Lonely O'Malley/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
In which the King is again disowned
SONNY, have you lost a goat?"
"Mebbe!" answered Lonely, non-committally, eyeing the angular and angry-eyed woman in the pink sunbonnet.
"Well, that goat 's et up every blessed one of my black raspberry bushes!" declared the unknown woman, looking at Lonely as though she could willingly have done the same with him.
"That 's too bad!" said the new boy, blinking at the pink sunbonnet. His coolness had far from a pacifying effect.
"And that goat goes to pound, young man, till them bushes is paid for, and well paid for!" stormed the woman.
"All right!" said Lonely, moodily. He had other troubles to occupy his mind.
The pink sunbonnet disappeared. A few minutes later the sound of shrill screams rang through the quiet village street.
Lonely ventured tentatively forth, to take in the situation. Three gateways beyond his own house he found the woman of the pink sunbonnet marooned on the box of her chain-pump, with Gilead keeping guard below, doggedly. He had been attacked with a kettleful of hot water; but the engagement had been a brief one.
It was only after exacting a promise that nothing more should be said of the black raspberry bushes, that Lonely dragged Gilead away; and, having made a bird-snare into which even the Chamboro sparrows resentfully declined to poke their heads, he once more loitered ill at ease about his own yard, a bitter and rebellious young Ishmaelite, seeing that Alaska Alice did not fall out of her cart, and making sure that the omnivorous Plato did not extend his browsing exercises to the family furniture. He was still brooding about the way in which he had been received in Chamboro, where not an advance had been made to him, and not a subject had paid fealty to him. And he could have told them more about shiners and mud-cat and sunfish than could all the village Solomons put together. He, the one-time boy king of Cowansburg, could have shown them how to snare more bull-frogs than Chamboro ever dreamed of. He could have taught them more about bird-nesting, and more about twitch-ups and dead-falls and box-traps and fishing-otters, than could the oldest naturalist on the river.
MAROONED ON THE TOP OF HER CHAIN-PUMP
And perhaps it would be as well to take a second and longer look at Lonely O'Malley, as he prowls so moodily about between those imprisoning home fences.
Beyond a trick of nervously hunching up one shoulder, of wriggling his body when talking, and squinting at people, especially his elders, he is, after all, only a good deal of the every-day, ubiquitous, dream-weaving, nondescript and much misunderstood creature known as Boy. It was only in the merest accidentals, such as being powder-marked on the right cheek-bone, that he differed from others of his kind.
The first thing one would be sure to notice about Lonely was a nebulous cloud of freckles, as brown as the spots on a turkey egg, bridging his rather crooked little nose. His thin young face was always hungry-looking, wearing obviously the hunger of the soul and not that of the body, since Lonely, even after his seventh apple turn-over, still bore his wistful look of want. His hair was a dingy reddish-brown, thick and matted, sprouting waywardly up through the rents in his tattered old skull-cap, giving every evidence of that time-honored home-treatment, demanding only a bowl and a pair of scissors—though later in the summer, it must be confessed, a friendly groom at the livery-stable put this crude method to shame by brief yet transforming applications of the horse-clippers.
From under Lonely's bushy little russet eyebrows looked out a pair of eyes which had no right to be there; for they were, in truth, the eyes of a woman,—unfathomable, lustrous, quick-changing, restlessly meditative eyes,—the sort of eyes, for all the nervous squint that often came into them, that made tender-hearted women vaguely wish, when they chanced to catch sight of Lonely in a moment of fleeting and innocent repose, that they might some day be his Sunday-school teacher and talk to him about his soul. They were eyes that made the hearts of more elderly maiden ladies, when not indignantly driving their predaceous owner out of a strawberry patch, wish just as incongruously that they could some day be a mother to Lonely, and at the same time speculate as to how nice he would be with a well-washed face, or in a clean and respectably starched roundabout.
If, alas! those undiscerning and deluded ladies had let their gaze fall a little lower and studied Lonely's most significant and eloquent members, his sinewy and scrawny young legs, they might have hesitated for a moment or two. For those gently concave, bandy legs of Lonely's veritably seemed built for shinning up apple-trees, for scaling orchard fences, for worming under wood-sheds and careering through melon-patches, for that airy "frog-motion" which is the pride of all youthful swimmers, and, finally, for the general destruction of those garments which are the despair of all experienced mothers.
His gnarled and crooked little fingers, too, were equally expressive, cut and scarred and marked as they were, embellished with a supply of warts which had so far defied every art of conjuration, every spell and incantation for their removal, from burying beefsteak under a full moon to assiduous anointment with "witch-oil."
When idle, Lonely had the habit of twitching these fingers restlessly (nervous women he could always put to rout by merely working his double-jointed thumbs). Likewise, he had the somewhat irritating habit of knocking his heels together. At such times he usually fell to whistling, always out of time and out of tune,[1] with one shoulder hunched ominously up and his bushy russet eyebrows drawn darkly down. He was, in fact, precisely the sort of boy you would suspect if you chanced to find your Crawford's Early ravaged of its last peach, or if your English setter happened to be discovered under the back piazza with a watering-can tied to his tail.
Yet the next day, as you glanced into Lonely's starry and hungry-looking eyes, you might be nervously wondering if, after all, he really got enough to eat at home. Or you might surprise yourself by solemnly asking his advice about mole-traps and the best way of getting rid of the striped cucumber-bug.
So to the bitter end, you see, Lonely O'Malley must remain a very incongruous muddle-up, a contradictory, evasive, ordinary, mortal boy,—a little more sinewy about the shoulders, a little wilder and less learnedly ignorant, a little more artful and inventive, than may have been many of his kind; but still made up of that ancient and eternal mixture of good and bad which makes one boy so like another.
Sorrow could not lie long on that restless, hunched-up shoulder of Lonely's; and as his first long Saturday morning in Chamboro wore away, his earlier sense of misery went with it. He had just gone through his complete repertoire of animal sounds, a performance of untiring delight to the gurgling Alaska Alice, when he became suddenly aware of an uninvited auditor in a red dress. This auditor took the form of a pair of very yellow braids, a pair of very pink cheeks, and a pair of very blue eyes peering in at him through the fence-pickets.
At these he promptly turned, and made a face—an indescribable contortion of the features, in which he expressed all his old-time, unutterable, and implacable contempt for the softer sex.
At that the little girl with the yellow braids bobbed down her head and drew back, abashed. Recovering herself, she continued on her journey erratically down the sidewalk, her otherwise strange hesitations and gyrations being due to a supreme effort to avoid each and every crevice, for, she artlessly sang to herself as she went:
Step on a crack—
Break your mother's back!
As she passed in front of the bake-shop she came to a stop, and gazed pensively up at the iron railing which guarded the little show-window. Her thoughts were traveling back to the winter day when, in ecstatic contemplation of the sweets within, she had absent-mindedly essayed to suck the frosty iron—and had straightway stuck to it.
Already she saw signs of a new stock for that old, alluring window. And she was a young lady of much forethought. So she decided to forgive the new baker's son.
Lonely himself grew tired of the silence and the quietness. He glanced furtively up the street after the little girl with the yellow braids. She was returning now, with slow and measured tread, her hands crossed before her, her head bowed with grief She paid no attention to Lonely, as she passed solemnly by.
"What are y' playin'?" asked the New Boy, tentatively.
"Widow," answered the girl with the yellow braids.
"Widow—what 's that?"
"My husband just died; I 'm in mournin' for him!" she explained sadly, with a bit of a lisp as she spoke.
"H'h!" scoffed Lonely; "how can you be in mournin', in a red dress?"
Here was a stickler, indeed. But the young widow was resourceful.
"Oh, well, my husband died o' scarlet fever!" she said, triumphantly. Then she climbed up on the footboard and leaned in over the fence. There she stood and gazed at Plato with well-meant but unfortunate solicitude.
"Don't you ever feed him things?" she inquired softly.
Lonely glared at his questioner, fiercely statuesque. Plato changed legs, and rested on another three.
ARE N'T YOU THE NEW BAKER'S LITTLE BOY?
"Oh, and you 've got a baby!" cried the little girl.
"She ain't mine!" explained Lonely, hastily.
"But is n't she a darling?" The little girl in red had been sizing up the bake-shop window.
"She ain't much!" deprecated Lonely, melting a little. There was a moment's silence.
"Are n't you the new baker's little boy?" she next demanded, looking at him with wide-open eyes. Her attitude was plainly conciliating, her tone was companionable, and after all, decided Lonely, a girl was at least something to talk to.
"Yep!" he answered, carelessly slinging a stone at a telephone pole, neatly smashing the insulating glass, and allowing the "little boy" to pass.
"We 've had the scarletina in our house!" she said proudly, as she opened the gate and crept in. "That 's why all my dolls is naked."
"They was boiled, so people can't catch it off 'em," she explained, in answer to Lonely's puzzled frown.
"What 's your name?" demanded Lonely. She told him that it was Annie Eliza Gubtill.
"What 's yours?"
"Just Lonely—Lonely O'Malley!" He tried to say it airily and off-hand, but his face grew hot over the demeaning and unusual necessity of explaining who he was—he, once the best-known boy in all Cowansburg. But Cowansburg, at that moment, seemed very far away.
"Lonely! What a funny name!" avowed Annie Eliza. "Was you called that because no one would ever come in an' play with you?"
"Huh?" snorted Lonely. "Not much, I guess!"
"Then how did you ever get such a funny name?"
"It ain't so funny, when you get used to it; it 's just a name—same as yours or anybody else's!"
"I s'pose so," soliloquized Annie Eliza. She was persistent, however.
"But were n't you lonely, or something, when they called you that?"
"Naw!" said the boy, in disgust.
Then he hunched a shoulder up and squinted a little—always an ominous sign to those who knew him.
"I was born twins, at first," he explained feelingly. "But the other one of us, he up an' died, an' left me all alone!"
Annie Eliza's face twisted, and she showed signs of impending tears, at this sad confession.
"Then the docter, he wrapped me up in a blanket, and he brung me over to maw, an' he put me in the bed next to her, an' he says, 'This lonely little fellow, you 'll have him to look after.' An' maw, she said, 'Poor, lonely little fellow.' An' she says it kind o' stuck, that word, and so she just called me Lonely,[2] right along."
Annie Eliza wiped her eyes, and Lonely, the artist, gloried in his work, seeing it was good. Then he wakened, as from a dream, and testily demanded of himself just why he had stooped to such easy triumphs.
"Can you come an' play with Lionel Clarence and me, sometimes?" Annie Eliza was asking him.
"Mebbe," he sourly conceded.
An awkward silence fell over the two new friends.
"Do you want to see my cut?" the girl finally asked him. This was the supreme mark of her good will.
He admired it as he ought. He was on the point of exhibiting to her his double-jointed thumbs, an exhibition for which of old he had invariably demanded twenty pins, when he remembered himself, and strove desperately to rise above any such ingratiating advances—humbled, broken, and desolate as he was. He asked neither the pity nor the friendship of women folks. And he threw a vindictive pebble or two at Plato, each missile smiting so soundly on his ribs that Annie Eliza was moved to ejaculate an almost tearful "Oh!"
"The poor thing!" she murmured, forgetfully.
"He ain't so poor!" maintained Lonely. "That's his way—he's one of the bony kind!"
"Oh, I see!" said Annie Eliza. A little sigh of sympathy escaped her, however, as she looked at Plato still again.
"But why don't you have a nicer lookin' horse?" she persisted.
Then came another of Lonely's dangerous moments. He saw red, and murdered Truth. That Plato had been purchased for fourteen dollars on the market square of Cowansburg, and had been looked upon, first as an instrument of the intended migration, and later as a docile and patient steed for the bake-shop delivery wagon, no longer troubled Lonely.
"Why," he spluttered, "that horse took Pop over the White Pass!"
"Ginger-pop?" asked Annie Eliza, brightening.
"No, Pop,—the old man! An' horses was fallin' dead all around, but Plato, he kept right on, till he got over that White Pass!"
"Where 's the White Pass?"
"Why, up in the Klondike somewheres, where Pop made his fortune. Plato there was Pop's best friend all through that trip, an' showed him the way out of a blizzard once, an' another time came an' found him when he was lost!"
"Goodness!" exclaimed Annie Eliza.
"An'—an' Pop says he 's just like a brother to him, even though he ain't very showy-lookin'. Gee-whittaker!—he would n't sell Plato for all Chamboro!"
"Goodness me! that 's different, is n't it?" sdd Annie Eliza. "He does n't really look so ver-r-ry thin, especially when you see him from the front!"
HE DOES N'T REALLY LOOK SO VER-R-RY THIN!
And so they talked on until, from a near-by yellow house behind the lilac-hedge, Annie Eliza's mother called her to dinner. That young lady took her departure reluctantly, saying that she would be back again, and inquiring if Lonely would like to help her make tatting or come with her and the dolls, sometime, and play in the graveyard.
Lonely's sudden answer, which was not a polite one, somewhat speeded Annie Eliza in her departure. Even after she had disappeared, the New Boy gazed down with moody and far-away eyes at the baby, and without even noting the fact, saw that young lady gleefully and doggedly consume a woolly caterpillar and several handfuls of mud from the remnants of a flower-bed.
Then he made his escape to the back of the stable, where he sought consolation in much chair-rattan smoke, and thought of the old Cowansburg gang, and from time to time wished that he were dead.
Much earlier than Lonely had looked for, however, he was destined to meet with a companion of his own sex, if not altogether of his own bent and disposition. This friend was Lionel Clarence Sampson; the Preacher's son, who lived not half a block away from the little bake-shop.
Gilead was the cheery but unwelcome emissary that brought about the unexpected meeting. For Gilead, having in an unguarded moment made his escape, proceeded leisurely to the little Town Park lying between the river and Watterson's Creek. There he devoured all of the municipal flower-bed and then most of the park shrubs, and was enjoying the bark from a few of the younger shade-trees when discovered by old Jenkins, the gardener, who drove him ignominiously forth with a spade and much bad language.
Wandering fretfully homeward, Gilead lingered a moment or two in the Sampsons' side yard, over a tempting row of geraniums, set out but a week before by the Preacher's wife. This repast eventually led him to the door of the summer kitchen, where sat Mrs. Sampson herself and a Swedish servant-girl, patiently and contentedly stoning a huge crock of raisins, for her next Christmas pudding, that excellent housekeeper always priding herself on the fact that her puddings of this nature should stand and ripen for at least six months.
Gilead, with a light and confident bound, leaped inside the summer kitchen. At this unlooked-for apparition the Swedish girl fled, screaming lustily. A moment later, she was followed, quite briskly, by the more portly Mrs. Sampson.
Once behind the screen-door of the inner kitchen, the two women exhausted every expedient to shoo or drive Gilead away.
Gilead, indeed, made himself quite at home, and discovering the large crock of carefully stoned raisins, slowly, contentedly, and deliberately made away with them, under the rueful eyes of Lionel, his mother, and the Swedish housemaid.
In despair, they at last sent in word to the Reverend James Sampson, busily preparing his sermon in the quietness of his study. That gentleman, noting the devastation which had been wrought, decided to take no half measures. Securing the horse-whip from the driving-shed, he boldly opened the screen-door into the kitchen, and, facing the unperturbed Gilead, vigorously and heatedly chastised the intruder on his hairy back.
It was not until an accidental stroke caught Gilead on the tender tip of the nose that the character of the action altered. Then the intruder turned sharply, and followed Lionel's father through the screen-door into the kitchen, 
ONCE WORE UP THE BACK STAIRS
Then, in an inspired moment, Lena, the Swedish girl, slammed the door between her master, and his pursuer. And there was Gilead, safe and sound, a prisoner in the Preacher's dining-room, where, recovering his composure, he made away with the table-fern and was leisurely nibbling at Mrs. Sampson's window plants, when Lionel Clarence was hurriedly dispatched for the new O'Malley boy, who, it was claimed, was the rightful owner of the trespasser.
Lonely appeared, solemn-eyed, pensive-looking, with one shoulder hunched up. He led Gilead ingloriously forth by means of the chin-whisker, and in the back yard belabored him—where the hair was long and thick—until even the Preacher turned away and commiseratively demanded that Lonely forbear.
Indeed, Mrs. Sampson presented the startled and wondering New Boy with a huge slice of pound-cake for his bravery, and hoped that he would come regularly to Sunday-school, and always be kind to dumb animals, and not fight with Lionel Clarence, as did the other boys. And Lonely gazed at Lionel Clarence, and said he guessed there would n't be any fighting between them—for Lonely had his tribal pride as to whom he chose for his enemies.
Yet it was out of this untoward incident that sprang the immediate if incongruous friendship between Lonely and the Preacher's son. That very afternoon they met in secret, and being joined later by Annie Eliza and her dolls, they performed a long and elaborate funeral service over the Gubtills' dead canary. Then, touched with a common infection of grief, Lonely assisted in the disinterring of the remains, and was meekly luxuriating in the sorrow consequent upon a second and even more magnificent burial service, when Chamboro's young band of adventurers, drifting somewhat disconsolately and wearily homeward from their truant day on the river, lined quietly up at the fence, and took in the mourning group with the silence of unspeakable contempt.
Lonely, looking up and finding himself discovered in the midst of an eloquent funereal prayer, flushed hot and cold with a sudden inward rage—a rage more at himself than at his scoffing enemies.
"Makin' mud-pies?" mildly asked Redney McWilliams. There was something maddening in the soft and oily insolence of such a question. Lonely got up from his funeral hands-and-knees position.
"Why, he ain't got curls like the other two!" said one of the tormentors, in mock wonder.
Lonely walked slowly toward the fence, his face white, his jaws set, bristling like an angry terrier.
"I can lick you, you saphead!" he cried shrilly, as he shook his fist in the face of Piggie Brennan, the heaviest of the leering band. "I can lick you, d' you hear! I can lick any blamed one o' you."
A chorus of youthful laughter went up at this ineffectual and frenzied sally.
"Who 's fightin' with females?" inquired Pud Jones.
Then some one tossed a dead sunfish neatly against the starched white blouse of the Preacher's son.
Piggie Brennan, finding a loose picket on the fence, wrenched it off, and deftly and contemptuously flung it for Lonely's shins. Lonely jumped and missed the blow. The laughing band fell back, and went listlessly and carelessly on its way. He was not even worth fighting with!
"Don't you come around me again until you get that hair o' yours cut off! D' you hear me?" Lonely suddenly blazed out at the startled and altogether innocent Preacher's son, in an inconsequential rage that was as unlooked for as it was passionate. And he contemptuously kicked over tombstone, burial casket, and canary hearse, and strode away. - The River of Youth
From all the golden hills of dream,
Dew-cool and rainbow kissed,
It twines and glides, a silver stream,
Through valleys hung with mist,
Down past Enchanted Woods to where
Romance walks ever young,
Where Kings ride forth to take the air
On steeds with velvet hung,—
Where secret stairways tempt the bold,
Where Pirate Caves abound,
And many a chest of Spanish gold
May solemnly be found!
Through magic years it twines and creeps,
Past Towers of peacock blue,
Where still some ancient Princess sleeps,
And dreams come always true!
Then gleam by gleam the light goes out,
Then darkened, grief by grief,
It sighs into our Sea of Doubt,
And Manhood's Unbelief!}}
- ↑ Lonely was, in fact, quite tone-deaf. Yet just how blind he was to this defect may be seen from the fact that when the Cowansburg School began practicing for the annual Christmas Cantata, Lonely boldly volunteered as one of the soprano voices. He escaped detection by simply mouthing, and making no sound, when the teacher chanced to stand at his end of the singing line. One day, however, carried away by the joyous rapture of the music, Lonely absent-mindedly poured out his cacophonous young soul, off key and out of tune, to a bewildered and admiring class. The teacher listened, illuminated, and Lonely was cruelly and peremptorily weeded out and ejected—to his lasting shame and sorrow!
- ↑ This touching and fanciful explanation, I regret to say, is and always was quite destitute of historical foundation, notwithstanding the persistence and feeling with which Lonely repeated it when occasion demanded. "Lonely," indeed, was a boyhood corruption of his mother's patronymic, "Lomely,"—a corruption, however, which had clung and was to cling to Master O'Malley for many years.