DOBBS!

A Thumbnail Sketch of a Martyr.

I AM proud of my acquaintance with Dobbs.

He was a hero, whose deeds were not spread upon any of the books of men, but whose martyrdom I am sure illustrates a glowing page in God’s great life book.

I met him late one night.

The paper, with its burden of news and gossip, had just been put to press, and I strolled out of the hot, clanking room to catch a sight of the cool morning stars, and a whiff of the dew-laden breezes of the dawn.

Silhouetted against the intercepted stars, I saw a tall and striking form, standing like a statue on the corner.

As I came out of the door the figure approached.

“Is this the Herald office, sir?”

“Yes, sir. Can I serve you in any way?”

“Well—” hesitating for an instant, and then speaking boldly and sharply, “I wanted to know if you could not trust me for a few papers?”

“I suppose so; walk in to the light.”

I shall never forget the impression Dobbs made on me that night, as we two walked in from the starlight to the glare of the gas-burners.

A BLAZE OF HONESTY.

As I have said before, he had a tall and striking figure. His face was ugly. He was ungraceful, ragged, and uncouth. Yet there was a splendid glow of honesty that shone from every feature, and challenged your admiration. It was not that cheap honesty that suffuses the face of your average honest man; but a vivid burst of light that, fed by principle, sent its glow from the heart. It was not the 221passive honesty that is the portion of men who have no need to steal, but the triumphant honesty that has grappled with poverty, with disease, with despair, and conquered the whole devil’s brood of temptation; the honesty that has been sorely tried, the honesty of martyrdom; the honesty of heroism. He was the honestest man I ever knew.

THE PATHOS OF INCONGRUITY.

There was one feature of his dress that was pathetic in its uniqueness. He wore a superb swallow-tail dress-coat; a gorgeous coat, which was doubtless christened at some happy wedding (his father’s, I suppose); had walked side by side with dainty laces; been swept through stately quadrilles, pressed upon velvet, and to-night came to me upon a shirtless back, and asked “trust” for a half-dozen newspapers.

It had that seedy, threadbare look which makes broadcloth, after its first season, the most melancholy dress that sombre ingenuity ever invented. It was scrupulously brushed and buttoned close up to the chin, whether to hide the lack of a shirt, I never in the course of six months’ intimate acquaintance had the audacity to inquire. In the sleeve, on which rosy wrists had, in days gone by, laid in loving confidence, a shriveled arm hung loosely, and from its outlet three decrepit fingers driveled. His hat was old, and fell around his ears.

His breeches, of a whitish material, which had the peculiarity of leaving the office perfectly dirty one evening and coming back pure and clean the next morning. What amount of midnight scrubbing this required from my hero Dobbs, I will not attempt to tell. Neither will I guess how he became possessed of that wonderful coat. Whether in the direst days of the poverty which had caught him, his old mother, pitying her boy’s rags, had fished it up from the bottom of a trunk where, with mayhaps an orange-wreath or a bit of white veil, it had lain for years, the last token of a happy bridal night, and, baptizing it with her 222tears, had thrown it around his bare shoulders, I cannot tell. All I know is, that taken in connection with the rest of his attire, it was startling in its contrast; and that I honored the brave dignity with which he buttoned this magnificent coat against his honest rags, and strode out to meet the jeers of the world and work out a living.

FIVE DOLLARS A WEEK.

I knew Dobbs for six months! Day after day I saw him come at three o’clock in the morning. I saw his pale face, and that coat so audacious in its fineness, go to the press-room, fold his papers, and hurry out into the weather. One night I stopped him.

“Dobbs,” says I, “how much do you make a week?”

“I average five dollars and twenty cents, sir. I have twenty-seven regular customers. I get the paper at fifteen cents a week from you, and sell it to them at twenty-five cents. I make two dollars and seventy cents off of them, and then I sell about twenty-five extra papers a morning.”

“What do you do with your money?”

“It takes nearly all of it to support me and mother.”

“You don’t mean to tell me that you and your mother live on five dollars and twenty cents a week?”

“Yes, sir, we do, and pay five dollars a month rent out of that. We live pretty well, too,” with a smile, possibly induced by the vision of some of those luxuries which were included under the head of “living pretty well.” I was crushed!

Five dollars and twenty-five cents a week! The sum which I waste per week upon cigars. The paltry amount which I pay almost any night at the theater. The sum that I spend any night I may chance to strike a half-dozen boon companions. This sum, so contemptible to me—wasted so lightly—I find to be the sum total of the income of a whole family—the whole support of two human beings.

I left Dobbs, humiliated and crushed. I pulled my hat over my eyes, strolled down to Mercer’s, and bought a 223twenty-five cent cigar and sat down to think over my duty in the premises.

... One morning the book-keeper of the Herald, to whom my admiration for Dobbs was well known (I having frequently delivered glowing lectures upon his character from the mailing table to an audience of carriers, clerks, and printers), approached me and with a devilish smack of joy in his voice, says:

“I am afraid your man Dobbs is a fraud. Some time ago he persuaded the clerk to give him credit on papers. He ran up a bill of about seven dollars, and then melted from our view. We have not seen or heard of him since—expect he’s gone to trading with the Constitution now, to bilk them out of a bill.”

This looked bad—but somehow or other I still had a firm faith in my hero. God had written “honesty” too plain in his face for my confidence in him to be shaken. I knew that if he had sinned or deceived, that it was starvation or despair that had driven him to it, and I forgave him even before I knew he was guilty....

About a week after this happened, a bombazine female—one of those melancholy women that occasionally arise like some Banquo’s ghost in my pathway, and always, I scarce know why, put remorse to twitching at my heart-strings—came into my sanctum and asked for me.

“I am the mother,” says she, in a voice which sorrow (or snuff) had filled with tears and quavers—“of Mr. Dobbs, a young man who used to buy papers from you. He left owing you a little, and asked me to see you about it.”

“Left? Where has he gone?”

“To heaven, I hope, sir! He is dead!”

“Dead?”

A CONSCIENTIOUS DEBTOR.

“Yes, sir; my poor boy went last Thursday. He were all I had on earth, but he suffered so it seemed like a mercy 224to let him go. He were worried to the last about a debt he was owin’ of you. He said you had been clever to him, and would think hard ef he didn’t pay you. He wanted you to come and see him so he could explain as how he were took down with the rheumatizum, but that were no one to nuss him while I come for you. He had owin’ to him when he were took, about three dollars, which he have an account of in this little book. He told me with his last breath to cullect this money, and not to use a cent tell I had paid you, and if I didn’t git enough, to turn you over the book. I hev took in one dollar and tirty cents, and”—with the air of one who has fought the good fight—“here it is!” So saying, she ran her hand into a gash in the bombazine, which looked like a grievous wound, and pulled out one of those long cloth purses that always reminded me of the entrails of some unfortunate dead animal, and counted out the money. This she handed me with the book.

I ran my eye over the ruggedly kept accounts and found that each man owed from a dime up to fifty cents.

“Why, madam,” says I, “these accounts are not worth collecting.”

“That’s what he was afraid of,” says she, moving toward a bundle that lay upon the floor; “he told me if you said so, to give you this, and ask you to sell it if you could, and make your money. It’s all he had, sir, or me, either, and he wouldn’t die easy ’til I told him I wud do it! God knows”—and the tears rolled down her thin and hollow cheeks—“God knows it were a struggle to promise to give it up. He wore it, and his father before him. How many times it has covered ’em both! I had hoped to carry it to the end with me, and wrap my old body in it when I died. But it was all we had which was fine, and he wouldn’t rest ’til I told him I wud give it to you. Then he smiled as pert-like as a child, and kissed me, and says, ‘Now I am ready to go!’ He were a good boy, sir, as ever lived”—and she rocked her old body to and fro with her grief. Need I say that she had offered me the old dress-coat? 225That sacred garment, blessed with the memory of her son and his father, and which, rather than give up, she would willingly pluck either of the withered arms that hung at her sides from its socket!

I dropped my eyes to the account book again—for what purpose I am not ashamed that the reader may guess.

In a few moments I spoke:

“Madam, I was mistaken in the value of these accounts; most of the debtors on this book, I find upon a second look, are capitalists. The $11 worth of accounts will sell for $12 anywhere. Your son owed me $7. Leave the book with me; I will pay myself, and here is $5 balance which I hand to you. Your son was a good boy, and I feel honored that I can serve his mother.”

She folded the old coat up and departed.

I kept the book.

It was a simple record of Dobbs’s life. Here ran his expense list—a dreary trickle of “bacon” and “meal” and “rent,” enlivened only once with “sugar”; a saccharine suggestion that I am unable to account for, as it surely did not comport with either of the staples that formed the basis of his life. Probably, on some grand occasion, he and his mother ate it in the lump.

Here were his accounts, of say fifty cents each, on men accounted responsible in the world’s eye—accounts for papers furnished through snow, and sleet, and rain! Some of them showed signs of having been called for a dozen times, being frescoed with such notes as “Call Tuesday,” “Call Wednesday,” “Call Thursday,” etc.

On another page was a pathetic list of delusive liniments and medicines, with which he had attacked his stubborn disease. Such as, “King of Pane—kored a man in Maryetti in 2 days, $1.00”; “Magic Linament—kores in 10 minnits, $2.00 a bottel”; and so on through the whole catalogue of snares which the patent office turns out year after year. Poor fellow! the only relief he got from his racking pains was when God laid his healing hand on him.

I shall keep the book as long as I live.

226In its thumbed and greasy leaves is written the record of a heroism more lofty and a martyrdom more lustrous than ever lit the page of book before or since.

I think I shall have it printed in duplicate, and scattered as leaven throughout the lumpy Sunday-school libraries of the land.

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