EARLY SATURDAY AFTERNOON, May 23, 1896, the party checked in at the Grand Hotel and then repaired to Pretoria Gaol Hammond greeted Clemens. “Mr. Clemens, Fm certainly glad to see you again. How did you ever find your way into this Godforsaken hole?” Clemens replied, “Getting into jail is easy. I thought the difficulties arose when it came to getting out.”
According to a newspaper account, based on notes that Smythe made from memory and gave the press, Clemens said he was delighted to see that there was only one journalist among the prisoners and that he was not at all surprised to find so many lawyers. “The dream of his life had been to get into gaol, but misfortune dogged his footsteps, for whenever he had committed anything, it had always happened that no witnesses were present except himself, and his reputation for veracity had not been sufficient to obtain conviction without corroborative evidence. There is no place where a man can secure such uninterrupted quiet as in gaol.” He proposed taking the prisoners’ place, serving as hostage for their good conduct and at the same time finding peace and quiet in which to write his book. Neither Don Quixote nor Pilgrim’s Progress would ever have been written had their authors not been imprisoned. Yes, the longer the Reform Committee members remained in jail the more they would appreciate the “insidious charm of the life.”
Clemens described his visit in a letter to his friend Joseph Twitchell. “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 ‘death line’ one of the prisoners called it. Not in earnest, though, I think … These prisoners are strong men, prominent men, and I believe they are all educated men. They are well off; some of them are wealthy. They have a lot of books to read, they play games and smoke, and for awhile they will be able to bear up in their captivity; but not for long, not for very long, I take it. I am told they have times of deadly brooding and depression. I made them a speech — sitting down. It just happened so, I don’t prefer that attitude. Still, it has one advantage — it is only a talk, it doesn’t take the form of a speech … I advised them at considerable length to stay where they were — they would get used to it and like it presently; if they got out they would only get in again somewhere else, by the look of their countenances; and I promised to go and see the President and do what I could to get him to double their jail-terms.”
After declining Hammond’s invitation to wait until the prisoners were ready to leave, Clemens returned to his hotel to prepare for the first of three At Homes at Pretoria’s Caledonian Hall. Reviewers praised his performance but condemned the hall’s acoustics. “The Caledonian Hall is excellent for dancing, but as a lecture hall it is hopeless. The alcove or platform is a grand retreat for an aggressive brass band but it is no place for a lecturer.” Although it was impossible to hear him satisfactorily at the far end of the room, he elicited “a veritable boom of laughter.” One critic chided those reviewers who related too much of the performer’s material, which threatened to lessen its freshness. “It is not satisfactory to find that Mr. Clemens had previously given absolution in the apple incident — to Durban, Maritzburg, and Johannesburg — before he absolved Pretoria of the desire to eat forbidden fruit.” Clemens found his largely Boer audience “promptly and abundantly responsive” once he had broken through their reserve.
The next day, at an interview in his hotel, Clemens spoke ironically about the filthy, overcrowded, vermin-ridden jail, with its grossly inadequate sanitary facilities. He was glad, he said, that the prisoners’ comfort was so well looked after and that they fully appreciated the advantages of an outdoor life. He called it “an ideal rest cure for tired businessmen.” The next day a humorless editorial writer, taking Clemens’s comments literally, railed against the jail’s leniency, pointing out that a prison was supposed to be a place of punishment. Hammond claimed that as a result of the editorial the prisoners’ rations were reduced.
The following day, Sunday, Clemens again went to the prison, but according to his letter to the Reverend Twitchell, he was unable to enter because a minister was visiting the prisoners. The warden “[ex]plained that his orders wouldn’t allow him to admit saint and sinner at the same time, particularly on a Sunday” Outside the jail, there was such stillness on the streets that Clemens felt as if the Puritan Sundays of the seventeenth century had returned.
Competition from a promenade concert given by the Pretoria Volunteer Cavalry Band at the cavernous Market Hall, where the Reform prisoners had been tried, may have accounted for the smaller assembly at his third performance, on Tuesday, May 26. Clemens told a new story, describing his reaction to the clock in the Government Buildings opposite his hotel, which chimed in the old Afrikaner style. After the half-hour signal, the number of the next hour would be chimed. Two strokes, for example, would indicate half past one. Unable to reconcile the chiming with his Waterbury watch, he claimed to have lost faith in his expensive timepiece and to have tossed it out the window. His audience greeted the local anecdote with “immense applause.”
That day Clemens visited President Kruger, then seventy years old and serving the third of four consecutive five-year terms as president of the republic. As a child he had participated in the great northward migration of Afrikaner farmers from the Cape Colony. Eventually settling in what became the Transvaal, this God-fearing Calvinist of little formal education became a farmer and soldier. He fought the Matabele and the Zulus, struggled to establish an orderly government in what became the South African Republic, helped organize resistance to British rule after Britain annexed it, and, following a series of Boer victories in the first Anglo-Boer War of 1880-81, skillfully negotiated a peace convention that restored Boer independence, albeit under nominal British suzerainty.
After the restoration of the republic, a Boer farmer complained to him that the departure of the British occupiers had depressed the market for “mealies” (Indian corn). Kruger asked him how many bags of mealies he produced each year. About three hundred. And how many did he need for his own consumption? About 150. “There, that is what I always ask when I am asked these questions. Here is a farmer who only needs 150 bags of mealies a year and he goes to the trouble of producing 300! I have no patience for such people.”
When news reached Pretoria that Jameson and his forces were close to Krugersdorp, Kruger took out his rifle and ordered that his horse be saddled. This was a man who years earlier had severed his own thumb at the joint, when gangrene began to spread after a hunting accident. He might be old, but he was still brave. “Now that this Jameson’s on the veld,” he is reported to have said, “we’ll soon see what he’s worth.” It took considerable skill to persuade him that he would be more useful to the state in Pretoria than on the veld.
At the time of his interview with Clemens, Kruger faced a cruel problem. On the one hand he wanted to placate the Uitlanders, who controlled the economy and, since most were British subjects, could appeal to Britain to support their claims. On the other he needed to maintain the support of his traditional constituency, who were probably already outnumbered by the Uitlanders and who were understandably alarmed at the prospect of losing political control. Jameson’s raid convinced Kruger and his government that the British intended to subvert the republic’s independence. From that time onward, the Transvaal prepared for war, which finally broke out three and a half years later. In the meantime his lenient treatment of the raiders and the conspirators bought him time. Severe punishment, although amply deserved, might have encouraged the British to intervene before the Boers felt ready for them. “If the heads of the Boer Government had not been wise men,” wrote Clemens in Following the Equator, “they would have hanged Jameson, and thus turned a very commonplace pirate into a holy martyr.”
Clemens, accompanied by the American consul Robert Chapin, visited Kruger on behalf of the American Reform prisoners. A translator mediated their conversation. Kruger was, Clemens noted, “in ordinary everyday clothes, and sat in an armchair, smoking Boer tobacco (the common black kind), his head and body bent forward. He had a bad cold and a very husky voice. He said he felt friendly toward America, and that it was his disposition to be lenient with the American captives.” According to Hammond, prison conditions improved after Clemens’s meeting with Kruger.
On Wednesday morning, May 27, Clemens and Smythe left Pretoria for Krugersdorp, about thirty-five miles southwest, where Clemens was to perform that evening. It was near Krugersdorp, at the edge of the Transvaal gold reef, that the Boers had ambushed Jameson’s raiders, who had intended to take the town before continuing on to Johannesburg. The Boers killed, wounded, or captured sixty men in this encounter, while suffering only a few casualties themselves. The raiders then sought another route to Johannesburg, but they were surrounded the next day and forced to surrender.
Clemens’s hostess in Krugersdorp, Mrs. Seymour, served as a volunteer nurse at the improvised field hospital, in a new store about to be opened, to which the wounded were brought after the ambush. She remained on duty for several days, until trained nurses could arrive. She and the other untrained nurses were commended by the district surgeon, who said that although attendance at operations imposed “a great strain” on them, they “worked splendidly, and better than I would ever have thought possible.” He described Mrs. Seymour’s work as “especially valuable.”
She was now engaged in a more congenial activity, welcoming Clemens as an overnight guest and organizing a late supper for him after his performance. The At Home did not impose a financial sacrifice upon the committee that had guaranteed the house, since the hall was “crowded to utmost capacity,” but the local critic was disappointed. “The yarns were rather too lengthy and too prosily told to evoke much enthusiasm … But all the same the lecture was enjoyable and afforded a rich treat to most of those who were present.” Perhaps inflated expectations caused the critic’s disappointment. As Clemens noted in his journal during his South African tour, “the human imagination is much more capable than it gets credit for. This is why Niagara is always a disappointment when one sees it for the first time … God will be a disappointment to most of us, at first … St. Peter’s, Vesuvius, Heaven, Hell, everything that is much described is bound to be a disappointment at first experience.” Clemens was almost certainly tired. Aside from the interludes of sea voyages and those imposed by illness, he had been performing for ten months.
The morning after his Krugersdorp At Home, he traveled to Johannesburg. Mrs. Seymour drove him to the station “with a pair of horses over a rough & rocky & guttered road — drove like Satan; how she kept her seat I don’t know; it would have been a hard drive for me, only I was in the air the main part of the time & the air at [Krugersdorp] is very thin & soft on account of the great altitude. Nothing else saved me from having my spine driven out at the back of my head like a flagstaff.”
That night he performed for the fifth and last time in Johannesburg, before a packed and fashionable audience, who accorded him deafening applause for his sympathetic references to the Reform prisoners. It was a pity, he said, that men of such tremendous talent, intelligence, and energy were locked away for even a short time. He could not convince himself that they had deliberately set about to overturn the Transvaal Republic. As for the Americans involved, he continued, their training forbade such a thing. Love of republicanism was characteristically American; without it an American was like an “unclassified dog.” To explain his allusion, he referred to an old minister who said that Presbyterianism without the doctrine of Infant Damnation would be like a dog that had lost its tag on a railroad journey and was therefore “unclassified.” He hoped that the Reformers would soon be released from prison and that the Americans among them would still be wearing their tags.
Clemens’s private opinion about the Reformers was less complimentary. To Mrs. Clemens he wrote that Rhodes and the principal Reformers had intended the government’s overthrow. In his journal, he remarked that “Miss Rhodes, middle-aged sister of Cecil and the Colonel (one of the four) told Smythe in the hotel in Pretoria that the prisoners were furious because I praised their lodgings and comforts; Smythe said the Colonel said — either^ was a damn fool or/was. He seems to be in doubt. I’m not. We are all fools at times; this is his time. The prisoners ought to have had a policy and stuck to it. But no — Butters and others were for conciliating the Boers (which was wise). Col. Rhodes and others were for driving them — which wasn’t.”
Clemens saw Rhodes not only as the fomentor of Jameson’s raid, but also as an engine of rapacious and unscrupulous exploitation in Rhodesia, “a happy name for that land of piracy and pillage,” as he wrote in Following the Equator. “That he is an extraordinary man, and not an accident of fortune, not even his dearest South African enemies were willing to deny …The whole South African world seemed to stand in a kind of shuddering awe of him, friend and enemy alike. It was as if he were deputy God on the one side, deputy Satan on the other… I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.”
But Rhodes, representing the British, was not the only highwayman. “There isn’t a foot of land in the world,” Clemens noted in his journal, “which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive ‘owners,’ who each in turn, as ‘patriots,’ with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of ’robbers’ who came to steal it and did— and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn. And this Transvaal, now, is full of patriots, who by the help of God, who is always interested in these things, stole the land from the feeble blacks, and then re-stole it from the English robber and has put up the monument — which the next robber will pull down and keep as a curiosity.”
Since it is indeed the rule that new owners pull down their predecessors’ symbols, it is astonishing that two years after all-race national elections, the old symbols by and large remain. True, a new flag waves from government buildings and citizens sing a new anthem, but government receptionists answer the phone in English and Afrikaans just as they did under the old regime. Inside the Voortrekker Monument, a monument to the Boer pioneers on the outskirts of Pretoria, a candle flame still burns to represent the civilization that the Boers believed they brought to Africa, although the sign forbidding admission to blacks has been removed. The site of Market Hall, where the Reform leaders were tried, is still named Strijdom Square, after one of the principal architects of apartheid. Even Kafferrivier, literally Nigger River, remains the name of a rural village in Afrikaner country
A white acquaintance, who serves on a committee that chooses street names for Pretoria, tells us that black members, including the chairman, rarely attend committee meetings. White members are unwilling to choose street names for black areas without black participation, so that streets go for months without a name, which in turn holds up housing construction. Our informant thinks that black intergroup rivalries may explain black committee members’ reluctance to choose names, an understandable aversion to being caught in crossfire.
An aversion to being caught in crossfire also explains Clemens’s remarks about the Reform prisoners at the conclusion of his last performance in Johannesburg. By flattering the prisoners’ abilities, he buttered up the English, and by asserting his disbelief in their intention to overturn Kruger’s government, implying the immorality of such an act, he pleased the Afrikaners. After leaving the theater he accompanied a friend to the home of a German bachelor, where, as Clemens wrote in his journal, they had “supper and comfortable fire (cold night) and hot whiskey and cigars; and good talk.”
The friend who took Clemens there was the forty-four-year-old Poultney Bigelow, an American adventurer, world traveler, and roving foreign correspondent for New York’s Herald. In his autobiographical Seventy Summers (1925), Bigelow recalled that in Johannesburg, gold miners would rush forward to shake Clemens’s hand at the end of each performance, referring to shared experiences in Nevada or California. “Put it there, old man! Don’t you remember me? — don’t you remember Bill Bloodgood that night in Jim Dusenbury’s cabin? and that Chinaman who poured our whisky into the oilcan? Dear old Mark! those were happy days! Put it there, old hoss — I knew you’d know me again, etc. etc.” Clemens would reply “Of course — why of course!” but later, alone with Bigelow, he dismissed them as “God damned liars.”