The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez [english novels for students txt] 📗

done him a mortal injury; but when, after we were in bed and half asleep, he started saw-filing again, I wished I had."

The hurricane season now came on, and wild tropic storms, of a violence of which they had never before dreamed, beat on the little house in the clearing with terrifying fury. "We had a very heavy rainstorm," the diary records, "with thunder and lightning. At night the rain fell so noisily that we could not hear each other speak, and it seemed as though the house must be crushed in by the weight of water falling on it. In the middle of the night Louis arose, made a light, and fell to writing verses. I was troubled about the taller corn--lest it be broken down and spoiled. Yet all went well, for the verses turned out not badly and the corn stood as straight as I could have wished it to do.

"The banana patch is pretty well cleared, but it is difficult to keep men at work there. 'Too many devils, me 'fraid,' explained Lafaele when he came back sooner than I had anticipated. There are devils everywhere in the bush, it is said; creatures that take on the semblance of man and kill those with whom they converse, but our banana patch seems to be exceptionally cursed with the presence of these demons."

Indeed, to be alone in the jungle is a solemn thing, even for people of stronger mentality than the superstitious natives. The vegetation is so dense that there are no shadows, and, the location of the sun being an unsolvable mystery, one becomes affected by a strange lost feeling. The loneliness, the silence, the impossibility of seeing far into the surrounding wall of foliage, all oppress the soul, and strange alarms attack the most hardy. Then at night, when there is no moon and the darkness is thick, a phosphorescent light, due to decaying wood, shines fearsomely all about on the ground, so that it seems, as Louis said, "like picking one's way over the mouth of hell." "We ourselves," writes Mrs. Stevenson, "have become infected with the native fear of the spirits. Louis has been cutting a path in the bush, and he confesses that the sight of anything like a human figure would send him flying like the wind with his heart in his mouth. One night the world seemed full of strange supernatural noises. When Louis whispered 'Listen! What's that?' I felt as though cold water had been poured down my back, but it was only the hissing of a fire in the clearing. The same night we were waked by sounds of terror in the henhouse. Paul, Louis, and I ran out with one accord, but could see nothing. In the morning we found the body of a pullet with its heart torn out. Simile says that the murderer is a certain small and beautiful bird, but we were quite in the mood to believe it an
aitu ."

Notwithstanding the slow progress caused by inefficient help and the difficulty of getting materials up the steep road to their plantation, they could see their home gradually growing around them. Mr. Stevenson's health was better than it had been since their marriage, and a deep content settled gently upon their long-harassed spirits. Something of this is reflected in an entry made in her diary on a certain beautiful, still evening: "It is now half-past eight and very dark, for the moon is not yet up and the sky is overcast. The air is fresh and sweetly damp and redolent of many scented leaves and flowers. I can hear the sea on Apia beach; the sound of it is regular, like hoarse breathing, or even more like the rhythmic purring of a gigantic cat. Crickets and tree frogs and innumerable other insects and small beasts are chirping and pecking with various noises that mingle harmoniously. Occasionally a bird calls with a startling cry--perhaps the very bird that murdered my poor pullet. When I stood in the doorway and looked in, the room seemed to be glowing with color, glowing and melting, and yet there is nothing to go upon but the tapa on the walls, the coral, the pink and maroon window curtains of the coarsest cotton print, a ragged old ink-spotted table-cover, a few print-covered pillows, and the pandanus mats on the floor. Louis's books, with their bindings of blue and green, to say nothing of gold lettering, help greatly on the six shelves, and the two kava bowls that I have worked as hard to color as a young man with his first meerschaum have taken on a fine opalescent coating." This, of course, was when they were living in the temporary quarters while the main house was being built.

The entry of November 15 gives us an amusing tale of the horses: "The cart horses, a couple of large, mild-eyed, gentle, dappled grays, have arrived from Auckland. It was pleasant to see them fall upon the grass after their tedious sea voyage. Just as we were thinking about going to bed, an alarming noise was heard from the direction of the stable. It had been raining hard all day and was still drizzling. The weeds on the way to the stable were up to my waist and dripping with water. The prospect was not inviting, but we nobly marched out with the lantern and an umbrella. As we entered the enclosure where the stable stands, or rather stood, we became aware of two large white objects showing indistinctly through the darkness. A little nearer and our two horses were looking us in the face. They had eaten the sides and ends of their house quite away. They must have thought it odd to be housed in an edible stable.[44] When we entered they received us with every sign of welcome, but we were dismayed to find them tangled with each other and the wreck of the partition. Louis crawled in under the big hairy feet, and, after much labor, got one wet knot untangled, the horses meanwhile smelling and nosing about the top of his head. He said he expected at every moment to have it bitten off, for, he argued, if the horses found a stable edible, in these outlandish parts, they might easily conceive the idea of sampling the hostler.... I am interrupted at this moment by Simile at the door to ask a question. I wish I could take a photograph as he stands at the door, with the steady eyes of a capable man of affairs, but the dress of a houri; about his loins he has twisted a piece of white cotton; a broad garland of drooping ferns passes over his forehead, crosses at the back of his head, and coming forward round his neck is fastened in a knot of greenery on his breast. He is rather a plain young man, but he looks really lovely just now, and the incongruous expression of his eyes heightens the effect.

[Footnote 44: The stable was probably made of pandanus
leaves, like the native houses.]

"Yesterday we had a terrific storm, quite alarming to people living in such a vulnerable abode. Even when the weather is fair the house shakes as though it would fall if any one comes upstairs rapidly, and the slight iron roof is entirely open at the eaves to catch any wind that blows. We could not keep a lamp burning, and the lantern kept for such emergencies having been broken by Paul, we were in semi-darkness. Late in the afternoon a cloud enveloped us so that we could see no farther than in a London fog. From that time the gale increased, lashing the branches of the trees together, and sometimes twisting their trunks and throwing them to the ground. We could see the rain through the windows driving in layers, one sheet above another. Occasionally there was an ominous thrashing on the iron roof as though the great hardwood tree alongside of the house meant to do us an injury. Water poured in under our ill-fitting doors, the matches were too damp to light, and the general discomfort and sloppiness gave one quite the feeling of being at sea. I wished we might reef in some of our green tree sails, which reminded me of Ah Fu's terror of the land and longing to be at sea in bad weather. Simile and his boys are building or, rather, excavating, a hurricane refuge. I went to see it yesterday and found it a big mudhole with immense boulders heaving up from the bottom. I advised the instant digging of a ditch unless they wished to use it for a bathing pool. The hole must be pretty well filled up by to-day, for last night the rain came down in awful torrents. For the last two days the evening light has been very strange and disquieting--a whitish glare in the sky, the trees and bare ground a burnt-sienna red, and the vegetation a strong crude green with a delicate white bloom. The rain is still pouring and the whole world is damp and uncomfortable."

The hurricanes were varied now and then by earthquakes, of which they felt two distinct shocks on January 13. To add to these discomforts, tiny visitors from the jungle gave them many pin-pricks of annoyance. "It is strange," says the diary, "that each night has its separate plague of insects. The mosquitoes, of course, are always with us, and Simile's hurricane cellar has become a fine breeding place for them. But on one night moths are our torment, while perhaps the very next night it will be myriads of small black beetles. At another time the creatures may be of a large cockshafer sort, or a dreadful square-tailed thing that is especially ominous. To-night I have had for the first time two sets of tormentors, the first being small burnished beetles of the most lovely colors imaginable. A pinkish-bronze fellow lies on my paper as I write; he kept standing on his head until he died in a fit. It seems a color night, for I now have small silver moths, all of a size but with different beautiful markings. There are also large salmon-colored moths that Louis cannot bear the sight of because they are marked like a skeleton. Perhaps they are a variety of the death's head moth. They are almost as large as a humming-bird, and have beautiful eyes that glow in the dark like fire."

Enough order had now come out of the first chaos to encourage them to write for the elder Mrs. Stevenson. Her son went to Sydney to meet her, but was there taken very ill and returned in that condition with his mother as nurse. During his absence his wife remained in sole charge, and, judging by the entries in her diary, she had her hands full every moment of the time. Everybody--white, brown, or black--went to her with apparently full confidence that she was able to cure any wound or disease. "One day," she says, "I heard a loud weeping as of some one in great pain; a man had just had two fingers dreadfully crushed. I really didn't know what to do except to go to a doctor, but as the wound was bleeding a good deal I mixed up some crystals of iron in water and washed his hand in that. To my surprise his cries instantly ceased, and he declares he has had no pain since. It was only for the effect on his mind that I gave the iron, which so far as I know is a styptic only; I always