The Last Bookaneer (21 page)

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.”

“Is your mind so base that you cannot see and admire what is beautiful in the form God Almighty has created? Do you not see that what you do on this beautiful island is pollute their minds and sully their modest thoughts?”

Hines, fidgeting like a marionette with the strings loose, offered to send a fresh pig over for the feast—a gift of hospitality from one white man to another, he said before he hurriedly gathered himself to exit. Stevenson did not make a move to see him out. The novelist closed his eyes as though he were going to take a nap. I was relieved, confident Hines would never be seen near Vailima again. I suppose I shouldn't have savored the moment as much as I did—as I leaned forward, my spectacles started to slip and, before I could catch them, fell from my face, drifting over the railing of the mezzanine.

They didn't break. But it might have been better if they had, so they would not be recognizable. They floated down and landed with a rattle in Hines's path. He noticed them right before his boot was about to crush them. He picked them up and studied them, before placing them back on the floor.

Davenport had received my message from Vao's hand and remained in the outbuilding until Hines was gone. Running down the stairs to retrieve my spectacles and make my exit, I nearly ran headlong into Fanny, who did not flinch from a possible collision. She stood stock-still, with the same hard glare I had seen her direct toward us in the fields.

“What is it you want here?”

I do not know how a person can be described both as almost whispering and almost yelling, but that is how I remember her words sounded. I was prepared to babble out an answer when she turned on her heel and went to check on her husband, who had broken down into a violent cough.

When I recounted these details later that day to Davenport, he seemed neither as concerned with Hines's visit nor as relieved at its outcome as I'd expected. Other things preoccupied him. The slow pace of Stevenson's writing, the novelist's untimely seclusion, my description of Fanny's sudden hostility and her peculiar question to me. And Belial, I suspected, more than anything. Not that Davenport would talk about any of it, lately less than ever. Instead, he was spending hours at a time in a laconic and expressionless state; he appeared suddenly plumper than he really was (this happened regularly with him, like phases of the moon). At Vailima, he had to play the part of the amiable visitor. When he was with me in our hut, he dropped all pretense and resembled one of the Stevensons' Buddhas.

Since Davenport's stony muteness in this period renders him rather resistant to all descriptions, I will return for a moment to an earlier point in time, and recount for you a conversation that occurred when he was in a more loquacious state. I had interrupted myself before—weren't you supposed to remind me, Mr. Clover?—when telling you of the time riding side by side when Davenport suddenly saw fit to finally answer a question of mine about whether he ever desired to be a writer. “Of course, every young man of a certain kind at a certain time in his life wishes to be a writer, often confusing eagerness and talent for reading with ability to write. You did not feel that way?”

“Who am I?” I replied. “It would never have crossed my mind.”

“A born bookseller.”

“How did your plans change?”

“About?”

I reminded him of the topic—his young self. “College,” Davenport began, “was a bitter disappointment.” At seventeen years old, he said, he knew with great passion what he did not want. He would not sit in a dusty chamber breathing the smoky air of a city street through a window while copying out legal documents. No, he would not share the destiny of other fellows who also had no fortunes to inherit. His would be a life of sophistication, a life of invitations into the best social circles and men of letters. He expected college to provide him with that.

Instead, Davenport explained to me, during his sophomore year he was accused of stealing. The matter had to do with a classmate, a rich bore named Halsey Alexander. The theft was that of a book, and the president of the faculty insisted Davenport confess. He did so, without coercion.

“Do you claim the book was yours?”

“No.”

“Young man, I hope you understand the seriousness of this action. A student in our college is forbidden to steal. You must know that. Are you aware that it is a rare and priceless book? A family heirloom that belonged to his grandfather.”

“Wait a minute there, just wait a minute. Professor, do you know where I found the book? It was propping open the window, the heavy pane crunching down the spine. Where I come from, books are rare treasures, and a book like this . . . Tell me honestly, do you think, sir, that Alexander deserves such a treasure?”

“Who do you think, young man, is in a position to judge that? A man from a family such as the Alexanders, or a man with an ancestry such as yours, a family of day laborers and wanderers?”

The president went on to insist that Davenport return the book at once and apologize for so basely insulting Alexander. Davenport handed over the book, shook the president's hand, and said he would not apologize were the earth to start orbiting Venus.

 • • • 

P
REPARING FOR HIS DEPARTURE
from Princeton, New Jersey, the latent ambition to be a writer increased by the minute. His departure, and its basis in the theft of a book, in retrospect pointed out his true destiny. The whole truth was, Davenport had no particular interest in book editions or in collecting books. His antagonism toward his classmate was against his ignorance and undeserved wealth.

Davenport would attain his goals not only for himself but also on behalf of anyone whose dreams had been buried.

“What in the land do you intend to do for funds?” Flowers, one of his college friends, had asked him when he announced his plan to go to Boston.

“Boston is an expensive place, Davenport,” added in his roommate, Lank Bailey.

“See it this way, Davenport. Take a spot on the literary magazine here, make your name, then you'll find your place in Boston or New York later.”

“That's a head on your shoulders, Flowers,” Bailey said, applauding.

Davenport shook his head. He had not told them that the faculty had voted for him to leave for at least a year, and that he had decided he would never come back. “No, men. I shall not wait. Not a month, not a year, not another day. Writing, Lank, is about living—not living in luxury. Flowers, literature is about now. Its pulse comes from today, not yesterday or even tomorrow.”

His fellow sophs stared glumly.

“Here, Lank, we merely kick our feet, hands in pockets, watching the active world move around us. I wish to move with it, from this point on.”

“That's Emersonian enough,” Bailey began. “See here, Davenport. If this is about what that fop Alexander said you did—”

“Not at all,” Davenport interrupted, and waved all other objections away with his hand.

Once in Boston, Davenport waited patiently to hear when the stories he had sent ahead to
The Atlantic Monthly
would be published. After nearly a month, he received a letter from the editor.

He marched over to the famous bookshop that back then housed the magazine's offices. He described his business there to no fewer than four different people with vague positions of influence, and after what seemed to be an hour, he was ushered through a curtain to the messy chamber occupied by James T. Fields, the very man who had rejected his submissions. The big-bearded man was disarmingly enthusiastic as he explained the ways in which Davenport might tinker with his piece to make it more suitable for publication.

Before Davenport stepped out of the room, he saw something that sickened him. He was watching a man in an apron remove manuscripts from a large pile, glance through them, and discard them—all in a swift, almost unified motion. The apron made him look like a butcher and in the collegian's eyes he might have been covered in blood instead of ink. Davenport had felt reassured by what Fields had said to him and about his prospects, but now he realized it was a conversation the editor had ten times a week. He would never be published in
The
Atlantic
. He knew all this the moment he laid eyes on the butcher.

Before he could think of it, Davenport watched himself as though from a distance, as his own fingers swiftly pulled some papers from a nearby desk and folded them neatly into the inside pocket of his raggedy coat. He felt unaccountably happier. His eyes turned to a small woman in a cream-colored bonnet, her eyes challenging him with their own accidental glance before she seemed to glide away.

He should have been contemplating the rote dismissal by the literary man and his own inexplicable theft, but instead he thought for hours about that face. Her eyes were certain, strong, wild. She seemed to be some mythological being whose gaze might transform you into some base animal, or disable your senses, or suit you in magical armor that would repel enemies.

In the days that followed his encounter at the publishing office, Davenport wandered. Gone was the sense of purpose and destiny he had brought to Boston. Every day he loitered in another place in this Athens of America. Every day he saw her. First, at the coffeehouse. Then inside the horse cars. And in the Common applauding a procession of Union soldiers who had returned home. She never looked at him directly, yet he was dismayed by the fact that she was everywhere. He lay awake at night. In those sleepless hours he came to believe that James T. Fields suspected him of his theft and had sent this pretty woman to spy on him before calling in the police.

Then a day passed without sight of her, and the fear flew right out of his mind. But still he could not sleep, and he walked the streets at night. To be a stranger in New York is to be like everyone else; to be a stranger in Boston is to feel what it is to be a stranger. It gives a man an unsubdued craving. He had worn out his only shoes. He stopped at a well-lit spot where he could study the face of some heroic and aloof soldier of the Revolution—he had not bothered to read the name on the base of the statue.

“You are a dull man.”

He turned at the voice to see whom she was addressing. It would never have occurred to him that the words could have been directed at him; that was how far from dull he believed himself. Of course, it was the mythological woman from the publishing firm.

“You see me following you for days and instead of attempting to discover who I am, you try to escape. I suspect you escaped to Boston, too.”

Davenport wanted to prove he knew more than she thought. “You were at Ticknor and Fields when I met with that cold-blooded liar, Mr. Fields. You believe I committed some wrong there, and hope that under your spell I will confess it.”

“You fancy yourself important but you're not. You have never done anything in your life that would make you worthy of being followed. But that could change right now. I want you to do something for me.”

“That's brash, miss.” The truth was, the eighteen-year-old young man would have done anything she asked.

“Don't bother resenting the Boston literati. This city did not earn its place as a publishing center; it inherited it. That is why New York readies to overtake it, because it is craftier and more determined. I need a set of plates stolen from Houghton,
The
Atlantic
's printer.”

“Why would you think I would help with such a thing?” He acted disgusted, though, for a reason he could not understand, he was not. Maybe because the writers printed in
The
Atlantic
did not deserve to be, not like he did.

“The plates will be made and protected by the printers' devils. Women cannot be employed among those peculiar scum, which makes it difficult for me to gain entrance.”

“But I can be one of the scum.”

“You must be hired as a devil and then follow my instructions.”

He shuffled his feet as though to get out of the trap she was setting.

“If you refuse, I will tell Fields about your theft.”

He felt himself back in the president of the faculty's office. His outrage overtook him. “You haven't any evidence I ever stole anything. Nothing that would hold in a court of law.”

She nodded and removed the proof sheet he had taken from the magazine offices.

“Where did you get that?” he asked.

“From your hotel room, Mr. Davenport. The room you are already behind four dollars on paying. This is your hand, is it not, in the margins, critiquing the poor quality of writing? You are very liberal in your exclamation marks. But I know something about you. You do not want to be a writer.”

“Wait a minute. How are you so certain?” Her statement sent a nervous tremor through him.

She had an openmouthed grin. “Because you don't have to be. Writers must write and they suffer if they don't. Then they suffer if they do. It is no way to live, and if they could they would do something else, anything else. You can do something else—something that will give you far more control than those writers you admire.” I ought to add that in person Kitten was just who she seemed to be; this was a peculiar trait for a woman who employed disguises and false identities from time to time in her profession, and I think people believed because, when it came to Kitten, you wanted to believe her. But there was no escaping the fact that she was going to take something in return for that faith; it was only a matter of when and how much.