Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 48
THERE was a dead silence. There was no doubt about it that Tom Marcey was in earnest. The children ate with downcast eyes. You could see even a tear coursing slowly down Sara's smooth cheek. Tom Marcey drew a long breath and smiled at Alice.
"Alice," he said, "I've been thinking you ought to go and take a vacation,—anyway go off for a week—go off for a week-end. You need a change."
"Maybe I will," she reflected.
The children still were quiet after their father's outburst.
"What peace!" said Tom. "Beautiful old times those when children were seen and not heard."
"Yes, it's peaceful now," said Alice pessimistically, "but what of this afternoon? What's to prevent my cousin Melinda coming? What's to prevent those awful people that took such a fancy to you last year descending? What's to prevent an influx of those relatives of yours in Pennsylvania any minute? Do you realize that I've got any number of second cousins scattered around Boston and its suburbs? Why shouldn't they come? Look what's come this month already. Think what it's done to the family! Look what it's done to the bills! There's no security any more in living in the country. Space isn't any more. Formerly, when people whom you didn't like were tucked securely away in some obscure place you could be pretty sure you wouldn't see them. Now look at it! Here we are swarmed over by Mullinses one day—what's to keep off the Brewsters?"
"Good heavens!" said Tom, "you don't think that!"
"Why shouldn't they! After Mullinses anything could happen—Brewsters or anything."
"What's a Brewster?" piped up Sara.
"A Brewster's an animal. She gets a strangle-hold on you and never lets go," explained her father.
"What's a Brewster like?" Sara inquired further. She had forgotten her griefs. Her eyes gleamed. There was something about her father's description that arrested her imagination.
"Brewsters are like three dour women draped in black. They look like human beings, but they're really vampires."
"Oo-oo-oo!" cried Sara, having a delicious scary shiver.
"Ghouls, too," her father continued, "they haunt graveyards."
"Oo-oo-oo!" said Sara again. "Sumpin' like ghosts?"
"Worse," her father told her impressively.
Here Sara banged a little fist on the table until the dishes rattled.
"I'll tell you what, Father," she declared, "we won't let um in. If I see three black ones coming in here me and Robert and Jamie'll drive them off. We'll throw things at um! We won't let um in! We'll set Uncle Zotsby's dog on 'em."
"No, you won't set Uncle Zotsby's dog on 'em. I'm not going to keep 'em off," growled Robert, deep in the gloom into which he had retired at his father's admonition, for it brought to his mind only too plainly the bitterest disappointment of his life, which had occurred the night before when Mr. Mullins had offered to take him off for a tour in his car. "Pack him in as easy as not," he had repeatedly urged. Since then life to Robert had seemed a stagnant pool. He realized that life without Mullinses at best was going to be a blank and dismal affair, but to cut Mullinses, and a motor trip in a magnificent car, out of his life at one swift blow had been too much for his soul. His rebellion now found vent in these sour words:
"I wish Brewsters would come. I wish they'd come and stay!"
He rose to his feet and moodily left the room. Sara cast a reproachful glance after him.
"Oh, dear!" she said, "oh, dear, now he's going to be trying all day!" Then she returned with zest to her former conversation. "Do they look like people, Brewsters?"
"Yes," said Tom, "they have the human form; but that's all.
Here Jamie let his spoon fall with a clatter. Alice turned toward him and observed that he was staring at his father wide-eyed. The menace of the Brewsters had for some reason arrested his imagination as had nothing else before. Sara, also, observed her brother. To see him thus stirred from his usual tranquil calm made the thought of Brewsters all the more menacing and delightful.
"How will they come—on broomsticks?" she asked.
"Broomsticks? Of course not! How would any disagreeable thing come? In a motor, of course. They'll come in a big black motor, and I've no doubt their chauffeur will look like a hearse driver."
For the next little while peace brooded over the Marcey household. It was so intense that presently Alice went to find out where her children were. Robert was lying on the lawn on his stomach, his eyes fixed on vacancy. He was brooding deeply and bitterly over his great grief. It was evident that parents seemed to him inimical to all the joys of childhood. When Alice called to him to find out where Sara and Jamie were, he answered in surly fashion that Alice could "search him."
It was Laurie who supplied this information. She supplied it in a high and angry tone.
"Will you step this way, Mis' Marcey, and rout me out them two from underneath my bed, and me wanting to dress for mass an' late an' all. An' not a foot will they budge, an' Sara saying 'Oo-oo-oo' in a tone that would bring goose flesh on you. She keeps on like a daft one saying to me, 'Git out, ye Brewsters!' an' thin Jamie he says 'Oo-oo-oo' like a banshee."
As Alice entered Laurie's room "Oo-oo-oo" came in Sara's voice, making what was known to her as a "ghost noise."
"Here's another, Jamie! Oo-oo-oo!" Then, as her mother peered under the bed, "Oh," said Sara in her natural voice. "Sweet Mother! I thought you was some one else."
"What are you doing underneath that bed, getting your white dress all dirty and you, Jamie, with your clean Sunday clothes and white socks? Come right out from there. What are you doing?" she demanded as they emerged, crumpled and flushed, and with marks of dust upon them that proclaimed to Alice that Laurie was not as thorough as one would have liked to have believed her. To her impatient question they chirped in chorus:
"Brewstering!"
"Stop it!" commanded Alice. "It's a very silly thing to do. I wish you'd go out and play in the sunshine."
They trotted off together and Alice heard them making ghost noises as they went, their imaginations still captivated by the Brewster menace.
The older Marceys went out to inspect their garden, and again a Sabbath peace seemed to brood. But Alice felt that this peace was illusion, that under the fair surface of a calm Sunday morning, things were brewing, as if some kind of storm of the spirit were coming up. It in no way surprised her when the sound of dispute arose, and Robert's voice in loud anger.
"You keep off me or I will, I say!" and then a shrill wail of pain from Sara. She flew around the corner of the house, followed by her brother.
"He's done it!" she shrilled. "He's done it—what you told him never to, no matter what I did. He's done it! He hit me!"
"Yes! And why—and why?" cried Robert, with the indignation of the outraged male; "they was hiding behind trees and Jamie shot arrows at me, and Sara came out and kicked me and said, 'Get out, you Brewster!'"
"But he knew I was in fun," wailed Sara; "he knew I was in fun. I didn't mean to hurt him, and he—he meant to hurt me."
"But I didn't hurt you," said Robert.
"But you meant to hurt me, and I didn't mean to hurt you," sobbed Sara. "And now, Father, now give it to him! You said last time he did it he was too big, and that men never hit women, and you said you'd give him"
"Now, see here, Sara," her father commanded, "stop crying. And, Robert, you go into the house. Peace," he cried, "is what I want, and peace is what I intend to have. Who started this silly Brewster business, anyway?"
"You did," Alice informed him. He ignored this loftily.
"You did, Father," Sara corroborated.
"There'll be no more of it," her father informed her.
"But what can I do?" Sara inquired. "I can't Brewster; I can't Chaplin."