Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1081 page)

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.”

At Saranac Stevenson carried on his music under disadvantages, and his chief solace lay in the pleasures of adaptation. “All my spare time,” he wrote, “is spent in trying to set words to music. My last attempt is the divine theme of Beethoven’s six variations faciles.  

will know it; and if she does not like it — well, she knows nothing of music, or sorrow, or consolation, or religion. . . . That air has done me more good than all the churches of Christendom.”

Meanwhile, as an interpreter, he fell from the pianoforte to the more portable penny whistle. “ ‘T is true my whistle explodes with sharp noises, and has to be patched with court-plaster like a broken nose; but its notes are beginning to seem pretty sweet to the player — The Penny Piper.”

But already, in the heart of the mountains, he had been laying plans of travel, which were to lead him far and wide across the seas and to end in a continued exile of which at this time he had never dreamed. He had always nourished a passion for the sea, whether in romance or in real life; it ran in his blood, and came to him from both his father and his grandfather.1 As a boy, on Saturday afternoons, he would make a party to go down to Leith to see the ships, for in those days, as always, he loved a ship “as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak.” The sea was to him the redeeming feature of engineering, and a year or two after he had given up the profession he wrote with eager anticipation of a projected trip in the Pharos, the lighthouse steamer. Then for ten years he hardly mentioned the sea again, and even in crossing the Atlantic as an amateur emigrant, he seems to have taken more interest in his fellow-passengers than in the ocean. But his feelings were unchanged: in 1883 his idea of a fortune is to “ end 1 “ It was that old gentleman’s blood that brought me to Samoa.” — Letters, ii. 258.

with horses and yachts and all the fun of the fair”; and in some verses written at Hyeres, contrasting his wife’s aspirations with his own, he declares —

“She vows in ardour for a horse to trot, I stake my votive prayers upon a yacht.”

We have seen how he enjoyed his voyage across the Atlantic; and to this pleasure he was perpetually recurring: “I have been made a lot of here, . . . but I

could give it all up, and agree that was the author of my works, for a good seventy-ton schooner and the coins to keep her on. And to think there are parties with yachts who would make the exchange! I know a little about fame now; it is no good compared to a yacht; and anyway there is more fame in a yacht, more genuine fame.”1 And no doubt his envy had been excited at Newport by hearing of Mr. Osbourne’s experiences in learning to sail a cat-boat.2

It was therefore no unexpected development, no outbreak of any new taste, when it became a favourite diversion of the winter nights at Saranac to plan a yachting cruise. So far indeed were the discussions carried, that the place for the piano in the saloon and the number and disposition of the small-arms were already definitely settled. At first, in spite of the severity of the climate and the proverbial roughness of the weather, they had looked chiefly to the Atlantic seaboard, but in the end of March, when Mrs. Stevenson left Saranac for California on a visit to her people, she 1    Utters, ii. 68.

2     A rather broad and shallow boat, round-bottomed, with a centre board, and a single mast stepped at the extreme point of the bow. was instructed to report if she could find any craft suitable for their purpose at San Francisco.

At last, by the middle of April, Stevenson was free to return to the “cities if he chose. He made a heroic effort to deal with the arrears of his correspondence: “In three of my last days I sent away upwards of seventy letters”; and then turning his steps to New York, he there spent about a fortnight. The time to which he recurred with the greatest pleasure was an afternoon he spent on a seat in Washington Square enjoying the company and conversation of “Mark Twain.” But of the city he soon wearied; in the beginning of May he crossed the Hudson, and went to an hotel near the mouth of the Manasquan, a river in New Jersey, where with his mother and stepson he spent nearly a month. The place had been recommended to him by Mr. Low, who was able to spend some time there, and who says: “Though it was early spring and the weather was far from good, Louis (pretending that, in comparison with Scotland at least, it was fine spring weather) was unusually well, and we had many a pleasant sail on the river and some rather long walks. Louis was much interested in the ‘cat- boat,’ and, with the aid of various works on sailing- vessels, tried to master the art of sailing it with some success.

“He was here at Manasquan when a telegram arrived from his wife, who had been in San Francisco for a few weeks, announcing that the yacht Casco might be hired for a trip among the islands of the South Seas. I was there at the time, and Louis made that decision to go which exiled him from his dearest friends — though he little suspected at the time — while the messenger waited.”

The decision taken, Stevenson returned to New York on the 28th, and by the 7th of June he had reached California. Who that has read his description of crossing the mountains on his first journey to the West but remembers the phrase — ”It was like meeting one’s wifel”? And this time his wife herself was at Sacramento to meet him.

It was a busy time. The Casco was the first question — a topsail schooner, ninety-five feet in length, of seventy tons burden, built for racing in Californian waters, though she had once been taken as far as Tahiti.” She had most graceful lines, and with her lofty masts, white sails and decks, and glittering brasswork, was a lovely craft to the eye, as she sat like a bird upon the water. Her saloon was fitted most luxuriously with silk and velvet of gaudy colours, for no money had been spared in her construction; nevertheless her cockpit was none too safe, her one pump was inadequate in size and almost worthless; the sail-plan forward was meant for racing and not for cruising, and even if the masts were still in good condition, they were quite unfitted for hurricane weather.