Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  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 realized 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 colored. 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 colors, 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 colored,” 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.”

&nb
sp; 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.”

  This story instantly created much discussion. Articles were written about it, sermons were preached on it, and letters poured in from all sorts of people with their theories about the strange tale. Six months after it was published nearly forty thousand copies were sold in England alone; but its greatest success was in America where its popularity was immediate and its sale enormous.

  One day he was attracted by a book of verses about children by Kate Greenaway, and wondered why he could not write some too of the children he remembered best of all. Scenes and doings in the days spent at Colinton with his swarm of cousins; the games they had played and the people they had known all trooped back with other memories of Edinburgh days. As he recalled these children, they tripped from his pen until he had a delightful collection of verses and determined to bring them together in a book.

  First he called it “The Penny Whistle,” but soon changed the title to “A Child’s Garden of Verses” and dedicated it, with the following poem, to the only one he said who would really understand the verses, the one who had done so much to make his childhood days happy:

  TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM

  FROM HER BOY

  “For the long nights you lay awake

  And watched for my unworthy sake;

  For your most comfortable hand

  That led me through the uneven land;

  For all the story-books you read;

  For all the pains you comforted;

  For all you pitied, all you bore

  In sad and happy days of yore; —

  My second Mother, my first wife,

  The angel of my infant life —

  From the sick child, now well and old,

  Take, nurse, the little book you hold!

  “And grant it, Heaven, that all who read,

  May find as dear a nurse at need,

  And every child who lists my rhyme,

  In the bright fireside, nursery clime,

  May hear it in as kind a voice

  As made my childish days rejoice.”

  “Of course,” he said, speaking of this dedication when he wrote to Cummie about the book, “this is only a flourish, like taking off one’s hat, but still a person who has taken the trouble to write things does not dedicate them to anyone without meaning it; and you must try to take this dedication in place of a great many things that I might have said, and that I ought to have done; to prove that I am not altogether unconscious of the great debt of gratitude I owe you.”

  Facsimile of letter sent to Cummy with “An Inland Voyage”

  If Thomas Stevenson had been one of the first to doubt his boy’s literary ability, he was equally quick to acknowledge himself mistaken. He was proud of his brilliant son, keenly interested in whatever he was working on and, during the days spent together at Skerryvore, gave him valuable aid in his writing.

  To have this old-time comradeship with his father, to enjoy his sympathy and understanding once more was Stevenson’s greatest joy at this time; a joy which he sorrowfully realized he must soon part with forever as his father’s health was failing rapidly.

  Thomas Stevenson remained at Skerryvore until April, 1887, when he left for a short visit to Edinburgh. While there he became suddenly worse and died on the 8th of May.

  Louis’s greatest reason for remaining in England was gone now, and he determined to cross the ocean with his family once more.

  His mother willingly gave up her home, her family, her friends, and the comforts she had always enjoyed to go with him to a new country, on any venture he might propose if his health could only be improved thereby.

  On August 21, 1887, Louis bade good-by to Scotland for the last time and sailed away from London on the steamship Ludgate Hill for New York.

  CHAPTER VII

  SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA

  “Tis a good land to fall in with men, and a pleasant land to see.”

  — (Words spoken by Hendrik Hudson when he first brought his ship through the Narrows and saw the Bay of New York.)

  Stevenson’s second landing in New York was a great contrast to his first. The “Amateur Emigrant” had no one to bid him welcome and Godspeed but a West Street tavern-keeper, and now when Mr. Will Low, his old friend of Fontainebleau days, hastened to the dock to welcome him on the Ludgate Hill, he found the author of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” already surrounded by reporters.

  The trip had done him good in spite of their passage having been an unusually rough one, with numerous discomforts. The Ludgate Hill was not an up-to-date liner and she carried a very mixed cargo. The very fact of her being a tramp ship and that the passengers were free to be about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, and enjoy a real sea life, delighted Stevenson, and he wrote back to Sidney Colvin:

  “I enjoyed myself more than I could have hoped on board our floating menagerie; stallions and monkeys and matches made our cargo; and the vast continent of the incongruities rolled the while like a haystack; and the stallions stood hypnotized by the motion, looking through the port at our dinner table, and winnied when the crockery was broken; and the little monkeys stared at one another in their cages ... and the big monkey, Jacko scoured about the ship and rested willingly in my arms ... the other passengers, when they were not sick, looked on and laughed. Take all this picture, and make it roll till the bell shall sound unexpected notes and the fittings shall break loose in our state rooms, and you have the voyage of the Ludgate Hill. She arrived in the port of New York without beer, porter, soda-water, curaçoa, fresh meat, or fresh water, and yet we lived and we regret her.”

  After a short visit with friends in Newport they returned to New York and settled down for a time in the Hotel St. Stephen, on 11th Street, near University Place, to make plans for their winter’s trip.

  Soon after their arrival “Jekyll and Hyde” was dramatized and produced with great success. When it was known that the author of this remarkable story was in the city, people flocked from all sides to call on him, and fairly wearied him with their attentions, although he liked to see them and made many interesting acquaintances at the time.

  Washington Square was one of his favorite spots in New York, and he spent many hours there watching the children playing about. A day he always recalled with special pleasure was the one when he had spent a whole forenoon in the Square talking with Mark Twain.

  Among those who were anxious to know Stevenson was the American sculptor Augustus S
t. Gaudens. He had been delighted with his writings and regretted he had not met him in Paris when he and Mr. Low had been there together. “If Stevenson ever comes to New York,” he said to Mr. Low, “I want to meet him,” and added that he would consider it a great privilege if Stevenson would permit him to make his portrait.

  It was with much pleasure, therefore, that Mr. Low brought them together, and they took to one another immediately. “I like your sculptor. What a splendid straightforward and simple fellow he is,” said Stevenson; and St. Gaudens’s comment after their first meeting was: “Astonishingly young, not a bit like an invalid and a bully fellow.”

  Stevenson readily consented to sit for his portrait, and they spent many delightful hours together while the sketches were being made for it.

  One day the sculptor brought his eight-year-old son, Homer, with him, and years afterward gave the following description of the child’s visit:

  “On the way I endeavored to impress on the boy the fact that he was about to see a man whom he must remember all his life. It was a lovely day and as I entered the room Stevenson lay as usual on rather a high bed. I presented Homer to him ... but since my son’s interest, notwithstanding my injunctions, was to say the least far from enthusiastic, I sent him out to play.

  Bas-relief of Stevenson by Augustus Saint Gaudens

  “I then asked Stevenson to pose but that was not successful ... all the gestures being forced and affected. Therefore I suggested to him that if he would try to write, some natural attitude might result. He assented and taking a sheet of paper ... he pulled his knees up and began. Immediately his attitude was such that I was enabled to create something of use and continued drawing while he wrote with an occasional smile. Presently I finished and told him there was no necessity for his writing any more. He did not reply but proceeded for quite a while. Then he folded the paper with deliberation, placed it in an envelope, addressed it, and handed it to me. It was to ‘Master Homer St. Gaudens.’