Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

  THEY WENT FROM NEW YORK to many cities on the East Coast, then they came back for a banquet at the New York Press Club; then they went to Chicago (on February 14), then on to California (Los Angeles) on March 21. On Sunday, March 29, Stanley reached New Orleans after a thirty-two-year absence.

  From Stanley’s Journal, circa 1893, Relating How He Later Came to Write about His Early Days with Samuel Clemens

  HAVING JOURNEYED TO NEW ORLEANS by private train in early 1891 as part of an itinerary of some one hundred engagements across the United States, with several stops in Canada, I had not expected how touched I would be by those distant yet familiar surroundings. The tour itself had, to that point, been a matter of fulfilling an obligation. Though I was still exhausted from my recent Africa travels and would have been content to stay home with my new bride in England, I had undertaken this tour to make amends to my American agent, Major Pond. Four years earlier, in the autumn of 1886, while lecturing in the northeast—after having attracted some very good press notices, a result of successful engagements in Hartford and Boston, where I had been introduced to my audiences by old friend Samuel Clemens—I was soon flooded with offers from all parts of the country; so many, in fact, that Major Pond was kept quite busy in his New York office making adjustments to my schedule day by day. By that mid-December of 1886, just as the offers continued to pour in and I had completed my eleventh lecture, in Amherst, with some eighty-nine more to come—as per my original contract with Major Pond—a telegram from William Mackinnon arrived at my hotel. It was an urgent summons to England, advising me to drop everything and move forward with the final preparations for an armed expedition to relieve the Emin Pasha, governor of the southernmost province of Equatoria, then under siege by the forces of the Mahdi in a stronghold near Lake Albert, his life being in imminent danger.

  As it had been a condition of my original agreement with Mr. Pond that I could cancel my tour at any time given such an emergency, I quickly booked passage back to Southampton—to Mr. Pond’s heartbreak, but not without having first given him my word that I would later return to complete my contractual obligations should I survive the ordeal that awaited me.

  So it was that after four years of rigorous travel I found myself in the limelight again. It was no easy thing for me to face the public at that time (or any time), for though my return from Africa had been at first received with great jubilation, some rather severe and startling attacks on the nature of my command had begun to appear in the press within a few months. One particular aspect of my account in In Darkest Africa—in regard to the cruel and irrational behavior of the officer commanding my rear column, the late Major Barttelot, who was responsible for many unnecessary native deaths—had come under question. His family, rushing to the dead man’s defense, and naturally wishing to restore his good name, had launched a campaign to discredit my reputation and abilities. Joining them were others, principally Lieutenant Troup, who not only made claims against my moral character but also reported on the unsavory activities of certain of my other officers. Altogether, though I ultimately made a successful case in my defense, it remained an ordeal, for I had to spend countless hours, in England and in America, submitting myself to long and tedious interviews with journalists, answering every kind of inquiry, and living under magnified scrutiny, as if I were in court and under indictment for a crime.

  Thankfully, on this journey I was accompanied by my new wife, Dorothy, the pearl of my days, whose sunny temperament and joy for life remained a solace to me. My mother-in-law, Gertrude Tennant, and her nephew, Hamilton Aide, and one of my old (and most loyal) Africa hands, Lieutenant Arthur J. M. Jephson, comprised the rest of my party. Our private train cars featured all the amenities of a fine hotel, and as we crossed the country, I had the use of a small office and writing desk on which to make improvements to my lectures as needed. Because I had always experienced some unease before audiences and remained wary about going over certain distasteful details in regard to my recent expedition, I was plagued all along by a great reticence. (I worried, mostly, about being boring.) Here my clever wife’s input was invaluable to me. It was her idea that I somewhat broaden the scope of my talks so as to include the story of my encounters with the Pygmies of the forest and other remarkable, somewhat pleasant discoveries. My lecture, which had at first been advertised in New York as “The Relief of Emin Pasha,” became “The March through the Magical Forest,” a change that, according to Major Pond, much invigorated box-office receipts. (We did many thousands of dollars’ worth of business at each venue.) No amount of what I said could begin to capture my experiences, but I tried to put my listeners into my shoes: It was exhausting, to say the least, but I was applauded everywhere I went.

  Since I had given over most of my spare time to the refining of my talks, I mainly left sightseeing to my wife and her mother. Dolly could at least use that opportunity to take in something of my adoptive country and meet some of our many friends. In New York, that chaotic metropolis (a city planner’s nightmare was my impression), I had the pleasure of introducing her to Samuel Clemens for the first time—he liked her immediately, I am happy to say, and one evening they attended a Buffalo Bill rodeo show together. And Clemens—that is, Mark Twain—was also on hand during some of the lectures I gave in Hartford, his hometown, and in Boston. It was joyous to me that they got on so well.

  On one of those afternoons in Boston, after a fine snowfall, Dolly and Clemens, along with his youngest daughter, Jean, went out for several hours of sleigh riding. Upon their return, my wife was rosy-cheeked and ecstatically happy. “Oh, Bula Matari, come and have a ride and breathe the most delicious air under heaven!” she said to me in her endearing way. Clemens, smiling, his hat of Russian fur and his long coat still dripping with particles of snow, joined in: “Yes, Bula,” he told me. “Your winter chariot awaits.” But having my duties, I excused myself and returned to work; besides, I liked the idea of Clemens befriending my wife. She was, after all, quickly becoming my “better half” and an asset to me socially, and I knew that Clemens would have a more congenial time with her than he would with me, so preoccupied was I about saving my energies for my nightly performances.

  NOW, BY THE TIME WE ARRIVED in New Orleans, in March, I was somewhat ready for a diversion beyond the endless dinners and fetes in my honor, which I, being cautious around strangers, would have been happy to avoid. Nevertheless I gave lectures in the elegant salons and society halls of the city. Playing up my “Southern roots” for the crowds, I spiced my stew of African tales with frequent mentions of having worn the Confederate uniform and participated in the Battle of Shiloh, though I had since become better known for “other things.” I spoke of Southern bravery and resolve during that war and ventured the notion that if I had remained cool in some very dangerous situations in Africa and other locales, I owed it to those earlier formative experiences. But while speaking of these things, my life before the Civil War began to come back to me, having lain dormant under a multitude of other memories; and so, breaking from my normal routine, I decided to spend a morning with my wife and her mother, sightseeing around the city.

  On that occasion, I showed them the places where I had once wandered, the harborside and levee, the labyrinthine center of the French Quarter, even the old coffee stands where I used to dally as a young man. And I took them up the main commercial strip, where I had once worked for the better part of a year as a clerk in a store. When we came to that location, at number 3 Tchoupitoulas Street, we found that a store still existed there, selling, as far as I could tell, much of the same kinds of goods, though with many a modern addition to its inventory. I could not resist going inside to take in the old ambience.

  Then we strolled over to my first boardinghouse, an old clapboard affair on St. Thomas Street. I was very touched to see that with the exception of some physical improvements to the premises and the addition of some rosebushes clustered by and adorning the front yard’s white picket fence, it was much as I remembered it.
And because it had been such a happy place for me, a home where I had received much kindness, I felt a great curiosity to see if my former landlady Mrs. Williams still lived there. And so with my wife and mother-in-law in tow, I knocked on the front screen door. Shortly, as we waited in the heat of the day, we heard a voice calling from inside—“Hold on!” Though I had not heard that voice in years, it sounded like Mrs. Williams, and within those moments, I experienced a drawing back in time to my youth, when I knew little about the world. With those years falling away from my travel-worn self, I felt a strangely invigorating grace come through me. To my delight, when the door opened, there stood before us a pretty black woman, her hair all white and tied up in a bun; she was wearing a floral-patterned dress and an apron and smelled sweetly of lilac perfume. She was perhaps seventy or so, though her bearing and manner were youthful.

  “What can I do for you folks?”

  At first, she displayed no awareness that the well-dressed gentleman with his hat in hand and in the company of two ladies had been one of her boarders many years before. I had, indeed, changed: The lad of eighteen, with his youthful countenance and ruddy cheeks, who until he was twenty-five had never seemed to most people older than fifteen, now stood before her with his hair turned white, a weathered face, and a great walrus mustache.

  “Good afternoon, madame. Are you the same Mrs. Jessica Williams who ran this boardinghouse in the years before the war?”

  “I surely am and still do. And who might you be?”

  “You may not remember me. My name is Henry Morton Stanley, but I once stayed here for the better part of a year in the late 1850s, under another name, Mr. John Rowlands.”

  Looking me over, she finally declared: “Why, the little Welsh boy, Mr. Johnny! Come in, come in!” And she beamed so delightfully, shaking all our hands and smiling so gratefully, in a way not often seen in our lofty London circles, that even my most aristocratic mother-in-law was charmed. “Oh, my,” Mrs. Williams said with excitement. “Ain’t you the very one I have been reading ’bout in the papers!”

  Indeed, my arrival in New Orleans had been much publicized in advance, thanks to my agent, Major Pond—my every lecture advertised and every luncheon and dinner engagement duly noted. Extensive, too, had been reports of my African exploits and the celebration of my return as an “adopted son of the city.” Yet I felt somewhat humbled to be in Mrs. Williams’s presence, for she had known me before I had become the “great Henry Stanley.”

  We sat in her parlor and reminisced, but as I had some pressing engagement awaiting us later that afternoon, we could not stay as long as I would have liked. As we took our leave, Mrs. Williams told my wife—“Your husband, ma’am, was one of the most polite and studious of my boarders, and neat as a pin and grateful for the littlest things. Always thought he would land on his feet one way or the other. But never in all my days did I think to see him go so far in this world; you’ve made an old woman happy, coming here, you certainly have.”

  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.

  WITH MR. TWAIN

  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.