Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1024 page)

Alas, I was just beginning to get eloquent, and there goes the lunch bell, and after lunch I must make up the mail.

Do come. You must not come in February or March — bad months. From April on it is delightful. — Your sincere friend,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

To Henry James

December 5th, 1892.

MY DEAR JAMES, — How comes it so great a silence has fallen? The still small voice of self-approval whispers me it is not from me. I have looked up my register, and find I have neither written to you nor heard from you since June 22nd, on which day of grace that invaluable work began. This is not as it should be. How to get back? I remember acknowledging with rapture
The Lesson of the Master
, and I remember receiving
Marbot
: was that our last relation?

Hey, well! anyway, as you may have probably gathered from the papers, I have been in devilish hot water, and (what may be new to you) devilish hard at work. In twelve calendar months I finished
The Wrecker
, wrote all of
Falesá
but the first chapter, (well, much of)
The History of Samoa
, did something here and there to my Life of my Grandfather, and began And Finished
David Balfour
. What do you think of it for a year? Since then I may say I have done nothing beyond draft three chapters of another novel,
The Justice-Clerk
, which ought to be a snorter and a blower — at least if it don’t make a spoon, it will spoil the horn of an Aurochs (if that’s how it should be spelt).

On the hot water side it may entertain you to know that I have been actually sentenced to deportation by my friends on Mulinuu, C.J. Cedercrantz, and Baron Senfft von Pilsach. The awful doom, however, declined to fall, owing to Circumstances over Which. I only heard of it (so to speak) last night. I mean officially, but I had walked among rumours. The whole tale will be some day put into my hand, and I shall share it with humorous friends.

It is likely, however, by my judgment, that this epoch of gaiety in Samoa will soon cease; and the fierce white light of history will beat no longer on Yours Sincerely and his fellows here on the beach. We ask ourselves whether the reason will more rejoice over the end of a disgraceful business, or the unregenerate man more sorrow over the stoppage of the fun. For, say what you please, it has been a deeply interesting time. You don’t know what news is, nor what politics, nor what the life of man, till you see it on so small a scale and with your own liberty on the board for stake. I would not have missed it for much. And anxious friends beg me to stay at home and study human nature in Brompton drawing-rooms!
Farceurs!
And anyway you know that such is not my talent. I could never be induced to take the faintest interest in Brompton
qua
Brompton or a drawing-room
qua
a drawing-room. I am an Epick Writer with a k to it, but without the necessary genius.

Hurry up with another book of stories. I am now reduced to two of my contemporaries, you and Barrie — O, and Kipling — you and Barrie and Kipling are now my Muses Three. And with Kipling, as you know, there are reservations to be made. And you and Barrie don’t write enough. I should say I also read Anstey when he is serious, and can almost always get a happy day out of Marion Crawford —
ce n’est pas toujours la guerre
, but it’s got life to it and guts, and it moves. Did you read the
Witch of Prague
? Nobody could read it twice, of 276 course; and the first time even it was necessary to skip.
E pur si muove.
But Barrie is a beauty, the
Little Minister
and the
Window in Thrums
, eh? Stuff in that young man; but he must see and not be too funny. Genius in him, but there’s a journalist at his elbow — there’s the risk. Look, what a page is the glove business in the
Window
! knocks a man flat; that’s guts, if you please.

Why have I wasted the little time that is left with a sort of naked review article? I don’t know, I’m sure. I suppose a mere ebullition of congested literary talk. I am beginning to think a visit from friends would be due. Wish you could come!

Let us have your news anyway, and forgive this silly stale effusion. — Yours ever,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

To J. M. Barrie

[
Vailima, December 1892.
]

DEAR J. M. BARRIE, — You will be sick of me soon; I cannot help it. I have been off my work for some time, and re-read the
Edinburgh Eleven
, and had a great mind to write a parody and give you all your sauce back again, and see how you would like it yourself. And then I read (for the first time — I know not how) the
Window in Thrums
; I don’t say that it is better than the
Minister
; it’s less of a tale — and there is a beauty, a material beauty, of the tale
ipse
, which clever critics nowadays long and love to forget; it has more real flaws; but somehow it is — well, I read it last anyway, and it’s by Barrie. And he’s the man for my money. The glove is a great page; it is startlingly original, and as true as death and judgment. Tibbie Birse in the Burial is great, but I think it was a journalist that got in the word “official.” The same character plainly had a word to say to Thomas Haggard. Thomas affects me as a lie — I beg your pardon; doubtless 277 he was somebody you knew; that leads people so far astray. The actual is not the true.

I am proud to think you are a Scotchman — though to be sure I know nothing of that country, being only an English tourist, quo’ Gavin Ogilvy. I commend the hard case of Mr. Gavin Ogilvy to J. M. Barrie, whose work is to me a source of living pleasure and heartfelt national pride. There are two of us now that the Shirra might have patted on the head. And please do not think when I thus seem to bracket myself with you, that I am wholly blinded with vanity. Jess is beyond my frontier line; I could not touch her skirt; I have no such glamour of twilight on my pen. I am a capable artist; but it begins to look to me as if you were a man of genius. Take care of yourself for my sake. It’s a devilish hard thing for a man who writes so many novels as I do, that I should get so few to read. And I can read yours, and I love them.

A pity for you that my amanuensis is not on stock to-day, and my own hand perceptibly worse than usual. — Yours,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

December 5th, 1892.

P.S.
— They tell me your health is not strong. Man, come out here and try the Prophet’s chamber. There’s only one bad point to us — we do rise early. The Amanuensis states that you are a lover of silence — and that ours is a noisy house — and she is a chatterbox — I am not answerable for these statements, though I do think there is a touch of garrulity about my premises. We have so little to talk about, you see. The house is three miles from town, in the midst of great silent forests. There is a burn close by, and when we are not talking you can hear the burn, and the birds, and the sea breaking on the coast three miles away and six hundred feet below us, and about three times a month a bell — I don’t know where the bell is, nor who rings it; it may be the bell in Hans Andersen’s story for all I know. It is never hot 278 here — 86 in the shade is about our hottest — and it is never cold except just in the early mornings. Take it for all in all, I suppose this island climate to be by far the healthiest in the world — even the influenza entirely lost its sting. Only two patients died, and one was a man nearly eighty, and the other a child below four months. I won’t tell you if it is beautiful, for I want you to come here and see for yourself. Everybody on the premises except my wife has some Scotch blood in their veins — I beg your pardon — except the natives — and then my wife is a Dutchwoman — and the natives are the next thing conceivable to Highlanders before the forty-five. We would have some grand cracks!

R. L. S.

Come, it will broaden your mind, and be the making of me.

To Charles Baxter

This correspondent had lately been on a tour in Sweden.

[
Vailima
]
December 28th, 1892.

MY DEAR CHARLES, — Your really decent letter to hand. And here I am answering it, to the merry note of the carpenter’s hammer, in an upper room of the New House. This upper floor is almost done now, but the Grrrrrreat ‘All below is still unlined; it is all to be varnished redwood. I paid a big figure but do not repent; the trouble has been so minimised, the work has been so workmanlike, and all the parties have been so obliging. What a pity when you met the Buried Majesty of Sweden — the sovereign of my Cedercrantz — you did not breathe in his ear a word of Samoa!

This kind of thing might be kept up a Lapland night. “Let us bury the great joke” — Shade of Tennyson, forgive!

I am glad to say, you can scarce receive the second bill for the house until next mail, which gives more room to turn round in. Yes, my rate of expenditure is hellish. It is funny, it crept up and up; and when we sat upon one vent another exploded. Lloyd and I grew grey over the monthly returns; but every damned month, there is a new extra. However, we always hope the next will prove less recalcitrant; in which faith we advance trembling.

The desiderated advertisement, I think I have told you, was mighty near supplied: that is, if deportation would suit your view: the ship was actually sought to be hired. Yes, it would have been an advertisement, and rather a lark, and yet a blooming nuisance. For my part, I shall try to do without.

No one has thought fit to send me Atalanta; and I have no proof at all of
D. Balfour
, which is far more serious. How about the
D. B.
map? As soon as there is a proof it were well I should see it to accord the text thereto — or t’other way about if needs must. Remember I had to go much on memory in writing that work. Did you observe the dedication? and how did you like it? If it don’t suit you, I am to try my hand again. — Yours ever,

R. L. S.

 Editors and publishers (since those days we have been
déniaisés
with a vengeance) had actually been inclined to shy at the terms of the fraudulent marriage contract, which is the pivot of the whole story; see below, .

 For a lively account of this plantation and its history, see Lord Pembroke’s
South Sea Bubbles
, chap. i.

 The native wife of a carpenter in Apia.

 The sequel to
Kidnapped
, published in the following year under the title
Catriona
.

 Most of the work on the plantations in Samoa is done by “black boys,”
i.e.
imported labourers from other (Melanesian) islands.

 By Howard Pyle.

 In answer to the obvious remark that the length and style of
The Wrecker
, then running in Scribner’s Magazine, were out of keeping with what professed at the outset to be a spoken yarn.

 Of Ballantrae: the story is the unfinished
Young Chevalier
.

 Afterwards changed into
The Ebb Tide
.

 Wordsworth’s
Ode to Duty
, a shade misquoted.

 “Kava, properly Ava, is a drink more or less intoxicating, made from the root of the
Piper Methysticum
, a Pepper plant. The root is grated: formerly it was chewed by fair damsels. The root thus broken up is rubbed about in a great pail, with water slowly added. A strainer of bark cloth is plunged into it at times, and wrung out so as to carry away the small fragments of root. The drink is made and used in ceremony. Every detail is regulated by rules, and the manner of the mixture of the water, the straining, the handling of the cup, the drinking out of it and returning, should all be done according to a well-established manner and in certain cadences.” I borrow this explanation from the late Mr. Lafarge’s notes to his catalogue of South Sea Drawings. It may serve to make clearer several passages in later letters of the present collection. Readers of the late Lord Pembroke’s
South Sea Bubbles
will remember the account of this beverage and its preparation in Chap. viii. of that volume.

 Referring to the marriage contract in the
Beach of Falesá:
see above, .

 This about the consulship was only a passing notion on the part of R. L. S. No vacancy occurred, and in his correspondence he does not recur to the subject.

 I had not cared to send him the story as thus docked and rechristened in its serial shape.

 Austin Strong, on his way to school in California.

 By Émile Zola.

 The reference is to the writer’s maternal cousin, Mr. Graham Balfour (
Samoicè
, “Pelema”), who during these months and again later was an inmate of the home at Vailima: see above, .

 Robert MacQueen, Lord Braxfield, the “Hanging Judge,” (1722-1799). This historical personage furnished the conception of the chief character, but by no means the details or incidents of the story, which is indeed dated some years after his death.

 The allusion is to
Tess
: a book R. L. S. did not like.

 A character in
The Wrecker
.

 Exactly what in the end actually happened.

 Austin Strong.

 This tale was withheld from the volume accordingly.

 The magazine in which
Catriona
first appeared in this country, under the title
David Balfour
.

XIII

LIFE IN SAMOA —
Continued