Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1108 page)

Bas-relief of Stevenson by Augustus Saint Gaudens

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

“I asked him: ‘Do you wish me to give this to the boy?’

“‘Yes,’

“‘When? Now?’

“‘Oh, no, in five or ten years, or when I am dead.’

“I put it in a safe and here it is:

“May 27, 1888.

“Dear Homer St. Gaudens — Your father has brought you this day to see me and tells me it is his hope you may remember the occasion. I am going to do what I can to carry out his wish; and it may amuse you, years after, to see this little scrap of paper and to read what I write. I must begin by testifying that you yourself took no interest whatever in the introduction, and in the most proper spirit displayed a single-minded ambition to get back to play, and this I thought an excellent and admirable point in your character. You were also, — I use the past tense with a view to the time when you shall read rather than to that when I am writing, — a very pretty boy, and to my European views startlingly self-possessed. My time of observation was so limited that you must pardon me if I can say no more ... but you may perhaps like to know that the lean, flushed man in bed, who interested you so little, was in a state of mind extremely mingled and unpleasant; harassed with work which he thought he was not doing well, troubled with difficulties to which you will in time succeed, and yet looking forward to no less a matter than a voyage to the South Seas and the visitation of savage and desert islands.

“Your father’s friend,

“Robert Louis Stevenson.”

The portrait was finished in bas-relief and many copies were made of it. The most familiar is the one giving only Stevenson’s head and shoulders, but the splendid big one placed as a memorial to him in St. Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh shows him as he must have looked that day lying in bed, writing to Homer St. Gaudens.

Another man in New York whom Stevenson had admired for years and longed to meet was General Sherman. The war was long past, and he was then an old gentleman living very quietly. One day St. Gaudens took Stevenson to call on him, and he was asked afterward if he was at all disappointed in his hero.

“Disappointed,” he exclaimed. “It was simply magnificent to stand in the presence of one who has done what he has, and then to find him so genial and human. It was the next thing to seeing Wellington, and I dare say the Iron Duke would not have been half so human.”

The anticipation of a train trip across the continent was so distasteful that a proposed visit to colourado was given up, and they decided to try the climate of the Adirondacks for the winter instead.

They chose Saranac, not far from the Canadian border, and rented a cottage there.

The climate was as unpleasant as possible. It rained, snowed, sleeted, and froze continually. The cold at times was arctic, the thermometer dropping thirty degrees below zero in January. “Venison was crunching with ice after being an hour in the oven, and a large lump of ice was still unmelted in a pot where water was steaming all around it.”

Their cottage was dubbed “Hunter’s Home.” It was far from the railroad, few luxuries were to be had, and they lived a simple life in earnest.

Of course, they had a dog; no “hunter’s home” would be complete without one, but Louis scouted the idea of adding things as unfitting as plush table-covers and upholstered footstools. The table went bare, and he fashioned a footstool for his mother out of a log, in true backwoods fashion.

His wife and mother found the cold hard to bear, but he stood it remarkably well and benefited by it. Saranac reminded him of Scotland, he said, without the smell of peats and the heather.

Dressed in a buffalo coat, astrakhan cap, and Indian boots, he and Lloyd walked, skated, or went sleighing every day.

His pen was kept busy also. A new novel, “The Master of Ballantrae,” was started, and he contributed a series of articles to
Scribner’s Magazine
. For these he was paid a regular sum offered by the publishers and agreed upon in advance — a new experience. It made him feel “awfu’ grand,” he told a Scotch friend.

A venture he had been longing to make since a boy was a cruise among the islands of the South Seas. While enduring the bitter cold of Saranac such hazy ideas as he had had about such a trip began to form themselves into a definite scheme. He was anxious for a long voyage; perhaps the warm sea air might cure him after all else had failed.

So night after night he and Lloyd eagerly pored over books and maps, and the family discussed plans for such an expedition.

When spring came Mrs. Stevenson started for San Francisco to secure, if possible, a yacht in which they might undertake such a cruise. If all went well Louis and his mother and Lloyd would follow.

While they waited for results they spent the time at Manasquan, on the New Jersey coast. There Stevenson and his son enjoyed the sailing, and their New York friends came often to see them.

Mr. Low tells of the day at Manasquan when word was received from Mrs. Stevenson that she had found a schooner-yacht satisfactory for the voyage.

An answer must be sent at once. Her husband telegraphed that they would come, but it was not without misgivings that he made this final decision. There was much at stake in an uncertain venture of the kind. It meant a sacrifice of comfort for his wife and mother, big expense, and perhaps no better health in the end.

However, it seemed worth the risk, and having decided to go he began to look forward to the trip with boyish delight. “It will be horrid fun,” he said, “to be an invalid gentleman on board a yacht, to walk around with a spy-glass under your arm, to make landings and trade beads and chromos for cocoanuts, and to have the natives swim out to meet you.”

He and Lloyd spent hours laying their course and making out lists of stores with which to furnish the schooner, regardless of the doubt expressed by their friends as to the capacity of the boat. “They calmly proceeded with their interminable lists and scorned the criticism of a mere land-lubber. All conversation that was not of a nautical character failed to hold their interest.”

Cheered with strong hopes for Louis’s future, the family departed for San Francisco on the 28th of May, 1888. Their one regret was the good friends they were leaving behind. This particularly affected Louis, but he tried to hide his feelings by making all sorts of lively and impossible proposals for their joining him later on.

His parting words to Mr. Low were: “There’s England over there — and I’ve left it — perhaps I may never go back — and there on the other side of this big continent there’s another sea rolling in. I loved the Pacific in the days when I was at Monterey, and perhaps now it will love me a little. I am going to meet it; ever since I was a boy the South Seas have laid a spell upon me.”

CHAPTER VIII

IN THE SOUTH SEAS

“Since long ago, a child at home,
I read and longed to rise and roam,
Where’er I went, what’er I willed,
One promised land my fancy filled.
Hence the long road my home I made;
Tossed much in ships; have often laid
Below the uncurtained sky my head,
Rain-deluged and wind buffeted;
And many a thousand miles I crossed,
And corners turned — love’s labor lost,
Till, Lady, to your isle of sun
I came, not hoping, and like one
Snatched out of blindness, rubbed my eyes,
And hailed my promised land with cries.”

Once, while Louis was a discontented student at the University of Edinburgh, the premier of New Zealand, Mr. Seed, spent an evening with his father and talked about the South Sea Islands until the boy said he was “sick with desire to go there.”

From that time on a visit to that out-of-the-way corner of the earth was a cherished dream, and he read everything he could lay hands on that told about it.

While in California, the first time, Mr. Virgil Williams, an artist, aroused his interest still more by the accounts of his own trip in the South Seas.

Now his opportunity to see them had actually come. He already knew much of the kind of places and people they were going among.

Three thousand miles across the open sea lay the Marquesas Islands, the first group they hoped to visit, and it was for that port their schooner, the
Casco
, turned her head when she was towed out of the Golden Gate at dawn on the 28th of June.

Besides the family and a servant, Valentine Roch, who had been with them since Bournemouth days, the party consisted of the skipper, Captain Otis, who was well acquainted with the Pacific, a crew of four deck-hands, and a Japanese cook.

The
Casco
was a fore-and-aft schooner, ninety-five feet in length, of seventy tons’ burden. “She had most graceful lines and with her lofty masts, white sails and decks, and glittering brass work, was a lovely craft to the eye as she sat upon the water.”

“I must try to describe the vessel that is to be our home for so long,” Mrs. Stevenson, senior, wrote to her sister at Colinton. “From the deck you step down into the cockpit, which is our open air drawing room. It has seats all around, nicely cushioned, and we sit or lie there most of the day. The compass is there, and the wheel, so the man at the wheel always keeps us company.... At the bottom of the stairs on the right hand side is the captain’s room. Straight ahead is the main — or after — cabin, a nice bright place with a skylight and four portholes. There are four sofas that can be turned into beds if need be, and there are lockers under them in which our clothes are stored away. Above and behind each sofa is a berth concealed by white lace curtains on brass rods, and in these berths we three women are laid away as on shelves each night to sleep.

“Opposite the entrance is a mirror let into the wall, with two small shelves under it. On each side of this is a door. The one to the right leads ... to Lloyd’s cabin, and beyond that again is the forward cabin, or dining room. The door to the left opens into ... Louis’ sleeping-room. It is very roomy with both a bed and a sofa in it, so that he will be very comfortable....

“The dining room has a long table and chairs. Between the doors a very ugly picture of fruit and cake. Louis would fain cover it up if we could spare a flag with which to do it. The doors at the further end lead to the pantry and galley and beyond these are the men’s quarters.”

No expense had been spared in building the
Casco
to make her comfortable. She was intended, however, for cruising in the California waters and was hardly suited to the rough handling she received during the squally weather of the next few months. Fortunately she stood the test well and her passengers suffered few discomforts.

Once under way and settled for living, the trip proved quite uneventful. The long days were spent on deck reading or working, and Stevenson began to gather material for a book on the South Seas. The ship’s life suited him admirably; every strange fish and new star interested him, and he grew stronger hourly in the warm air.

“Since the fifth day,” he wrote, “we were left behind by a full-rigged English ship ... bound round the Horn, we have not spied a sail, nor a land bird, nor a shred of sea-weed. In impudent isolation, the toy schooner has plowed her path of snow across the empty deep, far from all track of commerce, far from any hand of help; now to the sound of slatting sails and stamping sheet blocks, staggering in the turmoil of that business falsely called a calm, now, in the assault of squalls burying her lee-rail in the sea.... Flying fish, a skimming silver rain on the blue sea; a turtle fast asleep in the early morning sunshine; the Southern Cross hung thwart the forerigging like the frame of a wrecked kite — the pole star and the familiar plough dropping ever lower in the wake; these build up thus far the history of our voyage. It is singular to come so far and see so infinitely little.”

The squalls that came very quickly, frequently broke the monotony of the trip. One moment the
Casco
would be sailing along easily and the “next moment, the inhabitants of the cabin were piled one upon another, the sea was pouring into the cockpit and spouting in fountains through forgotten deadlights, and the steersman stood spinning the wheel for his life in a halo of tropical rain.”

After twenty-two days at sea they sighted their first island, Nukahiva, one of the Marquesan group, and were all on deck before dawn anxiously watching for it. They not only looked forward eagerly to the sight of land again after so many days on the open ocean, but it was indeed an adventure to come to a country totally strange to all of them, where few white people had been before.

“Not one soul aboard the Casco had set foot upon the Islands,” says Stevenson, “or knew except by accident one word of any of the island tongues; and it was with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as thrilled the bosom of the discoverers that we drew near these problematic shores.

“Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe was already paddling from the hamlet. It contained two men: one white, one brown and tattooed across the face with bands of blue, both immaculate with white European clothes.... Canoe followed canoe till the ship swarmed with stalwart, six foot men in every stage of undress ... the more considerable tattooed from head to foot in awful patterns ... all talking and we could not understand one word; all trying to trade with us who had no thought of trading, or offering us island curios at prices palpably absurd.”