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The Citizen

Recollections of a Voyage with Robert Louis Stevenson.

VOL. I. January, 1896. No. 5.

One of those gorgeous tropical sunsets was exciting the admiration of the passengers of the steamship "Mariposa" as she slowly passed out of the harbour of Honolulu into a truely pacific ocean. I was standing on deck sharing the glory of the scene and pitying the hapless "Miowera" as we passed her stranded on the coral reef which here forms the protection of the port, when my attention was attracted by a new-comer who had joined us, and who was sitting in earnest conversation with Mr. Ide, the recently appointed Chief Justice of Samoa, now on his way to his new home. These two men formed a curious contrast. The Chief Justice was a big, well-fed, and fastidiously dressed man, whose sense of the dignity of his new office exhibited itself chiefly in his indifference to everything and everybody, while the new-comer was a phenomenally thin, narrow-chested, round-shouldered individual with a pale beardless face and long jet-black hair. He wore a sadly faded velvet jacket, and the general carelessness of his attire made but the more prominent the reproachless apparel of his companion. These two men sat talking until the daylight had gone, and when I retired to my cabin for the night they were still page 186 in earnest discussion. The thin stranger was Robert Louis Stevenson, the novelist, and those who know his keen interest in Samoan affairs and the history of his struggle with Chief Justice Ide's predecessor, will readily understand how much he would have to say of importance to this new Governor of the Island. My hope was that he would talk out the main matters of interest in this long conversation so that I might have a chance of a chat with the great novelist next day. With that prospect I got to bed. Early the following morning I was able to gratify my wish. I was sitting reading before breakfast, and he took a seat beside me. I forget what our introductory remarks were, but I remember that very early in first conversation I seemed to tread upon a favourite corn. We were discussing the homes of some English men of letters, and I said : "Most people consider you a voluntary exile." "Do you not," I asked, "find living in Samoa provoke some sense of being shut off from your fellows." "Certainly not," he replied emphatically, "I find the Samoan native quite as interesting as the ordinary British tourist." This was apparently a tender subject, and I did not pursue it. I discreetly subdued any sense of resentment for this personality by the reflection that the possession of such shocking taste was in itself sufficient punishment. After breakfast he asked me if I played chess. I modestly admitted that I knew the game, and we got the materials. I very soon found that Stevenson knew no more about chess than I did. He explained that he had been a good player, but he was quite out of practice. I assured him that that was precisely my case. After a long series of moves which did not seem to proceed on any apparent plan, he got my men shut up in rather an awkward position, and he began to hint vaguely at a checkmate just by way of breaking the news to me gently. I saw that something desperate must be done, and I began to exchange pieces. This I continued to do until my opponent's chance of giving checkmate was gone and my position the stronger. Stevenson had during this process frequently reminded me that we were not playing page 187 draughts, and when ultimately I won the game he declared my play the most inartistic he had ever seen. During the remainder of my week with him we played one game every day. He said it was unwise to play more, and that he had made a rule never to do so. When, however, the last day of the voyage came and I was a game to the good, he thought that circumstances justified an exception to this rule, and we played two games, but he lost both.

I found him a very good-tempered player. The game absorbed him entirely, but as he played he struck off, quite unconsciously, quotations apropos of this or that move, and these were often so apt that I enjoyed them as much as I did the game itself. I bad made a considerable collection of books during my travels—I was now returning from a trip round the world—and he used to come into my cabin and look through my little library. To my surprise, the first day he did this he selected a work on Roman Law and began to talk about emphyteusis, the possidetis and Utrubi. He saw that I thought he had merely picked up these names somewhere, and he said with some dignity, "Don't you know I am a Scottish advocate." I pleaded forget fulness, and he proceeded to demonstrate his further knowledge of Roman law. I don't think he knew much about either the Roman or any other system of jurisprudence, but he certainly displayed more pride over the possession of these legal chips than he did when discussing his best books. Great men are often proudest of their least achievements. Books naturally formed the chief topic of our talks, and it was not difficult to discuss his own. "The theatre," he said, "an author addresses is occupied by three classes—the wise, the mediocrites, and the foolish. The last class is the one it pays best to cater for, and all books I have written for it have given me a good return. The profits derived from works provided for the mediocrites have been fairly satisfactory, but those written for the wise have been financial failures." Having named these classes I tried to get him to say to which class particular books of his I named belonged, but he declined to give himself away in that fashion and declared page 188 that the classification must be left to myself. He admitted, however, that "Memories and Portraits" and "Virginibus Puerisque" were his favourites, and that they were written for that select circle of the wise I wanted to know what he thought of "Prince Otto," which in my opinion is about the poorest of his books, and his reply was :—"Don't mention it. I am not a bit fond of my paternity of that weakling. It was," he added, "a translation, in the main, and the work of a holiday excursion." Regarding "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," he complained that as a rule the novel was not properly understood. "I intended it," he said, "to illustrate, perhaps somewhat grotesquely, the fact that each of us have at least two characters, and assume the one that serves us best for the time being. It is usually read as a gruesome supernatural story, without as much as a suspicion in the readers' minds of the moral the work was intended to point."

I told him that I liked his work best when he was recounting his own experiences or expressing his own opinions, and that it was the personal element in "Across the Plains," "Travels with a Donkey," "Memories and Portraits," &c., that made them so charming to my taste. "I suppose that carries with it a suggestion of egotism against me," he said, good naturedly, "and I have no doubt I am guilty. Very likely my own estimate of" Memories and Portraits "is due to the fact that so much of it is about myself."

I asked him what his method of working was, and he told me that he rose very early and was at his desk by five or six o'clook in the morning. He wrote on for some hours, had a light breakfast, and then continued writing until one or two o'clock in the afternoon, when he had finished for the day. That was as much as he could stand, he said, and if he worked longer into the afternoon, or in the evening, his lack of energy the following day compelled him to reduce his average task time. The wonder to me was that a frame so apparently weak could stand such a strain. Perhaps there is something in Bossuet's fine saying that "A great soul is page 189 always master of the body it animates." Stevenson's sudden death at his desk seems to show that he drove the machine to the very end.

He very often, during the few days of our voyage, came to see what I was reading. He never cared to do any classics with me, and I remember one morning when I was reading some Horace, and he enquired what it was, I told him it was the ode from which he had borrowed the title of one of his best books. He didn't understand me, and I quoted the lines beginning—"Odi profanum vulgus et arceo," and ending "Virginibus puerisque canto." He showed me that he did not wish to join in any talk about the ode, and told me that he now rarely read any Horace. He was, however, a great lover of Herrick, and on any occasions upon which I had a volume of his poems in my hand he would come and pour out choice lines from the "Hesperides."

The tone of all he said about life and living was brave and optimistic. That was perhaps the most surprising thing about him. Mrs. Stevenson had told my wife that the doctor at Honolulu proclaimed him a walking reflection upon medical science, since by all its recognised tests he ought to have been dead some years before then. Stevenson, of course, knew the views experts held of his health, and of his chances of much longer life, but this knowledge seemed in no way to affect his spirits or his industry. His attitude towards death seemed to be exactly that expressed in his essay "Aes Triplex" where he says:—"There is a great deal of vile nonsense talked upon both sides of the matter; tearing divines reducing life to the dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so short as to be barely decent; and melancholy unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away. Both sides must feel a little ashamed of their performances now and again when they draw in their chairs to dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of wine is an answer to most standard works upon the question. Death may be knocking at the door like the commander's statue. We have something else in hand, page 190 thank God, and let him knock. Passing bells are ringing all the world over. All the world over, and every hour someone is parting company with all his aches and ecstasies. For us all the trap is laid. But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. ... So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain like a dismal fungus, it finds its expression in a paralysis of generous acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a faucy for parlours with a regulated temperature, and takes his morality on the principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important body becomes so engrossing that all the noises of the outer world begin to come thin and faint into the parlour with the regulated temperature. Now the man who has his heart on his sleeve and a good whistling weather-cock of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the world, keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, until, if he be running towards anything better than wild-fire, he may shoot up and become a constellation in the end. . . . . Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries; unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed friends and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal synod about his path. And what cares he for all this ? Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any other striving deadly warfare, push on at his best pace until he reaches the goal. Who would find heart enough to begin to live if he dallied with the consideration of death ? And after all what sorrowful and pitiful quibbling all this is. To forgo all the issues of living in a parlour with a regulated temperature, as if that were not to die a hundred times over and for ten years at a stretch; as if it were not to die a hundred times over at a stretch; as if it were not to die all one's own life time, and without even the sad ministerios of death; as if it were not to die and yet be page 191 the patient spectators of our own pitiable change. It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it than to die daily in the sickroom. By all means begin your folio even if the doctor does not give you a year; even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week. All who have meant good work with their whole hearts have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. And even if death catch people like an open pitfall, and in mid career, laying out vast projects, flushed with hope and their mouths full of boastful language, they should at once be nipped up and silenced, is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination ? And does not life go down with better grace falling in full body over a precipice than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas ?"

I have given this long extract because it summarises faith-fully the talks we had about life and man's proper attitude towards death, and because a man's opinions upon these subjects are perhaps the best general guide we can have to his temperament and character. How closely, too, did Stevenson practice what he preached. He was never wilfully reckless about his health, but he certainly never let its consideration interfere with what he did. Sometimes after dinner he would walk forward to the bows of the vessel, and, finding a seat there, sit talking with myself and others till long after nightfall. He would, on these occasions, have nothing on but the light clothes he had worn during the day, and yet he seemed to feel no concern for the effect the change of temperature might have upon him. His wife displayed much more solicitude for her husband's health, and oftentimes when she saw him standing in an exposed place or in a draft, she would come and say, "Louis, don't stand here," or take him away upon some errand, doubtless improvised for the purpose.

Stevenson was a genial talker, but not a brilliant one. His conversation answered his description of natural talk, which he page 192 says, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of life rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience, anecdote, incident, cross lights, quotations, historical instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter we have in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental elevation and abasement—these are the material with which talk is fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive." All these features characterised his conversation, hut there were few or none of those bright flashes of wit or felicities of phrase which abound in most of his written work. He talked easily, quietly, simply, while he made and smoked innumerable cigarettes.

He seemed to be readily set upon the track of a possible romance. We had as one of our passengers a little man whose looks would certainly not be dangerous to any daughter of Eve. He said he was a doctor of medicine, and we will call him "Esculapios." He came with us from San Francisco, and fastened himself pretty well exclusively to a French Count who was travelling with us. Stevenson, when he joined us at Honolulu, soon came to know and like the Count, and to know and hate "Esculapios." He didn't believe he was a doctor, and was ready to credit anything about him as long as it was bad. "Esculapios" was voluble upon almost any subject except himself, and upon that topic he was practically a sealed book. Only the vaguest answers could be got to any questions regarding his future plans or his past history. Stevenson soon began to scent a mystery, and mentioned his suspicions to an Irish barrister we had on board. This gentleman undertook to solve all doubt, and at once threw himself in the way of our mysterious friend, whose secrets he first endeavoured to win from him by means of a kodac. He photographed him about a dozen times a day, whenever he could get a snap shot at him, but the camera told him nothing. A day or two passed, and one day the Irishman came to Stevenson with the alarming news that he had plucked out the heart of the page 193 mystery and discovered that this unattractive and apparently harmless "Esculapios" was none other than a genuine Russian spy—a spy who was under commission from the Czar, and whose duty it was to examine colonial harbours with a view to a Russian descent upon our shores. This was right into Stevenson's hands. The very thing he wanted. Here was the basis of a novel developing before his very eyes, while the discovery amply justified the suspicions he had already expressed, and the dislike he had so often displayed. Our Irish friend, however, could give no grounds for his conclusion, except his assurance that he was certain his suspicion was correct. We pressed him for reasons, but evidently, like Falstaff, he would give no reasons upon compulsion, although he indicated that he had them as plenty as blackberries. Stevenson at last got tired of these vague replies, and one evening while he and I were sitting smoking at the ship's bow he confessed that he was not satisfied with the story of the Russian spy, and urged me to see what I could make of the mystery. He impressed upon me, however, that he was certain there was a mystery, and what he wanted was my services to discover what kind of one it was. I agreed to see what I could do, and next day I began my detective business. It required no skill to get at the root of the matter. Our mysterious friend was a medical doctor and a lecturer in one of the Scottish Universities. He was on his way to Australia to see if he could get an opening in his profession there. If he couldn't he was going to return to Scotland. About this project he was inclined to be reticent, and any suspicions he had aroused were merely the result of his desire to conceal what his mission really was, and from this desire arose the peculiar manner he at once assumed if you touched upon his future. Another circumstance, which no doubt influenced our Irish friend's mind, was the fact that "Esculapios" spoke with a slightly German accent although he claimed to be a Scotchman. It was this claim perhaps which first led Stevenson to suspect that he was on the track of a mystery. The novelist did not seem satisfied page 194 with the fruit of my enquiries—was disposed to think that I had been deceived—and begged me to make further investigation after I left Samoa, and report to him by letter. I never got any further information and there the mystery ended.

Stevenson had met Sir Robert Stout when the latter spent ten days in Samoa, and Sir Robert's name was mentioned in some of our conversations. "He's a thorough-going Radical," said Stevenson, "and I am a dry bone of a Tory. We had arguments when he visited me about the social and political reforms he advocated. Just fancy how admirably we must have agreed. On nearly all important political questions our views are fundamentally different. He was for manhood suffrage, I was and am dead against it. He argued well enough, but I think in one or two of our discussions I completely bested him, especially on this question of manhood suffrage. I got him to concede that exceptions to the general rule must be made. He gave me drunkards, convicts, wife-beaters, vagrants, and so many other undesirable classes that at last I jumped up and asked him where his rule was. He had given it away in exceptions," chuckled Stevenson, "and I was left easily victor." I have spoken to Sir Robert Stout regarding these discussions of his with Stevenson, and although he remembers them, he strangely enough cannot recall the victories the novelist claimed to have won.

When we reached Samoa a number of people came off to the steamer to welcome Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson, and I was struck with the warmth of the greetings. Lloyd Osborne was among these friends, and the two writers kissed each other affectionately, while some of the ladies decorated Stevenson with a necklace of flowers according to the Samoan custom. He said good-bye to us all and left the ship towards evening, and here ends my recollections of my voyage with Robert Louis Stevenson.

J. G. Findlay.