Fanny squirmed at this declaration, one repeated on a regular basis, to judge by its delivery. Stevenson did not appear to be suffering, but at the same time he was far from healthy. No loose style of clothing could hide how emaciated he was. He also stifled harsh coughs, which clawed their way out as extravagant wheezes.
As we prepared to ride to our cottage that afternoon, Fanny chased after us. We were nearing the stables. She threw a look over her shoulder back at the house. Then she let out a quick sigh that itself sounded like a plea. “Gentlemen, please say you will stay for supper tonight.”
To my surprise, Davenport protested.
“Our man Cipaou wished to cook a special tiffin at our own modest table. We shall have to return or risk wounding his pride.”
“Please, we will send a messenger to tell him. I have made mutton curry, a dish I learned from an East Indian cook in Fiji. You will like it. Louis will not talk so much of the island politics when guests are present. He does not eat when he is agitated, and the talk is not good for his health. There are rumblings of more interference by Herr Becker and the Germans against the natives who oppose the puppet king. The whole attitude of the Germans here is so excessively English.”
“Of course we shall stay, if it is a help,” Davenport said.
“Thank you,” said Fanny, her face softening with gratitude—and, more so than any other as I look back, that was the moment we secured our places at Vailima.
? ? ?
“MY WHITE GENTLEMEN” was how Stevenson referred to us, while we were Fergins and Porter (Davenport’s assumed name) to the rest of the family, and interchangeably White Chief to most of the Vailima natives. It was clear that Davenport’s first hope—that Stevenson’s isolation and his vanity as a writer would make him inclined to want to know another writer—had been misguided. Stevenson was vulnerable to our presence, but his vulnerability was of a different nature. It was precisely how seriously he took his life on the Samoan islands. He had not come to the island for an exotic escape into a kind of monastic writerly solitude; that much was now obvious. He was fully entrenched. He had brought his whole family, even his elderly mother. She was my favorite member of the household, and when she ventured down from her sewing machine to the ground floor, which was rare, the sunny old woman would never fail to speak in clever aphorisms. The novelist’s whole life had been transplanted into Samoan soil. With help from his stepson, he even seemed to thrive on overseeing the very large staff of servants and dealing with the complexities of maintaining and improving the grounds of what he mischievously called his “plantation.” As far as I could tell, he weeded as much as he wrote.
Because he cared so much about Samoan life, it made perfect sense that Stevenson would want to ensure Davenport portrayed the island in a favorable way for his supposed book of travel stories, and that resulted in more meals and more time. Davenport declined as many of the invitations that came to our cottage as he accepted. He explained to me that, once establishing our foothold, we must not appear overly inquisitive about the Stevensons or riveted by Vailima. Still, the more time we were there, the more clues Davenport gathered. Stevenson was actually quite open in talking about his writing. Hines had once told us that all whites were instant friends with each other in these lands of islanders, and perhaps that phenomenon contributed to Stevenson’s willingness to share.
The novelist would stop in mid-conversation—mid-sentence, to be more precise—while walking, for example, down the paths that ran along Fanny’s elaborate flower gardens, to dig out a piece of paper when he had an idea. He would then write a paragraph or a page right in front of us.
“Yes,” he would mumble, “yes, just so!” Then, looking up at one of us with the wildness of creativity in his eyes, he would say, “One of you hold this, won’t you?” He would pass over his ever-present cigarette, and Davenport or I would take it. We came to understand that the thing was meant to be preserved, however pitifully short, and there one of us would stand tending to the smoldering cigarette while Stevenson wrote in a mad dash.
On that occasion in the garden, it was Davenport tending to the cigarette. Stevenson, pausing from his scribbling, suddenly spoke of the virtues of their tobacco, which was called Three Castles.
“We are slaves to our brand, I’m afraid. They must be imported, like everything in Samoa. Do you know even the wood we used to build the house was brought from America? Trees all around us, but the natives know nothing of how to harvest wood and—this is crucial to understand, if you wish to grasp Samoa and its people for your travel book—do not want to know how to do it.”
All of this while he was writing. It was as though the concentration came only at the moment of generating an idea, while the actual writing was a formality. There was a deep generosity that came across. Even while doing his own writing, he was trying to help the writing he believed Davenport was doing.
“It is quite foreign to you, isn’t it, Mr. Porter?”
“What is, Tusitala?” replied Davenport.
“The idea of a man leaving behind civilization for what our esteemed literati back in Europe or America would look askance at. You come here to record the exotic, to see butlers with bare feet, precisely because you cannot believe it possible for a white man to belong here.”
“I hadn’t thought of it in that way.”