Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1043 page)

July 29th.
— No, Barrie, ‘tis in vain they try to alarm me with their bulletins. No doubt, you’re ill, and unco ill, I believe; but I have been so often in the same case that I know pleurisy and pneumonia are in vain against Scotsmen who can write. (I once could.) You cannot imagine probably how near me this common calamity brings you.
Ce que j’ai toussé dans ma vie!
How often and how long have I been on the rack at night and learned to appreciate that noble passage in the Psalms when somebody or other is said to be more set on something than they “who dig for hid treasures — yea, than those who long for the morning” — for all the world, as you have 419 been racked and you have longed. Keep your heart up, and you’ll do. Tell that to your mother, if you are still in any danger or suffering. And by the way, if you are at all like me — and I tell myself you are very like me — be sure there is only one thing good for you, and that is the sea in hot climates. Mount, sir, into “a little frigot” of 5000 tons or so, and steer peremptorily for the tropics; and what if the ancient mariner, who guides your frigot, should startle the silence of the ocean with the cry of land ho! — say, when the day is dawning — and you should see the turquoise mountain tops of Upolu coming hand over fist above the horizon? Mr. Barrie, sir, ‘tis then there would be larks! And though I cannot be certain that our climate would suit you (for it does not suit some), I am sure as death the voyage would do you good — would do you
Best
— and if Samoa didn’t do, you needn’t stay beyond the month, and I should have had another pleasure in my life, which is a serious consideration for me. I take this as the hand of the Lord preparing your way to Vailima — in the desert, certainly — in the desert of Cough and by the ghoul-haunted woodland of Fever — but whither that way points there can be no question — and there will be a meeting of the twa Hoasting Scots Makers in spite of fate, fortune and the Devil.
Absit omen!

My dear Barrie, I am a little in the dark about this new work of yours: what is to become of me afterwards? You say carefully — methought anxiously — that I was no longer me when I grew up? I cannot bear this suspense: what is it? It’s no forgery? And AM I HANGIT? These are the elements of a very pretty lawsuit which you had better come to Samoa to compromise. I am enjoying a great pleasure that I had long looked forward to, reading Orme’s
History of Indostan
; I had been looking out for it everywhere; but at last, in four volumes, large quarto, 420 beautiful type and page, and with a delectable set of maps and plans, and all the names of the places wrongly spelled — it came to Samoa, little Barrie. I tell you frankly, you had better come soon. I am sair failed a’ready; and what I may be if you continue to dally, I dread to conceive. I may be speechless; already, or at least for a month or so, I’m little better than a teetoller — I beg pardon, a teetotaller. It is not exactly physical, for I am in good health, working four or five hours a day in my plantation, and intending to ride a paper-chase next Sunday — ay, man, that’s a fact, and I havena had the hert to breathe it to my mother yet — the obligation’s poleetical, for I am trying every means to live well with my German neighbours — and, O Barrie, but it’s no easy!... To be sure, there are many exceptions. And the whole of the above must be regarded as private — strictly private. Breathe it not in Kirriemuir: tell it not to the daughters of Dundee! What a nice extract this would make for the daily papers! and how it would facilitate my position here!

August 5th.
— This is Sunday, the Lord’s Day. “The hour of attack approaches.” And it is a singular consideration what I risk; I may yet be the subject of a tract, and a good tract too — such as one which I remember reading with recreant awe and rising hair in my youth, of a boy who was a very good boy, and went to Sunday Schule, and one day kipped from it, and went and actually bathed, and was dashed over a waterfall, and he was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. A dangerous trade, that, and one that I have to practise. I’ll put in a word when I get home again, to tell you whether I’m killed or not. “Accident in the (Paper) Hunting Field: death of a notorious author. We deeply regret to announce the death of the most unpopular man in Samoa, who broke his neck, at the descent of Magiagi, from the misconduct of his little raving lunatic of an old beast of a pony. It is 421 proposed to commemorate the incident by the erection of a suitable pile. The design (by our local architect, Mr. Walker) is highly artificial, with a rich and voluminous Crockett at each corner, a small but impervious Barrièer at the entrance, an arch at the top, an Archer of a pleasing but solid character at the bottom; the colour will be genuine William-Black; and Lang, lang may the ladies sit wi’ their fans in their hands.” Well, well, they may sit as they sat for me, and little they’ll reck, the ungrateful jauds! Muckle they cared about Tusitala when they had him! But now ye can see the difference; now leddies, ye can repent, when ower late, o’ your former cauldness and what ye’ll perhaps allow me to ca’ your
tepeedity
! He was beautiful as the day, but his day is done! And perhaps, as he was maybe gettin’ a wee thing fly-blown, it’s nane too shüne.

Monday, August 6th.
— Well, sir, I have escaped the dangerous conjunction of the widow’s only son and the Sabbath Day. We had a most enjoyable time, and Lloyd and I were 3 and 4 to arrive; I will not tell here what interval had elapsed between our arrival and the arrival of 1 and 2; the question, sir, is otiose and malign; it deserves, it shall have no answer. And now without further delay to the main purpose of this hasty note. We received and we have already in fact distributed the gorgeous fahbrics of Kirriemuir. Whether from the splendour of the robes themselves, or from the direct nature of the compliments with which you had directed us to accompany the presentations, one young lady blushed as she received the proofs of your munificence.... Bad ink, and the dregs of it at that, but the heart in the right place. Still very cordially interested in my Barrie and wishing him well through his sickness, which is of the body, and long defended from mine, which is of the head, and by the impolite might be described as idiocy. The whole head is useless, and the whole sitting part painful: reason, the recent Paper Chase.

422

Come, my mind is looking up. The above is wholly impromptu. — On oath,

Tusitala.

To Sidney Colvin

The missionary view of the Sunday paper-chase, with an account of Stevenson’s apologies to the ladies and gentlemen of the mission, have been printed by Mr. W. E. Clarke in the Chronicle of the London Missionary Society for April and May 1908.

[
Vailima
]
Aug. 7th, 1894.

MY DEAR COLVIN, — This is to inform you, sir, that on Sunday last (and this is Tuesday) I attained my ideal here, and we had a paper-chase in Vailele Plantation, about 15 miles, I take it, from us; and it was all that could be wished. It is really better fun than following the hounds, since you have to be your own hound, and a precious bad hound I was, following every false scent on the whole course to the bitter end; but I came in 3rd at the last on my little Jack, who stuck to it gallantly, and awoke the praises of some discriminating persons. (5 + 7 + 2½ = 14½ miles; yes, that is the count.) We had quite the old sensations of exhilaration, discovery, an appeal to a savage instinct; and I felt myself about 17 again, a pleasant experience. However, it was on the Sabbath Day, and I am now a pariah among the English, as if I needed any increment of unpopularity. I must not go again; it gives so much unnecessary tribulation to poor people, and, sure, we don’t want to make tribulation. I have been forbidden to work, and have been instead doing my two or three hours in the plantation every morning. I only wish somebody would pay me £10 a day for taking care of cacao, and I could leave literature to others. Certainly, if I have plenty of exercise, and no work, I feel 423 much better; but there is Biles the butcher! him we have always with us.

I do not much like novels, I begin to think, but I am enjoying exceedingly Orme’s
History of Hindostan
, a lovely book in its way, in large quarto, with a quantity of maps, and written in a very lively and solid eighteenth century way, never picturesque except by accident and from a kind of conviction, and a fine sense of order. No historian I have ever read is so minute; yet he never gives you a word about the people; his interest is entirely limited in the concatenation of events, into which he goes with a lucid, almost superhuman, and wholly ghostly gusto. “By the ghost of a mathematician” the book might be announced. A very brave, honest book.

Your letter to hand.

Fact is, I don’t like the picter. O, it’s a good picture, but if you
ask
me, you know, I believe, stoutly believe, that mankind, including you, are going mad. I am not in the midst with the other frenzy dancers, so I don’t catch it wholly; and when you show me a thing — and ask me, don’t you know — Well, well! Glad to get so good an account of the
Amateur Emigrant
. Talking of which, I am strong for making a volume out of selections from the South Sea letters; I read over again the King of Apemama, and it is good in spite of your teeth, and a real curiosity, a thing that can never be seen again, and the group is annexed and Tembinoka dead. I wonder, couldn’t you send out to me the
first
five Butaritari letters and the Low Archipelago ones (both of which I have lost or mislaid) and I can chop out a perfectly fair volume of what I wish to be preserved. It can keep for the last of the series.

Travels and Excursions
, vol. II. Should it not include a paper on S. F. from the Mag. of Art? The A. E., the New Pacific capital, the Old ditto.
Silver.
Squat.
This would give all my works on the States; and though it 424 ain’t very good, it’s not so very bad.
Travels and Excursions
, vol. III., to be these resuscitated letters —
Miscellanies
, vol. II. —
comme vous voudrez, cher monsieur!

Monday, Aug. 13th.
— I have a sudden call to go up the coast and must hurry up with my information. There has suddenly come to our naval commanders the need of action, they’re away up the coast bombarding the Atua rebels. All morning on Saturday the sound of the bombardment of Luatuanu’u kept us uneasy. To-day again the big guns have been sounding further along the coast. One delicious circumstance must not be forgotten. Our blessed President of the Council — a kind of hoary-headed urchin, with the dim, timid eyes of extreme childhood and a kind of beautiful simplicity that endears him to me beyond words — has taken the head of the army — honour to him for it, for his place is really there — and gone up the coast in the congenial company of his housekeeper, a woman coming on for sixty with whom he takes his walks abroad in the morning in his shirt-sleeves, whom he reads to at night (in a kind of Popular History of Germany) in the silence of the Presidential mansion, and with whom (and a couple of camp stools) he walked out last Sunday to behold the paper-chase. I cannot tell you how taken I am with this exploit of the President’s and the housekeeper’s. It is like Don Quixote, but infinitely superior. If I could only do it without offence, what a subject it would make!

To-morrow morning early I am off up the coast myself. Therefore you must allow me to break off here without further ceremony. — Yours ever,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

To Dr. Bakewell

The following is to a physician in Australia.

Vailima, August 7, 1894.

DEAR DR. BAKEWELL, — I am not more than human. I am more human than is wholly convenient, and your 425 anecdote was welcome. What you say about
unwilling work
, my dear sir, is a consideration always present with me, and yet not easy to give its due weight to. You grow gradually into a certain income; without spending a penny more, with the same sense of restriction as before when you painfully scraped two hundred a year together, you find you have spent, and you cannot well stop spending, a far larger sum; and this expense can only be supported by a certain production. However, I am off work this month, and occupy myself instead in weeding my cacao, paper-chases, and the like. I may tell you, my average of work in favourable circumstances is far greater than you suppose: from six o’clock till eleven at latest, and often till twelve, and again in the afternoon from two to four. My hand is quite destroyed, as you may perceive, to-day to a really unusual extent. I can sometimes write a decent fist still; but I have just returned with my arms all stung from three hours’ work in the cacao. — Yours, etc.,

R. L. S.

To James Payn

Vailima, Upolu, Samoa
[
August 11, 1894
].

MY DEAR JAMES PAYN, — I hear from Lang that you are unwell, and it reminds me of two circumstances: First, that it is a very long time since you had the exquisite pleasure of hearing from me; and second, that I have been very often unwell myself and sometimes had to thank you for a grateful anodyne.

They are not good, the circumstances, to write an anodyne letter. The hills and my house at less than (boom) a minute’s interval quake with thunder; and though I cannot hear that part of it, shells are falling thick into the fort of Luatuanu’u (boom). It is my friends of the
Curaçoa
, the
Falke
, and the
Bussard
bombarding 426 (after all these — boom — months) the rebels of Atua. (Boom-boom.) It is most distracting in itself; and the thought of the poor devils in their fort (boom) with their bits of rifles far from pleasant. (Boom-boom.) You can see how quick it goes, and I’ll say no more about Mr. Bow-wow, only you must understand the perpetual accompaniment of this discomfortable sound, and make allowances for the value of my copy. It is odd, though, I can well remember, when the Franco-Prussian war began, and I was in Eilean Earraid, far enough from the sound of the loudest cannonade, I could
hear
the shots fired, and I felt the pang in my breast of a man struck. It was sometimes so distressing, so instant, that I lay in the heather on the top of the island, with my face hid, kicking my heels for agony. And now, when I can hear the actual concussion of the air and hills, when I
know
personally the people who stand exposed to it, I am able to go on
taut bien que mal
with a letter to James Payn! The blessings of age, though mighty small, are tangible. I have heard a great deal of them since I came into the world, and now that I begin to taste of them — Well! But this is one, that people do get cured of the excess of sensibility; and I had as lief these people were shot at as myself — or almost, for then I should have some of the fun, such as it is.