How I Met the President - Page 2

dance; and what could be more beautiful
and beneficent than a dance? At an abrupt turn of it I came upon
a low white building, with dark doors and dark shuttered windows,
evidently not inhabited and scarcely in the ordinary sense inhabitable--
a thing more like a toolhouse than a house of any other kind.
Made idle by the heat, I paused, and, taking a piece of red chalk
out of my pocket, began drawing aimlessly on the back door--
drawing goblins and Mr. Chamberlain, and finally the ideal
Nationalist with the Kruger beard. The materials did not permit
of any delicate rendering of his noble and national expansion
of countenance (stoical and yet hopeful, full of tears for man,
and yet of an element of humour); but the hat was finely handled.
Just as I was adding the finishing touches to the Kruger fantasy,
I was frozen to the spot with terror. The black door,
which I thought no more of than the lid of an empty box,
began slowly to open, impelled from within by a human hand.
And President Kruger himself came out into the sunlight!

He was a shade milder of eye than he was in his portraits, and he did
not wear that ceremonial scarf which was usually, in such pictures,
slung across his ponderous form. But there was the hat which filled
the Empire with so much alarm; there were the clumsy dark clothes,
there was the heavy, powerful face; there, above all, was the Kruger
beard which I had sought to evoke (if I may use the verb) from under
the features of Mr. Masterman. Whether he had the umbrella or not I
was too much emotionally shaken to observe; he had not the stone
lions with him, or Mrs. Kruger; and what he was doing in that dark
shed I cannot imagine, but I suppose he was oppressing an Outlander.

I was surprised, I must confess, to meet President Kruger
in Somersetshire during the war. I had no idea that he was in
the neighbourhood. But a yet more arresting surprise awaited me.
Mr. Kruger regarded me for some moments with a dubious grey eye,
and then addressed me with a strong Somersetshire accent.
A curious cold shock went through me to hear that inappropriate voice
coming out of that familiar form. It was as if you met a Chinaman,
with pigtail and yellow jacket, and he began to talk broad Scotch.
But the next moment, of course, I understood the situation.
We had much underrated the Boers in supposing that the Boer
education was incomplete. In pursuit of his ruthless plot
against our island home, the terrible President had learnt not
only English, but all the dialects at a moment's notice to win
over a Lancashire merchant or seduce a Northumberland Fusilier.
No doubt, if I asked him, this stout old gentleman could
grind out Sussex, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, and so on,
like the tunes in a