The Man Who Loved Children

by Christina Stead

  But Evie, up in the house, grunted under the tables and round the chairs, removing old dust and musing in a delirium of contentment: Louie had just told her that Auntie Bonnie had a little baby and that they were both coming to stay. Evie was already arranging in her mind that the baby should sleep in her room, so that she could mind it.

  2 Gold mare’s tail.

  Sam did not come home till the sky was green and a cloud hung above Bancroft Hall and the lost horizon. He was alone. Bonnie had been neglected all day except for little visits of consolation from the neighbor from below and was ill, angry, and feverish when her brother got there. Where was the baby? The neighbor had told her that it was being looked after by a nurse, but she wanted to see it. Was it a boy or a girl? It was a boy with faint white hair. She must feed it. No, not for forty-eight hours. She whined, went to sleep, and woke up again, worrying about the baby, and said she must get up, and asked where the nurse was. The neighbor said, and believed, that Jo had gone to make arrangements for her to go to a nursing home with the baby. But Bonnie knew about Jo what no one else knew, having seen her in her agonized fury during the previous twenty-four hours. She would have stolen out if she could have moved, because she felt so weak that she was sure she was going to die. Very little had been done in the room: the flies buzzed, and it was sultry, thunderstorm weather. Bonnie cried and in her new helplessness and anxiety thought over the secrets of the past few months. She would never in her life admit her humiliations: she had been and would again be a gay, buzzing girl with the disease of optimism. When she woke once she found her loved brother Sam in her room and wept bitterly in his arms, saying how weak she felt and that she thought she was going to die.

  Jo wanted to move Bonnie away at once, to avoid explanations, but Sam explained to her that Bonnie could not be moved (“Don’t tell me—please tell me when you came from the maternity ward!—ridiculous!—I understand as well as you!—nonsense!” ejaculated Jo meanwhile); and he suggested that it would be better to keep Bonnie close and quiet till she could move, say a week or ten days, and then let her go out at nightfall. Bonnie could then go to him at Spa House, and he would come to fetch her.

  Jo became very tormented at the idea that she would have to live in the same two-room apartment with Bonnie for a whole week or more, wrung her hands, and said she could not face the school—she must get sick leave, she could not face her tenants with rent day nearly due, and what would she do about the decorator who was coming to paint her walls Nile green? But Sam became stern and forbade her to move Bonnie; and as soon as she was so ordered the domineering, unruly Jo became meek at once, if not acquiescent. Sam told her to get food and clothing for Bonnie, saying bitterly that after such a few days the burden would fall on him, Jo need not fret. He was very thoughtful coming home, but the thickset woods and the broad, fish-silver Severn made his heart lighter. He had not been to see “the man, the card-trick horror,” whom Jo asserted was the cause of Bonnie’s downfall, because Bonnie had said so often and positively that the man was a bachelor, an actor now on tour (withholding his name), that Sam dared not interfere at present. He was grave and deeply ashamed, offended with Fate, not with Bonnie; he muttered his favorite saying over and over as the train racketed along,

  Good name—in man—and woman—good my Lord,

  Is—the Immediate—Jewel—of their—souls!

  Who steals—my purse, steals trash—’tis something—nothing!

  Good name—in man—and woman—good my Lord,

  Steals trash—’tis something, nothing—good my Lord—

  ’Tis something, nothing, ’tis something, nothing—good name—

  He stopped at the boat basin as always and chatted with the captain of the Mary III and then walked to the bridge. Birds were flying in funnels and purse seines in the steep air, dragging, trawling the air for insects, getting ready to settle in trees and already in tree shapes. In the air was the strange cloud, bright gold, in the shape of an ostrich feather or the tail of a sculptured horse. It was late; the dark was closing globularly round, and little was left but the green top and the strangely lighted west. Many people stopped to look at the ominous cloud, which, after remaining for some time with its pure, glittering, fimbriate forms, began to dissolve; the light retired behind it where it burned still. Gradually the texture of the rest of the sky became apparent; the sky was covered with short mares’ tails of cloud which were now lengthening, anastomosing, knitting. Sam heard a chattering on the other side and in the dusk saw a small group of children, with “Coffin” Lomasne and old Bill the fisherman, standing on his own beachlet, discussing the marlin which lay in the water.

  “Gee Whittaker!” said Sam, “she will pooh if I don’t hurry,” and he widened his stride.

  The children had seen him though and came hallooing towards him. “Pad, you’re so late; Pad, it’s too late to cook the spikefish; Dad, can we build the fire now under the copper?” while Ernie came towards him chanting, while he pointed to the flimsy sky, “Mares’ tails and mackerel scales make heavy ships carry light sails,” the old saw.

  As soon as dinner was finished, they went down with their own railway storm lantern (which was named “Old Man Hat”) and with lamps borrowed from the boatmen, and with the ax saw and skinning knives, to dissect the fish. Soon Little-Sam came leaping down the dark earthy cliff to say the fire was hot and the water singing to the boil. They were going to boil the fish through the night. There were basins alongside, on boards on top of the washtubs, into which the oil was to be ladled as it floated to the top; and all the washed bottles, with some gallon jars, stood along the wall of the washhouse. Sam had made up his mind to show them an item of his economy and to provide for as many household oils as he could from this single fish. Henny sent a message out to ask how on earth she was to do the washing on Monday, but Sam sent back a message to say that the boys would get inside and scrub it out with sand and washing soda. They then cut the fish up fairly small into pieces six to nine inches in length and threw them into the copper in which was a little water (it should have been done in a double boiler, said Sam, but “necessity was the mother of invention”). They kept the head separate to boil in a caldron in the yard the next day, because Sam wanted to see how much oil was in the head alone, out of mere curiosity.

  In about twenty minutes, at about nine-forty-five in the evening, a strong smell of fish stew arose, which increased as the boiling went on. They banked the fire, as the fish began to stick, and threw in more water. It was a to-and-fro all the time, with the children simmering and carrying messages to each other and to their father, and Henny coming out to find out what was that horrible smell and was it going on all night. The boiling water was now covered with large oil spots and scum, which they occasionally ladled off into the available enamel hand basins and the kitchen pail; long tubes of steam went off, and the air in the washhouse was palpable. Henny was walking through the house now, wringing her hands on her skirts and saying she would never get the smell out of the house.

  “Hassie’s place smells like fish, and I come home to this: my life has been one blessed fish chowder!”

  Then when she had gone upstairs “away from the stink”—though, heavy as it was, almost leaden in the heavy air, it was rising slowly, and flowing round the house, to reach the second story and the roofs and chimney pots and float sluggishly away to other parts—the fun really began. It was a night of jamboree with Sam, the boys and girls, the fire on the lower part of their faces, taking turns at watching the fire under the boiler and telling long anecdotes, joking, reminiscing, Sam reciting, “Good name in man and woman, good my Lord,” and Louie, “When Moloch in Jewry munched children with fury, ’twas thou Devil dining with pure intent.” Presently the house was ready for the night, and they expostulated with Sam about the smell, one at a time, but ended by settling down with the others and dreamily taking it in.

  “Superbus,” cried Sam, “superbus, it is a good whiff; when you fellers snuff my mortal remains, it
won’t be half what this is!”

  “Stop it!” cried Louie.

  “They is stinx en stinx,” Sam said, beginning to caper on his haunches; “they is good sniffs and bad whiffs; they is snot smells and pot smells; they is green-grown wells and hell’s bells; they is dogs what prowls and cats what howls, and showers what lowers for hours and hours, and they’s dead fish and dirty dish, en dead gulfweed what’s dead indeed, en clams en corpses en barnacles en all of the salt sea’s miracles; what is dead, what is dead en tho hit is dead, it floats en it bloats, en it gloats en—ef you stick a knife in it, whew!”

  And he held his nose, while all around him they held their noses and said, “Phew!”

  “Phew!” he continued, “say, kids, ain’t you en me havin’ a good time? Now, we got to take turns watchin’ this yere fire all the livelong night; we cain’t afford to let it get away from us: we live in a wooden house, though it don’t look wooden. Now, who is game for a fishing expedish?”

  “I think it’s going to rain, Pad,” said Little-Sam, wrinkling his nose; “it sure smells like rain.”

  As if in answer to him came a low growl, perhaps from the northwest, and the air trembled like a curtain.

  “The fish will be there,” said Sam, “but maybe we are too late. So we’ll go to bed, and Little-Womey will take first watch till eight bells; then she will wake Looloo, who will take the dog watch becaze she is dogged, and then we will have two shifts, Little-Sam for two hours and Saul for two hours becaze they cain’t do nothin’ by halves.”

  “When will you watch, Pad?” asked Ernie.

  “Now, I am doing the superintendin’,” said Sam, “and I cain’t watch, it stands to reason de boss cain’t do everything.” He grinned wickedly at them. However, when Henny heard the watches the children were to keep, she sent down an angry message from her room, and presently they drew up a new roster, in which each was to watch two hours, including Sam, to watch and keep the fire, skim the scum, stir the stew, and make a cup of tea for the watch to follow.

  The night was with them. Mutterings ran through the sky, and the land began to moan, and the trees heaved as if the whole earth was a timbered ship trying to make headway on a threatening sea. The thundering increased, coming nearer, and brilliant lightning began, splitting the entire sky, in which balls of fire seemed to bounce in an instant from the close doorstep of heaven to earth; then the sky and earth began to shudder and dissolve into one another like one corrugated sheet along which the lightning spilled. The children ran about pallid and tremulous through all this, long trained to be afraid of none of the effects of nature, and yet surprised at this bizarre electric storm.

  Upstairs, Henny could not sleep and went downstairs to get the baby, which she took back upstairs with her. She got into bed, holding the heavy body of the unconscious child as long as she could, and then placed it in the bed alongside her. Meanwhile, she could see what she was accustomed to see from her bedroom window—the ghastly tilted roofs, a bit of stony street, the clumsy wooden bridge, the colorless lashing water with shells of boats tossing. Somewhere beyond the world, an enormous voice shouted, whips cracked, and sheet-iron clanged through space, while every few minutes the flares of an open hearth, distant and beneath, lighted the entire sky. Sometimes it was as the seven candlesticks seized at the horizon and carried by a rushing wing flickering to the other verge. Surge after surge in spouts and cataracts roared the rain.

  Henny once wrapped her dressing gown round her and rushed down the stairs furiously, to knock at Sam’s door and ask if the children were not even to be allowed to have their night’s sleep on account of the cursed great fish and if they were to be allowed to drown down there in the brimming yard.

  “Go back to bed,” called Sam’s voice from behind the door.

  “If the miserable fish has to be watched, I’ll watch it, much as I hate it, rather than see the poor kids kept up all night for your idiot whims!”

  “Go away,” called Sam, “now you’ve wakened me, and I’ll watch it.”

  Henny went upstairs grumbling and whimpering to herself, but when she saw him come out dressed, she went back to bed. She began to play cards, determined to take the next two-hour watch after Sam, instead of Saul, who had to be waked then according to the roster.

  Darkness poured from the sky with the hissing as of falling ashes, trickles of fire, and sudden explosion. Henny got out her cards and started to play her famous double patience (with two packs of cards). The first layout was all hearts and diamonds, yet impossible to make a move, the second all clubs and spades and again impossible to make a move; the third time, the layout, mixed, looked unpromising, but the game started to come out with the greatest rapidity, and yet by accident not by bad shuffling, and Henny, used to cheating herself, this time was tempted to cheat the other way, blocking the solution. In five minutes the game was out! Henny forgot the storm and the fish in the copper and looked helplessly at the eight stacks of cards before her, each with a king on top. The game that she had played all her life was finished; she had no more to do: she had no game. She was angry and, picking up the cards again, shuffled them carefully and started to lay them out in the same old pattern, but she had only laid down nine cards when she was seized with such a violent nausea, such a feeling of the emptiness and aimlessness of the game—thinking that she might have to go through another fifteen or twenty years before it came out again!—that she gathered them quickly and threw them into her drawer loosely. She got up and looked out at the window and the surging, swelling, yellowed creek.

  When Ernie, who was wakened by the storm, got up to see the change of watch, his mother said, “Tell your father to let Saul sleep: I will go and sort the clothes and do my knitting out there,” and the message was delivered.

  Sam, who merely regarded this as a feeble, shamefaced concession on Henny’s part, an admission that she was interested in the marlin boiling and his planned economy, said mischievously, “All right, tell your mother that she can watch the fish from two to four A.M. if she wants to—but only if she wants to—and Saul can come at four.”

  Ernie said, “No, Tadpole, don’t let her: you know Mother doesn’t like the smell of fish.”

  Sam laughed, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. Never mind, son: what the eye doesn’t see the mouth gapes at; the quickness of the intellect deceives the crooked; watch my patter, and I’ll hear you picking my pocket: Mothering, my dear boy, has a sneaking interest in our little proceedings, and this is her queer, obstinate, mulish, womanish way of showing it—she pretends to sacrifice herself, when she really wants to be one of us!—don’t you see that, Ermy? You must get to know women, Ermy! Women is trouble; women is cussed; you have got to learn to run women, boy, yes, sir. If Mother offers to watch the marlin, let her watch, says I.”

  Ernie, laughing uncertainly backed down. Louie, waked by the commotion and the storm, came walking through the house and out to the washhouse too, and was most indignant when she heard that Henny was to watch, but Sam only laughed joyously, poked her in the ribs, and told her not to interfere, “Poor Old Mother Interference, someone ruined her appearance!”

  Through the wet air, in the intervals of the storm, pockets of marlin fumes blew around them. Louie went storming upstairs, “Mother, I’m awake, I’ll watch the boiling.”

  “You go to bed: you’ll look like the usual boiled owl in the morning!”

  “I’ll watch!”

  “I’ll watch! I can’t stand argument, go to bed. I hope I catch my death of cold!”

  Louie, looking from their window, saw Sam and Ernie walking down to the bluff to look in the risen creek and plodding round the sodden grounds, squelching, laughing, dashing wet sprays in each other’s face.

  “Race you to the washus,” cried Sam.

  “All right,” said Ernie.

  Neither was a good runner, and the boy soon got a stitch in his side, so that Sam got there first.

  �
�Beatcha,” said Sam cheerfully, throwing down the stick he was carrying and darting into the washhouse to lift the lid and look into his stew. “My cooking,” said Sam, “my cooking—worth something! What Sam-the-Bold cooks up ain’t a angry stew like womenfolks. Sam-the-Bold cooks what air useful to man en horse en motorbike: the essential oil!”

  Henny, with sunk angry eyes, got up and brushed past him suddenly. She said to the boy, “Ernie-dear, since your clever father is here, perhaps the stupid people can go and get something to eat: come, and I’ll give you some milk and put you to bed.”

  Sam gave a comical jeering snarl, “Ermy-boy, you c’mere! Boy, you’re on sentry-go: you’re up, you may as well stick along o’ Sam. Go tell your mother to make some corf for all hands.”

  “I’m so sleepy, Pad,” said the boy.

  “You do what the Old Man says,” Sam smiled.

  Henny said outside, to the white night, “I wish he’d stop playing his silly monkey tricks with the children and let them grow up,” and she went into the house to make the fresh coffee. When it was made, she put it steaming on the table with fruit and sandwiches and, going to the door of the porch, called, “Ernie, tell your father his coffee’s on the table.”

  “Is it on the table, is it on the table?” Sam shouted. “Can’t come unless it’s on the table.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Henny said to herself. The boy looked at his father.

  “Get me corf,” said Sam; “then you get a drop of suthin good what slides down quick, and you go to bed. Meanwhile, you unravel them grapevines you got in the line, Ermy: you’ll never make a proper fisherman with the instincts of a fisherman if you let grapevines stay in.”

  The boy took up the wet mess of tangled line and began to pick it over. As Sam continued to give him advice, Ernie sulkily moved across the yard to the kitchen to do his picking.

  Sam felt lonely suddenly in the washhouse, with only the bubbling of the fish stew to keep him company. It was a glorious, rich smell certainly, and Sam counted on getting a gallon of oil at the least, probably nearer two gallons, but what was the purpose of it all? Wasn’t his life empty, always amusing the kids, thinking up projects for them, teaching them to be good men and women when they ran off upon their own bents and a woman was always twisting them, snatching them away from him? I mustn’t think that, thought Sam, shaking himself and beginning to hammer out bent nails that he had saved from old packing cases: waste not, want not, same applies to energy. Mustn’t waste emotion, want it for a great job in the future, maybe: I may be called to a great position later on—never can tell, preparedness is everything: you work for years and the opportunity comes—meanwhile, here I work with my little community, leading it, creating a feeling in Eastport, a civic feeling, speaking to the Parents’ Association about peace and progress, and soon I’ll be helping to watch our waters and foreshores and increasing their fertility. Man is the symbol of fertility, and increase is his job. Yes, mustn’t despair: everything comes to him who waits—waits with preparedness. Overcome all enemies, including spiritual enemies, weariness, disappointment. I carry the torch, I will pass it to one, two, three, of my spawn; in the meantime, I must watch, wait, pray—not pray, no, but learn to lead my fellow man, for the spirit was given to me. Where is Looloo? These are thoughts which she should understand. Poor, lost, worrying Looloo! I bet she’s awake now; because my spirit is awake and between her and me is immediate communication, mental radio. …