Robert Louis Stevenson Part 2

'I never knew so sweet a child.'

And his mother always said of him that his sweetness and patience were beautiful. On one subject only mother and child sometimes differed.

Louis wished her to agree with him that grandpapa's home was the nicest in the world, but the mother maintained their own home was best.

Until his grandfather died in 1860, when he was ten years old, the manse at Colinton was the little boy's favourite abiding place. Here 'Auntie'

lived, and near here, too, was the home of the 'sister-cousin,' and her brother who grew up with him, and who, of all the much loved cousins of that large connection, were nearest and dearest in his child-life, and to whom he sings--

'If two may read aright These rhymes of old delight, And house and garden play You two, my cousins, and you only may.

'You in a garden green, With me were king and queen, Were soldier, hunter, tar, And all the thousand things that children are.'

With these two cousins the favourite game was the fleeing from, conquering, and finally slaying a huge giant called Bunker, invented by Louis, who, the trio believed, haunted the manse garden, and required continual killing. One time, on the Bonaly Road, they were s.h.i.+pwrecked hungry sailors, who ate so many b.u.t.tercups that the little boys were poisoned and became very ill, and the little girl only escaped because she found the flowers too bitter to eat! In the 'Redford burn of happy memories' they sailed s.h.i.+ps richly laden with whin pods for vanilla, and yellow lichen for gold. They always hoped to see ghosts, or corpse candles, and were much disappointed they never saw anything more terrible, in the gruesome place where the s.e.xton kept his tools, than a swaying branch of ivy.

Of the tall, pale, venerable grandfather, with his snowy hair, Louis stood a good deal in awe; and he tells us in his charming paper, 'The Manse,' in _Memories and Portraits_, that he had not much in common with the old man although he felt honoured by his connection with a person reverend enough to enter the pulpit and preach the sermon every Sunday.

So many Balfours were scattered over the world, in India and the Colonies, that the old rooms at the manse were full of eastern curiosities and nick-nacks from distant lands dear to the hearts of little folks. And, while the garden was a bower of delight, the house was a veritable treasure trove to the grandchildren from far and near who played in it.

To Robert Louis Stevenson, with his mind full of romance, it must have been a paradise indeed, and one that he admirably pictures in the verses addressed to an Anglo-Indian cousin who, as a married woman, has returned to the India of her birth.

It is worth mentioning--as a note by the way which ill.u.s.trates that abiding boyishness in Mr Stevenson, so well known to all who knew him--that four particularly hideous Indian idols stood guard at the hall door of 'The Turret,' the house of his uncle, John Balfour, at Leven.

Two of them were life-size with their hands discreetly folded in prayer, two of them were smaller and made in a kneeling posture, and, as something rattled if you shook them, it was our juvenile belief that treasure was concealed inside their bodies. This idea Mr R. L. Stevenson eagerly fostered in the slightly younger generation, and, with the love of harmless mischief natural to him, implored us to 'rattle them _soundly_ when we were about it!'

In the manse garden at Colinton there was a mysterious and delightful gap that gave egress to the Water of Leith, and to pa.s.s through this and stray, out of safe and guarded precincts, into a wide and wet world beyond was a keen pleasure to the little boy whose gipsy instincts were already loudly calling to him to take 'the road' his wandering soul so dearly loved.

'Keepsake Mill' is a charming tribute to the joys of those illicit escapes and to the memories of the cousin playfellows now scattered in far lands, or for ever at rest from life's labour, who played in the garden where the delicate bright-eyed lad was the inventor and leader in their games.

One sweet fancy of the imaginative child, who all his life had a fine mental and physical courage in spite of his delicacy, is still recalled by his 'sister-cousin'; the graveyard wall was at one place high above the garden it partially enclosed, and the little boy, afflicted with no superst.i.tious terrors, had an idea that the souls of the dead people at rest in 'G.o.d's acre,' peeped out at him from the c.h.i.n.ks of the wall. And one feels sure that here as all through his life, shadowed by so much of suffering, he held fast, after a fas.h.i.+on of his own, the belief that goes deeper than his playful rendering of it in _The Unseen Playmate_ seems at first to infer:

'Whene'er you're happy and cannot tell why, The Friend of the children is sure to be by.'

A faith that was taught him by an earnest father and by the loving voice of a mother who held it fast through her own happy childhood and the joys and sorrows that as wife and mother came to her in later years.

After the death of the Rev. Dr Balfour, in April 1860, the manse ceased to be the second home of Louis Stevenson, and in the November of that year his aunt, Miss Balfour, and the nephews and nieces who stayed with her moved to a house in Howard Place.

In 1858 he went to school, and from 1860 to 1861 he and his cousin, Lewis Charles Balfour, were together at Mr Henderson's preparatory school in India Street from which both went to the Academy in 1861. Of Lewis Stevenson,--who in later life was always called Louis or Lou by his family and friends,--Mr Henderson reports: 'Robert's reading is not loud, but impressive.'

In July he was in bed with scarlet fever on his examination day, which was a great disappointment to him. He had a first prize for reading that year; but his zeal over school and lessons was very short-lived, and he never hungered for scholastic honours.

As a child he did not learn quickly, and he was in his eighth year before he could read fluently for himself. Nevertheless his especial bent showed itself early, and when in his sixth year he dictated a _History of Moses_, which he ill.u.s.trated, giving the men pipes in their mouths. This, and an account of _Travels in Perth_, composed in his ninth year, are still in existence. The _History of Moses_ was written because an uncle had offered a prize to his own children for the best paper on the subject, and the little Louis was so disappointed at not being asked to compete that he was finally included among the compet.i.tors, and did a paper which though not best was still good and which was given a prize. He had begun to print it for himself, with much toil, but his mother offered to write it out from his dictation. Another composition of this time was a fierce story of s.h.i.+pwreck and fighting with savages.

In 1863 he was sent for a few months to a boarding school kept by a Mr Wyatt at Spring Grove, near London. Life at a boarding school was misery to a lad so fond of wandering at his own sweet will as the small Louis, and he was full of distress at the prospect of leaving home. In _Random Memories_ he gives his ideas as to going to school, and expresses his belief that it is not so much the first night or day at school that is so terrible to a courageous child, as the dismay at the thought of leaving home with its familiar life and surroundings, and the painful suspense for some days before the plunge into the new world of school is taken. It was, he says, this miserable feeling of suspense that made him share his sorrows with a desolate, but amiable cat in the Easter Road, which mingled its woes with his and as it purred against him consoled him.

His tender-hearted parents were so touched by his evident affliction, and especially by the little story of the cat that his father took him a trip round the coast of Fife in _The Pharos_ and he thus made an early and delightful acquaintance with some of the lights and harbours which his father had gone to inspect.

Although the cousin, Lewis Charles Balfour, who had been his schoolfellow in Edinburgh, and two of his younger brothers were day pupils at the Spring Grove School, and his aunt, Miss Balfour, was living near, he became very homesick and unhappy, and the regular school work, with its impositions and punishments, fretted him and made him so ill, that in December his father, who had been at Mentone with his mother, hastily returned and took him away from school. It was too late, however, the few months had been too great a trial for his health, and he had a serious illness, during which, Dr Henry Bennett prescribed some very bracing treatment of which the youthful patient highly disapproved.

Of the home where so much consideration was shown to a child's health and feelings, no better description can be given than the graphic one of a little Stevenson cousin who had gone with his parents to stay there, and who thus spoke of it: 'A child who never cries, a nurse who is never cross, and late dinners.'

Can one imagine a dignified, childish paradise that could go much further! Nor were the joys of books awanting to the happy small boy who describes himself as in early days being carried off by his nurse

'To bed with backward looks, At my dear world of story books.'

As soon as he had learned to read he was an eager and an omnivorous reader, and could, from his eighth year, pa.s.s happy hours with a book, any book so long as it did not mean lessons.

He was before very long a book-buyer as well as a book-lover, and he has for ever immortalised, in the charming pages of _A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured_, that old bookshop (late J. L. Smith) at the corner of Leith Walk, where eager boys without coppers were but coldly received, but whence the fortunate capitalist could emerge, after having spent his Sat.u.r.day pocket-money, the proud possessor of plays positively bristling with pirates and highwaymen. With these treasures he fled home in the gathering dusk, while 'Leerie-Light-the-Lamps' was kindling his cheery beacons along the streets, and, with pleasant terrors, devoured the weird productions, finally adding to their weirdness by the garish contents of a child's paint-box.

CHAPTER III

BOYHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS

'A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'

--LONGFELLOW.

... 'Strange enchantments from the past And memories of the friends of old, And strong tradition binding fast The "flying terms" with bands of gold.'

--ANDREW LANG.

The years 1861 and 1862 found Louis, with his childhood left behind him, a boy among other boys who sat on the forms and who played in the yards of the Academy, at which, during the greater part of the present century, many of the sons of Edinburgh men, and indeed of Scotsmen everywhere at home and abroad, have received their education.

From 1864 to 1867 he was princ.i.p.ally at a Mr Thompson's school in Frederick Street, and he studied from time to time with private tutors at the different places to which his parents went for the benefit of their own health or his. These rather uncommon educational experiences were of far more value to him in after life than a steady attendance at any one school, as they made him an excellent linguist and gave him, from very youthful years, a wide knowledge of foreign life and foreign manners. In 1862 the Stevenson family visited Holland and Germany, in 1863 they were in Italy, in 1864 in the Riviera, and at Torquay for some months during the winter of 1865 and 1866; but after 1867 the family life became more settled and was chiefly pa.s.sed between Edinburgh and Swanston.

In those days Louis was a lean, slim lad, inclined to be tall, and with soft, somewhat lank, brown hair and brown eyes of a shade that seemed to deepen and change with every pa.s.sing impression of his quick working brain. His features were rather long, the upper part of his narrow face was delicately formed like his mother's, but the lips were full, and a more virile strength in chin and jaw faintly reminded one of his father's powerful physiognomy.

He had opinions of his own in regard to education, and they by no means led him to consider a strict attendance at school or a close application to lessons as necessary for his future life-work. He read, it is true, voraciously, but it was hardly on the lines of the sternly respectable cla.s.sical curriculum which his tutors or the Academy offered him. He was an historical student after a fas.h.i.+on of his own, dipping deep into such books of bygone romance as Sir Walter Scott had conned and loved. His geography at that time took a purely practical and somewhat limited form, and resolved itself into locating correctly the places and abodes sacred to the characters in his favourite books.

In the delightful dedication of _Catriona_,--to Mr Charles Baxter, W.S., Edinburgh, who was his life-long friend--he describes those pilgrimages charmingly, and one can, in imagination, see the eager lads wandering in search of famous 'streets and numbered houses,' made historic for them by some such magic pen as that which has for ever made sacred the _Old Tolbooth_ or the _Heart of Midlothian_, from the coblestones of which, in the pavement of St Giles and near the Parliament House, one reverently steps aside lest careless feet should touch that memento of the past. One can picture too as he himself does, the romantic boys of to-day following the wanderings of David Balfour by Broughton and Silver-mills, the Water of Leith, the Hawes Inn at Queensferry, and the wind-swept sh.o.r.es of the Forth. But one can still more clearly see that slim, brown-eyed youth--a-quiver with the eagerness that was so conspicuous a characteristic of his,--as in these very places he remembered bygone tales and even then formed plans for, and saw visions of, his own stories yet to be.

One can think of him with his eyes s.h.i.+ning, and his face luminous, as he held forth to some choice friend, of sympathetic soul, on all these things of which his heart and brain were so full. One knows that when his walks were solitary his time was already put to a good account, and that the note-books which even then he carried in his pocket were in constant requisition.

The boy, from the very first, felt a strong leading to the profession of letters, which he ultimately followed; and he describes himself as from very early boyhood having been given to make notes for possible romances, and to choose words of peculiar fitness for the purpose he had in hand, as well as to weave tales of thrilling adventure.

Style was from the first a pa.s.sion with him; and the lad had already begun in these juvenile note-books that careful choice of words and language which was at the very outset of his literary career to make so competent a critic as Mr Hamerton call him one of the greatest living masters of English prose. That he became something of a master in verse also those few thin volumes of deep thoughts, in a setting of fitly chosen words and rhymes, which he has published, amply prove.

To return, however, to the boy who went to the Academy, or rather who did _not_ go to the Academy, for he had a faculty for playing truant which must have been extraordinarily provoking to parents and masters.

No sooner was he out of the door in the morning than he could truly say--