“I’m so sorry, sir. Myself, I am your admirer. Can you forgive my intrusion?”
“Yes. Now go away!”
“But begging you pardon, again, sir, I was just asking you a civil sort of question. I meant no disturbance.”
“My dear fellow,” Stanley said. “I do not know you; I do not want to know you. And I do not care to begin any form of conversation with you. Is that clear?”
“Ah, then,” he said. “I guess I have been mistaken about you. It wasn’t much that I asked of you, was it?”
Bowing, he left to take his broom again, muttering to himself.
“IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME,” he said to me. “Once I am asked such a thing, I am robbed of time, as surely as flour passes through a sieve.” But then he began to sulk about it. “Samuel, do you think I was unfair to the fellow?”
“A few words to soothe him might have been all right.”
He made no further mention of the incident until later. He had perhaps realized his rudeness or, thinking of his electioneering, had thought about how such a trivial incident could hurt him, but when he saw the same man solemnly polishing some glasses behind the bar, Stanley did the right thing, which was to approach him with a kind word.
“Dear sir, now that I am done with my billiards, to address your earlier query… the situation in Africa, and this information you should share with your relations, is of such a complicated nature that there is no way for me to provide any easy answer, except to say I am absolutely certain that, as surely as you and I are standing here, Providence is seeing to the evolution of better conditions in that place. Whatever falsehoods are bandied about, it is civilization — and by that I mean railroads and hospitals and civil order — that is being established in the Congo. It is for the greater good of all the people there, Europeans and Africans alike, that my efforts have been made.” Then: “Now, how can I be of further service to you?”
The porter stammered some words of thanks, then asked Stanley to sign a piece of paper as an autograph; as Stanley did so he heard a litany of praises, his few phrases having made the right impression.
That afternoon we’d probably had a few more drinks than was necessary, but I had hoped to persuade a relaxed Stanley to publish a book with me. The subject I had seized upon was a journey we had made together to the Antilles as young men, the story of which Stanley, for stubborn reasons of his own, had never wanted to convey. But as so many years had since passed — more than thirty — I found it surprising to see that he had kept the same strong feelings against such a book.
“Why not, Henry?” I said.
“If I should decide to write of this, it will be in my autobiography. Besides, Samuel, it is something that still pains me all these years later. I have not even told Dolly about it.”
I understood, to a certain extent, his desire for privacy, but I could not understand his apparent shame about what had happened in Cuba — and so, for the time being, I dropped the subject but considered it an out-and-out pity.
BACK IN HIS HOTEL ROOM, in an establishment not quite up to the standards of what he was used to, Samuel Clemens drank a warmed whiskey and, putting aside his notebook, went to bed.
PORTRAITS WITH TWAIN
Third Fragment from Lady Stanley’s Unpublished Memoir
ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, while Stanley was out at a meeting, Clemens made his way to our home. He brought roses for my mother, and after he had refreshed himself with chilled water — he had been tramping around from office to office, and it was unusually warm in London that day — I brought him to the place where I had set up a row of easels on which I displayed my paintings of street children; the most well known of them he had seen before, and another, Sprites at Sea, had been reproduced widely as a print. The others were reworkings of drawings I had done for the magazines Little Folks and The Quiver. I also had some of my drawings and paintings of Stanley to show Mr. Clemens. It is a funny thing: No matter how often one has looked at and attempted to draw a subject, something always seems to be missing; and yet with Stanley, I felt that I had captured everything about him, even the particular way his brow furrowed when he was having a special thought. But he never smiled.
Clemens was very courteous and generous in his praise of the Stanley portraits. I had made three: one of Stanley standing, one of Stanley sitting with a book open before him, and a more conventional portrait of Stanley contemplating a map of Africa, which the National Gallery liked very much.
“Goodness,” Clemens said pleasantly. “These are all fine. Well done. You’ve even captured the opaqueness of Stanley’s eyes.”
“Opaque? But they are blue and green, like yours.”
“I meant opaque in that they are hard to read: He’s like a sphinx, that husband of yours. He never shows what he has seen or sees, does he?”
“He doesn’t, but he expresses himself in other ways.”
“Oh, but I know that.” Looking about, he asked, “Where do you want me to sit?”
“Just there, in front of the hearth.”
“You mind if I smoke?”
“Not at all.”
I was used to Stanley smoking whenever he sat for me: Thusly anticipating my new subject’s similar habit, I had my butler put out an ash urn beside the chair for Clemens to use. Wearing my smock, and with a fresh sheet of paper on which to draw my preliminary study of him, I tried to determine the position in which Mr. Clemens would be most comfortable and which pose would be advantageous to him.
“Just relax, as if you were talking to me, but sit generally still.”
“That’s something I generally aspire to, madame,” he said.
I began to draw him in pencil, and, as I did so, I noticed that he had started to hum to himself; looking out through my studio window to a great chestnut tree, he took on a tranquil expression.
“And what is that you’ve been humming?”
“Oh, an old Negro spiritual taught to me by slaves on my uncle John’s farm, back when I was a boy. He lived about four miles out from Florida, Missouri, he did. A finer man there never was.” Then: “Do you know, Mrs. Stanley, that whenever I am troubled I think of my days there and in Hannibal?”
“Are you troubled now?”
“Madame, I am like a cucumber soaking in a vat of vinegar, but I am still optimistic enough, I suppose.” Then: “It is a funny thing, Mrs. Stanley: The older I get — and I will be fifty-seven come November — the more aware of the minutiae of my past I become. As your wise husband told me the other day, there’s so much to remember that, as the years go by, there’s hardly any room left in the brain for something new. Each day I ask myself, ‘How are things remembered, Sam?’ Then I say that I remember things as if my brain were some kind of camera — a camera that has taken a million photographs. Why some of those pictures stick in the mind more clearly than others, after so many years, is a mystery to me. Take my mother, Jane Lampton. She passed on two Octobers ago, in 1890, at a mighty age, her eighty-eighth year. That she lived so long was miraculous in a way, for she was as frail and delicate in her youth as my own wife, Livy, is now; and yet if there is such a thing as the spirit keeping the body sound, despite its maladies, she did so, year after year.”