The Man Who Loved Children (56 page)

There was plenty of this, and during the warm advancing spring Louie became more and more thoughtful and round-eyed. Sam might rave at her woodenheadedness as he liked, she had too much to dream about. Now, “so that you can tell the good from the bad, and avoid what your own conscience tells you is the wrong thing,” Sam had revealed to her in a few weeks, and without a word of his, the unspeakable madness of sensuality in past ages and concealed imaginations; nations had done this, armies, great names and glorious artists, and her father had told her to study the books carefully with the following strange words: “It is the father who should be the key to the adult world, for his daughters, for boys can find it out for themselves.” After this, Sam turned shy and avoided saying one word more to her on all these subjects, even avoided her, and when she turned her darkened, staring eye on him by accident, he would glance away as if ashamed. But the more she read of these works, the more she felt guilty of power of her own, and she began suddenly to despise and loathe Sam with an adult passion.

A very unpleasant thing had been discovered in an outlying part of the district in recent weeks. A girl child having been found pregnant, her father, a jobless roustabout, had been accused of incest; the girl went to a state home, but the father, only accused by hearsay and on the confused testimony of the child, still remained at home. The papers contained accounts and mysterious charges which the children read eagerly but did not understand. Sam’s hair rose on the first evening and, suddenly flaming with temper, shouting with rage, he seized a stick and declared that there and then he would head a posse of respectable fathers and citizens and go to chastise the editor of the paper. “I am a man of peace,” cried Sam shouting with rage, “but this is a case where vigilante law comes into being and has its function. The miserable cowardly yellow devil who dares attack a father in his own home, on top of the sorrow he must be feeling at finding his daughter in trouble, a little girl with a baby to come—think of that, Looloo, a girl two years younger than you, poor baby!—has to suffer undefended an unspeakable charge like this. He is to be brought up on this charge,” shouted Sam, grasping his walking stick, “and because he is poor, and has only one of those windblows of shacks to live in, they can attack him with impunity. Every decent-thinking man and decent-living man in this community will be roused by this: I am a man of peace but I would go myself and horsewhip the dirty cur,” and a frightening typhoon raged for a long time, a storm with a high yellow glare and copper-colored waves hissing, licking, and rising round them.

But Sam did not go: he only cursed the editor and declaimed every day until the subject died down. The daughter had accused her own father, “poor miserable wretch,” said Sam sternly, “baby taught to say something to help the cause of a wicked lawyer. No doubt, Loo and Ernie,” he continued, “you will find behind this story some dreadful corruption: a landlord trying to evict the man—doubtless he is a good man who has tried, in the past, to show up the forces of evil, and this is their stenchful revenge. My boys and girls, mark this; and notice other things that I bring to your notice. Your father does not get angry about things for nothing. This world is full of corruption, and when the foul press, the sink of greed, the gutter of moneybags spewing its filth back to the gutter whence it came, the harlot of the world, begins to get its back up and get moral about something, be sure that things are not what they seem and that they are trying to cover up, not
expose,
a scandal. When a man is poor,” said Sam solemnly, turning to Ernie and pouring his white heat into Ernie’s serious, round eyes, “the world hates him: you must be prepared for that, Ermo: you might fight it as I have. The entire gamut of scandal, hate, and lying is prepared for a poor man in this world who dares to work for the truth. That is why they got rid of me too: they feared me, for wickedness fears Truth.”

Ernie stared at him for a moment longer and, getting slowly off the porch where they were all sitting now, looking at Sam’s blond flame, walked off by himself. They saw his round brown head disappearing amongst the bushes, down towards the beach. Sam winked at them all, and, nudging Looloo, said
sotto voce,
“Thinking! A thoughtful head! Not a big head but a brain with many corrugations, I’ll be bound!” He smiled and nodded at them all, “A good boy!”

It was a queer thing, that though Louie had been brought up on
The Origin of Species
and
The Animal Kingdom
(of Cuvier) and numerous works in biology and psychology, not to mention the works Sam had just given her, she scarcely comprehended at all the actions meant by “sexual commerce.” But after this horrific happening which had taken place in one of these hideous far suburbs built on yellow sumps and dominated by the Gargantuan black pipes of Bethlehem Steel, with nothing but tracks over the mud and colorless dry grass, she got the idea that she had run up against one of the wickednesses of the universe, an infernal middle kingdom of horror that she alone could stand. For Sam could rave and the little children could look at her queerly when she blurted out the half-formed thoughts in her mind, but she felt sure that she only
felt
what was going on under the ribs of the visible world. Under the eternal belching black organ pipes of Bethlehem Steel was the vile lake that covered an agony of fire, a lake that hid something like Grendel, or the pained bowels of an Aetna, or the cancer of a Prometheus, and in this lake too was this hideous father with his lying child half smothered by the swelling fruit of her womb.

Louie’s brain boiled by day and by night, and every joke of Sam’s, every silly crack and harmless tease made her flame with a murderous revenge. Whenever she and he were at home, she would mutter at him (from a silent distance), “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” Against this went her terrible passion for Miss Aiden, childish in its ignorance, adult in its turbulency. At school she was in heaven, at home she was in a torture chamber. The children would often study her attentively and seem to know that she was now in a very strange world, but to Sam she only seemed “more muddleheaded than ever, instead of brighter as I had hoped.” To escape Sam she would always run away from the house with her book, usually Shelley (she wanted to marry a man like Shelley, only Shelley), and read and learn.
The Cenci,
a famous piece, she had avoided for weeks because the subject seemed forbidding, but when she at last began to read it, she began marveling again, for it seemed that (eliminating the gloomy and gorgeous scene) Beatrice was in a case like hers. The Saturday afternoon before Henny went to town, then, with the doll for poor Cathleen, she had learned,

…
I, alas!

Have lived but on this earth a few sad years,

And so my lot was ordered, that a father

First turned the moments of awakening life

To drops, each poisoning youth’s sweet hope;.
…

(Shelley:
The Cenci
, Act V, Scene 2)

It was mid-afternoon when they saw Louie coming up from the beach again: the blood-gold sun rimmed grass, leaves, and Louie’s new-washed hair.

“See where Looloo walked by herself, thinking her thoughts,” said Sam to the twins, who were stretched beside him on the grass at the western side of the house. “Always thinking, always mooning, it’s a pity she didn’t have her own mother for a few years, and she would have been better. You see, I think I made a mistake letting her talk to Bonniferous so much, when poor Bonniferous was here, for Bonniferous had silly ideas about going on the stage and now Looloo does nothing but talk to herself,” and cheerily he hailed her, “Bluebeak? Is you talkin’ to yousef or is you recitin’ poetry?”

Louie stopped and looked at them and said very proudly, “Reciting poetry, if you must know.”

“Come, recite it to us, Looloo,” said Sam stretching himself. Louie did not wait a moment but stepped over to them and declaimed Cenci’s speech,

God!

Hear me! If this most specious mass of flesh,

Which Thou hast made my daughter; this my blood
…
this devil

Which sprung from me as from a hell, was meant

To aught good use …

Sam stared and his eyes narrowed, but he was reassured by the book in her hand, the very one he had given her; Louie continued,

… if her bright loveliness

Was kindled to illumine this dark world
…

Sam repeated softly, “If her bright loveliness was kindled to illumine this dark world,” and waited patiently for Louie to continue, always with the gentle smile playing on his long, well-formed lips. Louie stopped and said proudly again, “You’re making fun of me!” She started to leave them.

“Stay, Looloo,” begged Sam. “No, not to be made fun of.” “Stupid Looloo,” cried Sam, in surprise. “Looloo, afternoon tea in the common room.”

When she brought in the jingling tray and set it down at the western end of the long table, Sam and the boys had a lighted candle before them, and Ernie, who was very keen on physics, was explaining to them that in the center of the flame was nothing but a cool spot: if you put a match there, said Ernie, it would not light. The children, giggling with excitement, began brushing their fingers through the flame, to feel the cool spot. Ernie held his finger there for a moment and pulled it away with a comical shriek, and then Sam put out his big yellow forefinger and put it into the flame and drew it away, blowing and making a great travesty of his sufferings. Looloo stood watching the candle’s pale ear of light floating beside the dusty sunbeam streaming through the window.

“And Looloo try,” said Ernie, appealing to her, “you try too, Looloo,” for Ernest was always anxious that everyone should be convinced of his proofs. The children meanwhile were dashing their fingers back and forth in a silly way, giggling and licking their hands. Louie, with a slight smile, stuck out the little finger of her right hand and held it in the flame. The children’s faces stilled with surprise, their eyes opened, and Sam, whose face had held as always a merry jeer, looked questioningly at her, and he suddenly cried, “Looloo, don’t be a fool!” while Tommy said, “Ooh, Ooh, you’ll hurt yourself,” and Ernie said, “Looloo, don’t.” There was a nasty smell of frying flesh in the room. Louie withdrew her finger and showed it to them for an instant, charred, and then coolly walked out of the room to go and wrap it in oil. Evie and Little-Sam were bawling, and the others were pale with fright, while Sam repeated several times angrily, “Looloo is a cussed, mulish donkey: Looloo has not an ounce of sense in her bonnet.” He even got up and came to the door of the kitchen and asked angrily, “Looloo, isn’t it hurting you?”

“It is not hurting me,” she said stiffly.

“It must be.”

“Nothing hurts me if I don’t want it to,” she told him. He lumbered away, shrugging his shoulders and utterly at a loss. The child was beyond him. He made up his mind that he would never let Ernie get out of hand like that. As for Evie, she was not going to go to high school. He had made up his mind that it was the higher education that had “knocked spots off Looloo’s common sense,” as he now told his little family in a soft grumble, and he would eat his hat if they ever caught him making a cantankerous wretch out of Little-Womey.

But Ernie pussyfooted out to the kitchen and asked, “Doesn’t it hurt, Louie?” to which Louie replied with a smile, “Yes, of course it hurts, but it doesn’t matter.” With the children she felt cool; all her passions flowed far above their unharmed heads. This evening Sam left her alone in the cool of her room upstairs; and it was this evening, looking at the sky bloom darkly and the pendent globe of Jupiter, that she had a splendid idea. In June would be Sam’s birthday, and for it she would write a play which the children could act. She got out her pen and paper and, instead of writing for Miss Aiden, wrote for herself, not for the children, a strange little play. When it was written (there were scarcely twenty lines in it), she turned it into a secret language that she began to make up there on the spot. This was a good idea, she thought: so that she could write what she wished, she would invent an extensive language to express every shade of her ideas. “Everyone has a different sphere to express, and it goes without saying that language as it stands can never contain every private thought.” But she was only a weakling and a mental dwarf now as before, and the new vocabulary did not ever exceed a few hundred words, nor was there ever more than one play written in it! She was called from this by a bump and Chappy’s (Charles-Franklin’s) scream, and as she plunged to the rescue, she heard again Sam’s plaintive, bashful question to Little-Womey, “Why is Mothering out all day? Why is the Henny-penny always away from the chicken-lickens now? Don’t she want to take her responsibilities any mower? Why, Little-Womey, soon you got to be my wife, I speck.”

“Yes, Taddy,” Evie answered, from the porch door, seeing that Chappy was already in Louie’s arms. She rushed up, too, seeing that he still sobbed, “Wassamatter, Chappy? Hurt ooself?” Sam came running, snatched the little butter-blond boy away and started tossing him to the ceiling and at last ran off with him, hallooing and doing the round of the orchard. They heard Chappy’s loud crowing laughs.

“Daddy said I could be his wife,” Evie told Louie, looking up at her confidentially and not sure whether she would laugh and approve. Louie turned her back, and Evie’s face fell.

Since May the little boys with real fishing tackle had been fishing the streams that feed the Severn, and the local coves, with Sam. Sam predicted a roaring summer. Saul Pilgrim, who did a fishing column for one of the Washington papers and who wrote fishing poetry which he syndicated, was to come down to Spa House, just about Sam’s birthday, June twenty-third, on his way to Ocean City, for the big-game season. The boys had caught plenty of poor sport, gudgeons, minnows, even pike and sunfish, but they nagged Sam to be allowed to go with one or other of the fishermen and boatowners down to the Winter Quarter Shoals or the Tide Rips, for catching the game king, the marlin, who in midsummer here strikes his most northerly point. Sam refused, and the boys found to their sorrow that even the fishermen were joking; the marlin is no minnow, will fight from four to fifteen hours, and kills his fishers when he can. The season was now the talk of the bay, for many men idle during the year are in good work from May to November. About three hundred thousand persons go to the Chesapeake for the summer fishing, six hundred and thirty odd boats are employed at a rental of nearly three hundred thousand dollars yearly, a giant revenue for the tidewater section of Maryland; meantime, the bait for trout, spot, and croakers, chiefly peeler crabs in all stages, sold at from fifty cents to two dollars a dozen has increased the income of the crabber, and, in addition to the big boats, are all sorts of rowboats, sailing boats, canoes, and lighter craft. The boys looked forward to a raging summer. Sam and other fishermen predicted from certain signs (early swarming, strange electric weather) a great catch. The air was alive with fish stories, the points of a good fisherman, and Sam was full of indignations and moral points—depletion of the crab supply, use of beardless hooks, the democratization of game fishing, and the commercial utilization of the immense supply of big game fish taken in at this season and wasted. “The marlin is a singularly oily fish”; said Sam, “no doubt the flesh is inedible, though it may possibly be treated, but surely we ought to use this valuable supply of animal oil, thrashing about in the ocean under our noses. The fishing is done for us, at great expense by wealthy fishermen,” and he proposed schemes for receiving the marlin as soon as it was caught after verification of size and poundage, and to try out the oil and use the offal for fertilizer perhaps. “We are now slowly awakening to the need for reforestation,” said Sam, “and why should we lay waste the great treasuries of the sea?”