One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
mable doctor eyed him, tapped at him, pinched his tender
parts; and making him swear he was really the man, and had
eaten nothing whatever but unadulterated water-cresses in
the interval, seized on him in an ecstasy by the collar of his
coat, pushed him into the surgery, knocked him over, killed
him, cut him up, and enjoyed the felicity of exposing to view
the very healthiest patient ever seen under dissecting hand,
by favour of the fortunate discovery of the specific for him.
All to further science!—to which, in spite of the petitions of
all the scientific bodies of the civilized world, he fell a martyr
on the scaffold, poor gentleman! But we know politics to be
no such empirical science.
Simeon ingeniously interwove his analogy. He brought it
home to Beaves Urmsing, whose laugh drove any tone of
apology out of it. Yet the orator was asked: ‘Do you take
politics for a joke, Simmy?’
He countered his questioner: ‘Just to liberate you from your
moribund state, my friend.’ And he told the story of the
wrecked sailor, found lying on the sands, flung up from the
foundered ship of a Salvation captain, and how, that nothing
could waken him, and there he lay fit for interment; until
presently a something of a voice grew down into his ears; and
it was his old chum Polly, whom he had tied to a board to give
her a last chance in the surges; and Polly shaking the wet from
her feathers, and shouting: ‘Polly tho dram dry!’—which struck
on the nob of Jack’s memory, to revive all the liquorly tricks of
the cabin under Salvationism, and he began heaving, and at
last he shook in a lazy way, and then from sputter to sputter
got his laugh loose; and he sat up, and cried; ‘That did it! Now
to business!’ for he was hungry. ‘And when I catch the ring of
this world’s laugh from you, my friend … !’ Simeon’s application
of the story was drowned.
After the outburst, they heard his friend again
interruptingly: ‘You keep that tongue of yours from wagging,
as it did when you got round the old widow woman
for her money, Simmy !’
Victor leaned forward. Simeon towered. He bellowed
‘And you keep that tongue of yours from committing incest
on a lie!’
It was like a lightning-flash in the theatre. The man went under.
Simeon flowed. Conscience reproached him with the little he had
done for Victor, and he had now his congenial opportunity.
399