Island memories were always dear to her, and when one day she heard that a ship had come into port manned with sailors from Samoa, she at once sent to the dock and invited them all to call on her. Soon the dark-skinned, picturesque troop, shy but proud of the attention shown them by Tusitala's widow, arrived. The ava bowl was brought out and placed before them as they sat cross-legged on the floor in a semi-circle, and after the brewing of the ava it was drunk with all the proper ceremonies of speech-making and exchanges of compliments. Mr. Carmichael Carr, who, with his mother, the well-known singer, was one of the visitors that day, writes: "I have a wonderfully clear picture of the reception Mrs. Stevenson gave and the South Sea men she had gathered around her—their strange appearance and incantations and the peculiar drink they brewed."
At the Hyde Street house she received many distinguished people—actors, writers, singers, and even royalties. There Henry James, S. S. McClure, David Bispham, William Faversham and his wife, ex-Queen Liliuokalani and a hundred others went to pay her their respects. It was at a reception she was giving to Liliuokalani—which, by the way, she gave in the hope of arousing favourable interest in the Queen's mission to Washington to seek justice—that she first met David Bispham, and first heard him sing, too, in a rather unusual way. Some one—I think it was Gelett Burgess—said to the Queen, "Will your Majesty please issue a royal command? We have never heard one." Whereupon her Majesty pointed her finger at Bispham and said, "The bard is commanded to sing!"
When the Stevenson Society of San Francisco held their yearly meetings of commemoration on Louis's birthday she was the honoured guest, and it was characteristic of her to remember to invite his old friend, Jules Simoneau of Monterey, for these occasions. When she first asked the old man to come he shrugged his shoulders and said: "What! Will you take me to see your fine friends in this old blouse? I have no other clothes." "Your clothes are nothing," she replied. "All that matters to me is that you were my husband's dear friend." So he went, and was entertained in her house with as much consideration as though he had been a prince of the blood. On the evening of the dinner given by the Society at the old restaurant which had once been frequented by Stevenson, she took Simoneau in her carriage, and when a fashionable young lady in her party objected to this arrangement she was rebuked by being sent home in a street-car.
Among other public functions to which she was invited to do her honour as the widow of Stevenson was a banquet given by the St. Andrews Society, which included nearly all the Scotchmen in San Francisco. In conversation with three of them she remarked that she had the sugar bowl from which Bobby Burns had sweetened his toddy when he went to see Robert Stevenson,[69] and, after inviting them to call, promised to mix a toddy for them and sweeten it from the same historic sugar bowl. About a week later the three appeared, exceedingly Scotch in their long black coats and silk hats, and each carrying a formal bouquet. They had a delightful time, drinking their toddy, which was duly sweetened from the hallowed bowl, and reciting Burns's poems to her in such broad Scotch that she could not understand a word of it. But she loved the sound of it all the same.
It was soon after her return to San Francisco that Mrs. Stevenson interested herself in the story of a half-caste Samoan girl, a sort of modern Cinderella, of whom she had heard before leaving the islands. This girl, who was an orphan, had been left a fortune in lands and money in Samoa by her American father, and when she was five years of age had been sent to San Francisco by her guardian to be educated. There, through a combination of circumstances, she disappeared, and her property in Samoa lay unclaimed, while the rents went to the benefit of others. When Mrs. Stevenson heard of this she determined to make a search for the girl, and as soon as she reached San Francisco set out to do so. After the rounds of all the private schools and seminaries had been made without success, her friend, Miss Chismore, thought of trying the charity orphan asylums, and in one of these, a Catholic convent school for orphans, she found a girl bearing a somewhat similar name to the lost one. Mrs. Stevenson, taking with her a Samoan basket and some shells, immediately went out to see her. At the school a small, dark, shy girl was brought by the sisters into the visitors' room, and at sight of the Samoan basket she gave a joyful cry of recognition. The long-lost heiress was found, living as a pauper in a charity school! The difficulty then was to prove her claim to the property and secure it for her. In her determination to do this Mrs. Stevenson went to Washington, where, after seeing senators, priests of the Catholic Church, and other persons in authority, she finally succeeded in having the girl's lands, with some of the back rents, restored to her. All this was like a fairy story to the kind sisters at the convent, and their joy was unbounded at seeing their little pauper pupil thus romantically transformed into the rich princess. Meanwhile Mrs. Stevenson invited the young lady to her house, gave a party in her honour, helped her buy clothing suitable to her new station, and, when the time came for her triumphant departure to claim her island possessions, went to see her off on the steamer. As long as this little Cinderella lived she never forgot the fairy godmother who had worked this wonderful change in her life.
It was during this period that the regrettable incident of Mr. Henley's attack on the memory of Stevenson occurred—an incident that attracted a great deal more attention in England than in America, where it was forgotten almost as soon as it happened. Mrs. Stevenson herself always ascribed this strange act on the part of her husband's old friend to his state of health, which had never been good and was rapidly growing worse; and, because she believed he had become embittered by his misfortunes, she bore no rancour. In referring to it she repeated one of her favourite sayings, "To know all is to forgive all," and when, after Mr. Henley's death, his widow wrote to her asking for letters to be published in his "life," she sent them with a kind and affectionate note.
While the house in San Francisco was building, Mrs. Stevenson went away for a time, accompanied only by her maid, for a camping trip in the Santa Cruz Mountains, down among the redwoods. The delights of the place where they camped, in a shady little valley about ten miles from Gilroy, soon won her heart completely, and she decided to purchase a small ranch there for a permanent summer home. For the first season she lived there in true campers' fashion, which she describes in a letter to her daughter: "At the ranch I have one tent with a curtain in the middle. We sleep on one side of the curtain and sit on the other. I have only the most primitive facilities for cooking, and the butcher is twelve miles away over a mountain road. He is anything but dependable, and when I send for a piece of roast beef I may get a soup bone of veal, or a small bit of liver, or a side of breakfast bacon, which I keep hung in a tree. I cannot keep flour on a tree, so am dependent on the boarding-house Afterwards tents were put up for the accommodation of her family, and every spring, after the rains were over, they all moved down to take up a delightful out-of-door life such as can scarcely be enjoyed anywhere in the world except in California. Cooking was done in the open air, and meals were taken at a long table spread in a deep glen, where the trees were so thick that it was pleasantly cool even on the hottest days. As time went on the mistress of this sylvan paradise grew more and more attached to it, and she at length decided to build more permanent quarters. First of all, she made a model of a house out of match boxes, with pebbles for the foundation wall, all glued together, painted and complete. Then she hired a country carpenter and built her house—a pleasant little dwelling, with a wide veranda extending in country fashion around two sides of it. In building the foundation wall boulders from the stream were used, and many were found bearing bold imprints of fossil ferns, birds, and snakes. Mrs. Stevenson was delighted to have these reminders of a past age for her wall, but, alas, during her absence the stones were all cemented in place with the nice smooth sides outward and the fossils turned inward.