The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson
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22 The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 1
Scanned and proofed by David Price
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1
CHAPTER I - STUDENT DAYS AT EDINBURGH, TRAVELS AND EXCURSIONS,
1868-1873
Letter: SPRING GROVE SCHOOL, 12TH NOVEMBER 1863.
MA CHERE MAMAN, - Jai recu votre lettre Aujourdhui et comme le jour
prochaine est mon jour de naisance je vous ecrit ce lettre. Ma
grande gatteaux est arrive il leve 12 livres et demi le prix etait
17 shillings. Sur la soiree de Monseigneur Faux il y etait
quelques belles feux d'artifice. Mais les polissons entrent dans
notre champ et nos feux d'artifice et handkerchiefs disappeared
quickly, but we charged them out of the field. Je suis presque
driven mad par une bruit terrible tous les garcons kik up comme
grand un bruit qu'll est possible. I hope you will find your house
at Mentone nice. I have been obliged to stop from writing by the
want of a pen, but now I have one, so I will continue.
My dear papa, you told me to tell you whenever I was miserable. I
do not feel well, and I wish to get home.
Do take me with you.
R. STEVENSON.
Letter: 2 SULYARDE TERRACE, TORQUAY, THURSDAY (APRIL 1866).
RESPECTED PATERNAL RELATIVE, - I write to make a request of the
most moderate nature. Every year I have cost you an enormous -
nay, elephantine - sum of money for drugs and physician's fees, and
the most expensive time of the twelve months was March.
But this year the biting Oriental blasts, the howling tempests, and
the general ailments of the human race have been successfully
braved by yours truly.
Does not this deserve remuneration?
I appeal to your charity, I appeal to your generosity, I appeal to
your justice, I appeal to your accounts, I appeal, in fine, to your
purse.
My sense of generosity forbids the receipt of more - my sense of
justice forbids the receipt of less - than half-a-crown. - Greeting
from, Sir, your most affectionate and needy son,
R. STEVENSON.
Letter: TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
WICK, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1868.
MY DEAR MOTHER, - . . . Wick lies at the end or elbow of an open
triangular bay, hemmed on either side by shores, either cliff or
steep earth-bank, of no great height. The grey houses of Pulteney
extend along the southerly shore almost to the cape; and it is
about half-way down this shore - no, six-sevenths way down - that
the new breakwater extends athwart the bay.
Certainly Wick in itself possesses no beauty: bare, grey shores,
grim grey houses, grim grey sea; not even the gleam of red tiles;
not even the greenness of a tree. The southerly heights, when I
came here, were black with people, fishers waiting on wind and
night. Now all the S.Y.S. (Stornoway boats) have beaten out of the
bay, and the Wick men stay indoors or wrangle on the quays with
dissatisfied fish-curers, knee-high in brine, mud, and herring
refuse. The day when the boats put out to go home to the Hebrides,
the girl here told me there was 'a black wind'; and on going out, I
found the epithet as justifiable as it was picturesque. A cold,
BLACK southerly wind, with occasional rising showers of rain; it
was a fine sight to see the boats beat out a-teeth of it.
In Wick I have never heard any one greet his neighbour with the
usual 'Fine day' or 'Good morning.' Both come shaking their heads,
and both say, 'Breezy, breezy!' And such is the atrocious quality
of the climate, that the remark is almost invariably justified by
the fact.
The streets are full of the Highland fishers, lubberly, stupid,
inconceivably lazy and heavy to move. You bruise against them,
tumble over them, elbow them against the wall - all to no purpose;
they will not budge; and you are forced to leave the pavement every
step.
To the south, however, is as fine a piece of coast scenery as I
ever saw. Great black chasms, huge black cliffs, rugged and over-
hung gullies, natural arches, and deep green pools below them,
almost too deep to let you see the gleam of sand among the darker
weed: there are deep caves too. In one of these lives a tribe of
gipsies. The men are ALWAYS drunk, simply and truthfully always.
From morning to evening the great villainous-looking fellows are
either sleeping off the last debauch, or hulking about the cove 'in
the horrors.' The cave is deep, high, and airy, and might be made
comfortable enough. But they just live among heaped boulders, damp
with continual droppings from above, with no more furniture than
two or three tin pans, a truss of rotten straw, and a few ragged
cloaks. In winter the surf bursts into the mouth and often forces
them to abandon it.
An EMEUTE of disappointed fishers was feared, and two ships of war
are in the bay to render assistance to the municipal authorities.
This is the ides; and, to all intents and purposes, said ides are
passed. Still there is a good deal of disturbance, many drunk men,
and a double supply of police. I saw them sent for by some people
and enter an inn, in a pretty good hurry: what it was for I do not
know.
You would see by papa's letter about the carpenter who fell off the
staging: I don't think I was ever so much excited in my life. The
man was back at his work, and I asked him how he was; but he was a
Highlander, and - need I add it? - dickens a word could I
understand of his answer. What is still worse, I find the people
here-about - that is to say, the Highlanders, not the northmen -
don't understand ME.
I have lost a shilling's worth of postage stamps, which has damped
my ardour for buying big lots of 'em: I'll buy them one at a time
as I want 'em for the future.
The Free Church minister and I got quite thick. He left last night
about two in the morning, when I went to turn in. He gave me the
enclosed. - I remain your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
Letter: TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
WICK, September 5, 1868. MONDAY.
MY DEAR MAMMA, - This morning I got a delightful haul: your letter
of the fourth (surely mis-dated); Papa's of same day; Virgil's
BUCOLICS, very thankfully received; and Aikman's ANNALS, a precious
and most acceptable donation, for which I tender my most ebullient
thanksgivings. I almost forgot to drink my tea and eat mine egg.
It contains more detailed accounts than anything I ever saw, except
Wodrow, without being so portentously tiresome and so desperately
overborne with footnotes, proclamations, acts of Parliament, and
citations as that last history.
I have been reading a good deal of Herbert. He's a clever and a
devout cove; but in places awfully twaddley (if I may use the
word). Oughtn't this to rejoice Papa's heart -
'Carve or discourse; do not a famine fear.
Who carves is kind to two, who talks to all.'
You understand? The 'fearing a famine' is applied to people
gulping down solid vivers without a word, as if the ten lean kine
began to-morrow.
Do you remember condemning something of mine for being too
obtrusively didactic. Listen to Herbert -
'Is it not verse except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lover's loves?
MUST ALL BE VEILED, WHILE HE THAT READS DIVINES
CATCHING THE SENSE AT TWO REMOVES?'
You see, 'except' was used for 'unless' before 1630.
TUESDAY. - The riots were a hum. No more has been heard; and one
of the war-steamers has deserted in disgust.
The MOONSTONE is frightfully interesting: isn't the detective
prime? Don't say anything about the plot; for I have only read on
to the end of Betteredge's narrative, so don't know anything about
it yet.
I thought to have gone on to Thurso to-night, but the coach was
full; so I go to-morrow instead.
To-day I had a grouse: great glorification.
There is a drunken brute in the house who disturbed my rest last
night. He's a very respectable man in general, but when on the
'spree' a most consummate fool. When he came in he stood on the
top of the stairs and preached in the dark with great solemnity and
no audience from 12 P.M. to half-past one. At last I opened my
door. 'Are we to have no sleep at all for that DRUNKEN BRUTE?' I
said. As I hoped, it had the desired effect. 'Drunken brute!' he
howled, in much indignation; then after a pause, in a voice of some
contrition, 'Well, if I am a drunken brute, it's only once in the
twelvemonth!' And that was the end of him; the insult rankled in
his mind; and he retired to rest. He is a fish-curer, a man over
fifty, and pretty rich too. He's as bad again to-day; but I'll be
shot if he keeps me awake, I'll douse him with water if he makes a
row. - Ever your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
Letter: TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
WICK, SEPTEMBER 1868. SATURDAY, 10 A.M.
MY DEAR MOTHER, - The last two days have been dreadfully hard, and
I was so tired in the evenings that I could not write. In fact,
last night I went to sleep immediately after dinner, or very nearly
so. My hours have been 10-2 and 3-7 out in the lighter or the
small boat, in a long, heavy roll from the nor'-east. When the dog
was taken out, he got awfully ill; one of the men, Geordie Grant by
name and surname, followed SHOOT with considerable ECLAT; but,
wonderful to relate! I kept well. My hands are all skinned,
blistered, discoloured, and engrained with tar, some of which
latter has established itself under my nails in a position of such
natural strength that it defies all my efforts to dislodge it. The
worst work I had was when David (MacDonald's eldest) and I took the
charge ourselves. He remained in the lighter to tighten or slacken
the guys as we raised the pole towards the perpendicular, with two
men. I was with four men in the boat. We dropped an anchor out a
good bit, then tied a cord to the pole, took a turn round the
sternmost thwart with it, and pulled on the anchor line. As the
great, big, wet hawser came in it soaked you to the skin: I was
the sternest (used, by way of variety, for sternmost) of the lot,
and had to coil it - a work which involved, from ITS being so stiff
and YOUR being busy pulling with all your might, no little trouble
and an extra ducking. We got it up; and, just as we were going to
sing 'Victory!' one of the guys slipped in, the pole tottered -
went over on its side again like a shot, and behold the end of our
labour.
You see, I have been roughing it; and though some parts of the
letter may be neither very comprehensible nor very interesting to
YOU, I think that perhaps it might amuse Willie Traquair, who
delights in all such dirty jobs.
The first day, I forgot to mention, was like mid-winter for cold,
and rained incessantly so hard that the livid white of our cold-
pinched faces wore a sort of inflamed rash on the windward side.
I am not a bit the worse of it, except fore-mentioned state of
hands, a slight crick in my neck from the rain running down, and
general stiffness from pulling, hauling, and tugging for dear life.
We have got double weights at the guys, and hope to get it up like
a shot.
What fun you three must be having! I hope the cold don't disagree
with you. - I remain, my dear mother, your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
Letter: TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
PULTENEY, WICK, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 1868.
MY DEAR MOTHER, - Another storm: wind higher, rain thicker: the
wind still rising as the night closes in and the sea slowly rising
along with it; it looks like a three days' gale.
Last week has been a blank one: always too much sea.
I enjoyed myself very much last night at the R.'s. There was a
little dancing, much singing and supper.
Are you not well that you do not write? I haven't heard from you
for more than a fortnight.
The wind fell yesterday and rose again to-day; it is a dreadful
evening; but the wind is keeping the sea down as yet. Of course,
nothing more has been done to the poles; and I can't tell when I
shall be able to leave, not for a fortnight yet, I fear, at the
earliest, for the winds are persistent. Where's Murra? Is Cummie
struck dumb about the boots? I wish you would get somebody to
write an interesting letter and say how you are, for you're on the
broad of your back I see. There hath arrived an inroad of farmers
to-night; and I go to avoid them to M- if he's disengaged, to the
R.'s if not.
SUNDAY (LATER). - Storm without: wind and rain: a confused mass
of wind-driven rain-squalls, wind-ragged mist, foam, spray, and
great, grey waves. Of this hereafter; in the meantime let us
follow the due course of historic narrative.
Seven P.M. found me at Breadalbane Terrace, clad in spotless
blacks, white tie, shirt, et caetera, and finished off below with a
pair of navvies' boots. How true that the devil is betrayed by his
feet! A message to Cummy at last. Why, O treacherous woman! were
my dress boots withheld?
Dramatis personae: pere R., amusing, long-winded, in many points
like papa; mere R., nice, delicate, likes hymns, knew Aunt Margaret
('t'ould man knew Uncle Alan); fille R., nommee Sara (no h), rather
nice, lights up well, good voice, INTERESTED face; Miss L., nice
also, washed out a little, and, I think, a trifle sentimental; fils
R., in a Leith office, smart, full of happy epithet, amusing. They
are very nice and very kind, asked me to come back - 'any night you
feel dull; and any night doesn't mean no night: we'll be so glad
to see you.' CEST LA MERE QUI PARLE.
I was back there again to-night. There was hymn-singing, and
general religious controversy till eight, after which talk was
secular. Mrs. S. was deeply distressed about the boot business.
She consoled me by saying that many would be glad to have such feet
whatever shoes they had on. Unfortunately, fishers and seafaring
men are too facile to be compared with! This looks like enjoyment:
better speck than Anster.
I have done with frivolity. This morning I was awakened by Mrs. S.
at the door. 'There's a ship ashore at Shaltigoe!' As my senses
slowly flooded, I heard the whistling and the roaring of wind, and
the lashing of gust-blown and uncertain flaws of rain. I got up,
dressed, and went out. The mizzled sky and rain blinded you.
C D
+-------------------
|
|
+-------------------
\
A\
\
B\
C D is the new pier.
A the schooner ashore. B the salmon house.
She was a Norwegian: coming in she saw our first gauge-pole,
standing at point E. Norse skipper thought it was a sunk smack, and
dropped his anchor in full drift of sea: chain broke: schooner
came ashore. Insured laden with wood: skipper owner of vessel and
cargo bottom out.
I was in a great fright at first lest we should be liable; but it
seems that's all right.
Some of the waves were twenty feet high. The spray rose eighty
feet at the new pier. Some wood has come ashore, and the roadway
seems carried away. There is something fishy at the far end where
the cross wall is building; but till we are able to get along, all
speculation is vain.
I am so sleepy I am writing nonsense.
I stood a long while on the cope watching the sea below me; I hear
its dull, monotonous roar at this moment below the shrieking of the
wind; and there came ever recurring to my mind the verse I am so
fond of:-
'But yet the Lord that is on high
Is more of might by far
Than noise of many waters is
Or great sea-billows are.'
The thunder at the wall when it first struck - the rush along ever
growing higher - the great jet of snow-white spray some forty feet
above you - and the 'noise of many waters,' the roar, the hiss, the
'shrieking' among the shingle as it fell head over heels at your
feet. I watched if it threw the big stones at the wall; but it
never moved them.
MONDAY. - The end of the work displays gaps, cairns of ten ton
blocks, stones torn from their places and turned right round. The
damage above water is comparatively little: what there may be
below, ON NE SAIT PAS ENCORE. The roadway is torn away, cross
heads, broken planks tossed here and there, planks gnawn and
mumbled as if a starved bear had been trying to eat them, planks
with spales lifted from them as if they had been dressed with a
rugged plane, one pile swaying to and fro clear of the bottom, the
rails in one place sunk a foot at least. This was not a great
storm, the waves were light and short. Yet when we are standing at
the office, I felt the ground beneath me QUAIL as a huge roller
thundered on the work at the last year's cross wall.
How could NOSTER AMICUS Q. MAXIMUS appreciate a storm at Wick? It
requires a little of the artistic temperament, of which Mr. T. S.,
C.E., possesses some, whatever he may say. I can't look at it
practically however: that will come, I suppose, like grey hair or
coffin nails.
Our pole is snapped: a fortnight's work and the loss of the Norse
schooner all for nothing! - except experience and dirty clothes. -
Your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
Letter: TO MRS. CHURCHILL BABINGTON
[SWANSTON COTTAGE, LOTHIANBURN, SUMMER 1871.]
MY DEAR MAUD, - If you have forgotten the hand-writing - as is like
enough - you will find the name of a former correspondent (don't
know how to spell that word) at the end. I have begun to write to
you before now, but always stuck somehow, and left it to drown in a
drawerful of like fiascos. This time I am determined to carry
through, though I have nothing specially to say.
We look fairly like summer this morning; the trees are blackening
out of their spring greens; the warmer suns have melted the
hoarfrost of daisies of the paddock; and the blackbird, I fear,
already beginning to 'stint his pipe of mellower days' - which is
very apposite (I can't spell anything to-day - ONE p or TWO?) and
pretty. All the same, we have been having shocking weather - cold
winds and grey skies.
I have been reading heaps of nice books; but I can't go back so
far. I am reading Clarendon's HIST. REBELL. at present, with which
I am more pleased than I expected, which is saying a good deal. It
is a pet idea of mine that one gets more real truth out of one
avowed partisan than out of a dozen of your sham impartialists -
wolves in sheep's clothing - simpering honesty as they suppress
documents. After all, what one wants to know is not what people
did, but why they did it - or rather, why they THOUGHT they did it;
and to learn that, you should go to the men themselves. Their very
falsehood is often more than another man's truth.
I have possessed myself of Mrs. Hutchinson, which, of course, I
admire, etc. But is there not an irritating deliberation and
correctness about her and everybody connected with her? If she
would only write bad grammar, or forget to finish a sentence, or do
something or other that looks fallible, it would be a relief. I
sometimes wish the old Colonel had got drunk and beaten her, in the
bitterness of my spirit. I know I felt a weight taken off my heart
when I heard he was extravagant. It is quite possible to be too
good for this evil world; and unquestionably, Mrs. Hutchinson was.
The way in which she talks of herself makes one's blood run cold.
There - I am glad to have got that out - but don't say it to
anybody - seal of secrecy.
Please tell Mr. Babington that I have never forgotten one of his
drawings - a Rubens, I think - a woman holding up a model ship.
That woman had more life in her than ninety per cent. of the lame
humans that you see crippling about this earth.
By the way, that is a feature in art which seems to have come in
with the Italians. Your old Greek statues have scarce enough
vitality in them to keep their monstrous bodies fresh withal. A
shrewd country attorney, in a turned white neckcloth and rusty
blacks, would just take one of these Agamemnons and Ajaxes quietly
by his beautiful, strong arm, trot the unresisting statue down a
little gallery of legal shams, and turn the poor fellow out at the
other end, 'naked, as from the earth he came.' There is more
latent life, more of the coiled spring in the sleeping dog, about a
recumbent figure of Michael Angelo's than about the most excited of
Greek statues. The very marble seems to wrinkle with a wild energy
that we never feel except in dreams.
I think this letter has turned into a sermon, but I had nothing
interesting to talk about.
I do wish you and Mr. Babington would think better of it and come
north this summer. We should be so glad to see you both. DO
reconsider it. - Believe me, my dear Maud, ever your most
affectionate cousin,
LOUIS STEVENSON.
Letter: TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM
1871?
MY DEAR CUMMY, - I was greatly pleased by your letter in many ways.
Of course, I was glad to hear from you; you know, you and I have so
many old stories between us, that even if there was nothing else,
even if there was not a very sincere respect and affection, we
should always be glad to pass a nod. I say 'even if there was
not.' But you know right well there is. Do not suppose that I
shall ever forget those long, bitter nights, when I coughed and
coughed and was so unhappy, and you were so patient and loving with
a poor, sick child. Indeed, Cummy, I wish I might become a man
worth talking of, if it were only that you should not have thrown
away your pains.
Happily, it is not the result of our acts that makes them brave and
noble, but the acts themselves and the unselfish love that moved us
to do them. 'Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of
these.' My dear old nurse, and you know there is nothing a man can
say nearer his heart except his mother or his wife - my dear old
nurse, God will make good to you all the good that you have done,
and mercifully forgive you all the evil. And next time when the
spring comes round, and everything is beginning once again, if you
should happen to think that you might have had a child of your own,
and that it was hard you should have spent so many years taking
care of some one else's prodigal, just you think this - you have
been for a great deal in my life; you have made much that there is
in me, just as surely as if you had conceived me; and there are
sons who are more ungrateful to their own mothers than I am to you.
For I am not ungrateful, my dear Cummy, and it is with a very
sincere emotion that I write myself your little boy,
Louis.
Letter: TO CHARLES BAXTER
DUNBLANE, FRIDAY, 5TH MARCH 1872.
MY DEAR BAXTER, - By the date you may perhaps understand the
purport of my letter without any words wasted about the matter. I
cannot walk with you to-morrow, and you must not expect me. I came
yesterday afternoon to Bridge of Allan, and have been very happy
ever since, as every place is sanctified by the eighth sense,
Memory. I walked up here this morning (three miles, TU-DIEU! a
good stretch for me), and passed one of my favourite places in the
world, and one that I very much affect in spirit when the body is
tied down and brought immovably to anchor on a sickbed. It is a
meadow and bank on a corner on the river, and is connected in my
mind inseparably with Virgil's ECLOGUES. HIC CORULIS MISTOS INTER
CONSEDIMUS ULMOS, or something very like that, the passage begins
(only I know my short-winded Latinity must have come to grief over
even this much of quotation); and here, to a wish, is just such a
cavern as Menalcas might shelter himself withal from the bright
noon, and, with his lips curled backward, pipe himself blue in the
face, while MESSIEURS LES ARCADIENS would roll out those cloying
hexameters that sing themselves in one's mouth to such a curious
lifting chant.
In such weather one has the bird's need to whistle; and I, who am
specially incompetent in this art, must content myself by
chattering away to you on this bit of paper. All the way along I
was thanking God that he had made me and the birds and everything
just as they are and not otherwise; for although there was no sun,
the air was so thrilled with robins and blackbirds that it made the
heart tremble with joy, and the leaves are far enough forward on
the underwood to give a fine promise for the future. Even myself,
as I say, I would not have had changed in one IOTA this forenoon,
in spite of all my idleness and Guthrie's lost paper, which is ever
present with me - a horrible phantom.
No one can be alone at home or in a quite new place. Memory and
you must go hand in hand with (at least) decent weather if you wish
to cook up a proper dish of solitude. It is in these little
flights of mine that I get more pleasure than in anything else.
Now, at present, I am supremely uneasy and restless - almost to the
extent of pain; but O! how I enjoy it, and how I SHALL enjoy it
afterwards (please God), if I get years enough allotted to me for
the thing to ripen in. When I am a very old and very respectable
citizen with white hair and bland manners and a gold watch, I shall
hear three crows cawing in my heart, as I heard them this morning:
I vote for old age and eighty years of retrospect. Yet, after all,
I dare say, a short shrift and a nice green grave are about as
desirable.
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