Part 5 (2/2)

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 G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 ill.u.s.trating 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 cla.s.ses. 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 ma.s.sed support behind, in the most approved military fas.h.i.+on 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 s.h.i.+p ... 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 s.h.i.+pmates. 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.”

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