(_WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED "ANECDOTES."_)
Let us imagine, if you please, that the toils and trampings of the day
are over. You are staying at a comfortable country-house with friends
whom you like. You have had a good day at your host's pheasants
and his rabbits. Your shooting has been fairly accurate, not
ostentatiously brilliant, but on the whole satisfactory. You have
followed out the hints given in my previous Chapters, and are
consequently looked upon as a pleasant fellow, with plenty to say for
himself. After tea, in the drawing-room, you have had an hour or two
for the writing of letters, which you have of course not written, for
the reading of the morning papers from London which you have skimmed
with a faint interest, and for the forty or eighty or one hundred
and twenty winks in an armchair in front of the fire, which are by
no means the least pleasant and comforting incident in the day's
programme. You have dressed for dinner in good time; you have tied
your white tie successfully "in once;" you have taken in a charming
girl (ROSE LARKING, let us say) to dinner. The dinner itself has been
good, the drawing-room interlude after dinner has been pleasantly
varied with music, and the ladies have, with the tact for which they
are sometimes distinguished, retired early to bed-rooms, where it is
believed they spend hours in the combing of their beautiful hair, and
the interchange of gossip. You are in high spirits. You think, indeed
you are sure (and again, on thinking it well over, not quite so sure),
that the adorable ROSE looked kindly upon you as she said good-night,
and allowed her pretty little hand to linger in your own while you
assured her that to-morrow you would get for her the pinion-feather
of a woodcock, or die in the attempt. You are now arrayed in your
smoking-coat (the black with the red silk-facings), and your velvet
slippers with your initials worked in gold--a birthday present from
your sister. All the rest are, each after his own fashion, similarly
attired, and the whole male party is gathered together in the
smoking-room. There you sit and smoke and chat until the witching hour
of night, when everybody yawns and grave men, as well as gay, go up to
their beds.
Now, since you are an unassuming youngster, and anxious to learn,
you ask me probably, how you are to bear yourself in this important
assembly, what you are to speak about, and how? The chief thing, I
answer, is _not to be a bore_. It is so easy _not_ to be a bore if
only you give a little thought to it. Nobody wants to be a bore. I
cannot imagine any man consciously incurring the execration of his
fellow-men. And yet there exist innumerable bores scattered through
the length and breadth of our happy country, and carrying on their
dismal business with an almost malignant persistency. Longwindedness,
pomposity, the exaggeration of petty trivialities, the irresistible
desire to magnify one's own wretched little achievements, to pose as
the little hero of insignificant adventures, and to relate them to the
whole world in every dull detail, regardless of the right of other men
to get an occasional word in edgewise--these are the true marks of
the genuine bore. He must know that you take no interest in him or his
story. Even if you did, his manner of telling it would flatten you,
yet he fascinates you with that glassy stare, that self-conscious
and self-admiring smirk, and distils his tale into your ears at the
very moment when you are burning to talk over old College-days with
CHALMERS, or to discuss an article in the _Field_ with SHABRACK.
I remember once finding myself, by some freak of mocking destiny, in
a house in which _two_ bores had established fortified camps. On the
first night, we all became so dazed with intolerable dulness, that
our powers of resistance faded away to the vanishing point. Both bores
sallied out from their ramparts, laid our little possessions waste,
and led, each his tale of captives back with him, gagged, bound, and
incapable of struggle.
So next day, when the accustomed train
Of things grew round our sense again,
we agreed together, those of us, I mean, who had suffered on the
previous night, that something must be done. What it was to be
we could not at first decide. We should have preferred "something
lingering, with boiling oil in it," but at last we decided on the
brilliant suggestion of SHABRACK, who was of the party, that we should
endeavour by some means or other to bring the two bores, as it were,
face to face in a kind of boring-competition in the smoking-room
that very night, to engage them in warfare against one another
and ourselves to sit by and watch them mutually extinguishing one
another; a result that, we were certain, could not fail to be brought
about, owing to the deadly nature of the weapons with which each was
provided. Both the bores, I may observe, shot execrably during the
day. In the evening, after a short preliminary skirmish, from which
SHABRACK the hussar extricated us with but little loss, that which we
desired came to pass. It was a terrible spectacle. In a moment both
these magnificent animals, their bristles erect, and all their tusks
flashing fiercely in the lamp-light, were locked in the death-grapple.
Every detail of the memorable struggle is indelibly burnt into my
brain. Even at this distance of time, I can remember how we all looked
on, silent, awestruck, fascinated, as the dreadful fight proceeded
to its inevitable close. For the benefit of others, let me attempt to
describe it in the appropriate language of the Ring.