“Louie,” said the apparition, in a voice of sweet admonition, “take Miss Aiden into my room; it is more pleasant there.” Mrs. Pollit had marks of gentility, but at present her graciousness seemed to pester her like an itch—she brought out the kindness irritably, struggling with her worse feelings apparently. Yet, Miss Aiden could tell that she bore her no grudge for coming. “Domestic rift,” diagnosed Miss Aiden. She was astonished at the walnut suite in Mrs. Pollit’s room: yet, on the bed was a worn and torn cover, and the table covers were not fresh. “Decayed gentility,” now thought Miss Aiden, “and in what a state of decay!”
But apart from a couple of pieces of furniture, the Pollits lived in a poverty that to her was actually incredible. They lacked everything. She was shown the bathroom, and found herself in a shanty with wooden walls and a roughly cemented floor. One end of this was filled by a cement tub about five feet long by three deep; but the cement had a surface as rough as a coconut cake; Miss Aiden thought of submitting her soft, sleek, spoiled flesh to its gray rasping ridges and, thinking it impossible, looked about for a rubber sheet—they must use something to cover the cement when bathing. Everything was to match; homemade, rough and ready; instead of toilet paper, they used cut-up newspaper; there was no bathmat but a sodden crisscross of slats. “I had no idea,” thought Miss Aiden, “that there was a place as primitive in the whole world”; and she began to wonder how they lived at all.
Greatly disappointed in her visit, she followed the excitable Louie out through the home-cemented back porch and into the orchard wilderness, which was a delightful playground and now in full leaf and dotted with little fruit. There was a stew cooking, and Miss Aiden saw the dark thin woman poking over the stove: she nodded gaily at them as they went past. Miss Aiden could not keep back the question, “Does your mother like cooking?”
“Oh, no! she has too much to do,” Louie said with unreflective candor.
Miss Aiden pursued, “You have a lot of brothers and sisters.”
“Only one sister,” said Louie: “that little fair girl is Mr. Lomasne’s little girl. Yes, mother says she has too many,” and she laughed.
“But she wanted them,” pursued the teacher sentimentally.
“No, she didn’t: the doctor said she should only have two—but they came”; Louie laughed.
The teacher looked down sharply, but saw only a fat, fair, laughing face: it’s queer to know everything and know nothing at one and the same time, thought Miss Aiden.
Dinner was something Miss Aiden was never to forget; for she had passed what she considered a very rebellious, but what was really a very respectable life within the confines of the agreeably slick. Like Sam (though she was an honors student in English and Higher English), she saw truth, beauty, and progress in terms of the twenty-five-cent story magazines; in fact, she was but a handsome, gracious, and amiable young edition of Auntie Jo. First, from this house of misrule, came the sound of a beautiful gong, like the temple gongs in the movies; then the children came tearing up from all parts of the grassy waste, while two other children (which until this moment she had supposed Pollits) started to run down the avenue and away from Spa House. Mr. Pollit, who had neither washed his hands nor put on his coat, then started to whistle, and as he whistled shouts came from the scampering children, “Yes, Dad; yes, Taddy; yes, Dad, yippo”: and so forth. Immediately, Louie, with a pleased confused face, came to fetch her in to the table, and they came into a long, boarded room, with dirty window curtains, a battered dresser, homemade wall shelves, and a long, oak table with fat Victorian legs, on which hung a dirty, worn tablecloth covered with the old silver and stained knives. A thin glass vase, dirty napkins in rings, and one water glass with a Greek-key pattern engraved graced this cloth. On the table besides were cruets, a slab of butter, and a loaf of bread. Miss Aiden found her place to be in front of the one water glass. Mr. Pollit then gave a whistle, and the team sat down, excepting Louie and the wife, who were juggling dishes in the kitchen, which was across the dark passage. Presently, without prelude, Louie began to hurry backwards and forwards with dishes of Irish stew, Miss Aiden getting the first, Mr. Pollit the second, and then in order of age.
“May I have a glass of water?” asked Miss Aiden sweetly, seeing none; but Louie at once seized the milk jug and poured out some for her. No one else got any. After they were all served, Louie and her mother came to sit down. As soon as Mrs. Pollit lifted her knife and fork, all followed suit and fell to in silence. Table talk was apparently considered improper in this family during the first course. As soon as Sam Pollit had finished, however, he began asking Miss Aiden if she liked fishing and if she knew that the Chesapeake was the finest little fishing hole in the world, he himself having fished there from the age of six; and that if she wanted to fish, the boys would take her out any day and not charge her fifteen dollars, the way the party boats did—or at least he didn’t know. “Perhaps when Tommy grows up, he’ll make us a party boat and then we’ll all be rich—for three months a year.” Laughter bubbled round the table at this happy prospect.
“Tommo’s only six though,” said Ernie, “and you have to have a boat, and the tackle costs about two hundred dollars, and there’s the oil—”
“Oh, we’ll run ours on marlin oil,” declared Sam, “and ketch it for nothing! And won’t the big boys swim after us when they smell their breruther’s oily tang?”
Louie was very indignant at this stupid conversation, which she thought beneath Miss Aiden’s level. Ernie did not raise even the ghost of a smile. Mrs. Pollit remained silent throughout, except to say to Tommy, “Tip your plate outwards, Tommy-boy!” and to Evie, under her breath, “Use both hands to wipe your mouth!”
Presently, during an awkward lull, while Louie was carrying out the dishes two at a time, Mr. Pollit said in a queer tone, distantly paternal, with a condescending expression, to his wife, “Have we salad, Henrietta?” The wife, flushing angrily, merely lowered her head over her plate and replied nothing. Miss Aiden flashed a look of astonishment from one to the other, then turned to Little-Sam, who sat at her side, “And are you the boatbuilder?” Sam, meanwhile, bit his lip; and in a moment repeated politely, “Have we a salad to come, Henrietta?” At this Henny coolly got up from her seat, smiling to Miss Aiden with an “Excuse me, please, I am the cook too,” drew Evie after her, and, when she had stepped into the corridor, said gently to Evie, “Tell your father that the snails ate the lettuce, and I had no money to buy trimmings!” Evie turned back and demurely repeated this message to her father. The children gazed from their father to Miss Aiden, to see what she would make of this. The dessert was brought in by the mother and served by her: it was bread pudding, with some preserved berries from last year. Henny admitted that these were her preserves and carried off the trying situation (Miss Aiden could not help thinking) with aplomb. Yet, she was wondering, “Why did they invite me?” After dessert, Louie went to make the coffee, after asking her mother in a low tone, and her father in a high tone, and Miss Aiden in a languishing tone, what each would take. Mr. Pollit would have prolonged the meal, for he became spirited and garrulous after the coffee, but Mrs. Pollit, fixing her black eyes on his face with a meaningful glare of hate, and slightly rising, forced back the words on his lips, while Louie and Evie rose too slightly and so induced Miss Aiden to get up. The teacher offered to help with the dishes, seeing no help, but Sam said at once, “No, the girls will do it while I show you the lordly acres, Miss Aiden,” and with a sort of rustic galloping gallantry, like a sheep dog, he got her out into the yard, and, taking her elbow, began pointing out things to her and talking “nineteen to the dozen,” as Henny declared.
“A fat chance you’ll have to talk to your beautiful Miss Aiden,” she cried. Louie was about to burst into tears. The most beautiful moment of her life had just passed: it had been when she walked with Miss Aiden up and down the aisles of the orchard. But all the time she was rushed, she could not collect her senses, for she knew the time was short: even when
Miss Aiden stopped and, looking at her earnestly, begged her to work during the summer, for she would certainly be famous (“be famous,” was what she said, though surely it was a hallucination), Louie was fretting that the time was so short; soon Miss Aiden would go away. Louie thus had no time to think about the house, nor how it looked; she was quite satisfied with it—they were poor, but it was spacious, and her expectations were infinite. There was a book called Great Expectations, which she had never read: she supposed, though, that it referred to something like her own great expectations, which were that at a certain moment, like a giant Fourth of July rocket, she would rise and obscure all other constellations with hers. She was likewise so used to hearing of her mother’s rich family, and of her father’s superiority in intellect and feelings to the rest of mankind, that she believed they all occupied an enviable position in the community. They had been brought up in Washington, and if the nation only knew of Sam’s capacities, it would clamor for him—what more could be needed by a family? Enviously, she watched Sam, who grabbed everything, to his greater glory, grabbing Miss Aiden too: there he talked, endlessly, by the half hour. What could he be saying to her? Soon he would win her away entirely from Louie: Miss Aiden would think, What a clever, brilliant father Louie has—why Louie is not a patch on him! Louie was racked with disappointment. When she went out to empty the leavings into the garbage can, she went the long way round to overhear their words. Sam was saying, “And my little Looloo—I called her ‘Ducky’ then—at a very early age showed a most mulish disposition: that’s why I’m speaking to you, because she thinks so highly of you—” Looloo! Ducky! Oh, a hell of torment! Louie went back to the kitchen and burst into tears.
“What the dickens is the matter now?” asked Henny, without malice.
“He’s talking to her—he’s telling her everything—”
Henny shrugged her shoulders and went on cleaning the knives. “She’s not a bad woman, and if she’s not an absolute fool, she’ll see the way I’m treated.”
Louie flashed up with a smile of gratitude, “Oh, Mother, do you like her?”
“I like her, yes.”
“Oh, Mother!”
“Don’t faint,” said Henny irritably, suppressing a smile. At last, Louie was able to get away, but Sam kept on talking cheerfully until the last moment, when he walked her to the gate. Louie was allowed to walk up to the station with Miss Aiden, a walk of about a mile. When they were on the Eastport Bridge, they heard a faint shout, and looking back, saw the Pollit clan lined up once more in front of the Wishing Tree, waving the flag at them.
“Your father is very amusing,” said Miss Aiden, patronizingly. For the first time, Louie found the shadow of a ghost of a fault in Miss Aiden’s manner.
3 Delayed mail.
Having delivered himself of his heartfelt sentiments once again, Sam was gay and went merrily footling round the place, looking for fresh worlds to conquer. “Tah yez wot I do,” he declared, “I’ll make Looloo-the-Zulu a new bookcase, now she’s learned to read; feelin’ fine! Old Aido’s a nice old girl! I like Old Aido and if she’d ask me twice, I’d marry her.” The children were nodding buttercups of giggles. Some of them departed to other occupations (to pore over the presents they had given Sam that day, for example), but the twins stayed with Sam, who now went into Louie’s bedroom, to take down the old bookcase, which was about ten feet high, and measured the wall space for a new one. He began to dust off the top and there found all sorts of things—a forgotten pin box, a pill box with tacks in it, two knitting needles, and an out-of-date diary on which was written in capitals: THE AIDEN CYCLE.
“Sirprise after sirprise,” announced Sam shaking his head; “well, blow me down ef it ain’t poickry. Say, kids, Looloo’s a dangblueblasted better poet then whut I am. Now, what do you know about that, Little-Sam? Say, quick, Sawbones, go get the kids: quick! When Looloo gits back frum a-walkin’ out with her beloved, she’ll find us all a-joying of her poickry. Quick, quick.”
The call went out, and the children straggled back to the house. It was a lovely evening, and the grateful and fascinated children from the party were drifting back to the gate and the fences, poking their heads in and holding wistful conversations with the happy savages of Spa House.
“Oh, Jiminy Jee,” sighed Ernie: “if we aren’t always at his beck and call.”
“You get along,” cried Henny, hearing this, “or he’ll be whistling and calling, and I can’t stand any more today.”
She rounded them up. Soon Louie’s room was full of them, while Sam, standing on his small stepladder with the book in his hand, declaimed,
All nature is in you, its monsters less;
As nature monsters are, so less are you
Than nature: nature lacks what you have more
Than natural: unnatural, you bless
Our lives too natural—yet world I’d rue
Without this extra-nature I adore.
“Whut in the name of dingbingbusted commen sense,” asked Sam, “is this? Hit’s a crostword puzzle. Blow me darn, here’s another!
Pearlshell, pearl, and madrepore,
Purple wampum, rich fish dyes,
Of gold and silver a great store,
In megaron, in mattamore;
But, Rosalind, thou art much more.
Oh, Rosalind; oh, kiss me, Rosalind!”
At this moment, Tommy, who had watched in the falling night for Louie’s return, bounded in shouting, “She’s coming back now, she’s on the bridge.”
“Ooh,” said Evie, “Daddy, she will be very angry with you.”
“You ought to stop, Pad,” said Ernie.
“She’s in love with Miss Aiden, oh, Rosalind,” chanted Sam, squirming. The children imitated him. “She worships Miss Aiden,” said Little-Sam shrilly. “Oh, I love you, Miss Aiden.”
“Shh!” said Sam leaning over mysteriously, as he was turning over a leaf, “Tommo! Go to the gate and tell me when Looloo is coming: tell Looloo I’m reading her poickry. See what she says! Eh?” There were varying tones of assent and dissent, but Tommy galloped off. Louie was coming home slowly, breathing in the soft-smelling, bayside, thickening air; bats flew, mosquitoes sang. She was glad no one was with her, for after all she had nothing to say to anyone, not even to Miss Aiden, since ravishment cannot be spoken.
“Louie, Louie!” It was Tommy calling her from the gate.
“What do you want?”
“Louie, Dad’s reading all your poems!
Tommy saw the pale form pelting towards him, “Where?” she called, seizing him by the shoulder. He felt a tremor of fear and anticipation;
“In your room—he wanted to make—” but Tommy was alone, while a large dark shape rounded the corner of the drive. He ducked under the white railing to cut across the lawn, when he saw at his feet two oblong shapes, two letters left lying on the lawn. He picked them up and ran in. The light shone through the two windows of Louie’s room, and he could see the mess of children in there, with Sam’s laughing face and the book held out as he read; the children lounged round, uninterested. As he passed the open window Sam was saying, “Here’s one (where’s Looloo-dirl?)—
There is a sick one within these walls,
She is mad I know by the songs she sings—
Louie burst into the room. “Here’s Louie, here’s Louie,” they sang out.
“Give to me,” she shouted, “you give it to me!”
“No! Leave me read it,” he wheedled. “You ain’t got nuffin you don’t want your Poor-Sam for to see, hev you?
I must confess I love you,
I love you in my fashion,
’Tis not from lack of passion
I would not say I love—
“Give it to me,” shrieked the girl: “I’ll make you.” The children made way for her and she came up the first step after her father, grabbing for the book, which, of course, he waved away from her. He looked handsome, bewitching, never so handsome as when teasing, “ ‘I love you.’ �
��
She got off the step and stood underneath him, looking up and saying, “Give it to me, give it to me.”
The Indian starling, flashing in the shade
Is like your eye, all flecked with gold and blue
“Here,” he said, throwing it to her, so that it fell on the floor, “take it away; and don’t write such sickening tommyrot. Write if you want to, but not such silly nauseating stuff. I didn’t think you’d be so silly as to fall for calf love for a teacher, I thought you had more in you.
“Looloo,” he said turning away to the children, “is trying to practice poickry without a poick’s license, and I think she ought to be fined or go to jail. Now, dear old Georgie the Fisherman says to me the other day, he says, with rather a shamefaced look, kids, because of his ignorance, becaze even fisherboys is rayther ashamed of their iggerance, not like Tommy here, and quite evidently with a automobile permit in mind—or whatever fat George Pudding-and-Pie drinks with—‘Mr. Pollick,’ sezee, ‘wy do they give poicks licences to say things wrong?’ In conversation that followed, I saw quite clearly that he thought poicks got licences like fishermen, maybe by the traffic department, so these dopey nuts who make schooldays so hard for poor fat boys could get their stuff printed with a licence. So I think we’ll get Looloo a licence, maybe a dog licence.”
Tommy, who had been listening with his mouth open, now pushed forward waving two letters in his hand, “Mothering says two letters for you, Pad: I found them in the wet grass.”
“What,” cried Sam, taking them: “that dopey Popeye Banks again! I’ll write to the post office about having a nitwit for a letter carrier: I don’t know why boys like him aren’t sent to a lethal chamber, or just nipped in the bud at birth. The communication between men ought to be the most sacred of all things: and if we weren’t so busy building warships,” declared Sam, in a temper, “we would have money for better mail services; and if we weren’t despised by people because we live in a mudhole. I’ll make a complaint about this and get him removed.”
The Man Who Loved Children Page 49