From Lady Stanley’s Journal
MY DARLING IS SINKING, slowly and painlessly. His dear mind wanders gently at times, and his eyes look far away.
FOR ANOTHER TWO WEEKS he lingered, lost to the world. He’d gotten over his pleurisy by then, could breathe more or less normally, but everything else he had suffered from had taken its cumulative tolclass="underline" His body was simply giving out. Often he thought, “I am looking forward to the very great rest.” Sometimes he would look across the room, as if seeing some invisible being standing there; in one instance, Livingstone himself came up from the underworld to tell him, “Come, now, Stanley; it won’t be so bad.” He even fancied seeing his own Welsh father in tattered rags, with a bottle of ale in hand, sitting beside his nurse in the corner of the room, trying to gather himself to say a proper few words to his son. “When will he speak?” he’d ask himself. His father, a dark-haired man with thick hands and a bristled face, ever so timid, in the way of drunks, finally spoke up one afternoon: “You may not think much of me, but I have ever been proud to see you done so good in the world.” Others came to tell him that he had done right: Even his mother, dressed in the very fineries he’d once bought her in Paris, told Stanley: “I may not have been much of a mother to you, Johnny, but I was your mother, and in the end result, making you who you were, I didn’t do so badly, did I?”
Through this process, Stanley was surprised by how peaceful he had begun to feel. Lethargic, unable to leave his bed, he slowly slipped away, his days and nights spent dreaming. Mainly he liked to think about the way life would go in the household even without him; he liked to imagine Dolly sitting before her dressing-room mirror each morning, brushing out her hair, or bathing with a scrub brush in hand, the door always left slightly ajar, as if she wanted him to look in and see her naked body. He would miss the sheer joy of looking in at her in her studio, as she pensively and serenely contemplated a drawing. Would that wonderful sensation be transferred to some other life? he wondered.
If he had any great regrets, they came down to the sad prospect of never seeing his son again, for when he contemplated an afterlife, it was a shadowy zone where souls wandered in darkness, longing for the world, much as the Greeks of his boyhood readings had imagined. Yet in Denzil he saw pure light. In giving him what he, an abandoned child, had never received — the best of his affections — Stanley felt renewed. In fact, no greater pleasure came to him than when, while resting in his bed, he would feel the atmosphere of his sickroom changing, the ever so slight weight falling on the mattress, and his one good hand, his right, feeling upon its knuckles many soft and moist kisses — Stanley opening his eyes and seeing the gentle manner in which his son was trying to awaken him.
“It’s me,” he’d say. “Are you happy, Father?”
“Always, when I see you.”
And then a whole new ritual would begin, Stanley slowly shifting his body to the side in his bed to make room: “Come lie beside me.” Denzil’s lithe and nearly weightless body with all its warmth snuggling close to him, his hand laid tenderly across the right side of Stanley’s face, the boy asking all kinds of questions: “When will you get up, Father?” and “Can you read something to me?”
All of that he would miss.
FOR DAYS HE DREAMED about Africa. He often spoke in Swahili; at times he seemed to be at the head of a column, shouting out orders that could be heard throughout the house. Once he awakened in a sweat, convinced that he had a pith helmet upon his head. His flannel undergarments were drenched with moisture, and his body throbbed from the impossible heat that rose in shafts from the jungle floor around him. He believed, in such moments, that he was a younger man again, and as such, reliving those discomforts did not bother him, for sooner or later, the small ecstasies of such journeys came back to Stanley as well. He would find himself perched on a ravine overlooking a waterfall, its spray shooting up great clouds of rainbowed mists that settled coolly and lovingly upon his face; or he would be on the fortieth day of a trek in the continuous twilight of a forest, bringing his column to a halt, astounded to discover a single radiant shaft of sunlight coming down through a clearing in the treetops, a cluster of tropical orchids gleaming like church lamps before him, God’s handiwork illuminating the darkness.
One afternoon when Stanley opened his eyes, in the corner of his bedroom was sitting his plump Irish nurse, praying over a rosary; then he saw Kalulu — no longer a pile of bones residing somewhere at the bottom of the Congo rapids but rather standing straight and tall at the foot of his bed, smiling. And this cheered him greatly:
“Kalulu, I am happy to see you again.”
“And I you, master.”
“But why have you come?”
“To bring you some water. Are you not thirsty?”
“I am.”
And with that Kalulu, wearing nothing more than a pair of linen pantaloons, drew from a water bag a cup’s worth, which he brought to Stanley’s parched lips; and then, as if to baptize him, he dampened his fingers with water and anointed Stanley’s brow and eyelids, as if in a gesture of final peace.
“Thank you, Kalulu. But why are you being so kind to me when it was because of me that you drowned in the rapids?”
“Even as I am dead and drowned, as you say, it was you who, in bringing me to London and to England, showed me a new world. I would never have seen it without you; and though I miss life itself I will never forget the things I have experienced.”
“Then you are not angry with me?”
“No, Bula Matari. I have only come to welcome you.”
In that parting, a simple embrace: Then a blink of the eyes, and Kalulu was gone.
STANLEY HAD NO AWARENESS that he might have set into motion a colonial machine that, as rumor had it, was responsible for the mutilation and death of hundreds of thousands of Congolese natives. The London Herald and Le Monde were writing continually of atrocities, and world opinion was shocked by the release of the Casement Report — but Stanley never saw it.
As his end approached, he was not bitter, only wistful at not being able to say good-bye to old friends. Among those he most dearly wished to see again was Samuel Clemens; he asked that Clemens’s books be placed beside him, and, in a final effort, he asked Dolly to write Clemens a letter to see if he might be persuaded to visit them in London.
Dear Samuel—
As I send you these words, I am on my way out of this nonsense. What you once described to me as the “lowly dirges of life” I have come to. God bless me, brother, if you can.
Then he began to fade.
From Lady Stanley’s Journal
IT WAS THIS MORNING, MAY 10, that my beloved died. But I had not expected it to come so soon, for we still held out hopes for his recovery. In those early hours, he suddenly cried out, “Oh, I want to be free! I have done all my work… I want to go home!” He told me then: “Good-bye, my sweet love; good-bye.”
STANLEY’S FUNERAL WAS HELD at Westminster Abbey on May 17; as with his and Dolly’s wedding, tickets were given out only by written request and at the discretion of the family. The nave was filled to capacity, and Stanley was carried toward the altar by a distinguished group of pallbearers — from the RGS, mainly: Arthur J. M. Jephson; David Livingstone Bruce; James Hamilton, Duke of Abercorn; Alfred Lyall; George Goldie; Henry Hamilton Johnston; John Scott Keltie; and Henry Wellcome. The service had been appropriately respectful, and yet for all the ceremonial pomp and reverence accorded the old explorer, the abbey’s dean, Joseph Armitage Robinson, a man not entirely convinced of Stanley’s innocence in the “rape of the Congo,” had denied him the one honor that he had most wanted, which was to be buried alongside Livingstone. Later, his cortege wound through the crowd-lined streets in its silent and solemn march toward Waterloo station, whence his ashes were taken by train to Surrey and laid to rest in the cemetery of St. Michael and All Angels Church in Pirbright.