Still, he was turning into the kind of fine and well-bred adolescent that Stanley would have wanted him to be — not too foppish or spoiled or overly aware of his high social standing. Never told by Stanley that without his and Dolly’s intercession he would likely have ended up as a ward of some parish orphanage in Wales, he moved through his childhood as humbly and happily as possible for a boy who’d witnessed his own father’s gradual death. Among his interests were the language of French and collecting cartes de visite: he wrote to many a family friend requesting such items and amassed a great variety of stamps and butterflies as well. While lacking any genetic link to the drawing talents of his adoptive mother and father — she’d always admired Stanley’s hand-drawn maps and illustrations of the various arcane objects he wished to record in his travels — Denzil seemed to possess some natural ability of his own. It helped that his mother had taken considerable joy in teaching him the rudiments of drawing with pencil and watercolors and that he had had much exposure to the artistic habits she resumed after the upheavals of her husband’s final illnesses.
Even in her widow’s life, she rarely refrained from spending at least an hour or two every day in the room known as the birdcage, working on some unfinished portraits or scenes; and while she did not take long strolls around the city, as she once used to, Dolly, commissioned by friends to make new illustrations for books and articles about the life of poor children in London, still visited her favorite squares by coach, looking for more urchins to sketch. Dressing in black for a year, she had not allowed her sadness to keep her from renewing that practice, nor did she abstain from wearing jewelry, for, while wanting to seem in mourning, she never wanted to appear drab or commonplace. And while her mother, Gertrude, continued to disapprove, as she always had, of bringing such children into the mansion—“It is below your station,” she would say — when those often unruly children came into her studio, Dolly remained open-minded enough to allow Denzil into the room while she drew her subjects. She even allowed him to make his own sketches and talk with the children, though they did not have much in common. They were the children of beggars or washerwomen or garbage pickers, while he, as she was wont to remind him, was the son of one of the greatest men who’d ever lived in England.
Only ten years of age, this slight and long-nosed boy seemed to understand this. The hours he had spent with his father, listening to him describe the “dark” regions he’d traveled, listening to his lectures about the making of maps or where a particular spear or arrowhead had come from — all these he had not forgotten. And there were his father’s books in the library — rows and rows of them, in many languages, and while he had not yet developed the taste or patience for actually reading them, he sometimes picked one of them off a shelf and would sit, its pages opened before him, astounded by the sheer magnitude of words and thinking that his father was still alive because of them.
Dolly remembered how well composed Denzil had been through all the eulogies at Westminster; he sat without moving for most of the service, only turning once when the shadow of some bird traveled across the stained-glass windows and seemed to cross the floor toward the altar. Afterward, during the recessional, he slowly marched out of the church with his family, clouds of incense preceding him, his hand in his mother’s. Then their progress toward Waterloo station: On public buildings the Union Jack fluttered at half-mast, and the streets were lined with people, many of them working-class folk who counted Stanley as one of their own. Most were standing on the curbs solemnly; some applauded, and some dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs. Through all this Denzil had been well behaved, even stoic; but even so, he asked his mother, “Where will Father go?”
BY THE SPRING OF 1907, Dolly had not only overcome the loss of Stanley, whom she believed still lingered around her, but had decided, being a social creature and thinking of Denzil’s welfare, to marry again. The object of her attentions was the Harley Street surgeon Dr. Henry Curtis, whom she had met while accompanying Stanley to the doctor’s office for treatment of gastritis. She found it a pleasant coincidence to discover, in the course of several conversations with Curtis, that he had a great interest in the general field of psychic research; the doctor had attended, in his time, various séances through which he had hoped to contact his late mother. But there was something else: While not a handsome man, and somewhat stout, and rather upright and self-effacing in his demeanor, he seemed the sort of well-heeled gentleman, eleven years younger than she, who, with a practice to keep him busy, would not impinge upon her independence.
IN THOSE DAYS, DOLLY WAS SAD to realize that Samuel and his surviving daughters had become distant figures in her life. It sometimes stunned her to think that she had not seen him in seven years, and while they had exchanged Christmas greetings, much of their correspondence seemed to consist of letters of condolence. Though the familiarity with which they had once written each other had given way to a more formal tone, her affection for Clemens had never faded. Following his political writings, as she received from friends copies of “Mark Twain’s” articles and open letters to the public, she was quite aware of his outspokenness about certain matters, for since Livy’s passing his patience for the insane cruelties of the world had ended; what had been private opinion had become public. She knew that he supported an anticzarist revolution in Russia, that he deplored the partition of China by Western powers, and that he blamed the Boxer Rebellion on the missionary influence there. She also knew that he strongly disapproved of the British war against the Boers in South Africa and had felt ashamed by America’s slaughter of innocent people in the Philippines in the name of bringing them democracy.
Without a doubt he had grieved over the loss of Stanley, but with his friend’s death had come a certain liberation; while he would have never written such a thing on the chance of offending his old friend while he was alive, once Stanley had gone to the peace of his grave (or the constant wanderings of a spirit) Clemens took up his pen and addressed, most caustically, the situation in the Congo by means of a pamphlet entitled King Leopold’s Soliloquy, which was published by the Congo Reform Association in Boston.
One day, Dolly received a copy of the pamphlet from Samuel Clemens himself. With it came a letter.
21 Fifth Avenue
May 2, ’06
Dear Lady Stanley,
Inasmuch as my anti-Leopold pamphlet seems to have gone into the world, I thought you should receive a copy from me if you have not received one already. I wrote it as an American citizen with the intention of simply asking its American readers to realize how misguided and greedy and callous the Belgian king has been in regard to the Congo. Knowing that he was Stanley’s friend, I hope you do not find its contents too upsetting, but by my lights, the greater truth about what has been going on in that region, as reported by various eyewitnesses — and by the greatest witness of all, the camera — is well worth telling.