An American Idyll by Cornelia Stratton Parker

C >> Cornelia Stratton Parker >> An American Idyll

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12

By that time, we had come a bit to our senses, and I had realized that
since there was no money anyhow to marry on, and since I was so young, I
had better stay on and graduate from college. Carl could have his trip
to Europe and get an option, perhaps, on a tent in Persia. A friend was
telling me recently of running into Carl on the street just before he
left for Europe and asking him what he was planning to do for the
future. Carl answered with a twinkle, "I don't know but what there's
room for an energetic up-and-coming young man in Asia Minor."

I stopped writing here to read through Carl's European letters, and laid
aside about seven I wanted to quote from: the accounts of three dinners
at Sidney and Beatrice Webb's in London--what knowing them always meant
to him! They, perhaps, have forgotten him; but meeting the Webbs and
Graham Wallas and that English group could be nothing but red-letter
events to a young economic enthusiast one year out of college, studying
Trade-Unionism in the London School of Economics.

Then there was his South-African trip. He was sent there by a London
firm, to expert a mine near Johannesburg. Although he cabled five times,
said firm sent no money. The bitter disgust and anguish of those
weeks--neither of us ever had much patience under such circumstances.
But he experted his mine, and found it absolutely worthless; explored
the veldt on a second-hand bicycle, cooked little meals of bacon and
mush wherever he found himself, and wrote to me. Meanwhile he learned
much, studied the coolie question, investigated mine-workings, was
entertained by his old college mates--mining experts themselves--in
Johannesburg. There was the letter telling of the bull fight at
Zanzibar, or Delagoa Bay, or some seafaring port thereabouts, that broke
his heart, it was such a disappointment--"it made a Kappa tea look gory
by comparison." And the letter that regretfully admitted that perhaps,
after all, Persia would not just do to settle down in. About that time
he wanted California with a fearful want, and was all done with foreign
parts, and declared that any place just big enough for two suited
him--it did not need to be as far away as Persia after all. At last he
borrowed money to get back to Europe, claiming that "he had learned his
lesson and learned it hard." And finally he came home as fast as ever he
could reach Berkeley--did not stop even to telegraph.

I had planned for months a dress I knew he would love to have me greet
him in. It was hanging ready in the closet. As it was, I had started to
retire--in the same room with a Freshman whom I was supposed to be
"rushing" hard--when I heard a soft whistle--our whistle--under my
window. My heart stopped beating. I just grabbed a raincoat and threw it
over me, my hair down in a braid, and in the middle of a sentence to the
astounded Freshman I dashed out.

My father had said, "If neither of you changes your mind while Carl is
away, I have no objection to your becoming engaged." In about ten
minutes after his return we were formally engaged, on a bench up in the
Deaf and Dumb Asylum grounds--our favorite trysting-place. It would have
been foolish to waste a new dress on that night. I was clad in cloth of
gold for all Carl knew or cared, or could see in the dark, for that
matter. The deserted Freshman was sound asleep when I got back--and
joined another sorority.

Thereafter, for a time, Carl went into University Extension, lecturing
on Trade-Unionism and South Africa. It did not please him altogether,
and finally my father, a lawyer himself, persuaded him to go into law.
Carl Parker in law! How we used to shudder at it afterwards; but it was
just one more broadening experience that he got out of life.

Then came the San Francisco earthquake. That was the end of my Junior
year, and we felt we had to be married when I finished college--nothing
else mattered quite as much as that. So when an offer came out of a
clear sky from Halsey and Company, for Carl to be a bond-salesman on a
salary that assured matrimony within a year, though in no affluence, and
the bottom all out of the law business and no enthusiasm for it anyway,
we held a consultation and decided for bonds and marriage. What a
bond-salesman Carl made! Those who knew him knew what has been referred
to as "the magic of his personality," and could understand how he was
having the whole of a small country town asking him to dinner on his
second visit.

I somehow got through my Senior year; but how the days dragged! For all
I could think of was Carl, Carl, Carl, and getting married. Yet no
one--no one on this earth--ever had the fun out of their engaged days
that we did, when we were together. Carl used to say that the
accumulated expenses of courting me for almost four years came to
$10.25. He just guessed at $10.25, though any cheap figure would have
done. We just did not care about doing things that happened to cost
money. We never did care in our lives, and never would have cared, no
matter what our income might be. Undoubtedly that was the main reason we
were so blissful on such a small salary in University work--we could
never think, at the time, of anything much we were doing without. I
remember that the happiest Christmas we almost ever had was over in the
country, when we spent under two dollars for all of us. We were
absolutely down to bed-rock that year anyway. (It was just after we paid
off our European debt.) Carl gave me a book, "The Pastor's Wife," and we
gloated over it together all Christmas afternoon! We gave each of the
boys a ten-cent cap-pistol and five cents' worth of caps--they were in
their Paradise. I mended three shirts of Carl's that had been in my
basket so long they were really like new to him,--he'd forgotten he
owned them!--laundered them, and hung the trio, tied in tissue paper and
red ribbon, on the tree. That _was_ a Christmas!

He used to claim, too, that, as I got so excited over five cents' worth
of gum-drops, there was no use investing in a dollar's worth of French
mixed candy--especially if one hadn't the dollar. We always loved
tramping more than anything else, and just prowling around the streets
arm-in-arm, ending perhaps with an ice-cream soda. Not over-costly, any
of it. I have kept some little reminder of almost every spree we took in
our four engaged years--it is a book of sheer joy from cover to cover.
Except always, always the need of saying good-bye: it got so that it
seemed almost impossible to say it.

And then came the day when it did not have to be said each time--that
day of days, September 7, 1907, when we were married. Idaho for our
honeymoon had to be abandoned, as three weeks was the longest vacation
period we could wring from a soulless bond-house. But not even Idaho
could have brought us more joy than our seventy-five-mile trip up the
Rogue River in Southern Oregon. We hired an old buckboard and two
ancient, almost immobile, so-called horses,--they needed scant
attention,--and with provisions, gun, rods, and sleeping-bags, we
started forth. The woods were in their autumn glory, the fish were
biting, corn was ripe along the roadside, and apples--Rogue River
apples--made red blotches under every tree. "Help yourselves!" the
farmers would sing out, or would not sing out. It was all one to us.

I found that, along with his every other accomplishment, I had married
an expert camp cook. He found that he had married a person who could not
even boil rice. The first night out on our trip, Carl said, "You start
the rice while I tend to the horses." He knew I could not cook--I had
planned to take a course in Domestic Science on graduation; however, he
preferred to marry me earlier, inexperienced, than later, experienced.
But evidently he thought even a low-grade moron could boil rice. The
bride of his heart did not know that rice swelled when it boiled. We
were hungry, we would want lots of rice, so I put lots in. By the time
Carl came back I had partly cooked rice in every utensil we owned,
including the coffee-pot and the wash-basin. And still he loved me!

That honeymoon! Lazy horses poking unprodded along an almost deserted
mountain road; glimpses of the river lined with autumn reds and yellows;
camp made toward evening in any spot that looked appealing--and all
spots looked appealing; two fish-rods out; consultation as to flies;
leave-taking for half an hour's parting, while one went up the river to
try his luck, one down. Joyous reunion, with much luck or little luck,
but always enough for supper: trout rolled in cornmeal and fried, corn
on the cob just garnered from a willing or unwilling farmer that
afternoon, corn-bread,--the most luscious corn-bread in the world,
baked camper-style by the man of the party,--and red, red apples, eaten
by two people who had waited four years for just that. Evenings
in a sandy nook by the river's edge, watching the stars come out
above the water. Adventures, such as losing Chocolada, the brown
seventy-eight-year-old horse, and finding her up to her neck in a deep
stream running through a grassy meadow with perpendicular banks on
either side. We walked miles till we found a farmer. With the aid of
himself and his tools, plus a stout rope and a tree, in an afternoon's
time we dug and pulled and hauled and yanked Chocolada up and out onto
dry land, more nearly dead than ever by that time. The ancient senile
had just fallen in while drinking.

We made a permanent camp for one week seventy-five miles up the river,
in a spot so deserted that we had to cut the road through to reach it.
There we laundered our change of overalls and odds and ends, using the
largest cooking utensil for boiling what was boiled, and all the food
tasted of Ivory soap for two days; but we did not mind even that. And
then, after three weeks, back to skirts and collars and civilization,
and a continued honeymoon from Medford, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington,
doing all the country banks _en route_. In Portland we had to be
separated for one whole day--it seemed nothing short of harrowing.

Then came Seattle and house-hunting. We had a hundred dollars a month to
live on, and every apartment we looked at rented for from sixty dollars
up. Finally, in despair, we took two wee rooms, a wee-er kitchen, and
bath, for forty dollars. It was just before the panic in 1907, and rents
were exorbitant. And from having seventy-five dollars spending money a
month before I was married, I jumped to keeping two of us on sixty
dollars, which was what was left after the rent was paid. I am not
rationalizing when I say I am glad that we did not have a cent more. It
was a real sporting event to make both ends meet! And we did it, and
saved a dollar or so, just to show we could. Any and every thing we
commandeered to help maintain our solvency. Seattle was quite given to
food fairs in those days, and we kept a weather eye out for such. We
would eat no lunch, make for the Food Show about three, nibble at
samples all afternoon, and come home well-fed about eight, having bought
enough necessities here and there to keep our consciences from hurting.

Much of the time Carl had to be on the road selling bonds, and we almost
grieved our hearts out over that. In fact, we got desperate, and when
Carl was offered an assistant cashiership in a bank in Ellensburg,
Washington, we were just about to accept it, when the panic came, and it
was all for retrenchment in banks. Then we planned farming, planned it
with determination. It was too awful, those good-byes. Each got worse
and harder than the last. We had divine days in between, to be sure,
when we'd prowl out into the woods around the city, with a picnic lunch,
or bummel along the waterfront, ending at a counter we knew, which
produced, or the man behind it produced, delectable and cheap clubhouse
sandwiches.

The bond business, and business conditions generally in the Northwest,
got worse and worse. In March, after six months of Seattle, we were
called back to the San Francisco office. Business results were better,
Carl's salary was raised considerably, but there were still separations.

CHAPTER IV

On July 3, the Marvelous Son was born, and never was there such a
father. Even the trained nurse, hardened to new fathers by years of
experience, admitted that she never had seen any one take parenthood
quite so hard. Four times in the night he crept in to see if the baby
was surely breathing. We were in a very quiet neighborhood, yet the next
day, being Fourth of July, now and then a pop would be heard. At each
report of a cap-pistol a block away, Carl would dash out and vehemently
protest to a group of scornful youngsters that they would wake our son.
As if a one-day-old baby would seriously consider waking if a giant
fire-cracker went off under his bed!

Those were magic days. Three of us in the family instead of two--and
separations harder than ever. Once in all the ten and a half years we
were married I saw Carl Parker downright discouraged over his own
affairs, and that was the day I met him down town in Oakland and he
announced that he just could not stand the bond business any longer. He
had come to dislike it heartily as a business; and then, leaving the boy
and me was not worth the whole financial world put together. Since his
European experience,--meeting the Webbs and their kind,--he had had a
hankering for University work, but he felt that the money return was so
small he simply could not contemplate raising a family on it. But now we
were desperate. We longed for a life that would give us the maximum
chance to be together. Cold-bloodedly we decided that University work
would give us that opportunity, and the long vacations would give us our
mountains.

The work itself made its strong appeal, too. Professor Henry Morse
Stephens and Professor Miller of the University of California had long
urged Carl to go into teaching; and at last we decided that, even if it
meant living on husks and skimmed milk all our days, at least we would
be eating what there was to eat together, three meals a day every day.
We cashed in our savings, we drew on everything there was to draw on,
and on February 1, 1909, the three of us embarked for Harvard--with
fifty-six dollars and seventy-five cents excess-baggage to pay at the
depot, such young ignoramuses we were.

That trip East was worth any future hardship we might have reaped. Our
seven-months-old baby was one of the young saints of the world--not once
in the five days did he peep. We'd pin him securely in the lower berth
of our compartment for his nap, and back we would fly to the corner of
the rear platform of the observation car, and gloat, just gloat, over
how we had come into the inheritance of all creation. We owned the
world. And I, who had never been farther from my California home town
than Seattle, who never had seen real snow, except that Christmas when
we spent four days at the Scenic Hot Springs in the Cascades, and skied
and sledded and spilled around like six-year-olds! But stretches and
stretches of snow! And then, just traveling, and together!

And to be in Boston! We took a room with a bath in the Copley Square
Hotel. The first evening we arrived, Nandy (Carleton, Jr.) rolled off
the bed; so when we went gallivanting about Boston, shopping for the new
home, we left him in the bath-tub where he could not fall out. We padded
it well with pillows, there was a big window letting in plenty of fresh
air, and we instructed the chambermaid to peep at him now and then. And
there we would leave him, well-nourished and asleep. (By the time that
story had been passed around by enough people in the home town, it
developed that one day the baby--just seven months old, remember--got up
and turned on the water, and was found by the chambermaid sinking for
the third time.)

Something happened to the draft from the home bank, which should have
reached Boston almost at the same time we did. We gazed into the family
pocket-book one fine morning, to find it, to all intents and purposes,
empty. Hurried meeting of the finance committee. By unanimous consent of
all present, we decided--as many another mortal in a strange town has
decided--on the pawnshop. I wonder if my dear grandmother will read
this--she probably will. Carl first submitted his gold watch--the baby
had dropped it once, and it had shrunk thereby in the eyes of the
pawnshop man, though not in ours. The only other valuable we had along
with us was my grandmother's wedding present to me, which had been my
grandfather's wedding present to her--a glorious old-fashioned
breast-pin. We were allowed fifty dollars on it, which saved the day.
What will my grandmother say when she knows that her bridal gift resided
for some days in a Boston pawnshop?

We moved out to Cambridge in due time, and settled at Bromley Court, on
the very edge of the Yard. We thrilled to all of it--we drank in every
ounce of dignity and tradition the place afforded, and our wild Western
souls exulted. We knew no one when we reached Boston, but our first
Sunday we were invited to dinner in Cambridge by two people who were,
ever after, our cordial, faithful friends--Mr. and Mrs. John Graham
Brooks. They made us feel at once that Cambridge was not the socially
icy place it is painted in song and story. Then I remember the afternoon
that I had a week's wash strung on an improvised line back and forth
from one end of our apartment to the other. Just as I hung the last damp
garment, the bell rang, and there stood an immaculate gentleman in a
cutaway and silk hat, who had come to call--an old friend of my
mother's. He ducked under wet clothes, and we set two chairs where we
could see each other, and yet nothing was dripping down either of our
necks; and there we conversed, and he ended by inviting us both to
dinner--on Marlborough Street, at that! He must have loved my mother
very dearly to have sought further acquaintance with folk who hung the
family wash in the hall and the living-room and dining-room. His house
on Marlborough Street! We boldly and excitedly figured up on the way
home, that they spent on the one meal they fed us more than it cost us
to live for two weeks--they honestly did.

Then there was the dear "Jello" lady at the market. I wish she would
somehow happen to read this, so as to know that we have never forgotten
her. Every Saturday the three of us went to the market, and there was
the Jello lady with her samples. The helpings she dished for us each
time! She brought the man to whom she was engaged to call on us just
before we left. I wonder if they got married, and where they are, and if
she still remembers us. She used to say she just waited for Saturdays
and our coming. Then there was dear Granny Jones, who kept a
boarding-house half a block away. I do not remember how we came to know
her, but some good angel saw to it. She used to send around little bowls
of luscious dessert, and half a pie, or some hot muffins. Then I was
always grateful also--for it made such a good story, and it was true--to
the New England wife of a fellow graduate student who remarked, when I
told her we had one baby and another on the way, "How interesting--just
like the slums!"

We did our own work, of course, and we lived on next to nothing. I
wonder now how we kept so well that year. Of course, we fed the baby
everything he should have,--according to Holt in those days,--and we ate
the mutton left from his broth and the beef after the juice had been
squeezed out of it for him, and bought storage eggs ourselves, and queer
butter out of a barrel, and were absolutely, absolutely blissful.
Perhaps we should have spent more on food and less on baseball. I am
glad we did not. Almost every Saturday afternoon that first semester we
fared forth early, Nandy in his go-cart, to get a seat in the front row
of the baseball grandstand. I remember one Saturday we were late, front
seats all taken. We had to pack baby and go-cart more than half-way up
to the top. There we barricaded him, still in the go-cart, in the middle
of the aisle. Along about the seventh inning, the game waxed
particularly exciting--we were beside ourselves with enthusiasm. Fellow
onlookers seemed even more excited--they called out things--they seemed
to be calling in our direction. Fine parents we were--there was Nandy,
go-cart and all, bumpety-bumping down the grandstand steps.

I remember again the Stadium on the day of the big track meet. Every
time the official announcer would put the megaphone to his mouth, to
call out winners and time to a hushed and eager throng, Nandy, not yet a
year old, would begin to squeal at the top of his lungs for joy. Nobody
could hear a word the official said. We were as distressed as any
one--we, too, had pencils poised to jot down records.

Carl studied very hard. The first few weeks, until we got used to the
new wonder of things, he used to run home from college whenever he had a
spare minute, just to be sure he was that near. At that time he was
rather preparing to go into Transportation as his main economic subject.
But by the end of the year he knew Labor would be his love. (His first
published economic article was a short one that appeared in the
"Quarterly Journal of Economics" for May, 1910, on "The Decline of
Trade-Union Membership.") We had a tragic summer.

Carl felt that he must take his Master's degree, but he had no foreign
language. Three terrible, wicked, unforgivable professors assured him
that, if he could be in Germany six weeks during summer vacation, he
could get enough German to pass the examination for the A.M. We believed
them, and he went; though of all the partings we ever had, that was the
very worst. Almost at the last he just could not go; but we were so sure
that it would solve the whole A.M. problem. He went third class on a
German steamer, since we had money for nothing better. The food did
distress even his unfinicky soul. After a particularly sad offering of
salt herring, uncooked, on a particularly rough day, he wrote, "I find I
am not a good Hamburger German. The latter eat all things in all
weather."

Oh, the misery of that summer! We never talked about it much. He went to
Freiburg, to a German cobbler's family, but later changed, as the
cobbler's son looked upon him as a dispensation of Providence, sent to
practise his English upon. His heart was breaking, and mine was
breaking, and he was working at German (and languages came fearfully
hard for him) morning, afternoon, and night, with two lessons a day, his
only diversion being a daily walk up a hill, with a cake of soap and a
towel, to a secluded waterfall he discovered. He wrote a letter and a
postcard a day to the babe and me. I have just re-read all of them, and
my heart aches afresh for the homesickness that summer meant to both of
us.

He got back two days before our wedding anniversary--days like those
first few after our reunion are not given to many mortals. I would say
no one had ever tasted such joy. The baby gurgled about, and was kissed
within an inch of his life. The Jello lady sent around a dessert of
sixteen different colors, more or less, big enough for a family of
eight, as her welcome home.

About six weeks later we called our beloved Dr. J---- from a banquet he
had long looked forward to, in order to officiate at the birth of our
second, known as Thomas-Elizabeth up to October 17, but from about
ten-thirty that night as James Stratton Parker. We named him after my
grandfather, for the simple reason that we liked the name Jim. How we
chuckled when my father's congratulatory telegram came, in which he
claimed pleasure at having the boy named after his father, but cautioned
us never to allow him to be nicknamed. I remember the boresome youth who
used to call, week in week out,--always just before a meal,--and we were
so hard up, and got so that we resented feeding such an impossible
person so many times. He dropped in at noon Friday the 17th, for lunch.
A few days later Carl met him on the street and announced rapturously
the arrival of the new son. The impossible person hemmed and stammered:
"Why--er--when did it arrive?" Carl, all beams, replied, "The very
evening of the day you were at our house for lunch!" We never laid eyes
on that man again! We were almost four months longer in Cambridge, but
never did he step foot inside our apartment. I wish some one could have
psycho-analyzed him, but it's too late now. He died about a year after
we left Cambridge. I always felt that he never got over the shock of
having escaped Jim's arrival by such a narrow margin.

And right here I must tell of Dr. J----. He was recommended as the best
doctor in Cambridge, but very expensive. "We may have to economize in
everything on earth," said Carl, "but we'll never economize on doctors."
So we had Dr. J----, had him for all the minor upsets that families need
doctors for; had him when Jim was born; had him through a queer fever
Nandy developed that lasted some time; had him through a bad case of
grippe I got (this was at Christmastime, and Carl took care of both
babies, did all the cooking, even to the Christmas turkey I was well
enough to eat by then, got up every two hours for three nights to change
an ice-pack I had to have--that's the kind of man he was!); had him
vaccinate both children; and then, just before we left Cambridge, we sat
and held his bill, afraid to open the envelope. At length we gathered
our courage, and gazed upon charges of sixty-five dollars for
everything, with a wonderful note which said that, if we would be
inconvenienced in paying that, he would not mind at all if he got
nothing.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12