OF SCOTLAND AND SAMOA,
I DEDICATE THESE STORIES OF THAT
GREY GALLOWAY LAND
WHERE
ABOUT THE GRAVES OF THE MARTYRS
THE WHAUPS ARE CRYING--
HIS HEART REMEMBERS HOW.
Still much fearing and trembling, how needlessly I guessed not then, I
packed up and despatched a copy to Samoa. Whereupon, after due
interval, there came back to these shores a letter--the sense of which
reached me deviously--not to myself but to his friend, Mr. Sidney
Colvin. "If I could only be buried in the hills, under the heather, and
a table tombstone like the martyrs; 'where the whaups and plovers are
crying!' Did you see a man who wrote 'The Stickit Minister,' and
dedicated it to me, in words that brought the tears to my eyes every
time I looked at them? 'Where about the graves of the martyrs the
whaups are crying--his heart remembers how.' Ah, by God, it does!
Singular that I should fulfil the Scots destiny throughout, and live a
voluntary exile and have my head filled with the blessed, beastly place
all the time!"
To another friend he added some criticism of the book. "Some of the
tales seem to me a trifle light, and one, at least, is too slender and
fantastic--qualities that rarely mingle well." (How oft in the stilly
night have I wondered which one he meant!) "But the whole book breathes
admirably of the soil. 'The Stickit Minister,' 'The Heather Lintie,'
are two that appeal to me particularly. They are drowned in Scotland.
They have refreshed me like a visit home. 'Cleg Kelly' also is a
delightful fellow. I have enjoyed his acquaintance particularly."
Curiously enough, it was not from Samoa, but from Honolulu, that I first
received tidings that my little volume had not miscarried. It was quite
characteristic of Mr. Stevenson not to answer at once: "I let my
letters accumulate till I am leaving a place," he said to me more than
once; "then I lock myself in with them, and my cries of penitence can be
heard a mile!"
In a San Francisco paper there appeared a report of a speech he had made
to some kindly Scots who entertained him in Honolulu, In it he spoke
affectionately of "The Stickit Minister." I have, alas! lost the
reference now, but at the time it took me by the throat. I could not
get over the sheer kindness of the thing.
Then came a letter and a poem, both very precious to me:
"Thank you from my heart, and see with what dull pedantry I have been
tempted to extend your beautiful phrase of prose into three indifferent
stanzas:
"Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying;
Blows the wind on the moors to-day, and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying--
My heart remembers how!
Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,
Standing Stones on the vacant, wine-red moor;
Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races,
And winds austere and pure!
Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,
Hills of home! and to hear again the call--
Hear about the graves of the martyrs the pee-wees crying,
And hear no more at all."
To me, in the all too brief days that remained to him, he wrote letter
after letter of criticism, encouragement, and praise (in which last, as
was his wont, he let his kind heart run far ahead of his judgment). It
goes to my heart now not to quote from these, for they are in some wise
my poor patent of nobility. But, perhaps with more wisdom, I keep them
by me, to hearten myself withal when the days of darkness grow too many
and too dark.
So much for bush to this second draught of countryside vintage--the more
easily forgiven that it tells of the generosity of a dead man whom I
loved. But and if in any fields Elysian or grey twilight of shades, I
chance to meet with Robert Louis Stevenson, I know that I shall find him
in act to help over some ghostly stile, the halt, the maimed, and the
faint of heart---even as in these late earthly years he did for me--and
for many another.