We got roaring, hilariously drunk that final night. Richard drank more than I had ever seen one man consume, and we stag-gered into our rooms in a stupor that I can barely remember. In the morning we both paid the price: Richard was actually ill from the aftereffects, and it took him all morning, until just before his steamer departed, to begin to recover. I walked with him to the dock and we promised to write. I gave him a standing order for any books he might produce, “two copies of each, please, one inscribed to me, for as long as you write them and as long as I’m here to receive them.”
I watched him, a lonely figure on the riverboat’s deck, until he went out of sight. In that moment I’d have done anything to have him back. The city that night was full of tourists, but to me it was excruciatingly empty, and I knew the long voyage home would be solemn and bleak.
As I checked out the next morning, the clerk asked if my stay had been satisfactory. “And will you be seeing your friend again, sir?”
“I hope so. But he lives in London…”
“I only ask, sir, because the maid found something he left in his room.”
He brought it out from behind the desk.
It was Richard’s notebook.
Of course I wrote him, telling him I had the notebook and it was safe with me until such time as he could claim it. Did he want me to entrust it to the mails? That transatlantic passage could be perilous, but I would be happy to send it on if that’s what he wanted. Otherwise I would hold it until we met again.
His reply when it came months later was enigmatic and brief. He would appreciate it if I would put the journal in a safe place, unseen by anyone, until he could retrieve it. “I must have knocked myself out that night,” he said by way of apology. “I thought I packed it, but I drank like a fish.”
Other than that I didn’t expect much from his promise to write: Burton was a busy world traveler and in the gradual letdown after my homecoming, I had to be realistic. I was a minor character in his crowded life, an admirer he had met by chance. But one day a letter came.
It was everything I could have hoped for: detailed, packed with news of his journey to see Brigham Young, his trek to California and across Central America, and the steamer voyage home. Soon he would have a book, to be called The City of the Saints, describing what he had seen of the Mormons and his stagecoach trip across the American desert to California, and his book The Lake Regions of Central Africa was imminent from the publisher. “I have taken you at your word regarding two copies of each book, but don’t hesitate to holler uncle if it becomes too burdensome.” He said nothing about his journal, and though it sat on my shelf like some wicked temptress, I never opened it, I never peeped; I rose to the highest expectation of his trust and let it be.
I wrote him back at once, saying that not only did I want his new books as they came off the press but any new editions of his older works as well, especially if they contained new or amended material. I sent him news from the States. The little garrison at Fort Moultrie was living under a national microscope in the wake of Lincoln’s election, anything could tip us into war, and if there was a chance that his books might fail to arrive through some difficulty with the mails, he should please hold them for me until the trouble was settled.
I followed the events at Moultrie and kept a diary of my reactions, with the silly idea of sending it to Burton at some point and perhaps egging him to do a book on our part of his journey. “Old Gardner has been replaced by a much younger commander, Major Robert Anderson,” I wrote in December. “Captain Doubleday is his right-hand man.” Later that month I wrote again, when the Moultrie garrison slipped into Fort Sumter under cover of night, exactly as Burton had suggested almost a year before. “You must have made far more sense to that captain than either of us thought at the time,” I said. “Of course, having no alternative will change a man’s mind.”
“God help us all now,” I wrote in January. “War cannot possibly be averted more than another two weeks.” But the talks dragged on until April, when a blaze of fire sent us into four years of hell.
All that year the war news was bleak. Any hope for a quick end dwindled in a series of bloody battles that pushed us to new levels of hatred. November brought my severest test with Richard when a Union warship stopped the British mail steamer Trent and two Confederate officials on board were arrested. In London, Lord Palmerston thundered and roared. This was the excuse he had been waiting for. I trembled with rage as thousands of British troops, the vanguard of a certain invasion, were massed on the Canadian border. During those weeks I felt so wracked with suspicion that I decided to torch Richard’s books and be done with him. If I sent him a box filled with their ashes, topped by a petulant note telling him what I thought of his honor and the worthlessness of his word, perhaps that would ease my conscience somewhat. But I couldn’t light the fire: I couldn’t even bring myself to read the truth in his journal, and at last I took it out of my room, out of sight, and, I hoped, out of mind. I waited into January, thank God, when Seward finally announced that the Rebels were being set free, and the crisis with England was defused.
One day a cryptic note came to me. It was months old, written at Christmas in the worst days of the Trent affair. It was only two lines and unsigned, but there was no mistaking that cribbed hand: I made my best case, it said. Now we’ll see what happens. You may he sure, that I join you in hoping for cool heads to prevail. Again I felt riddled with shame. The bad friend had not been Richard but myself, and my lack of faith had nearly brought us to ruin. I made up my mind that I would keep his friendship for the rest of my days. No matter what happened, there would be no further suspicion. And to seal my decision I brought out his journal and put it up on my open shelf, where it has sat unread ever since.
* * *
I got nothing more from him until our war was over, but the cornucopia that followed was one of my great thrills of 1866. A vast collection arrived in two enormous boxes: The Lake Regions of Central Africa, in two volumes, signed to me with an inscription that never fails to warm my heart. To Charles Warren—my dear friend Charlie—I think of you often and hold very dear those days we traveled together through your troubled American South. I read The City of Saints with great interest, wondering why he had written not a word on his time in the South. I knew he hated slavery; why would he not take that opportunity to comment on its evils. A trace of the old suspicion wafted up: Because he was a spy, England will invade us the first chance she gets, and I in my silence am her accomplice. But those dark thoughts I pushed aside: my trust in Richard always returned.
There was more in the boxes: The Prairie Traveler was a book of advice for hardy souls crossing the vast American continent. Abeokuta and the Camaroons Mountains had a striking frontis portrait of Burton, charming despite the posed, formal nature of it. Wanderings in West Africa from Liverpool to Fernando Po and A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome continued his fascination with and exploration of the great Dark Continent. The Nile Basin was a small work that I was happy to have as a book collector but as his friend found unfortunate in its continuation of his rivalry with Speke, who was then dead by his own hand. Later I would learn that its reception in England confirmed my own judgment: you can’t win an argument with a dead man, and Burton should never have published it. But Wit and Wisdom from West Africa was a charming collection of native beliefs, and The Guide-Book: A Pictorial Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina (Including Some of the More Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Mohammed, the Arab Lawgiver) summarized his most famous journey. In the bottom of the second box was the strangest book he ever wrote: a long poem in the form of a dialogue, titled Stone Talk, ostensibly written by a “Frank Baker” but full of Burtonian trademarks. It was a biting attack on religion, embracing Darwin in crude and clever ways, and calling his homeland to account for her hypocrisy and crimes around the world. He penned a tongue-in-cheek inscription and signed it “Frank.” If it becomes known that I wrote this I will be run out of England and banished to the land of the Mormons forever.