It seemed fanciful, an idea worthy of a wine-and-cigar session at Pfaff’s vault among a host of other bookaneers in the golden age of their trade. Still, I thoroughly searched my share of the grounds. The next time we were out surveying, we heard hoof falls approach. A horse and rider had started toward us and then stopped at a distance. It was Fanny Stevenson; she brought her horse to a halt about fifty feet away. I saluted her, but she did not return it. The encounter felt odd. I could not see her face very clearly, and as far as I could tell she seemed to be squinting at us in careful study. After a while, Lloyd and Belle appeared behind her on their horses and she turned around and cantered off with them.
The dark clouds had come closer and over the next twenty-four hours hovered in long clusters directly east. Cipaou—and the Vailima household, and for that matter everyone else on the island—was filled with dire, excited predictions about the rainy season. All this seemed to force Stevenson to emerge from his bout of isolation to oversee matters. The day he returned to the public rooms he looked dreadfully ill, his eyes hollow, his sticklike legs wobbly, his motions jerky. The household had spoken of his social moods alternating with his private ones, but seeing him like this led me to believe his encampments in the sanctum also served to conceal his worst spells of sickness. With his bare feet, one might have mistaken him, when lying down, for a dead body waiting to be prepared for burial.
In addition to the tasks related to the dangers of the rainy season, during our visits we witnessed regular callers to Vailima demanding one thing or another from the novelist. Chiefs representing the various villages of the island asked his counsel and advice on political matters, ranging from inter-village disputes over the marriage of a chief’s daughter to the demands of one of the foreign consulates. We were at the house when one of the highest chiefs of the island came. Because of his status, we were all invited to take ’ava with him. He was there to ask Stevenson to reconcile two feuding chiefs by hosting a feast.
At the end of their conference, Stevenson asked the visitor what gift he would like from Vailima, for it was one of the most galling Samoan traditions, to the mind of an Englishman, anyway, that a distinguished visitor would not depart from your home without taking something with him. The chief asked for a revolver. Stevenson handed it to the chief’s wife, another custom of the islands’ gift giving. She proceeded to open the chamber and then empty the bullets on the floor. They seemed to enjoy the thing as though it were a novelty rather than a weapon. Then she pointed it at her husband’s heart and pulled the trigger as he pretended to be shot. We all laughed at the morbid pantomime.
She kept pulling the trigger, eliciting more melodramatic reactions from the chief.
“No!” was shouted.
John Chinaman threw himself across the room and knocked the revolver away. It was then that I noticed what the mysterious servant had seen before any of us. There were only five bullets on the floor. When he rose to his feet amid confusion, he opened the chamber and showed us inside. Had she finished one more playful shot, the chief would have been shot in the heart.
We were all very somber after the embarrassed couple exited to think of the near tragedy that had occurred. When Davenport and I were making our own departure for the evening, I could hear Stevenson and Fanny in the great hall. They had recovered from the startling incident and were trading elaborately whimsical stories about what would have transpired had the chief been accidentally assassinated in their house. It was the happiest I ever heard the husband and wife during our time on island.
Stevenson had promised the chief to host the reconciliation feast as soon as the weather permitted, and that planned feast gave rise to another visit that could have threatened all our plans.
Belle told me that there had been some discord over a task, given to one of the servants, to secure a pig to roast for the feast. Charlie would usually do it, but because of his recent unsteady behavior, a servant named Eliga, whose English was less fluent, was sent on the assignment.
Instead of a pig, the servant brought home a boar. That was the sort of thing that became the talk of the house. I expected later to hear of Stevenson dressing down the native but instead he spoke to him quietly in the library and sent him on his way, livery securely in place. “Now, think of what I’ve said, Eliga,” was Stevenson’s parting message for him.
“Oh, I will, Master Tusitala,” said Eliga, head bowed, hands cupped together and trembling. “My life is yours and I your servant until death.”
I happened to be walking past Stevenson’s sanctum while approaching Fanny at the time, and did not think of it again. After all, I was rather distracted. Fanny was unusually reserved with me, and the change in her demeanor was concerning enough to make me sweat as much as the humidity. She greeted me with a mumble and parted from me without much more than that.