John Chinaman came over, his tanned face appearing flushed in the torchlight. He lifted his bandana and wiped his forehead. Though he was speaking Chinese, it became clear by his gestures that he objected to the idea of me coming back with them. Stevenson’s eyes caught mine for a moment.
“He has been officially ruled a free man when released from jail,” Stevenson reminded his attendant. But after another round of argument from the usually obedient fellow, Stevenson relented: “Very well. Then he will not come back with us. Take him to Apia, John, but from there he may do as he’d like. He is not a prisoner of ours or the island’s. Vao,” he said, turning to her and frowning, “no more adventures of vengeance for you. The war clouds are moving over the island fast, and a bloody battle is expected any day. You are to come back home with us.”
“Tusitala,” she said, bowing her head and seeming to be a much younger girl again.
“Tusitala,” I called out to him, knowing it could be my last time ever speaking with him. “What was it you said to the cannibals?”
“Do you think a man jogging to his club in London has so much to interest him? Can you still not conceive of why this place is awful fun?” Stevenson remarked as he looked around the dark, unforgiving woods, holding up his long fingers to the sky. He came around to answering my question. “I told them a yarn about you, Mr. Fergins.”
No answer could have surprised me more. “Me?”
“Yes, about you and Mr. Davenport, and your expedition, and imprisonment, and the machinations of Belial.”
“But they wouldn’t know the first thing about such matters.”
“Of course, you are right, they do not care about Davenport, or you, or me for that matter. Do they care how many novels I have published, how many pages written, or how many copies sold or stolen by literary pirates? No, they would have heard about me as they hear of the various spirits and demons of the island. Would they care about Belial the high and mighty bookaneer? Would they care whether Davenport ever achieved the pinnacle of his calling? No, you are right, they would not. But they would understand—deep in their veins—the desire for your revenge against a man who took something away that you believed belonged to you. To tell a story of vengeance that is yet to be satisfied is to forge a connection with them, to bring to boil what simmers always in their blood, and to draw them into your sphere, which would otherwise be a foreign and unknowable thing. Do you know why they eat other men? They eat other men because they believe the spirits of their enemies occupy them, and it is the only way to chase those away—but if they think they begin to understand you, they will not eat you. Usually.” The last word was added with a deep but hoarse tone, a primeval growl I only ever heard in my life from Robert Louis Stevenson.
XVI
The Chinese servant was a brisk, controlled rider. The passage to the beach felt even longer than it was because of the distrust and anger I could sense from him as I sat behind him in the saddle. Though the island had altered his dress and even the tint of his skin, there was something about the way he rode that remained different than that of the natives and Europeans—something that harkened to faraway lands.
Lloyd Osbourne traveled alongside us on his horse and treated the ride as he seemed to treat everything he did—half pleasure and half inconvenience. We slowed down several times to wait for him to catch up, each halt accompanied by a snort from John that mixed with those of the impatient animal beneath our hips.
Other things weighed down my mind despite the reprieve from the cannibals delivered by Stevenson: Nobolo’s murder, the horrific sight and sounds of Hines’s brutal demise, the abrupt loss of Vao’s companionship, Davenport’s imprisonment, the lost hope of ever finding Belial.
The final time the horses took on water, we were perched on a hill overlooking the village of Apia. It was dawn on a foggy morning. We saw a troop of natives with tall headdresses, their faces covered in black war paint, while from somewhere in the bush, war drums pounded.
“Is it true that if war comes, this time the whites will all be killed?” I asked.
“Hopefully not, selfishly speaking,” Lloyd said, after thinking about it for a moment.
There were sounds of another approaching party below. John removed a spyglass and, extending it, watched with interest before passing the lens to Lloyd. I asked if I could have a look and was given the instrument by Lloyd, whose smile seemed to bear no grudges about what had happened in Vailima. I removed my spectacles and pressed my eye against the instrument. I could make out a group of two dozen Chinese men marched across a road by armed natives. They were not chained, but were being kept in a controlled formation. Two Europeans headed the group. John began to roll a fresh smoke in the style of Stevenson, as though dangling a reminder over me that he remained part of Vailima while my place had been permanently forfeited. I studied his reaction to the strange vision below.
“Wherever there are merchants, there are men in chains, metaphorical or otherwise,” Lloyd philosophized, modifying one of Stevenson’s axioms about arms and ammunition. “Aphorism: Lloyd Osbourne.”
John could see I was waiting for his thoughts.
He turned toward me, his usual look of harsh scrutiny softened. It is hard to represent for you the broken and frustrated way he spoke in English, for anything more than a few words was obviously a great effort for him, and a challenge to understand. In fact, it made me feel honored that he used so much energy to address me. He explained that when he was eight years old he was sold to a French merchant, and brought to the Marquesas Islands as a plantation slave. He was later forced to be a soldier in the civil wars there. He continued: One day, he escaped his enslavement in a rickety boat and would have drowned if he had not been picked up by the ship Stevenson sailed in. “He ask me if I wished to be cook. I offer my services as servant for life.”