Stanley helped Clemens to dress, which is to say that he picked out his outfit from a closet, a dark frock coat and a pair of Harris Tweed trousers along with a clean white shirt; and although Clemens resisted, so Stanley later told me, he had stood over a washbasin while Stanley shaved him. When he finally emerged from his room, quite improved in his appearance by my husband’s ministrations, we heard him saying: “Just look at me, ladies. It seems that Stanley has half revived a dead man.” Then: “Though it is a hard fact, I can’t believe she’s gone.”
“Look here, Samuel,” Stanley said. “As it’s a beautiful day, why don’t we get out of here for a while? The ladies have packed a picnic. The fresh air will do you good.”
“I will if you think I should,” he said. “But mind you, you will be picnicking with a somnambulist; a walking ghost. Yes, let us go: Lead me on, and do make sure that the vultures out there leave me alone.”
BY HIRED CARRIAGE WE PROCEEDED to a meadow a few miles out of town. There we found a congenial place under a spreading elm near a brook, along which there were some good-size rocks on which we might sit. Clemens, stretching his legs and looking around, allowed that it was as pretty a spot as he had ever seen. As we sat to have some bread and cheese, Mother serving us all, I asked Samuel if he was willing to speak about his journey to India as a way of distracting him. “Was there any one place you found especially agreeable?”
“‘India’ and ‘agreeable’ are not two words I would put together in any sentence,” he said. “But I will allow that there are some pretty interesting places — like Benares. I think we were most impressed with the Taj Mahal at Agra: what gardens, what flowers, what flaming poinciana trees! And all surrounding the vast ivory-white Taj Mahal — a tomb, big as any palace, built by a Mogul emperor grieving for his dead wife, but one did not think of it that way. A majestic place, and so pretty I can remember thinking that Susy would have very much enjoyed seeing it. I don’t know if she would have been up to the hard parts of travel, but Livy, frail as she was, bravely got through the whole business. But now my Susy will never see anything beautiful again. And all because of me.”
“My friend,” Stanley said, “I know what you are feeling is of the greatest difficulty; but remember that she loved you, and that is the best thing of all.”
“Oh, yes, she did, certainly she did: And what did she get for it but death?”
“Why would you even think that, Samuel?” I ventured to ask.
“Why? I’ll tell you: If I hadn’t let my partner, Charles Webster, run my publishing house into the ground, and if I hadn’t gone deeper into bankruptcy because of that blasted Paige typesetting machine, I would never have had to go on my world tour. And if I hadn’t gone on that tour I would have been with Susy, and she wouldn’t have gotten sick with worry and would be alive today.”
“Samuel,” my husband said, “you’re thinking irrationally. Calm yourself.”
“Easy to say, Henry; hard to do. The worst of it for me is that I know how my dear Livy will be sorely affected; she is at sea even as we sit here. What she’ll do when she finally hears the news worries me most of all. If it doesn’t kill her, I’m sure she’ll wish it had.”
Then: “The hardest thing is that as a family we were on the verge of finding some normalcy again. I finished a new novel, about Joan of Arc — we know how that ended — and my debts were all but paid; it was time for us as a family to go forward. But somehow, even when we settled in town, I had a hunch that things might go wrong — just how wrong I could not have imagined. I’d stay in the house with Livy and Clara until about five, writing — or trying to write. Supper would be at seven, but in the few hours before that I would venture forth into town to have a half and half in the pub: Few knew me, and no one had read my books, but just the same they were awfully friendly.”
In seeking to change the subject, Mother brought up the writer Gustave Flaubert, whom she had once known in the days of her youth in Paris, but Clemens didn’t seem to hear a single word of what she said, his sad eyes looking off into the distance. So great was his melancholy that Stanley also seemed affected in a way that he was not with others: His hardened soul somehow always softened in the presence of that man. We sat in that place for around an hour or so, and at around four, as I remained with Mother, Clemens and my husband went for a walk along a trail in the woods. Upon their return we accompanied Clemens back to his rented house, where we said our good-byes, Stanley assuring Clemens that should he be needed he would drop everything else to see him. “No need to,” Clemens said. “I’ve gotten accustomed to my bit of purgatory.”
“Well, we will see you again,” Stanley said. “I hope under better circumstances.”
“Will there ever be better circumstances?” Clemens asked.
LATER, ON THE TRAIN BACK to London, I asked my husband what he and Clemens had talked about during their walk in the woods; they had been gone for about half an hour.
“It was not so much what we spoke about that was interesting,” Stanley told me. “It was what happened. During our walk he spoke mainly of his daughter, as if there had been nothing else in the world: I could not blame him, his tragedy being so recent. I listened, admitting that I would not know what I would feel if something happened to our little Denzil. But as always, our paths diverged on the subject of God and the afterlife, as I tried to offer him the solace that a heavenly reward awaited her. He had no use for such ideas, though he wished that what I said was true for his wife’s sake. He then told me that in the midst of all his misery the only time he felt any relief was during a fleeting dream from the night before, about a blue jay alighting upon his arm. In that dream the delicate little creature had somehow managed to lift him up off the ground into the air — the sensation of floating free from the troubles of the world having greatly pleased him. When I told Clemens that I thought it was a dream about Susy’s spirit, about this he also disagreed. But no sooner had I mentioned it than a blue jay appeared before us on the path, picking around for seeds; and then, strangely enough, it lifted off the ground and alighted briefly on Samuel’s shoulder before taking off again. When I said, ‘Ah, you see, dear Samuel, there is someone listening,’ he allowed that it was a memorable coincidence but left it at that. I suddenly pitied the man as I never had before — even after the passing of the years, his is still a godless world. We continued our walk in silence.”
From Stanley’s Notebook
A SMALL STORY: AS WE WALKED in the woods, Samuel told me a dream he’d had—“the only one, besides imagining Joan of Arc burning at the stake,” wherein he had been visited by a blue bird that had given him the magical ability to fly. Knowing a little of dream symbols, I tried to plant the notion in Clemens’s mind that it had been about Susy’s soul, newly released into God’s universe; but just as he began to take it as a more or less pleasant thing, along the trail in front of us we came across a gravely injured creature — a blue bird, in fact, writhing upon the ground, its pellet eyes twitching with helplessness, the sight of which saddened Clemens even more. He nearly wept then, but being a manly sort, he restrained himself. I broke the spell by offering him a cigar, and we made our way back. Later, for Dolly’s sake, I reported the story about the bird differently so as to conform with her optimistic belief that in life there are always happy endings. I disagree, and so does Samuel.