affection to those others to whom I cling, I love better than all
the world besides - my mother. From the opposite end of the table,
my wife, who has been all in all to me, when the days were very
dark, looks to-night into my eyes - while we have both grown a bit
older - with undiminished and undiminishing
affection.
"Childless, yet on either side of me sits that good woman, my
daughter, and the stalwart man, my son, and both have been and are
more than son and daughter to me, and have brought into my life
mirth and beauty. Nor is this all. There sits the bright boy dear
to my heart, full of the flow and the spirits of
boyhood, so that I
can even know that for a time at least we have still the voice of a
child in the house."
Mr A. W. Mackay gives an
account of the
funeral and a description
of the burial-place, ending:
"Tofa Tusitala! Sleep peacefully! on thy mountain-top, alone in
Nature's
sanctity, where the wooddove's note, the moaning of the
waves as they break unceasingly on the distant reef, and the
sighing of the winds in the distant tavai trees chant their
requiem."
The Rev. Mr Clarke tells of the
constant and active interest Mr
Stevenson took in the missionaries and their work, often aiding
them by his advice and fine
insight into the
character of the
natives; and a
translation follows of a dirge by one of the chiefs,
so fine that we must give it:
I.
"Listen, O this world, as I tell of the disaster
That
befell in the late afternoon;
That broke like a wave of the sea
Suddenly and
swiftly, blinding our eyes.
Alas for Loia who speaks tears in his voice!
REFRAIN - Groan and weep, O my heart, in its sorrow.
Alas for Tusitala, who rests in the forest!
Aimlessly we wait, and sorrowing. Will he again return?
Lament, O Vailima,
waiting and ever
waiting!
Let us search and inquire of the captain of ships,
'Be not angry, but has not Tusitala come?'
II.
"Teuila, sorrowing one, come thou
hither!
Prepare me a letter, and I will carry it.
Let her Majesty Victoria be told
That Tusitala, the
loving one, has been taken hence.
REFRAIN - Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.
III.
"Alas! my heart weeps with
anxious grief
As I think of the days before us:
Of the white men
gathering for the Christmas assembly!
Alas for Aolele! left in her loneliness,
And the men of Vailima, who weep together
Their leader - their leader being taken.
REFRAIN - Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.
IV.
"Alas! O my heart! it weeps unceasingly
When I think of his illness
Coming upon him with fatal swiftness.
Would that it waited a glance or a word from him,
Or some token, some token from us of our love.
REFRAIN - Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.
V.
"Grieve, O my heart! I cannot bear to look on
All the chiefs who are there now assembling:
Alas, Tusitala! Thou art not here!
I look
hither and t
hither in vain for thee.
REFRAIN - Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc."
And the little
booklet closes with Mr Stevenson's own lines:
"REQUIEM.
Under the wide and
starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie;
Glad did I live and
gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
'Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea;
And the
hunter home from the hill.'"
Every touch tells here was a man, with heart and head, with soul
and mind
intent on the loftiest things; simple, great,
"Like one of the simple great ones gone
For ever and ever by.
His
character towered after all far above his books; great and
beautiful though they were. Ready for friendship; from all
meanness free. So, too, the Samoans felt. This, surely, was what
Goethe meant when he wrote:
"The clear head and stout heart,
However far they roam,
Yet in every truth have part,
Are everywhere at home."
His manliness, his width of
sympathy, his practicality, his range
of interests were in nothing more seen than in his contributions to
the history of Samoa, as
specially exhibited in A FOOTNOTE TO
HISTORY and his letters to the TIMES. He was, on this side, in no
sense a
dreamer, but a man of acute
observation and quick eye for
passing events and the
characters that were in them with
sympathyequal to his discernments. His portraits of certain Germans and
others in these writings, and his power of tracing effects to
remote and
underlying causes, show
sufficiently what he might have
done in the field of history, had not higher voices called him.
His
adaptation to the life in Samoa, and his
assumption of the
semi-patriarchal
character in his own
sphere there, were only
tokens of the presence of the same traits as have just been dwelt
on.
CHAPTER XI - MISS STUBBS' RECORD OF A PILGRIMAGE
MRS STRONG, in her chapter of TABLE TALK IN MEMORIES OF VAILIMA,
tells a story of the natives' love for Stevenson. "The other day
the cook was away," she writes, "and Louis, who was busy writing,
took his meals in his room. Knowing there was no one to cook his
lunch, he told Sosimo to bring him some bread and
cheese. To his
surprise he was served with an excellent meal - an omelette, a good
salad, and perfect coffee. 'Who cooked this?' asked Louis in
Samoan. 'I did,' said Sosimo. 'Well,' said Louis, 'great is your
wisdom.' Sosimo bowed and corrected him - 'Great is my love!'"
Miss Stubbs, in her STEVENSON'S SHRINE; THE RECORD OF A PILGRIMAGE,
illustrates the same
devotion. On the top of Mount Vaea, she
writes, is the
massive sarcophagus, "not an ideal
structure by any
means, not even beautiful, and yet in its
massive ruggedness it
somehow suited the man and the place."
"The wind sighed
softly in the branches of the 'Tavau' trees, from
out the green recesses of the 'Toi' came the
plaintive coo of the
wood-pigeon. In and out of the branches of the
magnificent 'Fau'
tree, which overhangs the grave, a king-fisher, sea-blue,
iridescent, flitted to and fro,
whilst a
scarlet hibiscus, in full
flower, showed up royally against the gray lichened
cement. All
around was light and life and colour, and I said to myself, 'He is
made one with nature'; he is now, body and soul and spirit,
commingled with the
loveliness around. He who longed in life to
scale the
height, he who attained his wish only in death, has
become in himself a parable of
fulfilment. No need now for that
heart-sick cry:-
"'Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,