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.