Under the Wide and Starry Sky (39 page)
Louis has gone off to the Sydney to meet his mother and accompany her back to Samoa. It is an obligatory trip that he didn't want to make, as he was concerned about leaving me here alone in hurricane season, but I'm glad he is gone. It will get him away from the local politics, which he has taken up with too much fervor. He may have abandoned writing travel letters for McClure's syndicate, but now he writes furious letters to the editor of the
Times
of London about the interference of the imperial powers in the lives of native Samoans. What care the readers of the
Times
? It is the preacher in Louis that makes him write those letters, and then, there is the matter of his sense of right. He is disgusted that the Germans have set up Malietoa Laupepa as the puppet king. Louis says he's a good man who's not fit to run things. We both believe the rival, Mata'afa, is the far stronger leader: He understands the importance of his people claiming and using their land so outsiders can't. Germany, in particular, has much to lose if Mata'afa's influence takes hold. Britain and the U.S. have inserted themselves into the picture, and now all three countries have consuls in Apia.
And so Louis writes his letters. He has fashioned himself a diplomat and is trying to bring about some compromise between the two chiefs. He has never forgiven himself for not intervening in the Irish boycott that left those women in Kerry defenseless. The other day he said to me, “I was silent about Ireland. I won't make that mistake here.”
Among the workers, rumors fly that there will be a war. I cannot think of war; I must be ready for Louis's mother. The workers seem as weary as I am, for I have driven all of us pretty hard. But we will have a sparkling room ready for her in the new house, come hell or high water.
I have hired a new cook, a native woman named Emma who cooks all right but seems frightened to be working here. She says the kitchen is full of devils. She says that a woman and a man were murdered some time ago on the site of our cottage, and their ghosts are the very spirits who follow her home and climb into bed with her at night. That makes three dens of devils on our property: in the barn, on the land near the garden, and now in the kitchen.
“Henry, I want you to make some sandwiches for supper. It will be just the two of us. Emma is off today, and Lafaele has arranged to court his lady.” The Archangel had already left, garlanded and smelling heavenly.
Fanny went out to the garden to finish planting a couple of precious rhubarb plants given her by a missionary. She listened for the rumbling sounds she'd heard earlier, but only the wind and birdcalls disturbed the air. Possibly what she'd heard before was a volcanic rumbling, far more serious. A chemical odor like burning sulfur hung about the farm, yet she saw no fires or smoke out in the bush. The air had the green tint that the Indiana sky carried when a tornado was approaching. In the eerie light, the plants took on a spectrum of glowing hues, from chartreuse to near black.
Leaden clouds moved in quickly from the sea, and before she finished her row, drops of rain sharp as sleet stung her skin. She hurried inside.
As blasts of wind rattled the little cottage, her head began to pound, just above the hairline. She told Henry to go ahead and eat without her and she went upstairs to bed. No position she tried would ease the pain, which was so severe, that her skull felt close to bursting. She took out the medicine box and rifled through it. The laudanum Louis had given her for rheumatism had not worked last time. She found the bottle of chlorodyne. Her eyes went down the list of ingredients. Morphine, Indian cannabis, nitroglycerin â¦Â She drank a capful. Not intolerable. She waited to see if the pounding quieted.
Why, oh why, was her head going wrong now? Only Henry downstairs to help. She'd not had one of these spells for a long while, and she became afraid when she contemplated what might happen.
Sleep it off, Fanny
. She threw on her nightgown and fell into bed.
When she awoke in the middle of the night, her heart and neck were pounding like horse hooves. Above, a white streak lit the ceiling. She sat up, groped frantically for the matchbox on the side table. She heard the box fall and the wooden sticks splatter across the floor. She slid out of bed to her knees, took up a match, struck it against a floorboard, and lit the candle. Shadows licked the walls. Climbing under the covers, she leaned against the headboard and closed her eyes, lest she begin to see strange things. In her mind, the face of a woman appeared. Her eyes were wild, her mouth gaping in a long O. She was clasping two small children to her chest. Fanny shook her head and opened her eyes. In front of her, the woman was standing at the end of the bed, holding each baby by a foot, so that the small bodies hung from her fists like dead white birds. “Stop that!” Fanny screamed. She leaped out of bed with a pillow and threw it at the woman, then screamed again. A loud pounding at the wall sounded outside her curtained room.
“Louis?” she called out. “Is that you, Louis?”
Henry stepped through the curtain, alarmed, as Fanny's limbs went weak. He caught her as she fell, and carried her back to bed.
The window curtains were open, and the sun was high when she awakened. A tray with tea and ship biscuits sat atop the table. In a while, Henry tapped on the frame opening to her room.
“Come in,” she told him. He stood at the foot of the bed, where the hideous apparition had been the night before. “Thank you for coming to help last night.”
Henry affected a philosophical shrug.
“It was just a bad dream,” she said.
“Yes, Tamaitai.”
“Do not tell Mr. Stevenson when he returns, “ she said. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, Tamaitai.”
Louis worried the inside of his cheek with his teeth. He was not suited for bookkeeping, and it boded ill for the day's writing when he started with the account books. He was a fool with figures, but even a fool could see they were bleeding money at Vailima. For the first time in his career, his income was truly respectableâfour thousand pounds a yearâbut upkeep and outgo overshadowed it.
The property and new house had cost twelve thousand dollars, far more than the figure he had estimated with Moors when he started the project. He searched the list of itemized construction costs, trying to understand how a simple wood house in the tropics could cost so much, when his eye fell on the word
fireplace.
Well, he had no one to blame for that but himself. It had seemed essential to have a fireplace in any house he built, even if it
was
the only one in Samoa, as he'd been told repeatedly by astounded locals. He'd been punished already for his folly on that item. The damned thing didn't even draw.
The arrival of the furniture from Skerryvore had caused an enormous sensation in Apia, all the paintings and boxes full of china and crystal had stunned the town. The sight of a piano supported on poles carried by an army of Samoans up the three miles to Vailima had awed even him.
Then there was the new wing his mother had required the moment she arrived in May. “Lloyd doesn't have a proper place to sleep,” she argued. “I'll pay for half the costâfive hundred pounds.” Ha! Five hundred pounds was nothing to the seventy hundred dollars Moors was estimating for the addition. Lloyd had chimed in, “I'll use my earnings from the
Wrecker
on it.” How could Louis say no?
Naturally, a new wing would cost even more, since every nail and board used at Vailima had to be imported. They would be sleeping in style, all right. Dear God, what next? Another ice machine to replace the one Lloyd had bought that didn't work? There had been teas and parties galore at which they'd fed half the town and the crew of any ship that happened to be in port. As for the Great Farming Experiment underway outside, he hadn't a guess as to how much that totaled to date. Asking Fanny was to invite war. He had made that mistake earlier in the week, when she'd come into his study to tell him she needed more money.
“You forget I sold Skerryvore to help pay for this place,” she told him indignantly when he remarked upon the outflow of money. “I am working as hard as I can to get a plantation going. Lord knows, I would write stories and sell them to help with the expenses if I might. But you don't want me to, do you? I am Robert Louis Stevenson's wife, after all. It is regarded as a publisher's favor to have any of my stories printed at this point. Isn't that what people said when the âNixie' appeared?”
Though Louis had cringed at her bitter words and sneer as she stood on the other side of his desk, he had plunged on. “I gave you a budget for the planting.” He kept his voice reasonable and calm. “You now say you are out of money. All I ask is an accountingâ”
She bent over the desk and positioned a quivering forefinger inches from his nose. “I wonder what would become of you, Louis Stevenson, if you had to get by as a woman must.” She straightened her back and took him in with a withering look. “You would hate it, I can assure youâto have to beg and scheme to get any say over how the household money is spent, to have to regard the clothes you wear as gifts and be beholden for whatever else comes to you. I think you would be a resentful person, indeed. I suspect you would make quite a stink about it.”
She'd turned on her heel and made a defiant exit. It hurt his head to remember the scene. And it did him no good. What he knew for certain was that, exhausted as he was by the tension in the house and his recent output, he needed to work. More.
Outside, he could hear Fanny's voice growing louder. “You say you got no work?” she screeched. “I give you work, you no do it. Where you go after lunch? You hide. Now you want pay? I no pay you for afternoon. No come back tomorrow.”
Louis shivered at the unabated shrillness.
Her voice used to be so soft.
He watched in shame as the men, even Lafaele, who adored her, steered clear of Fanny.
It seemed every day brought another argument. There were brief intervals of normalcy, but they never lasted long. She regularly kept the family waiting while she remained in the field long after the conch had been sounded for dinner. At every turn, she seemed to be looking for a fight. Once, at an English friend's home, Louis impulsively toasted the queen, and Fanny took it as a direct insult to herself, as an American. “Was that necessary?” she asked on the way home. “You seem to be taking a page from Henley. Hasn't he just come out with new verses? âBlow your Bugle for England' or some such claptrap?”
Louis's bedroom was his sanctuary now. Early on in the building of the new house, it had become clear that he
had
to take for himself the bedroom they'd originally planned for his mother. He set up his office in an adjoining room and most days found the quiet he craved. He was working at a furious pace. Some time ago, he had abandoned the big South Seas book for Fanny's peace of mind, and for his own, since she nagged him fiercely about it. Discouraged, he'd pulled together some of his letters for McClure and written
In the South Seas,
then let it go from his fingers out into the world. Nobody would buy it, he was quite sure. It was an imperfect thing, a stunted version of a giant dream.
Now he wrote realistic stories about the South Seas and wondered if they would bring in any money. At least he'd enjoyed some hilarity in collaborating with Lloyd on his first novel.
The Wrong Box
was more Lloyd's book than his own, marked by the boy's love of mix-ups and false identities. It was a fine example of how Louis's standards had slid in the cause of mentorship.
“I don't like it,” Moors had the audacity to tell him recently. “
The Wrong Box,
I mean. It isn't worthy of you. Why do you bother to collaborate?”
Louis felt his ears go hot and imagined for a moment punching Moors right between his blue eyes.
What can the man possibly understand of my life?
But he was the trader's guest, sitting out the afternoon heat on Moors's balcony, drinking Moors's beer, and facing a hill that gave Louis untold pleasure to view, a slope reminiscent of Kinnoull Hill in Perth, Scotland, except for the palm trees and native girls in
lavalavas
who were passing along a path in the distance.
“I think you know the answer to that,” Louis replied. “Money. And good company. Lloyd's a great mimic, you know. He can reproduce a man's style of speaking after two or three sentences, and he has a way with comic scenes. I think the one we are working on now,
The Wrecker,
will be wonderful.”
“In the end, you wrote the whole thing over.”
“
The Wrong Box
? I wrote the final draft, yes.”
“I much prefer your own work,” Moors said. He sipped his beer. “This collaboration business is a mistake, as I see it.”
Louis knew that Lloyd rubbed the trader the wrong way. The boy's English accent rang false in Moors's American ears, despite the fact that Lloyd had acquired it honestly. Louis suspected that Moors thought the boy's taste for fine liquor had come too early, and, by route of his mother's marriage, too easily. It made Louis cringe, too, when he observed Lloyd at a party playing the high-nosed sophisticate with a glass of fine whisky in hand. Still, he could not tolerate Moors passing judgment on matters in Louis's life that he did not understand.
He rose to leave.
Oblivious to any offense given, Moors patted him on the back in the overfamiliar way a lot of Americans had. “Why don't you go to Nassau Island with me sometime soon? My cabin is nearly done over there. You can work undisturbed. I won't bother you until sundown, when I come round with a bottle of rum in my hand. You need a break from those women up there, Stevenson. You're all tied up in apron strings.”
They walked through the dining room of the house, where a comely girl washed windows. Her shapely breasts bobbed beneath a flower wreath around her neck.
“How is it a man is expected not to respond to such a sight?” Louis mumbled when they got to the door.
Moors grinned. “A man's a fool if he lives in paradise and doesn't taste the fruit.”
Louis regretted he'd ever opened himself up to Moors. Not that he had revealed himself in the same way he always had to Colvin and Baxter. But other than Reverend Clarke, Moors was the closest thing to a confidant Louis had on the island, even though he felt uneasy about some unsavory aspects he'd heard of Moors's past, relating to the labor trade.
It was
business
that had thrown him together with Moors. The fellow was bright, an astute observer of Samoan politics, and willing to help at every turn. He was kind to his wife, though there were the usual rumors that he was not immune to the charms of other island women. Truth was, Louis needed Moors, warts and all. What other English-speaking companions did he have but for Lloyd, or his mother, or Belle? Fanny hardly counted as a companion anymore, so obsessively did she work on the farm. She had become almost a stranger.
When loneliness had his foot in its trap, Louis mounted Jack and rode the poor horse as fast as he could. The two of them seemed to be in need of the same thing; they soared over pig fences as if they were a pair of coupled birds.
Some days he rode out to Mata'afa's camp in Malie, where he talked for hours with the chief and his subchiefs. No longer was he simply gathering information for his letters and books; no longer was he merely observing. The native men were his friends; Louis knew their wives and children, their fortunes, misfortunes, peculiarities. They respected him, he thought, and his status among them had nothing to do with his fame as a writer. He had studied their culture and learned their language. He had tried to wade into their world without manipulating them, except for urging peace. It was disturbing, then, when he sensed that his most outstanding quality was his wealth. For the natives had witnessed the huge wooden crates coming off ships, being loaded onto carts pulled by dray horses that struggled up the hill to Vailima, a palace compared to their own homes. He was a rich man in their eyes, and there was no getting around it. He cringed when he overheard the natives say of him,
“Ona.”
It occurred to him that despite his efforts to master their language and customs and history, he might always be to them, above all, a rich white man.