_Sept._ 5_th_, 1893, _Vailima Plantation_, _Upolu_, _Samoa_.
MY DEAR MEREDITH,—I have again and again taken up the pen to write to
you, and many beginnings have gone into the waste paper basket (I have
one now—for the second time in my life—and feel a big man on the strength
of it). And no doubt it requires some decision to break so long a
silence. My health is vastly restored, and I am now living patriarchally
in this place six hundred feet above the sea on the shoulder of a
mountain of 1500. Behind me, the unbroken bush slopes up to the backbone
of the island (3 to 4000) without a house, with no inhabitants save a few
runaway black boys, wild pigs and cattle, and wild doves and flying
foxes, and many parti-coloured birds, and many black, and many white: a
very eerie, dim, strange place and hard to travel. I am the head of a
household of five whites, and of twelve Samoans, to all of whom I am the
chief and father: my cook comes to me and asks leave to marry—and his
mother, a fine old chief woman, who has never lived here, does the same.
You may be sure I granted the petition. It is a life of great interest,
complicated by the Tower of Babel, that old enemy. And I have all the
time on my hands for literary work. My house is a great place; we have a
hall fifty feet long with a great red-wood stair ascending from it, where
we dine in state—myself usually dressed in a singlet and a pair of
trousers—and attended on by servants in a single garment, a kind of
kilt—also flowers and leaves—and their hair often powdered with lime.
The European who came upon it suddenly would think it was a dream. We
have prayers on Sunday night—I am a perfect pariah in the island not to
have them oftener, but the spirit is unwilling and the flesh proud, and I
cannot go it more. It is strange to see the long line of the brown folk
crouched along the wall with lanterns at intervals before them in the big
shadowy hall, with an oak cabinet at one end of it and a group of Rodin’s
(which native taste regards as _prodigieusement leste_) presiding over
all from the top—and to hear the long rambling Samoan hymn rolling up
(God bless me, what style! But I am off business to-day, and this is not
meant to be literature.).
I have asked Colvin to send you a copy of _Catriona_, which I am
sometimes tempted to think is about my best work. I hear word
occasionally of the _Amazing Marriage_. It will be a brave day for me
when I get hold of it. Gower Woodseer is now an ancient, lean, grim,
exiled Scot, living and labouring as for a wager in the tropics; still
active, still with lots of fire in him, but the youth—ah, the youth where
is it? For years after I came here, the critics (those genial gentlemen)
used to deplore the relaxation of my fibre and the idleness to which I
had succumbed. I hear less of this now; the next thing is they will tell
me I am writing myself out! and that my unconscientious conduct is
bringing their grey hairs with sorrow to the dust. I do not know—I mean
I do know one thing. For fourteen years I have not had a day’s real
health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my
work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it,
written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing,
written when my head swam for weakness; and for so long, it seems to me I
have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been
rightly speaking since first I came to the Pacific; and still, few are
the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes
on—ill or well, is a trifle; so as it goes. I was made for a contest,
and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy,
inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle. At least I have not
failed, but I would have preferred a place of trumpetings and the open
air over my head.
This is a devilish egotistical yarn. Will you try to imitate me in that
if the spirit ever moves you to reply? And meantime be sure that away in
the midst of the Pacific there is a house on a wooded island where the
name of George Meredith is very dear, and his memory (since it must be no
more) is continually honoured.—Ever your friend,