“And see…?” The writer glanced over at Coggie, who peered at her brother attentively.
“‘Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest’?” Ferrier leaned towards his old friend, studying him under gathered brows. “‘Drink and the devil have done with the rest?’”
Stevenson might have found such close scrutiny unsettling in and of itself. Given the line their conversation seemed to be taking, it was all the more so.
It was Coggie who broke several seconds of awkward silence. “Walter! What are you on about?”
Ferrier leaned back and sniffed. “It’s not lost on me, Lou, that your tale is primarily a broadside against the follies of avarice. Wise men and fools alike seduced by the lure of immeasurable wealth.” He waved a hand as though to include the richly appointed room itself among the vain treasuries of the world.
Stevenson shifted restlessly in his chair.
“Jim vowing, in the end, never to go back to Treasure Island. Jim haunted all his days by the horror of what he has witnessed—that, and the awful echo of Silver’s parrot—and how apt the man’s name, no? Silver!—‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’” The sick man screeched in perfect imitation of a bird.
“I expect I should again be flattered. You’ve evidently studied my little entertainment with some care.”
“Aye. And drunk deep of it, laddie. And, as I say, caught a strong whiff of your notoriously imminent socialism.”
“Oh, Walter!” exclaimed Stevenson. “My dark secret is a secret no more. Promise me this will never get back to my father.” He winked nervously at Coggie, who grinned her reassurance.
“Nonetheless,” Ferrier continued more earnestly, “you seem to have written at least as strong an indictment of drink. Have you not?”
Well, hell and damnation! thought Stevenson, as the grimmest potential of his visit was somehow coming to fruition. The conversation had run hard up against exactly what made the present moment so very dreadful. “Walter,” he protested, looking assertively at his friend. “It’s a boys’ entertainment, the silly book. Not a polemic.”
Ferrier leaned forward once more. “Don’t you know what I’m saying?”
“You think my book is a Temperance tract?” Stevenson thought back to the wet and dreary week in Braemar when he and Sam, cottage-bound, had drawn the treasure map and hatched the plot, and his father had joined them in the giddy excitement of invention. Any of them would have sworn under oath that it had been undertaken as pure amusement.
“I do. In its way. Should I not?”
In an instant, it was as though the morning’s colloquy with his father had been a calculated prelude to all of this. Uncontestably explicit communication. Somehow, he now found himself precisely in his father’s position, naively assuming that writing ought to be “clear as a patent light,” that he had written a tale whose motive and effect were irrevocably linked to one another. Perhaps they seldom were.
“Well,” he responded, “I don’t know. I can’t honestly say I thought of all the drinking as anything more than a way to color character.” He looked at Coggie as though to muster her support. “Rum for pirates, wine for gentlemen, you know. Muskets for the pirates and a fowling gun for the Squire. I don’t think of myself as a writer of allegories.”
Ferrier sat up and turned to his sister. “Am I daft? You read it. Look at all the men dead from drink. The fifteen on the chest ain’t the half of ‘em.”
“I don’t know, Walter,” replied Coggie. “I’ve not had the privilege of attending university. It is not for the likes of me to judge complicated matters of textual understanding.”
“For God’s sake, Coggie,” sputtered Ferrier. “When did you turn into the New Woman? I might as well have Nora Helmer for my nursemaid.” Despite his animation, he managed to smile at her before he turned back to Stevenson. “Far be it from me to point it out to their creator, Lou—but, thick as I may be, I could hardly help noticing that the wisest of your characters demonize drink. Silver and the doctor both. The survivors. ‘The fittest.’ I don’t know if it’s a case of moral justice or of Darwinian science, but that’s surely one of the lessons that emerge from your little adventure. No?”
Stevenson waited for a moment before he spoke, guiltily wishing he were somewhere else entirely. Playing at tin soldiers with Sam. Resisting Mary’s proffered charms. Even arguing theology with his father. “Remember, Walter; Silver and Livesey are drinkers, too. Both of them. And I am hardly one to demonize drink. How long is it that I have been sober now? Six hours?”
“You’re right,” conceded Ferrier, guffawing at that. “I phrased it poorly. But neither of them drinks to excess, Lou.”
Excess, of course, was the thing. Read it that way and the tale might well constitute a sermon decrying the extravagance of the Walters of the world. Or, perhaps more kindly, as some kind of warning to the Walters of the world—late as it may have been delivered.
For a moment, none of them spoke. Finally, Stevenson found it in himself to concede to the inevitable, uncomfortable as it might be. “I suppose, Walter, you might justly see the narrative as warning against… the kinds of indulgence you cite. Also against the mindless pursuit of wealth.”
Coggie nodded.
“And you intended that first?” asked Ferrier pointedly.
“Perhaps I did. Indirectly. I fancy I was writing to please my father. At least in part I was. He was there, you see, with Sam and the rest when it was written. He always frowned on my carryings-on, you know. On our collective carryings-on.” He grinned at the irony of it all: to have defied one’s father by becoming a writer, only to write just what a father would want one to have written! The goose feather in the hurricane.
“Thank you, Louis. For indulging me.” Ferrier settled back on the chaise. “I am relieved to think that I’m not utterly mad. Now, let us put this to rest, this latter-day Inquisition.”
“I am so very relieved,” sighed Coggie. “I do like to think a university education makes for an improved life, not a more fractious one.”
“Behold the idealism of the uninitiated!” pronounced Ferrier. “Matriculate, my dear girl, and you will quickly see what a complete waste it all is, this baccalaureate nonsense. By the by, Lou, I won’t for a second say that your rummy book didn’t sometimes make me as thirsty as it made me fear the thirst.”
“Alas! I seem to have scribbled shoddy propaganda.”
“Rather like those sermons,” Ferrier chuckled, “where the sins we are meant to eschew are described in such alluring detail that they become far more appealing than their remedies?”
Stevenson grinned and was about to respond when there came a loud knock at the door.
“Yes?” called Coggie.
The maid who had shown Stevenson into the house reentered the room. “Mrs. Ferrier would like to see you in the drawing room, Miss Elizabeth.”
“Thank you, Annie,” said Coggie, rising to her feet. “Tell her, please, I shall be there presently.” She turned to Stevenson. “I don’t know how long I shall be gone. Perhaps I should bid you adieu.”
“À bientôt, rather,” said Stevenson, standing to take her hand. “It has been lovely to see you.”
“And you. You are so good to have visited.”
“I shall come as often as I can.”
“We shall count on it, Walter and I.” With a smile at her brother, she turned to slip quietly out the door.
“You should have married the lass,” declared Ferrier with a shake of the head. “I always said so. Nothing against…against…?”
“Fanny.”
“Of course. Fanny. Damn my shriveling brain! Now, fetch me a glass!”
“Pardon me? A glass?”
Ferrier pointed to a small decanter across the room.
“Walter!” Stevenson looked askance at his ailing friend. “I thought we had just determined—”
“For God’s sake, Louis! That was all amusing chatter. A renewal of our entertaining debates at the Speculative Society. But
I’m past saving, don’t you know? You can plainly see I am past any cure. No matter how many compelling morals I may draw from my literary diversions.” He looked imploringly at his friend, who stood immobilized. “Damn it, Stevenson! Even my sanctimonious mother knows I can’t live without a drop. That’s the only reason there’s any of it in the house! Besides, it’s not as though I can drown myself in the stuff. Look at the size of that bottle. It’s a bloody thimble, Lou. Please!”
Still Stevenson hesitated.
“For the love of God, man!”
The writer rose and slowly crossed the room, sensing his friend stewing with impatience behind him. He poured a glass half-full of spirits and started back.
“Fill it!” barked Ferrier. Then, more softly, “Fill it, if you would. And one for yourself.” His look was, in equal measure, imperious and imploring. “Don’t stand there like a statue, man. Surely you’ll drink with me. Who knows when you’ll have another chance?”
There was obviously no cure for Ferrier’s ailment. It could well be that a further dose of his curse was the man’s only palliative. Stevenson recalled his own Jim Hawkins finally breaking down and fetching Billy Bones his forbidden rum at the Admiral Benbow. Perhaps, in this, his creature was his better.
“Of course I will,” he sighed. “Even if this is not the last time. Which I hope and trust it will not be.”
“There!” exclaimed Ferrier as he savored a deep swallow. He composed himself almost instantaneously. “Here’s to friendship!”
“To friendship.”
Their glasses clinked. In the silence that followed, Stevenson felt the inevitable wave building in his chest until he knew it must break. “I fear, though,” he offered up in a voice almost too soft to be heard, “I have not always been much of a friend.”
“Nonsense. You have been as loyal as Damon to Pythias. Or is it Pythias to Damon? I’ll be damned if I can ever remember which of the buggers went off to prison for the other.” He guffawed yet again and held out his empty tumbler.
“Should you?”
“No. But there’s scarce an alternative, Lou. You can see it’s my only solace. Excepting the ministrations of my dear sister. And, of course, your coming back to see me.” He took the refilled glass from Stevenson’s hand and raised it anew. “To Pythias. And Orpheus. And Jesus Christ. Would-be rescuers all.”
“I fear I’ve come too late,” sighed the writer.
“You’ve come.”
“I was with you too seldom when you…while…”
“While what?” asked Ferrier, with a slight cough and slap at his chest. “When what? Do you think you could have made a difference for me, Lou?”
“I don’t know, Walter. I suppose I should like to have tried.”
“I believe you did try. Well before you even wrote your book—if that was truly a little admonitory salvo.” He smiled kindly. “When and as you could. I think you told me more than once that I was living with no regard…well, recklessly, I suppose. I honestly recall cursing you for some of the things you said to me, so you must have said some forceful things, and said them more than once.” Ferrier chuckled. “And the way you would sometimes look at me! My God! It has all been great fun, Walter,” he intoned, mimicking Stevenson’s soft tenor voice. “But we have serious lives to get on with.”
“So let us embrace the wisdom of our fathers?” Stevenson smiled at the poignant recollection. “As opposed to disregarding everything they ever said?”
“Exactly!”
“It wasn’t the kind of advice a wastrel could readily take to heart, was it? Any of us.”
“Not precisely.”
“Well, I should like to have done better. I should like, at least, to have spent more time with you.”
“You had other things to attend to. Things that were more important to you.”
“Walter!”
“No, Louis. I am perfectly serious. We all have our own lives to live. I have found my own way, and you have found yours. I wish you every happiness pursuing it.”
Stevenson remained silent. Here and now, there was painfully little to be said, unless it were to offer some insipid hope for Walter’s fate at Judgment—that, or the simple wish for a painless end.
“Besides,” Ferrier continued, “I would have been poor company far too much of the time. Even distasteful company, I suppose. Certain days and nights.” He looked at Stevenson piercingly. “I don’t wish to be immodest, Lou, but I could write a book, a life, to shock the respectable world. I abhor the man I have sometimes become.”
“Walter!”
“No. Abhorrence is not too strong a word. For his endless indulgences. For his damnable disregard for others. And mostly, you know… mostly…” He paused, nodding to himself.
“For what?”
“For the way his indulgences continued to beckon. Night and day. As inescapable as the skin on my bones.” Ferrier flinched visibly. “He called me back like a fucking siren every time I resolved to take back the helm and steer another course. To live to some end, for God’s sake, other than myself. This wretched self.”
It was a moment before Stevenson could speak. “We’ve all of us been selfish, Walter. At one time or another. It can never have been worse than some of the silly jinkings we used to get up to.”
Ferrier smiled but shook his head. “You wouldn’t have known me, Lou. Honestly. I quailed to know myself.”
Stevenson labored to whisper. “Is it too late?”
Ferrier held up both of his hands, as though to frame his face. “Ecce homo. Behold what I have done to myself.”
4
I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as of a beloved daydream, on the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path; doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that in the agonized womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then, were they dissociated?
—DR. HENRY JEKYLL
The weather had begun to clear by the time Stevenson left the Ferrier house. Despite a mounting wind, he resolved not to return directly to Heriot Row. As he often did when grappling with a challenge of a personal or literary sort, he took to his feet, ambling south in the dying sunlight. Beyond the Castle, Arthur’s Seat glowed stunningly against a retreating bank of cloud, and he struck out in that direction, nudged along by the freshening gale. To make his way home, he would be obliged to walk straight into the teeth of it. For now, though, it was easy to sail straight before the wind, heedless of futurity, collar turned up, hands thrust deeply into his overcoat pockets.
Thank goodness Coggie had been there. He had gone with no distinct sense of what it was he wanted to say to Walter, and with her in attendance, he could at least hope that his dreadful incapacities were less glaring. Still, his virtual bankruptcy of any significant or consoling words to offer the dying man surprised and bewildered him. And he affected to be a writer! It reminded him of those wretched days when, try as he might, as energized as he might be by tea and tobacco, he festered over a blank sheet of paper with a skull as void as a vacuum bottle. It occurred to him, by way of self-consolation, that little in his past had prepared him for the demands of the moment. The death of a beloved cat—even of a beloved grandparent—had hardly set him up for the challenges of the day. He had also been thrown off balance by Ferrier’s tart manner, not to mention his mother’s singularly abrupt departure. In Ferrier’s position, of course, he too might have been determined to show an old friend that his wit was still in the finest order. Nonetheless, the sweet playfulness of Walter’s wonted humor had been strongly tempered by something more acerbic. Per
haps his rather abrasive jocularity was a gift of sorts, perhaps even a double gift—both lightening the somberness of the moment and also, given its sharp edge, sparing one the awkwardness of feeling too much pity for the man.
By the time Stevenson passed the hotel where he had lunched what seemed like eons ago, the sun had dropped to within a few degrees of the Pentland Hills. He reached the long series of steps leading up to Calton Hill just as the lamplighters began their rounds in the streets below. Climbing steadily towards the prospect he had long considered Edinburgh’s best, he recalled countless nights when, as a child, he had perched in a dining room window at dusk, waiting for the man called Leerie who, regular as clockwork, hastened through their terrace, setting each lamp aglow. The mysterious functionary had seemed to young Louis like a nocturnal honeybee—or better, perhaps, like an angular moth—settling for a perfectly motionless instant at each gaslight before he flitted off to the next, leaving behind him a magical trail of brilliance. Stevenson often wondered if he himself could be seen from the street, silhouetted in the tall window, and if Leerie might ever notice him waiting there and wonder about him in anything like the same way he wondered about Leerie. Where did the man live? Did another little son wait patiently for him in another snug home? Did the man sleep all day long so that he could wake all night, linking each Edinburgh street and wynd in a twinkling net of tiny yellow stars?
As the western sky deepened through crimson into violet, Stevenson halted and took a seat on a bench overlooking the great city. The evening’s high wind had cleared most of the smoke that so often dulled the grand prospect, but the acrid scent of a thousand coal fires still found its way to him. On a clement day, even at this hour, scores of people would have been there to share this choice vista. Now he was the only soul in sight. It was almost certainly rash to be here on his own, a ripe mark for anyone wanting a quick and unearned coin. Just a week back, he had read, a drunken railway navvy had been beaten and robbed right there at the base of the Nelson Monument, left for dead—and would have died, had a constable not stumbled upon him. On a day such as this, though, caution be damned!
Seeking Hyde Page 7
