“He was arrested when it was discovered he planned to steal some papers from your stepfather. You must remember. I heard about the affair from another visitor you might recollect, Mr. Fergins.”
Mr. Osbourne rubbed his long chin and then began to make another cigarette. We were facing the barren fireplace that had cost Stevenson so much to construct. “The name Fergins sounds somewhat familiar, but my memory is very poor when it comes to remembering names. If you had their portraits to guide me . . . Porter, yes. Some of it comes back to me a little. I remember watching the pair of men being carried away by soldiers in a litter with iron bars around it. I cannot give you very many particulars, though, or tell you whatever became of the poor fellows. We’ve gone through so many wars here, so many coups d’état, it’s a wonder we haven’t all been tossed into the prison at one time or another. I find I remember such useless things sometimes. What do you make of that? I seem to remember the man’s eyes—this Mr. Porter, I mean. Sleepy green eyes. Rather a handsome man, in a funny sort of way, no doubt my sister must have harassed him. Is that the fellow?”
I said it was, though of course I had never met the man outside my mind’s eye.
“Yes, I remember those catlike eyes, but nothing about what happened after he was taken away. You can inquire at the prison to see their records, if they even keep any, which they probably don’t since, I’ll remind you again, this is Samoa. I think you have the other name wrong. Fergin, I believe it was, there was no ‘s’ at the end. I helped bring him to Apia. Fergin was always reading one book or another he’d borrow from Louis’s library. Do you know that once, in this very room, Louis laid down the copy of Don Quixote he was reading, and told me, in words that linger still in my ears, that it was the saddest book he had ever read. I asked him what he meant. He said, ‘That’s what I am—just another Don Quixote.’”
When I was riding away from Vailima, I looked back and noticed a swirling line of white smoke coming out of the chimney.
Three days remained of my furlough on the islands. Most of the men had taken canoes to one of the islands known to be filled with ritual dancing, feasts, and friendly girls. After speaking to Mr. Osbourne my purpose became fixed. I would find out what had happened to Davenport after his imprisonment in Samoa. That had been one of the questions I most regretted not having asked when I still had the chance.
Nobody at the Upolu prison had any distinct impressions of the man as I described him. One guard I interviewed thought certain the American had been in the prison for only six weeks, while another prison official believed the bookaneer had suffered confinement for years before deportation was arranged by the consulate. In any case, the prison had been through two fires and a dynamite explosion in an attempt to release political prisoners, and, as Mr. Osbourne predicted, there were no written records kept there. I could gain no reliable information about when he was released, or the bookaneer’s whereabouts after leaving Samoa, if he did make it off the island safely. The men at the consul knew nothing more than the prison officials. My search seemed pointless until, back in the village of Apia, I heard a rumor.
It was said a white man of great ability and mystery who had been in Samoa had sailed to the nearby sovereign island of Tonga, and became a sort of informal adviser to the king there, after which he was granted control of his own small, sparsely populated island on the edge of the kingdom. I asked several Samoans and some foreigners who had been there for a long time whether this man was still on the Tongan island, and whether he and Pen Davenport might be one and the same.
“I do not know his white name, and I doubt it is remembered by anyone,” said a Chinese man who owned one of three new restaurants in the village. “He is called Fa’amoemoeopu,” said a fisherman, whose words my hunchbacked guide translated slowly in my ear. The name, I was told, meant “one who does not forget words.” “It is said Fa’amoemoeopu was in Tale-Pui-Pui once, years ago.”
“That’s the prison?” I asked. I brightened up. Perhaps Davenport himself could finally give me the answers Mr. Fergins had not, if I could persuade him to talk to me.
“I saw him once.” This came from a gray-haired Samoan woman whose excellent English brought her odd jobs for the American consulate.
“You did?”
“Not in person, no,” she admitted. “I saw a portrait brought back from Tonga. He will not allow most men to see his face and it is covered by a bushy beard. But he has many followers and admirers who serve him, as I understand it. He is like you,” she said after a moment of studying me.
“What do you mean?”
She grinned. “You could be his son.”
I was not sure what she meant. Since to these natives my coffee-colored skin seemed more white than black, it could have simply meant Fa’amoemoeopu was a white man and the native woman thought I was also, or a close enough approximation.
By this point, there was not enough time left in the furlough to go to Tonga. In the months that followed, as we continued our route through the South Seas, Davenport—the exile, the secret white king of the natives—flourished in my imagination. His calling taken away from him, his rival having vanquished him, he would have refused to return to a world desolate and empty. The bookaneer would have a new purpose and a new source of power. As I became increasingly fascinated by these notions, I determined to return one day to investigate them. Then, there was a stroke of bad luck that proved a godsend to my curiosity. On our return voyage, the rains came and lasted a week; our ship had leaks and required repairs so we returned to anchor near the nineteenth parallel south latitude—not very far from Tonga. While repairs were being made, one of the masts was found to be rotted, which would require another week, at least. Being stranded let me solve the mystery of Pen Davenport sooner than I’d hoped.