Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

HIRING A CREW of some twenty masons and carpenters, Stanley, like the commander he had once been, presided over the yearlong renovations at Furze Hill, his architect and foreman often by his side. Around its outer walls went up scaffolding, and for five and sometimes six days a week, in the manageable seasons, the sounds of sawing and hammering and winches pulling up old bolts and nails and pieces of flooring could be heard everywhere.

He’d come home on Saturdays (usually by six) and spend an hour soaking in a bath to get the grit out of his skin, thereafter sitting down with Mother and me to dinner and reporting the details of his progress with the house. (I always listened patiently, often eager to head out to some affair in which Stanley had no interest.) Sundays he spent with Denzil, taking him to church in the morning and, in the right kind of weather, strolling with him though the Zoological Society’s gardens at Regent’s Park in the afternoon. (I still have that enviable but disintegrating photograph of Denzil and Stanley in a howdah, riding the massive African elephant Jimbo along a circular dirt track in that park, Denzil cuddling in Stanley’s arms and my husband looking somewhat bemused in the course of participating in London’s famous zoo ride: “I have shot elephants, but never ridden them before,” he said to me that day.) Otherwise, when at home with the child, Stanley attended to his education, reading aloud some Latin texts and teaching him mathematics, as if that boy, at five, were already an adult.

Still, despite his pedantic manner with the boy, Stanley had a soft spot for Denzil and was not immune to the fatherly impulses of spoiling him. Coming in from Furze Hill, sometimes after two weeks’ absence, he’d turn up with some wooden horses or a castle that he had made himself and painted during his evenings alone. But no matter what, he always came home with something for Denzil — a top, a cup-and-balls game, some miniature soldiers — even if he had to prowl the neighborhood around Waterloo station for toy shops. As he’d come into our entranceway, calling out, “Anyone here?” Stanley always looked forward to the moment when our blond cherub, Denzil, would come charging down the hall into his arms, crying out, “Father!”

The cool weather found Stanley at night in the mansion’s front entry hall, where he slept on a cot with some blankets amid the piles of timber and slating and dust, or reading some book by the light of a kerosene lamp, the fireplace blazing. But in good weather, he’d pitch a tent in the field and sleep under the stars (Stanley wrote me many notes about the “glistening, and knowing, character of the constellations”). All this he found invigorating and almost regretted when, after so many months of labor, the tasks at hand were nearing completion.

But transform the place and its grounds he did. Most capriciously, huddling with his architect, Stanley — in fulfilling some boyhood fantasy that had been born of his liking for gothic novels and the strange devices that were found in those fictional houses — had his carpenters install trick sliding walls and cabinets, which, with the press of a button, would open onto a hiding place. Though these installations were costly, Stanley thought them worthwhile, for, as he told me, “If I am bothered by company, I can simply disappear.”

As a final touch, he had a stonemason carve a crest bearing his monogram, HMS, into the entranceway portico; under it was a date, 1899.

OVER THE COURSE of the restoration, Stanley had overseen the transformation of every walkway, every crumbling wall and cracking cornice, into a monument of artisanship. The fences were of the strongest and best description; even the ends of the main gate and fence posts he had dipped in pitch so they would better resist decay. He built footbridges for the many streams that flowed through the grounds; he also constructed a boathouse, which he stocked with canoes for the large pond that Dolly had named Stanleypool. Envisioning Furze Hill as a kind of utopian refuge, Stanley created a sheep farm and brought in bulls and cows to laze about and procreate in a bucolic meadow. While his wife planted rose gardens and put down the seeds of an apple orchard, he made footpaths and set benches and tea tables out so that their future guests might rest after their leisurely strolls. A pine woodland they named the Aruwimi Forest after the dense jungle that the tireless Stanley had once penetrated in Africa as a younger man. A brook that meandered across the property his wife christened the Congo — the naming of such places a happy diversion. (They even gave the surrounding fields African names; there was Wanyamwezi, Mazamboni, and Katunzi, among others, each with its own place in Stanley’s illustrious history of exploration.)

The property itself he called the Bride, in honor of his marriage to Dolly.

AND IN OTHER WAYS 1899 was a good year; for despite Stanley’s decline in relevance to the popular imagination of the British nation, for whom the age of African exploration had become passé, he, having renounced his American citizenship to stand for the House of Commons, could at long last accept a knighthood from the queen. In a ceremony at Windsor Castle, Victoria, stocky and jowl-chinned (she bore a remarkable resemblance to Gertrude Tennant in that regard), wearing a black velvet dress, stood up and, assisted by a royal page, placed around the neck of the kneeling Stanley a golden chain to which was affixed the weighty ornament known as the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. In that moment he became Sir Henry Stanley.

“Receiving me at Windsor Castle, the queen actually looked at me with kindness,” he wrote.

SETTLED IN AT FURZE HILL, Stanley seemed most happy to pursue the life of a country gentleman. Often he rode a horse over the property, or else he just hiked off by himself over the hills, returning home many hours later with some wildflowers gathered from a field for his wife.

He’d come back in a reflective state and, in his reserved manner, retire to his study, where he would sit, at times motionless, before his desk and the quires from his autobiography, the work he had long since lost his desire to write.

And on many a day, in the appropriate seasons, in the hours before he would make his various excursions, Stanley would look from his study window and watch Dolly, in a shepherdess bonnet and florid silk shirtwaist dress, sitting out on their lawn before an easel with a palette of watercolors, executing the most delicate works of nature, renderings that engendered the deepest pride and wonderment. He’d find himself marveling not only at her God-given talents but also at the many pleasures her gentle and vivacious character had brought into his life, even if they had come late. For her presence, and for all the things he had been given — his fame, his wealth, and the adopted son on whom he doted — he often thanked God.

How lonely did Stanley feel when wife and son made their inevitable return to London.

From Lady Stanley’s Journal, circa 1899

IT WAS BY AN AGREEABLE COINCIDENCE that the autumn of 1899 found the Clemens family back in London, having returned from Vienna and other places, and in residence at 30 Wellington Court, Albert Gate, a household that my sister Eveleen and I occasioned to visit, namely in service of Mrs. Clemens’s continuing interest in the psychic realms. However disappointed she had been with the failure of various mediums to summon forth her daughter—“The spirits sometimes sleep for a hundred years before venturing into the world,” I once told her — she seemed to enjoy our lunches and romps to local galleries, where my knowledge of the Pre-Raphaelite painters seemed to interest her greatly, as did any subject that took her mind off her daughter.