Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 52
IT was true. The house was spooky. Robert found a book from which he learned incantations. Sara spent her time in conjuring. The Marcey house seemed peopled with strange presences, and Jamie, who during this duel was neglected, wept.
Alice felt she had enough to bear without her Mother-in-law arriving with one large yellow balloon—just one single balloon, and that for Sara. Every one who has any children knows that there is nothing more destructive to the domestic peace than a present to one child in the family alone, and Alice knew only too well that Sara would use this toy for the purpose vulgarly known as "getting Robert's goat."
Alice was right. Sara used her balloon shamelessly, not only for the discomfiture of Robert, but, this being a moment when all males were distasteful to her, she flaunted it before the eyes of the poor, famished Jamie. Alice was glad when, with a peacocking walk, Sara and her balloon departed to Mrs. Painter's. Alice cast a searching look on her Mother-in-law, hoping that she might have noticed what havoc this inadequate present had caused. But the elder Mrs. Marcey was knitting placidly; she had brought her work for the afternoon.
Very soon came the sound of Sara's feet upon the stairs. But instead of descending upon her mother as she usually did when she returned from Mrs. Painter's, full of new fairy lore and tales of canary birds who ate from one's mouth, Sara continued up the stairs. Instead of rushing up them with a glad little patter, Alice noticed that Sara walked slowly, as though suddenly stricken with age. Then, as some friends came in, Alice forgot her child. It was not until they had left and dusk was falling that she turned to her Mother-in-law with the question:
"I wonder what's happened to Sara?"
Another ten minutes went by. Still no Sara. Alice went through the rooms of her house, calling. There was no reply anywhere. Alice went down the back stairs to the kitchen, but Sara had vanished. She had come into the house and the house had apparently swallowed her up.
"It's this fairy business," Alice grumbled. "It's getting worse than Evelyn Dearie." Indeed, since the coming of the fairies and Sara's numerous bumps from her attempts to learn to fly there had been no peace in the Marcey household.
Alice began a systematic search. She looked under beds; she searched in closets. Anxiety clutched her heart—an anxiety which grew with each moment. It communicated itself to her Mother-in-law and to Laurie, until the house echoed with voices crying for Sara, while the women went around, opening and shutting the same closets and looking beneath the same pieces of furniture.
One thing was sure: Sara must be in the house somewhere. To go out, she would have had to pass through the kitchen or they would have heard her. coming down the front stairs.
Alice had several times gone up to the attic, but in the attic were no hiding places, unless one hid behind trunks. At last, as no place remained except the attic, she took a candle and again went up-stairs. From one corner came a little sound of hopeless sobbing. Alice followed this sound, and in a wide-yawning Saratoga trunk was Sara. Sara had opened the trunk and got in to sob her heart out in the hopeless despair of childhood—a despair that knows only the moment and cannot feel the dawn of any to-morrow.
The sound of children crying this way is one of the most terrible sounds in the world, because when grief, unmixed with any anger, overtakes them, there is nothing for them except hopelessness.
In all Alice's life she had never heard Sara cry like this. Sara usually cried loudly and resentfully, or, if her feelings were hurt, two lovely tears as clear as jewels overflowed from her eyes—tears evidently meant to be kissed away. She had cried for grief, of course, but before, with a grief that could be comforted. One did not have to tell Alice that this grief of Sara's, whatever it was, was hopeless. Something irrevocable had happened to her little spirit that she would always remember. Alice knelt beside the trunk.
"Sara," she said, "Sara, darling! Tell mother what's the matter."
At the sympathy in Alice's voice Sara shrank away. Her sobbing changed to a low moan of grief. Nothing could comfort her.
There came Grandma's heavy foot upon the steep attic stairs. She puffed slightly as she came across the room.
"Why, of all things!" she said, and then her eyes fell with compassion upon Sara's little flattened figure, face down upon the bottom of the big trunk.
"Well, of all things," she repeated in a voice of deep sympathy. "Why, sweet Sara—Grandma's darling! What's the matter, Sara darling?"
As her mother and grandmother implored her to tell them what was the matter, for nothing deserved tears like this, Sara remained speechless and continued to cry the more. It was then that the Grandmother had a moment of insight.
"Leave her," she whispered to Alice, "leave her alone a moment. Send Robert up to her. Perhaps she'll talk to Robert." For childhood will confess to childhood when words fail them before grown-ups.
They waited what seemed an interminable time, asking each other:
"What could be the matter with her?"
"What do you suppose has happened?"
At last Robert returned. His face was serious.
"She's done an awful thing," he announced; "she's killed Mrs. Painter's tamest canary. She didn't mean to, of course. She just came in with her balloon, and the canary's always loose, and it was scared and dashed its head against the mirror! What ails Sara is that she feels like a murderess, I guess!"
Sara, the murderess, had been weeping hours unconsoled and inconsolable!
"She thinks it all happened because Father threw away her lucky stone," Robert continued. "And she blames my Attic Fairy."
Alice started up the stairs again, but Laurie stopped her.
"Sara's gone out, though it's dusk already," she said; "nor could I nor any one have stopped her. With the tears streaming down her face she's gone out, and looking determined; so I hadn't a word to say to her."
"She's gone for her lucky stone," said Robert.
"Maybe she's gone to Mrs. Painter's," Grandma suggested.
Robert was sent on the search.
"She isn't in the yard," he reported, and a few moments later, "She's not at Mrs. Painter's. I looked through the window, and Mrs. Painter was sitting just rocking and sewing all by herself."
Visions of what might have happened to Sara in this moment of her determination and her despair came to Alice.
"There's nothing to do but to go and look everywhere," she said to her Mother-in-law.