The covenant - James A. Michener [396]
Frank noticed that up to the time of his formal employment, Rhodes addressed him with a curt 'Saltwood,' but once he accepted his assignment he became 'Frank,' and so he would remain, perpetually young, perpetually smiling. Like all the young gentlemen, he was paid well.
The second interesting bit involved Mr. Rhodes' chief rival in diamonds, an extraordinary chap who never stopped amazing the young gentlemen and the public at large. He was as different from Mr. Rhodes as a man could be, but was equally ruthless in hounding a business opportunity, and he alone stood between Rhodes and true riches.
Barnett Isaacs was a year older than Rhodes, a Jew born in one of the worst slums of London; in the midst of an undistinguished career as a frowzy vaudeville comedian and tap-dancer, he decided in a stroke of pure genius to make his fortune in the mines of South Africa. With only his nerve and some boxes of cheap cigars purchased near the docks at Cape Town, he talked his way north to Kimberley, peddled his 'six-penny-satisfiers,' and earned a pitiful living entertaining the miners with deplorable jokes, ridiculous acrobatics, and whatever else came to his mind when he stood before them in one cheap hall or another.
But Barnett Isaacs was an inspired listener, and while he clowned he picked up choice bits of negotiable information: who was going broke, who wanted to return to London, who had stolen whose claim. And bit by bit he pulled this information together, acquiring a horse and cart and prowling the diggings as a kopje-walloper, a kind of money-minded vulture looking to snap up the discarded pickings off other men's sorting tables. He soon got his hands on valuable rights, and one day Kimberley woke to find that Isaacs was one of the richest men on the diamond fields.
He thereupon changed his name to Barney Barnato, bought himself several suits of slick clothes, and indulged in a fancy which had tantalized many an earlier vaudevillian.
At a considerable personal cost, he assembled a moderately good theatrical company, purchased himself a set of Shakespearean costumes, and offered South Africa its first performance of Othello, with himself in the title role. Frank arrived at the mines too late to see the opening performance, but when all the young gentlemen purchased tickets to a subsequent exhibition, he went along to a steaming tin-roofed shed crowded with a noisy audience that cheered madly when 'Our Barney' strode onstage. His Desdemona, unfortunately, was six inches taller than he and appeared to be wrestling with him whenever they embraced; also, his makeup was so black and so thick that when she touched him her skin came away smeared while his showed white empty spaces.
'But he's rather good!' Frank whispered to the men beside him.
'Wait till the afterpiece!'
'What happens?'
'You won't believe it.'
When the final curtain fell, with Desdemona dead and pretty well besmudged, the young actor who played Cassio came forward to announce that in response to unusual demand, Mr. Barnato, who had already excelled in Othello, would now give his classic rendition of Hamlet's soliloquy, at which the crowd began to roar and whistle. After a few minutes Mr. Barnato, his face wiped clean, appeared in a whole new costume. 'Watch this!' the young gentlemen whispered.
While Frank gaped, Mr. Barnato nimbly gave a flip-flop and ended standing on his head. Maintaining perfect balance for a surprisingly long time, he began to recite the soliloquy, but as he came to the better lines, he gave wild gestures with his hands, stabbing at 'bare bodkin' and waving madly at 'fly to others that we know not of.' At the concluding words 'and lose the name of action' he gave an amazing flip and landed back on his feet. The applause was shattering, for as Mr. Rhodes admitted acidly when his young men returned, 'The remarkable thing is not that he can do it, but that whilst on his head he can speak so powerfully and deliver such convincing gestures. I've never seen a better Hamlet.'
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