“Pardon?”
“Done. Buy it. Your mother and I will make up what you can’t manage. And we shall come visit. God willing, we shall eat Fanny’s tomatoes—prepared by this much-vaunted Valentine.” The old man raised his glass as a pledge. “Not that you will ever be able to grow good tomatoes on this godforsaken island.”
Stevenson found himself with his mouth agape. “You amaze me, Father,” he was able to declare after a moment. “Your generosity is… What can I say? It’s simply overwhelming.”
“Don’t be daft. You need a place to live. This sounds like a place to live.”
“Well, it assuredly is.” Stevenson gave a nervous giggle. “You’re certain you can afford it?”
“Of course we can’t afford it. Not since my damned brother ruined us. But, if it keeps you from running off to America, then we’d be fools not to make the investment, would we not? I’ll just call it an investment. Tell your solicitor to be in touch with me.”
Stevenson laughed. “You do remember that Baxter is my solicitor?”
“Well, tell him to be in touch with me nonetheless. I shall try my damnedest to be civil to the wretch.”
Stevenson rose again and walked across the room. He placed his hand on his father’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze, struck in the act at how strangely paternal it felt. “Again, I don’t know what to say.”
His father set his glass carefully on the desk and reached up, clapping his hand on top of his son’s. “Just be happy in it, Smout. That’s all I ask.”
For a moment, Stevenson could do no more than nod. Then “We will,” he just managed to say, as he walked back to his chair.
They sat for a full minute in silence, save for a slight rasp in the older man’s breathing. A chunk of coal popped in the grate, followed by the sigh of slumping ash.
“Shall I tend to the fire?”
“Mmmm? No. I shall be retiring soon.”
“As will I.” Stevenson had thought about going out for a walk to clear his head in the cool evening air. The urge, though, seemed to have left him, washed away by the third glass of port. What seemed urgent now was to see his father safely upstairs and then to collapse into his childhood bed, giving himself up to the darkness.
“So you called on Elizabeth?”
“I did.”
“And Mrs. Ferrier?”
“Wouldn’t see me.”
“Shame. What a shame.”
“Indeed. But at least she spared me the torture of the conversation.”
His father eyed him censoriously. “That remark is beneath you, Lou.” He tucked the lap robe more closely about his legs and noisily cleared his throat.
“I know it is, Father. This is not a situation I relish. In the least.”
“No. And how is Elizabeth?”
“Struggling to be strong, I would say. It is a bitter charge for her to bear, as well—her dear mother claiming that Walter died because those of us who loved him just stood by and let it happen. Or, in my case, encouraged it.”
Thomas Stevenson shook his head. “May the good Lord grant them understanding and mercy. Both of them.”
The waning fire crackled and sighed.
“I showed her a piece I had written,” said Stevenson.
“Oh?”
“A piece about mortality. A silly little thing inspired by Hamlet. But about Walter, really. I’d wanted to say something for a long time, you know.” He gazed over at his father, whose head was tilted back on his chair.
“And the gist of it?” The old man’s eyes were closed.
“I’ve brought it back with me. It’s quite short. Perhaps you’d like to read it.”
“I would. But not tonight.” He raised his head and smiled wearily at his son.
Stevenson returned the smile. “Tomorrow, then.”
“Tomorrow. Leave it in the dining room, if you would. I shall read it over my breakfast.”
“I shall run up and fetch it. After I have seen you to bed.”
“No need. I can still haul this old carcass up the stairs on my own.”
“Please. I insist.”
“Thank you,” said his father. “You have always been a most satisfactory son.”
It occurred to Stevenson that, at this particular moment, the words might be entirely devoid of irony.
The wind came up during the night, barreling off the Firth to rouse Stevenson from his slumber. Somewhere nearby, a shutter must have come unlatched, and it banged away in the gale with a maddening regularity, like a giant clock ticking at quarter speed. He willed the owner to wake, to register the racket, to rise and throw the sash open to secure the damn thing—but to no avail. He rolled from his side onto his back, lying there stiffly with his arms tight against his body. The tucked-in covers pulled uncomfortably on his toes, so he kicked them free, rearranging his feet to feel less constricted. He knew he could never sleep in this position, but he often found that if he could coax himself close enough to the edge of slumber while he was lying supine, then a simple turn onto his side could plunge him quickly into oblivion.
As the shutter clattered on, he ventured in his mind’s eye out into the windy streets, passing from one pool of lamplight to the next like a boy hopping, rock-to-rock, down a tumbling stream. He passed Ferrier’s house, peering up to see Coggie weeping in a window while, at the door, her mother belabored a cowed magistrate over arrests he was failing to make. He passed Dunbar’s, where Baxter sat laughing in front of the crackling fire, one hand cradling a huge tankard of ale while the other fiddled briskly inside the bodice of a fiery-haired lass. He found his way back to the valley that cleaved the city, New from Old, and to the Waverley Station where, that very day, in the hiss and steam of a brace of idling engines, the feral little man who peddled Parisian photographs had flashed his wares with a conspiratorial grin. Next best thing to being there, he whispered again, his breath scalding and rank. Looking’s almost touching. There now, shockingly, was an image of Coggie, resting her bare breasts on Walter’s coffin while she stared boldly and coldly into the prying camera lens. There, as well, was Fanny, also naked to the waist, fondling the stiffened member of a youth masked as Death. And there, too, was Valentine, waiting at the door of a room in which hideous old men were being ministered to by nubile girls of every race and stature. Take all three, hissed the man. Never know when you’ll have another chance.
The day dawned clear, with a few clouds gliding off to the southwest as the night’s gale eased. Stevenson shuffled in his robe and slippers down to the dining room to find his mother and father sharing a pot of tea.
“Goodness, Mother,” he said, sidling around to her chair. “What a surprise to find you up so bright and early. A pleasant one, to be sure. And good morning, Father.”
“Good morning, Louis,” said his mother, offering her cheek for a kiss. Thomas Stevenson gazed neutrally at his son’s attire, then bobbed his own greeting. His hand rested on the manuscript Stevenson had left on the table the night before.
“Have you read it, then?” asked the son.
“I have, indeed. ‘Old Mortality.’” His father smiled wistfully. “Let us all have a bite, and then perhaps we shall discuss it.”
Once the table had been had been cleared of all but the tea things, Thomas Stevenson turned to his son and patted the manuscript that lay next to him. “I say again, Louis, it’s a poignant day when a man sees his own son, his only son, tendering thoughts on the fragility of human life. Such wise and sober thoughts into the bargain.”
“I gather you approve, then?”
“I do approve. It is a truly moving tale of error and redemption. And so often aptly phrased, Lou. You do write masterfully, I must admit.” He turned a number of the pages, evidently looking for something in particular. “This, for example, which I read to your mother earlier.” He adjusted his spectacles and read. “From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family he had deserted;
with broken wing, never more to rise. But in his face there was a light of knowledge that was new to it.”
He looked pointedly at his wife, who nodded in appreciation. “The spent swimmer is so nicely drawn,” she averred. “I can just see him dripping. And so very cold and weary.”
His father turned another page and tapped a passage with his forefinger. “Or this: The tale of this great failure is, to those who remained true to him, the tale of a success. In his youth he took thought for no one but himself; when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, he seemed to think of none but others. These are noble perceptions, Lou. Nobly expressed. A life all but lost—but manfully brought back into balance. All by the Grace of God.”
Stevenson could not honestly recall having written divine agency into the tale’s resolution, but he thought better of saying as much. “Thank you, Father.”
“Now tell me this. Is it all true?”
The question took Stevenson aback. His mind coursed, in a reflex of unguarded frankness, back to that last afternoon with Ferrier and to the desperate craving for drink that had followed so hard on the heels of the demonstrations of self-knowledge and courageous good cheer. “I believe so,” he answered. “Though one never knows.”
“No,” his father agreed. “One doesn’t. But we shall hope so, for the sake of poor Ferrier’s soul. Elizabeth has seen this, then?”
“She has. She very much wants me to send it out into the world.”
“I should think she would,” said his mother. “From what your father says, you manage to show Walter in such a good light. In the end, at least.”
“Only the good light he put himself into,” responded Stevenson, smiling soothingly at his mother. But his father’s bald query continued to give him pause. Had Walter indeed placed himself in any positive light at all? Or was that only the self-indulgent illusion of sentimental portraiture? Was it even self-exonerating for the portraitist, to the extent that it was all made to come around right in the end, at least in regards to the man’s soul?
“How satisfying it must be to write as well as you do,” cooed his mother, setting her cup and saucer off to the side. “And think of all the young men whose lives you can help with an edifying tale such as this.”
“One can always hope,” answered Stevenson.
“Why should you doubt the efficacy of what you’ve written?” asked his father.
“Well, I suppose I suspect that, whatever good my little piece may do for Walter’s dear sister and friends, it’s tricked out in such a lauda-tory and abstract and allegorical way that the common man is unlikely to take the moral to heart. If he even extracts one.”
“Whatever do you mean?” asked his mother.
“Walter’s downfall was drink, as you and I and everyone who was close to him knew very well. But I hardly felt as though I could make that explicit, for fear the particulars would bring more shame than consolation to his family. So while the narrative speaks in one way to a reader in the know—to us, for example—its effect upon someone who has simply pulled the thing out of a pile of random papers is likely to be altogether different—and quite possibly boring into the bargain, stripped as it is of vivid particularities.”
“What else could you have done?” asked the older man.
“As Hardy has done, perhaps. In his latest.”
“And that is…?”
“The story of a man who, drunk almost senseless on some highly adulterated beverage, sells his wife and daughter to a sailor.”
Thomas Stevenson bellowed with laughter. “The outcome seems as implausible as its purported cause is commonplace.” He looked jovially at his wife, who now appeared vaguely mystified.
“True enough,” allowed Stevenson. “Yet the moral is crushingly clear: partake of doctored spirits and you’ll end up peddling your entire family for tuppence. What’s more, the selling has an alluring touch of prurience to it, no? It’s not far to search why a sailor might wish to possess himself of two females at once in some remote inland town.”
“I am not sure I like the line this conversation is taking,” remarked Margaret Stevenson, looking to her husband for support. Stevenson’s father eyed him with a raised brow.
“I don’t like to cram my opinions, willy-nilly, you know, down anyone’s throat,” Stevenson continued. “At least I don’t think I do. But I don’t mind thinking that the yarns I spin might somehow contribute to someone’s prosperity and happiness. And I should damn well like to make some money at it.” He slapped his hands on the tablecloth on either side of his plate.
“Now there’s a commendable goal,” laughed his father, “for all of this vanity and vexation of spirit.”
“Hardy will make a bundle, of that you can be sure.” Stevenson drummed his long fingers on the damask. “The days of Mr. Mudie’s prune-dry pieties are long behind us, and the writer who knows that is the writer who sells. Give me real heroes and villains. Real flesh and blood. Happily married and virtuous one day, whoring the next.”
“Louis!” exclaimed his mother. “I’m speechless!” She looked indignantly at her husband, whose air of jocularity hardened again into mute admonition.
“Of course I don’t mean that,” averred the writer. “Nor does Hardy, in the end, provide it. Tease us he may, but when it comes to matters of the flesh, it’s all implication and assumption and surmise with him. The spice without the honest truth.” He shook his head and sighed. “And yet it sells.”
“Still, you’ve done rather well of late, have you not?” asked his father, clearly interested in redirecting the conversation.
Stevenson grinned at him. “Have you seen anything that’s been written about Otto?”
“Your friend Henley was kind enough to send his piece from The Athenaeum,” replied the older man.
Stevenson chuckled. “Friendly it was to send, and friendly to write.”
“He said such lovely things,” offered his mother.
“He would,” replied Stevenson. “Being, as I said, a friend. And a collaborator.”
“What do the others say?” asked his father.
“Well, The Saturday Review was wonderfully flattering. Something about how painful it is to have no words of praise whatsoever to lavish on a book by Mr. Stevenson. Then Meredith wrote to say that my prince was ‘morally limp.’”
“Perhaps you intended him to be morally limp,” offered the elder Stevenson. “Perhaps it was a commendation.”
“Perhaps. He didn’t make himself abundantly clear. Yet there was little beside that observation in his letter. I can hardly take it as a staunch endorsement.”
“My, but it’s a brutal world out there,” sighed his mother, rolling her napkin and sliding it back into the ring. “Thank goodness mothers aren’t subject to such fierce public appraisals as authors are. Or wives.” She looked appealingly at both of her men.
“You would fare magnificently, dear,” declared her husband. “There would be hell to pay for any naysayer.”
“Our revenge would be swift and terrible,” added Stevenson. “And hideously just.”
Part Two
JEKYLL
9
It chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck; that man is not truly one, but truly two.
—DR. HENRY JEKYLL
BOURNEMOUTH, AUGUST 1885
“I thought we might have some tea a bit later on,” said Stevenson. “Anything for now, James? Sherry? Whisky?”
“Whisky, please. A small one. As long as you will join me.”
“If I must,” laughed Stevenson. “Love?”
“If I must.” Fanny adjusted a striking new Kashmiri shawl about her shoulders and gazed cheerful
ly at their visitor.
Fanny’s fellow expatriate took his place in the squat blue chair by the drawing-room door. Henry James’s first visit to Skerryvore, as the Bournemouth house had been renamed in honor of Uncle Alan Stevenson’s most celebrated light, had been an unexpected delight for Stevenson and Fanny. Both of them had invited the celebrated American author to call as often as he might. Now James was in town for an extended stay, keeping his sister daily company as she took treatment for a longstanding but ill-defined emotional affliction. The two writers had already exchanged respectful but contentious essays in the pages of Longman’s Magazine, but Stevenson now relished every chance to debate, viva voce, with one of the only men he had met who seemed inclined to think as seriously about the craft of fiction as the lighthouse-building Stevensons thought about the science of refracted light. Fanny had dubbed Thomas Hardy a “frightened little man” when she had met him months back, and her attitudes towards the rest of the Anglophone literary elite were even more dismissive. Nevertheless, despite James’s owlish physique and his equally owlish tendency to sit in one’s presence with uncannily observant stillness, she found him to be a man of considerable warmth and charm. It didn’t weaken her endorsement that James clearly adored her husband—or that the only James story she had read straight through touched on the stoic grace of a dying child in ways that mirrored, with wrenching perfection, the last days of her own little Hervey.
Stevenson went to a side table and, righting three tumblers on the lacquered tray, poured two inches into each and carried them back to his companions. He settled himself in a straight-backed chair opposite James and raised his glass.
“They speak o’ my drinkin’,” he intoned, “but ne’er think o’ my thirst.”
“Open confession is good for the soul,” countered their visitor. Fanny joined the toast, took a small sip, and lay back in her chair, draping one arm over the side. “So. How is Alice?”
“It is exceedingly difficult to say,” sighed James. “Her doctor seems sanguine; a sort of mesmeric procedure devised by Charcot, he claims, may be of some use. Some days she seems perfectly lucid and content. Others…”
Seeking Hyde Page 15
