CHAPTER VIII
I
August 1, 1900.
Dearest Judy dear: Father and Uncle Phineas and Chris have all gone to Portland for a few days. They left here last Thursday. I think that they will return to-morrow. Father had to see Dr. Joe. I don’t know why the others went, unless it was, perhaps, for the trip.
Christopher was no sooner out of sight than Irene began to move Father’s belongings out of his room, preparing to unpack her boxes and to instal herself and Christopher in Father’s room. She said she positively had not asked Father to exchange rooms with her. She said he had offered to do so, because he had heard that she wanted a cupola room in order to fix the cupola up as an Oriental cozy corner.
Olympe asked her why she had not made the exchange while Christopher had been at home. Irene said because she wished to surprise him. (It is only by remembering Grandfather’s sixth rule, under “B,” that I am restraining myself from underlining almost every word in this letter, and clubbing it all up with ! ! !)
Aunt Gracia and Olympe tried to reason with Irene. She kept right along dumping things out of Father’s room and tugging her things in. I ran and told Grandfather. He would not budge. Grandfather, of late, budges less and less. The only thing he has said about the entire affair he said this morning when Irene took him into the room to show it to him. He said: “My word! My wordless word!”
Neal declares that he and I should try to be broad-minded and receptive toward the new. He says that forward steps should be made in house furnishings as well as in other things. He says that perhaps the ultra-moderns are right in attempting to get away from the austerity of the early colonial furnishings. He says that perhaps we do need more colour, more daintiness, more luxury, and more invitations to relaxation.
Aunt Gracia says that if Neal and I find daintiness in that room, her imagination pales before our conception of a really honest, cleanly junk heap. She said that a fishnet stuck full of trash was not merely inartistic, it was also a wall-wide inducement to dirt. She said she could get all the colour she needed from the Turkey carpets in the front and back parlours that Great-great-grandfather had bought in the Orient, or from the pulled rugs that Great-grandmother and her sister-in-law had made. She said the Oriental cozy corner was not an invitation to relaxation. She said it was an invitation to assassination.
Poor, lovely Aunt Gracia has grown bitter of late. For one thing, I think that her blackmailing, as she called it, has turned into a boomerang. Irene told me about it. That is, Irene said that if Chris knew she didn’t have to stay here, that Archie was pleading with her to return to him, and that he would send her the money for the trip at any time, she thought that Chris would act very differently.
I asked Irene why, then, if she wished Chris to act differently, she did not tell him about Archie? She said that she was tempted to, every minute of the day; but that Gracia advised so strongly against it she was afraid to. She said that Gracia had known Chris longer than she, Irene, had known him; and that Gracia was afraid such a disclosure might result in tragedy.
I asked Irene what sort of tragedy. Irene did not know. So I went and asked Aunt Gracia.
I could not get any satisfaction from her because she was indignant with Irene for having told me about Archie Biggil and his passionate letter, and the rest. Aunt Gracia is sweet but odd. She does not understand that I know all there is to know about at least the theories of love and passion from having read widely about them in books.
She said that unless I would promise her never again to listen to Irene when she talked on subjects of the sort, she would take the matter up with Grandfather. I told her I would not promise, because it was unreasonable for her to ask me to. Not, you understand, Judy dear, that I liked listening to the sort of thing Irene was always telling me. Dr. Joe did not like to cut up cadavers when he was in medical college, either. It was a part of his education that he had to endure. So I thought that, since live men did actually say to live women: “My God! The haunting beauty of your white body never leaves me day or night!” I should, as a prospective writer, know it. That is what I told Aunt Gracia.
She put her arm around me and said let us go and talk to Grandfather. We did so. Aunt Gracia and I were both astonished to find that he knew all about Archie Biggil. Irene had told him, he said, because she was troubled and needed to confide in someone.
Grandfather said that I had been quite right in refusing to promise not to listen to Irene; that is, if I wished to be a writer of the Laura Jean Libby or Marie Corelli school. He had thought, he said, that I cared more for Dickens, Thackeray, and Scott; but, evidently, he had been labouring under a misconception.
I had a feeling that Grandfather was what Chris calls “spoofing” me; but I could not be sure. Perhaps I was mistaken. At any rate, quite soon, we got it straightened out tidily.
An author, Grandfather says, must go about collecting material constantly. But, despite that, an author must use a definite discrimination about the sort of material he chooses to collect. Grandfather says that no person can gather all the sorts, because it is a physiological fact that one’s brain has room for only a certain amount. It was necessary, he said, to decide quite early on one’s standards, and then collect in line with them, to the exclusion of other material, in order that one’s mind should not become hopelessly cluttered.
I feel that Grandfather should have given me this information long ago. I am thankful to have obtained it now before it is entirely too late.
It took us some time, you see, to get to the explanation of the tragedy that Aunt Gracia feared.
Grandfather said to her that he, like Lucy, was not quite clear on this point. He could not, he said, visualize Christopher running about menacing fatuous ex-husbands.
Aunt Gracia replied that it seemed to her the real tragedy impending was for Christopher to discover Irene.
Grandfather smiled that heavenly smile of his that usually means a pearl. “He won’t, dearest. Set your mind at rest. He won’t. That, in itself, constitutes the tragedy—or the triumph—of marriage.”
I think that I do not fully understand this. But, since I am sure it is a pearl, I am quoting it for you. You are married. You may understand it. At any rate, no matter what it means, exactly, it must mean that no tragedy, like Hamlet, with everyone lying about dead, is apt to happen.
Judy dear, I love you. Will you tell Greg that I love him, too?—Lucy.
II
August 28, 1900.
Dear, dear Judy-pudy: It was good of you to take so long to explain to me what Grandfather meant about the tragedy, or the triumph, of marriage. I think it rather bold of you to say that Grandfather, who is eighty years old, is wrong about it. You are only twenty-two years old. But it does not matter. I am no longer interested in marriage. I have decided, with Neal, never to marry.
Though, of late, I dislike to be on Neal’s side about anything. Some great change, terrible, grewsome, seems to have occurred within him. (I know that is a poor sentence, and that it is of a literary flavour which I despise. But I have tried several drafts on scratch paper and it seems to be the best I can do.) Or, to put it simply as Grandfather always advises: If Neal had been a dog for the past few months we should have been afraid he would bite us. Now he acts as if he had bitten us and were glad of it.
I do not know what has caused this change in Neal, but I know who has. The person is Uncle Phineas. When Uncle Phineas came home from his prospecting trip last month, he came home with a secret. He told Neal the secret. I am sure of this. They got off alone together and whispered about the secret.
When I said this to Neal he was angry. He said to have a person like me in it was a scourge to any family. He did not mean that, I am sure. But he was very polite, and talked in a low voice, even when he called names, such as “rubberneck” and threatened. After the many years of deep study that I have devoted to character, I hope I have at least discovered that no one gets as angry over anything as Neal got unless it is the truth. If I had been making a childishly simple mistake, Neal would have teased me and laughed at me.
Neal said that it was crumby—everything is crumby with Neal, just now, but that is an improvement over wormy—for me to think that Uncle Phineas would share a secret with him and with no other member of the family. It isn’t—crumby, I mean—because, if it were rather a naughty or mischievous secret, as it probably would be since Uncle Phineas had it for his, Neal would be more in sympathy with it than would any other member of the family. Not, of course, that either Neal or Uncle Phineas would do any wrong thing, but—well, you understand what I mean. For instance, Uncle Phineas, I believe, is the only member of the family who would join Neal in his plan to separate Irene and Christopher. Of course I have no proof that Uncle Phineas has not shared his secret with some other member of the family. All I know about that is, if he has shared it with someone else it has not affected the someone as it has affected Neal.
Father has changed a bit since he returned from Portland, but, if possible, for the better. I think that is because Chris has stopped worrying him. Did I tell you that Christopher went to Portland to try to raise some money? He couldn’t. He has come home again and is working hard on his new play.
Uncle Phineas has remained in Portland. Even though he is not running up hotel bills, but is visiting Dr. Joe, it does seem strange for him to remain in the city for so long. Olympe is furious about it. She does fury beautifully—not at all in an ordinary fashion, but with dignity and hauteur. She manages it so nicely, I think, because she blames Irene and not Uncle Phineas. She pretends that no person in his senses would stay on the same ranch with Irene if he could stay elsewhere. I should think that she might blame Chris because he is responsible for Irene. She does not. She pities him. That is worse than blaming, of course. Though poor Chris does seem to deserve to be pitied.
Judy, dear, he was stunned when he discovered that Irene had exchanged rooms with Father. He came downstairs alone, looking faded and like a poor photograph of himself.
“Dick, old boy,” he said to Father, “I’m tremendously sorry about this fracas upstairs. It isn’t that Irene is selfish. She’s the most generous little thing in the world, really. She doesn’t understand——”
Father said of course she didn’t, and neither did he. He said there was no tradition that he was aware of which would keep the various members of the family from making an exchange of rooms, when the exchange was advantageous.
It may be advantageous for Irene. For all the rest of us it is an irritation. A dozen times a day, beginning with the morning towels and ending with the evening lamps, some one of us makes a mistake about the rooms. We stand and knock at the door of the room that is now Father’s thinking that Irene or Christopher may be in it. And, since we know that Father is never in his room in the daytime, we open that door and walk right in, intruding on Irene and Christopher in a most humiliating fashion.
Father himself forgets. He came from his bath, the other evening—he was very tired—and opened the door to his old room and walked right in. He came so quietly, in his slippers, that Irene had not heard him. She was in the room alone and she was frightened. (She said it was partly because she had never seen Father in his dressing gown before.) She screamed and screamed and screamed. She cried, and had what she calls a heart attack. Chris was frantic, and poor, darling Father was stunned from the shock of having caused a lady such distress.
During the heart attack, Irene said that any decent house would have keys to the doors. Wednesday, Aunt Gracia went to the attic and found the keys for the doors, and shined them up with Sapolio and put them in the keyholes. None of us use them, except Irene. Neal is very smart about them. He says they open a new era on the Q 2 Ranch. He has made up a song, to the tune of “Bringing in the Sheaves,” which he calls “Turning Quilter Keys,” and which he sings about, objectionably.
I send my love to you, dear, and to Greg.—Lucy.