The Man Who Loved Children

by Christina Stead

  “Go on, darlin’,” begged Bonnie, tapping away. Evie had stopped, looking from one to the other. Louie obstinately kept twirling farther off, in a corner of the carpet.

  “Stop it, you fathead, you silly fathead,” cried Sam wrathfully, “do you want to make an idiot of yourself? You don’t know what you look like, you great fat lump. I don’t want to see your legs: keep your dress down. And please tell Henny to lengthen it.” With a sort of sacred horror he looked aghast at her fat thighs half revealed. Louie flushed and, moving down the room, towards the south window, did a few steps to herself, hesitating and quiet as a meditation.

  “Stop it, you—mule!” cried Sam, half laughing, “or I’ll give you a flip. I can’t bear to see Looloo making a fool of herself,” he explained to his sisters. “So cussed a child I’ve never seen.” He looked at her sideways, taunting, charming, “You’ll find your place in the world, Looloo, but whatever we eventually find in that mountain of fat, it isn’t going to be a Pavlova!” Even Bonnie held her tongue. “Your head’s big enough to hold a fair mess of brains, if they’re not addled, always, of course,” said Sam, in high good humor. He turned away from her altogether, frowning again, “I don’t know where Looloo, though, gets the foolish, flighty notions she’s been getting lately.” He explained to every one present, “Bonniferous was an awful nitwit when she was a kid, always thinking she would be a stage or cinema star and darned if silly Looloo hasn’t been bitten by the same bug.” He began to laugh and there were some more silly jokes about the adventure of Crazy-Daisy.

  Meanwhile, no one had noticed Henny return home and go into her room, leaving the door slightly ajar. Thus Henny heard that Sam, going into the men’s room, had come into a discussion between Craven Day and a messenger, from which he learned that Craven Day lent money secretly and at usurious rates to empty pockets, miseries, and follies in the Department. Samuel had been most irate and had reported this to the chief of Day’s division, as was only his duty: “to think of an officer of the Department battening on the wretchedness or improvidence of his fellow being,” said Sam, though less hotly than at that other time.

  “Is he a Jew?” asked Jo.

  “No more than you,” Sam replied. “And it’s just possible that you’ll become one in time, Jo, collecting rents and grinding the noses of the poor.”

  “I keep my nose to the grindstone,” said Jo bitterly.

  “It doesn’t do it much good,” Bonnie hastened to say.

  “Jo the Jew,” said Ernie thoughtfully. Jo flashed a look at him by no means friendly. But this inspired Louie to remark that she had personally seen the stewed cats at the Kydds place today. Bonnie was all eyes and ears and wanted to know the details. Louie, giggling, informed them that she had dropped a piece of bacon in the stewed cats, and that she had escaped in the nick of time from Old Goat, who had returned early to beat Angela and eat his cats. Up till this minute she had forgotten the drowning; and suddenly she flushed and said no more. Sam was grinning at this improvement on his morning fancy and asked in a mean, driveling tone what the stew smelled like. Immediately, Henny’s door, which had been standing open, flew shut. Everyone started, “What was that?” The wind? No, no wind. Ernie drawled,

  “It was Mothering: she’s been home for ages!”

  “Oh, I must see Henny,” declared Jo in excitement and jumped up. No sooner had she quit the piano stool than Bonnie flew to it and began to sing and play in her best style, “L’amour est un oiseau.”

  The children, after knocking, rushed in ahead of their aunt and found Evie already there, asking,

  “Do you want a cup of tea, Mother?”

  “Would you care for?”

  “Would you care for a cup of tea?”

  “Yes, I should be very glad of it.” She rooted Tommy out of the armchair, saying, “You and your everlasting messing,” and flopped into the chair sighing. She turned with a smile to the twins standing side by side and gave one of her queer little recitations that they all knew by heart but loved to hear:

  “Have a cup of tea, sir? No, sir! Why, sir? Because I have a cold, sir! Let me hear you cough, sir! Hm, hm, hm!”

  Louie, arriving at this moment, said with a silly smile, “Say, Piccadilly, Mother.”

  Henny obliged with “Offal baw the R.A. Show and yet a chappie has to go: the only thing in Piccadilleh I wegard as being silleh.”

  When they asked for The Bath Bun, her good temper evaporated, and she told them to clear out and shut the door.

  “Aren’t you coming out to see Auntie Jo?” inquired Tommy, who was new to life.

  “I’d like to see her at the bottom of the sea,” Henny replied genially (and Jo, on the other side of the door, hearing this, sniffed good-humoredly and prepared a smile); “and all the fool Pollits with her: now get out.”

  “We’re Pollits, Moth,” Ernest reminded her as usual.

  “And I might screw your necks too,” Henny agreed. They all laughed and scampered out, finding Auntie Jo at the door. She sniffed honorably to signal that she was there and called cheerfully,

  “Henny, my dear, may I come in?” She carefully shut the door, and at this sound Bonnie stopped playing. After a moment, hearing Jo talking “nineteen to the dozen,” she sighed and went on with her music, but with less verve. It was a mystery, thought Bonnie, that Jo was so wonderful with little kiddies and knew so little about all other kinds of people. As soon as children crossed the threshold of the elementary schoolroom they became forever incomprehensible and alien to Jo.

  Evie, standing now between her mother and her aunt, fidgeting with her aunt’s great arm round her, seemed to be looking up trustfully with her brown eyes, but those deceptive eyes were full of revolt, mistrust, and dislike. Evie saw only the peccary skin, long blond hair strewn on her aunt’s slab cheeks, the powder and rouge (light as it was) caked with moisture, the loofah hair; she shrank from the long, plump, inhuman thigh, the glossy, sufficient skirt, from everything powerful, coarse, and proud about this great unmated mare. She shrank from her caresses and from the undulations of a voice intended to be full of honey: she understood that Jo was wooing her mother. The thin, dark mother seemed, as she grew more insolent, more polished, more ladylike, to be more enchanting to little dark Evie. “Oh,” thought Evie to herself, “when I am a lady with a baby, I won’t have all those bumps, I won’t be so big and fat, I won’t croak and shout, I will be a little woman, thin like I am now and not fat in front or in the skirt.” She was very much ashamed of Auntie Jo’s waggling; she feared that when her aunt went down the street, people would stop and begin to laugh, until the whole street would point at her aunt and shriek, “As she walks she wobbles.” Evie gradually, politely, drew away from Auntie Jo and laid her thin brown arms over her mother’s slender thighs.

  “Run away and play, mother’s pet,” said Henny, now as elegant and sweet as she could possibly be. As Evie closed the door, she heard Aunt Jo say,

  “Well, I found out all about that man! Bonnie has been carrying on with him as I thought. I can’t get over it! A sister of mine! But then, I suppose I should realize that Bonnie lost her mother when very young,” and Jo’s voice, becoming sentimental and womanly, was lost to Evie, though she had closed the door as slowly as possible.

  Presently Jo had to go, saying good-by all round, patting heads, waving very cheerfully and lovingly to Henny, even though once again she had to trample on her feelings and forbid the question that always came up in her mind, “Why won’t Henny ask me just once to stay to a meal?” Henny, not even waiting till Jo had got safely out of earshot, ran out to the kitchen to get some more tea, exclaiming,

  “Frowsy, blowsy old hen! I wonder I put up with her as much as I do! Why does she sit gabbling in my ear for an hour? Does she think I like her company? Why on earth doesn’t she put a comb through that bristling ugly yellow haystack of hers. I can’t stand it: it’s like a birch broom in a fit. I wish she would stop pawing and mugging me. Ugh!” And the children pondered once more over t
his mystery; why was Jo’s fine corn-silk hair so ugly?

  Meanwhile, Sam, after a long and merry afternoon, at last declared that it was knock-off time and went upstairs to rest before dinner. He did close his eyes for half an hour before a bright idea unfolded itself to him and he got up to knock out a program for his Pacific trip on the portable. But during this half-hour he had been thinking about his little sister, Bonnie, for whom he had a great tenderness. She had always opened an eager ear to all his little-boy projects and schoolboy boastings and adolescent discoveries. When he was away, would she fall a prey to the card-trick man, the wolf Holloway? She knew nothing of the world, Sam thought, and he wished again that his mother had lived, if only for Bonnie’s sake. This led him to think of Henny and her occupations during his absence. Although Henny was now old and leathery, scraggy and haggard, she had a large acquaintance in her old home town, Baltimore, amongst immoral and worthless men and women, who went in for alcohol and smoking.

  Sam had discussed this intimate question at lunch yesterday with Saul Pilgrim, his oldest friend; Saul had given the world-old advice, had dug up the plan that had already served since antiquity. For the tenth time, he told Saul Pilgrim about the second year of his marriage to Henny. He had brought a man to the house who had been the codlin-moth of marriage. He had told him never to darken his door again, but the mischief was done. A woman that Sam had loved, wooed, and given his name to, and had a child by, could in such a short space of time look at another man and perhaps worse! Only Henny’s vicious upbringing, that of a rich wastrel, could explain it. Sam, like all men who have the traits of a man, had not failed to do, in the second year of marriage and ever since, what all real men do: he had confided his secret sorrow to a great many of his bosom friends, calling upon truth to witness that never was a more faithful, long-suffering husband than he, or a lighter-headed, vainer, more pernicious woman, than this that he, good soul, had innocently joined himself to. There were plenty of women, said Sam, yes, he knew it, with his views of loyalty; he believed in, loved the sex; but all the Collyers were corrupt.

  Sam had told Saul about the delights of his first marriage. The first true joy he had known on earth, even greater than his first love, Louie’s mother, was the education of his baby daughter Louisa. He had kept a journal from the first day, supervised her education from the first week. As a reward, he one day heard her say his name, “Tamma, Tamma!”

  Thinking of the delight he had each time, to see the new inchoate mind burst from the womb, to see the clouds of larval imbecility disperse from the infant face, to watch that horrible throbbing patch close in the cranium and try to devise from its round forehead what its future would be, Sam got up with a sibylline smile and went to his desk to write out a prospectus of his Pacific trip. Though far away, he would carry his children with him in his heart and he would be with them too.

  It was then that Sam found Henny’s note, left since this morning, and till now covered by papers, for Little-Sam, looking for “The Year 3000,” had scrambled up everything. A minute later came the lusty shout,

  “Henrietta! Come up here!”

  Henny muttered in her room; it was like the rusty stirring of some weed-grown sea animal, bottom-prisoned by blindness.

  “Henrietta! Henrietta!” shouted Sam. Henny muttered. Then, suddenly, she was in the door of the kitchen, tossing her head and rolling her eyes back so that her pale olive eyeballs glared—a bizarre trick of hers, saying loudly to Bonnie,

  “Tell the children’s father that he can come down to me if he wants to speak to me. I’m not a servant!” She then retreated as hastily to her bedroom. Bonnie looked discomfited at Louie and whispered,

  “You go and tell Daddy he ought to go and talk to your mother when she wants him to; oh, dear,” and she gave Louie a plaintive glance and nodded.

  “Henrietta, speak to me, you devil,” cried Sam.

  Like a genie of smoke Henny again stood in the kitchen door; and said firmly, “Louisa, don’t stand there like a stuck pig! Go and tell your father that if he wants to speak to me he can come downstairs to do it, even if he is the Great I Am.” The little girl, hangdog, bowed under the guilt of both, stumped upstairs, as Sam continued to call and Henny continued to blackguard him. At the top of the stairs, in his sitting room, Sam was standing, holding a piece of paper in his hand and trembling with rage. He shouted at Louisa,

  “Tell that accurst devil to come and say what she has to say, not to write letters!”

  Louie mumbled, “She said to go to her, Daddy; she said she won’t come up. She said she couldn’t walk upstairs.” Louie looked at his red face and whispered hastily, “Don’t shout at her, Daddy, it makes her angry.” Desperately she looked up into his face: but he was beyond her. However, he mastered himself and brushed past Louisa towards the stairs. At the head of the stairs, he turned towards her roughly and said,

  “Go and look at yourself in the glass! You’d better clean up your face.” While he was running downstairs, Louisa hastened to his shaving glass and saw that her nose was running with her crying, and she had brushed her face into smudges. She wept while she was rubbing her cheeks on his shaving towel. Everyone heard the birds outside.

  Samuel found Henny standing, in her outdoor dress, waiting stiffly, and—as he admitted in a moment of surprise—attractive with her proud expression, high color, and curled hair. He handed her the note with a glance of contempt, and she mechanically read through what she had herself written:

  Samuel Pollit: I have to talk to you about finances and about that child of yours. I cannot be left stranded with a houseful of children and no servant. I must have Hazel Moore back and be able to pay her. You must agree to this and also make regular payments. You can starve me but not your children.

  HCP.

  She threw it on the bed.

  “What’s the meaning of this, Henny?” he asked, pointing to the crushed bit of paper. “Don’t send me notes. I ordered you not to do it.”

  Her voice rattled in her throat and she rolled her lids down over her large eyes and compressed her mouth, looking as ugly and bitter as she could,

  “You take a jaunt whenever you like, and expect me to stay here when I’m sick with a great windy house gone to seed, full of little children. How am I to look after them? I do all the work and get all the blame while you streel off whenever it suits you and get your name in the papers. You cut a big figure with your friends, but I know what’s behind it.” She tossed her head, “I suppose you think I don’t know how you tell everyone everything about me! What can you expect—?”

  But Sam was taking hold of himself, and a surge of compassion, not only for himself, nor for Henny, but for the misery of all such souls wedded to bondage, rushed up,

  “What do you want to see me about, Pet? As for the money, you’ll get all I have: you’ll get it regularly. I understand that it’s not easy for you to be left alone here and you’d better make up your mind either to live amicably with Bonnie, or else to get a general servant. But I absolutely forbid you to have Hazel Moore in this house. She’s a Bible thumper and hates me; she’s a desiccated virgin and hates the children, and I won’t have a cabal of women setting my children against me.”

  Henny threw her head back and laughed, the artificial, society laugh never heard in Tohoga House except in stresses, a gesture which showed all the cords and wrinkles in her early-aged neck and her saffron skin. She went on,

  “I suppose you want me to bring up two little girls with a woman like your sister Bonnie in the house? Hazel is the only one who’ll stand by me and she’s the only one who would stand your insults and the poverty and dirt of this house, and the noise. I’ve got to have her. I won’t, I can’t undertake it by myself. You plant me in a charity house on the top of a windy hill and expect me to bring up six children without money, or heat, or proper clothes, or decent food, and in a town that’s the most expensive in the country, where everyone has a car and servants. Why, I wonder you don’t notice that everyo
ne laughs in your face. Well, there’s just one thing for it—either I have Hazel, and money to pay her, or I’ll go home and take the children with me, and if you try to take them, I’ll sue you and let out all the rotten bag of tricks you pull. I’ll take the grin off your face and the flattering smile and the softsoaping handshake, and I’ll wipe the great big, mealy words out of your mealy mouth.”

  He bent a little, baffled by her rowdiness, but replied, “I won’t have Hazel, she puts my children against me. I haven’t forgotten,” he ended in a low voice, eying Henny accusingly. She gave a ringing laugh,

  “She threw your stupid books on the floor and that’s an injury for life; don’t you think a woman gets sick of your jawing, and calling you to your meals, while she’s got the dirty work to do?”

  “Books are sacred to me,” Sam said in a self-commiserating voice: “who would hurt them, would hurt a human being; it is more and worse, because they are the thoughts of people.”

  “And for one of your dirty books you would kill me,” Henny cried, getting up. “Let’s stop this. You have her or you don’t have me, that’s all. You can go now and make up your mind.”

  He softened his voice, “Pet, don’t let’s get into a conflict again: try to help me. This is for you and the children. Even if you hate me, you know this job is a good thing. I have a better position and better pay. You could have done much better and had social life if you had been willing. I can get a job anywhere after an appointment like this. If you are tired of Washington, we can go elsewhere perhaps.”

  She was silent for a while and relaxed slightly so that one could see that for him she had once had charm. At last she said,

  “Don’t be so pigheaded: you think of no one but yourself. You know I can’t manage the children. I haven’t the force of character of a Pollit. I won’t let Hazel say anything against you. You ought to know that. As for her religious mumbo jumbo—do I go to church? You weaned me from that! You can rest assured.”

  He began to hector, “I won’t have any negative talk round my children. I love my children: they are with me day and night.” She cried, “Oh, Samuel, don’t be such a fool. What humbug! Do you think I can’t manage Hazel! She’s been with me since I was a girl—and if I can’t, Mother can. Let’s talk about other things. Louisa’s getting too big to beat. I don’t know what to do with her. Her stupid great-aunt didn’t ask her to her for the holidays today, and I’m darned if I’ll have her round the house all the time. I want a little peace and to have my children to myself. She has your high-and-mighty ways. Another thing, she’s over eleven and she’s getting to be a woman already. It makes me sick to think that I have to tell her what’s coming to her, what she has to go through. Why should I do it? Why should I go through the rigmarole with another woman’s girl? I’m not going to speak to her. It’s your place or the place of one of her aunts. I couldn’t drag her into all the darn muck of existence myself.”