The Man Who Loved Children (69 page)

After a silence, during which he breathed quietly, he heard her begin to mutter again, “ ‘Enmity calls for death and I am longing for life’ ” (Nijinsky’s letter to Diaghilev), but at this Sam merely smiled again, thinking with joy, yes, she loves love and hates hate even as I do. Nothing could be better for a lead-in to his heart-to-heart talk with her that he planned in this dawn (it could be her watch with the fish, for example, and they could let Little-Sam sleep).

“There is love in the city, lust in the country,” said Louie to herself; “the storm suffocates the land, the creek ravishes the beach, the hilltop violates the sky—”

At this, Sam came into the room and said sternly, “I hear a lot of darn nonsense, but I don’t hear much sense: what sort of an author are you quoting, Looloo-girl?”

Louie frowned menacingly, “Nobody: I made it up.”

“A nice sort of thing to make up,” said Sam. “You are too much alone: I hear so much stupidity, I can’t understand it. Get up and get dressed, I want to talk to you.”

“It isn’t morning,” said Louie, burning red and angry.

“It is your watch at the marlin boiling, and anyhow, I am up and I see I have to say many things to you.”

Louie curled her lip, “You don’t know anything.”

“Get dressed, you dogged wretch.”

“Well, you go out.”

Sam withdrew, pulling the door violently after him and shouting through it, “Now hurry, hurry: Samulam want to talk,” being pleasant again so that she would be friendly when she came downstairs. The fire was now low, and Sam said, “Let us watch the dawn rise, we will just walk about over to the cove and back, and peek in at the fire all the time,” and after they had looked in at the stew on which the oil was now in some spots two inches thick, they began their walk down the heavy-headed avenue, dark with rain. Banks of loose cloud covered the sky, floating higher and away. The east seemed distant, a glum blue, but the waves and trees seemed still of one element.

“Looloo,” said Sam solemnly, “I perhaps should have spoken to you as a woman before. We should like relations between men and women to be ideal, but, as you are apparently coming to realize, they are not. Your own bringing-up, whatever its apparent defects, has helped you to realize that we must not blame either side: it is all a question of adjustment and patience. I hope you will be happy, Looloo. The great question is self-control, Looloo, and to fix the mind on the many many problems of science, both solved and unsolved. In the arcanum of the unsolved of nature is much for busy brains to do: I hope you will be of the number of the searchers and finders. What do you want to do, Looloo?” She was silent. “You can tell your father.”

“I don’t know.”

“Now, for women there is a greater freedom. I am hoping that you will choose to remain with me and work with me for the greater freedom of all men; but you must understand in your own life that liberty isn’t libertinism, not that that is yet a problem for you, though men and women alike today, as they go out in the world, face temptations. Now, you must know without my telling you, Looloo-girl, that temptation in sex, which comes to some early and some late and to some happy ones not at all, can betray us into being not ourselves. I heard you mention something which, I might say, had a venereal implication—symbols, examples, words, which—of the meaning of which you are doubtless not quite cognizant as yet—whatever you feel like, Looloo, and I leave that all to you. Remember that self-control is our only safeguard and that the abuses of
the
instinct lead to—either waste of energy and emotion and the finer feelings, or indiscriminate recourse to members of the other sex, upon which follows venereal disease, a thing too dreadful to contemplate or to talk about and which I would not have to speak about if you had a decent mother—but you have not: this duty is left in the hands of a father. I feel as embarrassed about it as you. Promise me, Looloo (this is a strange thing to be talking about in such a wild, pure dawn, between night and day, between sea and sky), that if you are thinking of a man or boy, you will not think seriously of him without marriage; or if you must, if you must ever go with man or boy, Looloo—I leave it to you, it seems inadvisable to me, understanding these things so much better than you—that you will first demand a medical certificate from him.”

Louie laughed, “I will never do that.”

“Never promise?”

“Never do it. It’s so silly.”

“You know not whereof you speak,” said Sam huskily.

“I love, I love, I only know about love,” cried Louie madly, bursting into tears. “What has that to do with it? You keep out of it.”

“Hush, Looloo: I was speaking to Ernie too tonight, and I told him when he begins to think about girls he must tell me.”

Louie said bitterly, “There is one thing I am quite sure of: he never will. Not one of the children will ever confide in you.”

He looked at her, shocked, “Looloo! But I confide in you! I tell you all I can, suited to your understanding of life and human naturel My dear girl, naturally, you look upon me as a father, someone above ordinary temptations, but that is not so: I have been tempted. The worst thing about temptation is,” he smiled coaxingly at her, “Looloo, is that you want to yield to it. You even like it!” He smiled to himself and looked at the ground. “There is a wonderful young woman, Looloo, who seems to me to be—is—my perfect mate: it would be for me one of those marriages made in heaven. I cannot think of it because of your mother. Naturally. But she too feels this way about me, and she would sacrifice everything for me, if it were possible. I said to her, ‘I know you, my girl, I know you would give up everything for me: all I would ask out of life now—for my pride has fallen—is to have you be my constant companion, to be by my side, in my utmost need to go by my side. I know’ (I told her only yesterday, Looloo) ‘that life means little to you either, without me. I know you are prepared to live in a little flat waiting for me when I can come, that you will live in the back street of life, without children, but the two of us facing the future wide-eyed and full of its promise, that is even better than children, perhaps—and besides I have children’—and she said, ‘Yes,’ Looloo,” his voice broke: “she said, ‘Yes,’ she would do so.

“But I cannot ask her to do it! It is dishonorable in the eyes of the world. And the little old world is not always wrong. Good name is something too. Without good name, Looloo, what good could I do? Most people are simple good folk: they believe in the plain, honest ways of living, the old-fashioned ways that my mother believed in. No, we cannot contravene the ways of the honest, humble poor, the ways of innocence and the integrity of family life. The home, the hearth, the family and fatherhood, the only ideals the old Romans ever had that were any good, little as they lived up to them.”

Louie burst out crying.

Sam said tenderly, “Always blubbering, Looloo, what a big mass of blubber yet!”

“You must let me leave you,” said Louie, “you must give me some freedom.”

He became stern, “Looloo, you will never leave me, you must never leave me: you and I must cleave together through the storms to come. The house is cold and full of bitter hate. I told my darling girl that, too. I want you, Looloo, as a bulwark between me and her hate, a bulwark of living love. I cannot live in such an atmosphere of hate. It is not for me. And I know it is hard on you, too, Looloo—now don’t tell me that again; but if you could know what you meant to me when I first saw you come from your mother’s womb. Women have meant so much in my life, believing in me (as they believe in men, for they are born to do that, Looloo, and that’s why I don’t want you cynical), listening to me, loving me too, I verily believe, though I was always too modest and bashful perhaps, to rightly see love when it came, and always helping me and wanting to love Nature, as I loved it. Women are the blessing of men. Oh, Looloo, if I could have had the right wife, what a great man I would have been! Certainly a good one, better than I am now. And our children, happy in the love of father and mother, playing round my feet, growing from innocent, lusty, laughing babyhood to strong forthright boyhood and to wide-eyed, idealistic youth, and to vigorous loving manhood! But I am satisfied with what I have: do not think I am criticizing your brothers and dear Little-Womey. They may not be all exactly as I would have wished, but they are dear to me: they will go the right path and follow the light; they will come through, Looloo. I want you to know I am optimistic for you all.”

He waited for a response, then added, “What have you to say to me about your own little affairs, Looloo?”

“I want to leave home.”

“After all I have said to you?”

“I must leave home. You must give me some money to go to Harpers Ferry.”

“I must, I must! I won’t! You’re still in tutelage, thank God, and I hope still to make you more amenable! I won’t have this cussed obstinacy. I’ll break that miserable dogged spirit of yours: it will get you nowhere. What man will look at you with your piggish, sulky, thick face always gloomy? Do you think any man is going after a face like that? Thank God, now women can get jobs anyhow, if they have sufficient education; when I was a boy some looks were necessary: you had to charm men. You can get your living, but I want to see you happy. You have got to cheer up; you have got to smile. Don’t you notice when we walk down the street together that the women and men too look after me with a smile; and that they look at you surprised at your glum, stupid, sullen air?”

“I notice,” said Louie. “You must let me go. I will have to go, anyhow.”

“What can a girl do by herself?”

“Clare and I are going on a walking trip this summer by ourselves.”

“With boys, I suppose.”

“Oh, no!—we are going to walk.”

“What fools, what stupid puppies!” He flung himself off to the distance of two yards in advance. “Stupid little spoiled conceited puppies. What can two girls do on the road? Don’t you know that you are helpless? What will you do at night? Where will you sleep? In the fields?”

“At Auntie Jo’s and at Harpers Ferry and at Hazel’s in Charlestown, West Virginia,” said Louie. “We thought it all out, and Clare has friends too, and there are the Pryors, Mother’s relatives in Frederick. It is not stupid at all.”

“Where will you get the money? To live, to eat?”

“Why—” she faltered, “I suppose, they will give us something to eat.”

He said savagely, “If you want to know, your aunt at Harpers Ferry has just refused to take you for the summer; she cannot afford it any more—no sooner does the Collyer money fade than all my resources go: the servility of men is humiliating. That’s something you don’t happen to know about. You are going to stay here, and be a good daughter to me, and look after your brothers and sister; and I am going to send Henny away, if you are so obstinate as to force me to tell you. Your stepmother has deceived me often—” he ceased speaking and held his hands before his face, squeezing them together, “with another, with another man. I never thought such a thing would come into my family life. I have been the best of husbands, never deceived her, whatever the temptations, and they are many. And now I know what has been going on for years. Why, in the very first years—my own very best friend—a man called Mark Colefax, hard as it is for me to pronounce his name—after him I never thought I could believe in friendship again—your stepmother went out with him: I trust, she said it was no more. But all men lie in those situations through a mistaken idea of gallantry, and I never found out the truth. Now, however, thanks, I regret to say, to a horrible anonymous letter, filthy but true, I know that your mother was going out with a man when I was away in the Pacific, and I hardly know—Looloo, Looloo!—” he began to sob, and Looloo stood still, frightened, “Looloo!—I hardly know whether Chappy, my little big-eyed Megalops, is mine or not. A human life—and perhaps it were better he had never been born. Outside the pale, perhaps; perhaps it will come to light. What will I do then?”

“What will Mother do?”

“She has made her bed: let her lie on it. I cannot worry about a woman who never worried for a moment about my name. Yet,” he said, with regret, “I have to, Looloo: we have had children together—that is the infernal tie, the bond of carnality. I don’t know what to do.”

After a silence, during which they turned towards the fateful Spa House, he said, in a low voice, “You see, you see, Looloo? You see why you must stay by me forever? I have had too many burdens.”

She was silent until they reached the house. The dawn broke clear, with light yellow wisps of cloud scattered over a wide, wind-swept sky. Sam took her silence as submission and, brushing away his sorrows, went cheerfully back to poke the fire under the copper.

At breakfast time, the children, tired and excited, beat time on tin plates and chanted, while porridge was being brought in, “Am marlin, is marlin, was marlin, be marlin, marlin along of me!”

Sam shouted, “Who for the washus, kids! Who wants to take up the stand?” “No one,” said Little-Sam: “we wanna rest, Big Chief.” Sam told them that “arter brekker” (after breakfast) he was going to photograph the marlin’s head, and then put it on to boil in the yard, for “serpently bad weather was a-blowin’ up.” He told them that during the night he had had a good idea—he would take down the chimneys before the gale came, because he reckoned that gale was going to be a humdinger. He was afraid of falling from roofs, with his vertigo (which fear the twins and Ernie shared), and yet he loved the altitude and great sweep of landscape. He told them that as soon as he got into the Conservation Department he was going to agitate for a plane for his own use in observation, and that they would soon see their own beloved Dad circling over Spa House, and that they must arrange bags of coffee (in a thermos) and bananas and choc, so that he could come over with a big hook and pick them up while he was on his job. He could also get letters that way and telephone messages, and Mothering could send up her fifty-foot bills.

Sam had now rigged up the developing room in one corner of the boys’ bedroom and after breakfast, while the girls fixed up the house, with many yawns and flagging, stumbling steps, the boys rushed between the washhouse, the photographic room, and the caldron in the yard, which had just been put on a tripod, over a bricked-in fire, all put up for the occasion. Presently they had a picture of the twins holding the marlin’s head and Tommy holding his nose, in a group, Sam all the time expatiating on light and sun’s angle, lenses and how he could get a better photograph with an old kodak than most people could with a Zeiss-Tessar, papers, chemicals. “Scenes that are brightest, te-te-te-te-TE!” sang Sam; “All chime in! Ain’t home nice? Te-te-te-te-te! Da-da-da-da! Fathead, you’re tipping the bottle of KCN,” he continued to Little-Sam, “Da-da-da. KCN kills customers neatly, kindly, cunningly noxious; kids, cyanide nullifies! One bit of that, my lads, in a glass of water and you ain’t, maybe twa draps for Little-Sam because he’s mean. What is KCN, my boyos?”