“It is a very long time since you had the exquisite pleasure of hearing from me”

[As usual, dots between square brackets indicate cuts made by Sidney Colvin. For full, correct and critical edition of this letter, see Mehew 8, 2770.]

To James Payn [Colvin 1911, 4, pp. 341-4]

Vailima, Upolu, Samoa [August 11, 1894]

My dear James Payn,

I hear from Lang that you are unwell,

James Payn (1830-1898), English novelist and editor. Among the periodicals he edited were Chambers’s Journal in Edinburgh (1860-75) and the Cornhill Magazine in London (1883-96). In his last years Payn was crippled by rheumatism, later described as ‘arthritic gout’ [https://commons.wikimedia.org/]

and it reminds me of two circumstances: First, that it is a very long time since you had the exquisite pleasure of hearing from me; and second, that I have been very often unwell myself, and sometimes had to thank you for a grateful anodyne.

They are not good, the circumstances, to write an anodyne letter. The hills and my house at less than (boom) a minute’s interval quake with thunder; and though I cannot hear that part of it, shells are falling thick into the fort of Luatuanu’u (boom).

It is my friends of the Curaçoa, the Falke, and the Bussard

HMS Curaçoa, a Comus-class corvette of the Royal Navy, launched in 1878, and sold in 1904 to be broken up. She served on the Cape of Good Hope and West Africa Station, the Australia Station and as a training cruiser in the Atlantic. She arrived in Australia in August 1890 and recommissioned at Sydney in November 1891. Her captain, Herbert William Sumner Gibson (1846-1923) had joined the Navy in 1859 and retired in 1901 [https://en.wikipedia.org]

SMS Falke was an unprotected cruiser of the Bussard class, built for the Imperial german Navy. She was the second member of the class of six vessels. The cruiser was laid down in 1890, launched in April 1891, and commissioned into the fleet in September of that month. Designed for overseas service, she carried a main battery of eight 10.5-centimeter (4.1 in) guns and had a top speed of 15.5 knots (28.7 km/h; 17.8 mph). Falke served abroad for the majority of her career, seeing duty in East Asia, the Central Pacific, and the Americas. She assisted in the suppression of a revolt in Samoa in 1893, and was damaged in a later uprising there in 1899. In 1901, Falke was transferred to the American Station, and the following year she took part in the  Venezuela Crisis of 1902-02, during which she helped enforce an Anglo-German blockade of the Venezuelan coast. In 1907, Falke was recalled to Germany [https://en.wikipedia.org/]

SMS Bussard was the lead ship of the Brussard class of unptotected cruisers built for the German Imperial Navy in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Designed for service in Germany’s colonial empire, the class emphasized a long-range cruising radius and relatively heavy armament; they were also the last cruisers in the Kaiserliche Marine to be equipped with an auxiliary sailing rig. The ships were equipped with eight 10.5-centimeter (4.1 in) guns. All six ships served abroad for the majority of their careers, primarily in Africa and the south Pacific, where they assisted in the suppression of uprisings such as the Boxer Rebellion in China and the Sokehs Rebellion in the  Caroline Island. Bussard and Falke were broken up for scrap in 1912 [https://en.wikipedia.org/]

bombarding (after all these – boom – months) the rebels of Atua. (Boom-boom.)

Atua is an ancient political district of Samoa, consisting of most of the eastern section of Upolu and the island Tutuila. A fresh rising of the partisans of Tamasese, belonging to the Atua district, had taken place, and was, after some time, suppressed, with circumstances of damage and suffering which RLS thought might have been avoided if the policy of the Three Powers bad been wiser or more judiciously carried out
[https://en.wikipedia.org/]

It is most distracting in itself; and the thought of the poor devils in their fort (boom) with their bits of rifles far from pleasant. (Boom-boom.) You can see how quick it goes, and I’ll say no more about Mr. Bow-wow, only you must understand the perpetual accompaniment of this discomfortable sound, and make allowances for the value of my copy. It is odd, though, I can well remember, when the Franco-Prussian war began, and I was in Eilean Earraid,

Earraid (Scottish Gaelic: Eilean Earraid) is a tidal island approximately one mile square located in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. RLS had visited the island in August 1870. He refers to his emotions at that time in ‘Memoirs of an Islet’ (Memories and Portraits) [https://www.tripadvisor.it/Attraction_Review-g186584-d1792513-Reviews-Isle_of_Erraid-Isle_of_Mull_The_Hebrides_Scotland.html]

far enough from the sound of the loudest cannonade, I could hear the shots fired, and I felt the pang in my breast of a man struck. It was sometimes so distressing, so instant, that I lay in the heather on the top of the island, with my face hid, kicking my heels for agony. And now, when I can hear the actual concussion of the air and hills, when I know personally the people who stand exposed to it, I am able to go on tant bien que mal with a letter to James Payn! The blessings of age, though mighty small, are tangible. I have heard a great deal of them since I came into the world, and now that I begin to taste of them – Well! But this is one, that people do get cured of the excess of sensibility; and I had as lief these people were shot at as myself – or almost, for then I should have some of the fun, such as it is.

You are to conceive me, then, sitting in my little gallery room,

RLS’s writing desk, Vailima.

shaken by these continual spasms of cannon, and with my eye more or less singly fixed on the imaginary figure of my dear James Payn.

“The Heir of the Ages”. Payn as caricatured by Ape (Carlo Pellegrini) in Vanity Fair, 8 September 1888 [https://en.wikipedia.org/]

I try to see him in bed; no go. I see him instead jumping up in his room in Waterloo Place (where ex hypothesi he is not),

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/31363949@N02/8753688422]

sitting on the table, drawing out a very black briar-root pipe, and beginning to talk to a slim and ill-dressed visitor in a voice that is good to hear and with a smile that is pleasant to see.

RLS by A.S. Boyd, Vailima 1894.

After a little more than half an hour, the voice that was ill to hear has ceased, the cannonade is over. And I am thinking how I can get an answering smile wafted over so many leagues of land and water, and can find no way.

I have always been a great visitor of the sick […]; and one of the sick I visited was W.E. Henley,

W.E. Henley (1849-1903)[http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.org.uk]

which did not make very tedious visits, so I’ll not get off much purgatory for them. That was in the Edinburgh Infirmary, the old one, the true one, with Georgius Secundus standing and pointing his toe in a niche of the facade; and a mighty fine building it was!

The Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh [https://www.facebook.com/lostedinburgh/photos/a.265472390177118/523920430998978/?type=3]

And I remember one winter’s afternoon, in that place of misery, that Henley and I chanced to fall in talk about James Payn himself. I am wishing you could have heard that talk! I think that would make you smile. We had mixed you up with John Payne,

John Payne (1852-1916), English poet and translator [https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/]

for one thing, and stood amazed at your extraordinary, even painful, versatility; and for another, we found ourselves each students so well prepared for examinations on the novels of the real Mackay. Perhaps, after all, this is worth something in life – to have given so much pleasure to a pair so different in every way as were Henley and I, and to be talked of with so much interest by two such (beg pardon) clever lads!

The cheerful Lang has neglected to tell me what is the matter with you;

Andrew Lang (1844-1912), RLS’s friend, 1884 [htt p://media.vam.ac.uk]

so, I’m sorry to say, I am cut off from all the customary consolations. I can’t say, ‘Think how much worse it would be if you had a broken leg!’ when you may have the crushing repartee up your sleeve, ‘But it is my leg that is broken.’ This is a pity. But there are consolations. You are an Englishman (I believe); you are a man of letters; you have never been made C.B.; your hair was not red […]; you have played cribbage and whist; you did not play either the fiddle or the banjo; you were never an aesthete; you never contributed to [Pearson]’s Journal;

Pearson’s Weekly, a popular magazine founded in 1890 by (Sir) Arthur Pearson as a rival to Tit-Bits. It lasted until 1938 [https://www.abebooks.it/PEARSONS-WEEKLY-INTEREST-ELEVATE-AMUSE-Proprietors/11407954736/bd#&gid=1&pid=1]

your name is not Jabez Balfour;

Jabez Spencer Balfour (1843-1916), company director and property developer, who founded the Liberator Building Society in 1868 and built up a network of associated companies. His companies failed in 1892 and Balfour (who was a Liberal MP) fled the country to escape arrest for fraud. He was finally traced and arrested in Argentina in Jan 1894 but was not extradited until April 1895. He was sentenced to 14 years’ penal servitude [https://insidecroydon.com/2020/12/31/hard-labour-the-croydon-mayor-dodgy-deals-and-bankruptcy/]

[…] you are totally unconnected with the Army and Navy departments; I understand you to have lived within your income – why, cheer up! here are many legitimate causes of congratulation. I seem to be writing an obituary notice. Absit omen! But I feel very sure that these considerations will have done you more good than medicine.

By the by, did you ever play piquet? I have fallen a victim to this debilitating game.

A Game of Piquet, imaginary 17th century scene painted in 1861 by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891), National Museum of Wales [https://en.wikipedia.org/]

It is supposed to be scientific; God save the mark, what self-deceivers men are! It is distinctly less so than cribbage.

Cribbage Players, 1822 [https://www.consumergrouch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Cribbage-Players-1822.jpg]

But how fascinating! There is such material opulence about it, such vast ambitions may be realised – and are not; it may be called the Monte Cristo of games. And the thrill with which you take five cards partakes of the nature of lust – and you draw four sevens and a nine, and the seven and nine of a suit that you discarded, and O! but the world is a desert! You may see traces of discouragement in my letter: all due to piquet! There has been a disastrous turn of the luck against me; a month or two ago I was two thousand ahead; now, and for a week back, I have been anything from four thousand eight hundred to five thousand two hundred astern. If I have a sixième, my beast of a partner has a septième; and if I have three aces, three kings, three queens, and three knaves (excuse the slight exaggeration), the devil holds quatorze of tens! – I remain, my dear James Payn, your sincere and obliged friend – old friend let me say,

Robert Louis Stevenson