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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 barrel organ. I
could not wonder if our plain, true-hearted German millionaires fell before a cunning so penetrated with
culture as this.
. . . . .
And now I come to the third and greatest surprise of all that this strange old man gave me. When he
asked me, dryly enough, but not without a certain steady civility that belongs to old-fashioned country
people, what I wanted and what I was doing, I told him the facts of the case, explaining my political
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 DE COEUR 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
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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.
XX. The Giant
I sometimes fancy that every great city must have been built by night. At least, it is only at night that
every part of a great city is great. All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is
really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks. At least, I think many people of those nobler trades that
work by night (journalists, policemen, burglars, coffee-stall keepers, and such mistaken enthusiasts as
refuse to go home till morning) must often have stood admiring some black bulk of building with a crown
of battlements or a crest of spires and then burst into tears at daybreak to discover that it was only a
haberdasher's shop with huge gold letters across the face of it.
. . . . .
I had a sensation of this sort the other day as I happened to be wandering in the Temple Gardens
towards the end of twilight. I sat down on a bench with my back to the river, happening to choose such a
place that a huge angle and facade of building jutting out from the Strand sat above me like an incubus. I
dare say that if I took the same seat to-morrow by daylight I should find the impression entirely false. In
sunlight the thing might seem almost distant; but in that half-darkness it seemed as if the walls were almost
falling upon me. Never before have I had so strongly the sense which makes people pessimists in politics,
the sense of the hopeless height of the high places of the earth. That pile of wealth and power, whatever
was its name, went up above and beyond me like a cliff that no living thing could climb. I had an irrational
sense that this thing had to be fought, that I had to fight it; and that I could offer nothing to the occasion
but an indolent journalist with a walking-stick.
Almost as I had the thought, two windows were lit in that black, blind face. It was as if two eyes had
opened in the huge face of a sleeping giant; the eyes were too close together, and gave it the suggestion
of a bestial sneer. And either by accident of this light or of some other, I could now read the big letters
which spaced themselves across the front; it was the Babylon Hotel. It was the perfect symbol of
everything that I should like to pull down with my hands if I could. Reared by a detected robber, it is
framed to be the fashionable and luxurious home of undetected robbers. In the house of man are many
mansions; but there is a class of men who feel normal nowhere except in the Babylon Hotel or in
Dartmoor Gaol. That big black face, which was staring at me with its flaming eyes too close together, that
was indeed the giant of all epic and fairy tales. But, alas! I was not the giant-killer; the hour had come,
but not the man. I sat down on the seat again (I had had one wild impulse to climb up the front of the
hotel and fall in at one of the windows), and I tried to think, as all decent people are thinking, what one
can really do. And all the time that oppressive wall went up in front of me, and took hold upon the
heavens like a house of the gods.
. . . . .
It is remarkable that in so many great wars it has been the defeated who have won. The people who
were left worst at the end of the war were generally the people who were left best at the end of the
whole business. For instance, the Crusades ended in the defeat of the Christians. But they did not end in
the decline of the Christians; they ended in the decline of the Saracens. That huge prophetic wave of
Moslem power which had hung in the very heavens above the towns of Christendom, that wave was
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broken, and never came on again. The Crusaders had saved Paris in the act of losing Jerusalem. The
same applies to that epic of Republican war in the eighteenth century to which we Liberals owe our
political creed. The French Revolution ended in defeat: the kings came back across a carpet of dead at
Waterloo. The Revolution had lost its last battle; but it had gained its first object. It had cut a chasm. The
world has never been the same since. No one after that has ever been able to treat the poor merely as a
pavement.
These jewels of God, the poor, are still treated as mere stones of the street; but as stones that may [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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