Everywhere I looked there was row after row of American battleships along the harborside, and many soldiers and sailors, too: Stanley, the country is occupied 100 percent!
But we had come into port for no more vital mission than to meet with some local officials and then have lunch, so we dined in a mansion in El Cerro — a neighborhood on a hill. Journalists were on hand to interview Mr. Reed, who declared the island “safe and sound.”
Afterward I visited the plaza: I found an English-speaking bookseller there, and when I asked him to recommend a volume of Cuban literature, he came up with a book of poetry called Versos sencillos by one José Martí. It’s a funny thing, Stanley — apparently the poet is considered a very great Cuban patriot, for he died in an early battle against the Spaniards, but as I looked over his poetry, in Spanish, which I will take pains to translate, it occurred to me that I had once met him before, perhaps in New York or Boston, where he was said to have lived for a time.
In any event, old friend, I wish that you had been able to come along. We might have fooled ourselves into thinking we were young again and could have traipsed about Havana like Huck and Tom along those streets, beautiful as ever.
Faithfully,
S. L. Clemens
Furze Hill, April 17, 1903: Another Special Spring Day
STANLEY HAD NOT BEEN FEELING particularly well when he took Denzil for a walk; they had gone out into a meadow to fly a box kite, as there had come some good winds that late morning — the British and American flags Stanley kept on the lawn were flapping gloriously in the breeze — but he should have known better, for just the day before, while coming down the mansion staircase with a drink in hand, on his way to take the hounds out and shoot some birds, he had experienced a bout of giddiness. His face had heated up, and all at once the walls around him suddenly turned a bright red, as if he had been staring into a sunny lake for too long; for a few moments he had to steady himself on the banister. Sitting on the landing, as he looked around the mansion and saw his many possessions, and as he looked through a window at the fields and woods, ever so radiant at dusk, he began laughing, his joy so pure and timeless that, in those moments, he considered himself nearly immortal. One of the servants found him there, and no sooner did he inquire after his master’s well-being than this brief ecstasy passed. Helped up to his feet and insisting that he was perfectly fine, Stanley took a stroll through his gardens. Their loveliness inspired him to believe that he was an especially blessed man and that Providence had, for whatever reason, rewarded his difficult life with that little moment of earthly happiness.
Walking the grounds that evening he had felt deeply contented; the months he’d passed apart from London society he had spent peacefully — reading when his eyes were up to it; forgetting all the bad news about Africa; choosing only to remember his good experiences. And he spent as much time with Denzil as the boy could tolerate, teaching him about plants and the nature of gardens — in short, behaving with him in a manner that Stanley had missed as a child.
He considered his friendships. In the previous few years he had become quite amicably disposed to the company of Henry Wellcome, and his amity with Edwin Arnold and Frederic Myers, for all their eccentricities, provided him with more pleasure than annoyance. And when he reflected upon his other friends, like Samuel Clemens, whom he considered a unique and kind man of astounding talents, he smiled at the thought. In such moments, when he felt that all was good with the world, he wished that his old American friend were by his side and that he could somehow magically convey his wondrous feelings to him, for he knew that the poor fellow had suffered so much. It was as if, in an unexpected way, he could feel a “benevolence” all around him. And this benevolence made him feel nearly saintly. For all his grumblings to Dolly about feeling unappreciated by the world — for by then he had become a relic of the past — he found himself, in fact, feeling no malice toward anyone — not even King Léopold, who had deceived him with his sanctimonious prattle about bringing peace and prosperity to the Congo. Suddenly he was so charitably disposed that were his mother-in-law present, he would have shocked her with a bounty of kisses upon her face. It was as if he had been suddenly freed from all self-restraint: He felt young and loving, dashing and wildly handsome; and though he knew he could not, he wanted to celebrate. And there was Dolly. When he last saw her, in the late morning, she was sitting in her studio at Furze Hill, at work on one of her paintings — it happened to be one of the portraits of Clemens she had been working on — and although he sometimes felt a slight twinge of jealousy about her fascination with him, for she had always behaved coquettishly around Clemens, it did not bother Stanley. Instead he wanted to seek her out and sing the praises of her talents and beauty — and then, in imagining that alternate self, he wanted to overwhelm her with the long-recessed powers of amore that he’d always known he had within himself.
But all that, too, turned out to be an illusion, for shortly the elation he had been experiencing was followed by a severe headache, which laid him so low that he dropped down onto a walkway bench, remaining there until one of his farmhands found him slumped over in agony and helped him back to the mansion, where he spent the evening in bed, a strong dose of brandy, along with some grains of quinine, which he had taken as a precaution against malaria, seeing him through the night. Yet by the morning, as that severe pain had seemed to have receded to a mild ache, and as his son had a rejuvenating effect upon his waning vitality, Stanley, never wishing to disappoint Denzil, went to find him in his nursery, where he had been playing with a set of wooden grenadiers, a gift from the king.
“Come, my boy,” he had said to Denzil. “Let’s go outside. This time, we will get it flying.”
In his hands was the box kite that he had constructed for his son from a kit. And so, even if he could only move ever so slowly, and even if the effort of keeping his head up taxed him, he did not let on. Denzil, in the joy and sprightliness of youth, could barely keep himself from leaping up and down even as he ran forward.
They had come to one of the meadows somewhat east of the house. As Stanley stood, watching the boy scamper forward with the string and kite floating over his head, his father wished that a strong breeze would come along and lift it upward — and it did. As the kite ascended, low clouds drifting along the horizon, Stanley again felt himself fading — a sudden paroxysm so numbing his left hand that he let the string he was holding fall away. The kite pulled up on the current and slowly rose over the fields; Denzil watched it lift beyond the clouds and out of sight.
SOMEHOW HE MANAGED to make his way back to the mansion, where, begging his son’s forgiveness—“I am sad that I cannot play more with you, but I will get you another kite soon enough”—he retired to his bedroom. Along the way Dolly, seeing his pallid face and drunken manner of walking as he entered the front hall of the mansion — for even with the assistance of a cane he swayed slightly from side to side — was so alarmed that she wanted to send for the local doctor. But Stanley, who had grown tired of doctors and treatments and medicines, told her: “With a little rest I will be better.” Then, to further ease her mind, he added, a slight slur in his voice: “Haven’t I always gotten over things? I may be worse for wear, but I will recover; perhaps it was something I ate.”