“How very quaint,” observed James. “The lethal umbrella is a fine touch.”
“Rather jaunty, I think. Or would it be abandoned?”
James chuckled once more.
Stevenson smoothed the paper and read on. “‘Well, that acidulated fool, Hidanseek—’”
“Perfect!”
“‘Hidanseek got into serious trouble, and I wanted to cut him. But I couldn’t; when I had divided myself into him one day, I found it impossible to get the right sort of sugar to bring me back again. For the right sort of sugar was adulterated, and adulterated sugar cannot be obtained in London!’”
“Thanks be to the reformers. And your resolution? Their resolution?” Stevenson laughed. “This: ‘And now, after piecing all this together, if you can’t see the whole thing at a glance, I am very sorry for you, and can help you no further. The fact is, I have got to the end of my “141 pages for a shilling.” I might have made myself into four or five people instead of two—who are quite enough for the money.’”
“How convenient,” laughed James. “I have sometimes wished I could avail myself of such an expedient fin d’oeuvre. So tell me, Louis. How was it, bearing the public ridicule? If you can remember that far back.”
Laying down the pages, Stevenson reached carelessly for another cigarette. “Quite to the contrary, I am inclined to think Burnand and his crew served me well. I cannot imagine they suppressed in the least the sales of my little shocker. They likely enhanced them.”
James tipped his head to acknowledge the plausibility.
“Fanny, as you might expect, was furious.” Stevenson struck a light and, bringing it to the tip of the cigarette, drew an appreciative breath. “If she had had access to a bomb, I believe she would at present be taking the cure in Newgate Prison instead of Bath.
“Your violent friend.”
“Verily.”
“You say Bath, Louis. Is Fanny not well?” James leaned forward with concern, waving an arabesque of smoke away from his face.
“Tolerably.” Stevenson switched the cigarette to his other hand. “I believe there’s a touch of hypochondria in my beloved helpmeet. I can well understand, though. After all these years caring for me, she might feel in need of some medical attention for herself. She’s gone up for a week to take the waters—and to consult with a specialist in women’s matters.”
“I see.” James leaned back once again, placing his hands on the arms of his chair.
“And Alice?”
The American shook his head.
“I am sorry, Henry. It’s been a long siege. I know how difficult it must be.”
“Thank you. Perhaps we shall talk of it another day.”
“Of course.”
The better part of a minute had passed before Stevenson jumped in to fill the silence. “You were asking, you know, about my loosing a Jekyll other than my own into the world? Steered by another hand?”
“I did,” replied James, returning his attention to his host.
“It’s curious, but I wonder if I haven’t already done as much.”
“And by that you mean…?”
“Just that one never knows how the things one writes will be received. I don’t mean how they will be appraised, by a reviewer or a purchaser, but how they will be understood. How their impact will be registered.”
James reached up to pinch his lower lip between thumb and forefinger. He tilted his head slightly. “You are surprised by that?”
“Not entirely.”
“Nor should you be.” He clasped his hands tidily on the modest rise of his vest, his fingers interlaced. “I have often given thought to writing a little something in which the understanding of the whole of the piece, even down to the level of deciding what has literally happened, should depend entirely upon a reader’s point of view. A reader’s assumptions. I simply have yet to find the appropriate vehicle. The trope.” He threw his head back and gazed at the ceiling, drumming his fingers on his knuckles as he did. “Some event as witnessed and represented by a young woman with a particularly robust imagination, perhaps. And some irreversible consequences based upon her testimony. Some turn on the ambiguities of Daisy Miller, perhaps. But,” he said brusquely, lowering his gaze and refocusing on Stevenson, “I take us from your precise point.”
“Well—I had a letter from a friend shortly after Jekyll was published. And in it the fellow said something that took me rather by surprise. Something that bears on the question of our ultimate control over what we write. Over its final effect.”
“And what was it that he said?”
“That Jekyll was a dreadful thing, to begin with—and not, I think, because he found it poorly written.”
“Of course not.”
“Rather that it seemed to him that the book might be capable of eroding a vulnerable reader’s self-restraint. ‘Loosening the last threads,’ I recall his saying, in some poor soul whose better self might be unraveling, giving way to his worse.”
“Hmmm. And thus,” observed James, “essentially, the book might be capable of eroding the self-restraint of anyone at all. Aren’t we all of us teetering on some brink, to a greater or lesser degree?”
“So it sometimes seems.”
“And what this fellow said took you by surprise because…?”
“Well, because I would have thought that, if anything, Jekyll’s fate would tend to make a reader more cautious about plunging head-long down the path of self-indulgence. Rather than more inclined to do so.”
“Well,” said James, reaching up to smooth the fringe of hair at the back of his head, “I suppose it doesn’t end particularly well for Jekyll, does it?”
“Hardly.”
“Then again, it is the shallow reader whose entire reaction to a narrative is determined by the fate of the protagonist.”
“And Symonds is anything but a shallow reader.”
“Symonds, did you say?”
Stevenson silently rebuked himself for revealing the name. “Yes.”
“J. A. Symonds?”
“Yes.”
“I know him—I finished his biography of Cellini not long ago. Excellent. Exceptional. And you are perfectly correct. The man can hardly be a shallow reader.”
“No.”
“But, Louis,” James continued as he adjusted himself once again in his chair. “If you are to practice high art, you must pursue the complexities of the human condition—and permit your reader to respond to those complexities in whatever way he chooses.”
“And you are certain a reader has that freedom of choice?”
“Of course.”
“I wonder what you would say if, for example, your Princess Casimassima were determined by a perceptive reader of your own to incline him towards acts of political terrorism?”
“Dear Fanny’s bombs and the like?”
“Perhaps.”
James looked briefly at the ceiling. “I would think, I expect, that I had succeeded in creating a world in which he were exposed to the very same influences one is likely to encounter in this slightly more tangible world that surrounds us presently.”
“Not that you had done something for which you ought to repent?” “Not in the least. The man would have been free, to begin with, to read my book or not, as he chose. Unless, of course, he were a student at a very progressive school.” James chuckled. “In any case, any subsequent actions that reader might take would then be the result of an entirely separate and unencumbered choice. Were he to be at all influenced in any way, it might as likely be by his having ingested a plate of bad fish as by reading anything that I had written.”
Stevenson eyed his friend keenly. Whatever else one might say about James, he was a staunch believer in the radical independence of the human will. How might life have been different, he wondered, if it had been someone like this American, and not Cummy, who had presided over the Stevenson nursery? He took a deep breath and settled back in his chair. “As I expected. Dependable old James.”
“I am delighted to be of service. So then,” declared James, checking his watch. “Before I rush off, do tell me if I should see this play when it opens. Even if the responsible dramaturge is not your own masterful self.”
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—The Lyceum—Wellington Street
“The attention of the audience was arrested by the dominant power of the actor. The murder of General Carew will be pronounced the most powerful and horrible thing ever seen on the modern stage.”—The Daily Telegraph, 6 August 1888
“Studies of the horrible are not usually attractive to the public, who, after all, go to the theatre mainly for the purpose of being pleasantly entertained and lifted out of themselves. The truth of this axiom playwrights have more than once found to their cost. Still The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde appeals in a certain degree to the love of the occult which is deeply implanted in the human mind, and it may for that reason be able to hold its place in the Lyceum bill.”—The Times, 6 August 1888 “The town will doubtless flock to see Mr. Mansfield’s dual impersonation. Whenever Mr. Mansfield becomes Hyde, his savage chuckles, his devilish gloating over evil, his malignant sarcasms, his fierce energy of hate and revelling in all sinful impulses, awaken strange sensations in the spectator, and the unearthly restless figure of this variation upon Frankenstein’s fatal handiwork takes a powerful hold on the imagination. Hyde, in brief, in Mr. Mansfield’s hands, is a creation of genius.”—The Daily News, 6 August 1888
Stevenson, Fanny, and Sam had travelled to London to attend the gala opening. They were to have been special guests of the Lyceum’s managing principal actor, Henry Irving, who had arranged for a lavish meal to follow the performance at the theater’s own Gridiron Room, site of the most storied fêtes of the capital’s artistic elite. Mansfield was, naturally, to be there, as was W. S. Gilbert, in whose light operatic productions the actor had dazzled the nation.
When they had arrived at the Grosvenor the night before the performance, however, Stevenson was handed a telegram from Edinburgh bearing the news that his father was failing rapidly. Margaret Stevenson begged her son to hasten north as quickly as he was able. The three of them had boarded the Flying Scotsman the following morning, arriving in Edinburgh just after six.
They’d found his mother in hysterics. She reported in tears that she had scarcely slept in days. Night after night, for over a week, her husband had awakened her time and again to confess to an ever-deepening depression. In the wee hours of the previous morning, the poor man had tugged on her shoulder and informed her, simply but flatly, that the end was near. His wife, begrudgingly admitting to herself that he was right, immediately arranged for the telegram. On the morning of the day their son arrived, Thomas Stevenson had insisted on rising and dressing, but he no longer knew either his wife or the doctor or any of the servants.
Stevenson had found his father sitting in the drawing room, bolt upright, his hands clasped tightly on the arms of his chair, as though a coastal gale were bidding to sweep him away. Directed to look upon his son, the old man had stared in utter blankness at his offspring’s frozen features. As often as Stevenson had imagined his father close to death—sometimes, shamefully, with an odious eagerness, but more often in the knowledge that the man had treated him with more patience than he himself might have mustered had their positions been reversed—he had been completely unprepared for this moment. Every feature was unquestionably his father’s, but the utter slackness of his gaze could have been the aspect of a spavined nag waiting for the drop of the renderer’s hammer.
For a moment, the old fellow’s brows had knit tightly above the still-noble bridge of his nose, his eyes first quizzical and then fearful, and then he had turned back to the wall that faced him. It was only a few hours then to the end.
Stevenson arranged for the funeral. It was to be a stately affair, with over one hundred family, friends, and associates borne to the service by a fleet of fifty carriages. Stevenson, Sam, and Cousin Bob greeted guests at Heriot Row, and then the elaborate procession set off across the city to the New Calton Burying Ground. The weather was beastly, unseasonably bitter with a driving rain, and for a week Stevenson had been suffering from a wretched cold. At one point he nearly fainted with the strain of the day, and Fanny, fearing he might soon follow his father to the grave, bundled him summarily back to the house before Thomas’s coffin was even lowered into the ground. Bob presided, of necessity, at the interment, grimly aware how his late uncle would have balked at his last public moments being overseen by a young man who, he was certain, had led his son down all the worst paths.
Once it was over, Fanny did her best to reassure Stevenson that it had been a perfectly marvelous send-off, an elegant and fitting farewell from the best in the capital city to one of its most revered citizens. Stevenson, though, fought to stave off the conviction that he had, at the very end, and in an irreversibly significant way, dishonored the hand that had sustained him, for better or worse, all of his days. Coggie Ferrier had come to the funeral, speaking warmly if briefly with both Stevenson and his mother at Heriot Row. Her own mother, however, had refused to attend—something that Margaret Stevenson found extremely hard to accept. Thomas’s passing seemed to put new steel in his widow’s backbone, such that it was only with difficulty that Fanny had dissuaded her mother-in-law from calling at 28 Charlotte Square to confront the woman—not only for the slight to Thomas and the family, but most especially to her son. Stevenson, however, resolved to meet with Coggie as soon as it could be arranged, readily accepting that it might have to be under a roof other than her mother’s.
In the event, he met her at the George Hotel on a rare sunny afternoon. He arrived before she did, and requested a table by a window. Sitting back to enjoy a cigarette, he scanned the stately room with its huge, round skylight and gilded Corinthian columns. Over half of the tables were occupied by members of Edinburgh’s respectable set, even though the time for luncheon had come and gone and it was still early for afternoon tea. He grinned to contemplate what Baxter, Ferrier, Bob, and he would have made of the chance to gather here on a quiet afternoon, scrutinizing this table of prim matrons chatting here, that pair of elderly gentlemen smoking quietly over their papers there. He could almost hear their unruly undergraduate prattle growing louder and louder, drifting towards ever more unsavory topics. He could imagine noisy requests for rough beverages the George had never served—and exclamations of disgust when their requests went unsatisfied. Depending on the day, there might have been a chunk or two of a scone or teacake flung well beyond the bounds of their table, almost certainly a soft chorus of belches, and, especially if Ferrier and Baxter were already into their cups, the physical accosting of a waitress or two and an ostentatious breaking of wind. Now here he sat, conventionally attired and almost conventionally coiffed, owner of a substantial villa on the south English coast and very likely to inherit his father’s valet as a butler, of all unimaginable things. That he still recognized himself in the mirror each morning was perhaps a function of superficial physiognomy over anything else.
Coggie arrived a quarter of an hour late, sweeping into the room with profound apologies for the delay. She held Stevenson for a moment longer than he might have expected, her head against his chin, then settled herself elegantly in her chair. How, he wondered, did ladies manage this fashion of the bustle, seemingly more pronounced with every year? As with everything else she did, Coggie moved, sat, and conversed with infatuating grace and ease.
As they waited for their refreshments to arrive, Coggie told Stevenson how moving his father’s funeral had been, how splendidly arranged, how deeply honoring to his father and the family. She apologized, finally, for her mother, deftly expressing a loving understanding of her parent while also making it very clear that she found the old woman’s accusations utterly unfounded and her recent discourtesy all but unforgiveable. Stevenson, harboring a secret wish that she, rather than Henley, could be his partner in all collaborations rhetorical, th
anked her for her great thoughtfulness.
“Well, Louis,” said Coggie, after the tea and sweets had arrived. “Your Jekyll and Hyde seems to have made quite an impression.”
“It has,” replied Stevenson, unaccountably sensing the onset of a blush. “It’s quite beyond me, why the public has taken to it so. But so they seem to have done.”
“There is a play of it now, no? At the Lyceum?”
“There is. Fanny and I were to have attended the opening performance, but we were called north for…” His voice suddenly deserted him and he waved his hand as though to say, “all this.”
Coggie smiled understandingly. How exceedingly fortunate the man who might awake each morning to find himself the object of that gentle regard!
“I don’t suppose you saw the review in the Times?” Stevenson asked. “Of the production?”
“No, I didn’t. Was it a good one?”
“Not especially,” snorted Stevenson. “The best the fellow could say was that it might hold its place on the bill.”
“Did you have a large part in putting it together, then?”
“Not at all. It was all Mansfield. And a fellow from America named Sullivan.”
“So as a consequence,” Coggie offered brightly, “if it doesn’t ‘hold its place,’ that will say absolutely nothing about your own work. Which is a wonder!”
“Well, there are some financial ramifications.” Stevenson grimaced. “And Jekyll and Hyde are still my children.”
“Your Abel and Cain.”
Stevenson chuckled. “Abel and Cain, yes. Let us just hope, in passing, that Mansfield’s efforts prove to be less damaging to me and mine than Cain’s were to his brother.”
Seeking Hyde Page 24
