Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1112 page)
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Authors: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
“A messenger was dispatched to a few chiefs connected with the family, to announce the tidings and bid them assemble their men on the morrow for the work there was to do....
“The morning of the 4th of December broke cool and sunny.... A meeting of chiefs was held to apportion the work and divide the men into parties. Forty were sent with knives and axes to cut a path up the steep face of the mountain, and the writer himself led another party to the summit — men chosen from the immediate family — to dig the grave on the spot where it was Robert Louis Stevenson’s wish that he should lie.... Nothing more picturesque can be imagined than the ledge that forms the summit to Væa, a place no wider than a room, and flat as a table. On either side the land descends precipitously; in front lies the vast ocean and surf-swept reefs; to the right and left green mountains rise....
“All the morning Samoans were arriving with flowers, few of these were white, for they have not learned our foreign custom, and the room glowed with the many colours. There were no strangers on that day, no acquaintances; those only were called who would deeply feel the loss. At one o’clock a body of powerful Samoans bore away the coffin, hid beneath a tattered red ensign that had flown above his vessel in many a remote corner of the South Seas. A path so steep and rugged taxed their strength to the utmost, for not only was the journey difficult in itself, but extreme care was requisite to carry the coffin shoulder high....
“No stranger hand touched him.... Those who loved him carried him to his last home; even the coffin was the work of an old friend. The grave was dug by his own men.”
Tusitala had left them, and his friends in the South Seas had lost a faithful friend and companion, a wise and just master.
His family and friends the world over had lost not only these but far more. His life had been a chivalrous one with all the best that chivalry stands for, “loyalty, honesty, generosity, courage, courtesy, and self-devotion; to impute no unworthy motives and to bear no grudges; to bear misfortune with cheerfulness and without a murmur; to strike hard for the right and to take no mean advantage; to be gentle to women and kind to all that are weak; to be rigorous with oneself and very lenient to others — these ... were the traits that distinguished Stevenson.”
“They do not make life easy as he frequently found.”
His resting-place on the crest of Væa Mountain is covered by a tomb of gray stone. On one side is inscribed in English the verses he had written for his own requiem:
A | ROBERT LOUIS | © |
“Under the wide and starry sky, |
The tomb of Stevenson on Væa Mountain
On the other side, written in Samoan and surrounded by carvings of thistles, his native flowers, and the hibiscus flowers, emblem of the South, are the words from the Bible:
“Whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people; and thy God my God; where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried.”
The Samoan chiefs have forbidden the use of firearms upon Væa hillside, “that the birds may live there undisturbed, and raise above his grave the songs he loved so well.”
“Tusitala, the lover of children, the teller of tales,
Giver of counsels and dreams, a wonder, a world’s delight,
Looks o’er the labours of men in the plain and the hills; and the sails
Pass and repass on the sea that he loved, in the day and the night.”
— ANDREW LANG.
THE LIFE OF MRS. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON By Nellie Van De Grift Sanchez
This biography of Stevenson’s wife was first published in 1920.
Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson
CONTENTS
FRANCE, AND THE MEETING AT GREZ
IN CALIFORNIA WITH ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
THE LAST DAYS AT SANTA BARBARA
PREFACE
When I first set out to tell the life story of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, I received the following letter from her old friend Mr. Bruce Porter:
“Once when I urged your sister to set down the incidents of her life she listened, pondered, and then dismissed the suggestion as impossible, as her life had been like a dazed rush on a railroad express, and she despaired of recovering the incidental memories. The years with Stevenson have of course been adequately told, but the earlier period — Indianapolis and California — had a romance as stirring, even if sharpened by the American glare. This sharpness has already, for all of us, begun to fade, to take on the glamour of time and distance, and I cannot think of a better literary service than to make the fullest possible record now, before it utterly fades away.”
It was not only the difficulty of recalling events that caused her to resist all urgings to undertake this task, but a certain shy reluctance in speaking of herself that was characteristic of her. It has, therefore, fallen to me to collect the widely scattered material from various parts of the world and weave it into a coherent whole as best I may, but my regret will never cease that she did not herself tell her own story.
It would take a more competent pen than mine to do her justice; but whoever reads this book from cover to cover will surely agree that no woman ever had a life of more varied experiences nor went through them all with a stauncher courage.
It is right that I should acknowledge here my profound obligation to the kind friends who have generously placed their personal recollections at my disposal. These are more definitely referred to in the body of the book. Aside from these personal contributions, the main sources of material have been as follows:
Ancestral genealogies, including The Descendants of Jöran Kyn, by Doctor Gregory B. Keen, secretary of the Pennsylvania Historical Society.
Data concerning the genealogy of the Keen and Van de Grift families collected by Frederic Thomas, of New York, nephew of Mrs. Stevenson.
Notes covering the life of Mrs. Stevenson up to the age of sixteen years, as dictated by herself.
A collection of her own letters to friends and relatives.
Letters to Mrs. Stevenson from friends.
Extracts from various books and magazines, including The Letters of Mrs. M. I. Stevenson (Methuen and Company, London); The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Graham Balfour; The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Sidney Colvin; Vailima Memories, by Lloyd Osbourne and Isobel Osbourne Strong, now Mrs. Salisbury Field; The Cruise of the Janet Nichol, by Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson; McClure’s, Scribner’s, and the Century magazines. Acknowledgment is due the publishers of the above books and periodicals for their courteous permissions.
A diary kept by Mrs. Stevenson of her life in Samoa, for which I am indebted to the considerate kindness of Miss Gladys Peacock, an English lady, into whose hands the diary fell by accident.
My own personal recollections.
Above all, I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to Mrs. Stevenson’s daughter, Isobel Field, without whose unflagging zeal in forwarding the work it could scarcely have been carried to a successful conclusion, and to my son, Louis A. Sanchez, for valuable assistance in the actual writing of the book.
N. V. S.
Berkeley, California, January, 1919.
THE LIFE OF MRS. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
CHAPTER I
ANCESTORS
To arrive at a full understanding of the complex and unusual character of Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, which perhaps played as large a part as her beauty and intellectual charm in drawing to her the affections of one of the greatest romance writers of our day, one must go back and seek out all the uncommon influences that combined to produce it — a long line of sturdy ancestors, running back to the first adventurers who left their sheltered European homes and sailed across the sea to try their fortunes in a wild, unknown land; her childhood days spent among the hardy surroundings of pioneer Indiana, with its hints of a past tropical age and its faint breath of Indian reminiscence; the early breaking of her own family ties and her fearless adventuring by way of the Isthmus of Panama to the distant land of gold, and her brave struggle against adverse circumstances in the mining camps of Nevada. All these prenatal influences and personal experiences, so foreign to the protected lives of the women of Stevenson’s own race, threw about her an atmosphere of thrilling New World romance that appealed with irresistible force to the man who was himself Romance personified.
Fanny Stevenson was a lineal descendant of two of the oldest families in the United States, her first ancestors landing in this country in the early part of the seventeenth century. In 1642 Jöran Kyn, called “The Snow White,” reached America in the ship Fama as a member of the life-guard of John Printz, governor of the Swedish colony established in the New World by King Gustavus Adolphus. He took up a large tract of land and was living in peace and comfort on the Delaware River when William Penn landed in America. He was the progenitor of eleven generations of descendants born on American soil. His memory is embalmed in an old document still extant as “a man who never irritated even a child.”
In the list of his descendants one Matthias stands out as “a tall handsome man, with a very melodious voice which could be intelligibly heard at times across the Delaware.”
