On this occasion, Stanley invited them into our home for dinner, and to this Clemens agreed, as long as it was not a big affair at which he would feel compelled to entertain an audience. “I am too tired of being Mark Twain lately,” he told my husband. “But I will be happy to turn up as Sam and see your sparkling new baby.”
We kept to our word, though Mother was beside herself that she could not make it a society event, my husband having demanded that it be kept an intimate thing. “Mr. Clemens may be a famous man, perhaps the most famous American in the world,” he told her, “but his privacy is to be protected, at least in this household!”
Besides, the truest guest of honor was our Denzil, whom we brought into our parlor and kept in a fine crib. Stanley sat beside him, often just staring at the young, untarnished face, ever so proud of his “darling and pure cherub.” It pleased him that he was always able to calm Denzil down when he cried. Holding the child in his arms, he’d delight in sniffing at his head, which he claimed smelled like freshly baked bread. He was so attached to our infant that it was as if nothing in his life before that, not even Africa, had counted for much. He called the baby “my truest treasure” and came to often say: “Every moment I am away from him seems a wasted moment: If all I can do for the rest of my life is to see that he is brought up well and cared for—well, then, that will be a most worthy occupation.”
Such was his pride that when Clemens finally arrived with his wife and daughter Clara at our home, Stanley led him immediately to the crib and surprised us all by introducing Mr. Clemens in this way: “Now, dear Denzil, here is your uncle Mark!” a distinction that led our honored guest to blush. “What can I say,” remarked Clemens, “but that I am honored?” Then: “Ah, a new and fresh life!”
A congenial evening passed. Whatever fatigues and concerns had descended upon Clemens from the strain of his worries and travels were forgotten for a few hours. The high point of the evening, I should say, were Clemens’s most colorful descriptions of India, which intrigued me, especially where they concerned the country’s religious aspects. He called India “a land of ten thousand gods, one for every single thing you could ever think about; religion, pungent as burning incense, is thick in the air. And mosquitoes, too.” (But did he believe in all that? I think not, because he called the Hindu beliefs “a system by which the poor masses are kept in their lowly state.”) Later, as it would be an early evening for them, I prevailed upon Clemens to come and look at one of the paintings I had worked up of him.
“Will you come back another day?” I asked him, but he confessed that because of Livy’s frail health, they would be leaving London shortly. They had rented a house in Surrey, in the town of Guildford, where Livy might rest and he could quietly pursue his writing—a new book about his recent travels—away from the clamor of London.
“Well, then, we will visit you,” I told him.
“When my daughters arrive from America we will have you over; and bring the little one, too, if it’s not an inconvenience.”
“But you will sit for me again, won’t you?”
I could not help but press that point, and he was agreeable enough to say he would once he and the family were settled. Unfortunately it would be a long time before that day would come to pass.
SEVERAL DAYS HAD GONE BY when there arrived a letter posted from Guildford.
August 16, 1886
My dear friends,
If you have not heard from me in recent days it is because a crisis has arisen regarding the health of my daughter Susy. In the heat of a horrendous Hartford summer she has fallen ill from a fever. The brave girl has apparently been ill for some weeks and had the misfortune of depending too greatly on a spiritualist healer who advised her badly; she is now staying with some family friends, and I am glad to say that under a doctor’s care she is apparently coming along, though she at this point will not be well enough to come here for quite some time. All this has, of course, left my dear wife and daughter Clara in a state of concern, and yesterday I saw them off at the station, for they have booked passage back to America from Portsmouth to attend to her convalescence. Even now they are at sea; in the meantime I have been sitting on pins and needles, racked with anxiety. Last night what sleep I managed was filled with sad dreams. Though her doctor—Dr. Porter—has assured me by cable that her cure is a matter of rest.
Which is to say that once I hear better news nothing would more please me than for you to join me here for a day; it is a pleasant enough little town, without much to do but go walking. The surrounding countryside is idyllic, in a Surrey way.
Yours,
Samuel
Naturally Stanley wanted to head out to Guildford to reassure his old friend that all would turn out well, but he had come down with some very bad symptoms of his own—gastritis again—and could barely work up the will to leave his bed save to look in on the baby—in such moments, despite his awareness of the flagging resources of his body, he always managed to get up and drag himself, ever so slowly, to the nursery. Always a stoic about pain and somewhat indifferent to any fear of his own death, Stanley had been changed by Denzil’s presence in our lives. If anything pained him it was the thought that his wish to live for another twenty years, or at least as long as it would take for Denzil to grow into a man, was unlikely, given his own ever-declining health.
THEN CAME A DAY of sad news. Stanley had been sitting at the dining room table reading the morning newspapers when he came across an item on the front page of the London Times that much grieved him.
Gertrude, sitting across from him, noticed Stanley’s face draining of color. “What is it?” she asked. “Read it,” he told her. What met her eye was a headline: MARK TWAIN’S ELDEST DAUGHTER DIES OF SPINAL MENINGITIS.
A few nights before, on the evening of the eighteenth, Susy Clemens, after several weeks of suffering, passed away at her father’s Hartford home; in her company were several family friends, among them the Reverend Joseph Twichell, their housekeeper, Katy Leary, and her aunt and uncle Charles and Susan Crane. “The famous author’s firstborn daughter was called to peace at approximately 8:30 that night,” the article said. No sooner had Stanley deliberated on this tragic development—“Oh, why, dear God, should this happen to such a dear and decent man?” he thought—than he called out to his wife, Dolly, in her studio. Though he was having some difficulty walking, relying upon a cane, and although he had several appointments that he would have to cancel for the day, he had no doubt what they would have to do: “Come on,” he told her, showing Dolly the newspaper. “We’ve got to go to Guildford and find Clemens.” Her own distress was great—that this should happen to their friend in the midst of their own happiness seemed most unfair. “Yes, of course. We’ll go,” she told her husband.
THE DAY BEFORE, Clemens had been in the dining room of his rented cottage in Guildford, trying to distract himself from thoughts about Susy. The messages he and Livy had received before Livy’s departure for America had been mixed; the first few said that their daughter had fallen mysteriously ill, perhaps from her tendency to practice her singing for too many hours a day in the heat of an uncommonly warm Hartford summer. Indisposed with a fever that was “nothing serious,” she would have to recover before coming to England with her sister Jean and Katy Leary, their housekeeper, a journey that was to have begun on August 5. But later telegrams, while predicting an eventual recovery, were riddled with alarming phrases: “She is still weak and faint but in good spirits” and “In some pain, she is getting better” among them. Still, those telegrams raised such apprehension that Clemens spent nearly every evening at the town telegraph office, awaiting the latest word. On such nights, neither he nor Livy could sleep. The very possibility that her condition could take a turn for the worse precipitated his wife and daughter’s journey back to America. Even as they set sail from Portsmouth, and even as Clemens received yet another telegram saying that her recovery was all but certain, her spinal meningitis was diagnosed in Hartford. Yet for the
life of him, as he would sit to work on his travel book, he couldn’t figure out why his thoughts—of meteorites flashing across the night skies beyond Hawaii and the luminous lunar eclipse they had seen on their way to Fiji, memories of a beautiful universe in motion—would turn into visions of Susy helpless in bed, a look of despair and loneliness upon her face. No, he couldn’t write much, hard as he tried to: A tightening of his legs, a flaring up of his rheumatism, a twisting of his gut accompanied the inescapable sensation that his daughter was, in fact, dying. All of them had experienced that sense without saying so, but Clemens, who refused to believe that it could possibly be true, still awaited the knock on his door, the arrival of the friendly telegraph man, with good news from Katy Leary or Joseph Twichell: “Your daughter Susy has recovered and is now well” was the nine-word sentence he wanted to read; but that morning, August 19, when he had been thinking about whether he should take a walk to the local bakery to buy some bread, then make his way to the newsagent’s shop to collect the daily papers, then later drop a note to his friend Stanley, there indeed came, as he had hoped—and dreaded—a knock at his door.
Twain looked out: A ruddy-cheeked telegraph man with kind eyes, who had no doubt taken down the message after it had been conveyed across the Atlantic to London and then to Guildford, didn’t seem to know quite what to say. “Mr. Clemens, this is for you, sir.” And there it was, contained within the telegram, a simple phrase, sent by the Reverend Twichell, informing him of his daughter’s passing the night before.
“I am sad to report that Susy was peacefully released from her sufferings today.”
Clemens gave the telegraph man a shilling for his trouble. Heard the words “I’m sorry for you, sir.” He seemed to sit down, the actual contents of the telegram not quite registering upon him. He thought, for some reason, about molecules. How much does a molecule weigh? he asked himself. Why is it that when one is happy—say, at a time of love or when first beholding a newborn child—one experiences a nearly weightless density, as if one can nearly fly? And conversely, he wondered, what does a molecule weigh when one is feeling grief? And while he could not exactly determine what had just made him think of such things—the immediate fact of Susy’s passing having been occluded behind a wall of disorientation and denial—he fancied that the molecules around him were rapidly growing denser with alarming emotions, until each, as he would later put it, weighed “a ton of sadness, five tons of guilt, then twenty tons of gloom.” On that morning, as he sat with the telegram in hand, he found it a physical impossibility to even move, so great was his pain at being unbearably alone and beset by the sadness of this existence, which like the wind, could suddenly come upon him from any direction.
From Lady Stanley’s Journal, Friday, August 20, 1886
WHEN WE SET OUT FOR GUILDFORD on the afternoon train out of Waterloo station, Mother insisted on coming along, as she, too, had been sorely concerned for our friend Clemens, with whom she had been having a regular correspondence. What she wrote to him I cannot say, but clearly she had taken to Clemens with a natural liking that I wished she had for Stanley. Not that they were not getting along; Stanley, for the most part, had gotten used to her demanding and exacting ways.
As we prepared to leave, Stanley and I were at first at a loss at what to bring along with us, but it was Mother who, in the practical wisdom of her years, suggested that we gather together a lunch basket for Mr. Clemens should he be hungry. Stocked from our abundant pantry, it contained cheeses, good bread, and some cured French sausages along with some chocolates, which Stanley remembered Clemens liked. Stanley himself had pulled out a bottle of good port and several bottles of French wine from our cellar; from his library he found a volume by the eminent Anglican theologian Reverend Everett Thomas, Meditations on the Passings of Man, and brought that along. My own contributions consisted of several pamphlets from the Society for Psychical Research about the everlasting nature of the human soul: Whether Clemens would be receptive to this I did not know.
Arriving in Guildford, we learned that the town’s residents were very aware of Clemens’s existence in their midst: At the train station, when we told the carriage driver to take us to the residence of Samuel Clemens on Portsmouth Road, he looked at us from beneath a stovepipe hat and said, “Of course—you are the third party from London I’ll have driven there today.” As our carriage came to a halt, the street on which he currently resided—a quiet stretch of ordinary houses off the main thoroughfare of shops and taverns and inns—was filled with curious townspeople gathered on the curb opposite his house. Among them were several journalists waiting, I assumed, for an interview with Clemens. One of them, seeing that I had looked his way, and perhaps recognizing us, tipped his bowler at me.
Before the doorway of Clemens’s house stood a giant of a man, recruited, no doubt, from a local pub to prevent any incursions against Clemens’s privacy. He glared at us when we alighted from our carriage and approached the door. “Who are you, and what do you want?”
My husband, in a commanding military tone, addressed him: “Please tell Mr. Clemens that Henry Morton Stanley has come to see him.”
This person, ignorant of my husband’s standing, told us, in his gruff manner, “Wait a moment, will you? But don’t expect anything.” As he went inside, I noticed that several bouquets of spring flowers had been set along the pavement beside the house, likely from sympathetic locals; and even as we waited, however briefly, two journalists crossed over, calling out: “Mr. Stanley, can we have a moment of your time, sir?” But my husband would have nothing of it: “Can you not see that this is a private moment? Now go away.” Stanley himself, not at his physical best, had put his hand up on the wall beside the doorway to support himself: His hair was as white as I had ever seen it.
“What is taking so long?” he asked while we were waiting.
Finally the door was opened by the burly fellow.
“You can go inside now.”
We entered. To our left was a fully furnished parlor containing an upright piano and a billiard table, and to the right was a dining room, which Samuel had made into his study. Spread all across a long oak table were piles of scribbled-over manuscript pages and several plates holding uneaten portions of meals; an ashtray filled with black cigar butts; many crumpled pieces of paper; two candles that had completely melted down, their wax overflowing their holders onto the wood; a few glasses next to a half-empty bottle of whiskey; and a small clock. A musty and smoky odor prevailed, and the room itself was dark—none of the window shutters had been opened for some days, it seemed. And in that darkness sat Mr. Clemens, wearing a bathrobe, his face unshaved, his eyes red-rimmed, his leonine countenance, topped by a mass of unruly white hair, looking so sad and drawn that my first impulse was to rush over to him. However, I left it to Stanley to have the first word:
“Samuel, we are here for you, my brother.”
When Clemens got up and embraced Stanley, I cannot say if he was weeping (Stanley would never weep), but through his mutterings Mother and I heard him calling Stanley “my dear friend” again and again. Then Samuel, composing himself, came around to greeting us.
“Thank you for coming, my dear ladies, but I wish you hadn’t gone to the trouble: I am fairly useless right now, but you are welcome just the same.” Then: “Forgive me my appearance. I suppose I should get dressed.”
Truthfully he seemed embarrassed both by the unseemliness of his surroundings and, as I have seen with persons in sudden mourning, by the rawness of his pain; he seemed nearly apologetic over his solemn state. “If it’s a bit untidy here, its because I’ve let my housekeeper go, and, as you can see, I’ve lived a month’s worth of bad habits in a day or so.” Then, managing a smile, he added, attempting to make a joke of his circumstances, “Oh, don’t look so worried about me; I’ll get over it in about a hundred years or so.”
My husband escorted Samuel into his dressing room and held the writer steadily by his arm, patting him gently on the back, patiently,
as Samuel, in a state of shock, moved ever so slowly, slippers shuffling along the floor, as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“Come on, Samuel, you must be strong now,” I heard him say.
After they left us, Mother and I took the liberty of putting some order to the room without disturbing his manuscripts (with their many crossed-out paragraphs, they were obviously the failed attempts of a man trying to find some coherence in his troubled thoughts). But I could not avoid seeing the penciled scrawl written in large letters on a single sheet, in Clemens’s hand: “I wish it had been me.” Nor could I avoid the discovery of a photograph in an oval frame that had been turned down on its face: It showed a young woman of about twenty, her expression solemn, her large and liquid eyes like that of a startled sparrow—his daughter Susy, I presumed. The sentiment that this tender and troubled face was that of the deceased nearly brought me to tears, but Mother, in her strong way, told me to attend to my duties. Although I was unaccustomed to such tasks, I carried the plates into the kitchen to soak them in a basin; then I gave the floors, which were covered in cigar ashes, a sweep. Mother, in the meantime, had opened the window shutters, and the room was filled with light and fresh air. From her own experience she knew that someone should take the initiative, for when Father died, Mother had sat in her darkened bedroom for a month and had only come around when my brother, Charles, and I finally drew open the curtains for her; now she was doing the same for Clemens. But no sooner had she thrown the window shutters open than we saw why Mr. Clemens had kept them closed: The journalists who had been stationed across the street were abruptly upon us, peering in and shouting all manner of questions at us. We shut them again.