Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

  A grand reception was given in his honor by the Royal Geographical Society in London. Royal Albert Hall was packed with some ten thousand important spectators, Dorothy Tennant among them. For reasons that were of an intestinal origin, Stanley, hearing one wave after another of applause in anticipation of his appearance, fainted three times. (“What brought that about I do not know,” he wrote.) Finally coming out onto the stage, he stood before Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, president of the society, and, hearing his praises sung as a great and intrepid explorer, and as Sir Mountstuart placed around his neck the red ribbon and gold medal of the RGS, bearing an image of Stanley’s profile imposed upon an image of Africa, he was dearly tempted, in the name of truth, to expose the whole enterprise as a “bold, certainly brave procession of madness, come to a good conclusion.” But when he accepted the medal, he spoke instead of the many great things he accomplished—of the advantages that were to be gained by the European presence in Africa and about the “high moral road to be taken by all.” Methodically, and with the assistance of several maps, he described, in the simplest of terms, the results of his expedition, the high point of his exegesis being a description of his definitive establishment of the exact location of the legendary Mountains of the Moon on his return route, which brought about yet another great ovation. Humbly thanking the gathering, he left the stage to sustained applause—archbishops, scientists, noblemen, and even cynical journalists were on their feet. Shaking many hands backstage, Stanley then inquired as to the whereabouts of a water closet; led to one, he closed the door behind him and vomited. Though he would publicly say that the RGS reception was by far the grandest he had ever known, in the privacy of the loo, he repeated to himself: “This is s—t, all of it the d—est s—t.”

  IN HIS CORRESPONDENCE ONE DAY, after he had settled back into his New Bond Street flat, was a letter from Dorothy Tennant. It had been written one morning when she had awakened from yet another of her dreams about him.

  June 7, 1890

  Dearest Stanley—

  I know that you may have thought of never hearing from me again, but I should let you know that although I behaved foolishly in regard to you, for the many months of your absence—four years now—I have often reflected tenderly on the matter of our mutual affections; these thoughts came to me when I realized my own despair over the possibility that you might have come to harm in Africa. I prayed for your safe return nightly—I consulted often with Lord Mackinnon as to word of your well-being… In short, dear Henry, I realized how dearly I held you and regretted my grievous and selfish actions. Though you must surely think me bold to write you now, after so long a time, it is because I have been struggling to change… to turn away from the selfishness that blinded me to your worth as a man. If I have been neglectful in this regard, then understand that I am more than what I was then and would be honored and deeply glad to see you again, not because you have done great things but because I fear I might never see you again.

  Your sincere friend,

  Dorothy Tennant

  STANLEY DID NOT ANSWER THIS LETTER and did his best to avoid her. Each time he went to a reception or banquet in his honor, his face would heat up at the prospect of meeting Miss Tennant. But in the small circles of London, it was inevitable that they would meet again. It happened one evening at a reception held by Mackinnon in Stanley’s honor at the Langham hotel. With Mackinnon by his side, Stanley—dressed in the same white corded Egyptian officer’s uniform that Dorothy would immortalize in her painting of him—stood about, gloomily sipping Champagne. Then he saw her, in the bloom of her beauty—even more beautiful than he recalled—standing in the corner of the room demurely with her mother, the old bat nodding at him when she caught his eye. Why was it, he wondered, that Dorothy then beamed a smile at him, despite all the public humiliation she had put him through? (Everyone in London knew about her rejection of his proposal.) And why did the very air around him seem to take on such a heavy weight, as if its molecules had grown dense? Why did his pulse race—either anger or nascent love teeming through him? He could not say. Hoisting her own Champagne glass up to him, Dorothy nodded, and he turned away, his face flush. Mackinnon, who had taken the liberty of inviting the Tennants to his fete on the chance that Stanley might reconcile with her (for she had seemed genuinely affectionate in speaking of Stanley in his absence), turned to his explorer friend, asking: “But Stanley, what harm would there be in your speaking to her?”

  “I would sooner be back in the swamps and up to my neck with leeches,” he snapped.

  As he occupied himself in petty conversation with his admirers, she noticed him turning to look toward her despite his efforts not to do so—an effort he would never admit to undertaking. Inevitably, she worked her way across the room, her progress slow, for in her way she was famous, too, and she often stopped to speak with her own admirers. Finally, when she found herself standing a few paces from him, she was startled to see how the great man had been aged by his travels. It was not so much that his hair had turned completely white but that his whole being, which had seemed, in his moments of good health, tireless, now seemed subdued, even frail. She was suddenly aware that he had seemed to have shrunk somewhat, not in matters of height—she was some three inches taller than he was—but by way of a diminished vitality. His air of immortality had faded. All at once, though he refused to look her squarely in the eye, she found this softer, more world-weary Stanley somehow more appealing than the previous Stanley, and without even considering how it would look to others, Dorothy took hold of his hands and held them close to her heart: “Oh, Mr. Stanley, if you only knew how long I’ve waited to see you again.” Then: “But will you not speak to me?”

  “Miss Tennant,” he said somewhat coldly, “I appreciate your sentiments, but please, do me a service: Go off into your fine life and leave me alone.”

  “I don’t believe you mean it,” she said—and the truth was that he trembled when speaking it. “You will hear from me—again and again until we can be as we once were.”

  And that was how they left it.

  MORE NOTES FROM MISS TENNANT continued to arrive at his flat: He chose to ignore them. Still he received more letters—first of farewell (“When shall we say our proper good-byes?”), then others of devotion (“Having been so foolish a girl, unacquainted with love, I rejected you; but now I feel as if by doing so I have exiled myself to a lightless land of complete unhappiness”; “I am yours whether you will or will not be my husband”; “I am ready to be yours”; “I will obey as well as love”).

  These were letters so humble that Stanley, in a maudlin and solitary mood himself for some weeks—finally chose to respond to her:

  That you have put me, a man of importance and high self-esteem, in such a bad way; that you, whom I have told so much to, especially about the misery I had known in terms of family relations… that you, who had seemed so maternally kind to me, had in a callous mood refused my sincerest emotions, denying such emotions and whatever feelings you had, if you had them at all—all these, taken together, have made any future arrangements between us impossible: For your refusal has entered me like an arrow deep into my heart. There is nothing I can further say on this subject: You must leave me alone.

  Then came this missive from her:

  Of course I understand. And if I am never to see you again, never to hear the timbre of your powerful voice, and if I must expect to go on regretting such things as I have done for the rest of my life, then so it must be. But if you can believe that there can be a different outcome to a story that began brightly, then darkened because of my own faults and inexperience, then I know that we can make a life of happiness: For I know that deep down you want the same wonderful things as I do. So humbly, I ask you to marry me, Mr. Stanley. Should you refuse, then this will be the last you will hear from me. But oh, Bula Matari, say yes, and a new and glorious life will begin.

  RECEIVING THIS LETTER ONE JUNE MORNING at his New Bond Street flat, he sat down, without mo
ving, for several hours. He half crumpled the thing in his hands. He got up to shave. Looking into a mirror, he thought that he had lost the innocence and openness of his expression, each line equal to a year of passing loneliness and struggle in his life. Well into his twenties he had been boyish in appearance, but slowly his visage began to change, not just because of the ordinary passing of time but also from having witnessed so much death. It had been a companion since his boyhood days in Wales; it had followed him to New Orleans, then to Cuba, and then, during the Civil War, at the Battle of Shiloh, as a Confederate. Thereafter he watched death multiply before him in Africa time and time again. From native attacks. Fevers. Dysentery. And he had witnessed all of it from the vantage point of his solitude—would it ever pass, that loneliness?

  Once, in an African forest, he had come upon a clearing where the trees were shimmering blue, their leaves vibrating rapidly. He stepped closer. Thousands of butterflies of many colorations had been resting there, wings flickering like candle flames—but all he could identify with was the lowly beetle that had scurried by his mud-encrusted boots.

  “I’ll take the hardy over the beautiful,” he had thought.

  He could have died a hundred times save for his fortitude. There was a big difference between stepping down on a thistle and thereby cutting the sole of your foot while hiking in Wales and doing the same in Africa. He remembered a minor “cut” he’d gotten in the jungle, the sharp tip of a reed having gone through the sole of his boot. Within a few hours the skin around the wound had swollen and turned a livid pink; within a day it became black and blue. The following morning it had begun to seep pus, and he fell into a fever for days—but even that had been easier to bear than Miss Tennant’s rejection of him. No wonder he was sometimes so foul of mood and enraged during his last expedition; no wonder some of his porters had come to fear him.

  “What is love, anyway?” he asked himself over and over again.

  STANLEY BEGAN A HALF DOZEN different letters to her before sending her this:

  Dear Miss Tennant,

  In all truth I have wondered if the sea change of your feelings toward me has to do with my fame, and I have not found it easy to forget your past rejection of me. I have treated even the lowest Pygmy better than you treated me, but I will admit that your claims to have prayed for my forgiveness—and love, if that is so—have moved me from a settled indifference to what might happen between us to a greater and more profound sympathy for the enterprise; and while I have yet to become completely convinced of your good intentions, I will make an attempt to reach that faith. But be warned: I do not find it a paltry matter.

  And he went on for page after page, as if on a forced march of his emotions, until he had filled eighteen such pages: “If this is some piracy of your emotions to trick me again, then do not answer this; if you are sincere, I will be willing.”

  He was, after all, feeling that he would not live forever.

  FROM SAMUEL CLEMENS to William Dean Howells:

  June 25, 1890

  Hartford, Connecticut

  Dear Howells,

  A curious thing: You remember meeting Henry Morton Stanley a few years back? The poor fellow had been going through a rather sticky and disappointing romance with a London society dame who had put him through the wringer. It put him in such a bad way that he had forsworn contact with the feminine universe until further notice; but lo and behold, I have just received an invitation to attend their wedding ceremony, to be held in the hallowed halls of Westminster in a few weeks’ time; apparently Stanley, back from his Africa travels, experienced a change of heart—just one of those things, I suppose, that will happen to a man when he’s cooped up in the wilds and malarial. Bemused as I am by the whole business, I wish that brave Hercules all the good luck in the world. Much as Livy and I would like to attend, and as curious as I am about attending a wedding at Westminster, we won’t be going. (Among other things, Livy is under the weather and has been told that she needs a few months to recover from a recent heart ailment.) But I do wish the boy the best, and I am sure to meet the lady who snared him sooner or later.

  THEIR WEDDING

  From Lady Stanley’s Unpublished Memoir, circa 1907

  ON THE AFTERNOON of July 12, 1890, when I wed Henry Morton Stanley in Westminster Abbey, most everyone of importance in London—including the Prince of Wales and Gladstone himself—turned up for our ceremony. (Of the five thousand requests for seats, only one-third of them could be honored.) Along the rainy streets outside the abbey a great crowd of well-wishers gathered to view the procession of dignitaries entering the sacristy, a flank of bobbies and mounted Life Guards keeping clear a path into the square as carriage after carriage veered into sight of the abbey doors. I’m told that within that gathering were pennywhistle musicians and jugglers; vendors hawked apples and taffy candies, as well as souvenir pamphlets and pins and postcards featuring pictures of Stanley and me and commemorating our union.

  At about one-thirty, when I disembarked from my carriage in the company of my mother and brother, Gertrude and Charles Coombe Tennant, I alighted into a crowd of well-wishers, the ladies and young girls among them oohing and aahing over the nature of my wedding gown and train. It was a costume whose specifics I had dreamed about and made sketches of in my studio. My petticoat, bodice, and skirt were of white satin and trimmed with lace and silk cording, their edges decorated with garlands of orange blossoms and pearls; my bodice’s high collar, in the Medici style, was similarly embroidered with pearls. I wore a tulle veil fastened to my hair with diamond stars, above which sat a crown of orange blossoms held in place by an aigrette, also of diamonds (a gift from Stanley). My shoes were of silver leather with diamond buckles. These were complemented by a long diamond necklace, a gift from Sir William Mackinnon, shipping magnate and head of the Imperial British East Africa Company, who helped to finance Stanley’s last expedition. From it hung a brooch consisting of thirty-eight diamonds that had been arranged around a cameo of our good Queen Victoria (a gift, appropriately so, from Her Majesty).

  During the days preceding our wedding, Henry had been laid low in his New Bond Street flat, unable to stir from his bed. He had fallen fiercely ill from a bout of chronic gastritis. Though he had continued on in great pain and was pale and feverish on the morning of our wedding, Stanley, fretful of missing out on what he had described to me in one of his daily letters as “the occasion of his greatest hope and promise in life,” roused himself from his bed and, hobbling, managed to bathe, shave, sit for a proper haircut, and dress. His valet, Hoffman, and Dr. Parke assisted him into a fine ensemble that included a silk top hat and dark frock coat, to whose lapel he affixed a white carnation.

  By the time he came by carriage into the square, buoyed by the jubilation of the crowd, who greeted him with whistles and applause and shouts of joy—“Long live Stanley!”—he was barely able to walk without a cane, but with his usual fortitude and resilience he summoned enough strength to get out of the carriage unassisted.

  With a pipe organ playing and a choir singing, I made my entrance into the abbey shortly after my husband’s arrival, a relief coming over me at the sight of him fidgeting with a pair of white kidskin gloves, for until a few moments before, we had wondered if Stanley would make it at all.

  With my brother by my side, and with my two bridesmaids, bouquets of white roses in hand and jasmine wreaths upon their heads, leading the way, and with my two plumed squires carrying my lustrous train following at a distance of some twenty paces, I proceeded toward the altar into a realm that felt sanctified, supernatural, and protective. In the towering nave of Westminster, its stained-glass windows glorious with light, candles and lanterns aglow, in my trembling hands I carried a bouquet of white jasmine, gardenias, roses, and pancratium lilies.

  When I joined Stanley by the altar, he was pale, his rheumy eyes betraying to me the gravity of his illness, his face drawn and his hair turned completely white. But he still managed to greet me with a slight smile
and a nod of his head, and there was strength in his hand when he took hold of my mine. I can remember looking at Stanley and asking him, in a whisper, “Are you certain in your heart about this?” At that point he took a deep breath and stood straight, saying firmly, “Yes.”

  When we left Westminster, rose petals tossed from the balconies of surrounding houses were falling upon the pavement and street like snow in our wake. And as the tower’s bells were ringing and the bystanders lining the street were waving miniature Union Jacks—as well as a few American flags, in honor of Stanley’s American association—I realized that my new husband had quickly fallen ill again. As we made our brief but jubilant procession by carriage to my family’s town house in Richmond Terrace, he let out a shallow breath and slumped back into his seat. Eventually, the carriage compartment, jostling along the cobblestones, brought him enough discomfort that he doubled over. But then he would open his eyes and ask, “Are we there yet?”