Secrets

Chapter 11

While my own personal preference in music has never been specific and rather restricted, a phrase which here means being restrained or unable to develop further due to factors that prevent any further interest such as a villain constantly trying to murder you, or you end up having to escape from a box which has been placed at the top of a cliff. Perhaps it is due to my constant need to be on the run from the authorities or researching the story of the Baudelaire orphans, but the closest melodies I have ever come to prefer are relatively short, soothing ballads with rhyming lines about markings on ankles and doing noble without being paid. Rhymes which are often recited by children during games on the playground or by parents as they try to rock their troubled children to sleep so they will not know about the associates lurking outside their small cattle farm. Or the other type of melody that I favour is a long symphony that requires a great many instruments working together in harmony and is often accompanied by a woman who is dressed in a lovely gown meant to represent an insect with surprisingly functional wings and a high soprano. However, the thought of even thinking about this second type of music will bring a large lump of grief to my throat and I must excuse myself from the dinner party before we are able to eat the tasty flambé dessert, which will also give me terrible flashbacks despite the delicious temptations of banana foster after the burning of the concoction with fire. A person once asked me why I keep listening to the operatic symphony if they depress me so, and I responded with a heavy sigh to explain that it is one of the many ways in which I attempt to keep the woman I love alive in my mind, my heart, and in my ears.

While my preference in music is limited and gives me a heavy heart, I am afraid that the terrible person who was about to interrupt Holly S.'s private concert for her friends, his taste in music even more narrow and inadequate than my own. For the man who was at that moment racing through the halls of Prufrock Preparatory School to stop the rather lovely melodies that were being played, he had an enormous ego, a phrase which means that he only ever looked out for himself as an individual with a very bloated sense of his self-importance, and only preferred to hear music in which he played. While I cannot confirm or deny the theory that I have developed over my research of the Baudelaires' time at the austere academy of education, but I believe that the man who insisted on playing the violin when it was apparent to everyone that he cannot do so, was to protect his ego. It is possible that he was given too much approval for everything in his childhood, which when given in fair dosages to children, will give them a healthy sense of self-worth. However, for this unpleasant man, he thought he could do anything, he picked an instrument he had no business playing, declared himself the best violinist in the world, and made sure that there was no other music being performed at the school, allowing no comparison to prove that he was not the best violinist in the world. Not even close.

And it is from this enormous ego that the vice-principal of the boarding school stormed into the private concert occurring in the courtyard next to Orphan's Shack, which I do not need to remind you is a very rude thing to do especially when you are not invited and began yelling.

"What in the Apuleius of Mandrill is going on here?!" the man with the very red nose and pigtails in his hair demanded.

All the children stopped what they were doing, Holly was particularly upset considering she had been in the middle of her favourite classical piece before they were rudely interrupted.

"Apuleius?" Sunny shrieked in confusion. The youngest Baudelaire turned to her brother for an explanation.

"What I think Vice-Principal Nero means is Apuleius of Madaurus, who was a Roman writer who wrote the well-known Latin text Metamorphoses, where the hero of the story discovers the Egyptian Goddess, Isis, who is the goddess of music and the hero is transformed from a man to a donkey while music and musical instruments aid in the worship of the goddess. However, our great vice-principal mixed up Madaurus with Mandrill, which is a type of primate that has various colours on its face and hindquarters..."