Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 47

Louis awoke early. No new dream. But the old one wouldn’t go away. It chilled him to remember it.

He could see them quite clearly. Two gentlemen pass through a wooden door and enter a damp courtyard. They know a man who lives in the house that faces the open court. When they glance up, they see a  vexed-looking  man  who sits by a  half-open  window on  the second ?oor. “Dr. Jekyll!” one of the men calls out to the fellow. “Do come down and have a walk with us. You could use the fresh air. You don’t look so well.” The man won’t come down. And then a terrifying expression overtakes the doctor’s face. He closes the window and moves away from it, but in that moment, both of the men on the ground understand they have glimpsed something—a transformation, inutterably horrifying.
The second part of the dream was vivid. A small man runs through the streets. His pants drag. His clothes are too big for him. He has a  hideous, somehow malformed face and corded, hairy hands. A policeman chases after him, shouting, “Stop!” The man disappears into an old doorway o? the street. Runs through a courtyard and up some stairs, past a surgical theater, and into a doctor’s laboratory. He is frantic. He pours white salts from a glass saucer into a beaker half full of red liquid. He drinks it and his face appears to melt, change  hue,  then  reshape  itself  with  di?erent  features.  His  body  grows  large,  into  a di?erent man’s body. He is transformed. He is a whole and respectable ?gure. At the door, the policeman is pounding …

Louis scoured his brain for a few more scrapings of the dream. Nothing. The Brownies had left  just  those  bits:  the  agonized Dr.  Jekyll  at  the  window,  and later,  the  hideous Edward Hyde taking the potion.

The evening before, Louis had come up to the bedroom, itching to pound more walls. But his ?st was a?ame from the ?rst punch. Instead, he fell into the bed to stew over his wife’s remarks.

How galling  that Fanny considered herself  his ultimate critic. Thomas Stevenson  was partly to blame for that. Long ago, he had said to Louis,  “You really shouldn’t publish anything  that  Fanny  has  not  approved ?rst.” She  had taken  that  endorsement  far  too seriously. Louis blamed himself, too, for he’d brought her along, invited her to collaborate on story collections and playwriting with him and Henley. Recently, Henley had said,  “I

can only collaborate with one Stevenson at a time.”

Long ago, before he met Fanny, he had made up his mind that marrying another writer would be a mistake. A family could tolerate only one. Well, Fanny had been an aspiring writer before he knew her. Any qualms Louis might have felt about a life with her had inevitably  passed.  Their  time  together  had  become  one  long  conversation—contentious sometimes, yes—yet she had opened his mind in many ways. And Fanny’s mind was keen; she had a wonderful way of seeing things that was all hers. Sometimes her thoughts were so original that they took Louis aback. But she was more intuitive about human nature than skilled in literary nuance. He wanted to say to her, I love you, I owe my life to you. But my writing comes ?rst, even before you. Because I  am my writing. And when you meddle in my work, you muck with my soul.

Louis looked at the pile of paper on his lap. Earlier, he had felt so exhausted that he could not even contemplate rereading the story for errors. He had hoped to sleep tonight and read the next day with a fresh brain. There were at least thirty thousand words there.
Before he laid his head down, it hit him. Goddammit, she’s right. As it stood, the Jekyll and  Hyde  story  was  merely  a  penny  dreadful  horror.  The  tale should  be  written  as  a stronger allegory. It held within it a germ of truth about the “other” in every man, a truth so powerful it could make any reader of the story ?inch with recognition of his own weaker self.

After he had tossed the manuscript into the ?replace, he tried to sleep, but the new story would not let him rest. Louis sat up, mapping out the direction of the next version on his board. As soon as his notetaking ended, his pen was writing a new version of the story. Ideas, whole paragraphs sparked around his brain; he abbreviated words to capture them on paper before another bolt hit him.

Next to the bed, a tray with food and medicine appeared. Someone, Fanny or Valentine or maybe even Lloyd, had delivered it during the day, and now Louis fell upon it with gusto. He kept his pen moving as he ate, noting down, a horror that is knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; and man is not truly one, but truly two.

After a while, the food in his belly—or perhaps the morphine—made him dog-tired, and he fell asleep sitting up with his tray on his lap. When he awoke, it was black outside and raining. The house was silent. He picked up his pen, put it between his third and fourth

?ngers to alleviate the pain in his hand, and continued writing. The words did not stop. Morning came. Eggs on a plate arrived, warm and fragrant. He nodded to Fanny as she set the  tray  on  his  bedside  table,  but  shook  his  head  to  signal  no  conversation.  She  had buttered a roll for him. He dipped it in the dish of jam with his left hand and ate it like a starving man while his right hand moved across the paper.

He tried to imagine how it would feel to have one’s body begin to change of its own volition. He remembered what it was like as a boy to emerge from a nightmare brought on by fever, seeing the clothes he had hung on a door hook take on ghastly shapes like the fearsome bodies of monsters. Jekyll must see himself in the mirror that way—ghoulishly transformed. Louis re?ected on how his own body could turn upon him; in the space of a few minutes, he could become a sick, pathetic thing utterly unlike his well self.
The sun came into the window, patterned the room, went away. The night passed as the previous one had and the next one would, with Louis upright in bed, his hand cramped with pain as he wrote and wrote. In the late afternoon of the next day, he let his arm fall next to the bed; the pen slipped out of his hand.

He had been writing straight, with almost no breaks, for six days: three days on the ?rst draft, three days on the second, for a total of over sixty thousand words.
When  Fanny  entered  the  room  with  another  tray  of  food,  she  found  her  husband standing at his mirror, touching his face with both hands.

“What is it?” she asked him.

“I was so emairsed,” he said, “I half-expected to see Hyde’s face.” She eyed him cautiously, then saw the fat stack of pages he’d written. He rubbed his eyes. “I will read tonight,” he said.