In the meantime, the merde piles up higher and higher; it seems as if all this hatred, at the Jews’ expense, will cost heavily sometime in the future.
I wish I could understand these quarrels, but of course I can’t.
I will now end these few lines of my grumbling: Livy calls me a grouch, and my daughters try to stay out of my way, probably with good reason.
With best wishes,
“Mark”
(a.k.a. Samuel the Jew)
Hotel Krantz
May 20, 1898
Dear Mrs. Stanley,
You will notice that I begin this note with an actual date as absolute proof that I am capable of such subtleties. In your house in London a hundred years ago you said that my occasional omission of dates (or years, anyway) is a bad habit — and I have since tried to reform, as I would not want to disappoint you. Your remark has cost me worlds of time and torture and buckets of ink; but I thank you for the fine advice.
I hope it will interest you (for I have no one else who would much care to know it) that here lately the dread of leaving the children in difficult circumstances has died down and disappeared. I am now having peace from that long, long financial nightmare and can sleep as well as anyone. It seems that with one thing and another and with much good management and advice from my benefactor, Mr. H. H. Rogers (head of Standard Oil), I have finally come out of debt. Every little while, for these three years now, Mrs. Clemens has sat down in the evenings with pencil and paper to tally up our accounts. Two nights ago I was still a worrier, but last night, she reminded me that we own a house and furniture in Hartford; that my English and American copyrights pay an income that represents a value of $200,000; and that we have $107,000 cash in the bank. What a boost to my spirits! I suddenly feel like a free man again.
Lovingly,
Samuel
P.S. I have been out and bought a box of six-cent cigars; I was smoking four-and-a-half-centers before.
Hotel Krantz
August 24, 1898
To the Stanleys,
We’ve enjoyed Vienna to a point, but since the war in Cuba has ended, and on the heel of our “liberating” invasion of the Philippines, most folks around here (including myself) have gotten the notion that the United States is playing the empire game. The Austrians, who once flocked to our parlor — and have not been shy about heaping admiration upon me, despite my known disapproval of their local politics — have been receiving us far less warmly than before, even coolly. As we are being lumped in with the brutish notion of American aggression, and as Clara has finished her piano studies (her teachers have concluded that her hands are too small to overcome the technical demands of certain pieces, so she has decided to become a singer instead), we are planning on leaving soon enough — to sightsee, take some cures (Livy and I and Jean) where we can, and eventually to settle in England again, for a short time, at least.
Of course, we will see you then, dear friends.
Lovingly yours,
Samuel
THE COUNTRY LIFE
From Lady Stanley’s Journal, Regarding the Years 1898–99
DURING OUR YEARS OF MARRIAGE, for our occasional escapes, we had prevailed upon the respite of inns at seaside resorts such as Brighton and Llandudno or upon the generosity of friends who would invite us out to their estates, where Stanley indulged in hunting small game and I made studies from nature, Denzil always by my side. Stanley, however, had grown dissatisfied with our life in London and, seeking a permanent retreat we could call our own, decided to look for a property in the countryside. Mother was none too happy about the proposed change; Stanley felt otherwise. While there were certain advantages and comforts to be had in the capital, with its societies, theaters, and gentlemen’s clubs, he had lost his taste for the public life and perhaps wished to put some distance between himself and his detractors, of which there were many. After a long period of professional torpor, in which he seemed to move through his days with little interest in the tedious duties awaiting him in Parliament, Stanley awakened one morning to announce his intentions. Mainly he desired, at long last, “a home to call my own,” a home that he could configure in his own image and where he might spend his last years, whenever they might come, in peace amid his family and the things he loved the most — his books, his artifacts, and his maps, all of which brought him comfort.
Much as Mother disliked the idea, Stanley stood firm.
“By God, woman, do you not know that it is now my time to find some peace at last? Do you not know that I am tired and in need of a rest?”
Over the summer and into the first weeks of autumn in 1898, when Parliament was in recess, he spent many days looking at various properties, some fifty-seven of them in total, outside London, in the Home Counties, mainly in Surrey. But there was one estate of some seventy acres, near the town of Pirbright, thirty-five miles southwest of London, in the midst of farm country, that he returned to again and again: Furze Hill.
A “real beauty,” he said, “but one in need of a little care, I will admit.”
The photographs of that place were, frankly, a bit off-putting, for the house, a rather grotesquely overwrought Tudor ruin some two hundred years old, seemed to be falling apart. With its overgrowth of ivy, and with trees and bushes that practically enveloped the whole premises and crept up its turreted towers — for the grounds had apparently not been attended to for years — it seemed the kind of dwelling where a coven of witches might live; yet Stanley had his heart set on it.
“The price is quite reasonable,” he told me. “Besides, it seems like me.”
Whatever my original reservations about the property were, they were only enhanced by the journey we made there one day by train in the early autumn of 1898, just before Stanley was about to purchase it. (“Of course I will buy it only if you approve,” he said.) When we arrived at the Brookwood station from Waterloo, and made our way by hired carriage to Furze Hill, as we entered the grounds, not only did the stony mansion seem more dilapidated and gray than it was in the photographs (it did not help that the weather was grim), the surrounding property seemed covered with an oily greenish scum. At least it seemed to be a quiet sort of place. But then, too, on that day, we heard from the distance the firing of cannons. “What is that?” I asked Stanley.
“Oh, the cannons? Just a bit of a military exercise in progress. You see,” he said rather happily, “the properties surrounding us belong to the British Army: they come out here every several months to drill. The main thing is that we will be absolutely left alone, with few neighbors to disturb us.”