Louis shortened the reins, bent forward, and pushed his weight into his boot heels to lift off the saddle. Up ahead a pig fence, one of many constructed—incredibly—right across the road by native farmers to corral their livestock; Louis dared the horse to clear it. Jack never broke his canter, sailing over the crude barrier of cocoa posts as if he were steeplechasing. “A fine beast you are!” Louis shouted to the horse, whose neck lathered whiter with each jump. Louis had counted eight pig fences on his way to Mata’afa’s camp; now they repeated the jumps as they returned to Vailima.
Louis felt exhilarated, coming away from his first meeting with the rebel chief. Mata’afa was all Moors had said he would be. The chief had the bearing and vision of a great statesman when he spoke about the need for his people to take control of Samoa’s destiny. Louis had looked at the chief and thought, Here is the man who will bring this country out of chaos.
He knew the thrill pulsing through his body was not only from the fence leaping; it came from being an actor in something real. Louis tried to remember the last time he’d engaged in the public life of any place he had lived. He’d been a sickly hermit in Bournemouth and Hyères and Davos. But he was well now and eager for the game. Louis had never felt so much a citizen. And if ever there were a moral obligation to behave like a citizen—for God’s sake, to head off war—now was the moment.
WHEN HE RETURNED home, Louis wrapped himself in a lavalava and walked down to the bathing pool. It was his favorite ritual of the day, one he sometimes shared with the Samoans who worked at Vailima. Today he was alone. The spot was a vision of paradise, surrounded as it was by wild orange trees, its banks dripping with ferns and fragrant yellow jessamine. He picked two oranges, cut them, then squeezed them over his head, as the natives did, to clean their hair. All around, bright birds he had no names for hopped among the branches of shrubs he intended to identify when he got a moment. He’d never been good at remembering tree and plant names; he was doubly challenged in this place. He laughed to himself for the hundredth time at the exotic turn his life had taken.
Ahead, the day held other pleasures. Lloyd was just back from England. Having arranged the sale at Bournemouth and the shipment of Skerryvore’s furniture to Vailima, the lad had escorted Maggie Stevenson to Sydney, where she waited for the right moment to come to Samoa. Soon Louis would fetch her and bring her to Vailima.
He was glad Lloyd was back. It meant they would work together on The Wrecker, their comical tale about a motley group of unscrupulous adventurers bent on striking it rich. During the months the boy was in Britain, they had attempted to collaborate long-distance, which had been mightily frustrating. Today they would put in two or three hours. Louis would write another column for McClure’s syndicate, describing his visit to Mata’afa. He would fit in some weeding, so that when the conch shell was blown for dinner, he could tell himself he had earned his keep at Vailima. Afterward, they would all sit outside and share news from their letters; Lloyd was going into Apia today to collect the mail.
It was a miracle they got any letters at all. Four times a month, a mail steamer running between San Francisco and Sydney passed near the island, and a local boat went out to meet it. When the weather cooperated, a seaman on the ship tossed mailbags into the smaller vessel. When conditions were bad, the bags were not tossed, or worse, they disappeared into the waves.
At the house, he found that Lloyd had already passed out everyone’s mail. Louis savored the sight and feel of the thick pile on his desk. He sorted the letters: Edmund Gosse and Sidney Colvin went to the top. Baxter’s he would read later; it would be full of financial figures and worries.
Gosse’s missive was loaded with gossip and flattery about the letters Louis had been writing recently to the editors of the Times of London regarding the political situation in Samoa. Since Byron was in Greece, nothing has appealed to the literary man as so picturesque as that you should be living in the South Seas. Louis chuckled to himself.
Colvin’s letter was about business. Louis scanned it for news and stopped abruptly at one paragraph. The New York Sun has run thirty-four of your letters but has backed out of publishing the remainder of them. They say the letters haven’t enough incident and experiences, but appear to be merely the advance sheets of a book. And a dull book at that.
Louis felt the wind go out of his chest. How brutal Colvin could be in his truth telling, and how kind Gosse was in his lying. Why hadn’t he seen this coming? He’d not gotten much comment from his friends in London about the columns, or his letters to the Times, for that matter. Louis immediately started a letter to Colvin, reminding him that the articles for McClure were only meant as preliminaries to a much more important work. He put down the pen in frustration. Lloyd has just seen all these people in London. He will know what’s going on.
Louis threw the letter from Colvin on the dining table, where Lloyd sat alone reading a book. Louis pointed to the offending paragraph. “What are you not telling me?”
Lloyd squirmed. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
Lloyd looked miserable. In the evenings since his return, the boy had filled the family with the news from Louis’s old crowd; at his stepfather’s request, Lloyd had gone to see all of them: Colvin, Baxter, Gosse. Louis had not named Henley, but Lloyd adored him and had visited on his own. The stories of the old friends had been riotously fun, though Louis suspected his stepson had edited the reports heavily. No doubt Lloyd had heard an earful and, out of loyalty, was withholding the negative.
At the moment, the young man’s face reflected his distress; confusion gave way to a look of pure sadness. Louis had seen the look before. He’d watched the same changes in Lloyd’s emotional weather when he was eight years old. It was one of the few reminders of the lad he had been. Lloyd was fully adult now, at twenty-three. Louis had watched him change from small boy to shy stripling to outspoken six-foot-tall college student to young man with continental tastes that offended some people—Moors came to mind. Lloyd was finding his style, trying on various personae. He had returned from London wearing a pincenez and knotted cravat and saying “quite right” quite often. If, in this most recent stage, the boy mimicked too closely the dandies he’d seen in Regent Street, Louis could forgive him because he knew who Lloyd was in his heart: a witty fellow with a soft spot for the downtrodden. If Lloyd was haughty, he was also kind to every underdog he ever met. If he was sometimes cold and undemonstrative, he was calm water in a family given to dramatic swells of sentiment.
“You are my sounding board, Lloyd, and I am yours. Tell me the truth.”
“No one cares about Polynesians over there,” Lloyd said. “They don’t care for the newspaper columns or the idea of a book about the South Seas. They want stories like your early ones.” He put up his palms in resignation. “They want stories about white men.”
Louis snickered. “Then they shall get their white men. A whole gallery of the species that thrive here.”
Lloyd rose smiling. “I’ll see you at two o’clock,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” Louis called after him. “Disappointing my old friends doesn’t sting half as bad as it used to.”
IT STUNG SOME, though. Financially, it was a loss, as he would be paid perhaps a third of what he had counted on from McClure. Equally bad was the embarrassment he felt that he had failed. He wasn’t accustomed to failure, at least in the literary realm. Am I Byron in Greece or a literary has-been living out in the bush? Louis fretted briefly, then let it go. He used to worry about his standing in London’s literary circles. It occurred to him that he cared much less these days. The circles that mattered were his family, his growing clan, and these Samoans, who were becoming his people.
It wasn’t only the South Seas material that Colvin objected to. Louis knew his friend regarded his collaboration with Lloyd as a colossal waste of time. Well, a man did for his family what he could. If I can’t help my own, who can I help?
Louis’s mind flashed back to the countless tavern conversations he’d had with Henley during their periods of collaboration. They’d talked endlessly about how this or that man fit into the pantheon of important English writers and thinkers, all the while stoking each other’s vanity. Henley had assured him that at his best, Louis was single-handedly reviving the Romantic tradition. Louis propped up Henley by saying that his poetry would be remembered in a hundred years. That was colossally wasted time. Now all Louis craved was freedom from expectations. He wanted to try so many things.
After two years of sailing the South Seas and a year in Samoa, how was it possible not to move beyond the Old World to engage in these people’s lives? Self-forgetfulness came more easily in this place. Bathing in the pool this morning, he had experienced a kind of heaven: He was the water, the birds, the sweet-smelling air. He wanted to have that feeling more often.
At the moment, he felt agitated and defiant. He might be done with his reporting and commentary for McClure, but he fully intended to finish A Footnote to History, protesting the absurd incompetence of the colonial powers in Samoa. He would name names, by God. And he would continue writing fictional stories about life in this part of the world.
His most recent story, “The Beach at Falesa,” would be as dark a moral tale as he’d ever told. The main character was a bigoted trader who “marries for one night” a native woman and surprises himself when he falls in love and stays with her. When they have children, he discovers his beloved offspring are consigned to a disturbing racial purgatory because of their mixed blood. The story was entirely unromantic. It would seduce English readers not because it had white men in it but because it was powerful, full of living, breathing characters. As far as he knew, it was the first truly realistic South Seas fiction anybody had done; every other writer had gotten waylaid by the romance of the place. He picked up his pen and continued his letter to Colvin.
Now I have got the smell and look of the thing a good deal. You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale than if you had read a library.
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.