Robert Louis Stevenson; a Bookman extra number 1913/Stevenson's Two Mothers
STEVENSON'S
TWO MOTHERS
LOUIS STEVENSON, in one of his chance autobiographic glimpses, tells us how he came to accompany his father on an inspection of the harbour lights of Fife. "It was," he says, "my first professional tour, my first journey in the complete character of man without the help of petticoats." A great influence had these petticoats in bending his thoughts aright, when he was but a green twig. Their patience, their cheerfulness, flooded the dawn of his life with sunshine, and the very remembrance of these palmy days filled him with joyousness, for, as Sydney Smith says, "If you make children happy, you will make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it." He was a lucky-starred boy. Fortune had gifted him with two sterling mothers, for the nurse to whom he so touchingly dedicated his "Garden of Verses" held a place in his affections only second to one. Along with Mrs. Stevenson, this mother of his adoption, Alison Cunningham, tended him with a care to which he owed his life. His nurse is now the only one of the petticoated angels of his infant life left.[1] Mrs. Stevenson, in May, 1897, was laid beside her husband under the good Scots sods their son had longed to rest below. She had not dreamed she would have wept the eyes that should have wept for her, and had, when left a widow, transplanted herself and the endeared belongings of her married home to Samoa. When, her son died she returned to the Old World for one tie she had left there—her elder sister (the Auntie[2] of Louis' Verses), who had always been a centre in her family. This Miss Balfour had mothered Mrs. Stevenson in her school days, and now the later generation of orphans she had reared being started in life, she needed her younger sister to be eyes and ears to her, when sight and hearing were failing. Glad were Mrs. Stevenson's old friends when she re-settled in Edinburgh with this senior sister, in a house overlooking river and sea, with one of those unique views which only a city built as Auld Reekie is, can command.
Mrs. Stevenson courageously faced her sorrow. She remained as of yore, bright and calm. Her son, I heard, when a grown man, recall how proud he was of her clear-cut features, her gracious manner when he went, under her wing, to children's parties. He boasted no child at these entertainments had so pretty a mother as he. Hers was a perennial beauty. With her cultured mind, her goodly presence, strangers who latterly met her would not credit she was nearing threescore and ten. The son who had gone before her was the theme she loved to hear others discourse on. Her unceasing interest in everything connected with him, her every thought given so wholly to him, made her listeners realise how great was her loss, how great was her love. She, so "austerely led," had never been otherwise than "well content." When people marvelled at her vivacity, she bravely replied she had surely had small cause to repine with a happy record of married life to dwell on, and forty-five years of her son's companionship granted to her. If her Louis had remained unknown to fame, to hear her speak of him would have drawn about her pleased listeners, for she told with such a spice of wit and graphicness, reminiscences of him, they fastened on the hearer's memory.
Alison Cunningham came to share with her the care of Louis when he was eighteen months old, and for stark love and kindness she too would have followed him into far countries. "Cummy," as her small charge promptly christened her, hailed from Torryburn, a village of white crowstepped houses, which lies facing the sun on the edge of the Forth. Her people had belonged for generations to this west neuk of Fife, and she had endless tales to tell of its local legendry and historic lore. She knew gruesome facts of resurrectionists who lifted from Torryburn's graveyard and its neighbour, Culross Abbey. Her collection of stories were doubtless a mine of wealth to young R. L. S., for, like her mistress, Cummy had the gift of picturing in words. She had had the advantage of a sound education, for to finish her schooling she went daily to Dunfermline five miles away. This distance she proudly records she covered in a marvellously short time, for Louis's "Comely Cummy," as he called her, along with her refined features, is still trig and active. When she went back for her holidays to red-roofed Torryburn she received and preserved many letters from her charge. Mrs. Stevenson wrote these early epistles to little Loo's dictation. They are full of childish reiterations, hopes that his Cummy will come back soon, and questions as to the people in her old world village she had made him acquainted with by her descriptions. He informs her, "Catherine sleeps in my room because Papa said it," and that Papa said it, has an authoritative brevity which even His Majesty Louis the Worshipped did not gainsay. At the end of one letter he signs himself "Your loving Robert Louis Stevenson," but fearing this full and then seldom used title sounded stiff and estranged, he ordered his mother between the "loving" and his baptismal name to insert "little son," knowing that these two short words would act as a magnet on Cummy, and insure her return, despite the attractions of that El Dorado he longed to visit—Torryburn. Cummy tells how, when ailing, he would, after tossing sleepless, desire to hear comforting words from Scripture read, to be a rod and staff to him in the darksome, terror-haunted vale of night. Willingly good Cummy complied with his wish, and read till she saw through her "kind voice " he had found rest. In the morning, when he awoke refreshed, and the sun shone into his room, he again issued his constant command, "Read to me, Cummy." His nurse, knowing well his fears with the shadows of night had flown away, and the "Old, Old Story" would be laid aside till he again traversed the "uneven land," with well-pretended ignorance would ask, "What chapter will I read to you, my laddie?" But her laddie no longer a saint would be, and with the unhypocritical honesty of childhood replied, "Why, Cummy, it's daylight now; put away the Bible and reach over for that new book of Ballantyne's." Early on him came the desire to write. Cummy depicts how he often slipped his hand into hers when he was a petticoated boy of three and four, and dragged her off to the nursery, signalled to her to lock the door, and putting his finger to his lips to enjoin secrecy, whispered as loud as a stage conspirator, "I've got a story to tell, Cummy; you write it." "He just havered," says Cummy, smiling yet at the recollection of her little lad, whose keen eyes glowed all the darker then in contrast with the childish yellow hair which crowned his head. Cummy entered heartily into the mystery and conspiracy of the secretive tale-maker. His women-folk were always slavishly good-humoured to their young autocrat, doing his whimsical bidding, when practicable, without hesitation. "I wrote down every word he spoke," says Cummy, "it pleased the bairn, and I read his havers to his mother at the nursery fire." When others spoke of him as the masterly master of his pen, the petticoated guardians of his youth still loved to speak of him as Smout his father's name for him. They pictured him hiding in the manse garden at Colinton, while they, the seekers, wandered about pretending they could not see the girlishly-dressed boy in blue so obviously hidden. Not only "the little feet along the floor" did the mother often chance to hear in after years, but also his piping voice, asking in the childish refrain, "How far is it to Babylon?" as he and his cousins sang by the water door, wondering if they would reach that distant city "by candle light." Cummy kept a journal in these days, in which she registered small Smoutie's first words, his pretty sayings, his precocious chatter, his fertile make-believes. Thinking she was nigh unto death once, she burned this chronicle. "I mind every word he said to me," she says, "and when his mamma and I looked at the photographs of him in the frocks I made for him, we seemed to see him playing about again so happy like." Their minds were so filled with him they never quite realised his own words:
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there."
"On my tomb, if ever I have one, I mean to get these words inscribed, 'He clung to his paddle,'" Louis said in his first book, "The Inland Voyage." In this watery journey the Arethusa had born him gallantly down the Oise, till it rushed below a fallen tree, and then the canoe absconding, like Absalom's steed, left her skipper entangled in the branches. "Death himself had me by the heels," he wrote, "for this was his last ambuscade, and he must now personally join in the fray. And still I clung to my paddle." The paddle with which he plied his course in life, and steered therewith into our hearts was in reality his pen. He clung to it despite adverse currents, and moreover wielded it with a boyish gaiety of spirit which showed his heroic pluck. "Gladly I lived," he truly sang. His contented, happy temperament he owed in a great measure to the help of the petticoats who shielded his youthful years. They never willingly thwarted or out of laziness refused any reasonable request of the delicate boy they cherished. They petted him without spoiling him. They taught him despite the many months his feeble health held him captive in the house, to see, for as Ruskin says, "Thousands can think for one who can see; to see clearly is poetry, prophecy, religion, all in one:"
he wrote in after life, which was a sentiment he learned when he was a light-hearted ruler of the nursery realm, cheerful if autocratic.
These two fervent smiths who forged this bright sword[3] of literature had good metal wherewith to fashion their blade and they knew it, for they proudly dreamed of a brilliant future for their little Loo even when he dictated havers to Cummy. He put up a door-plate on 17, Heriot Row, with "R. L. Stevenson, Advocate," thereon, and they knew his deed box in the Parliament House was guiltless of briefs, and everyone thought he was a born idler, or as he himself said, "base," not to follow the profession of his fathers. They believed he would yet shine. Instead of dry legal pages he was these years preparing to bring into life David Balfour, to resurrect Lord Braxfield as Weir of Hermiston, and brighten our shelves with "Memories and Portraits." His first essays in print, "The Charity Bazaar," "The Pentland Rising," and a few papers in the Edinburgh University Magazine (now all so valued by the bibliomaniac) were often read and praised by his first amanuenses and critics. His mother with keen maternal insight early guessed wherein his genius lay, guessed what would be his ablest weapon, and fostered his inclination to hold by the pen as he held by the truant Arethusa's paddle. In his Table Talk Shirley bears this out. "It was from this cottage (Swanston) that possibly the most charming of our younger Scottish writers went out into the world to try his luck. Hardly anyone except his mother guessed as yet what was in store. But she was prescient as mothers are."
"Be good yourself—make others happy," Mrs. Stevenson wrote as a motto on a quilt after her signature. "That," she added, as she finished the "happy," "is the Gospel according to R. L. Stevenson." It was a gospel she preached by precept and example, and she took pains to impress it on her little son, so when he grew "well and old," it tided him over many of the ills of life.
Of his "second mother, my first wife," as he called his faithful Alison Cunningham, bereft of her boy and of her mistress, who so generously let her share her only child with her, the mistress who grew into Cummy's best friend, she was left as she with hopefulness said, "not for long," Mrs. Stevenson on her last visit to Cummy's snug home noted the crape still on her dress which she had donned when the fell news came from Samoa. "Don't take it off, Cummy," she said, as she touched this trapping of woe. She well knew Cummy's mourning was not only an outward sign of grief. These two angels "of his infant life," overcoming their national Scots reserve, had for his sake proudly worn their hearts upon their sleeves, so he who ran might read engraven thereon his first mother's last word on earth—"Louis."
1897.
- ↑ She died July, 1913.
- ↑ "Chief of our Aunts—not only I,
But all your dozen nurslings cry,
What did the other children do,
And what were childhood wanting you?" - ↑ "So like a sword the son shall roam
On nobler missions sent;
And as the smith remained at home
In peaceful turret pent,
So sits the while the mother well content."
—"Underwoods," by R.L.S.