mission and the almost angelic qualities of the Liberal
candidate. Whereupon, this old man became suddenly
transfigured in the sunlight into a devil of wrath.
It was some time before I could understand a word he
said, but the one word that kept on recurring was
the word “Kruger,” and it was invariably
accompanied with a volley of violent terms. Was
I for old Kruger, was I? Did I come to him and
want him to help old Kruger? I ought to be ashamed,
I was . . . and here he became once more obscure.
The one thing that he made quite clear was that he
wouldn’t do anything for Kruger.
“But you are Kruger,” burst from
my lips, in a natural explosion of reasonableness.
“You are Kruger, aren’t you?”
After this innocent CRI decoeur of mine,
I thought at first there would be a fight, and I remembered
with regret that the President in early life had had
a hobby of killing lions. But really I began
to think that I had been mistaken, and that it was
not the President after all. There was a confounding
sincerity in the anger with which he declared that
he was Farmer Bowles, and everybody knowed it.
I appeased him eventually and parted from him at
the door of his farmhouse, where he left me with a
few tags of religion, which again raised my suspicions
of his identity. In the coffee-room to which
I returned there was an illustrated paper with a picture
of President Kruger, and he and Farmer Bowles were
as like as two peas. There was a picture also
of a group of Outlander leaders, and the faces of
them, leering and triumphant, were perhaps unduly
darkened by the photograph, but they seemed to me
like the faces of a distant and hostile people.
I saw the old man once again on the fierce night of
the poll, when he drove down our Liberal lines in
a little cart ablaze with the blue Tory ribbons, for
he was a man who would carry his colours everywhere.
It was evening, and the warm western light was on
the grey hair and heavy massive features of that good
old man. I knew as one knows a fact of sense
that if Spanish and German stockbrokers had flooded
his farm or country he would have fought them for
ever, not fiercely like an Irishman, but with the
ponderous courage and ponderous cunning of the Boer.
I knew that without seeing it, as certainly as I knew
without seeing it that when he went into the polling
room he put his cross against the Conservative name.
Then he came out again, having given his vote and
looking more like Kruger than ever. And at the
same hour on the same night thousands upon thousands
of English Krugers gave the same vote. And thus
Kruger was pulled down and the dark-faced men in the
photograph reigned in his stead.
