“In one of my books, and in one only, the characters 1 In the South Seas, . took the bit in their teeth; all at once, they became detached from the flat paper, they turned their backs on me and walked off bodily; and from that time my task was stenographic — it was they who spoke, it was they who wrote the remainder of the story.”1
But within two months Stevenson began to flag, and not long after a visit for his father’s sake to Matlock, where he had made small progress with the writing, he decided, at Mr. Colvin’s suggestion, to break off with David’s return to Edinburgh and leave the tale half told. Mr. Henderson gladly accepted the story for Young Folks, where it ran under Stevenson’s own name from May to July, and was then published by Messrs. Cassell & Co.
It was dedicated to Mr. Baxter, whose permission was asked in a letter indicating its character and showing its author’s capacity in dialect, if he had ever had a mind to let it run riot in his pages. “ It’s Sc&tch, sir: no strong, for the sake o’ thae pock-puddens, but jist a kitchen o’t, to leaven the wersh, sapless, fushionless, stotty, stytering South Scotch they think sae muckle o’.”
The whole took him, as he said, “probably five months’ actual working; one of these months entirely over the last chapters, which had to be put together without interest or inspiration, almost word for word, for I was entirely worked out.” But as a whole, the author thought it the best and most human work he had yet done, and its success was immediate with all readers. To mention two instances only: — Matthew Arnold, who apparently knew Stevenson’s work little, if at all, before this, was at once filled with delight, and 1 Scribner’s Magazine, 1888, . we are told that it was the last book Lord Iddesleigh was able to read with pleasure—” a volume,” continues Mr. Lang, “ containing more of the spirit of Scott than any other in English fiction.”
The elder Stevenson had for several years, as we have seen, been declining in health and spirits, and the shadows began to close about his path. In 1885 he gradually reduced the amount of his work, though he still continued his practice, and could not altogether refuse the solicitations he received to appear as a scientific witness before Parliamentary Committees.
The tenderness of the relation between father and son now became pathetic in the extreme. As the old man’s powers began to fail, he would speak to Louis as though he were still a child. When they went to the theatre together, and Louis stood up in his place, the father put his arm round him, saying: “Take care, my dearie, you might fall.” At night, as he kissed his son, he would say reassuringly: “ You ‘11 see me in the morning, dearie.” “ It was,” says his daughter-in-law, “ just like a mothei with a young child.”
It was chiefly in the summers and autumns that Louis left Bournemouth, but even then he rarely travelled any distance or was absent for any length of time. In 1885 he went to London in June, and then accompanied his wife on a last visit to Cambridge, to stay with Mr. Colvin, who was now resigning his professorship. In August he started for Dartmoor, but after meeting Mr. Thomas Hardy and his wife at Dorchester, was laid up with a violent hemorrhage at Exeter, in the hotel, and was compelled to remain there for several weeks before he was able to return home. In the following year he went to town in June, and again in August, the latter time extending his journey to Paris in the company of his wife and Mr. Henley, to see their friends Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Low, then, after a long interval, revisiting France for the first time.
Meeting once more in their early haunts, the old friends revived many memories. One trivial reminiscence of this occasion is yet so characteristic of Stevenson, and so illustrates the working of his mind, that it may find a place here. The two friends, painter and writer, both possessing a fine palate for certain wines, had always laughed at one another’s pretensions to such taste. In 1875 or 1876, soon after Mr. Low’s marriage, he and his wife had gone to dine with Stevenson at the Musee de Cluny in the Boulevard St. Michel. Mr. Low hesitating for a moment in his choice of a wine, Stevenson turned to Mrs. Low, and on the spot made up and elaborately embellished a story of how her husband had once gone with him to dine at a restaurant, and had tasted and rejected every vintage the establishment was able to offer. At last — so the tale ran — the proprietor confessed that there was one bottle even finer in his cellar, which had lain there forty years, but that he was ready to give it up to such a master, although it was like surrendering a part of his life. A procession was formed, first the proprietor, then the cellarman, then the waiters of the establishment, and they all went down to the cellar to get the famous bottle. Back they came in the same order with the priceless treasure borne tenderly in the arms of the cellarman, a man with a long beard down to his waist, who had been so much in the cellar that the light made him blink. Slowly and rev- erently they approached the table, and then they all sighed. The bottle was deliberately and ceremoniously uncorked, and the wine poured into small glasses, while the waiters looked on with breathless reverence. The two connoisseurs touched glasses and slowly carried them to their lips. There was absolute silence. All eyes were upon them, and when they drank deeply and expressed their satisfaction, the whole establishment heaved a sigh of relief.
Mrs. Low now reminded Stevenson of this story, and he, declaring it was no “story,” but an historical account of what had actually happened, repeated it word for word as he had originally told it. When he came to the end, he added, “And the cellarman, overcome with emotion, dropped dead.” As he said these words, he saw by his hearers’ faces that this was a divergence from the original tale, and added quickly, “ That about the cellarman is not really true!”
The quickness with which he caught the first sign of surprise at the only variation, and the readiness with which he recovered himself, were no less characteristic of Stevenson, as Mr. Low truly says, than the fact that the story of his invention took so concrete a form in his mind that, perhaps without its having recurred to his memory in all the interval, he was able to give the identical words and details as they had originally presented themselves to him.
An old project had this year been revived by Mr. Gilder of a boat-voyage down the Rhone to be written by Stevenson and illustrated by Mr. Low, but the former’s health was now too precarious for even the most luxurious of such journeys. His visit to Paris, however, was most successful, its chiet event being a visit to Rodin the sculptor, to whom Mr. Henley introduced him. He came home in what was for him exceptionally good health; but returning in October to The Monument — his invariable name for Mr. Colvin’s house at the British Museum — he did not escape so easily. The second holiday began delightfully, for it was on this occasion that he met some of the most distinguished of his elders in the world of letters and of art — especially, as Mr. Colvin records, Browning, Lowell, and Burne-Jones. But soon the visitor was taken ill, confined to bed, and unable to return home until the very end of November, when a succession of fogs made the danger of remaining in London greater than the risk of any journey.
This autumn there occurred a curious event in Stevenson’s literary career, which is recorded only in a letter to his mother. “5th Sept., 1886. — ... I have just written a French (if you please!) story for a French magazine! Heaven knows what it’s like; but they asked me to do it, and I was only too pleased to try.”
Mr. Osbourne and Mrs. de Mattos alone of the intimates of that time remember the fact, but whether the tale was ever despatched to its destination, or what that destination was, are questions that can no longer be answered. Although Stevenson had a wide and full vocabulary, and spoke French with a good accent and complete fluency, it seems certain that he had not the perfect knowledge of the language necessary for serious composition. He once wrote a French dedication in a book which he presented to Mrs. Low, prefacing it with the statement—” I am now going to make several mistakes,” as in fact, says her husband, he immediately proceeded to do.
By this time he had begun to write the Memoir of his friend Jenkin, the only biography which he ever actually carried to an end. A few mont
hs later Mrs. Jenkin came to Skerry vore to afford him what assistance he needed, and of his method of dealing with the work, she has given us a description.
“I used to go to his room after tea, and tell him all I could remember of certain times and circumstances. He would listen intently, every now and then checking me while he made a short note, or asking me to repeat or amplify what I had said, if it had not been quite clear. Next morning I went to him again, and he read aloud to me what he had written — my two hours of talk compressed into a page, and yet, as it seemed to me, all there, all expressed. He would make me note what he had written word by word, asking me, ‘ Does this express quite exactly what you mean?’ Sometimes he offered me alternative words, ‘ Does this express it more truly?’ If I objected to any sentence as not conveying my meaning, he would alter it again and again — unwearied in taking pains.”
His life in England led him to take both in home and in foreign politics a closer interest than he had felt before. He was deeply moved during these years by two events, though neither in the end led to any action on his part, nor even an open Ideclaration of his views. These were the death of Gordon and a case of boycotting women in Ireland.
In 1884 he had felt acutely the withdrawal of the garrisons from the Soudan. “ When I read at Nice that Graham was recalled from Suakim after all that butchery, I died to politics. I saw that they did not regard what I regarded, and regarded what I despised; and I closed my account. If ever I could do anything, I suppose I ought to do it; but till that hour comes, I will not vex my soul.”
This was no passing wave of sentiment; Gordon’s fate was laid even more deeply to heart, and one of the motives which induced Stevenson to begin his letters to the Times upon Samoan affairs was the memory that in 1884 he had stood by in silence while a brave man was being deserted and a population dependent for help on the government of this country was handed over to the mercies of barbarism. So when he finally came to the point of writing the letter to Mr. Gladstone about the Iron Duke,1 he could think of no other signature open to him than “ Your fellow-criminal in the eyes of God,” and forbore.
But although the passionate indignation and “that chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound” were highly characteristic of Stevenson, at the most they could have led to nothing more than a series of letters to the papers. They might have stirred the public conscience, but though Stevenson would have been dealing with matters less remote from the knowledge of his readers, yet his part in any agitation or protest would not have differed greatly from his efforts in the cause of Samoa. The other project, on the contrary, would, if he had been able to carry it out, have led to a definite and entire change of the whole course of his life. On November 13th, 1885, Mr. John Curtin had 1 See vol. ii. . been murdered by a party of moonlighters in his house, Castle Farm, at Castle Island, County Kerry. His grown-up sons and daughters had shown the greatest courage, and one of the murderers had been shot. For this the family were cut off as far as possible from all the necessaries of life, and in April, 1887, the boycott still continued. Stevenson, while admitting the wrongs of Ireland, had always the most profound regard for the paramount claims of the law, and had long been shocked both by the disregard of it in Ireland and by the callous indifference of the English to the needs of those engaged in its support. He now pitched upon the case of the Curtin family as a concrete instance in which it behoved England to do her duty, and since no one else was forthcoming for the task, he prepared to offer himself as an agent, and, if need were, a martyr in the cause. As a man of letters he was not tied down to any one place to do his work, so he proposed to take the Curtins’ farm and there live with his wife and his stepson. His wife added her protests to those of all his friends who heard of the project, but in vain, and so without sharing his illusions she cheerfully prepared to accompany him.
It is impossible to conceive a more quixotic design. Many of the objections to it Stevenson realised himself, or was told by his friends.1 But perhaps he never suspected how little he understood the Irish, or how utterly futile his action would have proved. As a matter of fact he hardly ever came into contact with Irishmen at any time during his life, was probably misled by false inferences from the Highlanders as to Celtic peculiari-
1 Letters, ii. 27. This letter belongs, however, to 1887. ties, and in the principal Irishman whom he drew — Colonel Burke in The Master of Ballantrae — he has not carried conviction.1 But these considerations, even if they had been brought home to him, would equally have failed to move him, and it was nothing but his father’s illness which kept him for the time in this country. He abandoned the design with reluctance, and, as Mr. Colvin says, “ to the last he was never well satisfied that he had done right in giving way.”
It was driven from his mind, however, by events which touched him more nearly. In the autumn his parents had taken a house in Bournemouth for the winter, that Mr. Stevenson might have the companionship of his son. For some time after they came Louis was laid up in London, and even when he returned he was too ill to see much of his father or to have any cheering influence upon him. In February Thomas Stevenson was taken by his wife to Torquay, but came back to Bournemouth on the ist of April. By the 21 st he was so ill that it was thought better to bring him home, and he returned to Edinburgh. The accounts of him grew so alarming that Louis followed on the 6th of May, but was too late for his coming to be of any use, and on the 8th all was over.
Of the son’s affection and of his appreciation for his father enough has been said to show how great the sense of his loss must have been. The shock of having found his father no longer able to recognise him preyed upon his mind, and for some time to come he was haunted day and night with “ ugly images of sickness, 1 Mac, the Ulstennan in The IVrecker, is better, but would not have helped his creator much in Kerry.
decline, and impaired reason,” which increased yet further his sadness and the physical depression that weighed him down.
In the meantime he took cold, was not allowed to attend the funeral, and never left the house until, at the end of May, he was able to return to Bournemouth, and quitted Scotland for the last time.
CHAPTER XII
THE UNITED STATES — 1887-88
“But, indeed, I think we all belong to many countries. I am a Scotchman, touch me and you will find the thistle; 1 am a Briton, and live and move and have my being in the greatness of our national achievements; but am 1 to forget the long hospitality of that beautiful and kind country, France? Or has not America done me favours to confound my gratitude? Nay, they are all my relatives; I love them all dearly; and should they fall out among themselves (which God in his mercy forbid!), 1 believe 1 should be driven mad with their conflicting claims upon my heart.” — R. L. S., ms. of Tie Silverado Squatters.
The chief link which bound Stevenson to this country was now broken, for his mother was free to follow him and his wife to whatever climate the advice of the doctors might send him. Year after year the struggle with ill-health was becoming more painful; “an enemy who was exciting at first, but has now, by the iteration of his strokes, become merely annoying and inexpressibly irksome.” He seemed condemned to a life in the sick-room, and even there to be steadily losing ground. Under the altered circumstances, his uncle, Dr. George Balfour, peremptorily insisted on a complete change of climate for a year, suggesting a trial of either one of the Indian hill-stations or colourado; this advice was reinforced by his Bournemouth physician, Dr. Scott, and for several obvious reasons America was preferred. As soon as his mother’s promise to accompany the party was obtained, Skerryvore was let, and by the middle of July their tickets were taken for New York. Early in the same month he had written to his mother: . . I can let you have a cheque for 100 to-morrow, which is certainly a pleasant thing to be able to say. I wish it had happened while my father was still here; I should have liked to help him once — perhaps even from a mean reason: that he might see I had not been wrong in taking to letters. But all this, I daresay, he obser
ves, or, in some other way, feels. And he, at least, is out of his warfare, as I could sometimes wish I were out of mine. The mind of the survivor is mean; it sees the loss, it does not always feel the deliverance. Yet about our loss, I feel it more than I can say — every day more — that it is a happy thing that he is now at peace.”
But the invalid was not to escape from England without another illness; worn as he was by his recent experiences, he once more broke down, and was laid up again with hemorrhage.
On the 20th August, however, he left Bournemouth for London, and spent Sunday in the city, at Armfield’s Hotel. Here those of his closest friends who at that season were within reach came to bid him farewell, a last good-bye as it proved for all, since he never saw any one of them again. “ In one way or another,” he had written, “life forces men apart and breaks up the goodly fellowships for ever,” and he himself was now to become “ no more than a name, a reminiscence, and an occasional crossed letter very laborious to read.” 1
As Mr. Colvin had been the first to welcome him on his return from America, so he was the last to take leave of him the next day, when the party of five — for 1 Virginibus Puerisque, chap. i.
Valentine Roch accompanied them — embarked on the steamship Ludgate Hill.
The beginning of their voyage was an unpleasant surprise, for their passages had been taken in ignorance that the ship was used as a cattle-boat, and it was only when the family came on board that they learned that they were going to put in at Havre for their cargo before sailing for America. But Stevenson, ill as he was, did not allow mere discomfort to affect him. His mother’s diary contains an entry highly characteristic both of herself and of her son: “We discover that it is a cattle-ship, and that we are going to Havre to take in horses. We agree to look upon it as an adventure and make the best of it. . . . It is very amusing and like a circus to see the horses come on board.” Not only was there a shipload of horses, but the vessel resembled the fleet of Ophir at least in this, that she carried a consignment of apes; of which “the big monkey, Jacko, scoured about the ship,” and took a special fancy to Stevenson. The other passengers were not unenter- taining, and the voyage itself was to him a pure delight, until they came to the Banks of Newfoundland, where he again caught cold. “ I was so happy on board that ship,” he wrote to his cousin Bob; “I could not have believed it possible. We had the beastliest weather, and many discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp-ship gave us many comforts; we could cut about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel- house, discuss all manner of things, and really be a little at sea. And truly there is nothing else. I had literally forgotten what happiness was, and the full mind — full of external and physical things, not full of cares and labours and rot about a fellow’s behaviour. My heart literally sang; I truly care for nothing so much as for that.” 1
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson Page 842
