Under the Wide and Starry Sky (46 page)

Louis knocked on the frame of Fanny's bedroom door. “May I come in?”

She looked up from the book she was reading. “Of course.”

“Do you want to hear a bit more of
Weir of Hermiston
?”

“Yes,” she said.

He sat down on a chair opposite her, but before he started, he blurted out, “I have been downhearted.”

“I know. You tend to get down in the dumps just before you write something wonderful.”

He shifted in his seat. “What do you say we bury the hatchet?”

“For what?'

“For everything that hasn't been good in the past year,” he said. “For all of it. It's not helpful for either of us to carry around the bad old feelings. I would like to return to what we used to have.”

“It's that simple?” She shot him an ironic smile.

“Ah, Fanny. I know this life you've had with me hasn't been easy. You've given over a whole chunk of your life to being a nurse. You've had to pick up and move so many times. It occurred to me that I don't ask what
you
long for. You never talk about missing California.”

She tipped her head thoughtfully. “Since the day we married, you were my home. I never longed to go back to America. And I never felt lonely until the past year or two.”

“You've been lonely?”

Fanny laughed. “How could I not be? You don't come to me when you are thinking something through, or to tell me about your day, as you used to. We have drifted pretty far afield from each other, wouldn't you say?”

“I've made mistakes. I have said things I regret, Fanny.” He sighed deeply. “Sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.”

“It's my fault, too. I know that. Maybe I've wanted too much of you. But lately, it seems you don't care to know what is inside here.” She put her palm to her breast.

“I can see how you might have felt that, but it changed when you broke down. Truly.” Louis reached over and picked up his manuscript from the floor. “I want you to listen to this. You remember the premise, don't you? A young man, Archie, is at odds with his father, Lord Justice Clerk, a terrifying man. Archie has denounced his father publicly for hanging a man, and he's been banished to the family's country estate. That's where Archie meets a woman named Kirstie.”

“There are two Kirsties, as I recall.”

“Aye. The first one we meet is the aunt, who's handsome, passionate—she's the housekeeper at Hermiston. She spends evenings talking deeply with him, ranging over many subjects, and becomes a bit sweet on him, though he's much younger. Later, she introduces him to her niece, Kirstie, a pretty, coquettish girl, and Archie falls in love with her.”

Louis read to Fanny for nearly an hour. He stood as he read, and swayed as he felt the rhythm of the sentences in his body. Near the end, he came to a part he'd written about the aunt.

When Louis glanced up, he saw that Fanny looked troubled. “So I am the elder Kirstie,” she said.

“A man's wife gets into his fiction. You are in her, my girl. But there is much Fanny Stevenson in the young Kirstie, too.”

He read on, and when he finished, he sought out her eyes.

“It's startlingly good,” she said. “Your language is cleaner. Simpler.”

“You noticed.”

“And the Kirsties—both aunt and niece—are flesh-and-blood women.”

“Thank you,” he said rather formally. “It's a love story. And there are always problems with a love story.”

“I know,” she said.

“For instance, I'd prefer to write the sex part of it frankly, the way I write the rest of it,” he went on, “but no publisher would allow it to see the light of day.” Louis felt Fanny warm to him. He sat down on the bed and rubbed her feet as he used to.

“Does it have a tragic ending?” she asked.

“I don't know. I suppose it should. The funny thing is that I suspect it will have a happy ending. We shall see. This time, when I picked it up again, the words just flowed. I hope it continues at this pace, but I am not going to rush. If I take my time, it may turn out to be the best thing I've ever done.” He laughed. “My God, they should put up a plaque at Rutherford's bar as a nudge to all those miserable Scottish lads who long to be writers. I can't tell you how often I hung about that bar pitying myself, despairing of ever writing a full book, let alone ever having a wife.”

“Look at you now,” she said.

“And what a fine, fine wife I have.” He got up and began to pace around the room, his hands fluttering as he talked. “I've been thinking lately, we need to have
fun.
A cotillion is in order, wouldn't you say? I want to see you again in that dress I gave you.”

“Oh, we've had so many people up.”

“Dancing, wonderful food. It
is
one of the things we do well together.”

“Throw parties?”

“Some of the best.”

“What do you say?”

She looked at him skeptically, and he stopped pacing.

“It's a
normal
thing to do, Fan, a happy thing. That's all.”

“All right,” she said. “I'm game.”

On the afternoon of Louis's birthday, November 13, a hundred people came up the main road and took the new cutoff to the house. Recently completed by the chiefs after their release from jail in August, the new section bore the name they had given it: the Road of the Loving Heart. Friends of every stripe came: British, Samoans, Germans, Americans. The captain of the H.M.S.
Curacoa
brought sixteen of his men. The jailer, Wurmbrand—who'd lost his job for allowing Fanny to sneak old P'oe out of the jail—stayed until the end. Grudges were set aside all around as people danced and changed partners.

How strange it was that the hundreds of turns in Louis's life had brought him to the spectacle playing out just now. Never could his bounteous imagination have conjured such a picture when he stood on the North Bridge in a whipping wind, watching the trains leaving Edinburgh and longing, longing to be on one. Around him, the native members of the Vailima clan wore the Scottish plaid
lavalavas
Belle had sewn for them. The seamstress herself, who was flirting with every sailor on the premises, wore a sash in the same plaid.

Louis studied Fanny as she talked to guests, sparkling. She was wearing every diamond in the establishment, from her own earrings to Maggie's necklace and brooch. She looked lovely in her black velvet dress, and he felt a flush of longing for her in the old way. If he could go back to that day on the North Bridge and alter the years that had intervened, he would change a few things. But not this woman.

“Something bad is going to happen today,” Fanny fretted at breakfast. “Someone is in danger.”

“Well, out with it,” Louis humored her. “Who is it?”

“It's not you or me.”

“Lucky us!”

She focused her gaze out the window to the lawn, where Austin played tennis with a neighbor boy. “It's somebody else in the family, that much I know. Somebody we love.”

“Hmmm. I just saw Lloyd, and he was fit as a fiddle—actually pecking on his typewriter. Unless the ceiling falls in, I think he is quite safe. Belle is under my command this morning until lunchtime. I will only allow her one trip to the privy, and that is all. Austin is … well, Austin. We'll have to put Arrick on duty.” Louis turned to Maggie. “Mother?” he said. “Health report.”

Maggie looked up from a newspaper she was reading with a magnifying glass. “Steady as she goes. No need for Arrick to watch Austin. I'll keep an eye on him.”

“Everyone is accounted for, then. Come, let's get you out to your pea patch.”

“I don't know, Louis,” Fanny said, shaking her head.

“Now, look, Fan. The sun is shining. Christmas is three weeks away. You haven't grown a mustache. Belle is cooking your favorite roast for dinner. Your husband loves you. Tell me, could life be better?”

She smiled grudgingly. “And you are a canary bird.”

Louis laughed. It once was one of her cruelest names for him, because of his incessant, chirpy cheerfulness. Now he found it mild. “You haven't brought that one out in a while.”

He walked her out into the garden, where Lafaele was hoeing. “Mr. Archangel,” Louis said to him, “would you kindly watch out for Tamaitai this morning? Don't let her fall in a ditch or some such.”

Lafaele assented.

“Do you know what I am dreaming of?” Louis said to her. “A big bowl of salad greens with dinner. Do we still have lettuces?”

“Have you ever known me not to have lettuces?”

“Will you make a nice mayonnaise dressing today?” He kissed her on top of her head.

“Yes.”

“Good. I'll help.”

A quicksilver change. Last night she had been laughing on the verandah, telling stories about their voyage on the
Janet Nicoll.
Now she seemed hardly fit to stand up in the garden. He walked back to the house and went to his study, where Belle was stationed at the writing desk. “Your mother is having a hard day … “

“I know. I noticed it immediately this morning.” Belle sighed. “I hope it is not the beginning of a bout, what with Mr. Baxter coming in a couple of weeks.”

“If Fanny is depressed, we won't have to pretend around Charles. He is a man for all seasons.”

The thought of Baxter lightened his own mood immeasurably. He was already on his way, carrying the proofs of
The Edinburgh Edition.
No one, aside from Colvin or Henry James, could brighten Louis's life in the same way.

“Why don't you go to your mother now and come back in an hour. I'm not quite ready to dictate.”

“All right. When she's finished in the garden, I'll get her started on some Christmas decorations.”

“Good girl.”

Alone, he assessed what he needed for the next chapter of
Weir.
In front of him were papers with phrases penned in his pained scrawl, as well as a history of Lord Braxfield, the lord justice clerk upon whom the coarse, terrifying character of the father was based. He looked at his simple outline of the plot, waiting for some door to open into the chapter.
This is how it always is.
I must sit on my eggs like a hen.

He understood enough about his working method to know he would have to be patient; there was no point in forcing words onto paper. What came from his unconscious was the only thing worth writing down for the big moments in his book. And today he was working on a big moment, the instant when Archie must understand that his beloved young Kirstie is more complicated than he realized. That
women
are more complicated than he realized.

Louis sank back in his chair, closed his eyes, and let himself fall into a half-sleep. He saw in his mind's eye the pretty redheaded young lady who used to distract him in church; he heard in his ears the Scottish voices of a half-dozen girls he had known as a youth on the streets of Edinburgh, and in the Pentland Hills when he went to Swanston Cottage on holiday. The Kirsties already had strong Border accents, but he wanted more. He would put old Scots words into their mouths—
bairns
for children,
howl
for hovel,
toon
for town—knowing full well some of his readers would rebel against the strange vocabulary. He would pull them along with enough straight English to make the reading bearable for an Englishman or American.

The voice that next came to him was Thomas Stevenson's.
I would ten times sooner see you lying in your grave than that you should be shaking the faith of other young men and bringing ruin on other houses as you have brought it upon this.
How vividly he remembered his father's furious outpouring. Those words were precisely the burning vitriol Judge Hermiston would have hurled at his son, Archie.
God knows, they still hurt to remember them.
Somehow he would have to weave in the part about bringing ruin upon the house.

Daydreaming, he heard his own voice, the narrator's voice, and it was more confident than it had ever been. It was telling the story of a young man coming to understand the world. It was the voice of an older Louis speaking of the young Louis through the character of Archie—the poetry-writing, sweet soul he once was, in all his joyful, poignant, silly innocence.

Louis sat up straight, grabbed his pen, and began a scene in which Archie arrived late for church because he'd tarried to smell the first blossoms of spring. The first person he must see was the lovely young Kirstie in another pew. Louis was fairly cackling as he fired off two paragraphs, then stopped to admire his prose.

The lip was lifted from her little teeth. He saw the red blood work vividly under her tawny skin. Her eye, which was great as a stag's, struck and held his gaze.

Ah, young love. There it was. Embarrassing to read? Aye, but only as embarrassing and sweet as it was to experience young love. Anybody who had fallen hard at sixteen or seventeen would feel that moment of recognition. With his cramped hand, he scrawled more sentences and notes before he set down the pen.

He breathed deeply and laughed out loud. Just then a little knock came on his door.

“Avast, mate!” Louis cried when he saw Austin. “State your business.”

“It's time for my lesson. Did you forget?”

“Only for a minute.”

The boy came into the room and looked around. “Who were you laughing with?”

“Meself, laddie. I just had a fine visit with the Brownies.”

Austin nodded matter-of-factly. He knew about the Brownies.

“And I was thinking that when I'm old and gone, schoolboys like you will someday say, ‘There were three Rrrrobies: Robbie Burns, Robbie Fergusson, and Robbie Stevenson!'”

Austin grinned. “How do you do that?”

Louis opened the boy's mouth and looked inside. “You've got all the parts you need. Roll your tongue around to loosen it up.”

The boy wagged his tongue all around.

“Now put your tongue up flat against your palate and blow air out, so your tongue vibrates.”

Austin produced a windy flutter.

“Now make the sound of R as you do it. Say ‘Rrrrobbie.'”

“Rrrrrrrobbie!”

“Hooray!” Louis shouted.

Austin set down a deck of cards on Louis's desk.

“Ach, my boy. We need to work on a recitation for Christmas dinner.”

Austin's face fell.

“We must show your mother and grandmother
something
after all these lessons,” Louis said. “They'll think we haven't been working.” They hadn't been. The French lessons often dissolved into games.

“What shall I recite, Uncle Louis?”

“Oh, some welcoming remarks.
Joyeux Noel,
along those lines, but a whole paragraph. I'll make up something.”

“When shall I recite it?”

“Before we set doon ta roastit bubbly-jock, laddie.”

Austin blinked repeatedly, trying to translate.

“‘Turkey,' you'd say in California. Recite your little speech after the prayer and just before the turkey is served.”

“All right,” Austin said disconsolately.

“Here now.” Louis handed him a few scrawled French sentences. “If you master it quickly enough, we will play a game of cards before we have to eat.”

At lunch, Fanny, sitting quietly at the table, was silently suffering. When she caught him staring at her, she said, “I know what you are thinking, that I am a coward for all my worrying. But I'm not. For a woman, I am brave.”

Louis went around to his wife's side of the table and put his hands on her shoulders. “There is no question of your mettle, my love. You are the bravest person I know.” He pecked her cheek. “After lunch, why don't you and Lloyd have a tour of the cacao field? I noticed a lot of new growth when I was out there yesterday.”

Standing on the verandah outside his study, Louis watched the tall son walking beside his wee mother out into the fields. The sweep of Vailima—its lawn, garden rows, fields, and forests rising up toward Mount Vaea—filled his eyes with its grandeur. Suddenly, tears filled them, for he was transported to the foothills of the Highlands near Callander. His mind's eye saw little stone houses, tweedy old men wet from rain entering a low door into a pub. He saw lakes, and smoking chimneys and children in the street. He could swear he smelled peat burning.

Fanny was still miserable at five when he went downstairs. He played a game of solitaire while she watched, so as to cheer her, and then persuaded her to begin the salad. He went to the cellar to fetch a bottle of wine. As he poked around the wine shelf, a line from a Yeats poem repeated itself for the hundredth time in his head:
For always, night and day, I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore.
He'd been drunk on that line for a week.
Damn, it's good.
He wished he'd written it himself. Louis spotted an old burgundy he had been saving.
This will cheer us.

It was a hot evening. He mixed up a whisky and soda, drank it down, then stood on the verandah next to Fanny, dripping oil slowly into the egg yolk she stirred in a small bowl. Talolo leaned on the porch railing nearby. In the distance, they saw Lloyd returning from a dip in the pool.

“A touch more oil?” Louis asked her, raising the bottle. In that moment, his knees wobbled.

“No, I think—”

“Ahhhh!” he cried out. Fire exploded behind his eyes. “What a pain!” He grabbed his head with both hands. Fanny blurred before him. Dizzy, he gasped, “Do I look strange?”

Fanny lurched forward to catch him as he fell to the floor.

“Show me where the pain is,” she cried. “Show me.”

A gray fog fell around him. He heard wind … footsteps … there, a beam of light …

Fanny watched Louis touch his head. The hand fell, and his eyes closed.

“Lloyd!” she screamed. “Lloyd!” She saw him running toward her. “Go down and get the doctor from the
Wallaroo.
As fast as you can! And get Dr. Funk, too!”

Lloyd galloped wildly out of the paddock on his horse as Talolo lifted Louis's limp body and carried him inside to a chair in the great hall.

The tips of his fingers were cold. Now Maggie was in the room. Fanny rolled up Louis' sleeves, and the two women frantically rubbed his arms with brandy, trying to make the blood flow. Fanny saw how labored his breathing was, and she breathed in time with him until she couldn't take in air that slowly anymore. Lafaele came in, untied the laces of his boots, and pulled them off. Belle brought hot water and rubbed his feet vigorously, while Lafaele laid a cool cloth on his forehead.

The room fell dark as they waited. Some of the natives lit torches outside so the doctors could find their way to the house. Nearly all the Vailima men and women, having heard the word, came into the great room. Some fanned him; others crouched along the walls. Austin sat among them, watching and weeping. The ship surgeon, Dr. Anderson, arrived first. He lifted Louis's eyelids, felt his pulse.

“A cerebral hemorrhage, I'm certain,” he told Fanny. He turned to Lloyd. “Can we get some air in here?” Lloyd threw open the windows. The smell of gardenias flooded the room.

Funk, who had treated Louis in the past, arrived from Apia and ordered a bed be brought into the great room so Louis might lie flat. He conferred with Anderson, and the two men worked on Louis for nearly two hours. Dr. Funk finally shook his head sadly and said, “I'm sorry, Mrs. Stevenson. There is nothing anyone can do for him.”

When the doctors moved away, Lloyd put his arm under Louis and embraced him.

Fanny watched Louis's chest rise, shudder, and fall as the last ounce of life ebbed from him. She placed her cheek over his chest. His body was warm, but no beat came from his great heart.

“No!” she cried. “No, Louis! Please, no.” She raised her head to look at his eyes.

“I beg of you, my love. Don't leave me!”

His lids were closed and still. Everything about him was still. He was gone.