Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson Vol 2 | Page 6

sense in the pursuit of his pleasure; and DELIRIUM TREMENS has
more of the honour of the cross. We were full of the pride of life, and
chose, like prostitutes, to live by a pleasure. We should be paid if we
give the pleasure we pretend to give; but why should we be honoured?
I hope some day you and Mrs. Gosse will come for a Sunday; but we
must wait till I am able to see people. I am very full of Jenkin's life; it is
painful, yet very pleasant, to dig into the past of a dead friend, and find
him, at every spadeful, shine brighter. I own, as I read, I wonder more
and more why he should have taken me to be a friend. He had many
and obvious faults upon the face of him; the heart was pure gold. I feel
it little pain to have lost him, for it is a loss in which I cannot believe; I
take it, against reason, for an absence; if not to-day, then to-morrow, I
still fancy I shall see him in the door; and then, now when I know him
better, how glad a meeting! Yes, if I could believe in the immortality
business, the world would indeed be too good to be true; but we were
put here to do what service we can, for honour and not for hire: the
sods cover us, and the worm that never dies, the conscience, sleeps well
at last; these are the wages, besides what we receive so lavishly day by
day; and they are enough for a man who knows his own frailty and sees
all things in the proportion of reality. The soul of piety was killed long
ago by that idea of reward. Nor is happiness, whether eternal or
temporal, the reward that mankind seeks. Happinesses are but his
wayside campings; his soul is in the journey; he was born for the
struggle, and only tastes his life in effort and on the condition that he is
opposed. How, then, is such a creature, so fiery, so pugnacious, so
made up of discontent and aspiration, and such noble and uneasy
passions - how can he be rewarded but by rest? I would not say it aloud;
for man's cherished belief is that he loves that happiness which he
continually spurns and passes by; and this belief in some ulterior
happiness exactly fits him. He does not require to stop and taste it; he
can be about the rugged and bitter business where his heart lies; and yet
he can tell himself this fairy tale of an eternal tea-party, and enjoy the
notion that he is both himself and something else; and that his friends
will yet meet him, all ironed out and emasculate, and still be lovable, -
as if love did not live in the faults of the beloved only, and draw its

breath in an unbroken round of forgiveness! But the truth is, we must
fight until we die; and when we die there can be no quiet for mankind
but complete resumption into - what? - God, let us say - when all these
desperate tricks will lie spellbound at last.
Here came my dinner and cut this sermon short - EXCUSEZ.
R. L. S.

Letter: TO JAMES PAYN

SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH, JAN. 2ND, 1886.
DEAR JAMES PAYN, - Your very kind letter came very welcome;
and still more welcome the news that you see -'s tale. I will now tell
you (and it was very good and very wise of me not to tell it before) that
he is one of the most unlucky men I know, having put all his money
into a pharmacy at Hyeres, when the cholera (certainly not his fault)
swept away his customers in a body. Thus you can imagine the
pleasure I have to announce to him a spark of hope, for he sits to-day in
his pharmacy, doing nothing and taking nothing, and watching his
debts inexorably mount up.
To pass to other matters: your hand, you are perhaps aware, is not one
of those that can be read running; and the name of your daughter
remains for me undecipherable. I call her, then, your daughter - and a
very good name too - and I beg to explain how it came about that I took
her house. The hospital was a point in my tale; but there is a house on
each side. Now the true house is the one before the hospital: is that No.
11? If not, what do you complain of? If it is, how can I help what is
true? Everything in the DYNAMITER is not true; but the story of the
Brown Box is, in almost every particular; I