“Our journey is through ghostly deserts, sage brush and alkali, and rocks without form or colour, a sad corner of the world. I confess I am not jolly, but mighty calm, in my distresses. My illness is a subject of great mirth to some of my fellow travellers, and I smile rather sickly at their jests.
“We are going along Bitter Creek just now, a place infamous in the history of emigration, a place I shall remember myself among the blackest. — R.L.S.”
When California was finally reached he decided to rest and recover strength by camping out for a few days in the Coast Range Mountains beyond Monterey, but the anxiety and strain of the long journey had been greater than he realised, and he broke down and became very ill. For two nights he lay out under the trees in a kind of stupor and at length was rescued by two frontiersmen in charge of a goat-ranch, who took him to their cabin and cared for him until he partly recovered.
“Here is another curious start in my life,” he wrote to Sidney Colvin. “I am living at an Angora goat-ranch, in the Coast Line Mountains, eighteen miles from Monterey. I was camping out, but got so sick that the two rancheros took me in and tended me. One is an old bear hunter, seventy-two years old, and a captain from the Mexican War; the other a pilgrim, and one who was out with the bear flag and under Fremont when California was taken by the States. They are both true frontiersmen, and most kind and pleasant. Captain Smith, the bear hunter, is my physician, and I obey him like an oracle....
“I am now lying in an upper chamber, with the clinking of goat bells in my ears, which proves to me that the goats are come home and it will soon be time to eat. The old bear hunter is doubtless now infusing tea; and Tom the Indian will come in with his gun in a few moments....
“The business of my life stands pretty nigh still. I work at my notes of the voyage. It will not be very like a book of mine; but perhaps none the less successful for that. I will not deny that I feel lonely to-day.... I have not yet had a word from England, partly, I suppose, because I have not yet written for my letters to New York; do not blame me for this neglect, if you knew all I have been through, you would wonder I had done as much as I have. I teach the ranch children reading in the morning, for the mother is from home sick.
“Ever your affectionate friend.
“R.L.S.”
As soon as Stevenson was well enough he returned to Monterey and fell to working upon several short stories and the notes of his voyage, which he brought together and published later under the titles “The Amateur Emigrant” and “Across the Plains.”
Monterey in those days was a small Mexican town; “a place of two or three streets economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which were the water courses in the rainy season.... The houses were, for the most part, built of unbaked adobe brick....
“There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where the people sat almost all day playing cards. The smallest excursion was made on horseback. You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with their Mexican housings. In a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you saw not only Mexican saddles, but true Vaquero riding — men always at a hand gallop, up hill and down dale, and round the sharpest corners, urging their horses with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotary spurs, checking them dead, with a touch, or wheeling them right about face in a square yard. Spanish was the language of the street.”
He lodged with a doctor and his wife, and took his meals at the little restaurant kept by Jules Simoneau, “a most pleasant old boy,” with whom he played chess and discussed the universe daily.
About the middle of December he pushed on to San Francisco, and prepared to settle down and work for an indefinite time. Though he had known but few people in Monterey, nevertheless it was a social little place in comparison to a great city like San Francisco, where Stevenson found himself indeed a stranger and friendless and learned for the first time in his life what it really meant to be lonely.
Funds were running low; so he secured the cheapest possible lodging and took his meals at various small restaurants, living at the rate of seventy cents a day.
On December 26 he wrote: “For four days I have spoken to no one but my landlady or landlord or the restaurant waiters. This is not a gay way to pass Christmas, is it?” But some days later, nothing daunted, he added: “I lead a pretty happy life, though you might not think it. I have great fun trying to be economical, which I find as good a game of play as any other. I have no want of occupation and though I rarely see any one to speak to, have little time to worry.”
To make matters worse, letters containing money went astray and word came that some articles submitted to his publishers in England, on which he had depended for funds, were not satisfactory, and this forced him to reduce his living expenses to forty-five cents a day. The letters from home were most unsatisfactory and lacked the kind of news he longed for. “Not one soul ever gives me any news,” he complained to Sidney Colvin, “about people or things, everybody writes me sermons; it is good for me, but hardly the food necessary for a man who lives all alone on forty-five cents a day, and sometimes less, with quantities of hard work and many heavy thoughts. If one of you could write me a letter with a jest in it, a letter like what is written to real people in the world — I am still flesh and blood — I should enjoy it. Simpson did the other day, and it did me as much good as a bottle of wine — man alive I want gossip.”
Day in and day out he worked doggedly, fighting discouragement, with little strength or inspiration to write anything very worth while.
To cap all, his landlady’s little boy fell ill, and Stevenson, who had a great love and sympathy for all children, helped to nurse him, and this proved too much in the nervous and exhausted state he was in. The boy recovered, but Stevenson fell ill again, and for six weeks hovered between life and death.
This seems to have been the turning-point in his ill luck. Toward the middle of February, as he slowly began to mend, he was cheered on by long letters from home, full of anxiety for his health and advances of money from his father, with strict instructions that from now on he was no longer to stint and deny himself the bare necessities of life, as he had been doing. Later, in April, came a telegram from Thomas Stevenson saying that in future Louis was to count on an income of two hundred and fifty pounds a year.
Cheered with the prospect of an easier road ahead of him, he struggled back to life once more with a strong resolve to work harder and make those at home proud of him.
“It was a considerable shock to my pride to break down,” he wrote to a friend, “but there it’s done and can not be helped. Had my health held out another month, I should have made a year’s income, but breaking down when I did, I am surrounded by unfinished works. It is a good thing my father was on the spot, or I should have had to work and die.”
Early in the spring he and Mrs. Osbourne met again, and on May 19, 1880, they were married in San Francisco.
For the rest of his life Stevenson had no cause to complain of loneliness, for in his wife he had an “inseparable sharer of all his adventures; the most open-hearted of friends to all those who loved him; the most shrewd and stimulating critic of his work; and in sickness, despite her own precarious health, the most devoted and most efficient of nurses.”
Immediately after their marriage Stevenson and his wife and stepson — and the dog — went to the Coast Range Mountains and, taking possession of an old deserted miner’s camp, practically lived out-of-doors for the next few months, with no neighbors aside from a hunter and his family.
This was healthy, but the life of a squatter has its limitations, and their trials and tribulations during these weeks Stevenson told most amusingly in “The Silverado Squatters.”
Gradually a longing began to come to R.L.S. to see those at home once more and have them know his wife. This desire grew so from day to day that July found them bidding good-by to California, and on the 7th of August they sailed from New York for Liverpool.
SCOTLAND AGAIN
“Bells upon the city are ringing in the night,
High above the gardens are the houses full of light,
On the heathy Pentlands is the curlew flying free,
And the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie.
“We canna break the bonds that God decreed to bind,
Still we’ll be the children of the heather and the wind,
Far away from home O, it’s still for you and me
That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie.”
On his return to Scotland the spell of his own land fell upon R.L.S. for the first time. He realised now how he loved it spite of its bad climate, how much there was at home waiting for him. “After all,” he said, “new countries, sun, music, and all the rest, can never take down our gusty, rainy, smoky, grim old city out of the first place it has been making for itself in the bottom of my soul.”
But he had returned only to be banished. The doctors found his lungs too weak to risk Edinburgh winters and advised him to try the Alps.
Accordingly a cottage was rented in Davos Platz, a health resort. There and at similar places near by they spent the next few winters with visits to England and France between. Switzerland never suited Stevenson. He disliked living among invalids, and with his love for exploring the nooks and corners of any spot he was in he felt like a prisoner when he found himself shut in a valley among continual snow with few walks possible for him to take. “The mountains are about me like a trap,” he complained. “You can not foot it up a hillside and behold the sea on a great plain, but live in holes and corners and can change only one for the other.”
Tobogganing was the only sport of Davos Platz he really enjoyed, and he pursued that to his heart’s content. “Perhaps the true way to toboggan is alone and at night,” he said. “First comes the tedious climb dragging your instrument behind you. Next a long breathing space, alone with the snow and pine woods, cold, silent and solemn to the heart. Then you push off; the toboggan fetches away, she begins to feel the hill, to glide, to swim, to gallop. In a breath you are out from under the pine-trees and the whole heaven full of stars reels and flashes overhead.”
He accomplished little work at this time. Sometimes for days he would be unable to write at all. But the little boy who had once told his mother, “I have been trying to make myself happy,” was the same man now who could say: “I was never bored in my life.” When unable to do anything else he would build houses of cards or lie in bed and model little figures in clay. Anything to keep his hands busy and his mind distracted from the stories that crowded his brain and he had not strength to put on paper. His one horror, the fear that urged him on to work feverishly when he was suffering almost beyond endurance, was the thought that his illness might one day make him a helpless invalid.
The splendid part to think of is that no hint of his dark days and pains crept into his writings or saddened those who came to see him. Complaint he kept to himself, prayed that he might “continue to be eager to be happy,” lived with the best that was in him from day to day, and the words that went forth from his sick-room have cheered and encouraged thousands.
When asked why he wrote so many stories of pirates and adventurers with few women to soften them he replied: “I suppose it’s the contrast; I have always admired great strength, even in a pirate. Courage has interested me more than anything else.”
He and his stepson had grown to be great chums. At Silverado Lloyd had been seized with a desire to write stories and had set up a toy printing-press which turned off several tales. At Davos Platz they both tried their hand at illustrating these stories with pictures cut on wood-blocks and gayly coloured. Lloyd’s room was quite a gallery of these artistic attempts. But their favorite diversion was to play at a war game with lead soldiers. In after-years Lloyd wrote his recollections of the days they spent together enjoying this fun and he says: “The war game was constantly improved and elaborated, until from a few hours, a war took weeks to play, and the critical operations in the attic monopolized half our thoughts. This attic was a most chilly and dismal spot, reached by a crazy ladder, and unlit save for a single frosted window; so low at the eaves and so dark that we could seldom stand upright, nor see without a candle. Upon the attic floor a map was roughly drawn in chalks of different colours, with mountains, rivers, towns, bridges, and roads of two classes. Here we would play by the hour, with tingling fingers and stiffening knees, and an intentness, zest, and excitement that I shall never forget.
“The mimic battalions marched and counter-marched, changed by measured evolutions from column formation into line, with cavalry screens in front and massed support behind, in the most approved military fashion of to-day.”
Neither of them ever grew too old for this sport. Year after year they went back to the game. Even when they went to Samoa they laid out a campaign room with maps chalked on the floor.
In the spring of 1885 Thomas Stevenson purchased a house at Bournemouth, England, near London, as a present for his daughter-in-law.
They named the cottage “Skerryvore,” after the famous lighthouse he had helped to build in his young days, and it was their home for the next three years — busy ones for R.L.S.
Skerryvore Cottage, Bournemouth
It was a real joy to have his father and mother and Bob Stevenson with them again and his friends in London frequently drop in for a visit.
His health was never worse than during the Bournemouth days. He seldom went beyond his own garden-gate but lived, as he says, “like a weevil in a biscuit.” Yet he never worked harder or accomplished more. He wrote in bed and out of bed, sick or well, poems, plays, short stories, and verses.
He finished “Treasure Island,” the book that gained him his first popularity, and wrote “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” which made him famous at home and abroad.
“Treasure Island” had been started some time previous to please Lloyd, who asked him to write a “good story.” It all began with a map. Stevenson always loved maps, and one day during a picture-making bout he had drawn a fine one. “It was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured,” he says. “The shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbors that pleased me like sonnets.... I ticketed my performance Treasure Island.”
Immediately the island began to take life and swarm with people, all sorts of strange scenes began to take place upon it, and as he gazed at his map Stevenson discovered the plot for the “good story.”
“It is horrid fun,” he wrote, “and begins in the Admiral Benbow public house on the Devon coast; all about a map and a treasure and a mutiny, and a derelict ship ... and a doctor and a sea-cook with one leg with the chorus ‘yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,’ ... No women in the story, Lloyd orders.”
Parts of the coast at Monterey flashed back to his mind and helped him to picture the scenery of his “Treasure Island.” “It was just such a place as the Monterey sand hills the hero John Hawkins found himself on leaving his mutinous shipmates. It was just such a thicket of live oak growing low along the sand like brambles, that he crawled and dodged when he heard the voices of the pirates near him and saw Long John Silver strike down with his crutch one of his mates who had refused to join in his plan for murder.”
The Treasure Island map
As the story grew he read each new chapter aloud to the family in the evening. He was writing it for one boy, but found he had more in his audience. “My father,” he says, “not only heard with delight the daily chapter, but set himself actively to collaborate. When the time came for Billy Bones’ chest to be ransacked, he must have passed the better part of a day preparing on the back of a legal envelope an inventory of its contents, which I exactly followed, and the name of Flint’s old ship, the Walrus, was given at his particular request.”
When the map was redrawn for the book it was embellished with “blowing whales and sailing ships; and my father himself brought into service a knack he had
of various writing, and elaborately forged the signature of Captain Flint and the sailing directions of Billy Bones.”
These daily readings were rare treats to those at Skerryvore, for Stevenson was a most dramatic reader. “When he came to stand in the place of Silver you could almost have imagined you saw the great one-legged John Silver, joyous-eyed, on the rolling sea.”
The book was not long in springing into popularity. Not only the boys enjoyed it but all sorts of staid and sober men became boys once more and sat up long after bedtime to finish the tale. Mr. Gladstone caught a glimpse of it at a friend’s house and did not rest the next day until he had procured a copy for himself, and Andrew Lang said: “This is the kind of stuff a fellow wants. I don’t know when, except Tom Sawyer and the Odyssey, that I ever liked a romance so well.”
It was translated into many different languages, even appearing serially in certain Greek and Spanish papers.
“Kidnapped” followed; a story founded on the Appan murder. David Balfour, the hero, was one of his own ancestors; Alan Breck had actually lived, and the Alison who ferried Alan and David over to Torryburn was one of Cummie’s own people. The Highland country where the scenes were laid, he had traversed many times, and the Island of Earraid, where David was shipwrecked, was the spot where he had spent some of his engineering days.
Stevenson had often said the “brownies” in his dreams gave him ideas for his tales. At Skerryvore they came to him with a story that among all his others is counted the greatest.
“In the small hours one morning,” says his wife, “I was awakened by cries of horror from Louis. Thinking he had a nightmare I awakened him. He said angrily, ‘Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.’“
The dream was so vivid that he could not rest until he had written off the story, and it so possessed him that the first draft was finished within three days. It was called “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Page 854
