Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1090 page)

“Thursday. — The others withdrew to the next village. Meanwhile I had Virgil’s bay all morning to myself, and feasted on solitude, and overhanging woods, and the retiring sea. The quiet was only broken by the hoarse cooing of wild pigeons up the valley, and certain inroads of capricious winds that found a way hence and thence down the hillside and set the palms clattering; my enjoyment only disturbed by clouds of dull, voracious, spotted, and not particularly envenomed mosquitoes. When I was still, I kept Buhac powder burning by me on a stone under the shed, and read Livy, and confused to-day and two thousand years ago, and wondered in which of these epochs I was flourishing at that moment; and then I would stroll out, and see the rocks and the woods, and the arcs of beaches, curved like a whorl in a fair woman’s ear, and huge ancient trees, jutting high overhead out of the hanging forest, and feel the place at least belonged to the age of fable, and awaited ./Eneas and his battered fleets.

“Showers fell often in the night; some sounding from far off like a cataract, some striking the house, but not a drop came in. . . . At night a cry of a wild cat-like creature in the bush. Far up on the hill one golden tree; they say it is a wild cocoanut: I know it is not, they must know so too; and this leaves me free to think it sprang from the gold bough of Proserpine.

“The morning was all in blue; the sea blue, blue inshore upon the shallows, only the blue was nameless; the horizon clouds a blue like a fine pale porcelain, the sky behind them a pale lemon faintly warmed with orange. Much that one sees in the tropics is in water- colours, but this was in water-colours by a young lady.”

The mention of Livy recalls a curious circumstance, and raises besides the question of Stevenson’s classical studies.

A year or two later he told me that he had read several books of Livy at this time, but found the style influencing him to such an extent that he resolved to read no more, just as in earlier days he had been driven to abandon Carlyle. Mr. Gosse has recorded that Walter Pater in turn refused to read Stevenson lest the individuality of his own style might be affected, but it is more curious to find Stevenson himself at so late a stage fearing the influence of a Latin author.

As to his classics, he was ignorant of Greek, and preferred the baldest of Bohn’s translations to more literary versions that might come between him and the originals. His whole relation to Latin, however, was very curious and interesting. He had never mastered the grammar of the language, and to the end made the most elementary mistakes. Nevertheless, he had a keen appreciation of the best authors, and, indeed, I am not sure that Virgil was not more to him than any other poet, ancient or modern. From all the qualities of the pedant he was, of course, entirely free. Just as he wrote Scots as well as he was able, “ not caring if it hailed from Lauderdale or Angus, from the Mearns or Galloway,” but if he had ever heard a good word, he “used it without shame,” so it was with his Latin. Technicalities of law and the vocabulary of Ducange were admitted to equal rights with authors of the Golden Age.

Latin no doubt told for much in the dignity and concision of his style, and in itself it was to him — as we see in his diary — always a living language. But as an influence, Rome counted to him as something very much more than a literature — a whole system of law and empire.

From this expedition he returned to Apia in an open boat, a twenty-eight hours’ voyage of sixty-five miles, on which schooners have before now been lost. But for the journey and the exposure Stevenson was none the worse. “ It is like a fairy-story that I should have recovered liberty and strength, and should go round again among my fellow-men, boating, riding, bathing, toiling hard with a wood-knife in the forest.”

Before the end of the month the family were installed in the new house, and in May they were reinforced not only by the elder Mrs. Stevenson, but also by Mrs. Strong and her boy from Sydney, who thenceforward remained under Stevenson’s protecting care.

His wanderings were now at an end, and he was to enter upon a period of settled residence. Stevenson has been generally regarded as a tourist and an outside observer in Samoa, especially by those who least know the Pacific themselves. There is, it must be admitted, only one way to gain a lifelong experience of any country, but to have lived nowhere else is conducive neither to breadth of view nor to wisdom. It must always be borne in mind that before Stevenson settled down for the last three and a half years of his life in his own house of Vailima, he had spent an almost equal length of time in visiting other islands in the Pacific. In fact, had he been deliberately preparing himself for the life he was to lead, he could hardly have pursued a wiser course, or undergone a more thorough training. On his travels he enjoyed exceptional opportunities of gathering information, and in general knowledge of the South Seas, and of Samoa in particular, he was probably at the time of his death rivalled by no more than two or three persons of anything like his education or intelligence.

CHAPTER XV

VAILIMA — 1891-94

“We thank Thee for this place in which we dwell; for the love that unites us; for the peace accorded us this day; for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food, and the bright skies that make our lives delightful; for our friends in all parts of the earth, and our friendly helpers in this foreign isle. . . . Give us courage and gaiety ind the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another.” — R. L. S., Vailima Prayers.

The new house and the augmentation of his household marked the definite change in Stevenson’s life, which now assumed the character that it preserved until the end. In private his material comfort was increased, and he was delivered from most of the interruptions to which his work had lately been subject; in public it now became manifest that he was to be a permanent resident in Samoa, enjoying all the advantages of wealth and fame, and the consideration conferred by numerous retainers.

To the world of his readers, and to many who never read his books, his position became one of extreme interest. He was now living, as the legend went, among the wildest of savages, who were clearly either always at war or circulating reports of wars immediately to come; settled in a house, the splendour and luxury of which were much exaggerated by rumour; dwelling in a climate which was associated with all the glories of tropic scenery and vegetation, and also, in the minds of his countrymen at all events, with a tremendous cataclysm of the elements, from which the British navy had emerged with triumph. It was little wonder that, as Mr. Gosse wrote to him, “ Since Byron was in Greece, nothing has appealed to the ordinary literary man so much as that you should be living in the South Seas.”

It is clear that a mode of life so unusual for a man of letters not only absolves his biographer from the duty of withholding as far as possible the details of every-day existence, but even lays upon him the necessity of explaining various trivial matters, which, if they belonged to the life of cities or of states, it would be his first anxiety to suppress. It well may be that no author of eminence will ever again take up his abode in Samoa or even in the South Seas, but the problem of keeping in touch at the same time with man, with nature, and with the world of letters, is as far from its solution as from losing its general interest. And the most stolid of glances cannot fail to be arrested for a moment by the sight of a figure as chivalrous and romantic as Stevenson, living in a world so striking, so appropriate, and so picturesque.

To trace in detail the growth of the house or the development of the estate would be no less tedious than to follow closely the course of political intrigues or the appointment and departure of successive officials. I shall therefore abandon the temporal order, and briefly describe, in the first instance, the material environment in which Stevenson lived, his house, and the surrounding country, his mode of life, his friends and visitors, his work, and his amusements. It will then be necessary to mention very briefly his political relations before passing on to the record of his writings during this period.

The island of Upolu, on which he lived, was the central and most important of the three principal islands composing the group to which the collective name of Samoa is applied. It is some five-and-forty miles in length and about eleven in average breadth. The interior is densely wooded, and a central range of hills runs from east to west. Apia, the chief town, is situated about the centre of the north coast, and it was on the hills about three miles inland that Stevenson made his home.

The house and clearing lay on the western edge of a tongue of land several hundred yards in width, situated between two streams, from the westernmost of which the steep side of Vaea Mountain, covered with forest, rises to a height of thirteen hundred feet above the sea. On the east, beyond Stevenson’s boundary, the ground fell away rapidly into the deep valley of the Vaisigano, the principal river of the island. On the other hand, the western stream, formed by the junction of several smaller watercourses above, ran within Stevenson’s own ground, and, not far below the house, plunged over a barrier of rock with a fall of about twelve feet into a delightful pool, just deep enough for bathing and arched over with orange-trees. A few hundred yards lower down it crossed his line with an abrupt plunge of forty or fifty feet. It was from this stream and its four chief tributaries that Stevenson gave to the property the Samoan name of Vailima, or Five Waters.

The place itself lay, as has been said, some three miles from the coast, and nearly six hundred feet above sea-level. From the town a good carriage-road, a mile in length, led to the native village of Tanugama- nono, where the Stevensons had lodged upon their first arrival. Beyond that point there was for a time nothing but the roughest of footpaths, which led across the hills to the other side of the island through a forest region wholly uninhabited, all the native villages being either by the sea or within a short distance of the coast.

The track to Vailima was made over and over again by Stevenson, occasionally in concert with some of the owners of the lower lands, until it gradually assumed the appearance of a road, and could be traversed in dry weather by wagons or even by a buggy. But to the last the carrying for the house was done by the two big New Zealand pack-horses. East, and west, and south of the clearing the land was covered with thick bush, containing many scattered lofty forest trees like those judiciously spared by the axemen where they did not endanger the new house. Here and there in the forest was a great banyan with branching roots, covering many square yards of surface, and affording a resting-place for the flying-foxes, the great fruit-eating bats, which sally forth at dusk with a slow, heavy flight, like a straggling company of rooks making for the coast. Even to the north, although most of the ground between Vailima and Apia had to some extent been cultivated, along the “ road “ the trees grew close and high, and on a dark night the phosphorescence gleamed on fallen logs amid the undergrowth, twinkling and flickering to and fro, like the hasty footsteps of the witches the Samoans believed it to be. On the estate itself the route lay by the lane of limes, a rugged, narrow, winding path, that seemed, as Stevenson said, “almost as if it was leading to Lyonesse, and you might see the head and shoulders of a giant looking in.”1 But this part of the track was afterwards cut off by the Ala Loto Alofa, the Road of the Loving Heart, built by the Mataafa chiefs in return for Tusitala’s kindness to them in prison. It was a broader and more level way, also leading past a fragrant lime-hedge, and having as the centre of its view for any one journeying to Vailima the wooded crest of Vaea.

The house of Vailima was built of wood throughout, painted a dark green outside, with a red roof of corrugated iron, on which the heavy rain sounded like thunder as it fell and ran off to be stored for household purposes in the large iron tanks. The building finally consisted of two blocks of equal size, placed, if I may use a military phrase in this connection, in echelon. It was the great defect of the house in its master’s eyes that from a strategical point of view it was not defensible, but fortunately there was never an occasion during his lifetime when it would have been desirable to place it in a state of siege. It fulfilled many of the requirements both of structure and more especially of position which he had laid down for his ideal house.2

After December, 1892, the downstairs accommodation consisted of three rooms, a bath, a storeroom and 1 Vailima Letters, p. 258.          2 Miscellanea, p. 42. cellars below, with five bedrooms and the library upstairs. On the ground-floor, a verandah, twelve feet deep, ran in front of the whole house and along one side of it. Originally there had been a similar gallery above in front of the library, but it so darkened that room as to make it almost useless for working. Stevenson then had half of the open space boarded in, and used it as his own bedroom and study, the remainder of the verandah being sheltered, when necessary, by Chinese blinds. The new room was thus a sort of martin’s nest, plastered as it were upon the outside of the house; but except for being somewhat hot in the middle of the day, it served its purpose to perfection. A small bedstead, a couple of bookcases, a plain deal kitchen table and two chairs were all its furniture, and two or three favourite Piranesi etchings and some illustrations of Stevenson’s own works hung upon the walls. At one side was a locked rack containing half-a-dozen Colt’s rifles for the service of the family in case they should ever be required. One door opened into the library, the other into the verandah; one window, having from its elevation the best view the house afforded, looked across the lawns and pasture, over the tree-tops, out to the sapphire sea, while the other was faced by the abrupt slope of Vaea. The library was lined with books, the covers of which had all been varnished to protect them from the climate. The most important divisions were the shelves allotted to the history of Scotland, to French books either modern or relating to the fifteenth century, to military history, and to books relating to the Pacific.