Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 11
WHAT with people from the Other Side straying in the daily adventures in life handed out to Alice were more exciting than any other adventures of the spirit which life had offer. She found what people called the "monotonous domestic life" often nerve-racking; it played over all the emotions from comedy to the blackest tragedy. It was funny and pathetic—everything in its diversity but dull. Its fault was that of being too absorbing, for whenever one wanted to take a vacation into the calm spaces of the outer world, from the crowding emotions which it was forever giving you, it would pull you back by handing you one of those absorbing adventures which it was forever preparing. That was why neither Tom nor Alice could endure conversation which began, "How do you stand the monotony of domestic life?"
Friends would ask in a tone of pity, "Don't you find Shoreham dull after having lived in New York?" Or a friend from his bachelor days would ask Thomas Marcey:
"Well, Marcey, who would have expected to see either you or Alice so domestic!"
Talk like this would have made Alice gnash her teeth if she had known how. It was her mother-in-law, however, who was proud of having had but one child, who aroused Alice's temper the easiest. The elder Mrs. Marcey was forever mourning:
"Oh, my dear, I hope that Jamie will be the last! Three children, and the oldest only eight, are really too much!" Or, "When I think of how children shut a mother up"
There were times when Alice's former chum, Sue Grayson, exasperated her almost as much as did her mother-in-law. She would come to call, bringing her only child and crying,
"Well, how you manage it I don't know! Gladys is enough for me. And the expense!"
It was when baited beyond endurance by talk like this that Alice asserted,
"I think that three children is a miserable little family. I want at least two more."
She said this before Sue Grayson and her mother-in-law and she said it defiantly. Alice's hair was red, and she had a high and sparkling temper. Sue Grayson rested an uncomprehending gaze on Alice, such a gaze one rests on a lower animal, a rabbit or a guinea pig, for instance.
"Enough is enough," said she definitely if cryptically. "Impassed in domesticity, what becomes of a woman's higher spiritual nature? It dies. The spiritual nature, to continue to exist, must have adventure."
It annoyed Alice to the point of wishing to stamp feet not to be able to explain what she felt to these two superior women.
Her mother-in-law murmured with austere self-congratulation:
"I could never bring myself to call but one human soul from the unknown!"
Only her early training prevented Alice from crying "Bosh and rubbish!" while from childhood there rushed over her a desire to snap her fingers and stamp her foot which, when you are young, is a satisfactory way of expressing the emotion of anger. When her mother-in-law spoke about the unknown, and her friend openly pitied her for being what is known as "tied down so," you were at the point where Alice became infuriated.
No one could guess that the loud and angry roar of Sara which reached the parlor with a shocking volume of sound, rang up the curtain on a new phase of the domestic drama. At this noise Alice said:
"Excuse me. I must see what the matter is."
She found Sara, in a highly satisfactory temper. Sara was shaking her red-gold curls and stamping her feet. She was screaming, too.
"Darling angel," thought her mother. "Scream while you can and stamp your feet while you can. Soon enough you'll be grown up and have to be polite. Soon enough you will have to swallow your indignation."
Robert sat with protecting arms around Jamie, who in faithful imitation of his serious-minded Scotch nurse, waggled his finger at his screaming sister, saying self-righteously:
"No, no; naughty!"
Robert told his mother the cause of the trouble in a shocked voice:
"She almost slapped the baby!"
"Poor darling!" cried Alice, embracing not the baby but Sara. Sara, grateful for sympathy, wept quietly into Alice's shoulder.
"Bad girl," Jamie remarked solemnly.
"Yes, she is," cried Robert.
"Both of you boys stop nagging Sara," commanded Alice. She soothed her daughter. The tense atmosphere of the nursery relaxed. Alice made no attempt to inquire into the cause of trouble.
"I'll take Sara with me," said she smiling at her two sons as if it were a favor for them to lend Sara
They both looked at her so pleasantly boyish that she ran back to kiss them. Their agreeable appearance must have also appeared to Sara. She ran after Jamie, her "own sweet baby." She put both her arms around him and almost strangled him in her close embrace.
No one in this little world was surprised at the sudden change from anger to love. No one wanted explanations; no one wanted to fix blame and have punishment meted out. It is grown people who teach children to take satisfaction in one another's punishment. This absence of the judicial frame of mind was one of the attributes of childhood which most charmed Alice. Refreshed, she speeded her guests on their way.