This plan, with an infinity of councils, subcouncils, and town meetings, Sam had got down on paper before he left. He hoped it would have borne fruit in his absence; and within a year or two he hoped to be named, with others, to this Supreme Conservation Council. Roosevelt, loved of “the people,” could do all. Sam believed that it was opposition to this grand socialist plan which was fermenting in the Department; and to his proposition that a quarter of a million dollars should be the petty cash at first allocated to the new branch of Federal Government therein proposed. In his mind’s eye he saw internations within internations; and overnations over nations, all separate functions of Federal Government rising to one crest of supreme judgment, sitting in a room; all glass, no doubt, with windows on the world; each power of government to be independent, though interdependent. Sam had numerous codicils to add to his great scheme, after his taste of Imperial Government, not that he admired it—he thought the American system far more modern—but he liked the word farflung, the farflung bournes of conservation, and public necessity’s eminent domain. Sam was a vague eclectic socialist, and some of the things he wrote were far more horrifying to his friends than he understood; not to mention that he went about proclaiming fair play in opinion and saying that there was some good, no doubt, in the U.S.S.R.’s system as well as holiness in the ideas of Confucius.
“I wish I could go to jail for my ideas,” he said more than once, in a burst of fervor, “and then scoffers—there are scoffers even at my patent sincerity—would see how deeply I feel these ideas.”
Sam with all this behind him, then, did not feel as anxious as his friends about the present attack on him: it was the rotten fabric woven by evil, the overnight sham bulwarks of enemies of the people; it would burn to ash at the match of truth. Besides Sam had powerful friends who loved the truth.
Some of this, indeed, all of this, he was able to tell the children while the old Pollit sedan was passing out of Washington and into the wooded areas on the road to Annapolis. But when they reached the richer part of the wooded road, he broke off and began to talk to them about the Free State of Maryland which would from now on be their home, how it was the first, finest, richest of the states and that with the most vision, how its foreshows had remained untouched because the pikes had had to go far inland to avoid the marshes and watercourses. No sight on earth was like the moonlight on the Choptank, and he made a great many other remarks which proved that it was only after a strict examination of all the other states in the Union, he had impartially chosen the Free State to be born in. Then he sang them a song of the trees of his home state, the oaks, red oak, scarlet oak, black oak, white oak, water oak and willow oak, shingle oak and post oak, mosscup oak and overcup oak, rock oak and swamp oak and all the others, elms, maples, hickories, dogwoods, persimmons, and pines, from Rising Sun to Snow Hill, Port Tobacco to Port Deposit, Liberty Town to Bohemia Manor, Fox Hill Levels to Deep Creek Lake, Spaniard’s Neck to Indian Head, Love Point to West Friendship, Cole to The Bunker, Governor’s Run to Cover, Humphrey to Pumphrey and Beaver Dam to Bivalve and a great many more which he had worked up into a recitative for them months and years ago, showing them the map and teaching them the counties. When they came into Anne Arundel county, he began to show them the soils and trees of the county that would be their future home and expressed a hope that in a very short time they would beat him at distinguishing every natural feature, because they were boys at liberty to roam and he was their busy father, earning bread and lemonade for them all.
To all of this Henny, her weary face a little softened by the fresh summer air, said nothing, but held the baby in her lap and sometimes hushed one of the boys who shrieked too loudly.
But as they went along, nothing could bottle up their effervescence, and every half minute one of them asked, “Are we nearly there?” “What’s the house like?” “When will the animals get there?” and “Is the first van of furniture there yet?” Sam meanwhile being very happy to answer each and all of the questions and not even once rebuking or frowning at any of his little citizens. The sun sizzled, the birds sang, they saw two baby rabbits foolishly sitting on the roadside and startled a pheasant. It was the finest holiday imaginable. They had all left school before the end of the term and would go no more till the summer was over.
Henny thought of this as she scudded along and worried about two things: how she could get help to set the house in order, and how, without Louie’s help, she would manage through the summer (for she had determined to send Louisa to Harpers Ferry again). Sam was still going into the Department but himself confessed in her hearing (they were not speaking) that there was talk of his immediate suspension until the Civil Service Commission could inquire into the whole confusing business. It had all blown up out of nothing at all, out of those vague “enemies” and “evil ones” whom Sam had mentioned for many years.
Then they began to pass indications of summer camps and new houses, half finished in new clearings, and came into the older cottages settled behind Annapolis. At length, wild with excitement, experiencing disappointment, after the grandeur of Washington, they drove round State Circle, were unable to admire what Sam admired, the colonial charm of the State House, the pleasant retirement of St. John’s College (though they saw quickly enough the little black kitten hiding in its bushes). But when Sam drove them slowly down College Avenue to King George Street, and they could see the Academy, they were excited, though the boys declared nothing would induce them to associate with such flossies, yet they would be glad enough to get in to see the Orioles v. Navy when they could; and suddenly thinking of this, Annapolis appeared to them a great and glorious place; it burst forth in the most brilliant colors. Having achieved his effect, Sam smiled and drove them back by cobbled Randall Street to the Market Space and saw the Dock, and so with them asking frenziedly, all the time, “Where is it, our House, Pad?” “But where do we live?” by Compromise Street to the Eastport Bridge. Until this moment, Henny had not had too many qualms about the place where she would have to bring up her brood. She had visited Annapolis so very often when a girl that she liked it, and yet because it was old and isolated, she knew she could avoid her old friends there or meet them there, as she pleased. She knew they were to have a house with two acres and a water frontage, and she had imagined one of the old, pretentious houses some distance up Spa Creek, or one of the primly coquettish little brick affairs standing in rows down to the boat basin. The view was exquisite there, at nightfall rivaling in stillness and sheen some little foreign lake of postcard fame. But they were to cross the Eastport Bridge. Eastport is a pleasant, little, hopeless, poor mudbank, level with the broad and shallow Chesapeake. The Chesapeake at this point is not picturesque and scarcely salt. The Eastport Bridge, low, awkward, and makeshift, looks as if it had been thrown across by an army in a hurry and forgotten there. Spa Creek is rimmed with modern and even expensive houses on the Annapolis side, but on the Eastport side to which they were now crossing, it is rimmed by a couple of slipways, boatsheds, dilapidated family houses with crumbling loamy banks and long grass down to the thick water. On the Bay side are jetties, gardens, yachts, and powerboats for bay and sea fishing. It is the sort of place for a fisherman, a mudstalker and hookbaiter, but seems pretty messy, wet, and penurious to any other person. Sam belonged to the first sort and Henny to the majority.
The children craned from the car like geese at Thanksgiving from their crates, gabbling about the yachts, jetties, and shrieking “Which house is it, Dad?” for they knew it was near the bridge and on the water. They fixed on a tidy house with a private jetty on the left hand but Ernie picked out a large tumble-down place, two stories with an attic, on the right hand, right on the shallow reach above the bridge.
“Yes,” said Sam excitedly, “Yes, Ermy, Ermy right as per usual: it is, it is, the cannon’s opening roar.”
“Is it ours, Ded?” inquired Evie, viewing it with alarm because it was so different from Tohoga House, and she had pictured an identical plac
e. Henny stared at the ugly old castle comedown, with its rooms upon rooms and unkempt grounds, and looked as if she would cry, but not a word came out of her until Charles-Franklin whimpered. Then she muttered, “No wonder!” Meanwhile the twins were shouting, “Can we sleep upstairs on the balcony?” and Ernie shrieked, “Wait till you get there, you dopes!”
“ ‘It is indeed a momentious event,’ ” said Sam softly, in the verbal tatters of Artemus Ward. “Kids, there’s a marvolious old orchard full of apples, a manure heap, seedling frames, and all: we’ll really have a garding here.”
Evie repeated in her dolly voice, “I beg your parding, Mrs. Harding, but there’s a blowfly in your garding.”
Ernie looked at her with contempt, “You kill me!”
Evie looked quickly at her father for protection, but Sam was too anxious to know Henny’s unexpressed feelings about the new house to bother about squabbles in Lilliput.
Sam had wheeled them quickly round by Severn Avenue, hoping they would not take too much notice of the weatherboard cottages. The house could be entered in two ways, by boat, from Spa Creek, or from the back by way of a long serpentine dirt drive, edged on one side by the creek and on the other by the orchard. Along this drive stood very tall old trees, all kinds of maples and an elm. The drive turned round to the left (they had now made a hairpin bend), and they stopped on ragged grass beside the glassed-in and viny side door. Towards the water was a pleasant half-moon of lawn with shrubs; beyond the shrubs was the fall of the bank on which grew large trees and rushes, and under that was a small sand beach. A rotted row-boat lay sunk in the beach. The children discovered all this in a minute, poured out of the car, and dashed about with cries.
“The house, kids,” cried Sam, “here we are, here we are home again, home again. Spa House. We’ll put up a board tomollo [tomorrow] saying ‘Spa House’ and ‘No admittens.’ ”
“Are we going to live here?” inquired Evie somewhat dubiously, after surveying the porch and balcony, the old withering walls and the broken planks.
“Yes, Love, e pluribus unum in proprietor persony!” exclaimed Sam, more heartily than he felt, for as he unlocked the side door, he saw Henny sniffing angrily at the decaying timber and dirty panes. The house had been abandoned for a year, and Sam had got it cheaper than he expected, at a price of a little over $5000, with a mortgage, because he asked for no patching-up (he and the boys would do it, aided by Uncles Lennie and Ebby), and because, with a great many new building schemes and threats of condemnation, the despised Eastport was considered to be altogether unmarketable. All that part of town was now sniffed at by progressive residents: the town was progressing towards the west where the high school stands, with modern bungalows and new highways. The officers at the Naval Academy were soon to be taken out of their apartments in private houses in the town and housed in special buildings, and government and state officials from Baltimore were to be moved down here into special new buildings. The old town round the Academy was dying. People were dubious about the fate of St. John’s College, and the old part of the town could look for nothing but visitors in June Week, visitors for the August fishing festival, and a possible revival in wartime. At all events, not a householder in Annapolis but considered Eastport a civic disgrace of deep dye, and would see it cleaned out and rebuilt. On the farther side of the Eastport flat, beside huge old houses built on neglected estates (it was once thought that Eastport would become fashionable) lived Negro families in a desperate situation and poor-white families, and in the little cove there are the most abandoned, hopeless old rat-eaten and rotten tubs in the whole of the watery world.
The first van of furniture was turning into the drive before they had explored even the second story, so the children were turned out to grass and Henny went to sit on a weather-beaten rocking chair with the seat out that had been left on the veranda. She faced Annapolis. Only a few hundred yards from her was the sheeny basin, a tiny Como. She had cast one glance into the Spa House kitchen and seen its old stoves (one iron oven built in and one old gas range), leprous sink, and wormy floor, and then gone silently to the rocking chair. For the past half hour she had felt a curious, dull, but new sensation and as she sat there she found out what it was. Across the water was a houseboat, a cabin on a raft, about which climbed two or three young plump girls in skin-tight satin bathing things and a couple of lanky boys in trunks. Cars were parked beyond in Shipwrights’ Street. Casual mosquitoes buzzed in the damp silent rafters of the veranda but did not annoy her in the mild sunlight. All the children but Louie had already disappeared to the fringe of beach, and she heard their voices through the reeds. A girl took a plunge from the houseboat; a middle-aged man with a sandy fringe of hair round a bald spot rowed languidly past in a suicidal rowboat; two naval cadets had come into the Creek and were clutching at a flapping sail. Henny heard the men moving in some heavy thing, and heard her husband say wearily, “Looloo-dirl, make some cawf!” The reek of weeds forever damp and of the brackish water came up to her and the smell of the ground under the veranda. It had rained slightly in the night. Louie, who pretended not to hear Sam’s call, came in a dawdle round the house and leaned against the veranda post behind the vines, chewing a grass stalk. She was droning to herself and presently she droned clearly, “Oh, the waterskin crawls shorewards; and the leprous sky scales earthwards, from the musical moaning channel, to the dirty margin.” It was halfwater; the surface was dull, and the sky was windy.
At that particular moment, Henny awoke from a sort of sullen absence and knew what was happening; her heart was breaking. That moment, it broke for good and all.
“Stop that rot,” she cried madly to Louie, startling her out of her wits, “I never heard such damnfool tommyrot. Go and get the coffee. A big lumbering sheep, and on a day like this, she holds up the veranda post.” Louie, with tactful soft-footing, disappeared from behind the vines, and presently Henny heard her saying,
“I say, Dad, this gas won’t turn on; it’s jammed.”
The men trundled backwards and forwards and puffed. Louie soon came to the veranda with a cup of tea for her mother (Henny’s heart would not stand coffee), “Mother, Daddy says, ‘Where do you want things put?’ ”
“What the devil do I care? Put them in the orchard and make a bonfire of them. Put them where you like,” she ended, less ungraciously. “Is it my home? It’s your father’s idea. Do what you like; all I want is a place to lie down, and get me a bed for Baby. Tell him I am not going to lift a finger to fix up his stinking tenement: the animals have better cages. Go on now, don’t stand there staring.”
Louie, not at all offended, and now observing more closely the many defects of the old house, the hanging window cords, unlatchable latches, and sunken floors, went in to say, “Mother says put everything where you like.”
Sam, only too pleased, at once hallooed and whistled for the gang of children and consulted their tastes. It was not hard to suit most of them.
2 Sam suspended.
For the next month, until the middle of July, in deep middle of the bee season, old Spa House rang from six in the morning till nightfall with the boys’ shouting and Sam’s whistling, hammering, ripping of timbers, and falling of plaster. Sam, with the boys, was taking the house apart and putting it together again on a different plan. He himself would renew the furnace system, take down the chimneys, pull out the bathroom, install a shower room, make new steps, put in timbers in the decrepit veranda, put in glass where it was broken, patch the plaster, calcimine, paint, and otherwise repair. The great project filled him with joy. “With my own labor union,” said he to them, “I need nobody; no strikes, no trouble, only the work going up fast.”
“You don’t pay anything,” Ernie said disagreeably. He felt first, after Henny, the pinched circumstances in which they were now living. His perquisites had ceased, and because (after a first visit during which Henny had remained in her room) one and all of the relatives in Baltimore had become timid or distant, he received no nickels o
r dimes in presents. His rich grandfather was dead, and Henny, more ferocious than ever, had absolutely forbidden him (“whatever your father says”) to run errands for the grocer, black boots, or do any of the other things that his imagination suggested to him. Henny kept completely to herself, refusing to speak to any of the poor neighbors. Since the breakdown of her hopes, many things had come home to her. She was ashamed of everything, especially ashamed of her laboring husband who could be seen at any hour of the day crawling about the house and acting like a common workman. Why wasn’t he at work? the neighbors might be asking. Henny, too, had suddenly become ashamed of having so many children; for now that Collyer was dead and the estate dissipated, people asked her ordinary questions.
“It’s all bets off, and they think I’m one of themselves,” Henny told her friend, old maid Miss Orkney. “I’m ashamed to go out of the house with that string, I’m like a common Irish Biddy.” She was glad to hide behind the wild growths of Spa House.
The Man Who Loved Children Page 38