Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1145 page)

“I had been married about two years when Mrs. Stevenson came to England in 1898, and we were living at Oxford. I was naturally a little nervous as to my first introduction to her. My husband wanted to take me up to London to see her, but I asked to go alone, feeling somehow that it would be easier. To this day I remember the trepidation with which I followed the parlor maid upstairs in Oxford Terrace, and was ushered into the room where a lady of infinite dignity was lying on a sofa. It seems to me now that after one steady look from those searching ‘eyes of gold and bramble dew’ (which had rather the effect of a sort of spiritual X-ray), I lost my feeling of being on approval, and in ten minutes I was sitting on the floor beside the sofa, pouring out my own past history in remarkable detail, and feeling as if I had known Tamaitai for years.

“In the following summer, 1899, she came to stay with us at Oxford, to give Palema all the help she could about the life of Robert Louis Stevenson he had just undertaken at her urgent request. Incidentally, she was to be introduced to her godson, our eldest boy Gilbert, who was then about six months old. She gave him a christening present of a silver bowl for his bread and milk, upon a silver saucer which could be reversed and used also as a cover. On the covering side were the words from the Child’s Garden:

‘It is very nice to think
The world is full of meat and drink
With little children saying grace
In every Christian kind of place.’

“When the cover was taken off and used as a saucer it had on its concave side:

‘A child should always say what’s true
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table,
At least as far as he is able.’

“Tamaitai had had a very critical operation during the previous autumn, and was still comparatively invalided with the effects of it. She spoke enthusiastically of Sir Frederick Treves, who had performed it and had refused any fee, saying he counted it a privilege to attend her. I have a clear picture of her in my mind, lying on the sofa in our drawing-room. The door opened and the nurse carried in the baby, barefooted. ‘Ah,’ she said to him, ‘who’s this coming in hanging out ten pink rosebuds at the tail of his frock?’ And the little pink toes justified a description that only she would have so worded.

“We drove her round to a few of the most beautiful and characteristic of the Oxford colleges. She was easily fatigued, but she delighted in what she saw. I remember admiring her pretty feet, clad in quite inadequate but most dainty black satin shoes, with very high heels, and fine silk stockings. When I put my admiration into words she just smiled upon me delightfully but said nothing.

“One evening we talked desultorily about the ‘criminal instinct.’ ‘Well,’ I said at last, ‘there’s one thing certain, I should never commit a murder. I shouldn’t have the courage when it came to the point!’ ‘Oh,’ said she, ‘I could murder a person if I hated him enough for anything he had done, but I should have to call upon him in the morning and tell him I was going to murder him at five o’clock.’

“We dined out with some Oxford friends, among whom was a tall Scotch professor who was a brilliant and quick talker. Tamaitai took no part in the rapid thrust and parry of the talk, but sat silently looking from one to another with her great dark eyes. Their comment on her long afterwards was that she was the most inscrutable person they had ever met. As we drove home after the party I asked Tamaitai: ‘What did you think of the talk?’ There was a brief silence — then: ‘I didn’t understand a single word of it, they talked so fast,’ said she frankly.

“I don’t think I ever knew a woman who was a more perfect ‘gentleman.’ Scorning all that was not direct, and true, and simple, she herself hated disguise or casuistry in any form. Her eyes looked through your soul and out at the other side, but you never felt that her judgment, whatever it was, would be harsh. She was curiously detached, and yet you always wanted her sympathy, and if she loved you it never failed you. She was a strong partisan, which was perhaps the most feminine part of her character. She was wholly un-English, but she made allowances for every English tradition. My English maids loved her without understanding her in the least. I never knew any one that had such a way as she had of turning your little vagaries and habits and fads to your notice with their funny side out, so that all the time you were subtly flattered and secretly delighted.”

I wish I had the power to describe that mysterious charm which drew to her so many and such various people — the high and the low in far-scattered places of the earth — but it was too elusive to put in words. Perhaps a large part of it lay in her clear simplicity, her utter lack of pretence or pose. I remember reading once in a San Francisco newspaper a comment by a writer who seemed to touch nearly upon the heart of the secret. The paragraph runs thus:

“Once a man told me that Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson was the one woman in the world he could imagine a man being willing to die for. Every man I asked — every single man, rich and poor, young or old, clever or stupid — all agreed about Mrs. Stevenson, that she was the most fascinating woman he had ever seen. It was some years ago that I saw her, but I would know her again if I saw her between flashes of lightning in a stormy sea. Individuality — that was her charm. She knew it and she had sense enough to be herself. Individuality and simple unaffected honesty of speech and action and look are the most potent charms and the most lasting that any woman can ever hope to have.”

Her broad sympathies, too, had much to do with it. If there is any word in the English language that means the opposite of snob, it may certainly be applied to her. She picked out her friends for the simple and sufficient reason that she liked them, and they might and did include a duchess, a Chinese, a great English playwright, a French fisherman, a saloon-keeper who was once shipwrecked with her, a noted actor — and so on through a long and varied list. Once in Sydney when she was out walking with her daughter, both richly dressed, she stopped suddenly to shake hands with a group of black-avised pirates (to all appearances) with rings in their ears. She had met them somewhere among the islands, and her little white-gloved hand grasped their big brown ones with genuine and affectionate friendship. Wide apart as she and her husband were in many things, in their utter lack of snobbery they were as one. Once they were at a French watering-place when from their room upstairs they heard a loud uproar below. A voice cried: “I will see my Louis!” Going out to see what the trouble was, Louis found four French fishermen in a char-à-bancs — all in peasant blouses. The major-domo of the fashionable hotel was trying to keep them out, but when Louis appeared he called out their names joyfully, and they all cried: “Mon cher Louis!” After each had embraced him, he asked them up to his rooms, and, despite the ill-concealed scorn of the waiter, ordered up a grand dinner for them. They were the French fishermen he had known at Monterey, California, and one may be sure that they met with as cordial a welcome from his wife as from himself. I know that in one of her letters she urges him not to forget to write to François the baker, at Monterey, saying: “It seems to me much more necessary to write some word to him than to Sir Walter, or Baxter, or Henley, for they are your friends who know you and will not be disappointed, either in a pleasure or in humanity, as this poor baker will be. Indeed you must write and say something to him.”

As has been said, her dislike of deceit and treachery was one of the most strongly marked traits in her character. Once when she had reason to fear that a person whom she was befriending was deceiving her, and she was told that a simple inquiry would settle the matter, she replied: “But I couldn’t bear to find out that he is lying to me.”

Her charities were many, but they were always of the quiet, unobtrusive sort, of which few heard except those most nearly concerned. For instance, when she heard of a poor woman in her neighbourhood whose life could only be saved by an expensive operation, she paid to have it done. Her life was full of such acts, and there are many, many people who have good reason to be grateful to her memory.

But when all is said, it has always seemed to me that the bright star of her character, shining above all other traits, was her loyalty — that staunch fidelity that made her cling, through thick and thin, through good or evil report, to those whom she loved. But as she loved, so she hated, and as she endowed her friends with all the virtues, so she could see no good at all in an enemy. Yet, just when you thought you were beginning to understand her nature — with its love and hate of the primal woman — her anger would suddenly soften, not into tenderness, but into a sort of dispassionate wisdom, and she would quote her favourite saying: “To know all is to forgive all.”

That she had infinite tenderness for the feelings of others, living or dead, she proved every day. In a letter to Mr. Scribner asking advice about the publication in London of certain letters of her husband, she says:

“Some of the letters that are intended to go into the book should not, in my judgment, appear at all. When my husband was a boy in his late ‘teens’ and early twenties he and his father — a rigid old Calvinist — quarrelled on the subject of religion. Louis being young enough to like the melodrama, it took on an undue importance, out of all keeping with the real facts. During this turbulent period Louis poured out his soul in letters, the publication of many of which would give a false impression of the relations between the son and the father. Louis was twenty-five when I first met him, and the period of the religious discussion was long past. Mr. Thomas Stevenson loved me and was as kind to me as though I were his own daughter. I cannot, for the sake of an extra volume that would produce a certain amount of money, do anything that in my heart would seem disloyal to the dear old man’s memory — all the more because he is dead.”

In her character there were many strange contradictions, and I think sometimes this was a part of her attraction, for even after knowing her for years one could always count on some surprise, some unexpected contrast which went far in making up her fascinating personality. Notwithstanding the broad view that she took of life in most of its aspects, in some things she was old-fashioned. She was never reconciled, for instance, to female suffrage, and once when she was persuaded to attend a political meeting at which her daughter was one of the speakers, she sat looking on with mingled pride in her daughter’s eloquence and horror at her sentiments. Yet, after the suffrage was granted to women in California, her family was amused to see her go to the polls and vote and carefully advise the men employed on her place concerning their ballots.

Some persons were repelled by what they considered Mrs. Stevenson’s cold and distant manner, but they were not aware of what it took her own family a long time to discover — that this apparent detachment and sphinxlike immobility covered a real and childlike shyness; yet it was never apathy, but the stillness of a frightened wild creature that has never been tamed. Though she said so little, she never failed to create an impression. Some one once said of her that her silence was more fascinating than the most brilliant conversation of other women, and, indeed, “Where Macgregor sits is the head of the table” applied very aptly to her. Her manner had nothing of the aggressive self-confidence of the “capable woman.” She seemed so essentially feminine, low-voiced, quiet, even helplessly appealing, that it was difficult to realise that she was a fair shot, a fearless horsewoman, a first-rate cook, an expert seamstress, a really scientific gardener, a most skillful nurse, and had, besides, some working acquaintance with many trades and professions upon which she could draw in an emergency.

Her physical courage was remarkable; she would get on any horse, jump into a boat in any sea, face a burglar — do anything, in fact, that circumstances seemed to require. But perhaps her moral courage, that which gave her strength to face great crises — as when Louis was near death — with a smile on her face, was even greater. This I know came to her as a direct inheritance from our mother, Esther Van de Grift, who was never known to give way under the stress of great need.

In her fondness for animals she reminds one of her maternal ancestress, Elizabeth Knodle, who used to rush out and seize horses by the bridle when she thought they were being driven too fast by their cruel drivers. Nothing would more surely arouse her anger than the sight of any unkindness to one of these “little brothers.” Once at Vailima a gentleman, who ought to have known better, came riding up on a horse that showed signs of being in pain. “That horse has a sore back,” she cried. The rider angrily denied it, but she insisted on his dismounting, and when the saddle was removed found that her suspicions were but too well founded. She compelled him to leave the suffering creature in her care until its back was entirely cured.

I have been surprised sometimes to hear people speak of her as “bohemian.” Simplicity and genuineness were the foundation-stones of her character, and she certainly dispensed with many of the useless conventions of society, but she was a serious-minded woman for whom the cheap affectations generally labelled as “bohemianism” could have no attractions.

She was entirely feminine in her love of pretty clothes. In choosing her own attire, though she followed the fashions and never tried to be extravagant or outré, she had a discriminating taste that made her always seem to be dressed more attractively than other people. All who think of her, even in her last days, must have a picture in their minds of the dainty, lacy, silken prettiness in which she sat enshrined.

She was pretty as a young woman, but as she grew older she was beautiful — with that rare type of beauty that “age cannot wither nor custom stale.” With her clear-cut profile, like an exquisite cameo, colour like old ivory, delicate oval face, eyes dark, vivid, and youthful, her appearance was most unusual. Louis used to say of her eyes that her glance was like that of one aiming a pistol — direct, steady, and to some persons rather alarming. Her voice, as I think I have said somewhere else in these pages, was low, with few inflections, and was compared by her husband to the murmur of a brook running under ice. The poet Gosse said of her: “She is dark and rich-hearted, like some wonderful wine-red jewel.”