Part 3 (1/2)
It was a comfort to him at this time to remember other Scotchmen, Jeffries, Burns, Fergusson, Scott, Carlyle, and others, who had roamed these same streets before him, not a few of them fighting with the same problems he faced in their struggle to win their ideal.
This unhappy time, this ”Greensickness,” as he called it, came to an end, however, through the help of what Louis had always secretly longed for--friends. Several whom he met at this time influenced him, but first of them all he put his cousin Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (Bob), who returned to Edinburgh about this time from Paris, where he had been studying art.
Louis says: ”The mere return of Bob changed at once and forever the course of my life; I can give you an idea of my relief only by saying that I was at last able to breathe.... I was done with the sullens for good.... I had got a friend to laugh with.”
Here at last was a companion who understood him and sympathized with what he was trying to do. Since as children they had made believe together in their rival kingdoms of ”Nosingtonia” and ”Encyclopaedia”
they had had many traits and tastes in common. They now began where they had left off and proceeded to enjoy themselves once more by all sorts of wild pranks and gay expeditions.
The Speculative Society became another great source of pleasure. It was an old society and had numbered among its members such men of note as Scott, Jeffrey, Robert Emmet, and others. Once a week from November to March the ”Spec,” as it was called, met in rooms in the University of Edinburgh. An essay was read and debates followed with much hot discussion, which delighted Stevenson. ”Oh, I do think the Spec is about the best thing in Edinburgh,” he said enthusiastically.
Sir Walter Simpson, son of the famous doctor, Sir James Simpson, who discovered chloroform, became another chum about this time, and for the next ten years they were much together. He likewise was studying law and was a near neighbor. The Simpsons kept open house, and it was the custom for a group of cronies to drop in at all hours of day and night. Louis was among those who came oftenest, and Sir Walter's sister writes: ”He would frequently drop in to dinner with us, and of an evening he had the run of the smoking room. After ten p.m. the 'open sesame' to our door was a rattle on the letter box and Louis' fancy for the mysterious was whetted by this admittance by secret sign, and we liked his special rat-a-tat for it was the forerunner of an hour or two of talk.”
They teased him about his queer clothes and laughed at some of his wild ideas, but he seldom was angry at them for it and never stayed away very long.
With them he often skated on Duddington Loch or canoed on the Firth of Forth. One summer he and Sir Walter yachted off the west coast of Scotland, and still another year, when longing for further wandering possessed them, they made a trip in canoes through the inland waters of Belgium from Antwerp to Brussels, and then into France and by the rivers Sambre and Oise nearly to Paris.
In the ”Inland Voyage,” where Stevenson describes this trip, he calls Sir Walter and his canoe ”Cigarette” while he was ”Arethusa.” Adventures were plentiful, and they aroused much curiosity among the dwellers on the banks, with whom they made friends as they went along.
Once Arethusa was all but drowned, when his canoe was overturned by the rapids; and on several occasions, when they applied for a night's lodging, they were suspected of being tramps or peddlers because of their bedraggled appearance.
One evening after a hard day's paddling in the rain they landed tired, wet, and hungry at the little town of La Fere. ”The Cigarette and I could not sufficiently congratulate each other on the prospect,” says the Arethusa, ”for we had been told there was a capital inn at La Fere.
Such a dinner as we were going to eat. Such beds as we were going to sleep in, and all the while the rain raining on homeless folk over all the poplared country-side. It made our mouths water. The inn bore the name of some woodland animal, stag, or hart, or hind, I forget which.
But I shall never forget how s.p.a.cious and how eminently comfortable it looked as we drew near.... A rattle of many dishes came to our ears; we sighted a great field of tablecloth; the kitchen glowed like a forge and smelt like a garden of things to eat.
”Into this ... you are now to suppose us making our triumphal entry, a pair of damp rag-and-bone men, each with a limp india-rubber bag upon his arm. I do not believe I have a sound view of that kitchen; I saw it through a sort of glory, but it seemed to me crowded with the snowy caps of cook-men, who all turned round from their saucepans and looked at us with surprise. There was no doubt about the landlady however; there she was, heading her army, a flushed, angry woman, full of affairs. Her I asked politely--too politely, thinks the Cigarette--if we could have beds, she surveying us coldly from head to foot.
”'You will find beds in the suburb,' she remarked. 'We are too busy for the like of you.'
”If we could make an entrance, change our clothes, and order a bottle of wine I felt sure we could put things right, so I said, 'If we can not sleep, we may at least dine,' and was for depositing my bag.
”What a terrible convulsion of nature was that which followed in the landlady's face! She made a run at us and stamped her foot.
”'Out with you--out of the door!' she screeched.
”I do not know how it happened, but the next moment we were out in the rain and darkness. This was not the first time that I have been refused a lodging. Often and often I have planned what I would do if such a misadventure happened to me again, and nothing is easier to plan. But to put in execution, with a heart boiling at the indignity? Try it, try it only once, and tell me what you did.”
Frequently on this trip the Arethusa's odd dress and foreign looks led him to be taken for a spy. It was not long after the Franco-Prussian war, and all sorts of rumors of suspicious characters were afloat. Once he was actually arrested and thrown into a dungeon because he could show no pa.s.sport, and the commissary refused to believe he was English and puzzled his head over the sc.r.a.ps of notes and verses found in his knapsack.
He was rescued by the faithful Cigarette, who finally convinced the officials that they were British gentlemen travelling in this odd way for pleasure, and the things in his friend's bag were not plans against the government, but merely sc.r.a.ps of poetry and notes on their travels that he liked to amuse himself by making as they went along. [Footnote: This incident is told in the ”Epilogue to An Inland Voyage.”]
The canoe trips ended in a visit to the artists' colony at Fontainebleau, where Bob Stevenson and a brother of Sir Walter's were spending their summer. This place always had a particular attraction for Louis and he spent many weeks both there and at Grez near by during the next few years.
The free and easy life led by the artists suited him exactly, although he found it hard to accomplish any work of his own, but dreamed and planned all sorts of essays, verses, and tales which he never wrote, while the others put their pictures on canvas.
”I kept always two books in my pocket,” he says, ”one to read and one to write in. As I walked my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside I would either read, or a pencil and penny version-book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words.”
If there was little work, to show after a stop at Fontainebleau he had many memories of good-fellows.h.i.+p and some of the friends he met there were to be the first to greet him when he came to live on this side of the water.
While on their ”Inland Voyage” the two canoemen had decided that the most perfect mode of travel was by ca.n.a.l-boat. What could be more delightful? ”The chimney smokes for dinner as you go along; the banks of the ca.n.a.l slowly unroll their scenery to contemplative eyes; the barge floats by great forests and through great cities with their public buildings and their lamps at night; and for the bargee, in his floating home, 'travelling abed,' it is merely as if he were listening to another man's story or turning the leaves of a picture book in which he had no concern. He may take his afternoon walk in some foreign country on the banks of the ca.n.a.l, and then come home to dinner at his own fireside.”
They grew most enthusiastic over the idea and told one another how they would furnish their ”water villa” with easy chairs, pipes, and tobacco, and the bird and the dog should go along too.