Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 44

“Are you up to a lesson with Adelaide?”

Louis was sitting, stuporous, at the desk in his study. “Is she here?” Fanny nodded in the direction of the drawing room. “Send her in, then.”

He eyed the pile of correspondence he had intended to attack. It would have to wait. He had nearly as little enthusiasm for writing letters as he had for teaching writing to Adelaide Boodle. The wind had been out of his sails for a week, ever since the Forces—his doctor, Fanny, his lungs—pronounced the London teaching position mere fantasy to pursue.
“I came across something I want to read to you,” Louis said to Adelaide Boodle, who sat in a wing chair opposite him. He pulled from a bookcase behind him a volume of essays by Shelley. “‘A  man,   to   be   greatly   good,’   he   read, “‘must   imagine   intensely   and comprehensively; he must put himself in  the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.’” Louis closed the book. “Now, I believe that is ?ne advice for a writer. Except, I would add, he ought to try to live inside the skin of other species, too. I suspect a pig has a point of view about a few things.”
“I think that way—about the cats,” Adelaide said.

“Oh, I don’t doubt it. You are a naturally good girl, Boodle. It will be easy to put yourself in the boots of the hero. As a boy, I always imagined myself as the good fellow on a white horse who was coming to the rescue of the others. But if you want to be a writer, you are going to have to put yourself in the shoes of people who are not so good. Everybody has faults. Some people have a lot of them. Yet no one sees himself as a monster. You need to try being him—or her—to know how she feels and thinks.”

Louis went to one corner of his study, where wooden crates his mother had recently sent from  Edinburgh  were  stacked  up  to  his  height.  They  contained  books,  except  for  one marked “Skelt” on the outside. He removed a couple of boxes o? the top to get to that one, then  used  his  folding  knife  to  pry  it  open.  He  laughed  softly  when  he  looked  at  the contents. On top of some smaller boxes inside was the collapsed framework for the toy theater he had played with as a child. “Have you seen one of these?”
“No.”  The  girl  moved  over  to  the  corner  where  Louis  sat  cross-legged  on  the  ?oor, assembling the simple wooden stick framework that supported painted background scenery,

props, and the little hand-colored figures of a particular drama.

“I got my ?rst drama set when I was six years old,” he said. “Now, what you see here are pieces of a number of di?erent sets I owned as a child. “ He lifted out a painted scene. “This is a backdrop for a melodrama called ‘Three-Fingered Jack, the Terror of Jamaica.’ Some of the characters in that little play have survived, but not all.”

He  began  sorting  through  a  box  that  held  small  hand-colored  ?gures  from  di?erent dramas.  “Here’s Robin Hood. Here’s Aladdin. Here’s a maiden who works at an inn. You can see it’s a mishmash. I think that is all right for us. I loved the little plays they provided, but I often departed from those outlines, and that’s just what I want you to do. Start with a backdrop. There are a couple of others in the box.”

The girl pulled out a  castle scene,  a  prison  vault,  and an  island/ocean  scene with  a warship among the waves.

“Good,” he said.  “Now look through these characters and see if you can ?t together a likely setting for, say, four of them. See these little props? There’s an ax, a bag of gold coins. A paper that’s a will, from the looks of it.” He rummaged about. “Here’s a treasure chest.  The  way  the  plays always worked was that  there  was some  contest  to get  at  a treasure. Might be a pretty girl two fellows are after. Choose your—”
“I know what to do,” Adelaide said.

“Have them talk to each other. Out loud. Even yell.”

The girl got down on her belly in front of the wood structure. She slid the castle scene into the slot for the backdrop, then started poking through the colorful paper characters.
Louis departed the room so the child wouldn’t be embarrassed to try out a few lines. Winded from the box lifting,  he lay  down  on  his daybed in  the drawing  room to rest. Memories of his boyhood Saturdays flooded his head.

The day had always begun with the stated intent of  “having a look at the ships.” He went out to a corner near his house with his father or mother and others—Bob came, too, when he was living with them—and stood in the chill, whipping Edinburgh wind to admire from a distance the visiting ships in the Firth of Forth. The joy of those long-ago Saturday mornings was what came next: strolling to the window of a stationer’s shop on Leith Walk that sold Skelt’s Juvenile Drama toy theater sets. In front of that window, penniless, Louis su?ered bouts of anguished longing. The scenes in the window changed regularly. There might be a  forest with a  halted carriage. Beside it would be a  battle raging between a

rowdy band of robbers and bearded fellows in dress coats, brandishing pistols. He studied the  names  displayed  near  the  characters: “The  Miller,” “The  Huntsman,”  “Long  Tom Co?n.” A person could buy a paper ?gure, unpainted, for a penny. There were colored ones available for twopence, having been painted by the wife and grown daughter of the shop’s owner. But that would have stolen the pleasure  -when he was able to buy some ?gures—of  dipping  his  own  brush,  choosing  his  own  colors,  then  cutting  out  the  little people and pasting them to cardboard. And then the acting out of the play began. What a bargain those childish dramas were for my parents! The theater sets bought hours of solitude for the adults who lived at 17 Heriot Row, and incalcuble happiness for the boy who was housebound there.

“She’s having a grand time.” Fanny’s voice. She laid a blanket over his chest. Louis focused his eyes upon his wife. “Who am I as a writer but what Mr. Skelt made of
me? He taught me how to tell stories.”

“Stand back!” came a holler from the other room. “Shall I send her home?”

“No, God no. Leave her alone. Let the child play.”