It was a rather remarkable affair,
taken altogether. Wilkins was not what one would
call an attractive man, and none of the young women
of Dumfries Corners who had met him had ever manifested
anything but a pronounced aversion to his society.
“I’d rather be a wall-flower
than dance with Sam Wilkins,” one of these young
women had said. “He not only can’t
dance, but, what is infinitely worse, he doesn’t
know that he can’t dance, and as for his conversation well,
give me silence.”
“You are perfectly right about
that,” said another. “Whenever I see
him about to waltz or two-step, I immediately remove
myself from the scene, and pray for the girl he’s
dancing with. He is a train-wrecker, and the
favorite resting-place for his heels is on some one
else’s foot. I’ve heard that he steps
on his own feet, too, he’s so awkward, and I
hope he does if it hurts him as much as he hurts me
when he steps on mine.”
For Wilkins’s sake I am very
sorry to say that this feeling towards him was invariable.
I never cared much for him myself, but I felt rather
sorry for him when I perceived the persistent snubbing
with which he was everywhere received. He never
seemed aware of it himself, happily, however, and
accepted my merely sympathetic attentions with that
superciliousness which always goes with conscious rectitude.
Conscious rectitude, I think, was
Wilkins’s trouble. He was good, and he
was aware of it, but he was not content with that.
He wanted everybody else to be good. I really
believe that Wilkins could have carried on a Platonic
love affair with an auburn-haired girl for ten weeks
without an effort, he was so terribly good, which
did not at all contribute to his popularity.
A fellow who talks about ritualism while walking in
the moonlight with a sentimental woman, doesn’t
count for much, and Wilkins was always doing things
like that. It was even whispered last winter
when he went sleigh-riding with that fascinating little
widow, Mrs. Broughton, that he let her do the driving,
clasped his own hands in front of him, and talked
of nothing but the privations of the missionaries
in China, and never mentioned oysters or cold birds
and a bottle.
“And worst of all,” snapped
Mrs. Broughton, “he really seemed to enjoy it.
I never saw such a man!”
I have mentioned all these details
for the purpose of indicating how unpopular Wilkins
was and how it was that he had become so, for with
this knowledge the reader will share the surprise which
we all felt when Wilkins suddenly blossomed forth
as the most popular man of Dumfries Corners.
It was really a knockdown blow to the most of us, for
while we may have been jealous on occasions of each
other, it never occurred to any of us to be jealous
of the train-wrecker.
I didn’t like it when Araminta
smiled upon Harry Burnham, but it was not injurious
to my self-respect that she should do it, because Harry
Burnham averages up as good a fellow as I am, and then
Harry and I could drown our differences in the flowing
bowl later on. On the other hand, if Harry’s
Fiametta cast side glances at me, of course Harry would
be wroth, but he could understand why Fiametta should
be so affected by the twinkle in my eye an
affection by the way which has often got me unconsciously
into trouble that she should for the moment
forget herself and respond to it.
But when Araminta and Fiametta on
a sudden, just after the leap-year dance, wholly,
and, as we thought, basely, deserted us for that emblem
of conscious rectitude, Sam Wilkins, a man whose eye
couldn’t learn to twinkle in a thousand years,
a mere human iceberg, then it was that we were astounded.
Nor was this secession limited to Araminta and Fiametta.
The conversion of the girls of Dumfries Corners to
Wilkins was as complete, as comprehensive, as it was
startling to the men. Jack Lester, as Bob Jenks
expressed it, was “trun down” by Daisy
Hawkins, who appeared to have eyes for none but Wilkins,
while Bob, in turn, when going to make his usual Thursday
evening call upon Miss Betsy Wilson, discovered that
Miss Betsy had gone to the University extension lecture
with the train-wrecker, an act unprecedented, for it
had long been the custom for Bob to spend his Thursday
evenings at the Wilson mansion, and, while nothing
had as yet been announced, everybody in town was getting
his congratulations ready for Bob as soon as that which
was understood became a matter of common knowledge.
For a week or two we none of us let
on that we had observed the remarkable change that
had come o’er the spirit of our dreams.
Harry has always been remarkable for his ability to
conceal his feelings, and in that respect I am a good
second, and except for the fact that we spent more
time at the club playing pool nobody would have suspected
that we cared whether Araminta or Fiametta still loved
us or not. Besides, we each had a feeling that
two could play at this Wilkins game, and I had made
up my mind that if Araminta could so easily find a
substitute for me I, with my twinkle, could as speedily
replace her. That is to say, I felt that I could
create that impression in Araminta’s mind, and
that was all I was after. I didn’t really
intend, however easy it would be to do so, to create
a flutter of a permanent nature in any other woman’s
heart that is, not until I was sure that
Araminta was lost to me forever. After a decent
period of mourning I might have used my twinkle for
permanent effect, but at that moment my only idea was
to show Araminta that if one could be fickle, two
could be twice as fickle. Harry had the same
course of treatment in store for Fiametta, and we
both made a strong bid for the company of Mary Brown,
who, it must be confessed, was a charming girl, and
stood second in the affections of every man in Dumfries
Corners.
It was the opportunity of Mary Brown’s
life, for even as Harry and I had decided, so had
all the other jilted swains, but that curious girl
either could not or would not grasp it. She, too,
had become a Wilkinsite, and would have nothing to
do with any of us. She declined to attend the
Beldens’s musicale with me, and went bicycling
with the iceberg. She told Robinson she hated
lectures, and went to a stereopticon show with the
train-wrecker. All the other men met with a similar
rebuff, and at the last meeting of the Chafing Dish
Club she capped the climax by refusing my lobster
a la Newburg and Harry’s oysters poulet,
to have a second helping to the sole-leather welsh
rarebit which Wilkins had constructed; Wilkins, a rank
outsider, who had been asked to come to the meeting
by every blessed girl in the club, although heretofore
he had not been considered as a possible member, and
in fact had been black-balled by the girls themselves!
And when it came time for the girls to go home, instead
of each one being escorted by a single male member,
Wilkins corralled the whole lot of them in a huge
omnibus which he had hired, and drove off with them,
leaving us disconsolate. He smiled so broadly
you could see his teeth in the dark.
This, as I have said, capped the climax.
“That settles it,” said
Burnham. “I’m going to New York for
a rest. These Dumfries Corners girls needn’t
think they’re the only women in the world.
There are others.”
“I’m going to stay and
stick it out,” said I. “I’ve
got my sister left. She’ll never succumb
to the Wilkins influence.” But alas!
I leaned upon a broken reed. My sister is a sensible
girl, but she is “literary.” She
had a joke in Life once, and since that time
she has neglected almost everything but writing and
her brother. She doesn’t neglect me, and
altogether I’m glad she writes, since it fills
her with enthusiasm until the articles come back,
and up to now she had not written poetry. But,
as I say, I leaned upon a broken reed, for when, the
next day, I asked her what she was writing, she laughed
and showed me a sonnet.
“Poetry, eh?” I said,
disapprovingly, as I looked over her manuscript.
“Yes,” she answered, modestly. “A
sonnet.”
And I read, “To S.W.”
“Who’s ‘S.W.?’”
I asked, with a frown, although I little suspected
what her answer would be.
“Sam Wilkins,” she replied.
I then realized the full force of Caesar’s “Et
tu, Brute?” and fled.
Meanwhile Wilkins was becoming insufferable.
If Bunthorne was an ass, he was at least clever, but
this Wilkins he was a whole drove of asses,
and not a redeeming feature to the lot. He could
no more account for his sudden popularity than we
could, but he could not help realizing it after a
week or two, and then, for the first time in his life,
he began to take notice. We men all wanted to
thrash him, and I think Burnham would have done it
if the rest of us hadn’t prevented him.
“He needed a licking before
this,” said Harry, “but now he’s
worse than ever. It isn’t conscious rectitude
now, it’s triumphant virtue. He makes me
tired. He was telling me the other day that while
girls might be captivated by flippant, superficial,
prancing dudes for a while, in the end solid worth
would win, and then he went on to say that the youth
of modern times cultivated his feet to the exclusion
of his head, and that while he had, of course, learned
to dance, he had not devoted all his time to it, and
regarded it, after all, as a very minor sort of an
attraction as far as women are concerned. ’I
don’t rely on my dancing, Burnham,’ he
said. ’It’s the head, and the heart,
my boy, that triumphs.’ And when I asked
him where he learned all this he answered, ‘from
personal experience.’”
I immediately let go of Burnham.
“Go and half-lick him, Harry,” said I.
“And when you’ve done with him pass him
over to me, and I’ll finish him. The supercilious
ass.”
That was the way Wilkins affected us.
The other men took their dose in different
ways. Jenks began to drink a little more; Lester
drank a little less. Hicks didn’t care much
about it one way or the other, and Wilson swore that
if Wilkins came to call on his sister again he’d
kick him out of the house.
Six weeks rolled by thus, and finally
Easter Sunday came. No mitigation of the Wilkins
visitation had entered into our lives. As the
days wore on the girls became more devoted to him
than ever, and he became correspondingly unbearable.
The condescension with which he would treat his fellow-men
was something hardly to be tolerated, and the worst
of it was there didn’t seem to be any way of
bringing the girls to terms. There wasn’t
anybody left for us to flirt with now that Mary Brown
had gone over to the enemy, she who had always been
willing to flirt with anybody.
“There’s only one hope,”
said Jenks. “If he’ll only marry one
of ’em, the others will come back. He can’t
marry ’em all, thank Heaven.”
“Suppose it was Fiametta he married?”
said I.
“Or Araminta!” was his preposterous retort.
“He’ll never do that,”
said Lester. “He’s in clover now,
and for the first time in his life, and the more of
an ass he is the more he’ll like clover.
He’s paying attention to the lot. He’ll
never settle down to one. It’s all up with
us unless he bankrupts himself.”
“He won’t,” observed
Harry Burnham. “Conscious rectitude won’t
do anything like that. I’m going to New
York to call on an old flame, and I advise the rest
of you to do the same.”
“Well, I don’t know but
what you are right,” said I, “but Araminta
shall have one more chance. I’m going to
church to-morrow. It’s Easter Sunday, and
I’ll offer to escort her home. If she says
‘yes,’ all right. If she doesn’t,
I’m lost to her forever.”
“Good scheme,” quoth the others.
“We’re with you.”
And that is what we all did.
The girls were all there, resplendent in new bonnets
and toggery of other sorts, and the smirking Wilkins
was there too. He passed the plate after the
sermon, and his rectitude shone out oleaginously on
every line of his face. It was as much as I could
do to keep from tripping him up in the aisle, and
sending him and the contribution-plate sprawling.
I almost did it when I imagined his feelings as the
nickels rattled down through the register into the
furnace below, but I restrained myself and
the killing glances he threw into those glass eyes
of his, whenever he happened to hold the plate before
one of those Dumfries girls! It was sickening,
and I came near to flying before the close of the
service. The others had the same sensations and
temptations, and it is a wonder that Wilkins did not
meet with some dreadful humiliation before he got
the collection back into the chancel. It was
a terrible strain on us, and his horrid unconsciousness
that he was anything but perfect, and that the rest
of us were anything more than so many paving stones
to be walked on, was aggravating to a degree.
Nothing unusual happened, however, and the service
came to an end, and with it came to us all another
surprise, but this time the surprise gave Wilkins
a pain, and I had a front seat when the blow was dealt.
It had occurred to the immaculate
rival of all the manhood of Dumfries Corners that
he would honor Araminta with his society on the way
home from church, and he and I reached her side after
service at one and the same moment.
“May I have the pleasure of
seeing you home?” said Wilkins, twirling his
mustache with a “resist me if you can”
smile on his lips.
“Don’t let me interfere,”
said I, dryly, and was about to turn away.
“Thank you, Mr. Wilkins,”
replied Araminta, “but Mr. Smithers has already
asked me.”
It was a beautiful, lovely, sweet
lie. I hadn’t done anything of the sort,
but I’d meant to, of course, and perhaps Araminta
had become a mind reader. Wilkins got a little
flushy around his cheek-bones, and posted off to Fiametta,
but she and Burnham were already en route and apparently
reconciled. So it went with all. Wilkins
was left. Even my sister, who, lacking Wilkins,
would have to walk home with the minister’s
wife, declined, and the fall of the great man was complete.
Mary Brown was the only one remaining in the field,
and when he fled to her she said she wasn’t
going home.
“Well, then,” said Wilkins,
“let me take you to wherever you are going?”
“Thank you,” returned
Miss Brown, “I’m not going there either,”
and she joined Araminta and myself, much to our delight,
for we have no secrets from her. And then it
all came out.
The girls had not loved us less, or
Wilkins more, but they had resolved to keep Lent with
unusual rigor this year.
They had sworn us off and taken up Wilkins for
penance.
Hard on Wilkins?
Not a bit of it. He’s as
conscious of his rectitude and as unconscious of his
unpopularity as ever.
Only he is a little more outspoken
about women than he used to be, and somehow or other
he has let it creep out that he “doesn’t
find them interesting.”
“They can’t even learn
to dance without tripping a fellow up,” says
he.