all
were as naught. He had some Scotch obstinacy of his own. Every fiber of
his being yearned for her. She needed him. He was going to her!

Of course his action in thus sailing away to a strange land alone was a
shock to his parents. He was a man in years, but they regarded him as
but a child, as indeed he was. He had never earned his own living. He
was frail in body, idle, erratic, peculiar. His flashing wit and subtle
insight into the heart of things were quite beyond his parents--in this
he was a stranger to them. Their religion to him was gently amusing, and
he congratulated himself on not having inherited it. He had a pride,
too, but Graham Balfour said it was French pride, not the Scotch brand.
He viewed himself as a part of the passing procession. His own velvet
jacket and marvelous manifestations in neckties added interest to the
show. And that he admired his own languorous ways there is no doubt.

His "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" he declared in sober earnest, in which was
concealed a half-smile, was autobiography. And this is true, for all
good things that every writer writes are a self-confession.

Stevenson was a hundred men in one and "his years were anything from
sixteen to eighty," says Lloyd Osbourne in his "Memoirs." But when a
letter came from San Francisco saying Fanny Osbourne was sick, all of
that dilatory, procrastinating, gently trifling quality went out of his
soul and he was possessed by one idea--he must go to her!

The captain of the ship had no authority to follow the order of an
unknown person and put him ashore, so the telegram was given to the man
to whom it referred.

He read the message, smiled dreamily, tore it into bits and dropped it
on the tide. And the ship turned her prow toward America and sailed
away. So this was the man who had no firmness, no decision, no will!
Aye, heretofore he had only lacked a motive. Now love supplied it.

* * * * *

It is life supplies the writer his theme. People who have not lived, no
matter how grammatically they may write, have no real message. Robert
Louis had now severed the umbilical cord. He was going to live his own
life, to earn his own living. He could do but one thing, and that was to
write. He may have been a procrastinator in everything else, but as a
writer he was a skilled mechanic. And so straightway on that ship he
began to work his experiences up into copy. Just what he wrote the world
will never know,