Stevenson soon all but vanished once again from the public rooms at Vailima, and with his seclusion his work came to a halt. The last thing he said about his writing in our hearing was that he was broken down. “The orange is squeezed out, and I will do nothing as long as I can,” he said in a sad, trancelike state. He was draped in a blue and white kimono from Japan that fit his skeletal frame like a scarecrow’s coat. “Sometimes,” he continued, “a man must wonder how anyone can be such an ass to enter the profession of letters instead of being apprenticed to a barber or keep a baked-potato stall.” I could almost hear Davenport and Belial—who were on opposite ends of the great hall when Stevenson announced this—groan to themselves that the novel’s completion would be postponed once more.
The novelist’s spidery shoulders formed a slouch, and he slouched his way to his library and through the glass door at the end of that room, closing it behind him. The small sanctum, where we had seen him preside over his bedside court proceeding for the case of the stolen pig, was an enclosed portion of the upper verandah that contained little more than a bed and a table. I had been inside on only two occasions. The table could fold and unfold and swing over the bed. Two windows overlooked the majestic, luxuriant volcano. There were engravings of his ancestors in traditional Scotch dress along the plain walls. In one corner, there was a stand with several Colt repeating rifles. Opposite that, a small bookcase had editions of Stevenson’s own titles. Above the bed was another bookcase with some more of his titles and a big book entitled A Record of Remarkable Crimes and Criminals, which I imagined him searching for ideas. Stevenson would write sitting up in the bed and tossing his pages onto the table, and when he could not write, he would lie there staring at the beams in the ceiling. We suspected he had fallen back into the latter state. We began to hear the frequent sad squealing of the flageolet. The sound of a man not writing.
There were new troubles to keep at bay in addition to the halt in Stevenson’s progress. The dwarf who attended Vao continued his hostile stares and comments and had added Davenport as one of his targets. One damp afternoon, I was holding my reliable umbrella over Davenport on the lawn when we passed near the fierce little man, who was leaning against a tree, his legs in a sort of squatting position. His eyes were closed and he was mouthing something silently to himself. He paused and returned his usual glare.
“Is there some problem between us to address?” Davenport asked.
“No, White Chief. But Tulagi is not to be angered, be sure about it.”
“Who is this Tulagi?” I was about to ask, before I understood the dwarf suffered from the trait, not uncommon among those Samoan natives who learned English later in their lives, of speaking of himself in third person.
“What reason have either of us given you not to trust us, Tulagi?” Davenport asked him.
Tulagi laughed hard. “You are a handsome man.”
I looked over at Davenport. The tone of his skin had turned smooth and rich, a perfect parchment, during his time in the tropical sun. As with many who had come here from far away, his appearance had vastly improved.
“White men tend to infatuate themselves with my charge. Handsome white men think themselves entitled to be near Vao—to possess her, to seek pleasure from her, and to try to remove her from here.”
“How is it that she is your concern?” Davenport asked.
“She is a tapo. Each village chooses their prettiest maiden to represent them to the island. It is my honor to have been appointed to protect her and guide her when she was just a girl.”
“Well, I have business more important than stealing away your favorite little maiden, Tulagi.”
“Making certain you do not try is Tulagi’s business.”
“Tell us, are you some kind of a mystagogue?”
“What is it you were whispering about, if you don’t mind telling us?” I asked to soften Davenport’s sarcasm.
Tulagi appeared to mind, but answered. “I am a memorizer.”
“A what?”
“Tulagi is one of those chosen to keep our islands’ history alive—to recite the stories of our past and practice them when not at my duties of looking after Vao.”
“Why not write them down? Then they would never be forgotten. They would be safe.”
“They are safer in my heart and my brain, than on pieces of paper that could be lost or burned or made false.” He returned to whispering to himself and I listened to as much as I could before we moved on. From what I could gather, he was telling himself the story of the first whites who came to the island, and how the natives believed them by the color of their skin to be walking corpses. Just the fragment of this tale put me somewhat ill at ease, especially as Davenport continued to direct me to ride into the wild, overgrown portions of the property and the sunless virgin forests looking for the now almost-legendary fifth stream.
“What exactly is it you believe we will find once we locate the stream?” I asked on one of these tiring excursions.
Davenport seemed to relish my question, though a quick smirk straightened itself into a serious and profound answer, after he made sure none of the outside boys were close enough to hear. “Another way off the property, one where we cannot be followed. That is why we cannot simply ask the domestics. Another possibility is that the fifth stream may lead us to another outbuilding, where Stevenson piles up pages he is not ready to share.”
“A kind of treasure chest of lost literature,” I suggested.