The Man Who Loved Children (61 page)

“Hello, dear Louie,” she said, beaming on the flushed girl. This was the first time she had ever said “dear,” and Louie was in ecstasy. She became very quiet and sedate in her great happiness; and then very talkative, pointing out the house, and the points of interest to the family. She even pointed out “Coffin” Lomasne, who was standing on his slipway and looking with interest at the banner attached to the Pollit Wishing Tree; and in long gabble told all about him, his coffins, and how he went, in the family, by the name of “Mud Turtle.”

Louie had on the same soiled dress that she had worn to school, Miss Aiden observed, with hurt, for she had expected to be treated with more ceremony. However, she was flattered by the banner and by the family drawn up irregularly there under the trees, and all those eyes searching her from a distance. It was a dear old house, with wonderful old trees, and a sweet little bathing beach, as she told Louie, and they all must be very happy there, especially in summer. “Are there mosquitoes?” she asked. (Yes, there were: but they took measures against them: only Ernie and Tommy suffered badly from the bites.) “You don’t need to go away for the holidays,” said Miss Aiden. (Oh, but Louie would go, she hoped, to Harpers Ferry. She had a cousin there who had promised to take her down the river in a canoe, if it was not too dry.) “A boy cousin?” said Miss Aiden coquettishly. “Yes, a boy cousin, Dan.” Miss Aiden had never been to Eastport before; it was an exceedingly poor part, rundown, with a few broken-down family houses, but splendid old run-to-seed patches that you could do something with, though the soil was poor. The entrance to Spa House was down a short muddy lane bordered with what appeared to be fishermen’s cottages, with pails and clothes on the wooden porches. A broad new picket gate, however, with the words “Spa House” painted on it, showed her that she had arrived at Louie’s home. The gate was ajar: they pushed it and came quickly up the curving rutty drive, under magnificent trees. The straggling bushes of the bank and somebody’s rowboats came right up to the trees on the western side.

A reception committee awaited her, a tall, yellow-haired, red-faced man, with sparkling, self-satisfied eyes, rather heavy cheeks and nose and teeth well met in a kind of religious mouth, a man who would make a good, new-world dissenting minister, thought Miss Aiden. There was a bevy of children, none like Louie, with two blond and two dark boys and one very pretty little dark girl—Miss Aiden did not know if they were all Pollits or not. There was no sign of the mother. Miss Aiden was not experienced enough yet to enjoy meeting the girls’ mothers, though she got on well with them afterwards, because of her cheerful good nature.

Louie was evidently very nervous. “Will you come inside and take off your hat?” she kept asking, at every break in the conversation. The conversation did not flag, because Mr. Pollit seemed to be a lively, agreeable, unassuming man with a lot of information that he was anxious to bestow upon her; he was very joky too, and Miss Aiden began to laugh with him in a way which, she noticed, did not seem to please Louie. At length, she went in with the girl. They entered by a wind-broken side porch, over a bit of coconut matting worn through to the boards, and came into a dark, dirty hall laid with defaced oilcloth. In the minute before coming into Louie’s bedroom to take off her hat, Miss Aiden revised her visions of the Pollit homestead: they were a raggedy, rackety family, too big for their father’s means, and living was hard with them, but no doubt they struggled to put a face on it. The reason Louie was untidy and even dirty was that they were poor and was not merely the slatternliness of adolescence. Miss Aiden was disappointed. She now imagined Mrs. Pollit to herself as a worn blonde slut with soft manners, Louie’s predecessor (for she had no idea of the family history), and she was so startled that she hesitated for a moment when she saw come into the room a black-eyed, feverishly rouged hag with pepper-and-salt hair drawn back into a tight knot. Louie said hastily, “This is Miss Aiden. Miss Aiden, my mother.”

“Louie,” said the apparition, in a voice of sweet admonition, “take Miss Aiden into my room; it is more pleasant there.” Mrs. Pollit had marks of gentility, but at present her graciousness seemed to pester her like an itch—she brought out the kindness irritably, struggling with her worse feelings apparently. Yet, Miss Aiden could tell that she bore her no grudge for coming. “Domestic rift,” diagnosed Miss Aiden. She was astonished at the walnut suite in Mrs. Pollit’s room: yet, on the bed was a worn and torn cover, and the table covers were not fresh. “Decayed gentility,” now thought Miss Aiden, “and in what a state of decay!”

But apart from a couple of pieces of furniture, the Pollits lived in a poverty that to her was actually incredible. They lacked everything. She was shown the bathroom, and found herself in a shanty with wooden walls and a roughly cemented floor. One end of this was filled by a cement tub about five feet long by three deep; but the cement had a surface as rough as a coconut cake; Miss Aiden thought of submitting her soft, sleek, spoiled flesh to its gray rasping ridges and, thinking it impossible, looked about for a rubber sheet—they must use something to cover the cement when bathing. Everything was to match; homemade, rough and ready; instead of toilet paper, they used cut-up newspaper; there was no bathmat but a sodden crisscross of slats. “I had no idea,” thought Miss Aiden, “that there was a place as primitive in the whole world”; and she began to wonder how they lived at all.

Greatly disappointed in her visit, she followed the excitable Louie out through the home-cemented back porch and into the orchard wilderness, which was a delightful playground and now in full leaf and dotted with little fruit. There was a stew cooking, and Miss Aiden saw the dark thin woman poking over the stove: she nodded gaily at them as they went past. Miss Aiden could not keep back the question, “Does your mother like cooking?”

“Oh, no! she has too much to do,” Louie said with unreflective candor.

Miss Aiden pursued, “You have a lot of brothers and sisters.”

“Only one sister,” said Louie: “that little fair girl is Mr. Lomasne’s little girl. Yes, mother says she has too many,” and she laughed.

“But she wanted them,” pursued the teacher sentimentally.

“No, she didn’t: the doctor said she should only have two—but they came”; Louie laughed.

The teacher looked down sharply, but saw only a fat, fair, laughing face: it’s queer to know everything and know nothing at one and the same time, thought Miss Aiden.

Dinner was something Miss Aiden was never to forget; for she had passed what she considered a very rebellious, but what was really a very respectable life within the confines of the agreeably slick. Like Sam (though she was an honors student in English and Higher English), she saw truth, beauty, and progress in terms of the twenty-five-cent story magazines; in fact, she was but a handsome, gracious, and amiable young edition of Auntie Jo. First, from this house of misrule, came the sound of a beautiful gong, like the temple gongs in the movies; then the children came tearing up from all parts of the grassy waste, while two other children (which until this moment she had supposed Pollits) started to run down the avenue and away from Spa House. Mr. Pollit, who had neither washed his hands nor put on his coat, then started to whistle, and as he whistled shouts came from the scampering children, “Yes, Dad; yes, Taddy; yes, Dad, yippo”: and so forth. Immediately, Louie, with a pleased confused face, came to fetch her in to the table, and they came into a long, boarded room, with dirty window curtains, a battered dresser, homemade wall shelves, and a long, oak table with fat Victorian legs, on which hung a dirty, worn tablecloth covered with the old silver and stained knives. A thin glass vase, dirty napkins in rings, and one water glass with a Greek-key pattern engraved graced this cloth. On the table besides were cruets, a slab of butter, and a loaf of bread. Miss Aiden found her place to be in front of the one water glass. Mr. Pollit then gave a whistle, and the team sat down, excepting Louie and the wife, who were juggling dishes in the kitchen, which was across the dark passage. Presently, without prelude, Louie began to hurry backwards and forwards with dishes of Irish stew, Miss Aiden getting the first, Mr. Pollit the second, and then in order of age.

“May I have a glass of water?” asked Miss Aiden sweetly, seeing none; but Louie at once seized the milk jug and poured out some for her. No one else got any. After they were all served, Louie and her mother came to sit down. As soon as Mrs. Pollit lifted her knife and fork, all followed suit and fell to in silence. Table talk was apparently considered improper in this family during the first course. As soon as Sam Pollit had finished, however, he began asking Miss Aiden if she liked fishing and if she knew that the Chesapeake was the finest little fishing hole in the world, he himself having fished there from the age of six; and that if she wanted to fish, the boys would take her out any day and not charge her fifteen dollars, the way the party boats did—or at least he didn’t know. “Perhaps when Tommy grows up, he’ll make us a party boat and then we’ll all be rich—for three months a year.” Laughter bubbled round the table at this happy prospect.

“Tommo’s only six though,” said Ernie, “and you have to have a boat, and the tackle costs about two hundred dollars, and there’s the oil—”

“Oh, we’ll run ours on marlin oil,” declared Sam, “and ketch it for nothing! And won’t the big boys swim after us when they smell their breruther’s oily tang?”

Louie was very indignant at this stupid conversation, which she thought beneath Miss Aiden’s level. Ernie did not raise even the ghost of a smile. Mrs. Pollit remained silent throughout, except to say to Tommy, “Tip your plate outwards, Tommy-boy!” and to Evie, under her breath, “Use
both
hands to wipe your mouth!”

Presently, during an awkward lull, while Louie was carrying out the dishes two at a time, Mr. Pollit said in a queer tone, distantly paternal, with a condescending expression, to his wife, “Have we salad, Henrietta?” The wife, flushing angrily, merely lowered her head over her plate and replied nothing. Miss Aiden flashed a look of astonishment from one to the other, then turned to Little-Sam, who sat at her side, “And are you the boatbuilder?” Sam, meanwhile, bit his lip; and in a moment repeated politely, “Have we a salad to come, Henrietta?” At this Henny coolly got up from her seat, smiling to Miss Aiden with an “Excuse me, please, I am the cook too,” drew Evie after her, and, when she had stepped into the corridor, said gently to Evie, “Tell your father that the snails ate the lettuce, and I had no money to buy trimmings!” Evie turned back and demurely repeated this message to her father. The children gazed from their father to Miss Aiden, to see what she would make of this. The dessert was brought in by the mother and served by her: it was bread pudding, with some preserved berries from last year. Henny admitted that these were her preserves and carried off the trying situation (Miss Aiden could not help thinking) with aplomb. Yet, she was wondering, “Why did they invite me?” After dessert, Louie went to make the coffee, after asking her mother in a low tone, and her father in a high tone, and Miss Aiden in a languishing tone, what each would take. Mr. Pollit would have prolonged the meal, for he became spirited and garrulous after the coffee, but Mrs. Pollit, fixing her black eyes on his face with a meaningful glare of hate, and slightly rising, forced back the words on his lips, while Louie and Evie rose too slightly and so induced Miss Aiden to get up. The teacher offered to help with the dishes, seeing no help, but Sam said at once, “No, the girls will do it while I show you the lordly acres, Miss Aiden,” and with a sort of rustic galloping gallantry, like a sheep dog, he got her out into the yard, and, taking her elbow, began pointing out things to her and talking “nineteen to the dozen,” as Henny declared.

“A fat chance you’ll have to talk to your beautiful Miss Aiden,” she cried. Louie was about to burst into tears. The most beautiful moment of her life had just passed: it had been when she walked with Miss Aiden up and down the aisles of the orchard. But all the time she was rushed, she could not collect her senses, for she knew the time was short: even when Miss Aiden stopped and, looking at her earnestly, begged her to work during the summer, for she would certainly be famous (“be famous,” was what she said, though surely it was a hallucination), Louie was fretting that the time was so short; soon Miss Aiden would go away. Louie thus had no time to think about the house, nor how it looked; she was quite satisfied with it—they were poor, but it was spacious, and her expectations were infinite. There was a book called
Great Expectations,
which she had never read: she supposed, though, that it referred to something like her own great expectations, which were that at a certain moment, like a giant Fourth of July rocket, she would rise and obscure all other constellations with hers. She was likewise so used to hearing of her mother’s rich family, and of her father’s superiority in intellect and feelings to the rest of mankind, that she believed they all occupied an enviable position in the community. They had been brought up in Washington, and if the nation only knew of Sam’s capacities, it would clamor for him—what more could be needed by a family? Enviously, she watched Sam, who grabbed everything, to his greater glory, grabbing Miss Aiden too: there he talked, endlessly, by the half hour. What could he be saying to her? Soon he would win her away entirely from Louie: Miss Aiden would think, What a clever, brilliant father Louie has—why Louie is not a patch on him! Louie was racked with disappointment. When she went out to empty the leavings into the garbage can, she went the long way round to overhear their words. Sam was saying, “And my little Looloo—I called her ‘Ducky’ then—at a very early age showed a most mulish disposition: that’s why I’m speaking to you, because she thinks so highly of you—” Looloo! Ducky! Oh, a hell of torment! Louie went back to the kitchen and burst into tears.

“What the dickens is the matter now?” asked Henny, without malice.

“He’s talking to her—he’s telling her everything—”