Footprints by Kay Cleaver Strahan

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.