After the lapse of more than a quarter of a century, it might not come amiss to recount another little incident at the same office.
I mentioned one day to Mr. Gilder that some notes by Mr. Eaton written during his last illness had been rejected. "You don't mean to tell me that anything by Wyatt was rejected at this office," said he, and going into an inner room, returned in a few minutes with a goodly check. "There," said he, as he put it in my hand, "Send in the notes at your convenience."
Stevenson laughed good-naturedly over the dilemmas the editors of western papers threw him into, by their tardiness in paying space rates for the stories and essays that now rank among his finest productions. Indeed one wonders whether he would have survived the hardships of those Monterey days, had not the good Jules Simoneau found him "worth saving," a circumstance for which he is accorded the palm by posterity rather than for the flavor of his tamales.
In many ways it is given to the humble to minister to the needs of the great. A distinguished author once said to me: "I could never have arrived without the help of my poor friends."
As Stevenson went from reminiscence to reminiscence, we felt that from this period of his vivid obscurity might have been drawn material for some of his most stirring romances, and we were rewarded as good listeners by the discovery of that which he thought his best work, namely, the little story called "Will o' the Mill."
"Ah!" exclaimed Mr. Sanborn, his eyes beaming, "if you live to be as old as Methuselah, with all the world's lore at your finger-ends, you could never improve on that simple little story."
We teased Stevenson a good deal on the hugeness of his royalties on "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," which, besides having had what the publishers call a "run," was bringing in a second goodly harvest from its dramatization, by which his voyage to the South Seas had become a reality.
Remembering his remark that his idea of Purgatory was a perpetual high wind, I asked him: "Why have you chosen an island for your future habitat; or, if an island, why not Nevis in the West Indies, where one is in the perpetual doldrums, so to speak?" "There will be no more wind on Samoa than just enough to turn the page of the book one is reading," he replied; and windless Nevis was British, you see, and his first necessity was to get away where nobody reads. Like Jubal, son of Lamech, who felt himself hemmed in by hearing his songs repeated in a land where everybody sang, so he was shadowed by the Jekyll and Hyde mania in a land where everybody read.
The very essence of his isolation is felt in a playful little fling at a Mr. Nerli, an artist, who went out there to paint his portrait, as well as the boredom everyone experiences in sitting to a painter:
"Did ever mortal man hear tell, of sae singular a ferlie,