The Man Who Loved Children (39 page)

All the joyful Pollits were still running up- and downstairs, and the clink of plates, silver, and glasses could be heard, as well as Bonnie’s gay call, “Nearly ready, folks, nearly ready: get ready! Who’s going to strike up?” and Lennie’s wild bagpipes (made by vibrating his long lean cheek),
The Campbells Are Coming, Hooray, Hooray!
Then the strains of the wedding march started up under Jo’s tough fingers as Leslie Benbow,
née
Pollit, new-married, arrived with her short, half-bald husband, rather more flustered than is common in a twenty-six-year-old bride and plump in the waist. Leslie had not stayed her marriage for Sam. Many things had gone on without him.

But they all stayed in the house or on the porch, leaving Sam to his children at the top of the orchard, and to his thoughts which, it was evident, were not of the sweetest, not the sort a man might be expected to have on returning to the bosom of his family from a glorious trip to the Far East. Sam felt it keenly that Leslie, his favorite niece, did not come to see him, and that no one seemed to bother about him. He went on talking tiredly to the boys, with a joke from time to time, trying to regain his old style: “ ‘The people gave me a cordyal recepshun. The press was loud in her prazes,’ ” but Artemus Ward fell off his tongue without a rebound.

Now the noises had quietened a little and the Pollits seemed to be conferring” about something. In another minute, Bonnie sang out, “Come on, now, Samuel: we want you in the sun-room!”

Sam got up holding out his long fingers to his boys, and trailed them with him to the house. He stopped a minute, without thinking, before the back porch, staring at it, and then said mildly, “Needs a couple of coats!”

Inside they were avid for him, waiting to pounce on him.

“Here’s our Sam! Samuel! Sammy, my boy! Sam!” Bonnie rushed forward and pecked him on the cheek. Her skin had yellowed through the winter; she was overrouged, and her beautiful hair new washed, full of blue lights, made her look sicklier.

“You’re not the only one in the paper,” cried Jinny affectionately, buxom and pretty in a blue dress, her red hair in more of a fuss than ever. “Jo was in the papers. Jo sent one of her poems to the
Sun
and they published it.”

“Did you see our poetess?” asked Bonnie. “Jo’s poems? Did you send it to him, Jo?”

“It’s pretty,” said Leslie, in a retiring way.

“You’re flattering me,” said Jo, “it’s not so wonderful as you make out.”

“It’s very good, Jo,” Bonnie declared reproachfully.

“Did you write a poem, Jo?” Sam asked with interest.

“In the Baltimore
Sun
,” said Ernie breathlessly; “she got paid for it.”

“Josephine M. Pollit!” affirmed Jinny Pollit good-naturedly. Because it was Sam’s welcome-home, she tried to cover up the quarrel between herself and Jo; but Jo did no such thing. She turned her back on Jinny in a grand manner.

“Have you got it, Jo?” Sam asked.

“I have it,” said Bonnie, rushing to the settee and rummaging in her purse. She at length produced a dirty, browned scrap of paper which she unfolded and handed with pride to Sam. Jo said with bonhomie, “I just thought I’d send it in; and they accepted it at once.”

“You could make money that way,” said Lennie to Jo.

“Isn’t it wonderful, Sam, a poetess in the family?” demanded Bonnie. “Being published? You ought to publish some of your letters, Sam. They went all round the family; we could never get enough of them. We read them aloud. Henny sent us all your letters. Henny was such a dear and so good to the little ones: but then she is a wonderful mother to the little ones, she really is.”

During Bonnie’s enthusiastic rattle, an uneasy silence had begun to gather over assembled Pollitry, but it was not till it was well advanced that Bonnie saw it and stopped. Henny was not present. Faintly Bonnie repeated, “Read it, Sam; it’s wonderful.”

“Don’t be absurd,” commanded Jo, frowning, “such a silly fuss!”

The children clustered round Sam, looking at Jo, this combination of Minerva and Juno.

“Read it, Deddy,” said Tommy in his pretty, chipping accent.

Sam laughed ruefully, “Don’t call me Deddy. And my Sedgewing who wrote to me, ‘Dead Dad.’ ”

They all shrieked with laughter. Evie looked greatly mortified. Sam continued tenderly, “And who asked me if I could shot a tiger?”

There was wild hilarity, kind Bonnie and Jinny stuffing their hands into their mouths, kind Lennie and Peter Pollit, uncles, turning side on, because anyone could see that Evie was nearly in tears. Sam’s old father, seventy-year-old Charles, sitting behind the throng on the settee, laughed consumedly, laughing at them all, delighted to have them together for once. He no more noticed little Evie than some puppy hiding in a corner. Sam held up his hand for the merriment to cease, saying,

“Listen, kids and kinfolk, Josie wrote this and it’s very beautiful.”

(“Listen, listen,” whispered the relatives on all sides. Old Charles Pollit leaned forward, laughing still. He could write poetry better than the lot of them.)

Sam read,

In Peggy’s eyes

Is the blue of the skies

And innocent looks

That are more than wise.

In a garden plot

Of forgetmenot,

And water brooks

Beneath blue skies

A duplicate lies

Of Peggy’s eyes.

Evie stared at her Aunt Jo in the delicious, timid, vacant admiration of the inept. Ernie slewed a look at Louie, standing behind two visitors, and saw her flash a look of contempt at Sam and Jo too. Sam raised his head and saw her too. He said pleasantly, “Isn’t that pretty, Looloo?”

“It’s nice.”

Sam was pleased, “It’s very nice, Looloo. Why don’t you try to write something like that too, Looloo? All of us Pollits are a good hand at jingle: we can all turn out a rhyme. I think you could, and they might publish it too.”

Louie became speechless with resentment, but none saw this but the watchful Ernie. Jo bounced and cried, “Oh, she’s very like me: I know she’s got a talent: Louie’s all right. I bet she could do one nearly as good as that right now.”

In a choking voice, Louie said quickly, “Oh, I don’t think I would write one like that.”

“Well, perhaps not right now: but soon, some day! And now, Father, Father! Come on and do your stunt!”

They began to clear back, leaving a wide circle into which old Charlie advanced with accomplished hesitations, pretending to be broken down with age and rheumatism. They began to clap and back farther away to leave him room for his dance. Louie, choking with rage, slipped out of the door without being noticed, and went into the quiet upstairs. Henny had retired for the day to the girls’ room. She was sitting in a big, easy chair looking very bitter and pale, with the brown, mottled skin of pregnancy’s end, her neck corrugated. Louie came slowly towards her,

“Everyone’s here now, Mother.”

Henny grunted, in contempt. “They were reading Auntie Jo’s poem in the
Sun
.”

Henny grunted.

“I think it’s rot,” pouted Louie.

“Oh, the Pollits are all so conceited,” Henny said impatiently, “that if they write two lines, everyone has to take three fits and a faint. Don’t you be like them, that’s all I ask.”

“Will I tidy the room?” asked Louie.

“No, leave me alone. No one’s coming up here; I gave orders about that. I wish to God I could take a taxi and get away from their idiot party and all that buzzing and jigging that they think’s so clever and funny.”

The grandfather’s cracked baritone chirped away to the audience below,

Slap, dash, slap, with a whitewash brush—

Talk about a county ball!

In and out the corners, round the Johnny Horners;

We were a gay old pair of gorners—

“Wouldn’t you go down for a little while, Mother?”

“No, I’d rather go to the big bonfire! I suppose now the word will go round that I am sabotaging. Oh, darn everything. Go on down and help. Don’t stand there fidgeting and staring at me.”

“Would you like some tea, Mother?”

“Oh, I suppose I’ve got to take something. I’m so empty, I feel like a big barrel floating out to sea.”

Louie, delighted, ran downstairs. Whenever her irritations got too deep, she mooched in to see her mother. Here, she had learned, without knowing she had learned it, was a brackish well of hate to drink from, and a great passion of gall which could run deep and still, or send up waterspouts, that could fret and boil, or seem silky as young afternoon, something that put iron in her soul and made her strong to resist the depraved healthiness and idle jollity of the Pollit clan.

It was a strange affection. It could never express itself by embraces or kisses, nothing more than a rare, cool, dutiful kiss on the withering cheek of Henny. It came from their physical differences, because their paths could never meet, and from the natural outlawry of womankind. Downstairs came Louie, for the tea, cheerfully muttering,

Moonbeam, leave the shadowy vale,

To bathe this burning brow.

(Shelley: “To the Moonbeam”)

The indefatigable Jinny was stretching and puffing on the stepladder on the front porch, fixing a forgotten string of Chinese lanterns. In the dining room and the hall stood the wooden cases Sam had brought back from Malaya. None had been opened, though many a curious finger had poked them since early this afternoon. As soon as Sam knew that they were giving a surprise party, he had announced that, despite his fatigue, he would open them all and that everyone would see the Eastern treasures and carry off a present.

Grandfather Charlie, in high feather, spied Louie and called excitedly,

“The Old Gaffer’s going to give another show! Come on, Granddaughter! The Old One’s about to present ‘Mr. Wemmick and the Aged Parent.’ Come along, come along, roll up, roll up, come right in, the show’s just about to begin! All star performance: manager, Charles Pollit; business manager, Charlie Pollit; stage manager, Chas. Pollit, and barker, Old Charlie. Mr. Wemmick, played by Charles Pollit, and The Aged, played by Charles Pollit. You must excuse, not stare at, the redundancy of that beautiful name, Pollit, in the caste, ladies and gentlemen, if there be any of that name here, for it’s all in the family. And the play written by Charles—Dickens, the greatest Charlie!”

“Oh, Father, you’re a perfect scream,” declared Bonnie. “The old gaffer’s all right,” she assured the rest.

“Shut up, girl,” said her father, “no talking in the free seats. Curtain! Lights! Action!” He gave three taps as he said the last three words. In a profound silence, he began the act that he had worked up himself from
Great Expectations.

“ ‘Massive? I think so. And his watch is a gold repeater, and worth a hundred pound.’ ”

The little ones sat round like idols in front of the throng or on their relatives’ laps, with carved smiles on their faces and round, floating eyes. The old man, with nothing but a red bandanna, which he ordinarily used to brush off his snuff, became alternately Mr. Wemmick and The Aged, Old Grandfather Charlie, through some trap door of the imagination, disappeared until the act was over; when he suddenly popped up again with a here-we-are-again, crowing, and stumbling into his little buck-and-wing dance. At last they dragged him off the center of the stage. He sank into a rattan armchair near the door and drew Louie towards him,

“How did you like it, granddaughter?”

“Oh, you were very good,” she exclaimed.

He twined a strand of her hair round his fingers gently, repeating with great affection,

Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax,

Her cheeks like the dawn of day,

Her bosom white as the hawthorn buds

That ope in the month of May.

She blushed to the roots of her hair and the flush crept downwards to stain the hawthorn. Her grandfather patted her and turned away, pulling Evie towards him instead, to hide her embarrassment. Then there was a bellying of the crowd at the southern end and something black dropped in through the window; and this black thing hopped into the middle of the room, grinning and rolling white eyes, Cousin Sid doing his Yacht Club Boys, Mammy-Minstrel Act. Then Uncle Leonard sang
The Two Grenadiers
; and this was followed by a hush. Ernie had stolen out, and there came the expected notes of the gong, liquid gold, bommm-bommm scarcely a sound, that rippled, spun, and spread itself through all the air.

The old man arose with a knowing air and came into the center of the carpet again, tramping, stamping, pawing.

“Snake dance,” cried Saul excitedly.

All the Pollits lined up behind the old man in order of age, the children last in a long skeletal tail; and after stamping thunderously, they began to sway and weave out the long south window, singing at the top of their voices, “Oh sound a blast for freedom, boys, and send it far and wide!” They circled the animal cases and the rock warden and. circumnavigating the house. came in again by the front door, the old chief entering the long dining room where the banquet was spread, just as they came to the chorus of the second verse: “Hurrah, Hurrah, we bring the Jubilee!” roared the Pollits, and the rafters rang. Sam and the old man were weeping tears of emotion, and there were other damp eyes in the crowd. Then there was a great rumbling of chairs and scurrying of women, all wedging and hedging in, fitting of elbows and knees, groans and giggles until the great tribe was set to table. They had fitted into the table the two dust-stained, extra leaves from the attic, and yet it was hardly big enough. At one end of the table stood a broad-bottomed armchair empty. Old Charles, after one glance at it, wriggled out of his seat again (he was at the other end, next to Sam), saying, “Wait and see, wait and see: the Old Gaffer’s going to get our Henny.” Sam’s head and lower lip drooped at this, but the others urged him on, saying with honest enthusiasm, “Yes, beg her to come, Father,” and explaining to each other, “You see, poor thing, she’s miserable in her condition,” and “She hates to be seen—it’s very natural: I don’t blame poor Pet,” and so on. There was indeed no malice in all Pollitry, for Henny. From time to time, one or other of them was inspired by the awful idol they worshiped, their Bounding Health, to go On the Warpath against one of their own; and when On the Warpath, a Pollit was a strange, frightful being, a being of brawn and no human understanding, armed with a moral club; but they had no malice against them who hated them; they loved and pitied the intractable, malicious Henny.