Urban Sketches

Bret Harte

Description

This varied collection of essays, sketches and tales from Bret Harte will charm readers. In "Surprising Adventures of Master Charles Summerton," a five-year-old boy runs away from home and encounters the wider world, and in "Melons," a seven-year-old boy brings a rare treat to his fellow ragamuffins.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781776674930
• Langue: English

Extrait

URBAN SKETCHES
* * *
BRET HARTE
 
*
Urban Sketches First published in 1901 Epub ISBN 978-1-77667-493-0 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77667-494-7 © 2014 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
*
A Venerable Impostor From a Balcony Melons Surprising Adventures of Master Charles Summerton Sidewalkings A Boys' Dog Charitable Reminiscences "Seeing the Steamer Off" Neighborhoods I Have Moved From My Suburban Residence On a Vulgar Little Boy Waiting for the Ship
A Venerable Impostor
*
As I glance across my table, I am somewhat distracted by the spectacleof a venerable head whose crown occasionally appears beyond, at aboutits level. The apparition of a very small hand—whose fingers are bunchyand have the appearance of being slightly webbed—which is frequentlylifted above the table in a vain and impotent attempt to reach theinkstand, always affects me as a novelty at each recurrence of thephenomenon. Yet both the venerable head and bunchy fingers belong toan individual with whom I am familiar, and to whom, for certain reasonshereafter described, I choose to apply the epithet written above thisarticle.
His advent in the family was attended with peculiar circumstances. Hewas received with some concern—the number of retainers having beenincreased by one in honor of his arrival. He appeared to be weary,—hispretence was that he had come from a long journey,—so that for days,weeks, and even months, he did not leave his bed except when he wascarried. But it was remarkable that his appetite was invariably regularand healthy, and that his meals, which he required should be brought tohim, were seldom rejected. During this time he had little conversationwith the family, his knowledge of our vernacular being limited, butoccasionally spoke to himself in his own language,—a foreign tongue.The difficulties attending this eccentricity were obviated by the youngwoman who had from the first taken him under her protection,—being,like the rest of her sex, peculiarly open to impositions,—and who atonce disorganized her own tongue to suit his. This was affected by thecontraction of the syllables of some words, the addition of syllables toothers, and an ingenious disregard for tenses and the governing powersof the verb. The same singular law which impels people in conversationwith foreigners to imitate their broken English governed the family intheir communications with him. He received these evidences of his powerwith an indifference not wholly free from scorn. The expression of hiseye would occasionally denote that his higher nature revolted from them.I have no doubt myself that his wants were frequently misinterpreted;that the stretching forth of his hands toward the moon and stars mighthave been the performance of some religious rite peculiar to his owncountry, which was in ours misconstrued into a desire for physicalnourishment. His repetition of the word "goo-goo,"—which was subject toa variety of opposite interpretations,—when taken in conjunction withhis size, in my mind seemed to indicate his aboriginal or Aztec origin.
I incline to this belief, as it sustains the impression I have alreadyhinted at, that his extreme youth is a simulation and deceit; that heis really older and has lived before at some remote period, and that hisconduct fully justifies his title as A Venerable Impostor. A variety ofcircumstances corroborate this impression: His tottering walk, which isa senile as well as a juvenile condition; his venerable head, thatchedwith such imperceptible hair that, at a distance, it looks like a mildaureola, and his imperfect dental exhibition. But beside these physicalpeculiarities may be observed certain moral symptoms, which go todisprove his assumed youth. He is in the habit of falling intoreveries, caused, I have no doubt, by some circumstance which suggestsa comparison with his experience in his remoter boyhood, or by someserious retrospection of the past years. He has been detected lyingawake, at times when he should have been asleep, engaged in curiouslycomparing the bed-clothes, walls, and furniture with some recollectionof his youth. At such moments he has been heard to sing softly tohimself fragments of some unintelligible composition, which probablystill linger in his memory as the echoes of a music he has longoutgrown. He has the habit of receiving strangers with the familiarityof one who had met them before, and to whom their antecedents andpeculiarities were matters of old acquaintance, and so unerring ishis judgment of their previous character that when he withholds hisconfidence I am apt to withhold mine. It is somewhat remarkable thatwhile the maturity of his years and the respect due to them is denied byman, his superiority and venerable age is never questioned by the brutecreation. The dog treats him with a respect and consideration accordedto none others, and the cat permits a familiarity which I should shudderto attempt. It may be considered an evidence of some Pantheistic qualityin his previous education, that he seems to recognize a fellowship evenin inarticulate objects; he has been known to verbally address plants,flowers, and fruit, and to extend his confidence to such inanimateobjects as chairs and tables. There can be little doubt that, in theremote period of his youth, these objects were endowed with not onlysentient natures, but moral capabilities, and he is still in the habitof beating them when they collide with him, and of pardoning them with akiss.
As he has grown older—rather let me say, as we have approximated to hisyears—he has, in spite of the apparent paradox, lost much of his senilegravity. It must be confessed that some of his actions of late appear toour imperfect comprehension inconsistent with his extreme age. A habitof marching up and down with a string tied to a soda-water bottle, adisposition to ride anything that could by any exercise of the liveliestfancy be made to assume equine proportions, a propensity to blacken hisvenerable white hair with ink and coal dust, and an omnivorous appetitewhich did not stop at chalk, clay, or cinders, were peculiarities notcalculated to excite respect. In fact, he would seem to have becomedemoralized, and when, after a prolonged absence the other day, he wasfinally discovered standing upon the front steps addressing a group ofdelighted children out of his limited vocabulary, the circumstance couldonly be accounted for as the garrulity of age.
But I lay aside my pen amidst an ominous silence and the disappearanceof the venerable head from my plane of vision. As I step to the otherside of the table, I find that sleep has overtaken him in an overt actof hoary wickedness. The very pages I have devoted to an expositionof his deceit he has quietly abstracted, and I find them coveredwith cabalistic figures and wild-looking hieroglyphs traced with hisforefinger dipped in ink, which doubtless in his own language conveysa scathing commentary on my composition. But he sleeps peacefully,and there is something in his face which tells me that he has alreadywandered away to that dim region of his youth where I cannot follow him.And as there comes a strange stirring at my heart when I contemplate theimmeasurable gulf which lies between us, and how slight and feeble asyet is his grasp on this world and its strange realities, I find, toolate, that I also am a willing victim of the Venerable Impostor.
From a Balcony
*
The little stone balcony, which, by a popular fallacy, is supposed to bea necessary appurtenance of my window, has long been to me a source ofcurious interest. The fact that the asperities of our summer weatherwill not permit me to use it but once or twice in six months does notalter my concern for this incongruous ornament. It affects me as Isuppose the conscious possession of a linen coat or a nankeen trousersmight affect a sojourner here who has not entirely outgrown his memoryof Eastern summer heat and its glorious compensations,—a luxuriousprovidence against a possible but by no means probable contingency. I dono longer wonder at the persistency with which San Franciscans adhereto this architectural superfluity in the face of climaticalimpossibilities. The balconies in which no one sits, the piazzason which no one lounges, are timid advances made to a climate whosechurlishness we are trying to temper by an ostentation of confidence.Ridiculous as this spectacle is at all seasons, it is never more so thanin that bleak interval between sunset and dark, when the shrillscream of the factory whistle seems to have concentrated all the hard,unsympathetic quality of the climate into one vocal expression. Add tothis the appearance of one or two pedestrians, manifestly too late fortheir dinners, and tasting in the shrewish air a bitter premonition ofthe welcome that awaits them at home, and you have one of those ordinaryviews from my balcony which makes the balcony itself ridiculous.
But as I lean over its balustrade to-night—a night rare in its kindnessand beauty—and watch the fiery ashes of my cigar drop into the abysmaldarkness below, I am inclined to take back the whole of that precedingparagraph, although it cost me some labor to elaborate its politemalevolence. I can even recognize some melody in the music which comesirregularly and fitfully from the balcony of the Museum on MarketStreet, although it may be broadly stated that, as a general thing,the music of all museums, menageries,