THE UNDOING OF DINNEY
CROCKETT
Tho' they tykes us out of our gutter 'ome,
An' scrub till our 'ides is sore,
Their stinkin' suds won't myke of a bloke
W'ot 'e never was afore!
THE UNDOING OF DINNEY CROCKETT
DINNEY was born lucky. No one knew this better than Dinney himself, who was, in a way, a sort of second Dr. Pangloss.
And, look at it from whatever standpoint you will, Dinney had many reasons to be happy. In the first place, he was as free as the wind, and answerable to no one but his own elastic conscience.
As for his wordly wants, he had plenty to eat, for he could live sumptuously on eight cents a day. Four cents were really enough, on a pinch, but Dinney found that he most always got a stomach-ache after a few days of four-cent diet.
In the second place, Dinney was never without a place to sleep. In fact, he had dozens of them. If it chanced to be winter, he slumbered on the comfortable iron door over the hot-air shaft of the World building, where the heat blew out through the iron grating in a most delicious way. There, no matter how cold it was, he was as contented and as much at home as the most luxuriously cotted child on Fifth Avenue. And what was more, he was not afraid of the dark, and the night had no terrors for him. Dinney, like all self-respecting members of the profession, had an honest and outspoken contempt for fixed quarters of any sort, and openly scoffed at the Newsboys' Home. Another point to be remembered was that with sleeping apartments at the World building, Dinney was always on hand for the morning papers, which, as very few in the great city ever guessed, came up long before the sun itself.
In the summer, Dinney had the habit of going about and nosing out sleeping-places at his own sweet will. Often, it is true, he had to fight for them, but that fact only made him enjoy them all the more.
So, since Dinney could sell as many as seventy papers of an afternoon, he envied no one, shot his craps, tossed his pennies, and enjoyed his quiet smoke with the rest of "de gang," and had no particular kick to register against the things that were.
But continuous sleeping in the open, the perpetual smoking of cigarettes and the vilest of cigar stubs, and the immoderate consumption of over-ripe fruit, stale sandwiches, and well-larded doughnuts, while perhaps pleasant enough in their way, do not tend either to promote growth or to produce remarkable roundness of feature. And for this reason all men misunderstood Dinney.
Yet probably that was why he was so very thin. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes were hollow, and there was a general air of wistful hungriness about his woeful little face. Dinney knew this well enough; in fact, he inwardly rejoiced over it, being wise enough to realise why he could sell seventy papers while his more prosperous-looking rivals scarcely got rid of their paltry two dozen.
Indeed, it was nothing else than this intangible soul-hunger shadowing Dinney's face that one day caused a certain sad-eyed woman in a carriage to stop at the curb where Dinney was selling his papers, and blushingly thrust a quarter into his black and dirty hand.
Dinney's heart turned on its electrics at that. Such things meant something to him, for he was always too proud to beg, though not to steal. His big eyes lighted up in a truly marvellous way, and he, carried for a moment off his guard, grinned his genuine gratefulness.
That made the sad-eyed woman in the carriage turn to her husband and say:
"Did you notice, George? He has really a bee-yew-tiful face!"
They had been watching him for weeks.
"Yes, I suppose so," answered the man, with feigned disinterestedness, "if he'd only wash it now and then."
"Do you know, George, as I pass him I often think—he he looks like poor little Albert."
The man called George had thought so, too, but did not say so. Instead, he looked up at the roofs of the buildings, for Albert had been their only child, had died but a year before, and neither of them could quite forget it, as sometimes happens in this world.
Dinney did not forget that carriage, and it must be confessed that he made it a point to assume a most ridiculous and priggish expression of dejected meekness whenever it passed. He knew it would not make the sad-eyed woman any happier to feel that he had shot craps with every cent of her quarter!
But as time went on these little gifts grew more and more frequent, and, if kept up, would have been the ruin of the best news-boy in the Ward. The outcome of it all was that the sad-eyed woman came one day and drove off with Dinney in her carriage.
"George, do you know, I believe that child has consumption," she explained to her husband, who was really not a bit astonished at her act, "and I've brought him home, and I'm going to nurse him up for a while!"
George kissed her and called her a silly little woman, and said he supposed he'd have to let her have her own way. It was very lonely in that big house.
In fact, it was George himself who led Dinney up to the bathroom, showed him how to turn on the hot water, and significantly advised him not to be afraid of wasting the soap. In some unaccountable way George found it very pleasant to talk to a child again, and answer questions, and explain what everything was for. When he went downstairs he mildly and tentatively suggested that Dinney be taken out to their country house with them. He also determined, in his own mind, to see about buying Dinney a box of tools.
As for Dinney himself, that strange bathroom, with all its pipes and taps and shower controller and enamel tub, was a wonder and delight. For the fact must be confessed, it was Dinney's first premeditated bath.
He overflowed the bath tub, spotted the woodwork with soap suds, unscrewed one of the taps for investigative purposes, and had a most delightful time of it.
When a big, clean-shaven, stately-looking man in a bottle green suit with brass buttons stepped in, Dinney's heart jumped into his mouth, as he thought for a moment that it was a policeman. It was only the butler with a new suit of clothes for him. Dinney eyed them with some curiosity, for it was his first acquisition of such a character. He ordered the butler to put them down on the towel rack, and did it in a tone of authority which the butler somewhat resented. Dinney's heart sank, however, when the man with the brass buttons, "at master's orders," carried away his ragged but beloved old suit, to be incinerated down in the furnace room. Before carrying out those orders, the butler viewed Dinney's tattered raiment with unconcealed disgust. He approached the bundle suspiciously, and carried it at arm's length, significantly holding his nose as he departed.
Dinney was quick to see the intended insult. A cake of wet soap hit the man with the brass buttons, hit him squarely on the back of the neck. The soap was followed by a volley of blasphemy that was, as the butler afterwards told the chambermaid, "fairly heart-renderin' and too awful for respectable people to talk on!"
When Dinney was led downstairs he was a very changed boy—that is, of course, changed in appearance. His sandy little crop of hair was on end, his face was shiny with much rubbing, and for the first time in history his person was odorous of toilet soap. What troubled him most was that his new pants were very prickly.
They were patiently waiting for him, and the sad-eyed woman took him on her knee and wept over him for a while. Dinney neither enjoyed nor understood that, but with him it was a law to look meek when in doubt. Yet he felt an indefinite unrest and restraint that was even more painful than the prickly torture of his new pants.
The sad-eyed woman took it for illness (Dinney was as tough as a pine knot!) and wept over him once more and asked how he would like to be her boy, her very own little boy for all the rest of his life.
That was a question Dinney had not thought over. But at that moment he heard the rattle of the dinner dishes and caught a whiff of the consommé being brought in, so he, being very much in doubt, looked meeker than ever. He next noticed a silver dish on the sideboard piled high with big oranges. The oranges settled the matter. He was hers—hers for all time.
But he wriggled away, because he did not like being hugged. Such things were strange to him, he had never been taught to look for them, and his heart had never hungered for them. But he kept his eye on the dish of oranges. During all this George coughed once or twice, and said Dinney had the making of a fine boy in him, a very fine boy indeed!
So Dinney, who had beheld nothing but brick and stone all his life, was carried away into the country. Never before had he seen hot corn, the same as the Italians sold on the street corners, growing on long stalks. Nor had he ever before seen apples hanging on trees, or acres and acres of green grass, or flowers, millions and millions of flowers, all growing wild on the ground, like a lot of cobble-stones. It filled him with a silent wonder.
The little, sad-eyed woman and George talked over Dinney's future, and planned out his life for him, and nudged each other and nodded their heads significantly at each little sign from the child as he gazed out wide-eyed on a new world.
But at the end of the first day on the farm a change crept over Dinney. He did not romp laughing-eyed across the fields, nor did he gather hands full of flowers, as they had expected, or sit listening to the birds singing in the trees.
He hung disconsolately about the stables, with his hands in his pockets, asking the coachman endless questions about the polishing of harness and the breeding of horses. He caught and made captive a stray collie pup, and shut it up in one of the empty oat bins, and then chased the ducks for one busy hour. When stopped at this by the gardener, he fell out of an apple-tree or two, and then, wrapped in sudden thought, wondered what Gripsey was doing at home just at that moment. Then he fell to ruminating as to whether or not the evening papers were out, and wistfully told the man called George all about "de gang," and the lives they lived and the things they did.
Then, being unable to fathom his indefinite and unknown unhappiness, he wailed aloud that he was hungry. The sad-eyed woman fed him until she feared he would burst, and said the air was doing him a world of good. Dinney had been used to eating whenever the spirit moved him, and it seemed to him a ridiculous custom to sit down and devour things at stated times, whether you were hungry or not.
But after his meal his melancholy returned to him. What with the prickliness of his new clothes and his secret desire to indulge in a quiet smoke, he suffered untold agonies.
In his loneliness and misery he disappeared stableward, and was not seen again until dinner-time.
The poor little sad-eyed woman was worried to distraction about him. When he shambled back to the house she called him over to her and took him up on her knee, and petted him as few mothers pet even their own son. But it was all lost on Dinney. He squirmed and was unhappy.
"What is it, dear? Are you not well?" she asked, with a real and beautiful tenderness. Dinney was silent.
"Are you not happy here, dear?" the little woman asked once more, putting all the pent-up love of her childless life in one mother's kiss on the boy's flushed forehead.
It was too much! Dinney broke loose and sprang away like a young tiger.
"Gordammit! lee' me alone!" he screamed; "lee' me alone!" His face was contorted with a sort of blind fury. "I'm sick of all dis muggin', an' dis place, an—an everyt'ing else, and I want to go home, see! I want to go home—I want to go home!"
He wailed it out, over and over again, and the tears streamed down his face.
"But—but, Dinney, are n't you happy here?"
"No, I ain't," almost shrieked the child, in a passion of homesickness, "an' I'm tired o' dis bloody place, an' I want to go home—I want to go home!"
To his lifelong shame, Dinney broke down and bawled like any baby in arms.
The childless mother covered her eyes with her handkerchief and wept silently. The man called George walked nervously up and down the room, and then looked absently out over the fields of ripening wheat, golden in the sunlight of the late afternoon.
There was silence for several minutes, and then the man said, and it seemed almost resignedly:
"Very well, Dinney, if you really want to, I'll take you back to the city with me in the morning."
Could it have been a sob that choked his voice? Dinney neither knew nor cared. He wiped his eyes and seemed to smell once more the smell of the crowded city street, and to hear the music of a thousand hurrying wheels.