The Man Who Loved Children (32 page)

“Will you put my letter in with yours, Moth?” asked Evie.

“I’m afraid to write to your father: he criticizes my spelling,” sneered Henny. “And it appears I know nothing about geography. Hang his stuck-up conceit.”

Louisa restlessly rose again from her writing to go and look through the grimy curtains of her mother’s bedroom at the every-night scene which was wild and brilliant now—the trees of the heath round the Naval Observatory, the lamplight falling over the wired, lichened fence of the old reservoir, the mysterious, long, dim house that she yearned for, the strange house opposite, and below, the vapor-blue city of Washington, pale, dim-lamped, under multitudinous stars, like a winter city of Africa, she thought, on this night at this hour. After a little while, she came back and began to drag her pen over the sheet of paper again.

“Darn it!” cried Henny again. “For the love of Mike, tell Hazel to give me some tea and an aspirin, my eyes are burning out my skull.”

The dishes stopped rattling in the kitchen. They heard Hazel hang the big washbowl on its high nail; and then Evie came running in, holding the silver tight in two hands. She thrust it into the drawers of the old scratched sideboard and came bursting into the semicircle round the fire, saying,

“Oo, gee whiz, is it cold; jiminy, I’m freezing. Moth, when are we going to get the coal?”

“Your father thinks I can heat it over here from the lurid tales he puts in his letters,” Henny chattered. “I’ll get the coal, don’t worry. Oh, that’s enough for tonight.”

“I wish you’d let me do it,” said Louie; “let me try.”

“You’re not strong enough, my girl: you need my tough old arms to do this,” Henny exclaimed. “Wait till you’ve washed and scrubbed for a man for ten or twelve years. Until that time, I won’t let you turn into a drudge. You do the darn birds, that’s all you’re asked to do. Ernie, boy, go and get Mother’s tea, I hear it being poured out.”

Henny edged in close to the fire and placed her bony hands to warm them on the hot, silky heads of the twins. They turned towards her, inwards, two similar red and yellow apples, and Saul began to sing falsetto,

I would not marry a butcher, I’ll tell you the reason why;

He’d chop me up for mincemeat and put me in a pie.

“Let Mother sing it,” they clamored.

“Let Mother alone,” said Henny.

Hazel sat in the kitchen in the cold, wrapped in a black, crocheted shawl brooding. During the last month or two she and Henny had quarreled much, and it was always over money. Henny ignored her maid’s sulking in the kitchen and, to show her indifference, consented to sing, very low for them, “I wouldn’t marry a butcher,” a song she had dug up for the Düsseldorf scandal.

“Have you finished your father’s letter, Louie?”

“Nearly.”

“It’s about time; you’ve been all night at it, and you haven’t touched your homework. I don’t know why you leave it to the last moment. You know he looks for it and you know if your father doesn’t get it, he blames me. You don’t want me forever to be the scapegoat, do you? And if you don’t get through this rotten homework they pile on you, at your age, he’ll blame me too. I’ll write to the principal.”

Louie was silent, in dread; but passed over the two-page letter she had written. Henny read it with distaste, jerked it back to her, and said, “Get the letters together and let’s post them tonight; then I’ll have no more of this trash round the dining room.”

Hazel, looking bitter and neglected, stalked in from the kitchen, untying her dark blue apron, emphatically, from her waist. In a sergeant’s voice, she demanded, “Has Louie written to her father?”

“Yes,” Louie answered dryly.

“Have the others written?”

“Yes, they’ve written. Thank God, there’s another mail off. I simply dread mailing days; I can never get the kids to write to their father.”

Ernest, great favorite of Hazel, lifted his soft, wide-eyed face and shot at her, “All the ‘varmints’ start out with, ‘Dear Dad, I hope you are well, I am well, Mother is well,’ and then they get stuck.” “Evie put ‘Dead Dad,’ ” Saul informed them.

Tattletale tit, your tongue will be split,

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And all the little puppy dogs will get a little bit,

Hazel recited. She stroked down Evie’s hair, “There, my kittycat is Hazel’s baby; never mind what they say: it’s all right.”

“That child can’t spell a word, and her father blames it on me,” said Henny irritably.

The little dark girl mourned amongst them, looking abashed and melancholy from one to the other.

The letters were piled on the table, each addressed in the awkward writing of the author. Each envelope had been long and proudly fingered, and tears and smuts were strewn over them.

Just when they had all forgotten Ernie’s cleverness, Evie bleated, “Ernie hasn’t got any homework tonight: his class didn’t have homework; I heard Miss Morrin say.”

“I have, too,” Ernie declared.

Louie looked at his book for a minute and decided, “It’s made-up homework.”

“I can do it,” Ernie said angrily.

“You’re screwing up your eyes there and you don’t have to do it?” Henny demanded, much put out. “I’ve been letting you sit there half an hour longer because I thought you had to do it: you told me that, you wretched little fibber.”

“It’s some problems the teacher told us to do.”

“Told you you could do,” corrected Louie. Ernie stuck out his lower lip rebelliously.

“Ernie’s nuts,” said Little-Sam, “he’s always studyin’; he’s a fairy.”

“What did you say?” cried Henny. Little-Sam grinned foolishly while the other boys (except Ernie) looked pleased. After a devious discussion which revealed that Little-Sam used the word for anyone but a football hero, Henny suddenly cried,

“Now pack up, kids, and go to bed. I’ve never seen such pests,” while Ernie’s voice was suddenly heard, contemptuous,

“Is there a law sayin’ I can’t do homework?”

Tommy whimpered, “Oo, my itti-gutties [itchy-scratchies]” and started to scratch at the large pink welts appearing on his legs.

“Don’t scratch, and get away from the fire,” Hazel commanded. Tommy jerked up his head, said, “I go bed,” and scrambled off his stool. Then he burst into tears.

It was hard to get away from the hot fire and plunge into the icy air that waited for them just outside the hearth and that got colder and colder as they went to their rooms upstairs. The central heating had been off for some days, since the coal and some remains of wood blocks had given out. Little-Sam stopped at the door, whined,

“Willya tell’s a story, Louie?”

“No, I’ve got my homework.”

“Oh, go on, Louie,” both the twins whined disagreeably, and Evie got up expectantly, “I’ll get into Saul’s bed.”

Hazel’s voice came over the stairhead, “Children!”

“Louie!”

“Oh, all right.”

They scampered upstairs like iron nuts and bolts falling downstairs. Suddenly the noise halted. They started to come down again, “Mothering, Mothering!”

“I wish they wouldn’t call me that idiotic name,” Henny said, over the white wool she had begun to knit.

“Mothering, you will come up and say good night, Ernie says,” Evie’s figure reappeared in the doorway.

“No, I will not. Go upstairs before I chase you.”

“It’s so co-old,” said Little-Sam, reappearing. “It’s so mizz [miserable].” He shuddered.

“You go upstairs before I fan your pants,” said Henny. They whinnied with fun and scampered for the stairs again. Ernie came and stood before his mother in his winter bunnyhug pyjamas, round, rosy, eager, to begin their private ritual, made up accidentally, in Ernie’s second year of life, by them both,

Good night, Mother.

Good night, my son.

Will I see you in the morning?

You will if you’ve got any luck.

Well, I’ve got heaps of luck and loads of luck, so will I?

You will, my son.

Good night, Mother.

Do you love me, Son?

Yes, Mother.

How much do you love me?

Lots and lots of love.

But how much is lots?

More than all the money in all the world in all the years and all there is.

That’s good. Well, good night now.

Good night, Mother.

It was Ernie who first insisted on repeating this, each night before going to sleep, to his mother, and on having her solemn assurance that she would be there when he woke up; and even sometimes he had insisted, “But you will be there when I wake up?” Nor had he gone to bed one night without saying it with her except when, as she said, she took a busman’s holiday and went for two weeks to the maternity ward.

Ernie dashed a kiss off on his mother’s cheek and sprinted for the stairs, crowing, “I wonder what story Looloo’s going to tell us? I hope a story about Malaya.”

There was a dive and scramble for the beds. When they had all snuggled in, sheets and blankets up to their ears, whimpering and giggling at the heat and cold, Louie, sitting in an armchair, in her winter overcoat, between the two doors, after waiting for silence and hearing all the hisses and gigglings die down, said solemnly,

“I’ll tell you a story about Daddy, Sam-the-Bold. When he was just outside of Kuala Tokang, in Kelantan, he met a Korinchi-man.”

There was a speechless silence.

“Although it was midafternoon, they noticed when they came near to the village on struts, in a clearing in the jungle”

“Who noticed?” asked Ernie.

“Daddy and his men. They noticed that all the doors and windows were shut. They have no windows, only shutters in wood. The only thing they could see was a small kid tied in a rough cage.”

“A kid in a cage?”

“Goat kid,” explained Ernie dreamily, “like Whitey’s.”

“The cage was made of rough stripped saplings with its door held open by a long sapling. The kid was tied to a notched stick in the inside of the cage. ‘Tiger expected,’ said Wan Hoe.”

“Who’s Hoe?” asked Evie.

“Daddy’s secretary, dumfie,” said Little-Sam, while the others said “shh!”

“The Malays began to shin up trees,” said Louie. “Daddy and Wan Hoe went and knocked at one of the cabins, and Wan Hoe and one of the Malays talked to them. ‘They will not answer,’ said the Malay. ‘Ask them what it is all about, friend,’ said Daddy.”

“Why did he say ‘friend’?” asked Evie. Solemn as a church, Louie replied,

“Because Daddy wishes all men white and black to be his friends. And he tells people when he says that that it is because he is American and he came from the great white city of brotherhood, Washington.”

“And he says he is with the American Smithsonian Field Expedition,” said Ernie.

“Yes. Eventually, however, there was a babble from inside the hut which burst out like a packet of crackers and then stopped. The Malay, although he was a Mohammedan and had been to Mecca, a traveled man, and was called Awang Haji, seemed afraid and kept looking everywhere over his shoulders, into the trees and undergrowth, and he kept looking at his companions, too, who were scattered around. ‘Korinchi-man about here,’ Wan Hoe explained to Daddy.” Louie waited. The children waited. Then Little-Sam said slowly,

“What is a Korinchi-man?”

“The Korinchi-men are a wandering breed of Malays who are supposed to be weretigers, that is, they are men by day and turn into tigers at night.”

“Oo-hoo-hoo-oo!” they shuddered.

“When night falls, they come and knock at a door. People open the door and ask them what they want. Then the Korinchi-man says, ‘Please let me stay for the night, because tigers are prowling round. Who is so cruel as to shut out a naked man without a gun?’ So the Korinchi-man asks and gains admittance to the household and when they are asleep he turns into a tiger and eats them all.”

“Wheese!” Little-Sam exclaimed.

“But is it true? Do they turn into tigers?”

“Of course not,” said Louie. “That is just what they think.”

“Who think?”

“The other natives who live in the cabins.”

“But haven’t the Korinchi-men got cabins?”

“No. They are too poor.”

“Why can’t they chop down trees,” Tommy wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” said Louie, “they are just a kind of gypsy; but people hate them because they have no cabins.”

“If—” said Ernie, but Louie promptly jumped into the breach, “If the natives think he is a Korinchi-man they won’t let him in, but make him stay out in the jungle all night. When morning comes, very often they find a tiger’s tracks and no man at all; and no man comes back the next night.”

They waited. Louie waited.

“Or,” said Louie, “they see by the marks on the ground that the tiger has dragged a body off into the jungle.”

Evie and Little-Sam shivered and hid their faces for a moment.

“So they think it is the best thing to kill Korinchi-men if they can, if they catch one alone in the daylight,” said Louie, “at least some think that. Because it happened amongst Daddy’s Malays there was a Korinchi-man, no one would let them in, and they were obliged to pitch tents in the open. The others, I tell you, did not like sleeping with the Korinchi, but Daddy said they would have a fire all night, and watches kept.”

“Go on,” said Little-Sam, “go on!”

Louie waited cunningly.

“Go on,” said Ernie to oblige her. They had all heard the story several times before and yet their interest was more passionate now than at first.

“In the night Sam-the-Bold heard a giant harsh breathing just outside the tent, near his bed. He heard soft movements, and later the kid screamed. In the morning, though, the kid had gone and the bad Malay, the Korinchi-man, too. The trap had fallen, but this was one of those cunning tigers that eat up natives for years and are too smart to be caught. They were going back to their launch anyhow and they could not wait to look for Tong—”

“—the bad Malay,” said Saul.

“—and no one wanted them because people thought they had brought along a weretiger with them. So they had to get back without Tong who had gone back to the jungle, perhaps to his death, for if he had the mark of the Korinchi-man he was wanted nowhere and had to go straight to the tiger’s claws.”