In his usual way he soon made acquaintance with his fellow passengers and did them many a friendly turn. They took him for one of themselves and showed little curiosity as to where he came from, who he was, or where he was going. He says: “The sailors called me ‘mate,’ the officers addressed me as ‘my man,’ my comrades accepted me without hesitation for a person of their own character and experience. One, a mason himself, believed I was a mason, several, among these at least one of the seamen, judged me to be a petty officer in the American navy; and I was so often set down for a practical engineer that at last I had not the heart to deny it.”
The emigrants were from many countries, though the majority were Scotch and Irish bound for the new world with the hope of meeting with better fortune than they had had in the old, and they whiled away the days at sea in their several ways, making the best of their discomforts and cheering one another when they grew lonely or homesick for those they had left behind.
When the weather was good their spirits rose and there were many rounds of singing and story-telling as they sat clustered together like bees under the lee of the deck-house, and in all of these Stevenson joined heartily.
“We were indeed a musical ship’s company,” he says, “and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the accordion, and the songs of all nations, good, bad or indifferent — Scottish, English, Irish, Russian or Norse — the songs were received with generous applause. Once or twice, a recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scotch accent, varied the proceedings; and once we sought in vain to dance a quadrille, eight men of us together, to the music of the violin. The performers were humorous, frisky fellows, who loved to cut capers in private life; but as soon as they were arranged for the dance, they conducted themselves like so many mutes at a funeral. I have never seen decorum pushed so far; and as this was not expected, the quadrille was soon whistled off, and the dancers departed.
“But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed over modesty and even the inclemencies of the sea and sky. On one rough Saturday night, we got together by the main deck-house, in a place sheltered from the wind and rain. Some clinging to the ladder which led to the hurricane-deck and the rest knitting arms or taking hands, we made a ring to support the women in the violent lurching of the ship, and when we were thus disposed, sang to our hearts’ content.
“There was a single chess-board and a single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love. There were feats of dexterity, puzzles for the intelligence and a regular daily competition to guess the vessel’s progress; at twelve o’clock when the result was published in the wheel house, came to be a moment of considerable interest.... We had beside, romps in plenty. Puss in the Corner, which we rebaptized, in more manly style, Devil and Four Corners, was my favorite game; but there were many who preferred another, the humor of which was to box a person’s ears until he found out who cuffed him.”
The voyage, which lasted ten days, was uneventful except for some rough weather when Stevenson found his cabin most stuffy and uncomfortable. He was not really ill, however, and spent much of the time finishing a tale called “The Story of a Lie,” while his table played “Bob Jerry with the ink bottle.” On his arrival in New York the story was sent back to London with the following letter to Sidney Colvin:
“On Board S.S. Devonia an hour or two out of New York, Aug., 1879.
“My dear Colvin:
“I have finished my story. The handwriting is not good because of the ship’s misconduct; thirty-one pages in ten days at sea is not bad. I am not very well; bad food, bad air and hard work have brought me down. But the spirits keep good. The voyage has been most interesting and will make, if not a series of Pall Mall articles, at least the first part of a new book. The last weight on me has been trying to keep notes for this purpose. Indeed I have worked like a horse and am tired as a donkey. If I should have to push on far by rail, I shall bring nothing but my fine bones to port.
“Goodbye to you all. I suppose it is now late afternoon with you all across the seas. What shall I find over here? I dare not wonder. — Ever yours R.L.S.”
As California was the goal he aimed for, in spite of his fatigue after ten days of poor living and the sea, he determined to push on immediately in an emigrant train bound for the Pacific coast.
On reaching port he and a man named Jones, with whom he had had more in common than with any of his other fellow passengers, landed together.
“Jones and I issued into West Street, sitting on some straw in the bottom of an open baggage wagon. It rained miraculously, and from that moment till on the following night I left New York, there was scarce a lull, and no cessation of the downpour....
“It took but a few moments, though it cost a good deal of money, to be rattled along West Street to our destination: Reunion House, No. 10 West Street, ‘kept by one Mitchell.’
“Here I was at last in America and was soon out upon the New York streets, spying for things foreign....
“The following day I had a thousand and one things to do; only the day to do them in and a journey across the continent before me in the evening.... It rained with potent fury; every now and then I had to get under cover for a while in order, so to speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for under this continued drenching it began to grow damp on the inside. I went to banks, post-offices, railway offices, restaurants, publishers, book sellers and money changers.
“I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell’s toward evening, that I had simply to divest myself of my shoes, socks and trousers, and leave them behind for the benefit of New York City. No fire could have dried them ere I had to start; and to pack them in their present condition was to spread ruin among my other possessions. With a heavy heart I said farewell to them as they lay a pulp in the middle of a pool upon the floor of Mitchell’s kitchen. I wonder if they are dry by now.”
That night he joined a party of emigrants bound for the West, the weight of his baggage much increased by the result of his day’s purchases — Bancroft’s “History of the United States” in six fat volumes. So in less than twenty-four hours after landing on one coast he was on his way to the other.
If at times he had been uncomfortable on the steamer he was ten times more so on the train. It is hard to realize in these days of easy travelling what the discomforts of riding in the emigrant trains were; crowded together in badly lighted, badly ventilated cars, with stiff wooden benches on either side, which were most uncomfortable to sit on and next to impossible to lie down upon. Meals were taken as best they might when they stopped at way stations while some bought milk and eggs and made a shift to cook themselves a meal or brew a cup of tea on the stove at the end of the car.
Over a week of this sort of slow travelling through the heat of the plains was enough to tax the strength and courage of the most robust man, let alone one in as delicate health as Stevenson at that time, and it is a wonder he ever lived through it. Indeed, he was ill but kept cheerful in spite of all, and was interested in the country and the sights along the way. His own discomforts seemed to dwindle when he contrasted them with those the pioneers endured travelling that same direction twenty years before; crawling along in ox-carts with their cattle and family possessions; suffering hunger, thirst, and infinite weariness, and living in daily terror of attack from the Indians.
He made note of all he saw and the doings of his fellow emigrants, to be used later on. Letters to Henley and Colvin en route are interesting.
“In the Emigrant Train from New York to San Francisco, Aug., 1879.
Dear Colvin, — I am in the cars between Pittsburg and Chicago, just now bowling through Ohio. I am taking charge of a kid, whose mother is asleep, with one eye while I write you this with the other. I reached N.Y. Sunday night, and by five o’clock Monday was underway for the West. — It is now about ten on Wednesday morning, so I have already been forty hours in the cars. It is impossible to lie down in them, which must end by being very wearying....
“No man
is any use until he has dared everything; I feel just now as if I had, and so might become a man. ‘If ye have faith like a grain of mustard seed.’ That is so true! Just now I have faith as big as a cigar case, I will not say die, and I do not fear man nor fortune. — R.L.S.”
“Crossing Nebraska, Saturday, Aug. 23, 1879.
“My Dear Henley, — I am sitting on the top of the cars with a mill party from Missouri going west for his health. Desolate flat prairie upon all hands.... When we stop, which we do often, for emigrants and freight travel together, the kine first, the man after, the whole plain is heard singing with cicadae. This is a pause, as you may see from the writing. What happened to the old pedestrian emigrants; what was the tedium suffered by the Indians and trappers of our youth, the imagination trembles to conceive. This is now Saturday, 23rd, and I have been steadily travelling since I parted from you at St. Pancras. It is a strange vicissitude from the Savile Club to this; I sleep with a man from Pennsylvania who has been in the Navy Yard, and mess with him and the Missouri bird already alluded to. We have a tin wash-bowl among four, I wear nothing but a shirt and a pair of trousers and never button my shirt. When I land for a meal, I pass my coat and feel dressed. This life is to last until Friday, Saturday or Sunday next. It is a strange affair to be an emigrant, as I hope you shall see in a future work. I wonder if this will be legible; my present station on the wagon roof, though airy, compared to the cars, is both dirty and insecure. I can see the track straight before and straight behind me to either horizon....
“Our journey is through ghostly deserts, sage brush and alkali, and rocks without form or color, 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 realized, 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.
CHAPTER VI
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,
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson Page 881