CHAPTER VII
I
July 6, 1900.
Dear, dear Sister Judy: Last night I had a terrible nightmare. I screamed and woke. I found unhappiness sitting like a giant on my chest. I began to cry. Neal came in, wrapped in his dressing gown. You know how Neal seems to lose command of himself when I cry, so almost at once I had to stop. I hoped he might go back to bed again. He would not. He insisted on sitting on the foot of my bed until we could, as he said, discover together what troubled me until I woke crying in the night. Finally, after quite a talk, we found that it was, probably, fear. Fear, you know, of our losing Q 2.
Speaking of fear usually makes Neal impatient. Last night he said—he is often sarcastic of late, but Grandfather told me, privately, that was but another manifestation of his age—of course crying was the best thing to do in the face of fear or danger. He said when Teddy charged up San Juan Hill he got afraid they were going to lose the battle, about midway up the hill, and put his head down and wept salt tears into his horse’s mane. He said that was the way to win battles—to sit and cry, as Olympe did, and make plans for the poorhouse.
I told Neal that, if we called it a battle, Irene must be the foe, and that she cried most of the time—always when either Christopher or Father was present.
Neal said tears were her weapons, not ours, he hoped.
I explained that I was not using tears for weapons. I was using them for lamentations over having to leave Q 2.
Neal said, who was going to leave? He wasn’t. If worst came to worst, he would stay in Q 2 as a stableboy for some Swede farmer. He said he would stay just as he would stay in America and be an American if some foreign power, even Spain, should conquer us. He said, too, that just as there was nothing he wouldn’t do, including the shedding of blood, to save his country from foreign usurpation, so there was nothing he would not do to save Q 2 for the Quilters. (For one thing, I think, it was the Fourth of July only day before yesterday.)
What we must do, Neal said, was what Uncle Phineas had tried to do with the Nome scheme: separate Irene and Christopher. He thinks Christopher would stop thinking about selling Q 2 if he were removed from what Neal calls the venom of Irene’s proximity.
I thought separating them would be wrong, since they loved each other. Neal said it was not love. It was infatuation. He called me an idiot. I did not like it, so perhaps I am not one.
I told Neal that it was difficult for me to understand how so much trouble could be caused about nothing but money. Money is real. It can be handled and earned, and lost. People have it, to save or to spend. I have always fancied that real trouble had to be about vague things, such as love, or hate; or about unobtainable things, like health for darling Father and Greg, or a baby for Uncle Phineas and Olympe; or unpreventable things, like war and death.
Father just came in. Aunt Gracia needs me, so I must end this letter. Father looks very tired most of the time lately. He told Neal the other day that he could not work and fight both, and that he had to work. He said for you not to worry about Bryan’s nomination. That he would have been elected in 1896, if he had ever been going to be. He sends you and Greg his dearest love, and a check, and says there is plenty more of both where these came from.
I hope what I have written about money won’t worry you, dear. Aunt Gracia said the other day that what we send to you and Greg to live on would not be pin money for Chris, let alone Chris and Irene.
I love you, Judy. I love dear Greg. I love you both together.—Lucy.
II
July 31, 1900.
Dearest dear Judy-pudy: Olympe says that she wrote to you several days ago and told you about darling Father’s narrow escape from death. All of me goes empty, even yet, when I think of it. Fancy the wagon’s tongue breaking when Father was driving Bell and Zebub over Quilter Mountain! Grandfather had advised against the team, but Father was in a hurry and Bread and Butter are so slow.
If Indian Charles, from 3 O X, had not happened to be right there, Father would certainly have been killed. Aunt Gracia thinks that God put Indian Charles at that particular curve to stop the horses, though, as Grandfather says, that bears thinking through. It does seem that the simpler way would have been to have had Neal notice the tongue when he was overhauling the wagon. Darling Father would be angry if he knew I had written that. He says overhauling the wagon was his job and not Neal’s, and that Neal is in no way responsible for the accident. Poor Neal keeps declaring that the tongue was in good shape a week ago, and everyone is being so exaggeratedly nice to him that I scarcely see how he can endure it. Even Dong Lee baked Neal’s special tart for supper that evening.
Father makes light of the whole affair, though he strained the ligaments in his wrist and has to wear his arm in a sling. About all that Father is, is thankful. Irene and Christopher were going with him and, at the last moment, decided against it. If three people had been on the seat, Father thinks none of them could have stayed there. Aunt Gracia attributes Christopher’s and Irene’s decision to God, too. Isn’t it strange how trying to see the hand of Providence in things does confuse them? I have been thinking a great deal, lately, about God. I wrote a poem about Him. It is the accident, I think. Until Uncle Phineas came home, the accident had a most sobering, almost religious effect on all of us.
This is odd. When you and Greg went away, it seemed as if the happiness we had had because of having you with us never had equalled, nor made up for, the unhappiness we had to endure because you were gone. But, when Uncle Phineas came home on Wednesday, it seemed as if the unhappiness of having him away had been nothing compared to the fun of having him home again. Uncle Phineas, I believe, is one of those people whom his family appreciate more after they have been without him for rather a long time.
He is in splendid high spirits. Perhaps he has found another gold mine. No one, I think, has remembered to ask him. While he was away, Olympe kept longing for his return in order that he and she might make their plans together for the poorhouse. But she has been so happy since he came that she has forgotten all about the poorhouse. She is wearing her gayer frocks, and giving only her lighter, more whimsical speeches.
Since the accident, I haven’t heard either Irene or Chris mention selling the place. Chris is working hard on his new play. Mr. Joseph Jefferson is to have the leading rôle. Also, Chris has done another sonnet to Irene. He did it yesterday during our lesson time. It is fortunate that Irene has so many splendid rhymes: green, serene, sheen, queen, been (as Grandfather pronounces it), clean, and dozens of others. Greg would have a hard time rhyming you into a sonnet. But Greg would never think of writing a sonnet to you. Aren’t you glad? Not, of course, that I disapprove of authors, since I am planning to be one. But I am going to be a writer, rather than an author. When I told Chris that, and that I was going to cover pages and pages with real written words, and then stack them up and sell them, he said: “Precisely. You are going to be a hardy perennial author.” And then he gave me quite a lecture about ambitions and bandbox zeniths. But Grandfather said, not at all. That he had yet to associate real genius with the ability for being enterprisingly unproductive.
It is past bedtime. I love you both very dearly, and I send my love to you both in this letter.—Lucy.