“Yes, my love!”
“But is this Cairo?”
“No, you are home, at Furze Hill.”
And he looked at Dolly with confusion, having trouble recognizing her.
“And you are?”
“I am your wife, Dorothy.”
“So I am married? How did that come to be?”
“Oh, Stanley, do you not remember? We have been wedded now for thirteen years!” And she pulled the boy close to his side. “This lovely cherub is your son, Denzil. And look there, through the windows: You will see the spreading meadows and woods — they are yours, as is everything you see around you.”
“Ah, yes, I suppose that is so.” Then: “What’s happened to me?”
“You’ve fallen ill.”
“From malaria?”
“No, my love; you have suffered from a different kind of affliction.”
“And you say that my name is Stanley?”
“Yes! Henry Morton Stanley.”
“Why does it seem odd to me?”
“Because you have been ill.”
And when he turned away sadly, Dolly, in her most hopeful and cheerful manner, said: “The main thing is that you are getting well! And if you do not remember everything clearly now, it will all come back to you, day by day; that I promise you.”
BY LATE JUNE, HAVING RECOVERED his memory and most of his faculties, he was well enough to be carried downstairs from his sickbed in an invalid’s chair to take in the sun on his lawn at Furze Hill. Once out through the entry hall’s door into the open air, he nearly wept from joy. It was a glorious day, teeming with life: a flight of sparrows flocking across the woods; the tapping of woodpeckers and the churning of a brook sounding from a forest hollow in the distance; a monarch butterfly dallying over a rose. In the fields, some of his men, a hearty crew, were digging out a well. Cows, sheep, and horses lolled in a meadow; dogs were barking; his farmhands were going about their business in attending to the estate. And around him — everywhere, he supposed, in the very radiance of life itself — was God’s unseen presence, of which the miracle of the world’s existence in those moments was proof enough.
Although he was no mystic, his stroke had left him predisposed to wild imaginings, for whereas before he had once looked at the horizon and saw it, geographically speaking, coming to an end, in whatever direction he now looked Stanley fantasized that he could follow the terrain beyond its apparent boundaries, as if, radiant with divinity and the promise of youth, he could roam the world from his chair. Though he could not move without assistance, for he did not yet have the strength to wheel himself about, he spent many a day reveling in mental adventures, the likes of which he had not experienced since he was a boy and dreamed of following the road out from St. Asaph’s to the rest of England. Just looking out at the horizon brought back the wanderlust that had driven him throughout his life — how else could he have journeyed so far and wide? He felt blessed to have seen so much of the world, and whether it had been good or bad, he reckoned that he had experienced more than most men ever would. If he felt sad at all, it was out of a longing for the days when the future was a mystery to be pursued and explored.
How he wished he could get out of that chair.
He read quite a bit then — Dickens, Blake, Gibbon — his son often by his side, playing with some puppies on the lawn. With the sun suddenly emerging from behind a cloud and filling the world with light, his son would come with some drawings in hand to show him: “This is Mother”—as a hen. “This is you, Daddy”—as a lion. Day after day went by in this fashion, and he always lamented the coming of night: Even if the mansion was a most comfortable and homey place by then, the world’s darkness distressed him, as the night could only bring him sorrow.
His farmhands often came to pay their respects to him and to see how the old man was doing. One of his builders came by to tell Stanley that he was naming his new house Bula Matari, and one of his housekeepers, having given birth to a little boy, tried to cheer her employer by christening her son Henry. The local vicar, Lamb, and his wife came to visit weekly. And certain friends from London ventured out — Henry Wellcome, H. G. Wells, Edward Marston, and dear old Edwin Arnold.
Often he would simply sit looking out into the woods in a daydream of his past. Once, while drifting into sleep, he conjured a riverboat on the lawn, and, looking up beyond its various decks, he saw Samuel Clemens as a young man in the pilothouse. Samuel was considerate enough to wave and gesture for him to come up and take the wheel, the Mississippi waiting. Then he had a dream of being on the Congo River, along one of its tranquil stretches, its serpentine course drifting past verdant tracts of jungle, friendly Africans clustering on its banks, clacking sticks to get his attention, and holding up baskets of food they wished to barter for lengths of merikani cloth and coils of wire and beads — ah, yes, it was not all bloody hell. Somehow he grew sad to think that some of the Africans might end up slaves: He saw them being herded off by the Arabs, transported in chains through the jungle, their robes dropping off of them; then, just as suddenly, the Congo would turn into the Mississippi, and he would see these same natives on riverboats as the vessels, their great horns blowing, would come into the port of New Orleans or Natchez or Memphis — the two rivers, the Congo and the Mississippi, merging as one in his mind. Along the way the native Africans were turned into the niggers of the South, the sorrowful and beautiful souls he had once known—“At least, in my small way, I have perhaps spared some of their predecessors from a similar fate.” And then, just then, he might hear a voice and open his eyes to see that it was all an illusion, a great sadness coming over him as he realized that he was confined to a chair.
The view from Mount Craig, the African highlands, a stampede of zebras and antelopes in the distance, and much more came to him during such enforced idylls.
DAILY, WITH THE HELP of his nurse and a servant, he attempted to stand up, his legs and coordination having gone out from under him. Giving such exercises his all, by September he could, with considerable effort, walk short distances — down a hallway, across a room, from one end of the veranda to the other — but only with a cane and the assistance of Dolly, the only one to ever hold him closely, to help him along. Sometimes, in order to keep up the strength of his one good hand — his right — he would spend hours kneading a small rubber ball (his left hand was never strong again). And while he consoled himself with the fact that he was making some progress, many a dark thought entered his mind, and so it was that against his doctor’s orders he’d bribe one of his servants to bring him a glass of whiskey or some other strong spirits.
The Carriage Ride
THAT WINTER, back at Richmond Terrace, Stanley, in wishing to settle matters for the future, made up a final will (his fifteenth), leaving most of his estate to Lady Stanley and Denzil. Many of his geographical books, maps, and travel notebooks he left to the RGS; informally, he prevailed upon Dolly, who did not care for such talk, to send, upon his demise, certain items to friends — especially Samuel Clemens, for whom Stanley had set aside a very old edition of the Twelve Caesars, which Clemens had once admired while visiting him, and a vest-pocket watch and gold chain, the inner case inscribed BULA MATARI so that his old friend would perhaps remember the man known as Stanley. Much else of what he possessed he left to Lady Stanley to keep or dispose of as she pleased, though he expressed the hope that she would “take care of and cherish” his collection of Mark Twain books, in particular his copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.