DOUBLE DINKS.
BY ELIZABETH STODDARD.
WIDE AWAKES, you have not heard of the boy Lolly Dinks that was, and is—a boy mitey in body and mighty in mind. He knows himself as the son and ruler of Mr. Dinks, a mild, pleasant man, who tears his shirt collar in two of mornings when his slippers are in the very place he put them, and he can’t find them, and who sits up of nights making books out of other people’s thoughts, and calls it a Literary Avocation!Icall it st—al—ng. WhatIwrite comes from my own mind and Lolly’s.
Now, as always, the business of my life is to amuse Lolly. Lots of oat-meal, beef-tea, little pills, have I taken to keep me up so that I might make a successful business. For a time I supposed that I was teaching him; but I wasn’t, he was teaching me, and from that he went on till I found he governed me.Didyou ever hear anything like this—me, Mrs. Dinks, his mother, minding Lolly Dinks? Somebody has to mind me, and as Mr. Dinks will not read this, I confess I makehimmind.
And I thought myself so clever,—that I was packing, cramming the cells of Lolly’s brain with useful in-for-ma-tion, as full as the cells of a bee-hive with honey. I did it at all hours, and made a nuisance of myself under all circumstances. I’d go on this way: Suppose it a winter morning, and breakfast-time. Lolly and I are waiting for the bell to ring.
“Lolly,” say I, “little Jack Frost came in last night by the window panes; don’t you long to hear about little Jack?” and my voice is sweet as a sugar lump.
“No, marmy, I want some beefsteak. I smell it;” and Lolly gives so loud a sniff that I have to raise my voice, and thereby lose some of its sweetness.
“It is strange so many things should have Jack tied to them,” I continued. “There’s Jack-at-a-pinch, Jack-at-all-trades,—”
“Tom Bower,” breaks in Lolly, “has a toy he calls Jack-in-a-box; nasty thing, it jumps. I want my egg boiled so hard that this poker couldn’t smash it,” and he gives the fender such a bang that my nerves go ting-a-ling like a cracked bell,—not like poor Ophelia’s sweet bells, jangled, out of tune. But duty requires me to go on, for must not my Lolly understand something of great Nature’s laws? With sternness I proceed.
“There is, also, Jack-a-dandy, Jack-ass, Jack-a-napes, Jack Ketch, the hangman, Jack-pudding—”
“And Jack-straw,” cries Lolly; “and somebody’s lost my set of ivory Jack-straws.”
“My son, the substance, or appearance, which we call Jack Frost, is rigidly and beautifully regulated by laws, crystals—”
“Where is that boy?” asked papa Dinks, coming from behind his newspaper.
A moment afterward we heard him singing in the breakfast-room, “Spring, spring, gentle spring,” and presently found him near a beefsteak tranquilly munching a biscuit.
“The childhood,” says Milton, “shows the man, as morning shows the day;” but Milton was always saying one thing or another. If this is true, what will Lolly’s bump of reverence be when he has grown to be a man? Where shall a bank be found rich enough for him to draw the money he must have? And how many persons will be hired to find his garters, his hat, his knife, his book? I never could abear Paradise Lost, and I don’t wonder that the angel with the flaming sword kept Adam and Eve out of the garden, for Adam and Eve were a poky pair, after all, and could never have raised vegetables; that is, according to Milton. As a man, will this said Lolly domineer over his kind, and exact his rights? He thinks it hard that children should not have the privilege of scolding parents, when the parents are so old and the children so young; and why shouldn’t he contradict, when he is contradicted; he knows just as well as any old Dinks knows?
Lolly is not a nice hero for a story, but what can I do? He is all the Lolly Dinks I have,—a “poor thing, but mine own.” And if I can’t make the best of him, I must make the worst; it is “live and Dinks live” with me. All is, Wide Awakes, try to help him with his poor traits; that is, not make use of them on your own account.
Outside his family circle, which is compact though narrow, my Lolly has the reputation of a “perfect gentleman.” Our friends and neighbors invite him to dinner and to lunch. Then they tell how good, how refined, how sweet his manners, how gentle! And this young Dinks hears it all; does he believe so? Why not? He is to these people as he appears; but when I try to present to their view an interior picture, one I am somewhat familiar with, they return a pitying smile, and believe in their hearts that I am describingmyself, or, at any rate, that I am solely to blame for all his shortcomings. I even bring up absolute facts. I say, “This morning, when I offered Lolly five cents, he tossed away, because I would not give him ten cents.” Or, “Yesterday, because I refused to go on the beach in a gale of wind to sail his boat, Lolly said, ‘You never do anything for me; you sit in your chair and read and read, and I think you are real mean.’” This, too, when I had trudged a mile into the woods with him, and lugged home a pile of bushes, flowers, and grasses. It is of no use; I am in the minority; they sympathize with him, not with me. I must hold my peace, but I will ask myself the question, so long as I have the spirit of a woman,—not Pilate’s,—whether old people or young people tell the truth; but, is it the young people or the old people who lie?
Whatever Lolly’s aspects are, life is a constant surprise and delight to him. He walks daily among wonders, as Emerson says. Well, as I have said before, this Master Dinks got into the habit of instructing me. His style was more imperative and curt than mine. Here is a sample:—
“Do you wish to know?Listen, Marmy.Shall I tell you?”
“Do you wish to know?Listen, Marmy.Shall I tell you?”
“Do you wish to know?Listen, Marmy.Shall I tell you?”
“Do you wish to know?
Listen, Marmy.
Shall I tell you?”
Of course I have got to know. His lesson begins: “Suppose, Mrs. Marmy, that the moon, being tired of her white color, should wish to borrow a few yellow rays from the sun,—where would she find postage stamps to get it at the sun post office?”
This terrible conundrum floors me, and I sit dismayed.
“Get ’em from the next rainbow!” he shrieks.
“My Lolly,” I reply, solemnly, “I see you understand the eternal fitness of things.”
And then in his turn he is posed, and falls back into his simple child ways. He twists himself up into my lap, and rubs his head against my shoulder, and says, for the hundredth time,—
“Tell me what you used to do, mother, dear.”
He kisses me; but I must own there is an “ancient and fish-like smell” about him, which comes from his fondness for catching minnows, and other small deer of the sea. Still it goes for a kiss.
A short tale follows.
Cola Meggs and Sailor Studd were two dogs, whose acquaintance I made in my childhood. One was mouse-colored, and the other was white, with large black patches; both were large. They hated cats, they hunted cats. In the underpinning of our house was a hole where the broken crockery was thrown. I used to crawl through this hole to get dishes for my family’s table; very odd-shaped dishes, kind of three-cornered things they were. The cats hid in this dark place when Cola and Sailor were on the war-path, and made themselves very unpleasant. So much so that I was often obliged to sit on the doorstep while the battle raged between cats and dogs. Then I knew what it meant by reigning cats and dogs. One day I sat on the cold, cold doorstep till I grew numb, but my brain was on fire. I composed a poem.
“So Cola Meggs and Sailor StuddHad a fight and fell in mud.Won’t I hang them onto pegs,Even though they have 8 legs.”(The cat was killed.)
“So Cola Meggs and Sailor StuddHad a fight and fell in mud.Won’t I hang them onto pegs,Even though they have 8 legs.”(The cat was killed.)
“So Cola Meggs and Sailor StuddHad a fight and fell in mud.Won’t I hang them onto pegs,Even though they have 8 legs.”(The cat was killed.)
“So Cola Meggs and Sailor Studd
Had a fight and fell in mud.
Won’t I hang them onto pegs,
Even though they have 8 legs.”
(The cat was killed.)
“Marmy,” said Lolly, with dignity, “will you please read me Jules Verne’s story ‘Round the World.’”
Ah me, the mitey part of my Lolly Dinks had flown into the past, where so many little children lie in the amber of a mother’s memory.
He reminds me of the apple blossom and the apple; both are perfect in their way, and in the latter the nub of the blossom, from which the fruit comes, remains. But this does not make me opposed to apple trees; I am not like the man who said he was fond of apples, but he did not approve of the cultivation of the apple tree. I am willing that they should grow as crooked as they like, and lay their dark arms about Tennyson’s fields, and his white kine glimmer as they please.
I also made it one branch of my Dinks amusing business to print some of my talks with Lolly. Mr. Gill made a book for me; not the Mr. Gill whose teeth Wordsworth has given an immortal chatter to, but a Boston Gill. I thought some mothers might find a soothing syrup in the book for their Dinks boys. I know one little girl liked it so much that in reading it she fell out of bed and bumped her head dreadfully. A boy found it in a circulating library, but his mother carried it back the next day. She could see neither rhyme nor reason in it, and the boy cried, because he said he was afraid there was only one Lolly Dinks mother in the world; if there was, he was sure he could be as bad as Lolly Dinks, too.
What to do next about Lolly? Some wise person talks to me about the transition periods; meantime am I to submit to having all my moral corns trod upon, and to watch the growth of his incipient corns? So far he has had everything, from Noah’s ark to a schooner-rigged boat, from a paint box to a set of croquet. He has had all that money can buy; but I have a curious feeling that now he needs something that money cannot buy. I hope this confession will not bring down upon my weak head any dogmatic, cut-and-dried mamma. I am not at home to her. I have gone out: business calls me yonder. Perhaps my own Lolly will tell me what to do next. With all his restlessness and perversity, I see how the sense of beauty develops in his mind, and that somehow he begins to perceive the harmony of goodness; that to be selfish gives him a kind of creepy shame.
“Our Father in heaven,” he said, one day. “Where is the Mother?”
Will he see our life better, more clearly, than Mrs. Dinks, his mother, or Mr. Dinks, his father? We are waiting to learn.