Under the Wide and Starry Sky

by Nancy Horan

  If her remark had landed as she hoped, Adams gave no sign of it, as he’d turned his attention to swatting mosquitoes. But Louis’s eyes had widened at her retort.

  “Good riddance,” Fanny muttered when the men left.

  “Is the hostess feeling a bit churlish?” Louis said.

  “What a ridiculous prig! Does Adams always refer to himself in the third person?”

  “Louis Stevenson was wondering the same thing,” Louis said.

  Standing there, she looked at her husband as Henry Adams must have seen him, an emaciated figure with legs so long and thin, he resembled a stork. Her eyes followed Louis’s legs to his mismatched socks, and then she began to laugh uncontrollably. He looked down at his feet, sank onto the porch step, and laughed, too.

  She realized their happiest times had been just like this, when the two of them were alone with the rest of the world at bay, as they’d been at Hyeres. They did best when they were making a new beginning, planning and creating together. She savored having Louis to herself, without friends or family. His jokes and thoughts were only for her. Pulled away from his writing by the physical work at hand, and miraculously healthy, Louis seemed reborn.

  They had been through wretched times, and Louis had relapsed often enough that she’d learned not to trust the moments of reprieve. But she couldn’t help thinking, This feels different. This time we are on solid ground.

  During those first months at Vailima, an impetuous joy overtook her. She would walk out to find Louis in a field valiantly weeding, fall on her knees beside him, and declare, “Fanny Stevenson loves you madly.”

  CHAPTER 70

  Henry informs us that the workers have given us native names. I am Tamaitai, for “Madam,” and sometimes, Aolele, “Flying Cloud.”

  Fanny looked up from her diary to find Henry standing over her. “Lafaele stepped on a nail, Tamaitai. The native doctor is out there.”

  “Oh, that’s no use.” Fanny sighed. “I’ll be right down.”

  When she found Lafaele, he was lying on the ground, his foot in the hands of an old man.

  “What is happening?” she asked Henry, who stood nearby.

  “The doctor say the devil got in him through the nail hole. Now the devil want to take over his body.”

  “Thank the doctor very much for coming. We will fetch him if things get worse.”

  She washed out the wound, treated the puncture with carbolic acid solution, wrapped the foot and fed Lafaele salicylate to dull the pain. His terrified expression remained.

  “Close your eyes,” she told him. She put two fingers on his eyelids. “You are going to be just fine. My devils are more powerful than his devils. Now go to your bed, and we will bring food to you.”

  At dinner with the family, Henry said, “Lafaele is feeling better. He says you are a great healer.”

  “I rather like that.”

  “Now if you could just persuade him to go into the bush to our banana plantation …” Louis said. “He claims he has seen a devil in the form of a strange man come out of the forest.”

  “Vailima is overrun with ghosts, if you believe the men,” Fanny said. “Lafaele says there is one in our spring. And another near the garden. I heard something like a rumbling the other day, and I must admit, it gave me pause.” She took a bite of the breadfruit on her plate and thought of how tired she was of it. “And then there is the spirit whose name translates to something like ‘Come to Me Thousands.’ Have you heard of her?”

  Louis shook his head.

  “The cook says there is an evil female aītu who preys on women when they are alone. Appears as a crone and asks for some favor, a bit of bread, say, and if she doesn’t get it, woe to the lady. Slips into her body while she is sleeping. Apparently, the poor woman possessed by her will leap up and run through the hills crazily and carouse all night.”

  “Sounds like a fellow’s dearest fantasy,” Louis muttered. He pushed his chair back from the table. “Say, Moors invited us to come down to their house for Christmas Eve dinner.”

  “Thank heavens!” Fanny said. “There won’t be a holiday dinner at Vailima this year, I can assure you. My plants aren’t near ready to be harvested.”

  On Christmas Eve, Louis saddled up Jack, and Fanny rode the piebald horse they’d bought from a traveling circus for his mother’s eventual use. In spite of the rainy season, it was a fine afternoon, and they rode down to Apia in high spirits. Fanny wore a split skirt that Dora had sent her from San Francisco, which freed her from riding sidesaddle.

  Moors and his wife had invited a local lawyer, three other Samoan women, plus a colorful missionary from Tonga. Mrs. Moors was a mature, graceful woman. She had spread the table with a banquet of Samoan and American foods, and Fanny did her best not to ravage a plate in two gulps. Seated next to Mr. Moors, she described the rumbling sounds coming from somewhere near the garden.

  “As I recall, there’s a cave in that area,” Moors said. “It’s possible that runaways from the German plantations are hiding there. I suspect there are plenty of labor boys living in the bush near Vailima.”

  “We aren’t far from a plantation. During the day, I can hear them call in the workers with a conch shell.” Fanny sipped her wine. “It is strange to think of runaways hiding out there. I don’t know how they survive during the rainy season. Lafaele says they live on yams they dig up. Imagine how hungry they must be.”

  “I understand you are quite a medicine woman,” Moors said, changing the subject.

  “Word travels quickly.”

  “Oh, you have no idea. In Apia, rumors are the main form of discourse. If it has to do with spirits, all the better.” He chuckled. “There is a native word for spirit. It is aītu—”

  “I know the word,” she said.

  “Then you know there is always some rumor of aītus going around.”

  “What is the latest news in town about the supernatural world?”

  “Some fishermen saw a war canoe with four spirit men in it coming into shore. It is said, that one of the fishermen who saw them is on his mat, dying.” Moors shook his head. “The natives take all this as a sign of war coming. They are hurrying around looking for ammunition.”

  “Doesn’t that worry you?”

  “The part about the ammunition? Not in the least. It is nothing new.”

  “I must say, Mr. Moors,” Fanny remarked, “that when you showed us the property and told us about the waterfalls, and the streams, and the secret banana plantation, you forgot to mention it’s common knowledge that Vailima is overrun with aītus.”

  “An oversight,” he said. “But it’s actually a good deal. The locals won’t be tempted to steal from you if your land is regarded as haunted. So the ghosts, you might say, are a gift.” Moors lifted his glass. “Happy Christmas to you, Mrs. Stevenson!”

  At around eleven, Fanny and Louis took their leave. Rain began to fall as the lights of Apia disappeared behind them. In the darkness of the forest, the horses grew skittish on the path, cocking their ears at the burbling sound the wind and rain made in the trees. Flying foxes whipped past overhead. Weird whitish bars of light appeared here and there on the forest ground.

  “What is it?” Fanny asked when Louis stopped to gape.

  “Phosphorescent light from the dead wood,” he said. “Looks like grating over hell. No wonder the natives think the nighttime is full of bogeys. Scary, ain’t it?”

  A great gust of wind came up the hill, knocking Fanny’s hat off into the darkness and lifting high the manes of the horses.

  Louis’s Jack quailed. He took off uphill, and Fanny’s horse hurried behind him.

  CHAPTER 71

  1891

  Louis shortened the reins, bent forward and pushed his weight into his boot heels to lift off the saddle. Up ahead a pig fence, one of many constructed—incredibly—right across the road by native farmers to corral their livestock; Louis dared the horse to clear it. Jack never broke his canter, sailing over the crude barrier of cocoa pos
ts as if he were steeplechasing. “A fine beast you are!” Louis shouted to the horse, whose neck lathered whiter with each jump. Louis had counted eight pig fences on his way to Mata’afa’s camp; now they repeated the jumps as they returned to Vailima.

  Louis felt exhilarated, coming away from his first meeting with the rebel chief. Mata’afa was all Moors had said he would be. The chief when he had the bearing and vision of a great statesman spoke about the need for his people to take control of Samoa’s destiny. Louis had looked at the chief and thought, Here is the man who will bring this country out of chaos.

  He knew the thrill pulsing through his body was not only from the fence leaping; it came from being an actor in something real. Louis tried to remember the last time he had engaged in the public life of any place he had lived. He’d been a sickly hermit in Bournemouth and Hyeres and Davos. But he was well now and eager for the game. Louis had never felt so much a citizen. And if ever there were a moral obligation to behave like a citizen—for God’s sake, to head off war—now was the moment.

  When he returned home, Louis wrapped himself in a lava-lava and walked down to the bathing pool. It was his favorite ritual of the day, one he sometimes shared with the Samoans who worked at Vailima. Today he was alone. The spot was a vision of paradise, surrounded as it was by wild orange trees, its banks dripping with ferns and fragrant yellow jessamine. He picked two oranges, cut them, then squeezed them over his head, as the natives did, to clean their hair. All around, bright birds he had no names for hopped among the branches of shrubs he intended to identify when he got a moment. He’d never been good at remembering tree and plant names; he was doubly challenged in this place. He laughed to himself for the hundredth time at the exotic turn his life had taken.

  Ahead, the day held other pleasures. Lloyd was just back from England. Having arranged the sale of Bournemouth and the shipment of Skerryvore’s furniture to Vailima, the lad had escorted Maggie Stevenson to Sydney, where she waited for the right moment to come to Samoa. Soon Louis would fetch her and bring her to Vailima.

  He was glad Lloyd was back. It meant they would work together on The Wrecker, their comical tale about a motley group of unscrupulous adventurers bent on striking it rich. During the months the boy was in Britain, they had attempted to collaborate long-distance, which had been mightily frustrating. Today they would put in two or three hours. Louis would write another column for McClure’s syndicate, describing his visit to Mata’afa. He would fit in some weeding, so that when the conch shell was blown for dinner, he could tell himself he had earned his keep at Vailima. Afterward, they would all sit outside and share news from their letters; Lloyd was going into Apia today to collect the mail.

  It was a miracle they got any letters at all. Four times a month, a mail steamer running between San Francisco and Sydney passed near the island and a local boat went out to meet it. When the weather cooperated, a seaman on the ship tossed mailbags into the smaller vessel. When conditions were bad, the bags were not tossed, or worse, they disappeared into the waves.

  At the house, he found that Lloyd had already passed out everyone’s mail. Louis savored the sight and feel of the thick pile on his desk. He sorted the letters: Edmund Gosse and Sidney Colvin went to the top. Baxter’s he would read later; it would be full of financial figures and worries.

  Gosse’s missive was loaded with gossip and flattery about the letters Louis had been writing recently to the editors of the Times of London regarding the political situation in Samoa. Since Byron was in Greece, nothing has appealed to the literary man as so picturesque as that you should be living in the South Seas. Louis chuckled to himself.

  Colvin’s letter was about business. Louis scanned it for news and stopped abruptly at one paragraph. The New York Sun has run thirty-four of your letters but has backed out of publishing the remainder of them. They say the letters haven’t enough incident and experiences, but appear to be merely the advance sheets of a book. And a dull book at that.

  Louis felt the wind go out of his chest. How brutal Colvin could be in his truth telling, and how kind Gosse was in his lying. Why hadn’t he seen this coming? He’d not gotten much comment from his friends in London about the columns, or his letters to the Times, for that matter. Louis immediately started a letter to Colvin, reminding him that the articles for McClure were only meant as preliminaries to a much more important work. He put down the pen in frustration. Lloyd has just seen all these people in London. He will know what’s going on.

  Louis threw the letter from Colvin on the dining table, where Lloyd sat alone reading a book. Louis pointed to the offending paragraph. “What are you not telling me?” he asked.

  Lloyd squirmed. “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean,”

  Lloyd looked miserable. In the evenings since his return, the boy had filled the family with the news from Louis’s old crowd; at his stepfather’s request, Lloyd had gone to see all of them: Colvin, Baxter, Gosse. Louis had not named Henley, but Lloyd adored him and had visited on his own. The stories of the old friends had been riotously fun, though Louis suspected his stepson had edited the reports heavily. No doubt Lloyd had heard an earful and, out of loyalty, was withholding the negative.

  At the moment, the young man’s face reflected his distress; confusion gave way to a look of pure sadness. Louis had seen the look before. He’d watched the same changes in Lloyd’s emotional weather when he was eight years old. It was one of the few reminders of the lad he had been. Lloyd was fully adult now, at twenty-three. Louis had watched him change from small boy to shy stripling to outspoken six-foot-tall college student to young man with continental tastes that offended some people—Moors came to mind. Lloyd was finding his style, trying on various personae. He had returned from London wearing a pince-nez and knotted cravat and saying “quite right” quite often. If, in this most recent stage, the boy mimicked too closely the dandies he’d seen in Regent Street, Louis could forgive him because he knew who Lloyd was in his heart: a witty fellow with a soft spot for the downtrodden. If Lloyd was haughty, he was also kindly to every underdog he ever met. If he was sometimes cold and undemonstrative, he was calm water in a family given to dramatic swells of sentiment.

  “You are my sounding board, Lloyd, and I am yours. Tell me the truth.”

  “No one cares about Polynesians over there,” Lloyd said. “They don’t care for the newspaper columns or the idea of a book about the South Seas. They want stories like your early ones.” He put up his palms in resignation. “They want stories about white men.”

  Louis snickered. “Then they shall get their white men. A whole gallery of the species that thrive here.”

  Lloyd rose smiling. “I’ll see you at two o’clock,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” Louis called after him. “Disappointing my old friends doesn’t sting half as bad as it used to.”

  It stung some, though. Financially, it was a loss, as he would be paid perhaps a third of what he had counted on from McClure. Equally bad was the embarrassment he felt that he had failed. He wasn’t accustomed to failure, at least in the literary realm. Am I Byron in Greece or a literary has-been living out in the bush? Louis fretted briefly, then let it go. He used to worry about his standing in London’s literary circles. It occurred to him that he cared much less these days. The circles that mattered were his family, his growing clan, and these Samoans, who were becoming his people.

  It wasn’t only the South Seas material that Colvin objected to. Louis knew his friend regarded his collaboration with Lloyd as a colossal waste of time. Well, a man did for his family what he could. If I can’t help my own, who can I help?

  Louis’s mind flashed back to the countless tavern conversations he’d had with Henley during their periods of collaboration. They’d talked endlessly about how this or that man fit into the pantheon of important English writers and thinkers, all the while stoking each other’s vanity. Henley had assured him that at his best, Louis was singlehandedly reviving the Rom
antic tradition. Louis propped up Henley by saying that his poetry would be remembered in a hundred years. That was colossally wasted time. Now all Louis craved was freedom from expectations. He wanted to try so many things.

  After two years of sailing the South Seas and a year in Samoa, he found it impossible not to move beyond the old world to engage in these people’s lives. Self-forgetfulness came more easily in this place. Bathing in the pool this morning, he had experienced a kind of heaven: He was the water, the birds, the sweet-smelling air. He wanted to have that feeling more often.

  At the moment, though he felt agitated and defiant. He might be done with his reporting and commentary for McClure, but he fully intended to finish his essay A Footnote to History, protesting the absurd incompetence of the colonial powers in Samoa. He would name names, by God. And he would continue writing fictional stories about life in this part of the world.

  His most recent story, “The Beach at Falesa,” would be as dark a moral tale as he’d ever told. The main character was a bigoted trader who “marries for one night” a native woman and surprises himself when he falls in love and stays with her. When they have children, he discovers his beloved offspring are consigned to a disturbing racial purgatory because of their mixed blood. The story was entirely unromantic. It would seduce English readers not because it had white men in it but because it was powerful, full of living, breathing characters. As far as he knew, it was the first truly realistic South Seas fiction anybody had done; every other writer had gotten waylaid by the romance of the place. He picked up his pen and continued his letter to Colvin.

  Now I have got the smell and look of the thing a good deal. You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale than if you had read a library.