Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1119 page)

“I think, I hope, I dream no more
The dreams of otherwhere;
The cherished thoughts of yore;
I have been changed from what I was before;
And drunk too deep perchance the lotus of the air
Beside the Susquehanna and along the Delaware.”

Again, in writing the poem entitled Ticonderoga, it was the name that first drew his attention, and

“It sang in his sleeping ears,
It hummed in his waking head;
The name — Ticonderoga.”

Some story that we told him about a man who named his numerous family of daughters after the States — Indiana, Nebraska, California, etc. — took his fancy and suggested the name of Arizona Breckinridge to him.

Out of the mist arise memories of walks along the beach — the long beach of clean white sand that stretches unbroken for many miles around the great sweeping curve of Monterey Bay, where we “watched the tiny sandy-pipers, and the huge Pacific seas.” Sometimes we walked there at night, when the blood-red harvest-moon sprang suddenly like a great ball of fire above the rim of horizon on the opposite side of the circling bay, sending a glittering track across the water to our very feet. To walk with Stevenson on such a night, and watch “the waves come in slowly, vast and green, curve their translucent necks and burst with a surprising uproar” — to walk with him on such a night and listen to his inimitable talk is the sort of memory that cannot fade. On other nights when the waters of the bay were all alight with the glow of phosphorescence, we walked on the old wooden pier and marvelled at the billows of fire sent rolling in beneath us by the splashing porpoises.

Perhaps nothing about the place interested him more deeply than the old mission of San Carlos Borroméo, once the home of the illustrious Junípero Serra, and now the last resting-place of his earthly remains. Within its ruined walls mass was celebrated once a year in honour of its patron, Saint Charles Borroméo, and after the religious service was over the people joined in a joyous merienda under the trees, during which vast quantities of tamales, enchiladas, and other distinctive Spanish-American viands were generously distributed to friend and stranger, Catholic and Protestant. Mr. Stevenson attended one of these celebrations, and was greatly moved by the sight of the pitiful remnant of aged Indians, sole survivors of Father Serra’s once numerous flock, as they lifted their quavering voices in the mass. He expressed much surprise at the clarity of their pronunciation of the Latin, and in his essay on The Old Pacific Capital, he says: “There you may hear God served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any other temple under Heaven.... These Indians have the Gregorian music at their finger-ends, and pronounce the Latin so correctly that I could follow the music as they sang.” Much has been changed since then, for the church has been “restored,” and the little band of Indians have long since quavered out their last mass and gone to meet their beloved pastor, the saintly Serra.

Those were dolce-far-niente days at Monterey, dreamy, romantic days, spent beneath the bluest sky, beside the bluest sea, and in the best company on earth, and all glorified by the rainbow hues of youth. But, as Mr. Stevenson prophesied, the little town was “not strong enough to resist the influence of the flaunting caravanserai which sprang up in the desert by the railway,” and after the coming of the fashionable hotel the commercial spirit came to life in the place. The tile-topped walls, hiding their sweet secluded gardens, gave way to the new frame or brick buildings, the narrow, crooked streets were straightened and graded, the breakneck sidewalks replaced by neat cement pavements, and, at last, the Spirit of Romance spread her wings and vanished into the mists of the Pacific.

The setting of the picture is now changed to Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, where we lived for some months in the little house which Mr. Stevenson himself describes in the dedication to Prince Otto as “far gone in the respectable stages of antiquity, and which seemed indissoluble from the green garden in which it stood, and that yet was a sea-traveller in its younger days, and had come round the Horn piecemeal in the belly of a ship, and might have heard the seamen stamping and shouting and the note of the boatswain’s whistle.” This cottage was of the variety known as “cloth and paper,” a flimsy construction permitted by the kindly climate of California, and on winter nights, when the wind blew in strongly from the sea, its sides puffed in and out, greatly to the amusement of the “Scot,” accustomed as he was to the solid buildings of his native land. It was, as he says, “embowered in creepers,” for over its front a cloth-of-gold rose spread its clinging arms, and over one side a Banksia flung a curtain of green and yellow.

It was during his stay in this house that we first realised the serious nature of his illness, and yet there was none of the depressing atmosphere of sickness, for he refused to be the regulation sick man. Every day he worked for a few hours at least, while I acted as amanuensis in order to save him the physical labour of writing. In this way the first rough draught of Prince Otto was written, and here, too, he tried his hand at poetry, producing some of the poems that afterwards appeared in the collection called Underwoods, although it is certain that he never believed himself to be possessed of the true poetic fire. Brave as his spirit was, yet he had his dark moments when the dread of premature death weighed upon him. It was probably in such a mood that he wrote the poem called Not Yet, My Soul, an appeal to fate in which he expressed his rebellion against an untimely end.

“Not yet, my soul, these friendly fields desert,
.......
The ship rides trimmed, and from the eternal shore
Thou hearest airy voices; but not yet
Depart, my soul, not yet awhile depart.
.......
Leave not, my soul, the unfoughten field, nor leave
Thy debts dishonored, nor thy place desert
Without due service rendered. For thy life,
Up, spirit, and defend that fort of clay,
Thy body, now beleaguered.”

While engaged in dictating, he had a habit of walking up and down the room, his pace growing faster and faster as his enthusiasm rose. We feared that this was not very good for him, so we quietly devised a scheme to prevent it, without his knowledge, by hemming him in with tables and chairs, so that each time he sprang up to walk he sank back discouraged at sight of the obstructions. When I recall the sleepless care with which Mrs. Stevenson watched over him at that critical point in his life, it seems to me that it is not too much to say that the world owes it to her that he lived to produce his best works.

But above and beyond his wife’s care for his physical well-being was the strong courage with which she stood by him in his hours of gloom and heartened him up to the fight. Her profound faith in his genius before the rest of the world had come to recognize it had a great deal to do with keeping up his faith in himself, and her discriminating taste in literature was such that he had begun even then to submit all his writings to her criticism.

Although his own life work lay entirely in the field of letters, he had a sincere admiration for work with the hands, and often expressed his surprise at the mechanical cleverness of American women. He took pleasure in seeing that we could cut, fit, and make our own clothing, and do a pretty good job of it, too, and looked on at the operation with serious interest, sometimes making useful suggestions, for he had a genuine and unaffected sympathy with the work and aims of other people, no matter how humble they might be. Any one could go to him with a tale of daily struggle, of little ambitions bravely fought for, even though it were nothing more than a job as waiter in a restaurant, and be sure of his respectful consideration and sincere advice, always granting that the ambition were honest and the fight well fought.

Sickness and discouragement were not enough to keep down his boyish gaiety, which he sometimes manifested by teasing his womenfolk. One of his favourite methods of doing this was to station himself on a chair in front of us, and, with his brown eyes lighted up with a whimsical smile, talk broad Scotch, in a Highland nasal twang, by the hour, until we cried for mercy. Yet he was decidedly sensitive about that same Scotch, and his feelings were much wounded by hearing me express a horror of reading it in books.

A pleasant trivial circumstance of our life that comes to mind is an occasion when we were all rejoicing in the possession of new clothes — a rare event with any of us in those days, and Louis proposed that we should celebrate this extraordinary prosperity by an evening at the theatre. Women wore pockets then, but there had been no time to provide my dress with one, so Louis agreed to carry my handkerchief, but only on condition that I should ask for it when needed in a true Scotch twang, “Gie me the naepkin!” a condition that I was compelled to fulfill, no doubt to the surprise of our neighbours at the theatre. Gilbert and Sullivan were in their heyday then, and the play given that night was The Pirates of Penzance. Louis said the London “bobbies” were true to life.

Chief among the amusements with which we tried to brighten the extreme quietude of our lives in the little Oakland house was reading aloud. We obtained books from the Mercantile Library of San Francisco, among which I especially remember the historical works of Francis Parkman, who was a great favourite with Mr. Stevenson. He had a theory that the not uncommon distaste among the people for that branch of literature was largely the fault of the dull style adopted by many historians, and saw no good reason why the thrilling story of the great events of the world should not be presented in a manner that would hold the interest of readers. Yet he had no patience with the sort of writing that subordinates truth to the desire of presenting a striking picture. As an instance, certainly of rare occurrence in Parkman, he noticed a paragraph in The Conspiracy of Pontiac, in which the author refers to the shining of the moon on a certain night when a party was endeavouring to make a secret passage down the river through hostile country. He thought it unlikely that Parkman could have known that the moon shone on that particular night, though it is possible that he did him an injustice, for it sometimes happens that just such a trivial circumstance is mentioned in the documents of the early explorers.

Sometimes he read aloud to us from some French writer, translating it into English as he read for our benefit. Les Étrangleurs was one of the books that he read to us in this way, while we sat and sewed our seams. He seemed to get a good deal of rest as well as amusement from the reading of such books of mystery and adventure. His taste was always for the decent in literature, and he was much offended by the works of the writers of the materialistic school who were just then gaining a vogue. Among these was Emile Zola, and he exacted a promise from me never to read that writer — a promise that has been faithfully kept to this day.

His stay at Monterey had given him a fancy to study the Spanish language, so we obtained books and began it together. He had a theory that a language could be best acquired by plunging directly into it, but I have a suspicion that our choice of a drama of the sixteenth century, one of Lope de Vega’s, I think, was scarcely a wise one for beginners. He refers to this venture of ours in a letter to Sidney Colvin as “the play which the sister and I are just beating our way through with two bad dictionaries and an insane grammar.” Nevertheless, we made some headway, and I remember that he marvelled greatly at the far-fetched, high-flown similes and figures of speech indulged in by the writers of the “Golden Age” of Spain. In spite of his confessed dislike for the cold-blooded study of the grammar, we did not altogether neglect it, and a day comes to my mind when he was assisting me in the homely task of washing the dishes in the pleasant sunny kitchen where the Banksia rose hung its yellow curtain over the windows. We recited Spanish conjugations while we worked, and he held up a glass for my inspection, saying: “See how beautifully I have polished it, Nellie. There is no doubt that I have missed my vocation. I was born to be a butler.” “No, Louis,” I replied, “some day you are to be a famous writer, and who knows but that I shall write about you, as the humble Boswell wrote about Johnson, and tell the world how you once wiped dishes for me in this old kitchen!”

For the long evenings of winter we had a game which Louis invented expressly for our amusement. Lloyd Osbourne, then a boy of twelve, had rather more than the usual boy’s fondness for stories of the sea. It will be remembered that it was to please this boy that Mr. Stevenson afterwards wrote Treasure Island. Our game was to tell a continued story, each person being limited to two minutes, taking up the tale at the point where the one before him left off. We older ones had a secret understanding that we were to keep Lloyd away from the sea, but strive as we might, even though we left the hero stranded in the middle of the Desert of Sahara, Lloyd never failed to have him sailing the bounding main again before his allotted two minutes expired.

Many and long were the arguments that we had on the merits of our respective countries, and I remember that Mr. Stevenson did not place the sentiment of patriotism at the top of the list of human virtues, for he believed that to concentrate one’s affections and interest too closely upon one small section of the earth’s surface, simply on account of the accident of birth, had a narrowing effect upon a man’s mental outlook and his human sympathies. He was a citizen of the world in his capacity to understand the point of view of other men, of whatsoever race, colour, or creed, and it was this catholicity of spirit that made it possible for him to sit upon the benches of Portsmouth Square in San Francisco and learn something of real life from the human flotsam and jetsam cast up there by fate.

Of all the popular songs of America he liked Marching Through Georgia and Dixie best. For Home, Sweet Home he had no liking, perhaps from having heard it during some moment of poignant homesickness. He said that such a song made too brutal an assault upon a man’s tenderest feelings, and believed it to be a much greater triumph for a writer to bring a smile to his readers than a tear — partly, perhaps, because it is a more difficult achievement.