Читать книгу An American Idyll - Cornelia Stratton Parker - Страница 9

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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 Schröter 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 Bücher 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 "Walküre!"—utterly aghast and rather impatient at so much non-understandable noise. Then we would drop down to "Carmen," "La Bohême," Hoffman's "Erzäblung," 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 Café 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 Strasse it was. At once Carl started out to find coaching; and how he found it always seemed to me an illustration 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 "Saturday Evening Post" stories; there was a class of five middle-aged women, who wanted Shakespeare, and got it; two classes 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 assumed in our prosperity the luxury of a maid—the unparalleled Anna Bederke aus Rothenburg, Kreis Bumps (?), Posen, at four dollars a month, who for a year and a half was the amusement 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.

With Anna to leave the young with now and then, I was able to get in two sprees a week with Carl. Every Wednesday and Saturday noon I met him at the University and we had lunch together. Usually on Wednesdays we ate at the Café Rheingold, the spot I think of with most affection as I look back on Berlin.

We used to eat in the "Shell Room"—an individual chicken-and-rice pie (as much chicken as rice), a vegetable, and a glass of beer each, for thirty-five cents for both. Saturdays we hunted for different smaller out-of-the-way restaurants. Wednesday nights "Uncle K." of the University of Wisconsin always came to supper, bringing a thirty-five-cent rebate his landlady allowed him when he ate out; and we had chicken every Wednesday night, which cost—a fat one—never more than fifty cents. (It was Uncle K. who wrote, "The world is so different with Carl gone!") Once we rented bicycles and rode all through the Tiergarten, Carl and I, with the expected stiffness and soreness next day.

Then there was Christmas in Berlin. Three friends traveled up from Rome to be with us, two students came from Leipzig, and four from Berlin—eleven for dinner, and four chairs all told. It was a regular "La Bohême" festival—one guest appearing with a bottle of wine under his arm, another with a jar of caviare sent him from Russia. We had a gay week of it after Christmas, when the whole eleven of us went on some Dutch-treat spree every night, before going back to our studies.

Then came those last grueling months in Berlin, when Carl had a breakdown, and I got sick nursing him and had to go to a German hospital; and while I was there Jim was threatened with pneumonia and Nandy got tonsillitis. In the midst of it all the lease expired on our Wohnung, and Carl and Anna had to move the family out. We decided that we had had all we wanted of coaching in Berlin—we came to that conclusion before any of the breakdowns—threw our pride to the winds, borrowed more money from my good father, and as soon as the family was well enough to travel, we made for our ever-to-be-adored Heidelberg.