I have already referred to the story, An Object of Pity, or the Man Haggard, which was written by my brother and myself in collaboration with the Stevensons. The idea was that each author should describe his or her own character, that Haggard should be the hero of a romance running through the whole, and that we should all imitate the style of Ouida, to whom the booklet was inscribed in a delightful dedication afterwards written by Stevenson, from which I venture to cull a few extracts:
“Lady Ouida,—Many besides yourself have exulted to collect Olympian polysyllables and to sling ink not Wisely but too Well. They are forgotten, you endure. Many have made it their goal and object to Exceed; and who else has been so Excessive?... It is therefore, with a becoming diffidence that we profit by an unusual circumstance to approach and to address you.
“We, undersigned, all persons of ability and good character, were suddenly startled to find ourselves walking in broad day in the halls of one of your romances. We looked about us with embarrassment, we instinctively spoke low; and you were good enough not to perceive the intrusion or to affect unconsciousness. But we were there; we have inhabited your tropical imagination; we have lived in the reality that which you have but dreamed of in your studio. And the Man Haggard above all. The house he dwells in was not built by any carpenter, you wrote it with your pen; the friends with which he has surrounded himself are the mere spirit of your nostrils; and those who look on at his career are kept in a continual twitter lest he should fall out of the volume; in which case, I suppose he must infallibly injure himself beyond repair; and the characters in the same novel, what would become of them?... The present volume has been written slavishly from your own gorgeous but peculiar point of view. Your touch of complaisance in observation, your genial excess of epithet, and the grace of your antiquarian allusions, have been cultivated like the virtues. Could we do otherwise? When nature and life had caught the lyre from your burning hands who were we to affect a sterner independence?”
There follow humorous comments on the contents of the chapters, and the Dedication ends with the signatures of “Your fond admirers” in Samoan with English translations. Mrs. Stevenson, for instance, was “O Le Fafine Mamana O I Le Maunga, The Witch-Woman of the Mountain”; and the rest of us bore like fanciful designations. It was of course absurd daring on the part of Rupert and myself to write the initial chapters, which dealt with an imaginary conspiracy typical of the jealousies among various inhabitants of the Islands, and with our expedition to Malie (Mataafa’s Camp); but we were honoured by the addition of four amusing chapters written by Stevenson, Mrs. Stevenson, Mrs. Strong, and their cousin Graham (now Sir Graham) Balfour. The Stevensons gave a lurid account of Haggard’s evening party at Ruge’s Buildings, and Mr. Balfour projected himself into the future and imagined Haggard old and historic surrounded by friends and evolving memories of the past.
“AN OBJECT OF PITY”
We had kept him in ignorance of what was on foot, but when all was complete the Stevensons gave us luncheon at Vailima with the best of native dishes, Lloyd Osbourne, adorned with leaves and flowers in native fashion, officiating as butler. When the banquet was over a garland of flowers was hung round Haggard’s neck, a tankard of ale was placed before him, and Stevenson read aloud the MSS. replete with allusions to, and jokes about, his various innocent idiosyncrasies. So far from being annoyed, the good-natured hero was quite delighted, and kept on saying, “What a compliment all you people are paying me!” In the end we posed as a group, Mrs. Strong lying on the ground and holding up an apple while the rest of us knelt or bent in various attitudes of adoration round the erect form and smiling countenance of Haggard. The photograph taken did not come out very well, but sufficiently for my mother later on to make a coloured sketch for me to keep as a frontispiece for my special copy of An Object of Pity. It was indeed a happy party—looking back it is sad to think how few of those present now survive, but it was pleasure unalloyed while it lasted.
As for the booklet, with general agreement of the authors I had it privately printed at Sydney, the copies being distributed amongst us. Some years after Stevenson’s death Mr. Blaikie asked leave to print twenty-five presentation copies in the same form as the Edinburgh edition, to which Mrs. Stevenson consented. I wrote an explanatory Preface, and lent for reproduction the clever little book of coloured sketches by Mrs. Strong, with Stevenson’s verses underneath to which I have already alluded.
We had arranged to return to Australia by the American mail-ship, the Mariposa, so after three of the happiest weeks of my life we had to embark on board her on the evening of September 2nd, when she entered the harbour of Apia.
Regret at leaving Samoa was, however, much allayed by meeting my son, Villiers, who had come across America from England in the charge of Sir George Dibbs, our New South Wales Premier, whose visit to the mother-land I have already described. Villiers had grown very tall since we parted, he had finished his Eton career and joined us to spend some months in Australia before going to Oxford. We were amused by an “interview” with him and Dibbs in one of the American papers, in which he was described as son of the Governor of New South Wales, but more like a young Englishman than a young Australian, which was hardly surprising considering that he had at that time never set foot in Australia. This reminds me of some French people who seeing a Maharajah in Paris at the time of Lord Minto’s appointment to India, thought that the dignified and turbaned Indian must be the new Viceroy—the Earl of Minto.
COURAGE OF R. L. STEVENSON