The Man Who Loved Children (43 page)

Upstairs they heard Henny groan with impatience.

“We have a long night ahead,” said Sam. “I want you to arrange the children’s beds downstairs. Mother wants to sleep upstairs.”

“Is she very sick?” asked Louie, much frightened.

“All that,” said Sam, “is a child trying to be born. I guess that by sunrise tomorrow we will have another child in the family.”

Louie looked as if she could not believe her ears. She faltered, “Another child?”

“The groans you hear are the beginning of the greatest drama on earth, the act of birth.” He looked at her with luminous eyes; his voice had taken on a tone of incantation. “With the coming of morning, Samuel Pollit will have a new son or daughter.”

Louie blushed from head to foot.

“And I myself am so ill, Looloo-girl, that I can hardly rejoice as I always do at the birth of a child. The great glory of man, the great glory of the flaming forth of new stars, the glory of the expanding universe, which are all expressed in our lives by the mystery, wonder, and tragedy of birth have always thrilled me beyond expression. And here I lie, with bones of jelly. It did for me, Looloo. The last nights in Singapore I was so tired that when I shut my eyes, I saw blue and yellow flames, I saw things as clear as photographs, not ordinary visions; I dreamed there was a dragon on my bed. Don’t tell anyone that, Looloo, and not Henrietta either, now. I don’t want her to be worried.”

Louie stared at him uncomfortably. Sam laughed, “a giant in his weakness.”

Louie said,

The desolator desolate,

The tyrant overthrown;

The arbiter of other’s fate,

A suppliant for his own!

Sam looked at her with a puzzled expression, “Why did you say that?”

She melted into a grin, “I just thought of it.”

“Leave me to sleep; go and see if your mother wants anything.”

When Louie got upstairs she found that Doctor Rock had been admitted by Bonnie.

“Get some clean towels for me, Louie,” said Henny gasping.

The doctor turned to her with an angry expression.

“Go on, my dear,” said poor Henny, quite kindly.

Bonnie was making Louie’s bed.

“You will have to sleep downstairs tonight,” said Henny grimly.

The doctor kept staring at her angrily.

“The water is beginning to drip, Doctor.”

The doctor glared at Louie, “Go away, run away!”

Sanguine and sun-haired Sam Pollit, waiting for the birth of his seventh child, had not slept all night. Louie, after some attendance at the door of the birth room, had slept well, downstairs, in Henny’s big bed, with Evie. Kind Bonnie had stayed all night. The four boys, used to wind cries and human cries, had slept very well on mattresses on the floor in the sunroom, exactly as they had on the day of the great gale in 1933 when Sam feared the chimney pots would blow down. One or two of them woke once or twice and, hearing their mother cry out, saw nothing in it at all but an ordinary connubial quarrel between her and Sam, and turned and slept again. There were torments in the Himalayas, windspouts in the Grand Canyon, and Judges of the Supreme Court got into sacred rages. What could little boys do, too, about differences between their hearthstones, Mother and Father? They listened for a while, turned, and slept again.

At four o’clock the sky grew lighter and, one by one, the birds began to creak, some like rusty winches, some like door hinges, and some like fishing lines unreeled at a great rate.

There was one that sang joyously like the water burbling down a choked drain. At any rate, to Sam’s ear, all of these were singing hymns of praise to the rising dawn, and congratulating themselves on their broods and him on his new child. “All Nature is awake,” thought Sam, prowling amongst the chance-sown seedlings of pine at the bottom of the orchard, “and my latest young one, in a new suit of flesh, is trying to greet the dawn, too.” At five-thirty the flame-red sun, so heralded, was kicked out of the horizon’s waist and visibly jerked upwards. Not even a breeze stirred the hundred-year-old elms on the south-facing bluff of Tohoga Place. Overhead stretched an immense, tender spring sky. The budding trees, already root-hid in weeds, ran up the hill on all sides. The surrounding streets, their hollows, the lesser heights, and dome bubbles of reeking Washington were visible; the world was a milky cameo at sunup. The neglected garden thronged upwards with all its plants into the new sun, with its guava trees, peach trees, magnolia trees, apple trees, seedling pines and forsythia, and the wild double narcissus that grew so rank and green on the possums’ graves.

From the girls’ bedroom that looked due south into Virginia, carried on the sloping airs to Sam, his wife’s screams began coming louder and closer together. No doubt their neighbors with the small, pinched brick faces, feverishly avoiding the sunspots on their spoiled sheets in bedrooms on Reservoir Street, and the encroachers on old Tohoga House Estate, slums of Thirty-fifth Street, back-bedroom dwellers, who rested their hot eyes on green Tohoga’s wilderness, if they were awake, heard the sound too. The air was still and lazy. Sam plied fast his long legs and reached the house in a minute.

“It’s the end,” said Sam. Both leaves of the tall south door stood open letting in the moist air, and he raced from the porch through them and along the hall to Henny’s bedroom where the two girls were fast asleep. Brick-colored light fell through the shutters of the French windows on to the ceiling, and moved quickly in bars farther and farther into the room. The air breathed heat and nightlong sweat mixed with the dewy morning coming through the shutter slits. The windows were open. Louie’s long hair was spread out in a fan on the pillow, and the rumpled sheet was kicked to the bottom of the bed on her side, though it still half embraced Evie. Sam, standing at the foot of the bed, whistled Louie’s whistle. When she opened her eyes, he said quickly, “Get the kids up and dressed, Looloo: I want ’em to hear the new baby come.”

“Is it here?” asked the girl, half awake. He pointed in the direction of the noises, “Coming, coming; hurry. That means the end. I’ll get the boys.”

His daughter jumped out of bed, after shaking Evie.

“Little-Womey, hurry, hurry,” said Sam, stooping to the level of her vague, surprised eyes, on the bed. “New bimbo, new bambino!”

Evie sat up suddenly, her face pulled into a grotesque and comical grin, “Have we got a new bimbo?”

“Not yet; coming, coming!” He bent and kissed her, “Bimbo’s in a hurry; wants to see Little-Sam and Little-Womey.”

Evie looked round everywhere, “Where, Taddy?”

“With Mother yet,” Sam said tenderly.

He went to get up the boys. Ernie was out of bed like a shot and pulling his pajama pants off his feet. He looked interested and serious. He stopped with his day shirt half over his head, his two big eyes out like Brer Rabbit’s from the mudhole, questioning Big Sam, at a noise from upstairs. But Big Sam did nothing, only put himself everywhere at once, on all sides of the mattresses. “Git-up, git-up,” pulling and tugging at arms and legs, while the twins, not yet aware, groaned and muttered, “You get out, Erno, or I’ll hit yer,” and then at one moment shuttered up their eyes finally and gladly stared at Sam, back from Malaya and Manila.

“Daddy!” they both cried.

“Git-up, git-up!” he whispered joyously, mysteriously. They shot up and began prancing on their mattresses. The sun shone, but there was trouble above-stairs. Sam, however, instead of pulling a loner face and slewing: towards them woebegone eves, was all merriment and gratulation, his eyes a playground for scores of dancing little twitching elvish smiles, here and there, come and gone; his tired, yellow, and flabby cheeks, flushed a little; his ugly bloodshot eyes, which had gone creased, half shut and Indian, in the tropical sun, squinting at them, leering at them, with every token of a good time to come.

“New bimbo,” half whispered Sam, “new bimbo; get ready, get ready.”

To Louie who appeared, hastily dressed, he said, laughing, “Get ’em dressed, Looloo.”

Little-Sam stood up straight, his eyes and ears straining towards the stairs, as Louie knelt to fasten his sandals. The sun blushed on them all, banana yellow on the blonds and ginger on the brunets. They were all amazed and sober, examining the faces of Louie and Sam attentively. Sam was unconcerned. He smiled and, bending to kiss Evie, crooned, “Ming! Sedgewing! Smudgewing! Wat oo so sober fower? Wat oo ready to bust in two tears fower? Mummy get a new urchin, Daddy get a new shrimp, Evie get a new cradle kid, Tommo get a new brudder, Louie get a new somebuddy to make
wawa!
”

Evie raised her pansy kitten-face and pored over his lineaments, trying to make sense out of it all, trying to suck information out of him. He looked at her adoringly, and suddenly swung her up into his arms.

“My Little-Womey! Should have come to Malay with Poor-Sam to see all the—little brown, little bronze, little copper, little sulphur, little corn-cake, little waffle babbies; should have come to nurse all the little brown babbies; shouldn’t have stayed so far away from her poor little Sam.”

She threw back her head like Henny, and laughed provokingly, “But you wouldn’t take me, you wouldn’t take me!”

Three ringing cries came from the room upstairs, above the ceiling of the sunroom. Evie looked frightened. Sam’s face changed. He plumped her on to the floor.

“Quick, quick, all hands on deck!”

He ran amongst them, behind them, marshaling them, like a sheep dog, to the bottom of the stairs, where they stood with charmed expectant faces raised towards the landing.

Sam began to chant rather low, bending over them, with his hands on shoulders, bunching them together,

Mother’s got a lot, but she bought a new cot!

Daddy’s got Sedgewing, but he’s got a new Thing!

Louie’s got another little Creaker to her string!

All the children laughed, a babble of little chuckles and crows, like a summer wave rearing on the shingle; but stopped, with their mouths open to listen, as Henrietta screamed wildly, hoarsely, such a cry as they never thought she could make: Louie turned startled eyes to Samuel, believing that she had gone mad. Evie started to cry. Sam grew solemn and held up his hand,

“Kids, I want you to listen: she’s been crying all night; this is the end; soon you’ll hear a new kind of cry. That will be the new baby. Listen, listen!”

The children strained their faces upwards listening. Sam said softly, “This is the first sunrise and the first day on earth for one of our family. See what time it is, Looloo.”

It was six-thirty. When the baby’s cry came, they could not pick it out, and Sam, eagerly thrusting his face amongst their ears, said, “Listen, there, there, that’s the new baby.” He was red with delight and success. They heard voices, and their mother groaning still, and then, quite free and separate, the long thin wailing, and the voices again.

“Six-forty-five,” called Louie.

“Did you hear, Ming,” he asked, “did you hear?”

“Yes, Taddy, I heard.”

“What is it?” asked Tommy.

“The new baby, listen, the new baby.”

“We heard,” Saul announced, for the twins.

They were still there puzzled, but believing in him, so that they were convinced that a baby had in some miraculous way arrived by the roof; when, in the soft stir upstairs, they heard their mother’s speaking voice and a man answering her.

“Who is there, Taddy?” Tommy asked.

“Go tell Bonnie,” Sam commanded with a little satiric grin; for Bonnie, in tears and full of objections, had refused to be with them in their waiting and had gone off to the back porch to cool her feelings.

The next moment the door opened upstairs, and a strange, severe man came to the top of the stairs, surveyed them all with distaste and choler, and unkindly said to Sam, “Mrs. Pollit wishes to see you.”

Sam instantly swarmed through his children, putting them aside with his hands, disengaged his long legs from the mass of little legs, and bounded up the stairs. The doctor disappeared. At the top of the flight, Sam stopped and, turning round to them, gave them a wide grin, a chuckle, and said softly,

“Wait and see, kids: wait and see!”

The door closed. They heard their parents’ voices.

“Is it a baby?” inquired Little-Sam again, much surprised.

“Of course, silly; Daddy said,” Evie corrected him. They had understood nothing at all, except that Mother had been angry and miserable and now she was still; this was a blessed relief. They began to scatter through the hall after Louie had forbidden them to follow Sam upstairs. Suddenly Sam was at the bottom of the stairs again, flustered with a new love. He grabbed the twins by the shoulders and said excitedly, “Tribe, you have a new brother.”

The children looked at each other. “What’s his name?” inquired the twin Sam.

“He has no name,” said big Sam comically, knowing how odd that seemed to them. “We got to give him a name. What’ll we call him, kids?”

“Sam,” said twin Saul promptly.

The rest of them, all but the twin Sam, laughed. They began to suggest names, calling the baby after friends at school and street friends; and then a strange, unpleasant woman who had flown in, in the night, came halfway down the stairs and said agreeably, “Mrs. Pollit wants to see Tommy.”

The frightened Tommy made a step and hung back.

“Can I go? Can I go?” they all babbled.

“She said me,” Tommy objected and made a slow progress to the stairs. But he refused the nurse’s hand and looked sullen when she remarked with professional unction that he was a big boy now and had a little brother to look after.

“Charles Franklin,” said big Sam, “that’s what we’ll call him probably, after Grandpa and after the President, the greatest man of our time, the Daniel of our days. May little Charles-Franklin grow up to be like him.”

“And like Grandpa,” Ernie remarked.

“Grandpa is all right, but Grandpa is Grandpa; Grandpa had a hard row to hoe when he was a young man; but you kids have advantages. Grandpa came to this country with nothing but a tin box with his clothes in, but Charles-Franklin is going to have a better chance, and this is a better age. Things have changed since your grandpa’s day. Grandpa specially asked for the baby to be called after him; it’s just a little sentimental matter, you see, kids: Grandpa’s old; we can’t refuse him.” He nodded his head over them and sent them outside to play till Bonnie and Hazel got breakfast ready.