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 educated 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.