Thankfully, when the English tour ended, by the end of July, we went to Switzerland, where Stanley began a well-deserved rest. By then he seemed so fatigued and weary that I questioned the soundness of his reasoning in having accepted yet another tour that coming October, to Australia. He was not looking forward to it, but as he was a man who believed in keeping his promises, he could no more change his mind than, as he put it, “a bee could turn into a butterfly.” But in Switzerland, he took advantage of the fresh air, and our days were spent in long hikes in the meadows of Mürren. On one hike, however, along a field of damp grass, it was his misfortune to lose his footing — the man who had traveled for years throughout equatorial Africa without once breaking any bones shattered his ankle from a fall. The painful injury precipitated yet another bout of malaria.
For some months he could only walk with the assistance of a crutch. He hated the thing, but on at least one occasion, my husband found that it worked to his advantage. It was in October of that year, 1891, just before we were to leave for Australia, that King Léopold summoned Stanley to his palace in Ostend to discuss the possibility of Stanley’s returning to the Congo. When the king broached the subject, Stanley pointed out the lameness of his leg, from which he had yet to recover. “Well, it will be healed by the time you return from Australia, will it not?” the king said. “Then I will have a big task on hand for you, when you are ready.”
Throughout our long tour of Australia and New Zealand, Stanley underwent numerous relapses of gastritis and malaria; the latter would usually come over him after he had been weakened by the former, which is to say that the conditions of touring and travel in general, particularly given the very long periods at sea, were proving too much for my husband’s flagging constitution. Loving him so, I, for one, did not want him risking his life in Africa again. For all the praises heaped upon him by the likes of Léopold, I began to remind my husband that however immortal he might sometimes feel, he was very much a man of flesh, of a finite duration, one who, in his matrimony, should prepare himself — give himself over to — a more domestic and safe life, an idea that he only reluctantly came around to.
Strange dreams plagued him. He would report these dreams in a most factual, almost casual manner over breakfast, and we, alarmed that most of his dreams were about death, began to wonder if Stanley were having premonitions about his own.
“Please, Henry,” I would say to him. “Allow me to take care of you.”
But his illnesses — his malaria, in particular — were more persuasive than my words. Physical pain, such as what he suffered when he broke his ankle on an ordinary hike in Switzerland, he was indifferent to. But, as I would learn, what he most feared was a diminishment of his faculties — his memories, his ability to organize his thoughts and write through the long hours, and the very physical aspect of his written script, in which he had always taken great pride. These became the things he wished to preserve, the loss of which he feared the most.
Thankfully, when we did come back to England some eight months later, in June of 1892, Stanley had begun to take my own many reservations about such rigorous journeys to heart. “My love,” I said to him. “Having worked so hard, should you not now begin to enjoy your life?”
“It is the better idea,” he admitted. “I will not return to Africa,” he told me.
WHEN HE WAS NOT ILL, he remained as energetic as any man. The lack of a great challenge had left him restless. As he easily tired of London society, Mother and I, thinking it an honorable profession that Father would have approved of, persuaded Stanley to give up his American citizenship and stand for a seat in the House of Commons as a Liberal Unionist candidate for the North Lambeth district in London. Ours was a rushed decision, and Stanley entered the contest just ten days before the polling would take place, in late June. Refusing to go door to door, to call personally on voters, or to loll about in pubs and meetinghouses, he preferred to rely upon the carefully prepared speeches that he, as a son of the working class, would give at labor clubs and assemblies. Such experiences, however, did not go well at first. During a speech at Hawkstone Hall, Lambeth, it seemed not to matter what he said, for he was heckled by an organized rabble from the opposition, his every word shouted down.
“Whatever I have achieved in life has been achieved by my own hard work, with no help from privilege or favor of any kind. My strongest sympathies are with the working classes… and as such I see myself endeavoring to better the conditions of the masses…” He had just finished saying these words when the stage upon which we were seated was stormed and we were forced to flee to our carriage.
Despite our late entry into the fray, Stanley, on the strength of his reputation and great patriotism, lost by only one hundred and thirty votes. And while he had no great love for electioneering, he promised to continue on as a candidate for the next election, Along the way came other interludes of travel, mainly for reasons of his unsteady health, which by then had begun to trouble me, as these affected his mood. We rarely argued, but what arguments did take place seemed to come about from his continuing discomforts, which enfeebled him, and putting him in the care of others seemed to shame Stanley. In that state, he preferred to be left alone; he would enter into weeklong periods of isolation, when he would rarely venture from our house. Otherwise, even when good health found him, it was only an exceptional person who could rouse him from his seclusion, as happened one June afternoon in 1892, when we learned that Samuel Clemens had arrived in London from Berlin, on his way back to America.
On Mr. Twain
WHAT I UNDERSTOOD FROM STANLEY of Mr. Clemens’s situation in those days was that the great American writer had been undergoing some rather difficult times in regard to his finances and health. An entrepreneur, Clemens had started his own publishing house in the 1880s, Charles L. Webster and Company, through which he put out his own books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn being the first. His greatest success came with the publication of the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant, in 1885, which sold many hundreds of copies. Despite profits from it, Clemens had taken a ruinous loss through a gamble on another book, Life of Pope Leo XIII, as neither Catholics nor Protestants bought that pious volume, and several other of his publishing ventures had also failed or not come to fruition. But what money he had made over the years from his own popular writings and from the Webster publishing company turned to air, for he had poured huge amounts into the development of a typesetting machine, the completion of which its inventor — a certain Mr. Paige — much delayed, at great expense to Clemens.
Clemens had written Stanley a few letters that mentioned these reversals, but never had he prevailed upon my husband for any funds and referred to his decision to move with his family to Europe as one made out of a concern for his wife’s health. Since we had last seen them, two years before, Livy had begun to suffer from a crippling rheumatism and heart palpitations that left her faint, short of breath, and listless. And one of their daughters, the youngest, Jean, at the age of twelve, had come down with some unusual symptoms of her own, her sweet personality suddenly changing. Clemens himself, in the urgency of his financial need, was driven to write many hours each and every day to raise money, to the point where his right arm became practically paralyzed. One of the letters that awaited Stanley on our return from Australia, in mid-1892, had arrived from Berlin, where Clemens and his family had been staying for some months. Clemens’s script was unrecognizable, as he had taken to writing with his left hand.