Millin S. G., Cecil Rhodes (1933).pdf

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C E C I L
RHODES
BY
Sarah Gertrude Millin
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C
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Chapter 1. The Matoppos and Bishop Stortford
3
II. The South Africa to Which Rhodes Came
10
III. From Kimberley to Oxford
21
IV. The Disciple of Ruskin
30
V. The Trekking Boers
39
VI. Rhodes in Parliament
48
VII. Who Shall Have Bechuanaland ?
57
VIII. The First Step North
70
IX. Rhodes Founds His Goldfields Company
75
X. Rhodes Amalgamates the Diamond Mines
80
XI. Lobengula, Son of Moselikatze
94
XII. The Concession-Hunters
101
XIII. Rhodes Takes His North
111
XIV. The Pioneers Occupy Mashonaland
120
XV. Rhodes Prime Minister of the Cape
126
XVI. Rhodes This Sort of Man and That
136
XVII. The Home Rhodes Built
147
XVIII. The Peak of Existence
155
XIX. England's Trade, England's Life, is the World! 170
XX. What Should Offer Itself But Matabeleland!
181
XXI. The End of Lobengula
191
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XXII. Ideas Need Money
204
XXIII. Rhodes and the Natives
219
XXIV. A Bill for Africa
233
XXV. "If Only One Had a Johannesburg"
241
XXVI. Kruger and the Uitlanders
250
XXVII. The Impatience of Jameson
264
XXVIII. The Raid
278
XXIX. The Fall of Rhodes
289
XXX. The Matabele Rising and His Redemption
298
XXXI. Rhodes Finds His Burial Place
315
XXXII. The Shareholders Turn at Last
319
XXXIII. The Rhodes Scholarships
325
XXXIV. Rhodes after the Raid
335
XXXV. Union! Union! Union!
339
XXXVI. "Colossus!"
343
XXXVII. "Bayete!"
348
Chronological Table
353
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C
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1
THE MATOPPOS AND BISHOP STORTFORD
I
Y
OU worship Rhodes?" George Meredith wrote to a lady. "I
would crown him, and then scourge him with his crown still on
him."
He wrote on April 22, 1902. The Boer War had a month to go.
Rhodes was dead a month. He died at the age of forty-eight, less
pleasantly than he had supposed people did die of heart disease. "At
any rate, Jameson, death from the heart is clean and quick. There's
nothing repulsive about it. It's a clean death, isn't it?"
But they say the heat at Cape Town that summer was a plague. Such
summers come to Cape Town. Then the blue hydrangeas climbing up
the mountain at Rhodes' command lie pallid in their tracks, the
whiteness of his house is a pain to the eyes, the Indian and Atlantic
Oceans meet and the wan air is not stirred by the gigantic embrace.
And in such a heat Rhodes, his clothes unbuttoned, his face swollen
and purple, his brow wet beneath his grey, tousled hair, wandered
from room to room of Groote Schuur, his house, trying to breathe. He
lay on a couch in the darkened drawing-room and could not breathe.
He crouched on a chair at his desk and could not breathe. He laboured
up to his bedroom and about it. He stood at the window that faced his
mountain. Below him a regiment of flowers, in big, hard, brilliant,
scentless masses, climbed the mountain slope by regular steps, and the
trees he
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had lopped of their branches that screened the mountain, striped with
black its purple and blue. But what would a man see of such things
who could not breathe?
He was carried to his cottage by the sea, and they made a hole in
the wall to let in the air, and laid ice between the ceiling and the iron
roof to cool it, and waved punkahs to stir it to life.
Every day for two weeks his coloured man got ready a cart and
horses to take him to his farm in the Drakenstein Mountains. But he
was not called upon to inspan. Rhodes decided, instead, to go to
England. It was cold now in England. Life seemed to be in that
coldness.
It was arranged that he should sail on March 26th; a cabin was
fitted with electric fans and oxygen tubes and refrigerating pipes. He
died on the day he should have left.
A man might think the worshippings, crownings, and scourg-ings of
his world an equal futility who had given his name to a country and
could not get a little air.
II
Rhodes was born in an English vicarage on July 5, 1853. He began
in the little greenness of a place called Bishop Stortford, and he ended
in the granite desolation of a land called after himself.
Rhodes rests in a grave of rock. Here he came to brood on mortality,
and here he chose to be laid. Forests, grotesquely piled boulders,
hurrying, agitated monkeys lead to it. The approach is alive. But on
the other side of this hill of granite, this glacier of black stone so
smooth it is hard to climb—on the other side of this smooth, shining,
black hill on which there lie carelessly, as if in an abandoned game of
Brobdingnags, stones round as sea pebbles and large as houses, a
world spreads itself of rough grey rocks spattered out on a desert
landscape like the final vomit of planets long since dead.
In a cave near Rhodes sits the skeleton of the Matabele who
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