Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

by Oscar Hijuelos

  That’s when someone stood up and said, “Long live Stanley!”

  AFTER THAT LAST “PUBLIC” DECLARATION, Stanley and his family withdrew into nearly complete isolation: Stanley did not once leave the confines of the mansion until April, when he departed London for Furze Hill, in the last spring of his life. There, in the company of his wife and son, he calmly approached his waning days; Dorothy, reading aloud to him, rarely left his side. The change in setting had, at first, a salutary affect, and for two of the most peaceful and happy weeks of their lives, he seemed to be regaining his strength. His spirits were raised, books and the good memories they brought him all but obliterating the sad aftertaste of the Africa controversies. Given that he appeared to be slowly improving, death was seemingly kept at bay.

  But that same April, he, Dolly, Denzil, and Gertrude went out for a carriage ride; a piercing chill came abruptly over Stanley, who, despite the blankets in which he’d been wrapped, began to shiver, and by the time they returned to the estate, he was feverish, his lungs congested so badly that he could only breathe sitting up in bed. The good doctor from Pirbright diagnosed a case of pleurisy. Were he younger and his system not compromised by years of illnesses, he might have had some chance of recovery, but for ten days he struggled just to open his eyes. Up until then Dolly had maintained some hope, but one evening as she sat beside him, she had a premonition of his death—a black shadow passed quickly across the room behind her; she had just caught a fleeting glimpse of it—and with that she turned to her husband and embraced him dearly, as if to do so would ward off death itself: “Now, what is this?” he asked her.

  “I will never leave you alone again, I promise you.”

  And she didn’t, believing that somehow her love would protect him.

  By then, however, he was preparing himself for what he called the final liberation, and as he wished to pass his last days in his first true home he asked to be taken back to London. He was too ill to contend with the train, and was thus transported back to Richmond Terrace by a private ambulance, his world, at last, reduced to the confines of his bedroom, where he was to take comfort again in his love of literature and family. Often he slept, but awake one evening, he sat up and said to Dolly:

  “Where will you put me?” Then: “When I am gone?”

  “Stanley,” she told him, “I want to be near you, but they will put your body in Westminster Abbey, next to Livingstone’s.”

  He told her, “Yes, it would be right to do so,” but then, even as he said so, there was doubt in his eyes. “Will they?”

  From Lady Stanley’s Journal

  MY DARLING IS SINKING, slowly and painlessly. His dear mind wanders gently at times, and his eyes look far away.

  FOR ANOTHER TWO WEEKS he lingered, lost to the world. He’d gotten over his pleurisy by then, could breathe more or less normally, but everything else he had suffered from had taken its cumulative toll: His body was simply giving out. Often he thought, “I am looking forward to the very great rest.” Sometimes he would look across the room, as if seeing some invisible being standing there; in one instance, Livingstone himself came up from the underworld to tell him, “Come, now, Stanley; it won’t be so bad.” He even fancied seeing his own Welsh father in tattered rags, with a bottle of ale in hand, sitting beside his nurse in the corner of the room, trying to gather himself to say a proper few words to his son. “When will he speak?” he’d ask himself. His father, a dark-haired man with thick hands and a bristled face, ever so timid, in the way of drunks, finally spoke up one afternoon: “You may not think much of me, but I have ever been proud to see you done so good in the world.” Others came to tell him that he had done right: Even his mother, dressed in the very fineries he’d once bought her in Paris, told Stanley: “I may not have been much of a mother to you, Johnny, but I was your mother, and in the end result, making you who you were, I didn’t do so badly, did I?”

  Through this process, Stanley was surprised by how peaceful he had begun to feel. Lethargic, unable to leave his bed, he slowly slipped away, his days and nights spent dreaming. Mainly he liked to think about the way life would go in the household even without him; he liked to imagine Dolly sitting before her dressing-room mirror each morning, brushing out her hair, or bathing with a scrub brush in hand, the door always left slightly ajar, as if she wanted him to look in and see her naked body. He would miss the sheer joy of looking in at her in her studio, as she pensively and serenely contemplated a drawing. Would that wonderful sensation be transferred to some other life? he wondered.

  If he had any great regrets, they came down to the sad prospect of never seeing his son again, for when he contemplated an afterlife, it was a shadowy zone where souls wandered in darkness, longing for the world, much as the Greeks of his boyhood readings had imagined. Yet in Denzil he saw pure light. In giving him what he, an abandoned child, had never received—the best of his affections—Stanley felt renewed. In fact, no greater pleasure came to him than when, while resting in his bed, he would feel the atmosphere of his sickroom changing, the ever so slight weight falling on the mattress, and his one good hand, his right, feeling upon its knuckles many soft and moist kisses—Stanley opening his eyes and seeing the gentle manner in which his son was trying to awaken him.

  “It’s me,” he’d say. “Are you happy, Father?”

  “Always, when I see you.”

  And then a whole new ritual would begin, Stanley slowly shifting his body to the side in his bed to make room: “Come lie beside me.” Denzil’s lithe and nearly weightless body with all its warmth snuggling close to him, his hand laid tenderly across the right side of Stanley’s face, the boy asking all kinds of questions: “When will you get up, Father?” and “Can you read something to me?”

  All of that he would miss.

  FOR DAYS HE DREAMED about Africa. He often spoke in Swahili; at times he seemed to be at the head of a column, shouting out orders that could be heard throughout the house. Once he awakened in a sweat, convinced that he had a pith helmet upon his head. His flannel undergarments were drenched with moisture, and his body throbbed from the impossible heat that rose in shafts from the jungle floor around him. He believed, in such moments, that he was a younger man again, and as such, reliving those discomforts did not bother him, for sooner or later, the small ecstasies of such journeys came back to Stanley as well. He would find himself perched on a ravine overlooking a waterfall, its spray shooting up great clouds of rainbowed mists that settled coolly and lovingly upon his face; or he would be on the fortieth day of a trek in the continuous twilight of a forest, bringing his column to a halt, astounded to discover a single radiant shaft of sunlight coming down through a clearing in the treetops, a cluster of tropical orchids gleaming like church lamps before him, God’s handiwork illuminating the darkness.

  One afternoon when Stanley opened his eyes, in the corner of his bedroom was sitting his plump Irish nurse, praying over a rosary; then he saw Kalulu—no longer a pile of bones residing somewhere at the bottom of the Congo rapids but rather standing straight and tall at the foot of his bed, smiling. And this cheered him greatly:

  “Kalulu, I am happy to see you again.”

  “And I you, master.”

  “But why have you come?”

  “To bring you some water. Are you not thirsty?”

  “I am.”

  And with that Kalulu, wearing nothing more than a pair of linen pantaloons, drew from a water bag a cup’s worth, which he brought to Stanley’s parched lips; and then, as if to baptize him, he dampened his fingers with water and anointed Stanley’s brow and eyelids, as if in a gesture of final peace.

  “Thank you, Kalulu. But why are you being so kind to me when it was because of me that you drowned in the rapids?”

  “Even as I am dead and drowned, as you say, it was you who, in bringing me to London and to England, showed me a new world. I would never have seen it without you; and though I miss life itself I will never forget the things I have experienced.”r />
  “Then you are not angry with me?”

  “No, Bula Matari. I have only come to welcome you.”

  In that parting, a simple embrace: Then a blink of the eyes, and Kalulu was gone.

  STANLEY HAD NO AWARENESS that he might have set into motion a colonial machine that, as rumor had it, was responsible for the mutilation and death of hundreds of thousands of Congolese natives. The London Herald and Le Monde were writing continually of atrocities, and world opinion was shocked by the release of the Casement Report—but Stanley never saw it.

  As his end approached, he was not bitter, only wistful at not being able to say good-bye to old friends. Among those he most dearly wished to see again was Samuel Clemens; he asked that Clemens’s books be placed beside him, and, in a final effort, he asked Dolly to write Clemens a letter to see if he might be persuaded to visit them in London.

  Dear Samuel—

  As I send you these words, I am on my way out of this nonsense. What you once described to me as the “lowly dirges of life” I have come to. God bless me, brother, if you can.

  Then he began to fade.

  From Lady Stanley’s Journal

  IT WAS THIS MORNING, MAY 10, that my beloved died. But I had not expected it to come so soon, for we still held out hopes for his recovery. In those early hours, he suddenly cried out, “Oh, I want to be free! I have done all my work… I want to go home!” He told me then: “Good-bye, my sweet love; good-bye.”

  STANLEY’S FUNERAL WAS HELD at Westminster Abbey on May 17; as with his and Dolly’s wedding, tickets were given out only by written request and at the discretion of the family. The nave was filled to capacity, and Stanley was carried toward the altar by a distinguished group of pallbearers—from the RGS, mainly: Arthur J. M. Jephson; David Livingstone Bruce; James Hamilton, Duke of Abercorn; Alfred Lyall; George Goldie; Henry Hamilton Johnston; John Scott Keltie; and Henry Wellcome. The service had been appropriately respectful, and yet for all the ceremonial pomp and reverence accorded the old explorer, the abbey’s dean, Joseph Armitage Robinson, a man not entirely convinced of Stanley’s innocence in the “rape of the Congo,” had denied him the one honor that he had most wanted, which was to be buried alongside Livingstone. Later, his cortege wound through the crowd-lined streets in its silent and solemn march toward Waterloo station, whence his ashes were taken by train to Surrey and laid to rest in the cemetery of St. Michael and All Angels Church in Pirbright.

  Thereafter, as the kind of woman hard put to openly grieve or even admit to any finality about death, Lady Stanley had at first devoted her energies to finding a monument appropriate to her late husband’s status as a “great man.” For three months she conducted a search for a monolith with which to mark the grave where Stanley’s ashes had been buried and, to that end, contracted a certain Mr. Edwards of the Art Memorial Company to scour the quarries, fields, and riverbanks of Dartmoor for a sufficiently grand stone, the kind that in the days of ancient practices would have been put up to mark the passing of a king—a druidic monolith that in its blunt majesty and permanence would fly in the face of the slight that had been rendered toward her husband by the sanctimonious powers that be. Various localities were visited—Moreton, Chagford Gidleigh, Walla Brook, Teigncombe, Castor, Hemstone, and Thornworthy—and thousands of stones were examined for their suitability; the search was a matter of such popular concern that many local farmers and their tenants joined in, with the happy result that by the summer a proper mass of granite, some twelve feet high and four feet wide and weighing six tons, had been located on a farm called Frenchbeer. Hauled to the churchyard and put up, its face bore the following inscription:

  Henry Morton

  Stanley

  Bula Matari

  1841–1904

  Africa

  Above the inscription was carved the symbol of life everlasting, a Christian cross.

  CLEMENS IN THAT TIME

  Yours has just this moment arrived—just as I was finishing a note to poor Lady Stanley. I believe the last country house visit we paid in England was to Stanley. Lord! how my friends and acquaintances fall about me now in my gray-headed days!

  SAMUEL CLEMENS TO THE REVEREND TWICHELL, 1904

  CLEMENS HAD BEEN SITTING on the veranda of his rented palazzo in Florence, the Villa Reale di Quarto, when he read in the late afternoon papers of Stanley’s death. By then, no bad news surprised him, for since he had taken up residence in that poorly heated and damp building, with its cavernous halls and chilly floors, few good things had happened. If there had been a high point, it had come with the singing recital that Clara had given in early April, but even then, his joy quickly vanished, for that same evening, Livy suffered a sudden heart seizure and would have died had not a subcutaneous injection of brandy revived her. Altogether, this sojourn in Italy, during which he had hoped to recapture the pleasantness of an earlier stay—one that took place some ten years before, at the Villa Viviani—had been a fiasco of discomforts. It rained continually, and daily fogs, like a “blue gloom,” enveloped the grounds so completely that their rose and holly garden—the most charming feature of the property—seemed, with its crumbling walls and arches, like a haunted cemetery. And their landlady, the Countess Massiglia, who lived in an apartment on the grounds, was a foul, proprietary, and bitter woman, seemingly bent on making their lives miserable. Despite the fact that she knew Clemens had arranged for a doctor to attend to the ailing Livy daily, she ordered her servants to keep the front gates locked so the physician would have to wait endlessly. When Clemens, complaining of bad odors that filled the lower floors, asked her to have the cesspools under the villa drained, she ignored him, and Clemens had to have his own dredgers come in. Incensed by this poor treatment, he was, in any case, already gravely distracted, for instead of helping Livy recover, that bleak and inhospitable Tuscan setting only seemed to have made her worse.

  As his old friend Stanley had begun to fade in the early months of 1904, so did Livy. Various attacks of breathlessness and torpor and depression came over her, and oxygen and morphine had to be often administered. Worse was that he could rarely see her: Livy’s doctor limited his visits to two minutes a day—once again!—as if he, the love of her life, were somehow harmful to her. For those months she had remained in bed, attended by a nurse, Margaret Sherry, and by Katy Leary, their housekeeper, who had joined them from America.

  Occasionally Clara went into her mother’s room to pass an hour by her side, as her presence seemed to calm her; but neither Samuel nor Jean, with her own continuing frail health and tendency toward fainting, was allowed to freely visit her. Clemens was so grieved by their separation that he would sometimes go into her room to quickly embrace her and cover her neck with kisses: Then suddenly, fearing that he would harm her, he would just as quickly leave.

  To assuage his misery—and the long wait—he worked on his autobiography, dictating aloud to his secretary.

  AT LAST, BY MAY, the weather became glorious; the gardens went into bloom, wisteria fell over the walls, and butterflies came lilting over the blossoms. And the palazzo itself, while never entirely warm, had, with its fireplaces burning, at least lost its constant chilliness. With the appearance of the sun and Florence gloriously vivid to the west—the duomo, the campanile, the Medici Chapels, and the beautiful tower of the Palazzo Vecchio glowing in the distant plain, and with many villas and houses vanishing in and out of the light, as if time had dissolved them—the dreariness of that setting was transformed by a peculiar Tuscan magic. (Clara had the best of the views, because from her room, she could look out at the scenery through ten-foot-high windows.) Clemens, newly invigorated and inspired by the change of weather, began to search anew for a villa near Fiesole.

  Livy seemed to become better by early May, but during one of Samuel’s brief visits with her, she looked at him with haunted eyes and said: “I don’t want to die, but I will, won’t I?”

  Sometimes Clemens would take long strolls along the pathways of the villa,
enjoying the gardens and the beautiful decay of its moldering, ivy-covered walls. His passage meandered under arbors heavy with grapevine; or he would head out to the stable to watch his daughters ride around the estate on the gray mares that their mother had given them. But at around four, he always waited for his servant to bring the papers in from Florence, among them the London Times (always a few days old), La Stampa, and Corriere della Sera, which he would go over with an Italian dictionary in hand. But on that day—May 11, 1904—he had no need to, for even with his quite limited Italian there was no mistaking the headline: IL ESPLORATORE HENRY MORTON STANLEY È MORTO A LONDRA, IERI MATTINA.

  Greatly saddened by the news, Clemens called forth his memory of first seeing Stanley, so many years before, standing by the railing of the boiler deck of the steamship—the scene coming back to him with an immediacy that confounded him. It was as if, as they had sometimes discussed, the past, as cumbersome as it was in memory, seemed only separated from the present by the thinnest of lines, and more so as one got older—a tautological folly. Like free-winging angels, exempt from the linear constrictions of time, memory did as it pleased. As he thought about his friend a few tears came to his eyes; these he brushed away. For by that time in his life so many old friends had passed on—just a week earlier he had read of the death of Antonin Dvoák, whom he had gotten to know in Vienna; there were others, but Stanley went back so far in his life that he immediately set out to write Lady Stanley a letter of condolence, despite the fact that he would have preferred to not dwell on the subject at all.