He had applied for work to Mr Henderson, the Scotch editor of Young Folks, and to the acceptance of this application the world owes Treasure Island and the charming stories which followed it. The editor of Young Folks, who offered to take a story from him, showed him a treasure-hunting tale by Mr Peace, and asked him to give him something on the same lines. The result was The Sea Cook, which appeared in the paper in the autumn of 1881, and was not very highly paid for. It was written under the nom-de-plume of Captain North to give the idea the author was a sailor; it was not given a very important place in the paper and it had no very marked success as a serial. It was, with very little alteration, published by Messrs Cassell & Co. in 1883, under the name of Treasure Island, and it had an instant and well-deserved success. It is an excellent book for boys, full of stirring adventure, in the old-time fashion of fifty years ago, but it is much more; it is a book that grown-up folk, whose taste is still fresh enough to enjoy a good tale of the sea, delight in as heartily as the juniors. It was written while the Stevenson family were staying for a time at Braemar, and Mr Thomas Stevenson gave his son valuable help in it from his own experiences at sea while on his cruises of inspection round the coasts.

The Black Arrow also appeared in Young Folks during 1883 as by Captain North; it is said to have been very successful as a serial, but it has not been a great favourite in book form, and is one of the least interesting of his stories.

Kidnapped came out in 1886 in the same paper and was the first to be signed as by Robert Louis Stevenson. In its serial form it was not highly paid for but it had, when Messrs Cassell & Co. published it as a book, a large and an immediate success. It forms the first instalment of the delightful experiences of David Balfour, that somewhat pawky young Scot who, from the moment he leaves 'The Hawes Inn' at Queensferry and embarks on his adventures with Alan Breck and other strange worthies in Appin and elsewhere till we finally bid him good-bye on the last page of Catriona, never fails at odd times and places to remind one of Mr Stevenson himself at David's age and of what he might have been and done had David Balfour's fate been his in those early days of plot and turmoil in which his part is played.

Catriona, which is a continuation of Kidnapped, at first appeared in Atalanta, and was published in book form by Messrs Cassell & Co. in 1893. In the recent edition of 1898 both volumes are brought out as The History of David Balfour, and are beautifully illustrated. Catriona is a charming book, full of life and action, and the breezy, outdoor existence, in the picturing of which its author excels. The Edinburgh of the last half of the eighteenth century, with its quaint closes, and quainter manners, is admirably portrayed, and the old lady with whom Catriona lives, and Lord Prestongrange and his daughters, are very clever pictures from a bygone day. Indeed, Miss Grant is one of the best drawn women in all Mr Stevenson's books; she has life and reality in a greater degree than most of his female characters. She is true to feminine human nature in any age, and as she makes eyes at David Balfour from under her plumed hat, and flirts with him across the narrow close, she is very woman, and alive enough to be some later day judge's daughter of modern Edinburgh, coquetting with Mr Stevenson himself, while she playfully adjusts her becoming head-gear, and lets her long feathers droop to the best advantage.

She and the two Kirsties in the unfinished Weir of Hermiston stand out alone among all the heroines in Mr Stevenson's books as real breathing, living women. They are natural, they are possible, they have life and interest; all the rest are more or less lay figures put in because a heroine is necessary—the more's the pity evidently from the author's point of view!—and drawn somewhat perfunctorily by their creator, with but a limited knowledge of the virtues, the faults, the failings, and, above all, the 'little ways,' which go to make up the ordinary woman.

The women are undoubtedly a weakness in the author's work. It looks as if he had known intimately only exceptional women,—who, possibly, had left behind them, before he knew them well, most of a young girl's faults and follies, and some of her attractions also,—and had never found other women worth studying deeply, so that the girls in his books do not read real enough to interest one greatly, and it is almost a relief to take up Treasure Island, The Wrecker, or The Ebb Tide, in which there is very little about them. Lady Violet Greville, in a recent article, expresses much the same opinion. She says, 'The late Robert Louis Stevenson had no opinion of women writers, he said they were incapable of grasping the essential facts of life. He was a great master of style, but I doubt if he had much knowledge of feminine character'—a dictum in which many women will agree with her. She goes on to say that there is some truth in what he says of women writers, because women and men regard as essential quite different facts in life; and she explains it by saying that it is the difference of personality and of point of view. Certainly Mr Stevenson's point of view in regard to his heroines is not a satisfying one to most women.

Many men have drawn excellent female characters, just as a few women have given us life-like heroes. These exceptions, one imagines, must have been to some extent better able to appreciate the other sex thoroughly than most writers; but it strikes one as odd that Mr Stevenson, who had in himself so much of gentleness and of the essentially feminine, should have so continually failed to give a living interest to his heroines. Possibly had he lived longer, and had the maturing of his powers, so evident in Weir of Hermiston, been accompanied by a measure of improved health, the women of his later books might all have been as powerful creations as the two Kirsties promised to be.

His heroes are all that heart can desire, manly, brave, and natural; his villains make villainy interesting; so it may be forgiven him that scarcely one of his feminine characters lives in the reader's memory.

One of the most widely known of his books is that curious story, published in 1886, called The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the popularity of which, especially in America, was immense. It deals with man's dual nature, and while Dr Jekyll embodies the good side of it, Mr Hyde, with whom he is compelled continually to exchange bodies, as well as souls, is the evil side, and commits crimes so atrocious, that the miserable doctor is well-nigh driven to despair. It is a powerful subject, powerfully treated, and contains in its small compass more moral teaching than a hundred sermons. It has, particularly in America, been used by many clergymen as the foundation of their homilies.

The Master of Ballantrae, a weird and striking tale of the times of 'the forty-five,' is extraordinarily graphic both in its descriptions of places and of people. The gloomy house of Durrisdeer, with its stately panelled hall, the fine grounds so carefully laid out, the thick shrubberies, the spot where the duel was fought on the hard, frozen ground by the light of the flickering candles in the tall silver candlesticks, the wave-beaten point where the smuggling luggers land goods and passengers, and finally the awful journey through the uncleared woods of America, make a fit setting, in our memories, for the splendidly drawn pictures of the three Duries, the old father, the unappreciated Henry, the mocking master, their faithful land-steward, Mackellar, and the more shadowy personalities of the Frenchman, the lady, and the children. The tale is one of unrelieved horror, but it is a masterpiece nevertheless, and it has had a very large sale.

With his wife Mr Stevenson in More New Arabian Nights and The Dynamiter did some work of considerable interest, and with his stepson, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, he wrote that quaint tale, The Wrong Box. In collaboration also with Mr Lloyd Osbourne he wrote The Wrecker and The Ebb Tide.

The Wrecker is a wild and interesting story which had a large success. It originally appeared in Scribner's Magazine from August 1891 to July 1892, and was republished in book form by Messrs Cassell & Co. The scene is constantly changing in it, and the hero visits Edinburgh, stays in the students' quarter in Paris, personally conducts speculative picnics at San Francisco, distinguishes himself at the wreck on the lonely reef in mid-ocean, and finally, after appearing in England and Fontainbleau, tells his wonderful story to a friendly trader in the south seas. There is plenty of life and of action in the tale, and there are also some delightful descriptions of the Pacific and of the wonderful glamour lagoons and palm trees throw over the spirit of the man who learns to know and to love the beautiful South Sea islands.

The Ebb Tide, originally published in Mr Jerome K. Jerome's magazine To-day from November 1893 to February 1894, was republished in book form by Mr W. Heinemann in 1894. Like Treasure Island it is a tale without a heroine, almost, indeed, without the mention of a woman except Attwater's statuesque native servant and the shadowy personalities of Herrick's mother and fiancee in London, and Captain Davis's wife and his little girl, who died before she got the doll he had so carefully bought for her, and the memory of whom is the one soft spot in his dark soul. They are merely mentioned, however, and take no actual part in the story. It is not a pleasant tale, everyone in it is more or less bad; more by preference rather than less!—and for no one in it can one feel the slightest sympathy. There are villains and villains in fiction, and for some of them, for instance, Bret Harte's Jack Hamlin, or even the Master himself in The Master of Ballantrae, one can feel a sincere affection or at least have a grudging sort of admiration, but it is not possible to even faintly like or hesitatingly pity a cowardly Robert Herrick, whose self-pity is so strong, and who from first to last is, as his creator intended him to be, a thorough inefficient. Half-hearted in his wickedness, self-saving in his repentance, he somehow fails to interest one; and even his lower-class associates, the horrible Huish and the American captain, are almost less detestable. Huish is quite diabolical, but he, at least, has the courage of his iniquities. Attwater is not attractive either as villain or as religious enthusiast, but he is a fairly possible character and at least a degree less unpleasant than the American captain after his conversion. Captain Davis's effort to save Herrick's soul, given in the last paragraph of the book, is disagreeably profane in its familiarity with things sacred. Altogether it is not an attractive book, although it is an undoubtedly clever one; it has some redeeming features in the really lovely descriptions of the island and the lagoon; and the appearance of the divers in full working costume remind one of Mr Stevenson's own early experience in a diver's dress.

Without collaboration Mr Stevenson wrote the three pretty little tales of South Sea life reprinted, as Island Nights' Entertainments, in book form about 1893. The Beach of Falesa was published in The Illustrated London News from July 2nd to August 6th, 1892. The Bottle Imp appeared in Black and White from March 28th to April 4th, 1891, and The Isle of Voices was in The National Observer between 4th and 25th February of 1893.

They are charming stories, rich in local colour, and in all of them one sees that Mr Stevenson's quick eye for the essential in life has shown to him that among these simple islanders are to be found just the same elements of romance as among more highly civilised peoples, the same motives make and influence character there as elsewhere. So in Wiltshire and his relations with the islanders, in the curious stories of The Bottle Imp and The Isle of Voices, we are interested in a new set of people in fresh surroundings, and can in a large measure sympathise with the pleasure that the Samoans had in reading these tales of island life in their own tongue. The Bottle Imp was the first story ever read by the Samoans in their native language, and it raised their affection for 'Tusitala, the Teller of Stories' to positive enthusiasm.

St Ives is a bright story of adventure which Mr Stevenson had almost completed, and which Mr Quiller Couch was enabled very skilfully to finish with the assistance of the author's step-daughter, Mrs Strong, who had, besides being its amanuensis, helped Mr Stevenson with this story and been much in his confidence regarding it. It appeared first in The Windsor Magazine where it was received with favour. It is the history of a French prisoner in Edinburgh Castle during the wars of the great Napoleon. He makes, like the other prisoners, little carved ornaments for sale, and Flora, the heroine, has so touched him while buying these that he falls in love with her and presents her with a carved lion. She returns his sentiment of admiration, and after his escape she and her brother, a natural gentlemanly lad, hide Mr St Ives in the henhouse at Swanston Cottage where they live with a stern old aunt. The aunt is a well-drawn type of old-fashioned Scotchwoman, infinitely more natural and more interesting than the niece. In Edinburgh and round Mr Stevenson's own country home Swanston, the interest at first largely centres, and the writer gives a very graphic description of the home garden and the cottage and its outhouses,

'Marvellous places though handy to home.'

One imagines the tales of John Todd the shepherd must have helped much in his splendid description of the escape into England with the drovers by the solitary drove roads, at one point of which the escaping prisoner has the honour of meeting and conversing with 'The Shirra,' so well loved on Tweed side and elsewhere. After many and marvellous adventures, Mr St Ives returns a free and pardoned man to sue, not in vain, for the hand of Flora.

Last, but, if one may judge by its powerful beginning, which is, alas! all that the master-hand had left of it, certainly best of Mr Stevenson's work is Weir of Hermiston. In the few perfectly finished chapters there is a fulness of power and a perfection of style that promised great things. As one read the description of the fierce old judge, his gentle artistic son, the cunning dandified friend, the two Kirsties, and the four black Elliot brothers, one felt that here indeed was congenial matter; and that in the tragedy of fierce human passion about to be played out amid wild moorland surroundings, Mr Stevenson would rise to a greater perfection and a nobler success than he had yet attained to.... It was not to be, the busy brain stopped instantaneously, the pen that had worked so happily all the morning was laid by for ever; and the world is infinitely the poorer for the sudden catastrophe of that sad December evening which left the home at Vailima desolate.

* * * * *

The beautiful Edinburgh Edition of Mr Stevenson's works—which his friends Mr Colvin and Mr Baxter have been seeing through the press—is almost completed; one, or at most, two volumes only being now unpublished. It consists of an edition of 1035 copies, and includes the plays and everything of interest that he has written, and it will number twenty-seven or perhaps twenty-eight volumes. While this book has been passing through the press, volume twenty-seventh has been issued. It contains St Ives, and practically completes the edition; but Mr Stevenson's widow and Mr Sydney Colvin, who are acting as his executor and his editor, have gratuitously given to the subscribers to this Edinburgh Edition a twenty-eighth volume, consisting of various odds and ends not hitherto made public. Of this, 'A New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses' and 'The Thermal Influence of Forests,' recall the period of his engineering and scientific training; and the interesting facsimile reproductions of the quaint 'Moral Emblems,' written by him at Davos in 1880 and 1882, and printed with illustrations on a toy printing press by the then very youthful Mr Lloyd Osbourne, are yet another proof that even in his time of acute invalidism he was busily and cheerily employed.



CHAPTER XI

HIS LIFE IN SAMOA

'Sometimes I am hopeful as the spring, And up my fluttering heart is borne aloft As high and gladsome as the lark at sunrise, And then as though some fowler's shaft had pierced it It comes plumb down in such a dead, dead fall.' —FROM Philip Van Artevelde.

Mr Thomas Stevenson died early in May 1887, having lived long enough to see his son's fame as an author firmly established. Not very long afterwards Mrs Thomas Stevenson joined her son and his wife and with them went to America, and on that yachting tour among the South Sea islands, which finally resulted in the purchase, by Robert Louis, of the little property on the slope of the Vaea mountain, above the town of Apia, in Samoa, which he called by the musical name of Vailima, and where, in 1890, he finally made his home.

His mother returned to Scotland for some months in 1889, arriving in the June of that year and remaining till the October of 1890, when she joined her son and his wife in their Samoan home. In 1893 she again visited Edinburgh to see her relatives there, and to arrange for the breaking up of the home at 17 Heriot Row, the sale of the house and of such things as she did not care to keep or to take with her to that new home which she also intended to make her headquarters. She remained on this occasion almost a year, and left for London, en route for Samoa, on the 5th of March 1894, promising her relatives and her friends, who so greatly grudged her to her son and his household, that she would pay a visit to Scotland once every five years.

Alas! in less than one year her son had followed his father into the Life Eternal, and she was left that most desolate of all mourners 'a widow and childless.' She remained for a little time with her daughter-in-law and the sorrow-stricken Vailima household, and on 1st June 1895 she arrived in Edinburgh to make her home with her sister, Miss Balfour, as that sister so touchingly expresses it, 'a desolate woman.'

Much was left to her in the love of relatives and friends, and in her own bright spirit, which, while it recalled the happiness of the past, never repined at the emptiness of the present; but so much of her heart lay buried in her two graves that one dared not murmur, nay, one could hardly fail to rejoice for her, when, early in May 1897, she too passed into her rest, most deeply mourned by all who had so dearly loved her, and not least by the little children who had held so warm a place in her affections, and whose spontaneous offering of flowers so touched and comforted the sad hearts of her sorrowing relatives.

In his mother's letters to her sister and to other members of her family—so often kindly read to friends—one had almost as graphic an account of Mr Stevenson's Samoan home as in the delightful volume of Vailima Letters itself. Gifted also with a fluent pen and a keen interest in the details which make up life, the mother like the son wrote charmingly; and one laughed, as one does in The Vailima Letters, over such misfortunes as the raid of the little pigs among the young corn; the more or less serious peccadilloes of the childlike Samoan servants; and that crowning catastrophe, so comically described by Mr Stevenson, when the carpenter's horse put its foot into a nest of fourteen eggs, and 'made an omelette of all their hopes'!

Nothing could have, been more delightful or more amusing than that unconventional sunny life to people who like the Stevensons were perfectly happy among themselves, and, in spite of the often serious anxieties and worries incident on their settling in the new home, absolutely contented with their surroundings. The out-of-door existence, the free, untrammelled life, was dear to all of them, and especially good for Mr Stevenson; and far from the hurry and bustle of towns they found, under the unclouded blue of the Samoan sky, the rest and the peace their souls had longed for.

The climate worked wonders for Mr Stevenson, and it seemed hardly possible to believe that the pale shadow of the Bournemouth days was the active owner of Vailima, who himself worked untiringly in clearing the scrub, and making the rank, tropical bush give place to the ordered beauties of civilisation. Not only he but his wife cheerfully took a turn in weeding, and, hot, tired, and with skins blistered by the poisonous plants with which war had to be waged by hand, they themselves did as much as, if not more than, their Samoan assistants to eradicate the noxious growths and make the precious blades of grass spring up in their place. Yet glad as they were to welcome the grass, Mr Stevenson, as he pulled the weeds up, hated to cause their death, and felt that they were victims in the great war of life against life of which the world is full.

Existence at Vailima was simple and patriarchal in the extreme. The Samoans, who found in its owner so kind and so staunch a friend, had the warm hearts, the natural good qualities of children, but they had some of the vices of untrained children also, and petty thefts and tiresome acts of disobedience, gave their master and mistress abundant trouble, and often necessitated a species of impromptu court of justice, in which Mr Stevenson distributed reproofs and meted out punishments to the offenders in the midst of a full gathering of the domestic staff, both indoor and out, who all looked up to him much as one fancies the desert herdsmen did to Abraham, or as in later days the Highland clansmen feared and yet worshipped their chief, whose word was law.

His wife's ready wit on at least one occasion showed itself by utilising the native superstition to bring home the enormity of the offence to the possible stealer of a young pig. The fear of an 'Aitu,' or wicked woman-spirit of the woods, and the general dread of devils, has far more effect on the Samoan conscience than more civilised methods of warning and reproof. So when Mrs Stevenson, by a clever imitation of native conjuring, made Lafaele believe that 'her devil,' or divining spirit, would tell her where the missing pig was, it is probable that Lafaele, even if innocent himself, shared the feast with his friends with trembling.

The master and mistress had the kindest interest in all their native servants, and it is a quaint thing to read of the great writer, for whose books publishers and public impatiently waited, not only giving Mr Strong's little boy, Austin, history lessons, but spending hours over teaching Henry, the Samoan chief, who was his native overseer. Very strange, too, it is to realise that he carried his interest in missions and missionaries to so practical a point as for a time at least to teach Sunday school himself. His stepson, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, shared to the full his interest in these things, and both of them must have been very comforting to the missionaries in Samoa, one of whom especially, Mr Clark, was so valued a friend of the whole Vailima household. The Roman Catholic priests, many of whom are doing devoted work in the islands, were also welcome visitors at Vailima.

Never bound by creeds or forms, Mr Stevenson had a thoroughly practical religion, calculated to do infinitely more good in the world than all the theological disputes and hair splittings that ever were penned in ponderous volumes or thundered solemnly from orthodox pulpits.

Of his political work in Samoa, his earnestness for the good government of its people, his anxiety that they should have a just control and a due freedom, it is unnecessary to speak fully here, as his letters in the home press at the time and the volume Footnotes to History brought the knowledge of his views and actions within reach of all. Nothing could have been more unselfish than the attitude of the writer, to whom politics were abhorrent, who, nevertheless, from sheer humanity entered, at some personal risk, into the petty struggle with excellent results for the Samoans. And certainly nothing more courageous can be imagined than the man, whose tender heart winced at the sight of suffering and bloodshed, going down into the hospitals during the brief war, and himself helping to tend and comfort the wounded and the dying. In his interest in native affairs he had, as in all else that made up life for him, the thorough sympathy of his wife, and also of the other members of his most united household.

It was a very happy party in spite of some misfortunes and anxieties, occasional visits of the influenza, and the dread of ruin from rain or hurricane; and after their first difficulties as to house-building were over, it was to a very spacious and pleasant house that they welcomed the elder Mrs Stevenson when she returned to Samoa in 1893. The scrub still, however, required much clearing, and we find in The Vailima Letters Mr Stevenson dividing his day into so many hours of literary work and so many hours of weeding!

The day began early, and Mr Stevenson, after the first breakfast, did his literary work, until the sound of a conch summoned the family to a lunch, or second breakfast, about eleven o'clock. After this there was rest and music till four, and then outdoor work or play, lawn-tennis being a very favourite pastime, and in the evening they had more music, and a game at cards. It was a simple, natural life, and one that made far more for health, mental and physical, to those whose constitutions suited the climate, than the bustle and the clamour of cities. Visitors, too, often came up the hill to Vailima, sometimes the residents in Apia, sometimes home friends or distinguished strangers, who were glad to visit the much-loved author in his distant retreat, and to all was given the same cordial welcome, to all there remains the memory of delightful hours in the company of those who knew so well how to make time pass bewitchingly.

The household by this time consisted of Mr Stevenson, his wife, his mother, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, his sister, Mrs Strong, who acted as her stepfather's amanuensis, her little boy, Austin, who went to school in California in 1892, and Mr Graham Balfour, a cousin of Mr Stevenson's.

Until he left for school, Mr Stevenson gave Austin his lessons, and, as his uncle Lloyd had done, the boy considered the teacher only a larger playfellow.

A very pretty picture of the home life is given in a note-book of Mrs Thomas Stevenson's, in which she describes a birthday feast in her honour, at which little Austin Strong recited some verses made for the occasion by her son. Very amusing the verses are, and in them the small scholar repeats with pride what strides in knowledge he had made under the able tuition of his step-grandfather. It is not a little comic to think that Mr Stevenson had at this time a well-grown step-grandchild, and had, indeed, held the honourable and venerable position of a step-grandparent shortly after he was thirty.

Very amusing features of the letters that Mrs Thomas Stevenson sent home were the funny illustrations of daily life enclosed in them, and which were drawn by a clever pencil in the household. Like the old plays in the Leith Walk shop the youthful Louis once so frequently visited, they were A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured. Sometimes they were mere outlines of domestic processions, sometimes they were gay with paint in shades of brown and green and blue. In them all the members of the family were represented, and now and then there appeared the dusky semblance of a Samoan domestic Faauma, 'the bronze candlestick,' or Lafaele, the amiable and the willing. As one recalls them one sees again a verandah, with long chairs and lazy loungers, Mr Stevenson pretending to play his flageolet, but too comfortable actually to begin; the rest in attitudes more or less suggestive of that warmth and satisfaction which we in colder climes can only dream of; or in another a few bold strokes pictured the ladies of the family on household cares intent, domestic service of the humblest, cooking, dusting, bed-making, and all the trivial daily doings that were so mirthfully treated both by pen and pencil.

Mr Stevenson and his wife took a keen interest in their garden, which stood so high above sea-level, that they could have the pleasure of trying to grow in it some British flowers, fruits, and vegetables, as well as those native to the tropics. This endeavour to naturalise the products of the old home in the new one was a great pleasure to Mrs Stevenson, and one fully shared by her husband, who was so often, in spite of his delight in the soft airs, the blue skies, heart-sick for the cold grey ones of the old country, and who was reminded on a fresh wet morning after a storm, of the West Highlands, near Callander, and

'The smell of bog, myrtle and peat,'

by the rain dashing on the roof, and trickling down the window panes, of far-off misty Scotland, where

'On the moors the whaups are calling.'

The Samoan days were very full of work, and much was done, and still more was planned in them by Mr Stevenson's busy brain and untiring activity. Here was written Catriona, The Master of Ballantrae, a part of those annals of the Stevenson family which he hoped to give to the public, The Beach of Falesa, The Bottle Imp, and The Isle of Voices; and with Mr Lloyd Osbourne was completed The Ebb Tide and The Wrecker, the ideas for which had occurred to them when at sea.

Father Damien, An Open letter, had been already written, but here was composed A Footnote to History, and both show to perfection their writer's interest in suffering humanity. Here, saddest of all, were planned many works never to be accomplished—among them that powerful fragment Weir of Hermiston and St Ives—the latter finished all but the last portion, which Mrs Strong, who had helped much with this story, could supply to Mr Quiller Couch, so that he was enabled to complete it. Mr Stevenson, like his father, found his relaxation in a change of work, so to this period also belong the fugitive verses collected under the title, Songs of Travel, published after his death.

In spite of the apparent improvement in his health, Mr Stevenson had had, especially when for a short time at Sydney and Honolulu, serious returns of illness, and after one attack of influenza, the old foe hemorrhage briefly reappeared. Not yet, however, would he own himself beaten, and in spite of some anxiety on the part of his doctors, he assured his friends he was very well. His friends' fears were not so easily silenced. In the last year of his life his bright mood varied, and his letters often caused grave anxiety to those at home. He had times of despondency and of undue distress as to his monetary future and his literary success, which were scarcely justified by the facts. Although always gentle and gay with his own family circle, the little strain of worry showed itself repeatedly in his correspondence with his friends and caused them a keen foreboding of evil, so unlike was it to the old, sunny, cheery spirit with which he had fought bad health, and gained for himself so high a place in the world of letters and so warm a niche in the heart of his public.



CHAPTER XII

HIS DEATH

'Gone to thy rest—no doubt, no fear, no strife; Men whispering call it death—God calls it life.' ROBERT RICHARDSON.

As the months of 1894 slipped away, the unusual despondency and worry, noticeable so especially in Mr Stevenson's correspondence, increased, while it seemed that his literary work, which had hitherto been his greatest pleasure, had now become a strain and a weariness to him.

By fits and starts the joy of working still visited him it is true. Weir of Hermiston he felt to be his very best—St Ives now and then went gaily. But the dark moods were only dormant not dead, and anxiety for the future of his family, and a longing to be able to cease working for daily bread, grew upon him greatly.

That, for a time after the settlement in Samoa, monetary anxieties may have been somewhat pressing, is not only possible, but probable. No moving of 'the household gods,' however small, or for however short a distance, can be managed without considerable cost and trouble, and the expense invariably exceeds the estimate made, for unforeseen outlays and difficulties crop up that entail added expenditure with its consequent anxiety.

If this is so in ordinary cases, how much more would it be so when the pulling up of stakes meant a move to the antipodes and the change of home included the purchase of uncleared land in Samoa, the building of a house and the laying out of an estate, which its owner felt certain could not repay the money spent upon it for at least five or six years.

All great changes and large undertakings are fraught with difficulty, and the Vailima venture was no exception to the rule. The Samoan home meant much pleasure to its owner, but it entailed keen anxiety also.

Nevertheless the mental worry of those later months was by no means justified by the facts. Mr Stevenson's literary work had long been paid according to its merits, so that each book brought him in a satisfactory sum; while the future of the Edinburgh Edition of his works gave cause for sincere satisfaction to the friends who were seeing it through the press, and whose letters gave assurance of its success. The cloud was therefore due to internal, not to external causes, and in the state of Mr Stevenson's health was, alas! to be found the explanation of this sad change from the gay bravery with which he had hitherto faced the world. Suspected by his doctors, feared by his friends, but unknown to himself, for at this time he constantly wrote of his improved health, a new development in his illness was nearing its fatal crisis, and these symptoms of mental distress and irritation were only the foreshadowing of the end.

In these last days his life had many pleasures; he was enjoying the Samoan climate and the free unconventional existence to the full; he was surrounded by all his loved home circle; and in the October of 1894, two months before his death, the Samoan chiefs, in whose imprisonment he had proved his friendship to them, gave him a tribute of their love and gratitude which was peculiarly pleasing and valuable to him. An account of this and of the very beautiful speech he made in return appeared in the home papers at the time, and are to be found in an appendix to The Vailima Letters. The chiefs, who knew how much store he set by road-making as a civilising element in Samoa, as elsewhere, themselves went to him and offered their services to make a road to join his property to the main highway. They, as well as their young men, worked at it with picks and spades, and when it was finished they presented it to their beloved 'Tusitala' as an abiding remembrance of their grateful regard. It was a noble tribute to a noble nature, and one the value of which can only be fully appreciated by those who realise what the personal manual labour meant to these proud island chiefs so wholly unaccustomed to exertion of any kind, and so imbued with the idea that all labour was derogatory to their dignity. Their loving service touched Mr Stevenson and all his family very deeply, and this bright memory gladdened the last weeks of his life, and must be a very pleasant one to recall for those of the Vailima household who still survive him.

At the celebration of his birthday on 13th November he had received also a tribute of kindly appreciation from the European and American residents in Apia. On the occasion of a 'Thanksgiving' feast in that same November, he made a speech, in which he said he had always liked that day, for he felt that he had had so much for which to be thankful. He especially mentioned the pleasure he had in his mother being with him, and said that to America—where he had married his wife—he owed the chief blessing of his life.

In spite of his assurances that he was very well, he was exceedingly thin and wasted in those days, and later Samoan photographs show a melancholy change in him. On the morning of the 3rd December, however, he felt particularly well and wrote for several hours. It is very pleasant to know, from A Letter to Mr Stevenson's Friends, sent to the Times after his stepfather's death by Mr Lloyd Osbourne as an acknowledgment of the vast amount of sympathy expressed, and so impossible to be otherwise answered, that he had enjoyed his work on Weir of Hermiston, and felt all the buoyancy of successful effort on that last morning of his life.

Letters for the mail were due to be written in the afternoon, and he spent his time penning long and kindly greetings to absent friends.

'At sunset,' Mr Osbourne says, 'he came downstairs, rallied his wife about the forebodings she could not shake off; talked of a lecturing tour in America he was eager to make, "as he was so well," and played a game of cards with her to drive away her melancholy.'

By-and-bye he said that he was hungry, and proposed a little feast, for which he produced a bottle of old Burgundy, and went to help her to prepare a salad, talking gaily all the while. As they were on the verandah, he suddenly cried out, 'What is that?' put his hands to his head, and asked, 'Do I look strange?' In a moment he had fallen down beside her.

His wife called for help, and she and his body-servant Sosima carried him into the great hall, where he had known so much happiness, and placed him in the old arm-chair which had been his grandfather's. Medical aid was quickly obtained, but he had already lost consciousness, and, in spite of every effort, he never regained it. His mother's letters written after his death touchingly describe how, although called at once, she yet reached the hall too late to find him conscious, as by that time he was leaning back in his chair breathing heavily. The family, with an agony of grief, quickly realised that there was no hope.

A little bed was brought, and he was placed on it in the middle of the hall, and there, with those he loved close about him, and his faithful Samoan servants seated round him on the floor, he quietly passed away. The deep breaths came at ever longer intervals, the sleep of unconsciousness was never broken, and as his loved and valued friend, the Reverend Mr Clark, prayed beside him, his spirit took its flight into eternity. He died as he had wished, quickly and well-nigh painlessly. He had known so much of lingering illness, he dreaded that greatly, but of death he had no fear, and peacefully and suddenly he passed into the Unseen.

His death took place at a little past eight o'clock on the evening of the 3rd December at the early age of forty-four.

When the news was cabled to England, it was received by many people with grave doubts. His relatives and friends dreaded its truth, but could not at first believe it. Many exaggerated newspaper reports, copied especially from the more sensational American press, had from time to time caused needless distress and anxiety to those who loved him, so that it was possible to allow oneself the shadow of a hope, particularly as his uncle, Dr George W. Balfour, who had at first received the news somewhat vaguely worded, doubted it also, and wrote to the Scotsman expressing his unbelief.

Too soon, unfortunately, all such hopes were proved false, and eager eyes scanning the morning papers on the 23d December 1894 read this sad corroboration of the news that had been posted in London on the 17th of the same month.

'SAN FRANCISCO (no date). BALFOUR, 17 Walker Street, Edinburgh. LOUIS died suddenly third. Tell friends. STEVENSON.'

The telegram was from his mother in answer to one from his uncle asking for true particulars as to the earlier report, and on its receipt and publication relatives and friends knew that hope was dead, and there remained only a sad waiting for further particulars. These by-and-bye came in letters from his mother to her relatives and friends in Scotland, in letters to his literary friends and in that 'Letter' to the Times from his friend and stepson Mr Lloyd Osbourne to the vast mass of acquaintances and readers who all claimed him as a loved personal friend.

From all these sources the manner of his death, and the touching final tragedy of his pathetic funeral became known to the world of English-speaking people everywhere, who each and all mourned individually for the loved and lost author as one near and dear in their personal regard.

He had always expressed a wish to be buried on the Vaea mountain which rises immediately behind Vailima, and the summit of which commands a wide prospect of land and sea and sky. In the spring of 1894, he had suggested the making of a road, and the planting of the spot which he had chosen for his resting-place, but, as the idea was painful to his family, nothing was done in the matter. As soon as he had passed away, those whom he loved hastened to give effect to his wishes, and Mr Lloyd Osbourne planned and courageously carried out in an incredibly short time the forming of a road which made it possible to carry him to the summit of Vaea, and lay him on the spot that he had chosen. Forty Samoans with knives and axes cut a path up the mountain side, and Mr Lloyd Osbourne, with a few specially chosen dependents, dug the grave in which he was to lie.

Meantime, his body covered with the Union Jack rested in the Samoan home that he had loved so well, surrounded by the furniture of the old Scotch home around which his childish feet had played, and on which his father, and possibly his father's fathers, had daily looked, for his mother had taken with her to Vailima all that had most of memory and of family tradition from the house in Heriot Row.

His family lingered in the dear presence, the heartbroken Samoans knelt and kissed his hands, and at the request of his favourite servant, Sosima, who was a Romanist, the solemn and touching prayers of the Church of Rome were, with a certain fitness, repeated over the man who had been the champion of Father Damien, and among whose friends were numbered the earnest and faithful Roman Catholic missionary priests of the South Sea Islands.

On his coffin was laid the 'Red Ensign' that had floated from his mast on many a cruise, and he was carried up the steep path by those who loved him. Europeans as well as Samoans toiled up that difficult ascent to place him with reverent hands in that grave which was so fitting a resting-place for the man who had loved, above all things, the freedom of the open air, the glory of the sea and the sky, the sighing of God's winds among the trees, and the silent companionship of the stars.

* * * * *

Life for those who remained in the Samoan home became an impossible thing without him, and so Mrs Stevenson, with her son and daughter, by-and-bye left Vailima, and the home of so much happiness is now falling into ruin, the cleared ground lapsing back to the bush. And perhaps it is best so; without him Vailima is like a body without a soul; and he who so dearly loved nature would hardly have regretted that the place he loved should return to the mother heart of the earth and become once more a solitude—a green place of birds and trees.



CHAPTER XIII

HIS LIFE-WORK

'Art's life, and when we live we suffer and toil.' —MRS BARRETT BROWNING.

'A healthful hunger for the great idea, The beauty and the blessedness of life.' —JEAN INGELOW.

It is perhaps impossible for those who knew Mr Stevenson and came under the influence of the rare attraction of his charming personality, to assign to him and to his work a suitable place in the world of letters. Probably it is still too early for anyone to say what rank will in the future be held by the man who in his life-time assuredly stood among the masters of his craft. Fame, while he lived, was his, and, better than fame, such love as is seldom given by the public to the writer whose books delight it.

Deservedly popular as the books are, the man was still more popular; and the personality that to his friends was so unique and so delightful, made friends of his readers also. He was so frank, so human, in his relations with his public.

His dedications not only gave pleasure to the members of his family, or to the many friends to whom he wrote them, they, as it were, took his readers into his confidence also, and let them share in the warmth of his heart. His prefaces are delightfully autobiographical, and are valuable in proportion to the glimpses they give of one of the most amiable and most widely sympathetic natures imaginable.

His methods of work were singularly conscientious; even in the days when, as a truant lad, he carried in his pocket one book to read, and another to write in, he was slowly perfecting that style which was to give to his literary work a distinction all its own. He spared himself no trouble in ensuring the accuracy of all that he wrote.

It may be interesting to recall in this connection the letters written by two of his readers to the Scotsman expressing some doubt as to there having been shops in Princes Street at the date of his story St Ives—Mr Stevenson mentions shops in St Ives. In reply to the letters of enquiry, his uncle, Dr G. W. Balfour, wrote to the Scotsman on 26th November 1897:—

'Sir,—It may interest your correspondents "J. W. G." and "J. C. P." to know that Louis Stevenson always took care to verify his statements before making them, and that his correspondent, to whom he applied for information as to the existence of shops in Princes Street at the early date referred to, took the only legitimate means open to him of ascertaining this by consulting the directories of the date.'

And, as a matter of fact, it was conclusively proved that Mr Stevenson was correct, by the name and number of at least one well-known shop, of that date, being given by another correspondent in the paper very shortly afterwards.

No minute observation was too trying for Mr Stevenson, no careful research too tedious for him; no historical fact apparently too insignificant or obscure for him to verify. He was never weary of reading books dealing with the periods in which the action of his stories takes place.

Costume, dialect, scenery, were all thoroughly studied, and when himself distant from the scenes of his tales, he is to be found constantly writing from Vailima to friends in London or in Edinburgh for the books and the information he required. In the period between 1745 and 1816, in which the plots of Kidnapped, Catriona, The Master of Ballantrae, Weir of Hermiston, and St Ives are laid, he is especially at home, and old record rolls, books on manners and on costume, are all laboriously studied to give to his stories that accuracy and truth to life which he considered to be absolutely necessary. To such good effect did he study volumes of old Parliament House trials, that the dress of Alan Breck, in Kidnapped, is literally transcribed from that of a prisoner of Alan's period, whose trial he had perused.

Nor did his conscientiousness stop here; he wrote and re-wrote everything, sometimes as often as five times, and no page ever left his hands which had not been elaborately pruned and polished. No wonder, therefore, that his work was welcome to his publishers, and that he was never among the complaining authors who think themselves underpaid and unappreciated by the firms with whom they deal.

He gave of his best, good honest hard work, and he received in return not only money but regard and consideration; and his own verdict was that it was difficult to choose among his publishers which should have a new book, for all of them were so good to him. A pleasant state of matters that goes far to prove that, where work is conscientious and author and publisher honourable and sensible, there need be little or no friction between them. In this, as in the care which he bestowed on his work, the long and earnest apprenticeship he served to the profession of letters, he sets an example to his fellow-authors quite as impressive as that which he showed to his fellow-men in the patience with which he bore his heavy burden of bad health, and the courage with which he rose above his sufferings and looked the world in the face smiling.

In an age when a realism so strong as to be unpleasant has tinged too much of latter-day fiction Mr Stevenson stood altogether apart from the school of the realists. His nature, fresh and boyish to the end, troubled itself not at all with social questions, so he dipped his pen into the wells of old romance and painted for us characters so alive with strength and with humour that they live with us as friends and comrades when the creations of the problem novelists have died out of our memories with the problems they propound and worry over.

His books are bright, breezy, cheerful, rich in idealism, full of chivalry, and they have in them a glamour of genius, a power of imagination, and a spirit of purity, which makes them peculiarly valuable in an age when these things are too often conspicuous by their absence from the novel of the day.

His essays are full of a quaint, delightful humour, his verses have a dainty charm, and in his tales he has given us a little picture gallery of characters and landscapes which have a fascination all their own. Like Sir Walter Scott he had to contend with the disadvantages of a delicate childhood which interfered with settled work; and yet, in both cases, one is tempted to think that that enforced early leisure was of far more ultimate benefit to the life-work than years of dutiful attendance at school and college. Like Sir Walter Scott, also, he has drawn much of his inspiration from 'Caledonia, stern and wild'; and none of her literary sons, save Burns and 'The Wizard of the North' himself, has Caledonia loved so well or mourned so deeply.

Cosmopolite in culture, in breadth of view, in openness of mind, Mr Stevenson was yet before all things a Scotsman, and one to whom Scotland and his native Edinburgh were peculiarly dear. Condemned by his delicate and uncertain health to make his dwelling-place far from the grey skies and the biting east winds of his boyhood's home, these grey Scotch skies, these bitter winds, still haunt him and appear in his books with the strange charm they have for the sons and daughters of the north who, even while they revile them, love them, and in far lands long for them with a heart-hunger that no cloudless sky, no gentle zephyr, no unshadowed sunshine of the alien shore can appease.[6]

In all his wanderings his heart turned fondly to the old home, to the noble profession of his fathers, and on smiling seas and amid sunny islands he never forgot the bleak coasts of Scotland, that his ancestors' hands had lighted from headland to headland, and his heart

'In dreams (beheld) the Hebrides.'

A Scot of whom Edinburgh and Scotland are justly proud, he was a man whose life and faith did credit to the stern religion and the old traditions of his covenanting forefathers, and although, like so many men and women of earnest minds and broad culture in the present day, he early left behind him much of the narrowness of churches and of creeds, he held closely to 'the one thing needful,' a humble and a trusting belief in God that filled all his soul with strength and patience, and gave to him that marvellous sympathy with humanity which made him a power among men, whether they were the learned and the cultured, or simple children of nature like the Samoans, who so truly understood and loved him.

The books undoubtedly are great, but the man is greater; and it is not only as a writer of no small renown that he will be revered and remembered but as a man among men whose patience and courage gave to his too short life a pathos and a value. Among his friends he was beloved in a manner quite unique, he had a peculiar place of his own in their regard. By the younger school of writers, whose work he so fully and so generously appreciated, he was regarded as a master; and one of the pleasures to be enjoyed on the publication of that Life, which Mr Sydney Colvin presently has in preparation, will be to learn more about his agreeable relations with his literary juniors.

Of his sacred home life no outsider can speak; but it is the truest test of perfect manhood when the man who is not unknown in the great world shows himself at his best in the smaller world of home, and has a brighter and a sweeter side of his nature to display to wife and mother and close fireside circle than he has to his admiring public. Mr Stevenson never despised the trivial things of life, and the everyday courtesies, the little unselfishnesses—which are often so much more difficult to practise than the great virtues—were never forgotten all through the years in which so much of pain and of weariness might have made occasional repining, occasional forgetfulness of others, almost pardonable.

Eager in his own work, untiring in his literary activity, he was equally eager to toil in the great vineyard, to do something for God and for man, to make his faith active and not passive. This was his attitude through life; he would always have 'tholed his paiks' that the poor might 'enjoy their play,' the imprisoned go free; and the position which he took up in regard to Samoan troubles was a practical proof that he was, as he called himself, 'a ready soldier,' willing to spend and be spent for others. Of one whose position was that of 'the ready soldier,' no more fitting concluding words can be said than those in his mother's note-book, and written to her by the wife of the Rev. Mr Clark, his Samoan friend, in November 1895:—

... 'So few knew your dear son's best side—his Christian character. Of course, men don't write often on that subject, and to many he was the author, and they only knew him as such. To me his lovely character was one of the wonderful things, so full of love and the desire to do good. I love to think of him.' ...

That the man and his work are appreciated is amply proved by the monument already erected to his memory in San Francisco by the zeal of the American Committee, and by the enthusiastic meeting in his own Edinburgh, presided over by Lord Rosebery, in the autumn of 1896, at which Mr J. M. Barrie made an interesting and an appreciative speech; and by the equally enthusiastic gathering in Dundee in the spring of 1897.

At these meetings it was proposed to receive subscriptions, and to erect a Stevenson memorial in some form to be afterwards decided on. The suggestion was largely responded to, but it is probable the response would have been even more cordial had it been determined that the memorial should take a practical rather than an ornamental form. Monuments are cold things whereby to perpetuate love and admiration; an 'arbour of Corinthian columns,' which one paper recently suggested, would have appealed to Mr Stevenson himself only as an atrocity in stone. His sole sympathy with stone was when it served the noble purpose to which his father had put it, and, as lighthouse or harbour, contributed to the service of man. If the memorial might have been too costly in the form of a small shore-light, a lifeboat seemed a thing that would have been dear to his own heart. And as, in years to come, men read of rescues by the Robert Louis Stevenson, on some wreck-strewn, rock-bound corner of our coasts, the memory of the man who loved the sea, and of the race who toiled to save life in its storms, would have been handed down to future generations in a fitting fashion.

The memorial is to take the form of a mural monument with a medallion portrait of his head in high relief. It is to be placed in the Moray Aisle of St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh, which it is thought might be a suitable 'Poets' Corner' for Scotland. If there is sufficient money, and if the necessary permission is obtained, a stone seat may also be erected on the Calton Hill at the point from which Mr Stevenson so greatly admired the view. The medallion is to be entrusted to Mr A. Saint Gaudens, an American sculptor of repute, who studied in France, and who had the great advantage of personally knowing Mr Stevenson in America in 1887 and 1888, and at that time getting him to sit for a medallion, which is considered by his widow and family to be the best likeness of him that they have seen. It is satisfactory that at last someone has been found who can do justice to the quaint, mobile face, and give to the memorial some of the living charm of the man. It is also pleasant to know that Mrs Stevenson and her family have expressed themselves perfectly satisfied with the choice of a sculptor.

The San Francisco monument is in the form of a sixteenth century ship, of thirty guns, careening to the west, with golden sails full spread, and with a figure of Pallas, looking towards the setting sun, in its prow. The ship is about five feet high, and behind it, on a simple granite plinth, is engraved the famous passage from his Christmas sermon:—'To be honest, to be kind; to earn a little, to spend a little less; to keep a few friends, and these without capitulations.'

On one surface of the plinth is a spigot and a cup, and underneath a drip-stone, where thirsty dogs can drink. The drinking place is assuredly a part of the monument that would have commended itself to the man who loved his canine friends and all other animals so truly.

Even if a monument has about it something of the commonplace, it is well that the memory of the man and of his work should be perpetuated; but of all memorials of him, the Samoan 'Road of Gratitude' is likely to be for ever remembered as the most suitable and the most perfect.

FOOTNOTE:

[6] It is on record that Mr Stevenson, who always talked to a compatriot when he could, was, a propos of his home in Samoa, told by a sailor with whom he was having a chat, that he 'would rather gang hame an' be hanged in auld Scotland than come an' live in this —— hole.' No doubt, Mr Stevenson appreciated the sturdy mariner's patriotism, although it was expressed in language more forcible than polite!

THE END