One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
backward step by step until we retreat precipitately into the
nooks where waxen tapers, carefully tended by writers on
the Press, light-up mysterious images of our national selves
for admiration. Something surely we do, or we should not
be where we are. But what is it we do (excepting cricket, of
course) which others cannot do? Colney asks; and he excludes
cricket and football.
An acutely satiric man in an English circle, that does not
resort to the fist for a reply to him, may almost satiate the
excessive fury roused in his mind by an illogical people of a
provocative prosperity, mainly tongueless or of leaden tongue
above the pressure of their necessities, as he takes them to
be. They give him so many opportunities. They are angry
and helpless as the log hissing to the saw. Their instinct to
make use of the downright in retort, restrained as it is by a
buttoned coat of civilization, is amusing, inviting. Colney
Durance allured them to the quag’s edge and plunged them
in it, to writhe patriotically; and although it may be said,
that they felt their situation less than did he the venom they
sprang in his blood, he was cruel; he caused discomfort. But
these good friends about him stood for the country, an illogical
country; and as he could not well attack his host Victor
Radnor, an irrational man, he selected the abstract entity
for the discharge of his honest spite.
The irrational friend was deeper at the source of his irritation
than the illogical old motherland. This house of
Lakelands, the senselessness of his friend in building it and
designing to live in it, after experiences of an incapacity to
stand in a serene contention with the world he challenged,
excited Colney’s wasp. He was punished, half way to frenzy
behind his placable demeanour, by having Dr. Schlesien for
chorus. And here again, it was the unbefitting, not the person,
which stirred his wrath. A German on English soil should
remember the dues of a guest. At the same time, Colney said
things to snare the acclamation of an observant gentleman
of that race, who is no longer in his first enthusiasm for English
beef and the complexion of the women. ‘Ah, ya, it is
true, what you say: “The English grow as fast as odders, but
they grow to corns instead of brains.” They are Bull. Quaat
true.’ He bellowed on a laugh the last half of the quotation.
Colney marked him. His encounters with Fenellan were
enlivening engagements and left no malice; only a regret,
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