in these beds?" "Yes," was the reply, "that is my business." "Well, then," said the miner after a little further reflection, "it's a d.a.m.ned mean way of making your living; that's all I can say."

Even those who were not democratic by nature became so in California. All men felt that they were, at last, free and equal. Social distinctions were rubbed out. A man was judged by his conduct, not by his bank account, nor by the set, the family, the club, or the church to which he belonged.[28]

All former records were wiped from the slate; and n.o.body inquired whether, in order to reach California, a man had resigned public office or position, or had escaped from a jail.

"Some of the best men," says Bret Harte, "had the worst antecedents, some of the worst rejoiced in a spotless, Puritan pedigree. 'The boys seem to have taken a fresh deal all round,' said Mr. John Oakhurst one day to me, with the easy confidence of a man who was conscious of his ability to win my money, 'and there is no knowing whether a man will turn out knave or king.'"

This, perhaps, sounds a little improbable, and yet here, as always, Bret Harte has merely stated the fact as it was. One of the most accurate contemporary historians says: "The man esteemed virtuous at home becomes profligate here, the honest man dishonest, and the clergyman sometimes a profane gambler; while, on the contrary, the cases are not few of those who were idle or profligate at home, who came here to be reformed."[29]

"It was a republic of incognitos. No one knew who any one else was, and only the more ill-mannered and uneasy even desired to know. Gentlemen took more trouble to conceal their gentility than thieves living in South Kensington would take to conceal their blackguardism."[30]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FIRST HOTEL AT SAN FRANCISCO

Copyright, Century Co.]

"Have you a letter of introduction?" wrote a Pioneer to a friend in the East about to sail for California. "If you have, never present it. No one here has time to read such things. No one cares even to know your name. If you are the right sort of a man, everything goes smoothly here." "What is your partner's last name?" asked one San Francisco merchant of another in 1850. "Really, I don't know," was the reply; "we have only been acquainted three or four weeks." A miner at Maryville once offered to wager his old blind mule against a plug of tobacco that the company, although they had been acquainted for some years, could not tell one another's names; and this was found upon trial to be the case.

Men were usually known, as Bret Harte relates, by the State or other place from which they came,--with some prefix or affix to denote a salient characteristic. Thus one miner, in a home letter, speaks of his friends, "Big Pike, Little Pike, Old Kentuck, Little York, Big York, Sandy, and Scotty." Men originally from the East, and long supposed to be dead, turned up in California, seeking a new career. In fact, there seems to have been a general inclination among the Pioneers to strike out in new directions. "To find a man here engaged in his own trade or profession,"

wrote a Forty-Niner, "is a rare thing. The merchant of to-day is to-morrow a doctor; lawyers turn bankers, and bankers lawyers. The miners are almost continually on the move, pa.s.sing from one claim to another, and from the Southern to the Northern mines, or _vice versa_."

Bret Harte was startled by meeting an old acquaintance in a strange situation. "At my first breakfast in a restaurant on Long Wharf I was haunted during the meal by a shadowy resemblance which the waiter who took my order bore to a gentleman to whom in my boyhood I had looked up as to a mirror of elegance, urbanity, and social accomplishment. Fearful lest I should insult the waiter--who carried a revolver--by this reminiscence, I said nothing to him; but a later inquiry of the proprietor proved that my suspicions were correct. 'He's mighty handy,' said this man, 'and can talk elegant to a customer as is waiting for his cakes, and make him kinder forget he ain't sarved.'"

Bret Harte relates another case. "An Argonaut just arriving was amazed at recognizing in the boatman who pulled him ash.o.r.e, and who charged him the modest sum of fifty dollars for the performance, a cla.s.smate at Oxford.

'Were you not,' he asked eagerly, 'Senior Wrangler in '43?' 'Yes,' said the other significantly, 'but I also pulled stroke against Cambridge.'"

A Yale College professor was hauling freight with a yoke of oxen; a Yale graduate was selling peanuts on the Plaza at San Francisco; an ex-governor was playing the fiddle in a bar-room; a physician was was.h.i.+ng dishes in a hotel; a minister was acting as waiter in a restaurant; a lawyer was paring potatoes in the same place. Lawyers, indeed, were doing a great deal of useful work in California. One kept a mush and milk stand; another sold pies at a crossing of the American River; a third drove a team of mules.

John A. McGlynn, one of the best known and most successful Forty-Niners, began by hitching two half-broken mustangs to an express wagon, and acting as teamster. He was soon chosen to enforce the rules regulating the unloading of vessels and the cartage of goods. All the drivers obeyed him, except one, a native of Chili, a big, powerful man, with a team of six American mules. McGlynn ordered him into line; he refused; and McGlynn struck him with his whip. In an instant both men had leaped from their wagon-seats to the ground. The Chileno rushed at McGlynn, with his bowie-knife in his hand; but the American was left-handed, for which the Chileno was not prepared; and with his first blow McGlynn stretched his antagonist on the ground. There he held him until the fellow promised good behavior. On regaining his feet the defeated man invited all hands to drink, and became thenceforth a warm friend of the victor.

The judge of the Court for Santa Cruz County kept a hotel, and after court adjourned, he would take off his coat and wait on the table, serving jurors, attorneys, criminals and sheriffs with the same impartiality which he exhibited on the bench. A brief term of service as waiter in a San Francisco restaurant laid the foundation of the highly successful career of another lawyer, a very young man. One day a merchant upon whom he was waiting remarked to a companion: "If I only had a lawyer who was worth a d.a.m.n, I could win that suit." "I am a lawyer," interposed the waiter, "and I am looking for a chance to get into business. Try me." The merchant did so; the suit was won; and the former waiter was soon in full legal practice.

Acquaintances were formed, and the beginning of a fortune was often made, by chance meetings and incidents. Men got at one another more quickly than is possible in an old and conservative society. One who became a distinguished citizen of California began his career by accepting an offer of humble employment when he stepped into the street on his first morning in San Francisco. "Look here, my friend," said a merchant to him, "if you won't get mad about it, I'll offer you a dollar to fill this box with sand." "Thank you," said the young fellow, "I'll fill it all day long on those terms, and never become angry in the least." He filled the box, and received payment. "Now," he said, "we'll go and take a drink with this dollar." The merchant acquiesced with a laugh, and thus began a life-long connection between the two men.

There were some recognitions of old acquaintances as remarkable as the making of new friends. Two brothers, Englishmen from the Society Islands, met in a mining town, and were not aware of their relations.h.i.+p until a chance conversation between them disclosed it. A merchant from Cincinnati arrived in San Francisco with the intention of settling there. One of the first persons whom he met was a prosperous business man who had absconded some years before with ten thousand dollars of his money. He recovered the ten thousand dollars and interest, without making the matter public, and went back to Ohio well satisfied.

A lawyer of note in San Francisco remarked, in 1850, that the last time he saw Ned McGowan, previous to his arrival in California, McGowan stood in the criminal dock of a Philadelphia court where he was receiving a sentence to the State prison for robbery. Subsequently he was pardoned by the Governor of Pennsylvania, on condition that he should leave the State.

When this lawyer settled in San Francisco, he was employed to defend some persons who had been arrested for drunkenness; and upon entering the court room he was thunderstruck by the appearance of the magistrate upon the bench. After a careful survey of the magistrate and a pinch of the flesh to make sure that he was not dreaming, he exclaimed:--

"Ned McGowan, is that you?"

"It is," was the cool reply.

"Well, gentlemen," said the lawyer, turning to his clients, "you had better toll down heavy, for I can do you no good with such a judge."

Tolling down heavy was probably a practice which the judge encouraged, for, a year later, upon the organization of the Vigilance Committee, Ned McGowan fled from San Francisco, if not from California.

California, from 1849 to 1858, was a meeting ground for all the nations of the earth. One of the first acts of the Legislature was to appoint an official translator. The confusion of languages resulted in many misunderstandings and some murders. A Frenchman and a German at Moquelumne Hill had a controversy about a water-privilege, and being unable to understand each other, they resorted first to pantomime, and then to firearms, with the unfortunate result that the German was killed.

A trial which occurred at San Jose ill.u.s.trates the multiplicity of tongues in California. A Spaniard accused a Tartar of a.s.saulting him, but as the Tartar and his witnesses could not speak English the proceedings were delayed. At last another Tartar, called Arghat, was found who could speak Chinese, and then a Chinaman, called Alab, who could speak Spanish; and with these as interpreters the trial began. Another difficulty then arose, namely, the swearing of the witnesses. The court, having ascertained that the Tartar mode of swearing is by lifting a lighted candle toward the sun, adopted that form. The judge administered the ordinary oath to the English and Spanish interpreters; the latter then swore Arghat as Tartar and Chinese interpreter, and he, in turn, swore Alab, by the burning candle and the sun, as Chinese and Spanish interpreter; and the trial then proceeded in four languages.

The first newspaper was printed half in English, half in Spanish. Sermons were preached by Catholic priests both in English and in Spanish. The Fourth of July was celebrated at San Jose in 1850 by one oration in English and another in Spanish. German and Italian weekly papers were published in San Francisco. The French population of the city was especially large. They made _rouge-et-noir_ the fas.h.i.+on. "Where there are Frenchmen," remarks a Pioneer, "you will find music, singing and gayety."

A French benevolent society was established at San Francisco in 1851.

Many of the best citizens of California were Englishmen. There was a famous ale-house in San Francisco, called the Boomerang, where sirloins of beef could be washed down with English ale, and followed by Stilton cheese; where the London "Times," "Punch" and "Bell's Life" were taken in.

Australia and New South Wales contributed a considerable and by no means the best part of the population. The "Sydney Ducks" who infested the dark lanes and alleys of San Francisco, and lurked about the wharves at night, lived mainly by robbery; and they often murdered in order to rob. An English traveller said of them: "I have seen vice in almost every form, and under almost every condition in the Old World, but never did it appear to me in so repulsive and disgusting a shape as it exists among the lower orders of Sydney, and generally in New South Wales."[31]

But not all of the immigrants from English colonies were of this character. Many were respectable men, and succeeded well in California. An Australian cabman, for example, brought a barouche, a fine pair of horses, a tall hat and a livery coat all the way across the Pacific, and made a fortune by hiring out at the rate of twenty dollars an hour.