Robert Louis Stevenson

by Margaret Moyes Black

Mr Stevenson listened gravely to all these things. He professed a real interest in them. He even remembered the names of the puppets and the parts they had played, and so gained for himself an enduring niche in the heart that had bitterly resented the mockery of the others. It is quite possible that a nature so gentle and so appreciative as his really felt the sympathy. The juniors are rarely mistaken as to the genuineness of the feelings of their elders, and his interest certainly rang true to the youthful mind. He had been himself a delicate child, so he was capable of understanding how many weary and solitary hours the romantic plays had filled pleasantly.

It is not a memory of much moment, perhaps, but it shows that even at an age when most young men are too keenly concerned with themselves and their own affairs to take much trouble for those who are a few years their juniors, Mr Stevenson had thought and sympathy to spare for the small joys and sorrows, the interests, and the 'make-believes' that had amused a lonely child, and which, after all, in one form or another, make up a good deal of life to most of us.

One is inclined to gather from his books, and from the statements accredited to him in magazines and newspapers, that he never took women very seriously. He may not have done so—save those who were very near and dear to him, and they were set in a sacred shrine of their own—but he certainly always treated women very charmingly; and the young girl relatives and friends, who were accustomed to be much in his home circle, had never any reason to complain of the lack of the most dainty and courtly attentions or of a most constant and spontaneous kindness from the somewhat solemn youth, who, like other youths of twenty, considered that it showed a great knowledge of the world to affect a rather cynical disdain of the feminine half of humanity. In himself there was, curiously enough, always a reminder of the feminine; an almost girlish look passed now and again, in those days, over the thin delicately-tinted face, and a womanly gentleness in voice and manner reminded one of his mother.

The same ready sympathy, the same power, as it were, of putting himself into a friend's place and entering with heart and soul into the affairs of others which made him so interested a listener to a young girl's story of her childhood's plays, made him in his later years the friend of the Samoans, the champion of Samoan liberties, and, all through his life, the one man whom the men and women who knew him loved with the love that is only given to the very few, and those the few, too often, whose death in life's prime, or before it, prove them to have been among those whom the old poet tells us 'the gods love.'

Nothing at this time was more remarkable in Mr Stevenson than his extraordinary youthfulness of mind. At an age when other young men affect to be blasé and world weary he was delightfully and fearlessly boyish. Boyish even in his occasional half-comic solemnity of appearance; he was boyish likewise in his charming jests and jokes, and, above all, in his hearty delight in any outdoor 'ploy' that came in his way.

A comical instance of this nearness of the boy to the surface in him displayed itself one grey east-windy afternoon at Leven, when one saw quite another side to him than the literary and dilettante one displayed, with something of a mannered affectation, the day before in 'The Turret' drawing-room. He had walked down to the sands with his aunt and there were assembled various younger members of the Balfour clique, and some whom age and sex ought perhaps to have taught to despise, though it had not, the hoydenish pleasures of 'a sea-house.' A 'sea-house,' for the benefit of the uninitiated, is a deep hole dug in the sand while the tide is out, and the sand taken from the hole is built round in broad, high walls to make the fort resist as long as possible the rush of the incoming waves. It takes hours to make, but no trouble is too great, for is there not the fierce joy of adventure at the last when the waves finally win in the struggle and the huddled-together inmates of the now submerged house are thoroughly soaked with spray and salt water?

The 'sea-house,' the shouts of its builders, the tempting curl on the waves, as each one came a little further, the slight rise of the wind driving the breakers hurriedly landwards, were evidently too much for Mr Stevenson. One moment the weight of his nineteen years and the duty of politeness to his aunt restrained him, the next Mrs Balfour was left standing alone, and overcome with laughter, while Louis was in the sea house scolding, praising, and exhorting all at once, but above all imploring us to 'sit it out a little longer' as wave after wave widened the breach in the ramparts of sand, and

'In every hole the sea came up,

Till it could come no more,'

while wetter and wetter grew the heroic few who, with Mr Stevenson 'sat it out' loyally, till it was possible to sit there no longer. Then wet—wetter indeed than ever before—the remnant crept home to be frowned upon and punished but to know no repentance; for had not Robert Louis been the ringleader, and was there any punishment invented that could take from the joy and the pride of a mischievous adventure in which he had had a part! And he, with the water dripping from his trousers and 'squirching' in his boots, was perfectly and placidly happy, regardless of his aunt's dismay and the future horrors of a possible bad cold. He had been a schoolboy again for the all too brief half hour beside the grey and gurly sea, and that youthfulness, that survived through all the patient suffering of his life and that seems to laugh out of the pages of his books to the last, was in the ascendant as he walked off jauntily townwards, amiably oblivious of the lecture his aunt gave him by the way.