Part 7

Since taking to writing as a profession I have lost most of the interest I had in literature as literature pure and simple. That interest gradually faded and "Art for Art's sake," in the sense the simple in studios are wont to dilate upon, touches me no more, or very, very rarely. The books I love now are those which teach me something actual about the living world; and it troubles me not at all if any of them betray no sense of beauty and lack immortal words. Their artistry is nothing, what they say is everything. So on the shelf to which I mostly resort is a book on the Himalayas; a Lloyd's Shipping Register; a little work on seamanship that every would-be second mate knows; Brown's Nautical Almanacs; a Channel Pilot; a Continental Bradshaw; many Baedekers; a Directory to the Indian Ocean and the China Seas; a big folding map of the United States; some books dealing with strategy, and some touching on medical knowledge, but principally pathology, and especially the pathology of the mind.

Yet in spite of this utilitarian bent of my thoughts there are very many books I know and love and sometimes look into because of their associations. As I cannot understand (through some mental kink which my friends are wont to jeer at) how anyone can return again and again to a book for its own sake, I do not read what I know. As soon would I go back when it is my purpose to go forward. A book should serve its turn, do its work, and become a memory. To love books for their own sake is to be crystallised before old age comes on. Only the old are entitled to love the past. The work of the young lies in the present and the future.

But still, in spite of my theories, I like to handle, if not to read, certain books which were read by me under curious and perhaps abnormal circumstances. If I do not open them it is due to a certain bashfulness, a subtle dislike of seeing myself as I was. Yet the books I read while tramping in America, such as Sartor Resartus, have the same attraction for me that a man may feel for a place. I carried the lucubrations of Teufelsdrockh with me as I wandered; I read them as I camped in the open upon the prairie; I slipped them into my pocket when I went shepherding in the Texan plateau south of the Panhandle.

Another book which went with me on my tramps through Minnesota and Iowa was a tiny volume of Emerson's essays. This I loved less than I loved Carlyle, and I gave it to a railroad "section boss" in the north-west of Iowa because he was kind to me. When Sartor Resartus had travelled with me through the Kicking Horse Pass and over the Selkirks into British Columbia, and was sucked dry, I gave it at last to a farming Englishman who lived not far from Kamloops. I remember that in the flyleaf I kept a rough diary of the terrible week I spent in climbing through the Selkirk Range with sore and wounded feet. It is perhaps little wonder that I associate Teufelsdrockh, the mind-wanderer, with those days of my own life. And yet, unless I live to be old, I shall never read the book again.

The tramp, or traveller, or beach-comber, or general scallywag finds little time and little chance to read. And for the most part we must own he cares little for literature in any form. But I was not always wandering. I varied wandering with work, and while working at a sawmill on the coast, or close to it, in the lower Fraser River in British Columbia, I read much. In the town of New Westminster was a little public library, and I used to go thither after work if I was not too tired. But the work in a sawmill is very arduous to everyone in it, and while the winter kept away I had little energy to read. Presently, however, the season changed, and the bitter east winds came out of the mountains and fixed the river in ice and froze up our logs in the "boom," so that the saws were at last silent, and I was free to plunge among the books and roll and soak among them day and night.

The library was very much mixed. It was indeed created upon a pile of miscellaneous matter left by British troops when they were stationed on the British Columbian mainland. There was much rubbish on the shelves, but among the rubbish I found many good books. For instance, that winter I read solidly through Gibbon's Rome, and refreshed my early memories of Mahomet, of Alaric, and of Attila. Those who imported fresh elements into the old were even then my greatest interest. I preferred the destroyers to the destroyed, being rather on the side of the gods than on the side of Cato. Lately, as I was returning from South Africa, I tried to read Gibbon once more, and I failed. He was too classic, too stately. I fell back on Froude, and was refreshed by the manner, if not always delighted by the matter.

After emerging from the Imperial flood at the last chapter, I fell headlong into Vasari's Lives of the Painters, in nine volumes. Then I read Motley's Netherlands and the Rise of the Dutch Republic, always terrible and picturesque since I had read it as a boy of eleven.

At the sawmill there was but one man with whom I could talk on any matters of intellectual interest. He was a big man from Michigan and ran the shingle saw. We often discussed what I had lately read, and went away from discussion to argument concerning philosophy and theology. He was a most lovable person; as keen as a sharpened sawtooth, and a polemic but courteous atheist. His greatest sorrow in life was that his mother, a Middle State woman of ferocious religion, could not be kept in ignorance of his principles. We argued ethics sophistically as to whether a convinced agnostic might on occasion hide what he believed.

Sometimes this friend of mine went to the library with me. He had the penchant for science so common among the finer rising types of the lower classes. So I read Darwin's Origin of Species, and talked of it with my Michigan man. And then I took to Savage Landor and learnt some of his Imaginary Conversations by heart. I could have repeated Æsop and Rhodope.

But the one thing I for ever fell back upon was an old encyclopædia. I should be afraid to say how much I read, but to it I owe, doubtless, a stock of extensive, if shallow, general knowledge. Certainly it appears to have influenced me to this day; for given a similar one I can wander from shipbuilding to St. Thomas Aquinas; from the Atomic Theory to the Marquis de Sade; from Kant to the building of dams; and never feel dull.

Now when I come across any of these books I am filled with a curious melancholy. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire means more to me than to some: I hear the whirr of the buzz-saw as I open it; even in its driest page I smell the resin of fir and spruce; Locke's Human Understanding recalls things no man can understand if he has not worked alongside Indians and next to Chinamen. As for Carlyle, I never hear him mentioned without seeing the mountains and glaciers of the Selkirks; in his pages is the sound of the wind and rain.

There are some novels, too, which have attractions not all their own. I remember once walking into a store at Eagle Pass Landing on the Shushwap Lake and asking for a book. I was referred to a counter covered with bearskins, and beneath the hides I unearthed a pile of novels. The one I took was Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. And another time I rode into Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, California, and, while buying stores, saw Gissing's Demos open in front of me. It was anonymous, but I knew it for his, and I read it as I rode slowly homeward down the Sonoma Valley, the Valley of the Seven Moons.

These are but a few of the books that are burnt into one's memory as by fire. All I remember are not literature: perhaps I should reject many with scorn at the present day; nevertheless, they have a value to me greater than the price set upon many precious folios. I propose one of these days to make a shelf among my shelves sacred to the books which I read under curious circumstances. I cannot but regret that I often had nothing to read at the most interesting times. So far as I can recollect, I got through five days' starvation in Australia without as much as a newspaper.

A VISIT TO R. L. STEVENSON

It was late in May or early in June, for I cannot now remember the exact date, that I landed in Apia, in the island of Upolu. Naturally enough that island was not to me so much the centre of Anglo-American and German rivalries as the home of Robert Louis Stevenson, then become the literary deity of the Pacific. In a dozen shops in Honolulu I had seen little plaster busts of him; here and there I came across his photograph. And I had a theory about him to put to the test. Though I was not, and am not, one of those who rage against over-great praise, when there is any true foundation for it, I had never been able to understand the laudation of which he was the subject. At that time, and until the fragment of Weir of Hermiston was given to the world, nothing but his one short story about the thief and poet, Villon, had seemed to me to be really great, really to command or even to be an excuse for his being in the position in which his critics had placed him. Yet I had read The Wrecker, The Ebb Tide, The Beach of Falesa, Kidnapped, Catriona, The Master of Ballantrae, and the New Arabian Nights. I came to the conclusion that, as most of the organic chorus of approval came from men who knew him, he must be (as all writers, I think, should be) immeasurably greater than his books. I was prepared then for a personality, and I found it. When his name is mentioned I no longer think of any of his works, but of a sweet-eyed, thin, brown ghost of a man whom I first saw upon horseback in a grove of cocoanut palms by the sounding surges of a tropic sea. There are writers, and not a few of them, whose work it is a pleasure to read, while it is a pain to know them, a disappointment, almost an unhappiness, to be in their disillusioning company. They have given the best to the world. Robert Louis Stevenson never gave his best, for his best was himself.

At any time of the year the Navigator Islands are truly tropical, and whether the sun inclines towards Cancer or Capricorn, Apia is a bath of warm heat. As soon as the Monowai dropped her anchor inside the opening of the reef that forms the only decent harbour in all the group, I went ashore in haste. Our time was short, but three or four hours, and I could afford neither the time nor the money to stay there till the next steamer. I had much to do in Australia, and was not a little exercised in mind as to how I should ever be able to get round the world at all unless I once more shipped before the mast. I was, in fact, so hard put to it in the matter of cash, that when the hotel-keeper asked three dollars for a pony on which to ride to Vailima, I refused to pay it, and went away believing that after all I should not see him whom I most desired to meet. Yet it was possible, if not likely, that he would come down to visit the one fortnightly link with the great world from which he was an exile. I had to trust to chance, and in the meantime walked the long street of Apia and viewed the Samoans, whom he so loved, with vivid interest. These people, riven and torn by internal dissensions between Mataafa and Malietoa, and honeycombed by Anglo-American and German intrigue, were the most interesting and the noblest that I had met since I foregathered for a time with a wandering band of Blackfeet Indians close to Calgary beneath the shadows of the Rocky Mountains. Their dress, their customs, and their free and noble carriage, yet unspoiled by civilisation, appealed to me greatly. I could understand as I saw them walk how Stevenson delighted in them. Man and woman alike looked me and the whole world in the face, and went by, proud, yet modest, and with the smile of a happy, unconquered race.

As I walked with half a dozen curious indifferents whom the hazards of travel had made my companions, we turned from the main road into the seclusion of a shaded group of palms, and as I went I saw coming towards me a mounted white man behind whom rode a native. As he came nearer I looked at him without curiosity, for, as the time passed, I was becoming reconciled by all there was to see to the fact that I might not meet this exiled Scot. And yet, as he neared and passed me, I knew that I knew him, that he was familiar; and very presently I was aware that this sense of familiarity was not, as so often happens to a traveller, the awakened memory of a type. This was an individual and a personality. I stopped and stared after him, and suddenly roused myself. Surely this was Robert Louis Stevenson, and this his man. So might the ghosts of Crusoe and Friday pass one on the shore of Juan Fernandez.

I called the "boy" and gave him my card, and asked him to overtake his master. In another moment my literary apparition, this chief among the Samoans, was shaking hands with me. He alighted from his horse, and we walked together towards the town. I fell a victim to him, and forgot that he wrote. His writings were what packed dates might be to one who sat for the first time under a palm in some far oasis; they were but ice in a tumbler compared with séracs. He was first a man, and then a writer. The pitiful opposite is too common.

I think, indeed I am sure, for I know he could not lie, that he was pleased to see me. What I represented to him then I hardly reckoned at the time, but I was a messenger from the great world of men; I moved close to the heart of things; I was fresh from San Francisco, from New York, from London. He spoke like an exile, but one not discouraged. Though his physique was of the frailest (I had noted with astonishment that his thigh as he sat on horseback was hardly thicker than my forearm), he was alert and gently eager. That soft, brown eye which held me was full of humour, of pathos, of tenderness, yet I could imagine it capable of indignation and of power. It might be that his body was dying, but his mind was young, elastic, and unspoiled by selfishness or affectation. He had his regrets; they concerned the Samoans greatly.

"Had I come here fifteen years ago I might have ruled these islands."

He imagined it possible that international intrigue might not have flourished under him. Never had I seen so fragile a man who would be king. He owned, with a shyly comic glance, that he had leanings towards buccaneering. The man of action, were he but some shaggy-bearded shellback, appealed to him. His own physique was his apology for being merely a writer of novels.

We went on board the steamer, and at his request I bade a steward show his faithful henchman over her. In the meantime we sat in the saloon and drank "soft" drinks. It pleased him to talk, and he spoke fluently in a voice that was musical. He touched a hundred subjects; he developed a theory of matriarchy. Men loved to steal; women were naturally receivers. They adored property; their minds ran on possession; they were domestic materialists. We talked of socialism, of Bully Hayes, of Royat, of Rudyard Kipling. He regretted greatly not having seen the author of Plain Tales from the Hills.

"He was once coming here. Even now I believe there is mail-matter of his rotting at the post-office."

I asked him to accept a book I had brought from England, hoping to be able to give it to him. It was the only book of mine that I thought worthy of his acceptance. That he knew it pleased me. But he always desired to please, and pleased without any effort. When the boy came back from viewing the internal arrangements of the Monowai, he sat down with us as a free warrior. He was more a friend than a servant; Stevenson treated him as the head of a clan in his old home might treat a worthy follower. As there was yet an hour before the vessel sailed I went on shore with him again. We were rowed there by a Samoan in a waistcloth. His head was whitened by the lime which many of the natives use to bleach their dark locks to a fashionable red.

The air was hot and the sea glittered under an intense sun. The rollers from the roadstead broke upon the reef. The outer ocean was a very wonderful tropic blue; inside the reefs the water was calmer, greener, more unlike anything that can be seen in northern latitudes. A little island inside the lagoon glared with red rock in the sunlight; cocoanut palms adorned it gracefully; beyond again was the deeper blue of ocean; the island itself, a mass of foliage, melted beautifully into the lucid atmosphere. Yonder, said Stevenson, lay Vailima that I was not to see. But I had seen the island and the man, and the natural colour and glory of both.

As we went ashore he handed the book which I had given him to his follower. He thought it necessary to explain to me that etiquette demanded that no chief should carry anything. And etiquette was rigid there.

"Mrs Grundy," he remarked, "is essentially a savage institution."

We went together to the post-office. And in the street outside, while many passed and greeted "Tusitala" in the soft, native speech, we parted. I saw him ride away, and saw him wave his hand to me as he turned once more into the dark grove wherein I had met him in the year of his death.