We owe our host everything. He gives, we take. Let us anyway accept graciously, punctiliously, and considerately, not as if we were doing the favour; the boot is on the other foot.
Only eight or nine weeks before her death, Miss Mary Kingsley had dined with me on the eve of her departure from England, full of health and spirits, laughingly saying that she did not quite know why she was going out to South Africa, excepting that she felt she must. She wanted to nurse soldiers; she wished to see war; and, above all, she desired to collect specimens of fish from the Orange River.
Armed with some introductions, which I was able to give her, she departed, declaring with her merry laugh she would only be away a few months, and would probably return to collect some more specimen-jars and butterfly-nets before going on to West Africa to continue her studies there. She had only been a few weeks at the Cape when she was taken ill and died. She was a woman of strong character, great determination, a hard worker in every sense of the word, one who had struggled against opposition and some poverty, and the death of Mary Kingsley was a loss to her country.
The intrepid explorer was thirty before she had ever been away from our shores. She had up to that time nursed her invalid mother at Cambridge. But the spirit of adventure, the desire to travel, were burning within her; and as soon as the opportunity came she went off by herself to the wild, untrammelled regions of West Africa, and has left a record of her experiences in some interesting volumes.
Mary Kingsley made money as a lecturer, but the odd thing was that she was by no means good at the art. She possessed a deep and almost manly voice, but being far too nervous to trust to extemporaneous words, she always read what she had to say, and in her desire to read slowly and to be clear and distinct, she adopted an extraordinary sing-song, something like the prayers of a Methodist parson. This was all very well when she was telling a funny story, as it only heightened its effect, but when one had to listen for an hour and a half to this curious monotone, it became tiring. All who knew her, however, recognised her as a brilliant conversationalist. Sir William Crookes once truly said:
“Mary Kingsley on the platform, and Mary Kingsley in the drawing-room, are two entirely different personalities.”
This woman who accomplished and dared so much, who braved the climate and the blacks of Africa alone, whose views on West African politics were strongly held and strongly expressed, was the very antithesis of what one would expect from a strong-minded female. She was small and thin, her light hair was parted in the middle, and she wore a hard black velvet band across the head in quite a style of her own, never seen nowadays on anyone except the little girl in the nursery. She had all the angular ways, and much of the determination, of the male, when put to the test, although to look at her one might think a puff of wind would blow her away.
Mary Kingsley was the niece of Charles Kingsley, and the daughter of Dr. Henry Kingsley. The woman, who would face a whole tribe of natives alone and unprotected, was in the society of her own people a shrinking, nervous little creature. Indeed, one marvelled and wondered however she kept the strength of will and the physical courage which she displayed on so many notable occasions during her adventurous travels. Once she wrote to me:
“My dear Mrs. Alec,
“Thank you very much. I will come if I possibly can. I have an uncle ill just now that uses up my time considerably and makes me dull and stupid and unfit for society, but he is on the mend.