The Last Bookaneer

  After his speech, he continued on his way without a farewell. He may have been half-English, but he was all New Yorker.

  I shouldn’t blame Mr. Fergins’s departure for the fact that the romance of the railroad was lost to me, especially since so many train routes had already been permanently unhooking their restaurant cars to save money. Maybe I have a better way to put it, which is this: once reading books lost a little romance, so did living in New York City and, in some related way, so did being a railroader. I suppose Mr. Fergins’s story had a part in my moving on from this era of life, though at the time the reverse seemed true. It seemed as though Mr. Fergins, having found in me a willing recipient for his narrative, had finally freed himself from the memory he carried around of those events and had been able to return to his humdrum but contented existence in London without another thought.

  I cannot remember ever conceiving of a book as a piece of property before meeting Mr. Fergins. Or if I ever had stopped to think such a thing, it was that the book I held in my hands belonged to me, or to Mr. Fergins, who had loaned it to me, or to my father, or a public library. I suppose it might have occurred to me that the book belonged to the author, too, but this would have seemed remote, something that mattered only in the past. Now I understood that intellectual property, as it was called in the language of the law, was always in danger and the reason began with my own impressions. It had seemed natural and right that the contents, the ideas should belong to me as much as to their creator, and in a nutshell that explained the whole existence and history of the bookaneers.

  I had trouble looking at a book the same way I had before Mr. Fergins told me his incredible tales. He once said to me that books can make you do things without your realizing. For example, he said, when a book describes someone opening his mouth slightly and licking the outlines of his lips, you cannot help but touch your tongue to your own lips. If it is a bit more specific, say, describing the tongue running along each tooth under your upper lip, your own tongue will perform the act involuntarily sooner or later. A trivial example, of course, but he cautioned me that the pages of a book can influence our thinking and our actions in ways we never comprehend, and that the world of publishing has always been well aware of it. I have revered books, but now I never read a page without sensing the various demons fighting for control of the words, control of me. There were times when I cursed myself for it, and cursed Mr. Fergins for peeling the ink from the page and showing me what lay between.

  A new book cart, smaller and creakier, appeared on the train before the winter was out. The vendor’s New York accent seemed strange and modern when expecting Mr. Fergins’s lively and soothing English. This impostor’s cart never made a stop, never even slowed down, unless a paying customer snapped fingers or waved a hand. This made Mr. Fergins’s removal from my life sting more.

  Another few months went by. There used to be a small bookstore in the city, not far from where I was enjoying what passed for outdoors in that metropolis. In the window, I noticed the name Robert Louis Stevenson on a book under a placard announcing, “Newly Published!” I picked it up straightaway, expecting that Stevenson’s masterpiece, the source of the battle between the two greatest bookaneers, had finally been published, and would give me some answers. As I held it in my hands, Belial’s face, his proud and repulsive scowl, appeared in my mind. But this was no novel at all. It was called A Footnote to History, a long essay of sorts on Samoa. I could only read a few pages in the store before the glare of the bookseller paralyzed me. Mr. Fergins told me a bookseller can determine almost immediately whether one who enters his store can afford to buy a book or not, and, as usual, I fell into the latter category. Before I returned it to the table, I happened to notice the name of the publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York—the same firm where Belial had been taken by the police.

  That summer marked my last run on the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad before I joined the merchant navy, where I would remain in service for more than five years. The first two years I sailed the African and Asian continents, and I suppose it could be said that the experience changed and hardened me, but no more or less than any other man; after a brief sojourn on my own, I shipped with another vessel, which went through the South Seas.

  There is so much to see when touring new places, I’ve found it interesting to notice what I remember and what is soon forgotten. What stays in my memory about my first passage through the South Seas are colors. Because of the volcanic coral below, the ocean waters take on a variety of colors depending on the spot, as though a rainbow dripped into the water. As we hove to, the giant black hull of our ship seemed an unwanted conqueror of all that beauty, the seabirds crying out at us. All the ships and buildings that could be seen on land from the sea were of European or American styles; only in the interior of the islands would I see what the native houses were like. Naturally, when I found myself in that amazing part of the world I began thinking again of the events as told to me by Mr. Fergins. The details were as fresh in my mind as if they had happened last week and happened to me; indeed, they were more real than some of my own adventures. When I had the opportunity to visit Samoa, with a little free time on my hands, I could not resist. I hired a guide and asked to go to Vailima.

  Upolu was quiet. I saw scorched ground and from a distance I spied severed human heads on stakes—brown and white heads alike, and three of the heads appeared to be taken from women—but judging from the degree of decomposition, these horrific remnants of war must have been baking in the sun for a long time. My guide said that after an unusually dry season, famine had struck the island and the war halted. I had learned from Stevenson’s book on Samoa (which I eventually read during my travels) that the island could have famine or it could have war, but it could not sustain both.

  Vailima was as desolate as the island itself. Most of the livestock I’d heard described by Mr. Fergins wandered free or were gone altogether; two lonely horses grazed in the humid afternoon air near the paddock. One was a black mare with a lump on her knee. I recognized the other one as the novelist’s unmistakable piebald circus animal, Jack. His mane was filled with flowers. Jack raised his head with a faint snort and blinked out at me with handsome but vacant eyes; I could picture him rearing on his hind legs and dancing. Instead he just chewed his grass and, tiring of me, lowered his head again. After a time, the tall, slender figure of a man approached and my heart beat fast with anticipation. He was wearing a straw hat and dark sun spectacles and was barefoot.

  As he came closer, I recognized Lloyd Osbourne from Mr. Fergins’s descriptions as a sturdy man with a juvenile face. He seemed sluggish in general, an impression made stronger by the striped cotton clothes that looked like pajamas, but he appeared equal to having visitors, even a stranger. He led the way inside to the great hall. There was the piano—now covered in layers of dust, like much of the furniture in the house—that Pen Davenport had once ordered Mr. Fergins to play.

  “You can play?” Mr. Osbourne said in a tone between a question and a statement.

  “My father’s church had an organ and he used to teach me when the chapel was empty. I only know some very stiff church music, unfortunately,” I said, running my fingers just above the keys, thinking of the bookseller nervously coaxing out Stevenson on Davenport’s command.

  We were joined by a native girl, no older than fourteen, who sat on the floor and mixed a drink in a sliced coconut shell.

  “Have you had ’ava?” my host asked.

  “I’ve heard about it from—” I stopped short. “. . . some of the sailors.”

  “Chewed root mixed with water, and strained. Oh, it takes some getting used to. But it’s authentic, at least, more than can be said for the tinned beef and religions we’ve managed to introduce to the islanders. ’Ava is made in a rather grotesque fashion in the young girls’ mouths, but one gets used to anything. Just stay away from green root.”

  “Oh
?”

  “The green ’ava root is stronger, and has a positively awful effect in nonnatives, so much that they cannot move their legs for twenty hours or so. The natives giggle about it, but you wouldn’t if you ever drank it.”

  “Thank you,” I said, as the shell came to me.

  “My stepfather is over there,” Mr. Osbourne said. I followed his gaze to a window that opened onto a view of the volcanic mountain rising above us. “We had a great ceremony with some of the local chiefs who helped carry his body up.”

  “What happened?” I asked, taking a small sip of the pungent beverage. “Forgive me for not knowing, Mr. Osbourne. I have been at sea and we see newspapers infrequently.”

  “Why, it was about a year ago from this past December. He wrote hard all day, another new novel he judged his best work—about a father who is a judge and a son who is a lawyer in Edinburgh—he always thought a new book would be his best. We had our ’ava as usual. He actually mentioned how well he was feeling, and that he was thinking of making a lecture tour of America as Dickens once did. He was talking and talking on the verandah, as buoyant as you please, when he suddenly dropped to his knees. We brought him to that green chair and later our little brass bedstead was carried down here. I took the fastest horse we had—Louis’s fearless old circus creature, Jack—and went to fetch the doctor. When I jumped off, the doctor got on and Jack brought him back as though the animal knew what was happening and what was needed. I refuse to give Jack up for any price, for I think he is extraordinary, and the native boys who pass drape him in flowers as a reward for how he tried to save Louis. But, in any event, Louis never recovered consciousness. ‘Tofa!’ whispered the Samoans all around the house. Sleep.”

  “So much for a violent death,” I said with a pang of unexpected sorrow.

  Mr. Osbourne did not hear my quiet aside or ignored it. “You will find which path to take up when you are closer, now that we have marked it. I can tell you the inscription on the grave, but most want to read it for themselves when they reach the summit. You are a pilgrim, are you not, Mr. Clover?”

  He shuffled to a chair and sank into it as I tried to think how to answer. “An American reader, traveling here to see Louis’s grave?” he tried again, a touch of annoyance in his voice. “Oh, we have all kinds—acclaimed literati, political gentlemen of high standing, single women, Negroes, men who know not a word of English—nothing surprises me anymore. So many always said they meant to visit while he lived here, yet it’s once he was in the ground that the visitors finally come for Louis. He would not have liked to hear me call him that, you know. They called him by a savage name here and”—he chuckled—“he took to it after a while.”

  “Tusitala.” This prompted a second look from the writer’s stepson, and I moved the conversation hastily along. “Where is the rest of your family, Mr. Osbourne, if I may ask?”

  His sister, Belle, had left the island almost immediately after Stevenson’s death, and his mother departed from Samoa a few weeks later. Fanny returned to America, which, Mr. Osbourne said, she acknowledged as her true home. Stevenson had given a purse of gold to Ah Fu, the real name of John Chinaman, in case he ever wanted to return to his family in China, which he did only after the novelist’s death. All but a few of the remaining servants removed to their own villages or joined the various warring factions. Mr. Osbourne stayed on to finish clearing out the estate. As I looked around, the scenes Mr. Fergins described to me four and a half years earlier came to life—the quiet infiltration by Davenport and Belial that had gone so wrong.

  “What will become of Vailima?”

  “Indeed, Mr. Clover,” Mr. Osbourne said, then gave what Mr. Fergins had called a philosophical shrug. “My sister and mother prayed so hard to leave this island, prayed that Louis, a man who never changed his mind, would decide to go back to England or Scotland. This was rather a grand place once, and I even find myself a little reluctant to close it up and go. What a world this was! Louis may not have always been happy here, but I am sure of one thing: he was happier here than he would have been in any place in the world. Maybe one would not think a stepson could judge best.”

  “Do you recall a visitor to your house called Penrose Davenport?” I asked. “Or Thomas, the missionary?”

  He seemed irritated that I had let his lofty comment float away in favor of my eager change of topic. I tried to make up for it by adding something personal. “I, also, have a stepfather, actually. I was ten when my mother married, and soon after I was told the white minister at the same church where my mother worked was my father. Maybe I had secretly known before; it’s hard to really remember. I had two fathers after that, I suppose, but could not really call either one father.”

  He sat up straighter, closing his eyes and nodding before blowing another cloud from his cigarette and taking a long drink from a glass of beer that must have been near the boiling point, as it had been in the room before my arrival. “Who was it you’re talking about? Davenport?”

  “An American. It was some five years ago he would have arrived here. You might remember him by the name he originally gave: Porter.”

  “No, friend, no. This is Samoa. You cannot expect me to remember such things after so many have passed through here. Why, what white man in the South Seas doesn’t go by a false name at one time or another? I wouldn’t bet a single shilling your name is Clover.”

  “It certainly is.”

  “Even ‘Tusitala’ was a disguise of sorts for Louis,” he went on, then sighed when he saw I still waited for him to give real consideration to the question. “There are four steamers a month that make port at Apia when it’s not the rainy season, and back then there was an endless parade of strangers and visitors trying to stake claims to the island. And the missions, trying to collect as many souls as possible. Well, there were the Methodists, the Wesleyans, the Marists. Perhaps I do recall something of the missionary you mention. There have been so many who came through here, I probably could not remember half the names. They all liked Louis, and he usually liked them. Missionaries enjoy knowing men who have no religion. Fancy that! Thomas left rather hurriedly, if we are thinking of the same man. I tried to stay uninvolved in most of my stepfather’s business and political dealings; it seemed to have a way of making me his partner, and I always wanted to feel I was his son. I spent my time overseeing the outside boys. As for Davenport . . . Porter, did you say he was called at first?”

  “He was arrested when it was discovered he planned to steal some papers from your stepfather. You must remember. I heard about the affair from another visitor you might recollect, Mr. Fergins.”

  Mr. Osbourne rubbed his long chin and then began to make another cigarette. We were facing the barren fireplace that had cost Stevenson so much to construct. “The name Fergins sounds somewhat familiar, but my memory is very poor when it comes to remembering names. If you had their portraits to guide me . . . Porter, yes. Some of it comes back to me a little. I remember watching the pair of men being carried away by soldiers in a litter with iron bars around it. I cannot give you very many particulars, though, or tell you whatever became of the poor fellows. We’ve gone through so many wars here, so many coups d’état, it’s a wonder we haven’t all been tossed into the prison at one time or another. I find I remember such useless things sometimes. What do you make of that? I seem to remember the man’s eyes—this Mr. Porter, I mean. Sleepy green eyes. Rather a handsome man, in a funny sort of way, no doubt my sister must have harassed him. Is that the fellow?”

  I said it was, though of course I had never met the man outside my mind’s eye.

  “Yes, I remember those catlike eyes, but nothing about what happened after he was taken away. You can inquire at the prison to see their records, if they even keep any, which they probably don’t since, I’ll remind you again, this is Samoa. I think you have the other name wrong. Fergin, I believe it was, there was no ‘s’ at the end. I helped brin
g him to Apia. Fergin was always reading one book or another he’d borrow from Louis’s library. Do you know that once, in this very room, Louis laid down the copy of Don Quixote he was reading, and told me, in words that linger still in my ears, that it was the saddest book he had ever read. I asked him what he meant. He said, ‘That’s what I am—just another Don Quixote.’”

  When I was riding away from Vailima, I looked back and noticed a swirling line of white smoke coming out of the chimney.

  Three days remained of my furlough on the islands. Most of the men had taken canoes to one of the islands known to be filled with ritual dancing, feasts, and friendly girls. After speaking to Mr. Osbourne my purpose became fixed. I would find out what had happened to Davenport after his imprisonment in Samoa. That had been one of the questions I most regretted not having asked when I still had the chance.

  Nobody at the Upolu prison had any distinct impressions of the man as I described him. One guard I interviewed thought certain the American had been in the prison for only six weeks, while another prison official believed the bookaneer had suffered confinement for years before deportation was arranged by the consulate. In any case, the prison had been through two fires and a dynamite explosion in an attempt to release political prisoners, and, as Mr. Osbourne predicted, there were no written records kept there. I could gain no reliable information about when he was released, or the bookaneer’s whereabouts after leaving Samoa, if he did make it off the island safely. The men at the consul knew nothing more than the prison officials. My search seemed pointless until, back in the village of Apia, I heard a rumor.

  It was said a white man of great ability and mystery who had been in Samoa had sailed to the nearby sovereign island of Tonga, and became a sort of informal adviser to the king there, after which he was granted control of his own small, sparsely populated island on the edge of the kingdom. I asked several Samoans and some foreigners who had been there for a long time whether this man was still on the Tongan island, and whether he and Pen Davenport might be one and the same.