CHAPTER X

THE HOMES AND HAUNTS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

The Tropics vanish; and meseems that I From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again. Far set in fields and woods, the town I see Spring gallant from the shadow of her smoke, Cragged, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort beflagged. R. L. STEVENSON.

Robert Louis Stevenson, remembering his Edinburgh days, must have remembered three homes and many haunts. There was his parents’ town house, 17 Heriot Row; there was his grandfather’s manse at Colinton, set low in the old village graveyard by the river; and there was little Swanston, rented by his parents many years as a country residence, nestling in a little hollow high up on the edge of the Pentlands.

During all Stevenson’s Edinburgh days from his eighth year 17 Heriot Row was his home proper. Heriot Row, one of the pleasantest resident streets in Edinburgh, is, like all Edinburgh resident streets, a row of grey stone houses built in absolute uniformity. It is built on the northern slope of the New City, parallel with the three large main streets,--Princes Street, George Street, and Queen Street,--but below them, and is a single row of houses with an open outlook, facing the green trees and turf of the gardens that stretch between Heriot Row and Queen Street above. It was in the nursery facing the gardens and looking up to the dignified dwellings of Queen Street through the trees that the little fretful invalid child was soothed by his faithful Calvinistic nurse, Alison Cunningham, and that on summer evenings, after he had gone to bed, he lay listening to “grown-up people’s feet” on the street below, and watching the birds in the trees.

Till yesterday, when electricity turned night into day, the lamplighter used to go quickly at evening along the Edinburgh streets with his ladder, fix the hook at the end of it into the cross-bar of each lamp-post in turn, run up, lift off the glass top, and light the lamp. Every small street urchin in Scotland knows the cry of “Leerie, Leerie, licht the lamps!”--and the little town child, in his cosy Edinburgh nursery, counted himself very lucky to have a lamp-post just before the front door of his home, and used to sit until his tea was ready and watch for “Leerie” posting down the street with his ladder and his light.

The grandfather Balfour’s manse at Colinton was associated with holidays when all the young cousins played in the dark, shabby, homelike rooms, or, “sin without pardon,” broke the branches and got through a breach in the garden wall, and so to the joys of the river.

It is all there to-day: the damp old harled manse beside the parish church; the graveyard with its ancient tombs and the great iron coffin,--memento of the days of “resurrectionist” terror; the great swirling brown river under the magnificent trees of Colinton Dell; even the “weir with its wonder of foam,” and the old mill with the “wheel in the river.” It is one of the prettiest spots round Edinburgh, cool and quiet, with the reflections of the branches on the brown, foam-flecked surface of the deeper pools; and, close to the village end of the Dell, where the tall, wonderful cedars stand high against the sky above the manse and the church, there is a little fragment of ruin half-hidden among the trees on the steep bank, and tradition speaks vaguely, but suggestively, of a forgotten hermit and his cell.

The village itself is changed since Stevenson knew it. There is now a little double line of railway passing through, and an occasional train puffs out of a rocky tunnel into a little station, and presently proceeds on its leisurely way up the valley. The old parts of Colinton remain in picturesque patches, but round them has blossomed forth a community of red-roofed, gabled houses, with quaint latticed windows, and every shade of “harled” walls. They face every way; but whichever way they face they command lovely views, seen through the clear, brisk Midlothian air, across fields under the rule of the famed Midlothian farming, and to the grand range of the Pentlands, with the beautiful, richly-coloured valley between, and overhead a Scottish sky of great fleecy clouds and deep blue vistas.

Of Stevenson it may be submitted that he was a wandering sheep who did not love the fold; and his _Picturesque Notes_, for all their literary value, are tinged with the Calvinism he learnt at his nurse’s knee, and inhaled unconsciously in his native air, and that glooms his outlook even whilst he is most jeeringly observant of its effects on others. He was not happy in Edinburgh. But, underlying all the sarcasm, all the sneers, all the bitterness and fretfulness--whether directed at convention, custom, clothes, creeds, or climate--one seems to hear the cry of despairing indignation of youth lacking its birthright of strength and health.

It is pleasanter to think of Stevenson playing the truant from the University, in his country haunts amid whins and whimsies, than of his facing a “downright meteorological purgatory” in the “draughty parallelograms” of the city. Every inch of the Pentlands, of Blackford Hill, of the Braids, of “classic Hawthornden” and all the valley of the Esk, of the windings of the Water of Leith and of the shores of the Firth of Forth--all of it was known to the youthful Stevenson, known so well and so faithfully that he could describe it afterwards from the Tropics. But especially dear and homelike must the Pentlands have been to him--the Pentlands, where the old manse of his boyish holidays lies, and where “Little Swanston” of his later years still nestles in the trees beside one of the most picturesque villages in Scotland, within half-an-hour’s walk from Edinburgh. All the ground between Colinton and Swanston is historic. Had the countryside kept a diary, the first leaves would have been inscribed in Roman characters; for here was once a Roman town, though all that now remains of the conquering race of the old world is a little Roman bridge, and the great unhewn Battlestone standing huge and awesome alone in a field, and telling of the battle fought here, centuries ago, between the Picts and the Romans. A few hundreds of pages farther on in the diary would come the stern words of the persecuted Covenanters, who were encamped near here before the battle of Rullion Green.

All this romance and lore was known to Stevenson and loved by him, as well as he knew and loved the cry of the sea-gulls as they circled overhead, or followed the plough with loud cries of hunger. Often must the young Stevenson, with his strange face and long hair and his eccentric garb, have climbed the steep hill road, past “Hunter’s Tryst,” five hundred feet above sea-level, where, it is told, Allan Ramsay laid the scenery of the _Gentle Shepherd_,[66] and where the members of the Six Feet Club used to meet in the little roadside inn which Sir Walter Scott and the Ettrick Shepherd both knew well. The quiet cart-road to Swanston leads out of this road, a little beyond the sharp turn at “Hunter’s Tryst,” and before the

cross-roads at Fairmilehead. It leads yet another hundred feet higher, a gentle ascent between fields and pastures, and across a tiny trickling burn fringed with willows, to the green slopes at the foot of Caerketton, one of the Pentland range. Passing a big open cart-shed, many empty carts, a cottage or two, cackling poultry, and a barking dog, you come to Swanston, the garden gate open, giving a most alarming view of a very modern and grotesque effigy of Tam o’ Shanter--usually taken for a statue of Stevenson--which is set on a rockery half-way up the little drive. All this is visible and prominent; but the village lies hidden behind the house; and Swanston Cottage, Stevenson’s home, is a little to one side, on the slope of the hill, and remains unseen, especially in spring or summer when the trees are full of leaf. Swanston itself, now a farm, was originally a grange belonging to some neighbouring religious house, probably Currie, and is a fine old stone building, its tall gabled side having the characteristically Scottish “crow steps.” The road continues, a mere cart track, in front of the garden wall, and curls round at the back to some modern cottages, “stane sclated”; and here it ends, as if unwilling to betray that a few steps farther on is one of the prettiest villages in Scotland--a rustic group of thatched and harled homesteads, with here and there fenced-in gardens of old-fashioned flowers, and all set round about an irregular patch of village green and Swanston Burn, beside which play the little healthy, bonny Scottish bairns, “like tumbled fruit in grass.”

The inhabitants of this village remember Stevenson well. They thought he was “daft.” His fame has not yet impressed them. “Ay, he was much aboot the place,” an old dame will say, indifferently. “But, whenever the wind was in the east, he would be off to his grandfather’s at Colinton,” a hale and sturdy old man will add.

“He was much aboot the place.” To the Stevenson lover this is its charm to-day--above the bleating of the lambs, above the delight of the wholesome air, above the tones and tints of thatch against the hill or of wood reek against the sky. And yet, to Stevenson, it was all these things that charmed, and that he recollected so tenderly when he lay slowly dying in far-away Samoa: the barking of the sheep-dog and the voice of the shepherd in the grey early morning, and the pure air that was “rustically scented”--all the sights and sounds so dear to the country-lover. And yet, climb up a little among the whins and the pastures behind his home, and turn--and there lies Edinburgh below you, painted like a picture in the haze of smoke and sunshine.