The Man Who Loved Children (46 page)

Sam sat with his hands hanging loosely between his legs. “It’s a blow, and no mistake. We’ve got two months to get out.”

“I’d like to be able to do something to that man,” said Henny, referring to Archie Lessinum. “ ‘The law is a divinity above justice even’! Dad was just bewitched by him. He gave him his own way in everything. He gave him Eleanor, made him executor. And he used to go round making great calf eyes at me and saying he was a mystic and the law was almost a mystic idea. I said, ‘How interesting!’ And here I sit now with seven children in rags, while there he sits with the mystic idea of Dad’s estate in his hands.”

“What’s the good of this?” asked Sam pathetically. “This is sordid. Don’t think about it now, Henny: wait till you’re up. Meanwhile I’ll look about for a house.” On the mantelpiece stood the little wreath of orange flowers. He took it up absent-mindedly and said, after fingering it for a while, sighing, “I’ll try this on Little-Womey’s hair. It was for a little bride of fourteen; but I got the man to give it to me.” He had forgotten that he had taken it as a childbed present to Henny. She watched him depart with it, with a bitter look, but said nothing.

Sam told Louie first, trailing out his misery, then Ernie, and then took the three little boys away down to the snake cages and told them they had to leave those slopes and gardens bursting up into a new spring. They were to be sold: other children would have the right to be there. One by one, the children became subdued, all except Little-Womey, who, with the orange wreath in her hair, was running to all her friends, the neighbors, showing off her beauty, with her soft deer eyes running over with mirth and excitement, while she told them they were all going away from Tohoga House and going to live in Virginia. By ten o’clock the next morning everyone knew it who knew Sam, and the Department was full of excitement. So he got nothing out of the old man at the last: so he had sold out for the fleshpots of Egypt and in the pots was nothing but dandelion salad. So Old Softsoap wasn’t going from triumph to triumph; and one evil young man got up a story that it was very queer, Sam had been away from home ten months and yet he arrived home to the birth of a new son, oh, entirely in order, the result of a queer gynecological condition. Although it was a lie, everyone was delighted and by nightfall, instead of its being a joke and a tall story, it had become a bit of truthful scandal, the low-down on the private life of a social and service climber, a grinning Pharisee and rich man’s pet. Twenty-four hours before, Sam had been the rising star of the service and now people skipped from desk to desk laughing about him and saying that he was a sneak, milksop, and goody-goody. Sam, for all his credo of the firm handclasp and frank smile, had made a sufficiency of enemies for all sorts of reasons—little enemies, people beneath him in grade and fortune, people he had never troubled to conciliate because they were mean. He had refused to consider religious partisanship or join any fraternities, “no phratries,” he said contemptuously, and he had joined gaily, frequently, and with the naïvest faith in his luck, in all sorts of foolish campaigns against minor bureaucrats, sprinkling his talk with their insulting nicknames.

Then, when he was absent in Malaya, his rivals and enemies had a chance to work against him, and it could have been argued (it was argued) that Sam had deserted his official post for a floating, indefinable job and that he had excellent prospects anyhow, anywhere, so why need he get back his old job in the Department? To cap it all came the shoals of complaints from Colonel Willets in Singapore. He sat in the Raffles Hotel, or in some bungalow where he was a guest, and wrote or dictated journals and letters, full of complaints about everyone but chiefly about that snake charmer and departmental meteor, Mr. Samuel Clemens Pollit. “He arrogated every honor to himself, he went out of his way to push into official circles, he sucked up to English officialdom, he was always holding an umbrella for some lady; he did what he could to oust Colonel Willets and ingratiate himself with foreign governments, he applied for jobs in foreign (Chinese) universities, he ran round with members of the Kuomintang and abetted absconding clerks.” There was nothing that Colonel Willets did not know, in his spite: his correspondence with Washington made a wonderful Eastern romance of intrigue and hate. But Colonel Willets did not despise influence, nor lobbyists, nor Senators: he had a few of them in his sleeve, as he occasionally remarked to a select audience. When, by good luck, the great pillar of Sam’s career, David Collyer, brother of the railroad millionaire, Bradford Collyer, died in debt, Colonel Willets decided to get rid of the irritating young man. He had no very good reason for it; Psalm-singing Sam (he called him this very unfairly) simply got under his skin. Sam ridiculed him. Sam offered him the hand of friendship when Colonel Willets would have been glad of a punch in the nose; he smiled at him when Colonel Willets wanted a row; he defied him pleasantly but firmly to ever put an obstacle in his brilliant career. Sam could go back to the strange yellow and brown men that he seemed to like the smell of so much, said Willets.

Washington papers were full of the return of the Expedition and the report being presented by Colonel Willard Willets. Other members of the Expedition were mentioned, including Samuel Pollit, originally of the Bureau of Fisheries and organizer and now head of the Conservation Bureau; and it was hinted (much to Sam’s surprise) that Sam now might move to another sphere of activities. As the Conservation Bureau was Sam’s beloved child, and yet coveted by numerous others who considered themselves better qualified than he, this unexpected paragraph in the
Post
gave him a sinking feeling; and he began harking back to the dreams of snakes he had had since his return home. “Shoals ahead,” said Sam in a midday conference with his old friend Saul Pilgrim, “but I am on deck, they won’t torpedo me. This is Crabby Willets’ doing. Residents of Virginia and Maryland are allowed to crab in the Potomac, not in the Bureau.”

But the local papers, being hungry at that moment for some juicy departmental scandal, seized on the romantic story of Sam, and with a show of spicy amiability told all, with that display of intuition and penetration of character told tersely, which is common in the world’s journalist capital, that city from which (it is the proud boast) half a million words are telegraphed daily. Everyone kicked Sam about, had his opinion about Sam, including the respectable breakfasters in the S. & W. cafeteria, star-spangled visitors to the Occidental and eaters beneath its senator-ribanded walls, fish devourers in O’Donnell’s, perpetual peaceful roomers of Franklin Square, and such lions as got to the zoo. Sam was daily accused of inefficiency, of bureaucracy, of pusillanimity; even malversation was hinted at. Sam’s fair face became clouded, became scarlet, became pale: he ran from friend to chief, and ran into those he knew to be his enemies as often as possible, going up to them in corridors, holding out his hand, asking them why they pursued him, speaking to them of government service and charity, humanity, the service of the people: “A public office is a public trust.” To a certain extent these tactics succeeded in that he embarrassed his enemies dreadfully, and they ran away from him, hiding their faces under hat brims and their necks under coat collars. They crossed the street from him and changed their routes to the office. But nothing stopped the log that was rolling towards his neck. As soon as Sam saw how badly it all was going and that those he called “the people of evil, the enemies of the commonweal, those in whom the devil, that wicked idea of our ancestors, was in a sort incarnate,” were getting the upper hand for the moment, and heard with great wrath but great helplessness, that his suspension was hinted at, pending inquiry, he went to his brother-in-law and asked him to arrange to postpone the sale of Tohoga House for a few months till things were decided. Archie Lessinum, gravely kindhearted, now that handsome Sam Pollit was rolling in the mud, agreed to do this; and Sam, instead of looking for a house in Virginia, began to think of his prospects in his natal soil of Baltimore. Solicitous friends in the Department, amongst whom was the malicious, gleeful, but somewhat paternal J. Cappie Larbalestier, were warning Sam that his days were numbered.

“I am innocent,” cried Sam, “my record is spotless; I am an exemplary officer. I defy them to pin any scandal of any sort on me.

“They will ease you out if they can,” said the younger Brownell, who had become very friendly with this man under a cloud. But Sam saw in the younger Brownell an agent of evil and the spokesman of his enemies. Now nobody hesitated to take Sam aside and, with a frank pat on the back, tell him the sober truth; his faults had been such and such; so and so was a worm digging into his back, and since poor old David Collyer died, of course he was without his best support. Sam came nearer to knocking a confrere down than ever before whenever this last remark was made, for it was Sam’s boast that he had had no support in all his life but had hewn his way through the granite of official indifference and public ignorance.

“Alone I did it,” would he say. “God helps those who help themselves,” and, “All things work together for the good of them who love the Lord,” but by “the Lord” he only meant an obscure creature of his imagination, possibly “the Public Good,” or even just his own will.

Things were blacker for Sam every day and, with his heart sounding hourly in bitter, secret oceans of misery, Sam faced something he had never conceived of in all his life—the triumph of calumny. He would go about repeating to his friends and children, “Truth crushed to earth shall rise again, the eternal years of God are hers,” but the traitor thought crept in every day, as a mouse through a rotting door, that he had not before him the eternal years of God, but only a few of human fame. He suppressed these thoughts and resolved never to blacken his hands with the pitch being poured around him, and to try to tread the path of goodness, smile at his enemies, and proceed exactly as if nothing had happened. He would not seek partisans, not enter at the head of a flock of witnesses, only tell the plain truth: plain truth would shine through in beauty, more dazzling for the black or bedizened lies that “the evil ones” brought in. Sam gave one or two sober interviews, and refused to write to the papers to answer indignant letters from persons both official and private who seemed deeply stirred over his ways and personality.

“You are doomed with this air of Christian martyrdom,” cried Saul Pilgrim wrathfully and humorously. His square-set, big-nosed face, a clownish variant on Sam’s own, had long, lugubrious, creased cheeks, which came from his having been an intimate acquaintance of defeat since his boyhood. But Sam would just as wrathfully, and not at all humorously, reply that he had no churchly reek, he was merely acting for the right, and that the good would win, it must win.

“Suppose it does not win?” asked Saul. “You see, Sam, you call me a cynic; but I am a creator, I am a God myself. Here is a little world I have made up and in it beings: for years I have struggled to make the good triumph, but it is still a drawn battle.”

In this way Saul referred to his serial story,
When the Day Comes,
which appeared in a little Alexandria advertising paper Saul had published himself, for the last seventeen years.
When the Day Comes
had begun, Chapter One, of Part One, in the very first edition of the paper seventeen years back, and this serial, the only serial at all competitive with the serial of the sun, was not yet finished, for the simple reason that the paper was still running. Saul had never been able to bring himself to botch up a happy, but improbable ending, yet could not resign himself to unpopularity with a sad ending, and hence had gone on adding incident to incident, hoping the problem would solve itself accidentally.

“It is just like life,” Saul would think to himself, in surprise, as he considered the latest chapter of
When the Day Comes.
So he was in a position to look at Sam’s fix in a resigned and human way. He admired Sam for his glorious, messianic belief in himself, the world, and other people, and wished he had this temperament; but he now felt impelled to tell Sam some of the truths of life, just as if Sam had been one of his characters.

“Saul,” said Sam, “what I am telling you may sound weak and willful, but it is not so: it is the innermost heart of my belief in myself and human nature. My silly Louie has written a motto on a piece of paper and stuck it on the side of her bookcase, ‘By my faith and hope I conjure thee, throw not away the hero in thy soul.’ In that, at least, she shows the power, the strength, and the glory of her poor Sam. She is beginning to see the light. But that is not what I wanted to say, my dear old Saul. There is a faith men live by; I have it in me. I cannot sully it by entering the forum of public debate, much as I believe that all things in the republic should be aired in the public eye. Yes, Saul, even aliens, people of a strange culture, feel this entity in me. Naden bin Tahir, my Indian secretary, asked me if I believed in my white God. ‘No,’ said I, ‘friend; I do not need a God for I believe in ultimate good.’ ‘Tuan,’ he said (though I told him many times I was no master but the servant of the people), ‘I am surprised at this, for you are one of the Heaven-born.’ ‘No, brother,’ I replied, ‘I am a humble man who loves his fellow man.’ ‘I am sure, sir,’ said my faithful black friend, ‘that you will go to heaven. God is coming to earth soon,’ said Naden, ‘everyone can see it by the troubles that are going on. When he comes, wherever you are, sir,’ he said, ‘he will take you up in the hollow of his hand and place you on a celestial carpet near his own.’ ‘Oh, Naden,’ said I, ‘I would ask the Lord at Judgment Day to leave a little bit of my own earth and make me forever mortal on it; then under a great green-headed native elm I would sit and watch the little mortal birds. I do not want to go to heaven; I want my children, forever children, and other children, stalwart adults, and a good, happy wife, that is all I ask, but not paradise; earth is enough for me: it is because I believe earth is heaven, Naden, that I can overcome all my troubles and face down my enemies.’ That is what I said to him, Saul: and to this poor black civil servant with nothing but a mean ambition and a superstitious belief in the immediate coming of some cruel Jehovah, I told what I really believe. This is God’s footstool, my dear good mother used to say: and if it were really so, I should be glad to live forever by the little toe of God.”