The Last Bookaneer

by Matthew Pearl

  I took in the possibility. I thought about the last time I had seen Kitten, and the word Belial sent a fresh chill through me. “I fear I am at a disadvantage,” I said, trying to hide what I was really thinking about. “With all your history with the man, I never had a chance to see him in person, and now that I think it over you’ve never assigned me to gather information on him. There are times over the years I wondered if the man was a figment.”

  “I never assigned you anything on Belial because there is no information to gather. Not really. No one knows where he lives or where he goes when he is not bookaneering. He talks of a wife incessantly, though I’ve never seen her. If she exists, I shall never stop pitying her. He might as well be a figment. Am I understood?”

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s something he always says. ‘Am I understood?’ He could be telling you that it is noontime, and still finish the sentence with, ‘am I understood?’”

  I thought about Davenport often saying, “Wait a minute,” with no regard to how long the so-called minute would actually be, but I nodded. “What exactly does he look like?”

  “Like no other.”

  “There must be some way to describe him.”

  “He looks . . . to be honest . . .” It was rare to find Davenport lost for words and he seemed annoyed by the fact. “I have it, Fergins. He looks like one of those ancient Greek sculptures of a god, just before the Romans knocked off its arms and nose.”

  There you have Davenport truly believing he was answering a question.

  I thought I had this somewhere on me. Here, Mr. Clover, while I drink my water, I present evidence for my statement about the bookaneers’ practices. See where I have underlined.

  THE BOOKANEER’S RULES . . . COLLECTED AND TRANSCRIBED BY E. C. FERGINS FROM PENROSE DAVENPORT

  . . . The bookaneer does not tell his stories.

  . . . The bookaneer should refrain from and avoid sharing information with other bookaneers.

  . . . Missions should never be undertaken or altered for the sole or chief purpose of competing with or sabotaging another bookaneer.

  . . . The identities of parties engaging the bookaneer’s services should be protected for all time.

  . . . Similarly, the bookaneer is never to reveal his identity to the Subject of a mission even after a mission has ended.

  . . . The bookaneer avoids, whenever possible, the appearance of any interest in publishing or books in order to leave their Subjects ignorant of his intentions.

  . . . If the bookaneer requires assistance on a mission, the assistant must never question anything that may occur.

  . . . The bookaneer should never work for or cooperate directly with an author, as to leave their respective interests uncontaminated.

  As you think of these during my tale, keep in mind that Davenport liked to make qualifications about these commandments. To return to our visit to Vailima. I could hardly sleep that night thinking of what it might be like. Ceremonious and formal, maybe, or warm and raucous. When the hour finally came the next day for our call, we rode up a long, steep mountain road—“road” on Upolu being anything less dense and impassable than an uncut jungle—that ended at a vast clearing. Palm trees swayed back and forth in clusters along the property. There were servants spread out in every direction. Two at the entrance gate. A party of rugged servants working the grounds with hatchets tucked into the bands and belts. House servants standing stock-still with rifles around the shoulders of their white liveries, staring coldly out at us. It reminded me of what the other whites had told us—Hines and the man from the English consulate—that no part of the island except for the beach was truly safe. That no white man in his right mind would leave the beach, yet here was Stevenson’s house. And here we were.

  Mount Vaea, the volcanic center of the island, was a giant above us, climbing into the thick white and silver clouds and throwing deep shadows. Vailima was as high up on Upolu as could be. In fact, if you looked back, as Dante warns never to do with the threat of returning to the beginning, all you could see beyond the green slopes was the unbroken expanse of ocean.

  Before we could reach the threshold of the house, a large and muscular man, one of the house servants, blocked our way and demanded something of us in Samoan. “Solosolo! Solosolo!” he was repeating.

  “What do we do?” I asked Davenport when no solution to the standoff presented itself.

  “Handkerchief,” called a voice from one of the many windows just below the terra-cotta roof. “It means ‘handkerchief.’”

  This did not in itself clarify the demand.

  “Solosolo. Show them!” continued the disembodied voice.

  Davenport and I glanced at each other. “Solosolo,” the bookaneer said with amusement, removing his wrinkled silk handkerchief from the pocket of his shirt. He unfolded it and held it up, then turned it to show the other side. I did the same with mine. The big man in front of us studied them with the careful eyes of a museum-goer, then waved us ahead through the door.

  Fanny Stevenson, who must have been the voice we had heard from above, was racing down the stairs as we entered. “We cannot be too cautious,” she explained of the handkerchief ceremony. “Louis becomes ill so easily, we must ensure nobody having a cold comes near him. Please, follow me, sit down with us.”

  Do not wait to hear the impressions of Robert Louis Stevenson I gathered from this visit, because we never saw him. Davenport had been wrong about inciting Stevenson’s compulsion to investigate the new “author.” It was Fanny, an American, who had heard from her husband of a new British citizen on Upolu, and had insisted on sending for me. For me. Davenport was nothing more than an afterthought. She asked me an array of questions, many political, about England and Scotland and the latest news from abroad. She hardly said a word to Davenport, whose annoyance would have been obvious only to me.

  Fanny’s adult daughter and son, Belle and Lloyd, sat obligingly across from us in the large hall. The walls were a calm shade of blue, reminding me of the ocean on a clear, windless day. Though the place was impressive, the dust and flies still gathered in the air here as they did in the most humble hut on the island. The three Stevensons presented a picture of a very purposeless family. Each one meticulously rolled his and her own cigarette, but other than that seemed content to wait around. From somewhere in the house, there was the high whistle of a wind instrument.

  “Louis says if a man does not roll his smoke oneself, it is not worth smoking,” pointed out Lloyd to illuminate his fastidious cigarette-making procedure. He leaned far back in his chair and glanced languidly at us as he finished, admiring the result before resting it in his lips. I was so consumed by the fact we were in the Stevensons’ home, I hardly recall what initial opinion I formed of Lloyd that day. He was tall and slender like his stepfather, but sturdier, with a face more juvenile than his twenty-two years, and had a way of shrugging his shoulder that could dismiss entire philosophies of existence. “But you know Louis,” he added, as though we did. “He has his rules for life.”

  Belle chuckled. She was much shorter than her brother, with a dark tint to her pretty skin that seemed better suited to island life. “Example. He believes women should be allowed to divorce, but men shouldn’t. Thank goodness, or I might still be chained to that worthless drunkard.”

  “If there had not been the possibility of divorce, you would not have married Joe at all,” Lloyd said; then, in my general direction: “My sister is attracted by the possibility of trouble, you know, Mr. Fergus.”

  “Well,” she insisted, “I now have my higher calling here in Samoa.”

  “It’s Fergins, actually—” I interjected.

  “Calling? I was not aware you had found a higher calling,” needled her brother.

  She ignored him, and with a slight fluttering of her eyes, turned to Davenport. “Oh, do you like it?”

  Davenpo
rt had stood and was examining the large hearth. This was at one end of the hall, opposite a rickety piano.

  “It is handsome, Miss Strong,” said Davenport. “But I would think a fireplace would have limited utility in the tropical climate.”

  “Useless thing,” Belle Strong confirmed with a dash of disgust, her finger pointed at the hearth, though her dark eyes lingered on Davenport. “As a point of fact, you gentlemen are sitting in the first and only room in all Samoa to have a fireplace. Only Louis dares use it in this never-ending heat. It is rather a spectacle for the natives around here. Your missionaries can teach them all they want about Jesus Christ, but the silly creatures will still stick their heads inside and try to understand whether this is something good or it is from the devil.”

  “Louis declared he would not live in a house without a fireplace,” added Fanny, chortling and then shaking her head at the thought. The novelist’s wife, like her daughter, was short with dark hair and big, sparkling eyes. They could have been sisters, and in some way Fanny would be the more intriguing of the two. She wore a native-style dress that would be called a nightgown in London or New York, shapeless and decorated with tobacco and spots of grass that were the only evidence so far of any members of the family ever leaving the house. She left me with the impression of Bluebeard’s wife after being brought into the light. Her infectious smiles were followed each time with heavy sighs. “It almost bankrupted us, costing more than one thousand dollars to build, so I suppose his threat nearly came true. Mr. Fergins,” she said, turning back to me with an almost desperate air, “what do you really believe about how Louis would be received were he to ever go back to Great Britain?”

  I could see how important it was to her that I give an encouraging answer.

  “With a hero’s welcome. King Arthur coming home from Avalon. Great writers move us all closer to God. And there are very few great writers left in the world, Mrs. Stevenson.”

  (Fanny, she chided me. I protested. She insisted.)

  “Those who remain,” I went on, “like your husband, are really walking treasures, Fanny. Imagine Wordsworth and Dickens come back to life to walk the streets and shake hands with their readers. It would be as if you brought the English language itself to life.”

  There was never a suggestion of Stevenson receiving us that day, nor on the next visit a few days later. Fanny was just as bored with her fellow American and preoccupied with interviewing me about her husband’s literary reputation. We only caught a glimpse of Belle and Lloyd this time before they went off on a picnic with some of the domestics, then we had tea with Fanny, until a servant came to whisper something to her that caused her to furrow her brow before excusing herself with a quick march out of the room.

  I could see Davenport growing more irritated that even time to ourselves in the house could not be very productive. To gain entrance into the life of an author who lived alone was usually a rare opportunity for a bookaneer—it reminds me of when Davenport managed to be invited in by Miss Dickinson, for instance, to be part of her eccentric household in Amherst in the summer of ’78—but to be in Vailima was to be an insect under glass. One of the servants, whose Samoan name had been anglicized from Sala to Charlie, was particularly prone to being right at our heels as we wandered around, amusing himself by translating Samoan words into English and vice versa, in a deep, excitable voice. “Loi: Ants!”

  “How have you learned so much English?” I asked him, careful not to step on the long line of ants to which he was pointing.

  “My master gives me lessons,” Charlie said, tucking a smile under his carefully groomed mustache. His hair was dyed a soft orange, but his mustache was dark black, making him seem an amalgam of several men. Along with his earthy necklaces, he wore a wooden crucifix.

  “You do your master proud,” Davenport said. Then, struck with an idea, he added, “I mean to say, you do Tusitala proud.”

  “Tusitala: Teller of tales!” translated Charlie.

  Davenport threw a grin in my direction. “Teller of tales,” he echoed.

  Not long after, the halls were pierced with a strange howling noise. There was a pause, then it rang out again.

  “What is that?” I asked after noticing Charlie was reluctant to speak.

  He whispered to us with a very different tone, one of trepidation: “Tusitala.”

  The awful noise—which reached our ears once more—was kind of like how I’d imagine the war whoop of your nation’s backwoods Indians. Servants ran from all directions and entered from outside, chasing the sound.

  “I’m very sorry for him,” Charlie mumbled. “He does not know what is in store.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Davenport asked.

  The attendant’s eyes widened with fright. “Whoever did wrong to Tusitala.”

  Charlie joined the stream of servants and we both followed. The natives had collected inside a small, dimly lit room entered through the library, a chamber we would later hear referred to as the master’s den or sanctum. Each took his or her place sitting on the floor, forming a semicircle around a narrow bed. Charlie threw a look back that cautioned us not to come closer, so we remained in the library.

  Leaning my body toward the French doors, I could see arms, long and gaunt as oars, of the man who was sitting up in bed, wrapped in what appeared to be shawls and blankets, and propped up by pillows. Though his face was obscured from view, I knew at once it was him. That is one thing about Stevenson. Even a fingertip of his was unmistakable. In a pitch-dark room, one would surely feel his presence before ever seeing him.

  I could also see the profile of Fanny standing by the bed, guarding him like some enchanted dragon beside a medieval king.

  Stevenson began a prayer in English, his voice sonorous, commanding. “Our God, look down upon us and shine into our hearts. Help us to be far from falsehood so that each of us may stand before thy face in his integrity.”

  The rest of the bizarre session was conducted in the native tongue. Each servant came up to the bed and placed his or her hand on a Bible, which Stevenson gripped with his long fingers, then repeated the very serious and absurd oath stated by their master.

  We found Charlie later that day, and he translated the refrain best he could remember: “This is the Holy Bible here that I am touching. Behold me, O God! If I knew who it was that took away the pig or the place to which the stolen pig was taken, or have heard anything relating to the pig, and shall not declare the same—be made an end of by God this life of mine!”

  Even before we knew what the words meant, I could make out enough to know that the ritual ensnared a bowlegged young man who trembled and stammered when it came to his turn to recite. After a brief exchange, the bowleg confessed to having eaten the missing pig in question.

  “Fiaali’i,” Stevenson intoned after the culprit groveled for forgiveness, the master now switching to English, “your wish to eat was greater than your wish to be a gentleman. You have shown a bad heart and your sin is a great one, not for the pig—I hope you know the damn pig counts as naught—but because you have been false to your Vailima family. It is easy to say that you are sorry, that you wish you were dead: but that is no answer. We have lost far more than food meant for Lloyd’s birthday. We have lost our trust in you, which used to be so great, our confidence in your loyalty. See how many bad things have resulted from your first sin? You have hurt all our hearts here, not because of the pig, but because we are ashamed and mortified before the world. I am not your father. I am not your chief. The belly is your chief!”

  Lloyd Osbourne would make an offhand remark during our stay in Samoa, capped by the philosophical shrug of his, that I cannot help but recall as I think of that scene we witnessed. “This, Fergus,” he said to me of Vailima, “is the only place where you will ever see Samoans run.”

  • • •

  IT WAS A BURNING HOT DAY on our next call to Vailima. Sitting in the great
hall felt like being inside a volcano. A little native girl was fanning one side of Belle’s face with a beautiful span of crimson feathers, while Belle fanned her other cheek with a Japanese-style fan. She mentioned to us that her stepfather had been out on the grounds before our arrival but now, yet again, had retreated to the seclusion of his sanctum. I could see Davenport was trying his best to appear unmoved by our continuing bad luck. The more time went on without developing some kind of relationship with Stevenson, the harder it would be to invent excuses to keep calling on them, and I knew he worried that our invitations would run dry before he had a chance to ingratiate himself with the writer.

  “It is a hard and unexciting life. Most times the only people there are to talk to around here are the domestics,” Belle complained, her plump pink lips puckered. “And they hardly speak English.”

  “New faces must be a welcome sight, then,” Davenport ventured, perhaps hoping she would be our way of ensuring the continuation of our visits.

  She looked him up and down, studying him with as much interest and doubt as when she had first met us. “Sometimes,” she said with so little inflection, it might have come from Davenport himself.

  Fanny was bent over the spotless but dusty fireplace smoking a cigarette. I still had to swallow down my horror at the sight of the wife of one of the world’s greatest novelists smoking in a public room.

  “Unexciting?” I wriggled into the conversation. “It seems there is no lack of excitement here, Miss Strong.”

  “Yes,” she answered, taking a long puff from a cigarette. “For instance, when I found my husband had taken his opium and his native wife to the other side of the island. The ape, the disgusting ape, the foppish little drunken ape.”

  “I see,” I surrendered.

  “If you brought Austin home from school, you would be less lonely. A boy should be with his mother.”