Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

When we parted, though I wished to embrace her, for the thought occurred to me that I would probably never see Mrs. Williams again, my affectionate side, seen by so few in this life, remained within, buried under the shell of my long-practiced formality. So in farewell, I simply took her hand in mine and held it for a few moments. She smiled, and I could see a few tears in her kindly eyes. I came away from that visit in a solemn rather than joyous mood, as in those moments, I had repeated one of the great failings of my life — an inability to express, regardless of my desire to do so, just how deeply moved I could feel by a person.

IN THE COURSE OF THAT LECTURE TOUR, I had been presented with honorary university degrees and keys to one city and another and with medals and plaques and certificates singing my praises, but as my visit with Mrs. Williams had come on the heels of so many formal occasions, that brief meeting, standing out in my mind, seemed to have a subtle effect on my emotions. For I continued to think about our visit together, my mind vexed by how so simple a soul, whose importance to the greater world was negligible, had certainly found contentment, while I seemed to be in the midst of a perpetual mad scramble to preserve my fame and reputation.

From Lady Stanley’s Unpublished Memoir

THE YEARS 1891–92 were occupied with much travel. When we returned from America in April, after a short rest in London, Stanley was pressed to fulfill a commitment to tour the British Isles, our journeys taking us, by private train, out from London to the far reaches of Scotland and Wales. Wherever he appeared — to champion the cause of England’s further involvement in Africa — the public gathered. (There was another category of lecture as well: Stanley would receive a heartfelt summons from an earnest vicar speaking on behalf of his parish. Because he was known, in some devout circles, for his pious work of bringing the Word to the savages of Africa, as per the example of his “second father,” David Livingstone, he was often sought out by the common religious folk, those lordly people of the earth who always asked Stanley to come to their churches to speak.) Aside from advocating that England build a great Congo railway, so as to link the isolated interior with the rest of the continent, he wanted the British people to rise to the challenge of fostering English civilization in East Africa — in the regions of Uganda and Kenya. He spoke before antislavery societies about the repression of the Arab slave trade, to medical societies about the training of medical officers, and to medical missionaries about the treatment of tropical diseases, for from his own experience with malaria, he saw that such diseases, unchecked, would eventually evolve into new plagues, impeding European progress in those countries. But many a deaf ear was turned to him.

Such tours were exhausting for my husband. While Mother and I sometimes accompanied him and could enjoy the amenities of luxury travel, we did not have to mount the stage and speak for several hours at a time. (Hard as he tried, he had only been able to get his Emin Pasha speech down to one hour and forty minutes.) Nor did we have to answer the unending questions of journalists or put up with the demands of holding forth with strangers at those meals. We were something of a buffer for Henry, and he had become grateful even for my mother’s company, for people are not so forward if you are not alone. What private moments he had, on such tours, when he was traveling without us, he cherished: His free time was spent reading or writing. Still, when ensconced in a room in a small-town inn, my husband, craving the fresh air, got into the habit of slipping out at every opportune moment.

Thankfully, when the English tour ended, by the end of July, we went to Switzerland, where Stanley began a well-deserved rest. By then he seemed so fatigued and weary that I questioned the soundness of his reasoning in having accepted yet another tour that coming October, to Australia. He was not looking forward to it, but as he was a man who believed in keeping his promises, he could no more change his mind than, as he put it, “a bee could turn into a butterfly.” But in Switzerland, he took advantage of the fresh air, and our days were spent in long hikes in the meadows of Mürren. On one hike, however, along a field of damp grass, it was his misfortune to lose his footing — the man who had traveled for years throughout equatorial Africa without once breaking any bones shattered his ankle from a fall. The painful injury precipitated yet another bout of malaria.

For some months he could only walk with the assistance of a crutch. He hated the thing, but on at least one occasion, my husband found that it worked to his advantage. It was in October of that year, 1891, just before we were to leave for Australia, that King Léopold summoned Stanley to his palace in Ostend to discuss the possibility of Stanley’s returning to the Congo. When the king broached the subject, Stanley pointed out the lameness of his leg, from which he had yet to recover. “Well, it will be healed by the time you return from Australia, will it not?” the king said. “Then I will have a big task on hand for you, when you are ready.”

Throughout our long tour of Australia and New Zealand, Stanley underwent numerous relapses of gastritis and malaria; the latter would usually come over him after he had been weakened by the former, which is to say that the conditions of touring and travel in general, particularly given the very long periods at sea, were proving too much for my husband’s flagging constitution. Loving him so, I, for one, did not want him risking his life in Africa again. For all the praises heaped upon him by the likes of Léopold, I began to remind my husband that however immortal he might sometimes feel, he was very much a man of flesh, of a finite duration, one who, in his matrimony, should prepare himself — give himself over to — a more domestic and safe life, an idea that he only reluctantly came around to.

Strange dreams plagued him. He would report these dreams in a most factual, almost casual manner over breakfast, and we, alarmed that most of his dreams were about death, began to wonder if Stanley were having premonitions about his own.

“Please, Henry,” I would say to him. “Allow me to take care of you.”

But his illnesses — his malaria, in particular — were more persuasive than my words. Physical pain, such as what he suffered when he broke his ankle on an ordinary hike in Switzerland, he was indifferent to. But, as I would learn, what he most feared was a diminishment of his faculties — his memories, his ability to organize his thoughts and write through the long hours, and the very physical aspect of his written script, in which he had always taken great pride. These became the things he wished to preserve, the loss of which he feared the most.

Thankfully, when we did come back to England some eight months later, in June of 1892, Stanley had begun to take my own many reservations about such rigorous journeys to heart. “My love,” I said to him. “Having worked so hard, should you not now begin to enjoy your life?”

“It is the better idea,” he admitted. “I will not return to Africa,” he told me.

WHEN HE WAS NOT ILL, he remained as energetic as any man. The lack of a great challenge had left him restless. As he easily tired of London society, Mother and I, thinking it an honorable profession that Father would have approved of, persuaded Stanley to give up his American citizenship and stand for a seat in the House of Commons as a Liberal Unionist candidate for the North Lambeth district in London. Ours was a rushed decision, and Stanley entered the contest just ten days before the polling would take place, in late June. Refusing to go door to door, to call personally on voters, or to loll about in pubs and meetinghouses, he preferred to rely upon the carefully prepared speeches that he, as a son of the working class, would give at labor clubs and assemblies. Such experiences, however, did not go well at first. During a speech at Hawkstone Hall, Lambeth, it seemed not to matter what he said, for he was heckled by an organized rabble from the opposition, his every word shouted down.