Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson Volume 2 Part 36

On the hot water side it may entertain you to know that I have been actually sentenced to deportation by my friends on Mulinuu, C. J.

Cedercrantz, and Baron Senfft von Pilsach. The awful doom, however, declined to fall, owing to Circ.u.mstances over Which. I only heard of it (so to speak) last night. I mean officially, but I had walked among rumours. The whole tale will be some day put into my hand, and I shall share it with humorous friends.

It is likely, however, by my judgment, that this epoch of gaiety in Samoa will soon cease; and the fierce white light of history will beat no longer on Yours Sincerely and his fellows here on the beach. We ask ourselves whether the reason will more rejoice over the end of a disgraceful business, or the unregenerate man more sorrow over the stoppage of the fun. For, say what you please, it has been a deeply interesting time. You don't know what news is, nor what politics, nor what the life of man, till you see it on so small a scale and with your own liberty on the board for stake. I would not have missed it for much. And anxious friends beg me to stay at home and study human nature in Brompton drawing-rooms!

FARCEURS! And anyway you know that such is not my talent. I could never be induced to take the faintest interest in Brompton QUA Brompton or a drawing-room QUA a drawing-room. I am an Epick Writer with a k to it, but without the necessary genius.

Hurry up with another book of stories. I am now reduced to two of my contemporaries, you and Barrie - O, and Kipling - you and Barrie and Kipling are now my Muses Three. And with Kipling, as you know, there are reservations to be made. And you and Barrie don't write enough. I should say I also read Anstey when he is serious, and can almost always get a happy day out of Marion Crawford - CE N'EST PAS TOUJOURS LA GUERRE, but it's got life to it and guts, and it moves. Did you read the WITCH OF PRAGUE? n.o.body could read it twice, of course; and the first time even it was necessary to skip.

E PUR SI MUOVE. But Barrie is a beauty, the LITTLE MINISTER and the WINDOW IN THRUMS, eh? Stuff in that young man; but he must see and not be too funny. Genius in him, but there's a journalist at his elbow - there's the risk. Look, what a page is the glove business in the WINDOW! knocks a man flat; that's guts, if you please.

Why have I wasted the little time that is left with a sort of naked review article? I don't know, I'm sure. I suppose a mere ebullition of congested literary talk I am beginning to think a visit from friends would be due. Wish you could come!

Let us have your news anyway, and forgive this silly stale effusion. - Yours ever,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

Letter: TO J. M. BARRIE

[VAILIMA, DECEMBER 1892.]

DEAR J. M. BARRIE, - You will be sick of me soon; I cannot help it.

I have been off my work for some time, and re-read the EDINBURGH ELEVEN, and had a great mind to write a parody and give you all your sauce back again, and see how you would like it yourself. And then I read (for the first time - I know not how) the WINDOW IN THRUMS; I don't say that it is better than THE MINISTER; it's less of a tale - and there is a beauty, a material beauty, of the tale IPSE, which clever critics nowadays long and love to forget; it has more real flaws; but somehow it is - well, I read it last anyway, and it's by Barrie. And he's the man for my money. The glove is a great page; it is startlingly original, and as true as death and judgment. Tibbie Birse in the Burial is great, but I think it was a journalist that got in the word 'official.' The same character plainly had a word to say to Thomas Haggard. Thomas affects me as a lie - I beg your pardon; doubtless he was somebody you knew, that leads people so far astray. The actual is not the true.

I am proud to think you are a Scotchman - though to be sure I know nothing of that country, being only an English tourist, quo' Gavin Ogilvy. I commend the hard case of Mr. Gavin Ogilvy to J. M.

Barrie, whose work is to me a source of living pleasure and heartfelt national pride. There are two of us now that the s.h.i.+rra might have patted on the head. And please do not think when I thus seem to bracket myself with you, that I am wholly blinded with vanity. Jess is beyond my frontier line; I could not touch her skirt; I have no such glamour of twilight on my pen. I am a capable artist; but it begins to look to me as if you were a man of genius. Take care of yourself, for my sake. It's a devilish hard thing for a man who writes so many novels as I do, that I should get so few to read. And I can read yours, and I love them.

A pity for you that my amanuensis is not on stock to-day, and my own hand perceptibly worse than usual. - Yours,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

DECEMBER 5TH, 1892.

P.S. - They tell me your health is not strong. Man, come out here and try the Prophet's chamber. There's only one bad point to us - we do rise early. The Amanuensis states that you are a lover of silence - and that ours is a noisy house - and she is a chatterbox - I am not answerable for these statements, though I do think there is a touch of garrulity about my premises. We have so little to talk about, you see. The house is three miles from town, in the midst of great silent forests. There is a burn close by, and when we are not talking you can hear the burn, and the birds, and the sea breaking on the coast three miles away and six hundred feet below us, and about three times a month a bell - I don't know where the bell is, nor who rings it; it may be the bell in Hans Andersen's story for all I know. It is never hot here - 86 in the shade is about our hottest - and it is never cold except just in the early mornings. Take it for all in all, I suppose this island climate to be by far the healthiest in the world - even the influenza entirely lost its sting. Only two patients died, and one was a man nearly eighty, and the other a child below four months.

I won't tell you if it is beautiful, for I want you to come here and see for yourself. Everybody on the premises except my wife has some Scotch blood in their veins - I beg your pardon - except the natives - and then my wife is a Dutchwoman - and the natives are the next thing conceivable to Highlanders before the forty-five.

We would have some grand cracks!

R. L. S.

COME, it will broaden your mind, and be the making of me.

CHAPTER XII - LIFE IN SAMOA, CONTINUED, JANUARY 1893-DECEMBER 1894

Letter: TO CHARLES BAXTER

[APRIL, 1893.]

. . . About THE JUSTICE-CLERK, I long to go at it, but will first try to get a short story done. Since January I have had two severe illnesses, my boy, and some heart-breaking anxiety over f.a.n.n.y; and am only now convalescing. I came down to dinner last night for the first time, and that only because the service had broken down, and to relieve an inexperienced servant. Nearly four months now I have rested my brains; and if it be true that rest is good for brains, I ought to be able to pitch in like a giant refreshed. Before the autumn, I hope to send you some JUSTICE-CLERK, or WEIR OF HERMISTON, as Colvin seems to prefer; I own to indecision.

Received SYNTAX, DANCE OF DEATH, and PITCAIRN, which last I have read from end to end since its arrival, with vast improvement.

What a pity it stops so soon! I wonder is there nothing that seems to prolong the series? Why doesn't some young man take it up? How about my old friend Fountainhall's DECISIONS? I remember as a boy that there was some good reading there. Perhaps you could borrow me that, and send it on loan; and perhaps Laing's MEMORIALS therewith; and a work I'm ashamed to say I have never read, BALFOUR'S LETTERS. . . . I have come by accident, through a correspondent, on one very curious and interesting fact - namely, that Stevenson was one of the names adopted by the MacGregors at the proscription. The details supplied by my correspondent are both convincing and amusing; but it would be highly interesting to find out more of this.

R. L. S.

Letter: TO A. CONAN DOYLE

VAILIMA, APIA, SAMOA, APRIL 5TH, 1893.

DEAR SIR, - You have taken many occasions to make yourself very agreeable to me, for which I might in decency have thanked you earlier. It is now my turn; and I hope you will allow me to offer you my compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes. That is the cla.s.s of literature that I like when I have the toothache. As a matter of fact, it was a pleurisy I was enjoying when I took the volume up; and it will interest you as a medical man to know that the cure was for the moment effectual. Only the one thing troubles me: can this be my old friend Joe Bell? - I am, yours very truly,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

P.S. - And lo, here is your address supplied me here in Samoa! But do not take mine, O frolic fellow Spookist, from the same source; mine is wrong.

R. L. S.

Letter: TO S. R. CROCKETT

VAILIMA, SAMOA, MAY 17TH, 1893.

DEAR MR. CROCKETT, - I do not owe you two letters, nor yet nearly one, sir! The last time I heard of you, you wrote about an accident, and I sent you a letter to my lawyer, Charles Baxter, which does not seem to have been presented, as I see nothing of it in his accounts. Query, was that lost? I should not like you to think I had been so unmannerly and so inhuman. If you have written since, your letter also has miscarried, as is much the rule in this part of the world, unless you register.

Your book is not yet to hand, but will probably follow next month.

I detected you early in the BOOKMAN, which I usually see, and noted you in particular as displaying a monstrous ingrat.i.tude about the footnote. Well, mankind is ungrateful; 'Man's ingrat.i.tude to man makes countless thousands mourn,' quo' Rab - or words to that effect. By the way, an anecdote of a cautious sailor: 'Bill, Bill,' says I to him, 'OR WORDS TO THAT EFFECT.'

I shall never take that walk by the Fisher's Tryst and Glencorse.

I shall never see Auld Reekie. I shall never set my foot again upon the heather. Here I am until I die, and here will I be buried. The word is out and the doom written. Or, if I do come, it will be a voyage to a further goal, and in fact a suicide; which, however, if I could get my family all fixed up in the money way, I might, perhaps, perform, or attempt. But there is a plaguey risk of breaking down by the way; and I believe I shall stay here until the end comes like a good boy, as I am. If I did it, I should put upon my trunks: 'Pa.s.senger to - Hades.' How strangely wrong your information is! In the first place, I should never carry a novel to Sydney; I should post it from here. In the second place, WEIR OF HERMISTON is as yet scarce begun. It's going to be excellent, no doubt; but it consists of about twenty pages. I have a tale, a shortish tale in length, but it has proved long to do, THE EBB TIDE, some part of which goes home this mail. It is by me and Mr. Osbourne, and is really a singular work. There are only four characters, and three of them are bandits - well, two of them are, and the third is their comrade and accomplice. It sounds cheering, doesn't it? Barratry, and drunkenness, and vitriol, and I cannot tell you all what, are the beams of the roof. And yet - I don't know - I sort of think there's something in it. You'll see (which is more than I ever can) whether Davis and Att.w.a.ter come off or not.

WEIR OF HERMISTON is a much greater undertaking, and the plot is not good, I fear; but Lord Justice-Clerk Hermiston ought to be a plum. Of other schemes, more or less executed, it skills not to speak.

I am glad to hear so good an account of your activity and interests, and shall always hear from you with pleasure; though I am, and must continue, a mere sprite of the inkbottle, unseen in the flesh. Please remember me to your wife and to the four-year- old sweetheart, if she be not too engrossed with higher matters.

Do you know where the road crosses the burn under Glencorse Church?

Go there, and say a prayer for me: MORITURUS SALUTAT. See that it's a sunny day; I would like it to be a Sunday, but that's not possible in the premises; and stand on the right-hand bank just where the road goes down into the water, and shut your eyes, and if I don't appear to you! well, it can't be helped, and will be extremely funny.