Читать книгу An American Idyll - Cornelia Stratton Parker - Страница 7

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There were three boys in the Parker family, and one girl. Each of the other brothers had been encouraged to see the world, and in his turn Carl planned fourteen months in Europe, his serious objective being, on his return, to act as Extension Secretary to Professor Stephens of the University of California, who was preparing to organize Extension work for the first time in California. Carl was to study the English Extension system and also prepare for some Extension lecturing.

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.