"Into this ... you are now to suppose us making our triumphal entry, a
pair of damp rag-and-bone men, each with a limp india-rubber bag upon
his arm. I do not believe I have a sound view of that kitchen; I saw it
through a sort of glory, but it seemed to me crowded with the snowy caps
of cook-men, who all turned round from their saucepans and looked at us
with surprise. There was no doubt about the landlady however; there she
was, heading her army, a flushed, angry woman, full of affairs. Her I
asked politely--too politely, thinks the Cigarette--if we could have
beds, she surveying us coldly from head to foot.

"'You will find beds in the suburb,' she remarked. 'We are too busy for
the like of you.'

"If we could make an entrance, change our clothes, and order a bottle of
wine I felt sure we could put things right, so I said, 'If we can not
sleep, we may at least dine,' and was for depositing my bag.

"What a terrible convulsion of nature was that which followed in the
landlady's face! She made a run at us and stamped her foot.

"'Out with you--out of the door!' she screeched.

"I do not know how it happened, but the next moment we were out in the
rain and darkness. This was not the first time that I have been refused
a lodging. Often and often I have planned what I would do if such a
misadventure happened to me again, and nothing is easier to plan. But to
put in execution, with a heart boiling at the indignity? Try it, try it
only once, and tell me what you did."

Frequently on this trip the Arethusa's odd dress and foreign looks led
him to be taken for a spy. It was not long after the Franco-Prussian
war, and all sorts of rumors of suspicious characters were afloat. Once
he was actually arrested and thrown into a dungeon because he could show
no passport, and the commissary refused to believe he was English and
puzzled his head over the scraps of notes and verses found in his
knapsack.

He was rescued by the faithful Cigarette, who finally convinced the
officials that they were British gentlemen travelling in this odd way
for pleasure, and the things in his friend's bag were not plans against
the government, but merely scraps of poetry and notes on their travels
that he liked to amuse himself by making as they went along. [Footnote:
This incident is told in the "Epilogue to An Inland Voyage."]

The canoe trips ended in a visit to the artists' colony at
Fontainebleau, where Bob Stevenson and a brother of Sir Walter's were
spending their summer. This place always had a particular attraction for
Louis and he spent many weeks both there and at Grez near by during the
next few years.

The free and easy life led by the artists suited him exactly, although
he found it hard to accomplish any work of his own, but dreamed and
planned all sorts of essays, verses, and tales which he never wrote,
while the others put their pictures on canvas.

"I kept always two books in my pocket," he says, "one to read and one to
write in. As I walked my mind was busy fitting what I saw with
appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside I would either read, or a
pencil and penny version-book would be in my hand, to note down the
features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived
with words."

If there was little work, to show after a stop at Fontainebleau he had
many memories of good-fellowship and some of the friends he met there
were to be the first to greet him when he came to live on this side of
the water.

While on their "Inland Voyage" the two canoemen had decided that the
most perfect mode of travel was by canal-boat. What could be more
delightful? "The chimney smokes for dinner as you go along; the banks of
the canal slowly unroll their scenery to contemplative eyes; the barge
floats by great forests and through great cities with their public
buildings and their lamps at night; and for the bargee, in his floating
home, 'travelling abed,' it is merely as if he were listening to another
man's story or turning the leaves of a picture book in which he had no
concern. He may take his afternoon walk in some foreign country on the
banks of the canal, and then come home to dinner at his own fireside."

They grew most enthusiastic over the idea and told one another how they
would furnish their "water villa" with easy chairs, pipes, and tobacco,
and the bird and the dog should go along too.

By the time Fontainebleau was reached they had planned trips through all
the canals of Europe. The idea took the artists' fancy also, and a group
of them actually purchased a canal-boat called _The Eleven Thousand
Virgins of Cologne_. Furnishing a water villa, however, was more
expensive than they had foreseen, and she came to a sad end. "'The
Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne' rotted in the stream where she was
beautified ... she was never harnessed to the patient track-horse. And
when at length she was sold, by the indignant carpenter of Moret, there
was sold along with her the _Arethusa_ and the _Cigarette_ ... now these
historic vessels fly the tricolor and are known by new and alien names."

In 1873 Stevenson planned to try for admission to the English bar
instead of the Scottish and went to London to take the examination. But
his health, which had been rather poor, became worse, and on reaching
London the doctor ordered him to Mentone in the south of France, where
he had been before as a boy.

There he spent his days principally lying on his back in the sun reading
and playing with a little Russian girl with whom he struck up a great
friendship. His letters to his mother were full of her sayings and
doings. He was too ill to write much, although one essay, "Ordered
South," was the outcome of this trip, the only piece of writing in which
he ever posed as an invalid or talked of his ill health.

At the end of two months he improved enough to return to Edinburgh, but
gave up the idea of the English bar. His illness and absence seemed to
have smoothed out some of the difficulties at home, and after he
returned things went happier in every way.

On July 14, 1875, he passed his final law examinations, and was admitted
to the Scottish bar. He was now entitled to wear a wig and gown, place
a brass plate with his name upon the door of 17 Heriot Row, and "have
the fourth or fifth share of the services of a clerk" whom it is said he
didn't even know by sight. For a few months he made some sort of a
pretense at practising, but it amounted to very little. Gradually he
ceased paying daily visits to the Parliament House to wait for a case,
but settled himself instead in the room on the top floor at home and
began to write, seriously this time--it was to be his life-work from now
on--and the law was forgotten.

His first essays were published in the _Cornhill Magazine_ and _The
Portfolio_ under the initials R.L.S., which signature in time grew so
familiar to his friends and to those who admired his writings it became
a second name for him, and as R.L.S. he is often referred to.

He was free now to roam as he chose and spent much time in Paris with
Bob. The life there in the artists' quarter suited him as well as it
had at Fontainebleau. There, among other American artists, he was
associated with Mr. Will Low, a painter, whom he saw much of when he
came to New York.

One September he took a walking trip in the CГ©venne Mountains with no
other companion than a little gray donkey, Modestine, who carried his
pack and tried his patience by turns with her pace, which was "as much
slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run," as he tells in the
chronicle of the trip.

A visit at Grez in 1876 was to mark a point in his life. Heretofore the
artists' colony had been composed only of men. This year there were
three new arrivals, Americans, a Mrs. Osbourne and her young son and
daughter. Their home in California had been broken up and the mother had
come to Grez to paint for the summer.

Those who had been there for a number of years, R.L.S. among them,
looked on the newcomers as intruders and did not hesitate to say so
among themselves. Before the summer was over, however, they were
obliged to confess that the newcomers had added to the charms of Grez,
and Louis found in Mrs. Osbourne another companion to add to his rapidly
growing list.

When the artists scattered in the autumn and he returned to Edinburgh
and Mrs. Osbourne to California, he carried with him the hope that some
time in the future they should be married.

For the next three years he worked hard. He published numerous essays in
the _Cornhill Magazine_ and his first short stories, "A Lodging for the
Night," "Will O' the Mill," and the "New Arabian Nights." These were
followed by his first books of travel, "An Inland Voyage," giving a
faithful account of the adventures of the _Arethusa_ and the
_Cigarette_, and "Travels with a Donkey in the CГ©vennes."

When the latter was published, Mr. Walter Crane made an illustration for
it showing R.L.S. under a tree in the foreground in his sleeping-bag,
smoking, while Modestine contentedly crops grass by his side. Above him
winds the path he is to take on his journey, encouraging Modestine with
her burden to a livelier pace with his goad; receiving the blessing of
the good monks at the Monastery of Our Lady of the Snows; stopping for a
bite and sup at a wayside tavern; conversing with a fellow traveller by
the way; and finally disappearing with the sunset over the brow of the
hill.

Some time previous to all this he had written in a letter: "Leslie
Stephen, who was down here to lecture, called on me, and took me up to
see a poor fellow, a poet who writes for him, and who has been eighteen
months in our Infirmary, and may be for all I know eighteen months more.
Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fellow sat up in
his bed with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as
if he had been in a king's palace of blue air."

This was William Ernest Henley, and his brave determination to live and
work, though he knew he must ever remain in a maimed condition, roused
Stevenson's sincere admiration. With his usual impetuous generosity, he
brought him books and other comforts to make his prolonged stay in the
infirmary less wearisome and a warm friendship sprang up between them.

As Henley grew stronger they planned to work together and write plays.
Stevenson had done nothing of the kind since he was nineteen. Now they
chose to use the same plot that he had experimented with at that time.
It was the story of the notorious Deacon Brodie of Edinburgh, which both
considered contained good material for a play.

"A great man in his day was the Deacon; well seen in good society,
crafty with his hands as a cabinet-maker, and one who could sing a song
with taste. Many a citizen was proud to welcome the Deacon to supper,
and dismiss him with regret ... who would have been vastly disconcerted
had he known how soon, and in what guise his visitor returned. Many
stories are told of this redoubtable Edinburgh burgher.... A friend of
Brodie's ... told him of a projected visit to the country, and
afterwards detained by some affairs, put it off and stayed the night in
town. The good man had lain some time awake; it was far on in the small
hours by the Tron bell; when suddenly there came a crack, a jar, a faint
light. Softly he clambered out of bed and up to a false window which
looked upon another room, and there, by the glimmer of a thieves'
lantern, was his good friend the Deacon in a mask."

At length after a certain robbery in one of the government offices the
Deacon was suspected. He escaped to Holland, but was arrested in
Amsterdam as he was about to start for America. He was brought back to
Edinburgh, was tried and convicted and hanged on the second of October,
1788, at the west end of the Tolbooth, which was the famous old
Edinburgh prison known as the Heart of Midlothian.

[Illustration: Edinburgh Castle]

This story of Brodie had always interested Stevenson since he had heard
it as a child, and a cabinet made by the clever Deacon himself formed
part of the furniture of his nursery.

"Deacon Brodie" and other plays were finished and produced, but never
proved successful. Indeed, the money came in but slowly from any of his
writings and, aside from the critics, it was many a long day before he
was appreciated by the people of his own city and country. They refused
to believe that "that daft laddie Stevenson," who had so often shocked
them by his eccentric ways and scorn of conventions, could do anything
worth while. So by far his happiest times were spent out of Scotland,
principally in London, where a membership in the Savile Club added to
his enjoyment. Here he met several interesting men, among them Edmund
William Gosse and Sidney Colvin, both writers and literary critics, with
whom he became very intimate.

"My experience of Stevenson," writes Mr. Gosse, "during these first
years was confined to London upon which he would make sudden piratical
descents, staying a few days or weeks and melting into thin air again.
He was much at my house, and it must be told that my wife and I, as
young married people, had possessed ourselves of a house too large for
our slender means immediately to furnish. The one person who thoroughly
approved of our great bare absurd drawing room was Louis, who very
earnestly dealt with us on the immorality of chairs and tables, and
desired us to sit always, as he delighted to sit, upon hassocks on the
floor. Nevertheless, as armchairs and settees straggled into existence,
he handsomely consented to use them, although never in the usual way,
but with his legs thrown sidewise over the arms of them, or the head of
a sofa treated as a perch. In particular, a certain shelf with cupboards
below, attached to a bookcase, is worn with the person of Stevenson, who
would spend half an evening, while passionately discussing some question
... leaping sidewise in a seated posture to the length of this shelf and
back again.

"... These were the days when he most frequented the Savile Club, and
the lightest and most vivacious part of him there came to the surface.
He might spend the morning in work or business, and would then come to
the club for luncheon. If he were so fortunate as to find a congenial
companion disengaged, or to induce them to throw over their engagements,
he would lead him off to the smoking-room, and there spend an afternoon
in the highest spirits and the most brilliant and audacious talk.

"He was simply bubbling with quips and jests. I am anxious that his
laughter-loving mood should not be forgotten, because later on it was
partly, but I think never wholly quenched, by ill health, responsibility
and advance of years.

"His private thoughts and prospects must often have been of the
gloomiest, but he seems to have borne his unhappiness with a courage as
high as he ever afterwards displayed."

Sidney Colvin he met some time previous while visiting relatives in
England, and their friendship was renewed when they met again in
London; a friendship which lasted throughout their lives and which even
the distance of two seas failed to obliterate. They kept up a lively
correspondence and Mr. Colvin aided him with the publication of his
writings while he was absent from his own country. After his death,
according to Stevenson's wishes, Mr. Colvin edited a large collection of
his letters and in the notes which he added paid his friend many
splendid tributes which show him to be a fair critic as well as an
ardent admirer. "He had only to speak," he says, "in order to be
recognized in the first minute for a witty and charming gentleman, and
within the first five minutes for a master spirit and man of genius."

Louis's long absences from home often troubled his mother and caused her
to complain when writing. In one answer to her about this time he said:

"You must not be vexed at my absences, you must understand I shall be a
nomad, more or less, until my days be done. You don't know how much I
used to long for it in the old days; how I used to go and look at the
trains leaving, and wish to go with them. And now, you know, that I have
a little more that is solid under my feet, you must take my nomadic
habit as a part of me. Just wait till I am in swing and you will see
that I shall pass more of my life with you than elsewhere; only take me
as I am and give me time. I _must_ be a bit of a vagabond."

For all so little of his writing was ever done in his own country,
nevertheless he turned to Scotland again and again for the setting of
his stories and the subject of his essays. Although he often spoke
harshly of Edinburgh when at home, he paid her many loving tributes in
writing of her in a foreign land: "The quaint grey-castled city where
the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers
fly and beat.... I do not even know if I desire to live there, but let
me hear in some far land a kindred voice sing out 'Oh, why left I my
hame?' and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and
no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my own
country. And although I think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my
heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scotch clods. I will say
it fairly, it grows on me with every year; there are no stars so lovely
as the Edinburgh street lamps. When I forget thee, Auld Reekie, may my
right hand forget its cunning."




CHAPTER V

AMATEUR EMIGRANT

 "Hope went before them
  And the world was wide."


In the summer of 1879 R.L.S. was once more seized with the desire to
roam and to roam farther than ever before. California had been beckoning
to him for some time, and in August he suddenly made up his mind, and
with scarcely a word of farewell to his family and friends he embarked
on the steamship _Devonia_, bound for New York.

Partly for the sake of economy, for he determined to pay his own way on
this venture, and partly because he was anxious to experience emigrant
life, he engaged passage in the second cabin, which in those days
differed very little from the steerage. The main advantages were a
trifle better food and a cabin to himself with a table where he could
write.

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,
  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.

[Illustration: 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."

[Illustration: 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."

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."

[Illustration: 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.