Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 41

1882-1884

The following summer in Scotland weakened once again the health Davos had restored. As fall  progressed and the  question  of  winter  quarters  loomed,  they  decided to  take  their chances away from the Alps.

Fifteen miles as the  crow ?ies; near a ?rwood, if possible. Louis had happy memories of earlier  visits  to  the  South  of  France. “The  C?te  d’Azur,”  he  proposed.  “Either  Nice  or Marseilles.” Louis set out ahead to ?nd a place to live, while Sammy went back to school in Bournemouth. When Fanny arrived in Marseilles in October, they found each other in much better health and joyful to be reunited. The separation had shaken them awake.
They made love tenderly and wide-eyed. She let go of the buzzing that usually ?lled her brain,  the  questions. Is  he  thinner?  Was  that  a  di?erent  sort  of  cough?  Has  he  eaten  his breakfast  today?  She  pretended  they  were  normal  people  on  a  holiday.  Their  reunion invigorated both of them.

“What a morning,” Louis would say as they walked the rocky, dry hills above their rented chateau just outside Marseilles. “I want to take this day, fold it up, and put it in my pocket so I can have it again and again. What is really necessary in life? A blue bay to gaze on. Sun.”

“We’re rich,” she said.

Fanny sent for their furniture from Davos, but it wasn’t long  before word came that typhoid fever was sweeping through Marseilles. In the wee hours she heard the thundering of wooden wheels on cobblestone. “What is going on at night that keeps people out in the city’s streets?” she asked a neighbor who spoke English.

The elderly woman, whose chin bristled with white hairs, looked around as if she had a secret. “They’re carrying bodies to the cemetery in the night so no one can see how many are dead.”

One morning when Fanny went out to get milk, she found the bloated body of a man at the bottom of their stairs. “Somebody has dumped a dead person in the street outside our house,” she told Louis excitedly. She suspected he didn’t believe her. He thought sometimes she exaggerated so as to get her way. “How do you know he was actually dead?” he asked. “He might have simply fainted in the heat.”

“We’re leaving,” she said ?rmly. The furniture had not yet arrived. It was easy for them to get out of town.

Hyères was only forty miles southeast of Marseilles, but she felt safer there. “Chalet La Solitude,” the funny little house she found, was too small to stay in permanently, but for now it was a lovely, waking dream. They rented it at the beginning of 1883, and the move felt like a fresh start.

The house was toy-sized but possessed all the essentials of a real one. A wealthy man from  the  area  had  visited  the  Paris  Exposition  and  seen  miniature  models  of  Chinese pagodas, Turkish mosques, and Swiss chalets. It was the chalet that stole his heart. Though it was intended merely as a model for a larger version, he bought the house on the spot and had it shipped to Hyères, where it was reassembled on the steep, rocky side of a hill. When she cooked, Fanny found the kitchen so small that she risked burning herself on the range or impaling herself on pothooks. Louis’s parents visited shortly after their arrival. They all squeezed into the tiny dining room, where their chairs were pushed up against the walls around the table. A servant, hired for the occasion, handed plates to them over their heads. By  comparison,  the  garden  was  spectacular,  rich  with  olive,  orange,  palm,  and eucalyptus trees, nightingales, and a view of the ocean in the distance. Below their terrace, terra-cotta tile roofs rippled picturesquely down the hillside.

The ?rst day of their stay, Fanny woke at dawn to a blue sky marbled with pink clouds. She wandered through the grove of olive trees behind the house, touching her palm to the bark of each one.  “Thirty-?ve!” she told Louis gleefully when he awoke. Everywhere she looked,  she  saw  rosebushes  and aloe.  It  was  March.  In  a  few  weeks  the  carpet  of  ?g marigolds would be beaming happily, like a nursery of little pink-faced babies. She wrote immediately to her sister in the States to send vegetable and flower seeds.
An old staircase led down to town. They stayed aloft, mostly, well above the old village. It was a ?lthy place below, unswept, with refuse blown about the streets by the hot mistral winds.  Convinced  that Treasure  Island  would  be  a  greater  success  as  a  novel  than  the syndicated  version  in Young  Folks,  Louis  spent  his  days  rewriting  the  material  to  be published as a book. Only occasionally did he put on his short black cape to venture down for a visit with his friend LeRoux the wine merchant. He followed his usual routine, writing all morning until noon, while Fanny kept herself busy with the house. She painted several interior doors in  a  Japanese style with  female ?gures. One of  the painted women  was

yawning, and it set anyone who visited to yawning furiously.

Fanny  loved  marketing  in  the  morning  and  always  found  the  stalls  full  of  prettily arranged vegetables despite the general disorder of the streets. In  the afternoons when Louis stopped writing, they wandered with Bogue through the garden, inspecting Fanny’s beans and lettuces. One night they sat out on the terrace and watched the clouds scudding overhead against the black sky.

“I’d swear the stars are moving.”

“Put your ?nger on that star,” Louis told her, guiding her ?nger up toward the sky. “Now keep it there. It’s not movin’, girlie.”

“I am content,” she said. “This is contentment.”

Why is it, she wondered a few weeks into their stay at La Solitude, that whenever I say out loud I’m happy, something goes wrong?

“Louis,” she told him one morning, “I think I’m pregnant.”

Louis was honing the end of a  pencil with a  pocketknife. He set them down, leaned against the kitchen table and crossed his arms. “How late are you?”
“Two weeks. You could set a clock by me most of the time.” Standing in the tiny kitchen, Fanny tried to count back to find the day when it might have happened.
“We could adapt,” Louis said, summoning an encouraging tone.  “Of course we could. I suppose we’d have to.”

Dear Lord, don’t let it be. She remembered how much she had wanted to give Louis a baby of his own. When they married, she’d thought it was still possible, if only his health would stabilize. But the past two years of illness had put that dream to rest.

When another week had passed with no menstruation, he asked, “How do you feel about having a baby?”

“Afraid. We said in Davos that children were out of the question. But I know you wanted a  child when  we met,  and now  we never talk  about it.  How  does a  baby  ?t into this traveling circus? I’m forty-four—I could be ill, and then what? And how could we a?ord it? As it is, we are continually short of funds—”

He put a forefinger on her lips. “Hush. I agree.”

When  she announced the next afternoon  that she had begun  to menstruate,  his face broke into relief. But in the following few days, Louis seemed bereft, as if he had lost an

actual child whose fingers and toes he had already counted.

Shortly after the turn  of the year in  1884, Henley and Baxter came to Hyères to visit. Fanny’s relations with his friends—other than Bob—had been politely strained since the scene at the Grosvenor Hotel in London. She thought it was best that way, and apparently, so did Louis’s friends, for they’d made little e?ort to rekindle their old familiarity. She didn’t  trust  Henley,  in  particular.  She  suspected  him  of  a  backstairs  cunning  he  never showed to Louis, though she hadn’t any proof.

Still, she found herself trying to win him over. She made a dinner of roast beef especially for him. When they squeezed around the little table at dinner, knocking elbows as they ate, she sought to ?nd the common  ground on  which  they might converse. Treasure  Island’s recent publication in book form was a safe topic.

“We’ve  received so  many  letters  from  readers  since  it  came  out,”  she  said.  “Not  just children are reading it. Many adults, too.”

“I  heard  Prime  Minister  Gladstone  has  read  it  through  a  couple  of  times,”  Baxter reported.

“Shouldn’t he be running the country?” Louis said.

Henley cackled, knowing how deeply Louis despised the man. He maneuvered the bowl of potatoes toward his plate. “It’s a pity about the book rights,” he said. “Only a hundred pounds.” The big man shook his head. “You could be sailing around in a yacht if you wrote plays. I heard recently that George Sims made ten thousand pounds on one melodrama alone.”

“What are you working on now?” Baxter asked.

“A poetry collection,” Louis replied. “I’m calling it A Child’s Garden of Verses.” Henley nearly choked. “‘A child’s garden …?”

“Go  write  your  damn  masterpieces!”  Louis  shouted.  Henley  and  Baxter  laughed,  but everyone in  the room knew Louis was livid when  he jabbed his ?nger emphatically at Henley as he spoke. “When I su?er in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium. Anyone who entertains me with a  great story is a  doctor of the spirit. Frankly, it isn’t Shakespeare we take to when we are in a hot corner, is it? It’s Dumas or the best of Walter Scott. Don’t children, especially children, deserve that kind of refuge? Even if it’s poetry?”
Fanny  savored the  look  of  defeat  on  Henley’s  face.  He  was  a  poet,  after  all.  “Good

heavens, you’re touchy. I was merely teasing!” he protested.

She was already thinking what she would say to Louis in bed that night. “He is so jealous of you.”

Henley  had  been  ?oundering  since  his London magazine folded, while Louis’s literary reputation kept growing. The previous week, Fanny had received a copy of The  Century with a glowing review of Louis’s newest stories. She could hardly sleep the night the review arrived in the mail. Everyone she knew back in California read The Century. She nearly burst with glee when she thought of the friends who had questioned her choice of a sickly, penniless writer as her new husband. All of them—Timothy Rearden, Dora Williams, Sam Osbourne, her whole blessed family—would ?nally see how prescient she had been about Louis’s talent.

Fanny thought Henley might be right about playwriting. A melodrama would be the gold mine Henley claimed. And it was probable the two men would do better a second time together. Whatever came, Henley was going to be a ?xture in their lives for the duration. So was Baxter. Louis trusted his old friend from law school, and in a moment of candor, even  Fanny  had  admitted  to  Baxter,  “I’m  no  better  than  Louis  with  money.”  Still,  it bothered her that the lawyer held the purse strings.

“Burly, you look positively Brobdingnagian!” Louis remarked when he witnessed Henley’s mighty frame crammed into the chalet’s tiny parlor. The men quickly understood that there was little fun to be had in so small a house. With Fanny’s tepid blessing and a bottle of ergotin  in  hand,  Louis  was  o?  with  Baxter  and  Henley  to  Monaco,  Monte  Carlo,  and Mentone.

It wasn’t long before Fanny got word from Louis that he had fallen ill in Nice, on his way home. His friends thought it was merely a cold, left him at a hotel, and returned to London. Now he was hemorrhaging. She immediately caught a train to Nice, all the while cursing the hides of Henley and Baxter. Were they even bigger fools than she thought them to be? What would it take to make them realize how fragile Louis was?

When she reached his bedside, she found him sleeping; his cheeks were sunken purple shadows, his ?ngertips white as paper. The French physician attending him told her to go into the hallway.

“Mr.   Stevenson   has   pneumonia,   which   has   aggravated   his   poor   lungs   into

hemorrhaging,” he said, after closing the door to Louis’s room. “You should notify a male friend or member of the family that he may be needed, in case your husband dies.”
Fanny was stunned. She searched his face and found only dull resignation.  “I need to contact his mother to get here right away,” she muttered.

“Where is she?”

“Edinburgh.”

The doctor shook his head. “She won’t arrive in time.”

Fanny  sat  beside  Louis’s  bed  throughout  the  night,  watching  in  frozen  panic  as  he struggled  to  breathe.  By  morning,  though,  her  husband  was  performing  his  Lazarus impersonation once again.

“Would you kindly get me a newspaper, Fan?” he asked when he opened his eyes. “I feel as if I don’t know a thing about what’s going on in the world.”

With the help of the hotel manager, Fanny arranged for a visit from a di?erent doctor, who gave Louis a good once-over and announced, “You could live until you are seventy, sir, but you must curtail the traveling. You are a writer, yes?”

“Yes,” Louis replied. “A very seedy one, at the moment.”

“We are going to have to bind your right arm so that you are not tempted to use it. In this way, you will be able to lie very still. No talking, either. That is how it must be until your hemorrhaging stops.”

Fanny was unsure how she would succeed in transporting Louis sixty-?ve miles back to Hyères. In a  panic, she contacted Louis’s old canoeing friend Walter Simpson; when he declined, she suspected what he thought: that she was a Cassandra and this was a false alarm. She called upon Bob next, even though she had enlisted him far too many times in the past. He was married now, like Walter and the others, but Bob said yes, he would come. They managed to get Louis home slowly, with intervals of rest along the train route. Fanny was relieved and moved when Henley arranged for his trusted English doctor to come to Hyeres to treat Louis. Along with Baxter and Bob, he guaranteed to pay the doctor’s fees.
As she nursed Louis in the weeks that followed, she acted as his amenuensis as well. He was  forbidden  to  pace,  let  alone  get  out  of  bed,  though  that  did  not  stop  him  from dramatizing the dialogue as he dictated pieces of a romance he was calling Prince Otto. He growled the prince’s lines and spoke in a high pitch for the females. During the hours she wrote for him, Fanny fell under the spell of his storytelling. She found herself whiling away

hours with him as he processed one plot approach after another. She loved collaborating with  him,  but  it  was  not  her  only  work;  there  were  meals  to  cook,  sheets  to  change, bedpans to empty.

Exhausted, she hired a local woman named Valentine Roch to help nurse Louis. After one week of caring for him, the plain French countrywoman, wasp-waisted in her white apron, said directly, “I am not leaving you.” She melded into their lives as easily as a nice cousin might. Fanny taught her how to cook the food Louis could eat, and showed her how to lower him into bed on  all fours when  his back  pained him.  It was a  godsend to have another strong person who could manage the job, and Louis liked her. He teased Valentine shamelessly  and  called  her “Joe.”  She  was  a  simple  young  woman  who  intuitively understood the conditions that arose when a person boomeranged between life and death.
Louis was heroic, and for his companions to be anything less was unthinkable.  “Might you pin some paper to a board and put it in front of me?” he requested of Fanny one day. “I’ve come up with a couple of verses I’d like to set down.” She provided him with the board and paper. He sat in the darkened room and de?ed doctor’s orders by using his left hand to scribble out the poems.

“There is something else I want you to do for me.” “What is it?”

“Go out on a walk and think up some story ideas for me, Fan, even if you just walk back and forth in front of the house. We need the money, and Prince Otto has stopped talking.”
“So I am to be your Scheherazade? I think you just want to be rid of me.” He smiled. “There might be a touch of that in it.”

She found relief in the walks. She had been reading in the newspaper about some young Irish-American men who had returned to Ireland to participate in a bombing plot against the English. She tried to imagine what sort of people could allow themselves to be part of such a heinous scheme. Soon enough, a mysterious man in a sealskin coat was ?itting about her head, followed by a wealthy girl using an alias, and a house exploding. At night she spun stories out of thin air the way she’d done as a child, and she glowed when Louis remarked,  “My lady has quite the perfervid imagination, thinks I to meself.” She could barely contain her delight when he began concocting threads to connect the disparate tales. “I’m fairly sure I can publish these,” he remarked at the end of her fourth night of tale spinning.

She jumped up and opened the best wine in the house. “To our ?rst collaboration,” she toasted.

Out and about every day, Fanny learned from two encounters with English speakers that cholera was raging in Toulon, just three miles away. When she told Louis, they both let down their brave masks. Early in the morning, they could hear the sound of patients in the town below being wheeled to the pest house with the other contagious people. They knew then that cholera was closer than Toulon; it had obviously reached Hyères. In bed, Fanny huddled close to Louis’s left side.

One night in late winter, he began to hemorrhage again. By now Fanny knew what to do. For some time she had carried a small vial of ergotin in pockets that she sewed into her dresses; she was never without it. The sight of Louis ?lling a bowl with nearly a pint of blood sucked the air right out of her lungs. She raced for water to mix with the ergotin granules in a minim glass, but her hands shook so wildly that Louis took the medicine away from her, he calmly poured himself the proper dosage, and drank it down.
He signaled to her to bring a pencil and paper. With his left hand, he scrawled out, Don’t be afraid. If this is death it is an easy one.

Fanny kept watch through the night. Outside, the trees rustled uneasily. She imagined the wind was blowing up the hillside from the old town, bringing with it thick clouds of germs—cholera, smallpox, typhus, who knew what—from the damp streets and pestilential piles of garbage below. She got up and went to the window. Even the olive trees had taken on a sinister aspect, as if their leaves were coated with a sickening dust.