“He told me once that you met long ago.”
“Indeed we did. It was a friendship that commenced by chance — on the boiler deck of a steamboat heading upriver, between New Orleans and St. Louis… in the autumn of 1860, just before the Civil War, during my days as a Mississippi River pilot.”
A plume of bluish smoke.
“Stanley was traveling in the company of his adoptive American father, a merchant trader who plied the Mississippi port towns. He was Stanley’s mentor in New Orleans and a great influence on his manner of dress and grooming, and he did much, as I remember, to advance his son’s education, which by my lights was already considerable. Stanley was one of the better-read young men on that river. Of course I already knew some bookish types; Horace Bixby, a fellow pilot, got me to reading William Shakespeare, and occasionally I’d meet some traveling professor or any number of journalists with whom I could sometimes talk about literature. But Stanley, in those days, with his good common-school English education — one that he was modest about — was quite a cut above the average Mississippi traveler. And he seemed the most guileless and unassuming fellow one could ever encounter, to boot.”
He puffed on his cigar again, and even as he was speaking, conjured, in his mind, the sight of drowsy still waters at dusk, campfires along the Mississippi River dotting the shore with light, the stars beginning to rise.
“He always had a book in hand and seemed anxious to learn about the world: I found myself beguiled by him, and I was touched that he seemed to be in need of a friend. We were both young men — I was twenty-five or so, and I believe Stanley was then about nineteen, the same age as my dear recently deceased younger brother, also named Henry. I suppose I was ready and willing to befriend Stanley for that reason alone, though who knows how or why chance happens to place a person in one’s path. Whatever the mysterious cause, our friendship blossomed and eventually led to a quite interesting run of years. I am surprised that he has not told you more about our beginnings.”
SHE SITS DOWN TO WRITE a letter in the parlor of her mansion, the interior unchanged from the day Stanley had died, three years before, at six in the morning, just as Big Ben was ringing in that hour from a distance. In its rooms many of Stanley’s possessions and keepsakes remain where she had put them; in the hallways, framed photographs of Stanley on safari, Stanley in Zanzibar with his native porters, Stanley poised on a cliff in the rainbow mists of Victoria Falls. A bookcase bears a multitude of first editions and translations of his African memoirs. Atop the numerous tables and travertine pedestals are a variety of ornate freedom caskets from cities like Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Swansea, and Manchester, each honoring Stanley for one or the other of his African exploits. Here and there, hanging on a wall, are plaques that Stanley had particularly liked. One of them, harking back to 1872, when he had become famous for finding Livingstone in the wilds of Africa, reads:
A COMMON COUNCIL
Holden in the chamber of Guildhall, of the City of London
On Thursday, the 21st day of November, 1872,
RESOLVED UNANIMOUSLY
That this court desires to express its great appreciation of the eminent services rendered by
MR. HENRY MORTON STANLEY
To the cause of science and humanity by his persistent and successful endeavors to discover and relieve that zealous and persevering
Missionary and African Traveller,
DR. DAVID LIVINGSTONE,
The uncertainty of whose fate had caused such deep anxiety, not only to Her Majesty’s subjects, but to the whole civilised world.
There are framed maps of Africa and bronze busts of Stanley lining the hallways and several Minton biscuit figurines of Stanley — the kind that were sold for years in the tourist shops of Piccadilly — set out on a parlor table. On a desk in Lady Stanley’s own study, just down the hall from her painting studio, sit her commonplace books and a manuscript of her own writings — the fragments of a memoir (never to be completed) called My Life with Henry Morton Stanley—alongside a plaster cast of Stanley’s left hand, which she keeps for good luck. But there is also much more about Stanley — diplomas, royal decrees, gold medals (the Order of Léopold and the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath from the late queen; the Grand Cordon of the Imperial Order of Medijdieh from the khedive of Egypt) — to come upon in that house. There are also many other keepsakes — old compasses, sextants, and other instruments as well as various native African artifacts, such as Zulu fly whisks, spearheads, and phallic oddities brought back by Stanley after his journeys — on display in a curio cabinet.
As she writes, his presence is inescapable. Even as she is about to remarry, in a few weeks, Lady Stanley has never gotten around to removing a thing from Stanley’s private bedroom — they had sometimes slept apart. His wardrobe closet still contains the Savile Row suits he favored, along with his shirts, his lace bow ties, his vests, suspenders, stockings, his walking sticks, and many pairs of his distinctively smallish-size shoes. Even his bedside table has remained as it was the morning he left her — a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles sitting atop the pages of a Bible, opened to the chapters of Genesis. Nor has she touched the mantel clock with Ottoman numerals, except to rewind it nightly; nor has she removed from that chamber the other books he had taken much comfort in: Gladstone’s Gleanings of Past Years, a volume of autobiographical essays that Stanley admired despite his personal dislike of the man (“I detect the churchgoing, God-fearing, conscientious Christian in almost every paragraph,” he had written); the histories of Thucydides; and two novels, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (“That boy was me, in my youth,” he once said) and another by his old friend Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—the very copy Stanley had carried with him on his final expedition to Africa.
And along with the framed photographs he had asked to be placed near him as he had lain in his bed, beside those of Denzil, Queen Victoria, and Livingstone, there are several oil studies made by Lady Stanley in earlier days: Stanley sitting on the lawn of their country estate in Surrey; a portrait of Samuel Clemens that Dolly had commenced some years before in her studio.
From Lady Stanley to Samuel Clemens
May 11, 1907
2 Richmond Terrace, Whitehall, London
Dearest Samuel,
I have been going through Henry’s many papers and notebooks in my attempt to fill out his history. In his study, he kept several large cabinets of facsimiles of letters, old manuscripts, and notebooks. He was a hoarder of all things pertaining to himself, perhaps for the sake of the historical record, and so, as you may well imagine, there has been quite a bit to consider. Lately, I have made it my habit to spend a part of my days searching for materials pertinent to the story of his life — no easy task, given their volume. It is a labor I have conducted in slow but steady measures.
In any event, I have come across a manuscript that I had never seen before. It is a manuscript I believe Henry had commenced shortly after we had visited New Orleans in the autumn of 1890, while on tour for dear Major Pond, when Henry’s memories of his life there, after an absence of thirty years, had been freshly reawakened. Since much of it was written out on stationery from hotel and steamship lines, with which I am familiar, having accompanied Stanley on his tours of the States and Australia in 1891 and 1892, I date its composition to that time. At first, I had thought the manuscript a preliminary version of the chapters regarding his first years in his adopted country, which Henry would later refine. But as I read on I was surprised to see how much it diverged from what he later left as the “official” version, for these pages contain an untold story. And that story has presented me, as the amateur compiler of his life, with a very great dilemma.