“One day,” Stanley once told me, “People will look back and think what I did was a good thing.”
SUNDAY EVENING FOUND THEM GATHERED in the parlor, Clemens, to everyone’s joy, performing spirituals on both the piano and guitar. The songs he played (“Go down, Moses,” “I got shoes, you got shoes,” “I know the Lord has laid his hands on me”) seemed to take him and the family back to better times, when such performances were part of any gathering of friends, for this was something that Samuel had not done in years. Then the evening took a turn toward literature, for Lady Stanley asked Clemens if he might read something aloud to them; he did so — first, a curious bit of fiction in which a man is transformed into a microbe and travels through the innards of a distressed intestine, a clever tale that, however imaginative, left Livy mortified. But then he followed it by reading from one of the chapters of his Huckleberry Finn book, prevailing upon Stanley to retrieve his copy for him. (Knowing it to be the very one that Stanley had taken with him to Africa, he was impressed by its pristine condition, as if it had been cared for tenderly — although it did not smell neutral, having a foreign fragrance to it. He was also quite intrigued by Stanley’s penciled notations in the margins of certain pages, and though he did not mention it, his expression conveyed an interest in reading all of them.) He chose one of Stanley’s favorite sections, the chapter (23) wherein Nigger Jim recounts the story of how he learned that his daughter ’Lizabeth was a deaf mute. Throughout this recitation, for reasons he did not know, Stanley could not take his eyes off Clemens. When Samuel, in his mimicry of the Negro dialect, recounted how Jim slapped the girl’s face for not responding to an order, and then, standing behind her, yelled “Pow!” in her ear and discovered that she was deaf — enunciating carefully the passage, “Oh, de po’ little thing! De Lord God Amighty fogive po’ ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to forgive hisself as long’s he live!”—Stanley was overcome with emotion, and Dolly noticed the first glimmerings of tears in his eyes. Whether it was Jim’s grief or ’Lizabeth’s suffering that Stanley related to we will never know.
When Clemens finished, he looked around and asked: “Who’s next?” Then to Stanley: “My dear man, please: Why not grace us plebeians with something from your own pen? Otherwise I’ll read more, and who would want that?”
Stanley, deeply touched and perhaps emboldened by the reminder that there was something noble and beautiful and deeply human about literature, then stood up, and, with his eyes most sad, excused himself from the parlor and headed into his library, where he kept some sections of his autobiography in a drawer. Written in longhand and converted into typescript, those pages were much expanded from the days when he had first begun them, in the early 1890s (that version proceeding after his “cabinet” manuscript), and though he had since rarely added anything more than a few sentences a day, despite the hours he had devoted to the book, he chose, in an effort to please Clemens, to plunge forward and read from its beginning. But it was no easy thing. When, after some fifteen minutes, and after gulping down two shots of a fine Napoleon brandy, Stanley returned to the parlor, the discoverer of Livingstone and the conqueror of the Congo—“the new Alexander,” as Léopold had once called him — sat down humbly and, with his hands shaking, began to read a section involving his own youth titled “Through the World.”
Tracing the beginnings of his lowly childhood in north Wales, it was a rather fanciful collage of vaguely remembered people and scenes from his earliest days — the interior of a peasant’s cottage, with its ordinary objects: some Chinese pictures, a window set in lead, a teapot hissing, an old clock with chains and weights beneath it, a fly alighting near his cradle — all such things described with care and read in a halting but clear voice. The progress of those pages was marked with various hesitations, his words hardly audible as he stated that he had no father, the man having died a few weeks after his birth, and, with his gut tightening and breathing laborious, his pace slowing whenever he came to any references to the mother who had abandoned him. His face would redden whenever he mentioned that shadowy presence in his narrative.
Then, with the apparent exhaustion of a man who had marched out of a swamp, he simply stopped. “However well, mechanically speaking, I may write, and however many books I have sold — for I have earned my living mainly from literary output — nothing I ever create will be as heart-wrenching as Mark Twain’s tales.” In a solemn mood, he added, “Still, this is what your humble servant has been doing.”
He may have felt bad about his writing, but there was much excitement among his listeners. Clemens’s daughters, although spoiled by their exposure to famous people, knew that it had been a special moment, and they applauded his efforts: Gertrude had often nodded approvingly, and Dolly, greatly pleased and wanting to see and hear more of his autobiography, hoped the recitation would be the beginning of a new phase, one in which he might feel emboldened to finish the “chimerical story of his life.” And Clemens? Touched by Stanley’s timidity in reading from that work aloud, drew him aside and said: “Look here, Henry, if you should need me in any way to assist you, then I am at your disposal. If you care to, I would be glad to be your editor.”
Stanley, shaking Clemens’s hand, answered, “Thank you, Samuel, but this book feels like it will be my coffin. What I have written of it will remain where I left it. It is just my way.”
With that, he and Stanley went out onto the veranda with some brandies and cigars in hand, and there, while luxuriating in the beauty of the night sky, Stanley bared his soul to Clemens.
PERHAPS HE HAD INTUITED that he might never see Clemens again, but on that Easter Sunday evening, Stanley, not feeling long for the world, said:
“Now, Samuel, may I ask you something?”
“Surely.”
“What do you really make of the doings in the Congo?”
“I’ve heard both good and bad things about it, like most folks.”
“But the bad things — do you believe them?”
He thought for a moment and said: “I do, sometimes.”
“You know it’s the ivory and rubber trade behind it. I’ve been made sick over the whole business. And yet some people are saying I’ve profited greatly from it. But what money I have, Samuel, I’ve earned from my lectures and books, mainly.”
“I believe you.”
“Then why do I think you don’t?”
“Sir Henry, I have my own highly developed peeves. The likes of Léopold, your friendly king; the Russian czar; the missionaries in China. America as well these days. I would sooner drink piss than fall in line with the acquisition-mad parties who have made the world a misery for so many. But even if I distrust the motives behind the Africa game and deplore imperialism — well, I’ve said it: Not once have I ever thought you implicated as the planner of such things.”
“Some have accused me of cruelty.”
“You’ve told me that, but do I believe it? My God, Henry, I would imagine that, in the circumstances you’ve been in, you did what you had to do.”
“I’ve never awakened any one morning and thought I would have to kill someone to survive the day, but I have killed again and again.”
“So your conscience is bothering you?”
“No, my conscience is clear. Yet… in the midst of my days, even when I am taking a stroll with little Denzil, some part of my mind is always racing and taking account of the number of lives I have personally brought to an end. Some days I come up with a modest figure — thirty-seven; then the next day I will remember another incident. The number shoots up to one hundred; then on yet other days, I tally up five hundred and more graves and fall into a vague sense of remorse. That’s not counting the hands I’ve lost to malaria and other diseases and those who have starved to death or been shot with poison darts or rifles or drowned, like my poor Kalulu. Nor does it account for the many animals who’ve died on my expeditions — hounds, donkeys, horses, and birds. I don’t lose sleep over it, mind you, I just have odd dreams, in which I am a harbinger of death. Yes, I know that my efforts have contributed to making central Africa what it is today, but never did I dream possible the sufferings that have been reported. Even if only ten percent of the stories are true, as I know them to be, that is hard for me to live with. And though I do not feel at fault — for I was never given a chance to run things there — I have some moments of misery just the same.”