to James Payn

Vailima, Upolu, Samoa [August 11, 1894].

MY DEAR JAMES PAYN,—I hear from Lang that you are unwell, 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 bombarding (after all these—boom—months) the rebels of Atua.  (Boom-boom.)  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, 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, 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.  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), 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.  (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, 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 façade; and a mighty fine building it was!  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, 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; 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 æsthete; you never contributed to —’s Journal; your name is not Jabez Balfour; 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.  It is supposed to be scientific; God save the mark, what self-deceivers men are!  It is distinctly less so than cribbage.  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.