by Frank Harris
The choristers sang a hymn: the young voices brought tears to my eyes and I was not the only one so affected: Huxley's handkerchief was before his eyes as the music ceased.
The coffin was lowered to its place by Chaucer's tomb; the Dean said the benediction and the great organ boomed out the Dead March from Saul.
Slowly we all began to move, and when I stood by the grave, great spirits seemed to people the place: Chaucer and Shakespeare, Spenser and Ben Jonson were there, and the great Doctor with his stout figure and reverent soul; and the spirit of Robert Browning met them and words of his seemed to stir the sentient air:
O lyric love half angel and half bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire.
Other lines of his floated into my head, unforgettable lines: the woman's confession in The Ring and the Book:
He was ordained to call and I to come.
And how Browning thanks God that each man has two soul-sides: … one to face the world with One to show a woman when he loves her.
But does the light come after the darkness and will the woman-soul be wailing? Who knows? Who can tell?
Out of the throng in the great church into the foggy great gloom. Even Froude is affected; I hear him whispering: "Soon, soon. He giveth his Beloved sleep," and then aloud: "What a great ceremony!" he went on, "and a great man." I bowed my head.
In the summer of 1888 Rhodes startled English society by giving?. 10,000 to Parnell on condition that he'd work for the retention of Irish Members in the British House of Commons, for he believed, as he told Parnell, that "Irish Home Rule would lead to Imperial Home Rule." Suddenly it dawned upon English politicians that they must enlarge their views or the ablest men from their own colonies would be against them. I had already helped to found the Imperial Federation League, so I was heart and soul with Rhodes from the beginning. A very notable Englishman, I thought him, without "side" or pose of any sort, using British snobbery with some disdain to forward his own schemes. He spoke of Parnell as "the most reasonable and sensible man I have ever met." People forget many of Rhodes's achievements. In 1887 Lord Salisbury was quite willing to accept Portugal's extravagant claim to a continuous dominion from Angola on the west coast to Mozambique on the east, which would have finally limited England's empire in Africa. Luckily Rhodes had won Sir Hercules Robinson over to his, or rather Bartle-Frere's idea, that England should annex the whole high central plateau of Africa from the Cape to Cairo. W. H. Smith was opposed to granting a charter to the Rhodes' Exploration Company till Sir Hercules Robinson talked of "the amateur meddling of irresponsible and ill-advised persons in England." In April, 1889, Lord Gifford, Rhodes, Rudd and Beit applied for a charter and Lord Knutsford commended the proposal to Lord Salisbury as likely to save the heavy expenses that had been incurred in British Bechuanaland; and Rhodes was informed privately that he would get what he wanted if he put influential persons on his board. Thereupon he got the Duke of Abercorn as Chairman: the Duke got the Prince of Wales's son-in-law, the Duke of Fife, to consent to join the board, and best of all Albert Grey, whom Courtney called "the Paladin of his generation," and the most distinguished member of the South African Committee. Though warned by Chamberlain, Albert Grey finally agreed to throw in his lot with Rhodes. The trick was turned and the Chartered Company came into existence.
All through these negotiations I met Rhodes twice or thrice a week and learned to know him intimately, and most of the marked steps of his rise of fortune and power I heard from his own lips. In 1882 his De Beers Company only paid three per cent on the capital of?. 200,000; in 1888 it paid twentyfive per cent on a capital of over two millions and a quarter. It paid, that is,?. 6,000 in 1882 and six years later?. 600,000. Then he told me of his long fight with Barnato and how at length he incorporated Kimberley Central with De Beers. I shall never forget how summarily he treated it and how differently it all sounded when I heard it from Beit later and then from Barnato and Woolfie Joel. They went, it appeared, to a final meeting one evening in Kimberley, Rhodes and Beit on one side, Barnato and Woolfie Joel on the other. Beit had made it up with Rhodes to let him do the bargaining: "I'm not a Jew for nothing; I'll get it cheaper than you can!" Rhodes consented.
Barnato and Woolfie were nearing the place when Barnato said suddenly,
"What should we get?"
Woolfie said, "Half a million, I hope."
"Bah!" cried Barney, "I'm going to be a millionaire tonight, you'll see. Rhodes doesn't value money," and he smacked his lips.
When the four met, Rhodes, forgetting all that he had promised Beit, began at once, "I hate bargaining: I'll give you, Barnato, more than your holding in Kimberley's worth. I'll give you a cool million cash!"
Beit cried, "Oh my God, my God, Rhodes! You'll ruin us."
Barnato got up at once and reached for his hat: "We may as well go, Woolfie, if they think one million can buy us. I thought we were going to get a square deal," and he turned to the door.
"Sit down, sit down," cried Rhodes. "Here, Beit, you talk to them."
The quartette spent the whole night talking, bargaining, disputing, but at length Rhodes and Beit bought Kimberley Central for over five million sterling; yet the amalgamation was a good deal for De Beers and left Rhodes free to make even more out of the gold fields of the Rand than he had made out of diamonds in Kimberley.
When he got the promise of the charter for his exploring company, he went about London with a sheaf of many coloured application forms in his breast pocket. Long before this I had introduced him to Arthur Walter of The Times.
Strange to say, Arthur Walter did not take to Rhodes at first. "He's a boor," he said. "He forgets common civilities in his haste to push his own ideas."
"True enough," I replied, "but you'll get to like him, Walter; he has no malice in him, nothing petty," and soon my forecast proved true.
On a certain evening Rhodes outstayed Walter and then handed me a coloured form. "Write your application for shares in the Chartered Company on that," he said, "and up to a thousand shares you'll get the allotment."
I handed him back the paper, shaking my head; at once he selected another color and pushed it across to me. "That's the biggest I'm giving, Harris; that goes in thousands."
"I don't want it," I said. "I don't gamble."
"Gamble be d… d!" he cried. "This is a certainty: these shares will be dealt in on the stock exchange at a premium of?. 5; you can make?. 40,000 in a week by using that form. I'll give you?. 20,000 for it when you please!"
"No, no, Rhodes," I said. "You mustn't misunderstand me. I believe Chartered Shares will go to a big premium (within a week they went to?. 8 each), but I like you and what I've done I've done to help you and the cause we both have at heart, and I don't want any pay for it."
He held out his hand to me, saying simply, "I understand, still I wish…" I shook my head. "D'ye know there's only one other man in England besides yourself who has refused? Look at this list," and he handed it to me. One of the first names to catch my eye was that of the Duchess of Abercorn; the next that struck me in turning the pages was that of Schradhorst, the brother of the Liberal agitator who was always against Rhodes's schemes: he was down for 100 shares. "He asked me for "em," was Rhodes's comment.
"Who's that?" I asked, pointing to a name which had only five shares opposite to it.
"Oh," exclaimed Rhodes after some thought, "that must be the name of the midshipman who took me out in his gig to the flagship in Simon Bay."
We both laughed: from duchess to midshipman, enemy as well as friend, all held out their hands. And Rhodes persisted with me. "You're too careless about money, Harris! You'll see; you'll be sorry for it yet. Take 10,000; put it away in Consols and forget it. Before you die, you'll say my advice was the best you've ever had."
Winston Churchill gave me the very same advice twenty years later, said that the money I got him for his Life of his father had made him free from care and fear. Rhodes and Winston Churchill were right. I should have taken
the money offered me and put it away in Consols and have forgotten about it; I'd have been happier if I had followed their advice.
For a good many years about this time I spent the worst of the winter months in Monte Carlo and at first used to gamble a good deal, though I never lost my head or did myself any serious harm.
One evening at Monte Carlo I became aware that the Prince of Wales was standing just behind me. Almost at the same moment Sir Algernon Borthwick, whom I knew fairly well, touched my shoulder and bending down told me in a low voice that the Prince wished me to be presented to him. Of course I got up and turned round at once, and the Prince, shaking my hand said, with a strong German accent, "I've heard a great deal about you from my uncle, the Duke of Cambridge. He calls you the best storyteller he has ever met. I hope I may hear you tell some stories one of these days, but now I see you are playing with great luck and I wish you'd put these on for me," and he handed me a bundle of bank notes.
His accent was that of a German Jew and "the" was a stumbling block: "that" was "dat" and "these" "dese." There had been a run of red and I had backed it, so I placed the Prince's pile beside mine and won a couple of times, when I took off a couple of maximums for each of us. I was well inspired, for black won the next coup and the Prince was as delighted as a child. What he said about the story-telling came into my head as he stuffed the notes in his pockets. It suddenly occurred to me that probably no one had ever ventured to tell him a naughty story. So I told him a naughty rhyme to his huge amusement.
Here's to the game of twenty toes,
It's known all over the town;
The girls play it with ten toes up
And the boys with ten toes down.
"Tell me another, tell me another," he cried. So nothing loath, I told him a story that always seemed to me supremely amusing. An old actor found himself one evening on the Thames embankment. Out of work and out at elbows he sat brooding, when one of the female night birds sank onto the bench beside him. He made room for her, bowing courteously, so she began to talk, and finally asking him what he was.
"An actor, Madame, merely an old actor. And you?" he added courteously.
"Oh," was the bitter reply. "I'm only a prostitute!"
The broken down actor turned to her earnestly; "Two great professions, Madame, ours, cursed by the competition of amateurs!"
The Prince knit his brow for a moment and then the humour struck him and he laughed heartily.
"Another story, Sir," I began, and told of Lady Hawkins. Sir Henry Hawkins, the famous "hanging" judge, so-called, had married his cook in later life and she used English like a common cockney woman and soon became the notorious Mrs. Malaprop of the last decades of the nineteenth century in London. Sir Henry Hawkins loved beautiful oriental carpets and had got a splendid one for his sitting-room. At a reception once, a young lord complimented Lady Hawkins on the splendid carpet. "I don't know how many men have copulated me upon that carpet," the lady is said to have replied.
The Prince was so delighted and laughed so heartily that I told him the story of the English servant girl who came to her mistress at the end of the first week, saying, "Mum, I'll have to leave."
"Why, Mary," said the mistress, "you've only been here just over a week and we've tried to make it comfortable for you. What's wrong?"
"Well, mum, it's them 'orrid texts in my bedroom. I can't abear 'em."
"Horrid texts, Mary? What texts?" asked the old Puritan lady in astonishment.
"Well, Mum, there's one just over my bed: 'Be ye also ready, for you know not the day nor the hour when the Master cometh.' "
"Well," said the old lady, "what do you object to in that, Mary?"
"Well, mum," said Mary setting her jaw. "I've been ready over a week and he ain't come yet. I can't sleep."
The Prince laughed so consumedly that I continued with old schoolboy "chestnuts" that I should have thought everyone knew. Evidently he had never heard one of them, for he walked up and down the gambling room for half an hour with his arm on my shoulder, shaking with laughter. It was the limericks he seemed to like most; one in especial pleased him so much that he tried to learn it by heart. Here it is.
There was a young lady at sea Who said, "God, how it hurts me to pee."
"I see," said the Mate,
"That accounts for the state
Of the captain, the purser and me."
I noticed that both Lord Hartington and Randolph Churchill were waiting for a chance of speech with the Prince. I told him this and as a sudden thought came into my head, I blurted it out: "Jeanne Granier, the great French actress is here, Sir, and she's one of the wittiest women in Paris and a great story teller. If you'd do me the honour to sup with me tonight at the Grand Hotel, I'd have Granier and we'd try to amuse you."
"I'd love it," he said at once, "but the d… d journalists might talk. Get Lord Randolph Churchill to come too and it'll all be put to his account; more talk about him than me, see?"
"All right, Sir," I said. "Shall we say ten o'clock?"
"Sure, sure!" he replied. "At ten I'll be with you."
On my way to find Jeanne Granier I saw Randolph and he consented to come, but with some unwillingness. "If you don't wish to come," I said, "I can get Lord Hartington, but the worst of it is, he knows no French, while your French is very good."
"That settles it," he said whimsically. "I'll call it a command and come."
I soon found Granier and took her to dinner; she was the best type of French woman and I think we liked each other sincerely. When I told her about the Prince and how I had won him by risque stories which no one had ever dared to tell him before, she laughed with keen appreciation. "We are all won by the lives we know nothing about," she said. "I'll tell him stories he has never imagined; leave it to me."
We had an excellent dinner and a little before ten made our way to the Grand Hotel. At the very door of the hotel we came across the Prince. It was a wonderful night: the heavens like one deep sapphire set off by the radiance of a full moon. Scarcely had I presented Mile. Granier to the Prince and he had said how delighted he was to know personally such a queen of the stage, when she struck an attitude and pointing to the moon cried: "Qu'elle est belle et pale cette lune-la." And then in a man's voice she rejoined, "Pour belle je n'en sais rien; pour pale, elle doit bien I'etre, elle a passe tant de nuits!" The Prince laughed, delighted with the witty innuendo, and indeed I was surprised by it, till some years afterwards I found that the witty word was from Henri Becque, the dramatist, who passed almost unnoticed and unknown through life, in spite of possessing a great talent.
When we got upstairs to my rooms Randolph soon put in an appearance, but he didn't add much to the gaiety of the evening. All the burden was carried by Jeanne Granier, who immediately, after a little supper, began telling us stories of her early life on the stage with incomparable verve and humor. She had been on the boards as a child and from ten years of age on had hardly known an evening without being annoyed by the desire of some old man.
"What did they do?" asked the prince.
"This manager kissed me, Sir," she said; "that director pinched my bottom (fesses) as I passed; the other told me I was pretty and tempting: all of them without exception persecuted me. Yet I liked it all, I must confess, and the bolder they were, the more I liked 'em!" We could not but laugh!
The Prince was rejuvenated, and towards the end Randolph, too, began to take an interest in Granier's stories; and really they were excellent and formed a complete intimate picture and chronicle, so to say, of the French stage. The name of Sarah Bernhardt having come up, she recited a witty little verse as an epitaph of the great cabotine:
Artiste adoree aux deux poles
Ci-git Sarah, qui remplissait
Mieux ses roles
Que son corset.
Of course we all talked of Sarah for some time and then went off upon Coquelin, whom I always thought the best actor I had ever seen on any stage.
To my amazement Randolph agreed
with me; he had seen him in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and like myself thought him inimitable.
Curiously enough, Granier knew a witty epitaph on him, too, and gave it with astounding brio and a shade of malice.
Ci-git sous le marbre et le lierre Le petit-flls, le digne heritier de Moliere:
Seulement trop modest, au lieu de Poquelin Il s'est appele Coquelin.
I don't know why we all laughed so consumedly or why the hours fled so delightfully, but when we separated it was nearly three o'clock and the Prince thanked me for one of the most charming evenings he had ever spent.
He praised Granier, too, to the nth and sent her away happy, and even Randolph said that it was a great and memorable night. Before leaving he confessed to me that his inexplicable depression came from losses at the tables. "I must stop gambling," he said. "I have no luck." His luck was out forever, as I shall tell in a later chapter.
It seems to me that it was about this time that the great brewing firm of Guinness turned its business into a limited liability company. The company was brought out by the house of Baring and no one ever saw such a success in company promoting in the city of London. All day long hundreds of people besieged the banking offices and when the doors were shut, some daring spirits put stones in their checks and threw them through the windows, determined to get their applications accepted. The shares went immediately to a large premium and everyone was congratulating Lord Revelstoke as the head of the great bank. I saw him one afternoon and he admitted to me that Barings had made over a million pounds sterling on the one transaction, and in the one day, a stroke unparalleled, save by some performances of Hooley some years later.
A day or two afterwards I met Lord Rothschild at dinner at Sir Charles Dilke's, and I was very curious to find out whether the man's ability in any way matched his great position. I told the story of the Guinness promotion as Lord Revelstoke had told it to me and Lord Rothschild listened with seeming interest. When I had finished he said, "The Guinness promotion was offered to us first but we refused it!"
