To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  Empty landscape, I think, looking at the rocks and the trees, and between these shores the undulating pavement of water. How strange the cities have become. The tongues of whales, which the Indians eat raw, the tongues of spirits.

  —

  Where have I come from, where am I going? Robert Haack asked himself staring from his mountain aerie at dawn. He could see the farms on the Cedar Hill plain with their neatly sculpted fields. He could see the beach at Cadboro Bay, near the foot of the mountain, strewn with fishing boats. And the islands in the strait, set out like finger bones and fingernails all separated. Links and chains; pieces broken off. He went through his naming: James Island, San Juan Island, D’Arcy Island, Sidney Island. He had been to almost all of them at one time or another. They made gunpowder on James Island—he had tried to get a job there. There was abalone off Sidney Island—he had dived for it and sold some to a restaurant when he needed the money. And San Juan, of course, where the Americans had their settlement and which had been disputed territory until after midcentury when a German emperor had settled the problem to the satisfaction of his countrymen, and to no one else. Haack scratched his head. Borders never had made much sense to him. Which was one of the reasons he had never considered smuggling across them to be much of a crime. Although the penalties were stiff enough. As Smiling Jimmy had pointed out.

  He pondered a minute longer, thinking about the island he had never set foot on. D’Arcy Island. The island of lepers. Nobody went there, except the lepers, of course. They were supplied by the City of Victoria, which was responsible for imprisoning them. It was not a subject much talked of: it tended to be bad for morale. And the lepers were all Chinese, so far as he knew. Once sent to the island they ceased to exist for the rest of the world. Even passing ships avoided their shores, arcing away from the coastline where the lepers had their colony. People were superstitious about it, as well as frightened. The Indians said the island was cursed. It was too small and too unsheltered to be much good for anything. It might as well not have been there at all for all the use it was.

  He was a man on a hilltop, surveying the landscape he knew best, where ships crisscrossed and farmers worked and there was the pull of a city in the distance.

  Cities. And islands. All of which could be blotted from his sight by his uplifted hand. It was that simple. He could do anything, he thought, if he could only decide what the anything was. He was on the verge of mysteries, of visions, of answers.

  And so he slept that morning after breakfast with his dog by his side. And, as was bound to happen eventually, for the present had come to a halt and he had finished his building and made himself comfortable and there was nothing more he could do to stave off the past, which, with its knife, cuts through the shelter of our habits and lets in the night, which is the future…he dreamed and remembered.

  —

  Dust obscured the vision at first. Hot, dry, Carmel, California dust. The dust of his childhood. He blinked his eyes at it and wanted to sneeze. He suppressed a cough. For there was someone in the vision, just emerging from the cloud in which she moved, whom he didn’t care to disturb. It was his mother, but dressed as he had never known her, in a travelling suit and delicate shoes. Her pretty auburn hair, from which his had taken its glint of red, was gathered up beneath a hat. She wore a travelling cloak, and the dust she brushed from her shoulders had been made by a rapidly departing horse and cart.

  His mother sat on her luggage at the side of the road looking down at her idle hands. When the dust had settled, Haack noted that the hills above the valley were tinged with green. The murmur of a nearby stream competed with the chirrup of birds. It was spring. Eventually, perhaps when she had rested enough, Robert’s mother stood, then bent to the task of moving her luggage ahead of her down the track. Eastwards, into the interior of the valley. Away from what, he did not know, unless it was the job she’d had teaching school, and towards, amongst other matters, his own birth.

  More dust. This time approaching from the west. And now the goat fanner made his appearance. He was long-bodied and short-legged, this much was clear even as he sat his horse. What was not clear was why Robert’s mother climbed up on the horse behind him. Unless, as it suddenly occurred to Haack, she had determined to surrender to chance.

  Time passed, as it does in dreams and as it does for unhappy children. That is, it scarcely passed at all, although there were some consolations: tree frogs, golden as fire, to be watched; the tinkle of the goats’ bells as the flocks wandered the hills; the white puffs of angora wool caught on branches and lifting like feathers as the boy ran by.

  There was his mother, with whom he lived in a shack a quarter mile from the farmhouse; there was the goat farmer, who ignored him, except to make him work, or to teach him what it meant to be a man—that is suffering—and to drink. And to play a game of cards. All this by the time he was twelve.

  And so time passed as if for all his life he would be locked in this valley with no way out, until the day, at seventeen, when, pretending a courage he did not feel and abandoning the mother he had promised to rescue, he walked out of the valley and away from his childhood without looking back.

  Not at the hills or at the restless dry trees or at his mother, who stood at the door of the shack with a book in her hand, shading her eyes to follow him.

  Not at himself, until this very moment.

  Robert Haack, on top of his mountain, slept in daylight. Not a quiet sleep as one sleeps in a room, but a wakeful sleep as one sleeps at sea, aware of the wind, the creaking of ropes, of the strain in an engine or sail. Of others’ voices, and orders and duties neglected. Of possible hazards, of sea life and shoals, shipwrecks on islands. Submarines. Cannibals. Submarines.

  The little Spanish town of Monterey was spread neatly over the foot of a hillside topped by pines. The boy, Robert Haack, crossed the railway line, then gazed down at the sea and the white sailing ships and whalers that encrusted it. The blue water was roughened into grey by a wind cooled with fog. The boats tacked and tossed, drew near to each other then shied away like horses. What he had been told by his mother and what he had read had not prepared him for this. It was so much less magnificent yet more vital than he had thought. The sea. It was like opening his veins to the wind. He felt painfully, unbearably, all he’d already missed in his life, what he had to make up for: the passing of time.

  He ran down to the little town, scarcely watching where he was going, stumbling and tripping in his eagerness to begin. There were red roofs on top of whitewashed adobe dwellings. A few wooden buildings with painted signs: the Bohemia Saloon, at the intersection with Alvarado Street, outside of which a man with a shovel was aimlessly digging; restaurants and general stores and ships’ chandlers. And Indians holding up doorways, and Portuguese sailors and Chinese and Mexicans and Americans. What seemed to the boy like crowds of people; although there were, in the little town, but three hundred and fifty people in all.

  Suddenly he stopped. He had passed into a residential district. Here windows were shuttered and the houses were decorated with iron balconies and flowering vines. There were walls embroidered with flowers, and gates from behind which came the sound of women’s laughter.

  Directly ahead of him was a small, two-storied rose-covered adobe cottage. And although most of the sidewalks were made of wooden planking, just here, where he had halted, they were shining whalebone. A pony was tied to an upright Spanish cannon. Somebody was singing in the garden in a tuneful baritone. There was the sound of coughing. More laughing.

  How to describe what happened then? Dreaming about it, so many years afterwards, made Robert Haack shiver, although it was daylight on top of his mountain, and Charlie lay snugly next to him.

  At the entrance to the garden of the rose-covered cottage, there was an arch made of the curving jawbones of a whale. The door on the far side of the archway opened, and through it came a woman.

  She was small and pretty and tawny-skinned. She had thick, short, dark brow
n hair, which shone in the sun. A cross hung around her neck, and a fringed shawl was draped over her dress. She was laughing and calling out to the man who followed through the gate behind her. “Lully, Lully,” she called. “Hurry up or we’ll be late to dinner.”

  The man was cadaverously thin. He had long, lank, brown hair, and wore a threadbare velvet coat. His expression was mischievous. He did not answer her at once but began to whistle. The lady, puckering her lips, whistled also, waited for him, and took his arm. And so the two of them swept down the street, whistling and laughing, until they turned the corner and were lost to sight.

  Robert, as if suddenly jerked to life by a string they had tied to him as they passed, ran after them. He did not know why he did so, unless it was due to their happiness: there had been little enough of that in his life. Or perhaps it was the woman herself, her liveliness and prettiness. He could count the number of women he’d met on one hand, and none of them had looked like that. They were farm women, neglected like his mother or worn out from work in their houses and fields.

  Robert ran through a grove of cypress trees: he could hear the ocean at his back, urging him on. He saw a calf, caught in a fence, bawling for help, and although the plight of the beast tugged at his conscience, he did not stop. The whistling led him on, then dropped him off in time to see the woman’s disappearing back as she slipped through the door of a fishermen’s restaurant.

  What to do next? That question was solved for him as a rough hand grabbed the back of his neck and spun him around.

  “Why!” the man said in surprise, “you’re only a lad!” It was the tall thin man who, with the lady, Haack had been following. “What on earth do you want with us?”

  Robert blushed and looked down at his feet. He wore no shoes. The bundle of his few belongings hung from his fingers.

  “What is it?” the man questioned him, more kindly. “Are you hungry? Have you travelled far?”

  Weakly, Haack nodded his head. His blush would not subside. He was embarrassed, so early on in his independent life, to have been found in the wrong.

  “Come on, then,” the thin man said with a smile, “I’ll take you inside.” And he guided Robert Haack up the steps in front of him.

  It was a simple enough place in appearance. Six or eight tables covered with red-and-white checkered tablecloths. Men—there were no women other than the lady who had so recently entered—sat eating in their shirtsleeves. There was a large stove in a rear corner, and beyond that the entrance to the kitchen. Steam rose from a brimming kettle.

  “That’s Donna Martina’s famous fish soup,” said Haack’s new acquaintance, taking in the aroma. “You must have some with us.”

  There was something different in the way the man spoke. As if the words were formed then half rubbed out. This contributed to Robert Haack’s shyness.

  The boy blushed more deeply as he was seated next to the dark-haired lady.

  “This is Mrs. Osbourne,” said Robert’s host. “My name is Robert Stevenson.”

  “Call him Louis,” said Mrs. Osbourne, making room at the table.

  “You called him Lully,” blurted the boy. “I heard you.”

  “Why, so she did,” said Robert Louis Stevenson quickly, to cover Fanny Osbourne’s look of astonishment. “And you shall call me Lully, too, if you wish.”

  At which point the proprietor, a bearded, white-haired old man called Jules Simoneau, came to their table. The meal was discussed and ordered in terms Haack could not hope to follow, but soon the fish soup arrived, as promised. Robert stared at his cutlery, wondering which spoon to pick up as Stevenson poured out wine.

  “You haven’t told us your name, yet, you know,” said Stevenson. “Would you like us to guess?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” said the boy, who was beginning to feel more comfortable as he drank the wine and ate the bread provided. “It’s the same as yours.”

  “Not Lully!” Stevenson exclaimed. He turned to Fanny Osbourne with a smile. “Is there room for two of us in this town, do you think?

  “Please,” begged the boy, fearful of being misunderstood. “That’s not what I meant. My names are Robert Louis, like yours are. That’s all I meant.”

  “A coincidence!” cried Stevenson. “Jules, Donna!” he called out to the kitchen, “did you hear that? Now you’ve two poor vagabonds to feed, both called Robert Louis. I call that luck!”

  Fortune smiled upon the company. The couple warmed to the lonely boy, and Robert Haack poured out to them his dreams. It was the first time ever he had spoken so freely. Of the goat farm he had come from, of his schoolteacher mother, of his father’s cruelty. Of his wish to make his way in the world by his own honest labour (although he wasn’t sure how, just yet).

  Of the books he had read or hoped to read. For by now he had learned that Fanny and Louis were artists, Stevenson a poet and Fanny a woman of many unusual interests.

  “I’ll find a way to pay you back,” said Robert Haack to Robert Stevenson as they left the restaurant and walked through the streets in darkness. The couple had found a room for the boy by asking at the restaurant. They were showing him the way.

  There is no need, the couple demurred.

  “It’s a promise I made,” the young boy said. “I swore to my mother I would never owe money.”

  Weeks went by. Robert Louis Haack and Robert Louis Stevenson walked together on the beach, often accompanied by one of Fanny’s children. Stevenson tried out ideas for his writing for the Monterey Californian, or made up stories, always talking, always entertaining. Robert Haack listened.

  They followed the sandy edge of Monterey Bay, or visited the lighthouse, or walked up the slopes away from the sound of the sea and into the sheltered soughing of wind among trees. They stayed until sunset, watching the fog roll in over the ocean. And when the air grew chill and deadly, they went home.

  All this time the boy was looking for work. And he found it where he could, going out on boats with the fishermen, helping with nets and unloading. He took fish to Simoneau’s restaurant to be cooked for his dinner. He traded fish for his rent. He made friends with some of the other lads he met. And he started to try his luck at cards. For he had almost nothing to live on, and he couldn’t buy clothes with fish, he couldn’t buy boots. And he had promised to pay his debts.

  How could he know that Stevenson had a horror of gambling? That he had once left his hotel in Monte Carlo after a suicide in the casino? How could he know what else had happened in the young Scotsman’s life: that he’d been waiting for Fanny’s divorce (no small matter in the late 1870s), and that at last it had come; that he was short of money himself and in desperate health; or that Fanny’s daughter, Belle, had eloped with a painter and provoked a family crisis?

  How could he know that all these matters played their part in the poet’s gentle disengagement from his, Robert Haack’s, life? For the last he heard from the writer was in a note, left for him at Simoneau’s restaurant, and accompanied by the gift of a poem—the one Robert Haack had shown to India. The note said that perhaps they’d meet again sometime, elsewhere.

  For Stevenson and entourage had left for San Francisco.

  A big city. Hilly, windy, colder. Crowded with people making their way in the world. Far lonelier than Monterey for this boy who had followed his hero, hoping to start things over. He kept the poem close in his pocket, believing it would help, that at any second the long, striding figure would round the corner ahead of him calling out, “It’s Lully, Robert Louis. What are you doing? Let’s go for a walk.” And that at once they’d be engaged in talk.

  Of the sun and the moon and the stars and the planets. Of life and death. (“No,” interrupts Fan. “Not this poet. He never talked about death. He was too sick.”)

  Of his childhood, then, his beloved Edinburgh with its cliffy streets and precipices, and its darkly moral habits; of murderers and smugglers, and the Cow Gate and Grassmarket; of the view from Calton Hill and the folly of the castle; of foreign sailors arri
ving in port; of the windy Pentland Hills where the Covenanters met. Of politics and religious passions, and royal intrigue and armed rebellion. In short, of such a world as Robert Haack, son of a goat farmer from Carmel, California, could only dream.

  But no such thing happened. Instead he wandered the docks with other young drifters, hopeless, penniless, until he was given the job of driving a wagon by opium smugglers.

  And this was the story: thirty thousand dollars worth of bonded raw opium had been withdrawn from the bonded warehouses for shipment to Victoria on board a steamer, the California Navigation Company’s Brother Jonathan. The opium was escorted down to the ship and stowed on board. Now while the steamers used one side of the pier, on the other were the Sacramento River boats, owned by the same company. While all was bustle and activity, the docks crowded with people, Robert Haack, following instructions, drove a cartload of empty trunks to the docks and unloaded them. Soon a number of trunks were passed down from the Brother Jonathan, and Robert Haack, with his empty wagon in the line of wagons loading baggage from the Sacramento River boats, drew alongside of them. When his loaded wagon was stopped (for customs had watched the whole procedure), it was found to contain about thirty thousand dollars worth of opium. In tins, in the trunks.

  Bad luck, said the judge, who thought him quite innocent. But who put him in jail for six months.

  A downfall, a very long fall, when he had scarcely begun to climb and was not even twenty.

  The sadness of it woke Robert Haack on his mountaintop. Charlie licked the tears from his face. For a few more minutes Haack was a boy wondering how to repair the damage, how to recover himself. But as he blinked, he remembered he was a man, and these were not boys’ tears at all but a bad spring cold. He watched the birds patrol the waters below him.

  —

  An Indian camp on the shoreline near the abandoned whale fishery. A bonfire on the beach. We are safely at anchor, or at least safe so long as the winds stay calm. “The southeasterly and westerly winds blow through with great violence” says the British Columbia Pilot.