As the last carriage left it began to snow, and as the feathery white fell around him I noticed Stanley looking up into the sky. Then he began turning in a circle, his head arched back, spinning slowly around, as would a child, and if I am not mistaken, he was laughing — I thought it a good thing that no other persons were on hand to witness this uncharacteristically eccentric act, but I doubt he would have been twirling around had he known that I was watching him from our window. For a few minutes he continued in this fashion, then he started back toward our door, pausing by the top step to take another look; though he was hatless and wore no overcoat and must have surely been chilled, it was as if he did not want to come inside, much enjoying his exposure to the purity of the elements. But thankfully, his common sense prevailed, and he came back into the house; he was shaking from the cold but made nothing of it and quickly settled into the comfort of our parlor’s warmth.
Mother had gone to bed, so Stanley and I sat alone in front of the fireplace. It having occurred to me that he might have had too much to drink that evening — for every time I had looked at him during dinner he seemed to have yet another glass of brandy in his hand — I asked him if he might want a cup of tea. This he declined, testily, calling in one of our servants to bring him some brandy instead. Then, in a deeply pensive mood, staring into the fire, he loosened his cravat and warmed his brandy with a lit vesta, sipping the drink slowly, his eyes widening. In such moments I always supposed he was remembering some distant place or some moment of great enchantment or grief.
ON PSYCHICS
CHRISTMAS DAY, 1896: While the Stanley household bustled with visitors, Stanley himself spent much of that afternoon in an idyll of pride and wonderment as friends came by to look upon their infant, who, like a princeling, lay in his crib under a silken canopy in the parlor. Meanwhile, Clemens and his family sat inside their flat, estranged to any Yuletide cheer — the writer huddled in his study; his wife, Livy, sitting by a window and staring out as a fresh snowfall came drifting down over Tedworth Square. But the loveliness of it all, that whiteness that purified the gutters, turned into slush after a cold rain. They passed the time reading aloud Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Clara practiced scales upon a rented piano, but there was not a single mention of Christmas, their solemnity being so resolute and great. They gave out no presents and had no tree, not even a simple wreath; their only shopping trip in those days yielded, for the females, black ladies’ mourning hats affixed with widow’s veils. Even several of the parcels they’d received from Richmond Terrace they left untouched, waiting until well after the New Year to open them.
Sunday was their main day for excursions, when Clemens and his daughters took their constitutionals in the city’s parks. Upon occasion during the week, they visited one museum or another. In the great hall of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, Clemens, in seeing the skeletons of animals as they lay in their glass cases, thought about coffins. The truth that everything living in the world was meant to die configured sadly in his fecund mind into a vision of his daughter as she lay in her final rest. That he had not been able to bring himself to travel back to Elmira, New York, for the funeral of his most favored daughter, Susy, he put down to its being unbearable to his soul. To contemplate her sufferings so pained him that, as he once wrote in a note to Stanley, he thought about taking his own life — and he might have had he not Livy and his daughters to look after.
What pleasures he had were of an intellectual sort. When he was not holed up working from seven in the morning until seven at night, without so much as breaking for a meal — the heavy fumes of his cigars, smoked one after the other, clouding his study — he tended to read voraciously, as if words would smother his sad emotions.
Often he raged about God, or the foolishness of believing in God, mainly around his daughters, who had to contend with this sentiment every time they went out with him, for their father, at this point, was bent upon obliterating from their minds the idea of any presiding deity.
“There is nothing there, no kindly being attending to us. What is called God is but a projection of a dismal mankind hoping for more.” And what were churches to him? “Artifices of superstition, monuments of ignorance, the refuge of the dim-minded and gullible.” On their walks, he spent much of his time lamenting the “damned human race,” eternally corrupt, privately likening life on earth to living in hell. (“Even my well intentioned H.S. doesn’t, in his blindness, see or want to believe what he has set in motion in Africa: In his well-protected shell, he hardly grasps that the natives, whose lot he might have sought to improve, are being enslaved, mutilated, murdered at whim. Now, I ask you, if as moralistic a chap as Stanley, who seems to really believe in all that stately fluff one hears from the pulpits, and if even he, who cares, in his way, for those Africans, can allow the wool to be pulled over his eyes — then what hope is there for this world?” he wrote.)
“I AM FAR FROM a perfect man,” he wrote to Stanley. “I blow my top over a lot of things. I suppose it’s the effect of Susy’s death on me, but there’s more: I’ve still got some debts to settle — perhaps I might have to take on yet another wearisome tour, but then Livy has so withdrawn from life these days that I doubt if she could bear the idea; and she, in any case, is not so well. I think her heart has somehow been damaged by all this, and she seems bent on becoming an invalid, sitting all day and doing nothing except staring out at empty space. Neither books nor the prospect of even taking a walk holds much interest for her. I am thankful for my own work, and she has been helpful as my editor — it’s the only labor she undertakes — but even then I don’t think she ever stops thinking about Susy for a single moment of the day. I, at least, can lose myself in the recollection of distant climes and the research attached to my writing: Still, I am almost afraid of finishing the book for that reason alone. And my daughter Jean’s epilepsy has been acting up — she hardly leaves the house because of it, and, aside from my own work, I really don’t want to leave her or Livy alone, so I rarely go out myself; which is to say, dear Stanley, that there are innumerable reasons why we have not seen you and your own. I keep hoping, at any rate, that future months will bring better things with them, mentally speaking.”
Dear Samuel,
During my recent voyage down to South Africa, I often thought about what you said to me — that no worse a thing can happen to a father than losing a child. I know that this is true. In adopting our own little boy, Denzil, a Welsh orphan, the fact that he is hardly of my own flesh hasn’t mattered very much to me or my wife. He has become the light and center of my world, as your daughter had always been to you. Though he was far from me during my journey, I spent most of my time trying to find a semblance of Denzil among the young passengers on deck. On the way back to England, I saw his sparkling eyes in every child’s face. Thus reminded of the beauty of innocence and the fineness of the beginning of life, I became forgetful of my own self-importance and made it a habit to speak to the little ones during my constitutionals along the deck, each smile, each laugh, lifting my great loneliness away. Sadly, during that voyage, one of those fair children died suddenly of a fever, and as the customary funeral at sea was held, with the ship’s chaplain saying the appropriate words, I watched solemnly as the little casket, wrapped in the Union Jack, was committed to the sea and nearly wept thinking of my Denzil and how thin is the fabric that separates all such children — and all of us — from an uncertain, perhaps glorious, destiny.