For a decade the grave lay untended. At the moment of death, the silence is deep. The pain is too fresh. Out of very love neglect is justifiable, for it is the train of dejected mourners who cannot think of niceties. But then come the "knockers at the gate," they who know nothing of the frailties of men and revel in an immortality that is memory.
I paused frequently during that half-hour climb. Cooing doves called to one another understandingly across the death-like stillness which filled the valley below. From the direction of Apia came the sound of the lali, which seemed only to quicken mystery into being. I breathed more heavily. There, alone on the slopes of that peak, with the only thing that makes it memorable beneath the sod on the summit, I felt strangely in touch with the dead. The isolation gave distinction to him who had been laid there, which no monument, however superb, can give in the crowded graveyard. The personality of the departed hovers round in the silence.
Still, the thought of death itself is alien here. Fear is barren. One climbs on with an easy, smiling recognition of the summit of all things,—not as death, but as life. Oh, the sweet silence that muffles all!
A strange relapse into the ordinary came to me as I reached the top. I took a picture of the tomb, gazed out across the hazy blue world about,—and thought of nothing. I was not disappointed, nor sad. Had I found myself sinking, dying, I believe that it would not have ruffled my emotions any more than the flight of a bird leaves ripples in the air. Below, five miles away, the waves broke upon the reefs and spread in smooth foam which reached endlessly toward the shore. "It is better to travel than to arrive," they seemed to say to me across the void.
The red hibiscus was in bloom around the tomb. A sweet-scented yellow flower made the air heavy with its rich perfume. The trees speckled the simple concrete casing over the grave with their restless little shadow leaves. The spot was cool and free from growths. And it was, then, a symbol of a quarter of a century made real.
Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will.
Savage, child, romancer, literary stylist,—all have been under the influence of this wandering Scotsman, and the manner of showing him love and gratitude has been not in imitation only. At Monterey in California he was nursed by an old Frenchman through a long period of illness; in semi-savage Samoa men untutored in our codes of affection beat not a path but a road to his door, and carried his body up the steep slope of Mount Vaea. And the month before I stood beside his tomb, the ashes of his wife and devoted helpmate were deposited beside him by his stepdaughter, who had journeyed all the way from California to unite their remains.
Tusitala, the tale-teller, the natives called him, and in the sheer music of that strange word one senses something of the regard it was meant to convey. And in the years to come, when Samoans become a nation in the Pacific, part of the Polynesian group, Tusitala will doubtless be one of the heroes, tales of whose beneficence will light the way for little Polynesians growing to manhood.
It was becoming too hot up there on the peak for me before breakfast-time was over, so I slipped down into the valley. At the barracks the soldiers invited me to have a bite with them. The simple porridge, the crude utensils, the bare benches would elsewhere after so long a walk and so steep a climb have been a Godsend; but here, in the tropics, it seemed that more would have been a waste of human life. The sergeant-at-arms asked me if I should like to have some breadfruit. He stepped out into the yard and gathered a round, luscious melon-like fruit which, when cut, opened the doors of alimentary bliss to me. The trees grow in bisexual pairs, male and female, the female tree bearing the fruit.
The sergeant then took me to Vailima, Stevenson's last home, now the residence of the governor-general. It was, of course, stripped of everything which once was Stevenson's, and had acquired wings and porticos, gaunt and disproportioned. I could not work up any sentimental regret at this change, for that is what Stevenson himself would have wished. The best way to preserve a thing is to keep it growing. Stevenson worked here for four years; others may tamper with it for four hundred years without completely obliterating the character given it by its first maker.