Part 3 (2/2)

By the time Fontainebleau was reached they had planned trips through all the ca.n.a.ls of Europe. The idea took the artists' fancy also, and a group of them actually purchased a ca.n.a.l-boat called _The Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne_. Furnis.h.i.+ng a water villa, however, was more expensive than they had foreseen, and she came to a sad end. ”'The Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne' rotted in the stream where she was beautified ... she was never harnessed to the patient track-horse. And when at length she was sold, by the indignant carpenter of Moret, there was sold along with her the _Arethusa_ and the _Cigarette_ ... now these historic vessels fly the tricolor and are known by new and alien names.”

In 1873 Stevenson planned to try for admission to the English bar instead of the Scottish and went to London to take the examination. But his health, which had been rather poor, became worse, and on reaching London the doctor ordered him to Mentone in the south of France, where he had been before as a boy.

There he spent his days princ.i.p.ally lying on his back in the sun reading and playing with a little Russian girl with whom he struck up a great friends.h.i.+p. His letters to his mother were full of her sayings and doings. He was too ill to write much, although one essay, ”Ordered South,” was the outcome of this trip, the only piece of writing in which he ever posed as an invalid or talked of his ill health.

At the end of two months he improved enough to return to Edinburgh, but gave up the idea of the English bar. His illness and absence seemed to have smoothed out some of the difficulties at home, and after he returned things went happier in every way.

On July 14, 1875, he pa.s.sed his final law examinations, and was admitted to the Scottish bar. He was now ent.i.tled to wear a wig and gown, place a bra.s.s plate with his name upon the door of 17 Heriot Row, and ”have the fourth or fifth share of the services of a clerk” whom it is said he didn't even know by sight. For a few months he made some sort of a pretense at practising, but it amounted to very little. Gradually he ceased paying daily visits to the Parliament House to wait for a case, but settled himself instead in the room on the top floor at home and began to write, seriously this time--it was to be his life-work from now on--and the law was forgotten.

His first essays were published in the _Cornhill Magazine_ and _The Portfolio_ under the initials R.L.S., which signature in time grew so familiar to his friends and to those who admired his writings it became a second name for him, and as R.L.S. he is often referred to.

He was free now to roam as he chose and spent much time in Paris with Bob. The life there in the artists' quarter suited him as well as it had at Fontainebleau. There, among other American artists, he was a.s.sociated with Mr. Will Low, a painter, whom he saw much of when he came to New York.

One September he took a walking trip in the Cevenne Mountains with no other companion than a little gray donkey, Modestine, who carried his pack and tried his patience by turns with her pace, which was ”as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run,” as he tells in the chronicle of the trip.

A visit at Grez in 1876 was to mark a point in his life. Heretofore the artists' colony had been composed only of men. This year there were three new arrivals, Americans, a Mrs. Osbourne and her young son and daughter. Their home in California had been broken up and the mother had come to Grez to paint for the summer.

Those who had been there for a number of years, R.L.S. among them, looked on the newcomers as intruders and did not hesitate to say so among themselves. Before the summer was over, however, they were obliged to confess that the newcomers had added to the charms of Grez, and Louis found in Mrs. Osbourne another companion to add to his rapidly growing list.

When the artists scattered in the autumn and he returned to Edinburgh and Mrs. Osbourne to California, he carried with him the hope that some time in the future they should be married.

For the next three years he worked hard. He published numerous essays in the _Cornhill Magazine_ and his first short stories, ”A Lodging for the Night,” ”Will O' the Mill,” and the ”New Arabian Nights.” These were followed by his first books of travel, ”An Inland Voyage,” giving a faithful account of the adventures of the _Arethusa_ and the _Cigarette_, and ”Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes.”

When the latter was published, Mr. Walter Crane made an ill.u.s.tration for it showing R.L.S. under a tree in the foreground in his sleeping-bag, smoking, while Modestine contentedly crops gra.s.s by his side. Above him winds the path he is to take on his journey, encouraging Modestine with her burden to a livelier pace with his goad; receiving the blessing of the good monks at the Monastery of Our Lady of the Snows; stopping for a bite and sup at a wayside tavern; conversing with a fellow traveller by the way; and finally disappearing with the sunset over the brow of the hill.

Some time previous to all this he had written in a letter: ”Leslie Stephen, who was down here to lecture, called on me, and took me up to see a poor fellow, a poet who writes for him, and who has been eighteen months in our Infirmary, and may be for all I know eighteen months more.

Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fellow sat up in his bed with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a king's palace of blue air.”

This was William Ernest Henley, and his brave determination to live and work, though he knew he must ever remain in a maimed condition, roused Stevenson's sincere admiration. With his usual impetuous generosity, he brought him books and other comforts to make his prolonged stay in the infirmary less wearisome and a warm friends.h.i.+p sprang up between them.

As Henley grew stronger they planned to work together and write plays.

Stevenson had done nothing of the kind since he was nineteen. Now they chose to use the same plot that he had experimented with at that time.

It was the story of the notorious Deacon Brodie of Edinburgh, which both considered contained good material for a play.

”A great man in his day was the Deacon; well seen in good society, crafty with his hands as a cabinet-maker, and one who could sing a song with taste. Many a citizen was proud to welcome the Deacon to supper, and dismiss him with regret ... who would have been vastly disconcerted had he known how soon, and in what guise his visitor returned. Many stories are told of this redoubtable Edinburgh burgher.... A friend of Brodie's ... told him of a projected visit to the country, and afterwards detained by some affairs, put it off and stayed the night in town. The good man had lain some time awake; it was far on in the small hours by the Tron bell; when suddenly there came a crack, a jar, a faint light. Softly he clambered out of bed and up to a false window which looked upon another room, and there, by the glimmer of a thieves'

lantern, was his good friend the Deacon in a mask.”

At length after a certain robbery in one of the government offices the Deacon was suspected. He escaped to Holland, but was arrested in Amsterdam as he was about to start for America. He was brought back to Edinburgh, was tried and convicted and hanged on the second of October, 1788, at the west end of the Tolbooth, which was the famous old Edinburgh prison known as the Heart of Midlothian.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Edinburgh Castle]

This story of Brodie had always interested Stevenson since he had heard it as a child, and a cabinet made by the clever Deacon himself formed part of the furniture of his nursery.

”Deacon Brodie” and other plays were finished and produced, but never proved successful. Indeed, the money came in but slowly from any of his writings and, aside from the critics, it was many a long day before he was appreciated by the people of his own city and country. They refused to believe that ”that daft laddie Stevenson,” who had so often shocked them by his eccentric ways and scorn of conventions, could do anything worth while. So by far his happiest times were spent out of Scotland, princ.i.p.ally in London, where a members.h.i.+p in the Savile Club added to his enjoyment. Here he met several interesting men, among them Edmund William Gosse and Sidney Colvin, both writers and literary critics, with whom he became very intimate.

”My experience of Stevenson,” writes Mr. Gosse, ”during these first years was confined to London upon which he would make sudden piratical descents, staying a few days or weeks and melting into thin air again.

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