Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 88

“Something  bad is going  to happen  today,” Fanny  fretted at breakfast.  “Someone is in danger.”

“Well, out with it,” Louis humored her. “Who is it?” “It’s not you or me.”

“Lucky us!”

She focused her gaze out the window to the lawn, where Austin played tennis with a neighbor boy. “It’s somebody else in the family, that much I know. Somebody we love.”
“Hmmm. I just saw Lloyd, and he was ?t as a ?ddle—actually pecking on his typewriter. Unless the ceiling falls in, I think he is quite safe. Belle is under my command this morning until lunchtime. I will only allow her one trip to the privy, and that is all. Austin is … well, Austin.  We’ll  have  to  put  Arrick  on  duty.”  Louis  turned to  Maggie.  “Mother?”  he  said. “Health report.”

Maggie looked up from a newspaper she was reading with a magnifying glass. “Steady as she goes. No need for Arrick to watch Austin. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“Everyone is accounted for, then. Come, let’s get you out to your pea patch.” “I don’t know, Louis,” Fanny said, shaking her head.

“Now, look, Fan. The sun is shining. Christmas is three weeks away. You haven’t grown a mustache. Belle is cooking your favorite roast for dinner. Your husband loves you. Tell me, could life be better?”

She smiled grudgingly. “And you are a canary bird.”

Louis laughed. It once was one of her cruelest names for him, because of his incessant, chirpy cheerfulness. Now he found it mild. “You haven’t brought that one out in a while.”
He walked her out into the garden, where Lafaele was hoeing.  “Mr. Archangel,” Louis said to him, “would you kindly watch out for Tamaitai this morning? Don’t let her fall in a ditch or some such.”

Lafaele assented.

“Do you know what I am dreaming of?” Louis said to her. “A big bowl of salad greens with dinner. Do we still have lettuces?”

“Have you ever known me not to have lettuces?”

“Will you make a nice mayonnaise dressing today?” He kissed her on top of her head.

“Yes.”

“Good. I’ll help.”

A quicksilver change. Last night she had been laughing on the verandah, telling stories about their voyage on the Janet Nicoll. Now she seemed hardly fit to stand up in the garden. He walked back  to the house and went to his study,  where Belle was stationed at the writing desk. “Your mother is having a hard day … “

“I  know.  I  noticed  it  immediately  this  morning.”  Belle  sighed.  “I  hope  it  is  not  the beginning of a bout, what with Mr. Baxter coming in a couple of weeks.”
“If Fanny is depressed, we won’t have to pretend around Charles. He is a man for all seasons.”

The thought of Baxter lightened his own mood immeasurably. He was already on his way,  carrying  the  proofs  of The  Edinburgh Edition. No one, aside from Colvin  or Henry James, could brighten Louis’s life in the same way.

“Why don’t you go to your mother now and come back in an hour. I’m not quite ready to dictate.”

“All right.  When  she’s ?nished in  the  garden,  I’ll get  her  started on  some  Christmas decorations.”

“Good girl.”

Alone, he assessed what he needed for the next chapter of Weir. In front of him were papers with phrases penned in his pained scrawl, as well as a history of Lord Brax?eld, the lord justice clerk upon whom the coarse, terrifying character of the father was based. He looked at his simple outline of the plot, waiting for some door to open into the chapter.

This is how it always is. I must sit on my eggs like a hen.

He understood enough about his working method to know he would have to be patient; there was no point in forcing words onto paper. What came from his unconscious was the only thing worth writing down for the big moments in his book. And today he was working on a big moment, the instant when Archie must understand that his beloved young Kirstie is more complicated than he realized. That women are more complicated than he realized.
Louis sank back in his chair, closed his eyes, and let himself fall into a half-sleep. He saw in his mind’s eye the pretty redheaded young lady who used to distract him in church; he heard in his ears the Scottish voices of a half-dozen girls he had known as a youth on the streets of  Edinburgh,  and in  the Pentland Hills when  he went to Swanston  Cottage on

holiday. The Kirsties already had strong Border accents, but he wanted more. He would put old Scots words into  their  mouths—bairns  for  children, howl  for  hovel, toon  for  town— knowing full well some of his readers would rebel against the strange vocabulary. He would pull  them  along  with  enough  straight  English  to  make  the  reading  bearable  for  an Englishman or American.

The voice that next came to him was Thomas Stevenson’s. I would ten times sooner see you lying in your grave than that you should be shaking the faith of other young men and bringing ruin on other houses as you have  brought it upon this. How vividly he remembered his father’s furious outpouring. Those words were precisely the burning vitriol Judge Hermiston would have hurled at his son, Archie. God knows, they still hurt to remember them. Somehow he would have to weave in the part about bringing ruin upon the house.
Daydreaming, he heard his own voice, the narrator’s voice, and it was more con?dent than it had ever been. It was telling the story of a young man coming to understand the world. It was the voice of an older Louis speaking of the young Louis through the character of  Archie—the poetry-writing,  sweet soul he once was,  in  all his joyful,  poignant,  silly innocence.

Louis sat up straight, grabbed his pen, and began a scene in which Archie arrived late for church because he’d tarried to smell the ?rst blossoms of spring. The ?rst person he must see was the lovely young Kirstie in another pew. Louis was fairly cackling as he ?red o? two paragraphs, then stopped to admire his prose.

The lip was lifted from her little teeth. He saw the red blood work vividly under her tawny skin. Her eye, which was great as a stag’s, struck and held his gaze.

Ah, young love. There it was. Embarrassing to read? Aye, but only as embarrassing and sweet  as it  was to  experience  young  love.  Anybody  who  had fallen  hard at  sixteen  or seventeen  would feel that moment of recognition. With his cramped hand, he scrawled more sentences and notes before he set down the pen.

He breathed deeply and laughed out loud. Just then a little knock came on his door. “Avast, mate!” Louis cried when he saw Austin. “State your business.” “It’s time for my lesson. Did you forget?”

“Only for a minute.”

The boy came into the room and looked around. “Who were you laughing with?” “Meself, laddie. I just had a fine visit with the Brownies.”

Austin nodded matter-of-factly. He knew about the Brownies.

“And I was thinking that when I’m old and gone, schoolboys like you will someday say, ‘There were three Rrrrobies: Robbie Burns, Robbie Fergusson, and Robbie Stevenson!’”
Austin grinned. “How do you do that?”

Louis opened the boy’s mouth and looked inside. “You’ve got all the parts you need. Roll your tongue around to loosen it up.”

The boy wagged his tongue all around.

“Now  put  your  tongue  up  ?at  against  your  palate  and blow  air  out,  so your  tongue vibrates.”

Austin produced a windy flutter.

“Now make the sound of R as you do it. Say ‘Rrrrobbie.’” “Rrrrrrrobbie!”

“Hooray!” Louis shouted.

Austin set down a deck of cards on Louis’s desk.

“Ach, my boy. We need to work on a recitation for Christmas dinner.” Austin’s face fell.

“We must show your mother and grandmother something after all these lessons,” Louis said. “They’ll think we haven’t been working.” They hadn’t been. The French lessons often dissolved into games.

“What shall I recite, Uncle Louis?”

“Oh, some welcoming remarks. Joyeux Noel, along those lines, but a whole paragraph. I’ll make up something.”

“When shall I recite it?”

“Before we set doon ta roastit bubbly-jock, laddie.” Austin blinked repeatedly, trying to translate.

“‘Turkey,’  you’d say  in  California.  Recite  your  little  speech  after  the  prayer  and just before the turkey is served.”

“All right,” Austin said disconsolately.

“Here now.” Louis handed him a few scrawled French sentences. “If you master it quickly enough, we will play a game of cards before we have to eat.”

At lunch, Fanny, sitting quietly at the table, was silently su?ering. When she caught him staring at her, she said,  “I know what you are thinking, that I am a coward for all my

worrying. But I’m not. For a woman, I am brave.”

Louis went around to his wife’s side of the table and put his hands on her shoulders. “There is no question of your mettle, my love. You are the bravest person I know.” He pecked her cheek. “After lunch, why don’t you and Lloyd have a tour of the cacao ?eld? I noticed a lot of new growth when I was out there yesterday.”

Standing on the verandah outside his study, Louis watched the tall son walking beside his wee mother out into the ?elds. The sweep of Vailima—its lawn, garden rows, ?elds, and forests rising  up  toward Mount Vaea—?lled his eyes with  its grandeur.  Suddenly,  tears ?lled them, for he was transported to the foothills of the Highlands near Callander. His mind’s eye saw little stone houses, tweedy old men wet from rain entering a low door into a pub. He saw lakes, and smoking chimneys and children in the street. He could swear he smelled peat burning.

Fanny was still miserable at ?ve when he went downstairs. He played a game of solitaire while she watched, so as to cheer her, and then persuaded her to begin the salad. He went to the cellar to fetch a bottle of wine. As he poked around the wine shelf, a line from a Yeats poem repeated itself for the hundredth time in his head: For always, night and day, I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore. He’d been drunk on that line for a week. Damn, it’s good. He wished he’d written it himself. Louis spotted an old burgundy he had been saving. This will cheer us.

It was a hot evening. He mixed up a whisky and soda, drank it down, then stood on the verandah next to Fanny, dripping oil slowly into the egg yolk she stirred in a small bowl. Talolo leaned on the porch railing nearby. In the distance, they saw Lloyd returning from a dip in the pool.

“A  touch  more  oil?”  Louis  asked  her,  raising  the  bottle.  In  that  moment,  his  knees wobbled.

“No, I think—”

“Ahhhh!” he cried out. Fire exploded behind his eyes.  “What a pain!” He grabbed his head with both hands. Fanny blurred before him. Dizzy, he gasped, “Do I look strange?”
Fanny lurched forward to catch him as he fell to the floor.

“Show me where the pain is,” she cried. “Show me.”

A gray fog fell around him. He heard wind … footsteps … there, a beam of light … Fanny watched Louis touch his head. The hand fell, and his eyes closed.

“Lloyd!” she screamed. “Lloyd!” She saw him running toward her. “Go down and get the doctor from the Wallaroo. As fast as you can! And get Dr. Funk, too!”
Lloyd galloped wildly out of the paddock on his horse as Talolo lifted Louis’s limp body and carried him inside to a chair in the great hall.

The tips of his ?ngers were cold. Now Maggie was in the room. Fanny rolled up Louis’ sleeves, and the two women frantically rubbed his arms with brandy, trying to make the blood ?ow. Fanny saw how labored his breathing was, and she breathed in time with him until she couldn’t take in air that slowly anymore. Lafaele came in, untied the laces of his boots, and pulled them o?. Belle brought hot water and rubbed his feet vigorously, while Lafaele laid a cool cloth on his forehead.

The room fell dark as they waited. Some of the natives lit torches outside so the doctors could ?nd their way to the house. Nearly all the Vailima men and women, having heard the word, came into the great room. Some fanned him; others crouched along the walls. Austin sat among them, watching and weeping. The ship surgeon, Dr. Anderson, arrived first. He lifted Louis’s eyelids, felt his pulse.

“A cerebral hemorrhage, I’m certain,” he told Fanny. He turned to Lloyd.  “Can we get some air in  here?” Lloyd threw open  the windows.  The smell of  gardenias ?ooded the room.

Funk, who had treated Louis in the past, arrived from Apia and ordered a bed be brought into the great room so Louis might lie ?at. He conferred with Anderson, and the two men worked on Louis for nearly two hours. Dr. Funk ?nally shook his head sadly and said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Stevenson. There is nothing anyone can do for him.”

When the doctors moved away, Lloyd put his arm under Louis and embraced him. Fanny watched Louis’s chest rise, shudder, and fall as the last ounce of life ebbed from
him. She placed her cheek over his chest. His body was warm, but no beat came from his great heart.

“No!” she cried. “No, Louis! Please, no.” She raised her head to look at his eyes. “I beg of you, my love. Don’t leave me!”

His lids were closed and still. Everything about him was still. He was gone.