The Man Who Loved Children (34 page)

In a bed near the window hole was the timorous black girl, Naden’s young wife, whose new firstborn was a son. The sick woman tried to rise, out of respect and fright, but Sam waved her back to the pillow and bent over the bed, shook the tiny hand of the baby, and kissed its head; and then put into its hand the little necklace of silver shells he had got at a friendly curio dealer’s that day. The mother nearly fainted with emotion. Then Sam, smiling graciously once more, withdrew. He could not speak one word of any of their languages, and he had to go home, change, address a Y.M.C.A. meeting, and then go to an evening at a friend’s house. He suffered without respite from the tropical heat, and his principles prevented him from ever taking the solace or strength of alcoholic drinks. The room of the weatherboard house smelled of mildew and sweat; snakes coiled under the floor, bats lived in the attic, and swallows squeaked in the air or in the eaves, all this without mentioning the thousand kinds of insects, all new and unpleasant, even for a naturalist, to live with.

As he stepped into the street, Sam wiped his neck with his handkerchief already wringing wet, “You have a sweet wife and child, Naden.”

“No, indeed, sah, I am ashamed: they are not worthy of your kind visit. You are so kind, sah.”

Naden, naturally severe, became wet-eyed and soft with emotion. Sam told Naden how lucky he was, again. He himself, Sam, had had the pleasure of being a father, five times already, and imagine the joy when he found that at one birth he had twins! He could never have it enough. Each time, he explained to Naden, he felt an immense pride, a belief in a limitless future, in an unfolding universe, a hope for the proliferating human race in that shadow of dust, and infinitesimal corner of dimensionless space, even so.

“We were monkeys, we were men: what will be men in the time to come, Naden?”

“Gods perhaps, tuan. Who knows?”

“You are right: men like gods. A great white writer wrote a book about that once. But you see, you have the same idea. Ideas unite us, Naden. I am so tired, Naden. I wish I was at home with a new little baby to cheer me up. Soon I will have a seventh child. I myself am a seventh child. You know, Naden, though, I wish I had a black baby too. A tan one, a Chinese one—every kind of baby. I am sorry that the kind of father I can be is limited.” He laughed in a tired way and ran his finger round inside the collar. “Men have thought of schemes for fathering many children,” he continued faintly, still laboring to bring the ideas of the west to the cultured Indian, “for preserving man’s seed in tubes and fertilizing selected mothers.”

“And there would be a marriage ceremony?” inquired Naden politely.

Sam smiled, “I don’t think so! But that is a detail. But now we are very backward. A man who knows he is a good father of good stock may still only have one wife.”

“It is a pity, sah?” inquired Naden politely.

“I am not so sure it is a good thing,” said Sam, shaking his head, but very dubious about his own idea, “either for man or woman, especially for women. Many fine women would make good mothers—” he shook his head.

Naden nodded but he said merely, “Will you work late tonight, sah, when you get back?”

Sam said briefly, “No.” After a moment he laughed generously, “If I had the money, do you know what I should do, Naden? You remember that orphan asylum I addressed the other day? I should adopt them all—well, not all. I should have a little Chinese baby, an Indian one, out of the asylum and take them home with me.”

“And your wife, too, she likes that too, tuan?”

“The women have to wash the diapers: they are not quite so generous as ourselves, it is not mankind, but little Sam and little Naden,” said Sam. “But if one could have many wives, wives too would get the idea of the community perhaps. That would be splendid—godlike, eh, Naden?”

Naden laughed, “You are joking, I know, tuan.”

“Then you do not think that I could manage all those wives?”

“Any man can,” said Naden calmly. “Sah, if you will permit me: you take a great risk going down all those streets at night alone.”

“I was not alone: I was with my fellow men.”

“No, no, Tuan Pollit, you must never do that again. When I saw you last night, my throat jumped into my mouth, my heart, I mean.”

“Man must never be afraid of man, friend.”

Naden looked up at him soberly, “You are very full of ideals, sah: you are a good man. God protects goodness.”

“But I keep my feet on earth, Naden.”

Naden smiled at this. Sam, looking keenly at him, because there was no reply, saw the smile and asked, “Do you think I have feet of clay?”

“That is the only safe thing to have, sah. But, pardon me, you really should not go down so far into the streets at night. Every one sees you. You are so very much the white man with your fine, white hair, too, sah. There are men from the west, dark, with dark hair, but you are everything that is the white man. It is not done, I assure you, sah. Pardon me a thousand times.”

“Ah,” said Sam, “my natural love, Naden, my friend, of the study of mankind, man’s proper study, and my real longing—it is a prodigious yearning, a passion beyond all other passions in me, Naden, for the time of the One Great Nation to come, when we will all be joined, man to man, regardless of color and creed, has given me a prodigious disregard for what is
not done.
What is not done, man can do.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Naden.

“And a wonderful regard for what is done, by the people.”

Naden said nothing.

“And particularly by your own people or peoples, Naden, whom I love, respect, and wish to understand. How otherwise can we teach them the few things we ourselves know in human progress? And we have something to learn from the ancient civilization you represent, the antique cultures of India.”

“We are children, tuan. Thank you very much; we do not know very much; what we had we have forgotten. We are not modern.”

“I wish you could come to my country and visit it: I should like you as my guest,” Sam sighed. “You would see my children, and you would bring your little fellow.”

“You are good, sah: you are as a god.”

“No, Naden: just a man looking for the right and for the happiness of others.”

“Sah, you are as the gods.”

“I do not believe in gods, only in good,” said Sam. “Gods demand sacrifices: good gives to all.”

Naden smiled a little to himself, in his small, dark mustache and felt kindly towards the pale man wrapped in his dreams. He became a little more serious.

“I believe in God. I am sure God is coming soon, and if you are here, you will see him: then you will believe. And he will see you.”

Sam said fretfully, “You know, my friend, I would rather be at home, with my children, and hear the elms and sycamores and the cedars rustle, and hear dear little Mareta, with her thin voice, asking if she will get her wish, and keeping my record of Georgetown birds, than even be near the throne of a God. And if I had to choose between such a Him, and them, I would choose them at once. And so would you, Naden. There never was a father would sacrifice his son to God, as the wicked old story has it: there never was.”

Naden was silent, astonished by this idea. Sam felt he might have been rude to his believing secretary, so he added, wearily, but whimsically,

“Perhaps there is a black god and a white one.” They were now crossing the little Cavanagh Bridge and under the sky, paling before moonrise, could see the flotilla of barges tied up in the river at the left hand. Sam halted to get the thin currents of coolness which were heavily moving through tons of wet air, like trickles pushing and nosing against a leviathan and gradually persuading the sleepy bulk to move an inch or so.

“I have not thought about the color of God,” came the Indian’s tricky, two-toned voice out of the dark.

“Abishegenaden, you are very black!”

“Yessah,” he said firmly.

“Wouldn’t you like to be light-colored like me?”

“No, tuan: I am not Heaven-born as you are.”

“You must not say that to a poor mortal like me,” said Sam.

Again Sam misunderstood the Indian clerk but was happy in his error, “You know the white man, the stupid white man feels superior to those of other colors. How do you feel about that?”

“They feel, sah, that the darkest races are the oldest; it is not so long since the white man became powerful. He thinks what he thinks because he is young in the world, as a child, as my child will feel when he is a two-year-old and will be butting me with his head. That cannot last very long. The Kings of Egypt were dark; all the world was dark until a very little while ago. Then the white man came from some little crack in the earth. He does not know about the times before he came. That is how we feel, sah; he is an accident.”

This surprising answer quieted Sam for a space; at length he answered (they were walking through a garden, planted with old trees, and beside high white walls),

“This is a wrong idea you have, Abishegenaden; the Egyptians were pale (coppery at best); even the very darkest among you are descended long ago from whitish or pale people like the ancient Persians. The Chinese are almost white, too, for the most part. The black man is rather rare. Do you really think, Naden,” he asked, “that primitive man was black? Do you think he was black and got white?”

“Perhaps there were two or three primitive men,” said Naden.

Singapore is all native quarter, with the exception of small parts given over almost entirely to Europeans. The dark and mustard skins are of many races from the mainland of Malaya, from India and China, from Tanah Bugis (Celebes), Negeri Jawa, and Malays from the Menangkabau districts of Sumatra and natives from Burma, Siam, Cochin China and even dark-eyed men from Turkey, Armenia, Portugal, with a few sons of Nippon. The British direct, with the aid of white British Empire and American overseers and bosses, but the Chinese are bosses, too, and are the machinery of the place: Malaya is strung together by the Chinese chambers of commerce. Sam’s heart seemed to expand at the contact of so many alien peoples and the generous feeling that he called love of man and worship of mankind had grown up like a puffball in Singapore. He tried to learn the greetings of each race, to distinguish them and their accents, if not their languages. Very different was Abishegenaden the clerk, who, on a precarious footing in the government service, like all bureaucrats, moreover, despised not only all other races, but all grades inferior to himself. His affection for Sam was temporary and had something patronizing in it—Sam had come from outside the service and by no means could understand the niceties, strict taboos of the service. There were flabby men from outside the service, a strange sort of Yahoo, and the white man of the East, who was on the inside: Naden smiled in his sleeve,—what can a white man in a country of white men know about anything of that sort? Naden forbore to make further remarks to his superior about dark skins in America, but he thought to himself—this also is a man who—Washington or no Washington—knows nothing about how his own country is run. As they mounted the steps of the boardinghouse where Sam was staying and where his Chinese secretary was still working over his notes, Sam said with good intent,

“You are but an ebonized Aryan, Naden, and I am the bleached one that is fashionable at present.”

Naden pretended not to hear this.

Lai Wan Hoe, a Baba Chinese (Singapore-born Chinese), his polyglot secretary, was still transcribing out of a notebook of beautiful, endlessly flowing shorthand. He was Sam’s right-hand man and, in fact, did most of the work for him; without him Sam could never have done anything at all in the fainting climate. Sam sank into a chair, laughing ruefully,

“Wan Hoe, I wonder why the white man is so screwy as to worry about what is in the tropics, man, beast, or mildew! We should leave it to you and your wonderful people.”

“And so you will, sir, one day,” said Wan Hoe affectionately, knowing that this was one of Sam’s favorite ideas, for he had become wholly enamored of all things Chinese, Chinese manners, intellects, polish, capacity for work and for living in the heat.

Naden, after seeing his white man back, had gone home again. He did not wish to work after hours, and he left the two outcasts talking together. If Sam was not a government man, Wan Hoe, who was, was just the same riding for a fall. Naden knew all about his money affairs, which every minute went from bad to worse. In fact, Wan Hoe, after drawing ahead on his salary, had got himself into debt to the moneylenders to the extent of nearly one thousand Straits dollars. Everyone in the service knew about it and whispered that Wan Hoe had stolen government money. It was a question not of who would peach first (for they had told on him long ago) but of how long the Pathan moneylender would wait for his money.

This money waste was to Sam, the only bad spot in his noble Wan Hoe.

“Sweet little woman, Naden’s wife, and sweet little tar baby too,” murmured Sam. He laughed, “I asked him if he liked being very black and he said, ‘Yes.’ ”

“Yes, sir, very likely.” Wan Hoe smiled. “Should you like some tea, sir? You look all in.”

“Dead to the world, Wan Hoe, dead to the world,” said Sam. “Any telephone calls?”

“Colonel Willets rang up, sir, and wished you to come to his hotel immediately,” he said as if it were of no account.

“Good heavens! Now I’m a messenger boy to run to his hotel when he gets petulant. The white man in the tropics degenerates every day,” grumbled Sam.

Wan Hoe was sympathetically silent.

“Did he say anything else?”

“He asked when you were going to address the meeting; and seemed quite angry, sir: he said they should have asked him, and further, he thinks it is a compromising subject.”

“Trade-unionism is taboo, I suppose.”

“He thought it improper for an American, sir.”

“The old billy goat’s jealous, that’s all,” declared Sam. “They asked me because I’m a good speaker.” After a while he relented and said coaxingly to Wan Hoe, “Colonel Willets is only interested in making up to the English official set and attending the Governor’s Sunday service with special italic-script invitations, and taking stengahs at the Raffles or Lady Modore’s. How could anyone suspect that he would be interested in the Y.M.C.A.? He sits there making Hitlerist jokes: it is time the melting pot melted, and I wish it wouldn’t melt on me. He’s been here four months and he has learned to treat the syces in just the right British way. Could the Y.M.C.A. guess he was interested in spreading human knowledge?”