Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (eBook)

 CHAPTER IV - THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT, MONTEREY AND SAN FRANCISCO, JULY  1879-JULY 1880

 Letter:  TO SIDNEY COLVIN

ON BOARD SS. 'DEVONIA,' AN HOUR OR TWO OUT OF NEW YORK [AUGUST  1879].

MY DEAR COLVIN, - I have finished my story.  The handwriting is not  good because of the ship's misconduct:  thirty-one pages in ten  days at sea is not bad.

I shall write a general procuration about this story on another bit  of paper.  I am not very well; bad food, bad air, and hard work  have brought me down.  But the spirits keep good.  The voyage has  been most interesting, and will make, if not a series of PALL MALL  articles, at least the first part of a new book.  The last weight  on me has been trying to keep notes for this purpose.  Indeed, I  have worked like a horse, and am now as tired as a donkey.  If I  should have to push on far by rail, I shall bring nothing but my  fine bones to port.

Good-bye to you all.  I suppose it is now late afternoon with you  and all across the seas.  What shall I find over there?  I dare not  wonder. - Ever yours,

R. L. S.

P.S. - I go on my way to-night, if I can; if not, tomorrow:   emigrant train ten to fourteen days' journey; warranted extreme  discomfort.  The only American institution which has yet won my  respect is the rain.  One sees it is a new country, they are so  free with their water.  I have been steadily drenched for twenty- four hours; water-proof wet through; immortal spirit fitfully  blinking up in spite.  Bought a copy of my own work, and the man  said 'by Stevenson.' - 'Indeed,' says I. - 'Yes, sir,' says he. -  Scene closes.

Letter:  TO SIDNEY COLVIN

[IN THE EMIGRANT TRAIN FROM NEW YORK TO SAN FRANCISCO, AUGUST  1879.]

DEAR COLVIN, - I am in the cars between Pittsburgh and Chicago,  just now bowling through Ohio.  I am taking charge of a kid, whose  mother is asleep, with one eye, while I write you this with the  other.  I reached N.Y. Sunday night; and by five o'clock Monday was  under way for the West.  It is now about ten on Wednesday morning,  so I have already been about forty hours in the cars.  It is  impossible to lie down in them, which must end by being very  wearying.

I had no idea how easy it was to commit suicide.  There seems  nothing left of me; I died a while ago; I do not know who it is  that is travelling.

 Of where or how, I nothing know; And why, I do not care; Enough if, even so, My travelling eyes, my travelling mind can go By flood and field and hill, by wood and meadow fair, Beside the Susquehannah and along the Delaware. I think, I hope, I dream no more The dreams of otherwhere, The cherished thoughts of yore; I have been changed from what I was before; And drunk too deep perchance the lotus of the air Beside the Susquehannah and along the Delaware. Unweary God me yet shall bring To lands of brighter air, Where I, now half a king, Shall with enfranchised spirit loudlier sing, And wear a bolder front than that which now I wear Beside the Susquehannah and along the Delaware.

 Exit Muse, hurried by child's games. . . .

Have at you again, being now well through Indiana.  In America you  eat better than anywhere else:  fact.  The food is heavenly.

No man is any use until he has dared everything; I feel just now as  if I had, and so might become a man.  'If ye have faith like a  grain of mustard seed.'  That is so true! just now I have faith as  big as a cigar-case; I will not say die, and do not fear man nor  fortune.

R. L. S.

Letter:  TO W. E. HENLEY

CROSSING NEBRASKA [SATURDAY, AUGUST 23, 1879].

MY DEAR HENLEY, - I am sitting on the top of the cars with a mill  party from Missouri going west for his health.  Desolate flat  prairie upon all hands.  Here and there a herd of cattle, a yellow  butterfly or two; a patch of wild sunflowers; a wooden house or  two; then a wooden church alone in miles of waste; then a windmill  to pump water.  When we stop, which we do often, for emigrants and  freight travel together, the kine first, the men after, the whole  plain is heard singing with cicadae.  This is a pause, as you may  see from the writing.  What happened to the old pedestrian  emigrants, what was the tedium suffered by the Indians and trappers  of our youth, the imagination trembles to conceive.  This is now  Saturday, 23rd, and I have been steadily travelling since I parted  from you at St. Pancras.  It is a strange vicissitude from the  Savile Club to this; I sleep with a man from Pennsylvania who has  been in the States Navy, and mess with him and the Missouri bird  already alluded to.  We have a tin wash-bowl among four.  I wear  nothing but a shirt and a pair of trousers, and never button my  shirt.  When I land for a meal, I pass my coat and feel dressed.   This life is to last till Friday, Saturday, or Sunday next.  It is  a strange affair to be an emigrant, as I hope you shall see in a  future work.  I wonder if this will be legible; my present station  on the waggon roof, though airy compared to the cars, is both dirty  and insecure.  I can see the track straight before and straight  behind me to either horizon.  Peace of mind I enjoy with extreme  serenity; I am doing right; I know no one will think so; and don't  care.  My body, however, is all to whistles; I don't eat; but, man,  I can sleep.  The car in front of mine is chock full of Chinese.

MONDAY. - What it is to be ill in an emigrant train let those  declare who know.  I slept none till late in the morning, overcome  with laudanum, of which I had luckily a little bottle.  All to-day  I have eaten nothing, and only drunk two cups of tea, for each of  which, on the pretext that the one was breakfast, and the other  dinner, I was charged fifty cents.  Our journey is through ghostly  deserts, sage brush and alkali, and rocks, without form or colour,  a sad corner of the world.  I confess I am not jolly, but mighty  calm, in my distresses.  My illness is a subject of great mirth to  some of my fellow-travellers, and I smile rather sickly at their  jests.

We are going along Bitter Creek just now, a place infamous in the  history of emigration, a place I shall remember myself among the  blackest.  I hope I may get this posted at Ogden, Utah.

R. L S.

Letter:   TO SIDNEY COLVIN

[COAST LINE MOUNTAINS, CALIFORNIA, SEPTEMBER 1879.]

HERE is another curious start in my life.  I am living at an Angora  goat-ranche, in the Coast Line Mountains, eighteen miles from  Monterey.  I was camping out, but got so sick that the two  rancheros took me in and tended me.  One is an old bear-hunter,  seventy-two years old, and a captain from the Mexican war; the  other a pilgrim, and one who was out with the bear flag and under  Fremont when California was taken by the States.  They are both  true frontiersmen, and most kind and pleasant.  Captain Smith, the  bear-hunter, is my physician, and I obey him like an oracle.

The business of my life stands pretty nigh still.  I work at my  notes of the voyage.  It will not be very like a book of mine; but  perhaps none the less successful for that.  I will not deny that I  feel lonely to-day; but I do not fear to go on, for I am doing  right.  I have not yet had a word from England, partly, I suppose,  because I have not yet written for my letters to New York; do not  blame me for this neglect; if you knew all I have been through, you  would wonder I had done so much as I have.  I teach the ranche  children reading in the morning, for the mother is from home sick.  - Ever your affectionate friend,

R. L. S.

Letter:  TO SIDNEY COLVIN

MONTEREY, DITTO CO., CALIFORNIA, 21ST OCTOBER [1879].

MY DEAR COLVIN, - Although you have absolutely disregarded my  plaintive appeals for correspondence, and written only once as  against God knows how many notes and notikins of mine - here goes  again.  I am now all alone in Monterey, a real inhabitant, with a  box of my own at the P.O.  I have splendid rooms at the doctor's,  where I get coffee in the morning (the doctor is French), and I  mess with another jolly old Frenchman, the stranded fifty-eight- year-old wreck of a good-hearted, dissipated, and once wealthy  Nantais tradesman.  My health goes on better; as for work, the  draft of my book was laid aside at p. 68 or so; and I have now, by  way of change, more than seventy pages of a novel, a one-volume  novel, alas! to be called either A CHAPTER IN EXPERIENCE OF ARIZONA  BRECKONRIDGE or A VENDETTA IN THE WEST, or a combination of the  two.  The scene from Chapter IV. to the...