Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1122 page)

“I was told there was to be a dance in the dining-room and cake and ices in my honor, so Louis and I went down in the evening. I watched the dancing awhile, when suddenly I found myself seated alone at the end of the room. Judge of my surprise, and I must confess, dismay, when I saw the two little Doney children, in Watteau costumes, looking just like bits of porcelain painting, coming down the center towards me, one bearing a large birthday cake and the other a bouquet of flowers. The beautiful little creatures dropped on their knees at my feet and presented their offerings. I suppose I should have said something, but Louis said I did the best thing possible; I only kissed both the darlings. Other people had had birthdays and only received congratulations, so I felt horribly embarrassed by all these grand doings in a public room, though I was very grateful for the friendly feelings of those who arranged the affair.”

The snow came late, but during the winter it lay deep and heavy on the ground, making the roads almost impassable and their isolation more complete. Both husband and wife began to feel an almost uncontrollable depression amid these bleak surroundings, aggravated as they were by many deaths among the patients. As spring approached Mrs. Stevenson wrote:

“Louis is not very well and not very ill. Spring, I think, sits upon him, and so also all these deaths and Bertie’s illness. As soon as he is a little stronger the doctor is going to send him to some place in the neighborhood for a change.”

And she, to whom warmth and colour were a very part of her nature, was an exotic, a lost tropic bird, in these icy mountains. In a letter to her mother-in-law her heart cried out: “I cannot deny that living here is like living in a well of desolation. Sometimes I feel quite frantic to look out somewhere, and almost as though I should suffocate. But may Davos forgive me! It has done so much for Louis that I am ashamed to say anything against it.”

In the latter part of April their discontent went beyond endurance, and, believing his health now sufficiently improved to warrant the risk, they turned their steps once more towards their beloved France, where they spent a month between Barbizon, St. Germain, and Paris.

In Paris their haunting Nemesis gave them a little breathing spell, and when Louis’s strength permitted, they wandered about the streets in their own careless, irresponsible fashion, having a delightful time poking into all sorts of strange places, in one of which he insisted on spending practically his last sou for an antique watch for which she had expressed admiration. “Now we’ll starve,” said she, but after reaching home he happened to put his hand in the pocket of an old coat and drew out an uncashed cheque which had been forgotten. One day when out alone she went into a dismal-looking pawn-shop in a part of the city that was not considered exactly safe. She was puzzled by the evident superiority of the proprietor to his surroundings, and when he invited her to follow him, she went without hesitation back through winding passages until they stepped out into a beautiful garden, where sat a charming invalid lady, wife of the pawnbroker. It seemed that they were people who had fallen from a high estate, and, through devotion to his wife, who was helplessly confined to her chair, he had for years kept the secret of his occupation from her, and she had lived in her garden like a fair flower, uncontaminated by the slums of Paris. In this shop Mrs. Stevenson bought four rich mahogany posts, part of an antique bedstead, which she used many years afterwards as pillars in the drawing-room of her San Francisco house.

But alas, their pleasant jaunting soon came to an end, for Louis had a relapse which brought desperate disappointment to them both, and of which she writes to his mother: “I felt compelled to tell him that he must be prepared for whatever may happen. Naturally the poor boy yearned for his mother. I think it must be very sweet to you to have this grown-up man of thirty still clinging to you with his child love.”

The setback dashed their spirits so severely that his conscientious Scotch parents thought it their duty to lecture them on the sin of ingratitude for the blessings that were still theirs. In great contrition their daughter-in-law writes:

“I was just about to write when a double letter from you and Mr. Tommy came to hand. When I read what Mr. Tommy said about gratitude I felt more conscience-stricken than words can express. Neither Louis nor I have any right to feel even annoyed about anything. Certainly God has been good. I have seen others, apparently no more ill than Louis was at one time, laid in their graves, and I see others, quite as ill, struggling wearily for their daily bread. We see misery and wretchedness on every hand, and here we sit, none of it touching us, Louis feeling better, and both of us complaining shamefully because in the smallest things the world does not go round smoothly enough for us.... I fancy we shall start for Scotland Tuesday, but will travel slowly on account of Louis’s fatigue and nervous exhaustion from the shaking of the train.”

Edinburgh was reached on May 31, 1881, and a few days later, accompanied by his mother, they went to Pitlochry, where they spent two months in Kinnaird Cottage, on the banks of a lovely river. This was a beautiful but inclement region, and cold winds and rain prevailed almost constantly. The two ladies never ventured out without umbrellas, and even then usually returned in a drenched condition. Imprisoned by the weather, the sick man was compelled to spend all his waking time in the sitting-room, where his confinement was made the more penitential by the absence of books. It happened that the only books in the house were two volumes of Voltaire, and these were taken from the younger pair one dreary Sunday by their stern parents as not proper “Sabba’-day” reading.

Thrown entirely on their own resources, they decided to write stories and read them to each other. These tales, coloured by the surroundings, were of a sombre cast. Here Thrawn Janet was begun. In a preface, written years later, Mrs. Stevenson gives a graphic description of the first writing of this gloomy but powerful story.

“That evening is as clear in my memory as though it were yesterday — the dim light of our one candle, with the acrid smell of the wick that we had forgotten to snuff, the shadows in the corners of the ‘lang, laigh, mirk chamber, perishing cauld,’ the driving rain on the roof close above our heads, and the gusts of wind that shook our windows. The very sound of the names, ‘Murdock Soulis, the Hangin’ Shaw in the beild of the Black Hill, Balweary in the vale of Dule,’ sent a ‘cauld grue’ along my bones. By the time the tale was finished my husband had fairly frightened himself, and we crept down the stairs clinging hand in hand like two scared children.”

“Weather wet, bad weather, still wet, afraid to go out, pouring rain,” appeared almost constantly in Mrs. Thomas Stevenson’s diary, and though Stevenson, whether inspired by home scenes or driven in upon himself for relief from the outer dreariness, did some of his best work here, it became clear that a more favourable spot must be sought. From Pitlochry they went to Braemar, but that place proved to be no improvement. Mrs. Stevenson writes of it in her preface to Treasure Island:

“It was a season of rain and chill weather that we spent in the cottage of the late Miss McGregor, though the townspeople called the cold, steady, penetrating drizzle ‘just misting,’ In Scotland a fair day appears to mean fairly wet. ‘It is quite fair now,’ they will say, when you can hardly distinguish the houses across the street. Queen Victoria, who had endeared herself greatly to the folk in the neighborhood, showed a true Scotch spirit in her indifference to the weather. Her Majesty was in the habit of driving out to take tea in the open, accompanied by a couple of ladies-in-waiting. The road to Balmoral ran not far behind the late Miss McGregor’s cottage, and as the Queen always drove in an open carriage, with her tea basket strapped on behind, we could see her pass very plainly. Our admiration for the sturdy old lady was very much tempered by our sympathy with the ladies-in-waiting, with whom driving backward on the front seat did not apparently agree. Their poor noses were very red, and the expression of their faces anxious, not to say cross, as they miserably coughed and sneezed.”

At Braemar the working fever continued, and Treasure Island was planned, but when autumn came they fled before the Scotch mists, and once more wended their way to the frozen Alps, settling for the winter in the Châlet am Stein. From mist to snow was but a rueful change, but this time Louis’s health seemed to gain greater benefit, and a reasonable amount of work was accomplished.

So the level current of their lives flowed on through a rather mild winter, with an occasional föhn wailing about their châlet as the “rocs might have wailed in the valley of diamonds,” until one morning they heard a bird sing, and soon the snow on the higher levels began to melt and send the water with a rush down the sides of the streets. Almost in a breath the hill slopes about them turned as white with crocus blooms as they had been in their winter covering of snow. Into their hearts something of the springtime entered, and one day Louis sat singing beside his wife, who writes: “I do not care for the music, but it makes me feel so happy to see him so well. When I wake in the morning I wonder what it is that brings such a glow to my heart, and then I remember!”

Yet it was then, as the flowers began to bloom and the birds to sing, that many of those to whom they had become attached with the pitiful bond of a common affliction broke the slender cord that held them to life and quietly slipped away. Of these she writes: “Louis is much cut up because a young man whom he liked and had been tobogganing with has been found dead in his bed. Bertie still hovers between life and death. Poor little Mrs. Doney is gone; my heart is sad for those two lovely little girls. In a place like this there are many depressing things, but it is encouraging to know that many are going away cured.”

Their own case had gone better, and Doctor Ruedi had given them leave “to live in France, fifteen miles as the crow flies from the sea, and if possible near a fir wood.”

In April they left the Alps and ventured back to their misty island, where they spent an unsatisfactory summer, moving from place to place in a fruitless search for better weather. Several hemorrhages forced them to the conclusion that they must be once more on the wing, and as both felt an unconquerable repugnance to spending another winter at bleak Davos, it was finally decided to go where their hearts led them, and seek a suitable place in the south of France. As Mrs. Stevenson was too ill just then to travel, the invalid, accompanied by his cousin, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, started about the middle of September, 1882, for Marseilles. The wife’s anxiety, however, gave her little rest, and almost before she was able to stand she set out after him, arriving in an alarmed and fatigued condition, of which he wrote to his mother in his humourous way: “The wreck was towed into port yesterday evening at seven P.M. She bore the reversed ensign in every feature; the population of Marseilles, who were already vastly exercised, wept when they beheld her jury masts and helpless hull.”

To her mother-in-law she wrote from here: “This is a lovely spot, and I cannot tell you how my heart goes out to it. It is so like Indiana that it would not surprise me to hear my father or mother speak to me at any moment, and yet it is not like home either. The houses and the ships look foreign, but the colour of the sky and the quality of the air, the corn, the grapes, the yellow pumpkins, the flowers, and the trees, are the same. Everything seems as it is at home, steeped in sunshine.”

In a few days they found a house, the Campagne Defli, in the suburbs of St. Marcel, “in a lovely spot, among lovely wooded and cliffy hills,” where they fondly hoped their pursuing fate would forget them for a time. Of Campagne Defli she joyfully writes to her mother-in-law: “Of all the houses in the world I think I should choose this one. It is a garden of paradise, and I cannot tell you how I long to have you here to enjoy things with me. It is such happiness to be in a place that combines the features of the land where I was born and California, where I have spent the best years of my life.”

She set eagerly to work to turn this charming but neglected place into a pleasant home, directing servants in the cleaning and scrubbing, hanging curtains over draughty doors, repapering walls, putting fresh coverings on old furniture, planting flowers and vegetables in the garden — in fact, pouring out her Dutch housekeeping soul in a thousand and one ways. The French servants, amazed at these activities, thought she was very queer. Once when she was on a step-ladder, with a hammer in her hand, putting up some pictures, she heard some one whisper outside: “Elle est folle.” As the two servants came in she cried out indignantly, waving the hammer for emphasis, “Pas folle! Beaucoup d’intelligence!” and then, losing her balance, fell over, step-ladder and all, while the servants fled shrieking. To her mother-in-law she writes: “For Louis’s birthday I found a violet blooming at the back of the house, and yesterday I discovered in our reserve a large magnolia tree, the delight of my heart. I am continually finding something new.”

Two things were to her as a closed book: one was foreign languages and the other was music. She could not sing a note nor hardly tell one tune from another, yet she liked to listen to music. Her speaking voice was low, modulated, and sweet, but with few inflections, and her husband once compared it to the pleasantly monotonous flow of a running brook under ice. As to languages, although she never seemed able to acquire any extended knowledge of the tongue of any foreign land in which she dwelt, she always managed in some mysterious way of her own to communicate freely with the inhabitants. In Spanish she only learned si, yet, supplemented with much gay laughter and many expressive gesticulations, that one word went a long way. She writes amusingly of this difficulty from Marseilles:

“Yesterday the servant and I went out shopping, which was difficult for me, but, although she knows no English, she seems to understand, as did the shopkeepers, my strange lingo. I had to put on the manner of an old experienced shopper and housekeeper, and count my change with great care, for it was important that I should impress both the woman and the shop people with the notion that I knew what was what. I have been in town all day, making arrangements with butchers, buying an American stove — for the enormous gaudy French range is of no account whatever — and even went and got my luncheon in a restaurant, and all upon my pidgin French. To Louis’s great amusement I sometimes address him in it. I bought some cups and saucers to-day of a man who said ‘yes’ to all I said, while to all his remarks I answered ‘oui.’ The servant we have is very anxious to please us, and I have finally got her to the length of bringing the knives to the table cleaned; she could hardly believe at first that I was serious in wanting clean knives when there was no company.”