The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [10]
It did not last long. For three long summers around the northern shores of Scotland, Louis tried to bend his mind to the disciplines of engineering. Tom received erratic reports of progress, the news of an underwater trip in a diving bell, and occasional muffled cursings at the intransigence of the weather or the incompetence of the workmen. Louis experimented with waves, fussed over the slowness of his drawing and tried without conviction to improve his mathematics. ‘My daily life,’ he told his cousin Bob gloomily, ‘is one repression from beginning to end.’ While Tom continued to receive news of the slow progress of building at Dhu Heartach, Louis spent the rest of his leisure time wistfully discussing metrical narratives and small beer in letters to friends. In the spring of 1871, back in Edinburgh, Louis presented a paper, ‘On a New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses’, at the Royal Scottish Society of Arts. The essay showed the accumulated knowledge of three obedient years following the Stevenson grail: it was workmanlike, efficient, and showed no spark of initiative whatsoever.
Tom was among the audience and watched Louis being awarded the Society’s silver medal. For him, it was a proud and vindicating moment; Louis, it seemed, had finally submitted to good sense. A week later, the two walked out to Cramond. ‘On being tightly cross-questioned,’ wrote Louis later, ‘I owned that I cared for nothing but literature. My father said that was no profession.’ Angry and desperate, Tom suggested something else instead, ‘and so, at the age of 21, I began to study law.’ It was small consolation for both of them since Louis was no more interested in advocacy than he was in engineering. Tom was left to blame his son’s fall from grace on a surfeit of imagination and too many books. Later, the two fell out even more dramatically over Louis’s agnosticism, but even then never completely separated. For years, Tom continued to send his son corrective notes on his fiction; a little more Scripture here, a little sermonising there. Sensibly, Louis ignored him. But it was a measure of Tom’s affection that he abandoned his engineering ambitions for Louis with so little resistance. As Maggie Stevenson, Louis’s mother, later noted, ‘it was a cutting-short of his own life, as he had looked forward to its being continued in his son’s career.’
Louis, it seemed, had been quick to recognise both the benefits and drawbacks of his family’s profession. As he wrote in The Education of an Engineer,
It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour sides, which is the richest sort of idling; it carries him to wild islands, it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable life of cities. 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 passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls and for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.
Later, still smitten with guilt over his exile from Scotland and his family, he wrote a revealing