# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 17

THIS discussion had been punctuated by the cheerful noises of laughing children. Now Sara's voice rose up shrill, while Robert kept up a never-ending chuckle; they were having that rough and tumble play known as "fooling." All the time that Alice was arguing, her subconscious went on unceasingly,
"You'd better stop them. You'd better stop them. This is no time for them to yowl." It was only because there was something Spartan in the depths of Alice's spirit that she didn't.
"Let her see them at their worst," she thought defiantly. "It's good for Sara to be toughened." So she waited, as one might await an unimportant yet nerve-racking crack of doom, for the inevitable howl from her daughter, the howl that almost always happens when little boys and girls play together.
Jamie was playing by himself. He played outside the circle of his older brother's and sister's interest, as oblivious of them as of his elders. He ran from a rose bush to a given spot, stamped his foot, ran in a circle around the spot and ran back to the rose bush. It seemed like a mysterious fairy play, as strange and unfathomable as his gestures were lovely.
Yet the sight of him failed to please his mother. Indeed, she hastily turned her eyes away when Mrs. Marcey remarked, "How sweetly he plays alone," for Alice knew only too well that Jamie was engaged in no mystical imaginings, no delicate play of childhood, but that he was glutting his innocent lust of slaughter. ​Jamie was picking rose bugs from the rose bush, placing them on the stone and stamping them, one by one. Sara had taught him to do this, and since then this loathsome sport had been his favorite diversion. Alice dreaded the moment when his grandmother would gather her flowing draperies around her and say, "I must see what the little darling is doing."
Early childhood knows no good or bad, nor does it know clean or dirty. Or if it knows, it prefers dirty. Sweet pink and white childhood loves squashing rose bugs, cleaning fish and paddling in mud; it delights in all things squashy and sticky. There is nothing it resents more than enforced cleanliness, and Jamie was at an age to resent this with full-lunged bellows.
So between the three of them Alice was far from comfortable. That is the way with mothers, as long as they are within earshot of their children their subconsciousness peers ahead into the unknown, predicts disaster and foresees danger, keeping up such a clamor that the nerves grow brittle. Now with the arrival of Tom and some visitors, Alice forgot these subconscious warnings.
Jamie still ran in circles around the massacre of the rose bugs, and Sara and Robert were "fooling" like puppies. Robert's voice arose mocking:
"Don't you wish you knew the name of Uncle Zotzby's dog?
"Ah, tell me, tell me," came from Sara.
"Oh, don't you wish you knew?"
"Really," said the elder Mrs. Marcey, "that Zotsby matter goes too far, frequently."
Indeed, Robert had an expression with which he would walk through a room, his mouth shut tightly, a provocative look in his eyes which meant "I have a secret." Now he openly taunted Sara. The wail of woe had not ​yet come, but like an unseen presence Alice knew it was there, waiting.
At last it came, and Alice drew a sigh of relief at the long-drawn-out, expected cry of anguish and wrath, and eased her nerves.
"Has that rascal been hurting Sara again?" Tom wishes to know.
"Oh, it's nothing," Alice murmured, wishing they wouldn't investigate further. She knew so well what would happen; she knew also that Tom's mother could not let her grandchild shriek in vain.
"I'm going to find out," Tom insisted.
"They'll be all over it in a minute," Alice murmured.
"What's that got to do with it," Tom asked indignantly. "Of course she'll get over it. If that young ruffian broke her head open with an ax, she'd get over it—if she didn't die."
"I don't see why you always assume every thing's Robert's fault," Alice argued.
"I don't understand why you have no instinct to protect Sara," said Tom.
They faced each other, hostility smoldering between them.
Tom started rapidly for the hammock, Alice after him more sure than ever of her husband's inability to bring up children. By the time they got there the quarrel was over. Sara and Robert were a picture of brotherly and sisterly love, they sat side by side in the hammock, looking at a picture book. No parent would have disturbed them at this moment. Their grandmother asked, however:
"What hurt my dearie?" Tears filled Sara's beautiful eyes, filled but did not overflow.
"He," she cried, shaking her finger in the direction ​of Robert, "he kicked me in the guts!" Her voice was tragic.
Robert arose; the wrath of misrepresented man was his. "Tattle-tale!" he said, "cry-baby! You know I only meant to kick you from behind."
It's not thus that one wishes one's children to speak in the presence of grandmothers or callers. The moment was awkward. One of the ladies tactlessly turned the subject with the air of cloaking some unsightly spectacle from view. No words were needed to tell the parents of Sara and Robert that terms like "guts" had never been mentioned in the family of these three ladies. But sympathy had done its devastating work on Sara. "He hurt me," she sobbed.
"I didn't mean to," Robert protested, his arms round his sister.