One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
business: my first experience in the City was, that the power
to drink—keeping a sound head—conduces to the doing of
business.’
‘It’s a pleasant way of instructing men to submit to their
conqueror.’
‘If it doubles the energies, mind.’
‘Not if it fiddles inside. I confess to that effect upon me.
I’ve a waltz going on, like the snake with the tail in his mouth,
eternal; and it won’t allow of a thought upon Investments.’
‘Consult me to-morrow,’ said Mr. Radnor, somewhat
pained for having inconsiderately misled the man he had
hitherto helpfully guided. ‘You’ve looked at the warehouse?’
‘That’s performed.’
‘Make a practice of getting over as much of your business
in the early morning as you well can.’
Mr. Radnor added hints of advice to a frail humanity he
was indulgent, the giant spoke in good fellowship. It would
have been to have strained his meaning, for purposes of sarcasm
upon him, if one had taken him to boast of a personal
exemption from our common weakness.
He stopped, and laughed: ‘Now I ‘m pumping my pulpiteh?
You come with us to Lakelands. I drive the ladies down
to my office, ten A.M.: if it’s fine; train half-past. We take a
basket. By the way, I had no letter from Dartrey last mail.’
‘He has buried his wife. It happens to some men.’
Mr. Radnor stood gazing. He asked for the name of the
place of the burial. He heard without seizing it. A simulacrum
spectre-spark of hopefulness shot up in his imagination,
glowed and quivered, darkening at the utterance of the Dutch
syllables, leaving a tinge of witless envy. Dartrey—Fenellan
had buried the wife whose behaviour vexed and dishonoured
him: and it was in Africa! One would have to go to Africa to
be free of the galling. But Dartrey had gone, and he was
free!—The strange faint freaks of our sensations when struck
to leap and throw off their load after a long affliction, play
these disorderly pranks on the brain; and they are faint, but
they come in numbers, they are recurring, always in ambush.
We do not speak of them: we have not words to stamp
the indefinite things; generally we should leave them unspoken
if we had the words; we know them as out of reason:
they haunt us, pluck at us, fret us, nevertheless.
Dartrey free, he was relieved of the murderous drama in-
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