[Clipping from the Port Hume Clarion of Sunday supplement, 13 April 1919. Page seven. Sepia photograph of a young August at Yale, with a yearbook-style caption. Length: feature column.]

A QUIETER HUME

Some Notes on August Hume at Twenty-Five Years' Distance

— A Special Correspondent

The month of April marks two anniversaries of August Hume, the younger brother of our City's most prominent citizen, which have not in recent years been remarked upon in our press. Twenty-five years ago this month — the spring of 1894 — August Hume departed Port Hume for the American Southwest, never again to return alive to the city of his birth. Sixteen years ago this month — the spring of 1903 — he died in a lodging house in San Francisco, of the tubercular affliction that had necessitated his departure. He was thirty years of age.

The departure of a Hume from the city, in the days when the city was smaller, was not a private matter. August went quietly but not invisibly. He went because his brother Edmund arranged, with a dispatch and a discretion that was remarked upon at the time and has not since been much discussed, for him to go. The accounts of the reasons for his removal, then as now, were various. The received account — given by the family, given gently by their pastor Rev. Tanner in the sole remarks he ever made on the subject, given at length by the San Francisco physicians who attended August in his last illness — is that he suffered from a constitutional weakness of the lungs and required the dryer climate. This is not false. It is incomplete.

This newspaper has, in preparing the present notice, spoken with three persons who were present in Port Hume in the spring of 1894 and who remember the period. We shall not name them. They include a household servant then in the employ of the Humes (now retired), a Yale classmate of August's who was his guest at Vanderlin Row in the weeks preceding his departure, and a member of the Port Hume Bar Association who was present at the Ladies' Musical Society dinner of the 4th of May, 1894 — a dinner whose events are remembered differently by different people who were there, though on one point they agree.

All three of our sources describe August Hume, in that period, as a young man in a state of what one called "a turbulence that was not the turbulence of drink alone." The second source — the Yale classmate — described him, in a letter to his mother from Vanderlin Row at the time (which he has permitted this reporter to read), as "a young man who has discovered something about his house that he does not know what to do with, and which he would like his brother to discover with him, and which his brother will not discuss." The third source — the lawyer — describes the Ladies' Musical Society dinner of the 4th of May as an occasion at which August, having taken too much wine, "addressed several remarks to Edmund, loudly, which struck those present as wild but which referred by our observation to something Edmund understood and refused to entertain." The remark that is most remembered — though reported differently by different witnesses — contained the formulation "you don't know who you are; you don't know who I am." Our three sources agree that this was said.

August left Port Hume within the fortnight. The remainder of his life, as we have said, was spent between the dry Southwest and the hills of San Francisco. He corresponded steadily with his sister Clara — we are told by a person close to the Westbrook household that there are many such letters, preserved — and less steadily with his brother Edmund. He died as we have said.

We offer these notes because the historical record of our City is impoverished when the fuller story of any of our prominent families is allowed to thin, over the generations, into a single agreed version. The Humes have, for three generations, been a house whose public story is carefully composed. It is — we submit, respectfully — not for our Press to let that composition rest unexamined at the quarter-century. It is for our Press to note, gently but without reservation, that there are agreeable stories and there are accurate stories, and where our City is concerned it is the accurate stories that, in the long run, serve the City best.

We do not know — we cannot know — what August Hume understood in the spring of 1894 that his brother would not discuss. We report only that something was understood by August, and that his life was thereafter arranged around his absence. We mark this quarter-century with our sympathy for the younger Hume, whose thirty years are quieter in the record than his family's ninety years require them to be, and whom we take occasion here to remember.

[pencil annotation, Harriss's hand, clipped to the carbon:]

"Reddick called personally at the office. I offered him a chair. He declined the chair. He said the piece was 'an imposition.' I asked what part of it was inaccurate. He said he was not at liberty. I said then the piece would run. He said his client would be 'distressed.' I said distress was a small matter against accuracy. He said very good morning and he left. The piece ran. No letter has come to us from Mr. Hume himself. He does not write letters he would not wish read." — C.H.