Since we bid farewell to Cecil Rhodes in this chapter after having almost continuously touched his career from the moment we reached Capetown, let us make a final measure of his human side,—and he was intensely human—particularly with reference to Rhodesia, which is so inseparably associated with him. His passion for the country that bore his name exceeded his interest in any of his other undertakings. He liked the open life of the veldt where he travelled in a sort of gypsy wagon and camped for the night wherever the mood dictated. It enabled him to gratify his fondness for riding and shooting.

He was always accompanied by a remarkable servant named Tony, a half-breed in whom the Portuguese strain predominated. Tony bought his master's clothes, paid his bills, and was a court of last resort "below stairs." Rhodes declared that his man could produce a satisfactory meal almost out of thin air.

Rhodes and Tony were inseparable. Upon one occasion Tony accompanied him when he was commanded by Queen Victoria to lodge at Sandringham. While there Rhodes asked Tony what time he could get breakfast, whereupon the servant replied:

"Royalty does not breakfast, sir, but you can have it in the dining-room at half past nine." Tony seemed to know everything.

Throughout Rhodesia I found many of Rhodes' old associates who affectionately referred to him as "The Old Man." I was able to collect what seemed to be some new Rhodes stories. A few have already been related. Here is another which shows his quickness in capitalizing a situation.

In the days immediately following the first Matabele war Rhodes had more trouble with concession-hunters than with the savages, the Boers, or the Portuguese. Nearly every free-lance in the territory produced some fake document to which Lobengula's alleged mark was affixed and offered it to Rhodes at an excessive price.

One of these gentry framed a plan by which one of the many sons of Lobengula was to return to Matabeleland, claim his royal rights, and create trouble generally. The whole idea was to start an uprising and derange the machinery of the British South Africa Company. The name of the son was N'jube and at the time the plan was devised he held a place as messenger in the diamond fields at Kimberley. By the system of intelligence that he maintained, Rhodes learned of the frame-up, the whereabouts of the boy, and furthermore, that he was in love with a Fingo girl. These Fingoes were a sort of bastard slave people. Marriage into the tribe was a despised thing, and by a native of royal blood, meant the abrogation of all his claims to the succession.

Rhodes sent for N'jube and asked him if he wanted to marry the Fingo girl. When he replied that he did, the great man said: "Go down to the DeBeers office, get £50 and marry the girl. I will then give you a job for life and build you a house."

N'jube took the hint and the money and married the girl. Rhodes now sent the following telegram to the conspirator at Bulawayo:

"Your friend N'jube was divided between love and empire, but he has decided to marry the Fingo girl. It is better that he should settle down in Kimberley and be occupied in creating a family than to plot at Bulawayo to stab you in the stomach."

This ended the conspiracy, and N'jube lived happily and peacefully ever afterwards.

Rhodes was an incorrigible imperialist as this story shows. Upon one occasion at Bulawayo he was discussing the Carnegie Library idea with his friend and associate, Sir Abe Bailey, a leading financial and political figure in the Cape Colony.

"What would you do if you had Carnegie's money?" asked Bailey.

"I wouldn't waste it on libraries," he replied. "I would seize a South American Republic and annex it to the United States."

Rhodes had great admiration for America. He once said to Bailey: "The greatest thing in the world would be the union of the English-speaking people. I wouldn't mind if Washington were the capital." He believed implicitly in the invincibility of the Anglo-Saxon race, and he gave his life and his fortune to advance the British part of it.

For the last I have reserved the experience that will always rank first in my remembrance of Rhodesia. It was my visit to the grave of Rhodes. Most people who go to Rhodesia make this pilgrimage, for in the well-known tourist language of Mr. Cook, like Victoria Falls, it is "one of the things to see." I was animated by a different motive. I had often read about it and I longed to view the spot that so eloquently symbolized the vision and the imagination of the man I admired.

The grave is about twenty-eight miles from Bulawayo, in the heart of the Matopo Hills. You follow the road along which the body was carried nineteen years ago. You see the native hut where Rhodes often lived and in which the remains rested for the night on the final journey. You pass from the green low-lands to the bare frontiers of the rocky domain where the Matabeles fled after the second war and where the Father of Rhodesia held his historic parleys with them.

Soon the way becomes so difficult that you must leave the motor and continue on foot. The Matopos are a wild and desolate range. It is not until you are well beyond the granite outposts that there bursts upon you an immense open area,—a sort of amphitheatre in which the Druids might have held their weird ritual. Directly ahead you see a battlement of boulders projected by some immemorial upheaval. Intrenched between them is the spot where Rhodes rests and which is marked by a brass plate bearing the words: "Here Lie the Remains of Cecil John Rhodes." In his will he directed that the site be chosen and even wrote the simple inscription for the cover.

When you stand on this eminence and look out on the grim, brooding landscape, you not only realize why Rhodes called it "The View of the World," but you also understand why he elected to sleep here. The loneliness and grandeur of the environment, with its absence of any sign of human life and habitation, convey that sense of aloofness which, in a man like Rhodes, is the inevitable penalty that true greatness exacts. The ages seem to be keeping vigil with his spirit.

For eighteen years Rhodes slept here in solitary state. In 1920 the remains of Dr. Jameson were placed in a grave hewn out of the rock and located about one hundred feet from the spot where his old friend rests. It is peculiarly fitting that these two men who played such heroic part in the rise of Rhodesia should repose within a stone's throw of each other.

During these last years I have seen some of the great things. They included the British Grand Fleet in battle array, Russia at the daybreak of democracy, the long travail of Verdun and the Somme, the first American flag on the battlefields of France, Armistice Day amid the tragedy of war, and all the rest of the panorama that those momentous days disclosed. But nothing perhaps was more moving than the silence and majesty that invested the grave of Cecil Rhodes. Instinctively there came to my mind the lines about him that Kipling wrote in "The Burial":

It is his will that he look forth
Across the world he won—
The granite of the ancient North—
Great spaces washed with sun.

When I reached the bottom of the long incline on my way out I looked back. The sun was setting and those sentinel boulders bulked in the dying light. They seemed to incarnate something of the might and power of the personality that shaped Rhodesia, and made of it an annex of Empire.