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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Complete Short Stories of R. L. Stevenson," Robert Louis Stevenson showcases a rich tapestry of human experience through his compelling narratives, imaginative settings, and profound psychological insights. This collection captures the essence of the late 19th-century literary landscape, intertwining realism with elements of adventure and gothic horror. Stevenson's narrative style is characterized by its vivid imagery and meticulous attention to character development, as seen in tales like "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and "The Body Snatcher," which explore the duality of human nature and the moral ambiguities of life. Robert Louis Stevenson, a Scottish novelist and essayist, found inspiration for his stories through his own tumultuous experiences and literary influences, including the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. His diverse travels and encounters with various cultures, alongside his struggles with health, shaped his understanding of life's complexities and human emotions. Stevenson's works reflect his deep empathy and fascination with the darker sides of humanity, infusing his short stories with a blend of whimsy and philosophical depth. This anthology is a must-read for anyone interested in the evolution of short fiction and the exploration of complex moral themes. Whether you are a long-time admirer of Stevenson's genius or a newcomer to his work, this collection invites you to immerse yourself in vivid tales that resonate with contemporary readers, making it an essential addition to the library of any literature enthusiast. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF R. L. STEVENSON
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection gathers the full range of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short fiction as represented by the major cycles and volumes that shaped his reputation in the form: the urban experiments grouped under New Arabian Nights, the Pacific-set Island Nights’ Entertainments, and the capacious Scottish and European miscellany The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables. Bringing these works into a single volume clarifies Stevenson’s evolution across settings and moods, from metropolitan intrigue to maritime peril, from Gothic unease to philosophical fable. The purpose is to present, in one place, the breadth of his short-form craft and the continuity of his concerns over nearly two decades of writing.
The contents are exclusively short-form prose: short stories, linked story cycles, novelettes, and brief fables. There are no novels, plays, poems, essays, letters, or diaries. Within this compact spectrum Stevenson tests multiple modes—adventure, mystery, romance, supernatural tale, and parable—often combining them in hybrid forms. Some sequences employ framing devices and recurring characters; others stand alone as concentrated narratives. The fables, a distinctive subset, reduce narrative to pointed allegory. Taken together, these varied text types demonstrate how Stevenson adapted magazine-friendly forms into enduring literature without leaving the domain of short fiction.
Most pieces first appeared in periodicals before being gathered into books, a context that encouraged episodic structures, cliff-edge pacing, and tonal variety. The geographical arc is equally clear: early London and Continental settings give way to Scottish locales and, later, to the Pacific islands that Stevenson knew in the final years of his life. This arrangement highlights his responsiveness to place, speech, and custom, as well as his preference for concise plots that turn on choice and consequence. Seen as a whole, the collection maps a career-long commitment to the short story as a laboratory of narrative technique.
Under the banner of New Arabian Nights, Stevenson explores the modern city as a theatre of disguise, coincidence, and moral testing. The sequence uses a flexible frame—glimpsed in the Cigar Divan pieces—to link adventures that blur the line between leisure society and clandestine enterprise. The stories move with brisk urbanity, yet they probe the anxieties of an age fascinated by clubs, secret societies, and the riddle of character. Through puzzles, reversals, and elegant misdirection, Stevenson turns London into an imaginative counterpart of the tales of the East, alive to marvel, risk, and the ethics of curiosity.
Within this sphere, The Suicide Club and The Rajah’s Diamond show how a linked design can yield contrasting effects. One cycle follows an urbane gentleman drawn into a hidden organization that tests fate; the other traces a jewel’s passage through disparate hands, exposing weakness, greed, and gallantry. Both sequences use shifting viewpoints and interlocking episodes, inviting the reader to reassess prior events from fresh angles. The result is a mosaic of motives and masks, as notable for its light touch and irony as for its suspense. Stevenson’s control of structure is as memorable as his atmosphere of urbane peril.
Alongside the cycles stand independent tales that illustrate Stevenson’s range. The Pavilion on the Links sets romance and rivalry against a storm-swept coast. A Lodging for the Night — A Story of Francis Villon adopts a historical canvas to test a poet’s conscience during a winter episode in Paris. The Sire de Maletroit’s Door compresses a lifetime’s decision into one charged night in medieval France. Providence and the Guitar strikes a gentler, comic note. These pieces reveal a talent equally at home in historical reconstruction and contemporary adventure, always anchored by swift characterization and moral pressure.
The later sequence signaled by the Prologue and Epilogue of the Cigar Divan extends the Arabian Nights experiment toward satire and farce. Episodes such as Challoner’s Adventure, Somerset’s Adventure, and Desborough’s Adventure encounter eccentric conspirators and ambiguous causes, while narrative intrusions—Zero’s Tale of the Explosive Bomb, for instance—play with the reliability of testimony. Story of the Destroying Angel and Story of the Fair Cuban move between London drawing rooms and transatlantic entanglements. Throughout, Stevenson blends momentum with commentary, turning the linked-story format into a study of storytelling itself: who speaks, what is withheld, and how plots metastasize in a credulous world.
Island Nights’ Entertainments (often called South Sea tales) shifts the stage to Oceania, where traders, missionaries, and island communities meet under the pressure of commerce, belief, and desire. The stories draw on Stevenson’s lived encounters in the Pacific, but they remain emphatically crafted fictions—concise, atmospheric, and alert to moral cost. Here he refines the art of narrative economy: a pact, a curse, a bargain, or a rumor sets action in motion, and the consequences disclose the character of individuals and cultures. Language, setting, and custom are treated with close attention, yielding tales at once adventurous and ethically searching.
The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables assembles Scottish sea-coasts, mountain villages, Continental roads, and philosophical byways into a generous miscellany. The Merry Men itself is a study of obsession against a treacherous island sea. Will o’ the Mill meditates on choice and renunciation. Thrawn Janet plunges into folk belief and the uncanny with stern gravity, while Olalla marries romance to ancestral mystery. In The Treasure of Franchard, questions of wealth and worth are tested through a French setting. As a group, these works epitomize Stevenson’s knack for fitting large moral questions into taut narrative frames.
Elsewhere the tone darkens or turns antic. The Body-Snatcher presses into medical history and the ethics of complicity, drawing dread from professional decorum under siege. The Misadventures of John Nicholson treats folly and flight with comic verve, an urban picaresque of errors and sudden reckonings. The Story of a Lie experiments with perspective and the costs of falsehood. Across these pieces Stevenson balances entertainment with scrutiny: he delights in tight plotting and surprise while insisting that actions leave a residue—on conscience, on friendship, and on the fragile reputations that govern social life.
The fables—brief pieces such as The Persons of the Tale, The Sinking Ship, The Yellow Paint, The Four Reformers, The Reader, and many others—distill his art to crystalline form. They are swift, elliptical, and edged with irony, staging debates between abstractions or giving voice to unexpected speakers. Instead of moralizing outright, they dramatize a paradox, a vanity, or a social pose, leaving the verdict to the reader. Their wit anchors the larger collection by showing the same preoccupations—identity, chance, authority, and self-deception—rendered in miniature, as if the architecture of the longer tales had been sketched in a few deft lines.
Seen together, these stories reveal unifying themes: the testing of character under pressure; the play of chance and design; the masks people wear and the truths they evade; the pull between romance and realism. Stylistically, Stevenson favors clarity, rhythmic prose, and structural invention—frames, linked episodes, and perspective shifts—always in the service of momentum. The collection remains significant because it demonstrates how the short story can carry the weight of adventure, philosophy, comedy, and terror without excess, and because it preserves, across varied settings, a consistent moral imagination alert to consequence and choice.
Author Biography
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and travel writer whose work helped shape modern adventure fiction, psychological horror, and reflective nonfiction. Writing in the late Victorian era, he combined brisk narrative with stylistic clarity and an interest in moral complexity. His books reached an international audience during his lifetime and have remained continuously in print. He moved easily among genres—romance, Gothic, historical tale, children’s verse—while maintaining a distinctive voice recognizable for its musical prose and economy. Beyond entertainment, his stories probe identity, conscience, and the pressures of society, themes that have invited generations of adaptation and critical debate.
Born and raised in Edinburgh, he was educated in the city’s schools and at the University of Edinburgh, where he first prepared for engineering before turning to law. Although he qualified for the bar, literature occupied him more fully, and he joined a circle of critics and writers who encouraged his early experiments in essays and tales. He admired narrative masters such as Daniel Defoe, Sir Walter Scott, and Alexandre Dumas, and he studied the essay tradition from Montaigne to English periodical writers. His early critical pieces reflect an emerging program: to defend romance and storytelling vigor against narrow forms of contemporary realism.
His first books grew from continental travels undertaken for health and curiosity. An Inland Voyage, recounting a canoe trip through Belgium and France, and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes displayed an observant, humorous, and humane voice. At the same time he gathered essays in volumes such as Virginibus Puerisque and Familiar Studies of Men and Books, honing a supple style attentive to rhythm and clarity. Short fiction in magazines culminated in New Arabian Nights, an innovative sequence of linked tales that played with urban mystery and exoticism. By the early 1880s he had established himself as a versatile writer with a growing readership.
International fame followed quickly. Treasure Island defined a strain of seafaring adventure that shaped popular culture, while A Child’s Garden of Verses offered memorable lyric poems for and about childhood. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde caught public attention with its concise exploration of divided selfhood, and Kidnapped channeled Scottish history into a brisk pursuit narrative. Reviewers often praised his craftsmanship and narrative economy, though some critics questioned his allegiance to “romance” over social realism. The reading public, however, responded enthusiastically, and these works secured his reputation across both sides of the Atlantic and in translation.
In subsequent years he diversified further. Historical romances such as The Black Arrow and The Master of Ballantrae extended his interest in conflict and loyalty, and he followed Kidnapped with Catriona. He also produced plays and collaborated on fiction; with Lloyd Osbourne he wrote The Wrong Box, The Wrecker, and The Ebb-Tide. Moves across Europe and the United States, and extended voyages in the Pacific, supplied new landscapes and concerns. Collections later known as Island Nights’ Entertainments explored the South Seas with an unsentimental eye. He worked at a demanding pace, revising constantly, and left some projects, including Weir of Hermiston, unfinished at his death.
Beyond storytelling, he was a notable essayist of literary theory and practice. Pieces such as “A Gossip on Romance” and “A Humble Remonstrance” argued for the legitimacy of adventure, pattern, and pleasure in fiction, countering prescriptive aesthetics of the period. In the Pacific he engaged publicly with colonial politics; A Footnote to History examined recent events in Samoa and criticized imperial entanglements and administrative failures. These activities connect to recurring themes in his work: the testing of conscience, the strain between individual aspiration and social authority, and the ethical ambiguities of power. His arguments were civil in tone but firm in principle.
Settling in Samoa in the early 1890s, he continued to write and became known locally as Tusitala, “teller of tales.” He died there in the mid-1890s, leaving a compact but remarkably varied body of work. His reputation has shifted over time—sometimes diminished by strict genre hierarchies, later restored by reassessment of his technique and psychological insight. Today he is read both for narrative pleasure and for subtle reflections on identity, justice, and empire. His stories and poems remain staples in classrooms, and adaptations continue on stage and screen. As a stylist and storyteller, he stands among the most enduring voices of his century.
Historical Context
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) wrote across the high Victorian age into the fin-de-siècle, a period defined by imperial expansion, industrial modernity, and anxieties about moral and social change. Born in Edinburgh to a family of lighthouse engineers, he came of age as Britain consolidated global power while its cities swelled and technologies transformed daily life. These pressures and promises filter through his short fiction, which moves from gaslit London to storm-lashed Scottish coasts and the contested South Pacific. The collection’s urban intrigues, maritime perils, and colonial encounters all reflect a generation negotiating the exhilarations and disquiet of late nineteenth-century modernity.
Edinburgh’s intellectual and religious legacies shaped Stevenson’s imagination. The Scottish Enlightenment’s rationalism coexisted with stern Presbyterian Calvinism and a folklore of the uncanny. Stories of witchcraft, damnation, and moral testing descended from kirk discipline and rural tradition, while skepticism and inquiry marked urban education. The Body-Snatcher draws on Edinburgh’s notorious anatomy scandals and the Burke and Hare murders of 1828, while Thrawn Janet evokes parish terrors and covenanting history. This fusion of Enlightenment scrutiny and gothic fear animates The Merry Men and other tales, in which seemingly orderly worlds are riven by superstition, conscience, and the relentless scrutiny of the self.
The Stevenson engineering dynasty—grandfather Robert Stevenson and father Thomas—built lighthouses amidst North Sea gales. Their charts, storms, and beaconry haunt the settings and metaphors of the coastal tales. Shipwrecks, tidal rips, and salvage law color The Merry Men and The Pavilion on the Links, where lives pivot on navigation, secrecy, and the calculus of risk. Trained briefly for engineering and then law at the University of Edinburgh, Stevenson rejected both professions for letters, yet the disciplines of observation, precision, and structural design inform his prose. Maritime technology and coastal economies thus provide not only scenery but narrative engines and ethical tests.
Rapid urbanization and the culture of clubland form the backdrop for New Arabian Nights. London in the 1870s mixed West End luxury with fog, crime, and labyrinthine streets. Gentlemen’s clubs, discreet lodging houses, and night walks supplied both mise-en-scène and social codes for plots about hidden vice and theatrical self-presentation. The Suicide Club and The Rajah’s Diamond translate oriental tale structures into a metropolis run by timetables and cash, parodying the city’s ritualized sociability. The metropolis becomes a stage where class, anonymity, and spectacle converge—an environment ideal for conspiracies, chance meetings, and moral trials masked beneath wit and good manners.
Stevenson’s short fiction prospered amid the explosion of Victorian magazines and shilling monthlies. Periodicals such as The Cornhill Magazine, Longman’s Magazine, and Scribner’s provided international platforms between the late 1870s and early 1890s. New Arabian Nights first appeared in London periodicals in 1877–78 before book publication in 1882 by Chatto and Windus, illustrating how serial form shaped pacing, cliffhangers, and interconnected episodes. The detective and sensation traditions—Poe, Wilkie Collins, Gaboriau—gave models for ratiocination and suspense that Stevenson refitted to his interests in psychology and ethics. The magazine market rewarded brevity, surprise, and variety, conditions well matched to his narrative experiments.
Continental travel and the regimen of health tourism left deep marks on setting and tone. Frequent bouts of lung disease sent Stevenson to French spa towns and Alpine climates—Fontainebleau, Grez-sur-Loing, Davos, Hyères—where he mingled with artists, poets, and expatriates. These milieus cultivated cosmopolitan sensibilities and an eye for borderlands: mountain passes, inns, and villages where lives turn on a single night. Will o’ the Mill and A Lodging for the Night distill European traditions—folkloric fatalism, medieval bravado, and French realism—into compact parables of choice and chance. The invalid’s discipline sharpened his economy of style and his fascination with decisive moments.
The 1880 marriage to Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in San Francisco pulled Stevenson into transatlantic and collaborative networks. The couple’s shared enterprise with Lloyd Osbourne produced the cycle later known as More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885), parts of which appear here as the Cigar Divan frame and tales of Zero and explosive plots. Their satire engages the era’s dynamite scares: Alfred Nobel’s invention in 1867, Fenian attacks in London between 1881 and 1885, and the formation of Special Branch in 1883. The stories exploit the modern city’s fear of invisible networks, theatrical revolutionaries, and the spectacle of technology turned terror.
From 1888 to 1894 Stevenson voyaged across and then settled in the South Pacific, a region under intense colonial pressure. Sailing first on the schooner Casco from San Francisco to the Marquesas and Tahiti, then on the Equator through the Gilbert Islands to Samoa, he witnessed the copra trade, blackbirding to Queensland, and imperial rivalries. Island Nights’ Entertainments (1893) refracts this experience into fictions attentive to missionaries, traders, and indigenous authority. In Samoa he made a home at Vailima on Upolu, adopting the name Tusitala, writer of tales. The Berlin Act of 1889 and contests between Germany, Britain, and the United States shadow these narratives.
Missionary enterprise and commercial capitalism clashed throughout the Pacific, a struggle reflected in Stevenson’s island stories. The London Missionary Society and Wesleyan Methodists planted congregations, while traders and planters sought labor and profit from copra and sandalwood. Stevenson’s sympathies often lie with local chiefs navigating entangled jurisdictions and imported moralities. The Beach of Falesa, The Bottle Imp, and The Isle of Voices adapt European folklore to Polynesian settings to examine contract, temptation, and reciprocity. The hybrid idiom—biblical cadence, sailor slang, and island speech—registers a world where empire’s legal and spiritual claims collide with older customs and community obligations.
Victorian science offered both tools and anxieties. Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and the new disciplines of bacteriology, psychiatry, and criminology unsettled inherited notions of character. Atavism and degeneration theory, popularized by thinkers like Cesare Lombroso, echo through Olalla, where tainted lineage becomes an allegory of historical burden. The Body-Snatcher draws on the pre-Anatomy Act era, when demand for cadavers fostered grave robbing and murder, but it also indicts professional complicity. Medical schools in Edinburgh and London—and the figure of the respectable man with secret knowledge—provide a crucial template for tales where ethical certainty erodes under empirical scrutiny.
Scottish local life supplies idiom and ethical weather for many pieces. The Disruption of 1843, which created the Free Church of Scotland, and a tradition of Sabbatarian rigor inform depictions of village piety and gossip. Thrawn Janet stages a conflict between Enlightenment preaching and folk dread, while The Merry Men confronts island superstition with coastal realities of wrecking and scarcity. The aftermath of the Highland Clearances and the shift from subsistence to cash economies haunt landscapes where kinship, reputation, and the kirk govern conduct. In such settings a rumor, a storm, or a sermon can tip the balance of fate.
Finance and respectability preoccupy the late Victorian imagination, and Stevenson tracks their double edge. The expansion of joint-stock companies and credit culture, alongside shocks like the City of Glasgow Bank failure in 1878, produced a climate of speculative risk and sudden ruin. Stories such as The Misadventures of John Nicholson and The Superfluous Mansion play on embezzlement, bogus gentility, and the moral arithmetic of debt. Legal reforms in bankruptcy and company law created frameworks for failure and reinvention. Within clubland and counting-house, Stevenson finds the comedy and danger of identities secured by ledgers, balances, and the fragile theater of status.
Gender roles and theatricality shift across these tales in step with broader debates of the 1880s and 1890s. The Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 altered legal autonomy, while the New Woman stirred anxieties and aspirations. Stevenson, writing with Fanny in parts of the Cigar Divan cycle, stages ingenious female figures—spirited widows, Cubans, and aristocrats—who navigate fraud, danger, and desire. These characters move through melodramatic plots derived from stagecraft and feuilleton, yet they probe contemporary questions about consent, self-fashioning, and the masks demanded by propriety. Performance becomes both a survival tactic and a critique of patriarchal scripts.
Medievalism and continental history supply imaginative distance for moral experiment. A Lodging for the Night and The Sire de Maletroit’s Door return to fifteenth-century France—Villon’s Paris, the long shadow of the Hundred Years’ War—to scrutinize honor and necessity. Stevenson knew French literature intimately and traveled widely in France and Belgium, absorbing both Romantic medieval revivals and realist disillusion. The medieval tale here functions less as antiquarianism than as a pressure chamber in which codes of chivalry, hospitality, and law expose the stark calculus of life and death. The past, rendered vivid, becomes a lens for modern ethical dilemmas.
Stevenson’s brief fables draw on a long European tradition from Aesop and La Fontaine to Addison’s Spectator. Written mainly in the later 1880s and early 1890s and published posthumously in 1896, these concise pieces distill the concerns of his era—progress, duty, self-deception—into parable. Items such as The Sick Man and the Fireman or The Yellow Paint weigh the promises of reform and the seductions of cosmetic virtue. The Song of the Morrow revives Scots cadence and ballad fatalism. Their stripped form suits a culture saturated with journalism and sermons, inviting readers to test maxims against a world of flux.
Publishing conditions and transatlantic circulation shaped reception. After the runaway success of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886, Stevenson’s brand enabled riskier short forms and exotic settings. Chatto and Windus, Longmans, and American magazines such as Scribner’s and The Century extended his reach, while pre-1891 copyright gaps encouraged piracies and bowdlerization. Serial publication meant that sequences like New Arabian Nights could be read episodically yet cohere in volume. The book market’s appetite for adventure, mystery, and moral curiosity created a space where experiments with framing devices, club tales, and cosmopolitan settings could flourish.
From his Samoan home at Vailima, Stevenson engaged colonial politics directly, publishing A Footnote to History in 1892 about the crisis between Mataafa, Malietoa Laupepa, and the great-power consuls. His death on 3 December 1894 from cerebral hemorrhage ended a career that had telescoped Edinburgh closes, London clubs, medieval chambers, and Pacific beaches into a single compass. Buried on Mount Vaea, he left manuscripts edited by Sidney Colvin and collaborations with Fanny and Lloyd that secured the short fiction’s afterlife. Read together, these tales map the late nineteenth century’s restless energies—imperial, urban, scientific, and moral—into narratives of choice under pressure.
Synopsis (Selection)
Island Nights' Entertainments (South Sea Tales)
Set in the South Pacific, these tales pit European outsiders against island taboos and magic. Plots range from a trader’s compromised marriage and local sorcery to a wish-granting bottle with a damning price and an invisible coin-minting art that invites danger.
New Arabian Nights: The Suicide Club
Prince Florizel and Colonel Geraldine uncover a clandestine society that arranges death by lot for the desperate, leading to a pursuit of its urbane mastermind across London and the Continent.
New Arabian Nights: The Rajah’s Diamond
A notorious jewel triggers a chain of thefts, disguises, and reversals among artists, rogues, and gentlemen, with intersecting episodes tracing the diamond’s corrupting trail.
New Arabian Nights: The Pavilion on the Links
On a remote Scottish shore, a stranded gentleman becomes protector to a mysterious woman besieged by Italian conspirators, as past betrayals and hidden treasure surface.
New Arabian Nights: A Lodging for the Night (A Story of Francis Villon)
During a bitter Paris winter, the poet Villon seeks shelter and confronts a stern moralist, weighing survival, charity, and crime.
New Arabian Nights: The Sire de Maletroit’s Door
A young cavalier, trapped overnight by a capricious nobleman, must decide between coerced marriage and peril, with honor and chance shaping his fate.
New Arabian Nights: Providence and the Guitar
A playful vignette of a penniless musician couple whose evening of music, suspicion, and small kindnesses spirals into comic misunderstanding and relief.
More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (Cigar Divan cycle)
Framed by the Cigar Divan’s raconteurs, a series of linked capers follows well-meaning or hapless conspirators, courtiers, and lovers entangled with bomb-plotters in Victorian London. The tone is satirical and romantic, with explosions more absurd than deadly and stories that dovetail through recurring characters.
The Merry Men
Returning to a Hebridean isle, a young man confronts wreckers, superstition, and a family secret while the roaring reefs—the ‘Merry Men’—claim ship after ship.
Will o’ the Mill
Content to stay in his valley inn, a thoughtful youth lets love and adventure pass, reflecting on choice, renunciation, and the passage of time.
Thrawn Janet
A strict young minister battles rumored witchcraft in a Scottish village when his housekeeper shows signs of possession, testing faith against uncanny dread.
Olalla
Convalescing in an isolated Spanish estate, a soldier falls for a withdrawn noblewoman while sensing a hereditary curse within her family.
The Treasure of Franchard
After a doctor and his ward discover a hidden hoard, the windfall unsettles their household and character, prompting flight, temptation, and hard lessons about home.
The Misadventures of John Nicholson
A respectable clerk’s rash theft launches a comic-penitential odyssey from Edinburgh to the colonies and back, as he schemes to make amends.
The Body-Snatcher
Two former medical students recall their complicity in procuring corpses for anatomy, culminating in a chilling reckoning with the past.
The Story of a Lie
A protective falsehood meant to shield a friend’s romance escalates into social scandal, revealing how deception multiplies consequences.
Fables (The Devil and the Innkeeper; The Tadpole and the Frog; The Persons of the Tale; The Sinking Ship; The Two Matches; The Sick Man and the Fireman; The Penitent; The Yellow Paint; The House of Eld; The Four Reformers; The Man and His Friend; The Reader; The Citizen and the Traveller; The Distinguished Stranger; The Cart-Horses and the Saddle-Horse)
Brief allegories that skewer vanity, zeal, rationalism, and literary convention through talking objects, imagined dialogues, and ironic reversals. Each compresses a moral or paradox into a pointed scene.
South Sea Parables (Something In It; Faith, Half Faith and No Faith At All; The Touchstone; The Poor Thing)
Compact Pacific-set parables in which skepticism, belief, and character are tested by taboo places, trials, and small temptations amid colonial life. They blur the boundary between superstition and conscience without fixing easy lessons.
The Song of the Morrow
A lyrical fairy tale about prophecy, delay, and the inexorability of time, following a sovereign who seeks to postpone an ominous fate.
THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF R. L. STEVENSON
Island Nights' Entertainments (South Sea Tales)
THE BEACH OF FALESÁ.
CHAPTER I. A SOUTH SEA BRIDAL.
I saw that island first when it was neither night nor morning. The moon was to the west, setting, but still broad and bright. To the east, and right amidships of the dawn, which was all pink, the daystar sparkled like a diamond. The land breeze blew in our faces, and smelt strong of wild lime and vanilla: other things besides, but these were the most plain; and the chill of it set me sneezing. I should say I had been for years on a low island near the line, living for the most part solitary among natives. Here was a fresh experience: even the tongue would be quite strange to me; and the look of these woods and mountains, and the rare smell of them, renewed my blood.
The captain blew out the binnacle lamp.
“There!” said he, “there goes a bit of smoke, Mr. Wiltshire, behind the break of the reef. That’s Falesá, where your station is, the last village to the east; nobody lives to windward — I don’t know why. Take my glass, and you can make the houses out.”
I took the glass; and the shores leaped nearer, and I saw the tangle of the woods and the breach of the surf, and the brown roofs and the black insides of houses peeped among the trees.
“Do you catch a bit of white there to the east’ard?” the captain continued. “That’s your house. Coral built, stands high, verandah you could walk on three abreast; best station in the South Pacific. When old Adams saw it, he took and shook me by the hand. ‘I’ve dropped into a soft thing here,’ says he.— ‘So you have,’ says I, ‘and time too!’ Poor Johnny! I never saw him again but the once, and then he had changed his tune — couldn’t get on with the natives, or the whites, or something; and the next time we came round there he was dead and buried. I took and put up a bit of a stick to him: ‘John Adams, obit eighteen and sixty-eight. Go thou and do likewise.’ I missed that man. I never could see much harm in Johnny.”
“What did he die of?” I inquired.
“Some kind of sickness,” says the captain. “It appears it took him sudden. Seems he got up in the night, and filled up on PainKiller and Kennedy’s Discovery. No go: he was booked beyond Kennedy. Then he had tried to open a case of gin. No go again: not strong enough. Then he must have turned to and run out on the verandah, and capsized over the rail. When they found him, the next day, he was clean crazy — carried on all the time about somebody watering his copra. Poor John!”
“Was it thought to be the island?” I asked.
“Well, it was thought to be the island, or the trouble, or something,” he replied. “I never could hear but what it was a healthy place. Our last man, Vigours, never turned a hair. He left because of the beach — said he was afraid of Black Jack and Case and Whistling Jimmie, who was still alive at the time, but got drowned soon afterward when drunk. As for old Captain Randall, he’s been here any time since eighteen-forty, forty-five. I never could see much harm in Billy, nor much change. Seems as if he might live to be Old Kafoozleum. No, I guess it’s healthy.”
“There’s a boat coming now,” said I. “She’s right in the pass; looks to be a sixteen-foot whale; two white men in the stern sheets.”
“That’s the boat that drowned Whistling Jimmie!” cried the Captain; “let’s see the glass. Yes, that’s Case, sure enough, and the darkie. They’ve got a gallows bad reputation, but you know what a place the beach is for talking. My belief, that Whistling Jimmie was the worst of the trouble; and he’s gone to glory, you see. What’ll you bet they ain’t after gin? Lay you five to two they take six cases.”
When these two traders came aboard I was pleased with the looks of them at once, or, rather, with the looks of both, and the speech of one. I was sick for white neighbours after my four years at the line, which I always counted years of prison; getting tabooed, and going down to the Speak House to see and get it taken off; buying gin and going on a break, and then repenting; sitting in the house at night with the lamp for company; or walking on the beach and wondering what kind of a fool to call myself for being where I was. There were no other whites upon my island, and when I sailed to the next, rough customers made the most of the society. Now to see these two when they came aboard was a pleasure. One was a negro, to be sure; but they were both rigged out smart in striped pyjamas and straw hats, and Case would have passed muster in a city. He was yellow and smallish, had a hawk’s nose to his face, pale eyes, and his beard trimmed with scissors. No man knew his country, beyond he was of English speech; and it was clear he came of a good family and was splendidly educated. He was accomplished too; played the accordion first-rate; and give him a piece of string or a cork or a pack of cards, and he could show you tricks equal to any professional. He could speak, when he chose, fit for a drawing-room; and when he chose he could blaspheme worse than a Yankee boatswain, and talk smart to sicken a Kanaka. The way he thought would pay best at the moment, that was Case’s way, and it always seemed to come natural, and like as if he was born to it. He had the courage of a lion and the cunning of a rat; and if he’s not in hell to-day, there’s no such place. I know but one good point to the man: that he was fond of his wife, and kind to her. She was a Samoa woman, and dyed her hair red, Samoa style; and when he came to die (as I have to tell of) they found one strange thing — that he had made a will, like a Christian, and the widow got the lot: all his, they said, and all Black Jack’s, and the most of Billy Randall’s in the bargain, for it was Case that kept the books. So she went off home in the schooner Manu’a, and does the lady to this day in her own place.
But of all this on that first morning I knew no more than a fly. Case used me like a gentleman and like a friend, made me welcome to Falesá, and put his services at my disposal, which was the more helpful from my ignorance of the native. All the better part of the day we sat drinking better acquaintance in the cabin, and I never heard a man talk more to the point. There was no smarter trader, and none dodgier, in the islands. I thought Falesá seemed to be the right kind of a place; and the more I drank the lighter my heart. Our last trader had fled the place at half an hour’s notice, taking a chance passage in a labour ship from up west. The captain, when he came, had found the station closed, the keys left with the native pastor, and a letter from the runaway, confessing he was fairly frightened of his life. Since then the firm had not been represented, and of course there was no cargo. The wind, besides, was fair, the captain hoped he could make his next island by dawn, with a good tide, and the business of landing my trade was gone about lively. There was no call for me to fool with it, Case said; nobody would touch my things, everyone was honest in Falesá, only about chickens or an odd knife or an odd stick of tobacco; and the best I could do was to sit quiet till the vessel left, then come straight to his house, see old Captain Randall, the father of the beach, take pot-luck, and go home to sleep when it got dark. So it was high noon, and the schooner was under way before I set my foot on shore at Falesá.
I had a glass or two on board; I was just off a long cruise, and the ground heaved under me like a ship’s deck. The world was like all new painted; my foot went along to music; Falesá might have been Fiddler’s Green, if there is such a place, and more’s the pity if there isn’t! It was good to foot the grass, to look aloft at the green mountains, to see the men with their green wreaths and the women in their bright dresses, red and blue. On we went, in the strong sun and the cool shadow, liking both; and all the children in the town came trotting after with their shaven heads and their brown bodies, and raising a thin kind of a cheer in our wake, like crowing poultry.
“By-the-bye,” says Case, “we must get you a wife.”
“That’s so,” said I; “I had forgotten.”
There was a crowd of girls about us, and I pulled myself up and looked among them like a Bashaw. They were all dressed out for the sake of the ship being in; and the women of Falesá are a handsome lot to see. If they have a fault, they are a trifle broad in the beam; and I was just thinking so when Case touched me.
“That’s pretty,” says he.
I saw one coming on the other side alone. She had been fishing; all she wore was a chemise, and it was wetted through. She was young and very slender for an island maid, with a long face, a high forehead, and a shy, strange, blindish look, between a cat’s and a baby’s.
“Who’s she?” said I. “She’ll do.”
“That’s Uma,” said Case, and he called her up and spoke to her in the native. I didn’t know what he said; but when he was in the midst she looked up at me quick and timid, like a child dodging a blow, then down again, and presently smiled. She had a wide mouth, the lips and the chin cut like any statue’s; and the smile came out for a moment and was gone. Then she stood with her head bent, and heard Case to an end, spoke back in the pretty Polynesian voice, looking him full in the face, heard him again in answer, and then with an obeisance started off. I had just a share of the bow, but never another shot of her eye, and there was no more word of smiling.
“I guess it’s all right,” said Case. “I guess you can have her. I’ll make it square with the old lady. You can have your pick of the lot for a plug of tobacco,” he added, sneering.
I suppose it was the smile stuck in my memory, for I spoke back sharp. “She doesn’t look that sort,” I cried.
“I don’t know that she is,” said Case. “I believe she’s as right as the mail. Keeps to herself, don’t go round with the gang, and that. O no, don’t you misunderstand me — Uma’s on the square.” He spoke eager, I thought, and that surprised and pleased me. “Indeed,” he went on, “I shouldn’t make so sure of getting her, only she cottoned to the cut of your jib. All you have to do is to keep dark and let me work the mother my own way; and I’ll bring the girl round to the captain’s for the marriage.”
I didn’t care for the word marriage, and I said so.
“Oh, there’s nothing to hurt in the marriage,” says he. “Black Jack’s the chaplain.”
By this time we had come in view of the house of these three white men; for a negro is counted a white man, and so is a Chinese! a strange idea, but common in the islands. It was a board house with a strip of rickety verandah. The store was to the front, with a counter, scales, and the poorest possible display of trade: a case or two of tinned meats; a barrel of hard bread; a few bolts of cotton stuff, not to be compared with mine; the only thing well represented being the contraband, firearms and liquor. “If these are my only rivals,” thinks I, “I should do well in Falesá.” Indeed, there was only the one way they could touch me, and that was with the guns and drink.
In the back room was old Captain Randall, squatting on the floor native fashion, fat and pale, naked to the waist, grey as a badger, and his eyes set with drink. His body was covered with grey hair and crawled over by flies; one was in the corner of his eye — he never heeded; and the mosquitoes hummed about the man like bees. Any clean-minded man would have had the creature out at once and buried him; and to see him, and think he was seventy, and remember he had once commanded a ship, and come ashore in his smart togs, and talked big in bars and consulates, and sat in club verandahs, turned me sick and sober.
He tried to get up when I came in, but that was hopeless; so he reached me a hand instead, and stumbled out some salutation.
“Papa’s pretty full this morning,” observed Case. “We’ve had an epidemic here; and Captain Randall takes gin for a prophylactic — don’t you, Papa?”
“Never took such a thing in my life!” cried the captain indignantly. “Take gin for my health’s sake, Mr. Wha’s-ever-your-name— ‘s a precautionary measure.”
“That’s all right, Papa,” said Case. “But you’ll have to brace up. There’s going to be a marriage — Mr. Wiltshire here is going to get spliced.”
The old man asked to whom.
“To Uma,” said Case.
“Uma!” cried the captain. “Wha’s he want Uma for? ‘s he come here for his health, anyway? Wha’ ‘n hell’s he want Uma for?”
“Dry up, Papa,” said Case. “‘Tain’t you that’s to marry her. I guess you’re not her godfather and godmother. I guess Mr. Wiltshire’s going to please himself.”
With that he made an excuse to me that he must move about the marriage, and left me alone with the poor wretch that was his partner and (to speak truth) his gull. Trade and station belonged both to Randall; Case and the negro were parasites; they crawled and fed upon him like the flies, he none the wiser. Indeed, I have no harm to say of Billy Randall beyond the fact that my gorge rose at him, and the time I now passed in his company was like a nightmare.
The room was stifling hot and full of flies; for the house was dirty and low and small, and stood in a bad place, behind the village, in the borders of the bush, and sheltered from the trade. The three men’s beds were on the floor, and a litter of pans and dishes. There was no standing furniture; Randall, when he was violent, tearing it to laths. There I sat and had a meal which was served us by Case’s wife; and there I was entertained all day by that remains of man, his tongue stumbling among low old jokes and long old stories, and his own wheezy laughter always ready, so that he had no sense of my depression. He was nipping gin all the while. Sometimes he fell asleep, and awoke again, whimpering and shivering, and every now and again he would ask me why I wanted to marry Uma. “My friend,” I was telling myself all day, “you must not come to be an old gentleman like this.”
It might be four in the afternoon, perhaps, when the back door was thrust slowly open, and a strange old native woman crawled into the house almost on her belly. She was swathed in black stuff to her heels; her hair was grey in swatches; her face was tattooed, which was not the practice in that island; her eyes big and bright and crazy. These she fixed upon me with a rapt expression that I saw to be part acting. She said no plain word, but smacked and mumbled with her lips, and hummed aloud, like a child over its Christmas pudding. She came straight across the house, heading for me, and, as soon as she was alongside, caught up my hand and purred and crooned over it like a great cat. From this she slipped into a kind of song.
“Who the devil’s this?” cried I, for the thing startled me.
“It’s Fa’avao,” says Randall; and I saw he had hitched along the floor into the farthest corner.
“You ain’t afraid of her?” I cried.
“Me ‘fraid!” cried the captain. “My dear friend, I defy her! I don’t let her put her foot in here, only I suppose ‘s different to-day, for the marriage. ‘s Uma’s mother.”
“Well, suppose it is; what’s she carrying on about?” I asked, more irritated, perhaps more frightened, than I cared to show; and the captain told me she was making up a quantity of poetry in my praise because I was to marry Uma. “All right, old lady,” says I, with rather a failure of a laugh, “anything to oblige. But when you’re done with my hand, you might let me know.”
She did as though she understood; the song rose into a cry, and stopped; the woman crouched out of the house the same way that she came in, and must have plunged straight into the bush, for when I followed her to the door she had already vanished.
“These are rum manners,” said I.
“‘s a rum crowd,” said the captain, and, to my surprise, he made the sign of the cross on his bare bosom.
“Hillo!” says I, “are you a Papist?”
He repudiated the idea with contempt. “Hard-shell Baptis’,” said he. “But, my dear friend, the Papists got some good ideas too; and tha’ ‘s one of ‘em. You take my advice, and whenever you come across Uma or Fa’avao or Vigours, or any of that crowd, you take a leaf out o’ the priests, and do what I do. Savvy?” says he, repeated the sign, and winked his dim eye at me. “No, sir!” he broke out again, “no Papists here!” and for a long time entertained me with his religious opinions.
I must have been taken with Uma from the first, or I should certainly have fled from that house, and got into the clean air, and the clean sea, or some convenient river — though, it’s true, I was committed to Case; and, besides, I could never have held my head up in that island if I had run from a girl upon my wedding-night.
The sun was down, the sky all on fire, and the lamp had been some time lighted, when Case came back with Uma and the negro. She was dressed and scented; her kilt was of fine tapa, looking richer in the folds than any silk; her bust, which was of the colour of dark honey, she wore bare only for some half a dozen necklaces of seeds and flowers; and behind her ears and in her hair she had the scarlet flowers of the hibiscus. She showed the best bearing for a bride conceivable, serious and still; and I thought shame to stand up with her in that mean house and before that grinning negro. I thought shame, I say; for the mountebank was dressed with a big paper collar, the book he made believe to read from was an odd volume of a novel, and the words of his service not fit to be set down. My conscience smote me when we joined hands; and when she got her certificate I was tempted to throw up the bargain and confess. Here is the document. It was Case that wrote it, signatures and all, in a leaf out of the ledger: —
This is to certify that Uma, daughter of Fa’avao of Falesá, Island of — -, is illegally married to Mr. John Wiltshire for one week, and Mr. John Wiltshire is at liberty to send her to hell when he pleases.
John Blackamoar. Chaplain to the hulks.
Extracted from the Register by William T. Randall, Master Mariner.
A nice paper to put in a girl’s hand and see her hide away like gold. A man might easily feel cheap for less. But it was the practice in these parts, and (as I told myself) not the least the fault of us white men, but of the missionaries. If they had let the natives be, I had never needed this deception, but taken all the wives I wished, and left them when I pleased, with a clear conscience.
The more ashamed I was, the more hurry I was in to be gone; and our desires thus jumping together, I made the less remark of a change in the traders. Case had been all eagerness to keep me; now, as though he had attained a purpose, he seemed all eagerness to have me go. Uma, he said, could show me to my house, and the three bade us farewell indoors.
The night was nearly come; the village smelt of trees and flowers and the sea and breadfruit-cooking; there came a fine roll of sea from the reef, and from a distance, among the woods and houses, many pretty sounds of men and children. It did me good to breathe free air; it did me good to be done with the captain and see, instead, the creature at my side. I felt for all the world as though she were some girl at home in the Old Country, and, forgetting myself for the minute, took her hand to walk with. Her fingers nestled into mine, I heard her breathe deep and quick, and all at once she caught my hand to her face and pressed it there. “You good!” she cried, and ran ahead of me, and stopped and looked back and smiled, and ran ahead of me again, thus guiding me through the edge of the bush, and by a quiet way to my own house.
The truth is, Case had done the courting for me in style — told her I was mad to have her, and cared nothing for the consequence; and the poor soul, knowing that which I was still ignorant of, believed it, every word, and had her head nigh turned with vanity and gratitude. Now, of all this I had no guess; I was one of those most opposed to any nonsense about native women, having seen so many whites eaten up by their wives’ relatives, and made fools of in the bargain; and I told myself I must make a stand at once, and bring her to her bearings. But she looked so quaint and pretty as she ran away and then awaited me, and the thing was done so like a child or a kind dog, that the best I could do was just to follow her whenever she went on, to listen for the fall of her bare feet, and to watch in the dusk for the shining of her body. And there was another thought came in my head. She played kitten with me now when we were alone; but in the house she had carried it the way a countess might, so proud and humble. And what with her dress — for all there was so little of it, and that native enough — what with her fine tapa and fine scents, and her red flowers and seeds, that were quite as bright as jewels, only larger — it came over me she was a kind of countess really, dressed to hear great singers at a concert, and no even mate for a poor trader like myself.
She was the first in the house; and while I was still without I saw a match flash and the lamplight kindle in the windows. The station was a wonderful fine place, coral built, with quite a wide verandah, and the main room high and wide. My chests and cases had been piled in, and made rather of a mess; and there, in the thick of the confusion, stood Uma by the table, awaiting me. Her shadow went all the way up behind her into the hollow of the iron roof; she stood against it bright, the lamplight shining on her skin. I stopped in the door, and she looked at me, not speaking, with eyes that were eager and yet daunted; then she touched herself on the bosom.
“Me — your wifie,” she said. It had never taken me like that before; but the want of her took and shook all through me, like the wind in the luff of a sail.
I could not speak if I had wanted; and if I could, I would not. I was ashamed to be so much moved about a native, ashamed of the marriage too, and the certificate she had treasured in her kilt; and I turned aside and made believe to rummage among my cases. The first thing I lighted on was a case of gin, the only one that I had brought; and, partly for the girl’s sake, and partly for horror of the recollections of old Randall, took a sudden resolve. I prized the lid off. One by one I drew the bottles with a pocket corkscrew, and sent Uma out to pour the stuff from the verandah.
She came back after the last, and looked at me puzzled like.
“No good,” said I, for I was now a little better master of my tongue. “Man he drink, he no good.”
She agreed with this, but kept considering. “Why you bring him?” she asked presently. “Suppose you no want drink, you no bring him, I think.”
“That’s all right,” said I. “One time I want drink too much; now no want. You see, I no savvy I get one little wifie. Suppose I drink gin, my little wifie he ‘fraid.”
To speak to her kindly was about more than I was fit for; I had made my vow I would never let on to weakness with a native, and I had nothing for it but to stop.
She stood looking gravely down at me where I sat by the open case. “I think you good man,” she said. And suddenly she had fallen before me on the floor. “I belong you all-e-same pig!” she cried.
CHAPTER II. THE BAN.
I came on the verandah just before the sun rose on the morrow. My house was the last on the east; there was a cape of woods and cliffs behind that hid the sunrise. To the west, a swift cold river ran down, and beyond was the green of the village, dotted with cocoa-palms and breadfruits and houses. The shutters were some of them down and some open; I saw the mosquito bars still stretched, with shadows of people new-awakened sitting up inside; and all over the green others were stalking silent, wrapped in their many-coloured sleeping clothes like Bedouins in Bible pictures. It was mortal still and solemn and chilly, and the light of the dawn on the lagoon was like the shining of a fire.
But the thing that troubled me was nearer hand. Some dozen young men and children made a piece of a half-circle, flanking my house: the river divided them, some were on the near side, some on the far, and one on a boulder in the midst; and they all sat silent, wrapped in their sheets, and stared at me and my house as straight as pointer dogs. I thought it strange as I went out. When I had bathed and come back again, and found them all there, and two or three more along with them, I thought it stranger still. What could they see to gaze at in my house, I wondered, and went in.
But the thought of these starers stuck in my mind, and presently I came out again. The sun was now up, but it was still behind the cape of woods. Say a quarter of an hour had come and gone. The crowd was greatly increased, the far bank of the river was lined for quite a way — perhaps thirty grown folk, and of children twice as many, some standing, some squatted on the ground, and all staring at my house. I have seen a house in a South Sea village thus surrounded, but then a trader was thrashing his wife inside, and she singing out. Here was nothing: the stove was alight, the smoke going up in a Christian manner; all was shipshape and Bristol fashion. To be sure, there was a stranger come, but they had a chance to see that stranger yesterday, and took it quiet enough. What ailed them now? I leaned my arms on the rail and stared back. Devil a wink they had in them! Now and then I could see the children chatter, but they spoke so low not even the hum of their speaking came my length. The rest were like graven images: they stared at me, dumb and sorrowful, with their bright eyes; and it came upon me things would look not much different if I were on the platform of the gallows, and these good folk had come to see me hanged.
I felt I was getting daunted, and began to be afraid I looked it, which would never do. Up I stood, made believe to stretch myself, came down the verandah stair, and strolled towards the river. There went a short buzz from one to the other, like what you hear in theatres when the curtain goes up; and some of the nearest gave back the matter of a pace. I saw a girl lay one hand on a young man and make a gesture upward with the other; at the same time she said something in the native with a gasping voice. Three little boys sat beside my path, where, I must pass within three feet of them. Wrapped in their sheets, with their shaved heads and bits of top-knots, and queer faces, they looked like figures on a chimney-piece. Awhile they sat their ground, solemn as judges. I came up hand over fist, doing my five knots, like a man that meant business; and I thought I saw a sort of a wink and gulp in the three faces. Then one jumped up (he was the farthest off) and ran for his mammy. The other two, trying to follow suit, got foul, came to ground together bawling, wriggled right out of their sheets mother-naked, and in a moment there were all three of them scampering for their lives and singing out like pigs. The natives, who would never let a joke slip, even at a burial, laughed and let up, as short as a dog’s bark.
They say it scares a man to be alone. No such thing. What scares him in the dark or the high bush is that he can’t make sure, and there might be an army at his elbow. What scares him worst is to be right in the midst of a crowd, and have no guess of what they’re driving at. When that laugh stopped, I stopped too. The boys had not yet made their offing, they were still on the full stretch going the one way, when I had already gone about ship and was sheering off the other. Like a fool I had come out, doing my five knots; like a fool I went back again. It must have been the funniest thing to see, and what knocked me silly, this time no one laughed; only one old woman gave a kind of pious moan, the way you have heard Dissenters in their chapels at the sermon.
