The little boy thought it was a very jolly place. He loved the tobogganing, the skating, the snow-balling; loved the crisp, tingling air, and the woods full of Christmas trees, glittering with icicles. Nor with his toy theatre and printing-press was the indoor confinement ever irksome. He but dimly appreciated that his stepfather and mother were less happy in so favoured a spot. His mother’s face was often anxious; sometimes he would find her crying. His stepfather, whom he idolised, was terribly thin, and even to childish eyes looked frail and spectral. The stepfather was an unsuccessful author named Robert Louis Stevenson, who would never have got along at all had it not been for his rich parents in Edinburgh. The little boy at his lessons in the room which they all shared grew used to hearing a sentence that struck at his heart. Perhaps it was the tone it was uttered in; perhaps the looks of discouragement and depression that went with it.
‘Fanny, I shall have to write to my father.’
It served to make the little boy very precocious about money. In a family perennially short of it he learned its essentialness early. He knew too, that he was a dreadfully expensive child. His stepfather paid forty pounds for his winter’s tutoring, not to speak of an additional outlay on a dying Prussian officer who taught him German with the aid of a pocket-knife stuck down his throat to give him the right accent. It was with consternation that he once heard his stepfather say in a voice of tragedy: ‘Good Heavens, Fanny, we are spending ten pounds a week on food alone!’
The little boy, under the stress of this financial urgency, decided to go into business, finding a capital opening in the Hotel Belvidere, where a hundred programmes were required weekly for the Saturday night concerts. A gentleman with a black beard, who was in charge of these arrangements, willingly offered to pay two francs fifty centimes for each set of programmes. The little boy was afraid of the gentleman with the black beard; he was a formidable gentleman, with a formidable manner, and he was very exacting about spelling. The gentleman with the black beard attached an inordinate importance to spelling. The gentleman with the black beard was wholly unable to make allowances for the trifling mistakes that will occur in even the best-managed of printing-offices. If the little boy printed: ‘’Twas in Trofolgar’s Bay . . . sung by Mr. Edwin Smith,’ the black-bearded gentleman had no mercy in sending that poor little boy back to do it all over again. But he paid promptly—a severe man, but extremely honourable. There were charity-bazaars too, public invitations, announcements, letter-heads, all bringing grist to the mill. The ‘Elegy for Some Lead Soldiers’ was brought out, and sold for a penny. Once there was a colossal order for a thousand lottery tickets.
The little boy’s ambitions soared. He wrote and printed a tiny book of eight pages, entitled ‘Black Canyon, or Life in the Far West,’ in which he used all the ‘cuts’ he had somehow accumulated with his type—the story conforming to the illustrations instead of the more common-place way of the illustrations conforming to the text. This work can occasionally be picked up at one of Sotheby’s auctions, and if you can get it for less than twenty-five pounds you are lucky—that is if you are a collector and prize such things. It has risen to the dignity of ‘Davos Booklets; Stevensoniana; excessively rare.’ But its original price was sixpence, and its sale was immediate and gratifying. The little boy discovered that there was much more money to be made from one book than a dozen sets of programmes, and that without any black-bearded gentleman either to tweak his nose when errors crept in.
Louis, as the little boy always called his stepfather, with a familiarity that was much criticised by strangers, followed this publishing venture with absorbing interest. Then his own ambitions awakened, and one day, with an affected humility that was most embarrassing, he called at the office, and submitted a manuscript called, ‘Not I, and Other Poems,’ which the firm of Osbourne and Co. gladly accepted on the spot. It was an instantaneous hit, selling out an entire edition of fifty copies.
The publisher was thrilled, and the author was equally jubilant, saying it was the only successful book he had ever written, and jingling his three francs of royalties with an air that made the little boy burst out laughing with delighted pride. In the ensuing enthusiasm another book was planned, and the first poem for it written.
‘If only we could have illustrations,’ said the publisher longingly. But his ‘cuts’ had all been used in ‘Black Canyon, or Life in the Far West.’ Illustrations had to be put by as a dream impossible of fulfilment. No, not impossible! Louis, who was a man of infinite resourcefulness (he could paint better theatre-scenes than any one could buy), said that he would try to carve some pictures on squares of fretwood. The word fretwood seems as unknown nowadays as the thing itself; it was an extremely thin piece of board with which one was supposed to make works of art with the help of pasted-on patterns, an aggravating little saw, and the patience of Job. . . . Well, Louis cut out a small square of fretwood, and in a deeply-thoughtful manner applied himself to the task. He had only a pocket-knife; real tools came later; but he was impelled by a will to win that carried all before it. After an afternoon of almost suffocating excitement—for the publisher—he completed the engraving that accompanies the poem: ‘Reader, your soul upraise to see.’ But it had yet to be mounted on a wooden block in order to raise it to the exact level of the type. At last this was done. A proof was run off. But the impression was unequal. Oh, the disappointment! Author and publisher gazed at each other in misery. But woman’s wit came to the rescue. Why not build it up with cigarette papers? ‘Bravo, Fanny!’ The author set to work, deftly and skilfully. Then more proofs, more cigarette-papers, more running up and down stairs to the little boy’s room, which in temperature hovered about zero. But what was temperature? The thing was a success. The little boy, entranced beyond measure, printed copy after copy from the sheer pleasure of seeing the wet ink magically reproducing the block.
The next day the little boy was sent to a dying Swiss—half the population of Davos were coughing away the remnants of life—who lived with his poverty-stricken family in one room, earning their bread by carving bears. A model block was shown him. Could he reproduce a dozen exactly like it, but in a wood without any grain? The dying Swiss said he could, leaving his bear forthwith, and applying himself to the task. The pinched-face children looked on amazed; the little print of ‘Reader, your soul upraise to see’ was passed from hand to hand with exclamations of astonishment. The dying Swiss gave the little boy the blocks, beautifully and faultlessly finished. Would the little boy care to buy a bear? No, the little boy didn’t. He scurried home through the snow with the precious blocks.
Thus ‘Moral Emblems’ came out; ninety copies, price sixpence. Its reception might almost be called sensational. Wealthy people in the Hotel Belvidere bought as many as three copies apiece. Friends in England wrote back for more. Meanwhile the splendid artist was assiduously busy. He worked like a beaver, saying that it was the best relaxation he had ever found. The little boy once overheard him confiding to a visitor: ‘I cannot tell you what a Godsend these silly blocks have been to me. When I can write no more, and read no more, and think no more, I can pass whole hours engraving these blocks in blissful contentment.’ These may not have been the actual words, but such at least was their sense.