Vailima Letters (eBook)

CHAPTER XV  JAN 31ST, '92.

 MY DEAR COLVIN, - No letter at all from you, and this scratch  from me!  Here is a year that opens ill.  Lloyd is off to  'the coast' sick - THE COAST means California over most of  the Pacific - I have been down all month with influenza, and  am just recovering - I am overlaid with proofs, which I am  just about half fit to attend to.  One of my horses died this  morning, and another is now dying on the front lawn - Lloyd's  horse and Fanny's.  Such is my quarrel with destiny.  But I  am mending famously, come and go on the balcony, have  perfectly good nights, and though I still cough, have no  oppression and no hemorrhage and no fever.  So if I can find  time and courage to add no more, you will know my news is not  altogether of the worst; a year or two ago, and what a state  I should have been in now!  Your silence, I own, rather  alarms me.  But I tell myself you have just miscarried; had  you been too ill to write, some one would have written me.   Understand, I send this brief scratch not because I am unfit  to write more, but because I have 58 galleys of the WRECKER  and 102 of the BEACH OF FALESA to get overhauled somehow or  other in time for the mail, and for three weeks I have not  touched a pen with my finger.

 FEB. 1ST.

 The second horse is still alive, but I still think dying.   The first was buried this morning.  My proofs are done; it  was a rough two days of it, but done.  CONSUMMATUM EST; NA  UMA.  I believe the WRECKER ends well; if I know what a good  yarn is, the last four chapters make a good yarn - but pretty  horrible.  THE BEACH OF FALESA I still think well of, but it  seems it's immoral and there's a to-do, and financially it  may prove a heavy disappointment.  The plaintive request sent  to me, to make the young folks married properly before 'that  night,' I refused; you will see what would be left of the  yarn, had I consented.  This is a poison bad world for the  romancer, this Anglo-Saxon world; I usually get out of it by  not having any women in it at all; but when I remember I had  the TREASURE OF FRANCHARD refused as unfit for a family  magazine, I feel despair weigh upon my wrists.

As I know you are always interested in novels, I must tell  you that a new one is now entirely planned.  It is to be  called SOPHIA SCARLET, and is in two parts.  Part I. The  Vanilla Planter.  Part II. The Overseers.  No chapters, I  think; just two dense blocks of narrative, the first of which  is purely sentimental, but the second has some rows and  quarrels, and winds up with an explosion, if you please!  I  am just burning to get at Sophia, but I MUST do this Samoan  journalism - that's a cursed duty.  The first part of Sophia,  bar the first twenty or thirty pages, writes itself; the  second is more difficult, involving a good many characters -  about ten, I think - who have to be kept all moving, and give  the effect of a society.  I have three women to handle, out  and well-away! but only Sophia is in full tone.  Sophia and  two men, Windermere, the Vanilla Planter, who dies at the end  of Part I., and Rainsforth, who only appears in the beginning  of Part II.  The fact is, I blush to own it, but Sophia is a  REGULAR NOVEL; heroine and hero, and false accusation, and  love, and marriage, and all the rest of it - all planted in a  big South Sea plantation run by ex-English officers - A LA  Stewart's plantation in Tahiti.  There is a strong  undercurrent of labour trade, which gives it a kind of Uncle  Tom flavour, ABSIT OMEN!  The first start is hard; it is hard  to avoid a little tedium here, but I think by beginning with  the arrival of the three Miss Scarlets hot from school and  society in England, I may manage to slide in the information.   The problem is exactly a Balzac one, and I wish I had his  fist - for I have already a better method - the kinetic,  whereas he continually allowed himself to be led into the  static.  But then he had the fist, and the most I can hope is  to get out of it with a modicum of grace and energy, but for  sure without the strong impression, the full, dark brush.   Three people have had it, the real creator's brush: Scott,  see much of THE ANTIQUARY and THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN  (especially all round the trial, before, during, and after) -  Balzac - and Thackeray in VANITY FAIR.  Everybody else either  paints THIN, or has to stop to paint, or paints excitedly, so  that you see the author skipping before his canvas.  Here is  a long way from poor Sophia Scarlet!

This day is published SOPHIA SCARLET By ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

CHAPTER XVI

FEB. 1892.

 MY DEAR COLVIN, - This has been a busyish month for a sick  man.  First, Faauma - the bronze candlestick, whom otherwise  I called my butler - bolted from the bed and bosom of  Lafaele, the Archangel Hercules, prefect of the cattle.   There was the deuce to pay, and Hercules was inconsolable,  and immediately started out after a new wife, and has had one  up on a visit, but says she has 'no conversation'; and I  think he will take back the erring and possibly repentant  candlestick; whom we all devoutly prefer, as she is not only  highly decorative, but good-natured, and if she does little  work makes no rows.  I tell this lightly, but it really was a  heavy business; many were accused of complicity, and Rafael  was really very sorry.  I had to hold beds of justice -  literally - seated in my bed and surrounded by lying Samoans  seated on the floor; and there were many picturesque and  still inexplicable passages.  It is hard to reach the truth  in these islands.

The next incident overlapped with this.  S. and Fanny found  three strange horses in the paddock: for long now the boys  have been forbidden to leave their horses here one hour  because our grass is over-grazed.  S. came up with the news,  and I saw I must now strike a blow.  'To the pound with the  lot,' said I.  He proposed taking the three himself, but I  thought that too dangerous an experiment, said I should go  too, and hurried into my boots so as to show decision taken,  in the necessary interviews.  They came of course - the  interviews - and I explained what I was going to do at huge  length, and stuck to my guns.  I am glad to say the natives,  with their usual (purely speculative) sense of justice highly  approved the step after reflection.  Meanwhile off went S.  and I with the three CORPORA DELICTI; and a good job I went!   Once, when our circus began to kick, we thought all was up;  but we got them down all sound in wind and limb.  I judged I  was much fallen off from my Elliott forefathers, who managed  this class of business with neatness and despatch.  Half-way  down it came on to rain tropic style, and I came back from my  outing drenched liked a drowned man - I was literally blinded  as I came back among these sheets of water; and the  consequence was I was laid down with diarrhoea and  threatenings of Samoa colic for the inside of another week.

I have a confession to make.  When I was sick I tried to get  to work to finish that Samoa thing, wouldn't go; and at last,  in the colic time, I slid off into DAVID BALFOUR, some 50  pages of which are drafted, and like me well.  Really I think  it is spirited; and there's a heroine that (up to now) seems  to have attractions: ABSIT OMEN!  David, on the whole, seems  excellent.  Alan does not come in till the tenth chapter, and  I am only at the eighth, so I don't know if I can find him  again; but David is on his feet, and doing well, and very  much in love, and mixed up with the Lord Advocate and the  (untitled) Lord Lovat, and all manner of great folk.  And the  tale interferes with my eating and sleeping.  The join is  bad; I have not thought to strain too much for continuity; so  this part be alive, I shall be content.  But there's no doubt  David seems to have changed his style, de'il ha'e him!  And  much I care, if the tale travel!

 FRIDAY, FEB. ?? 19TH?

 Two incidents to-day which I must narrate.  After lunch, it  was raining pitilessly; we were sitting in my mother's  bedroom, and I was reading aloud Kinglake's Charge of the  Light Brigade, and we had just been all seized by the horses  aligning with Lord George Paget, when a figure appeared on  the verandah; a little, slim, small figure of a lad, with  blond (I.E. limed) hair, a propitiatory smile, and a nose  that alone of all his features grew pale with anxiety.  'I  come here stop,' was about the outside of his English; and I  began at once to guess that he was a runaway labourer, and  that the bush-knife in his hand was stolen.  It proved he had  a mate, who had lacked his courage, and was hidden down the  road; they had both made up their minds to run...