Part 2

"And was it a want of faith in the durability of stone fences, or ignorance of their dream-assets, that accounts for the way that Cato and Demosthenes solved their problems?" was the next question, but as this high strain was interrupted by more frivolity, my thoughts again reverted to the solidity of Stevenson's dreams, that now furnished his inquiring soul with new fields for exploitation, as well as a dominant interest to fill up the measure of his earthly span.

He regretted leaving the haunts of man, he told us, particularly the separation from his friends, which was satisfactory, coming, as it did, from the man who coined the truism that the way to have a friend is to be one.

But this was his fighting chance, "and a fellow has to die fighting, you know." What was civilization anyway to one who needed only sunshine and negligée? Thus in no other than a tone of pleasantry did he refer to his condition, and never have I seen a face or heard a voice so exempt from bitterness. He told me, in fact, that he was unable to breathe in a room with more than four people in it at a time. This sounds like an exaggeration, or one of the vagaries of the sick, yet things that seem trifles to the well, can be tragic to the nervous sufferer. Mrs. Low has told me that at a dinner of only five or six covers Stevenson would frequently get up and throw open a window to breathe in enough ozone to enable him to get through the evening.

He was embarking to the lure of soft airs and long, subliminal solitudes, accepting gracefully the one hope held out, when the crowded habitations of cities had become a torture. We felt the pity of the enforced exile of so companionable a spirit, but we did not voice it, feeling constrained to live up to the standard of cheerfulness he had so valiantly set for us.

Mr. Eaton, who boasted that, in him, a good sea captain had been spoiled to make a bad painter, encouraged Stevenson to talk freely of his plans, and he dwelt at some length on the beauty and seaworthiness of the yacht _Casco_, that had been chartered for the voyage. This sea theme led, of course, to the inevitable fish stories, and after some mythological whale had been swallowed by some non-Biblical Jonah, I remarked, in the lull that followed, "Maybe the waters of the South Seas will yield you up a heroine."

A laugh went around at this, for some present thought I had said a "herring." But Stevenson had no doubt as to my meaning. "I am always helpless," said he, "when I try to describe a woman; but then," he added, brightly, "how should I hope to understand a woman, when God, who made her, cannot?" As straws show how the wind blows, so this little joke throws light on Stevenson 's state of mind toward womankind in general. During this heroine discussion, he remarked that he was always "unconscionably bored" by the conversation of young girls. He had no desire, it seems, to mould the young idea to his taste, as Horace, when he said:

"Place me where the world is not habitable, Where the Day-God's Chariot too near approaches, Yet will I love Lalagé, see her sweet smile, Hear her sweet prattle."

Even as a school-boy he was unable to mingle with lads of his own age. This, doubtless, is another of the precocities of the early-doomed, who feel that every moment of life they have must be lived to the full. A well-known artist, Who was suffering with tuberculosis, once said to me, in describing his working hours at the studio, "I must make every touch tell, and every moment count." So to Stevenson the rounded out sympathies of maturity were more attractive than the sweet prattle of girlhood, because, like the painter, with his paint, he, with his life, had to _make every moment count_. This, of course, explains his having chosen a woman so much older than himself as a life-companion; a woman in whom he could find a response on his own mental plane.

In the following little poem, which is perhaps his best known tribute to his wife, he embodies in cameo clearness my own early impression of the intrinsic qualities of her character:

"Trusty, dusky, vivid true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer Made my mate.

Honor, anger, valor, fire; A love that life could never tire; Death quench or evil stir, The mighty master Gave to her.

Teacher, tender, comrade, wife, A fellow-farer true through life, Heart-whole and soul-free, The august father Gave to me."

It was at the Lows' Apartment in New York that I first met Mrs. Stevenson. I called one afternoon to see Mrs. Low, who was convalescing from an illness. She sent word that she would be able to see me in half an hour, and I was shown into the living-room, where, meditating by the fire, sat Mrs. Stevenson. She seemed exceedingly picturesque to me, in a rich black satin gown, her hair tied back by a black ribbon in girlish fashion and falling in three ringlets down her back.

She told me stories of her first arrival in New York that were as amusing as some of Stevenson's prairie experiences. She engaged a messenger-boy to pioneer her through the great stone jungle, not from fear of pickpockets or the like, but to save her from a helplessly lost feeling she always had when alone on the streets of a strange city. On arriving, she went directly to the old St. Stephen's Hotel on University Place and Eleventh Street, registering thus:

"Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson (wife of the author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)."

To those of the friends who smiled over it, she explained that, being ill at the time, she had a horror of dying unknown in a hotel room and being sent to the morgue.

I replied to this by telling her how my mother, being alone at a large London hotel for a night, insisted on having one of the chambermaids sleep with her, no doubt from the same sense of hopeless wandering in a similar Dædalian Labyrinth.

Years after, some autograph collector hunted up that old St. Stephen's register and cut the name from the page, which reminded me of a little story I once told Mrs. Low.

As a boy Mr. Eaton one day mounted the pulpit of the church in the little village of Phillipsburg, P. Q., Canada, where he was born, and made a drawing on one of the fly-leaves of the Bible. When it was later told in the village that he had exhibited at the Paris Salon, someone cut the leaf from the Book of Books.

When one starts story telling to a good listener, little incidents dart through the brain that for long have lain dormant, and to pass the time, I told Mrs. Stevenson that on the day Mr. Eaton finished his portrait of President Garfield for the Union League Club, he asked the newly landed Celtic maid if she would wash his brushes for him (an office that he generally performed for himself), to which she exclaimed joyfully, "To think that I have lived to see the day that I washed the brushes that painted the President of the United States!"

What the artist regarded as an added chore to her already full labors, was to her willing hands a pride and an honor. It may be a truism that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but there certainly seems to be a good deal in a view-point. In looking back, I know that I grasped, that day, something of what the later years proved her to the world, for I read her then, as a highly gifted woman who had submerged her own personality in the greater gifts and personal claims of her invalid husband and in a recent reading of her Samoan notes there was imparted to me, by means too subtle to explain, those glimpses that insight bestows, that are called reading between the lines--a realization of the hardship of much of her life in the South Seas. I felt distinctly the under-current of troubled restlessness beneath the apparent good time of an unusual environment.

To the woman who loves becoming toilets and the vivacity and movement of life in literary and social centres, and who, moreover, possesses the useful hands and right instincts both in artistic and domestic relationships, the long sojourns in desolate places, the doing with makeshifts and the like that these entail, are a real deprivation, and a persistent irritation that calls for the counteraction of an exceptional degree of poise and self-mastery.

Nothing, in short, emphasizes this sense of her isolation, to my mind, so strongly as Stevenson himself in describing her quarters on board the schooner _Equator_, as a "beetle-haunted most unwomanly bower," and this simultaneously with the reminder that it will be long before her eyes behold again the familiar scenes of rural beauty dear to her memory.

The pen sketch of Stevenson forming the frontispiece was drawn by Mr. Eaton in a few minutes from memory. I regret to say that it is reproduced from a reproduction, the original (owned by Mr. S. S. McClure) could not be found, when wanted, Mr. McClure being in France at the time, but we were glad to obtain one of these copies, now becoming rare.

I have never seen a portrait of Stevenson that equalled his appearance that day. The bas-relief by Saint Gaudens approximates it somewhat in ethereal thinness, but the _verve_, the glow, the vital spark, are lacking even in that.

It has always been a satisfaction to me that our meeting was on an occasion when his illness was least apparent. My memory of his face has nothing of that pain-worn expression so often seen in photographs.

The afternoon of the day we received his message, I caught a glimpse of him at a distance from my window. He was coming up from the Inlet, where, no doubt, he had gone to take a plunge. There was a briskness about his movements that seemed like the unconscious enjoyment of sound health, and in appearance he certainly was as romantic a figure as any of his own characters. Whenever I read "In the Highlands," I see him as he appeared at that moment, treading through a maze of bright sabatia and sweet clover, the mental picture, as it were, becoming a part of that beautiful and touching poem:

In the highlands, in the country places, Where the old plain men have rosy faces, And the young fair maidens quiet eyes; Where essential silence cheers and blesses, And for ever in the hill-recesses Her more lovely music broods and dies.

O to mount again where erst I haunted; Where the old red hills are bird-enchanted, And the low green meadows bright with sward; And when even dies, the million-tinted, And the night has come, and planets glinted, Lo! the valley hollow, lamp-bestarred.

O to dream, O to awake and wander There, and with delight to take and render, Through the trance of silence, quiet breath; Lo! for there, among the flowers and grasses, Only the mightier movement sounds and passes; Only winds and rivers, life and death.

I felt the poetry of the day more poignantly as the hour for parting approached, and when the sun began to wane, I went out on the lawn to see the place under the spell of the lengthened shadows and the mellow sun-rays that turn the tree-trunks to burnished gold. This has always been my favorite hour, this charmed hour before sunset, when we can almost feel the earth's movement under our feet--an hour that transcends in poetry anything that can be imagined by the finite mind.

I walked up and down under the cedars bordering the river, to quiet my emotion. It was there, too, under the cedars, that a remark of Mr. Eaton's, in describing to me his first meeting with Stevenson, flashed across my memory: "He combined the face of a boy with the distinguished bearing of a man of the world."

And I thought, as I saw him then, merrily recalling the scenes and escapades of student life, "How well the distinguished man of the world had succeeded in keeping the heart of a boy!"

A passage in Mr. Low's book, "A Chronicle of Friendships," that recalls that day most vividly, is this: "Stevenson never once excused himself from our company on the plea of having work to do." For so it was with us; he seemed to have no cares or preoccupations, but to be content to be there, enjoying the conversation and the pleasantness of the passing hour.

I had a cosy quarter of an hour with his mother after my walk, and off by ourselves, in a corner, away from interruption, she spoke of her son's childhood. In her eyes, he was still the "bonnie wee laddie" who scouted about in his make-believe worlds among the chairs and tables in the drawing-room while she entertained her friends, and we repeated bits from "A Child's Garden of Verses."

I think that if there is any clue to the character of a great man we must look to his mother. Mrs. Stevenson embodied the idea of her son's peculiar charm; there was the same triumphal youthfulness, and her cheeks were round and rosy like a ripe apple.

I think of the mother now, after so many years, as the crowning influence of the day, quiet and reticent, but always felt, and honored by all as became the mother of our welcome guest.

In her letters, written in the Marquesas to her sister in Scotland, she carries out this impression of habitual freshness of spirit, and her humor is subtle and optimistic: "Nothing gives me more pleasure or a better appetite than an obstacle overcome." She shows herself the life of "The Silver Ship," as the people of Fakarava dubbed the _Casco_, and never a word of criticism or complaint is penned at any inconvenience or annoyance endured by the way. Indeed, one marvels at her tranquillity in the midst of so many complications--just as one wondered at the simplicity of Queen Victoria in her diary. One of the chief delights in the perusal of these letters is the questions they project into the mind of the reader. Is it a style, a native virtue, a mannerism, a fad, or what?

For example, she never suspects that the French man-o'-war in one of the bays may account for some of the good behavior of the natives, or that their bounty in cocoanuts and bread-fruit may be tendered with an eye to the novelties to be had in exchange, but accepts all in good faith, as part of their native generosity.

And what a joy it is to see her taking holy communion with these people, so lately reclaimed from cannabalism, and taking the ceremony "_au grand serieux_"! Thus, a missionary within, a warship without, the amenities of religion and society are enjoyed to the full.

One lays down these letters and laughs, many a time, where no laughter was intended. Certainly, she was a good mixer as well as the born mother of a genius.

Stevenson's death is an anomaly no less pathetic than his life, for in eluding extinction by consumption, he probably achieved a still earlier end by apoplexy. I had the account from Mrs. Low, who received it directly from "Fanny" by letter. Mrs. Stevenson was mixing a salad of native ingredients of which Stevenson was very fond, when he joined her in the kitchen, complaining that he was not very well, and sitting down, laid his head on her shoulder, where in about twenty minutes he expired.

I said at the beginning that I was not disappointed in the personality of Stevenson, but it would be nearer the mark to say that my anticipations fell far short of the reality.

It is often the case in meeting literary celebrities that one has the feeling that they are first authors, and after that men. Rodin, the French sculptor, focuses this idea by saying that "many are artists at the expense of some qualities of manhood." With Stevenson one was clearly in the presence of a man, and after that the scholar and the gentleman.

Was it not this fine distinction that, in spite of woolen shirt and a third-class transportation, awoke the suspicions of his companions of the steerage, that prompted the already quoted remark, "You are not one of us?"

And on that memorable journey across the plains, seeking the woman of his choice, resolved, though penniless and unknown, to make her his wife in spite of every obstacle, the truth that the frailty of the body is no criterion for the strength of the spirit is well brought out. It was, in fact, this quality of initiative that constituted his chief charm--the quality that, above all others, made us so spontaneous in his presence and so proud of his achievement.

We knew that we were seeing him at his best, surrounded by his old friends, and with the light of the memory of his youthful ambitions on his face. We knew, too, that the parting would be a life-long one, and that we would never look upon his like again. This regret each knew to be uppermost in the mind of the others, but when the good-byes began, we made no sign that it was to be more than the absence of a day.

Nevertheless, the tensity of the last moments of parting was keenly felt. Stevenson had planned to spend his last night at Wainwright's, and Lloyd Osbourne was to row him across the river. Mr. Eaton and I went down to the river-bank to see them off and to wave our last _adieux_.

The rumble of carriage-wheels in the distance, and the reverberations of footsteps and voices on the old wooden bridge grew fainter and died away, before the little boat was pushed off; and then, these two friends, Robert Louis Stevenson and Wyatt Eaton, both at the zenith of their life and powers, and both hovering so closely on the brink of eternity, sent their last messages to each other, across the distance, until the little boat had glided away, on the ebb-tide, a mere speck in the gray transparency of the twilight.

FATE OF THE _CASCO_

There are ships that, like certain people, seem created for an unusual and distinguishing destiny, and are unable long to survive the destruction of those peculiar conditions that have given them their dominating qualities, animation and color. Mr. Francis Dickie of Vancouver, B. C., has described with a vivid pen the later adventures and slow foundering of the _Casco_.

This gentleman has kindly given me permission to reprint it here. Our sympathy goes out to the beautiful yacht in her lonely buffetings and chill decay, but though stricken and vanished, we know that she will live long in romance and in song as "The Silver Ship."

FATE OF THE _CASCO_

by

FRANCIS DICKIE

Forty miles from Nome, Alaska, breaking under the Arctic winter on the shores of bleak King Island, lies the skeleton of a wrecked top-mast schooner.

Early in June, 1919, a small crew of adventurous spirits had turned her nose out through the Behring Sea, headed for the Lena River and Anadyn--and gold. She was small and old, this yacht, but what are thirty-three years when a craft has the proper tradition for daring, hazardous adventure?

September storms swept upon the _Casco_, pounding her teak sides with unfamiliar Northern blasts. Fog, cold, night--and she lay shuddering on the rocks, snow-beaten, ice-broken, abandoned by her crew.

So ships pass and become smooth driftwood on scattered beaches. But sometimes the magic of long adventure will gather around an abandoned hull, and form a rich memory to tempt the eternal wanderlust of man. What is an old ship but a floating castle built upon the memories of the men who have helmed her? Sometimes she plies the same dull course throughout her existence. Sometimes she changes trade with surprising chances. So it was with the _Casco_--now a glittering pleasure yacht, whim of an old millionaire, now stripped of gaudy trappings and bent to the grim will of seal hunter and opium trader.

In the opening of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, "The Wrecker," with red ensign waving, sailing into the port of Tai-o-hae in the Marquesas, the _Casco_ takes her place in fiction. But she is far more romantic as she has sailed in fact.

"Winged by her own impetus and the dying breeze, the _Casco_ skimmed under cliffs, opened out a cove, showed us a beach and some green trees, and flitted by again, bowing to the swell ... from close aboard arose the bleating of young lambs; a bird sang on the hillside; the scent of the land and of a hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us; and presently"--

Presently they sailed among the Isles of Varien, sunny and welcoming in the South Seas.

Stevenson wrote this in the cabin of the _Casco_, in the summer of '88. His always delicate health had broken completely under the San Francisco climate. Friends had urged a cruise to the South Seas, he had gladly acquiesced, and looked around for a ship. There was a subtle romantic call for the author of "Treasure Island" in a voyage on a ship of his own choosing and direction under the soft skies of the tropics.

The _Casco_ had been built by an eccentric California millionaire, Dr. Merritt, for cruising along the coast, and no money had been spared in her fittings. She was a seventy-ton fore-and-aft schooner, ninety-five feet long, with graceful lines, high masts, white sails and decks, shiny brasswork, and a gaudy silk-hung saloon. She was not perhaps too staunch a cruiser. "Her cockpit was none too safe, her one pump was inadequate in size and almost worthless; the sail plan forward was meant for racing and not for cruising; and even if the masts were still in good condition, they were quite unfitted for hurricane weather."

Nevertheless, negotiations were opened with Dr. Merritt. That gentleman had read of Stevenson. He had conceived him as an erratic, irresponsible soul who wrote poetry and let everything else go to the devil. He'd be blamed, he said, if he'd let any scatter-brained writer use his precious yacht. Finally, a meeting between the two was effected; and, speedily charmed by Stevenson's manner, he decided to let him have the _Casco_. Therefore, with Capt. Otis as skipper, four deck hands, "three Swedes and the inevitable Finn," and a Chinese cook, the Stevensons sailed June 28, 1888, for the Marquesas.

Stevenson's health rapidly improved in the first weeks of the voyage. He was charmed by the Southern islands and began making notes and gathering data from the natives for later books. He wrote parts of "The Master of Ballantrae" and of "The Wrong Box," and spent much of his time studying the intricate personality of his skipper, whose portrait afterward appeared in the pages of "The Wrecker."

After months of idle cruising, it was discovered that the _Casco's_ masts were dangerously rotten. Repairs were immediately necessary. Meantime Stevenson became less and less well. When the ship was again in commission and took them to Hawaii, he realized the impossibility of his returning to America, and, sending the _Casco_ back to San Francisco, started upon the exile that was to terminate in his death.