EDINBURGH DAYS
"I am fevered with the sunset,
I am fretful with the bay,
For the wander-thirst is on me
And my soul is in Cathay.
"There's a schooner in the offing,
With her topsails shot with fire,
And my heart has gone aboard her
For the island of Desire."
--RICHARD HOVEY.
In spite of the fact that his law studies now left him an opportunity
for the work he wanted so much to do, Louis was far from happy, for
between his parents and himself, who had always been the best of
friends, there were many misunderstandings.
Thomas Stevenson was bitterly disappointed that his only son should
choose to be what he called "an idler"--generous to a fault and always
out of money, dressing in a careless and eccentric way, which both
amused and annoyed his friends and caused him to be ridiculed by
strangers, preferring to roam the streets of old Edinburgh scraping
acquaintance with the fishwives and dock hands, rather than staying at
home and mingling in the social circle to which his parents belonged.
But his father was still more troubled by certain independent religious
opinions, far different from those in which he had been reared, that
Louis adopted at this time.
How any good result could come from all this neither his father nor
mother could see, and with the loss of their sympathy he was thrown upon
himself and was lonely and rebellious.
He longed to get away from it all, to quit Edinburgh with its harsh
climate, and often on his walks he leaned over the great bridge that
joins the New Town with the Old "and watched the trains smoking out from
under, and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies." He
longed to go with them "to that Somewhere-else of the imagination where
all troubles are supposed to end."
It was a comfort to him at this time to remember other Scotchmen,
Jeffries, Burns, Fergusson, Scott, Carlyle, and others, who had roamed
these same streets before him, not a few of them fighting with the same
problems he faced in their struggle to win their ideal.
This unhappy time, this "Greensickness," as he called it, came to an
end, however, through the help of what Louis had always secretly longed
for--friends. Several whom he met at this time influenced him, but first
of them all he put his cousin Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (Bob), who
returned to Edinburgh about this time from Paris, where he had been
studying art.
Louis says: "The mere return of Bob changed at once and forever the
course of my life; I can give you an idea of my relief only by saying
that I was at last able to breathe.... I was done with the sullens for
good.... I had got a friend to laugh with."
Here at last was a companion who understood him and sympathized with
what he was trying to do. Since as children they had made believe
together in their rival kingdoms of "Nosingtonia" and "Encyclopædia"
they had had many traits and tastes in common. They now began where they
had left off and proceeded to enjoy themselves once more by all sorts of
wild pranks and gay expeditions.
The Speculative Society became another great source of pleasure. It was
an old society and had numbered among its members such men of note as
Scott, Jeffrey, Robert Emmet, and others. Once a week from November to
March the "Spec," as it was called, met in rooms in the University of
Edinburgh. An essay was read and debates followed with much hot
discussion, which delighted Stevenson. "Oh, I do think the Spec is about
the best thing in Edinburgh," he said enthusiastically.
Sir Walter Simpson, son of the famous doctor, Sir James Simpson, who
discovered chloroform, became another chum about this time, and for the
next ten years they were much together. He likewise was studying law and
was a near neighbor. The Simpsons kept open house, and it was the custom
for a group of cronies to drop in at all hours of day and night. Louis
was among those who came oftenest, and Sir Walter's sister writes: "He
would frequently drop in to dinner with us, and of an evening he had the
run of the smoking room. After ten p.m. the 'open sesame' to our door
was a rattle on the letter box and Louis' fancy for the mysterious was
whetted by this admittance by secret sign, and we liked his special
rat-a-tat for it was the forerunner of an hour or two of talk."
They teased him about his queer clothes and laughed at some of his wild
ideas, but he seldom was angry at them for it and never stayed away very
long.
With them he often skated on Duddington Loch or canoed on the Firth of
Forth. One summer he and Sir Walter yachted off the west coast of
Scotland, and still another year, when longing for further wandering
possessed them, they made a trip in canoes through the inland waters of
Belgium from Antwerp to Brussels, and then into France and by the rivers
Sambre and Oise nearly to Paris.
In the "Inland Voyage," where Stevenson describes this trip, he calls
Sir Walter and his canoe "Cigarette" while he was "Arethusa." Adventures
were plentiful, and they aroused much curiosity among the dwellers on
the banks, with whom they made friends as they went along.
Once Arethusa was all but drowned, when his canoe was overturned by the
rapids; and on several occasions, when they applied for a night's
lodging, they were suspected of being tramps or peddlers because of
their bedraggled appearance.
One evening after a hard day's paddling in the rain they landed tired,
wet, and hungry at the little town of La Fère. "The Cigarette and I
could not sufficiently congratulate each other on the prospect," says
the Arethusa, "for we had been told there was a capital inn at La Fère.
Such a dinner as we were going to eat. Such beds as we were going to
sleep in, and all the while the rain raining on homeless folk over all
the poplared country-side. It made our mouths water. The inn bore the
name of some woodland animal, stag, or hart, or hind, I forget which.
But I shall never forget how spacious and how eminently comfortable it
looked as we drew near.... A rattle of many dishes came to our ears; we
sighted a great field of tablecloth; the kitchen glowed like a forge and
smelt like a garden of things to eat.
"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 Cévenne 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 Cévennes."
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."