The Man Who Loved Children (44 page)

“What’s your name?” asked Evie, playing “mothers” with the twins.

“Ippa-pa-tixit!” declared Saul. “Mr. Ippa-pa-tixit!”

“Mrs. Ippa-pa-tixit,” corrected Evie. “You’re Sam’s mother. What’s your name, Ernie?”

“Oh, shut up,” said Ernie, measuring himself against pencil marks on the veranda post.

“You’re a lady, too, no,” said Evie, ignoring the obstreperous Ernie, her usual antagonist and claiming Little-Sam. “You’re his new baby. Mother has a new baby, and the lady in there has a new baby. Her name’s Mrs. Arkus.

“Who’s Mrs. Arkus?”

“Mrs. Ahss,” said Ernie. The boys laughed, Evie frowned.

“The lady in there with the white dress, the nurse,” explained Evie. “I have a new baby; and Mother’s name is Mrs.—I don’t know.”

“Ahss,” said Ernie.

“Mrs. Curling Tongs,” Saul suggested.

“Mrs. Garbage,” said Ernie.

“Mrs. Curling Tongs: and Aunt Bonnie is Mrs.—what, Saul?”

“Mrs. Garbage,” said Little-Sam.

“Mrs. Cabbage!” said Evie.

“Mrs. Cabbage is making a cup of tea for Mrs. Curling Tongs; and she will go up and see her new baby. And Mrs. Curling Tongs says, ‘How is your new little baby, Mrs. Cabbage?’ ”

They went on playing quietly and waiting for Sam (who had gone back to the bedroom to seek Tommy) and for their turns to see Mother. Bonnie meanwhile, with a rueful expression, was leaning out the front window, and presently she could not help interrupting them, “Why is my name Mrs. Cabbage, why not Mrs. Garlic or Mrs. Horse Manure?” They did not hear her, so intent were they, visiting each other and inquiring after the health of their respective new babies. They did not hear her complaining to Louie that, instead of being Mrs. Grand Piano or Mrs. Stair Carpet, they called her Garbage, “Greta Garbage, Toni Toilet,” said she, laughing sadly, “because they always see me out there with the garbage can and the wet mop; association in children’s naive innocent minds, you see!”

“Oh, no, it isn’t that,” protested Louie, “Garbage is just a funny word: they associate you with singing and dancing and all those costumes you have in your trunk!”

“Do you think so?” Bonnie was tempted to believe. “Mrs. Strip Tease?”

Suddenly there was Sam racing madly up the slope and shouting,

“Gas, gas, I smell gas; Looloo, Bonniferous, GAS! Hazel! Ernie tell those dad-blamed women, GAS. All down the slope.”

A breeze had arisen and trailed faintly through the house like a sick woman in a long dressing gown, and with it the odor of a blown-out jet, under the oatmeal. The sky was faintly greenish. The children had left their game and were wandering about over the buffalo-grass lawn, under the impression that, with Daddy’s return and the new baby’s advent, there would be no school. Breakfast would be in the back grass so that the house would be kept quiet. Meantime, the twins had gone up to see mother, but had been refused at the bedroom door; Mother was too tired to see anyone now; and back they came again, hand in hand, disconsolate because the new baby was invisible.

“Ma mither ca’d it God’s pockit breeze,” said Sam, for the thousandth time in their lives, in his imitation of a Scottish accent. “Ma graunmither useta caw me, Wee Saumy, coom ben the hoose; en she tawd me, ‘Your mither, ma bonnie dochter Mary, hes muckle childer, but she hes ae ween ah luv en that’s ma wee Saumy!’ ”

Thus Sam, in a sickly voice, reclining on the grass under the back porch, and he went on to other reminiscences of his babyhood, all in his idiom that he had from his grandmother, as he assured them, his grandmother being a stout and bonny woman afraid of no man, and his mother a stout, braw woman, though a bit bony, and very good and religious, but “no unco guid, but wi’ a human hert.” This morning reminded Sam of the dawn of life when, with the house full of monstrous brothers and sisters, he, the Benjamin, with an ailing mother, skipped about, peered, pondered on the mysteries of Nature, thinking the long, long thoughts of youth and discovering, by his lonesome, Nature’s secrets; and he told how then and there, when his eyes were scarcely unsealed from babyhood’s blissful ignorance, he fell in love with Nature and made up his mind never to leave her. So he hoped would they all, so little Charles-Franklin (that was to be) when he could toddle.

“It is never too soon to maunder and ponder,” said Sam whimsically, “and there are few adults who give children, thoughtful children, that is, credit for the ideas they have. What is more promising than a wondering child? Preserve your wonder, kids! Lavoisier was a child once; Newton was once a child in arms; Joseph Henry once was no older than Charles-Franklin; Thomas A. Edison, that great man, once lay in his cradle and puked.”

A few white clouds appeared in the sky, “It might be the childhood of a new Agassiz,” said Sam.

“A gas, or a Gassy?” asked Ernie.

“Going to have a light westerly,” said Sam.

The children began to skip, exhilarated by the new light and new air. Inside was a clacking of pot lids and cups. A flock of starlings flew overhead.

“Orchard oriole,” shouted Ernie from the breast of the orchard slope, “Samulum, Sam-the-Bold!”

“Oh,” cried Sam, with a great sigh, “boys, boys, I’m home: oh, what that means to me. You know how I love the great world; but how glad I am to be home with ma ain folk, no one will ever know.”

He threw himself full length on the ground and grasped handfuls of new spring soft grass. “To Singapura to see many fat pigs; home again, home again, jiggity-jigs.”

Suddenly he turned over sniffing the air loudly, “Gas, gas,” he exploded, “Ernest-Paine, gas! Sawsam, run tell Looloo, gas!”

Ernest started to run towards the kitchen shouting, “Looloo, gas, Daddy says Agassiz.” The smell of gas streamed out stronger. Sam started up and himself came to the kitchen window trying to crane in, “Gas, gas in the kitchen, tell Bonnie, Gas. Kids, tell them shemailes, gas.” The four streamed after him, helter-skelter, laughing, shouting, “Gas, gas!” Suddenly Louisa put her head out of the kitchen window “Tea’s ready.”

“Gas,” said Sam. “Hitting up the bills, eh? Friend of the gas company, eh? Here, Incorporated Friends and Allies of the Gas Co.”

Louisa laughed, “It was too low under the oatmeal; it kept blowing out.”

“Waste not, want not,” said Sam. “Tea’s ready, kids; Little-Womey (Big-Womey now), Mornin’ teal Syce, syce, tea!” He squirmed about looking for a nonexistent syce; then imitated,

“Yes, tuan!” He called again to his syce, “Syce,
teh pagi-pagi!
[early morning tea]. “Ya, tuan!” He grinned at the children, who were just getting used to having their big comrade and shock brigader back with them, and he chattered suddenly at them, “
Hantar-kau barang barang saya ka-Raffles Hotel
[Send my things to the Raffles Hotel].” But as they could not understand him, they looked bored.

“Whenever I went into a little village, I rattled off a few phrases to get the boys and girls friendly,” explained Sam. “No master, no white man bothers with their lingo, so they loved me for trying. When I saw a little puddle, I would say, ‘Are there any crocodiles in there?’ Then I would say, ‘Panas-nya sangat terek’ [The heat is terrible]. All the kids ran after me. Wait till I go through my bags. It will take Sam-the-Bold nine months to tell you all that happened to him; no, I can’t tell you the tithe; but no matter, here you all are with open eyes, mouths, and ears and I can talk to you, thank God (who isn’t), thank goodness and thank goo.”

Then he began himself to hand out the tea to them, counting in Malay,
satu, dua, tiga, ampat
… and taught them to count the same.

“Now I am home again with my Malay little friends and home again in Tohoga,” he said with a broad smile. Everything had to have its Malay name; and already he was beginning to slop over, drown them with his new knowledge, bubbling, gurgling as he poured into them as quickly as possible all he had learned. When the tea was finished, he got them to their feet, marshaled them in order of age, to walk round the garden and survey the animals with him, saying,

“Ermy-Paine [Ernie], Mouse-deer [Evie], Gemini-Seltsam [the twins], Bullhead [Tommy], all follow Tuan Pollit to the hanni-miles, left-right, left-right! Hayfoot, strawfoot!”

Then when he had them swaying in different directions, he serpentined them across the backyard patch towards the animal cages, singing, “In de mornin’, in de foren’n, by de brightlight, you can hear dose darkies singing, in de foren’n.” Then he gave their several whistles, making them answer; and he murmured in a weeping tone, “I used to whistle your whistles, kids, many mornings way back on the backwaters of Malaya, but you never answered; didn’t you hear your poor Sam whistling to you across the waste of waters?”

He grinned and gave a jig, “Now I got to get a new whistle, one for Charles-Franklin (maybe),” and after a moment’s thought, he began flutings until suddenly he heard the orchard oriole at the bottom of the slope warbling on its own; when he cried, “That’s for me; the bird sends me its song and that will be Charles-Franklin’s whistle,” and he went through the whole range of whistles, adding last six sweet warbling notes which he now called “Charles-Franklin’s whistle.”

As they stood in front of the snake cage, he said anxiously, “Kids, last night I was dozing on Bonniferous’s bed when Bonniferous was helping Mother, and I had my snake dream. Great snakes alive were crawling around da kitch [the kitchen] and out of one of my boxes jumped two beautiful young spotted cats, ocelots,
Felis pardalis,
which relieved me considduble, because they began to fight with the naiks [snakes], and then an ocelot with a snake curled round him and hissing at me tried to break through the netted back door here at me and I pushed with all my strength against them, crying out, but they gradually opened it, when I saw the door opened right on the city of Washington! There it was, with all its marbles like bones gleaming under me, and I hung on the edge of a precipice—it was the snake, or the bone yard!”

He laughed tiredly, “So, kidalonks, Fate is giving Poor-Sam yet another nest of enemies, for snakes mean enemies for Pollit. Fate loves me, kids, or she wouldn’t give me so many hurdles to jump. Fate wants to put fight into me. Only I wish she wasn’t quite such a worrying, devouring mother, sometimes.”

Lowering his voice and looking towards the house, he said, “Kids, don’t tell Mother, any time, or Bonniferous, but on the boat coming over I was so worried by silly Willets that at night I saw dragons round my bed,” and he looked anxiously at the mansards of the house as if he expected to see a Chinese dragon flying through the robin’s-egg blue sky at him any minute.

Then, mildly, he told them that poor Old David was dead at this minute, lying, waiting for his funeral, but it meant nothing, no more than when poor Vulpecula, the Australian opossum, died; and soon Old David would be in the fermenting, jolly ground. Daffy-downdillies [daffodils] would spring from the soil, the fresh winds would blow through the daffodils that were Old David and spread all that was mortal of Old David through the airs: “And there wasn’t nuffin that was immortal in Old David,” said Sam kindly, “only the love you have for him in your little beating hearts, for that’s the only immortality we can have, loves; just as I have a little immortality already way over there in Singapore, in the heart of Law Chew Teng, my wonderful Chinese friend, the curio dealer—he gave me a queer present all right, a Chinese coffin, all carved—it’s considered a treasure; and it’s coming on after me; and then I have immortality in the breast of Mohammed bin Hassan, a Malay friend and his little boy, Ali, and in the breast of Lai Wan Hoe and others; and poor little Sam has achieved this little speck of immortality because he loves his fellow man. You do the same, kids. Now you see until the day you die, Old David is living in your hearts and memories; and perhaps longer, for you will tell your children, when you have them, about dear Old David.”

Then he got them to sing a little song for dear Old David, the little ditty that their grandfather would always sing to them,
Always Merry and Bright!
Thus old David Collyer’s painful and, for them, disastrous death passed over in a minute, like the death of a gnat or bee, less than the miserable, straggle-feathered death of some poor little bird in the long grasses of the White Field.

Sam worked hard, but he could not conceal from them that the distant and authoritarian Sam who had come home was not quite the lighthearted Sam that had gone away; he was harsher, and a European, he had the germ power, in his brain. At breakfast they had the nurse, Miss Putnam, with them; she was a bony-faced, bright-eyed woman, with long, irregular brows that jigged questioningly. She asked, with a sort of grace, “Mr. Pollit, will you pour me some more coffee, please?” too unctuous perhaps, for Sam, rising and pushing the electric coffeepot in her direction, turned his back, and said rudely, “Pour for yourself, Nurse Putnam!” Everyone felt most uneasy. But not Sam. He went out into the hall and grumbled to Bonnie,

“I don’t want any maternity nurse vamping me; let her try her charms on Dr. Rock. If I’d had my way, Louie would have helped Pet this time, as I intended. How better can a woman-child get her apprenticeship than helping an older woman?”

“Samuel,” cried Bonnie, “you are joking.”

“In Malaya, full of little bouncing healthy brown babies, the adolescent girls help their mothers in the villages: I don’t want a soft, effete generation of women. If it hadn’t been for Pet’s darnfool belief in doctors and all the other civilized superstition, I shouldn’t have had a doctor at all. Pet herself knows better than any doctor when it is coming; and her girls are little women. It’s all tomfoolery, this idea of a medicine man with a degree. I detest all degrees. It’s antidemocratic: a way of separating the monastic, university type from everyday life. I want my girls to be like those sweet brown women of the East. Their girls are beauties, better than mine because they are women.”

Bonnie, carrying in another serving of toast, after having studied him for a minute, said briefly, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and sprang into the long dining room with a high color. She bent officiously over the flustered nurse, saying, “My brother has all his own ideas; don’t take any notice, Nurse.”