horses in the stable and horses outside. The cattle outside were mine.
Three hundred sheep I was responsible for. Some young motherless foals I
nursed. I milked six cows. I chopped wood. I cleaned buggies. I drove
wagons and carriages and cleaned and greased them. Sometimes I stood in
the middle of the great barn-lot or barnyard and tore my hair in
desperation. I had so much to attend to that only the strictest method
enabled me to get through it. And, as Jack had told me would happen, my
method was knocked endways by the requirements of the lady who was my
"boss." What a woman wants done is always the most important thing on
earth. She used to ask me to do up her acre of a garden in between times
when the sheep wanted water or twenty horses required hay. She was
amiable, kindly, but she never understood. At such times who could blame
me if I went to the bull's stable when I saw her coming. Though the bull
was the sweetest character on the ranch, she went in mortal terror of
him. She would try to find me in the horse stable, but she would not
come near El Toro for her very life. It was better to sit quietly with
him and recover my equanimity while she called. I knew her well enough
to know that in a quarter of an hour something else of the vastest
importance would engage her attention and I should be free to attend
more coolly to my own work.
Yet sometimes she stuck to my track so closely that there was nothing
for me to do but to turn El Toro loose. Then I could say, "Very well,
madam, but in the meantime I must go after the bull." She knew what the
bull being loose meant; he carried devastation wherever he went. He was
the greatest fighter in the whole county. I had to get my whip and my
fastest horse to try and catch him. I can hardly be blamed if I did not
catch him till the evening. For in that way I got a wild kind of holiday
on horseback and was saved from insanity. Certainly, when El Toro got
away on the loose and was looking for other bulls to have a row with I
could think of nothing else. Sometimes he got free by the rope rotting
close up to his ring. In that case he went headlong. If he took the rope
with him he sometimes trod on it and gave himself a nasty check.
Usually, however, he got it across his big neck and kept it from falling
to the ground. He never stopped for any gate. When he saw one he gave a
bellow, charged it and went through the fragments with me after him. If
I was really anxious to get him back at once I usually caught him within
a mile. When I wanted a rest I only succeeded in turning him five or six
miles away, after he had thrashed a bull or two belonging to other
ranchers. No fence was any use to keep him out or in. On one occasion he
broke into a barn in which a rash young bull was kept. When the row was
over that barn stood sadly in need of repair: and so did the young
pedigree bull. I may say that on this particular occasion El Toro got
away entirely by himself, and I only knew he was free when I found the
door of his stable in splinters.
There was a magnificent difference between El Toro as I sat on him and
scratched him with a nail and as he was when he turned himself loose for
a happy day in the country. In the stable he was as mild as milk. I
could have almost imagined him purring like a cat. He chewed the cud and
made homely sloppy noises with his tongue, and regarded me with a calm,
bovine gaze, which was as gentle as that of any pet cow's. I could have
fallen asleep beside him. It is reported that my predecessor Jack, on
one occasion, came home much the worse for liquor and was found
reclining on El Toro. There was not a soul on the ranch who dared
disturb the loving couple. But when the rope was parted and El Toro
loped down the road to seek a row as keenly as any Irishman on a fair
day, he was another guess sort of an animal. He carried his tail in the
air and bellowed wildly to the hills. He threw out challenges to all and
sundry. He gave it to be understood that the world and the fatness
thereof were his. This was no mere braggadocio; it was not the misplaced
confidence of a stall-fed bull in his mere weight; he really could
fight, and though he was only on the warpath about once a month, there
was not a bull in the valley which had not retained in his thick skull
and muddy brains some recollection of El Toro's prowess. The only
trouble about this, from my pet bull's point of view, was that he could
rarely get up a row. Most of his possible enemies fled when he tooted
his horn and waltzed into the arena through a smashed fence. He was
magnificent and he was war incarnate.
In that country, which is a hard-working country, there is really very
little sport. Further south in California, the ease-loving Spanish
people who remain among the Americans still love music and the dance. We
worked, and worked hard; only Sundays brought us a little surcease from
toil. All our notions of sport centred on our bull. I had many Italian
co-workers, some Swedes, and an odd citizen of the United States. All
alike agreed in being proud of El Toro. We yearned to match him against
any bull in the State. Sometimes of a Sunday morning, after he had
devastated the country and was back again, he held a kind of _levée_.
The Italians brought him pears as I sat on him in triumph and combed him
in places where he had not been wounded. He always forgot that I had
come behind him and laced his tough hide with my stock-whip. He bore no
malice, but took his fruit like a good child. I think he was almost as
proud of himself as we were. Certainly we were proud of him. As for me,
had I not ridden desperate miles after him: had I not interviewed
outraged owners of other bulls and broken fences: had I not played the
diplomat or the bully according to the treatment which seemed indicated?
He was, properly speaking, my bull; I did not care if I had to spend
three days mending our home gates and other's alien fences.
Yes, it was a fine thing to gallop through that warm, bright,
Californian air after El Toro, with the brown hills on either side and
its patches of green vineyard brightening daily. It was freedom after
the toil of axle-greasing and the slow work with sheep. It was better
than grinding axes and trying to cut the tough knobs of vine stumps:
better than grooming horses and milking cows. It made me think even more
of the great Australian plains and of the Texas prairie and the round
up. _Ay de mi_, I remember it now, sometimes, and I wish I was on
horseback, swinging my whip and uttering diabolic yells, significant of
the freedom of the spirit as I rush after the spirit of El Toro. For my
pet, my brindled fighter, my own El Toro, whom I combed so delicately
with a bent nail, for whom I gathered buckets of bruised but fat
Californian pears, is now no more. They told me, when I visited Los
Guilucos seven years ago, that he became difficult, morose, hard to
handle, and they sold him. They sold this joyous incarnation of the
spirit of battle and the pure joy of life for a mean and miserable
thirteen dollars! When I think of it I almost fall to tears. So might
some coward son of the seas sell a battleship for ten pounds because it
was not suitable for a ferry-boat or a river yacht. I would rather a
thousand times have paid the thirteen dollars myself and have taken him
out to fight his last Armageddon and then have shot him on the lonely
hills from which all other bulls had fled. These mean-souled,
conscienceless moneymakers, who could not understand so brave, so fine a
spirit, sold him to a Santa Rosa butcher! Shame on them, I say. I am
sorry I ever revisited the Valley of the Seven Moons to hear such
lamentable news. It made me unhappy then, makes me unhappy now. My only
consolation is that once, and twice, and thrice, and yet again, I gave
El Toro the chance of finding happiness in the conflict. And when I left
Los Guilucos, before I returned to England, I sat upon his huge
shoulders and scratched him most thoroughly, while ever and again I
offered him a juicy and unbruised pear. On that occasion I pulled him
the best fruit, and left windfalls for the ranging, greedy hogs. And as
I fed and scratched him he lay on his hunkers in great content, and made
pleasant noises as he remembered the day before. On that day, owing to
the kindly feeling of me, his true and real friend, he had had a great
time three miles towards Glenallen, and had beaten a newly-imported bull
out of all sense of self-importance. He was pleased with himself,
pleased with me, pleased with the world.
BOOKS IN THE GREAT WEST
Since taking to writing as a profession I have lost most of the interest
I had in literature as literature pure and simple. That interest
gradually faded and "Art for Art's sake," in the sense the simple in
studios are wont to dilate upon, touches me no more, or very, very
rarely. The books I love now are those which teach me something actual
about the living world; and it troubles me not at all if any of them
betray no sense of beauty and lack immortal words. Their artistry is
nothing, what they say is everything. So on the shelf to which I mostly
resort is a book on the Himalayas; a Lloyd's Shipping Register; a little
work on seamanship that every would-be second mate knows; Brown's
Nautical Almanacs; a Channel Pilot; a Continental Bradshaw; many
Baedekers; a Directory to the Indian Ocean and the China Seas; a big
folding map of the United States; some books dealing with strategy, and
some touching on medical knowledge, but principally pathology, and
especially the pathology of the mind.
Yet in spite of this utilitarian bent of my thoughts there are very many
books I know and love and sometimes look into because of their
associations. As I cannot understand (through some mental kink which my
friends are wont to jeer at) how anyone can return again and again to a
book for its own sake, I do not read what I know. As soon would I go
back when it is my purpose to go forward. A book should serve its turn,
do its work, and become a memory. To love books for their own sake is to
be crystallised before old age comes on. Only the old are entitled to
love the past. The work of the young lies in the present and the future.
But still, in spite of my theories, I like to handle, if not to read,
certain books which were read by me under curious and perhaps abnormal
circumstances. If I do not open them it is due to a certain bashfulness,
a subtle dislike of seeing myself as I was. Yet the books I read while
tramping in America, such as _Sartor Resartus_, have the same attraction
for me that a man may feel for a place. I carried the lucubrations of
Teufelsdrockh with me as I wandered; I read them as I camped in the open
upon the prairie; I slipped them into my pocket when I went shepherding
in the Texan plateau south of the Panhandle.
Another book which went with me on my tramps through Minnesota and Iowa
was a tiny volume of Emerson's essays. This I loved less than I loved
Carlyle, and I gave it to a railroad "section boss" in the north-west of
Iowa because he was kind to me. When _Sartor Resartus_ had travelled
with me through the Kicking Horse Pass and over the Selkirks into
British Columbia, and was sucked dry, I gave it at last to a farming
Englishman who lived not far from Kamloops. I remember that in the
flyleaf I kept a rough diary of the terrible week I spent in climbing
through the Selkirk Range with sore and wounded feet. It is perhaps
little wonder that I associate Teufelsdrockh, the mind-wanderer, with
those days of my own life. And yet, unless I live to be old, I shall
never read the book again.
The tramp, or traveller, or beach-comber, or general scallywag finds
little time and little chance to read. And for the most part we must own
he cares little for literature in any form. But I was not always
wandering. I varied wandering with work, and while working at a sawmill
on the coast, or close to it, in the lower Fraser River in British
Columbia, I read much. In the town of New Westminster was a little
public library, and I used to go thither after work if I was not too
tired. But the work in a sawmill is very arduous to everyone in it, and
while the winter kept away I had little energy to read. Presently,
however, the season changed, and the bitter east winds came out of the
mountains and fixed the river in ice and froze up our logs in the
"boom," so that the saws were at last silent, and I was free to plunge
among the books and roll and soak among them day and night.
The library was very much mixed. It was indeed created upon a pile of
miscellaneous matter left by British troops when they were stationed on
the British Columbian mainland. There was much rubbish on the shelves,
but among the rubbish I found many good books. For instance, that winter
I read solidly through Gibbon's _Rome_, and refreshed my early memories
of Mahomet, of Alaric, and of Attila. Those who imported fresh elements
into the old were even then my greatest interest. I preferred the
destroyers to the destroyed, being rather on the side of the gods than
on the side of Cato. Lately, as I was returning from South Africa, I
tried to read Gibbon once more, and I failed. He was too classic, too
stately. I fell back on Froude, and was refreshed by the manner, if not
always delighted by the matter.
After emerging from the Imperial flood at the last chapter, I fell
headlong into Vasari's _Lives of the Painters_, in nine volumes. Then I
read Motley's _Netherlands_ and the _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, always
terrible and picturesque since I had read it as a boy of eleven.
At the sawmill there was but one man with whom I could talk on any
matters of intellectual interest. He was a big man from Michigan and ran
the shingle saw. We often discussed what I had lately read, and went
away from discussion to argument concerning philosophy and theology. He
was a most lovable person; as keen as a sharpened sawtooth, and a
polemic but courteous atheist. His greatest sorrow in life was that his
mother, a Middle State woman of ferocious religion, could not be kept in
ignorance of his principles. We argued ethics sophistically as to
whether a convinced agnostic might on occasion hide what he believed.
Sometimes this friend of mine went to the library with me. He had the
_penchant_ for science so common among the finer rising types of the
lower classes. So I read Darwin's _Origin of Species_, and talked of it
with my Michigan man. And then I took to Savage Landor and learnt some
of his _Imaginary Conversations_ by heart. I could have repeated _Æsop_
and _Rhodope_.
But the one thing I for ever fell back upon was an old encyclopædia. I
should be afraid to say how much I read, but to it I owe, doubtless, a
stock of extensive, if shallow, general knowledge. Certainly it appears
to have influenced me to this day; for given a similar one I can wander
from shipbuilding to St. Thomas Aquinas; from the Atomic Theory to the
Marquis de Sade; from Kant to the building of dams; and never feel dull.
Now when I come across any of these books I am filled with a curious
melancholy. The _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ means more to me
than to some: I hear the whirr of the buzz-saw as I open it; even in its
driest page I smell the resin of fir and spruce; Locke's _Human
Understanding_ recalls things no man can understand if he has not
worked alongside Indians and next to Chinamen. As for Carlyle, I never
hear him mentioned without seeing the mountains and glaciers of the
Selkirks; in his pages is the sound of the wind and rain.
There are some novels, too, which have attractions not all their own. I
remember once walking into a store at Eagle Pass Landing on the Shushwap
Lake and asking for a book. I was referred to a counter covered with
bearskins, and beneath the hides I unearthed a pile of novels. The one I
took was Thomas Hardy's _Far from the Madding Crowd_. And another time I
rode into Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, California, and, while buying
stores, saw Gissing's _Demos_ open in front of me. It was anonymous, but
I knew it for his, and I read it as I rode slowly homeward down the
Sonoma Valley, the Valley of the Seven Moons.
These are but a few of the books that are burnt into one's memory as by
fire. All I remember are not literature: perhaps I should reject many
with scorn at the present day; nevertheless, they have a value to me
greater than the price set upon many precious folios. I propose one of
these days to make a shelf among my shelves sacred to the books which I
read under curious circumstances. I cannot but regret that I often had
nothing to read at the most interesting times. So far as I can
recollect, I got through five days' starvation in Australia without as
much as a newspaper.
A VISIT TO R. L. STEVENSON
It was late in May or early in June, for I cannot now remember the exact
date, that I landed in Apia, in the island of Upolu. Naturally enough
that island was not to me so much the centre of Anglo-American and
German rivalries as the home of Robert Louis Stevenson, then become the
literary deity of the Pacific. In a dozen shops in Honolulu I had seen
little plaster busts of him; here and there I came across his
photograph. And I had a theory about him to put to the test. Though I
was not, and am not, one of those who rage against over-great praise,
when there is any true foundation for it, I had never been able to
understand the laudation of which he was the subject. At that time, and
until the fragment of _Weir of Hermiston_ was given to the world,
nothing but his one short story about the thief and poet, Villon, had
seemed to me to be really great, really to command or even to be an
excuse for his being in the position in which his critics had placed
him. Yet I had read _The Wrecker_, _The Ebb Tide_, _The Beach of
Falesa_, _Kidnapped_, _Catriona_, _The Master of Ballantrae_, and the
_New Arabian Nights_. I came to the conclusion that, as most of the
organic chorus of approval came from men who knew him, he must be (as
all writers, I think, should be) immeasurably greater than his books. I
was prepared then for a personality, and I found it. When his name is
mentioned I no longer think of any of his works, but of a sweet-eyed,
thin, brown ghost of a man whom I first saw upon horseback in a grove of
cocoanut palms by the sounding surges of a tropic sea. There are
writers, and not a few of them, whose work it is a pleasure to read,
while it is a pain to know them, a disappointment, almost an
unhappiness, to be in their disillusioning company. They have given the
best to the world. Robert Louis Stevenson never gave his best, for his
best was himself.
At any time of the year the Navigator Islands are truly tropical, and
whether the sun inclines towards Cancer or Capricorn, Apia is a bath of
warm heat. As soon as the _Monowai_ dropped her anchor inside the
opening of the reef that forms the only decent harbour in all the group,
I went ashore in haste. Our time was short, but three or four hours, and
I could afford neither the time nor the money to stay there till the
next steamer. I had much to do in Australia, and was not a little
exercised in mind as to how I should ever be able to get round the world
at all unless I once more shipped before the mast. I was, in fact, so
hard put to it in the matter of cash, that when the hotel-keeper asked
three dollars for a pony on which to ride to Vailima, I refused to pay
it, and went away believing that after all I should not see him whom I
most desired to meet. Yet it was possible, if not likely, that he would
come down to visit the one fortnightly link with the great world from
which he was an exile. I had to trust to chance, and in the meantime
walked the long street of Apia and viewed the Samoans, whom he so loved,
with vivid interest. These people, riven and torn by internal
dissensions between Mataafa and Malietoa, and honeycombed by
Anglo-American and German intrigue, were the most interesting and the
noblest that I had met since I foregathered for a time with a wandering
band of Blackfeet Indians close to Calgary beneath the shadows of the
Rocky Mountains. Their dress, their customs, and their free and noble
carriage, yet unspoiled by civilisation, appealed to me greatly. I could
understand as I saw them walk how Stevenson delighted in them. Man and
woman alike looked me and the whole world in the face, and went by,
proud, yet modest, and with the smile of a happy, unconquered race.
As I walked with half a dozen curious indifferents whom the hazards of
travel had made my companions, we turned from the main road into the
seclusion of a shaded group of palms, and as I went I saw coming towards
me a mounted white man behind whom rode a native. As he came nearer I
looked at him without curiosity, for, as the time passed, I was becoming
reconciled by all there was to see to the fact that I might not meet
this exiled Scot. And yet, as he neared and passed me, I knew that I
knew him, that he was familiar; and very presently I was aware that this
sense of familiarity was not, as so often happens to a traveller, the
awakened memory of a type. This was an individual and a personality. I
stopped and stared after him, and suddenly roused myself. Surely this
was Robert Louis Stevenson, and this his man. So might the ghosts of
Crusoe and Friday pass one on the shore of Juan Fernandez.
I called the "boy" and gave him my card, and asked him to overtake his
master. In another moment my literary apparition, this chief among the
Samoans, was shaking hands with me. He alighted from his horse, and we
walked together towards the town. I fell a victim to him, and forgot
that he wrote. His writings were what packed dates might be to one who
sat for the first time under a palm in some far oasis; they were but ice
in a tumbler compared with séracs. He was first a man, and then a
writer. The pitiful opposite is too common.
I think, indeed I am sure, for I know he could not lie, that he was
pleased to see me. What I represented to him then I hardly reckoned at
the time, but I was a messenger from the great world of men; I moved
close to the heart of things; I was fresh from San Francisco, from New
York, from London. He spoke like an exile, but one not discouraged.
Though his physique was of the frailest (I had noted with astonishment
that his thigh as he sat on horseback was hardly thicker than my
forearm), he was alert and gently eager. That soft, brown eye which held
me was full of humour, of pathos, of tenderness, yet I could imagine it
capable of indignation and of power. It might be that his body was
dying, but his mind was young, elastic, and unspoiled by selfishness or
affectation. He had his regrets; they concerned the Samoans greatly.
"Had I come here fifteen years ago I might have ruled these islands."
He imagined it possible that international intrigue might not have
flourished under him. Never had I seen so fragile a man who would be
king. He owned, with a shyly comic glance, that he had leanings towards
buccaneering. The man of action, were he but some shaggy-bearded
shellback, appealed to him. His own physique was his apology for being
merely a writer of novels.
We went on board the steamer, and at his request I bade a steward show
his faithful henchman over her. In the meantime we sat in the saloon and
drank "soft" drinks. It pleased him to talk, and he spoke fluently in a
voice that was musical. He touched a hundred subjects; he developed a
theory of matriarchy. Men loved to steal; women were naturally
receivers. They adored property; their minds ran on possession; they
were domestic materialists. We talked of socialism, of Bully Hayes, of
Royat, of Rudyard Kipling. He regretted greatly not having seen the
author of _Plain Tales from the Hills_.
"He was once coming here. Even now I believe there is mail-matter of his
rotting at the post-office."
I asked him to accept a book I had brought from England, hoping to be
able to give it to him. It was the only book of mine that I thought
worthy of his acceptance. That he knew it pleased me. But he always
desired to please, and pleased without any effort. When the boy came
back from viewing the internal arrangements of the _Monowai_, he sat
down with us as a free warrior. He was more a friend than a servant;
Stevenson treated him as the head of a clan in his old home might treat
a worthy follower. As there was yet an hour before the vessel sailed I
went on shore with him again. We were rowed there by a Samoan in a
waistcloth. His head was whitened by the lime which many of the natives
use to bleach their dark locks to a fashionable red.
The air was hot and the sea glittered under an intense sun. The rollers
from the roadstead broke upon the reef. The outer ocean was a very
wonderful tropic blue; inside the reefs the water was calmer, greener,
more unlike anything that can be seen in northern latitudes. A little
island inside the lagoon glared with red rock in the sunlight; cocoanut
palms adorned it gracefully; beyond again was the deeper blue of ocean;
the island itself, a mass of foliage, melted beautifully into the lucid
atmosphere. Yonder, said Stevenson, lay Vailima that I was not to see.
But I had seen the island and the man, and the natural colour and glory
of both.
As we went ashore he handed the book which I had given him to his
follower. He thought it necessary to explain to me that etiquette
demanded that no chief should carry anything. And etiquette was rigid
there.
"Mrs Grundy," he remarked, "is essentially a savage institution."
We went together to the post-office. And in the street outside, while
many passed and greeted "Tusitala" in the soft, native speech, we
parted. I saw him ride away, and saw him wave his hand to me as he
turned once more into the dark grove wherein I had met him in the year
of his death.
A DAY IN CAPETOWN