The Man Who Loved Children (33 page)

“Oo-hoo-hoo-hoo,” cried Evie in a little emotional convulsion.

“Tell another story, not creepy,” said Saul promptly, “so Evie won’t get a dream.”

They all laughed and, more sleepily, more relaxed, slid into the bedclothes.

“The golden box with the glass key,” Louie announced. “Oh, goodness I Oh, I’ve got to go. Go to bed. I forgot to give Mother the letter. There’s a registered letter from Malaya.”

She rushed to her schoolbag with Ernie at her heels and drew out from a slot between books a long, much-stamped, blue-penciled letter addressed to Mrs. Samual C. Pollit. With this she ran downstairs, with Henny calling out,

“What’s happened now: is the house on fire? At least we’d get warm,” while Hazel continued her yarn, “And because Barry wouldn’t marry her she drank iodine and they gave her white of eggs, but she was in a state—what have you got there, Louisa?”

“A letter from Daddy, Mother!” called Ernie.

“Give that to me! Where did you get it?” Henny rose from her seat, sliding her work onto the floor. “Where did you get it? Why did you hide it from me?”

“The postman brought it and I put it in my bag to keep it safe and forgot it—”

The children had tumbled downstairs again and were gathering like soft-footed, eel-haired ghosts round the fire.

“Go upstairs and get into bed,” called Henny harshly. “You’ll hear what you have to hear in the morning.” The children trailed back again regretfully, calling questions down to her all the way up.

“This is a most important letter, this is the letter I have been sitting up for to put me out of all my misery,” said Henny stormily to Louie, “and you go and hide it; what did you do it for? Are you a devil or a girl? Here I have been suffering and pricking my fingers and going through agony for hours waiting for this letter and wondering what on earth had happened. Do you like to see me suffer? Do you do it purposely? You great, woodenheaded idiot: oh, go up to bed and take that great moon-face out of my sight, and stop your sniveling.”

“Is it from Daddy, Mother?” Louie could not resist asking.

“Of course, don’t be an idiot. Go up to bed quickly before I hit you. When I think of the hours of agony I put in because you were too lazy and stupid to give me my letter, I want to beat you till I fall down. Oh, stop that bawling. Good night, good night.”

Louie, on the stairs, heard her say, “He sent money: look—five hundred dollars. Now, thank God, the children can eat.”

“You’d better give it to me,” Hazel said grimly. “I don’t understand how you get into such a hole.”

“There’s a lot you don’t understand!”

Louie flushed with joy. The twins were reciting,

I went up one pair of stairs
(Just like me!)

I went up two pair of stairs
(Just like me!)

I opened the door
(Just like me!)

And looked out the window
(Just like me!)

And there I saw a donkey
(Just like me!)

Louie smiled to herself and went to stand in their doorway. Said she,

Will you kindly stop your hollers?

Daddy sent five hundred dollars!

Pandemonium broke out of bed and the anvil chorus standing at the head of the stairs shrieked, “Mummy, did Daddy send five hundred dollars?”

Henny rushed to the foot of the stairs, her old red dressing gown flying from her in the black of the hallway.

“Louisa, mind your own business! Kids, go to bed, and if one of you mentions it, I’ll beat you till I can’t stand up! What will I do with that child?” she moaned, going back into the warm room.

“Now we can get the new tubes for the radio,” Ernie whispered to Louie.

“Hooray, hooray, hooray!” Evie capered in a slipper dance. But Louie succeeded in getting them all to bed in a few minutes. It was not long before Tommy was steaming away in sleep, and the twins, with their moon complexions, were glimmering quietly on their pillows, and Evie, with hair wild and clenched dark face, was tossing in sleep too; but Ernie was awake, calculating what they could get tomorrow; and as for Louie, in a few minutes she had entirely forgotten the five hundred dollars and, lying on her back, was halfway to sleep, thinking dizzily,

“I thought it was a horseman and it’s only the blood beating through my temples when I lie down: it was a horseman, riding up and down and—wampum, purple strings of shells, fimbriate horsemane shell and the ctenidium deep, deep down in this dusty—red—” She woke up with a start, trying to remember the beautiful thoughts she had been having; and tried to thread back, but could not. She fell asleep really and woke up shrieking, dreaming another old nightmare that she often tried to describe to them, “Hard-soft, hard-soft,” a dream without sight or name, which her hands dreamed by themselves, swelling and shriveling, hard-soft. She turned on her side, and the friendly horseman (she still thought of him riding, though he was now only a phantom) lulled her to sleep with his
ker-porrop!

It was not raining, but it should have rained. No fresh breeze had cleared away the exhalations since the evening before, and the air stuck to them like a wet rag. There were bucketfuls of water hanging in the air over their heads. Sam, towhead bare, panama in hand, all in crumpled white, with his Indian secretary, a Madrasi Kerani, trotting, walking hurriedly a step in the rear, went pushing his way along the busy five o’clock street. The immense open gutters, pitfalls, were spanned every few feet by large flagstones, and Sam and Naden had to keep dodging over these into the open street to avoid crushes and social affairs on the pavement—a family with its mattresses and rags preparing to sleep out during the steaming night, a wedding feast, with its tables and benches and hundred guests taking up several frontages, the thirteen-year-old bridegroom bedizened and bedaubed, in white cap, posing with father and uncles for his photograph. All the traffic of the pavement as well as Sam and Naden had to serpentine around these knots. Chinese lanterns and naked bulbs were strung across the pavement, and open flares lighted the tables. A Chinese peddler with a small basket was selling noisemakers, a whirring whistle very loud and highly painted, and red, white, and blue trumpets, but he could hardly make himself heard, even though Sam and Naden were thrusting along right beside him. A peddler somewhere in the throng was shouting “choklets-choklets,” but all they saw were two sandaled feet sticking out of a globular swarm of market baskets of all sorts—no head was visible, nor a body, but through the rattan and pandanus solar system came the voice.

Sam was head and shoulders above most of the people. Not so Naden, his clerk, the Indian. Here and there a giant Sikh policeman, with bearded face and turban on his uncut hair, dominated the throng of torn, patched, ragged, turbaned, and capped heads. Many of these heads had no business whatever, but had so lounged and mournfully, vacantly gazed from morning to night, for many months, unemployed and disorganized, hopeless and without any shelter save those of a few charities, sleeping in filth and eating garbage. The employed were scarcely better off; the smallest frontages, back rooms, passageways, holes in the wall, served for shops, businesses, and schools; and a good many businessmen kept their merchandise in their cap, pocket, lap, in the sole of their shoe or the palm of their hand. Some used the pavement, with ready-cooked food spread out before them; there were public scribes and pavement shoemakers. It was a raving, wild, thirsting, vain, money-loving, patriotic city, its own pride, the gateway of the East to the West, and the West to the East, the key of the Golden Chersonese.

“And all of these,” shouted Sam, “squashed flat as pancakes under the well-oiled, deep-wrinkled, naked-naveled bellies of yellow Greed: running on the futile messages of Greed and his two secretaries of the Treasury, British Government and the Chinese Chamber of Commerce!”

“I beg pardon, sah,” shouted Naden.

“Mammon,” shouted Sam, “Mammon, Naden, Greed, Briton and the Yellow Peril on top of the heap!”

“Yessah.”

“That’s a bit of irony,” yelled Sam, putting his hand between his mouth and his secretary’s ear: “he can’t make himself heard to sell his noisemakers.”

Naden looked swiftly at the merchant, “Those are trash, tuan: I should not buy them.”

“I told you not to call me ‘tuan,’ Naden.”

“Yessah.” Naden smiled and bowed slightly, “You see, I can’t help myself, and I assure you, sah, it is the regular thing. My wife, sah, would be very, very much ashamed if she did not hear that: she would be afraid I should lose my job.”

Sam laughed, “You have a very young wife, you must teach her differently. Tell her there is no difference between you and me, or you and the moneylenders, or you and the men of money.”

Naden, not hearing very well, bowed slightly again, “Yessah! Only two streets more, please,” he pointed. “You will not mind if my friends are there,” he asked in the tone of one repeating a question.

“Your friends are my friends, only they probably like you better,” said Sam.

The thick, moist Singapore night closed round them. In many parts it seemed to Sam that he alone could be seen amongst those dark myriads, thick as migrant birds twittering and jostling on a cornice, struggling for a foothold in this notch of the universe. Here and there the gleams of eyes and teeth could be seen, lemon faces, hadji caps, laundered coats, pale garments. As they turned out of the thoroughfare, they jostled some stretcher-bearers who were jog-trotting along with a corpse announced by bells. Merchants of live birds and lizards, merchants of fishballs and sweetmeats they left behind them, as well as the ordinary foot passengers, and a little surge of trouble that was merely a native policeman arresting someone suspected of murder.

“Good heavens, Naden,” exclaimed Sam indignantly, “how can they tell one dark face from another in this light?”

“Ofttimes they can’t,” said Naden, “but they arrest someone. Someone they know. It is fair enough. It is certain he has already committed a murder. They would all murder if they got a chance.”

“They’re your people!” cried Sam.

“No, tuan, they are not,” said Naden, “we have passed through a lot of scum. I am a government servant, however humble.”

But Sam misunderstood the ambitious fellow entirely and considered him abject. “If that is the justice of Government,” said Sam, “would you not be better without it?”

“No, tuan.”

“Do you believe in masters’ justice, imperialist justice?”

“You have great experience, sah: you have seen more than me.

“No, Naden, do not overrate me. I am nobody. If I seem strange to you, it is because I am not a socialist, as Colonel Willets, my boss, was once (though now, you may be sure, he is for millionaires and not the millions), nor a Laborite, nor a Democrat, nor any party man, but I look forward to the Union of Democratic Republics of the World, the United States of Mankind. Look at this poor old world as we see it today—you may look at home, Abishegenaden, for all Europe, Asia; and the Pacific World is no better nor wiser; the men of money, the bankers, the evil ones have been coming together and torturing this poor old world for a long time now, Naden. We must get rid of them, by wisdom, by spreading the light amongst these dark, dark masses. You are dark, Naden, but you are light: you are an educated man. You, too, though you are poor, must think you are rich, because you have millions—behind you! Millions of poor men who would be your brothers.”

“You are a very good man,” said Naden. They had now turned into the quiet streets of dwelling houses, with trees, and an occasional car, where the better-paid government servants and junior clerks lived. It was a brilliant, black tropical night, swimming with powerful scents landwards and with vapors skywards. There was still a restlessness of birds in all the trees, and insects flew round the lamps.

“Look at my poor Lai Wan Hoe in shackles because he owes money to a Sikh moneylender,” mourned Sam. “That is terrible, Naden. I am afraid some harm will come to my wonderful Wan

Hoe, all because of extravagance, and the awful power of money, like a great hairy foul spider with a million eyes, as this night, sucking the blood of us poor humans. Yes, it sucks the life from the rich too, but they can stand it.” He laughed heartily into Naden’s eyes.

Naden laughed, but could not help remarking, “He is a ne’er-do-well, I fear, sah, speaking privately, sah.”

“And that wedding feast, Naden,” Sam caught him up warmly, “in the open tumult, with its gay little bridegroom sitting on his father’s shoulders, and the admiring relations, the cheerful drinks—little as I approve of them!—the cakes and candies, Naden; that was a fine sight, a human sight, wasn’t it?”

“Yes it was, sah!”

“It was for that that Wan Hoe got himself indebted, friend: because his brother is away in China, and he must marry his brothers and sisters and keep his old father and bury his mother. It was for pure goodness of heart and kindness and duty that he got himself indebted; perhaps they will throw him into prison-all for being profuse with the milk of human kindness. Is that bad?”

“One is obliged to consider ways and means,” said Naden, unshaken. “Who goes to the moneylender, indebts his grandchildren.”

Naden had been melting and glinting through his glasses, smiling, and now bowed Sam to a little house behind a lush garden. There were lights in the house which glowed through glassless windows. In that climate windows would collect mildew.

“This way,” said Naden, bursting with pride and joy; and with great dignity, he stepped into the square sitting room, where a number of people were sitting and standing, and he said,

“Here is Special Field Commissioner Samuel Pollit, my most honored chief.”

Sam swam up to the surface of the river of moisture that was drowning, suffocating him, and looking at all these happy or inquisitive dark faces, flashed smiles at them, talked to them all, felt the great urge of love of man rise up in his throat. What a gift he had been given, he thought, to love and understand so many races of man!—and why? His secret was simple. They were all alike: they all longed for love and understanding.