DURING THE TRAIN RIDE SOUTH from Wales, Dolly held the baby closely: All her affection for children, which she had previously expressed in her paintings of London street urchins, multiplied, and her maternal side blossomed. Her journey was spent kissing the baby’s face: Stanley, for his part, could not have been more attentive. He often sat back, beside his wife, thinking about the fact that he, as an abandoned waif, never knew where he really came from and never felt that anyone really cared: But this child would have a different fate. All around them, the countryside was rushing by — the incredible sun glaring through the treetops cast a shadow in the shape of a lunar crescent upon the compartment’s wooden walls. The baby looked at it, enthralled, and Stanley remarked, “How alert! He’ll be a good soldier one day!” Later, as the train jostled along, and as his wife swaddled the baby in her arms, Henry Stanley made it a point to dangle before the child’s large brown eyes a key. And as he did so, he said: “You are now my son.”
All at once, it seemed that the horrors of life, the petty nuisances and myriad responsibilities that had made his days an unending progression of work and fretful concerns, fell away. It was if the child’s presence had created for Stanley a new world; as if emanating from that innocence came a sanctuary of sweet and reassuring emotions.
FROM HIS LAST MISSION IN AFRICA, Stanley had carried back a vial of water taken from Lake Albert, and with this water he had the child baptized. The name he chose for the child, Denzil, a variation of Dennis, was traced back to some distant ancestor of Dolly’s who had been one of Cromwell’s captains. Stanley gave the boy his own invented middle name, Morton, and a nursery was set up in the house on Richmond Terrace. A nanny was brought in, and the explorer himself, moved to excitement, set out to add his touches to that cheerful, sunlit room: Besides some scenes of fairy tales — colored lithographs by the elf artist Richard Doyle (uncle of Arthur Conan Doyle, inventor of the famed Sherlock Holmes and a family friend) — and several drawings by Dorothy, Stanley put up over the crib a framed map of Africa, so that in infancy the boy would grow up familiar with his adoptive father’s accomplishments.
Then Stanley wrote to his friend: “Dear Samuel — When you are done with your touring you and the Mrs. must come to see the enchantment that has entered into this old soldier’s life.”
From Lady Stanley’s Journal, 1896
IT WAS LATE JULY when Samuel Clemens arrived in England from South Africa with his wife, Livy, and daughter Clara. He had finished the last leg of his yearlong world tour, undertaken to pay off his considerable debts. We had been kept informed of his itinerary by Mr. Smythe, Stanley’s own Australian agent, who had booked Clemens’s antipodean lectures, but in addition, every so often there arrived in the mail letters from the weary traveler and cartes de visite from various exotic locales. Clemens had set out the year before from Vancouver, bound for Australia and New Zealand, then he had traveled onward to India and Ceylon and other points of interest. His plans were to settle in England for a few months before proceeding home, and, to that end, he had come to London to find an appropriate house to rent. Shortly he would be joined by his two other daughters, Susy and Jean, from America — and a much-belated reunion would ensue.
“What is hardest,” he had written my husband from Agra, India, “are not the bugs and snakes and the incessant heat of this dusty land, nor is it my own persistent colds and carbuncles, and it is not even the misery of the poverty that exists everywhere and spills onto the steps of the most opulent maharaja’s palace; rather, my dear Stanley, it is the powerful loneliness that I feel when thinking about my daughters and how this separation must weigh upon them — particularly Susy, my eldest and most sensitive one, who, I know, was none too happy that we were going away for so long. It’s my dream to put my debts to bed for good and abandon this nomad’s life, and I look forward to a normal and civilized family existence back home in Hartford. I, for one, cannot wait for my burden to be lifted again; I hope that will be the case when I come back through England, in the spring or summer — the sooner the better.”
The first week of August, we were therefore pleased to hear from Clemens by way of a telegram conveying the news that he, Livy, and Clara were in London for a few days; straightaway Stanley went to the Langham Hotel to find Clemens somewhat indisposed in bed.
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.”