Part 2 (1/2)

”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 comrades.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+bboleth, 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+pwrecked.

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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 s.h.i.+ps and seas and perilous headlands and s.h.i.+ning 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 friends.h.i.+p 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.