Robert Louis Stevenson by Frank McLynn

Author:Frank McLynn [Frank McLynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1994-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

Occasionally Louis, as well as his wife, felt the need to escape the isolation of Saranac. In December 1887 he was briefly back in New York City again, and it was then that Saint-Gaudens introduced him to his hero, General Sherman. Three years from his death, the victor of Atlanta was already failing fast and at first took Stevenson for ‘one of my boys’; when the mistake was rectified, a stimulating discussion on military tactics ensued, in which the well-read Louis more than held his own. Both men took away pleasant memories. RLS, who had always hero-worshipped soldiers, from Wellington to Gordon, thrilled to the experience of meeting a real-life hero of the Civil War, and told Will Low: ‘It was the next thing to seeing Wellington, and I dare say that the Iron Duke would not have been half so human.’ Sherman told Saint-Gaudens with a smile: ‘He [RLS] is a fine old dog with enough of the Old Adam in him to suit even your Scotch taste.’11

As the New Year approached at Saranac, there were few occasions for travel, for the Stevensons were snowed in. Inspired by the similarity of the scenery to the Highlands, Louis began a tale of the 1745 rising that eventually became The Master of Ballantrae. There was much that was Scottish about the Adirondacks, from the venison and salmon trout the Stevensons cooked for dinner to the roaming cows that woke Louis in the morning by butting the wooden walls of the cottage; it was true that Saranac did not have the charm of Davos but Louis’s health held up amazingly well – after leaving Bournemouth he chalked up a stretch of fifteen months without haemorrhage – and he fell ravenously on his food whenever he came in from the cold. Winter in the Adirondacks was beyond anything he had experienced yet, even in Davos. By December the thermometer was at twenty-five below zero; the walls of the cottage snapped and cracked as they expanded and contracted with the ice; Louis had frostbite on his ears; Valentine found one morning that the handkerchief under her pillow had frozen into a ball of ice; the kitchen floor, when washed with hot water, immediately became a skating-rink. Fanny came down from Montreal with the winter equipment, not a moment too soon, and Louis donned his thick buffalo-skin coat, Indian boots and astrakhan hat that made him look like an early Polar explorer. By the end of January 1888 the temperature had plummeted to forty below zero; whenever they ventured out in the buckboard they drove with three pairs of gloves and with hot soapstones to warm the feet and hands. It was so cold that if you touched metal your flesh stuck; one morning Louis’s buffalo coat was stuck frozen to the kitchen floor while Valentine got her dress wet from the kitchen floor and walked around all day with a hem as heavy as chainmail. Louis arranged his routine around the winter conditions: he

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