The Man Who Loved Children (48 page)

“ ‘It is indeed a momentious event,’ ” said Sam softly, in the verbal tatters of Artemus Ward. “Kids, there’s a marvolious old orchard full of apples, a manure heap, seedling frames, and all: we’ll really have a garding here.”

Evie repeated in her dolly voice, “I beg your parding, Mrs. Harding, but there’s a blowfly in your garding.”

Ernie looked at her with contempt, “You kill me!”

Evie looked quickly at her father for protection, but Sam was too anxious to know Henny’s unexpressed feelings about the new house to bother about squabbles in Lilliput.

Sam had wheeled them quickly round by Severn Avenue, hoping they would not take too much notice of the weatherboard cottages. The house could be entered in two ways, by boat, from Spa Creek, or from the back by way of a long serpentine dirt drive, edged on one side by the creek and on the other by the orchard. Along this drive stood very tall old trees, all kinds of maples and an elm. The drive turned round to the left (they had now made a hairpin bend), and they stopped on ragged grass beside the glassed-in and viny side door. Towards the water was a pleasant half-moon of lawn with shrubs; beyond the shrubs was the fall of the bank on which grew large trees and rushes, and under that was a small sand beach. A rotted row-boat lay sunk in the beach. The children discovered all this in a minute, poured out of the car, and dashed about with cries.

“The house, kids,” cried Sam, “here we are, here we are home again, home again. Spa House. We’ll put up a board tomollo [tomorrow] saying ‘Spa House’ and ‘No admittens.’ ”

“Are we going to live here?” inquired Evie somewhat dubiously, after surveying the porch and balcony, the old withering walls and the broken planks.

“Yes, Love,
e pluribus unum in proprietor persony!
” exclaimed Sam, more heartily than he felt, for as he unlocked the side door, he saw Henny sniffing angrily at the decaying timber and dirty panes. The house had been abandoned for a year, and Sam had got it cheaper than he expected, at a price of a little over $5000, with a mortgage, because he asked for no patching-up (he and the boys would do it, aided by Uncles Lennie and Ebby), and because, with a great many new building schemes and threats of condemnation, the despised Eastport was considered to be altogether unmarketable. All that part of town was now sniffed at by progressive residents: the town was progressing towards the west where the high school stands, with modern bungalows and new highways. The officers at the Naval Academy were soon to be taken out of their apartments in private houses in the town and housed in special buildings, and government and state officials from Baltimore were to be moved down here into special new buildings. The old town round the Academy was dying. People were dubious about the fate of St. John’s College, and the old part of the town could look for nothing but visitors in June Week, visitors for the August fishing festival, and a possible revival in wartime. At all events, not a householder in Annapolis but considered Eastport a civic disgrace of deep dye, and would see it cleaned out and rebuilt. On the farther side of the Eastport flat, beside huge old houses built on neglected estates (it was once thought that Eastport would become fashionable) lived Negro families in a desperate situation and poor-white families, and in the little cove there are the most abandoned, hopeless old rat-eaten and rotten tubs in the whole of the watery world.

The first van of furniture was turning into the drive before they had explored even the second story, so the children were turned out to grass and Henny went to sit on a weather-beaten rocking chair with the seat out that had been left on the veranda. She faced Annapolis. Only a few hundred yards from her was the sheeny basin, a tiny Como. She had cast one glance into the Spa House kitchen and seen its old stoves (one iron oven built in and one old gas range), leprous sink, and wormy floor, and then gone silently to the rocking chair. For the past half hour she had felt a curious, dull, but new sensation and as she sat there she found out what it was. Across the water was a houseboat, a cabin on a raft, about which climbed two or three young plump girls in skin-tight satin bathing things and a couple of lanky boys in trunks. Cars were parked beyond in Shipwrights’ Street. Casual mosquitoes buzzed in the damp silent rafters of the veranda but did not annoy her in the mild sunlight. All the children but Louie had already disappeared to the fringe of beach, and she heard their voices through the reeds. A girl took a plunge from the houseboat; a middle-aged man with a sandy fringe of hair round a bald spot rowed languidly past in a suicidal rowboat; two naval cadets had come into the Creek and were clutching at a flapping sail. Henny heard the men moving in some heavy thing, and heard her husband say wearily, “Looloo-dirl, make some cawf!” The reek of weeds forever damp and of the brackish water came up to her and the smell of the ground under the veranda. It had rained slightly in the night. Louie, who pretended not to hear Sam’s call, came in a dawdle round the house and leaned against the veranda post behind the vines, chewing a grass stalk. She was droning to herself and presently she droned clearly, “Oh, the waterskin crawls shorewards; and the leprous sky scales earthwards, from the musical moaning channel, to the dirty margin.” It was halfwater; the surface was dull, and the sky was windy.

At that particular moment, Henny awoke from a sort of sullen absence and knew what was happening; her heart was breaking. That moment, it broke for good and all.

“Stop that rot,” she cried madly to Louie, startling her out of her wits, “I never heard such damnfool tommyrot. Go and get the coffee. A big lumbering sheep, and on a day like this, she holds up the veranda post.” Louie, with tactful soft-footing, disappeared from behind the vines, and presently Henny heard her saying,

“I say, Dad, this gas won’t turn on; it’s jammed.”

The men trundled backwards and forwards and puffed. Louie soon came to the veranda with a cup of tea for her mother (Henny’s heart would not stand coffee), “Mother, Daddy says, ‘Where do you want things put?’ ”

“What the devil do I care? Put them in the orchard and make a bonfire of them. Put them where you like,” she ended, less ungraciously. “Is it my home? It’s your father’s idea. Do what you like; all I want is a place to lie down, and get me a bed for Baby. Tell him I am not going to lift a finger to fix up his stinking tenement: the animals have better cages. Go on now, don’t stand there staring.”

Louie, not at all offended, and now observing more closely the many defects of the old house, the hanging window cords, unlatchable latches, and sunken floors, went in to say, “Mother says put everything where you like.”

Sam, only too pleased, at once hallooed and whistled for the gang of children and consulted their tastes. It was not hard to suit most of them.

For the next month, until the middle of July, in deep middle of the bee season, old Spa House rang from six in the morning till nightfall with the boys’ shouting and Sam’s whistling, hammering, ripping of timbers, and falling of plaster. Sam, with the boys, was taking the house apart and putting it together again on a different plan. He himself would renew the furnace system, take down the chimneys, pull out the bathroom, install a shower room, make new steps, put in timbers in the decrepit veranda, put in glass where it was broken, patch the plaster, calcimine, paint, and otherwise repair. The great project filled him with joy. “With my own labor union,” said he to them, “I need nobody; no strikes, no trouble, only the work going up fast.”

“You don’t pay anything,” Ernie said disagreeably. He felt first, after Henny, the pinched circumstances in which they were now living. His perquisites had ceased, and because (after a first visit during which Henny had remained in her room) one and all of the relatives in Baltimore had become timid or distant, he received no nickels or dimes in presents. His rich grandfather was dead, and Henny, more ferocious than ever, had absolutely forbidden him (“whatever your father says”) to run errands for the grocer, black boots, or do any of the other things that his imagination suggested to him. Henny kept completely to herself, refusing to speak to any of the poor neighbors. Since the breakdown of her hopes, many things had come home to her. She was ashamed of everything, especially ashamed of her laboring husband who could be seen at any hour of the day crawling about the house and acting like a common workman. Why wasn’t he at work? the neighbors might be asking. Henny, too, had suddenly become ashamed of having so many children; for now that Collyer was dead and the estate dissipated, people asked her ordinary questions.

“It’s all bets off, and they think I’m one of themselves,” Henny told her friend, old maid Miss Orkney. “I’m ashamed to go out of the house with that string, I’m like a common Irish Biddy.” She was glad to hide behind the wild growths of Spa House.

Sam was being treated ignominiously in the Department. He had been suspended without pay after receiving pay for three months, at first; and though his case was up before the Civil Service Commission, friends warned him that he was likely to find himself out on his ear, in the street, penniless and cheated of his pension.

“It is impossible,” said Sam stoutly, “I am guiltless, and I will not fight them with their own weapons. I will not excite opposition—for I do excite opposition. When they see how unselfish I am, it somehow arouses the madness of anger, and jealousy in my enemies. My absence serves me better than any number of petitions and any logrolling. I have been accused of receiving support from Old David’s political friends: may that never be said about a Pollit! I will only go to Washington to see my friends. Their machinations are beneath the very contempt of a man like me.”

Henny, never speaking to him, heard him with fright; but she had given herself up entirely to despair; she said nothing, and it seemed to her that (now that the clouds had rolled away) she saw her husband for the first time: she had married a child whose only talent was an air of engaging helplessness by which he got the protection of certain goodhearted people—Saul Pilgrim, who was penniless, various old Socialists, of small property, and in the dim past, by the same means, her own father.

“Why don’t I tie a stone round my neck and drown myself in his idiotic creek?” she asked Louie with quiet sadness, when she heard these declarations from Sam in the intervals of hammering. Money was slow coming from his pockets, and Henny’s allowance (which had never been more than $10 to $20 monthly from Sam, on account of her father’s generosity to her) ceased altogether. When Henny sent Louie with indignant messages to her father about this, Sam coolly sent back his answer, that, “Soon she would get her quarterly allowance from the estate, and in the meantime, they must all pull in their belts.” Henny would reply (by the same telegraph) that “he ought to be ashamed to live off a dead man,” to which Sam, with a stern expression, would answer nothing at all, or merely mutter that if it had not been for her devilish extravagance of a spoilt fool raised for the marriage market, they would have been well enough off on his savings. This was a constant source of quarreling (always by telegraph) and, because of it, the children knew almost all the ins and outs of their family society.

Louie, who was much involved in all this, was a hotheaded person easily getting indignant over the injustices of one to the other; and about her own share of injustice storing up a wealth of vengeful feeling, a tempest on a chain which she intended to let loose at some vague season in the future. But, to her great surprise, the rest of the family who were, after all, own sons and own daughter of Henny, seemed to take not the slightest interest in the obscene drama played daily in their eyes and ears, but, like little fish scuttling before the disturbing oar, would disappear mentally and physically into the open air or into odd corners of the house. When a quarrel started (Henny and Sam did speak at the height of their most violent quarrels) and elementary truths were spoken, a quiet, a lull would fall over the house. One would hear, while Henny was gasping for indignant breath and while Sam was biting his lip in stem scorn, the sparrows chipping, or the startling rattle of the kingfisher, or even an oar sedately dipping past the beach, or even the ferry’s hoot. Exquisite were these moments. Then the tornado would break loose again. What a strange life it was for them, those quiet children, in this shaded house, in a bower of trees, with the sunny orchard shining, the calm sky and silky creek, with sunshine outside and shrieks of madness inside. For Sam, in his rages, had long ago forgotten all kindness and said to his wife the vilest insults, throwing up at her all that could possibly be called her life; and she retaliated, but losing, losing all the time. From the moment they came to Spa House Henny had begun to lose ground in the war. Back she went, step by step; and it seemed that Sam, as poverty closed round them, gained stride by stride. Poverty was a beautiful thing to him, something he was born to and could handle: to her it was something worse than death, degradation, and suicide. She envied every creature she saw if she did not immediately think with bitterness, “Little the poor wretch knows what is coming to it,” or, “The poor dumb fool is too stupid to see what a life it leads.” Of these remarks she was free to her children and to Louie. She often said to her stepdaughter, “Your father broke my heart, then he broke my body with housework, now he is breaking my children: I have no money—what do you think there is for me? How can he criticize me? The great ignorant howling fool! Let me die.”

It was a beautiful summer. Sam hoped still that “truth crushed to earth would rise again” (he meant his case would succeed). He found a thousand theories to justify his changing the children’s food from butter to margarine, and from meat, to beans, spaghetti, and fish. He superintended the cooking himself, reproaching his Little-Woman with her clumsy attempts at cooking and himself instructing her because her mother would not. He knew a noble woman, it appeared, in the Conservation Department, who put out pamphlets on cooking, and Sam was always chatting about her recipes and always trying them out. He imported gallons of oil, of all kinds, himself making experiments in the kitchen, peanut oil, corn oil, fish oil, and every kind of oil, which filled the wooden house with a roof-lifting stench and made Sam very gay indeed. He raged against Henny’s odors, but for himself, in his own universe, concocted such powerful, world-conquering odors as could be smelled across Spa Creek and up and down the foreshores. Waiting for his case to be decided, he was able to forget the world and be happy.