Once he’d put his large and formidable writing desk, which resembled a preacher’s pulpit, near the fireplace, and once he had installed a correspondence cabinet, he attended to his books — one such crate, marked THE ONE HUNDRED WORTHIES, bore those volumes necessary to a gentleman’s essential education. There were also geographical books, books in Latin and Greek, books on ornithology, many books on religion and theological thought, and numerous biographies. (“It is my intention,” he told me in those days, “to write my autobiography so as to get the record of my life straight.”) For his pleasure, there were novels. In fact it was my observation that, when he was not writing, he considered the companionship of a book — nearly any book at all — indispensable to his well-being. He read everything, from the cheapest shilling novels — the kinds of shockingly bad yellow-backed romances one would find in the kiosks of railway stations — to books written by the great past masters, such as Cervantes, as well as authors of current interest — Kipling, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky among them. (It was a habit, I would learn, that he did not share with Mr. Clemens, who was not quite as well read as my husband, particularly in the realm of novels.) But among the books that he most cherished he included the works of Mark Twain, to which, I noticed, he returned again and again.
Despite the great acclaim that had met his initial return from the Emin Pasha expedition, it was not long afterward that his actions were being daily condemned by missionaries and humanitarian groups in the newspapers. One of the officers in his party, a certain Lieutenant Troup, with whom Stanley had a falling-out, had written to the newspapers describing the expedition as a “mad mission, supposedly dedicated to the spread of civilization but really about exterminating the natives in the way the Americans had exterminated the red man.”
“My dear,” he once told me, “it is one thing to command the physical body of a man to do such and such a thing: But to command the mind and the soul is not so easy at all. The conditions of such an unearthly world produce in normally civilized and reasonable men many a strange response, which no one man can predict or control once soul-altering madness has descended. In a place like Africa, where the ‘wilds’ quickly find a man out, there is no substitute for fortitude and character.”
Some accused him of being power-driven and merciless in his treatment of the Africans. This, I knew, was far from the truth. Henry had believed Léopold when he said his goal was to modernize the Congo and bring enlightenment to the backward nation, thereby eliminating the brutal slave trade. Only now did he begin to question the Belgian king’s motives.
Nor was he pleased to find himself the butt of jokes. One evening, out of curiosity, we had occasion to attend a theatrical venue in the East End and saw a play called Stanley in Africa. To my husband’s dismay, he was portrayed by a baboonish actor who played Stanley as a daft British officer, oblivious to the sufferings of the column in his charge. The guffaws of the audience when his character would bellow out, “March on through the dismal swamps to find the snippety pasha — and ivory, too!” so upset him that we left quickly.
“What I did was for the good of the future of Africa,” he told me again and again from his sickbed one day. “Those who do not believe me can go to H — s and stay there forever.”
THANKFULLY, IN NOVEMBER of 1890, just as he had begun to grow overly testy and weary of the public atmosphere in England, we traveled to a far more evenhanded place where such controversies did not exist: America. The reason for our sojourn was a lecture tour of that country arranged by one Major James Burton Pond (who, I should add, happened to be Samuel Clemens’s agent). With my mother, Gertrude, two of our Swahili servants, and in the company of Lieutenant Jephson and my cousin, we set sail from Liverpool to New York, aboard the SS Cuba.
Upon our arrival, Stanley’s mood, dour in recent weeks, greatly improved: A military band had gathered on the chilly, windblown dock, performing both “God Save the Queen” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As we passed into the customhouse, there was a contingent of press on hand to ask friendly questions, most of them having nothing to do with Africa. But then, for whatever reason, it seemed a funny thing to the local press that Stanley had escorted my mother down the gangplank and across the pier to the customhouse, his elbow locked on her arm while she, with her other hand gesticulating toward his person, seemed to be expressing some strong opinions. Then an argument between them erupted over a trivial matter: I can remember that the stevedores and dock workers found this incident quite funny and began calling out many foolish things. Just then, I had counseled my husband to remember the glory awaiting him, and he resumed escorting my mother with courtesy. But a seed was planted: By the time we had finished our progression to the customhouse, the press had formed the unfair opinion that Stanley was under the sway of a nagging mother-in-law, a motif that would follow us, to his annoyance, in humorous newspaper accounts throughout the land.
WE STAYED AT THE PLAZA HOTEL, just off Central Park, a large suite of rooms at our disposal. Telegrams and notes lay in piles upon the desk of Stanley’s temporary study, including an invitation from Thomas Edison to visit with him at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, one of the few outings that Stanley seemed to genuinely look forward to. Stanley on that occasion also received a great number of telephone calls — among them one from Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, and one from Mrs. Astor, who had arranged a dinner in her Fifth Avenue mansion in his honor. Thoroughly prepared for the lectures that he would be giving in New York — at the Century Association, the Cooper Union, and in Steinway Hall, among other places, he would address both geographical societies and ordinary audiences on “The Founding of the Congo Free State”—he still felt hard-pressed to make a good impression about his activities there.
With so many engagements, dinners, lectures, and luncheons and such, we were always making our way through the streets of the city by carriage. Stanley found the city barbarically noisy and in a state of disorder: The elevated trains he despised; the many posters and advertisements that were thrown up everywhere, without regard to any aesthetic concern, troubled him as well. He on one occasion took the time to count the telegraph and telephone wires that crisscrossed above the street outside one of our windows — some one hundred and seventy four, he counted: a web of wiring; an ugly scene.
Late one Sunday afternoon, Stanley mentioned, with some delight, that he wanted me to meet someone who was waiting below in a lobby sitting room with Stanley’s American agent, Major Pond. “And who is this?” I asked.
“Come; you will see.”
Descending to the Plaza lobby, Stanley and I found the supremely tall and bearded Major Pond sitting at a banquette in a dark corner of a salon. Beside him was a quite pleasant and genteel, rather angelic-faced woman who immediately smiled upon our approach. Just as Major Pond stood up to greet us, the gentleman by her side struck a match for his cigar, his distinguished face, with its high, curling brows and handlebar mustache, glaring like sculpted stone in that sudden flaring light — like a jack-o’-lantern, perhaps; the very sharp features of his face, with its aquiline nose and deep-set, hawkish eyes flashed brilliantly white and yellow, then faded low into a sudden bluish shadow as the match went out. In that moment I knew that he was none other than Samuel Clemens, or Mark Twain, the lady at his side being his wife, Livy.