[72] The Window in Thrums, with illustrations by W. Hole, R.S.A. Hodder and Stoughton. 1892.
[73] The scheme of the Edinburgh Edition.
XIV
LIFE IN SAMOA—Concluded
FOURTH YEAR AT VAILIMA—THE END
January-December 1894
This new year began for Stevenson with an illness which seemed to leave none of the usual lowering consequences, and for Samoa with fresh rumours of war, which were not realised until the autumn, and then—at least in the shape of serious hostilities—in the district of Atua only and not in his own. On the whole Stevenson’s bodily health and vigour kept at a higher level than during the previous year. But for serious imaginative writing he found himself still unfit, and the sense that his old facility had for the time being failed him caused him much inward misgiving. In his correspondence the misgiving mood was allowed to appear pretty freely; but in personal intercourse his high spirits seemed to his family and visitors as unfailing as ever. Several things happened during the year to give him peculiar pleasure: first, at the beginning of the year, the news of Mr. Baxter’s carefully prepared scheme of the Edinburgh Edition, and of its acceptance by the publishers concerned. On this subject much correspondence naturally passed between him and Mr. Baxter and myself, over and above that which is here published; and finally he resolved to leave all the details of the execution to us. By the early autumn the financial success of the scheme was fully assured and made known to him by cable; but he did not seem altogether to realise the full measure of relief from money anxieties which the assurance was meant to convey to him. Other pleasurable circumstances were the return of Mr. Graham Balfour after a prolonged absence; the visit of a spirited and accomplished young English man of business and of letters, Mr. Sidney Lysaght (see below, pp. 385, 388, etc.); and the frequent society of the officers of H.M.S. Curaçoa, with whom he was on terms of particular regard and cordiality. Lastly, he was very deeply touched and gratified by the action of the native political prisoners, towards whom he had shown much thoughtful kindness during their months of detention, in volunteering as a testimony of gratitude after their release to re-make with their own hands the branch road leading to his house: “the Road of Loving Hearts,” as it came to be christened. Soon afterwards, the anniversaries of his own birthday and of the American Thanks-giving feast brought evidences hardly less welcome, after so much contention and annoyance as the island affairs and politics had involved him in, of the honour and affection in which he was held by all that was best in the white community. By each succeeding mail came stronger proofs from home of the manner in which men of letters of the younger generation had come to regard him as a master, an example, and a friend.
But in spite of all these causes of pleasure, his letters showed that his old invincible spirit of inward cheerfulness was beginning not infrequently to give way to moods of depression and overstrained feeling. The importunity of these moods was no doubt due to some physical premonition that his vital powers, so frail from the cradle and always with so cheerful a courage overtaxed, were near exhaustion. During the first months of the year he attempted little writing; in the late spring and early summer his work was chiefly on the annals of his family and on the tale St. Ives. The latter he found uphill work: after the first ten or twelve chapters, which are in his happiest vein, the narrative, as he himself was painfully aware, began to flag. Towards the end of October he gave it up for the time being and turned to a more arduous task, the tragic Weir of Hermiston. On this theme he felt his inspiration return, and during the month of November and the first days of December wrought once more at the full pitch of his powers and in the conscious delight of their exercise. On the third of December, after a morning of happy work and pleasant correspondence, he was seen gazing long and wistfully toward the forest-clad mountain, on a ledge of which he had desired that he should be buried. In the afternoon he brought his morning’s work to his wife, the most exacting of his critics; asked her whether it was not well done; and in her glow of admiring assent found his confirmation and his reward. Nevertheless she could not throw off an oppressive sense of coming calamity. He was reassuring her with gay and laughing talk when the sudden rupture of a blood-vessel in the brain laid him almost in a moment unconscious at her feet; and before two hours were over he had passed away. All the world knows how his body was carried by the loving hands of his native servants to the burial-place of his choice, and rests there with the words of his own requiem engraved on his tomb—the words which we have seen him putting on paper when he was at grips with death fifteen years before in California—