Robert Louis Stevenson

by Margaret Moyes Black

There was something so strong and manly in Mr Thomas Stevenson, something so sweetly womanly in his wife. A beautiful woman always, because hers was the beauty of soul, as well as of feature, in those early seventies, one cannot imagine anyone more graceful, more gracious, or more charming than she was.

It would also be difficult to imagine a wife or mother more sympathetic or more sensible. She could always see the fun of things; she never objected to clubs and men's dinners, and the excuse for a night away from the home hearth, that is so dear to the best of men.

Not many weeks before her death, when we were talking of those happy days of long ago, she told me that she always took a book and contented herself, and then was ready to be interested when the truant returned with a latch-key. An example, that if closely followed, would assuredly make for domestic peace. And one fancies that the woman who said smilingly, she always much approved of 'The Evening Club,' because her husband or son could make merry there so late, that she was sound asleep, and could not miss their conversation, was likely to be a pleasant wife to live with, and an ideal mother for a son of such Bohemian tendencies as Robert Louis.

Even that marvellous taste in dress which her son affected, and which would certainly have dismayed more conventional mothers, only amused her immensely. Among other jottings of hers about him in her little note-book is one which relates with much appreciation that a faithful servant says of him, 'One summer he tried to wear a frock-coat and tall hat, but after a little he laid them aside and said, "I am not going to be a swell any more," and returned to the velveteen coat and the straw hat which he preferred.'

Except at a wedding, or some such solemn function, whereat he probably looked misery personified, one cannot remember him so conventionally apparelled as in the frock-coat and the tall hat. Possibly it was before this access of propriety temporarily had him in its grasp that one day we saw him in Princes Street 'taking the air' in an open cab with a Stevenson cousin, attired in like manner with himself. In those days fashionable people often walked in Princes Street in the afternoon, so what was our dismay, in the midst of quite a crowd of the gay world, to see that open cab, at a word of command from Robert Louis, draw near the pavement as we approached, when two battered straw hats were lifted to us with quite a Parisian grace. Both young men wore sailor hats with brilliant ribbon bands, both were attired in flannel cricketing jackets with broad bright stripes, and round Louis's neck was knotted a huge yellow silk handkerchief, while over both their heads one of them held an open umbrella. In days when the wearing of cricketing clothes, except in the playing fields, was in Scotland still so uncommon that it is on authentic record that an elderly unmarried lady in an east coast watering place, on meeting in its high street a young man in boating flannels, was so shocked at the innovation that she promptly went home, leaving all her shopping undone and her tea-drinking and friendly gossip forgotten, such an apparition as that in the open cab required more courage to face than people accustomed to the present-day use of gay tennis garb can easily imagine. It was fortunate that nerve to return the salutation smilingly was not wanting, or Mr Stevenson would certainly have pitilessly chaffed the timid victims of conventionality afterwards.

Having borne the ordeal with such courage as we possessed, we hastened to have tea with Mrs Stevenson, whose first question was, 'Have you seen Lou?'

And when we described that startling vision that was slowly creeping along Princes Street in the open cab, she laughed till her tears fell. In half an hour or so her son came in cool and unconcerned, and as punctiliously polite as if his attire had been the orthodox apparel for an afternoon tea-party.

The effects of his dressing and appearance on the foreign mind is most humorously described by himself in his Epilogue to an Inland Voyage, where the extraordinary nature of his garments so dismayed the French police that while his friend, the late Sir Walter G. Simpson, 'The Cigarette,' was allowed to go free, 'The Arethusa' was popped into prison, kept there for an hour or two, and finally hustled off to Paris, an adventure of the two friends, who were so systematically taken for 'bagmen,' on that charming expedition, which was always told with much laughter by 'The Arethusa's' parents.

One of the last memories of Mr Stevenson in Edinburgh that distinctly remains with me was finding him looking into the window of Messrs Douglas & Foulis in Castle Street on a grey, east windy day that was cold enough to make the thickest great-coat necessary. But he was visibly shivering in one of his favourite short velvet coats. It was palpably too short in the arms, and certainly the worse for wear; his long hair fell almost to his shoulders, and he wore a Tyrolese hat of soft felt. With a whimsical and appreciative glance at his garments, he offered to accompany me along Princes Street; so we set off westwards together, when, so charming was his conversation, that long before we reached the doorsteps of his relative's house, which was my destination, one had forgotten that the wind was in the east, and the sky greyer than the pavements, and only longed for the walk to begin over again, that he might talk all the way. These eccentricities of attire were merely a part of the rather attractive vanity of a clever youth, whose exuberance of spirits was, in spite of much bad health, at that time so great that he was often merry with a gaiety that was as child-like as it was amusing. In later life he gradually modified his ideas as to dress, and in the Vailima Letters he writes of himself in Samoa as going to Apia to social amusements in most orthodox coats and ties.