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Updated: June 16, 2025
Besides native feasts there were afternoon teas, evening receptions, dinner parties, private and public balls, paper chases on horseback, polo, tennis parties, and picnics. Sometimes a party of flower-wreathed natives might come dancing over the lawn at Vailima, or a band of sailors from a man-of-war would be seen gathered in an embarrassed knot at the front gate."
Yonder, said Stevenson, lay Vailima that I was not to see. But I had seen the island and the man, and the natural colour and glory of both. As we went ashore he handed the book which I had given him to his follower. He thought it necessary to explain to me that etiquette demanded that no chief should carry anything. And etiquette was rigid there.
The day was always celebrated at Vailima with much ceremony, and a gigantic tree, covered with carefully chosen presents for everybody, from the head of the family down to the humblest Samoan retainer, was set up in the large hall. Months before Mr. Stevenson had sent to the army and navy stores in London and had a large boxful of presents for the tree sent out.
In spite of the many interests in his present life, his love for the people and the country, the yearning for the friends far away grew daily. How he longed to have them see Vailima with all its beauties! To talk over old times again. Such visits were continually planned, but they were never realized. He seldom complained and those who were with him every day rarely found him low in spirits.
Isobel Strong, the devoted step-daughter and amanuensis of Robert Louis Stevenson, once repeated to the present writer a conversation at Vailima in which the novelist remarked that whenever, in a story by a friend of his, he came upon a passage that was notably untrue, he always suspected that it had been transcribed directly from actual life.
Criticism: Essays, by Harrison, in Early Victorian Literature; by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library. Stevenson. Life: by Balfour; by Baildon; by Black; by Cornford. See also Simpson's Edinburgh Days; Eraser's In Stevenson's Samoa; Osborne and Strong's Memories of Vailima. Criticism: Raleigh's Stevenson; Alice Brown's Stevenson.
Once at Vailima they were all playing a game called "Truth," in which each person writes a list of the qualities courage, humour, beauty, etc. supposed to be possessed by the others, with the corresponding ratio in numbers, ten being the maximum. Louis put his wife down as ten for beauty.
She says: "It would have been all right if Nerli had only been content to paint just Louis, and had not insisted on representing instead the author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." It was not all work at Vailima by any means. "Socially," she writes, "Samoa was not dull. There were many entertainments given by diplomats and officials in Apia.
In Samoa, he enjoyed the purest of pleasures, gardening. "Nothing is so interesting," he says, in his VAILIMA LETTERS, "as weeding, clearing, and path-making. It does make you feel so well." But despite warring with weeds and forest rides, in an enervating country, he wrote persistently through the swooningly hot days of damp heat.
Churchill picked the crew for the general's boat, and saw to it that they wore a smart uniform and that they could sing the Samoan boatsong, which in the first week Mrs. Churchill herself could sing like a native girl. Next morning bright and early Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson came to the Spray and invited me to Vailima the following day.
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