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 souclass="underline" 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.