I see what you mean, Mr. Clover. But here is what you overlook. He is already a friend; that cannot change in the blink of an eye. A man takes a wife “for better or for worse,” and a friend comes with hardly less responsibility, sometimes more. Remember, I had agreed to assist in the success of this Samoan adventure, no matter what else happened. Sometimes, adversity requires increased commitment. Observing him in agony on the floor of our hut, I feared for what would happen to him.
I can recall other times over the years when I worried about his mental well-being a good deal. In the period after he lost Kitten, Davenport was adrift. He drank too much, he accepted missions that he would have never ordinarily considered from men who once upon a time would have made him turn up his nose. I remember one occasion in particular: he asked me to find out the location of a rather disreputable book reviewer, a man who dressed like a cheap poet and chewed tobacco like an American. A publisher had hired Davenport to pay this fellow a visit. It was Davenport’s assignment to remind the reviewer that he had been paid to puff—to write a positive review, in layman’s terms—a new book, after a rumor had been overheard that he was, in fact, composing a rather scathing one. This was the sort of mission usually only taken by one of the lowest class of bookaneers, the so-called barnacles. Davenport was so mastered by drink that I had to escort him to the address in a suburb of London or he wouldn’t have found it. I heard a tumult inside and ran into the house. When the critic scoffed at Davenport’s demand, the bookaneer struck him in the head, but it turned out the reviewer was also an Oxford pugilist. I had to pull the fellow off the bookaneer and peel my companion, bloodied, from the imitation Turkish rug.
I grew quite concerned about the health of the Samoan mission. We had not been back to Vailima since Charlie was buried and had no intelligence about what was happening there. And each day, as the death of Charlie began to seem more part of the past than of the present, the object of my sorrow began to shift from the lost servant to the despair of my companion. I carefully formulated a statement of reassurance that ran something like this: “It was not your intention, Davenport, to do the young native harm, and you mustn’t blame yourself for doing what you had to do in the name of a mission.” I hoped this might help him surrender those burdens he had brought upon himself, and allow him to move forward with what could still be accomplished. When I finally prepared to say this, it was no use; he spoke over me.
“Fergins, I am quite tired of so many delays,” he said, a glimmer in his eye that had not been present since before the funeral. He was looking with intensity at the upper beams holding up our iron roof. He reached up and idly brushed his hand against it. He might have been studying the vaulted ceilings of an ancient cathedral. “Tired. Collect some fruit and prepare our trunks. We are finished with this place.”
“Davenport? You want me to go out and collect fruit in the dark?”
He stepped onto the wooden plank that formed the threshold of our hut, outlined by the darkness, pushing his face against the onslaught of wind. “You can manage. I have already sent for Cipaou to deliver a farewell card to Stevenson. We’re leaving first thing in the morning, as soon as Cipaou comes.” He ducked his head as he moved inside and said no more.
That night, I lay awake thinking of what might happen next, when Davenport began to thrash . . . groan . . . cry out . . . even (so it sounded) weep. I did not have the heart when morning came to ask him what it was he had seen in his dreams. Later, while mired in disaster, he revealed to me that he had dreamt of Kitten in her final hours.
Whether by virtue of illness, death, incarceration, or the twilight of the profession itself, every bookaneer had a last mission, but it was rare that the mission brought about the end. Such was the unusual destiny of Kitten, a woman who believed destiny was a comfort for the weak minded. I remember hearing the first rumblings about her fateful endeavor during the summer of 1882. It was late at night and I was dog tired when Davenport finally entered the drawing room at the Hogarth Club, with its big chairs and long rugs. I was waiting to hand over a biographical listing he needed for an important negotiation in order to prove a contested item was not a forgery. But he hardly looked in my direction and had no interest in the document that was the product of hours in the damp closets of libraries and antiquarians’ attics. He tilted back the strong drink I’d ordered him and snapped his fingers for the waiter to bring another before he slammed the empty glass to the table. In a few minutes he had produced more noise, without saying a word, than I had heard in the room during the previous two hours.
Davenport’s moods were always unpredictable, but I knew something had gone wrong when he voluntarily started to talk about Kitten. He said that Kitten had been hired to go abroad and search out a series of manuscript pages that had been believed lost for more than sixty years. The facts seemed rather unremarkable in themselves and did not justify his agitation.
“She will receive market value for the pages? Then why—”
“From what she tells me, in fact, the offer made to her is generous, quite generous.”
“In that case, what—”
Again he interrupted. “Never search for any kind of Holy Grail, Fergins. It is the sort of thing done by your onetime friend Whiskey Bill, who has been unable to forget the legends of Poe’s lost novel, which is exactly why Bill is no more useful than a squeezed orange or a spent bullet.”
“Well, if Kitten, who is as experienced as any bookaneer, judges it conducive—”
“She taught me that. Yes. Avoid the Holy Grail, the heroic journeys, the pursuit of a legend—that is not the life of the bookaneer, who must keep his eyes on the ground while other book people live by dreaming. A mission such as this could drag on and become a drain that ruins a bookaneer’s fortunes.”
I spoke quicker and completed a question. “Who has hired her for it, and what is it, exactly?”