The Man Who Loved Children (71 page)

“Are you insane?” cried Henny.

“Get out of my way,” Sam growled. “You get to the kitchen and mind your business—don’t you put your spoke in here, or I’ll get rid of you, mind that; I’ll have no more interfering with my children and putting them against me; now, get out of here.”

Little-Sam, expecting his mother to intervene, sullenly stooped and picked up another shovelful of the mess. He took two steps away, bent over it, but when he passed Sam suddenly threw it down and put both hands on his belly.

“Sam,” cried his father, “stop that belching. No hysteria, come along! Look,” he said, turning angrily to his wife, “this is your doing! He would have been on his way in perfect calm but for you: don’t I know there’s no kindness in this, but sabotage? Do you think I don’t see through your miserable tricks? You pretend to defend them in order to make me seem harsh and cruel. I’ll have no more of it. Get back to the kitchen, you miserable wretch. Little-Sam, you come back here before I whale you: look sharp.”

“Ai, ai,” cried Henny, beginning to cry like a little girl, and putting the fold of her dressing gown to her face, “ai, ai!”

“Daddy,” said Evie. “Little is sick, what do you do it for?”

“You stop imitating your mother and looking at me with that sneaking Collyer grimace, ready to burst into tears,” said Sam. Evie turned pale but dared not cry.

“Little-Sam is sick,” said Saul severely to his father. Sam gave am an admonitory kick in the shins, shaking his head meaningly.

“No,” Little-Sam bellowed surprisingly, “no, it makes me sick.”

“There,” said Sam, throwing out his hands and getting up, “there, she’s done it—and you’ve done it, Pollux [to Saul], stirring up rebellion! There’s one thing you don’t understand about Little-Sam: I understand him because he is myself. Now, I suffered in life from a certain diffidence, which in Little-Sam is sullenness and morbidity: I’ll conquer it. Castor [Little-Sam], you come here!”

The eight-year-old boy suspiciously and slowly drew near, eying his father with all the hate of his wide blue eyes.

“I’ll finish this,” Sam said.

He picked up the dipper that Henny used for the washing, sunk it in the bottom of the copper, and drew it out half full. He took Little-Sam by the neck, drew him out of the wash-house, and, when he stood on the newly cemented yard outside the door, suddenly flung the liquid over him, drenching him. Little-Sam and the children were petrified with surprise. Sam did not even laugh but considered his son triumphantly. Not a tremor passed over the boy’s face. He stood dripping with the juice, fish tatters on his head, one long shred of skin hanging down over one eye, making him look like the offspring of a mermaid and a beachcomber. He looked funny. Suddenly, Ernie began to grin, his face widened, and he began to laugh; the laugh spread, and the children stood round the queer little Neptune laughing, Sam joining in, and only Saul, the twin, standing by as quiet as Little-Sam himself. Henny, standing with evil face inside the glassed-in porch, gabbled furiously to Louie, and in a minute, it was Louie dashing forth, crying to her father not to be “so horrible, so disgusting,” that broke up the circle. It was cooler than the season that day, and Little-Sam had begun to pick the wet shirt off his arms, saying, “Ooh, it’s nasty!”

“Good,” said Sam, “good! Now Little-Sam, you take another shovelful down to the manure heap, and you can go and get washed. Kids, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest! Little-Sam could and did get over his abhorrence, you see! And if I didn’t have a lot of interfering, miserable beasts,” he gave a kind of malicious smile at the two little girls, “I’d have you all right in no time. I’m sorry,” he continued to Evie, “I’m sorry I didn’t take a dipperful of that and sling it at your Motherings: it would have taught her a thing or two; it would have given her something to think about, instead of always filling that empty, worthless head with the wrongs done to her. I’m the one that’s suffered, I’m the one that’s had things to think about, but do you see me go about sniveling and calling names? Women is the devil! The tyranny of tears, Little-Womey, and don’t you never make no man suffer that.” He began to laugh, as he saw Little-Sam trotting off with the fish offal to the manure heap. “Yes, Ermy,” he said confidentially, putting his arm round his eldest son’s neck and drawing him closer, “you know I should have done the same to Looloo too: I’ll bet she would have kicked up a riot, oh, boy! Why didn’t I think of that? Will I do it, eh, will I do it?”

“Not now, it’s all over,” Ernie said.

Sam laughed, “All right: whatever you say.”

Now the twins came back and Saul said, “Pad, can Little go and have a shower now?”

Louie came to the back door and shouted indignantly, “Now Mother fainted! It’s your fault.”

“Good heavens, you mean wretch!” said Sam. “You’d think she enjoyed it! Can’t Little-Sam use his own tongue to ask his little father for a shower?”

Little-Sam said nothing.

“Eh?” inquired Sam, “did he cough up his tongue, too?”

“He’s got fish in his mouth,” said Saul.

At this the children burst out laughing excitedly again, and Sam had the sense to send Little-Sam away, for he saw that he was working up to a roar of misery. The old shower room opened on to the new cement yard. They could see the two butter-yellow boys standing under the shower, both scrubbing away at Little-Sam’s body and hair. Meanwhile Sam sat down to wait for lunch.

“Too much trubsy, love,” he said to Little-Womey, “do myed, love.” While she stroked his head, he watched the twins with pleasure and directed their operations.

“Drop your clobber [clothes] in the cornder, it’s washday tomorrow: rub yourself down. Twins is queer cattle,” he continued in a low tone to Evie, “there’s no hegsplaining twins. (Little-Sam, don’t make yourself too clean, you can get inside the copper and clean it after lunch: it’s very convenient.) Twins are not two children, but one, you see, love: one egg that has split and become two of the same. Twins have always known each other from the same moment, from the day they were jellies: yiss, love, Castor and Pollux were jellies and sardines and lizards and funny monsters all the time together; they had to fight for their life at the same time and came into the world at the same time, only twenty minutes’ difference.”

Ernie came up inquisitively, “And if one twin has a pain in his leg, the other feels it too: a boy at school got hit in the leg with a ball, and his brother had a pain,” he laughed.

“Wery inconwenient,” said Sam, “but wery mysterioso. But they mustn’t be sissies, just the same, neither one nor the other.”

Although they scrubbed the copper out with soft sand and kitchen powder, they could not get out the fish smell. It was in all the cracks of the old cement floor, in the hairy timbers of the walls and shelves, in the chimney, the washtubs, the mangle, wringer, clothes boxes, and the dirty clothes. The fourteen bottles were greasy with it; and Sam, at last giving up the job of cleaning, decided to try a few experiments with the oil first drawn off, from which a sediment was now drifting down. He oiled the bike with it, wiping off the excess on various bits of rag, oiled his old brown tramping shoes, cracked and stiff with spring mud, rubbed down a few bits of old iron going rusty, massaged Tommy’s legs to see if it would keep off the blains he usually got in spring, and sent in a bottle of the best to Henny to tell her to try cooking with it. After this, he suddenly felt very tired and said he must have a snooze before he went up on the roof again.

The sun had come out hot again; and the house settled down to a needed siesta, by which time the heavy reek of fish oil rose up, swirled quietly round, and invaded the timbers of the house. One marlin had been enough, with their kneading, manuring, trotting about, plastering, oiling, and dripping, to give Spa House a scent of its own for many years to come. When they were all resting, prior to the four o’clock snack, Henny came downstairs in one of her silk dressing gowns, to look round. At least they had cleaned the copper, and perhaps it was imagination when she thought she smelled it in everything. On the shelf in the washhouse were bottles neatly labeled in Sam’s capitals:
FISH-FRY, BIKE-OIL, MARLIN-BALM, MACHINE-OIL, HAIR-OIL, LEATHER-GREASE; OIL, OIL, OIL
on the rest. When she went back upstairs, she was conscious of the rich rotten smell and the softness of it in her hair; there was a faint mark already on the pillow where she had lain and a greasy finger mark on the library book. She lifted her old slippers and smelled it on their sodden soles; there was a dark mark on the light gray silk hem. Just when she had reached this point in her examination, Evie came panting up the stairs, holding a little medicine bottle in her hand.

“Daddy says, you can use this instead of cold cream: he says please try it, because whale oil is very good for the skin.”

Henny took it without a word and stood in the doorway while Evie deprecatingly climbed downstairs again. Then she marched into Louie’s room to show the girl how impossible her father was. Louie was stretched out on her unmade bed, dead asleep, with her legs resting high up on the back of the bed, and a book open on her chest.

Henny frowned at the streaky creek through the window and turned back to her room, pulling the door after her. She began going through bundles of papers and old letters that she pulled out from long-closed drawers.

A telephone ringing without answer presently woke the house. Ernie came panting upstairs, excited, “Moth, it’s Miss Wilson, Tommy’s teacher.”

“Tell her I’m out.”

“She says to say can she see you for a minute if she comes over?”

“Tell her I’m out.”

“O.K.”

At the same time she heard Sam shouting outside, “Hey, Tommo! Your teacher is coming to pay us a visit.”

“Oh, keep your sticky beak out,” muttered Henny miserably. Louie, who had awakened, wanted to know if Miss Wilson was coming: “No, no, no, no,” Henny said.

Then there was Sam questioning Ernie in the hall and, “Your mother told you to tell a lie and you told it, despite what I’ve told you?”

Then some muttering. “More trouble,” said Henny to Louie. “Why doesn’t he drop down dead? Was he sent by God to worry women?”

Then Ernie coming upstairs and saying, “Mother, Daddy says you are not to make us tell lies,” with a very frightened face; and Henny screaming at Sam over the balustrade, and Sam shouting, “Shut up.”

Ernie was stuck on the stairs between them but Louie withdrew backwards into her room.

“You wanted to see the old maid so you could pour your woes into her ears,” Henny cried; while Sam, pushing Ernie aside, started to come upstairs, saying in a deep voice that she must close her trap.

But Henny went on laughing, “You can’t shut me up now. You want the truth, let it be the truth: he only wants the truth, but he wants my mouth shut. Why don’t you leave me alone? This is my house. Go and sit on the beach with your clothes. I’m sick and tired of washing the fish out and your dirty papers full of big talk.”

“Henny,” said Sam sullenly, “you be quiet or leave my house. I have the whiphand now, owing to your own deed; if you do not get out, I will put you out by the force of law.”

She screamed hoarsely, “You get out of here, get out, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you; you’ve only been waiting for this like a great foul monster waiting, sneaking, lying in wait to take my children away. If you touch them I’ll kill you: if you try to put me out, I’ll kill you.”

She turned quickly to Louie, who was standing thoughtfully in the doorway, and shouted, panting, “Louie, don’t you ever let a man do that; don’t you ever do what his women are doing—a woman’s children are all she has of her body and breath, don’t let him do that, Louie, don’t let him do that. He has been waiting for years to snatch them from me; now the dirty wretch has been watching me and thinks he has an excuse. Don’t let him.”

She picked up a slipper which had stood on the washstand since she had smelled the fish oil on the sole and rushed at him to strike him in the eyes with the heel. He seized her arm and tried to bend it down. “Put that down, you fool, you madwoman,” he bellowed. “You’ll push me downstairs, Henny—look out!”

“I’ll kill you,” she panted, “I’ll push you downstairs, I don’t care if I go too. I’ll break your neck.”

She suffocated, struggled as he put his large hand over her mouth, bit it.

“Henny, Henny,” he cried in desperation himself, “shut up. Don’t let our children hear.”

She tore the hand away in a violent spasm. “You rotten flesh,” she screamed, insane, “you rotten, rotten thing, you dirty sweaty pig. pig. pig.” She vomited insults in which the word “rotten” rose and fell, beating time with it.

“Henny, shut your foul mouth.” He let go of her and flung away to the doorway of Louie’s room, himself revolted by her and the terrible struggle.

The children who had crept into the hall below stood rooted to the floor, listening to this tempest, trembling. Louie sank down on her bed in a stupor, her heart beating hard. It was not the quarrel, nor even the threats of murder, but the intensity of the passions this time that stifled them all. And why, out of a clear sky? They never asked any reasons for their parents’ fights, thinking all adults unreasonable, violent beings, the toys of their own monstrous tempers and egotisms, but this time it seemed different.

Henny was shrieking, “Ernest, Ernest, Louie, your father’s struck me; come and save me, Ernest, your father’s killing me, he’s trying to kill me, help—”

Louie started up and rushed out into the hall, “Leave her alone.”

“Henny, Henny, be quiet, or I’ll knock you down,” shouted the desperate man.

She rushed to her window, which was at the back nearest a neighbor (though that was still a hundred and fifty yards distant), and cried, “I’ll call Mrs. Paine: I’ll tell everyone in the street, and you won’t get away with this, you rotten foul murderer. You think you’re so fine with your bragging and science and human understanding—oh, I’ve heard all about it till I could scream myself insane with the words; and you can run everything, and world problems, when all the time it’s other women, you hypocrite, you dirty, bloodless hypocrite, too good, other women, scientific women, young girls, and your own wife—I’ll write to all your scientific societies, I’ll write to the Conservation Department, I’ll tell them what my life has been—beat me, knock me down, I can’t stand it. You threaten but do nothing, nothing to give me a chance, to get out, not till you’ve got something on me to steal my children: you won’t—you won’t—I’m going to kill them all, I’ll kill them all tonight, I’ll pour that stinking oil on fire down your throat and kill my children, you won’t get them—there’ll be a sight tomorrow for the people to see: try to explain that away, try to explain it to God or in hell, wherever you go—”