Read Ebook: The Blunders of a Bashful Man by Victor Metta Victoria Fuller

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Ebook has 969 lines and 39850 words, and 20 pages

"Yes, certainly--here they are. I do believe there's a strange dog under the counter! Get out--get out, sir, I say!" and my cruel parent gave me a vicious kick.

I pinched his leg impressively. I meant it as a warning, to betray to him that it was I, and to implore him, figuratively, to keep silence.

But he refused to comprehend that agonized pinch; he resented it. He gave another vicious kick. Then he stooped and looked under--it was a little dark--too dark, alas! under there. He saw a man--but not to recognize him.

"Ho!" he yelled; "robber! thief! burglar! I've got you, fellow! Come out o' that!"

I never before realized father's strength. He got his hand in my collar, and he jerked me out from under that counter, and shook me, and held me off at arm's length.

"There, Mr. Burglar," said he, triumphantly, "sneak in here again will--JOHN!"

The girls had been screaming and running, but they stood still now.

"Well, you're a pretty one!" exclaimed father.

The girls must have told of it, for the story got out, and Fred advised me to try counter-irritation for my bashfulness.

"You're not a burglar," said he, "but you're guilty of counter-fitting."

"Nothing would suit me better," I retorted, "than to be tried for it, and punished by solitary confinement."

And there was nothing I should have liked so much. The iron had entered my soul. I was worse than ever. I purchased a four-ounce vial of laudanum, went to my room, and wrote a letter to my mother:

"Mother, I am tired of life. My nose is turn-up, my mouth is large; I pocket other people's saucers and napkins; I am always making blunders. This is my last blunder. I shall never blush again. Farewell. Let the inscription on my tombstone be--'Died of Bashfulness.' JOHN."

And I swallowed the contents of the vial, and threw myself on my little bed.

HE IS DOOMED FOR WORSE ACCIDENTS.

It may seem strange for you to hear of me again, after the conclusion of the last chapter of my blunders. But it was not I who made the last blunder--it was the druggist. Quite by mistake the imbecile who waited upon me put up four ounces of the aromatic syrup of rhubarb. I felt myself gradually sinking into the death-sleep after I had taken it; with the thought of Belle uppermost in my mind, I allowed myself to sink--"no more catastrophes after this last and grandest one--no more red faces--big mouth--tea-napkins--wonder--if she--will be--sorry!" and I became unconscious.

I was awakened from a comfortable slumber by loud screams; mother stood by my bed, with the vial labeled "laudanum" in one hand, my letter in the other. Father rushed into the room.

"Father, John's committed suicide. Oh! bring the tartar-emetic quick! Make some coffee as strong as lye! Oh! send for a stomach-pump. Tell Mary to bring the things and put the coffee on; and you come here, an' we'll walk him up and down--keep him a-going--that's his only salvation! Oh! John, John! that ever your bashfulness should drive you into this! Up with him, father! Oh! he's dying! He ain't able to help himself one bit!"

They dragged me off the bed, and marched me up and down the room. Supposing, as a matter of course, that I ought to be expiring, I felt that I was expiring. My knees tottered under me; they only hauled me around the more violently. They forced a spoonful of tartar-emetic down my throat; Mary, the servant-girl, poured a quart of black coffee down me, half outside and half in; then they jerked me about the floor again, as if we were dancing a Virginia reel.

The doctor came and poked a long rubber tube down and converted me into a patent pump, until the tartar-emetic, and the coffee, and the pumpkin-pie I had eaten for dinner had all revisited this mundane sphere.

They had no mercy on me; I promenaded up and down and across with father, with Mary, with the doctor, until I felt that I should die if they didn't allow me to stop promenading.

The worst of it was, the house was full of folks; they crowded about the chamber door and looked at me, dancing up and down with the hired girl and the doctor.

"Madam, your son will live! Our skill and vigilance have saved him."

"Bless you, doctor!" sobbed my parents.

"John," said my father, weeping, "arouse yourself! You shall leave this place, if you desire it--only live! I will get you the position of weather-gauger on top of Mount Washington, if you say so, but don't commit any more suicide, my son!"

I was affected, and promised that I wouldn't, provided that I was found a situation somewhere by myself. So the excitement subsided. Father slept with me that night, keeping one eye open; the doctor got the credit of saving my life, and the girls of Babbletown were scared out of laughing at me for a whole month.

When we came to talk the matter over seriously--father and I--it was found to be too late in the season to procure me the Mount Washington appointment for the winter; besides, the effect of my attempt to "shuffle off this mortal coil" was to literally overrun our store with customers. People came from the country for fifteen miles around, in ox teams, on horse-back, in sleighs and cutters, and bob-sleds, and crockery-crates, to buy something, in hopes of getting a glimpse of the bashful young man who swallowed the pizen. Now, father was too cute a Yankee not to take advantage of the mob. He forgot his promises, and made me stay in the store from morning till night, so that women could say: "I bought this 'ere shirting from the young man who committed suicide; he did it up with his own hands."

"I'll give you a fair share o' the profits, John," father would say, slyly.

Well, things went on as it greased; the girls mostly stayed away--the Babbletown girls, for they had guilty consciences, I suspect; and in February there came a thaw. I stood looking out of the store window one day; the snow had melted in the street, and right over the stones that had been laid across the road for a walk, there was a great puddle of muddy water about two yards wide and a foot deep. I soon saw Hetty Slocum tripping across the street; she came to the puddle and stood still; the soft slush was heaped up on either side--she couldn't get around and she couldn't go through. My natural gallantry got the better of my resentment, and I went out to help her over, notwithstanding what she had said when I was under the counter. Planting one foot firmly in the center of the puddle and bracing the other against the curb-stone, I extended my hand.

"If you're good at jumping, Miss Slocum," said I, "I'll land you safely on this side."

"Oh," said she, roguishly, "Mr. Flutter, can I trust you?" and she reached out her little gloved hand.

All my old embarrassment rushed over me. I became nervous at the critical moment when I should have been cool. I never could tell just how it happened--whether her glove was slippery, or my foot slipped on a piece of ice under slush, or what--but the next moment we were both of us sitting down in fourteen inches of very cold, very muddy water.

My best beaver hat flew off and was run over by a passing sled, while a little dog ran away with Hetty's seal-skin muff.

I floundered around in that puddle for about two minutes, and then I got up. Hetty still sat there. She was white, she was so mad.

The boys were coming home from school, and they began to hoot and laugh. I ran after the little dog who was making off with the muff. How Hetty got up, or who came to her rescue I don't know. That cur belonged about four miles out of town, and he never let up until he got home.

I grabbed the muff just as he was disappearing under the house with it, and then I walked slowly back. The people who didn't know me took me for an escaped convict--I was water-soaked and muddy, hatless, and had a sneaking expression, like that of a convicted horse-thief. Two or three persons attempted to arrest me. Finally, two stout farmers succeeded, and brought me into the village in triumph, and marched me between them to the jail.

"Why, what's Mr. Flutter been doin'?" asked the sheriff, coming out to meet us.

"Do you mean to say you know him?" inquired one of the men.

"Yes, I know him. That's our esteemed fellow-citizen, young Flutter."

"And he ain't no horse-thief nor nuthin'!"

"Not a bit of it, I assure you."

The man eyed me from head to foot, critically and contemptuously.

"Then all I've got to say," he remarked slowly, "is this--appearances is very deceptive."

It was getting dusk by this time, and I was thankful for it.

"I slipped down in a mud-puddle and lost my hat," I explained to the sheriff, as I turned away, and had the satisfaction of hearing the other one of my arresters say, behind my back:

"Oh, drunk!"

I hired a little boy, for five cents, to deliver Miss Slocum's muff at her residence. Then I went into the house by the kitchen, bribed Mary to clean my soiled pants without telling mother, slipped up-stairs, and went to bed without my supper.

The next day I bought a handsome seven-dollar ring, and sent it to Hetty as some compensation for the damage done to her dress.

That evening was singing-school evening. I went early, so as to get my seat without attracting attention. Early as I was, I was not the first. A group of young people was gathered about the great black-board, on which the master illustrated his lessons. They were having lots of fun, and did not notice me as I came in. I stole quietly to a seat behind a pillar. Fred Hencoop was drawing something on the board, and explaining it. As he drew back and pointed with the long stick, I saw a splendid caricature of myself pursuing a small dog with a muff, while a young lady sat quietly in a mud-puddle in the corner of the black-board, and Fred was saying, with intense gravity:

"Muff-in ring," suggested some one, and then they laughed louder than ever.

I felt that that singing-school was no place for me that evening, and I stole away as noiselessly as I had entered.

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