The Man Who Loved Children (67 page)

She began to walk up and down the room, not looking at any of them, avoiding their glances, delivering a manifesto, “She isn’t my sister: to come there at the last moment without giving me any warning, after being silent all that time and in that state-why didn’t she die? I thought she was sure to. What am I to do? Everyone must know. She wouldn’t be quiet; I kept trying to stop her. I had to give the woman ten dollars to take the horrible thing away, the baby, early this morning, and she’s coming back on Monday. Don’t you see it’s blackmail? I’m ruined. I won’t have her; I’m finished with her. Sam can do what he likes. She’ll never see my face again. And this morning I had a telegram from Miss Atkinson—she was one of those who knocked at my door yesterday afternoon! What am I to say? I rang her up and told her someone was taken very ill with accidental poisoning, and we had to have the stomach-pump. But will she believe it? I’ve got to get that thing out of my rooms. What will I do, Henny?”

“Is she alive? What do you mean?”

“She’s ill,” said Jo solemnly.

“It would have been better if she’d died,” said Henny.

“Will you come and get her, Henny? Down here no one comes: she could stay here until she can get up. Then she must go away. I’m sorry I have to talk about her.”

Sam looked angry, “I’m going up at once to see the man.”

“What can he do? He’s married, isn’t he? The rotten coward took a young girl, knowing he couldn’t be stuck with her. Don’t be wasting your valuable time.”

“To think of the way I’ve lived and fought for every penny,” said Jo, stopping and standing in front of Henny. “Now I must sell the house. I can’t face the disgrace. I can’t go back while she’s there when I think of what she’s done to me. A sister of mine!—oh, I don’t know how I can bear it! How can this happen to me, when I’ve worked so hard. Miss Atkinson came with two of the teachers—we were going to have a cup of tea and go to the cinema. What can I say to them on Monday? I can’t face it. I must get temporary leave. Oh, it’s dreadful, it might ruin me, a thing like that.”

“What about Bonnie, Jo?” Sam asked gently.

Jo shouted rudely, “Do you think I care about a thing like that, a prostitute trailing around with married men and having babies in the street? Oh, it’s awful. It’s awful, Henny. I don’t know what to do. In our family—I didn’t know such things happened.”

“You big brass-mouthed old-maid cow,” said Henny, “I hope a thousand worse things happen to you to teach you to be a bit human, instead of always prancing about with your head in the air.”

“Henny! I thought that you at least—Henny! Don’t, don’t say that! You don’t understand. You have your father’s money and estate: I had to build up every cent of this with my own hands; don’t you see? It might ruin me. You don’t know what it means to have to be your own father and mother the way I had to, and look out for your old age. You have a husband, little ones for your old age; but who is there for me? I’m darned if I’ll stand such a thing,” cried Jo, suddenly getting angry again. “I should have strangled her with my own hands, yesterday: I had the chance; I was too cursed weak. What difference would it make?”

“You ought to have had a man to make you wash floors and kick you in the belly when you didn’t hurry up for him,” said Henny with all the hate of a dozen years. “I’m as rotten as she is—I’ve had men too—I’ve gone trailing my draggletail in all sorts of low dives—I’ve taken money from a man to keep his children—I’m a cheat and a liar and a dupe and a weak idiot and there’s nothing too low for me, but I’m still ‘mountains high’ above you and your sickly fawning brother who never grew up—I’m better than you who go to church and than him who is too good to go to church, because I’ve done everything. I’ve been dirty and low and done things you’re both too stupid and too cowardly to do, but however low I am, I’m not so filthy crawling in the stench of the gutter, I haven’t got a heart of stone, I don’t sniff, sniff, sniff when I see a streetwalker with a ragged blouse, too good to know what she is: I hate her but I hate myself. I’m sick of the good ones; I’m sick of that stupid staring idiot standing goggling at me who’s going to be as good as you are; nothing’s too good for you, nothing’s too bad for me; I’ll go and walk the streets with that poor miserable brat sister of yours—we’ll both get something to eat and some men to be decent to us, instead of loudmouthed husbands and sisters who want to strangle us—that’s what you said, that’s what you said, you can never go back on that, and in that your whole black cruel cold heart came out of you and you tried to strike her down with it, like a stone as he’d like to strike me down when he gets all he can out of me—and I know you both, I know you all—she’s the only decent one and that’s because she’s like me—no good—good because she’s no good—take your eyes off me, you staring idiot, get out of here, you filthy child—tell your daughter to get out of here—I can’t stand it—” Henny could say no more but began to scream and then fell to the floor, bumping her head hard. Her eyes were closed; she seemed cold as stone.

Louie, with streaming eyes, went slowly to get her a cushion as so often before, while Jo said, “Well, in all my life!”

“Shut up, Jo: the trouble with you is you don’t understand anything and you don’t try to learn,” Sam said, in a voice low and mortified. “Let us go outside and leave her alone. Louie, leave your mother to come to herself. Jo, I can’t go on. You don’t know what I have to put up with, so don’t give me advice. I will go up with you, and you and I will get Bonnie out of your place. I’ll bring her down here. Jo, you must try to be kinder. You are beyond human life.”

“I’ve never done any wrong,” said Jo, stony with pride and passion; “I’ve never done wrong to a single human being: no one can say that.”

“Get your hat, Jo: we’ll go and see Bonnie.”

Henny groaned and stirred slowly. Louie, who had been watching, snuffling and sobbing in the corner of the room, came forward, “Will I help you up, Mother?”

“Yes, take me into the baby’s room.”

But when she got up she withdrew her hand quickly from the hated child’s touch, and, going into the baby’s room, slammed the door. Louie went round outside and peered in the window. Henny was lying on Tommy’s bed, under the picture of the girl with oranges, and large tears were rolling from under her dry, tanned lids.

The boys, who had been playing down on the beach, now rushed up shrieking, “Auntie Jo; can we take your car to the ferry to get the marlin? It’s coming now.” So it happened that, as they couldn’t let the marlin lie corrupting on the street end where the Matapeake ferry comes in, they went and brought home the marlin before Jo and Sam went to see Bonnie. The boys staggered down to the beach with the weighty spikefish. Its great eyes were sunken; it looked exhausted from its battle for life; there was a gaping wound in its deepest part. They attached it by a cord to a stake and immersed it in the creek, to keep it as fresh as possible till Sam came home. The children began to run towards Spa House from all over Eastport, and people started to look at them from the bridge and Shipwright’s Street. The children were proud and happy and would not stir from the beach all the morning. The air was crisp, electric, nervous, but the children only flickered, leaped, and played like fish.

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.

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.