Let now your soul in this substantial world
Some anchor strike. Be here the body moored; –
This spectacle immutably from now
The picture in your eye; and when time strikes,
And the green scene goes on the instant blind –
The ultimate helpers, where your horse today
Conveyed you dreaming, bear your body dead.
‘An End of Travel’1
IN SAMOA, Stevenson was intrigued to think of himself as ‘the farthest, I suppose, of all that ever blackened paper with English words’, but his exile was impenetrable to all but a handful of visitors, and he knew he was unlikely to see his friends again. Colvin couldn’t bear the thought of the long sea-voyages, Baxter was beset with money troubles (and, secretly, drink), and Henley of course considered himself ‘all too near’ in Edinburgh.2 But Stevenson’s fame, and his exotic isolation, were stirring other, unknown or unmet writers to make the pilgrimage to Samoa: Marcel Schwob, the French novelist with whom Stevenson had corresponded sporadically since 1882, was longing to meet his hero; J.M. Barrie, the young Scots writer whose letters charmed RLS and prompted extravagant replies, was hoping to visit in 1893, as was Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.
Stevenson had little idea of his own fame, and found it ‘very queer’ on a trip to Sydney in 1893 that so many passers-by pointed him out on the street. His image had become familiar to the public from newspapers around the world, and there were plenty of photographs to choose from, as he seems never to have refused an opportunity to sit in front of a camera. Editors ran filler stories about the author constantly: ‘the gossip-columns of the newspapers pullulate with gossip about you’, Gosse told him, providing some spoof examples:
‘All our readers will rejoice to learn that the aged fictionist L.R. Stevenson has ascended the throne of Tahiti of which island he is now a native.’
‘Mr R.L. Stevenson, who is thirty-one years of age, is still partial to periwinkles, which he eats with a silver pin, presented to him by the German population of Samoa.’3
Journalists who made their way to Vailima were often treated negligently by Stevenson, who resented being disturbed from his work. He met a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner in a sleeveless undershirt and rolled-up trousers, and sat with a can of tobacco ‘within easy reach’ all through the interview, nonchalantly rolling a fresh smoke ‘as soon as the old one gave out’, while ‘as he talked he gently toyed among his shapely toes with his disengaged hand’.4 Whenever possible, reporters were handed over to Mrs Stevenson, who would show them round the newly extended house, the pride of which was the new hall on the ground floor, entirely floored and panelled in varnished Californian redwood, ‘a sort of parody upon the old English oaken hall’, as the British Consul, Sir Berry Cusack-Smith, spitefully put it. Here hung Sargent’s portrait of Louis and Fanny at Skerryvore, some of Bob’s paintings, a rather bad portrait of Robert Stevenson (now at the Stevenson Museum in St Helena, California), a bust of the same, the Rodin Printemps, slightly damaged by its travels, and numerous photographs of friends such as Gosse and Colvin. There was a reproduction of the Opie portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, which Fanny pointed out with pride to a journalist from Woman and Home, speaking of their closeness to Lady Shelley.5 Both Fanny and Lloyd were keen to promote the association: Lloyd had spent time and his stepfather’s money in London getting the pistols which Sir Percy and Lady Shelley had presented to Stevenson pompously engraved with details of the gift.
The absurdity of his position was not lost on Stevenson. Meeting his cousin Graham Balfour off a boat in Apia in August 1892, Stevenson was bemused by the response of the crew and passengers to his name: champagne was popped, and the clicking of a camera ‘kept time to my progress like a pair of castanets’:
The whole celebrity business was particularly characteristic; the Captain has certainly never read a word of mine; and as for the Jew with the Kodak, he had never heard of me till he came on board. There was a third admirer who sent messages in to the Captain’s cabin asking if the Lion would accept a gift of Webster’s Unabridged. I went out to him and signified a manly willingness to accept a gift of anything. He stood and bowed before me, his eyes danced with excitement. ‘Mr Stevenson’ he said and his voice trembled, ‘Your name is very well known to me. I have been in the publishing line in Canada and I have handled many of your works for the trade.’ Come, I said, here is genuine appreciation.6
Quite different from this was the imaginative space that Stevenson was beginning to take up in the minds of some fellow writers. His Prospero-like exile half out of this world had endowed him with a sort of magus status. Rudyard Kipling, the new literary star, in turmoil after proposing to Carrie Balestier in 1891, vowed to ‘get clean away and re-sort myself with a pilgrimage to his hero, Stevenson,7 and when delirious in illness eight years later, raved about being in a submarine on his way to Vailima. Schwob (a consumptive) also saw Stevenson as a sort of healer, and made the journey to Samoa to share in his cure as well as his company, though he didn’t arrive till after Stevenson’s death (and then found the climate uncongenial). The novelist John Galsworthy too, unknown to Stevenson, had set out from England late in 1892 ‘to visit Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa’. The nearest he got was Adelaide, where in March 1893 he began the return journey to Cape Town on the clipper Torrens. This previously unrecorded incident (unrecorded in Stevenson biography, that is) is remarkable for the fact that the first mate of the Torrens, with whom Galsworthy and his companion Ted Sanderson became friendly, was Merchant Seaman Joseph Conrad, soon to turn novelist and become the new favourite of Fanny Sitwell and Sidney Colvin. In view of Conrad’s subsequently troubled relationship with Stevenson as a literary influence, it is strange to think of him sailing in southern waters at this time, hearing Galsworthy’s regrets about not reaching Vailima and mulling over the phenomenon of ‘RLS’.8
With the removal of Joe and guardianship of her son Austin given to Louis, Belle Strong became completely dependent on her stepfather. It became politic for her to ingratiate herself with him and the household, but her resources were limited; apart from cheerfulness and a childish delight in dressing things and people up, Belle was not much use at anything. She had none of her mother’s readiness to work, indeed, she hated getting her hands dirty, and though she was a competent seamstress, could not always be making little outfits for her pets among the servants’ children. They already had striped jackets to wear as a Vailima ‘uniform’ for special occasions, and lava-lavas whimsically made (at Louis’s request) from Stewart tartan. Belle’s name among the natives was ‘Teuila’, meaning ‘the one who adorns things’. Like Fanny’s names ‘Tamaitai’ (‘high-born lady’) and ‘Aolele’ (‘the flying cloud’), it may not always have been respectfully applied.
When Louis began to suffer from writer’s cramp in the summer of 1892, Belle came into her own as an amanuensis, a role in which she continued till the writer’s death. Her spelling and punctuation were poor, so Stevenson had to proceed more slowly than he might have wished; her presence also undoubtedly affected the content of his dictation (letters mostly, but later some literary work). The sight of Belle’s round hand on the envelope must have been strangely unwelcome to Colvin and the others back home, a further barrier to intimacy, and her habit of interjecting comments in the letters was an insistent reminder of her mediumship. But Stevenson was very glad of her help, and glad, as always, to have an immediate audience to perform to. For her part, Belle moved swiftly from merely secretarial duties to general maintenance; ‘she runs me like a baby’, he told Barrie. She chose his socks, trimmed his hair, fussed over his cufflinks and kept a pile of autographs ready to send to fans.
Though there is no evidence (or likelihood) of a sexual relationship between Belle and her stepfather, the intimacy which grew between them in this period became far more sustaining and comforting to the writer than his marriage. For relations between Louis and Fanny were under enormous strain. At first, this seemed the result of mere exhaustion, but it persisted and worsened during the period when they were moving into the new house in the second half of 1891. With Louis’s health stabilising, and the excuse lost for constantly moving on, everything seemed suddenly difficult, even contentious, as if their mutual anxiety about his imminent death had been the only thing holding their marriage together. Hence Stevenson’s plangent remark about being ‘only happy once – that was at Hyères’, and his announcement to Colvin, ‘I am gay no more.’9 The couple went on separate trips away – Louis around the Samoan islands in the spring of 1891, and Fanny to Fiji that autumn – and slept in separate rooms, Louis indulging the discomforts of the hard makeshift bed in his study and reading himself to sleep at night.
It was only in the spring of 1893 that Stevenson felt able to reveal to Colvin that for the past eighteen months his wife had been suffering from a severe psychotic illness:
At first it only seemed a kind of set against me; she made every talk an argument, then a quarrel; till I fled her, and lived in a kind of isolation in my own room. [ … ] I felt so dreadfully alone then. You know about F. there’s nothing you can say is wrong, only it ain’t right; it ain’t she; at first she annoyed me dreadfully; now of course, that one understands, it is more anxious and pitiful.10
Without this explicit statement to Colvin, it would be virtually impossible to detect any hint of trouble in Stevenson’s letters during the period in question, such is his determination to protect his wife. His sporadic reports that she had been ‘very ill’ would of course have aroused no concern whatever: Fanny was always ‘very ill’ one way or another, and had had plenty of nervous collapses in the past, from the breakdown following Hervey’s death to the ‘brain-congestion’ of 1879. And the symptoms of this illness – if it was distinctly different from those – could have been contained, at a pinch, in the pathology of that generous hold-all, the menopause. Fanny was withdrawn, moody, obsessive (or alternatively, shrill and alarmist); she had attacks of angina, and ‘aneurism’, and was more than ever ‘ill to manage’.11 Louis found this distressing and puzzling, as is clear from this letter to Anne Jenkin in May 1892:
She has been quite sharply ill indeed, and I can’t think what was wrong with her; for the rest she keeps ailing, which is a miserable thing – but she gives herself no chance, being always out fighting in her garden, with the industry of a bee or a devil, and the rest is what she knows not. I need not speak; I know little of it myself; and indeed we are an indefatigable household, up early, down late.12
And then he changes the subject … His tendency was to make light of his wife’s symptoms, as he did at first to Colvin (though his comparison of Fanny’s to ‘my father’s case’ betrays a fear of insanity setting in13), but photographs of Fanny at Vailima always show a very set jaw and furrowed brow. The servants thought her ‘aitu’, or uncanny, and at a siva, or traditional seated dance, the locals evoked her ‘with a pantomime of terror well-fitted to call up her haunting, indefatigable and diminutive presence’.14 Her work in the garden became manic, not pleasurable; she disrupted the rhythm of the household by being late for every meal, and she had started to find company agitating. Increasingly, Stevenson had to excuse himself from social events, or divert them away from Vailima, to avoid potentially embarrassing scenes when Fanny was in one of these dismaying phases.
The description of himself and his wife which Stevenson sent to J.M. Barrie early in 1893 (exactly the time he was confessing his anxieties to Colvin) obliquely glosses the troubled state of affairs:
Here follows a catalogue of my menagerie:
R.L.S.
The Tame Celebrity.
Native name, Tusi Tala
Exceedingly lean, dark, rather ruddy – black eyes [ … ] crow’s-footed, beginning to be grizzled, general appearance of a blasted boy – or blighted youth – or to borrow Carlyle on De Quincey ‘Child that has been in hell’. Past eccentric – obscure and O no we never mention it – present, industrious, respectable and fatuously contented. [ … ] Hopelessly entangled in apron strings. Drinks plenty. Curses some. Temper unstable. Manners purple on an emergency, but liable to trances. [ … ]
Fanny V. de G. Stevenson.
The Weird Woman.
Native name, Tamaitai.
This is what you will have to look out for, Mr Barrie. If you don’t get on with her, it’s a pity about your visit. She runs the show. Infinitely little, extraordinary wig of gray curls, handsome waxen face like Napoleon’s, insane black eyes, boy’s hands, tiny bare feet, a cigarette, wild blue native dress usually spotted with garden mould. [ … ] Hellish energy; relieved by fortnights of entire hibernation. Can make anything from a house to a row, all fine and large of their kind. [ … ] The Living Partizan: a violent friend, a brimstone enemy. [ … ] Is always either loathed or slavishly adored; indifference impossible. The natives think her uncanny and that devils serve her. Dreams dreams, and sees visions.15
‘A violent friend, a brimstone enemy’; this brilliantly concise summation of his wife’s character indicates the complexity of Stevenson’s situation. In it is packed all the reciprocal ardour of their love for each other and the harsh sacrifices that Stevenson had been made to pay for it. Awe and loyalty, bemusement, pride and distaste are all there, but perhaps most striking is the critical objectivity at work, the intimidating intellectual power usually kept under such close guard with reference to his wife, or suspended altogether. This word-portrait of Fanny makes it clear that if anyone could ever have demolished her it would not have been Bob, or Katherine, or the Margaret Berthe Wrights of this world, or Henley still festering over the old quarrel, but Uxorious Billy himself.
When describing Belle to J.M. Barrie, Louis was able to be much more light-hearted (she was taking the dictation, after all), passing on the local rumour that she was Louis’s illegitimate daughter by a Moorish woman. It was an idea that ‘delighted’ Louis and which he liked to play up, as Belle told Charles Warren Stoddard: ‘[Louis] introduces me as his daughter, and when he talks about the old days in Morocco he is magnificent. He tells me long tales about my mother which invariably wind up with “She was a damned fine woman!”’16 The irony of this is transparent; physically no one could have mistaken Belle for the daughter of anyone but Fanny, in colouring and size so much her double. But by reminiscing about a dear departed ‘Moorish’ wife and mother, Louis and Belle were not indulging a fantasy, but stating a present truth: Fanny had been ‘a damned fine woman’ – in the past.
The physical and intellectual isolation of Stevenson’s years in Samoa had many effects, from the obsessive interest he began to take in Polynesian history and politics to the systematic questioning of his own methods and achievement. The new realism in his work, possibly fuelled by the difficulty he had in ‘explaining’ Samoa to his distant audience, was not to find many appreciators until long after his death, and he knew he had to keep turning out stories in his own manner, as it were, and not just to pay the bills. Hence the sequel to Kidnapped (or completion of Kidnapped, to be more accurate), the book called ‘David Balfour’ by the author, published in Britain as Catriona. Hence also the pursuit of crowd-pleasing Scots historical themes in ‘Heathercat’, ‘The Young Chevalier’, St Ives and Weir of Hermiston – all left unfinished at his death.
The title Catriona was an unfortunate imposition by the publisher, as the daughter of James More Drummond is not central to Stevenson’s romance (while the narrator, David Balfour, is). The love story between her and David is in fact a bit of a red herring: Catriona is rather a dissection of the Appin murder trial of 1752, a sort of three-dimensional fictional model of that notorious case. Perhaps Stevenson’s imagination was most usefully exercised this way, in speculation about the emotional underpinnings of historical events. The romance element is not decorative or distracting, but shown to be inherent in the facts: in this respect Stevenson was perhaps Scott’s only true successor. History, for him, suggested play of character and motive; it was this that made him think the Covenanting writers ‘delightful’ and which animated his reading of documents such as the transcripts of the trial of James of the Glens, one of the texts on the Highlands that his father sent out to Davos in 1881. Now, twelve years later and with a strangely similar model of political intrigue playing out before him day to day in Samoa, Stevenson was able to construct a story that illustrated in ingenious ways the oddities and tragedy of the case.
The Samoan struggle, and the parallels with the Highland crises of the eighteenth century it brought constantly to mind, clearly informed Stevenson’s treatment of his theme, which was of a conflict that ‘had the externals of a sober process of law, [but was] in its essence a clan battle between savage clans’.17 The removal of the good man, the honest witness, from a show trial; the triumph of rhetoric over plain speech, revenge over justice – these things reflect to some extent the frustrations of watching history unfold, disastrously, in Samoa. ‘It is a singular thing that I should live here in the South Seas under conditions so new and striking, and yet my imagination so continually inhabit that cold old huddle of grey hills from which we come,’ Stevenson wrote to Barrie, but of course it wasn’t singular at all. He was going through a sharp twist of homesickness, and Catriona is probably his most Scots book, most notably in the quantity and variety of Scots language used in it. David’s soft Lowland dialect (the most ‘English’ in the book) is differently constructed from Catriona’s Highland phraseology (her ‘correctness’ in this is part of her clan standing); both are politer than the Edinburgh lawyer Charles Stewart, whose vocabulary and dry manner the ex-advocate knew so well; Stewart in turn, though a Highlander, has nothing of Black Andie’s power of vernacular, and Andie’s tale, told in broad Scots, is immediately followed by a fight with a Gaelic-speaker, who claims the story for his own tradition. Stevenson in this way wittily and deftly demonstrates the problems with Scots diversity that had concerned him all his life.
Black Andie’s narrative, ‘The Tale of Tod Lapraik’, is the story-within-a-story at the heart of the novel, a political allegory that deals again with the theme of the double. David Balfour is told the tale while he is incarcerated on the Bass Rock, but it is about the Rock, too, and a protagonist who, like Davie, would like to be elsewhere and who sells his soul in order to escape. In ‘Tod Lapraik’ the bogle is seen dancing for joy among the solan geese on the Bass in ways reminiscent of Hyde’s glee before the mirror: ‘it lowped and flang and capered and span like a teetotum, and whiles we could hear it skelloch as it span’.18 Like ‘Thrawn Janet’ (which, with ‘Tod Lapraik’, the author ranked among his proudest achievements), the story imitates the oral tradition; the characterisation is simple, the theme supernatural and the narrative moves rapidly to a startling crisis. These are templates of what Stevenson thought story-telling should be: direct and stirring, ‘not making stories true’, as he had said in ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, ‘as making them typical’.
Catriona sparked a revival of that old debate with Henry James, for when the American objected to the ‘almost painful under-feeding’ of the visual imagination in the novel, Stevenson responded spiritedly with a sort of battle-cry: ‘War to the adjective. [ … ] Death to the optic nerve [ … ] I hear people talking, and I feel them acting, and that seems to me to be fiction.’19 Both the response and James’s initial criticism are rather mystifying, for the vividness of Stevenson’s descriptive writing in Catriona relies heavily, as always, on the visual, as in this passage when Davie is rowed down the Firth by his captors and the Bass Rock comes into view:
There began to fall a greyness on the face of the sea; little dabs of pink and red, like coals of slow fire, came in the east; and at the same time the geese awakened, and began crying about the top of the Bass. It is just the one crag of rock, as everybody knows, but great enough to carve a city from. The sea was extremely little, but there went a hollow plowter round the base of it. With the growing of the dawn I could see it clearer and clearer; the straight crags painted with sea-birds’ droppings like a morning frost, the sloping top of it green with grass, the clan of white geese that cried about the sides, and the black, broken buildings of the prison sitting close on the sea’s edge.20
Light effects, colours, mass; these were all staples in Stevenson’s descriptive technique. One can only conclude that in claiming to wish death on the optic nerve, he was trying to humour James, or was carried away by having elicited any sort of comment on his style from the cautious mandarin of De Vere Gardens.
David Balfour proved a resilient hero. Dropped mid-paragraph at the end of Kidnapped by his exhausted creator, he might have proved hard to revive, but his development in Catriona is one of Stevenson’s major achievements, a ‘full length’ portrait, which the author recognised as exceeding anything by Scott: ‘He never drew a full length like Davie, with his shrewdness and simplicity, and stockishness and charm. Yet, you’ll see, the public won’t want it; they want more Alan. Well, they can’t get it. And readers of “Tess” can have no use for my David, and his innocent but real love affairs.’21 The reference to Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, published in 1891, was a troubling one for Stevenson. He was never explicit about what upset him so much in that novel (which, he admitted, he never finished reading), but it seems to have been the inclusion, and then ‘untrue’ treatment, of the rape scene. It was ‘as false a thing as ever I perused’, he complained to Colvin in the first flush of his anger. ‘If ever I do a rape, which may the almighty God forfend! You would hear a noise about my rape, and it should be a man that did it.’22 This rather cranky objection was clearly in extenuation of the problems he had dealing with sex in ‘The Beach of Falesá’, about to be serialised in the Illustrated London News with cuts to the text of which the author was yet ignorant. When Barrie told him later in the year of similar absurd changes that the serial publishers had made to Hardy’s Tess (making Angel Clare transport the milkmaids across a river by barrow instead of in his arms), Stevenson was somewhat mollified as a fellow sufferer at the hands of the censor, but it did nothing to change his basic revulsion at Hardy’s novel. This indeed increased as he became aware slowly of Hardy’s critical success in England and began to consider the implications for himself. He started sounding out his friends as if there were ranks to be drawn up, as indeed there were, though it is odd to see the co-author of The Wrecker leading an attack on grossness, or attempting to separate the issues of treatment and content so completely.
For though Stevenson’s own method was fairly consistent (in the sort of sensual realism and ‘plain physical sensations plainly and expressly rendered’ he favoured), his subject-matter and manner varied too extravagantly for many readers to associate him with any kind of ‘consistency’. Which was the more characteristic book, The Wrecker or Treasure Island, Catriona or Island Nights’ Entertainments (which included ‘The Beach of Falesá’ and ‘The Bottle Imp’)? Was Kidnapped a story for children or for adults? Was The Ebb-Tide a story by Stevenson or Osbourne? What was left of the elegant aphorist of Virginibus Puerisque? When he was alive and charming, these questions seemed of importance only to his friends as they strove to see some shape evolving in this extraordinarily gifted writer’s career. When he was dead, that very versatility seemed suspect, the career chaotic (as indeed it was and most are), the ‘masterpiece’ missing. When the new discipline of ‘English Literature’ emerged in the new century, Stevenson was nowhere to be seen. He had been popular, he had been a romancer, a writer for boys, a Scot.
The summer of 1892 saw the first visit to Vailima of Graham Balfour, the thirty-four-year-old son of Margaret’s cousin Thomas. Handsome, modest, moustachioed and over six foot tall, Graham was as fine a specimen of Scots manhood as could have been wished. Like Louis, he had studied for the bar but never practised, and later in his career he would become a respected writer on educational issues, a director of education (for Staffordshire), a knight of the realm and his cousin’s first biographer.
Balfour got on well with everyone and became the idol of the household. To Lloyd, with whom he was lodged in Pineapple Cottage, he was the ideal bachelor companion, to Belle he was someone to flirt with (though Balfour did nothing whatever to encourage her), to Margaret Stevenson he was a source of great family pride. Fanny was in awe of his good looks and Oxford degree, while Stevenson was delighted with his cousin’s quiet, clever, manly company. He found in Balfour the sympathetic kins-man-helper that Lloyd had never quite managed to become. Graham understood the tone and context of Louis’s talk perfectly, the literary and legal references, the dialect, the family ‘accent of mind’, and his presence encouraged Louis to start setting down reminiscences of his youth in Scotland. Balfour seemed the ideal custodian of this information; he would understand how to transmit it eventually to Colvin, Stevenson’s designated biographer. Thus in the copious Balfour papers now housed at the National Library of Scotland are page after page in Graham’s hand of notes taken at Vailima of Stevenson’s table-talk and memories, long before anyone other than Colvin was being considered as the ‘official’ keeper of the flame.
Relatively few of Balfour’s personal impressions of Vailima made their way into his 1901 biography of his cousin, though the thorough knowledge of the household he acquired over his three extended stays in 1892, ‘93 and ‘94 (amounting to fourteen months altogether) allowed him unique insight into the problems of how to present that last phase of Stevenson’s life (sympathetic concealment of Fanny’s illness, for instance, and of many other sensitive family issues, was essential). He was given the name ‘Pelema’: not a ‘native’ title of significance, but a pidgin version of Stevenson’s frequent jokey reference to his cousin as ‘that blame Balfour’.
Another ‘cousin’ visited Samoa in the summer of 1892 and did much to agitate the volatile situation at Vailima. Margaret Child-Villiers, wife of the Governor of New South Wales, Lord Jersey, had been invited to the islands by Bazett Haggard with her seventeen-year-old daughter Margaret and her brother, Captain Rupert Leigh, an ADC to the Governor. The dark-haired, vivacious, forty-three-year-old Countess fell in immediately with Stevenson, whose growing reputation as a controversialist in the region must have intrigued her, and he in turn was delighted with a dose of English manners, aristocratic élan and female charm. Within hours of meeting, Haggard was at the door of Vailima with a request from Lady Jersey to be included on a visit which Louis and Fanny had planned to make to Malie, on the southern coast of Upolu, where Mataafa had set up his rebel headquarters. Captain Leigh had already expressed a desire to come along on the jaunt, using an assumed name so as not to implicate Lord Jersey’s office. Now Lady Jersey wanted to join in too, in the guise of Mr Stevenson’s ‘cousin’. No sooner was this irresponsible desire expressed than Stevenson was sending letters all round, to Mataafa, telling him to expect a ‘Miss Amelia Balfour’ who would require separate sleeping quarters, to Leigh and to ‘Miss Balfour’ herself (in a letter frivolously dated 1745 and referring to Mataafa as ‘the king over the water’), with details of their rendezvous by the ford of Gase-Gase. ‘This lark is certainly huge,’ Stevenson wrote to Colvin, revelling in the escape into melodrama. On the day of the tryst, the Vailima party hid in a thicket hard by the ford: ‘Thirty minutes late. Had the secret oozed out? Were they arrested? [ … ] Haggard, insane with secrecy and romance, overtook me, almost bore me down, shouting “Ride, ride!” like the hero in a ballad.’23 No one seemed to consider that this pantomime might have detracted from the respect due to Mataafa; they were all too much on the spree. For a couple of days, Stevenson was as elated as a child playing hide and seek in the garden of Colinton Manse.
The ‘wild round of gaiety’ that accompanied Lady Jersey’s visit included a steeplechase, dinners, the joint writing of a ‘Ouida romance’ about Haggard, and the opening of a girls’ school in Apia where Stevenson was able to appreciate the siren’s ‘voice of gold’.24* No wonder Fanny was less than thrilled with the English visitors and left an acid account of them in her diary: ‘The Jerseys have been and gone, trailing clouds of glory over the island. [ … ] They were a selfish “champagne Charley” set [ … ] Lady Jersey tall and leggy and awkward, with bold black eyes and sensual mouth; very selfish and greedy of admiration, a touch of vulgarity.’26
The larks with Lady Jersey may have been wonderful for letting off steam, but were ill-conceived politically and compounded Stevenson’s growing reputation in diplomatic circles as a publicity-seeking nuisance. His letters to The Times about Samoa (there were ten of them published altogether) were too long, too particular and too bridlingly rhetorical to win much praise or even attention from his British and American literary friends, though they were noted by the Foreign and Consular Office. But again the Old Man Virulent felt moved to have his say, enclosing with one letter copies of extensive correspondence with Baron Pilsach, the main object of his ire. Pilsach had been left in charge of five rebel chiefs who had surrendered themselves to the Chief Justice, Conrad Cedercrantz, on the understanding that they would be well treated during six months’ incarceration. In Cedercrantz’s absence, Pilsach had mined the Apia prison and threatened to blow it up at any attempt at escape or rescue. This was one of many issues Stevenson took up with zeal. Petty corruption, tax avoidance, non-payment of rent among the government administrators – most of his complaints were aimed at the Germans, whose lack of interest in Samoan self-government and continued ambition to take over the islands grew daily more alarming and infuriating to Stevenson. The Times continued to print his letters, though noting in one editorial that the ‘very fury’ of the novelist’s attack ‘suggests the possibility that the glowing indignation which inflames the champion may have so warped his judgement as to make him less than just to his opponents’.27 In fact, Stevenson had no personal animus against Cedercrantz whatever, even found him charming, and was well aware of his letters’ one-sidedness (also their tiresomeness, writing to Lang that they made his ‘jaws yawn to re-read’28). Still, he stuck pig-headedly to what he saw as the task in hand, informing The Times in September 1892 that he would carry on troubling the editor ‘with these twopenny concerns [ … ] until some step is taken by the three Powers, or until I have quite exhausted your indulgence’.29
Stevenson was lucky to have a powerful supporter in Lord Rosebery, then Foreign Secretary, who was a great admirer of his books. Without friends in such high places, Stevenson might well have found himself deported from Samoa as a troublemaker, for his support of Mataafa raised rumours at one point that the author was personally trying to engineer a war. Nothing put him off adding fat to the fire, however, and he went ahead quickly with A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa, hoping it would be in time to be of ‘some service to a distracted country’. Aware that such a book might be refused by his publishers, Stevenson was prepared to bear the costs himself. ‘You will I daresay be appalled to receive three (possibly four) chapters of a new book of the least attractive sort: a history of nowhere in a corner [which] very likely no one would possibly wish to read [ … ], but I wish to publish,’ he wrote to Burlingame in November 1891.30 In the end, A Footnote found publishers on both sides of the Atlantic (such was the draw of the author’s name), and appeared in August 1892. Stevenson waited impatiently for some reaction, but as with his other forays into public invective, the effect was disappointing. The most response he got was an unwelcome one: the threat of legal action from a missionary who felt he had been libelled. Still, Stevenson had stood up robustly for his principles yet again.
To friends in England, Stevenson’s interest in Samoan politics was beginning to seem an unholy bore. Colvin must have tired of having to act as an apologist on behalf of ‘Tusi Tala’: he wanted ‘Ah welless’ back, in spirit if not in body, and wrote to say so in strong terms:
Do [any of our white affairs] interest you at all[?]. I could remark in passing that for three letters or more you have not uttered a single word about anything but your beloved blacks – or chocolates – confound them; beloved no doubt to you; to us detested, as shutting out your thoughts, or so it often seems, from the main currents of human affairs, and oh so much less interesting than any dog, cat, mouse, house, or jenny-wren of our own known and hereditary associations, loves and latitudes. [ … ] please let us have a letter or two with something besides native politics, prisons, kava feasts, and such things as our Cockney stomachs can ill assimilate.31
Stevenson replied with remarkable patience, ‘Dear Colvin, please remember that my life passes among my “blacks or chocolates”. [ … ] You must try to exercise a trifle of imagination, and put yourself, perhaps with an effort, into some sort of sympathy with these people, or how am I to write to you?’32 Colvin apologised subsequently for what he knew had been an intemperate outburst, and admitted in his published Memories and Notes that he had become ‘hypercritical about the quality and value of some of the work sent home from the Pacific’, which was ‘disappointingly lacking in the thrill and romance one expected of [Stevenson] in relating experiences which had realized the dream of his youth’.33 This sense of dashed expectations was widespread among Stevenson’s friends and admirers. ‘I see that romantic surroundings are the worst surroundings possible for a romantic writer,’ Oscar Wilde wrote. ‘In Gower Street Stevenson could have written a new Trois Mousquetaires. In Samoa he wrote letters to The Times about Germans.’34
Graham Greene, a subsequent admirer of Stevenson, but critical of those who overvalued the ‘spurious maturity’ of his essays and early works, felt quite the opposite: that it was only in these last years, and faced with the challenge of the South Sea material, that Stevenson began to ‘shed disguising graces’. ‘If he is to survive for us,’ Greene wrote, ‘[it will be as] the tired, disheartened writer of the last eight years, pegging desperately away at what he failed to recognise as his masterworks.’35 The book Greene must have had in mind as an example of ‘pegging away at a masterwork’ was The Ebb-Tide, the composition of which is documented thoroughly in Stevenson’s letters of 1893. Few better accounts exist of a novelist suffering the agonies of writer’s block. Stevenson had returned to the novel, based on Lloyd’s ‘Pearl Fisher’ (begun in Hawaii three years earlier), while Catriona was in production, putting aside another Scottish novel, Weir of Hermiston, to make some money from an easy job. By the time Stevenson began to work steadily on it, in February 1893, Lloyd had no further part in the writing, and the original large scheme, for a book as long as The Wrecker, had been abandoned. Stevenson had decided to concentrate on the character of Attwater, the refined, elusive monomaniac living on an uncharted pearl-fishing island in the South Seas, whose story takes up the whole second half of the book and was entirely the work of the one writer.
In May, Stevenson reported to Colvin that he was ‘grinding singly’ at the manuscript, and had reached page 82 of a projected 110 or so. ‘Not much Waverley Novels about this!’ he remarked, referring to the slow rate of production, only twenty-four pages in three weeks. On the sixteenth he complained that the work was like ‘a crucifixion’,36 and dreaded having to finish his letter and return to ‘the damned thing lying waiting for me on p.88, where I last broke down’:
I break down at every paragraph, I may observe, and lie here, and sweat, and curse over the blame thing, till I can get one sentence wrung out after another. Strange doom! after having worked so easily for so long!37
Page 88 was to prove as inescapable as his old recurring nightmare of the everlasting stair, for he thought he had finished it on the sixteenth, but two days later was back again, and feared a relapse even further, to page 85. On 20 May he lamented only having written or revised eleven pages in nine days; then he pushed on to page 100, only to slip back, by the beginning of June, to page 93. So it went on, an ebbing tide indeed, a book which he might almost have imagined disappearing under his pen. And the difficulty was not artistry so much as ‘my total inability to write’, as he bravely confessed to Colvin:
Yesterday I was a living half hour upon a single clause and have a gallery of variants that would surprise you. And this sort of trouble (which I cannot avoid) unfortunately produces nothing when done but alembication and the far-fetched.38
To another correspondent he wrote in a more humorous vein:
Be it known to this fluent generation that I, R.L.S., in the forty-third year of my age and the twentieth of my professional life, wrote twenty-four pages in twenty-one days: working from six to eleven, and again in the afternoon from two to four, without fail or interruption. Such are the gifts the gods have endowed us withal; such was the facility of this prolific writer!39
The labour of writing The Ebb-Tide left him incapable of deciding whether the book was ‘an extraordinary work’ or ‘forced, violent, alembicated’ (the phrases appear in the same letter40), whether the characters ‘knocked spots’ or were ‘a troop of swine’.41 In fact, all those things are true to some degree. The story begins with three white beachcombers facing utter destitution in Papeete after ‘a long apprenticeship in going downward’: Davis, an American sea-captain, is an alcoholic whose negligence killed seven of his former crew; Huish, an unscrupulous and degenerate cockney clerk; and Herrick, an Oxford-educated man who has sunk through various levels of failure and disgrace and is now in self-exile in the Pacific. When the chance arises to take over the charter of a schooner blighted by smallpox, the desperados take it and set out, with what they have been told is a cargo of Californian champagne, to make some money in Sydney.
Far out at sea, they discover that most of the cargo is water, not champagne, and propelled off-course by bad weather, they are in worse straits, it seems, than before. The sighting of an island which is not on the chart but of which there are rumours reported in the mariners’ directory leads the men to speculate that some valuable private trade goes on there, and they approach to investigate. Thus they meet Attwater, the owner of the island, a tall, impeccably dressed Englishman, guarded and cultured, who has assumed absolute power over his native servants (all but three of whom have recently died from an outbreak of smallpox). He is an ex-missionary and ardent evangelist – ‘God hears the bell!’ he tells his guests, ‘we sit in this verandah on a lighted stage with all heaven for spectators!’42 – whose choice of habitation, it becomes clear, has as much to do with socio-religious experimentation as commerce. When he isolates Herrick from his shipmates, intending to win over the only member of the trio worth saving, Herrick’s loyalties (if that is quite the right word) are torn between this coolly superior new acquaintance and the wretches with whom he has shared destitution, and who clearly intend to rob, blackmail or kill their host.
The stand-off ends in a tense attempt at a parley and Huish’s crude attack on Attwater with a bottle of vitriol, anticipated by the pearl trader, who shoots him dead. Attwater gets his convert in the unattractive shape of Davis, and the novel ends with the ex-alcoholic pleading with Herrick to stay on the island and share the ‘peace of believing’. It wasn’t an ending that pleased the critics (perhaps they didn’t admit its profound cynicism), though the reviews were pretty favourable, if restrained. No one recognised the birth of a new and very modern literary motif in Stevenson’s invention of a hidden settlement ruled over by a maverick lone white man, the theme to be taken up in the following decade by H.G. Wells in The Island of Dr Moreau,* Conrad in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim and Rider Haggard in Heart of the World, and penetrating into popular culture as far as Superman’s archenemy Lex Luther and some of Ian Fleming’s Bond villains.
Another innovative, under-appreciated work by Stevenson from these last years of his life was the stories collected posthumously as Fables (which included some of the stories written in the 1870s). ‘The Persons of the Tale’, written some time between 1881 and 1894, is particularly remarkable, a ‘postmodern’ fiction created before the dawn of Modernism. In it, two of the characters from Treasure Island, Long John Silver and Captain Smollett, take a break between chapters thirty-two and thirty-three of the novel to smoke a pipe ‘not far from the story’ and discuss their relative importance to the author, as they perceive it. ‘“Who am I to pipe up with my opinions?”’ Smollett says. ‘“I know the Author’s on the side of good; he tells me so, it runs out of his pen as he writes.”’ Silver argues that though he is the villain of the story, he knows he has the author’s sympathy: ‘“I’m his favourite chara’ter. He does me fathoms better’n he does you – fathoms, he does. And he likes doing me. He keeps me on deck mostly all the time, crutch and all, and he leaves you measling in the hold, where nobody can’t see you, nor wants to.”’ Smollett replies that the author ‘“has to get a story [ … ] and to have a man like the doctor (say) given a proper chance, he has to put in men like you and Hands.”’ They are called back into the novel by the opening of the ink bottle and the author writing the words ‘Chapter XXXIII’ (the chapter of Treasure Island in which Silver’s authority is overturned).43 Fables was lucky to get published, as Fanny hated the stories. ‘I can’t see that they mean anything at all,’ she wrote to her mother-in-law in November 1895. ‘I wouldn’t let Louis publish them when he wrote them, and am disgusted that it should have been done now. They were written in what I used to call one of Louis’s lapses, and are foolish and meaningless.’44 But Charles Baxter spirited the manuscripts away from Vailima, and negotiated magazine publication in 1895 and book publication the following year.
Early in 1893 the extension to Vailima was finished, at huge cost, considerable inconvenience and against the wishes of the Work Horse. Margaret Stevenson, at whose strong insistence the whole project had been instigated, chose just this moment to go back to Scotland for an indefinite visit. The ostensible reason was ‘la grippe’, but it seems likely that she wanted a respite from having to witness the symptoms of Fanny’s deterioration. Austin Strong had been sent away to school in California (to live with his greataunt Nellie Vandegrift and her husband in Monterey) and Graham Balfour was off on his travels; the household was therefore at its smallest when Fanny suffered her worst ‘fit’ yet, as Stevenson confided to Colvin (in the one explicit letter on the subject):
The last was a hell of a scene which lasted all night – I will never tell anyone what about, it could not be believed, and was so unlike herself or any of us – in which Belle and I held her for about two hours; she wanted to run away.45
Desperate for some remedy, Louis and Belle decided to take Fanny to Sydney to consult a doctor, booking in to the Oxford Hotel again in late February. Released by a sense of holiday and a seeming improvement in Fanny, Louis went on a spending spree, buying new clothes for all of them, including a sumptuous black velvet gown for his wife, made secretly, to Belle’s measurements, as a surprise. They also had their photographs taken, and those of Fanny are among the most remarkable of all images of her. Unlike the scowling, dark, rather masculine figure she usually presents in pictures from these years, in Sydney the fifty-three-year-old ‘weird woman’ looked suddenly beautiful again, with a steady, sleepwalking look in her eyes and an almost magical youthfulness of feature.
But it wasn’t to last. ‘The first few weeks were delightful,’ Louis told Colvin,
her voice quiet again – no more of that anxious shrillness about nothing, that had so long echoed in my ears. And then she got bad again. Since she has been back, also she has been kind – querulously so, but kind. And today’s fit (which was the most insane she has yet had) was still only gentle and melancholy. I am broken on the wheel, or feel like it. Belle and Lloyd are both as good as gold. Belle has her faults and plenty of them; but she has been a blessed friend to me.46
In April, Louis wrote to his mother that they were ‘all recovered or recovering’, but Belle interrupted the dictation and exhorted Louis to ‘tell the truth – that Fanny is not recovering’. Louis continues, ‘But though it is true she seems to have taken a cast back, she is far indeed from being so dreadfully ill as she was before.’ At this, Belle abandons dictation and writes in her own person, ‘(She lies in bed, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t want to eat or speak; Louis does not want to alarm you but I think you should know what a really anxious time we are going through [ … ] The doctor says there is no danger and I hope he is right, but I would like to see her take an interest in something. Belle.)’47
Louis kept reporting his wife ‘much better’ over the next few months in letters to Colvin, and indeed never complained again to him about the problem, showing himself perhaps too much his mother’s son in this capacity to shut his eyes to unpleasantness. He was relieved to get a diagnosis for his wife’s illness of Bright’s Disease from a doctor in Honolulu: Fanny seemed relieved too – a kidney disorder was so much easier to live with. But the likelihood of Fanny having had Bright’s, which affects mostly young people and of which she had few symptoms except the sporadic stomach cramps, seems remote. Bright’s Disease is also traditionally confusable with syphilis.
When Fanny resumed writing her diary in July 1893, the domestic atmosphere it recorded was as bad as before. Her continuing instability is evident in her drive to justify all her own actions and criticise all those of her husband, often described as ‘in the sulks’. Contention seems the dominant note, and Louis the isolated target. When the menfolk of Vailima, on the outbreak of war in the islands, warned her and Belle to keep a low profile (for obvious reasons), she complained to her diary, ‘Lloyd and Pelema are young, and of course intolerant, but it is a little surprise [sic] to find Louis with the same ideas.’48 And when they all advised against attending a Fourth of July ball in Apia, Fanny and Belle became set on going. ‘Louis in deep sulks at our attitude, Lloyd sweetly amiable, Pelema keeping out of sight,’ she wrote, with a flash of the old humour, but went on to register petty complaints about Louis insisting on leaving the ball before three in the morning (so that he could work next day) and the fact that she and Belle had not dressed up as much as the other American women, who all, she notes pointedly, had elaborate new gowns for the occasion.
Once war had broken out in Samoa, it became, in Fanny’s mind, a sort of extension of the marital battleground. She persisted in misinterpreting Louis’s motives and loyalties in order to have something substantial to disagree with him about, pretending to find his placation of the Samoan Secretary of State sinister, and ‘furious’ over what she thought was a lessening of his fervour towards Mataafa. ‘I intend to do everything in my power to save Mataafa,’ she wrote dramatically on 17 July 1893:
And if Louis turns his face from him by the fraction of an inch, I shall wear black in public[.] [I]f they murder him, or if he is brought in to Apia a prisoner I shall go down alone and kiss his hand as my king. Louis says this is all arrant mad quixotism. I suppose it is; but when I look at the white men at the head of the government and cannot make up my mind which is the greater coward, my woman’s heart burns with shame and fury and I am ready for my madness.49
To some extent, as Louis knew, Fanny had always been like this: self-dramatising, highly strung, over-emphatic. The thought could not have been comforting, for she was now, to a greater or lesser extent, deranged. Louis’s description of himself to Barrie at the end of this year as ‘fatuously contented’ was a deliberately misleading one. There is no doubt that though he tried to keep it secret, the last three years of Stevenson’s life were deeply unhappy.
The Samoan war, when it came, lasted only nine days. There had been skirmishes since the spring of 1893 between Mataafa’s and Laupepa’s men, but the trigger was Mataafa’s raising of his flag at Malie, declaring himself king. On 8 July, government forces defeated him at Vailele (as it was obvious they would) and he fled to the tiny island of Manono, just off the western end of Upolu. Holed up there, he could easily have been beaten by Laupepa, but before the showdown took place British and German warships were sent to Manono and forced Mataafa to surrender. He was then deported to the Marquesas and the chiefs who had fought with him were put in prison in Apia.
Stevenson’s support of these imprisoned chiefs, by means of visits to them and continued agitation of the authorities about the conditions under which they were being kept, earned him their deep gratitude, and when they were released they offered to make a road from Vailima in commemoration of it. The opening of ‘The Road of the Loving Heart’ (suitably marked with a sign that made the political origins of the gift quite clear) was occasion for one of the many feasts that Stevenson and his family gave at Vailima. Birthdays, Thanksgiving, the arrival of a British warship’s crew into Apia; almost anything could suggest one of these parties, photographs of which show everyone seated on the floor on the wide verandas (twelve feet deep all round) facing a rather intimidating quantity of taro, bananas and ship’s biscuits. The most splendid party they ever gave was a ball in February 1894, to which ‘all the big-wigs’ on the island were invited, and which only the German Consul and Cedercrantz refused to attend. There were bowls of kava (the mildly hallucinogenic local root that is pounded to make the Samoan national drink), a claret cup and beer, caviar and devilled chicken, Scottisches and gavottes:
For music the two Johnson boys and an unhanged thief and villain of a Hawaiian, with two boys who sang and played tambourine and bells, made the best band ever heard in Apia – bar men-of-wars. The floor was waxed to perfection, falls were frequent and heavy. The room shone all over with the glow of the four big lamps, and the sideboard glittered with all the silver and two lamps of its own. The front of the house shone from end to end [ … ] in the most lavish and resplendent manner with sixty-five coloured paper lanterns at a total cost of twelve dollars and I don’t know how much for candles.50
Stevenson still had hopes that Vailima would become ‘really a place of business’,51 and had been discussing banana yields with Graham Balfour, and the possibility of getting a tramway built from the house to the port. The cash-flow problem no longer looked like a temporary one; nor did Louis’s restored vitality. He had come to think of himself, almost glumly, as indestructible, doomed ‘to see it out’52 despite persistent migraines throughout 1893, a new and thoroughly unpleasant development. The symptoms seemed so obviously connected to his intake of alcohol and tobacco that he contemplated the unthinkable – giving both up – with ‘nauseating intimations that it ought to be forever’, as he confided to Gosse.53 ‘Cigarettes without intermission except when coughing or kissing’ is how Stevenson had described his nicotine habit to Barrie,54 so no wonder his resolve to give up proved unsustainable. He must have reasoned that the headaches would simply have to be endured, perhaps with the aid of another strong coffee, or a glass of Merlot.
Baxter’s slide into alcoholism, which Colvin had been trying to keep from his friend, had to be confessed in 1894, as he was intending to make the journey out to Samoa. The deaths of his wife Grace in March 1893 and his father the following year, and continuing business troubles, had set Baxter on a downward path, and Colvin thought him ‘completely unhinged’ at their latest meeting, creating ‘deplorable scenes’.55 Baxter had put forward the idea (obviously for his own benefit as well as Louis’s – he would get a commission as agent) to publish a limited collected edition of Stevenson’s works to date, to be sold by subscription at the highest price possible, and to be called the Edinburgh Edition. Louis was delighted at the prospect, especially since he was not required to do anything (all the editing, such as it was, was done by Colvin, and the complex negotiations with the many publishers involved were undertaken by Baxter). The estimated profits from the venture would be eight to ten thousand pounds – an enormous sum that would be the saving of them all. And Baxter’s hopes were amply justified: the Edinburgh Edition sold out its subscription within two months of being advertised and eventually realised something near £10,000. But by then it was a memorial, not a work in progress.56
The edition was dedicated to Fanny:
I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn
On Lammermuir. Harkening I heard again
In my precipitous city beaten bells
Winnow the keen sea wind. And here afar
Intent on my own race and place I wrote.
Take thou the writing: thine it is. For who
Burnished the sword, blew on the drowsy coal,
Held still the target higher, chary of praise
And prodigal of censure – who but thou?
So now, in the end, if this the least be good,
If any deed be done, if any fire
Burn in the imperfect page, the praise be thine.57
The search for Stevenson’s ‘masterpiece’ might have gone on for years, like the hunt for a hidden will, had he not left unfinished at his death Weir of Hermiston, on which his friends fell with gratitude, especially Colvin, who felt it held ‘certainly the highest place’ among Stevenson’s works, citing ‘the ripened art [ … ] the wide range of character and emotion over which he sweeps with so assured a hand, his vital poetry of vision and magic of presentment’.58 Arnold Bennett also thought Weir surpassed ‘all Stevenson’s previous achievement’,59 a dubious compliment which Stevenson would have been the first to raise an eyebrow at. But of course what his friends really valued was Weir’s potential, and, perhaps, an end to having to worry about the meaning of Stevenson’s oeuvre. The line had been drawn, the author had died young and his last work naturally acquired a symbolic status beyond all the others, indicating what might have issued from that fertile brain and hard-pressed body had Stevenson been spared.
Stevenson had started the story in 1890, put it by several times, and only worked on it consistently in the last weeks of his life, having spent months beforehand slogging away at St Ives (also unfinished). St Ives, set during the Napoleonic Wars, was described by the author as ‘a mere tissue of adventures’, and represented all he most disliked about his own talent: ‘a very little dose of inspiration, and a pretty little trick of style, long lost, improved by the most heroic industry’.60 From the first pages of Weir, on the other hand, it is obvious that Stevenson was relishing both his subject and his style. The writing is pithy and sardonic; Weir discusses old capital cases with his bride-to-be, by way of love-talk; she, in a comically constructed line, is described as ‘pious, anxious, tender, tearful, and incompetent’; Mrs Weir hears the local minister ‘booming outside on the dogmatic ramparts [ … ] like the cannon of a beleaguered city’, while Dandie Elliott is seen ‘honouring the Sabbath by a sacred vacancy of mind’. Weir himself is a great character-study, based on a real-life ‘hanging judge’, Lord Braxfield, the last on the Scottish bench, according to Stevenson, to employ the pure Scots idiom. Weir has no affectations, not even that of judicial impartiality. He is natural to the point of grossness, continually offending his refined son by his manners and language and terrifying his meek wife, who thinks him ‘the extreme, if scarcely the ideal, of his sex’. But the recondite pleasure Weir finds in his work (condemning criminals to death) is not mere sadism, as his son believes, nor does Weir lack finer feelings; he is simply impotent to express them. His stoicism about this disability is deftly portrayed by the author: ‘If [Weir] failed to gain his son’s friendship, or even his son’s toleration, on he went up the great, bare staircase of his duty, uncheered and undepressed.’61
There are two prominent women characters in the book, both (in a return to the double motif) called Kirstie Elliott; one is the young woman whom Archie Weir loves, the other her aunt, a Border-country earth-goddess, emotional and strong-minded. The chapter about the elder Kirstie alone in her bedroom, ‘A Nocturnal Visit’, represents the first time the author had allowed any sustained attention to rest in the thoughts of a female character:
By the faint light of her nocturnal rush, she stood before the looking-glass, carried her shapely arms above her head, and gathered up the treasures of her tresses. She was never backward to admire herself; that kind of modesty was a stranger to her nature; and she paused, struck with a pleased wonder at the sight. ‘Ye daft auld wife!’ she said, answering a thought that was not; and she blushed with the innocent consciousness of a child. Hastily she did up the massive and shining coils, hastily donned a wrapper, and with the rush-light in her hand, stole into the hall.62
The strong characterisation of the elder Kirstie, and her mature womanliness, seemed a relief to many critics who had feared that to Stevenson ‘woman remained the eternal puzzle’.63 ‘It will be an eternal pity if a writer like Stevenson passes away without having once applied his marvellous gifts of vision and sympathy to the reproduction and transfiguration of every-day human life,’ Israel Zangwill had written when reviewing the all-male Ebb-Tide, ‘if he is content to play perpetually with wrecks and treasures and islands, and to be remembered as an exquisite artist in the abnormal.’64 Weir of Hermiston gave everyone the opportunity to forget those apparent shortcomings, the ‘abnormality’ of his stories of blacks and chocolates, the dubious status of his collaborations, and return to an image of the author as they had first loved him: a brilliant stylist, a whirlwind of potential, a young man with a half-developed idea to be continued.
Every reader who picks up Weir of Hermiston knows it is an uncompleted novel, yet the end, coming as it does mid-sentence, is always a shock:
There arose from before him the curtains of boyhood, and he saw for the first time the ambiguous face of woman as she is. In vain, he looked back over the interview; he saw not where he had offended. It seemed unprovoked, a wilful convulsion of brute nature
That is where Louis stopped work at midday on Monday, 3 December 1894. In the afternoon he gave Austin a lesson in French and later in the day (Fanny said it was about 6 p.m.) he was on the back veranda with his wife, helping her prepare the dressing for a salad. By her account in a letter to Anne Jenkin written two days later, Fanny had been having presentiments of disaster all day and Louis was ‘trying to cheer me up’. ‘One of the last things he did was to play a game of solitaire with cards for me to watch, thinking it would amuse me and take my mind off the terror that oppressed me.’65 This is an odd detail, for solitaire is not a game with any spectator-value, and Fanny, an avid card-player, is as likely to have played it herself as stood and watched someone else do so. Perhaps Louis was trying to entertain her with a commentary on his game as she worked – some such benign picture of the concerned spouse is certainly what Fanny wanted to suggest. It could also have been the case that Louis was sitting out ‘the terror’ of his wife’s dark mood by retreating into this quintessentially solitary pastime.
When it came to making the mayonnaise (Louis’s special request – again it sounds as if he was trying to humour or divert his wife), he took the job of dripping the oil in, while Fanny dealt with the egg yolks. ‘Suddenly he set down the bottle, knelt by the table leaning his head against it,’ Fanny wrote, unable to finish her account, which Belle completed: ‘He suddenly said, “What’s that?” or “What a pain!” and put both hands to his head. “Do I look strange?” he asked, and then he reeled and fell backwards.’66 The servant Sosimo ran to help, Fanny cried out for hot water to be fetched, and as they half-carried him into the big hall, Louis, according to Austin Strong, said, ‘All right Fanny, I can walk.’67 Belle had come down to see what her mother was shouting about, and found Louis unconscious in a chair, breathing heavily, his feet in the hot water, his hands being chafed to keep his circulation active. Lloyd, arriving up the garden, unaware of an emergency, was sent immediately down to Apia to fetch help, while Margaret, Fanny and Belle did their best, rubbing brandy on Louis’s skin: ‘We saw that he was dying,’ Belle wrote, ‘though each said to the other “he is surely better” or “his pulse is stronger”’:
[ … ] as the room darkened one by one all the Samoans on the place crept in silently and sat on the floor in a wide semi-circle around him. Some fanned him, others waited on one knee for a message and others ran down the road with lanterns to light the doctor.68
Lloyd found two doctors, the first to arrive the surgeon from HMS Wallaroo, who took Stevenson’s limping pulse, but clearly felt there was no hope of revival. Seeing the writer’s emaciated arms, he exclaimed, ‘How can anybody write books with arms like these?’69 Their local doctor, Bernard Funk, came next, but there was nothing to be done except fetch a bed into the hall and listen to the prayers of Aunt Maggie and her friend Clarke, the missionary. In between those, there were only fewer, fainter breaths.
Stevenson died just after eight o’clock that evening, of a cerebral haemorrhage, according to Funk’s certification. There was no commotion or outcry; the family, who had lived with this death for so long, seemed numb. They laid out the body in dress trousers, a white shirt and gold studs, and two of the ‘boys’ put the corpse’s hands together, ‘interlacing the fingers with tender care’.70 The news spread quickly, and all through the evening local chiefs and their families came to pay their respects, laying on the body the fine woven mats that were Samoans’ most precious currency and saying their dignified, brief farewells: ‘Tofa, Tusi Tala,’ ‘Alofa, Tusi Tala.’
In the tropical heat, the burial needed to take place quickly, but the place where Louis had wanted to be laid, the plateau of Mount Vaea that was visible from the house, had no path to it. Lloyd, thrust into authority, had to find some way of accessing the site and appealed to all their friends on the island to send whoever was available to help cut a path. More than forty Samoans, including some chiefs, came promptly the next day and began the seemingly impossible task of clearing the virgin jungle up the mountainside. Two paths exist today, one following approximately the line of that first, most direct one; both are very steep at points and tiring to climb in the equatorial humidity. The construction of the original path at speed on the day after Stevenson’s death was a feat of love as well as industry, the latest and greatest mark of the Samoans’ respect and affection for their most sympathetic sojourner.
On a ‘gloomy, gusty, sodden December day’ in London, Sidney Colvin entered the street after lunching at a government office in Westminster, and saw newspaper posters ‘flapping dankly in the street corners, with the words “Death of R.L. Stevenson” printed large upon them’.71 Baxter, on his way to Samoa, heard the news in Port Said. He reached Vailima almost eight weeks later. In his bags were copies of the first two volumes of the Edinburgh Edition.
*Fanny’s voice is often described by her husband during this period as ‘shrill’, and the general tone at Vailima ‘a Babel fit for the bottomless pit; my wife, her daughter, her grandson and my mother all shrieking at each other round the house’.25
*Wells’s ghastly novel of 1896 is remarkable for another strong link with Stevenson, which may be entirely coincidental (as he could have heard the story only from hearsay by the date when The Island of Dr Moreau was published), and that is the incident in Dr Trudeau’s laboratory on his island in Saranac Lake when Stevenson voiced repulsion at the practice of vivisection. The similarity with the scene in Moreau’s laboratory, even to the names of the doctors, is peculiar.