“What’s hardest,” he had written to Stanley, “is that we have decided to leave our beloved house in Connecticut. When we will return I do not know — I hope it will be soon; but I have found positions for my coachman of twenty-one years and my butler, George, and have left behind my two most trusted servants to look after the place. You may ask if I am happy to be traveling again: The answer is no! But do I find it necessary. The ‘cures’ of Europe will be good for us all; and it’s a cheaper way of living, to be sure.”
It is a curious thing that while we were vacationing in Switzerland, Clemens and his family were at Marienbad, taking the bath cures. Knowing Clemens, he had become convinced that his old friend, with so many pressures in his life, had entered into a melancholic state.
“Were I in a better condition,” he told me, “I would go to him tomorrow.”
THEY FINALLY ARRANGED TO MEET at Claridge’s for four o’clock tea, with my mother and me coming along. Stanley took a place beside us at a banquette, his hands cupped over the head of a cane, which he still needed, looking about each time someone entered the room. When Clemens walked in, some few minutes after the hour, he was instantly recognized by the patrons, who applauded his entrance. Clemens, majestic in a white linen suit, his hair streaming madly from his head, nodded and smiled at them as he made his way toward us. Stanley got up immediately and seemed genuinely moved to see him again. Not one to smile, Stanley easily did so then.
“Samuel Clemens, how the deuces are you?” Stanley happily said.
Clemens was affable that afternoon, quite complimentary of me, and actually doting on my mother. He seemed to find it amusing that Stanley was running for Parliament—“A dark rumor I heard at the Blackfriars Club; is it so?”—but he also seemed rather weary, even apprehensive. I do not recall if he made a joke about being in reduced circumstances, but as he sat with us he mentioned that his trip to America was necessary because of “urgent business matters.” His right arm seemed somewhat better than what we had expected: The cures he had taken had improved his condition to the point where he could lift his elbow above his shoulder, something he said he could not do for the longest time: “Made me feel like an injured bird,” he told us. The baths in mud are messy but remarkable, he allowed. Another help to the bodily maladies, he mentioned, was something he called the mind cure.
“Do you folks know of it? Learned it years ago from a governess we once had. It works by sheer willpower. But you have to really concentrate on putting the malady out of your thoughts. Anyway, this method seems to work nicely with stomachaches and such, if you can stop thinking about your troubled innards.”
“I doubt it would work with malaria,” my husband said. “Many is the time I have been stricken and wished it would go away. It just doesn’t happen.”
“Everything is harder in our years, Henry. We are no longer at an age when such things come easily. Even my memory is lagging lately: Don’t know if it’s business that does it, or just plain worries, but names leave me more easily these days. It’s getting old, isn’t it?”
“I think not,” my husband said. “The longer you live, the more things you have to remember, and I would imagine there’s only so much room in the human mind.”
“I’ll allow that might be so, Henry, but why is it — and I address this to Mrs. Tennant as well — that it is easier to remember some things from childhood than the name of a gentleman you just met in a crowded room?”
“You will always remember persons of interest,” my mother said. “Most individuals are not worth remembering.”
“I can see that — and yet even the best-remembered and fondest things get all scrambled up when you remember them, don’t they? How I wish in these days to recall only the things that make me happy. It would be a kind of paradise, wouldn’t it?”
HE TOLD US that he would be giving a lecture at the Garrick Club in London, and he asked if Stanley would be kind enough to introduce him. (Stanley said he would.) He said that he was writing travel letters for a New York paper, the Sun, as I recall, and working on a book, a historical novel, the subject of which he would not mention, having some superstitious sense of secrecy about it. (This I would read years later; the book was about Joan of Arc.) And, as a gift, he had brought along “another ditty that has somehow tumbled out from my pen,” a copy of his latest novel, The American Claimant, which had just been published in May. “A humble effort for your library,” he told us.
Stanley was delighted to receive it, searching, as he always did when receiving anything from Clemens, for an inscription on its title page: Reading it over to himself, he showed it to me. It said: TO THE HAPPY NEWLYWEDS. MAY IT ALWAYS BE SO FOR YOU. SAM CLEMENS.
“This is fine indeed: I will read it tomorrow,” Stanley told him. Then: “I do not know if you have received my latest on the Emin Pasha expedition, In Darkest Africa,” he said. “I know that I asked Major Pond to make sure that you had a set.”
“I do.”
“And your opinion of it?”
“You know I like your writing, Henry; you must work harder than anyone — I was in on the birth of it. I remember your letter from Cairo about the book and how quickly it was written. How many words are in it?”
“About six hundred thousand, more or less.”
“In how many days?”
“Eighty-six.”
“My God! And all the things you put in it — maps, drawings, letters, lists — how on earth you did it I cannot imagine, but you did! It reads like a novel, almost — but some new kind of novel, I should say. Closest I ever got to something like that… well, it was Life on the Mississippi. Of course I admire it for the sheer audacity of the thing. Well done, Henry: And I am saying that despite my own feelings about the situation there. But as a work, well, I’ve got to hand it to you. I am admiring of it.”
“Thank you, Samuel. Coming from you, that means a lot to me.”
Stanley’s face had flushed, and he looked into Clemens’s eyes, which had briefly but intensely focused on his own.
“I do mean it. You’ve turned into one of the most muscular writers in the world. But I couldn’t help noticing that you dedicated that book to King Léopold: I don’t like him, Henry.”
“That is a pity. He is a well-intentioned man in a difficult situation: The Congo does things to men’s souls. Unkind things sometime happen.”
(HERE STANLEY DAYDREAMED for a moment. He remembered the first time he spoke with Léopold. One evening in 1878, in the wake of his second expedition, after the most lavish of dinners, they had gone strolling in the gardens of his palace at Ostend, and the king, humbled by Stanley’s explorations and lavishly praising him, a “common churl,” as the greatest of explorers, had broached the subject of retaining his services in the Congo. The king had an immediate advantage. At some six feet four, he towered over Stanley, but despite this, he continually dropped his head low and slouched his shoulders; at every other moment he seemed to pause, bending low to pick at some blossom, his sentences coming when he, at a lower altitude, met Stanley eye to eye. That night he confessed his personal failings.