Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  ‘ Once past the stable you were now fairly within the garden. On summer afternoons the sloping lawn was literally steeped in sunshine; and all the day long, from the impending wood, there came the sweetest and fullest chorus of merles and thrushes and all manner of birds, that it ever was my lot to hear. The lawn was just the centre of all this — a perfect goblet for sunshine, and the Dionysius’ ear for a whole forest of bird-songs. This lawn was a favourite playground; a lilac that hung its scented blossom out of the glossy semicirque of laurels was identified by my playmates and myself as that tree whose very shadow was death. In the great laurel at the corner I have often lain perdu, with a toy-gun in my hand, waiting for a herd of antelopes to defile past me down the carriage drive, and waiting (need I add?) in vain.1 Down at the corner of the lawn next the snuff-mill wall 1 Another version runs: 4 Once as I lay, playing hunter, hid in a thick laurel, and with a toy-gun upon my arm, I worked myself so hotly into the spirit of my play, that I think I can still see the herd of antelope come sweeping down the lawn and round the deodar; it was almost a vision.’

  In 1857, at Bridge of Allan, he was one day asked, ‘ What are you doing?’ ‘ Ah’m just hunting blaauwboks!’

  there was a practicable passage through the evergreens and a door in the wall, which let you out on a small patch of sand, left in the corner by the river. Just across, the woods rose like a wall into the sky; and their lowest branches trailed in the black waters. Naturally, it was very sunless. . . . There was nothing around and above you but the shadowy foliage of trees. It seemed a marvel how they clung to the steep slope on the other side; and, indeed, they were forced to grow far apart, and showed the ground between them hid by an undergrowth of butter-bur, hemlock, and nettle. ... I wish I could give you an idea of this place, of the gloom, of the black slow water, of the strange wet smell, of the draggled vegetation on the far side whither the current took everything, and of the incomparably fine, rich yellow sand, without a grit in the whole of it, and moving below your feet with scarcely more resistance than a liquid. ... I remember climbing down one day to a place where we discovered an island of this treacherous material. O the great discovery! On we leapt in a moment; but on feeling the wet, sluicy island flatten out into a level with the river, and the brown water gathering about our feet, we were off it again as quickly. It was a “ quicksand,” we said; and thenceforward the island was held in much the same regard as the lilac-tree on the lawn.

  ‘The wall of the church faces to the manse, but the churchyard is on a level with the top of the wall, that is to say, some eight or ten feet above the garden, and the tombstones are visible from the enclosure of the manse. The church, with its campanile, was near the edge, so that on Sundays we could see the cluster of people about the door. Under the retaining wall was a somewhat dark pathway, extending from the stable to the far end of the garden, and called “ The Witches’ Walk,” from a game we used to play in it. At the stable end it took its rise under a yew, which is one of the glories of the village. Under the circuit of its wide, black branches, it was always dark and cool, and there was a green scurf over all the trunk among which glistened the round bright drops of resin. . . . This was a sufficiently gloomy commencement for the Witches’ Walk; but its chief horror was the retaining wall of the kirkyard itself, about which we were always hovering at even with the strange attraction of fear. This it was that supplied our Arcady with its gods; and in place of classic forms and the split hooves of satyrs, we were full of homely Scottish superstitions of grues and ghosts and goblins. . . . Often after nightfall have I looked long and eagerly from the manse windows to see the “ spunkies “ playing among the graves, and have been much chagrined at my failure; and this very name of spunkie recalls to me the most important of our discoveries in the supernatural walk. Henrietta, Willie,1 and I, just about dusk, discovered a burning eye looking out from a hole in the retaining wall, in the corner where it joins the back of the stable. In hushed tones we debated the question; whether it was some bird of ill omen roosting in the cranny of the wall, or whether the hole pierced right through into a grave, and it was some dead man who was sitting up in his coffin and watching us with that strange fixed eye. If you remember the level of the churchyard, you will see that this explanation suited pretty well; so we drew a wheelbarrow into the corner; one after another got up and looked in; and when the last was satisfied, we turned round, took to our heels, and never stopped till we were in the shelter of the house. We ourselves, in our after-discussions, thought it might have been the bird, though we preferred the more tremendous explanation. But for my own part, I simply believe that we saw nothing at all. The fact is, we would have given anything to have seen a ghost, or to persuade ourselves that we had seen a ghost. . . . I remember going down into the cellars of our own house 1 Cf. The Child’s Garden of Verses, Envoy I. His two favourite cousins, the children of his mother’s sister, Mrs. Ramsay Traquair.

  in town, in company with another, . . . and persuading myself that I saw a face looking at me from round a corner; and I may even confess, since the laws against sorcery have been for some time in abeyance, that I essayed at divers times to bring up the devil, founding my incantations on no more abstruse a guide than Skelt’s Juvenile Drama of Der Freischiitz. I am about at the end of horrors now; even out of the Witches’ Walk, you saw the manse facing towards you, with its back to the river and the wooded bank, and the bright flower-plots and stretches of comfortable vegetables in front and on each side of it; flower-plots and vegetable borders, by the way, on which it was almost death to set foot, and about which we held a curious belief — namely, that my grandfather went round and measured any footprints that he saw to compare the measurement at night with the boots put out for brushing; to avoid which we were accustomed, by a strategic movement of the foot, to make the mark longer. . . .

  ‘ So much for the garden; now follow me into the house. On entering by the front-door you had before you a stone-paved lobby, with doors on either hand, that extended the whole length of the house. There stood a case of foreign birds, two or three marble deities from India, and a lily of the Nile in a pot; and at the far end the stairs shut in the view. . . . With how many games of “tig” or brick-building in the forenoon is the long low dining-room connected in my mind.

  . . . ‘But that room is principally dear to me from memories of the time when I, a sickly child, stayed there alone. First, in the forenoon about eleven, how my aunt1

  1 ‘ I have mentioned my aunt. In her youth she was a wit and a beauty, very imperious, managing and self-sufficient. But as she grew up, she began to suffice for all the family as well. An accident on horseback made her nearly deaf and blind, and suddenly transformed this wilful empress into the most serviceable and amiable of women. There were thirteen of the Balfours as (oddly enough) there were of the Stevensons also, and the children of the family came home to her to be nursed, to be educated, to be mothered, used to open the storeroom at the one end and give me out three Albert biscuits and some calf-foot jelly in a black pot with a sort of raised whi|e pattern over it. That storeroom was a most voluptuous place with its piles of biscuit boxes and spice tins, the rack for buttered eggs, the little window that let in sunshine and the flickering shadow of leaves, and the strong sweet odour of everything that pleaseth the taste of man. . . . But after my biscuits were eaten and my pot emptied (I am supposing one of those many days when I was not allowed to cross the threshold), what did there remain to do? ... I would often get some one for amanuensis, and write pleasant narratives, which have fallen some degree into unjust oblivion. One, I remember, had for scene the Witches’ Walk, and for heroine a kitten. It was intended to be something very thrilling and spectral; but I can now only recall the intense satisfaction (I illustrated these works myself) with which I contemplated three coats of gamboge upon the cat’s supper of pease-brose. Another story was entitled The Adventures of Basil, and consisted mainly of bungling adaptations from Mayne Reid, to whom I was indebted even for my hero’s
name; but I introduced the further attraction of a storm at sea, where the captain cried out, “ All hands to the pumps!” . . .

  ‘Another time my aunt had brought me a large box of tin soldiers from town. I had only to drop the smallest hint of what I wanted and I had it the next from the infanticidal climate of India. There must sometimes have been half a score of us children about the manse; and all were born a second time from Aunt Jane’s tenderness. It was strange when a new party of these sallow young folk came home, perhaps with an Indian ayah. This little country manse was the centre of the world j and Aunt Jane represented Charity. The text, my mother says, must have been written for her and Aunt Jane: “ More are the children of the barren than the children of the married wife.”’ — From an autobiographical fragment, written in San Francisco early in 1880. (For other portions vide pages 83, 86. For the use of this I am indebted to Mrs. Strong, to whom the early part of this manuscript was presented at Vailima by her step-father.) Cf. Child5 Garden, Envoy III.

  time the phaeton went in. . . . So after dinner on the first day of my new acquisition, I was told to exhibit my soldiers to grandpapa. The idea of this great and alarming dignitary stooping to examine my toys was a new one; and I ranged my wooden militia with excessive care upon the broad mahogany, while my grandfather took his usual nuts and port wine. Not only was he pleased to approve of the way in which I had “ marshalled my array”; but he also gave a new light to me on the subject of playing with soldiers — a technical term, you observe. He told me to make the battle of Coburg. Now Waterloo I knew; and Crimean battlefields I knew (for they were within my own memory); but this Coburg was a new and grand idea, a novel vista of entertainment, an addition to my vocabulary of warlike sports; and so I have never forgotten it.

  ‘But now I come to the crown of my dining-room reminiscences, for after dinner, when the lamp was brought in and shaded, and my aunt sat down to read in the rocking-chair, there was a great open space behind the sofa left entirely in the shadow. This was my especial domain: once round the corner of the sofa, I had left the lightsome, merry indoors, and was out in the cool, dark night. I could almost see the stars. I looked out of the back window at the bushes outside. I lay in the darkest corners, rifle in hand, like a hunter in a lonely bivouac. I crawled about stealthily watching the people in the circle of lamplight, with some vague remembrance of a novel that my aunt had read to me, where some fellow went out from “ the heated ballroom “ and moralised in the “ Park.”1 Down in the corner beside the bricks, whether on the floor or on a book-shelf I do not remember, were four volumes of Joanna Baillie’s plays. Now as Cummie always expatiated on the wickedness of anything theatrical, I supposed these books to be forbidden, and took every sly opportunity of 1 Cf. ‘ A Gossip on Romance,’ Memories and Portraits, .

  reading them. But I don’t think I ever read one through: my chief satisfaction was puzzling out, in the obscurity, the scenes—” a convent in a forest: the chapel lit: organ playing a solemn chant”—” a passage in a Saxon castle “ — and the like; and then transforming my dark place behind the sofa into one and all of these. . . .

  ‘ Opposite the study was the parlour, a small room crammed full of furniture and covered with portraits, with a cabinet at the one side full of foreign curiosities, and a sort of anatomical trophy on the top. During a grand cleaning of this apartment I remember all the furniture was ranged on the circular grass-plot between the churchyard and the house. It was a lovely still summer evening, and I stayed out, climbing among the chairs and sofas. Falling on a large bone or skull, I asked what it was. Part of an albatross, auntie told me. “ What is an albatross? “ I asked. And then she described to me this great bird nearly as big as a house, that you saw out miles away from any land, sleeping above the waste and desolate ocean. She told me that the Ancient Mariner was all about one; and quoted with great verve (she had a duster in her hand, I recollect) —

  “With my cross-bow I shot the albatross.”

  * Wonderful visions did all this raise in my imagination, so wonderful, that when, many years later, I came to read the poem, my only feeling was one of utter disappointment. Willie had a crossbow; but up till this date, I had never envied him its possession. After this, however, it became one of the objects of my life.’

  His mother and his nurse read to him, as we have seen, indefatigably, and so it was not until he was eight years old that he took any pleasure in reading to himself. The consciousness of this delight came upon him suddenly; its coming was connected in his memory with a book called Paul Blake,’ a visit to the country, and an experience unforgettable. The day had been warm; Henrietta and I had played together charmingly all day in a sandy wilderness across the road; then came the evening with a great flash of colour and a heavenly sweetness in the air. Somehow my playmate had vanished, or is out of the story, as the sagas say, but I was sent into the village on an errand; and, taking a book of fairy-tales, went down alone through a fir-wood, reading as I walked. How often since then has it befallen me to be happy even so; but that was the first time: the shock of that pleasure I have never since forgot, and if my mind serves me to the last, I never shall; for it was then that I knew that I loved reading.’1

  This day must have been followed closely by the evening recorded in another essay.2 ‘ Out of all the years of my life I can recall but one home-coming to compare with these (when he returned with some new play for his toy-theatre), and that was on the night when I brought back with me the Arabian Entertainments in the fat, old, double-columned volume with the prints. I was just well into the story of the Hunchback, I remember, when my clergyman grandfather (a man we counted pretty stiff) came in behind me. I grew blind with terror. But instead of ordering the book away, he said he envied me. Ah, well he might.’

  Although an only child and rendered more solitary by illness, Louis was not without companions, drawn (as often happens in early years) chiefly from the crowded ranks of his cousins, of whom he was nearly sure to find some at Colinton.3 By them he seems to have been treated, as Mr. Colvin so happily says,’ as something of a small sickly prince’; over them he cast the spell of 1 ‘ Rosa quo Locorum ‘: Juvenilia, .

  2 ‘ A Penny Plain, Twopence Coloured: Memories and Portraits, .

  3 He had more than fifty first cousins in all, forty being on his mother’s side. Many of them were much younger than himself, but nearly all were born or bred in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh.

  his imagination in devising games, and they submitted to the force of his character in accepting the rdles which he saw fit to allot. ‘We children had naturally many plays together,’ he says of Colinton; ‘ I usually insisted on the lead, and was invariably exhausted to death by the evening. I can still remember what a fury of play would descend upon me.’ Whether solitary or in company, he could never be still, but always must follow out his fancies in action. Were a horse to be mounted, a ship to be handled, a dragon to be slain, each and all of these operations must be conducted with all the fire and fury which the very idea aroused in his imagination.1

  The country and the summer months gave him more companions, but the whole winter of 1856-57 was spent in Heriot Row by the most brilliant of them all, the one who had most in common with Louis, and of all his kin was his closest friend in after-life, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, the only son of his uncle Alan. He was the cousin of Child’s Play? who ate his porridge ‘ with sugar, and explained it to be a country continually buried under snow,’ while Louis took his ‘with milk, and explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation.’

  ‘ We lived together in a purely visionary state,’ wrote Louis, ‘and were never tired of dressing up.’ One of their chief delights was in the rival kingdoms of their own invention — Nosingtonia and Encyclopaedia, of which they were perpetually drawing maps. Nosingtonia was ‘ shaped a little like Ireland’; Encyclopaedia, Louis’ island, ‘lay diagonally across the paper like a large tip-cat.’ I have before me a state-paper of the period; the Latin must be t
he elder boy’s, as Louis had not yet been to school: ‘ Received by me from Rex Encyclo- paediae: patent thickness 1 Air Gun of Grundrungia cloth and 1000 yards therefore in exchange for the Pine Islands. — R. Stevenson, Rex Nozzinton.’

  1 c Child’s Play,’ Virginibus Puerisque, .

  2 P. 167. See this volume, n.

  VOL. I. D

  It was during this winter and in this company that Louis, at the age of six, first entered the realms of gold described in ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’ (.Memories and Portraits), the region of the toy-theatre and the ‘scenery of Skeltdom.’ The romance of purchasing the plays for himself came a little later, for during these months he could hardly leave the house; but now began the delight in the book and the dramatis persona. Years afterwards he described himself as ‘ no melodramatist, but a Skelt-drunken boy; the man who went out to find the Eldorado of romantic comedy.’ Now also began the joys of illumination. Now he painted the characters ‘with crimson-lake (hark to the sound of it — crimson-lake! — the horns of elf-land are not richer on the ear) — with crimson-lake and Prussian blue a certain purple is to be compounded, which, for cloaks especially, Titian could not equal.’

  The last of his reminiscences of childish days that I have to give was written in Samoa, and describes with all the resources of his perfected art a state of mind more subtle and tragic than any that we are accustomed to associate with the confines of infancy. From any one who less accurately remembered the sensations of his earliest years, it might seem fanciful and unreal; to those who know the truthfulness with which its author has depicted the successive stages through which he passed, it will be as convincing as it is delightful. On this page also we first meet his sentiment for the venerable city which to the end he thought of as his home.