Under the Wide and Starry Sky (23 page)

1882–1884

The following summer in Scotland weakened once again the health Davos had restored. As fall progressed and the question of winter quarters loomed, they decided to take their chances away from the Alps.

Fifteen miles as the crow flies; near a firwood, if possible.
Louis had happy memories of earlier visits to the South of France. “The Côte d'Azur,” he proposed. “Either Nice or Marseilles.” Louis set out ahead to find a place to live, while Sammy went back to school in Bournemouth. When Fanny arrived in Marseilles in October, they found each other in much better health and joyful to be reunited. The separation had shaken them awake.

They made love tenderly and wide-eyed. She let go of the buzzing that usually filled her brain, the questions.
Is he thinner? Was that a different sort of cough? Has he eaten his breakfast today?
She pretended they were normal people on a holiday. Their reunion invigorated both of them.

“What a morning,” Louis would say as they walked the rocky, dry hills above their rented chateau just outside Marseilles. “I want to take this day, fold it up, and put it in my pocket so I can have it again and again. What is really necessary in life? A blue bay to gaze on. Sun.”

“We're rich,” she said.

Fanny sent for their furniture from Davos, but it wasn't long before word came that typhoid fever was sweeping through Marseilles. In the wee hours she heard the thundering of wooden wheels on cobblestone. “What is going on at night that keeps people out in the city's streets?” she asked a neighbor who spoke English.

The elderly woman, whose chin bristled with white hairs, looked around as if she had a secret. “They're carrying bodies to the cemetery in the night so no one can see how many are dead.”

One morning when Fanny went out to get milk, she found the bloated body of a man at the bottom of their stairs. “Somebody has dumped a dead person in the street outside our house,” she told Louis excitedly. She suspected he didn't believe her. He thought sometimes she exaggerated so as to get her way. “How do you know he was actually dead?” he asked. “He might have simply fainted in the heat.”

“We're leaving,” she said firmly. The furniture had not yet arrived. It was easy for them to get out of town.

Hyères was only forty miles southeast of Marseilles, but she felt safer there. “Chalet La Solitude,” the funny little house she found, was too small to stay in permanently, but for now it was a lovely, waking dream. They rented it at the beginning of 1883, and the move felt like a fresh start.

The house was toy-sized but possessed all the essentials of a real one. A wealthy man from the area had visited the Paris Exposition and seen miniature models of Chinese pagodas, Turkish mosques, and Swiss chalets. It was the chalet that stole his heart. Though it was intended merely as a model for a larger version, he bought the house on the spot and had it shipped to Hyères, where it was reassembled on the steep, rocky side of a hill. When she cooked, Fanny found the kitchen so small that she risked burning herself on the range or impaling herself on pothooks. Louis's parents visited shortly after their arrival. They all squeezed into the tiny dining room, where their chairs were pushed up against the walls around the table. A servant, hired for the occasion, handed plates to them over their heads.

By comparison, the garden was spectacular, rich with olive, orange, palm, and eucalyptus trees, nightingales, and a view of the ocean in the distance. Below their terrace, terra-cotta tile roofs rippled picturesquely down the hillside.

The first day of their stay, Fanny woke at dawn to a blue sky marbled with pink clouds. She wandered through the grove of olive trees behind the house, touching her palm to the bark of each one. “Thirty-five!” she told Louis gleefully when he awoke. Everywhere she looked, she saw rosebushes and aloe. It was March. In a few weeks the carpet of fig marigolds would be beaming happily, like a nursery of little pink-faced babies. She wrote immediately to her sister in the States to send vegetable and flower seeds.

An old staircase led down to town. They stayed aloft, mostly, well above the old village. It was a filthy place below, unswept, with refuse blown about the streets by the hot mistral winds. Convinced that
Treasure Island
would be a greater success as a novel than the syndicated version in
Young Folks,
Louis spent his days rewriting the material to be published as a book. Only occasionally did he put on his short black cape to venture down for a visit with his friend LeRoux the wine merchant. He followed his usual routine, writing all morning until noon, while Fanny kept herself busy with the house. She painted several interior doors in a Japanese style with female figures. One of the painted women was yawning, and it set anyone who visited to yawning furiously.

Fanny loved marketing in the morning and always found the stalls full of prettily arranged vegetables despite the general disorder of the streets. In the afternoons when Louis stopped writing, they wandered with Bogue through the garden, inspecting Fanny's beans and lettuces. One night they sat out on the terrace and watched the clouds scudding overhead against the black sky.

“I'd swear the stars are moving.”

“Put your finger on that star,” Louis told her, guiding her finger up toward the sky. “Now keep it there. It's not movin', girlie.”

“I am content,” she said. “This is contentment.”

Why is it
, she wondered a few weeks into their stay at La Solitude,
that whenever I say out loud I'm happy, something goes wrong?

“Louis,” she told him one morning, “I think I'm pregnant.”

Louis was honing the end of a pencil with a pocketknife. He set them down, leaned against the kitchen table and crossed his arms. “How late are you?”

“Two weeks. You could set a clock by me most of the time.” Standing in the tiny kitchen, Fanny tried to count back to find the day when it might have happened.

“We could adapt,” Louis said, summoning an encouraging tone. “Of course we could. I suppose we'd have to.”

Dear Lord, don't let it be
. She remembered how much she had wanted to give Louis a baby of his own. When they married, she'd thought it was still possible, if only his health would stabilize. But the past two years of illness had put that dream to rest.

When another week had passed with no menstruation, he asked, “How do you feel about having a baby?”

“Afraid. We said in Davos that children were out of the question. But I know you wanted a child when we met, and now we never talk about it. How does a baby fit into this traveling circus? I'm forty-four—I could be ill, and then what? And how could we afford it? As it is, we are continually short of funds—”

He put a forefinger on her lips. “Hush. I agree.”

When she announced the next afternoon that she had begun to menstruate, his face broke into relief. But in the following few days, Louis seemed bereft, as if he had lost an actual child whose fingers and toes he had already counted.

Shortly after the turn of the year in 1884, Henley and Baxter came to Hyères to visit. Fanny's relations with his friends—other than Bob—had been politely strained since the scene at the Grosvenor Hotel in London. She thought it was best that way, and apparently, so did Louis's friends, for they'd made little effort to rekindle their old familiarity. She didn't trust Henley, in particular. She suspected him of a backstairs cunning he never showed to Louis, though she hadn't any proof.

Still, she found herself trying to win him over. She made a dinner of roast beef especially for him. When they squeezed around the little table at dinner, knocking elbows as they ate, she sought to find the common ground on which they might converse.
Treasure Island
's recent publication in book form was a safe topic.

“We've received so many letters from readers since it came out,” she said. “Not just children are reading it. Many adults, too.”

“I heard Prime Minister Gladstone has read it through a couple of times,” Baxter reported.

“Shouldn't he be running the country?” Louis said.

Henley cackled, knowing how deeply Louis despised the man. He maneuvered the bowl of potatoes toward his plate. “It's a pity about the book rights,” he said. “Only a hundred pounds.” The big man shook his head. “You could be sailing around in a yacht if you wrote plays. I heard recently that George Sims made ten thousand pounds on one melodrama alone.”

“What are you working on now?” Baxter asked.

“A poetry collection,” Louis replied. “I'm calling it
A Child's Garden of Verses
.”

Henley nearly choked. “‘A child's garden …?”

“Go write your damn masterpieces!” Louis shouted. Henley and Baxter laughed, but everyone in the room knew Louis was livid when he jabbed his finger emphatically at Henley as he spoke. “When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium. Anyone who entertains me with a great story is a doctor of the spirit. Frankly, it isn't Shakespeare we take to when we are in a hot corner, is it? It's Dumas or the best of Walter Scott. Don't children, especially children, deserve that kind of refuge? Even if it's poetry?”

Fanny savored the look of defeat on Henley's face. He was a poet, after all. “Good heavens, you're touchy. I was merely teasing!” he protested.

She was already thinking what she would say to Louis in bed that night. “He is so jealous of you.”

Henley had been floundering since his
London
magazine folded, while Louis's literary reputation kept growing. The previous week, Fanny had received a copy of
The Century
with a glowing review of Louis's newest stories. She could hardly sleep the night the review arrived in the mail. Everyone she knew back in California read
The Century.
She nearly burst with glee when she thought of the friends who had questioned her choice of a sickly, penniless writer as her new husband. All of them—Timothy Rearden, Dora Williams, Sam Osbourne, her whole blessed family—would finally see how prescient she had been about Louis's talent.

Fanny thought Henley might be right about playwriting. A melodrama would be the gold mine Henley claimed. And it was probable the two men would do better a second time together. Whatever came, Henley was going to be a fixture in their lives for the duration. So was Baxter. Louis trusted his old friend from law school, and in a moment of candor, even Fanny had admitted to Baxter, “I'm no better than Louis with money.” Still, it bothered her that the lawyer held the purse strings.

“Burly, you look positively Brobdingnagian!” Louis remarked when he witnessed Henley's mighty frame crammed into the chalet's tiny parlor. The men quickly understood that there was little fun to be had in so small a house. With Fanny's tepid blessing and a bottle of ergotin in hand, Louis was off with Baxter and Henley to Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Mentone.

It wasn't long before Fanny got word from Louis that he had fallen ill in Nice, on his way home. His friends thought it was merely a cold, left him at a hotel, and returned to London. Now he was hemorrhaging. She immediately caught a train to Nice, all the while cursing the hides of Henley and Baxter. Were they even bigger fools than she thought them to be? What would it take to make them realize how fragile Louis was?

When she reached his bedside, she found him sleeping; his cheeks were sunken purple shadows, his fingertips white as paper. The French physician attending him told her to go into the hallway.

“Mr. Stevenson has pneumonia, which has aggravated his poor lungs into hemorrhaging,” he said, after closing the door to Louis's room. “You should notify a male friend or member of the family that he may be needed, in case your husband dies.”

Fanny was stunned. She searched his face and found only dull resignation. “I need to contact his mother to get here right away,” she muttered.

“Where is she?”

“Edinburgh.”

The doctor shook his head. “She won't arrive in time.”

Fanny sat beside Louis's bed throughout the night, watching in frozen panic as he struggled to breathe. By morning, though, her husband was performing his Lazarus impersonation once again.

“Would you kindly get me a newspaper, Fan?” he asked when he opened his eyes. “I feel as if I don't know a thing about what's going on in the world.”

With the help of the hotel manager, Fanny arranged for a visit from a different doctor, who gave Louis a good once-over and announced, “You could live until you are seventy, sir, but you must curtail the traveling. You are a writer, yes?”

“Yes,” Louis replied. “A very seedy one, at the moment.”

“We are going to have to bind your right arm so that you are not tempted to use it. In this way, you will be able to lie very still. No talking, either. That is how it must be until your hemorrhaging stops.”

Fanny was unsure how she would succeed in transporting Louis sixty-five miles back to Hyères. In a panic, she contacted Louis's old canoeing friend Walter Simpson; when he declined, she suspected what he thought: that she was a Cassandra and this was a false alarm. She called upon Bob next, even though she had enlisted him far too many times in the past. He was married now, like Walter and the others, but Bob said yes, he would come. They managed to get Louis home slowly, with intervals of rest along the train route. Fanny was relieved and moved when Henley arranged for his trusted English doctor to come to Hyeres to treat Louis. Along with Baxter and Bob, he guaranteed to pay the doctor's fees.

As she nursed Louis in the weeks that followed, she acted as his amenuensis as well. He was forbidden to pace, let alone get out of bed, though that did not stop him from dramatizing the dialogue as he dictated pieces of a romance he was calling
Prince Otto.
He growled the prince's lines and spoke in a high pitch for the females. During the hours she wrote for him, Fanny fell under the spell of his storytelling. She found herself whiling away hours with him as he processed one plot approach after another. She loved collaborating with him, but it was not her only work; there were meals to cook, sheets to change, bedpans to empty.