Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 40

“Louis, are you all right?”

Louis was splayed on the bed, his legs half on and half o? the mattress, his arms spread like wings. “I’m preparing myself,” he said.

“For what?”

“For the Brownies.”

“Don’t the Brownies come if you’re just lying in your usual way?” “This position always brought them when I was a child.” “I’ll sleep in the other bedroom.”

“Do you mind, Pig? I had a  real crawler last night. Perhaps I can  get it back again tonight if I go to sleep thinking about it. I was an injured soldier in a hospital in Spain, and the doctor sent me off to recuperate in a terrifying old house …”

She didn’t mind. The bed was Louis’s nest, his writing desk, his sitting room for receiving visitors during the day, and at night a playground for the Brownies, or “the Little People,” as he called them. When he was under the weather, he took his meals there. Sometimes the sheets were stained with gravy from his dinner. On nights like this, she welcomed a retreat into another room. Here in Scotland, where they were sharing a cottage with his parents in Braemar, she would stay in the extra bed in Sammy’s room.

By now she knew that dreams were as important to Louis as a bottle of ink. Sometimes a particular dream stretched out over three or four nights, unfolding as neatly as a ?nished story. When that happened, he credited the Brownies entirely. More often they left behind puzzle pieces from which he put together a story. Any moral element had to be created during waking hours.  “The Brownies don’t have a  rudiment of conscience,” he told her drily.

Fanny’s dreams were nothing like his. Sometimes they were so humdrum that she was bored even as she had them. “How did you dream last night, love?” he would ask in the morning, and she’d have to report, “I laced my shoes and brushed my hair.”
The morning after the Spanish dream, he said, “I got the rest of it. I woke up and wrote down what I could remember. It’s a whole story.”

“You’re making me positively jealous.”

“You have to train yourself to be ready for the Little People. Set yourself to sleep with a

particular place in mind.”

Fanny attempted the method for a string of nights, hoping to bring up a ghost tale. She remembered the gnarly black branches of an oak that used to tap on her bedroom window in Indiana and set loose waves of goose bumps. In the morning, no story suggested itself. Her own Brownies were stingy, having left behind a paltry image of herself as a girl of seventeen, looking all over the house for something she had lost.

“It doesn’t work for me,” she told him. They were sitting on the porch of their cottage. “Don’t let it get you down, Pig. You seem to have your own strange route to the spirit
world.”

“Make fun all you want.”

“I’m not making fun,” Louis said gently, rubbing the top of her hand.  “I’ve seen your instincts run true a hundred times.”

“Well, you do make fun of me.” “When?”

“Every time you call me Pig.” “But that’s an affectionate term, love.”

“And I’m much thinner now that we are out of the blessed Alps.” “You are. Stop all this, now. Let’s go for a walk.”

He took her hand and led her from the stone cottage, through the garden gate, and away from the other picturesque stone houses, past an open country ?eld to where a birk wood began.

They sat on a carpet of soft grass in an unshaded spot. Above, an Indiana-blue sky spread itself out between the tall downy birches. “You are my own luscious spaewife,” he said. “You know I adore you.” She laughed and let her head fall back on the warm earth. He lay down next to her and rested her head on his shoulder. Lying still, she felt sunned all through.

“You can leave Davos. Your lungs are in splendid shape,” Dr. Reudi had told Louis.  “But there are no guarantees. If you won’t remain at a high altitude, then go somewhere in the South of France, ?fteen miles as the crow ?ies from the sea, and if possible, near a ?r wood.”

They had danced for joy around the chalet when Louis came home with the news. In Davos, Louis’s face had filled out; his cheeks had turned ruddy with health. The idea that he

might not have tuberculosis made them buoyant. They left the Alps in a hurry, before the outlook changed, and headed for Scotland to summer with his parents and Sammy in the Highlands before they went on to find a place in France.

Louis had been writing like a madman since they’d arrived in Braemar. He ?nished two shockers—”Thrawn Janet” and  “Body Snatchers”—and  “The Merry Men,” about wrecked treasure ships. It was the pile of completed work on his desk, rather than her own dreams, that inspired Fanny to ?nally ?nish a tale of her own, “The Shadow on the Bed,” which she hoped would be included in his next collection.

Everyone in the family felt the creative whirl inside the cottage. Having lost his best companions  to  the  writing  table,  Sammy  sometimes  set  up  his  paints  to  pass  a  rainy afternoon. “Come color with me,” he pleaded one day when Louis emerged from the room where he’d been working. Louis spread out a piece of paper on a table and began painting an island with some watercolors. Below the drawing, he wrote “Treasure Island.”
“Imagine that there is an island where a chest full of gold is buried,” he said to Sammy. “There is a boy named Jim who, quite by chance, comes into possession of a map of the island.  The  map  has been  drawn  by  a  crusty  old sailor  of  questionable  morals,  a  man named, ah … Billy … Billy Bones. And through some series of events, the boy goes o? on a schooner to look for the treasure. He is traveling with a collection of sailors, some of them decent fellows, and some scoundrels bent on  killing  the other men  when  they ?nd the gold …”

“Luly, is John Silver one of them?” “Aye, he is.”

Louis turned out several chapters in a matter of days. When Fanny tiptoed into his room, he cried out, “There’ll be widders in the morning!”

“Widders?”

“Widows, madam.”

At dinner,  he complained,  “The trouble with  a  boy’s story  is to write it without any cursing in it. And pirates do nothing but curse. I need tepid oaths, I suppose.”
“Fiddlesticks?” Maggie offered.

“Carpet bowls!” Thomas thundered.

Soon they could hear Louis shouting in his study. “Son of a Dutchman!” he would yell. “Dash my buttons!” Passing by his door, Fanny heard him cackle, “Shiver my timbers!”

“The Sea Cook,” he announced one evening when everyone gathered in the sitting room after dinner to hear the ?rst chapter. “Or ‘Treasure Island,’ as you wish. By Captain George North.”

“A pseudonym?” Mrs. Stevenson asked.

“I can’t risk my literary reputation on a piece like this.”

When  Louis  read  it  to  the  family,  he  pitched  his  voice  high  for  the  mother’s  words —”Dear,  dearie  me!  What  a  disgrace  upon  the  house!”—and  made  the  voice  of  the buccaneer Billy Bones as gravelly as a  river bottom. Fanny noticed Louis seemed to be playing not only to Sammy but also to Thomas Stevenson who tittered like a schoolboy at every exciting plot turn. What made them all gasp was the arrival of Long John Silver, the pirate character who had been brewing in Louis’s imagination for some time.
“‘His left leg was cut o? close by the hip, and under the left shoulder he carried a crutch, which he managed with wonderful dexterity, hopping about upon it like a bird,’” Louis read.  “‘He was very tall and strong, with a  face as big as a  ham—plain  and pale, but intelligent and smiling.’”

“It’s your friend Henley!” Thomas shouted. “Aye, it is,” Louis admitted. “But in body only.”

Having brought the Stevenson household to its feet, he made an outline of the rest of the story,  sent  it  o?  to  a  boy’s  magazine  called Young  Folks,  and  promptly  sold  it  for serialization. It didn’t pay much, but he was exuberant in the following weeks as he worked toward the middle of the story.

One evening after dinner, Louis walked through the cottage sitting room where the family was gathered, waving a few pages of the manuscript.  “If this don’t fetch the kids, why, they’ve gone rotten since my day!” he shouted.

Everyone laughed but Louis’s father.

“It’s a ?ne story, Lou,” Thomas Stevenson chimed in. He waited a beat. “But this Amateur Emigrant book … “ He had been reading the Emigrant manuscript all afternoon by a front window of the cottage. His elbows rested on the arms of his chair; his ?ngers formed the steeple he made when he was deep in thought.  “I don’t want it published. It’s not up to your standards, and it makes you look so … threadbare. It shames all of us.”
Louis crossed his arms, his own characteristic response to his father’s criticisms. After a

moment, he excused himself.

“You just now got a taste of the bad Thomas Stevenson,” Louis said to her when Fanny came to the bedroom.

“It wasn’t nearly so bitter as the arguments you told me about.”

“This morning he actually pulled me aside to say I should insert a religious passage in the pirate story. He followed up that bit of advice with the news that he hopes to buy the Emigrant back from the publisher. He’s embarrassed that his son traveled in steerage. He thinks it reflects badly on him.”

“Louis, Louis. Just ignore the ?rst part. As for the Emigrant, I don’t think he sees it as censorship. And you can always publish it later. It’s a temporary compromise. They are supporting us, after all.”

“That’s just the problem, isn’t it? As long as I depend upon his money, I am beholden to him. And his literary taste.”

By morning, though, Louis had shifted. The Emigrant would be pulled. In the days that followed, the price of his frantic writing pace revealed itself. His nerves
were at a high pitch, and he had a whoreson in?uenza bout followed by a visit from Bluidy Jack.

Chastened, they returned to the Alps for the winter.