London Days: A Book of Reminiscences

by Arthur Warren

Out of the station they drove amid a din of cheering, but still he maintained his silence. One of them told me afterwards that he was silent until they reached their door in Stratton Street, Piccadilly. All the way the crowds cheered. Sometimes, when the roar was unusually loud, he would lift his hat. Then, when the spectators saw that his close-cut hair had turned white, they would double their cheers. I don't know what men think about when they experience such moments. I have asked many who have had them. They seemed to think that they were gratified, or puzzled, or stunned. I can imagine Stanley asking himself: "When can I get out of this?" But his face might have been the face of a graven image,—say a Sphinx from the sands of North Africa.

The next time I saw him in public was at St. James' Hall, about a week later, when he addressed an audience invited by the Emin Pasha Relief Committee. It was a ribboned and jewelled audience; it was composed of royalties, nobilities, famous commoners and fighting men, diplomats who sparkled and bishops who did not, men of letters, men of science and art, not to mention their radiant ladies, an audience which literally shone, for the affair was an "occasion." The Prince of Wales (afterward King Edward VII) presided; his Princess and the present King sat in the front row. If I were to give a list of "among those present" it would exhaust pages of "Debrett" and "Who's Who", to say nothing of my own pages. The Emin Pasha Relief Committee had done the thing handsomely, as well they might, for this was Stanley's first public appearance since his return from the expedition of which the world babbled long. It was all in the day's work for him. He never turned a hair. He was in command of that audience, he told it what he wished to tell it, quietly, resolutely, and his words went home. They would have thought he addressed such audiences every night. But he had spoken in circumstances far more difficult.

At the proper moment he took his manuscript in hand and walked to the edge of the platform. When the audience had finished its applauding welcome, he looked about for a reading desk, or a table, on which he might put his papers. He seemed puzzled, and I daresay he was, that the committee of the occasion had not provided something of the kind. The Prince of Wales was quick to perceive his need, and picking up a small table that stood in front of his own chair, he carried it to Stanley and placed it in front of him. Then the explorer smiled, bowed, and thanked the Prince, and, turning to his audience, he fitted a pair of gold-bowed spectacles before his eyes and plunged at once into his address.

He told simply, directly, without oratorical flourishes, but as a courageous man to whom dangers were familiar, the story of that awful march into the heart of Africa. It was a famous march then. The world has since forgotten it, I daresay, having had, for years, its fill of deadly suffering. But it is worth remembering as a tale of heroism, and I am able to repeat here some of the passages which I preserved at the time. Stairs, and Parke, and Jephson, and Nelson, the surviving officers of his expedition, were with him on the platform.

The little religion that our Zanzibaris knew, said Stanley, was nothing more than legendary lore, and in their memories floated dimly a story of a land that grew darker and darker as you travelled toward the end of the world, and drew nearer to the place where a great serpent lay supine, coiled round the whole earth. And the ancients must have referred to this, where the light is so ghastly, where the woods are endless, and are so still and solemn and grey, to this oppressive loneliness amid so much life, this loneliness so chilling to the heart! And the horror grows darker with their fancies, the cold of early morning, the comfortless grey of the dawn, the dead white mist, the ever-dripping tears of the dew, the deluging rains, the appalling thunder-bursts. When night comes with its thick, palpable darkness, our Zanzibaris lie cuddled in their little damp huts, they hear the tempest, the growling of the winds, the grinding of the storm-tossed trees, the fall of granite, the shock of the trembling earth, the roaring and rushing as of a mad, overwhelming sea—and then the horror is intensified.

It may be, next morning when they hear the shrill sounds of the whistle, and the officers' voices ring out in the dawn, and the blare of the trumpet stirs them to preparation and action, that the morbid thoughts of the night, and the memories of the terrible dreams, will be effaced for a time. But when the march has begun once again, and the files are slowly moving through the woods, they renew their morbid broodings and ask themselves: "How long is it to last?"

They disappear into the woods by twos and threes and sixes, and, after the caravan has passed, return to the trail, some to reach Yambruja, and upset the young officers with their tales of woe, some to stray in the dark mazes of the forest, hopelessly lost, some to be carved for the cannibal feast.

Those who remain, committed by fears of greater danger, mechanically march on, the prey to dread and weakness, the scratch of a thorn, the puncture of a pointed cane, the bite of an ant, the sting of a wasp. The smallest thing serves to start an ulcer, which becomes virulent and eats its way to the bone, and the man dies.

That self-contained man had been the leader in that march of death. Weeks, months, years of such fighting he had known, fighting not man but nature, a foe he could not strike in return. Sometimes man and his weaknesses aided the enemy, jolly black, or surly black fellows packed with superstitious fears. The voice of the demagogue was loud in England in those days, but not so loud as it is in these days. Stanley had been criticised harshly for his "treatment of the natives"; they were "our black brothers" and all the rest of it; he had even been criticised for making expeditions at all, since "only by black labour could expeditions go forward. What is there in it for the blacks?" There were other mushy-minded objections similar to those employed by pacifists in these days. He had his own way of hitting back at the mollycoddles. They had been asking what he got out of the bold adventure. That is always the way. He turned to Stairs and Parke, Jephson and Nelson, and said quietly to his audience: