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.
CHAPTER 72
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.
I would as soon think of renting a child to love as a piece of land. When I plant a seed or a root, I plant a bit of my heart with it and do not feel that I have finished when I have had my exercise and amusement. But I do feel not so far removed from God when the tender leaves put forth and I know that in a manner I am a creator. My heart melts over a bed of young peas, and a blossom on my rose tree is like a poem written by my son.
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.
CHAPTER 73
Louis has gone off to the Sydney to meet his mother and accompany her back to Samoa. It is an obligatory trip that he didn’t want to make, as he was concerned about leaving me here alone in hurricane season, but I’m glad he is gone. It will get him away from the local politics, which he has taken up with too much fervor. He may have abandoned writing travel letters for McClure’s syndicate, but now he writes furious letters to the editor of the Times of London about the interference of the imperial powers in the
lives of native Samoans. What care the readers of the Times? It is the preacher in Louis that makes him write those letters, and then, there is the matter of his sense of right. He is disgusted that the Germans have set up Malietoa Laupepa as the puppet king. Louis says he’s a good man who’s not fit to run things. We both believe the rival, Mata’afa, is the far stronger leader: He understands the importance of his people claiming and using their land so outsiders can’t. Germany, in particular, has much to lose if Mata’afa’s influence takes hold. Britain and the U.S. have inserted themselves into the picture, and now all three countries have consuls in Apia.
And so Louis writes his letters. He has fashioned himself a diplomat and is trying to bring about some compromise between the two chiefs. He has never forgiven himself for not intervening in the Irish boycott that left those women in Kerry defenseless. The other day he said to me, “I was silent about Ireland. I won’t make that mistake here.”
Among the workers, rumors fly that there will be a war. I cannot think of war; I must be ready for Louis’s mother. The workers seem as weary as I am, for I have driven all of us pretty hard. But we will have a sparkling room ready for her in the new house, come hell or high water.
I have hired a new cook, a native woman named Emma who cooks all right but seems frightened to be working here. She says the kitchen is full of devils. She says that a woman and a man were murdered some time ago on the site of our cottage, and their ghosts are the very spirits who follow her home and climb into bed with her at night. That makes three dens of devils on our property: in the barn, on the land near the garden, and now in the kitchen.
“Henry, I want you to make some sandwiches for supper. It will be just the two of us. Emma is off today, and Lafaele has arranged to court his lady.” The Archangel had already left, garlanded and smelling heavenly.
Fanny went out to the garden to finish planting a couple of precious rhubarb plants given her by a missionary. She listened for the rumbling sounds she’d heard earlier, but only the wind and birdcalls disturbed the air. Possibly what she’d heard before was a volcanic rumbling, far more serious. A chemical odor like burning sulfur hung about the farm, yet she saw no fires or smoke out in the bush. The air had the green tint that the Indiana sky carried when a tornado was approaching. In the eerie light, the plants took on a spectrum of glowing hues, from chartreuse to near black.
Leaden clouds moved in quickly from the sea, and before she finished her row, drops of rain sharp as sleet stung her skin. She hurried inside.
As blasts of wind rattled the little cottage, her head began to pound, just above the hairline. She told Henry to go ahead and eat without her and she went upstairs to bed. No position she tried would ease the pain, which was so severe, that her skull felt close to bursting. She took out the medicine box and rifled through it. The laudanum Louis had given her for rheumatism had not worked last time. She found the bottle of chlorodyne. Her eyes went down the list of ingredients. Morphine, Indian cannabis, nitroglycerin … She drank a capful. Not intolerable. She waited to see if the pounding quieted.
Why, oh why, was her head going wrong now? Only Henry downstairs to help. She’d not had one of these spells for a long while, and she became afraid when she contemplated what might happen.
Sleep it off, Fanny. She threw on her nightgown and fell into bed.
When she awoke in the middle of the night, her heart and neck were pounding like horse hooves. Above, a white streak lit the ceiling. She sat up, groped frantically for the matchbox on the side table. She heard the box fall and the wooden sticks splatter across the floor. She slid out of bed to her knees, took up a match, struck it against a floorboard, and lit the candle. Shadows licked the walls. Climbing under the covers, she leaned against the headboard and closed her eyes, lest she begin to see strange things. In her mind, the face of a woman appeared. Her eyes were wild, her mouth gaping in a long O. She was clasping two small children to her chest. Fanny shook her head and opened her eyes. In front of her, the woman was standing at the end of the bed, holding each baby by a foot, so that the small bodies hung from her fists like dead white birds. “Stop that!” Fanny screamed. She leaped out of bed with a pillow and threw it at the woman, then screamed again. A loud pounding at the wall sounded outside her curtained room.
“Louis?” she called out. “Is that you, Louis?”
Henry stepped through the curtain, alarmed, as Fanny’s limbs went weak. He caught her as she fell, and carried her back to bed.
The window curtains were open, and the sun was high when she awakened. A tray with tea and ship biscuits sat atop the table. In a while, Henry tapped on the frame opening to her room.
“Come in,” she told him. He stood at the foot of the bed, where the hideous apparition had been the night before. “Thank you for coming to help last night.”
Henry affected a philosophical shrug.
“It was just a bad dream,” she said.
“Yes, Tamaitai.”
“Do not tell Mr. Stevenson when he returns, “ she said. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, Tamaitai.”
CHAPTER 74
Louis worried the inside of his cheek with his teeth. He was not suited for bookkeeping, and it boded ill for the day’s writing when he started with the account books. He was a fool with figures, but even a fool could see they were bleeding money at Vailima. For the first time in his career, his income was truly respectable—four thousand pounds a year—but upkeep and outgo overshadowed it.
The property and new house had cost twelve thousand dollars, far more than the figure he had estimated with Moors when he started the project. He searched the list of itemized construction costs, trying to understand how a simple wood house in the tropics could cost so much, when his eye fell on the word fireplace. Well, he had no one to blame for that but himself. It had seemed essential to have a fireplace in any house he built, even if it was the only one in Samoa, as he’d been told repeatedly by astounded locals. He’d been punished already for his folly on that item. The damned thing didn’t even draw.
The arrival of the furniture from Skerryvore had caused an enormous sensation in Apia, all the paintings and boxes full of china and crystal had stunned the town. The sight of a piano supported on poles carried by an army of Samoans up the three miles to Vailima had awed even him.
Then there was the new wing his mother had required the moment she arrived in May. “Lloyd doesn’t have a proper place to sleep,” she argued. “I’ll pay for half the cost—five hundred pounds.” Ha! Five hundred pounds was nothing to the seventy hundred dollars Moors was estimating for the addition. Lloyd had chimed in, “I’ll use my earnings from the Wrecker on it.” How could Louis say no?
Naturally, a new wing would cost even more, since every nail and board used at Vailima had to be imported. They would be sleeping in style, all right. Dear God, what next? Another ice machine to replace the one Lloyd had bought that didn’t work? There had been teas and parties galore at which they’d fed half the town and the crew of any ship that happened to be in port. As for the Great Farming Experiment underway outside, he hadn’t a guess as to how much that totaled to date. Asking Fanny was to invite war. He had made that mistake earlier in the week, when she’d come into his study to tell him she needed more money.
“You forget I sold Skerryvore to help pay for this place,” she told him indignantly when he remarked upon the outflow of money. “I am working as hard as I can to get a plantation going. Lord knows, I would write stories and sell them to help with the expenses if I might. But you don’t want me to, do you? I am Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife, after all. It is regarded as a publisher’s favor to have any of my stories printed at this point. Isn’t that what people said when the ‘Nixie’ appeared?”
Though Louis had cringed at her bitter words and sneer as she stood on the other side of his desk, he had plunged on. “I gave you a budget for the planting.” He kept his voice reasonable and calm. “You now say you are out of money. All I ask is
an accounting—”
She bent over the desk and positioned a quivering forefinger inches from his nose. “I wonder what would become of you, Louis Stevenson, if you had to get by as a woman must.” She straightened her back and took him in with a withering look. “You would hate it, I can assure you—to have to beg and scheme to get any say over how the household money is spent, to have to regard the clothes you wear as gifts and be beholden for whatever else comes to you. I think you would be a resentful person, indeed. I suspect you would make quite a stink about it.”
She’d turned on her heel and made a defiant exit. It hurt his head to remember the scene. And it did him no good. What he knew for certain was that, exhausted as he was by the tension in the house and his recent output, he needed to work. More.
Outside, he could hear Fanny’s voice growing louder. “You say you got no work?” she screeched. “I give you work, you no do it. Where you go after lunch? You hide. Now you want pay? I no pay you for afternoon. No come back tomorrow.”
Louis shivered at the unabated shrillness. Her voice used to be so soft. He watched in shame as the men, even Lafaele, who adored her, steered clear of Fanny.
It seemed every day brought another argument. There were brief intervals of normalcy, but they never lasted long. She regularly kept the family waiting while she remained in the field long after the conch had been sounded for dinner. At every turn, she seemed to be looking for a fight. Once, at an English friend’s home, Louis impulsively toasted the queen, and Fanny took it as a direct insult to herself, as an American. “Was that necessary?” she asked on the way home. “You seem to be taking a page from Henley. Hasn’t he just come out with new verses? ‘Blow your Bugle for England’ or some such claptrap?”