第24章 A SAMOAN MEMORIAL OF R.L.STEVENSON(3)
Mr A.W.Mackay gives an account of the funeral and a description of the burial-place, ending:
"Tofa Tusitala! Sleep peacefully! on thy mountain-top, alone in Nature's sanctity, where the wooddove's note, the moaning of the waves as they break unceasingly on the distant reef, and the sighing of the winds in the distant tavai trees chant their requiem."
The Rev.Mr Clarke tells of the constant and active interest Mr Stevenson took in the missionaries and their work, often aiding them by his advice and fine insight into the character of the natives; and a translation follows of a dirge by one of the chiefs, so fine that we must give it:
I.
"Listen, O this world, as I tell of the disaster That befell in the late afternoon;
That broke like a wave of the sea Suddenly and swiftly, blinding our eyes.
Alas for Loia who speaks tears in his voice!
REFRAIN - Groan and weep, O my heart, in its sorrow.
Alas for Tusitala, who rests in the forest!
Aimlessly we wait, and sorrowing.Will he again return?
Lament, O Vailima, waiting and ever waiting!
Let us search and inquire of the captain of ships, 'Be not angry, but has not Tusitala come?'
II.
"Teuila, sorrowing one, come thou hither!
Prepare me a letter, and I will carry it.
Let her Majesty Victoria be told That Tusitala, the loving one, has been taken hence.
REFRAIN - Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.
III.
"Alas! my heart weeps with anxious grief As I think of the days before us:
Of the white men gathering for the Christmas assembly!
Alas for Aolele! left in her loneliness, And the men of Vailima, who weep together Their leader - their leader being taken.
REFRAIN - Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.
IV.
"Alas! O my heart! it weeps unceasingly When I think of his illness Coming upon him with fatal swiftness.
Would that it waited a glance or a word from him, Or some token, some token from us of our love.
REFRAIN - Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.
V.
"Grieve, O my heart! I cannot bear to look on All the chiefs who are there now assembling:
Alas, Tusitala! Thou art not here!
I look hither and thither in vain for thee.
REFRAIN - Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc."
And the little booklet closes with Mr Stevenson's own lines:
"REQUIEM.
Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie;
Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
'Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea;
And the hunter home from the hill.'"
Every touch tells here was a man, with heart and head, with soul and mind intent on the loftiest things; simple, great, "Like one of the simple great ones gone For ever and ever by.
His character towered after all far above his books; great and beautiful though they were.Ready for friendship; from all meanness free.So, too, the Samoans felt.This, surely, was what Goethe meant when he wrote:
"The clear head and stout heart, However far they roam, Yet in every truth have part, Are everywhere at home."
His manliness, his width of sympathy, his practicality, his range of interests were in nothing more seen than in his contributions to the history of Samoa, as specially exhibited in A FOOTNOTE TO
HISTORY and his letters to the TIMES.He was, on this side, in no sense a dreamer, but a man of acute observation and quick eye for passing events and the characters that were in them with sympathy equal to his discernments.His portraits of certain Germans and others in these writings, and his power of tracing effects to remote and underlying causes, show sufficiently what he might have done in the field of history, had not higher voices called him.
His adaptation to the life in Samoa, and his assumption of the semi-patriarchal character in his own sphere there, were only tokens of the presence of the same traits as have just been dwelt on.