Under the Wide and Starry Sky (38 page)

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 posts 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 Romantic 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.

He could picture Colvin sitting in his reading chair in his apartment at the British

Museum, with the “Beach at Falesa” manuscript in his lap, harrumphing, “What the hell is
this
?” Louis smiled.
The worm turns, Sidney,
he said to Colvin in his mind.
Your trusty Romantic has gone Realist.

Fanny's days as a farmer started auspiciously enough but frequently turned discouraging. She'd arranged for Lafaele to take a wagon into town and pick up a shipment of plants. “Do not lose the plant labels,” she'd instructed him. So that he understood her clearly, she showed him what she meant by
label.
In the afternoon, when he returned, he was smiling proudly. He produced a bag he had kept close to him all the way home. Looking inside, she found that he had taken every doggone label off the plants and put them into one safe place. When she pointed out his mistakes, Lafafele's face looked as though it might crack with shame.

It was hardly the first of their disastrous miscommunications. What to do about her paltry pidgin English? What to do about Lafaele? He meant well, and he was so devoted to her that he called her Mama. Recently, while they worked together out in a field, he'd felt it somehow important to confess to her that during the previous evening he had encountered a girl on the road and had sex with her, after which he informed the girl that he would have to tell his “Mama” about it.

Fanny examined a patch of wilted yellow lettuces. These were her own personal failures, for she'd planted them in too sunny a spot. That problem was easily remedied, though the rats that ate the innards of her melons could not be dispensed with so handily. The farm animals bedeviled her most. Mornings, she set out with her wooden egg-collecting box, hoping to fill its soft horsehair indentations with fresh eggs. Often enough she found her chickens were on strike, or if not, the cock had pecked holes in the eggs. Every remedy she tried was useless. The cock knew perfectly well he had the upper hand and strutted by her with contempt. The unruly pigs, which were downright mean-spirited, defied her by breaking through their pen and lumbering into the forest. Complicating the whole picture was her awful sense of guilt that sooner or later, she would be the instrument of their murder.

That night, after a day of swine chasing, she slept on the floor next to Louis, having washed only her feet and hands. The muscles in her back made a crunching sound when she lay down on the hard wood. “Three hundred acres of our own.” She yawned. “What were we thinking?”

“What were
you
thinking?” he said. His eyes stayed on the page he was reading. “You were the one who wanted to be a farmer.”

Fanny was quiet, considering the idea.

Louis looked over his book at her. “You have the soul of a peasant, my dear. Accept it.”

She shot a puzzled look at him, unsure of his direction. “I love the soil, yes.”

“That's not what I mean. It is not so much that you love working with the earth but that you know it is your
own
earth that you are delving into. If you had the soul of an artist, the stupidity of possessions would have no power over you.”

Fanny fell mute. How could Louis not know—creative energy so possessed her mind and body that some days she thought she might go mad from it. That sometimes it took fourteen hours of grinding work before the forces inside her had been sated and she could lay herself down to rest.

She waited for Louis's hand to reach out to hers to say,
There now, I didn't mean that little cruelty.
But it did not come. While he dozed off, she stayed awake, nursing her trodden pride. When it was clear she would not sleep, she got up and went to a makeshift desk to write in her diary.

A couple of weeks later, the insult was still fresh. The joy she'd felt at the beginning of her farm-making seemed to have shriveled since Louis had hurled his dart. One day, when Lafaele succeeded in planting Fanny's precious supply of seed corn, she made a show of complimenting him heartily in front of Louis. Lafaele beamed like a man made new.

“Don't all of us love a little praise sometimes?” Fanny said when Lafaele walked away.

“Love it like pie,” Louis assented.

Fanny thought of all the stories she had written that had never made it into print. She had wanted only a scintilla of recognition.

“I always thought being a peasant was the happiest of lives,” she said to Louis the next night when they retired. “It is a simple, noble life.”

“You are what you always wanted to be, then. I personally think the peasant class is a most charming one.” He rolled over to face the wall. “Admire it immensely.”

“You are condescending to me,” she seethed. “Why don't you just say you appreciate art, and I appreciate mud!”

“I don't know why you're offended,” he muttered. “No one should be offended if it is said that he is not an artist. The only person who should be insulted by such an observation is an artist who supports his family with his work.”

“Louis, do you hear yourself? You are talking like a fool. You are saying a person is not an artist if he doesn't support his family with his work. You are saying
you
are the only member of this family who is a real artist.”

He put his arm up over his ear.

“Do you know what I think?” she said. “You're angry that the
New York Sun
doesn't want any more of the letters you've been sending them, and you're taking it out on me.”

Louis did not respond. She pulled his arm down so he could not pretend he didn't hear her. “I warned you readers would find them boring. And I was right!”

Louis sat up in a huff at her remark, took his pillow, and climbed over her and out of the bed.

Sleepless in the ensuing hours, Fanny knew Louis was camped on the floor of the new house. It was three or four o'clock before she drifted off. When she woke and looked outside, she caught sight of Louis's back as he rode off on his horse.

From her window, Fanny could see the big field where the day workers had been planting coffee seedlings for a few days. Her mind's eye skipped forward: She saw the house surrounded by acres upon acres of coffee, vanilla, and cacao trees. How vivid the picture was! She imagined herself in six or seven years—
I would not be so terribly old yet
—a woman planter and the living legend behind the vast and thriving plantation called Vailima. “There were moments when I lacked faith,” Louis would admit to a newspaper reporter someday, “but my wife always knew it would be a success.”

She closed her eyes, savored the image for a minute longer, then moved away from the window. Dressing quickly, she collected a hard-boiled egg from the kitchen hut that she peeled and ate as she walked out to inspect the distant field where the coffee plants grew. What she found made her heart drop. The starts, unwatered, were all dead. She should have come out sooner to oversee the men, but she'd been too busy, too trusting.

“Damned tears!” she cursed aloud, wiping her eyes as she contemplated the big field for which she'd had such high hopes. “Damned plants!” When the tears stopped, she recognized in herself a perverse sense of relief and satisfaction. This week, at least, she had failed rather grandly at being a peasant.