Robert Louis Stevenson Part 6

and with it, to the great interest of his simple neighbours, started on a tour in the Cevennes. The pair set forth speeded on their way by many good wishes and, in spite of a slow pace and not a few misfortunes with the baggage and the pack-saddle, the tour was most successful. As to Modestine's pace her master describes it as being 'as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run'!

The experiences of the traveller in the crisp, bright autumn weather and the perfect scenery of the Cevennes were thoroughly enjoyable. The simple peasantry and the homely innkeepers proved more friendly and agreeable than those along the route of the canoeists had done. In the monastery of 'Our Lady of the Snows' he had a kindly welcome from the Trappist monks, who seemed to have found it possible to break their stern rule of silence in their eagerness to convert him to Roman Catholicism. Among themselves this rule of silence and the poorest diet is rigidly enforced, and as the traveller left their hospitable doors he 'blessed G.o.d that he was free to wander, free to hope, and free to love.'

In the country of the Camisards--that little sect of persecuted religionists whose fierce brief struggle against the tyranny of the Church of Rome he so graphically describes--the descendant of Scotch Covenanters found himself at home, and at 'Pont de Montvert' his heart beat in a certain stern sympathy with the persecuted remnant, who here slew Du Chayla, and with that strange weird prophet Spirit Seguir, who, after the deed was done, and he was about to suffer death for it at the stake, said: 'My soul is like a garden full of shelter and fountains.'

The rising took place on 24th July 1702, and Mr Stevenson says of it:

''Tis a wild night's work with its accompaniment of psalms; and it seems as if a psalm must always have a sound of threatening in that town upon the Tarn.'

There is a delightful description of a night among the firs in which the very spirit of nature breathes through his words, and his reason for travelling as he does is happy and convincing.

'I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move, to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off the feather bed of civilisation and find the globe granite under foot and stern with cutting flints. Alas! as we get up in life and are more pre-occupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing to be worked for.'

Many people have all through life a closer acquaintance with 'the globe granite under foot' than with 'the feather bed of civilisation,' and daily bread even more than a holiday is a thing to be worked for. But Mr Stevenson's lines had hitherto fallen in very pleasant places, and he had not as yet entered as seriously as he had to do later into the bitter battle of life.

After twelve days together he sold Modestine at St Jean du Gard and made his return journey by diligence. This book, like the first, was widely read and heartily appreciated as soon as it appeared.

FOOTNOTE:

[4] This is to be found reprinted in the Edinburgh Edition, in which are also published for the first time the _Amateur Emigrant_ in full, a fragmentary romance, _The Great North Road_, and other papers and letters, &c., not hitherto known to the public.

CHAPTER VII

WANDERINGS IN SEARCH OF HEALTH

'Know how sublime a thing it is To suffer and be strong.'--LONGFELLOW.

Mr Stevenson's health, although always a cause of more or less anxiety, was from time to time somewhat better; else he could hardly have learned the practical work of a bra.s.s foundry, superintended the building of light towers and harbours, and taken such very active holidays as _An Inland Voyage_, and the tour _Through the Cevennes with a Donkey_.

Nevertheless the delicacy was there, and it not only increased in 1873 but culminated in the autumn of that year in the first of those serious attacks of illness which afterwards frequently caused himself so much suffering and his friends such keen distress all through the life that, in spite of them, he lived so bravely.

In the October of 1873 the doctors took so grave a view of his indisposition that they ordered him south for the winter, and on the 5th of November he started on the first of those pilgrimages in search of health of which he says, somewhat sadly, in writing of his grandfather, in his paper on _The Old Manse_:

'He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight; I have sought it in both hemispheres, but whereas he found it and kept it, I am still on the quest.'

The anxiety and distress of his parents during that winter were naturally intense, and there is something tragic in the dates so carefully preserved:

'Lou started on 5th November 1873.'

'He returned to Heriot Row on 26th April 1874.'

_Ordered South_ appeared in _Macmillan_ for that same April, and in its very beauty there is a most painful pathos. The polish of its style, its exquisitely chosen words, give to it something of the sadness of the brilliant autumn tints on a wood, the red gold and the glory of decay.

It is a brave paper and it is an intensely sad one, the sadness in which goes straight to the reader's heart, while the courage takes his respect by storm. No wonder it calls forth universal sympathy; too many homes have been darkened by the dread sentence 'Ordered South,' too many sufferers have obeyed it in life's gay noonday, or in its sunny prime, and few, alas! very few, have even returned to face the long struggle with fate that Mr Stevenson fought so heroically! This was the first, for him, of many journeys 'South'; for although the winter in the Riviera sent him back somewhat stronger, the inherent delicacy was still there, and time after time, in the twenty years and eleven months that he lived after the November morning when he set out on that melancholy journey, the recurrence of the graver symptoms of his malady obliged him to seek sunnier skies and warmer climates.

Scotland which he loved, the grey skies, the greyer mists, the snell winds,--that even in his happy Samoan life his exile's heart hungered for to the last,--were fatal to his delicate lungs, and year by year he was compelled to live less and less in his old Edinburgh home.

In 1880 when he brought his wife to Scotland to visit his parents his health was so precarious that he had to hurry abroad before the winter, and he and his wife and stepson went to Davos where they met and formed a pleasant friendship with Mr J. A. Symonds and his family. On their return it was hoped that the climate of the south of England might suit Mr Stevenson and be conveniently near London for literary business and literary friendships, so he, and his wife and son settled at Bournemouth in a house called Skerryvore, after the famous lighthouse so dear to all the Stevensons. Here too, alas! his enemy found him out; and chronic, indifferent health, with not infrequent attacks of lung disease in its more serious forms, finally obliged him about 1887 to take another journey to America in the hope that it might do him good.

Through all his life the shadow of death was never quite out of sight for him or for those who loved him; the skeleton hand was continually beckoning to him. When we think what that means, in a man's life, we realise with amazement his charming cheerfulness, his wonderful courage, and the magnitude of his work, the exact.i.tude of his methods, the carefulness of his research, appeal to us as something positively heroic in one so handicapped by adverse fate.

When many men in despair would have given in he fought on; and the sum of his work, the length of his years--comparatively short as these were--witness to the truth that _will_ can do many things. He willed to fight, he willed to live, he scorned to drop by the wayside, or to die one day before the battle was hopeless, and he fought his fight with a smiling face and a gay courage that was as fine a thing in its way as an act which has won a Victoria Cross; nay, finer, perhaps, for the struggle was not of minutes, or of hours, but of a lifetime, a stern prolonged tussle with death, in which he was never selfish, never peevish, always thoughtful of others, invariably merry and bright, with a wonderful sparkling whimsical mirth that had in it no touch of bitterness or of cynicism. Even the last years of life, when the need to work hard for an income that would sufficiently maintain his household, made brain work, under conditions of physical weakness, often peculiarly trying, were largely full of the same marvellous pluck and illumined by the same sunny temperament.

In the years between 1873 and 1879, in the summer of which he went to San Francisco, he had sought health in many places with a varying degree of success. He had seen much of life and, as he was an excellent linguist, had everywhere formed friendships with men of all nationalities, and was thus enabled to study at his leisure continental life and manners. He frequently stayed at Fontainbleau, where he had a Stevenson cousin studying art, and the pleasant unconventional life of the student settlement at Brabazon was very attractive to a man of Mr Stevenson's temperament. His first visit to the artist colony was paid in 1875, and it was often repeated.

His wanderings had unfortunately brought no permanent improvement to his health so, for that and other reasons, it occurred to him in 1879 to go to San Francisco to see if the Californian climate would be of benefit to him. Eager as ever to study life in all its phases and from every point of view he took his pa.s.sage in an emigrant ship--where he tells us he posed as a mason and played his part but indifferently well!--and at New York resolved to continue his journey across America by emigrant train.

In the graphic account of his experiences, in the volume of essays ent.i.tled _Across the Plains_, and in _The Amateur Emigrant_, he describes what must have been a very trying time to a man of his refined upbringing and frail const.i.tution. But he looks, here as elsewhere, at the bright side of people and things; and even for the Chinaman, from whom the other emigrants hold themselves aloof, he has a good word to say. He keenly observed everything from his fellow-pa.s.sengers, the character of the newsboys on the cars, and the petty oppressions of the railway officials to the glories of the scenery on that marvellous journey of which Joaquin Miller says:--

'We glide through golden seas of grain, We shoot, a shining comet, through The mountain range, against the blue, And then, below the walls of snow, We blow the desert dust amain, We see the orange groves below, We rest beneath the oaks, and we Have cleft a continent in twain.'

After the long rush across the plains, Mr Stevenson's heart bounded with joy when he caught a glimpse of 'a huge pine-forested ravine, a foaming river, and a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.'

'You will scarce believe it,' he says, 'how my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting one's wife. I had come home again--home from unsightly deserts to the green and habitable corners of the earth.'

By the afternoon they had reached Sacramento, which he writes of as 'a city of gardens in a plain of corn,' and before the dawn of the next day the train was drawn up at the Oaklands side of San Francis...o...b..y. The day broke as they crossed the ferry, and he says:

'The fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was perfect, not a ripple, scarce a stain upon its blue expanse, everything was waiting breathless for the sun.

'A spot of gold first lit upon the head of Talampais and then widened downwards on its shapely shoulder' ... and by-and-bye

'The tall hills t.i.tan discovered,'

'and the city of San Francisco and the bay of gold and corn were lit from end to end with summer daylight.'

In _The Old Pacific Capital_ he writes delightfully of San Francisco and the surge of its 'toss'd and tumbled sea,' that echoes forever around Monterey and its woods of oaks and pines and cedars. He has much that is interesting to tell of the curious contrast between San Francisco, modern and American, and Monterey, the 'Old Pacific Capital,' so full of a pathetic and a half-forgotten history. He has a deep sympathy with its refined and impoverished Spanish gentle-folk and their unpractical ideas of what is honourable; and he predicts that the people who do not consider it etiquette to look through an important paper before signing it are, in spite of America's a.s.sertions that they are well able to take care of themselves, little likely to survive long in a world of Yankee sharpness and smartness.

He revelled in the beautiful woods so often devastated by forest fires.

On one occasion, he says, he came perilously near lynching, for he applied a match to the dry moss which clings to the bark of the trees to see if it were so peculiarly ignitable as to be an important factor in the rapid spread of a fire. In a moment flames broke out all over the tree, and he found to his horror that he had started a fresh fire of his own very difficult to put out, and exceedingly likely to arouse the indignation of the men who were struggling to beat out the existing conflagration, to the point of lynching the too officious stranger.

The solemn boom of the Pacific was a constant delight to him, and he gloried in the ever-changing lights and shadows on the sea. If he did not attain to permanent good health while at San Francisco and Monterey he at least found there something else which made for the lasting happiness of his life, as it was there that he married his wife.

After spending about seven years of married life at Bournemouth he again, in 1887, tried a visit to America. His health, however, did not improve, and, during the winter of 1887 and 1888, when he was at Saranac Lake, he speaks of himself, in _The Vailima Letters_, as having been--in the graphic Scots words--'far through'; and the idea occurred to him of chartering a yacht and going for a voyage in the South Seas. His mother on this occasion accompanied the family party, and between 1888 and 1890 they sailed about among the lovely islands of the South Sea, visiting Honolulu, and finally touching at Apia in Samoa, where they promptly fell in love with the beauty of the scenery and the charm of the climate.

On this voyage, as always, Mr Stevenson made friends wherever he went, and had much pleasant intercourse with wandering Europeans, missionaries and natives.

On her return to Edinburgh, after this cruise with him, his mother used to give most entertaining accounts of the feasts given in their honour by the native kings and chiefs, and of the quaint gifts bestowed on them. At an afternoon tea-party at 17 Heriot Row, shortly before the home there was finally broken up, she put on for our benefit the wreath--still wonderfully green--that had been given to her to wear at one of those island festivities. She had promised the sable majesty who gave it to her to be photographed with it on, and to send him one of the copies. One of these photographs is beside me now, and is an excellent likeness. Close to it is the graceful one of her son, taken at Bournemouth, wearing his hair long, and one of the velvet coats that he loved, and it is a most curious contrast to the st.u.r.dy Scotsman, his father, who looks out at it from his frame, in conventional broadcloth and with the earnest gravity so characteristic of his face in repose.

Innumerable photographs, pictures, and busts, were taken of Robert Louis Stevenson, but not one of them has ever been a very real or a very satisfying likeness. In recent years one rarely sees an Academy Exhibition without one or more representations of the mobile face, the expression of which has, alas! eluded the grasp of even the best of artists.

The Stevenson party had been so charmed with Samoa, that, as the climate suited Louis admirably, they resolved to give up the Bournemouth home, buy some ground in Samoa, and finally settle there. So sometime about 1890 Vailima was bought, and building and reclaiming operations were begun, and, save for occasional visits to Sydney or Honolulu, Mr Stevenson and his household gave up personal communication with the busy and civilised world, and happily settled themselves in a peaceful life among the palms and the sunshine of the tropics and the friendly Samoan natives, who grew to be so deeply attached to them, and so proud of 'Tusitala.'