Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  “Right in the wind’s eye, and right athwart the dawn, a conspicuous mountain stands, designed like an old fort or castle, with naked cliffy sides and a green head. In the peep of the day the mass is outlined dimly; as the east fires, the sharpness of the silhouette grows definite, and through all the chinks of the high wood the red looks through, like coals through a grate. From the other end of the harbour, and at the extreme of the bay, when the sun is down and night beginning, and colours and shapes at the sea-level are already confounded in the greyness of the dusk, the same peak retains for some time a tinge of phantom rose.

  “Last night I was awakened before midnight by the ship-rats which infest the shores and invade the houses, incredible for numbers and boldness. 1 went to the water’s edge; the moon was at the zenith; vast fleecy clouds were travelling overhead, their borders frayed and extended as usual in fantastic arms and promontories. The level of their flight is not really high, it only seems so; the trade-wind, although so strong in current, is but a shallow stream, and it is common to see, beyond and above its carry, other clouds faring on other and higher winds. As I looked, the skirt of a cloud touched upon the summit of Pioa, and seemed to hang and gather there, and darken as it hung. I knew the climate, fled to shelter, and was scarce laid down again upon the mat before the squall burst. In its decline, I heard the sound of a great bell rung at a distance; I did not think there had been a bell upon the island. I thought the hour a strange one for the ring- ing, but I had no doubt it was being rung on the other side at the Catholic Mission, and lay there listening and thinking, and trying to remember which of the bells of Edinburgh sounded the same note. It stopped almost with the squall. Half an hour afterwards, another shower struck upon the house and spurted awhile from the gutters of the corrugated roof; and again with its decline the bell began to sound, and from the same distance. Then I laughed at myself, and this bell resolved into an eavesdrop falling on a tin close by my head. All night long the flaws continued at brief intervals. Morning came, and showed mists on all the mountain- tops, a grey and yellow dawn, a fresh accumulation of rain imminent on the summit of Pioa, and the whole harbour scene stripped of its tropic colouring and wearing the appearance of a Scottish loch.

  “And not long after, as I was writing on this page, sure enough, from the far shore a bell began indeed to ring. It has but just ceased, boats have been passing the harbour in the showers, the congregation is within now, and the mass begun. How very different stories are told by that drum of tempered iron! To the natives a new, strange, outlandish thing: to us of Europe, redolent of home; in the ear of the priests, calling up memories of French and Flemish cities, and perhaps some carved cathedral and the pomp of celebrations; in mine, talking of the grey metropolis of the north, of a village on a stream, of vanished faces and silent tongues.

  “The Bay of Oa “ We sailed a little before high-water, and came skirting for some while along a coast of classical landscapes, cliffy promontories, long sandy coves divided by semi- independent islets, and the far-withdrawing sides of the mountain, rich with every shape and shade of verdure. Nothing lacked but temples and galleys; and our own long whale-boat sped (to the sound of song) by eight nude oarsmen figured a piece of antiquity better than perhaps we thought. No road leads along this coast; we scarce saw a house; these delectable islets lay quite desert, inviting seizure, and there was none like Keats’s Endymion1 to hear our snowlight cadences. On a sudden we began to open the bay of Oa. At the first sight my mind was made up — the bay of Oa was the place for me. We could not enter it, we were assured; and being entered we could not land; both statements plainly fictive; both easily resolved into the fact that there was no guest-house, and no girls to make the kava for our boatmen and admire their singing. A little gentle insistence produced a smiling acquiescence, and the eight oars began to urge us slowly into a bay of the /Eneid. Right overhead a conical hill arises; its top is all sheer cliff of a rosy yellow, stained with orange and purple, bristled and ivied with individual climbing trees; lower down the woods are massed; lower again the rock crops out in a steep buttress, which divides the arc of beach. The boat was eased in, we landed and turned this way and that like fools in a perplexity of pleasures; now some way into the wood toward the spire, but the woods had soon strangled the path — in the Samoan phrase, the way was dead — and we began to flounder in impenetrable bush, still far from the foot of the ascent, although already i Book II. 1. 8o. n8

  the greater trees began to throw out arms dripping with lianas, and to accept us in the margin of their shadows. Now along the beach; it was grown upon with crooked, thick-leaved trees down to the water’s edge. Immediately behind there had once been a clearing; it was all choked with the mummy-apple, which in this country springs up at once at the heels of the axeman, and among this were intermingled the coco-palm and the banana. Our landing and the bay itself had nearly turned my head. ‘ Here are the works of all the poets passim,’ I said, and just then my companion stopped. ‘Behold an omen,’ said he, and pointed. It was a sight I had heard of before in the islands, but not seen: a little tree such as grows sometimes on infinitesimal islets on the reef, almost stripped of its leaves, and covered instead with feasting butterflies. These, as we drew near, arose and hovered in a cloud of lilac and silver-grey1. . . .

  “All night the crickets sang with a clear trill of silver; all night the sea filled the hollow of the bay with varying utterance; now sounding continuous like a mill-weir, now (perhaps from further off) with swells and silences. I went wandering on the beach, when the tide was low. I went round the tree before our boys had stirred. It was the first clear grey of the morning; and I could see them lie, each in his place, enmeshed from head to foot in his unfolded kilt. The Highlander with his belted plaid, the Samoan with his Iavalava, each sleep in their one vesture unfolded. One 1 “ Later on I found the scene repeated in another place; but here the butterflies were of a different species, glossy brown and black, with arabesques of white.”

  boy who slept in the open under the trees had made his pillow of a smouldering brand, doubtless for the convenience of a midnight cigarette; all night the flame had crept nearer, and as he lay there, wrapped like an oriental woman, and still plunged in sleep, the redness was within two handbreadths of his frizzled hair.

  “I had scarce bathed, had scarce begun to enjoy the fineness and the precious colours of the morning, the golden glow along the edge of the high eastern woods, the clear light on the sugar-loaf of Maugalai, ‘.tie woven blue and emerald of the cone, the chuckle of morning bird-song that filled the valley of the woods, when upon a sudden a draught of wind came from the leeward and the highlands of the isle, rain rattled on the tossing woods; the pride of the morning had come early, and from an unlooked-for side. I fled for refuge in the shed; but such of our boys as were awake stirred not in the least; they sat where they were, perched among the scattered boxes of our camp, and puffed at their stubborn cigarettes, and crouched a little in the slanting shower. So good a thing it is to wear few clothes. I, who was largely unclad — a pair of serge trousers, a singlet, woollen socks, and canvas shoes; think of it — envied them in their light array.

  “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 pl
ace 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 thirt
een 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.