An American Idyll Part 2

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 gra.s.sy 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 a.s.sistant 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 b.u.mmel 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 pa.s.sed 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 p.a.w.nshop. 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 p.a.w.nshop 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 p.a.w.nshop?

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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.days 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 m.u.f.fins. 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 b.u.t.ter 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day 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, b.u.mpety-b.u.mping 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. n.o.body 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 a.s.sured him that, if he could be in Germany six weeks during summer vacation, he could get enough German to pa.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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-a.n.a.lyzed 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.

Such excitement! We had expected two hundred dollars at the least! We tore out and bought ten cents' worth of doughnuts, to celebrate. When we exclaimed to him over his goodness,--of course we paid the sixty-five dollars,--all he said was: "Do you think a doctor is blind? And does a man go steerage to Europe if he has a lot of money in the bank?" Bless that doctor's heart! Bless all doctors' hearts! We went through our married life in the days of our financial slimness, with kindness shown us by every doctor we ever had. I remember our Heidelberg German doctor sent us a bill for a year of a dollar and a half. And even in our more prosperous days, at Carl's last illness, with that good Seattle doctor calling day and night, and caring for me after Carl's death, he refused to send any bill for anything. And a little later, when I paid a long overdue bill to our blessed Oakland doctor for a tonsil operation, he sent the check back torn in two. Bless doctors!

When we left for Harvard, we had an idea that perhaps one year of graduate work would be sufficient. Naturally, about two months was enough to show us that one year would get us nowhere. Could we finance an added year at, perhaps, Wisconsin? And then, in November, Professor Miller of Berkeley called to talk things over with Carl. Anon he remarked, more or less casually, "The thing for you to do is to have a year's study in Germany," and proceeded to enlarge on that idea. We sat dumb, and the minute the door was closed after him, we flopped. "What was the man thinking of--to suggest a year in Germany, when we have no money and two babies, one not a year and a half, and one six weeks old!"

Preposterous!

That was Sat.u.r.day afternoon. By Monday morning we had decided we would go! Thereupon we wrote West to finance the plan, and got beautifully sat upon for our "notions." If we needed money, we had better give up this whole fool University idea and get a decent man-sized job. And then we wrote my father,--or, rather, I wrote him without telling Carl till after the letter was mailed,--and bless his heart! he replied with a fat G.o.d-bless-you-my-children registered letter, with check enclosed, agreeing to my stipulation that it should be a six-per-cent business affair. Suppose we could not have raised that money--suppose our lives had been minus that German experience! Bless fathers! They may scold and fuss at romance, and have "good sensible ideas of their own" on such matters, but--bless fathers!

CHAPTER V

We finished our year at Harvard, giving up the A.M. idea for the present. Carl got A's in every subject and was asked to take a teaching fellowship under Ripley; but it was Europe for us. We set forth February 22, 1909, in a big snowstorm, with two babies, and one thousand six hundred and seventy-six bundles, bags, and presents. Jim was in one of those fur-bags that babies use in the East. Everything we were about to forget the last minute got shoved into that bag with Jim, and it surely began to look as if we had brought a young and very lumpy mastodon into the world!

We went by boat from Boston to New York, and sailed on the Pennsylvania February 24. People wrote us in those days: "You two brave people--think of starting to Europe with two babies!" Brave was the last word to use.

Had we worried or had fears over anything, and yet fared forth, we should perhaps have been brave. As it was, I can feel again the sensation of leaving New York, gazing back on the city buildings and bridges bathed in sunshine after the storm. Exultant joy was in our hearts, that was all. Not one worry, not one concern, not one small drop of homesickness. We were to see Europe together, year before we had dreamed it possible. It just seemed too glorious to be true. "Brave"?

Far from it. Simply eager, glowing, filled to the brim with a determination to drain every day to the full.

I discovered that, while my husband had married a female who could not cook rice (though she learned), I had taken unto myself a spouse who curled up green half a day out on the ocean, and stayed that way for about six days. He tried so desperately to help with the babies, but it always made matters worse. If I had turned green, too--But babies and I prospered without interruption, though some ants did try to eat Jim's scalp off one night--"sugar ants" the doctor called them. "They knew their business," our dad remarked. We were three days late getting into Hamburg--fourteen days on the ocean, all told. And then to be in Hamburg in Germany--in Europe! I remember our first meal in the queer little cheap hotel we rooted out. "_Eier_" was the only word on the bill of fare we could make out, so Carl brushed up his German and ordered four for us, fried. And the waiter brought four each. He probably declared for years that all Americans always eat four fried eggs each and every night for supper.

We headed for Leipzig at once, and there Carl unearthed the Pension Schroter on Sophien Platz. There we had two rooms and all the food we could eat,--far too much for us to eat, and oh! so delicious,--for fifty-five dollars a month for the entire family, although Jim hardly ranked as yet, economically speaking, as part of the consuming public.

We drained Leipzig to the dregs--a good German idiom. Carl worked at his German steadily, almost frantically, with a lesson every day along with all his university work--a seven o'clock lecture by Bucher every morning being the cheery start for the day, and we blocks and blocks from the University. I think of Carl through those days with extra pride, though it is hard to decide that I was ever prouder of him at one time than another. But he strained and labored without ceasing at such an uninspiring job. All his hard study that broken-hearted summer at Freiburg had given him no single word of an economic vocabulary. In Leipzig he listened hour by hour to the lectures of his German professors, sometimes not understanding an important word for several days, yet exerting every intellectual muscle to get some light in his darkness. Then, for, hours each day and almost every evening, it was grammar, grammar, grammar, till he wondered at times if all life meant an understanding of the subjunctive. Then, little by little, rays of hope. "I caught five words in ----'s lecture to-day!" Then it was ten, then twenty. Never a lecture of any day did he miss.

We stole moments for joy along the way. First, of course, there was the opera--grand opera at twenty-five cents a seat. How Wagner bored us at first--except the parts here and there that we had known all our lives.

Neither of us had had any musical education to speak of; each of us got great joy out of what we considered "good" music, but which was evidently low-brow. And Wagner at first was too much for us. That night in Leipzig we heard the "Walkure!"--utterly aghast and rather impatient at so much non-understandable noise. Then we would drop down to "Carmen," "La Boheme," Hoffman's "Erzablung," and think, "This is life!"

Each night that we spared for a spree we sought out some beer-hall--as unfrequented a one as possible, to get all the local color we could.

Once Carl decided that, as long as we had come so far, I must get a glimpse of real European night-life--it might startle me a bit, but would do no harm. So, after due deliberation, he led me to the Cafe Bauer, the reputed wild and questionable resort of Leipzig night-life, though the pension glanced ceiling-wards and sighed and shook their heads. I do not know just what I did expect to see, but I know that what I saw was countless stolid family parties--on all sides grandmas and grandpas and sons and daughters, and the babies in high chairs beating the tables with spoons. It was quite the most moral atmosphere we ever found ourselves in. That is what you get for deliberately setting out to see the wickedness of the world!

From Leipzig we went to Berlin. We did not want to go to Berlin--Jena was the spot we had in mind. Just as a few months at Harvard showed us that one year there would be but a mere start, so one semester in Germany showed us that one year there would get us nowhere. We must stay longer,--from one to two years longer,--but how, alas, how finance it?

That eternal question! We finally decided that, if we took the next semester or so in Berlin, Carl could earn money enough coaching to keep us going without having to borrow more. So to Berlin we went. We accomplished our financial purpose, but at too great a cost.

In Berlin we found a small furnished apartment on the ground floor of a Gartenhaus in Charlottenburg--Mommsen Stra.s.se it was. At once Carl started out to find coaching; and how he found it always seemed to me an ill.u.s.tration of the way he could succeed at anything anywhere. We knew no one in Berlin. First he went to the minister of the American church; he in turn gave him names of Americans who might want coaching, and then Carl looked up those people. In about two months he had all the coaching he could possibly handle, and we could have stayed indefinitely in Berlin in comfort, for Carl was making over one hundred dollars a month, and that in his spare time.

But the agony of those months: to be in Germany and yet get so little Germany out of it! We had splendid letters of introduction to German people, from German friends we had made in Leipzig, but we could not find a chance even to present them. Carl coached three youngsters in the three R's; he was preparing two of the age just above, for college; he had one American youth, who had ambitions to burst out monthly in the "Sat.u.r.day Evening Post" stories; there was a cla.s.s of five middle-aged women, who wanted Shakespeare, and got it; two cla.s.ses in Current Events; one group of Christian Scientists, who put in a modest demand for the history of the world. I remember Carl had led them up to Pepin the Short when we left Berlin. He contracted everything and anything except one group who desired a course of lectures in Pragmatism. I do not think he had ever heard of the term then, but he took one look at the lay of the land and said--not so! In his last years, when he became such a worshiper at the shrine of William James and John Dewey, we often used to laugh at his Berlin profanity over the very idea of ever getting a word of such "bunk" into his head.

But think of the strain it all meant--lessons and lessons every day, on every subject under heaven, and in every spare minute continued grinding at his German, and, of course, every day numerous hours at the University, and so little time for sprees together. We a.s.sumed in our prosperity the luxury of a maid--the unparalleled Anna Bederke aus Rothenburg, Kreis b.u.mps (?), Posen, at four dollars a month, who for a year and a half was the amus.e.m.e.nt and desperation of ourselves and our friends. Dear, crooked-nosed, one-good-eye Anna! She adored the ground we walked on. Our German friends told us we had ruined her forever--she would never be fit for the discipline of a German household again. Since war was first declared we have lost all track of Anna. Was her Poland home in the devastated country? Did she marry a soldier, and is she too, perhaps, a widow? Faithful Anna, do not think for one minute you will ever be forgotten by the Parkers.