But the invalid was not to escape from England without another illness; worn as he was by his recent experiences, he once more broke down, and was laid up again with hemorrhage.
On the 20th August, however, he left Bournemouth for London, and spent Sunday in the city, at Armfield’s Hotel. Here those of his closest friends who at that season were within reach came to bid him farewell, a last good-bye as it proved for all, since he never saw any one of them again. “ In one way or another,” he had written, “life forces men apart and breaks up the goodly fellowships for ever,” and he himself was now to become “ no more than a name, a reminiscence, and an occasional crossed letter very laborious to read.” 1
As Mr. Colvin had been the first to welcome him on his return from America, so he was the last to take leave of him the next day, when the party of five — for 1 Virginibus Puerisque, chap. i.
Valentine Roch accompanied them — embarked on the steamship Ludgate Hill.
The beginning of their voyage was an unpleasant surprise, for their passages had been taken in ignorance that the ship was used as a cattle-boat, and it was only when the family came on board that they learned that they were going to put in at Havre for their cargo before sailing for America. But Stevenson, ill as he was, did not allow mere discomfort to affect him. His mother’s diary contains an entry highly characteristic both of herself and of her son: “We discover that it is a cattle-ship, and that we are going to Havre to take in horses. We agree to look upon it as an adventure and make the best of it. . . . It is very amusing and like a circus to see the horses come on board.” Not only was there a shipload of horses, but the vessel resembled the fleet of Ophir at least in this, that she carried a consignment of apes; of which “the big monkey, Jacko, scoured about the ship,” and took a special fancy to Stevenson. The other passengers were not unenter- taining, and the voyage itself was to him a pure delight, until they came to the Banks of Newfoundland, where he again caught cold. “ I was so happy on board that ship,” he wrote to his cousin Bob; “I could not have believed it possible. We had the beastliest weather, and many discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp-ship gave us many comforts; we could cut about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel- house, discuss all manner of things, and really be a little at sea. And truly there is nothing else. I had literally forgotten what happiness was, and the full mind — full of external and physical things, not full of cares and labours and rot about a fellow’s behaviour. My heart literally sang; I truly care for nothing so much as for that.” 1
By this time his reputation had crossed the Atlantic, and, chiefly by means of Jekyll and Hyde, had spread there to an extent which he had probably not yet realised. The first indication reached him, however, before he had sighted the coast-line of the States, for, on September 6th, when the pilot came on board, it turned out that he was known on his boat as Hyde, while his better-tempered partner was called Jekyll.
The next day the Ludgate Hill arrived at New York, where Stevenson was met by a crowd of reporters, and — what was more to his taste — by his old friend, Mr. Will H. Low. He was forthwith carried off to an hotel where Mr. and Mrs. Charles Fairchild had made all arrangements for his reception, and the next day he proceeded to their house at Newport. But on the journey he caught fresh cold, and spent a fortnight there chiefly in bed.
On his return to New York he saw a few people, mostly old friends like Mr. Low and his wife, and first made the personal acquaintance of Mr. Charles Scribner and Mr. Burlingame. Mr. St. Gaudens, the eminent American sculptor, now began to make the necessary studies for the large medallion, which was not completed until five years later. It is the most satisfactory of all the portraits of Stevenson, and has been reproduced with one or two slight modifications for the memorial in St. Giles’ Cathedral. The artist was a great admirer of Stevenson’s writings, and had said that if he 1 Letters, ii. 67.
ever had the chance he would gladly go a thousand miles for the sake of a sitting. The opportunity came to his doors, and he made a sketch of the head and one hand, though it was not until the following spring that he was able to complete his drawings.
At this time the popularity of Stevenson’s work in America was attested also by its appearance on the stage; not only were there two dramatised versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde upon the boards, but Deacon Brodie was shortly afterwards produced in Philadelphia by an English company.
For the dramatisation of his story Stevenson was of course in no way responsible, but the publicity and the advertisement of his name had naturally the effect of enabling publishers to offer better terms for his work. He had already contributed to American magazines for several years, in the first instance to the Century, and then to the new periodical of Messrs. Scribner, for which he now undertook to write a series of twelve articles during the ensuing year. For this he was to receive ^700, and this bargain was followed shortly afterwards by an offer of^i6oo from another firm for the American serial rights of his next story. The first proposal of all, from the New York World, was £2000 for an article every week for a year; but this he had refused. In February, 1883, he had written to his mother: “My six books (since 1878) have brought me in upwards of £600, about ^400 of which came from magazines.” So great was the change in four years. It must be remembered that in England also he had now reached the turning-point of his fortunes; and early in the following year he became a member of the Athenaeum Club in London under the rule permitting the committee to elect nine persons annually “as being of distinguished eminence in Science, Literature or the Arts, or for Public Services.” In this very year it had been found worth while to collect and republish with additions such of his stories, essays, and verse as had hitherto appeared only in magazines. But though the change was not solely due to the greater enterprise of American publishers, it is none the less striking.
His first need, however, for the present was to select a climate where he could best pass the winter. He had come to America in search of health, but the information he received in New York dissuaded him from colourado Springs, which, situated as it is nearly six thousand feet above the sea, would have deprived him of the company of his wife, to whom such high altitudes were no longer possible. He turned instead to a place at a lower elevation in the Adirondack Mountains, close to the Canadian border, where a sanatorium for consumptive patients had recently been established near the shores of Saranac lake.
Thither went accordingly Mrs. Louis Stevenson and her son, and there they succeeded in finding a house which would serve as winter-quarters for the family. Stevenson arrived with his mother on October 3rd, and here he remained until the middle of the following April. It was no very pleasant spot, at all events in the winter months, and formed a curious contrast to his experience in the tropics. The climate comprised every variety of unpleasantness: it rained, it snowed, it sleeted, it blew, it was thick fog; it froze — the cold was Arctic; it thawed — the discomfort was worse; and it combined these different phases in every possible way. Two things only could be advanced in its favour, the first and vital fact that Stevenson’s health did not suffer, but actually improved; and secondly, it served at times to remind him of Scotland — a Scotland “ without peat and without heather” — but that is no very hard task with the true Scot, as may be seen with Stevenson himself in the Pacific.
The place was still somewhat undeveloped; the railway was opened to Saranac itself only during the course of the winter. It was nevertheless so far accessible that visitors not unfrequently found their way there to make Stevenson’s acquaintance, and occasionally even stayed a few days, though there was in the house but one spare attic of limited capacity. In Dr. Trudeau, the physician, Stevenson found an agreeable companion, and he also enjoyed the society of some of the resident patients, though he went but little beyond the limits of his own family. They occupied a house belonging to a guide, a frame-house of the usual kind with a verandah; here, with the services of Valentine and a cook, and a boy to chop wood and draw water
, they made themselves as comfortable as possible during the winter.
The younger Mrs. Stevenson began the campaign by a hasty visit to Canada to lay in a supply of furs for the family, and her foresight was well rewarded. In December the cold began, and by January the thermometer was sometimes nearly 30 degrees below zero. There was a stove in each chamber, and an open fireplace for logs in the central living-room, but these were of little avail. ‘‘ Fires do not radiate,” wrote Stevenson; “you burn your hands all the time on what seem to be cold stones.” His mother gives an illustration: “ Cold venison was crunching with ice after being an hour in the oven, and I saw a large lump of ice still unmelted in a pot where water was steaming all round it.”
Stevenson himself stood the cold better than any of his family, and, arrayed in a buffalo coat, astrakhan cap, and Indian boots, used to go out daily. He would take short walks on a hill behind the house, and skated on the lake when the ice could be kept clear. But both the ladies were ordered away for their health at different times, while in February the maid was laid up with a severe attack of influenza, the next victim being Stevenson himself.
In the meantime he had not been idle. By December he had written four of the essays for the magazine, and was already on the threshold of a new Scotch story.
“I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. It was winter; the night was very dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and sweet with the purity of forests. From a good way below, the river was to be heard contending with ice and boulders: a few lights appeared, scattered unevenly among the darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense of isolation. For the making of a story here were fine conditions. I was besides moved with the spirit of emulation, for I had just finished my third or fourth perusal of The Phantom Ship. ‘Come,’ said I to my engine, Met us make a tale, a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and civilisation; a story that shall have the same large features, and may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the book you have been reading and admiring.’ . . . There cropped up in my memory a singular case of a buried and resuscitated fakir, which I had often been told by an uncle of mine, then lately dead, Inspector-General John Balfour. On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the thermometer below zero, the brain works with much vivacity; and the next moment I had seen the circumstance transplanted from India and the tropics to the Adirondack wilderness and the stringent cold of the Canadian border. ... If the idea was to be of any use at all for me, I had to create a kind of evil genius to his friends and family, take him through many disappearances, and make this final restoration from the pit of death, in the icy American wilderness, the last and grimmest of the series. I need not tell my brothers of the craft that I was now in the most interesting moment of an author’s life; the hours that followed that night upon the balcony, and the following nights and days, whether walking abroad or lying wakeful in my bed, were hours of unadulterated joy. My mother, who was then living with me alone, perhaps had less enjoyment; for, in the absence of my wife, who is my usual helper in these times of parturition, I must spur her up at all seasons to hear me relate and try to clarify my unformed fancies.
“And while I was groping for the fable and the character required, behold I found them lying ready and nine years old in my memory. . . . Here, thinking of quite other things, I had stumbled on the solution, or perhaps I should rather say (in stagewright phrase) the Curtain or final Tableau of a story conceived long before on the moors between Pitlochry and Strathairdle, con- ceived in Highland rain, in the blend of the smell of heather and bog-plants, and with a mind full of the Athole correspondence and the Memoirs of the Chevalier de Johnstone. So long ago, so far away it was, that I had first evoked the faces and the mutual tragic situation of the men of Durrisdeer.” 1
The accessibility of his winter-quarters had its advantages, but was not without its dangers for Stevenson, now that publishers recognised him as a writer for whose works they must contend in advance. * Acute and capable as he was when confronted with any piece of business, the moment it was done he dismissed it from his mind, and allowed its details, if not its very existence, to fade from his memory. Having promised Messrs. Scribner the control of all his work which might appear in America, he shortly afterwards, in sheer for- getfulness, sold the serial rights of his next story to Mr. M’Clure. Nobody could have been more sincerely or more deeply distressed over the matter than Stevenson himself, and, fortunately for his peace of mind, nobody seems ever for one instant to have thought him capable of any act of bad faith. But it must have been as much of a relief to every one concerned, as it was very greatly to his own advantage, when shortly afterwards he handed over the disposal of his writings to the management of his old and trusted friend, Mr. Charles Baxter.
At Saranac Mr. Osbourne wrote entirely on his own account a story called at first The Finsbury Tontine and afterwards The Game of Bluff, which, after the lapse of many months and a course of collaboration with his stepfather, was to appear as The Wrong Box. At first 1” Genesis of’ The Master of Ballantrae,’ “Juvenilia, p. 297. this was an independent book, but as soon as the idea of collaboration had occurred to them, several projects were speedily set on foot, since the joint books would have this advantage, that, Mr. Osbourne being an American citizen, they could be copyrighted in the United States. The New York Ledger is a paper which had long a reputation for sensational stories of the fine old melodramatic kind, and as the editor was willing to give Stevenson a commission, it seemed to him highly entertaining to try his hand at this style of narrative. A plot was drawn out, and then: “Study of the Ledger convinced me that ‘ Fighting the Ring’ would not do. Accordingly, at about nine one night Lloyd and I began, and next day before lunch we had finished the design of a new and more sensational tale, ‘The Gaol Bird.’ ‘Tis the correct Ledger subject of a noble criminal, who returns to prove his innocence; but it seems picturesquely designed, and we flatter ourselves that the relations between the criminal and the man whom he suspects (Donald, first Baron Drummond of Drummond and Raracaroo, late Governor-General of India) are essentially original, and should quite blind all but the most experienced.”
Mr. Osbourne laboured at this tale by himself for many a long day in vain; but the plot was hardly sketched before the collaborators were again deep in the plan of a new novel dealing with the Indian Mutiny — “a tragic romance of the most tragic sort. . . . The whole last part is — well, the difficulty is that, short of resuscitating Shakespeare, I don’t know who is to write it.”
Of their methods Mr. Osbourne writes: “When an idea for a book was started, we used to talk it over together, and generally carried the tale on from one invention to another, until, in accordance with Louis’ own practice, we had drawn out a complete list of the chapters. In all our collaborations I always wrote the first draft, to break the ground, and it is a pleasure to me to recall how pleased Louis was, for instance, with the first three chapters of The Ebb Tide. As a rule, he was a man chary of praise, but he fairly overflowed toward those early chapters, and I shall never forget the elation his praise gave me. The draft was then written and rewritten by Louis and myself in turn, and was worked over and over again by each of us as often as was necessary. For instance, the chapter in The Wrecker at Honolulu, where Dodd goes out to the lighthouse, must have been written and rewritten eleven times. Naturally it came about that it was the bad chapters that took the most rewriting. After this, how could anybody but Louis or myself pretend to know which of us wrote any given passage? The Paris parts of The Wrecker and the end of The Ebb Tide (as it stands) I never even touched.1 The collaboration was, of course, a mistake for me, nearly as much as for him; but I don’t believe Louis ever enjoyed any work more. He liked the comradeship — my work coming in just as his energy flagged, or vice versa; and he liked my applause when he — as he always did — pulled us magnificently out of sloughs. In a way, I was well fitted to help
him. I had a knack for dialogue — I mean, of the note-taking kind. I was a kodaker: he an artist and a man of genius. I managed the petty makeshifts and inventions which were constantly necessary; I
1 Cf. Letters, ii. 357. was the practical man, so to speak, the one who paced the distances, and used the weights and measures; in The Wrecker, the storm was mine; so were the fight and the murders on the Currency Lass; the picnics in San Francisco, and the commercial details of Loudon’s partnership. Nares was mine and Pinkerton to a great degree, and Captain Brown was mine throughout. But although the first four chapters of The Ebb Tide remain, save for the text of Herrick’s letter to his sweetheart, almost as I first wrote them, yet The Wrong Box was more mine as a whole than either of the others. It was written and then rewritten before there was any thought of collaboration, and was actually finished and ready for the press. There was, in consequence, far less give and take between us in this book than in the others. Louis had to follow the text very closely, being unable to break away without jeopardising the succeeding chapters. He breathed into it, of course, his own incomparable power, humour, and vivacity, and forced the thing to live as it had never lived before; but, even in his transforming hands, it still retains (it seems to me) a sense of failure; and this verdict has so far been sustained by the public’s reluctance to buy the book. The Wrecker, on the other hand, has always been in excellent demand, rivalling Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae, and Catriona, and still continues to earn £200 a year with unvarying regularity.”
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Page 834