The Man Who Loved Children

by Christina Stead

  “Send the child away,” Hassie said.

  “Let her stay,” Old Ellen commanded comfortably. “She’s a big girl now, and Evie’s too little a girl, eh, my dears? What do you fret yourself so much for?” she asked Henny. “Wait till you’ve had as many as I’ve had. They know more or less, it makes no difference in the end of the book. Sure, let her stay, you want to stay, don’t you, Louie?”

  “Yes—no,” Louie looked from one to the other. Henny laughed with irritation, “Let her stay, let her hear the dirt.” Old Ellen laughed, “You want to hear the dirt?”

  “She’s got her ears stuffed with dirt,” said Henny. They all laughed good-naturedly. Old Ellen affected to disregard the child’s blush and cried,

  “Well, I’ve got a head full of dirt. You could comb it out. These windy days I don’t wash it for a sixmonth. Life’s dirty, isn’t it, Louie, eh? Don’t you worry what they say to you, we’re all dirty.”

  Louie lifted her head, her eyes opened gladly, and she began to laugh while Evie moved slowly into Hassie’s skirts. Old Ellen said loudly,

  “Only it’s all over now; I’m clean now. The worst was when they were all at school and running to the stables and dirtying up the house and worrying about women with that hang-dog, up-and-down-day, blue-Monday look, tramping through the house, dirtying it all up with cigars and cigarettes and stealing your father’s keys and getting at his lordship’s decanters.” She laughed uproariously, “Oh, I used to listen at night for Barry creeping down, the way you listen for a mouse to squeak. There I would find him tasting and nipping with an electric torch! What a lad!” She laughed. “Now, it’s different. I’m a decent body, fit to talk to my washerwoman. No more milk on my bodices, mud on my skirts, only snuff on my mustache.”

  With utter repugnance, the two little girls looked at the well-filled old parchment face with its corrugated lips.

  “Mother! Louie, run out onto the lawn. Mother, I wish you wouldn’t talk that way before the children. Evie, run and play in the drawing room! Will you stop it, Mother! You’re disgusting.”

  The old woman laughed, “Oh, let her stay. One day she’ll get married, won’t you, Louie?”

  Louie looked shyly at her, filled with gratitude.

  “And I’ll have a baby,” said Evie.

  “You’ll have a man in your skirts soon enough,” said Old Ellen.

  “Mother, for shame! You ought to blush!” cried the two women. “Before babies!”

  “Baby me no babies!” cried Old Ellen. “They’re grown women. When I was Evie’s age I was looking after cows and horses and listening to the bellowing, with the cows a-bulling in the great big yellow summer moons. Kids grow up in the country. You keep them in bibs, you’re child spoilers. Louie’s a big sensible girl. Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, eh, Louie?”

  Louie simpered vaguely.

  “Mother, be quiet!”

  Old Ellen had the devil in her. “Do you know that old joke that you brought home from school, and did I give you a smack-bottom then, though I remember the day with a laugh this many years gone. Mrs. Jones had a black baby. Mr. Jones died of fright when he had to explain it.”

  “Mother! Louie, leave the room. Mother, she’d do better to go and talk to that poor miserable creature from Highlandtown in your kitchen than to you. Go at once, Louie!”

  The old woman gabbled on, ignoring her daughters’ frowns, and Louie lingered. “Then the baby died and they buried it in one coffin and everyone saw that the little thing was black. Haugh!”

  Hassie flushed and bounced up. But Henny sat in her place and merely commanded harshly, “Leave the room at once, or I’ll make you.”

  Louie, struggling for a foothold, said quickly, with a whine, “Mother, Nellie says I am a bastard.”

  They all thoroughly enjoyed the cries and questions that followed. But Old Ellen herself bounced in her seat, saying, “I’ll put salt on my lady’s tail,” while Hassie cried that she must get rid of the wicked little faggot and Henny told her this was what came of letting Barry choose the kitchenmaids. At that moment, there was a sound of a car honking plaintively, and they saw Archie’s big sedan behind Hassie’s car on the gravel drive. At the same time, Henny violently tugged at the bellpull and there came Nellie’s running footsteps.

  Archibald Lessinum came up the drive with a fretful expression which changed to polite pleasure when he saw the ladies. Mother and Hassie and Henny were all greeted and kissed, and he already noted their trouble and anger—three matrons with tumbled laps and Henny still carrying her serviette and wiping her lips.

  “Did I alarm you, ladies?”

  Archie was a short, neat, small-boned blond of a family of decayed officials whose money had gone during the war. Old David Collyer, self-made man who loved struggling talent, picked out Archie Lessinum and made him his clerk, then lawyer, then son-in-law, just as he had picked out Samuel Pollit and made him son-in-law and advanced him. Archie, thin and weak, had first liked a little the sprightly, spoiled young Henny with her dark great eyes; but after a few months of feeding, he felt the power rise up in him to cope with noble fleshly Eleanor, her father’s pet, who fell romantically in love with him. This passion held for seven years when they were married.

  Hassie, who expected to be named executrix of her father’s will, treated Archie very seriously and confidentially as man to man; Henny saw him with a twinge of pain even now. Eleanor had no children. As for Old Ellen, she could hardly distinguish him from the rest of the world or her sons; having produced so many after pregnancies of identical length and after so many identical childhood illnesses, she could hardly tell one man from another. She was as glad to see young Archie as anyone else.

  “Here you come as usual in the nick of time, young Archie,” said she. “A young puss I have here has been giving lip again. I want you to speak to her. She must be sick of listening to women’s jaw.”

  “Certainly, Mother,” he said, taking it to heart, and fixing his little round glasses at the girl who was retreating through the back hall.

  “Nellie! Come here at once.”

  The women looked very serious. He planted himself a little to the side of the three women, all taller than he. “What is it?” he muttered to Hassie. Hassie told him the offense.

  “What did you say, Nellie?” he asked. “Repeat the word. You told Louie something.” When he said “Louie,” he winced slightly, for he detested the child as well as her father. It pained him to have to be compared with this other hand-picked son-in-law. The harum-scarum little creature looked worried; but she was frightened and told all. Archie said,

  “You will go up to your room and pack, Nellie.”

  Immediately there was a movement amongst the women, Henny saying, “Quite right; I’d do the same,” but Hassie looking doubtful and Old Ellen taking the apron from Nellie’s hands,

  “Well, if she’s going, I have to get the supper.”

  “She can have her notice, but she must wait till tomorrow,” said Hassie, “Mother can’t be left alone and Barry is out.”

  Louie started forward to help, “No, Uncle Barry is in the stables.”

  “How do you know?” cried Henny.

  “I saw him; he’s asleep on the bed up there.” There was another cat’s-paw of emotion, Henny declaring, “You had no right to go sneaking up there, haven’t I told you not to,” and, Hassie fervently ejaculating that Henny should look after a young girl better, both tweaked hold of poor Louie’s dress and urged her out on to the veranda, “Now go and play and don’t cause any more trouble.” Too much was going on, however, for them to notice her, and Evie, who remained sitting all the time on the bottom shelf of the big hall stand, saw everything unrebuked.

  In the end Nellie went up to pack, Hassie driving her before her like a heifer to market, through the kitchens and to the enclosed stairs. Old Ellen going up the front stairs, arrived heavily and flatfooted in her room at the same time, going through the billiard room to say,

  “Stop bl
ubbering, my girl, and get your things together unless you want us to pack for you, and it mighn’t be a bad idea. I’m sorry to see you go: you were a good girl in your way.”

  Meanwhile, in the breakfast room, where Archie sat with Henny and Hassie had returned, a violent conversation had arisen about Nellie’s bags. All servant girls stole, said Archie; and Hassie said that where they didn’t it was the exception that proved the rule.

  “I’d steal if I had only her threadbare rags, and rich rotters swanked their things under my nose,” said Henny viciously, irritated by Archie’s pious look and cautionary notions. Archie did not deign to answer this; but he gave Henny a secret glance which seemed to mean that he wouldn’t put it past her; and she replied with a black look.

  “But I feel embarrassed,” confessed Hassie, “when I look through and find nothing. It is like a slap in the face.”

  “You must not think of yourself,” Archie assured her severely, “it has a demoralizing effect on the girls if they think they can get away with anything. If they don’t steal this time, then they will next, provided they fancy they will not be searched.”

  The upshot of it was that Archie’s male authority won. No sooner had Nellie brought down her old-fashioned trunk and valise than they had to be set down in the great hall and opened again. Henny poh-pohed and declared she would not stay there poking her nose into any slovenly, filthy Highlandtown rags, and went out of the hall, while Archie held up his small white hand, trying to frown down Henny of whom he now violently disapproved, and sternly told the girl not to touch the things but to let her mistress go through them.

  “Then she must get the potstick or the copper stick,” said Henny, from the door. “If she touches the mess, she’s a fool; I’d rather be boiled in oil than put a finger to it; who knows what dirt is there—bugs or some disease, who knows what dirt? Here,” said she, and stuck out between Hassie and Old Ellen towards Archie a pair of brass-handled tongs that she had seized from the fireplace in the breakfast room, “here, Archie, lift her things out with these!” But it was an insult to Archie, not the girl. He turned away and said,

  “Mother, will you look through, please.”

  Henny shrugged and gave the tongs to Evie to put back. “Of all the dam foolery,” said Henny.

  Meanwhile Old Ellen was puffing over the trunk and pushing her fingers under old stockings and the remains of a dark apricot outfit bought for Nellie’s last Easter, and presently hauled out a photograph of Barry, from Barry’s room.

  “What is this, my lady?” she asked, as she held out her hands.

  “You are a thief,” said Hassie, horrified.

  “You know what we could do to you for this?” inquired Archie, solemnly.

  She looked around at them, frowning. It ended by her having to unpack everything before their eyes and then repacking and trudging out with both packets to Hassie’s car where she had to sit. Hassie would take her downtown when she went. Meanwhile, Henny was very angry with them all, because this meant that Louie or she would have to stay overnight and get their own food, and that Hassie would have to engage a new servant by tomorrow; and Henny was more angry still because now it could not be put off any longer and they would have to sit down at once and discuss Henny’s financial position. The family was to make Henny a loan, in order to pay off bills she had run up for the children’s clothes and dentistry, unknown to Sam, and she was to pay Archie back each time she received money from Sam. At her own urgent, exasperated request, after many threats of suicide and tears, Archie had agreed not to tell Sam about these debts.

  “He would make it an excuse for taking my children away from me,” said Henny, and related how Samuel struck her when he found out about the $102 owing at Middenway’s, the corner grocer’s. There was some talk about speaking to Samuel about striking his wife, but secretly they all felt that it would not do their spoiled sister any harm. Old David had paid Henny’s bills so long after they each had had to struggle for every cent they used.

  4 Shoes.

  The clear autumn weather was with them, fresh as spring; and for the children it was always spring anyway: shriveling summer was spring, the blight of the leaves was spring, the frozen gutter was spring, and spring waiting for the buds to glisten and the birds to break eggshells was early spring too, spring so young and foolish that no poems yet applied to it, spring just born, spring with throbbing head, spring babbling and spilling, spring with jelly backbone.

  Louie, going to the eastern veranda, to hang out the dishcloths and dish mop after washing up, saw the strange girl, Olive Burchardt, going down beside the fence, between the thinning lower branches of the trees.

  Olive, who was fourteen already, looked at her and smirked, “You wash the dishes.”

  Louie grinned and blushed, but the rictus of embarrassment pleased Olive.

  “You wash up; I seen you hanging out the dishcloth,” Olive elaborated.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “You do the work,” Olive continued, sidling along up the street, towards the back steps, her dark, famished face never to be fed, looking backwards over the paling tops. Louie watched her intently. Olive laughed.

  “Mr. Middenway said you passed lowest in all the school.”

  “How does he know?”

  “He went down to ask why his kids didn’t pass and he found out everything.”

  Olive sidled down the street again and, without another word, but with a few backward grins and grimaces, made towards the Middenway store. Louie stared after her as painfully as if Olive was dragging some piece of her living flesh and blood over the fence tops with her. She knew Olive was going to chat about her and her mother with the Middenways and that everyone knew they owed a huge bill to the Middenways: she knew that to owe a huge bill was both a distinction and a disgrace. Then there was the hushed-up theft mystery. Olive bought from cheap Murchison, the butcher. Although the Burchardts lived just down the block, Mrs. Pollit knew nothing of them.

  Hazel Moore, the maid from Monocacy, looked between the curtains of Henny’s room and called, “Your mother wants you.”

  “Yes, Hazel.”

  She went reluctantly indoors, giving a last stretch after Olive, now out of sight. Henny was continuing to Hazel,

  “Lord, I hate to go and get the kids shoes: I can’t keep them in shoes the way they scuff and kick and shuffle along. In summer they play football and skate, and in winter they tramp in the wet till the leather is sodden and rotten.”

  Louie called from the staircase, “What dress will I put on, Mother?”

  “Don’t ask silly questions. I hate her to go into Washington, in that old thing: she looks like a sack of potatoes. Tell Toddy [Ernest] to clean my shoes. A-ah, deuce take it. I burned my neck again; where’s the cold cream? Don’t I look foul? I look like a half-breed.”

  Hazel, the tall-boned, blue-tinged Catholic maid, called from the bedroom,

  “Toddy, Toddy: clean Mother’s shoes.”

  Evie called, “Ernest is feeding the animals.”

  Hazel went to the south hall door calling, “Toddy, Toddy.”

  “Yippills?” Ernest answered.

  “Clean Mother’s shoes, darling.”

  “Momento, zecond; Little-Sam has the snake out.”

  “What do you say? What is that you said?” Yes, this was followed by a shriek of horror, “Henny, that boy has the snake out of the cage.”

  “Momento,” shouted Ernest soothingly. “Smart’s the word and cool’s the action: snako, go back.”

  Little-Sam said nothing during this excitement, but picked up the cold, sulky snake by the head behind the ears, and as it began to wreathe itself slowly round his arm, he offered it the cage door. The snake put out its forked tongue tentatively, hesitated, and began to penetrate the cage, moving slowly over the dried grass. Meanwhile Henny had burned herself again, under the ear, an ugly burn that she could not afford, for her hair scarcely fell there. But the slot door fell to, and the snake was home again, sitting in th
e eleven o’clock sun, grudgingly awake on this cold day.

  “Hurry up,” shouted Henny.

  “Ya’m: come nup,” Ernest answered, bolting into view over the steep lawn, now rough with grass and weeds of all summer. He appeared breathless, under the back veranda, cheerfully anxious and conciliatory.

  “Naughty boy,” cried Hazel, “to let the snake out.”

  “I was cleaning the box,” said Ernest. “Dad-pad told me to clean it. Gee, I didn’t know Mothering was going already. O.K.”

  Louie loomed on the second floor south and leaned over, “Ernie, hay! Toddy, Ernesto!”

  Ernest craned upwards, “Whappills?”

  “How’s the possum?”

  “Mean, she hissed at me.”

  “Are any of the snakes asleep yet?”

  “Sure, one and there’s another shutting her eyes. Gee, they are torpid, gee are they sleepy!” He jubilated. He ran back into the kitchen to finish the half-blacked shoes. Louie went slowly into her father’s room, which she now occupied alone, and finished dressing at a snail’s pace, pondering over the possum’s meanness and the snake’s hibernation. On her father’s open roll-top desk was a book on parthenogenesis, a fertile and beautiful book of metaphysics, as it seemed to Louie, a lens on Life and its transparent secrets. Spreading glass but subtle wings, wide as the world, Louie, meandering through flowery mazes of metaphysics, was walking out with beauty and destiny. This made the process of dressing very slow, and Henny was powdered, curled, pressed, and had her hat on before Louie had buttoned her dress down the back.

  “Louie, Louie!”

  She fastened on her sailor and went downstairs. Her shoes were old and down at heel, but it was a happy day today, for they were going to get new ones. Henny and Hazel stood in the hall with a tinge of acrimony in their remarks to each other; something had been blowing up for days past. Hazel, twelve years older than Henny, strict, sober, and religious, made no bones about lecturing her on her wasteful ways; and Mr. Middenway, the grocer, had made some tart remarks around the district about the Pollit bills, which Hazel had picked up coming out of Mass the Sunday before. Another Sunday loomed, and Hazel wished to pay the bill in time.