Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1025 page)

THIRD YEAR AT VAILIMA

January-December 1893

By the New Year of 1893 the fine addition to the house at Vailima was finished, and its pleasantness and comfort went far to console Stevenson for the cost. But the year was on the whole a less fortunate one for the inmates than the last. A proclamation concerning penalties for sedition in the Samoan Islands, which from its tenor could have been aimed at no one else but Stevenson, had been issued at the close of 1892 by the High Commissioner at Fiji; and with its modification and practical withdrawal, by order of the Foreign Office at home, the last threat of unpleasant consequences in connection with his political action disappeared. But a sharp second attack of influenza in January lowered his vitality, and from a trip which the family took for the sake of change to Sydney, in the month of February, they returned with health unimproved. In April the illness of Mrs. Stevenson caused her husband some weeks of acute distress and anxiety. In August he suffered the chagrin of witnessing the outbreak of the war which he had vainly striven to prevent between the two rival kings, and the defeat and banishment of Mataafa, whom he knew to be the one man of governing capacity among the native chiefs, and 281 whom, in the interest alike of whites and natives, he had desired to see the Powers not crush, but conciliate. On the other hand, he had the satisfaction of seeing the Chief Justice and President removed from the posts they had so incompetently filled, and superseded by new and better men. The task imposed by the three Powers upon these officials was in truth an impossible one; but their characters and endeavours earned respect, and with the American Chief Justice in particular, Mr. C. J. Ide (whom he had already known as one of the Land Commissioners), and with his family the Vailima household lived on terms of cordial friendship. In September Stevenson took a health-trip to Honolulu, which again turned out unsuccessful. For some weeks he was down with a renewed attack of fever and prostration, and his wife had to come from Samoa to nurse and fetch him home. Later in the autumn he mended again.

During no part of the year were Stevenson’s working powers up to the mark. In the early summer he finished
The Ebb Tide
, but on a plan much abridged from its original intention, and with an unusual degree of strain and effort. With
St. Ives
and his own family history he made fair progress, but both of these he regarded as in a manner holiday tasks, not calling for any very serious exercise of his powers. In connection with the latter, he took an eager interest, as his correspondence will show, in the researches which friends and kinsmen undertook for him in Scotland. He fell into arrears in regard to one or two magazine stories for which he had contracted; and with none of his more ambitious schemes of romance,
Sophia Scarlet
,
The Young Chevalier
,
Heathercat
, and
Weir of Hermiston
, did he feel himself well able to cope. This falling-off of his power of production brought with it no 282 small degree of inward strain and anxiety. He had not yet put by any provision for his wife and step-family (the income from the moderate fortune left by his father naturally going to his mother during her life). His earnings had since 1887 been considerable, at the rate of £4,000 a year or thereabouts; but his building expenses and large mode of life at Vailima, together with his habitual generosity, which scarce knew check or limit, towards the less fortunate of his friends and acquaintances in various parts of the world, made his expenditure about equal to his income. The idea originally entertained of turning part of the Vailima estate into a profitable plantation turned out chimerical. The thought began to haunt him, What if his power of earning were soon to cease? And occasional signs of inward depression and life-weariness began to appear in his correspondence. But it was only in writing, and then but rarely, that he let such signs appear: to those about him he retained the old affectionate charm and inspiring gaiety undiminished, fulfilling without failure the words of his own prayer, “Give us to awake with smiles, give us to labour smiling; as the sun lightens the world, so let our loving-kindness make bright this house of our habitation.”

To Sidney Colvin

[
Vailima
]
January 1893.

MY DEAR COLVIN, — You are properly paid at last, and it is like you will have but a shadow of a letter. I have been pretty thoroughly out of kilter; first a fever that would neither come on nor go off, then acute dyspepsia, in the weakening grasp of which I get wandering between 283 the waking state and one of nightmare. Why the devil does no one send me Atalanta? And why are there no proofs of
D. Balfour
? Sure I should have had the whole, at least the half, of them by now; and it would be all for the advantage of the Atalantans. I have written to Cassell & Co. (matter of
Falesá
) “you will please arrange with him” (meaning you). “What he may decide I shall abide.” So consider your hand free, and act for me without fear or favour. I am greatly pleased with the illustrations. It is very strange to a South-Seayer to see Hawaiian women dressed like Samoans, but I guess that’s all one to you in Middlesex. It’s about the same as if London city men were shown going to the Stock Exchange as
pifferari
; but no matter, none will sleep worse for it. I have accepted Cassell’s proposal as an amendment to one of mine; that
D. B.
is to be brought out first under the title
Catriona
without pictures; and, when the hour strikes,
Kidnapped
and
Catriona
are to form vols. I. and II. of the heavily illustrated
Adventures of David Balfour
at 7s. 6d. each, sold separately.

—  — ’s letter was vastly sly and dry and shy. I am not afraid now. Two attempts have been made, both have failed, and I imagine these failures strengthen me. Above all this is true of the last, where my weak point was attempted. On every other, I am strong. Only force can dislodge me, for public opinion is wholly on my side. All races and degrees are united in heartfelt opposition to the Men of Mulinuu. The news of the fighting was of no concern to mortal man; it was made much of because men love talk of battles, and because the Government pray God daily for some scandal not their own; but it was only a brisk episode in a clan fight which has grown apparently endemic in the west of Tutuila. At the best it was a twopenny affair, and never occupied my mind five minutes.

I am so weary of reports that are without foundation and threats that go without fulfilment, and so much occupied besides by the raging troubles of my own wame, that I have been very slack on politics, as I have been in literature. With incredible labour, I have rewritten the First Chapter of the
Justice-Clerk
; it took me about ten days, and requires another athletic dressing after all. And that is my story for the month. The rest is grunting and grutching.

Consideranda for
The Beach
: —

I. Whether to add one or both the tales I sent you?

II. Whether to call the whole volume
Island Nights’ Entertainments
?

III. Whether, having waited so long, it would not be better to give me another mail, in case I could add another member to the volume and a little better justify the name?

If I possibly can draw up another story, I will. What annoyed me about the use of
The Bottle Imp
was that I had always meant it for the centre-piece of a volume of
Märchen
which I was slowly to elaborate. You always had an idea that I depreciated the
B. I.
; I can’t think wherefore; I always particularly liked it — one of my best works, and ill to equal; and that was why I loved to keep it in portfolio till I had time to grow up to some other fruit of the same
venue
. However, that is disposed of now, and we must just do the best we can.

I am not aware that there is anything to add; the weather is hellish, waterspouts, mists, chills, the foul fiend’s own weather, following on a week of expurgated heaven; so it goes at this bewildering season. I write in the upper floor of my new house, of which I will send you some day a plan to measure. ‘Tis an elegant structure, surely, and the proid of me oi. Was asked to pay for it just now, and genteelly refused, and then agreed, in view of general good-will, to pay a half of what is still due.

24th January 1893.
— This ought to have gone last 285 mail and was forgotten. My best excuse is that I was engaged in starting an influenza, to which class of exploit our household has been since then entirely dedicated. We had eight cases, one of them very bad, and one — mine — complicated with my old friend Bluidy Jack. Luckily neither Fanny, Lloyd, or Belle took the confounded thing, and they were able to run the household and nurse the sick to admiration.

Some of our boys behaved like real trumps. Perhaps the prettiest performance was that of our excellent Henry Simelé, or, as we sometimes call him, Davy Balfour. Henry, I maun premeese, is a chief; the humblest Samoan recoils from emptying slops as you would from cheating at cards; now the last nights of our bad time, when we had seven down together, it was enough to have made anybody laugh or cry to see Henry going the rounds with a slop-bucket and going inside the mosquito net of each of the sick, Protestant and Catholic alike, to pray with them.

I must tell you that in my sickness I had a huge alleviation and began a new story. This I am writing by dictation, and really think it is an art I can manage to acquire. The relief is beyond description; it is just like a school-treat to me, and the amanuensis bears up extraordinar’. The story is to be called
St. Ives
; I give you your choice whether or not it should bear the sub-title, “Experiences of a French prisoner in England.” We were just getting on splendidly with it, when this cursed mail arrived and requires to be attended to. It looks to me very like as if
St. Ives
would be ready before any of the others, but you know me and how impossible it is I should predict. The Amanuensis has her head quite turned and believes herself to be the author of this novel (and is to some extent) — and as the creature (!) has not been wholly useless in the matter (I told you so! A.M.) I propose to foster her vanity by a little commemoration 286 gift! The name of the hero is Anne de St. Yves — he Englishes his name to St. Ives during his escape. It is my idea to get a ring made which shall either represent
Anne
or A. S. Y. A., of course, would be Amethyst and S. Sapphire, which is my favourite stone anyway and was my father’s before me. But what would the ex-Slade professor do about the letter Y? Or suppose he took the other version, how would he meet the case, the two N.’s? These things are beyond my knowledge, which it would perhaps be more descriptive to call ignorance. But I place the matter in the meanwhile under your consideration and beg to hear your views. I shall tell you on some other occasion and when the A.M. is out of hearing how
very
much I propose to invest in this testimonial; but I may as well inform you at once that I intend it to be cheap, sir, damned cheap! My idea of running amanuenses is by praise, not pudding, flattery and not coins! I shall send you when the time is ripe a ring to measure by.

To resume our sad tale. After the other seven were almost wholly recovered Henry lay down to influenza on his own account. He is but just better and it looks as though Fanny were about to bring up the rear. As for me, I am all right, though I
was
reduced to dictating
Anne
in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, which I think you will admit is a
comble
.

Politics leave me extraordinary cold. It seems that so much of my purpose has come off, and Cedercrantz and Pilsach are sacked. The rest of it has all gone to water. The triple-headed ass at home, in his plenitude of ignorance, prefers to collect the taxes and scatter the Mataafas by force or the threat of force. It may succeed, and I suppose it will. It is none the less for that expensive, harsh, unpopular and unsettling. I am young enough to have been annoyed, and altogether eject and renegate the whole idea of political affairs. Success in that field appears to be the organisation of failure enlivened with defamation of character; and, much as I love pickles and 287 hot water (in your true phrase) I shall take my pickles in future from Crosse and Blackwell and my hot water with a dose of good Glenlivat.

Do not bother at all about the wall-papers. We have had the whole of our new house varnished, and it looks beautiful. I wish you could see the hall; poor room, it had to begin life as an infirmary during our recent visitation; but it is really a handsome comely place, and when we get the furniture, and the pictures, and what is so very much more decorative, the picture frames, will look sublime.

Jan. 30th.
— I have written to Charles asking for Rowlandson’s
Syntax
and
Dance of Death
out of our house, and begging for anything about fashions and manners (fashions particularly) for 1814. Can you help? Both the Justice Clerk and St. Ives fall in that fated year. Indeed I got into St. Ives while going over the Annual Register for the other. There is a kind of fancy list of Chaps. of St. Ives. (It begins in Edinb Castle.) I. Story of a lion rampant (that was a toy he had made, and given to a girl visitor). II. Story of a pair of scissors. III. St. Ives receives a bundle of money. IV. St. Ives is shown a house. V. The Escape. VI. The Cottage (Swanston Cottage). VII. The Hen-house. VIII. Three is company and four none. IX. The Drovers. X. The Great North Road. XI. Burchell Fenn. XII. The covered cart. XIII. The doctor. XIV. The Luddites. XV. Set a thief to catch a thief. XVI. M. le Comte de Kérouaille (his uncle, the rich
émigré
, whom he finds murdered). XVII. The cousins. XVIII. Mr. Sergeant Garrow. XIX. A meeting at the Ship, Dover. XX. Diane. XXI. The Duke’s Prejudices. XXII. The False Messenger. XXIII. The gardener’s ladder. XXIV. The officers. XXV. Trouble with the Duke. XXVI. Fouquet again. XXVII. The Aeronaut. XXVIII. The True-Blooded Yankee. XXIX. In France. I don’t know where to stop. Apropos, I want a book about Paris, and the
first return
of the
émigrés
and all up to the 288
Cent Jours
: d’ye ken anything in my way? I want in particular to know about them and the Napoleonic functionaries and officers, and to get the colour and some vital details of the business of exchange of departments from one side to the other. Ten chapters are drafted, and VIII. re-copied by me, but will want another dressing for luck. It is merely a story of adventure, rambling along; but that is perhaps the guard that “sets my genius best,” as Alan might have said. I wish I could feel as easy about the other! But there, all novels are a heavy burthen while they are doing, and a sensible disappointment when they are done.