Rhodes liked his answers, and when the others left he kept Saltwood beside him: ‘You’re the only one who made sense.’ Then he became excited. He did not speak, he orated—in a high voice that grew higher as his enthusiasm flamed. He sat on his hands, rocking back and forth, and always he returned to the subject of Africa and the extension of empire: ‘Germany is coming at us from the west, and Portugal’s dug in on the east. It will be our responsibility to fend them both off. Push the channels north. Always north till we reach Cairo. The world can be saved only by Englishmen standing together. Saltwood, I need your help.’
‘What about the Boers?’ Frank evaded. ‘Can they, too, be used?’
‘The Boers are some of the finest people on earth. United with them, we could form a nation of unsurpassed strength.’
‘Why don’t we invite them to join us?’
Mr. Rhodes frowned and rubbed his chin. ‘You know, I’m a member of Parliament. And what kind of district elected me, if you please? Heavily Boer. I work with them, I collect their votes—and damnit, I know them no better than when I started. And those who emigrated north I understand even less.’
‘Is there a mystery?’
‘Yes. They huddle in their little republics and refuse to join the mainstream of the human race. They keep on their farms and leave the running of the world to us.’
‘You speak as if you intend to rule the world.’
‘Nothing less.’ Quickly he added, ‘If that sounds arrogant, I mean that the empire I shall put together for England must rule the world.’ He dropped his voice: ‘So your task will be to bring the Boers in with us.’
Then he became so impassioned on this point that he asked Saltwood to wait by the railing, and while other passengers were heading for the dining room, he ran to his cabin and returned with a rumpled piece of paper. It was a holograph of his will, and when Saltwood read it he was shocked: C.J. Rhodes was donating all his possessions to two minor officials of the English government, commissioning them to bring into the British Empire countries as diverse as the United States, the east coast of China and the whole continent of Africa, the Voortrekker republics not excluded.
‘Can this really be done?’ Frank asked.
‘It must be,’ Rhodes said, ‘and you’re to be part of it.’
When the volatile man disappeared into his cabin, Saltwood reflected on his curious behavior: he was offering a young Oriel graduate, whom he scarcely knew, a part in governing the world, but he never invited him to his cabin, or to his table, or to any other event of which he was a part. And one afternoon when he saw Frank talking with an attractive girl on her way home to Cape Town, he actually scowled and turned away in disgust. For some days thereafter he did not speak to Frank, and when he finally did he muttered, ‘I hope you’re not making silly promises to some silly girl,’ and only when Saltwood replied, ‘Hardly,’ did he resume his friendship.
When the ship docked at Port Elizabeth, Frank headed immediately north for his family’s farm, and he supposed that he would never again see C.J. Rhodes, but one afternoon as he and his parents sat at tea on a veranda overlooking the pastures and the stream, a dusty cart clattered up to the gate, and Mr. Rhodes strode up to the porch. After the most perfunctory acknowledgment of Frank’s parents, he asked bluntly, ‘Well, Saltwood, are you prepared to come with me?’
‘I haven’t really …’
‘You’re not mooning about the law, are you? With so much work to be done?’
Frank tried to avoid a harsh answer that would send Mr. Rhodes away permanently, and once he vacillated, Rhodes sprang at him like a tiger: ‘Good! We’re off to Kimberley in the morning.’ Only then did he bother with the older Saltwoods: ‘I’ll watch over him. He’ll be at the heart of things, and when you next see him he’ll be a man.’
The next day they drove to Graaff-Reinet, where they caught the stagecoach to Kimberley, whose violent activity was bewildering. Frank would never forget his first sight of the diamond mines, for as he wrote to his mother, they were like nothing else on earth:
Each prospector is entitled to a square of precious land, thirty-one feet to a side, but of this land he must leave a narrow path for others to use. Since Miner A had dug his plot forty feet down, and Miner B twenty feet, poor Miner C who has not dug at all finds himself atop a square with such precipitous sides that any fall is fatal. Also, at night irresponsible men cut underneath the footpaths, causing them to collapse. All is chaos.
But what catches the eye is a massive nest of cobwebs which looks as if ten thousand Arachnes had been spinning. They are the wires and ropes leading from the edge of the mine down to each of the individual holdings. On them buckets are drawn up, bearing the diamantiferous soil, and this immense tangle of lines, the buckets rising and falling are the signs of a diamond mine at Kimberley.
It is Mr. Rhodes’ fervent hope that he can bring some order into this madness, and to this end he has quietly been buying up plots here and there, endeavoring to consolidate them into some kind of reasonable concentration. If he can do so, he will command the industry and will become even more rich and powerful than he now is. It is my job to cut down to the same level all the contiguous plots he acquires, and I am finding many diamonds in the soil left for the footpaths. But for the moment the chaos continues, with one block fifty feet up in the air, the one beside it fifty feet down, and no order anywhere except in those areas he controls. It is a race between reason and anarchy, and he assures me that where men of good sense are concerned, reason always wins. He intends to.
Frank did not tell his mother what might have been the two most interesting bits of information. In the cottage occupied by Mr. Rhodes just as much chaos reigned as in the mines; a tin-roofed affair, it was Spartan-like, with not a single adornment to grace it, clothes pitched everywhere, dishes unwashed and furniture about to collapse. No woman was ever allowed in the house, which Rhodes shared with a gifted, sickly young man a few years younger than he. Frank found that he wasn’t the only one in his early twenties selected to advance Mr. Rhodes’ many interests; a squad of bright, eager recruits submerged their personal interests in those of this dreamer who visualized a Union Jack over every territory from the Cape to Cairo.
He invariably called his young men by their first names: Neville, Sandys, Percival, Bob, Johnny, and often he encouraged them to engage in hearty pranks, as if they were in grammar school. They were free to entertain such women as they could find in the diamond town, but there was an unwritten law that ladies were to be flirted with, and perhaps frolicked with, but quickly forgotten. Far greater things were in store for ‘my young gentlemen,’ as he referred to them, and like Shaka, he wanted his regiments to keep their hearts on the great tasks ahead and not on the bosoms of their wives.
Frank noticed that up to the time of his formal employment, Rhodes addressed him with a curt ‘Saltwood,’ but once he accepted his assignment he became ‘Frank,’ and so he would remain, perpetually young, perpetually smiling. Like all the young gentlemen, he was paid well.
The second interesting bit involved Mr. Rhodes’ chief rival in diamonds, an extraordinary chap who never stopped amazing the young gentlemen and the public at large. He was as different from Mr. Rhodes as a man could be, but was equally ruthless in hounding a business opportunity, and he alone stood between Rhodes and true riches.
Barnett Isaacs was a year older than Rhodes, a Jew born in one of the worst slums of London; in the midst of an undistinguished career as a frowzy vaudeville comedian and tap-dancer, he decided in a stroke of pure genius to make his fortune in the mines of South Africa. With only his nerve and some boxes of cheap cigars purchased near the docks at Cape Town, he talked his way north to Kimberley, peddled his ‘six-penny-satisfiers,’ and earned a pitiful living entertaining the miners with deplorable jokes, ridiculous acrobatics, and whatever else came to his mind when he stood before them in one cheap hall or another.
But Barnett Isaacs was an inspired listener, and while he clowned
he picked up choice bits of negotiable information: who was going broke, who wanted to return to London, who had stolen whose claim. And bit by bit he pulled this information together, acquiring a horse and cart and prowling the diggings as a kopje-walloper, a kind of money-minded vulture looking to snap up the discarded pickings off other men’s sorting tables. He soon got his hands on valuable rights, and one day Kimberley woke to find that Isaacs was one of the richest men on the diamond fields.
He thereupon changed his name to Barney Barnato, bought himself several suits of slick clothes, and indulged in a fancy which had tantalized many an earlier vaudevillian.
At a considerable personal cost, he assembled a moderately good threatrical company, purchased himself a set of Shakespearean costumes, and offered South Africa its first performance of Othello, with himself in the title role. Frank arrived at the mines too late to see the opening performance, but when all the young gentlemen purchased tickets to a subsequent exhibition, he went along to a steaming tin-roofed shed crowded with a noisy audience that cheered madly when ‘Our Barney’ strode onstage. His Desdemona, unfortunately, was six inches taller than he and appeared to be wrestling with him whenever they embraced; also, his makeup was so black and so thick that when she touched him her skin came away smeared while his showed white empty spaces.
‘But he’s rather good!’ Frank whispered to the men beside him.
‘Wait till the afterpiece!’
‘What happens?’
‘You won’t believe it.’
When the final curtain fell, with Desdemona dead and pretty well besmudged, the young actor who played Cassio came forward to announce that in response to unusual demand, Mr. Barnato, who had already excelled in Othello, would now give his classic rendition of Hamlet’s soliloquy, at which the crowd began to roar and whistle. After a few minutes Mr. Barnato, his face wiped clean, appeared in a whole new costume. ‘Watch this!’ the young gentlemen whispered.
While Frank gaped, Mr. Barnato nimbly gave a flip-flop and ended standing on his head. Maintaining perfect balance for a surprisingly long time, he began to recite the soliloquy, but as he came to the better lines, he gave wild gestures with his hands, stabbing at ‘bare bodkin’ and waving madly at ‘fly to others that we know not of.’ At the concluding words ‘and lose the name of action’ he gave an amazing flip and landed back on his feet. The applause was shattering, for as Mr. Rhodes admitted acidly when his young men returned, ‘The remarkable thing is not that he can do it, but that whilst on his head he can speak so powerfully and deliver such convincing gestures. I’ve never seen a better Hamlet.’
These two titans, Rhodes the taciturn plotter, Barnato the vaudevillian, fought each other for years, and then one night they stood face-to-face in the cottage of a man destined to be famous in South African history: Dr. Leander Starr Jameson. At four in the morning, after eighteen hours of tense bargaining, a deal was struck whereby Othello would eventually surrender all his control to Mars for a check whose photograph would be widely displayed throughout the world: £5,338,650. As Barnato capitulated, bleary-eyed and worn down, he said, ‘Some people have a fancy for one thing, some for another. You, Rhodes, have a fancy for building an empire. Well, I suppose I must give in to you.’ But he refrained from doing so until Rhodes promised that he would personally sponsor Barnato for membership in the ultra-exclusive Kimberley Club, where no Jewish Othello from Whitechapel would normally be welcomed.
If Barney’s recitation of Hamlet had been surprising to Frank, his campaign for election to Parliament was stupefying: he purchased a whole new set of Paris suits, an imperial landau pulled by four dappled horses, European gilded uniforms for six footmen, a handsome costume for a postillion who rode ahead blowing a long trumpet, and a brass band of eighteen to follow behind. ‘I voted for him,’ Frank told the young gentlemen, and to his delight he found that they had, too. And he suspected that Mr. Rhodes had done the same, for as he once said, ‘There are few men in this world who achieve everything they seek. Barney Barnato is one. He’s played Othello to applause. He’s recited Hamlet on his head. He’s won the boxing championship of the diamond mines for his weight. He’s had his own imperial guard. He’s been elected to office. And he’s the richest Jew in the country, with a full-fledged membership in the Kimberley Club. What more could he want?’
The young gentlemen were saddened when they heard that this man who had conquered the world by courage and sheer brazenness had committed suicide by throwing himself off the England-bound Scot in the middle of the Atlantic.
When Cecil Rhodes acquired control of the diamond fields, his attention was free to focus on the greater goals of his life; mere money, of which he now had prodigious supplies, interested him little except as a path to power. In the years when he was one of the richest men in the world, he continued to live with his young gentlemen in austere surroundings. ‘Every man has his price,’ he assured Saltwood, ‘and often it’s a hankering for luxury. With enough money you can buy any man. For example, the king up in Matabeleland wants guns. Above everything else, he wants guns. So let’s see that he gets them.’
Selecting a team from among his Kimberley staff, he began to suborn the king, and this left him free to study the perpetual problem: ‘Frank, we have at our end of the continent a priceless land governed by three races. English—who ought to rule. Boers—who don’t know how to rule. And Kaffirs—who should never be allowed to rule. What’s to be done?’
He allowed Frank to study this problem for some days, then gave his own answer: ‘It’s clear that England was intended to govern all of Africa. We’re people of vision, decency, honor. We know how to govern, and to everyone we govern we bring added virtues. So we must gain control.
‘The Boers? I love them. In some ways they’re sturdier than the English. But they lack vision. They will never be able to provide good government. The republics they occupy must become part of our enterprise, and I think I see ways of accomplishing this. When they join us, they must be given every consideration, for we need them. But join they must.
‘The Kaffirs? I stand ready to offer full citizenship to any man regardless of his color, so long as he is civilized. Would it be proper for them to have the vote while they remain in barbarism? I say they must be treated as children, and we must do something for the minds and brains the Almighty has given them.’ He added, ‘We must lord it over them until they gain civilization. Above all, Frank, never let them have alcohol.’
Upon analysis, Frank found that all of Mr. Rhodes’ basic beliefs were debatable: at Majuba the Boer armies had knocked the devil out of regular British troops; Germany was moving defiantly into Africa and had already annexed the southwest lands along the Atlantic Ocean, her moves outsmarting the English; in the mines, Kaffir workmen were proving at least as capable as whites. But Mr. Rhodes had several million pounds to support his objectives, and Saltwood had none, so it was the former’s views that prevailed.
To Rhodes, diamonds were the fire of his life, the glittering foundation of his fortune, so it was not surprising that he had been lukewarm to the discovery of gold two years earlier on the Witwatersrand (White Water Ridge), some five hundred miles to the north in the heart of the Boer republics. He did, however, stake his claim to a share of the golden fortunes, launching a great company that made him a Croesus, with unlimited power to undermine the Boers, keep the blacks obedient, and drive his highway of empire straight to the heart of Africa.
What happened next was inexplicable. In the Cape Parliament, Cecil Rhodes invariably sponsored full partnership for any Afrikaners who resided in the province, and they reciprocated by electing him to office, and would do so till he died. They liked his courage and admired his abilities. But now he decided to destroy the Boer republics in the north because, as he explained to Saltwood, ‘They must come in with us.’
‘But if they don’t want to?’
‘Then we shall force them.’
His reasoning was simple. The diamond mines at Kimber
ley were located on farmland which the English by infamous chicanery had forced to become part of their colony; English law governed the diamond fields. But the gold mines were located within the boundaries of one of the Boer republics; here Boer law prevailed, and this raised problems.
In the gold fields, which proliferated at a rate far greater than that seen in either Australia or California, there were Englishmen galore, and hundreds of Australians, and many Frenchmen, and Italians and Canadians and not a few American citizens who flocked in on ships from all the ports of the world. They were noisy, undisciplined, and a menace to the stolid Boers who wanted to be left alone on their farms; they swooped down on Witwatersrand like vultures finding a carcass on the highveld, and with them they brought contention, violence and every possible threat to the phlegmatic Boer way of life.
The self-governing Boers retaliated with the most imprudent laws: an Uitlander (Outlander) could vote for the Volksraad only after fourteen years’ residence; before that apprenticeship he remained a second-class citizen, entitled to cast his ballot only for a separate assembly subject to Boer veto; dynamite required in mining was made by a Boer-favored monopoly, and prices for it became prohibitive; any infraction of a score of meticulous laws must be judged in a Dutch-speaking court according to laws not promulgated in English. Investment of money, movement of men and the mining of gold all fell under Boer law, and no concessions to reason were granted.
Rhodes, with his relentless determination to bring disparate elements in Africa under English rule, was convinced that the arrogant conduct of the Boers was ill-advised and must lead to rebellion unless modified. He decided to intervene personally with the forbidding Boer leader, Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, that rumbling volcano of a man who ruled his little world from the stoep of his unpretentious dwelling on a tree-lined street in Pretoria.
The Covenant: A Novel Page 87