Robert Louis Stevenson and his Friends—Stevenson as a
Roadmaker—Timbo—Stevenson on the Schooner—The Skipper—“Tusitala” and
the Natives—Conventionality—A Visit to King Malietoa—Stevenson’s Love
of Adventure—Stevenson the Writer—Genius in the Southern
Seas—Socialism
I SAW Stevenson several times after that at society balls and concerts
in Apia, where sometimes he seemed full of merriment and indeed the life
of the party, and again at other times strangely silent, revealing the
man of moods. I have never heard that he was fond of being alone, but I
can vouch for it that he was as often alone in his wanderings over the
islands as he was with friends; indeed I think I saw him more often
alone than otherwise. I met Mr Strong twice, I think, when he was with
Stevenson. Mr Moore too, who wrote _With Stevenson in Samoa_, was a
pleasant man, and Robert Louis Stevenson and he were as familiar as
brothers.
Almost the last time I saw Stevenson was at the Tivoli in Apia; he was
with Mr Moore and several other men whom I cannot recall. They were all
taking refreshments and talking. Stevenson was flushed a bit, his eyes
were very bright, and with his hat off, revealing a lofty, pale brow, he
looked unlike the ordinary run of men. He was in an excellent mood, and
Mr Moore and another member of the party were so intensely amused at
what he was saying that they almost upset their glasses and spluttered
as they laughed; which gave Stevenson very obviously great pleasure, for
he was as fond of a joke as any of them.
On that special occasion I was in the company of the chief mate of a
large schooner which was leaving Apia the next day for Honolulu.
Stevenson, or one of the party, called us across and offered us drinks
and cigars. Soon after my companion, who had to get on board his ship,
left and I went with him; and as we got outside we still heard the
jovial exclamations of Stevenson and his friends as they yarned on,
their voices fading behind us as we walked away into the moonlight and
shadows of the coco-palms many years ago.
Stevenson would often tackle rough work, such as tree-chopping and
digging; and was often to be seen perspiring and covered with grime as
he helped the natives to make tracks across the rough jungle and forest
land that surrounded Vailima. Bare-footed, dressed in old clothes and a
seaman’s cast-off cap, he looked like some vagabond dust-man. His manner
to the natives who worked for him was jovial enough; he would shout: “Go
it, Sambo, that’s right, te rom and te pakea[3] if you work hard”; and
then with a twinkle in his eyes he’d stand and watch them lugging the
wheelbarrows up the slope as they jabbered like school-children and
worked their hardest. Several of Stevenson’s friends also worked with
him: one of them would be cutting the trees down as the novelist smoked,
and jocularly criticising him, telling him to “keep moving and not be
such a loafer.” Mrs Stevenson arrived on the scene of hard work once and
chided him for exerting himself. “Don’t do that, dear, or you will be
ill again,” she would say; and the novelist would look up and then work
harder than ever.
Footnote 3:
Meaning rum, refreshments and tobacco.
He was to be found in all the out-of-the-way places and would go miles
alone, usually on foot; though he had an old horse or ass, I forget
which, he seldom rode it.
One day I was walking along near the coast when a little native boy of
about six years of age, came limping out of the jungle scrub just by the
track. I picked the little fellow up and discovered he had trodden on
some glass, and had a deep gash in his foot. As I was carrying him down
to the shore to wash his wound, Stevenson and a boy came strolling by.
Stevenson, who was always very kind to children, examined the wound,
took out his pocket-handkerchief and bound the foot up, after we had
well bathed it: his manner to the little outcast was one of extreme
tenderness.
I was living with two kindly disposed old natives at that time, so I
picked the child up and carried him home. We found out the next day that
the poor little fellow’s parents had been drowned by the upsetting of a
canoe in a typhoon off Apia harbour. He was very thin and looked ill, so
I gave my hosts some money and told them to feed him up, which they did.
I became very fond of him; he had thick curls all over his head, and his
cheery little brown face was lit up by a pair of beautiful brown eyes.
He slept near me, and every morning he would jump off his bed-mat and
caper about like a puppy and would insist in helping me put my boots on.
He heard me play the violin and was deeply interested in it. I was
always catching him looking at my violin, and each time he looked up at
me artfully, as much as to say: “I must not touch your wonderful music.
Oh no, I’m not that kind of Samoan baby!”
I only chided him once, when I caught the little dark tinker unscrewing
all my violin pegs. He gave a terrified shriek as I ran after him, and
was off like a frightened rabbit. When I at length caught him, and
regained my property, he looked up at me with pleading eyes, gave a
baby-like cry, and in musical, infantile Samoan phrases asked to be
forgiven. So I at once placed him on my shoulder and gave him a ride to
his heart’s delight; and after that he stood guard over my violin, and
came rushing up to me if even the dog went near it. I let him sleep with
me sometimes, and he placed his arms about my neck as though I were some
sweet-bosomed mother; and so in that way fell asleep the little brown
savage in the arms of Western civilisation.
Of course this is not telling you much of Robert Louis Stevenson, but to
me, and in my memory of it all, it’s just as important, perhaps even
more so. The old Samoan wife became very fond of Timbo, as I called him,
and he became quite plump. So I secured a good home for him for life, or
till he grew up, and therefore you will see that I have also done good
mission work in the South Seas!
I heard when I came home afterwards that Stevenson had seen Timbo and
given him some presents, including a box of tin German soldiers. Timbo
gave me half of them. I was obliged to accept them to please him. If
he’s alive still he must be a fine young fellow, for he was affectionate
and plucky even as a tiny child. I remember how I once took him for a
canoe ride, and his delight as I rocked the small craft in the shallow
water till he fell overside, for he could swim like a fish. Once I took
him out in Apia harbour and we went aboard a schooner that had
encountered a typhoon; she was being overhauled, for her deck was almost
washed clean, the rigging was a mass of tangle and the galley had been
washed away. The skipper was a pleasant enough man; he hailed from San
Francisco and had a voice that could compete with the wildest gale’s
thunder, but nevertheless his heart was in the right place when whisky
was scarce. I had met him ashore and, hearing that I came from Sydney,
and had lived near his home in San Francisco, he got into conversation
with me and hinted that there was a chance of a berth aboard for me, if
I felt inclined to take it.
While I was on this schooner one afternoon suddenly Stevenson and his
wife came on board; they had been brought out in one of the small native
canoes that were always hovering by the beach, awaiting passengers
wanting to visit the anchored crafts in the harbour. The novelist was in
high spirits and helped Mrs Stevenson up the rope ladder in great mirth.
Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson was an excellent sailor and made no fuss
about the ascent, as she clambered up and leapt on the deck with a
bounce!
The skipper knew them well and was very polite to them. A young American
or Australian lady, I forget which, was also visiting on board, and the
skipper introduced her to Mr and Mrs Stevenson. She devoted all her
attention to the novelist, and as they were having lunch together in the
schooner’s cuddy Stevenson’s misery, as she plied him with questions and
reiterated her flattering approval of his books, was very evident. “Oh,
I think your books most delightful; how do you think of such things? Was
it really true about that rich uncle and the derelict piano? Have you
read _Lady Audley’s Secret_?” So she rattled on. Stevenson looked
appealingly at his wife, in an attempt to get her to engage the girl’s
attention, but still she persisted in reiterating those things which she
thought were music to the novelist’s ears. Suddenly Stevenson looked up,
and with his fine eyes alive with satire said something to the effect
that “he did not write books for ladies to read,” punctuating the remark
with a look that made the garrulous visitor immediately retire into her
shell.
The convivial equilibrium was not restored till the skipper sat down at
the cuddy’s harmonium and, with his feet pedalling away at full speed,
started to sing with his thunderous voice:
“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,
Yo! Ho! Ho! for a bottle of rum!”
The young lady who had so annoyed Stevenson joined in, and revealed the
fact that her voice as a musical medium was a deal more pleasant than
when it tried to flatter a writer of books. Stevenson seemed delighted
to find such an opportunity insidiously to apologise for his previous
irritability, and so at once started to applaud the lady’s singing in an
almost exaggerated fashion.
A bottle of whisky was opened, and the skipper drank half-a-tumblerful,
just to sample it and see if he had really opened the special brand
which he had been recommending to his visitors. Finding there was no
mistake, with all the liberality of a sailor, he allotted to each a due
portion; whereby the dimly lit cabin festival was immensely enhanced.
Stevenson’s mirth was frequently stimulated by the drunken mate, who
repeatedly poked his head into the cuddy door and, with a
half-apologetic leer at the ladies, looked at the skipper and said:
“All’s well, sir. I’m going ashore.” The skipper, who was half-seas-over
himself, looked at him contemptuously and said: “Clear out of it.” “Ay,
ay, sir,” responded the mate, and in a few minutes he was back again,
and out came the same information, “All’s well, sir. I’m off ashore.”
Suddenly the skipper arose and went on deck and a loud argument
commenced, interspersed with those maritime epithets which enforce sea
law and are not to be found in navigation books. After a brief interval
of silence the skipper could be heard shouting out oaths as he shook his
fist to the mate, who was being rowed away ashore by the natives who
always haunted the gangways of anchored ships.
At sunset the party left the schooner, and the skipper went with them,
and we heard their laughter fading away over the darkening waters as the
singing natives paddled them away to Apia’s island town.
That same night I also went ashore with the sailors. Timbo sat in the
middle of the ship’s boat; he had been entertained by the hands in the
forecastle. As soon as I arrived on the beach I made my way to my
friendly natives’ home, for the hour was late and I wanted to get Timbo
off to bed. I was deep in thought, and as he toddled beside me I held
his hand. Suddenly I was startled by hearing the child make throaty
gurgles as though he wanted to be sick, his little brown face wrinkling
up as he made fearful grimaces. “What’s the matter, Timbo?” I said,
somewhat alarmed, and for answer he looked up at me helplessly and
dropped several objects in the scrub. I picked them up and found that he
had been sucking away at a large, rank meerschaum pipe, which I at once
recognised as belonging to the boatswain of the schooner which we had
just left. The boy had also stolen a purse with a few coppers in it and
a small leather belt purse full of brass buttons. I felt pretty wild
with the little fellow at first, because it meant that I had to go back
to the schooner and return the things.
Taking Timbo up, I sat on a log and laid him across my knees, ready to
give him a good spanking, for it was not his first misdemeanour; indeed,
he had done many things which I have left untold. As I laid him face
downwards, so that I might administer chastisement, he twisted his
little curly head round and looked appealingly up at me with his big
brown eyes: as if to say: “Oh, noble white man from the far-off moral
integrity of Western civilisation, may I beg of you to overlook the sad
indiscretion of a Samoan child?” That part whereon I was about to
administer justice looked so small and helpless that I did that which I
should have liked to have been done to me in my earlier years, for I
relented and stood Timbo on his feet. Then I said: “Timbo, for that
which you have done you will be arrested and taken to Mulinuu Jail,
where the wicked chiefs are imprisoned.” Hearing this, he clung to me
and sobbed, and large tears rolled down his cheeks and splashed on to
his small mahogany-coloured toes. So I said: “Timbo, I forgive you.” For
I knew, deep down in my heart, that, though I was white, I had in my
childish days committed several little indiscretions very similar to
Timbo’s. He was only a tiny fellow, and I thought of English babies who
at his age were still in arms and busy sucking dummies; and I knew that
civilisation itself was a monstrous baby, devoid of wit, sucking away at
the dry, windy dummy and soothing itself with the thought that it was
swallowing kindly feeding milk. As I thought I looked at Timbo, and the
expression of gratitude on his little half-wild face, as he stood on his
head and waved his feet to the skies, seemed to applaud my mild
philosophy.
In all that I recall of Robert Louis Stevenson—his manner to strangers,
his ever-ready attention to those who would earnestly tell him
something, his kindness to the natives and to all who were in a
conventional sense beneath him—was revealed a large mind with a
sympathetic, human outlook.
Often little actions, something done on the impulse of the moment, told
of simplicity and tenderness and the greatness which reveals a spirit
that sees the link of fellowship between men, no matter what their caste
or position in human affairs.
At times he might have appeared theatrical to those around him; but it
was the expression of an intellectual, dramatic instinct, not for the
stage, but for the drama played by men of this world, as though he were
ever gazing critically on mortals before the limelight of existence and
saying, half to himself: “There you are! I told you so. What would you
say to all that you’ve just heard if you read it in a book? You wouldn’t
believe it, I’ll be bound.”
His manner to Mrs Stevenson revealed an affectionate, confiding nature
that loved attention. I should think it was the affection of a boy’s
heart, with the strong strain of a discerning man who knew the nature of
women. He would always treat native women with the same deference that
he showed to the women of his own race; a deference always delicately
courteous, excepting on those occasions when women might court his
criticism by criticising him, or by casting aside the delicate armour of
their sex and assuming man’s rôle.
His kindness and the trouble he took on behalf of the Samoans is well
known, and the natives earnestly expressed their gratitude by listening
to and following the advice of “Tusitala,” as they called him, and when
he died they loudly bewailed his death. The poet-author’s coffin was
borne on the strong shoulders of Samoan chiefs, and the sound of their
wailing, as they carried the coffin onwards up the slopes, with slow
footsteps, to the grave on Vaea’s sea-girt height, was his funeral
chant.
I saw Robert Louis Stevenson in many places and in many moods, and
looking back, as I now can, the perspective clearly shows me that he was
a religious man in the true sense of that term. In no wise bigoted, he
often fell into the ranks of Christianity and beat time, with a smile on
his lips, as though he wished to set an example to those around him, in
his knowledge that the example was better than his own half-sad, hopeful
smile. At times, too, he would fall out of the ranks and become a
harum-scarum renegade, and at such moments he seemed to have no idea of
the existence of the barrier-lines that men, before the public, draw
between the jovial rogue and the respectable citizen. “Well, captain,
how goes it? Got an eye-opener aboard?” he would say as he jumped aboard
the schooner’s deck; and then he would turn to the sailor who might be
cleaning brass close by and offer him a cigarette, or walk into the
forecastle and chum with the crew, or look over the ship’s side and shy
a copper to the swimming natives who haunted the bay, with the
sea-birds, looking for a living. Such was Stevenson’s manner in the
isles of Samoa, where, notwithstanding the wildness and the proximity to
primitive life, many of the emigrant citizens still did things, or did
not do things, because of the standard set by a majority.
It does not matter where you go, or how remote from civilisation your
dwelling-place may be, you are sure to have some living illustration
before you to tell you that the chains of conventionality are forged
from the natures of men. I believe that if we could come back to this
world a myriad years hence, when the sun has cooled down to a ghostly
moon, when the seas are frozen and swinging to the tideless desolation
that precedes the final crashing of the planetary system, and the human
race has dwindled to a camp of twelve shivering mortals wrapped in
bearskins, we should find them sitting over the last log fire without
wood, with gloomy faces, anxiously awaiting Monday—because it is Sunday!
Mrs Stevenson was as much a Bohemian as her husband. She accompanied him
on his short visits to Apia town, and on those occasions she was
generally to be seen hurriedly rushing back to get, or inquire for, that
which had been left behind. The novelist walked ahead and, as he went on
dreaming, forgot that his wife was out with him till the domestic voice
came again. Mrs Stevenson was very pleasant to talk to; she invited me
to Vailima, but I was not able to go. Indeed, I was only a lad and, not
being a lady’s man, would have run twenty miles to escape Vailima
fashion.
I recall many men who were acquaintances of Robert Louis Stevenson, and
whom I have never heard of since. I remember one old man in particular
whom Stevenson was always glad to meet. Indeed, the novelist’s face lit
up directly he saw him. His name was Callard, and he was a bit of a
scallawag, was a character and had plenty of spare cash. He was never
silent, but talked all day long and nearly all night, and always had
some new trouble to relate. I slept in his room one night with two other
men and he kept on and on about some friend who had swindled him out of
five dollars in San Francisco, for that was his native place. “Yes, he
did me, by heaven he did”; and saying this he would start reckoning up
on a bit of paper, and sit on the side of the bed swearing till my
friend and I said: “If you won’t worry any more about it we’ll give you
the five dollars.” About a week after he took a passage on the ’Frisco
mail-boat. I really believe that he hurried home and spent five hundred
dollars to ease his mind about that five dollars, and would have spent a
thousand dollars sooner than be done. I am rather like that myself, but
I do not let such losses prey on my mind, for if I did, and tried to get
even with the culprit, I should be incessantly travelling off somewhere
or other.
Well, Stevenson often met Callard, and the old chap treated him as
though he was a boy, told the novelist jokes, spun yarns and repeatedly
nudged him in the ribs; and the two would finally end up by retiring to
the bar and standing each other treat.
Callard’s great ambition at that time was to see King Malietoa Laupepa
at Mulinuu. I went off with him, and with the assistance of some
Malietoans got him an introduction at the royal court. Callard behaved
with great propriety, indeed, bowed to almost all the native servants of
the court retinue! I played the violin to the King, who was a most
agreeable gentleman, and carried himself with a deal more importance
than Mataafa did. Callard spoke day and night of the King’s handshake,
and chuckled in his very sleep at the thought of what his friends in
America would think when they heard of Callard and the King of Samoa
together. He went especially to Vailima to tell Stevenson about King
Malietoa, and kept the novelist amused the whole evening.
Callard’s eyebrows were about half-an-inch long and they stuck straight
out, and as he spoke his eyelids kept closing as though he was in deep
thought; and what with that and his high, bald head, he was a
cheerful-looking man. He always drank whisky, and Stevenson tucked him
up to sleep on his couch at Vailima when he was too full of it to walk
back to his lodgings! I am quite sure if Stevenson had lived the world
would have heard of Callard.
[Illustration: WANGANUI RIVER, N.Z.]
Stevenson had a sneaking regard for vagabonds, and his eyes twinkled
with delight in their company. He was very credulous and believed a deal
that he heard. I think he would have gone off exploring for some new
country, or a treasure island, in five minutes, if he had been
encouraged by some of the fearless adventurers whom he mixed with
through his love of vagabondage and adventure. The questions he used to
ask men of the seafaring class revealed how implicitly he believed that
which they were telling him, yet at other times he seemed alert with
suspicion and in a mood to disbelieve actual facts.
Though I heard Stevenson make several attempts to play the violin, and
also heard him pedalling at the harmonium, I cannot recall that he
accomplished anything that struck me as showing musical talent—that is,
talent revealing a quick ear to distinguish the scales and intervals of
mechanical music. Indeed the pedals made more noise and sounded more
rhythmical than the time he played; and he looked like some careworn
priest toiling away on the treadmill of penance to save his soul. But
still I can say that Stevenson had a gift that was something much
greater than an ear for light melody. He was a great tone poet! His mind
was a shell that caught echoes from the vastness of creation, and the
murmurs of humanity in all its joy, passion and sorrow. Otherwise he
could never have even noticed, let alone described as he did, for not in
all literature will you find another who describes _sound_ so perfectly
at one stroke as Stevenson did. You can _hear_ Nature’s moods, in all
her wild grandeur of seas and the winds in the mountain forests, as you
read his books. The seas beating over the barrier reefs, the vast
silence of the tropical night, the starlit coco-palms and the coughing
derelict beachcomber sleeping beneath them, become realities that haunt
your mind, because they are made and played by a great musician who was
an artist in Nature’s great orchestra.
I think if Stevenson had been able to cast aside all thought of the
critical inspection of lovers of polite literature, and the mechanical
niceties of phrase and thought, and had written his reminiscences down
in a book, the characters therein would have walked, talked and laughed
with cinema realism. Down in the magical world of words, before the
mind’s eye and ear, we should have seen the vast tropical Pacific, and
the stars over it reflected in the lagoons of the far-scattered isles
clad with coco-palms as if painted by the magical silver oils of
moonlight. We should have heard the cry of the traders and seen the
beachcombers’ ragged clothes fluttering by tossing waters, and paddled
canoes filled with the swarthy faces of wild men, on the waves that were
breaking over the shores of his wonderful pages.
But, unfortunately, it was not to be, because of the great truth that we
cannot do differently from that which we do. We are born in the chains
of grim conventionality that become inevitably a part of us. Indeed he
who professes to be utterly free from it, and to have no regard for it
in his work, has his published book as strong evidence against his
sincerity.
I’ve met far greater geniuses than Robert Louis Stevenson in the
Southern Seas—geniuses so intense with pathos, wit, insight and heroic
courage that though they had never even read a book, or learnt to write,
their minds were gold mines of truth and experience and all that men
have ever attempted to tell in polite phrase. Could they, by some
magical means, have turned a handle and so written down in a book their
reminiscences, and their thoughts on human affairs, modern literature
would not have to bewail the loss of its Golden Age, but would be
absorbed with delight, filled with ecstatic charm over the pathos and
the wonderful touches of truth, in what would be the great classic, the
new Odyssey of modern times.
But to return to Stevenson. I once heard him arguing violently on board
a ship, when he was at dinner in the saloon. At the time I was busily
cleaning the brass door handle. It grieves me to have to confess to this
humble occupation while I was seeking fame and fortune in far countries,
but it was the execution of this little detail of one of my many
professions that gave me the opportunity of hearing the celebrated
author’s opinion on Socialism.
One of the diners, who sat opposite Robert Louis Stevenson, was a big
red-faced man, weighing about sixteen stone, a quantity of heavy
jewellery which adorned his clothing being included. He breathed
violently as he ate and kept insisting on the wonderful virtues of
Socialism. Stevenson combated with him in fine style, winning every
point. All I can remember of the conversation was that the author said:
“Socialism is based on ideas of equality and the freedom of the
individual; yet its principal aim in practice would be to destroy
individuality and freedom, and the equality would be a system producing
nothing else but a nation of slaves.”
I think Stevenson was right, for I have noticed that socialists are not
continually busy in giving away anything. Indeed, socialists have so
developed the instinct of commercial grab that they can always perceive,
“by the cut of your jib” (a socialistic phrase), how much you are worth
and whether you would part with it without the use of muscular force. I
am not well read in the ethics of Socialism, because I cannot waste my
time. If a burglar broke into my house, and I caught him stealing my
goods as his fair share, I should not want to read his private
correspondence and hear his views on human affairs, or wish to know if
he had a clean shirt on ere I threw him out of the window or fetched the
police. Socialists do not like sharing their property with others any
more than I do.
I have striven to tell in the brief foregoing details my impressions and
experiences of Robert Louis Stevenson. I hope they may be interesting.
In the books that deal with his life in the South Seas it is little
short of marvellous how tamely his life there is painted, especially
when one thinks that his island home was overrun by semi-civilised
natives and a white population of the most mixed and adventurous people
the world could well place together; and certainly Stevenson was not the
kind of man to travel to the South Seas and seek no other excitement
beyond an afternoon walk or a fashionable dance in an Apia ballroom.
* * * * *
It was somewhere about the period which I am dealing with that a
discussion was going on concerning Father Damien, the celebrated
Catholic priest who had sacrificed his life for the sake of the lepers
at the dread lazaretto on the Isle of Molokai. In my first book of
reminiscences in the South Seas I touched briefly on the few incidents
which I heard from a native friend of mine, Raeltoa the Samoan. And
before I proceed with my later reminiscences of Samoa and elsewhere I
will tell you all I heard about Father Damien whilst I was in Honolulu.
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