The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson

by Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

But above and beyond his wife's care for his physical well-being was the strong courage with which she stood by him in his hours of gloom and heartened him up to the fight. Her profound faith in his genius before the rest of the world had come to recognize it had a great deal to do with keeping up his faith in himself, and her discriminating taste in literature was such that he had begun even then to submit all his writings to her criticism.

Although his own life work lay entirely in the field of letters, he had a sincere admiration for work with the hands, and often expressed his surprise at the mechanical cleverness of American women. He took pleasure in seeing that we could cut, fit, and make our own clothing, and do a pretty good job of it, too, and looked on at the operation with serious interest, sometimes making useful suggestions, for he had a genuine and unaffected sympathy with the work and aims of other people, no matter how humble they might be. Any one could go to him with a tale of daily struggle, of little ambitions bravely fought for, even though it were nothing more than a job as waiter in a restaurant, and be sure of his respectful consideration and sincere advice, always granting that the ambition were honest and the fight well fought.

Sickness and discouragement were not enough to keep down his boyish gaiety, which he sometimes manifested by teasing his womenfolk. One of his favourite methods of doing this was to station himself on a chair in front of us, and, with his brown eyes lighted up with a whimsical smile, talk broad Scotch, in a Highland nasal twang, by the hour, until we cried for mercy. Yet he was decidedly sensitive about that same Scotch, and his feelings were much wounded by hearing me express a horror of reading it in books.

A pleasant trivial circumstance of our life that comes to mind is an occasion when we were all rejoicing in the possession of new clothes—a rare event with any of us in those days, and Louis proposed that we should celebrate this extraordinary prosperity by an evening at the theatre. Women wore pockets then, but there had been no time to provide my dress with one, so Louis agreed to carry my handkerchief, but only on condition that I should ask for it when needed in a true Scotch twang, "Gie me the naepkin!" a condition that I was compelled to fulfill, no doubt to the surprise of our neighbours at the theatre. Gilbert and Sullivan were in their heyday then, and the play given that night was The Pirates of Penzance. Louis said the London "bobbies" were true to life.

Chief among the amusements with which we tried to brighten the extreme quietude of our lives in the little Oakland house was reading aloud. We obtained books from the Mercantile Library of San Francisco, among which I especially remember the historical works of Francis Parkman, who was a great favourite with Mr. Stevenson. He had a theory that the not uncommon distaste among the people for that branch of literature was largely the fault of the dull style adopted by many historians, and saw no good reason why the thrilling story of the great events of the world should not be presented in a manner that would hold the interest of readers. Yet he had no patience with the sort of writing that subordinates truth to the desire of presenting a striking picture. As an instance, certainly of rare occurrence in Parkman, he noticed a paragraph in The Conspiracy of Pontiac, in which the author refers to the shining of the moon on a certain night when a party was endeavouring to make a secret passage down the river through hostile country. He thought it unlikely that Parkman could have known that the moon shone on that particular night, though it is possible that he did him an injustice, for it sometimes happens that just such a trivial circumstance is mentioned in the documents of the early explorers.

Sometimes he read aloud to us from some French writer, translating it into English as he read for our benefit. Les Étrangleurs was one of the books that he read to us in this way, while we sat and sewed our seams. He seemed to get a good deal of rest as well as amusement from the reading of such books of mystery and adventure. His taste was always for the decent in literature, and he was much offended by the works of the writers of the materialistic school who were just then gaining a vogue. Among these was Emile Zola, and he exacted a promise from me never to read that writer—a promise that has been faithfully kept to this day.

His stay at Monterey had given him a fancy to study the Spanish language, so we obtained books and began it together. He had a theory that a language could be best acquired by plunging directly into it, but I have a suspicion that our choice of a drama of the sixteenth century, one of Lope de Vega's, I think, was scarcely a wise one for beginners. He refers to this venture of ours in a letter to Sidney Colvin as "the play which the sister and I are just beating our way through with two bad dictionaries and an insane grammar." Nevertheless, we made some headway, and I remember that he marvelled greatly at the far-fetched, high-flown similes and figures of speech indulged in by the writers of the "Golden Age" of Spain. In spite of his confessed dislike for the cold-blooded study of the grammar, we did not altogether neglect it, and a day comes to my mind when he was assisting me in the homely task of washing the dishes in the pleasant sunny kitchen where the Banksia rose hung its yellow curtain over the windows. We recited Spanish conjugations while we worked, and he held up a glass for my inspection, saying: "See how beautifully I have polished it, Nellie. There is no doubt that I have missed my vocation. I was born to be a butler." "No, Louis," I replied, "some day you are to be a famous writer, and who knows but that I shall write about you, as the humble Boswell wrote about Johnson, and tell the world how you once wiped dishes for me in this old kitchen!"

For the long evenings of winter we had a game which Louis invented expressly for our amusement. Lloyd Osbourne, then a boy of twelve, had rather more than the usual boy's fondness for stories of the sea. It will be remembered that it was to please this boy that Mr. Stevenson afterwards wrote Treasure Island. Our game was to tell a continued story, each person being limited to two minutes, taking up the tale at the point where the one before him left off. We older ones had a secret understanding that we were to keep Lloyd away from the sea, but strive as we might, even though we left the hero stranded in the middle of the Desert of Sahara, Lloyd never failed to have him sailing the bounding main again before his allotted two minutes expired.

Many and long were the arguments that we had on the merits of our respective countries, and I remember that Mr. Stevenson did not place the sentiment of patriotism at the top of the list of human virtues, for he believed that to concentrate one's affections and interest too closely upon one small section of the earth's surface, simply on account of the accident of birth, had a narrowing effect upon a man's mental outlook and his human sympathies. He was a citizen of the world in his capacity to understand the point of view of other men, of whatsoever race, colour, or creed, and it was this catholicity of spirit that made it possible for him to sit upon the benches of Portsmouth Square in San Francisco and learn something of real life from the human flotsam and jetsam cast up there by fate.

Of all the popular songs of America he liked Marching Through Georgia and Dixie best. For Home, Sweet Home he had no liking, perhaps from having heard it during some moment of poignant homesickness. He said that such a song made too brutal an assault upon a man's tenderest feelings, and believed it to be a much greater triumph for a writer to bring a smile to his readers than a tear—partly, perhaps, because it is a more difficult achievement.