Man Who Loved Children, The by Stead Christina

Author:Stead, Christina [Stead, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Modern Classics, Classics, Novel
ISBN: 9781453265253
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1940-01-24T20:45:00+00:00

Jo waited till they paused and sniffed good-humoredly, “Well, you’re too glad to see your Daddy back to think of me: it’s Father’s Day.”

She left them there, a handsome buttercup garland sprawled along the lawn. After a short silence, Sam raised his eyes from the depths of the orchard, where he had plunged them, drinking in through them the green and the blue, and he said wearily,

“You kids didn’t lose any dorsal vertebrae weeding the gardens while Dad-the-Bold was in furrin parts, did you?” Ernie defended himself, “The varmints wouldn’t work.” They defended themselves, “He never told us to.” Their father said miserably, as if to himself, “And the boiler wasn’t fixed up; and there’s no new boiler; and the possum died and a snake died. Nobuddy did nuffin. When Sam went away everybody just plain forgot him. ‘Near can I forgit the surblime speckticul which met my gase as I alited from the Staige with my umbreller and verlise.’ [Artemus Ward: The Atlantic Cable.] Weeds, springing up everywhere, the paths cracked and our hanni-miles dead.” He did not even laugh; just went on sadly recounting to himself the default. The boys sat round with him, as miserable as himself. In all the wild, vacant months that had passed, like a stupid, shouting, windy holiday, they had never given one thought to their father’s schemes and ideas. It had been nothing but Little-Sam’s and Saul’s and Ernie’s ideas, a great savanna of opportunity in which they stumbled, ranged, hallooed, occasionally catching sight of each other, at intervals dreaming about a personage, genie of the swamp, who called himself Sam-the-Bold, their father, and was away, his wand broken.

All the joyful Pollits were still running up- and downstairs, and the clink of plates, silver, and glasses could be heard, as well as Bonnie’s gay call, “Nearly ready, folks, nearly ready: get ready! Who’s going to strike up?” and Lennie’s wild bagpipes (made by vibrating his long lean cheek), The Campbells Are Coming, Hooray, Hooray! Then the strains of the wedding march started up under Jo’s tough fingers as Leslie Benbow, née Pollit, new-married, arrived with her short, half-bald husband, rather more flustered than is common in a twenty-six-year-old bride and plump in the waist. Leslie had not stayed her marriage for Sam. Many things had gone on without him.

But they all stayed in the house or on the porch, leaving Sam to his children at the top of the orchard, and to his thoughts which, it was evident, were not of the sweetest, not the sort a man might be expected to have on returning to the bosom of his family from a glorious trip to the Far East. Sam felt it keenly that Leslie, his favorite niece, did not come to see him, and that no one seemed to bother about him. He went on talking tiredly to the boys, with a joke from time to time, trying to regain his old style: “ ‘The people gave me a cordyal recepshun. The press was loud in her prazes,’ ” but Artemus Ward fell off his tongue without a rebound.

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