Under the Wide and Starry Sky

by Nancy Horan

  “I think I could live and die here,” she said.

  “You smell like coconut.” His fingers stroked her neck, then sought her breasts. He groped around in the folds of fabric. “Does that thing you wear have a drawstring at the bottom as well as the top?” he asked.

  “Let’s go to your berth, love.”

  “You said you felt odd about—”

  “They’re not up yet.”

  Louis’s tiny cabin had a narrow bed with a blanket and a finely woven little pillow made from pandanus leaves that a Marquesan had presented to him. Immediately beside the bed was a projecting shelf that served as a desk. The porthole in his room was open, and a cool breeze blew across her face. She heard sheep bleating hungrily on the hillside near Anaho beach, heard the chink of crockery in the galley as she felt the pulse of his heart quicken against hers.

  It was Louis who broke the silence afterward. “I woke up this morning,” he said softly, “and I had to convince myself yet again that this whole spectacle”—he pointed toward the window—“this morning in eternity is not a dream. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? To be here, living an adventure bigger than anything I dreamed of as a boy is one thing, but to be here and be well, not just well but feeling positively spruce, is beyond all—”

  His voice cracked. A beam of sun shone through the window and lit tears rolling down his cheeks. She squeezed his hand to comfort him but, in the next moment, saw him smiling broadly. “Do you see what an infant I’ve become?” He laughed. “Yesterday I stood in the surf and let the waves simply knock me over. I picked up shells like those children I used to watch on the beach at Bournemouth. And do you know, a little sea creature crawled out of his house to have a look at me. No child could have been more wonderstruck than I at that tiny speck of life. I have spent most of my days on this planet trying to get well. And now, to have hope of good health? It is a whole new world for me, Fanny.

  “I want to write a book on the South Seas, “ he said as he pulled on his clothes. “There is so much here. The history of these people, their myths, the language subtleties. I will write chapters and take parts of what I write to send McClure as travel letters. Two birds with one stone. I can already see it’s going to be a devil of a big book.”

  “I haven’t seen you this well in such a long time.” She embraced him. “You’ve never had such rich characters to write up. I am so happy.”

  Louis’s strength had grown steadily from the moment the sea air hit his lungs. He pranced around the Casco as it heeled and heaved, surefooted as a mountain goat. He looked different. There was meat on his bones, though anyone seeing him for the first time would take him for a starveling. But to Fanny, who had lifted and turned his body through long, terrifying nights in Oakland and Hyeres and Bournemouth, he was a new man. To see the wind billowing his shirt as he clung to a shroud, to see such wild joy in his eyes, was something she had frankly despaired of ever witnessing again. The wonder of his good health struck her as it struck him: a miracle.

  It wasn’t only Louis who had been altered by the trip. Maggie Stevenson had shown herself to be a woman Fanny hadn’t known existed. “She’s returned to the girl she was before her marriage, I think,” Louis observed. “It makes me realize how heavily my father influenced her.” And Lloyd—how changed he was. He seemed charged with excitement. He was making photographs, writing stories, participating as an adult in the gatherings they’d had with natives.

  Fanny had been taking notes on an irregular basis, and she sat down now to try to capture what she was feeling.

  Louis says he feels alive in an entirely new way, and I must say I share the feeling. I am freer now, to be sure. There is no house to keep and I am able to explore as I choose, so long as Louis is well. I do feel healthier, as he does. My headaches are gone. Only the seasickness remains a constant. It will never let up, I am quite certain. But the wretchedness of a sick stomach is overshadowed when I witness the happiness of my two boys.

  Oh, the things we all have seen! In the two months we’ve been in the Marquesas, most of it was spent on the island of Nuka Hiva. When we departed, we gave a ride to Frère Michel to the island of Hiva Oa, where we are anchored now. Just yesterday Louis and he rode up the green hills on horseback, a feat that would have been unthinkable six months ago in England.

  How far away Bournemouth seems, how distant the people we knew there. Henley no longer shadows me now. He grows smaller and smaller as the world gets bigger and bigger. I feel as if Louis and I have survived a terrible test of some kind. Going away on the cruise has brought us back together.

  Yesterday, when I came down to my berth for a nap, I found a poem Louis wrote attached to the inside of my bed curtain.

  Fanny went to the back of the box where she kept her correspondence, pulled out the note, and pinned it to the page she had just written.

  Trusty, dusky, vivid, true

  With eyes of gold and bramble-dew

  Steel-true and blade-straight,

  The great artificer

  Made my mate.

  Honour, anger, valour, fire;

  A love that life could never tire,

  Death quench or evil stir,

  The mighty master

  Gave to her.

  Teacher, tender, comrade, wife,

  A fellow-farer true through life;

  Heart-whole and soul-free

  The august father

  Gave to me.

  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 flowed. 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 magnificent,” 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 flesh with fabric, of Catholic priests who descended into slovenly habits and unclean appearance in th
e absence of wives. They talked of the Tahitian princess who saved Louis’s life by feeding him fish 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 Pacific,” 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 difficult. “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.”

  Living on the beach, they marked time at Waikiki, waiting for word from Baxter that money was back in the depleted coffers. 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 flowers 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 scientific 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 scientific and historical impersonal thing comparing the different languages (of which he knows nothing, really) and the different 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 influence 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.

  CHAPTER 64

  My dear Fanny Sitwell,

  By now Louis has told Sidney that we will be delayed from returning to England. After four months in Honolulu, it is ever clearer that Louis’s health fares best at sea, and truth be told, the social whirl of Honolulu has worn heavily on us. Belle’s friend King Kalakaua has entertained us royally, but we have simpler needs than ever before, and we long for one more cruise, this time to the Gilbert Islands. Louis found a new trading ship, the Equator, which will take us on and allow us to explore different islands while it’s in port, conducting its trading activities. Copra is the main product the Equator crew wants, and it is plentiful in the South Seas. Copra, by the way, is the dried meat of the coconut that they boil in water to make coconut oil.

  The captain of the ship is a fresh-faced boy of twenty-three who wears a tam-o’-shanter and whose speech is heavily sauced with a Scots accent. Can you imagine Louis’s pure joy to have a countryman at the wheel? Mrs. Stevenson will return to Scotland for a while, but Lloyd will go with us, continuing on as photographer for the South Seas book. So will Belle’s husband, Joe, who will photograph also (and hopefully straighten out his life under our watch). Belle and her little boy will go on to Sydney to live for four months until we arrive there.

  How we miss you! But we will never have another chance to see this part of the world in this way. And so we go.

  With dearest affection, believe me,

  Fanny V. de G. Stevenson

  “You’re about to get your wish, Mr. Stevenson,” Captain Reid said. The slender young Scot, topped as usual by his tartan bonnet, took a final gulp from a tin cup before returning his attention to the ship’s wheel.

  “Which wish is that?”

  “For a braw adventure, sir. The Equator shall make for Apemama.”

  “Apemama? The home of …”

  “Tembinoka, aye.”

  Fanny saw Louis’s back straighten and his eyes shoot sparks. “The Napoleon of the Gilberts?”

  “The same,” Reid replied.

  Louis giggled jubilantly.

  “Have you met him?” Fanny asked.

  “Oh, yes. Several times. You will, too—he does all his own trading. He comes aboard and sometimes stays overnight. Eats our food, which is all for the good, because it means we have something that he wants. He has a huge appetite for new objects.” Reid laughed. “He has a huge appetite.”

  “And he has copra …”

  “Houses of it. That’s how he sells it. By the houseful.”

  “Are you afraid of him?”

  Reid’s brows went up. “Well, I don’t cross him. He has killed coldheartedly in his day. They say he murdered one of his wives who betrayed him. Put her rotting corpse out in front of his palace as a lesson to the others. He won’t let whites stay on his island but for one broken-down old fellow who is a recluse. Oh, he allowed a missionary to stay around long enough to teach him English, then booted him off. He won’t even let traveling natives from other islands stay. No, Tembinoka must be the only man in charge, you see. He has a few chaps as lieutenants, but mostly, he is surrounded by his women. Has a whole harem.” Reid turned to his first mate. “Smarten up the ship. We are headed into Apemama.”

  In a few minutes, sailors with mops and buckets were scrubbing decks and overhauling the trading room. In the distance, Fanny could see the slender strip of atoll and its interior lagoon. “So sma
ll a kingdom for so great an ogre,” she mused aloud.

  The Equator edged carefully through shoals until they dropped anchor. The sun was so glaringly bright upon the beach that the glittering white strip seemed to bore into Fanny’s retinas. Onshore she saw a village smattered with high-roofed huts but no people. Apart from the sound of the waves, the scene was eerily quiet.

  “Now we wait for our visitor,” Reid said.

  Soon enough, a handful of people appeared. A boat carrying the king and a large ladder approached the ship. “He once had a ship’s ladder collapse under him,” Reid explained. “Now he brings his own.”

  Fanny understood the need when she spied the king climbing onto the Equator’s deck. Tembinoka’s large head of black hair came up over the ship’s railing, and then his great brown forearms lifted up a massive body attired in a costume that stole her breath away. It was a cardinal-red velvet uniform so braided and beribboned, she wondered if somehow the king had seen a Gilbert and Sullivan production. If his costume revealed a giddy streak, his face did not. He had a hawkish nose, piercing black eyes, and a fiercely sober mouth. He’s all business, she thought.

  After Reid introduced the king to Louis and Fanny, Tembinoka began his appraisal of the trading room’s contents. Bored quickly by the bolts of fabric and appliances, he moved through the ship, poking his head into every cabin. When he got to Fanny’s room, he spied a dressing case that caught his fancy.

  “It is utterly worthless,” she whispered to Louis, “certainly useless for a man. I keep my hair combs and such in there.”

  “I am afraid we can’t sell it,” Louis piped up.

  The king looked at his face for the first time. “How much?” Tembinoka asked in his high voice, clearly having assumed that Louis was starting a round of haggling.

  “Gift from a friend,” Louis said, “so sorry.”

  The king looked at him wearily, like a man accustomed to a familiar gambit. “Kaupoi.” He smirked. Fanny suspected the word meant “rich man” or, more cynically, “Mr. Important.” Tembinoka took a bag of coins from a retainer and spread out twenty pounds in gold. Twenty pounds!