“Are you up to a lesson with Adelaide?”
Louis was sitting, stuporous, at the desk in his study. “Is she here?”
Fanny nodded in the direction of the drawing room. “Send her in, then.”
He eyed the pile of correspondence he had intended to attack. It would have to wait. He had nearly as little enthusiasm for writing letters as he had for teaching writing to Adelaide Boodle. The wind had been out of his sails for a week, ever since the Forces—his doctor, Fanny, his lungs—pronounced the London teaching position mere fantasy to pursue.
“I came across something I want to read to you,” Louis said to Adelaide, who sat in a wing chair opposite him. He pulled from a bookcase behind him a volume of essays by Shelley. “ ‘A man, to be greatly good,’ ” he read, “ ‘must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.’ ” Louis closed the book. “Now, I believe that is fine advice for a writer. Except, I would add, he ought to try to live inside the skin of other species, too. I suspect a pig has a point of view about a few things.”
“I think that way—about the cats,” Adelaide said.
“Oh, I don’t doubt it. You are a naturally good girl, Boodle. It will be easy to put yourself in the boots of the hero. As a boy, I always imagined myself as the good fellow on a white horse who was coming to the rescue of the others. But if you want to be a writer, you are going to have to put yourself in the shoes of people who are not so good. Everybody has faults. Some people have a lot of them. Yet no one sees himself as a monster. You need to try being him—or her—to know how she feels and thinks.”
Louis went to one corner of his study, where wooden crates his mother had recently sent from Edinburgh were stacked up to his height. They contained books, except for one marked “Skelt” on the outside. He removed a couple of boxes off the top to get to that one, then used his folding knife to pry it open. He laughed softly when he looked at the contents. On top of some smaller boxes inside was the collapsed framework for the toy theater he had played with as a child. “Have you seen one of these?”
“No.” The girl moved over to the corner where Louis sat cross-legged on the floor, assembling the simple wooden stick framework that supported painted background scenery, props, and the little hand-colored figures of a particular drama.
“I got my first drama set when I was six years old,” he said. “Now, what you see here are pieces of a number of different sets I owned as a child.” He lifted out a painted scene. “This is a backdrop for a melodrama called ‘Three-Fingered Jack, the Terror of Jamaica.’ Some of the characters in that little play have survived, but not all.”
He began sorting through a box that held small hand-colored figures from different dramas. “Here’s Robin Hood. Here’s Aladdin. Here’s a maiden who works at an inn. You can see it’s a mishmash. I think that is all right for us. I loved the little plays they provided, but I often departed from those outlines, and that’s just what I want you to do. Start with a backdrop. There are a couple of others in the box.”
The girl pulled out a castle scene, a prison vault, and an island/ocean scene with a warship among the waves.
“Good,” he said. “Now look through these characters and see if you can fit together a likely setting for, say, four of them. See these little props? There’s an ax, a bag of gold coins. A paper that’s a will, from the looks of it.” He rummaged about. “Here’s a treasure chest. The way the plays always worked was that there was some contest to get at a treasure. Might be a pretty girl two fellows are after. Choose your—”
“I know what to do,” Adelaide said.
“Have them talk to each other. Out loud. Even yell.”
The girl got down on her belly in front of the wood structure. She slid the castle scene into the slot for the backdrop, then started poking through the colorful paper characters.
Louis departed the room so the child wouldn’t be embarrassed to try out a few lines. Winded from the box lifting, he lay down on his day-bed in the drawing room to rest. Memories of his boyhood Saturdays flooded his head.
The day had always begun with the stated intent of “having a look at the ships.” He went out to a corner near his house with his father or mother and others—Bob came, too, when he was living with them—and stood in the chill, whipping Edinburgh wind to admire from a distance the visiting ships in the Firth of Forth. The joy of those long-ago Saturday mornings was what came next: strolling to the window of a stationer’s shop on Leith Walk that sold Skelt’s Juvenile Drama toy theater sets. In front of that window, penniless, Louis suffered bouts of anguished longing. The scenes in the window changed regularly. There might be a forest with a halted carriage. Beside it would be a battle raging between a rowdy band of robbers and bearded fellows in dress coats, brandishing pistols. He studied the names displayed near the characters: “The Miller,” “The Huntsman,” “Long Tom Coffin.” A person could buy a paper figure, unpainted, for a penny. There were colored ones available for twopence, having been painted by the wife and grown daughter of the shop’s owner. But that would have stolen the pleasure—when he was able to buy some figures—of dipping his own brush, choosing his own colors, then cutting out the little people and pasting them to cardboard. And then the acting out of the play began. What a bargain those childish dramas were for my parents! The theater sets bought hours of solitude for the adults who lived at 17 Heriot Row, and incalculable happiness for the boy who was housebound there.
“She’s having a grand time.” Fanny’s voice. She laid a blanket over his chest.
Louis focused his eyes upon his wife. “Who am I as a writer but what Mr. Skelt made of me? He taught me how to tell stories.”
“Stand back!” came a holler from the other room.
“Shall I send her home?”
“No, God no. Leave her alone. Let the child play.”