On the fourth morning of my father’s illness, with little progress by way of his recovery to report, Clemens accompanied me into his room and witnessed a remarkable thing. For a few hours my father seemed to take a turn for the better: As when we entered, he was sitting up, and though by no means cured, he had apparently regained some strength.
“Come close to me,” he said to me in a hoarse and low voice. “There is something I must tell you.”
“What is it, Father?”
“As you can see, you have journeyed far to look upon the face of a dying man.”
“Think not of such things,” I said. “I know in my heart that you will get better, and when you do, there will be much awaiting us! And if you must stay in this place, then I will be by your side.”
“Oh, my boy, just wanting something does not make it so: I can no more wish myself to good health than I can command the furniture to rise off the floor. But take heart: Though I am a dying man, I am not bothered by it, for I know that I will soon find the answer to many things.” Then, as if he could read my thoughts, he said: “As to more practical matters, regarding your adoption: I have promised to make you my legal heir, and I am now ready to do so. But I have no such paper, and so you, my dear young gentleman, must compose one for me to sign while I can still hold a pen.”
This I agreed to do, but thinking it unsavory to hurry the matter, I remained by his side. Within a few hours Mr. Stanley’s condition worsened to the point where he could barely open his eyes or even move his head: His breathing had become forced, and all manner of aches overwhelmed him. But Death was merciful, for there came over Mr. Stanley’s face a change of expression. Shortly whatever anxieties and sadnesses were going through his mind departed, and with a sigh, and with his pulse slowing, he took my hand into his own and was about to say something, when all at once, he faintly smiled and closed his eyes and settled into a sleep from which he would not awaken. Later that night, as I stood by his side in misery and with a feeling of an impending and irretrievable loss, he breathed his last.
MR. DAVIS HAD THOUGHT to arrange the transport of his body back to America, so that Mr. Stanley might be buried alongside his wife in St. Louis, but the logistics and the matter of preservation made it impossible, for there was no ice in that place, nor was there a nearby mortician to do the work; and he had thought of instructing his blacksmith to build a lead coffin, but such materials were not at hand. And so it was that on the morning of April 12, 1861, after a brief ceremony, during which Mr. Davis and I said some words, Mr. Stanley was laid to rest in a grave under a banyan tree on that plantation.
The next day, Clemens and I began our journey back to Havana. What I had left of the late Mr. Stanley, aside from an indelible memory of his last moments, were a lock of his hair, which I had cut from his head as he had lain still in his bed, some few letters, and a watch of his that Mr. Davis had given me as a keepsake. Naturally my spirits were low, and my body was soon again racked by illness, my recurring malaria coming back to me: I was so grieved and upset that my constitution suffered for it. But hardly anyone would have noticed my state, for when we finally arrived in Havana, the city was in an uproar over the latest news brought in on ships from Florida. A few days before, on April 12, 1861, the same day that my father was buried, Fort Sumter had been bombed, beginning the armed hostilities of the Civil War. It took us another nine days before we reached New Orleans, and from there, we parted in the harbor, Clemens heading north up to St. Louis to join his family; and I, some hours afterward, setting off upriver to Cypress Bend, mainly to retrieve my possessions. But upon my arrival, like most young men from those parts, I was quickly swept up by the war fever, and, wishing to take my mind off Cuba and Mr. Stanley’s death, I decided to honor my promise to join the Dixie Grays, under the command of a certain Colonel Lyon, thereupon beginning my life as a Confederate soldier.
I did not see my dear friend Clemens again for six years.
Here the manuscript ends.
READING THE “CABINET” MANUSCRIPT over several evenings, Samuel Clemens gathered his own recollections regarding those days with Stanley, distant though they were to the seventy-one-year-old writer. Though he well understood the improvisational nature of memory, he found the latter part of Stanley’s account a mostly imaginative interpretation of what, so many years before, had transpired in Cuba. Clemens also thought his old friend had taken liberties in his portrait of his American “father.” Having read it over, with one or another of his half a dozen cats purring on his lap, at a time when his own writings seemed hopelessly beyond achieving the continuity of memoir — or, for that matter, the concentrated expression of the self required in novels — Clemens, who knew how difficult such writings were, deliberated endlessly about his response to Lady Stanley, “an aristocrat as nice as any he had ever known.”
In the end, Clemens wrote a gentle note back:
May 27, 1907
21 Fifth Avenue, New York City
Dear Dorothy—
I must thank you for Stanley’s manuscript, and therefore thank you as well for the opportunity to comment upon it. It does, indeed, cover some terrain of my life — and opening such old doors brings to mind how much I miss your late husband — but as I would like to fill you in and can’t right now, on account of the fact that I am getting ready to leave for England next week, I would prefer to wait and discuss it with you in person when I come to London. In the meantime, as always, on behalf of myself and my daughters, I send you our love.
Samuel
ON TWAIN AND STANLEY MEETING AGAIN
I’d seen Stanley’s anger before, going back to the days when I first came to England, in 1872, during the blossoming of our mutual fame. He was maltempered, indignant, and thought nothing about lashing out publicly at his detractors, who had dared to doubt, and rather viciously so, the truth of his Livingstone expedition. I had seen him conversing with persons and storming off in the middle of a sentence and muttering, “I have seen baboons smarter than you!” I had seen Stanley pacing frantically in a room, after a reception in his honor, denouncing one person after the other, to the point where I would have to say to him: “Henry, calm yourself, you’re doing your reputation harm.” I understood him in that regard, having a temper myself. And I knew him well enough to stand off on certain subjects; and I understood just how he, who had come up from nothing and made something of himself, had been mocked (our own friendship had suffered for several years when he had happened upon a false rumor that had me accusing him of being a “rancorous puppy,” a remark that was taken out of context). I sympathized with his feelings about the aristocracy, to whom he sometimes referred as the “upper asses.” And I suspected that the Africa business had left him thin-skinned, but my God, did he always remain bitter about those days.