Free The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead Page A

considerately, “you don’t need to tonight. Tomorrow’s Sunday-Funday, and we’re painting the house—I’ll wear my overalls.”
    “Did you hear what I said?”
    “O.K.” He shed his trousers at once and rushed in to her holding them out at arm’s length. He stood beside her for a moment, watching her pinch the cloth together. “I bet I could do that easy, Mum: why don’t you teach me?”
    “Thank you, my son; but Mother will do it while she has the strength.”
    “Are you sick today, Mother?”
    “Mother’s always sick and tired,” she said gloomily.
    “Will I bring you my shawl, Mother?” This was his baby shawl that he always took to bed with him when he felt sick or weepy.
    “No, Son.” She looked at him straight, as if at a stranger, and then drew him to her, kissing him on the mouth.
    “You’re Mother’s blessing; go and help Louie.” He cavorted and dashed out, hooting. She heard him in half a minute, chattering away affectionately to his half sister.
    “But I should have been better off if I’d never laid eyes on any of them,” Henny grumbled to herself, as she put on her glasses and peered at the dark serge.
2 Sam comes home.
    Stars drifted in chinks of the sky as Sam came home: the lamps were clouded in leaves in this little island of streets between river and parks. Georgetown’s glut of children, issue of streets of separate little houses, went shouting, colliding downhill, while Sam came up whistling, seeing the pale faces, flying knees, lights and stars above, around him. Sam could have been home just after sunset when his harum-scarum brood were still looking for him, and he had meant to be there, for he never broke his word to them. He could have taken Shank’s ponies, which, he was fond of saying, “take me everywhere, far afield and into the world of marvels which lies around us, into the highways and byways, into the homes of rich and poor alike, seeking the doorstep of him who loves his fellow man—and fellow woman, of course—seeking every rostrum where the servants of evil may be flagellated, and the root of all evil exposed.”
    On Shank’s ponies he could have got home that afternoon in less than an hour, crossing the Key Bridge from Rosslyn, when the naturalists left the new bird sanctuary on Analostan Island. But today Sam was the hero of his Department and of the naturalists because he had got the long-desired appointment with the Anthropological Mission to the Pacific, and not only would he have his present salary plus traveling expenses, but his appointment was a bold step forward on his path of fame.
    Sam looked, as he passed, at a ramshackle little house, something like the wretched slum he had once boarded in with his brother at Dundalk, out of Baltimore, and a smile bared his teeth.
    “Going to glory,” said Sam: “I’ve come a long way, a long, long way, Brother. Eight thousand a year and expenses—and even Tohoga House, in Georgetown, D.C., lovely suburb of the nation’s capital; and the children of poor Sam Pollit, bricklayer’s son, who left school at twelve, are going to university soon, under the flashing colonnades of America’s greatest city, in the heart of the democratic Athens, much greater than any miserable Athens of the dirt grubbers of antiquity, yes—I feel sober, at rest. The old heart doesn’t flutter: I must be careful not to rest on my laurels now—haste not, rest not! I feel free!” Sam began to wonder at himself; why did he feel free? He had always been free, a free man, a free mind, a freethinker. “By Gemini,” he thought, taking a great breath, “this is how men feel who take advantage of their power.”
    Sam looked round him—just ahead was Volta Place, where Dribble Smith, his friend in the Treasury, lived. He chuckled, hearing Dribble practicing his scales inside, to his daughter’s accompaniment. Passing Smith’s hedge, Sam said half aloud,
    “What it must be, though, to taste supreme power!”
    He thought of his