“Please do, Mr. Fergins,” Fanny encouraged me.
“It took eleven of the brown boys eight hours to carry that awful heavy thing up here on poles,” Belle added, always the first to describe any difficulty. “Of course, nobody here plays except me, and I am simply terrible. You must, Mr. Fergins.”
Lloyd patted me on the back and helped me up. I stood there.
“We’re waiting,” Davenport said.
“What would I play?” I asked, barely concealing my misery.
“The latest from London,” came the ridiculous answer from the bookaneer.
I had perhaps been asked to play at a party once or twice in my life, so often was a considerable hyperbole, and my answer when asked would have been a resounding no. I had not played a note in more than two years. I walked over to the old piano, cased in black ivory, and sat on the bench. I tell you I was so troubled by the idea of playing in front of this room of languid, sweaty Bohemians that I closed my eyes as I played. The keys were cold and stiff against my unwilling fingers and I felt myself wanting to melt atom by atom and disappear into the tropical air.
When I stopped, there was some discordant clapping. This sent a flood of fresh humiliation through me.
“More, Mr. Fergins,” said Fanny with a big, loose grin. She was my advocate in all things.
“I mustn’t,” I said, stepping away from the bench to make it final.
Then I heard the slower clapping of a newcomer.
“Excellent. Better than a dig in the eye with a sharp stick, anyway.” Stevenson was looking at me with those all-seeing wide-set eyes from the entrance into the room. “The new men. I remember you. Have you not been served a drink? Even our houseboys are wilting today. I will get it for you myself. A lemon drink, or something stronger?”
I could only bring myself to repeat, “Lemon drink?” He took my question as an answer and returned a few minutes later.
The novelist wore a remarkable costume: a tight-fitting flannel shirt revealing his excessively thin and long arms, and white flannel trousers, which were rolled up and tucked into one brown wool sock and one purple, which had holes, revealing the pale flesh of the bottom of his feet when he walked across the room.
“How about we start a fire?” he asked as he brought me the drink, and handed another to Davenport.
“Too hot,” came the retort from wife and stepdaughter.
“Yes,” said Stevenson, his face falling with disappointment. “Today is probably too hot. Mr. . . .”
“Fergins,” Davenport answered for me.
“Yes, that’s right. Englishman. Mr. Fergins, pray humor us with some more music. Something classic this time.”
I can hardly explain the effect of a direct command from this otherworldly man, but there I was, planting my backside again right on the piano bench, where I had sworn to myself mere moments before I would never return were my life dependent on it, my fingers fumbling into position as I tried to remember a Strauss waltz I was once taught by a piano master in exchange for a rare copy of Longfellow’s first published volume. Stevenson kept time with the song by picking at one end of his mustache with his finger and thumb, swinging a limp cigarette caught between his lips.
? ? ?
STEVENSON DID NOT STAY in the room very long that morning, but before he exited he bid us to come again soon. Davenport was as pleased on our ride home as a child with a new toy.
“I never knew you played piano, Fergins.”
“That is because I absolutely do not, or at least certainly not well enough to play for anyone but my nieces, who are by now better than I am at eight and ten years old. If you didn’t know, why on earth did you ask me to play?”
“Because I had a line of thought, while we were sitting there languishing in the stillness and heat in that big room. They have wallowed in the South Seas for a few years. They are musically inclined enough to have a piano, not an everyday object on this island, and I have heard a kind of flute in the house that I suspected might be played by Stevenson—since I heard it in the presence of each other family member. Not played well, mind you. Nor did you have to play anything well—and you did not—as long as it was something new. New for them, I mean, having been gone for so long. I thought that in a place like this, novelty might be enough. I do not play a note, and supposed a thorough English gentleman like yourself might. You should be proud, Fergins!”
“Humiliated,” I said quietly. “That’s what I should be. Am.”
“Oh?” Davenport replied as though the point were irrelevant.
Of course, my concern for my own dignity was irrelevant here. We had been brought back to Stevenson’s attention, which meant the real campaign to find the manuscript could begin. Davenport was so pleased with me that he volunteered an answer to a question from days before. “You had asked me whether I ever wanted to be a writer. . . .” But I do not want to forget my place in the story, so remind me to return to that.
We would learn that as easily as Fanny Stevenson alternated between smiles and sighs, Robert Louis Stevenson alternated between reclusive and public periods, and it seemed around this time he had entered one of his more public moods. When we next went to Vailima, we came upon the novelist and John Chinaman—as the attendant was called whom we met with Stevenson at the stream—clearing an area of tangled brush at the entrance to the property. As before, John followed Stevenson several paces behind, watching without actually helping. Stevenson was covered in mud and dust and carrying his own tools.
When we reached the front verandah, Stevenson let out one of his war whoops, this time serving to call his family and natives over to see to us. Despite the fact that the Vailima servants saw the man every day, they gaped at the gaunt, earth-encrusted, long-legged novelist when he passed, as though he were one of the island’s gods.