His Heart’s Desire

         No one knew the secret ambition which Andy Benton cherished in his inmost heart. He had never even breathed it to the beautiful lady whom he had chosen as his love. She worked in a factory and had a gorgeous hat with plumes on it, and she understood everything. But for all this, he had never confided in her. Sometimes at night he lay awake and thought it over, and wondered how it might come about that he could have his heart’s desire, but he always fell asleep before any successful solution could be made of the problem, and the morning found him as far from the goal as ever. 

         Had Andy told any one or even whispered his secret longing it might have been granted; but Andy was a boy, and boys don’t tell their hearts out, and, furthermore, he was ashamed to confess his weakness for the world to laugh at, and gibe and jeer at him, for Andy wanted a doll.

         He was no weak, puny boy; he was round and sturdy and hard-fisted, and he was 5 years old, and had already learned to bully his small sister and to gaze with envious eyes at Dobson and Abe Powers as they stood on the sidewalk smoking cigarettes and using picturesque and ornate language when occasion presented itself. Andy deemed that day a red-letter one when a member of ‘de gang’ noticed him, even though it be but a careless ‘Hullo, kid!’ Then would Andy swell his little chest and strut and answer with a comical imitation of the larger boy’s manner, and he would go to the small sister and push her in token of his overweening joy.

         He could fight, too. Willie Brown had taught him how to put up his fists and to make passes and feints, and one day he had repaid Willie for his kindness by giving him a pretty fair imitation of a black eye.

         Still Andy wanted a doll. Sissy wanted one, too, but she had one. Somewhere out of the odds and ends that were pushed into the dark corners of their room Andy had gathered together material and fashioned a queer semblance of a baby, under pretense of gratifying her wishes. Its eyes were buttons and its mouth the sprig of the bit of calico which formed its head. None of the arms and legs matched, but Sissy was content and so was Andy. With the excuse of showing her how to handle the baby doll he held it and crowed over it and loved it, while Sissy looked on and clapped her hands. Those were happy moments, cuddled up close to Sissy in a corner of their room, furtively watching his mother out of one eye as she bent over her tub, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing and wringing her water-soaked arms out of the suds long enough to put back a wisp of dingy hair that ever and anon strayed over her forehead.

         “When I git to be a man,” he whispered to Sissy one day, “I’m gointer buy you a big, big doll.”

         Sissy clapped her hands and whispered a rapturous “yeth” back. Andy did not feel it necessary to tell her that the big, big doll would, like the little rag one, be as much for his pleasure as for her own.

         “She’s gointer to have blue eyes and pretty hair, an’—an’—she’ll walk an’ talk,” pursued Andy. 

         “Yeth, ’deed,” murmured Sissy. 

         “An’—an’—she’ll have on a blue silk dress an’ we’ll have to put her to bed.”

         “Um,” groaned Sissy; “wisht you wuz a man.”

         “Nev’ min’, Sissy, you’ll have a doll some time.”

         But in his heart of hearts he was consoling Andy and bidding him wait until a more auspicious time.

         Then a great joy came into his life, and it seemed that the doll would for the nonce be forgotten. Mrs. Benton had been persuaded, no one knew how, for she was a most unpersuadable person, to allow Andy to go to the kindergarten of the Pure in Heart. Mrs. Benton was a woman who scorned innovations; she deemed them unworthy and unnecessary. She had never been led to see the wisdom of wringers and washing machines, although her daily bread came from bending over the tubs in her one little dark back room. The kindergarten she had sternly denounced as a “mess,” invented merely to make children more troublesome. Besides, like many others, she still resented the presence of the mission in ’Steenth Street. She had never got over the feeling of invasion and the grim suspicion of being spied upon for the opportunity of having a tract or a temperance lecture thrust upon her. 

         Still Andy came into the kindergarten and brought Sissy with him, and Sissy, true to her maternal instincts, brought the doll with her. Andy found it convenient to keep close to his sister in the classroom. The kindergarten teacher marveled at the love and protecting care of this small boy for his smaller sister. He hovered near her in all the games, and would sit holding her hand and looking as near seraphic as a round-headed, pug-nosed small boy can look. Andy’s hand and Sissy’s met on the pliable yet dirty form of the doll, and they caressed it alternately and stole furtive glances at it, when necessity compelled it to rest in Sissy’s lap.

         The joy, however, was not in the new attendance at the kindergarten, though that in itself was great enough; it was in the concert to be. The Pure in Heart felt that within itself there was material enough to raise funds for its treasury, and so the guiding spirits at the head had decided upon a little entertainment at a hall up in 3d avenue. The programme was left to the kindergarten teacher.

         Andy had a habit of gazing rapturously into the teacher’s eyes and smiling vaguely at his work, until Annie Berkeley, taking pity on him, slipped it under her table and returned it to him completed. This gave him an appearance of great attention, and by reason of it he had been cast for a speaking part. The news crushed him with overwhelming joy, and he hung his head in awful confusion when he was told and gripped Sissy and the doll in a wild agony of fear lest it be not true. The next instant he had let her hand go and had sat up straight. He had put such trivialities aside now. He would be a big boy like Dobson and Jimmy Brown. Since he was about to appear on the public stage it behooved him to put aside such childish things. Still he reached out in the night and clutched the rag doll now and then at the thought of losing her, and then in a sudden revulsion of feeling he hid his face in the bedclothes and kicked Sissy violently until she whimpered a feeble protest.

         That was a great affair, that concert. The little hall, up three flights of stairs, was decorated with flags and many wonderful tissue paper flowers. A stage was at one end, with a most mysterious curtain of green cambric that hitched always at the crucial moment. There were little dressing rooms on each side and many rows of chairs in front. But all of these were lost to Andy’s eyes in the glories of the booths ranged along the lower wall. They were gorgeous, and signs announced that here refreshments and fancy work were to be sold. 

         Mrs. Benton had come early. Andy’s face and hair glistened with a liberal application of soap and towel, and while his chest swelled with pride at the occasion there were funny little sick-like thumps within that he could not understand. Sissy had been for bringing the doll along, but Andy was stern in his forbiddance.

         “Don’t need no dolls,” he had growled to her in their accustomed corner, while the mother was hurrying with her work to be through in time.

         “I wanth my doll,” wailed Sissy.

         Andy’s further remarks were emphatic, but not loquacious. Sissy cried out and he narrowly escaped a spanking. But the doll staid/stald at home.

         The booths in the hall fascinated Andy. There was one where nothing but dolls were sold. Sitting firmly by his mother, before the programme began, he held tight to Sissy’s hand, and resolutely turned his face away from the tempting sight. But turn where he might, there were bisque faces and flaxen curls everywhere. They stared from every wall and peered from behind the green cambric curtain. Surely, surely, one glimpse couldn’t hurt. He jerked his head about suddenly to the shrine, and oh, horrors, there was his flaxen-haired ideal in the blue-silk frock!

         All subsequent events were blanks. He knew nothing save that his doll was there and he could not have her. Dobson and Jimmy Brown and Scrappy Franks came swaggering in and even vouchsafed him a playful tweak of the ear, but they were heroes no longer. The World was going round and round in a whirl of flaxen curls and blue eyes and Andy was heartsick at the certain crushing of all his hopes.

         But there was not much more time to think or grieve. The piano began a tinkly tune and the small folk were marched behind the green curtain. Sissy wept when Andy went from her side. She was too small to appear on the sage, and it was lonely for her in all that crowd without Andy and without the rag doll. She was not used to her mother very much, and a little awed by the unaccustomed sight of a hat where she usually saw a shawl.

         Andy’s role as a star did not begin until at the end of the concert. He was to say four lines in the grand Dewey finale, dressed in a piece of American flag, with a small college cap on his head to represent very young America. After much pleading and expostulating on the part of the teacher Gus Schwartz had consented to stand for Dewey and pose in a heroic attitude at the feet of Miss Liberty. Gus knew that he was losing caste by doing so, but he had a deep motive at the bottom of his consent. At a certain moment Andy was to step forth from the throng of flag-draped children and repeat with a dramatic gesture:

         “Greatest Dewey, thee we sing,

         Admiral, soldier, more than king;

         Let us raise our voices sweet,

         Laying laurels at thy feet.”

Andy’s laurel wreath of green paper was ready, and Andy had stepped forth in response to the teacher’s prompting. He was not timid, not he. His chest heaved with pride again, as with his eyes fixed on Gus Schwartz’ perspiring face, he began:

         “Greatest Dewey, thee we sing—”

Then he stole a furtive glance at the audience, to see how they were appreciating his genius. His mother sat upright in conscious pride of her son.

         “Admiral, soldier, more than king—”

His eyes sought the booth where his flaxen-haired goddess sat. Mrs. Jackson, in charge of the booth, had that particular doll in her hand. There was no gainsaying that. The blue-silk frock was too brilliant to be mistaken. Andy gulped a little and faltered:

         “Let—us—raise—”

Heavens! Mrs. Jackson had handed the doll to a young woman, and there was the flash of coin between them. What did it mean?

         “—our voices—sweet—”

The young woman had turned from the booth with the doll in her arms. She was going away. His goddess was sold. He forgot everything—Dewey, his lines, the crowd, all. With one agonized cry he threw the laurel wreath at the feet of the hero and sobbed aloud:

         “My doll, my doll: she’s tooked my doll!”

There were explanations after the green cambric curtain had hitched its way slowly over the broken tableau. The kindergarten teacher was provoked, for she herself had written the Dewey extravaganza, and it was the piece de resistance of the evening. But Mrs. Morton listened with a twinkle in her eyes to Andy’s sobbing explanations.

         “It was de blue silk doll; I wanted it—an’—an’ de lady, she tooked it.”

         “Are you sure it’s gone?” inquired Mrs. Morton.

         “I mean—I mean—” said Andy, straightening up in an instant, “I mean I wanted it for Sissy.” 

         There were games and plays and ice cream for the children afterward, and a good time generally to be had. But Andy sat still and miserable by his mother, gripping Sissy’s hand in a very agony of shame and remorse and disappointment. His heart’s desire had been found only to be lost, his career as an actor ruined at its outset. It was sickening. 

         Mrs. Morton was coming toward him with something in her arms. He did not look up; he was too ashamed, bruised and broken to care to look any one in the face again. She stopped and held out something to him and he suddenly realized that she was handing him his heart’s desire.

         “A present from a friend of yours, Andy,” she said, gently.

         He grabbed the doll wildly, hardly realizing it. It could not be true; it could not be for him. His hand wandered over the soft silk of its frock, and the flaxen splendor of its hair. He hugged it up tight in his arms and cooed to it softly. Then he looked up to see Mrs. Morton’s quizzical face bent upon him, and his dignity returned.

         “I wanted it fer Sissy,” he said, sheepishly, and reluctantly placed it in his sister’s arms.