Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1144 page)

“From the novelist’s widow she always received most delicate and thoughtful kindness. Mrs. Stevenson often wrote to her and she amply supplemented the original pension settled on her by Mr. Thomas Stevenson, Louis’s father. A few months before Cummy’s death (at the age of ninety-two), she cordially agreed, on condition that Cummy should not know of it, to make a special additional annual payment which I had ascertained, from an outside source, would add to the old lady’s happiness. And as soon as she received my letter telling her of Cummy’s accident (a fall causing a broken hip), I had a characteristically generous message from her, sent by wire from San Francisco, giving me carte-blanche for Cummy’s benefit. I call this message characteristic, because I find in her letters such passages as this: ‘Please, dear Cummy, always let me know instantly when there is anything in the world I can do to add to your comfort, your happiness, or your pleasure. There is so little I can do for you, and I wish to do so much. You and I are the last; and we must help each other all we can, until we, too, follow.’“

When Cummy died Mrs. Stevenson was represented at the funeral by Mr. A. P. Melville, W. S., and a wreath ordered by her was placed on the coffin. She also bore the expense of Cummy’s last illness and funeral and had a handsome tombstone put up in her memory.

In these days the sands began to run low in the hour-glass of the life of Fanny Stevenson, and a great weariness seemed to be settling upon her. Writing to Mr. Scribner in June, 1913, she says: “All my life I have taken care of others, and yet I have always wanted to be taken care of, for naturally I belong to the clinging vine sort of woman; but fate seems still against me.” Nevertheless, I truly believe she enjoyed being the head of her clan, the fairy godmother, the chieftainess of her family, to whom all came for help and counsel. But now the shadows of evening were growing long, and she was getting very, very tired.

But, world-weary as she was, she consented at this time to prepare for publication in book form the notes which she had taken, primarily for her husband’s use, of one of their voyages in the South Seas. As it happened, he made little use of the notes, so that most of it was new material. In this work, for dear memory’s sake, she took a real pleasure, of which she speaks in the preface in these words: “The little book, however dull it may seem to others, can boast of at least one reader, for I have gone over this record of perhaps the happiest period of my life with thrilling interest.” The book was brought out by Charles Scribner’s Sons, under the title of The Cruise of the “Janet Nichol”, and it has a melancholy interest, apart from its contents, as the last work done by her in this life. She had only finished the reading of the proofs a few days before her death, and the book did not appear until some months afterwards.

In November, 1913, she was threatened with asthma, and in consequence went to spend some time at Palm Springs, a health resort on the desert in southeastern California. In the dry, clear air of that place her health improved so wonderfully that all her friends and family believed that a crisis had passed, and that she had fortunately sailed into one of those calm havens which so often come to people in their later years. She returned to Stonehedge seemingly well. All their fears were lulled, and the blow was all the more crushing when, on the 18th of February, 1914, silently and without warning, she passed from this life. In the manner of her death and that of her husband there was a striking coincidence; each passed away suddenly, after only a few hours of unconsciousness, from the breaking of an artery in the brain. The story of her last moments may best be told in the words of a letter from her devoted maid, Agnes Crowley, which is so sincere and touching that I quote it without eliminations:

“My dear Mrs. Sanchez:

“We are a very sad little household — we are all heart-broken, to think our dear little Madam has gone away never to return. It seems too awful, and just when she was enjoying everything. We were home from Palm Springs just one week when she was taken away from us — but you can console yourself by thinking that she was surrounded by love and devotion. She was not sick and did not suffer. Tuesday evening, February 17, she felt well and read her magazines until nine o’clock, and Mr. Field played cards with her till 10.30. Then she retired. The next morning I went in to attend to her as usual, and there was my dear little Madam lying unconscious. I thought at first she was in a faint, and I quickly ran for Mr. Field; he jumped up and put on his bathrobe and went to her while I called Dr. Hurst. It took the doctor about seven minutes to get here, and as soon as he saw her he said it was a stroke, but he seemed to be hopeful and thought he could pull her through. He put an ice pack on her head and gave her an injection in the arm and oxygen to inhale, and she seemed to begin to breathe natural, and we all hoped, but it was in vain. She never regained consciousness, and at two o’clock she just stopped breathing, so you see she did not suffer. But oh Mrs. Sanchez, we all seemed so helpless — we all loved her so and yet could do nothing. Dr. Hurst worked hard from 8.30 till two o’clock, and when the end came he cried like a little child, for he loved Mrs. Stevenson very much. It was an awful blow to us all — it was so sudden. This place will never seem the same to William and me, for we loved our little Madam dearly, and it was a pleasure to do anything for her — for she was always so gentle and sweet. I adored her from the first time I ever saw her, and will always consider it the greatest pleasure of my life to have had the privilege of waiting upon her.

“I remain very affectionately,
“Agnes Crowley.”

When the angel of death stooped to take her he came on the wings of a wild storm, which raged that week all through the Southwest — fitting weather for the passing of the “Stormy Petrel.” Railroads were flooded all over the country, and her son, Lloyd Osbourne, was delayed by washouts for some days on the way out from New York. On his arrival the body was removed to San Francisco, where a simple funeral ceremony was held in the presence of a few sorrowing friends and relatives. On her bier red roses, typical of her own warm nature, were heaped in masses. A touching incident, one that it would have pleased her to know, was the appearance of Fuzisaki, her Japanese gardener at Stonehedge, with a wreath of beautiful flowers. It was in accordance with her own wish, several times expressed to those nearest her, that her body was cremated and the ashes later removed to Samoa, there to lie beside her beloved on the lonely mountain top.

To her own family the sense of loss was overwhelming, and I cannot perhaps express it better than in the words of her grandson, Austin Strong: “To say that I miss her means nothing. Why, it is as if an Era had passed into oblivion. She was so much the Chief of us all, the Ruling Power. God rest her soul!”

When Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson passed from this earth the news of her death carried a pang of grief to many a heart in far distant lands. One who knew her well, her husband’s cousin, Graham Balfour, writes his estimate of her character in these words:

“Although I had met Fanny Stevenson twice in England, I first came to know her on my arrival at Vailima in August, 1892, when within a single day we established a firm friendship that only grew closer until her death. The three stanzas by Louis so completely expressed her that it seems useless for a man to add anything or to refine upon it:

‘Steel-true and blade-straight
......
Honor, anger, valor, fire,
A love that life could never tire,
......
Teacher, tender comrade, wife,
A fellow-farer true through life.’

“These were all the essentials, and if we add her devotion to her children and her loyalty to her friends, we have the fabric of which her life was woven. Her integrity and her directness were such that one could, and frequently did, differ from her and express the difference in the strongest terms without leaving a trace of bitterness.

“I remember in particular a scheme which she wished to set on foot for releasing Mataafa and other Samoan chiefs from their exile in the German island of Jaluit and carrying them off to Australia. The project was a wild one and would only have led to their return and disgrace, and in these terms and much stronger expressions we discussed it, without ever abating one jot from our personal friendship.

“And in the long years that followed absence made no difference. Every letter, when it came, was as full of affection and of confidence as its predecessors — full of loyalty and tenderness.

“To her enemies, of course, she showed another side. Opposition she did not mind, but dishonesty and deceit were unforgivable.

“The news of her death reached me in St. Helena, as the announcement of Louis’s death found me on another far-off island in the Carolinas; and both times the world became a colder, greyer, more monotonous place.”

These pages have been written in vain if I have not made clear what the world owes this rare woman, not only for the sedulous care which kept the invalid genius alive long after the time allotted to him in the book of fate, but for the intellectual sympathy and keen discernment with which she stood beside him and

“Burnished the sword, blew on the drowsy coal,
Held still the target higher, chary of praise
And prodigal of counsel.”

In speaking of literature’s great debt to her, Lord Guthrie says:

“Without her Louis’s best work neither could nor would have existed. In studying the life and works of Thomas Carlyle I often had occasion to contrast his wife and Louis’s. With all Mrs. Carlyle’s great and attractive qualities and her undoubted influence on her husband, she made his work difficult by her want of perspective, magnifying molehills into mountains. It could not be said that any of his great writings owed their existence to her.”

An article appearing in the Literary Digest shortly after her death touches upon this point:

“Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson was content to remain in the background and let her husband reap all the glory for his literary achievements, and the result was that her part in his career had probably been minimized in the public mind. She was a great deal more than a mere domestic help meet.”

From her old and attached friend, Mr. S. S. McClure, comes this sincere tribute:

“The more I saw of the Stevensons the more I became convinced that Mrs. Stevenson was the unique woman in the world to be Stevenson’s wife.... When he met her her exotic beauty was at its height, and with this beauty she had a wealth of experience, a reach of imagination, a sense of humor, which he had never found in any other woman. Mrs. Stevenson had many of the fine qualities that we usually attribute to men rather than to women; a fair-mindedness, a large judgment, a robust, inconsequential philosophy of life, without which she could not have borne, much less shared with a relish equal to his own, his wandering, unsettled life, his vagaries, his gipsy passion for freedom. She had a really creative imagination, which she expressed in living. She always lived with great intensity, had come more into contact with the real world than Stevenson had done at the time when they met, had tried more kinds of life, known more kinds of people. When he married her, he married a woman rich in knowledge of life and the world.

“She had the kind of pluck that Stevenson particularly admired. He was best when he was at sea, and although Mrs. Stevenson was a poor sailor and often suffered greatly from seasickness, she accompanied him on all his wanderings in the South Seas and on rougher waters, with the greatest spirit. A woman who was rigid in small matters of domestic economy, who insisted on a planned and ordered life, would have worried Stevenson terribly.

“A sick man of letters never married into a family so well fitted to help him make the most of his powers. Mrs. Stevenson and both of her children were gifted; the whole family could write. When Stevenson was ill, one of them could always lend a hand and help him out. Without such an amanuensis as Mrs. Strong, Mrs. Stevenson’s daughter, he could not have got through anything like the amount of work he turned off. Whenever he had a new idea for a story, it met, at his own fireside, with the immediate recognition, appreciation, and enthusiasm so necessary to an artist, and which he so seldom finds among his own blood or in his own family.

“After Stevenson disappeared in the South Seas, many of us had a new feeling about that part of the world. I remember that on my next trip to California I looked at the Pacific with new eyes; there was a glamour of romance over it. I always intended to go to Samoa to visit him; it was one of those splendid adventures that one might have had and did not.

“One afternoon in August, 1896, I went with Sidney Colvin and Mrs. Sitwell (now Lady Colvin) to Paddington Station to meet Mrs. Stevenson, when, after Stevenson’s death she at last returned to Europe after her world-wide wanderings — after nine years of exile. When she alighted from the boat train I felt Stevenson’s death as if it had happened only the day before, and I have no doubt that she did. As she came up the platform in black, with so much that was strange and wonderful behind her, his companion of so many years, through uncharted seas and distant lands, I could only say to myself: ‘Hector’s Andromache!’“

She had one of those unusual personalities that attract other women as well as men, and one of them, Lady Balfour, writes of her from the point of view of her own sex:

“When Mrs. Stevenson heard of my engagement to Graham Balfour she wrote me the kindest and tenderest of letters, telling me not to have any fears in the new path that lay before me. She added: ‘I who tell you so have trodden it from end to end.’ This sympathy meant much to me, for it could only have come from such a generous heart as hers. She had hoped that Palema would continue to make his home with them, and she had great confidence in and love for him. He would have been a link between her and the old associations of the Vailima life, and his engagement to an English girl proved to her that this would no longer be possible. Yet where a less fine nature would have contented itself with the mere formal congratulations as all that could be possible under the circumstances, she gave generous sympathy to a stranger, who caused her fresh loss, from her generous ‘steel-true’ heart.