The Man Who Loved Children (35 page)

“He is not interested in that; he said he is the head of the Expedition.”

Sam flared up, “He arrogates it to himself: we are all here on an equal footing. Dictators amongst scientists and men of mind! About the orphanage, too—and because I wrote a little thing for
The Straits Times
and because he thought I was trying to get out of paying my seat in the automobile, the time I flew to Kuala Lumpur, and, in short, friend, because he is against me. I represent the young service, and he represents the gerontocracy that is on its last legs. Shame on the old intriguer! He sent a letter about me back to Washington by the last mail. Oh, Wan Hoe, how tired I am! I don’t like to complain, but I am in pain most of the day; and I have terrible insomnia. I don’t know how the others get through, because, after all, I take no drink, I have no poison in my system.”

“Will I now telephone Colonel Willets, sir, or will I leave it till the morning?”

Sam was thinking about the night ahead of him. He would sink on his fresh pillow and at once sweat would start from him, a Niagara of sweat, and drown the pillow and the bedding and his pajamas. Shutters, cool floors, open verandas, baths, and changes of clothes twice daily did nothing against the exhausting sweating and the heat. He would drowse and wake up any moment, any hour, with fear in him, his heart yawing and plunging into some small but bottomless pit, his head full of lead. All he could do, if it was near morning, would be to call to the boy, “Syce, tea,” and swing slowly up and out, balancing himself and his head carefully. The tea would help him for a while, making him sweat profusely, and he would have half an hour in which to hope that one of his heat headaches was not going to arrive and stay with him till the four-o’clock breeze or the next nightfall.

Wan Hoe, seeing that Sam did not answer, left him to reverie and went on transcribing in his clear handwriting. His face was dark and, though fleshy, drooped with fatigue. He paused several times and laid down his pen, looked at Sam Pollit as if about to broach a new and personal subject to him; but on observing Sam’s drained, drooping cheeks and his mouth loose from the long day, he quietly took up his pen again and went on writing.

When Sam had come first to British Malaya a few months ago he had been shocked by the white man of the tropics and had made up his mind not to go the way others went. He would take exercise every day, walk wherever he could, to find out how the people lived and what they were; he would speak to the dark skin and strange nether garment as a brother, and he would never fall under the sodden spell of alcohol. He struggled unaided except by iced water, through the drowsiness of the siesta hours, trying to write his impressions and articles for papers back home (he very much admired the profession of the journalist, thinking him a good retail purveyor of enlightenment); and about five or six would go home to take a shower and would sit with a bath towel round his loins, or with nothing on at all but a clout, while he wrote up his diary or his mail for the day. But in this climate everything had become a weariness of the flesh, even writing and speaking. He, a man capable of doing walks of twenty miles on Sundays, at home, here could hardly make ten paces without feeling weak. Still he kept it up, walking round Singapore, or the other towns, or struggling through the jungle without a moan, avoiding the European streets and shops, finding the poorest, immigrant and native-born people, the ones with no home, the ones that walked the streets all night, even after nightfall and against all warnings roaming the congested streets, through dark throngs whose faces he could not see but only suspect in the flashing of an eyeball, tooth, or trinket, in the light of a shop lamp, or electric sign hanging downwards, or the frosted bleary sparkle of some miserable shopwindow, perhaps mildew-grown.

Both Naden and Wan Hoe were worried about this habit of Sam’s and warned him often, but he walked on, tall amongst the small people, protected by his humane folly. He walked bareheaded; he believed that his wonderful white-gold hair, rarely seen except in Friesland or Norway, protected him, that these childhearted people took him for something next to a god. When Naden told him he was like a god, he saw no humor in it. He thought that to the poor Indian clerk he must seem something like a god; he knew their superstition (he said to others) and how easily reverence and love passed into worship. Quietly, he would explain, “I believe in myself, because I know I love the good, and as that old sinner Thoreau said, ‘I will never let the vestal fire go out in my innermost recesses’: people feel that vestal fire and they feel that its possessor is sacred: they will not harm him. He walks unharmed amongst people reputed savage because they honor what is most good in man.”

To whatever argument they made against this strange talk, he merely replied that he did come back unharmed and that he had ventured, on the upper parts of wild rivers in innermost Malaya where no white man had been before, and had never been harmed or hated. Only once a wicked little urchin in far Trengganu had hooted him, a boy with a mean rat face. But at Kemaman and elsewhere they had all been his friends and followed him around, the women first laughing and much embarrassed and then praising him, admiring his white hair and white bare narrow feet, or so he heard. The streets of some of these towns were almost like the back streets of a quiet Southern town where the Negroes live, the houses standing side by side, cabins and huts with occasional weatherboard houses, a hard dirt road, and, instead of telegraph posts, the tall palms clashing in the breeze, partly shutting out the blasting blue sky and the dazzling shadows and furnace lights on the road. But the Southern Negroes would never have made friends with Sam as these people did. His heart was flooded with a blue sea of hope; it was his own experience with the cheerful, good-natured people that made him hope that the progress of friendship between nations would be as easy—it merely required a little good will, such as he had and the thing would be done in half a day.

In a short time he had fallen madly in love with Malaya and saw her as a great country, unplundered, untouched, undreamed of, brimming with natural wealth, which would make all of its soft-skinned people rich and happy. All that was needed was understanding and the eviction of the People of Greed. He himself was helping mightily the people, he believed, by getting to know them and finding out their different types and entirely addled strains. He could tell the indigenous Malays from the new imports from India, Hailam from Canton, Hohkien from Teochiew, and he tried to have a friend in each of these and many other strains. He felt like a kind of Livingstone going into the heart of the darkest unknown, as he put it, the heart of man. Some day, with the help of believers like himself, the pure souls of the earth would get together, the good and energetic who understood men, like, say, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ramsay MacDonald, Upton Sinclair, Nicholas Murray

Butler, H. G. Wells, and even himself, Samuel Pollit, and it would not be too soon for Eden, “the time of the internation,” to arrive. If such a concourse of great souls could have been got together five hundred years back, Sam believed, the world would have been saved from its sorrows, wars, hate, misunderstanding, class wars, Hitler, and moneylenders; and the Golden Age, permeated by simple jokes and ginger-ale horseplay, tuneful evenings, open-air theaters and innumerable daisy chains of naturalists threading the earth and looking, looking, would have already produced a good-hearted, mild human race. Were not his own children happy, healthy and growing like weeds, truth-loving and inventive, merely through having him to look up to and through knowing that he was always righteous, faithful, understanding?

“Have you heard from your children, sir?” asked Wan Hoe, pausing.

“That is wonderful,” cried Sam, “telepathy, Wan Hoe; that was telepathy,” and he proceeded to tell him the chain of thought which at that moment had caused him to think of his children. He told his Chinese friend about them once more, “I suffer from the heat, the humidity, and the strangeness—not of black, but of white men—but I suffer most because when I wake, under the pressure of the heavy waves of moisture in the foredawn, before the stabbing light can get to my eyeballs I cannot call to them as I do at home, to my little dark-eyed, smudge-eyed Evie, my Little-Womey. You know what I do, Wan Hoe? I call, ‘Sedgewing, Sedgewing, Sedgewing!’ (Sedgewing is a made-up word that reminds me of her.) ‘Sedgewing, come en do me yed.’ Then she rolls out of bed grumbling gently, a thing I love to hear, and trots in in her long pink cotton nightdress, pouting gently, saying, ‘Daddy, lemme lone, I wanna sleep!’ But when I put out my hand, she trudges over and then hops onto my pillow and thrusts her soft finger into my hair to stroke the scalp; then my headache goes away, if I have one. Then I call up my eldest girl, Louie, a girl with a great head, perhaps too many troubles, but it makes her wiser in time to come, and she makes the morning tea, and then I get the boys out, Ernie and the Gemini, to go whistling round the place with me, sizing up carpentering jobs and bits of stonemasonry required. That is the happy life, Wan Hoe. Little-Sam sits there thinking on the path, thinking the strange, long thoughts of childhood, pondering over things which he will fashion into thoughts of science one day: and Saul, sensible and cool, goes his way poking and deducing; while Ernie, my little wonder-boy, who will certainly be a great mathematician, or (I hope not quite a dryasdust, not altogether a blue stocking) a physicist.”

Sam suddenly cried, with a smile, “Bless you, Wan Hoe, you’re such a good friend to me! I never had better friends than the Chinese friends I have met here in half a year, and you principally. No one understands friendship like the wise, the good and ancient People of the Middle Kingdom.”

Wan Hoe’s sensitive face, a soft boy’s face thinning into sorrowful manhood, changed several times and his eyes smiled at Sam, “I am glad you like us very much.”

“In the Chinese are great treasures of wisdom and good subtlety, craftsmanship and labor that we could do with in our country,” said Sam stoutly. “I think you are the most wonderful people in the world.”

Wan Hoe listened intently; and after a moment he said almost cautiously, “If you had no children, sir, I would think that you were coming to live amongst us.”

“How happy that would make me! But I couldn’t stand the climate and I could not bring all my children up here, Wan Hoe. No, you will have to contrive to come and visit me.”

Wan Hoe shook his head, smiling pitifully. Just as Sam, guessing his troubles partly, began to speak to him about his great debts, the telephone rang again and there was Colonel Willets, irate, asking where was the s.o.b. and did he think he was going to sit round there twiddling his thumbs, and telephoning forty times in that heat. Wan Hoe said that Sam would soon be back and would no doubt go over to Willets’ hotel at once. He put it down and looked regretful again that he had not spoken to

Pollit about his own affairs. But Sam had quite forgotten about it.

Wan Hoe looked round cautiously. Sam’s temper was wasting. Sam confirmed Wan Hoe in his view that people born and living outside the Asiatic world were children in the world. Other men were indiscreet through temper, brutality, or contempt of their subordinates; Sam was indiscreet through trust of his subordinates. Wan Hoe speculated on the American government service and wondered for a moment if Sam had been sent to Malaya to get him out of the way. But now Sam had to swallow another mouthful of gall and trot off to Colonel Willets’ room. Who was he, he asked Wan Hoe, but a vain old man who had cast his Socialist skin twenty years ago, after he had made money in real estate? All had gone by the board for Mammon, and now he thought everyone admired his boots of gold: he wanted to be cock of the walk everywhere. “May I never be an old man!” said Sam.

“Our old age is perhaps life’s decision about us,” said Wan Hoe, “but I hope there is no living god we may blame for the invention. Everyone remembers himself as a child and cannot recognize himself in the tatters and wrinkled, dirty flesh, in the stench and hairy moles he is forced to inhabit. He wants to cry out, ‘Look, I am not like this, I am a fairy little child with peach skin and sky-blue eyes, I am like a sun gem, I sing, dance, skip; I am not this old relic of the ragbag, cadging, cheating, scolding, whining, faking, dying.’ The Chinese are a knowing people; and I daresay that is why they once made a religious odor about old age; to prevent their sons seeing their own future. They sealed their eyes. You see when a man knows he will be old, he is afraid: when he becomes old, he cares for nothing—love does not count, only comfort; honor does not count, only cheating for a niche.”

“How queer,” said Sam smiling, “I am not Chinese, but I honor old age: I hope I will have a happy one. My sons will be grown up, men of science, my daughters married with grandchildren: my hair will be silver, not much different from now.

You are rather morbid, aren’t you, Wan Hoe? I hope to have a long and happy life.”

“Do you think that is possible nowadays?” asked the secretary.

Sam looked at him but said nothing. He had gathered from some vague hints that this native-born Singapore Chinese was a revolutionary, belonged to the Kuomintang frowned upon equally by the British and the rich Chinese. He could not be sent back to China, however, as immigrants could. Sam knew that Wan Hoe was on the verge of disgrace. However, he made it a rule not to inquire into a man’s political actions, especially into his dangers; and he got up quickly to go out and see his colleague. He had first to strip off his soaking clothes, bathe, and get fresh ones. One of his coats put away damp, by accident, was hanging in the closet spotted with mildew. The smell of mildew could not be got out of the closet.

Sam had a quarrel with Colonel Willard Willets at the Raffles, but it ended as all their quarrels had to date in a sort of querulous capitulation on the part of the old man. He said Sam had engaged a seat in an automobile with him to visit a village of pygmies. Pygmies usually wander about in search of their food, but these pygmies, about forty in number, had been in this spot for a number of years. In the meantime, Sam had been taken up by the Governor and his wife, and it was arranged by them that he was to go with a visiting British scientist on the same expedition, but in a private car for which he would not pay. Now Colonel Willets thought Sam had let him down again and that he would have the whole expense of the trip himself.