May 24 Sunday – In Pretoria Carlyle Smythe led a Press reporter to interview Sam in the Grand Hotel. Sam was talkative giving the journalist an hour “full of wit and entertaining items,” including a desire to meet the “man of the hour,” President Kruger. He then gave the reporter an autograph and a curious line:
Truth is stranger than fiction — to some people. But I am measurably familiar with it / Truly yours, Mark Twain. / May 24, 1896 [Parsons, “Clubman in S.A.” 248].
Sam also returned to visit the prisoners but due to the arrival of a clergyman, he was not allowed entrance. He wrote of this and other happenings to Joe Twichell; On the train from Johannesburg the day before, Sam read Twichell’s article on Mark Twain in the May Harper’s Monthly (see May 23 for first part of this letter).
Thank you a thousand times, Joe, you have praised me away above my deserts, but I am not the man to quarrel with you for that; and as for Livy, she will take your very hardiest statements at par, and be grateful to you to the bottom of her heart. Between you and Punch and Brander Matthews, I am like to have my opinion of myself raised sufficiently high….
Yesterday I was allowed to enter the prison with Mrs. Hammond. A Boer guard was at my elbow all the time, but was courteous and polite, only he barred the way in the compound (quadrangle or big open court) and wouldn’t let me cross a white mark that was on the ground — the “deathline” one of the prisoners called it. Not in earnest, though, I think. …
We had a very good sociable time till the permitted time was up and a little over, and we outsiders had to go. I went again to-day, but the Rev. Mr. Gray had just arrived, and the warden, a genial, elderly Boer named Du Plessis, pained that his orders wouldn’t allow him to admit saint and sinner at the same time, particularly on a Sunday.
Sam regretted not bringing Livy and Clara from Durban, but wanted to save them the 30-hour train trip. He would reunite with them in Port Elizabeth after his lectures, they taking a ship down from Durban. He ended by noting it was then after midnight, and gave Joe “a world of thanks” [MTP].
At about 2:30 p.m. Sam called on Mrs. Gray (née Mary Tyler), Hartford-born and wife of a Presbyterian minister, answering her note and card. This was likely the wife of the clergyman whose admission to the prison had trumped Sam’s second visit there [mentioned in May 25 to Livy; Philippon 17]. See Parsons, “Traveler in S.A” p 19 for more on this visit.
Sam added to his May 23 letter to Livy at the Royal Hotel in Durban by adding “Notes for this letter” in a list. These notes contain a somewhat modified narrative of his talk to the prisoners as found in MTB (see May 23). Sam headed the segment “The Queen’s Birthday / 96,” and the only item not discussed in the earlier segment is:
This brisk & delicious air, this crystal-clear atmosphere, this luminous sky, destitute of any vagrant feather of cloud, these faint purple hills under the remote horizon — not real hills apparently, but dreams of hills that once were. And everywhere these wide deserted streets, this deep Sunday stillness, this mysterious & impressive absence of life and movement. This is the Puritan Sabbath of two centuries ago come back to earth again.
No time to write the letter. Goodnight, sweetheart — I dearly love you / Youth [MTP].