The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls Part 2

"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 Sn.o.b 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 pa.s.sages 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 b.u.t.toned 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 a.s.ses 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 b.u.t.toned, 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 ill.u.s.trated with much color and the magazines circulated among the boys for a penny a reading. One was called _The Sunbeam Magazine_, an ill.u.s.trated 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 antic.i.p.ation 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. c.u.mmie 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 pa.s.sed a night of superst.i.tious 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 pa.s.ses 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 sc.r.a.ping 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."