The Man Who Loved Children

by Christina Stead

  She sank into a chair, frowning at him. Presently he raised his eyes from the table where he was jumping a table knife,

  “Well, Louie, since you’re beginning to understand some things and since you’re occasionally getting a thought into that fat head of yours” (but after this insulting beginning, which she knew was only to cover timidity, he went on to tell her about his boyhood; and how in poverty and ignorant youth, with a gay, licentious father and a dying mother, he had begun his experiments in science and fought upwards, ever since).

  “Your mother loved me dearly and short as was her life,” said Sam in a weeping tone, “she sacrificed every deed, every thought to you and me: she was a most beautiful soul and I hope you will grow like her; in love we must sacrifice—love is sacrifice, and that is why for love of the people, I have sacrificed my whole life, and would again, had I a thousand lives. I love, all my life has been love, love to me is the whole world—love of nature, man and mankind’s good, I mean. Man is naturally good, not wicked, though wicked men, more beasts than men, transformed by greed, have led him into evil. When the time for man comes, though, he will see and rise to the light—there is no need of revolution, but only of guidance, and through evolution and good laws by wise men administered, we will reach the good world, the new age of gold. I heard you speak the other day of the Augustan Age, Looloo: now, that was a wicked age. I wish they would not teach you history, for the pages of history are blotted with crime—only in the good around us, and in our own lives, can we do good. And even we are stained.”

  Louie had laid her sheets of paper down on the table and was idly scribbling on them. Sam paused for a moment, to attract her attention, but since she said nothing, he went on in a softer, more insinuating tone, “And you later on will lead others to understand: first you must come to understanding yourself. It is not study but the penetration of human motive, you see, Looloo. I think you can do that.”

  Outside was the plashing of the creeping tide, and the shrieks of young people on the little lighted houseboat, at the end of Shipwrights Street. They both listened to it, and to the breeze, still brittle, not fully leaved.

  “The year is young, gawky,” thought Sam to himself, “like poor Looloo, so ignorant of herself and me.” He said in a low voice, “What are you thinking of, Looloo?”

  She replied, with a rush, “It is night: now do all gushing fountains speak louder, and my heart also is a gushing fountain.”

  “What is that?” She did not reply.

  After a silence, he went on, “You know I call myself an agnostic; and perhaps you will be too, Looloo. But we both believe that good is paramount and will spread through the nations, perhaps through the help of the radio. I always said that a second Christ could arise with the radio, speaking to all mankind—though for that we need the universal tongue and not cranky Frongsay and guttural Deutsch: yes, I believe it will spread even to the mean-spirited Frogs and the savage Rossian Tartars, though they may be the cream of Tartars, since Lenin’s little tricks—”

  He waited for the laugh, but it did not come. Louie was scribbling at the other end of the table.

  “I am not personally concerned in what anyone believes as long as he believes in those main principles which you have so often heard me set forth, so often that you know them by heart, Looloo, Looloo, Looloo!”

  She raised a drained, martyred face.

  “What are you writing, Looloo? Are you making notes of what your dad is telling you?”

  She said nothing: her shoulders writhed slightly. He could see that all of two sheets were covered with her little scrawl.

  He went on, “And in you I see sure signs of the love of man—Looloo, look at me: what are you writing?”

  She sat with her head sunk between her shoulders. Amazed, he got up and came up to the other end of the table. She sat there without a movement. He bent over her shoulder and read,

  Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, I can’t stand your gassing, oh, what a windbag, what will shut you up, shut up, shut up. And so ad infinitum.

  He was terribly hurt. He could hardly believe his eyes. He flung at her, thrusting her shoulder back so that he could look into her face, “What is the matter with you? You’re mean and full of hate. You love hate. I think of love and you are all hate. Sitting there you look like some mean cur in the street, whining and sniveling; you look like a mean gutter rat: your devil of a stepmother has done for you. What can I do with a girl like you? You have no looks, and instead of trying to light up your sullen face with a smile, and beaming on people as I always do, you sit there scowling with a hangdog expression. Get out of my sight: go to bed. I don’t understand you.”

  Half smiling, bursting with confusion, the hulking child rose, gathered together her papers, and went into her bedroom.

  Sam flung himself into his armchair and then got up and went out. Louie heard the screen door close and felt a pain in her heart. She sat down on her bed when she had put her papers on the table. Then she rose mechanically and got out her pen and journal preparatory to writing her sonnet to Miss Aiden; but she sat staring at the blank page. She put her head in her hands and, not even crying, groaned, “What can I do? What will be the end of me?”

  When Sam came back from a long pacing back and forth under the old maples and elms of the avenue, Louisa was sitting patiently at the common-room table waiting for him.

  “Do you want some coffee, Dad?”

  “Yiss, Looloo,” he cast a pathetic look upon her.

  When she set it before him, she sat down, folded her hands, and said, “I’m no good to you: why don’t you let me go and live with the Bakens at Harpers Ferry? I could go to school there. What is the good of my staying here? You and mother are always fighting about me.”

  “Good heavens, I’m trying to bring you closer to me, and the first thing you think of is to go off to Harpers Ferry. It must never be, Louie—a woman must not leave her father’s home till she goes to her husband: that is what I am here for, to look after you.”

  “But all these quarrels—we don’t understand each other,” Louie said sadly.

  “Yes we do, Looloo girl,” he answered gently, “yes we do: these are just little storms in a teacup that will pass over.”

  “No, I must go: you must let me be on my own,” persisted Louie quietly. “What is the good—what is the good?”

  Sam flushed, “If you were to go, Looloo-girl, I would blame your mother as I’ve never blamed her for anything. I would put all the blame on her shoulders for driving you from home. It has been her lifelong object to break up my home. I have always fought for the sanctity of my home. Do you want me to blame her?”

  “No.”

  “Then there is nothing more to be said.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  1 Sunday a Funday.

  IT WAS MAY, FULLEST SPRING, and all the week Henny had been whimsical and cheerful: she was dressing a doll for the eighteenth birthday of Cathleen, Hassie’s only child. Cathy had dark gold hair, a thick, creamy skin, and pretty, vacant, tender blue eyes under auburn brows. Her face was oval and empty of all but a little child’s experience. By ill luck her squarish shoulders concealed her wide-set breasts, round as cups. Her frailty expressed itself in an eighteen-inch waist and thin legs and arms. She wound a bath towel round her waist before dressing and wore skirts as long as possible and long sleeves. The style of costume no longer favored eighteen-inch waists, and her powerful fat mother kept drumming in her ears that men no longer wished to embrace a matchstick middle. She was deeply ashamed of her figure, stooped to hide it, and clung fervently to her mother’s side. Cathleen had been one of those rare children who love dolls passionately: her entire uncompanioned childhood had been spent nursing dolls and dreaming of them. An expensive doll had always come to her on every anniversary—birthday, Christmas, New Year’s Day (which was the great Collyer reunion day at Monocacy), and at odd times during the year. Not only Hassie gave Cathleen dolls, but also all the relatives. Now tha
t she was eighteen she had a doll collection and with factitious ardor still prattled about it, her only interest in life. Hassie, madly loving and maliciously depreciating her, accompanied her everywhere still. A young girl, brought up in traditions of the sweet-minded middle South, must go nowhere alone. (David Collyer had come first from Gloucester, Massachusetts, and his people from Biddeford, Maine, of old Devonshire people.) Henny and Hassie were great friends and for this eighteenth birthday had worked up a great surprise—Cathleen was to get six differently dressed dolls.

  “I think it is so nice,” said Hassie to all her friends, “it keeps Cathy’s mind on the dolls and on looking after them, it gives her something to do: if she marries, the dolls will come in handy for her own nursery and if she doesn’t—and you can never tell, men don’t like wasp-waisted women any more, they think it means they have no stamina—if she doesn’t marry, she always has the collection, hasn’t she? It will be worth something. Every stitch in the dolls’ clothing has been put in by hand. It’s nice for girls, that’s what I always say.”

  Henny sometimes said fretfully to Louie, “A lot of tomfoolery giving dolls to a great big woman who ought to be looking for a husband—does she think she’ll keep her a child forever?”

  But Henny got on well with Hassie, had a lot of fun with her, and collaborated with her. Of the three, Henny did the best sewing. Her long, strong, firm-tipped fingers gave her power and delicacy: she did beautiful Madeira embroidery, made darns fit for an old-fashioned ladies’ workbook, and, when she could, sewed seams by hand with tiny stitches. She prided herself on it still and had even in the last few years taught Louie to sew and embroider. Every one in the immense double family praised “Henny’s exquisite work.” Now Henny had put out her best effort for the dressing of a dark-eyed, bisque-complexioned china doll (she still preferred the china dolls to the new composition and cloth ones, with their quaint upturned modern eyes). Henny and Hassie were full of wonderful lore and morality, all concerning dolls. Dolls should be expensive and daintily dressed; girls of eleven and so on should have baby dolls with real diapers; little children should have rag dolls (Henny had made a plenty of rag dolls for her family, running them up on the machine); boys and girls alike should have dolls till about the age of eight; paper dolls taught them to do nice handwork, and so forth. They could discuss the doll question for hours and all most solemnly, laying down the law, and discussing the moral deformity that came from too-late or the wrong use of dolls. Henny’s doll was dressed in the secrecy of her room. She said, a dozen times a week, “I have no home—they only allow me a room here, but it is my room.” The little girls were allowed to come in after knocking, and would tiptoe forward, holding their breath, fascinated by Henny’s magic. At other times she would be sniffing her smelling salts, or taking aspirin, or mending linen, or reading, always using her eyes which grew darker and more tired every day, always doing things that were private to herself. She was a charming, slatternly witch, their household witch; everything that she did was right, right, her right: she claimed this right to do what she wished because of all her sufferings, and all the children believed in her rights.

  The entire house was a dark cavern of horrors and winds perpetually moving and howling. When Sam was in all day, now, Henny would send a message that she would be out all day: and, no more complaining of her untidy loose clothes and stray graying hairs and ugly old black hat, she would skip out of the house as soon as she could “to escape the damn hammering and whistling,” and go up to town “to meet Hassie.” She looked much older than she had in Washington; she was viler, she had lost even the seeming of respect for Sam, but she was merrier. For months she had not spoken to any one of the “mud rats” of Eastport, but after school opened and Tommy went to school, for the first time, she went over to “ladida” with his teacher, a nice little old maid called Miss Lake, and soon got to know “the parents.” She had given up all pretensions to middle-class elegance. She was one of the Collyers of Baltimore, the bankrupt Collyers, she sneered and laughed at herself and, pointing to her old clothes, her grease spots, would say she was an old joke and life was an old joke.

  The children were happier with this Henny than with the other. She would always insult Sam when she mentioned him, but now with a laugh as if he was of no more consequence than the butcher or than dirty old “Coffin” Lomasne. Henny soon knew all the personalities of the place and as she used to jeer at the neighbors of Georgetown, now mocked at them instead. The children, too, became very friendly with the “mud rats,” and Henny did not even try to keep them away from fishermen’s and boatbuilders’ children. “We’re all mud rats,” she would say to the children as they crowded about her bent shoulders, peering at her satin stitch or Madeira work, “my kids too: I’m not proud; well, I don’t care what happens to you kids, I’ve done my best and if that’s not satisfactory, you must try another shop.” Then she would lift her head and laugh at them. She was turning into a dried-up, skinny, funny old woman, “I’m an old woman, your mother’s an old woman, so I’ll be an old woman, and I’ll do what I please.”

  Sometimes Hassie would drive down to Annapolis, but it took her forty-five minutes and she could rarely leave the sea-food shop for the day: so, generally, Henny had to take the little rackety train which passed through hated woodland and straggly little suburbs (as Henny said) before at last teetering into Camden Station where Hassie would meet her. These days (the dividends coming much sooner and faster than anyone had expected, and Henny being able to get money irregularly from the not unkind Lessinum), Hassie and Henny went in for shopping sprees, following all the “opportunity” and “budget” sales and “throwouts below cost.” Henny always came home exhausted but happy with bundles in her arms, or bundles to follow by express, while the children danced about or waited impatiently for the carrier and post. True, Sam had at last decided to ask for a job as biologist with the Maryland Conservation Commission, although he resolutely refused to work for “the prostituted press” or for “private greed,” but their money had run out and now they were living entirely on credit, on Henny’s promises, lies, and tricks, and on Henny’s dividends. Sometimes when Henny was broke, Hassie would lend her money “until her check came in,” and once more, then, Henny would come home, smiling, lovingly, to her brood, with her arms full and clothes for them all, and even something for Sam whose wardrobe was worn out, and even sometimes toys and rare delicacies that she craved for—crystallized violets, preserved ginger, pickled walnuts, and little lengths of cloth and little bits of confectioners’ ingredients that she could use for school and church bazaars. For though Henny never went to parents’ meetings and church services, she loved to donate things made by herself to their festivals, bazaars, and sales of work. A lot of the local women, especially the mothers, came to like her and respect her because (coming of such a fine family) she put on no airs, because the poor thing managed so well on nothing with so many dear, well-behaved children, and because she was so generous. She was a genius at making both ends meet indeed, for they managed to live and when she could, Henry disobeyed Sam’s orders about substitute foods (margarine for butter, maize oil for olive oil, pork and beans for red meat), because, she said, her children should not live on trash, her children had to fight for their livings, having such a silly, puffed-up ignoramus of a father, her girls were not going to be underfed “mud rats.” Sam ignored all her darts, and even pretended to ignore where the household money came from (he would find it lying on his desk, in this time of distress, with the usual note: “Samuel C. Pollit: Use this for your expenses,”), though he often spoke of their poverty and his sartorial misery, saying, “And I’m a good-looker too, the cheapest suits look like eighty dollar suits on me, and I can’t even get twenty-five dollars for a suit because of the wickedness of men.” About their money, as about everything, he was vague and sentimental. But in a few months he would be earning, and in the meantime, he said, “It was only right that the mother too should fend for her offsprin
g.” Henny, hearing this, would merely say, “Hrmph!” or, “The damn fool!” or, “Well, I’m doing it, aren’t I?”

  How thrilling were the days, for the children, when Henny was heard stirring early, before breakfast, and when they would see her already dressed for town, not in her wrapper! They would crowd round her shrilling, “Are you going to town, Mothering? Mothering, am I going to get my new suit today? Mothering, you ought to see the big hole in my shoe!” and Henny would push them away with her hands, laughing a bit, “Yes, yes, yes, now keep quiet and don’t shout so loud or the Great I-Am will be asking questions and preaching about extravagance.” At this the children would flush happily, giggle, and break up into atoms of humanity, but still ask softly, If they could have a belt, and, Whether Mothering was going to get Saul a baseball mitt or not. “Wait and see,” Henny would say, “wait and see.” Then off she would rush, leaving a sweet quiet in the house, the sun falling on unswept floors and undusted furniture. Charming was this slatternliness: this dirt was a heaven to the harassed children, and they loved Henny for leaving it so.

  Meanwhile, Sam, whistling and singing operas and popular hits, would be leaving his trail of sawdust and brickdust, cement pellets and putty crumbs, and never an experiment in chemistry or physics did he perform nor ever work with them over a book, but only talked with tender abstraction of “great lives” and “great chemists” and of his own beautiful soul and sympathetic life story. He would reform the state, even the world, because through love he knew more than all the politicians, and yet the queer thing was that the children were always having to help him, tell him what Tommy and Evie and Louie were doing in the secrecy of their rooms or the nooks they had made their own. With what surprise and joy he would seize on all this information of his loving spies, showing them traits of character, drawing a moral conclusion from everything! Yes, he and the children were very close: they were leading an ideal life, and Sam felt very sorry, as he often told them, that he had to leave them soon and go back into the struggle, for his great fitness was to be leader of children. He hoped, he said, that all of his children would enter the service of the people and perhaps some of them would be schoolteachers, because to lead youth was beautiful, and then it was a safe job, and respected. Now, this appealed to the children who had been worrying about his job and their future jobs; especially to Ernie who studied the bills that came into the house and always asked his father how much money he earned every month, and tried to calculate, even, his mother’s dividend earnings, a thing impossible because of the irregularity of her drawings.