A Great Emergency and Other Tales | Page 7

was not for want
of warnings that I had made a fool of myself.

I had looked forward to going to school with about equal measures of
delight and dread; my pride and ambition longed for this first step in
life, but Rupert had filled me with a wholesome awe of its stringent
etiquette, its withering ridicule, and unsparing severities. However, in
his anxiety to make me modest and circumspect, I think he rather
over-painted the picture, and when I got through the first day without
being bullied, and made such creditable friends on the second, I began
to think that Rupert's experience of school life must be due to some
lack of those social and conversational powers with which I seemed to
be better endowed. And then Weston's acting would have deceived a
wiser head than mine. And the nursemaids had always listened so
willingly!
As it happened, Rupert was unwell next day and could not go to school.
He was obviously afraid of my going alone, but I had no fears. My
self-satisfaction was not undone till playtime. Then not a boy dispersed
to games. They all gathered round Weston in the playground, and with
a confident air I also made my way to his side. As he turned his face to
me I was undeceived.
Weston was accustomed--at such times as suited his caprice and his
resources--to give exhibitions of his genius for mimicry to the rest of
the boys. I had heard from Rupert of these entertainments, which were
much admired by the school. They commonly consisted of funny
dialogues between various worthies of the place well known to
everybody, which made Weston's audience able to judge of the
accuracy of his imitations. From the head-master to the idiot who blew
the organ bellows in church, every inhabitant of the place who was
gifted with any recognizable peculiarity was personated at one time or
another by the wit of our school. The favourite imitation of all was
supposed to be one of the Dialogues of Plato, "omitted by some strange
over-sight in, the edition which graces the library of our learned and
respected doctor," Weston would say with profound gravity. The
Dialogue was between Dr. Jessop and Silly Billy--the idiot already
referred to--and the apposite Latin quotations of the head-master and
his pompous English, with the inapposite replies of the organ-blower,
given in the local dialect and Billy's own peculiar jabber, were

supposed to form a masterpiece of mimicry.
Little did I think that my family chronicle was to supply Weston with a
new field for his talents!
In the midst of my shame, I could hardly help admiring the clever way
in which he had remembered all the details, and twisted them into a
comic ballad, which he had composed overnight, and which he now
recited with a mock heroic air and voice, which made every point tell,
and kept the boys in convulsions of laughter. Not a smile crossed his
long, lantern-jawed face; but Mr. Thomas Johnson made no effort this
time to hide a severe fit of his peculiar spasms in his spotted
handkerchief.
Sometimes--at night--in the very bottom of my own heart, when the
darkness seemed thick with horrors, and when I could not make up my
mind whether to keep my ears strained to catch the first sound of
anything dreadful, or to pull the blankets over my head and run the risk
of missing it,--in such moments, I say, I have had a passing private
doubt whether I had inherited my share of the family instinct of
courage at a crisis.
It was therefore a relief to me to feel that in this moment of despair,
when I was only waiting till the boys, being no longer amused by
Weston, should turn to amuse themselves with me, my first and
strongest feeling was a sense of relief that Rupert was not at school,
and that I could bear the fruits of my own folly on my own shoulders.
To be spared his hectoring and lecturing, his hurt pride, his reproaches,
and rage with me, and a probable fight with Weston, in which he must
have been seriously hurt and I should have been blamed--this was some
comfort.
I had got my lesson well by heart. Fifty thousand preachers in fifty
thousand pulpits could never have taught me so effectually as Weston's
ballad, and the laughter of his audience, that there is less difference
than one would like to believe between the vanity of bragging of one's
self and the vanity of bragging of one's relations. Also that it is not
dignified or discreet to take new acquaintance into your entire

confidence and that even if one is blessed with friends of such quick
sympathy that they really enjoy hearing about people they have