Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 74

Louis worried the inside of his cheek with his teeth. He was not suited for bookkeeping, and it boded ill for the day’s writing when he started with the account books. He was a fool with ?gures, but even a fool could see they were bleeding money at Vailima. For the ?rst time in his career, his income was truly respectable—four thousand pounds a year—but upkeep and outgo overshadowed it.

The property and new house had cost twelve thousand dollars, far more than the ?gure he had estimated with Moors when he started the project. He searched the list of itemized construction costs, trying to understand how a simple wood house in the tropics could cost so much, when his eye fell on the word fireplace. Well, he had no one to blame for that but himself. It had seemed essential to have a ?replace in any house he built, even if it was the only one in Samoa, as he’d been told repeatedly by astounded locals. He’d been punished already for his folly on that item. The damned thing didn’t even draw.
The arrival of the furniture from Skerryvore had caused an enormous sensation in Apia, all the paintings and boxes full of china and crystal had stunned the town. The sight of a piano supported on poles carried by an army of Samoans up the three miles to Vailima had awed even him.

Then there was the new wing his mother had required the moment she arrived in May. “Lloyd doesn’t have a proper place to sleep,” she argued. “I’ll pay for half the cost—?ve hundred pounds.” Ha! Five hundred pounds was nothing to the seventy hundred dollars Moors was estimating for the addition. Lloyd had chimed in, “I’ll use my earnings from the Wrecker on it.” How could Louis say no?

Naturally, a new wing would cost even more, since every nail and board used at Vailima had to  be  imported.  They  would be  sleeping  in  style,  all  right.  Dear  God,  what  next? Another ice machine to replace the one Lloyd had bought that didn’t work? There had been teas and parties galore at which they’d fed half the town and the crew of any ship that happened to be in port. As for the Great Farming Experiment underway outside, he hadn’t a guess as to how much that totaled to date. Asking Fanny was to invite war. He had made that mistake earlier in the week, when she’d come into his study to tell him she needed more money.

“You forget I sold Skerryvore to help pay for this place,” she told him indignantly when

he remarked upon the out?ow of money. “I am working as hard as I can to get a plantation going. Lord knows, I would write stories and sell them to help with the expenses if I might. But you don’t want me to,  do you?  I  am Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife,  after all.  It is regarded as a publisher’s favor to have any of my stories printed at this point. Isn’t that what people said when the ‘Nixie’ appeared?”

Though Louis had cringed at her bitter words and sneer as she stood on the other side of his desk, he had plunged on.  “I gave you a budget for the planting.” He kept his voice reasonable and calm. “You now say you are out of money. All I ask is an accounting—”
She bent over the desk and positioned a quivering fore?nger inches from his nose.  “I wonder what would become of you, Louis Stevenson, if you had to get by as a woman must.” She straightened her back and took him in with a withering look. “You would hate it, I can assure you—to have to beg and scheme to get any say over how the household money  is  spent,  to  have  to  regard  the  clothes  you  wear  as  gifts  and  be  beholden  for whatever else comes to you. I think you would be a resentful person, indeed. I suspect you would make quite a stink about it.”

She’d turned on her heel and made a de?ant exit. It hurt his head to remember the scene. And it did him no good. What he knew for certain was that, exhausted as he was by the tension in the house and his recent output, he needed to work. More.

Outside, he could hear Fanny’s voice growing louder.  “You say you got no work?” she screeched. “I give you work, you no do it. Where you go after lunch? You hide. Now you want pay? I no pay you for afternoon. No come back tomorrow.”

Louis shivered at  the  unabated shrillness. Her voice  used to be  so soft. He watched in shame as the men, even Lafaele, who adored her, steered clear of Fanny.
It seemed every day brought another argument. There were brief intervals of normalcy, but they never lasted long. She regularly kept the family waiting while she remained in the ?eld long after the conch had been sounded for dinner. At every turn, she seemed to be looking for a ?ght. Once, at an English friend’s home, Louis impulsively toasted the queen, and Fanny took it as a direct insult to herself, as an American. “Was that necessary?” she asked on the way home. “You seem to be taking a page from Henley. Hasn’t he just come out with new verses? ‘Blow your Bugle for England’ or some such claptrap?”
Louis’s bedroom was his sanctuary now. Early on in the building of the new house, it had become clear that he had to take for himself the bedroom they’d originally planned for his

mother. He set up his o?ce in an adjoining room and most days found the quiet he craved. He was working at a furious pace. Some time ago, he had abandoned the big South Seas book for Fanny’s peace of mind, and for his own, since she nagged him ?ercely about it. Discouraged, he’d pulled together some of his letters for McClure and written In the South Seas, then let it go from his ?ngers out into the world. Nobody would buy it, he was quite sure. It was an imperfect thing, a stunted version of a giant dream.

Now he wrote realistic stories about the South Seas and wondered if they would bring in any money. At least he’d enjoyed some hilarity in collaborating with Lloyd on his ?rst novel. The Wrong Box was more Lloyd’s book than his own, marked by the boy’s love of mix-ups and false identities. It was a ?ne example of how Louis’s standards had slid in the cause of mentorship.

“I don’t like it,” Moors had the audacity to tell him recently. “The Wrong Box, I mean. It isn’t worthy of you. Why do you bother to collaborate?”

Louis felt his ears go hot and imagined for a moment punching Moors right between his blue  eyes. What can the man possibly understand of my life? But he was the trader’s guest, sitting out the afternoon heat on Moors’s balcony, drinking Moors’s beer, and facing a hill that gave Louis untold pleasure to view,  a  slope reminiscent of  Kinnoull Hill in  Perth, Scotland, except for the palm trees and native girls in lavalavas who were passing along a path in the distance.

“I  think  you  know  the  answer  to  that,”  Louis  replied.  “Money.  And  good  company. Lloyd’s a great mimic, you know. He can reproduce a man’s style of speaking after two or three sentences, and he has a way with comic scenes. I think the one we are working on now, The Wrecker, will be wonderful.”

“In the end, you wrote the whole thing over.” “The Wrong Box? I wrote the final draft, yes.”

“I  much  prefer  your  own  work,” Moors  said.  He  sipped his  beer.  “This  collaboration business is a mistake, as I see it.”

Louis knew that Lloyd rubbed the trader the wrong way. The boy’s English accent rang false in Moors’s American ears, despite the fact that Lloyd had acquired it honestly. Louis suspected that Moors thought the boy’s taste for ?ne liquor had come too early, and, by route of his mother’s marriage, too easily. It made Louis cringe, too, when he observed Lloyd at a party playing the high-nosed sophisticate with a glass of ?ne whisky in hand.

Still, he could not tolerate Moors passing judgment on matters in Louis’s life that he did not understand.

He rose to leave.

Oblivious to any o?ense given, Moors patted him on the back in the overfamiliar way a lot of Americans had.  “Why don’t you go to Nassau Island with me sometime soon? My cabin  is  nearly  done  over  there.  You  can  work  undisturbed.  I  won’t  bother  you  until sundown, when I come round with a bottle of rum in my hand. You need a break from those women up there, Stevenson. You’re all tied up in apron strings.”
They  walked  through  the  dining  room  of  the  house,  where  a  comely  girl  washed windows. Her shapely breasts bobbed beneath a flower wreath around her neck.
“How is it a man is expected not to respond to such a sight?” Louis mumbled when they got to the door.

Moors grinned. “A man’s a fool if he lives in paradise and doesn’t taste the fruit.” Louis regretted he’d ever opened himself up to Moors. Not that he had revealed himself in
the same way he always had to Colvin and Baxter. But other than Reverend Clarke, Moors was the closest thing to a con?dant Louis had on the island, even though he felt uneasy about some unsavory aspects he’d heard of Moors’s past, relating to the labor trade.
It  was business that had thrown him together with Moors. The fellow was bright, an astute observer of Samoan politics, and willing to help at every turn. He was kind to his wife, though there were the usual rumors that he was not immune to the charms of other island women. Truth was, Louis needed Moors, warts and all. What other English-speaking companions did he have but for Lloyd, or his mother, or Belle? Fanny hardly counted as a companion anymore, so obsessively did she work on the farm. She had become almost a stranger.

When loneliness had his foot in its trap, Louis mounted Jack and rode the poor horse as fast as he could. The two of them seemed to be in need of the same thing; they soared over pig fences as if they were a pair of coupled birds.

Some days he rode out to Mata’afa’s camp in Malie, where he talked for hours with the chief and his subchiefs. No longer was he simply gathering information for his letters and books; no longer was he merely observing. The native men were his friends; Louis knew their wives and children, their fortunes, misfortunes, peculiarities. They respected him, he

thought, and his status among them had nothing to do with his fame as a writer. He had studied their culture and learned their language. He had tried to wade into their world without  manipulating  them,  except  for  urging  peace.  It  was  disturbing,  then,  when  he sensed that his most outstanding quality was his wealth. For the natives had witnessed the huge wooden crates coming o? ships, being loaded onto carts pulled by dray horses that struggled up the hill to Vailima, a palace compared to their own homes. He was a rich man in  their  eyes,  and there  was  no  getting  around it.  He  cringed when  he  overheard the natives  say  of  him, “Ona.”  It  occurred  to  him  that  despite  his  e?orts  to  master  their language and customs and history, he might always be to them, above all, a rich white man.