The Man Who Loved Children (15 page)

He opened his eyes on the hazy blue world, said gently, “Yiss?”

Mareta Jewell, a little dark girl, came precipitately up the steps, and approached him with the little dancing hesitations of the shy, “Can I go round the Wishing-Tree?”

“Yes, love,” he smiled.

“Will I get my wish, Mr. Pollit?”

“Maybe, if you wish hard, and are a good girl and it’s a good wish, you will get it, I expect.”

She gurgled joyously and ran round the little spruce.

I
N THE AFTER-DINNER HEAT
, when the dishes were dried and put away and the greasy sink was shining, Louie slipped down the orchard in her bare brown feet and, opening the unhinged back gate a trifle, looked out into the peaceful street. Just opposite were the little wooden houses of the only two neighbors who were Louie’s friends—the Kydds and the Walkers. The Walkers were a middle-aged couple with a twelve-year-old boy called Mark Antony. Junius Walker, the dark, nervous father, worked in the Bureau of Engraving, and tried to teach his slow lad Latin at night. He inveigled Louisa into his parlor, from time to time, to read a Latin grammar with his boy. When the time came, blond, fat Mark Antony would go to a private school in England to learn to be a gentleman.

In between the Walkers’ small lot and Middenways’, the corner grocers, on a lot of the same size, was a similar wooden house, neglected and vine-grown, in which lived an old couple, John and Angela Kydd. John Kydd made toys and, to show it, had two rocking-horse heads on his gate. He left promptly at seven-thirty every morning and returned rotating on his fat legs at six every evening. In between these hours the lonely and scared old woman would often call in Louisa, who was such a big, brave girl, to keep her company. Louisa did not care for either place; they offered her nothing to eat and they reeked of eccentricity; but Junius Walker took pains to explain to her things that no one else had mentioned, ceramics, glazes, firing, and offered to teach her china painting, and as for the Kydds, no one in the neighborhood but herself had ever been invited into the frowsy, furniture-choked dwelling. Sam, always lampooning, found the Kydds and the Walkers inexhaustible sources of inspiration: every day he found new jokes about the two eccentrics. Though Louie knew them much better than he did, she saw them with his eyes, as ridiculous if not positively touched, filthy and mean-spirited to be so poor, vain to have airs and graces when so poor, superstitious to hold any religious beliefs, thickheaded to hold any political beliefs, hoity-toity to hold any esthetic beliefs, fustian to pretend to any education, when so poor. But Louie never said what was in her head and she had a kind heart; so she came down, with bare legs, and in her faded, dirty, outgrown dress, in torn underwear from her fine house on the hill, and listened for hours to the notions that these strange poor folk had about themselves. She felt at home with them. She was eccentric, ugly, and awkward, and they were quite evidently, in their lives, eccentric, ugly, and awkward. Sam had a voice, she had an ear, and these struggling, poor people, gasping just at the surface of the river, about to sink, had lives. They told her something about their lives, which were not cataclysmic, such as Pollitry lived, but lives lived in neat corpuscles, lives which only looked out, squinted-eyed, askance, dubious, through two fishy eyes. The Walkers and Kydds repelled Louie, but she was flattered that they chose her. Ernie knew all the men and women; Evie visited all the “ladies with babies,” as she said, and Tommy was dangerously favored: only the two oddities wanted Louie.

Sam and the boys were resting in the deep coarse grass at the bottom of the orchard under the trees and Louie was about to join them. It was a fatty, dreamy hour. Sam’s voice began behind Louie with a low insinuating humming that enchanted the sulky ear guards and got straight to their softened brains,

“Your Poor-Sam brought you up in Washington, the new Jerusalem, as I verily believe, because he wanted you to feel the blood beating through the heart of the nation. Think of the logcutters’ children in Oregon and the little redskins on Indian reservations and the little tall-eared Missourians and the little frozen two-legged ears of Minnesota Swedish wheat whose only dream in life is to come and see the Great White Father—whoever he may happen to be: while my tadpoles can see not only him but me, every day that is.”

“I’d like to go on an Indian reservation,” said Saul, far away.

Sam began his humming again:

Most beloved by Hiawatha

Was the gentle Chibiabos,

He, the best of all musicians,

He, the sweetest of all singers.

Beautiful and childlike was he,

Brave as man is, soft as woman …

When he sang, the village listened:

All the warriors gathered round him:

All the women came to hear him:

Now he stirred their souls to passion,

Now he melted them to pity.

“The passion was the passion of nature, the passion for good, not selfish human passion,” Sam commented.

Bare feet appeared now and again amongst the green blond spikelets, and now a summer-burnt head appeared in the same place. Saul said, “Where’s Looloo? She went out the gate.” The grass bottom bloomed with heads and eyes. “She’s gone to Mrs. Kydd’s.” They giggled.

“I have many wonderful thoughts during those times when I am sauntering about by myself (and when perhaps to the foolish or mean eyes and heads that I seem to have round me I am just mooning about). Take the theory of the expanding universe—I want to figure it out some day. It came to me by myself. The theory of wave motion came to me merely from looking at my mother’s dishcloth hanging on the back veranda, when I was a little boy no bigger than Ernest-Paine here. And very often I have an idea and then find months, years later, that a man like our very great Woodrow Wilson or Lloyd George or Einstein has had it too. Of course, I believe in a transmission of ideas, on the same principle as radio, amongst a community of minds.”

The children were silent, sunk back to the grass; but Little-Sam had sneaked off to the gate to look after Louie.

“It is a pity I had handicaps which you all know about,” he said hastily, “or I should have been able to accomplish all the wonderful things in my heart.” He sighed, “When you kids get bigger, and have your own life dreams, you will appreciate your Poor-Sam more.”

Through all the soft wind sounds came the call of bobwhites in the White Field.

“Hear in the Buzzum of my famerly I am enjoyin’ myself at peas with awl mankind and the wiminfolks likewise,” Sam quoted dreamily.

“Little-Samuel, come’n lie down,” called his father. But Little-Sam, after gaping at the Kydds’ house, had slid on to the footpath to read the newest legends scrawled on the Pollit back fence. Opinions of the Pollits as well as of neighbors were written here every day by boys. Sam, used to being obeyed, did not know that Little-Sam was away still.

“Boys,” said he, “boys, you soon won’t have your little feyther with you. He is going away to Greenland’s icy mountings and India’s coral strand. You have to look after yourselves, your mother, and your sisters. I want all of you to stand together and look after the house for me, not only the female hanni-miles mentioned and aforesaid, but also the real honest-to-goodness hanni-miles, Procyon the raccoon, Gimlet the parrot, Didelpha the vixen opossum, Cocky-Andy the sulphur-crested cockatoo, Big-Me the pygmy opossum, not to mention the birds and reptilians. That will be quite a job for even you smart boys. Now we’ll have to work up a schedule. And fustest, you must write to your pore little Sam ebbly week and tell him how ’tis tuh hum; and second, you must keep a record of the birds and hanni-miles wot visit Tohoga House, Tohoga Place that is. No! Momento! Loogoo-brious can do that. It will be a good thing for her, keep her mind off of her herself, on which onpleasant objeck,” he continued (believing that Louie was there), “it is glued at time of speaking. But that is, no doubt, on account of her fai-hairy figuar and her bewchus face.”

He waited for the boys to laugh, but they were all in a mood of indolence. Near them was only the warning chak-chak of the catbird.

“Yes, siree,” continued Sam, “Loochus’s eggspression at this yere moment eggspresses one idear, Give us Liberty or give us Death. But that is the age, that is the season; we must forgive Loochus her trespasses, or else bring in a verdick of arson in the third degree.”

Little-Sam had been timidly flirting with a stray fox-terrier bitch, with a sore paw, but after a few pats from a safe distance, the dog showed such a sudden, desperate affection for the boy, that he got frightened and, darting to the gate, shut it in the fox’s nose. In a surge of emotion he dashed up to his father with,

“Looloo’s gone over to see Mrs. Kydd. Mrs. Kydd called her and took her inside.”

“I hope Old Goat gives her a nice sardine tin to eat,” said Sam.

The front gate to the Kydds’ house was locked and fixed with barbed wire. The lock and hinges had rusted. The front path, unused for years, could barely be seen through the grass and weeds. Unpruned cedars lined this path. The only entrance was by the side gate, over a cinder path, covered by a trellis broken with the weight of untidy grapevines. Caterpillars dropped from this vine on to Louie’s hair, but she put her hands up and delicately removed them. The little old woman ran in front of her, turning every few steps to smile, nod, and beckon,

“Quick, come into my kitchen: I must show you something,” and again a pretty nod of complicity. Louie hoped for something sweet, even though she had never eaten in this house before. They hurried down the side passage and onto a wooden veranda, very dark with vines. There were two rockers, with faded cushions and a rain-beaten table. Old Angela raised her finger warningly and pointed down at the broken plank just by the door. They went into the narrow hall littered with bits of furniture, indistinguishable in this sudden dark, but which Louie knew from other visits, and so into the old kitchen, where a wood-and-coal stove was set in a large fireplace. Old Angela, with her quaint bright mystery, beckoned Louie again to the fireplace and, when she got there, cautiously lifted the lid of a small black stew-pot.

“Look, look,” she nodded with excitement. The little girl looked and saw nothing but a meat stew with vegetables from which steam was rising.

“And something else,” cried the old woman in a fit of generosity, “look! Only wait!” She scurried to the dark larder and, after struggling for a while with something, returned with a half slice of bacon which she dangled before her. “There,” she said, “you watch,” and she dropped the bacon into the stew. “A better taste,” nodded the old woman. “My, it will be wonderful tonight! Mr. Kydd loves stew and stew with a bit of bacon in it—mm-mm, he loves that. Mr. Kydd says to me, ‘Angela, you’re a good cook, and just put a bit of bacon in and you’re a better cook!’ ” She nodded at the girl full of understanding. “Come, will we go into the front room? It’s brighter, eh, more cheerful for a young lady! And you have such beautiful little feet,” she continued, stopping in the hallway, “such beautiful, beautiful little brown feet, a little brown maid.”

“Oh,” said Louie, “I forgot—at home we go about barefoot because it is healthier—”

“Such beautiful little feet: you are quite right,” said the old woman, “I am sure you are a wonderful girl at home to your mother, yes I am sure of it.”

Louie would not be pushed into any admission, but followed her into the parlor. They passed one closed room which Louie had never seen, and reached the parlor where John Kydd had his organ. The sunlight poured through a triple window with dust-thick panes, and cast red, blue, and green stains on the thick dust of the floor. Three doors, beside the hall door, led out of this room, but it was impossible to reach two of them, and the third could be got at only by squirming around a large drop-leaf table extended, two chairs, and an old-fashioned glass table designed for showing a tea service under glass. Near the window was a dining table, a card table, and other odds and ends.

“We have so much furniture,” said Angela, “so many things! Aren’t people stupid, eh? You must think us so stupid! Now sit down and let me look at you. Your hair is so lovely, isn’t it, such a nice shade, and what a trouble it must be to your dear mother to wash and fix and braid and all that!” Louie became conscious of the tatters of her hair.

“I am sure you play the organ,” cried the old woman. “Do try it, do play me something? Mr. Kydd loves to play to me.”

“No, no,” protested Louie, “I can’t.”

“But you have such artistic hands,” protested the old lady. She looked scarcely older, perhaps younger, than Louie as she sat there, or rather like a child face fitted into a bonnet of untidy white hair and stuck on an old wrinkled neck. Her dirty brown woolen dress had lost its belt, and its hem was undone. A black petticoat hung beneath, but revealed wrinkled stockings fallen round the ankles and turned black shoes. But the little heart-shaped face that nodded so eagerly at Louie had two large soft brown eyes, well set, and deep fringed, and a supplicating, kind smile blew in and out of the old cheeks. Since Louie had come she had altered her years, she seemed ten, fifteen years younger; and she sat now on the organ stool dangling her little legs and chattering away like a little girl, poring credulously over Louie’s expressions, begging for acquiescence, for information. Louie was used to her. Her dirt and the dirt of the old man were repulsive, but the old man beat her, so the story went, and Louie felt conscience-stricken. Often, Louie had seen her racing after him down the passage, as he strutted to the gate in the morning, crying,

“John, John! Don’t leave me without a cent, John! What will happen to me? John, only a nickel! It’s just to have. I spend nothing. What do I spend? I need nothing. But I must have money!”

Everyone knew of her and John. They sought no friends amongst the neighbors, despising them all. But everyone knew (for Angela had confided the truth from time to time, whispering into one ear and begging some little snatch of food from another) that this same John beat her, starved her, and insulted her and that she was abandoned by all her family, though old and frail, because John had systematically alienated them. The Walkers, on one side, Middenway, the grocer, on the other, had heard her cries and his storming late at night or in the peace of some holiday.