The Man Who Loved Children (58 page)

When he had gone, “Now,” said Sam, “tell Glossy-eyes to come and hump himself, too. I want to see that lead in the wash-house before lunch.”

“Ernie’s got lead, under his bed,” sang Little-Sam, and danced. “And Ernie’s got old iron; there’s the ferry siren.”

“It don’t Mattapeake,” said Sam.

Ernie rose slowly above the front rise (which Sam called the Butte) with a martyred expression.

“Lead out, Ermineus,” shouted Sam.

Ernie smiled with constraint, “I’m collecting it.”

“Collect it in the washus.”

“I’m collecting it.”

“It’s gotta go to the washus, Ermineus,” wheedled Sam; “lotsa room there; no one will run off with your coupla tonsa lead. Two centsa ton, oh, boy what fun, but when de war come, it will go into a gun—” He stopped and said gravely, “That’s true: no Ermy, we cain’t colleck lead. Ain’t it enough to have the planes dropping bombs on ducks? We gotta get rid of it.”

Ernie will knock them dead,

With his lead,

said Little-Sam.

“I’ll get rid of it when I can sell it,” said Ernie. “You kids leave me alone: you all suck round Pad.”

“Now don’t say that, Ermy,” Sam reproached him: “they love their father. Do you think the Gemini like a mountain of lead in their room?”

“You leave me alone,” said Ernie.

“Now, Ermineus, now, now!”

“Well, you leave me alone,” remarked Ernie sulkily.

Sam looked handsome, spiritual, when he reproved Ernie, “I don’t want you to lose your temper, Erno; you’re all right, you’re a good sort, but sometimes you get that Collyer expression and then I want to kick your pants.”

Ernie tried not to look like a Collyer. When lunch was finished, though, Sam felt intrigued by the lead, and he said nicely, to Ernie, patting his shoulder, “Well, kids, a little yob before readin’ and writin’ and ’rithmetic; we’ll jes heft that lead out to the tool house.” The twins gamboled ahead to their room, which was at the back, looking over the orchard, and when they got in, they began to shriek and tug. “There it is, there it is!” Little-Sam lugged forth a huge, misshapen gray lump. Ernie went for him, gave him a whack, and said, “You leave that lead alone or I’ll murderya.” Sam was bending over looking at the lead, and Ernie cried angrily, “You leave that lead alone, I collected it,” and he gave Sam a push.

“What?” cried Sam, astonished. He pulled out the lead with assiduity after bestowing a bear cuff on Ernie. Ernie kicked him in the pants. Sam was so surprised as to be almost pleased. “Imagine doing that to your poor little Dad! Ermineus! Kids, Ermy akshooly went and kicked his poor little dad.” Ernie grinned shamefacedly, “You leave my lead alone, and I won’t.”

“You won’t anyhow,” said Sam, giving him a good whack. Ernie turned angry. Sam had managed to drag all the heavy stuff out now and, bothered by the exertion, he said angrily to his eldest son, “Ernest, if you’re going to sell it, why the juice don’t you sell it?”

The children tattled, “And he went past on Thursday, and Ermy wouldn’t.”

“He’s keeping it: he can’t bear to part with it,” the twins said.

“He’s in love with it,” said Evie, giggling and putting her fat brown hand over her mouth.

“He loves it,” said Sam, smiling to himself.

“Oh, I love you, lead,” said Saul falsetto. “Oh, I’m going to marry you, lead.”

Ernie grinned faintly. Sam smiled, and commanded, “Now, ebblebody ep cawwy yout diss yer leadulead.” (Everybody help carry out this lead.) The children buckled down and with much puffing and groaning heaved it all out, along the side porch across the lawn (which would some day be a tennis lawn), to the tool house which stood over near the dead-end street. Ernie stood by, not lifting a finger, disobeying Sam, grim until the last piece was stowed away. Sam surveyed him and then, with sundry comical kicks, told the children to start their homework. Ernie stood, self-contained, at the end of the porch. Sam went down the orchard, watching him from moment to moment, interested to see what he would do, ready to rush in and give a final nick, like a fisherman playing a game fish and ready for the plunge and tussle. As soon as they had dropped the last piece, grunting, and had made themselves scarce for fear of further jobs, Ernie rushed forward and began to drag and tug it all the way back. Sam let him take back two pieces before he fell upon him.

“Take that back!”

“It’s my lead!” Ernie doggedly dragged out another lump.

“Do what you’re told!” Sam dragged it from him and sent it loudly clopping across the yard towards the washhouse door. Ernie began to cry, at first, miserably and then bellowing, but obstinate, and rushed at his father like a bull calf,

“It’s mine, don’t touch it: it’s mine, I collected it; it’s mine!” He banged Sam with his two fists blindly. Sam caught him roughly by the arm and swung him round to look in his face. Ernie kept his face lowered and tried to punch Sam again.

Sam said sternly, giving him a mild kick, “Sam-the-Bold said, ‘The washhouse’!”

“It’s mine.”

“Then you’ve got to sell it. What are you keeping it for?”

The family was again timidly collecting, in various stages of beach attire, at the far edge of the scene, peering through the trellis from the western porch. “What are you keeping it for?”

Saul shouted helpfully, “It’s for your birthday, Pad!” Sam dropped Ernie’s arm at once and said gently, “Is it for Sam-the-Bold that you’re doing this?”

“I’m saving it!”

“Is it for me, Ermineus?”

“I’m saving it!”

Sam was beginning to smile to himself again, “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I’m saving it!”

Sam, suddenly tiring of the struggle, began to stretch his long legs across the grass. At the porch, Little-Sam whispered wonderingly, “Pad, he’s taking it back again.” Sam nodded, “Sure nuf! Sure’s you’re alive! Ermy’s got some will power! Yessuh! And is it for me, really?”

“Yes,” they all confirmed eagerly.

Sam was delighted. He wheeled the twins round cheerfully and began to march them. “Now then,” he said, “To market, to market to buy a fat pig, home again, home again, jiggity-jig!”

When Louie started to bring out the lunch, she paused with a dish in her hand, and asked, smiling sillily, “Dad, can I ask Miss Aiden to lunch soon?”

“Old Aido,” shouted Sam, in appreciation: “the bewchus dame shall grace our board. What say next Choosday, my burf-day? Ask Old Aido to dinner next Choosday evo [evening].” Louie blushed and almost crumpled to the floor with pleasure. The children jeered a little, but they were anxious to see the famous and beloved beauty themselves. Henny, who was in the kitchen, grumbled a great deal, but gave in easily, only saying, “She must take potluck: I’m not making anything special for any hoity-toity schoolteacher.”

“She’s isn’t hoity-toity, Mother: she’s a wonderful woman, she’s so kind and understanding, she’s so nice, she’s a wonderful woman.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said Henny; “well, when she comes here she’ll understand a few things too, if she’s so wonderful.” Louie never doubted for a moment that Henny would exert herself to make a good dinner for Miss Aiden, especially as it was Sam’s birthday too; but Ernie worried like a major-domo, running five times on Sunday and twice daily on Monday and Tuesday to ask, “Mother, what will we give Miss Aiden? Mother, are we going to have roast meat? Mother, what are we going to have for dessert? Mother, will there be a clean napkin for Miss Aiden? Mother, will you have some of my snapdragons on the table or some of Saul’s wallflowers? Mother, the oilcloth on each doorstep is worn right out, you can’t see the pattern.”

At each excursion, Henny would grumble and mutter things like, “Let her see! Who is she, the wonderful woman? What do I care? Don’t drive me crazy! Oh, you kids will have me in the bathouse! Stop bothering! I don’t care if we eat off the floor!” Though Louie was too blind to see it (after ringing up Miss Aiden in Baltimore and getting her consent, being in a delirium of expectant love), Henny made no special preparations even for Sam’s birthday. “Let his kids amuse him,” said she, to Louie who, however, took no more notice of this ominous remark than of anything else. Henny secretly believed that Miss Aiden could not be such a bad creature “if she took an interest in such a slummicker as Louisa,” and she made up her mind to let Miss Aiden see how the little girl really lived and how the grand Pollits really lived and how she, “the mother of so many children,” really lived.

Sam’s birthday began in a lovely morning, and everyone got up early. There was dew on everything, the cedar-waxwings were eating the mulberries, and there was the sound of a bombardment from the corrugated iron roof of the new shed, where the wasteful little wretches, in their hundreds, threw down scarcely tasted berries. There was haze over everything, dew on the anthills, and the determined, brilliant wasps were at work, scratching wood fiber off the old wooden bench with a light rasping sound, zooming dizzily and plastering with a do-or-die air. It was so steamy-soft that the birds were relatively silent, except the bobbing, stripping cedar-waxwings and the black “devils of the sky,” far off with a soft cah-cah. The sky was gray with humidity, the sun could be looked at with the naked eye, a pan full of liquid, like a dish of snapdragon, and against this sky the leaves were sharp and austere as in a steel engraving. Henny, running about early to get the tea “so that the kids could prance around their father,” declared that she felt nervous as a cat. Louie looked at the silky sulky reflections of sepia and dun in the creek and thought they were like the shades of a woman’s unsunned breasts; there was a still, breeding, inward-looking moist atmosphere, so that it seemed beans would begin to push out of the earth suddenly; it was like a bride, heavy with child, dull and potent. Louie could hardly lift her heavy stumps, even when Henny called sharply, but she did arrive in the kitchen in time, and there Henny was kind to her, asked her if the children had all a present for their father, and what she had got for him; and furtively, and with a shamed face, Henny gave Louie a little parcel in tissue paper for him; it was a pair of hand-knitted socks (which he preferred and which were easier to reheel and retoe). “And your present?” whispered Henny. Louisa said, “I wrote a play.” Henny looked at her curiously, wondering at her cheapness, but at length said, “Well, I suppose your father will like it, at any rate,” and sent her off upstairs with the tea, where a great jamboree was in progress.

“Is this a present for Sambo-the-Great?” inquired Sam, lifting the tissue paper parcel off the tray.

“From Mother,” said Louie.

Sam squinted comically at them all, opened it, and, after inspecting the knitting, said, “Well, I don’t say no, boys and girls: socks is socks; but I love hinges and nayrers [nails] en doyleys, even ef the stitches which is there are a bit spidery, en doyleys Little-Womey, enwhaleboats en bugeyes what is on the way, en I will go fishin for eisters en whales disarvo [this afternoon], en I like the shavin’ brush what Charles-Franklin guv me—” and he looked at Louie.

“And Louie wrote you a play,” said Ernie, dancing with excitement. Louie marked time shamefacedly, “It’s a tragedy, and it’s only in one scene.”

“Hit’s doubtless a tragedy,” remarked Sam, “en once seen, is seen pretty often: bit whar is hit?”

“In my room,” Louie said unwillingly, “but the varmints” (she waved her hand towards Ernie and Evie, who for once dropped their squabble and glanced with meek conceit at each other), “the varmints know it; they are going to recite it.”

“We learned it,” burst out Evie, and looked all round the room, red with excitement. “And you can’t understand it.” Sam stared at them all, grinning and pleased as punch at the great secret, which he had known was simmering for the past week.

“We don’t know what it means,” said Ernie.

“Ernie is the father, and Evie is the little girl,” Saul told them; “it is about a father and a little girl.”

They were all mystified and excited. Sam said, “What’s all this? Now, Little-Sam, you bring in the prog, en after prog we see the play.”

The two actors scooped up the oatmeal with the greatest speed, but Sam insisted on everyone polishing his plate with his tongue, before the play. Then, when the coffee was put round, Louie came and put a piece of paper in front of Sam and herself recited the prologue, which was nothing but a quotation from Longfellow (
The Masque of Pandora
):

Every guilty deed

Holds in itself the seed

Of retribution and undying pain.

Sam, with open mouth, meanwhile had been looking from her to the paper and from the paper to her, for on the top of the paper he read, in painful capitals:
TRAGOS: HERPES ROM. JOST 1.
when Louie had finished reciting, he asked in a most puzzled voice, “what is this, Louie?” Louie gravely pointed to the paper, “this means—
TRAGEDY: THE SNAKE-MAN. ACT 1.
There is only one act,” she explained: “I thought we could do it too, this evening when Miss Aiden comes.”

The two actors, meanwhile, were swollen with pride and agitation.

“Why isn’t it in English?” asked Sam angrily. Louie was at a loss to explain this, so she scolded, “Don’t put the children off. You follow on the paper.” The others meanwhile left their places to crane at the sheet. “There are two actors,” said Louie, “The man—
Rom—
whose name is Anteios; and the daughter—
Fill—
whose name is Megara. Evie is Megara, and Ernie is the
Rom,
Anteios.”

“Why can’t it be in English?” said Sam feebly. Louie smiled vacantly, like a little child, “I don’t know—I thought—anyhow, go on, Anteios! Ia deven …”

The boy and Evie then proceeded to recite.

ANTEIOS:
Ia deven fecen sigur de ib. A men ocs ib esse crimened de innomen tach. Sid ia lass ib solen por solno or ib grantach.

MEGARA:
Men grantach es solentum.
(“
Men juc aun
,” said Louie)
Men juc aun.
(“
Ben es bizar den ibid asoc solno ia pathen crimenid
,” said Louie, and Evie repeated it with several promptings.)