Fools' Harvest

"And were there really shops full of lollies and toys once upon a time,
Uncle Wally?" Rex asked dubiously.

"Plenty of them, towhead," I told him.

He raised his head from my shoulder against which he had been snuggling,
and turned for confirmation of the amazing statement to Lynda. As such an
idea belonged to the realms of fairy tales in his mind, his appeal to his
mother was to unimpeachable authority.

Lynda, looking up from her knitting, nodded her head and added, "And
perhaps we shall have them again sometime, darling." Then seeing the few
wretched little sweets I had given him, she charged me with spoiling her
son--unconscious of the pathos of the indictment.

"What's spoiling?" He was at the age when every new word demanded
elucidation.

"Something you, at least, will never suffer from," I told him.

Just then the long-drawn wail of a steam siren came from the mills by the
distant wharf. To a thousand men it was a summons to another night of
toil. Lynda put aside her knitting and stood up.

"Eight o'clock, Rexy boy, bed time!" She held out her hands. With an
obedience that was part nature and part training, he slipped off my
knees. He bestowed rather a sticky kiss, first on his father and then on
me, And turned to his mother. Fergus and I watched them until Lynda
closed the door of the next room behind her.

We sat staring at the smouldering heap of smoky coal slack on the hearth
that scarcely took the chill from the room.

I spoke my thoughts aloud. "Spoiling him! Think of it, man! Half a dozen
miserable little sweets one wouldn't have given to a beggar child a few
years ago! That's spoiling him! The tragedy of it!"

Fergus stirred uneasily in his creaking home-made chair. "Luxury is
relative, although we have only learned it lately," he said. "But don't
let it get you down, Wally."

"But it does get me down!" I retorted. "I know you and Lynda have carved
out some strange kind of paradise for yourselves in the common hell we
live in, but I cannot help wondering what Rex and a few thousand kiddies
like him will think when they are old enough to know what we have done to
them."

"We?" Fergus sounded argumentative.

"Yes, we! You, I and everyone else who survives. We asked for it, and got
it. But it's so infernally unfair to them. Dash it, Fergus! it was their
heritage more than ours."

"That conscience of yours must be a nasty companion," Fergus grinned.
"Don't let it prod you, old boy. Be reasonable, and recognise that
neither you nor I, personally, could have altered things one hair's
breadth. Kismet!"

"Kismet be blowed!" I came back. "I doubt if in another twenty years the
children who are growing up now will accept that explanation."

"Arguing can't help us, Wally--or them." I knew he was trying to turn me
off the subject. It was a settled policy of both my sister and Fergus not
to let me dwell on the works of the "Paramount Power."