The Man Who Loved Children (41 page)

Sam sprang up, sending his chair sprawling, “Henny, quit the room!” The brothers and sisters jumped up too, to restrain Sam, pacify Henny, and send out the children. The old father got up with his bent knees and laid his knotted, veined hand on his son’s arm. Samuel did not notice him, thought it was some child.

Henny, laughing, stood up slowly, brushing the crumbs from her knees,

“Look at me! My back’s bent in two with the fruit of my womb; aren’t you sorry to see what happened to me because of his lust? I go about with a body like a football, fit to be kicked about by a bohunk halfback, an All-America football, because of his lust, the fine, pure man that won’t look at women. Don’t you regret my condition because of his lust? Didn’t he fix me up, pin me down, make sure no man would look at me while he was gallivanting with his fine ladies? I guarantee, Samuel, that no man looked at me while you were away. Oh, what do I care?” she said, weeping to Jinny, who was talking to her, pleading with her, “What do I care, Jinny? You’re a mother yourself. Haven’t you done the horrible thing three times yourself for a man? What do you care when the time comes? What does any woman care for the man who got her that way? I am such a God-forgotten imbecile as to be going through the bloody mess again for a man like that, that’s been slinking through the slime of Singapore with his high-society whores for eight months, and left me in this misery. I hope I never come back; I hope this is the last you see of such a rotten, helpless, stupid thing as I am, falling into his trap every time; I hope I die. I am sure I’ll die. I pray to God I’ll die. I can’t fight any more. I’m not one of his tigers to fight all my life. I’m not a grenadier like a rotten old schoolma’am to squabble all my life. Look how he insults me! He no sooner gets back than he insults me before the whole swarm of them! Let me go; why do you hang on to me, all of you? What have I done? How did I get here? I know, through his sniveling, whining, get-rich-quick tricks. To you he’s something wonderful; if you knew what he is to me, something filthy crawling in the sleeve of my dressing gown; something dirty, a splotch of blood or washing-up water on my skirts. That’s what he is, with his fine airs and don’t-touch-me and I’m-too-good-to-drink. The little, tin Jesus! Oh, let me go, Jinny! What do you know about him? Oh, let me go, I’m a damned fool to give way this way.”

The old man said, “Son, son, go and speak to her: you ought to remember the condition she’s in; a woman is not a man,” and Bonnie whispered to her father, “Sam’s dreadfully tired, let him alone too,” while the gaping, frightened children stood stockstill in their places. Only Essie, Jinny’s daughter, was grinning, a naughty girl who sneered at everyone, Jinny’s pride. To Louie she said, poking her, “I always knew they fought like cats and dogs in your family: Aunt Henny gives Uncle Sam hell!” and Essie laughed. At this moment Jinny, red as a May Day flag, arrived behind her pride, and boxed her ears, which sent her howling and kicking into the passage, although Essie was twelve years old. Henny’s attention was attracted that way, and Henny, feeling a deep shame for the scene she had brought on, cried out, to Louie, “What are you doing, you fat pig, slopping over the table like that? Take your fat belly off the tablecloth and stop looking like your greasy father!” and laughed desperately.

“Henny,” said Jinny. “Henny, dear, come and lie down. I’ll get you an ice bag for your headache; come and lie down, dear!” and Bonnie was frowning and crying at Sam, “Samuel, how could you, today of all days?”

“This is the home I come home to,” said Sam and sank into his chair.

Soon Henny was lying down on Louie’s bed upstairs and Louie came up with tea for her, to calm her and an aspirin, and the party, in Henny’s absence, had made a shift to reorganize itself, and gather in the children to get them into a better state of mind and make them forget. They were now singing the “Hallelujah” Chorus, in a moderated style, round Henny’s grand piano, with quick-witted Bonnie at the keyboard. Sam had wandered away from them, beside himself, ill and out of his usual mind, to look at the rock garden, wind-picked and weed-covered, and the cement fishpond, green with rags of moss, with sick-looking fish—the whole place had been given a lick and a promise in preparation for his coming, no sooner than yesterday. He took with him Ebby’s boys, kindhearted, fox-snouted Cousin Sid, and Little-Sam. Of all the boys, he had thought most of Little-Sam throughout his exile from home, the strawheaded, tempestuous, stubborn little boy of unpredictable reactions, with his shouts of mirth and shouts of rage, the boy who looked most like himself and who, Sam told himself, was a young genius, sure to be a great scientist and carry on his own work.

To him, kicking his heels round the rock garden, came Evie scurrying with a telegram in her hand, “It’s for Mother; but Auntie Jinny says for you to open it.”

Sam tore the paper and read:

FATHER COLLYER DIED SUDDENLY THIS MORNING CAN YOU COME TO YOUR MOTHER ARCHIBALD LESSINUM

“I will go after the opening of the boxes,” said Sam. “Don’t take it to your mother. Old David is dead. Dear old David is dead.”

Now Ernest and Tommy came in deputation to him, running and out of breath but with hope and embarrassment.

“Daddy, everyone wants to know if you’re going to open the boxes now?”

“Deddy, are you going to show us the things you brought?”

Sam smiled, “Sure-LY,” and started up the slope. They skipped round him, rushing toward the house and back towards him. Suddenly Ernie spurted off to carry the news. A movement began again, breathless and happy among all the Pollits; they had been straying, and now they began circulating slowly but regularly in groups like creatures swimming round an aquarium.

“Sam is going to open the cases; Sam is going to show us the Chinese things. Oh, isn’t that grand!”

“Wow!” “Gee!” “Gee, I’m excited, aren’t you?” “What has Uncle Sam got in there, Mumsy?” “Shh, you’ll see.”

Sam went to the tool house and came in with a hammer and a cold chisel. Presently all the boys and men were lugging, tugging the boxes, but as gently as they were able so as not to break the flimsy and precious things inside.

Sam was rather reluctant to open the cases because, although he was generous, he had brought many things that he intended for the adornment of his own bare house with its great rooms. He was unaware of the sensuality of his own nature and of the joy he took in these porcelains, silks, and embroideries, the longing, the lust he had for them. He had always been poor and modern, and suddenly in the East he had found the treasures of the past. He had always despised the past, hated history, believed only in man today and in a sober, future commonweal; and now for the first time, through his love of the Chinese he loved the workmanship, treasures, theories, men of the past; and through his new acquaintance with white men in the East in positions of power. He had gone, stupidly, for the pomp and spreadeagle of scientific societies and human uplift associations, now for the first time, he had seen the exquisite beauty, sensibility and sensuality of the things treasured by those who put others in bondage. Poor good man, he thought that he had discovered a new principle, which was, as he told Saul Pilgrim, that the rich and powerful are human beings too. Talk to them of some innocent thing, like natural history and human advancement and they were as human, more human, tender, than the wages-obsessed workman: they had seen much and understood much. But he bore a little grudge to his raw, sensual, penurious family, at this moment, for standing there, adoring his success and his possessions so openly; there they stood, good-natured vultures, his own blood, ready to fall on his stuffs and snatch them, saying oh, and ah, and slavering for them; but he would not give them much, his own children came first. For them he would make a nest, a haven, a palace, a university, all in his own plot of ground and this phalanstery of a house: he would now be the East to his children as well as the West.

They first opened the box of ceramics and found two twenty-inch vases smashed; but there were left a dozen or so cloisonne and lacquer vases of various sizes. Everyone helped to put the things on the table, the mantelpiece and the piano. It was like a village fire brigade passing buckets. The expensive chips were shoveled out into the ash can. The second case had on its very top a mandarin gown of celestial blue with gold metallic threads, which was for Louie. Louie, who expected nothing of the shortsighted world, was baffled by this gift.

Her father raised his tired eyes upon her, “I bought that for you, Louie; it was sold by a real Chinese prince, a refugee, and my friend gave it to me for almost nothing, for my eldest daughter.”

With a sullen, downcast face, but with a faint flush, she took it. As she went past the ranks of Pollits, they looked curiously, grudgingly at her, or fingered it. She laid it out on the sofa in the long dining room. When alone with it, triumph surged up—mine, she thought, mine; and grasped one of the stiff folds, mine—and she laid the other hand flat on it. She went self-consciously and stolidly back, but no one noticed her. Two ordinary Chinese silk dressing gowns, one pink and one yellow, with heavy embroidery and gold threads, lay on the chair, and Auntie Bonnie said fussily, “Those are for your Mother: why don’t you ask her to come down, dear?”

“I’ll take them up to her,” said Louie.

Henny had already regretted her act of tempest, and she looked with melancholy softness at the dressing gowns, “Put them there and thank your father.”

“They say, won’t you come down, Mother?”

“No, I only want to be left alone.” Louie withdrew.

Sam had emptied one box, all packed with silk suits of pajamas and gowns, scarves, and a long, feast-day banner of red, showing a woman in a multicolored gown. He broke open another case which chanced to contain small jade ornaments, in dark, pale, and white jade, snuffboxes and little pots and napkin rings. The furniture and fixtures could no longer be seen, overwhelmed with the china, bronze, brass, lacquer, and silks he had brought and with two cork pictures and some bits of embroidery. Sam made the boys bring in a light pine table from the veranda and on this he set out for show all the little
objets d’art.

“Now,” he said, clearing his throat, “there is something for everyone. Let us clear the chairs and put all the stuff in the other room: everyone will sit down and everyone will choose what he likes from the pine table.”

Ernie, quickly looking round, saw the discomfiture amongst his relatives. They, the poor, were only to get the little things. They were not experts, and they loved the polished vases, the red lacquer, the silks and banners. The small things seemed of little value to them.

Sam, too, no slower than anyone, had seen the disappointment and embarrassment of his brothers, sisters, and their families. He looked embarrassed and gave a little grin. He hurried his boys with their bundles of stuffs. Bonnie, good girl, seeing how things were, immediately became very cheerful and rattled away, “While you’re all getting seated, I’ll give you a song,” and she took a flying leap into
Funiculi, Funicula.

The distribution began. Sam made himself a dispenser of bric-a-brac, with a pin pot here, a matchbox there, a napkin ring beside, and a snuffbox neighboring, and again a pin pot, according to the choice of the men and women. He had a wonderful set of actor dolls, with a demon, a prince, a princess, and several minor fiends, and a little stage, but these were for his own children. He had Chinese instruments which he played for them in between times, to give a saving touch of grotesquerie to the whole thing. Perhaps soon they would forget the parsimony and disperse and not come together again until the memory of the pin pots was half gone.

There were seven cases to unpack. Sam, once started and sunk to his waist in a lake of treasures, with his tools and his relatives around him, worked without stopping, except once to say to Bonnie, “Bon, cawf [coffee].” Now Sam had reached the seventh case, which contained metals, knives with chased, inlaid, and beaten blades, and with carved and inlaid handles of ebony, ivory, and brass-inlaid silver and so on, a Chinese two-edged broadsword, a creese, a mace. At the bottom was something that he unwrapped with surprise and dragged out with difficulty, a Chinese bronze gong two feet in diameter, with raised figures. Struck once, it gave out a long, distant mellow roll, a sound which was never a single note, always a whole meditation of sound.

Sam said, “I see now why he packed it himself; it is a present from my friend Abdul Jamid ben Ali. Yes, now I remember, Abdul Jamid said, ‘I hope nothing breaks,’ and I am sure there is something that will not break. This is his gift. What friends in the east!”

Louie said,

A yellow plum was given me and in return a topaz fair I gave,

No mere return for courtesy but that our friendship might outlast the grave.

“Eh? What is that?”

“That is a poem after Confucius!”

Sam was careful to show no surprise, “I am glad you have got to Confucius and beyond Confusion. Abdul’s little boy, Mahmoud,” he continued, turning to his father, “I met every day going to school; he was intelligent and quick and spoke good English and had a ready smile for everyone.”

Meanwhile there was a subdued chatter all over the rooms, where the Pollits were exclaiming over the stuffs and curios. Louie stood abstracted, with the peach-bloom silk, brought for Leslie, at her feet; and unexpectedly, she took a step forward, over the bolt of silk and declaimed,

A simple peach was given me, and in return a ruby gem I gave,

No mere return for courtesy, but that our friendship might outlast the grave!

Her cousin Essie, who was playing with the little wooden toys, models of water carriers and buffalo carts and sawyers’ blocks, gave a sidelong glance and turned back intently to her game. No one else took the least notice, except Little-Sam, sitting near her, who kept looking up into her face questioningly. Big Sam took no notice. Encouraged by this, Louie declared,

A loquat branch was given me and in return an emerald I gave,