all my romance, I am a realist and a prosaist, and a most fanatical lover of plain physical sensations plainly and expressly rendered; hence my perils. To do love in the same spirit as I did (for instance) D. Balfour’s fatigue in the heather [in Kidnapped]; my dear sir, there were grossness – ready made!
So Dick and Joanna are permitted only a loving presexual friendship. But the idea – love, friendship, forgiveness as the only trustworthy code – is nonetheless central.
The rest of adventure is now seen simply as ‘the desperate game we play in life’. But not for the first time. My lasting impression of Stevenson the tale-teller of adventure is of the radical ambivalence he felt for his subject. There were two Sindbads in him: one the restless sailor; the other the landsman, who would stay home if only he could find the home to stay in, safely distant, like Dick and Joanna in their greenwoods, from the desperate game. Thus, it seems fitting to place Jim Hawkins and Dick Shelton in the strange company of the unadventurous Will, the amiable pedant of mediocrity Doctor Desprez, the hapless rebel of ‘The House of Eld’, and the princess who learns that ‘the song of the morrow’ simply turns her into the crone on the beach. She had better have remained home in her Lady of Shalott cloister, like those ambivalent lotus-eaters Will and Desprez. Yet, had the young cavalier stayed home, gone decently to bed, and not backed through the Sire de Malétroit’s door, he would not have found his love.
In the face of this ambivalence at the heart of adventure, we are left with the wicked Sire’s enigmatic chirp and chuckle, with the caustic Casimir’s equally enigmatic ‘Tiens!’ at the end of ‘Franchard’, and with Henry James’s amiable evocation of the author, ‘half inviting, half defying you to interpret.’
Francis Russell Hart
The House of Eld
so soon as the child began to speak, the gyve was riveted; and the boys and girls limped about their play like convicts. Doubtless it was more pitiable to see and more painful to bear in youth; but even the grown folk, besides being very unhandy on their feet, were often sick with ulcers.
About the time when Jack was ten years old, many strangers began to journey through that country. These he beheld going lightly by on the long roads, and the thing amazed him. ‘I wonder how it comes,’ he asked, ‘that all these strangers are so quick afoot, and we must drag about our fetter?’
‘My dear boy,’ said his uncle, the catechist, ‘do not complain about your fetter, for it is the only thing that makes life worth living. None are happy, none are good, none are respectable, that are not gyved like us. And I must tell you, besides, it is very dangerous talk. If you grumble of your iron, you will have no luck; if ever you take it off, you will be instantly smitten by a thunderbolt.’
‘Are there no thunderbolts for these strangers?’ asked Jack.
‘Jupiter is long-suffering to the benighted,’ returned the catechist.
‘Upon my word, I could wish I had been less fortunate,’ said Jack. ‘For if I had been born benighted, I might now be going free; and it cannot be denied the iron is inconvenient, and the ulcer hurts.’
‘Ah!’ cried his uncle, ‘do not envy the heathen! Theirs is a sad lot! Ah, poor souls, if they but knew the joys of being fettered! Poor souls, my heart yearns for them. But the truth is they are vile, odious, insolent, ill-conditioned, stinking brutes, not truly human – for what is a man without a fetter? – and you cannot be too particular not to touch or speak with them.’
After this talk, the child would never pass one of the unfettered on the road but what he spat at him and called him names, which was the practice of the children in that part.
It chanced one day, when he was fifteen, he went into the woods, and the ulcer pained him. It was a fair day, with a blue sky; all the birds were singing; but Jack nursed his foot. Presently, another song began; it sounded like the singing of a person, only far more gay; at the same time there was a beating on the earth. Jack put aside the leaves; and there was a lad of his own village, leaping, and dancing and singing to himself in a green dell; and on the grass beside him lay the dancer’s iron.
‘Oh!’ cried Jack, ‘you have your fetter off!’
‘For God’s sake, don’t tell your uncle!’ cried the lad.
‘If you fear my uncle,’ returned Jack, ‘why do you not fear the thunderbolt?’
‘That is only an old wives’ tale,’ said the other. ‘It is only told to children. Scores of us come here among the woods and dance for nights together, and are none the worse.’
This put Jack in a thousand new thoughts. He was a grave lad; he had no mind to dance himself; he wore his fetter manfully, and tended his ulcer without complaint. But he loved the less to be deceived or to see others cheated. He began to lie in wait for heathen travellers, at covert parts of the road, and in the dusk of the day, so that he might speak with them unseen; and these were greatly taken with their wayside questioner, and told him things of weight. The wearing of gyves (they said) was no command of Jupiter’s. It was the contrivance of a white-faced thing, a sorcerer, that dwelt in that country in the Wood of Eld. He was one like Glaucus that could change his shape, yet he could be always told; for when he was crossed, he gobbled like a turkey. He had three lives; but the third smiting would make an end of him indeed; and with that his house of sorcery would vanish, the gyves fall, and the villagers take hands and dance like children.
‘And in your country?’ Jack would ask.
But at this the travellers, with one accord, would put him off; until Jack began to suppose there was no land entirely happy. Or, if there were, it must be one that kept its folk at home; which was natural enough.
But the case of the gyves weighed upon him. The sight of the children limping stuck in his eyes; the groans of such as dressed their ulcers haunted him. And it came at last in his mind that he was born to free them.
There was in that village a sword of heavenly forgery, beaten upon Vulcan’s anvil. It was never used but in the temple, and then the flat of it only; and it hung on a nail by the catechist’s chimney. Early one night, Jack rose, and took the sword, and was gone out of the house and the village in the darkness.
All night he walked at a venture; and when day came, he met strangers going to the fields. Then he asked after the Wood of Eld and the house of sorcery; and one said north, and one south; until Jack saw that they deceived him. So then, when he asked his way of any man, he showed the bright sword naked; and at that the gyve on the man’s ankle rang, and answered in his stead; and the word was still Straight on. But the man, when his gyve spoke, spat and struck at Jack, and threw stones at him as he went away; so that his head was broken.
So he came to that wood, and entered in, and he was aware of a house in a low place, where funguses grew, and the trees met, and the steaming of the marsh arose about it like a smoke. It was a fine house, and a very rambling; some parts of it were ancient like the hills, and some but of yesterday, and none finished; and all the ends of it were open, so that you could go in from every side. Yet it was in good repair, and all the chimneys smoked.
Jack went in through the gable; and there was one room after another, all bare, but all furnished in part, so that a man could dwell there; and in each there was a fire burning, where a man could warm himself, and a table spread where he might eat. But Jack saw nowhere any living creature; only the bodies of some stuffed.
‘This is a hospitable house,’ said Jack; ‘but the ground must be quaggy underneath, for at every step the building quakes.’
He had gone some time in the house, when he began to be hungry. Then he looked at the food, and at first he was afraid; but he bared the sword,