# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 6

IT is astonishing how quickly The Other One learns to hide. If you even glanced at Jamie when he went to The Other Side he knew it and came back even though he was only two and a half.
Alice knew that he danced to himself in the glass. She had found it out one day when he had forgotten that she was in the room, and she saw him jigging to himself. He held his hands above his head, fluttering them in time to one of those rhythms to which babies are forever beating time, that are forever ringing in their ears. Sometimes he took chubby dance steps and again he jigged up and down from the knees but not moving his feet at all. He was as absorbed as a scientist and as serious as if dancing were a religious rite. A solemn joy shone from his face. Then presently, without remembering his mother, he sat down on the floor and picked up a shoe and played himself a rhythm which went: "Tap, tap tap—Tap, tap, tap—Tap, tap, tap, tap."
She spied on him after that and would find him dancing before the glass, keeping time to the music she couldn't hear. But if he heard her footstep first—he would pretend to be about something else. Often she would hear him beating out his mysterious rhythms. Often, forgetting himself, he would absent-mindedly play them with a spoon on the table during mealtimes.
Alice so loved the spectacle of this dance that she would play foot-compelling airs on the piano never look​ing around. She would be rewarded by hearing him jigging away behind her. She had a triumph the day he tugged her by the skirt, and when she followed unresisting he towed her to the piano without speaking a word. That day she kept faith with him and never so much as glanced sidelong from the corners of her eyes. After a long time he became so tame that Alice could turn around if she did it unobtrusively and shyly enough—if you act embarrassed before them it sometimes helps—and that was one of the days when she felt a decoration had been given her.
Of all the children Robert was the most mysterious. You would never have suspected him of such things as going to The Other Side at all. He was matter-of-fact in his manner, and when inclined spoke beautiful English, ornamented with long and carefully chosen words, many of whose meanings he understood, and all of which sounded well.
By this time his attitude toward his sister Sara did not differ from that of most brothers. He was censorious and hectoring in his manner toward her. But in his heart of hearts he yielded a sullen respect to that fiery child. Besides, he loved her tenderly, and not only endured her tumultuous affection but he kissed her as often as he allowed her to kiss him, until he went to school and learned that a boy unsexes himself when he kisses his sister.
He was the last boy in the world one would have expected to have anything like two voices. Time and again when he was little Alice would hear him playing with another child. The other child had a high, rather plaintive voice, almost like a girl's. Robert from babyhood had had a resonant boyish voice. From a distance Alice would hear these two children conversing together. She had heard them playing outside. She had ​heard them playing in the nursery when it seemed unlikely that Robert would have a friend with him.
The first time that the true state of affairs really pricked itself into her consciousness was one day when she had been giving Robert his bath. She left the bathroom, and as she shut the door the familiar treble voice sounded in her ears and Robert's voice in answer; and the treble voice again and then Robert's. A stranger would have sworn that two children were playing there in the tub together, and yet Alice knew there was but one child and that child was Robert.
After that she heard them often and yet she never surprised them together. Robert never forgot she was in the room. She would hear them talking after Robert had been put to bed, but silence greeted her when she came in. She never caught a word that The Other One said. Once only she almost surprised them, coming in quietly as she did, and when she asked Robert,
"What were you playing, dear?" he answered,
"Nothing," and kicked both his feet with embarrassment. Then when she insisted in a disarming voice,
"But you were playing something," he hid his head in the pillow for greater security, although it was already dark, and when she urged her smoothest,
"Tell Mother," he murmured in a suffocated voice,
"I was an angel, and I was in the angel cage on top of the ship."
She figured it out later that angels had to have cages because of their wings. The angel cage was the only glimpse she ever got of what went on behind her back, until much later.
In the street, however, she would sometimes come upon Robert, who at home was so serious and good-mannered, his face alight with a deviltry unknown to her, a swaggering, bullying, roystering spirit shining ​through him that was as foreign to her as though she had never seen the child before. She knew for a fact that he could put both his hands behind his ears and waggle them in so exasperating a fashion that every little girl who beheld him screamed and stuck out her tongue, and every little boy went into fits of joyful laughter and tried to imitate Robert's gesture; but not even in the nursery at home was he ever known to waggle hands behind ears. Certainly not in his home had he got the special inspiration such a gesture required.
This was not all. As he grew older Alice became conscious of a curious throbbing, chuffing noise. It was as though she heard an engine.
"Chuff, chuff, chuff!" it would go; "chucc, chucc!" It was a cautious, secretive engine and, grown-up and a mother as Alice was, she knew by instinct that it was a different make altogether from the ordinary steamboat or car noises with which every well-regulated nursery abounds. All she knew was that it emanated from Robert, and somehow or other she also knew that it was a noise from The Other Side. It became more evident when Robert's best friend, William Travers Jenkins, was in the house.
Alice and Mrs. Jenkins discussed it. "What are they up to?" Mrs. Jenkins wanted to know. "I can't tell you," said Alice. She had got far beyond the point of asking Robert such foolish things as, "What are you playing, dear?"