SCOTLAND AGAIN
"Bells upon the city are ringing in the night,
High above the gardens are the houses full of light,
On the heathy Pentlands is the curlew flying free,
And the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie.
"We canna break the bonds that God decreed to bind,
Still we'll be the children of the heather and the wind,
Far away from home O, it's still for you and me
That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie."
On his return to Scotland the spell of his own land fell upon R.L.S. for
the first time. He realized now how he loved it spite of its bad
climate, how much there was at home waiting for him. "After all," he
said, "new countries, sun, music, and all the rest, can never take down
our gusty, rainy, smoky, grim old city out of the first place it has
been making for itself in the bottom of my soul."
But he had returned only to be banished. The doctors found his lungs
too weak to risk Edinburgh winters and advised him to try the Alps.
Accordingly a cottage was rented in Davos Platz, a health resort. There
and at similar places near by they spent the next few winters with
visits to England and France between. Switzerland never suited
Stevenson. He disliked living among invalids, and with his love for
exploring the nooks and corners of any spot he was in he felt like a
prisoner when he found himself shut in a valley among continual snow
with few walks possible for him to take. "The mountains are about me
like a trap," he complained. "You can not foot it up a hillside and
behold the sea on a great plain, but live in holes and corners and can
change only one for the other."
Tobogganing was the only sport of Davos Platz he really enjoyed, and he
pursued that to his heart's content. "Perhaps the true way to toboggan
is alone and at night," he said. "First comes the tedious climb
dragging your instrument behind you. Next a long breathing space, alone
with the snow and pine woods, cold, silent and solemn to the heart. Then
you push off; the toboggan fetches away, she begins to feel the hill, to
glide, to swim, to gallop. In a breath you are out from under the
pine-trees and the whole heaven full of stars reels and flashes
overhead."
He accomplished little work at this time. Sometimes for days he would be
unable to write at all. But the little boy who had once told his mother,
"I have been trying to make myself happy," was the same man now who
could say: "I was never bored in my life." When unable to do anything
else he would build houses of cards or lie in bed and model little
figures in clay. Anything to keep his hands busy and his mind distracted
from the stories that crowded his brain and he had not strength to put
on paper. His one horror, the fear that urged him on to work feverishly
when he was suffering almost beyond endurance, was the thought that his
illness might one day make him a helpless invalid.
The splendid part to think of is that no hint of his dark days and pains
crept into his writings or saddened those who came to see him. Complaint
he kept to himself, prayed that he might "continue to be eager to be
happy," lived with the best that was in him from day to day, and the
words that went forth from his sick-room have cheered and encouraged
thousands.
When asked why he wrote so many stories of pirates and adventurers with
few women to soften them he replied: "I suppose it's the contrast; I
have always admired great strength, even in a pirate. Courage has
interested me more than anything else."
He and his stepson had grown to be great chums. At Silverado Lloyd had
been seized with a desire to write stories and had set up a toy
printing-press which turned off several tales. At Davos Platz they both
tried their hand at illustrating these stories with pictures cut on
wood-blocks and gayly colored. Lloyd's room was quite a gallery of these
artistic attempts. But their favorite diversion was to play at a war
game with lead soldiers. In after-years Lloyd wrote his recollections of
the days they spent together enjoying this fun and he says: "The war
game was constantly improved and elaborated, until from a few hours, a
war took weeks to play, and the critical operations in the attic
monopolized half our thoughts. This attic was a most chilly and dismal
spot, reached by a crazy ladder, and unlit save for a single frosted
window; so low at the eaves and so dark that we could seldom stand
upright, nor see without a candle. Upon the attic floor a map was
roughly drawn in chalks of different colors, with mountains, rivers,
towns, bridges, and roads of two classes. Here we would play by the
hour, with tingling fingers and stiffening knees, and an intentness,
zest, and excitement that I shall never forget.
"The mimic battalions marched and counter-marched, changed by measured
evolutions from column formation into line, with cavalry screens in
front and massed support behind, in the most approved military fashion
of to-day."
Neither of them ever grew too old for this sport. Year after year they
went back to the game. Even when they went to Samoa they laid out a
campaign room with maps chalked on the floor.
In the spring of 1885 Thomas Stevenson purchased a house at Bournemouth,
England, near London, as a present for his daughter-in-law.
They named the cottage "Skerryvore," after the famous lighthouse he had
helped to build in his young days, and it was their home for the next
three years--busy ones for R.L.S.
[Illustration: Skerryvore Cottage, Bournemouth]
It was a real joy to have his father and mother and Bob Stevenson with
them again and his friends in London frequently drop in for a visit.
His health was never worse than during the Bournemouth days. He seldom
went beyond his own garden-gate but lived, as he says, "like a weevil in
a biscuit." Yet he never worked harder or accomplished more. He wrote in
bed and out of bed, sick or well, poems, plays, short stories, and
verses.
He finished "Treasure Island," the book that gained him his first
popularity, and wrote "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," which made him famous
at home and abroad.
"Treasure Island" had been started some time previous to please Lloyd,
who asked him to write a "good story." It all began with a map.
Stevenson always loved maps, and one day during a picture-making bout he
had drawn a fine one. "It was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully
colored," he says. "The shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it
contained harbors that pleased me like sonnets.... I ticketed my
performance Treasure Island."
Immediately the island began to take life and swarm with people, all
sorts of strange scenes began to take place upon it, and as he gazed at
his map Stevenson discovered the plot for the "good story."
"It is horrid fun," he wrote, "and begins in the Admiral Benbow public
house on the Devon coast; all about a map and a treasure and a mutiny,
and a derelict ship ... and a doctor and a sea-cook with one leg with
the chorus 'yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,' ... No women in the story,
Lloyd orders."
Parts of the coast at Monterey flashed back to his mind and helped him
to picture the scenery of his "Treasure Island." "It was just such a
place as the Monterey sand hills the hero John Hawkins found himself on
leaving his mutinous shipmates. It was just such a thicket of live oak
growing low along the sand like brambles, that he crawled and dodged
when he heard the voices of the pirates near him and saw Long John
Silver strike down with his crutch one of his mates who had refused to
join in his plan for murder."
[Illustration: The Treasure Island map]
As the story grew he read each new chapter aloud to the family in the
evening. He was writing it for one boy, but found he had more in his
audience. "My father," he says, "not only heard with delight the daily
chapter, but set himself actively to collaborate. When the time came for
Billy Bones' chest to be ransacked, he must have passed the better part
of a day preparing on the back of a legal envelope an inventory of its
contents, which I exactly followed, and the name of Flint's old ship,
the Walrus, was given at his particular request."
When the map was redrawn for the book it was embellished with "blowing
whales and sailing ships; and my father himself brought into service a
knack he had of various writing, and elaborately _forged_ the signature
of Captain Flint and the sailing directions of Billy Bones."
These daily readings were rare treats to those at Skerryvore, for
Stevenson was a most dramatic reader. "When he came to stand in the
place of Silver you could almost have imagined you saw the great
one-legged John Silver, joyous-eyed, on the rolling sea."
The book was not long in springing into popularity. Not only the boys
enjoyed it but all sorts of staid and sober men became boys once more
and sat up long after bedtime to finish the tale. Mr. Gladstone caught a
glimpse of it at a friend's house and did not rest the next day until he
had procured a copy for himself, and Andrew Lang said: "This is the kind
of stuff a fellow wants. I don't know when, except Tom Sawyer and the
Odyssey, that I ever liked a romance so well."
It was translated into many different languages, even appearing serially
in certain Greek and Spanish papers.
"Kidnapped" followed; a story founded on the Appan murder. David
Balfour, the hero, was one of his own ancestors; Alan Breck had actually
lived, and the Alison who ferried Alan and David over to Torryburn was
one of Cummie's own people. The Highland country where the scenes were
laid, he had traversed many times, and the Island of Earraid, where
David was shipwrecked, was the spot where he had spent some of his
engineering days.
Stevenson had often said the "brownies" in his dreams gave him ideas for
his tales. At Skerryvore they came to him with a story that among all
his others is counted the greatest.
"In the small hours one morning," says his wife, "I was awakened by
cries of horror from Louis. Thinking he had a nightmare I awakened him.
He said angrily, 'Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey
tale.'"
The dream was so vivid that he could not rest until he had written off
the story, and it so possessed him that the first draft was finished
within three days. It was called "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde."
This story instantly created much discussion. Articles were written
about it, sermons were preached on it, and letters poured in from all
sorts of people with their theories about the strange tale. Six months
after it was published nearly forty thousand copies were sold in
England alone; but its greatest success was in America where its
popularity was immediate and its sale enormous.
One day he was attracted by a book of verses about children by Kate
Greenaway, and wondered why he could not write some too of the children
he remembered best of all. Scenes and doings in the days spent at
Colinton with his swarm of cousins; the games they had played and the
people they had known all trooped back with other memories of Edinburgh
days. As he recalled these children, they tripped from his pen until he
had a delightful collection of verses and determined to bring them
together in a book.
First he called it "The Penny Whistle," but soon changed the title to "A
Child's Garden of Verses" and dedicated it, with the following poem, to
the only one he said who would really understand the verses, the one who
had done so much to make his childhood days happy:
TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM
FROM HER BOY
"For the long nights you lay awake
And watched for my unworthy sake;
For your most comfortable hand
That led me through the uneven land;
For all the story-books you read;
For all the pains you comforted;
For all you pitied, all you bore
In sad and happy days of yore;--
My second Mother, my first wife,
The angel of my infant life--
From the sick child, now well and old,
Take, nurse, the little book you hold!
"And grant it, Heaven, that all who read,
May find as dear a nurse at need,
And every child who lists my rhyme,
In the bright fireside, nursery clime,
May hear it in as kind a voice
As made my childish days rejoice."
"Of course," he said, speaking of this dedication when he wrote to
Cummie about the book, "this is only a flourish, like taking off one's
hat, but still a person who has taken the trouble to write things does
not dedicate them to anyone without meaning it; and you must try to
take this dedication in place of a great many things that I might have
said, and that I ought to have done; to prove that I am not altogether
unconscious of the great debt of gratitude I owe you."
[Illustration: Facsimile of letter sent to Cummy with "An Inland
Voyage"]
If Thomas Stevenson had been one of the first to doubt his boy's
literary ability, he was equally quick to acknowledge himself mistaken.
He was proud of his brilliant son, keenly interested in whatever he was
working on and, during the days spent together at Skerryvore, gave him
valuable aid in his writing.
To have this old-time comradeship with his father, to enjoy his sympathy
and understanding once more was Stevenson's greatest joy at this time; a
joy which he sorrowfully realized he must soon part with forever as his
father's health was failing rapidly.
Thomas Stevenson remained at Skerryvore until April, 1887, when he left
for a short visit to Edinburgh. While there he became suddenly worse and
died on the 8th of May.
Louis's greatest reason for remaining in England was gone now, and he
determined to cross the ocean with his family once more.
His mother willingly gave up her home, her family, her friends, and the
comforts she had always enjoyed to go with him to a new country, on any
venture he might propose if his health could only be improved thereby.
On August 21, 1887, Louis bade good-by to Scotland for the last time and
sailed away from London on the steamship _Ludgate Hill_ for New York.