The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez [english novels for students txt] 📗

it only right to ask for a vote of the family, for without their concurrence he would not take such a step. The vote was unanimously in favour of the publication. When the pamphlets were ready, his wife, with her son and daughter, set to work addressing them and sending them far and wide. It was certain that he would not appeal in vain in such a matter to his wife, for in their sympathies with the unfortunate and unjustly used they were as one.

Their hopes of going to England, based on the long respite of eighteen months during which Mr. Stevenson had been free from his old trouble, were dashed to the ground by a severe cold caught in Sydney and a return of the hemorrhages. His only chance seemed to lie on the sea--in fact, the doctor said nothing would save him but the South Seas--but when his wife went to the water-front to secure passage she found that, owing to a sailors' strike, only one ship, the Janet Nichol , an iron-screw steamer of about six hundred tons, was going out. She went to the owners and asked to be taken, but they refused, on the ground that they didn't want women on board. Nevertheless she went right on, with pitiful persistence, with her preparations, and finally had the sick man carried down to the landing-place and rowed out to the ship. She had won out, but they received her very reluctantly. And such a ship! It must have looked fine, however, to Mrs. Stevenson, after the Equator , for she writes: "Think of two bathrooms and only one other passenger besides ourselves, a nice long wide deck to walk on, steam to run away from squalls with, and no flopping about in calms." But when her daughter went on board to see them off she was horrified at the sight of it--black with coal dust, manned by Solomon Island "black boys," and just as they stepped on deck Tin Jack (Jack Buckland[33]) came up the gangway drunk and fell off into the water. It was pandemonium, but very exciting, and in the midst of it Mrs. Stevenson was calmly looking after her husband and keeping up a smiling, courageous face.

[Footnote 33: Tin is the equivalent in the islands for
Mr. Jack Buckland was the living original of Tommy
Haddon in The Wrecker .]

As soon as they were at sea Louis recovered, and after stopping off at Apia for a look at their new property, they went the rounds of the "low islands," visiting thirty-three in all. Although they confessed to a certain monotony in these islands, their adventures, of which Mrs. Stevenson kept a regular diary, were many and exciting. These notes were written for her husband's benefit, but as it happened that he made but slight use of them, she prepared them for publication herself in a volume called The Cruise of the Janet Nichol . "This diary," she says in her preface, "was written under the most adverse conditions--sometimes on the damp up-turned bottom of a canoe or whale-boat, sometimes when lying face downward on the burning sands of the tropic beach, often in copra sheds in the midst of a pandemonium of noise and confusion, but oftener on board the rolling Janet , whose pet name was the Jumping Jenny , but never in comfortable surroundings."

It was on this voyage, during which they were well tossed about by the frisky Janet , that the ship was set on fire by the spontaneous combustion of some fireworks in one of the cabins. In the midst of the excitement some native sailors were seen by Mrs. Stevenson about to toss overboard a blazing trunk. She stopped them in time and was thankful to discover that she had saved all her husband's manuscripts.

At the end of the cruise, from which his health did not benefit as much as had been hoped, they returned to Sydney, meeting there a reception which, while irritating enough at the time, afterwards afforded them much amusement. They went directly from the ship to the most fashionable hotel, but, not being known there, their queer appearance, with their Tokalu buckets, mats, shells, straw hats, etc., brought upon them a severe snubbing. Then they went to the Oxford, a little old inn on George Street, where they were courteously received and given the whole first floor, without being asked to show their credentials. The next morning every paper in Sydney had their names on the front page, and all the clubs, societies, churches, and schools sent cards to the fine hotel, whose proprietor had to send a messenger three times a day to the Oxford with a basketful of letters for the Stevensons. The proprietor, now aware of what he had done, came in great chagrin to beg them to come back, and offered them the rooms for half price--for nothing--but they refused; and, besides, they were too comfortable at the Oxford to be willing to leave. After that, whenever Mrs. Stevenson went to Sydney she always stayed at the Oxford, for she was always loyal to those who showed her consideration.

During their stay in Sydney at this time Mr. Stevenson was so ill that he was compelled to keep his room, and all thought of a return to England was now definitely abandoned. Plans were set on foot for establishing a permanent residence in Samoa, and while Lloyd Osbourne went to England to bring the furniture from Skerryvore, the Stevensons returned to Apia and camped in a gate lodge on their place until the new house should be built.


CHAPTER VIII

THE HAPPY YEARS IN SAMOA.


It was in Samoa that the word "home" first began to have a real meaning for these gypsy wanderers, lured on as they had been half round the world in their quest of the will-o'-the-wisp, health. Having bought the land, which lay on rising ground about three miles from the town of Apia, it was then necessary to find the money to build a house on it. After some thought, Mrs. Stevenson suggested that they might sell Skerryvore in England, and thus turn the one house directly into the other. As Skerryvore had been a gift to her from her father-in-law, Louis said, "But this money is yours," and he then said he would make it all right by leaving her the Samoan place in his will, which he did, "with all that it contained."

The next thing was to choose a name, and they finally decided upon the native word Vailima,[34] meaning "five waters," in reference to a stream fed by four tributaries that ran through the place.

[Footnote 34: Pronounced Vyleéma.]

Without more ado they plunged eagerly into the business of clearing the forest and building their house--a task for which Fanny Stevenson, by taste and early training, was supremely fitted. She wrote at once to her mother-in-law in Scotland, saying: "Come when you like. Even if we make a temporary shelter you need not be so very uncomfortable. The only question is the food problem, and if in six months I cannot have a garden producing and fowls and pigs and cows it will be strange to me." In all this she took a high delight, for, like a true pioneer, she found more pleasure in the doing of a task than in the thing finished. When the house or garden or what-not was done, and there was nothing left but to admire, a great part of the interest in it was gone for her. At Vailima she had almost a virgin field for her gardening activities, and her "Dutch blood" rejoiced within her. In the old California days her husband, in his humorous way, had called her "the forty-niner," but now, as he watched her, flitting in her blue dress, like a witch, in all parts of the plantation, directing, expostulating, and working with her hands when words failed, he called her "my little blue bogie planter." Writing to Miss Taylor, he says: "Ill or well, rain or shine, a little blue indefatigable figure is to be observed howking about certain patches of garden. She comes in heated and bemired up to the eyebrows, late for every meal...."

The place they had bought was not precisely in the "bush," as the unbroken forest is called in those lands, for it had once been partly under cultivation; but it needs only a short season of neglect for the devouring jungle to sweep over and obliterate all traces of the handiwork of man. To all intents they began anew to clear out a place for their house and garden, in the midst of the great silent forest, "where one might hear the babbling of a burn close by, and the birds, and the sea breaking on the coast three miles away and six hundred feet below." The days were "fine like heaven; such a blue of the sea, such green of the trees, and such crimson of the hibiscus flowers were never dreamed of; and the air as mild and gentle as a baby's breath--and yet not hot."

"The scenery," writes Mrs. Stevenson to Miss Boodle, "is simply enchanting; here a cliff, there a dashing little river, yonder a waterfall, here a great gorge slashed through the hillside, and everywhere a vegetation that baffles description. Our only workmen are cannibals from other islands and so-called savages--though I have never yet met one man whom that word described accurately. I have with me [on the steamer Lubeck , on the way from Sydney to Samoa] a cageful of beautiful yellow fowls, a big black mother sow is to follow, and soon I mean to have some pretty Jersey cows and some gentle horses. I have packages of garden seeds to experiment with, and it is odd indeed if I am not able soon to provision a garrison. One of the first things I shall plunge into is an ice-house run by cascade power."

At first they lived in a two-room cottage, designed to serve later as a gate lodge, where comfort was at a minimum. The road to Apia was scarcely more than a footpath, and it was difficult to bring up supplies in any quantity. At times provisions ran low, and the story of the occasion when they were reduced to dining on a single avocado[35] pear was told so often, in print and otherwise, that during all the following time of plenty they had to keep explaining that they really had enough to eat. Of course the famine was more apparent than real, for there was enough food at the town only three miles away, and the occasional dearth in those first days was merely a matter of the inconvenience of bringing it up.

[Footnote 35: Commonly called "alligator" pear.]

It was in the hurricane season, too, and there were days when they sat in momentary fear lest their frail dwelling should be carried away by the fury of the storm or crushed beneath some falling giant of the forest.

From the day of their arrival at Vailima, in September, 1890, Mrs. Stevenson began to keep a diary--a record which has proved to be one of the most valuable sources of material in writing her biography, and which itself has a curious history. When, after her husband's