# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 53

THEY started forth, Alice with an ever-growing sickness, for there is hardly anything worse for a mother than those black moments when for a while she does not know where her children are. She ran into Tom, and the calmness with which he took Sara's disappearance did not tranquilize her. One cannot reason with mothers about things like this: they would rather have the father of their children as panic-stricken as they are themselves.
At last, far off down the street, under an electric light, Alice saw the flutter of a white dress. It was accompanied by the ample outline of Grandma. Alice quickened her pace to a run, and Tom followed her with irritating requests for her to be calm, and still more irritating assertions that he had known all the time that Sara was all right.
Alice threw her arms about Sara and crushed her to her breast as though she had been lost for weeks.
"Where did you find her?" she asked her Mother-in-law.
"Where indeed?" said Grandma. "Where but in my own house, and doing what? Some instinct told me, Alice, that I should find that child at my house. I can't tell you why. And I came there just in time to find her burning up my new switch which, it seems, she had learned about when she was snooping around acquiring those three gray hairs she burned. Of course, you can't punish her to-day."
Sara was no longer crying. Her eyes were swollen ​and her face was mottled, but serenity shone from her.
"I burned it so my fairies would bring back that bird to life!" she asserted calmly.
She looked up trustingly at her mother and father. Surely they would understand that the sacrifice of a mere switch was nothing compared to a bird's life! Surely they would understand that if burning three gray hairs was so potent a magic, burning a whole switch must be far better! But whether they understood or not, whether punishment followed or not, she, Sara, felt that she had done her duty.
She had them all at a disadvantage. She had, in the first place, the weapon of perfect faith. Moreover, she had about her the radiant consciousness of one who has performed a noble act. So this high moment was not the time for a talk on either the morals of burning one's Grandmother's new switch, or the laws of nature. She stood there a white, straight little figure—the figure of one who has had a moment of insight, of high resolve, and the courage to carry through her resolve.
The three older people were silent, Grandma bursting to speak, but restraining herself in the face of Sara's recent bereavement. Her mother for a moment had caught a glimpse deep into the heart of her little girl and into her tangled mind, and wondered what would happen to this blind faith when even this act of courage had not brought the bird back to life.
They passed by Mrs. Painter's. That kind and voluminous lady was proceeding leisurely down her flower-bordered path.
"Oh, I'm glad that's you!" she cried cheerily. "I was just going to your house, Mrs. Marcey. I've been worried about Sara all the afternoon. When she went home crying I called after her that Teeny was all right, but I was afraid she didn't hear."
​She opened her hand, and in it nestled the canary.
Chronology had no meaning for Sara. She jumped up and down and clapped her hands.
"You see, I brang it back! You see, I brang it back!"
"Mrs. Painter," said Grandma, and her tone was not without bitterness, "it was you, I think, who suggested burning gray hairs?"
"Oh, I've burned bunches of 'em!" cried Sara.
"It was my switch she burned," Grandma announced in a voice which held dry disapproval. "She burned it to bring your bird to life."
Mrs. Painter indecorously leaned against one of the trees which flanked the entrance of her yard and laughed. She laughed until she shook through her whole vast person.
"Oh, dear, dear, dear!" she cried. "What will that child do next?"
The sense of injury which had been suppressed in Mrs. Marcey's breast here burst forth.
"Allow me to say," she enunciated, "that I think this filling of children's heads with nonsense can sometimes pass the limit, and had it been your switch you might have seen less humor in this. I'm not going to darken your doors again, Alice, as long as this nonsense is permitted to go on. I don't relish children who talk about no other thing than witches and specters, banshees, norns, and elephant-faced monstrosities. If you think it's nice for a little girl of Sara's age to claim to possess Moloch and Juggernaut—well, Alice, I don't. To my certain knowledge some of Robert's gods were not only bloodthirsty but worse."
A private house was no fit abode for the gods of antiquity, Alice reflected. They should stay in their temple or museums.
​"They shall all go," Tom announced firmly. "From now on there are no fairies of any nature or description allowed in this house. And all the gods have got to go!"
He looked belligerently at his son. Robert was also one who could rise to an occasion.
"I was getting sick of the old things anyway," he said. He sidled up to Sara. "While they were looking for you I looked for your lucky stone and found it," he said in the ungracious tone employed by small boys when doing kind acts.
Sara took her stone and clutched it to her bosom. It evidently fulfilled her heart's desire.
"I don't care about 'em," said Sara. "I can have mine outside, and Robert's was always getting more powerful than mine. I don't want 'em, and besides, Mother, I know why he's sick of 'em. Uncle Zotsby don't like 'em!"
"And, Mother," said Robert censoriously, "now that they've all gone, I think Sara ought to have science explained to her. She ought to be told that burning up a switch or anything else won't bring anything to life."
Alice looked at Sara. She thought of the abandon of her grief and of her heroic desperation. It was no time for an anti-climax.
"I'll do that some other time," she told Robert.
That night she went up to Sara's room to see if she slept peacefully after her eventful day. She sat down on the edge of the bed, and sat on something hard.
It was the lucky stone. Alice sighed. She knew that the fairies might be gone and the gods banished, but now for weeks and weeks, wherever Sara went, this large cobblestone would go. One would be forever stubbing one's toe upon it, or sitting down on it in chairs where ​it had been temporarily left. It had come to stay, brought over from the other side to be part of things forever more, as inescapable as Evelyn Dearie or Uncle Zotsby and his nameless dog.