THE LIFE OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
BY
JACQUELINE M. OVERTON
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1933
[Illustration: Robert Louis Stevenson, from a photograph by Mr. Lloyd
Osbourne]
TO THE BOYS AT THE YORKVILLE LIBRARY
AND
TO ALL OTHER BOYS
WHO LOVE TO TRAMP AND CAMP AND SEEK ADVENTURE
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
WITH THE HOPE OF MAKING THEM
BETTER FRIENDS WITH A MAN WHO ALSO
LOVED THESE THINGS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 3
II. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 16
III. THE LANTERN BEARER 31
IV. EDINBURGH DAYS 47
V. AMATEUR EMIGRANT 72
VI. SCOTLAND AGAIN 93
VII. SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 108
VIII. IN THE SOUTH SEAS 121
IX. VAILIMA 148
BIBLIOGRAPHY 175
ILLUSTRATIONS
Robert Louis Stevenson _Frontispiece_
From a photograph by Mr. Lloyd Osbourne
FACING
PAGE
No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Stevenson's birthplace 18
Colinton Manse 26
Swanston Cottage 42
Edinburgh Castle 64
Skerryvore Cottage, Bournemouth 98
The Treasure Island map 100
Facsimile of letter sent to Cummy with "An Inland Voyage" 106
Bas-relief of Stevenson by Augustus Saint Gaudens 112
South Sea houses 130
The house at Vailima 154
A feast of chiefs 162
The tomb of Stevenson on Væa Mountain 172
THE LIFE OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
"Write me as one who loves his fellowmen."
--HUNT.
CHAPTER I
THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS
"... For the sake
Of these, my kinsmen and my countrymen,
Who early and late in the windy ocean toiled
To plant a star for seamen."
The pirate, Ralph the Rover, so legend tells, while cruising off the
coast of Scotland searching for booty or sport, sank the warning bell on
one of the great rocks, to plague the good Abbot of Arbroath who had put
it there. The following year the Rover returned and perished himself on
the same rock.
In the life of one of Scotland's great men, Robert Louis Stevenson, we
find proud record of his grandfather, Robert Stevenson, having built
Bell Rock Lighthouse on this same spot years afterward.
No story of Robert Louis Stevenson's life would be complete that failed
to mention the work done for Scotland and the world at large by the two
men he held most dear, the engineers, his father and grandfather.
When Robert Stevenson, his grandfather, received his appointment on the
Board of Northern Lights the art of lighthouse building in Scotland had
just begun. Its bleak, rocky shores were world-famous for their danger,
and few mariners cared to venture around them. At that time the coast
"was lighted at a single point, the Isle of May, in the jaws of the
Firth of Forth, where, on a tower already a hundred and fifty years old,
an open coal-fire blazed in an open chaufer. The whole archipelago thus
nightly plunged in darkness was shunned by seagoing vessels." [Footnote:
Stevenson, "Family of Engineers."]
The board at first proposed building four new lights, but afterward
built many more, so that to-day Scotland stands foremost among the
nations for the number and splendor of her coast lights.
Their construction in those early days meant working against tremendous
obstacles and dangers, and the life of the engineer was a hazardous one.
"The seas into which his labors carried him were still scarce charted,
the coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far beyond the
convenience of any road; the isles in which he must sojourn were still
partly savage. He must toss much in boats; he must often adventure much
on horseback by dubious bridle-track through unfrequented wildernesses;
he must sometimes plant his lighthouses in the very camp of wreckers.
"The aid of steam was not yet. At first in random coasting sloop, and
afterwards in the cutter belonging to the service, the engineer must ply
and run amongst these multiplied dangers and sometimes late into the
stormy autumn."
All of which failed to daunt Robert Stevenson who loved action and
adventure and the scent of things romantic.
"Not only had towers to be built and apparatus transplanted, the supply
of oil must be maintained and the men fed, in the same inaccessible and
distant scenes, a whole service with its routine ... had to be called
out of nothing; and a new trade (that of light-keeper) to be taught,
recruited and organized."
Bell Rock was only one of twenty lighthouses Robert Stevenson helped to
build, but it was by far the most difficult one ... and even to-day,
after it has been lighted for more than a hundred years, it still
remains unique--a monument to his skill.
Bell Rock was practically a reef completely submerged at full tide and
only a few feet of its crest visible at low water. To raise a tower on
it meant placing a foundation under water, a new and perilous
experiment.
"Work upon the rock in the earliest stages was confined to the calmest
days of the summer season, when the tides were lowest, the water
smoothest, and the wind in its calmest mood. Under such conditions the
men were able to stay on the site for about five hours....
"One distinct drawback was the necessity to establish a depot some
distance from the erecting site. Those were the days before steam
navigation, and the capricious sailing craft offered the only means of
maintaining communication between rock and shore, and for the conveyance
of men and materials to and fro....
"A temporary beacon was placed on the reef, while adjacent to the site
selected for the tower a smith's forge was made fast, so as to withstand
the dragging motion of the waves when the rock was submerged. The men
were housed on the _Smeaton_, which, during the spells of work on the
rock, rode at anchor a short distance away in deep water." [Footnote:
Talbot, "Lightships and Lighthouses."]
Once the engineers were all but lost when the _Smeaton_ slipped her
moorings and left them stranded on the rock.
In spite of all the obstacles, the work was completed at the end of two
years and the light was shown for the first time February 1, 1811.
"I found Robert Stevenson an appreciative and intelligent companion,"
writes Sir Walter Scott in his journal, speaking of a cruise he made
among the islands of Scotland with a party of engineers. The notes made
by him on this trip were used afterward in his two stories, "The Pirate"
and "Lord of the Isles."
"My grandfather was king in the service to his finger-tips," wrote Louis
Stevenson. "All should go his way, from the principal light-keeper's
coat to the assistant's fender, from the gravel in the garden walks to
the bad smell in the kitchen, or the oil spots on the storeroom floor.
It might be thought there was nothing more calculated to awaken men's
resentment, and yet his rule was not more thorough than it was
beneficent. His thought for the keepers was continual.... When a keeper
was sick, he lent him his horse and sent him mutton and brandy from the
ship.... They dwelt, many of them, in uninhabited isles or desert
forelands, totally cut off from shops.
"No servant of the Northern Lights came to Edinburgh but he was
entertained at Baxter Place. There at his own table my grandfather sat
down delightedly with his broad-spoken, homespun officers."
As he grew old his "medicine and delight" was his annual trip among his
lighthouses, but at length there came a time when this joy was taken
away from him and there came "the end of all his cruising; the knowledge
that he had looked the last on Sunburgh, and the wild crags of Skye, and
the Sound of Mull; 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 dusk their flower of fire, or the topaz and ruby interchange on
the summit of Bell Rock."
Throughout the rank and file of his men he was adored. "I have spoken
with many who knew him; I was his grandson, and their words may very
well have been words of flattery; but there was one thing that could
not be affected, and that was the look that came over their faces at the
name of Robert Stevenson."
Of his family of thirteen children, three of his sons became engineers.
Thomas Stevenson, the father of Robert Louis, like the others of his
family, contributed largely to lighthouse building and harbor
improvement, serving under his older brother, Allen, in building the
Skerryvore, one of the most famous deep-sea lights erected on a
treacherous reef off the west coast where, for more than forty years,
one wreck after another had occurred.
"From the navigator's point of view, the danger of this spot lay chiefly
in the fact that it was so widely scattered. The ridge runs like a
broken backbone for a distance of some eight miles.... In rough weather
the whole of the rocks are covered, and the waves, beating heavily on
the mass, convert the scene into one of indescribable tumult....
"There was only one point where a tower could be placed, and this was
so exposed that the safe handling of men and material constituted a
grave responsibility."
It was necessary to erect a tower one hundred and thirty feet high; "the
loftiest and weightiest work of its character that had ever been
contemplated up to this time....
"The Atlantic swell, which rendered landing on the ridge precarious and
hazardous, did not permit the men to be housed upon a floating home, as
had been the practice in the early days of the Bell Rock tower. In order
to permit the work to go forward as uninterruptedly as the sea would
allow, a peculiar barrack was erected. It was a house on stilts, the
legs being sunk firmly into the rock, with the living quarters perched
some fifty feet up in the air.
"Residence in this tower was eerie. The men climbed the ladder and
entered a small room, which served the purposes of kitchen, living-room,
and parlor....
"When a storm was raging, the waves, as they combed over the rock,
shook the legs violently and scurried under the floor in seething foam.
Now and again a roller, rising higher than its fellows, broke upon the
rock and sent a mass of water against the flooring to hammer at the
door. Above the living-room were the sleeping quarters, high and dry,
save when a shower of spray fell upon the roof and walls like heavy
hail.... The men, however, were not perturbed. Sleeping, even under such
conditions, was far preferable to doubtful rest in a bunk upon an
attendant vessel, rolling and pitching with the motion of the sea. They
had had a surfeit of such experience ... while the barrack was under
erection.
"For two years it withstood the seas without incident, and the engineer
and men came to regard the eyrie as safe as a house on shore. But one
night the little colony received a shock. The angry Atlantic got one or
two of its trip-hammer blows well home, and smashed the structure to
fragments. Fortunately, at the time it was untenanted."
No time was lost in rebuilding the barrack and this time it withstood
all tests until it was torn down after Skerryvore was finished.
"While the foundations were being prepared, and until the barrack was
constructed, the men ran other terrible risks every morning and night
landing upon and leaving the polished surface of the reef. Five months
during the summer was the working season, but even then many days and
weeks were often lost owing to the swell being too great to permit the
rowing boat to come alongside. The engineer relates that the work was 'a
good lesson in the school of patience,' because the delays were frequent
and galling, while every storm which got up and expended its rage upon
the reef left its mark indelibly among the engineer's stock in trade.
Cranes and other materials were swept away as if they were corks;
lashings, no matter how strong, were snapped like pack-threads.
"Probably the worst experience was when the men on the rock were
weather-bound for seven weeks during one season.... Their provisions
sank to a very low level, they ran short of fuel, their sodden clothing
was worn to rags....
"Six years were occupied in the completion of the work, and, as may be
imagined, the final touches were welcomed with thankfulness by those who
had been concerned in the enterprise."
It was in meteorological researches and illumination of lighthouses,
however, that Thomas Stevenson did his greatest work. It was he who
brought to perfection the revolving light now so generally used.
In spite of this and other valuable inventions his name has remained
little known, owing to the fact that none of his inventions were ever
patented. The Stevensons believed that, holding government appointments,
any original work they did belonged to the nation. "A patent not only
brings in money but spreads reputation," writes his son, "and my
father's instruments enter anonymously into a hundred light rooms and
are passed anonymously over in a hundred reports, where the least
considerable patent would stand out and tell its author's story."
He was beloved among a wide circle of friends and the esteem of those in
his profession was shown when in 1884 they chose him for president of
the Royal Society of Edinburgh. To the general public, however, he
remained unknown in spite of the fact that "His lights were in all parts
of the world guiding the mariners."
CHAPTER II
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
"As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the window of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play."
--"Child's Garden of Verses."
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born at No. 8 Howard Place,
Edinburgh, Scotland, November 13, 1850.
In 1852 the family moved from Howard Place to Inverleith Terrace, and
two years later to No. 17 Heriot Row, which remained their home for many
years.
As a child Louis was very delicate and often ill, for years hardly a
winter passed that he did not spend many days in bed.
Edinburgh in winter is extremely damp and he tells us: "Many winters I
never crossed the threshold, but used to lie on my face on the nursery
floor, chalking or painting in water-colors the pictures in the
illustrated newspapers; or sit up in bed with a little shawl pinned
about my shoulders, to play with bricks or what not."
The diverting history of "Hop-O'-My-Thumb" and the "Seven-League Boots,"
"Little Arthur's History of England," "Peter Parley's Historical Tales,"
and "Harry's Ladder to Learning" were books which he delighted to pore
over and their pages bore many traces of his skill with the pencil and
paint-brush.
Those who have read the "Child's Garden of Verses" already know the
doings of his childish days, for although those rhymes were not written
until he was a grown man he was "one of the few who do not forget their
own lives" and "through the windows of this book" gives us a vivid and
living picture of the boy who dwelt so much in a world of his own with
his quaint thoughts.
If his body was frail his spirit was strong and his power of
imagination so great that he cheered himself through many a weary day by
playing he was "captain of a tidy little ship," a soldier, a fierce
pirate, an Indian chief, or an explorer in foreign lands. Miles he
travelled in his little bed.
"I have just to shut my eyes,
To go sailing through the skies--
To go sailing far away
To the pleasant Land of Play"
he says.
[Illustration: No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Stevenson's birthplace]
In spite of his power for amusing himself, days like these would have
gone far harder had it not been for two devoted people, his mother and
his nurse, Alison Cunningham or "Cummie" as he called her. His mother
was devoted to him in every way and encouraged his love for reading and
story-making. She kept a diary of his progress from day to day, and
treasured every picture he drew or scrap he wrote. Cummie came to him as
a Torryburn lassie when he was eighteen months old and was like a second
mother to him. She not only cared for his bodily comforts but was his
friend and comrade as well. She sang for him, danced for him, spun fine
tales of pirates and smugglers, and read to him so dramatically that his
mind was fired then and there with a longing for travel and adventure
which he never lost. When they took their walks through the streets
together Cummie had many stories to tell him of Scotland and Edinburgh
in the old days. For Edinburgh is a wonderful old city with a wonderful
history full of tales of stirring adventure and romance. "For centuries
it was a capitol thatched with heather and more than once, in the evil
days of English invasion, it has gone up in flames to Heaven, a beacon
to ships at sea.... It was the jousting-ground of jealous nobles, not
only on Greenside or by the King's Stables, where set tournaments were
fought to the sound of trumpets and under the authority of the royal
presence, but in every alley where there was room to cross swords.... In
the town, in one of those little shops plastered like so many swallows'
nests among the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that familiar autocrat
James VI. would gladly share a bottle of wine with George Heriot the
goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly look down on the
castle with the city lying in waves around it, those mad and dismal
fanatics, the Sweet Singers, haggard from long exposure on the moors,
sat day and night 'with tearful psalms.'... In the Grassmarket,
stiff-necked covenanting heroes offered up the often unnecessary, but
not less honorable, sacrifice of their lives, and bade eloquent farewell
to sun, moon and stars and earthly friendships, or died silent to the
roll of the drums. Down by yon outlet rode Grahame of Claverhouse and
his thirty dragoons, with the town beating to arms behind their horses'
tails--a sorry handful thus riding for their lives, but with a man at
their head who was to return in a different temper, make a bold dash
that staggered Scotland, and die happily in the thick of the fight....
"The palace of Holyrood is a house of many memories.... Great people of
yore, kings and queens, buffoons and grave ambassadors played their
stately farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing
has lasted deep into the night, murder has been done in its chambers.
There Prince Charlie held his phantom levГ©es and in a very gallant
manner represented a fallen dynasty for some hours....
"There is an old story of the subterranean passage between the castle
and Holyrood and a bold Highland piper who volunteered to explore its
windings. He made his entrance by the upper end, playing a strathspey;
the curious footed it after him down the street, following his descent
by the sound of the chanter from below; until all of a sudden, about the
level of St. Giles the music came abruptly to an end, and the people in
the street stood at fault with hands uplifted. Whether he choked with
gases, or perished in a quag, or was removed bodily by the Evil One,
remains a point of doubt, but the piper has never again been seen or
heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into the land
of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may take
a thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a strange
moment for the cabmen on the stands beside St. Giles, when they hear the
crone of his pipes reascending from the earth below their horses' feet."
In Edinburgh to-day there are armed men and cannon in the castle high up
on the great rock above you: "You may see the troops marshalled on the
high parade, and at night after the early winter evenfall and in the
morning before the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over
Edinburgh the sounds of drums and bugles." (Stevenson, "Essay on
Edinburgh.")
Long before Louis could write he made up verses and stories for himself,
and Cummie wrote them down for him. "I thought they were rare nonsense
then," she said, little dreaming that these same bits of "rare
nonsense" were the beginnings of what was to make "her boy" famous
across two seas in years to come.
He writes of her when speaking of long nights he lay awake unable to
sleep because of a troublesome cough: "How well I remember her lifting
me out of bed, carrying me to the window and showing me one or two lit
windows up in Queen Street across the dark belt of garden, where also,
we told each other, there might be sick little boys and their nurses
waiting, like us, for the morning."
Her devotion to him had its reward in the love he gave her all his life.
One of his early essays written when he was twenty and published in the
_Juvenilia_ was called "Nurses." Fifteen years later came the
publication of the "Child's Garden of Verses" with a splendid tribute to
her as a dedication. He sent her copies of all his books, wrote letters
to her, and invited her to visit him. She herself tells that the last
time she ever saw him he said to her, "before a room full of people,
'It's _you_ that gave me a passion for the drama, Cummie,' 'Me, Master
Lou,' I said, 'I never put foot inside a playhouse in my life.' 'Ay,
woman,' said he, 'but it was the good dramatic way ye had of reciting
the hymns.'"
When he was six years old his Uncle David offered a Bible picture-book
as a prize to the nephews who could write the best history of Moses.
This was Louis's first real literary attempt. He was not able to write
himself, but dictated to his mother and illustrated the story and its
cover with pictures which he designed and painted himself.
He won the prize and from that time, his mother says, "it was the desire
of his heart to be an author."
During the winter of 1856-57 his favorite cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray
Stevenson, usually called Bob, visited them; a great treat for Louis,
not only because his ill health kept him from making many companions of
his own age, but because Bob loved many of the same things he did and to
"make believe" was as much a part of his life as Louis's. Many fine
games they had together; built toy theatres, the scenery and characters
for which they bought for a "penny plain and twopence colored," and were
never tired of dressing up. One of their chief delights, he says, was in
"rival kingdoms of our own invention--Nosingtonia and Encyclopædia, of
which we were perpetually drawing maps." Even the eating of porridge at
breakfast became a game. Bob ate his with sugar and said it was an
island covered with snow with here a mountain and there a valley; while
Louis's was an island flooded by milk which gradually disappeared bit by
bit.
In the spring and summer his mother took him for short trips to the
watering-places near Edinburgh. But the spot unlike all others for a
real visit was at Colinton Manse, the home of his grandfather, the
Reverend Lewis Balfour, at Colinton, on the Water of Leith, five miles
southwest of Edinburgh. Here he spent glorious days. Not only was there
the house and garden, both rare spots for one of an exploring turn of
mind, but, best of all, there were the numerous cousins of his own age
sent out from India, where their parents were, to be nursed and educated
under the loving eye of Aunt Jane Balfour, for whom he wrote:
"Chief of our aunts--not only I,
But all the dozen nurslings cry--
What did the other children do?
And what was childhood, wanting you?"
[Illustration: Colinton Manse]
If Louis lacked brothers and sisters he had no dearth of cousins, fifty
in all they numbered, many of them near his own age. Alan Stevenson,
Henrietta and Willie Traquair seem to have been his favorite chums at
Colinton.
Of his grandfather Balfour he says: "We children admired him, partly for
his beautiful face and silver hair ... partly for the solemn light in
which we beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers in the
pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy, of old
age, slow blood, and settled habits, oppressed us with a kind of terror.
When not abroad, he sat much alone writing sermons or letters to his
scattered family.... The study had a redeeming grace in many Indian
pictures gaudily colored and dear to young eyes.... When I was once sent
in to say a psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with fear,
but at the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might
reward me with an Indian picture."
"There were two ways of entering the Manse garden," he says, "one the
two-winged gate that admitted the old phaeton and the other a door for
pedestrians on the side next the kirk.... On the left hand were the
stables, coach-houses and washing houses, clustered around a small,
paved court.... Once past the stable you were fairly within the garden.
On summer afternoons the sloping lawn was literally _steeped_ in
sunshine....
"The wall of the church faces the manse, but the church yard is on a
level with the top of the wall ... and the tombstones are visible from
the enclosure of the manse.... Under the retaining wall was a somewhat
dark pathway, extending from the stable to the far end of the garden,
and called the 'witches' walk' from a game we used to play in it....
Even out of the 'witches' walk' you saw the Manse facing toward you,
with its back to the river and the wooded bank, and the bright
flower-plots and stretches of comfortable vegetables in front and on
each side of it; flower plots and vegetable borders, by the way, on
which it was almost death to set foot, and about which we held a curious
belief,--namely, that my grandfather went round and measured any
footprints that he saw, to compare the measurement at night with the
boots put out for brushing; to avoid which we were accustomed, by a
strategic movement of the foot to make the mark longer....
"So much for the garden; now follow me into the house. On entering the
door you had before you a stone paved lobby.... There stood a case of
foreign birds, two or three marble deities from India and a lily of the
Nile in a pot, and at the far end the stairs shut in the view. With how
many games of 'tig' or brick-building in the forenoon is the long low
dining room connected in my mind! The storeroom was a most voluptuous
place, with its piles of biscuit boxes and spice tins, the rack for
buttered eggs, the little window that let in the sunshine and the
flickering shadows of leaves, and the strong sweet odor of everything
that pleaseth the taste of men....
"Opposite the study was the parlor, a small room crammed full of
furniture and covered with portraits, with a cabinet at the side full of
foreign curiosities, and a sort of anatomical trophy on the top. During
a grand cleaning of the apartment I remember all the furniture was
ranged on a circular grass plot between the churchyard and the house. It
was a lovely still summer evening, and I stayed out, climbing among the
chairs and sofas. Falling on a large bone or skull, I asked what it was.
Part of an albatross, auntie told me. 'What is an albatross?' I asked,
and then she described to me this great bird nearly as big as a house,
that you saw out miles away from any land, sleeping above the vast and
desolate ocean. She told me that the _Ancient Mariner_ was all about
one; and quoted with great _verve_ (she had a duster in her hand, I
recollect)--
'With my crossbow
I shot the albatross.'
... Willie had a crossbow, but up to this date I had never envied him
its possession. After this, however, it became one of the objects of my
life."
With many playmates, free to roam and romp as he chose, his illness
forgotten, it is no wonder he says he felt as if he led two lives, one
belonging to Edinburgh and one to the country, and that Colinton ever
remained an enchanted spot to which it was always hard to say good-by.
CHAPTER III
THE LANTERN BEARER
"Perhaps there lives some dreamy boy, untaught
In school, some graduate of the field or street,
Who shall become a master of the art,
An admiral sailing the high seas of thought,
Fearless and first, and steering with his fleet
For lands not yet laid down on any chart."
--LONGFELLOW.
School days began for Louis in 1859, but were continually interrupted by
illness, travel, and change of school. His father did not believe in
forcing him to study; so he roamed through school according to his own
sweet will, attending classes where he cared to, interesting himself in
the subjects that appealed to him--Latin, French, and
mathematics--neglecting the others and bringing home no prizes, to
Cummie's distress.
Certain books were his prime favorites at this time. "Robinson Crusoe,"
he says, "and some of the books of Mayne Reid and a book called Paul
Blake--Swiss Family Robinson also. At these I played, conjured up their
scenes and delighted to hear them rehearsed to seventy times seven.
"My father's library was a spot of some austerity; the proceedings of
learned societies, cyclopædias, physical science and above all, optics
held the chief place upon the shelves, and it was only in holes and
corners that anything legible existed as if by accident. Parents'
Assistant, Rob Roy, Waverley and Guy Mannering, Pilgrim's Progress,
Voyages of Capt. Woods Rogers, Ainsworth's Tower of London and four old
volumes of Punch--these were among the chief exceptions.
"In these latter which made for years the chief of my diet, I very early
fell in love (almost as soon as I could spell) with the Snob Papers. I
knew them almost by heart ... and I remember my surprise when I found
long afterward that they were famous, and signed with a famous name; to
me, as I read and admired them, they were the works of Mr. Punch."
Two old Bibles interested him particularly. They had belonged to his
grandfather Stevenson and contained many marked passages and notes
telling how they had been read aboard lighthouse tenders and on tours of
inspection among the islands.
After he was thirteen his health was greatly improved and he was able to
enjoy the comradeship of other lads, though he never cared greatly for
sports. He was the leader of a number of boys who used to go about
playing tricks on the neighbors--"tapping on their windows after
nightfall, and all manner of wild freaks."
"Crusoing" was a favorite game and its name stood for all picnicking in
the open air, building bonfires and cooking apples, but the crowning
sport of all was "Lantern Bearing," a game invented by himself and
shared by a dozen of his cronies.
"Toward the end of September," he says, "when school time was drawing
near and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from
our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern....
We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them,
such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled
noxiously of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they would
always burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure of them
merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat
asked for nothing more.
"When two of these asses met there would be an anxious, 'Have you your
lantern?' and a gratified 'Yes,' That was the shibboleth, and a very
needful one too; for as it was the rule to keep our glory contained,
none could recognize a lantern-bearer, unless like a polecat, by the
smell.
"The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night,
the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping whether to
conduct your footsteps or make your glory public, a mere pillar of
darkness in the dark, and all the while, deep down in the privacy of
your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt and exult
and sing over the knowledge."
In later years one of the Lantern Bearers describes Louis as he was
then. "A slender, long legged boy in pepper and salt tweeds, with an
undescribable influence that forced us to include him in our play as a
looker on, critic and slave driver.... No one had the remotest intention
of competing with R.L.S. in story making, and his tales, had we known
it, were such as the world would listen to in silence and wonder."
At home and at his last school he was always starting magazines. The
stories were illustrated with much color and the magazines circulated
among the boys for a penny a reading. One was called _The Sunbeam
Magazine_, an illustrated miscellany of fact, fiction, and fun, and
another _The School Boy Magazine_. The latter contained four stories and
its readers must have been hard to satisfy if they did not have their
fill of horrors--"regular crawlers," Louis called them. In the first
tale, "The Adventures of Jan Van Steen," the hero is left hidden in a
boiler under which a fire is lit. The second is a "Ghost Story" of
robbers in a deserted castle.... The third is called, "by curious
anticipation of a story he was to write later on, 'The Wreckers.'"
Numerous plays and novels he began but they eventually found their fate
in the trash basket. An exception to this was a small green pamphlet of
twenty pages called "The Pentland Rising, a page of history, 1666." It
was published through his father's interest on the two-hundredth
anniversary of the fight at Rullion Green. This event in Scotland's
history had been impressed on his mind by the numerous stories. Cummie
had told him of the Covenanters and the fact that they had spent the
night before their defeat in the town of Colinton.
From the time he was a little chap, balancing on the limb of an
apple-tree in the Colinton garden trying to see what kind of a world
lay beyond the garden wall, Louis had had a longing to travel and see
sights. This began to find satisfaction now.
His father took him on a trip around the coast of Fife, visiting the
harbor lights. The little towns along the coast were already familiar to
him by the stories of the past. Dunfermline, where, according to the
ballad, Scotland's king once "sat in his tower drinking blood-red wine";
Kerkcaldy, where the witches used to sink "tall ships and honest
mariners in the North Sea"; and "Wemyss with its bat-haunted caves,
where the Chevalier Johnstone on his flight from Colloden passed a night
of superstitious terrors."
Later the family made a trip to the English Lakes and in the winter of
the same year to the south of France, where they stayed two months, then
making a tour through Italy and Switzerland. The following Christmas
found Louis and his mother again in Mentone, where they stayed until
spring.
French was one of his favorite studies at school, and now after a few
months among French people he was able to speak fluently. Indeed, in
after life he was often mistaken for a Frenchman.
His French teacher on his second visit to Mentone gave him no regular
lessons, but "merely talked to him in French, teaching him piquet and
card tricks, introducing him to various French people and taking him to
concerts and other places; so, his mother remarks, like Louis' other
teachers at home I think they found it pleasanter to talk to him then to
teach him."
After their return to Edinburgh came the time when, his school days
finished, Louis must make up his mind what his career is to be and train
himself for it.
Even then he knew what he wanted to do was to write. He had fitted up a
room on the top floor at Heriot Row as a study and spent hours there
covering paper with stories or trying to describe in the very best way
scenes which had impressed him. Most of these were discarded when
finished. "I liked doing them indeed," he said, "but when done I could
see they were rubbish." He never doubted, however, that some day his
attempts would prove worth while, if he could only devote his time to
learning to write and write well.
His father, he knew, had different plans for him, however. Of course,
Louis would follow in his footsteps and be the sixth Stevenson to hold a
place on the Board of Northern Lights. So, although he had little heart
in the work, he entered the University of Edinburgh and spent the next
three and a half years studying for a science degree.
The summer of 1868 he was sent with an engineering party to Anstruther,
on the coast, where a breakwater was being built. There he had his first
opportunity of seeing some of the practical side of engineering. It was
rough work, but he enjoyed it. Later he spent three weeks on Earraid
Island, off Mull, a place which left a strong impression on his mind and
figured afterward as the spot where David Balfour was shipwrecked.
Among the experiences at that time which pleased him most was a chance
to descend in a diver's dress to the foundation of the harbor they were
building. In his essays, "Random Memories," he tells of the "dizzy
muddleheaded joy" he had in his surroundings, swaying like a reed, and
grabbing at the fish which darted past him.
In writing afterward of these years he says: "What I gleaned I am sure I
do not know, but indeed I had already my own private determination to be
an author ... though I haunted the breakwater by day, and even loved the
place for the sake of the sunshine, the thrilling sea-side air, the wash
of the waves on the sea face, the green glimmer of the diver's helmets
far below.... My own genuine occupation lay elsewhere and my only
industry was in the hours when I was not on duty. I lodged with a
certain Bailie Brown, a carpenter by trade, and there as soon as dinner
was despatched ... drew my chair to the table and proceeded to pour
forth literature.
"I wish to speak with sympathy of my education as an engineer. It takes
a man into the open air; keeps him hanging about harbor sides, the
richest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it gives him a
taste of the genial danger of the sea ... and when it has done so it
carries him back and shuts him in an office. From the roaring skerry and
the wet thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk, and
with a memory full of ships and seas and perilous headlands and shining
pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to the pretty niceties of
drawing or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive
figures."
"The roaring skerry and the tossing boat," appealed to him as they had
to his grandfather before him, but they did not balance his dislike for
the "office and the stool" or make him willing to devote his time and
energy to working for them, so his university record was very poor. "No
one ever played the truant with more deliberate care," he says, "and no
one ever had more certificates (of attendance) for less education."
One thing that he gained from his days at the university was the
friendship of Professor Fleeming Jenkin. He was fifteen years older than
Louis, but they had many common interests and the professor had much
good influence over him. He was one of the first to see promise in his
writing and encouraged him to go on with it.
Both the professor and Mrs. Jenkin were much interested in dramatics and
each year brought a group of friends together at their house for private
theatricals. Stevenson was a constant visitor at their home, joining
heartily in these plays and looking forward to them, although he never
took any very important part.
After Professor Jenkin's death Stevenson wrote his biography, and says
it was a "mingled pain and pleasure to dig into the past of a dead
friend, and find him, at every spadeful, shine brighter."
About this time Thomas Stevenson bought Swanston Cottage in the Pentland
Hills, about five miles from Edinburgh, and for the next fourteen years
the family spent their summers there, and Louis often went out in
winter as well. It ever remained one of his favorite spots and with
Colinton stood out as a place that meant much in his life.
[Illustration: Swanston Cottage]
These years saw great change in him; from a frank and happy child he had
grown into a lonely, moody boy making few friends and shunning the
social life that his father's position in Edinburgh offered him. He
describes himself as a "lean, ugly, unpopular student," but those who
knew him never applied the term "ugly" to him at any time.
At Swanston he explored the hills alone and grew to know them so well
that the Pentland country ever remained vividly in his memory and found
its way into many of his stories, notably "St. Ives," where he describes
Swanston as it was when they first made it their summer home.
Many solitary winter evenings he spent there rereading his favorite
novels, particularly Dumas's "Vicomte de Bragelonne," which always
pleased him. "Shakespeare has served me best," he said. "Few living
friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or
Rosalind. Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare is
D'Artagnan, the elderly D'Artagnan of the 'Vicomte de Bragelonne.'
"I would return in the early night from one of my patrols with the
shepherd, a friendly face would meet me in the door, a friendly
retriever scurry up stairs to fetch my slippers, and I would sit down
with the Vicomte for a long, silent, solitary lamp-lit evening by the
fire."
At Swanston he first began to really write, "bad poetry," he says, and
during his solitary rambles fought with certain problems that perplexed
him.
Here he made the acquaintance of the Scotch gardener, Robert Young, and
John Todd, the "Roaring Shepherd, the oldest herd on the Pentlands,"
whom he accompanied on his rounds with the sheep, listening to his tales
told in broad Scotch of the highland shepherds in the old days when "he
himself often marched flocks into England, sleeping on the hillsides
with his caravan; and by his account it was rough business not without
danger. The drove roads lay apart from habitation; the drivers met in
the wilderness, as to-day the deep sea fishers meet off the banks in the
solitude of the Atlantic."
All this time Louis was idling through the university, knowing that in
the end he would make nothing of himself as an engineer and dreading to
confess it to his father. At length, however, his failure in his studies
came to Thomas Stevenson's attention, and, on being questioned about it
"one dreadful day" as they were walking together, the boy frankly
admitted that his heart was not with the work and he cared for nothing
but to be able to write.
While at school his father had encouraged him to follow his own bent in
his studies and reading, but when it came to the point of choosing his
life-work, there ought to be no question of doubt. The only natural
thing for Louis to do was to carry on the great and splendid work that
he himself had helped to build up. That the boy should have other plans
of his own surprised and troubled him. Literature, he said, was no
profession, and thus far Louis had not done enough to prove he had a
claim for making it his career.
After much debate it was finally decided that he should give up
engineering, but should enter the law school and study to be admitted to
the bar. This would not only give him an established profession, but
leave him a little time to write as well.
CHAPTER IV
EDINBURGH DAYS
"I am fevered with the sunset,
I am fretful with the bay,
For the wander-thirst is on me
And my soul is in Cathay.
"There's a schooner in the offing,
With her topsails shot with fire,
And my heart has gone aboard her
For the island of Desire."
--RICHARD HOVEY.
In spite of the fact that his law studies now left him an opportunity
for the work he wanted so much to do, Louis was far from happy, for
between his parents and himself, who had always been the best of
friends, there were many misunderstandings.
Thomas Stevenson was bitterly disappointed that his only son should
choose to be what he called "an idler"--generous to a fault and always
out of money, dressing in a careless and eccentric way, which both
amused and annoyed his friends and caused him to be ridiculed by
strangers, preferring to roam the streets of old Edinburgh scraping
acquaintance with the fishwives and dock hands, rather than staying at
home and mingling in the social circle to which his parents belonged.
But his father was still more troubled by certain independent religious
opinions, far different from those in which he had been reared, that
Louis adopted at this time.
How any good result could come from all this neither his father nor
mother could see, and with the loss of their sympathy he was thrown upon
himself and was lonely and rebellious.
He longed to get away from it all, to quit Edinburgh with its harsh
climate, and often on his walks he leaned over the great bridge that
joins the New Town with the Old "and watched the trains smoking out from
under, and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies." He
longed to go with them "to that Somewhere-else of the imagination where
all troubles are supposed to end."
It was a comfort to him at this time to remember other Scotchmen,
Jeffries, Burns, Fergusson, Scott, Carlyle, and others, who had roamed
these same streets before him, not a few of them fighting with the same
problems he faced in their struggle to win their ideal.
This unhappy time, this "Greensickness," as he called it, came to an
end, however, through the help of what Louis had always secretly longed
for--friends. Several whom he met at this time influenced him, but first
of them all he put his cousin Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (Bob), who
returned to Edinburgh about this time from Paris, where he had been
studying art.
Louis says: "The mere return of Bob changed at once and forever the
course of my life; I can give you an idea of my relief only by saying
that I was at last able to breathe.... I was done with the sullens for
good.... I had got a friend to laugh with."
Here at last was a companion who understood him and sympathized with
what he was trying to do. Since as children they had made believe
together in their rival kingdoms of "Nosingtonia" and "Encyclopædia"
they had had many traits and tastes in common. They now began where they
had left off and proceeded to enjoy themselves once more by all sorts of
wild pranks and gay expeditions.
The Speculative Society became another great source of pleasure. It was
an old society and had numbered among its members such men of note as
Scott, Jeffrey, Robert Emmet, and others. Once a week from November to
March the "Spec," as it was called, met in rooms in the University of
Edinburgh. An essay was read and debates followed with much hot
discussion, which delighted Stevenson. "Oh, I do think the Spec is about
the best thing in Edinburgh," he said enthusiastically.
Sir Walter Simpson, son of the famous doctor, Sir James Simpson, who
discovered chloroform, became another chum about this time, and for the
next ten years they were much together. He likewise was studying law and
was a near neighbor. The Simpsons kept open house, and it was the custom
for a group of cronies to drop in at all hours of day and night. Louis
was among those who came oftenest, and Sir Walter's sister writes: "He
would frequently drop in to dinner with us, and of an evening he had the
run of the smoking room. After ten p.m. the 'open sesame' to our door
was a rattle on the letter box and Louis' fancy for the mysterious was
whetted by this admittance by secret sign, and we liked his special
rat-a-tat for it was the forerunner of an hour or two of talk."
They teased him about his queer clothes and laughed at some of his wild
ideas, but he seldom was angry at them for it and never stayed away very
long.
With them he often skated on Duddington Loch or canoed on the Firth of
Forth. One summer he and Sir Walter yachted off the west coast of
Scotland, and still another year, when longing for further wandering
possessed them, they made a trip in canoes through the inland waters of
Belgium from Antwerp to Brussels, and then into France and by the rivers
Sambre and Oise nearly to Paris.
In the "Inland Voyage," where Stevenson describes this trip, he calls
Sir Walter and his canoe "Cigarette" while he was "Arethusa." Adventures
were plentiful, and they aroused much curiosity among the dwellers on
the banks, with whom they made friends as they went along.
Once Arethusa was all but drowned, when his canoe was overturned by the
rapids; and on several occasions, when they applied for a night's
lodging, they were suspected of being tramps or peddlers because of
their bedraggled appearance.
One evening after a hard day's paddling in the rain they landed tired,
wet, and hungry at the little town of La FГЁre. "The Cigarette and I
could not sufficiently congratulate each other on the prospect," says
the Arethusa, "for we had been told there was a capital inn at La FГЁre.
Such a dinner as we were going to eat. Such beds as we were going to
sleep in, and all the while the rain raining on homeless folk over all
the poplared country-side. It made our mouths water. The inn bore the
name of some woodland animal, stag, or hart, or hind, I forget which.
But I shall never forget how spacious and how eminently comfortable it
looked as we drew near.... A rattle of many dishes came to our ears; we
sighted a great field of tablecloth; the kitchen glowed like a forge and
smelt like a garden of things to eat.
