IT is with some diffidence that I sit down at an age so mature that I
cannot bring myself to name it, to write a preface to works I printed and
published at twelve.
I would have the reader see a little boy living in a châlet on a Swiss
mountain-side, overlooking a straggling village named Davos-Platz, where
consumptives coming to get well more often died. It was winter; the
sky-line was broken by frosty peaks; the hamlet—it was scarcely more
then—lay huddled in the universal snow. Morning came late, and the sun
set early. A still, silent and icy night had an undue share of the round
of hours, which at least it had the grace to mitigate by a myriad of
shining stars.
The little boy thought it was a very jolly place. He loved the
tobogganing, the skating, the snow-balling; loved the crisp, tingling
air, and the woods full of Christmas trees, glittering with icicles. Nor
with his toy theatre and printing-press was the indoor confinement ever
irksome. He but dimly appreciated that his stepfather and mother were
less happy in so favoured a spot. His mother’s face was often anxious;
sometimes he would find her crying. His stepfather, whom he idolised,
was terribly thin, and even to childish eyes looked frail and spectral.
The stepfather was an unsuccessful author named Robert Louis Stevenson,
who would never have got along at all had it not been for his rich
parents in Edinburgh. The little boy at his lessons in the room which
they all shared grew used to hearing a sentence that struck at his heart.
Perhaps it was the tone it was uttered in; perhaps the looks of
discouragement and depression that went with it.
‘Fanny, I shall have to write to my father.’
It served to make the little boy very precocious about money. In a
family perennially short of it he learned its essentialness early. He
knew too, that he was a dreadfully expensive child. His stepfather paid
forty pounds for his winter’s tutoring, not to speak of an additional
outlay on a dying Prussian officer who taught him German with the aid of
a pocket-knife stuck down his throat to give him the right accent. It
was with consternation that he once heard his stepfather say in a voice
of tragedy: ‘Good Heavens, Fanny, we are spending ten pounds a week on
food alone!’
The little boy, under the stress of this financial urgency, decided to go
into business, finding a capital opening in the Hotel Belvidere, where a
hundred programmes were required weekly for the Saturday night concerts.
A gentleman with a black beard, who was in charge of these arrangements,
willingly offered to pay two francs fifty centimes for each set of
programmes. The little boy was afraid of the gentleman with the black
beard; he was a formidable gentleman, with a formidable manner, and he
was very exacting about spelling. The gentleman with the black beard
attached an inordinate importance to spelling. The gentleman with the
black beard was wholly unable to make allowances for the trifling
mistakes that will occur in even the best-managed of printing-offices.
If the little boy printed: ‘’Twas in Trofolgar’s Bay . . . sung by Mr.
Edwin Smith,’ the black-bearded gentleman had no mercy in sending that
poor little boy back to do it all over again. But he paid promptly—a
severe man, but extremely honourable. There were charity-bazaars too,
public invitations, announcements, letter-heads, all bringing grist to
the mill. The ‘Elegy for Some Lead Soldiers’ was brought out, and sold
for a penny. Once there was a colossal order for a thousand lottery
tickets.
The little boy’s ambitions soared. He wrote and printed a tiny book of
eight pages, entitled ‘Black Canyon, or Life in the Far West,’ in which
he used all the ‘cuts’ he had somehow accumulated with his type—the story
conforming to the illustrations instead of the more common-place way of
the illustrations conforming to the text. This work can occasionally be
picked up at one of Sotheby’s auctions, and if you can get it for less
than twenty-five pounds you are lucky—that is if you are a collector and
prize such things. It has risen to the dignity of ‘DAVOS BOOKLETS;
STEVENSONIANA; EXCESSIVELY RARE.’ But its original price was sixpence,
and its sale was immediate and gratifying. The little boy discovered
that there was much more money to be made from one book than a dozen sets
of programmes, and that without any black-bearded gentleman either to
tweak his nose when errors crept in.
Louis, as the little boy always called his stepfather, with a familiarity
that was much criticised by strangers, followed this publishing venture
with absorbing interest. Then his own ambitions awakened, and one day,
with an affected humility that was most embarrassing, he called at the
office, and submitted a manuscript called, ‘Not I, and Other Poems,’
which the firm of Osbourne and Co. gladly accepted on the spot. It was
an instantaneous hit, selling out an entire edition of fifty copies.
The publisher was thrilled, and the author was equally jubilant, saying
it was the only successful book he had ever written, and jingling his
three francs of royalties with an air that made the little boy burst out
laughing with delighted pride. In the ensuing enthusiasm another book
was planned, and the first poem for it written.
‘If only we could have illustrations,’ said the publisher longingly. But
his ‘cuts’ had all been used in ‘Black Canyon, or Life in the Far West.’
Illustrations had to be put by as a dream impossible of fulfilment. No,
not impossible! Louis, who was a man of infinite resourcefulness (he
could paint better theatre-scenes than any one could buy), said that he
would try to carve some pictures on squares of fretwood. The word
fretwood seems as unknown nowadays as the thing itself; it was an
extremely thin piece of board with which one was supposed to make works
of art with the help of pasted-on patterns, an aggravating little saw,
and the patience of Job. . . . Well, Louis cut out a small square of
fretwood, and in a deeply-thoughtful manner applied himself to the task.
He had only a pocket-knife; real tools came later; but he was impelled by
a will to win that carried all before it. After an afternoon of almost
suffocating excitement—for the publisher—he completed the engraving that
accompanies the poem: ‘Reader, your soul upraise to see.’ But it had yet
to be mounted on a wooden block in order to raise it to the exact level
of the type. At last this was done. A proof was run off. But the
impression was unequal. Oh, the disappointment! Author and publisher
gazed at each other in misery. But woman’s wit came to the rescue. Why
not build it up with cigarette papers? ‘Bravo, Fanny!’ The author set
to work, deftly and skilfully. Then more proofs, more cigarette-papers,
more running up and down stairs to the little boy’s room, which in
temperature hovered about zero. But what was temperature? The thing was
a success. The little boy, entranced beyond measure, printed copy after
copy from the sheer pleasure of seeing the wet ink magically reproducing
the block.
The next day the little boy was sent to a dying Swiss—half the population
of Davos were coughing away the remnants of life—who lived with his
poverty-stricken family in one room, earning their bread by carving
bears. A model block was shown him. Could he reproduce a dozen exactly
like it, but in a wood without any grain? The dying Swiss said he could,
leaving his bear forthwith, and applying himself to the task. The
pinched-face children looked on amazed; the little print of ‘Reader, your
soul upraise to see’ was passed from hand to hand with exclamations of
astonishment. The dying Swiss gave the little boy the blocks,
beautifully and faultlessly finished. Would the little boy care to buy a
bear? No, the little boy didn’t. He scurried home through the snow with
the precious blocks.
Thus ‘Moral Emblems’ came out; ninety copies, price sixpence. Its
reception might almost be called sensational. Wealthy people in the
Hotel Belvidere bought as many as three copies apiece. Friends in
England wrote back for more. Meanwhile the splendid artist was
assiduously busy. He worked like a beaver, saying that it was the best
relaxation he had ever found. The little boy once overheard him
confiding to a visitor: ‘I cannot tell you what a Godsend these silly
blocks have been to me. When I can write no more, and read no more, and
think no more, I can pass whole hours engraving these blocks in blissful
contentment.’ These may not have been the actual words, but such at
least was their sense.
Thus the second ‘Moral Emblems’ came out; ninety copies, price ninepence.
The public welcomed it as heartily as the first, the little boy becoming
so prosperous that he accumulated upwards of five pounds. But let it
never be said that he spurned the humble mainstay of his beginnings. He
printed the weekly programmes as usual, and bore the exactions of the
black-bearded gentleman with fortitude. When he made such a trifling
mistake, for instance, as ‘The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Hells,’ he
dutifully climbed the hill to his freezing room, and ran off a whole
fresh set. Two francs fifty was two francs fifty. Every business man
appreciates the comfort of a small regular order which can be counted on
like the clock.
But one day there was no black-bearded gentleman. ‘Oh, he was dead. Had
had a hemorrhage three days before and had died.’ I don’t know whether
the little boy mourned for him particularly, but it was a shock to lose
that two francs fifty centimes. The little boy was worried until he
found a lady who had substituted herself for the gentleman with the black
beard. She was a very kind lady; you could print anything for that lady,
and ‘get away with it’ as Americans say. But she was frolicsome and
lacked poise; she was vague about appointments, and had a disheartening
way of saying: ‘Oh, bother,’ when the little boy appeared; she would
insist on kissing him amid circumstances of the most odious publicity;
was so abased a creature besides, that she often marred the programmes by
making pen-and-ink corrections. In contrast, the little boy looked back
on the black-bearded gentleman almost with regret.
Two winters were thus occupied, with incidental education that seemed far
less important. The Prussian officer had fortunately died, releasing the
little boy from any further study of German. All that he retains of it
to-day is the taste of that pocket-knife, and of the Prussian officer’s
thumb. Then he was sent to boarding-school in England, or to be precise
to a tutor who had half a dozen resident pupils. Time passed; publishing
became a memory. Then a long summer holiday found the little boy, now
much grown and matured, reunited with his family in Kingussie. The
printing-press was there, and business was resumed with enthusiasm. The
stepfather, who had made much more progress with engraving than the boy
had with Latin, had the blocks and poems all ready for ‘The Graver and
the Pen.’
But the printing-press broke down; and after an interval of despair and
unavailing attempts to repair it, an amiable old man was found who had a
press of his own behind a microscopic general shop. Here ‘The Graver and
the Pen’ was printed with what now seems an almost regrettable
perfection. The amiable old man was altogether too amiable. He would
insist on doing far too much himself, though he had been merely paid a
trifling rent for the use of the press. An edition of a hundred copies
was printed, of which almost none were sold. The little boy had grown
such a big boy that he was ashamed of tradesmanship. He had passed the
age when he could take sixpences and ninepences with ease from strangers.
New standards were imperceptibly forming, and it pleased him better to
see his stepfather give away ‘The Graver and the Pen’ to those worthy of
so signal an honour.
In fact ‘The Graver and the Pen’ was the last enterprise of Osbourne and
Co. ‘The Pirate and the Apothecary’ was projected; three superb
illustrations were engraved for it; yet it never saw more light than the
typewriter afforded. ‘The Builder’s Doom’ has remained in manuscript
until the present time. No illustrations were either drawn or engraved
for it. It marked the final decline of a once flourishing business,
which in its day had given so much laughter to many people sadly in need
of it.