Sam thought that it was pleasant enough for you to have a dead Mother who was like "the flash of a white wing across a stormy sea," but he did not see any possible connection between that fact and stoning all the white sea-gulls in sight. Ladykin, on the contrary, told Sam distinctly that she'd knock his head off if he ever hit a gull, but fortunately—or unfortunately—Ladykin's aim was not so sure as Sam's. It was you who had to stay behind on the beach and pommel more than half the life out of Sam while Ladykin, pink as a posy in her best muslin, scared to death of wet and cold, plunged out to her little neck in the chopping waves to rescue a quivering fluff of feathers that struggled broken-winged against the cruel, drowning water. "Gulls are gulls!" persisted Sam with every blubbering breath. "Gulls are Mothers!" gasped Ladykin, staggering from the surf all drenched and dripping like a bursted water-pail. "Well, boy-gulls are gulls!" Sam screamed in a perfect explosion of outraged truth. But Ladykin defied him to the last. Through chattering teeth her vehement reassertion sounded like some horrid, wicked blasphemy: "Nnnnnnnnnnnn-oo! Bbb-o-y ggggg-ggulls are MMMMMM-Mothers too!" Then with that pulsing drench of feathers cuddled close to her breast, she struggled off alone to the house to have the Croup, while you and Sam went cheerily up the beach to find some shiners and some seaweed for your new gull hospital. Not till you were quite an old boy did you ever find out what became of that gull. Sacred Bruno-Clarice ate him. Ladykin, it seems, knew always what had happened to him, but she never dreamed of telling you till you were old enough to bear it. To Ladykin, Truth out of season was sourer than strawberries at Christmas time.
Sam would have told you anything the very first second that he found it out. Sam was perfectly great for Truth. He could tell more Great Black Truths in one day than there were thunder-clouds in the whole hot summer sky. This quality made Sam just a little bit dangerous in a crowd. He was always and forever shooting people with Truths that he didn't know were loaded. He was always telling the Grandmother-Lady, for instance, that her hair looked exactly like a wig. He was always telling Ladykin that she smelled of raspberry jam. He was always telling you that he didn't believe your Father really loved you. Oh, everything that Sam said was as straight and lank and honest as a lady's hair when it's out of crimp. Nothing in the world could be straighter than that.
But sometimes, when you had played sturdily with Sam for a good many hours, you used to coax Ladykin off all alone to the puffy, scorchy-looking smoke tree, where you could cuddle up on the rustic seat and rest your Honesty. And when you were thoroughly rested, you used to stretch your little arms behind your yawning face and beg:
"Oh, Ladykin, wouldn't you, couldn't you please say something curly?"
Ladykin's mind seemed to curl perfectly naturally. The crimp of it never came out. Almost any time you could take her words that looked so little and tight, and unwind them and unwind them into yards and yards and yards of pleasant, magic meanings.
There were no magic meanings in Sam's words. Sam, for instance, could throw as many as a hundred stones into the water, yet when he got through he just lay down in the sand and groaned, "Oh, how tired I am! Oh, how tired I am!" But Ladykin, after she'd thrown only two stones—one that hit the beach, and one that hit you—would stand right up and declare that her arm was "be-witched." Tired? No, not a bit of it, but "be-witched!" Hadn't she seen, hadn't you seen, hadn't everybody seen that perfectly awful sea-witch's head that popped out of the wave just after she had thrown her first stone? Oh, indeed, and it wasn't the first time either that she had been so frightened! Once when she was sitting on the sand counting sea-shells, hadn't the Witch swooped right out of the water and grabbed her legs? So, now if you wanted to break the cruel spell, save Ladykin's life, marry Ladykin, and live in a solid turquoise palace—where all the walls were papered with foreign postage-stamps, and no duplicates—you, not Sam, but you, you, chosen of all the world, must go down to the little harbor between the two highest, reariest rocks and stick a spiked stick through every wave that came in. There was no other way! Now you, yourself, might possibly have invented the witch, but you never, never would have thought of harpooning the waves and falling in and drowning your best suit, while Ladykin rested her arms.
Yet in the enforced punishment of an early bedtime you were not bereaved, but lay in rapturous delight untangling the minutest detail of Ladykin's words, till turquoise cities blazed like a turquoise flashlight across your startled senses, wonderful little princes and princesses kowtowed perpetually to royal Mother Ladykin and royal Father Yourself, and life-sized postage-stamps loomed so lusciously large that envelopes had to be pasted to the corners of stamps instead of stamps to the corners of envelopes. And before you had half straightened out the whole thought, you were fast asleep, and then fast awake, and it was suddenly morning! Oh, it is very comforting to have a playmate who can say curly things.
Sometimes, too, when Sam's and Ladykin's Mother had been rude to them about brushing their teeth or tracking perfectly good mud into the parlor, and Sam had gone off to ease his sorrow, scating hens or stoning cats, you and Ladykin would steal down to the gray rock on the beach to watch the white, soft, pleasant sea-gulls. There were times, you think, when Ladykin wished that her Mother was a sea-gull. Then you used to wonder and wonder about your own Mother, and tell Ladykin all over again about the creaky, black-oak library, and the smoky, smelly hearth-fire with the hurt red book, and the blue-flowered muslin sleeve beckoning and beckoning to you; and Ladykin used to explain to you how, very evidently, you were the only souvenir that your Father did not burn. With that thought in mind, you used to try and guess what could possibly have happened long ago on a Thursday to make a Happy-Day forever and ever. Ladykin said that of course it was something about "Love," but when you ran off to ask the Grandmother-Lady just exactly what Love was, the Grandmother-Lady only laughed and said that Love was a fever that came along a few years after chicken-pox and measles and scarlet fever. Ladykin was saucy about it. "That may be true," Ladykin acknowledged, "but t'aint so!" Then you went and found Sam and asked him if he knew what Love was. Sam knew at once. Sam said that Love was the feeling that one had for mathematics. Now that was all bosh, for the feeling that you and Ladykin had for Mathematics would not have made a Happy-Day for a cow.
But even if there were a great many things that you could not find out, it was a good deal of fun to grow up. Apart from a few stomach-aches and two or three gnawing pains in the calves of your legs, aging was a most alluring process.
Springs, summers, autumns, winters, went hurtling over one another, till all of a sudden, without the slightest effort on your part, you were fifteen years old, Bruno-Clarice had grown to be a sober, industrious, middle-aged dog, Sam was idolatrously addicted to geometry, and Ladykin subscribed to a fashion magazine for the benefit of her paper dolls.