The Man Who Loved Children (72 page)

“Louie,” said Sam sternly, “go and throw cold water over your mother; go and force her to be quiet. If she sees you—” But Louie had only entered the room, in her confused, embarrassed way, when Henny turned to her and began to vociferate abominable insults, and pushed her out of the room after which she locked the door, and shouted through the door, “I’m going to kill myself; tell your dirty father to go downstairs. I’ll kill myself, I’ll do it: I can’t stand it any longer.”

“Mother, Mother,” called Louie.

Ernie had come upstairs and now rushed to the door and beat on it, crying out, “Mother, don’t, don’t, please.”

Henny was silent. Louie sobbed brokenheartedly against the door, and Ernie seemed to have lost his wits. He sank to her feet and blubbered there.

“She won’t do it,” said Sam nervously.

They heard the children whimpering downstairs, and Sam with a gesture sent Louie down to them, but she clung to the door, “No, no, Mother, don’t!”

Suddenly, they heard the bolt being drawn: Henny stood there with chalk-white face, her great eyeholes, coal-black, “Get out of here, you lot of howlers, leave me alone.”

“Henny,” said Sam; but at that she screamed in such a fury, “If you speak another word to me in your life, I’ll slit my throat the same minute,” that they all retreated, leaving her again behind the bolted door.

There she stayed for hours. Louie, creeping breathlessly up the stairs, avoiding the creaking boards as well as she could, heard the tearing of papers stop and Henny call out, “Who’s that spying on me now?” and then would ask feebly, “Can I get you a cup of tea, Mother?” until Henny at last answered, “Yes, I’ll take a phenacetin: this headache is killing me.”

Louie saw her mother at last. Henny was dressed, as if to go to town, but only snarled when Louie showed her surprise. There was a smell of fire at which Sam bolted upstairs to thunder on the door and ask (without response) what Henny was doing; and at last, Henny came downstairs with her hat on, an old red hat, left over from the previous summer. At once Sam barred her way, asked her where she was going, if she was coming back to her home again, and particularly ordered her not to show herself in the streets, looking like a hag of eighty in that skittish little hat. Then he snatched it from her head. At once Louie ran up, full of indignation, calling upon Ernie to defend his mother, but Ernie was too overwhelmed to know how or when to defend her. As she at last ran jerkily down the avenue, in a black hat, sobbing and trying to fix the collar of her blouse, Ernie ran after her with a very pale, working face, to ask if she was going to come home again.

“I don’t know,” she replied stonily.

“Won’t I ever see you again?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mother,” he burst out crying, buried his face in her waist, “are you going to kill the children?”

“Don’t be a fool; I’ll leave that to your father.”

“You won’t give me my money back, Mother?”

“Do you think I have any money, you poor wretch? I don’t know if I have any. Perhaps I’ll have to beg on the streets to get my train fare; perhaps I’ll have to go on my knees to Jim Lomasne to get a dollar; perhaps I’ll have to scrub a floor first for his wife. Where do you think money comes from? I’ll never be able to pay you any money in your life, Ernie, and you may as well get used to the idea now. I’m broke, so dead broke that I don’t know where to turn; I’m out of my mind, Ernie, and don’t pay any attention to what Mother says.”

“You won’t pay me,” he said, hanging on to the stuff of her dress, “Mother, you owe me so much, five dollars and eighty-nine cents. I can’t save it up any more, we’re so poor.”

“You poor wretch,” she said, bursting into tears, “you poor sniveling little kid: why do you have to get into my messes? Well, it makes me feel so rotten—go on, go away, go back.”

“Are you going to beg for money, Mother?”

“Yes,” she cried impatiently, “yes, yes, I am: I’m going down in the dirt. Now, leave me alone. Go back and tell Louie to give you something to eat.”

She forced him away at last and in great trembling herself made her way along the street. Ernie and Louie watched for a long time but did not see her cross the bridge. Louie was afraid she had gone to drown herself.

However, late that night, Henny did return, and no sooner was she in the house than Sam, fresh and angry, began a great scene asking where she had been; but to this he got no response. The children were asleep, but not so Louie. She was afraid that the man and woman would kill each other: yet the quarrel dragged on, with its long tedious conversations and spurts of drama, all through the night. She would hear Henny drinking tea, or Sam drinking coffee; each would retire to a separate room, but would come out again, to rage again, first one, then the second, as if they could never have enough of this rage.

“I look awful,” thought Louie, “and it is because I have no decent home; and the children are all getting sulky-looking too, except Evie, and she’s going to be browbeaten for life. They’re too cowardly to separate. If I killed them both we would be free. The only thing is, I don’t want to go to jail, I must get through school and go on the stage, so I have to go to dramatic school. All this quarreling and crying is just ruining my face for the stage too. I’m pretty stupid though, clumsy that is, and I’d be sure to make a mess of things, if I killed them with a knife. There would be the fingerprints and blood marks; I know myself, I’d never get rid of them, and I’d be sure to give myself away after. The thing to do is to do something that is sure but looks like an accident. Poison! Permanganate, the thing that girl killed herself with when Uncle Barry left her with a baby, that’s no good; carbolic acid neither, because of the pain and the length of time. There is that cyanide, but it’s so quick—”

She paused for a while to wonder about the cyanide, frightened of it because it seemed too simple and quick. She went on to think that if the cyanide worked she would then have a houseful of children on her hands, have to explain things: “How did it happen?” “I don’t know; I wasn’t there!” “Where were you?” “In bed: Mother was making the morning tea.” (Absurd! How could she slip down unobserved, and slip upstairs into bed again, and yet be sure that none of the children got the cyanide?) No, “How did it happen?” “I was making the tea, and saw Mother slip something into the cup but thought it was for her headache.” (Absurd! The children would recognize the cyanide bottle, and she certainly would.) No.

Louie puzzled about this until her head ached. Then she began to worry about the children. First: Ernie would go to the grandmother, Evie and the twins, for a short time to Aunt Hassie, Tommy to Aunt Eleanor, and Hazel Grey in Charles-town would take the baby. She would go to Harpers Ferry, or Auntie Jo’s, or Miss Aiden’s, preferably the last, to finish her education. She must be very careful about her attitude—let it be sullen, stupid, she had better say she had been badly beaten the night before and did not remember much: “They were always quarreling.” Louie saw herself in court and began to sweat, for surely the lawyers smart as foxes would see through her transparent lies, her miserable devices. “But then,” thought Louie, “I am still a schoolgirl—my confusion will be put down to trouble: who will suspect me?” Then she thought that perhaps a lot of people thought she was a very wicked, lying child, believing Henny’s tales (what she believed to be Henny’s tales), and that the finger of suspicion would veer to her in no time. She could not sleep but, after tossing for a long time in her bed, got up and sat by the window, thinking this thing over. Only one thing was certain: it must be done, to save the children. “Who cares for them but me?” she thought coldly. “Those two selfish, passionate people, terrible as gods in their eternal married hate, do not care for them; Mother herself threatened to kill them. Perhaps she would: at any rate, their life will be a ruin even if they are allowed to go on living. There is no question of it: I have the will, I must have the firmness to get rid of the two parents.” She no longer thought of Sam as her father: she had not thought of him as anything but a mouthy jailer for months; as for Henny, she did not see how her fate would be better if she went on living. Louie had doubts of herself that made her sweat cold again. She had brought so little to fruit in her life: she sometimes thought she had dementia praecox, and at other times thought she was a terrifying genius, and at other times again thought she was one of those pitiful sham-talents which glitter in youth and dance in maturity and are malicious apes, sometimes suicides later on in the dread arctic of age, around forty.

Now she thought of these three possibilities and turned from one to the other like a weathercock; but it was only because she doubted her ability to do the deed and fool people afterwards. She never once doubted that the right thing to do was to use cyanide tomorrow morning, or that she must liberate the children: it fell to her, no one else would do it or understand the causes as she did. Then she would at once be free herself. She made up her mind to do it at last. She planned the few simple motions necessary to get the cyanide, take out a little (with gloves on), put it in a small pillbox that she had in her drawer (no, false move—in a pillbox she would take from Henny’s drawer tomorrow morning or next time Henny went down in this infernal night), and so on. Let the rest take care of itself, thought Louie: “I am sure to cry, that will help me out a lot: they won’t question a child deprived of its parents in a morning, and there will be the children to get breakfast for.” She saw, with free lungs and a regularly beating heart, that this was the right thing to do: she should have done it before but had not had the insight nor the will. Everything was will: “The world stands aside to let the man pass who knows whither he is going!” Louie fell into a light refreshing sleep but woke up soon after, and was able to steal into Henny’s room to get the pillbox, during one of Henny’s trips downstairs. The quarrel raged again. This she did with perfect ease, and even pushed her self-assurance so far as to go downstairs where the unhappy pair were and noticed that her mother was eating one of her nervous meals-tea, almost black, with toast and mustard pickles.

“What are you wandering about for, looking like a boiled owl?” Henny demanded harshly. Louie looked at her for a while calmly, thinking, “Perhaps I won’t see her alive again”; and then she turned, humping her shoulders as she passed her father, not even looking at him, her flesh revolting at his nearness. He said nothing to her, but when she was on the stairs, she heard Henny snarl, “Why don’t you go to bed: you see the children can’t sleep? Are you going to stay up all night to pick on me?” Louie heard her father creak heavily into a chair. “Yes,” thought Louie, “I won’t have any peace with their squabbles.”

Henny slept very little, in a restless rage, and got up at five to sort the washing. The fish smell had by this time seeped into everything in the lower house, it seemed: and Henny hung over the basket, cursing like a fishwife indeed. An electric storm threatened again. Henny always hated them and felt ready for a fight before them; but this was the sort of weather that suited Louie best—she always felt lithe, vigorous, and calm before a storm. The weather had been electric for some time, the skies unusual, and the winds various. They all felt certain by their own animal symptoms of the approach of big weather. The sky was barred with cloud, and the trees were uneasy. Sam felt qualmish, with a slight fever this morning, and lay late in bed, calling to the children to get up, and to Evie to come and stroke his head. It reminded him of Singapore. He kept the Venetian blind down and in a weak, sick voice kept making his little jokes, calling his syce, wishing, with all its faults, that for a moment he were back in dear old Singapura. “A man should travel,” he told Evie suddenly: “home deadens a man’s wits: I’m a better man away from home”—but scarcely were these words out of his mouth than he regretted them, dark treachery to his home, his native land, and his loved ones!

“Looloo,” he called, feebly. “Dotta det up, Loogoobrious: maka da tea.”

She woke up and thought at once, “This is the morning, and I slept late!” She put on her dressing gown, took the little box, and with a stern strut went downstairs, not replying to the few remarks addressed to her on the way. She thought, “This is the hour: soon it will be all over.” She put on the kettle, began to arrange the cups fussily, making a noise about it, when there were yet some cups to get down, slipped into the boys’ room, which opened on to the kitchen, and into the darkroom. The boys were both up. Ernie had left a pile of clothes, his pajamas, perhaps, ready for the wash, through the bars of the bottom of his bed, but there was no one in the room. But her hand trembled, and she was only just putting some grains of cyanide into the box when she heard a noise and saw Henny in the kitchen.

“What are you messing in there for at this time of the morning when we’re all so late?” called Henny. “Give me a cup of tea before I pass out. Every rotten thing in the place is alive with his fish oil; I’m nearly going mad with headache.”

With a scarlet blush that covered her entire body, Louie came out of the darkroom, but Henny did not see her—she was already bustling back to the washhouse with a pile of kitchen towels. “God,” thought Louie (the first time she ever used that word), “Oh, God, I nearly was caught.” Her heart began to beat so heavily that she could hardly stand. She was now afraid that she would never have the strength to do it, with her blood beating so madly. She made the tea in a convulsion of trembling, and when it was made, a nausea of fear and doubt came over her—was she doing the right thing? To settle it, she slid the grains of cyanide all into one large breakfast cup, holding the box through her apron meanwhile, blew the grains off her apron into the cup, and threw the box into the garbage pail. At this moment she heard her father thumping cheerfully downstairs and talking to Evie. “I can never do it,” thought Louie and turned round, to back up against the table on which the cup stood. There stood Henny.