_Honolulu_ [_March_ 1889].
MY DEAR JAMES,—Yes—I own up—I am untrue to friendship and (what is less,
but still considerable) to civilisation. I am not coming home for
another year. There it is, cold and bald, and now you won’t believe in
me at all, and serve me right (says you) and the devil take me. But look
here, and judge me tenderly. I have had more fun and pleasure of my life
these past months than ever before, and more health than any time in ten
long years. And even here in Honolulu I have withered in the cold; and
this precious deep is filled with islands, which we may still visit; and
though the sea is a deathful place, I like to be there, and like squalls
(when they are over); and to draw near to a new island, I cannot say how
much I like. In short, I take another year of this sort of life, and
mean to try to work down among the poisoned arrows, and mean (if it may
be) to come back again when the thing is through, and converse with Henry
James as heretofore; and in the meanwhile issue directions to H. J. to
write to me once more. Let him address here at Honolulu, for my views
are vague; and if it is sent here it will follow and find me, if I am to
be found; and if I am not to be found the man James will have done his
duty, and we shall be at the bottom of the sea, where no post-office
clerk can be expected to discover us, or languishing on a coral island,
the philosophic drudges of some barbarian potentate: perchance, of an
American Missionary. My wife has just sent to Mrs. Sitwell a translation
(_tant bien que mal_) of a letter I have had from my chief friend in this
part of the world: go and see her, and get a hearing of it; it will do
you good; it is a better method of correspondence than even Henry
James’s. {141} I jest, but seriously it is a strange thing for a tough,
sick, middle-aged scrivener like R. L. S. to receive a letter so
conceived from a man fifty years old, a leading politician, a crack
orator, and the great wit of his village: boldly say, ‘the highly popular
M.P. of Tautira.’ My nineteenth century strikes here, and lies alongside
of something beautiful and ancient. I think the receipt of such a letter
might humble, shall I say even —? and for me, I would rather have
received it than written _Redgauntlet_ or the _Sixth Æneid_. All told,
if my books have enabled or helped me to make this voyage, to know Rui,
and to have received such a letter, they have (in the old prefatorial
expression) not been writ in vain. It would seem from this that I have
been not so much humbled as puffed up; but, I assure you, I have in fact
been both. A little of what that letter says is my own earning; not all,
but yet a little; and the little makes me proud, and all the rest
ashamed; and in the contrast, how much more beautiful altogether is the
ancient man than him of to-day!
Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he _is_ of the nineteenth
century, and that glaringly. And to curry favour with him, I wish I
could be more explicit; but, indeed, I am still of necessity extremely
vague, and cannot tell what I am to do, nor where I am to go for some
while yet. As soon as I am sure, you shall hear. All are fairly
well—the wife, your countrywoman, least of all; troubles are not entirely
wanting; but on the whole we prosper, and we are all affectionately
yours,