The Man Who Loved Children (62 page)

Henny shrugged her shoulders and went on cleaning the knives. “She’s not a bad woman, and if she’s not an absolute fool, she’ll see the way I’m treated.”

Louie flashed up with a smile of gratitude, “Oh, Mother, do you like her?”

“I like her, yes.”

“Oh, Mother!”

“Don’t faint,” said Henny irritably, suppressing a smile. At last, Louie was able to get away, but Sam kept on talking cheerfully until the last moment, when he walked her to the gate. Louie was allowed to walk up to the station with Miss Aiden, a walk of about a mile. When they were on the Eastport Bridge, they heard a faint shout, and looking back, saw the Pollit clan lined up once more in front of the Wishing Tree, waving the flag at them.

“Your father is very amusing,” said Miss Aiden, patronizingly. For the first time, Louie found the shadow of a ghost of a fault in Miss Aiden’s manner.

Having delivered himself of his heartfelt sentiments once again, Sam was gay and went merrily footling round the place, looking for fresh worlds to conquer. “Tah yez wot I do,” he declared, “I’ll make Looloo-the-Zulu a new bookcase, now she’s learned to read; feelin’ fine! Old Aido’s a nice old girl! I like Old Aido and if she’d ask me twice, I’d marry her.” The children were nodding buttercups of giggles. Some of them departed to other occupations (to pore over the presents they had given Sam that day, for example), but the twins stayed with Sam, who now went into Louie’s bedroom, to take down the old bookcase, which was about ten feet high, and measured the wall space for a new one. He began to dust off the top and there found all sorts of things—a forgotten pin box, a pill box with tacks in it, two knitting needles, and an out-of-date diary on which was written in capitals: THE AIDEN CYCLE.

“Sirprise after sirprise,” announced Sam shaking his head; “well, blow me down ef it ain’t poickry. Say, kids, Looloo’s a dangblueblasted better poet then whut I am. Now, what do you know about that, Little-Sam? Say, quick, Sawbones, go get the kids: quick! When Looloo gits back frum a-walkin’ out with her beloved, she’ll find us all a-joying of her poickry. Quick, quick.”

The call went out, and the children straggled back to the house. It was a lovely evening, and the grateful and fascinated children from the party were drifting back to the gate and the fences, poking their heads in and holding wistful conversations with the happy savages of Spa House.

“Oh, Jiminy Jee,” sighed Ernie: “if we aren’t always at his beck and call.”

“You get along,” cried Henny, hearing this, “or he’ll be whistling and calling, and I can’t stand any more today.”

She rounded them up. Soon Louie’s room was full of them, while Sam, standing on his small stepladder with the book in his hand, declaimed,

All nature is in you, its monsters less;

As nature monsters are, so less are you

Than nature: nature lacks what you have more

Than natural: unnatural, you bless

Our lives too natural—yet world I’d rue

Without this extra-nature I adore
.

“Whut in the name of dingbingbusted commen sense,” asked Sam, “is this? Hit’s a crostword puzzle. Blow me darn, here’s another!

Pearlshell, pearl, and madrepore,

Purple wampum, rich fish dyes,

Of gold and silver a great store,

In megaron, in mattamore;

But, Rosalind, thou art much more.

Oh, Rosalind; oh, kiss me, Rosalind!”

At this moment, Tommy, who had watched in the falling night for Louie’s return, bounded in shouting, “She’s coming back now, she’s on the bridge.”

“Ooh,” said Evie, “Daddy, she will be very angry with you.”

“You ought to stop, Pad,” said Ernie.

“She’s in love with Miss Aiden, oh, Rosalind,” chanted Sam, squirming. The children imitated him. “She worships Miss Aiden,” said Little-Sam shrilly. “Oh, I love you, Miss Aiden.”

“Shh!” said Sam leaning over mysteriously, as he was turning over a leaf, “Tommo! Go to the gate and tell me when Looloo is coming: tell Looloo I’m reading her poickry. See what she says! Eh?” There were varying tones of assent and dissent, but Tommy galloped off. Louie was coming home slowly, breathing in the soft-smelling, bayside, thickening air; bats flew, mosquitoes sang. She was glad no one was with her, for after all she had nothing to say to anyone, not even to Miss Aiden, since ravishment cannot be spoken.

“Louie, Louie!” It was Tommy calling her from the gate.

“What do you want?”

“Louie, Dad’s reading all your poems!

Tommy saw the pale form pelting towards him, “Where?” she called, seizing him by the shoulder. He felt a tremor of fear and anticipation;

“In your room—he wanted to make—” but Tommy was alone, while a large dark shape rounded the corner of the drive. He ducked under the white railing to cut across the lawn, when he saw at his feet two oblong shapes, two letters left lying on the lawn. He picked them up and ran in. The light shone through the two windows of Louie’s room, and he could see the mess of children in there, with Sam’s laughing face and the book held out as he read; the children lounged round, uninterested. As he passed the open window Sam was saying, “Here’s one (where’s Looloo-dirl?)—

There is a sick one within these walls,

She is mad I know by the songs she sings—

Louie burst into the room. “Here’s Louie, here’s Louie,” they sang out.

“Give to me,” she shouted, “you give it to me!”

“No! Leave me read it,” he wheedled. “You ain’t got nuffin you don’t want your Poor-Sam for to see, hev you?

I must confess I love you,

I love you in my fashion,

’Tis not from lack of passion

I would not say I love—

“Give it to me,” shrieked the girl: “I’ll make you.” The children made way for her and she came up the first step after her father, grabbing for the book, which, of course, he waved away from her. He looked handsome, bewitching, never so handsome as when teasing, “ ‘I love you.’ ”

She got off the step and stood underneath him, looking up and saying, “Give it to me, give it to me.”

The Indian starling, flashing in the shade

Is like your eye, all flecked with gold and blue

“Here,” he said, throwing it to her, so that it fell on the floor, “take it away; and don’t write such sickening tommyrot. Write if you want to, but not such silly nauseating stuff. I didn’t think you’d be so silly as to fall for calf love for a teacher, I thought you had more in you.

“Looloo,” he said turning away to the children, “is trying to practice poickry without a poick’s license, and I think she ought to be fined or go to jail. Now, dear old Georgie the Fisherman says to me the other day, he says, with rather a shamefaced look, kids, because of his ignorance, becaze even fisherboys is rayther ashamed of their iggerance, not like Tommy here, and quite evidently with a automobile permit in mind—or whatever fat George Pudding-and-Pie drinks with—‘Mr. Pollick,’ sezee, ‘wy do they give poicks licences to say things wrong?’ In conversation that followed, I saw quite clearly that he thought poicks got licences like fishermen, maybe by the traffic department, so these dopey nuts who make schooldays so hard for poor fat boys could get their stuff printed with a licence. So I think we’ll get Looloo a licence, maybe a dog licence.”

Tommy, who had been listening with his mouth open, now pushed forward waving two letters in his hand, “Mothering says two letters for you, Pad: I found them in the wet grass.”

“What,” cried Sam, taking them: “that dopey Popeye Banks again! I’ll write to the post office about having a nitwit for a letter carrier: I don’t know why boys like him aren’t sent to a lethal chamber, or just nipped in the bud at birth. The communication between men ought to be the most sacred of all things: and if we weren’t so busy building warships,” declared Sam, in a temper, “we would have money for better mail services; and if we weren’t despised by people because we live in a mudhole. I’ll make a complaint about this and get him removed.”

He stopped, looking at what he had drawn out of the envelope. It was a triangle of newsprint dragged from yesterday’s paper; round the borders in heavy penciling were insulting words, and part of the message was written across the print.

“What is it, Dad?”

He held it close to the ceiling light and made out words,

“
You twofaced son of a bitch, would you like to know who was the dad of your last boy take a look in the internal revenue dept and you’ll learn lots your wife certainly put one over on you you lowdown bastard while you were getting hot with the chink girlies you sap everyone knows it but you who was away ten months you sap Im glad they threw you out on your can even if your wife owes me an everybody in shoeleather pullenty
.”

“What is it, Dad?” (They could see enormity in his face.)

“It is one of the foulest things on this earth—” He was still puzzling it, hoping to read something different. His hand began to shake.

“Pad—”

“Get out!”

They ran away, looking back over their shoulders with startled eyes.

“Megalops!” cried Sam. (Megalops, infant crab, was his pet name for Charles-Franklin.) The children hid themselves, with receptive ears, round corners. But after this, Sam was silent. He had sat down on Louie’s bed, doing nothing, apparently thinking, while the lights blazed away, running up the electricity bills.

It was a strange night: they were put to bed quickly, and Louie, with red eyes, leaned amongst them to tell them the story of Hawkins, the North Wind.

Evie said, “No,
The Spring House!
Ooh!”

Downstairs a great racket was going on, which was nothing but Henny and Sam going it hammer and tongs, with Henny saying, “You’re a sneak and always were,” and Sam shouting, “Indiscriminate sexual relations”; but the children paid no attention to it.

Tommy shouted, “No, the Indian ghosts!” while Little-Sam called for
The Invisible Snake.
But Louie, insisting that Hawkins was her new story, because she had just made it up, made it
Hawkins.

“Chawkins?” queried Tommy with his invented foreign accent.

“One evening in October a black man was working in his potato patch at Jones, over by Rugby Hall; the sun was a flare burning up the trees and smoke and flames came from it. That was because it was cold. Now a withered and warty horse came up through the hill, with a man on its rumpbones; the sun was so low and red, it looked—I don’t know what.”

“My money box,” said Ernie: “it’s low and red.”

“It looked like Ernie’s money box. ‘Peaslop,’ said the man on the horse, ‘I’m hungry and thirsty and I got to get down to the water tonight.’
Down by what water?
‘Down by Severnside.’
Then you better get going.
‘No, my horse’s got his night eyes.’
Then stay to supper.
‘Now what you got?’
Got plenty.
The shack was all surrounded with garlic on strings and cobs of corn, beans in packets and black walnuts in bags, salt codfish in dozens and smoked shad in strings and black clove hams and black wild cherries. Then Ambrose, the man on the horse, wiped his hand across his mouth like this—whirrsh! (
Now, Mrs. Peaslop, you cook a dinner for a man with an empty stomach
.) The woman stuck her black head out of the window and yelled,

“ ‘I lack one thing for my fry, Peaslop.’

“ ‘And what’s that?’

“ ‘That s my horse’s mane, man.’

“The man came up quickly and cut off the horse’s mane and threw it in the kitchen window. The frizzling went on and in a minute the woman looked out and sang out, ‘I lack only one thing for my fry, Peaslop.’

“ ‘And what’s that?’

“ ‘That’s horse’s tail, man.’

“ ‘I got horse’s tail.’

“And the black man came and grabbed the horse’s tail, cut off a handful, and threw it in the window. The man on the horse’s rump meanwhile had gone right off to sleep, and he nodded, nid-nod, nid-nod, in the slight breeze that was coming up. Then the woman came to the window and yelled (though you couldn’t see her, the night had got so black):

“ ‘There’s one thing surely I need for my baking, Peaslop.’

“ ‘And what’s that?’

“ ‘That’s horse’s warts.’

“ ‘Now, that’s just what I got,’ said Peaslop, and he cut them off and threw a handful through the window.

“But the woman yelled, though it was so dark you could see nothing but Peaslop’s eyeballs rolling, ‘There’s one thing would make my stew better, Peaslop.’

“ ‘And what’s that?’

“ ‘That’s horse’s hide; I do need that.’

“So Peaslop took a skinning knife, and he skinned that horse as quick as lightning just as it stood there with its head hanging, asleep in the black night and so quick and smart that the horse didn’t know, but it shivered.

“ ‘My horse’s catching cold,’ said the man on the horse, Ambrose I mean. ‘His teeth are chattering to themselves.’

“ ‘Horse’s teeth,’ said Peaslop, ‘why that’s just what would flavor my old woman’s stew,’ and he wrenched out the teeth to stop them from chattering.

“ ‘And my poor nag’s knees are just knocking together/ complained Ambrose, ‘and every one of his ribs are rattling.’

“ ‘Now horse’s rib soup would make good stock for my old woman’s stew,’ said Peaslop. Without another word, so dark was it, he stole every horse’s rib and every horse’s shinbone without so much as tipping Ambrose a wink. But he left a hipbone for Ambrose to rest his weary bones upon.

“ ‘Now, friend Peaslop,’ said the rider, ‘my horse’s flesh, it just quivers and quakes like a jelly without ice; and I’m very much afraid it’s getting colder.’

“ ‘Then give me that flesh, it certainly will make a good roast for my old woman’s table,’ said Peaslop; and he snatched all the horse’s fine roast from underneath Ambrose, but he still left him a hipbone to sit upon.

“Well, I don’t know how fine that cooking must have been, that frying and baking and stewing and roasting and broiling and boiling and basting, nor the feasting and guzzling and gourmandizing that followed. Perhaps they would have put up Ambrose for the night and given him his horse hale and whole again in the morning; only just at that moment was a low sighing moan.