Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 53

At Le Havre, where the Ludgate Hill stopped to pick up more passengers, Fanny managed to go up on deck to enjoy the stillness of the boat in port. It was late afternoon and the light of the day was beginning to fade. Stacks of hogshead barrels on the quay shone golden brown  in  the sun.  Fanny  heard a  chorus of  neighing.  She squinted and saw  a  herd of something coming aboard—horses, it looked like.
“They are horses,” she said to her mother-in-law. “A lot of them.” They  watched  as  masses  of  animals  boarded. “Ninety-one,  ninety-two …”  Maggie Stevenson counted. “There must be over a hundred,” she gasped.

“Is it a circus?” Fanny asked.

“No, my dear.” Maggie pointed to a herd of cows coming on behind the horses. “We are on a livestock boat. I’m quite sure of it.”

Louis had gone down to have a closer view of “the pageant,” as he called it, and Fanny could see him on the side of the ramp, watching. She spied several cages, obviously for large animals, rolling onto the ship. Through the bars of one of them, a long hairy arm extended out toward Louis, as if in greeting. Fanny saw her husband reach out his own arm, missing by a foot the touch of the ape’s fingers.

“No wonder this passage was a bargain,” Fanny muttered when Louis returned to their cabin. “Not a word was mentioned of animals when I bought the tickets.”
“Think of it as an adventure, Fan,” Louis said. “How often does a man get to chat with one of his simian cousins? The baboons are such beauties! I’m told they’re headed for zoos in America. The palms of their hands! The eyes! I would swear some of them were saying hello to me.” He pulled her up from her berth.  “Come up to the deck. It will help your stomach.”

Louis  grabbed two  bottles  of  champagne  from  their  supply.  As  the  ship  departed Le Havre, Fanny followed him as he went about dispensing cups of it to the pale, queasy souls lying on steamer chairs, shivering in blankets.

“Will you have some Henry James?” Louis asked a sickly-looking woman. “Champagne, madam,” he explained when she looked confused. She took the cup of wine gratefully and drank it down.

Louis  grew  stronger  with  every  passing  day  on  board  the  steamer.  The  sea  breezes nourished him in a way that no city or country air had ever done. Watching him, Fanny thought he was more like the man she’d met in Grez than he had been at any time since. He walked—sprang—miles at a time around the deck, talked to everyone he encountered, studied ?shing boats that passed by, seagulls, rope knotting. He reveled in standing in the wheelhouse with the captain, bandying about nautical terms. Word spread quickly among the odd assortment of fellow travelers that he was an author of some reputation, and soon enough crew and passengers and animal keepers were his best friends.
“Those stallions are worth twenty thousand pounds,” Louis told Fanny when they were dining in the saloon. “The owner says he paid ?rst-class passage for them.” After dinner, Louis  took  Fanny’s  hand  and  led  her  to  the  lower  deck  to  see  the  caged  apes  he’d befriended—some thirty of them.

“Pity they are going into zoos, where they will be cooped up for good,” Louis said. “Those are mating pairs. I can attest to that—they don’t mind who’s watching. But the funny part is how they  … court. I’d call it courting. They have lovers’ quarrels and little intimacies. These two over here? The keeper had them both in hats the other day, and they were trading. Trying on the other one’s cap. “

“You did that when we were at Silverado,” she said.

Louis led her over to another cage. “And this fellow?” He opened the cage door; a middlesized baboon climbed into his arms as nonchalantly as if it were Louis’s own child.  “His name is Jacko,” he said.

With no one else around, Fanny allowed herself to simply stare at the long member of the baboon. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an overtly … sexual … animal.”
“And the poor fellow’s all alone in his cage, I don’t know why. It’s not easy being a captive ape. Doesn’t seem right to deny him his rare pleasures.” Louis stroked the top of the animal’s head. “At least you’re not a human, Jacko. You’d have ideals and convictions to bother with.” He eased the ape back into his cage.

“You’re having the time of your life, aren’t you, Mr. Darwin?” She laughed. “I believe I could be happy simply living at sea,” he said grinningly, and in a blink, his
countenance changed. “I was caged in Bournemouth, Fan. It wasn’t a life.”
As  the  voyage  progressed,  the  seas  grew  wilder.  The  boat  creaked  as  furious  waves pitched it  back  and forth,  up  and down,  through  one  whole  night.  “Terrifying,”  Louis

admitted when he crawled from his berth after the raging tempest had passed.
Fanny lay in her bed with a bucket at hand. It was no longer news in the family that she had no sea legs, and Louis did. Valentine and Lloyd were mostly of Fanny’s constitution, but the real surprise was Louis’s mother. Maggie Stevenson showed more pluck than any of them knew she possessed. She strode the pitching deck as if it were a city sidewalk, the white veil of her widow’s cap whipping behind her in the wind. She accompanied Louis on his walks with Jacko and ate her supper heartily in the saloon, where horses eyeballed the diners through the portholes.

On the fourth evening out, the high winds turned nightmarish. Cups and saucers began to  ?y  during  dinner  hour,  and people  left  behind their  ox tongue  and muttonchops to retreat to their cabins.  “The waves are curling right over the decks,” Louis said when he crept back to their stateroom. He and Fanny clung to the sides of their berths and watched as ?ttings from their cabin shook loose, then slid back and forth across the ?oor. Outside, bells clanged crazily as the ship pitched and rolled. The turmoil lasted for hours, and once, when  the door of the cabin  ?ew open, she heard the screams of the monkeys and the clomping hooves of terrified horses.

“Tea and biscuits?” Louis called out to her in the noise. “No,” she groaned.

“Henry James?” he asked.

“Yes, yes, right away,” she shouted back, and took the whole bottle to her lips. By the end, they had been on board nearly two weeks. Fanny and Louis, watching from
the deck, were ecstatic when they saw a small boat appear to lead the steamer into New York. A young sailor on the Ludgate Hill stopped his work to watch. “See that pilot boat, Mr. Stevenson? I worked on it for about a month right before I come on this one. The captain’s a  tough  master,  he is.” He laughed.  “Do you know  what we called him? Mr. Hyde.”

Fanny shot a startled glance at Louis, who shrugged.  “The book has been selling well over here, they say. Too bad it has mostly been pirated. We might have gotten rich.” He looked down at her. “Are you feeling up to going to the play premiere when we get there?” “I wouldn’t miss it,” she said.

When the Ludgate pulled into New York, it was a few passengers short. A number of the baby monkeys, sickened by the voyage, had died and been  tossed overboard. Everyone

looked shaken. Everyone but Louis, who appeared to be glowing with youth and vigor. The only evidence of the harrowing passage was the condition of his coat, which had been mauled to pieces by Jacko during the storms.

Fanny blessed the earth when they walked down the ramp and onto terra ?rma. She had traveled by ship often enough to know that her body would be swaying for a good couple of days. They climbed into a carriage and proceeded to their hotel, talking gaily the whole way of beds and baths and hotel food. From the side of the carriage, she looked at the dresses on the street. Seven years, and how the clothing had changed! The women of New York were wearing bustles again.

In the hotel lobby crowded with men, Will Low stood waiting to see them, looking highly respectable in a suit—not at all the bohemian painter they had known and loved ten years earlier in Grez. “Louis!” he called out when he spotted his old friend, whereupon the entire lobby full of men turned at once.

“Mr. Stevenson! Mr. Stevenson!” they called out as they closed in on Louis.  “New York Herald  here!” someone  shouted.  Notebooks appeared,  arms waved above  heads as they hollered questions at Louis, who looked morti?ed. Amid the shouts, Fanny heard again and again: Jekyll and Hyde.