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.”