第20章 MY FIRST BOOK: 'TREASURE ISLAND' (3)

Here, then, was everything to keep me up, sympathy, help, and now a positive engagement.I had chosen besides a very easy style.Compare it with the almost contemporary 'Merry Men', one reader may prefer the one style, one the other - 'tis an affair of character, perhaps of mood; but no expert can fail to see that the one is much more difficult, and the other much easier to maintain.It seems as though a full-grown experienced man of letters might engage to turn out TREASUREISLAND at so many pages a day, and keep his pipe alight.But alas! this was not my case.Fifteen days I stuck to it, and turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the early paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold.My mouth was empty; there was not one word of TREASURE ISLAND in my bosom; and here were the proofs of the beginning already waiting me at the 'Hand and Spear'! Then I corrected them, living for the most part alone, walking on the heath at Weybridge in dewy autumn mornings, a good deal pleased with what I had done, and more appalled than I can depict to you in words at what remained for me to do.I was thirty-one; Iwas the head of a family; I had lost my health; I had never yet paid my way, never yet made 200 pounds a year; my father had quite recently bought back and cancelled a book that was judged a failure: was this to be another and last fiasco? Iwas indeed very close on despair; but I shut my mouth hard, and during the journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter, had the resolution to think of other things and bury myself in the novels of M.de Boisgobey.Arrived at my destination, down I sat one morning to the unfinished tale;and behold! it flowed from me like small talk; and in a second tide of delighted industry, and again at a rate of a chapter a day, I finished TREASURE ISLAND.It had to be transcribed almost exactly; my wife was ill; the schoolboy remained alone of the faithful; and John Addington Symonds (to whom I timidly mentioned what I was engaged on) looked on me askance.He was at that time very eager I should write on the characters of Theophrastus: so far out may be the judgments of the wisest men.But Symonds (to be sure) was scarce the confidant to go to for sympathy on a boy's story.

He was large-minded; 'a full man,' if there was one; but the very name of my enterprise would suggest to him only capitulations of sincerity and solecisms of style.Well! he was not far wrong.

TREASURE ISLAND - it was Mr.Henderson who deleted the first title, THE SEA COOK - appeared duly in the story paper, where it figured in the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and attracted not the least attention.I did not care.I liked the tale myself, for much the same reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my kind of picturesque.I was not a little proud of John Silver, also; and to this day rather admire that smooth and formidable adventurer.What was infinitely more exhilarating, I had passed a landmark; I had finished a tale, and written 'The End' upon my manuscript, as I had not done since 'The Pentland Rising,' when I was a boy of sixteen not yet at college.In truth it was so by a set of lucky accidents; had not Dr.Japp come on his visit, had not the tale flowed from me with singular case, it must have been laid aside like its predecessors, and found a circuitous and unlamented way to the fire.Purists may suggest it would have been better so.I am not of that mind.The tale seems to have given much pleasure, and it brought (or, was the means of bringing) fire and food and wine to a deserving family in which I took an interest.I need scarcely say Imean my own.