The Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes/Part 3
PART III.
THE CLOSING SCENE.
Mr. Rhodes died at Muizenberg, a small cottage on the sea-coast near Cape Town, on March 26, 1902. The result of the post mortem examination showed that with the exception of the aneurism of the heart, which caused an immense distension of that organ, he was in a perfectly healthy state. The heart trouble had been with him from his youth. When he attained manhood it abated somewhat, but after his fortieth year it returned, and gradually increased until his death, which did not come to his release until after some weeks of very agonising suffering. He was conscious to the very last, and attempted to transact business within a week of his decease. He was attended constantly by his old and faithful friend, Dr. Jameson, whose name was the last articulate word which escaped from his lips.
All the deep-seated tenderness of his nature, which led Bramwell Booth to describe him as having a great human heart hungering for love, found expression in these last days whenever he spoke or thought of Dr. Jameson. The affection which Mr. Rhodes entertained for the Doctor dated far back in the early days when they were at Kimberley together, and never varied through all the vicissitudes of his eventful career. At one time, when Dr. Jameson was ill and in prison, bearing the punishment for an enterprise the precipitation of which was due to incentives from a much higher than any African quarter, he was troubled by the maddening fear that Mr. Rhodes had not forgiven him for the upsetting of his apple-cart. But Mr. Rhodes was not a man who wore his heart upon his sleeve. He schooled himself to repress manifestations of affection, but an incident for which Lord Grey is my authority shows how unfounded were Dr. Jameson’s misgivings. If Mr. Rhodes loved anything in the world, he loved his house, and Groote Schuur was the nest which he had built for himself in the shadow of Table Mountain, which he had filled with all manner of historic and literary treasures. When the year 1896—the year of the ill-fated Raid—was drawing to a close, Lord Grey, then Administrator of Rhodesia, received a telegram early in the morning to the effect that Groote Schuur had been burnt down with most of its contents. Knowing how intensely Mr. Rhodes was attached to his home, Lord Grey shrank from breaking the news to him until they were alone. He feared that Mr. Rhodes might lose his self-control. They rode out together that morning, and not until they were far out in the country did Lord Grey think of telling the evil tidings which arrived that morning. As they rode together Mr. Rhodes began talking of the misfortunes of the twelve months then drawing to a close. Nothing but ill-luck had attended him for the whole course; he did not think that his luck could mend, and could only hope that the new year would dawn without any further disaster. Lord Grey said to him gently—
“Well, Mr. Rhodes, I am very sorry, but I am afraid I must give you a rather ugly knock.”
Mr. Rhodes reined up his horse, and turning to his companion he exclaimed, his face livid, white and drawn with an agony of dread—
The Cottage at Muizenberg where Mr. Rhodes died.
(By permission of the proprietors of “South Africa.”)
“Good heavens! Out with it, man! What has happened?”
“Well,” said Lord Grey, “I am sorry to tell you that Groote Schuur was burnt down last night.”
The tense look of anguish disappeared from Rhodes’s face. He heaved a great sigh, and exclaimed with inexpressible relief—
“Oh, thank God, thank God! I thought you were going to tell me that Dr. Jim was dead. The house is burnt down—well, what does that matter? We can always rebuild the house, but if Dr. Jim had died I should never have got over it.”
Only those who knew what Groote Schuur was to Mr. Rhodes can understand the depth and fervour of a human attachment which enabled him to bear the loss of his house not merely with equanimity but absolute gratitude.
It is a very striking illustration of the practical value of one of Mr. Rhodes’s favourite sayings:—
“Do the comparative. Always do the comparative.”
By this he meant, whenever you are overtaken by a misfortune or plunged into dire tribulation, you can find consolation by reflecting how much worse things might have been, or how much greater had been the misery suffered by others. I well remember Mr. Rhodes telling me how he had frequently supported himself in the midst of the most trying crisis of his career, when everything seemed to be lost. He used to say—
“When I was inclined to take too tragic a view of the consequences of apparently imminent disaster, I used to reflect what the old Roman Emperors must have felt when (as often happened) their legions were scattered, and they fled from a stricken field, knowing that they had lost the empire of the world. To such men at such times it must have seemed as if their world was going to pieces around them. But after all,” he said, “the sun rose next day, the river flowed between its banks, and the world went on very much the same despite it all. And, thinking of this, I used to go to bed and sleep like a child.”
A still more remarkable instance of the deliberate way in which he practised the maxim was also told me. When Mr. Rhodes came home after the Raid he fully expected to be sent to prison, and amused himself during the voyage by drawing up a scheme of reading which he hoped to carry out during the seclusion of the gaol; but it was not until after his death that I heard from Lord Grey how he proposed to nerve himself for the ordeal of imprisonment.
“Do the comparative!” Mr. Rhodes said to Lord Grey one day when they were together in Rhodesia. “Always do the comparative! You will find it a great comfort. For instance, if I had been sent to gaol after the Raid, I had fully made up my mind what I would do. I should have gone down to the Tower before I was locked up; I should have gone to the cell in which poor old Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned before he was led out to be beheaded; I should have gone to the cell and thought of all that Raleigh suffered in the long years in which he lay there. And then, afterwards, when I was in my comfortable cell in Holloway Gaol, I should have consoled myself every day by thinking, ‘After all, you are not so badly off as poor Sir Walter Raleigh in that cell of his in the Tower.’”
On another occasion, when he had been made wretched by the attacks made upon him in the Cape Parliament for his share in the Raid, when 
The Lying-in-State.
The Procession Passing the Memorial Column, Bulawayo.
THE FUNERAL OF MR. RHODES.
“Do you know, Grey, I have just been thinking that you have never been sufficiently grateful for having been born an Englishman. Just think for a moment,” he went on, “what it is to have been born an Englishman in England. Think how many millions of men there are in this world to-day who have been born Chinese or Hindus or Kaffirs; but you were not born any of these, you were born an Englishman. And that is not all. You are just over forty (which was about Rhodes’s own age at that time), and you have a clean, healthy body. Now think of the odds there are against anyone having those three things—to be born an Englishman, to be over forty, and to have a clean, healthy body. Why, the chances are enormous against it, and yet you have all three. What enormous chances there are against you having drawn all these prizes in the lottery of life, and yet you never think of them.”
“I could have hugged the poor old chap,” said Lord Grey, “for it was so evident that he had been doing the comparative by way of consoling himself, and reflecting that in the midst of all his misfortunes there were some things which no one could take away from him; and then he would burst into my room to pour out his soul to me in that fashion.”
Mr. Rhodes was very much given to musing, and even talking to himself upon the most serious subjects. Mr. Rudd told me that in Mr. Rhodes’s early days nothing delighted him more than, when the day’s work was done, to get a friend or two into his tent and discuss questions of philosophy and theology. Sir Charles Warren has told us how, when Rhodes was quite a young man, he and Warren had a long debate over the Thirty-nine Articles, and differed hopelessly upon the doctrine of predestination. His favourite author was said to have been Gibbon, but what served him as a pocket-Bible was the writings of Marcus Aurelius. As Gordon never went anywhere without his little pocket edition of Thomas à Kempis, so Rhodes never left behind him his pocket edition of Marcus Aurelius. His copy was dog-eared and scored with pencil marks, showing how constantly he had used it. But he never quite attained to the serene philosophy of the Imperial philosopher. He shrank from death, not so much from the fear of anything after death, but because it was the arrest of activity, the cessation of the strenuous life which he had always lived. He was ever a doer. Once an acquaintance had remarked to him, when he returned from London to South Africa—
“I suppose you found London Society very lively?”
To whom Mr. Rhodes replied—
“When I have a big thing on hand I don’t dine out. I do that, and nothing else.”
It was this feeling which led him to cling so passionately to life. From the day when his heart suddenly gave way, and he fell from his horse and shattered his shoulder, he felt that he lived under the sword of Damocles, and at any moment the hair which suspended it might break and all would be over. It was this overmastering passion of energetic vitality which prompted his despairing cry when he lay on his death-bed—“So much to do, so little done!”
One of the passages which he marked in the book which lay ever near his hand contained the reflections which Marcus Aurelius addressed to those who dreaded the approach of death:—
You have been a citizen of the great world-city. Five years or fifty, what matters it? To every man his due as law allots. Why then protest? No tyrant gives you your dismissal, no unjust judge, but nature, who gave you the admission. It is like the prætor discharging some player whom he has engaged—“But the five acts are not complete; I have played but three.” Good: life’s drama, look you, is complete in three. The completeness is in his hands who first authorised your composition, and now your dissolution. Neither was your work. Serenely take your leave; serene as he who gives you the discharge.”
After the siege of Kimberley, in 1900, Mr. Rhodes told me he thought he had fourteen years more to live; and that time seemed to him far too short to accomplish all that he had in his mind to do. Few of his friends ventured to anticipate for him so long a lease of life. The result proved that their forebodings were only too well justified. Instead of fourteen years, he lived barely two.
There is, however, something consoling in the heroism with which he risked and lost his life at the end. It is probable that if he had not returned to South Africa in the last year of his life he might have lived for several years. His medical advisers and his most intimate friends were aghast when he announced his determination to return to South Africa to give evidence in the case of Princess Radziwill.
Mr. Rhodes, although unmarried, was singularly free from any scandal about women. As might be imagined, being a millionaire, a bachelor, and a man of charming personality, he was abso
Excavating Mr. Rhodes's Tomb on the Matoppos.
“You are sending him to his death,” said Dr. Jameson, as he prepared to accompany his friend on the last voyage to the Cape. The passage was exceptionally rough. Mr. Rhodes was once thrown out of his berth on to the floor of his cabin. When he arrived in South Africa it was with the mark of death upon him. His evidence had to be taken at Groote Schuur; but he never showed any sign of regret that he had responded to the summons of the Courts. It was his duty, and he did it, and did it, as the result proved, at the cost of his life.
So it came to pass that he who had never harmed a woman in his life met his death in clearing his name from the aspersions of a woman whom, out of sheer good-heartedness, he had befriended in time of need.
Despite the difficulty of breathing caused by the pressure upon his lungs and the agonising pain from which he suffered, his mind was vigorous and his interest in all questions relating to South Africa unabated to the last. Nothing but his passionate will to live kept him alive. When at last he was compelled to admit that his end was approaching, he still clung to the hope that his life might be prolonged so as to enable him once more to return to England before he died. He wished to come home. A cabin was taken for him on the steamer, but when the hour came it was impossible to remove him from the room in which, propped up with pillows, he sat awaiting the end. Messages from the King and Queen and from friends all over the world were cabled to the sick-room at Muizenberg, and those loving messages of sympathy and affection helped to console him in the dark hours of anguish.
During the whole of these terrible weeks there was only one occasion on which he spoke on those subjects which in the heyday of his youth were constantly present to his mind. On one occasion, after a horrible paroxysm of pain had convulsed him with agony, he was heard, when he regained his breath and the spasm had passed, to be holding a strange colloquy with his Maker. The dying man was talking to God, and not merely talking to God, but himself assuming both parts of the dialogue. The attendant in the sick chamber instinctively recalled those chapters in the book of Job in which Job and his friends discussed together the apparent injustice of the Governor of the world. It was strange to hear Mr. Rhodes stating first his case against the Almighty, and then in reply stating what he considered his Maker’s case against himself. But so the argument went on.
“What have I done,” he asked, “to be tortured thus? If I must go hence, why should I be subjected to this insufferable pain?”
And then he answered his own question, going over his own shortcomings and his own offences, to which he again in his own person replied; and so the strange and awful colloquy went on, until at last the muttering ceased, and there was silence once more.
Beyond this there is no record of what he thought or what he felt when he fared forth to make that pilgrimage which awaits us all through the valley of the shadow of death. He had far too intense vitality ever to tolerate the idea of extinction.
“I’m not an atheist,” he once said to me impatiently; “not at all. But I don’t believe in the idea about going to heaven and twanging a harp all day. No. I wish I did sometimes; but I don’t. That kind of æsthetical idea pleases you perhaps; it does not please me. But I’m not an atheist.”
“I find I am human,” he wrote on one occasion, “but should like to live after my death.”
And in his conversation he frequently referred to his returning to the earth to see how his ideas were prospering, and what was being done with the fortune which he had dedicated to the service of posterity. Some of his talk upon the subject of the after-life was very quaint, and almost child-like in its simplicity. His ideas, so far as he expressed them to me, always assumed that he would be able to recognise and converse with those who had gone before, and that both he and they would have the keenest interest in the affairs of this planet. This planet, in some of his moods, seemed too small a sphere for his exhaustless energy.
“The world,” he said to me on one occasion, “is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered, and colonised. To think of these stars,” he said, “that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”
Since Alexander died at Babylon, sighing for fresh worlds to conquer, has there ever been such a cry from the heart of mortal man?
When the end was imminent, his brother was brought to the bedside. He recognised him, and clasped his hand. Then releasing his grasp, the dying man stretched his feeble hand to the Doctor, and murmuring “Jameson!” the greatest of Africanders was dead.
After death his features regained that classic severity of outline which was so marked in the days before they had been disfigured by the malady to which he succumbed. After lying in state at Groote Schuur, the funeral service was held in the Cathedral at Cape Town, and then, in accordance with the provisions of his will, his remains were taken northward to the Matoppos, where, near the great African chief Umsilikatse, he was laid to rest in the mountain-top which he had named “The View of the World.” Seldom has there been a more imposing and yet more simple procession to the tomb. For 
The Scene at the Burial of Mr. Rhodes.
The coffin is being lowered into the tomb, and the picture shows the slab, weighing three tons, which covers the coffin.