The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [102]
In 1850, my grandfather began to fail early in the year, and chafed for the period of the annual voyage which was his medicine and delight. In vain his sons dissuaded him from the adventure. The day approached, the obstinate old gentleman was found in his room furtively packing a portmanteau, and the truth had to be told him ere he would desist: that he was stricken with a malignant malady, and before the yacht should have completed her circuit of the lights, must have himself started on a more distant cruise. My father has more than once told me of the scene with emotion. The old man was intrepid; he had faced death before with a firm countenance; and I do not suppose he was much dashed at the nearness of our common destiny. But there was something else that would cut him to the quick: the loss of the cruise, the end of all his cruising; the knowledge that he looked his last on Sumburgh, and the wild crags of Skye, and the Sound of Mull with the praise of which his letters were so often occupied; that he was never again to hear the surf break in Clashcarnock; never again to see lighthouse after lighthouse (all younger than himself and the more part of his own device) open in the hour of the dusk their flowers of fire, or the topaz and the ruby interchange on the summit of the Bell Rock. To a life of so much activity and danger, a life’s work of so much interest and essential beauty, here came the long farewell.
The Commissioners, gathered together the day after his death, recorded a solemn obituary to ‘this zealous, faithful and able officer’, and gave their condolences to the remaining Stevensons on the loss ‘of one who was most estimable and exemplary in all the relations of social and domestic life.’ Their regret was doubtless genuine, but the record unwittingly emphasises the irony of Robert’s life. Despite all his inventions and endeavours he remained eternally the servant, never the master. Almost all of his work had been done with the explicit intention of providing something for others – a public service, a monument to industry, a method of saving other men’s lives – and Robert took the benefits and the drawbacks of that philosophy. The Bell Rock had given him the recognition he had always wanted, but he did not, unlike Rennie, Telford and many of his engineering contemporaries, move on to more glamorous projects. His work remained functional, the stuff of public highways or municipal schemes rather than the architecture on which Victorianism prided itself. If people noticed his bridges, harbours, docks and drainage schemes, they did so only because they were well built and stood the test of time. Even the lighthouses were unlikely to invite anything except the fleeting gratitude of a passing mariner. The fame went to others, and the Bell Rock remained his masterpiece. He was forced to take his satisfactions from the more elusive charms of his trade, in hard work and enduring strength. Initially, he had been content with his role as public servant, but, as his peers outstripped him and the admiring notices went to other, grander names, the lack of recognition nagged away at him. Others, he felt, did less work for better rewards. As he wrote to a friend many years after the completion of the Bell Rock, ‘When I look back on my long experience as a Marine Engineer I often blame myself for not standing more forward.’ Perhaps there is also a certain piquancy in the fact that his last task had been to write up his record of a journey with another, more famous man. It was a final try at celebrity, this time by association.
When Robert died, some of the qualities that he had brought to his work died with him. His methods – learned more through the practice than theory, discovered painstakingly through trials and errors, through improvising where necessary and adapting where possible – had been superseded as much by his own efforts as