Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 38

1881

On the way to Davos, they stopped in London at the Grosvenor Hotel for a week, where they took a suite with an extra bedroom for Sammy and a sitting room in which Louis could receive  guests.  When  Bob,  Henley,  Baxter,  Colvin,  and  an  old  literary  friend,  Edmund Gosse,  showed  up,  Fanny  detected  the  cautious  attitude  of  the  men  as  they  gingerly embraced her husband. “We thought the devil had you, Lou,” Gosse said. “But by God, you old stick, you’re looking famous.”

“Both the Louises are looking famous,” Colvin said, pecking Fanny on the cheek. It had been two years since she had seen her husband’s old crowd. Henley had put on
more paunch. So had Bob. They were all changed by age, marriage, children, jobs, and some of the friendships had grown  more complex. Baxter, a  lawyer, handled legal and ?nancial matters for Louis. Henley was his publisher at London, as well as his literary agent —albeit  unpaid,  but  he  had  high  hopes  that  their  play  collaborations  would  prove lucrative. Colvin, who was paying o? a signi?cant loan from Louis in small amounts, acted as an editor and a sort of well-connected sponsor. Together just now, though, they might have been carefree schoolboys.

They had come to see Louis, their beloved Puck, but Fanny enjoyed the talk and stayed through  the  ?rst  evening’s  conversation.  There  was  a  genial  glow  in  the  room,  such tenderness toward Louis, and Fanny, for what she had been through with his illness in the States.

Louis, for his part, was elated. He had been among mostly women and children for the past  few  months,  and  Fanny  saw  how  it  lifted  his  spirits  to  be  with  his  old  cronies, especially before the “confinement” in Davos.

“You’ll be surprised by the place,” Gosse said.  “Symonds is in Davos and plans to stay indefinitely. He has an actual life there. You’ll like his company.”

“Ah, he’s a pompous ass,” Henley opined.

“The  man’s  earned  the  right.  He’s  considered  a  great  Renaissance  scholar,”  Gosse explained to Fanny.

“Symonds is his name?” Fanny asked. “Does he have a family in Davos?” “A wife and four daughters.” Henley sniggered, waving  a  dismissive hand.  “Professor

Symonds is an expert on Greek love.”

“He just did a translation of Michelangelo’s sonnets,” Louis explained as the others talked on. “As they were written—man to man.”

“I understood Mr. Henley’s remark,” she replied.

“He’s an impeccable scholar. He’s all the talk now in certain circles.” Louis said. “Are we a little jealous of Symonds’s fame, perhaps?” Gosse asked Henley. “No more than you.”

“I suppose I should be jealous.” Gosse sighed. “I seem to keep hanging by my eyelids to the outer cliff of fame.”

Fanny sti?ed a snicker. What high opinions these fellows have of themselves. She excused herself, put Sam to bed, then retired to her own room with a book. When she came back in the parlor near eleven, she found the men in their cups.

“Do bring your wives next time,” Fanny said, gently encouraging them out the door. Next day was a luncheon at the Savile Club, from which Louis returned drunk. When he
had slept o? the e?ects, a new round began. Henley, who had not bothered to nap since lunch, arrived smelling of whiskey, an odor he was now complicating with wine.
“I want you to hear the poem our friend here recited for us today at the club,” Louis said. “He wrote it whilst in hospital with his leg—the year I met him. Do you mind repeating it, old man?”

Aiming his delivery to a  corner of the parlor ceiling, Henley let loose a  rant against death. He spoke the last lines with a de?ant anguish: “‘I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.’”

“Thank you,” Fanny interjected into the silence that followed.

Louis paced the carpet, a crooked finger over his lips, while Henley looked at his lap. “You have traveled a hard road, William,” Fanny said.

Henley muttered sadly into his beard, which lay ?at upon his chest,  “I was a panther once.”

“The man  hasn’t a  shred of  manners,” she steamed when  Henley was gone.  “It goes straight to my vitals that he ignores your health. It’s one o’clock.”

“Yes, yes,” Louis said absently. He was up then, and out of bed, knocking into furniture as he went for paper and pen. “I must light the lamp for a bit. Sorry, Fan.”
“Can’t it wait?”

“I need to write it: the maimed manhood of Henley.” His voice was feverish. “That is the key to a great character.”

For a week the old friends came back to visit. Fanny kept Louis in bed much of the day, then stepped in and out of the evening scene in the parlor. Often she felt the air in the room was charged with something. Competitiveness? The men appeared to be jockeying for closer position to Louis. After the ?rst night, she stayed in Sammy’s room or her own until around ten or eleven, when she took a seat among them, hoping her yawns might signal that there were others in the suite eager for sleep. She listened silently to their repartee, which grew less clever with the ticking of the clock. What a collection of friends Louis had gathered! Colvin a?ected a look of bemusement most of the time. He kept his neat little head cocked and his nostrils half ?ared, as if he had picked up the scent of an overripe cheese. When he spoke, his words amounted to sti? nothings. Gosse’s manner was smooth as silk, but he was hopelessly conceited. Henley, by contrast, revealed signs of a heart, mightily injured as it was. He bore the mark of su?ering not only in his body but in his conversation. He had come from a big, poor family and his childhood had been a sorrowful struggle. Despite it, he was a  self-made man  who turned his miserable luck into heroic poetry. And yet in the midst of all his high talk, he diminished himself when he gossiped, or when he chewed his food like a sheep, with his mouth half open and his chin rotating in a circle while he spewed cracker crumbs into his red whiskers, where they rode out the remainder of the evening. Baxter, the lawyer, whom Fanny found to be one of those brownhaired young men who was indistinguishable from the next, remained insistently drunk. Only Bob Stevenson still pleased her, though she wanted to strangle him for staying on. The room was so ?lled with smoke that she could barely stand it, and she was a smoker herself.

Their planned week at the hotel turned into two as the men’s visits melded into one long  bout of  false humility  and intellectual one-upsmanship.  There were no
pretenses now. When she made a rare comment, they talked over her. No one but Louis noticed when she retired to bed.

Unable to sleep, she sat up and was shocked when tears spurted from her eyes. Why are you crying, you fool? And then she knew. It felt like an arrow every time Louis’s friends came and made her feel like an unwanted outsider. It hurt. When Henley got on to the

subject of American culture, his frequent use of “barbaric” seemed aimed directly at her.
She wiped her eyes and comforted herself by formulating caustic remarks she wanted to deliver to each of them. “How fortunate for you, Mr. Henley, that you have never had to bother your head with the annoyance of notoriety … How perfectly suited you are to be a sponsor of talent, Mr. Colvin. Borrowed limelight is better than none.”
She picked up a pen and began a letter to Louis’s mother. I cannot bear London, she wrote. It is unhealthy for both my body and my mind.

One night Henley’s shouts, booming like cannon reports through the thin walls, were especially infuriating. If they were keeping her awake, then Sam was wide awake in his bed on the other side of the sitting room. Sam adored Henley because he thought of him as a jolly musketeer; just now the boy was getting a full dose of the blackguard side of his hero.

She gave up trying to block out the voices and listened. They were gossiping about a journalist  who  had  recently  died  whose  name  she  didn’t  recognize.  All  of  them  were roasting the man on a spit.  “I suppose I have some time left,” Louis said.  “God seems to want only the bad writers up there.”

She would have smiled at another time, when her head wasn’t throbbing. She got back under the covers. At two o’clock, when Henley’s laugh roared once more, a rush of holy rage shot her out of bed and into the parlor.

“For God’s sake, go home—all of you! Am I going to deliver a dead man to Davos?” she shouted. “You have kept him up until the morning hours every single night we have been here. And to what end? So you can assassinate someone’s character! Have you no selfrespect? Are you not men?”

Baxter sat up in his chair, bristling like a cornered cat. Henley set his jaw. Colvin leaped to his feet. In the space of a minute, the sodden party stumbled out of the hotel room, leaving behind half-?nished cigarettes and whiskys. When they were gone, Fanny leaned, quaking, against the door. Outside, she could hear the men in the hall, waiting for the lift. “What did I tell you?” Henley’s gravelly voice demanded.

It dawned on Fanny what she looked like. Her hair was undone, wild as Medusa’s; her heavy breasts, hanging loose under a violet-printed nightgown, quivered with every thud of her heart.

In the bedroom, Louis held his tongue, though he was clearly crestfallen.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said, still shaking. “I’m not a diplomat! I can a?ord to say what I think.”

There was no leaving the Grosvenor Hotel, however, until the staggering bill was settled. Fanny was stunned to see that they had burned through ?fty pounds. That was nearly one fourth of the annual sum Louis’ father had promised them. How was it possible? She could only picture Henley ?nishing o? bottles of Talisker when she considered the bill. But he hadn’t done it alone. In the hotel restaurant, she and Louis had ordered freely, with no eye to  the  budget.  Now  they  would have  to  eat  humble  pie  by  asking  his father  for  more money. Louis leaned on Colvin, too, to come up with some cash. Fanny felt better about that; it was owed to him, after all.

When  Colvin  showed  up  with  a  check,  he  enjoyed  witnessing  their  embarrassment. “What innocents you are,” he teased them, “taking the dearest suite in the hotel.”