“Oh, no, Father,” said Jo. “Not now.”
Old Charles appealed to the children, abstractedly picking his own pocket of the bandanna meanwhile, “ ‘I won’t abase myself by descending to hold no conversation with him.’ replied the Dodger.”
“For he’s a jolly good fellow,” sang out Bonnie, touching the piano.
“For he’s a jolly good fellow,” Ebby sang.
“And so say all of us,” shouted Jo.
“Don’t,” said Sam, “don’t, boys and girls,” but his eyes were moist and to the children’s surprise he seemed older. His eyes had new crow’s-feet, and the tired upper part of the face, with sunken temples, for the hour resembled the weathered mahogany face of Old Charles.
“And why not?” shouted Jo jovially. “Aren’t you our very own Smithsonian? Our family genius? No, or yes?”
“Yes, yes!”
“Our only genius,” Jo continued.
Louie’s face lowered. By a curious chance Jo looked straight at Louie, grinning evilly, Louie thought.
“And you, Jo, aren’t you our genius too?” inquired Bonnie innocently. “Well, I guess we’re all small pertaters, only we don’t know it, all except Sam.” She spun on the stool.
“Tune up,” cried Grandfather in his trembling voice, and he began, in a furry voice full of little hidden screams or scratches, The Gang’s All Here.
“Let Father give us a tune,” said Ebby delightedly, his good gray eyes caressing his father. “What’ll it be, Father?”
The old man ran to the center of the carpet, bagging his trousers, fussing his bushy gray hair, and pinching his cheeks to make them pink; so that they all answered that they wanted to hear The Bold Fisherman. Out of his coat pocket came the red bandanna which he tied in the open V of his blue shirt. The little boys were a bit ashamed, too, of the way his trouser band bulged, of the wrinkles in the legs, of the snuff spots on the handkerchief and the coat, and, in particular, of his eagerness to sing to them. But he was used to giving performances wherever he could, and he had far too many spawn, and spawn’s spawn, to notice the greensickness of little boys in seven-inch pants. He threw himself into the song, and the shocking perpetual youth of Grandfather ceased shocking them for a while,
Oh, there was a bold fisherman and he set sail from Billingsgate
To chase the mild bloater and the gay mackeeray;
But when he arrove off Pimlico, the stormy wynds they began to blow, and the little boat wibble-wobbled so,
That smack overboard he fell!
This was followed by an adorable parlando with improvisations during which Grandfather performed on his accordion, “my I. W. W. pianner,” as he called it, “music on the hoof.” Grandfather was generous with his shows, and he went through three stanzas. They had hardly stopped laughing and got through wild, prolonged applause (during which Henny was seen bleakly rotating past the doorway into the kitchen), when Grandfather ran to a corner of the room and seemed to fall behind the settee. They were just wondering whether they should go and help him when he reappeared jubilant, holding his old banjo between his legs and hands. When they saw it, they all shouted. Old Charles positively gave a goatlike leap at this shout and himself cried, “A seat, a chair for the wandering minstrel!”
Well, there was no stopping him; the children were delighted, and only the distrait noticed Henny, during the next song, moving with elephantine grace in the dining room, carrying a silver sugar basin. Then Ebby took the banjo and played One Evening in the Month of May, and during this Bonnie saw Henny, with a scowl, heaving herself to the bottom of the staircase and then heard her moving slowly up.
More refreshments were served, and during the bustle Henny came downstairs again, this time in the new pink Chinese dressing gown.
“I feel full as a tick,” said Henny, discouraged, “but I must take something; I know I’m empty,” and she sat down to the kitchen table with Jinny, not saying much, but gulping down hot tea hungrily. Then she restlessly went upstairs again.
“We’ll all be going soon,” said Jinny kindly. “I’ll pack them off, Pet!”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter; I’m so darned restless, I don’t care what they do: I hardly hear them,” said Henny. “Ugh! I’m going upstairs to rest; now I have indigestion! I’m a fool to mix my drinks. Tell Louie to bring me the bicarbonate.”
She labored upstairs. The Pollits below sang madly, “The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, have nothing to do with the case.”
“I suppose Collyer left this house to Henny and you?” inquired Lennie of Sam.
“Oh, he promised it,” said Sam. “Don’t talk about it, Len; I was very fond of the old boy and he of me.”
“And that’s what I mean when I say and I sing,” sang the Pollits, leaning on each other’s shoulders round the piano.
“Have you told Henrietta yet?”
“No, she’s probably very tired. I telephoned the house and explained I’d tell her in the morning. I’ll go to the funeral; it will be the first I ever went to. I don’t like funerals, but dear Old David was different: I’m sorry I didn’t see him; I bitterly regret it. I loved Old David.”
They moved to the hall door.
“Pet will be very upset.”
“Of course! Her father!”
Louie came downstairs quickly, “Daddy, Mother’s sick, she says to call the doctor.”
“Ugh, ouf!” said Henny loudly.
“She shouldn’t have taken that wine,” said Sam, “and overexcited herself. You see, I can’t tell her tonight.”
“Oh, damn it,” said Henny loudly above.
Sam frowned.
“Louie!” called Henny, “Louisa! Bonnie!”
“I’ll go,” said Sam.
“Let Auntie Bonnie go,” Louie advised. “Auntie!” The Pollits were roaring, “The music goes round and round!”
“Auntie!” called Louie, looking through the rooms. Bonnie came running, flustered but cheerful, from the bathroom, holding a newspaper in her hand and saying, “Oh, Sam, what are they saying about Wally in Singapore; I forgot to ask? What does the British Empire say about the American Beauty?”
“And it comes out here!” they shouted, groaned, whined, and squeaked at the piano, bellowing with laughter.
Louie said quickly, “Auntie, Mother says will you go up!”
“Louie!” screamed Henny, unseen, seething with exasperation. “Louie, tell that mad crowd to stop it!”
Leonard turned back, “Shh! Shh! Henny’s sick!”
“I’ll pack them off,” cried Jinny, hurrying up to them.
Suddenly Henny screamed, “Samuel! Tell the damnfools to go,” and they heard her begin to moan. Jinny rushed in and turned herself into a dozen Jinnys, patting and pulling, packing them off, telling them where their coats were, apologizing, explaining—Henny was overtired with the excitement and must be left alone with her family.
Henny shouted, hoarse with anger, “Samuel! Samuel!”
Louie rushed downstairs again, making a noise enough for a cavalry horse, “Daddy, Mother says she’s too sick to stand it!”
“Nerves,” said Sam, in a tired way, “but I suppose it’s natural. Poor Pet is waiting; it’s the waiting at the end.”
Grandfather hurried up to Samuel, “What is it? The—”
“No,” said Sam, “it’s a fortnight too soon. Just hysteria.”
Old Charles said hurriedly, with a shamed, begging face, “Samuel, they never called any of the little ones after me—when it comes, if it’s a boy, will you call it Charles? I’ll ask Henny myself, dear boy, when the time comes. I haven’t got long to go; I’d like to see a little rogue of a Charlie called after his worthless old gaffer.”
“All right, Father,” Sam laughed a little; “he’s staking out his claim.”
“Here’s your coat, Lennie,” said Jinny bustling up, already dressed for going out. “Will you go out and start the car? and I’ll get the children.”
Bonnie came running down, “
I can’t quite understand it, unless it’s—” she looked worried from one to the other. “Send for the doctor, Samuel.”
“Has she Doctor Rock still?” asked Sam frowning.
“Of course!”
“All right!”
Bonnie went to the telephone.
They heard Henny above.
The Pollits went scurrying, flying out by the open long windows and doors, shaking hands, backing into their coats, settling their hats, shouting, “Good-by! So long! See you in the comic supplement!” being whispered to, by their fathers and mothers, falling over people’s feet, tangling up their own and streaming out to their automobiles and along the street to the streetcar. Neighbors facing Tohoga House, in the semidetached brick cottages, came out on the porches to watch them go.
No one went to say good-by to Henny, who was reported sick. Upstairs Henny heard them go, racing and tramping. She sat in a chair beside Louie’s bed, with a stricken look, and when Louie reappeared after saying good-by, Henny said quietly,
“Tell your father to come up and see me!”
Samuel went upstairs reluctantly, and Louie, waiting at the foot of the staircase, heard his expostulations and Henny’s angry answers,
“How could I arrange for it? I had no money. It’s going to be here!”
“No money? What happened to all I sent? I denied myself for you and the children.”
“Don’t fight about money now, with the state I’m in! Get Doctor Rock.”
“I told you not to have Doctor Rock; he has a reputation.”
“I don’t give a damn what reputation he has: he suits me. He’s a good family doctor. Do I have to scream at you to get something! No sooner do you come home than it becomes a bedlam. Do I have to scream at you? Get him! Bonnie! Louie! Tell this idiot, tell this blockhead, tell him, Bonnie! Get him, you ugly beast! A woman in my condition has to beg and pray and explain!”
Louie rushed to the telephone and telephoned Doctor Rock again. The doctor’s calm voice, insolently calm, it seemed, said, “What is it? What did she say?”
“She says to come quickly.”
“I’ll send the nurse.”
The quarrel upstairs was being carried on in subdued tones. Sam presently came downstairs looking grave and quiet. He murmured impersonally to Louie, “Keep the children quiet: Mother’s ill.”
“I know,” said Louie rudely.
He looked coldly at her, “If you know, keep them quiet. I’m sick myself, Looloo,” he said breaking down suddenly. “I can’t go much further myself.”
He stumbled into the riotously littered dining room and across it, skirting every manner of grotesque and outlandish thing to the sunroom, where he threw himself on the settee.
“Looloo-dirl,” he called piteously, “come and talk to me.” She went in.
Upstairs they heard Henny groan with impatience.
“We have a long night ahead,” said Sam. “I want you to arrange the children’s beds downstairs. Mother wants to sleep upstairs.”
“Is she very sick?” asked Louie, much frightened.
“All that,” said Sam, “is a child trying to be born. I guess that by sunrise tomorrow we will have another child in the family.”
Louie looked as if she could not believe her ears. She faltered, “Another child?”
“The groans you hear are the beginning of the greatest drama on earth, the act of birth.” He looked at her with luminous eyes; his voice had taken on a tone of incantation. “With the coming of morning, Samuel Pollit will have a new son or daughter.”
Louie blushed from head to foot.
“And I myself am so ill, Looloo-girl, that I can hardly rejoice as I always do at the birth of a child. The great glory of man, the great glory of the flaming forth of new stars, the glory of the expanding universe, which are all expressed in our lives by the mystery, wonder, and tragedy of birth have always thrilled me beyond expression. And here I lie, with bones of jelly. It did for me, Looloo. The last nights in Singapore I was so tired that when I shut my eyes, I saw blue and yellow flames, I saw things as clear as photographs, not ordinary visions; I dreamed there was a dragon on my bed. Don’t tell anyone that, Looloo, and not Henrietta either, now. I don’t want her to be worried.”
Louie stared at him uncomfortably. Sam laughed, “a giant in his weakness.”
Louie said,
The desolator desolate,
The tyrant overthrown;
The arbiter of other’s fate,
A suppliant for his own!
Sam looked at her with a puzzled expression, “Why did you say that?”
She melted into a grin, “I just thought of it.”
“Leave me to sleep; go and see if your mother wants anything.”
When Louie got upstairs she found that Doctor Rock had been admitted by Bonnie.
“Get some clean towels for me, Louie,” said Henny gasping.
The doctor turned to her with an angry expression.
“Go on, my dear,” said poor Henny, quite kindly.
Bonnie was making Louie’s bed.
“You will have to sleep downstairs tonight,” said Henny grimly.
The doctor kept staring at her angrily.
“The water is beginning to drip, Doctor.”
The doctor glared at Louie, “Go away, run away!”
3 Morning rise.
Sanguine and sun-haired Sam Pollit, waiting for the birth of his seventh child, had not slept all night. Louie, after some attendance at the door of the birth room, had slept well, downstairs, in Henny’s big bed, with Evie. Kind Bonnie had stayed all night. The four boys, used to wind cries and human cries, had slept very well on mattresses on the floor in the sunroom, exactly as they had on the day of the great gale in 1933 when Sam feared the chimney pots would blow down. One or two of them woke once or twice and, hearing their mother cry out, saw nothing in it at all but an ordinary connubial quarrel between her and Sam, and turned and slept again. There were torments in the Himalayas, windspouts in the Grand Canyon, and Judges of the Supreme Court got into sacred rages. What could little boys do, too, about differences between their hearthstones, Mother and Father? They listened for a while, turned, and slept again.
At four o’clock the sky grew lighter and, one by one, the birds began to creak, some like rusty winches, some like door hinges, and some like fishing lines unreeled at a great rate.
There was one that sang joyously like the water burbling down a choked drain. At any rate, to Sam’s ear, all of these were singing hymns of praise to the rising dawn, and congratulating themselves on their broods and him on his new child. “All Nature is awake,” thought Sam, prowling amongst the chance-sown seedlings of pine at the bottom of the orchard, “and my latest young one, in a new suit of flesh, is trying to greet the dawn, too.” At five-thirty the flame-red sun, so heralded, was kicked out of the horizon’s waist and visibly jerked upwards. Not even a breeze stirred the hundred-year-old elms on the south-facing bluff of Tohoga Place. Overhead stretched an immense, tender spring sky. The budding trees, already root-hid in weeds, ran up the hill on all sides. The surrounding streets, their hollows, the lesser heights, and dome bubbles of reeking Washington were visible; the world was a milky cameo at sunup. The neglected garden thronged upwards with all its plants into the new sun, with its guava trees, peach trees, magnolia trees, apple trees, seedling pines and forsythia, and the wild double narcissus that grew so rank and green on the possums’ graves.
From the girls’ bedroom that looked due south into Virginia, carried on the sloping airs to Sam, his wife’s screams began coming louder and closer together. No doubt their neighbors with the small, pinched brick faces, feverishly avoiding the sunspots on their spoiled sheets in bedrooms on Reservoir Street, and the encroachers on old Tohoga House Estate, slums of Thirty-fifth Street, back-bedroom dwellers, who rested their hot eyes on green Tohoga’s wilderness, if they were awake, heard the sound too. The air was still and lazy. Sam plied fast his long legs and reached the hous
e in a minute.
“It’s the end,” said Sam. Both leaves of the tall south door stood open letting in the moist air, and he raced from the porch through them and along the hall to Henny’s bedroom where the two girls were fast asleep. Brick-colored light fell through the shutters of the French windows on to the ceiling, and moved quickly in bars farther and farther into the room. The air breathed heat and nightlong sweat mixed with the dewy morning coming through the shutter slits. The windows were open. Louie’s long hair was spread out in a fan on the pillow, and the rumpled sheet was kicked to the bottom of the bed on her side, though it still half embraced Evie. Sam, standing at the foot of the bed, whistled Louie’s whistle. When she opened her eyes, he said quickly, “Get the kids up and dressed, Looloo: I want ’em to hear the new baby come.”
“Is it here?” asked the girl, half awake. He pointed in the direction of the noises, “Coming, coming; hurry. That means the end. I’ll get the boys.”
His daughter jumped out of bed, after shaking Evie.
“Little-Womey, hurry, hurry,” said Sam, stooping to the level of her vague, surprised eyes, on the bed. “New bimbo, new bambino!”
Evie sat up suddenly, her face pulled into a grotesque and comical grin, “Have we got a new bimbo?”
“Not yet; coming, coming!” He bent and kissed her, “Bimbo’s in a hurry; wants to see Little-Sam and Little-Womey.”
Evie looked round everywhere, “Where, Taddy?”
“With Mother yet,” Sam said tenderly.
He went to get up the boys. Ernie was out of bed like a shot and pulling his pajama pants off his feet. He looked interested and serious. He stopped with his day shirt half over his head, his two big eyes out like Brer Rabbit’s from the mudhole, questioning Big Sam, at a noise from upstairs. But Big Sam did nothing, only put himself everywhere at once, on all sides of the mattresses. “Git-up, git-up,” pulling and tugging at arms and legs, while the twins, not yet aware, groaned and muttered, “You get out, Erno, or I’ll hit yer,” and then at one moment shuttered up their eyes finally and gladly stared at Sam, back from Malaya and Manila.
“Daddy!” they both cried.
The Man Who Loved Children Page 34