Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 27

“I need money, Burly,” Louis said.
“We all need money,” Henley replied.

The tavern was almost empty. They had been coming to the pub in Shepherd’s Bush every afternoon since Louis returned to London from the Cévennes and settled in at the Savile Club. It was afternoon, and the bright gray October light outside made no inroad into the tavern’s interior. In the dim, smoky room, the pub owner was polishing his bar to a high  shine;  across  the  room,  the  only  other  customer,  an  elderly  chap,  was  talking  to himself.

“It will take three hundred fifty pounds if I am to breathe freely,” Louis said. “Have you asked your father?”

“Nae. I’m as like to get a fart of a dead man as money from my father for a trip to California.”

“Then Deacon Brodie it is!” Henley boomed. “How many times must I say it to you, my lad?” he asked, pounding the establishment’s much abused table. “Your best idea is sitting at the bottom of a drawer. You could be rich right now.”

Louis looked across at Henley’s great pale face, bent and cackling into the pint as the man  imagined the  brilliant  reviews  they  would garner.  Though  the  two  of  them  were burning the midnight oil to put out the magazine, it was the play Henley talked most of every day.

“You’re going back to your parents’ for the holiday,” Henley said. “Pull the damned thing out and look at it. Or don’t look at it. Just start over with me. I tell you, the idea is meant to be a play, and we are meant to collaborate on it. It will be a roaring success, and you shall have your three hundred fifty pounds. And much, much more.”

“Ah, but the buggers have to talk to each other,” Louis lamented. “A play is all dialogue and I’m not good at it yet. Not in my stories, anyway.”

“Go to some of your old haunts in the Old Town and take your pencil. You’ll get your thug talk there. Or have you lost your stomach for slumming?”

Louis recoiled. Henley knew how to plant little blasting caps. He was overly fond of reminding Louis of his affluent upbringing.

“You think it’s that simple, do you?”

“You write the ?rst draft, and I will make it sing,” Henley said. “If you want, I’ll make it rhyme.”

Louis stroked his mustache absently. It was rich territory, Deacon Brodie’s double life. Ever since he was a boy, Louis had heard the legend of the cabinetmaker who was the deacon of his Edinburgh trade union by day and a burglar after dark. Brodie loomed large in Louis’s childish imagination. He’d thought of him nearly every night, in fact; Thomas Stevenson,  an  avid  antique  collector,  had  bought  an  old  wardrobe  handmade  by  the scoundrel and placed it in Louis’ bedroom.

At fifteen, Louis had looked into Brodie’s life and learned he had a gambling problem; the stealing began as a way to pay off debts. His nightlife, in time, included more than robbery. The deacon had two mistresses who knew nothing of each other, as well as many o?spring, in addition to his legal family.

“It’s a hell of an ending,” Henley mused.  “Foxy old Brodie hanging in gallows that he himself carpentered—now, that’s a poetic touch.”

“When he didn’t get caught, the burglar in him grew bolder,” Louis said. “He felt more alive when he was stealing, don’t you think? I want him to be an everyman who slowly slides over to the other side.”

“Don’t wait until the holiday,” Henley said excitedly. “You’re here. Start it now.” To toast the idea, he ordered another round, which Louis paid for.

He didn’t know if Henley was right about plays being lucrative, and he doubted the poet would make a great playwright. But he knew his friend needed money as badly as he did. Visiting  Henley  and his  new  wife  in  their  tiny  ?at,  Louis  could see  how  meager  their circumstances were. They had put what little he had into London, and it was faltering. Yet he was happier than Louis had ever seen him, with his adoring bride in his life.
“All right. I can devote my mornings to it over at the club.”

Henley beamed. “Wait until I tell Anna.”

“Do you know what I think, Burly?” Louis said. “I think a special tax should be levied on all you grooms who grin so gloatingly in front of less fortunate lads. Baxter is just as bad.”
Henley let out one of his shaking laughs. “You’ve changed your tune. What was it you used to call marriage? A friendship recognized by the police?”

“Ah, hell. I envy you.”

“Have you heard anything?”

“Yes and no. Fanny writes and says nothing. I can’t fathom what is happening over there.” Louis slumped in his chair. He remembered how he had raced with his heart in his throat  to  Alais  to  collect  his  mail  after  selling  Modestine.  It  had  been  a  surprisingly bittersweet parting; he had grown fond of the little donkey. Only one letter was waiting, in which Fanny talked about the weather in Oakland and seeing her old friends. It might have been written by a new acquaintance.

“This woman is different from you,” Henley said. “Fanny?”

Henley pursed his lips.  “She is from a di?erent world. America is an entirely di?erent beast. Far more … primitive than Scotland.”

“I love her! And I can’t bear all this waiting. I want to talk to her in person. If I could get to California, we would resolve it. If I were there, she’d have the strength to move the divorce along. I’m a lawyer, for God’s sake, I could advise her. “ He rubbed his temples with both hands. “I want, I want, I want … But there’s no encouragement from her. Some days I think I shall go mad from it.”

December 20, Louis had handed over his third draft of the play to Henley and headed for Edinburgh,  where he found Thomas in  a  rather expansive mood.  He was obviously pleased by his trip to Paris in the fall, pleased to have been taken into Louis’s con?dence about the new love complication in his life. And it had all worked out as he’d had hoped: The  father  had been  able  to  support  the  son  in  a  moment  of  personal  crisis,  and the troublesome woman had eventually gone away. Two wins for the father. A victory for the mother, too, who was ecstatic to have Louis home after a six-month absence. She set about making  the  Christmas holiday  festive,  arranging  gatherings at  which  a  number  of  dull young women—unmarried daughters of friends—appeared serially in the parlor.
On Christmas Eve, the patriarch’s spirits lifted higher, and Louis was touched to see how glad his father was to be on decent terms with him again. After he’d downed a pint, the old man’s face turned serious as he spoke about love and loss.

“I’ve never faulted a woman for divorce. Never held a bad opinion of a divorced woman. Men who abandon the home, on the other hand, should be shot.” Thomas Stevenson stood with one elbow propped on the ?replace mantel of his study, entirely in his element. “But a woman doesn’t divorce lightly. No, no. I would not hold that against your lady friend.” He

walked over to where Louis sat and patted his back. “It’s for the best, son, the way things have worked out, I think you will see that. Someone will come along who will light up your heart, and you will know, the way I did with your mother.”

Next to his bedroom, in a little study his parents had created for him, Louis holed up to work on a new story. He found himself, instead, looking back on what he had already written.

New Year’s Day,  1879, he wrote in his journal. At least I have worked. I have no shame about that. What else I have to show for the past year is questionable.
Louis laid out periodicals on his desk, everything he had published so far, as if he were counting money. His mother had kept a copy of every journal, and he pulled out the issues of Cornhill and McMillan’s. He saw progress in his work. He saw some sentences he liked in the essays he’d written about Victor Hugo’s romances and about Edinburgh, among others. He liked very much his first fictional story about Fran?ois Villon.

And then there was the book, Inland Voyage, in all its imperfect glory. But it was a book, by God, a true book. He took a copy of it from his bookshelf and placed it in the middle of the desk. He couldn’t help running his hand over its cover with childish pleasure. Soon he could add Travels with a Donkey to the pile. There were a few good parts in it that he felt he would be willing to claim twenty years from now.

He leaned back and studied the stacks of magazines. What did they really amount to? An honorable  start.  It  wasn’t  money,  though.  The  money  he’d  earned  for  the  whole  pile amounted to almost nothing. His heart sank when he recalled how he’d promised Fanny that he would support her. Had she seen how impossible that task would be and simply given up?

He had been wanting to write a full-length novel, but the idea seemed laughable. How would he support even  himself through such a  long process? I’m twenty-eight. Men build bridges by that age. Find cures for diseases. Build lighthouses. Suddenly, the pile of periodicals and the lone book looked small indeed.