The Last Bookaneer (9 page)

We went above and took some chairs up on the deck. Sailors occasionally passed on some errand in their uniforms, which were far less starchy than I remembered upon boarding. We were out at sea and the winds were strong and the snow-white sails full and magnificent. Davenport crossed his legs and looked over at me, as though he were back in the Garrick Club in '71 waiting for my part of our first conversation.

“Davenport!” I repeated. “Aren't you even going to explain?”

“I needed you to come with me to Samoa,” he said with his usual absence of emphasis, his hands crossed over his lap. “Think of the position I was in. You increasingly dislike long ocean voyages as you've gotten older. You grow nauseated and turn green. Even ten years ago your sea legs were wobbling. Remember the time you had to retrieve me from southern Italy and the schooner nearly capsized?”

“I recall something about it.”

“And I am not blind, my dear Fergins. I could see that your concerns about my mission flowed deeper than the treacherous passage, as you admitted. Would you have come with me halfway across the world this time?”

“You never asked me.”

“Oh, you would have readily agreed to it. Then, at the last moment, you would have confessed that you could not keep your resolve and would have apologized profusely before quickly disembarking and trying to take me with you.”

“Not so.” I tried to stay strong in my protest even though my voice must have confessed that he was right.

“Cheer up. You've passed the first day and a half of the voyage in tranquility and you shall be better able to manage because some of your senses will remain numbed for another few days.” He gestured up to the darkness gathering in the distance. Even the ocean looked black where an awning of clouds was sweeping in ahead. “Old Ormond says we are sailing into a storm, but then this far out at sea they are forever trading one storm for another.”

“Why?”

“I cannot say. Particles of vapor attracting each other.”

“I mean: Why do you need
me
? Indeed, I have often felt myself no more than a nuisance when I have traveled with you. How in the world can I be of help to you in Samoa, of all places?”

He leaned forward, seemingly giving this question more studious thought than the subject of my sedation. “At the start of July, when the new laws of copyright go into effect, my time as a bookaneer reaches an end. Well, there may be an odd job here or there, but mostly it will be finished except for the lowest scum of our profession, the barnacles who can hardly even be called bookaneers. We have not discussed that fated hour much, you and I, and I should just as soon keep it that way. Except for this: I want you to write a record of my last mission.”

“A book?”

“Heavens no! I should as soon be shot for adding to the world's bloated library. When did it occur to people to start writing books about what they like for supper? Not for posterity's sake either, as Bill was babbling on about. I do not give a whit for any of that. I simply want to remember what it was like. For myself, I mean. When I am old and forgetful.”

“You wish me to chronicle what happens in Samoa, then? That is why I am here on this ship?”

“Not just what happens this time. My history as a bookaneer. Perhaps some ruminations on the trade.”

The proposal did not entirely surprise me. Davenport disliked talking about himself but really liked other people talking about him.

“I have always wished you would discuss more openly . . .” I began. He glanced at me with a bored frown, impatient, as usual, for my answer. “It will be my honor, Davenport.”

As our discussions went on through supper, somehow my hesitation to come on the mission—a pure hypothetical, given the fact that he had never asked—became painted as a grave error on my part, and I must have apologized three or four times for the inconvenience of his taking extreme measures. “Why, if I were you, I would have lashed my arms and legs to the mast,” I offered. Questions occurred to me at regular intervals. “Where are my notebooks?” “Do I have enough to dress myself in?” “What about my bookstall?”

One of the trunks I had helped to carry onboard, it turned out, was filled with my belongings. As for the bookstall, Davenport, who had devised his plan to bring me several weeks earlier, had arranged for a temporary overseer, a mutual acquaintance called Frank Johnson.

“Oh,” I said, “he is a reliable sort.” Johnson was a former doctor who had given up his original profession to enter the book trade and for years was a competitor to my original mentor, Stemmes. He was a good bookseller, an honest businessman, and a big, friendly man, if slightly supercilious. He often boasted that he was related to Dr. Samuel Johnson and would only admit he was not if the other person knew enough to laugh at the ridiculous assertion. When I saw him, he would address me as “brother bookseller.”

“He retired two years ago from the trade but has been terribly bored, so he will relish being surrounded by your books on a temporary basis. I made it clear I expect him to live up to your standards.”

I could not help but feel flattered that Davenport, who could not be bothered to pay his hotel bills or eat a proper meal on most days, had made elaborate arrangements on my behalf. Being an associate of Pen Davenport, you alternated between wanting to run away and not being able to resist the chance to see what might happen next.

 • • • 

I
T IS NO PLEASURE
CRUISE
, sailing aboard a man-of-war, but the luxury steamship companies are not in the business of sailing for distant lands known for headhunters and cannibals. Frigates had better accommodations than dirty, crowded merchant vessels, at least. When the gunships had berths to spare, passengers brought extra income to defray unforeseen costs, besides breaking up the monotony for the officers. The
Colossus
had been called to the South Pacific to the island nations where the British government had interests to protect and oversee, including the several islands that comprised the small nation of Samoa.

To see the passengers is not so different from what you must see, Mr. Clover, in this restaurant car of the railroad: each person is trying to escape from somewhere or trying to find something they think they have lost. There were about a dozen fellow passengers onboard with us, including an Australian merchant named Lionel Hines. We dined with him at the captain's table several times. His head and stomach were large in relation to the rest of his body, his eyes like a squirrel's, his speaking voice loud and intense. The protruding position of his bottom jaw made his teeth seem clenched, and the shape of his mouth seemed made to vent anger. You will see I have cause for the thoroughly harsh opinion of him.

“What exactly is it you are going to do on the islands?”

He asked this question at supper with some of the officers. He was looking at me, so I opened my mouth ready to answer, but Davenport's voice interrupted before I spoke.

“We travel on business, Mr. Hines.”

Davenport, sitting to my left, had put a period to the exchange in only six words, because he knew that no man of business wanted an obligation to give details of his purpose, and for Hines to press us would violate that unspoken rule.
Business
was a word that stopped conversation. Hines grumbled slightly, his teeth back to their clench.

This man was particularly displeased with me, though I identified no logical reason for animus. I am believed overly garrulous by many—oh, I know how a peddler is seen by other people. We talk and talk until money changes hands for our wares and then we shut up and move on. But we do not talk in order to sell, contrary to what people believe; we talk because to sell, to convince, to persuade, is a life of loneliness, whether the goods are books, gold watches, or flowers. In any case, Captain Ormond, with his clay pipe always fixed in his mouth, and his officers seemed to enjoy my company, laughing at my anecdotes about some of the colorful characters who would come to my stall in London. I make no personal claims as raconteur. But they were hearing only complaints from the mouth of Hines, and little of anything out of Davenport, who stayed in his tiny berth for four or five hours at a time. There were no female passengers aboard. Many of the other passengers were even more seasick than I was. I was the best option for amusement, in other words, in a place with little competition.

There was a small chamber belowdecks the crew called a library. It had three benches, a broken table, no librarian, no shelves, and no more than twenty inexpensive books kept in an old trunk, half of which were related to sailing or marine matters. Even the semblance of a library was a siren song calling me to it, and as storms overtook the craft and we were forced to spend most of the time between decks it became my usual station. I would put the books out on the table and benches to organize them, even though they would be tossed around again by the waves once they were back in the trunk. This is how Hines found me occupied on an afternoon when the ship was pulled hard by the waves in every direction.

“Rough go of it, isn't it?” I greeted him. “They say it helps to keep the eyes away from the water.”

He paced back and forth. “Well?”

“Pardon, Mr. Hines?” I had a Walter Scott book in my hand and could not imagine what he was expecting me to say. “Is there something I can help you with, Mr. Hines? I would be happy to help you choose a book.”

“‘Mr. Hines! Mr. Hines!'” he echoed mockingly. “Do you know what it is that so irks a man like me about a bookworm like you?”

I felt the blood drain from my face and said I did not.

“You look like you're reading even when there is no book in your hands. A shadow falls in circles around your eyes even when you do not wear your dapper little eyeglasses. Savvy?”

“Spectacles. If my eyesight were a bit better, perhaps eyeglasses would suffice. But I confess I do not understand—”

“You read instead of going to church; you forsake God.”

“I did find church rather repetitive in my childhood, for it was like reading the same book again and again, and back then I was reading one or two books every day. But see here! I have never forsaken God, and have lived by righteous principles.”

“You think you're better than the rest of us. Better than a man like me without a formal education. Is that what you think about while you hide yourself behind your precious books?”

He was leaning into me and shouting as he revealed his anger, and my answers did nothing to assuage him. I could smell liquor on his clothes and breath, an indication of how he was coping with the increased time belowdecks. I stretched my arm out toward the nearest bell to call for a steward, but it was just past my reach. His hand came toward my face and I prepared to be struck. Instead he snatched off my spectacles.

Here you go, Mr. Clover, take a look at the world through my spectacles. Everything blurs, doesn't it? Thank you—now, don't drop them! Mr. Clover, you see how much hard work they do for me, and what happens when I am deprived of their help. Everything blurred together. I stumbled to my feet and backed away to try to see better. I could make out enough to determine that Hines had put my spectacles over his own face, stretching the metal roughly to fit over his ears. He was using a nasal pitch to imitate my voice. I could hear another man enter the chamber from behind me and I burned with greater shame at having a witness. When I became a bookseller, I sometimes think it was to ensure, however little money I earned, I would not have to encounter men like Hines.

The second man was an utter kaleidoscope of warm colors from where I stood.

“This is between me and your book-obsessed friend. You stay clear,” warned Hines.

“Fergins. Mr. Hines,” he finally greeted us. It was Davenport. When he fell quiet I could hear his calm breathing as he was assessing the scene.

Hines threw my spectacles back at me as though to remove evidence of taking them. I put them on and blinked a few times to gain my bearings.

“Just a little conversation between men, I say,” Hines went on. “No, I stand corrected. Not between men. Between man and bookworm. Savvy?”

“You do not like that my friend is in the book trade.”

“It's nothing to me what he is,” groused the merchant, slipping into a more civilized tone. “I simply do not appreciate being condescended to by men who think they are better than me because they carry the leathery odor of
books
on their skin.”

“I tend to agree with you,” Davenport said, situating himself on one of the benches with a lit cigar and handing a cigar to the Australian.

“Do you?”

“A man must never think reading a book makes him special. Speaking of that, what book is it that inside your coat?”

Hines played dumb but Davenport never could countenance liars, or dumb liars, and went on without mercy: “There is a certain way a man carries himself with a book on one side, and the outline through the material of an inexpensive coat is a distinctive one. I noticed when you first came down the stairs into the captain's room our first evening. Yours is a thin volume, and a small edition, no doubt, perhaps poetry. I've found the man who carries a book in his coat pocket relies upon it with passion and a dependence as a captain of a ship does upon a compass on a moonless night. A book that changed your life.”

“What nonsense you speak!”

“Show me,” ordered Davenport.

We both waited. The motion of the ship rocked us left and then right. There was nothing more the man could say. The wrath on his face drifted into submission. Hines reached into his coat and slowly pulled out a slender book, just as Davenport described. The bookaneer passed it to me.

“
Leaves of Grass
, by Walt Whitman,” I said, rotating it in my hands. “The pages have been cut with a careful touch. The leaves have been turned many times but none torn. This book has been wonderfully treasured.”