Rough diamond, p.22
Rough Diamond, page 22
“Well,” he said slowly, “you’d become a director of the new company, of course.”
Barney smiled and shook his head.
“I’ll be frank and tell you I don’t have any great objections to the articles as you’ve outlined them,” he said, “as long as they don’t eat up the profits, and I believe they can be written in such a manner as to prevent this. But I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Rhodes. I wasn’t happy to lose control of Kimberley, but I’m in a strong bargaining position now, and you know it and I know it and you know I know it. I’d be a fool not to take advantage of it. Just being a director of a company means nothing. Regardless of the number of shares I hold, your smart friends could—and would—have me out on the street in no time. I’d want to be a life governor with no problem of reelection.”
Rhodes was looking at him, his hooded eyes steady on Barney’s face.
“I’m sure that would be no problem, Mr. Barnato. What else?”
“Bamato Brothers would be given half the trade in the selling of the company’s stones.”
There was a long silence. Rhodes began to confer with Alfred Beit in whispers at the table and then decided this was not private enough. The two men repaired to the far side of the room and conversed with their faces almost next to each other. Barney took advantage of the break to finish his drink and refill his glass. He glanced at his nephew at his side; Solly’s eyes were intent upon Rhodes across the room. Solly had been listening to the discussion with relief that Barney had not made a fool of himself, and a fool—by association—of Solly, before a man as educated, as refined, as—well, as all-around admirable as Cecil Rhodes. Solly just hoped the air of good will maintained itself to the end of the meeting. In fact, now that Solly had a chance to think about it, maybe it was just as well that Barney had lost control of Kimberley Mines. Maybe it was even better for himself, Solly Loeb. Now they—he—would be associated with Cecil John Rhodes, and who would ask for better than that? Barney should really thank him for having sold his miserable five thousand shares—shares that should have been many more had Barney not been so tightfisted, so unrewarding for work faithfully and well done—to the pasty-faced representative of De Beers, rather than having blamed him. But that’s the way the world was—unappreciative! Or at least that’s the way his uncle was; Solly was sure that Cecil Rhodes would never be like that—
His thoughts were interrupted; Rhodes and Beit had finished their conference and had returned to the table, still murmuring between them. Rhodes nodded his head at some last word of Beit’s and then turned to Barney.
“We would be in agreement that one half the trade in the sale of the stones be carried on by Barnato Brothers in London,” he said, “on one condition. Prices will be set by the company, not by Barnato Brothers, and Barnato Brothers must abide by those prices. Is that agreed?”
Barney nodded. “I’ll agree to that.”
“Is there anything else?”
Barney smiled. “Just one thing.” For a moment his old, always latent resentment at Rhodes’ past treatment of him seemed to gleam in his spectacled eyes; now, when people insulted Jews, they insulted his beloved Fay as well. As if he could feel the look trying to escape his eyes, he transferred his glance to his whiskey glass, swirling the glass idly as he searched for and found the words he wanted. Then he looked up innocently. “It isn’t important,” he said. His tone indicated it might very well be extremely important, might even disrupt the entire negotiations. “But I want to become a member of the Kimberley Club.”
Rhodes did not even hesitate. “I was going to suggest it,” he said at once. The two men looked each other in the eye a moment, and then both smiled with a bit of embarrassment. “I wasn’t going to suggest anything of the sort,” Rhodes confessed ruefully, “but I obviously will, now.”
“You mean, you have no choice?”
“I mean, I wasn’t going to, before. But now I think I want to,” Rhodes said, and held his hand across the table.
Barney took the offered hand, feeling the softness of it, feeling almost sorry for a man whose hand was that soft while at the same time being a man as hard, as ruthless, as Cecil John Rhodes. As well as being a man as dedicated to an ideal as Cecil Rhodes.
“We’ll get along,” Barney said, meaning it. “You have your dreams, and I have mine. You want the world, and I suppose if we can we must give it to you. All I want is money and peace.”
“And I suppose, if we can, we must give you those,” Rhodes said. “Is there anything else?”
Barney smiled. “Yes, one very important feature. Let us now begin to discuss the matter of money. Kimberley Mines will have to be liquidated before any new company can be formed. I wish to be assigned twenty-six per cent of the new shares; these I will pay for at the established rate. But the shares held by myself and my family, in Kimberley Mines, as well as any shares you failed to pick up in the raid from other shareholders, will have to be purchased by the new company. Let us now begin to discuss the price you will have to pay for those shares. I realize the prices you offered today are not a realistic expectation, so may I suggest a figure of sixty pounds per share?”
Rhodes smiled. “Before the raid began, the price at the closing of the Exchange on Friday last, was a bit under fifty pounds. May I suggest that even at that price, the stock was higher than the output of the Kimberley Mines warranted. May I therefore suggest a price per share of forty-five pounds?”
“Ah!” Barney said, enjoying himself, “but that was based on prices for diamonds that you yourself said were too low. Considering that you will now be able to raise those prices considerably, the output of the Kimberley Mine will be worth far more than at present. Therefore I believe the price of sixty pounds to be eminently fair …”
Everyone filled his whiskey glass and prepared for the longest and hardest part of the evening’s negotiations.
Fay stared at Barney, appalled. “You lost the company? When?”
The two were in bed after the almost all-night session Barney had spent with Rhodes; Fay had known he was tied up in a business meeting, but had not been told as of that moment what that meeting had involved. Barney, despite the hour, was not in the least sleepy; he was still too exhilarated by the bargaining session and the deal he had finally consummated.
“Today,” he said equably.
“You lost the company in one day? In one day? How?”
Barney smiled. He was slowly becoming accustomed to the fact that he would not have to go into the office at any particular hour anymore; that Solly Loeb had only to transfer the records and the registry books to the De Beers people and he, too, would be free. The agreement the night before had promised continued employment to all of the Kimberley staff of diggers and sorters who wished to stay, with the exception of Barney and Solly. He looked at Fay affectionately.
“You’re beginning to sound like my mother. How Jewish can you get in a few years?” He stopped smiling, reaching out to place a hand on one of Fay’s full breasts, kneading it gently as he spoke. “Rhodes made a raid on our company stock today—or yesterday, I suppose you’d call it. Solly was sure I still retained control without his five thousand shares, so he sold them on Sunday night. I thought Solly wouldn’t even know about the raid, since he would be at the yard, so I sold the shares I had above control for an absurdly high price as soon as I heard of it. The result: Rhodes got control. It’s that simple.”
Fay frowned, her mind divided between the fact that Kimberley Mines was no longer theirs and the languorous feeling that was beginning to suffuse her limbs as Barney kneaded her nipple.
“But what does it mean?”
“It means,” Barney said, feeling the nipple beginning to get hard under his manipulation, “that De Beers will issue a check to cover the shares he didn’t pick up in the raid—ninety-seven thousand five hundred shares. At fifty-five pounds a share.”
Fay gasped. “That’s an awful lot of money!”
Barney nodded. “Yes, it’s a lot of money. It’ll be the largest transaction in history, I think. Over five and a third million pounds. And most of it ours.”
Fay tried to comprehend the size of a sum that great. “But what will you do?”
Barney moved closer to her, moving his hand from her breast to run it down her belly, raising her nightgown, touching her, feeling himself getting more and more excited, as if the excitement of the bargaining session was transferring itself somehow to their conjugal bed. “Be with you,” he murmured, his mind far from what he was saying. “Maybe go to England and meet the family. Take it easy. When we get back, maybe look into this talk of gold in the Transvaal…”
Fay’s mind came back from far away to realize what they were doing. “Barney!” she said, catching her breath. “Wait! I’m not prepared…”
“You’re as prepared as you need be,” he said. “Tonight we’re going to make those children you’ve always wanted.”
“Oh, Barney!” she said, and moved to him, as happy as she was excited.
BOOK II: Gold!
JOHANNESBURG
PROLOGUE
February 1887
There are other blink klippies, other shining stones, besides diamonds. The reflection of light from a gold nugget caught in a stream, the glint of gold peeping from a band of quartz, the glimmer of a gold strain peering from a stratum of rock…
Men have searched for gold throughout recorded history and before, and they have searched for it in every corner of the earth. The legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece was supposedly based on a true expedition that took place a millennium and more before the birth of Christ, to find gold washed down from the rivers of what is now Armenia, gold particles that were caught from the rushing waters by the fleece of skinned sheep. Gold brought the Conquistadores to Mexico and Central and South America; it brought the covered wagons to California and the dogsleds to Alaska. Gold has been sought and found in almost every country, nor was South Africa an exception.
At a place called Pilgrim’s Rest, in the Boer Republic of the Transvaal, there was a flurry of mining for gold as far back as the early eighteen-seventies, and Pilgrim’s Rest enjoyed a brief moment in the sun, only to disappear as a town when the single seam of gold-bearing rock ran out. A decade later, some distance farther to the east in the De Kaap Valley but still in the Transvaal, gold was discovered in the small town of Barberton. Once again men poured in with their picks and shovels; hotels were quickly constructed, brothels and bars hastily established, claims offices sprang up, homesite speculation was rife—until the gold at Barberton also ran out and the town soon became a deserted monument to the evanescent character of that most elusive but enticing of metals.
Then, early in the year 1886, an itinerant down-at-the-heels miner named George Harrison came wandering up from Kimberley with his ox wagon and supplies, to a part of the Transvaal known as the Witwatersrand, or White Water Ridge, about thirty miles south of Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal Republic. Harrison was admittedly a failure, partly—as he would have put it—because of bad luck, but largely, it seemed, because he was a nomad at heart. He liked to move on, nor could success in any mining venture keep him in one place. He had found diamonds in Kimberley early in the game, not many but enough to have kept a less restless digger at work, but he had forgone his claim in the Dutoitspan hole to visit Pilgrim’s Rest. He had returned to Kimberley to abandon a claim in the Bultfontein mine and try his luck with gold once again at Barberton, only to return for the third time to Kimberley when the bonanza was over. This time his departure from Kimberley was to bring him to the Witwatersrand, or the Rand, as it became more familiarly known. Here, on the farm of the widow Oosthuizen, Harrison found an outcropping that showed gold, and which eventually would have made him a very rich man, but the wanderlust called again and he sold his claim for ten pounds to a couple of brothers named Struben, who had been prospecting in the area without luck. Not only were the Struben brothers content to remain and work the rich claim, but they were not averse to advertising the fact that gold existed on the Rand, and apparently in large quantities. Whatever happened to George Harrison remains a mystery, but he never returned to the goldfield he had accidentally discovered, nor was he ever seen again in Kimberley.
The propaganda of the Strubens bore rapid fruit, for had they mentioned the presence of gold on the Rand for the purpose of gaining companionship they were eminently successful. Within a few months over three thousand miners were digging away at outcroppings they could easily expose with a little pick-and-shovel work on the rolling hillsides, shalelike strata that could easily be crushed with relatively simple equipment and washed in crude rockers to extract the retained gold. And the three thousand diggers became ten, and the ten thousand diggers became thirty, and they spread themselves across the Reef—not the barren reef of the diamond mines, the edge that was nonproductive and that could and often did fall in on the diggers below and kill them—but the Reef! It was the main lode, the center of the seam, the backbone of the goldfields, the spine that ran for thirty miles from east to west and was several miles wide, and nobody even dared to dream how deep it might be. A mountain beneath the surface, and all of it gold! George Harrison had stumbled on the major gold deposit of the world.
And in a short time the place resembled Kimberley as Kimberley had been fifteen or eighteen years before, a city without ever having been a town or even a village, a city mainly of tents or corrugated iron shanties, a scattering of miserable dwellings over miles of barren soil with neither a tree nor a bush to break the monotony; with the same sanitation pits to be covered when full, if time were found from the endless digging, from the constant search for wealth; with the seemingly same dogs fighting over the offal of slaughtered oxen or cattle, with all the sickening odors and miasma of the earlier Kimberley, and with none of the amenities of decent life that Kimberley had managed to carve out for itself from its diamonds. And in December of 1886 they named the place Johannesburg in honor of a man all of the diggers hated profoundly, the President of the Republic of the Transvaal, Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger.
But while the Reef was demonstrably full of gold, the easily worked outcroppings ran out, and the crude equipment of the individual digger no longer served to bring the metal to the surface and drag it from the rock in which it was imbedded so tenaciously. And so slowly the miners were forced to admit failure; they packed their gear and moved on; and then some of the hotels began to close, and a good portion of the brothels were without custom and soon without girls, and the least secure bar owners nailed boards across the door and packed their kegs and their bottles into wagons and left. For not only were the easily worked outcroppings disappearing, but the gold brought up from the depths was in hard rock, and even when this rock was finally crushed, only a small fraction of the gold it contained could be recovered. And it appeared that, like Pilgrim’s Rest and Barberton, the town of Johannesburg was doomed to disappear into the mists of mining history; and everyone agreed that it was a bloomin’ pity, because the gold was actually there. Except nobody knew how to get it out.
And in this situation, with the gold-mining industry of Johannesburg in a profound depression, and with no solution in sight that anyone could see, Barney Barnato arrived back from England. He had been away almost five years and while Fay had enjoyed the refinements of England, and the meeting of Barney’s family, the miscarriage she had suffered there, losing what both Barney and Fay had hoped would be their first child, had put a pall over the trip that the Grand Tour of the continent had failed to remove. Now both were pleased to be back in South Africa and on their way back to Kimberley. Fay was once again pregnant, and Barney was sure that here at home, among friends and in the country they both loved, there would be no further trouble in the childbearing business.
And Barney was also sure that it was time to be getting back to work. They were saying that the gold business was finished up in Johannesburg, that people were selling out, and that the city would soon die as Pilgrim’s Rest and Barberton had died. It was precisely the type of challenge that Barney Barnato enjoyed; this business of gold, apparently, needed looking into …
9
March 1892
The driver of the new and expensive trap that Barney had acquired was at the stable harnessing the four horses that would draw the trap on the first stage of the long and tiresome five-day trip to Johannesburg; the outriders who had been selected to accompany the trip were in the corral behind the stable selecting the horses that would be taken along as replacements. The railway from Cape Town to Kimberley had been finished and in operation for over seven years, but the stubborn Paul Kruger refused permission for the line to be extended into Transvaal territory. It would, he said, bring in more Uitlanders and further despoil what had been a moral and religious land before the hated foreigners had brought in their brothels and their whores and their gaming and their greed and all the rest of their verdoem vices. It was bad enough that some Uitlanders were already there, but he had no intention of encouraging their sins by allowing a railway to be built that would bring in thousands more. Let them travel by carriage or oxcart over the rough roads and trails; it might even make them think twice before coming to Johannesburg in the first place.
Barney stopped by the Paris Hotel to see that the trap was supplied with a wicker basket well filled with whiskey and sandwiches for at least the first part of the journey. He and Fay no longer lived at the hotel; during their absence in Europe a large home had been built to Barney’s specifications as a surprise gift to Fay upon their return, but the Paris Hotel still drew him to it for entertainment, nor had he ever been tempted to sell it. It was a visible sign to him of where he had come from, of the poverty with which he had arrived in Kimberley, and he never wished to forget either those conditions or those days. Besides, it was here he had bedded his beloved Fay for the first time, and he knew he would never forget the early days of their marriage, enjoyed in this very building.
