Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1135 page)

“Everybody is well of the measles by now and all are crawling out into the sunshine. There have been a hundred and fifty deaths on this island alone. Our Sosimo was taken ill down in the town. Tamaitai and I went down to see him, and, finding him in a wretched state, had him brought home in a native sling on a pole, the way they carry wounded soldiers. None of our people died, for they willingly accepted our rules for their care.”

After the war was over, it was found that the stress and excitement of it all had told on Mr. Stevenson’s health, and in the early part of September he went to Honolulu for a change. The trip was a disappointment, for he was taken quite seriously ill there, and his wife had to take steamer and go after him, arriving in a state of great anxiety. Under her tender care he soon recovered and they returned to Vailima.

In Samoa, Tusitala was not the only “teller of tales,” for all sorts of strange stories — some amusing, some scurrilous and malicious — were invented about the family at Vailima and ran current in the gossip “on the beach.” One of the most fantastic of these inventions was that Mr. Stevenson had been married before to a native woman, and that Mrs. Strong was his half-caste daughter by this marriage. The one advantage about this peculiar story was the hilarious fun he was able to get out of it. He made up all kinds of wonderful romances about the supposititious first wife, who he said was a native of Morocco, “black, but a damned fine woman.” When Mrs. Stevenson scolded him for not wearing his cloak in the rain he pretended to weep and said: “Moroccy never spoke to me like that!” One evening Mrs. Strong heard gay laughter in her mother’s room, and, going in to see what it was about, found her mother sitting up in bed laughing, while Louis walked up and down the room gesticulating and telling her the “true story” of his affair with Moroccy.

So passed all too swiftly three full years — years crowded with work and play and many rare experiences — and less darkly shadowed by the spectre that had stalked beside them ever since their marriage. For this short space he knew what it was to live like a man, not like a “pallid weevil in a biscuit,” and she, though her vigilance was never relaxed for a moment, breathed somewhat more freely. The days sped happily by, until Thanksgiving, November 29, 1894, which was celebrated with an elaborate dinner at Vailima. Mrs. Stevenson was anxious to have this a truly American feast, from the turkey to the last detail, but cranberries were not to be had, so she produced a satisfactory substitute from a native berry, and under her careful supervision her native servants succeeded in setting out a dinner that would have satisfied even an old Plymouth Rock Puritan. At the dinner, the last entertainment taken part in by Mr. Stevenson, in enumerating his reasons for thankfulness, he spoke of his wife, who had been all in all to him when the days were very dark, and rejoiced in their undiminished affection.

A day or two afterwards she was seized with a presentiment of impending evil — a formless shadow that seemed to settle down upon her spirit, and that no argument could relieve. Her mother-in-law writes: “I must tell you a very strange thing that happened just before his death. For a day or two Fanny had been telling us that she knew — that she felt — something dreadful was going to happen to some one we cared for; as she put it, to one of our friends. On Monday she was very low and upset about it and dear Lou tried to cheer her. Strangely enough, both of them had agreed that it could not be to either of them that the dreadful thing was to happen.”

On the afternoon of December 3, 1894, according to their custom he took his morning’s work for her criticism. She quickly perceived that in this, which neither dreamed was to be the last work of his pen, his genius had risen to its highest level, and she poured out her praise in a way that was unusual with her. It was almost with her words of commendation still ringing in his ears that he passed to the great beyond. In a letter addressed to his friends shortly afterwards, Lloyd Osbourne gives us the details of these last moments:

“At sunset he came downstairs, rallied his wife about the forebodings she could not shake off; talked of a lecturing tour to America that he was eager to make, ‘as he was now so well,’ and played a game of cards with her to drive away her melancholy. He said he was hungry; begged her assistance to help him make a salad for the evening meal; and to enhance the little feast he brought up a bottle of old Burgundy from the cellar. He was helping his wife on the veranda, and gaily talking, when suddenly he put both hands to his head and cried out: ‘What’s that?’ Then he asked quickly: ‘Do I look strange?’ Even as he did so, he fell on his knees beside her.” Just as he had leaned upon her for help, comfort, and advice for so many years of his life, so it was at her feet that he sank in death when the last swift summons came. He was helped into the great hall between his wife and his body servant, Sosimo, and at ten minutes past eight the same evening, Monday, December 3, 1894, he passed away.

Her great task was finished, and she sat with folded hands in the quiet house from which the soul had fled; but, although the lightning suddenness of the blow made it almost a crushing one, the bitterness of her grief was greatly softened by her firm belief in a life beyond the grave and the certainty of a reunion with him there.

She bore this supreme sorrow with the same silent fortitude with which she had always met trouble, but a subtle change came over her. While it could not be said that she looked exactly old, yet the youthfulness for which she had been so remarkable seemed suddenly to vanish, and her hair grew rapidly grey. A little child — Frank Norris’s daughter — said, with an acuteness beyond her years: “Tamaitai smiles with her lips, but not with her eyes.”

Among the hundreds of letters of condolence which she received from all over the world, none, perhaps, came more directly from the heart than that written by her old friend, Henry James from which I have taken the following extracts:

“My dear Fanny Stevenson:

“What can I say to you that will not seem cruelly irrelevant or vain? We have been sitting in darkness for nearly a fortnight, but what is our darkness to the extinction of your magnificent light? You will probably know in some degree what has happened to us — how the hideous news first came to us via Auckland, etc., and then how, in the newspapers, a doubt was raised about its authenticity — just enough to give one a flicker of hope; until your telegram to me via San Francisco — repeated also from other sources — converted my pessimistic convictions into the wretched knowledge. All this time my thoughts have hovered round you all, around you in particular, with a tenderness of which I could have wished you might have, afar-off, the divination. You are such a visible picture of desolation that I need to remind myself that courage, and patience, and fortitude are also abundantly with you. The devotion that Louis inspired — and of which all the air about you must be full — must also be much to you. Yet as I write the word, indeed, I am almost ashamed of it — as if anything could be ‘much’ in the presence of such an abysmal void. To have lived in the light of that splendid life, that beautiful, bountiful being — only to see it, from one moment to the other, converted into a fable as strange and romantic as one of his own, a thing that has been and has ended, is an anguish into which no one can enter with you fully and of which no one can drain the cup for you. You are nearest to the pain, because you were nearest the joy and the pride. But if it is anything to you to know that no woman was ever more felt with and that your personal grief is the intensely personal grief of innumerable hearts — know it well, my dear Fanny Stevenson, for during all these days there has been friendship for you in the very air. For myself, how shall I tell you how much poorer and shabbier the whole world seems, and how one of the closest and strongest reasons for going on, for trying and doing, for planning and dreaming of the future, has dropped in an instant out of life. I was haunted indeed with a sense that I should never again see him — but it was one of the best things in life that he was there, or that one had him — at any rate one heard him, and felt him and awaited him and counted him into everything one most loved and lived for. He lighted up one whole side of the globe, and was in himself a whole province of one’s imagination. We are smaller fry and meaner people without him. I feel as if there were a certain indelicacy in saying it to you, save that I know that there is nothing narrow or selfish in your sense of loss — for himself, however, for his happy name and his great visible good fortune, it strikes one as another matter. I mean that I feel him to have been as happy in his death (struck down that way, as by the gods, in a clear, glorious hour) as he had been in his fame. And, with all the sad allowances in his rich full life, he had the best of it — the thick of the fray, the loudest of the music, the freshest and finest of himself. It isn’t as if there had been no full achievement and no supreme thing. It was all intense, all gallant, all exquisite from the first, and the experience, the fruition, had something dramatically complete in them. He has gone in time not to be old, early enough to be so generously young and late enough to have drunk deep of the cup. There have been — I think — for men of letters few deaths more romantically right. Forgive me, I beg you, what may sound cold-blooded in such words — or as if I imagined there could be anything for you ‘right’ in the rupture of such an affection and the loss of such a presence. I have in my mind in that view only the rounded career and the consecrated work. When I think of your own situation I fall into a mere confusion of pity and wonder, with the sole sense of your being as brave a spirit as he was (all of whose bravery you shared) to hold on by. Of what solutions or decisions you see before you we shall hear in time; meanwhile please believe that I am most affectionately with you.... More than I can say, I hope your first prostration and bewilderment are over, and that you are feeling your way in feeling all sorts of encompassing arms — all sorts of outstretched hands of friendship. Don’t, my dear Fanny Stevenson, be unconscious of mine, and believe me more than ever faithfully yours,

“Henry James.”

With this and the many other letters came one written in pencil on a scrap of paper, unsigned:

“Mrs. Stevenson.

“Dear Madam: — All over the world people will be sorry for the death of Robert Louis Stevenson, but none will mourn him more than the blind white leper at Molokai.”

CHAPTER IX

THE LONELY DAYS OF WIDOWHOOD

As the slow, empty days passed, the weight of her sorrow bore more and more heavily upon her and she grew steadily weaker. Finally, the doctors said the only thing was change, so, in April, 1895, she set sail with her family for San Francisco.

On the way a stop was made in Honolulu, where Mrs. Stevenson was deeply distressed to find the provisional government in control and her old friend, Queen Liliuokalani, imprisoned. The deposed queen was kept in Iolani Palace under close guard, and ostensibly debarred from all visitors, but one must presume the guard not to have been so strict as it seemed, for Mrs. Stevenson was able to gain entrance and secure an audience with the royal prisoner through the not very dignified avenue of the kitchen-door of the palace. When she gave expression to her profound sympathy and indignation at the turn affairs had taken, Liliuokalani replied that she wished she had had Louis to advise her in her dark hours.

A summer without special incident was spent in California — a grey summer for her, for her son and daughter tried in vain to interest her in things there. Her health improved, but she cared for nothing outside of Samoa and only yearned to go back and be near the grave on Mount Vaea, so in the autumn they again turned their faces toward the Pacific Isles.

When they left San Francisco they had added another member to their party — a small donkey named Dicky, given to Mrs. Stevenson by one of the Golden Gate Park commissioners, which she intended to use in driving about the plantation to a little Studebaker cart she had had made especially for the purpose. A little stable was put up on deck for Dicky and a bale of hay provided for him, but it was not long before the little fellow had become such a pet with the carpenter and his mates that he was taken into the forecastle to live with them and share their mess, eating his meals out of a tin plate. The men taught him many amusing tricks, and it got to be quite the thing for the cabin passengers to make trips down to the forecastle to see him do them and to feed him chocolate creams. At Waikiki Beach, where they lived in a cottage attached to the Sans Souci Hotel during their stay of several months in Hawaii, Mrs. Stevenson often drove about the park in the little cart which was just fitted to Dicky. She was surprised at first to find that he would only make short trips and then come to a dead stop, from which it was impossible to budge him. Nothing would make him go on until his mistress got out and in again, and then he would pick up his little feet and trot on for another five minutes, when the same performance would have to be repeated. At last they realised that he had been trained to make five-cent trips at Golden Gate Park, and that nothing would ever break him of it. When they left Honolulu for Samoa they had difficulty in getting him on board the steamer, for although there was a belt and tackle to hoist him up, they could not drag him to it. One man — then two — then finally six men were hauling at him, while the ship waited, with all passengers on board and surveying the scene with intense amusement. The captain suddenly shouted through a megaphone: “Pull him the other way!” They did so and he immediately backed right up to the tackle and was hauled on deck amid the plaudits of the multitude. At Samoa he was a great pet; the native girls loved him and took him with them when they went to cut alfalfa for the cows. They made a pretty picture coming through the forest — the girls in leaves and flowers and Dicky a walking mountain of green, with only his long ears sticking out and his bright eyes gleaming through the foliage.

Honolulu brought back to Mrs. Stevenson many poignant memories of other days, of which she wrote to her mother-in-law in these words: