Sunday.—I was chased out by my lamp again last night; it always goes out when I feel in the humour to write to you. To-day I have been to Church, which has not improved my temper I must own. The clergyman did his best to make me hate him, and I took refuge in that admirable poem the Song of Deborah and Barak; I should like to make a long scroll of painting (say to go all round a cornice) illustrative of this poem; with the people seen in the distance going stealthily on footpaths while the great highways go vacant; with the archers besetting the draw-wells; with the princes in hiding on the hills among the bleating sheep-flocks; with the overthrow of Sisera, the stars fighting against him in their courses and that ancient river, the river Kishon, sweeping him away in anger; with his mother looking and looking down the long road in the red sunset, and never a banner and never a spear-clump coming into sight, and her women with white faces round her, ready with lying comfort. To say nothing of the people on white asses.
O, I do hate this damned life that I lead. Work—work—work; that’s all right, it’s amusing; but I want women about me and I want pleasure. John Knox had a better time of it than I, with his godly females all leaving their husbands to follow after him; I would I were John Knox; I hate living like a hermit. Write me a nice letter if ever you are in the humour to write to me, and it doesn’t hurt your head. Good-bye.—Ever your faithful friend,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
To Mrs. Sitwell
The projected visit to his Russian friend in Poland did not come off, and shortly after the preceding letter Stevenson went for a few days’ walking tour in the Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire, as recorded in his essay An Autumn Effect. He then came on for a visit to London.
[London, November 1874.]
When I left you I found an organ-grinder in Russell Square playing to a child; and the simple fact that there was a child listening to him, that he was giving this pleasure, entitled him, according to my theory, as you know, to some money; so I put some coppers on the ledge of his organ, without so much as looking at him, and I was going on when a woman said to me: “Yes, sir, he do look bad, don’t he? scarcely fit like to be working.” And then I looked at the man, and O! he was so ill, so yellow and heavy-eyed and drooping. I did not like to go back somehow, and so I gave the woman a shilling and asked her to give it to him for me. I saw her do so and walked on; but the face followed me, and so when I had got to the end of the division, I turned and came back as hard as I could and filled his hand with money—ten to thirteen shillings, I should think. I was sure he was going to be ill, you know, and he was a young man; and I dare say he was alone, and had no one to love him.
I had my reward; for a few yards farther on, here was another organ-grinder playing a dance tune, and perhaps a dozen children all dancing merrily to his music, singly, and by twos and threes, and in pretty little figures together. Just what my organ-grinder in my story wanted to have happen to him! It was so gay and pleasant in the twilight under the street lamp.
I am very well, have eaten well, and am so sleepy I can write no more. This I write to let you know I am no worse; all the better.—Ever your faithful friend,
R. L. S.