“Davenport,” I said, cowed by his uncharacteristic tone. “It’s nothing. I hurt my ankle the other day on the trails.”
Davenport looked as though he might throw the umbrella and maybe me into the magma chamber of Mount Vaea. Belial was never seen without his golden-hued cane, though it was not clear whether he suffered from a physical limitation or it was an accessory; it made observers examine him all the more closely, one moment believing they could identify a limp or maybe a weak knee, sympathizing with him, stopping themselves out of politeness from asking, and then wondering again if any limp was there at all. Davenport suspected that however I injured myself I found the idea of imitating the great Belial appealing.
Of course, this was not so at all. Or perhaps there was truth in it. Perhaps the power of suggestion took hold of me without my knowing. I cannot say. I understand the intensity of my companion’s feelings against Belial, especially after we learned more about what had happened with Kitten in the time before her death. But selfishly I could not help being tickled to think that here I was, Edgar Fergins, proprietor of the Hoxton Square Bookstall, dwelling on a remote island with the world’s two greatest bookaneers in the battle to claim their ultimate prize.
Stevenson soon all but vanished once again from the public rooms at Vailima, and with his seclusion his work came to a halt. The last thing he said about his writing in our hearing was that he was broken down. “The orange is squeezed out, and I will do nothing as long as I can,” he said in a sad, trancelike state. He was draped in a blue and white kimono from Japan that fit his skeletal frame like a scarecrow’s coat. “Sometimes,” he continued, “a man must wonder how anyone can be such an ass to enter the profession of letters instead of being apprenticed to a barber or keep a baked-potato stall.” I could almost hear Davenport and Belial—who were on opposite ends of the great hall when Stevenson announced this—groan to themselves that the novel’s completion would be postponed once more.
The novelist’s spidery shoulders formed a slouch, and he slouched his way to his library and through the glass door at the end of that room, closing it behind him. The small sanctum, where we had seen him preside over his bedside court proceeding for the case of the stolen pig, was an enclosed portion of the upper verandah that contained little more than a bed and a table. I had been inside on only two occasions. The table could fold and unfold and swing over the bed. Two windows overlooked the majestic, luxuriant volcano. There were engravings of his ancestors in traditional Scotch dress along the plain walls. In one corner, there was a stand with several Colt repeating rifles. Opposite that, a small bookcase had editions of Stevenson’s own titles. Above the bed was another bookcase with some more of his titles and a big book entitled A Record of Remarkable Crimes and Criminals, which I imagined him searching for ideas. Stevenson would write sitting up in the bed and tossing his pages onto the table, and when he could not write, he would lie there staring at the beams in the ceiling. We suspected he had fallen back into the latter state. We began to hear the frequent sad squealing of the flageolet. The sound of a man not writing.
There were new troubles to keep at bay in addition to the halt in Stevenson’s progress. The dwarf who attended Vao continued his hostile stares and comments and had added Davenport as one of his targets. One damp afternoon, I was holding my reliable umbrella over Davenport on the lawn when we passed near the fierce little man, who was leaning against a tree, his legs in a sort of squatting position. His eyes were closed and he was mouthing something silently to himself. He paused and returned his usual glare.
“Is there some problem between us to address?” Davenport asked.
“No, White Chief. But Tulagi is not to be angered, be sure about it.”
“Who is this Tulagi?” I was about to ask, before I understood the dwarf suffered from the trait, not uncommon among those Samoan natives who learned English later in their lives, of speaking of himself in third person.
“What reason have either of us given you not to trust us, Tulagi?” Davenport asked him.
Tulagi laughed hard. “You are a handsome man.”
I looked over at Davenport. The tone of his skin had turned smooth and rich, a perfect parchment, during his time in the tropical sun. As with many who had come here from far away, his appearance had vastly improved.
“White men tend to infatuate themselves with my charge. Handsome white men think themselves entitled to be near Vao—to possess her, to seek pleasure from her, and to try to remove her from here.”
“How is it that she is your concern?” Davenport asked.
“She is a tapo. Each village chooses their prettiest maiden to represent them to the island. It is my honor to have been appointed to protect her and guide her when she was just a girl.”
“Well, I have business more important than stealing away your favorite little maiden, Tulagi.”
“Making certain you do not try is Tulagi’s business.”
“Tell us, are you some kind of a mystagogue?”
“What is it you were whispering about, if you don’t mind telling us?” I asked to soften Davenport’s sarcasm.
Tulagi appeared to mind, but answered. “I am a memorizer.”
“A what?”
“Tulagi is one of those chosen to keep our islands’ history alive—to recite the stories of our past and practice them when not at my duties of looking after Vao.”
“Why not write them down? Then they would never be forgotten. They would be safe.”
“They are safer in my heart and my brain, than on pieces of paper that could be lost or burned or made false.” He returned to whispering to himself and I listened to as much as I could before we moved on. From what I could gather, he was telling himself the story of the first whites who came to the island, and how the natives believed them by the color of their skin to be walking corpses. Just the fragment of this tale put me somewhat ill at ease, especially as Davenport continued to direct me to ride into the wild, overgrown portions of the property and the sunless virgin forests looking for the now almost-legendary fifth stream.
“What exactly is it you believe we will find once we locate the stream?” I asked on one of these tiring excursions.
Davenport seemed to relish my question, though a quick smirk straightened itself into a serious and profound answer, after he made sure none of the outside boys were close enough to hear. “Another way off the property, one where we cannot be followed. That is why we cannot simply ask the domestics. Another possibility is that the fifth stream may lead us to another outbuilding, where Stevenson piles up pages he is not ready to share.”
“A kind of treasure chest of lost literature,” I suggested.
It seemed fanciful, an idea worthy of a wine-and-cigar session at Pfaff’s vault among a host of other bookaneers in the golden age of their trade. Still, I thoroughly searched my share of the grounds. The next time we were out surveying, we heard hoof falls approach. A horse and rider had started toward us and then stopped at a distance. It was Fanny Stevenson; she brought her horse to a halt about fifty feet away. I saluted her, but she did not return it. The encounter felt odd. I could not see her face very clearly, and as far as I could tell she seemed to be squinting at us in careful study. After a while, Lloyd and Belle appeared behind her on their horses and she turned around and cantered off with them.
The dark clouds had come closer and over the next twenty-four hours hovered in long clusters directly east. Cipaou—and the Vailima household, and for that matter everyone else on the island—was filled with dire, excited predictions about the rainy season. All this seemed to force Stevenson to emerge from his bout of isolation to oversee matters. The day he returned to the public rooms he looked dreadfully ill, his eyes hollow, his sticklike legs wobbly, his motions jerky. The household had spoken of his social moods alternating with his private ones, but seeing him like this led me to believe his encampments in the sanctum a
lso served to conceal his worst spells of sickness. With his bare feet, one might have mistaken him, when lying down, for a dead body waiting to be prepared for burial.
In addition to the tasks related to the dangers of the rainy season, during our visits we witnessed regular callers to Vailima demanding one thing or another from the novelist. Chiefs representing the various villages of the island asked his counsel and advice on political matters, ranging from inter-village disputes over the marriage of a chief’s daughter to the demands of one of the foreign consulates. We were at the house when one of the highest chiefs of the island came. Because of his status, we were all invited to take ’ava with him. He was there to ask Stevenson to reconcile two feuding chiefs by hosting a feast.
At the end of their conference, Stevenson asked the visitor what gift he would like from Vailima, for it was one of the most galling Samoan traditions, to the mind of an Englishman, anyway, that a distinguished visitor would not depart from your home without taking something with him. The chief asked for a revolver. Stevenson handed it to the chief’s wife, another custom of the islands’ gift giving. She proceeded to open the chamber and then empty the bullets on the floor. They seemed to enjoy the thing as though it were a novelty rather than a weapon. Then she pointed it at her husband’s heart and pulled the trigger as he pretended to be shot. We all laughed at the morbid pantomime.
She kept pulling the trigger, eliciting more melodramatic reactions from the chief.
“No!” was shouted.
John Chinaman threw himself across the room and knocked the revolver away. It was then that I noticed what the mysterious servant had seen before any of us. There were only five bullets on the floor. When he rose to his feet amid confusion, he opened the chamber and showed us inside. Had she finished one more playful shot, the chief would have been shot in the heart.
We were all very somber after the embarrassed couple exited to think of the near tragedy that had occurred. When Davenport and I were making our own departure for the evening, I could hear Stevenson and Fanny in the great hall. They had recovered from the startling incident and were trading elaborately whimsical stories about what would have transpired had the chief been accidentally assassinated in their house. It was the happiest I ever heard the husband and wife during our time on island.
Stevenson had promised the chief to host the reconciliation feast as soon as the weather permitted, and that planned feast gave rise to another visit that could have threatened all our plans.
Belle told me that there had been some discord over a task, given to one of the servants, to secure a pig to roast for the feast. Charlie would usually do it, but because of his recent unsteady behavior, a servant named Eliga, whose English was less fluent, was sent on the assignment.
Instead of a pig, the servant brought home a boar. That was the sort of thing that became the talk of the house. I expected later to hear of Stevenson dressing down the native but instead he spoke to him quietly in the library and sent him on his way, livery securely in place. “Now, think of what I’ve said, Eliga,” was Stevenson’s parting message for him.
“Oh, I will, Master Tusitala,” said Eliga, head bowed, hands cupped together and trembling. “My life is yours and I your servant until death.”
I happened to be walking past Stevenson’s sanctum while approaching Fanny at the time, and did not think of it again. After all, I was rather distracted. Fanny was unusually reserved with me, and the change in her demeanor was concerning enough to make me sweat as much as the humidity. She greeted me with a mumble and parted from me without much more than that.
A few days later, the conch announced a horseman, and Vailima’s front door opened on Lionel Hines. I was in the great hall and my heart jumped. It was alarming to see our fellow passenger from the Colossus on Stevenson’s estate, especially because I recalled him saying he did not know Stevenson personally. It meant something out of the ordinary had brought him. Davenport had still been tinkering with his plans for the mission while onboard the frigate. He had already been using the alias of Porter, but had told Hines he was a collector of primitive antiques, not a travel writer. It may sound like a trivial point, but it was the sort of thing that could be enough, if it came out, to plant a seed of suspicion in Stevenson—the sort of thing that could quickly unravel a bookaneer’s mission.
While the visitor was busy fumbling for his handkerchief to display to Fanny, I rushed upstairs. I was out of view but that was not sufficient to feel safe. Davenport was in the stables, where Charlie had been taken to be cared for. Charlie had broken out into a fever and one native doctor after another, usually white haired and bent, came carrying palm-leaf baskets of exotic herbs and flowering plants. Davenport had been visiting the sick young man often—another way of contriving reasons for our calls to Vailima, I supposed, though it also seemed the bookaneer was genuinely moved by the native’s plight. Davenport could be returning at any moment and would find himself face-to-face with the Australian. I rushed into the library and found a Bible and some writing paper. After copying some verses, I searched for one of the domestics. The first one to come was the beautiful maiden.
“Vao, could you please bring this to my friend? He is visiting Charlie in the stables.” She stood blinking at me. I remembered myself. Here I was pleading to a girl who didn’t speak English. While I was attempting to translate my request into rough Samoan, Tulagi appeared, steaming mad.
“Tulagi warned you against bothering her,” said the dwarf.
“I am not. I need for this to be delivered to my companion.”
“What is it?”
“It is a prayer to read to the ailing servant in the stables, Tulagi.”
“Bring it yourself, then, if you care so much about Charlie’s eternal soul,” he growled.
I swallowed, unable to explain why I could not walk by Hines. Then the young woman took the paper and bowed to me; there was a deeper understanding of the situation behind her eyes that both made me feel great relief and worried me.
“Talofa,” she said, and I returned the gesture.
I thought I saw her glance down at the message and wondered, for a moment, whether she could have noticed and perhaps even understood that I wrote certain words from the Psalm in a slightly larger hand, trying to convey the warning to stay out.
Lord, remember David, and all his afflictions:
How he swore unto the Lord, and vowed unto the mighty God of Jacob;
Surely I will NOT COME INTO the tabernacle of my HOUSE, nor go up into my bed;
I will not give sleep to mine eyes, or slumber to mine eyelids,
Until I find out a place for the Lord, an habitation for the mighty God of Jacob.
The maiden’s willingness did nothing to soften Tulagi, but he also did not prevent her from taking my message; he followed her, leaving me alone again. I took the opportunity to position myself on the mezzanine above the great hall, where I would not be seen but could listen. I could only hope the visit did not signal that Hines would be a new addition to Vailima society. I dared to lean over the banister just enough to see the two of them when Stevenson had emerged.
“Your card asking me here was most unexpected, I confess,” said Hines after handing Stevenson a folded paper. It was clear from his voice that Hines, despite having run Stevenson down under his breath to us on the warship, was puffed up to have been invited. “I was actually at the British consul yesterday just after I got your card, and there was a wire coming in for you,” he continued, “so I took the liberty of volunteering to deliver it. No whites really want to go this far into the interior, you know, but I must make constant visits to my properties, and always hunt for new potential plots. Savvy? If you ever think of selling this fine land—”
“I do not.”
“Well, I hope there’s some other service I might provide for you, Mr. Stevenson.”
Stevenson glared at the man for usin
g his “civilized” name but did not correct him. They were in chairs separated by a big Turkish rug, and, in addition to my eyes, two matching statues of Buddha on the stairs watched them.
Hines found a chair. Stevenson never just sat in a chair. He perched on the arm, or sat cross-legged against it, or, as he did now, positioned himself sideways like a bored child, bony legs dangling. There was a shift that came over Stevenson sometimes, something that possessed him, moved him from gangly European exile to imposing Samoan overseer. It was unspecific, intangible, but I had begun to recognize it when it happened.
“There is something you can help me with, Mr. Hines. It seems you sold a pig to one of my men, only the animal received was an old boar, too tough to be digested by human stomachs. When he returned to your house and asked you to correct the mistake, it is my understanding you laughed in his face.”
Hines’s cheeks reddened beyond his thick, curly beard. “I’m afraid it was your boy’s mistake. Savvy? But if you had come to me yourself, of course, I would have rectified it at once and. . .”
The visitor lost his line of thought when his host yawned; it was a low-bred, gaping, animal yawn that could stop any speech mid-sentence. Stevenson locked his hands behind his head. “Was it my man’s mistake for being brown rather than white, making him a mark to cheat?” he asked. He interrupted the stuttering umbrage from Hines: “Understand, Mr. Hines, that the men and women I employ at Vailima are not servants. They are ainga—family—I their chief, and if you cheat one of them you cheat me. The fraud against us is not to be repeated. Unlike men of your kind who come to wring coin out of the soil, glorified beachcombers, I have chosen this land as my land, the people as my people, to live and die with.”
“Surely, we can come to some arrangement.”
“It’s my understanding that you require all native women who work for you to wear full dresses.”
“Now, see here. If I help my brown boys and girls to be more civilized, I don’t see how it’s your business.”
The Last Bookaneer Page 18