X
TO AUSTIN STRONG
Jan. 27, 1893.
Dear General Hoskyns,—I have the honour to report as usual. Your giddy mother having gone planting a flower-garden, I am obliged to write with my own hand, and, of course, nobody will be able to read it. This has been a very mean kind of a month. Aunt Maggie left with the influenza. We have heard of her from Sydney, and she is all right again; but we have inherited her influenza, and it made a poor place of Vailima. We had Talolo, Mitaele, Sosimo, Iopu, Sina, Misifolo, and myself, all sick in bed at the same time; and was not that a pretty dish to set before the king! The big hall of the new house having no furniture, the sick pitched their tents in it,—I mean their mosquito-nets,—like a military camp. The Tamaitai and your mother went about looking after them, and managed to get us something to eat. Henry, the good boy! though he was getting it himself, did housework, and went round at night from one mosquito-net to another, praying with the sick. Sina, too, was as good as gold, and helped us greatly. We shall always like her better. All the time—I do not know how they managed—your mother found the time to come and write for me; and for three days, as I had my old trouble on, and had to play dumb man, I dictated a novel in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet. But now we are all recovered, and getting to feel quite fit. A new paddock has been made; the wires come right up to the top of the hill, pass within twenty yards of the big clump of flowers (if you remember that) and by the end of the pineapple patch. The Tamaitai and your mother and I all sleep in the upper story of the new house; Uncle Lloyd is alone in the workman’s cottage; and there is nobody at all at night in the old house, but ants and cats and mosquitoes. The whole inside of the new house is varnished. It is a beautiful golden-brown by day, and in lamplight all black and sparkle. In the corner of the hall the new safe is built in, and looks as if it had millions of pounds in it; but I do not think there is much more than twenty dollars and a spoon or two; so the man that opens it will have a great deal of trouble for nothing. Our great fear is lest we should forget how to open it; but it will look just as well if we can’t. Poor Misifolo—you remember the thin boy, do you not?—had a desperate attack of influenza; and he was in a great taking. You would not like to be very sick in some savage place in the islands, and have only the savages to doctor you? Well, that was just the way he felt. “It is all very well,” he thought, “to let these childish white people doctor a sore foot or a toothache, but this is serious—I might die of this! For goodness’ sake let me get away into a draughty native house, where I can lie in cold gravel, eat green bananas, and have a real grown-up, tattooed man to raise spirits and say charms over me.” A day or two we kept him quiet, and got him much better. Then he said he must go. He had had his back broken in his own islands, he said; it had come broken again, and he must go away to a native house and have it mended. “Confound your back!” said we; “lie down in your bed.” At last, one day, his fever was quite gone, and he could give his mind to the broken back entirely. He lay in the hall; I was in the room alone; all morning and noon I heard him roaring like a bull calf, so that the floor shook with it. It was plainly humbug; it had the humbugging sound of a bad child crying; and about two of the afternoon we were worn out, and told him he might go. Off he set. He was in some kind of a white wrapping, with a great white turban on his head, as pale as clay, and walked leaning on a stick. But, O, he was a glad boy to get away from these foolish, savage, childish white people, and get his broken back put right by somebody with some sense. He nearly died that night, and little wonder! but he has now got better again, and long may it last! All the others were quite good, trusted us wholly, and stayed to be cured where they were. But then he was quite right, if you look at it from his point of view; for, though we may be very clever, we do not set up to cure broken backs. If a man has his back broken we white people can do nothing at all but bury him. And was he not wise, since that was his complaint, to go to folks who could do more?
Best love to yourself, and Louie, and Aunt Nellie, and apologies for so dull a letter from your respectful and affectionate
Uncle Louis.
[13] The lady to whom the first three of these letters are addressed “used to hear” (writes Mr. Lloyd Osbourne) “so frequently of the ‘boys’ in Vailima, that she wrote and asked Mr. Stevenson for news of them, as it would so much interest her little girls. In the tropics, for some reason or other that it is impossible to understand, servants and work-people are always called ‘boys,’ though the years of Methuselah may have whitened their heads, and great-grandchildren prattle about their knees. Mr. Stevenson was amused to think that his ‘boys,’ who ranged from eighteen years of age to threescore and ten, should be mistaken for little youngsters; but he was touched to hear of the sick children his friend tried so hard to entertain, and gladly wrote a few letters to them. He would have written more but for the fact that his friend left the home, being transferred elsewhere.”
[14] Come-a-thousand.
[15] The German company, from which we got our black boy Arick, owns and cultivates many thousands of acres in Samoa, and keeps at least a thousand black people to work on its plantations. Two schooners are always busy in bringing fresh batches to Samoa, and in taking home to their own islands the men who have worked out their three years’ term of labour. This traffic in human beings is called the “labour trade,” and is the life’s blood, not only of the great German company, but of all the planters in Fiji, Queensland, New Caledonia, German New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and the New Hebrides. The difference between the labour trade, as it is now carried on under Government supervision, and the slave trade is a great one, but not great enough to please sensitive people. In Samoa the missionaries are not allowed by the company to teach these poor savages religion, or to do anything to civilise them and raise them from their monkey-like ignorance. But in other respects the company is not a bad master, and treats its people pretty well. The system, however, is one that cannot be defended and must sooner or later be suppressed.—[L.O.]