Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  The new home was named Vailima, which is Samoan for “Five Waters,” there being five streams running through the property.

  The house was built of wood, painted dark green with a red roof. When finished its chief feature was the great hall within, sixty feet long, lined and ceiled with California redwood. Here among the home treasures — his own portrait, war dresses, corselets, fans, and mats presented to him by island kings — the marble bust of grandfather Stevenson smiled down with approval on many a motley gathering. Louis often wondered if they reminded the old gentleman of some of the strange people he had entertained years ago in Baxter Place.

  All about was dense, tropical undergrowth, only paths led to the house, and these must continually be cut out. All carrying was done by two big New Zealand pack-horses.

  A large garden was planted — Mrs. Stevenson’s special hobby. Cocoanuts, oranges, guavas, and mangoes already grew on the estate. The ground was very fertile, and kava, the root of which is used for the Samoan national drink, pineapples, sweet potatoes, and eggplants were soon flourishing among other things. Limes were so plentiful that they formed the hedge about the place; citrons were so common that they rotted on the trees.

  The house at Vailima

  All this ground-breaking, house-building, and gardening were new to Stevenson, and he revelled in them to the neglect of his writing.

  “This is a hard and interesting and beautiful life we lead now,” he wrote to Sidney Colvin. “Our place is in a deep cleft of Væa Mountain; some six hundred feet above the sea, embowered in forest, which is our strangling enemy, and which we combat with axes and dollars. I am crazy over outdoor work, and had at last to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board. Nothing is so interesting as weeding, clearing, and pathmaking; the oversight of laborers becomes a disease; it is quite an effort not to drop into the farmer; and it does make you feel so well. To come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain after some hours in the bush, change, rub down, and take a chair in the verandah, is to taste a quiet conscience.”

  Before his arrival in Apia, Stevenson’s tale of “The Bottle Imp” had been translated into Samoan by the missionaries. When the natives discovered he was its author they immediately named him Tusitala, The Teller-of-Tales. He still owned the bottle, they said; it was that gave him the wealth to cruise about in a great boat and build a fine house. The family often wondered why native visitors were curious to see the inside of the great safe in the hall at Vailima until they found that it was the belief among the islanders that the safe was the bottle’s hiding-place.

  Mrs. Stevenson, senior, returned with Lloyd from England, and later Mrs. Strong and her small son, Austin, came from Honolulu to make the family complete.

  The servants were all natives, “boys” as they called themselves. There were usually about half a dozen about the house, with a boy for the garden and to look after the cows and pigs, besides a band of outside laborers, varying from half a dozen to thirty, under Lloyd’s direction.

  Sosimo was Stevenson’s particular boy. He waited upon him hand and foot, looked after his clothes and his pony “Jack,” and was devoted in every way. His loyalty to his master lasted to the end of his own life.

  The servants were governed on something very like the clan system. A Vailima tartan was adopted for special occasions and Stevenson encouraged them to think of the household as a family, to take interest and pride in all its doings.

  On Sunday evenings the entire household was assembled. A chapter of the Samoan Bible was read and Samoan hymns sung. Then a prayer in English written by Stevenson was read, concluding with the Lord’s Prayer in Samoan.

  If the master had cause to be displeased with any one of them, they were all summoned and reprimanded or fined.

  His stories delighted them. They were never tired of looking at the picture of Skerryvore Light and hearing about the rugged coasts of Tusitala’s native island and of his father and grandfather who built lighthouses. The latter impressed them greatly, since building of any kind in Samoa is considered a fine art. The deeds of General Gordon, the Indian Mutiny, and Lucknow were likewise favorite tales when Tusitala showed them a treasure he prized highly: a message written by General Gordon from Khartoum. It was in Arabic on a small piece of cigarette-paper which might be easily swallowed should the messenger be captured. Stevenson always believed it to be the last message sent before the great general’s death.

  They came to him for everything and he was ever ready with help and advice. They were quick to appreciate his justice and kindliness, and to a man were devoted to him. “Once Tusitala’s friend, always Tusitala’s friend,” they said.

  With his customary energy he threw himself heart and soul for a time into the political troubles of the island, making himself the champion of the natives’ cause. He wrote a series of letters to the papers at home stating his idea of the injustice shown the Samoans under their present government. It was a most delicate situation, and at times led to very strained relations between himself and the officials in Apia.

  Those at home wondered why Stevenson tampered with island politics at all. Why did he not simply leave them to the powers in charge?

  His answer was, he had made Samoa his home, the Samoans were his people, and he could not fail to resent any injustice shown them.

  Lloyd Osbourne says: “He was consulted on every imaginable subject.... Government chiefs and rebels consulted him with regard to policy; political letters were brought to him to read and criticise.... Parties would come to hear the latest news of the proposed disarming of the country, or to arrange a private audience with one of the officials; and poor war-worn chieftains, whose only anxiety was to join the winning side and who wished to consult with Tusitala as to which that might be. Mr. Stevenson would sigh sometimes as he saw these stately folks crossing the lawn in single file, their attendants following behind with presents and baskets, but he never failed to meet or hear them.”

  He aided one party of chieftains in prison, and to show their gratitude on regaining their freedom they cleared and dug a splendid road leading to his house. All the labor and expense they bore themselves, which amounted to no small matter. Ala Loto Alofa, they called it, the Road of the Loving Hearts.

  Warlike outbreaks were not infrequent near Vailima. The woods were often full of scouting parties and the roll of drums could be heard. One day as Stevenson and Mrs. Strong were writing together they were interrupted by a war party crossing the lawn. Mrs. Strong asked: “Louis, have we a pistol or gun in the house that will shoot?” and he answered cheerfully without stopping his work: “No, but we have friends on both sides.”

  With all their political differences he and the officials retained friendly feeling. He paid calls on them at Apia and attended various town gatherings, while they were often entertained at Vailima.

  Always hospitable, it was a delight to him now to keep open house. Not only the chief justice, the consuls, the doctor, the missionaries, and the traders were in the habit of dropping in to Vailima, but from every ship that docked at Apia came some visitor who was anxious to meet Stevenson and his family; from the war-ships came the officers and sailors.

  The bluejackets were always particularly welcome. Mrs. Strong tells of a party who came from H.M.S. Wallaroo on one Thanksgiving Day, when “the kitchen department was in great excitement over that foreign bird the turkey” and all was confusion. “But Louis kept his sailors on all the afternoon. He took them over the house and showed them ... the curiosities from the islands, the big picture of Skerryvore lighthouse,... the treasured bit of Gordon’s handwriting from Khartoum, in Arabic letters on a cigarette paper,... and the library, where the Scotchmen gathered about an old edition of Burns, with a portrait. Louis gave a volume of Underwoods (Stevenson’s poems) with an inscription to Grant, the one who hailed from Edinburgh, and the man carried it carefully wrapped in his handkerchief. They went away waving their hats and keeping step.”

  A cr
oquet-ground and tennis-court were laid out, and Vailima was the scene of balls, dinners, and parties of all kinds. No birthday or holiday, English, American, or Samoan, was allowed to pass unnoticed, and the natives were included in these festivities whenever possible.

  The first Christmas at Vailima they had a party for the children who had never before seen a Christmas tree.

  Tusitala’s birthday was always a special event to his island friends. The feast was served in native style; all seated about on the floor. Rather large gatherings they must have been, to judge from Mrs. Strong’s account. “We had sixteen pigs roasted whole underground, three enormous fish (small whales, Lloyd called them), four hundred pounds of beef, ditto of pork, 200 heads of taro, great bunches of bananas, native delicacies done up in bundles of ti leaves, 800 pineapples, many weighing fifteen pounds, all from Lloyd’s patch. Among the presents for Tusitala, besides flowers and wreaths, were fans, native baskets ... and cocoanut cups beautifully polished.”

  A feast of chiefs

  On these occasions the hosts were often entertained with dances and songs. All the Samoans are great singers. They composed songs about everything and everybody, so that one could judge the standing a person held by the songs that were sung about him.

  Those sung at Vailima parties were usually written by one of the house “boys” and “they were danced and acted with great spirit.... Sometimes every member of the family would be represented ... but the central figure, the heart of the song was always Tusitala.”

  It is a marvel with the many demands made upon him, his varied interests, and frequent visits to neighboring islands, Stevenson still found time to write stories, poems, prayers, notes of the South Sea Islands, Samoan history, and many, many letters. “It is a life that suits me but absorbs me like an ocean,” he said. Through it all his health continued fairly good. He was able to take long tramps and rides that would have been physically impossible two years before.

  Mrs. Strong acted as his secretary and the majority of his writing now was done by dictation. “He generally makes notes early in the morning,” she wrote, “which he elaborates as he reads them aloud ... he never falters for a word, but gives me the sentence with capital letters and all the stops as clearly and steadily as though he were reading from an unseen book.”

  The two South Sea books occupied much of his time, but it was of his own land and people so far away that he had so little hope of ever seeing again, he loved best to write.

  “It is a singular thing,” he wrote to James Barrie, “that I should live here in the South Seas, and yet my imagination so continually inhabit the cold old huddle of grey hills from which we came.”

  He finished and sent away further adventures of David Balfour and Alan Breck under the title of “David Balfour.” “St. Ives” followed with its scenes laid around Edinburgh Castle, Swanston Cottage, and the Pentland Hills. In his last book, “Weir of Hermiston,” the one he left unfinished, broken off in the midst of a word, he roamed the streets of Auld Reekie again with a hero very like what he had once been himself, who was likewise an enthusiastic member of the “Spec.”

  Something which pleased him greatly at this time was the news from his friend Charles Baxter in Edinburgh that a complete edition of his works was to be published in the best possible form with a limited number of copies, to be called the “Edinburgh Edition.”

  “I suppose it was your idea to give it that name,” Stevenson wrote, thanking him. “No other would have affected me in the same manner.... Could a more presumptuous idea have occurred to us in those days when we used to search our pockets for coppers, too often in vain, and combine forces to produce the threepence necessary for two glasses of beer, than that I should be strong and well at the age of forty three in the island of Upolu, and that you should be at home bringing out the ‘Edinburgh Edition’?”

  In spite of the many interests in his present life, his love for the people and the country, the yearning for the friends far away grew daily.

  How he longed to have them see Vailima with all its beauties! To talk over old times again. Such visits were continually planned, but they were never realized.

  He seldom complained and those who were with him every day rarely found him low in spirits. It was into the letters to his old intimates that these longings crept when it swept over him that, though a voluntary exile in a pleasant place, he was an exile none the less, with the fate of him who wrote:

  “There’s a track across the deep,

  And a path across the sea,

  But for me there’s nae return

  To my ain countree.”

  “When the smell of the good wet earth” came to him it came “with a kind of Highland tone.” A tropic shower found him in a “frame of mind and body that belonged to Scotland.” And when he turned to write the chronicle of his grandfather’s life and work, the beautiful words in which he described the old gentleman’s farewell to “Sumbraugh and the wild crags of Skye” meant likewise his own farewell to those shores. No more was he to “see the topaz and ruby interchange on the summit of Bell Rock,” no more to see “the castle on its hills,” or the venerable city which he always thought of as his home.

  “Like Leyden,” he wrote, “I have gone into a far land to die, not stayed like Burns to mingle in the end with Scottish soil.”

  It was drawing near the close of their fourth year in Apia. On November 13 his birthday had been celebrated with the usual festivities, and on Thanksgiving Day he had given a dinner to his American friends — and then the end of all his wanderings and working came suddenly.

  “He wrote hard all that morning of the last day,” says Lloyd Osbourne, “on his half-finished book Hermiston.... In the afternoon the mail fell to be answered; not business correspondence — but replies to the long, kindly letters of distant friends, received but two days since, and still bright in memory.

  “At sunset he came downstairs.... He was helping his wife on the verandah, and gaily talking, when suddenly he put both hands to his head, and cried out, ‘What’s that?’ Then he asked quickly, ‘Do I look strange?’ Even as he did so he fell on his knees beside her. He was helped into the great hall, between his wife and body-servant, Sosimo, losing consciousness instantly, as he lay back in the arm-chair that had once been his grandfather’s. Little time was lost in bringing the doctors, Anderson of the man-of-war, and his friend Dr. Funk. They looked at him and shook their heads ... he had passed the bounds of human skill....

  “The dozen and more Samoans that formed part of the clan of which he was chief, sat in a wide semicircle on the floor, their reverent, troubled, sorrow-stricken faces all fixed upon their dying master. Some knelt on one knee to be instantly ready for any command that might be laid upon them....

  “He died at ten minutes past eight on Monday evening the 3rd of December, in the forty-fifth year of his age.

  “The great Union Jack that flew over the house was hauled down and laid over the body, fit shroud for a loyal Scotsman. He lay in the hall which was ever his pride, where he had passed the gayest and most delightful hours of his life.... In it were the treasures of his far off Scottish home.... The Samoans passed in procession beside his bed, kneeling and kissing his hand, each in turn, before taking their places for the long night watch beside him. No entreaty could induce them to retire, to rest themselves for the painful arduous duties of the morrow. It would show little love for Tusitala, they said, if they did not spend their last night beside him. Mournful and silent, they sat in deep dejection, poor, simple, loyal folks, fulfilling the duty that they owed their chief.

  “A messenger was dispatched to a few chiefs connected with the family, to announce the tidings and bid them assemble their men on the morrow for the work there was to do....

  “The morning of the 4th of December broke cool and sunny.... A meeting of chiefs was held to apportion the work and divide the men into parties. Forty were sent with knives and axes to cut a path up the steep face of the mountain, and the writer him
self led another party to the summit — men chosen from the immediate family — to dig the grave on the spot where it was Robert Louis Stevenson’s wish that he should lie.... Nothing more picturesque can be imagined than the ledge that forms the summit to Væa, a place no wider than a room, and flat as a table. On either side the land descends precipitously; in front lies the vast ocean and surf-swept reefs; to the right and left green mountains rise....

  “All the morning Samoans were arriving with flowers, few of these were white, for they have not learned our foreign custom, and the room glowed with the many colors. There were no strangers on that day, no acquaintances; those only were called who would deeply feel the loss. At one o’clock a body of powerful Samoans bore away the coffin, hid beneath a tattered red ensign that had flown above his vessel in many a remote corner of the South Seas. A path so steep and rugged taxed their strength to the utmost, for not only was the journey difficult in itself, but extreme care was requisite to carry the coffin shoulder high....

  “No stranger hand touched him.... Those who loved him carried him to his last home; even the coffin was the work of an old friend. The grave was dug by his own men.”

  Tusitala had left them, and his friends in the South Seas had lost a faithful friend and companion, a wise and just master.

  His family and friends the world over had lost not only these but far more. His life had been a chivalrous one with all the best that chivalry stands for, “loyalty, honesty, generosity, courage, courtesy, and self-devotion; to impute no unworthy motives and to bear no grudges; to bear misfortune with cheerfulness and without a murmur; to strike hard for the right and to take no mean advantage; to be gentle to women and kind to all that are weak; to be rigorous with oneself and very lenient to others — these ... were the traits that distinguished Stevenson.”