The Man Who Loved Children (8 page)

On Shank’s ponies he could have got home that afternoon in less than an hour, crossing the Key Bridge from Rosslyn, when the naturalists left the new bird sanctuary on Analostan Island. But today Sam was the hero of his Department and of the naturalists because he had got the long-desired appointment with the Anthropological Mission to the Pacific, and not only would he have his present salary plus traveling expenses, but his appointment was a bold step forward on his path of fame.

Sam looked, as he passed, at a ramshackle little house, something like the wretched slum he had once boarded in with his brother at Dundalk, out of Baltimore, and a smile bared his teeth.

“Going to glory,” said Sam: “I’ve come a long way, a long, long way, Brother. Eight thousand a year and expenses—and even Tohoga House, in Georgetown, D.C., lovely suburb of the nation’s capital; and the children of poor Sam Pollit, bricklayer’s son, who left school at twelve, are going to university soon, under the flashing colonnades of America’s greatest city, in the heart of the democratic Athens, much greater than any miserable Athens of the dirt grubbers of antiquity, yes—I feel sober, at rest. The old heart doesn’t flutter: I must be careful not to rest on my laurels now—haste not, rest not! I feel free!” Sam began to wonder at himself; why did he feel free? He had always been free, a free man, a free mind, a freethinker. “By Gemini,” he thought, taking a great breath, “this is how men feel who take advantage of their power.”

Sam looked round him—just ahead was Volta Place, where Dribble Smith, his friend in the Treasury, lived. He chuckled, hearing Dribble practicing his scales inside, to his daughter’s accompaniment. Passing Smith’s hedge, Sam said half aloud,

“What it must be, though, to taste supreme power!”

He thought of his long-dead mother, who came from the good old days when mothers dreamed of their sons’ being President,
Poor woman, good woman: she little thought when she dropped a tear at my being sent to work in the fish market that in the fish market I would meet my fate.
Ahead of him, not far uphill, was his harbor and his fate.

“Another thing,” said Sam to himself, “is that going away now, Madeleine and I will have time to use our heads, get things straight: the love that harms another is not love—but what desires beset a man! They are not written in the calendar of a man’s duty; they are part of the secret life. Some time the secret life rises and overwhelms us—a tidal wave. We must not be carried away. We have each too much to lose.” He strode on, “Forget, forget!” He struggled to remember something else, something cheerful. They had taken him to Dirty Jack’s house to celebrate his appointment; there they had made merry, Sam being at the top of his form. There was a young creature there, timid, serious, big-eyed, with a black crop who turned out to be Dirty Jack’s (that is, Old Roebuck’s) only daughter, the one who did the charming flower painting. What an innocent, attentive face! It positively flamed with admiration; and the child-woman’s name was Gillian. He had made up a poem on the spur of the moment:

Gillian, my Gillian,

He would be a villy-un,

Who would be dally-dillyin’

About a Lacertilian

When he could look at you!

“By Jiminy!” ejaculated Sam, who had strange oaths, since he could never swear foul ones, “genius burns: nothing succeeds like success! And did Dirty Jack jerk back his head and give me one of those looks of his with his slugs of eyes, to intimidate me; whereas, no one noticed him at all, at all, poor old Dirty Jack.” He began to hum with his walking, “Oh, my darling Nelly Gray, they have taken you away.”

“By Gee,” he exclaimed half aloud, “I am excited! A pity to come home to a sleeping house, and what’s not asleep is the devil incarnate; but we’re a cheerful bunch, the Pollits are a cheerful bunch. But wait till my little gang hears that they’re going to lose their dad for a nine-month! There’ll be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth!” and Sam clapped his hands together. He loved this Thirty-fourth Street climb, by the quiet houses and under the trees. He had first come this way, exploring the neighborhood, a young father and widower, holding his year-old Louisa in his arms, with her fat bare legs wagging, and, by his side, elegant, glossy-eyed Miss Henrietta Collyer, a few months before their marriage; and that was ten years ago. Then afterwards, with each and all of the children, up and down and round about, taking them to the Observatory, the parks, the river, the woodland by the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, or walking them out to Cabin John, teaching them birds, flowers, and all denizens of the woodland.

Now Old David Collyer’s Tohoga House, Sam’s Tohoga House, that he called his island in the sky, swam above him. A constellation hanging over that dark space midmost of the hill, which was Tohoga’s two acres, was slowly swamped by cloud.

He came up slowly, not winded, but snuffing in the night of the hot streets, looking up at the great house, tree-clouded. Now he crossed P Street and faced the hummock. On one side the long galvanized-iron back fence of his property ran towards Thirty-fifth Street and its strip of brick terrace slums. Over this fence leaned the pruned boughs of giant maples and oaks. The old reservoir was away to the right. A faint radiance showed Sam that the light in the long dining room was on. He ran up the side steps and stole across the grass behind the house, brushing aside familiar plants, touching with his left hand the little Colorado blue spruce which he had planted for the children’s “Wishing-Tree” and which was now five feet high.

He was just on six feet and therefore could peer into the long room. It ran through the house and had a window looking out at the front to R Street. A leaved oak table stood in the center and at the table, facing him, sitting in his carving chair, was his eldest child, Louisa, soon twelve years old, the only child of his dead first wife, Rachel. Louie was hunched over a book and sat so still that she seemed alone in the house. She did nothing while he looked at her but turn a page and twist one strand of her long yellow hair round and round her finger, a trick of her father’s. Then without Sam having heard anything, she lifted her head and sat stock-still with her gray eyes open wide. She now rose stiffly and looked furtively at the window behind her. Sam heard nothing but the crepitations of arboreal night. Then he noticed that the window was sliding gently down. Louisa advanced jerkily to this magically moving window and watched it as it fitted itself into the sill. Then she shook her head and turning to the room as if it were a person she laughed soundlessly. It was nothing but the worn cords loosening. She opened the window and then shut it again softly, but leaned against the pane looking up into the drifting sky, seeking something in the street. She had been there, and Sam, whistling softly
Bringing Home the Sheaves,
was about to go inside, when a thin, dark scarecrow in an off-white wrapper—Henrietta, his wife—stood in the doorway. Through the loose window frame he heard her threadbare words,

“You’re up poring over a book with lights flaring all over the house at this hour of the night. You look like a boiled owl! Isn’t your father home yet?”

“No, Mother.”

“Why is your knee bleeding? Have you been picking the scab again?”

Louie hung her head and looked at her knee, crossed with old scars and new abrasions and bruises: she flushed and the untidy hair fell over her face.

“Answer, answer, you sullen beast!”

“I bumped it.”

“You lie all the time.”

The child straightened with wide frowning eyes, pulled back her arms insolently. Henny rushed at her with hands outstretched and thrust her firm bony fingers round the girl’s neck, squeezing and saying, “Ugh,” twice. Louisa looked up into her stepmother’s face, squirming, but not trying to get away, questioning her silently, needing to understand, in an affinity of misfortune. Henrietta dropped her arms quickly and gripped her own neck with an expression of disgust, then pushed the girl away with both hands; and as she flounced out of the room, cried,

“I ought to put us all out of our misery!”

Louisa moved back to her chair and stood beside it, looking down at the book. Then she sank into the chair and, putting her face on both hands, began to read again.

Sam turned his back to the house and looked south, over the dark, susurrous orchard, towards the faint lights of Rosslyn. A zephyr stole up the slope as quietly as a nocturnal animal and with it all the domestic scents, wrapping Sam’s body in peace. Within, a torment raged, day and night, week, month, year, always the same, an endless conflict, with its truces and breathing spaces; out here were a dark peace and love.

“Mother Earth,” whispered Sam, “I love you, I love men and women, I love little children and all innocent things, I love, I feel I am love itself—how could I pick out a woman who would hate me so much!”

Surefooted he moved way down to the animal cages, heard them stir uneasily, and spoke to the raccoon,

“Procyon! Procyon! Here’s little Sam!” But the raccoon refused to come to the wire. He went up the slope again, thinking,
Fate puts brambles, hurdles in my path, she even gives me an Old Woman of the Sea, to try me, because I am destined for great things.

When Sam came into the hall there was no light anywhere on the ground floor. The saffron dark through his sitting room at the head of the first flight of stairs showed that Louie was in her bedroom. She had heard his whistle and had rushed upstairs with her book.

“Why, why?” thought Sam. “She could have waited to hear what her daddy has been doing all day. She is so dogged—and she has her little burdens.” He climbed softly upstairs and peeped into the bedroom. Louie’s bed stood against the back or south wall and little Evelyn’s against the front wall. A brown paper shade arranged by Louie cut off the light from the smaller girl’s face. Louie in her petticoat, one sock on, one off, turned towards him guiltily.

“Why you up so late, Looloo?”

“I was reading.”

“Been seein’ things, Looloo?”

“What do you mean?” She looked suspicious.

“So you ain’t been seein’ things?” He began to chuckle.

She was silent, pondering.

“My mind says to me, it says, little glumpy Looloo been seein’ things and Looloo’s been unhappy too.”

She hung her head.

“What you see in the darkness of night, Looloo?”

“Nothing!”

“That ain’t much for tuh see. Air you tellin’ your poor Sam de troof?”

“I never lie,” she said angrily.

“No josts [ghosts], no sperrits, no invisible hands, no nuffin?”

“No,” but she began to smile shamefacedly.

“All right, Looloo: bed! Early start tomorrow.” He grinned at her, white-toothed, red-lipped, blue eyes bright.

“The paint came, Dad. Are you going to paint?” she asked excitedly.

“Sure thing. Fust thing you know! And Looloo—the big news, the big news has come! Shh! I’m going!”

“When?” She started towards him. He was very happy.

“You’re going to be months and months without your poor little Sam.”

“Who’ll look after us?”

“Your mother and Auntie Bonnie: same as now. And you yourself, Loolook! You’ll be in high school after the holidays!”

She reluctantly gave her book into his firm persuasive fingers. It was
The Legend of Roncesvalles.
He poked through it for a while and then handed it back, saying,

“Yes, you’ll learn from that, Loolook, that where there are kings there will be wars; don’t let it give you the idea, Loo, that there’s romance in those old savages: but you know better than that. I know my girl.”

So saying, he moved out and dropped downstairs, congratulating himself, “She said nothing about the little scene! Good girl! Nothing morbid there! Well, least said, soonest mended!”

He sat down to the covered tray that Henny had left for him as usual, and began to drink his milk and eat thinly cut sandwiches. He sat in the chair Louie had just vacated.

“To a certain extent,” he continued ruminating, “to a child of mine, these negative early experiences are aids in the formation of character, will prove of great value in penetrating human nature and human motives later on: perhaps she will go far, like myself, on the path of human understanding. Self-control; and a penetration of the springs of human action. It’s a pity she’s not a good-looker,” he finished hastily. He forgot Louie, and went on about Madeleine.

Madeleine was his secretary, Madeleine Vines, and he had only got her by a little gentle pressure, a little friendly smile in the right place, for she was the Helen of the Department of Commerce, and her admirers weekly predicted a siege by the Treasury, or State, War, and Navy, to get her. They made a splendid pair, handsome man and lovely woman; but months had gone by before Sam had suddenly seen the light pouring forth from her. On that day, a Tuesday morning in late winter, she had said these simple words, “Mr. Pollit, I just love to hear you talk!”

“That did it,” said Sam rapturously now, “yes, that did it. But what a slowpoke that same Samuel Pollit is!”

Suddenly there was a tapping at the back window and Sam started out of his delicious reverie. The shower had come; and it was very late.

Sam let the shower pass, but it came again. He, waking through the night, saw through the panes the tussle of cloud streak and sky spark, leaf blot and lamp flake, and smelled the damp cedar. Some marauder fluttered the nestlings. Sam looked out his window with “Hist, Hist!” and reduced the twig world to silence. Then, shutting the windows in his study, in the girls’ room and the twins’ room next to his and in the attic room, sometime towards morning, he woke some of his children and through their half-dreams they heard him say, Fine day, tomorrow, kids! I told it to stop raining by sunup! and tomorrow Sunday-Funday.

Louie, who had spent several hours already in an incommunicable world, woke to hear riding again the night rider in the street outside. For years now at night she had heard him riding his horse up and down, sometimes galloping faintly down the street but generally exercising around their very house, and for hours, as long as she could stay awake, Ker-porrop! Ker-porrop! Ker-porrop! he went. She had looked out before she went to bed, for the horseman, many nights, as tonight, and had not seen him. He only began to ride late after other folk were abed, Ker-porrop! Ker-porrop! on a thin-limbed, bay filly, as she imagined. Once she had asked, “Who is the horseman?” and been laughed at, “It’s only a dream!” But it was no dream for she heard it only when awake, and sometimes faint and sometimes near, he rode tonight again, in the summer swelter. She could almost see him as he passed and repassed under the lamplight and the dapple of leaves. She got up and leaned out of the southward window, her plait tumbling over the window sill; but the sound had ceased, he must have turned the corner. Yes, when she went back to bed, there he was again. She liked to wake in the night and hear the friendly rider: so perhaps, she thought, went Paul Revere, tumbling through the night, alone, a man when all others lay like logs. Louie and the rider on the red mare were wakers.