CHAPTER VI

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.