The Man Who Loved Children

by Christina Stead

  Sam was being treated ignominiously in the Department. He had been suspended without pay after receiving pay for three months, at first; and though his case was up before the Civil Service Commission, friends warned him that he was likely to find himself out on his ear, in the street, penniless and cheated of his pension.

  “It is impossible,” said Sam stoutly, “I am guiltless, and I will not fight them with their own weapons. I will not excite opposition—for I do excite opposition. When they see how unselfish I am, it somehow arouses the madness of anger, and jealousy in my enemies. My absence serves me better than any number of petitions and any logrolling. I have been accused of receiving support from Old David’s political friends: may that never be said about a Pollit! I will only go to Washington to see my friends. Their machinations are beneath the very contempt of a man like me.”

  Henny, never speaking to him, heard him with fright; but she had given herself up entirely to despair; she said nothing, and it seemed to her that (now that the clouds had rolled away) she saw her husband for the first time: she had married a child whose only talent was an air of engaging helplessness by which he got the protection of certain goodhearted people—Saul Pilgrim, who was penniless, various old Socialists, of small property, and in the dim past, by the same means, her own father.

  “Why don’t I tie a stone round my neck and drown myself in his idiotic creek?” she asked Louie with quiet sadness, when she heard these declarations from Sam in the intervals of hammering. Money was slow coming from his pockets, and Henny’s allowance (which had never been more than $10 to $20 monthly from Sam, on account of her father’s generosity to her) ceased altogether. When Henny sent Louie with indignant messages to her father about this, Sam coolly sent back his answer, that, “Soon she would get her quarterly allowance from the estate, and in the meantime, they must all pull in their belts.” Henny would reply (by the same telegraph) that “he ought to be ashamed to live off a dead man,” to which Sam, with a stern expression, would answer nothing at all, or merely mutter that if it had not been for her devilish extravagance of a spoilt fool raised for the marriage market, they would have been well enough off on his savings. This was a constant source of quarreling (always by telegraph) and, because of it, the children knew almost all the ins and outs of their family society.

  Louie, who was much involved in all this, was a hotheaded person easily getting indignant over the injustices of one to the other; and about her own share of injustice storing up a wealth of vengeful feeling, a tempest on a chain which she intended to let loose at some vague season in the future. But, to her great surprise, the rest of the family who were, after all, own sons and own daughter of Henny, seemed to take not the slightest interest in the obscene drama played daily in their eyes and ears, but, like little fish scuttling before the disturbing oar, would disappear mentally and physically into the open air or into odd corners of the house. When a quarrel started (Henny and Sam did speak at the height of their most violent quarrels) and elementary truths were spoken, a quiet, a lull would fall over the house. One would hear, while Henny was gasping for indignant breath and while Sam was biting his lip in stem scorn, the sparrows chipping, or the startling rattle of the kingfisher, or even an oar sedately dipping past the beach, or even the ferry’s hoot. Exquisite were these moments. Then the tornado would break loose again. What a strange life it was for them, those quiet children, in this shaded house, in a bower of trees, with the sunny orchard shining, the calm sky and silky creek, with sunshine outside and shrieks of madness inside. For Sam, in his rages, had long ago forgotten all kindness and said to his wife the vilest insults, throwing up at her all that could possibly be called her life; and she retaliated, but losing, losing all the time. From the moment they came to Spa House Henny had begun to lose ground in the war. Back she went, step by step; and it seemed that Sam, as poverty closed round them, gained stride by stride. Poverty was a beautiful thing to him, something he was born to and could handle: to her it was something worse than death, degradation, and suicide. She envied every creature she saw if she did not immediately think with bitterness, “Little the poor wretch knows what is coming to it,” or, “The poor dumb fool is too stupid to see what a life it leads.” Of these remarks she was free to her children and to Louie. She often said to her stepdaughter, “Your father broke my heart, then he broke my body with housework, now he is breaking my children: I have no money—what do you think there is for me? How can he criticize me? The great ignorant howling fool! Let me die.”

  It was a beautiful summer. Sam hoped still that “truth crushed to earth would rise again” (he meant his case would succeed). He found a thousand theories to justify his changing the children’s food from butter to margarine, and from meat, to beans, spaghetti, and fish. He superintended the cooking himself, reproaching his Little-Woman with her clumsy attempts at cooking and himself instructing her because her mother would not. He knew a noble woman, it appeared, in the Conservation Department, who put out pamphlets on cooking, and Sam was always chatting about her recipes and always trying them out. He imported gallons of oil, of all kinds, himself making experiments in the kitchen, peanut oil, corn oil, fish oil, and every kind of oil, which filled the wooden house with a roof-lifting stench and made Sam very gay indeed. He raged against Henny’s odors, but for himself, in his own universe, concocted such powerful, world-conquering odors as could be smelled across Spa Creek and up and down the foreshores. Waiting for his case to be decided, he was able to forget the world and be happy.

  “What a pity,” he said a thousand times, grinning at his children, “that the Law forces you to go to school. Children with a father like you have need no school. See what I would do! You would learn everything by projects: you would learn to build houses, plaster, repair—you all do know that now—you would be bricklayers, carpenters; the womenfolk would be good cooks, seamstresses; we would get the best, most modern machines, have every household process done by modern machinery, and we would have none of the archaic, anachronistic, dirt, filth, and untidiness which Henny strews about because she comes from the stupid old world. Baltimore, my native heath, used to be famous in the world, for commerce, yes, even for banking (though you know what I think of the Greedy, the Money-Powerful)—Brown Brothers had a great reputation as far away as wicked old London, that capital of evil. But there is a secondary strain in dirty old Baltimore, and that is a shameful love of vice. Not only did all these silk-skirted ‘great ladies’ (as they liked to call themselves, though they were silly little chits) breed slaves and sell them down to horror and hell, but they were themselves bred for marriage to wealthy men from abroad and from home too, I am sorry to say. Baltimore loves other things much worse, a real underworld of vice, which is, strange to say (you kids will understand this later), considered the upper world, society—a wicked convention which has imposed itself on a silly world, full of drinking, cardplaying, and racing. Baltimore has beauties, but what corruption does the ugly old girl hide under her parasol too? But let us leave this. Baltimore is sweet because she is between the great pothole of Nature and the wonderful Blue Ridge. That saves her.”

  The children listened to every word he said, having been trained to him from the cradle. Only Louie, who had much to think about (nothing to do with Sam at home), would always seep away from the group, linger deceptively for a moment round the door, and a few seconds later would be seen shining on the brink of the slope, or would have completely disappeared, and be mooning and humming on the beach. Henny thought that she had sneaked off to avoid work (they had no servant now). Sam suspected her thoughts—if they were not thoughts she could share with him, what sort of ideas could they well be; something unpleasant and even depraved. He feared, with the shrinking of the holily clean, the turpitudes of adolescence, and although boys might go through it, he heartily wished that bright pure womanhood could leap straight from Little-Womey’s innocence to the gentle sobriety of Gillian Roebuck’s nineteen or twenty years. The swelling thighs and
broad hips and stout breasts and fat cheeks of Louisa’s years (she was getting on past thirteen and having lived entirely in the open air and been fed on Henny’s rich meats, she looked fifteen, yet with uncouth childish manner) were repugnant to Sam: he wanted a slim, recessive girl whose sex was ashamed.

  Louisa was his first adolescent, too: he was full of the mystery of female adolescence of which, in his prim boyhood, he had been ignorant. He poked and pried into her life, always with a scientific, moral purpose, stealing into her room when she was absent, noting her mottoes on the wall, By my hope and faith, I conjure ye,

  throw not away the hero in your soul—Nietzsche

  and investigating her linen, shivering with shame when suggestive words came into her mouth. Her speech, according to his genteel ideas, was too wild, too passionate, too suggestive. He told her not to use the words “quick and the dead,” because “quick” meant the unborn; and not to use the words “passionate” or “passional,” which she was fond of, and not to recite certain of her favorite passages because she did not know the meaning of them; and all with a shrinking niceness, a qualmish sensibility which surprised and repelled her. His nice Louisa, brought up on sawdust excerpts from potted philosophers, intended for the holy life of science, he could see (much as he closed his eyes), was a burning star, new-torn from the smoking flesh of a mother sun, a creature of passion. This was what her years of sullenness had concealed, not a quiet and patient nature, like her mother’s, but a stern, selfish, vain nature like her grandfather’s, wicked Israel’s angry seed.

  Sam tried all the recipes. He gave her her mother’s photograph to hang above her bed.

  “What is a photograph to me?” asked Louie insolently, “Mother is my mother” (meaning Henny). He gave her a photograph of himself taken when he was twenty-three, just before marriage, an incredibly mild, beaming angelic face, blond as the sun, dreamy and self-doubting. He carefully went through her books, her notebooks, and scraps of paper in order to guide her, set her right: his palpitating heart could not bear to think of her coming to shipwreck on the hidden reefs of youth: and, for her sake, he went through all the literature on adolescence, becoming more horrified every day as Satan’s invisible world was revealed to him, who had been a bloodless youth living on greens and tap water. Youth was one of the beasts of Revelations, the worst, and more insolent than the Sun. He writhed within himself to think that his high-souled, sober-minded Louie had to go through all that. Why? With the proper training and abstracted from all bad companions, and carefully watched, he felt, and kept in touch with pure adult minds, she would pull through without scar or blot. He would be her constant companion: they would communicate thoughts, and she would be drawn to his side.

  With mental lip-licking, he followed her in her most secret moments. She had papers and all sorts of rubbish to burn (she was always “clearing up her drawers”); she would build a fire by the side of the orchard and stand by, in a dream, smelling the smoke, differentiating the odors of burnt grass, paper, rag, and printed cardboard and so on, with the intoxication of an old drug fiend, adding things to the fire to get the smell: and then he would come creeping behind her, stealing up on her to discover what she was doing, what was in the fire, and what in heaven caused this strange drifting nebula to spin.

  He did the same to the other children, particularly to Ernie, who had become withdrawn and gloomy, and Little-Sam, always an absorbed and uncannily tempestuous child, full of wild, formless agonies. He sensed that there was something going on, like an incantation perhaps, about which he knew nothing. He tried to think back to his youth, but could remember very little but quickly repressed shames and moral thoughts. He pried and pried, hoping to discover, in the love of science and youth, the mysteries about him. Suddenly, overcome with an inexplicable feeling of embarrassment, he would laugh aloud, run up to the child under observation and poke fun, or poke the boy with his toe, or poke Louie’s fire with an inebriated, quizzical expression. Louie would flush, rake out the fire, and turn her back, without a word: Ernie would fling away from the intruding toe; Little-Sam would hang his head, flush dark red and sometimes hit out clumsily. This amused and intrigued the innocent father; and it became a sort of game with him to come upon his children in their silences. Once he had thought their silences full of long, lofty thoughts, but now they were too old, he knew they might be thinking dangerous, filthy thoughts. From all that, he was there, their shield, to protect them.

  So now when Louie stole away, with what tricks and speed she could, she was pretty certain to find Sam at her back in a short time, or to hear one of the children calling her from the slope or the orchard lanes (if she was in one of her cubbyholes at the far end of the orchard). Very often she would take there with her one of the younger children: Saul, who remained in fair equilibrium through all the storms, or Tommy, the handsome child with the rosy cheeks and thick curls, who was very dear to her and whom she would nurse, between her loins and her breasts, feeling his sweet weight maternally. Tommy always yielded himself entirely, sinking back into her warm hard flesh, a boy to love and never to question womankind. Sam, seeing two of them there, would roam near and rove away again satisfied: or would ask in a quiet, paternal voice, “What donin, kids?” and would wait for the reply and depart.

  Louie was not to go away this summer. Her own relatives at Harpers Ferry were tired of keeping her without any payment at all from the wealthy Pollits. They themselves had become poorer as the health of the various heads of families declined, and the male youths were still looking about for wives and careers. Bradford Collyer had a magnificent place in Montgomery County, half cultivated, with ancient trees and thousands of wild birds and a farm and livestock in little, prize porkers, cattle, a barnyard, blood horses, fodder crops, and fruit. Completely neglected, but fed and befriended, Louie had spent several summers here without seeing another child or even any adults in the daytime. The family was old: one daughter was in a sanitarium and one married in Baltimore. Bradford Collyer divided his time between Baltimore and Washington and the South, and Mrs. Bradford, a superannuated beauty, once an overwhelming society matron, cooled her rattled brains comfortably in retirement.

  Mrs. Bradford, Henny’s Aunt Phoebe, had agreed once more to take the child off Henny’s hands, for the summer of 1937, when David Collyer’s death occurred; but after that, sentiment languished and withered between them, and Henny’s family became too scrubby for charity even. Besides this, if Louie had gone, the house would have been left to Sam’s raving gang of boys and to Little-Womey’s cooking! Hazel had married, and was now Mrs. Gray of Charlestown, West Virginia; and the irreplaceable Bonnie had dropped from human ken—no Pollit had heard from her for some time, and Pollits now lowered their voices and looked anxious in speaking of her. Sam had no money for a servant, and servants would rob him of the freedom of his own house where he ran about in shorts and the children ran about naked. No; all was for the best, and his two women, Louie and Little-Womey, would replace Henny, who was in her worst mood of bitterness, languor, and weakness. Try as she would, Henny could not do the work, make the children’s clothes, repair mattresses, beat carpets, launder Sam’s summer suits, and mend stockings. Sam never ceased to repine about his slovenly housekeepers and the bright beauty of homes of high-class public women who were friends of his in Washington. All went merry as a marriage bell; ringing the old changes. The children were happy and free. Louie was happy and as solitary as she could be—she had a real genius for solitude and could manage to have the solace of loneliness even in this community. She was lazy, said Henny: she was secretive, said Sam; but Louie, dragging herself by main force out of those frightful sloughs of despondency and doubt and uncleanness which seemed to be sucking her down, with amorous, muddy lips, saw hours of lightnings, when the universe split from heaven to hell and in the chasm writhed the delirium of glory, the saturnalia of which explained her world to her: she would stand on the beach watching the tall dry grass which stood in the moistest part
of the shore and suddenly she would think,

  Who can see aught good in thee

  Soul-destroying Misery?

  and in this flash of intelligence she understood that her life and their lives were wasted in this contest and that the quarrel between Henny and Sam was ruining their moral natures. Sam, once pathetically modest in his speech, now could hardly speak of Henny without using the word “devil; the foul devil, the miserable devil,” said Sam, in his pain, over and over; and even in fun he had come to call the obstinate Louie “you mean devil, you pigheaded devil,” though for her he had this dancing, inebriated look of the bad boy who teases the village idiot, and yet the two of them roamed about the village of Eastport together, following the motor roads and getting round to the small flat horseshoe inlets by rowing boat, like the closest of friends. There was nothing Sam had to say that Louie did not already understand.

  In this new intimacy with his children and while patching up his new house, Sam was able to forget his troubles in Washington. He ceased to read the newspapers, except when some friend sent him a marked copy showing some attack upon him, or some indignant letter from a friend. If Sam thought about it at all, his heart beat so hard and his head ached so much that he could neither sleep, eat, nor work: therefore the only alternative was not to think about it at all.

  Henny saw with alarm that Sam did not intend to fight: he was drifting, and no one seemed to know where their money was coming from. Sam referred vaguely to “your mother’s quarterly checks,” and remarked that “Henrietta must now expect to help with the household expenses.” The children, who had heard so often from Henny that “these few miserable dollars were her very own,” thought Sam very unjust, greedy, and even thieving. They did indeed see their mother in rags, and could not understand why their father did not go to work any more.