by Mark Twain
“Ah, Mr. Bret Harte, glad to see you, sir! Take the whole stateroom, sir.”
The bedless miner cast a scowl upon Harte which shed a twilight gloom over the whole region, and frightened that author to such a degree that his key and its wooden tag rattled in his quaking hand; then he disappeared from the miner’s view, and sought seclusion and safety behind the life-boats and such things on the hurricane-deck. But nevertheless the thing happened which he was expecting—the miner soon appeared up there and went peering around; whenever he approached dangerously near, Harte shifted his shelter and hid behind a new one. This went on without unhappy accident for half an hour, but at last failure came: Harte made a miscalculation; he crept cautiously out from behind a life-boat and came face to face with the miner! He felt that it was an awful situation, a fatal situation, but it was not worth while to try to escape, so he stood still and waited for his doom. The miner said, sternly,
“Are you Bret Harte?”
Harte confessed it, in a feeble voice.
“Did you write that ‘Luck of Roaring Camp’?”
Harte confessed again.
“Sure?”
“Yes”—in a whisper.
The miner burst out fervently and affectionately,
“Son of a ———! Put it there!” and he gripped Harte’s hand in his mighty talons and mashed it.
Tom Fitch knows that welcome phrase, and the love and admiration that purge it of its earthiness and make it divine.
In the early days I liked Bret Harte, and so did the others, but by and by I got over it; so, also, did the others. He couldn’t keep a friend permanently. He was bad, distinctly bad; he had no feeling, and he had no conscience. His wife was all that a good woman, a good wife, a good mother, and a good friend, can be; but when he went to Europe as Consul he left her and his little children behind, and never came back again from that time until his death, twenty-six years later.
He was an incorrigible borrower of money; he borrowed from all his friends; if he ever repaid a loan the incident failed to pass into history. He was always ready to give his note, but the matter ended there. We sailed for Europe on the 10th of April, 1878, and on the preceding night there was a banquet to Bayard Taylor, who was going out in the same ship as our Minister to Germany. At that dinner I met a gentleman whose society I found delightful, and we became very friendly and communicative. He fell to talking about Bret Harte, and it soon appeared that he had a grievance against him. He had so admired Harte’s writings that he had greatly desired to know Harte himself. The acquaintanceship was achieved, and the borrowing began. The man was rich, and he lent gladly. Harte always gave his note, and of his own motion, for it was not required of him. Harte had then been in the East about eight years, and these borrowings had been going on during several of those years; in the aggregate they amounted to about three thousand dollars. The man told me that Harte’s notes were a distress to him, because he supposed that they were a distress to Harte.
Bret Harte continued: his visit to Newport; his several visits to Mr. Clemens in Hartford; once to borrow money, once to finish a story, once to write a play with Mr. Clemens; at the close of the latter visit Mr. Clemens gives him his opinion of his character.
Then he had what he thought was a happy idea: he compacted the notes into a bale, and sent them to Harte on the 24th of December ’77 as a Christmas present; and with them he sent a note begging Harte to allow him this privilege because of the warm, and kind, and brotherly feeling which prompted it. Per next day’s mail Harte fired the bale back at him, accompanying it with a letter which was all afire with insulted dignity, and which formally and by irrevocable edict permanently annulled the existing friendship. But there was nothing in it about paying the notes some time or other.
When Harte made his spectacular progress across the continent, in 1870, he took up his residence at Newport, Rhode Island, that breeding-place—that stud-farm, so to speak—of aristocracy; aristocracy of the American type; that auction mart where the English nobilities come to trade hereditary titles for American girls and cash. Within a twelvemonth he had spent his ten thousand dollars, and he shortly thereafter left Newport, in debt to the butcher, the baker, and the rest, and took up his residence with his wife and his little children in New York. I will remark that during Harte’s sojourns in Newport and Cohasset he constantly went to dinners among the fashionables where he was the only male guest whose wife had not been invited. There are some harsh terms in our language, but I am not acquainted with any that is harsh enough to properly characterize a husband who will act like that.
When Harte had been living in New York two or three months he came to Hartford and stopped over night with us. He said he was without money, and without a prospect; that he owed the New York butcher and baker two hundred and fifty dollars, and could get no further credit from them; also he was in debt for his rent, and his landlord was threatening to turn his little family into the street. He had come to me to ask for a loan of two hundred and fifty dollars. I said that that would relieve only the butcher and baker part of the situation, with the landlord still hanging over him; he would better accept of five hundred, which he did. He employed the rest of his visit in delivering himself of sparkling sarcasms about our house, our furniture, and the rest of our domestic arrangements.
Howells was saying, yesterday, that Harte was one of the most delightful persons he had ever met, and one of the wittiest. He said that there was a charm about him that made a person forget, for the time being, his meannesses, his shabbinesses and his dishonesties, and almost forgive them. Howells is right about Harte’s bright wit, but he had probably never made a search into the character of it. The character of it spoiled it; it possessed no breadth and no variety; it consisted solely of sneers and sarcasms; when there was nothing to sneer at, Harte did not flash and sparkle, and was not more entertaining than the rest of us.
Once he wrote a play with a perfectly delightful Chinaman in it—a play which would have succeeded if any one else had written it; but Harte had earned the enmity of the New York dramatic critics by freely and frequently charging them with being persons who never said a favorable thing about a new play except when the favorable thing was bought and paid for beforehand. The critics were waiting for him, and when his own play was put upon the stage they attacked it with joy, they abused it and derided it remorselessly. It failed, and Harte believed that the critics were answerable for the failure. By and by he proposed that he and I should collaborate in a play in which each of us should introduce several characters and handle them. He came to Hartford and remained with us two weeks. He was a man who could never persuade himself to do a stroke of work until his credit was gone, and all his money, and the wolf was at his door; then he could sit down and work harder—until temporary relief was secured—than any man I have ever seen.
To digress for a moment. He came to us once, just upon the verge of Christmas, to stay a day and finish a short story for the New York Sun called “Faithful Blossom”—if my memory serves me. He was to have a hundred and fifty dollars for the story, in any case, but Mr. Dana had said he should have two hundred and fifty if he finished it in time for Christmas use. Harte had reached the middle of his story, but his time-limit was now so brief that he could afford no interruptions, wherefore he had come to us to get away from the persistent visits of his creditors. He arrived about dinner time. He said his time was so short that he must get to work straightway after dinner; then he went on chatting in serenity and comfort all through dinner, and afterward by the fire in the library until ten o’clock; then Mrs. Clemens went to bed, and my hot whisky punch was brought; also a duplicate of it for Harte. The chatting continued. I generally consume only one hot whisky, and allow myself until eleven o’clock for this function; but Harte kept on pouring and pouring, and consuming and consuming, until one o’clock; then I excused myself and said good night. He asked if he could have a bottle of whisky in his room. We rang up George, and he furnished it. It seemed to m
e that he had already swallowed whisky enough to incapacitate him for work, but it was not so; moreover, there were no signs upon him that his whisky had had a dulling effect upon his brain. He went to his room and worked the rest of the night, with his bottle of whisky and a big wood fire for comfort. At five or six in the morning he rang for George; his bottle was empty, and he ordered another; between then and nine he drank the whole of the added quart, and then came to breakfast not drunk, not even tipsy, but quite at himself, and alert and animated. His story was finished; finished within the time-limit, and the extra hundred dollars was secured. I wondered what a story would be like that had been completed in circumstances like these; an hour later I was to find out.
At ten o’clock the young girls’ club—by name the Saturday Morning Club—arrived in our library. I was booked to talk to the lassies, but I asked Harte to take my place and read his story. He began it, but it was soon plain that he was like most other people—he didn’t know how to read; therefore I took it from him and read it myself. The last half of that story was written under the unpromising conditions which I have described; it is a story which I have never seen mentioned in print, and I think it is quite unknown, but it is my conviction that it belongs at the very top of Harte’s literature.
To go back to that other visit. The next morning after his arrival we went to the billiard room and began work upon the play. I named my characters and described them; Harte did the same by his. Then he began to sketch the scenario, act by act, and scene by scene. He worked rapidly, and seemed to be troubled by no hesitations or indecisions; what he accomplished in an hour or two would have cost me several weeks of painful and difficult labor, and would have been valueless when I got through. But Harte’s work was good, and usable; to me it was a wonderful performance.
Then the filling-in began. Harte set down the dialogue swiftly, and I had nothing to do except when one of my characters was to say something; then Harte told me the nature of the remark that was required, I furnished the language, and he jotted it down. After this fashion we worked two or three or four hours every day for a couple of weeks, and produced a comedy that was good and would act. His part of it was the best part of it, but that did not disturb the critics; when the piece was staged they praised my share of the work with a quite suspicious prodigality of approval, and gave Harte’s share all the vitriol they had in stock. The piece perished.
All that fortnight at our house Harte made himself liberally entertaining at breakfast, at luncheon, at dinner, and in the billiard room—which was our workshop—with smart and bright sarcasms leveled at everything on the place; and for Mrs. Clemens’s sake I endured it all, until the last day; then, in the billiard room, he contributed the last feather: it seemed to be a slight and vague and veiled satirical remark with Mrs. Clemens for a target; he denied that she was meant, and I might have accepted the denial if I had been in a friendly mood, but I was not, and was too strongly moved to give his reasonings a fair hearing. I said in substance this:
“Harte, your wife is all that is fine and lovable and lovely, and I exhaust praise when I say she is Mrs. Clemens’s peer—but in all ways you are a shabby husband to her, and you often speak sarcastically, not to say sneeringly, of her, just as you are constantly doing in the case of other women; but your privilege ends there; you must spare Mrs. Clemens. It does not become you to sneer at anybody at all; you are not charged anything here for the bed you sleep in, yet you have been very smartly and wittily sarcastic about it, whereas you ought to have been more reserved in that matter, remembering that you have not owned a bed of your own for ten years; you have made sarcastic remarks about the furniture of the bedroom, and about the table-ware, and about the servants, and about the carriage and the sleigh, and the coachman’s livery—in fact about every detail of the house and half of its occupants; you have spoken of all these matters contemptuously, in your unwholesome desire to be witty, but this does not become you; you are barred from these criticisms by your situation and circumstances; you have a talent and a reputation which would enable you to support your family most respectably and independently if you were not a born bummer and tramp; you are a loafer and an idler, and you go clothed in rags, with not a whole shred on you except your inflamed red tie, and it isn’t paid for; nine-tenths of your income is borrowed money—money which, in fact, is stolen, since you never intended to repay any of it; you sponge upon your hard-working widowed sister for bread and shelter in the mechanics’ boarding-house which she keeps; latterly you have not ventured to show your face in her neighborhood because of the creditors who are on watch for you. Where have you lived? Nobody knows. Your own people do not know. But I know. You have lived in the Jersey woods and marshes, and have supported yourself as do the other tramps; you have confessed it without a blush; you sneer at everything in this house, but you ought to be more tender, remembering that everything in it was honestly come by and has been paid for.”
Harte owed me fifteen hundred dollars at that time; later he owed me three thousand. He offered me his note, but I was not keeping a museum, and didn’t take it.
Bret Harte continued: his contract with Bliss to write “Gabriel Conroy”—Two incidents: the miner of Jackass Gulch who borrowed a dollar of Mr. Clemens to give to the musical tramps; Bret Harte borrowed a dollar of Mr. Clemens to give to messenger for carrying manuscript to Parsloe’s theatre.
Harte’s indifference concerning contracts and engagements was phenomenal. He could be blithe and gay with a broken engagement hanging over him; he could even joke about the matter; if that kind of a situation ever troubled him, the fact was not discoverable by anybody. He entered into an engagement to write the novel, “Gabriel Conroy,” for my Hartford publisher, Bliss. It was to be published by subscription. With the execution of the contract, Bliss’s sorrows began. The precious time wasted along; Bliss could get plenty of promises out of Harte, but no manuscript—at least no manuscript while Harte had money, or could borrow it. He wouldn’t touch the pen until the wolf actually had him by the hind leg; then he would do two or three days’ violent work and let Bliss have it for an advance of royalties. About once a month Harte would get into desperate straits; then he would dash off enough manuscript to set him temporarily free, and carry it to Bliss and get a royalty-advance. These assaults upon his prospective profits were never very large, except in the eyes of Bliss; to Bliss’s telescopic vision a couple of hundred dollars that weren’t due, or hadn’t been earned, was a prodigious matter. By and by Bliss became alarmed. In the beginning he had recognized that a contract for a full-grown novel from Bret Harte was a valuable prize, and he had been indiscreet enough to let his good fortune be trumpeted about the country. The trumpeting could have been valuable for Bliss if he had been dealing with a man addicted to keeping his engagements; but he was not dealing with that kind of a man, therefore the influence of the trumpeting had died down and vanished away long before Harte had arrived at the middle of his book; that kind of an interest once dead is dead beyond resurrection. Finally Bliss realized that “Gabriel Conroy” was a white elephant. The book was nearing a finish, but, as a subscription-book, its value had almost disappeared. He had advanced to Harte thus far—I think my figures are correct—thirty-six hundred dollars, and he knew that he should not be able to sleep much until he could find some way to make that loss good; so he sold the serial rights in “Gabriel Conroy” to one of the magazines for that trifling sum—and a good trade it was, for the serial rights were not really worth that money, and the book-rights were hardly worth the duplicate of it.
I think the sense of shame was left out of Harte’s constitution. He told me once, apparently as an incident of no importance—a mere casual reminiscence—that in his early days in California when he was a blooming young chap with the world before him, and bread and butter to seek, he kept a woman who was twice his age—no, the woman kept him. When he was Consul in Great Britain, twenty-five or thirty years later, he was kept, at different times, by a couple of wom
en—a connection which has gone into history, along with the names of those women. He lived in their houses, and in the house of one of them he died.
I call to mind an incident in my commerce with Harte which reminds me of one like it which happened during my sojourn on the Pacific coast. When Orion’s thoughtful carefulness enabled my “Hale and Norcross” stock-speculation to ruin me, I had three hundred dollars left, and nowhere in particular to lay my head. I went to Jackass Gulch and cabined for a while with some friends of mine, surface-miners. They were lovely fellows; charming comrades in every way, and honest and honorable men; their credit was good for bacon and beans, and this was fortunate, because their kind of mining was a peculiarly precarious one; it was called pocket-mining, and so far as I have been able to discover, pocket-mining is confined and restricted on this planet to a very small region around about Jackass Gulch. A “pocket” is a concentration of gold-dust in one little spot on the mountain-side; it is close to the surface; the rains wash its particles down the mountain-side, and they spread, fan-shape, wider and wider as they go. The pocket-miner washes a pan of dirt, finds a speck or two of gold in it, makes a step to the right or the left, washes another pan, finds another speck or two, and goes on washing to the right and to the left until he knows when he has reached both limits of the fan, by the best of circumstantial evidence, to wit—that his pan-washings furnish no longer the speck of gold. The rest of his work is easy—he washes along up the mountain-side, tracing the narrowing fan by his washings, and at last he reaches the gold deposit. It may contain only a few hundred dollars, which he can take out with a couple of dips of his shovel; also it may contain a concentrated treasure worth a fortune. It is the fortune he is after, and he will seek it with a never-perishing hope as long as he lives. These friends of mine had been seeking that fortune daily for eighteen years; they had never found it, but they were not at all discouraged; they were quite sure they would find it some day. During the three months that I was with them they found nothing, but we had a fascinating and delightful good time trying. Not long after I left, a greaser (Mexican) came loafing along and found a pocket with a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in it on a slope which our boys had never happened to explore. Such is luck! And such the treatment which honest, good perseverance gets so often at the hands of unfair and malicious Nature!