My new dog sends his most respectful compliments to your new one. Mine is called Fin McCoul: he seems stupid, but amiable and honest. Youth, and Saturday Holidays, and a dog worth his shot, are things that come no more. I suppose we must all become laudatores temporis acti and canum actarum, which is, I fancy, and quite properly too, dog latin. But I am happy to remember that I have been a conservative all my days, which makes the situation less humiliating for me than it might be for many others. With affectionate regards, believe me, yours most affectionately James Rutherford Prof D. Fisher.
&c. &c. &c.
Letter III
WILLIAM RUTHERFORD TO CHARLES BUTLER
My dear Charles, God help me, if I know what to do with myself this morning. I am high and dry. The waters have gone down on all sides and left me stranded on my beam ends upon an illimitable quicksand. I am as fond of humanity as I was last night, and I have aims of the highest practicable or impracticable order; but my brain, my dear Charles, is a torrid desert — but my head, my dear Charles, is a belfry, where innumerable insane bellringers leap and swing and bob up and down upon excruciating bellropes. I stopped and listened to the air just now; I suppose it must be what they call a triple bob major. When they strike on a fine, deep, sonorous boom, like a crooning stock dove, I can dominate the agony and contain my spirit; but when they fly off into a treble clang with a shrill chord in it, it seems to me as if my sutures were uncemented, and my ribs unjointed, and my little, bare, blind, naked, immortal spirit went floating up and away into death-in-life and the inter-stellar spaces. All the time, the feet of the demon bellringers go flitting and skipping to and fro on the unhappy belfry floor; and every step is agony to me.
In short, I have neuralgia.
Only, it happens to be better just now and leaves me a lucid interval for conversation with a friend some streets away. God bless the penny postman. You will either answer or call, will you not?
This notion of mine about my head being a trampled and reverberating belfry, full of leaping bellringers and clangorous bells, has got between me and my healthy wits, I think. First, it led me on to the idea of such an expanse of green and quiet country as may be seen from many an English bell-tower; and so to the belief that all the world was silent and fresh and sweet, except that little temple of discord and agony, my tormented skull. And second, I got thinking, how my life was noisy and rude like the belfry and other people’s lives pleasant like the country round about. And third, I remembered how the bells, which sounded so harshly near at hand, sang as sweet as birds in the distance. And so from that, I came on to the grand conviction that out of this neuralgic head, there would go forth something helpful and supporting to mankind, for ever and ever, world without end, amen.
I don’t know what ‘world without end, amen’ means; but then no more do you. And besides I was drunk last night, and so do not require to be logical.
The world is quite mad, Butler, all except you and me. Paul Somerset, also, you will find to have some little golden grains of sanity in his soul, so soon as he returns from the Pyrenees and I shall be able to present you to each other. As for the poor creatures whom we have persuaded — bribed, shall I say? — to join in our society, for the sake of the beer and the liberty of language, they are not fit companions for us. But even the swift beating heart of the eagle must carry its tucked feet behind it into the heavens. If an army could consist of the generals alone, there would be battles fought to put history to the blush.
[For the title: — Liberty seems right — is the true blue, at least; youth’s watchword, the gist of hope. Justice — which means the liberty of others — is quite as good. But where the devil, Butler, got ye Reverence? I will admit that ‘L. J. R.’ is a pleasant monogram to put upon our tankards. But what, in the name of Beelzebub, have we to do with Reverence? What is Reverence?]
I am going to set to work upon the constitution tonight, if my head allows me. There seems to me to be some fine sentences in what you have drafted; but a little want of solid, constructive ideas; indeed there are so few of these that I had a humourous idea that it was hardly worth while founding a society on such a little bit of cobweb. Liberty, Justice, and so forth — why, damn it, Butler, these are everybody’s watchwords. The elder, the clergyman, the hereditary noble, all the swine and wolves of Europe cry Liberty and Justice in their moments. There would be a good opening for something a trifle more specific in our program; but that will come, I daresay, in time and by talking. We admitted, the other afternoon, that the first business we should have to attend to, was to educate our fellow members. Perhaps we shall really have to begin a step farther back, by educating ourselves. In the meantime, we have generous aspirations and ample faith; and that seems to me a pretty good stock in trade for a political society. [Nay, and I am most ungrateful; we have our tankard also, with the monogram carefully engraved; and we have our hall of convocation in a part of the town so low as to merit the name (to coin a singular) of a ‘purlieu.’ Someday, we shall have black masques and skulls and corresponding members, and a real mission.] People don’t wait until they are thrown off of shipboard, to purchase life-preservers or learn to swim; and so we also; let us have the disciples ready and the church organised; and sooner or later, who knows, but the gospel may make its appearance.
[I gave a look again over our notes, and I see I have been shamefully unjust. There is stuff in them; there are principles laid down there, Charles Butler, which, I am not ashamed to say, since after all they spring originally from neither you nor me, if they were once embraced, would turn this world into a garden. The essentials of liberty, the...]
Talking of the gospel, puts me in mind of something I had meant to tell you at full length when we met, but which I suppose I may as well set on paper at once. My only literary aspiration is to leave as much as possible of my life in my friends’ letter boxes; some of these days, when I have had a severe illness and come to myself in the beautiful early springtime, I shall collect my correspondence from the four winds, and prop myself up with pillows to live my hot youth over again in fancy. Picture it, O Butler, — O thou, who manufacturest reminiscences! — is that not an idea after thine own heart? I mean to begin in the morning, with the dew not yet shaken from the lilac flowers; sounds of country life shall come to me in the clear hush; the birds are to be all in admirable voice and all of one opinion about the unsurpassable weather; a little flutter of wind is to run in from time to time at the open window and just stir the letters on my lap; and when I turn my head a little, I am to see a bit of folded valley, with a church spire upon the sky. I will go a little farther, if you like; for luxuries cost nothing in a fancy piece. I will have a corner of fallow land within view, on a hillside; and there shall go a-ploughing, a big, cheery-throated fellow with a pair of lusty horses and a vortex of crows behind him. And now, with these surroundings, and in that frame of crystalline transparency of mind and body that follows upon a great sickness, to have all one’s old sorrows and joys, winter afternoons, roaring nights, spring vigils, all the grimy and beautiful stuff that goes to build up the dream that men call their youth, pass before you bit by bit in your own language of the moment — to have your old thoughts ‘take a new acquaintance of your mind’ as Shakespeare advises (and surely he was a good adviser) — to look back up the road of life and see yourself, as in one of these jolly old pictorial maps of the Pilgrim’s Progress, now here, now there, a little figure dwindling and dwindling down into the past — I am sure for my part that it would be twice the pleasure and not one half the pain of the actual rude living it. People say it is unlike youth to care about the past; we two must be very old then; you, who would always prefer a reminiscence to a glass of wine; I, who have been writing all this nonsense — not to you, do not flatter yourself — you are no more than a repository or sort of postal system — but to my own self twenty years hereafter, propped up on pillows by the open window.
Well, to go on, my poor father took it into his head that I should go wit
h him and see my cousin Nathaniel. The goodman is, as you know, a great believer in deathbed scenery; and Nath is in the Dark Valley with a vengeance for himself and many circumstances of aggravation for the spectator. He seems to have most known maladies, poor devil; and his cough has nearly killed me in a single morning call, so that I can judge what it must be for him all night and all day long. I have a great dislike to see slight empty characters placed in these grave situations. I think I have told you before what a shock I had, when that butterfly Mrs A died in childbed. Well, Nath is a stronger case; he is really of such small account as a fellow creature, that he seems unfit for dying altogether; the part is too serious for him; he is in his place well enough in a tea party, but to think of him alone in the Dark Valley! I feel choked with a sort of sobbing laughter at the thought. I could find it in my heart to jeer at him and cry over him in the same breath. Persons, whom you have always unwaveringly despised and hated, seem to put you in a false position when they come to die.
The poor fellow was propped up in bed when we went in, and looked very lamentable against the green bed curtains. I noticed by my father’s manner and the knowledge he seemed to have, that he must call nearly every day; which is indeed good of him, and like him; for you remember how he used to look down upon Nath in his better days. He professed himself overjoyed to see me, which I am afraid was a lie; and he must have found it difficult to articulate, for it set him coughing for quite a while, my father and I standing awkwardly before him until he was done. If it had not been for the pity of the thing, I believe we should have broken out laughing at each other, we both looked so foolish.
‘You don’t know how tired of himself, a fellow gets lying here,’ he said. ‘I declare if ever I get well, which is damned unlikely, I shall take to visiting the sick.’ This probably is the only speech of Nath’s in all his life that can be recorded to his credit; my father had not the heart to reprove him for the oath, although I could see he would have dearly liked. I could find nothing to say; I felt so ashamed of myself for hating him when he was sick, for one thing; and for another, when a fellow is quite deadly stupid, and absolutely corrupt in every thought, and has not a week to live, I should like to know what is the appropriate vein to talk to him in. I suppose perhaps it is the one my father chose; for down he sat by him; and prattled a sort of grown-up baby-talk, about dogs, and the weather and the man in the moon: a great deal about the man in the moon, for instance, and humourous enough it was. I can’t think how he kept it up; for I could see his heart was just broken all the time; and I could have fallen on his neck and wept. This sort of pitiful cheerfulness is of all things the most moving to me; and what with that and the cough-coughing of the invalid, I really felt as if I was going out of my wits. My embarrassment ran so high that I took refuge in the first book that came under my hand. It happened to be the New Testament; and I own that cast me down a little at first. People who have had the Bible so assiduously rung in upon them from the cradle upwards as you and I, will jib a little at any symptom of a new infliction. But just at the first pitch, I set my eyes on a passage that seemed to stand out of the paper. It was about God sending the sun and rain upon the just and the unjust indifferently and it gave me some new thoughts about Christ and what is called Christianity, which I mean to investigate at leisure. All great men are perhaps after the same end, about the same multisided business; and Christ and us, Wordsworth and Byron, Venus and Diana, may be all of a side, if we could only see the contrary; for you know how split up a party seems, until we can compare it with the other. Perhaps this is going to be the Gospel. Talk of faith, I am the true faithful. It is not possible that any man should be so anxious to do right as I am and not find a sufficient guide.
When the visit was over, my father and I got out into the street, and I hastened to excuse myself and slip away. My conscience smote me a little; for I saw he had set his heart on walking with me. But how could I dare? I tell you frankly, Charles, if I had not felt as kindly towards him, if he had not touched me so nearly by his gentleness with Nath, I might have risked a walk with him; but as things are, I could trust neither him nor myself; we should have been safe to grow confidential; and confidence, where there is so great a gulf in sympathy, means quarrelling. So I had to let him go on alone with the dogs, while I took refuge in a tobacconist’s shop. Of course, with the admirable instinct of a father, he will misunderstand me and be bitterly offended. But that is what life is. Now I wonder how people manage with their wives; if they’re anything like parents, give me white feathers and the tomb.
Write or call, like a good soul.
Yours ever Will Rutherford
Letter IV
WILLIAM RUTHERFORD TO PAUL SOMERSET
I had a strange waking vision this morning, my dear Paul, which has put me in a very high frame of mind. You know how the idea of dawn runs in my head. Well, it seemed to me that I rose pretty early, went over many little dewy meadows and by watercourses and willowwoods, and at length scaled a little hill and began to look about me in the grey of the morning. The height on which I stood was in itself inconsiderable, but by reason of its position in the bottom of a vast amphitheatre of highlands, it gave me a spacious outlook all around. The mists were lifting out of the hollows; the cocks were crowing in the steading yards; a tremor ran among the hills. And suddenly, the sun took hold upon one mountain top, and then of another, and began to spread out from peak to peak, and gush over through the breaches; until the whole amphitheatre brimmed with broad daylight and shadows.
That was the figure, and the rough substance; but how I am to tell you what I thought I saw along with all this, I do not know. For wherever this daylight fell, a joy seemed to come out of the earth; peace and glory possessed the world; injustice and tyranny and feverish thoughts seemed to pass away in the twinkling of an eye and forever, like swift birds. It was Kingdom Come; it was El Dorado, Astraea Redux: what you please. But my heart leaped up, and my clay seemed purged and quickened and sat more lightly on my thoughts.
Perhaps I am not a prophet; but then perhaps I am: the spirit of prophecy has no diagnostic symptoms like the measles. And at least, since I fancied I saw into the future, let me write the fancies down.
I saw people sitting, each in his garden, or roaming alone on woody hilltops whence they might perceive the sea; and each was poor, and happy and content. Not a man but was in rags; and the women too were clad poorly. When the dinner was cooked they ran out pressing their neighbours to come in; and the limping passer by, who was on some long journey and browned with noon in many another land, entered like an invited guest and took his place among the children. One man, methought, had a library of books, and I saw him hurry to and fro in the village, pressing others to borrow. Another, for some great service to the state, had been rewarded with a fortune unusual in that age; he seemed happy like a child; his eyes smiled like an angel’s; with a great purse, he kept running from door to door, and wherever there was a want to satisfy, he offered many smiling...
(Stevenson’s manuscript ends here, and was never finished.)
AN OLD SONG
Chapter I Lieutenant-Colonel John Falconer broke the traditions of his family by entering the army, and his whole youth was expensive and disastrous. He was near being asked to leave his regiment; he was in trouble about the mess funds; he was deplorably in debt; when his aunt sent him a religious tract, it was returned with a pen and ink commentary in a blunt, military style. By these flashes and reverberations his stormy existence was from time to time revealed to his family at home; and as he never wrote between whiles, a letter from India denoted a new scrape.
Suddenly, at the age of thirty, he was converted at a revival meeting. From that moment he was a changed man. It was his principal boast that he had not once omitted or shortened his devotions since that day, and for those who knew his previous habits, the pretension was imposing in the extreme. At the same time that he became religious he developed a sense of duty, and turned into a good officer. Falconer
was counted a trusty man; Napier swore by him; his men feared and admired him in equal parts.
When his father died, and he found himself the last of the family besides two nephews, he took it to be his duty to go home and supervise his nephews and the estate. An unpleasant duty was to him what stolen pleasures are to others: it was his passion; he flung himself into it headlong; and the more unpleasant it was, the higher his pride rose as he performed it. To live at Grangehead, to take care of an estate, to be pestered with a pair of playful urchins, to give up his regiment — this was the best thing of the sort he had yet encountered, the raciest piece of self-sacrifice conceivable, the very pink of martyrdom; and on his homeward voyage Colonel Falconer was a prey to all the delights of what we may call Black Happiness.
His old Aunt Rebecca (who had sent him the tract in former days) still survived in a cottage at Hampstead; she had received in the meantime the two nephews; and so the Colonel’s first visit was to her.
Aunt Rebecca was much moved when she saw the new arrival descend with a grave demeanour from a hansom cab. He was very tall, upright, and muscular, with a dash of the trooper — a sort of flavour of sword exercise about his carriage. His face was the colour of genuine Indian curry; his moustache heavy, and quite white; his eyebrows black, bushy, and singularly immobile. About his mouth there lurked a hard expression that was imposing, but a little doubtful; it smacked of the soldier. The Colonel was not a hypocrite, mind you.
Aunt Rebecca was all in a flutter, but he kissed her on the left eyebrow, asked after her in a harrowing voice, and generally put her at her ease again. He sat down, and they began talking of family bereavements.
‘My father was not irreligious, of course,’ said the Colonel, ‘but he scarcely seemed a man of vital piety.’
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson Page 386
