Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1068 page)

That the cruise itself was on the whole rather a cheerless experience is seen by the following letter, in which Stevenson lets us behind the scenes, and for once even grumbles a little.

1 Comptigne, 9th Sept. 1876. [Canoe Voyage.]

4 We have had deplorable weather quite steady ever since the start; not one day without heavy showers; and generally much wind and cold wind forby. ... I must say it has sometimes required a stout heart; and sometimes one could not help sympathising inwardly with the French folk who hold up their hands in astonishment over our pleasure journey. Indeed I do not know that I would have stuck to it as I have done, if it had not been for professional purposes; for an easy book may be written and sold, with mighty little brains about it, where the journey is of a certain seriousness and can be named. I mean, a book about a journey from York to London must be clever; a book about the Caucasus may be what you will. Now I mean to make this journey at least a curious one; it won’t be finished these vacations.

‘ Hitherto a curious one it has been; and above all in its influence on S. and me. I wake at six every morning; and we are generally in bed and asleep before half-past nine. Last night I found my way to my room with a dark cloud of sleep over my shoulders, so thick that the candle burnt red at about the hour of 8.40. If that isn’t healthy, egad, I wonder what is.’

CHAPTER VII

TRANSITION — 1876-79

‘ You may paddle all day long; but it is when you come back at nightfall, and look in at the familiar room, that you find Love or Death awaiting you beside the stove; and the most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.’  The concluding words of ‘
An Inland Voyage

The next three years of Stevenson’s life were so closely similar to the three preceding, that at first sight, but for his own selection of the age of five-and-twenty as the limit of youth, it might seem almost unnecessary to mark any division between them. He continued to spend his time between France, London, and Edinburgh, to lead a more or less independent life, and to give the best of his talents and industry to his now recognised profession. The year 1877 was marked by the acceptance of the first of his stories ever printed — A Lodging for the Night — and from that date his fiction began to take its place beside, and gradually to supersede, the essays with which his career had opened. The month of May 1878 saw not only the appearance of his first book — An Inland Voyage — but also the beginning of his two first serial publications — the New Arabian Nights and the Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh; and they were followed at the end of the year by the Edinburgh in book form, and in June 1879 by the Travels with a Donkey. All these, however, were but a measure of the author’s growing reputation, and of the facility with which he could now find a publisher.

Original as these writings were, and unlike the work of his contemporaries, none of them constituted any new departure in his life or any alteration in his attitude to the world: and the change that now came arrived from another quarter. His friendships, as we have seen, counted for a great deal with Stevenson, and though the roll of them was not yet closed, and ended indeed only at his death, it was at the beginning of this period that he made the acquaintance which affected him more than any other — he now met for the first time the lady who was afterwards to be his wife.

Already it is becoming difficult to realise that there was a time not long distant when study for all the professions, including that of art, was hedged about with arbitrary restrictions for women. At the date of which I am speaking these limitations had been removed to some extent in Paris as far as the studios were concerned, but the natural consequences had not yet followed in country quarters, and women artists were as yet unknown in any of the colonies about Fontainebleau. Hitherto these societies had been nearly as free from the female element as were afterwards the early novels of Stevenson himself: the landlady, the chambermaid, the peasant girl passed across the stage, but the leading rdles were filled by men alone. But when Stevenson and Sir Walter Simpson, the ‘ Arethusa’ and the ‘ Cigarette/ returned from the Inland Voyage to their quarters at Grez, they found the colony in trepidation at the expected arrival of the invader.

The new-comers, however, were neither numerous nor formidable; being only an American lady and her two children — a young girl and a boy. Mrs. Osbourne had seen her domestic happiness break up in California, and had come to France for the education of her family. She and her daughter had thrown themselves with ardour into the pursuit of painting, and thus became acquainted with some of the English and American artists in Paris.

After profiting by the opportunities afforded them in the capital, they were in search of country lodgings, and accordingly, having taken counsel with their artist friends, they came to Grez.

So here for the first time Stevenson saw the woman whom Fate had brought half-way across the world to meet him. He straightway fell in love; he knew his own mind, and in spite of all dissuasions and difficulties, his choice never wavered. The difficulties were so great and hope so remote that nothing was said to his parents or to any but two or three of his closest friends. But in the meantime life took on a cheerful hue, and the autumn passed brightly for them all until the middle of October,1 when Stevenson must return to Edinburgh, there to spend the winter.

In January 1877 he came to London for a fortnight, and first met Mr. Gosse, who, being immediately added to the ranks of his intimate friends, has given us a most vivid and charming description of the effect produced on strangers at that time by Stevenson.

‘It was in 1877,2 or late that I was presented to Stevenson, at the old Savile Club, by Mr. Sidney Colvin, who thereupon left us to our devices. We went downstairs and lunched together, and then we adjourned to the smoking-room. As twilight came on I tore myself away, but Stevenson walked with me across Hyde Park, and nearly to my house. He had an engagement, and so had I, but I walked a mile or two back with him. The fountains of talk had been unsealed, and they drowned the conventions. I came home dazzled with my new friend, saying, as Constance does of Arthur, “ Was ever such a gracious creature born?”

. . Those who have written about him from later

1       To the next year belongs the charcoal drawing made’by Mrs. Osbourne of her future husband, which has been redrawn by Mr. T. Blake Wirgman, and stands at the beginning of this volume.

2       Critical Kitcats: London, William Heinemann, 1896, p. 278.

impressions than those ot which I speak, seem to me to give insufficient prominence to the gaiety of Stevenson. It was his cardinal quality in those early days. A childlike mirth leaped and danced in him; he-seemed to skip upon the hills of life. He was simply bubbling with quips and jests; his inherent earnestness or passion about abstract things was incessantly relieved by jocosity; and when he had built one of his intellectual castles in the sand, a wave of humour was certain to sweep in and destroy it. I cannot, for the life of me, recall any of his jokes; and written down in cold blood, they might not be funny if I did. They were not wit so much as humanity, the many-sided outlook upon life. I am anxious that his laughter-loving mood should not be forgotten, because later on it was partly, but I think never wholly, quenched by ill-health, responsibility, and the advance of years. He was often, in the old days, excessively and delightfully silly — silly with the silliness of an inspired schoolboy; and I am afraid that our laughter sometimes sounded ill in the ears of age. . . .

‘My experience of Stevenson during these first years was confined to London, upon which he would make sudden piratical descents, staying a few days or weeks, and melting into air again. He was much at my house; and it must be told that my wife and I, as young married people, had possessed ourselves of a house too large for our slender means immediately to furnish. The one person who thoroughly approved of our great, bare, absurd drawing-room was Louis, who very earnestly dealt with us on the immorality of chairs and tables, and desired us to sit always, as he delighted to sit, upon hassocks on the floor. Nevertheless, as armchairs and settees straggled into existence, he handsomely consented to use them, although never in the usual way, but with his legs thrown sideways over the arms of them, or the head of a sofa treated as a perch. In particular, a certain shelf, with cupboards below, attached to a bookcase, is worn with the person of Stevenson, who would spend half an evening while passionately discussing some great question of morality or literature, leaping sideways in a seated posture to the length of this shelf, and then back again. He was eminently peripatetic, too, and never better company than walking in the street, this exercise seeming to inflame his fancy.’

It was in these years especially that he gave the impression of something transitory and unreal, sometimes almost inhuman.

cHe was careful, as I have hardly known any other man to be, not to allow himself to be burdened by the weight of material things. It was quite a jest with us that he never acquired any possessions. In the midst of those who produced books, pictures, prints, bric-a-brac, none of these things ever stuck to Stevenson. There are some deep-sea creatures, the early part of whose life is spent dancing through the waters; at length some sucker or tentacle touches a rock, adheres, pulls down more tentacles, until the creature is caught there, stationary for the remainder of its existence. So it happens to men, and Stevenson’s friends caught the ground with a house, a fixed employment, a ‘stake in life’; he alone kept dancing in the free element, unattached.’1

These were the days when he most frequented the Savile Club, and the lightest and most vivacious part of him there came to the surface. He might spend the morning in work or business, and would then come to the Club for luncheon. If he were so fortunate as to find any congenial companions disengaged, or to induce them to throw over their engagements, he would lead them off to the smoking-room, and there spend an afternoon in the highest spirits and the most brilliant and audacious talk.

His private thoughts and prospects must often have been of the gloomiest, but he seems to have borne his 1 Critical Kitcats: London, William Heinemann, 1896, p. 300.

unhappiness with a courage as high as he ever afterwards displayed, and with a show of levity which imposed on his friends and often ended by carrying him out of himself.

The whim of independence to which Mr. Gosse refers was carried out to an extreme by the two Stevenson cousins, about this time, in one of their visits to Paris, an experience which Louis afterwards transferred to the pages of The Wrecker. f Stennis’, it may be explained, was the nearest approach to their name possible to Barbizon, and accordingly it was as Stennis aint and Stennis frere that the pair were always known.

‘The two Stennises had come from London, it appeared, a week before with nothing but greatcoats and toothbrushes. It was expensive, to be sure, for every time you had to comb your hair a barber must be paid, and every time you changed your linen one shirt must be bought and another thrown away; but anything was better, argued these young gentlemen, than to be the slaves of haversacks. “ A fellow has to get rid gradually of all material attachments: that was manhood,” said they; “ and as long as you were bound down to anything — house, umbrella, or portmanteau — you were still tethered by the umbilical cord.”‘1

When he broke through this rule, his inconsistency was equally original and unexpected.

4 Paris, Jan. 1878. — I have become a bird fancier. I carry six little creatures no bigger than my thumb about with me almost all the day long; they are so pretty; and it is so nice to waken in the morning and hear them sing.’ Six or seven years later he again alludes to these or to other similar pets. ‘ There is only one sort of bird that I can tolerate caged, though even then I think it hard, and that is what is called in France the Bec-d’Argent. I once had two of these pigmies in captivity; and in the quiet, bare house upon a silent street where I was then 1 The Wrecker, i. p. 73.

living, their song, which was not much louder than a bee’s, but airily musical, kept me in a perpetual good- humour. I put the cage upon my table when I worked, carried it with me when I went for meals, and kept it by my head at night: the first thing in the morning, these maestrini would pipe up.’

The following letter written from Paris has preserved a record of one of the thousand little kind and thoughtful acts, which were so characteristic of Stevenson. Most of them are nameless and unremembered, but this — thanks to his perception of its humour — has been handed down to us.

41 st Feb. 1877, Paris. — My dear Mother, — I have ordered a picture. There is magnificence for you. Poor    is, as usual, hard up, and I knew wanted to make me a present of a sketch; so I took the first word and offered him 5of. for one. You should have seen us. I was so embarrassed that I could not finish a single phrase, and kept beginning, “ You know,” and “ You understand,”

and “ Look here,    ,” and ending in pitiful intervals of silence. I was perspiring all over. Suddenly I saw        

begin to break out all over in a silvery dew; and he just made a dive at me and took me in his arms — in a kind of champion comique style, you know, but with genuine feeling.’

This letter is also an indirect confirmation of what has been said in the preceding chapter as to Stevenson’s poverty. About this time, however, his father followed the precedent set in his own case, and paid to Louis as an instalment of his patrimony a considerable sum, amounting, I believe, to not less than a thousand pounds. The fact is certain, the date and exact details have been lost. In the end Stevenson derived small benefit himself. ‘ The little money he had,’ as Mr. Colvin says, ‘was always absolutely at the disposal of his friends.’ In 1877 he had still £800, but, owing to misfortunes befalling his friends, in none of which was he under any obliga