Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 18
THEY sat in the hammock, their arms around each other, explaining their altercation. They looked so sweet that in Alice's mind their uncouth language became charming. She considered the incident closed, but their grandmother didn't. Tom Marcey didn't think it was closed. His mother said—before every one:
"Something has got to be done about the language which those children use; where they hear such terms I can't imagine!" Then, with her eye on Jamie, who was still pursuing the slaughter of the rose bugs with the concentration of a two-and-a-half-year-old, once it finds a congenial employment, "I wonder why babies are so lovely in their bewitching little plays and become so vulgar as soon as they are older."
After the company had gone, Tom Marcey said, "Something has got to be done about Robert. A boy shouldn't kick his sister."
"They were only fooling," Alice protested weakly.
To this poor argument Tom paid no attention. "It should be instinctive in a manly boy," he said, "not to hurt his little sister. And as for kicks—" Tom's chivalrous spirit shrank before the idea of a brother so lost to decency that he could lift a kicking foot at his sister, even in play.
Alice made no answer to this statement either. History does not teach us that natural man finds any shrinking from lifting his hand to the females of his race. This theory of man's reluctance to hurt those of the weaker sex has only come into its full flowering in the past few years. Man through the ages has hit, pummeled, and kicked woman when she proved recalcitrant, and often when she did not, and boy unchecked will do the same. Alice knew this; all mothers who are not willfully blind or sentimental know this, and when it happens just in play it doesn't seem worth while to pay attention to it—there are so many things one has to pay attention to.
Tom Marcey had no doubts concerning the righteousness of his views. Chivalry was what that hulking boy of his was going to learn, even if he had to be taught chivalry with a club. Alice heard him teaching it in tones of righteous indignation and she also heard Robert say indignantly:
"She told me to try and see if I could kick her when she ran past. How could I know she was going to turn around and light with her stomach on my toe?"
Her sympathies were all with Robert, especially when she saw Sara peacocking off with her father, her head affectedly on one side, the conscious virtue of self satisfaction radiating from her for having come out on top. Alice realized then and there how sex antagonisms had begun. She realized also why Cain killed Abel.
Sara was insufferable the rest of the day. She told her mother, before Robert, that she was a good girl.
She was nauseously good; she was as offensive as little heroines of our grandmothers' day, who prayed freely that their parents' souls might be saved.
"Jamie kills rose bugs, he squashes them," she remarked in superior accents. "I wouldn't!"
"You used to," grumbled Robert.
"I don't now," she replied, smiling sweetly.
"You did yesterday," said Robert.
Sara looked at yesterday as down a vista of years. She shook her head.
"I don't now," she repeated with maddening sweetness. "I don't get dirty and horrid when I play. Mother, do I?"
"Often!" responded Alice brutally.
"Oh, no, I don't," Sara contradicted in sirupy tones.
"That," said Alice fiercely to her husband, "is what, you get by correcting one child before another."
"That is what I get?" he asked with the blindness of the male, "she seemed to me very charming."
This was more than Alice could bear. Sara had been ostentatiously affected, so affected that Alice longed to slap her, but Tom had drunk in all this sentiment, and apparently stood ready for more. What was the use of men, anyway, when they didn't know true affection from affectation? He could even reply pleasantly when she asked, "Aren't I a little angel, Father?"
There comes an end to all days, and no mother can deny that this had been a trying one. After everything that had happened, to have Sara turn sugary and superior was almost more than flesh could endure. The worst of it was that Sara was really being bad as anything, bad as Eve, and you couldn't say a thing to her; worse still, you couldn't do a thing to her. She was self-conscious, superior, affected, had an insufferable "I am better than thou" manner, toward Robert, was encased in an armor of vanity so thick that it could not be broken even by violence, and perfectly sure all the time that she was a good girl. Alice longed for the power to mete out some retribution to her as no naughtiness of Sara's had ever made her long.
Robert in disgust vanished from the scene and presently from a distance Alice heard a cautious "chugg chugging."
"There's that Zotsby again," said Sara. "He's a horrid person. I don't like persons with steam engine insides. I think steam engine insides are vulgar, don't you, Mother? That's why I wouldn't have him at Evelyn Dearie's funeral.—Though Evelyn Dearie was vulgar too—Laurie said so." She minced off calling over her shoulder to Robert, "I wouldn't listen to the name of Uncle Zotsby's dog if you told me!"