Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  The Travels with a Donkey were written in the winter and published in June. In the spring Louis wrote to R. A. M. Stevenson: c My book is through the press. It has good passages. I can say no more. A chapter called “ The Monks,” another “A Camp in the Dark,” a third, “ A Night among the Pines.” Each of these has, I think, some stuff in it in the way of writing. But lots of it is mere protestations to F., most of which I think you will understand. That is to me the main thread of interest. Whether the damned public But that’s all one.’

  He returned to London and began to collaborate with Mr. Henley in a play based on the latest of his drafts of 1 Memories and Portraits, .

  Deacon Brodie, which he had not touched since he was nineteen. In the meantime he started on another walk, this time down the valley of the Stour, which separates the counties of Essex and Suffolk; but a sore heel soon brought him back to London, not unwillingly, as he found it4 dull, cold, and not singularly pretty on the road.’ In December he wrote to his mother: ‘ I don’t wish the play spoken of at all; for of course, as a first attempt, it will most likely come to nothing. It is, however, pretty good in parts. I work three hours every morning here in the club on the brouillons; and then three in the afternoon on the fair copy. In bed by ten; here again in the morning, to the consternation of the servants, as soon as the club is open.’

  It was probably at this time that he made the social experiment recorded in the Amateur Emigrant of practising upon the public by ‘ going abroad through a suburban part of London simply attired in a sleeve-waistcoat.’

  ‘ The result was curious. I then learned for the first time, and by the exhaustive process, how much attention ladies are accustomed to bestow on all male creatures of their own station; for, in my humble rig, each one who went by me caused a certain shock of surprise and a sense of something wanting. In my normal circumstances, it appeared, every young lady must have paid me some passing tribute of a glance; and though I had often been unconscious of it when given, I was well aware of its absence when it was withheld. My height seemed to decrease with every woman who passed me, for she passed me like a dog. This is one of my grounds for supposing that what are called the upper classes may sometimes produce a disagreeable impression in what are called the lower; and I wish some one would continue my experiment, and find out exactly at what stage of toilette a man becomes invisible to the well-regulated female eye.’1

  1 The Amateur Emigrant, .

  VOL. I. L

  But life was not to be lived upon the old terms. His heart was elsewhere, and the news which reached him was disquieting. For some time it was fairly good; then Mrs. Osbourne fell seriously ill. There had been, there could be, no restoration of her home life; but it appeared that she would be able to obtain a divorce without causing any unnecessary distress to her family, and in this conjuncture Stevenson could not see clearly what his course of action ought to be. He was first at Swanston with Mr. Henley, finishing Deacon Brodie; then in London; at Swanston again, this time alone, writing his chapters on Lay Morals; then at the Gareloch with his parents. In May he went to London, and, after staying with Mr. George Meredith, crossed over to France. Had he found a companion, he would perhaps have gone to the Pyrenees, but he spent most of his time at Cernay la Ville, and returned to London in the end of June. He there saw Mr. Macdonald of the Times, in reference to some negotiations for his employment; he expressed himself as unwilling to accept ‘leaders,’ but apparently asked for some more general commission, which, however, he did not receive.

  The Travels with a Donkey had been published in June, and obtained the same unsubstantial success as the Inland Voyage, although, contrary to its author’s own judgment of the two books, it afterwards had slightly the better sale.

  On 14th July he returned to Edinburgh, and by the 30th his mind was made up — to California he must go. From Edinburgh he came back to London, presumably to make arrangements for his start; and wherever he went, he found his friends unanimous in their opinion that he ought to stay at home. Under these circumstances it seemed to him so hopeless to expect any other judgment on the part of his parents, that he did not even go through the form of consulting them on the matter, and with open eyes went away, knowing that he need look for no further countenance from home. He had long felt it to be a duty that every man on reaching manhood should cease to be a burden to his father; he had now learned his craft, and every circumstance seemed to him to point out that the time was come for him to seek his own livelihood and justify his independence. These considerations were very present to his mind, and perhaps he hardly realised the distress which he would inevitably cause his parents by leaving them without a word and in almost total ignorance of the hopes and motives which inspired him.

  CHAPTER VIII

  CALIFORNIA — 1879-80

  ‘ What a man truly wants, that will he get, or he will be changed in trying.’ — R. L. S., Aphorism.

  1 To My Wife.

  ‘ Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,

  With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,

  Steel-true and blade-straight

  The great artificer Made my mate.

  ‘Honour, anger, valour, fire;

  A love that life could never tire,

  Death quench or evil stir,

  The mighty master Gave to her.

  Teacher, tender, comrade, wife,

  A fellow-farer true through life,

  Heart-whole and soul-free

  The august father Gave to me.’

  Songs of Travel, No. xxvi.

  FROM London he went north, and on August 7th, 1879, sailed from the Clyde in the steamship Devonia,, bound for New York. She carried a number of emigrants, but Stevenson, though mixing freely with them, had, chiefly to obtain a table for his writing, taken his passage in the second cabin, which was almost indistinguishable from the steerage. His object in travelling in this fashion was, in the first instance, economy, and next to that, a desire to gain first-hand knowledge for himself of emigrants and emigration, which might be of immediate use for making a book and of ultimate service to him in a thousand ways. He suffered a good deal on the voyage, being already anxious and highly strung before he started, but he stuck manfully to his work and wrote, * in a slantindicular cabin, with the table playing bob-cherry with the ink-bottle/ the greater part of The Story of a Lie. The rest of his time he devoted to making the acquaintance of his fellow- passengers, learning their histories, studying their characters, and — as any one may see between the lines of The Amateur Emigrant1 — rendering them endless unobtrusive services, and helping and cheering them in every way possible. He passed easily for one of themselves. ‘ Among my fellow-passengers,’ he wrote elsewhere, passed generally as a mason, for the excellent reason that there was a mason on board who happened to know; and this fortunate event enabled me to mix with these working people on a footing of equality. ... It chanced there was a blacksmith on board who was not only well- mannered himself and a judge of manners, but a fellow besides of an original mind. He had early diagnosed me for a masquerader and a person out of place; and as we had grown intimate upon the voyage, I carried him my troubles. How did I behave? Was I, upon this crucial test, at all a gentleman? I might have asked eight hundred thousand blacksmiths (if Wales or the world contain so many) and they would have held my question for a mockery; but Jones was a man of genuine perception, thought a long time before he answered, looking at me comically, and reviewing (I could see) the events of the voyage, and then told me that “ on the whole “ I did “ pretty well.” Mr. Jones was a humane man, and very much my friend, and he could get no further than “ on the whole” and “ pretty well.” I was chagrined at the moment for myself; on a larger basis of experience, I am now only concerned for my class. My coequals would have done but little better, and many of them worse.’

  The voyage passed without event, and the steamer arrived at New York on the evening of the 18th of August. Stevenson passed the night in a shilling Irish boarding-house. 4 A little Irish
girl,’ he writes, ‘is now reading my book1 aloud to her sister at my elbow; they chuckle, and I feel flattered. P.S. — Now they yawn, and I am indifferent: such a wisely conceived thing is vanity.’ The following day he spent in making purchases, and also is said to have entered the offices of various magazines to establish, if possible, an American connection. Angels have been dismissed unawares at other places and at other times, and — if there be any truth in the story — Stevenson found that the moment of his welcome was not yet come.

  Within four-and-twenty hours of his first arrival he was already on his way as an emigrant to the Far West, a chief part of his baggage being ‘ Bancroft’s History of the United States in six fat volumes.’

  The railway journey began in floods of rain and the maximum of discomfort. The record of it is in the hands of all to read, and I need say only that it occupied from a Monday evening to the Saturday morning of the following week, and that the tedium and stress of the last few.days in the emigrant train proper were almost unbearable.

  On the 30th of August Stevenson reached San Fran cisco, but so much had the long journey shaken him that he looked like a man at death’s door. The news so far was good; Mrs. Osbourne was better, but that was all. To recover from the effects of his hardships he forthwith went another hundred and fifty miles to the south, and camped out by himself in the coast range of mountains beyond Monterey. But he had overtaxed his strength, 1 I.e. the Travels with a Donkey, then recently published.

  and broke down. Two nights he ‘ lay out under a tree in a sort of stupor,’ and if two frontiersmen in charge of a goat-ranche had not taken him in and tended him, there would have been an end of his story. They took him back to the ranche, and amid romantic surroundings and in that enchanting climate, he made a recovery for the time.

  ‘ I am now lying in an upper chamber, with a 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 minutes.’

  Here he spent a couple of weeks, passing the mornings in teaching the children to read, and then went down to Monterey, where he remained until the middle of December. In those days it still was a small Mexican town, altered but slightly by the extraordinary cosmopolitan character of the few strangers who visited it. In his own words, it was ‘ a place of two or three streets, economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which were watercourses in the rainy season, and at all times were rent up by fissures four or five feet deep. There were no street lights. . . . The houses were for the most part built of unbaked adobe brick, many of them old for so new a country, some of very elegant proportions, with low, spacious, shapely rooms, and walls so thick that the heat of summer never dried them to the heart. . . . There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where people sat almost all day long 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 the hand-gallop, up hill and down dale, and round the sharpest corner, urging their hurses with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs, checking them dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face in a square yard. . . . Spanish was the language of the streets. It was difficult to get along without a word or two of that language for an occasion. The only communications in which the population joined were with a view to amusement. A weekly public ball took place with great etiquette, in addition to the numerous fandangoes in private houses. There was a really fair amateur brass band. Night after night, serenaders would be going about the street, sometimes in a company and with several instruments and voices together, sometimes severally, each guitar before a different window. It was a strange thing to lie awake in nineteenth-century America, and hear the guitar accompany, and one of these old, heartbreaking Spanish love-songs mount into the night air, perhaps in a deep baritone, perhaps in that high-pitched, pathetic, womanish alto which is so common among Mexican men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not entirely human, but altogether sad.’1

  Here Stevenson found quarters curiously to his taste, which was simple, though discriminating. He lodged with the doctor, and for his meals went to a restaurant.

  4 Of all my private collection of remembered inns and restaurants — and I believe it, other things being equal, to be unrivalled — one particular house of entertainment stands forth alone. I am grateful, indeed, to many a swinging signboard, to many a rusty wine-bush; but not with the same kind of gratitude. Some were beautifully situated, some had an admirable table, some were the gathering-places of excellent companions; but take them for all in all, not one can be compared with Simoneau’s at Monterey.

  ‘ To the front, it was part barber’s shop, part bar; to the back, there was a kitchen and a salle a manger. The 1 ‘The Old Pacific Capital,’ Across the Plains, .

  intending diner found himself in a little, chill, bare, adobe room, furnished with chairs and tables, and adorned with some oil sketches roughly brushed upon the wall in the manner of Barbizon and Cernay. The table, at whatever hour you entered, was already laid with a not spotless napkin, and, by way of epergne, with a dish of green peppers and tomatoes, pleasing alike to eye and palate. If you stayed there to meditate before a meal, you would hear Simoneau all about the kitchen, and rattling among the dishes.’

  The fragment breaks off, or we should have had a picture of M. Simoneau, the proprietor, with whom Stevenson 4 played chess and discussed the universe’ daily. At his table there ‘sat down, day after day, a Frenchman, two Portuguese, an Italian, a Mexican, and a Scotsman; they had for common visitors an American from Illinois, a nearly pure-blood Indian woman, and a naturalised Chinese; and from time to time a Switzer and a German came down from country ranches for the night,’

  This society afforded Stevenson most of the diversion that he could now spare the time to enjoy. Of his adventures in the forest he has told us, and chiefly of that day when, setting fire to a tree in mere experiment and idleness of mind, he ran for his life in fear of being lynched. But during all these weeks he was working as he had hardly worked before. Half of a novel called A Vendetta in the West was written, and the whole of The Pavilion on the Links, which he had begun in London, was despatched to England. The scenery of the latter was, I believe, suggested by Dirleton in East Lothian, near North Berwick, and midway between Tantallon and Gullane, haunts of his boyhood, to which he returned in Catriona. At the same time he was writing up his emigrant experiences, about half of the original manuscript being completed at Monterey. There was a tiny local newspaper, The Monterey Californian, of which one of his friends was owner, editor, printer, and everything else, and to this Stevenson occasionally lent a hand. But he was still greatly agitated and worried, and though by this time word came from San Francisco that Mrs. Osbourne was well, and that matters were taking their course, the main object of his journey still seemed no nearer than before. The strain of exertion and anxiety was again too great, and 4 while leading a dull regular life in a mild climate,’ he developed pleurisy, and had for a few days to relax his exertions.

  All this time he was the kindly and bright companion; his gaiety and courage never flagged. ‘ There is something in me worth saying,’ he wrote to Mr. Henley, 4 though I can’t find what it is just yet.’

  About the middle of December he came to San Francisco, and there hired the most economical lodging he could find, at all compatible with the conditions of his work — a single room in a poor house in Bush Street. All his meals he took outside at some of the cheap restaurants; he lived at seventy cents a day, and worked yet harder than before. He made inquiries about work on the San Francisco Bulletin, but the payment offered by that newspaper for literary articles, which were all he was ready to undertake, was too small to be
of any use to a writer so painstaking and so deliberate. The Bulletin afterwards accepted at its own rates a couple of papers which he had not written specially for it, but his connection with the San Francisco press was absolutely limited to this transaction.1

  But the worst part of the change from Monterey was that he was thrown more upon himself. In place of the bright social life of the little Spanish town, a life such as is common on the Continent of Europe, but is hardly 1 ‘ There is no ground for the statement that he ever acted as a reporter for the Chronicle or any other San Francisco paper, the records of that journal bearing out the recollection of all his friends on this point’ (Times, 2nd July 1901). A legend that the San Francisco doctors refused him advice except for ready money seems equally unfounded.

  to be found in England, he was plunged into the terrible solitude of a large city. On the 26th December he writes: ‘ For four days I have spoken to no one but my landlady or landlord, or to restaurant waiters. This is not a gay way to pass Christmas, is it?’ And again: ‘ After weeks in this city, I know only a few neighbouring streets; I seem to be cured of all my adventurous whims, and even of human curiosity, and am content to sit here by the fire and await the course of fortune/

  It was in these days that he met that’ bracing, Republican postman in the city of San Francisco. I lived in that city among working folk, and what my neighbours accepted at the postman’s hands — nay, what I took from him myself — it is still distasteful to recall.’1