by Frank Harris
I release myself and begin to weave a mesh of kisses over her: the eyes, the hair, the perfect mouth, the breasts that have no shadow of fault, past the tiny coiling navel where the skin is increasingly sensitive, so quivering more with every kiss. (I always want to call a woman I love a harp.) At last the kiss that seals them all! Her body is convulsed with the intensity of the sensation.
Stressful little moans come from her throat blended with endearing names.
Her hands caress me frantically. We draw closer together. Her mouth finds my sensitive places. Incredible pleasure. Somewhere in my mind there is this thought: What a beautiful piece of work a sculptor who dared would make of this perverse intertwining of two figures in lesbic passion! Both bodies are fair enough, firm and young and supple-muscled. It must have been done by the ancients.
Cool rills of perspiration create separate tiny thrills where they traverse the skin. The quivering of her limbs, the bitter salts of her body on my tongue and lips, the sweet pressure and motion of her mouth, shake me into a scarlet blindness. The mounting sensations make me think of melodies I have heard, growing and growing to a crescendo and ending with the sudden silence that symbolizes the crisis.
We seem to flutter down from a far height and lie exquisitely quivering with the pleasure of perfect passion.
I raise myself a little and, gently now, lay little kisses along the limbs, the hips, upward over the breasts, across the throat back to the lips and grateful eyes. She is still-like a marble girl. I barely know her until she circles me with her arms and whispers, "Lover! Sweet, little burning lover!"
I can think of no name to call her that would harmonize with the reverence that fills me for her beauty and the intensity of the pleasures we have enjoyed. I kneel beside her and kiss her hands.
It seems to be almost a law that we love those who respond to us and worship all that gives us pleasure-pleasure in its very widest sense.
Vice-! The thought amuses me. There are only vicious people.
Marguerite rises, goes and pours out something, then returning, crouches beside me, and holds up one of her little glasses to my lips with enchanting grace.
Then we go and lie on the bed, she bringing Verlaine for me to read to her, while she strokes my body, resting her cheek against one of my breasts.
If the spirit of Verlaine lurked anywhere in the room, I am certain there was approval in its nebulous heart.
And Regina on the morrow-Regina!
CHAPTER VI
Barnato, Beit, and Hooley
'Tis a very good world to live in,
To lend or to spend or to give in;
But to beg or to borrow or get a man's own, 'Tis the very worst world that ever was known.
It was through my sojourn in South Africa in 1896 that I came to know the world of modern finance, where millions sometimes are made or lost in a day by speculation. It was in Johannesburg that I first got acquainted with this characteristic of the time.
Long before meeting him, I had heard of Barney Barnato: every one in the Rand Club knew the sturdy little middle-aged man, who was said to be worth twenty millions and was considered by many to be the true rival of Rhodes and Beit. Ten or twelve years before he had landed in Kimberley with the proverbial five pound note. How had he made such a fortune in so short a tune? His presence and speech were against him; he was commonly dressed and spoke like an uneducated Cockney, dropped his "h's" and made grammatical howlers in almost every sentence. Rhodes after all was "someone," while Barnato was plainly a rank "outsider," to use the ordinary English phrase.
It was said of Barney that in early days at Kimberley he had got a living by showing off as a fighter: he would put a square of carpet on the ground and bet that no one could stand up to him on it for five minutes. One rough miner after the other used to take on the job, but they soon found that little Barnato was really hard to beat, and they usually lost their money and took a good deal of punishment into the bargain.
Barnato soon bought claim after claim in Kimberley, and working as he had fought, with all his heart, quickly became one of the richest men in the camp.
From the beginning he was inconceivably mean: he never paid for a drink- always pretended that he had no loose cash about him. A story was told of him that always seemed to me to paint him to the life. Going to the Kimberley races once, he answered some jest made at his expense by saying that he would bet he could make a thousand pounds before the evening.
Several people bet with him. When he got to the race course, Barnato went up to a woman who was selling lemonade and drinks and asked her how much she expected to make during the day. She said, "Perhaps ten pounds."
"I'll give you twenty," he said, "for your stock, and five for yourself-is it a deal?"
The woman consented and Barnato began to sell her stock, and he did it with such humor and such understanding of almost every miner who came up that he soon had a great crowd about him and sold out at fabulous prices, getting higher and higher sums toward the end of the day; and finally achieved his aim and made his clear thousand pounds, besides the bets he had also won.
His common cockney English endeared him to the ordinary miner, but his knowledge of life and men was extraordinary; his energy extraordinary, too, as was his self-confidence. I have told the story how Rhodes and Beit bought him out at Kimberley; but Barnato soon established himself in Johannesburg as one of the great mine owners and made another huge fortune. Yet he only gambled when he was sure to win. I was once at a game of baccarat in his house where nearly a quarter of a million changed hands in two hours while Barney, having shed his boots, dozed on a sofa in the room.
I remember his telling me once that he was worth twenty-five millions. "My boy," he added, "I have made three millions in one day." I always thought that that was the day when he sold his claims in Kimberley to Rhodes and Beit.
I am giving no portrait of him, and yet I liked Barney Barnato, for he was really likable in spite of his meanness about petty sums. He told me one day how he had given one hundred pounds for his first claim in the diamond mine of Kimberley: he worked day and night at it with his niggers, and when he got down, a month later, to the blue ground where the stones were found, he made ten thousand pounds in the first hour. "Thirty good diamonds," he said.
"I could hardly believe my ears when I was offered eight thousand pounds for them; but I didn't sell them till I got the round ten thousand-about half their real worth, I should think."
"The week after, I bought three adjoining claims and since then my bank balance has grown pretty rapidly; I'm not complaining. I remember on my first day on the carpet in Kimberley, I had to fight like a wildcat with a big miner, and all for five quid-a change, eh?"
Every one knows how Barney Barnato bucked against the falling market in Johannesburg, brought about by Rhodes's schemes. He was said to have lost a million. I met him once near the end when he told me how Rhodes and Beit had kept him out and how he had bought on a f ailing market and lost his money. "My dear Barney," I said, "one of these days you will make another fortune. What's a million to you?"
"A million!" he snarled, "A million to me-it's ten hundred thousand pounds, you-!" There was something mad in his glare. It suddenly came to me that Barney had worn his mind out, and when he hurried into an inner room, muttering to himself, I felt sure that if he didn't soon win to self-control, he would come to grief. I perhaps read Barney correctly because I, too, had suffered from nerves and knew how essential it was to cure them. I may say here that constant change of scene and companionship, and the determination to take life easy for awhile are the best cures; but poor Barnato stuck to his work till the last.
A little later, on his way to England, he threw himself off the steamer into the sea; his body was recovered and brought to Southampton.
Woolfie Joel, his nephew, told me that Barney had worn himself out. Woolfie Joel had many of the fine qualities that Barney Barnato lacked. He hadn't the genius of his uncle, but he was far better educ
ated and of a generous and kindly nature. I always had a great liking for Woolfie Joel.
It is the development of a man, the growth of him, that is of supreme interest to his fellows: whoever can tell this story is sure of hearers; but how much more sure when the story is that of the master of millions in a day when all would be rich if they could.
It was in Alfred Beit's house in Park Lane in '97 or '98 that I put him to the question. We were seated in the room which was at once a sort of rockery and palm garden: a room of brown rocks and green ferns and tesselated pavement-an abode of grateful, dim coolness and shuttered silence, silence made noticeable, as it were, framed off by the vague hum of the outside world.
We had been talking of Kimberley and his early days there and his first successes, and I was eager to learn how, even in the race for wealth, he had outstripped a man like Barney Barnato, who had reached Kimberley years before him, and who had never cared for anything in his life but money, and had sought it night and day with the meanness of avarice which collects pennies and saves crusts; or, better still, which dines sumptuously at someone else's expense, inspired by the insane Jew greed which finds a sensual delight in the mention of gold and silver, and diamonds and pearls, and rubies- above all, rubies, hued like pigeon's blood, and more precious than a thousand times their weight in refined gold. In spite of his savage greed and oriental garishness, Barney Barnato had a touch of genius in him, and wasn't easily beaten at his own game.
In person Beit was not very remarkable: he was short-shorter even than Barney Barnato-and plump; in later days the plumpness became fat. But even in his prime he seemed to have "run to head"; the great round ball appeared too large for the little body and small limbs; but it was excellently well-shaped, the forehead very broad, and high-domed to reverence and idealism, like a poet's; the rest of the face was not so good; the nose fairly large, but slightly beaked, not noticeably fleshy-a good rudder; the chin rather weak than strong-no great courage or resolution anywhere. After the forehead the eyes and mouth were the two noteworthy features: the eyes prominent, large, brown, the glance at once thoughtful and keen; the mouth coarse and ill-cut, the lower lip particularly heavy. It reminded me of Rhodes's face; but Rhodes's mouth was coarser and more cruel than Beit's; his nose, too, larger and more beaked; his chin and jaw much more massive — altogether a stronger face, though not so intellectually alert.
Beit's manner was nervous, hesitating: he had a tiny dark moustache and a curious trick of twirling at it with the right hand, though he seldom touched it; the embarrassed nervousness of a student, rather than the assurance of a man of affairs accustomed to deal with men; but the nervousness was chiefly superficial, due perhaps to weak health, for as soon as he began to talk business he came to perfect self-possession.
Beit did not seem to wish to talk of Barney Barnato; he admitted his gifts, but evidently did not like him. But if Beit disliked being compared with Barnato, nothing flattered him more than to be compared with Rhodes. He had a profound and pathetic admiration for Rhodes, the admiration which only a born idealist could keep through many years of ultimate companionship.
And in connection with Rhodes, he had no disinclination to talk about himself; the phrase of Goethe, paraphrased at the beginning of this portrait, seemed to touch him.
"Yes," he said, "that's the good time of a man's life, if he only knew it, the Entwicklungsperiode."
"It is the beginning," I went on, "that is supremely interesting; how from nothing you won the first fifty thousand pounds, that interests everyone; but how afterwards you turned the fifty thousand into twenty millions is much less interesting."
"Well," said Beit, "I was one of the poor Beits of Hamburg; my father found it difficult even to pay for my schooling, and you know that is cheap enough in Germany; I had to leave before I had gone through the Real-schule. Of course, in Hamburg at that time everyone was talking about the discovery of diamonds in South Africa, and so, after helping my father for a little time, he made up his mind to send me to Amsterdam to learn all about diamonds. I went there and spent two years, and in that time got to know a good deal about diamonds."
"Of course," I interjected, "hi that time you must also have learnt Dutch."
"No," replied Beit; "no. I just did my work, and wasted my spare time like other young men. A little later my father had some interest with the house of Jules Forges in Paris, and I was sent out by him to Kimberley. I got my passage money and three hundred pounds for the first year. When I reached Kimberley, I found that very few people knew anything about diamonds; they bought and sold at haphazard, and a great many of them really believed that the Cape diamonds were of a very inferior quality. Of course, I saw at once that some of the Cape stones were as good as any in the world; and I saw, too, that the buyers protected themselves against their own ignorance by offering for them one-tenth part of what each stone was worth in Europe. It was plain that if one had a little money there was a fortune to be made, and I remember I wrote to Forges, offering to give up my position and pay him back my passage money if he would let me off my engagement to work for him for a year; but he would not let me off, so I went on working.
"I wrote to my father frequently, long letters, telling him all about Kimberley; how incredibly rich the ground was; how easy it was to make money with a little capital; and I begged him to send me as much as he could get together by the end of the year, and I promised him to return whatever money he lent me with good interest within a year.
"Before the end of my time with Forges, my father got together a couple of thousand pounds and sent it to me; but I did not use it in buying diamonds, as I should have done if he had sent it to me in the first six months. Kimberley was growing so fast that the demand for houses was extraordinary, so I bought a bit of land and put up twelve or thirteen offices, corrugated iron shanties, of which I kept one for myself. I let out these twelve or thirteen shanties, and I got eighteen hundred pounds a month for them."
"Eighteen hundred pounds a month!" I said. "How long did that continue?"
"For years and years," said Beit. "Twelve or thirteen years, I think, and then the pit had grown so large that my ground was wanted, and I sold the ground on which the shanties were built for a fair sum-I think it was about two hundred and sixty thousand pounds. I got something for the dwellings, too, I think," and he laughed. "Not a bad speculation!"
"No," I said, "indeed; that solves the question of how you came from poverty to riches."
While getting a subscription once for a charity, I came across a curious trait in his character-he seemed to over-estimate the value of small sums of money. If you spoke to him of two or three pounds, or twenty-two or twentythree, he was always eager to show you how thirty shillings could do in the one case, and how it was possible to attain the desired end with half the amount in the other. But the moment you spoke in thousands, he seemed to treat them as counters. He would jump from five thousand to fifty thousand as if there were no intervening figures. The truth was, of course, that Beit had learned the value of small sums of money when he was young and poor in Hamburg and Amsterdam, and no one knew better than he did how much could be done with a pound. But when you talked in thousands you were speaking to Beit the millionaire, who made fifty thousand in an afternoon, and did not attach precise importance to either sum.
Beit went into the Jameson Raid at Rhodes's request, but he protested against every stage of that mad and stupid enterprise. Indeed, the story of Jameson's Raid would only show that Beit was intensely loyal to Rhodes, even when he believed him to be entirely in the wrong. Beit was a good type of business man. He had an instinctive aversion to politics and raidings, and was chiefly interested in such enterprises as could be shown in a profit and loss account.
But there was another side of his nature: like many Jews, he had a real love and understanding of music; and he admired pictures and bronzes, too, though he was anything but a good judge of them. At bottom Beit was a sentimentalist, and did not count or reckon when h
is feelings were really touched. This was the fine side of the man, the side through which Rhodes used him, the side which, by contrast with his love of money, showed the breadth and height of his humanity. Of all the millionaires I had chanced to meet, Beit was the best. He had a great deal of the milk of human kindness in him, quick and deep sympathies, too, sympathies even with poverty, perhaps through his own early struggles; and if any plan of a social Utopia had been brought forward in his time, no one would have detected its weakness more quickly that Beit, no one would have seen its good points more clearly or been more willing to help it to accomplishment.
After Cecil Rhodes's death, I had written an article about him and about his will, in which I declared that posthumous benefactions seemed to me no proof of benevolence because they lacked the savor of sacrifice, and, to use Bacon's phrase, "were but the painted sepulchre of alms." Beit expressed his astonishment at this criticism, and thought there was a great deal of unselfish nobility shown in Rhodes's will, and added that he only hoped to make as good use of whatever he might possess when he died. Indeed, when Beit died in 1906, he left over two million pounds to charity.
It was in the late summer of 1896, after my return from South Africa, that A.
M. Broadley called on me one day in the office of the Saturday Review and brought a new interest into my life. I had known Broadley for a good many years and had long been convinced of his business ability, as well as his journalistic skill. He told me that he was making a good deal of money with Ernest Terah Hooley, whom I had just heard of as the successful promotor of the Dunlop Company. Broadley offered to bring me up to see him, suggesting that I should find it to my profit to help him in his financial schemes. Nothing loath, I went with Broadley and was introduced to Hooley at the Midland Grand Hotel. To my surprise, I learned that the financier had taken the whole of the first floor of the Midland Grand Hotel for his offices. I don't know how many rooms there were, but I believe there were certainly fifty; and from ten o'clock in the morning until six at night, almost every room was filled with people who had axes to grind. Hooley flitted from room to room, always good humored and decisively quick in dealing with the most heterogeneous projects.