The open-air life which he had perforce abandoned, the joy of physical strength and hair-breadth 'scape, could still be his by proxy. He revelled in delineating his ideal man:
"Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace until he touch the goal. 'A peerage or Westminster Abbey!' cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner. These are great incentives; not for any of these, but for the plain satisfaction of living, of being about their business in some sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of every nation tread down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the stumbling-blocks of prudence." (Virginibus Puerisque.)
The tramp of horse-hoofs, the clank of the capstan, the door ajar—a thousand sights and sounds were but symbolisms to him of some mysterious by-way of adventure to be followed up, quick with latent possibilities of romance; and from one word, one name, he could evolve a whole intricate plot. With the simplest of sentences, he could electrify the startled reader, as when in The Wrecker, where the desperate castaways sit gambling on the desert island, and one suddenly cries aloud, "Sail ho!"
"All turned at the cry,—and there, in the wild light of the morning, heading straight for Midway Reef, was the brig Flying Scud of Hull." (The Wrecker.)
On that moment the whole tale hangs as on a pivot. All its involution and evolution, all its intricate and tangled clues, lead—backwards or forwards—to this one swift breathless sight.
His morning's work accomplished, the tall gaunt man came downstairs, literally to play awhile. After weeks, it might be, of enforced seclusion in his room, his eye rested pleasurably upon the various attractive objects which almost seemed like new to him. Stevenson,—the avowed evader of personal property, the rolling-stone that had so long refused to gather moss,—was now, under a woman's tender surveillance, surrounded with charm and comfort. "Our drawing room," he maintained, "is a place so beautiful that it's like eating to sit down in it. No other room is so lovely in the world ... I blush for the figure I cut in such a bower." The garden, Mrs. Stevenson's special pleasure, but one in which her husband did not share, was very lovely, with a lawn, and heather-bank, and a half-acre of land, where a little stream ran down a "chine" full of rhododendrons. A large dovecot figured in the garden; and there also "Boguey," the Stevensons' dog, was buried, to whom no other dog had ever been deemed a worthy successor.
Stevenson, his clothes hanging loosely on his emaciated figure, and his hands—"wonderful hands—long and fragile, like those in the early portraits of Velasquez," lingered lovingly over the keys. For a while he amused himself by picking out, note by note, the old-world dance measures of Lully and Rameau; those gavottes, rigadoons and minuets, which conveyed to him the indefinable pot-pourri-like, flavour of his favourite eighteenth century, embued with a certain stately dignity, "the periwig feeling," he called it, as of lords and ladies treading courtly measures. Stevenson was passionately fond of classical music, but he had never attained to any facility of execution. And when he grew tired with his efforts as an interpreter of Lully, he turned to "pickling," as he called it—composing, that is to say, after a fashion, with "the manly and melodious forefinger." The fact that he had invariably failed to master the rudiments of theory, in no wise deterred him; on the contrary, difficulties rather enhanced his delight. "Books are of no use," he avowed, "they tell you how to write in four parts, and that cannot be done by man." So he continued to "pickle" with a light heart, and to enjoy consecutive fifths and other theoretical delinquencies with an enthusiasm worthy of the most modern composer.
Nothing but the lunch hour brought his musical experiments to a close. Stevenson, who had, in his own words, "been obliged to strip himself, one after another, of all the pleasures that he had chosen, except smoking" (and indeed, he was smoking cigarettes all day long) by no means disdained the pleasures of the table. Not, perhaps, in the role of a gourmet—but as an artist in the more recondite delicacies of taste and smell. "To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human perfection than to find beauty in the colours of a sunset," he observed; he coupled the flavour of wine with the beauty of the dawn, and declared that we do not recognise at its full value the great part in life that is played by eating and drinking. "There is a romance about the matter after all," he observed. "Probably the table has more devotees than love; and I am sure food is more generally entertaining than scenery." It was the "romance of the matter" that appealed to him; especially the colour, and savour, and poetical tradition of wine. "Books, and tobacco jars, and some old Burgundy as red as a November sunset, and as fragrant as a violet in April"—these, he thought, should suffice the most luxurious.
After lunch, if he anticipated an exhausting evening, he went to sleep—at a moment's notice—and after a short, sound repose, was as eager as ever to resume his pianoforte amusements; which he continued until friends arrived.
At the age of four-and-twenty, Stevenson had noted down his three chief wishes. "First, good health: secondly, a small competence: thirdly, O Du lieber Gott! friends." The first: wish was irrevocably denied: the second was only just beginning to be granted, the guerdon of unresting toil: the third petition had been abundantly answered. Never was a man more happy in his friends; or one who made them so instantaneously and without effort. "He had only to speak," said one friend, "in order to be recognised in the first minute for a witty and charming gentleman, and in the second, for a man of genius." Some, indeed, like Mr. Edmund Gosse, came home dazzled and astounded, saying, as Constance does of Arthur, "Was ever such a gracious creature born?" His expression, of mingled tenderness and mirth, his "scholarly and eclectic presence"—together with his picturesque, velvet-coated appearance, and his flashing flow of words, combined to make a man so attractive and so unique as could command all love at will. And the friends were very many and very notable, who haunted Skerryvore. First and foremost was "Bob," Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, the poet's first cousin, the brilliant art critic: "the man likest and most unlike to me," as R.L.S. described him. "Bob's" sister, Mrs. de Mattos, and her child were frequent visitors; then there were celebrities from London: such as Sargent the painter, William Archer, Sidney Colvin, W. E. Henley, Henry James; and again friends residing in the neighbourhood of Bournemouth; the poet Sir Henry Taylor, and his family; Sir Percy Shelley and his wife. These latter, indeed, regarded Stevenson almost in the light of a son. He struck them as bearing an extraordinary resemblance to Percy Bysshe Shelley; less, perhaps, in lineaments than in figure and in mind; and in consequence of this similarity, they held him very dear.