Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 63

In  the  dining  room of  the  Royal Hawaiian  Hotel,  the  Cascos fell upon  their  roast-beef dinner with near-savage gusto.

Belle laughed. “You’re starving!”

“We are,” Fanny admitted to her daughter, who sat at the long and groaning table with her husband and Austin. She noticed how much better Belle looked than she had in San Francisco. She had made it back to Hawaii, as they’d hoped, and it had warmed Fanny’s heart to see her girl waiting on the dock in Honolulu.

“Our supplies on the boat were very nearly gone,” Fanny said.  “Had we run into foul weather, we would have been in real trouble. But the wind was cooperative.”
“Cooperative?”  Captain  Otis  laughed. “It  was  a  gale-force  squall  got  us  here,  Mrs. Stevenson.”

“I saw your arrival,” Belle said. “It was a miracle you didn’t slam into another boat.” “To our braw captain,” Louis called out to Otis. Glasses were hoisted up and down the
table. “Thank you for that splendid landing.”

“One of the many miracles of this voyage,” Fanny said. Her eyes met the captain’s at that moment, and she saw him nod solemnly. She looked down  the table at Maggie, Lloyd, Valentine, and the sailors. They were all nodding.

“Tell us!” Belle said.

The stories ?owed. Captain Otis, who had been a surly, monosyllabic taskmaster at the beginning of the voyage, waxed poetic as he described with animated hands the tattooed legs of Queen Vaekehu. “For sheer beauty, I would say Nuka Hiva in the Marquesas was the most magni?cent,” Otis said. “But the most beautiful of the Polynesian people we met were the Tahitians.” Fanny had heard those very words come out of her husband’s mouth  a couple of days ago. It struck her that the captain had made a study of Louis’s style and opinions.

“Aye.” Maggie sighed. “Big, muscled men over six feet tall, with luminous brown eyes …” “… tattooed fore and aft …” Louis interjected.

“… just magnificent creatures, very well set up.”

“Aunt Maggie!” Lloyd lowered his head and looked at her over his spectacles.  “I didn’t know you were taking notice.”

Maggie put her hand up to her mouth in embarrassed delight. “I will confirm that observation,” Fanny said.

Everyone laughed, and the stories continued: of the things they’d seen in six months, of treacherous coral atolls and broken masts, of Protestant missionary wives bent on covering native ?esh with fabric, of Catholic priests who descended into slovenly habits and unclean appearance in the absence of wives. They talked of the Tahitian princess who saved Louis’s life by feeding him ?sh soup when he fell ill with fever, and of Ori a Ori, her Tahitian subchief who adopted Louis as a brother, moved out of his house, and gave it over to the Stevensons, even feeding them for weeks as Louis recovered from the one real sickness he’d had  since  they  left.  They  talked  of  the  magical  beauty  of  Hiva-Oa,  where  the  French missionaries’  battle  against  cannibalism  had  been  only  partly  successful,  where  the repugnant  cannibal chief  Moipu spoke  nostalgically  of  the  human  hand as his favorite morsel.

“The Paci?c,” Louis mused aloud,  “is a strange place indeed. It’s as if—” Just then the telephone in the dining room rang, and he nearly leaped from his chair.  “Dear God,” he said, “would someone stop that bleating thing?”

Everyone laughed except Louis, who was genuinely irritated. “You were sayin?” Belle said.

“It’s as if the nineteenth century exists here only in spots. I don’t know what to make of it entirely, but I consider myself lucky to have seen it before it changes.” The Cascos fell silent, as if Louis had just spoken a truth for all of them.

Now a leave-taking was imminent. Louis had told Otis that the Casco should return to San Francisco without them. They were out of funds and would have to stay in Hawaii until money from Scribner’s or McClure found its way to Honolulu. That might take another three or  four  months.  Then  they  would board a  steamer  to  Sydney  and eventually  travel  to England. Neither Fanny nor Louis had an appetite to race through winter weather to San Francisco  on  the Casco. There were embraces all around when the dinner ended, and a teary farewell to Valentine. Loyal Valentine, the funny, sometimes petulant young woman who had attended so faithfully to Louis during the past six years, would be moving to San Franciso to start her own life.

Outside, electric streetlights illuminated a passing streetcar. Louis stopped to gaze at the stars, which he did every night wherever he was, but tonight the lights made it di?cult.

“Let’s get a cottage at Waikiki,” he said as he and Fanny walked to the guesthouse where they were staying the night. “I can’t bear all this progress.”

on  the  beach,  they  marked time  at  Waikiki,  waiting  for  word from  Baxter  that money was back in the depleted co?ers. Louis worked on his South Seas book but was growing restless in his limbo. When Belle came with Austin to visit them, Louis took long walks with them, collecting shells and tossing rocks with the boy. The child provided some distraction, and the visits comforted Fanny, who was relieved to see Belle’s attitude toward Louis softening. The girl had blamed him entirely for the breakup of her parents’ marriage.
Once, when he was out on such a stroll, Fanny went to his desk to look at the pages he had  written.  What  she  found  shocked  her.  Louis  had  divided  his  work  into  sections, including language, songs, history, and myths, even some botany. It dawned on her that he was  writing  a  science  book,  not  the  sort  of  colorful  travel  material  for  which  he  was already known. What on earth was he thinking?

What she saw on the desk was an outline written by a layman intent upon a scholarly paper about the South Sea islands and islanders, a layman whose own brain, brilliant as it was, could not remember the names of trees and ?owers for any length of time. It was simply not his strength. Even if it were, it would take twenty years of living in these islands to  write  such  a  book.  Louis  kept  crowing  that  no  other  white  people,  except  perhaps Melville, had ever experienced what they had in these islands. Perhaps. But Melville had the good sense not to turn his knowledge into a scienti?c treatise. Fanny grabbed a couple of sheets of paper and went to her own desk to write a letter to Colvin.

Louis has the most enchanting material that any one ever had in the whole world for his book, and I am afraid he is going to spoil it all. He has taken it into his Scotch Stevenson head … that his book must be a sort of scienti?c and historical impersonal thing comparing the di?erent languages (of which he knows nothing, really) and the di?erent peoples … and the whole thing to be impersonal, leaving out all he knows of the people themselves … I am going to ask you to throw the weight of your in?uence as heavily as possible in the scales with me … otherwise Louis will spend a good deal of time in Sydney actually reading other people’s books on the islands. What a thing it is to have a “man of genius” to deal with. It is like managing an overbred horse. Why with my own feeble hand I could write a book that the whole world would jump at …

Fanny hurriedly sealed the letter inside an envelope and hid it between the pages of a book before Louis returned. Tomorrow, when she went into town, she would post it.