I tell you this, Miss Stewart, because over the decades when my dear Livy has asked—as all brides must eventually ask—if there had ever been a rival for her hand and affections, I eventually told her about us: about the aroma of sandalwood coming down from the forests above the sea, about the light a volcano makes and how pleasant it is to survive it, about our dream of descending into death’s kingdom to retrieve the uhane of our minister friend.
It comforts me, somehow, to know without believing that Livy’s spirit awaits me somewhere.
And it has comforted me, Miss Stewart, to know that my boylike disappointment at your refusal on my stammering proposal that long-ago June day was misdirected. It has comforted and pleased me over the years to read your wonderful travel books—I believe that Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Ohio Lady’s Visit to the Court of Japan, An Ohio Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, and Across the Wide Sahara by Camel and Moonlight were my favorites, although I confess that I have waited in vain all these years for your book on the Sandwich Islands.
I began one myself, you know. My first lectures were given on the Sandwich Islands and, once having found such a rich vein, I had every intention of mining it to death. In 1884 I began my novel about the Islands—about the old kings and the old ways and leprosy and idolatry, and shallow Christian missionaries and strange pagan rituals, but by and by the story got shanghaied and swallowed into a wilder tale that I called A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. But the Sandwich Islands tale is still around here somewhere, and if these old bones and this old mind can rouse themselves from their arthritic slumber, I shall dig it out by and by and begin anew, as I did once on a long-laid-aside book about a boy named Huckleberry. Perhaps I shall dictate the tale to my daughter Jean, who lives with me now. Jean enjoys saying that I never manage to shock her any longer.
Miss Stewart, I wander. What I meant to tell you, beyond the repeated and sincere belated thank you for your sympathy and kindness at the time of my loss this time last year, was how pleasant the memories of our time together in those far-off isles has become on this side of the ocean of memory.
While not the traveler that you have been, I have managed to see a bit of this sad old world in my days since our days together, and I must say that no alien land in all the world has had any deep, strong charm for me but that one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same.
For me, Miss Stewart, its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun, the pulsing of its surf beat in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud rack; I can feel the spirit of its woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished almost forty years ago.
And in all these visions, Miss Stewart, I see your noble, indomitable visage. I hear your challenging laugh. I see both of us—young, innocent, uncorrupted and unbowed by time—and I wonder if, perhaps just if, that rather than a Christian heaven, our uhane might sensibly flee to the Sandwich Islands when liberated from these old and decrepit vessels.
For my part, I hope it is true. I do not believe it true, but I hope it true. For my part, I think that no prettier fleet of islands has ever set anchor anywhere else in this world, and I would welcome the opportunity to return there in different garb to introduce Livy to you and you to Livy. We would find us two hammocks for the first century or two and talk while we watched the sun sink down—that one intruder from other realms and persistent in suggestions of them—and allow ourselves to be tranced in luxury to sit in the perfumed air and forget that there was or ever had been any world but those enchanted islands.
Pray, do write, Miss Stewart. I know your prose style. I admire it. I look forward to further exposure to it.
Until that day, I remain—
Yr. Aging but Obedient Servant,
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Dan Simmons lives along the front range of the Colorado Rockies. He is at work on a new novel…
Dan Simmons, Fires of Eden
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