Chapter Twenty.
Ralph groweth egregiously modest, and boasteth immoderately, until he is beaten by one with one foot in the grave; with something touching the feats of the man without feet.
I find myself in a dilemma. My modesty (?) is at variance with my love of verity. Oh, the inconvenience of that little pronoun, I! Would that I had in the first instance imitated the wily conduct of the bald-pated invader of Britain. How complacently might I not then have vaunted in the beginning, have caracoled through the middle, and glorified myself at the conclusion of this my autobiography! What a monstrous piece of braggadocio would not Caesar’s Commentaries have been, had he used the first instead of the third person singular! How intolerable would have been the presumption of his Thrasonical, “I thrashed the Helvetians—I subjugated the Germans—I utterly routed the Gauls—I defeated the painted Britons!” And, on the contrary—for I like to place heroes side by side—how decorously and ingeniously might I not have written, “Ralph Rattlin blackened Master Simpkin’s left eye—Ralph Rattlin led on the attack upon Farmer Russel’s orchard, and Ralph Rattlin fought three rounds, with no considerable disadvantage, with the long-legged pieman.” Alas! I cannot even shelter myself under the mistiness of the peremptory we. I have made a great mistake. But I have this consolation, in common with other great men, that, for our mistake, the public will assuredly suffer more than ourselves. Many a choice adventure, of which I was the hero, must be suppressed. I should blush myself black in the face to say what he would relate with a very quiet smile of self-satisfaction. However, as regrets are quite unavailing, unless, like the undertaker’s, they are paid for, I shall exclaim, with the French soldier, who found his long military queue in the hands of a pursuing English sailor, “Chivalry of the world, toujours en avant!”
I now began to commit the sin of much verse, and, consequently, acquired in the neighbouring village much notice. No chastising blow, or even word of reproof fell upon me. My mind was fed upon praise, and my heart nourished with caresses. In the school I had no equal, and my vanity whispered that such was the case without. However, this vanity I did not show, for I was humble from excessive pride.
There are two animals that are almost certain to be spoiled—a very handsome young man, and the “cock of the school.” Being certainly in the latter predicament, I was only saved from becoming an utter and egregious ass by the advent of one, the cleverest, most impudent, rascally, agreeable scoundrel that ever swindled man or deceived woman, in the shape of a wooden-legged usher. He succeeded my worthy friend of the guitar, Mr Sigismund Pontifex. His name was Riprapton, and he only wanted the slight requisite of common honesty to have made himself the first man of any society in which fate might happen to cast him—and fate had been pleased to cast him into a great many. He was a short, compactly-made, symmetrically-formed man, with a countenance deeply indented with the small-pox, and in every hole there was visibly ensconced a little imp of audaciousness. His eyes were such intrepid and quenchless lights of impudence, that they could look even Irish sang froid out of countenance. And then that inimitable wooden leg! It was a perfect grace. As he managed it, it was irresistible. He did not progress with a miserable, vulgar, dot-and-go-one kind of gait; he neither hopped, nor halted, nor limped; and though he was wood from the middle of his right thigh downwards, his walk might almost have been called the poetry of motion. He never stumped, but he stole along with a glissade that was the envy and admiration, not exactly of surrounding nations, but of the dancing-master. It was a beautiful study to see him walk, and I made myself master of it. The left leg was inimitably formed; the calf was perhaps a little too round and Hibernian—a fault gracious in the eyes of the fair sex; his ankle and foot were exquisitely small and delicately turned; of course he always wore shorts with immaculate white cotton or silk stockings.
I shall not distinguish the two legs by the terms, the living and the dead one—it would be as great an injustice to the carved as to the calfed one—for the former had a graceful life, sui generis, of its own. I shall call them the pulsating and the gyrating leg, and now proceed to describe how they bare along, in a manner so fascinating, the living tabernacle of Mr Riprapton. The pulsator, with pointed toe and gently turned calf, would make a progress in a direct line, but as the sole touched the ground, the heel would slightly rise and then fall, and whilst you were admiring the undulating grace of the pulsator, unobserved and silently you would find the gyrator had stolen a march upon you, and actually taken the pas of its five-toed brother. One leg marched and the other swam, in the prettiest semicircle imaginable. When he stopped, the flourish of the gyrator was ineffable. The drumstick in the hand of the big black drummer of the first regiment of foot-guards was nothing to it. Whenever Riprapton bowed—and he was always bowing—this flourish preluded and concluded the salutary bend. It was making a leg indeed.
Many a time, both by ladies and gentlemen, he has been offered a cork leg—but he knew better; had he accepted the treacherous gift he would have appeared but as a lame man with two legs, now he was a perfect Adonis with one. I do believe, in my conscience, that Cupid often made use of this wooden appendage when he wished to befriend him, instead of one of his own arrows, for he was really a marvellous favourite with the ladies.
Well, no sooner had my friend with the peg made himself a fixture in the school, than he took me down, not a peg or two, but a good half-dozen. He ridiculed my poetry—he undervalued my drawing—he hit me through my most approved guards at my fencing—he beat me hollow at hopping, though it must be confessed that I had the advantage with two legs; but he was again my master at “all-fours.” He out-talked me immeasurably, he out-bragged me most heroically, and out-lied me most inconceivably. Knowing nothing either of Latin or Greek, they were beneath a gentleman’s notice, fit only for parsons and pedants; and he was too patriotic to cast a thought away upon French. As he was engaged for the arithmetical and mathematical departments, it would have been perhaps as well if he had known a little of algebra and Euclid; but, as from the first day he honoured me with a strict though patronising friendship, he made me soon understand that we were to share this department of knowledge in common. It was quite enough if one of the two knew anything about the matter; besides, he thought that it improved me so much to look over the problems and algebraical calculations of my schoolfellows.
With this man I was continually measuring my strength; and as I conceived that I found, myself woefully wanting, he proved an excellent moral sedative to my else too rampant vanity. Few, indeed, were the persons who could feel themselves at ease under the withering sarcasms of his intolerable insolence. Much more to their astonishment than to their instruction, he would very coolly, and the more especially when ladies were present, correct the divinity of the parson, the pharmacy of the doctor, and the law of the attorney; and with that placid air of infallibility that carried conviction to all but his opponents.
Once, at a very large evening party, I heard him arguing strenuously, and very triumphantly, against a veteran captain of a merchant-ship, who had circumnavigated the world with Cook, that the degrees of longitude were equal in length all over the world, be they more or less—for he never descended to details—and that the further south you sailed the hotter it grew, though the worthy old seaman pointed to what remained of his nose, the end of which had been nipped off by cold, and consequent mortification, in the anti-arctic regions. As Riprapton flourished his wooden index, in the midst of his brilliant peroration, he told the honest seaman that he had not a leg to stand upon; and all the ladies, and some of the gentlemen, too, cried out with one accord, “O fie, Captain Headman, now don’t be so obstinate—surely you are quite mistaken.” And the arch-master of impudence looked round with modest suavity, and, in an audible whisper, assured the gentleman that sat next to him, that Captain Headman’s argument of the demolished proboscis went for nothing, for that there were other causes equally efficacious as cold and frost, for destroying gentlemen’s noses.
In the sequel, this very learned tutor had to instruct me in navigation. Nothing was too high or too low for him. Had any persons wished to have taken lessons in judicial astrology, Mr Riprapton would not have refused the pupil. Plausible ignorance will always beat awkward knowledge, when the ignorant, which is generally the case, make up the mass of the audience.