I

STEVENSON saw nothing of New York on the occasion of his first coming to America. At 6 P. M. on Sunday, August 18, 1879, he disembarked from the second cabin of the S. S. Devonia, which had sailed from the Clyde on August 7th. His sole impulsion at the time was that of "stepping westward"; and he remained in the metropolis only twentythree hours before crossing to Jersey City to take the train that was to carry him across the plains. Under the circumstances, he felt no desire to explore a city that seemed, at a glance, to have "an air of Liverpool."

Louis left the Devonia in the company of a fellow-traveller, named Jones; and an account of their adventures is rendered in the final chapter of The Amateur Emigrant,-the only passage in the works of R.L.S. that bears the caption of "New York." From this chapter the following quotations may be called to the remembrance of the reader:

Jones and I issued into West Street, sitting on some straw in the bottom of an open baggage-wagon. It rained miraculously; and from that moment till on the following night I left New York, there was scarce a lull, and no cessation of the downpour. . . . It took us but a few minutes, though it cost a good deal of money, to be rattled along West Street to our destination: "Reunion House, No. 10 West Street, one minute's walk from Castle Garden, the Steamboat Land. ings, California Steamers and Liverpool Ships; Board and Lodging per day 1 dollar, single meals 25 cents; no charge for storage or baggage; satisfaction guaranteed to all persons; Michael Mitchell, Proprietor." Reunion House was, I may go the length of saying, a humble hostelry. You entered

through a long bar-room, thence passed into a little dining-room, and thence into a still smaller kitchen. The furniture was of the plainest; but the bar was hung in the American taste, with encouraging and hospitable mottoes.. I suppose we had one of the "private rooms for families" at Reunion House. It was very small, furnished with a bed, a chair, and some clothes-pegs; and it derived all that was necessary for the life of the human animal through two borrowed lights; one looking into the passage, and the second opening, without sash, into another apartment, where three men fitfully snored, or in intervals of wakefulness, drearily mumbled to each other all night long. . . . You had to pass through the rain, which still fell thick and resonant, to reach a lavatory on the other side of the court. There were three basin-stands, and a few crumpled towels and pieces of wet soap, white and slippery like fish; nor should I forget a looking-glass and a pair of questionable combs. . . . Those who are out of pocket may go safely to Reunion House, where they will get decent meals and find an honest and obliging landlord.

Reunion House was still extant in the spring of 1895, when it was visited by a friend of the present writer, Mr. Louis Evan Shipman, who published his record of this visit in The Bookbuyer, for February, 1896. Some years ago, however, this landmark for literary pilgrims ceased to be. The site is now covered by the Whitehall Building—a skyscraper thirty-two stories high. The nearest edifice that dates from Stevenson's day is No. 16 West Street. This is a tenement-house, four stories in height, built. of red brick, with rusty iron fire-escapes dangling down the front. The streetlevel is occupied by a cheap Greek res

taurant. Beside the window of this restaurant, a dirty door-way admits the investigator, through a dingy passage, to a darkling inner court that appears predestined to enshrine "a pair of questionable combs." Nothing could be more characteristic of the transitional New York of the present time than the ridiculous contrast between the shabby and crumbling house at No. 16 West Street and the superb erection that adjoins it. To reconstruct the block as it appeared to R.L.S., it is necessary to imagine the Whitehall Building into non-existence, and to re-create a No. 10 in harmony with the aspect of the No. 16 that is still permitted to exist today. It is possible to imagine the astonishment of R.L.S.-if he could return to-morrow to seek the clothes that he abandoned "as they lay in a pulp in the middle of a pool upon the floor of Mitchell's kitchen"-to find himself confronted, on the site of his Reunion House, by a superb and soaring officebuilding, while all the rest of his remembered West Street remained dingy and depressing as of yore.

as

The single day of Monday, August 19, 1879, was spent by R.L S. in "nightmare wanderings in New York"; but these wanderings were motivated by immediate practical necessities, and not by any desire to see the city. "I went to banks, post-offices, railway-offices, restaurants, publishers, book-sellers, moneychangers" he tells us "and wherever I went, a pool would gather about my feet, and those who were careful of their floors would look on with an unfriendly eye."

A legend still persists that, during the course of this turbulent day, Stevenson turned up in the offices of the Century Magazine, and tried to sell some manuscripts, and was politely shown the door. because of his incongruous appearance. To put this rumour at rest, I wish to state that, some years ago, I took occasion to question the late Mr. Richard Watson Gilder very closely on this point, and that he assured me that there was absolutely no foundation for the legend.

II

The entire truth of that Great Adventure which allured Louis all the way from Grez to San Francisco has never yet been set before the reading public. The time has not yet come for telling all that is understood upon this subject by three or four people still living in the world; but, now that Louis has been dead for twenty years and Mrs. Stevenson has also passed away, a totally disinterested writer of a younger generation may perhaps be pardoned for lifting a single little corner of the veil which has been permitted for so many years to shroud in mystery this particular and all-important chapter of Stevenson's experience.

The very title of The Amateur Emigrant has led the majority of readers to infer that Louis came to America in the second cabin and crossed the plains in an emigrant train, mainly for the sake of the adventure and for the purpose of securing copy for his writings; and his love-story has been told in terms that have reduced it to the sentimental improved as highly proper in boardingbecility of those romances that are apschools for girls.

Let us now consider frankly a few of the facts. Stevenson met Mrs. Osbourne at Grez in the summer of 1876. Their union-to repeat a previous statement in these pages-was immediate and complete. It was not, however, till nearly three years later that Mrs. Osbourne found it necessary to return to husband, from whom she had previously California, to secure a divorce from her parted, by mutual consent, because of incompatibility of temper. When Stevenson informed his intimate friends of his intention to follow Mrs. Osbourne to California, and to marry her as soon as her divorce had been decreed, they endeavoured to dissuade him from the project. The grounds for their opinion of the case may now, perhaps, be stated clearly.

Stevenson's project was to marry a woman twelve years older than himself,

with two children in their teens. His assurance that she was the one woman in the world decreed by destiny to be his mate was, not unnaturally, discounted by those who, at the moment, knew him best. To put the matter somewhat crudely, they had heard him say the same sort of thing so many times before, that they were a little impatient of his protestations.

The history of Stevenson's relations with women in his youth has never yet been written. It has been stated-and stated truthfully-by his biographers that, in his growing years in Edinburgh, he was less interested than the average young man by women of his own age and of his own class. A famous Scottish man of letters-whose name I do not feel at liberty to mention-has assured me that, during his early twenties, Louis proposed marriage to two ladies who belonged to his own circle in Edinburgh. One of these ladies I have never seen. The other I have met; but, of course, I never questioned her upon the subject. If the information of my credible authority is not at fault, it seems most reasonable to infer that both of these rejected proposals were motivated by the impulse of the moment and represented no very profound feeling in the youthful suitor. One point, at least, is certain— that Louis, in his adolescence, was not accustomed, as the phrase is, to keep company with young women of his own aristocratic circle.

At the same time, as every one in Edinburgh knows, although this fact has hitherto been expunged from all biographies of R.L.S., Louis was habituated to a dangerous and fitful intimacy with many women of a class inferior to his own. In common with many people who are afflicted with a tendency to tuberculosis, he was troubled, throughout his adolescence, with a superfluity of sexual impulsion. His early quarrel with his father, and the consequent cutting down of his allowance, was occasioned not merely by a disagreement concerning the theory of religion, but also and a little more emphatically-by the

elder Stevenson's desire to curb what seemed to him the inexcusable and devastating wildness of his son.

These facts of Stevenson's early struggle between the two natures that were forever warring within him were, of course, known fully to those who loved him best, and cared most about his future, during the second half of the third decade of his life. His entanglement with Mrs. Osbourne appeared, therefore, to his best friends at the moment, merely as another misadventure from which-as so often in the past-he needed imperatively to be rescued. In this inference, his friends were wrong, as all of them [save one] admitted subsequently, when they met the lady in the case; but their opposition to the infatuation that appeared, at the time, to threaten a tragic termination to the promising career of R.L.S. can no longer be regarded as illogical.

In persisting in his determination to marry Mrs. Osbourne, Louis could expect no sympathy from his strictlyminded father; and to brave the disap.proval of his father was to render inevitable a discontinuance of that parental subsidy which theretofore had descended like manna from the skies as his sole means of support. This practical consideration afforded his best friends a secondary motive for urging him to discontinue a relation whose cost seemed, upon its face, to overweigh its value. In a world. in which, for Louis, there had been so many women, most of whom had been forgotten without pangs, it seemed quixotic and superfluous to sacrifice so much for one who figured, in the outlook of his most experienced and sage advisers, merely as the latest factor in a still unfinished series.

But Louis, this time, knew his mind. He had been taught at last what he had never learned before-although he had read it in Walt Whitman-that "the soul is not more than the body and the body is not more than the soul." He had learned at last to reconcile the sheer spirituality that he had experienced in his friendship with an unattainable

woman like Mrs. Sitwell with the sheer sensuality that he had experienced in his relations with many women whose names are not recorded in the story of his growing up. For the first time in his life, he realised a reconciliation of those apparent inconsistencies that are the necessary parents of the strange, miraculous phenomenon known to philosophic criticism by the name of "modern love," and could say, with the greatest lyric celebrant of this phenomenon, "Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor thee from myself, neither our love from God."

It was this impulsion that moved in the mind of R.L.S. when he determined to cut himself off from his father to follow Mrs. Osbourne to America. His last night in England was spent in the home of Mr. Edmund Gosse. Mr. Gosse has told me personally how, for hours, he reasoned with Louis, in an endeavour to deter him from what seemed, at the time, to be a mad determination. To put an end to the discussion, R.L.S. finally brought forward certain arguments to prove that, if he should decide to stay at home, he would write himself forever, in the books of the Recording Angel, as a coward and a cad. Thereupon, Mr. Gosse, changing his tactics, endeavoured to advance a loan of money to his friend; but this loan was firmly refused by an idealist who preferred to embark penniless upon his Great Ad

venture.

Another detail of these days was revealed to me by the late Alison Cunningham. She told me that Louis slunk away, without a word, from Swanston Cottage, in the early morning; and that his father never learned whither he had vanished until, a month later, he received a communication sent by Louis from New York. Cummy, at this time, was a very old woman, and I did not always trust the accuracy of her recollection of events long past; but she repeated this assertion several times, without any variation of detail, during the days I spent with her in Edinbugh, in the summer of 1910.

The poverty experienced by R.L.S. on his trip to California in 1879 was a matter of grim reality, and not at all a matter of romance. His reason for taking passage in the second cabin was not-as Mr. Balfour has suggested-"a desire to gain first-hand knowledge for himself of emigrants and emigration, which might be of immediate use for making a book and of ultimate service to him in a thousand ways." He travelled in the second cabin because, by cutting himself off from his father, he had made himself a pauper; and he chose the second cabin in preference to the steerage, merely in order that he might have a table on which to write for money while the ship was at sea. This convenience he utilised for composing The Story of a Lie.

His crossing of the continent in an emigrant train was dictated, also, not by the desire to gather copy for a subsequent book, but by the immediate necessity for strict economy. Louis had made a wager against the Providence that had coddled him throughout his youth; and the stakes were life and death. Though he had never earned his living, in all his thirty years of life, he had determined at last to do so, in order to establish his economic fitness to assume the burden of a marriage toward which he felt himself impelled by a sublime and rare conjunction of desire and duty. In this endeavour to become―at a single, unanticipated impulse-self-supporting, he ultimately failed; but he embarked upon it with a bravery that must be recorded to his everlasting credit. The horrors of Reunion House were turned to humour in the last chapter of The Amateur Emigrant; but, in actuality, they were borne with gritted teeth by a nameless author who, at the moment, was husbanding his small resources for a final and decisive battle against oblivion and death.

III

Stevenson's account of his experiences in the second cabin of the S. S. Devonia is rendered in The Amateur Emigrant;