Read Online The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead - Free Book Online Page B

air. If she became conscious of these streams on the rainbow fringe of memory, she would bite her lip and flush, perhaps angry at her indulgent father for getting her the man he had got, angry at herself for having been so weak.
    “Sadie was a lady,” she would suddenly say in the stillness, and, “Hrmph!” or, “If I had a ladida like that to deal with I’d drown her when a pup.” Besides, she could not even now forget the humiliation of having her name five or six years in old social calendars among the “eligibles”: nor of having married a man who was after all a mere jog-trot subaltern bureaucrat, dragged into the service in the lowest grades without a degree, from mere practical experience in the Maryland Conservation Commission, and who owed his jealousy-creating career to her father’s influence in the lobbies of the capital.
    Soon Ernie, her favorite, would rush in, saying breathlessly, “Did it come out, Moth?” This kept her sitting there. While she sat and played or did her microscopic darning, sometimes a small mouse would run past, or even boldly stand and inquisitively stare at her. Henny would look down at its monstrous pointed little face calmly and go on with her work, while it pretended to run off, and took another stand, still curious, behind another chair leg. The mice were well fed. They regularly set traps, but there was no coming to the end of the mice in that house. Henny accepted the sooty little beings as house guests and would only go on the warpath at night, when she woke up suddenly to smell in the great hall, or even in her own bedroom, the musky penetrating odor of their passage: or when she looked at her little spectator and saw that it was a pregnant mother. She would have accepted everything else, too, the winds, the rattlings and creaking of the old house, the toothaches and headaches, the insane anxieties about cancer and t.b., too, all house guests, if she could have, and somewhere between all these hustlers, made herself a little life. But she had the children, she had a stepdaughter, she had no money, and she had to live with a man who fancied himself a public character and a moralist of a very saintly type. The moralist said mice brought germs and so she was obliged to chase the mouse and all its fellow guests. Nevertheless, although she despised animals, she felt involuntarily that the little marauder was much like herself, trying to get by: she belonged to the great race of human beings who regard life as a series of piracies of all powers.
    She would play on and on till her cheeks got hot and then call for another cup of tea, or else go and get herself some store cheese and Worcestershire sauce in a plate, pushing the cards aside.
    “I wish your mother would stop playing patience, it makes her look like an old witch or an old vixen possum,” Sam would say in a gently benevolent voice, in some offstage colloquy, if he ever came home and found her still at it. It did exhaust her in the end. She played feverishly, until her mind was a darkness, until all the memories and the ease had long since drained away. And then when the father came home, the children who had been battling and shuttling around her would all rush off like water down the sink, leaving her sitting there, with blackened eyes, a yellow skin, and straining wrinkles: and she would think of the sink, and mutter, as she did at this moment,
    “A dirty cracked plate: that’s just what I am!”
    “What did you say, Mummy?” asked little Sam. She looked at him, the image of his father, and repeated, “I’m a greasy old soup plate,” making them all laugh, laughing herself.
    “Mother, you’re so silly,” Evie said.
    Henny got up and moved into her room. It was a large room taking up a quarter of the original ground-floor plan, with two windows facing the east, and one window on the front lawn but screened from R Street by the double hedges. Although the room was furnished with the walnut suite that she