Below him, beyond a stand of trees that tossed darkly in the wind, sprawled the meandering, medieval by-ways of Old Town, its tall lands packed with the destitute and hungry: society’s oft-decried “residuum.” Above and beyond them loomed the Castle, perched unassailably on its mighty rock, bastion of the transcendent, tyrannical might of ages past. To the right of that lay the scrupulously regular patterns of New Town, founded on trade and commerce and all of the less baldly brutal engines of modern dominance, a stylish yet deadening precinct of respectability and good taste. Just past there would be Ferrier’s house, final venue for a life of which all too much had unfolded in the dark and weathered haunts that lay, just now, much closer to hand, side sinister.
Stevenson could surely chart his own days and moral condition alike by placing them on an imaginary line between Old Town and New. If, after the fancy of St. Paul, there were a great schism between the law of one’s members and the law of one’s mind, that schism lay materially embodied before Stevenson, disposed in physical space, crafted in stone and mortar, steel and cement. The one city was two, the New always in peril of tumbling, like the boulder in the myth, back into the Old—of being drawn to it, of hearing its call and reverting to it, through a damning act of will. Or would even such a backsliding be scripted in advance by a divine hand, for whom no chapter of the earthly narrative could be anything other than predetermined? Stevenson no longer really prayed; but there, with the harsh wind whipping his long hair and darting its chilly way into his tightly gathered clothing, he could have prayed for Walter Ferrier.
His thoughts coursed back to the little lad on the train—only yesterday, was it?—so very much in the inaugural miles of his own life’s journey. It had been so easy, so gratifying, to scrawl a few amusing lines for him as he sped into his un-limned future. Perhaps something for Ferrier, as well, had already sprung from Stevenson’s pen; so Walter had alleged. If so, however, what possible good had it done him? And what could he possibly do for his old friend now? The whole auctorial enterprise seemed at times so pointlessly indulgent. It might well have been wiser to follow docilely in the family footsteps—to design and build lighthouses and incontestably save a man’s life now again. Even the practice of law would surely have yielded more patently useful results.
He rose from the bench with a sigh and set off down the hill into the teeth of a formidable gale.
As Fiona cleared the pudding plates, Thomas Stevenson pushed back from the table and turned to his son. “Port?”
“If you please.” Stevenson wiped his moustache and laid his napkin off to the side.
“Maggie?” asked the older man as he rose to his feet.
“No, thank you, dearest.”
Stevenson senior walked over to the claw-foot sideboard, clearly battling stiffness in his hips.
“Too much on my feet today,” he declared, raising two crystal glasses to the gas lamp for inspection.
“I told him to take the barouche,” said Stevenson’s mother. “But when does your father ever listen to me?”
Stevenson smiled and brushed distractedly at a few breadcrumbs on the tablecloth as his father poured two full measures from the flared decanter. He hobbled back to the dining table and extended a glass.
“Thank you, Father.”
“You are most welcome.” The older man made his way to his own seat, patting his wife on the shoulder as he passed. “I do listen, you know, Maggie. At least once a day, I listen.” She gazed up at him adoringly. “I think, Lou, you’ll find it a pleasant vintage.”
“Thank heavens this is not a teetotal house,” exclaimed Stevenson. He took a good swallow of the ruby draught, relishing its syrupy warmth as it rolled back over his tongue.
“Moderation in all things,” responded the father. “How readily we seem to forget the wisdom of the ancients.”
“How true,” agreed the son. “How true.” He sipped again and set the little glass down, rotating it slowly by the base with his long fingers. “This is very nice indeed.”
“You know, Lou,” said his father, in a softer tone, “reflecting on it, I don’t know that I could have managed the conversation with Walter any better than you did.”
“It was so dispiriting, Father. I was so little up to the task.”
“The important thing is that you were there,” observed his mother, reaching out to press his hand.
“Of course I was there,” sighed Stevenson. “And I am grateful to you for your letter, Mother. I expect I had simply been putting it all out of my head.”
“You can thank Mrs. Ferrier for the notice. It was she, you know, who wrote to me. To us.” Maggie Stevenson looked quickly at her husband, then back at her son.
“I suppose,” allowed Stevenson, “but Walter, as I said, is hardly as close to the grave as she might have led us to expect. And I confess I wasn’t much moved by the reception she gave me.”
“What do you mean?”
“She was extremely chilly to me, Mother. Called me ‘Mr. Stevenson’ and ‘sir.’ Left me with Walter and Coggie with no ceremony whatsoever. One might almost say she stormed out of the room mere minutes after I arrived.”
“Of course she will be devastated by the sad turn of events,” observed his father.
“Of course. But I fear she holds me responsible. Somehow.”
“Holds you responsible, Smout?” asked Thomas Stevenson. “However so?”
“I was his friend…”
“And?”
“And I suppose I neither set a very good example,” confessed Stevenson, pointing towards his glass, “nor truly took him aside when it was plain that he was doing himself in.”
“We have been through all of that most thoroughly, you and I,” declared the elder Stevenson with some force. “The old business of influences and the like. I own I was far too hard on you in some of the things I said. In the end, however, Walter chose for himself the path that he has walked down. There is little use in pointing fingers—either at others or at ourselves.”
“Surely we can point a finger at the drink trade, can we not?” asked his wife. “To some degree, at least? I think Mr. Gladstone surely has a vision of a better way.”
“Maggie,” sputtered her husband in feigned amazement. “Honestly, should we look for you to start clamoring for every other Liberal cause as well?”
“I expect we should,” quipped Stevenson. “Mother’s like to join the battle for women’s suffrage! Our gray-haired resident Amazon.” A sudden and unwelcome image of his mother swam into his ken, naked to the waist with a bow drawn over a surgically removed breast. He blinked it into oblivion.
“Well, gentlemen,” exclaimed his mother, twitching in a show of indignation. “I believe this may be the moment for me to retire for the evening. It is perfectly clear that I enjoy no respect in my present company.”
“We shall move on, dearest,” said Thomas Stevenson, checking to make sure that was indeed a smile poised on his wife’s lips. “I still maintain, however, as I always have, that there is nothing either demonic or angelic about alcohol. It is a neutral commodity. It merely makes a good man more engaged and jovial. And, as it seems from the depredations of this Skeleton Army about which we hear more and more, an evil man more remote and cruel.”
Stevenson struggled to hold his tongue—to no avail. “And if drink is a neutral commodity, Father, and it is the nature of the man that determines its effect, what then determines the nature of the man?”
“The nature of man is to be mired in sinfulness…to one degree or another. We were speaking of that just this morning, if I’m not mistaken. When you so fondly recalled Cummy’s daily pronouncements on ‘total depravity.’” Thomas Stevenson smiled in a playful manner.
“But some of those depraved ones are ultimately saved,” his son responded flatly. “Through no particular virtue of their own.”
“There are indeed the recipients of Grace—God’s Chosen. And then there are the others.”
“The others,” r
epeated Stevenson coldly. “The doomed. How I should like to know if Walter is doomed. Has always been doomed.”
“Has Walter been evil?” asked Margaret Stevenson with evident concern. “What has he done, Louis, aside from squandering his life the way he has?”
“I don’t think I can definitively say, Mother. I have not been with him so much of late.”
“I expect,” said Stevenson senior, “we will not in truth know how your friend is to be judged until we all stand before the Great White Throne and all things hidden are revealed. He may have done evil things. Unseemly things.” He paused and looked solicitously at his wife.
“I should like to know a bit sooner than that,” said his son. “And to know if Walter’s fate was determined, in essence, before he ever took his first step. And, selfishly, if anything I have done or said could really have made any difference to him at all.”
“Louis!” exclaimed his mother.
“No, Mother. I should also like to know why we must always wrestle, endlessly it seems, with what is unruly in our nature. What so many deem illicit—Paul and the rest. Is it truly illicit, I wonder? Or is it merely implicit, that part of us? Perhaps even important?”
“Of course it is important,” exclaimed Thomas Stevenson, warming in the face of his wife’s mounting distress. “It is our essential means of enacting virtue on this earth. We demonstrate our virtue by eschewing vice.”
“Yes, of course. I know. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue,” recited Stevenson dismissively. “But how unconscionably cruel it is, Father, that the urgings of our nature, of our very being, should be voices we must endlessly struggle to silence! I sometimes think that Ferrier drank so much precisely because he drank so much.”
“Oh my!” exclaimed his mother. “I am thoroughly confused.” Stevenson reined in a snort of annoyance. Far too many postprandial discussions had, in past years, ended in outbursts of temper and tears; he was newly determined to amend that. “Walter merely had a young man’s inborn thirst for amusement, Mother,” he explained. “But when he committed a few more solecisms than he ought, the raised eyebrows of respectability ultimately drove him to destruction.” A quick look at his father revealed to Stevenson that his self-restraint had come a trifle too late.
“Enough!” cried the latter. “We’ll have no more of this! Especially in front of your mother. Is this what comes of reading your wretched Spencer? All of that godless balderdash about…I don’t know what?”
Stevenson blinked momentarily, then loosed a nervous laugh. “Apparently it is.” He looked at his mother, who fanned herself busily with one hand. “I am sorry, Mother.”
“I should think you are,” declared his father. “I can barely tolerate that you’ve become a writer, Louis; I won’t have you becoming a theologian as well. Least of all an heretical one.”
“Again, I apologize for that. It has been a difficult day.” Stevenson looked once more at his mother, whose air of confusion resolved itself into an understanding nod.
“And this from a lad whose first literary undertaking was nothing less than A History of Moses,” observed Thomas, beginning to regain his equanimity.
“Indeed,” said Stevenson, with a wry chuckle. “Such a start! I seem to have wandered from the path. In the future, I shall endeavor to do better.”
“Excellent,” said his father. “We shall count upon it. Will you join me, then, in another splash of port?”
Dear Pig, wrote Stevenson, settled into the library after his mother and father had labored up the stairs to their bedroom. Twin gaslights sighed on the wall, and the oil lamp on the table in front of him filled the room with a distinctly antique odor as it cast its warm glow on his paper. Now and again, behind the drawn draperies, gusts rattled the frames of the high windows.
How I miss you—and miss your dear head on the pillow beside me. Almost certainly you will have embraced me myself—in all of my spindly glory—well before your sweet and plump little fingers caress these pages. I return to London and Bournemouth on the morrow, while the post will hardly travel as fast as I. Well before you receive this, wheedling soul that you are, you will doubtless have extracted from me every detail that may follow, rendering this epistle nothing more than an empty…well, the metaphor eludes me. And it is not the first time today that the flighty presumption that I am a man of words has been exposed for the fantasy that it is. You needn’t fear, sweet Goose, that I shall abandon my struggle to become the famed scribbler you would have me be. But as for all verbal pretentions, I went to see Ferrier today and was as dumb, in the end, as the Sphinx.
What a wreck poor Walter has made of himself! And how easily I say that, as though he were the product of his own choosing and nothing more. But, dearest Fanny, when (as I sat there) I wasn’t clawing my way out from under the old conviction that we control where we are bound no more than we can stifle a sneeze, I was ransacking a thousand memories for times when Baxter or Bob or, most of all, I could have picked him up by the scruff of the neck and shaken him powerful good and shouted in his pickled face, “Walter, cease this sotted buffoonery and become a Man!” Then again, when I might have done so, you had yet to make a Man of ME!
More on this later, no doubt, but how little of use I had to say to the poor lad. To him or to his most wonderful sister, whom I believe you have met. His mother, however…remind me to recount her behavior, and what I take to be its cause.
Last night Charles and I did waste a few hours in bibulous foolery, but none that ran us afoul of the Law, much to Mother Maggie’s relief. He remains such an entertaining fellow—as indeed does Ferrier, despite the grave decline. The poor lad’s good humour and wit are a wonder, although there is a roughness to it now. Sweet Walter peeks out now and again from behind that awful yellow mask he is wearing, but the poor fellow may have seen too much ever to be the dear old boy he was. I had such an inescapable sense of a man turned against himself. When he spoke of the depths to which he had descended, he spoke of himself in the third person, as though he were decrying an other fellow altogether for “his indulgences,” or “his damnable selfishness.” I cannot begin to know the whole of it, although he did allude sadly to a “Life” he could write that might “shock the world.” While I am certain he will not pick up the pen, invalided as he is under the roof of his censorious mother, I must confess to a certain morbid curiosity about what he might offer up. The sins of others are so enticing, especially when one has the courage to admit to oneself that “there but for fortune…” How much more engaging and worthy would something from Walter be than this farcical Bohemian three-decker fable to which you have me bound. O Otto, Otto, feckless Otto! Another Meredith I shall never be.
Mother and Father are well and ask after you fondly—and after Sam. I believe I shall have a last cigarette and retreat to my little bed in the attic to dream of you. Tomorrow I shall race back to you, leaving these limp and lifeless words to trail in my wake like dry and rustling leaves—if dry leaves can be limp. You see? O, but my muse has fled!!!
I remain, as ever and for all time, your devoted and doting slave,
Uxorious Billy
5
The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn towards the monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity.
—DR. HENRY JEKYLL
HYÈRES, MAY 1883
Stevenson lay sprawled on a Persian carpet, his legs jutting out from beneath a green paisley robe. The long, pajama-shrouded calves were tense with excitement, but they were scarcely stouter than chair legs.
Since he and Fanny and Sam had come to Hyères, his health had unquestionably improved. There had been little coughing now for weeks, and no hemorrhages for much longer than that. Still, his weight hung at the lowest level of his adult life, seven stone eleven, and this had sent Fanny into
the latest of her intermittent panics. Despite their slender means—imprudently depleted during an extravagant pre-departure stay at the Grosvenor Hotel when they had entertained scores of Stevenson’s London literary friends—she had insisted that they hire a cook-cum-general domestic in order to enhance their cuisine. Henceforth, the unmarried daughter of the local baker had laid on a groaning table of fresh meats, fish, and fowl; many of them bathed in the rich sauces of the region and accompanied by exquisite golden baguettes and croissants from her father’s shop. From time to time, Stevenson joked that he needed a diving suit to reach the bottom of Valentine’s soup bowls. It remained, nonetheless, a moustachioed scarecrow that greeted him each morning in the shaving glass.
“Sound the charge!” cried Sam, squatting across the carpet from his stepfather. He held his fist to his mouth in a commendable imitation of a bugle rousing men to battle.
“Pickett’s battle-hardened companies surge out from the trees along Seminary Ridge,” intoned Stevenson as he watched Sam advance a dozen lead soldiers from a fold in the carpet that was Longstreet’s position outside the small provincial town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “Grey and lean as starving wolves, brazen to a man, they stride out into the hot July sun.”
Eyes wide with excitement, trumpeting on in ever-higher keys, Sam pushed his troops forward, towards General Meade’s Union position—the fold that lay six feet away, just under Stevenson’s chin.
“Secure behind their advantageous stone wall,” the writer droned on, “Meade’s men hold their fire as the gray masses venture out onto the killing ground.” He chuckled demonically as he adjusted several of his own troops behind a small woolen kink he had dubbed the “Bloody Angle.”
Sam grinned at the dark narrative and inched his men bravely on. “Pickett’s loyal hundreds cross the Emmitsburg Road,” he chanted in turn, advancing a half-dozen men over the silk belt that had been stripped from Stevenson’s robe and laid diagonally across the carpet. “They hook north towards the Bloody Angle. Trimble, too, advances from the west.”
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