[_Vailima_, _May_ 1891.]
MY DEAR ADELAIDE,—I will own you just did manage to tread on my gouty
toe; and I beg to assure you with most people I should simply have turned
away and said no more. My cudgelling was therefore in the nature of a
caress or testimonial.
God forbid, I should seem to judge for you on such a point; it was what
you seemed to set forth as your reasons that fluttered my old
Presbyterian spirit—for, mind you, I am a child of the Covenanters—whom I
do not love, but they are mine after all, my father’s and my mother’s—and
they had their merits too, and their ugly beauties, and grotesque
heroisms, that I love them for, the while I laugh at them; but in their
name and mine do what you think right, and let the world fall. That is
the privilege and the duty of private persons; and I shall think the more
of you at the greater distance, because you keep a promise to your
fellow-man, your helper and creditor in life, by just so much as I was
tempted to think the less of you (O not much, or I would never have been
angry) when I thought you were the swallower of a (tinfoil) formula.
I must say I was uneasy about my letter, not because it was too strong as
an expression of my unregenerate sentiments, but because I knew full well
it should be followed by something kinder. And the mischief has been in
my health. I fell sharply sick in Sydney, was put aboard the _Lübeck_
pretty bad, got to Vailima, hung on a month there, and didn’t pick up as
well as my work needed; set off on a journey, gained a great deal, lost
it again; and am back at Vailima, still no good at my necessary work. I
tell you this for my imperfect excuse that I should not have written you
again sooner to remove the bad taste of my last.
A road has been called Adelaide Road; it leads from the back of our house
to the bridge, and thence to the garden, and by a bifurcation to the pig
pen. It is thus much traversed, particularly by Fanny. An oleander, the
only one of your seeds that prospered in this climate, grows there; and
the name is now some week or ten days applied and published. ADELAIDE
ROAD leads also into the bush, to the banana patch, and by a second
bifurcation over the left branch of the stream to the plateau and the
right hand of the gorges. In short, it leads to all sorts of good, and
is, besides, in itself a pretty winding path, bound downhill among big
woods to the margin of the stream.
What a strange idea, to think me a Jew-hater! Isaiah and David and Heine
are good enough for me; and I leave more unsaid. Were I of Jew blood, I
do not think I could ever forgive the Christians; the ghettos would get
in my nostrils like mustard or lit gunpowder. Just so you as being a
child of the Presbytery, I retain—I need not dwell on that. The
ascendant hand is what I feel most strongly; I am bound in and in with my
forbears; were he one of mine, I should not be struck at all by Mr. Moss
of Bevis Marks, I should still see behind him Moses of the Mount and the
Tables and the shining face. We are all nobly born; fortunate those who
know it; blessed those who remember.