The fragment was originally intended as a prologue; Attwater was to be blinded with vitriol and then return to England. The remainder of the action of the book was to take place in England, and chiefly in Bloomsbury, where the Herricks lived. Stevenson now reconsidered the whole question, accepted a shorter ending, and grew more and more interested in the character of Attwater, as he worked it out. It is perhaps worth remarking that the picture of the arrival of the schooner at the new island gives better than anything else some of the charm of such cruises as those which delighted its author, who found no experience more exhilarating than "when you sight an island and drop anchor in a new world."1 The fables begun before he had left England and promised to Messrs. Longmans, he attacked again, and from time to time added to their number. The reference to Odin perhaps is due to his reading of the Sagas, which led him to attempt a tale in the same style, called "The Waif Woman." But I find no clue to any fresh study of Celtic legends that could have suggested the last and most beautiful fable of all, called "The Song of the Morrow," which dealt with the king's daughter of Duntrine, who "had no care for the morrow and no power upon the hour," and is like nothing else Stevenson ever wrote. Besides all these and the letters to the Times, as well as his private correspondence, there were endless other schemes, for the most part projected and perhaps not even begun, never certainly brought near to completion. He wrote to Mr. Charles Baxter: "My schemes 1 Letters, ii. 120. are all in the air, and vanish and reappear again like shapes in the clouds." So likewise to Miss Boodle: "I have a projected, entirely planned love-story-everybody will think it dreadfully improper, I'm afraid — called Cannonmills. And I've a vague, rosy haze before me a love-story too, but not improper-called The Rising Sun. It's the name of the wayside inn where the story, or much of the story, runs; but it's a kind of a pun: it means the stirring up of a boy by falling in love, and how he rises in the estimation of a girl who despised him, though she liked him and had befriended him. I really scarce see beyond their childhood yet, but I want to go beyond, and make each out-top the other by successions: it should be pretty and true if I could do it." Neither of these was ever written. There was also a play for home representation, showing the adventures of an English tourist in Samoa; and I can remember two more serious schemes which were likewise without result. In the August before he died, he drew up with Mr. Osbourne the outline of a history, or of a series of the most striking episodes, of the Indian Mutiny, to be written for boys, and sent home for the books necessary for its execution. Another day he sketched the plan of an English grammar, to be illustrated by examples from the English classics. These are but a few, the many are unremembered; but all alike belong, not to the fleet of masterpieces unlaunched, but the larger and more inglorious squadron whose keels were never even laid down. To do their best for twoscore years! A ready soldier, here I stand, Help Thou mine unbelief And be my battle brief." Envoy to No. XXV. of Songs of Travel. THE climate of Samoa had apparently answered the main purpose of preserving Stevenson from any disabling attacks of illness, and allowing him to lead a life of strenuous activity. "I do not ask for health," he had said to his stepson at Bournemouth, "but I will go anywhere and live in any place where I can enjoy the ordinary existence of a human being." And this had now been granted to him beyond his utmost hope. In all the time he was in Samoa he had but two or three slight hemorrhages, that were cured within a very few days. The consumption in his lungs was definitely arrested, but it seems certain that a structural weakening of the arteries was slowly and inevitably going on, al though his general health was apparently not affected. He had influenza at least once; occasionally he was ailing, generally with some indefinite lassitude which was attributed to malaria or some other unverifiable cause. In the summer of 1892 he was threatened with writers' cramp, which had attacked him as long ago as 1884. From this time forth, however, his stepdaughter wrote to his dictation nearly all his literary work and correspondence, and, thanks to her quickness and unwearying devotion, he suffered the least possible inconvenience from this restriction of his powers. He had one or two threatenings of tropical diseases, which were promptly averted; and for several periods, to his own intense disgust, he gave up even the very moderate quantity of red wine which seemed to be a necessity of life to him, and worst deprivation of all-he abandoned at these times the cigarettes which usually he smoked all day long.1 But in spite of these occasional lapses, he was able to lead an active life, full of varied interests, and the amount of work which he did during this period would have been satisfactory to less careful writers, even if they had done nothing else but follow their own profession without any interruption or diversion whatever. In this respect Samoa was an infinite gain. If the tropical climate in any degree weakened the bodily fabric that might longer have borne the strain of his impetuous life in some more bracing air, no one can for a moment doubt what choice he himself would have made had he been offered five years of activity, of 1 Letters, ii. 297. cruising and riding and adventure, against five-andtwenty or fifty of existence in the sick-room and the sanatorium. It was his friends and his country that he missed. From the day that Mr. Colvin went down the ship's side in the Thames, or the day that Mr. Low parted from him in New York, Stevenson never again saw any one of his old and intimate companions. Fortune was against him in the matter. They were all busy people, with many engagements and many ties, and when at last Mr. Charles Baxter was able to start for Samoa, he had not yet reached Egypt before the blow fell. Nor was this perversity of fortune confined to his old friends alone; it also affected the younger writers with whom, in spite of distance, he had formed ties more numerous, and, in proportion to their number, more intimate than have ever before been established and maintained at any such distance by correspondence alone. And it was the more tantalising because the paths of several seemed likely to lead them past the very island where he lived. So he had to content himself as best he might with his mail-bag, which, especially in the answers to the Vailima Letters, did much to remove for him the drawbacks of his isolation and of absence from the centres of literature to which he always looked for praise and blame. But besides the loss of intercourse, he more than most men suffered from another pang. The love of country which is in all Scots, and beyond all others lies deepest in the Celtic heart, flowed back upon him again and again with a wave of uncontrollable emotion. When the "smell of the good wet earth" came to him, it |
