Ernie stared at him for a moment longer and, getting slowly off the porch where they were all sitting now, looking at Sam’s blond flame, walked off by himself. They saw his round brown head disappearing amongst the bushes, down towards the beach. Sam winked at them all, and, nudging Looloo, said sotto voce, “Thinking! A thoughtful head! Not a big head but a brain with many corrugations, I’ll be bound!” He smiled and nodded at them all, “A good boy!”
It was a queer thing, that though Louie had been brought up on The Origin of Species and The Animal Kingdom (of Cuvier) and numerous works in biology and psychology, not to mention the works Sam had just given her, she scarcely comprehended at all the actions meant by “sexual commerce.” But after this horrific happening which had taken place in one of these hideous far suburbs built on yellow sumps and dominated by the Gargantuan black pipes of Bethlehem Steel, with nothing but tracks over the mud and colorless dry grass, she got the idea that she had run up against one of the wickednesses of the universe, an infernal middle kingdom of horror that she alone could stand. For Sam could rave and the little children could look at her queerly when she blurted out the half-formed thoughts in her mind, but she felt sure that she only felt what was going on under the ribs of the visible world. Under the eternal belching black organ pipes of Bethlehem Steel was the vile lake that covered an agony of fire, a lake that hid something like Grendel, or the pained bowels of an Aetna, or the cancer of a Prometheus, and in this lake too was this hideous father with his lying child half smothered by the swelling fruit of her womb.
Louie’s brain boiled by day and by night, and every joke of Sam’s, every silly crack and harmless tease made her flame with a murderous revenge. Whenever she and he were at home, she would mutter at him (from a silent distance), “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” Against this went her terrible passion for Miss Aiden, childish in its ignorance, adult in its turbulency. At school she was in heaven, at home she was in a torture chamber. The children would often study her attentively and seem to know that she was now in a very strange world, but to Sam she only seemed “more muddleheaded than ever, instead of brighter as I had hoped.” To escape Sam she would always run away from the house with her book, usually Shelley (she wanted to marry a man like Shelley, only Shelley), and read and learn. The Cenci, a famous piece, she had avoided for weeks because the subject seemed forbidding, but when she at last began to read it, she began marveling again, for it seemed that (eliminating the gloomy and gorgeous scene) Beatrice was in a case like hers. The Saturday afternoon before Henny went to town, then, with the doll for poor Cathleen, she had learned,
… I, alas!
Have lived but on this earth a few sad years,
And so my lot was ordered, that a father
First turned the moments of awakening life
To drops, each poisoning youth’s sweet hope;. …
(Shelley: The Cenci, Act V, Scene 2)
It was mid-afternoon when they saw Louie coming up from the beach again: the blood-gold sun rimmed grass, leaves, and Louie’s new-washed hair.
“See where Looloo walked by herself, thinking her thoughts,” said Sam to the twins, who were stretched beside him on the grass at the western side of the house. “Always thinking, always mooning, it’s a pity she didn’t have her own mother for a few years, and she would have been better. You see, I think I made a mistake letting her talk to Bonniferous so much, when poor Bonniferous was here, for Bonniferous had silly ideas about going on the stage and now Looloo does nothing but talk to herself,” and cheerily he hailed her, “Bluebeak? Is you talkin’ to yousef or is you recitin’ poetry?”
Louie stopped and looked at them and said very proudly, “Reciting poetry, if you must know.”
“Come, recite it to us, Looloo,” said Sam stretching himself. Louie did not wait a moment but stepped over to them and declaimed Cenci’s speech,
God!
Hear me! If this most specious mass of flesh,
Which Thou hast made my daughter; this my blood … this devil
Which sprung from me as from a hell, was meant
To aught good use …
Sam stared and his eyes narrowed, but he was reassured by the book in her hand, the very one he had given her; Louie continued,
… if her bright loveliness
Was kindled to illumine this dark world …
Sam repeated softly, “If her bright loveliness was kindled to illumine this dark world,” and waited patiently for Louie to continue, always with the gentle smile playing on his long, well-formed lips. Louie stopped and said proudly again, “You’re making fun of me!” She started to leave them.
“Stay, Looloo,” begged Sam. “No, not to be made fun of.” “Stupid Looloo,” cried Sam, in surprise. “Looloo, afternoon tea in the common room.”
When she brought in the jingling tray and set it down at the western end of the long table, Sam and the boys had a lighted candle before them, and Ernie, who was very keen on physics, was explaining to them that in the center of the flame was nothing but a cool spot: if you put a match there, said Ernie, it would not light. The children, giggling with excitement, began brushing their fingers through the flame, to feel the cool spot. Ernie held his finger there for a moment and pulled it away with a comical shriek, and then Sam put out his big yellow forefinger and put it into the flame and drew it away, blowing and making a great travesty of his sufferings. Looloo stood watching the candle’s pale ear of light floating beside the dusty sunbeam streaming through the window.
“And Looloo try,” said Ernie, appealing to her, “you try too, Looloo,” for Ernest was always anxious that everyone should be convinced of his proofs. The children meanwhile were dashing their fingers back and forth in a silly way, giggling and licking their hands. Louie, with a slight smile, stuck out the little finger of her right hand and held it in the flame. The children’s faces stilled with surprise, their eyes opened, and Sam, whose face had held as always a merry jeer, looked questioningly at her, and he suddenly cried, “Looloo, don’t be a fool!” while Tommy said, “Ooh, Ooh, you’ll hurt yourself,” and Ernie said, “Looloo, don’t.” There was a nasty smell of frying flesh in the room. Louie withdrew her finger and showed it to them for an instant, charred, and then coolly walked out of the room to go and wrap it in oil. Evie and Little-Sam were bawling, and the others were pale with fright, while Sam repeated several times angrily, “Looloo is a cussed, mulish donkey: Looloo has not an ounce of sense in her bonnet.” He even got up and came to the door of the kitchen and asked angrily, “Looloo, isn’t it hurting you?”
“It is not hurting me,” she said stiffly.
“It must be.”
“Nothing hurts me if I don’t want it to,” she told him. He lumbered away, shrugging his shoulders and utterly at a loss. The child was beyond him. He made up his mind that he would never let Ernie get out of hand like that. As for Evie, she was not going to go to high school. He had made up his mind that it was the higher education that had “knocked spots off Looloo’s common sense,” as he now told his little family in a soft grumble, and he would eat his hat if they ever caught him making a cantankerous wretch out of Little-Womey.
But Ernie pussyfooted out to the kitchen and asked, “Doesn’t it hurt, Louie?” to which Louie replied with a smile, “Yes, of course it hurts, but it doesn’t matter.” With the children she felt cool; all her passions flowed far above their unharmed heads. This evening Sam left her alone in the cool of her room upstairs; and it was this evening, looking at the sky bloom darkly and the pendent globe of Jupiter, that she had a splendid idea. In June would be Sam’s birthday, and for it she would write a play which the children could act. She got out her pen and paper and, instead of writing for Miss Aiden, wrote for herself, not for the children, a strange little play. When it was written (there were scarcely twenty lines in it), she turned it into a secret language that she began to make up there on the spot. This was a good idea, she thought: so that she could write what she wished, she woul
d invent an extensive language to express every shade of her ideas. “Everyone has a different sphere to express, and it goes without saying that language as it stands can never contain every private thought.” But she was only a weakling and a mental dwarf now as before, and the new vocabulary did not ever exceed a few hundred words, nor was there ever more than one play written in it! She was called from this by a bump and Chappy’s (Charles-Franklin’s) scream, and as she plunged to the rescue, she heard again Sam’s plaintive, bashful question to Little-Womey, “Why is Mothering out all day? Why is the Henny-penny always away from the chicken-lickens now? Don’t she want to take her responsibilities any mower? Why, Little-Womey, soon you got to be my wife, I speck.”
“Yes, Taddy,” Evie answered, from the porch door, seeing that Chappy was already in Louie’s arms. She rushed up, too, seeing that he still sobbed, “Wassamatter, Chappy? Hurt ooself?” Sam came running, snatched the little butter-blond boy away and started tossing him to the ceiling and at last ran off with him, hallooing and doing the round of the orchard. They heard Chappy’s loud crowing laughs.
“Daddy said I could be his wife,” Evie told Louie, looking up at her confidentially and not sure whether she would laugh and approve. Louie turned her back, and Evie’s face fell.
2 Miss Aiden to dinner.
Since May the little boys with real fishing tackle had been fishing the streams that feed the Severn, and the local coves, with Sam. Sam predicted a roaring summer. Saul Pilgrim, who did a fishing column for one of the Washington papers and who wrote fishing poetry which he syndicated, was to come down to Spa House, just about Sam’s birthday, June twenty-third, on his way to Ocean City, for the big-game season. The boys had caught plenty of poor sport, gudgeons, minnows, even pike and sunfish, but they nagged Sam to be allowed to go with one or other of the fishermen and boatowners down to the Winter Quarter Shoals or the Tide Rips, for catching the game king, the marlin, who in midsummer here strikes his most northerly point. Sam refused, and the boys found to their sorrow that even the fishermen were joking; the marlin is no minnow, will fight from four to fifteen hours, and kills his fishers when he can. The season was now the talk of the bay, for many men idle during the year are in good work from May to November. About three hundred thousand persons go to the Chesapeake for the summer fishing, six hundred and thirty odd boats are employed at a rental of nearly three hundred thousand dollars yearly, a giant revenue for the tidewater section of Maryland; meantime, the bait for trout, spot, and croakers, chiefly peeler crabs in all stages, sold at from fifty cents to two dollars a dozen has increased the income of the crabber, and, in addition to the big boats, are all sorts of rowboats, sailing boats, canoes, and lighter craft. The boys looked forward to a raging summer. Sam and other fishermen predicted from certain signs (early swarming, strange electric weather) a great catch. The air was alive with fish stories, the points of a good fisherman, and Sam was full of indignations and moral points—depletion of the crab supply, use of beardless hooks, the democratization of game fishing, and the commercial utilization of the immense supply of big game fish taken in at this season and wasted. “The marlin is a singularly oily fish”; said Sam, “no doubt the flesh is inedible, though it may possibly be treated, but surely we ought to use this valuable supply of animal oil, thrashing about in the ocean under our noses. The fishing is done for us, at great expense by wealthy fishermen,” and he proposed schemes for receiving the marlin as soon as it was caught after verification of size and poundage, and to try out the oil and use the offal for fertilizer perhaps. “We are now slowly awakening to the need for reforestation,” said Sam, “and why should we lay waste the great treasuries of the sea?”
The house rang with all this great lore, for now Sam was in his fishy element; and, from long hearing and training, his sons and daughters were as expert with the hook, line, and sinker, as they were with the brace-and-bit and plumb-and-level. The boys were only at home half the day, being out with the men of the bay, getting information and swapping eagerness. Although friends had long since ceased to come to Sam’s house, Saul Pilgrim, the author of the interminable serial, had patience and pity and, without false pride, he would sneak in and out of Spa House, without meeting its lady and without asking for a meal. He would come into the dark narrow hall (very different from the broad thoroughfare of Tohoga House) and, while Louie took his hat, would begin poems and conundrums,
Oh, do not bring the catfish here,
The catfish is a beast I fear,
Don’t bring him here at all!
and,
If I were born a Pelican,
I’d do my best to be a Man;
If I were born a Man, I’d wish
I might associate with Fish;
If I were born a Fish—but then
What use to wish? Men must be men.
and very solemnly to Louie he would ask, “Do you know Latin? Well, translate this:
Isa belli haeres ago
Fortibuses in aro
An be sidem forte trux:
Si voticinem! Pes an dux.”
When Henny would come gloomily downstairs, he would murmur politely and make himself scarce till she had passed. Then he and Sam would sit down over some tea or coffee and biscuits, and it would be nothing but flannel bait, white-line peelers, green bait, beach casting, mine bilge pollution, Cono-wingo Dam shad, rainbow trout, and Tetraplurus albitus. In the days just gone Saul Pilgrim had got information for his columns from Sam, and Sam still could put him right on the technical and formal side, for Pilgrim had but a messy, literary mind and scattered experience. The children would sit around for a while, casting in questions and hearing strange things-how, sure as the calendar, the blue tuna turned up in the Bahamas on May fifteenth each year and then worked north, arriving in Nova Scotia on July fifteenth, and then disappeared entirely from view for nearly a year, though they were sighted cruising round the Atlantic end of the Mediterranean, and then, sure as the calendar, would turn up again in the Bahamas on May fifteenth; how they were hunting him by boat and by plane; of the great deeps off the Bahamas, when the sea, suddenly shelving from four hundred to four thousand fathoms, looks like a low-lying island and fatefully attracts unwary planes at nightfall; the mystery of what happens in those abysses, and all the mysteries of the sea; what is bred in the Sargasso Sea? They spun each other old true yarns, known to the children from their cradles, but which they listened to again, about the conger eel, born a thousand miles from shore in the Sargasso Sea, transparent as glass, which, working slowly shoreward, turns into the elver, and at last near the coast he begins to feed and turn dark.
“Now,” said Sam, turning to the wide-eyed children, “millions of those elvers are approaching our shores, entering our tidal basins and estuaries, here and all along the coast from Gulf to Gulf. In from five to twenty years, until they are older than you, much older than Looloo, they stay up streams and creeks and feed, and then the females begin to drop downstream again, sleeping in the daytime, traveling by night; then they change from that olive green to black, they meet the males, and males and females move out to sea. When they leave our shores they disappear, like so many migratory pelagic beings; no one knows how they go—whether in a great swarm like the great migrations of men in the Asiatic continent, or singly, on a tremendous love journey. Their offspring are found out over the watery abysses, beyond Florida and the Bahamas. Then it seems they die. Out there in mid-ocean, they meet the European eels, but they do not go back with the Frog eels and the Spik eels and the Arab eels—no sirree, their children all know where they come from, and they come back to America when they are born, ribboning transparently through the heavy, dark sea water.”
The children grinned from ear to ear, and Saul (who only in fishing found peace from his termagant wife) would grin too, and then would earnestly turn to Sam again and ask, Did he think the migratory schools of tuna and marlin traveled all the year in the Gulf Stream, as they were always to be found in the Stream; b
ut even so, how they knew the time of year was a mystery.
“Do they come on May fifteenth in leap year too?” asked Ernie with his mouth open, for the answer to pop in. Oh, they spent long hours together, and then the children saw a different sort of man, a thoroughly democratic sort of man who had no thought of grades and length of service, or of mortgages and of his sons’ being great scientists—they saw the Fisherman Sam; and Sam would say that though crops and livestock were privately owned, and birds and freshwater fish might be claimed by the land-grabber, the sea was socialist, the fish of the sea was for all, and it was wrong and a shame that anyone should presume to get separate fishing licenses and go fishing for private interest in the free and democratic sea: the fish should belong to all, the whole nation, the entire world could live off the sea, if it were properly used. But look how rash we are! When Captain John Smith came to the Chesapeake, he could ladle fish out of the bay with a frying pan—to fish with a line was not necessary. In Hiawatha’s time, the Great Lakes were stirring with fish, but we know so little that if the law did not arm inspectors and wardens, we would empty the whole giant Chesapeake system of fish, crustaceans, and bivalves, all that were edible, and kill what was left with the hideous effluvia of capitalism! “We are all the sons of old David Collyer,” said Sam, not troubling to drop his voice, “cramming our mouths, satisfying every taste, and wrecking his fortune and even grubbing into the ground under the house he built for odd pieces of good fortune that might be left. We are nothing but the locust; and the Department of Agriculture should send out planes to destroy with gas bombs those locusts of our foreshores and fishing waters who decimate the commissariat of our great and good mother Nature.” (Then, as a footnote, Sam mentioned his idea, that man himself should be decimated, and, with the good tithes left, a new race, especially interested in fish conservation, might be propagated.)
The Man Who Loved Children Page 45