STEVENSON'S SAMOA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18891, 13 December 1924, Page 1 (Supplement)

STEVENSON'S SAMOA.

FRIENDSH P AT VAILIMA.

BV MATA.VGA.

The quickened interest in Stevenson's Samoa, awakened by the visit of the Faipules, makes memory eling lingeringlv about his life there. It was to an assembly of their fathers that he said—" I love Samoa and her people. 1 love the land. I have chosen it to be my home while 1 live and my grave after I am dead, and I love the people, and have chosen them to be my people to live and die with."

He never regretted the choice. His letters to his old-world friends were full of his sustained enthusiasm for it. " I wouldn't change my present installation." he wrote to one, " for any post, dignity, honour, or advantage conceivable to me. It fills the bill." To another he seut an alluring description : " Our fine days are certainly fine like Heaven; such a blue of the sea, such green of the trees, and such crimson of the hibiscus flowers you never =hw, and the aiir as mild and gentle as a baby's breath." Those who remembered his'long fight against ill health were thrilled to read h's gay praise of his El Dorado —" the s<a. the inlands, the islanders, the island life and climate, make and keep me truh happier." It was not all rase and sunshine. Unbroken calm would not. have suited him. " Hard and interesting and beautiful" were the adjectives that summed its attractions for him. To Sidney Oolvin went ;i tale of a typical day of journeying and service to his adopted " people." a talc that read strangely in bis forsaken Scottish haunts. It closed on an accent of contrast:

After breakfast I rode home. Conceive such an outing, remember the pallid brute that lived in Skerryvore, like a weevil in a biscuit, and receive the intelligence that J was rather better for my journey, twenty miles' ride, sixteen fences taken, ten ot the miles in a drenchitiK rain, seven 01 them tastinc and in the morning chill, and six stricken hours' political discussion by an interpreter, to say nothing of sleeping in a native house at which many of our htterati would have looked askance.

That " world" was " so full of a number ot things" that a kingly happiness triumphed over all its stress and the fear, never wholly absent, that new-won health would crumble at some fell touch—as at last it did.

Troops of Friends. He found a satisfying joy in making troops of friends among the Samoans. He had, above others, the divine gift of attracting the love of those to whom he was a chieftain to bo obeyed. When be left the Gilbert Islands, Tembinok, the last king of that group, gave way to inconsolable grief. "As the time came for our departure." Stevenson wrote m his account of the leave-taking, " Tembinok became greatly changed; a softer, more melancholv, and, in particular, a mora confidential man appeared in Ins stea<l. Jo my wife he contrived laboriously to explain that though he knew he must lose bis father in the course of nature, he had not minded Or" realised it till the moment came; and, now that he was to lose us, he repeated the experience . '.I very sorrv vou go, he said at last. ' Miss Stlevens lie good man. woman he good man. boy he good man, all good man. Woman he smart all same man. My woman,- glancing towards his e f' , r l,e good woman no very smart. I think Miss Stlevens he big chief all the same cap n man-o'-war. 1 think Miss Stlevens he rich man all same me. Aft go schoona. 1 very sorrv. My pal ha he go. my uncle he go, my cutcheons he go, Miss Stlevens he go: all go. You no see King cry before. King all the same man; feel bad, he cry! I very sorry.' " It was always the same. On one of the South Sea voyages Stevenson and his party were detained at a native village for two months. The chief sent a faiewell letter after they left. Of that letter Stevenson wrote—" As for me, I would rather have received it than written ' Rod Gauntlet ' or the Sixth /Eneid." It told nf the chief's looking through his tears !at the. little ship as the. s; its were ! hoisted and the anchor raisec, of his running along the beach, crying his farewells, and then watching the dwindling vessel until the night fell, and of his longing.for the voyager's return to bring back comfort and content-

A Creed WeU Lived. It was the way of R.L.S. to live his creed of friendship, and the island peoples knew it. That creed he once put into words: "If we find but one to whom we can speak out of our heart freely, with whom we can walk in love aud simplicity without dissimulation, wo have no ground of quarrel with the world or God."

Vailima was a focus of friendships. There, " three miles from town, in the midst of great silent forests," with " a burn close by, and when wo are not talking you can hear the burn, and the birds, and the sea breaking on the coast three miles away aud six hundred feet below," there Stevenson held a court, that any monarch might envy. Often he went on his brown horse Jack down to Apia, joining there in entertainments given by the townspeople or the visiting naval 'men. But :it was beneath his own roof-tree that his heart opened most easily; and to know the deepest in him you must see him there. Come up the bush-covered road to that real home. You ran count, on a welcome. Let us choose an hour when the westering sun fills the way with deepening quiet in the shadows. The dusky passers-by already feel the crniing mysterv of' the night, and go swiftly on to their dwellings, fne distant droning of native drums tells of some y c t abroad—a raidinc partv bent on fight But they may be forgotten for soon the house we seek, surrounded with its sloping acres of tropic earden appears above. n

The Altar of Thanksgiving. A war conch breaks the silence near to us. Come softly: it is the call to evening prayer m that homestead where he with "something of the Shorter ('ate: chist gathers his household ere the nicht is over all. °

Through the open door vou see themllip family at one end of' the large hall and the natives in a wide semicircle beneath the great lamp. A young man reads a chapter in Saraoan from th,» Bible; a hymn in that same tongue follows,'and then a wan. spare man. with dark hair falling well back from the temples, kneels and prays aloud. After the liquid Samoan syllables (he English words cut sharp and ringing. They breathe the very atmosphere of Vailima's happy friendship:

■Lord, behold our family lice assembled We thank Thee lor this place in which we dwell; for the love (hat. unites us; for the peace Recorded ua this day: for ;he hone with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food, and the blight skies that make our lives delightful: for our mends in nil ports of the earth, and our lriendly helpers in this foreign isle. Let peace abound in our small company Puree out of every heart the lurking grudge • rive us grace and strength to forbeai and to persevere. Offenders, five us the grace to accept and to forgive offenders. Forgetful ourselves, help us to hear cheerfully the forgetfulneas of others. Give us courage and gajety and the quiet mind. Sparc to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Ules3 us, ,i ,t may be, m all our innocent endeavours. If it, may no t, give us the sirengtl) to encounter that which is to conn\ that we he brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down t<; i[e Rules of death loyal and loving one to another. As the clay to the potter, as the wndmill to the wind, as children of their sire, we beseech of Thee this help and mercy for Christ's sake

l'he English words, gently strong, merge into the Samoan version of the Lord's Prayer said in unison, and quietly the group stirs and dissolves. Is it any wonder that to Vaea's summit there was cut in a night by forty darkskinned men a pathway for'his worn-out body, or that on one id' the two bronze tablets up there men read with understanding eye-, an inscription in Samoan— " The resting place of Tusitala : Thy country shall I:e my country and thv God my God." ''.