The Man Who Loved Children

by Christina Stead

  Sam was unable to articulate, full of rage, fear, and astonishment. He pushed Bonnie away and finished the wiping himself. Then as he watched Henny, leaning, like the dying gladiator, on her arm, and brushing her hand across her mouth, he said in a strange, distant voice, “Leave us; go to bed and leave us!”

  Bonnie looked at him, terrified, but said nothing.

  Henny looked up at him, “I don’t want to be left with the likes of you; I’m afraid for my life.” She began to move like a creature broken with pain, and sniffing, still feeling her mouth with a drooping wrist, she stood up and pushed back her hair.

  Sam said automatically, “The gas is on full!” and Henny turned to it, and turned it down under the bubbling kettle.

  “Go to bed,” Sam admonished Louie in an undertone. Louie and Bonnie moved out, full of doubt, but not daring to intervene, realizing that this was a conflict on another plane. Bonnie, pausing on the stairs, sent the little girl to bed, whispering to her, “I’ll just wait for a while, darlin’; don’t you fret: Bonnie will watch.”

  “Henny!” Sam said.

  “Oh, what do you want?” she murmured mournfully.

  “Look at me!” He held out his arm and turned his face, showing the cuts which were still bleeding.

  She gave a swift glance and picked up the damp dishcloth which she handed to him again, “Here, wipe yourself off: don’t stand there with that blessed martyred air like a saint in church!” She looked at him awkwardly and with much difficulty wrenched her ashamed gaze away.

  He dropped the rag in the sink, dried his hands, and, looking at her sideways from the towel, said evenly, “The worst part of it is, Pet, that you love me still in a way; everything you do—even this!—shows me that. I know it!”

  Henny, after tightening all the taps on the stove, stood hunched, with her arms folded tightly gripping her forearms, her head bent towards her right shoulder; and in a moment she noticed the frosty glare of the wedding ring on her left fist. As she looked dully at the band of gold that was with her night, day, in her washings and cleanings, in the children’s sickness and at their birthday parties, that went into the bath water, the dough bowl, and the folds of new cotton print running over the sewing machine, that went to the maternity ward with her and to the manicurist and fortuneteller’s, that she saw when drinking cocktails with Bert and when signing away her every cent on some scrap of paper at the moneylender’s, that stayed with her as stayed the man she had taken it from, she took a grip on herself. If this plain ugly link meant an eyeless eternity of work and poverty and an early old age, it also meant that to her alone this potent breadwinner owed his money, name, and fidelity, to her, his kitchen-maid and body servant. For a moment, after years of scamping, she felt the dread power of wifehood; they were locked in each other’s grasp till the end—the end, a mouthful of sunless muckworms and grass roots stifling his blare of trumpets and her blasphemies against love. The timid, fame-loving wretch would never dare to shake her off; and that was how she had him still.

  Sam was saying, “—I had long shuddering days, Henny, when it was as if the north wind was blowing all day, when I thought of our home here on the heights, exposed to all the winds of our anger and hate, those winds raging every hour of the day and night through our rooms and corridors. What would I find when I reached home? You will never know—because you do not care in that way for me—what I suffered in the early days of our marriage. You talk of your own sufferings, Henny. I know, for instance, that that is why Hassie does not come here. But what about me? I loved you. Can you imagine the hours of horror I spent before I reached home, wondering if I would find my children slaughtered, as you promised, and yourself weltering in your own blood? One day I came home and looked everywhere for you. I called you. There was no answer. Nearly fainting, I rushed from room to room; and all the time, enjoying my exhaustion and horror, perhaps, you were hiding in the closet in the staircase. When I opened the door, I found you moaning and spent in the corner, worn out by your own dramatics! I never knew when you meant it, nor that you were always shamming so shamefully. I saw my entire life a waste, a desert of shame and unspeakable sorrow, and behind me, a suicided wife! I spent those years in fever and agony, those years that I would have gladly given to my country alone. The man with a peaceful nest to fly home to, has everything; there is no effort he will not make for his mate and offspring. A public office is a public trust; and yet above me I had this sword of Damocles. I could have gone farther, Henny. You could have been the wife of a bigger man, a better one. But I, the most natural and loving of husbands and fathers, have been denied this simple pleasure, the only reward, besides public esteem and the love of friends, that I ever wanted.”

  Henny, meanwhile, had been quietly busy at the stove and now pushed towards him, over the sink cover, a little white cup full of hot coffee.

  “Take some coffee, Samuel; the sugar’s on the dresser.”

  “I made long trips,” said Sam, in a warmer voice. “I visited the hatcheries and the foreshores and even went with the investigation vessel so that you would have time to settle down.”

  Henny said nothing but sat with her back to him, taking gulps of tea. Her face flushed slightly, and her eyes brightened.

  Sam broke the silence with a lamentable note, “And instead you flirted with Mark Colefax; I take your word it was no more.”

  Henny broke a biscuit and said nothing, though she slewed an impatient look in his direction. He missed it. “I have never forgiven him. It is against my nature. I love to forgive, let bygones be bygones, but a man who betrays his friend’s most sacred trust and essays to foul his home is no ordinary man. I am sorry to say that I pass on the other side of the street and avoid the streets he takes. No man with the feelings of a man could forgive!”

  These remarks brought up an expression of rage on Henny’s face, but she was careful not to let Sam see it. Sam felt her silence and assured her that goodness knew he did not mean to bring up all the black past; perhaps they had weathered the storm now; perhaps this appointment would bring a change of life for them both. They were older, their children were growing up; in the joys and interests of an adolescent family, they might lose themselves and think of others, of young ones, the citizens of the future.

  “I have done nothing in all these years to justify such dislike as you seem to show, or pretend to feel,” continued Sam, “but perhaps we both understand whence such feelings spring; we are both poor human creatures, and in this understanding of ourselves may be, perhaps, the origin of a better life together.”

  “I don’t know,” Henny at last murmured, “exactly what you’re driving at. What is the good of fooling ourselves? It has never worked—it never will. I don’t know what you want to hang on to me for. You should have let me go at the beginning. Why did you beg me to marry you at Frederick that day? I would have got another man.”

  “Though I am not religious, marriage seems to me sanctified,” Sam protested. “Even our marriage, Henny, is somehow above the tumult of life, if only because of our children. Could I see our children scattered, divided, with divided loyalties, trying to understand a sentence against father or mother! What a shocking thing! It is impossible,” and he shuddered. “No, home is the place for the fledglings till their wings are grown and they can flit to their own place in the world. I hope that you and I have turned out some splendid minds and souls among them, Pet; your father is a fine fellow. I hope there is at least one, perhaps another, great man of science amongst the boys, and the two girls will be fine women. I have shown them the way. If they be not as bright as I could wish, they can at least work in their country’s service, in the government employ, working with me and after me, when they understand my ideals, towards that superstate builded on ideals which are seeded in the oldest blood of our countrymen—scientists, socialists of a new socialism, leaders of men! Pet, you could not see our children divided. It has been my fondest hope that I would produce mighty children, a tribe of giants to come afte
r me. And that is the sole reason, since you ask me, for my having dragged you through these years of discontent, yet years of ferment. I did it, ungrudgingly, despite my own sorrow, and without your love, you know that: no one who knows me could doubt my motives.”

  Henny preserved her silence and hung over her empty cup, her head on her hand.

  “I hope that at last, Henny,” said Sam gently, “you are beginning to understand me.”

  Silence brooded; the hot air stagnated.

  “Pet,” said Sam gently, after a long pause, “look at me; don’t let me see only the back of your head.”

  Through the rest of the house was the breathing of sleep; Bonnie had long abandoned her post on the stairs. Henny, defenseless, in one of those absences of hatred, aimless lulls that all long wars must have, turned towards him, looking at him strangely with her great, brown eyes. These eyes, fringed with jet, long and well formed under the high, thin penciled brows, had always stirred Sam deeply; and even when he came on her in a mood he detested, when she was sitting staring into space, communing with her disillusion, his heart would be wrung by their unloving beauty.

  “Pet,” said Sam, reaching out his left hand, large and shapely, “come here; come to me. Don’t sit there, forever a stranger, a stranger on my hearth.”

  She did not move but continued to look at him speculatively, her mouth moving uncertainly. Sam tempted her, “You will be alone here a long time; come to me now: you must want to.”

  In the end, he rose and came towards her; she put up her hands but kissed him when he bent over her.

  “My dear girl,” he said passionately, “let us have another child, the seal of all our sorrows. Let us start a new life with it! I feel so much before me: nothing can stop me now. If you knew how to take the strength in me and use it for our good. I want to be happy. Kiss me, my girl: let this be our fortress against the world. I will make you understand me. You see, Pet,” he said very low, “I need a woman to understand me. That is my softness. I want you to understand me.”

  She started up, trembling; but his long fidelity to her, of which she felt sure, moved her beyond all her resolutions. She began to gather up the cups and saucers and, to justify herself, she thought,

  “I’ll wring every penny of my debts out of him some way, before he goes; I’ll find a way, anyway. I won’t suffer,” and a small trickle of courage came back into her veins.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1 No more forsaken.

  IN THE FIRST WEEK OF every summer vacation, Louie went quickly and mysteriously to her mother’s people, who lived along the Shenandoah, some in the bloody stand of hills at Harpers Ferry and some along the slopes of the upper river, near Charlestown and Winchester, in mixed orchard farms. One, Reuben Baken, kept a needy store in Frederick; one kept a large store, ships’ chandler’s and general grocery, in the market place in Baltimore, opposite the fishmarket (and it was here that Sam Pollit had met Rachel Baken fourteen years before). They were Virginians and Marylanders but all of Maryland origin, the root strain having settled there soon after the Revolutionary War, coming from the West of England, the Welsh Marches, and all, since the Reformation, left-wing dissenters, independent, lovers of the Lamb of God, pale-skinned, black-bearded, tall, inbred people, the greater part apathetic or infirm with the antiquity of their race, small farmers, artisans, or shopkeepers, milky-natured, music-voiced, gentle but enduring, with the quiet natures and sweet intonations of Worcester and Shrewsbury still in them. The family was full of queer aberrations, but there were no ghosts in the cupboard, for everything was told with Biblical simplicity. The Pollits fiercely guarded with the red blood of children all manner of commonplace miseries; Henny was lying, hypocritical, and ashamed before “the other woman’s child,” but the Bakens never saw any reason to be more secret than Isaiah. The grandfather, Israel Baken, was a boy of seven on that doomsday of December in 1859 and had never forgotten it: the family had seen the history of the Union as a history of the curtailment and abolition of involuntary servitude, and Israel’s father, fighting against the slaveholders, fell, in the taking of Winchester by the Union men, December, 1862, a week before the Emancipation. Israel, eldest of three boys, himself had eight boys and three girls: Reuben, Simeon, Judah, Beulah, Joseph, Benjamin, Leah, Rachel, Dan, Jacob, and Zachariah. Henny had a convention for her children that Louie had an aunt to whose house she went for the summer, and this aunt was Aunt Beulah, who came, once a year, for an afternoon tea of polite constraint with Henny, at the beginning of the school holidays, to take Louie away.

  Rachel dying, when Louie was six months old, had whispered to her eldest sister, “Look after the little girl; he is a good man, Beulah, but he knows nothing about children,” and Beulah had promised to watch out for the child. This maternal duty became more difficult each year. In those fat years, Beulah’s boarding-house at the top of the rise at Harpers Ferry had been full all the summer, and on Sundays automobile parties from Washington had come out all through the day to eat Beulah’s chicken dinners. Her husband, Charlie, had stayed all day in the closed-in back veranda, killing, cleaning, and preparing chickens, sometimes to the number of two hundred, for the car parties. But Harpers Ferry ceased to be fashionable, people took the skyride, the fashion changed; even Harper’s Ferry people all started moving away to Charlestown and elsewhere, everyone’s children got jobs in the Government, the river rose and drowned the lower town, and, long before the railroad yards had been shifted, Harpers Ferry was no longer the gateway to the South, the great strategic point for holidaymakers as for warmakers, and business died. Now Aunt Beulah no longer attempted to give Sunday dinners, and merely kept her large, clean, airy house open for occasional visitors. Her two sons were in government service, and her husband, crippled with arthritis, could do no more than a little gardening round the place, sometimes relieving at the garage, but not for cash. They owned a house in the street behind the house that led to the cemetery, but rarely rented it. Times had changed. But as times grew leaner, Louie grew larger and fatter and ate more and grew lazier. The rich Pollits (so they were to Aunt Beulah) had never paid a cent for Louie’s vacation, nor for her trip back home at the end of two months, or three; and Aunt Beulah, irritated from time to time, would try to make the big girl help her in the house, but she was ashamed to do so: the child was yellow as light honey and yet she reminded her of the blue-black Rachel, long dead, but whose long eyelashes, rebellious little mouth, and high cheekbones survived in young Louie. Everyone knew that Louie had rather a thin time with that basket of young puppies and most of the time, no servant to help “the stepmother.”

  When Beulah’s anemic, YMCA sons came home, they were kind to their little cousin, rigged up a hammock for her, showed her books to read, showed her how to make knots, to plant trees, and so on: and she would follow them naively, confidingly, and be sorry when they had gone.

  At other times, Beulah would rouse her from her dreaming and eternal reading and repeating of verses or scenes to herself, in some sheltered corner of the garden, to go and visit the other Bakens. First, there was Uncle Dan, who lived in Charlestown and who would come to fetch them in his car. All the Baken men were tall (Grandfather Israel was six feet four, in stockings with heel holes, and straight as an iron stake), but most were spare, willowy, and ham-backed. The only one of medium size was Dan. All the Baken men had busy, discontented wives (Grandfather Israel had one, Mary, who pleaded, begged, wooed him the one livelong day to get one bitter word from him), but Uncle Dan’s wife, Rose, was a mitigated shrew. All the Baken men were religious (though Grandfather Israel was too proud in his cruel, revolutionary religion to join their holy-holies), and Uncle Joseph was shut up in an asylum where he recited to himself the livelong day, but none was as nauseatingly sweet in his Christianity as Uncle Dan. Uncle Dan had traveled in groceries for thirty years and believed in the family life of breakfast foods, but he was sweet as sugar, sweet beyond belief to the forsaken Louie, and was always the first (after the sensible B
eulah) to welcome Louie to this Israel of the meeting of the waters. The first time she ever went, and wondered at the irritable kindness of Aunt Rose, she had supper with them. There was a large table, with Dan at the head and Rose at the foot; next to Dan, young Dan, two years Louie’s senior, and next to Rose, young Rose, Louie’s junior, and, in between them, young children, two boys. Beside Louie sat Aunt Beulah. When the soup was served, Uncle Dan stood up, and the children, now, Rose, Dan, little Nellie and David, began to kneel down round their chairs. Aunt Rose, meanwhile, was bustling out to the kitchen where a young woman was cooking. “Now, Rose,” said Uncle Dan kindly, and Rose, angrily untying her apron, came back and sat in her place; and then Uncle Dan said, “You need not kneel, dear Louie, but if you like to, you can,” and Louie at once knelt down, but with open eyes, looking round, and saw Rose and Dan smile and look expectantly at her. Now the unctuous, undulating voice of Uncle Dan began (as he stood with eyes closed, their long lashes on the cheeks, and his fine buttery oval of a face uplifted to the ceiling), “Psalm Twenty-eight, nine: ‘Save thy people and bless thine inheritance: feed them also: and lift them up forever.’ Amen.” He then went on to pray, mentioning all their names, “But first our dear Beulah who is with us again and especially our dear little cousin Louisa whom we all love though we see her so seldom, daughter of my dear sister Rachel, and who will surely ‘also be a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord.’ ”

  He broke off, to say to the little girl who was peering through her fingers at her cousins (while they peered through their fingers at her), “Yes, dear Louisa, we are so, so glad to have you with us,” and then to go on to pray for them and her, and then to sit down, with a joke, “Now we are in the soup,” to the table, and eat heartily, while Aunts Beulah and Rose hurried out to the kitchen again, to begin to chatter at once, about “Eva getting up two days after the child was born and who ever heard of such a thing?” After supper, the little girl, Rose, went and climbed on her father’s knee, and wreathed his neck with her arms, laughing and coaxing, asking to go to the movies on Saturday, and fourteen-year-old Dan came, with the same dulcet tones as his father, to invite Louie to go up the garden to see his pigeons; and the little boy, David, brought Louie a box, his peepshow, which he had made himself, which caused little blond Nellie to show Louie her doll. Meanwhile the women kept bustling, clearing away and chattering about family affairs: “And you know what I’d do if she was mine? I’d cut off those horrible yards of hair, and she would lose her headaches.” Afterwards they both went and sat on the porch, rocked, and did crochet and darning, while Nellie hung around her mother’s skirts, and Father Dan and Son Dan went for a walk with their arms round each other. Whenever Louie came in sight they called her “dear Louie,” and when bedtime came, there was another prayer, which Aunt Rose read from the place marked by Dan, “ ‘Oh, that men would praise the Lord for his goodness and for his wonderful works to the children of men! For he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness.’ Amen”; then there was kissing good night all round, so that even Louie and young Dan kissed good night without giggling, and Louie got into bed in the girls’ room, feeling a little self-conscious, because the two girls said prayers and she did not. But though she felt they were foolish, with their singing, tones and sweetness, their climbing on knees and kissing, prayers and family love, weakminded and backward, the air of the low-ceilinged wooden bedroom, which flowed between four shuttered windows and which was filled with shadows from moonshine and trees, seemed pure as the water of a river over sandstone. She was again (as each summer) one of the children of Israel; she was unquestioned in the house of Jacob, no more called forsaken.