Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  Afterwards it was present-time. I had bought a good Seiko watch for Fili, a smaller one for Manino and a tiny digital watch for Isaia which reduced him to tears. I gave Tolu my rubber-sealed torch, but I had three Parker pens for him, too. I had a beautiful lava-lava each for Emma and the old woman, two fine lava-lavas for Amosa, and a large bag of sweets for the little ones, Ruta and Ala. In return, the old lady presented me with a fine mat she had woven and hemmed with scarlet feathers; Isaia gave me a basket; Emma a prayerbook with an inscription in ink – ‘This Belongs To You, Gavin, Please Do Not Forget Me, Love Always, Emma Tolu.’

  Fili was holding out an amazing piece of local art: an upturned half-coconut shell on tiny pillars, a decorative circle of cowrie shells: a model of a Samoan chief’s assembly hall. How could I pack that? A letter went with it. ‘To My Dearest Friend, This is my meaalofa [present] to you my best friend. Don’t forget me, because I didn’t forget you my best friend … I love always for you, G. Young.’ Amosa knelt to hang a necklace of cowrie shells round my neck, and, on behalf of the family, Tolu took from a wooden chest a heavy Bible in Samoan, ‘For you,’ he said.

  Later, I lay under the mosquito net, listening for the last time to the rain thrumming on the thatched roof and the wind clattering the bamboos like a witch doctor making music on old bones. The wind reminded me of something Stevenson had said: ‘I have always feared the sound of wind beyond everything. In my hell, it would always blow a gale.’ But this was no gale. The night was soft and peaceful.

  Something scuttled across my neck, settled there, moved slowly on my shoulder … a tarantula – the Speckled Band? A hot iron seemed to touch my skin, and I leaped up, shouting – ‘Hey, Fili! Snake!’ That roused the house. Tolu searched the mattress with the torch I’d just given him, while my neck and shoulder burned like fire. Between us we found it in the end, looking down at us from the mosquito netting – a centipede, the biggest I have ever seen, three inches long. ‘Atualoa,’ Emma said when it lay crushed by Tolu’s foot. It was a pretty name for a centipede. ‘It came to kiss goodbye.’

  They laughed when I said I hoped the atualoa wasn’t an important aitu in disguise.

  *

  I drove to Apia early next morning. I was in a good mood for a funeral, though the car looked fit for a wedding. Isaia and Ruta had collected hibiscus and gardenia blossoms and strewn them on the bonnet and decorated the dashboard with frangipani flowers. Emma had tied a flowering creeper a yard long to the radio aerial so that it would stream behind us when I moved off. And Amosa arrived with a flower in his ear and a bush lime as a nosegay. The car smelled like a florist’s and sounded like a music parlour – Fili and Amosa sang all the way to Apia and always in falsetto. Tolu, Manino, Emma and Isaia followed us in a bus with a load of Tolu’s copra. It was too messy for the car, he said.

  At Aggie Grey’s Fili peered at my books. ‘This book? Mormon?’ He held up the hotel copy of The Book of Mormon, in which a former occupant of the room had scribbled: ‘All complete bullshit stories for small children.’ From the frontispiece the Mormons’ Prophet, Joseph Smith in a buff coat, looked at us with a pleasant, innocuous face. Next Amosa dug my old metal flask of whisky out of my bag.

  ‘Medicine,’ I said. ‘Not for you. For me.’

  ‘Bad!’ he retorted, undeceived. ‘Kkkhhhh!’

  They scrutinized my maps, examined my clothes, tasted my toothpaste. They might have been detectives investigating a prime murder suspect.

  ‘All right, I’m guilty,’ I said. ‘Come on, we go.’ But it took a little longer.

  The room was suddenly flooded with evangelism – the Revival Time Choir from American Samoa singing a song entitled ‘Eternal Life’. Amosa was carefully combing his long hair with my comb. ‘Sing along as Brother MacClellan leads us,’ said a radio voice as sludgy as cold molasses, but Fili was struggling into my Chengtu T-shirt. I switched off the radio abruptly and wrenched the T-shirt from Fili’s back. Then we went to join the others at the market. At last I was going to pay my respects to R.L.S.

  Twenty-three

  When work is over Louis sat down to rest, and sighed for a cigarette … At that moment Sosimo [his valet] appeared with the tobacco. ‘Quel e le potu,’ said Lou gratefully, ‘How great is the wisdom,’ and was deeply touched by the quick reply, ‘How great is the love!’

  Mrs Stevenson: Letters from Samoa

  The pass from the Prime Minister’s Department was made out to me alone, so Tolu and his family agreed to loll about under the great trees at the foot of Mount Vaea while I looked round the house. I could see that since Vailima had become the guest house of Samoa’s head of state it had been expanded; it was rather wider than the house Stevenson built in 1892 with the wood he had expensively shipped from San Francisco. Yet the original was still there, too. It was beautifully situated among the great trees, its porch half buried in flowering creepers. It was empty now; seldom used. A pale, white-haired, white-clothed figure met me on the verandah steps. ‘Miki Lalogi,’ it whispered its name, smiling. This was the cook and guardian I had been told to expect – half-Samoan, half-German, born here. Quite old and very friendly, he was pleased to have a visitor.

  I recognized the airy verandah from old photographs in R.L.S.’s Letters: its white, wooden ceiling fourteen feet high, its great width. I had the two books of Stevenson letters with me – Louis’ and his mother’s – and I showed Miki Lalogi the photographs they had taken here and what old Mrs Stevenson had written on this house:

  … the pleasant hours we spend grouped on the verandah whither we always betake ourselves after meals; lounging on easy chairs or squatting on mats, according to taste. The verandah is twelve foot wide, and as it goes round three sides of the house, we can always be sure of shade: I wish I could add of breeze also, but that is not so easily to be contrived.

  He nodded his old white head and pointed at a sepia photograph of the verandah. ‘It is the same,’ he said. We could not contrive a breeze today any more than the Stevensons had. Even at nine o’clock in the morning it was warming up. Soon it would be uncomfortable. In the Great Hall there was nothing but a long table now. You had to imagine the oil lamps, the chaises longues, the kneeling ceramic or wooden buddhas guarding the wide staircase – and Louis Stevenson himself, long-legged, skeletal, moustachioed, nervously pacing up and down the waxed floor. And old Mrs S., looking like a thin Queen Victoria, sipping brandy and soda and nibbling ship’s biscuits, scattering the crumbs, talking to Fanny, Lou’s wife, who sat sombrely watching her restless husband and smoking. Where we stood now, Lou had read aloud chapters of The Wreckers and Weir of Hermiston.

  On the stairs I felt sweat prickling my forehead. No wonder R.L.S. worked best at sunrise. In his bedroom, now a library, there was a framed poem by Rabindranath Tagore on one wall:

  Our voyage is done

  We bow to Thee, our Captain …

  Bookcases held hundred-year-old Tauchnitz editions, published in Leipzig. Zanoni and Kenelm Chillingly by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Conan Doyle’s The Stark Munro Letters, and Wilkie Collins’ No Name and Hide and Seek – how many people living have read those novels? Who has heard of Rider Haggard’s Jess, his The Witch’s Head or his Joan Haste? Across two shelves were ranged the complete works of R.L.S. himself, in the Heinemann Vailima edition of 1922, and an 1898 copy of St Ives.

  The room was quite airless, and smelled of must and dust. A dying fly lay on its back, filling the silence with its buzzing. ‘There is one novelty that ought to prove a comfort,’ said Mrs Stevenson again from the pages in my hand. ‘The doors and windows are closed in with wire gauze, so that it is insect-proof, and I can sleep without a mosquito-net. Moreover, I hope that horrid creature, the mason bee, won’t be able to get into my books and spoil them.’ There were no mason bees in evidence, and no wire gauze either.

  The study had a sketch by Belle Strong of R.L.S. reading to his wife, from which we were distracted by an extraordinary sound from the front lawn. A most peculiar brass
band was trying its best to strike up ‘Colonel Bogey’, but total disarray prevented struggling tubas, sousaphones and trombones from matching key for key, failing even to match oompah for oompah, and half the bandsmen were collapsed in helpless laughter on the grass, rolling about among their shiny, dented instruments. One or two wore uniform jackets of an unidentifiable (and unmatching) order. Most had bare torsos, though a very few had ragged shirts. A saxophonist, flat on his back, convulsed in hysterics, looked like a pirate in green headscarf and purple lava-lava. My ghostly guide, Miki, giggled. ‘Apia police band,’ he whispered. ‘Practice.’

  From the anarchy on the lawn I could look straight up at Mount Vaea, which seemed only touching distance away. Stevenson had leaned from this louvred window the morning of the day he died, aged forty-four, of a cerebral haemorrhage; he had gazed up at the mountain almost as if he had a premonition of death. His gardener, Lafaele, standing where the big drum banged now, had seen him and waved, and Stevenson had called ‘Talofa!’

  I could see a semicircular gleam of ocean above and beyond the garden plants of Vailima – flamboyants, gardenias, avocados, mangoes, lemons and oranges, padanus, roses and cassias. Before the garden there had been a jungle track, up which the Stevensons’ two packhorses, Donald and Edinburgh, had brought the first stores from Apia. Often the woods of Mount Vaea had been full of war drums. One of R.L.S.’s letters said, ‘A man brought in a head in great glory; they washed the black [war] paint off, and behold! it was his brother. When I last heard he was sitting in his house, with the head upon his lap, and weeping.’ Another letter told of warriors who ‘brought in eleven heads, and to great horror and consternation … one proved to be a girl – a Maid of the village…. It had been returned, wrapped in the most costly silk handkerchief, and with an apologetic embassy.’

  Yet, in this room, despite war drums, battle cries and maidens’ heads, he had dictated stories of the cold, mist-bound north. Looking out at the drumless woods of Vaea, I thought: The early missionaries did at least bring peace, yet Stevenson was not against small ‘hedge-wars’. They made the blood course; kept men on their toes. Men died, no doubt, but the race, purged and regenerated by battle, survived.

  ‘Give me five minutes, Miki … to browse.’

  I riffled the pages, stopping where I had made a pencil mark. Here, Stevenson was about to negotiate a truce between battling Samoans: ‘I must ride barefoot…. Twenty miles ride, ten of the miles in drenching rain, seven of them fasting in a morning chill, and six stricken hours political discussion by an interpreter; to say nothing of sleeping in a native house, at which many of our excellent literati would look askance of itself.’ The energy of a semi-invalid. His wife Fanny said, ‘Sometimes he looks like an old man, and then, at a moment’s notice, he’s a pretty brown boy.’ And here was an ordinary day:

  Wake at the first peep of day, come gradually to, and had a turn on the verandah before 5.55, at 6 breakfast; 6.10, to work … till 10.30; 11, luncheon. Make music furiously [on the flageolet] till about 2…. Work again till 4: fool from 4 to half-past, 4.30, bath; 5, dinner; smoke, chat on verandah, then hand of cards, and at last 8 come up to my room with a pint of beer and hard biscuit: turn in.

  It was on the verandah that the end had come. Mrs Stevenson wrote:

  My beloved son was suddenly called home last evening. At six o’clock he was well, hungry for dinner, and helping Fanny to make a Mayonnaise sauce; when suddenly he put both hands to his head and said, ‘Oh, what a pain!’ and then added, ‘Do I look strange?’ Fanny said no, not wishing to alarm him, and helped him into the hall, where she put him into the nearest easy chair. She called for us to come, but he was unconscious before I reached his side…. At ten minute past 8 p.m. all was over….

  The police band had shambled away down the drive. Two gardeners in red and yellow lava-lavas were cutting back the creeper by the verandah. There was a great whistling of birds.

  We brought a bed into the hall, and he was lifted on to it.

  When all was over his boys gathered about him, and the chiefs of Tanugamanono (the nearest village) arrived with fine mats which they laid over the bed, bowing and saying, ‘Talofa, Tusitala’; and then, after kissing him and sitting a while in silence, they bowed again, and saying, ‘Tofa, Tusitala’, and went out.

  It was hot already. Miki nodded his snowy head towards the back of the house and poured me iced water in the head of state’s kitchen, where R.L.S.’s cook, Talolo, had prepared Scottish food – stewed beef and potatoes, and soda scones – as well as baked bananas, and pineapple in claret. I took Miki’s pale hand in both of mine and thanked him. ‘Pleasant to have a visitor who knows the Tusitala,’ the reedy voice said. ‘Come again.’

  I found Tolu and the others sprawling patiently under the trees, and we set off to climb the mountain in an atmosphere like wet gauze.

  *

  My notes at this point are disfigured by drops of sweat:

  A hard climb. Mount Vaea stands 700 feet above Vailima, and we take the ‘fast’, straight-up track. How on earth did old Mrs Stevenson manage to follow Louis’ coffin – borne by chiefs – to the top? If she could, I can. Underfoot, the track is muddy and covered with sodden leaves. Even Tolu, who has not seen Mount Vaea before but should be fit with farming and cricket, sweats heavily. ‘The hill is very angry,’ he says, meaning ‘high’. It is all very well for the young – Fili, Amosa and Isaia hitch up their lava-lavas and disappear into the trees like woodcock. Their cries make the wood seem as if it’s full of taunting aitus.

  Manino and Emma keep with me. Manino’s stomach is upset, but she insists on coming. I have given her Lomotil. She plods gamely upwards, giving me a warm smile now and then. Thirty minutes’ steep, slippery climb. I feel crippled. My legs need to rest. Luckily there is a bench halfway up. Two young Samoans, running down, call in English a cheerful ‘Good morning.’ Up and up. And at last at the top. Unexpected Samoan music – a group of Samoan boys and girls are playing guitars under the trees. We sit and listen and cool off. Manino, smiling all the time, fans herself with a red and white handkerchief. The Lomotil seems to have done the trick. Isaia appropriates my binoculars. The crest of Mount Vaea is a wide, open space sloping towards the bay, hanging over Vailima. The tomb is white and rectangular, shaded by trees. R.L.S. lying in the earth here would only have to lift his head to see the ocean.

  Fili’s fingers run casually over the bronze lettering on the plaque: ‘1850 Robert Louis Stevenson 1894’. Amosa lightly polishes the raised letters of R.L.S.’s own Requiem:

  Here he lies where he longed to be;

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  It is not love of Tusitala, of course. It is just a feeling they have….

  On a second plaque a quotation in Samoan from ‘Ruta I, 16–17’. When I look it up in English it reads:

  And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people and thy God, my God: where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also if aught but death part thee and me.

  Beneath the words, a dying wreath of peonies. Red-bodied dragonflies dart like inquisitive spirits. The peace is exquisite. Manino begins to comb out her hair, letting it fall thick and black to her waist. Isaia is in a tree, his aitu’s cheek resting on a branch.

  ‘See.’ Tolu is pointing. Below us, through dark ancient trees a bright green lawn, the blue of Vailima’s sunlit roof. East, rising land and forest; a mountaintop lost in cloud; the silver wriggle of a river. South, the ocean; and the glittering pond of the harbour, with three small ships at anchor within the white curve of surf. The faint sigh of waves on the reef.

  An old man comes quietly out of the trees, grey and very grizzled, carrying a bush knife and a basket full of cut shrubs. To me, he says, ‘The leaves I have make the patient be healed.’ In c
lear English, holding up a leaf. To the view, he says, ‘Such beautiful sights.’

  He chats in Samoan with Tolu and Fili, turns again to me. ‘Where–may I ask you – is your home situated? Oh! So near to home of the Tusitala. The same country! And you come all this way….’ He waved a hand. ‘These friends say you are a writer, sir.’

  I smile and point to the almost empty hilltop we stand on. ‘Do you think there’s space for me here?’

  ‘Oh, plenty. Certainly, space.’ He smiles back, pointing down to Vailima. ‘I live near the pastor’s house in Vailima, sir. I sir. have several books by Mr Robert Louis Stevenson in my house. Come and see.’ He waves, drifting away.

  It is hot. And silent. The singers have gone. Fili sleeps. Amosa sits cross-legged in the shade, slowly blinking enigmatic eyes, like a cat. Tolu stares at the sea. Manino pulls petals off a flower. Emma is combing Isaia’s hair. For half an hour, except for a murmur or two, we are all silent. But it is getting too hot. ‘Shall we go?’ We begin the descent. Tolu, Manino, Emma and I descend sedately. Fili, Amosa and Isaia fly ahead as usual, and again the mountainside echoes like an aviary with their cries. In this damp heat I am glad to reach the falls in the valley where you cross over to the ‘Road of Loving Hearts’ the Samoans had built for Stevenson. He had admired these great forest trees. He heard the waterfall in that valley, the ‘wonderful fine glen’ at the bottom of the mountain. The house for him was ‘a place for angels’.