“Miss Tennant,” he said somewhat coldly, “I appreciate your sentiments, but please, do me a service: Go off into your fine life and leave me alone.”
“I don’t believe you mean it,” she said — and the truth was that he trembled when speaking it. “You will hear from me — again and again until we can be as we once were.”
And that was how they left it.
MORE NOTES FROM MISS TENNANT continued to arrive at his flat: He chose to ignore them. Still he received more letters — first of farewell (“When shall we say our proper good-byes?”), then others of devotion (“Having been so foolish a girl, unacquainted with love, I rejected you; but now I feel as if by doing so I have exiled myself to a lightless land of complete unhappiness”; “I am yours whether you will or will not be my husband”; “I am ready to be yours”; “I will obey as well as love”).
These were letters so humble that Stanley, in a maudlin and solitary mood himself for some weeks — finally chose to respond to her:
That you have put me, a man of importance and high self-esteem, in such a bad way; that you, whom I have told so much to, especially about the misery I had known in terms of family relations… that you, who had seemed so maternally kind to me, had in a callous mood refused my sincerest emotions, denying such emotions and whatever feelings you had, if you had them at all — all these, taken together, have made any future arrangements between us impossible: For your refusal has entered me like an arrow deep into my heart. There is nothing I can further say on this subject: You must leave me alone.
Then came this missive from her:
Of course I understand. And if I am never to see you again, never to hear the timbre of your powerful voice, and if I must expect to go on regretting such things as I have done for the rest of my life, then so it must be. But if you can believe that there can be a different outcome to a story that began brightly, then darkened because of my own faults and inexperience, then I know that we can make a life of happiness: For I know that deep down you want the same wonderful things as I do. So humbly, I ask you to marry me, Mr. Stanley. Should you refuse, then this will be the last you will hear from me. But oh, Bula Matari, say yes, and a new and glorious life will begin.
RECEIVING THIS LETTER ONE JUNE MORNING at his New Bond Street flat, he sat down, without moving, for several hours. He half crumpled the thing in his hands. He got up to shave. Looking into a mirror, he thought that he had lost the innocence and openness of his expression, each line equal to a year of passing loneliness and struggle in his life. Well into his twenties he had been boyish in appearance, but slowly his visage began to change, not just because of the ordinary passing of time but also from having witnessed so much death. It had been a companion since his boyhood days in Wales; it had followed him to New Orleans, then to Cuba, and then, during the Civil War, at the Battle of Shiloh, as a Confederate. Thereafter he watched death multiply before him in Africa time and time again. From native attacks. Fevers. Dysentery. And he had witnessed all of it from the vantage point of his solitude — would it ever pass, that loneliness?
Once, in an African forest, he had come upon a clearing where the trees were shimmering blue, their leaves vibrating rapidly. He stepped closer. Thousands of butterflies of many colorations had been resting there, wings flickering like candle flames — but all he could identify with was the lowly beetle that had scurried by his mud-encrusted boots.
“I’ll take the hardy over the beautiful,” he had thought.
He could have died a hundred times save for his fortitude. There was a big difference between stepping down on a thistle and thereby cutting the sole of your foot while hiking in Wales and doing the same in Africa. He remembered a minor “cut” he’d gotten in the jungle, the sharp tip of a reed having gone through the sole of his boot. Within a few hours the skin around the wound had swollen and turned a livid pink; within a day it became black and blue. The following morning it had begun to seep pus, and he fell into a fever for days — but even that had been easier to bear than Miss Tennant’s rejection of him. No wonder he was sometimes so foul of mood and enraged during his last expedition; no wonder some of his porters had come to fear him.
“What is love, anyway?” he asked himself over and over again.
STANLEY BEGAN A HALF DOZEN different letters to her before sending her this:
Dear Miss Tennant,
In all truth I have wondered if the sea change of your feelings toward me has to do with my fame, and I have not found it easy to forget your past rejection of me. I have treated even the lowest Pygmy better than you treated me, but I will admit that your claims to have prayed for my forgiveness — and love, if that is so — have moved me from a settled indifference to what might happen between us to a greater and more profound sympathy for the enterprise; and while I have yet to become completely convinced of your good intentions, I will make an attempt to reach that faith. But be warned: I do not find it a paltry matter.
And he went on for page after page, as if on a forced march of his emotions, until he had filled eighteen such pages: “If this is some piracy of your emotions to trick me again, then do not answer this; if you are sincere, I will be willing.”
He was, after all, feeling that he would not live forever.
FROM SAMUEL CLEMENS to William Dean Howells:
June 25, 1890
Hartford, Connecticut
Dear Howells,
A curious thing: You remember meeting Henry Morton Stanley a few years back? The poor fellow had been going through a rather sticky and disappointing romance with a London society dame who had put him through the wringer. It put him in such a bad way that he had forsworn contact with the feminine universe until further notice; but lo and behold, I have just received an invitation to attend their wedding ceremony, to be held in the hallowed halls of Westminster in a few weeks’ time; apparently Stanley, back from his Africa travels, experienced a change of heart — just one of those things, I suppose, that will happen to a man when he’s cooped up in the wilds and malarial. Bemused as I am by the whole business, I wish that brave Hercules all the good luck in the world. Much as Livy and I would like to attend, and as curious as I am about attending a wedding at Westminster, we won’t be going. (Among other things, Livy is under the weather and has been told that she needs a few months to recover from a recent heart ailment.) But I do wish the boy the best, and I am sure to meet the lady who snared him sooner or later.