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.