Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 12
SHE told Tom about it all as soon as he came home.
"What the matter with the world is, is politeness," she asserted. "I smile at people when they talk like that until my mouth cracks. It would be good for all of us if I told Sue Grayson and your mother what I think of them. Oh, you should have seen Sara's boiling hot temper. I kissed her to see her so perfectly mad. I felt as if she were my own spirit, stamping its foot for me."
What was the matter with the world, or even what ailed his mother, troubled Tom Marcey but little. What the matter was with his children was of immense importance. He had been thinking about them on his way home. He had one of those moments common to all fathers when he had looked down into the bottomless pit of his responsibility. There was so little time to spend on them: there was so much to be done. He was in a mood to take Sara's roars to heart, so he naturally asked what the matter had been. Alice replied airily:
"I didn't inquire. Rob said that Sara was in an awful rage. She almost slapped the baby."
"I think that if Sara almost slapped Jamie and was in an awful rage she didn't deserve petting," Tom said judicially.
"She needed petting," Alice exclaimed with some heat. Alice's temper was always frail after an encounter with Tom's mother. "Those boys had exasperated her."
"How do you know" asked the Scientist on the Hearth, "when you didn't take the trouble to ask a question?"
"I didn't have to ask questions; I only had to look at Sara," responded Alice. "Why don't you ask her what the matter was?" she suggested. The suggestion was a malicious one, and Alice knew it.
"Sara, darling, come to Father," said Tom guilelessly. "What were you crying about?"
"Did you brang something for me?" inquired Sara.
"What did you cry for a little while ago?"
"I wasn't cwying. Was I cwying, Mother?" Candid innocence was in her earnest eyes. "I was a good girl."
Alice turned to the window and inspected the world with an appearance of abstraction.
"Didn't you cry at all?" Sara shook her head meditatively and looked pensively back into the past.
"I never cwyed yesterday," she brought out with profound conviction.
"I'm not talking about yesterday: I'm talking about to-day."
"She means by 'yesterday' anything that has happened," Alice explained without turning her head.
"But you did cry yesterday," Tom went on with patience. "Just a little while ago. Think." There was silence. Sara seemed to be peering back into remotest antiquity. She looked up at her father with confiding eyes. He smiled encouragingly. The illuminating words which Sara spoke were:
"I see a eenty, weenty bird in the tree!"
"Sara," pleaded her father, "don't think about birds: think of why you cried."
"All right," she agreed cheerfully. Anything to please Father. She frowned her brow engagingly. "What for made me cwy? I cwyed because I just did—that's what for because."
"Her will-o'-the-wisp of a brain must do a few minutes' consecutive work now and then," Tom apologized to Alice, though he was beginning to feel like a pig. "Think, Sara, of the reason that made you cry."
Sara looked from one to the other; they towered above her, august but friendly. They were the two people toward whom her flooding affections flowed most readily. When they were displeased with her she wept. She wanted to be told as often as they would that they loved her. All day long, like a gay spring, she babbled terms of endearment. Hastily she turned her back on all difficult subjects. That was why she preferred birds as a topic of conversation to the unpleasant one of tears. She was a child of light, of a flowering, ardent nature, swift to anger, quick to tears and quickly back again to laughter. She played through this cycle many times a day. Emotion was the element in which she lived. Now her dear mother and father wanted something of her. They were both waiting, expectant. She would not fail them. Her searching eyes fell on the waving poplar leaves.
"What for did I cwy? I cwyed because the wind blowed in the trees."
She gave it out so sparkling and triumphant that no one would have had the heart to tell her that she wasn't a clever child. Her manner showed that she considered the incident closed, and with a burst of fireworks. Besides this, her father was laughing, and Sara laughed with him. She could tell by the way he laughed that she had been a clever child.
Everything would now have been well if Rob hadn't come into the room in time to hear her last words.
"That's not what made you cry," he asserted. "You got mad. You were mad because you were selfish. You wouldn't let Jamie take the blocks. You were a bad girl."
Silliness in his sister irritated him, and his parents frequently laughed at sayings of hers which irritated him most deeply. He did not consider her a baby to be indulged, but a trying and flighty contemporary.
"When you know what you did," said Tom, "what made you talk about wind in trees?" Alice sighed. Her husband frowned.
When a child is five it certainly ought to have more responsibility, and it is hard for the masculine mind to tolerate such vagueness.
"I'll tell you why she didn't," Robert volunteered. What he considered the smirking expression of his sister's face annoyed him. "She was afraid you'd punish her for being bad to the baby. She never tells the bad things she does—never."
Indeed, she never did. Her one desire in life was to please. Far from the mind of Sara was the telling of anything disagreeable about herself. Such happenings dropped promptly into the bottomless pit of oblivion, or were translated into some one else's fault.
Robert spoke with bitter disapproval; telling the bad things he did was his long suit. He had only to tell his parents the truth about his worst sins to be treated with lenience. He had gotten to depend a good deal on this shining quality of his to get him out of scrapes. Like most brothers, he had but small opinion of his sister's intelligence, and even less since she failed to grasp so simple a fact. At his son's words Tom Marcey eyed his daughter gloomily.
"She has no memory and no logic," said he. "She hasn't the slightest conception of cause and effect."
It is talk like this from men concerning their children that would drive young mothers to suicide were it not that consideration for their babies restrains them—for there is not a mother living who believes in her heart that her husband is fitted for the bringing up of young children.
Later Tom earnestly talked up the moral issue with Alice. He finally decided:
"That child has got to tell the truth!"
There are many men who would hesitate to say, "Come, my dear, she is small for her age and she must grow three inches by Tuesday week," who do say things like, "she must learn to tell the truth at once."