SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA
"Tis a good land to fall in with men, and a pleasant land to see."
—(Words spoken by Hendrik Hudson when he first brought his ship through the Narrows and saw the Bay of New York.)
Stevenson's second landing in New York was a great contrast to his first. The "Amateur Emigrant" had no one to bid him welcome and Godspeed but a West Street tavern-keeper, and now when Mr. Will Low, his old friend of Fontainebleau days, hastened to the dock to welcome him on the Ludgate Hill, he found the author of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" already surrounded by reporters.
The trip had done him good in spite of their passage having been an unusually rough one, with numerous discomforts. The Ludgate Hill was not an up-to-date liner and she carried a very mixed cargo. The very fact of her being a tramp ship and that the passengers were free to be about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, and enjoy a real sea life, delighted Stevenson, and he wrote back to Sidney Colvin:
"I enjoyed myself more than I could have hoped on board our floating menagerie; stallions and monkeys and matches made our cargo; and the vast continent of the incongruities rolled the while like a haystack; and the stallions stood hypnotized by the motion, looking through the port at our dinner table, and winnied when the crockery was broken; and the little monkeys stared at one another in their cages ... and the big monkey, Jacko scoured about the ship and rested willingly in my arms ... the other passengers, when they were not sick, looked on and laughed. Take all this picture, and make it roll till the bell shall sound unexpected notes and the fittings shall break loose in our state rooms, and you have the voyage of the Ludgate Hill. She arrived in the port of New York without beer, porter, soda-water, curaçoa, fresh meat, or fresh water, and yet we lived and we regret her."
After a short visit with friends in Newport they returned to New York and settled down for a time in the Hotel St. Stephen, on 11th Street, near University Place, to make plans for their winter's trip.
Soon after their arrival "Jekyll and Hyde" was dramatized and produced with great success. When it was known that the author of this remarkable story was in the city, people flocked from all sides to call on him, and fairly wearied him with their attentions, although he liked to see them and made many interesting acquaintances at the time.
Washington Square was one of his favorite spots in New York, and he spent many hours there watching the children playing about. A day he always recalled with special pleasure was the one when he had spent a whole forenoon in the Square talking with Mark Twain.
Among those who were anxious to know Stevenson was the American sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens. He had been delighted with his writings and regretted he had not met him in Paris when he and Mr. Low had been there together. "If Stevenson ever comes to New York," he said to Mr. Low, "I want to meet him," and added that he would consider it a great privilege if Stevenson would permit him to make his portrait.
It was with much pleasure, therefore, that Mr. Low brought them together, and they took to one another immediately. "I like your sculptor. What a splendid straightforward and simple fellow he is," said Stevenson; and St. Gaudens's comment after their first meeting was: "Astonishingly young, not a bit like an invalid and a bully fellow."
Stevenson readily consented to sit for his portrait, and they spent many delightful hours together while the sketches were being made for it.
One day the sculptor brought his eight-year-old son, Homer, with him, and years afterward gave the following description of the child's visit:
"On the way I endeavored to impress on the boy the fact that he was about to see a man whom he must remember all his life. It was a lovely day and as I entered the room Stevenson lay as usual on rather a high bed. I presented Homer to him ... but since my son's interest, notwithstanding my injunctions, was to say the least far from enthusiastic, I sent him out to play.
Bas-relief of Stevenson by Augustus Saint Gaudens
"I then asked Stevenson to pose but that was not successful ... all the gestures being forced and affected. Therefore I suggested to him that if he would try to write, some natural attitude might result. He assented and taking a sheet of paper ... he pulled his knees up and began. Immediately his attitude was such that I was enabled to create something of use and continued drawing while he wrote with an occasional smile. Presently I finished and told him there was no necessity for his writing any more. He did not reply but proceeded for quite a while. Then he folded the paper with deliberation, placed it in an envelope, addressed it, and handed it to me. It was to 'Master Homer St. Gaudens.'
"I asked him: 'Do you wish me to give this to the boy?'
"'Yes,'
"'When? Now?'
"'Oh, no, in five or ten years, or when I am dead.'
"I put it in a safe and here it is:
"May 27, 1888.
"Dear Homer St. Gaudens—Your father has brought you this day to see me and tells me it is his hope you may remember the occasion. I am going to do what I can to carry out his wish; and it may amuse you, years after, to see this little scrap of paper and to read what I write. I must begin by testifying that you yourself took no interest whatever in the introduction, and in the most proper spirit displayed a single-minded ambition to get back to play, and this I thought an excellent and admirable point in your character. You were also,—I use the past tense with a view to the time when you shall read rather than to that when I am writing,—a very pretty boy, and to my European views startlingly self-possessed. My time of observation was so limited that you must pardon me if I can say no more ... but you may perhaps like to know that the lean, flushed man in bed, who interested you so little, was in a state of mind extremely mingled and unpleasant; harassed with work which he thought he was not doing well, troubled with difficulties to which you will in time succeed, and yet looking forward to no less a matter than a voyage to the South Seas and the visitation of savage and desert islands.
"Your father's friend,
"Robert Louis Stevenson."
The portrait was finished in bas-relief and many copies were made of it. The most familiar is the one giving only Stevenson's head and shoulders, but the splendid big one placed as a memorial to him in St. Giles's Cathedral in Edinburgh shows him as he must have looked that day lying in bed, writing to Homer St. Gaudens.
Another man in New York whom Stevenson had admired for years and longed to meet was General Sherman. The war was long past, and he was then an old gentleman living very quietly. One day St. Gaudens took Stevenson to call on him, and he was asked afterward if he was at all disappointed in his hero.
"Disappointed," he exclaimed. "It was simply magnificent to stand in the presence of one who has done what he has, and then to find him so genial and human. It was the next thing to seeing Wellington, and I dare say the Iron Duke would not have been half so human."
The anticipation of a train trip across the continent was so distasteful that a proposed visit to Colorado was given up, and they decided to try the climate of the Adirondacks for the winter instead.
They chose Saranac, not far from the Canadian border, and rented a cottage there.
The climate was as unpleasant as possible. It rained, snowed, sleeted, and froze continually. The cold at times was arctic, the thermometer dropping thirty degrees below zero in January. "Venison was crunching with ice after being an hour in the oven, and a large lump of ice was still unmelted in a pot where water was steaming all around it."
Their cottage was dubbed "Hunter's Home." It was far from the railroad, few luxuries were to be had, and they lived a simple life in earnest.
Of course, they had a dog; no "hunter's home" would be complete without one, but Louis scouted the idea of adding things as unfitting as plush table-covers and upholstered footstools. The table went bare, and he fashioned a footstool for his mother out of a log, in true backwoods fashion.
His wife and mother found the cold hard to bear, but he stood it remarkably well and benefited by it. Saranac reminded him of Scotland, he said, without the smell of peats and the heather.
Dressed in a buffalo coat, astrakhan cap, and Indian boots, he and Lloyd walked, skated, or went sleighing every day.
His pen was kept busy also. A new novel, "The Master of Ballantrae," was started, and he contributed a series of articles to Scribner's Magazine. For these he was paid a regular sum offered by the publishers and agreed upon in advance—a new experience. It made him feel "awfu' grand," he told a Scotch friend.
A venture he had been longing to make since a boy was a cruise among the islands of the South Seas. While enduring the bitter cold of Saranac such hazy ideas as he had had about such a trip began to form themselves into a definite scheme. He was anxious for a long voyage; perhaps the warm sea air might cure him after all else had failed.
So night after night he and Lloyd eagerly pored over books and maps, and the family discussed plans for such an expedition.
When spring came Mrs. Stevenson started for San Francisco to secure, if possible, a yacht in which they might undertake such a cruise. If all went well Louis and his mother and Lloyd would follow.
While they waited for results they spent the time at Manasquan, on the New Jersey coast. There Stevenson and his son enjoyed the sailing, and their New York friends came often to see them.
Mr. Low tells of the day at Manasquan when word was received from Mrs. Stevenson that she had found a schooner-yacht satisfactory for the voyage.
An answer must be sent at once. Her husband telegraphed that they would come, but it was not without misgivings that he made this final decision. There was much at stake in an uncertain venture of the kind. It meant a sacrifice of comfort for his wife and mother, big expense, and perhaps no better health in the end.
However, it seemed worth the risk, and having decided to go he began to look forward to the trip with boyish delight. "It will be horrid fun," he said, "to be an invalid gentleman on board a yacht, to walk around with a spy-glass under your arm, to make landings and trade beads and chromos for cocoanuts, and to have the natives swim out to meet you."
He and Lloyd spent hours laying their course and making out lists of stores with which to furnish the schooner, regardless of the doubt expressed by their friends as to the capacity of the boat. "They calmly proceeded with their interminable lists and scorned the criticism of a mere land-lubber. All conversation that was not of a nautical character failed to hold their interest."
Cheered with strong hopes for Louis's future, the family departed for San Francisco on the 28th of May, 1888. Their one regret was the good friends they were leaving behind. This particularly affected Louis, but he tried to hide his feelings by making all sorts of lively and impossible proposals for their joining him later on.
His parting words to Mr. Low were: "There's England over there—and I've left it—perhaps I may never go back—and there on the other side of this big continent there's another sea rolling in. I loved the Pacific in the days when I was at Monterey, and perhaps now it will love me a little. I am going to meet it; ever since I was a boy the South Seas have laid a spell upon me."