Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 63
FROM her window Alice watched them starting out. Sara was slacking; her fingers but daintily touched the kettle; Robert remonstrated. They both set it down and glared at one another. It came with definiteness to Alice that no good would come of this trip.
Tom came into the room.
"Alice," he said, reprovingly, "do you think"
"I think that with a little flexibility one could avoid a great deal of noise, if you ask me!" she flashed at him.
She knew that she lacked both dignity and tact and that these were not the tactics with which to deal with an outraged husband, but into her heart surged Sara's heady joy in ill-doing. With these words she had flung out of the window her whole basket of tricks, all the various ways in the world which she knew—and they were many—of dealing with the temperament of Tom Marcey.
"I'm not talking about noise," said Tom.
"I am," Alice retorted maddeningly, "you always raise such a pother!"
"I?" Tom inquired, scandalized.
"You," Alice insisted firmly.
Tom looked at her with gravity.
"It seems to me that every one in this house, except me, has gone mad to-day," he asserted. "I don't understand you, Alice!"
"You don't need to tell me that," said Alice, "you never have and you never will, and what's more, I don't want you to!"
"Oh, very well!" said Tom huffily, and walked out of the room.
It seemed to Alice as if she were swept by chill wind. An awful sense of separation between her and those she loved enveloped her. Her second feeling was as though she had lost Tom forever. She was surprised to feel a hot drop on her hand and realized that she was crying.
Time dragged on. There was not a sound in the house.
Alice set her teeth. Whatever happened, Tom Marcey must come back to her of his own accord. Right or wrong she was not going to throw overboard all the traditions of women that had made life tenable in a difficult world, and go running after him.
Her treacherous heart suggested that orders were to be given to Laurie, that she wanted a book that was downstairs. She set herself sternly to the task of staying in her room.
She wanted to make up with Tom. She wanted to put things straight. She wanted to make up with him for the things she had thought about him and which she hadn't spoken. Off by herself, with Tom staying huffily downstairs, she knew that he was alienated from her not only by the question of Jamie's cart. What Tom was angry about was that Alice Marcey had acted as if the children were her children and her children alone. And since he was trying just as hard as she to progress along the stages of Parents Progress, he resented her unspoken superiority.
Another and deeper anguish began to grip her heart.
The children had not returned.
It is only too obvious to a mother, especially if she has let her nerves go, that if her children are a moment late, something has happened to them. This something is always lurking outside and dogging their every footstep every time they are out of her sight. Every motor-car that passes, every window that is open, every tree that is climbed, partakes of the nature of the menacing Something that any time may happen to them, until it seems too good to be true that life will ever give them back to you safe and sound again.
Alice could endure it no longer.
She had to go and look for them.
Deep down within her was the knowledge that she was really going to look for Tom. She had given in, but she refused to look this shameful fact in the face.
Flying the lofty colors of a mother's love and anxiety—with the fact of her submission locked safely up out of sight, she went down the hall.
At the foot of the stairs she ran into Tom.
"Tom!" she cried. They might have been separated for a week.
"Alice!" They embraced one another.
"I was just going to look for the children."
"I am coming to find you!" he said, with savage tenderness.
Alice smiled. The world was as it should be. The secret at the bottom of her heart died. She had come out of her room only to look for the children.
One has to play tricks with oneself like this once in a while, or where indeed would self-respect be?